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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Then I'll Come Back to You, by Larry Evans,
+Illustrated by Will Stevens
+
+
+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: Then I'll Come Back to You
+
+
+Author: Larry Evans
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 22, 2006  [eBook #18894]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 18894-h.htm or 18894-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/8/9/18894/18894-h/18894-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/8/9/18894/18894-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+by
+
+LARRY EVANS
+
+Author of
+Once to Every Man
+
+Illustrated by Will Stevens
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I
+Ain't Never Seen More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't
+Never Been Outen the Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More
+Now--Before I Get Done."]
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+Copyright, 1915, by
+The H. K. Fly Company.
+Copyright, 1915, by
+The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of
+
+My Mother
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+Chapter
+
+     I. I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
+    II. THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
+   III. THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
+    IV. I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
+     V. THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+    VI. MY MAN O'MARA
+   VII. HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
+  VIII. GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
+    IX. A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
+     X. NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
+    XI. I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
+   XII. THAT WOODS-RAT
+  XIII. THIS LITERARY THING
+   XIV. A GIRL LIKE HER
+    XV. LAW AND LUMBER
+   XVI. ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
+  XVII. HONEY!
+ XVIII. I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
+   XIX. SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
+    XX. BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
+   XXI. SETTING THE STAGE
+  XXII. IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
+ XXIII. TO-MORROW--
+  XXIV. --AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
+   XXV. IN REAL LIFE TOO
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I Ain't Never Seen
+More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't Never Been Outen the
+Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More Now--Before I Get
+Done." . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+
+"I've Always Had to Wait a Long Time for Everything I've Wanted," the
+Boy Answered, "But I Always Get It, Just the Same, if I Only Want it
+Hard Enough."
+
+"Blessings, My Children," He Called to the Two in the Shadow.  "My
+Felicitations! and E'en though I know Not Your Identity, Still I May
+Sense Your Fond Confusion."
+
+"Oh, I Can't Tell You How Glad I Am to See You So--So Well!"
+
+
+
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
+
+That year no rain had fallen for a score of days in the hill country.
+The valley road that wound upward and still upward from the town of
+Morrison ran a ribbon of puffy yellow dust between sun-baked,
+brown-sodded dunes; ran north and north, a tortuous series of loops on
+loops, to lose itself at last in the cooler promise of the first
+bulwark of the mountains.  They looked cooler, the distant wooded
+hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the
+gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines
+which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's
+rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss,
+shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even
+chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks that brawled in miniature
+rocky canyons.  And they made the gasping heat of the valley a little
+more unendurable by very contrast.
+
+Since early afternoon Caleb Hunter had been sitting almost immobile in
+the shade of the trellis which flanked the deep verandas of his huge
+white, thick-pillared house on the hill above the river.  It was
+reminiscent of another locality--the old Hunter place on the valley
+road.  When Caleb Hunter's father had come north, back when his loyalty
+to a flag and his pity for a gaunt and lonely figure in the White House
+had been stronger than bonds of blood, he had left its counterpart down
+on the Tennessee.  Afterward, with one empty sleeve pinned across his
+breast, he had directed with the other hand the placing of the columns.
+And finally, when he had had to leave this home in turn, along with its
+high, white painted walls and glossy green shutters, he had passed down
+to his son his inborn love of the warmth, his innocent delight in
+indolence--and an unsurpassed judgment of mint.  The mint bed still lay
+where he had located it, to the west of the house, moist and fragrant
+in the shadow.
+
+Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
+chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his
+comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat.  The lazy day was in his
+blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
+more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
+surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him.  Tiny dots of men in
+flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across
+the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
+lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
+veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
+altitude of the mercury.  He, without being analytical about it, would
+have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
+both were by the distance.
+
+Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
+white-columned house that hill above the river.  In those days it had
+been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
+self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might
+be added, ambition or seeming need of one.  The Basin where the river
+widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
+father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs
+of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then
+and smoked incessantly.  And now even the low-lying foothills in which
+the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to
+the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer given over to
+pasturage.  They had taken on an entirely different aspect.
+
+The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
+those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
+and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
+But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in
+the coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than
+half way.  From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
+brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
+across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before.  And just
+beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
+stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres of
+green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.
+
+To Dexter Allison's blame or credit--the nature of the verdict
+depending entirely upon whether it was rendered by the older or the
+newer generation--was laid the transformation of Morrison, the town
+proper.  Caleb Hunter had known Allison at college, where the latter
+had been prominent both because of the brilliance of his wardrobe and
+the reputed size of his father's steadily accumulating resources.
+Since that time seven-figure fortunes such as the younger Allison had
+inherited, had become too general to be any longer spectacular.  But
+Dexter Allison's garments had always retained their insistent note.
+Hunter himself had sold Allison the ground upon which the stucco house
+stood; he had heartily agreed that it was an ideal spot for a loafing
+place--and the fishing was good, too!  Now whenever Caleb thought of
+those first conferences which had preceded the sale, and recalled
+Allison's accentuation of the natural beauties of the spot, Caleb
+allowed himself to smile.
+
+The fishing was still far above reproach, a little further back
+country--and Dexter Allison owned the sawmills that droned in the
+valley.  His men drove his timber down from the hills in the north; his
+men piled the yellow planks upon his flat cars which ran in over his
+spur line that had crept up from the south.  His hundreds and hundreds
+of rivermen already trod the sawdust-padded streets of the newer
+Morrison that had sprung into being beyond the bend; they swarmed in on
+the drives, a hard-faced, hard-shouldered horde, picturesque,
+proficient and profane.  They brought with them color and care-free
+prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the
+whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden, swift
+encounters which were as silent as they were deadly.  And they spent
+their money without stopping to count it.
+
+The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out the
+virtues of this vice.  And after a time, when the older generation
+found that the rivermen preferred their own section of the town,
+ignoring as though they had never existed the staid and sleepy
+residential streets above, they heaved a sigh of partial relief and
+tried to forget their proximity.
+
+Little more than a year had been required for that transformation.  The
+boards of some of the newer shacks down river were still damp with
+pitch.  And twice during that period Dexter Allison had come into the
+hills to take up a transitory abode in the stucco house which had been
+quite six months in the building:--once, two years before, when he had
+disappeared into the mountains upon a prolonged fishing trip, to return
+fishless but with an astonishing mass of pencilled data and contour
+maps; and the second time for an even longer stay, a year ago when the
+mill was being erected.
+
+Since then the stucco and timber place had been closed, with no one but
+a doddering old caretaker and a gardener or two about the premises,
+until early that last hot August week.  On Monday Caleb Hunter had
+noticed that the blinds had been thrown open to the air; on Wednesday,
+from his point of vantage upon the porch, he had watched a rather
+astounding load of trunks careen in at the driveway, piloted by a mill
+teamster who had for two seasons held the record for a double-team load
+of logs and was making the most of that opportunity to prove his skill.
+And the next morning the tumult raised by a group of children racing
+over the shorn lawns had awakened him; he had descended to be hailed by
+Dexter Allison's own booming bass from behind the intervening high box
+hedge.
+
+It was the hottest day of the hottest fortnight that the hill country
+had known in years.  The very temperature gave color to Allison's
+statement that the heat had driven them north from the shore--him and
+his wife and Barbara, their daughter of ten, and the half-dozen or more
+guests whose trunks, coming on the next day, made an even more imposing
+sight than had Allison's own.  And yet as he sat there in the shadow,
+methodically pulling upon his pipe, Caleb Hunter smiled from time to
+time, reminiscently.  He last of all would have been the one to admit
+that the owner of the big stucco place and the mills, and--yes, of the
+newer Morrison itself--had not given a good account of the talents and
+tens of talents which had been passed down to him.  But the use of so
+much evasion, where no evasion at all seemed necessary, rather puzzled
+as well as amused Caleb; and yet, after all, this merely branded him as
+old-fashioned, so far as the newer business methods were concerned
+which were crowding into Morrison.  Allison's way of going about a
+thing made him think of the old valley road that wound north in its
+series of loops on loops; and yet, reflecting upon that parallel, he
+had to admit to himself, too, that the road achieved final heights
+which, in a straightaway route across country would have necessitated
+more than a few wearisome and heart-breaking grades.
+
+The comparison pleased Caleb.  He was nodding his head over it as he
+buried his nose in the mint-sprayed glass again, when a haze of dust to
+the north caught his vagrant attention.  Quite apparently it was raised
+by a foot-traveler, and the latter were not frequent upon that road,
+especially foot-travelers who came from that direction.  Trivial as it
+was, it piqued his interest, and he lay back and followed it from
+lazily half-closed eyes.  It topped a rise and disappeared--the dust
+cloud--and reappeared in turn, but not until it had advanced to within
+a scant hundred yards of him could he make out the figure which raised
+it.  And then, after one sharp glance, with a quick intake of breath,
+he rose and went a trifle hastily out across his own lawn toward the
+iron picket fence that bordered the roadside.  He went almost hurriedly
+to intercept the boy who came marching over the brow of the last low
+hill.
+
+Caleb Hunter, particularly in the last year or so, had seen many a
+strange and brilliant costume pass along that wilderness highway, but
+as he hung over the front gate he remembered that none of them had ever
+before drawn him from his deep chair in the shadow.  For him none of
+them had ever approached in sensationalism the quite unbelievable garb
+of the boy who came steadily on and on--who came steadily nearer and
+nearer.
+
+With a little closer view of him the watching man understood the reason
+for the dense cloud of dust above the lone pedestrian.  For when the
+boy raised his feet with each stride, the man-sized, hob-nailed boots
+which encased them failed to lift in turn.  Indeed, the toes did clear
+the ground, but the heels, slipping away from the lean ankles, dragged
+in the follow-through.  And the boy's other garments, save for his
+flannel shirt and flapping felt hat, were of a size in keeping with the
+boots.
+
+His trousers had once been white cotton drill, but the whiteness had
+long before given up the unequal struggle against grime and grease and
+subsided to a less conspicuous, less perishable grey.  They had been
+cut off just below the knees and, unhemmed, hung flapping with every
+step he took above a stretch of white-socked, spindly shanks.  But it
+was the coat he wore which held Caleb spellbound.  It was of a style
+popularly known as a swallowtail, faced with satin as to lapels and
+once gracefully rounded to a long, bisected skirt in the rear.  The
+satin facings were gone and the original color of the fabric, too, had
+faded to a shiny, bottle-green.  But the long skirts--at least all that
+was left of them--still flapped bravely, as did the trousers.  For
+they, like the nether garments, had been cut off, with more regard for
+haste than accuracy, so that the back of the coat cleared the ground by
+a good foot and a half.  The sleeves, rolled back from two slender,
+browned wrists, were cuffed with a six-inch stretch of striped, soiled
+lining.
+
+For a time Caleb had been at a loss to make out the object which the
+boy carried upon one shoulder, balanced above a blanket tight-rolled
+and tied with string.  Not until the grotesque little figure was within
+a dozen paces of him did he recognize it, and then, at the same moment
+that he caught a glimpse of an old and rusted revolver strapped to the
+boy's narrow waist, he realized what it was.  The boy was toting a
+double-springed steel trap, big enough it seemed to take all four feet
+of any bear that ever walked--and it was beautifully dull with oil!
+
+Caleb stood and stared, mouth agape.  A moment or two earlier he had
+had to fight off an almost uncontrollable desire to roar with laughter,
+but that mood had passed somehow as the boy came nearer.  For the
+latter was not even aware of his presence there behind the iron fence;
+he was walking with his head up, thin face thrust forward like that of
+a young and overly eager setter with the bird in plain sight.  The
+world of hunger in that strained and staring visage helped Caleb to
+master his mirth, and when, at a tentative cough from him, the small
+figure halted dead in his tracks and wheeled, even the vestige of a
+smile left the wide-waisted watcher's lips.  Then Caleb had his first
+full view of the boy's features.
+
+There were wide, deep shadows beneath the grey eyes, doubly noticeable
+because of the heavy fringe of the lashes that swept above them; there
+was a pallid, bluish circle around the thin and tight-set lips.  And
+the lean cheeks were very, very pale, both with the heat of the sun and
+a fatigue now close to exhaustion.  But the eyes themselves, as they
+met Caleb's, were alight with a fire which afterward, when he had had
+more time to ponder it, made him remember the pictured eyes of the
+children of the Crusades.  They fairly burned into his own, and they
+checked the first half-jocular words of greeting which had been
+trembling upon his lips.  His voice was only grave and kindly when he
+began to speak.
+
+"You--you look a trifle tired, young man," he said then.  "Are
+you--going far?"
+
+The boy touched his lips delicately with the point of his tongue.  His
+gravity more than matched that of his questioner.
+
+"Air--air thet the--city?"
+
+The words were soft of accent and a little drawling; there was an
+accompanying gesture of one thumb thrown backward over a thin shoulder.
+But Caleb had to smile a little at the breathless note in the query.
+
+"The city?" he echoed, a little puzzled.  "The city!  Well, now--I----"
+and he chuckled a bit.
+
+The boy caught him up swiftly, almost sharply.
+
+"Thet's--ain't thet Morrison?" he demanded.
+
+And then Caleb had a glimmer of comprehension.  He nodded.
+
+"Yes," he answered quietly.  "That's the city.  That's Morrison down
+there."
+
+The shoulders of the ancient coat lifted and fell with a visible sigh
+as the strange little figure turned again, head keenly forward, to gaze
+hungrily down at the town in the valley.  And Caleb translated that
+long-drawn breath correctly; without stopping to reason it out, he knew
+that it meant fulfillment of a dream most marvelous in anticipation,
+but even more wonderful in its coming true.  Words would have failed
+where that single breath sufficed.  The man remained quiet until the
+boy finally turned back to him, eased the heavy trap to his other
+shoulder and wet his lips once more.
+
+"I thought it war," he murmured, and a thread of awe wove through the
+words.  "I thought it est nachelly _hed_ to be!  Haow--haow many houses
+would you reckon they might be daown--daown in thet there holler?"
+
+The owner of the white-columned house gave the question its meed of
+reflection.
+
+"Well, I--I'd say quite a few hundred, at least."
+
+The odd little figure bobbed his head.
+
+"Thet's what Old Tom always sed," he muttered, more to himself than to
+his hearer.  "An'--an' I guess I ain't never rightly believed him till
+naow."  And then: "Is--is New Yor-rk any bigger?" he asked.
+
+The man at the picket fence smiled again, but the smile was without
+offense.
+
+"Well, yes," he answered.  "Yes, considerably bigger, I should judge.
+Twice as large, at least, and maybe more than that."
+
+The boy did not answer.  He just faced about to stare once more.  And
+then the miracle came to pass.  Around a far bend in Dexter Allison's
+single spur track there came careening an ashmatic switch engine with a
+half-dozen empty flats in tow.  With a brave puffing and blowing of
+leaky cylinder heads, it rattled across an open space between piles of
+timber in the mill-yard and disappeared with a shrill toot of warning
+for unseen workmen upon the tracks ahead.  The boy froze to
+granite-like immobility as it flashed into view.  Long after it had
+passed from sight he stood like a bit of a fantastic figure cut from
+stone.  Then a tremor shook him from head to foot, and when it came
+slowly about Caleb saw that his small face was even whiter than it had
+been before beneath its coat of tan and powdery dust.
+
+He swallowed hard, and tried to speak--and had to swallow again before
+the words would come.
+
+"Gawd--I--may--die!" ho broke out falteringly then.  "There goes a
+injine!  A steam injine--wan't it?"
+
+Long afterward, when he had realized that the boy's life was to bring
+again and again a repetition of that sublime moment of realization--a
+moment of fulfillment unspoiled by surfeit or sophistication or a
+blunted capacity to marvel, which Caleb had seen grow old and stale
+even in the children he knew, he wondered and wished that he might have
+known it himself, once at least.  Years of waiting, starved years of
+anticipation, he felt after all must have been a very little price to
+pay for that great, blinding, gasping moment.  But at the time, amazed
+at the boy's white face, amazed at the hushed fervor in the words he
+forgot,--he spoke before he thought.
+
+"But haven't you ever seen an engine before?" he exclaimed.
+
+As soon as the question had left his lips he would have given much to
+have had it back again; but at that it failed to have the effect which
+he feared too late to check.  Instead of coloring with hurt and shame,
+instead of subterfuge or evasion, the boy simply lifted his eyes
+levelly to Caleb's face.
+
+"I ain't never seed nuthin'," he stated patiently.  "I ain't never seed
+more'n three houses together in a clearin' before.  I--I ain't never
+been outen the timber--till today.  But I aim to see more, naow--before
+I git done!"
+
+The man experienced a peculiar sensation.  The boy's low, passionlessly
+vehement statement somehow made him feel that it wasn't a boy to whom
+he was talking, but a little and grave old man.  And suddenly the
+desire seized him to hear more of that low, direct voice; the impulse
+came to him and Caleb, whose whole life had been as free from erratic
+snap-judgments as his broad face was of craft, found joy in acting upon
+it forthwith, before it had time to cool.
+
+"The view is excellent from my veranda," he waved a hand behind him.
+"And--you look a little warm and tired.  If your business is not of too
+pressing a nature--have you----" he broke off, amazed at his helpless
+formality in the matter--"have you come far?"
+
+And he wondered immediately how the boy would receive that suggestion
+that he hesitate, there with the "city" in front of him, a fairy-tale
+to be explored.  And again he was allowed to catch a glimpse of age-old
+spirit--a glimpse of a man-sized self-discipline--beneath the childish
+exterior.
+
+The boy hesitated a moment, but it was his uncertainty as to just what
+Caleb's invitation had offered, and not the lure of the town which made
+him pause.  He took one step forward.
+
+"I been comin' since last Friday," he explained.  "I been comin' daown
+river for three days naow--and I been comin' fast!"
+
+Again that measuring, level glance.
+
+"An' I ain't got no business--yit," he went on.  "Thet's what I aim to
+locate, after I've hed a chance to look around a trifle.  But I am
+tired a little, an' so if you mean thet you're askin' me to stop for a
+minit--if you mean thet you're askin' me that--why, then . . . then, I
+guess I don't mind if I do!"
+
+"That's what I mean," said Caleb.
+
+And the little figure preceded him across his soft, cropped lawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
+
+Caleb Hunter had never married, and even now, at the age of forty and
+odd, in particularly mellow moments he was liable to confess that,
+while matrimony no doubt offered a far wider field for both general
+excitement and variety, as far as he himself was concerned, he felt
+that his bachelor condition had points of excellence too obvious to be
+treated with contumely.  Perhaps the fact that Sarah Hunter, four years
+his senior, had kept so well oiled the cogs of the domestic machinery
+of the white place on the hill that their churnings had never been
+evidenced may have been in part an answer to his contentment.
+
+For Sarah Hunter, too, had never married.  To the townspeople who had
+never dared to try to storm the wall of her apparent frigidity, or been
+able quite to understand her aloof austerity, she was little more than
+a weekly occurence as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun
+itself.  Every Sunday morning a rare vision of stately dignity for all
+her tininess, assisted by Caleb, she descended from the Hunter equipage
+to enter the portals of the Morrison Baptist church.  After the service
+she reappeared and, having complimented the minister upon the sagacity
+of his discourse, again assisted by Caleb, she mounted to the rear seat
+of the surrey and rolled back up the hill.
+
+That was as much as the townspeople ever saw of "Cal Hunter's maiden
+sister" unless there happened to be a prolonged siege of sickness in
+the village or a worse accident than usual.  Then she came and camped
+on the scene until the crisis was over, soft-voiced, soft-fingered and
+serenely sure of herself.  Sarah had never married, and even though she
+had in the long interval which, year by year, had brought to Caleb a
+more placid rotundity grown slender and slenderer still, and
+flat-chested and sharp-angled in face and figure, Caleb knew that
+underneath it all there had been no shrinkage in her soul--knew that
+there were no bleak expanses in her heart, or edges to her pity.
+
+They often joked each other about their state of single blessedness,
+did Caleb and his sister.  Often, hard upon his easy boast of
+satisfaction with things as they were, she would quote the fable of the
+fox and the high-hanging grapes, only to be taunted a moment later with
+her own celibacy.  But the taunt and the fable had long been stingless.
+For Sarah Hunter knew that one end of Caleb's heavy gold watch chain
+still carried a bit of a gold coin, worn smooth and thin from years of
+handling; she knew that the single word across its back, even though it
+had long ago been effaced so far as other eyes were concerned, was
+still there for him to see.  And Caleb, rummaging one day for some lost
+article or other, in a pigeonhole in Sarah's desk in which he had no
+license to look, had come across a picture of a tall and black-haired
+lad, brave in white trousers and an amazing waistcoat.  Caleb
+remembered having been told that he had died for another with that same
+smile which the picture had preserved--the tall and jaunty youngster.
+And so their comprehension was mutual.  They understood, did Caleb and
+his sister.
+
+But sure as he was of Sarah's fundamental kindness, Caleb experienced a
+twinge of guilty uncertainty that August afternoon as he closed the
+iron gate behind the grotesque little figure which had already started
+across his lawn.  For the moment he had forgotten that the sun was low
+in the west; he had overlooked the fact that it was customary for the
+Hunter establishment to sup early during the warm summer months.  But
+when he turned to find Sarah watching, stiff and uncompromising, from
+the doorway, he remembered with painful certainty her attitude toward
+his propensity to pick up any stray that might catch him in a moment of
+too pronounced mellowness--stray human or feline or lost yellow dog.
+
+Sarah's gaze, however, was not for her brother at that moment.  Her
+eyes were fixed unswervingly upon the figure in the once-white drill
+trousers and bobbed swallow-tail coat and shuffling boots.  She was
+staring from wide and, Caleb noted, rather horror-stricken eyes at the
+huge steel trap above the blanket pack.  But the boy who must have
+received her glance full in his face had not faltered a step in his
+advance.  He went forward until he stood at the foot of the low steps
+which mounted to the veranda; and there he stopped, looking up at her,
+and removed his battered hat.  Caleb ranged awkwardly up alongside him
+and looked up at her in turn.  He, searching desperately for a neat and
+cleverly casual opening speech, could not know that beneath her
+forbidding manner a peal of soft laughter was struggling for utterance;
+could not know that, at that moment, she was telling herself that, of
+the two, Caleb was far the younger.
+
+At last he cleared his throat, oratorically, and then she promptly
+interrupted him.
+
+"Supper is served, Cal," she drawled in her gentle, almost lisping
+voice.
+
+Caleb received the statement as if it were an astounding bit of
+hitherto undreamed-of news.
+
+"Comin', Sarah!" he chirped briskly.  "Comin' this blessed minute!"
+
+And then, with an attempt at disingenuousness:
+
+"I--I've a friend here, Sarah, whom I'd like to--er--present to you!
+This is my sister, Miss Hunter," he announced to the silent boy, "and
+this young man, Sarah, this young man is--er--ah--Mr.----"
+
+"I'm Steve," said the boy, mildly.  "I'm just Stephen O'Mara!"
+
+"Certainly!" gasped Caleb.   "Quite so--quite so!  Sarah, this is just
+Steve."
+
+The frail little woman with her quaint dignity of another decade failed
+to move; she did not unbend so much as the fraction of an inch.  But
+hard upon the heels of Caleb's last words the boy went forward
+unhesitatingly.  Hat in the hand that balanced his big steel trap, he
+stopped in front of her and offered one brown paw.
+
+"Haow dye do, Miss Hunter," he saluted her, gravely.  And with a slow
+smile that discovered for her a row of white and even teeth: "Haow dye
+do?  I--I reckon you're the first--dressed-up lady I ever did git to
+know!"
+
+The calm statement took what little breath there had been left in
+Caleb's lungs; it left Sarah breathless, too.  But after an
+infinitesimal moment of waiting she held out her own delicate fingers
+and took the outstretched hand.
+
+"Haow dye do, Steve?" she answered, and Caleb was at a loss to
+interpret the suppressed quality of her voice.  "And I--some day I am
+sure it will be a great pleasure to remember that I was the--first!"
+
+Then she faced her brother.
+
+"Will you--will your friend, Mr.--Steve--remain for supper, Cal?" she
+asked.
+
+And Caleb, quick to see an opening, made the most of this one.
+
+"Stay for supper," he repeated her question, and he laughed.
+"Stay--for--supper!  Well, I should hope he would.  Why--why, he's
+going to stop for the night!"
+
+From the vantage place there at the top of the steps Sarah stood and
+surveyed her brother's wide and guileless face for a second.  Then her
+lips began to twitch.
+
+"Very clever, Cal," she told him.  "Quite clever--for you!"
+
+And she nodded and withdrew to see that the table was laid for three.
+
+Caleb, chuckling, watched her go; then with a nod to the boy, he
+started to follow her in.  But Steve paused at the threshold, and when
+the man stopped and looked back to ascertain the cause of his delay he
+found that the boy was depositing the bear trap upon the porch
+floor--found him tugging to free the rusty old revolver from his belt.
+
+"I'll leave Samanthy here," the one called Steve stated, and Caleb
+understood that he meant the trap.  "An' I reckon I'd better not lug my
+weapon into the house, neither, hed I?  She might----"  He nodded in
+the direction of Sarah's disappearance--"Old Tom says womin folks
+that's gentle born air kind-a skittish about havin' shootin' irons
+araound the place.  And I don't reckon it's the part of men folks to
+pester 'em."
+
+Caleb didn't know just what to say, so he merely nodded approval.
+Again he had been made to feel that it was not a boy but some little
+old man who was explaining to him.  Silently he led the way upstairs,
+and after he had seen the blanket pack deposited in one corner of
+Sarah's beloved guest-room, after he had seen the rusty coat peeled off
+as a preface to removing the dust accumulation of the long hot day from
+hands and face, an inspiration came to him.  While the boy was washing,
+utterly lost to everything but that none-too-simple task, he went out
+of the room on a still-hunt of his own, and came back presently with
+the thing for which he had gone searching.  He found the boy wrestling
+a little desperately with a mop of wavy chestnut hair which only grew
+the more hopeless with every stroke of the brush.
+
+"Never mind that."  Caleb met the misapprehension in the boy's eyes.
+"Never mind that!  And I--I've taken the liberty of digging out this
+old canvas shooting coat.  It's one I got for Sarah--for my
+sister--but, as you say, women folks are mighty skittish about anything
+that has to do with a gun.  She never would go even so far as to try it
+on, but if you don't mind----  That coat of yours must be a trifle hot
+for this weather, I should say."
+
+Steve reached out a hand that trembled a little and took the coat.  He
+took it and stared at it with that same strained and hungry look which
+he had bestowed a half hour before upon the "City."
+
+"Do you mean," he asked, and his lips remained parted breathlessly upon
+the question, "do you mean--this yere's for me?"
+
+Caleb thought of the "injine"--the "_steam_ injine."
+
+"I mean just that, if you'll have it," he replied.  The boy slipped his
+little body into the garment and wheeled to survey himself in a mirror.
+In comparison with the dismembered swallowtail it was the purple of a
+Solomon.  There was a cartridge web across its front, with loops, and
+after he had looked long and long at his reflection, the boy thrust
+both his thumbs into the belt it made.
+
+Then: "Them's fer ketridges," he announced solemnly.
+
+He scowled judiciously and nodded.
+
+And, "I'll hev to git me some, the first thing in the mornin'," he said.
+
+That was his only remark then, and yet Caleb felt amply repaid.  Later
+he had more to say, but for the time being he merely followed Caleb
+back downstairs, walking very stiff and straight except when, with
+every few steps, he leaned over the better to see the looped webbing
+across his middle.
+
+And at table that evening the man came to know another trait in the odd
+little stranger's odd makeup which, coupled with those which he had
+already mentally tabulated for future private contemplation, set him to
+wondering more than a little.
+
+With the appearance of the first dish upon the table that night the boy
+was very frankly nonplussed at the array of implements upon each side
+of his plate, placed there for him to manipulate.  He scarcely knew one
+from the other, and the separate uses for each not at all.  But the way
+in which he met the problem made Caleb lift his eyes and meet Sarah's
+inscrutable glance with something akin to triumph.  For there was no
+awkwardness in the boy's procedure, no flushing embarrassment, no
+shame-facedness nor painfully self-conscious attempt to cover his
+ignorance.  Instead, he sat and waited--sat and watched openly until
+Miss Sarah had herself selected knife or fork, as the case might
+be--and then, turning back to those beside his own place, frowning
+intently, he made painstaking selection therefrom.  Nor did he once
+make a mistake.  And Caleb, after he had begun to mark a growing
+softness in the color of his sister's thin cheeks, ventured to draw
+into conversation their small guest.
+
+The boy talked freely and openly, always with his wide eyes upon the
+face of his questioner, always in the grave and slightly drawling
+idioms of the woods.  Again he confided that he had never before been
+out of the timber; he explained that "Old Tom's" untimely taking-off a
+fortnight back had been alone responsible for this pilgrimage.  And
+that opened the way for a question which Caleb had been eager to ask
+him.
+
+"I suppose this--this 'Old Tom' was some kin of yours?" he observed.
+
+The boy shook his head.
+
+"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin.  I ain't never hed
+nobody--father ner mother, neither!"
+
+Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips.  But the
+bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.
+
+"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to
+catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized
+that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was.  "I ain't
+never hed nobody but Old Tom.  And he was--he wasn't nuthin' but what
+he called my--my"--the sentence was broken while he paused to get the
+phrase correctly--"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"
+
+Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy,
+but he had to ask it just the same.
+
+"Still, I suppose his--his taking-off must have been something in the
+nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.
+
+The boy pursed his lips.
+
+"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly.  "No-o-o!  I can't
+say's it was.  We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon.  Old Tom, he
+often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin'
+drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids--and two weeks ago he
+done so!"
+
+And the rest of the words were quite casual.
+
+"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion,
+"if they'd hev been a trifle more water.  But the rocks was too close
+to the surface fer comfortable swimmin'.  The Jenkinses found him down
+in the slack water, Sunday noon or thereabouts, and they sed he'd never
+be no deader, not even if he'd a-died in a reg'lar bed, with a doctor
+helpin' him along."
+
+Caleb threw his sister one lugubriously helpless glance.  Sarah had
+choked, apparently upon a crumb of bread, and was coughing,
+stranglingly.  And Caleb made to change the drift of the conversation,
+but he was not quick enough.
+
+"I ain't never been much of a hand for licker," Steve finished naively.
+"Old Tom sed he never could understand it in me, neither, but he
+reckoned it was lucky in a way fer both of us.  He sed he'd whale the
+life outen me if he ever caught me even smellin' of a cork; and as fer
+him--well, it come in handy for him, havin' a sober hand round the
+shack when he wan't quite hisself!"
+
+This time when Caleb lifted his eyes he met a startled gleam behind
+Sarah's half dropped lashes.  She was peering steadily into the boy's
+lean, untroubled face.  Caleb voiced the query which he knew must be
+behind her quiet intentness.
+
+"You said your name was O'Mara, I believe.  I suppose that was--ah--Old
+Tom's last name, too?"
+
+Steve laughed; he laughed frankly for the first time since he had
+halted, hours before, outside in the dusty road.
+
+"Why, Old Tom had a dozen different names in the last few years," he
+replied.  "He had a new one every time he went outen the woods fer a
+trip.  But he always sed he mostly favored Brown or Jones or Smith,
+they bein' quiet and common and not too hard to remember.  He just
+changed names whenever he got tired of his old one, Old Tom did.  But
+he always did say, too, that if he'd hed as good a one as O'Mara, he'd
+a kept it--and kept it proud."
+
+At the conclusion of that statement it was Miss Sarah's gaze which went
+searching across the table for her brother's eyes.  But the boy just
+ran on and on, totally oblivious to their glances.
+
+He told them of his lonely days in the woods shack, when Old Tom went
+down river and was three or four weeks in returning; he dwelt upon
+blissful days in the spring when he had been allowed to play a man's
+part in the small drives which he and Old Tom and the "Jenkinses"
+began, and which Old Tom and the Jenkinses alone saw through to market
+in Morrison.  He touched lightly and inconsequentially upon certain
+days when Old Tom would hang for hours over an old tin box filled with
+soiled and ink-smeared memoranda, periods which were always followed by
+days of moody silence and a week or more of "lessons" in a tattered and
+thumbed reader which the woodsman had brought up-river--lessons as
+painful and laborious to Old Tom as they were delightful to the starved
+mentality of the pupil.  And Old Tom, the boy explained, was pretty
+likely to be "lickered up fer quite a spell" after such a session which
+invariably began with an exploration of the battered tin box.
+
+The boy told Caleb of days and nights on the trail--boasted
+unconsciously of Old Tom's super-cunning with trap and deadfall, and
+even poison bait.  And that brought him to the beautifully oiled bear
+trap which he had left outside the door.
+
+"I brung Samanthy along with me," he stated.  "I brung her just because
+somehow I kind-a thought mebby Old Tom'd be glad if I did.  Next to me
+he always sed he set a heap o' store on thet ole critter.  He sed
+Samanthy was as near to hevin' a woman around the house as anything he
+knew on--she hed a voice like a steel trap, and when she got her teeth
+sot in a argument she never did let up.  I brung her along with me, and
+the gun he give me, but I didn't take nuthin' else."
+
+Caleb waited there until he knew that the boy had finished.
+
+"You never bothered about that old tin box?" he inquired casually.
+
+The boy shook his head again.
+
+"Old Tom, whenever he went away for a spell, always sed I wan't to
+meddle with it," he explained.  "This time I reckoned his goin' was
+just about the same thing, only he won't be comin' back, so I--I just
+locked the box up in the cubberd and hitched the staple into the door
+and come down myself."
+
+By the time that meal was finished the boy's eyes were so heavy-lidded
+that, fight as he would, they still persisted in drooping till the long
+lashes curled over his cheeks.  And in spite of Caleb's remonstrance it
+was Sarah who saw him upstairs and into the huge guest-room with its
+four-poster and high-boy and spindle-backed chairs.
+
+When she came back downstairs her eyes were shining more than a little
+and the flush upon her cheeks was undeniably rose.  Her brother, from
+his seat before the unlighted fireplace, puffed methodically upon his
+pipe and barely lifted his head at her coming.  He was deep in
+meditation.  She stood looking at him for a time from the foot of the
+stairway.
+
+"He's asleep," she began finally in a very little voice.  "He fell
+asleep almost before his cheek touched the pillow."
+
+Caleb made no answer.  He nodded but his eyes were vacant with thoughts
+of his own.
+
+"Cal," she went on, "did you give him that old coat of mine?"
+
+Caleb nodded again--an affirmative.
+
+"Well, the last thing he asked before he slept was that I deliver a
+message to you.  'Tell him thanks for me,' he said.  'Tell him I clean
+forgot it til now!'  And as for me, Cal--why--why, 'he'd git me
+anuther, anytime I took the notion thet I wanted one!'"
+
+And still Caleb nodded.  The room was quiet for a long time.
+
+"Sarah," he murmured at last.
+
+"Yes, Cal," she answered.
+
+"Has that boy's--yarn--set you to thinking a little?"
+
+"It was very interesting and unusual," she admitted.  Then she rose and
+crossed over to his chair and perched herself, with odd, elfish,
+girlish grace upon its arm.
+
+"Do you mean Old Tom's tin box?" she asked gently.
+
+And he nodded.
+
+"Yes, in part--yes," he said.  "But not just that alone, either.  I
+mean everything, Sarah.  The way he handles himself; the way he looks
+one in the face when he is talking.  The--the--now what are you
+grinning over?"
+
+She stroked his sparse hair.
+
+"Cal, you old romancer, you.  Who'd ever suspect it in a man of your
+age and--and avoirdupois!"
+
+"Avoirdupois!" he snorted.  "Can't a man continue to have ideas now and
+then, even if he does become a--a trifle plump.  And that boy--why,
+Sarah I tell you----!"
+
+And then his sister put one hand over his lips.
+
+"I know, Cal," she interrupted placidly.  "I know!  You're going to
+tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that
+backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless
+bronze--or--or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and
+provided with the chance.  It sounds--it sounds very big and grand and
+romantic, Cal, but has it ever occurred to you that anyone big enough
+for things like those would find the way himself?"
+
+Immediately, jerkily, Caleb started to straighten up.
+Argumentatively--and then she checked him.
+
+"Oh, I know you don't believe it and I--I don't think I do myself, Cal.
+A man has to know what opportunity is before he can go out and hunt up
+his own big chance.  I just said it for the sake of argument, Cal.
+I--I'm like Samanthy--ole Samanthy, you know!  I'm a woman, and when I
+git my teeth sot in a argumint I never do let up.  Have your dreams,
+you--you boy!  And in the meantime, if you have any plans, tell me,
+please, what are you going to do with him in the morning?"
+
+Caleb Hunter bobbed his head, vehemently.  Rapidly he related to her
+the episode of the switch engine in Dexter Allison's millyards.
+
+"And I believe what I believe," he insisted, doggedly.  "And to-morrow
+I aim to give that boy a ride in one of Allison's 'steam injine' cabs,
+if it's all I do!"
+
+"I thought so," said Miss Sarah.
+
+For a time she sat there upon his arm chair.  Neither spoke, nor felt
+the need for words.  Just before she rose to go upstairs, she broke
+that quiet.
+
+"He has an odd, strange, half-wild beauty," she mused aloud.  "A beauty
+that is quite unusual, I should say, in children of his--his station.
+His hair is silken and, oh so thick!  And his eyes and square chin with
+that little cleft.  And his nose--his nose, I should say, might be said
+to denote estheticism--and--a--a--ah----"
+
+Caleb Hunter threw back his head at the telltale little quaver in the
+voice and found Sarah Hunter smiling down at him, whimsically.
+
+"Get all the amusement out of it that you can," he invited her.
+"And--and trust a woman to take note of such points as you have
+mentioned!"
+
+From the stairs she gave him one backward glance.
+
+"Forgive me, Cal," she hogged.  "I meant it all--truly!  Even the
+estheticism, which I only included to tease you.  And if you don't want
+to trust to a woman's judgment on such points as I have mentioned, I
+would suggest that you peep in on him when you retire, and--and confirm
+them for yourself."
+
+Hours later Caleb acted upon her suggestion.  Every characteristic
+which Sarah had mentioned he found and noted in that half-lighted
+moment or two while he stood at the bedside.
+
+And he noted more than just that.  Sarah's old canvas hunting coat was
+folded into a small bundle and lay, guarded by one outflung,
+loose-fingered brown hand, beside the sleeping boy's face on the pillow.
+
+Caleb went to bed with a half dozen wild notions whirling in his head,
+and a strange something tugging at his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
+
+Saturday morning dawned as hot and dry and windless as had been the
+other days of the week which had preceded it.  Caleb Hunter, rising
+from an uneasy night, blamed his sleeplessness upon the weather.  It
+was fully an hour before his usual, not-too-early hour of rising, when
+he slowly descended the wide stairway; and yet he was but little
+surprised to find the boy already there before him, seated upon the top
+step of the verandah, when he strolled outside.
+
+The little stranger with the grave voice, who had introduced himself as
+Stephen O'Mara, had not heard Caleb's step and the latter stood for a
+time in the doorway, contemplating the small, square-set shoulders in
+the canvas coat which had been his sister Sarah's, and the small,
+shapely head above them.
+
+Throughout the night while he lay awake pondering the fantastic
+possibilities which the boy's story had stirred him into half
+believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in
+which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing
+analysis of him, her brother.  Before morning came he had told himself
+a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer,
+who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a
+Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to
+have big eyes.  Merely because they had so persistently denied him
+sleep--those thoughts of Old Tom and his cherished tin box and the
+boy's own unmistakable poise and surety of self which even the
+shuffling boots and ragged clothes had only made the more
+impressive--merely because they persisted in endless procession through
+his brain, while he rolled and tossed and re-arranged the pillow, he
+had grown more and more peevishly eager to discount and discredit them,
+during the darkness.  But when morning came, and he rose and went into
+the big guest room to find it empty, he experienced a moment of panicky
+disappointment; suddenly anxious for another opportunity to verify all
+that which, in the hours of sleepless pro's and con's, had become
+figment-like and whimsical, he wondered if the boy really could have
+gone without even waiting to bid them good-bye.  He could not make that
+abrupt sort of a leave-taking harmonize with the rest of the
+youngster's actions--and then he caught a glimpse of him, motionless
+there on the verandah steps.
+
+The boy did not hear Caleb's coming that morning.  His head was tilted
+forward in that keen attitude of straining intentness which to the man
+had already become eloquently characteristic of his hungry spirit.  And
+for a time Caleb withheld his greeting; instead of speaking he stood
+and studied him, and while he studied it all came back again, until the
+illusion, if such it were, was far more vivid, far more compelling than
+it had been the night before.  Caleb told himself that to look only
+meant the discovery of new and compelling "points" both in feature and
+body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
+variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes.  And
+then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
+looking down into the town in the valley.
+
+Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
+direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
+although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
+silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof.  Caleb heard
+voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
+perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
+Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
+hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn.  And Caleb Hunter's
+brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
+black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
+gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
+days, flashed through behind him.  For Caleb heard the short gasp which
+came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
+darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
+hand at him.
+
+Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
+quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
+what had been holding so closely his attention.  He understood
+absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
+help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
+help but think----  His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
+from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
+wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
+absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
+the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.
+
+All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
+Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
+daughter, Barbara.  No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
+Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
+had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
+for his body.  Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
+moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force.  He
+recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
+adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
+recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
+party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
+morning garb.  But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was
+to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above
+spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and
+grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.
+
+To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her
+through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a
+mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly
+alive.  Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she
+was to be--of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was
+there in the promise of the years.  And he who was fond of insisting to
+his sister Sarah, that there was many a boy back in those hills who,
+with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized
+how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the
+fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to
+approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was
+typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter.
+
+He was no snob--Caleb Hunter--and yet the little girl's bearing at that
+moment doubly accented for him the gulf which lay between her and the
+hills-boy, by name Steve.  For though she did pause to stare at his
+white drill trousers and unbelievable man-sized boots with frankly
+childish astonishment, the next instant she had recovered herself and
+without another glance preceded her father across the grass.  Quite as
+though Steve had not been there at all she passed him, to hesitate
+demurely at Caleb's side.
+
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she greeted him.
+
+And then, quite suddenly, Caleb didn't feel so very sorry after all for
+his little visitor.  He stopped pitying him.  Steve's eyes had not
+wavered once from the little girl's face, from the time she appeared in
+the hedge gap until she mounted the steps, utterly oblivious to his
+nearness; but when she brushed against his elbow, the boy rose and
+stood, hat in hand, gravely quiet, gravely possessed, and silently sure
+of himself.
+
+Even after he had answered Barbara Allison's greeting and turned with
+his grown-up, ponderous courtesy to present the boy to her, only to be
+left with the words hanging upon tongue-tip by her instant
+disappearance inside in search of Sarah, Caleb caught no hint of the
+thoughts behind those impassive and steady eyes.  And yet he knew that
+Steve had risen in order that he might bow as he had the night before,
+when Caleb introduced him to his sister.
+
+Dexter Allison, coming up in less airy fashion across the lawn,
+surprised Caleb with his mouth still open.
+
+"Well?" said Dexter Allison--and Caleb recovered himself.
+
+"Well?" he countered; and then they both laughed softly and shook
+hands.  It was their unvaried formula of greeting, whether they had not
+seen each other for twenty-four hours or twenty-four months.
+
+And while they were shaking hands the boy turned quietly and re-seated
+himself upon the top step.  But Allison gave him more notice than had
+his daughter Barbara.  He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets,
+gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the
+scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of
+seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at
+Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was
+looking the other way.  After a time Allison raised quizzical eyes to
+Caleb's face.
+
+"Wel-l-l?" he intoned, and with a little reluctance as reasonless as it
+was unnoticed, Caleb answered the inferred question.
+
+"This--this is a little friend of mine, Dexter," he said, "down from
+the hills.  He's in to have a look at the city which you have been so
+instrumental in arousing to its present state of teeming activity.
+This is Stephen O'Mara.  Steve--this is Mr. Allison, Steve!"
+
+Then the boy turned and again rose to his feet, and at that moment
+Caleb could have hugged him for his deliberation.  The boy inclined his
+head; he bowed, without a word.  And it was Dexter Allison who first
+offered a hand.
+
+"Glad to make your acquaintance, Stephen," the latter exclaimed with
+quite violent good humor.  "And how are you?"
+
+Steve took the hand and closed his brown fingers hard upon the puffy
+white ones.  For an instant he stood, his eyes, grave and inscrutable,
+full upon Allison's smaller ones.  "I'm tol-lable," he drawled soberly.
+"And--haow be you--yourself?"
+
+Allison gasped, stood with mouth agape, and then burst into one of his
+rather too-frequent, too-hearty laughs.
+
+"Well, I'm----" he began his favorite phrase of ejaculation, and then
+stopped to look down again into the small face before him.  "Well,
+I'm----" and he stopped to chuckle.  Then he turned back to Caleb.
+
+"I suppose, Cal, you know what this early morning call presages?" he
+suggested.
+
+Caleb recalled himself with an effort from a contemplation of the
+sudden, prideful something which had warmed him while Steve was shaking
+hands.  He smiled, mechanically.
+
+"I suppose it's the usual raid upon the commissary," he answered.
+
+Allison mounted heavily to the verandah.
+
+"Right!" he exclaimed.  "Right!  You'll notice that Barbara has already
+gone on ahead.  She's the skirmish line--scouts--videttes--whatever you
+please to call 'em.  There's no-one up yet--none of the family--over to
+our place.  We are hungry, Cal.  I hope this is waffle morning?"
+
+Caleb smiled at him, less impersonality in the mirth.  It was a regular
+custom, this truancy of Barbara Allison and her father--one of the
+little human foibles which Caleb often told himself accounted, in part
+at least, for his real liking of the man.
+
+"Waffles it is," he said, and he turned toward the boy.
+
+"Would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" he asked.  "Will you tell
+her, please, that we are to be subjected to another neighborly
+imposition?"
+
+After the boy had disappeared Caleb followed the larger man to a chair.
+And this time it was Caleb who met Allison's silence with a
+challenging, "Well?"
+
+"Where did you get him, Cal?" Allison demanded.  "Where _did_ you get
+him?  Those shoes, and those trousers--pants, I guess is the word, eh?
+And say, how that little beggar did squeeze my hand!  Look here!"
+
+He held one soft hand up for inspection.  There were faint red welts
+still visible across the finger joints.
+
+"Friend of yours, did you say?"
+
+Without stopping to think about it, Caleb was not so keen to enlarge
+upon the boy's obvious "points" as he had been with Sarah.  He omitted
+to mention his thoughts of the night before, and he omitted any
+reference to Old Tom, except for the most hazy explanation that the boy
+had no immediate kin.  But with an increasing eagerness he dilated upon
+the small foot traveler's first view of the "city," his breathless
+reception of Allison's own switch engine, and his avowed intention to
+"look around a trifle," before he located something to do.
+
+"I thought I'd take him down this morning and get McLean to give him a
+ride in the cab of one of those sheet-iron steam relics of yours," he
+finished.
+
+If Caleb had expected his unadorned recitation of the boy's appearance
+to make any impression upon his hearer he would have been disappointed.
+But, without any confessed reason for so doing, Caleb had aimed rather
+at the opposite effect.  And Allison turned from it with a large,
+matter-of-fact indifference, to rise and bow to Sarah Hunter, who
+appeared that moment in the doorway.
+
+"Surely--surely," he echoed Caleb's suggestion.  "Take him down and
+give him a ride!  McLean'll be glad of the chance to show someone his
+pet buzz-saws and things.  I'll walk down with you, myself, after
+breakfast.  I may be away for a day or two, and I want to leave
+directions for changes to be incorporated while I'm gone."
+
+At the table that morning Caleb noted that there was no hesitation in
+Steve's selection from the silver beside his plate, no waiting to
+follow in the lead of Sarah Hunter's choice.  He noticed, too, that the
+boy's eyes did not once lift to those of Barbara Allison, opposite him.
+And while the little girl from time to time joined in the conversation,
+he not once opened his mouth to speak, until they were almost ready to
+rise from their places.
+
+Allison had been growling genially at the lack of water and the
+prolonged drouth which was burning the pasturage to a crisp and
+juiceless brown.
+
+"If that everlasting sun would only stop shining for a while," he said,
+"if it'd only rain a bit, I'd like to take a trip back north,
+a-fishing, before it gets too late in the season."
+
+"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north,
+don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.
+
+Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about
+methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.
+
+"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.
+
+Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.
+
+"I suppose so," he admitted.  "In the general course of things it'll
+come, no doubt, but----"
+
+The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.
+
+"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and
+it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"
+
+And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.
+
+"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly.
+"Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as
+good as the next man's."
+
+Once more the boy shook his head.
+
+"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed.  "Ner I ain't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til
+Wednesday, fer sure!"
+
+Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager
+two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's
+well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash
+offer.  Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but
+foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was
+based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.
+
+Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill
+that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one
+of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy
+tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.
+
+"All right, then," he gave in.  "If you want to come as much as all
+that, but--but you--now run along, then, with Stephen."
+
+On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.
+
+"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon
+being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives.  But the
+other sex is beyond me!  She's always turned up her dainty nose at the
+noise and dirt before, and--and now she's ready to cry because I
+suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"
+
+Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the
+road.  The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara
+walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort.
+Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes
+must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he
+understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's
+chin.  For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to
+inattention.  Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.
+
+"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent,"
+he mused.  "And she--she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful
+female person I ever did know."
+
+As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill
+superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one
+of his voluble tours of the premises.  But when Caleb had explained the
+main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of
+the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a
+wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.
+
+"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he
+asked then.  And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to
+hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"
+
+Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were.  It
+was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
+before him.
+
+"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.
+
+"Well, thin, we'll see."  McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
+in the diminutive cab.  "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
+he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"
+
+He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
+one foot upraised, hung back.  He faced toward Caleb and, without a
+glance in the girl's direction, said:
+
+"Mebby she--mebby she'd like to go, too?"
+
+Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
+her hand within that of her father.
+
+"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.
+
+Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
+and his face went pink.  Without another word he clambered up beside
+the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
+the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
+When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
+somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
+the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.
+
+"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
+assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
+
+Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand.  As
+grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
+
+"She--she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered.  And then,
+cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
+fer myself, some day!"
+
+McLean chuckled--he chuckled in deep delight within his white
+whiskers--and led the way to the mills.  But once there the amusement
+in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
+the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
+technically as did the mill boss himself.  And he knew timber; knew it
+with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
+border upon the uncanny.
+
+It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
+which was being discarded.
+
+"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
+asked.
+
+Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
+his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
+
+"She's holler," he stated succintly.  "Dry rotten above the stub!"
+
+And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one
+hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
+
+"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin'
+where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin
+the need arises!"
+
+A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram
+which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his
+attention.  They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara
+Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side.  After a brief
+examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders;
+then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his
+shoulder.
+
+"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith
+that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av
+quarter inch stuff--and three-quarters av an inch wide."
+
+The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling,
+empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.
+
+"The blacksmith says he ain't got no--no iron three-quarters of an inch
+wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths.  "But
+he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths.  Shall I--shall I git some
+o' that?"
+
+He waited the word, poised to go.
+
+McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground.  Now he rose
+and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with
+eagerness, uplifted to his.  Quiet endured for a long time, and then,
+at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled--he wheeled just in time to
+see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little
+smile.  And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.
+
+Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the
+boy's face.  The eager light faded from the gray eyes, until they were
+purple where they had been gray before.  And Caleb had never seen a
+face grow so white--so white and set and dangerous.  Stephen O'Mara's
+head drooped, he turned and wavered away a step or two.  Allison
+stopped laughing, abruptly.  Then McLean spoke.
+
+"'Twas funny, mebby," he muttered.  "But it was not so damned funny,
+aither!  An' I--I'll be goin' down now to teach that smith to kape his
+funny jokes till afther hours."
+
+He started toward the shop, and stopped again.
+
+"It's all right, buddy," he said.  "'Tis nothing that you need feel
+badly about, for 'twas I who made the mistake.  I should have sint you
+out to estimate whether our spruce would cut two million feet or less,
+an' you'd have come as close as mor-rtal man could, I'll wager.  'Twas
+a trivial thing, lad.  What's a little matter av figures between min av
+the river, eh?  We'll leave that to the capitalists who laugh at our
+dinseness, me bhoy!"
+
+With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.
+
+Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill.  Not once
+did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak
+whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself.  He only knew
+that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of
+mirth.  Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own
+gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark
+whatsoever.
+
+"I--you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that
+three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he
+tried to comfort him.  "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite
+of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."
+
+Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of
+laughter.  He whirled--the boy--and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed,
+bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones.  He shook with the very vehemence of
+the words that came through twitching lips.
+
+"_She_ didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out.  "If
+I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between
+them figgers, and _hedn't_ knowed, she could'a smiled.  But I--I ain't
+hed my chance--yit!"
+
+He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way
+upstairs.
+
+Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought
+uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely
+woman-wise.  A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to
+himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling
+up in the southwest.  One long finger of black cloud was already poked
+up over the horizon.  He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast
+table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and
+he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing
+trip on Monday--the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.
+
+He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of
+misery.  Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him
+the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly,
+come Monday!
+
+And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him
+alone for a while--alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than
+the spare little body which housed it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
+
+It rained that night.  The storm which hung for hours, a threatening
+bank of black in the south, finally tore north at sundown, to break
+with vicious fury.  And again Caleb spent a sleepless night, this time
+alone before the fireplace, but the thoughts which kept him awake
+failed to grow fantastic and romantically absurd with prolonged
+contemplation, as they had the night before.
+
+Never until that day had he considered his oft-repeated theory that
+there was many a boy in those back-woods who, with a chance, might go
+far, as anything but an idealistic truth, in the abstract.  The
+realization that a chance had come to test it, in the concrete, stunned
+him at first.
+
+Dispassionately he summed up all the boy's characteristics that night
+and reviewed them, one by one: His poise and utter lack of
+self-consciousness, his fearless directness and faith in himself, in
+all that he said or did; and they came through the mental assay without
+fault or flaw.
+
+He had already decided that he must go up-river and explore the old tin
+box which had been left there, locked in the "cubberd," but he was a
+little proud to make his decision before he learned all that it might,
+or might not, reveal; he was proud to believe that he knew a
+thorough-bred, without a pedigree for confirmation.  And when Sunday
+morning dawned and the floodlike downpour had subsided to a gray and
+steady rainfall, even Caleb, none too weatherwise, knew that it had
+come to "stay fer a spell."  He knew that the boy who had come marching
+down the valley road, two days before, was going to stay, too, if it
+lay within his power to persuade him.
+
+Steve was most taciturn at the table the following morning; his moody
+silence puzzled even Sarah Hunter.  But when the latter, whose Sunday
+schedule no storm could alter, came home from church and found Caleb
+and the boy immersed in a mass of flies and leaders, and lines which
+had been skeined to dry, her thorough disapproval loosed the boy's
+tongue.  She stood in the doorway surveying with a frown their
+preoccupied industry.
+
+"It seems to me, Cal," she commented, "that even if _you_ haven't any
+regard for the Sabbath, you might do better than lead those younger
+than yourself into doing things which might better be left for days
+which were meant for such things."
+
+She swished upstairs before Caleb had a chance to answer.  But minutes
+after she had gone Steve looked up from a line he was spooling.
+
+"She ain't particularly pleased, I take it," he remarked.
+
+"Not particularly," Caleb chuckled.  "It's funny, too, because I do
+most of this sort of work on Sunday.  You'd think she'd become resigned
+to it, but she doesn't."
+
+The boy thought deeply for a while.
+
+"Didn't--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" he asked
+presently.
+
+Up shot Caleb's head.
+
+"Huh-h-h?" he gasped.
+
+"I sed--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" Steve repeated.
+"Seems to me they did, but I can't just rec'lict now what chapter it
+was in."
+
+Caleb pulled his face into a semblance of sobriety.
+
+"Seems to me they did," he agreed, a little weakly, "now that you
+mention it.  I don't just recollect where it occurred, either, at the
+moment, but we'll have to look it up, because, as a case of precedent,
+it'll be a clincher for Sarah."
+
+He chuckled for a full hour over the thought before he forgot it.  The
+boy, however, upon whom Sarah's disapproval had made a more lasting
+impression, recalled it to him later.
+
+Allison joined them Monday morning at daybreak.  All day they drove
+through the seeping rain--drove north in Caleb's buckboard, to turn off
+finally upon a woods trail that ran into the cast, along the lesser
+branch of the river.  During the ride Steve's bearing toward the third
+member of the party was too plain to escape notice, for he never looked
+at nor directed a word to Allison unless it was in reply to a direct
+question, and then his answers were almost monosyllabic.  But Allison,
+who, as usual, gave his undivided attention to the country through
+which they were passing, in attitude toward the boy was even more
+remarkable.
+
+Once when they had halted at noon he pointed out a hillside of pine,
+black beneath the rain, close-clustered and of mastlike straightness.
+
+"There's a wonderful stand of pine, Cal," he remarked.  "I'd venture to
+say that it would cut at least two million feet."
+
+Instantly, although the remark was addressed to him, Caleb knew that it
+was Stephen's comment for which Allison was angling.  And hard upon his
+casual statement the boy's head came sharply around.
+
+"She'll run nigh double that," he swallowed the bait.  "She'll run
+double--and mebby a trifle more."
+
+Nor did Allison even smile now.
+
+"What makes you think so?" he asked.
+
+Again there came the boy's pat answer.
+
+"I ain't thinkin'," he said.  "It's jest there!  They're close
+set--them trees--and they're clear, clean to the tops.  There ain't a
+stump there that won't run near ten standard."
+
+Allison squinted and finally nodded his head.
+
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe."
+
+But later Caleb saw him enter some figures in his small, black-bound
+notebook.
+
+That night the episode was repeated with a bit of variation.  They had
+set up their tent and made camp, a little before nightfall.  Far below
+them, hidden by the trees, the east branch cut a threadlike gash
+through the center of a valley broad enough and round enough to have
+been a veritable amphitheater of the gods.  The whole great hollow was
+clothed with evergreen, a sea of dripping tops in the semi-gloom, and
+Allison, when he had set aside his plate and lighted his pipe, lifted a
+hand in a gesture which embraced it all.
+
+"If you weren't so lazy-brained, Cal," he said, "that sight would stir
+in you something more than a mere appreciation of what you call the
+'sublimity of sheer immensity.'  For the man who can look ahead ten or
+a dozen years there is an undreamed of fortune right here in this
+alley."
+
+Caleb yawned.
+
+"No doubt," he agreed.  "But I didn't coin that phrase for immense
+fortunes.  I guess I'm old-fashioned enough to like it a whole lot
+better just as it is."
+
+Then he became suddenly aware of the tense earnestness with which
+Stephen O'Mara was listening.  And when Allison, thinking aloud, mused
+that the cost of driving the timber down the shallow stream to the
+far-off mills would be, perhaps, prohibitive, words fairly leaped to
+the boy's lips.
+
+"But they--they won't be drivin' that timber by floods, when they git
+to tacklin' these here valleys," he exclaimed.  "Old Tom ses when they
+really git to lumberin' these mountains they'll skid it daown to the
+railroad tracks and yank it out by steam!"
+
+That sober statement in the piping voice had a strange effect upon
+Allison.  He leaned forward, a sort of guarded astonishment in his
+attitude, to peer at the childish face in the fire-glow.  Then he
+seemed to remember that it was just a bit of a woods-waif who had
+spoken.  But Caleb, who was lazy-brained in some matters, sensed that
+Steve had put into words Allison's own unspoken thought, just as
+Allison at that moment voiced the question which he was about to utter
+himself.
+
+"I suppose it was this--this Old Tom who taught you all these things
+you know about timber?" he said, curious.
+
+Steve pondered the question.
+
+"Wal-l-l, yes," he answered at last.  "Old Tom learned me some,
+but--but most of it I kind of feel as if I always knowed."
+
+The boy was fast asleep, curled up beneath the blankets, when Caleb
+finally broached, that night, the matter which had kept him awake the
+entire night before.  And when he had finished Allison sat quiet for a
+long time before he offered any reply.
+
+"You mean----" he began, at length.
+
+"I just mean that I'm going to give him his chance," Caleb cut in.  His
+voice was hushed, but vehement.  "Why, man, think what he has this
+minute, to start with!  A brain as clear as a diamond, absolutely
+fresh, absolutely unspoiled or fagged with the nonsensical fol-de-rol
+which makes up the bulk of the usual boy's education of his age, and a
+working knowledge, for instance, of this north country which most men
+might envy.  Why, the possibilities are limitless!"
+
+Allison puffed his pipe in silence.
+
+"No doubt you're right," he admitted.  "In ten years, with a technical
+education to back up his practical knowledge, he might prove priceless
+to someone who had need of such a specialist.  Always assuming, of
+course, that he developed according to promise.  But the possibilities
+are limitless, too, in the other directions, aren't they?"
+
+"Meaning?" invited Caleb.
+
+"Well, you don't know any too much concerning his antecedents, do you?"
+Allison suggested.  "And still----"
+
+"I don't have to," Caleb interrupted, "not after one look at him!"
+
+"--And still, if you catch a boy young enough," Allison finished
+serenely, "you can make a fairly presentable gentleman out of almost
+any material, with time enough and money enough to teach him what to
+do."
+
+"You can," Caleb came back, "but no matter how much money you spend,
+you can't make the sort of a gentleman out of him, that knows without
+being taught, what _not_ to do!  They--they have to be born to that,
+Dexter."
+
+And there they let it drop.  But the next morning, when they were alone
+upon the brook, Caleb, after several false starts managed to re-open
+the subject with the boy himself.
+
+"Has it ever occurred to you, Steve," he asked, "that all these things
+you know about the woods might be valuable, some day, to--to men who
+pay well for such knowledge?"
+
+Steve paid no apparent heed to the question until he had landed a trout
+which he had hooked a moment before.  It was a heavy fish--and Caleb
+had promised to teach him how to handle that fly-rod!  Then he looked
+up.
+
+"Once Old Tom sed they'd be payin' me more'n he ever earned in his
+lifetime, jest to go a-raound and tell 'em how much good lumber they
+was in standin' trees.  Is that--is that what you mean?"
+
+"Partly--partly, but not entirely, either," Caleb went on.  "You said
+last night that when they got to lumbering these mountains, they'd be
+taking it out by steam.  When they do they'll want men who know the
+woods--but they'll have to know how to bridge rivers and cross swamps,
+too, won't they?"
+
+The boy promptly forgot his fishing.  Knee-deep in the stream he faced
+squarely around toward Caleb, and from that glowing countenance the man
+knew that he had only repeated something which, long before, had
+already fired the boy's imagination.
+
+"They's places where I kin git 'em to learn me them things, ain't
+they?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes," said Caleb.  "There are places.  And you--you were thinking of
+going to school?"
+
+"Thinkin' of it?" echoed Steve.  "I always been thinkin' of it.  Why,
+thet's all I come outen the timber fer!"
+
+"But you said you meant to locate something to do," the man argued,
+nonplussed, "after you had looked around a trifle."
+
+Steve's eyes dropped toward the white drill trousers and big boots, the
+latter half-hidden from sight by the swirling water.
+
+"I got to earn money first," he explained patiently.  "I--I jest
+couldn't git to go to school--in these here clothes!"
+
+"Oh!" murmured Caleb.  "Oh!"  And then, recovering himself: "That'll
+take a long time," he ventured.
+
+The boy smiled, strangely--the first smile of man's sophistication
+which Caleb had seen upon his face.
+
+"I've always hed to wait a long time fer everything I've wanted," he
+answered, "but I always git it, just the same, if I only want it hard
+enough."
+
+[Illustration: "I've always hed to wait a long time for everything I've
+wanted," the boy answered, "but I always get it, just the same, if I
+only want it hard enough."]
+
+Caleb cleared his throat, self-consciously.
+
+"Still," he argued again, "it would waste some very valuable years.
+Now--now what do you think of staying with me, and--and starting in
+this fall?"
+
+The boy's lips fell apart while he stood and gaped up into Caleb's
+slightly red face.
+
+"You mean," he breathed, "you mean--jest live--with you?"
+
+"That was my idea," said Caleb.
+
+And then, slowly, the boy's head dropped again, as it had when he bowed
+to gaze at his uncouth, begrimed clothes.  The man thought that he
+caught the inference of that moment of silence.
+
+"We can fix up the matter of clothes later," he made haste to forestall
+any objection in that direction.  "That doesn't amount to anything,
+anyway."
+
+The clear eyes lifted again, steady and wide and very, very grave.
+
+"I always knowed it was comin'," said Stephen O'Mara.  "I always knowed
+it was a-comin'--this chance--even when I didn't know _haow_ it would
+come.  Ner I wa'n't thinkin' about my clothes.  I reckon I kin learn
+jest as fast in these as in any.  I was jest thinkin' about Miss Sarah.
+She--she might not like it, hevin' two men folks a-raound the house,
+under foot."
+
+It was Caleb's turn to stand, agape.
+
+"Miss Sarah?" he faltered, astonished--and then he remembered.  He
+laughed, unsteadily, with relief.  For an instant he had been
+inexplicably afraid that the boy was going to refuse his offer.
+
+"Why, you musn't mind what Sarah said yesterday," he rushed on.
+"She--she--well, she's a Baptist, Steve, and you know what that means."
+
+He leaned forward a little, his voice quite stealthily confidential.
+
+"But I can fix that all right," he promised.  "I can surely fix that.
+For I'll tell her--I'll tell her you're a Baptist, too!  Will you--will
+you stay?"
+
+And after a time solemnly Steve nodded.  Later, when alone, Caleb
+chuckled mountainously over his reply.
+
+"Thet's--thet's what I cal'late I be," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehearsed a half score of speeches
+with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken;
+but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the
+entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the
+facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything
+else.  It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily
+swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah
+had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the
+rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped
+from cold.  So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace
+when Caleb made known his decision.
+
+"I've never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know,
+Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct.  "And this
+seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have.  You--you
+like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"
+
+While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
+the face, once at least.  It was hard to know what she was thinking
+when she sat like that, staring into the fire.  He waited, not without
+grave misgivings, for her reply.
+
+"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.
+
+"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.
+
+"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.
+
+There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
+gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.
+
+"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured.  "It is
+pretty sudden--but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."
+
+And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother.  Her eyes were
+unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.
+
+"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered.  "Why, I knew you
+were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
+veranda behind him.  I was certain of it, even then.  And if you hadn't
+decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
+came back from that endless fishing-trip!"
+
+And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
+perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste.  For it was
+Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening.  She ran on and
+on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
+prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
+dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
+the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
+beside her woman-hunger.  It astonished him, when he mentioned the
+subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
+deed.
+
+"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
+caught up his suggestion.  "To-day I explored for hours and found some
+of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
+worn at all.  I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
+in the morning.  And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
+like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"
+
+The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
+he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she
+mentioned had been in vogue.  Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the
+gurgle in her throat.  And so, the next morning, when a little figure
+in velvet jacket and pantaloons--velvet of the same jet hue in which
+Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two
+before--stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed
+of not one whit of its sensationalism.
+
+Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever
+have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have
+stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance.  There were
+red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been
+encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of
+sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver
+buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which
+fastened it across his small chest--silver buttons to match upon the
+quaintly short sleeves.
+
+Stephen O'Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he
+started methodically down the stairs.  And immediately Caleb's
+amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him
+gave way to a newer wonder.  For the boy, in spite of the fact that his
+small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness
+of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable.  Then Caleb realized how
+great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in
+the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good
+mornings he led the way to the table.
+
+There was something in Sarah's fluttering delight over the boy's
+appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her
+brother.  For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the
+boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss
+Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his
+first appearance.  They had a word together--Sarah and Caleb--after
+breakfast.
+
+"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
+"Did you!  Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"
+
+Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.
+
+"I never did," he admitted.  And then, offhandedly: "What--did he say
+anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this
+morning."
+
+"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little.  "No.  But he--Cal, he just sat
+and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time.  He made me
+think somehow of a puppy that knows he's going to be scrubbed and--and
+dreads it exceedingly.  It's because of those dreadful things he's been
+wearing, don't you suppose so?"
+
+"No doubt of it," her brother said.  "No doubt!  And now I'm going over
+to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him.  I was telling
+him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."
+
+When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he
+searched the house through without finding the boy.  In his perplexity
+he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.
+
+"Where's Stephen?" he asked.
+
+Sarah nodded to Allison.
+
+"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought
+you wouldn't be back for a while, I sent him downtown--I sent him to
+the village----"
+
+Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.
+
+"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed.  "Did he--did he change
+his clothes?"
+
+"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.
+
+"And of course he didn't!"  Suddenly her brother's face alarmed her.
+"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven't done anything I shouldn't have done,
+have I?"
+
+Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.
+
+"In--that--outfit!" he groaned.  "Down to the village, and it's a
+lumber town!  He's gone, and if he doesn't have to fight his way back
+then I----"
+
+Sarah's alarm changed to fear instantly.  She stepped out upon the
+porch.
+
+"I never thought of that," she whispered.  "But you don't really
+think----"
+
+In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction.  But Allison,
+after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an
+expansive smile of anticipation upon his face, propped his feet upon
+the rail.
+
+"I think," he assured her, with no comfort in the assurance, "that this
+will be well worth watching through to the finish!"
+
+They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned.  As he
+appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat,
+half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair.  And even to
+Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit
+with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck.  The coat had
+been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as
+the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till
+the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric
+which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o'er-spread with egg.
+
+After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet
+and retreated none too steadily into the house.  But it wasn't the
+condition of the boy's clothes which held Caleb's gaze.  He was
+watching his face.  For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous
+whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man.  His lips
+were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in
+one corner.  And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
+Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach
+before Caleb spoke.  And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half
+to see the two men who were waiting his coming.
+
+"Well?" faltered Caleb.
+
+The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head.  Both men heard that
+breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.
+
+"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again.  "Where have you
+been?"
+
+He hardly recognized the boy's voice.
+
+"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words.  "I been daown to
+git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs--and I run into trouble--daown
+there--a-gittin' 'em!"
+
+"I--I should assume that you had," murmured Caleb.  "But you've brought
+the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren't
+in particularly edible condition."
+
+That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of
+laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath.  And Steve,
+teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.
+
+"You'd better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised
+him then.  "And I'll get you something less--less dangerous to wear
+before night."
+
+But the boy stood rigid still.
+
+"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"
+
+Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.
+
+"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket
+and handed the coin to the boy.  "Now what do you----Here, where are
+you going now?"
+
+Steve had turned and was marching down the steps.  He paused a minute
+to explain, however.
+
+"Why, I'm goin' back daown to the city," he grated out.  "I'm goin'
+back after Miss Sarah's eggs!"
+
+And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which
+held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer's
+counter.
+
+"Well I'm--I'm damned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the
+house.  "I _am_ damned!  You'll have to bring that youngster over, Cal,
+and introduce him to the children."
+
+Caleb couldn't help it.
+
+"I told you so!" he said.
+
+That was only a beginning.  The next fortnight was filled with more new
+experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
+be crammed into twenty times that duration.  And Caleb spent most of
+his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
+astonishing traits which he found in the boy.
+
+Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
+day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
+and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
+Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
+But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
+impressed itself upon Caleb.  As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
+over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
+after Caleb himself had suggested it.  And more often than not he would
+be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
+in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills.  It puzzled Caleb
+mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.
+
+Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
+of frank and undisguised wonder and worship.  Whatever they did, no
+matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
+bobbed head.  For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
+her for approbation.  And in return for that worship Barbara's
+treatment of him was truly feminine.  He out-ran the other boys as a
+deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
+an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
+dark-eyed Barbara.  She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
+eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
+with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
+understanding.  More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the
+little girl's disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve's reluctance to
+leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
+about it.
+
+"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
+there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
+of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
+thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares
+enough for her so that she can really hurt him!  If that Barbara was a
+boy I'd catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"
+
+At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
+asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.
+
+"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
+so much."  The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb.  "That
+isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them.  They have been
+laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
+openly--mocking his speech and--and manners!  All of them, that is,
+save Garry Devereau."
+
+Caleb's face hardened.
+
+"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
+
+"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed.  "And you musn't mention it to him.  I just
+gathered it from something he let drop the other day.  You know, Cal,
+he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
+marvelous.  He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
+and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
+didn't talk as--as he read.  He didn't know what I meant at first, but
+he understood the minute I tried to explain.
+
+"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.
+
+"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
+face began to go red.
+
+"'Do--do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk--like
+books?'
+
+"So you see!  And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
+idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
+mental process which is habit with him."  Sarah's face grew resentful.
+"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place.  We
+should have known!  For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
+which he doesn't catch.  And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
+depths of his sensitiveness."
+
+"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly.  "We'll keep him away from
+them."  And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
+heard him say in her presence.
+
+But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home.  Without some
+suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
+own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
+veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
+the voices behind the high hedge.  More and more often Garry Devereau
+came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
+daily trips down to the mills.  A quick intimacy had grown up between
+the two boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
+because of the very contrast between them.
+
+Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
+the matter of knowledge.  Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
+was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father.  For
+the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
+boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
+the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
+trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game."  The
+skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile.  And Caleb
+often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
+rather than at him.  The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
+exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
+all that.  It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
+
+Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
+all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter.  It seemed to him then that he
+should have foreseen it from the very first.  But as it was, when the
+denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
+with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.
+
+From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
+he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
+and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases.  But it was
+the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
+he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
+the pages.  And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
+came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand.  After she had
+caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
+had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
+of the Round Table.  His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
+and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
+brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
+old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
+appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
+
+Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
+again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
+the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
+echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge.  And after
+dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly,
+that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while.  Allison
+himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting,
+stopped to shake hands with him gravely.  So it came about that they
+were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when
+Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears.  They
+waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set
+them to running across the lawn.  But the scene which met Caleb's eyes
+when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
+
+There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon
+the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic--all save Garry
+Devereau.  He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer,
+crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable
+Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the
+infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
+An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison
+frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of
+fists--a man's contempt for another man who does not take his
+punishment in silence.  For the howls of the Honorable Archie were
+louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little
+girls who were watching.
+
+Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot
+make his feet obey the commands of his brain.  It was only when Barbara
+Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and
+legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little
+hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to
+him.  He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his
+weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar,
+jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave.  That effort raised the
+Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his
+antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
+
+It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering
+sternly down into his battle-streaked features.  Allison strode quietly
+up in that moment.
+
+"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
+"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
+
+The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to
+rearranging his crumpled raiment--fell to dabbling at a bruised and
+swollen nose.  When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief
+he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for
+Steve's answer.
+
+Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not
+have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question.
+The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead
+with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
+
+"Nuthin'--nuthin' much," he qualified the statement.  "Only we was
+goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table!  He
+wanted to be her knight"--an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the
+Honorable Archie--"and--and so did I."  This time his eyes went to
+Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip.  "He wanted to
+be her knight--an'--an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of
+trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her!  He couldn't fight good
+enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better.  I--I just
+licked him to prove it!"
+
+And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.
+
+Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the
+boy away from his shrieking rival.  But while he stood there, looking
+down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a
+situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope.  Already
+it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison--but it
+seemed symbolic to Caleb.  He sensed how close it lay to tragedy
+itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which
+he had thought to deliver.
+
+"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained
+ponderously, "the--the fair ladies always chose their own knights,
+didn't they?"
+
+But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy.  For,
+instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face,
+it only softened it.  Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe
+of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his
+shoulders and faced Barbara full.  The move was unmistakable--he was
+just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice.  And,
+instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled
+her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.
+
+"You--you--_my_ knight?" she half whispered, "_You_!"  And she turned
+her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.
+
+Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious
+amusement, at the livid change which came over Steve's face with that
+answer which she flung at him.  The boy fell away a step before her
+fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her
+fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before.  And then her meaning
+struck him like a blow between the eyes.
+
+Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and
+started for the gap in the hedge.  Caleb could not move, nor did
+Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things.  But Garry
+Devereau followed and overtook his friend.  He did not speak to him; he
+merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders.  And yet the men,
+had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was
+in that second of contact.  For it proved electrical in its effect.
+Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now--back to the
+group which had not moved.  Straight up to Barbara he went and faced
+her once again.
+
+"I wa'n't good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a
+hushed and vibrant voice.  "I--I don't know enough, ner I can't talk
+good enough, to be your knight.  I ain't good enough fer you!  But I'm
+a-goin' to be--do you hear?  I'm a-goin' to be--an' when I am . . .
+when I am . . . then I'll come back to you!"
+
+This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight.  Caleb stood
+staring at the ground.  Allison stood and stared at the horizon.
+
+And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the
+stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home.  It was the
+first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in
+anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all
+that was his!
+
+Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless
+face had told Sarah too much and too little.  After her brother had
+explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.
+
+"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said.  "It has
+been coming for days, this thing.  I think I knew it would come--but
+how could we have stopped it, Cal?  And you won't believe me, but it's
+because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy's little finger than she
+could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she--she said what she did.
+Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can't tell you why!"
+
+Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed
+to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his
+room, fear in their hearts.  The bed had not been slept in; the sheets
+were not even disarranged, but there was a scrap of paper pinned to one
+pillow-slip.  It wasn't written in "book language"--that short
+message--for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:
+
+
+I'm a-comin' back--I'm comin' back to you, someday when they won't be
+no need fer you to be ashamed fer me.  I'm takin' my new clothes with
+me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to--and the shoes, too.  I'm
+askin' you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her--and Miss
+Sarah ain't got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o'
+myself.
+
+
+It was signed "Stephen O'Mara."
+
+Sarah's face went white when she had read it through.  Her knees
+weakened under her and she had to sit down.
+
+"Why, Cal--why, Cal, he's--he's gone," she quavered.
+
+And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.
+
+"Yes--he--he's gone," he breathed.
+
+Sarah swallowed hard.  Then two bright tears crept out from under her
+eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks.  She rose and groped her way
+to her own room.
+
+Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still
+numb from the shock, went back downstairs.  She came up to him and
+stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the
+other.
+
+"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.
+
+Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.
+
+"Steve isn't here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.
+
+The child didn't understand.
+
+"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly.  "I'm to tell
+him that I'm sorry.  But I--I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn't
+have him for my knight--I--I wouldn't ever have any knight at all!"
+
+Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.
+
+"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.
+
+A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.
+
+"He'll be back for breakfast, won't he?" she asked, hopefully.
+
+"I'm afraid not, Barbara.  I'm afraid now that he may never come
+back--again."
+
+She didn't understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to
+explain.  But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper
+there was no further need of explanation.  She ran then and threw
+herself in a passion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner.  Caleb
+found his chair.  And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
+sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.
+
+"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
+"Please--please!  Because he _is_ coming back!  He told me he would--he
+told me he would, himself!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MY MAN O'MARA
+
+For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country.  He
+whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might
+overtake the boy who had gone in the night.  But none of the farmers on
+the outlying roads had seen pass their way a little foot traveler such
+as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.
+
+When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed
+than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears,
+had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away
+during the night.  Allison's concern was too genuine to be feigned; and
+Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor's amusement
+at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his sturdy
+gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of
+things which were as sealed books to Dexter.
+
+Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the
+country, until they both realized that the search was useless.  And at
+last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into
+that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely
+designated as "up-river."
+
+He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
+"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
+If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
+wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
+that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
+branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
+before.  But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
+ridge alone, by trail.  And even then, when he did locate the
+"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
+convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
+one.  Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
+another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
+in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll.  And they stood and stared
+in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather
+puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
+box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
+shut behind him.
+
+Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
+yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
+existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
+there came an opportunity to spend it.  And Sarah was waiting at the
+door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
+dusk, two days later.
+
+"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
+entered the hall.
+
+Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.
+
+"No, I haven't found _him_, Sarah," he said gently enough.  "But
+I--I've found out _who he is_!"
+
+They forgot their supper that night.  With heads close together they
+hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
+yielded up.  Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
+handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
+called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
+was very, very clear.
+
+There was one picture--a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
+hair.  Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable.  Sarah found that
+and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
+remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts.  These
+puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
+a folded and legal-looking document.  He opened that and then he
+understood--he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
+Tom had been able to earn.  After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
+refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
+it to Sarah at all.  Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
+to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
+reason was there.  At length he turned to his sister.
+
+"It's not hard to understand now, is it?" he said.  "It's pretty plain
+now why he had to go.  And we, Sarah--we who were going to 'make
+something of him'--why, we should have known absolutely, without this
+evidence.  They laughed at him; they made fun of him--and there isn't
+any better blood than flows in that boy's veins!  He was Stephen
+O'Mara's son, and no more brilliant barrister than O'Mara ever
+addressed a jury of a prisoner's peers and--and broke their very hearts
+with the simplicity of his pleading."
+
+Sarah folded her thin hands over the woman's picture.
+
+"I like his mother's face," she murmured, faintly.  "And I'm jealous of
+her, Cal!  You don't have to remind me of the rest of it, either, for I
+recall it all.  She died, and he--he went all to pieces.  They said, at
+his death, that he was destitute.  And when he did follow
+her--across--they hunted everywhere, didn't they, and never found the
+boy?  Didn't some of the newspapers argue that a servant--a
+gardener--had stolen him?"
+
+Caleb nodded his head.
+
+"Most of them ridiculed the suggestion, but it was true, just the same.
+That servant was Old Tom.  And the only defense he makes is just one
+line or so in--in this."  Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible
+pages.  "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the
+boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had
+made of his father's.  And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't
+help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have
+prosecuted was the best thing he could have done?  I'll take these
+things, now, and lock them in the safe for the boy, until he--until he
+comes back home!"
+
+But Sarah Hunter kept the picture of Stephen O'Mara's mother separate
+from the rest; she took it upstairs with her when she went, white and
+tired-faced, to bed.  And it was Sarah's faith which outlasted the
+years which followed.  She never weakened in her belief that some day
+the boy would come back--she and one other whose faith in his last
+boyish promise, phrased in bitterness, also endured.  For during the
+next five years there was not a summer which brought Allison into the
+hills but what the first question of his daughter Barbara, motherless
+now herself, was of Steve.
+
+"Has--has Stephen come back?" she asked invariably.
+
+At first the query was marked by nothing more than a child's naïve
+eagerness; and later, when it was brought up in a casual, by-the-way
+fashion, it was, nevertheless, tinged with hope.  Five years lengthened
+into ten, and still Steve did not come.  But whenever Barbara asked
+that question Caleb remembered, as though it had happened only
+yesterday, that morning when she first appeared to the boy.
+
+He wondered sometimes what Steve's reception of her would be now--if he
+did come back!  The thought supplied many idle hours with food for
+speculation for Barbara Allison, year by year, had grown into that
+slender, dark-eyed creature of more than usual beauty whom Caleb had
+seen, as through the boy's own eyes, in the promise of the years.
+Caleb had long before given up all hope, but he wondered just the same.
+And then there came a morning when he didn't have to wonder any more.
+There came a morning when that self-same scene was staged again by
+Chance--staged with Caleb for an audience.  There came a morning when
+Stephen O'Mara did return.
+
+More than a few times in those intervening years the Hunter home had
+been closed.  Sarah Hunter developed an uneasy restlessness which would
+have worried her brother had it not been for the light of wistful
+expectancy which never left her eyes.  She developed what her brother
+termed a habit of "seeing America first and last, and in the interval
+between."  But he, beneath his jocularity, was glad enough to accompany
+her upon those rambling journeys which, without itinerary, led them
+from coast to coast and he never smiled--at least not so that she might
+see him--even though he was certain that she, in her simplicity of
+spirit, was really looking for the boy.
+
+All winter and throughout the summer, too, the Hunter place had been
+closed, until that day in late October.  It had been a warm week--a
+week of such unseasonable humidity for the hills that Caleb, rising
+somewhat before his usual hour, had blamed his sleeplessness, as usual,
+upon the weather.  He was glad to be home again that morning; he had
+been so lonely away from home that he was warmed unaccountably by the
+thought that Allison was in the hills, too.  And he was sure of that
+fact, for the night before, when their train pulled into the station
+which occupied the spot where Allison's mill-yards had stood before,
+the bright brass work upon the private car of the owner of the stucco
+place next his own had been unmistakable.
+
+Caleb was even wondering if Barbara would be with her father on this
+trip.  Barbara had, he knew, been two years on the continent,
+"finishing," Allison called it, always with a wry face and a gesture
+toward his wallet pocket.  He was wondering, as he came down the
+stairs, if she would ask him again if--if . . . and then, at the sight
+of a seated figure outside on the top step of the veranda, he pulled up
+sharp in the doorway.
+
+Caleb didn't have to wonder any longer!
+
+The attitude of that figure before him was so like the picture which
+time had been unable to erase--so absolutely identical in everything
+save garb and size alone--that the man, recoiling a little, dragged one
+hand across his forehead as though he doubted his own eyes.  But when
+he looked again it was still there, sitting chin in palm, small head
+under a rather weather-beaten felt hat thrust slightly forward, gazing
+fixedly toward the stucco house beyond the shrubbery.  And before Caleb
+could move, before he was more than half aware of the painful pulse in
+his throat, it all happened again, just as it had happened years and
+years before.
+
+Caleb heard voices in the adjoining grounds, and as he half turned in
+that direction Allison's bulky form, vivid in a far more vivid plaid,
+appeared in the hedge gap.  While Caleb stared another figure flashed
+through ahead of him, laughter upon her lips, and paused a-tip-toe, to
+wave a hand in greeting.  And instantly, as they had a dozen years
+before, Barbara Allison's eyes swung in instant scrutiny of the one who
+was seated at Caleb's feet.  She hesitated, and recovered herself.  But
+when, with quite dignified deliberation, she finally came forward to
+pass that motionless figure upon the steps, every pulse in her body was
+beating consciousness of his nearness.  And yet, at that, when she
+paused at Caleb's side and bobbed her head with a characteristic
+impetuosity which she had never lost she seemed completely oblivious to
+the presence of anyone save Caleb and herself.
+
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she murmured, very demurely.
+
+Then the man upon the steps moved; he rose and turned and swept his
+rather weather-beaten hat from his head.  His hair was still wavy,
+still chestnut in the shadows.  And Caleb, though he could not force a
+word from his tightened throat, marveled how tall the boy had
+grown--how paradoxically broad of shoulder and slender of body he
+seemed to be.
+
+It was a man's face which was lifted to his, tanned and wrinkled a
+little at the corners of the eyes by much exposure to sun and wind.
+But the eyes themselves hadn't changed a bit.  They were still the same
+steady and unwavering gray.  A smile crept into them, a smile crept
+across the even lips, and for all the change there was in that slow
+mirth it might have been the little figure of other days--the boy in
+the white drill trousers and uncouth boots--who was smiling up at Caleb.
+
+Standing there in his blue flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, clasped
+tight to knee by high brown boots below them, Stephen O'Mara held out a
+sinewy brown hand.  His voice was a little unsteady, but the mimicry of
+his own drawling speech of former years held an echo of boyhood--a
+twanging, boyish echo--which dragged at Caleb's very heartstrings.
+
+"Haow--haow d'ye do, Uncle Cal?" he quavered.
+
+Barbara had turned and started indoors in search of Miss Sarah.  Now
+she halted, her slim back toward the two men at the veranda's edge, and
+stood motionless at the sound of that voice.  When, little by little,
+she faced around at last, it was fairly to feel those grave gray eyes
+resting upon her own face.  The blood of a sudden came storming up into
+Barbara's cheeks.  And Caleb, even if he did not know what all of the
+girl's emotions were at that moment, knew that he knew one of them at
+least.  Caleb had just learned himself what it was to see a ghost.
+
+Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his
+daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open.  Ho
+found her staring, velvet eyed and pink of face, at a tall figure in
+blue flannel and corduroy, and although he had never seen him in all
+the months that the latter had been in his employ, Allison knew this
+must be the one in whose keeping lay, directly or indirectly, the
+success or failure of the biggest thing he had ever attempted in this
+north country--the man to whom he always referred, whenever he boasted
+of his exploits, as "my man O'Mara."
+
+Beyond that point, however, Allison's immediate recognition did not go.
+The past interested him but little, except as a matter for precedent or
+a record of past performances.  But memory fairly clamored in the
+girl's ears that morning.  There was not one tiniest detail of the
+strangely intense, sturdily confident little hill-boy's bearing but
+what came back to her at that moment.  She remembered them all, and
+seconds later, when Steve's fingers had closed over her own
+outstretched hand, she realized that she was staring at him in a
+childishly concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the
+undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the
+eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight.  And she realized
+suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even
+though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable.
+
+"I always told them that you would come back," she murmured then.
+"Just as you--you said you would."
+
+The remark was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon
+its utterance she caught her breath in anger at herself for her own
+senseless confusion, which had led her into saying the one thing she
+least of all had wanted to voice.  Even an inane remark concerning the
+weather would have been better than that girlish naiveté which she felt
+seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a
+promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but
+a quaint episode not untinged with absurdity.
+
+She realized that her hand still lay in his; she grew hotly conscious
+of her father's rather perplexed survey of the tableau.  And in that
+instant when Allison's first words reached her burning ears, even
+before Steve could reply to her greeting, she wrung free her fingers
+with an abruptness which, when she remembered it afterward, only added
+to her fury at her absurd confusion.
+
+"Hum-m-m," puffed Allison.  "Hum-m-m!"  He spoke directly to Stephen
+O'Mara, who half turned his head at the first heavily facetious
+syllable.  "So you did get my message, eh?  I rather thought that it
+wouldn't reach you, up-river, until to-day."  An ample smile embraced
+the tall figure in riverman's garb and his own daughter's crimson
+countenance--a most meaningful smile of roguery.  "Well, from what I've
+heard," he stated, "and what I've . . . seen, I should say that you are
+my man, O'Mara.  Mr. Elliott himself has informed me that your quite
+spectacular success in one or two vital campaigns has been entirely due
+to the fact that you are an--er--opportunist!  I agree with Mr.
+Elliott, absolutely--that is, if my first premise is correct."
+
+And his laughter rumbled softly.
+
+Barbara's face had cooled a little in that moment since Steve's eyes
+had left her face.  Now she forgot her confusion--forgot to be annoyed,
+even at her father's clumsy banter.
+
+"_Your_ man, O'Mara!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "_Your_ man!  Why,
+he--he's _my_--" and that was as far as she went.
+
+Her voice thinned into nothingness, but words were not necessary to
+tell either Caleb or Steve that she had been about to assert a prior
+claim which dated back years and years.
+
+The man whose smile was still that of the boy turned slowly back to
+Barbara.  His quiet mirth, which crinkled the corners of his eyelids,
+seemed totally detached and impersonal; and yet it hinted, too, at an
+intimate enjoyment of the situation which they alone could appreciate.
+Steve merely held out his hand again and took her slim fingers within
+his own.
+
+"I have always insisted to Mr. Elliott," he said, "that the solution of
+all the difficulties, which he chooses to view as gloriously romantic
+tilts with Destiny, depends one-half upon luck, and the other half on
+being on the ground personally, when the--affair--starts."  He half
+faced toward Allison.  "I am O'Mara," he finished very briefly, "your
+man, O'Mara--if you happen to be the East Coast Development and Timber
+Company?"
+
+There was at most no more than the barest suggestion of it in Steve's
+crisp question, but Caleb sensed immediately that Allison's placid
+appropriation of the blue flannel-shirted one as his own particular
+property was not a mutually accepted status.  Dexter, however, failed,
+or chose, to read nothing in the drawling question.
+
+"I'm it," he agreed, jovially.  "That is--I and two or three others,
+including Mr. Elliott, our esteemed president."
+
+He mounted the steps heavily and stood contemplating the small hand
+still within the larger, browner one.
+
+"The introductions seem to have outstripped me," he remarked,
+"but--er--any objection to shaking hands with me, too, Mr. O'Mara?"
+
+Stephen laughed aloud.  Allison's attempted lugubrity was really funny.
+From the door Barbara echoed his laughter in bubbling, throaty
+amusement at it all.
+
+"Poor, blind papa!" she chanted mockingly, and disappeared on swift
+feet.
+
+Allison scowled after her.
+
+"Not so blind as some--the unprincipled jade!" he retorted.  "But
+that's another thing I've heard about you, Mr. O'Mara, if you will
+pardon a garrulous old gossip's personalities.  They tell me that you
+aren't particularly--susceptible?"
+
+And then the bantering tone was dropped entirely.  In the rest of
+Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's
+whole make-up--his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had
+done or might do, in a man's world.
+
+"I've heard much of you, Mr. O'Mara; I've looked forward to this
+meeting," he said, as he shook hands.  "Now I want to tell you that I
+am proud to know you.  And so you didn't get my message, after all?"
+
+The handclasp left Allison staring ruefully at his reddened fingers.
+Steve shook his head.
+
+"I had to come down river, yesterday," he explained.  "Your telegram
+found me here, and I waited over until this morning, as you suggested."
+
+"Surely . . . surely!  I see . . . I see!"  Allison emphasized his
+comprehension.  "Not that it was anything of vital importance.  I just
+wanted a short conference with you, yourself, that was all.  Elliott's
+own reports on the work are so tinged with his eternal optimism, so
+colored by what you aptly termed his romantic zest for the game, that I
+wanted your own opinion concerning the possibility of the East Coast
+Company finishing that railroad in time to fulfil their contracts.  No
+hurry about it; but that's my house over yonder.  You were just one
+place too far north to find me."
+
+He turned to face Caleb.  There was a flood of questions upon the
+latter's lips.  Caleb wanted to seize the boy by the shoulder, and spin
+him around toward the light and stare and stare into his face; but he
+waited because he found much that was hugely diverting in Dexter's
+bland ignorance, which had even accepted Steve's presence there as a
+case of misdirection.
+
+"I suppose you know what this early morning call presages, Cal?"
+Allison challenged.
+
+Before Caleb could reply Steve knew what the answer was to be.  The
+request found him already at the door, grinning broadly.
+
+"Would you--would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" Caleb asked.
+"Will you tell her, please, that we are to be subjected to
+another--neighborly imposition!"
+
+Steve's going left Allison frowning a little.
+
+"We've played this farce through a hundred times, Cal," he murmured,
+"and it wasn't according to formula--that last remark of yours.  But,
+do you know, just for a minute it sort of reminded me of
+something--something that seems to have happened before, and I can't
+recall just what."
+
+He shook his head and led the way to a chair.
+
+"It wasn't our nonsense that affected me, either," he finished.  "I
+believe it was O'Mara himself who . . . but I didn't know that you were
+acquainted with him, Cal.  Have you known him long?"
+
+"Um-m-m--yes!" Caleb weighed his reply.  "Quite some time, I think I
+might say."
+
+He shook with scarcely suppressed laughter, but Allison ignored his
+senseless mirth.
+
+"I'd like to claim that boy as my own discovery," he avowed, "but I
+can't--not without fear of successful contradiction on Elliott's part.
+And in point of service it isn't fair to call him a boy, either, though
+I suppose both of us are old enough to be his father.  He's Elliott's
+find.  Elliott suggested him as the one man for this job, when I
+consolidated with the Ainnesley crowd and they took up the contract to
+move the Reserve timber from Thirty-Mile and the valleys above.
+Elliott knew of him, but I've been looking up his record pretty
+closely, since he took hold in earnest.
+
+"He's in his twenties, as near as I can make out, but he's come through
+on one of two jobs that might well make an old campaigner envious.  He
+took a fortune in hard woods out of San Domingo for a Berlin concern;
+he was the only man on the St. Sebastian River job who said the
+construction was too light.  He said it wouldn't stand when the ice
+began to move in the spring--and it didn't!  Oh, he knows his business!
+But it wasn't his successes which caught Elliott's eye.  It's the way
+he has failed a couple of times, fighting right back to the last
+ditch--and fighting and fighting!--when all the rest had quit, that
+made me anxious to get a look at him.  Perhaps there are older men who
+can outfigure him on loads and stresses, but as a field general he
+stands alone.  He can handle men.  And, when it comes to meeting
+conditions just as they arise, Elliott says he's a wonder--he can
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!"
+
+There was grave appreciation in Allison's voice--honest appreciation of
+a man who had himself achieved, for another man's achievement.  And yet
+Caleb, in spite of the proud pumping of his heart, in spite of his
+desire to murmur, "But I told you so, Dexter, years ago," still found
+room to wonder at a thin strain of speculation which seemed to underrun
+the speaker's words.  In his reiteration of O'Mara's qualities Allison
+seemed almost to be assuring himself that infallibility was not a human
+attribute.  And his next remark only served to heighten that suggestion.
+
+"That's why the East Coast Co. brought him up here to build their bit
+of road," he went on slowly.  "They've got to move that Reserve Company
+timber.  They have a contract that'll break 'em--break us--if we fall
+down.  And do you know, Cal, I--I can't help but believe that the thing
+is beyond the pale of possibility.  I believed it six months ago, when
+Elliott and Ainnesley and the rest of them were so keen for it, and I
+believe it still, even though I have seen Elliott's engineer and know
+what he has already accomplished.  That track'll never go through on
+schedule--and that's why I'm up here for the winter.  It's going to be
+a hot little race against time, with some millions for a purse.  It'll
+break the East Coast Co. if he fails, and"--his voice became oddly
+intense--"and I tell you again that it--can't--be--done!"
+
+Then Allison became aware of Caleb's mild astonishment at his vehemence.
+
+"An amateur's opinion, of course, Cal," he laughed, "which is strictly
+_entre nous_.  But, win or lose, this man O'Mara will be a valuable man
+to have around after the thing is decided."
+
+"You said that he reminded you of something," Caleb began rather
+heavily.  "It recalled something to me, too.  I wonder if you remember
+a little fishing trip that we took, some ten or twelve years ago,
+Dexter, up into the hills?  It was to the headwaters of the cast
+branch, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Reserve Company's
+holdings, I should say."
+
+"Why, yes," the other answered, off-handedly.  "Why, yes, now that you
+mention it, I do remember.  May I ask your reason for speaking of it?"
+
+"No reason in particular," Caleb hesitated.  "Only this O'Mara reminded
+me of something, too--something that you said, that night at the
+camp-fire."
+
+"Well?"
+
+Allison's monosyllable was coolly noncommittal.
+
+"Can you remember what it was?" Caleb asked, positively uncomfortable
+now.
+
+"I think I remarked that there was a fortune for some man in that
+valley, if he was far-sighted enough.  Was that it?"
+
+Then Caleb understood the challenge in his friend's voice.  He thought
+he understood.  The names of the stockholders of the Reserve Company
+were all strange to Caleb save one.  The Honorable Archibald
+Wickersham, who was said to represent huge foreign interests, he had
+known as a boy.  And Caleb had seen Dexter indescribably sore, before
+this, from having overlooked, as he termed it himself, "a sure thing
+bet."  He laughed, more like his placid self again.
+
+"Bless you, no!" he exclaimed.  "What have I ever done to make you
+believe that a mere commercial estimate would remain with me this long?
+It--it was something that you said concerning the making of a
+gentleman.  I just wondered if you were of your early way of thinking.
+I wondered if you would consider that--that----"
+
+Allison lay back in his chair and breathed deeply, slowly--and Miss
+Sarah appeared that moment in the doorway, pinker of cheek and more
+tremulous of lip than her brother had ever seen her before.  She
+dropped Allison an old-fashioned curtsy, which was an exceedingly
+frivolous performance for Sarah.
+
+"Breakfast is served, Cal," she fairly chortled, "and there are two
+very hungry children inside."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
+
+Never before had the air of that long, paneled room been so surcharged
+with half-suppressed hilarity.  At first her father merely scowled at
+Barbara's intermittent little gurgles, which refused to stay entirely
+pent-up; he frowned at her seemingly inane interruptions of the
+technical discussion into which he had immediately plunged with the
+East Coast Company's engineer, until he could no longer ignore the
+smile which pulled at the lips of the latter, too, at every fresh
+attempt of the girl to swing the conversation into an utterly
+irrelevant channel.  He looked around the table then and caught the
+gleam in Caleb's eyes; he took note of Miss Sarah's illuminated face,
+and gave way to a burst of querulousness not all simulation.
+
+"_What_ is the joke?" he demanded in a voice that set them all to
+rocking in their chairs.  "Let me in on it--let me laugh, too--if there
+is anything worth laughing at.  Cal, you're growing old--old and
+feeble-witted!"
+
+He turned sternly to his daughter, but the darkly glowing eyes which
+she lifted to his absolutely silenced him for an instant.  Twin devils
+of mischief fairly danced in their shimmering, liquid depths.  The
+girl's face, even to him who had long before grown overfamiliar with
+its beauty, was a wonderfully lovely thing.  Allison sat and stared at
+her for a moment, blankly, and when he went on his voice had become
+less testy.
+
+"And you," he growled, "you have interrupted me a dozen times already,
+always with some nonsense of which I can make neither rime nor reason.
+Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get Mr. O'Mara's reason for
+establishing his headquarters at Thirty-Mile, instead of directing the
+work from Morrison, which would seem to be far more convenient."
+
+Barbara bobbed her head, meekly.  Her giggle, however, was shameless.
+
+"But Mr. O'Mara has been trying to tell you," she defended in a
+suffocated small voice, "that it's because the work at this end is not
+so difficult.  There are several miles of swamp work, I think he said,
+and a bridge or something, which promises trouble.  I--I am sorry if I
+interrupted.  I only wanted to ask Mr. O'Mara a question myself--a--a
+very unimportant question, I'm afraid!"
+
+Allison had had experience with his daughter's seeming meekness.
+Moreover, the working of Caleb's and Sarah's faces baffled him.  He
+waited, fuming.
+
+"Just before you and Uncle Cal came in we--we were talking about the
+weather," the girl struggled on.  "Mr. O'Mara predicted it would rain
+soon and I just wanted to ask him what made him think so."
+
+"Yes?" Allison temporized.
+
+It was very quiet for a moment.  Steve sat, a little red of face
+himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.
+
+"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.
+
+Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
+half-closed his eyes.  He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
+solemn, quaintly boyish treble.
+
+"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
+Wednesday, for sure!"
+
+At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
+apart.  They remained open long after Steve had finished.  Once he
+started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
+There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query.  At
+last he got to his feet and padded around the table.  With a hand on
+either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
+own.
+
+"You," he murmured, weakly.  "You!  And Elliott said that you could
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!  Well, I--I'm damned!"
+
+They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
+scant opportunity to make himself heard at all.  Even the reticence
+which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
+before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
+promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.
+
+"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
+to face," she rallied her father.  "It was dense enough of me not to
+have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
+endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.'  I, at least, should have
+known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do,
+in books!"
+
+It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason
+of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
+her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
+to which her mother had objected.  She still employed it, she
+explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.
+
+It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
+than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
+Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
+veranda.  They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam
+injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.
+
+"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly.  I know it
+was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it--there's always a woman,
+of course--but I can't recall----"
+
+He paused to ponder--paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's
+swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness.  Then it all
+returned to him with a rush.  He had his turn.
+
+"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled.  "Why, of course--_of course_!  It
+was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair!  But who was it whose
+choice conflicted with your own?"
+
+He cocked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to
+pounding his knee and roared with laughter.
+
+"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted.  "Archie Wickersham--oh, Lord!  I
+never really appreciated that _mêlée_ until this minute.  And you
+promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and--well, b'gad, here you
+are!  And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state
+that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently
+beneath the table for renewed composure.  I am not going to expound Mr.
+O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those
+which have brought him back.  But please shake hands again--Steve.
+And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to assure you that it was
+some battle!"
+
+If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.
+It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the
+episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely
+reduced to terms of farce-comedy.  When the men rose, after breakfast,
+to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of
+accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing.  She crossed
+the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss
+Sarah watching from the door.  Both men walked for a time in silence,
+their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater
+beside the taller one in blue flannel before them.  And, as usual,
+Allison was the first to speak.
+
+"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west
+branch, Cal," he said.  "And you were right.  It does take stuff to
+make that sort of a gentleman.  Isn't there anything more to tell me?
+I am truly interested, Cal."
+
+So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box.  And while he was
+explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to
+that day-before-yesterday now many years gone.  There was a quality of
+camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of
+tongue that morning that was entirely boyish.  Her very unconsciousness
+of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze
+rarely left her warm face.  And more than once she caught herself
+watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his
+eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at
+that new and quite frivolous mood of hers.  But when Steve finally
+asked for Devereau--Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the
+hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed
+shoulder--the light went from Barbara's eyes.  And Stephen O'Mara, who
+did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped
+smiling, too.
+
+"I liked him," Steve said simply.  "I've always remembered and liked
+him.  Thinking of him and--and--has often kept me from being too lonely
+nights when I was lonely enough."
+
+That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note
+which had come from his lips.  Barbara did not answer immediately, and
+Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply.  He could not know
+that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of
+diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having
+wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely
+indeed.
+
+"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were
+here?" she asked finally.  "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing
+named Mary Graves?"
+
+Stephen nodded.
+
+"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her?  He
+was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored
+us entirely, but never her."
+
+Again the inclination of the head.
+
+"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully.  "One
+never could tell what was behind his indifference or--or flippancies.
+He mocked at things . . . customs and courses of action, which we have
+come to accept and . . . and recognize.  But he was always gentle with
+her, and kind, and--oh, I think reverend is the right word!  Now,
+knowing Garry as I do--as you will, when you see him again--the phrase
+may seem a strange one to apply to him.  And yet it describes best his
+bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."
+
+She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.
+
+"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except
+just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than
+she was when you knew her.  I don't know whether you know it--of course
+you don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
+utterly.  And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
+even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry
+so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated.  It
+seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
+himself.  It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
+was his just by--by instinct.
+
+"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
+almost without a word of explanation to him.  Nobody ever cited Garry
+as a shining example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an
+unspeakable record!  Her family made the match--the newspapers call it
+a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
+Well, he had them--and she married him.  And Garret Devereau dropped
+out of the world for a long time.
+
+"It was a year before he came back.  People had already begun to talk
+about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.
+O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
+return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more.  I never knew
+before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
+man as I know Garry to be.  It's not just his face and his rather
+dreadful silence.  It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
+shows it, pitifully.  It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
+could so deliberately commit suicide.
+
+"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
+But I'll always care for him deeply.  That's why I have asked him up
+this fall.  Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
+have to go back into the woods before then?  I'm going to have a party
+for some week-end guests--a masque dance.  Garry needs his friends now,
+more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you,
+please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"
+
+Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
+contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
+clear-eyed boy.  He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
+as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
+finenesses of him whom they had known together.  Steve nodded his
+comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then.  But
+they found conversation somehow less easy after that.  It was not until
+they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
+and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
+lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
+girl regained in part her former vivacity.
+
+Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years.  A railroad
+station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
+the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
+south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
+odd miles below.  And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
+the town was different.  The men still swarmed in on the drives,
+brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
+wide streets.  Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
+prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
+simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
+mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish.  The
+dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
+sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
+the change which had taken place.  Even the vices of the older
+Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
+complicated, too.  It was no longer a river village.  Morrison was a
+city now.
+
+Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
+week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
+them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
+her companion and clutched his arm.  The red-shirted one fell to
+singing after they had passed.  A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
+That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner.  Steve
+looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.
+
+"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
+roaring good time.  His name is Harrigan.  He works on the Reserve
+Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
+had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song.  He's willing
+to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"
+
+The girl continued to gaze up at him.  His short laugh failed entirely
+to clear her face of apprehension.
+
+"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.
+
+"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted.  "Not when he is in that frame of
+mind!"
+
+"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her
+hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve.  "Did you know that
+your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant?  I never knew that
+anyone's arm could grow as hard as that.  And is that the way you
+always prepare to receive your--friends?"
+
+Steve colored a little.
+
+"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied.  "But it has to be hard.  It
+constitutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"
+
+Then her face lighted up again.  The delighted bob of her head with
+which she greeted that name astonished the man.
+
+"Do you--why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.
+
+Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.
+
+"Joe Morgan," she laughed.  "'Fat Joe,' isn't it?  And of course I have
+heard of him.  You don't realize it, but I know more about this East
+Coast work and--and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea
+myself.  Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once
+wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the
+files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, assistant
+to Chief O'Mara'!"
+
+Steve's chuckle of appreciation was answer enough.
+
+"I didn't know," he admitted, "but it's like him.  And it was no more
+than reasonable, either--that request--even if it is funny.  He has
+been cook for me; but he's been doctor and nurse and countless other
+things in as many crises.  He's the most trustworthy and capable
+adviser, too, that any man ever had."
+
+She scanned his face closely at the timbre of those words.  Then, with
+face averted, "Didn't he embroider you a--a sofa-cushion, too, once?"
+she inquired, quite demurely.
+
+Steve grew very red.
+
+"Who told you that?" he blurted, and Barbara giggled again.
+
+"Mr. Ainnesley, I think.  Then it is true?  I--I never believed it
+before."
+
+Watching the blood creep up beneath his tanned skin, she told herself
+that she did like more than a little the way his eyelids crinkled when
+he grinned.
+
+"We were in San Domingo that year," he explained none too composedly.
+"It was near Christmas, and Joe wouldn't consider any of the native
+wares as a gift.  So he--he worked it himself in--in yellow worsted on
+a red background.  I have it still, displayed in a conspicuous place in
+the shack up-river.  But now I'll wager that you can't guess what the
+motto is across its front.  He told me that he didn't care for it
+particularly himself, but it was the only one he could find.  You can't
+guess, but you are permitted to try."
+
+And he gasped when she threw back her head and burst into her gurgling,
+throaty laugh.
+
+"'What is home without a father?'" she sing-songed.  And when they were
+both sober-faced again she added:
+
+"I want to know him, please!  Can't I meet him, Mr. O'Mara?"
+
+Side by side they turned in at the millyard, between towering piles of
+aromatic raw planks.  Behind them Caleb and Allison had lost still more
+ground while the latter paused to speak a peremptory word in the ear of
+a mildly intoxicated, red-headed riverman who was pouring forth his
+whole soul in the refrain of "Harrigan, That's Me!"  And almost
+immediately, in answer to Barbara's question, Steve pointed across to a
+short, plump figure in conversation with McLean, the mill
+superintendent.  Even at that distance his broad face gleamed from the
+closeness of a recent shave; even at that distance it was quickly
+apparent to the girl that his garb was as near a replica of O'Mara's
+own clothes as his lack of height and extra weight would permit.
+
+"Will you bring him?" she asked eagerly.  "Will he come?"
+
+But the question was unnecessary.  Joe Morgan--Fat Joe to the
+river-front and the construction squad--was already hustling in their
+direction, even before Steve, with that slow smile tugging at his lips,
+had finished assuring her that it was never necessary to summon Joe
+into the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex.  He came
+without being called.  Barbara had a closer and closer view of him,
+until he stopped at last directly in front of them and bowed.  She
+wanted to laugh at that wide face--at the grandiloquent flourish with
+which he removed his hat--and would have had she not recalled the grave
+respect with which the man beside her had referred to him a moment
+before.  His eyes were palest blue, his nose a smooth pink mound in an
+expanse of pink, pink cheeks.  She noted that his teeth were as white
+and even as those of O'Mara himself.  Fat Joe bowed again.
+
+"Morning, Chief," he saluted, in that thin and reedy tenor which none
+but fat men have.
+
+Then Barbara laughed.
+
+Steve managed the presentation with extreme punctility and left them.
+When he returned, almost an hour later, he heard them both laughing
+long before he came into view, and on the way back up the hill the girl
+detailed for him much of her conversation with Fat Joe.
+
+"Hereafter I shall be more dignified when in your presence," she
+informed him in as deep a bass as she could summon.  "I had no idea how
+great and important a man was escorting me when I came down this hill!
+But Mr. Morgan has enlightened me."
+
+With that she discovered that she could still tease him, almost as
+easily as she had teased the sturdy small boy of the uncouth shoes and
+napping trousers.
+
+"Joe is necessarily prejudiced in his opinion," he argued, "and
+therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously."
+
+"He told me that you had one regrettable characteristic, however," the
+girl went on.  "He lamented your strength at the ancient and honorable
+pastime of stud-poker!  And he also bewails your taste in literature.
+Why, he tells me that you are indicted to Dickens and Dumas--he didn't
+pronounce it that way, either--and even fall back upon Shakespeare, in
+dark and dour hours.  No, I am positive that Mr. Morgan docs not
+approve of such fiction.  He confided to me that he finds more
+entertainment, of a winter's night, in perusing a Sears-Roebuck or a
+Montgomery-Ward catalogue.  And--and do you know what I admitted to
+him?  No?  Well, I told him that some of the happiest moments of my
+life had been spent in just such fashion.  I've always thought they
+were fascinating!"
+
+She badgered him on the way back up the hill that morning, but when
+they paused for a moment at the edge of the close-cropped lawn which
+rolled back to the stucco and timber house facing the river, she
+abandoned her facetiousness.
+
+"Why should there be any--any element of personal danger in this work
+you are doing, Mr. O'Mara?" she asked.  "And did I do wrong in
+mentioning to Mr. Morgan how that man came out of that--place, and
+glared so at you?"
+
+His rejoinder should have been very reassuring.
+
+"So Joe has been hinting at that mystery stuff again, has he?  After
+listening to him one is almost compelled to believe that I run daily a
+veritable gauntlet of nameless perils."
+
+Barbara stood, small fists buried in her sweater pockets, studying his
+smile of amusement.
+
+"I shouldn't like to believe so," her voice was faintly diffident.
+"And you--you haven't accepted my invitation for Friday.  May I expect
+you?  I didn't tell you, but Archie--Archibald Wickersham--will be
+there, as well as Garry.  So--so you won't be entirely unacquainted."
+
+And then, at those words, his face changed.  All in one fleet second,
+in spite of the whole morning's quick intimacy of mood and the spirit
+of companionship which to her had seemed a delightfully new yet
+time-tried thing, Barbara found that she could not read an inch behind
+those grave gray eyes.  She found his quiet countenance as unreadable
+as that of the utmost stranger might have been.  And while she waited,
+not entirely certain how displeased she was at his deliberation, a
+blackest of black horses soared splendidly over a fence to the north
+and came cantering down the road.  The rider, a tall, bare-headed girl,
+lifted her crop in salute as she caught sight of them.
+
+"My friend, Miriam Burrell," the girl murmured in explanation to Steve,
+and something had gone from her voice and left it conventionally
+impersonal.  "She's riding Ragtime, and isn't he a beauty--almost as
+much a beauty as she is herself?"
+
+The horse came on, to be reined up at last directly in front of the two
+at the roadside.  Stephen O'Mara met for a moment the level, measuring
+glance of its rider, before Miriam Burrell turned to Barbara.
+
+"I've enjoyed exceedingly our morning canter, Bobs," her alto voice
+drawled.
+
+Then, before Barbara could reply, she threw one booted leg from the
+stirrup and dismounted.  With the reins looped over her elbow she faced
+the man in blue flannel and corduroy, a tall, lithe figure with coppery
+red hair and whitest skin and doubly vivid lips.
+
+"You're Stephen O'Mara," she said, and the calmly direct statement
+might have been overbrusk had it not been for the modulation of her low
+voice.  "You're Stephen O'Mara, for a thousand!"
+
+And she held out a gauntleted hand, the clasp of which corroborated the
+suggestion of wirelike strength in that lithely straight body.
+
+Barbara Allison had never been able to analyze her preference for
+Miriam Burrell.  Even the girl's undeniable beauty of face had often
+puzzled her, for, taken each feature by itself, it was far more
+striking than beautiful.  There was no color in her pale skin; her red
+mouth, if anything, was a trifle too wide, and her wide-set eyes were
+tip-tilted in an almost Oriental slant.  Her utter lack of hypocrisy,
+her unsparing arraignment of fundamental motives--her own and those of
+all with whom she came in contact--often resulted in calmly direct
+comments which were stunningly disastrous to casual conversation.  For
+Miriam Burrell told the truth to others, which was unusual enough to
+puzzle more than a few; she did not lie to herself, and that was an
+enigma to almost all.  It resulted, of course, in a reputation for
+"unconventionalism."
+
+There was scarcely a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate
+dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or
+sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool
+voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through
+the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain
+beneath.  Barbara did not know just why she cared so deeply for Miriam
+Burrell--we scarcely ever realize that such a regard can be based only
+upon the deepest of deep-founded faith--but at that moment, while she
+and Steve were shaking hands so soberly, she felt very little, very
+much ignored; felt as though she did not share at all the understanding
+in their eyes.
+
+"I've just asked Mr. O'Mara to come to my dance, Miriam," she said,
+"and how did you know him, pray?  I've asked him, but he is
+unflatteringly long in accepting."
+
+"Know him?" she echoed.  "Know him!  Oh, Mr. O'Mara and I have met
+before.  I think just before the fall of the Roman Empire, wasn't it,
+Mr. O'Mara?  Weren't they dragging me in at the wheel of a chariot one
+afternoon, when you were dealing out a gold piece to each of your
+legionaries?"
+
+She laughed, dryly, and Barbara felt smaller and more forlorn and
+lonelier still.
+
+"No doubt Mr. O'Mara hasn't time to be flattering, Bobs," she
+commented.  "But you will have time to come Friday, for a little while,
+won't you?" she asked.
+
+Steve glanced down at the hand which still felt the pressure of her
+buckskin clad fingers.
+
+"I have to work--day and night--some weeks when things break badly," he
+told her simply.  "If I can"--and he turned to Barbara--"if I can, I
+want to come."
+
+Miriam nodded her head with brisk finality.
+
+"If you can," she agreed.  "Barbara, no doubt, has been telling you
+about Garret Devereau, hasn't she?  Yes--come if you can.  I have
+heard, Mr. O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of
+the dark, when everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to
+talk with--a specialist in such campaigns!"
+
+Stephen O'Mara had read a meaning in the words of that contained, often
+abrupt, straightly tall girl of which Barbara Allison had not even
+dreamed.  He stood watching them when they turned up the driveway, the
+horse Ragtime muzzling the woolly white sweater and following like a
+dog.  But he wasn't thinking of Miriam Burrell or of Garry Devereau,
+while he waited for Caleb and Dexter Allison to come up with him.  He
+was wondering about Archie Wickersham--the Honorable Archie--thinking
+about that funny brawl of years before, which had not been so funny
+after all--wondering if----
+
+It was past twelve that night when Miriam Burrell's door was pushed
+softly open by a slim white figure which hesitated on the threshold;
+but the night-light was still burning upon the table.  Barbara stood
+for a moment, staring at her friend, who was sitting bolt upright in
+bed.
+
+"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered.  "Are you--reading?"
+
+The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in
+that mist of loosened hair.
+
+"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were
+bookless.  "Yes, I'm reading.  I'm having a little squint at this
+puzzle-scroll they call Life."
+
+She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.
+
+"I--may I turn off the light?" she asked.
+
+Miriam snapped the button.
+
+"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice.
+"And I--I wanted--Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown
+girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me!  From the moment when
+I first recognized him and became so--tangled up--I've just chattered
+and chattered.  You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do
+you?"
+
+"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the
+uncompromising voice she knew so well.
+
+"Are you--you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated.  "Because
+I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at.  And I have poise.  I
+am not a child.  But looking back now, I can't quite account for all
+my--shall I call it cordiality?  Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was
+because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when
+he was a boy?"
+
+"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.
+
+"Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice.  "And,
+do you know, all day, even when we seemed so--such good friends, I
+still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a
+slight.  I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just
+the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party.  It
+was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who--who'd
+almost charter a liner to come--if I'd invite them.  It would have
+sounded conceited, but I wanted to _jolt_ him!  And he just said he'd
+come if he could!"
+
+"He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that
+wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't
+understand.  "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot
+more worth asking, if they had to work, too.  I wish every man had
+to--work--hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!"
+Her voice slurred and she recovered it.  "I don't know whether he
+remembers or not.  Probably not!  You've just had a unique experience
+for one of our kind, that's all.  You've met a man!"
+
+Barbara raised herself upon one elbow.
+
+"You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie
+Wickersham or my other friends, or--or Garry, aren't men?"
+
+"Males!" snapped the other girl.  "Just males!  But"--and she seemed to
+be arguing with herself--"but Garry might have been, though--he might
+have been!"
+
+Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.
+
+"It's odd," she murmured once, "but we did seem so--so congenial.  I
+can't remember when my brain has been so quick to catch a thought or
+supplement one.  Have you ever wondered, Miriam, why we--we can't seem
+to marry one who brings out the best in us, like that?"
+
+"Can't?  You mean, dear child, that we don't!  Some of us because the
+'best that is in us' is far, far too decently unexciting for daily
+diet.  And some of us--oh, just because we haven't the sand and
+backbone, I guess!"
+
+But Barbara was too nearly asleep to catch the bitterness of that
+reply.  Just once again, before she slept, she asked a question.
+
+"Should I have told Mr. O'Mara that my engagement to Archibald
+Wickersham was to be announced at the party?" she murmured.
+
+"Why should you have?" Miriam crisply wanted to know.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she mused.  "Only I thought he might be interested.
+You don't seem to realize that we are--very old friends!"
+
+And long after Barbara was sound asleep, her face buried in the palm of
+one hand, Miriam Burrell lay stiffly awake.  Once she smiled a little,
+for such perplexities which, of themselves, must work out inevitably.
+When dawn came it found her still struggling stubbornly with her own,
+for which it seemed there could be no solution now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
+
+It was late that night when Steve climbed into the rig which was
+waiting with Pat Joe at the reins and they turned north into the hills.
+For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in
+the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that
+ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years
+before, in the shack up-river.  And the latter was surprised at
+learning how much of it was no longer news.
+
+"Yes, I know," Steve told them, after Caleb had finished relating, with
+quite ponderous pride, many things which he ascertained concerning the
+Stephen O'Mara who had gone before.  "I know!  Four or five years ago,
+when I found out that it was--customary for one to be certain as to
+such things, I started to look it up myself.  And when I found out from
+the records that a boy by that name had disappeared--perhaps been
+stolen by an old servant--I remembered instantly, of course, the box
+over which Old Tom used to hang, hour after hour.  I came back into the
+woods looking for it that summer and found it gone and nothing left of
+the Jenkins' cabin but a pile of charred logs.  On my way out I stopped
+here--somehow I thought that maybe you might have it--but the house was
+closed.  And no one seemed to know where you had gone or when you would
+return."
+
+Caleb nodded, and his eyes turned to Sarah.
+
+"We were sleuthing, Steve," he explained as soberly as he was able.
+"We were ranging from border to border and coast to coast, looking for
+you."  He stopped to scan the browned face closely for an instant.
+"But couldn't you have written--or--or tried again?  We've been
+waiting--boy!"
+
+Steve's face colored a little.
+
+"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't
+have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or--or clothes,
+either.  I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of
+those visits, after I had tramped in overland.  The house was closed
+both times I came.  And then I did write once--that was from San
+Domingo--the third year after I left college.  I was so lonesome down
+there that I had to write, I think.  But there--wasn't any reply, so I
+sort of thought perhaps----"
+
+He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough.  Caleb faced about
+abruptly, his face sternly accusing.
+
+"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want----"
+and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head.  "We
+didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished.  "If we only had we--we
+would have been less lonely waiting, too."
+
+Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.
+
+"I should have known that," he faltered.  "I should have known that
+there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going,
+for the mails to be infallible.  But I wasn't just sure----"
+
+Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.
+
+"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
+almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
+which he has neglected to mention."
+
+She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
+picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
+with less difficulty than he had during her absence.  For a second or
+so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
+loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
+tucked away in his own iron box.  Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
+and long at his mother's picture.  When he finally raised his head
+again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.
+
+"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
+murmured.  "I can only tell you that I didn't know--I didn't
+understand----"
+
+Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand.  She did not
+need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.
+
+"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered.  "I
+am going to ask far more than that of you.  I've kept her picture
+always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
+it greatly if I were not to see it often.  Do you mind leaving it here,
+in your room upstairs?  I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
+mind doing so, then I--I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
+the--the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
+you good-night now."
+
+The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
+cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
+world could ever have been.  After she had left them alone Steve turned
+and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.
+
+"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
+said slowly.  "I wondered then if there could be other women with
+voices just as kind.  And I--I'm wondering now."
+
+Caleb smiled.
+
+"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked.  "And I
+don't know.  I don't know!  Sarah is pretty human--even for a Baptist,
+eh?"
+
+They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
+sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
+took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
+had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box.  Even if he had not
+been entirely certain of it that first day when he had neglected to
+show them to Sarah, he knew now just what reason underlay his secrecy.
+Like Old Tom, he felt that his action was in a way more or less
+extenuated by circumstance.  And still mindful of Dexter Allison's odd
+moment or two of guarded antagonism that very morning, he gradually led
+the conversation around to more recent things.
+
+"I suppose you have had your conference with Mr. Allison, Steve?" he
+suggested in a matter-of-fact way.
+
+Instantly at that question all the boyishness left the other's face.
+He looked away and looked back again, very deliberately.
+
+"No more than a word," he answered.  "He asked me to come down again,
+toward the end of the week, if I could get away.  He said no doubt I
+would want to spend all the time I could to-day with you and Miss
+Sarah."
+
+"Of course," Caleb exclaimed, "of course!  I see.  Is it--is it
+unethical if I ask, privately, your opinion of this job which the East
+Coast Company has on its hands?  Do you believe they can swing it in
+time to fulfill all their obligations?"
+
+Again there followed a moment's pause while Steve's eyes roved
+thoughtfully around the room.
+
+"Mr. Elliott wouldn't have risked every cent he has," he finally
+replied, "unless I had assured him that it wasn't so very much more
+than a man-sized gamble.  Nor Mr. Ainnesley, either, I think.  So that
+puts it up to me pretty squarely, doesn't it?  We'll have to win
+through--because we have to, now!"
+
+"Quite so!" murmured Caleb again.
+
+He studied a long time over his next words, and it was a very vivid
+vision of a rigid little figure in a wrecked black velvet suit--a
+vision of a bleak-faced boy with bruised lips who had insisted upon
+going back downtown for Miss Sarah's eggs--which eventually overbore
+his distaste for anything that might savor of disloyalty to a friend.
+
+"Of course there could arise unforeseen circumstances," he ventured.
+"Unforeseen interference which, unless one guarded against it, might
+defeat every effort."
+
+The room seemed very, very quiet.
+
+"Of course," came the calm answer at last; and Caleb could not see
+Steve's face behind the cupped hands at his pipe bowl, "of
+course--unless one more or less guarded against it."
+
+And there, just as calmly, they dropped it.  The topic was not
+discussed again that night, unless a bit of news which Fat Joe Morgan
+himself delivered might be construed as somehow relative.  Fat Joe had
+been driving for an hour, silent some of the time, but for the most
+part devoted to a whole-hearted rendition of "Home, Sweet Home," in his
+thin and bell-like tenor, when he broke off in the middle of a stanza
+to chuckle.
+
+"Say, Chief," he exclaimed, "I've got news for you that'll just fill
+you plumb full of happiness and good cheer.  I hired another hand
+to-day who'll be a distinct addition to our gang up-river.  Just to
+while away the dark hours I'll let you guess for a while who he is.
+I'll let you guess from here to Last Oak, above the cypress bend at the
+rapids.  One, two, three--and the contest is on!"
+
+The man beside Fat Joe stirred and opened his eyes.  Fat Joe couldn't
+see it, for it was too dark, but Steve frowned somewhat at the levity
+which had interrupted him.  He had just been thinking about the tight
+grip of a slender hand which had fallen upon his arm that afternoon
+when a red-headed riverman lurched drunkenly from a doorway ahead.
+Joe's words were exactly coincident with that thought and the answer
+came mechanically.
+
+"Harrigan," grunted Steve.
+
+And in the darkness Fat Joe sighed mournfully.
+
+"Bull's-eye," he whimpered, "and there goes the whole evenin's
+entertainment!  Why didn't you cast around, sort of fruitless for a
+while, and prolong the excitement?  But you're right.  Harrigan, that's
+him!  He'd just met up with that fat party who owns the plaster palace
+on the hill--just met up with him, down the road a piece, and Allison
+had fired him for keeps, he said.  He asked me if we didn't have room
+for a nice steady hand, so I hired him.  And I'll leave it to you if it
+ain't Harrigan's feet that's mostly unsteady, at that.  He seemed awful
+cheerful for a man who'd just been allowed to resign, but who was I to
+entertain dark doubts?  I hired him; I thought you might like the touch
+of color his hair'll lend to the landscape.  It'll be comfortin', too,
+havin' him around where we can have a look at him any time we take the
+notion.  Don't you think so?"
+
+Steve's grunted reply was hardly intelligible, but it seemed to satisfy
+Fat Joe.  The latter had long before learned to read the signs; he knew
+when his best efforts were only wasted words, and once more he gave his
+attention to the jogging horses and his neglected melody.
+
+Caleb Hunter, wondering after Steve had gone just how much he might
+have seemed to insinuate, regretted that he had spoken at all.
+Recollection of Allison's bluff cordiality with O'Mara only made him
+the more ashamed of his suspicion, and yet the next morning at table he
+attempted, covertly, to sound Sarah for an opinion, too.  She
+invariably solved his perplexities or relegated them to the limbo of
+gentle ridicule.
+
+"Just why should he want this East Coast job to fail?" he puzzled
+aloud.  "He's in it, along with Elliott and Ainnesley, even if he isn't
+in so deep.  That is, of course, assuming that he does want it to fail."
+
+The preoccupied gleam in Miss Sarah's eyes promised a reply that might
+be worth considering, but when it came Caleb found trouble in
+assimilating it.
+
+"They did look so well together," she murmured absently.  "He's so much
+broader--and a whole head taller, too!"
+
+It didn't seem to be exactly a relevant answer, but Caleb nodded
+patiently.
+
+"Taller, yes," he admitted judiciously.  "But he isn't half so big
+around."
+
+Sarah sat, fork poised, and gazed at him.
+
+"Not half so big as who?" she neglected her sentence structure.
+
+"Why--Dexter!" said Caleb.  "Isn't that what we were talking about?"
+
+"Maybe you were," Miss Sarah sniffed.  "But I was not discussing
+Dexter's height or girth either.  I was referring to his daughter
+and--and our boy, Stephen.  I was going to ask you if you thought she
+could be entirely disinterested in him.  I don't believe any woman
+forgets a man who has ever thought enough of her to fight for her."
+
+"I suppose not," agreed Caleb humbly.
+
+"And I was wondering, if that argument ever came up again--I'm
+wondering if Archibald Wickersham wouldn't come out second best, just
+as he did before?"
+
+Then her brother understood.  He threw back his head and laughed until
+Sarah's face registered a trace of vexation.
+
+"Sarah," he saluted her, "I'm a mere babe in arms when it comes to
+finesse, in comparison with you.  But since you have introduced the
+subject I might remark that there are two individuals to be considered.
+Maybe she might be--interested--as you so delicately phrase it.  But
+the boy--well, he's had one mighty pointed lesson, you know."
+
+But there was no mirth in Sarah's eyes.  She was most serious.
+
+"That's the very thing which perplexes me," she confessed.  "I was
+going to ask you about that.  For it was hurt pride that sent him away
+and he hasn't forgotten the hurt, even yet.  He was going to tell us,
+last night when I stopped him, that he hadn't written again because he
+wasn't certain that we wanted to hear; and he was painfully conscious
+of how childish it would sound in words, too.  Some men quit when they
+are whipped once, but don't some of them refuse to recognize that
+they've ever been whipped at all, Cal?  And then, she told me that she
+had asked him to her party, Friday night.  If he comes I think I'll be
+better able to tell just what----"
+
+"He won't!" cut in Caleb flatly, and when she taxed him for it he
+proceeded to elaborate at considerable length the reason for his
+certainty.  His argument was rather tight and so, just because of that,
+woman-fashion she believed the contrary.
+
+All day Friday she watched the hills' road.  Not until the orchestra in
+the lodge beyond the hedge had begun tunelessly to strum their
+instruments, to insure their later tunefulness, did she reluctantly
+abandon her position at the window.  But then, from his chair at the
+fire, Caleb noticed how wistfully disappointed her face was.
+
+It turned much colder with nightfall; a wind sharp with the tang of
+autumn was blowing in off the river when Barbara, muffled from throat
+to ankle in a sapphire fur-edged wrap, slipped in at the door, having
+stolen away ostensibly to display to them her costume.  It was after
+the hour of ten, but the girl lingered a little after she had executed
+that mission; she stopped again in the door, indecisively worrying her
+lip with small teeth, when she finally turned to depart.
+
+"We are very sorry that Mr. O'Mara could not come," she hesitated.  "I
+had promised both Garry and Archie Wickersham that he would be down."
+
+The older woman nodded and accepted the statement for what it was--a
+question which the girl's eyes failed to conceal.
+
+"We haven't heard from him since he went back into camp," she answered.
+"He, no doubt, has been unable to get away."
+
+Barbara turned without replying and passed out, less airily than she
+had entered.  But Miss Sarah's eyes were no longer disappointed as she
+again took her place at a window.  And a second later, when she had
+drawn back suddenly into the room with a muffled exclamation, her
+brother was astonished at her beaming face.  A moment earlier he would
+have sworn that it was only wistful, but before she went upstairs,
+exclaiming still further at the lateness of the hour, it began to look
+more than a little like veritable triumph to him.
+
+Barbara Allison recrossed the lawn very slowly that night; she retraced
+her steps with head bent, the fall of her slippered feet muffled by the
+carpet of thick, unfrosted grass.  Vaguely troubled, vaguely disturbed
+at herself for her inability to analyze that strange mood which, twice
+in the last few nights, had sent her with aching throat and wet cheeks
+into Miriam's room, she was within arm's length of the dark figure in
+the hedge gap through which she had just come, before she was aware of
+its presence.  Stephen O'Mara, weatherbeaten hat in hand, was standing
+there in her path, peering steadily at the stucco and timber lodge
+alight from end to end like a huge and sprawling glow-worm.
+
+Even in that first moment when she stopped and caught her breath,
+audibly, from sheer surprise, the girl sensed the indecision in the
+attitude of the man before her.  But she could not know that it was not
+a thing of the moment--that irresolution; could not know that
+throughout the week Steve had periodically abused himself for his
+inability to settle the question once and for all, and leave his brain
+free for more important things.  Just as often as he told himself that
+he would not go, he had found himself reopening the mental discussion,
+and yet--and strangely enough--it was not the recollection of Barbara's
+repeated invitations, or even her distress over Garry Devereau, who had
+been ceaselessly in his thoughts ever since she had spoken of him,
+which finally achieved the decision.  An insistent desire again to meet
+the Honorable Archibald Wickersham in the end led him to request Fat
+Joe to hook up the team, that day at noon, for the long drive down
+river.  With Steve himself handling the reins, they had rolled the
+thirty miles at a speed which might have mildly surprised Fat Joe had
+he not been accustomed to putting two and two together to make six or
+eight or more.  And Fat Joe's thin tenor was just drifting faintly off
+down the hill--a mournful rendition of "Home, Sweet Home"--when the
+girl stepped noiselessly forward and put a hand, feather-light, upon
+the man's arm.
+
+Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a
+step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled.  She
+even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face.  And then, the
+cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and
+shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him--a laugh a
+little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the
+spirit of youth itself.
+
+"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked.
+
+The man just stood and stared at her--stared much as if he mistrusted
+his own ears and eyes.
+
+"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
+words were tinged with doubt.  "Not all my friends," he said.
+
+And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness.  He
+was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
+head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
+from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
+her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
+blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
+above them.  Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
+lain for a moment upon his arm.
+
+"So you are--you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers.  "I
+wasn't--just sure."
+
+The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous
+affirmative.  She looked down at the hand holding her own,
+contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
+fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
+his big palm.
+
+Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
+in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
+speak.
+
+"Then it--must be you, too," she faltered.  "I wasn't sure, either,
+even when I knew it must be.  I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
+forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . .  Will you please say that you
+forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than
+you can know?"
+
+It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request.  The words were
+stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand.  Silence
+came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond.  Once,
+in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
+object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mâché
+pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the
+pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
+costume to him.
+
+His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
+Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
+white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
+which had come creeping over his face.  She saw it surge up in his
+eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
+which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's
+wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping.  She caught
+her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though
+they had gone dry of a sudden.  Involuntarily she stepped toward him,
+that single pace which she had fallen away.  And above the tumult of
+her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how
+unsteady the effort was.
+
+"Then you do forgive me?" she breathed.  "Do I--pass inspection?  Do
+you like me--in my masquerade?"
+
+Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened,
+conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking.
+
+"There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his
+voice grave.  "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have
+been that, always, yourself.  And you are not permitted to ask
+forgiveness from me, nor pardon.  Men do not admit that there can be
+need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped
+you.  You knew I was coming. . . .  I've been coming ten years now.
+But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."
+
+The words were blurred as a far-off echo in her ears.  She started to
+speak, but all that she would have said caught in her throat and hurt
+her, and only her unsteady breath came from parted lips.  Her head
+drooped forward again, while the small fist twisted and searched and
+found and clasped tight one finger of the hand that held it.  She
+realized that his free arm was lifted toward her.  As she started
+forward, her ankles became entangled in the soft pile of satin at her
+feet, and she stopped to free them--and started forward again.  But
+when, at her inarticulate effort at speech, he bent his head to her
+swiftly upflung face, her whole slender body tightened at the rough
+contact of blue flannel against her cheek.  Almost before they held her
+she struggled madly from the circle of his arms.  White of face, white
+of lip, she broke away from him and darted through the gap in the
+hedge, only to shrink back against him in panic the next instant before
+the black shape upon a blacker horse, between her and the lights.
+
+He was gazing in their direction--the man upon the horse.  He was
+laughing softly.  And when he thrust back the black cowl that hid his
+face and began to speak, Stephen O'Mara recognized that terribly pale,
+terribly drawn face.  Garry Devereau rocked a little in the saddle and
+waved a gracefully unsteady hand.
+
+"Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the shadow, and his
+tongue was not thick, but only wavering.  "My felicitations!  And e'en
+though I know not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion.
+And yet--why blush, dear unknowns?  'Tis in the air to-night.  Even I
+myself have yielded to spirit of frivolity.  Two hours ago I appeared
+masked in these dingy vestments as Love's Young Dream; but with me the
+mood has passed.  Fellow romancers, you have witnessed a metamorphosis;
+you are now gazing upon the Wrath of God, about to thunder forth upon a
+coal black charger.  I merely paused to bid you haste inside, lest you
+miss the crux of the evening.  When I withdrew the Honorable Archie was
+already searching, with bravely concealed distraction, for the fair
+daughter of the house.  The hour has struck--it's masks off--masks off,
+from eyes and hearts!"
+
+[Illustration: "Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the
+shadow.  "My felicitations!  And e'en though I know not your identity,
+still I may sense your fond confusion."]
+
+He laughed again, a low and ugly chuckle.  Sparks flew from Ragtime's
+hoofs when he touched the sleek flanks with his heels and the splendid
+animal quivered and bunched hard thigh muscles and spurned the gravel.
+White face whiter still against the background of his somber vestments,
+debonaire and drunkenly insecure in the saddle, Garret Devereau tore
+out into the main road and thundered off into the night.
+
+Barbara Allison stood a long time motionless, her back to the
+motionless man so near her.  She stood and stared, pale as had been
+that black-robed horseman, straight ahead of her.  Then a tremor shook
+her.  Mechanically she started forward, but at the first step Steve's
+hand reached out and found her arm and drew her back to him.  She faced
+about, and waited.
+
+"Is that--true?" he asked her, quietly.
+
+She made no move to answer.
+
+"Is that true?" his low and gentle voice commanded this time.  "You
+still mean to--marry--him?"
+
+She recovered her voice then.  All her confusion and stunned
+realization was swallowed up by that tide of fiercely unreasoning,
+deadly resentment which his very gentleness evoked.  There was nothing
+girlish in his reply--nothing boyish in that high-held chin and
+stiffened body.  A hard note marred her utterance, a perfection of
+insolence edged with scorn, which Steve's world did not know.  She
+wanted but one thing in that moment; she knew but one impulse--a mad
+desire to cut and tear and rend savagely his gravely possessed
+kindliness.
+
+"What I have done to-night I can never hope to explain," she told him.
+"I can only hope that some day I may cease to despise myself as utterly
+as you have taught me to, at this minute.  And since you choose to
+regard it now as your right to ask that question, I'll answer it for
+you.  I do not _mean_ to marry him.  I shall be proud to be his wife!"
+
+The light that streamed over her shoulder fell full upon his face.  She
+saw the blood pour up, staining throat and cheek and brow, and then ebb
+away.  She gave him time to answer, but he did not speak; and suddenly
+she knew what scene of another day he was remembering.  Her eyes
+dropped to her imprisoned hand.
+
+"You are--detaining me," she said.
+
+He released her immediately, and yet she did not move.  And while she
+waited he turned and stooped and turned to her again.  She stood like
+stone while he wrapped her fur-edged sapphire cloak about her and
+fastened it close beneath her uptilted chin.  He waited, bare of head,
+in the hedge gap until she had crossed the lawn to the house that lay a
+sprawling glow-worm in the darkness.  A tumult of voices leaped out to
+him when she opened the door--a lilting crash of syncopated melody.
+And then it was quiet again.
+
+After a glimpse of his chief's eyes that night, Fat Joe essayed not so
+much as one facetious protest against turning the fagged team homeward
+with scarcely any rest at all.  And hour after hour he drove in
+silence, checking himself apologetically once or twice when he forgot
+himself long enough to burst into the opening strains of his inevitable
+ballad.  He remained as quiet as that too quiet man beside him, until
+Steve himself opened his lips.
+
+"It's a--lonesome night," mused the latter at length.
+
+Fat Joe could not have endured it much longer.  His pent-up spirit
+leaped fervidly forth in reply.
+
+"Lonesome!" he ejaculated.  "Man, it's lonesomer'n hell!  Hear that
+damn wind sighin' in the branches, as your poets say.  Hear her moan!
+And look at them clouds edgin' in on the moon like they was thugs
+a-packin' blackjacks and waitin' for an openin' to whale in.  Lonesome?
+Say, it gives me chills, a night like this.  It don't seem to have no
+heart, somehow, nor mercy nor nuthin', does it?  It's all wrong!  It
+ain't dark enough, and it ain't light enough; it's too quiet, and the
+wind makes too much noise.  It keeps whisperin' over your shoulder,
+tauntin' yuh with somethin' you can't understand.  No, sir, this kind
+of a night ain't popular with me, at, all, at all! . . .  Say, Steve,
+how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"
+
+Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
+speech were opened for Joe.
+
+"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
+wanted to be certain sure.  It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
+of her name, any way you look at it.  And not that I've reached that
+state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either.  I just aim to
+be prepared, that's all."
+
+He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
+was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
+to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
+loomed up ahead.  And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
+long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
+through the darkness.  At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
+he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
+but he knew that the latter had not heard.  And when that night-bird's
+call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
+tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
+laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
+breastwork of trees.
+
+Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of their first
+plunge; and then he saw what Fat Joe had seen a second before.  High up
+on the hillside there was a light glowing from the windows of the shack
+which served the chief engineer of the East Coast job as office and
+domicile, too.  While Fat Joe laid on the whip a man came hurtling past
+the outflung door, sprang to his feet and, running low to the ground,
+disappeared into the blackness of the brush.  Joe swung the horses up
+in a galloping curve and with one catlike leap, incredibly light for a
+man of his chunky build, was down from the seat and crashing through
+the bushes on the trail of that fugitive whose noisy flight had already
+become a faint crackle in the distance.
+
+Flame poured from Fat Joe's revolver.  Two whiplike reports shattered
+the night quiet before Stephen O'Mara moved.  Then he lifted himself
+heavily from the seat.  Something nuzzled his shoulder while he stood
+listening to the diminishing tumult of the pursuit; and even before he
+turned he knew what it was.  He paused a moment to stroke the soft nose
+of the black horse standing there with reins a-trail.  It was Ragtime,
+wet with lather and caked with dust.  But even then he was not prepared
+for the sight which met him when he entered the shack.  Seconds must
+have passed while he stood staring from the threshold, for Fat Joe came
+puffing back from his fruitless chase in time to see him bend and lift
+a black-robed, lifelessly limp body from the floor and stagger with it
+toward a bunk.  Fat Joe's steady flow of profanity, oddly, double
+vicious in his thin, complaining voice, was checked short.  He, too,
+stood and stared from the doorway--stood and lifted his nose and
+sniffed.
+
+"Seems to be our night for callers," he remarked with bad mildness;
+"and, say, this one's got a peach of a load, ain't he?"
+
+Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and
+the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's
+temple.
+
+"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly
+again.  "So that's it!  But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put
+up a tidy little battle, was he?  Funny about that, too, but I could
+always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about
+half-over myself."
+
+His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf
+of blue-prints from a corner.
+
+"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when
+we busted in.  Steve, them's our bridge estimates--and there wa'n't no
+copies of 'em, either.  It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to
+replace 'em neither--not more'n two precious, priceless weeks.  I'm
+only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more
+than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea
+or somethin'.  I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be
+home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."
+
+Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had
+finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all.  He had
+finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own
+bunk.  He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat
+Joe joined him at the bedside.  The latter's thick fingers were as
+delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been.  He,
+too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids.  He shook
+his head, dubiously.
+
+"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but
+it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right
+now.  For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it
+was someone I'd a little prefer dead!  It ain't that scratch on the
+head that's got him slippin', either."  Joe paused and turned to
+address Garry Devereau's still white face itself.  "You sat in an'
+backed my game like a gentleman born," he said, "and now I'm a-goin' to
+play yourn, blue chips and white and yello'.  But this is goin' to be
+your last celebration, friend of mine, even if we do win through, or
+you'll be holdin' your next one where the company ain't so select and
+the climate nuthin' to compare with ourn!"
+
+And while he talked he worked, for it was Fat Joe who gave the orders
+that night.  He called for ammonia, for brandy, for a half-dozen drugs
+from the camp hospital chest; and each of them Steve brought in an
+automatic fashion that finally penetrated even Fat Joe's professional
+pleasure in the struggle.
+
+"Friend of yourn?" he asked in an interval while they rested.
+
+"A friend," Steve repeated with a tightening of his jaws, and Joe knew
+what that tone meant.
+
+After that they fought on in silence, side by side--sometimes waiting,
+sometimes fighting, both of them, to hold that horribly racked man upon
+the bed.  He fought them with every pound of strength in his emaciated
+body.  He moaned up at them, screamed at them, cursed them frothingly,
+and Fat Joe hung on and cursed him back--cursed him and promised him
+profanely that he would not let him die.  Steve's face was gray, sweat
+was pouring from Fat Joe's scarlet face when the life-tide ebbed lowest
+and there came a sudden cessation in that stream of babbled madness,
+Garry Devereau lay so quiet that an oath jerked huskily from Fat Joe's
+lips; but when he had listened at the motionless chest he lifted his
+head and smiled, seraphically.
+
+"There, by God," he stated in his high, complaining tenor, "there, by
+God!  And if I ain't created a vacancy in the angel chorus aloft, then
+I'm a liar!"
+
+And his explosive diagnosis proved to be as correct as it was utterly
+unprofane in spirit.  Before day broke there came an hour when Garry
+Devereau lifted himself upon one elbow and opened his eyes to stare
+half wildly, but very sanely, about the room.  His gaze flitted
+wonderingly from wall to wall before it rested, fearfully fixed, upon
+Steve's brown face.  Instantly he looked away, flinchingly, and met Fat
+Joe's voluminous grin--and looked back again, cunningly cautious.
+Finally he reached out a timid, blue-veined, pitifully unsteady hand
+and plucked at Steve's blue flannel sleeve.  And his words were an echo
+of those which Stephen O'Mara had heard before that night from other
+lips.
+
+"Then you--are you," he framed the words laboriously.  "I wasn't
+sure--even when I knew it must be."
+
+And Garry Devereau tried to smile--his slow smile of sophistry.
+
+"Greetings, Sir Galahad!" he faltered.  "And how are you, Steve--and
+who might your--fat friend be?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
+
+Of all the fragmentary pictures which those crowded twelve hours left
+registered upon Stephen O'Mara's brain, none proved more enduring than
+did the change which Garry Devereau's first haltingly weak but very sane
+greeting wrought in the expression on Fat Joe's pink visage that morning.
+The banter in Garry's labored words was so characteristic of the mocking
+spirit of the man who had come back the same inexplicably intimate friend
+which the boy had been, that it left Steve's dry throat speechless for
+the moment.  The visible effect upon Fat Joe was even more positive.
+
+Almost before he had finished his facetious query as to the identity of
+the one who had dragged him through that bad night Gary fell asleep; he
+slipped off into slumber, the very calmness of which guaranteed that the
+crisis had passed.  But the lugubrious astonishment which the question
+had evoked consumed more time in fading from Joe's face.  The latter's
+jaw had sagged open; he dragged a sleeve across his damp forehead while
+he stood and gazed in a sort of dumb dismay down at those pale and
+handsome features.  Then he chuckled suddenly; his whole squat body shook
+with comprehensive mirth.
+
+"Now what do you think of that!" he gurgled in admiration.  "What do you
+think of that?  A-hangin' on all night, alive once in a while, maybe, but
+the best you could say for him the rest of the time was a hope that he
+wasn't dead.  And now coming at us with the airy persiflage, the first
+regular breath he's drawed.  Fat!  It was me he meant to indicate, wasn't
+it?  He was joshin' me!  Say, Steve, ain't he the merry little joker?
+_Me--fat_!  Now that's real funny--I'll leave it to you if it ain't."
+
+Fat Joe leaned over and drew a blanket a little higher across the
+sleeping man's shoulder, while Steve continued silently to study Garry's
+face.  Even in unconsciousness a faintly crooked smile of skepticism
+still clung to the lips.
+
+"It was like him," Steve remarked at last, very soberly.  "Somehow, the
+minute he began to speak I knew it was exactly the sort of thing I
+expected him to say.  The probability of death is a much more amusing
+prospect to some men, Joe, than the perplexity of living."
+
+Fat Joe flashed a swift, half-puzzled glance at his chief's face; he
+started to ask a question, then scowled and checked himself and turned
+instead to kindle a fire in the stove of the lean-to kitchen of the
+cabin.  But a half-hour later he was still murmuring the last phrase over
+to himself, perplexedly, when Steve came leading the horse Ragtime up to
+the open door.  Saddled and with reins a-trail, the animal had been
+wandering throughout the night about the upper end of the construction
+camp clearing.  At the sound of hoofbeats outside Fat Joe left the stove
+and the half-cooked breakfast he had set himself to prepare.  From the
+doorway he stared through narrowed lids.
+
+For the moment Joe had half forgotten those night birds whose mournful
+hooting along the trail, a few hours back, had first stirred him to alert
+suspicion.  While he was struggling with Garry Devereau's faltering heart
+he had had scant leisure to devote to the problem of the other man's
+identity--that shadowy figure which had come plunging out of the cabin
+door and gone crashing off into the brush, a noisy but invisible target
+for his revolver.  Now recognition and a light of partial understanding
+rose and intermingled in his eyes.
+
+"So that's the way one of 'em come," he murmured.  "I was wondering some.
+Last night I didn't notice the horse, being a mite too hurried to give
+ample attention to details, as it were.  But ain't--ain't this one of
+Allison's horses?"
+
+Steve straightened from an examination of a deep scratch in one of
+Ragtime's knees and stood, back to the door, slowly stroking the soft
+black nose.  Just as well as though it had been voiced he caught the
+unphrased inference in the plump one's query.  After a time he shook his
+head, absently, in negation.
+
+"No, Joe," he answered heavily.  "He is from Allison's stables, but we
+have him to thank, just the same, along with Garry, for our blue-prints
+and estimates.  It was Mr. Devereau whom he brought up here last night,
+and in fairly good time I should judge, too, from the pace at which they
+set out.  Garry turned him into the hill-road, and he must have stuck to
+it blindly until he struck our fork."  And, after a longer pause: "The
+horse is Miss Allison's own property," he added quietly.
+
+Joe pursed his lips.  Instantly, at the mention of the girl's name, he
+felt himself better equipped to understand both the lack of immediate
+action and the seeming preoccupied indifference of his superior which, in
+the face of the night's developments, would have been otherwise utterly
+unaccountable that morning.
+
+There had been more than one instance of gross neglect and misinterpreted
+orders, particularly in the last week or so, that might have resulted
+disastrously if luck had not been with them; but Fat Joe had been unable
+to convince the chief engineer of the East Coast Company that their
+repetition was in any way a thing of sinister import.  Steve had merely
+smiled at his dogged belief in a veiled campaign of opposition, blaming
+the minor catastrophes upon blundering incompetence which they could hope
+to combat by unflagging vigilance alone.  And now, when the finding of
+the roll of estimates upon the floor and the blood clotted crease in
+Garry Devereau's forehead made further argument superfluous, his
+listlessness would have left Fat Joe alarmed had it not been for a
+recollection of the light he had glimpsed in Steve's eyes at the
+beginning of their sudden and unexplained return to camp the night
+before, and his brooding silence on the road.  At the mention of Barbara
+Allison's name it all recurred to Joe in nicely balanced and comforting
+sequence.  Fat Joe confessed shamelessly to a romantic soul.  And it
+helped him now to choose his own course of action, even though he had,
+for once, misread the other's mood.
+
+For if Steve had not forgotten the picture which Garry Devereau had made,
+robed and cowled and areel in the saddle, any more than he could ever
+hope to forget the slim, shimmering figure who had shrunk back against
+him in panic, there in the shadow of the hedge, both pictures had
+momentarily given way to an even more vivid memory.  He was thinking of
+Miriam Burrell's face and her last words to him: "I have heard, Mr.
+O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of the dark, when
+everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to talk with--a
+specialist in such campaigns!"
+
+The probable nearness of him who had gone bounding away empty-handed from
+the lighted shack was of far less moment than the possible identity of
+the one who had furnished the inspiration of that night raid.  And to
+Steve the need of assuring that tall girl with the vivid lips and coppery
+hair of Garry Devereau's safety bulked quite as important as did the
+advisability of seeking immediately an informal interview with Dexter
+Allison, such as the latter himself had so genially suggested.
+
+But Fat Joe, squinting at his chief's broad back, misread the signs that
+morning.  From where he stood in the doorway he could see the men of the
+upper camp already swarming out over the works, some of them mere dots
+across the expanse of swamp-land.  The rhythmic beat of pile-drivers
+thudded in his ears; raucous echoes of shouted orders floated up from the
+nearest gang-bosses, and punctuating it all came the intermittent boom of
+dynamite explosions from far north in the deep cut alongside the river
+edge.
+
+The construction camp had been nearly two hours awake; the race against a
+well-nigh impossible time limit which would brook neither mistake nor
+miscalculation had been picked up automatically at daybreak, where it had
+hesitated at nightfall the day before.  While he stared down at this
+activity, a realization of the months of bitter toil which stood between
+them and ultimate, uncertain success, crept over Fat Joe.  Little by
+little his features took on that look of hard and dangerous setness which
+always seemed so doubly threatening upon his placidly round countenance.
+And as casually as he was able he elected to go upon that errand of which
+his chief must have lost sight, in a dulled and moody contemplation of an
+entirely different matter.
+
+"Maybe," Joe suggested vaguely, "maybe I'll just ask you to watch these
+things on the stove a while, Steve.  I've got the fire to drawin' and
+some coffee set on, because I knew we'd need 'em before that cook-boy got
+his eyes open wide enough to see his way up here.  It ain't exactly a
+fancy repast, neither, so it won't tax your culinary skill none to tend
+it.  I--there's something I'd like to look into a little--something I
+sort of lost sight of while we were soothing our mutual friend in yonder.
+But I'll be back in a minute.  I'll just run down and see if everybody's
+onto his job."
+
+Hard on the heels of that explanation he started rapidly down the long
+bare slope and Steve watched his departure without comment.  While Joe
+was gone he tethered the black horse at the door frame, found a nose-bag
+and methodically presented the grateful beast with his breakfast.  And
+when Fat Joe returned he had finished preparing the meal which the former
+had begun; in absent-minded inattention that resulted in more than one
+perilously close call, with one hand he was placing brimming cups of
+blistering hot coffee beside the plates of food and condensed milk-cans
+upon the table, while he leafed slowly through the sheaf of blue-prints
+with the other, satisfying himself that they were untampered with.  Fat
+Joe shook his head mournfully over this last exhibition and dropped into
+a chair.
+
+They ate in silence that morning--a silence so heavy that the faint
+breathing of Garry in the bunk beyond them sounded almost stentorian at
+times.  More than once Joe's gaze went to that colorless face; just as
+often it searched Steve's gravely unreadable countenance, and it was Fat
+Joe who first found the silence no longer endurable.
+
+"What," he ventured to interrupt the other's brooding, "what is it,
+Steve, you call one of them little, gangling, bow-spectacled guys that
+fools his waking hours away studyin' the customs and morals and suchlike
+of birds and things?"
+
+Almost immediately Steve's face grew less blank at that bland question,
+and although his eyes failed to shift from the invisible point beyond Joe
+at which he was staring, his lips did curl a little.  He had long before
+learned to play up, solemnly, to those unprefaced and disingenuous leads.
+
+"Ornithologist?" he inquired soberly.  "Ornithologist--if that is what
+you mean."
+
+Joe nodded briskly.
+
+"That's it!" he exclaimed.  "I knew it was ornery something-or-other,
+and--and that makes it fit the case all the prettier, now don't it?
+Because in the last half-hour or so, since I left you here to tend to the
+cookin', I've been studying the birds somewhat myself.  And having been a
+little successful, so to speak, I'm ornerier'n even before I commenced."
+He stopped to swallow half the steaming coffee in his cup, and if when he
+began again his voice had hardened perceptibly, it was nevertheless still
+elaborately guileless.  "Steve," he said, "have _you_ ever stopped to
+consider real close and earnest any of the peculiarities of our feathered
+friends?  Say--well, say owls, for instance?"
+
+Then Steve ceased to smile.  He thought a moment, but his reply remained
+tuned to the other's artless key.
+
+"Why, yes," he drawled.  "Yes, and no.  As for the latter, however, I
+will admit that I have always believed their reputation for--er--wisdom
+to be a greatly overestimated thing."
+
+Widely Fat Joe grinned his pleasure.  His chief's eyes were no longer
+vague nor blank.
+
+"Which just bears out my own personal research in the field," he stated.
+"Not that I'm saying I've been real thorough in the matter, because I
+ain't had the time.  But what I've done I accomplished because I just
+naturally dote on that kind of thing."  His eye flitted carelessly toward
+a window.  "I happened to run into Harrigan, too, this morning," he
+murmured.
+
+As disinterestedly as had Joe, Steve now drained his coffee cup and
+waited.
+
+"He was down to the cook shanty," Fat Joe rambled on.  "It's an hour
+since he'd ought to have been out there with the powder squad in the
+north cut, and when I asks him if he was feelin' indisposed this morning
+he says no, but the supply teams was going out and one of the drivers had
+told him that I was sending him along to help with the loadin'.  He had
+such a nice, frank, open-faced way of lying that I couldn't bring myself
+to correct him.  I just let it stand that way and told him such was the
+arrangement."  Joe saw swift satisfaction play across Steve's face.
+"And--and then, after that, him and me--why, we just drifted off into a
+real interestin' and scientific discussion about them birds I been
+mentionin' to you.  We--somehow we got to discoursing about owls.
+
+"I told him I'd never noticed 'em to hoot so close together and
+persistent as they did last night, down along the trail, and wondered if
+by any chance he'd heard 'em, too.  And he said he had.  He's a nice
+smooth talker, Harrigan is, when he ain't too sober and not too drunk.
+Oh, yes, he'd heard 'em, being wakeful, he explained, what with worrying
+all night whether we'd ever get this line of steel laid before our
+contract run out on us!  Now wasn't that interestin'--wasn't it,
+especially coming from him?  Neatly put and self-possessed, I call it.
+He was worried because he's dreadful superstitions.  [Transcriber's note:
+superstitious?]  He claims when them birds gets to hedgin' in on each
+other's solos like they did last night it's a sign of bad luck or an
+accident for somebody, sure.  That give me an opening to ask him if the
+accident hadn't happened already, him having a bandage around his head
+not much different from this one our friend here is wearing.  But he
+couldn't see it that way.  A scratch he called it--just a scratch from a
+twig."
+
+The room was very quiet for a breath.  That thin note had crept into Fat
+Joe's tenor voice--thin and chill and menacing.  And there as abruptly as
+he had assumed it, he flung aside his mask of disingenuous irrelevance.
+Fat Joe wheeled, put both elbows upon the table edge and leaned forward
+heavily.  It was much as though he were setting himself to shoulder by
+sheer weight through the discouraging wall of indifference behind which
+the other was apparently withdrawing once more.
+
+"But as for me," his high voice rang a little, "but as for me--well, I
+always did pride myself that I could shoot some, whether it was by
+daylight or dark!"
+
+And the only result which that statement achieved was an answering,
+meditative nod.  Fat Joe subsided.  All that he could say had been said,
+and they finished breakfast as they had begun it, in absolute silence.
+But when Steve, with a word, halted him in the doorway as Joe was on the
+point of returning to the work in the valley, the latter turned to find
+the slow smile which he knew so well hovering upon the younger man's
+lips.  He fairly gulped in his sudden relief.
+
+"Joe," Stephen O'Mara began, and the words were suspiciously unsteady for
+those of a man who was bearing up bravely under a hidden sorrow, "Joe,
+you've missed your calling, I'm afraid.  As a naturalist you might have
+scored an instant and sensational success, in spite of the fact that you
+are neither bow-spectacled nor--er--gangling, as no doubt Mr. Devereau's
+reference to you has this morning made plain."
+
+He stopped to touch a match to the dry grains of tobacco which he had
+been tamping into the bowl of his pipe; he swung slowly around toward the
+inert figure on the bunk.  When he spoke again the thread of raillery was
+gone from his voice.
+
+"He'll sleep the day through, I think," he said, "and the night, perhaps.
+But I'd advise you to look in on him now and then, just the same.  He did
+us a good turn last night.  It's the second good turn he's done for me,
+Joe.  And now perhaps the chance has come to even up the score a little.
+You would know, wouldn't you, Joe, just how many drinks to prescribe for
+a man who has been as--as ill as Garry has?"
+
+Fat Joe's face commenced to shine, and at that he was only beginning to
+understand.
+
+"Ain't I the doctor?" he demanded aggrievedly.  "You don't have to go no
+deeper into technicalities with me.  And I told you last night, anyway,
+didn't I, that it would have to be his last little celebration, unless he
+was figurin' on a longer journey than he's ever took before.  Well, I've
+handled so many cases just like his that there ain't even a little
+enjoyable novelty in 'em any more for me."
+
+Steve received the statement with another nod.
+
+"That's it," he mused.  "That's it exactly.  It would have to be his
+last, unless he is figuring on a longer journey than he has ever taken
+before."
+
+He crossed and leaned over the thin and motionless form of his friend.
+He laid one hand gently upon the sleeping man's shoulder.
+
+"He did that for me once, Joe," he spoke quietly.  "He dropped his hand
+on my shoulder like that, and I never forgot the weight of it.  You watch
+him, Joe--watch him closely for a while, because--because, you see, a man
+does stray along once in so often who's so badly bewildered and trail
+weary, so tired of trying and--and hurt in soul, that the thought of such
+a journey as you speak of begins to seem the shortest route after all to
+an end of thoughts which even alcohol can't wipe out.  You take care of
+him, and if he wakes before I get back, explain to him a little just how
+he came here, and thank him a lot for what he did.  Ask him to wait until
+I come back from Morrison, will you?"
+
+For a moment Joe just stood and blinked, dumfounded.
+
+"Huh!" he blurted at last.  "Huh!  So that's what you been hintin' at all
+the time, is it?  I didn't just get you right until now.  But, do you
+know, it did seem to me once or twice while we were working over
+him--once or twice when the goin' was pretty bad--that his spirit wasn't
+heaving real hearty into the traces.  And, say, ain't that a poor idea
+for a guy to get into his head?  Now ain't it?"  And then, as the purport
+of the rest of Steve's words struck home: "Do you mean you are going to
+Morrison to have a----"
+
+Steve recrossed to the door and began to unfasten the feed-bag from
+Ragtime's nose.
+
+"And now about this ornithological problem, Joe," he cut in with a
+blandness that outdid Joe's best effort.  "About owls in particular!
+Your research work was illuminating; in view of its casual nature it was
+unbelievably helpful.  But personally I feel that a thorough sifting of
+the matter requires slightly different methods.  One should endeavor to
+get at the thing in its embryonic state, as--as it were.  Don't you think
+so?  If one could locate the place of incubation, the--er--nest from
+which these night birds of yours first stretched their wings, it might
+prove really worth while--no?  And--and at the same time I'll just return
+Miss Allison's horse to her, too, this morning."
+
+He leaned over to lengthen a stirrup; stopped again to light his pipe.
+
+"Watch things," he called, as he swung to the saddle and put Ragtime to
+the slope.  "Watch things!"  His voice drifted up from below, clear and
+eager, and alive with mirth.  "And drive 'em, Joe--drive 'em--drive 'em
+from daylight till dark!"
+
+From the threshold Fat Joe watched him until horse and rider disappeared
+beyond the line of timber; with broad face aglow he stood, head cocked
+upon one side.
+
+Then, "He was figurin'," he muttered in blithe delight, "he was
+a-figurin' to himself, all the time I thought he was thinking about her!
+I guess my own mind has lately got to dwelling too insistent on trivial
+things, for a laboring man. . . .  He's taking her back her horse--real
+broke up and sorrowful like over the prospect of seein' her again so
+soon, too, now wasn't he?  And me--me sympathizin' with _him_!
+Sometimes, Joe, your lack of penetration is plumb aggravatin' to me.  You
+talk a lot, but you don't say much!  You got to learn to listen."
+
+He stepped forward, remembered and turned back into the cabin.  There was
+womanish solicitude in the scrutiny he bent upon Garry Devereau's
+crookedly smiling face.
+
+"You and me was ordained to be friends," he declared oratorically,
+"because anybody that Steve O'Mara calls friend is good enough for me.
+And so I'll just naturally have to persuade you to put off indefinitely
+this idea of a prolonged excursion, won't I--convince you maybe of the
+unnumbered delights of our own earthly suburb, as it were.  And fat, eh?
+You think I'm fat, do you?  Well, that's a matter we'll have to thrash
+out when you come to--that and one other which ain't going to be half so
+amusin' nor congenial while under consideration.  About the best I can
+promise you for both of them arguments is that you ain't got a chance to
+win either.  I got my orders to take care of you."
+
+He tiptoed to the door and went with his oddly light and cat-footed tread
+down the hill.  Just once more he paused, halfway between the
+headquarters of the East Coast Company's chief engineer and the thudding
+pile-drivers at the edge of the swamp.
+
+"It won't be so lonesome, having him for company," he told himself.
+"It'll be a new mind to delve into,--that is, if he'll only listen a
+little to reason, when he wakes up.  And I wonder if he takes kindly to a
+little friendly game.  I wonder, now--I wonder!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
+
+Barbara Allison's presence upon the dusty hill-road that morning was
+more than the result of a merely casual whim, even though, when she
+turned her mount north into that mountain highway a scant two hours
+before, the choice had been made without actual thought for the route
+which she was selecting.  And yet, conscious or instinctive, the choice
+had brought her the things for which both brain and spirit were ahunger
+that morning: A silence so profound that the vague, crackling wood
+noises which disturbed it from time to time were not noises at all, but
+only a part of its very being; a solitude so breathlessly big and
+sweeping that she must needs throw out both slim arms finally in a
+childishly eager effort to embrace a tithe of it--and a chance to be
+alone!
+
+The night before, as soon as she had re-entered hurriedly the glowing
+lodge asprawl upon the hill, the impulse had first come to her--a swift
+and almost blind desire to turn and escape, if only for a little while,
+from the roomful of chatter and laughter and bright-eyed badinage
+loosed upon her immediately after the unmasking, by Dexter Allison's
+perfectly cadenced announcement of his daughter's engagement.  All in a
+breath the huge room had become stiflingly oppressive; the gaiety
+unbearable.  And at the end of the first half-hour following her
+truancy she might have yielded to the impulse, pleading the first
+flimsy excuse which would have purchased an opportunity to reconstruct
+that hysterically mad minute or two with him whom she had just left a
+little before in the hedge-gap, had not Miriam Burrell, at the very
+moment of decision, stung her into realization of what meaning such an
+act might convey to other less generous minds.
+
+That tall and lithe-bodied and abrupt-tongued friend of hers, colorless
+cheeks even paler against the black background, of her Mongolian
+costume, still had eyes for the change which had come over the younger
+girl, in spite of the terror which had been congealing her own heart
+since the moment of unmasking.  Her vivid lips were still able to
+smile, stiffly, when she finally drew Barbara into a corner and under
+cover of her lacquered fan mockingly pinched a little color into her
+wan cheeks.  But that strange girl failed to realize how much of scorn
+for a thing she labeled her own cowardice, she put into her words that
+night.
+
+"Please remember, dear child," she whispered, "that you are on
+exhibition as the ingenuously happy bride-to-be.  If you are going to
+play the game this way, like the rest of them, why not be a good sport
+and play it for all there is in it?  One owes it to one's partner, you
+know, not to reveal entirely the weakness of the hand that's just been
+dealt.  You should smile--at least a little!"
+
+Barbara, brain already hopelessly entangled, wheeled in astonishment at
+the almost viciously satirical suggestion, refusing even while her face
+flamed to believe that she had caught correctly the impossibly cynical,
+unbelievably unkind insinuation of this girl who was her closest
+friend.  But Miriam's eyes silenced the demand for an explanation,
+which had risen with an hitherto unknown coldness to her lips.  Instead
+Barbara reached out impetuously and took the girl's icy wrist in both
+her own hands.
+
+"Miriam, child, what is it?" she breathed.  "What is the matter, dear?
+You're ill--you're cold as death!"
+
+And at that the lash of scornful intolerance for all things
+hypocritical, the flick of which Barbara had never known before, was
+gone from Miriam's tongue.  She moistened her lips and tried to speak,
+and had to try again before her voice would come.
+
+"Have you--seen Garry?" she asked huskily.  "Do you know where he went?"
+
+The hopelessness of the query made possible but one interpretation of
+all that lay behind it, and yet Barbara, who had not so much as guessed
+at it until now, refused the thought as too fantastic for credence.
+Again a wave of conscious color stained her face.
+
+"Do you mean since--since----"  Her lips refused to phrase it, but
+Miriam finished it for her.
+
+"Since he went swinging out into the dark on Ragtime."  She, too,
+strained at the sentence, but for an entirely different reason.  "I was
+looking for him, but I was too late.  Bobs, all evening his eyes have
+been mad--his mood insane!  I heard just his last word or two to you
+and--Mr. O'Mara, out there on the lawn.  His father, you know--but you
+don't think. . . .  Barbara, I'm frightened--I'm so terribly
+frightened!"
+
+It ended in a little moan of fear.  And now, astounded past all belief,
+Barbara understood.  But before she could speak the seeming need of
+woman reassurance, no matter how illogical, was gone.  Amazingly, all
+in an instant, the living dread disappeared from Miriam's face; she
+stiffened and threw back her head with that short laugh which contained
+so little of mirth, so much that was hard to translate.  And the
+Honorable Archibald Wickersham, appearing the same instant at Barbara's
+elbow, frowned at its note of derision.
+
+"I've just been warning Barbara," the tall girl was already drawling
+with consummate impudence, "that the record of past performances are
+all against your finishing the distance without coming a cropper in
+these international matrimonial hurdles.  Just what is your opinion,
+Archibald?"
+
+Wickersham had never liked Miriam Burrell.  Now he smiled a trifle
+wryly into her insolently uptilted face, without attempting to answer
+the question.  And during the next dance with Barbara he unburdened
+himself, rather positively for him, of his distaste for her.  The
+pronounced frown, however, remained even longer upon his countenance.
+
+But that one moment had served where everything else might have failed.
+For the rest of the evening Barbara was again a creature of moods so
+frothy, so evanescent that she swept aside even Wickersham's habit of
+precision.  And if the spur that brightened her eyes and quickened her
+laughter was, after all, nothing more nor less than a hot contempt for
+herself--for the stolen moment in the hedge-gap and the inexplicable
+impulse upon which she had all but acted following it--her merriment
+was none the less a palpitant thing.
+
+And yet afterward, alone in her room, when the last treble note had
+died away and she had dismissed Cecile, her sleepy-eyed maid, the sense
+of oppression had returned redoubled.  She did not want to sleep; she
+was glad of her wide-eyed wakefulness, but in the darkness walls and
+ceiling and floor seemed fairly to close in upon her and hedge in soul
+and brain as well as body.  It was the first time the girl had ever
+known the need--the driving desire--to be alone out of doors, where
+there was nothing but sky and skyline to bound her thoughts.  And at
+last, when her restlessness became no longer bearable, while the
+remainder of the house still slept behind drawn curtains, she rose and
+slipped into boots and breeches and riding coat, and descended to order
+a not too wide-awake groom to saddle a horse.  And in the very middle
+of his sensational report of Ragtime's empty stall she swung to the
+saddle and turned toward the north.
+
+She rode hard at first.  She put the small roan mare between her knees
+to a pounding gallop, pulling to a walk only after the rushing air had
+whipped back into her cheeks a part at least of the glow which the
+sleepless night had robbed from them.  And if the tang of the trees and
+the solitude and the warmth of the sun did their work slowly, they
+nevertheless did it well.  Little by little her tense body relaxed; the
+line of her lips softened.  Almost before she realized it that morning,
+she had relegated her anxiety over Garry Devereau and her astonishment
+at the confession which she had beheld in Miriam's eyes to a rather
+hazy background, and turned to those very thoughts against which she
+had fought so fiercely throughout the night.  She drifted into a
+surprisingly unanalytical and most femininely inquisitive wonder
+concerning a tall figure in blue flannel and corduroy.  She suddenly
+found herself pondering the very incidents which, a few hours before,
+had set her small fists to clenching in a tide of incomprehensible
+resentment--against herself or him she could not for the life of her
+tell.
+
+Mile after mile, the roan mare placidly choosing the pace, she rode
+with one leg dangling over the pummel of the saddle, everything else
+forgotten in that preoccupied endeavor to review each moment she had
+shared with him.  Again she felt his arm harden threateningly under her
+startled clasp as a red-headed and very drunk river-man lurched out of
+a doorway ahead of them; with breath softly audible between arched lips
+she tried to recall the gentleness of his hands when he was refastening
+her cloak beneath her rigidly upflung chin.  And when the higher
+morning sun found her far beyond the rolling pasture land, miles in the
+heavy timber, she had dismounted, there where the highest loop in the
+road commanded its breath-taking sweep of country, and was sitting
+cross-legged upon the trunk of a fallen tree at the road edge.
+Frowning a little over the vexing uncertainty of details, Barbara was
+wondering just what their next meeting would be like; she had just
+finished picturing his man's discomfort and self-consciousness and lack
+of ease and, with a soberness so childish it would have dumbfounded her
+had she given it thought, was nodding approvingly over a contemplation
+of her own kind cordiality, when that very blue-shirted figure itself
+rounded a near corner in the narrow lane between the trees.  Stephen
+O'Mara, in the flesh, appeared before her, astride Ragtime and leading
+her roan, which, contentedly cropping the bush tops, had disappeared a
+full quarter of an hour before.
+
+The girl gasped at the suddenness of his coming; she half started to
+rise before she remembered the instability of her perch, and then
+crouched even lower than before when she saw that he was not yet aware
+of her nearness.  It was not at all like the encounter which she had so
+ably managed in her imagination an instant before, and somehow that
+graciously kind greeting of hers was lost completely through the
+perversity of an utterly different mood.  She waited, eyes gleefully
+bright, until he was almost opposite her before she coughed, ever so
+faintly.  Then she tilted her nose aloft in enchanting mimicry of his
+lean and forward-thrust face.
+
+"We never speak," she confided dolefully to the empty air in front of
+her, "we never speak as we pass by."  He whirled.  So swiftly that it
+took her breath he was out of the saddle and across the road, and
+standing knee-deep in the undergrowth beside her.  Only his profile had
+been visible to her at first.  Now the white line of his jaw and the
+light in the eyes that searched her face chilled her, even while they
+sent the blood singing in every vein.  Only a few hours before she had
+seen that same cold fear in Miriam Burrell's eyes; and yet not the
+same, either, for hers had been a panic of lost hope, and the gleam in
+the man's eyes was already only partly dread of disaster and partly a
+great and unmistakable glow of thankfulness.  Barbara remembered then,
+with a twinge of guilt, that she could have forgotten it so completely,
+the black-robed figure that had gone thundering off on the same mount
+which Stephen O'Mara was riding now.  She half lifted both hands to
+him, apprehensively.
+
+"You aren't going to tell me, are you," she asked, "that anything
+dreadful has happened to Garry?"
+
+Dumbly, but most reassuringly, Steve shook his head.  From the top of
+her hatless, wind-tossed, brown-crowned head to the tips of the
+absurdly small boots tucked up beneath her, he scanned her slim body.
+Barbara realized that he was trying to speak and finding the effort
+hard.  Slowly he removed his hat and passed one hand across his
+forehead.
+
+"Man," he ejaculated fervidly to himself, "but that's the longest
+hundred yards you've ever traveled, on foot or a-horseback!"  And
+abruptly, accusingly, to her: "Do you know that I've been months and
+years and ages rounding that bend to--to find you a little crumpled-up
+heap in the road?"
+
+After all, her unaccountably high spirits may have been only the
+natural reaction from the hours of depression through which she had
+lately passed.  But whatever the reason behind it, Barbara's levity was
+a totally spontaneous, deliciously colored thing.  She sat and tilted
+her head at him in audacious provocation; she assumed as chastened an
+expression as she could in the face of her very real relief at the news
+of Garry's safety.
+
+"I'm sorry," she murmured humbly.  "I'm sorry to--disappoint you.  But,
+you see, I didn't know----"
+
+She laughed at him.  Her lips curled, petal-like, in a gurgling peal of
+enjoyment at his shame-faced grin.
+
+"I found your horse rolling," he explained, and his gravity was dogged
+in the face of her brightness.  "How I knew it was yours I don't know,
+but I did just the same.  I thought she had thrown you; I'd already
+made up my mind, if there was one scratch on your body, to take that
+mare's head between my hands and break her neck!  You see, I believed I
+knew already just what it would mean to me if anything ever happened to
+you.  But it's a lot different imagining the world without
+you--and--and facing the actual possibility of it.  Was I--fairly
+tragic?"
+
+And now it was his turn to laugh over her pink-faced disconcernment.
+Most decidedly it was not the sort of an encounter which she had been
+contemplating a moment earlier.  There was no discomfort in that big,
+loose-limbed body.  She had imagined him as just a little moody and
+sad-eyed, at least.  And now she realized that she had never seen the
+latter so easy to read as they were at that minute.  Gray as the
+shadowed silver thread of the river far below in the valley, they
+glowed with a great gladness for her safety, and far, far more than
+just that.  The alarming cheerfulness of his gaze was too confusing to
+sustain.
+
+"Of course you've found Garry," she hastened to swing the conversation
+to a less personal quarter.  "Is he--will you tell me about it, please?"
+
+One small, gauntleted hand made an almost imperceptible gesture toward
+the unoccupied space beside her on the fallen tree.  But he chose the
+ground at her feet.  And after he had disposed his long length to his
+liking he answered her hurried question--answered it with an amiably
+lazy deliberation that promised a sure return to a topic of his own
+choosing, in his own good time.
+
+"No," he stated, and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of
+the statement.  "He found me.  And it was the biggest stroke of luck
+that he did.  I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn't you say
+so?"
+
+The question was quite innocently direct.  No, decidedly he was not
+discomfited--not ill at ease at all!  Apparently he found it much
+easier to look at her than at any of the points of interest in the
+landscape toward which her glances persisted in flitting.  While he
+marveled, without any manifestations of sorrow whatever, at the curve
+of her throat and the satin texture of that cheek turned toward him, he
+told her drawlingly all there was to tell of the night before.  And
+after a time Barbara forgot her warm face and the too plain message
+there in his eyes, in her growing excitement over that recitation.
+When he stopped her first question instinctively pounced upon the one
+detail he had purposely withheld.
+
+"But you must have an inkling as to the man's identity," she cried.
+"Why, you've got to find that out, before he does more harm next time.
+Haven't you a suspicion, even?"
+
+One foot swung free; she leaned forward in her eagerness, a slender and
+entirely boyish figure in diminutive breeches and boots and
+straight-lined coat.  And the man laughed aloud up into her flushed
+face, softly and not quite steadily at her hostile indignation, her
+intuitive feminine curiosity, and most of all, most unsteadily, at his
+wonder of her, herself.
+
+"Why, yes," he admitted.  "Both Joe and I do believe we know who it
+was, but we aren't sure because we don't understand yet what that man's
+motive might be.  I'd tell you, only I don't like to accuse anybody
+until there is cause for it.  But that's what brought me down here this
+morning--that and because I wanted to tell Miss Burrell that Garry is
+safe, and will continue to be from now on, I hope.  Those were two of
+my reasons for coming, at least.  I had a more important one than
+either, but----"
+
+Barbara did not wait for him to tell her what it was.  She was staring
+at him in unfeigned surprise.
+
+"To tell Miriam?" she echoed.  "Do you--you can't mean that you knew
+she cared for Garry?"
+
+"Didn't you?"
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+"Never, until just a little while ago!  I--do you know, in the last few
+days I've begun to realize how much more you--other people--observe
+than I do.  I've begun to wonder if I haven't been very blindly
+self-sufficient.  For I never dreamed of such a thing, until something
+happened after I left you last night."  Her voice faltered, but her
+eyes clung resolutely to his.  "She came to me and asked me if I knew
+where he had gone.  She had seen him ride away, too, Mr. O'Mara.  And I
+learned it then, just from the terror in her face.  But I didn't know
+until later how much she cared.
+
+"She came into my room this morning, and that, although you can't know
+it, was more than odd in itself, because I have always been the one to
+carry my woes to her.  It must have been between four and five, for I
+had counted a clock striking four; and yet she was still dressed in her
+party costume.  Have you guessed what she had been doing?  Mr. O'Mara,
+she had been out looking for him!  She had slipped out and been waiting
+because she was sure Ragtime would bolt and--and come back home,
+dragging him by a stirrup!  Wasn't that a horrible thing to wait for,
+alone in the dark?"
+
+With a little shudder the girl put her hands over her eyes, as if to
+shut out the picture.
+
+"She wasn't hysterical, either.  She was--just--ice!  And wringing wet
+and blue with cold.  Cool, proud, intolerant Miriam Burrell--and I'd
+never dreamed of her caring for anybody, until that minute.  I sent her
+to bed and I think I hated Garry Devereau for an hour or two.  Why, Mr.
+O'Mara, I'd never believed that a girl could care that much for any
+man!"
+
+He stopped toying with a handful of dry twigs and let them slip away
+between his fingers.  She saw his head come up; saw his eyes narrow.
+Then her own body stiffened as she realized what she had said.  And yet
+it was, after all, only a part of something she had decided she must
+make clear to him, ever since he had surprised her there at the road
+edge; it was part of an explanation which, without quite knowing why,
+she felt was due to him.  But she had not meant to employ that abrupt
+confession as a preface.  That made it inconceivably harder, it seemed.
+And he, silent at her feet, stared out at the blue rim of the hills and
+gave her no assistance now--not so much as a smile.  She sat a long
+time, nursing one slim knee between her palms.
+
+"Mr. O'Mara," she appealed to him at last, "how might one reopen a--a
+rather difficult subject with--with a suddenly most difficult
+conversationalist?"
+
+Without turning his head he made answer:
+
+"I think Fat Joe's method is as good as any," he suggested.  "Joe says
+the only way to reopen any argument is to take a running jump and land
+all spraddled out, right in the middle of it.  He insists that such
+procedure leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone that the discussion is
+about to be resumed."
+
+She laughed a little.
+
+"Then shall we consider that I've taken--the--the jump, and landed?"
+
+Just when she was wishing most that she could see his face he swung
+around toward her.  Again his gravity was a totally gentle thing.  It
+made her remember the self-possessed kindliness with which he had met
+her unreasoning rage the night before.
+
+"You don't have to explain," he told her, "unless you are sure you want
+to.  Sometimes, you see, I understand things without any special
+explanation.  It's a trick one learns from living alone a lot with
+one's own thoughts.  I told you, last night, that I wouldn't have you
+saying 'I'm sorry' to me.  And now I'll tell you that nothing you can
+ever say, now, is going to stop me from----"
+
+"I want to, please," she interrupted him vehemently.  "I--have to!  And
+I'm not going to make believe that I don't know what you are going to
+tell me--what you have been saying to me, all morning.  But it can't do
+any good.  Why, I'm just realizing that something which has been
+hurting me for hours was just--just sorrow for you.  It can't do any
+good, oh, truly!  But will you let me talk first, if I promise to
+listen afterward?"
+
+He promised.
+
+"Twice I've been bitterly unkind to you," she began again.  "Once a
+long time ago--and--and once last night.  And on both occasions you had
+just tried to tell me, indirectly at least, that you cared, hadn't you?"
+
+"Indirectly?" he murmured.  "Was I as obscure as that?"  And then,
+whimsically: "Won't you call that explanation enough, and let me tell
+it to you again--so you can't misunderstand?"
+
+"I've asked you to forgive me the first offense," she hurriedly denied
+his appeal.  "And the second--Mr. O'Mara, last night Miriam said
+something to me, something that she wouldn't have said if she hadn't
+been half mad with fear.  It was unkind, unfair, but it made me wonder
+if, perhaps, you might not be thinking the same thing, too.  Years ago
+you told me I didn't think you good enough to--to be my knight.  My
+outburst was only childish temper that day, but did you think last
+night that I still underrated you?"
+
+Steve finally shook his head when she persisted in waiting for his
+answer.
+
+"You just have to finish now," he warned her, however.  "It was your
+own bargain.  I'm not going to tell you one single bit of what I think
+of you until it comes my turn!"
+
+She tried to laugh at his stubbornness, but she had trouble with this
+explanation, which grew more vexingly intricate and involved the
+further she went.
+
+"Then we'll say you didn't," she continued.  "I told you last night,
+less kindly than I might have, that I was engaged to Mr. Wickersham.
+And I've just confessed, too, that I didn't know a girl could care for
+any man as unutterably, as blindly and pridelessly, as Miriam cares for
+the man Garry is.  That is the truth.  For quite a long, long time it
+has been understood that I was to marry Mr. Wickersham.  I have always
+admired him--found him above petty things.  But, Mr. O'Mara, I have
+always been sure, for just as long a time, that the ability to care for
+anyone the--the way I think you believed last night I might care for
+you, was left out of me.  And so it wasn't you who awoke my contempt,
+even though I did turn it against you.  It was I, myself.  It was I,
+and not you, who was not 'good enough'!  For even if I am the kind of a
+girl who can't love anybody, very much, except, perhaps, herself, I
+should at least play fair.  Isn't--isn't that so?"
+
+Minute after minute passed while she sat plaiting the cloth
+tight-stretched over one knee.  Lips softly aquiver, she waited,
+earnest, eager that he understand from her explanation that which she
+did not yet understand at all herself.  Again she wished that he would
+turn; she wanted greatly to see whatever there might be behind his
+heavy silence.
+
+"Isn't it?" she faltered timidly.
+
+And yet, when his head did come around she found she couldn't face him.
+
+"Is it my turn now?" he asked.
+
+Her answer was barely audible.
+
+"If--if you have to--have it.  But I've told you how useless it is."
+
+"Would you mind looking at me, just a minute?" said Steve.
+
+The brown head drooped even lower over the restless fingers.  It shook,
+ever so faintly.
+
+"I'd rather not. . . .  I'm listening!"
+
+His laugh lilted recklessly in sheer joy at her refusal.
+
+"Then I'll have to tell you," he stated, "that I'm smiling in spite of
+the hopelessness.  I'm smiling, even though my throat is aching and my
+lips pretty dry.
+
+"You've just finished trying to argue my man's case from your woman's
+point of view--one of the hardest, least satisfactory things that could
+be attempted, no doubt.  And if it were possible, I know I'd be loving
+you right now even more than I did before, just because you've been so
+entirely unsuccessful at it.  Maybe I could straighten out a point or
+two that must have been not quite clear to you; maybe--but I don't want
+to argue back at you now.
+
+"You say my telling you all I must tell you can't help my case a little
+bit.  All right--we'll let it stand like that, for the moment.  And you
+say you are going to marry Mr. Wickersham.  All right again--but better
+prophets than either of us have made mistakes before now!  If he hadn't
+forced on me one condition which I would have liked to be different,
+I'd rather have had to mention no other man at all.  This isn't the way
+I'd have chosen to tell you how much I care.  I'd rather have told you,
+a little at a time, but there isn't time for that now.  So maybe it'll
+sound crude to you.  I've not rehearsed it with any other woman, you
+see.  And if it does sound that way it won't help me much, either, will
+it?  But you're going to believe what I say!
+
+"You started back a dozen years or so, in order to make your
+explanation clear.  I'm starting there myself, so I'll be sure you
+understand.  You've been grieving because you hurt me--hurt me twice.
+Will you stop now, if I tell you that I wouldn't exchange those
+two--shall we call them wounds--for all the kindnesses of all the other
+women in the world?  I did believe that you didn't think me good
+enough, that first time.  That was why I was cut deeper than you'll
+ever know, because I knew it was only the truth.  I admitted
+it--remember?  I admitted it when I said I was coming back.  Well, I'm
+back now--and I'm still not good enough, and not because I haven't
+tried to be, either.  I'm just not admitting any man alive could be
+that.  But I'm telling you, too, in the same breath, that the man who
+takes you will have to prove he's a whole lot better--before I stand
+aside!"
+
+For the first time since he had begun the girl moved.  Her head leaped
+back; she half lifted one hand in protest, but the very gladness in his
+face silenced her.
+
+"My turn," he reminded her quizzically.  "You made the bargain, you
+know.  You've just finished a rather involved bit of reasoning
+concerning the way other women love, a lot of which I'll have to
+confess I didn't attend as closely as I should have.  Perhaps that's
+because no man's method of caring has ever interested me a great deal,
+except my own.
+
+"I loved you when you were a little bit of a girl--because I loved you!
+And I love you that way now.  Your face was the first woman face I ever
+looked on--and--really--saw.  And since that first morning it's been
+with me--been with me a lot of times when I didn't have anything else
+to look up to.  I've been less hungry, for thought of you; less
+thirsty, when the road got pretty long at times.  I--I worshiped you,
+do you hear?  Why, I've prayed to you, dumbly, wordlessly, out of black
+bitterness, when it seemed that any other divinity must be too busy to
+give any heed to--to the ragged little tad I was.  Now do you think I
+haven't known what it was, long before this, to go on when there wasn't
+any hope?"
+
+He waited.  Her breath came in a long and quivering gasp.  And yet he
+did not realize that she was crying.
+
+"I--I don't think that I want to--listen any more," she faltered.
+
+His face went white at that--and then he was smiling again.
+
+"I told you I'd have chosen to tell you differently," the drawling
+gentleness was unaltered, "but I'll have to finish this way now.  There
+may not be many chances for me to speak, for I've come back to you
+almost too late.  And I don't want to hurt you; why, I'm going to keep
+the laughter in your eyes and heart as long as you live.  For I thought
+it would be a woman I'd find when I came back, and I've found you still
+all girl--all save in those moments when you've seemed half boy to me.
+And that is strange, too, isn't it--strange that I never knew how much
+I wanted you to be like that, until you taught me the wonder of it
+yourself?  My--eyes are stinging.  I don't talk quite plainly.  My
+throat is too tight for easy speech.  For it's just the old wonder of
+you, after all--just the same--reverence, isn't it?  I'll never let you
+grow up now.  You'll have to stay girl--Boy--all the rest of your life!
+I've learned to be fairly sure of myself, but I'm not asking to be sure
+of you yet.  I'd never want to be too sure of you unless all the rest
+of my whole world had come tumbling down.  And then--then I'd need to
+know always that I could stake my soul on your keeping faith.  I'd want
+to know that I could reach out and find your hand searching for mine in
+the dark.  Your face was the first, girl--it's been the only one.
+It'll be the last thing I'll see, the last moment there is sight in my
+eyes!"
+
+His slow, infinitely gentle voice stopped.  He sat head up, before her.
+And then her choking sob answered him through that blind silence.  He
+was on his feet then; he started forward, and remembered again.  And as
+if that slim-limbed, huddled little figure had been a boy indeed, he
+dropped one arm reassuringly over her bowed shoulders.
+
+"Pity, Barbara?" he asked quietly.  "Are you crying from pity?  Because
+if it's that--it--it beats me!"
+
+She shook her head vehemently.
+
+"I'm not crying because of anything," she sniffed.  "I'm just
+crying--that' all!"
+
+One hand went searching through pocket after pocket; one elbow came up
+to shield her eyes.  She slid from the tree-trunk and swayed
+unsteadily, and groped out and found his arm.  And it was the boy he
+had just tried to comfort who curled both hands tightly around his
+flannel sleeve and hid a wet face against his shoulder.
+
+"I--I'm sorry.  I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.  I shouldn't have let
+you start to tell me--I knew it all along.  But I'm not pitying--big
+Stephen O'Mara; it--it was just little Steve who made me cry, I think."
+Again that long, sobbing breath.  "Will you--will you--I can't find my
+handkerchief," she gasped.
+
+Long after they had remounted and turned their horses toward the south
+Barbara rode with head bowed, slim shoulders turned toward the man
+beside her, a shield for her averted face.  From time to time she
+dabbled furtively at her eyes with the big, crisp square of linen with
+which Steve had answered the wailed announcement of the loss of her own
+handkerchief.  Once or twice she caught her breath, unsteadily.  And
+yet in spite of the fact that the actual desire was furthest of all
+things from her heart at that instant, when she did finally grow
+curious at his long silence and turn to steal a sidelong glance at him,
+the utter gloom upon Steve's face awoke within her an irresistible
+impulse to mirth.
+
+It was partly hysterical, partly the sudden realization that he was not
+the only one who had, that morning, found much in his companion which
+was insistently boyish.  For until then she had not glimpsed this side
+of that grown-up spirit which, in the boy, had evinced more than once a
+confidence in self so serenely unshakable that it had bordered on
+doggedness at times.
+
+In those days it had always irritated her, and set her small fists to
+clenching in a childish antagonism.  More than once she had answered it
+with superior little, child-woman smiles which had sent him marching,
+white of face and lip, back through the hedge gap, never realizing
+herself that her own pique sprang from the belief that his promises of
+conquest dealt only with material things--splendidly visioned, most
+vaguely detailed conquests which set his eyes afire but seemed to hold
+no place for the feminine of her.  She had never understood that he,
+with quite masculine bindness [Transcriber's note: blindness?], had
+taken for granted her comprehension that each and every conquest was to
+be solely a glorification of her, any more than she understood now why
+his black discouragement awakened in her a sudden warmth as different
+from her old perversity as the pulse in her throat was painful.  And
+yet she couldn't stifle that impulse.  She giggled aloud.  And when he
+turned--when he wheeled and encountered her shining eyes, still wet and
+brimming above the screen of his own handkerchief, she sensed
+immediately that he was flushing as little, too-sensitive Steve had
+flushed years before, when she had laughed at him less kindly.
+
+The girl was not conscious of it; she had no actual realization yet of
+how very deeply her unwilling readjustment of fundamental values had,
+in the last twenty-four hours, undermined her hitherto unquestioning
+acceptance of those inbred standards which, to all her world save
+Miriam Burrell, were creed and code of conduct.  That morning she only
+knew she was unaccountably glad because there was no malice in her
+mirth; had she given it thought she would have insisted that, in her
+heart, there no longer lurked a ghost, ignoble or otherwise, of what
+had once been a childishly snobbish belief in her inherent superiority.
+And as suddenly as she had giggled she now laughed aloud at the
+expression she had surprised there on his face.  Again, for an instant,
+the very spontaneity of her swift changing mood gave the situation into
+her hands.
+
+"Please," she begged him mockingly, "please, I did have to laugh, a
+little.  I had to!  It just occurred to me, all in a breath, that
+perhaps there is another of us who--who hasn't entirely grown up.  You
+looked so morbidly disheartened.  And I know it won't sound logical,
+but all this time during which I supposed you were smiling upon my--my
+absurd tears with that benign surety of yours, it hurt--hurt like
+everything--just knowing that it was all so hopeless for you.  But now
+that I have seen that you do understand, do we have to be so gloomy any
+longer?  Are we going to be so tragic, every time we meet?  They tell
+me it is an admission of unformed, unbalanced youth, Mr. O'Mara.  And,
+whether that is so or not, I do know that it is a great strain upon my
+complexion."
+
+Momentarily her effrontery had given the situation into her hands--but
+only momentarily.  For even while she was speaking the corners of
+Steve's eyelids began to crinkle; before she had finished mocking at
+him in a voice that still caught unsteadily in her throat, it was her
+up-turned face which had grown pink under his gravely amused scrutiny.
+
+"Was it as bad as that?" he asked.  "I don't know that I mind the
+'benign' part so very much, but as for my 'surety'--well, now I must
+set you right.  I have seen men holding four aces sit with faces so sad
+and hopeless that they might have earned their fortunes as professional
+mourners, could their expressions have been rendered permanent.  I've
+seen men with straight flushes bow their heads in sorrow over the cards
+they held.  And I think the one beatific visage it has been my good
+luck to behold belonged to Fat Joe, one night when the rest of the
+table had raised his very feet out from under him.  He sat and beamed;
+he radiated good cheer--now and then he chuckled with positively
+insulting self-confidence, while he was pushing forward all the chips
+he owned . . . and he had two deuces and four spades to back it up!
+
+"You'll find that most men play that way--most men, I mean, who play
+for big stakes and play to win.  And so--but I've told you already that
+I'm going to put all my cards on the table, with you.  You're going to
+know, always, the hand I hold.  Why, I told you I wasn't sure, even a
+little bit.  I've been smiling just to make it easy for you to
+understand that I know how to lose, if it has to come to that.  And do
+you suppose I'd have let you weep into my handkerchief, if I'd been
+half way certain, even?  Do you?  Because I wouldn't.  I have a pair of
+arms and two shoulders that have been reserved for that
+purpose--reserved, oh, for years and years."
+
+Barbara had lifted the handkerchief again.  The explanation which Steve
+had begun in half-assumed soberness ended in drawling, unmistakable
+gravity.
+
+"Perhaps it wasn't a particularly good parallel to use," he went on,
+even more slowly, when she failed to answer.  "I only wanted to make
+you see--to have you know----"
+
+Her brown head flashed up then, radiantly eloquent of entire
+understanding.
+
+"It was a very good parallel," she defended spiritedly.  "I liked it
+immensely.  I was thinking that some day when I get involved with
+Miriam in a particularly erudite discussion, I'd employ it myself.  But
+just now the one point which interests me most is this.  Did--did Fat
+Joe win?"
+
+His single quick word that checked Ragtime brought her roan mount also
+to a standstill.  Lightly Steve swung out and took both her gloved
+hands in a grip that made her draw back a little.
+
+"If you weren't the _girl_ to whom I'd just told my love," he stated,
+"I'd be telling you, right now, that I like you best of all the _men_ I
+know!"  He sat and looked at her.  "And since I don't remember clearly
+whether I've said it already this morning, I'll chance repeating it.
+You're the one prettiest thing in all this world--and it's not an
+unhandsome world this morning, either."
+
+For a moment longer her mood lasted while she surveyed him with
+dark-eyed audacity, head poised on one side in that attitude of wholly
+happy intimacy with which he had seen her many times greet Caleb Hunter.
+
+"For a man who claims to be strictly an amateur," she murmured, "I can
+only reply--you do extremely well, sir!"
+
+And then, as if her words had rung too cheaply flippant in her own
+ears, she took both hands impetuously from his.  She started her horse
+abruptly.  And it was yards before he overtook her, rods before she
+dropped back to a walk.  Her face had become wistful in its earnestness.
+
+"That was pretty, and sincere, and--and like you," she mused.  "I
+wonder why my answer sounded not quite so innately fine?  Do you
+suppose it was because I've already become accustomed to meeting
+flippancy with flippancy?  For if that isn't the reason then how would
+you explain my--my persistent tendency toward frivolity with you?
+Because it exists, you know.  Truly it does!  If I yielded to the
+impulse that is always with me, I--I'd coquette with you,
+disgracefully.  Doesn't that--even surprise you?  Now you _are_
+laughing at me . . . why, you weren't listening at all!"
+
+His shamefacedness was an admission of guilt, but he shook his head in
+contradiction.
+
+"Not at you," he corrected her.  "I wasn't laughing very heartily, or
+very steadily, was I?  And I'm trying to listen; I am trying to pay
+attention to everything you say.  It just isn't an easy thing to do,
+that's all, when--when I'm looking at you, too.  But I promised you
+that you were always going to be sure of me.  Couldn't that be reason
+enough; can't we just say you'd sensed it, yourself, even without my
+telling you so?"
+
+She bobbed her head, most anxious for his gravity now that she was not
+sure whether it was real or not.
+
+"I knew that must be it," she argued seriously.  "I thought it must be,
+anyway.  I just feel safe with you.  And yet I don't want you ever to
+believe, either, that I am deliberately playing.  It's just--oh, in my
+heart I know that you haven't any more than those two deuces, and--and
+the deal is mine.  Do you understand what I'm trying to say?  They
+always say it in--in books, Mr. O'Mara.  They always agree to be the
+'best of friends,' and it reads so funny and flat.  But that is exactly
+what I am trying to put into words.  It couldn't be anything more,
+ever, and yet I want this friendship which is different from everything
+I've ever known before.  I like you very, very much.  Listen, and I'll
+make a confession, too!  I used to watch and hope you'd come back,
+after I'd sent you home, heart-sick, years ago.  Do you suppose we
+might say the--the 'best of friends' in real life, too, and not sound
+instantly absurd?"
+
+"We might try it out," he suggested.
+
+Then she was positive that his face was too stiffly sober, but she
+ignored it--ignored, too, the tinge of whimsicality in his voice.
+
+"If I weren't so sorry for you I might not be so sure; but I am sorry.
+If you weren't so dismayingly cheerful about it, I wouldn't feel so
+badly.  But I've begun to understand how very long you have been
+playing your cards and smiling over them, no matter what might be dealt
+you.  And that is some improvement over the girl I've been, isn't it?
+For I've never had to struggle very hard for anything I've wanted.  I
+want to be friends, but I'm not silly enough to think you won't tell me
+again that you--care.  I want to be friends, but not at the price of
+your heart-ache and disappointment, and--why, I wonder, do I get all
+tangled up when I try to explain myself to you?  It's just this: I'm
+not going to be unkind to little Steve any more, Mr. O'Mara, or--or big
+Steve, either.  But I--I want to see you sometimes, too, and--and I
+just won't let myself cry any more this morning!"
+
+Her voice had grown very small toward the end.  It trailed off into a
+stifled but unmistakable sniff.  And a moment later, when she ceased
+fumbling with the reins and glanced with resolute brightness up at him,
+the film of hot tears in his eyes brought her hands to her throat.  But
+even then in the face of that light which she had never before glimpsed
+in any man's eyes for her, she was conscious of his use of her
+name--vaguely conscious of how different it sounded on his lips.
+
+"Barbara," Steve faltered, "Barbara, you blessed child, you!"  And
+there, dumbly, he shook his head over his stumbling utterance and tried
+to laugh to cover it.  "Sorry?  Sorry for me?  Why, God bless you,
+girl, you refuse me whenever you want to--whenever you have to!  I'm
+not asking you to help.  And don't you suppose after last night I know
+how near to losing out I am?  I understand.  Why, you're going to get
+quite a few refusals ahead of me, no doubt, before--before I catch up
+with you!  But don't you waste one bit of worry on me.
+
+"It would be your telling me that you did care, and then telling me
+that you didn't, that would about break me.  I have to keep on asking
+you; I have to keep on trying, but you can tell me 'no chance'
+whenever, in your heart, you believe it to be the truth, and I'll take
+it smiling.  Just don't let it become mechanical, that's all I ask,
+will you?  And--and if some day after I've gone, you suddenly begin to
+wish, even the tiniest bit, that you hadn't made the last refusal
+quite--quite so final, you needn't let that worry you, either.  Because
+I'll be back!  You can know that I'll come back, next day--next
+month--next year--thirty miles or three hundred--oh, just to see if my
+chances haven't improved any!  That does make you smile, doesn't it?  I
+reckon experienced match-makers would tell me that that isn't the way
+for me to talk if I'm going to win out.  But it's the way I like best.
+I want you to know that there is one person you can be sure of, all the
+days of your life.  I began a dozen years ago--I've only started loving
+the whiteness of you."
+
+She rode with wide eyes fastened upon his now wholly smiling face; rode
+with lips parted, all else submerged in that wonder which quickened her
+breath.  Once she leaned toward him as if to speak, and then shook her
+head at the inadequacy of the words.  They topped the last rise in the
+dusty, winding road and raised the river basin and the town itself in
+that long period of silence.  There, once more, she checked the roan
+mare.
+
+"If women could care like that," she told him quietly.  "If I believed
+that I could ever----"  She shook her head with a sad little smile.
+"Since you have come home you've made me feel very insignificant and
+petty at times.  You've made me wish I might have been as--as wonderful
+as you say I am to you.  But I know, you see."  She lifted one slim arm
+toward the newer Morrison stretched out along the river front.  "Do you
+remember the first day you saw the village it used to be, that day when
+you first came down river?"
+
+Steve knew what she was going to say.  She read amused anticipation in
+his eyes and grew self-conscious at it.
+
+"I thought yours was a perfectly good parallel," she asserted stoutly.
+"And you'll have to admit that you did believe it was wonderful then.
+Uncle Cal has told me how breathlessly you called it the 'city.'  But
+is it as wonderful, now?  Hasn't familiarity with real bigness dimmed
+its wonder a little?"
+
+For the first time that day his attitude was frankly challenging.
+
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe!  And maybe I like it better than ever, for
+the others I've seen!"  He frowned and shook his head.  "I'm quite
+likely to stick to first conclusions," he finished, "and your inference
+is basically wrong.  I do not need to look at other women to make me
+surer of the wonder of you.  A man doesn't have to live in a desert all
+his life to know what thirst is, you know.  And it's not bad--not bad
+as cities go!"
+
+As they had begun the morning they now finished it, on a plane of
+thorough comradeship which years and years alone cannot achieve.
+
+"Not bad," she echoed throatily.  "Not bad, at all!  It's marvelous
+too, how towns and people and--and things in general can improve, once
+they awake to their own importance in the scheme of things, isn't it?"
+
+Quite on a mutual impulse they clasped hands and laughed into each
+other's eyes; quite unnecessarily it may have appeared to the small
+group on the veranda of the stucco and timber place halfway down the
+slope between them and town.  And there on the crest of the hill,
+suddenly conscious of those eyes, the girl drew back as swiftly as she
+had swung toward him.
+
+"What in the world will they think!" she breathed.  "I've been gone
+since daybreak, without saying a word that I was going.  And it must be
+noon by now.  Come--no, don't hurry!  It's too late to hurry now!"
+
+Her chin came up; the line of her lips lost its soft fullness.  It was
+his hot face which made her aware of how surely her imperiously quick
+orders had stung him.  Then she was back, knee to knee, at his side.
+
+"That wasn't fair," she said.  "That was most unfair, to me.  You
+didn't think, did you, that I----"
+
+His interruption surprised her.
+
+"If I shouldn't inquire," he asked, "will you please tell me so, and
+forget I asked the question?  May I know when you--you and Mr.
+Wickersham are to be----"
+
+Barbara's face went slowly crimson, flushed to the nape of her neck.
+
+"It's not a certainty yet, the date," she answered kindly.  "Just late
+in the spring, I think."
+
+He nodded.  Again she knew how wholly unreadable his eyes could be.
+
+"Late in the spring," he repeated, so softly that he might have been
+talking to himself.  "Late in the spring I'll have two time limits run
+out on me."
+
+Wickersham himself was coming across the lawn to meet them when they
+drew rein at the head of the driveway.  With a deliberation so
+proprietary that it set Barbara suddenly to gnawing her lip, he unbent
+his long legs and straightened from his place on the top step of the
+veranda; and even though the wicker chairs behind him were filled he
+stood forth quite alone, extremely tall and straight, perfectly poised
+and entirely immaculate.  And without one outward sign of animosity to
+give it ground, that other man sitting loose-thighed upon Ragtime's
+back knew that he was wondering where she had been--why she had chosen
+to go alone.  Without exhibiting a trace of it upon his long face,
+Wickersham still radiated a swift and chilling jealousy which, now that
+he saw it again, Stephen O'Mara knew had never been entirely absent
+from the face of the Archibald Wickersham he had known many years
+before.  Just as Miriam Burrell, with a studied deliberation that
+matched that of the tall figure ahead of her, in turn detached herself
+from the throng and came down the steps, Barbara's eyes raised to
+Steve's.  She did not stop to reason it; she couldn't have made it
+sound reasonable had she tried, but she did not want those two to meet
+again just then--those two whose boyhood quarrel had centered about
+herself.
+
+"Won't you keep Ragtime until you come back to Uncle Cal's to-night?"
+she asked.  "I've kept you loitering for hours and hours on the way.
+But it will save you a little time."
+
+And this time Steve understood.  He nodded in reply.
+
+"Not a chance?" he asked her quietly.  "Not a chance?"
+
+She was wheeling the roan.
+
+"Not a chance," she whispered.  "Not a chance in the world!  But
+we--Mr. Elliott promised to show us the works this afternoon," she
+added in the next breath.  "Can you--do you suppose you can come?"
+
+And then, as she turned the mare and went skimming up the drive toward
+the stable, she wondered why he laughed.
+
+In his turn Steve set Ragtime's head toward the town in the valley.
+And therefore he did not see that Archibald Wickersham was left
+standing alone a moment in the middle of the lawn.  But Miriam Burrell
+saw and understood the black rage that shadowed his face.  Long before
+then she had penetrated to the layer of vanity beneath his air of
+boredom.  More than once she had used that knowledge maliciously, to
+stir him.  And she knew how unending could be his hatred for anyone who
+had ever made him appear ridiculous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
+
+Stephen O'Mara found Hardwick Elliott lunching alone in the East Coast
+Company's main Morrison office, a big unpainted shack that stood half
+lost in a maze of high-piled ties, midway between the saw-mills at the
+river edge and the first snarled network of switches converging on one
+reddish streak of steel that lanced into the north.  With moodily
+indifferent interest Elliott scarcely more than glanced up at the
+horseman's approach across the open plot of raw earth, hard-packed to a
+cement-like surface by the endless passage and repassage of countless
+hob-nailed, heavy-booted feet, but with that first glance his forehead
+began to smooth a little.  His face had lost something of its hint of
+gauntness, even before his chief engineer had swung down from the
+saddle.  Elliott had been exhibiting scant appetite for the cold food
+half buried in the pile of papers on his desk top; and though he smiled
+his characteristically courteous, mildly abstracted greeting when Steve
+loomed in the doorway, his attitude was still very patently that of a
+man who attempts to conceal his own perplexities lest they compound
+those of another whose perplexities are already more than enough.  He
+rose and held out a finely tapered hand.
+
+"Now, this is fine," he exclaimed.  "This is really fine, Mr. O'Mara.
+Rather odd, too--coincidence and that sort of thing, I mean.  Because I
+was just this instant wondering whether I had better send for you or
+wait until you just happened down river again."
+
+In many ways the president of the East Coast Company reminded Steve of
+Caleb Hunter, even though there could be no two things more in contrast
+than the latter's calm and comfortable bigness and Elliott's thin and
+wiry and extremely nervous exterior.  It was a similarity due entirely
+to the innate honesty of both men--such honesty as makes of every
+attempt at dissimulation an assured non-success.  And Miss Sarah had
+never anticipated her brother's clumsiest finesse with greater ease
+than did Steve sense, that afternoon, the weight of worry behind his
+employer's first effort at jauntiness.  He nodded, hopefully, it seemed.
+
+"Something else gone wrong?" he asked.  "Or are you going to tell me
+that McLean is still having trouble with that curve of his."
+
+Elliott, too, shook his head, but his negative nod was less brisk, less
+hopeful.
+
+"No," he replied.  "No, we've got that laid, or at least practically
+so.  It's not anything so satisfyingly material that I wanted to talk
+about.  I wish it were, because--well, the fact is, now that you are
+here it appears I may have considerable trouble in making you believe
+that I'm not merely developing a most womanish case of nerves.  Cold
+feet, I suppose, might not be far from correct, if we put it in the
+proper gender.  No, it's not the work itself.  You know the first few
+miles at this end afford pretty plain sailing.  We figured on that: or
+we wouldn't stand any chance of finishing the job.  And we are quite
+nicely ahead of our schedule, so far.  But have you--I was wondering if
+you, by any chance, have noticed any signs of discontent in your own
+squad at Thirty Mile?"
+
+Elliott eased himself back into his chair at the finish of the
+question.  Repugnantly he jerked a thumb in silent invitation toward a
+plate of sandwiches.  It indicated most clearly the state of his
+appetite--that gesture--and Steve could not help but smile a little as
+he refused.
+
+"No more than the usual disturbances," he answered.  "I have more or
+less trouble holding them--some of them--over the week-ends, of course.
+But then that's always to be expected.  They aren't the sort of men
+that go to make up the general run of construction squads.  One of my
+main reasons for wanting them was the fact that they were rivermen,
+hardened to swamping and white-water work and that kind of thing.  In a
+pinch they're good for twenty-four hours a day, over stretches that
+would take the heart out of most gangs.  I don't know of anything that
+can beat a lumber-jack on a squeeze job, once you get him to realize
+that he's up against long odds.  It's this ten-hour-a-day thing and too
+much ready money every pay-day; it's a town too temptingly close that
+makes them a--a trifle temperamental, Mr. Elliott.  Is that what you
+mean?"
+
+Elliott pondered for a moment.
+
+"That entirely duplicates what McLean said just a day or so ago."  On
+any other lips Elliott's deliberate neatness of phrase might have
+sounded solemnly funny.  "Thoroughly logical, of course,--thoroughly
+possible.  And yet, somehow it doesn't fit the case.  We've had the
+usual Monday morning vacancies, right along, as you know; but the
+delinquents always turned up before the five o'clock whistle blew, or
+at least reported Tuesday morning.  But this is the end of the week and
+we're short right this minute very close to thirty men.  They aren't
+coming back, Mr. O'Mara; on the contrary, they continue to dribble
+away, a few every day.  And though they appear to do nothing but talk
+their time away in the saloons in the lower end of the town, they seem
+to have just as much money to spend, as they did when they were getting
+their time checks from us."
+
+Steve leaned over and with nice deliberation selected a sandwich.
+
+"What sort of talking?" he wanted to know, suddenly.
+
+Again Elliott smiled in self-deprecation.
+
+"That's just it," he exclaimed.  "Their talk leads nowhere.  I went
+down and attempted to find out what their grievance might be, but they
+close up like clams whenever I come within earshot.  They stare at the
+ceiling, rub their chins, and laugh when there's nothing to laugh at.
+This morning, however, I finally convinced McLean that something was
+radically wrong.  So he took one of them who had just decided to quit
+and pinned him up against the embankment--but you know McLean and his
+methods!  He shoved his jaw up within an inch of the other's nose and
+invited him to talk, and--well, he found out enough to make him begin
+to worry, too.  Somebody's been talking to them, Mr. O'Mara; somebody
+has put the fool notion into their heads that this strip of railroad
+will mean the end of all lumber operations in this country--the
+old-time river drives, of course.  And some of them are beginning to
+believe--whoever was responsible for that statement.
+
+"You know and I know how absurd it is.  We know that this road will
+mean work for every riverman in this section, as often as he wants to
+work.  But it isn't going to help us any if they can't see it that way.
+It isn't going to replace the men who quit.  I've been deliberating one
+point.  Don't you suppose we might import a regular squad of
+construction men now, before it's too late?"
+
+"It's too late now," Steve told him, his words none the less final for
+all that they were absently quiet.  "It was too late the day we began
+operations.  And yesterday at this time I wouldn't have given much
+worry to this particular brand of trouble.  They're an odd lot; they're
+the hardest working, hardest living crowd of big men that ever failed
+entirely to grow up."  Steve stopped and looked down at the sandwich
+untouched in his hand, much as though he were surprised to find it
+there.  "But since yesterday--since yesterday--who, did you say, was
+responsible for that statement, as you call it?"
+
+"I didn't say." Elliott brushed away a persistent bluebottle fly, a
+lonesome survivor which the unseasonably warm day had reawakened.  The
+insect's droning wings as it persisted again and again back to the
+sandwich plate made the only sound in that big, bare room.  "And if
+I--if I had to guess----"  The hand passed across his eyes now.
+"O'Mara, do you know how deeply Mr. Ainnesley and myself are involved
+in this prospect?"
+
+After a long search the engineer of the East Coast Company had finally
+located his pipe.
+
+"I don't believe I have ever given it much actual thought," he said.
+"I never viewed it as any of my affair.  But I haven't forgotten the
+last time we talked the plans over, that you couldn't go into it to
+lose."
+
+Punctiliously Elliott proffered a lighted match for the other's filled
+pipe; he lighted a long and thin and very black cigar for himself.
+Steve noted then for the first time that the man's hand was shaking a
+little.
+
+"Of course," the latter answered quickly.  "Of course--of course!"  He
+seemed groping for a fresh beginning, then gave up suddenly all attempt
+at circuity and blurted it out much as though he had lived with the
+thought too long to endure it longer alone.
+
+"I'm in up to my last dollar," he stated.  "And Ainnesley--why,
+Ainnesley wouldn't have a roof over his head if we failed in our
+obligations!  You must know as well as I do why the banking interests
+took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive
+the first spike."
+
+When he failed to go on Steve understood that the last sentence had
+been a question.
+
+"Mr. Allison, I suppose."  His voice became utterly impersonal.
+"Without doubt you mean Mr. Allison?"
+
+"They would have laughed at us," the older man came back instantly.
+"And what is more, they did!  They wouldn't touch the proposition,
+until Allison came in with us.  And then--but you know what Dexter
+Allison has done already in this country.  I don't know what he started
+with.  I do know that all that Ainnesley and I had scraped up between
+us looked like a shoe-string to him.
+
+"We couldn't move until he, of his own accord, expressed his enthusiasm
+for the plan and asked for a share in the holdings.  You know, perhaps,
+how he can laugh, too.  Well, he laughed that way and confessed that we
+had just beaten him to it.  He said it would tap a gold mine--this
+'strip of steel,' as he called it.  He even told us that he'd parallel
+our road with a competitor, jokingly to be sure, if we hadn't tied up
+the only available and practicable right of way.
+
+"He came in.  He opened up, merely through his own name and all there
+is behind it, loan possibilities for which we might have struggled
+uselessly the rest of our lives without his help.  Between us Mr.
+Ainnesley and I just managed to hold the balance of stock control
+and--and that's how deep we are in, Mr. O'Mara."
+
+Both men sat and smoked, each avoiding, elaborately, the other's eyes.
+After a long pause, Elliott cleared his throat, laboriously.
+
+"This morning," he continued slowly, "this morning I am in receipt of a
+communication from Mr. Ainnesley himself, advising me that another
+right of way has been applied for, for a single track road here in the
+north.  The gossip which chanced to come his way was rather obscure.
+Little could be learned about the whole affair save that it was being
+put forward with a view to tapping the ore and timber lands all the way
+to and beyond the border.  But as nearly as he could ascertain the
+southern terminus of such a road would seem to be about--about at the
+mouth of that valley southernmost in the Reserve Company's timber
+holdings.  Rather a remarkable choice for a railroad terminus, Mr.
+O'Mara--wouldn't you say so?"
+
+Steve leaned toward him.
+
+"Do you mean that they've thrown out your earlier application for just
+such a grant?"
+
+"That would be a rather harshly definite way of putting it," Elliott
+smiled wryly.  "Ours is apparently just tabled--oh, tabled pending
+certain immaterial changes in the form!  You asked me a moment ago--or
+did I offer to guess who might be responsible for the report which is
+costing us our men?  I wonder if I need to tell you who controls this
+new northern route?"
+
+"Maybe you've been telling me," Steve came back coolly.  "You have
+already mentioned----"
+
+"Wickersham!" Hardwick Elliott corrected.  "Wickersham--that is,
+through allied interests which he represents or controls.  O'Mara, I
+doubt if I would even insinuate this to anyone else; I haven't even
+intimated it to Ainnesley as yet.  Wickersham is reputed to represent
+huge moneyed foreign interests.  But have you ever stopped to wonder
+whether he might not represent big local interests as well?"
+
+The tanned face opposite him was so gravely blank that Elliott once
+more laughed nervously, deprecatingly.
+
+"Doubt of any man's loyalty such as that query would imply is not one
+of my characteristics.  I would rather have left this thing unattempted
+than to have undertaken it in partnership with any man whom I felt I
+had to watch.  But I just thought that I'd better put it all on the
+table for you to consider.  I'd like to ask you--what do you think?"
+
+The man in blue flannel and corduroy tapped the sodden heel from his
+pipe and loaded it afresh.
+
+"Yesterday," he answered, "yesterday--Well I couldn't guarantee just
+what I might have thought, twenty-four hours back.  But doesn't one
+fact remain unchanged still, no matter what we think?  Suppose we admit
+that some one else does want this stretch of track we're laying?
+Suppose somebody is figuring on picking it up cheap, at a bankruptcy
+price, if we forfeit to the Reserve Company?  You know yourself that
+you would never have begun it simply for the profit there will be in
+moving the Reserve logs and the millions on millions of feet of lumber
+both to the east and west, which can't be touched at anything but a
+prohibitive figure, without this road.  We were going through to the
+border, too.  And if some one else is betting that we don't; if some
+one else is betting that we can't yank a trainload of logs down to this
+end of the line, before the first of May, that doesn't alter our case
+any, does it?  Even though we suspect that some man is playing us to
+lose, do we have to know exactly who he is?"
+
+Slowly but very surely the older man's face began to smooth.
+
+"Once or twice," he stated, "I've thought to anticipate you, perhaps
+because I have it on you a little, as they say, in the matter of years.
+I'm not going to attempt it any more.  For I thought that this
+conversation would be at least a surprise to you.  You sit there and
+take it very quietly, for a man who has been badly startled."
+
+"Fat Joe has been preaching it for a month."  Oddly enough, Stephen
+O'Mara chose that point at which to laugh, softly.  "And I, for a
+month, have been ridiculing him.  That's one of Fat Joe's pet
+diversions, you know.  When all other excitement fails Joe invariably
+falls back upon an imagination too totally vivid to be wasted on
+technical things.  I laughed at him, until last night.  Do you--but of
+course you know Garry Devereau?" he finished.
+
+"Knew his father," Elliott answered succinctly.  "Know him well!  Good
+blood--good brains--big hearts!  Why?"
+
+And then, for the second time that day, Steve related the salient
+points of that episode which had opened with the trio of owls along the
+trail and ended with the first gray streaks of returning day.  During
+the recital the expressions which chased across Elliot's face were as
+varied as they were full of concern.
+
+"Then I wasn't merely hysterical, was I?" he brooded after Steve had
+finished.  "Who--who did you say you thought might be behind the man
+who would have had your plans, had it not been for Mr. Devereau?"
+
+"I didn't say," replied Steve, and for the first time since his
+entrance there was mirth in the unison of their laughter.
+
+"It all brings us back to the point from which we started," the younger
+man went on when they were grave again.  "It's a plain enough issue, so
+far as we are concerned.  We've got to be at the mouth of that lower
+valley by May.  We're going to be!  And as I see it, wasting time and
+energy in--shall we call it sleuthing, Mr. Elliott?--won't help us
+much.  We thought that lack of time and the general nature of this
+country were going to be handicap enough.  But now your money is in and
+I--I never did like to be beaten.  Can't we let it stand like that, at
+least until some one else makes a plainer move?  We know the cards we
+hold.  If others care to sit in, perhaps we'll all come to a show-down,
+next spring at Thirty Mile.  It'll be easy enough to explain just how
+we did it.  Alibis based on veiled opposition wouldn't interest the
+Reserve people much, if we left their timber there to rot. . . .  And
+I'm trying not to overlook any bets, Mr. Elliott."
+
+Hastily the iron-gray man thrust his hat back from his forehead.  He
+came to his feet and crossed and clapped one hand upon Steve's shoulder.
+
+"Next May!" he barked.  "O'Mara, I'm glad you came down this morning.
+I've been carrying a lot of those ideas around in my head until they
+had become nightmarish.  But I'm through now.  You won't hear me croak
+again.  I staked what I had on you, months ago; I'd do it again this
+minute.  What's the odds, after all, who it is that's playing us to
+lose.  It's only the fact that somebody may be fighting us that needs
+to occupy our attention.  I'm done worrying, do you hear?  But what
+about those men who are quitting us?  You are sure it would be unwise
+to import labor?  It's cheaper, you know."
+
+Steve, too, had risen.
+
+"We'd have the prettiest kind of a scrap on our hands, the first day we
+tried to use them," he explained.  "It would be dear enough before we
+got through.  I guess I'd better run right out and have a talk with
+McLean.  He knows these men even better than I do, and I'm almost one
+of them, you know.  And I'll get a line on some of these delinquents
+who are crying calamity for the countryside.  I'd better, because we'll
+need them.  They simply haven't become thoroughly interested yet,
+that's all.  It will take something to jolt them; something to set them
+on fire.  And then--then just watch my plaid-shirted boys go!  They'll
+eat up your sledge-swingers!"
+
+Something of that promised fire was reflected now in Hardwick Elliott's
+eyes.
+
+"By Gad," he exclaimed, "by Gad, if it wasn't for Ainnesley I'd say the
+thing was worth it, win or lose, just for the game itself.  You go
+ahead and see McLean.  I'll be out there later, myself.  I promised
+Allison that I'd show the works to some of the young folks up there on
+the hill.  His daughter--but I keep forgetting that you've known her
+longer than I have.  There's quite a party of them.  She announced her
+engagement to Mr. Wickersham last night, I believe.  Heard that this
+morning--was too busy to go up last night myself.  Maybe you'll find
+time to help me play the host."
+
+Steve turned toward the door.
+
+"So I heard," he replied, without facing around.  "I'll try to be on
+hand."
+
+He stood for another instant on the threshold.
+
+"I'm going to ask you to see that my horse is fed and watered," he
+requested evenly.  "And I reckon you'd better eat your own lunch,
+yourself."
+
+But the man behind him had already anticipated that suggestion.
+Through a generous bite of sandwich he made answer.
+
+"I'll see that he is taken care of," he called cheerfully.  "See you
+later, Mr. O'Mara----  Pshaw, the coffee's cold!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THAT WOODS-RAT
+
+Between Dexter Allison's monopoly of his time and the persistence with
+which Miriam Burrell clung to Stephen O'Mara, Barbara Allison had
+opportunity for little more than a perfunctory word or two of greeting
+that afternoon, during the first hour or two that followed a jolting
+ride on the flat car which trundled them to the head of operations.
+Almost as soon as her feet touched the ground Miriam's eager survey
+singled out a tall figure at the edge of the farthest embankment; and
+in spite of the fact that he was at the moment in sober conversation
+with white-haired, white-bearded McLean, she crossed instantly to take
+possession of both Steve's arms and his undivided attention.  Barbara,
+at Wickersham's side, glancing now and then in their direction, knew
+well what subject was engrossing them to the exclusion of all else.
+But Allison's acceptance of that arrangement as time passed grew less
+patient.
+
+For a time he was content to stroll along with the rest--content with
+his facetious comments on Elliott's explanation of this matter or that.
+Yet whenever his eyes strayed toward Miriam and that other figure whom
+a week or two before he had designated as "my man, O'Mara," his
+jovialty faltered a little, his manner grew restive.  After a time he,
+too, detached himself and sauntered in the direction of that wholly
+preoccupied pair.
+
+"See here, my lady," he accosted the girl, who turned extremely bright
+eyes upon his approach.  "This won't do at all.  How do you suppose I
+am going to get a minute with Mr. O'Mara, here, if you persist in
+clinging to his elbow?  You'll have to run along--you run over and
+listen, with the rest, to Elliott's heroic tale of this scarring of the
+face of nature.  I've waited a good many days to talk business with Mr.
+O'Mara; I'm not going to lose him, now I've got him cornered."
+
+Had Dexter Allison been less occupied with other thoughts, the face
+which Miriam Burrell turned toward him would have surprised him, if
+only because of the unusual color burning in her cheeks.  At that he
+was vaguely aware that he had never before seen that quiet,
+self-contained girl so pulsingly happy.  She stood and gazed at him a
+moment, then made him a low and mocking obeisance.
+
+"Don't flatter yourself that I haven't noted your covetous glances,"
+she flashed.  "I've been talking very fast, because I knew this
+interruption was coming.  But we've finished, thank you, so I'll leave
+you to--to bore him now!"
+
+She turned back toward O'Mara.  "And thank you," she murmured not very
+audibly.  "Thank you, more than I ever thanked anybody before in my
+life.  You've made me very, very happy."
+
+No one could have missed the depth of real thankfulness in those last
+words.  Even Allison stood astonished at it, mouth open, following her
+rapid withdrawal toward the group fifty yards away.
+
+"Huh-h-h," he snorted.  "Huh-h-h.  A mighty strange girl!"  And then,
+as abruptly as he had interrupted their low conversation, "Well, how
+does it go, Chief?  How does it look to you, as far as you've gone?"
+
+No man's good humor could be more infectious than was that of this big,
+noisily garbed man.  Steve smiled and met his cordiality more than half
+way.
+
+"Not too bad," he answered.  "Not too bad."  He swept the ground before
+them with a short gesture.  "You aren't beginning to worry, too, are
+you?"
+
+"Worry?"  Allison's frown was barely perceptible.  "Why should I?  I
+never let anything worry me.  Who is beginning to fret?  You aren't,
+are you?  You don't look--much disturbed."
+
+"Not a particle!"  Steve still smiled.  "I never do either, unless that
+there is something worth while to make me.  I just thought perhaps you
+might have contracted it from Mr. Elliott.  He's been bothered, you
+see, by the way some of the men are acting.  We're short a lot of labor
+this week."
+
+The big man wheeled and squinted at the droves of men sweating under
+the unseasonably hot sun; he peered keenly at each clump of laborers,
+some of them scarcely distinguishable knots of humanity in the distance.
+
+"Not very short," he stated comfortably.  "I don't claim to be a wholly
+competent judge, but it looks to me as though they would be in one
+another's way if there were any more of them.  What's wrong?"
+
+The chief engineer's answer was drawling in its deliberation.
+
+"I wish I knew," he replied.  "I wish I could be positive.  And there
+aren't too many of them; they are altogether too few.  We're going to
+need them, and more, too, before we finish, Mr. Allison.  Perhaps I'd
+better figure on--perhaps if they continue to quit on us, by twos and
+threes, as they have in the last week--I'll have to----"
+
+His pause seemed almost an invitation that the other suggest a remedy;
+and whether it was or not Dexter Allison was quick to seize the
+opening.  His suggested solution was heartily bluff.
+
+"Import some more," he said.  "When you've employed these men as long
+as I have--the type of man who has worked all his life on the
+river--you'll know as well as I do just how uncertain and unreliable
+they are.  What you need is a gang that doesn't want to think for
+itself.  This crowd has too much imagination for a grind like this."
+
+Steve nodded very thoughtfully.
+
+"If it is all imagination," he wondered.  "But they're not merely
+discontented, you see, Mr. Allison.  They--they are misleading
+themselves.  They seem to think, from what I've gathered from McLean
+and a few with whom I have talked, that they are working themselves out
+of a job for good, when they help to build this strip of railroad.
+They think so--they have been convinced that such is the truth.
+Personally, however, I feel sure that between us, we can correct that
+impression."
+
+Even though he was looking in the direction of a heavy smoke-cloud that
+had followed a sharp blast to the north of them, Steve felt the weight
+of Allison's questioning glance.
+
+"We," he echoed.  "Where do I figure in it?"
+
+The younger man's upward glance was seemingly surprised.
+
+"You?  Why, you're a stockholder.  It means as much to you as it does
+to Mr. Ainnesley and Mr. Elliott."
+
+Allison interrupted him.
+
+"Of course," he exclaimed.  "Surely!  I see!  What I mean was how in
+the world can I make them understand that such a fool idea is all
+wrong?  So far as this constructive work is concerned, I'm not an
+active member.  I--I had that understood with Elliott when I went into
+this thing!"
+
+"Of course," Steve in turn broke in.  "I understand that.  But they
+know you; they know that Morrison would be nothing more than a street
+of well-kept lawns and cow-pastures, if you hadn't seen its
+possibilities.  And so I've already told some of them, Mr. Allison;
+I've gone even further, and given a lot of them my word that you'll
+guarantee, yourself, that this is the biggest thing for the good of
+this section that has yet happened."
+
+The speaker smiled frankly into the bigger man's eyes.
+
+"And that was all they needed, was it?" Allison queried, at length.
+"That fixed it, did it?"
+
+"Absolutely!"  Steve's cheeriness should have been infectious.
+"Absolutely, Mr. Allison.  A lot of people have come to look on your
+word as law in this country, you know--a lot of them!"
+
+"Hum-m-m," replied Allison.  "Hum-m-m."
+
+Both of them were quiet for a time.  Steve's next remark brought
+Allison's head up sharply.
+
+"I meant to bring some of my estimates and plans down with me, when I
+came," he told him.  "You spoke of wanting to run over the whole
+proposition with me, you'll remember, the first day you arrived."
+
+Allison nodded shortly.
+
+"I remember."
+
+"I'll bring them, next trip," Steve finished.  "I came so near to
+losing them last night that I'm taking no chances until they're in
+duplicate.  We can run over them later?"
+
+Allison wheeled and gazed meditatingly toward the group who were slowly
+moving their way.  His daughter Barbara, with Wickersham at her side,
+was in the lead.
+
+"Any time," he agreed.  "There's no particular hurry."
+
+And then a moment later, just when she was beginning to wonder whether
+he was purposely avoiding her, Barbara was surprised at the calm ease
+with which Steve took her away from her tall escort.  She had noticed
+that Wickersham and Steve had not touched hands when they first met, an
+hour or two before, nor even hinted at such a salute.  But now, as
+earlier in the day when her dash toward the stables had left him
+standing rigid in the middle of the lawn, she failed to see the
+expression that settled upon Wickersham's long face.  It was Dexter
+Allison this time who noticed it, and hours later, when he and
+Wickersham sat and faced each other in the downstairs room in the house
+on the hill, which served as Allison's office, he remembered and
+recognized it.
+
+"You wanted to talk with me?" Wickersham inquired as he entered the
+room that evening.
+
+Somehow Wickersham's unending politeness had always irritated Allison.
+That night his smoothly infectionless question nettled him.
+
+"Your damned fool, Harrigan, bungled last night!" he blurted out.  "He
+messed things up, beautifully.  He not only failed, but he failed to
+get away without being seen.  That's what comes of entrusting a job
+like that to a drunken sot."
+
+Wickersham seated himself--sat and caressed a cigarette.  Coolly he
+waited and blinked his eyelids.
+
+"My man?" he murmured.  "My man?"
+
+"Ours then," Allison corrected sharply.  "Ours."  Then he seemed to
+recollect himself and his voice became less abrupt.  "Listen.  This
+afternoon I had a talk with O'Mara.  That is, I started to have a talk
+with him, but--but he beat me to it.  And in just about three minutes
+he told me that he'd caught Harrigan on the job--not mentioning any
+names, I don't mean--but he didn't need to, And he told me more than
+that.  He as good as gave me to understand that he'd know where to
+place the blame, if there was any more interference with his men."
+
+Wickersham crossed a long leg and blew a thin blue streamer of smoke.
+
+"Yes?" he intoned bodilessly.
+
+It brought a blaze to Allison's eyes--that nerveless monosyllable.
+
+"That doesn't interest you, eh?" he snapped.  "Doesn't interest you at
+all!  Well, it does me.  Three months ago I bought into this affair
+because I was as sure as any man could be that I'd collect a hundred
+per cent on my money, next spring.  Elliott and Ainnesley?  Pah!--Nice
+gentle old ladies, when it comes to a game like this.  They're
+anachronists; they are honest business men, twenty years behind the
+times.  You've heard of taking candy from children.  Well, that's what
+it looked like then.  But it doesn't look that way any longer.  Talk
+with you?  Yes, I did want to talk.  I wanted to tell you that if you'd
+like to switch I'm willing, right now.  I wanted to tell you that if
+you'd rather be a good little boy and get into line, I'm willing and
+more than willing.  Because I can promise you, since I talked it over
+with O'Mara this afternoon, that we haven't any nice, dead-sure thing
+on our hands any longer.
+
+"Oh, you can sit there and smile your cold-blooded smile!  And if you
+think I'm experiencing pangs of conscience you're mistaken.  All I
+have, I got from other men who--who weren't strong enough to hang on to
+it.  There isn't any friendship in business--or if there is I never
+played it that way.  I'm just telling you that now is our one
+opportunity, if we want to join hands and hurrah with the rest of them
+for the completion of this job by next May.  We lose a railroad at a
+bargain, perhaps, but we've still got a mighty good right-of-way to the
+border, that will insure our welcome in the ranks.  Maybe we lose
+and--and maybe--well, I never did like to be beaten!  Nor do I say that
+such an argument will have any weight with you, but it's a chance to be
+on the dead level, for once.  What do you say?  Do we switch?"
+
+Then Allison remembered the expression which had flitted over
+Wickersham's face when Stephen O'Mara coolly appropriated Barbara.  But
+that expression had been a totally gentle thing beside the pale fury
+which now slowly overspread his features.  Wickersham twisted the
+cigarette to fragments--flung them from him, and the very gesture was
+vicious.
+
+"Switch," he snarled.  And he leaned forward, face bloodless, and beat
+upon a chair arm.  "Switch now!"  He laughed shrilly.  "Why, I'm going
+to beat that damned woods-rat in his matinée-idol costume so bad
+between now and next May that he'll be walking the roads for his next
+job.  Switch?  I'm going to brand him as the worst incompetent that
+ever dragged two poor fools down into pauperism.  I'll see him broke.
+I'll wipe that damned smooth smile from his lips, by God, if I have
+to----"
+
+Wickersham gasped; he came to his feet panting all in an instant with
+the rage that set his dry lips writhing.  But at that point he, too,
+remembered himself.  He swallowed and faced Allison, and the latter,
+sitting pop-eyed before his outbreak, gaped now at the change that came
+back over that twisted face.  Wickersham smiled.  Once more his bearing
+was the very essence of perfect poise and self-control.
+
+"If you--if you are afraid----" he inferred.  "If you----"
+
+Allison's laugh was big and booming, for all that the astonishment had
+not yet left his eyes.
+
+"Cold feet," he rumbled.  "Cold feet!  Me!"  And suddenly his gust of
+mirthless laughter made petty the other's insolence.  "Wickersham, I've
+broken better crooks than you'll ever be.  A man has to have a big
+heart to be a big crook and you--and you--well, sometimes I wonder
+whether there wasn't some sort of an oversight in that line, when they
+put you together."
+
+He couldn't have explained why the thought came to him at that moment
+any more than he understood his swiftly malicious impulse to use it;
+but all in a flash there came back to him a recollection of that day
+when he and Caleb had burst through the hedge to find the boy, Stephen
+O'Mara, pummeling a bigger prostrate boy who shrieked under the earnest
+thoroughness of that pummeling.  Allison, too, rose to his feet.
+
+"I only wanted to give you a chance," he stated dryly.  "I reckon I can
+take care of myself.  I always could.  And you--well, you know as well
+as I do what sort of a scrap that--that woods-rat can put up, or you
+ought to.  He gave you a sort of a demonstration, once, if I remember
+correctly.  I stick!  I never was overly squeamish.  But don't fool
+yourself, Archie, don't fool yourself.  If we light, we're fighting
+with a regular guy, your insinuation to the contrary.  I merely wanted
+you to realize what I know now.  We'll think we've been in a battle
+before we come to a finish!"
+
+His hand was on the door knob when the door itself flashed open.
+Dexter Allison's daughter hesitated, surprised, on the threshold.  Her
+eyes, brilliantly alight, leaped from her father's face to that of the
+man half toward her and back again.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed uncertainly, "I didn't know you were busy.  I saw
+the light.  I'd been over to Uncle Cal's, just for a minute.  I wanted
+to tell you--good night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THIS LITERARY THING
+
+It was dark, the night of that second day, when Stephen O'Mara came
+quietly up to the open door of his own lighted shack and stopped for a
+moment to gaze in at the two men whose faces were touched by the glow
+of the lamp on the table.  There had been more than one moment in those
+forty-eight hours which had elapsed since he had lifted that
+black-robed, inert figure from the floor in which Steve had wondered
+whether Garry Devereau would even await his return to Thirty-Mile; more
+than once he had smiled whimsically to himself, during the trip back
+up-river, over the scene which he was certain would meet his eyes, had
+Garry chosen to wait.
+
+But there were no poker chips in front of Fat Joe that night.  Round
+face propped upon one hand, the latter was staring motionless at a
+thick pad of yellow paper flat before his eyes.  And Garry himself was
+sitting with his back toward the light, staring as motionlessly into
+the cold fireplace.  Merely from their attitudes, Steve knew that they
+had been a long time silent; he knew that Fat Joe would have been
+making conversation, no matter how desperately footless it might have
+been, had he been conscious of the quality of the other's moody quiet.
+And then, as he was himself about to go forward, barely in time to
+check the word of greeting on his lips, Joe lifted pensive eyes to the
+other's back.  When Joe spoke his words were none too plain; he was
+gnawing a pencil tip in most evident perplexity.
+
+"Say," he broke that heavy silence, "say, Garry, how do you spell
+reconciliation?"
+
+Immediately the man outside in the dark decided not to announce himself
+just yet.  And much of his own puzzlement was mirrored in the worn face
+which Garry turned toward his questioner.
+
+"Reconciliation?" Garry repeated blankly.  "What in thunder----"
+
+"Of course I'd ought to be able to handle it," Joe cut in blandly
+apologetic.  "I just dismember whether it goes with a 'c' or a 'k.'"
+
+Garry tried not to grin; but outside in the dark Steve allowed his
+appreciation to spread and spread across his face.
+
+"With a 'c,'" the man before the fireplace told him soberly.  "Are
+you--what are you doing, Joe, making out reports?"
+
+With much care Joe transcribed it upon the virgin sheet before him;
+with a painful precision that brought the tip of his tongue beyond one
+corner of his lips, he rounded out the letters to his complete
+satisfaction.
+
+"No," his answer was mumbled in his abstraction.  "No, I ain't writing
+a report.  I'm--I'm just beginning my novel."
+
+Steve heard Garry gasp; he saw a gleam of pleased anticipation flash
+into his eyes, and knew instantly at what degree of friendship those
+two had already arrived.
+
+"Will you--will you please say that again, Joe?" Garry begged him, very
+earnestly.  "I wasn't paying attention.  I'm afraid I was thinking of
+something else too hard to hear you correctly."
+
+Joe's smile as he looked up had in it all of that quality which at
+times made it almost seraphic.  His answer seemed irrelevant at first.
+
+"I wonder if you know that Cecile person who works down to that big
+plaster house at Morrison--Allison's place on the hill?" he inquired.
+
+"Dexter Allison's?"  Garry thought a moment.  "Why, you must mean Miss
+Allison's little French maid, don't you, Joe?  Yes, I know who she is,
+if she's the one.  But what has she to do with it?"
+
+Joe laid down his pencil and set himself to be frankly explanatory.
+
+"Well, it's like this," he stated.  "She and I, now--we've got more or
+less acquainted in the last week or two, so to speak.  And that ain't
+bad progress when you figure out that she can't understand more'n a
+dozen or two of all the words I speak to her, and as for me--well, when
+she gets to talking back it just makes me dizzy, that's all.  But we're
+pretty good friends, when you consider that handicap.  The thing that
+really bothers me is that the only folks she seemed to have been real
+neighborly with, back in Paree--that's the way you say it, ain't
+it?--was mostly sculptors and painters and writers, and such lot.  So
+that would let me out of the running, right at the start, you see.
+
+"I figured I didn't class at all, at first, because about the best
+thing I can say for myself is that there ain't a man on the river who
+ever rode white water better.  I'm mostly a lumber jack, coming or
+going, whichever way you take me, although I've punched cattle and
+placer mined for variety.  But to-night--to-night since you been
+setting there quiet--I got to thinking, too.  She's a real nice girl.
+We get along fine together.  And I kind of think we would, anyhow, even
+if we could understand each other better.  I got to thinking to-night
+that maybe I'd better not quit cold, just yet.  Now--I can't sculp, and
+somehow I never was strong for them guys who sit straddle of a little
+chair and paint cows and posies and things on a strip of muslin hooked
+over a frame.  But, say, I've seen lots of writers who didn't look a
+whole lot more intelligent than me!  I--I just got to thinking,
+to-night, that I'd take a fall out of this literary thing!"
+
+Steve always held it to his friend's credit that he did not laugh.
+Indeed, Garry's soberness at that moment was almost woebegone.
+
+"I see, Joe," he answered.  "Not a bad idea.  May I ask what your
+story--your novel is to deal with?"
+
+"Deal with?  What do you mean?"
+
+"Why, they always deal with some problem, Joe," Garry squared around.
+"They always attack the rottenness of the rich, or sob over the
+rottenness of the poor.  They always expound the crime of divorce, or
+attack the error of matrimony.  Now which of----"
+
+"Then I ain't dealing with nothing," stated Joe.  "What I'm figurin' on
+doing is a regular love story.  I thought maybe I'd have a nice young
+chap who--who's building a railroad or something, fall in love with a
+real nice girl who's the daughter of a fat man who's a crook.  I mean
+the fat man's the crook, not the daughter.  And--and----"
+
+"And then what?" asked Garry Devereau.
+
+Fat Joe, unlike the man outside, did not notice that a new note,
+dangerously hard and wickedly edged with ridicule, had replaced the
+amusement in Garry's voice.  He grew a little more enthusiastic.
+
+"Well, that's as far as I've got, right up to now," he admitted with an
+explosive sigh.  "But it looks like a good enough beginning, at that.
+All I got to do now is run 'em through three or four hundred pages,
+with him a-talkin' to her and her a-talkin' at him.  All I got to do,
+accordin' to all the books I've ever read, is see that it don't all
+come too easy for him, and still turns out all right.  I expect I'll
+run 'em into a clinch with another guy standin' around eatin' his heart
+out with jealousy.  It'll serve him right; he's just that mean sort,
+you know.  Oh, I'll just marry 'em, along toward the end of the last
+chapter, and that'll kind of close it up."
+
+Stephen O'Mara had been watching Joe's face while the latter talked,
+and therefore he was no more prepared than was Joe himself for the
+burst of harsh laughter that came from Garry's lips.  It seemed utterly
+illogical that all actual humor should so swiftly fade from that
+situation with the first really audible expression of mirth.  Steve
+himself believed it was only simulated, until his eyes swung to Garry's
+face.  But he knew then what thoughts had been with Garret Devereau,
+all evening, before he had come up unheard to the door.
+
+"Why, you poor simple scholar of nature!"  The wan-faced one's lips
+curled.  "You're years behind your day!  If you submitted such a screed
+to a publisher now, he'd think you'd written a history of archaic
+American types."
+
+He stopped to sneer.
+
+"Listen," he went on.  "Listen, and I'll give you a plot, gratis,
+which, if you handle it right, will make you, overnight!  Take your
+girl--a nice girl, to be sure, sweet and unsophisticated and--and
+childishly innocent, Joe, and--and well, you'll have to describe her,
+first, won't you?  Let's dress her up, then--dress her up in an evening
+confection that leaves little to the imagination in front and--and
+ground for amazement in back.  That's a fair starter.  If you care to
+be analytical you can insist that the reason she dresses like that
+is--oh, just because she's so innocent that she doesn't know any
+better, eh!
+
+"All right!  That establishes her very well.  And then we can do just
+what you planned to do with your dear lady.  We'll run her through
+three or four hundred pages, but with just a trifling change or two.
+Every chapter or so I'd leave her, Joe, in a situation that ends with a
+gasp--no pause even for a caramel!  Three or four hundred pages, and
+then, if you have to marry her off why, let's be honest about it--no?
+Marry her off to the sort of a chap whom you'd man-handle to a pulp,
+Joe, if he came near--say a sister of yours.  A nice, white-skinned,
+red-lipped, sweet, innocent sort of a little girl, Joe--and--and that
+finish will keep her true to type!"
+
+At the beginning Fat Joe had been all eager attention.  His face became
+heavy with amazement long before Garry's hard voice was still.
+
+"But--but that ain't the kind of a yarn I'm figurin' on," he argued,
+his high voice faint but dogged.  "This ain't going to be any of that
+tabasco stuff.  Nope, I like it better the way I've got it planned.
+It--it leaves a better taste in your mouth, too."
+
+Again Garry laughed, to himself it seemed, this time.
+
+"Have your own way," he muttered.  "But if you're going to stick to it
+you'd better label it a romance!  Because there's only one kind of a
+woman, Joe, in reality.  Just the kind who's killed what used to be a
+demand for decent men."
+
+And then, outside in the dark, Stephen O'Mara forgot how sick the other
+man had been.  He was across the threshold in a single stride, and Fat
+Joe came lightly to his feet as he saw his chief's set face that night.
+It wiped, the smile from Garry's lips, too.  Squarely in front of the
+latter Steve halted and spoke with monotonous lack of haste.
+
+"You're going to tell me that you didn't mean that, Garry," he said
+quietly.  "For I'm going to marry one of those women myself."
+
+Garret Devereau's face had been white.  It went whiter now.  He too
+came squarely to his feet, his body stiff but very frail in the
+oversize garments from Steve's wardrobe which he was wearing.  He stood
+and stared emptily into his friend's eyes until something close akin to
+dreary defiance rose and marked his numbed comprehension.
+
+"What I said," he answered as quietly, "I'd alter for no man.  My
+opinions are my own."
+
+He turned and passed outside.
+
+For longer than he realized Steve stood gazing down into the burnt-out
+fireplace, until another thought, swifter even than the impulse that
+had lifted him across the threshold and thrust him into speech which,
+already, he would have given much to recall, whirled him around again.
+There was a light in the near end of the storehouse building just above
+his own cabin, and as he hurried toward it he knew Fat Joe must have
+fitted it up for the third man's quarters.  He knocked at the door, and
+when there came no response, unbidden he lifted the latch and entered.
+
+Garry was sitting on the edge of his blanketed bunk--sitting with
+shoulders slumped forward and head bowed low.  He did not look up, for
+he had not heard Steve's entrance.  He was pondering over the cylinder
+of a heavy, blued revolver, spinning beneath his transparent fingers.
+But Steve's first inarticulate effort at speech brought his head
+around.  Garry smiled up at him--a smile reminiscent of his rare smile
+of years before.
+
+"I didn't mean anything, Steve," he said in a hushed voice.  "I'm
+damned sorry I spoke as I did.  You see--you see, I just didn't know it
+would hit you, that's all."
+
+Again Steve swallowed.  Dumbly he pointed at the gun.
+
+"What are you doing with that?" he demanded hoarsely.
+
+Garry's eyes dropped.  He stared at the revolver in his hand in mild
+perplexity, much as though he, too, were surprised to find it there.
+
+"Why, nothing--nothing.  I often take a notion to--to look at it like
+this."
+
+Then his face went crimson.
+
+"You've heard the news, I see."  He tried to hide the bitterness behind
+the words, but one lip corner twitched and quivered.  "They posted you
+in advance, did they?  But you did not believe I was as bad as that,
+did you?  You didn't think, did you, Steve, that I--I'd go out leaving
+you to blame yourself even a little bit?"
+
+His question was curiously wistful--wistful and as unsteady as the hand
+which now proffered that blunt-barreled, huge-bore gun.
+
+"Here, you take it, if--if you'll sleep the sounder.  And don't you
+worry over me.  I'll see you in the morning, Steve."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A GIRL LIKE HER
+
+Save for a short and casual "see you in the morning, Garry," Stephen
+O'Mara turned without a word that night and left the improvised
+sleeping-quarters in the storehouse shack.  It was a man's
+leave-taking, short to abruptness, so badly stereotyped that it denied
+utterly any consciousness of threatened, reckless tragedy and cordially
+intimate only because in all man-to-man speech there is less and less
+of actual sincerity in a multiplicity of words.  But he might have
+talked till daylight and still have failed to register the binding
+acceptance of Garry's promise, which his silence, unaided, achieved.
+
+Soundlessly, unemotionally, Steve closed the door on that figure on the
+bunk edge which, suddenly slack of limb and shoulder, had averted its
+face.  But then, there in the darkness, with the gun swinging heavily
+between loose fingers, he hesitated in his very first step back from
+the threshold.  And twice, head bowed in indecision, he halted in his
+slow progress from that door to the lighted one of his own cabin which
+framed Fat Joe's immobile form--halted each time as though he would
+return--and each time went slowly forward again.  Fat Joe's eyes barely
+flitted over Steve's face that night; they clung in a fixed, pale blue
+stare of fear to the weapon in his hand.  And long after Steve had
+drawn up a chair next the one which Garry had vacated and fallen to
+filling his pipe, he stood, shifting from foot to foot in awkward,
+uncomfortable silence.  He crossed after a time and slipped into the
+empty seat.  His tongue was as haltingly guilty as his face was pink
+with shame when he began to speak.
+
+"Steve," he stammered, "Say, Steve, I--I didn't know I was going to
+start anything like that when I begun talking my ideas of art and
+literature and such like.  I didn't see where it was leading us to--not
+for a minute.  Why, Steve, every blessed hour of the days and nights
+since you've been away, I've been dodgin' every topic of conversation I
+thought might hit him hard.  I'm just several assorted kinds of
+fool--and you followed him that quick and quiet!"  The apology was
+tinged with pride.  "I just didn't think----  But ain't he got a poor
+opinion of women folks, though?  Was it--a close decision?"
+
+Steve shook his head; he smiled and the returning surety in his face
+did much to clear Joe's features.
+
+"No," Steve answered, "not very.  Somehow I know already that I needn't
+have followed at all, so far as that contingency was concerned.  And it
+was my fault, Joe, not yours.  I should have told you exactly how such
+things stood in Garry's mind--would have, if I had had the time.  His
+opinion of women isn't very high.  And it's odd, too, isn't it, that
+both the very highest and very lowest of such opinions are always held
+by men who base them upon what they have been taught by one woman
+alone.  Tell me, Joe, what's happened?  How have you and Garry hit it
+off, since I went down river? . . .  Trouble?"
+
+The fat man's eager denial was still self-consciously defensive.
+
+"Not a bit!" he stated.  "Not one little wrangle, even.  Of course I
+was expectin' it.  I've watched 'em come around too many times not to
+know how they can cuss a man cold one minute, and then make him plumb
+ashamed of mankind in general, with beggin' and pleadin'.  I just beat
+him to it the morning he woke up; I told him what he could have, and
+what he couldn't, and he took it calmly enough.  He just set there,
+pretty blue and shaky, and not quite clear in his head, and smiled that
+slow grin of his that's hardly any smile at all.
+
+"I don't mean that he didn't swear!  O my--O my!  It's nice, ain't
+it, to have the gift of ease and eloquence in speech?  He made me
+feel sort of amateurish and inadequate--me!  But he didn't beg.
+Not--one--peep--out--of--him!  He told me what he thought of me just as
+polite and cool as could be and let it go at that.  He said he guessed
+I was boss, for a while at least, and asked for chopped fine!"  Fat Joe
+hesitated.  His color grew higher again.  "After what's just happened,"
+he added, "I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but--but ain't this friend
+of yours one of them chaps they call 'thoroughbreds' in novels?"
+
+Steve flashed a glance at that earnest face.  For a moment he had
+forgotten the first glimpse he had caught of Joe that evening, bent
+double over the block of yellow paper--a glimpse which still seemed
+funny and yet not very funny either.
+
+"He comes of a very old family," he replied.  "Old as they are reckoned
+in this country."  And his answer held a question.
+
+Joe shook his head.
+
+"That ain't quite what I mean.  I've seen lots of the younger sons of
+them old families.  I've run into them in Yokohoma and Buenos Ayres;
+I've met up with them along the Yukon and down on the Mexican border.
+They're scattered all around, out through the Panhandle, ridin' calico
+ponies, with jingly spurs and more than a bushel of doo-dads on the
+saddle.  They all come from old families, and I suppose after all it
+was a blessing that they had that much in their favor.  Because if most
+of them hadn't had a family tree to lean up against at times, they
+never could have kept their feet at all."
+
+"No, that wasn't what I meant, Steve.  I figured he was kind of a
+regular chap--the hero guy that's too hot proud to bat an eye, you
+know, even when he's--well, I just can't get it straight in words, but
+this is what I'm driving at.  The first night after you had gone he was
+settin' right here where I'm settin' now, looking quiet into the fire.
+I didn't ask him what was on his mind, not because I've learned not to
+go trackin' across other men's mental preserves, but simply because I
+didn't even have to guess more than once.  He's a nice lookin' boy,
+ain't he?  Sort of fine cut and tight built, and clean and decent
+looking.  I'd been thinkin' of that, too; thinkin' he didn't look like
+the others I've seen drop off so sudden it left me gasping.  Nor like
+them who went over so screamin' mad it left my palms wet and clammy
+from hangin' on to myself while they were going.  He looked different,
+settin' here and staring into the fire, and hell burning inside him,
+and saying nothing.  I sort of got to figurin' over him about
+then--sort of begun to wonder, even before I hunted up a deck of cards.
+
+"Oh, you can smile if you want to, but you'll have to admit, just the
+same, that it's helped you stay sane once or twice yourself, figurin'
+whether or not I had an ace in the hole.  Lonesomeness like what we've
+both seen ain't so very different from what he was fightin' at that
+very moment--not if the thing you're lonesome for and the thing you're
+thirsty for are things you know you can't have.
+
+"I invited him to set in for a bit of intellectual pastime; I had to
+invite him twice, but he smiled then and agreed just as though he was
+glad to.  And then, careless and off-hand, I asked him would he care to
+name the stakes.
+
+"He waited quite a while before he answered me.  You know how quiet it
+can be here in the timber, Steve, when it starts out to be quiet.
+Well, I could just feel the silence right here in this room.  And then
+he laughed!  It wasn't hardly any sound at all he made, and yet it
+might have been a blast, it hit me that sudden.  I don't like that kind
+of laughter.
+
+"'Stakes?' he says after me, just as precise as could be.  'Why,
+surely!  I should be happy to back my play, but I'm afraid that my
+present supply of cash would hardly stand a very heavy drain.'
+
+"He didn't have to explain even that much.  Right along I'd been
+certain enough that he didn't have a copper with him.  I'd put his
+watch away where he couldn't find it and--and maybe swap it with one of
+the hands for a half a pint.  But I let on to be thinkin' for a while,
+until I brightened up as if the idea just hit me.
+
+"It wasn't exactly fair, I'll admit.  It wasn't what either of us would
+call a straight play, but--but--oh, I'd been watching him, just as I've
+told you.  I knew he would about pay his soul for the drink that was
+due him in fifteen or twenty minutes; he was eyein' the bottle on the
+shelf right that minute.  But I'd never seen a man's face give the lie
+to his spirit, either, the way his did, if he was the kind that would
+quit cold.
+
+"'Cash ain't no consideration with me,' I told him, generous enough.
+'But, personally, I've reached that degree of excellence where I can't
+play the game just for the sake of the technique of it any more.  It's
+a quarter to nine,' says I, 'and in just fifteen minutes you get your
+gill of Three Star.  Now, how much--how much, figurin' on the present
+state of supply and demand--would you reckon that drink appeals to you,
+in dollars and cents, U. S. A.?"
+
+"Steve, you know he wasn't too steady.  His hands were shaking--oh,
+you've seen 'em, too.  But there he sits and looks back across the
+table at me, monkeyin' with a stack of chips, and giving me smile for
+smile.
+
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink,' he murmured, 'I wouldn't sell it
+for . . . well'--and he licked his lips that were dry as leather.
+
+"That was enough!  I knew as well as he did how much he wanted it, but
+I was kind of disappointed, too.  I'd been hopin'--I thought
+maybe--Say, don't you just naturally hate to have your judgment of
+human nature miss the whole blamed target, just when you think you've
+scored a bulls-eye?  I do.  It hurts my self-confidence; makes me
+wonder if I ain't growin' careless of details.  And then, right there,
+I found out how close I'd come, and shootin' off-hand at that, mind
+you!  Right there he gave me my next lesson.  The nice, gentle way he
+cussed me out, that morning, was the first.  Maybe he'd read the
+disappointment in my face, because he laughed again, not quite so
+sudden this time.
+
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink for any price,' he repeats.  'But when it
+resolves itself to a gamble, I suppose, Joe, no gentleman should refuse
+the issue.  If I understand you correctly, if cash is no consideration,
+then suppose we say that one drink against the rest of the bottle, chip
+for chip and stack for stack.  Your confidence is not entirely
+reassuring to me, and yet perhaps I should tell you beforehand that
+I've always thought I could play this game half way well myself.'"
+
+Fat Joe rose and crossed to the table for a match.
+
+"Now wasn't that meeting me half way?" he continued, when he was seated
+again.  "Wasn't it neatly done?  Why, for a moment I was most ashamed
+to go through with it.  I wouldn't have, only he sat there, smilin' so
+easy and confident.  But we played.  We played until daylight came
+around.  And accordin' to the way he scored it, just before we went
+down to the works in the morning, he didn't have a drink comin' to him
+for the next forty-eight hours!  I play a real involved and scientific
+game, Steve--but that ain't what I'm drivin' at.  When we'd got
+done--when we'd finished--I tried to make him take the glass that had
+been comin' to him at nine.  And he needed it, don't doubt that.  He
+needed it and could have had it, for I made it just as easy as anybody
+could. . . .  Steve, he ain't had a drink since that first night.  That
+was what I meant when I spoke about him being what they call a
+thoroughbred."
+
+They sat for a time in silence after Joe had finished.
+
+"Pride!" Stephen O'Mara exploded softly.  "Pride!  And Garry thinks his
+is dead; he thinks he has killed it himself.  But it was there on his
+face to-night, too, laughing up at me, Joe, just as it did at
+you--laughing at me, all amused at itself, out of that crooked smile of
+his.  And it'll never die.  It'll live as long as he does!"
+
+He looked down at the gun on his knee.
+
+"That's all, Joe?"
+
+Fat Joe cleared his throat.
+
+"I--I gave him a job the next morning," lamely.  "We seemed to be
+getting along together fine so I----  Shucks, I was just afraid to have
+him go!  That's the flat truth of it.  And you told me to keep him, if
+I could.  So I set him to checking up the stock in the storeroom and
+put him on keepin' time for the squad up here.  He's drawin' eighteen a
+week, Steve.  Was that all right?  You were figurin' on keeping him
+here?"
+
+And then Joe Morgan saw Steve's eyes light up.  He saw a swift
+something flash out from within, which, once or twice before in the
+years of their friendship, had set his face to burning.
+
+"Joe," Steve exclaimed, "you're right about that matter of family
+trees.  I know a man right now who doesn't have to go back one minute
+in his pedigree to prove that he's a gentleman.  I've left some tough
+propositions for you to solve, Joe.  Lots of times, when I couldn't see
+the way out, I've put it up to you.  If I merely say 'thanks, Joe,' and
+let it go at that, do you think it will do?"
+
+"Suits me!" Joe's jauntiness was large.  "And it goes double on the
+rebound.  But how--how do you suppose any woman ever came to set a--boy
+like that to slipping?  Or why didn't he sit down where it was quiet
+and figure it all out for himself?  One bad guess don't make the whole
+world wrong.  And say, wouldn't it be lucky, though, if he could meet a
+real nice girl about now?"
+
+Steve leaned back and gave way to rare and subdued laughter.  It was
+much as though he did not want the sound to penetrate to that dark end
+room in the shack beyond.  And then he was quickly sober-faced again.
+
+"I think he is going to, Joe.  I think I may promise that he is likely
+to, very, very soon.  And it will make a difference--a mighty big
+difference for Garry.  For, if you don't mind my mentioning the matter
+again, in spite of the preachments of many of your novelists to the
+contrary, it's just about as Garry has argued it to be.  Most men are
+just as fine--just as decent--as women demand they shall be."
+
+He lifted the revolver and tossed it negligently across the room.  It
+struck with a thud in the middle of his own bunk.
+
+"Where did he get that six-shooter?  It looks like one of yours?"
+
+"It is," said Joe.  "Nothing gaudy nor ornamental, but a right handy
+thing.  And, there!  That's another error I made, ain't it?  I reckon
+it's going to be difficult for me to get used to the idea of any man
+being a dangerous enemy to himself.  I gave it to him the first day he
+went to work."
+
+Joe's eyes traveled across to the object under discussion.
+
+"Harrigan came back before you did," his explanation seemed to veer to
+another quarter.  "He was most punctual, I'd say, wouldn't you?  He
+came in tuned up real melodious on the last load with Big Louie.  He
+sung big-voiced that night; he's been talkin' big-voiced since, I'm led
+to understand."  Again that mental shift.  "Gun-play always did seem
+awful foolish to me--to talk about!  When men start to advertisin'
+trouble to come, by word o' mouth, it never does worry me particularly.
+I just gave your friend the gun to keep around handy, if he should
+happen to need it.  Did you know he could make the ace of spades look
+shopworn and weary at thirty paces with one of those toys?  Well, he
+can."
+
+Steve smiled.
+
+"You're not totin' one of them yourself, yet, I see?" he remarked
+lazily.
+
+Fat Joe spat in vast contempt.  He clenched one pudgy hand and sat
+watching the knuckles pale, iron-hard, beneath the seeming softness.
+
+"Are you?" he countered.
+
+This time Steve's laughter was soundless.
+
+"Scarcely!  We're going to hear some of them yap lots louder than they
+do now, before the winter is over.  But you might give that one back to
+Garry in the morning.  And, as for the rest of it, I suppose we'll be
+quite likely to forget, won't we, Joe, that either of us has so much as
+seen or thought of a gun to-night?"
+
+Both of them had risen.  Joe puckered his lips.
+
+"Forget it?  How can we," he demanded, "when we don't even know
+anything to forget!  Why, as I reckon it, we'll both get up in the
+morning and regard it as a dream just too foolish even to bother to
+relate."
+
+Their eyes held for a moment, before Steve turned again toward the
+door.  And perhaps his manner was a little too unconcerned that
+evening, a little too carefully careless, for almost before he had
+lifted the latch Fat Joe stepped forward, one quick, protesting step,
+and then stopped on second thought.
+
+"You ain't goin'----" he began, and suffered that spoken protest also
+to remain uncompleted.
+
+"It's not late," Steve's voice was thoughtful.  "It's not late, but
+it's surely very quiet."  He stood gazing out into the gloom.  "Maybe
+I'd best run down and see what ails our soloist to-night.  Somehow, the
+more I've thought about it, the more I've come to fear that he is
+temperamental, Joe--too temperamental, for such a wearing proposition
+as this one is likely to be.  And you haven't slept much since I've
+been gone.  Oh, that was easy, just from your eyes!  So you'd better
+turn in.  I'll just stroll down and let them know that I'm back home."
+
+It is odd how much of finality there can be in the quietest of
+statements.  Eyes narrowed, Joe stood in the middle of the floor and
+watched him depart without further objection.  But the moment the
+blackness had swallowed him up he backed to the bunk, fumbled for the
+gun which Steve had tossed upon the blankets, and followed out into the
+dark.
+
+Stephen O'Mara stood a long time outside the door of the men's
+bunkhouse that night, fingers upon the latch, before he made any move
+to enter.  But neither a wish to eavesdrop nor a desire to frame,
+experimentally, the words he meant to speak was the reason behind that
+pause.  It was in itself a new thing to find the long, low building
+lighted at that hour, even though, as he had himself put it to Joe an
+instant before, it was hours from being late.  That night the almost
+absolute silence beyond the closed door was an even more unusual state
+of affairs.  The voice of one man only was audible; the words he spoke
+indistinguishable altogether.  But sudden bursts of laughter,
+punctuating the recital which he could not clearly follow, were
+indication enough to the man outside of what manner of tale was holding
+the ears of that roomful of rivermen.  Stephen O'Mara, who had long
+ceased to wonder at the discovery in them, of new and impulsive
+finenesses which bordered close upon inherent nobility, knew fully as
+well how utterly and unspeakably gross could be the premeditated
+coarseness of those same men.
+
+There was no movement to mark his entrance when he finally pressed the
+latch and swung the door open; not so much as a single glance to
+indicate that his presence was noted.  Under the yellow light of
+flickering oil lamps the eyes of all those scores of gaudy-shirted
+figures lounging against the walls were fixed eagerly upon the face of
+him who held the middle of their stage--him who talked from where he
+half-lay, propped on one elbow, in his bunk at the end of the room.
+Harrigan, red-shirted, red-headed, was lounging at case, waiting for
+the last gurgle of appreciation to subside, before he gave them the
+close of the story--the last titbit, the savor of which already had set
+him noisily to licking his lips.  And in the doorway Steve, rigid of a
+sudden, sensed what that climax was to be.
+
+"--Her fi-an-say inside," the droningly indistinguishable words were
+very plain now, "her fi-an-say inside, consoomed with pr-ride and
+anticipation, tellin' all who had come to dance that she had pr-romised
+to be his, for-river more!  And her, at that same minute outside with
+him--and both av thim. . . ."
+
+Harrigan did not hurry it in the telling.  And if his portrayal of
+Archibald Wickersham was unmistakably deliberate, neither did he fail
+for want of sufficient detail, to make the other picture clear.  Vilely
+he gave them the complete imagery of his vile brain.
+
+A shout went up, a louder, hoarser outcry of applause which rocked the
+room.  And then that rigid figure in the doorway had started forward.
+Between those lanes of suddenly silent men Steve passed in silence, to
+stand before him who had achieved his climax a breath before.  And at
+his coming Harrigan slid from the bunk, started to reach within the
+blanket pack at the head of what had been his bed, and then thought
+better of such impulse.  Bravado intermingled with blank surprise, he
+came haltingly to his feet.  The voices of few men have been as
+unhurriedly deadly as was that of him who Harrigan that night.
+
+"That was wise, Harrigan," Steve told him slowly--far too gently.
+"That was wise to let your knife lie safe within your pack.  For if
+you'd touched it, I'd have killed you--as I ought to kill you now.  But
+you're drunk, Harrigan!  You were drunk a minute ago when you lied your
+lie. . . .  You're soberer now.  You're sober enough to start again and
+tell me you're a liar!"
+
+They waited--the roomful of rivermen.  Nothing stirred save the clouds
+of filmy blue smoke floating against the rafters--that and a bulky blot
+of shadow outside which shifted a little, noiselessly, just beyond the
+patch of light that streamed through the door.  They waited,
+heavy-breathed, while Harrigan began to recover from the disconcertment
+into which O'Mara's coming had flung him.  Slowly the former's lips
+twisted into a mocking leer; mockery rose and swam with the hatred in
+his inflamed eyes.  He would have spoken, sparring for time, when
+Steve's hand leapt in and made of the joking effort only a rattle in
+his throat.  Beneath the stiff red stubble the flesh was livid where
+those fingers had been, when he was able to draw breath again.
+
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke," he gasped, and gulped and swallowed hard.
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke I was tellin' the bhoys, about seein' you
+an'----"
+
+Steve's voice bit in and cut him short.
+
+"Your turkey's ready, Harrigan!"  He pointed at the pack toward which
+the other had groped and then thought better of the impulse.  "You were
+going, of your own accord, I see.  Well, I'm telling you to go, now!
+The door's open; I left it so for you, when I came in.  And I'm telling
+you too, before you leave, that you'll do well not to come back.
+There's not room for both of us on this river any more, Harrigan!"
+
+The riverman's eyes shifted.  Furtively they flitted from face to face
+in those rows of faces at the walls.  But whatever he thought or hoped
+to find--fleeting flash of support or encouragement--was hidden behind
+a common mask of astonishment as blank as had been his own.  They were
+waiting for his answer; he knew they were waiting for that as he
+crossed to the door.  And when he paused there, to turn in sudden
+savagery, he realized that his tardiness had robbed him of his chance.
+It was too late to talk back then.
+
+"You're tellin' me," he rasped out, "and I was going--sur-re!  But
+things ar-re not yet finished between you and me.  For I'm pr-romisin'
+you that I'll be back; I'm pr-romisin' you I'll be wid ye again.  I'll
+be wid ye again, come spring!"
+
+He disappeared.  And hard upon his going Steve wheeled and fronted
+those scores of silent men.  His eyes leaped from point to point, as
+Harrigan's had craftily flitted.  Briefly, crisply, he accompanied the
+sweeping survey with a voice that was loud enough for all of them to
+hear.
+
+"Big Louie! . . .  Fallon! . . .  Shayne!  This is your chance to say
+so, if you're going to be lonesome, now that your song-bird has flown.
+Speak up!  I came down tonight just to hear you talk."
+
+Nothing but an indistinguishable murmur answered him, a low growl that
+was neither argument nor evasion.  For those hottest partisans, whose
+names had been called aloud, knew with Harrigan's going toward whom the
+chill finger had been pointed, even though Death had entered and
+stalked through their ranks and slipped back out at the door almost
+before they realised its nearness.
+
+Rebellion was still a long way ahead for most of them.  They had not
+yet had time to talk themselves to the pitch of open revolt.  They had
+merely begun to listen to Harrigan whose disciples in dissatisfaction
+they were.  And now, in his absence, they stirred uncomfortably under
+the gaze of him who remained; they dropped their heads and searched for
+matches.  But Steve felt the weight of unspoken thoughts when he, too,
+faced back in the doorway.  This time there was no naming of names; he
+embraced the whole room when he spoke.
+
+"They tell me, boys," he said, "that there's talk among you of no more
+work on the river when we've put this railroad through.  I've heard it
+said that some of you think you are cutting the ground out from under
+your feet with every shovelful of earth you lift.  You ought to know
+better than that; you ought to know for yourselves that there'll be
+need for more men in these woods than there has ever been before.  But
+if you don't; if you can't see it that way, why not come around and let
+me have a fair chance to talk things over with you, myself, before you
+decide to turn on this job?  I want you to remember that a man who is a
+liar in one thing is mighty likely to talk loose-tongued, no matter
+what he preaches."
+
+And there, without lifting his eyes from the floor, Big Louie cleared
+his throat and made answer.
+
+"Maybe," he retorted.  "Maybe.  And maybe not so sure, either!  I have
+listened to big words before now, me, that have put no food under my
+belt, no coat to my back."
+
+Steve's smile was unruffled and kind.  No matter what the hidden
+verdict of the rest of that room might be, he had known already that
+Big Louie was past saving.  For there were not so many like him among
+those hills but what the type was instantly recognizable, wherever it
+was encountered.  He had the frame of a giant--Big Louie--the splendid
+legacy of generations of men who had lived out of doors.  But there was
+no depth in his seal-brown eyes which always seemed to brood; no
+decision in any move of his ponderous body.  He had little chin; he had
+no name, save Big Louie which his size alone had sired.  And Steve was
+very patient in making answer.
+
+"If it's only food and shelter, and clothes for your back, Big Louie,
+you'll not have to worry.  But I'm not promising either, mind, that
+there'll be easy money to blow on white whiskey.  Were you expecting
+any?"
+
+That brain which could cope with but one idea at a time was fertile
+ground for seed which such a one as Harrigan might sow.  Big Louie
+failed to reply.  He sat quiet, deep in thought when Stephen O'Mara
+closed the door noiselessly behind him.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was minutes after Steve had gone back up the hill before Garry
+Devereau reached out a hand in the darkness and touched,
+experimentally, what had seemed to be only a shapeless black blotch at
+the edge of light, a rod or two from the door.  And instantly at his
+touch the shadow was galvanized into life.  It reared and plunged and
+enveloped the slighter man in a crushing embrace and bore him over
+backward.  With the muzzle of a revolver chafing his ear Garry managed
+to worry his head high enough to free his mouth and nostrils from dirt.
+
+"Get off me!  Get off me, you fat romancer, you!" he whispered fiercely.
+
+An explosive grunt of dismay answered him, before Fat Joe let him rise.
+In a thin and profane tenor he was bidden to explain his presence there.
+
+"I couldn't sleep," Garry replied, his voice still peevish, "so I came
+out for a breath of air.  I saw him start this way--saw you following
+him with that gun in your hand.  I just slipped over, too, in case
+there might be doings.  What's the row, Joe?"
+
+Joe took him ungently by the elbow, turned him about and started him up
+the rise.
+
+"An old grudge," he deigned an ungracious explanation.  "It's years and
+years old.  Steve licked him once.  Once when they were boys the folks
+that live down next to Allison's dressed Steve up like a picture-book,
+the nearest I can make out, and sent him to town a-shoppin'.  Harrigan,
+he----"
+
+"I know!  I remember!"  Garry's eager whisper interrupted.  "That is, I
+didn't know that Harrigan was one of the mob Steve whipped that day.
+But that wasn't what I meant.  Who was the--the girl Harrigan was
+talking about, when Steve--when Steve----"
+
+Joe's fingers tightened a little as the other evinced a tendency to lag.
+
+"Hurry a bit, will you?" he urged complainingly.
+
+"Show a little speed!  I'm supposed to be up there asleep."  And then,
+gruffly: "It was the Allison girl, of course."
+
+In spite of the hand upon his elbow Garrett Devereau stopped short in
+his tracks.
+
+"Barbara!" he stammered.  "Barbara Allison?  Joe, was that the girl he
+meant to-night, when he said he was going to 'marry one of those women
+himself?'"
+
+Joe peered at him, trying to make out the expression upon his face.
+
+"Why not?" he wanted to know.  "Why not?  Ain't he good enough for her?"
+
+There came a pause--then Garry's stunned rejoinder.
+
+"Good enough!" he repeated senselessly.   "Good enough?"  He laughed
+half wildly, as though he had suddenly hit upon a very funny thought
+indeed.  "That man in love with a girl like her. . . .  Good Lord!"
+
+And Fat Joe, who had failed to understand, swore again beneath his
+breath because there was no time left in which to argue the matter.
+His face was still very red from his struggle for self-restraint, and
+his whole mental balance so disturbed that he forgot entirely to
+conceal the blued revolver dangling in one hand when he re-entered the
+cabin a moment later.  The latter object ruined the effect of his
+insouciant rendition of "Home, Sweet Home."
+
+"Thought you were going to retire, Joe?"
+
+Steve was already undressed and crawling into bed.  His question was
+slow-worded and a trifle stifled.
+
+"I was," Joe assured him hastily.  "I was.  I just stepped out to see
+that everything was tight and tidy for the night, that's all."
+
+Quizzical eyes contemplated the revolver now.
+
+"Taken to carrying a weapon, after all, eh?  Well, perhaps that's
+wisest.  And blow out the light, will you, Joe?  I'm tired.  You'll
+have to undress in the dark."
+
+Then Steve buried his face in his pillow.  But sundry sounds, escaping,
+were unmistakably hysterical.  Joe's mouth opened and closed, fishlike.
+He stood and stared down at his side, in beautifully eloquent
+profanity, if a stare can be both eloquent and profane.
+
+"You need a nurse," he stated sulkily at last.  He finished the light
+with a vicious blast.  "You need a chaperon!"
+
+But once again, just before he slept, Steve heard him mutter to
+himself, less injuredly, as he heaved over in his bunk.
+
+"This has been a very busy evening," he opined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+LAW AND LUMBER
+
+Rain fell the following fortnight in a steady downpour that did not
+cease, even for an hour.  Ragged, smokelike clouds hung over the valley
+at Thirty-Mile, dragged so low by their own weight that they not only
+hid the upper peaks but shrouded the lower ridges as well.  They drove
+by in interminable files of grey, making sluiceways of every cut and
+drenching continually the men of the construction gang who, in spite of
+the chill of that downfall, still sweated at their labor.  But both
+Steve and Fat Joe, for all that they caught each day a deeper note in
+the hoarse complaints of those same men--a note no less ominous than
+was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river--nevertheless were
+duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining.  It
+might have snowed.
+
+Each morning now as he stepped outside the shack Joe turned
+methodically toward the north, to cock his head and squint and sniff,
+questioningly.  He was waiting for the first flurry which would herald
+those months of bitter whiteness to follow; and each morning his short
+nod was a brief of satisfaction at the continued height of the mercury.
+They made the most of that open fall, bad as was the weather.  Without
+pause they toiled forward those wet days, or rather backward, for they
+had stopped, there at the edge of the river, in the work on that
+section of the rail-bed which, none too even-surfaced but almost
+arrow-straight, ran from the upper end of their valley to the very
+mouth of the Reserve Company's country.
+
+A month earlier it had been Steve's plan to span that mile or so of
+swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in.  Nor was his
+altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised
+the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow an
+oozing, quaking morass.  It no longer represented merely a positive not
+too alluring problem in engineering--that strip of swamp and open
+water.  It had taken on a newer, strategic importance.  And the change
+in Steve's plans, so far as the work at Thirty-Mile was concerned, was
+as much due to the news which Fat Joe brought home with him, one night
+toward the end of the next week, as it was the result of the interview
+which he had held with Hardwick Elliott himself.
+
+Joe had been a whole day absent on the north end of the line.  Alone he
+had been over every foot of that all but completed stretch which ended
+at the border of swampland, there at headquarters, troubling himself
+not at all over the unevenness of the roadbed, satisfied entirely with
+the surety he gained with every inspected mile, that a train-load of
+logs or a dozen train-loads, would stay on the rails when the rails
+were laid, and the day came to set wheels rolling.  But the further
+report he brought back with him was far less reassuring.
+
+"I wonder," Joe mused aloud that night, "I wonder, now, why any man who
+knows anything about handling timber should go to work bothering
+himself with skidways leadin' down to the river, when he knows, as well
+as Harrigan should know, that it ain't comin' out that way?  It don't
+seem good sense nor logic to me, unless----"
+
+He stopped there and left his own opinion unfinished.  Since the
+evening Harrigan had stepped out of the main bunkhouse and disappeared,
+black rage in his face and a promise to return upon his lips, that
+lumberman's red head had been conspicuous only because it was absent
+from the landscape.  So far Harrigan had failed to reappear and Fat
+Joe's method of apprising his chief of his return to the Reserve
+Company's pay-roll was distinctly characteristic.  But Steve's
+reception of the news was little more than listless.  He seemed to
+change the subject entirely.
+
+"I don't see why it wouldn't be just as easy, or easier," he replied,
+"to cross here on pilings, practically the whole distance, as it would
+be to fill and bridge, too.  And if we were to look at it in that
+light, then why wouldn't it be still easier to drive those piles, say
+next February or March, while the swamp is still crusted over and hard.
+It would afford us some sort of a footing to work on then, other than
+black ooze and lilypads.  Wouldn't it seem so to you?"
+
+Garry Devereau's agreement was quick with enthusiasm, but Fat Joe who
+was better schooled in those slow-syllabled discussions, barely nodded
+his head.
+
+"We'd still have that track north of here to lay," he advised, "when we
+work in from the south with steel."
+
+"Surely," Steve admitted.  "Of course.  But wouldn't that be a better
+bet than to stand to see our embankment and bridge----"
+
+He broke off there, just as Joe had hesitated a moment before.  The
+undercurrent of meaning for which the latter's ears were waiting came
+to the surface, however, when Steve began again.
+
+"Suppose, Joe," he pursued lazily, "suppose you had contracted with a
+railroad--an infant road too young even to be named--to move for you
+more timber than either of us will ever own; contracted in apparent
+good faith, when all along in your heart you were certain that the
+railroad itself would never be able to fulfill its half of the bargain?
+Granting such a state of affairs, Joe, what do you suppose you would
+do?"
+
+Garry was not quite certain that evening which was uppermost--the
+earnestness or quiet amusement which surely underlay that question.  He
+only knew that both existed.  But Fat Joe understood.  As he had done
+many times before now he wrinkled his forehead and pondered.
+
+"Maybe I'd hire me a red-headed river-dog," came his answer pat.
+"Maybe I'd hire me a bully-boy boss of white water, to build me some
+skidways to the nearest floodwater, so's I could teach the infant
+railroad you mention that business was business, contract or no
+contract."
+
+"Of course you would!" Steve agreed instantly, and he might have been
+complimenting a first primer favorite so pleased was his tone.  "Of
+course you would.  I'm afraid that was too easy for you, wasn't it,
+Joe?  But now suppose you were bent on proving to everybody, and
+particularly to those who had fathered it, what an unfortunate weakling
+this immature, unnamed child of constructive silence really was.  In
+that event how do you figure you'd conduct yourself?"
+
+Joe smiled oddly, a little balefully.  It was magic-quick, that change
+in his expression--as swift as was the thought behind it.
+
+"I'd have my logs all cut and ready to haul as an excuse, wouldn't I?"
+he inquired with simulated anxiety.  "Could I tell folks, through the
+newspapers for instance, that I wasn't strong for letting my timber lie
+for the grubs to lunch on, if I had to square myself?"
+
+"Quite naturally."  Until then Steve's face had kept its preternatural
+gravity.  He grinned ever so faintly now.  "Very naturally you'd want
+to save your winter cut."
+
+"Then I'd like to have 'em build a bridge somewheres along the river I
+aimed to drive--a bridge and a nice dirt embankment, all dressed up
+with rails and ties and things on top.  I'm allowed to suppose I've got
+an awful long standin' score, ain't I, along with all this timber?
+Well, that's what I'd like to have 'em do, then.  And when I opened her
+up, a few miles up river, and she began to roar; when that first head
+of water hit the bridge and the sticks begun to grind, I suppose I'd
+take up my position on the bank where I could watch real well.  I'd
+light me a long, black cigar and murmur, sort of languid and
+sympathetic, 'There goes your railroad, gents!'"
+
+Before the finish of that speech was reached Garry had begun to follow.
+When Joe drew down one corner of his mouth and puffed aloft an
+imaginary cloud of smoke by way of added vividness, his own laughter
+mingled with Steve's quieter appreciation.  But his contribution to the
+conversation was not as complacent as Fat Joe's had been.
+
+"Such a move in itself would be outside the letter of the contract," he
+expostulated.  "Why, they wouldn't dare do anything; they wouldn't dare
+to begin driving the river before your time was up, much less do damage
+to your completed work.  What excuse--what legal excuse--could they
+give, even though they were morally certain that you were bound to
+fail?"
+
+Very slowly, almost pityingly, Joe turned toward him.
+
+"Legal!" he droned.  "Moral?"  And then he laughed his clear tenor
+outburst which barely escaped being a giggle.  "Dear child, judiciously
+speaking, law and lumber and morals and mill-feet don't mix.  They
+don't mix at all, in this section of the country.  If they wanted to
+bother their heads with an alibi, they could say it was top of flood,
+and they weren't eager to be hung up, just because a brass-buttoned
+conductor promised 'em a through express in the morning.  They could
+say--  But what good would explanations do us, huh, if they sent a half
+million logs sky-hootin' into our bridge?  It wouldn't save our
+construction, would it?"
+
+He wheeled back to Steve, his manner brisk.
+
+"Do we leave that stretch open?" he asked.  "Is that the way you have
+it figured?"
+
+"I'm afraid we'd better," Steve said.
+
+And from the very deliberation of that reply Garry Devereau realized
+how vital was the point which they had been weighing so irresponsibly.
+
+That was as close as they came to anything resembling a discussion of
+the change which was growing more and more noticeable in the bearing of
+the men at Thirty-Mile.  As far as all outward evidence was concerned,
+Steve seemed to ignore it utterly, to retreat oftener and oftener
+behind his habit of silence which even Fat Joe, after several
+unsuccessful, garrulous attempts, gave over trying to penetrate.  And
+even Garry, who had greater respect for the other man's preoccupation
+because he felt that he understood it better, tried also to hide all
+evidence of the bitterness which it was re-awakening in him.  Yet, at
+that, Garry's surmise was erroneous; his conclusion wide of the mark.
+
+For it was not the hunger of his own heart; it was neither intolerance
+of restraint nor mental rebellion against the duties which were holding
+him so close up-river, that had caused the chief engineer of the East
+Coast work to withdraw so completely within himself, although, many
+times each day, his eyes did wander toward the south and Morrison.
+During that bleak period, as Garry had guessed, Steve's thoughts were
+often of Barbara, but they were not sombre thoughts.  The very hardness
+of his life schooling had taught him too well how little of wisdom
+there is in fretting against the day of action, when that day cannot be
+hurried nor controlled.  Steadfastedly he refused to let himself brood.
+If he could not go to her he would not, nevertheless, allow himself to
+dwell upon that impossibility.  Instead his spirit ranged ahead to a
+hopeful, more or less indefinite and not too distant date when his
+absence might not seem to threaten too great a cost to those whose
+matters lay in his trust.
+
+Garry's conclusion, borne of his own lesson in doubt, was wide of the
+mark.  It was not heartache.  The thoughts Steve had of her were his
+serenest thoughts, those days during which his body labored
+prodigiously and his brain groped for the solution of an affair that
+had not been his own, until he had chosen to make it so.  It was the
+problem of Garrett Devereau which lay behind Stephen O'Mara's hours of
+gravity--that perplexing problem which Miriam Burrell, level of eye and
+brave of tongue, had brought to him for help.  And in the end, as is
+usually the way, events of themselves finally gave Steve the
+opportunity to say all that he knew could not be introduced by him.
+Time showed the way just when he had reached the point of acknowledging
+that such an opportunity was beyond his own power to bring about.
+
+He had had little chance for conversation with Garry in those days,
+except for a word or two over a hastily snatched breakfast, or perhaps
+at supper at night, and at night he was usually too tired to talk.  But
+the other's growing restlessness had not escaped his notice.  For a
+while Garry had seemed to accept his continuance there at camp as a
+matter of course, and for that very reason neither Fat Joe nor Steve
+had dignified the thought of his possible departure by so much as a
+single spoken word.  Garry's own actions first began to indicate how
+incessantly he was debating that question within his own brain.
+
+There came, times without number, an uneasy, far-focused look into his
+eyes; came hours on end when he would sit, every debonaire effort at
+lightness abandoned, staring moodily into the fire, motionless save for
+his nervous hands which never seemed to rest.  Joe found it harder to
+entice him with the poker deck; oftener than not Steve had to repeat
+his question a second time, seeking to inveigle him into a discussion
+of what-not, before Garry even heard.  And one night toward the end of
+the week the latter finally reached the point of voicing for their ears
+a decision which was old in anticipation to them.  They were on the
+point of going to bed.  Garry had risen, and then paused.  He hesitated
+and crooked his arms and yawned, a trifle too carelessly that evening.
+
+"Well, this finishes another day," he remarked, nor did he realize how
+soulful were the words.  "And I cleaned up the last of the stock-room
+to-day, Joe.  A swift but accurate workman, eh?  I'll leave behind a
+record unblemished by oversight or sloth.  And now--now it's about
+time, I suppose, I was going back to town."
+
+It was out, nor could the yawn conceal his eagerness.  His back was
+turned, but Steve knew what light was in his eyes.  Steve's
+carelessness was a far neater thing than Garry's had been.
+
+"What's your hurry?" he inquired easily.  "Why rush away?  And if you
+think your industry has betrayed you into idleness, you're reasoning
+poorly to-night.  Want another job?"
+
+Bantering indifference was the keynote of that reply.  Mutually they
+had adopted it from the very first.  It smacked of the free-masonry
+which always marked Steve's conversations with Fat Joe, were they
+earnest or frivolous beneath the surface.  It is always recognizable in
+the speech of friends such as they, differentiated from actual
+indifference by an intimacy of inference between the lines which makes
+such discourse almost foreign to uninitiated ears.  But Garry's answer
+was not in kind.  Steve was caught so far off his guard by the question
+which came flinging back at him that he was glad Garry had not turned.
+
+"What else is there I could do?"
+
+No man save one who was very, very tired could have spoken in such a
+tone; no man except one who has tried himself in the highest of
+courts--his own opinion of himself--could have put such a degree of
+contempt into so simple a query.
+
+"Why--why----" Steve faltered, and then he took command of his own wits
+again.  "There's work enough, don't doubt that," he exclaimed, and
+laughed a little.  "Joe, here, will be another week or ten days
+finishing with the fill up yonder; he'll do well if he manages it by
+then, and that too with every available hand we have.  I don't want to
+rob him of a single man, if I can help it, but I've got to go ahead
+with the line to the south.  To put it concretely, I'm in need of a
+rodman.  Do you think you'd care to oblige?"
+
+Again the hint of banter persisted, but Garry's jaw was tight when he
+faced suddenly around.
+
+"I will!" he flashed back, hoarsely.  "I will, if it's a man's job.
+But I'm done with filling a dinky pad with rows of figures, all day
+long.  I'm finished with this damned tallying of cans of beans and soap
+and yards of rope!  Do you understand?  What _work_ would I have to do?"
+
+Out of the corners of his eyes Steve saw consternation o'erspread Fat
+Joe's face.  His own was only amused.
+
+"You'll have to swing an axe," he enumerated slowly, "and you'll have
+to lug a rod and tripod.  You'll wade through bog and fight your way
+through underbrush.  And then, for variety, swing an axe some more.  If
+you've never learned yet what it is to be really tired, Garry; if
+you've never known what it is to go to bed wishing morning would never
+come, you'll find out what that's like, too."
+
+As soon as it was spoken Steve recognized the slip.  Watching Garry's
+eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also.  For a moment a
+torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips.  And then he swallowed
+and nodded shortly.  The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully
+as electrical as the threatened outburst might have been.
+
+"I'll try it," he said, very simply.  "I'll have a try at it,
+to-morrow."
+
+And he pivoted on his heel and passed out.
+
+Some minutes after he had gone Fat Joe, still a little dazed, rose
+softly and unostentatiously, crossed to a shelf shoulder-high on the
+wall and reached to remove a quart bottle of brandy which Steve,
+returning home soaked through and through, had brought out and left
+standing there.  But Steve checked him in the very middle of that act.
+
+"Let it stand, Joe," he directed.  "Leave it where it is."
+
+As slowly as he had reached for it Joe started to put the bottle back.
+The very briefness of that order should have been warning enough, but
+Joe found it impossible to keep to himself his disapproval.
+
+"All right," he acquiesced, "only I can't help remindin' you, just the
+same, that when a horse is runnin' his heart out it's kind of
+superfluous to lay on the whip."
+
+And then the whole accumulation of those days of silent perplexity, of
+indecision and fruitless mental forays, spilled over upon Fat Joe's
+entirely innocent head.  Steve shot around and levelled a pre-emptory
+finger.
+
+"Whip--hell!" he barked.  "Put that bottle back!"
+
+Joe's fingers came away as though the glass had blistered them.
+
+"Lands' sakes!" he exclaimed; and in a voice that was chastened and
+meek when he had caught his breath: "Please, and it's back!"
+
+Chronic ill-temper could hardly have persisted in the face of that
+reply, and Steve's had been but a mood.  His first chuckle was in
+itself a plea for pardon.  He supplemented it, aloud.
+
+"I'm sorry, Joe--I'm worried.  I've got a job on my hands that bothers
+me.  It appears to be simple enough, until I get to planning how to
+tackle it, and then I can't make any headway at all.  But there isn't
+anything to be gained in hiding that stuff; that's one of the things I
+need to know.  It's better where it is."
+
+Joe waved a hand in bland dismissal of the apology.
+
+"My mistake," he averred, "though your harsh words have hurt me sore.
+I don't quite savvy it yet, but it's your affair, not mine.  You're
+dealin' and bankin' the chips.  And before now I've seen lots of
+well-meanin' bystanders get all mussed up from trying to horn into
+another man's pastime.  At my age I'd ought to have knowed better!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
+
+In itself that decision of Garry's to remain a little longer at
+Thirty-Mile was scarcely significant enough to be called sensational,
+and yet it proved to be the first of a series of events which, growing
+more and more sensational as they progressed, finally resulted in the
+hour for which Steve was biding his time.
+
+Garry entered upon his new duties the following morning in a spirit
+anything but reassuring to his companion.  Up to that time he had made
+his own industry the butt of much good-natured ridicule, viewing it
+apparently as a sort of vacation novelty amusing enough while the
+novelty lasted.  But he went from task to task that next day in a
+methodical, dogged fashion that was farthest of all from amiability.
+Two or three times Steve, trying to spare him needless effort,
+attempting to show him how to favor blistered hands and aching back,
+met with rebuffs so curt that he learned to keep his advice to himself.
+He knew what end Garry was working to achieve; he would have allowed
+himself to smile over the thought that the other man would be tired
+enough, before night came, without trying to make that work any harder,
+only he did not dare venture that smile.
+
+Times without number there were when Garry's monumental fit of sulks
+bordered close on the ridiculous, but the needed triviality which would
+have precipitated the whole fabric to a terra-firma of absurdity failed
+to materialize.  He cursed the rain, cursed it with his fluent
+precision which already had earned Fat Joe's admiring comment.  He
+complained, querulously, like a half-aged boy, over the treacherous
+footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded.  And once when he had
+felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of
+Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive
+diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things--a short
+discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's
+admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully
+concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and then died out
+in Garry's eyes when the hemlock only grazed him.
+
+Now and again Steve saw his lips move and then crook in cynical
+amusement, and knew that Garry was talking to himself and finding such
+communion most absorbing.  But he waited, outwardly patient at least,
+nor tried to hurry the issue.  He knew the woods; he knew what the
+silence and solitude could do.  For no man endures mutely the spell of
+the wilderness.  He talks, or he goes mad.  Put two men on a two-months
+trail and, be they the worst of enemies, they will still find a topic
+which each may approach.  Trap them for a winter in a snow-buttressed
+valley where no other man can penetrate and they will have bared
+jealous secrets before spring sets them free to go again their roads of
+doubled hatred.  And when dusk came--dusk and a fatigue which made it
+difficult to drag one foot after the other on the homeward
+journey--Garry had reached the point where he had to speak his thoughts
+aloud.
+
+The woods were new to that paler, slighter man.  He had to talk, but
+his beginning was circuitous.  He had been gazing down at his
+rain-soaked length, grotesquely thin in the flapping garments borrowed
+from Steve's wardrobe, to look up at last and smile, wryly.
+
+"I was just thinking," he began.  "I was just thinking if they could
+only see me now--the crowd down at Morrison for instance.  They used to
+gibe me.  They called me the immaculate Garry, once.  Aren't you a lot
+heavier than you look?"
+
+Plodding along beside him Steve nodded as though the whole day had been
+common with just such conversation.
+
+"No.  Those clothes were built with an eye to largeness of movement
+which scarcely insured shape or draping, even upon me."
+
+It was irrelevant, but it was a beginning.  And the reference to the
+crowd at Morrison made Garry's next remark clear.
+
+"Wouldn't it jolt them, if they could see me?  I thought of it this
+morning when I was walking a log without so much as a waver.  That
+phrase relative to walking a chalk-line is weak and inadequate, after a
+man has tried to work his way along a peeled hemlock.  If anyone wants
+to measure sobriety by word of mouth, there's his standard.  It
+involves the last degree in sure-footedness."
+
+Again Steve bowed his head, but not so immediately this time.  For
+already he realized that this was not to be the opportunity for which
+he was waiting.  And the other man was quick to catch that uncertainty.
+
+"The other evening----" he laughed unpleasantly--"that night when you
+came back to camp in time to hear of Joe's proposed novelistic effort,
+I think I mentioned it to you.  I'm not sure.  But whether I did or
+not, it was, no doubt, scarcely introduced in the spirit in which I
+should ask it now. . . .  I suppose they have given you a fairly
+thorough report of my--career, since we were knights bold and ladies
+fair, haven't they?"
+
+Without waiting for a reply he answered the question himself.
+
+"Of course they have," he exclaimed, "because I recognized your fine
+hand in Joe's attitude toward me, the very minute I waked up, back a
+week or so ago, the morning after I'd done my Phil Sheridan stunt from
+Allison's to your shack.  But do you mind telling me what your own
+opinion is?"
+
+Stephen O'Mara knew they were not going to get far if they followed
+that lead.  There was a challenge in Garry's voice which too closely
+resembled a snarl.
+
+"Why--no."  The pre-occupied note was uppermost in his answer.  "I'd
+not mind at all."
+
+But he offered no more than that.
+
+"Nor the reason why you've been so insistent that I stay on up here?"
+
+"Why not?  I've not forgotten my manners, even though I've lived some
+months in the back-brush!"
+
+No attempt at levity, however, could parry the other's deliberate
+insolence.  Garry worked nearer to what had lain all day behind his bad
+silence.
+
+"A man is wasting his time trying to reform another man," he
+vouchsafed, "if that other man has no desire for reformation."
+
+"That is very, very true," Steve agreed with even gravity.
+
+"Unless that man has the desire within himself, he need never waste his
+time even hoping to come back!"
+
+"I'm forced to admit that there is no room for argument in that,
+either," said Steve.  "Only it has to be more than a desire.  It must
+have become determination."
+
+He hesitated, and the whimsical note crept in and dulled the threatened
+edge of hardness in his voice.
+
+"I know of a case in point, that happened right here in these woods.
+One of the finest sportsmen who ever hunted or fished over this country
+had a favorite guide--Long John LeClaire was his name.  In fact, he
+never went into camp without him, for upward of a score of years, and
+he claimed there never was a better cook, between here and the border.
+But Long John had one bad failing.  As long as one kept to the timber
+with him it was plain sailing, but strike a town and it meant a week's
+delay in sobering that guide up.  Town and a spree were synonymous in
+Long John's mind; and after trying both mental and physical suasion the
+sportsman I mentioned finally hit upon another plan.  He persuaded Long
+John to take the 'cure'; more than that, he put him on a train himself
+and saw him off.  But there was nothing enthusiastic about John's
+departure.  You see, way down deep in his heart, he was just a little
+afraid this proposed treatment would be successful.
+
+"He went, but his going was reluctant.  And then, a month later he came
+back again, and, oh, what a difference there was in his return!  It
+took the conductor and two train-men to put him off at the station;
+they were considerably marked up in the operation.  Once safely landed
+on the platform, however, Long John spread out his feet to steady his
+wavering body and waved a hand in hearty greeting to the crowd which
+had assembled to welcome him home.  His hat was gone; he had a
+discolored eye, but the reluctance was gone from his carriage.  And he
+made a speech which for expressive briefness surpasses anything I've
+ever heard, before or since:
+
+"'There!' he declared his triumph.  'There!  And now I guess I've
+showed 'em no sanatorium could ever cure me!'"
+
+But Garry did not laugh.  His smile was mirthlessly sardonic.
+
+"Then why the devil have you tried to keep me up here?"
+
+Any man might well have objected to the manner of that question; many
+men would have spoken too hastily, forgetting that there are worse ills
+than those of the body.  But Steve was not ready to hit back yet.  He
+was thinking of Miriam Burrell; he lied with skillful smoothness.
+
+"I told you last night," he said.  "I need men.  And then, too, it's a
+long time since I've seen you.  I've not made so many friends, you
+know, Garry."
+
+Garrett Devereau would have stopped there, dripping as he was, in the
+middle of the timber, had not Steve held to his stride.  And he must
+have caught a momentary glimpse of that self which he was exhibiting to
+his companion, for his next words were a little mollified.
+
+"Perspective is an excellent thing," he murmured.  "It's been said
+before, but I'm repeating it.  It's not only illuminating in just the
+matter of view, but it unsettles one's sense of values, doesn't it?  I
+mean the Bignesses and Smallnesses of things--and creatures.  When I
+went away, or rather when you did, back I don't remember how many
+years, you were tugging at the bit to be up and at things.  That used
+to perplex me, although you may not have known it; I never really
+caught your angle or viewpoint.  But now that you are in the thick of
+it I'm puzzled to know whether you find it--well, sufficient in itself."
+
+O'Mara laughed softly over his shoulder.
+
+"Sufficient!" he echoed.  "Wouldn't you, if you were fact
+[Transcriber's note: face?] to face every day with some problem or
+other that had you stumped?  Wouldn't you, if you were playing a game
+that shifted so rapidly from point to point that it kept you dodging
+and ducking and swearing to hold your feet?"
+
+Garry drew a deep breath.
+
+"That's what I've been trying to establish in my own mind," he
+faltered.  "I've been thinking perhaps--but, pah!"  He spat out a
+fragment of laughter as though it were bitter to his tongue.  "I tried
+one job--I tried once!  I ought to know better than to wonder even,
+now.  And if a man can see no reason for living his life, it's his to
+quit, if he wants to!"
+
+And then Steve abandoned his air of tolerance; he changed his style of
+play.  The contempt in his retort could not have been more measured,
+even had it been other than a premeditated thing.
+
+"Quit is the right word," he came back coolly.  "I wasn't quite sure
+until now.  You asked me if the others had told me what sort of man you
+had become.  And if silence is affirmation, you had your answer.  You
+inquired concerning my own opinion and I withheld it.  Whatever it was
+doesn't matter now.  Maybe I was guilty of bad judgment, but you have
+set me right."
+
+Each word was tipped with scorn.  Again, with deliberate intent,
+Stephen O'Mara lied.
+
+"And I tell you now that had I been sure you wanted that hemlock to get
+you, I'd have left you where you stood.  The world is all cluttered up
+with fools, as it is."
+
+It came so quickly that Garry was not immediately aware of the attack.
+He smiled, covertly.
+
+"Accidents will happen," he feigned a protest.
+
+Abruptly the taller man wheeled, lids a-droop.
+
+"--Fools, and quitters, too," he supplemented, levelly.  "Quitters and
+men who show a streak of yellow that doesn't assay even a little bit of
+pure gold.  A minute ago I gave you one reason for my attempt to keep
+you here.  But I made a bad mistake there, too.  It's men I need!"
+
+He couldn't have straightened the other any more quickly had he swung
+and slapped his face.  Garrett Devereau went paper white.  They reached
+the edge of the heavier timber and came out upon the soggy sod of the
+clearing in the hush which followed that wickedly barbed speech.  Steve
+always stopped there, whenever he came back to the cabin alone.  He
+liked to look up at Joe's light, waiting in the window.  And now, a
+pace or two in the lead, Garry turned back and stared widely into
+Steve's cold eyes.  It had taken heat lightning to clear that brain
+which had been all day befogged.
+
+"That was frank, and altogether plain," he said.  "Joe took it upon
+himself to hire me, during your absence--the figure mentioned was
+eighteen a week.  Now, quite as frankly, I am admitting his lack of
+authority."
+
+Dusk comes quickly in the woods; twilight is only the briefest of
+pauses between daylight and dark.  In the half-light as he stood there
+it would have been very easy to have mistaken Garry Devereau for the
+man whose clothes he wore.  And while they waited, strained and tense,
+facing each other, a lone sapling between them and the eastern fringe
+of the clearing swung frantically earthward as if stricken by an
+invisible hand, and then thrashed upright again.  A fragment of green
+bark flew aloft.  They heard the deflected bullet go whining away.
+Then the tardy bark of a rifle.
+
+It was instant-quick, and yet little quicker than the expression that
+sped over Garry's features.  He turned and faced the thicket from which
+the report had come; he lifted his chin and opened his arms and laughed
+aloud.  The second time that day Steve reached out and jerked him
+viciously from his feet.  This time the bullet missed the sapling.
+They felt the air shock of its passage.
+
+There was nothing deliberate nor premeditated in the outburst which
+Steve loosed upon the man who had gone to his knees beneath the grip of
+his hands.
+
+"You fool!" he grated.  "You crazy-brained madman!"
+
+Garry rose and made as if to dust his knees.
+
+"Poor work," he criticised, easily.  "Too hurried--the first shot.
+There should have been no excuse for a second."
+
+With angry roughness Steve thrust him back into the deeper shadow.
+
+"Wait here!" he commanded.
+
+But Garry was only a step behind him when, a moment later, the former
+leaned over the spot where that invisible marksman had stood.  There
+were deep imprints in the forest mold--an empty shell upon the leaves.
+And by that time Steve had regained his grave composure.
+
+"Some idiot of a hunter," he ventured quietly, when he had straightened
+from a glance at those marks.  "One of those enthusiasts who shoot in
+haste at any rustle in the brush, and investigate at leisure."
+
+Momentarily the intimacy which had existed in other days between them
+was restored.  Garry's answer held no more of antagonism than had
+Steve's calm comment.  He tried to follow the tracks that led into the
+deeper timber.  It was too dark to follow far.
+
+"This is a hunter in a hurry, then," he remarked.  "Too much of a
+hurry, even, to investigate."
+
+"Hungry, and late for supper," suggested Steve.  "And we'll be late,
+ourselves, unless we travel along."
+
+He faced about and started straight across the clearing, and he
+maintained the lead in spite of Garry's effort to supplant him.  Before
+they reached the door of the cabin reserve that amounted to actual
+coolness once more cloaked them both.  Only once did either of them
+offer to speak.
+
+"You might do well to vary your costume a little," Garry observed
+impersonally, "if your nimrod friend who hunts at dusk is going to
+persist in mistaking you for a deer."
+
+He drank hard that night from the bottle which Fat Joe, in obedience to
+Steve's command, had left standing upon the shoulder-high shelf--drank
+first in a self-conscious fashion with a mumbled excuse to Joe that the
+rainfall had chilled him; then more and more openly, until he forgot
+that he had ever felt the need of an excuse.  Not one of the three men
+had made a move to go to bed, and before midnight came around Garry's
+black fit of absorbtion had given way to another mood.  Blithely he
+chafed Fat Joe one minute, blind to that one's sullen reception of his
+jocularity; the next moment he turned eyes that had long before lost
+their enmity in a glassier light of goodwill upon Steve, working over a
+drawing-board at the other end of the table, impatient yet elaborately
+approving of his industry.  And when Steve finally laid aside his work,
+signifying with a sigh that he had finished, Garry rose and lifted a
+half-emptied glass and made him a rollicking toast.
+
+"Here's to young Virtue's triumph, Steve," he chanted, "and damnation
+to the opposition!  I may be leaving you--I'll be on my way back to
+town to-morrow at this time--but I'm leaving my moral support behind
+me."
+
+Steve's reception of that flourish was in no way like what Fat Joe had
+expected.  He smiled cordially--a little absently.
+
+"Thanks, Garry," he said.  "And I guess I'll be needing all the support
+I can find, both moral and otherwise, before spring comes.  So you're
+not figuring on stopping off at Morrison?  Planning on going straight
+through, eh?"
+
+Garry made a gesture which was meant to embrace the whole chain of
+hills outside.
+
+"Absolutely!" he emphasized.  "This country is all right for those who
+were born to it--purple hills and purling brooks and silence brooding
+over all!--but it's too intense for your effete comrade.  Too
+quiet--too easy to think!  I'm going away from here just as fast as
+steam will haul me."
+
+The other man stretched his arms and swung one foot negligently over
+the chair arm.  His unqualified agreement brought sudden alarm to Joe's
+eyes.
+
+"I suppose you're right," he drawled.  "It does get on any man's
+nerves.  Right this minute I'm as tired of it as I ever dare let myself
+get.  I've sloughed around in the mud enough for one session."
+
+Garry frowned, perplexed.  His fast numbing brain refused to
+reconstruct clearly, and yet dimly he knew that this sentiment was not
+the one which he had heard a few hours before from Steve's lips.
+
+"Too true," he was content to reply sadly.  "Too true!"
+
+"We've both earned a vacation."  Steve's gentle smile never left his
+lips.  "To-day I couldn't help but think that it was a shame to miss
+such perfect hunting weather as this.  I wonder if I couldn't persuade
+you to postpone your going for just a day or two longer.  I can show
+you some deer, Garry."
+
+The frown upon the latter's forehead deepened with his effort at
+recollection.  Then he brightened with happy satisfaction.
+
+"Deer!" he chuckled, addressing himself to Joe.  "Hunter took me for a
+deer, thinking I was Steve."  He blinked, for the statement did not
+entirely please him.  "Doesn't sound logical," he pondered, "but it's
+so.  Fired twice and missed both shots.  Poor work--very poor work
+indeed!"
+
+Joe squared around, his perplexed scrutiny an accusation now.  Steve
+had neglected to apprise him of that incident which had happened on the
+way home, and Joe had not heard the rifle reports.  But O'Mara clung to
+the subject which he had introduced.
+
+"That's the trouble with hunting right here in the front yard," he
+admitted.  "There are too many gunners anxious to hear their rifles go
+off.  We might swing over toward the west branch, though.  As long as
+this rain holds on the leaves will be quiet as a carpet.  You've never
+seen my own private shooting box, either, have you Garry?"
+
+The questioned one tried hard to pay attention, but the attempt was no
+more than an indifferent success, for he was still grumbling to himself
+over that unknown marksman's lack of skill.
+
+"Never knew you had one," he answered.
+
+"My inheritance," laughed Steve.  From his manner he might have been
+talking to a sober man.  "And also the haunt of my boyhood days.  It's
+the shack, you know, where I spent a good many years with Old Tom.  It
+lies a half dozen miles through the woods from here.  I've made it
+weather-tight and dry.  I spend a day or so up there whenever I have a
+chance to get away.  We're sure of a shot if we still-hunt over in that
+direction--sure of a tight roof and good beds, too.  How does it appeal
+to you?"
+
+Garry spilled over his glass and had to fill it again, with many
+apologies for his clumsiness, so ardent was his acceptance of the
+invitation.  He rose and insisted upon shaking hands.
+
+"A personally conducted tour," he stammered gayly.
+
+"A pilgrimage to the nest from which young genius first spread its
+wings, personally conducted by my friend, Mr. O'Mara."  But his moods
+were growing more and more uncertain and changeable, now.  He bent a
+baleful glance upon Fat Joe.  "Is this--person going to accompany us,"
+offensively he wanted to know.
+
+Steve shook his head.
+
+"Joe'll have to stay here and hold things down until we return," he
+explained.
+
+Garry resumed his seat.
+
+"Then I'll go," he stated.  The baleful light was slow in leaving his
+eyes.  And, after a rambling, muttered something to himself: "Too
+officious . . . wouldn't let me have but one drink every three
+hours . . . better we left him alone.  He might shoot somebody,
+too--looks as though he might shoot and investigate at leisure."
+
+With that he turned once more to thoughts of him who, firing from
+ambush, had left a trail of hob-nails to voice mutely the haste of his
+retreat.  It had a fascination for him; his mind went back to it
+automatically, the only idea apparently upon which he found it possible
+to center his faculties.  Now and then he referred to it aloud, in
+jumbled and meaningless ejaculations.  Both men knew that he did not
+know what he was saying, and yet his reference to Fat Joe had left a
+hint of pain in the latter's eyes.  It was still there when Joe arose,
+an hour later, and jerked his head toward Garry's quarters.
+
+"If you need me, sing out," he said.  "There's whiskey locked in the
+medicine chest--and I'll be sleeping light."
+
+The words meant nothing to Garry, but he noted Joe's departure.  Steve
+saw that his eyes were fixed, his lips crusted with fever, when he too
+came to his feet in a supreme effort, and steadied himself by the back
+of his chair.
+
+"I've been most thoughtless, Steve," he apologized charmingly.  It was
+the spirit of the old Garry talking through the flesh of the Garry he
+had become.  "I've been unpardonably selfish.  You must be tired; you
+have worked hard to-day."
+
+In turn he made as if to cross to the door.  Steve drew him back.
+
+"Joe's taken your bed," he explained.  "He's been an hour asleep by
+now.  We'll be getting away at daybreak, and he always did hate to be
+waked an instant before his hour, so you'll have to occupy his bunk."
+
+It took Garry a minute or two to assimilate that.
+
+"Surely," he agreed.  "Daybreak."  Then, drearily, with no knowledge of
+what he was saying: "I wish I could go to sleep--I wish it was
+daybreak, now!"
+
+Yet he was almost sober again when Steve shook him awake at four the
+next morning, his first inquiry concerning the state of the weather
+proving that he recalled their plans of the night before.  But his
+politeness had given way to a pallid stubbornness that would not budge
+an inch until he had had a drink and filled a pair of flasks with all
+that the fresh bottle from the medicine chest contained.  He refused
+breakfast with sickened finality; declined even the coffee which Steve
+tried to press upon him.  When the latter handed him Joe's rifle and a
+handful of extra shells, however, his eagerness to be away showed in
+his eyes.
+
+Steve did not like that gleam any more than he understood it, and he
+did not understand it at all.  It went around him--through him--much as
+though Garry was peering cunningly at a far-off, bodiless something
+which the other man could not see.  And throughout the whole morning
+Steve was conscious of it whenever they met after skirting a swamp, or
+slipped noiselessly over a hardwood knoll, to rejoin each other.  The
+day was half gone before Steve realized that it was the telltale sign
+of a brain no longer sober, even though Garry's body continued to
+maintain an incredible steadiness.
+
+Long after it seemed that eyes such as his had become must needs be
+sightless the latter went on picking his way carefully over rough bits
+of going; when he had reached a condition where he no longer heard the
+word or two which, now and then, Steve addressed to him, he still
+flattened his body and crouched at the expected nearness of game.  It
+became an uncanny exhibition of mechanics after a while--a
+sleep-walking sort of thing which wore upon Steve's nerves until he was
+more than once at the point of taking possession of Joe's repeater.
+And yet it was Garry who jumped a spike-horn buck, just before
+nightfall.  It was he who fired twice before Steve's rifle reached his
+shoulder.  But they found only blood on the leaves when they hastened
+forward.
+
+"You hit him!"  Steve leaned over to examine those crimson stains.
+"You must have found him with both shots, judging from the way he's
+bleeding.  He's gone into that cedar swamp; he won't travel far, and I
+hate to let him crawl in there, wounded like that, to die."
+
+Indecisively he paused, not sure just what to do.  In that moment of
+quiet Garry lifted a flask to his lips and finding it empty let it slip
+heedlessly to the ground.
+
+"Two shots," he muttered darkly.  "Two, where one should have been
+enough."
+
+That echo of the night before helped the other man to decide.
+
+"This strip of dark timber runs straight west to the river--are you
+listening, Garry?" he asked.  "Straight to the river--it's only a scant
+mile--and you'll find the cabin on the rise of ground in a clump of
+balsams, three or four rods to the right.  I'm going to take your
+gun--you look fagged out.  You skirt around the edge of the bad going
+and I'll drive straight through.  It may be only a scratch, after all,
+although it doesn't seem possible, with all this blood.  I'll take your
+gun and, now, are you sure you can make it--sure you won't get turned
+around?  It'll be dark in half an hour, you know."
+
+Garry gave up his rifle without a sign of demur.  His eyes were burning
+with some sort of feverish anticipation, but his answer was clear
+enough.
+
+"I'll wait for you at the river," he said, and he started forthwith
+toward the west.
+
+Steve watched him out of sight before he turned to take up,
+irresolutely, the trail that zig-zagged into the cedar brake.  But once
+he had started he went ahead rapidly, jumping the wounded buck within
+five minutes and giving him no time to lie down again.  And after he
+had covered a quarter of a mile Steve saw that it was much as he had
+told Garry it might be; it was a flesh wound that bled profusely and
+that was all.  For the deer, holding to a direct line down the middle
+of the swamp, continued to travel strongly.  Steve had all but reached
+the river-edge where they were to stop for the night, before he
+detected a stirring in the bushes ahead of him and his ear caught the
+crackle of a dry branch.
+
+Instantly he forgot everything save the quarry he was running down;
+forgot Garry and the strange persistence with which the latter had gone
+back, after twelve hours, to quote himself word for word.  With rifle
+poised he edged forward a step and halted; he stooped and laid Garry's
+gun at the foot of a tree and went on again.  Once he made out a
+movement behind a nearer tangle and saw the branches shake before a
+heavy body that was forcing slowly through them.  His own rifle came
+up; his finger was on the trigger when he thought better of it.  Old
+Tom, more than a half-score of years before, had switched him well, not
+so very far from that very spot, because he had not made certain first
+of the target at which he was firing.
+
+There was an open patch to the left.  If the buck held to that quarter
+he would have to cross that clear.  Rock-steady the muzzle came down
+and covered the first indistinct brown bulk which entered the notch of
+the sights.  And then, with an oath, Steve let the gun slip to the
+ground at his feet and stood shaking, checks gone white.  Garret
+Devereau, wearing an old tan canvas coat which he had unearthed in the
+cabin peered slyly around a bush which he had been stirring gently with
+one hand.
+
+"Go ahead 'n' shoot," he ordered aggrievedly.  "Hunter'sh alwaysh shoot
+at rush'le in the dark.  Good joke on hunter'sh--good joke on my good
+frien', Misther O'Mara!  Think'sh's got deer until he inves'gates at
+leisure.  Best joke of all'sh on myself."
+
+The muscles which all day had been a marvel of firmness beneath him
+gave way altogether.  Without a sound he pitched forward upon his face.
+A second later Steve reached his side, but the horror had not faded
+from his own eyes after he had picked that prostrate figure up and
+carried it into the clay-clinked shack.  His memory played him an odd
+trick during that moment.  A vivid picture came back to him of the
+grave-faced boy he had been, struggling to steady Old Tom's helpless
+feet up that same rise.
+
+Garry was limp and blue and pulseless when Steve stretched him out,
+inside.  The second flask stood there where Garry had left it, upon a
+table, and while he was loosening the latter's clothing Steve shook it,
+experimentally, and found it empty.  He swung it aloft and drove it
+through a window.  The crash of shivered glass made the other stir.  He
+opened his eyes and stared vacantly up into his friend's face.
+
+"Steve," he moaned.  "Steve, I'm cold!"
+
+And that was the burden of the complaints which he lifted, time and
+again, throughout the first part of the night.  Even after Steve had
+wrapped him in everything which the bare room afforded he still
+continued to whimper like a sick boy.  But his body held strong.  Just
+as, all day, it had been his brain which had shown the effects of the
+alcohol which he had consumed, so now, all night, it was his brain
+which suffered most.  Again and again he called aloud a woman's name,
+in a voice which Stephen O'Mara had never before heard from his lips.
+In inconceivable tenderness he whispered it--the name of Mary
+Graves--only to cry aloud, "Steve--Steve," in accents of heartbreak the
+next.
+
+Long before morning came his pulse was steady--a little jumpy but
+reassuringly rhythmic.  But the sunlight was two hours old upon the
+floor before the silent watcher saw the white lids flutter and then
+part with a gaze that was once more sane.  Garry's smile had always
+been mocking; it was shamed and wistful now.  The clearness with which
+he remembered was a miraculous thing.
+
+"You see, Steve," he faltered.  "You see now, don't you, that I'm not
+worth trying to save?  Oh, you've tried hard; I knew how hard you were
+trying!  That's why I did--what I did.  I'm no good; there's no use,
+friend of mine.  Why don't you let me go?"
+
+Steve groped and found the hand groping for his.  He nodded his head,
+bruskly, to hide his eyes.  But his voice was not brusk.
+
+"I almost shot you, Garry," he said, and there was a husky echo of
+horror in the words.  "In another minute I'd have killed you.  Right
+now I don't know just what kept me from firing."
+
+"And I meant you to," Garry murmured almost inaudibly, "I planned that
+you should--started to plan last night.  I--I've been hating you for
+twelve hours--hating you because you were making me ashamed to do the
+thing I wanted to do most."
+
+He tried to rise and fell back, slack.  But his voice was stronger with
+sudden, swelling bitterness.
+
+"It wasn't for myself, Steve," he cried.  "It wasn't for what I might
+get out of it, or--or what it might bring me, I used to scoff at
+whatever others considered big and fine and clean, but I played it
+straight, just the same.  I played it as well as I knew how--straighter
+than you'd believe.  I thought it would make her happier, because I
+tried that hard.  And she . . .  Steve, if I had been a woman--a woman
+like what I thought she was, little and clean and white--I couldn't
+have let a man like him so much as touch my little finger!  And she--by
+God, she married him!"
+
+The agonized voice broke there--the voice of a boy who had had to learn
+that it is woman and not women who is fastidious.  Garry sat and
+swallowed, fighting for self-control.  His eyes were numb, but Steve's
+had taken fire, for he knew that the hour for which he had been waiting
+had come at last.
+
+"You've been trying to help me," Garry found his voice again, "you've
+been trying to throw me a line.  And, for a day or two, I tried to
+catch it, Steve.  But it isn't in me to try that hard, any more.  Some
+men do things for what there is in it--the pecuniary reward, I mean;
+some men--you for instance--because their self respect won't let them
+stop, win or lose.  But now and then there happens one who keeps on
+trying only because there is one other person, at least, who may be the
+gladder for his success.  I don't expect you to understand; I know it
+will sound small and cowardly to you. . . .  It's too lonesome living,
+Steve, when there's no one who cares whether you live or not!"
+
+"That does not fit your case," Steve objected instantly, "when your
+danger or your safety keeps a woman watching, white-faced with terror
+through the night, for your return."
+
+Garry propped himself upon one elbow, the better to see the speaker's
+countenance.
+
+"My safety?" he repeated, blankly.  "My return?"  And then, wanly
+grateful: "You are not the sort of man who lies convincingly, Steve."
+
+And then Stephen O'Mara let him have it--all the story which had lain
+so many days in his heart.  There were times when Garry went even paler
+during the short recital; times when everything else was submerged by
+the incredulity that flooded his face.  But before Steve had finished
+the last trace of doubt was gone.  Before the end came Garry had bowed
+his head, this time in flushed, self-conscious wonder which
+transfigured him.
+
+"Miriam Burrell!" he breathed.  "Proud, intolerant----"
+
+His head came up.  The next instant he voiced the words which Steve
+most wanted to hear.
+
+"You shouldn't have told me this," said he.  "You had no right,
+unless----"
+
+Steve laughed at him.
+
+"God bless you, boy," he exclaimed.  "I asked her if I might.  Why,
+don't you understand that she meant to, herself, if I didn't?  You see,
+she is--far, far braver than you are, Garry."
+
+Garry lifted his hands and hid his face.
+
+So quietly that his exit made no sound Steve slipped to his feet and
+passed outside.  It had stopped raining; the hardwood ridges, touched
+by frost, were flaming streaks of color against the rainwashed
+evergreens, when he picked his way down to the river and found a dry
+stone for a seat.  An hour and more he sat there, while his thoughts
+went back over the trail of the years--the trail which had led him from
+that cabin to a pair of violet eyes and lips that arched like a boy's.
+
+Steve let his mind turn again, unreservedly, to his own problem that
+morning; he tried to face, sure-eyed, the road which still stretched
+ahead.  He did not know that Garrett Devereau, the debonaire, the
+cynical, the world-weary and world-wise, had broken down and was
+sobbing noiselessly, as men sob, in the room which he had left--shaking
+with deep and terrible gasps that racked his very soul.  But it was
+already daybreak; it was trail's-end now for Garry.  It does make a
+difference if one knows that someone cares.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HONEY!
+
+Upon their return to Thirty-Mile, two nights later, Joe's attitude of
+criticism was the first thing which piqued Steve's interest.  There was
+something ludicrous in the former's voice as he sat and anathematized
+the food which the cook-boy brought to the table, even though he
+devoured hungrily all that his plate would hold.  And because Joe was
+so obviously primed for a sensation that evening, out of sheer
+perversity Steve struggled to draw him into a discussion of a topic,
+which, just as obviously, had no appeal just then.
+
+"What I hope to do," he confided gravely to Garry, "is to finish up at
+Morrison and make possible the transfer of some of those men up here.
+We are working only one shift now.  With two I figure we could sail
+along a-fogging.  How does that strike you, Joe?"
+
+That was only one of his many attempts, but all of them, save for the
+inner laughter which they afforded; were totally without result.  Joe's
+answers were monosyllabic--his attention wandering at best.  To that
+particular question he nodded his head, spiritlessly.
+
+"This butter ain't none too fresh," he growled sourly, "and I wonder if
+that cook-boy thinks we dote on ham every meal?  I don't for one.  It
+may be all right, if a man's plumb starving to death, but it don't lend
+no real elegance to a repast."
+
+That gloomy complaint brought little more than a sparkle to Steve's
+eyes, but it made Garry lean forward in his place.  Throughout the meal
+while the other two fenced in just such fashion he forgot his own food
+to listen, delighted anticipation in every feature.  And when they had
+finished supper and pushed back their chairs, he stood grinning a
+little, watching Joe survey that littered room which served as office
+and sleeping-quarters for the chief engineer of the East Coast Company.
+Fat Joe's gaze swung from wall to wall, from littered corner to
+heaped-up chair.  Then he shook his head in despair.
+
+"It looks to me, Steve," he grunted, "as though you ain't never had no
+real training in tidiness, have you?  There don't seem to be no system
+at all in the way you leave your things around.  There's one boot over
+in that corner; it's got a mate, I know, because I saw you take them
+off last night.  I wouldn't be certain otherwise.  And it's the same
+way with all your things.  Just look at this room!  A nice place to
+receive callers in, now ain't it?"
+
+That was the first lead he tendered them, but Steve, rather than
+gratify him with a direct question, chose to go forward in the dark.
+He leaned over and followed his usual custom when he wanted to think.
+He tapped out his pipe.
+
+"But I can always find everything," he defended, "that is, unless you
+have taken the trouble to put things away.  Then it's a toss-up that
+something or other will never be found, until it turns up of its own
+accord.  It's not so bad, Joe."  He, too, swung to survey the room.
+"Not so bad!  Just a little unsettled, that's all.  Are we likely to
+have any callers, do you think, who would object to this layout?"
+
+Joe snorted, but his eyes were mournful.  He knew that there was
+nothing else to do but yield, a part at least.
+
+"We ain't likely to," he murmured.  "We're just naturally bound to have
+'em.  They're comin' in to-morrow, and I ask you again, ain't this a
+pleasing prospect to greet 'em?"
+
+For all that he seemed to be staring ruefully down the room, he was
+watching for the surprise that darted across Steve's face.  Momentarily
+the latter had forgotten his assumed air of placidity.
+
+"To-morrow?  Who?"  And then Steve laughed.  "Go ahead and tell us,
+Joe.  I'm beat!  I'll admit that I'm panting with curiosity."
+
+Joe pulled up a chair and dropped into it.  It appealed to him--this
+method--whenever he had the time to spare.  His pink face was still
+innocent of guile.
+
+"I don't mind the men-folks," he resumed.  "That fat party, I mean, who
+wears the plaid suits, nor Caleb Hunter, either.  Both of them are used
+to such truck as this.  And I reckon it'll tickle the ladies, too.  But
+I can see Honey sticking his nose in the air and sniffin', supercilious
+like, the first minute he gets his nose in the door.  He ain't going to
+approve at all, at all--not any way you look at it."
+
+"Honey!"
+
+Both Steve and Garry ignored the rest of Joe's explanation to gasp that
+single word in concert.
+
+"Who in the world do you mean by 'Honey'?"
+
+"Who could I mean?" Joe demanded collectedly.  "I didn't give him the
+name, did I?  I mean that chap Wickersham who owns the timber north of
+us.  Foreign, ain't he?  Sure, I thought so?  Well, every time I run
+across that man's path my heart swells with patriotism.  I guess I'm
+just as glad to be born plain United States."
+
+The first part of that statement was listened to closely enough by both
+men; the last sentence or two, for all that it was heartfelt and
+sincere, was lost upon them both.  And Steve's mirth was even more
+hysterical than was that of Garry Devereau.
+
+"Honey!" he panted.  "Now isn't that a wonder?  Joe, you're too good!
+You are altogether too good to be wasted on these timbered solitudes.
+Men pay two dollars a seat, Joe, to hear performers work who are rank
+amateurs in comparison with you."
+
+The riverman's eyes grew belligerent.
+
+"Funny, is it?  So awful funny!  Well, perhaps you think I can't read
+plain print yet, never havin' enjoyed a liberal education.  But take a
+look for yourself."
+
+He pulled up a pile of newspapers which had come in since their
+absence, sorted out one that was creased open, and handed it to Steve.
+It was an announcement of Barbara Allison's engagement to the Hon.
+Archibald Wickersham--that column to which Fat Joe had folded the
+sheet--a many-days-old announcement, now.  But the smile did not even
+stiffen upon Steve's lips.  The picture which accompanied it was a poor
+one, heavy-shadowed and smeared and lacking in detail, yet Barbara's
+face was unmistakable.  The room became quiet.  In that hush Garry
+realized that Joe's mistaken translation of the title had not been, as
+Joe had himself suggested, due to lack of knowledge, but to a desire to
+apprise his employer, delicately, of that which he believed was still
+news to him.  And yet, from the easy way in which he read it, word for
+word, Garry was positive that all this which the New York daily
+blazoned forth with its customary mixture of snobbishness and vulgarity
+was no longer news to Steve.  The latter's eyes lifted and dwelt long
+upon Fat Joe's face.
+
+"So that's where you got it, was it, Joe?" he asked evenly.  "You make
+it 'Honey,' do you?  And when do they come in, Joe?"
+
+"To-morrow night.  One of the teamsters brought word this afternoon,
+just before you got back.  Honey is going to have a look at his trees
+and things, the way I understand it.  And the rest of them, I take it,
+want to look us over in our wild state.  Where are we going to put them
+girls?"
+
+Steve's answer was long in coming.
+
+"Miss--Allison?" he wanted to know.
+
+"--and her maid," Joe corrected promptly.  "Her maid, Cecile.  She's
+comin', too, and that tall, red-headed one.  I don't remember her name?"
+
+As studiously as he had done a moment before, Garry again avoided
+Steve's eyes.
+
+"Miriam Burrell," the latter supplied the omission.  "And that's fine,
+isn't it?  How long are they going to stay, Joe?"
+
+But Joe had finished with trifling.
+
+"Where are we going to put them?" he insisted doggedly.
+
+"Why, we have a couple of shelter tents somewhere in the duffle,
+haven't we?  We might pitch those if----" he looked about,
+ruminatively--"if you think this is too squalid."
+
+Joe turned appealingly to Garry, only to meet eyes flaring with
+deviltry.
+
+"If you think that I'm going to give up my quarters for a troup of
+curious sight-seers, you're mistaken.  If that's what you turned toward
+me for, don't allow yourself to dwell upon it another minute.  I'm a
+laboring man and I have to have decent rest at nights. . . .  Do you
+suppose Cecile would really mind a tent?"
+
+And then Joe's face went red.
+
+"Now ain't you the pair of rough jokers?" he whined.  "Ain't you,
+though?  But what's it going to be--this room or Garry's?  The way I
+look at it we're elected to camp out ourselves.  We're hardened sons of
+the wilderness, you know.  That's what they always call us in print.
+But how am I going to get this place cleaned up?"
+
+For another hour Joe argued it, and at last settled upon the
+store-house building as the likeliest for sleeping quarters for the
+feminine portion of the visitors.
+
+"We have to eat in here, anyhow," he argued, "so I guess it's the best
+arrangement we can hit on.  Honey won't be here much to meals, either.
+That'll be one nice thing about it.  He'll be going north directly.
+And now--now I guess I'll go out and have a look at the pantry, even if
+it does make me feel sort of faint every time I think of the grub we've
+got on hand.  Canned beans and boiled potatoes, and ham and bacon, to
+round out a banquet.  Why couldn't a couple of mighty hunters like you
+bring home more than one little haunch of venison?  Bacon and beans!
+Steve, you sure have been living mighty low-down on this job!"
+
+He went out with a great show of haste, but returned almost
+immediately, forgot the urgency of matters in general in finding Garry
+idly shuffling a deck of cards.  Throughout the evening Joe had
+exhibited an unwillingness to meet the third man's glances directly,
+but it was impossible for him to remain oblivious to the clicking of
+the chips.  He balanced first on one foot and then on the other for a
+moment; then diffidently drew up a chair.
+
+"Just a friendly hand or two, I suppose," he suggested, when the other
+made no move to begin.  "Low limit and wide open, eh?"
+
+Garry still toyed with the cards.
+
+"I don't suppose you've ever forgotten the first game in which we
+indulged, have you, Joe?" he asked at length.  Joe was not comfortable.
+
+"Scarcely," he admitted.  "Scarcely."
+
+"Nor the--stakes?" pursued Garry.
+
+"I--I seem to recall 'em, faintly."
+
+Garry's peal of amusement was as rollicking as a boy's.
+
+"So do I," he exclaimed.  "And if I remember rightly you stated on that
+occasion that cash was no consideration with you.  Does that still hold
+good?"
+
+It was the first good look Joe had had at the other's face.  The change
+he found in it seemed to perplex him more than a little.
+
+"I take it that it does."  Garry did not wait for his reply.  "And
+now--what do you say to that same full bottle against a--a ninety-nine
+year blanket restriction, with me at the wrong end of the odds?"
+
+Joe slitted his eyes.
+
+"When they tuck a ninety-nine year clause into a franchise they mean
+it's forever, don't they?" he wanted to know.
+
+"Forever, to all intents and purposes!" said Garry.
+
+Joe's chest sank and rose in a long, long breath.
+
+"It's no word to trifle with," he cautioned at last.  "If you lose
+it'll be a considerable drouth."
+
+"Cut!" invited Garry, and they started to play.
+
+That other night Garry's stack of chips had lasted far longer than they
+did on this second occasion.  A half hour later, when he rose to go to
+bed, his ninety-nine year promise of abstinence was piled symmetrically
+before Fat Joe.  But his good-night was gay.  For a time after his
+departure Joe eyed Steve, sidewise.
+
+"Hum-m-m," he cleared his throat.  "Hum-m-m!  And I was expectin' you
+to turn up any hour of the last twenty-four with a request that I come
+and help bring home the remains.  You must be quite a silver-tongued
+exhorter, aren't you, Steve?"
+
+Stephen O'Mara was silent over the paper which Joe had handed him
+earlier in the evening, and the lack of any offer on his part to go
+into details did not trouble his questioner.  Fat Joe sat and bobbed
+his head over what would never cease to be a miracle in his eyes.
+
+"And he'll stick this time," he vented his wonder aloud.  "He's surely
+going to stick!" Then he smiled widely.  "And I reckon you'll have to
+admit that I handled the small part that come my way with ease and
+dispatch, when I tell you that he didn't catch so much as one lonesome
+pair, all the time I was dealing.  I'm ashamed of myself.  I haven't
+seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I come East!"
+
+Garry was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to
+their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to
+the man whom he was assisting.  But neither his silence nor his
+nervousness any longer worried Steve.  Instead, the latter let himself
+smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his
+thoughts were on Garry at all.  For the latter's diffidence as the day
+aged became a flushed and warm-checked thing, until at four in the
+afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which
+wordlessly, Garry was asking.
+
+"Joe was more than half right," he remarked, one eye to his level, "in
+spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously.  We can't let
+those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable,
+so perhaps you'd better run ahead now, Garry, and see what he has
+accomplished.  I don't want to leave this spot myself until I have some
+figures upon which I know I can rely.  But you might run ahead, if you
+will.  I'll be along later."
+
+It was couched in the form of a request, but Garry's face flamed.  He
+went, albeit a bit reluctantly.  And he stopped more than a few times
+in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve's shack.
+But once he had passed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably
+trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment; he was on the
+point of going back outside to scan the bowl of the valley when a tall,
+short-skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous apron which Fat Joe in
+a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook-boy, flashed
+through the passage-way from the kitchen annex and barely missed
+catapulting into his arms.  Miriam Burrell, pink-faced from the heat of
+the roaring wood-stove, and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek,
+lifted her apron and swung it like a flag of victory.
+
+"I've found it," she sang triumphantly.  "I've found out what was the
+matter!  I'd just forgotten the baking-powder, that was all!  Next
+time----"
+
+Then she recognized him.  With outstretched hands still clutching the
+edge of her apron, she stood, almond eyes widening, and scanned him
+from head to foot.  Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had
+noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry's
+appearance.  To the girl who had not seen him for weeks, that flushed,
+self-conscious man was a different Garry than she had ever known
+before.  Hungrily her gaze went from open shirt to caked boots, from
+steady hands to clear eyes which made her own eyes shy.  And then
+Miriam Burrell, cool and poised Miriam, did what many another maid in a
+checkered apron has done in similar situations.  She lifted that stiff
+gingham to hide her unutterable happiness.  But before he could speak
+she found her voice; nor was it very steady, at that.
+
+"I thought you were that party of idlers come back," she hesitated.
+"How--how tanned you are becoming, Garry!  I thought they--oh, I can't
+tell you how glad I am to see you so--so well.  I'm making biscuits for
+supper--that is, I've just been practising until now.  It seemed as
+though I'd forgotten something that was necessary to the recipe,
+because they were flatter after they were cooked than when I put them
+in the oven.  And most marvelously heavy, too!  But it was just the
+baking-powder, that was all.  Do you--do you think you'd care to help?"
+
+[Illustration: "Oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you--so
+well."]
+
+Steve was very late in returning to camp that night.  Throughout the
+rest of the afternoon he set himself a pace, knee-deep in slushy mud,
+which Garry could not have maintained.  But when he paused there in the
+dark where he always stopped for a moment and a tumult of voices swept
+down to meet him, he forgot his fatigue.  He had lifted his battered
+hat from his head, striving to distinguish a single note in all that
+treble of girlish laughter when, framed suddenly against the background
+of light within, he saw a slender silhouette take up its station in the
+doorframe.  Barbara was still peering out across the darkness when he
+came up to her.
+
+"We've been waiting dinner for you for almost an hour," she rebuked
+him, in place of what might have been a commonplace greeting.  "We've
+been waiting in the face of Mr. Morgan's insistence that it was
+practically useless.  He has been telling us that when a man here in
+the hills fails to turn up for a meal you never bother to look for him;
+you know that the worst has happened."
+
+Over her head the first eyes that Steve encountered that evening were
+those of Archibald Wickersham.  While shaking hands with the girl, he
+bowed in grave welcome to the tall figure in leather puttees and
+whipcord riding-breeches, and Wickersham, from the far side of the
+room, bowed back in equal gravity.  Then Caleb Hunter grasped Steve's
+elbow and spun him around toward the light and peered at him
+accusingly.  Barbara had not noticed until then how tired Steve looked.
+
+"Before the others get to talking," said Caleb, "before the tide grows
+too strong for my weak voice, young man, I want to deliver a message.
+Miss Sarah wants it explicitly understood that unless you stop in to
+say hello on your next trip down, she herself will take the trail up
+here.  And lest that ultimatum sound too little threatening, I might
+add that when Miss Sarah takes the trail she never travels with less
+than six trunks."
+
+Caleb clung so tightly to his arm that it brought a tinge of color to
+Steve's cheeks.  It was minutes before he could get away to change his
+wet clothes, and in that minute or two he could not help but contrast,
+grimly, his own mud-spattered attire with that of Archie Wickersham.
+The tired blue circles beneath his eyes wore even more noticeable when
+he returned, to be ushered with much ceremony by Fat Joe to the head of
+the table.
+
+It was an utterly irresponsible gathering that leaned over the red
+tablecloth that night--an oddly assorted group which, from the very
+first, Joe realized was not at all to Wickersham's liking.  Dexter
+Allison himself, fairly radiating good-will, sat at the foot of the
+table, with his son-in-law-to-be on one side and Barbara's little maid,
+Cecile, on the other.  And between Cecile and Barbara, who sat opposite
+Garry and Miriam, Fat Joe leaned both elbows upon the table edge and
+monopolized the conversation.  The seating arrangement was Joe's; it
+was his party.  And the absolute inattention to detail, the large
+indifference to veracity which his discourse disclosed before that
+noisy supper was over, grew to be an astonishing thing.  His nights of
+fancy left Steve aghast in more than one instance; they even forced a
+stiff smile to Wickersham's lips, and that is saying much for Joe's
+success as an entertainer, for in the bearing of those two men toward
+each other there had been evident from the first a chill antipathy
+which amounted, actually, to armed truce.  And the color in Miriam's
+cheeks, whenever his gaze strayed to that side of the table, helped
+Steve to forget, temporarily, much that he found not pleasant to recall
+at all.
+
+For Miriam's tongue was no less irresponsible than was Joe's.  Her mood
+was so mercurial that she drew, time and again, the eyes of all at the
+table.  She chattered with an abandon that scandalized Barbara; broke
+in and interrupted every argument with hoydenish trivialities, in one
+breath, to appeal to Garry the next for refutation.  And Garry, the
+light-tongued and quick-witted, sat almost dumb of lip before her happy
+garrulity.  But his eyes never left her; they spoke his thought aloud.
+The quick lift and droop of her eyelids, the brilliancy of her lips,
+made Miriam's face a living thing of happiness--made Barbara's silence
+seem even more profound.  For the latter's withdrawal from the
+hilarity, dominated half the time by her father's booming bass, was
+nearly as complete as was that of Wickersham himself.
+
+Just once, shortly before they withdrew for the night, Steve caught a
+gleam of mischief in the dark eyes she turned toward him.  She rose the
+next moment and started slowly around the room, poking demurely into
+corners and closetted nooks.  Every eye was following her when she
+finally found the thing for which she was searching.  She drew a red
+felt, yellow-mottoed cushion from beneath the deer-hide covering a
+chair, and held it up so that all might read.  "What Is Home Without a
+Father?" it ran, and when the joy that stormed through the room made it
+sure that the exhibition needed no interpreter, Fat Joe turned and hid
+his face.  Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an
+examination of his handiwork.  Smooth face tinted by the firelight,
+copper hair almost dishevelled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely
+lovely thing.  In her alto voice she expressed her opinion.
+
+"It's an entirely new stitch to me, Bobs," she averred.  "I don't think
+I have ever before seen just this method employed."  And she turned to
+Stephen O'Mara.  "Do you suppose, Mr. O'Mara," she asked, "that I might
+learn it from the one who did this work for you?  It's rather"--and her
+head tilted to one side--"it's rather a pretty thing!"
+
+Again they succumbed to mirth, and then Joe rose, bristling, and went
+forward much as a gamecock might step out to do battle.  He took the
+cushion from the hands of the girls, who no longer had strength enough
+even to hold it.
+
+"If you are aiming to do any sewing around this camp," he stated, "you
+can start in sewing on buttons.  This kind of work is entirely too
+nerve-wearing for amateurs."
+
+He carried the cushion across the room and placed it, not where it had
+been hidden by the deer-hide, but in colorful prominence against the
+back of the chair.  Long after he had crossed with Steve and Garry to
+their tents he continued to explode with soft chuckles.
+
+"I never did say," he defended himself, "that that sentiment was
+strictly appropriate.  I always stated that it was the best I could.
+And as for my technique--well, either of you guys try it some time!
+You just take a needleful of that yellow worsted and start tracking
+across a couple of yards of red and pathless desert, and see where you
+come out.  I know, because I've done it.  I'm a pioneer.  But if I ever
+tackle another job like that it's going to be a crazy-quilt!"
+
+And Joe considered, in spite of the din which answered him, that his
+challenge was ample.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
+
+It was fully an hour after Fat Joe and Garry had rolled themselves up
+in their blankets when Steve, who had elected to sit up for one last
+pipe even though his body was aching with fatigue, heard behind him the
+approach of her footsteps.  Outside at the top of the rise some fifty
+yards in front of the tents, he had seated himself on a log, chin
+buried in one palm and eyes vacantly steady before him; but even before
+he turned--before he rose slowly to his feet--he knew who was coming,
+knew and realized that she should not have come.  Wrapped in a long
+heavy coat, face half-hidden by the upturned collar, bare of head,
+Barbara came quietly down to where he waited.  And without word of
+greeting on the part of either of them, they sat down together, facing
+the silvered bowl of the valley.
+
+Time passed before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake
+of breath.
+
+"I never dreamed it could be so big," she murmured in awe.  "And then
+to think that some day--within a few months in reality--engines will go
+screeching their signals across this very place.  It doesn't seem
+possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it, too."
+
+Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help
+but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself,
+since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just
+then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most
+apparent to him.
+
+"I've felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully.  "I
+like it better myself, as it is.  It does appear to be a long way
+ahead, doesn't it--that day of completion which you cover in the
+screech of the whistles?  Only to-day, when we were scrambling about
+down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I
+possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but
+thicket now.  But as for the bigness of it"--he laughed
+deprecatingly--"it isn't so very big, you know.  It's just a--a mean
+sort of proposition."
+
+Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
+She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness
+in those words.
+
+"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal!  Why, I thought the work at
+Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there--there isn't
+even a beginning or an ending here.  There's nothing but woods and
+water."
+
+She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow
+under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
+
+"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know.  "Is that the
+direction in which Mr. Wickersham's timber lies?"
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her.  "That's the end
+of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."
+
+Her next words made him start and then try to cover that moment with a
+readjustment of his long body.
+
+"I'm going up there to-morrow.  Mr. Wickersham has asked me to ride
+with him, in the morning."  She waited a moment or two.  "That--that's
+why I came out here to-night.  We'll be going back to town the next day
+or two, and I wanted to have a chance to bid you good-bye, before I
+left Morrison for the winter."
+
+He had known that she would not be likely to remain in the hills much
+longer.  He had realized that each day which he checked off, always
+hopeful that the next might open the way for him to see her again, was
+steadily bringing nearer the date of her departure.  But he had not let
+himself think that it would come so soon.  There was no doubt this time
+about the heaviness of his voice.
+
+"I see," he said.  "I see."
+
+There came another long silence.  Rising out of it, Barbara's voice
+sounded very, very little.
+
+"I've never known a sky in which the stars were so thick.
+They're--they're like a field of buttercups.  And have you ever seen
+such an irrepressibly happy creature as Miriam was to-night.  She was
+radiant--positively shameless!  Did you know that Garry knows----"
+
+"I told him, myself," said Steve, simply.
+
+The girl faced around in her surprise.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Most certainly!  Why not?"  His voice was not quite so unenthusiastic
+now.  "It's one of the few unmistakable opportunities I've ever had to
+make two people permanently as happy as Miriam was to-night.  I'd feel
+guilty all my life if I didn't help all I could, knowing how happy I am
+going to be, myself!"
+
+Thus did he work around, quite without abruptness, to a renewal of that
+discussion which she had thought to close, weeks before.
+
+"Are you trying to infer that I am to be a part of that happiness?" she
+asked none too promisingly.
+
+"You ought to know.  I said 'all my life.'"
+
+And there, suddenly, Barbara laughed.
+
+"I suppose now they'll marry and live happily ever after!" she
+exclaimed with an attempt at airiness.
+
+"Most certainly," asserted Steve, although her mirth puzzled him.  "Why
+is it funny to you?"
+
+"It isn't, but--yes it is too, now that it's no longer a thing one need
+worry about.  That's always the trouble with emotions which are too
+intense.  They're either very sad to contemplate, or very, very absurd.
+And they will persist in exchanging faces, to the confusion of the
+on-lookers.  Garry was so dangerously in love with Mary Graves, you
+see!"
+
+"He was in love with an idea," the man contradicted flatly.  "He was in
+love with just that.  And it is not safe for any man to live alone with
+an abstract conception of anything.  He's bound, sooner or later, to
+lose his grip on tangible things if he does.  He's likely to start
+destroying property to further the cause of labor, or liable to turn to
+shooting men who were born to jobs I'm certain some of them never
+wanted--kings and that sort, I mean--figuring on solving the social
+problems of men and women who must solve that problem themselves.
+Perfection is a fine thing to anticipate; expectations of it are
+dangerous.  And women aren't made that way."
+
+"No?" her voice slid coolly upward.
+
+"No," he told her, and smiled with that serenity she had come to know
+so well.  "Not even you, though I suppose I'd about annihilate anyone
+else if he ever hinted at it."  He chose to be didactic in tone.  "No,
+you're not perfect; you've too much intelligence for that.  Why, right
+now you're fighting with your brain against the dictates of your heart,
+and if you were above mortal error in judgment you'd know that you are
+wasting your time."
+
+The girl forgot entirely that she, too, had promised herself that their
+leave-taking should not cross the border of personalities.  And with
+that lazy joy of her on his tongue she might not have been quite so
+quick to hold that she could love no man, had she stopped to give it
+thought.  Her advance to the skirmish was most spirited.
+
+"Your opinion has the merit of sincerity," she said, "although, looking
+back upon a--a certain day, I can't help but wonder whether you haven't
+been guilty of mouthing pretty nothings for my poor ears."
+
+"That proves my point right now."  He was imperturbable.  "You're
+begging the question to gain----"
+
+"You said----" she flashed, and then grew red.
+
+"I said I'd let you ask no pardon of me.  I said I'd let myself find no
+flaw in you.  But how does that embarrass my present argument?
+Flawless perfection would be a mighty difficult thing to live with, day
+in and day out.  Living with a woman who never made a mistake could
+have no appeal for me.  She'd always be emphasizing my own
+shortcomings.  You become consistent and you'll catch me yawning some
+day; grow logical and you'll almost scare me off!  Why, you're a girl!"
+
+Her laughter was like a bell on the still air.
+
+"And you--you still sit there and insist that perfection has no
+attraction for you?  When you've just described, without knowing it,
+the--the sort of a girl you think is perfect."
+
+His lips curled in a way to quicken any woman's pulse.
+
+"You have me beaten," he laughed.  His eyes, dark as was the shadow
+upon his face, made her breath unsteady.  "I would like to watch you
+play poker with Fat Joe.  Your game would puzzle him more than a
+little.  Yes, you've surely left me without a leg on which to hobble
+off, because it would be small spirited in me, wouldn't it, if I were
+to tell you that you are the exception that makes my general rule hold
+sound?  I wouldn't, however, prescribe such a degree of perfection for
+any other man's daily diet.  It would prove his destruction."
+
+"Your own superiority, of course, rendering you immune?"
+
+"Maybe."  At least, whether she knew it or not, she loved his serenity.
+"Maybe--and maybe I'm an exception too."
+
+He sat very still.  She had turned away once more.
+
+"You'll be back again in the spring?" he asked with that gentleness he
+saved for her alone.
+
+"I hope--I think so."  The smallness of her voice angered her.  She
+feigned a short, carefree laugh.  "Unless I am too busy.  Getting
+married seems to become a more and come complicated problem of proper
+costuming, doesn't it, with every passing season!"
+
+She couldn't have told why she said it; she was trying to think of
+something else to say which would be kinder by far.  And then, half
+lifting her, he had swung her around to him.  For a moment he held her,
+face close to that small, frightened face buried in its deep collar,
+while she struggled uselessly against those hard arms which tried not
+to hurt her.  Her lips continued to rebel, long after her eyes had
+closed--long after body and brain were quiescent.
+
+"You mustn't!" she gasped.  "Oh, I can't let you . . . the moon . . .
+we--we're sure to be seen!"
+
+His lips on hers silenced that last incoherent resistance.  She sat,
+wavy brown head bowed, when he had set her free.
+
+"I was going to ask you not to forget!"  There was no weariness now in
+his voice.  "I had planned to ask you just that, a little ago, and it
+would have been a weak and useless request, wouldn't it?  Any man who
+has to beg to be remembered is not the sort to remain long in any
+woman's brain.  So I have taught you to remember, instead.  You aren't
+going to forget, ever, now!  You're coming back in the spring, and
+you're coming to stay!  And now _I'm_ telling _you_ good-bye.  It's
+time you were asleep."
+
+He helped her to her feet.  Together they turned--and Archibald
+Wickersham, tall to gauntness in the moonlight, was coming across
+toward them from the direction of the cabin.  The girl's slim body
+stiffened, but Steve saw her chin come up.  His own body grew lazier
+still, it seemed, in length and limb.
+
+Wickersham's approaching steps were crisply precise; he stopped an
+arm's length in front of them, and his words were an echo of that last
+sentence of Steve's.
+
+"It's time you retired," he said, ignoring the other man's presence
+entirely.  "It's cold, and you have a long, hard ride ahead of you
+to-morrow."
+
+For a barely perceptible moment, with the eyes of both men upon her,
+Barbara kept her place.  Neither of them saw that her teeth were
+tightly closed over one full lip; neither knew that she had closed her
+eyes, dizzily, for an instant.  And then, without a word, she put her
+hand upon the arm which Wickersham offered her; but Steve, on the other
+side, walked with her that night, as far as the door of the storehouse
+shack.  Miriam herself opened the door and snatched Barbara within, and
+then laughed with her consummate impudence into both men's faces.
+
+"G'lang wid ye's now," she flung at them, "an' quit disturbin' dacint
+folks that likes to sleep o' nights!"
+
+She slammed the door upon them.
+
+They stood there a second or two, Wickersham an inch or more taller and
+inches narrower in shoulder and girth of chest.  Perfunctorily they
+nodded, each to the other, and wheeled silently upon their heels.
+
+Steve did not respond the next morning when Joe summoned the rest with
+a long spoon applied heartily to the flat of a huge tin basin; and over
+the breakfast table Joe explained to the assembled guests the reason
+for his absence.  Before daybreak a rider had come from Morrison,
+bearing word from Hardwick Elliott that Ainnesley was on from Manhattan
+and wanted to talk with him; before the camp was fairly awake he had
+ridden away into the south.  And returning two days later, travelling
+the lower, lesser trails that followed the river, in order to save
+time, Steve missed her party going out.  So, in the last moment, after
+days and days of patient waiting, did Chance trick him sadly.
+
+How much or how little Wickersham might have overseen the night before
+he betrayed not at all at breakfast the next morning, either by word or
+look.  And throughout that day, and the day that followed, while she
+rode at his side, undetermined whether she should attempt an
+explanation, Barbara found his face inscrutable.  It was a week later,
+the night preceding her departure from the hills, long after the girl
+had ceased to think of him at all in connection with the incident,
+before she learned how much he really knew.
+
+Miss Sarah had found her brother most uncommunicative upon his return
+from Thirty-Mile.  In response to her first question concerning Steve
+he had assured her, lifelessly, that the latter was looking very well
+indeed, and let it go at that.  Because she was a very remarkable
+woman, Miss Sarah had been able to curb her curiosity for several days,
+but on that particular evening she found it impossible calmly to wait
+longer.
+
+"You have not told me yet, Cal," she reproached him at dinner, in her
+slightly lisping voice, "how much progress Steve seems to have made.
+You know how interested I am, and you must realize how undignified a
+thirty-mile dash on horseback would be on my part, in order to find
+out, myself."
+
+While up-river Caleb had found much time in which to talk with Garry
+Devereau--that is to say, quite a little time, in view of the fact that
+Miriam Burrell, in boots and mackinaw, had insisted upon following
+Garry wherever he went.  And since his return to Morrison he had been
+spending a surprisingly large share of his days in conference with
+Hardwick Elliott and his partner, Ainnesley.  Now his reply to his
+sister's query was startlingly fervid.
+
+"Progress!" he exclaimed.  "Progress!  I tell you he's going to win
+out, in spite of all of them, damn 'em!"
+
+Miss Sarah froze in her chair.
+
+"Caleb!" she expostulated.  "Caleb!"
+
+And Caleb's face went hot.
+
+"I am very sorry," he muttered contritely.  "But I couldn't help it.
+When I think of the way that boy has plugged on alone, all his life,
+with no one to give him a lift, it--it angers me to think that the very
+man whom I have prized as a friend should be the one to make his
+problem harder."
+
+"Would you mind explaining, lucidly?" Miss Sarah requested.  "And if it
+is business to which you are referring, will you please try to make it
+as brief and non-technical as possible?"
+
+Once he started to tell her, Caleb realized that it was just what he
+had needed to do all along, without knowing it.  Briefly as she had
+requested, he sketched for her the facts which, so far as he was
+concerned, had made of his first sneaking suspicion an absolute
+certainty.  And he waxed wroth in the recital.
+
+"It's treachery," he snapped, "rank, contemptible treachery.  And the
+worst part of it all is that, even now, when I am morally certain of
+his culpability, I--I can't bring myself to despise the man.  He's been
+my friend for thirty years, Dexter has, and damn it----  I beg your
+pardon, Sarah--but, damn it, I keep on thinking of him, in soft
+moments, as my friend now.  I sit by the hour trying to foist the blame
+upon Archie Wickersham, and he's no more guilty than Dexter.  Dexter's
+merely good-natured about his crookedness; wholesome about it, somehow.
+And Wickersham's a sneak!"
+
+In all the years they had lived together Miss Sarah had never heard her
+brother talk so bitterly.  Yet her voice remained soft.
+
+"It's very unpleasant, no doubt," she sympathized, "although I can't
+quite see why they don't all join hands and try to make a success of
+the project between them.  Surely it seems feasible.  And, somehow,
+even after listening to you, I don't seem to find myself greatly
+perturbed about our boy, Steve.  He's very big and strong, Cal,
+and--and I am very old-fashioned.  I still believe in the might of
+right.  It may sound very feminine to you, but I do not find myself
+worried at all over his lack of assistance in his work.  And I must
+confess that I did not have it in mind, at all, when I asked in regard
+to his progress."
+
+Caleb looked up, suspiciously.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"I meant how--how did he and Barbara appear to--get on together?"
+
+Caleb spilled a spoonful of soup.
+
+"Her!" he exploded with no regard for his grammar.  "Why, she is true
+to her blood!  If she weren't she wouldn't be engaged to that thief who
+masquerades as a gentleman.  She isn't blind, and she's going to marry
+him!"
+
+"You are positively violent, Cal," reproved his sister.  "And your
+reference to Barbara does not do you credit.  If I were your wife I
+suppose I'd rise coldly now and sweep upstairs to leave you alone with
+your bad mood.  But being merely your sister I remain to hear you
+apologize.  Barbara is not yet married to Wickersham, I might add."
+
+"I am exceedingly sorry," said Caleb.
+
+"And, without any reason for it, save my womanly intuition, I feel very
+certain that she will never marry him," Miss Sarah went on.  "But you
+spoke about Steve having no one upon whom he could depend for
+assistance, and it was really a helpful hint to me.  Did I fail to hear
+you say how they seemed to get on together?"
+
+"She didn't think he was good enough for her, ten years ago," growled
+Caleb.  "She wouldn't think so, now.  He cares for her, so she treats
+him like a dog, of course."
+
+Miss Sarah had to smile.
+
+"Then I think it is high time I did something about it," she stated
+thoughtfully.  "For she is a lovable girl, and she hasn't any mother of
+her own.  She's very pretty and little and finer than any girl I know.
+If she weren't, Steve would not be in love with her, I am sure.  And
+Dexter Allison is no doubt an estimable man in many ways, even though,
+as you feel positive, he has a tendency to acquisitiveness which is
+deplorable.  Your continued regard for him convinces me of that.  I
+wish, however, that Steve was not so entirely dependent upon what he
+earns.  There are many beautiful things--beautiful and intimate and
+feminine things--which no man can remain happy in seeing paid for by
+other money than his own, for the woman he loves."
+
+Ten minutes after it was done Caleb could not have told what impulse
+was to blame for the deed, but he rose forthwith and went to his
+strong-box, to return with the legal-looking document and the bunch of
+tax-receipts which he had found among Old Tom's papers, years and years
+before.
+
+"There's the deed to some thousands of acres of the finest timber in
+this country," he announced challengingly, "all ship-shape in the name
+of Stephen O'Mara, 2nd!  Old Tom bought them for the boy he hid away
+with him, in the days when timber-lands were going for a song.  He paid
+the taxes until he was drowned, and I--I've paid 'em since, my dear!
+Three or four hundred thousand dollars, or more, ought to buy quite an
+amount of--er--feminine necessities, it seems to me."
+
+With delicately thin fingers Miss Sarah leafed the papers through.
+
+"You have never told me of this matter before, Cal," she murmured.
+
+"Never told anybody!" chirruped Caleb triumphantly.  "I tried to find
+the boy--both of us did, that is--and we failed.  And when he turned up
+of his own accord--well, I knew a half year more of ignorance
+concerning his legacy wouldn't see him starve.  Sarah, I wanted to see
+how that boy of ours would behave, without any backing.  I wanted to be
+sure of the stuff he is made of!"
+
+They had finished a much interrupted meal, but Miss Sarah lingered a
+moment at table.  With incredible calm she had listened to the secret
+which her brother had been keeping to himself so long.
+
+"A very good reason," she agreed, "one that would seem to have many
+points to excuse it.  And although it is not within the letter of the
+law I--I think, Cal, I shall become an accessory before the fact.  Very
+shamelessly I am going to ask you to see that no one knows of this
+property of Steve's, for a little longer, at least.  I have spoken with
+the utmost confidence concerning Barbara; your reference to all that
+she said to Steve in a childish burst of passion years ago does not
+affect my attitude at all.  But I have not been blind to what might be
+her--opinion now, either, impossible and ignoble though it seems.  You
+will not tell Stephen of this matter for a while, Cal, for it would
+please me to know, without room for doubt, just what stuff she is made
+of, too!"
+
+She straightened her diminutive body and started upstairs.
+
+"She will be over to bid us good-bye to-night," she added.  "Will you
+see that she comes directly up to me?"
+
+And once more, from the landing, she spoke over her shoulder:
+
+"You said that she treated him like a dog, Cal," she managed to keep
+her features grave, "and being a woman I can understand exactly why
+that is so.  The joy of a breathless pursuit, it is often said, is the
+only choice left for the female.  But can you tell me why a man hunts
+out the deepest, most comfortable chair he can find and ensconces
+himself therein, once he had overtaken the idol of his fancy?  They
+often do, you know, sometimes for the rest of their lives."
+
+Caleb lighted his pipe and cast about for his paper.  "Maybe it's only
+the natural consequence," he retorted, his face turned away, "of such a
+pursuit as you mention.  Maybe he feels the need of a long, long rest!"
+
+And then Miss Sarah laughed.
+
+An hour later, when she ran upstairs, Barbara found Caleb's tiny
+spinster sister, in negligee and boudoir cap, sitting cross-legged like
+a girl in the middle of the floor.  There was an orderly litter of
+papers around her, and a confusion of clothes; and Barbara hesitated on
+the threshold until Miss Sarah nodded her head.
+
+"Come in, my dear," she invited.  "I'm indulging in one of the few joys
+left to advanced, unmarried years, that is all.  But even memories need
+prodding with more material things, at times, I find."
+
+The dark-eyed girl crossed and found a clear spot and seated herself.
+Without seeming to look at her, Miss Sarah saw that those eyes were
+vaguely troubled.
+
+"I'm leaving to-morrow," Barbara began after a minute.  "I came over to
+say good-bye."
+
+Miss Sarah went on with her sorting.
+
+"We'll see you again soon," she suggested pleasantly.
+
+There was trouble in the girl's voice, too.
+
+"I--don't think so."
+
+"It's a very pretty country--a hard country to forget."  Miss Sarah
+very wisely gave no heed to the woebegone note.  "Perhaps," archly,
+"perhaps you'll be returning as the new Mrs. Wickersham?"
+
+Barbara flushed duskily.  Miss Sarah, however, was gazing at a
+dog-eared picture--a very old-fashioned picture of a youth in brave and
+resplendent garb of a period long dead.  No one but herself and her
+brother had seen that photograph for many years, and he only because he
+had rummaged in a pigeon-hole in which he had no licence to look.  His
+sister's eyes, as well as her posture, were girlish when she laid it
+aside to hold up to view a battered black velvet suit with wide collars
+and cuffs.
+
+"I wonder if you could ever guess who once wore this?" she laughed
+lightly.
+
+Politely Barbara examined it.
+
+"I'm sure I couldn't," she answered.  And, very slowly:
+
+"Miriam is going to marry Garry Devereau.  She is disgracefully happy
+about it."
+
+The older woman received this irrelevance with composure.
+
+"How charming," she said.  "And I am sure that they will continue to be
+as happy as I hope you will be soon.  This suit was Steve's--little
+Steve's.  Dear me, what a day that was!"
+
+After a moment of hesitation Barbara leaned forward to examine the
+silver buttons.
+
+"It--it doesn't seem possible," she faltered.  "What sort of a--a day?"
+
+And then, with smooth, serious face upturned, she listened to Miss
+Sarah's tale--her own story of how she had dressed a gloomy-faced boy
+in half-century-old finery and sent him townward for eggs.  When it was
+finished and she had decided, abruptly, that she must be going,
+suddenly, wet-eyed, she wheeled in the doorway and went blindly back to
+the older woman's arms.  Miss Sarah hugged her once; then stood her
+away at arm's length.  She knew how few women weep, without hiding
+their heads.
+
+"There, we mustn't be temperamental," she chided.  "It's only for a
+winter, at most.  Remember, I love you very dearly, Barbara; write to
+me whenever you are lonely.  And be a very good girl."
+
+It was a brave bit of comfort, but Caleb's tiny sister, whose face had
+never lost its pink-and-whiteness, looked suddenly tired and old when
+she was alone again.  As blindly as Barbara had come into her arms, she
+reached for the dog-eared picture and held it to her flat breasts.
+There is no greatness of soul save there be simplicity.  Very directly,
+very simply Miss Sarah stood there in the middle of her girlish room
+and spoke to her Creator.
+
+"I do not mean to meddle, dear God," she whispered, with tears
+squeezing from beneath tight lids.  "I only want to help a little, if I
+may.  You see, I've never had a baby of my own."
+
+The door of the ground floor room which served Dexter Allison as an
+office was ajar when Barbara re-entered the house beyond the hedge.
+There was a streak of light running out across the floor of the dim
+hall from within, and the girl lingered on her hurried way to her own
+room to bid her father good-night.  But she found Wickersham alone when
+she pushed wider the door.  The light was behind him and she could not
+see how distorted was his face, yet as she paused on the threshold and
+a thin and pungent odor crinkled her nostrils, she sensed, somehow,
+that he had not been long alone.
+
+"Father gone to bed?" she called.  "Well, that's wise.  You'd better
+come, too; it's time you were asleep."
+
+She did not remember, just then, that other night when he had addressed
+those same words to her.  She only knew that his features became
+suffused with purple even before she had finished.  And then she
+realized quickly that it was alcohol she smelled; knew, too, that it
+was not Wickersham who had been drinking, even though Wickersham had
+trouble with his tongue.  And while she waited, puzzled and frowning,
+the man gave up an attempt at his usual nicety of phrase and blurted
+out all that which had been many days hidden behind his impassivity.
+
+"We haven't yet set a certain date for our marriage, Barbara," his
+voice was strained.  "Don't you think it is high time we did?"
+
+The girl colored.  It was, at least, very unexpected.
+
+"Why, no, we haven't," she admitted.  "But we can if you wish it.  Have
+you thought of a day you'd prefer?"
+
+"I have," he stated.  "Would the first of May be too early for you?"
+
+Often, afterward, she wondered at her humility of that night, for
+whatever the quick thought might have been which made her reach out one
+hand to touch the doorframe beside her, her words were merely mild.
+
+"It is, rather.  But I think I can manage it, if it will please you."
+
+Wickersham had come to his feet, but he would not turn so that she
+might see his face.  He spoke with eyes averted.
+
+"It would," he answered with an effort, "and--and in the interim I am
+going to be very sure, now, that no thoughtlessness of yours will be
+derogatory, either to my profound respect for you or your own respect
+for yourself."
+
+The small hand closed then until it was clutching whitely the woodwork
+beneath it.  She understood at last how much Wickersham had seen; she
+was never to understand entirely her mood of that moment.  For had she
+waited she would have left him with finger ringless.  Instead she
+wheeled without a word and climbed, white-lipped, upstairs.
+
+Miriam Burrell loomed in one window of her bedroom when she entered--a
+different Miriam than the one who had once sat in just such an
+attitude, gazing into the north.  The older girl's gladness of heart
+throbbed in her voice.
+
+"I don't want to leave it, Bobs," she sighed.  "I love every brawling
+rapid and sulky, ragged old peak.  Did you ever see a more perfect
+night?"
+
+Through the gloom the younger girl's answer lashed back, reckless of
+what hurt she might do.
+
+"I hate it!" she gasped vehemently.  "I hate it--hate it!  And I must
+ask you, please--I want to go to bed."
+
+There is a poise which comes only with hard-bought knowledge of one's
+self.  It was Miss Sarah's; Miriam had acquired it, too.  Without a
+hint of resentment in her manner she rose and withdrew.  But Barbara
+did not go to bed.  She took that vacated seat at the window.  And long
+after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still
+wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with
+elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who
+found it hard to keep his feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
+
+Her letter came to him a week later, though she had posted it the
+morning she took the train from Morrison.  It had lain for days in the
+post-office box of the East Coast Company, waiting the day when one of
+the teamsters should call and carry it in overland.  Steve had never
+before seen her handwriting.  It was his first letter from her; yet he
+recognized it the instant Big Louie put it in his hand.  And he was
+glad that night that both Fat Joe and Garry were absent from the
+up-river camp--glad that he was to have the next hour alone.  But when
+he broke the flap of it Big Louie, who lingered uneasily in the open
+doorway--even Big Louie, whose wits were not particularly keen--knew
+from the expression which passed over his superior's face that this
+heavy envelope which he had brought had not contained good news.  The
+quick contraction of muscles which tightened his jaw was too much like
+a spasm of pain.  For her first letter, so the sentence ran, was to be
+her last; she wrote "less kindly than she would have wished to write,"
+that she and Mr. Wickersham had decided upon the first of May, and
+after the silence had become a throbbing thing Big Louie decided,
+instinctively, that he would let go until later the demand which he had
+planned to make for a raise to meet that raise which, so he had heard
+it gossiped in town, was being paid the men in the northern
+lumber-camps.  He stumbled going out and lost his balance so that the
+door crashed to behind him, violently.  But Steve stood as he had stood
+when his eye's sought the first line of her note, nor did the crash
+penetrate his ears.
+
+Repeatedly, in the interval which had elapsed since she had bidden him
+good-bye, the latter had told himself that she would not write, but the
+repetition had been unconvincing.  He knew that now.  With the note
+which smelled faintly of her there in his hand he realized that he had
+gone beyond mere expectation of a letter; he had dared to hope
+concerning its contents.  How was he to know that she, too, after
+mailing it, had suffered as keenly as he was suffering that moment,
+wishing that she had employed less abrupt phrases, rebelliously
+regretting that she had sent it at all?
+
+That night his fingers closed until the monogrammed sheet was reduced
+to a crumpled ball.  The edges of the paper took fire slowly, then it
+exploded softly into flame upon the bed of coals in the fireplace where
+he had tossed it.  And at that he laughed aloud, a harsh taunt for his
+own high hopes, without thinking how much his mirth of that moment was
+like what Garry's once had been.  He lowered himself into a chair, and
+he was still there, motionless before a dead fire, when morning dawned
+greyly.  His face had become less hard; he even found it possible to
+smile a little when the cook-boy, starting at the sight of him fully
+dressed at that hour, advised with alarmed volubility that breakfast
+would be ready immediately.  But the few men who still remained at
+Thirty-Mile, felling and hauling the piles which were to carry the
+track across the swamp, noticed a difference in their chief that
+morning which made them careful to hear him, the first time he spoke an
+order.
+
+Barbara did not write again, and in this, at least, the man who loved
+her anticipated her correctly.  The letters, however, which Garrett
+Devereau received each day from Miriam--bulky, extra-postage
+epistles--brought often news of her; and these fragments Garry, knowing
+without being told for whom they were meant duly delivered to Steve, in
+weekly or fortnightly instalments, whenever the latter's duties brought
+him to Morrison.  For Garry and Fat Joe, who had been transferred to
+the lower end of the work, along with the bulk of the up-river force,
+had noticed that difference too.
+
+"Miriam says for me to keep my feet dry this cold weather," he'd tell
+the other man, laughingly, "and Barbara sends her regards to all of us,
+and hopes that we are making splendid headway."  Or again: "Barbara's
+looking a little pale, Miriam writes.  She says she's--er--trying to do
+altogether too much for her endurance."
+
+Whatever the bit of news was Garry passed it on religiously, a little
+guiltily, sometimes, because of his own great happiness.  Once he had
+failed, signally, to read behind his friend's moody silences; his
+surmise concerning the reason for Steve's changed bearing was not so
+wide of the mark this time.  Often, within himself, Garry's wrath
+seethed hot, but he was no longer as ready as he had once been with
+verbal, cynical criticism.  Only to Fat Joe did he dare pour out his
+soul with that vivid incisiveness which always held Joe spellbound.
+
+"He's eating his heart out over _her_," he'd explode, "over a girl who
+is proving every day that she isn't worth a minute's heart-ache of a
+man like him.  I used to think she had brains, if any of them did; I
+used to think that Barbara Allison was something besides a fluffy
+little fool!  Why can't he see for himself that she's just as worthless
+as most of the rest of them?"
+
+And from there, without knowing how truly funny such argument sounded,
+coming from his lips, he would soar to wonderful heights of profanity.
+But save for the pleasure which he took in the pyrotechnics, his
+outbursts made little impression upon Fat Joe.  The latter maintained a
+sort of placid superiority, perhaps because he had learned early that
+this attitude aggravated Garry's rages; perhaps because he was so very
+certain of his man.
+
+"I wouldn't go to getting all stirred up like this, so early in the
+game," he'd reply with unvaried calm.  "Shucks, it's too early to begin
+counting either man's pile of chips--" either man to both minds meaning
+Steve and Wickersham, without the naming of names.  "You are too liable
+to premature enthusiasms or discouragements, Garry.  That's why I
+mostly manage to beat you as easy as he beats me, whenever we throw a
+hand or two.  Ain't you never going to learn that a man must gamble a
+bit on the cards still waiting to be dealt?"
+
+And again, confidently:
+
+"He's worried--of course he is!  He ain't enjoyin' his meditations a
+little bit these days, but he's enjoyin' 'em more all by himself than
+he would be if we were up there with him, forcin' him to look
+everlastingly like four aces, when it's deuces at present he's holding.
+He's worried, and that's why I don't grow nervous myself.  Because it
+is only the man who is too sure who is awful likely to finish broke.
+Don't you waste any pity on him yet, and I wouldn't let him hear me
+passing uncomplimentary words concerning his girl, either, if I was
+you.  Lightning ain't particular where it strikes when it's been a long
+time cooped up.  Every man to his own taste in such matters, says
+I--and shucks, man, can't you tell, just from seein' 'em together that
+they was made for each other?  If a man quit every time a woman began
+to put him over the jumps we'd have a dangerous decrease in marriage
+licences staring us in the face.  He's just learning to care more for
+her, that's all, and caring a lot about anybody never was a comfortable
+state to be in.  It's entirely too uncertain and unsettling--but you
+wouldn't enjoy not caring about anybody at all, yourself, would you?"
+
+Garry admitted that he wouldn't.
+
+"Well, then, don't waste your time pitying him."  A cold gleam
+flickered in those bleached blue eyes.  "Don't you suppose I'd have
+taken apart long ago this animated ice-chest who is making all the
+trouble, just to see what makes him so cold, if I didn't know I'd be
+spoiling the big show?  Couldn't you see, without my tellin' you, that
+I'd rise up some day and leave him looking like a premature blast,
+after all I've learned he's plannin' to slip us, if I wasn't sure that
+he's going to get it, worse than I could ever give it to him, from that
+girl herself?  Well, I would.  He makes me shiver, that man; makes me
+crawl and itch to take his head in one hand and his throat in the other
+and exert a little strength in opposite directions.  Give our entry
+time!  The game is running dead against him at present, I'll admit, but
+he's husbanding his chips.  He ain't drawing wild and squandering his
+chances.  And he's only _begun_ to play."
+
+Which, in part, was very, very true; in part not so close to the facts.
+Before snow came that fall Steve had recovered his outward confidence,
+at least; he had begun to hope again, while he waited and labored
+prodigiously against the coming of spring.  But in his heart he was no
+longer sure; he could not summon back that serene self-surety which,
+toward the end, had shaken even the girl's certainty in herself.  He
+could no longer argue convincingly with a vision of her, as he had
+often argued with Barbara herself, that his way would be her way in the
+end.  For he had begun to realize the width of that gulf which he knew
+must seem to exist between them, if not to her then to the eyes of
+others of her world.
+
+It was his memories which gave him consolation those long nights, but
+they also gave him doubt.  Remembering the daintiness of her as she had
+come to him, the night of her party, recalling the things to which she
+had been accustomed since she had opened her eyes on the first light of
+day, he began to ask himself as every man like him has asked who ever
+loved a woman, how in any fairness he could expect her to accept the
+little which he could offer in return.  To Steve and Fat Joe, to the
+men of his gang, his confidence was that of the old, old Steve who, ten
+years before, had cocked his head at one of Allison's switch engines
+and promised gravely, "I'll hev to be gittin' one of them for myself,
+some-day."  But his heart ached.  And when that ache became so leaden
+that he couldn't endure it any longer in silence, he carried it to the
+one person in his life who was best calculated to understand.
+Diffidently he broached the subject with Miss Sarah, approaching it in
+a roundabout fashion least likely to deceive that bright-eyed little
+lady.
+
+"Garry is saving his money against the fatal day," he laughed one
+night.  "He has become a rank miser!  Joe says he goes for days at a
+time, borrowing his tobacco, and he won't play anything but penny-ante
+now, when he can be coaxed to play at all!"
+
+Miss Sarah was too kind to look at him directly that evening.
+
+"The regeneration of Garry is one of the things which had made my life
+most happy," she answered.  And then, paving the way for what she knew
+was on his mind.  "I suppose you will be surprising us yourself, one of
+these days.  And no doubt you'll be just as happily positive as Garry
+is, that your choice is the only one in the world."
+
+They were alone in the big living-room.  Caleb was still in town,
+gossiping with Hardwick Elliott.  And Steve's bruised smile clutched at
+Miss Sarah's heart.
+
+"I!" he overdid his amusement.  "I have lived too much alone, I'm
+afraid, ever to prove very attractive to any woman's fancy.  Bachelors
+are not always born; they are sometimes the habits of loneliness."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" the good woman ridiculed him.  "Why--why, if it
+weren't for a suspicion that you might have your eye on some small
+person or other, I'd drop everything and hunt one up for you, myself.
+Why, Stephen, what a remark for me to hear from you!"
+
+Both were silent for a moment.
+
+"Marriage is a mighty--expensive proposition," he commented at length,
+profoundly.
+
+"Is Garry such a plutocrat any more?"
+
+"That is not a fair illustration for us to employ," he countered, and
+Barbara Allison was not the only woman who loved his lazily final
+statements.  "Both Garry and Miriam have been taught that there are
+worse things than the hardship of making last year's limousine do for
+another season."
+
+Miss Sarah laughed at this drollery.  She was a better antagonist than
+most.  She had practiced on Caleb.
+
+"Can't one girl learn what another has been taught?" she wanted to
+know.  "Stephen, do you mean to sit there and infer that you could
+continue to _care_ for a girl who could not care for you, just for
+yourself?"
+
+His reply told her how tired he had become in trying to stem the tide
+of doubt alone.  It warned her, too, that she had gone too close, for
+he veered off sharply.  Steve persisted in generalities, but he wanted
+to talk.
+
+"I have been wondering if that is not an old-fashioned attitude," he
+said.  "Women, they tell, us, have broadened since they usurped many
+places in the business world once held by men.  They are looking mighty
+keen-eyed toward the vote now, and a share in the legislation of their
+growing affairs, or at least so they explain.  You have heard many men
+say 'business is business.'  Maybe you have watched quite a few
+charming brides walk to the altar, and wondered if that wasn't their
+sentiment, too."
+
+She chose to be suddenly vexed with him.
+
+"I do not like such humor, and of course you are joking.  I have heard
+Garrett Devereau talk in just such a strain too often to be amused by
+it.  And if you mean----"
+
+"If I meant it, I was crying the baby," stated the man coldly, and Miss
+Sarah knew that he was rebuking himself.  "I could care for such a
+girl--yes.  But I doubt if I would marry a woman who had even the
+smallest doubt.  There are too many sharp places to be smoothed over,
+without chancing that tragedy of discontent.  It's merely habit that's
+to blame again, that's all."  He cast about for a parallel.  "One does
+not miss sugar so very much from a meal, until he knows he can't have
+it.  And then--well, Miss Sarah, I have many times talked peevishly,
+for a man, because there was none to be had."
+
+"We are talking of women.  What about salt?" she inquired quickly.
+
+"That is very indispensable, too, but----"
+
+"Of the two which do you always take care shall not be missing from
+your pack, whenever you turn into the woods?"
+
+"I see where you are heading, but----"
+
+"I do not like dissemblance, Stephen," she warned.  "You know without
+the salt of love the sugar of life can grow sickeningly cloying."
+
+He did not win his argument, but defeat gave him far more happiness
+than could have come from victory.  Leaving her that night, he closed
+his hand over her delicate fingers in a clasp which left her smiling in
+wonder after he had gone.  She watched horse and rider disappear into
+the whiteness of the new winter till both were lost to her sight.
+
+"Bless the boy," she murmured then.  "Bless the boy!"  And to Caleb,
+her brother, when he came stamping in: "I surely must take a hand with
+these children.  They have been left to their own devices long enough."
+
+Caleb had recovered his good-natured view of the whole affair; he was
+given to grinning those days at her flutterings.  On more than one
+occasion he told her, none too flatteringly, that she made him think of
+an officious hen with a brood which a high rate of mortality and
+prowling night-raiders had left bereft of all save two of her hatch.
+But this particular witticism did not bother her in the least, perhaps
+because she realized how pat the comparison was.  Instead of silencing
+him she showed him the letter which she constructed some days
+later--constructed most painstakingly, the second week in December.
+She deigned to read it aloud to him, before she dispatched it on its
+journey.
+
+
+"Barbara, dear child," she wrote, "this is the appeal of a lonesome
+spinster lady who finds that winter, still only a lusty infant here, is
+the season for younger, warmer pulses.  I am very tired of Caleb's
+continued company; that is, with nothing to leaven it.  The keenest of
+epigrammarians, my dear, becomes very commonplace, you know, to ears
+too long tuned to one voice.  So I am writing you in dignified
+desperation to come to me this holiday season--Caleb is not always as
+epigrammatic as I could wish.
+
+"I am going to be positive that you will come, unless you have already
+made other plans.  And, on second thought, if you have already done so,
+I am going to fall back upon the privileged tyranny of one who once
+carried you in her arms.  You must come to me this Christmas!"
+
+
+There was another whole paragraph of rambling, repeated arguments, and
+then a full page devoted to the beauties of the hills and season.
+
+
+"The days are diamond brilliant," she wrote, "and the nights as drily
+cold and crisp as Caleb's few last cherished bottles of champagne.  We
+have a foot of snow, two feet in the ell of the house where the
+mint-bed lies, and that has afforded Caleb much peace of mind, too.
+The roots will live nicely under their warm blanket, you see--all of
+which must read frivolously to you, coming from staid Miss Sarah.  I
+can only plead that already I must be less lonely for anticipation of
+your arrival.  Are you well?  You will find new roses for your cheeks
+in this climate.  And you may telegraph your acceptance, this once, if
+you are too busy to write, although you know I deplore the lack of
+those punctillios which once made of all custom and etiquette a most
+charming thing."
+
+
+It was signed, "Yours, my dear, Sarah Hunter."
+
+There was a quaint twist to the letter S; sharp angles in the
+chirography which a newer decade of femininity might have found sadly
+lacking in a largeness of loops now indispensable as indication of
+"character."  And there was a postscript, of course.
+
+
+"Stephen O'Mara has been several times to dinner, since your departure.
+He is working very hard, but most successfully, I am sure, for he
+appears to be very happy.  He is thinner than he was, but who could
+have guessed that the boy he was would grow to be such a handsome man!
+Men with eyes like his and such voices used to break the hearts of
+susceptible maids, when I was sixteen.  Do come!  S. H."
+
+
+She read it aloud from beginning to end, nor did she falter much when
+Caleb greeted the postscript with a shout of joy.  Caleb was most
+high-spirited those days, for the line in regard to the progress of
+Steve's work was in truth an under-statement if anything, even though
+the assurance of his happiness might have been called a misconstruance
+of facts.  Caleb had almost begun to think that he had done Dexter
+Allison, his friend, an injustice.  He had begun to congratulate
+himself on having said nothing to him directly.
+
+"What do you think of it?" his sister asked pleasantly, when she had
+finished reading.  "Will it--do?"
+
+"If you mean--will it fetch her, I can only say Heaven knows!"  Indeed
+he was enjoying himself.  "You feel positive that she cares for him,
+you say? . . .  But I thought you were always inclined to believe Steve
+rather easy to look at, even as a boy?"
+
+"I was!" maintained Miss Sarah.  Her voice grew girlish.  "Do you
+remember the night you gave him my old hunting coat, Cal, and he went
+to sleep with it in his arms?"
+
+Some of the teasing note left her brother's voice.
+
+"Then why do you tell Barbara--why do you seem to infer--" he foundered
+hopelessly.
+
+"Stupid!" said Miss Sarah.  "Will she come?"
+
+"She won't!" he stated solidly.
+
+When he spoke in that tone Miss Sarah always chose to believe the
+contrary, and events in this instance proved her right.  Barbara did
+not wire.  She wrote a long letter full of little twists and turns
+which led at last to the subject which Miss Sarah had mentioned so
+parenthetically.
+
+
+"I am delighted at the prospect of getting away from town for a week,"
+she closed as she had opened her reply--"delighted at Mr. O'Mara's
+splendid success.  Last night I overheard father telling some business
+associates that he would one day be the biggest power in the north
+country, unless something happened to check him soon.  That was very
+flattering, wasn't it?  It will make you very proud, I know.  Tell Mr.
+O'Mara I wished to be recalled to him.  As I have already warned you in
+this letter, father insists on coming with me.  I think he must be a
+little tired of the city himself, for he is very restless.  And remind
+Uncle Cal that I am to have the wish-bone, or I will not come at all!"
+
+
+This reply Miss Sarah also read aloud to her brother, in a voice that
+was not quite Christian, however, for it was gloating in tone.
+
+"There!" she breathed, "and, Cal, aren't you ashamed sometimes to have
+your judgment so often refuted by a mere woman?"
+
+Caleb had been reading in the Morrison Standard that the East Coast
+Company had made unbelievable strides in its work, in spite of many
+conspiring hard-luck circumstances; he was frowning over that oddly
+veiled compliment of Allison's, which his daughter had so innocently
+repeated, but he was glad to hear that Dexter, too, planned to run up
+for the year-end.  He was a bit bored himself.  Now he grinned over
+another thought.
+
+"She fails to mention whether she ever noticed the color of his eyes,"
+he choked a little, "or--or the heart-breaking quality of his voice!
+Maybe she hasn't noticed 'em yet herself, eh?"
+
+Miss Sarah scorned to answer.  She went upstairs to her desk and she
+wrote two letters that night, before she retired.  One went back to
+Barbara.  The other had not so far to travel, but it was longer in
+reaching its destination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
+
+The world was snow-bound--all that small world which lay between the
+hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile.  For two days it had been snowing,
+great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making
+one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under
+the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling
+the elements.  For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved
+but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before
+Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather
+cleared.
+
+Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the
+afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she
+would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he
+was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself,
+upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the
+holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the
+snow.  It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of
+supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over
+the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch.
+Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the
+seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so
+stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind.  Fallon was driving;
+Shayne was beating his arms across his chest.  And the second team was
+fagged and caked with frozen lather.  Big Louie had been breaking trail
+for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from
+spent--not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their
+heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables.  Big Louie loved horses
+as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world.  Sober he fed them
+bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have
+understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who
+might chance to maltreat them.  That was the reason Steve had made Big
+Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.
+
+From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house
+door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew
+that they were too weary to unload that night.  And he was still there
+at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead,
+hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came
+straight toward his own shack.  He opened the door and bade them enter
+before they had had a chance to knock.  The swagger in the shoulders of
+two of them told him what to expect.  Big Louie was only clumsy, as
+usual.
+
+"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always
+addressed him.  His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was
+in part a question, in no wise a welcome.  "Well?" he asked.
+
+Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no
+hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.
+
+"We've come for our time," he growled.
+
+Steve nodded gravely.
+
+"I see," he murmured.  "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."
+
+They were the satellites of Harrigan.  Because of that he had kept them
+all where his eyes could find them at times.  And even though their
+arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he
+listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.
+
+"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps."  Fallon should not
+have gloated.  "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut.  We're
+going back to the river."
+
+"I see," again observed Steve.  "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as
+long as you want to work."
+
+Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.
+
+"We want our time," Fallon reiterated.  "This is going to be a man's
+year on the river!"
+
+"You, also?" Steve inquired of Shayne.
+
+That worthy gloated too.
+
+"Yes, me also," he came back, "an' a hundred others, before the ice
+goes out."
+
+Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was
+with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort.
+
+"I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man.  "I need
+you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know.  You are
+worth three a day to me.  Do you care to think it over?"
+
+Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold.
+They were that now.  He started to turn toward the window for a look at
+the stables, and then thought better of it.  Resolutely, for him, he
+shook his head.
+
+"I am done--me," he muttered.  "I work for no company that will leave
+honest men to starve."
+
+It was hopeless from the start, yet Steve tried again.
+
+"I can promise you work as long as you are able to hold a rein," he
+offered, but he moved nearer the door while he was speaking.  "That is
+all I can promise."
+
+Perhaps Fallon believed that Big Louie was weakening; perhaps he felt
+that the situation was too highly dramatic to be wasted, for he made a
+wide flourish with one hand.
+
+"We want our time, and we want it now," he threatened.  "We're going to
+show you who bosses this river, before we're done with you!"
+
+Fallon shouldn't have gloated; he shouldn't have threatened.  And
+Shayne shouldn't have smiled.  Steve had slipped the latch loose.  Now
+he swung open the door.
+
+"Call for your time at the Morrison office," he said evenly, "and if
+you're going--why, go!"
+
+By collar and belt he swung him back and drove him sprawling into a
+drift.
+
+"Are you in a hurry, too, Shayne?" he asked pleasantly, and Shayne
+buried his head beside Fallon's in the snow.  Then Steve closed the
+door carefully and turned again to Big Louie.
+
+"Louie," he said, "I make it a rule to urge no man who does not wish to
+stay.  If it needs persuasion to keep you, I do not want you here.  But
+you are running with the wrong crowd, Louie; you'll learn it
+someday--but someday may be too late."
+
+The big, dreamy-eyed man was hardly listening, but he gestured toward
+the door.  And Steve treated his departure kindly, as he had always
+treated his presence.  Outside where Shayne and Fallon had picked
+themselves up, Big Louie hesitated and fumbled in his pocket with a
+cold-cramped hand.  He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to
+him, before he went down the hill.  There are many men like Big Louie
+who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects.
+Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss
+Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty,
+Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted
+trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on
+their feet.  Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of
+the stables.  There were words between them, for Steve saw the huge
+man's arm lift to strike Shayne to the ground, and then drop harmlessly
+back to his side.  And Steve knew what that bit of pantomime meant.
+Big Louie had been to bid his team good-bye.  There was a smudge of
+brown sugar across his coat, though the watcher was too far away to see
+that.  But he knew that Big Louie had been crying, knew that Shayne had
+smiled.  It was the second time that Shayne had smiled that
+evening--his second bad mistake.  Long after they had disappeared into
+the north toward the Reserve Company's camps, Steve wondered that it
+had not cost him his life.
+
+Miss Sarah's note which had been almost a week on the way was very
+primly correct, but the inevitable postscript which under-ran it
+sounded a more intimate note.
+
+"We are not excessively formal as a rule, Stephen," she wrote, "so a
+dinner jacket will be adequate.  As I am expecting two other guests
+besides your friends, Mr. Morgan and Garrett Devereau, I must ask you
+to let no business matters interfere with your promptness."
+
+Steve dared not let himself wonder who those other guests would prove
+to be, Miriam Burrell, he knew, had already written Garry that this was
+to be the saddest Christmas, and the merriest, that she had ever known,
+giving as respective reasons her inability to be with him, and the fact
+that she was so entirely his.  Because he would not let himself hope
+this time he was not disappointed, or at least so he told himself, when
+he found only Dexter Allison with Caleb, the next afternoon near six.
+And on a sudden thought his eyes went roving around the room then,
+looking for Archibald Wickersham; but Miss Sarah gave him no time for a
+protracted scrutiny.
+
+"Your room is ready, Stephen," she told him, and steered him toward the
+stairs.  "You have an hour in which to dress--and you know already that
+I am old-maidenishly strict."
+
+Surely Archibald Wickersham was the other guest whom they were
+expecting.  Allison's very presence argued that.  Yet Steve's nose
+played him a startling trick as he mounted upward.  He could have sworn
+that he smelled that faint perfume which always made him remember, now,
+his first letter from her; had he not been afraid to hope he would have
+been positive that there was a flurry of skirts retreating above him.
+But he knew that she could not have come.  He knew it!  And then,
+three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again
+to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for
+him to appear.  In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her
+slenderness--made her appear even smaller than she was--she gave him an
+elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at him her
+laughter.
+
+"Merry Christmas, Sir Galahad," she called.
+
+Just as he had paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen
+O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him.
+It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in
+conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they
+had been on that remoter day.  But Steve did not even see her glowing
+face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison
+either, who watching Steve's eyes, had suddenly ceased to smile.  Caleb
+knew what his sister's thoughts were, however, for he was recalling
+that black velvet suit with silver buttons himself.  While Steve and
+Barbara were shaking hands he gained her ear in whispered admiration.
+
+"Sarah," he commented, "Sarah, you are clever!"
+
+Miss Sarah was on the point of taking Dexter Allison's arm to lead the
+way to table.  Her reply was tuned to Caleb's ear alone.
+
+"She had thought of him in terms of blue flannel and corduroy long
+enough," she said.  "If you please, Dexter--Stephen, do you and Barbara
+want any dinner?"
+
+Those two were still shaking hands.  Steve, who was only dimly aware of
+the fact that Garry and Fat Joe had arrived, the latter guilty of his
+first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at
+Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a
+word she spoke.  Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.
+
+"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him.  "Am I so
+pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"
+
+But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.
+
+"I thought you looked like--shall I tell you what I thought?"
+
+"Most certainly," she was forced to insist.  "Wasn't it a bald enough
+invitation for a pretty speech?"
+
+"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve
+leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe
+leaned over and nudged Garry.
+
+"What'd I tell you?" he demanded.  "What'd I tell you?  Say, ain't he
+working well to-night?"
+
+But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such
+as he had decried in Garry.  For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's
+phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy,
+until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in
+the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by
+the clothes he wore.  The very light in his eyes, whenever she
+contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind
+his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself
+to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen
+it.  More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the
+general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon
+O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was
+his custom when deeply perplexed.  Complications scarcely ever troubled
+Dexter Allison.  He was beginning to awake to one now which already
+worried him more than he cared to admit.
+
+There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over.  She
+ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and
+skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way.  And Steve, who had
+changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a
+crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white
+one twisted about her throat.  With much approval Miss Sarah noted,
+while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to
+his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some
+future date.  Caleb had very pronounced views regarding the lack of
+vanity in men's dress.  But for the time being she was content to go
+upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.
+
+The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence.
+They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the
+higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white,
+before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.
+
+"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.
+
+She needed no explanation of his mood.  To a woman there is no subtler
+flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability.  He
+talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was
+vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The
+work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the
+severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night.
+Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of
+himself--that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction
+that she was beyond his reach.
+
+It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about
+Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and
+a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.
+
+"It is too bad," he said slowly.  "I have been sorrier for him myself,
+since his going, than I've been over anything for years.  I do not know
+just why, but I'm afraid for him.  The others--"  He stopped there,
+catching himself before he had said too much.  "I could always tell Big
+Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of
+doubt that he would stick to my orders.  But that is the trouble with
+his kind.  Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend
+upon the ideas which other men supply him.  And there is no guarantee
+whether they will be good or bad ideas."
+
+From the first he talked fitfully that night.  On other occasions she
+had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to
+another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back
+again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread
+of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and
+delightful wisdoms to her ears.  But to-night his grave-voiced
+divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.
+
+"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he
+had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, should be
+the one to be trusted.  "He was never able to go fifty rods into the
+brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was
+born in these hills, at that."
+
+Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring,
+before she understood quite what he meant.  But he abandoned that
+trend, freakishly, the very next moment.
+
+"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered.  "To a man who has come
+into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all
+safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the
+flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest
+thing there is.  He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the
+land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars.  But the other
+one--the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many
+miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that
+many in the morning--why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until
+night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected
+for a camp-fire."
+
+Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his
+spirit--and she wanted him to go on.
+
+"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost."  Her hands
+were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with
+his stride.  "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."
+
+It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his
+smile was absent-minded.
+
+"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating
+it for a time.  "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who
+loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up.  Big Louie was that way.
+He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad
+with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue.  He had been running in
+a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see
+that we were friends.  He'd been listening to the night noises, you
+see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire,
+until his brain was no longer any use to him."
+
+"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was
+waiting for her to speak.  Yet his answer persisted in adding to that
+word-image which his mind was molding.
+
+"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything
+is following you!"  He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was
+talking at himself.  "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and
+the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear.  The wise man
+stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself
+collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by
+exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself.  And he sleeps if
+he can.  Anyhow he lies quiet and rests.  And when morning comes he
+uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play
+him false.  He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the
+sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by
+the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."
+
+This time the girl did not interrupt him.  She was watching his face.
+
+"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one
+little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused.  "When a man's
+instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's
+afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle
+around before it gets too dark to search for fuel.  But at that it
+isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again.
+It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't shine; sometimes
+day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too
+strongly.  Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been
+times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some
+object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight."  He stopped short
+and faced her.  "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would
+try hard to discipline yourself.  You would never go rushing blindly
+into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity
+down.  Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him.  And--and I
+have always been able to find my way myself."
+
+She knew now toward what point he had been talking.  Mentally he had
+been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide
+circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was
+hurting her, even while it was making her happy.  He had taken the
+example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the
+girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than
+was hers.
+
+"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly.  "If ever I am
+lost I--I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes
+to the fore."
+
+She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten
+a thong slipping from one webbed foot.  Below them stretched a plain of
+shimmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber.
+Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily;
+somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a
+sense of the mystery of his wilderness--its friendship for those who
+love it--its implacable enmity for those who do not understand.  And he
+looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.
+
+"It is wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out
+both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well.  "Now
+I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its
+spell."
+
+"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly
+again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a
+speech.
+
+"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to
+say in reply.
+
+But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if
+throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome.  He laughed aloud,
+and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was
+more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again.  But his attack
+no longer made her fear herself.
+
+"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go
+in that night.  "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could
+stand in the way.  But that is the reason I know I do not care."
+
+She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake
+it off.  There was doubt in his answer now.
+
+"Because I am not----"  But he could not force himself to ask it.
+
+"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care
+who marries you."
+
+She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why.  Pity is a
+very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.
+
+"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were
+dogged.  "Loving me more than you know."
+
+There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at
+Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye.  Other long
+tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his attitude
+remained much the same.  Whimsically at times he shared his innermost
+thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness
+in the telling that made it hard for her to listen.  Barbara least of
+all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week
+had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.
+
+"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to
+his sister's attention.  "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him
+this trip that he hasn't a chance."
+
+"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.
+
+And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss
+Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to
+view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her
+again.
+
+"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her.  "Proxy
+bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly
+interested."
+
+At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.
+
+"I will," she promised meekly.  And then, wide eyes vague with fear:
+"Aunt Sarah, I--I'm not sure that I want to be--married at all!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the
+train.  "You will be back in the spring?"
+
+It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.
+
+"I think so," she faltered in return.  "I mean to come and see the
+completion of your work, if father will let me."  She knew a moment of
+confusion.  "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the
+hills."
+
+Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications
+were small.  The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of
+blue flannel and corduroy.  But that was not the most disturbingly
+vivid memory which she carried away with her.
+
+"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling
+out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so
+reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch
+engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.
+
+She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.
+
+She did not want to go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SETTING THE STAGE
+
+There are two interviews which should be mentioned here, if for no
+other reason then merely because they were both so entirely the outcome
+of Miss Sarah's Christmas party.  Neither of them were long; the last
+one which took place between Wickersham and the girl he was to marry
+was the briefer of the two.  But her prettily serious argument that the
+first of May was too early a date for their wedding, in view of the
+work which he had to do and her own state of unpreparedness, left him
+so white of face that she felt guiltily sorry for him for many days to
+follow--felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had
+established that reprieve.  The other interview was longer, and took
+place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald
+Wickersham.
+
+Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his
+daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon
+his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night
+of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen
+O'Mara's face.
+
+Allison had never professed a knowledge of women.  Like her mother,
+Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often
+taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve.  Partly
+because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had
+taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice
+neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham.  The two
+had grown up from childhood together--Barbara and the man whom she was
+engaged to marry--and more than once her father had assured himself
+that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings
+to make for safety in the long run.
+
+His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle
+course of non-interference.  And he had never liked the boy; never
+learned to like the man he had grown to be.  Underneath Dexter
+Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would
+have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of
+spleen.  Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy--little
+rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap--without
+beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and
+twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months.  He
+believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram
+to the contrary.  He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of
+the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of
+rank and a thing of ranker repute.  But after his first shock at the
+realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself
+that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised
+that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the
+title in full.
+
+Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach.  Allison had
+taken pains to ascertain that.  But beyond that he did not let himself
+go; he neither allowed himself to wonder at, nor regret, her choice.
+He was too honest to decry in another much which he knew would not
+measure up to Golden Rule standards in himself.  And he had a really
+great man's unshakable faith in his own flesh and blood.
+
+Yet he had been troubled more than a little since his Christmas trip to
+Morrison.  When he turned a page he turned it for all time, but in the
+last day or two he had caught himself surrepticiously trying to steal a
+glance at some which had only just rustled into place.  Dexter Allison
+had left brilliant men of cross-examination panting impotently at the
+barrenness of their efforts; he had known it and enjoyed it to the
+full.  But he knew, too, that he could never face, jauntily or
+otherwise, one reproach in the dusky eyes of the girl with whom he had
+more than once played truant, to breakfast with Caleb and Miss Sarah.
+And he was facing that thought, nearer to panic than he had ever been
+before, the night before New Year's, when Wickersham was announced at
+nine.  He was thinking of Barbara's mother when he beckoned his guest
+to a chair, shook his head over his red cheeks, and offered a cigar.
+
+"Devilish cold weather," he grunted, none too graciously, for he had
+not wanted to be disturbed just then.
+
+The younger man admitted that it was.  His mind, plainly, was not upon
+the weather, but he found difficulty in introducing a topic of his own
+choosing.  Outspokenness had never been one of Archie Wickersham's
+boldest characteristics, so Allison assisted him now.  Allison liked a
+man to be outspoken.
+
+"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it.  What's on your mind?"
+
+There are times when hatred will betray 'most any man.  Hatred now led
+Wickersham to speak not wisely but with venom.
+
+"I want you to refuse to renew your name on the East Coast notes," he
+said.  "They are due on the second."
+
+Few men had ever said "I want you to" to Dexter Allison and, as he put
+it, "gotten away with it to any great extent."  And of all nights this
+one in particular was the least likely to prove propitious for such an
+attempt.  That was Wickersham's oversight.
+
+"So!" said Dexter, "so!  Well, now for your reason."
+
+Wickersham had not learned until after Barbara's departure that she was
+spending the holidays in Morrison, for he had himself expected to be
+away.  And it is only fair to the girl to say that she had honestly
+forgotten to apprise him of her plan, in her real excitement at going.
+But finding it out for himself had not made the fact any pleasanter to
+Wickersham.
+
+"It should be clear enough without explanation," he enunciated each
+word nicely, "if you want that road they are building."
+
+Allison glanced up, surprised at the tone employed.
+
+"Meaning of course I do," he mused.  "And yet--and yet, I don't know!"
+
+Fear burned in the tall, thin man's eyes that night--fear that made his
+hatred for the absent man who was teaching him fear anything but a
+pretty thing to watch.
+
+"I've tried to buy off their men."  He was holding himself with an
+effort that made him tremble.  "I've held up their supplies on every
+track that we control, but they've had the luck with them.  They've
+made up lost time by working day and night.  I've----"
+
+"You've set a drunken fool to steal his plans," drawled the other with
+deadly sarcasm, "like a second-rate, one-night-stand villain.  Don't
+forget to mention that, too!"
+
+In many ways it resembled an earlier conference which they had shared
+together; in many points it differed from it.  For if Allison had
+goaded the other man, on that former occasion, largely from a malicious
+delight in stirring him to verbal violence, such a thought was farthest
+from his mind now.  Allison was talking from a new angle.  If a turned
+page was a turned page to him, at least his memory was good.  His
+lounging body shifted a little.
+
+"Archie, do you remember what I told you about that woods-rat, as you
+called him once?  Did I tell you that he would fight?  Well, listen and
+listen closely while I repeat it for you.  He hasn't even warmed to it
+yet!"
+
+Wickersham went yellow at that, but his icy self-control held firm.  He
+did not break into vituperation this night; he smiled, though his voice
+was only a whisper.
+
+"Men have dropped out of sight before now, in those woods," he husked.
+"I'll win, or I'll see that he lies and rots in one of his own
+sink-holes."
+
+A big voice is a wonderful weapon at times.  Allison's booming bass
+made Wickersham's threat seem only mean and hollow when the heavy man
+leaped to his feet and shook a finger under that high-bridged nose.
+
+"No you won't!" he snapped.  "No you won't!  And if I didn't know,
+after hearing you talk, that you haven't stuff enough in you to be
+dangerous, I'd fix you so you'd be in no condition to bushwhack anybody
+for the next six months.  I'm in a bad mood to-night.  Drop out of
+sight, eh?  You'll play this fair--fair at least as I see it by my
+standards, and they are better standards than yours.  You've come
+dictating to me, ordering me to slip a knife into their backs.  Are you
+that kind of a sneak?  Did you think I was?  Now listen again, and
+listen well, for I mean what I say!
+
+"I want that railroad, if the man who is building it is too weak to
+keep me from taking it away from him.  But if I don't get it on such a
+basis, I'll know that there is a man at the head of it who is big
+enough to take care of my share of it.  Have you got that?  Very well.
+And now go back to your melodrama, if you want to.  Steal his men, if
+he will let you; fight him every inch of his construction--that is your
+job--and I'll still insist that it is his fault if he is tardy on the
+first of May.  But it's you and O'Mara from now on, Archie.  I'll be a
+spectator now!  And, by Gad, don't you ever come near me again with a
+request that I . . . don't you ever let me hear you threaten that
+you----"
+
+Allison's face was suffused before he finished, and Wickersham,
+astounded past utterance, slid from his chair away from that
+flourishing hand which had become a fist.  It was no scene to take
+place between a man and his prospective son-in-law.  Realizing that
+Allison tried to laugh, deprecatingly, at his temper.
+
+"Go out and get him, Archie," he invited.  "I'll be watching, don't
+doubt that.  And I know how much you want to win.  It's a bigger stake
+than most folks realize!"
+
+Like Barbara he tried to make his side of the interview kindly at the
+end, but he sent the other man away wondering whether he had understood
+that last remark, and afraid to think that he had.  And two other
+things Allison had done.  For once he had started to pay hush money to
+his conscience.  Once and for all, like Fat Joe, he had registered at
+last a refusal to interfere in any way that might spoil the climax of
+the "big show" for which Fate or Chance or Destiny, or whatever men may
+call it, was setting the stage, with an unhurried calm that contrasted,
+ironically, with the mad haste of her actors.
+
+But he watched, as he had promised he would.  The same day that more
+than half of O'Mara's men went on strike and deserted to the Reserve
+Company's payroll, the news reached him that a trainload of laborers
+had been shot in to take their places--those very types of laborers
+which Steve himself had warned Elliott would not last an hour, in the
+event of trouble.  For a week Allison wondered that there was no clash
+between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone
+and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end
+of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but
+just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could damn a
+man merely by bidding him good-morning.
+
+"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe
+would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the
+night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have
+learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham
+was missing no chances.
+
+"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told
+Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip.  "They are turning
+their attention to their float dams, now!"
+
+And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch
+he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on
+strike.
+
+With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pass on to his
+daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is,
+all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time,
+and not to the opposition which he was meeting.  Her excitement was a
+bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a
+war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into
+position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.
+
+Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time
+destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful
+intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness.  She saw
+less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs
+were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend
+most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who
+appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship.  Always she insisted
+that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers
+with both of them, in anticipation of their journey north, against the
+first of May.  But there was one bit of news which her father had not
+been able to pass on to her.  For Dexter Allison had had no way of
+learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had
+finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and
+forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.
+
+It was the bitterest January that the hill country had known in twenty
+years; but mile by mile that month the twin lines of steel crept
+steadily into the north under the urgings of Garry's smooth voice.  The
+snowfall for February broke all records for half that period; but
+Steve, with his handful of men at Thirty-Mile, put his piling down.
+And then it rained--it rained until small brooks ran torrents and the
+river tumbled white and thunderous its entire length.
+
+The snow went off the last of March that spring and the gorges could
+not carry away the water.  The sun turned summer hot; it burned the
+higher ridges dry while the valleys still lay hidden in flood.  It was
+August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara
+stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at
+Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.
+
+There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the
+strain they had been under.  They were few, they were unshaven and
+dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had
+once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent
+combat.  Fat Joe was no longer plump.  Steve was worn down to actual
+thinness.  And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the
+chief from their ranks that Sunday.
+
+The huge timbers had dropped into place like bits of jig-sawed puzzle.
+At three in the afternoon, too tired both in body and soul for elation,
+Steve watched them drive home the last spike and heard their hoarse
+effort at a cheer.  He had turned to start toward his shack, not like a
+man who knows that the end of a well-nigh hopeless task is in sight,
+but like a beaten man.  The first of May meant more to Steve than any
+clause of the East Coast Company's contract could convey.  He had not
+had even one letter since he put her upon her train.  Wickersham's
+appearance on horseback, at the head of the valley, picking his way
+around the flooded meadow, halted him in his heavy-footed climb.  A
+whistle shrilled, far to the south of them, down the completed track.
+And then, after ten years and more, they were face to face again.
+
+"That bridge will have to go down!"  Wickersham was breathing hard, for
+all that he had been riding.  "I'm going through with my drive to-day!"
+
+He had dismounted.  Steve smiled at him.
+
+"You're a whole week previous, Wickersham," he said, wearily.  "I'll be
+signaling for your first load of logs in less than sixty hours."
+
+Archibald Wickersham wished that he could have believed it impossible,
+for it would have given him courage and lent conviction to his stand.
+But he knew just how fast those few remaining miles of open roadbed
+would be spanned.  His eyes were furtive; there was no body to his
+voice.
+
+"My men are on the banks," he blustered.  "My first head of logs has
+started down.  It's too late to argue now--too late for your promises
+that none but fools ever believed!"  The sure irrevocability of what he
+was saying blanched his cheeks.  "I cannot wait for a miracle to be
+performed.  My timber must come out on this flood."
+
+Stephen O'Mara had whipped him once, but men had interfered.  This day
+Chance or Destiny or Fate--whatever you may choose to call it--saved
+him from destruction.  The lean and weary man who had not been out of
+his clothes for three days and three nights, save for a plunge in the
+icy river, had taken his first step forward, when the whistle screamed
+a nearer warning.
+
+She had told him that she would come to see the finish of his race, but
+he had long since stopped believing that.  And now when she stood and
+waved her hand at him from the brass-railed observation platform of
+Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the
+grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only
+stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.
+
+The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway.
+Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder.  And Wickersham,
+who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them,
+stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit.  Wickersham was
+smiling; Wickersham was safe again.  For Fate or Chance or Destiny who
+had been setting the stage was bringing on her principals.  She would
+brook no _ad lib_ now.
+
+A low mutter in the north became an ominous murmur while Steve was
+following slowly in Wickersham's steps, and he realized what it meant.
+He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to
+listen, too.  Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his
+own inferiority which he could never understand.  And a minute later,
+when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure
+with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt
+about her ankles and laughingly refused his assistance, and jumped to
+the ground unaided.  She was far too excited to know what she was
+doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act
+spelled much to him.  His hands were grimy, his face stubbly and
+streaked with sweat and mud, and he had been months alone with his
+too-sensitive spirit.
+
+"You should not be here," was all he said to her.  "This is no place
+for you."
+
+He shook hands with the men, mechanically--Allison quizzical, Elliott
+concerned.  He went back to his bridge.  The water had come up a half
+foot in the last few minutes some one--Fat Joe, perhaps--told him; it
+was sucking greedily at the piles.  And in the north the ominous murmur
+had become a rhythmic roar.
+
+Wickersham's men were driving the river.  They were singing "Harrigan,
+That's Me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
+
+It is said that men remember many things when death is imminent; and
+for days and days something had been dying hard in Stephen O'Mara's
+breast.  His step was slow that afternoon when he drew apart to take up
+his position alone upon a bit of higher ground, his shoulders heavy and
+drooping; yet his brain was feverishly active.  Recollection of many
+long gone days--thoughts of many things--came darting to his mind; but
+they were not thoughts of desperate, last-minute expedients which might
+stave off this present crisis.  For if he had believed that force alone
+would win for him; if he had had faith that mere numbers could save his
+construction, he would not have left Garry Devereau with his scores of
+laborers, busy five miles to the south.  Steve was not thinking of his
+construction now; it had become a dim and remote consideration.  It had
+lost its importance in his scheme of things.
+
+They came slowly at first--Wickersham's logs--thudding heavily, one by
+one, into the underpinnings of the bridge, sliding free or lodging
+cross-current as the case might be; then in a thicker and thicker tide
+that ground and up-ended and settled with the weight of the
+coffee-colored flood behind it.  In the beginning the handful of men
+who had put those timbers into place set themselves, doggedly, to save
+their completed structure, until the man who had worked with them,
+shoulder to shoulder, through the night called them with a nod back to
+the bank.  Obediently then they collected in a small knot behind him,
+murmurous, gutterally grumbling; waiting his further word they squatted
+on their haunches, staring hungrily at their chief who stood in seeming
+surrender, head bowed before them.
+
+The coming of Wickersham's men was not a thing of degrees.  They poured
+into view through the brush fringe at the north edge of the marsh and
+halted, but only for an instant.
+
+"Who is your friend at the time when you need a friend?----Harrigan,
+that's me!"
+
+The maudlin menace of that chorus rocketed from ridge to ridge.  Then,
+a tight-ranked mass of humanity, they had formed and were sweeping
+forward again, stepping out to the beat of the ragtime which was their
+marching hymn.  And still the man who stood apart from the rest gave no
+sign that he was aware of their approach.  Once he did straighten; when
+separate faces began to be distinguishable in that reeling mob he
+turned and gazed, emptily, toward the group a few yards
+away--Wickersham putty-skinned before this storm which he had brewed;
+Allison himself pale; and the girl whose eyes were staring back at him
+with no clear understanding in their depths.  He made no move toward
+action, not even when the singing pack surged up and spread out before
+him, until a jostling crescent, straggling at the points, half
+encircled him and swallowed up as well the little knot behind which had
+come bristling to its feet.  Their onslaught had seemed an irresistible
+thing, bent upon instant violence; and yet little by little their
+syncopated defiance died away until they, too, were staring uncertainly
+at that worn and mud-stained figure which seemed to hang its head.  His
+very inertia robbed them of their impetus.
+
+"Harrigan, that's me!" they faltered now, and there came a lull in the
+valley at Thirty-Mile, broken only by heavy breathing and the crunch of
+logs jamming beneath the bridge, and the ugly swirl of backed-up water.
+It held quiet while Steve looked up, mildly, and scanned the ring in
+front of him and nodded in recognition to a sullen few; then oaths
+broke that silence, and a command for room to pass.  An upheaval
+disrupted the crescent's centre.  Steve saw Big Louie's face high above
+the heads of his shorter companions; he watched him plow heavily
+forward.  Shayne he glimpsed, automatically, and Fallon, faithful
+henchmen.  And then Harrigan stood forth.
+
+Long arms dangling, palms back, almost to his knees, that red-headed
+one minced forward on the balls of his feet.  Harrigan was redeeming a
+promise many weeks overdue.  It was spring, and Harrigan had come back!
+
+"I'm here," he spoke to that bowed head, "if you are afther carin' to
+welcome me!"
+
+"I've been expecting you, Harrigan."
+
+Again that startling mildness.
+
+There is little wonder that it deceived the riverman.  Listening,
+watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie
+Wickersham's dared flash in triumph.  And Harrigan's went savagely
+exultant.
+
+"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted.  "Is it so difficult you
+find it now to speak up so I can hear?"
+
+"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"
+
+Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled
+at what Steve took in silence.
+
+"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade
+ended.  "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started
+at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys.  You've made a gr-reat
+success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should
+have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime.  For when you aimed to
+turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something
+too big for you to finish.  I'm taking it off your hands, now.  Can't
+you even talk back like a man?"
+
+There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated
+with an irrelevance strange even to himself--and that reference to her
+surely was not needed!  Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind
+Twin-face; people should be more careful whore they dropped matches in
+an unseasonably hot spring like this--and Harrigan's sneer for the boy
+who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the
+picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly
+squandered viciousness now.  Past and present they trouped before him,
+thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet
+long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he
+was going to answer it.  He didn't have to debate that, and
+deliberation only gave him the keener joy of anticipation.
+
+All his life opposition had been a familiar of his.  Days of hunger he
+had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so
+black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear.
+But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.
+
+Circumstance had been his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought
+to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end
+Custom was laughing in his face.  Beside those intangible antagonists
+which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and
+swaggering and cheap.  But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was
+an entity--a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's
+bitter intoleration.
+
+Steve had stopped thinking; he had had too much of thought.  Suddenly
+that question which had been a riddle to him was a riddle no longer.
+He had the answer, and could see himself as others no doubt had seen
+him--a fool who had believed in the supremacy of fineness; a boy who
+had reached for the moon.  But it left the issue clearer now.  He, too,
+was a riverman; the degree was different, that was all.  And rivermen
+did not vex their brains with abstract problems; they fought with their
+hands.  His bowed head came back then, and the mass of men, catching
+sight of the mad, glad light that flared in his eyes, rolled back to
+give them room.  He laughed at Harrigan.  He was laughing at himself.
+They heard and marveled at the pleasantry of his answer.
+
+"Maybe you are right, Harrigan," he said.  "You may be--I do not know.
+I have started big things and left them unfinished.  But you are wrong
+for the rest of it, Harrigan, for I am going--to--finish--you!"
+
+Men tell of that encounter now; it is already epic on the river.  One
+may listen to its details, and he chance into any of a half dozen
+places:--Mulcahy's, Laduc's, or Whitted's that once was Brown's.  And
+always one will hear different details, but always one accord of
+verdict.  They will tell you that no man ever went through worse
+vengeance and stayed a living man.
+
+For like a blast of wrath O'Mara lifted and struck him.  Harrigan's
+hands had not left his hips before he met the ground, and he was back
+on his feet like a bounding ball only to go down again before the
+smashing impact of those blows.  Caution he tried to use in rising and
+they searched out his face, his chin, and drove him hither and yon.
+Open fighting was not the river style of fighting and he closed this
+time and wrapped his gorilla arms about this fury who fought with
+lightning strokes to keep him off.  His greater weight o'erbore them
+both; he broke away and his hob-nailed boots, lashing out, bit the
+flesh of O'Mara's temple--they tore the turf where his face had been.
+
+There was madness in Harrigan's hideous roarings of hate, madness in
+his blind rushes; but his bull-strength availed at first.  He weathered
+destruction and managed to close again.  This time the lighter man was
+ready for the scuff of those armed boots; he twisted and covered his
+face with his shoulder, and only his shirt ripped open to let blood
+stream from the rent.  On their feet they rocked--to their knees!
+Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away.  And always
+Harrigan came back and found him, blindly.  Once his hairy hands
+searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of
+fingers tearing at his eye-sockets.  Dropping he escaped that gouging
+grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.
+
+Harrigan squandered his strength in drunken rushes, his breath in
+screams of hate.  He tore forward when the other had already stepped
+aside, and Steve, shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets
+into his eyes, met him returning.  There came a time when Harrigan's
+enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had
+to stand up and fight.  And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which
+made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set
+himself to chop his face to pieces.  Flail-like blows he side-stepped,
+and whipped to the other's eyes.  That open guard he feinted wider and
+laid flesh open raw.  Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were
+puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles.
+He could only sob, great groaning gasps for breath--and then he
+couldn't see!
+
+And now Steve was laughing aloud.  He knew that _she_ was watching;
+knew what loathing was in her eyes.  And he--he was a riverman!
+Sobbing himself for air, dripping crimson from forehead and shoulder,
+he set himself and swung from the waist.  Like a pole-axed ox, Harrigan
+stopped as he was lurching in.  His mouth sagged; his eyes flew wide in
+a fixed and stupid stare.  Then his legs folded under him and he swayed
+limply down.  But that blast of wrath would not let him lie!  It raised
+him and beat him down again; raised him and beat him down.  By his
+throat Steve swung him up--by throat and buckled belt.  High over his
+head he swung that bulk and lashed forward from his heels.  And
+Harrigan went back to his panting followers; twisting and spinning, his
+body swept Shayne and Fallon to the ground.
+
+Allison had not stirred, nor putty-faced Wickersham, nor the girl who
+stood with hands at breasts.  And now toward them Stephen O'Mara
+wheeled.  His legs would fail him, and he steadied them; blood blinded
+him, and he wiped it away.  Swaying giddily, he managed, somehow, a
+smile.
+
+"Wickersham, I have met the man whom you hired to fight for you," he
+called clearly, "and he has earned his wage!  Are you man enough to
+step forward now and fight for yourself?"
+
+Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield
+his face.  Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded
+him he put the girl between him and his fear.  And then weakness seized
+upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her--to the unspeakable
+horror in her eyes.
+
+"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"
+
+He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands
+as those.  Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his
+sight.  Fat Joe caught him as he fell.
+
+Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him
+up the hill.  Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the
+others he lay ignored.  It was a mob without a leader until, as is the
+way in all crises, a new leader arose.  Big Louie, stolid face no
+longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the
+unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.
+
+"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed.  "That bridge--she still
+is hold!"
+
+Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment
+ever came.  And Elliott and Allison watched now.  They were sheep no
+longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning.  Like wolves they
+followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam.  Wickersham's men
+were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold!  And
+while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound,
+blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing,
+and walked blindly into the brush.
+
+The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and
+cry for her.  It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on
+the hillside that she was missing.  And when men had been beating the
+woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no
+word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep
+his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged.  At daybreak Joe
+waked him and told him Barbara was lost.  They tried to argue with him,
+for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body
+seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him
+that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already
+found her, perhaps.  But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he
+threw off the hands that tried to detain him.  And it was Steve who
+found her, as he had known it would he, just before a second night of
+dread was closing in upon her.
+
+In circles of ever increasing radius he traveled at a foxtrot which
+thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon;
+but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled
+like a wild thing before him.  Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to
+the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up
+with her.  She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her
+loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to her feet.
+
+"Please," she whimpered, "Oh, please----"
+
+Yet when he spoke her name her head leaped back and she recognized him
+instantly.
+
+"I tried to wait," she chattered with all the voice she had left.  "I
+tried to sit still until someone came for me, but I thought I knew the
+way.  I tried not to listen to the noises; I remembered about the
+stars; and I knew I shouldn't run.  But I thought you were--I thought
+you were----"
+
+Remembered terror choked her.  Consciousness slipped away.
+
+By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he
+carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the
+crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight,
+though in the wrong direction.  But it was long after dark when the
+river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and glassy in the
+deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles.  A
+grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to
+him; and Steve had to travel slowly.  His head was spinning from
+fatigue and the throb of the jagged tear above his temple when the log
+building, streaked white with clay chinking, loomed up ahead, and yet
+involuntarily he stopped there a moment with his burden.
+
+He had pictured, many times, a night when he would bring her there,
+with both of them watching the moon in the rapids and listening to the
+waves lipping the banks.  This was not that night; that night would
+never be.  But the rebellion and bitterness was gone from his heart.
+After he had removed her wet shoes and stockings and brush-whipped suit
+and sheer black blouse, and she slept the sleep of exhaustion into
+which she had slipped from unconsciousness without even opening her
+eyes, he built a fire and sat before it until morning came.  And when
+it dawned and she waked dazedly while he was preparing breakfast, he
+had finished reconstructing many things.
+
+Her eyes went from wall to wall, frightened still and questioning at
+first, so he merely nodded and went outside and left her to remember
+alone.  Returning with wood on his arm he found recollection of much in
+her gaze.  She was looking at the thin heeled, buttoned boots before
+the fireplace; the stockings and furred garments cleaned of mud and
+dried on the backs of chairs.  A cloud of color stole up from the
+blanket edge at her throat to the line of her hair.
+
+"You were wet," he explained simply, "and you were too spent to help
+yourself.  I could not let you sleep in them."
+
+"I understand," her answer faltered a little.  "I was just
+thinking. . . .  I knew such things happened, but I thought it was only
+in books."
+
+Drowsily she watched him bending over frying pan and coffee pot,
+content herself to lie and rest.  But after a time, with fuller
+awakening, the bandage about his head claimed her attention.  To her it
+seemed impossible that this smoothly shaven man in clean blue shirt
+could be the same one who had emerged from a struggle still sickeningly
+brutish to her.  Involuntarily she shuddered a little without knowing
+that he watched.
+
+"I am going to the spring for fresh water," he told her then.  "There
+will be time for you to dress; and breakfast will be ready when I come
+back."
+
+Submissive before his tone she replied that she was hungry; that she
+would be ready, too.  She had donned blouse and skirt and stocking and
+shoes and finished braiding her hair when he re-entered.  He showed her
+a tin basin outside filled with icy water for her face and hands.  And
+then they sat down in silence to breakfast.
+
+Once he had dreamed what their first meal together in that room would
+be like.  This morning when she insisted upon pouring the coffee and
+scorched her hand in the attempt and chided him for careless
+housekeeping, pain showed in his smile.  But she did not immediately
+understand.  She only realized how sombre he was; how thin he looked
+and tired.  Again her eyes went to the bandage around his head.  It had
+a fascination for her, even though it filled her with repulsion for a
+decision which, she knew now, might have been hers, two days before.
+But eventually it was to that topic she turned.
+
+"You have been very good to me," she said.  "Far better than I was to
+you--the day before yesterday.  I can never hope to thank you enough
+for coming to help me."
+
+Wistful she had seen him, and grave and sober-eyed, but never sad until
+now.
+
+"I should have helped you," she went on.  "I would have, only I had
+come expecting . . .  I thought to see----"  Two days before when she
+alighted from her father's car, her heart a tumult in her ears, she
+could have told him perhaps.  She could not tell him now.  "I am not
+used to such things," she finished weakly.
+
+"I know," was all he replied, but the words were final, somehow.  They
+thrust her back, roughly, from any share in his thoughts.  They ate
+again in silence.
+
+"Miriam would have helped," she forgot herself and argued aloud once.
+"She would not have failed.  But--blood sickens me, I think."
+
+"It was neither a pretty nor prepossessing sight," he helped to excuse
+her, but excuse nor pardon was not what she wanted.
+
+"I told you that you would find out someday," she murmured.  "I warned
+you you would wake suddenly and see how shallow I am."
+
+Until she had finished eating he would not talk.  But she had finished
+now.  He faced her with an abruptness that startled her.
+
+"Waking has been no sudden thing with me!  I finished with dreams a
+long time back, but you are what you have been always in my thoughts.
+It's conditions I've waked to, not you!"
+
+With unwitting gruffness he had sometimes spoken to her, but never with
+constrained vehemence such as that.
+
+"Why should I find fault in anything you have done, or failed to do?"
+he demanded of both her and himself.  "Why should you be apologetic or
+regretful.  Such a thing as I had to do two days ago has held no place
+in your world, and never could, but I can't find it in myself to be
+apologetic, either, because it is a part of mine.  I meant to kill
+him--wanted to kill him--because I was certain of your scorn!  That was
+vindictive; that was foolish for a man.  But as for the rest of it--I
+know I may have it all to do over again, any day.  It was a vulgar
+brawl to you; to me----"
+
+"Not just a brawl," she contradicted quickly, anxious to be understood.
+"Just--oh, so needlessly brutal.  At first it left me only dazed and
+nauseated, but after I had had time to think, I made myself see your
+side of it.  You must crush insubordination.  And still it seems as
+though there might have been a less horrible way."
+
+"He had balked my work," he told her sternly.  "He has fired upon me
+from cover, when he dared not come out into the open.  He has been
+taking money for his work from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+cost.  Could I ask him please not to spoil my bridge?  Is that your
+idea of a man's way?"
+
+She had given no thought to Wickersham until that moment, and now she
+thought of him only in connection with a night when she had found him
+alone in her father's office and wondered at the stale odor of alcohol.
+
+"I do not know," she hesitated.  "I am not sure, only----"
+
+"You should know!"  But he was less vehement now.  Wearily he set
+himself to get at it in his own fashion.  "Some men are only physical
+cowards," he went on.  "But you have almost made a moral coward of me.
+Yes, you had nearly made me afraid to be the man I must be, if I am to
+do my work."
+
+"There are other fields----"
+
+He would not let her argue that.
+
+"There is no other field for me at present.  This is my work and while
+I continue in it men who oppose me with their brains I will fight with
+my brain.  But men who force me to meet them with fists I must beat
+with like weapons.  There is no alternative.  I have no choice--unless
+I quit.  And that is the reason I know that this is the end, for you
+and me!"
+
+Sadness she had never known before in his voice, nor the edge which was
+cutting all it came against.  Now it grew gentler, with that gentleness
+he saved for her alone.
+
+"Once we argued whether I was 'good enough' for you, and we wasted many
+words that day, for 'good enough' can cover too many qualities to be a
+safe basis for general comparison.  I have been arguing it with myself,
+blind to the vital question, but I am blind no longer.  Combat which
+sickened you has cleared my eyes.  What if I did believe that I was not
+good enough to touch your little finger?  What if you believed that
+too?  Would that have hindered us, in the end?  You know it wouldn't;
+you have seen too many women give themselves to men whom they knew were
+unworthy in a hundred ways, because they could not help themselves.
+But that way would never have done for me."
+
+"It isn't that," she cut in desperately.  "I know you are big and fine
+and clean.  It isn't that----"
+
+But he knew better than she did what it was she could not phrase.  He
+left her dry of lip now, for he had read her thoughts.
+
+"My ways would have had to be your ways, and we have learned at last
+what I have feared for long and long.  They lie too far apart for them
+ever to meet.  My man's way is not your woman's way, but I could not
+stay a man in your eyes if I let it become secondary to yours; and I
+would have to do just that to earn you.  Once I thought that there was
+no height I could not scale to gain your side.  I worked for you, but
+that is no way for a man to work.  He must work because he is a man and
+needs must win as big as he can to keep his own self-respect.
+
+"I promised to teach you to love me, and I've failed.  And knowing that
+my failure is not all my own fault is not going to make it any easier
+for me.  You've taught me loneliness I'm never going to forget as long
+as I live, but I don't love you any the less for that.  I dreamed big
+dreams for both of us."  His voice was dreary of a sudden.  "I promised
+I'd make those dreams come true, because I thought my life could be
+your life.  I've not done so; that thing could never be.  I've talked
+bigger than I could practice, and that is not going to help my
+self-confidence any, but as it stands now I can earn it back.  I
+couldn't have done that if I had married you, and waked some day to
+find you shrinking from me.  It would have killed it, and my
+self-respect too, to have learned too late that you believed still in
+your own greater fineness."
+
+"I tell you it is not that," she cried out.  "Can't I make you
+understand----"
+
+"You have made me understand till I am sure," he stated.  "I am no
+longer vexing myself with trivial things.  Birth?  My name means as
+much as yours.  Education?  You would not tell me, would you, that I am
+not wiser in most ways you'd think to mention.  I'd break any man who
+gave to your ears many things I have learned."  He was whimsical for a
+flash.  "I could outspell you without an effort; books have been my
+partners when you had rather dance.  Oh, you could not lose me, no
+matter where you strayed in fields like that.  In any way you care to
+mention I have outstripped you, for I decided long ago that I must know
+more than you.  Yet I have not forgotten how to play, either.
+
+"You have been uncertain; I have seen that.  You are certain now.  And
+the fundamental thing remains unchanged.  In me there is that man who
+once man-handled Harrigan--and you didn't want me to touch you!  You
+don't have to tell me any more that you can't love me.  When you drew
+away from me, that was enough."
+
+His voice held a question, but the girl couldn't answer at first.
+
+"Wasn't it?" he repeated very gently, for he would have it from her own
+lips.
+
+Her face lifted.  Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she nodded in
+affirmation.
+
+So roughly that the dishes rattled he rose.
+
+"I do not want your pity," he ended it.  "I am the wrong sort of a man
+for you."
+
+She sat and watched him put the room in order, and that hurt her more
+than anything else, for he would not let her help.  He made her change
+her high-heeled boots for moccasins which he brought and laced upon her
+feet; but the remainder of the day it was the old Steve who helped her
+over the bad bits of going and talked disconnectedly of many things
+meanwhile.  And yet no longer the old Steve, who had been so entirely
+her own.  Hers was the sad face when they entered the clearing at
+Thirty-Mile and a hoarse shout saluted her return.  In her father's
+embrace she clung and wondered that she did not cry.  And two pages had
+turned for her that day, for she sent Wickersham back his ring the same
+night the private car rolled down to Morrison.
+
+Harrigan was with Archibald Wickersham when the package, unaccompanied
+by explanation, reached the latter in his hotel room in town.  Harrigan
+was waiting for a reply to a question which he had just asked, when
+Wickersham opened the box and sat fingering for a while the thin hoop
+of gold with its single brilliant stone.  Once Fat Joe had spoken
+prophetically; this was the hour he had foreseen.  And when Wickersham
+raised his head the riverman's battered face lighted shockingly with
+triumph.
+
+"Go out and get him," said Wickersham.  "And see that you get him--for
+good!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+TO-MORROW--
+
+For two days and two nights the girl fought on alone against the outcry
+of her own heart, and as on a former occasion she chose again the open
+roads for her battlefield.  While she pounded Ragtime mercilessly over
+the little-traveled northern highways, she struggled rebelliously with
+stubborn arguments which only left her more and more bewildered, the
+more conclusive they became.  She summoned parallels by the score to
+her support, but she lacked the trick of facile finality, somehow,
+which had always marked his usage of such argument.  Hard moments she
+knew when she closed her teeth tight upon her decision and told herself
+that it was final, but the next moment, after she had laid whip across
+the black horse's flank and faced homeward, she was biting her lips in
+shaken, panic contemplation of another thought which would not be
+denied.
+
+There were times without number when Barbara hated the one whose very
+gentleness toward her was making her position hardest to maintain;
+times when she hated the work which, absorbing him by day at least,
+must be making his suffering less difficult to endure.  For she
+understood that there was still much for him to do, although the
+hill-country was already ringing with his victory.  And throughout
+every hour she hated herself most of all for that spirit behind the
+doubt which was swinging her, pendulum-like, between brain's reason and
+heart's desire.
+
+Barbara needed her mother in those days of wretchedness, for she came
+and went as blind to the helpless misery which followed her always from
+the eyes of her father as she was heedless of who might read the misery
+in her own.  She turned a chill, set face to the one attempt to help
+made by Miriam Burrell, who, at the first inkling of violence on the
+river and possible danger to Garry Devereau, had come rushing overnight
+into the hills, purposed never to leave them again unless it was with
+him, as the wife of the man she loved.  Barbara wanted her mother, and
+when that occurred to Miss Sarah, the latter could no longer continue
+in passive sympathy.  Without compunction or loss of more time, she
+reversed a decision at which she had arrived herself only a short time
+before.  For Miss Sarah had stopped campaigning.  Caleb, with fire in
+his eye, had brought her the story of how "her boy" Steve had broken
+Harrigan with his bare hands.  She had had little to say concerning
+that episode, but her brother, noting that she did not condemn it as
+regrettable, wondered too that he had never noticed before how hard his
+sister's eyes could be.  The news that Barbara was lost had reached
+Miss Sarah hours before Allison's private car brought the girl and her
+father and Hardwick Elliott back to Morrison.  Thereupon, with her
+first glimpse of Barbara's wanly mute and suffering face, she had
+pieced the details together; she had told herself, with sorrow and
+understanding in her heart, that she must no longer interfere.  And
+now, though she did summon Barbara to her, the end of the second
+endless day, it was with no thought for evasion or finesse.  Barbara
+obeyed that summons reluctantly.  In the face of an almost sullen light
+in the girl's eyes when she entered on lagging feet, the older woman
+knew that she could not have persisted in such an attempt, even had she
+planned to employ it.  Additional warning was not needed, but Barbara's
+first words told her that the hour was long past for such methods.
+
+At first the girl refused to sit down.  She wandered aimlessly around
+the room, switching nervously at her booted ankles with her
+riding-crop, to stop suddenly and raise a pale and stormy face.
+
+"I know why you sent for me," she exclaimed, "and I know just what you
+think of me.  But I must tell you, Miss Sarah, that there is nothing
+which can alter now, the least little bit, a decision which I know is
+wisest and best!"
+
+So she had the first word, never dreaming that Miss Sarah had seen to
+that.  Nor did the latter smile or seem to proffer argument at first.
+Oh, Miss Sarah had the true instincts of a big soul!
+
+"Barbara," she answered quietly, after her formal firmness had
+prevailed and the girl had seated herself, "Barbara, when I sent for
+you it was not with a belief that I might influence you, for both of us
+know that this is your problem alone.  I merely hoped to comfort, that
+was all.  More than once I have been guilty of trying to manage you a
+little, but you will forgive me, I know, when I tell you that I have
+loved Stephen almost all his life, as though he were my own, and hoped
+as long for his great happiness.  On more than one occasion I contrived
+situations which I thought might make your choice my happiness, too.  I
+know now that I was no better than any other meddling old woman, whose
+efforts are well meant but dangerous for all that.  And I will meddle
+no more.  But--but my heart aches a little, too, to-day, Barbara.  May
+I just talk to you?"
+
+Barbara blinked in surprise at the subdued sadness in the older woman's
+voice.  But her lips remained sullen.
+
+"There is nothing more to be said," she reiterated uncompromisingly.
+"I tell you I am sure!"
+
+And from that statement, minutes before she had thought to hear it,
+Miss Sarah learned, thankfully, just how deep was the girl's
+uncertainty.
+
+"Then I need not fear that I may sway you one inch from your own way of
+reasoning."  Her gentle voice might have held relief.  "For you will
+not consider it argument when I agree with you that hard and fast
+reasoning is not always a dependable guide for a woman."
+
+The girl was switching her ankles again.
+
+"Why isn't it?" she demanded abruptly, hungry for it now that the
+other, ostensibly, did not want to argue.  "If reason is no guide, what
+else is there left?"
+
+"My dear, I do not know," acknowledged Miss Sarah.  "Intuition is a
+much over-worked word.  And yet, had hard and fast reason been your
+guide, you would not have refused Stephen, I am sure.  For it would be
+difficult to name one particular in which he is not entirely a man."
+
+The violet eyes grew quickly hostile.  The girl was keen enough to
+argue, but she was in no mood for refutation.
+
+"I am afraid that I do not follow you?" came coldly from her.
+
+"There comes a day in every woman's life, of course," Miss Sarah
+ignored sweetly the interruption, "when she has to leave girlhood
+behind.  And lest that sound bromidic and trite, I will add that I do
+not mean the trivial material things of immaturity, but rather the
+happy irresponsibility which has no place in a woman's life."
+
+That statement offered a plain enough opening.
+
+"Am I responsible for his unhappiness?" Barbara flashed out.  "Is the
+fault entirely mine because----"  She faltered, ashamed of her
+abruptness which had brought a hurt bit of color to Miss Sarah's
+cheeks.  "I never gave him to understand--I told him always I could not
+care!"
+
+"Please bear with me a little to-day."  Miss Sarah's sweetness had
+become humble.  "I seem vagarious, I know.  And we are not considering
+Stephen, Barbara.  If you had been doing so, all these hours while you
+have been wasting your nervous energy in tearing around the
+country-side, it would be different.  But women never consider the man
+in such a situation, do they?  Aren't they too entirely heedless for
+that?  I was merely trying to tell you that the day has come when you
+must consider well your own happiness."
+
+Instantly Barbara condemned such a doctrine.
+
+"If that is true of others," she retorted, "they are even more
+despicable than I know myself to be."
+
+Until that moment Caleb Hunter's tiny sister had kept her brave eyes
+clear.  They clouded now.  They went beyond that pale and sullen and
+stormily pretty visage.
+
+"I was a woman like that," she said, with her quaint simplicity of
+accent.  "Do you look upon me with any such degree of scorn?  I was
+face to face with such a decision; and yet not the same either, for
+mine was far simpler than yours.  But I considered neither his
+happiness nor my own, simply because I lost sight of the years and
+years to come, in the momentary joy I found in his--his importunity.
+He was very big and strong and cheerful, like Stephen, Barbara, and I
+was sure he would not grudge me my last moment of girl-vanity, when I
+did surrender--to-morrow."
+
+There the quaint voice caught and broke.  The girl's eyes flew wider
+and hotter shame for her sulkiness stained her cheeks.  For suddenly
+Miss Sarah was fighting against tears.
+
+"I did not know," Barbara breathed her contrition.  "I never
+dreamed----"
+
+"No one ever does," faltered Miss Sarah.  "I--I am an old, faded,
+hopelessly unmarried woman to you, my dear--oh, child, you need not
+protest a kinder opinion!  I am just 'Caleb Hunter's spinster sister'
+to the people of this village.  But to--to myself, Barbara, I am at
+times the same girl who waited, roses in her hair and roses in her
+cheeks, for him to come, so that I might tell him that I was his, body
+and soul.  And he never came!  Oh, my dear, I do not mean to break down
+like this, for you have your own heart-ache.  But I trusted to reason.
+I told myself that to-morrow would be soon enough.  And when to-morrow
+came--they let me--go to him.  He died very bravely, Barbara, to save
+the life of another.
+
+"Since you are so sure, I can tell you this without seeming to warn
+you--without being accused of attempting to influence you.  But now you
+know why I say that every woman, if heedlessness for which she is
+perhaps not to blame will not let her consider the happiness of the man
+she loves, should still take care that she does not barter for an hour
+of quickened pulses the happiness of her whole life.  I was innocent
+enough.  It was harmless play to me.  But I have paid--and paid--and
+paid!  I would not have you, whom I cherish, rise each morning and
+wonder why you had to be the only one to suffer out of thousands who
+played the same way.  And now will you please forgive me this
+uncontrolled moment?  I usually inflict them upon no one; I hide them
+in my room.  But, Barbara, I was so proud of him--so sure--so positive
+that he was the only man in the world!  And I lost my chance to tell
+him how much I cared."
+
+The riding-crop lay neglected on the floor.  It had slipped and
+clattered down while Barbara sat and stared at the tiny woman who was
+dabbing at her eyes with a very girlish square of linen.  And then
+slowly Barbara rose and took an uncertain step or two.  She sank to her
+knees and pillowed her head upon Miss Sarah's lap.  Momentarily she had
+forgotten the struggle which was going on in her own heart.  Now even
+pity for the other could not keep her from turning hack to it.
+
+"But I do not know," she gasped.  "I--sometimes I think I must care,
+and then I am afraid----"  She lifted a face dry-eyed and tense.  "I
+ought to be proud of him, too.  If I loved him I would be, wouldn't I?
+If I cared I wouldn't ask anything more than just what he is.  Don't
+you see I'm only petty and rotten with snobbishness?"
+
+Miss Sarah sniffed, ever so delicately.
+
+"What a sentimental old woman I am!" she exclaimed.  "And, my dear, you
+talk as though you had just discovered a new and terribly perplexing
+complication.  Don't you know that it is as old as the feminine mind
+itself?"  Her handkerchief came down, then, disclosing eyes that were
+very bright and very tender.  "Why, a woman never loves a man merely
+for what he is!  She always reserves a few little things, at least,
+which she means--well, to rearrange.  She loves him just a bit more for
+what she secretly promises herself he shall be."
+
+Barbara's sullenness was gone.
+
+"I know," she whispered.  "I thought of that, too, long ago.  But it
+isn't just a--little thing.  A few days ago, Miss Sarah, when we took
+the train to go up north, I could scarcely wait for the engine to draw
+us there.  I think I counted every click of the rails, I know I sang
+his name in my heart with every click.  And then, when I wanted to walk
+straight off the steps of the car into his arms--when I . . .  Why do
+you sit there and listen and not say that you loathe me as I do myself?
+I know that he is all man, but his work and my world--oh, when that
+terrible thing happened, and he came lurching toward me, instead of
+helping him, do you know what I did?  I was sick at the sight of
+him--sick at the reck and grime and blood of him!  I just wanted to get
+away, and--and shudder at the thought of----"
+
+Miss Sarah's composure had returned, but her face grew more sober
+still.  This was a different, a graver thing, even than she had
+expected.
+
+"Your world?"  Deliberately now she dared to argue.  "Barbara, didn't
+you know, from the beginning, that his world would have to be yours?
+Did you ever think that you could change him--that way?"
+
+Barbara moved her head.
+
+"I wanted both," she said.  "I wanted all I have--and him, too.  I
+learned that night he took care of me how much I cared; I know he'd be
+as careful of me, all his life.  But I had thought that he might be
+able to do as father has done and let other men handle the----  But he
+knows now!  He understands me!  I tell you I'm no good.  I've no
+backbone.  I'm just pink and white flesh without any spirit!"
+
+The other woman sat and smoothed the bright head and wished she knew
+what to say.  "It would please me to know just what stuff she is made
+of, too," Miss Sarah had once admitted to her brother.  She wondered if
+at last she knew.
+
+"I do not know what to tell you," she murmured slowly.  "I thought if I
+talked with you I might be able to help you, but I am afraid now that I
+cannot.  He is a better man than you are woman, Barbara; because he has
+builded with his hands, he has reared him a soul as well.  He knows the
+depths, and the heights are far more wonderful for such knowledge.  Oh,
+dear me, I wish I knew----"
+
+She paused there, shaken by her own impotence.  Doubt and aching regret
+were overwhelming her.
+
+"I have told Mr. Wickersham that I will not marry him."  The brown head
+burrowed lower and muffled the words.  "I know that I could let no
+other man so--so much as touch me now.  Is that--caring enough?"
+
+But Miss Sarah only half heard the question.  She was expecting no
+surrender now.
+
+"----Nor how to advise you," she struggled on.  "For you have lived as
+all girls like you live.  You've lived for yourself; hoped for
+yourself; prayed for yourself--as all women pray, I suppose, directly
+or indirectly.  And yet is merely a question of whether you could live
+with him in his world, day for day and night for night?  Is it as
+simple as that?  I have told you what difference one day made with me.
+Have you thought what it might mean to wake and realize that you must
+live _without_ him, all the rest of your life?"
+
+Miss Sarah had stopped hoping.  And so there was sheer amazement in the
+triumph which rose and drove the regret from her faded pink-and-white
+face when the girl's dark-fringed eyes lifted.
+
+Since Stephen O'Mara had brought her back to her father, Barbara had
+wondered why she did not cry.  Great tears were sliding noiselessly
+down her cheeks when she raised her head.
+
+"I've tried to think--I haven't dared," Barbara sobbed.  "But he
+doesn't want me now.  He doesn't want the kind of a girl I am any more!"
+
+Thus in her moment of capitulation did the girl's heart cry aloud the
+one thought which, unknown to her, had been her unbearable pain.  And
+straightway Miss Sarah's illuminated countenance became a glorification
+of her spirit.  Silently she leaned over and folded the kneeling one
+round.
+
+Later she found it possible to speak.
+
+"You have convinced me forever of the futility of all snap judgments,"
+said she, and she marveled at the shyness in her own voice, "but you
+could never convince me of that.  You may go home now, Barbara, for you
+have worn yourself out.  But to-morrow I would suggest that you--ask
+him for corroboration, if you still hold to such an opinion."
+
+Instantly Barbara rose and bobbed her head.  She had always been a slim
+creature of moods mercurial; she would always be that.  And now her
+violet eyes radiated anticipation, perverse and impish and far, far
+different from the sullen dullness which had filled them an hour
+before.  Miss Sarah had spoken with well-seasoned wisdom, as was her
+wont: there are sometimes big moments which are the bigger for lack of
+analysis.  The girl did not know why, all in one breath, she no longer
+feared nor doubted--but she _knew_!  And that was a world and all of
+joy.  She bobbed her head.
+
+"Ask him?" she echoed, demurely confused.  "Ask--_him_!  To-morrow I am
+going to dare him to ask _me_--again!"
+
+But she did not obey Miss Sarah's suggestion that she return home and
+rest.  On winged feet she flew back through the hedge-gap and ordered
+Ragtime saddled once more; yet when she touched that splendid beast
+with the crop and sent him at a gallop down the drive, there was no
+longer any sting in the lash.  Even the groom, with critical eye,
+noticed the difference in the girl's seat that afternoon; for days and
+days to come he was the better contented with the companionship of
+horses, which was his lot, in dwelling upon the crazy moods of women.
+And Miriam Burrell, sighting Barbara's face as the latter wheeled
+toward the hills, flew from her window to scratch off a note to
+Garry--her third note that day, for she seemed always omitting most
+important things which needed saying.
+
+"It's come," she scrawled in delighted haste, "and Miss Sarah is a
+visiting angel from Heaven! . . .  When are we going to be married?"
+
+Others knew of it almost as soon as she did herself, but knowledge of
+that did not mar Barbara's rosy contemplation of this new-found,
+totally unbelievable happiness.  Once before she had ridden that road
+with him alone in her thoughts; now she realized that she had loved him
+then as she must have loved him always, and marveled at such blindness.
+Once, on that other day, she had told herself that all ignoble and
+unworthy comparisons of herself and him were done and gone.  Now she
+did not need such reassurance, when her lips were tremulous.
+
+Rest?  Pressing steadily into the north that afternoon, first at a
+gallop, then more and more slowly until Ragtime was picking his own
+gait, the girl smiled in pity for Miss Sarah and her day which had
+never dawned.  But there was scant room for sadness in her present
+mood.  Tomorrow?  She let herself be afraid for an instant, to tremble
+in delicious mock-terror, because there was nothing for her to fear now
+in the whole wide world.
+
+She grew pensive at times; at times in an abandon of gaiety she
+chattered back at a quarrelsome squirrel in the thicket.  She could
+rest later; and if she could not go to him immediately, at least every
+step the horse took was bringing them, for a little while, closer
+together.  And her to-morrow was only one twilight and one dawn away;
+her to-morrow would be his, as utterly as was she herself.  Dusk came,
+and regretfully she told herself that she must be turning back home.
+Two rifle shots, sharp and startlingly close, whipped through the quiet
+of that lazy afternoon, but they meant nothing to her.  She had reached
+the height of land, where he had found her the day her roan mare
+strayed off while she sat mooning on a log; she was holding out both
+arms toward the spot where the valley of Thirty-Mile must lie, when a
+team of heavy horses broke around a turn in the road, slowed to a trot
+at the sight of her, and came to an abrupt standstill.  When the girl
+rode nearer to them, merely surprised and curious at first, they
+snorted and showed the whites of their eyes and shied back nervously.
+
+Something chill clutched at Barbara's heart while she spoke
+pre-emptorily to Ragtime, who was dancing in sympathetic panic.  There
+was nothing to tell her, but she knew that these were Big Louie's
+horses.  And Big Louie was a dreamy incompetent--he had left them for a
+moment, that was all, and they had become frightened and bolted.  But
+Big Louie never neglected his team . . . they were not wet . . . they
+had not been running far.  And their fright became less when she
+dismounted and approached them, soothing them with her voice until they
+let her touch their sleek sides, without rearing away.
+
+Dusk had come and gone, for it was growing dark.  Uncertain, more and
+more unnerved as she stood and gazed at the forbidding, black-shadowed
+ridges beyond her, the girl had to fight suddenly against an impulse to
+turn and race back to the lower country and Morrison and home.  Even
+then the rifle shots meant nothing to her--and pride would not let her
+run.  She remounted and rode on a rod or two, and stopped to look back
+at the team which was watching her; she pressed on and rounded the
+curve.  Ragtime reared and snorted there, and she barely stifled the
+cry which his strange behavior brought to her lips.  Because of her
+senseless panic she punished him the more severely, and sent him on.
+And then she saw what the horse had already seen.
+
+A blue-shirted figure lay half in the road, half in the undergrowth
+that fringed it, one arm crooked under him and his face prone in the
+dust; a bulkier mass was stretched wholly within the trail--and she
+recognized him, too.  Big Louie's face was upturned, and the
+explanation of the two rifle reports and the driverless team was here.
+For Big Louie's hand still clutched the handle of a canvas pail.  They
+had stopped to water the horses; they had been shot down from behind.
+And first of all, unable to move, while horror parched her lips, the
+girl remembered words which the limp one, half in the road and half in
+the underbrush, had spoken to her in a moment of sternness.
+
+"He has fired upon me from cover," the man who loved her had said.  "He
+has been taking money from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+price!"
+
+Giddiness rose and swayed her, and she beat Ragtime mercilessly for his
+fear.  Instinct clamored flight, and she forced herself to wait,
+panting for that other shot which might leave her, too, lying in the
+road.  But even in that first frozen moment she began to reason
+clearly.  Back with the sleek team which welcomed her with questioning
+eyes she left Ragtime, for he would stand there, and retraced her way
+on foot.  She could not do it, she sobbed drily--but she raced to him
+and knelt and searched with swift fingers before the words were past
+her lips.  Her hand found moisture beneath his right shoulder; it was
+stained red when she held it up and stared at it.  And then she was
+closest to fainting.
+
+"Blood sickens me!" she whimpered aloud.  "Blood sickens me!"  But she
+managed to turn him over upon his back.  With brown head against his
+heart, she listened--listened and would not believe that her to-morrow
+might come too late.  And then she caught the slack pound of his pulse.
+
+From there on she was less panic-stricken; she gained control of
+faculties shocked for a time into uselessness.  Method marked her
+acts--deliberation mechanical but sure.  She was horribly afraid of Big
+Louie, but she finally disentangled the handle of the pail from those
+loose fingers, and ran to the brook which babbled near at hand.
+Returning, she drenched Steve's face with icy water; she lifted his
+head and propped it, as comfortably as she might, upon one thigh, and
+opened his flannel shirt.  The ball had passed through, for back and
+front the shirt became immediately wetter with fresh blood.  Blood
+sickened her, but she whipped off the coat of her boyish riding-habit
+and wrenched the sleeves from her linen blouse.  They were desperately
+scant, yet they provided pads with which to check that dreadful oozing.
+And when they were in place she turned again to bathing his forehead.
+
+A folded sheet of paper came to view when she tried once to ease his
+heavy body from the position which was numbing her leg, and she seized
+upon it fiercely.  It was only a brief line, bidding him come to her,
+but it bore her name.  With instant, bodiless clarity which had marked
+all her mental processes so far, its purport was hers.  She had not
+written--the hand that had traced her signature had been unstrung for
+once.  She understood, though such knowledge seemed of little moment
+now.
+
+She kept the pads cold and wet; she went for fresh water and stumbled
+and fell more than once, because of the treacherous footing in the
+deepening shadows.  But she was no longer afraid of the dark; she had
+grown to fear Big Louie less, even though there was no help for Big
+Louie any more.  It was the first time that Barbara had looked upon the
+face of a man who had died in violence.  Big Louie's face was growing
+indistinct now, but she knew that he was smiling--knew that his eyes
+were dreamy and mild.  Death, like Life, had been a quite
+incomprehensible puzzle to that slow-witted one who had no name.  But
+he had smiled seldom in life.  In death his smile was almost childish,
+almost sweet, and questioning beyond all else.
+
+Alone with him who still lived, the pallid girl sat and waited and
+wondered how long--or how soon--it would be.  But she wasn't afraid
+now.  They were his hills; it was his wilderness.  And could any harm
+come out of them equal to separation from him?  This was only the
+beginning of one night of darkness, and Miss Sarah had endured with
+patience and bravery through a whole lifetime of days and nights as
+black.  "Your face was the first . . . it will be the last thing I'll
+see, as long as there is sight in my eyes!" had been his words to her.
+She waited and she prayed shamelessly for herself--for one more
+chance--as Miss Sarah had said women always prayed.  But he was looking
+at her, when she opened her eyes after a long and incoherent appeal; at
+her first word he tried to rise and she had trouble in persuading him
+to lie back again.  She heard herself scolding, while she rearranged
+the bandages so that they would cover both wounds, and he listened,
+hot-eyed, without recognizing her.  Yet when she bade him wait, until
+she could bring the team, he nodded his comprehension; he was watching
+for her return.  And he came to his feet with a readiness that made her
+heart leap with hope; but he fell twice before she lifted him, half
+with her hands, half with her voice, to the seat.
+
+She crawled in beside him, and the next moment she had to struggle
+madly to prevent his returning to Big Louie.
+
+"He will wait quiet until we come for him," she protested.  "There
+isn't room for Big Louie--and he won't mind----"
+
+Her logic made an impression upon him, for he smiled.  There was no
+sequence in his acquiescence, however.
+
+"I have always been afraid for him," he told her in reply, as
+studiously grave as though he had been conscious of what he was saying.
+"The others--they can take care of themselves.  They are wrong ones
+together.  But Big Louie is only a child--but he won't mind--he'll
+understand----"
+
+She thought then that he had recognized her; she dared to hope that his
+brain was clearing.  But when the team went forward, nervously
+unmanageable at first, then more decorous as they drew away from him
+who would never feed them brown sugar again, the man beside her only
+persisted vacantly with his topic.
+
+"Big Louie never could find his way alone," he mused, "and that is
+strange, too, for he was born in these hills.  He was always getting
+lost----"  And with that he must not desert Louie!  She had even more
+trouble with him this time.  "He will lose his head," he expostulated
+mildly--his old, unfailing attitude of gentleness toward her.  "He will
+lose his head and waste his strength in running from things which do
+not exist."
+
+"Big Louie will find his way this time."  She was whimpering again in
+her helplessness.  "He is--already home."
+
+There she learned that her voice could control him when her arms
+availed not at all against even his dead weight.  And so she talked as
+steadily as she was able while she drove.  Once he lurched against her;
+when he pulled himself together he was so sanely apologetic of a sudden
+that she searched his face with hungry eyes.  But he was talking now to
+himself.
+
+"I must not touch her!" he stated firmly.  And then, drearily: "I am
+sick. . . .  I have never been so sick--before."
+
+With that he subsided, but his silence was far more dreadful than his
+wanderings had been; and as fast as she dared she pushed the heavy team
+on, with Ragtime following behind like a dog.  He slipped back against
+her almost immediately, and this time he had not the strength with
+which to apologize nor lift himself erect.  With his head heavy in the
+hollow of her arm, they came at length to the open pasture hills; they
+topped the rise and faced the loops on loops of highway that ran down
+to Morrison at the river-edge.  And so she brought him home.  At the
+sight of his "city" she sobbed aloud, but he, sunken and slack, was
+conscious neither of distance covered nor change of country.  He
+climbed down from the seat, however, in response to her urgings, when
+the team halted before Caleb Hunter's white-columned house--he turned
+and started stubbornly back the way they had come.
+
+She ran after him and clung to his arm.
+
+"You promised that you would come back to me," she cried up at him.
+"Oh, you cannot leave me now!"
+
+That halted him, momentarily.
+
+"I must go back to my bridge," he explained, plainly nonplussed.  "But
+then I'll surely come back to you."
+
+She pleaded with him--raged at him.
+
+"I must go back to my bridge," he reiterated gruffly now.
+
+Her arms went around him in desperation, and then, with one swing, he
+had swept her yards away, reeling before his blazing wrath.
+
+"Take your fingers from my eyes, Harrigan," he gasped in sudden agony.
+"I am going to kill you now--and _she_ is looking on!"
+
+The girl was afraid of him; she dared not try to hold him.  She
+screamed wildly for help, and screamed again.  And he had gone on, and
+wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her
+father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks.
+
+Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+--AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
+
+They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him,
+quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed.  They stood there,
+dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room,
+coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs.  And
+at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than
+their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's
+stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once
+Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient.  The girl refused,
+point-blank, to go.
+
+"He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply
+to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you,
+surely my staying now need not!"
+
+The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the
+phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in
+what she knew to be useless argument.  And though the girl grew sick
+and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and
+started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her
+remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary.
+
+Miss Sarah knew what to do; and she worked with unhurried thoroughness.
+They had sent for the doctor, and after ages had passed for the girl,
+maddeningly cool and unruffled, he arrived.  But his first words, too,
+were an order that she leave the room, and unable to combat his
+professional bleakness, meekly she had to obey.  Little and wholly
+hopeless she stole downstairs.
+
+Caleb and her father were confronting each other before the fireplace
+when she reached the lower floor, but the queer note of restraint in
+their voices meant nothing to her, until she heard her father cry out
+in sudden anguish.
+
+"Cal," he cried, "Cal, you don't think I was a party to this attempt at
+murder?"
+
+Then, at Caleb's reply, which went hurtling back at him, the girl was
+crouching, white and still, and clutching at the stair-rail.
+
+"Party!  Attempt!  Because you did not pull the trigger are you any the
+less guilty?"
+
+"Do you believe that I would murder the man my girl loves?" Dexter
+Allison moaned now.
+
+Barbara gasped at the deadly anger which crossed Caleb Hunter's face.
+Caleb had lifted a hand in righteous accusation.
+
+"You have dealt in crookedness," he thundered.  "You have thrived on
+cunning.  And, being a law unto yourself in this country, you have gone
+unpunished until now.  You aided and abetted a vicious and unscrupulous
+scoundrel in his villainy; and now you have looked upon the result of
+your works.  Law has never touched you, sir--reprisal has passed you
+by.  But, by God, sir, I warn you if that boy dies--if he dies--I shall
+see that you meet me at thirty paces the next morning.  And I shall not
+miss--I shall be your law!"
+
+They had been friends for close to forty years, yet they were worse
+than strangers now.  Dexter Allison could not answer; he could not
+speak aloud.  Caleb's finger had swung toward the door in a gesture
+unmistakable.  Allison turned, and, ghastly of face, met the eyes of
+his daughter.
+
+"Barbara," he appealed to her, frantically.  "Baby----"
+
+But she shrank, a huddled heap of misery, away from him.
+
+"You--too?" she whispered.  "You!"  And then, dully: "And you're my
+father!"
+
+The shoulders beneath the garish plaid rose and fell, pitifully.  This,
+then, was the moment which he feared.  He gulped aloud and hung his
+head, and turned his feet toward home.  Barbara rose after he had gone
+and crept into a chair.
+
+One after another they tried to persuade the girl to rest.  Miriam came
+and talked to her, and Caleb; and even Miss Sarah, passing through the
+room, stopped to urge her again to go to bed.  But she met them all
+with the same wordless refusal; she was waiting for him when the
+doctor, descending in the morning, tried to combine, diplomatically,
+praise for what she had done with disapproval of her obstinacy.
+
+"My dear child, this insubordination will help no one," he said, "and
+it may end in your collapse at just the moment when you are needed
+most."
+
+"Will he live?" was all she would say.  "Will he live?"
+
+And before such hopelessness the doctor could not lie.
+
+"He is hard hit and very, very weak," he had to admit.  "The shock is
+great and the tissue damage--unpromising.  It is far worse than I
+expected, but he is still alive, and most men would have been already
+dead.  And his vitality is a marvel, even to me."
+
+He might have comforted her, but with no other statement could he have
+told the truth.  He failed also in his effort to persuade her to go to
+bed; he had breakfast with Caleb, and she refused to eat.  And she was
+still there in her chair, asking only to be let alone, when Garry
+Devereau and Fat Joe arrived.  She rose and ran to meet the latter, but
+the doctor who knew how many such situations the pudgy riverman had
+weathered, summoned him immediately, and Barbara had to wait an hour
+before Joe came back downstairs.  By the lapels of his coat she clung
+to him then.
+
+"He's mighty sick," reluctantly Joe, too, told the truth.
+
+"The doctor said that it was worse than he expected," she droned.
+"They sent me away, but if he isn't going to live I won't let them keep
+me from him!"
+
+Joe's sympathy was unspoiled by professionalism.
+
+"Sick is one thing,"--his confidence was almost convincing,--"and dyin'
+is another.  And----  Shucks!  I ain't going to let no book-taught
+medico worry me yet!  Men get well because they are bound to get well,
+or they die because it's their time to die--and he's got too much to
+live for now!"
+
+Her hopeless face made deception impossible, but Joe comforted her,
+just the same.  He persuaded her to eat with him, and when he found
+that his conversation made the waiting easier for her, he waxed quite
+garrulous.
+
+"Why, he's been hurt almost as bad as this, once before," he rambled
+on, "but he's still alive, ain't he?"
+
+The girl's eyes livened at that.
+
+"Once, down on the island, he mixed in an affair in which most men
+would not have meddled.  And he got it from behind that time, too, only
+it was with a knife."
+
+"He never told me," murmured the girl.
+
+"It ain't likely he would," the other stated with finality.  "It was
+over a woman, and not a particularly pretty story, any way you look at
+it."
+
+Her dark eyes widened.  She bit her lip.  It came to her how little of
+his life she had shared.
+
+"Oh!" she barely breathed.  And again, falteringly: "Oh!"
+
+From that halting monosyllable Joe judged that something was amiss.
+Observation had never been a slow or painful process of concentration
+with him.
+
+"He didn't even know who she was.  He'd never even seen her before,"
+quickly he put her right.  "She was just a public dancer, that was all.
+But a man--mistreated her--and Steve, he just interfered----"
+
+Indeed, Joe had found the way to comfort her and still tell the truth,
+even though he found it foolishly difficult to swallow food and watch
+at the same time the warmth which his words kindled.  So for an hour he
+lingered at table and told her many things concerning the man she loved
+which she would never have learned from his own lips.  And it was Joe's
+jocularity which in the end subdued her rebel spirit.  She yielded at
+last and promised to go home and rest, but only after he had promised
+first in a fashion which could leave no doubt in her heart, that he
+would come for her if things grew worse.
+
+Before she left him that morning she told Joe of Big Louie, whom she
+had had to leave in the road; but he interrupted her before she could
+finish.  They had already found Big Louie.  Then she gave him the note
+which she had discovered crushed beneath Steve's body.  This Joe
+scanned ferociously; he flashed a strange glance at her from bleached
+blue eyes.
+
+"Some one traced your name," he put into words the first thought that
+had been hers.  "Some one who had your signature to copy."
+
+She nodded, whitely, in horror.  Joe folded the paper and tucked it
+into a pocket.
+
+"We can touch nobody," he averred regretfully, "unless we catch
+Harrigan!"
+
+Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she
+giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to
+increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet.  The ground
+persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to
+Caleb's arm.  And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate.  But
+at the sight of her father, sunk in silence Upon his desk in the ground
+floor "office," she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb's arm and
+went swiftly across to him.
+
+"Barbara," he beseeched her brokenly, the moment her cheek touched his.
+"You mustn't believe that I----"
+
+She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips.
+
+"I have been a very foolish and hysterical child," she said.  "I'll try
+to behave more like a woman now.  And you and Uncle Cal have been
+only--absurd!"
+
+She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed
+upstairs; but her head seemed steady enough.  It was only after she had
+reached her own room that she complained querrulously of the failing
+lights.  Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed.
+
+On the floor below, her father had turned again to his desk, his head
+bowed upon his arms.  And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter
+Allison when a hand touched, awkwardly, his shoulder.  He looked up
+heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter.  Caleb stuttered
+furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him.  Then a happy
+thought showed the way.
+
+"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he
+made of it a ceremonial.  "Do you think you would--care to join me,
+sir?"
+
+They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common
+tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity.  Dexter came to his feet;
+he reached out and crushed the other man's hand within his soft, white
+fingers.  Nor was his reply quite according to formula.
+
+"I don't mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank God . . . I
+don't mind if I do!"
+
+Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house.  And they kept
+close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that
+followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such
+companionship.
+
+Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay in the room which Miss
+Sarah had always kept waiting for him.  Fever strode upon him, while
+the girl who had brought him home slept in complete exhaustion.   At
+times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he
+called crisply for Fat Joe--he feared for his bridge--and Joe had to
+exert every iron muscle to hold him down.  And always he spoke
+Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the
+verge of collapse.  But he continued to live, through that day and the
+next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go
+for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity.  He
+continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he
+was no longer delirious.  Stephen O'Mara opened his eyes and gazed
+feebly but very understandingly into the eyes of Fat Joe, who was
+watching at that moment.
+
+Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little.
+
+"I know," he pronounced each word with calculated effort.  "I have been
+very sick, and I must not waste my strength.  But I have to be clear,
+first, on one point.  Have I dreamed it, Joe, or--or did she bring me
+home?"
+
+With his voice alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his
+friend alive.  The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so.
+And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an
+explosive thing.
+
+"Didn't I tell her so?" he demanded in his whining tenor.  "Didn't I
+say so, all along?  And I let that doctor worry _me_, just because he's
+got a diploma in a frame, hanging on his wall!"
+
+Then he answered Steve's question.
+
+"She found you," he said.  "She brought you home."
+
+A long time the sick man lay and pondered.  And finally he found it
+possible to smile.
+
+"I have not cared whether I lived or died," he said in little more than
+a whisper.  "All along I have seemed to know how near I was--to going
+across; and I have been near to quitting--at times.  For I was happier
+than I'd ever dared let myself be, before--and then, with the first
+shot that dropped Big Louie, I knew----"  He shook his head, still
+smiling vaguely.  "I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at
+things--more like a man now. . . .  You need not worry any longer, Joe.
+I'll sleep a little while, I think; and then I'll put my mind hard on
+getting well, when I awake."
+
+That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while
+he was talking, the fever began to abate.  He "put his mind on getting
+well," when he awoke, twelve hours later.  Strength was flowing in a
+steady tide back into his body long before Barbara's knees would again
+bear her weight.  For she had squandered her endurance without counting
+the cost, and she paid the full penalty.  She lay three days and three
+nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all; and even
+then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles
+beneath her eyes.
+
+Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied
+the seething town of men; he returned the same day Barbara was about
+again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won
+clear.  And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which
+straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture.  Some said
+that they must have managed to cross the border; others maintained that
+they had found sanctuary in the lumber-camps of the lake country to the
+west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood
+unchanged.  For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is
+always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb
+and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to
+touch him.  Harrigan had disappeared from the ken of men, and
+Wickersham delayed only until his departure could no longer be
+construed as flight.  Then one evening modestly he boarded a train.
+
+After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason;
+until it was best for her to go to him, she would wait as patiently as
+she was able.  And in the meantime, in a luxury of loneliness, wisely
+the girl spent her days out of doors, climbing oftenest to that
+hill-top where they had stood together, in the snow, the night of Miss
+Sarah's Christmas party.  From that point she could see Morrison and
+the river basin, and even the steam that jetted ever and again from the
+whistles of the engines clattering over his railroad which lanced into
+the north.
+
+But no discordant note of haste could reach her ears from so great a
+distance.  That whole vast panorama, suggestive least of all of
+violence, lay blanketed in a sleepy silence that matched the subdued
+security of her mood.
+
+Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient;
+and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during
+that period.  For with returning strength there came to him
+recollection of many things which required his attention.  He fretted
+over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make
+daily reports as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such
+visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, assured his
+chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by
+carping authority.
+
+But he lay and brooded, no humor in his eye, when he was left alone.
+Fat Joe had assured him that she had brought him home; but Fat Joe, who
+was ever averse to anti-climax, had told him no more than that.  His
+efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days
+because of the soberness of his friend's face.  And then, the same day
+that Joe raised him against the pillows so that he might watch a string
+of flat-cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her
+go to him.
+
+Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew
+was McLean's paen of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over
+the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him, when he turned
+and saw her standing on the threshold.  She had come on diffident,
+mouse-like feet.  She was watching him.  And before he believed it
+really was she, Barbara faltered his name.
+
+"Steve!"
+
+It was only a wisp of a sound--an aching, throbbing bit of tenderness
+lighter even than the breath that bore it.
+
+"Steve!" she breathed again.
+
+But thereupon, with a headlong little rush that scattered spools of
+bandage and rolls of lint, and set the bottles upon his table jingling
+dangerously, she flew to him and came, somehow, into his arms.
+
+They had not told him--at first he could not speak.  Dumbly he sat, his
+face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms.  She had told
+herself that she was a woman now--yet her first words were all girl.
+
+"Tell me just once that I'm pretty," she quavered.  "Say that I am
+still--half boy--to you!"
+
+His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her
+on that other day; and watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his
+eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one,
+from his lips.  But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch
+of her mouth--nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and brimming
+eyes.  She remembered his wincing shoulder then; her arms crept higher
+about his neck.  And now her face was uplifted and there was no more
+need for words.
+
+Afterward, when they spoke of Big Louie, she loved him more for the
+sorrow which he did not try to hide.  From Fat Joe he had already
+learned of Big Louie's last dereliction.  Out of a deeper silence,
+Steve spoke gravely--an epitaph for the man to whom he had been
+unfailingly kind.
+
+"Most any kind of a failure can live," he said, "but it takes a man--to
+smile and die."
+
+
+He let himself marvel aloud at her littleness.
+
+Their first hour together was only the happier for that moment of
+sadness they shared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+IN REAL LIFE TOO
+
+There was no longer any objection raised by Miss Sarah; and Barbara
+spent every hour of her days with him.  It grew warmer with aging
+spring--and almost immediately he was able to sit with her and watch
+the stream of logs coming in over the line from Thirty-Mile and beyond.
+
+Miriam and Garry were married in that week which followed directly
+Steve's first days of convalescence.  The former had returned with
+Garry to the northern valley, and already a note had come from her to
+the younger girl, in which she bewailed the servant question, as
+represented by the cook-boy whom her husband had inherited, along with
+the cabin at headquarters.
+
+Over that particular paragraph Barbara allowed herself to show
+amusement.  She tilted her nose, however, in vast disdain at the tenor
+of the rest of the letter.
+
+"From the way Miriam raves on and on," she exclaimed, "one would think
+that Garry had saved the day."
+
+They were at the window together on this occasion, Steve outwardly
+still a little pale and haggard, but for the rest his old serene self
+again.  He managed not to smile at her small and serious face.
+
+"It certainly has not strengthened my vanity a little bit, either,"
+said he, "to learn how smoothly things can move along without me."
+
+Day by day the girl was finding her way deeper into that innermost
+heart of him which he had never shared with other woman or man.  Hour
+by hour she was learning to know him better, and yet his whimsical
+gravity still could deceive her--she was sometimes thoughts behind his
+thoughts.  Hard upon his reply her eyes flashed with indignation.
+
+"Pooh!" she scoffed, "Pooh!  Most any old clock will run, after
+somebody's wound it up!"
+
+It was a trick of speech that she had learned from him, but his
+employment of parallel, lazily amiable for the most part, had never
+been so hotly partisan as was hers at that moment.  And suddenly
+self-conscious--suddenly confused and warmly disconcerted at the
+quality of his gaze--she had to hide her head.  But she hid it upon a
+shoulder most conveniently at hand.
+
+Spring gave way to early summer--and now Steve was able to be on his
+feet again, so absurdly uncertain of balance at first, however, that
+she ridiculed him unmercifully one moment, only to rush to him in a
+panic of solicitude the next.  There came long walks, and longer trips
+in the saddle; came hours of silence that were the more wonderful for
+want of words--hours in which, in a hushed voice, she gave him shyly of
+her plans.  But always, too, the interruptions grew more and more
+frequent and insistent.  Fat Joe and McLean, and even Hardwick Elliott,
+made more and more pressing demands upon his time, until finally he
+insisted that he could no longer play, shamelessly, the invalid.  He
+must look in upon the works up-river, if only for the moral effect
+which it would have upon the men.  She assented, grudgingly; it would
+be but a day or two.  And then--then he would come back to her.
+
+The next morning, at the moment when Barbara and Steve were mounting
+their horses, for she wanted to ride with him a little way, Dexter
+Allison chose to disclose something which had been but lately in the
+process of preparation.  He joined them at the edge of the lawn, before
+the white-columned house on the hill.
+
+"Easing back into harness, I understand," he began, not quite
+comfortably, however, for he was aware of a gleam of disapproval in his
+daughter's eyes, at this interruption.  "Well, there's no great rush,
+but it's wise, no doubt, to see that things don't lag."  He hesitated,
+and shifted heavily to the other foot.  "We'll want to start through to
+the border by fall, I suppose?"
+
+"We'll be ready," Steve had to laugh at his lack of ease.
+
+"No doubt--no doubt!"  Again Dexter hesitated, momentarily.  And then
+there came to the surface that proneness to accept men for what they
+were, in a man's world, which had long before convinced Caleb Hunter of
+Allison's inherent bigness.
+
+"Elliott resigned the Presidency of the East Coast Company last night."
+The statement was brief to actual crispness.  "I merely tell you this
+so that you can begin to lay tentative plans accordingly.  Because, in
+view of the immediate need of filling that vacancy, I feel sure that
+there will be too many demands upon your time, here at the Morrison
+office, for you to plan on much field work for yourself in the future."
+
+To Barbara, at the beginning, the speech seemed merely another of her
+father's rather involved, entirely labored attempts at the facetious.
+But when she saw the blood steal up and stain Stephen O'Mara's face,
+she realized that it was the very sort of a suggestion from which, on
+her lips, he had turned roughly away.  Coming from the lips of her
+father, Steve accepted gravely, with a matching briefness that could
+not hide a surge of triumph.  A month before Barbara would have been
+unable to understand why there was any difference, simply because the
+suggestion came from another.  Now, when it could no longer make or mar
+her happiness, she understood very well indeed.
+
+She rode with him that day until he told her that it was time for her
+to turn back.  With Ragtime standing quiet, she laid her face against
+his, and complained that he had promised her she should never be
+allowed to go more than arms' length away from him, once she was his.
+
+"This is the last time," he told her, in a voice vibrant and low.
+"This is the last time--for you and me."
+
+He held her closer for a moment.
+
+"You will be ready when I come back?"
+
+She bobbed her head.
+
+"Ready--and waiting," she said.
+
+She sat and put up a hand to him, wistfully disconsolate, before he
+disappeared beyond a twist in the trail.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The next night, in the cabin up-river, after Miriam had left them alone
+to what she termed their complacent silence, Garry Devereau and Steve
+sat a long while before the former raised a face alight with his rare
+mirth.
+
+"Remember Joe's one proposed journey into the realms of romance?" he
+asked suddenly.
+
+Openly Steve grinned, and nodded.
+
+"Remember how Joe threatened to close the last chapter?"
+
+Steve nodded again.
+
+"Well, here we are!" chuckled Garry.  "I, poor but honest, already in
+the toils of matrimony; and you, a plutocrat in sudden danger of a
+government investigation, I'm told, and hovering on the brink!"
+
+"Here we are!" echoed Steve.
+
+And that was as close as either of them came to outspoken emotion.
+With a lightness somewhat self-conscious, Garry had alluded to the
+property which Caleb Hunter had turned over to Steve.  There was a
+trace of like humor in the latter's reply.
+
+"I certainly am oppressed with the cares of sudden wealth," said he.
+
+They were silent again, and then they heard lifted at a distance a thin
+and reedy tenor.  Joe was still humming his inevitable ballad, when he
+entered and closed the door behind him, with an alarming flourish.
+
+"Evenin', folks," he saluted, but he did not seek a chair.
+
+Before then they had seen him primed for a sensation; never until that
+moment had he failed to aggravate their curiosity.  He circled the room
+but once, before he confronted them in a fashion that would have been
+challenging, had it not been for his fiery face.
+
+"Well, you may as well congratulate me," he invited, "and have done
+with it.  Because the suspense is over for me!"
+
+Both men straightened in their chairs; both understood instantly.  But
+Garry was the quicker in speech.
+
+"Not Cecile?" he inquired, in feigned consternation.
+
+"Why not?" Joe was quickly belligerent.
+
+"Oh, dear!" mourned Garry.  "Oh, dear!  I wish you had consulted me--or
+some other married man first.  Compatibility and common tastes, you
+know, Joe, and all that sort of thing.  She's a little Parisienne, and
+you--well, you're only a riverman, like me!"
+
+Joe condescended to draw up a chair.  And his verbal condescension was
+large.
+
+"Sometimes you're fair," he spoke with scornful superiority, "and
+sometimes you are so amateurish you make me homesick for Steve to come
+back."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+She was waiting for him at the twist in the road.  She was ready, two
+days later, as she had promised to be.
+
+Only her father and Miss Sarah and Caleb were present when they were
+married.  And then, and not alone because she knew he wished it, but
+because it was the dearest wish of her own heart, they turned their
+faces towards the cabin on the balsam knoll.
+
+That day was theirs alone to be shared with no other living thing, save
+the lesser brethren of the wilderness.  Noon found them far north of
+the foothills, deep in the hushed and higher ridges; twilight had come
+and gone and the first of the stars were already blurred points of
+light in the riffles, when they raised the river ahead.  And there he
+checked his horse, to point out the cabin, white-streaked with clay
+chinking against a wall of green--he dismounted and lifted her to the
+ground, for suddenly she wanted to go the rest of the way on foot.
+
+She let her weight lie against him, the top of her head scarce higher
+than his chin, and sighed a little.
+
+"Tired?" he asked with that gentleness he saved for her alone.
+
+The bright head shook.
+
+"Happy?" he asked again, as gently.
+
+She swung around and clung to him then.
+
+"I'm so happy!" she whispered.  "Do you suppose that anyone will ever
+be as happy again?"
+
+There was ineffable content in her question.  Whimsically her own
+phrase rose to his lips.
+
+"Maybe," he said, "maybe sometime--in books!"
+
+She lifted her face then.  He had the dusky glory of her eyes.
+
+"Maybe," she echoed, her voice tremulous,--"sometime.  But this time in
+real life, too."
+
+
+
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+<h1 align="center">The Project Gutenberg eBook, Then I'll Come Back to You, by Larry Evans,
+Illustrated by Will Stevens</h1>
+<pre>
+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 <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Then I'll Come Back to You</p>
+<p>Author: Larry Evans</p>
+<p>Release Date: July 22, 2006  [eBook #18894]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU***</p>
+<br><br><center><h3>E-text prepared by Al Haines</h3></center><br><br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="&quot;I Ain't Never Seen Nothin',&quot; He Stated Patiently.  &quot;Ain't Never Seen More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't
+Never Been Outen the Timber&mdash;Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More
+Now&mdash;Before I Get Done.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="584" HEIGHT="482">
+<H3>
+[Frontispiece: "I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  <BR>
+"I Ain't Never Seen More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  <BR>
+I Ain't Never Been Outen the Timber&mdash;Till To-Day.  <BR>
+But I Aim to See More Now&mdash;Before I Get Done."]
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+LARRY EVANS
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+AUTHOR OF
+<BR>
+ONCE TO EVERY MAN
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+<BR>
+WILL STEVENS
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NEW YORK
+<BR>
+GROSSET &amp; DUNLAP
+<BR>
+PUBLISHERS
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+Copyright, 1915, by
+<BR>
+THE H. K. FLY COMPANY.
+<BR><BR>
+Copyright, 1915, by
+<BR>
+THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+To the Memory of
+<BR>
+My Mother
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS.
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<CENTER>
+
+<TABLE WIDTH="80%">
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">Chapter</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">&nbsp;</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">I.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap01">I DON'T MIND IF I DO!</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">II.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap02">THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">III.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap03">THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap04">I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">V.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap05">THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap06">MY MAN O'MARA</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap07">HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">VIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap08">GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">IX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap09">A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">X.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap10">NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap11">I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap12">THAT WOODS-RAT</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap13">THIS LITERARY THING</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XIV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap14">A GIRL LIKE HER</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap15">LAW AND LUMBER</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XVI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap16">ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XVII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap17">HONEY!</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XVIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap18">I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XIX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap19">SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XX.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap20">BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XXI.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap21">SETTING THE STAGE</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XXII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap22">IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XXIII.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap23">TO-MORROW&mdash;</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XXIV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap24">&mdash;AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR>
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top">XXV.&nbsp;&nbsp;</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<A HREF="#chap25">IN REAL LIFE TOO</A></TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+</H2>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-front">
+"I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I Ain't Never Seen
+More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't Never Been Outen the
+Timber&mdash;Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More Now&mdash;Before I Get
+Done."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <I>Frontispiece</I>
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-056">
+"I've Always Had to Wait a Long Time for Everything I've Wanted," the
+Boy Answered, "But I Always Get It, Just the Same, if I Only Want it
+Hard Enough."
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-124">
+"Blessings, My Children," He Called to the Two in the Shadow.  "My
+Felicitations! and E'en though I know Not Your Identity, Still I May
+Sense Your Fond Confusion."
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#img-260">
+"Oh, I Can't Tell You How Glad I Am to See You So&mdash;So Well!"
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+</H1>
+
+<BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+That year no rain had fallen for a score of days in the hill country.
+The valley road that wound upward and still upward from the town of
+Morrison ran a ribbon of puffy yellow dust between sun-baked,
+brown-sodded dunes; ran north and north, a tortuous series of loops on
+loops, to lose itself at last in the cooler promise of the first
+bulwark of the mountains.  They looked cooler, the distant wooded
+hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the
+gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines
+which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's
+rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss,
+shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even
+chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks that brawled in miniature
+rocky canyons.  And they made the gasping heat of the valley a little
+more unendurable by very contrast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since early afternoon Caleb Hunter had been sitting almost immobile in
+the shade of the trellis which flanked the deep verandas of his huge
+white, thick-pillared house on the hill above the river.  It was
+reminiscent of another locality&mdash;the old Hunter place on the valley
+road.  When Caleb Hunter's father had come north, back when his loyalty
+to a flag and his pity for a gaunt and lonely figure in the White House
+had been stronger than bonds of blood, he had left its counterpart down
+on the Tennessee.  Afterward, with one empty sleeve pinned across his
+breast, he had directed with the other hand the placing of the columns.
+And finally, when he had had to leave this home in turn, along with its
+high, white painted walls and glossy green shutters, he had passed down
+to his son his inborn love of the warmth, his innocent delight in
+indolence&mdash;and an unsurpassed judgment of mint.  The mint bed still lay
+where he had located it, to the west of the house, moist and fragrant
+in the shadow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
+chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his
+comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat.  The lazy day was in his
+blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
+more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
+surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him.  Tiny dots of men in
+flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across
+the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
+lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
+veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
+altitude of the mercury.  He, without being analytical about it, would
+have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
+both were by the distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
+white-columned house that hill above the river.  In those days it had
+been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
+self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might
+be added, ambition or seeming need of one.  The Basin where the river
+widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
+father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs
+of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then
+and smoked incessantly.  And now even the low-lying foothills in which
+the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to
+the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer given over to
+pasturage.  They had taken on an entirely different aspect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
+those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
+and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
+But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in
+the coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than
+half way.  From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
+brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
+across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before.  And just
+beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
+stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres of
+green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Dexter Allison's blame or credit&mdash;the nature of the verdict
+depending entirely upon whether it was rendered by the older or the
+newer generation&mdash;was laid the transformation of Morrison, the town
+proper.  Caleb Hunter had known Allison at college, where the latter
+had been prominent both because of the brilliance of his wardrobe and
+the reputed size of his father's steadily accumulating resources.
+Since that time seven-figure fortunes such as the younger Allison had
+inherited, had become too general to be any longer spectacular.  But
+Dexter Allison's garments had always retained their insistent note.
+Hunter himself had sold Allison the ground upon which the stucco house
+stood; he had heartily agreed that it was an ideal spot for a loafing
+place&mdash;and the fishing was good, too!  Now whenever Caleb thought of
+those first conferences which had preceded the sale, and recalled
+Allison's accentuation of the natural beauties of the spot, Caleb
+allowed himself to smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fishing was still far above reproach, a little further back
+country&mdash;and Dexter Allison owned the sawmills that droned in the
+valley.  His men drove his timber down from the hills in the north; his
+men piled the yellow planks upon his flat cars which ran in over his
+spur line that had crept up from the south.  His hundreds and hundreds
+of rivermen already trod the sawdust-padded streets of the newer
+Morrison that had sprung into being beyond the bend; they swarmed in on
+the drives, a hard-faced, hard-shouldered horde, picturesque,
+proficient and profane.  They brought with them color and care-free
+prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the
+whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden, swift
+encounters which were as silent as they were deadly.  And they spent
+their money without stopping to count it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out the
+virtues of this vice.  And after a time, when the older generation
+found that the rivermen preferred their own section of the town,
+ignoring as though they had never existed the staid and sleepy
+residential streets above, they heaved a sigh of partial relief and
+tried to forget their proximity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Little more than a year had been required for that transformation.  The
+boards of some of the newer shacks down river were still damp with
+pitch.  And twice during that period Dexter Allison had come into the
+hills to take up a transitory abode in the stucco house which had been
+quite six months in the building:&mdash;once, two years before, when he had
+disappeared into the mountains upon a prolonged fishing trip, to return
+fishless but with an astonishing mass of pencilled data and contour
+maps; and the second time for an even longer stay, a year ago when the
+mill was being erected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since then the stucco and timber place had been closed, with no one but
+a doddering old caretaker and a gardener or two about the premises,
+until early that last hot August week.  On Monday Caleb Hunter had
+noticed that the blinds had been thrown open to the air; on Wednesday,
+from his point of vantage upon the porch, he had watched a rather
+astounding load of trunks careen in at the driveway, piloted by a mill
+teamster who had for two seasons held the record for a double-team load
+of logs and was making the most of that opportunity to prove his skill.
+And the next morning the tumult raised by a group of children racing
+over the shorn lawns had awakened him; he had descended to be hailed by
+Dexter Allison's own booming bass from behind the intervening high box
+hedge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the hottest day of the hottest fortnight that the hill country
+had known in years.  The very temperature gave color to Allison's
+statement that the heat had driven them north from the shore&mdash;him and
+his wife and Barbara, their daughter of ten, and the half-dozen or more
+guests whose trunks, coming on the next day, made an even more imposing
+sight than had Allison's own.  And yet as he sat there in the shadow,
+methodically pulling upon his pipe, Caleb Hunter smiled from time to
+time, reminiscently.  He last of all would have been the one to admit
+that the owner of the big stucco place and the mills, and&mdash;yes, of the
+newer Morrison itself&mdash;had not given a good account of the talents and
+tens of talents which had been passed down to him.  But the use of so
+much evasion, where no evasion at all seemed necessary, rather puzzled
+as well as amused Caleb; and yet, after all, this merely branded him as
+old-fashioned, so far as the newer business methods were concerned
+which were crowding into Morrison.  Allison's way of going about a
+thing made him think of the old valley road that wound north in its
+series of loops on loops; and yet, reflecting upon that parallel, he
+had to admit to himself, too, that the road achieved final heights
+which, in a straightaway route across country would have necessitated
+more than a few wearisome and heart-breaking grades.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The comparison pleased Caleb.  He was nodding his head over it as he
+buried his nose in the mint-sprayed glass again, when a haze of dust to
+the north caught his vagrant attention.  Quite apparently it was raised
+by a foot-traveler, and the latter were not frequent upon that road,
+especially foot-travelers who came from that direction.  Trivial as it
+was, it piqued his interest, and he lay back and followed it from
+lazily half-closed eyes.  It topped a rise and disappeared&mdash;the dust
+cloud&mdash;and reappeared in turn, but not until it had advanced to within
+a scant hundred yards of him could he make out the figure which raised
+it.  And then, after one sharp glance, with a quick intake of breath,
+he rose and went a trifle hastily out across his own lawn toward the
+iron picket fence that bordered the roadside.  He went almost hurriedly
+to intercept the boy who came marching over the brow of the last low
+hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter, particularly in the last year or so, had seen many a
+strange and brilliant costume pass along that wilderness highway, but
+as he hung over the front gate he remembered that none of them had ever
+before drawn him from his deep chair in the shadow.  For him none of
+them had ever approached in sensationalism the quite unbelievable garb
+of the boy who came steadily on and on&mdash;who came steadily nearer and
+nearer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With a little closer view of him the watching man understood the reason
+for the dense cloud of dust above the lone pedestrian.  For when the
+boy raised his feet with each stride, the man-sized, hob-nailed boots
+which encased them failed to lift in turn.  Indeed, the toes did clear
+the ground, but the heels, slipping away from the lean ankles, dragged
+in the follow-through.  And the boy's other garments, save for his
+flannel shirt and flapping felt hat, were of a size in keeping with the
+boots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His trousers had once been white cotton drill, but the whiteness had
+long before given up the unequal struggle against grime and grease and
+subsided to a less conspicuous, less perishable grey.  They had been
+cut off just below the knees and, unhemmed, hung flapping with every
+step he took above a stretch of white-socked, spindly shanks.  But it
+was the coat he wore which held Caleb spellbound.  It was of a style
+popularly known as a swallowtail, faced with satin as to lapels and
+once gracefully rounded to a long, bisected skirt in the rear.  The
+satin facings were gone and the original color of the fabric, too, had
+faded to a shiny, bottle-green.  But the long skirts&mdash;at least all that
+was left of them&mdash;still flapped bravely, as did the trousers.  For
+they, like the nether garments, had been cut off, with more regard for
+haste than accuracy, so that the back of the coat cleared the ground by
+a good foot and a half.  The sleeves, rolled back from two slender,
+browned wrists, were cuffed with a six-inch stretch of striped, soiled
+lining.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a time Caleb had been at a loss to make out the object which the
+boy carried upon one shoulder, balanced above a blanket tight-rolled
+and tied with string.  Not until the grotesque little figure was within
+a dozen paces of him did he recognize it, and then, at the same moment
+that he caught a glimpse of an old and rusted revolver strapped to the
+boy's narrow waist, he realized what it was.  The boy was toting a
+double-springed steel trap, big enough it seemed to take all four feet
+of any bear that ever walked&mdash;and it was beautifully dull with oil!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb stood and stared, mouth agape.  A moment or two earlier he had
+had to fight off an almost uncontrollable desire to roar with laughter,
+but that mood had passed somehow as the boy came nearer.  For the
+latter was not even aware of his presence there behind the iron fence;
+he was walking with his head up, thin face thrust forward like that of
+a young and overly eager setter with the bird in plain sight.  The
+world of hunger in that strained and staring visage helped Caleb to
+master his mirth, and when, at a tentative cough from him, the small
+figure halted dead in his tracks and wheeled, even the vestige of a
+smile left the wide-waisted watcher's lips.  Then Caleb had his first
+full view of the boy's features.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were wide, deep shadows beneath the grey eyes, doubly noticeable
+because of the heavy fringe of the lashes that swept above them; there
+was a pallid, bluish circle around the thin and tight-set lips.  And
+the lean cheeks were very, very pale, both with the heat of the sun and
+a fatigue now close to exhaustion.  But the eyes themselves, as they
+met Caleb's, were alight with a fire which afterward, when he had had
+more time to ponder it, made him remember the pictured eyes of the
+children of the Crusades.  They fairly burned into his own, and they
+checked the first half-jocular words of greeting which had been
+trembling upon his lips.  His voice was only grave and kindly when he
+began to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You&mdash;you look a trifle tired, young man," he said then.  "Are
+you&mdash;going far?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy touched his lips delicately with the point of his tongue.  His
+gravity more than matched that of his questioner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Air&mdash;air thet the&mdash;city?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The words were soft of accent and a little drawling; there was an
+accompanying gesture of one thumb thrown backward over a thin shoulder.
+But Caleb had to smile a little at the breathless note in the query.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The city?" he echoed, a little puzzled.  "The city!  Well, now&mdash;I&mdash;&mdash;"
+and he chuckled a bit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy caught him up swiftly, almost sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thet's&mdash;ain't thet Morrison?" he demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Caleb had a glimmer of comprehension.  He nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," he answered quietly.  "That's the city.  That's Morrison down
+there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The shoulders of the ancient coat lifted and fell with a visible sigh
+as the strange little figure turned again, head keenly forward, to gaze
+hungrily down at the town in the valley.  And Caleb translated that
+long-drawn breath correctly; without stopping to reason it out, he knew
+that it meant fulfillment of a dream most marvelous in anticipation,
+but even more wonderful in its coming true.  Words would have failed
+where that single breath sufficed.  The man remained quiet until the
+boy finally turned back to him, eased the heavy trap to his other
+shoulder and wet his lips once more.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought it war," he murmured, and a thread of awe wove through the
+words.  "I thought it est nachelly <I>hed</I> to be!  Haow&mdash;haow many houses
+would you reckon they might be daown&mdash;daown in thet there holler?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The owner of the white-columned house gave the question its meed of
+reflection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, I&mdash;I'd say quite a few hundred, at least."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The odd little figure bobbed his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thet's what Old Tom always sed," he muttered, more to himself than to
+his hearer.  "An'&mdash;an' I guess I ain't never rightly believed him till
+naow."  And then: "Is&mdash;is New Yor-rk any bigger?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man at the picket fence smiled again, but the smile was without
+offense.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, yes," he answered.  "Yes, considerably bigger, I should judge.
+Twice as large, at least, and maybe more than that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy did not answer.  He just faced about to stare once more.  And
+then the miracle came to pass.  Around a far bend in Dexter Allison's
+single spur track there came careening an ashmatic switch engine with a
+half-dozen empty flats in tow.  With a brave puffing and blowing of
+leaky cylinder heads, it rattled across an open space between piles of
+timber in the mill-yard and disappeared with a shrill toot of warning
+for unseen workmen upon the tracks ahead.  The boy froze to
+granite-like immobility as it flashed into view.  Long after it had
+passed from sight he stood like a bit of a fantastic figure cut from
+stone.  Then a tremor shook him from head to foot, and when it came
+slowly about Caleb saw that his small face was even whiter than it had
+been before beneath its coat of tan and powdery dust.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He swallowed hard, and tried to speak&mdash;and had to swallow again before
+the words would come.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gawd&mdash;I&mdash;may&mdash;die!" ho broke out falteringly then.  "There goes a
+injine!  A steam injine&mdash;wan't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long afterward, when he had realized that the boy's life was to bring
+again and again a repetition of that sublime moment of realization&mdash;a
+moment of fulfillment unspoiled by surfeit or sophistication or a
+blunted capacity to marvel, which Caleb had seen grow old and stale
+even in the children he knew, he wondered and wished that he might have
+known it himself, once at least.  Years of waiting, starved years of
+anticipation, he felt after all must have been a very little price to
+pay for that great, blinding, gasping moment.  But at the time, amazed
+at the boy's white face, amazed at the hushed fervor in the words he
+forgot,&mdash;he spoke before he thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But haven't you ever seen an engine before?" he exclaimed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As soon as the question had left his lips he would have given much to
+have had it back again; but at that it failed to have the effect which
+he feared too late to check.  Instead of coloring with hurt and shame,
+instead of subterfuge or evasion, the boy simply lifted his eyes
+levelly to Caleb's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I ain't never seed nuthin'," he stated patiently.  "I ain't never seed
+more'n three houses together in a clearin' before.  I&mdash;I ain't never
+been outen the timber&mdash;till today.  But I aim to see more, naow&mdash;before
+I git done!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man experienced a peculiar sensation.  The boy's low, passionlessly
+vehement statement somehow made him feel that it wasn't a boy to whom
+he was talking, but a little and grave old man.  And suddenly the
+desire seized him to hear more of that low, direct voice; the impulse
+came to him and Caleb, whose whole life had been as free from erratic
+snap-judgments as his broad face was of craft, found joy in acting upon
+it forthwith, before it had time to cool.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The view is excellent from my veranda," he waved a hand behind him.
+"And&mdash;you look a little warm and tired.  If your business is not of too
+pressing a nature&mdash;have you&mdash;&mdash;" he broke off, amazed at his helpless
+formality in the matter&mdash;"have you come far?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he wondered immediately how the boy would receive that suggestion
+that he hesitate, there with the "city" in front of him, a fairy-tale
+to be explored.  And again he was allowed to catch a glimpse of age-old
+spirit&mdash;a glimpse of a man-sized self-discipline&mdash;beneath the childish
+exterior.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy hesitated a moment, but it was his uncertainty as to just what
+Caleb's invitation had offered, and not the lure of the town which made
+him pause.  He took one step forward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I been comin' since last Friday," he explained.  "I been comin' daown
+river for three days naow&mdash;and I been comin' fast!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again that measuring, level glance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"An' I ain't got no business&mdash;yit," he went on.  "Thet's what I aim to
+locate, after I've hed a chance to look around a trifle.  But I am
+tired a little, an' so if you mean thet you're askin' me to stop for a
+minit&mdash;if you mean thet you're askin' me that&mdash;why, then&nbsp;&#8230; then, I
+guess I don't mind if I do!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's what I mean," said Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the little figure preceded him across his soft, cropped lawn.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter had never married, and even now, at the age of forty and
+odd, in particularly mellow moments he was liable to confess that,
+while matrimony no doubt offered a far wider field for both general
+excitement and variety, as far as he himself was concerned, he felt
+that his bachelor condition had points of excellence too obvious to be
+treated with contumely.  Perhaps the fact that Sarah Hunter, four years
+his senior, had kept so well oiled the cogs of the domestic machinery
+of the white place on the hill that their churnings had never been
+evidenced may have been in part an answer to his contentment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For Sarah Hunter, too, had never married.  To the townspeople who had
+never dared to try to storm the wall of her apparent frigidity, or been
+able quite to understand her aloof austerity, she was little more than
+a weekly occurence as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun
+itself.  Every Sunday morning a rare vision of stately dignity for all
+her tininess, assisted by Caleb, she descended from the Hunter equipage
+to enter the portals of the Morrison Baptist church.  After the service
+she reappeared and, having complimented the minister upon the sagacity
+of his discourse, again assisted by Caleb, she mounted to the rear seat
+of the surrey and rolled back up the hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was as much as the townspeople ever saw of "Cal Hunter's maiden
+sister" unless there happened to be a prolonged siege of sickness in
+the village or a worse accident than usual.  Then she came and camped
+on the scene until the crisis was over, soft-voiced, soft-fingered and
+serenely sure of herself.  Sarah had never married, and even though she
+had in the long interval which, year by year, had brought to Caleb a
+more placid rotundity grown slender and slenderer still, and
+flat-chested and sharp-angled in face and figure, Caleb knew that
+underneath it all there had been no shrinkage in her soul&mdash;knew that
+there were no bleak expanses in her heart, or edges to her pity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They often joked each other about their state of single blessedness,
+did Caleb and his sister.  Often, hard upon his easy boast of
+satisfaction with things as they were, she would quote the fable of the
+fox and the high-hanging grapes, only to be taunted a moment later with
+her own celibacy.  But the taunt and the fable had long been stingless.
+For Sarah Hunter knew that one end of Caleb's heavy gold watch chain
+still carried a bit of a gold coin, worn smooth and thin from years of
+handling; she knew that the single word across its back, even though it
+had long ago been effaced so far as other eyes were concerned, was
+still there for him to see.  And Caleb, rummaging one day for some lost
+article or other, in a pigeonhole in Sarah's desk in which he had no
+license to look, had come across a picture of a tall and black-haired
+lad, brave in white trousers and an amazing waistcoat.  Caleb
+remembered having been told that he had died for another with that same
+smile which the picture had preserved&mdash;the tall and jaunty youngster.
+And so their comprehension was mutual.  They understood, did Caleb and
+his sister.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But sure as he was of Sarah's fundamental kindness, Caleb experienced a
+twinge of guilty uncertainty that August afternoon as he closed the
+iron gate behind the grotesque little figure which had already started
+across his lawn.  For the moment he had forgotten that the sun was low
+in the west; he had overlooked the fact that it was customary for the
+Hunter establishment to sup early during the warm summer months.  But
+when he turned to find Sarah watching, stiff and uncompromising, from
+the doorway, he remembered with painful certainty her attitude toward
+his propensity to pick up any stray that might catch him in a moment of
+too pronounced mellowness&mdash;stray human or feline or lost yellow dog.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah's gaze, however, was not for her brother at that moment.  Her
+eyes were fixed unswervingly upon the figure in the once-white drill
+trousers and bobbed swallow-tail coat and shuffling boots.  She was
+staring from wide and, Caleb noted, rather horror-stricken eyes at the
+huge steel trap above the blanket pack.  But the boy who must have
+received her glance full in his face had not faltered a step in his
+advance.  He went forward until he stood at the foot of the low steps
+which mounted to the veranda; and there he stopped, looking up at her,
+and removed his battered hat.  Caleb ranged awkwardly up alongside him
+and looked up at her in turn.  He, searching desperately for a neat and
+cleverly casual opening speech, could not know that beneath her
+forbidding manner a peal of soft laughter was struggling for utterance;
+could not know that, at that moment, she was telling herself that, of
+the two, Caleb was far the younger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At last he cleared his throat, oratorically, and then she promptly
+interrupted him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Supper is served, Cal," she drawled in her gentle, almost lisping
+voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb received the statement as if it were an astounding bit of
+hitherto undreamed-of news.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Comin', Sarah!" he chirped briskly.  "Comin' this blessed minute!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, with an attempt at disingenuousness:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I've a friend here, Sarah, whom I'd like to&mdash;er&mdash;present to you!
+This is my sister, Miss Hunter," he announced to the silent boy, "and
+this young man, Sarah, this young man is&mdash;er&mdash;ah&mdash;Mr.&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm Steve," said the boy, mildly.  "I'm just Stephen O'Mara!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Certainly!" gasped Caleb.   "Quite so&mdash;quite so!  Sarah, this is just
+Steve."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The frail little woman with her quaint dignity of another decade failed
+to move; she did not unbend so much as the fraction of an inch.  But
+hard upon the heels of Caleb's last words the boy went forward
+unhesitatingly.  Hat in the hand that balanced his big steel trap, he
+stopped in front of her and offered one brown paw.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Haow dye do, Miss Hunter," he saluted her, gravely.  And with a slow
+smile that discovered for her a row of white and even teeth: "Haow dye
+do?  I&mdash;I reckon you're the first&mdash;dressed-up lady I ever did git to
+know!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The calm statement took what little breath there had been left in
+Caleb's lungs; it left Sarah breathless, too.  But after an
+infinitesimal moment of waiting she held out her own delicate fingers
+and took the outstretched hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Haow dye do, Steve?" she answered, and Caleb was at a loss to
+interpret the suppressed quality of her voice.  "And I&mdash;some day I am
+sure it will be a great pleasure to remember that I was the&mdash;first!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then she faced her brother.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you&mdash;will your friend, Mr.&mdash;Steve&mdash;remain for supper, Cal?" she
+asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Caleb, quick to see an opening, made the most of this one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stay for supper," he repeated her question, and he laughed.
+"Stay&mdash;for&mdash;supper!  Well, I should hope he would.  Why&mdash;why, he's
+going to stop for the night!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the vantage place there at the top of the steps Sarah stood and
+surveyed her brother's wide and guileless face for a second.  Then her
+lips began to twitch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Very clever, Cal," she told him.  "Quite clever&mdash;for you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And she nodded and withdrew to see that the table was laid for three.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb, chuckling, watched her go; then with a nod to the boy, he
+started to follow her in.  But Steve paused at the threshold, and when
+the man stopped and looked back to ascertain the cause of his delay he
+found that the boy was depositing the bear trap upon the porch
+floor&mdash;found him tugging to free the rusty old revolver from his belt.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll leave Samanthy here," the one called Steve stated, and Caleb
+understood that he meant the trap.  "An' I reckon I'd better not lug my
+weapon into the house, neither, hed I?  She might&mdash;&mdash;"  He nodded in
+the direction of Sarah's disappearance&mdash;"Old Tom says womin folks
+that's gentle born air kind-a skittish about havin' shootin' irons
+araound the place.  And I don't reckon it's the part of men folks to
+pester 'em."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb didn't know just what to say, so he merely nodded approval.
+Again he had been made to feel that it was not a boy but some little
+old man who was explaining to him.  Silently he led the way upstairs,
+and after he had seen the blanket pack deposited in one corner of
+Sarah's beloved guest-room, after he had seen the rusty coat peeled off
+as a preface to removing the dust accumulation of the long hot day from
+hands and face, an inspiration came to him.  While the boy was washing,
+utterly lost to everything but that none-too-simple task, he went out
+of the room on a still-hunt of his own, and came back presently with
+the thing for which he had gone searching.  He found the boy wrestling
+a little desperately with a mop of wavy chestnut hair which only grew
+the more hopeless with every stroke of the brush.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never mind that."  Caleb met the misapprehension in the boy's eyes.
+"Never mind that!  And I&mdash;I've taken the liberty of digging out this
+old canvas shooting coat.  It's one I got for Sarah&mdash;for my
+sister&mdash;but, as you say, women folks are mighty skittish about anything
+that has to do with a gun.  She never would go even so far as to try it
+on, but if you don't mind&mdash;&mdash;  That coat of yours must be a trifle hot
+for this weather, I should say."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve reached out a hand that trembled a little and took the coat.  He
+took it and stared at it with that same strained and hungry look which
+he had bestowed a half hour before upon the "City."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean," he asked, and his lips remained parted breathlessly upon
+the question, "do you mean&mdash;this yere's for me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb thought of the "injine"&mdash;the "<I>steam</I> injine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mean just that, if you'll have it," he replied.  The boy slipped his
+little body into the garment and wheeled to survey himself in a mirror.
+In comparison with the dismembered swallowtail it was the purple of a
+Solomon.  There was a cartridge web across its front, with loops, and
+after he had looked long and long at his reflection, the boy thrust
+both his thumbs into the belt it made.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then: "Them's fer ketridges," he announced solemnly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He scowled judiciously and nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And, "I'll hev to git me some, the first thing in the mornin'," he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was his only remark then, and yet Caleb felt amply repaid.  Later
+he had more to say, but for the time being he merely followed Caleb
+back downstairs, walking very stiff and straight except when, with
+every few steps, he leaned over the better to see the looped webbing
+across his middle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And at table that evening the man came to know another trait in the odd
+little stranger's odd makeup which, coupled with those which he had
+already mentally tabulated for future private contemplation, set him to
+wondering more than a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the appearance of the first dish upon the table that night the boy
+was very frankly nonplussed at the array of implements upon each side
+of his plate, placed there for him to manipulate.  He scarcely knew one
+from the other, and the separate uses for each not at all.  But the way
+in which he met the problem made Caleb lift his eyes and meet Sarah's
+inscrutable glance with something akin to triumph.  For there was no
+awkwardness in the boy's procedure, no flushing embarrassment, no
+shame-facedness nor painfully self-conscious attempt to cover his
+ignorance.  Instead, he sat and waited&mdash;sat and watched openly until
+Miss Sarah had herself selected knife or fork, as the case might
+be&mdash;and then, turning back to those beside his own place, frowning
+intently, he made painstaking selection therefrom.  Nor did he once
+make a mistake.  And Caleb, after he had begun to mark a growing
+softness in the color of his sister's thin cheeks, ventured to draw
+into conversation their small guest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy talked freely and openly, always with his wide eyes upon the
+face of his questioner, always in the grave and slightly drawling
+idioms of the woods.  Again he confided that he had never before been
+out of the timber; he explained that "Old Tom's" untimely taking-off a
+fortnight back had been alone responsible for this pilgrimage.  And
+that opened the way for a question which Caleb had been eager to ask
+him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose this&mdash;this 'Old Tom' was some kin of yours?" he observed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin.  I ain't never hed
+nobody&mdash;father ner mother, neither!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips.  But the
+bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to
+catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized
+that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was.  "I ain't
+never hed nobody but Old Tom.  And he was&mdash;he wasn't nuthin' but what
+he called my&mdash;my"&mdash;the sentence was broken while he paused to get the
+phrase correctly&mdash;"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy,
+but he had to ask it just the same.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Still, I suppose his&mdash;his taking-off must have been something in the
+nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy pursed his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly.  "No-o-o!  I can't
+say's it was.  We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon.  Old Tom, he
+often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin'
+drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids&mdash;and two weeks ago he
+done so!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the rest of the words were quite casual.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion,
+"if they'd hev been a trifle more water.  But the rocks was too close
+to the surface fer comfortable swimmin'.  The Jenkinses found him down
+in the slack water, Sunday noon or thereabouts, and they sed he'd never
+be no deader, not even if he'd a-died in a reg'lar bed, with a doctor
+helpin' him along."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb threw his sister one lugubriously helpless glance.  Sarah had
+choked, apparently upon a crumb of bread, and was coughing,
+stranglingly.  And Caleb made to change the drift of the conversation,
+but he was not quick enough.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I ain't never been much of a hand for licker," Steve finished naively.
+"Old Tom sed he never could understand it in me, neither, but he
+reckoned it was lucky in a way fer both of us.  He sed he'd whale the
+life outen me if he ever caught me even smellin' of a cork; and as fer
+him&mdash;well, it come in handy for him, havin' a sober hand round the
+shack when he wan't quite hisself!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This time when Caleb lifted his eyes he met a startled gleam behind
+Sarah's half dropped lashes.  She was peering steadily into the boy's
+lean, untroubled face.  Caleb voiced the query which he knew must be
+behind her quiet intentness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You said your name was O'Mara, I believe.  I suppose that was&mdash;ah&mdash;Old
+Tom's last name, too?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve laughed; he laughed frankly for the first time since he had
+halted, hours before, outside in the dusty road.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, Old Tom had a dozen different names in the last few years," he
+replied.  "He had a new one every time he went outen the woods fer a
+trip.  But he always sed he mostly favored Brown or Jones or Smith,
+they bein' quiet and common and not too hard to remember.  He just
+changed names whenever he got tired of his old one, Old Tom did.  But
+he always did say, too, that if he'd hed as good a one as O'Mara, he'd
+a kept it&mdash;and kept it proud."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the conclusion of that statement it was Miss Sarah's gaze which went
+searching across the table for her brother's eyes.  But the boy just
+ran on and on, totally oblivious to their glances.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He told them of his lonely days in the woods shack, when Old Tom went
+down river and was three or four weeks in returning; he dwelt upon
+blissful days in the spring when he had been allowed to play a man's
+part in the small drives which he and Old Tom and the "Jenkinses"
+began, and which Old Tom and the Jenkinses alone saw through to market
+in Morrison.  He touched lightly and inconsequentially upon certain
+days when Old Tom would hang for hours over an old tin box filled with
+soiled and ink-smeared memoranda, periods which were always followed by
+days of moody silence and a week or more of "lessons" in a tattered and
+thumbed reader which the woodsman had brought up-river&mdash;lessons as
+painful and laborious to Old Tom as they were delightful to the starved
+mentality of the pupil.  And Old Tom, the boy explained, was pretty
+likely to be "lickered up fer quite a spell" after such a session which
+invariably began with an exploration of the battered tin box.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy told Caleb of days and nights on the trail&mdash;boasted
+unconsciously of Old Tom's super-cunning with trap and deadfall, and
+even poison bait.  And that brought him to the beautifully oiled bear
+trap which he had left outside the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I brung Samanthy along with me," he stated.  "I brung her just because
+somehow I kind-a thought mebby Old Tom'd be glad if I did.  Next to me
+he always sed he set a heap o' store on thet ole critter.  He sed
+Samanthy was as near to hevin' a woman around the house as anything he
+knew on&mdash;she hed a voice like a steel trap, and when she got her teeth
+sot in a argument she never did let up.  I brung her along with me, and
+the gun he give me, but I didn't take nuthin' else."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb waited there until he knew that the boy had finished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You never bothered about that old tin box?" he inquired casually.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy shook his head again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Old Tom, whenever he went away for a spell, always sed I wan't to
+meddle with it," he explained.  "This time I reckoned his goin' was
+just about the same thing, only he won't be comin' back, so I&mdash;I just
+locked the box up in the cubberd and hitched the staple into the door
+and come down myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By the time that meal was finished the boy's eyes were so heavy-lidded
+that, fight as he would, they still persisted in drooping till the long
+lashes curled over his cheeks.  And in spite of Caleb's remonstrance it
+was Sarah who saw him upstairs and into the huge guest-room with its
+four-poster and high-boy and spindle-backed chairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When she came back downstairs her eyes were shining more than a little
+and the flush upon her cheeks was undeniably rose.  Her brother, from
+his seat before the unlighted fireplace, puffed methodically upon his
+pipe and barely lifted his head at her coming.  He was deep in
+meditation.  She stood looking at him for a time from the foot of the
+stairway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's asleep," she began finally in a very little voice.  "He fell
+asleep almost before his cheek touched the pillow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb made no answer.  He nodded but his eyes were vacant with thoughts
+of his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cal," she went on, "did you give him that old coat of mine?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb nodded again&mdash;an affirmative.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, the last thing he asked before he slept was that I deliver a
+message to you.  'Tell him thanks for me,' he said.  'Tell him I clean
+forgot it til now!'  And as for me, Cal&mdash;why&mdash;why, 'he'd git me
+anuther, anytime I took the notion thet I wanted one!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And still Caleb nodded.  The room was quiet for a long time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sarah," he murmured at last.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, Cal," she answered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has that boy's&mdash;yarn&mdash;set you to thinking a little?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was very interesting and unusual," she admitted.  Then she rose and
+crossed over to his chair and perched herself, with odd, elfish,
+girlish grace upon its arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean Old Tom's tin box?" she asked gently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, in part&mdash;yes," he said.  "But not just that alone, either.  I
+mean everything, Sarah.  The way he handles himself; the way he looks
+one in the face when he is talking.  The&mdash;the&mdash;now what are you
+grinning over?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She stroked his sparse hair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cal, you old romancer, you.  Who'd ever suspect it in a man of your
+age and&mdash;and avoirdupois!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Avoirdupois!" he snorted.  "Can't a man continue to have ideas now and
+then, even if he does become a&mdash;a trifle plump.  And that boy&mdash;why,
+Sarah I tell you&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then his sister put one hand over his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know, Cal," she interrupted placidly.  "I know!  You're going to
+tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that
+backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless
+bronze&mdash;or&mdash;or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and
+provided with the chance.  It sounds&mdash;it sounds very big and grand and
+romantic, Cal, but has it ever occurred to you that anyone big enough
+for things like those would find the way himself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Immediately, jerkily, Caleb started to straighten up.
+Argumentatively&mdash;and then she checked him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, I know you don't believe it and I&mdash;I don't think I do myself, Cal.
+A man has to know what opportunity is before he can go out and hunt up
+his own big chance.  I just said it for the sake of argument, Cal.
+I&mdash;I'm like Samanthy&mdash;ole Samanthy, you know!  I'm a woman, and when I
+git my teeth sot in a argumint I never do let up.  Have your dreams,
+you&mdash;you boy!  And in the meantime, if you have any plans, tell me,
+please, what are you going to do with him in the morning?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter bobbed his head, vehemently.  Rapidly he related to her
+the episode of the switch engine in Dexter Allison's millyards.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And I believe what I believe," he insisted, doggedly.  "And to-morrow
+I aim to give that boy a ride in one of Allison's 'steam injine' cabs,
+if it's all I do!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought so," said Miss Sarah.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a time she sat there upon his arm chair.  Neither spoke, nor felt
+the need for words.  Just before she rose to go upstairs, she broke
+that quiet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has an odd, strange, half-wild beauty," she mused aloud.  "A beauty
+that is quite unusual, I should say, in children of his&mdash;his station.
+His hair is silken and, oh so thick!  And his eyes and square chin with
+that little cleft.  And his nose&mdash;his nose, I should say, might be said
+to denote estheticism&mdash;and&mdash;a&mdash;a&mdash;ah&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter threw back his head at the telltale little quaver in the
+voice and found Sarah Hunter smiling down at him, whimsically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Get all the amusement out of it that you can," he invited her.
+"And&mdash;and trust a woman to take note of such points as you have
+mentioned!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the stairs she gave him one backward glance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Forgive me, Cal," she hogged.  "I meant it all&mdash;truly!  Even the
+estheticism, which I only included to tease you.  And if you don't want
+to trust to a woman's judgment on such points as I have mentioned, I
+would suggest that you peep in on him when you retire, and&mdash;and confirm
+them for yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hours later Caleb acted upon her suggestion.  Every characteristic
+which Sarah had mentioned he found and noted in that half-lighted
+moment or two while he stood at the bedside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he noted more than just that.  Sarah's old canvas hunting coat was
+folded into a small bundle and lay, guarded by one outflung,
+loose-fingered brown hand, beside the sleeping boy's face on the pillow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb went to bed with a half dozen wild notions whirling in his head,
+and a strange something tugging at his heart.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Saturday morning dawned as hot and dry and windless as had been the
+other days of the week which had preceded it.  Caleb Hunter, rising
+from an uneasy night, blamed his sleeplessness upon the weather.  It
+was fully an hour before his usual, not-too-early hour of rising, when
+he slowly descended the wide stairway; and yet he was but little
+surprised to find the boy already there before him, seated upon the top
+step of the verandah, when he strolled outside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The little stranger with the grave voice, who had introduced himself as
+Stephen O'Mara, had not heard Caleb's step and the latter stood for a
+time in the doorway, contemplating the small, square-set shoulders in
+the canvas coat which had been his sister Sarah's, and the small,
+shapely head above them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Throughout the night while he lay awake pondering the fantastic
+possibilities which the boy's story had stirred him into half
+believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in
+which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing
+analysis of him, her brother.  Before morning came he had told himself
+a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer,
+who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a
+Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to
+have big eyes.  Merely because they had so persistently denied him
+sleep&mdash;those thoughts of Old Tom and his cherished tin box and the
+boy's own unmistakable poise and surety of self which even the
+shuffling boots and ragged clothes had only made the more
+impressive&mdash;merely because they persisted in endless procession through
+his brain, while he rolled and tossed and re-arranged the pillow, he
+had grown more and more peevishly eager to discount and discredit them,
+during the darkness.  But when morning came, and he rose and went into
+the big guest room to find it empty, he experienced a moment of panicky
+disappointment; suddenly anxious for another opportunity to verify all
+that which, in the hours of sleepless pro's and con's, had become
+figment-like and whimsical, he wondered if the boy really could have
+gone without even waiting to bid them good-bye.  He could not make that
+abrupt sort of a leave-taking harmonize with the rest of the
+youngster's actions&mdash;and then he caught a glimpse of him, motionless
+there on the verandah steps.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy did not hear Caleb's coming that morning.  His head was tilted
+forward in that keen attitude of straining intentness which to the man
+had already become eloquently characteristic of his hungry spirit.  And
+for a time Caleb withheld his greeting; instead of speaking he stood
+and studied him, and while he studied it all came back again, until the
+illusion, if such it were, was far more vivid, far more compelling than
+it had been the night before.  Caleb told himself that to look only
+meant the discovery of new and compelling "points" both in feature and
+body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
+variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes.  And
+then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
+looking down into the town in the valley.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
+direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
+although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
+silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof.  Caleb heard
+voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
+perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
+Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
+hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn.  And Caleb Hunter's
+brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
+black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
+gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
+days, flashed through behind him.  For Caleb heard the short gasp which
+came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
+darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
+hand at him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
+quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet&mdash;and Caleb understood
+what had been holding so closely his attention.  He understood
+absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
+help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy&mdash;he couldn't
+help but think&mdash;&mdash;  His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
+from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
+wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
+absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
+the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
+Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
+daughter, Barbara.  No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
+Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
+had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
+for his body.  Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
+moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force.  He
+recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
+adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
+recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
+party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
+morning garb.  But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was
+to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above
+spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and
+grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her
+through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a
+mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly
+alive.  Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she
+was to be&mdash;of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was
+there in the promise of the years.  And he who was fond of insisting to
+his sister Sarah, that there was many a boy back in those hills who,
+with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized
+how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the
+fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to
+approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was
+typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was no snob&mdash;Caleb Hunter&mdash;and yet the little girl's bearing at that
+moment doubly accented for him the gulf which lay between her and the
+hills-boy, by name Steve.  For though she did pause to stare at his
+white drill trousers and unbelievable man-sized boots with frankly
+childish astonishment, the next instant she had recovered herself and
+without another glance preceded her father across the grass.  Quite as
+though Steve had not been there at all she passed him, to hesitate
+demurely at Caleb's side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she greeted him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, quite suddenly, Caleb didn't feel so very sorry after all for
+his little visitor.  He stopped pitying him.  Steve's eyes had not
+wavered once from the little girl's face, from the time she appeared in
+the hedge gap until she mounted the steps, utterly oblivious to his
+nearness; but when she brushed against his elbow, the boy rose and
+stood, hat in hand, gravely quiet, gravely possessed, and silently sure
+of himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even after he had answered Barbara Allison's greeting and turned with
+his grown-up, ponderous courtesy to present the boy to her, only to be
+left with the words hanging upon tongue-tip by her instant
+disappearance inside in search of Sarah, Caleb caught no hint of the
+thoughts behind those impassive and steady eyes.  And yet he knew that
+Steve had risen in order that he might bow as he had the night before,
+when Caleb introduced him to his sister.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dexter Allison, coming up in less airy fashion across the lawn,
+surprised Caleb with his mouth still open.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" said Dexter Allison&mdash;and Caleb recovered himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" he countered; and then they both laughed softly and shook
+hands.  It was their unvaried formula of greeting, whether they had not
+seen each other for twenty-four hours or twenty-four months.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And while they were shaking hands the boy turned quietly and re-seated
+himself upon the top step.  But Allison gave him more notice than had
+his daughter Barbara.  He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets,
+gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the
+scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of
+seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at
+Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was
+looking the other way.  After a time Allison raised quizzical eyes to
+Caleb's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wel-l-l?" he intoned, and with a little reluctance as reasonless as it
+was unnoticed, Caleb answered the inferred question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This&mdash;this is a little friend of mine, Dexter," he said, "down from
+the hills.  He's in to have a look at the city which you have been so
+instrumental in arousing to its present state of teeming activity.
+This is Stephen O'Mara.  Steve&mdash;this is Mr. Allison, Steve!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then the boy turned and again rose to his feet, and at that moment
+Caleb could have hugged him for his deliberation.  The boy inclined his
+head; he bowed, without a word.  And it was Dexter Allison who first
+offered a hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Glad to make your acquaintance, Stephen," the latter exclaimed with
+quite violent good humor.  "And how are you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve took the hand and closed his brown fingers hard upon the puffy
+white ones.  For an instant he stood, his eyes, grave and inscrutable,
+full upon Allison's smaller ones.  "I'm tol-lable," he drawled soberly.
+"And&mdash;haow be you&mdash;yourself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison gasped, stood with mouth agape, and then burst into one of his
+rather too-frequent, too-hearty laughs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, I'm&mdash;&mdash;" he began his favorite phrase of ejaculation, and then
+stopped to look down again into the small face before him.  "Well,
+I'm&mdash;&mdash;" and he stopped to chuckle.  Then he turned back to Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose, Cal, you know what this early morning call presages?" he
+suggested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb recalled himself with an effort from a contemplation of the
+sudden, prideful something which had warmed him while Steve was shaking
+hands.  He smiled, mechanically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose it's the usual raid upon the commissary," he answered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison mounted heavily to the verandah.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Right!" he exclaimed.  "Right!  You'll notice that Barbara has already
+gone on ahead.  She's the skirmish line&mdash;scouts&mdash;videttes&mdash;whatever you
+please to call 'em.  There's no-one up yet&mdash;none of the family&mdash;over to
+our place.  We are hungry, Cal.  I hope this is waffle morning?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb smiled at him, less impersonality in the mirth.  It was a regular
+custom, this truancy of Barbara Allison and her father&mdash;one of the
+little human foibles which Caleb often told himself accounted, in part
+at least, for his real liking of the man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Waffles it is," he said, and he turned toward the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" he asked.  "Will you tell
+her, please, that we are to be subjected to another neighborly
+imposition?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After the boy had disappeared Caleb followed the larger man to a chair.
+And this time it was Caleb who met Allison's silence with a
+challenging, "Well?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where did you get him, Cal?" Allison demanded.  "Where <I>did</I> you get
+him?  Those shoes, and those trousers&mdash;pants, I guess is the word, eh?
+And say, how that little beggar did squeeze my hand!  Look here!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He held one soft hand up for inspection.  There were faint red welts
+still visible across the finger joints.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Friend of yours, did you say?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Without stopping to think about it, Caleb was not so keen to enlarge
+upon the boy's obvious "points" as he had been with Sarah.  He omitted
+to mention his thoughts of the night before, and he omitted any
+reference to Old Tom, except for the most hazy explanation that the boy
+had no immediate kin.  But with an increasing eagerness he dilated upon
+the small foot traveler's first view of the "city," his breathless
+reception of Allison's own switch engine, and his avowed intention to
+"look around a trifle," before he located something to do.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought I'd take him down this morning and get McLean to give him a
+ride in the cab of one of those sheet-iron steam relics of yours," he
+finished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If Caleb had expected his unadorned recitation of the boy's appearance
+to make any impression upon his hearer he would have been disappointed.
+But, without any confessed reason for so doing, Caleb had aimed rather
+at the opposite effect.  And Allison turned from it with a large,
+matter-of-fact indifference, to rise and bow to Sarah Hunter, who
+appeared that moment in the doorway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Surely&mdash;surely," he echoed Caleb's suggestion.  "Take him down and
+give him a ride!  McLean'll be glad of the chance to show someone his
+pet buzz-saws and things.  I'll walk down with you, myself, after
+breakfast.  I may be away for a day or two, and I want to leave
+directions for changes to be incorporated while I'm gone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the table that morning Caleb noted that there was no hesitation in
+Steve's selection from the silver beside his plate, no waiting to
+follow in the lead of Sarah Hunter's choice.  He noticed, too, that the
+boy's eyes did not once lift to those of Barbara Allison, opposite him.
+And while the little girl from time to time joined in the conversation,
+he not once opened his mouth to speak, until they were almost ready to
+rise from their places.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison had been growling genially at the lack of water and the
+prolonged drouth which was burning the pasturage to a crisp and
+juiceless brown.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If that everlasting sun would only stop shining for a while," he said,
+"if it'd only rain a bit, I'd like to take a trip back north,
+a-fishing, before it gets too late in the season."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north,
+don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about
+methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose so," he admitted.  "In the general course of things it'll
+come, no doubt, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and
+it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly.
+"Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as
+good as the next man's."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once more the boy shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed.  "Ner I ain't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til
+Wednesday, fer sure!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager
+two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's
+well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash
+offer.  Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but
+foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was
+based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill
+that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one
+of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy
+tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All right, then," he gave in.  "If you want to come as much as all
+that, but&mdash;but you&mdash;now run along, then, with Stephen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon
+being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives.  But the
+other sex is beyond me!  She's always turned up her dainty nose at the
+noise and dirt before, and&mdash;and now she's ready to cry because I
+suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the
+road.  The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara
+walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort.
+Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes
+must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he
+understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's
+chin.  For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to
+inattention.  Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent,"
+he mused.  "And she&mdash;she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful
+female person I ever did know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill
+superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one
+of his voluble tours of the premises.  But when Caleb had explained the
+main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of
+the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a
+wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he
+asked then.  And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to
+hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were.  It
+was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
+before him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, thin, we'll see."  McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
+in the diminutive cab.  "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
+he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
+one foot upraised, hung back.  He faced toward Caleb and, without a
+glance in the girl's direction, said:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mebby she&mdash;mebby she'd like to go, too?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
+her hand within that of her father.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
+and his face went pink.  Without another word he clambered up beside
+the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
+the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
+When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
+somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
+the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
+assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand.  As
+grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She&mdash;she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered.  And then,
+cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
+fer myself, some day!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+McLean chuckled&mdash;he chuckled in deep delight within his white
+whiskers&mdash;and led the way to the mills.  But once there the amusement
+in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
+the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
+technically as did the mill boss himself.  And he knew timber; knew it
+with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
+border upon the uncanny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
+which was being discarded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
+asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
+his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She's holler," he stated succintly.  "Dry rotten above the stub!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one
+hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin'
+where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin
+the need arises!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram
+which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his
+attention.  They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara
+Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side.  After a brief
+examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders;
+then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his
+shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith
+that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av
+quarter inch stuff&mdash;and three-quarters av an inch wide."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling,
+empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The blacksmith says he ain't got no&mdash;no iron three-quarters of an inch
+wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths.  "But
+he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths.  Shall I&mdash;shall I git some
+o' that?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He waited the word, poised to go.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground.  Now he rose
+and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with
+eagerness, uplifted to his.  Quiet endured for a long time, and then,
+at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled&mdash;he wheeled just in time to
+see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little
+smile.  And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the
+boy's face.  The eager light faded from the gray eyes, until they were
+purple where they had been gray before.  And Caleb had never seen a
+face grow so white&mdash;so white and set and dangerous.  Stephen O'Mara's
+head drooped, he turned and wavered away a step or two.  Allison
+stopped laughing, abruptly.  Then McLean spoke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Twas funny, mebby," he muttered.  "But it was not so damned funny,
+aither!  An' I&mdash;I'll be goin' down now to teach that smith to kape his
+funny jokes till afther hours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He started toward the shop, and stopped again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's all right, buddy," he said.  "'Tis nothing that you need feel
+badly about, for 'twas I who made the mistake.  I should have sint you
+out to estimate whether our spruce would cut two million feet or less,
+an' you'd have come as close as mor-rtal man could, I'll wager.  'Twas
+a trivial thing, lad.  What's a little matter av figures between min av
+the river, eh?  We'll leave that to the capitalists who laugh at our
+dinseness, me bhoy!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill.  Not once
+did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak
+whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself.  He only knew
+that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of
+mirth.  Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own
+gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark
+whatsoever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that
+three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he
+tried to comfort him.  "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite
+of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of
+laughter.  He whirled&mdash;the boy&mdash;and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed,
+bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones.  He shook with the very vehemence of
+the words that came through twitching lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>She</I> didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out.  "If
+I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between
+them figgers, and <I>hedn't</I> knowed, she could'a smiled.  But I&mdash;I ain't
+hed my chance&mdash;yit!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way
+upstairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought
+uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely
+woman-wise.  A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to
+himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling
+up in the southwest.  One long finger of black cloud was already poked
+up over the horizon.  He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast
+table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and
+he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing
+trip on Monday&mdash;the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of
+misery.  Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him
+the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly,
+come Monday!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him
+alone for a while&mdash;alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than
+the spare little body which housed it.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+It rained that night.  The storm which hung for hours, a threatening
+bank of black in the south, finally tore north at sundown, to break
+with vicious fury.  And again Caleb spent a sleepless night, this time
+alone before the fireplace, but the thoughts which kept him awake
+failed to grow fantastic and romantically absurd with prolonged
+contemplation, as they had the night before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Never until that day had he considered his oft-repeated theory that
+there was many a boy in those back-woods who, with a chance, might go
+far, as anything but an idealistic truth, in the abstract.  The
+realization that a chance had come to test it, in the concrete, stunned
+him at first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dispassionately he summed up all the boy's characteristics that night
+and reviewed them, one by one: His poise and utter lack of
+self-consciousness, his fearless directness and faith in himself, in
+all that he said or did; and they came through the mental assay without
+fault or flaw.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had already decided that he must go up-river and explore the old tin
+box which had been left there, locked in the "cubberd," but he was a
+little proud to make his decision before he learned all that it might,
+or might not, reveal; he was proud to believe that he knew a
+thorough-bred, without a pedigree for confirmation.  And when Sunday
+morning dawned and the floodlike downpour had subsided to a gray and
+steady rainfall, even Caleb, none too weatherwise, knew that it had
+come to "stay fer a spell."  He knew that the boy who had come marching
+down the valley road, two days before, was going to stay, too, if it
+lay within his power to persuade him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve was most taciturn at the table the following morning; his moody
+silence puzzled even Sarah Hunter.  But when the latter, whose Sunday
+schedule no storm could alter, came home from church and found Caleb
+and the boy immersed in a mass of flies and leaders, and lines which
+had been skeined to dry, her thorough disapproval loosed the boy's
+tongue.  She stood in the doorway surveying with a frown their
+preoccupied industry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It seems to me, Cal," she commented, "that even if <I>you</I> haven't any
+regard for the Sabbath, you might do better than lead those younger
+than yourself into doing things which might better be left for days
+which were meant for such things."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She swished upstairs before Caleb had a chance to answer.  But minutes
+after she had gone Steve looked up from a line he was spooling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She ain't particularly pleased, I take it," he remarked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not particularly," Caleb chuckled.  "It's funny, too, because I do
+most of this sort of work on Sunday.  You'd think she'd become resigned
+to it, but she doesn't."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy thought deeply for a while.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Didn't&mdash;didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" he asked
+presently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Up shot Caleb's head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Huh-h-h?" he gasped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I sed&mdash;didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" Steve repeated.
+"Seems to me they did, but I can't just rec'lict now what chapter it
+was in."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb pulled his face into a semblance of sobriety.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seems to me they did," he agreed, a little weakly, "now that you
+mention it.  I don't just recollect where it occurred, either, at the
+moment, but we'll have to look it up, because, as a case of precedent,
+it'll be a clincher for Sarah."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He chuckled for a full hour over the thought before he forgot it.  The
+boy, however, upon whom Sarah's disapproval had made a more lasting
+impression, recalled it to him later.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison joined them Monday morning at daybreak.  All day they drove
+through the seeping rain&mdash;drove north in Caleb's buckboard, to turn off
+finally upon a woods trail that ran into the cast, along the lesser
+branch of the river.  During the ride Steve's bearing toward the third
+member of the party was too plain to escape notice, for he never looked
+at nor directed a word to Allison unless it was in reply to a direct
+question, and then his answers were almost monosyllabic.  But Allison,
+who, as usual, gave his undivided attention to the country through
+which they were passing, in attitude toward the boy was even more
+remarkable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once when they had halted at noon he pointed out a hillside of pine,
+black beneath the rain, close-clustered and of mastlike straightness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's a wonderful stand of pine, Cal," he remarked.  "I'd venture to
+say that it would cut at least two million feet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Instantly, although the remark was addressed to him, Caleb knew that it
+was Stephen's comment for which Allison was angling.  And hard upon his
+casual statement the boy's head came sharply around.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She'll run nigh double that," he swallowed the bait.  "She'll run
+double&mdash;and mebby a trifle more."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor did Allison even smile now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What makes you think so?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again there came the boy's pat answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I ain't thinkin'," he said.  "It's jest there!  They're close
+set&mdash;them trees&mdash;and they're clear, clean to the tops.  There ain't a
+stump there that won't run near ten standard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison squinted and finally nodded his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But later Caleb saw him enter some figures in his small, black-bound
+notebook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That night the episode was repeated with a bit of variation.  They had
+set up their tent and made camp, a little before nightfall.  Far below
+them, hidden by the trees, the east branch cut a threadlike gash
+through the center of a valley broad enough and round enough to have
+been a veritable amphitheater of the gods.  The whole great hollow was
+clothed with evergreen, a sea of dripping tops in the semi-gloom, and
+Allison, when he had set aside his plate and lighted his pipe, lifted a
+hand in a gesture which embraced it all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you weren't so lazy-brained, Cal," he said, "that sight would stir
+in you something more than a mere appreciation of what you call the
+'sublimity of sheer immensity.'  For the man who can look ahead ten or
+a dozen years there is an undreamed of fortune right here in this
+alley."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb yawned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt," he agreed.  "But I didn't coin that phrase for immense
+fortunes.  I guess I'm old-fashioned enough to like it a whole lot
+better just as it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then he became suddenly aware of the tense earnestness with which
+Stephen O'Mara was listening.  And when Allison, thinking aloud, mused
+that the cost of driving the timber down the shallow stream to the
+far-off mills would be, perhaps, prohibitive, words fairly leaped to
+the boy's lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But they&mdash;they won't be drivin' that timber by floods, when they git
+to tacklin' these here valleys," he exclaimed.  "Old Tom ses when they
+really git to lumberin' these mountains they'll skid it daown to the
+railroad tracks and yank it out by steam!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That sober statement in the piping voice had a strange effect upon
+Allison.  He leaned forward, a sort of guarded astonishment in his
+attitude, to peer at the childish face in the fire-glow.  Then he
+seemed to remember that it was just a bit of a woods-waif who had
+spoken.  But Caleb, who was lazy-brained in some matters, sensed that
+Steve had put into words Allison's own unspoken thought, just as
+Allison at that moment voiced the question which he was about to utter
+himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose it was this&mdash;this Old Tom who taught you all these things
+you know about timber?" he said, curious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve pondered the question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wal-l-l, yes," he answered at last.  "Old Tom learned me some,
+but&mdash;but most of it I kind of feel as if I always knowed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy was fast asleep, curled up beneath the blankets, when Caleb
+finally broached, that night, the matter which had kept him awake the
+entire night before.  And when he had finished Allison sat quiet for a
+long time before he offered any reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mean&mdash;&mdash;" he began, at length.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I just mean that I'm going to give him his chance," Caleb cut in.  His
+voice was hushed, but vehement.  "Why, man, think what he has this
+minute, to start with!  A brain as clear as a diamond, absolutely
+fresh, absolutely unspoiled or fagged with the nonsensical fol-de-rol
+which makes up the bulk of the usual boy's education of his age, and a
+working knowledge, for instance, of this north country which most men
+might envy.  Why, the possibilities are limitless!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison puffed his pipe in silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt you're right," he admitted.  "In ten years, with a technical
+education to back up his practical knowledge, he might prove priceless
+to someone who had need of such a specialist.  Always assuming, of
+course, that he developed according to promise.  But the possibilities
+are limitless, too, in the other directions, aren't they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Meaning?" invited Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, you don't know any too much concerning his antecedents, do you?"
+Allison suggested.  "And still&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't have to," Caleb interrupted, "not after one look at him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;And still, if you catch a boy young enough," Allison finished
+serenely, "you can make a fairly presentable gentleman out of almost
+any material, with time enough and money enough to teach him what to
+do."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can," Caleb came back, "but no matter how much money you spend,
+you can't make the sort of a gentleman out of him, that knows without
+being taught, what <I>not</I> to do!  They&mdash;they have to be born to that,
+Dexter."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there they let it drop.  But the next morning, when they were alone
+upon the brook, Caleb, after several false starts managed to re-open
+the subject with the boy himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has it ever occurred to you, Steve," he asked, "that all these things
+you know about the woods might be valuable, some day, to&mdash;to men who
+pay well for such knowledge?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve paid no apparent heed to the question until he had landed a trout
+which he had hooked a moment before.  It was a heavy fish&mdash;and Caleb
+had promised to teach him how to handle that fly-rod!  Then he looked
+up.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Once Old Tom sed they'd be payin' me more'n he ever earned in his
+lifetime, jest to go a-raound and tell 'em how much good lumber they
+was in standin' trees.  Is that&mdash;is that what you mean?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Partly&mdash;partly, but not entirely, either," Caleb went on.  "You said
+last night that when they got to lumbering these mountains, they'd be
+taking it out by steam.  When they do they'll want men who know the
+woods&mdash;but they'll have to know how to bridge rivers and cross swamps,
+too, won't they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy promptly forgot his fishing.  Knee-deep in the stream he faced
+squarely around toward Caleb, and from that glowing countenance the man
+knew that he had only repeated something which, long before, had
+already fired the boy's imagination.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They's places where I kin git 'em to learn me them things, ain't
+they?" he demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," said Caleb.  "There are places.  And you&mdash;you were thinking of
+going to school?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thinkin' of it?" echoed Steve.  "I always been thinkin' of it.  Why,
+thet's all I come outen the timber fer!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But you said you meant to locate something to do," the man argued,
+nonplussed, "after you had looked around a trifle."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's eyes dropped toward the white drill trousers and big boots, the
+latter half-hidden from sight by the swirling water.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I got to earn money first," he explained patiently.  "I&mdash;I jest
+couldn't git to go to school&mdash;in these here clothes!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh!" murmured Caleb.  "Oh!"  And then, recovering himself: "That'll
+take a long time," he ventured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy smiled, strangely&mdash;the first smile of man's sophistication
+which Caleb had seen upon his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've always hed to wait a long time fer everything I've wanted," he
+answered, "but I always git it, just the same, if I only want it hard
+enough."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-056"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-056.jpg" ALT="&quot;I've always hed to wait a long time for everything I've wanted,&quot; the boy answered, &quot;but I always get it, just the same, if I
+only want it hard enough.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="527" HEIGHT="468">
+<H3>
+[Illustration: "I've always hed to wait a long time for everything <BR>
+I've wanted," the boy answered, "but I always get it, just the same, <BR>
+if I only want it hard enough."]
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Caleb cleared his throat, self-consciously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Still," he argued again, "it would waste some very valuable years.
+Now&mdash;now what do you think of staying with me, and&mdash;and starting in
+this fall?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy's lips fell apart while he stood and gaped up into Caleb's
+slightly red face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mean," he breathed, "you mean&mdash;jest live&mdash;with you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was my idea," said Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, slowly, the boy's head dropped again, as it had when he bowed
+to gaze at his uncouth, begrimed clothes.  The man thought that he
+caught the inference of that moment of silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We can fix up the matter of clothes later," he made haste to forestall
+any objection in that direction.  "That doesn't amount to anything,
+anyway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The clear eyes lifted again, steady and wide and very, very grave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I always knowed it was comin'," said Stephen O'Mara.  "I always knowed
+it was a-comin'&mdash;this chance&mdash;even when I didn't know <I>haow</I> it would
+come.  Ner I wa'n't thinkin' about my clothes.  I reckon I kin learn
+jest as fast in these as in any.  I was jest thinkin' about Miss Sarah.
+She&mdash;she might not like it, hevin' two men folks a-raound the house,
+under foot."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was Caleb's turn to stand, agape.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miss Sarah?" he faltered, astonished&mdash;and then he remembered.  He
+laughed, unsteadily, with relief.  For an instant he had been
+inexplicably afraid that the boy was going to refuse his offer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, you musn't mind what Sarah said yesterday," he rushed on.
+"She&mdash;she&mdash;well, she's a Baptist, Steve, and you know what that means."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He leaned forward a little, his voice quite stealthily confidential.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But I can fix that all right," he promised.  "I can surely fix that.
+For I'll tell her&mdash;I'll tell her you're a Baptist, too!  Will you&mdash;will
+you stay?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And after a time solemnly Steve nodded.  Later, when alone, Caleb
+chuckled mountainously over his reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thet's&mdash;thet's what I cal'late I be," he said.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehearsed a half score of speeches
+with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken;
+but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the
+entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the
+facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything
+else.  It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily
+swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah
+had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the
+rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped
+from cold.  So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace
+when Caleb made known his decision.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know,
+Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct.  "And this
+seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have.  You&mdash;you
+like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
+the face, once at least.  It was hard to know what she was thinking
+when she sat like that, staring into the fire.  He waited, not without
+grave misgivings, for her reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
+gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course it&mdash;it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured.  "It is
+pretty sudden&mdash;but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother.  Her eyes were
+unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A surprise&mdash;a&mdash;a somewhat sudden!" she faltered.  "Why, I knew you
+were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
+veranda behind him.  I was certain of it, even then.  And if you hadn't
+decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
+came back from that endless fishing-trip!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
+perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste.  For it was
+Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening.  She ran on and
+on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
+prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
+dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
+the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
+beside her woman-hunger.  It astonished him, when he mentioned the
+subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
+deed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
+caught up his suggestion.  "To-day I explored for hours and found some
+of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
+worn at all.  I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
+in the morning.  And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
+like you ever could have worn such&mdash;such dainty and cunning things!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
+he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she
+mentioned had been in vogue.  Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the
+gurgle in her throat.  And so, the next morning, when a little figure
+in velvet jacket and pantaloons&mdash;velvet of the same jet hue in which
+Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two
+before&mdash;stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed
+of not one whit of its sensationalism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever
+have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have
+stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance.  There were
+red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been
+encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of
+sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver
+buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which
+fastened it across his small chest&mdash;silver buttons to match upon the
+quaintly short sleeves.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he
+started methodically down the stairs.  And immediately Caleb's
+amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him
+gave way to a newer wonder.  For the boy, in spite of the fact that his
+small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness
+of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable.  Then Caleb realized how
+great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in
+the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good
+mornings he led the way to the table.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was something in Sarah's fluttering delight over the boy's
+appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her
+brother.  For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the
+boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss
+Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his
+first appearance.  They had a word together&mdash;Sarah and Caleb&mdash;after
+breakfast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
+"Did you!  Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never did," he admitted.  And then, offhandedly: "What&mdash;did he say
+anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this
+morning."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little.  "No.  But he&mdash;Cal, he just sat
+and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time.  He made me
+think somehow of a puppy that knows he's going to be scrubbed and&mdash;and
+dreads it exceedingly.  It's because of those dreadful things he's been
+wearing, don't you suppose so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt of it," her brother said.  "No doubt!  And now I'm going over
+to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him.  I was telling
+him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he
+searched the house through without finding the boy.  In his perplexity
+he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where's Stephen?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah nodded to Allison.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought
+you wouldn't be back for a while, I sent him downtown&mdash;I sent him to
+the village&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed.  "Did he&mdash;did he change
+his clothes?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And of course he didn't!"  Suddenly her brother's face alarmed her.
+"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven't done anything I shouldn't have done,
+have I?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In&mdash;that&mdash;outfit!" he groaned.  "Down to the village, and it's a
+lumber town!  He's gone, and if he doesn't have to fight his way back
+then I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah's alarm changed to fear instantly.  She stepped out upon the
+porch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never thought of that," she whispered.  "But you don't really
+think&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction.  But Allison,
+after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an
+expansive smile of anticipation upon his face, propped his feet upon
+the rail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think," he assured her, with no comfort in the assurance, "that this
+will be well worth watching through to the finish!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned.  As he
+appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat,
+half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair.  And even to
+Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit
+with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck.  The coat had
+been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as
+the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till
+the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric
+which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o'er-spread with egg.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet
+and retreated none too steadily into the house.  But it wasn't the
+condition of the boy's clothes which held Caleb's gaze.  He was
+watching his face.  For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous
+whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man.  His lips
+were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in
+one corner.  And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
+Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach
+before Caleb spoke.  And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half
+to see the two men who were waiting his coming.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" faltered Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head.  Both men heard that
+breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again.  "Where have you
+been?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He hardly recognized the boy's voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words.  "I been daown to
+git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs&mdash;and I run into trouble&mdash;daown
+there&mdash;a-gittin' 'em!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I should assume that you had," murmured Caleb.  "But you've brought
+the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren't
+in particularly edible condition."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of
+laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath.  And Steve,
+teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'd better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised
+him then.  "And I'll get you something less&mdash;less dangerous to wear
+before night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the boy stood rigid still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket
+and handed the coin to the boy.  "Now what do you&mdash;&mdash;Here, where are
+you going now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve had turned and was marching down the steps.  He paused a minute
+to explain, however.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, I'm goin' back daown to the city," he grated out.  "I'm goin'
+back after Miss Sarah's eggs!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which
+held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer's
+counter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well I'm&mdash;I'm damned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the
+house.  "I <I>am</I> damned!  You'll have to bring that youngster over, Cal,
+and introduce him to the children."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb couldn't help it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told you so!" he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was only a beginning.  The next fortnight was filled with more new
+experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
+be crammed into twenty times that duration.  And Caleb spent most of
+his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
+astonishing traits which he found in the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
+day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
+and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
+Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham&mdash;the Right Honorable Archie.
+But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
+impressed itself upon Caleb.  As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
+over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
+after Caleb himself had suggested it.  And more often than not he would
+be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
+in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills.  It puzzled Caleb
+mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
+of frank and undisguised wonder and worship.  Whatever they did, no
+matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
+bobbed head.  For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
+her for approbation.  And in return for that worship Barbara's
+treatment of him was truly feminine.  He out-ran the other boys as a
+deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
+an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
+dark-eyed Barbara.  She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
+eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
+with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
+understanding.  More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth&mdash;the
+little girl's disdainfully tilted chin&mdash;and when Steve's reluctance to
+leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
+about it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
+there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
+of a woman-child of ten&mdash;unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
+thirty, and on up the scale&mdash;when she first finds out that a man cares
+enough for her so that she can really hurt him!  If that Barbara was a
+boy I'd catch her and switch her&mdash;Allison or no Allison!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
+asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
+so much."  The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb.  "That
+isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them.  They have been
+laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
+openly&mdash;mocking his speech and&mdash;and manners!  All of them, that is,
+save Garry Devereau."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb's face hardened.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed.  "And you musn't mention it to him.  I just
+gathered it from something he let drop the other day.  You know, Cal,
+he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
+marvelous.  He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
+and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
+didn't talk as&mdash;as he read.  He didn't know what I meant at first, but
+he understood the minute I tried to explain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
+face began to go red.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Do&mdash;do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk&mdash;like
+books?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So you see!  And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
+idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
+mental process which is habit with him."  Sarah's face grew resentful.
+"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place.  We
+should have known!  For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
+which he doesn't catch.  And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
+depths of his sensitiveness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly.  "We'll keep him away from
+them."  And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
+heard him say in her presence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home.  Without some
+suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
+own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
+veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
+the voices behind the high hedge.  More and more often Garry Devereau
+came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
+daily trips down to the mills.  A quick intimacy had grown up between
+the two boys&mdash;an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
+because of the very contrast between them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
+the matter of knowledge.  Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
+was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father.  For
+the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
+boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
+the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
+trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game."  The
+skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile.  And Caleb
+often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
+rather than at him.  The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
+exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
+all that.  It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
+all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter.  It seemed to him then that he
+should have foreseen it from the very first.  But as it was, when the
+denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
+with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
+he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
+and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases.  But it was
+the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
+he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
+the pages.  And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
+came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand.  After she had
+caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
+had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
+of the Round Table.  His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
+and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
+brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
+old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
+appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
+again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
+the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
+echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge.  And after
+dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly,
+that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while.  Allison
+himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting,
+stopped to shake hands with him gravely.  So it came about that they
+were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when
+Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears.  They
+waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set
+them to running across the lawn.  But the scene which met Caleb's eyes
+when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon
+the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic&mdash;all save Garry
+Devereau.  He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer,
+crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable
+Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the
+infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
+An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison
+frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of
+fists&mdash;a man's contempt for another man who does not take his
+punishment in silence.  For the howls of the Honorable Archie were
+louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little
+girls who were watching.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot
+make his feet obey the commands of his brain.  It was only when Barbara
+Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and
+legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little
+hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to
+him.  He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his
+weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar,
+jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave.  That effort raised the
+Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his
+antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering
+sternly down into his battle-streaked features.  Allison strode quietly
+up in that moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
+"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to
+rearranging his crumpled raiment&mdash;fell to dabbling at a bruised and
+swollen nose.  When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief
+he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for
+Steve's answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not
+have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question.
+The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead
+with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nuthin'&mdash;nuthin' much," he qualified the statement.  "Only we was
+goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table!  He
+wanted to be her knight"&mdash;an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the
+Honorable Archie&mdash;"and&mdash;and so did I."  This time his eyes went to
+Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip.  "He wanted to
+be her knight&mdash;an'&mdash;an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of
+trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her!  He couldn't fight good
+enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better.  I&mdash;I just
+licked him to prove it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the
+boy away from his shrieking rival.  But while he stood there, looking
+down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a
+situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope.  Already
+it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison&mdash;but it
+seemed symbolic to Caleb.  He sensed how close it lay to tragedy
+itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which
+he had thought to deliver.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained
+ponderously, "the&mdash;the fair ladies always chose their own knights,
+didn't they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy.  For,
+instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face,
+it only softened it.  Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe
+of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his
+shoulders and faced Barbara full.  The move was unmistakable&mdash;he was
+just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice.  And,
+instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled
+her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You&mdash;you&mdash;<I>my</I> knight?" she half whispered, "<I>You</I>!"  And she turned
+her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious
+amusement, at the livid change which came over Steve's face with that
+answer which she flung at him.  The boy fell away a step before her
+fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her
+fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before.  And then her meaning
+struck him like a blow between the eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and
+started for the gap in the hedge.  Caleb could not move, nor did
+Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things.  But Garry
+Devereau followed and overtook his friend.  He did not speak to him; he
+merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders.  And yet the men,
+had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was
+in that second of contact.  For it proved electrical in its effect.
+Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now&mdash;back to the
+group which had not moved.  Straight up to Barbara he went and faced
+her once again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wa'n't good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a
+hushed and vibrant voice.  "I&mdash;I don't know enough, ner I can't talk
+good enough, to be your knight.  I ain't good enough fer you!  But I'm
+a-goin' to be&mdash;do you hear?  I'm a-goin' to be&mdash;an' when I am&nbsp;&#8230;
+when I am&nbsp;&#8230; then I'll come back to you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight.  Caleb stood
+staring at the ground.  Allison stood and stared at the horizon.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the
+stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home.  It was the
+first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in
+anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all
+that was his!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless
+face had told Sarah too much and too little.  After her brother had
+explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said.  "It has
+been coming for days, this thing.  I think I knew it would come&mdash;but
+how could we have stopped it, Cal?  And you won't believe me, but it's
+because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy's little finger than she
+could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she&mdash;she said what she did.
+Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can't tell you why!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed
+to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his
+room, fear in their hearts.  The bed had not been slept in; the sheets
+were not even disarranged, but there was a scrap of paper pinned to one
+pillow-slip.  It wasn't written in "book language"&mdash;that short
+message&mdash;for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+I'm a-comin' back&mdash;I'm comin' back to you, someday when they won't be
+no need fer you to be ashamed fer me.  I'm takin' my new clothes with
+me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to&mdash;and the shoes, too.  I'm
+askin' you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her&mdash;and Miss
+Sarah ain't got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o'
+myself.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was signed "Stephen O'Mara."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah's face went white when she had read it through.  Her knees
+weakened under her and she had to sit down.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, Cal&mdash;why, Cal, he's&mdash;he's gone," she quavered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes&mdash;he&mdash;he's gone," he breathed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah swallowed hard.  Then two bright tears crept out from under her
+eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks.  She rose and groped her way
+to her own room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still
+numb from the shock, went back downstairs.  She came up to him and
+stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the
+other.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve isn't here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The child didn't understand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly.  "I'm to tell
+him that I'm sorry.  But I&mdash;I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn't
+have him for my knight&mdash;I&mdash;I wouldn't ever have any knight at all!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He'll be back for breakfast, won't he?" she asked, hopefully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm afraid not, Barbara.  I'm afraid now that he may never come
+back&mdash;again."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She didn't understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to
+explain.  But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper
+there was no further need of explanation.  She ran then and threw
+herself in a passion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner.  Caleb
+found his chair.  And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
+sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
+"Please&mdash;please!  Because he <I>is</I> coming back!  He told me he would&mdash;he
+told me he would, himself!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+MY MAN O'MARA
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country.  He
+whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might
+overtake the boy who had gone in the night.  But none of the farmers on
+the outlying roads had seen pass their way a little foot traveler such
+as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed
+than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears,
+had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away
+during the night.  Allison's concern was too genuine to be feigned; and
+Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor's amusement
+at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his sturdy
+gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of
+things which were as sealed books to Dexter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the
+country, until they both realized that the search was useless.  And at
+last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into
+that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely
+designated as "up-river."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
+"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
+If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
+wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
+that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
+branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
+before.  But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
+ridge alone, by trail.  And even then, when he did locate the
+"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
+convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
+one.  Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
+another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
+in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll.  And they stood and stared
+in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather
+puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
+box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
+shut behind him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
+yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
+existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
+there came an opportunity to spend it.  And Sarah was waiting at the
+door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
+dusk, two days later.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
+entered the hall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, I haven't found <I>him</I>, Sarah," he said gently enough.  "But
+I&mdash;I've found out <I>who he is</I>!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They forgot their supper that night.  With heads close together they
+hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
+yielded up.  Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
+handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
+called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
+was very, very clear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was one picture&mdash;a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
+hair.  Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable.  Sarah found that
+and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
+remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts.  These
+puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
+a folded and legal-looking document.  He opened that and then he
+understood&mdash;he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
+Tom had been able to earn.  After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
+refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
+it to Sarah at all.  Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
+to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
+reason was there.  At length he turned to his sister.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's not hard to understand now, is it?" he said.  "It's pretty plain
+now why he had to go.  And we, Sarah&mdash;we who were going to 'make
+something of him'&mdash;why, we should have known absolutely, without this
+evidence.  They laughed at him; they made fun of him&mdash;and there isn't
+any better blood than flows in that boy's veins!  He was Stephen
+O'Mara's son, and no more brilliant barrister than O'Mara ever
+addressed a jury of a prisoner's peers and&mdash;and broke their very hearts
+with the simplicity of his pleading."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah folded her thin hands over the woman's picture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I like his mother's face," she murmured, faintly.  "And I'm jealous of
+her, Cal!  You don't have to remind me of the rest of it, either, for I
+recall it all.  She died, and he&mdash;he went all to pieces.  They said, at
+his death, that he was destitute.  And when he did follow
+her&mdash;across&mdash;they hunted everywhere, didn't they, and never found the
+boy?  Didn't some of the newspapers argue that a servant&mdash;a
+gardener&mdash;had stolen him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb nodded his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Most of them ridiculed the suggestion, but it was true, just the same.
+That servant was Old Tom.  And the only defense he makes is just one
+line or so in&mdash;in this."  Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible
+pages.  "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the
+boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had
+made of his father's.  And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't
+help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have
+prosecuted was the best thing he could have done?  I'll take these
+things, now, and lock them in the safe for the boy, until he&mdash;until he
+comes back home!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Sarah Hunter kept the picture of Stephen O'Mara's mother separate
+from the rest; she took it upstairs with her when she went, white and
+tired-faced, to bed.  And it was Sarah's faith which outlasted the
+years which followed.  She never weakened in her belief that some day
+the boy would come back&mdash;she and one other whose faith in his last
+boyish promise, phrased in bitterness, also endured.  For during the
+next five years there was not a summer which brought Allison into the
+hills but what the first question of his daughter Barbara, motherless
+now herself, was of Steve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has&mdash;has Stephen come back?" she asked invariably.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At first the query was marked by nothing more than a child's naïve
+eagerness; and later, when it was brought up in a casual, by-the-way
+fashion, it was, nevertheless, tinged with hope.  Five years lengthened
+into ten, and still Steve did not come.  But whenever Barbara asked
+that question Caleb remembered, as though it had happened only
+yesterday, that morning when she first appeared to the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He wondered sometimes what Steve's reception of her would be now&mdash;if he
+did come back!  The thought supplied many idle hours with food for
+speculation for Barbara Allison, year by year, had grown into that
+slender, dark-eyed creature of more than usual beauty whom Caleb had
+seen, as through the boy's own eyes, in the promise of the years.
+Caleb had long before given up all hope, but he wondered just the same.
+And then there came a morning when he didn't have to wonder any more.
+There came a morning when that self-same scene was staged again by
+Chance&mdash;staged with Caleb for an audience.  There came a morning when
+Stephen O'Mara did return.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+More than a few times in those intervening years the Hunter home had
+been closed.  Sarah Hunter developed an uneasy restlessness which would
+have worried her brother had it not been for the light of wistful
+expectancy which never left her eyes.  She developed what her brother
+termed a habit of "seeing America first and last, and in the interval
+between."  But he, beneath his jocularity, was glad enough to accompany
+her upon those rambling journeys which, without itinerary, led them
+from coast to coast and he never smiled&mdash;at least not so that she might
+see him&mdash;even though he was certain that she, in her simplicity of
+spirit, was really looking for the boy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All winter and throughout the summer, too, the Hunter place had been
+closed, until that day in late October.  It had been a warm week&mdash;a
+week of such unseasonable humidity for the hills that Caleb, rising
+somewhat before his usual hour, had blamed his sleeplessness, as usual,
+upon the weather.  He was glad to be home again that morning; he had
+been so lonely away from home that he was warmed unaccountably by the
+thought that Allison was in the hills, too.  And he was sure of that
+fact, for the night before, when their train pulled into the station
+which occupied the spot where Allison's mill-yards had stood before,
+the bright brass work upon the private car of the owner of the stucco
+place next his own had been unmistakable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb was even wondering if Barbara would be with her father on this
+trip.  Barbara had, he knew, been two years on the continent,
+"finishing," Allison called it, always with a wry face and a gesture
+toward his wallet pocket.  He was wondering, as he came down the
+stairs, if she would ask him again if&mdash;if&nbsp;&#8230; and then, at the sight
+of a seated figure outside on the top step of the veranda, he pulled up
+sharp in the doorway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb didn't have to wonder any longer!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The attitude of that figure before him was so like the picture which
+time had been unable to erase&mdash;so absolutely identical in everything
+save garb and size alone&mdash;that the man, recoiling a little, dragged one
+hand across his forehead as though he doubted his own eyes.  But when
+he looked again it was still there, sitting chin in palm, small head
+under a rather weather-beaten felt hat thrust slightly forward, gazing
+fixedly toward the stucco house beyond the shrubbery.  And before Caleb
+could move, before he was more than half aware of the painful pulse in
+his throat, it all happened again, just as it had happened years and
+years before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb heard voices in the adjoining grounds, and as he half turned in
+that direction Allison's bulky form, vivid in a far more vivid plaid,
+appeared in the hedge gap.  While Caleb stared another figure flashed
+through ahead of him, laughter upon her lips, and paused a-tip-toe, to
+wave a hand in greeting.  And instantly, as they had a dozen years
+before, Barbara Allison's eyes swung in instant scrutiny of the one who
+was seated at Caleb's feet.  She hesitated, and recovered herself.  But
+when, with quite dignified deliberation, she finally came forward to
+pass that motionless figure upon the steps, every pulse in her body was
+beating consciousness of his nearness.  And yet, at that, when she
+paused at Caleb's side and bobbed her head with a characteristic
+impetuosity which she had never lost she seemed completely oblivious to
+the presence of anyone save Caleb and herself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she murmured, very demurely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then the man upon the steps moved; he rose and turned and swept his
+rather weather-beaten hat from his head.  His hair was still wavy,
+still chestnut in the shadows.  And Caleb, though he could not force a
+word from his tightened throat, marveled how tall the boy had
+grown&mdash;how paradoxically broad of shoulder and slender of body he
+seemed to be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a man's face which was lifted to his, tanned and wrinkled a
+little at the corners of the eyes by much exposure to sun and wind.
+But the eyes themselves hadn't changed a bit.  They were still the same
+steady and unwavering gray.  A smile crept into them, a smile crept
+across the even lips, and for all the change there was in that slow
+mirth it might have been the little figure of other days&mdash;the boy in
+the white drill trousers and uncouth boots&mdash;who was smiling up at Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Standing there in his blue flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, clasped
+tight to knee by high brown boots below them, Stephen O'Mara held out a
+sinewy brown hand.  His voice was a little unsteady, but the mimicry of
+his own drawling speech of former years held an echo of boyhood&mdash;a
+twanging, boyish echo&mdash;which dragged at Caleb's very heartstrings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Haow&mdash;haow d'ye do, Uncle Cal?" he quavered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara had turned and started indoors in search of Miss Sarah.  Now
+she halted, her slim back toward the two men at the veranda's edge, and
+stood motionless at the sound of that voice.  When, little by little,
+she faced around at last, it was fairly to feel those grave gray eyes
+resting upon her own face.  The blood of a sudden came storming up into
+Barbara's cheeks.  And Caleb, even if he did not know what all of the
+girl's emotions were at that moment, knew that he knew one of them at
+least.  Caleb had just learned himself what it was to see a ghost.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his
+daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open.  Ho
+found her staring, velvet eyed and pink of face, at a tall figure in
+blue flannel and corduroy, and although he had never seen him in all
+the months that the latter had been in his employ, Allison knew this
+must be the one in whose keeping lay, directly or indirectly, the
+success or failure of the biggest thing he had ever attempted in this
+north country&mdash;the man to whom he always referred, whenever he boasted
+of his exploits, as "my man O'Mara."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Beyond that point, however, Allison's immediate recognition did not go.
+The past interested him but little, except as a matter for precedent or
+a record of past performances.  But memory fairly clamored in the
+girl's ears that morning.  There was not one tiniest detail of the
+strangely intense, sturdily confident little hill-boy's bearing but
+what came back to her at that moment.  She remembered them all, and
+seconds later, when Steve's fingers had closed over her own
+outstretched hand, she realized that she was staring at him in a
+childishly concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the
+undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the
+eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight.  And she realized
+suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even
+though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I always told them that you would come back," she murmured then.
+"Just as you&mdash;you said you would."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The remark was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon
+its utterance she caught her breath in anger at herself for her own
+senseless confusion, which had led her into saying the one thing she
+least of all had wanted to voice.  Even an inane remark concerning the
+weather would have been better than that girlish naiveté which she felt
+seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a
+promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but
+a quaint episode not untinged with absurdity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She realized that her hand still lay in his; she grew hotly conscious
+of her father's rather perplexed survey of the tableau.  And in that
+instant when Allison's first words reached her burning ears, even
+before Steve could reply to her greeting, she wrung free her fingers
+with an abruptness which, when she remembered it afterward, only added
+to her fury at her absurd confusion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hum-m-m," puffed Allison.  "Hum-m-m!"  He spoke directly to Stephen
+O'Mara, who half turned his head at the first heavily facetious
+syllable.  "So you did get my message, eh?  I rather thought that it
+wouldn't reach you, up-river, until to-day."  An ample smile embraced
+the tall figure in riverman's garb and his own daughter's crimson
+countenance&mdash;a most meaningful smile of roguery.  "Well, from what I've
+heard," he stated, "and what I've&nbsp;&#8230; seen, I should say that you are
+my man, O'Mara.  Mr. Elliott himself has informed me that your quite
+spectacular success in one or two vital campaigns has been entirely due
+to the fact that you are an&mdash;er&mdash;opportunist!  I agree with Mr.
+Elliott, absolutely&mdash;that is, if my first premise is correct."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And his laughter rumbled softly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara's face had cooled a little in that moment since Steve's eyes
+had left her face.  Now she forgot her confusion&mdash;forgot to be annoyed,
+even at her father's clumsy banter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Your</I> man, O'Mara!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "<I>Your</I> man!  Why,
+he&mdash;he's <I>my</I>&mdash;" and that was as far as she went.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her voice thinned into nothingness, but words were not necessary to
+tell either Caleb or Steve that she had been about to assert a prior
+claim which dated back years and years.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man whose smile was still that of the boy turned slowly back to
+Barbara.  His quiet mirth, which crinkled the corners of his eyelids,
+seemed totally detached and impersonal; and yet it hinted, too, at an
+intimate enjoyment of the situation which they alone could appreciate.
+Steve merely held out his hand again and took her slim fingers within
+his own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have always insisted to Mr. Elliott," he said, "that the solution of
+all the difficulties, which he chooses to view as gloriously romantic
+tilts with Destiny, depends one-half upon luck, and the other half on
+being on the ground personally, when the&mdash;affair&mdash;starts."  He half
+faced toward Allison.  "I am O'Mara," he finished very briefly, "your
+man, O'Mara&mdash;if you happen to be the East Coast Development and Timber
+Company?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was at most no more than the barest suggestion of it in Steve's
+crisp question, but Caleb sensed immediately that Allison's placid
+appropriation of the blue flannel-shirted one as his own particular
+property was not a mutually accepted status.  Dexter, however, failed,
+or chose, to read nothing in the drawling question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm it," he agreed, jovially.  "That is&mdash;I and two or three others,
+including Mr. Elliott, our esteemed president."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He mounted the steps heavily and stood contemplating the small hand
+still within the larger, browner one.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The introductions seem to have outstripped me," he remarked,
+"but&mdash;er&mdash;any objection to shaking hands with me, too, Mr. O'Mara?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen laughed aloud.  Allison's attempted lugubrity was really funny.
+From the door Barbara echoed his laughter in bubbling, throaty
+amusement at it all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor, blind papa!" she chanted mockingly, and disappeared on swift
+feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison scowled after her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not so blind as some&mdash;the unprincipled jade!" he retorted.  "But
+that's another thing I've heard about you, Mr. O'Mara, if you will
+pardon a garrulous old gossip's personalities.  They tell me that you
+aren't particularly&mdash;susceptible?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then the bantering tone was dropped entirely.  In the rest of
+Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's
+whole make-up&mdash;his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had
+done or might do, in a man's world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've heard much of you, Mr. O'Mara; I've looked forward to this
+meeting," he said, as he shook hands.  "Now I want to tell you that I
+am proud to know you.  And so you didn't get my message, after all?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The handclasp left Allison staring ruefully at his reddened fingers.
+Steve shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I had to come down river, yesterday," he explained.  "Your telegram
+found me here, and I waited over until this morning, as you suggested."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Surely&nbsp;&#8230; surely!  I see&nbsp;&#8230; I see!"  Allison emphasized his
+comprehension.  "Not that it was anything of vital importance.  I just
+wanted a short conference with you, yourself, that was all.  Elliott's
+own reports on the work are so tinged with his eternal optimism, so
+colored by what you aptly termed his romantic zest for the game, that I
+wanted your own opinion concerning the possibility of the East Coast
+Company finishing that railroad in time to fulfil their contracts.  No
+hurry about it; but that's my house over yonder.  You were just one
+place too far north to find me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He turned to face Caleb.  There was a flood of questions upon the
+latter's lips.  Caleb wanted to seize the boy by the shoulder, and spin
+him around toward the light and stare and stare into his face; but he
+waited because he found much that was hugely diverting in Dexter's
+bland ignorance, which had even accepted Steve's presence there as a
+case of misdirection.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you know what this early morning call presages, Cal?"
+Allison challenged.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before Caleb could reply Steve knew what the answer was to be.  The
+request found him already at the door, grinning broadly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you&mdash;would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" Caleb asked.
+"Will you tell her, please, that we are to be subjected to
+another&mdash;neighborly imposition!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's going left Allison frowning a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We've played this farce through a hundred times, Cal," he murmured,
+"and it wasn't according to formula&mdash;that last remark of yours.  But,
+do you know, just for a minute it sort of reminded me of
+something&mdash;something that seems to have happened before, and I can't
+recall just what."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He shook his head and led the way to a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It wasn't our nonsense that affected me, either," he finished.  "I
+believe it was O'Mara himself who&nbsp;&#8230; but I didn't know that you were
+acquainted with him, Cal.  Have you known him long?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Um-m-m&mdash;yes!" Caleb weighed his reply.  "Quite some time, I think I
+might say."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He shook with scarcely suppressed laughter, but Allison ignored his
+senseless mirth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd like to claim that boy as my own discovery," he avowed, "but I
+can't&mdash;not without fear of successful contradiction on Elliott's part.
+And in point of service it isn't fair to call him a boy, either, though
+I suppose both of us are old enough to be his father.  He's Elliott's
+find.  Elliott suggested him as the one man for this job, when I
+consolidated with the Ainnesley crowd and they took up the contract to
+move the Reserve timber from Thirty-Mile and the valleys above.
+Elliott knew of him, but I've been looking up his record pretty
+closely, since he took hold in earnest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's in his twenties, as near as I can make out, but he's come through
+on one of two jobs that might well make an old campaigner envious.  He
+took a fortune in hard woods out of San Domingo for a Berlin concern;
+he was the only man on the St. Sebastian River job who said the
+construction was too light.  He said it wouldn't stand when the ice
+began to move in the spring&mdash;and it didn't!  Oh, he knows his business!
+But it wasn't his successes which caught Elliott's eye.  It's the way
+he has failed a couple of times, fighting right back to the last
+ditch&mdash;and fighting and fighting!&mdash;when all the rest had quit, that
+made me anxious to get a look at him.  Perhaps there are older men who
+can outfigure him on loads and stresses, but as a field general he
+stands alone.  He can handle men.  And, when it comes to meeting
+conditions just as they arise, Elliott says he's a wonder&mdash;he can
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was grave appreciation in Allison's voice&mdash;honest appreciation of
+a man who had himself achieved, for another man's achievement.  And yet
+Caleb, in spite of the proud pumping of his heart, in spite of his
+desire to murmur, "But I told you so, Dexter, years ago," still found
+room to wonder at a thin strain of speculation which seemed to underrun
+the speaker's words.  In his reiteration of O'Mara's qualities Allison
+seemed almost to be assuring himself that infallibility was not a human
+attribute.  And his next remark only served to heighten that suggestion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's why the East Coast Co. brought him up here to build their bit
+of road," he went on slowly.  "They've got to move that Reserve Company
+timber.  They have a contract that'll break 'em&mdash;break us&mdash;if we fall
+down.  And do you know, Cal, I&mdash;I can't help but believe that the thing
+is beyond the pale of possibility.  I believed it six months ago, when
+Elliott and Ainnesley and the rest of them were so keen for it, and I
+believe it still, even though I have seen Elliott's engineer and know
+what he has already accomplished.  That track'll never go through on
+schedule&mdash;and that's why I'm up here for the winter.  It's going to be
+a hot little race against time, with some millions for a purse.  It'll
+break the East Coast Co. if he fails, and"&mdash;his voice became oddly
+intense&mdash;"and I tell you again that it&mdash;can't&mdash;be&mdash;done!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Allison became aware of Caleb's mild astonishment at his vehemence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"An amateur's opinion, of course, Cal," he laughed, "which is strictly
+<I>entre nous</I>.  But, win or lose, this man O'Mara will be a valuable man
+to have around after the thing is decided."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You said that he reminded you of something," Caleb began rather
+heavily.  "It recalled something to me, too.  I wonder if you remember
+a little fishing trip that we took, some ten or twelve years ago,
+Dexter, up into the hills?  It was to the headwaters of the cast
+branch, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Reserve Company's
+holdings, I should say."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, yes," the other answered, off-handedly.  "Why, yes, now that you
+mention it, I do remember.  May I ask your reason for speaking of it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No reason in particular," Caleb hesitated.  "Only this O'Mara reminded
+me of something, too&mdash;something that you said, that night at the
+camp-fire."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison's monosyllable was coolly noncommittal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can you remember what it was?" Caleb asked, positively uncomfortable
+now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think I remarked that there was a fortune for some man in that
+valley, if he was far-sighted enough.  Was that it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Caleb understood the challenge in his friend's voice.  He thought
+he understood.  The names of the stockholders of the Reserve Company
+were all strange to Caleb save one.  The Honorable Archibald
+Wickersham, who was said to represent huge foreign interests, he had
+known as a boy.  And Caleb had seen Dexter indescribably sore, before
+this, from having overlooked, as he termed it himself, "a sure thing
+bet."  He laughed, more like his placid self again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bless you, no!" he exclaimed.  "What have I ever done to make you
+believe that a mere commercial estimate would remain with me this long?
+It&mdash;it was something that you said concerning the making of a
+gentleman.  I just wondered if you were of your early way of thinking.
+I wondered if you would consider that&mdash;that&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison lay back in his chair and breathed deeply, slowly&mdash;and Miss
+Sarah appeared that moment in the doorway, pinker of cheek and more
+tremulous of lip than her brother had ever seen her before.  She
+dropped Allison an old-fashioned curtsy, which was an exceedingly
+frivolous performance for Sarah.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Breakfast is served, Cal," she fairly chortled, "and there are two
+very hungry children inside."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Never before had the air of that long, paneled room been so surcharged
+with half-suppressed hilarity.  At first her father merely scowled at
+Barbara's intermittent little gurgles, which refused to stay entirely
+pent-up; he frowned at her seemingly inane interruptions of the
+technical discussion into which he had immediately plunged with the
+East Coast Company's engineer, until he could no longer ignore the
+smile which pulled at the lips of the latter, too, at every fresh
+attempt of the girl to swing the conversation into an utterly
+irrelevant channel.  He looked around the table then and caught the
+gleam in Caleb's eyes; he took note of Miss Sarah's illuminated face,
+and gave way to a burst of querulousness not all simulation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>What</I> is the joke?" he demanded in a voice that set them all to
+rocking in their chairs.  "Let me in on it&mdash;let me laugh, too&mdash;if there
+is anything worth laughing at.  Cal, you're growing old&mdash;old and
+feeble-witted!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He turned sternly to his daughter, but the darkly glowing eyes which
+she lifted to his absolutely silenced him for an instant.  Twin devils
+of mischief fairly danced in their shimmering, liquid depths.  The
+girl's face, even to him who had long before grown overfamiliar with
+its beauty, was a wonderfully lovely thing.  Allison sat and stared at
+her for a moment, blankly, and when he went on his voice had become
+less testy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And you," he growled, "you have interrupted me a dozen times already,
+always with some nonsense of which I can make neither rime nor reason.
+Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get Mr. O'Mara's reason for
+establishing his headquarters at Thirty-Mile, instead of directing the
+work from Morrison, which would seem to be far more convenient."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara bobbed her head, meekly.  Her giggle, however, was shameless.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But Mr. O'Mara has been trying to tell you," she defended in a
+suffocated small voice, "that it's because the work at this end is not
+so difficult.  There are several miles of swamp work, I think he said,
+and a bridge or something, which promises trouble.  I&mdash;I am sorry if I
+interrupted.  I only wanted to ask Mr. O'Mara a question myself&mdash;a&mdash;a
+very unimportant question, I'm afraid!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison had had experience with his daughter's seeming meekness.
+Moreover, the working of Caleb's and Sarah's faces baffled him.  He
+waited, fuming.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just before you and Uncle Cal came in we&mdash;we were talking about the
+weather," the girl struggled on.  "Mr. O'Mara predicted it would rain
+soon and I just wanted to ask him what made him think so."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes?" Allison temporized.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was very quiet for a moment.  Steve sat, a little red of face
+himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
+half-closed his eyes.  He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
+solemn, quaintly boyish treble.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
+Wednesday, for sure!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
+apart.  They remained open long after Steve had finished.  Once he
+started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
+There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query.  At
+last he got to his feet and padded around the table.  With a hand on
+either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
+own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You," he murmured, weakly.  "You!  And Elliott said that you could
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!  Well, I&mdash;I'm damned!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
+scant opportunity to make himself heard at all.  Even the reticence
+which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
+before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
+promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
+to face," she rallied her father.  "It was dense enough of me not to
+have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
+endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.'  I, at least, should have
+known, because&mdash;because"&mdash;she faltered a little&mdash;"well, they always do,
+in books!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It raised another storm of laughter&mdash;that faltering, ingenuous reason
+of hers&mdash;and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
+her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
+to which her mother had objected.  She still employed it, she
+explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
+than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
+Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
+veranda.  They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"&mdash;the "steam
+injine"&mdash;when Allison finally made himself heard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly.  I know it
+was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it&mdash;there's always a woman,
+of course&mdash;but I can't recall&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He paused to ponder&mdash;paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's
+swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness.  Then it all
+returned to him with a rush.  He had his turn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled.  "Why, of course&mdash;<I>of course</I>!  It
+was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair!  But who was it whose
+choice conflicted with your own?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He cocked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to
+pounding his knee and roared with laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted.  "Archie Wickersham&mdash;oh, Lord!  I
+never really appreciated that <I>mêlée</I> until this minute.  And you
+promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and&mdash;well, b'gad, here you
+are!  And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state
+that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently
+beneath the table for renewed composure.  I am not going to expound Mr.
+O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those
+which have brought him back.  But please shake hands again&mdash;Steve.
+And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to assure you that it was
+some battle!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.
+It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the
+episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely
+reduced to terms of farce-comedy.  When the men rose, after breakfast,
+to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of
+accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing.  She crossed
+the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss
+Sarah watching from the door.  Both men walked for a time in silence,
+their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater
+beside the taller one in blue flannel before them.  And, as usual,
+Allison was the first to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west
+branch, Cal," he said.  "And you were right.  It does take stuff to
+make that sort of a gentleman.  Isn't there anything more to tell me?
+I am truly interested, Cal."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box.  And while he was
+explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to
+that day-before-yesterday now many years gone.  There was a quality of
+camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of
+tongue that morning that was entirely boyish.  Her very unconsciousness
+of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze
+rarely left her warm face.  And more than once she caught herself
+watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his
+eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at
+that new and quite frivolous mood of hers.  But when Steve finally
+asked for Devereau&mdash;Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the
+hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed
+shoulder&mdash;the light went from Barbara's eyes.  And Stephen O'Mara, who
+did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped
+smiling, too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I liked him," Steve said simply.  "I've always remembered and liked
+him.  Thinking of him and&mdash;and&mdash;has often kept me from being too lonely
+nights when I was lonely enough."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note
+which had come from his lips.  Barbara did not answer immediately, and
+Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply.  He could not know
+that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of
+diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having
+wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely
+indeed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were
+here?" she asked finally.  "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing
+named Mary Graves?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her?  He
+was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored
+us entirely, but never her."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again the inclination of the head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully.  "One
+never could tell what was behind his indifference or&mdash;or flippancies.
+He mocked at things&nbsp;&#8230; customs and courses of action, which we have
+come to accept and&nbsp;&#8230; and recognize.  But he was always gentle with
+her, and kind, and&mdash;oh, I think reverend is the right word!  Now,
+knowing Garry as I do&mdash;as you will, when you see him again&mdash;the phrase
+may seem a strange one to apply to him.  And yet it describes best his
+bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except
+just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than
+she was when you knew her.  I don't know whether you know it&mdash;of course
+you don't!&mdash;but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
+utterly.  And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
+even wondered at it a little, she was so&nbsp;&#8230; so mouselike, and Garry
+so brilliant and hard and&mdash;I don't like the word sophisticated.  It
+seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
+himself.  It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
+was his just by&mdash;by instinct.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
+almost without a word of explanation to him.  Nobody ever cited Garry
+as a shining example, but he&mdash;that man whom Mary Graves married&mdash;had an
+unspeakable record!  Her family made the match&mdash;the newspapers call it
+a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
+Well, he had them&mdash;and she married him.  And Garret Devereau dropped
+out of the world for a long time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was a year before he came back.  People had already begun to talk
+about the way his father had gone before him&mdash;he shot himself, Mr.
+O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
+return&mdash;and when Garry reappeared they talked more.  I never knew
+before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
+man as I know Garry to be.  It's not just his face and his rather
+dreadful silence.  It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
+shows it, pitifully.  It's&mdash;oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
+could so deliberately commit suicide.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
+But I'll always care for him deeply.  That's why I have asked him up
+this fall.  Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
+have to go back into the woods before then?  I'm going to have a party
+for some week-end guests&mdash;a masque dance.  Garry needs his friends now,
+more than he ever did, and&mdash;and when you meet him will you&mdash;will you,
+please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
+contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
+clear-eyed boy.  He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
+as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
+finenesses of him whom they had known together.  Steve nodded his
+comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then.  But
+they found conversation somehow less easy after that.  It was not until
+they had traversed the streets of the lower village&mdash;long lanes of red
+and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
+lodging-houses&mdash;and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
+girl regained in part her former vivacity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years.  A railroad
+station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
+the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
+south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
+odd miles below.  And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
+the town was different.  The men still swarmed in on the drives,
+brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
+wide streets.  Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
+prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
+simplicity of it all seemed lacking&mdash;the simplicity which had once
+mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish.  The
+dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
+sophisticated, sinister note&mdash;which, after all, only sums up completely
+the change which had taken place.  Even the vices of the older
+Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
+complicated, too.  It was no longer a river village.  Morrison was a
+city now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
+week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
+them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
+her companion and clutched his arm.  The red-shirted one fell to
+singing after they had passed.  A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
+That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner.  Steve
+looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
+roaring good time.  His name is Harrigan.  He works on the Reserve
+Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
+had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song.  He's willing
+to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl continued to gaze up at him.  His short laugh failed entirely
+to clear her face of apprehension.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted.  "Not when he is in that frame of
+mind!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her
+hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve.  "Did you know that
+your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant?  I never knew that
+anyone's arm could grow as hard as that.  And is that the way you
+always prepare to receive your&mdash;friends?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve colored a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied.  "But it has to be hard.  It
+constitutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then her face lighted up again.  The delighted bob of her head with
+which she greeted that name astonished the man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you&mdash;why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe Morgan," she laughed.  "'Fat Joe,' isn't it?  And of course I have
+heard of him.  You don't realize it, but I know more about this East
+Coast work and&mdash;and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea
+myself.  Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once
+wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the
+files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, assistant
+to Chief O'Mara'!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's chuckle of appreciation was answer enough.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't know," he admitted, "but it's like him.  And it was no more
+than reasonable, either&mdash;that request&mdash;even if it is funny.  He has
+been cook for me; but he's been doctor and nurse and countless other
+things in as many crises.  He's the most trustworthy and capable
+adviser, too, that any man ever had."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She scanned his face closely at the timbre of those words.  Then, with
+face averted, "Didn't he embroider you a&mdash;a sofa-cushion, too, once?"
+she inquired, quite demurely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve grew very red.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who told you that?" he blurted, and Barbara giggled again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Ainnesley, I think.  Then it is true?  I&mdash;I never believed it
+before."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Watching the blood creep up beneath his tanned skin, she told herself
+that she did like more than a little the way his eyelids crinkled when
+he grinned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We were in San Domingo that year," he explained none too composedly.
+"It was near Christmas, and Joe wouldn't consider any of the native
+wares as a gift.  So he&mdash;he worked it himself in&mdash;in yellow worsted on
+a red background.  I have it still, displayed in a conspicuous place in
+the shack up-river.  But now I'll wager that you can't guess what the
+motto is across its front.  He told me that he didn't care for it
+particularly himself, but it was the only one he could find.  You can't
+guess, but you are permitted to try."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he gasped when she threw back her head and burst into her gurgling,
+throaty laugh.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'What is home without a father?'" she sing-songed.  And when they were
+both sober-faced again she added:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want to know him, please!  Can't I meet him, Mr. O'Mara?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Side by side they turned in at the millyard, between towering piles of
+aromatic raw planks.  Behind them Caleb and Allison had lost still more
+ground while the latter paused to speak a peremptory word in the ear of
+a mildly intoxicated, red-headed riverman who was pouring forth his
+whole soul in the refrain of "Harrigan, That's Me!"  And almost
+immediately, in answer to Barbara's question, Steve pointed across to a
+short, plump figure in conversation with McLean, the mill
+superintendent.  Even at that distance his broad face gleamed from the
+closeness of a recent shave; even at that distance it was quickly
+apparent to the girl that his garb was as near a replica of O'Mara's
+own clothes as his lack of height and extra weight would permit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you bring him?" she asked eagerly.  "Will he come?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the question was unnecessary.  Joe Morgan&mdash;Fat Joe to the
+river-front and the construction squad&mdash;was already hustling in their
+direction, even before Steve, with that slow smile tugging at his lips,
+had finished assuring her that it was never necessary to summon Joe
+into the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex.  He came
+without being called.  Barbara had a closer and closer view of him,
+until he stopped at last directly in front of them and bowed.  She
+wanted to laugh at that wide face&mdash;at the grandiloquent flourish with
+which he removed his hat&mdash;and would have had she not recalled the grave
+respect with which the man beside her had referred to him a moment
+before.  His eyes were palest blue, his nose a smooth pink mound in an
+expanse of pink, pink cheeks.  She noted that his teeth were as white
+and even as those of O'Mara himself.  Fat Joe bowed again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Morning, Chief," he saluted, in that thin and reedy tenor which none
+but fat men have.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Barbara laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve managed the presentation with extreme punctility and left them.
+When he returned, almost an hour later, he heard them both laughing
+long before he came into view, and on the way back up the hill the girl
+detailed for him much of her conversation with Fat Joe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hereafter I shall be more dignified when in your presence," she
+informed him in as deep a bass as she could summon.  "I had no idea how
+great and important a man was escorting me when I came down this hill!
+But Mr. Morgan has enlightened me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With that she discovered that she could still tease him, almost as
+easily as she had teased the sturdy small boy of the uncouth shoes and
+napping trousers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe is necessarily prejudiced in his opinion," he argued, "and
+therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He told me that you had one regrettable characteristic, however," the
+girl went on.  "He lamented your strength at the ancient and honorable
+pastime of stud-poker!  And he also bewails your taste in literature.
+Why, he tells me that you are indicted to Dickens and Dumas&mdash;he didn't
+pronounce it that way, either&mdash;and even fall back upon Shakespeare, in
+dark and dour hours.  No, I am positive that Mr. Morgan docs not
+approve of such fiction.  He confided to me that he finds more
+entertainment, of a winter's night, in perusing a Sears-Roebuck or a
+Montgomery-Ward catalogue.  And&mdash;and do you know what I admitted to
+him?  No?  Well, I told him that some of the happiest moments of my
+life had been spent in just such fashion.  I've always thought they
+were fascinating!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She badgered him on the way back up the hill that morning, but when
+they paused for a moment at the edge of the close-cropped lawn which
+rolled back to the stucco and timber house facing the river, she
+abandoned her facetiousness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why should there be any&mdash;any element of personal danger in this work
+you are doing, Mr. O'Mara?" she asked.  "And did I do wrong in
+mentioning to Mr. Morgan how that man came out of that&mdash;place, and
+glared so at you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His rejoinder should have been very reassuring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So Joe has been hinting at that mystery stuff again, has he?  After
+listening to him one is almost compelled to believe that I run daily a
+veritable gauntlet of nameless perils."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara stood, small fists buried in her sweater pockets, studying his
+smile of amusement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shouldn't like to believe so," her voice was faintly diffident.
+"And you&mdash;you haven't accepted my invitation for Friday.  May I expect
+you?  I didn't tell you, but Archie&mdash;Archibald Wickersham&mdash;will be
+there, as well as Garry.  So&mdash;so you won't be entirely unacquainted."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, at those words, his face changed.  All in one fleet second,
+in spite of the whole morning's quick intimacy of mood and the spirit
+of companionship which to her had seemed a delightfully new yet
+time-tried thing, Barbara found that she could not read an inch behind
+those grave gray eyes.  She found his quiet countenance as unreadable
+as that of the utmost stranger might have been.  And while she waited,
+not entirely certain how displeased she was at his deliberation, a
+blackest of black horses soared splendidly over a fence to the north
+and came cantering down the road.  The rider, a tall, bare-headed girl,
+lifted her crop in salute as she caught sight of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My friend, Miriam Burrell," the girl murmured in explanation to Steve,
+and something had gone from her voice and left it conventionally
+impersonal.  "She's riding Ragtime, and isn't he a beauty&mdash;almost as
+much a beauty as she is herself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The horse came on, to be reined up at last directly in front of the two
+at the roadside.  Stephen O'Mara met for a moment the level, measuring
+glance of its rider, before Miriam Burrell turned to Barbara.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've enjoyed exceedingly our morning canter, Bobs," her alto voice
+drawled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, before Barbara could reply, she threw one booted leg from the
+stirrup and dismounted.  With the reins looped over her elbow she faced
+the man in blue flannel and corduroy, a tall, lithe figure with coppery
+red hair and whitest skin and doubly vivid lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're Stephen O'Mara," she said, and the calmly direct statement
+might have been overbrusk had it not been for the modulation of her low
+voice.  "You're Stephen O'Mara, for a thousand!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And she held out a gauntleted hand, the clasp of which corroborated the
+suggestion of wirelike strength in that lithely straight body.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison had never been able to analyze her preference for
+Miriam Burrell.  Even the girl's undeniable beauty of face had often
+puzzled her, for, taken each feature by itself, it was far more
+striking than beautiful.  There was no color in her pale skin; her red
+mouth, if anything, was a trifle too wide, and her wide-set eyes were
+tip-tilted in an almost Oriental slant.  Her utter lack of hypocrisy,
+her unsparing arraignment of fundamental motives&mdash;her own and those of
+all with whom she came in contact&mdash;often resulted in calmly direct
+comments which were stunningly disastrous to casual conversation.  For
+Miriam Burrell told the truth to others, which was unusual enough to
+puzzle more than a few; she did not lie to herself, and that was an
+enigma to almost all.  It resulted, of course, in a reputation for
+"unconventionalism."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was scarcely a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate
+dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or
+sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool
+voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through
+the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain
+beneath.  Barbara did not know just why she cared so deeply for Miriam
+Burrell&mdash;we scarcely ever realize that such a regard can be based only
+upon the deepest of deep-founded faith&mdash;but at that moment, while she
+and Steve were shaking hands so soberly, she felt very little, very
+much ignored; felt as though she did not share at all the understanding
+in their eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've just asked Mr. O'Mara to come to my dance, Miriam," she said,
+"and how did you know him, pray?  I've asked him, but he is
+unflatteringly long in accepting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Know him?" she echoed.  "Know him!  Oh, Mr. O'Mara and I have met
+before.  I think just before the fall of the Roman Empire, wasn't it,
+Mr. O'Mara?  Weren't they dragging me in at the wheel of a chariot one
+afternoon, when you were dealing out a gold piece to each of your
+legionaries?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She laughed, dryly, and Barbara felt smaller and more forlorn and
+lonelier still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt Mr. O'Mara hasn't time to be flattering, Bobs," she
+commented.  "But you will have time to come Friday, for a little while,
+won't you?" she asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve glanced down at the hand which still felt the pressure of her
+buckskin clad fingers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have to work&mdash;day and night&mdash;some weeks when things break badly," he
+told her simply.  "If I can"&mdash;and he turned to Barbara&mdash;"if I can, I
+want to come."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miriam nodded her head with brisk finality.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you can," she agreed.  "Barbara, no doubt, has been telling you
+about Garret Devereau, hasn't she?  Yes&mdash;come if you can.  I have
+heard, Mr. O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of
+the dark, when everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to
+talk with&mdash;a specialist in such campaigns!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara had read a meaning in the words of that contained, often
+abrupt, straightly tall girl of which Barbara Allison had not even
+dreamed.  He stood watching them when they turned up the driveway, the
+horse Ragtime muzzling the woolly white sweater and following like a
+dog.  But he wasn't thinking of Miriam Burrell or of Garry Devereau,
+while he waited for Caleb and Dexter Allison to come up with him.  He
+was wondering about Archie Wickersham&mdash;the Honorable Archie&mdash;thinking
+about that funny brawl of years before, which had not been so funny
+after all&mdash;wondering if&mdash;&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was past twelve that night when Miriam Burrell's door was pushed
+softly open by a slim white figure which hesitated on the threshold;
+but the night-light was still burning upon the table.  Barbara stood
+for a moment, staring at her friend, who was sitting bolt upright in
+bed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered.  "Are you&mdash;reading?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in
+that mist of loosened hair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were
+bookless.  "Yes, I'm reading.  I'm having a little squint at this
+puzzle-scroll they call Life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;may I turn off the light?" she asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miriam snapped the button.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice.
+"And I&mdash;I wanted&mdash;Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown
+girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me!  From the moment when
+I first recognized him and became so&mdash;tangled up&mdash;I've just chattered
+and chattered.  You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do
+you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the
+uncompromising voice she knew so well.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you&mdash;you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated.  "Because
+I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at.  And I have poise.  I
+am not a child.  But looking back now, I can't quite account for all
+my&mdash;shall I call it cordiality?  Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was
+because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when
+he was a boy?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice.  "And,
+do you know, all day, even when we seemed so&mdash;such good friends, I
+still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a
+slight.  I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just
+the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party.  It
+was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who&mdash;who'd
+almost charter a liner to come&mdash;if I'd invite them.  It would have
+sounded conceited, but I wanted to <I>jolt</I> him!  And he just said he'd
+come if he could!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that
+wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't
+understand.  "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot
+more worth asking, if they had to work, too.  I wish every man had
+to&mdash;work&mdash;hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!"
+Her voice slurred and she recovered it.  "I don't know whether he
+remembers or not.  Probably not!  You've just had a unique experience
+for one of our kind, that's all.  You've met a man!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara raised herself upon one elbow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie
+Wickersham or my other friends, or&mdash;or Garry, aren't men?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Males!" snapped the other girl.  "Just males!  But"&mdash;and she seemed to
+be arguing with herself&mdash;"but Garry might have been, though&mdash;he might
+have been!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's odd," she murmured once, "but we did seem so&mdash;so congenial.  I
+can't remember when my brain has been so quick to catch a thought or
+supplement one.  Have you ever wondered, Miriam, why we&mdash;we can't seem
+to marry one who brings out the best in us, like that?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can't?  You mean, dear child, that we don't!  Some of us because the
+'best that is in us' is far, far too decently unexciting for daily
+diet.  And some of us&mdash;oh, just because we haven't the sand and
+backbone, I guess!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Barbara was too nearly asleep to catch the bitterness of that
+reply.  Just once again, before she slept, she asked a question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Should I have told Mr. O'Mara that my engagement to Archibald
+Wickersham was to be announced at the party?" she murmured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why should you have?" Miriam crisply wanted to know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, I don't know," she mused.  "Only I thought he might be interested.
+You don't seem to realize that we are&mdash;very old friends!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And long after Barbara was sound asleep, her face buried in the palm of
+one hand, Miriam Burrell lay stiffly awake.  Once she smiled a little,
+for such perplexities which, of themselves, must work out inevitably.
+When dawn came it found her still struggling stubbornly with her own,
+for which it seemed there could be no solution now.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+It was late that night when Steve climbed into the rig which was
+waiting with Pat Joe at the reins and they turned north into the hills.
+For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in
+the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that
+ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years
+before, in the shack up-river.  And the latter was surprised at
+learning how much of it was no longer news.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, I know," Steve told them, after Caleb had finished relating, with
+quite ponderous pride, many things which he ascertained concerning the
+Stephen O'Mara who had gone before.  "I know!  Four or five years ago,
+when I found out that it was&mdash;customary for one to be certain as to
+such things, I started to look it up myself.  And when I found out from
+the records that a boy by that name had disappeared&mdash;perhaps been
+stolen by an old servant&mdash;I remembered instantly, of course, the box
+over which Old Tom used to hang, hour after hour.  I came back into the
+woods looking for it that summer and found it gone and nothing left of
+the Jenkins' cabin but a pile of charred logs.  On my way out I stopped
+here&mdash;somehow I thought that maybe you might have it&mdash;but the house was
+closed.  And no one seemed to know where you had gone or when you would
+return."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb nodded, and his eyes turned to Sarah.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We were sleuthing, Steve," he explained as soberly as he was able.
+"We were ranging from border to border and coast to coast, looking for
+you."  He stopped to scan the browned face closely for an instant.
+"But couldn't you have written&mdash;or&mdash;or tried again?  We've been
+waiting&mdash;boy!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's face colored a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't
+have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or&mdash;or clothes,
+either.  I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of
+those visits, after I had tramped in overland.  The house was closed
+both times I came.  And then I did write once&mdash;that was from San
+Domingo&mdash;the third year after I left college.  I was so lonesome down
+there that I had to write, I think.  But there&mdash;wasn't any reply, so I
+sort of thought perhaps&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough.  Caleb faced about
+abruptly, his face sternly accusing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want&mdash;&mdash;"
+and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head.  "We
+didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished.  "If we only had we&mdash;we
+would have been less lonely waiting, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I should have known that," he faltered.  "I should have known that
+there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going,
+for the mails to be infallible.  But I wasn't just sure&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
+almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
+which he has neglected to mention."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
+picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
+with less difficulty than he had during her absence.  For a second or
+so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
+loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
+tucked away in his own iron box.  Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
+and long at his mother's picture.  When he finally raised his head
+again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
+murmured.  "I can only tell you that I didn't know&mdash;I didn't
+understand&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand.  She did not
+need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered.  "I
+am going to ask far more than that of you.  I've kept her picture
+always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
+it greatly if I were not to see it often.  Do you mind leaving it here,
+in your room upstairs?  I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
+mind doing so, then I&mdash;I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
+the&mdash;the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
+you good-night now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
+cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
+world could ever have been.  After she had left them alone Steve turned
+and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
+said slowly.  "I wondered then if there could be other women with
+voices just as kind.  And I&mdash;I'm wondering now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb smiled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked.  "And I
+don't know.  I don't know!  Sarah is pretty human&mdash;even for a Baptist,
+eh?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
+sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
+took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
+had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box.  Even if he had not
+been entirely certain of it that first day when he had neglected to
+show them to Sarah, he knew now just what reason underlay his secrecy.
+Like Old Tom, he felt that his action was in a way more or less
+extenuated by circumstance.  And still mindful of Dexter Allison's odd
+moment or two of guarded antagonism that very morning, he gradually led
+the conversation around to more recent things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you have had your conference with Mr. Allison, Steve?" he
+suggested in a matter-of-fact way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Instantly at that question all the boyishness left the other's face.
+He looked away and looked back again, very deliberately.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No more than a word," he answered.  "He asked me to come down again,
+toward the end of the week, if I could get away.  He said no doubt I
+would want to spend all the time I could to-day with you and Miss
+Sarah."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," Caleb exclaimed, "of course!  I see.  Is it&mdash;is it
+unethical if I ask, privately, your opinion of this job which the East
+Coast Company has on its hands?  Do you believe they can swing it in
+time to fulfill all their obligations?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again there followed a moment's pause while Steve's eyes roved
+thoughtfully around the room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Elliott wouldn't have risked every cent he has," he finally
+replied, "unless I had assured him that it wasn't so very much more
+than a man-sized gamble.  Nor Mr. Ainnesley, either, I think.  So that
+puts it up to me pretty squarely, doesn't it?  We'll have to win
+through&mdash;because we have to, now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite so!" murmured Caleb again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He studied a long time over his next words, and it was a very vivid
+vision of a rigid little figure in a wrecked black velvet suit&mdash;a
+vision of a bleak-faced boy with bruised lips who had insisted upon
+going back downtown for Miss Sarah's eggs&mdash;which eventually overbore
+his distaste for anything that might savor of disloyalty to a friend.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course there could arise unforeseen circumstances," he ventured.
+"Unforeseen interference which, unless one guarded against it, might
+defeat every effort."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The room seemed very, very quiet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," came the calm answer at last; and Caleb could not see
+Steve's face behind the cupped hands at his pipe bowl, "of
+course&mdash;unless one more or less guarded against it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there, just as calmly, they dropped it.  The topic was not
+discussed again that night, unless a bit of news which Fat Joe Morgan
+himself delivered might be construed as somehow relative.  Fat Joe had
+been driving for an hour, silent some of the time, but for the most
+part devoted to a whole-hearted rendition of "Home, Sweet Home," in his
+thin and bell-like tenor, when he broke off in the middle of a stanza
+to chuckle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Say, Chief," he exclaimed, "I've got news for you that'll just fill
+you plumb full of happiness and good cheer.  I hired another hand
+to-day who'll be a distinct addition to our gang up-river.  Just to
+while away the dark hours I'll let you guess for a while who he is.
+I'll let you guess from here to Last Oak, above the cypress bend at the
+rapids.  One, two, three&mdash;and the contest is on!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man beside Fat Joe stirred and opened his eyes.  Fat Joe couldn't
+see it, for it was too dark, but Steve frowned somewhat at the levity
+which had interrupted him.  He had just been thinking about the tight
+grip of a slender hand which had fallen upon his arm that afternoon
+when a red-headed riverman lurched drunkenly from a doorway ahead.
+Joe's words were exactly coincident with that thought and the answer
+came mechanically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Harrigan," grunted Steve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And in the darkness Fat Joe sighed mournfully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bull's-eye," he whimpered, "and there goes the whole evenin's
+entertainment!  Why didn't you cast around, sort of fruitless for a
+while, and prolong the excitement?  But you're right.  Harrigan, that's
+him!  He'd just met up with that fat party who owns the plaster palace
+on the hill&mdash;just met up with him, down the road a piece, and Allison
+had fired him for keeps, he said.  He asked me if we didn't have room
+for a nice steady hand, so I hired him.  And I'll leave it to you if it
+ain't Harrigan's feet that's mostly unsteady, at that.  He seemed awful
+cheerful for a man who'd just been allowed to resign, but who was I to
+entertain dark doubts?  I hired him; I thought you might like the touch
+of color his hair'll lend to the landscape.  It'll be comfortin', too,
+havin' him around where we can have a look at him any time we take the
+notion.  Don't you think so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's grunted reply was hardly intelligible, but it seemed to satisfy
+Fat Joe.  The latter had long before learned to read the signs; he knew
+when his best efforts were only wasted words, and once more he gave his
+attention to the jogging horses and his neglected melody.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb Hunter, wondering after Steve had gone just how much he might
+have seemed to insinuate, regretted that he had spoken at all.
+Recollection of Allison's bluff cordiality with O'Mara only made him
+the more ashamed of his suspicion, and yet the next morning at table he
+attempted, covertly, to sound Sarah for an opinion, too.  She
+invariably solved his perplexities or relegated them to the limbo of
+gentle ridicule.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just why should he want this East Coast job to fail?" he puzzled
+aloud.  "He's in it, along with Elliott and Ainnesley, even if he isn't
+in so deep.  That is, of course, assuming that he does want it to fail."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The preoccupied gleam in Miss Sarah's eyes promised a reply that might
+be worth considering, but when it came Caleb found trouble in
+assimilating it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They did look so well together," she murmured absently.  "He's so much
+broader&mdash;and a whole head taller, too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It didn't seem to be exactly a relevant answer, but Caleb nodded
+patiently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Taller, yes," he admitted judiciously.  "But he isn't half so big
+around."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sarah sat, fork poised, and gazed at him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not half so big as who?" she neglected her sentence structure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why&mdash;Dexter!" said Caleb.  "Isn't that what we were talking about?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe you were," Miss Sarah sniffed.  "But I was not discussing
+Dexter's height or girth either.  I was referring to his daughter
+and&mdash;and our boy, Stephen.  I was going to ask you if you thought she
+could be entirely disinterested in him.  I don't believe any woman
+forgets a man who has ever thought enough of her to fight for her."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose not," agreed Caleb humbly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And I was wondering, if that argument ever came up again&mdash;I'm
+wondering if Archibald Wickersham wouldn't come out second best, just
+as he did before?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then her brother understood.  He threw back his head and laughed until
+Sarah's face registered a trace of vexation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sarah," he saluted her, "I'm a mere babe in arms when it comes to
+finesse, in comparison with you.  But since you have introduced the
+subject I might remark that there are two individuals to be considered.
+Maybe she might be&mdash;interested&mdash;as you so delicately phrase it.  But
+the boy&mdash;well, he's had one mighty pointed lesson, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But there was no mirth in Sarah's eyes.  She was most serious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the very thing which perplexes me," she confessed.  "I was
+going to ask you about that.  For it was hurt pride that sent him away
+and he hasn't forgotten the hurt, even yet.  He was going to tell us,
+last night when I stopped him, that he hadn't written again because he
+wasn't certain that we wanted to hear; and he was painfully conscious
+of how childish it would sound in words, too.  Some men quit when they
+are whipped once, but don't some of them refuse to recognize that
+they've ever been whipped at all, Cal?  And then, she told me that she
+had asked him to her party, Friday night.  If he comes I think I'll be
+better able to tell just what&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He won't!" cut in Caleb flatly, and when she taxed him for it he
+proceeded to elaborate at considerable length the reason for his
+certainty.  His argument was rather tight and so, just because of that,
+woman-fashion she believed the contrary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All day Friday she watched the hills' road.  Not until the orchestra in
+the lodge beyond the hedge had begun tunelessly to strum their
+instruments, to insure their later tunefulness, did she reluctantly
+abandon her position at the window.  But then, from his chair at the
+fire, Caleb noticed how wistfully disappointed her face was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It turned much colder with nightfall; a wind sharp with the tang of
+autumn was blowing in off the river when Barbara, muffled from throat
+to ankle in a sapphire fur-edged wrap, slipped in at the door, having
+stolen away ostensibly to display to them her costume.  It was after
+the hour of ten, but the girl lingered a little after she had executed
+that mission; she stopped again in the door, indecisively worrying her
+lip with small teeth, when she finally turned to depart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are very sorry that Mr. O'Mara could not come," she hesitated.  "I
+had promised both Garry and Archie Wickersham that he would be down."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The older woman nodded and accepted the statement for what it was&mdash;a
+question which the girl's eyes failed to conceal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We haven't heard from him since he went back into camp," she answered.
+"He, no doubt, has been unable to get away."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara turned without replying and passed out, less airily than she
+had entered.  But Miss Sarah's eyes were no longer disappointed as she
+again took her place at a window.  And a second later, when she had
+drawn back suddenly into the room with a muffled exclamation, her
+brother was astonished at her beaming face.  A moment earlier he would
+have sworn that it was only wistful, but before she went upstairs,
+exclaiming still further at the lateness of the hour, it began to look
+more than a little like veritable triumph to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison recrossed the lawn very slowly that night; she retraced
+her steps with head bent, the fall of her slippered feet muffled by the
+carpet of thick, unfrosted grass.  Vaguely troubled, vaguely disturbed
+at herself for her inability to analyze that strange mood which, twice
+in the last few nights, had sent her with aching throat and wet cheeks
+into Miriam's room, she was within arm's length of the dark figure in
+the hedge gap through which she had just come, before she was aware of
+its presence.  Stephen O'Mara, weatherbeaten hat in hand, was standing
+there in her path, peering steadily at the stucco and timber lodge
+alight from end to end like a huge and sprawling glow-worm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even in that first moment when she stopped and caught her breath,
+audibly, from sheer surprise, the girl sensed the indecision in the
+attitude of the man before her.  But she could not know that it was not
+a thing of the moment&mdash;that irresolution; could not know that
+throughout the week Steve had periodically abused himself for his
+inability to settle the question once and for all, and leave his brain
+free for more important things.  Just as often as he told himself that
+he would not go, he had found himself reopening the mental discussion,
+and yet&mdash;and strangely enough&mdash;it was not the recollection of Barbara's
+repeated invitations, or even her distress over Garry Devereau, who had
+been ceaselessly in his thoughts ever since she had spoken of him,
+which finally achieved the decision.  An insistent desire again to meet
+the Honorable Archibald Wickersham in the end led him to request Fat
+Joe to hook up the team, that day at noon, for the long drive down
+river.  With Steve himself handling the reins, they had rolled the
+thirty miles at a speed which might have mildly surprised Fat Joe had
+he not been accustomed to putting two and two together to make six or
+eight or more.  And Fat Joe's thin tenor was just drifting faintly off
+down the hill&mdash;a mournful rendition of "Home, Sweet Home"&mdash;when the
+girl stepped noiselessly forward and put a hand, feather-light, upon
+the man's arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a
+step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled.  She
+even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face.  And then, the
+cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and
+shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him&mdash;a laugh a
+little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the
+spirit of youth itself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man just stood and stared at her&mdash;stared much as if he mistrusted
+his own ears and eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
+words were tinged with doubt.  "Not all my friends," he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness.  He
+was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
+head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
+from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
+her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
+blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
+above them.  Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
+lain for a moment upon his arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So you are&mdash;you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers.  "I
+wasn't&mdash;just sure."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl bobbed her head&mdash;her quaint and childishly impetuous
+affirmative.  She looked down at the hand holding her own,
+contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
+fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
+his big palm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
+in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
+speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then it&mdash;must be you, too," she faltered.  "I wasn't sure, either,
+even when I knew it must be.  I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
+forgotten&mdash;that you didn't care to.&#8230;  Will you please say that you
+forgive me&mdash;please&mdash;for something over which I have been sorrier than
+you can know?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was not more than a wisp of sound&mdash;that request.  The words were
+stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand.  Silence
+came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond.  Once,
+in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
+object which she carried in the crook of one arm&mdash;a tiny papier-mâché
+pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness&mdash;but the
+pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
+costume to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
+Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
+white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
+which had come creeping over his face.  She saw it surge up in his
+eyes&mdash;the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
+which, until that instant, she had looked in vain&mdash;but it was a man's
+wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping.  She caught
+her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though
+they had gone dry of a sudden.  Involuntarily she stepped toward him,
+that single pace which she had fallen away.  And above the tumult of
+her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how
+unsteady the effort was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then you do forgive me?" she breathed.  "Do I&mdash;pass inspection?  Do
+you like me&mdash;in my masquerade?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened,
+conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his
+voice grave.  "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have
+been that, always, yourself.  And you are not permitted to ask
+forgiveness from me, nor pardon.  Men do not admit that there can be
+need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped
+you.  You knew I was coming.&#8230;  I've been coming ten years now.
+But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The words were blurred as a far-off echo in her ears.  She started to
+speak, but all that she would have said caught in her throat and hurt
+her, and only her unsteady breath came from parted lips.  Her head
+drooped forward again, while the small fist twisted and searched and
+found and clasped tight one finger of the hand that held it.  She
+realized that his free arm was lifted toward her.  As she started
+forward, her ankles became entangled in the soft pile of satin at her
+feet, and she stopped to free them&mdash;and started forward again.  But
+when, at her inarticulate effort at speech, he bent his head to her
+swiftly upflung face, her whole slender body tightened at the rough
+contact of blue flannel against her cheek.  Almost before they held her
+she struggled madly from the circle of his arms.  White of face, white
+of lip, she broke away from him and darted through the gap in the
+hedge, only to shrink back against him in panic the next instant before
+the black shape upon a blacker horse, between her and the lights.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was gazing in their direction&mdash;the man upon the horse.  He was
+laughing softly.  And when he thrust back the black cowl that hid his
+face and began to speak, Stephen O'Mara recognized that terribly pale,
+terribly drawn face.  Garry Devereau rocked a little in the saddle and
+waved a gracefully unsteady hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the shadow, and his
+tongue was not thick, but only wavering.  "My felicitations!  And e'en
+though I know not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion.
+And yet&mdash;why blush, dear unknowns?  'Tis in the air to-night.  Even I
+myself have yielded to spirit of frivolity.  Two hours ago I appeared
+masked in these dingy vestments as Love's Young Dream; but with me the
+mood has passed.  Fellow romancers, you have witnessed a metamorphosis;
+you are now gazing upon the Wrath of God, about to thunder forth upon a
+coal black charger.  I merely paused to bid you haste inside, lest you
+miss the crux of the evening.  When I withdrew the Honorable Archie was
+already searching, with bravely concealed distraction, for the fair
+daughter of the house.  The hour has struck&mdash;it's masks off&mdash;masks off,
+from eyes and hearts!"
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-124"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-124.jpg" ALT="&quot;Blessings, my children!&quot; he called to the two in the shadow.  &quot;My felicitations!  And e'en though I know not your identity,
+still I may sense your fond confusion.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="441" HEIGHT="640">
+<H3>
+[Illustration: "Blessings, my children!" he called to the two <BR>
+in the shadow.  "My felicitations!  And e'en though I know <BR>
+not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion."]
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+He laughed again, a low and ugly chuckle.  Sparks flew from Ragtime's
+hoofs when he touched the sleek flanks with his heels and the splendid
+animal quivered and bunched hard thigh muscles and spurned the gravel.
+White face whiter still against the background of his somber vestments,
+debonaire and drunkenly insecure in the saddle, Garret Devereau tore
+out into the main road and thundered off into the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison stood a long time motionless, her back to the
+motionless man so near her.  She stood and stared, pale as had been
+that black-robed horseman, straight ahead of her.  Then a tremor shook
+her.  Mechanically she started forward, but at the first step Steve's
+hand reached out and found her arm and drew her back to him.  She faced
+about, and waited.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is that&mdash;true?" he asked her, quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She made no move to answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is that true?" his low and gentle voice commanded this time.  "You
+still mean to&mdash;marry&mdash;him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She recovered her voice then.  All her confusion and stunned
+realization was swallowed up by that tide of fiercely unreasoning,
+deadly resentment which his very gentleness evoked.  There was nothing
+girlish in his reply&mdash;nothing boyish in that high-held chin and
+stiffened body.  A hard note marred her utterance, a perfection of
+insolence edged with scorn, which Steve's world did not know.  She
+wanted but one thing in that moment; she knew but one impulse&mdash;a mad
+desire to cut and tear and rend savagely his gravely possessed
+kindliness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What I have done to-night I can never hope to explain," she told him.
+"I can only hope that some day I may cease to despise myself as utterly
+as you have taught me to, at this minute.  And since you choose to
+regard it now as your right to ask that question, I'll answer it for
+you.  I do not <I>mean</I> to marry him.  I shall be proud to be his wife!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The light that streamed over her shoulder fell full upon his face.  She
+saw the blood pour up, staining throat and cheek and brow, and then ebb
+away.  She gave him time to answer, but he did not speak; and suddenly
+she knew what scene of another day he was remembering.  Her eyes
+dropped to her imprisoned hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are&mdash;detaining me," she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He released her immediately, and yet she did not move.  And while she
+waited he turned and stooped and turned to her again.  She stood like
+stone while he wrapped her fur-edged sapphire cloak about her and
+fastened it close beneath her uptilted chin.  He waited, bare of head,
+in the hedge gap until she had crossed the lawn to the house that lay a
+sprawling glow-worm in the darkness.  A tumult of voices leaped out to
+him when she opened the door&mdash;a lilting crash of syncopated melody.
+And then it was quiet again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After a glimpse of his chief's eyes that night, Fat Joe essayed not so
+much as one facetious protest against turning the fagged team homeward
+with scarcely any rest at all.  And hour after hour he drove in
+silence, checking himself apologetically once or twice when he forgot
+himself long enough to burst into the opening strains of his inevitable
+ballad.  He remained as quiet as that too quiet man beside him, until
+Steve himself opened his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's a&mdash;lonesome night," mused the latter at length.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe could not have endured it much longer.  His pent-up spirit
+leaped fervidly forth in reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lonesome!" he ejaculated.  "Man, it's lonesomer'n hell!  Hear that
+damn wind sighin' in the branches, as your poets say.  Hear her moan!
+And look at them clouds edgin' in on the moon like they was thugs
+a-packin' blackjacks and waitin' for an openin' to whale in.  Lonesome?
+Say, it gives me chills, a night like this.  It don't seem to have no
+heart, somehow, nor mercy nor nuthin', does it?  It's all wrong!  It
+ain't dark enough, and it ain't light enough; it's too quiet, and the
+wind makes too much noise.  It keeps whisperin' over your shoulder,
+tauntin' yuh with somethin' you can't understand.  No, sir, this kind
+of a night ain't popular with me, at, all, at all!&#8230;  Say, Steve,
+how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
+speech were opened for Joe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
+wanted to be certain sure.  It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
+of her name, any way you look at it.  And not that I've reached that
+state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either.  I just aim to
+be prepared, that's all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
+was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
+to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
+loomed up ahead.  And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
+long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
+through the darkness.  At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
+he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
+but he knew that the latter had not heard.  And when that night-bird's
+call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
+tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
+laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
+breastwork of trees.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of their first
+plunge; and then he saw what Fat Joe had seen a second before.  High up
+on the hillside there was a light glowing from the windows of the shack
+which served the chief engineer of the East Coast job as office and
+domicile, too.  While Fat Joe laid on the whip a man came hurtling past
+the outflung door, sprang to his feet and, running low to the ground,
+disappeared into the blackness of the brush.  Joe swung the horses up
+in a galloping curve and with one catlike leap, incredibly light for a
+man of his chunky build, was down from the seat and crashing through
+the bushes on the trail of that fugitive whose noisy flight had already
+become a faint crackle in the distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Flame poured from Fat Joe's revolver.  Two whiplike reports shattered
+the night quiet before Stephen O'Mara moved.  Then he lifted himself
+heavily from the seat.  Something nuzzled his shoulder while he stood
+listening to the diminishing tumult of the pursuit; and even before he
+turned he knew what it was.  He paused a moment to stroke the soft nose
+of the black horse standing there with reins a-trail.  It was Ragtime,
+wet with lather and caked with dust.  But even then he was not prepared
+for the sight which met him when he entered the shack.  Seconds must
+have passed while he stood staring from the threshold, for Fat Joe came
+puffing back from his fruitless chase in time to see him bend and lift
+a black-robed, lifelessly limp body from the floor and stagger with it
+toward a bunk.  Fat Joe's steady flow of profanity, oddly, double
+vicious in his thin, complaining voice, was checked short.  He, too,
+stood and stared from the doorway&mdash;stood and lifted his nose and
+sniffed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seems to be our night for callers," he remarked with bad mildness;
+"and, say, this one's got a peach of a load, ain't he?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and
+the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's
+temple.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly
+again.  "So that's it!  But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put
+up a tidy little battle, was he?  Funny about that, too, but I could
+always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about
+half-over myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf
+of blue-prints from a corner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when
+we busted in.  Steve, them's our bridge estimates&mdash;and there wa'n't no
+copies of 'em, either.  It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to
+replace 'em neither&mdash;not more'n two precious, priceless weeks.  I'm
+only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more
+than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea
+or somethin'.  I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be
+home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had
+finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all.  He had
+finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own
+bunk.  He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat
+Joe joined him at the bedside.  The latter's thick fingers were as
+delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been.  He,
+too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids.  He shook
+his head, dubiously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but
+it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right
+now.  For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it
+was someone I'd a little prefer dead!  It ain't that scratch on the
+head that's got him slippin', either."  Joe paused and turned to
+address Garry Devereau's still white face itself.  "You sat in an'
+backed my game like a gentleman born," he said, "and now I'm a-goin' to
+play yourn, blue chips and white and yello'.  But this is goin' to be
+your last celebration, friend of mine, even if we do win through, or
+you'll be holdin' your next one where the company ain't so select and
+the climate nuthin' to compare with ourn!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And while he talked he worked, for it was Fat Joe who gave the orders
+that night.  He called for ammonia, for brandy, for a half-dozen drugs
+from the camp hospital chest; and each of them Steve brought in an
+automatic fashion that finally penetrated even Fat Joe's professional
+pleasure in the struggle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Friend of yourn?" he asked in an interval while they rested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A friend," Steve repeated with a tightening of his jaws, and Joe knew
+what that tone meant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After that they fought on in silence, side by side&mdash;sometimes waiting,
+sometimes fighting, both of them, to hold that horribly racked man upon
+the bed.  He fought them with every pound of strength in his emaciated
+body.  He moaned up at them, screamed at them, cursed them frothingly,
+and Fat Joe hung on and cursed him back&mdash;cursed him and promised him
+profanely that he would not let him die.  Steve's face was gray, sweat
+was pouring from Fat Joe's scarlet face when the life-tide ebbed lowest
+and there came a sudden cessation in that stream of babbled madness,
+Garry Devereau lay so quiet that an oath jerked huskily from Fat Joe's
+lips; but when he had listened at the motionless chest he lifted his
+head and smiled, seraphically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There, by God," he stated in his high, complaining tenor, "there, by
+God!  And if I ain't created a vacancy in the angel chorus aloft, then
+I'm a liar!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And his explosive diagnosis proved to be as correct as it was utterly
+unprofane in spirit.  Before day broke there came an hour when Garry
+Devereau lifted himself upon one elbow and opened his eyes to stare
+half wildly, but very sanely, about the room.  His gaze flitted
+wonderingly from wall to wall before it rested, fearfully fixed, upon
+Steve's brown face.  Instantly he looked away, flinchingly, and met Fat
+Joe's voluminous grin&mdash;and looked back again, cunningly cautious.
+Finally he reached out a timid, blue-veined, pitifully unsteady hand
+and plucked at Steve's blue flannel sleeve.  And his words were an echo
+of those which Stephen O'Mara had heard before that night from other
+lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then you&mdash;are you," he framed the words laboriously.  "I wasn't
+sure&mdash;even when I knew it must be."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Garry Devereau tried to smile&mdash;his slow smile of sophistry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Greetings, Sir Galahad!" he faltered.  "And how are you, Steve&mdash;and
+who might your&mdash;fat friend be?"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Of all the fragmentary pictures which those crowded twelve hours left
+registered upon Stephen O'Mara's brain, none proved more enduring than
+did the change which Garry Devereau's first haltingly weak but very sane
+greeting wrought in the expression on Fat Joe's pink visage that morning.
+The banter in Garry's labored words was so characteristic of the mocking
+spirit of the man who had come back the same inexplicably intimate friend
+which the boy had been, that it left Steve's dry throat speechless for
+the moment.  The visible effect upon Fat Joe was even more positive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Almost before he had finished his facetious query as to the identity of
+the one who had dragged him through that bad night Gary fell asleep; he
+slipped off into slumber, the very calmness of which guaranteed that the
+crisis had passed.  But the lugubrious astonishment which the question
+had evoked consumed more time in fading from Joe's face.  The latter's
+jaw had sagged open; he dragged a sleeve across his damp forehead while
+he stood and gazed in a sort of dumb dismay down at those pale and
+handsome features.  Then he chuckled suddenly; his whole squat body shook
+with comprehensive mirth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now what do you think of that!" he gurgled in admiration.  "What do you
+think of that?  A-hangin' on all night, alive once in a while, maybe, but
+the best you could say for him the rest of the time was a hope that he
+wasn't dead.  And now coming at us with the airy persiflage, the first
+regular breath he's drawed.  Fat!  It was me he meant to indicate, wasn't
+it?  He was joshin' me!  Say, Steve, ain't he the merry little joker?
+<I>Me&mdash;fat</I>!  Now that's real funny&mdash;I'll leave it to you if it ain't."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe leaned over and drew a blanket a little higher across the
+sleeping man's shoulder, while Steve continued silently to study Garry's
+face.  Even in unconsciousness a faintly crooked smile of skepticism
+still clung to the lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was like him," Steve remarked at last, very soberly.  "Somehow, the
+minute he began to speak I knew it was exactly the sort of thing I
+expected him to say.  The probability of death is a much more amusing
+prospect to some men, Joe, than the perplexity of living."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe flashed a swift, half-puzzled glance at his chief's face; he
+started to ask a question, then scowled and checked himself and turned
+instead to kindle a fire in the stove of the lean-to kitchen of the
+cabin.  But a half-hour later he was still murmuring the last phrase over
+to himself, perplexedly, when Steve came leading the horse Ragtime up to
+the open door.  Saddled and with reins a-trail, the animal had been
+wandering throughout the night about the upper end of the construction
+camp clearing.  At the sound of hoofbeats outside Fat Joe left the stove
+and the half-cooked breakfast he had set himself to prepare.  From the
+doorway he stared through narrowed lids.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the moment Joe had half forgotten those night birds whose mournful
+hooting along the trail, a few hours back, had first stirred him to alert
+suspicion.  While he was struggling with Garry Devereau's faltering heart
+he had had scant leisure to devote to the problem of the other man's
+identity&mdash;that shadowy figure which had come plunging out of the cabin
+door and gone crashing off into the brush, a noisy but invisible target
+for his revolver.  Now recognition and a light of partial understanding
+rose and intermingled in his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So that's the way one of 'em come," he murmured.  "I was wondering some.
+Last night I didn't notice the horse, being a mite too hurried to give
+ample attention to details, as it were.  But ain't&mdash;ain't this one of
+Allison's horses?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve straightened from an examination of a deep scratch in one of
+Ragtime's knees and stood, back to the door, slowly stroking the soft
+black nose.  Just as well as though it had been voiced he caught the
+unphrased inference in the plump one's query.  After a time he shook his
+head, absently, in negation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, Joe," he answered heavily.  "He is from Allison's stables, but we
+have him to thank, just the same, along with Garry, for our blue-prints
+and estimates.  It was Mr. Devereau whom he brought up here last night,
+and in fairly good time I should judge, too, from the pace at which they
+set out.  Garry turned him into the hill-road, and he must have stuck to
+it blindly until he struck our fork."  And, after a longer pause: "The
+horse is Miss Allison's own property," he added quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe pursed his lips.  Instantly, at the mention of the girl's name, he
+felt himself better equipped to understand both the lack of immediate
+action and the seeming preoccupied indifference of his superior which, in
+the face of the night's developments, would have been otherwise utterly
+unaccountable that morning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There had been more than one instance of gross neglect and misinterpreted
+orders, particularly in the last week or so, that might have resulted
+disastrously if luck had not been with them; but Fat Joe had been unable
+to convince the chief engineer of the East Coast Company that their
+repetition was in any way a thing of sinister import.  Steve had merely
+smiled at his dogged belief in a veiled campaign of opposition, blaming
+the minor catastrophes upon blundering incompetence which they could hope
+to combat by unflagging vigilance alone.  And now, when the finding of
+the roll of estimates upon the floor and the blood clotted crease in
+Garry Devereau's forehead made further argument superfluous, his
+listlessness would have left Fat Joe alarmed had it not been for a
+recollection of the light he had glimpsed in Steve's eyes at the
+beginning of their sudden and unexplained return to camp the night
+before, and his brooding silence on the road.  At the mention of Barbara
+Allison's name it all recurred to Joe in nicely balanced and comforting
+sequence.  Fat Joe confessed shamelessly to a romantic soul.  And it
+helped him now to choose his own course of action, even though he had,
+for once, misread the other's mood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For if Steve had not forgotten the picture which Garry Devereau had made,
+robed and cowled and areel in the saddle, any more than he could ever
+hope to forget the slim, shimmering figure who had shrunk back against
+him in panic, there in the shadow of the hedge, both pictures had
+momentarily given way to an even more vivid memory.  He was thinking of
+Miriam Burrell's face and her last words to him: "I have heard, Mr.
+O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of the dark, when
+everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to talk with&mdash;a
+specialist in such campaigns!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The probable nearness of him who had gone bounding away empty-handed from
+the lighted shack was of far less moment than the possible identity of
+the one who had furnished the inspiration of that night raid.  And to
+Steve the need of assuring that tall girl with the vivid lips and coppery
+hair of Garry Devereau's safety bulked quite as important as did the
+advisability of seeking immediately an informal interview with Dexter
+Allison, such as the latter himself had so genially suggested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Fat Joe, squinting at his chief's broad back, misread the signs that
+morning.  From where he stood in the doorway he could see the men of the
+upper camp already swarming out over the works, some of them mere dots
+across the expanse of swamp-land.  The rhythmic beat of pile-drivers
+thudded in his ears; raucous echoes of shouted orders floated up from the
+nearest gang-bosses, and punctuating it all came the intermittent boom of
+dynamite explosions from far north in the deep cut alongside the river
+edge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The construction camp had been nearly two hours awake; the race against a
+well-nigh impossible time limit which would brook neither mistake nor
+miscalculation had been picked up automatically at daybreak, where it had
+hesitated at nightfall the day before.  While he stared down at this
+activity, a realization of the months of bitter toil which stood between
+them and ultimate, uncertain success, crept over Fat Joe.  Little by
+little his features took on that look of hard and dangerous setness which
+always seemed so doubly threatening upon his placidly round countenance.
+And as casually as he was able he elected to go upon that errand of which
+his chief must have lost sight, in a dulled and moody contemplation of an
+entirely different matter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," Joe suggested vaguely, "maybe I'll just ask you to watch these
+things on the stove a while, Steve.  I've got the fire to drawin' and
+some coffee set on, because I knew we'd need 'em before that cook-boy got
+his eyes open wide enough to see his way up here.  It ain't exactly a
+fancy repast, neither, so it won't tax your culinary skill none to tend
+it.  I&mdash;there's something I'd like to look into a little&mdash;something I
+sort of lost sight of while we were soothing our mutual friend in yonder.
+But I'll be back in a minute.  I'll just run down and see if everybody's
+onto his job."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hard on the heels of that explanation he started rapidly down the long
+bare slope and Steve watched his departure without comment.  While Joe
+was gone he tethered the black horse at the door frame, found a nose-bag
+and methodically presented the grateful beast with his breakfast.  And
+when Fat Joe returned he had finished preparing the meal which the former
+had begun; in absent-minded inattention that resulted in more than one
+perilously close call, with one hand he was placing brimming cups of
+blistering hot coffee beside the plates of food and condensed milk-cans
+upon the table, while he leafed slowly through the sheaf of blue-prints
+with the other, satisfying himself that they were untampered with.  Fat
+Joe shook his head mournfully over this last exhibition and dropped into
+a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They ate in silence that morning&mdash;a silence so heavy that the faint
+breathing of Garry in the bunk beyond them sounded almost stentorian at
+times.  More than once Joe's gaze went to that colorless face; just as
+often it searched Steve's gravely unreadable countenance, and it was Fat
+Joe who first found the silence no longer endurable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What," he ventured to interrupt the other's brooding, "what is it,
+Steve, you call one of them little, gangling, bow-spectacled guys that
+fools his waking hours away studyin' the customs and morals and suchlike
+of birds and things?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Almost immediately Steve's face grew less blank at that bland question,
+and although his eyes failed to shift from the invisible point beyond Joe
+at which he was staring, his lips did curl a little.  He had long before
+learned to play up, solemnly, to those unprefaced and disingenuous leads.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ornithologist?" he inquired soberly.  "Ornithologist&mdash;if that is what
+you mean."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe nodded briskly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's it!" he exclaimed.  "I knew it was ornery something-or-other,
+and&mdash;and that makes it fit the case all the prettier, now don't it?
+Because in the last half-hour or so, since I left you here to tend to the
+cookin', I've been studying the birds somewhat myself.  And having been a
+little successful, so to speak, I'm ornerier'n even before I commenced."
+He stopped to swallow half the steaming coffee in his cup, and if when he
+began again his voice had hardened perceptibly, it was nevertheless still
+elaborately guileless.  "Steve," he said, "have <I>you</I> ever stopped to
+consider real close and earnest any of the peculiarities of our feathered
+friends?  Say&mdash;well, say owls, for instance?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Steve ceased to smile.  He thought a moment, but his reply remained
+tuned to the other's artless key.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, yes," he drawled.  "Yes, and no.  As for the latter, however, I
+will admit that I have always believed their reputation for&mdash;er&mdash;wisdom
+to be a greatly overestimated thing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Widely Fat Joe grinned his pleasure.  His chief's eyes were no longer
+vague nor blank.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Which just bears out my own personal research in the field," he stated.
+"Not that I'm saying I've been real thorough in the matter, because I
+ain't had the time.  But what I've done I accomplished because I just
+naturally dote on that kind of thing."  His eye flitted carelessly toward
+a window.  "I happened to run into Harrigan, too, this morning," he
+murmured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As disinterestedly as had Joe, Steve now drained his coffee cup and
+waited.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He was down to the cook shanty," Fat Joe rambled on.  "It's an hour
+since he'd ought to have been out there with the powder squad in the
+north cut, and when I asks him if he was feelin' indisposed this morning
+he says no, but the supply teams was going out and one of the drivers had
+told him that I was sending him along to help with the loadin'.  He had
+such a nice, frank, open-faced way of lying that I couldn't bring myself
+to correct him.  I just let it stand that way and told him such was the
+arrangement."  Joe saw swift satisfaction play across Steve's face.
+"And&mdash;and then, after that, him and me&mdash;why, we just drifted off into a
+real interestin' and scientific discussion about them birds I been
+mentionin' to you.  We&mdash;somehow we got to discoursing about owls.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told him I'd never noticed 'em to hoot so close together and
+persistent as they did last night, down along the trail, and wondered if
+by any chance he'd heard 'em, too.  And he said he had.  He's a nice
+smooth talker, Harrigan is, when he ain't too sober and not too drunk.
+Oh, yes, he'd heard 'em, being wakeful, he explained, what with worrying
+all night whether we'd ever get this line of steel laid before our
+contract run out on us!  Now wasn't that interestin'&mdash;wasn't it,
+especially coming from him?  Neatly put and self-possessed, I call it.
+He was worried because he's dreadful superstitions.  [Transcriber's note:
+superstitious?]  He claims when them birds gets to hedgin' in on each
+other's solos like they did last night it's a sign of bad luck or an
+accident for somebody, sure.  That give me an opening to ask him if the
+accident hadn't happened already, him having a bandage around his head
+not much different from this one our friend here is wearing.  But he
+couldn't see it that way.  A scratch he called it&mdash;just a scratch from a
+twig."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The room was very quiet for a breath.  That thin note had crept into Fat
+Joe's tenor voice&mdash;thin and chill and menacing.  And there as abruptly as
+he had assumed it, he flung aside his mask of disingenuous irrelevance.
+Fat Joe wheeled, put both elbows upon the table edge and leaned forward
+heavily.  It was much as though he were setting himself to shoulder by
+sheer weight through the discouraging wall of indifference behind which
+the other was apparently withdrawing once more.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But as for me," his high voice rang a little, "but as for me&mdash;well, I
+always did pride myself that I could shoot some, whether it was by
+daylight or dark!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And the only result which that statement achieved was an answering,
+meditative nod.  Fat Joe subsided.  All that he could say had been said,
+and they finished breakfast as they had begun it, in absolute silence.
+But when Steve, with a word, halted him in the doorway as Joe was on the
+point of returning to the work in the valley, the latter turned to find
+the slow smile which he knew so well hovering upon the younger man's
+lips.  He fairly gulped in his sudden relief.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe," Stephen O'Mara began, and the words were suspiciously unsteady for
+those of a man who was bearing up bravely under a hidden sorrow, "Joe,
+you've missed your calling, I'm afraid.  As a naturalist you might have
+scored an instant and sensational success, in spite of the fact that you
+are neither bow-spectacled nor&mdash;er&mdash;gangling, as no doubt Mr. Devereau's
+reference to you has this morning made plain."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stopped to touch a match to the dry grains of tobacco which he had
+been tamping into the bowl of his pipe; he swung slowly around toward the
+inert figure on the bunk.  When he spoke again the thread of raillery was
+gone from his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He'll sleep the day through, I think," he said, "and the night, perhaps.
+But I'd advise you to look in on him now and then, just the same.  He did
+us a good turn last night.  It's the second good turn he's done for me,
+Joe.  And now perhaps the chance has come to even up the score a little.
+You would know, wouldn't you, Joe, just how many drinks to prescribe for
+a man who has been as&mdash;as ill as Garry has?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe's face commenced to shine, and at that he was only beginning to
+understand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ain't I the doctor?" he demanded aggrievedly.  "You don't have to go no
+deeper into technicalities with me.  And I told you last night, anyway,
+didn't I, that it would have to be his last little celebration, unless he
+was figurin' on a longer journey than he's ever took before.  Well, I've
+handled so many cases just like his that there ain't even a little
+enjoyable novelty in 'em any more for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve received the statement with another nod.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's it," he mused.  "That's it exactly.  It would have to be his
+last, unless he is figuring on a longer journey than he has ever taken
+before."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He crossed and leaned over the thin and motionless form of his friend.
+He laid one hand gently upon the sleeping man's shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He did that for me once, Joe," he spoke quietly.  "He dropped his hand
+on my shoulder like that, and I never forgot the weight of it.  You watch
+him, Joe&mdash;watch him closely for a while, because&mdash;because, you see, a man
+does stray along once in so often who's so badly bewildered and trail
+weary, so tired of trying and&mdash;and hurt in soul, that the thought of such
+a journey as you speak of begins to seem the shortest route after all to
+an end of thoughts which even alcohol can't wipe out.  You take care of
+him, and if he wakes before I get back, explain to him a little just how
+he came here, and thank him a lot for what he did.  Ask him to wait until
+I come back from Morrison, will you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a moment Joe just stood and blinked, dumfounded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Huh!" he blurted at last.  "Huh!  So that's what you been hintin' at all
+the time, is it?  I didn't just get you right until now.  But, do you
+know, it did seem to me once or twice while we were working over
+him&mdash;once or twice when the goin' was pretty bad&mdash;that his spirit wasn't
+heaving real hearty into the traces.  And, say, ain't that a poor idea
+for a guy to get into his head?  Now ain't it?"  And then, as the purport
+of the rest of Steve's words struck home: "Do you mean you are going to
+Morrison to have a&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve recrossed to the door and began to unfasten the feed-bag from
+Ragtime's nose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And now about this ornithological problem, Joe," he cut in with a
+blandness that outdid Joe's best effort.  "About owls in particular!
+Your research work was illuminating; in view of its casual nature it was
+unbelievably helpful.  But personally I feel that a thorough sifting of
+the matter requires slightly different methods.  One should endeavor to
+get at the thing in its embryonic state, as&mdash;as it were.  Don't you think
+so?  If one could locate the place of incubation, the&mdash;er&mdash;nest from
+which these night birds of yours first stretched their wings, it might
+prove really worth while&mdash;no?  And&mdash;and at the same time I'll just return
+Miss Allison's horse to her, too, this morning."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He leaned over to lengthen a stirrup; stopped again to light his pipe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Watch things," he called, as he swung to the saddle and put Ragtime to
+the slope.  "Watch things!"  His voice drifted up from below, clear and
+eager, and alive with mirth.  "And drive 'em, Joe&mdash;drive 'em&mdash;drive 'em
+from daylight till dark!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the threshold Fat Joe watched him until horse and rider disappeared
+beyond the line of timber; with broad face aglow he stood, head cocked
+upon one side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, "He was figurin'," he muttered in blithe delight, "he was
+a-figurin' to himself, all the time I thought he was thinking about her!
+I guess my own mind has lately got to dwelling too insistent on trivial
+things, for a laboring man.&#8230;  He's taking her back her horse&mdash;real
+broke up and sorrowful like over the prospect of seein' her again so
+soon, too, now wasn't he?  And me&mdash;me sympathizin' with <I>him</I>!
+Sometimes, Joe, your lack of penetration is plumb aggravatin' to me.  You
+talk a lot, but you don't say much!  You got to learn to listen."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stepped forward, remembered and turned back into the cabin.  There was
+womanish solicitude in the scrutiny he bent upon Garry Devereau's
+crookedly smiling face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You and me was ordained to be friends," he declared oratorically,
+"because anybody that Steve O'Mara calls friend is good enough for me.
+And so I'll just naturally have to persuade you to put off indefinitely
+this idea of a prolonged excursion, won't I&mdash;convince you maybe of the
+unnumbered delights of our own earthly suburb, as it were.  And fat, eh?
+You think I'm fat, do you?  Well, that's a matter we'll have to thrash
+out when you come to&mdash;that and one other which ain't going to be half so
+amusin' nor congenial while under consideration.  About the best I can
+promise you for both of them arguments is that you ain't got a chance to
+win either.  I got my orders to take care of you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He tiptoed to the door and went with his oddly light and cat-footed tread
+down the hill.  Just once more he paused, halfway between the
+headquarters of the East Coast Company's chief engineer and the thudding
+pile-drivers at the edge of the swamp.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It won't be so lonesome, having him for company," he told himself.
+"It'll be a new mind to delve into,&mdash;that is, if he'll only listen a
+little to reason, when he wakes up.  And I wonder if he takes kindly to a
+little friendly game.  I wonder, now&mdash;I wonder!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Barbara Allison's presence upon the dusty hill-road that morning was
+more than the result of a merely casual whim, even though, when she
+turned her mount north into that mountain highway a scant two hours
+before, the choice had been made without actual thought for the route
+which she was selecting.  And yet, conscious or instinctive, the choice
+had brought her the things for which both brain and spirit were ahunger
+that morning: A silence so profound that the vague, crackling wood
+noises which disturbed it from time to time were not noises at all, but
+only a part of its very being; a solitude so breathlessly big and
+sweeping that she must needs throw out both slim arms finally in a
+childishly eager effort to embrace a tithe of it&mdash;and a chance to be
+alone!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The night before, as soon as she had re-entered hurriedly the glowing
+lodge asprawl upon the hill, the impulse had first come to her&mdash;a swift
+and almost blind desire to turn and escape, if only for a little while,
+from the roomful of chatter and laughter and bright-eyed badinage
+loosed upon her immediately after the unmasking, by Dexter Allison's
+perfectly cadenced announcement of his daughter's engagement.  All in a
+breath the huge room had become stiflingly oppressive; the gaiety
+unbearable.  And at the end of the first half-hour following her
+truancy she might have yielded to the impulse, pleading the first
+flimsy excuse which would have purchased an opportunity to reconstruct
+that hysterically mad minute or two with him whom she had just left a
+little before in the hedge-gap, had not Miriam Burrell, at the very
+moment of decision, stung her into realization of what meaning such an
+act might convey to other less generous minds.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That tall and lithe-bodied and abrupt-tongued friend of hers, colorless
+cheeks even paler against the black background, of her Mongolian
+costume, still had eyes for the change which had come over the younger
+girl, in spite of the terror which had been congealing her own heart
+since the moment of unmasking.  Her vivid lips were still able to
+smile, stiffly, when she finally drew Barbara into a corner and under
+cover of her lacquered fan mockingly pinched a little color into her
+wan cheeks.  But that strange girl failed to realize how much of scorn
+for a thing she labeled her own cowardice, she put into her words that
+night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Please remember, dear child," she whispered, "that you are on
+exhibition as the ingenuously happy bride-to-be.  If you are going to
+play the game this way, like the rest of them, why not be a good sport
+and play it for all there is in it?  One owes it to one's partner, you
+know, not to reveal entirely the weakness of the hand that's just been
+dealt.  You should smile&mdash;at least a little!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara, brain already hopelessly entangled, wheeled in astonishment at
+the almost viciously satirical suggestion, refusing even while her face
+flamed to believe that she had caught correctly the impossibly cynical,
+unbelievably unkind insinuation of this girl who was her closest
+friend.  But Miriam's eyes silenced the demand for an explanation,
+which had risen with an hitherto unknown coldness to her lips.  Instead
+Barbara reached out impetuously and took the girl's icy wrist in both
+her own hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam, child, what is it?" she breathed.  "What is the matter, dear?
+You're ill&mdash;you're cold as death!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And at that the lash of scornful intolerance for all things
+hypocritical, the flick of which Barbara had never known before, was
+gone from Miriam's tongue.  She moistened her lips and tried to speak,
+and had to try again before her voice would come.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have you&mdash;seen Garry?" she asked huskily.  "Do you know where he went?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The hopelessness of the query made possible but one interpretation of
+all that lay behind it, and yet Barbara, who had not so much as guessed
+at it until now, refused the thought as too fantastic for credence.
+Again a wave of conscious color stained her face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean since&mdash;since&mdash;&mdash;"  Her lips refused to phrase it, but
+Miriam finished it for her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Since he went swinging out into the dark on Ragtime."  She, too,
+strained at the sentence, but for an entirely different reason.  "I was
+looking for him, but I was too late.  Bobs, all evening his eyes have
+been mad&mdash;his mood insane!  I heard just his last word or two to you
+and&mdash;Mr. O'Mara, out there on the lawn.  His father, you know&mdash;but you
+don't think.&#8230;  Barbara, I'm frightened&mdash;I'm so terribly
+frightened!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It ended in a little moan of fear.  And now, astounded past all belief,
+Barbara understood.  But before she could speak the seeming need of
+woman reassurance, no matter how illogical, was gone.  Amazingly, all
+in an instant, the living dread disappeared from Miriam's face; she
+stiffened and threw back her head with that short laugh which contained
+so little of mirth, so much that was hard to translate.  And the
+Honorable Archibald Wickersham, appearing the same instant at Barbara's
+elbow, frowned at its note of derision.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've just been warning Barbara," the tall girl was already drawling
+with consummate impudence, "that the record of past performances are
+all against your finishing the distance without coming a cropper in
+these international matrimonial hurdles.  Just what is your opinion,
+Archibald?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham had never liked Miriam Burrell.  Now he smiled a trifle
+wryly into her insolently uptilted face, without attempting to answer
+the question.  And during the next dance with Barbara he unburdened
+himself, rather positively for him, of his distaste for her.  The
+pronounced frown, however, remained even longer upon his countenance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But that one moment had served where everything else might have failed.
+For the rest of the evening Barbara was again a creature of moods so
+frothy, so evanescent that she swept aside even Wickersham's habit of
+precision.  And if the spur that brightened her eyes and quickened her
+laughter was, after all, nothing more nor less than a hot contempt for
+herself&mdash;for the stolen moment in the hedge-gap and the inexplicable
+impulse upon which she had all but acted following it&mdash;her merriment
+was none the less a palpitant thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet afterward, alone in her room, when the last treble note had
+died away and she had dismissed Cecile, her sleepy-eyed maid, the sense
+of oppression had returned redoubled.  She did not want to sleep; she
+was glad of her wide-eyed wakefulness, but in the darkness walls and
+ceiling and floor seemed fairly to close in upon her and hedge in soul
+and brain as well as body.  It was the first time the girl had ever
+known the need&mdash;the driving desire&mdash;to be alone out of doors, where
+there was nothing but sky and skyline to bound her thoughts.  And at
+last, when her restlessness became no longer bearable, while the
+remainder of the house still slept behind drawn curtains, she rose and
+slipped into boots and breeches and riding coat, and descended to order
+a not too wide-awake groom to saddle a horse.  And in the very middle
+of his sensational report of Ragtime's empty stall she swung to the
+saddle and turned toward the north.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She rode hard at first.  She put the small roan mare between her knees
+to a pounding gallop, pulling to a walk only after the rushing air had
+whipped back into her cheeks a part at least of the glow which the
+sleepless night had robbed from them.  And if the tang of the trees and
+the solitude and the warmth of the sun did their work slowly, they
+nevertheless did it well.  Little by little her tense body relaxed; the
+line of her lips softened.  Almost before she realized it that morning,
+she had relegated her anxiety over Garry Devereau and her astonishment
+at the confession which she had beheld in Miriam's eyes to a rather
+hazy background, and turned to those very thoughts against which she
+had fought so fiercely throughout the night.  She drifted into a
+surprisingly unanalytical and most femininely inquisitive wonder
+concerning a tall figure in blue flannel and corduroy.  She suddenly
+found herself pondering the very incidents which, a few hours before,
+had set her small fists to clenching in a tide of incomprehensible
+resentment&mdash;against herself or him she could not for the life of her
+tell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mile after mile, the roan mare placidly choosing the pace, she rode
+with one leg dangling over the pummel of the saddle, everything else
+forgotten in that preoccupied endeavor to review each moment she had
+shared with him.  Again she felt his arm harden threateningly under her
+startled clasp as a red-headed and very drunk river-man lurched out of
+a doorway ahead of them; with breath softly audible between arched lips
+she tried to recall the gentleness of his hands when he was refastening
+her cloak beneath her rigidly upflung chin.  And when the higher
+morning sun found her far beyond the rolling pasture land, miles in the
+heavy timber, she had dismounted, there where the highest loop in the
+road commanded its breath-taking sweep of country, and was sitting
+cross-legged upon the trunk of a fallen tree at the road edge.
+Frowning a little over the vexing uncertainty of details, Barbara was
+wondering just what their next meeting would be like; she had just
+finished picturing his man's discomfort and self-consciousness and lack
+of ease and, with a soberness so childish it would have dumbfounded her
+had she given it thought, was nodding approvingly over a contemplation
+of her own kind cordiality, when that very blue-shirted figure itself
+rounded a near corner in the narrow lane between the trees.  Stephen
+O'Mara, in the flesh, appeared before her, astride Ragtime and leading
+her roan, which, contentedly cropping the bush tops, had disappeared a
+full quarter of an hour before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl gasped at the suddenness of his coming; she half started to
+rise before she remembered the instability of her perch, and then
+crouched even lower than before when she saw that he was not yet aware
+of her nearness.  It was not at all like the encounter which she had so
+ably managed in her imagination an instant before, and somehow that
+graciously kind greeting of hers was lost completely through the
+perversity of an utterly different mood.  She waited, eyes gleefully
+bright, until he was almost opposite her before she coughed, ever so
+faintly.  Then she tilted her nose aloft in enchanting mimicry of his
+lean and forward-thrust face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We never speak," she confided dolefully to the empty air in front of
+her, "we never speak as we pass by."  He whirled.  So swiftly that it
+took her breath he was out of the saddle and across the road, and
+standing knee-deep in the undergrowth beside her.  Only his profile had
+been visible to her at first.  Now the white line of his jaw and the
+light in the eyes that searched her face chilled her, even while they
+sent the blood singing in every vein.  Only a few hours before she had
+seen that same cold fear in Miriam Burrell's eyes; and yet not the
+same, either, for hers had been a panic of lost hope, and the gleam in
+the man's eyes was already only partly dread of disaster and partly a
+great and unmistakable glow of thankfulness.  Barbara remembered then,
+with a twinge of guilt, that she could have forgotten it so completely,
+the black-robed figure that had gone thundering off on the same mount
+which Stephen O'Mara was riding now.  She half lifted both hands to
+him, apprehensively.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You aren't going to tell me, are you," she asked, "that anything
+dreadful has happened to Garry?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dumbly, but most reassuringly, Steve shook his head.  From the top of
+her hatless, wind-tossed, brown-crowned head to the tips of the
+absurdly small boots tucked up beneath her, he scanned her slim body.
+Barbara realized that he was trying to speak and finding the effort
+hard.  Slowly he removed his hat and passed one hand across his
+forehead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Man," he ejaculated fervidly to himself, "but that's the longest
+hundred yards you've ever traveled, on foot or a-horseback!"  And
+abruptly, accusingly, to her: "Do you know that I've been months and
+years and ages rounding that bend to&mdash;to find you a little crumpled-up
+heap in the road?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After all, her unaccountably high spirits may have been only the
+natural reaction from the hours of depression through which she had
+lately passed.  But whatever the reason behind it, Barbara's levity was
+a totally spontaneous, deliciously colored thing.  She sat and tilted
+her head at him in audacious provocation; she assumed as chastened an
+expression as she could in the face of her very real relief at the news
+of Garry's safety.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sorry," she murmured humbly.  "I'm sorry to&mdash;disappoint you.  But,
+you see, I didn't know&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She laughed at him.  Her lips curled, petal-like, in a gurgling peal of
+enjoyment at his shame-faced grin.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I found your horse rolling," he explained, and his gravity was dogged
+in the face of her brightness.  "How I knew it was yours I don't know,
+but I did just the same.  I thought she had thrown you; I'd already
+made up my mind, if there was one scratch on your body, to take that
+mare's head between my hands and break her neck!  You see, I believed I
+knew already just what it would mean to me if anything ever happened to
+you.  But it's a lot different imagining the world without
+you&mdash;and&mdash;and facing the actual possibility of it.  Was I&mdash;fairly
+tragic?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now it was his turn to laugh over her pink-faced disconcernment.
+Most decidedly it was not the sort of an encounter which she had been
+contemplating a moment earlier.  There was no discomfort in that big,
+loose-limbed body.  She had imagined him as just a little moody and
+sad-eyed, at least.  And now she realized that she had never seen the
+latter so easy to read as they were at that minute.  Gray as the
+shadowed silver thread of the river far below in the valley, they
+glowed with a great gladness for her safety, and far, far more than
+just that.  The alarming cheerfulness of his gaze was too confusing to
+sustain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course you've found Garry," she hastened to swing the conversation
+to a less personal quarter.  "Is he&mdash;will you tell me about it, please?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One small, gauntleted hand made an almost imperceptible gesture toward
+the unoccupied space beside her on the fallen tree.  But he chose the
+ground at her feet.  And after he had disposed his long length to his
+liking he answered her hurried question&mdash;answered it with an amiably
+lazy deliberation that promised a sure return to a topic of his own
+choosing, in his own good time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he stated, and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of
+the statement.  "He found me.  And it was the biggest stroke of luck
+that he did.  I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn't you say
+so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question was quite innocently direct.  No, decidedly he was not
+discomfited&mdash;not ill at ease at all!  Apparently he found it much
+easier to look at her than at any of the points of interest in the
+landscape toward which her glances persisted in flitting.  While he
+marveled, without any manifestations of sorrow whatever, at the curve
+of her throat and the satin texture of that cheek turned toward him, he
+told her drawlingly all there was to tell of the night before.  And
+after a time Barbara forgot her warm face and the too plain message
+there in his eyes, in her growing excitement over that recitation.
+When he stopped her first question instinctively pounced upon the one
+detail he had purposely withheld.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But you must have an inkling as to the man's identity," she cried.
+"Why, you've got to find that out, before he does more harm next time.
+Haven't you a suspicion, even?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One foot swung free; she leaned forward in her eagerness, a slender and
+entirely boyish figure in diminutive breeches and boots and
+straight-lined coat.  And the man laughed aloud up into her flushed
+face, softly and not quite steadily at her hostile indignation, her
+intuitive feminine curiosity, and most of all, most unsteadily, at his
+wonder of her, herself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, yes," he admitted.  "Both Joe and I do believe we know who it
+was, but we aren't sure because we don't understand yet what that man's
+motive might be.  I'd tell you, only I don't like to accuse anybody
+until there is cause for it.  But that's what brought me down here this
+morning&mdash;that and because I wanted to tell Miss Burrell that Garry is
+safe, and will continue to be from now on, I hope.  Those were two of
+my reasons for coming, at least.  I had a more important one than
+either, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara did not wait for him to tell her what it was.  She was staring
+at him in unfeigned surprise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To tell Miriam?" she echoed.  "Do you&mdash;you can't mean that you knew
+she cared for Garry?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Didn't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl shook her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never, until just a little while ago!  I&mdash;do you know, in the last few
+days I've begun to realize how much more you&mdash;other people&mdash;observe
+than I do.  I've begun to wonder if I haven't been very blindly
+self-sufficient.  For I never dreamed of such a thing, until something
+happened after I left you last night."  Her voice faltered, but her
+eyes clung resolutely to his.  "She came to me and asked me if I knew
+where he had gone.  She had seen him ride away, too, Mr. O'Mara.  And I
+learned it then, just from the terror in her face.  But I didn't know
+until later how much she cared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She came into my room this morning, and that, although you can't know
+it, was more than odd in itself, because I have always been the one to
+carry my woes to her.  It must have been between four and five, for I
+had counted a clock striking four; and yet she was still dressed in her
+party costume.  Have you guessed what she had been doing?  Mr. O'Mara,
+she had been out looking for him!  She had slipped out and been waiting
+because she was sure Ragtime would bolt and&mdash;and come back home,
+dragging him by a stirrup!  Wasn't that a horrible thing to wait for,
+alone in the dark?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With a little shudder the girl put her hands over her eyes, as if to
+shut out the picture.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She wasn't hysterical, either.  She was&mdash;just&mdash;ice!  And wringing wet
+and blue with cold.  Cool, proud, intolerant Miriam Burrell&mdash;and I'd
+never dreamed of her caring for anybody, until that minute.  I sent her
+to bed and I think I hated Garry Devereau for an hour or two.  Why, Mr.
+O'Mara, I'd never believed that a girl could care that much for any
+man!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stopped toying with a handful of dry twigs and let them slip away
+between his fingers.  She saw his head come up; saw his eyes narrow.
+Then her own body stiffened as she realized what she had said.  And yet
+it was, after all, only a part of something she had decided she must
+make clear to him, ever since he had surprised her there at the road
+edge; it was part of an explanation which, without quite knowing why,
+she felt was due to him.  But she had not meant to employ that abrupt
+confession as a preface.  That made it inconceivably harder, it seemed.
+And he, silent at her feet, stared out at the blue rim of the hills and
+gave her no assistance now&mdash;not so much as a smile.  She sat a long
+time, nursing one slim knee between her palms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. O'Mara," she appealed to him at last, "how might one reopen a&mdash;a
+rather difficult subject with&mdash;with a suddenly most difficult
+conversationalist?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Without turning his head he made answer:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think Fat Joe's method is as good as any," he suggested.  "Joe says
+the only way to reopen any argument is to take a running jump and land
+all spraddled out, right in the middle of it.  He insists that such
+procedure leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone that the discussion is
+about to be resumed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She laughed a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then shall we consider that I've taken&mdash;the&mdash;the jump, and landed?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just when she was wishing most that she could see his face he swung
+around toward her.  Again his gravity was a totally gentle thing.  It
+made her remember the self-possessed kindliness with which he had met
+her unreasoning rage the night before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't have to explain," he told her, "unless you are sure you want
+to.  Sometimes, you see, I understand things without any special
+explanation.  It's a trick one learns from living alone a lot with
+one's own thoughts.  I told you, last night, that I wouldn't have you
+saying 'I'm sorry' to me.  And now I'll tell you that nothing you can
+ever say, now, is going to stop me from&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want to, please," she interrupted him vehemently.  "I&mdash;have to!  And
+I'm not going to make believe that I don't know what you are going to
+tell me&mdash;what you have been saying to me, all morning.  But it can't do
+any good.  Why, I'm just realizing that something which has been
+hurting me for hours was just&mdash;just sorrow for you.  It can't do any
+good, oh, truly!  But will you let me talk first, if I promise to
+listen afterward?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He promised.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Twice I've been bitterly unkind to you," she began again.  "Once a
+long time ago&mdash;and&mdash;and once last night.  And on both occasions you had
+just tried to tell me, indirectly at least, that you cared, hadn't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Indirectly?" he murmured.  "Was I as obscure as that?"  And then,
+whimsically: "Won't you call that explanation enough, and let me tell
+it to you again&mdash;so you can't misunderstand?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've asked you to forgive me the first offense," she hurriedly denied
+his appeal.  "And the second&mdash;Mr. O'Mara, last night Miriam said
+something to me, something that she wouldn't have said if she hadn't
+been half mad with fear.  It was unkind, unfair, but it made me wonder
+if, perhaps, you might not be thinking the same thing, too.  Years ago
+you told me I didn't think you good enough to&mdash;to be my knight.  My
+outburst was only childish temper that day, but did you think last
+night that I still underrated you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve finally shook his head when she persisted in waiting for his
+answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You just have to finish now," he warned her, however.  "It was your
+own bargain.  I'm not going to tell you one single bit of what I think
+of you until it comes my turn!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She tried to laugh at his stubbornness, but she had trouble with this
+explanation, which grew more vexingly intricate and involved the
+further she went.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then we'll say you didn't," she continued.  "I told you last night,
+less kindly than I might have, that I was engaged to Mr. Wickersham.
+And I've just confessed, too, that I didn't know a girl could care for
+any man as unutterably, as blindly and pridelessly, as Miriam cares for
+the man Garry is.  That is the truth.  For quite a long, long time it
+has been understood that I was to marry Mr. Wickersham.  I have always
+admired him&mdash;found him above petty things.  But, Mr. O'Mara, I have
+always been sure, for just as long a time, that the ability to care for
+anyone the&mdash;the way I think you believed last night I might care for
+you, was left out of me.  And so it wasn't you who awoke my contempt,
+even though I did turn it against you.  It was I, myself.  It was I,
+and not you, who was not 'good enough'!  For even if I am the kind of a
+girl who can't love anybody, very much, except, perhaps, herself, I
+should at least play fair.  Isn't&mdash;isn't that so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Minute after minute passed while she sat plaiting the cloth
+tight-stretched over one knee.  Lips softly aquiver, she waited,
+earnest, eager that he understand from her explanation that which she
+did not yet understand at all herself.  Again she wished that he would
+turn; she wanted greatly to see whatever there might be behind his
+heavy silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Isn't it?" she faltered timidly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And yet, when his head did come around she found she couldn't face him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is it my turn now?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her answer was barely audible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If&mdash;if you have to&mdash;have it.  But I've told you how useless it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you mind looking at me, just a minute?" said Steve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The brown head drooped even lower over the restless fingers.  It shook,
+ever so faintly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd rather not.&#8230;  I'm listening!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His laugh lilted recklessly in sheer joy at her refusal.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I'll have to tell you," he stated, "that I'm smiling in spite of
+the hopelessness.  I'm smiling, even though my throat is aching and my
+lips pretty dry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've just finished trying to argue my man's case from your woman's
+point of view&mdash;one of the hardest, least satisfactory things that could
+be attempted, no doubt.  And if it were possible, I know I'd be loving
+you right now even more than I did before, just because you've been so
+entirely unsuccessful at it.  Maybe I could straighten out a point or
+two that must have been not quite clear to you; maybe&mdash;but I don't want
+to argue back at you now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You say my telling you all I must tell you can't help my case a little
+bit.  All right&mdash;we'll let it stand like that, for the moment.  And you
+say you are going to marry Mr. Wickersham.  All right again&mdash;but better
+prophets than either of us have made mistakes before now!  If he hadn't
+forced on me one condition which I would have liked to be different,
+I'd rather have had to mention no other man at all.  This isn't the way
+I'd have chosen to tell you how much I care.  I'd rather have told you,
+a little at a time, but there isn't time for that now.  So maybe it'll
+sound crude to you.  I've not rehearsed it with any other woman, you
+see.  And if it does sound that way it won't help me much, either, will
+it?  But you're going to believe what I say!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You started back a dozen years or so, in order to make your
+explanation clear.  I'm starting there myself, so I'll be sure you
+understand.  You've been grieving because you hurt me&mdash;hurt me twice.
+Will you stop now, if I tell you that I wouldn't exchange those
+two&mdash;shall we call them wounds&mdash;for all the kindnesses of all the other
+women in the world?  I did believe that you didn't think me good
+enough, that first time.  That was why I was cut deeper than you'll
+ever know, because I knew it was only the truth.  I admitted
+it&mdash;remember?  I admitted it when I said I was coming back.  Well, I'm
+back now&mdash;and I'm still not good enough, and not because I haven't
+tried to be, either.  I'm just not admitting any man alive could be
+that.  But I'm telling you, too, in the same breath, that the man who
+takes you will have to prove he's a whole lot better&mdash;before I stand
+aside!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the first time since he had begun the girl moved.  Her head leaped
+back; she half lifted one hand in protest, but the very gladness in his
+face silenced her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My turn," he reminded her quizzically.  "You made the bargain, you
+know.  You've just finished a rather involved bit of reasoning
+concerning the way other women love, a lot of which I'll have to
+confess I didn't attend as closely as I should have.  Perhaps that's
+because no man's method of caring has ever interested me a great deal,
+except my own.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I loved you when you were a little bit of a girl&mdash;because I loved you!
+And I love you that way now.  Your face was the first woman face I ever
+looked on&mdash;and&mdash;really&mdash;saw.  And since that first morning it's been
+with me&mdash;been with me a lot of times when I didn't have anything else
+to look up to.  I've been less hungry, for thought of you; less
+thirsty, when the road got pretty long at times.  I&mdash;I worshiped you,
+do you hear?  Why, I've prayed to you, dumbly, wordlessly, out of black
+bitterness, when it seemed that any other divinity must be too busy to
+give any heed to&mdash;to the ragged little tad I was.  Now do you think I
+haven't known what it was, long before this, to go on when there wasn't
+any hope?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He waited.  Her breath came in a long and quivering gasp.  And yet he
+did not realize that she was crying.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I don't think that I want to&mdash;listen any more," she faltered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His face went white at that&mdash;and then he was smiling again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told you I'd have chosen to tell you differently," the drawling
+gentleness was unaltered, "but I'll have to finish this way now.  There
+may not be many chances for me to speak, for I've come back to you
+almost too late.  And I don't want to hurt you; why, I'm going to keep
+the laughter in your eyes and heart as long as you live.  For I thought
+it would be a woman I'd find when I came back, and I've found you still
+all girl&mdash;all save in those moments when you've seemed half boy to me.
+And that is strange, too, isn't it&mdash;strange that I never knew how much
+I wanted you to be like that, until you taught me the wonder of it
+yourself?  My&mdash;eyes are stinging.  I don't talk quite plainly.  My
+throat is too tight for easy speech.  For it's just the old wonder of
+you, after all&mdash;just the same&mdash;reverence, isn't it?  I'll never let you
+grow up now.  You'll have to stay girl&mdash;Boy&mdash;all the rest of your life!
+I've learned to be fairly sure of myself, but I'm not asking to be sure
+of you yet.  I'd never want to be too sure of you unless all the rest
+of my whole world had come tumbling down.  And then&mdash;then I'd need to
+know always that I could stake my soul on your keeping faith.  I'd want
+to know that I could reach out and find your hand searching for mine in
+the dark.  Your face was the first, girl&mdash;it's been the only one.
+It'll be the last thing I'll see, the last moment there is sight in my
+eyes!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His slow, infinitely gentle voice stopped.  He sat head up, before her.
+And then her choking sob answered him through that blind silence.  He
+was on his feet then; he started forward, and remembered again.  And as
+if that slim-limbed, huddled little figure had been a boy indeed, he
+dropped one arm reassuringly over her bowed shoulders.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pity, Barbara?" he asked quietly.  "Are you crying from pity?  Because
+if it's that&mdash;it&mdash;it beats me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She shook her head vehemently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm not crying because of anything," she sniffed.  "I'm just
+crying&mdash;that' all!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One hand went searching through pocket after pocket; one elbow came up
+to shield her eyes.  She slid from the tree-trunk and swayed
+unsteadily, and groped out and found his arm.  And it was the boy he
+had just tried to comfort who curled both hands tightly around his
+flannel sleeve and hid a wet face against his shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I'm sorry.  I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.  I shouldn't have let
+you start to tell me&mdash;I knew it all along.  But I'm not pitying&mdash;big
+Stephen O'Mara; it&mdash;it was just little Steve who made me cry, I think."
+Again that long, sobbing breath.  "Will you&mdash;will you&mdash;I can't find my
+handkerchief," she gasped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long after they had remounted and turned their horses toward the south
+Barbara rode with head bowed, slim shoulders turned toward the man
+beside her, a shield for her averted face.  From time to time she
+dabbled furtively at her eyes with the big, crisp square of linen with
+which Steve had answered the wailed announcement of the loss of her own
+handkerchief.  Once or twice she caught her breath, unsteadily.  And
+yet in spite of the fact that the actual desire was furthest of all
+things from her heart at that instant, when she did finally grow
+curious at his long silence and turn to steal a sidelong glance at him,
+the utter gloom upon Steve's face awoke within her an irresistible
+impulse to mirth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was partly hysterical, partly the sudden realization that he was not
+the only one who had, that morning, found much in his companion which
+was insistently boyish.  For until then she had not glimpsed this side
+of that grown-up spirit which, in the boy, had evinced more than once a
+confidence in self so serenely unshakable that it had bordered on
+doggedness at times.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In those days it had always irritated her, and set her small fists to
+clenching in a childish antagonism.  More than once she had answered it
+with superior little, child-woman smiles which had sent him marching,
+white of face and lip, back through the hedge gap, never realizing
+herself that her own pique sprang from the belief that his promises of
+conquest dealt only with material things&mdash;splendidly visioned, most
+vaguely detailed conquests which set his eyes afire but seemed to hold
+no place for the feminine of her.  She had never understood that he,
+with quite masculine bindness [Transcriber's note: blindness?], had
+taken for granted her comprehension that each and every conquest was to
+be solely a glorification of her, any more than she understood now why
+his black discouragement awakened in her a sudden warmth as different
+from her old perversity as the pulse in her throat was painful.  And
+yet she couldn't stifle that impulse.  She giggled aloud.  And when he
+turned&mdash;when he wheeled and encountered her shining eyes, still wet and
+brimming above the screen of his own handkerchief, she sensed
+immediately that he was flushing as little, too-sensitive Steve had
+flushed years before, when she had laughed at him less kindly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl was not conscious of it; she had no actual realization yet of
+how very deeply her unwilling readjustment of fundamental values had,
+in the last twenty-four hours, undermined her hitherto unquestioning
+acceptance of those inbred standards which, to all her world save
+Miriam Burrell, were creed and code of conduct.  That morning she only
+knew she was unaccountably glad because there was no malice in her
+mirth; had she given it thought she would have insisted that, in her
+heart, there no longer lurked a ghost, ignoble or otherwise, of what
+had once been a childishly snobbish belief in her inherent superiority.
+And as suddenly as she had giggled she now laughed aloud at the
+expression she had surprised there on his face.  Again, for an instant,
+the very spontaneity of her swift changing mood gave the situation into
+her hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Please," she begged him mockingly, "please, I did have to laugh, a
+little.  I had to!  It just occurred to me, all in a breath, that
+perhaps there is another of us who&mdash;who hasn't entirely grown up.  You
+looked so morbidly disheartened.  And I know it won't sound logical,
+but all this time during which I supposed you were smiling upon my&mdash;my
+absurd tears with that benign surety of yours, it hurt&mdash;hurt like
+everything&mdash;just knowing that it was all so hopeless for you.  But now
+that I have seen that you do understand, do we have to be so gloomy any
+longer?  Are we going to be so tragic, every time we meet?  They tell
+me it is an admission of unformed, unbalanced youth, Mr. O'Mara.  And,
+whether that is so or not, I do know that it is a great strain upon my
+complexion."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Momentarily her effrontery had given the situation into her hands&mdash;but
+only momentarily.  For even while she was speaking the corners of
+Steve's eyelids began to crinkle; before she had finished mocking at
+him in a voice that still caught unsteadily in her throat, it was her
+up-turned face which had grown pink under his gravely amused scrutiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was it as bad as that?" he asked.  "I don't know that I mind the
+'benign' part so very much, but as for my 'surety'&mdash;well, now I must
+set you right.  I have seen men holding four aces sit with faces so sad
+and hopeless that they might have earned their fortunes as professional
+mourners, could their expressions have been rendered permanent.  I've
+seen men with straight flushes bow their heads in sorrow over the cards
+they held.  And I think the one beatific visage it has been my good
+luck to behold belonged to Fat Joe, one night when the rest of the
+table had raised his very feet out from under him.  He sat and beamed;
+he radiated good cheer&mdash;now and then he chuckled with positively
+insulting self-confidence, while he was pushing forward all the chips
+he owned&nbsp;&#8230; and he had two deuces and four spades to back it up!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll find that most men play that way&mdash;most men, I mean, who play
+for big stakes and play to win.  And so&mdash;but I've told you already that
+I'm going to put all my cards on the table, with you.  You're going to
+know, always, the hand I hold.  Why, I told you I wasn't sure, even a
+little bit.  I've been smiling just to make it easy for you to
+understand that I know how to lose, if it has to come to that.  And do
+you suppose I'd have let you weep into my handkerchief, if I'd been
+half way certain, even?  Do you?  Because I wouldn't.  I have a pair of
+arms and two shoulders that have been reserved for that
+purpose&mdash;reserved, oh, for years and years."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara had lifted the handkerchief again.  The explanation which Steve
+had begun in half-assumed soberness ended in drawling, unmistakable
+gravity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perhaps it wasn't a particularly good parallel to use," he went on,
+even more slowly, when she failed to answer.  "I only wanted to make
+you see&mdash;to have you know&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her brown head flashed up then, radiantly eloquent of entire
+understanding.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was a very good parallel," she defended spiritedly.  "I liked it
+immensely.  I was thinking that some day when I get involved with
+Miriam in a particularly erudite discussion, I'd employ it myself.  But
+just now the one point which interests me most is this.  Did&mdash;did Fat
+Joe win?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His single quick word that checked Ragtime brought her roan mount also
+to a standstill.  Lightly Steve swung out and took both her gloved
+hands in a grip that made her draw back a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you weren't the <I>girl</I> to whom I'd just told my love," he stated,
+"I'd be telling you, right now, that I like you best of all the <I>men</I> I
+know!"  He sat and looked at her.  "And since I don't remember clearly
+whether I've said it already this morning, I'll chance repeating it.
+You're the one prettiest thing in all this world&mdash;and it's not an
+unhandsome world this morning, either."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a moment longer her mood lasted while she surveyed him with
+dark-eyed audacity, head poised on one side in that attitude of wholly
+happy intimacy with which he had seen her many times greet Caleb Hunter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For a man who claims to be strictly an amateur," she murmured, "I can
+only reply&mdash;you do extremely well, sir!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, as if her words had rung too cheaply flippant in her own
+ears, she took both hands impetuously from his.  She started her horse
+abruptly.  And it was yards before he overtook her, rods before she
+dropped back to a walk.  Her face had become wistful in its earnestness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was pretty, and sincere, and&mdash;and like you," she mused.  "I
+wonder why my answer sounded not quite so innately fine?  Do you
+suppose it was because I've already become accustomed to meeting
+flippancy with flippancy?  For if that isn't the reason then how would
+you explain my&mdash;my persistent tendency toward frivolity with you?
+Because it exists, you know.  Truly it does!  If I yielded to the
+impulse that is always with me, I&mdash;I'd coquette with you,
+disgracefully.  Doesn't that&mdash;even surprise you?  Now you <I>are</I>
+laughing at me&nbsp;&#8230; why, you weren't listening at all!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His shamefacedness was an admission of guilt, but he shook his head in
+contradiction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not at you," he corrected her.  "I wasn't laughing very heartily, or
+very steadily, was I?  And I'm trying to listen; I am trying to pay
+attention to everything you say.  It just isn't an easy thing to do,
+that's all, when&mdash;when I'm looking at you, too.  But I promised you
+that you were always going to be sure of me.  Couldn't that be reason
+enough; can't we just say you'd sensed it, yourself, even without my
+telling you so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She bobbed her head, most anxious for his gravity now that she was not
+sure whether it was real or not.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I knew that must be it," she argued seriously.  "I thought it must be,
+anyway.  I just feel safe with you.  And yet I don't want you ever to
+believe, either, that I am deliberately playing.  It's just&mdash;oh, in my
+heart I know that you haven't any more than those two deuces, and&mdash;and
+the deal is mine.  Do you understand what I'm trying to say?  They
+always say it in&mdash;in books, Mr. O'Mara.  They always agree to be the
+'best of friends,' and it reads so funny and flat.  But that is exactly
+what I am trying to put into words.  It couldn't be anything more,
+ever, and yet I want this friendship which is different from everything
+I've ever known before.  I like you very, very much.  Listen, and I'll
+make a confession, too!  I used to watch and hope you'd come back,
+after I'd sent you home, heart-sick, years ago.  Do you suppose we
+might say the&mdash;the 'best of friends' in real life, too, and not sound
+instantly absurd?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We might try it out," he suggested.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then she was positive that his face was too stiffly sober, but she
+ignored it&mdash;ignored, too, the tinge of whimsicality in his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I weren't so sorry for you I might not be so sure; but I am sorry.
+If you weren't so dismayingly cheerful about it, I wouldn't feel so
+badly.  But I've begun to understand how very long you have been
+playing your cards and smiling over them, no matter what might be dealt
+you.  And that is some improvement over the girl I've been, isn't it?
+For I've never had to struggle very hard for anything I've wanted.  I
+want to be friends, but I'm not silly enough to think you won't tell me
+again that you&mdash;care.  I want to be friends, but not at the price of
+your heart-ache and disappointment, and&mdash;why, I wonder, do I get all
+tangled up when I try to explain myself to you?  It's just this: I'm
+not going to be unkind to little Steve any more, Mr. O'Mara, or&mdash;or big
+Steve, either.  But I&mdash;I want to see you sometimes, too, and&mdash;and I
+just won't let myself cry any more this morning!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her voice had grown very small toward the end.  It trailed off into a
+stifled but unmistakable sniff.  And a moment later, when she ceased
+fumbling with the reins and glanced with resolute brightness up at him,
+the film of hot tears in his eyes brought her hands to her throat.  But
+even then in the face of that light which she had never before glimpsed
+in any man's eyes for her, she was conscious of his use of her
+name&mdash;vaguely conscious of how different it sounded on his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara," Steve faltered, "Barbara, you blessed child, you!"  And
+there, dumbly, he shook his head over his stumbling utterance and tried
+to laugh to cover it.  "Sorry?  Sorry for me?  Why, God bless you,
+girl, you refuse me whenever you want to&mdash;whenever you have to!  I'm
+not asking you to help.  And don't you suppose after last night I know
+how near to losing out I am?  I understand.  Why, you're going to get
+quite a few refusals ahead of me, no doubt, before&mdash;before I catch up
+with you!  But don't you waste one bit of worry on me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It would be your telling me that you did care, and then telling me
+that you didn't, that would about break me.  I have to keep on asking
+you; I have to keep on trying, but you can tell me 'no chance'
+whenever, in your heart, you believe it to be the truth, and I'll take
+it smiling.  Just don't let it become mechanical, that's all I ask,
+will you?  And&mdash;and if some day after I've gone, you suddenly begin to
+wish, even the tiniest bit, that you hadn't made the last refusal
+quite&mdash;quite so final, you needn't let that worry you, either.  Because
+I'll be back!  You can know that I'll come back, next day&mdash;next
+month&mdash;next year&mdash;thirty miles or three hundred&mdash;oh, just to see if my
+chances haven't improved any!  That does make you smile, doesn't it?  I
+reckon experienced match-makers would tell me that that isn't the way
+for me to talk if I'm going to win out.  But it's the way I like best.
+I want you to know that there is one person you can be sure of, all the
+days of your life.  I began a dozen years ago&mdash;I've only started loving
+the whiteness of you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She rode with wide eyes fastened upon his now wholly smiling face; rode
+with lips parted, all else submerged in that wonder which quickened her
+breath.  Once she leaned toward him as if to speak, and then shook her
+head at the inadequacy of the words.  They topped the last rise in the
+dusty, winding road and raised the river basin and the town itself in
+that long period of silence.  There, once more, she checked the roan
+mare.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If women could care like that," she told him quietly.  "If I believed
+that I could ever&mdash;&mdash;"  She shook her head with a sad little smile.
+"Since you have come home you've made me feel very insignificant and
+petty at times.  You've made me wish I might have been as&mdash;as wonderful
+as you say I am to you.  But I know, you see."  She lifted one slim arm
+toward the newer Morrison stretched out along the river front.  "Do you
+remember the first day you saw the village it used to be, that day when
+you first came down river?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve knew what she was going to say.  She read amused anticipation in
+his eyes and grew self-conscious at it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought yours was a perfectly good parallel," she asserted stoutly.
+"And you'll have to admit that you did believe it was wonderful then.
+Uncle Cal has told me how breathlessly you called it the 'city.'  But
+is it as wonderful, now?  Hasn't familiarity with real bigness dimmed
+its wonder a little?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the first time that day his attitude was frankly challenging.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe!  And maybe I like it better than ever, for
+the others I've seen!"  He frowned and shook his head.  "I'm quite
+likely to stick to first conclusions," he finished, "and your inference
+is basically wrong.  I do not need to look at other women to make me
+surer of the wonder of you.  A man doesn't have to live in a desert all
+his life to know what thirst is, you know.  And it's not bad&mdash;not bad
+as cities go!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As they had begun the morning they now finished it, on a plane of
+thorough comradeship which years and years alone cannot achieve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not bad," she echoed throatily.  "Not bad, at all!  It's marvelous
+too, how towns and people and&mdash;and things in general can improve, once
+they awake to their own importance in the scheme of things, isn't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Quite on a mutual impulse they clasped hands and laughed into each
+other's eyes; quite unnecessarily it may have appeared to the small
+group on the veranda of the stucco and timber place halfway down the
+slope between them and town.  And there on the crest of the hill,
+suddenly conscious of those eyes, the girl drew back as swiftly as she
+had swung toward him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What in the world will they think!" she breathed.  "I've been gone
+since daybreak, without saying a word that I was going.  And it must be
+noon by now.  Come&mdash;no, don't hurry!  It's too late to hurry now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her chin came up; the line of her lips lost its soft fullness.  It was
+his hot face which made her aware of how surely her imperiously quick
+orders had stung him.  Then she was back, knee to knee, at his side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That wasn't fair," she said.  "That was most unfair, to me.  You
+didn't think, did you, that I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His interruption surprised her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I shouldn't inquire," he asked, "will you please tell me so, and
+forget I asked the question?  May I know when you&mdash;you and Mr.
+Wickersham are to be&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara's face went slowly crimson, flushed to the nape of her neck.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's not a certainty yet, the date," she answered kindly.  "Just late
+in the spring, I think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He nodded.  Again she knew how wholly unreadable his eyes could be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Late in the spring," he repeated, so softly that he might have been
+talking to himself.  "Late in the spring I'll have two time limits run
+out on me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham himself was coming across the lawn to meet them when they
+drew rein at the head of the driveway.  With a deliberation so
+proprietary that it set Barbara suddenly to gnawing her lip, he unbent
+his long legs and straightened from his place on the top step of the
+veranda; and even though the wicker chairs behind him were filled he
+stood forth quite alone, extremely tall and straight, perfectly poised
+and entirely immaculate.  And without one outward sign of animosity to
+give it ground, that other man sitting loose-thighed upon Ragtime's
+back knew that he was wondering where she had been&mdash;why she had chosen
+to go alone.  Without exhibiting a trace of it upon his long face,
+Wickersham still radiated a swift and chilling jealousy which, now that
+he saw it again, Stephen O'Mara knew had never been entirely absent
+from the face of the Archibald Wickersham he had known many years
+before.  Just as Miriam Burrell, with a studied deliberation that
+matched that of the tall figure ahead of her, in turn detached herself
+from the throng and came down the steps, Barbara's eyes raised to
+Steve's.  She did not stop to reason it; she couldn't have made it
+sound reasonable had she tried, but she did not want those two to meet
+again just then&mdash;those two whose boyhood quarrel had centered about
+herself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Won't you keep Ragtime until you come back to Uncle Cal's to-night?"
+she asked.  "I've kept you loitering for hours and hours on the way.
+But it will save you a little time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And this time Steve understood.  He nodded in reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a chance?" he asked her quietly.  "Not a chance?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was wheeling the roan.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a chance," she whispered.  "Not a chance in the world!  But
+we&mdash;Mr. Elliott promised to show us the works this afternoon," she
+added in the next breath.  "Can you&mdash;do you suppose you can come?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, as she turned the mare and went skimming up the drive toward
+the stable, she wondered why he laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In his turn Steve set Ragtime's head toward the town in the valley.
+And therefore he did not see that Archibald Wickersham was left
+standing alone a moment in the middle of the lawn.  But Miriam Burrell
+saw and understood the black rage that shadowed his face.  Long before
+then she had penetrated to the layer of vanity beneath his air of
+boredom.  More than once she had used that knowledge maliciously, to
+stir him.  And she knew how unending could be his hatred for anyone who
+had ever made him appear ridiculous.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara found Hardwick Elliott lunching alone in the East Coast
+Company's main Morrison office, a big unpainted shack that stood half
+lost in a maze of high-piled ties, midway between the saw-mills at the
+river edge and the first snarled network of switches converging on one
+reddish streak of steel that lanced into the north.  With moodily
+indifferent interest Elliott scarcely more than glanced up at the
+horseman's approach across the open plot of raw earth, hard-packed to a
+cement-like surface by the endless passage and repassage of countless
+hob-nailed, heavy-booted feet, but with that first glance his forehead
+began to smooth a little.  His face had lost something of its hint of
+gauntness, even before his chief engineer had swung down from the
+saddle.  Elliott had been exhibiting scant appetite for the cold food
+half buried in the pile of papers on his desk top; and though he smiled
+his characteristically courteous, mildly abstracted greeting when Steve
+loomed in the doorway, his attitude was still very patently that of a
+man who attempts to conceal his own perplexities lest they compound
+those of another whose perplexities are already more than enough.  He
+rose and held out a finely tapered hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now, this is fine," he exclaimed.  "This is really fine, Mr. O'Mara.
+Rather odd, too&mdash;coincidence and that sort of thing, I mean.  Because I
+was just this instant wondering whether I had better send for you or
+wait until you just happened down river again."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In many ways the president of the East Coast Company reminded Steve of
+Caleb Hunter, even though there could be no two things more in contrast
+than the latter's calm and comfortable bigness and Elliott's thin and
+wiry and extremely nervous exterior.  It was a similarity due entirely
+to the innate honesty of both men&mdash;such honesty as makes of every
+attempt at dissimulation an assured non-success.  And Miss Sarah had
+never anticipated her brother's clumsiest finesse with greater ease
+than did Steve sense, that afternoon, the weight of worry behind his
+employer's first effort at jauntiness.  He nodded, hopefully, it seemed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Something else gone wrong?" he asked.  "Or are you going to tell me
+that McLean is still having trouble with that curve of his."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elliott, too, shook his head, but his negative nod was less brisk, less
+hopeful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he replied.  "No, we've got that laid, or at least practically
+so.  It's not anything so satisfyingly material that I wanted to talk
+about.  I wish it were, because&mdash;well, the fact is, now that you are
+here it appears I may have considerable trouble in making you believe
+that I'm not merely developing a most womanish case of nerves.  Cold
+feet, I suppose, might not be far from correct, if we put it in the
+proper gender.  No, it's not the work itself.  You know the first few
+miles at this end afford pretty plain sailing.  We figured on that: or
+we wouldn't stand any chance of finishing the job.  And we are quite
+nicely ahead of our schedule, so far.  But have you&mdash;I was wondering if
+you, by any chance, have noticed any signs of discontent in your own
+squad at Thirty Mile?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elliott eased himself back into his chair at the finish of the
+question.  Repugnantly he jerked a thumb in silent invitation toward a
+plate of sandwiches.  It indicated most clearly the state of his
+appetite&mdash;that gesture&mdash;and Steve could not help but smile a little as
+he refused.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No more than the usual disturbances," he answered.  "I have more or
+less trouble holding them&mdash;some of them&mdash;over the week-ends, of course.
+But then that's always to be expected.  They aren't the sort of men
+that go to make up the general run of construction squads.  One of my
+main reasons for wanting them was the fact that they were rivermen,
+hardened to swamping and white-water work and that kind of thing.  In a
+pinch they're good for twenty-four hours a day, over stretches that
+would take the heart out of most gangs.  I don't know of anything that
+can beat a lumber-jack on a squeeze job, once you get him to realize
+that he's up against long odds.  It's this ten-hour-a-day thing and too
+much ready money every pay-day; it's a town too temptingly close that
+makes them a&mdash;a trifle temperamental, Mr. Elliott.  Is that what you
+mean?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elliott pondered for a moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That entirely duplicates what McLean said just a day or so ago."  On
+any other lips Elliott's deliberate neatness of phrase might have
+sounded solemnly funny.  "Thoroughly logical, of course,&mdash;thoroughly
+possible.  And yet, somehow it doesn't fit the case.  We've had the
+usual Monday morning vacancies, right along, as you know; but the
+delinquents always turned up before the five o'clock whistle blew, or
+at least reported Tuesday morning.  But this is the end of the week and
+we're short right this minute very close to thirty men.  They aren't
+coming back, Mr. O'Mara; on the contrary, they continue to dribble
+away, a few every day.  And though they appear to do nothing but talk
+their time away in the saloons in the lower end of the town, they seem
+to have just as much money to spend, as they did when they were getting
+their time checks from us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve leaned over and with nice deliberation selected a sandwich.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What sort of talking?" he wanted to know, suddenly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again Elliott smiled in self-deprecation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's just it," he exclaimed.  "Their talk leads nowhere.  I went
+down and attempted to find out what their grievance might be, but they
+close up like clams whenever I come within earshot.  They stare at the
+ceiling, rub their chins, and laugh when there's nothing to laugh at.
+This morning, however, I finally convinced McLean that something was
+radically wrong.  So he took one of them who had just decided to quit
+and pinned him up against the embankment&mdash;but you know McLean and his
+methods!  He shoved his jaw up within an inch of the other's nose and
+invited him to talk, and&mdash;well, he found out enough to make him begin
+to worry, too.  Somebody's been talking to them, Mr. O'Mara; somebody
+has put the fool notion into their heads that this strip of railroad
+will mean the end of all lumber operations in this country&mdash;the
+old-time river drives, of course.  And some of them are beginning to
+believe&mdash;whoever was responsible for that statement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You know and I know how absurd it is.  We know that this road will
+mean work for every riverman in this section, as often as he wants to
+work.  But it isn't going to help us any if they can't see it that way.
+It isn't going to replace the men who quit.  I've been deliberating one
+point.  Don't you suppose we might import a regular squad of
+construction men now, before it's too late?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's too late now," Steve told him, his words none the less final for
+all that they were absently quiet.  "It was too late the day we began
+operations.  And yesterday at this time I wouldn't have given much
+worry to this particular brand of trouble.  They're an odd lot; they're
+the hardest working, hardest living crowd of big men that ever failed
+entirely to grow up."  Steve stopped and looked down at the sandwich
+untouched in his hand, much as though he were surprised to find it
+there.  "But since yesterday&mdash;since yesterday&mdash;who, did you say, was
+responsible for that statement, as you call it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't say." Elliott brushed away a persistent bluebottle fly, a
+lonesome survivor which the unseasonably warm day had reawakened.  The
+insect's droning wings as it persisted again and again back to the
+sandwich plate made the only sound in that big, bare room.  "And if
+I&mdash;if I had to guess&mdash;&mdash;"  The hand passed across his eyes now.
+"O'Mara, do you know how deeply Mr. Ainnesley and myself are involved
+in this prospect?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After a long search the engineer of the East Coast Company had finally
+located his pipe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't believe I have ever given it much actual thought," he said.
+"I never viewed it as any of my affair.  But I haven't forgotten the
+last time we talked the plans over, that you couldn't go into it to
+lose."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Punctiliously Elliott proffered a lighted match for the other's filled
+pipe; he lighted a long and thin and very black cigar for himself.
+Steve noted then for the first time that the man's hand was shaking a
+little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," the latter answered quickly.  "Of course&mdash;of course!"  He
+seemed groping for a fresh beginning, then gave up suddenly all attempt
+at circuity and blurted it out much as though he had lived with the
+thought too long to endure it longer alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm in up to my last dollar," he stated.  "And Ainnesley&mdash;why,
+Ainnesley wouldn't have a roof over his head if we failed in our
+obligations!  You must know as well as I do why the banking interests
+took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive
+the first spike."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When he failed to go on Steve understood that the last sentence had
+been a question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Mr. Allison, I suppose."  His voice became utterly impersonal.
+"Without doubt you mean Mr. Allison?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They would have laughed at us," the older man came back instantly.
+"And what is more, they did!  They wouldn't touch the proposition,
+until Allison came in with us.  And then&mdash;but you know what Dexter
+Allison has done already in this country.  I don't know what he started
+with.  I do know that all that Ainnesley and I had scraped up between
+us looked like a shoe-string to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We couldn't move until he, of his own accord, expressed his enthusiasm
+for the plan and asked for a share in the holdings.  You know, perhaps,
+how he can laugh, too.  Well, he laughed that way and confessed that we
+had just beaten him to it.  He said it would tap a gold mine&mdash;this
+'strip of steel,' as he called it.  He even told us that he'd parallel
+our road with a competitor, jokingly to be sure, if we hadn't tied up
+the only available and practicable right of way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He came in.  He opened up, merely through his own name and all there
+is behind it, loan possibilities for which we might have struggled
+uselessly the rest of our lives without his help.  Between us Mr.
+Ainnesley and I just managed to hold the balance of stock control
+and&mdash;and that's how deep we are in, Mr. O'Mara."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both men sat and smoked, each avoiding, elaborately, the other's eyes.
+After a long pause, Elliott cleared his throat, laboriously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This morning," he continued slowly, "this morning I am in receipt of a
+communication from Mr. Ainnesley himself, advising me that another
+right of way has been applied for, for a single track road here in the
+north.  The gossip which chanced to come his way was rather obscure.
+Little could be learned about the whole affair save that it was being
+put forward with a view to tapping the ore and timber lands all the way
+to and beyond the border.  But as nearly as he could ascertain the
+southern terminus of such a road would seem to be about&mdash;about at the
+mouth of that valley southernmost in the Reserve Company's timber
+holdings.  Rather a remarkable choice for a railroad terminus, Mr.
+O'Mara&mdash;wouldn't you say so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve leaned toward him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you mean that they've thrown out your earlier application for just
+such a grant?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That would be a rather harshly definite way of putting it," Elliott
+smiled wryly.  "Ours is apparently just tabled&mdash;oh, tabled pending
+certain immaterial changes in the form!  You asked me a moment ago&mdash;or
+did I offer to guess who might be responsible for the report which is
+costing us our men?  I wonder if I need to tell you who controls this
+new northern route?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe you've been telling me," Steve came back coolly.  "You have
+already mentioned&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wickersham!" Hardwick Elliott corrected.  "Wickersham&mdash;that is,
+through allied interests which he represents or controls.  O'Mara, I
+doubt if I would even insinuate this to anyone else; I haven't even
+intimated it to Ainnesley as yet.  Wickersham is reputed to represent
+huge moneyed foreign interests.  But have you ever stopped to wonder
+whether he might not represent big local interests as well?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The tanned face opposite him was so gravely blank that Elliott once
+more laughed nervously, deprecatingly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Doubt of any man's loyalty such as that query would imply is not one
+of my characteristics.  I would rather have left this thing unattempted
+than to have undertaken it in partnership with any man whom I felt I
+had to watch.  But I just thought that I'd better put it all on the
+table for you to consider.  I'd like to ask you&mdash;what do you think?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man in blue flannel and corduroy tapped the sodden heel from his
+pipe and loaded it afresh.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yesterday," he answered, "yesterday&mdash;Well I couldn't guarantee just
+what I might have thought, twenty-four hours back.  But doesn't one
+fact remain unchanged still, no matter what we think?  Suppose we admit
+that some one else does want this stretch of track we're laying?
+Suppose somebody is figuring on picking it up cheap, at a bankruptcy
+price, if we forfeit to the Reserve Company?  You know yourself that
+you would never have begun it simply for the profit there will be in
+moving the Reserve logs and the millions on millions of feet of lumber
+both to the east and west, which can't be touched at anything but a
+prohibitive figure, without this road.  We were going through to the
+border, too.  And if some one else is betting that we don't; if some
+one else is betting that we can't yank a trainload of logs down to this
+end of the line, before the first of May, that doesn't alter our case
+any, does it?  Even though we suspect that some man is playing us to
+lose, do we have to know exactly who he is?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Slowly but very surely the older man's face began to smooth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Once or twice," he stated, "I've thought to anticipate you, perhaps
+because I have it on you a little, as they say, in the matter of years.
+I'm not going to attempt it any more.  For I thought that this
+conversation would be at least a surprise to you.  You sit there and
+take it very quietly, for a man who has been badly startled."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fat Joe has been preaching it for a month."  Oddly enough, Stephen
+O'Mara chose that point at which to laugh, softly.  "And I, for a
+month, have been ridiculing him.  That's one of Fat Joe's pet
+diversions, you know.  When all other excitement fails Joe invariably
+falls back upon an imagination too totally vivid to be wasted on
+technical things.  I laughed at him, until last night.  Do you&mdash;but of
+course you know Garry Devereau?" he finished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Knew his father," Elliott answered succinctly.  "Know him well!  Good
+blood&mdash;good brains&mdash;big hearts!  Why?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, for the second time that day, Steve related the salient
+points of that episode which had opened with the trio of owls along the
+trail and ended with the first gray streaks of returning day.  During
+the recital the expressions which chased across Elliot's face were as
+varied as they were full of concern.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I wasn't merely hysterical, was I?" he brooded after Steve had
+finished.  "Who&mdash;who did you say you thought might be behind the man
+who would have had your plans, had it not been for Mr. Devereau?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't say," replied Steve, and for the first time since his
+entrance there was mirth in the unison of their laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It all brings us back to the point from which we started," the younger
+man went on when they were grave again.  "It's a plain enough issue, so
+far as we are concerned.  We've got to be at the mouth of that lower
+valley by May.  We're going to be!  And as I see it, wasting time and
+energy in&mdash;shall we call it sleuthing, Mr. Elliott?&mdash;won't help us
+much.  We thought that lack of time and the general nature of this
+country were going to be handicap enough.  But now your money is in and
+I&mdash;I never did like to be beaten.  Can't we let it stand like that, at
+least until some one else makes a plainer move?  We know the cards we
+hold.  If others care to sit in, perhaps we'll all come to a show-down,
+next spring at Thirty Mile.  It'll be easy enough to explain just how
+we did it.  Alibis based on veiled opposition wouldn't interest the
+Reserve people much, if we left their timber there to rot.&#8230;  And
+I'm trying not to overlook any bets, Mr. Elliott."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Hastily the iron-gray man thrust his hat back from his forehead.  He
+came to his feet and crossed and clapped one hand upon Steve's shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Next May!" he barked.  "O'Mara, I'm glad you came down this morning.
+I've been carrying a lot of those ideas around in my head until they
+had become nightmarish.  But I'm through now.  You won't hear me croak
+again.  I staked what I had on you, months ago; I'd do it again this
+minute.  What's the odds, after all, who it is that's playing us to
+lose.  It's only the fact that somebody may be fighting us that needs
+to occupy our attention.  I'm done worrying, do you hear?  But what
+about those men who are quitting us?  You are sure it would be unwise
+to import labor?  It's cheaper, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve, too, had risen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'd have the prettiest kind of a scrap on our hands, the first day we
+tried to use them," he explained.  "It would be dear enough before we
+got through.  I guess I'd better run right out and have a talk with
+McLean.  He knows these men even better than I do, and I'm almost one
+of them, you know.  And I'll get a line on some of these delinquents
+who are crying calamity for the countryside.  I'd better, because we'll
+need them.  They simply haven't become thoroughly interested yet,
+that's all.  It will take something to jolt them; something to set them
+on fire.  And then&mdash;then just watch my plaid-shirted boys go!  They'll
+eat up your sledge-swingers!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Something of that promised fire was reflected now in Hardwick Elliott's
+eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By Gad," he exclaimed, "by Gad, if it wasn't for Ainnesley I'd say the
+thing was worth it, win or lose, just for the game itself.  You go
+ahead and see McLean.  I'll be out there later, myself.  I promised
+Allison that I'd show the works to some of the young folks up there on
+the hill.  His daughter&mdash;but I keep forgetting that you've known her
+longer than I have.  There's quite a party of them.  She announced her
+engagement to Mr. Wickersham last night, I believe.  Heard that this
+morning&mdash;was too busy to go up last night myself.  Maybe you'll find
+time to help me play the host."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve turned toward the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So I heard," he replied, without facing around.  "I'll try to be on
+hand."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stood for another instant on the threshold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going to ask you to see that my horse is fed and watered," he
+requested evenly.  "And I reckon you'd better eat your own lunch,
+yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the man behind him had already anticipated that suggestion.
+Through a generous bite of sandwich he made answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll see that he is taken care of," he called cheerfully.  "See you
+later, Mr. O'Mara&mdash;&mdash;  Pshaw, the coffee's cold!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THAT WOODS-RAT
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Between Dexter Allison's monopoly of his time and the persistence with
+which Miriam Burrell clung to Stephen O'Mara, Barbara Allison had
+opportunity for little more than a perfunctory word or two of greeting
+that afternoon, during the first hour or two that followed a jolting
+ride on the flat car which trundled them to the head of operations.
+Almost as soon as her feet touched the ground Miriam's eager survey
+singled out a tall figure at the edge of the farthest embankment; and
+in spite of the fact that he was at the moment in sober conversation
+with white-haired, white-bearded McLean, she crossed instantly to take
+possession of both Steve's arms and his undivided attention.  Barbara,
+at Wickersham's side, glancing now and then in their direction, knew
+well what subject was engrossing them to the exclusion of all else.
+But Allison's acceptance of that arrangement as time passed grew less
+patient.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a time he was content to stroll along with the rest&mdash;content with
+his facetious comments on Elliott's explanation of this matter or that.
+Yet whenever his eyes strayed toward Miriam and that other figure whom
+a week or two before he had designated as "my man, O'Mara," his
+jovialty faltered a little, his manner grew restive.  After a time he,
+too, detached himself and sauntered in the direction of that wholly
+preoccupied pair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"See here, my lady," he accosted the girl, who turned extremely bright
+eyes upon his approach.  "This won't do at all.  How do you suppose I
+am going to get a minute with Mr. O'Mara, here, if you persist in
+clinging to his elbow?  You'll have to run along&mdash;you run over and
+listen, with the rest, to Elliott's heroic tale of this scarring of the
+face of nature.  I've waited a good many days to talk business with Mr.
+O'Mara; I'm not going to lose him, now I've got him cornered."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Had Dexter Allison been less occupied with other thoughts, the face
+which Miriam Burrell turned toward him would have surprised him, if
+only because of the unusual color burning in her cheeks.  At that he
+was vaguely aware that he had never before seen that quiet,
+self-contained girl so pulsingly happy.  She stood and gazed at him a
+moment, then made him a low and mocking obeisance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't flatter yourself that I haven't noted your covetous glances,"
+she flashed.  "I've been talking very fast, because I knew this
+interruption was coming.  But we've finished, thank you, so I'll leave
+you to&mdash;to bore him now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She turned back toward O'Mara.  "And thank you," she murmured not very
+audibly.  "Thank you, more than I ever thanked anybody before in my
+life.  You've made me very, very happy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No one could have missed the depth of real thankfulness in those last
+words.  Even Allison stood astonished at it, mouth open, following her
+rapid withdrawal toward the group fifty yards away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Huh-h-h," he snorted.  "Huh-h-h.  A mighty strange girl!"  And then,
+as abruptly as he had interrupted their low conversation, "Well, how
+does it go, Chief?  How does it look to you, as far as you've gone?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No man's good humor could be more infectious than was that of this big,
+noisily garbed man.  Steve smiled and met his cordiality more than half
+way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not too bad," he answered.  "Not too bad."  He swept the ground before
+them with a short gesture.  "You aren't beginning to worry, too, are
+you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Worry?"  Allison's frown was barely perceptible.  "Why should I?  I
+never let anything worry me.  Who is beginning to fret?  You aren't,
+are you?  You don't look&mdash;much disturbed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a particle!"  Steve still smiled.  "I never do either, unless that
+there is something worth while to make me.  I just thought perhaps you
+might have contracted it from Mr. Elliott.  He's been bothered, you
+see, by the way some of the men are acting.  We're short a lot of labor
+this week."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The big man wheeled and squinted at the droves of men sweating under
+the unseasonably hot sun; he peered keenly at each clump of laborers,
+some of them scarcely distinguishable knots of humanity in the distance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not very short," he stated comfortably.  "I don't claim to be a wholly
+competent judge, but it looks to me as though they would be in one
+another's way if there were any more of them.  What's wrong?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The chief engineer's answer was drawling in its deliberation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wish I knew," he replied.  "I wish I could be positive.  And there
+aren't too many of them; they are altogether too few.  We're going to
+need them, and more, too, before we finish, Mr. Allison.  Perhaps I'd
+better figure on&mdash;perhaps if they continue to quit on us, by twos and
+threes, as they have in the last week&mdash;I'll have to&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His pause seemed almost an invitation that the other suggest a remedy;
+and whether it was or not Dexter Allison was quick to seize the
+opening.  His suggested solution was heartily bluff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Import some more," he said.  "When you've employed these men as long
+as I have&mdash;the type of man who has worked all his life on the
+river&mdash;you'll know as well as I do just how uncertain and unreliable
+they are.  What you need is a gang that doesn't want to think for
+itself.  This crowd has too much imagination for a grind like this."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve nodded very thoughtfully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If it is all imagination," he wondered.  "But they're not merely
+discontented, you see, Mr. Allison.  They&mdash;they are misleading
+themselves.  They seem to think, from what I've gathered from McLean
+and a few with whom I have talked, that they are working themselves out
+of a job for good, when they help to build this strip of railroad.
+They think so&mdash;they have been convinced that such is the truth.
+Personally, however, I feel sure that between us, we can correct that
+impression."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Even though he was looking in the direction of a heavy smoke-cloud that
+had followed a sharp blast to the north of them, Steve felt the weight
+of Allison's questioning glance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We," he echoed.  "Where do I figure in it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The younger man's upward glance was seemingly surprised.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You?  Why, you're a stockholder.  It means as much to you as it does
+to Mr. Ainnesley and Mr. Elliott."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison interrupted him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," he exclaimed.  "Surely!  I see!  What I mean was how in
+the world can I make them understand that such a fool idea is all
+wrong?  So far as this constructive work is concerned, I'm not an
+active member.  I&mdash;I had that understood with Elliott when I went into
+this thing!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course," Steve in turn broke in.  "I understand that.  But they
+know you; they know that Morrison would be nothing more than a street
+of well-kept lawns and cow-pastures, if you hadn't seen its
+possibilities.  And so I've already told some of them, Mr. Allison;
+I've gone even further, and given a lot of them my word that you'll
+guarantee, yourself, that this is the biggest thing for the good of
+this section that has yet happened."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The speaker smiled frankly into the bigger man's eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And that was all they needed, was it?" Allison queried, at length.
+"That fixed it, did it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Absolutely!"  Steve's cheeriness should have been infectious.
+"Absolutely, Mr. Allison.  A lot of people have come to look on your
+word as law in this country, you know&mdash;a lot of them!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hum-m-m," replied Allison.  "Hum-m-m."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both of them were quiet for a time.  Steve's next remark brought
+Allison's head up sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I meant to bring some of my estimates and plans down with me, when I
+came," he told him.  "You spoke of wanting to run over the whole
+proposition with me, you'll remember, the first day you arrived."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison nodded shortly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I remember."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll bring them, next trip," Steve finished.  "I came so near to
+losing them last night that I'm taking no chances until they're in
+duplicate.  We can run over them later?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison wheeled and gazed meditatingly toward the group who were slowly
+moving their way.  His daughter Barbara, with Wickersham at her side,
+was in the lead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Any time," he agreed.  "There's no particular hurry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then a moment later, just when she was beginning to wonder whether
+he was purposely avoiding her, Barbara was surprised at the calm ease
+with which Steve took her away from her tall escort.  She had noticed
+that Wickersham and Steve had not touched hands when they first met, an
+hour or two before, nor even hinted at such a salute.  But now, as
+earlier in the day when her dash toward the stables had left him
+standing rigid in the middle of the lawn, she failed to see the
+expression that settled upon Wickersham's long face.  It was Dexter
+Allison this time who noticed it, and hours later, when he and
+Wickersham sat and faced each other in the downstairs room in the house
+on the hill, which served as Allison's office, he remembered and
+recognized it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You wanted to talk with me?" Wickersham inquired as he entered the
+room that evening.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Somehow Wickersham's unending politeness had always irritated Allison.
+That night his smoothly infectionless question nettled him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your damned fool, Harrigan, bungled last night!" he blurted out.  "He
+messed things up, beautifully.  He not only failed, but he failed to
+get away without being seen.  That's what comes of entrusting a job
+like that to a drunken sot."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham seated himself&mdash;sat and caressed a cigarette.  Coolly he
+waited and blinked his eyelids.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My man?" he murmured.  "My man?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ours then," Allison corrected sharply.  "Ours."  Then he seemed to
+recollect himself and his voice became less abrupt.  "Listen.  This
+afternoon I had a talk with O'Mara.  That is, I started to have a talk
+with him, but&mdash;but he beat me to it.  And in just about three minutes
+he told me that he'd caught Harrigan on the job&mdash;not mentioning any
+names, I don't mean&mdash;but he didn't need to, And he told me more than
+that.  He as good as gave me to understand that he'd know where to
+place the blame, if there was any more interference with his men."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham crossed a long leg and blew a thin blue streamer of smoke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes?" he intoned bodilessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It brought a blaze to Allison's eyes&mdash;that nerveless monosyllable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That doesn't interest you, eh?" he snapped.  "Doesn't interest you at
+all!  Well, it does me.  Three months ago I bought into this affair
+because I was as sure as any man could be that I'd collect a hundred
+per cent on my money, next spring.  Elliott and Ainnesley?  Pah!&mdash;Nice
+gentle old ladies, when it comes to a game like this.  They're
+anachronists; they are honest business men, twenty years behind the
+times.  You've heard of taking candy from children.  Well, that's what
+it looked like then.  But it doesn't look that way any longer.  Talk
+with you?  Yes, I did want to talk.  I wanted to tell you that if you'd
+like to switch I'm willing, right now.  I wanted to tell you that if
+you'd rather be a good little boy and get into line, I'm willing and
+more than willing.  Because I can promise you, since I talked it over
+with O'Mara this afternoon, that we haven't any nice, dead-sure thing
+on our hands any longer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, you can sit there and smile your cold-blooded smile!  And if you
+think I'm experiencing pangs of conscience you're mistaken.  All I
+have, I got from other men who&mdash;who weren't strong enough to hang on to
+it.  There isn't any friendship in business&mdash;or if there is I never
+played it that way.  I'm just telling you that now is our one
+opportunity, if we want to join hands and hurrah with the rest of them
+for the completion of this job by next May.  We lose a railroad at a
+bargain, perhaps, but we've still got a mighty good right-of-way to the
+border, that will insure our welcome in the ranks.  Maybe we lose
+and&mdash;and maybe&mdash;well, I never did like to be beaten!  Nor do I say that
+such an argument will have any weight with you, but it's a chance to be
+on the dead level, for once.  What do you say?  Do we switch?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Allison remembered the expression which had flitted over
+Wickersham's face when Stephen O'Mara coolly appropriated Barbara.  But
+that expression had been a totally gentle thing beside the pale fury
+which now slowly overspread his features.  Wickersham twisted the
+cigarette to fragments&mdash;flung them from him, and the very gesture was
+vicious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Switch," he snarled.  And he leaned forward, face bloodless, and beat
+upon a chair arm.  "Switch now!"  He laughed shrilly.  "Why, I'm going
+to beat that damned woods-rat in his matinée-idol costume so bad
+between now and next May that he'll be walking the roads for his next
+job.  Switch?  I'm going to brand him as the worst incompetent that
+ever dragged two poor fools down into pauperism.  I'll see him broke.
+I'll wipe that damned smooth smile from his lips, by God, if I have
+to&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham gasped; he came to his feet panting all in an instant with
+the rage that set his dry lips writhing.  But at that point he, too,
+remembered himself.  He swallowed and faced Allison, and the latter,
+sitting pop-eyed before his outbreak, gaped now at the change that came
+back over that twisted face.  Wickersham smiled.  Once more his bearing
+was the very essence of perfect poise and self-control.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you&mdash;if you are afraid&mdash;&mdash;" he inferred.  "If you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison's laugh was big and booming, for all that the astonishment had
+not yet left his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cold feet," he rumbled.  "Cold feet!  Me!"  And suddenly his gust of
+mirthless laughter made petty the other's insolence.  "Wickersham, I've
+broken better crooks than you'll ever be.  A man has to have a big
+heart to be a big crook and you&mdash;and you&mdash;well, sometimes I wonder
+whether there wasn't some sort of an oversight in that line, when they
+put you together."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He couldn't have explained why the thought came to him at that moment
+any more than he understood his swiftly malicious impulse to use it;
+but all in a flash there came back to him a recollection of that day
+when he and Caleb had burst through the hedge to find the boy, Stephen
+O'Mara, pummeling a bigger prostrate boy who shrieked under the earnest
+thoroughness of that pummeling.  Allison, too, rose to his feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I only wanted to give you a chance," he stated dryly.  "I reckon I can
+take care of myself.  I always could.  And you&mdash;well, you know as well
+as I do what sort of a scrap that&mdash;that woods-rat can put up, or you
+ought to.  He gave you a sort of a demonstration, once, if I remember
+correctly.  I stick!  I never was overly squeamish.  But don't fool
+yourself, Archie, don't fool yourself.  If we light, we're fighting
+with a regular guy, your insinuation to the contrary.  I merely wanted
+you to realize what I know now.  We'll think we've been in a battle
+before we come to a finish!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His hand was on the door knob when the door itself flashed open.
+Dexter Allison's daughter hesitated, surprised, on the threshold.  Her
+eyes, brilliantly alight, leaped from her father's face to that of the
+man half toward her and back again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh," she exclaimed uncertainly, "I didn't know you were busy.  I saw
+the light.  I'd been over to Uncle Cal's, just for a minute.  I wanted
+to tell you&mdash;good night!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+THIS LITERARY THING
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+It was dark, the night of that second day, when Stephen O'Mara came
+quietly up to the open door of his own lighted shack and stopped for a
+moment to gaze in at the two men whose faces were touched by the glow
+of the lamp on the table.  There had been more than one moment in those
+forty-eight hours which had elapsed since he had lifted that
+black-robed, inert figure from the floor in which Steve had wondered
+whether Garry Devereau would even await his return to Thirty-Mile; more
+than once he had smiled whimsically to himself, during the trip back
+up-river, over the scene which he was certain would meet his eyes, had
+Garry chosen to wait.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But there were no poker chips in front of Fat Joe that night.  Round
+face propped upon one hand, the latter was staring motionless at a
+thick pad of yellow paper flat before his eyes.  And Garry himself was
+sitting with his back toward the light, staring as motionlessly into
+the cold fireplace.  Merely from their attitudes, Steve knew that they
+had been a long time silent; he knew that Fat Joe would have been
+making conversation, no matter how desperately footless it might have
+been, had he been conscious of the quality of the other's moody quiet.
+And then, as he was himself about to go forward, barely in time to
+check the word of greeting on his lips, Joe lifted pensive eyes to the
+other's back.  When Joe spoke his words were none too plain; he was
+gnawing a pencil tip in most evident perplexity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Say," he broke that heavy silence, "say, Garry, how do you spell
+reconciliation?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Immediately the man outside in the dark decided not to announce himself
+just yet.  And much of his own puzzlement was mirrored in the worn face
+which Garry turned toward his questioner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Reconciliation?" Garry repeated blankly.  "What in thunder&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course I'd ought to be able to handle it," Joe cut in blandly
+apologetic.  "I just dismember whether it goes with a 'c' or a 'k.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry tried not to grin; but outside in the dark Steve allowed his
+appreciation to spread and spread across his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"With a 'c,'" the man before the fireplace told him soberly.  "Are
+you&mdash;what are you doing, Joe, making out reports?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With much care Joe transcribed it upon the virgin sheet before him;
+with a painful precision that brought the tip of his tongue beyond one
+corner of his lips, he rounded out the letters to his complete
+satisfaction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," his answer was mumbled in his abstraction.  "No, I ain't writing
+a report.  I'm&mdash;I'm just beginning my novel."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve heard Garry gasp; he saw a gleam of pleased anticipation flash
+into his eyes, and knew instantly at what degree of friendship those
+two had already arrived.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you&mdash;will you please say that again, Joe?" Garry begged him, very
+earnestly.  "I wasn't paying attention.  I'm afraid I was thinking of
+something else too hard to hear you correctly."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's smile as he looked up had in it all of that quality which at
+times made it almost seraphic.  His answer seemed irrelevant at first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder if you know that Cecile person who works down to that big
+plaster house at Morrison&mdash;Allison's place on the hill?" he inquired.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dexter Allison's?"  Garry thought a moment.  "Why, you must mean Miss
+Allison's little French maid, don't you, Joe?  Yes, I know who she is,
+if she's the one.  But what has she to do with it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe laid down his pencil and set himself to be frankly explanatory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, it's like this," he stated.  "She and I, now&mdash;we've got more or
+less acquainted in the last week or two, so to speak.  And that ain't
+bad progress when you figure out that she can't understand more'n a
+dozen or two of all the words I speak to her, and as for me&mdash;well, when
+she gets to talking back it just makes me dizzy, that's all.  But we're
+pretty good friends, when you consider that handicap.  The thing that
+really bothers me is that the only folks she seemed to have been real
+neighborly with, back in Paree&mdash;that's the way you say it, ain't
+it?&mdash;was mostly sculptors and painters and writers, and such lot.  So
+that would let me out of the running, right at the start, you see.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I figured I didn't class at all, at first, because about the best
+thing I can say for myself is that there ain't a man on the river who
+ever rode white water better.  I'm mostly a lumber jack, coming or
+going, whichever way you take me, although I've punched cattle and
+placer mined for variety.  But to-night&mdash;to-night since you been
+setting there quiet&mdash;I got to thinking, too.  She's a real nice girl.
+We get along fine together.  And I kind of think we would, anyhow, even
+if we could understand each other better.  I got to thinking to-night
+that maybe I'd better not quit cold, just yet.  Now&mdash;I can't sculp, and
+somehow I never was strong for them guys who sit straddle of a little
+chair and paint cows and posies and things on a strip of muslin hooked
+over a frame.  But, say, I've seen lots of writers who didn't look a
+whole lot more intelligent than me!  I&mdash;I just got to thinking,
+to-night, that I'd take a fall out of this literary thing!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve always held it to his friend's credit that he did not laugh.
+Indeed, Garry's soberness at that moment was almost woebegone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see, Joe," he answered.  "Not a bad idea.  May I ask what your
+story&mdash;your novel is to deal with?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Deal with?  What do you mean?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, they always deal with some problem, Joe," Garry squared around.
+"They always attack the rottenness of the rich, or sob over the
+rottenness of the poor.  They always expound the crime of divorce, or
+attack the error of matrimony.  Now which of&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I ain't dealing with nothing," stated Joe.  "What I'm figurin' on
+doing is a regular love story.  I thought maybe I'd have a nice young
+chap who&mdash;who's building a railroad or something, fall in love with a
+real nice girl who's the daughter of a fat man who's a crook.  I mean
+the fat man's the crook, not the daughter.  And&mdash;and&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And then what?" asked Garry Devereau.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe, unlike the man outside, did not notice that a new note,
+dangerously hard and wickedly edged with ridicule, had replaced the
+amusement in Garry's voice.  He grew a little more enthusiastic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, that's as far as I've got, right up to now," he admitted with an
+explosive sigh.  "But it looks like a good enough beginning, at that.
+All I got to do now is run 'em through three or four hundred pages,
+with him a-talkin' to her and her a-talkin' at him.  All I got to do,
+accordin' to all the books I've ever read, is see that it don't all
+come too easy for him, and still turns out all right.  I expect I'll
+run 'em into a clinch with another guy standin' around eatin' his heart
+out with jealousy.  It'll serve him right; he's just that mean sort,
+you know.  Oh, I'll just marry 'em, along toward the end of the last
+chapter, and that'll kind of close it up."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara had been watching Joe's face while the latter talked,
+and therefore he was no more prepared than was Joe himself for the
+burst of harsh laughter that came from Garry's lips.  It seemed utterly
+illogical that all actual humor should so swiftly fade from that
+situation with the first really audible expression of mirth.  Steve
+himself believed it was only simulated, until his eyes swung to Garry's
+face.  But he knew then what thoughts had been with Garret Devereau,
+all evening, before he had come up unheard to the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, you poor simple scholar of nature!"  The wan-faced one's lips
+curled.  "You're years behind your day!  If you submitted such a screed
+to a publisher now, he'd think you'd written a history of archaic
+American types."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stopped to sneer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Listen," he went on.  "Listen, and I'll give you a plot, gratis,
+which, if you handle it right, will make you, overnight!  Take your
+girl&mdash;a nice girl, to be sure, sweet and unsophisticated and&mdash;and
+childishly innocent, Joe, and&mdash;and well, you'll have to describe her,
+first, won't you?  Let's dress her up, then&mdash;dress her up in an evening
+confection that leaves little to the imagination in front and&mdash;and
+ground for amazement in back.  That's a fair starter.  If you care to
+be analytical you can insist that the reason she dresses like that
+is&mdash;oh, just because she's so innocent that she doesn't know any
+better, eh!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All right!  That establishes her very well.  And then we can do just
+what you planned to do with your dear lady.  We'll run her through
+three or four hundred pages, but with just a trifling change or two.
+Every chapter or so I'd leave her, Joe, in a situation that ends with a
+gasp&mdash;no pause even for a caramel!  Three or four hundred pages, and
+then, if you have to marry her off why, let's be honest about it&mdash;no?
+Marry her off to the sort of a chap whom you'd man-handle to a pulp,
+Joe, if he came near&mdash;say a sister of yours.  A nice, white-skinned,
+red-lipped, sweet, innocent sort of a little girl, Joe&mdash;and&mdash;and that
+finish will keep her true to type!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the beginning Fat Joe had been all eager attention.  His face became
+heavy with amazement long before Garry's hard voice was still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But&mdash;but that ain't the kind of a yarn I'm figurin' on," he argued,
+his high voice faint but dogged.  "This ain't going to be any of that
+tabasco stuff.  Nope, I like it better the way I've got it planned.
+It&mdash;it leaves a better taste in your mouth, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again Garry laughed, to himself it seemed, this time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have your own way," he muttered.  "But if you're going to stick to it
+you'd better label it a romance!  Because there's only one kind of a
+woman, Joe, in reality.  Just the kind who's killed what used to be a
+demand for decent men."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, outside in the dark, Stephen O'Mara forgot how sick the other
+man had been.  He was across the threshold in a single stride, and Fat
+Joe came lightly to his feet as he saw his chief's set face that night.
+It wiped, the smile from Garry's lips, too.  Squarely in front of the
+latter Steve halted and spoke with monotonous lack of haste.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're going to tell me that you didn't mean that, Garry," he said
+quietly.  "For I'm going to marry one of those women myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garret Devereau's face had been white.  It went whiter now.  He too
+came squarely to his feet, his body stiff but very frail in the
+oversize garments from Steve's wardrobe which he was wearing.  He stood
+and stared emptily into his friend's eyes until something close akin to
+dreary defiance rose and marked his numbed comprehension.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What I said," he answered as quietly, "I'd alter for no man.  My
+opinions are my own."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He turned and passed outside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For longer than he realized Steve stood gazing down into the burnt-out
+fireplace, until another thought, swifter even than the impulse that
+had lifted him across the threshold and thrust him into speech which,
+already, he would have given much to recall, whirled him around again.
+There was a light in the near end of the storehouse building just above
+his own cabin, and as he hurried toward it he knew Fat Joe must have
+fitted it up for the third man's quarters.  He knocked at the door, and
+when there came no response, unbidden he lifted the latch and entered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry was sitting on the edge of his blanketed bunk&mdash;sitting with
+shoulders slumped forward and head bowed low.  He did not look up, for
+he had not heard Steve's entrance.  He was pondering over the cylinder
+of a heavy, blued revolver, spinning beneath his transparent fingers.
+But Steve's first inarticulate effort at speech brought his head
+around.  Garry smiled up at him&mdash;a smile reminiscent of his rare smile
+of years before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't mean anything, Steve," he said in a hushed voice.  "I'm
+damned sorry I spoke as I did.  You see&mdash;you see, I just didn't know it
+would hit you, that's all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again Steve swallowed.  Dumbly he pointed at the gun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What are you doing with that?" he demanded hoarsely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry's eyes dropped.  He stared at the revolver in his hand in mild
+perplexity, much as though he, too, were surprised to find it there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, nothing&mdash;nothing.  I often take a notion to&mdash;to look at it like
+this."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then his face went crimson.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've heard the news, I see."  He tried to hide the bitterness behind
+the words, but one lip corner twitched and quivered.  "They posted you
+in advance, did they?  But you did not believe I was as bad as that,
+did you?  You didn't think, did you, Steve, that I&mdash;I'd go out leaving
+you to blame yourself even a little bit?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His question was curiously wistful&mdash;wistful and as unsteady as the hand
+which now proffered that blunt-barreled, huge-bore gun.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here, you take it, if&mdash;if you'll sleep the sounder.  And don't you
+worry over me.  I'll see you in the morning, Steve."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+A GIRL LIKE HER
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Save for a short and casual "see you in the morning, Garry," Stephen
+O'Mara turned without a word that night and left the improvised
+sleeping-quarters in the storehouse shack.  It was a man's
+leave-taking, short to abruptness, so badly stereotyped that it denied
+utterly any consciousness of threatened, reckless tragedy and cordially
+intimate only because in all man-to-man speech there is less and less
+of actual sincerity in a multiplicity of words.  But he might have
+talked till daylight and still have failed to register the binding
+acceptance of Garry's promise, which his silence, unaided, achieved.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Soundlessly, unemotionally, Steve closed the door on that figure on the
+bunk edge which, suddenly slack of limb and shoulder, had averted its
+face.  But then, there in the darkness, with the gun swinging heavily
+between loose fingers, he hesitated in his very first step back from
+the threshold.  And twice, head bowed in indecision, he halted in his
+slow progress from that door to the lighted one of his own cabin which
+framed Fat Joe's immobile form&mdash;halted each time as though he would
+return&mdash;and each time went slowly forward again.  Fat Joe's eyes barely
+flitted over Steve's face that night; they clung in a fixed, pale blue
+stare of fear to the weapon in his hand.  And long after Steve had
+drawn up a chair next the one which Garry had vacated and fallen to
+filling his pipe, he stood, shifting from foot to foot in awkward,
+uncomfortable silence.  He crossed after a time and slipped into the
+empty seat.  His tongue was as haltingly guilty as his face was pink
+with shame when he began to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve," he stammered, "Say, Steve, I&mdash;I didn't know I was going to
+start anything like that when I begun talking my ideas of art and
+literature and such like.  I didn't see where it was leading us to&mdash;not
+for a minute.  Why, Steve, every blessed hour of the days and nights
+since you've been away, I've been dodgin' every topic of conversation I
+thought might hit him hard.  I'm just several assorted kinds of
+fool&mdash;and you followed him that quick and quiet!"  The apology was
+tinged with pride.  "I just didn't think&mdash;&mdash;  But ain't he got a poor
+opinion of women folks, though?  Was it&mdash;a close decision?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve shook his head; he smiled and the returning surety in his face
+did much to clear Joe's features.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," Steve answered, "not very.  Somehow I know already that I needn't
+have followed at all, so far as that contingency was concerned.  And it
+was my fault, Joe, not yours.  I should have told you exactly how such
+things stood in Garry's mind&mdash;would have, if I had had the time.  His
+opinion of women isn't very high.  And it's odd, too, isn't it, that
+both the very highest and very lowest of such opinions are always held
+by men who base them upon what they have been taught by one woman
+alone.  Tell me, Joe, what's happened?  How have you and Garry hit it
+off, since I went down river?&#8230;  Trouble?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fat man's eager denial was still self-consciously defensive.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a bit!" he stated.  "Not one little wrangle, even.  Of course I
+was expectin' it.  I've watched 'em come around too many times not to
+know how they can cuss a man cold one minute, and then make him plumb
+ashamed of mankind in general, with beggin' and pleadin'.  I just beat
+him to it the morning he woke up; I told him what he could have, and
+what he couldn't, and he took it calmly enough.  He just set there,
+pretty blue and shaky, and not quite clear in his head, and smiled that
+slow grin of his that's hardly any smile at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't mean that he didn't swear!  O my&mdash;O my!  It's nice, ain't it,
+to have the gift of ease and eloquence in speech?  He made me feel sort
+of amateurish and inadequate&mdash;me!  But he didn't beg.
+Not&mdash;one&mdash;peep&mdash;out&mdash;of&mdash;him!  He told me what he thought of me just as
+polite and cool as could be and let it go at that.  He said he guessed
+I was boss, for a while at least, and asked for chopped fine!"  Fat Joe
+hesitated.  His color grew higher again.  "After what's just happened,"
+he added, "I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but&mdash;but ain't this friend
+of yours one of them chaps they call 'thoroughbreds' in novels?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve flashed a glance at that earnest face.  For a moment he had
+forgotten the first glimpse he had caught of Joe that evening, bent
+double over the block of yellow paper&mdash;a glimpse which still seemed
+funny and yet not very funny either.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He comes of a very old family," he replied.  "Old as they are reckoned
+in this country."  And his answer held a question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That ain't quite what I mean.  I've seen lots of the younger sons of
+them old families.  I've run into them in Yokohoma and Buenos Ayres;
+I've met up with them along the Yukon and down on the Mexican border.
+They're scattered all around, out through the Panhandle, ridin' calico
+ponies, with jingly spurs and more than a bushel of doo-dads on the
+saddle.  They all come from old families, and I suppose after all it
+was a blessing that they had that much in their favor.  Because if most
+of them hadn't had a family tree to lean up against at times, they
+never could have kept their feet at all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, that wasn't what I meant, Steve.  I figured he was kind of a
+regular chap&mdash;the hero guy that's too hot proud to bat an eye, you
+know, even when he's&mdash;well, I just can't get it straight in words, but
+this is what I'm driving at.  The first night after you had gone he was
+settin' right here where I'm settin' now, looking quiet into the fire.
+I didn't ask him what was on his mind, not because I've learned not to
+go trackin' across other men's mental preserves, but simply because I
+didn't even have to guess more than once.  He's a nice lookin' boy,
+ain't he?  Sort of fine cut and tight built, and clean and decent
+looking.  I'd been thinkin' of that, too; thinkin' he didn't look like
+the others I've seen drop off so sudden it left me gasping.  Nor like
+them who went over so screamin' mad it left my palms wet and clammy
+from hangin' on to myself while they were going.  He looked different,
+settin' here and staring into the fire, and hell burning inside him,
+and saying nothing.  I sort of got to figurin' over him about
+then&mdash;sort of begun to wonder, even before I hunted up a deck of cards.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, you can smile if you want to, but you'll have to admit, just the
+same, that it's helped you stay sane once or twice yourself, figurin'
+whether or not I had an ace in the hole.  Lonesomeness like what we've
+both seen ain't so very different from what he was fightin' at that
+very moment&mdash;not if the thing you're lonesome for and the thing you're
+thirsty for are things you know you can't have.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I invited him to set in for a bit of intellectual pastime; I had to
+invite him twice, but he smiled then and agreed just as though he was
+glad to.  And then, careless and off-hand, I asked him would he care to
+name the stakes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He waited quite a while before he answered me.  You know how quiet it
+can be here in the timber, Steve, when it starts out to be quiet.
+Well, I could just feel the silence right here in this room.  And then
+he laughed!  It wasn't hardly any sound at all he made, and yet it
+might have been a blast, it hit me that sudden.  I don't like that kind
+of laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Stakes?' he says after me, just as precise as could be.  'Why,
+surely!  I should be happy to back my play, but I'm afraid that my
+present supply of cash would hardly stand a very heavy drain.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He didn't have to explain even that much.  Right along I'd been
+certain enough that he didn't have a copper with him.  I'd put his
+watch away where he couldn't find it and&mdash;and maybe swap it with one of
+the hands for a half a pint.  But I let on to be thinkin' for a while,
+until I brightened up as if the idea just hit me.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It wasn't exactly fair, I'll admit.  It wasn't what either of us would
+call a straight play, but&mdash;but&mdash;oh, I'd been watching him, just as I've
+told you.  I knew he would about pay his soul for the drink that was
+due him in fifteen or twenty minutes; he was eyein' the bottle on the
+shelf right that minute.  But I'd never seen a man's face give the lie
+to his spirit, either, the way his did, if he was the kind that would
+quit cold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Cash ain't no consideration with me,' I told him, generous enough.
+'But, personally, I've reached that degree of excellence where I can't
+play the game just for the sake of the technique of it any more.  It's
+a quarter to nine,' says I, 'and in just fifteen minutes you get your
+gill of Three Star.  Now, how much&mdash;how much, figurin' on the present
+state of supply and demand&mdash;would you reckon that drink appeals to you,
+in dollars and cents, U. S. A.?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve, you know he wasn't too steady.  His hands were shaking&mdash;oh,
+you've seen 'em, too.  But there he sits and looks back across the
+table at me, monkeyin' with a stack of chips, and giving me smile for
+smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink,' he murmured, 'I wouldn't sell it
+for&nbsp;&#8230; well'&mdash;and he licked his lips that were dry as leather.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was enough!  I knew as well as he did how much he wanted it, but
+I was kind of disappointed, too.  I'd been hopin'&mdash;I thought
+maybe&mdash;Say, don't you just naturally hate to have your judgment of
+human nature miss the whole blamed target, just when you think you've
+scored a bulls-eye?  I do.  It hurts my self-confidence; makes me
+wonder if I ain't growin' careless of details.  And then, right there,
+I found out how close I'd come, and shootin' off-hand at that, mind
+you!  Right there he gave me my next lesson.  The nice, gentle way he
+cussed me out, that morning, was the first.  Maybe he'd read the
+disappointment in my face, because he laughed again, not quite so
+sudden this time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink for any price,' he repeats.  'But when it
+resolves itself to a gamble, I suppose, Joe, no gentleman should refuse
+the issue.  If I understand you correctly, if cash is no consideration,
+then suppose we say that one drink against the rest of the bottle, chip
+for chip and stack for stack.  Your confidence is not entirely
+reassuring to me, and yet perhaps I should tell you beforehand that
+I've always thought I could play this game half way well myself.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe rose and crossed to the table for a match.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now wasn't that meeting me half way?" he continued, when he was seated
+again.  "Wasn't it neatly done?  Why, for a moment I was most ashamed
+to go through with it.  I wouldn't have, only he sat there, smilin' so
+easy and confident.  But we played.  We played until daylight came
+around.  And accordin' to the way he scored it, just before we went
+down to the works in the morning, he didn't have a drink comin' to him
+for the next forty-eight hours!  I play a real involved and scientific
+game, Steve&mdash;but that ain't what I'm drivin' at.  When we'd got
+done&mdash;when we'd finished&mdash;I tried to make him take the glass that had
+been comin' to him at nine.  And he needed it, don't doubt that.  He
+needed it and could have had it, for I made it just as easy as anybody
+could.&#8230;  Steve, he ain't had a drink since that first night.  That
+was what I meant when I spoke about him being what they call a
+thoroughbred."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They sat for a time in silence after Joe had finished.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pride!" Stephen O'Mara exploded softly.  "Pride!  And Garry thinks his
+is dead; he thinks he has killed it himself.  But it was there on his
+face to-night, too, laughing up at me, Joe, just as it did at
+you&mdash;laughing at me, all amused at itself, out of that crooked smile of
+his.  And it'll never die.  It'll live as long as he does!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He looked down at the gun on his knee.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's all, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe cleared his throat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I gave him a job the next morning," lamely.  "We seemed to be
+getting along together fine so I&mdash;&mdash;  Shucks, I was just afraid to have
+him go!  That's the flat truth of it.  And you told me to keep him, if
+I could.  So I set him to checking up the stock in the storeroom and
+put him on keepin' time for the squad up here.  He's drawin' eighteen a
+week, Steve.  Was that all right?  You were figurin' on keeping him
+here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Joe Morgan saw Steve's eyes light up.  He saw a swift
+something flash out from within, which, once or twice before in the
+years of their friendship, had set his face to burning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe," Steve exclaimed, "you're right about that matter of family
+trees.  I know a man right now who doesn't have to go back one minute
+in his pedigree to prove that he's a gentleman.  I've left some tough
+propositions for you to solve, Joe.  Lots of times, when I couldn't see
+the way out, I've put it up to you.  If I merely say 'thanks, Joe,' and
+let it go at that, do you think it will do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Suits me!" Joe's jauntiness was large.  "And it goes double on the
+rebound.  But how&mdash;how do you suppose any woman ever came to set a&mdash;boy
+like that to slipping?  Or why didn't he sit down where it was quiet
+and figure it all out for himself?  One bad guess don't make the whole
+world wrong.  And say, wouldn't it be lucky, though, if he could meet a
+real nice girl about now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve leaned back and gave way to rare and subdued laughter.  It was
+much as though he did not want the sound to penetrate to that dark end
+room in the shack beyond.  And then he was quickly sober-faced again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think he is going to, Joe.  I think I may promise that he is likely
+to, very, very soon.  And it will make a difference&mdash;a mighty big
+difference for Garry.  For, if you don't mind my mentioning the matter
+again, in spite of the preachments of many of your novelists to the
+contrary, it's just about as Garry has argued it to be.  Most men are
+just as fine&mdash;just as decent&mdash;as women demand they shall be."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He lifted the revolver and tossed it negligently across the room.  It
+struck with a thud in the middle of his own bunk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where did he get that six-shooter?  It looks like one of yours?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is," said Joe.  "Nothing gaudy nor ornamental, but a right handy
+thing.  And, there!  That's another error I made, ain't it?  I reckon
+it's going to be difficult for me to get used to the idea of any man
+being a dangerous enemy to himself.  I gave it to him the first day he
+went to work."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's eyes traveled across to the object under discussion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Harrigan came back before you did," his explanation seemed to veer to
+another quarter.  "He was most punctual, I'd say, wouldn't you?  He
+came in tuned up real melodious on the last load with Big Louie.  He
+sung big-voiced that night; he's been talkin' big-voiced since, I'm led
+to understand."  Again that mental shift.  "Gun-play always did seem
+awful foolish to me&mdash;to talk about!  When men start to advertisin'
+trouble to come, by word o' mouth, it never does worry me particularly.
+I just gave your friend the gun to keep around handy, if he should
+happen to need it.  Did you know he could make the ace of spades look
+shopworn and weary at thirty paces with one of those toys?  Well, he
+can."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve smiled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're not totin' one of them yourself, yet, I see?" he remarked
+lazily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fat Joe spat in vast contempt.  He clenched one pudgy hand and sat
+watching the knuckles pale, iron-hard, beneath the seeming softness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you?" he countered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This time Steve's laughter was soundless.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Scarcely!  We're going to hear some of them yap lots louder than they
+do now, before the winter is over.  But you might give that one back to
+Garry in the morning.  And, as for the rest of it, I suppose we'll be
+quite likely to forget, won't we, Joe, that either of us has so much as
+seen or thought of a gun to-night?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both of them had risen.  Joe puckered his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Forget it?  How can we," he demanded, "when we don't even know
+anything to forget!  Why, as I reckon it, we'll both get up in the
+morning and regard it as a dream just too foolish even to bother to
+relate."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Their eyes held for a moment, before Steve turned again toward the
+door.  And perhaps his manner was a little too unconcerned that
+evening, a little too carefully careless, for almost before he had
+lifted the latch Fat Joe stepped forward, one quick, protesting step,
+and then stopped on second thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ain't goin'&mdash;&mdash;" he began, and suffered that spoken protest also
+to remain uncompleted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's not late," Steve's voice was thoughtful.  "It's not late, but
+it's surely very quiet."  He stood gazing out into the gloom.  "Maybe
+I'd best run down and see what ails our soloist to-night.  Somehow, the
+more I've thought about it, the more I've come to fear that he is
+temperamental, Joe&mdash;too temperamental, for such a wearing proposition
+as this one is likely to be.  And you haven't slept much since I've
+been gone.  Oh, that was easy, just from your eyes!  So you'd better
+turn in.  I'll just stroll down and let them know that I'm back home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is odd how much of finality there can be in the quietest of
+statements.  Eyes narrowed, Joe stood in the middle of the floor and
+watched him depart without further objection.  But the moment the
+blackness had swallowed him up he backed to the bunk, fumbled for the
+gun which Steve had tossed upon the blankets, and followed out into the
+dark.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara stood a long time outside the door of the men's
+bunkhouse that night, fingers upon the latch, before he made any move
+to enter.  But neither a wish to eavesdrop nor a desire to frame,
+experimentally, the words he meant to speak was the reason behind that
+pause.  It was in itself a new thing to find the long, low building
+lighted at that hour, even though, as he had himself put it to Joe an
+instant before, it was hours from being late.  That night the almost
+absolute silence beyond the closed door was an even more unusual state
+of affairs.  The voice of one man only was audible; the words he spoke
+indistinguishable altogether.  But sudden bursts of laughter,
+punctuating the recital which he could not clearly follow, were
+indication enough to the man outside of what manner of tale was holding
+the ears of that roomful of rivermen.  Stephen O'Mara, who had long
+ceased to wonder at the discovery in them, of new and impulsive
+finenesses which bordered close upon inherent nobility, knew fully as
+well how utterly and unspeakably gross could be the premeditated
+coarseness of those same men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no movement to mark his entrance when he finally pressed the
+latch and swung the door open; not so much as a single glance to
+indicate that his presence was noted.  Under the yellow light of
+flickering oil lamps the eyes of all those scores of gaudy-shirted
+figures lounging against the walls were fixed eagerly upon the face of
+him who held the middle of their stage&mdash;him who talked from where he
+half-lay, propped on one elbow, in his bunk at the end of the room.
+Harrigan, red-shirted, red-headed, was lounging at case, waiting for
+the last gurgle of appreciation to subside, before he gave them the
+close of the story&mdash;the last titbit, the savor of which already had set
+him noisily to licking his lips.  And in the doorway Steve, rigid of a
+sudden, sensed what that climax was to be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;Her fi-an-say inside," the droningly indistinguishable words were
+very plain now, "her fi-an-say inside, consoomed with pr-ride and
+anticipation, tellin' all who had come to dance that she had pr-romised
+to be his, for-river more!  And her, at that same minute outside with
+him&mdash;and both av thim.&#8230;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Harrigan did not hurry it in the telling.  And if his portrayal of
+Archibald Wickersham was unmistakably deliberate, neither did he fail
+for want of sufficient detail, to make the other picture clear.  Vilely
+he gave them the complete imagery of his vile brain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A shout went up, a louder, hoarser outcry of applause which rocked the
+room.  And then that rigid figure in the doorway had started forward.
+Between those lanes of suddenly silent men Steve passed in silence, to
+stand before him who had achieved his climax a breath before.  And at
+his coming Harrigan slid from the bunk, started to reach within the
+blanket pack at the head of what had been his bed, and then thought
+better of such impulse.  Bravado intermingled with blank surprise, he
+came haltingly to his feet.  The voices of few men have been as
+unhurriedly deadly as was that of him who Harrigan that night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was wise, Harrigan," Steve told him slowly&mdash;far too gently.
+"That was wise to let your knife lie safe within your pack.  For if
+you'd touched it, I'd have killed you&mdash;as I ought to kill you now.  But
+you're drunk, Harrigan!  You were drunk a minute ago when you lied your
+lie.&#8230;  You're soberer now.  You're sober enough to start again and
+tell me you're a liar!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They waited&mdash;the roomful of rivermen.  Nothing stirred save the clouds
+of filmy blue smoke floating against the rafters&mdash;that and a bulky blot
+of shadow outside which shifted a little, noiselessly, just beyond the
+patch of light that streamed through the door.  They waited,
+heavy-breathed, while Harrigan began to recover from the disconcertment
+into which O'Mara's coming had flung him.  Slowly the former's lips
+twisted into a mocking leer; mockery rose and swam with the hatred in
+his inflamed eyes.  He would have spoken, sparring for time, when
+Steve's hand leapt in and made of the joking effort only a rattle in
+his throat.  Beneath the stiff red stubble the flesh was livid where
+those fingers had been, when he was able to draw breath again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke," he gasped, and gulped and swallowed hard.
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke I was tellin' the bhoys, about seein' you
+an'&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's voice bit in and cut him short.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your turkey's ready, Harrigan!"  He pointed at the pack toward which
+the other had groped and then thought better of the impulse.  "You were
+going, of your own accord, I see.  Well, I'm telling you to go, now!
+The door's open; I left it so for you, when I came in.  And I'm telling
+you too, before you leave, that you'll do well not to come back.
+There's not room for both of us on this river any more, Harrigan!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The riverman's eyes shifted.  Furtively they flitted from face to face
+in those rows of faces at the walls.  But whatever he thought or hoped
+to find&mdash;fleeting flash of support or encouragement&mdash;was hidden behind
+a common mask of astonishment as blank as had been his own.  They were
+waiting for his answer; he knew they were waiting for that as he
+crossed to the door.  And when he paused there, to turn in sudden
+savagery, he realized that his tardiness had robbed him of his chance.
+It was too late to talk back then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're tellin' me," he rasped out, "and I was going&mdash;sur-re!  But
+things ar-re not yet finished between you and me.  For I'm pr-romisin'
+you that I'll be back; I'm pr-romisin' you I'll be wid ye again.  I'll
+be wid ye again, come spring!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He disappeared.  And hard upon his going Steve wheeled and fronted
+those scores of silent men.  His eyes leaped from point to point, as
+Harrigan's had craftily flitted.  Briefly, crisply, he accompanied the
+sweeping survey with a voice that was loud enough for all of them to
+hear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Big Louie!&#8230;  Fallon!&#8230;  Shayne!  This is your chance to say
+so, if you're going to be lonesome, now that your song-bird has flown.
+Speak up!  I came down tonight just to hear you talk."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nothing but an indistinguishable murmur answered him, a low growl that
+was neither argument nor evasion.  For those hottest partisans, whose
+names had been called aloud, knew with Harrigan's going toward whom the
+chill finger had been pointed, even though Death had entered and
+stalked through their ranks and slipped back out at the door almost
+before they realised its nearness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rebellion was still a long way ahead for most of them.  They had not
+yet had time to talk themselves to the pitch of open revolt.  They had
+merely begun to listen to Harrigan whose disciples in dissatisfaction
+they were.  And now, in his absence, they stirred uncomfortably under
+the gaze of him who remained; they dropped their heads and searched for
+matches.  But Steve felt the weight of unspoken thoughts when he, too,
+faced back in the doorway.  This time there was no naming of names; he
+embraced the whole room when he spoke.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They tell me, boys," he said, "that there's talk among you of no more
+work on the river when we've put this railroad through.  I've heard it
+said that some of you think you are cutting the ground out from under
+your feet with every shovelful of earth you lift.  You ought to know
+better than that; you ought to know for yourselves that there'll be
+need for more men in these woods than there has ever been before.  But
+if you don't; if you can't see it that way, why not come around and let
+me have a fair chance to talk things over with you, myself, before you
+decide to turn on this job?  I want you to remember that a man who is a
+liar in one thing is mighty likely to talk loose-tongued, no matter
+what he preaches."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there, without lifting his eyes from the floor, Big Louie cleared
+his throat and made answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," he retorted.  "Maybe.  And maybe not so sure, either!  I have
+listened to big words before now, me, that have put no food under my
+belt, no coat to my back."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's smile was unruffled and kind.  No matter what the hidden
+verdict of the rest of that room might be, he had known already that
+Big Louie was past saving.  For there were not so many like him among
+those hills but what the type was instantly recognizable, wherever it
+was encountered.  He had the frame of a giant&mdash;Big Louie&mdash;the splendid
+legacy of generations of men who had lived out of doors.  But there was
+no depth in his seal-brown eyes which always seemed to brood; no
+decision in any move of his ponderous body.  He had little chin; he had
+no name, save Big Louie which his size alone had sired.  And Steve was
+very patient in making answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If it's only food and shelter, and clothes for your back, Big Louie,
+you'll not have to worry.  But I'm not promising either, mind, that
+there'll be easy money to blow on white whiskey.  Were you expecting
+any?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That brain which could cope with but one idea at a time was fertile
+ground for seed which such a one as Harrigan might sow.  Big Louie
+failed to reply.  He sat quiet, deep in thought when Stephen O'Mara
+closed the door noiselessly behind him.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="60%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was minutes after Steve had gone back up the hill before Garry
+Devereau reached out a hand in the darkness and touched,
+experimentally, what had seemed to be only a shapeless black blotch at
+the edge of light, a rod or two from the door.  And instantly at his
+touch the shadow was galvanized into life.  It reared and plunged and
+enveloped the slighter man in a crushing embrace and bore him over
+backward.  With the muzzle of a revolver chafing his ear Garry managed
+to worry his head high enough to free his mouth and nostrils from dirt.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Get off me!  Get off me, you fat romancer, you!" he whispered fiercely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An explosive grunt of dismay answered him, before Fat Joe let him rise.
+In a thin and profane tenor he was bidden to explain his presence there.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I couldn't sleep," Garry replied, his voice still peevish, "so I came
+out for a breath of air.  I saw him start this way&mdash;saw you following
+him with that gun in your hand.  I just slipped over, too, in case
+there might be doings.  What's the row, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe took him ungently by the elbow, turned him about and started him up
+the rise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"An old grudge," he deigned an ungracious explanation.  "It's years and
+years old.  Steve licked him once.  Once when they were boys the folks
+that live down next to Allison's dressed Steve up like a picture-book,
+the nearest I can make out, and sent him to town a-shoppin'.  Harrigan,
+he&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know!  I remember!"  Garry's eager whisper interrupted.  "That is, I
+didn't know that Harrigan was one of the mob Steve whipped that day.
+But that wasn't what I meant.  Who was the&mdash;the girl Harrigan was
+talking about, when Steve&mdash;when Steve&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's fingers tightened a little as the other evinced a tendency to lag.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hurry a bit, will you?" he urged complainingly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Show a little speed!  I'm supposed to be up there asleep."  And then,
+gruffly: "It was the Allison girl, of course."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In spite of the hand upon his elbow Garrett Devereau stopped short in
+his tracks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara!" he stammered.  "Barbara Allison?  Joe, was that the girl he
+meant to-night, when he said he was going to 'marry one of those women
+himself?'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe peered at him, trying to make out the expression upon his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why not?" he wanted to know.  "Why not?  Ain't he good enough for her?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There came a pause&mdash;then Garry's stunned rejoinder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good enough!" he repeated senselessly.   "Good enough?"  He laughed
+half wildly, as though he had suddenly hit upon a very funny thought
+indeed.  "That man in love with a girl like her.&#8230;  Good Lord!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Fat Joe, who had failed to understand, swore again beneath his
+breath because there was no time left in which to argue the matter.
+His face was still very red from his struggle for self-restraint, and
+his whole mental balance so disturbed that he forgot entirely to
+conceal the blued revolver dangling in one hand when he re-entered the
+cabin a moment later.  The latter object ruined the effect of his
+insouciant rendition of "Home, Sweet Home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thought you were going to retire, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve was already undressed and crawling into bed.  His question was
+slow-worded and a trifle stifled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was," Joe assured him hastily.  "I was.  I just stepped out to see
+that everything was tight and tidy for the night, that's all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Quizzical eyes contemplated the revolver now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Taken to carrying a weapon, after all, eh?  Well, perhaps that's
+wisest.  And blow out the light, will you, Joe?  I'm tired.  You'll
+have to undress in the dark."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Steve buried his face in his pillow.  But sundry sounds, escaping,
+were unmistakably hysterical.  Joe's mouth opened and closed, fishlike.
+He stood and stared down at his side, in beautifully eloquent
+profanity, if a stare can be both eloquent and profane.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You need a nurse," he stated sulkily at last.  He finished the light
+with a vicious blast.  "You need a chaperon!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But once again, just before he slept, Steve heard him mutter to
+himself, less injuredly, as he heaved over in his bunk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This has been a very busy evening," he opined.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+LAW AND LUMBER
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Rain fell the following fortnight in a steady downpour that did not
+cease, even for an hour.  Ragged, smokelike clouds hung over the valley
+at Thirty-Mile, dragged so low by their own weight that they not only
+hid the upper peaks but shrouded the lower ridges as well.  They drove
+by in interminable files of grey, making sluiceways of every cut and
+drenching continually the men of the construction gang who, in spite of
+the chill of that downfall, still sweated at their labor.  But both
+Steve and Fat Joe, for all that they caught each day a deeper note in
+the hoarse complaints of those same men&mdash;a note no less ominous than
+was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river&mdash;nevertheless were
+duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining.  It
+might have snowed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Each morning now as he stepped outside the shack Joe turned
+methodically toward the north, to cock his head and squint and sniff,
+questioningly.  He was waiting for the first flurry which would herald
+those months of bitter whiteness to follow; and each morning his short
+nod was a brief of satisfaction at the continued height of the mercury.
+They made the most of that open fall, bad as was the weather.  Without
+pause they toiled forward those wet days, or rather backward, for they
+had stopped, there at the edge of the river, in the work on that
+section of the rail-bed which, none too even-surfaced but almost
+arrow-straight, ran from the upper end of their valley to the very
+mouth of the Reserve Company's country.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A month earlier it had been Steve's plan to span that mile or so of
+swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in.  Nor was his
+altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised
+the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow an
+oozing, quaking morass.  It no longer represented merely a positive not
+too alluring problem in engineering&mdash;that strip of swamp and open
+water.  It had taken on a newer, strategic importance.  And the change
+in Steve's plans, so far as the work at Thirty-Mile was concerned, was
+as much due to the news which Fat Joe brought home with him, one night
+toward the end of the next week, as it was the result of the interview
+which he had held with Hardwick Elliott himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe had been a whole day absent on the north end of the line.  Alone he
+had been over every foot of that all but completed stretch which ended
+at the border of swampland, there at headquarters, troubling himself
+not at all over the unevenness of the roadbed, satisfied entirely with
+the surety he gained with every inspected mile, that a train-load of
+logs or a dozen train-loads, would stay on the rails when the rails
+were laid, and the day came to set wheels rolling.  But the further
+report he brought back with him was far less reassuring.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder," Joe mused aloud that night, "I wonder, now, why any man who
+knows anything about handling timber should go to work bothering
+himself with skidways leadin' down to the river, when he knows, as well
+as Harrigan should know, that it ain't comin' out that way?  It don't
+seem good sense nor logic to me, unless&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stopped there and left his own opinion unfinished.  Since the
+evening Harrigan had stepped out of the main bunkhouse and disappeared,
+black rage in his face and a promise to return upon his lips, that
+lumberman's red head had been conspicuous only because it was absent
+from the landscape.  So far Harrigan had failed to reappear and Fat
+Joe's method of apprising his chief of his return to the Reserve
+Company's pay-roll was distinctly characteristic.  But Steve's
+reception of the news was little more than listless.  He seemed to
+change the subject entirely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't see why it wouldn't be just as easy, or easier," he replied,
+"to cross here on pilings, practically the whole distance, as it would
+be to fill and bridge, too.  And if we were to look at it in that
+light, then why wouldn't it be still easier to drive those piles, say
+next February or March, while the swamp is still crusted over and hard.
+It would afford us some sort of a footing to work on then, other than
+black ooze and lilypads.  Wouldn't it seem so to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry Devereau's agreement was quick with enthusiasm, but Fat Joe who
+was better schooled in those slow-syllabled discussions, barely nodded
+his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'd still have that track north of here to lay," he advised, "when we
+work in from the south with steel."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Surely," Steve admitted.  "Of course.  But wouldn't that be a better
+bet than to stand to see our embankment and bridge&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He broke off there, just as Joe had hesitated a moment before.  The
+undercurrent of meaning for which the latter's ears were waiting came
+to the surface, however, when Steve began again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Suppose, Joe," he pursued lazily, "suppose you had contracted with a
+railroad&mdash;an infant road too young even to be named&mdash;to move for you
+more timber than either of us will ever own; contracted in apparent
+good faith, when all along in your heart you were certain that the
+railroad itself would never be able to fulfill its half of the bargain?
+Granting such a state of affairs, Joe, what do you suppose you would
+do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry was not quite certain that evening which was uppermost&mdash;the
+earnestness or quiet amusement which surely underlay that question.  He
+only knew that both existed.  But Fat Joe understood.  As he had done
+many times before now he wrinkled his forehead and pondered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe I'd hire me a red-headed river-dog," came his answer pat.
+"Maybe I'd hire me a bully-boy boss of white water, to build me some
+skidways to the nearest floodwater, so's I could teach the infant
+railroad you mention that business was business, contract or no
+contract."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course you would!" Steve agreed instantly, and he might have been
+complimenting a first primer favorite so pleased was his tone.  "Of
+course you would.  I'm afraid that was too easy for you, wasn't it,
+Joe?  But now suppose you were bent on proving to everybody, and
+particularly to those who had fathered it, what an unfortunate weakling
+this immature, unnamed child of constructive silence really was.  In
+that event how do you figure you'd conduct yourself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe smiled oddly, a little balefully.  It was magic-quick, that change
+in his expression&mdash;as swift as was the thought behind it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd have my logs all cut and ready to haul as an excuse, wouldn't I?"
+he inquired with simulated anxiety.  "Could I tell folks, through the
+newspapers for instance, that I wasn't strong for letting my timber lie
+for the grubs to lunch on, if I had to square myself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quite naturally."  Until then Steve's face had kept its preternatural
+gravity.  He grinned ever so faintly now.  "Very naturally you'd want
+to save your winter cut."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I'd like to have 'em build a bridge somewheres along the river I
+aimed to drive&mdash;a bridge and a nice dirt embankment, all dressed up
+with rails and ties and things on top.  I'm allowed to suppose I've got
+an awful long standin' score, ain't I, along with all this timber?
+Well, that's what I'd like to have 'em do, then.  And when I opened her
+up, a few miles up river, and she began to roar; when that first head
+of water hit the bridge and the sticks begun to grind, I suppose I'd
+take up my position on the bank where I could watch real well.  I'd
+light me a long, black cigar and murmur, sort of languid and
+sympathetic, 'There goes your railroad, gents!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before the finish of that speech was reached Garry had begun to follow.
+When Joe drew down one corner of his mouth and puffed aloft an
+imaginary cloud of smoke by way of added vividness, his own laughter
+mingled with Steve's quieter appreciation.  But his contribution to the
+conversation was not as complacent as Fat Joe's had been.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Such a move in itself would be outside the letter of the contract," he
+expostulated.  "Why, they wouldn't dare do anything; they wouldn't dare
+to begin driving the river before your time was up, much less do damage
+to your completed work.  What excuse&mdash;what legal excuse&mdash;could they
+give, even though they were morally certain that you were bound to
+fail?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Very slowly, almost pityingly, Joe turned toward him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Legal!" he droned.  "Moral?"  And then he laughed his clear tenor
+outburst which barely escaped being a giggle.  "Dear child, judiciously
+speaking, law and lumber and morals and mill-feet don't mix.  They
+don't mix at all, in this section of the country.  If they wanted to
+bother their heads with an alibi, they could say it was top of flood,
+and they weren't eager to be hung up, just because a brass-buttoned
+conductor promised 'em a through express in the morning.  They could
+say&mdash;  But what good would explanations do us, huh, if they sent a half
+million logs sky-hootin' into our bridge?  It wouldn't save our
+construction, would it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He wheeled back to Steve, his manner brisk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do we leave that stretch open?" he asked.  "Is that the way you have
+it figured?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm afraid we'd better," Steve said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And from the very deliberation of that reply Garry Devereau realized
+how vital was the point which they had been weighing so irresponsibly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was as close as they came to anything resembling a discussion of
+the change which was growing more and more noticeable in the bearing of
+the men at Thirty-Mile.  As far as all outward evidence was concerned,
+Steve seemed to ignore it utterly, to retreat oftener and oftener
+behind his habit of silence which even Fat Joe, after several
+unsuccessful, garrulous attempts, gave over trying to penetrate.  And
+even Garry, who had greater respect for the other man's preoccupation
+because he felt that he understood it better, tried also to hide all
+evidence of the bitterness which it was re-awakening in him.  Yet, at
+that, Garry's surmise was erroneous; his conclusion wide of the mark.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For it was not the hunger of his own heart; it was neither intolerance
+of restraint nor mental rebellion against the duties which were holding
+him so close up-river, that had caused the chief engineer of the East
+Coast work to withdraw so completely within himself, although, many
+times each day, his eyes did wander toward the south and Morrison.
+During that bleak period, as Garry had guessed, Steve's thoughts were
+often of Barbara, but they were not sombre thoughts.  The very hardness
+of his life schooling had taught him too well how little of wisdom
+there is in fretting against the day of action, when that day cannot be
+hurried nor controlled.  Steadfastedly he refused to let himself brood.
+If he could not go to her he would not, nevertheless, allow himself to
+dwell upon that impossibility.  Instead his spirit ranged ahead to a
+hopeful, more or less indefinite and not too distant date when his
+absence might not seem to threaten too great a cost to those whose
+matters lay in his trust.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry's conclusion, borne of his own lesson in doubt, was wide of the
+mark.  It was not heartache.  The thoughts Steve had of her were his
+serenest thoughts, those days during which his body labored
+prodigiously and his brain groped for the solution of an affair that
+had not been his own, until he had chosen to make it so.  It was the
+problem of Garrett Devereau which lay behind Stephen O'Mara's hours of
+gravity&mdash;that perplexing problem which Miriam Burrell, level of eye and
+brave of tongue, had brought to him for help.  And in the end, as is
+usually the way, events of themselves finally gave Steve the
+opportunity to say all that he knew could not be introduced by him.
+Time showed the way just when he had reached the point of acknowledging
+that such an opportunity was beyond his own power to bring about.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had had little chance for conversation with Garry in those days,
+except for a word or two over a hastily snatched breakfast, or perhaps
+at supper at night, and at night he was usually too tired to talk.  But
+the other's growing restlessness had not escaped his notice.  For a
+while Garry had seemed to accept his continuance there at camp as a
+matter of course, and for that very reason neither Fat Joe nor Steve
+had dignified the thought of his possible departure by so much as a
+single spoken word.  Garry's own actions first began to indicate how
+incessantly he was debating that question within his own brain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There came, times without number, an uneasy, far-focused look into his
+eyes; came hours on end when he would sit, every debonaire effort at
+lightness abandoned, staring moodily into the fire, motionless save for
+his nervous hands which never seemed to rest.  Joe found it harder to
+entice him with the poker deck; oftener than not Steve had to repeat
+his question a second time, seeking to inveigle him into a discussion
+of what-not, before Garry even heard.  And one night toward the end of
+the week the latter finally reached the point of voicing for their ears
+a decision which was old in anticipation to them.  They were on the
+point of going to bed.  Garry had risen, and then paused.  He hesitated
+and crooked his arms and yawned, a trifle too carelessly that evening.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, this finishes another day," he remarked, nor did he realize how
+soulful were the words.  "And I cleaned up the last of the stock-room
+to-day, Joe.  A swift but accurate workman, eh?  I'll leave behind a
+record unblemished by oversight or sloth.  And now&mdash;now it's about
+time, I suppose, I was going back to town."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was out, nor could the yawn conceal his eagerness.  His back was
+turned, but Steve knew what light was in his eyes.  Steve's
+carelessness was a far neater thing than Garry's had been.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's your hurry?" he inquired easily.  "Why rush away?  And if you
+think your industry has betrayed you into idleness, you're reasoning
+poorly to-night.  Want another job?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Bantering indifference was the keynote of that reply.  Mutually they
+had adopted it from the very first.  It smacked of the free-masonry
+which always marked Steve's conversations with Fat Joe, were they
+earnest or frivolous beneath the surface.  It is always recognizable in
+the speech of friends such as they, differentiated from actual
+indifference by an intimacy of inference between the lines which makes
+such discourse almost foreign to uninitiated ears.  But Garry's answer
+was not in kind.  Steve was caught so far off his guard by the question
+which came flinging back at him that he was glad Garry had not turned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What else is there I could do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No man save one who was very, very tired could have spoken in such a
+tone; no man except one who has tried himself in the highest of
+courts&mdash;his own opinion of himself&mdash;could have put such a degree of
+contempt into so simple a query.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why&mdash;why&mdash;&mdash;" Steve faltered, and then he took command of his own wits
+again.  "There's work enough, don't doubt that," he exclaimed, and
+laughed a little.  "Joe, here, will be another week or ten days
+finishing with the fill up yonder; he'll do well if he manages it by
+then, and that too with every available hand we have.  I don't want to
+rob him of a single man, if I can help it, but I've got to go ahead
+with the line to the south.  To put it concretely, I'm in need of a
+rodman.  Do you think you'd care to oblige?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again the hint of banter persisted, but Garry's jaw was tight when he
+faced suddenly around.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will!" he flashed back, hoarsely.  "I will, if it's a man's job.
+But I'm done with filling a dinky pad with rows of figures, all day
+long.  I'm finished with this damned tallying of cans of beans and soap
+and yards of rope!  Do you understand?  What <I>work</I> would I have to do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Out of the corners of his eyes Steve saw consternation o'erspread Fat
+Joe's face.  His own was only amused.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll have to swing an axe," he enumerated slowly, "and you'll have
+to lug a rod and tripod.  You'll wade through bog and fight your way
+through underbrush.  And then, for variety, swing an axe some more.  If
+you've never learned yet what it is to be really tired, Garry; if
+you've never known what it is to go to bed wishing morning would never
+come, you'll find out what that's like, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As soon as it was spoken Steve recognized the slip.  Watching Garry's
+eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also.  For a moment a
+torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips.  And then he swallowed
+and nodded shortly.  The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully
+as electrical as the threatened outburst might have been.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll try it," he said, very simply.  "I'll have a try at it,
+to-morrow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And he pivoted on his heel and passed out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some minutes after he had gone Fat Joe, still a little dazed, rose
+softly and unostentatiously, crossed to a shelf shoulder-high on the
+wall and reached to remove a quart bottle of brandy which Steve,
+returning home soaked through and through, had brought out and left
+standing there.  But Steve checked him in the very middle of that act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let it stand, Joe," he directed.  "Leave it where it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As slowly as he had reached for it Joe started to put the bottle back.
+The very briefness of that order should have been warning enough, but
+Joe found it impossible to keep to himself his disapproval.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All right," he acquiesced, "only I can't help remindin' you, just the
+same, that when a horse is runnin' his heart out it's kind of
+superfluous to lay on the whip."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then the whole accumulation of those days of silent perplexity, of
+indecision and fruitless mental forays, spilled over upon Fat Joe's
+entirely innocent head.  Steve shot around and levelled a pre-emptory
+finger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whip&mdash;hell!" he barked.  "Put that bottle back!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's fingers came away as though the glass had blistered them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Lands' sakes!" he exclaimed; and in a voice that was chastened and
+meek when he had caught his breath: "Please, and it's back!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Chronic ill-temper could hardly have persisted in the face of that
+reply, and Steve's had been but a mood.  His first chuckle was in
+itself a plea for pardon.  He supplemented it, aloud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sorry, Joe&mdash;I'm worried.  I've got a job on my hands that bothers
+me.  It appears to be simple enough, until I get to planning how to
+tackle it, and then I can't make any headway at all.  But there isn't
+anything to be gained in hiding that stuff; that's one of the things I
+need to know.  It's better where it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe waved a hand in bland dismissal of the apology.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My mistake," he averred, "though your harsh words have hurt me sore.
+I don't quite savvy it yet, but it's your affair, not mine.  You're
+dealin' and bankin' the chips.  And before now I've seen lots of
+well-meanin' bystanders get all mussed up from trying to horn into
+another man's pastime.  At my age I'd ought to have knowed better!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap16"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+In itself that decision of Garry's to remain a little longer at
+Thirty-Mile was scarcely significant enough to be called sensational,
+and yet it proved to be the first of a series of events which, growing
+more and more sensational as they progressed, finally resulted in the
+hour for which Steve was biding his time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry entered upon his new duties the following morning in a spirit
+anything but reassuring to his companion.  Up to that time he had made
+his own industry the butt of much good-natured ridicule, viewing it
+apparently as a sort of vacation novelty amusing enough while the
+novelty lasted.  But he went from task to task that next day in a
+methodical, dogged fashion that was farthest of all from amiability.
+Two or three times Steve, trying to spare him needless effort,
+attempting to show him how to favor blistered hands and aching back,
+met with rebuffs so curt that he learned to keep his advice to himself.
+He knew what end Garry was working to achieve; he would have allowed
+himself to smile over the thought that the other man would be tired
+enough, before night came, without trying to make that work any harder,
+only he did not dare venture that smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Times without number there were when Garry's monumental fit of sulks
+bordered close on the ridiculous, but the needed triviality which would
+have precipitated the whole fabric to a terra-firma of absurdity failed
+to materialize.  He cursed the rain, cursed it with his fluent
+precision which already had earned Fat Joe's admiring comment.  He
+complained, querulously, like a half-aged boy, over the treacherous
+footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded.  And once when he had
+felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of
+Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive
+diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things&mdash;a short
+discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's
+admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully
+concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and then died out
+in Garry's eyes when the hemlock only grazed him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now and again Steve saw his lips move and then crook in cynical
+amusement, and knew that Garry was talking to himself and finding such
+communion most absorbing.  But he waited, outwardly patient at least,
+nor tried to hurry the issue.  He knew the woods; he knew what the
+silence and solitude could do.  For no man endures mutely the spell of
+the wilderness.  He talks, or he goes mad.  Put two men on a two-months
+trail and, be they the worst of enemies, they will still find a topic
+which each may approach.  Trap them for a winter in a snow-buttressed
+valley where no other man can penetrate and they will have bared
+jealous secrets before spring sets them free to go again their roads of
+doubled hatred.  And when dusk came&mdash;dusk and a fatigue which made it
+difficult to drag one foot after the other on the homeward
+journey&mdash;Garry had reached the point where he had to speak his thoughts
+aloud.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The woods were new to that paler, slighter man.  He had to talk, but
+his beginning was circuitous.  He had been gazing down at his
+rain-soaked length, grotesquely thin in the flapping garments borrowed
+from Steve's wardrobe, to look up at last and smile, wryly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was just thinking," he began.  "I was just thinking if they could
+only see me now&mdash;the crowd down at Morrison for instance.  They used to
+gibe me.  They called me the immaculate Garry, once.  Aren't you a lot
+heavier than you look?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Plodding along beside him Steve nodded as though the whole day had been
+common with just such conversation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  Those clothes were built with an eye to largeness of movement
+which scarcely insured shape or draping, even upon me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was irrelevant, but it was a beginning.  And the reference to the
+crowd at Morrison made Garry's next remark clear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wouldn't it jolt them, if they could see me?  I thought of it this
+morning when I was walking a log without so much as a waver.  That
+phrase relative to walking a chalk-line is weak and inadequate, after a
+man has tried to work his way along a peeled hemlock.  If anyone wants
+to measure sobriety by word of mouth, there's his standard.  It
+involves the last degree in sure-footedness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again Steve bowed his head, but not so immediately this time.  For
+already he realized that this was not to be the opportunity for which
+he was waiting.  And the other man was quick to catch that uncertainty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The other evening&mdash;&mdash;" he laughed unpleasantly&mdash;"that night when you
+came back to camp in time to hear of Joe's proposed novelistic effort,
+I think I mentioned it to you.  I'm not sure.  But whether I did or
+not, it was, no doubt, scarcely introduced in the spirit in which I
+should ask it now.&#8230;  I suppose they have given you a fairly
+thorough report of my&mdash;career, since we were knights bold and ladies
+fair, haven't they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Without waiting for a reply he answered the question himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course they have," he exclaimed, "because I recognized your fine
+hand in Joe's attitude toward me, the very minute I waked up, back a
+week or so ago, the morning after I'd done my Phil Sheridan stunt from
+Allison's to your shack.  But do you mind telling me what your own
+opinion is?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara knew they were not going to get far if they followed
+that lead.  There was a challenge in Garry's voice which too closely
+resembled a snarl.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why&mdash;no."  The pre-occupied note was uppermost in his answer.  "I'd
+not mind at all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But he offered no more than that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nor the reason why you've been so insistent that I stay on up here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why not?  I've not forgotten my manners, even though I've lived some
+months in the back-brush!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+No attempt at levity, however, could parry the other's deliberate
+insolence.  Garry worked nearer to what had lain all day behind his bad
+silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man is wasting his time trying to reform another man," he
+vouchsafed, "if that other man has no desire for reformation."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That is very, very true," Steve agreed with even gravity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Unless that man has the desire within himself, he need never waste his
+time even hoping to come back!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm forced to admit that there is no room for argument in that,
+either," said Steve.  "Only it has to be more than a desire.  It must
+have become determination."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He hesitated, and the whimsical note crept in and dulled the threatened
+edge of hardness in his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know of a case in point, that happened right here in these woods.
+One of the finest sportsmen who ever hunted or fished over this country
+had a favorite guide&mdash;Long John LeClaire was his name.  In fact, he
+never went into camp without him, for upward of a score of years, and
+he claimed there never was a better cook, between here and the border.
+But Long John had one bad failing.  As long as one kept to the timber
+with him it was plain sailing, but strike a town and it meant a week's
+delay in sobering that guide up.  Town and a spree were synonymous in
+Long John's mind; and after trying both mental and physical suasion the
+sportsman I mentioned finally hit upon another plan.  He persuaded Long
+John to take the 'cure'; more than that, he put him on a train himself
+and saw him off.  But there was nothing enthusiastic about John's
+departure.  You see, way down deep in his heart, he was just a little
+afraid this proposed treatment would be successful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He went, but his going was reluctant.  And then, a month later he came
+back again, and, oh, what a difference there was in his return!  It
+took the conductor and two train-men to put him off at the station;
+they were considerably marked up in the operation.  Once safely landed
+on the platform, however, Long John spread out his feet to steady his
+wavering body and waved a hand in hearty greeting to the crowd which
+had assembled to welcome him home.  His hat was gone; he had a
+discolored eye, but the reluctance was gone from his carriage.  And he
+made a speech which for expressive briefness surpasses anything I've
+ever heard, before or since:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'There!' he declared his triumph.  'There!  And now I guess I've
+showed 'em no sanatorium could ever cure me!'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Garry did not laugh.  His smile was mirthlessly sardonic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then why the devil have you tried to keep me up here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Any man might well have objected to the manner of that question; many
+men would have spoken too hastily, forgetting that there are worse ills
+than those of the body.  But Steve was not ready to hit back yet.  He
+was thinking of Miriam Burrell; he lied with skillful smoothness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told you last night," he said.  "I need men.  And then, too, it's a
+long time since I've seen you.  I've not made so many friends, you
+know, Garry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garrett Devereau would have stopped there, dripping as he was, in the
+middle of the timber, had not Steve held to his stride.  And he must
+have caught a momentary glimpse of that self which he was exhibiting to
+his companion, for his next words were a little mollified.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perspective is an excellent thing," he murmured.  "It's been said
+before, but I'm repeating it.  It's not only illuminating in just the
+matter of view, but it unsettles one's sense of values, doesn't it?  I
+mean the Bignesses and Smallnesses of things&mdash;and creatures.  When I
+went away, or rather when you did, back I don't remember how many
+years, you were tugging at the bit to be up and at things.  That used
+to perplex me, although you may not have known it; I never really
+caught your angle or viewpoint.  But now that you are in the thick of
+it I'm puzzled to know whether you find it&mdash;well, sufficient in itself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+O'Mara laughed softly over his shoulder.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sufficient!" he echoed.  "Wouldn't you, if you were fact
+[Transcriber's note: face?] to face every day with some problem or
+other that had you stumped?  Wouldn't you, if you were playing a game
+that shifted so rapidly from point to point that it kept you dodging
+and ducking and swearing to hold your feet?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry drew a deep breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's what I've been trying to establish in my own mind," he
+faltered.  "I've been thinking perhaps&mdash;but, pah!"  He spat out a
+fragment of laughter as though it were bitter to his tongue.  "I tried
+one job&mdash;I tried once!  I ought to know better than to wonder even,
+now.  And if a man can see no reason for living his life, it's his to
+quit, if he wants to!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Steve abandoned his air of tolerance; he changed his style of
+play.  The contempt in his retort could not have been more measured,
+even had it been other than a premeditated thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quit is the right word," he came back coolly.  "I wasn't quite sure
+until now.  You asked me if the others had told me what sort of man you
+had become.  And if silence is affirmation, you had your answer.  You
+inquired concerning my own opinion and I withheld it.  Whatever it was
+doesn't matter now.  Maybe I was guilty of bad judgment, but you have
+set me right."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Each word was tipped with scorn.  Again, with deliberate intent,
+Stephen O'Mara lied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And I tell you now that had I been sure you wanted that hemlock to get
+you, I'd have left you where you stood.  The world is all cluttered up
+with fools, as it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It came so quickly that Garry was not immediately aware of the attack.
+He smiled, covertly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Accidents will happen," he feigned a protest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Abruptly the taller man wheeled, lids a-droop.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;Fools, and quitters, too," he supplemented, levelly.  "Quitters and
+men who show a streak of yellow that doesn't assay even a little bit of
+pure gold.  A minute ago I gave you one reason for my attempt to keep
+you here.  But I made a bad mistake there, too.  It's men I need!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He couldn't have straightened the other any more quickly had he swung
+and slapped his face.  Garrett Devereau went paper white.  They reached
+the edge of the heavier timber and came out upon the soggy sod of the
+clearing in the hush which followed that wickedly barbed speech.  Steve
+always stopped there, whenever he came back to the cabin alone.  He
+liked to look up at Joe's light, waiting in the window.  And now, a
+pace or two in the lead, Garry turned back and stared widely into
+Steve's cold eyes.  It had taken heat lightning to clear that brain
+which had been all day befogged.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That was frank, and altogether plain," he said.  "Joe took it upon
+himself to hire me, during your absence&mdash;the figure mentioned was
+eighteen a week.  Now, quite as frankly, I am admitting his lack of
+authority."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dusk comes quickly in the woods; twilight is only the briefest of
+pauses between daylight and dark.  In the half-light as he stood there
+it would have been very easy to have mistaken Garry Devereau for the
+man whose clothes he wore.  And while they waited, strained and tense,
+facing each other, a lone sapling between them and the eastern fringe
+of the clearing swung frantically earthward as if stricken by an
+invisible hand, and then thrashed upright again.  A fragment of green
+bark flew aloft.  They heard the deflected bullet go whining away.
+Then the tardy bark of a rifle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was instant-quick, and yet little quicker than the expression that
+sped over Garry's features.  He turned and faced the thicket from which
+the report had come; he lifted his chin and opened his arms and laughed
+aloud.  The second time that day Steve reached out and jerked him
+viciously from his feet.  This time the bullet missed the sapling.
+They felt the air shock of its passage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was nothing deliberate nor premeditated in the outburst which
+Steve loosed upon the man who had gone to his knees beneath the grip of
+his hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You fool!" he grated.  "You crazy-brained madman!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry rose and made as if to dust his knees.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Poor work," he criticised, easily.  "Too hurried&mdash;the first shot.
+There should have been no excuse for a second."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With angry roughness Steve thrust him back into the deeper shadow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wait here!" he commanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Garry was only a step behind him when, a moment later, the former
+leaned over the spot where that invisible marksman had stood.  There
+were deep imprints in the forest mold&mdash;an empty shell upon the leaves.
+And by that time Steve had regained his grave composure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Some idiot of a hunter," he ventured quietly, when he had straightened
+from a glance at those marks.  "One of those enthusiasts who shoot in
+haste at any rustle in the brush, and investigate at leisure."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Momentarily the intimacy which had existed in other days between them
+was restored.  Garry's answer held no more of antagonism than had
+Steve's calm comment.  He tried to follow the tracks that led into the
+deeper timber.  It was too dark to follow far.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is a hunter in a hurry, then," he remarked.  "Too much of a
+hurry, even, to investigate."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hungry, and late for supper," suggested Steve.  "And we'll be late,
+ourselves, unless we travel along."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He faced about and started straight across the clearing, and he
+maintained the lead in spite of Garry's effort to supplant him.  Before
+they reached the door of the cabin reserve that amounted to actual
+coolness once more cloaked them both.  Only once did either of them
+offer to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You might do well to vary your costume a little," Garry observed
+impersonally, "if your nimrod friend who hunts at dusk is going to
+persist in mistaking you for a deer."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He drank hard that night from the bottle which Fat Joe, in obedience to
+Steve's command, had left standing upon the shoulder-high shelf&mdash;drank
+first in a self-conscious fashion with a mumbled excuse to Joe that the
+rainfall had chilled him; then more and more openly, until he forgot
+that he had ever felt the need of an excuse.  Not one of the three men
+had made a move to go to bed, and before midnight came around Garry's
+black fit of absorbtion had given way to another mood.  Blithely he
+chafed Fat Joe one minute, blind to that one's sullen reception of his
+jocularity; the next moment he turned eyes that had long before lost
+their enmity in a glassier light of goodwill upon Steve, working over a
+drawing-board at the other end of the table, impatient yet elaborately
+approving of his industry.  And when Steve finally laid aside his work,
+signifying with a sigh that he had finished, Garry rose and lifted a
+half-emptied glass and made him a rollicking toast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here's to young Virtue's triumph, Steve," he chanted, "and damnation
+to the opposition!  I may be leaving you&mdash;I'll be on my way back to
+town to-morrow at this time&mdash;but I'm leaving my moral support behind
+me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's reception of that flourish was in no way like what Fat Joe had
+expected.  He smiled cordially&mdash;a little absently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thanks, Garry," he said.  "And I guess I'll be needing all the support
+I can find, both moral and otherwise, before spring comes.  So you're
+not figuring on stopping off at Morrison?  Planning on going straight
+through, eh?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry made a gesture which was meant to embrace the whole chain of
+hills outside.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Absolutely!" he emphasized.  "This country is all right for those who
+were born to it&mdash;purple hills and purling brooks and silence brooding
+over all!&mdash;but it's too intense for your effete comrade.  Too
+quiet&mdash;too easy to think!  I'm going away from here just as fast as
+steam will haul me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The other man stretched his arms and swung one foot negligently over
+the chair arm.  His unqualified agreement brought sudden alarm to Joe's
+eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose you're right," he drawled.  "It does get on any man's
+nerves.  Right this minute I'm as tired of it as I ever dare let myself
+get.  I've sloughed around in the mud enough for one session."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry frowned, perplexed.  His fast numbing brain refused to
+reconstruct clearly, and yet dimly he knew that this sentiment was not
+the one which he had heard a few hours before from Steve's lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Too true," he was content to reply sadly.  "Too true!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We've both earned a vacation."  Steve's gentle smile never left his
+lips.  "To-day I couldn't help but think that it was a shame to miss
+such perfect hunting weather as this.  I wonder if I couldn't persuade
+you to postpone your going for just a day or two longer.  I can show
+you some deer, Garry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The frown upon the latter's forehead deepened with his effort at
+recollection.  Then he brightened with happy satisfaction.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Deer!" he chuckled, addressing himself to Joe.  "Hunter took me for a
+deer, thinking I was Steve."  He blinked, for the statement did not
+entirely please him.  "Doesn't sound logical," he pondered, "but it's
+so.  Fired twice and missed both shots.  Poor work&mdash;very poor work
+indeed!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe squared around, his perplexed scrutiny an accusation now.  Steve
+had neglected to apprise him of that incident which had happened on the
+way home, and Joe had not heard the rifle reports.  But O'Mara clung to
+the subject which he had introduced.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the trouble with hunting right here in the front yard," he
+admitted.  "There are too many gunners anxious to hear their rifles go
+off.  We might swing over toward the west branch, though.  As long as
+this rain holds on the leaves will be quiet as a carpet.  You've never
+seen my own private shooting box, either, have you Garry?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The questioned one tried hard to pay attention, but the attempt was no
+more than an indifferent success, for he was still grumbling to himself
+over that unknown marksman's lack of skill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never knew you had one," he answered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My inheritance," laughed Steve.  From his manner he might have been
+talking to a sober man.  "And also the haunt of my boyhood days.  It's
+the shack, you know, where I spent a good many years with Old Tom.  It
+lies a half dozen miles through the woods from here.  I've made it
+weather-tight and dry.  I spend a day or so up there whenever I have a
+chance to get away.  We're sure of a shot if we still-hunt over in that
+direction&mdash;sure of a tight roof and good beds, too.  How does it appeal
+to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry spilled over his glass and had to fill it again, with many
+apologies for his clumsiness, so ardent was his acceptance of the
+invitation.  He rose and insisted upon shaking hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A personally conducted tour," he stammered gayly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A pilgrimage to the nest from which young genius first spread its
+wings, personally conducted by my friend, Mr. O'Mara."  But his moods
+were growing more and more uncertain and changeable, now.  He bent a
+baleful glance upon Fat Joe.  "Is this&mdash;person going to accompany us,"
+offensively he wanted to know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe'll have to stay here and hold things down until we return," he
+explained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry resumed his seat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I'll go," he stated.  The baleful light was slow in leaving his
+eyes.  And, after a rambling, muttered something to himself: "Too
+officious&nbsp;&#8230; wouldn't let me have but one drink every three
+hours&nbsp;&#8230; better we left him alone.  He might shoot somebody,
+too&mdash;looks as though he might shoot and investigate at leisure."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With that he turned once more to thoughts of him who, firing from
+ambush, had left a trail of hob-nails to voice mutely the haste of his
+retreat.  It had a fascination for him; his mind went back to it
+automatically, the only idea apparently upon which he found it possible
+to center his faculties.  Now and then he referred to it aloud, in
+jumbled and meaningless ejaculations.  Both men knew that he did not
+know what he was saying, and yet his reference to Fat Joe had left a
+hint of pain in the latter's eyes.  It was still there when Joe arose,
+an hour later, and jerked his head toward Garry's quarters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you need me, sing out," he said.  "There's whiskey locked in the
+medicine chest&mdash;and I'll be sleeping light."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The words meant nothing to Garry, but he noted Joe's departure.  Steve
+saw that his eyes were fixed, his lips crusted with fever, when he too
+came to his feet in a supreme effort, and steadied himself by the back
+of his chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've been most thoughtless, Steve," he apologized charmingly.  It was
+the spirit of the old Garry talking through the flesh of the Garry he
+had become.  "I've been unpardonably selfish.  You must be tired; you
+have worked hard to-day."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In turn he made as if to cross to the door.  Steve drew him back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe's taken your bed," he explained.  "He's been an hour asleep by
+now.  We'll be getting away at daybreak, and he always did hate to be
+waked an instant before his hour, so you'll have to occupy his bunk."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It took Garry a minute or two to assimilate that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Surely," he agreed.  "Daybreak."  Then, drearily, with no knowledge of
+what he was saying: "I wish I could go to sleep&mdash;I wish it was
+daybreak, now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet he was almost sober again when Steve shook him awake at four the
+next morning, his first inquiry concerning the state of the weather
+proving that he recalled their plans of the night before.  But his
+politeness had given way to a pallid stubbornness that would not budge
+an inch until he had had a drink and filled a pair of flasks with all
+that the fresh bottle from the medicine chest contained.  He refused
+breakfast with sickened finality; declined even the coffee which Steve
+tried to press upon him.  When the latter handed him Joe's rifle and a
+handful of extra shells, however, his eagerness to be away showed in
+his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve did not like that gleam any more than he understood it, and he
+did not understand it at all.  It went around him&mdash;through him&mdash;much as
+though Garry was peering cunningly at a far-off, bodiless something
+which the other man could not see.  And throughout the whole morning
+Steve was conscious of it whenever they met after skirting a swamp, or
+slipped noiselessly over a hardwood knoll, to rejoin each other.  The
+day was half gone before Steve realized that it was the telltale sign
+of a brain no longer sober, even though Garry's body continued to
+maintain an incredible steadiness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long after it seemed that eyes such as his had become must needs be
+sightless the latter went on picking his way carefully over rough bits
+of going; when he had reached a condition where he no longer heard the
+word or two which, now and then, Steve addressed to him, he still
+flattened his body and crouched at the expected nearness of game.  It
+became an uncanny exhibition of mechanics after a while&mdash;a
+sleep-walking sort of thing which wore upon Steve's nerves until he was
+more than once at the point of taking possession of Joe's repeater.
+And yet it was Garry who jumped a spike-horn buck, just before
+nightfall.  It was he who fired twice before Steve's rifle reached his
+shoulder.  But they found only blood on the leaves when they hastened
+forward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You hit him!"  Steve leaned over to examine those crimson stains.
+"You must have found him with both shots, judging from the way he's
+bleeding.  He's gone into that cedar swamp; he won't travel far, and I
+hate to let him crawl in there, wounded like that, to die."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indecisively he paused, not sure just what to do.  In that moment of
+quiet Garry lifted a flask to his lips and finding it empty let it slip
+heedlessly to the ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Two shots," he muttered darkly.  "Two, where one should have been
+enough."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That echo of the night before helped the other man to decide.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This strip of dark timber runs straight west to the river&mdash;are you
+listening, Garry?" he asked.  "Straight to the river&mdash;it's only a scant
+mile&mdash;and you'll find the cabin on the rise of ground in a clump of
+balsams, three or four rods to the right.  I'm going to take your
+gun&mdash;you look fagged out.  You skirt around the edge of the bad going
+and I'll drive straight through.  It may be only a scratch, after all,
+although it doesn't seem possible, with all this blood.  I'll take your
+gun and, now, are you sure you can make it&mdash;sure you won't get turned
+around?  It'll be dark in half an hour, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry gave up his rifle without a sign of demur.  His eyes were burning
+with some sort of feverish anticipation, but his answer was clear
+enough.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll wait for you at the river," he said, and he started forthwith
+toward the west.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve watched him out of sight before he turned to take up,
+irresolutely, the trail that zig-zagged into the cedar brake.  But once
+he had started he went ahead rapidly, jumping the wounded buck within
+five minutes and giving him no time to lie down again.  And after he
+had covered a quarter of a mile Steve saw that it was much as he had
+told Garry it might be; it was a flesh wound that bled profusely and
+that was all.  For the deer, holding to a direct line down the middle
+of the swamp, continued to travel strongly.  Steve had all but reached
+the river-edge where they were to stop for the night, before he
+detected a stirring in the bushes ahead of him and his ear caught the
+crackle of a dry branch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Instantly he forgot everything save the quarry he was running down;
+forgot Garry and the strange persistence with which the latter had gone
+back, after twelve hours, to quote himself word for word.  With rifle
+poised he edged forward a step and halted; he stooped and laid Garry's
+gun at the foot of a tree and went on again.  Once he made out a
+movement behind a nearer tangle and saw the branches shake before a
+heavy body that was forcing slowly through them.  His own rifle came
+up; his finger was on the trigger when he thought better of it.  Old
+Tom, more than a half-score of years before, had switched him well, not
+so very far from that very spot, because he had not made certain first
+of the target at which he was firing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was an open patch to the left.  If the buck held to that quarter
+he would have to cross that clear.  Rock-steady the muzzle came down
+and covered the first indistinct brown bulk which entered the notch of
+the sights.  And then, with an oath, Steve let the gun slip to the
+ground at his feet and stood shaking, checks gone white.  Garret
+Devereau, wearing an old tan canvas coat which he had unearthed in the
+cabin peered slyly around a bush which he had been stirring gently with
+one hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go ahead 'n' shoot," he ordered aggrievedly.  "Hunter'sh alwaysh shoot
+at rush'le in the dark.  Good joke on hunter'sh&mdash;good joke on my good
+frien', Misther O'Mara!  Think'sh's got deer until he inves'gates at
+leisure.  Best joke of all'sh on myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The muscles which all day had been a marvel of firmness beneath him
+gave way altogether.  Without a sound he pitched forward upon his face.
+A second later Steve reached his side, but the horror had not faded
+from his own eyes after he had picked that prostrate figure up and
+carried it into the clay-clinked shack.  His memory played him an odd
+trick during that moment.  A vivid picture came back to him of the
+grave-faced boy he had been, struggling to steady Old Tom's helpless
+feet up that same rise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry was limp and blue and pulseless when Steve stretched him out,
+inside.  The second flask stood there where Garry had left it, upon a
+table, and while he was loosening the latter's clothing Steve shook it,
+experimentally, and found it empty.  He swung it aloft and drove it
+through a window.  The crash of shivered glass made the other stir.  He
+opened his eyes and stared vacantly up into his friend's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve," he moaned.  "Steve, I'm cold!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And that was the burden of the complaints which he lifted, time and
+again, throughout the first part of the night.  Even after Steve had
+wrapped him in everything which the bare room afforded he still
+continued to whimper like a sick boy.  But his body held strong.  Just
+as, all day, it had been his brain which had shown the effects of the
+alcohol which he had consumed, so now, all night, it was his brain
+which suffered most.  Again and again he called aloud a woman's name,
+in a voice which Stephen O'Mara had never before heard from his lips.
+In inconceivable tenderness he whispered it&mdash;the name of Mary
+Graves&mdash;only to cry aloud, "Steve&mdash;Steve," in accents of heartbreak the
+next.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long before morning came his pulse was steady&mdash;a little jumpy but
+reassuringly rhythmic.  But the sunlight was two hours old upon the
+floor before the silent watcher saw the white lids flutter and then
+part with a gaze that was once more sane.  Garry's smile had always
+been mocking; it was shamed and wistful now.  The clearness with which
+he remembered was a miraculous thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You see, Steve," he faltered.  "You see now, don't you, that I'm not
+worth trying to save?  Oh, you've tried hard; I knew how hard you were
+trying!  That's why I did&mdash;what I did.  I'm no good; there's no use,
+friend of mine.  Why don't you let me go?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve groped and found the hand groping for his.  He nodded his head,
+bruskly, to hide his eyes.  But his voice was not brusk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I almost shot you, Garry," he said, and there was a husky echo of
+horror in the words.  "In another minute I'd have killed you.  Right
+now I don't know just what kept me from firing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And I meant you to," Garry murmured almost inaudibly, "I planned that
+you should&mdash;started to plan last night.  I&mdash;I've been hating you for
+twelve hours&mdash;hating you because you were making me ashamed to do the
+thing I wanted to do most."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He tried to rise and fell back, slack.  But his voice was stronger with
+sudden, swelling bitterness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It wasn't for myself, Steve," he cried.  "It wasn't for what I might
+get out of it, or&mdash;or what it might bring me, I used to scoff at
+whatever others considered big and fine and clean, but I played it
+straight, just the same.  I played it as well as I knew how&mdash;straighter
+than you'd believe.  I thought it would make her happier, because I
+tried that hard.  And she&nbsp;&#8230;  Steve, if I had been a woman&mdash;a woman
+like what I thought she was, little and clean and white&mdash;I couldn't
+have let a man like him so much as touch my little finger!  And she&mdash;by
+God, she married him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The agonized voice broke there&mdash;the voice of a boy who had had to learn
+that it is woman and not women who is fastidious.  Garry sat and
+swallowed, fighting for self-control.  His eyes were numb, but Steve's
+had taken fire, for he knew that the hour for which he had been waiting
+had come at last.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've been trying to help me," Garry found his voice again, "you've
+been trying to throw me a line.  And, for a day or two, I tried to
+catch it, Steve.  But it isn't in me to try that hard, any more.  Some
+men do things for what there is in it&mdash;the pecuniary reward, I mean;
+some men&mdash;you for instance&mdash;because their self respect won't let them
+stop, win or lose.  But now and then there happens one who keeps on
+trying only because there is one other person, at least, who may be the
+gladder for his success.  I don't expect you to understand; I know it
+will sound small and cowardly to you.&#8230;  It's too lonesome living,
+Steve, when there's no one who cares whether you live or not!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That does not fit your case," Steve objected instantly, "when your
+danger or your safety keeps a woman watching, white-faced with terror
+through the night, for your return."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry propped himself upon one elbow, the better to see the speaker's
+countenance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My safety?" he repeated, blankly.  "My return?"  And then, wanly
+grateful: "You are not the sort of man who lies convincingly, Steve."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Stephen O'Mara let him have it&mdash;all the story which had lain
+so many days in his heart.  There were times when Garry went even paler
+during the short recital; times when everything else was submerged by
+the incredulity that flooded his face.  But before Steve had finished
+the last trace of doubt was gone.  Before the end came Garry had bowed
+his head, this time in flushed, self-conscious wonder which
+transfigured him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam Burrell!" he breathed.  "Proud, intolerant&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His head came up.  The next instant he voiced the words which Steve
+most wanted to hear.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You shouldn't have told me this," said he.  "You had no right,
+unless&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve laughed at him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"God bless you, boy," he exclaimed.  "I asked her if I might.  Why,
+don't you understand that she meant to, herself, if I didn't?  You see,
+she is&mdash;far, far braver than you are, Garry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry lifted his hands and hid his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So quietly that his exit made no sound Steve slipped to his feet and
+passed outside.  It had stopped raining; the hardwood ridges, touched
+by frost, were flaming streaks of color against the rainwashed
+evergreens, when he picked his way down to the river and found a dry
+stone for a seat.  An hour and more he sat there, while his thoughts
+went back over the trail of the years&mdash;the trail which had led him from
+that cabin to a pair of violet eyes and lips that arched like a boy's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve let his mind turn again, unreservedly, to his own problem that
+morning; he tried to face, sure-eyed, the road which still stretched
+ahead.  He did not know that Garrett Devereau, the debonaire, the
+cynical, the world-weary and world-wise, had broken down and was
+sobbing noiselessly, as men sob, in the room which he had left&mdash;shaking
+with deep and terrible gasps that racked his very soul.  But it was
+already daybreak; it was trail's-end now for Garry.  It does make a
+difference if one knows that someone cares.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap17"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+HONEY!
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Upon their return to Thirty-Mile, two nights later, Joe's attitude of
+criticism was the first thing which piqued Steve's interest.  There was
+something ludicrous in the former's voice as he sat and anathematized
+the food which the cook-boy brought to the table, even though he
+devoured hungrily all that his plate would hold.  And because Joe was
+so obviously primed for a sensation that evening, out of sheer
+perversity Steve struggled to draw him into a discussion of a topic,
+which, just as obviously, had no appeal just then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What I hope to do," he confided gravely to Garry, "is to finish up at
+Morrison and make possible the transfer of some of those men up here.
+We are working only one shift now.  With two I figure we could sail
+along a-fogging.  How does that strike you, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was only one of his many attempts, but all of them, save for the
+inner laughter which they afforded; were totally without result.  Joe's
+answers were monosyllabic&mdash;his attention wandering at best.  To that
+particular question he nodded his head, spiritlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This butter ain't none too fresh," he growled sourly, "and I wonder if
+that cook-boy thinks we dote on ham every meal?  I don't for one.  It
+may be all right, if a man's plumb starving to death, but it don't lend
+no real elegance to a repast."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That gloomy complaint brought little more than a sparkle to Steve's
+eyes, but it made Garry lean forward in his place.  Throughout the meal
+while the other two fenced in just such fashion he forgot his own food
+to listen, delighted anticipation in every feature.  And when they had
+finished supper and pushed back their chairs, he stood grinning a
+little, watching Joe survey that littered room which served as office
+and sleeping-quarters for the chief engineer of the East Coast Company.
+Fat Joe's gaze swung from wall to wall, from littered corner to
+heaped-up chair.  Then he shook his head in despair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It looks to me, Steve," he grunted, "as though you ain't never had no
+real training in tidiness, have you?  There don't seem to be no system
+at all in the way you leave your things around.  There's one boot over
+in that corner; it's got a mate, I know, because I saw you take them
+off last night.  I wouldn't be certain otherwise.  And it's the same
+way with all your things.  Just look at this room!  A nice place to
+receive callers in, now ain't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That was the first lead he tendered them, but Steve, rather than
+gratify him with a direct question, chose to go forward in the dark.
+He leaned over and followed his usual custom when he wanted to think.
+He tapped out his pipe.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But I can always find everything," he defended, "that is, unless you
+have taken the trouble to put things away.  Then it's a toss-up that
+something or other will never be found, until it turns up of its own
+accord.  It's not so bad, Joe."  He, too, swung to survey the room.
+"Not so bad!  Just a little unsettled, that's all.  Are we likely to
+have any callers, do you think, who would object to this layout?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe snorted, but his eyes were mournful.  He knew that there was
+nothing else to do but yield, a part at least.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We ain't likely to," he murmured.  "We're just naturally bound to have
+'em.  They're comin' in to-morrow, and I ask you again, ain't this a
+pleasing prospect to greet 'em?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For all that he seemed to be staring ruefully down the room, he was
+watching for the surprise that darted across Steve's face.  Momentarily
+the latter had forgotten his assumed air of placidity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To-morrow?  Who?"  And then Steve laughed.  "Go ahead and tell us,
+Joe.  I'm beat!  I'll admit that I'm panting with curiosity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe pulled up a chair and dropped into it.  It appealed to him&mdash;this
+method&mdash;whenever he had the time to spare.  His pink face was still
+innocent of guile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't mind the men-folks," he resumed.  "That fat party, I mean, who
+wears the plaid suits, nor Caleb Hunter, either.  Both of them are used
+to such truck as this.  And I reckon it'll tickle the ladies, too.  But
+I can see Honey sticking his nose in the air and sniffin', supercilious
+like, the first minute he gets his nose in the door.  He ain't going to
+approve at all, at all&mdash;not any way you look at it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Honey!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both Steve and Garry ignored the rest of Joe's explanation to gasp that
+single word in concert.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who in the world do you mean by 'Honey'?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who could I mean?" Joe demanded collectedly.  "I didn't give him the
+name, did I?  I mean that chap Wickersham who owns the timber north of
+us.  Foreign, ain't he?  Sure, I thought so?  Well, every time I run
+across that man's path my heart swells with patriotism.  I guess I'm
+just as glad to be born plain United States."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The first part of that statement was listened to closely enough by both
+men; the last sentence or two, for all that it was heartfelt and
+sincere, was lost upon them both.  And Steve's mirth was even more
+hysterical than was that of Garry Devereau.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Honey!" he panted.  "Now isn't that a wonder?  Joe, you're too good!
+You are altogether too good to be wasted on these timbered solitudes.
+Men pay two dollars a seat, Joe, to hear performers work who are rank
+amateurs in comparison with you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The riverman's eyes grew belligerent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Funny, is it?  So awful funny!  Well, perhaps you think I can't read
+plain print yet, never havin' enjoyed a liberal education.  But take a
+look for yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He pulled up a pile of newspapers which had come in since their
+absence, sorted out one that was creased open, and handed it to Steve.
+It was an announcement of Barbara Allison's engagement to the Hon.
+Archibald Wickersham&mdash;that column to which Fat Joe had folded the
+sheet&mdash;a many-days-old announcement, now.  But the smile did not even
+stiffen upon Steve's lips.  The picture which accompanied it was a poor
+one, heavy-shadowed and smeared and lacking in detail, yet Barbara's
+face was unmistakable.  The room became quiet.  In that hush Garry
+realized that Joe's mistaken translation of the title had not been, as
+Joe had himself suggested, due to lack of knowledge, but to a desire to
+apprise his employer, delicately, of that which he believed was still
+news to him.  And yet, from the easy way in which he read it, word for
+word, Garry was positive that all this which the New York daily
+blazoned forth with its customary mixture of snobbishness and vulgarity
+was no longer news to Steve.  The latter's eyes lifted and dwelt long
+upon Fat Joe's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So that's where you got it, was it, Joe?" he asked evenly.  "You make
+it 'Honey,' do you?  And when do they come in, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To-morrow night.  One of the teamsters brought word this afternoon,
+just before you got back.  Honey is going to have a look at his trees
+and things, the way I understand it.  And the rest of them, I take it,
+want to look us over in our wild state.  Where are we going to put them
+girls?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve's answer was long in coming.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miss&mdash;Allison?" he wanted to know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;and her maid," Joe corrected promptly.  "Her maid, Cecile.  She's
+comin', too, and that tall, red-headed one.  I don't remember her name?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As studiously as he had done a moment before, Garry again avoided
+Steve's eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam Burrell," the latter supplied the omission.  "And that's fine,
+isn't it?  How long are they going to stay, Joe?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Joe had finished with trifling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where are we going to put them?" he insisted doggedly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, we have a couple of shelter tents somewhere in the duffle,
+haven't we?  We might pitch those if&mdash;&mdash;" he looked about,
+ruminatively&mdash;"if you think this is too squalid."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe turned appealingly to Garry, only to meet eyes flaring with
+deviltry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you think that I'm going to give up my quarters for a troup of
+curious sight-seers, you're mistaken.  If that's what you turned toward
+me for, don't allow yourself to dwell upon it another minute.  I'm a
+laboring man and I have to have decent rest at nights.&#8230;  Do you
+suppose Cecile would really mind a tent?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Joe's face went red.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now ain't you the pair of rough jokers?" he whined.  "Ain't you,
+though?  But what's it going to be&mdash;this room or Garry's?  The way I
+look at it we're elected to camp out ourselves.  We're hardened sons of
+the wilderness, you know.  That's what they always call us in print.
+But how am I going to get this place cleaned up?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For another hour Joe argued it, and at last settled upon the
+store-house building as the likeliest for sleeping quarters for the
+feminine portion of the visitors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We have to eat in here, anyhow," he argued, "so I guess it's the best
+arrangement we can hit on.  Honey won't be here much to meals, either.
+That'll be one nice thing about it.  He'll be going north directly.
+And now&mdash;now I guess I'll go out and have a look at the pantry, even if
+it does make me feel sort of faint every time I think of the grub we've
+got on hand.  Canned beans and boiled potatoes, and ham and bacon, to
+round out a banquet.  Why couldn't a couple of mighty hunters like you
+bring home more than one little haunch of venison?  Bacon and beans!
+Steve, you sure have been living mighty low-down on this job!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He went out with a great show of haste, but returned almost
+immediately, forgot the urgency of matters in general in finding Garry
+idly shuffling a deck of cards.  Throughout the evening Joe had
+exhibited an unwillingness to meet the third man's glances directly,
+but it was impossible for him to remain oblivious to the clicking of
+the chips.  He balanced first on one foot and then on the other for a
+moment; then diffidently drew up a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just a friendly hand or two, I suppose," he suggested, when the other
+made no move to begin.  "Low limit and wide open, eh?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry still toyed with the cards.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't suppose you've ever forgotten the first game in which we
+indulged, have you, Joe?" he asked at length.  Joe was not comfortable.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Scarcely," he admitted.  "Scarcely."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nor the&mdash;stakes?" pursued Garry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;I seem to recall 'em, faintly."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry's peal of amusement was as rollicking as a boy's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So do I," he exclaimed.  "And if I remember rightly you stated on that
+occasion that cash was no consideration with you.  Does that still hold
+good?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the first good look Joe had had at the other's face.  The change
+he found in it seemed to perplex him more than a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I take it that it does."  Garry did not wait for his reply.  "And
+now&mdash;what do you say to that same full bottle against a&mdash;a ninety-nine
+year blanket restriction, with me at the wrong end of the odds?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe slitted his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When they tuck a ninety-nine year clause into a franchise they mean
+it's forever, don't they?" he wanted to know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Forever, to all intents and purposes!" said Garry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's chest sank and rose in a long, long breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's no word to trifle with," he cautioned at last.  "If you lose
+it'll be a considerable drouth."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cut!" invited Garry, and they started to play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That other night Garry's stack of chips had lasted far longer than they
+did on this second occasion.  A half hour later, when he rose to go to
+bed, his ninety-nine year promise of abstinence was piled symmetrically
+before Fat Joe.  But his good-night was gay.  For a time after his
+departure Joe eyed Steve, sidewise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hum-m-m," he cleared his throat.  "Hum-m-m!  And I was expectin' you
+to turn up any hour of the last twenty-four with a request that I come
+and help bring home the remains.  You must be quite a silver-tongued
+exhorter, aren't you, Steve?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara was silent over the paper which Joe had handed him
+earlier in the evening, and the lack of any offer on his part to go
+into details did not trouble his questioner.  Fat Joe sat and bobbed
+his head over what would never cease to be a miracle in his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And he'll stick this time," he vented his wonder aloud.  "He's surely
+going to stick!" Then he smiled widely.  "And I reckon you'll have to
+admit that I handled the small part that come my way with ease and
+dispatch, when I tell you that he didn't catch so much as one lonesome
+pair, all the time I was dealing.  I'm ashamed of myself.  I haven't
+seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I come East!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to
+their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to
+the man whom he was assisting.  But neither his silence nor his
+nervousness any longer worried Steve.  Instead, the latter let himself
+smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his
+thoughts were on Garry at all.  For the latter's diffidence as the day
+aged became a flushed and warm-checked thing, until at four in the
+afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which
+wordlessly, Garry was asking.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Joe was more than half right," he remarked, one eye to his level, "in
+spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously.  We can't let
+those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable,
+so perhaps you'd better run ahead now, Garry, and see what he has
+accomplished.  I don't want to leave this spot myself until I have some
+figures upon which I know I can rely.  But you might run ahead, if you
+will.  I'll be along later."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was couched in the form of a request, but Garry's face flamed.  He
+went, albeit a bit reluctantly.  And he stopped more than a few times
+in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve's shack.
+But once he had passed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably
+trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment; he was on the
+point of going back outside to scan the bowl of the valley when a tall,
+short-skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous apron which Fat Joe in
+a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook-boy, flashed
+through the passage-way from the kitchen annex and barely missed
+catapulting into his arms.  Miriam Burrell, pink-faced from the heat of
+the roaring wood-stove, and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek,
+lifted her apron and swung it like a flag of victory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've found it," she sang triumphantly.  "I've found out what was the
+matter!  I'd just forgotten the baking-powder, that was all!  Next
+time&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then she recognized him.  With outstretched hands still clutching the
+edge of her apron, she stood, almond eyes widening, and scanned him
+from head to foot.  Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had
+noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry's
+appearance.  To the girl who had not seen him for weeks, that flushed,
+self-conscious man was a different Garry than she had ever known
+before.  Hungrily her gaze went from open shirt to caked boots, from
+steady hands to clear eyes which made her own eyes shy.  And then
+Miriam Burrell, cool and poised Miriam, did what many another maid in a
+checkered apron has done in similar situations.  She lifted that stiff
+gingham to hide her unutterable happiness.  But before he could speak
+she found her voice; nor was it very steady, at that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought you were that party of idlers come back," she hesitated.
+"How&mdash;how tanned you are becoming, Garry!  I thought they&mdash;oh, I can't
+tell you how glad I am to see you so&mdash;so well.  I'm making biscuits for
+supper&mdash;that is, I've just been practising until now.  It seemed as
+though I'd forgotten something that was necessary to the recipe,
+because they were flatter after they were cooked than when I put them
+in the oven.  And most marvelously heavy, too!  But it was just the
+baking-powder, that was all.  Do you&mdash;do you think you'd care to help?"
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-260"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-260.jpg" ALT="&quot;Oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you&mdash;so well.&quot;" BORDER="2" WIDTH="557" HEIGHT="451">
+<H3>
+[Illustration: "Oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you&mdash;so well."]
+</H3>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Steve was very late in returning to camp that night.  Throughout the
+rest of the afternoon he set himself a pace, knee-deep in slushy mud,
+which Garry could not have maintained.  But when he paused there in the
+dark where he always stopped for a moment and a tumult of voices swept
+down to meet him, he forgot his fatigue.  He had lifted his battered
+hat from his head, striving to distinguish a single note in all that
+treble of girlish laughter when, framed suddenly against the background
+of light within, he saw a slender silhouette take up its station in the
+doorframe.  Barbara was still peering out across the darkness when he
+came up to her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We've been waiting dinner for you for almost an hour," she rebuked
+him, in place of what might have been a commonplace greeting.  "We've
+been waiting in the face of Mr. Morgan's insistence that it was
+practically useless.  He has been telling us that when a man here in
+the hills fails to turn up for a meal you never bother to look for him;
+you know that the worst has happened."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Over her head the first eyes that Steve encountered that evening were
+those of Archibald Wickersham.  While shaking hands with the girl, he
+bowed in grave welcome to the tall figure in leather puttees and
+whipcord riding-breeches, and Wickersham, from the far side of the
+room, bowed back in equal gravity.  Then Caleb Hunter grasped Steve's
+elbow and spun him around toward the light and peered at him
+accusingly.  Barbara had not noticed until then how tired Steve looked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Before the others get to talking," said Caleb, "before the tide grows
+too strong for my weak voice, young man, I want to deliver a message.
+Miss Sarah wants it explicitly understood that unless you stop in to
+say hello on your next trip down, she herself will take the trail up
+here.  And lest that ultimatum sound too little threatening, I might
+add that when Miss Sarah takes the trail she never travels with less
+than six trunks."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb clung so tightly to his arm that it brought a tinge of color to
+Steve's cheeks.  It was minutes before he could get away to change his
+wet clothes, and in that minute or two he could not help but contrast,
+grimly, his own mud-spattered attire with that of Archie Wickersham.
+The tired blue circles beneath his eyes wore even more noticeable when
+he returned, to be ushered with much ceremony by Fat Joe to the head of
+the table.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was an utterly irresponsible gathering that leaned over the red
+tablecloth that night&mdash;an oddly assorted group which, from the very
+first, Joe realized was not at all to Wickersham's liking.  Dexter
+Allison himself, fairly radiating good-will, sat at the foot of the
+table, with his son-in-law-to-be on one side and Barbara's little maid,
+Cecile, on the other.  And between Cecile and Barbara, who sat opposite
+Garry and Miriam, Fat Joe leaned both elbows upon the table edge and
+monopolized the conversation.  The seating arrangement was Joe's; it
+was his party.  And the absolute inattention to detail, the large
+indifference to veracity which his discourse disclosed before that
+noisy supper was over, grew to be an astonishing thing.  His nights of
+fancy left Steve aghast in more than one instance; they even forced a
+stiff smile to Wickersham's lips, and that is saying much for Joe's
+success as an entertainer, for in the bearing of those two men toward
+each other there had been evident from the first a chill antipathy
+which amounted, actually, to armed truce.  And the color in Miriam's
+cheeks, whenever his gaze strayed to that side of the table, helped
+Steve to forget, temporarily, much that he found not pleasant to recall
+at all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For Miriam's tongue was no less irresponsible than was Joe's.  Her mood
+was so mercurial that she drew, time and again, the eyes of all at the
+table.  She chattered with an abandon that scandalized Barbara; broke
+in and interrupted every argument with hoydenish trivialities, in one
+breath, to appeal to Garry the next for refutation.  And Garry, the
+light-tongued and quick-witted, sat almost dumb of lip before her happy
+garrulity.  But his eyes never left her; they spoke his thought aloud.
+The quick lift and droop of her eyelids, the brilliancy of her lips,
+made Miriam's face a living thing of happiness&mdash;made Barbara's silence
+seem even more profound.  For the latter's withdrawal from the
+hilarity, dominated half the time by her father's booming bass, was
+nearly as complete as was that of Wickersham himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just once, shortly before they withdrew for the night, Steve caught a
+gleam of mischief in the dark eyes she turned toward him.  She rose the
+next moment and started slowly around the room, poking demurely into
+corners and closetted nooks.  Every eye was following her when she
+finally found the thing for which she was searching.  She drew a red
+felt, yellow-mottoed cushion from beneath the deer-hide covering a
+chair, and held it up so that all might read.  "What Is Home Without a
+Father?" it ran, and when the joy that stormed through the room made it
+sure that the exhibition needed no interpreter, Fat Joe turned and hid
+his face.  Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an
+examination of his handiwork.  Smooth face tinted by the firelight,
+copper hair almost dishevelled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely
+lovely thing.  In her alto voice she expressed her opinion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's an entirely new stitch to me, Bobs," she averred.  "I don't think
+I have ever before seen just this method employed."  And she turned to
+Stephen O'Mara.  "Do you suppose, Mr. O'Mara," she asked, "that I might
+learn it from the one who did this work for you?  It's rather"&mdash;and her
+head tilted to one side&mdash;"it's rather a pretty thing!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again they succumbed to mirth, and then Joe rose, bristling, and went
+forward much as a gamecock might step out to do battle.  He took the
+cushion from the hands of the girls, who no longer had strength enough
+even to hold it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you are aiming to do any sewing around this camp," he stated, "you
+can start in sewing on buttons.  This kind of work is entirely too
+nerve-wearing for amateurs."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He carried the cushion across the room and placed it, not where it had
+been hidden by the deer-hide, but in colorful prominence against the
+back of the chair.  Long after he had crossed with Steve and Garry to
+their tents he continued to explode with soft chuckles.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never did say," he defended himself, "that that sentiment was
+strictly appropriate.  I always stated that it was the best I could.
+And as for my technique&mdash;well, either of you guys try it some time!
+You just take a needleful of that yellow worsted and start tracking
+across a couple of yards of red and pathless desert, and see where you
+come out.  I know, because I've done it.  I'm a pioneer.  But if I ever
+tackle another job like that it's going to be a crazy-quilt!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Joe considered, in spite of the din which answered him, that his
+challenge was ample.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap18"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVIII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+It was fully an hour after Fat Joe and Garry had rolled themselves up
+in their blankets when Steve, who had elected to sit up for one last
+pipe even though his body was aching with fatigue, heard behind him the
+approach of her footsteps.  Outside at the top of the rise some fifty
+yards in front of the tents, he had seated himself on a log, chin
+buried in one palm and eyes vacantly steady before him; but even before
+he turned&mdash;before he rose slowly to his feet&mdash;he knew who was coming,
+knew and realized that she should not have come.  Wrapped in a long
+heavy coat, face half-hidden by the upturned collar, bare of head,
+Barbara came quietly down to where he waited.  And without word of
+greeting on the part of either of them, they sat down together, facing
+the silvered bowl of the valley.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Time passed before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake
+of breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I never dreamed it could be so big," she murmured in awe.  "And then
+to think that some day&mdash;within a few months in reality&mdash;engines will go
+screeching their signals across this very place.  It doesn't seem
+possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help
+but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself,
+since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just
+then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most
+apparent to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully.  "I
+like it better myself, as it is.  It does appear to be a long way
+ahead, doesn't it&mdash;that day of completion which you cover in the
+screech of the whistles?  Only to-day, when we were scrambling about
+down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I
+possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but
+thicket now.  But as for the bigness of it"&mdash;he laughed
+deprecatingly&mdash;"it isn't so very big, you know.  It's just a&mdash;a mean
+sort of proposition."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
+She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness
+in those words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal!  Why, I thought the work at
+Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there&mdash;there isn't
+even a beginning or an ending here.  There's nothing but woods and
+water."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow
+under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know.  "Is that the
+direction in which Mr. Wickersham's timber lies?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her.  "That's the end
+of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her next words made him start and then try to cover that moment with a
+readjustment of his long body.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm going up there to-morrow.  Mr. Wickersham has asked me to ride
+with him, in the morning."  She waited a moment or two.  "That&mdash;that's
+why I came out here to-night.  We'll be going back to town the next day
+or two, and I wanted to have a chance to bid you good-bye, before I
+left Morrison for the winter."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had known that she would not be likely to remain in the hills much
+longer.  He had realized that each day which he checked off, always
+hopeful that the next might open the way for him to see her again, was
+steadily bringing nearer the date of her departure.  But he had not let
+himself think that it would come so soon.  There was no doubt this time
+about the heaviness of his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see," he said.  "I see."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There came another long silence.  Rising out of it, Barbara's voice
+sounded very, very little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've never known a sky in which the stars were so thick.
+They're&mdash;they're like a field of buttercups.  And have you ever seen
+such an irrepressibly happy creature as Miriam was to-night.  She was
+radiant&mdash;positively shameless!  Did you know that Garry knows&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told him, myself," said Steve, simply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl faced around in her surprise.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Most certainly!  Why not?"  His voice was not quite so unenthusiastic
+now.  "It's one of the few unmistakable opportunities I've ever had to
+make two people permanently as happy as Miriam was to-night.  I'd feel
+guilty all my life if I didn't help all I could, knowing how happy I am
+going to be, myself!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus did he work around, quite without abruptness, to a renewal of that
+discussion which she had thought to close, weeks before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you trying to infer that I am to be a part of that happiness?" she
+asked none too promisingly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You ought to know.  I said 'all my life.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And there, suddenly, Barbara laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose now they'll marry and live happily ever after!" she
+exclaimed with an attempt at airiness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Most certainly," asserted Steve, although her mirth puzzled him.  "Why
+is it funny to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It isn't, but&mdash;yes it is too, now that it's no longer a thing one need
+worry about.  That's always the trouble with emotions which are too
+intense.  They're either very sad to contemplate, or very, very absurd.
+And they will persist in exchanging faces, to the confusion of the
+on-lookers.  Garry was so dangerously in love with Mary Graves, you
+see!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He was in love with an idea," the man contradicted flatly.  "He was in
+love with just that.  And it is not safe for any man to live alone with
+an abstract conception of anything.  He's bound, sooner or later, to
+lose his grip on tangible things if he does.  He's likely to start
+destroying property to further the cause of labor, or liable to turn to
+shooting men who were born to jobs I'm certain some of them never
+wanted&mdash;kings and that sort, I mean&mdash;figuring on solving the social
+problems of men and women who must solve that problem themselves.
+Perfection is a fine thing to anticipate; expectations of it are
+dangerous.  And women aren't made that way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No?" her voice slid coolly upward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he told her, and smiled with that serenity she had come to know
+so well.  "Not even you, though I suppose I'd about annihilate anyone
+else if he ever hinted at it."  He chose to be didactic in tone.  "No,
+you're not perfect; you've too much intelligence for that.  Why, right
+now you're fighting with your brain against the dictates of your heart,
+and if you were above mortal error in judgment you'd know that you are
+wasting your time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl forgot entirely that she, too, had promised herself that their
+leave-taking should not cross the border of personalities.  And with
+that lazy joy of her on his tongue she might not have been quite so
+quick to hold that she could love no man, had she stopped to give it
+thought.  Her advance to the skirmish was most spirited.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your opinion has the merit of sincerity," she said, "although, looking
+back upon a&mdash;a certain day, I can't help but wonder whether you haven't
+been guilty of mouthing pretty nothings for my poor ears."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That proves my point right now."  He was imperturbable.  "You're
+begging the question to gain&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You said&mdash;&mdash;" she flashed, and then grew red.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I said I'd let you ask no pardon of me.  I said I'd let myself find no
+flaw in you.  But how does that embarrass my present argument?
+Flawless perfection would be a mighty difficult thing to live with, day
+in and day out.  Living with a woman who never made a mistake could
+have no appeal for me.  She'd always be emphasizing my own
+shortcomings.  You become consistent and you'll catch me yawning some
+day; grow logical and you'll almost scare me off!  Why, you're a girl!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her laughter was like a bell on the still air.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And you&mdash;you still sit there and insist that perfection has no
+attraction for you?  When you've just described, without knowing it,
+the&mdash;the sort of a girl you think is perfect."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His lips curled in a way to quicken any woman's pulse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have me beaten," he laughed.  His eyes, dark as was the shadow
+upon his face, made her breath unsteady.  "I would like to watch you
+play poker with Fat Joe.  Your game would puzzle him more than a
+little.  Yes, you've surely left me without a leg on which to hobble
+off, because it would be small spirited in me, wouldn't it, if I were
+to tell you that you are the exception that makes my general rule hold
+sound?  I wouldn't, however, prescribe such a degree of perfection for
+any other man's daily diet.  It would prove his destruction."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your own superiority, of course, rendering you immune?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe."  At least, whether she knew it or not, she loved his serenity.
+"Maybe&mdash;and maybe I'm an exception too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He sat very still.  She had turned away once more.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll be back again in the spring?" he asked with that gentleness he
+saved for her alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hope&mdash;I think so."  The smallness of her voice angered her.  She
+feigned a short, carefree laugh.  "Unless I am too busy.  Getting
+married seems to become a more and come complicated problem of proper
+costuming, doesn't it, with every passing season!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She couldn't have told why she said it; she was trying to think of
+something else to say which would be kinder by far.  And then, half
+lifting her, he had swung her around to him.  For a moment he held her,
+face close to that small, frightened face buried in its deep collar,
+while she struggled uselessly against those hard arms which tried not
+to hurt her.  Her lips continued to rebel, long after her eyes had
+closed&mdash;long after body and brain were quiescent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mustn't!" she gasped.  "Oh, I can't let you&nbsp;&#8230; the moon&nbsp;&#8230;
+we&mdash;we're sure to be seen!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His lips on hers silenced that last incoherent resistance.  She sat,
+wavy brown head bowed, when he had set her free.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was going to ask you not to forget!"  There was no weariness now in
+his voice.  "I had planned to ask you just that, a little ago, and it
+would have been a weak and useless request, wouldn't it?  Any man who
+has to beg to be remembered is not the sort to remain long in any
+woman's brain.  So I have taught you to remember, instead.  You aren't
+going to forget, ever, now!  You're coming back in the spring, and
+you're coming to stay!  And now <I>I'm</I> telling <I>you</I> good-bye.  It's
+time you were asleep."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He helped her to her feet.  Together they turned&mdash;and Archibald
+Wickersham, tall to gauntness in the moonlight, was coming across
+toward them from the direction of the cabin.  The girl's slim body
+stiffened, but Steve saw her chin come up.  His own body grew lazier
+still, it seemed, in length and limb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham's approaching steps were crisply precise; he stopped an
+arm's length in front of them, and his words were an echo of that last
+sentence of Steve's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's time you retired," he said, ignoring the other man's presence
+entirely.  "It's cold, and you have a long, hard ride ahead of you
+to-morrow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a barely perceptible moment, with the eyes of both men upon her,
+Barbara kept her place.  Neither of them saw that her teeth were
+tightly closed over one full lip; neither knew that she had closed her
+eyes, dizzily, for an instant.  And then, without a word, she put her
+hand upon the arm which Wickersham offered her; but Steve, on the other
+side, walked with her that night, as far as the door of the storehouse
+shack.  Miriam herself opened the door and snatched Barbara within, and
+then laughed with her consummate impudence into both men's faces.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"G'lang wid ye's now," she flung at them, "an' quit disturbin' dacint
+folks that likes to sleep o' nights!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She slammed the door upon them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They stood there a second or two, Wickersham an inch or more taller and
+inches narrower in shoulder and girth of chest.  Perfunctorily they
+nodded, each to the other, and wheeled silently upon their heels.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve did not respond the next morning when Joe summoned the rest with
+a long spoon applied heartily to the flat of a huge tin basin; and over
+the breakfast table Joe explained to the assembled guests the reason
+for his absence.  Before daybreak a rider had come from Morrison,
+bearing word from Hardwick Elliott that Ainnesley was on from Manhattan
+and wanted to talk with him; before the camp was fairly awake he had
+ridden away into the south.  And returning two days later, travelling
+the lower, lesser trails that followed the river, in order to save
+time, Steve missed her party going out.  So, in the last moment, after
+days and days of patient waiting, did Chance trick him sadly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+How much or how little Wickersham might have overseen the night before
+he betrayed not at all at breakfast the next morning, either by word or
+look.  And throughout that day, and the day that followed, while she
+rode at his side, undetermined whether she should attempt an
+explanation, Barbara found his face inscrutable.  It was a week later,
+the night preceding her departure from the hills, long after the girl
+had ceased to think of him at all in connection with the incident,
+before she learned how much he really knew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah had found her brother most uncommunicative upon his return
+from Thirty-Mile.  In response to her first question concerning Steve
+he had assured her, lifelessly, that the latter was looking very well
+indeed, and let it go at that.  Because she was a very remarkable
+woman, Miss Sarah had been able to curb her curiosity for several days,
+but on that particular evening she found it impossible calmly to wait
+longer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have not told me yet, Cal," she reproached him at dinner, in her
+slightly lisping voice, "how much progress Steve seems to have made.
+You know how interested I am, and you must realize how undignified a
+thirty-mile dash on horseback would be on my part, in order to find
+out, myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While up-river Caleb had found much time in which to talk with Garry
+Devereau&mdash;that is to say, quite a little time, in view of the fact that
+Miriam Burrell, in boots and mackinaw, had insisted upon following
+Garry wherever he went.  And since his return to Morrison he had been
+spending a surprisingly large share of his days in conference with
+Hardwick Elliott and his partner, Ainnesley.  Now his reply to his
+sister's query was startlingly fervid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Progress!" he exclaimed.  "Progress!  I tell you he's going to win
+out, in spite of all of them, damn 'em!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah froze in her chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Caleb!" she expostulated.  "Caleb!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Caleb's face went hot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am very sorry," he muttered contritely.  "But I couldn't help it.
+When I think of the way that boy has plugged on alone, all his life,
+with no one to give him a lift, it&mdash;it angers me to think that the very
+man whom I have prized as a friend should be the one to make his
+problem harder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you mind explaining, lucidly?" Miss Sarah requested.  "And if it
+is business to which you are referring, will you please try to make it
+as brief and non-technical as possible?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once he started to tell her, Caleb realized that it was just what he
+had needed to do all along, without knowing it.  Briefly as she had
+requested, he sketched for her the facts which, so far as he was
+concerned, had made of his first sneaking suspicion an absolute
+certainty.  And he waxed wroth in the recital.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's treachery," he snapped, "rank, contemptible treachery.  And the
+worst part of it all is that, even now, when I am morally certain of
+his culpability, I&mdash;I can't bring myself to despise the man.  He's been
+my friend for thirty years, Dexter has, and damn it&mdash;&mdash;  I beg your
+pardon, Sarah&mdash;but, damn it, I keep on thinking of him, in soft
+moments, as my friend now.  I sit by the hour trying to foist the blame
+upon Archie Wickersham, and he's no more guilty than Dexter.  Dexter's
+merely good-natured about his crookedness; wholesome about it, somehow.
+And Wickersham's a sneak!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In all the years they had lived together Miss Sarah had never heard her
+brother talk so bitterly.  Yet her voice remained soft.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's very unpleasant, no doubt," she sympathized, "although I can't
+quite see why they don't all join hands and try to make a success of
+the project between them.  Surely it seems feasible.  And, somehow,
+even after listening to you, I don't seem to find myself greatly
+perturbed about our boy, Steve.  He's very big and strong, Cal,
+and&mdash;and I am very old-fashioned.  I still believe in the might of
+right.  It may sound very feminine to you, but I do not find myself
+worried at all over his lack of assistance in his work.  And I must
+confess that I did not have it in mind, at all, when I asked in regard
+to his progress."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb looked up, suspiciously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I meant how&mdash;how did he and Barbara appear to&mdash;get on together?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb spilled a spoonful of soup.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Her!" he exploded with no regard for his grammar.  "Why, she is true
+to her blood!  If she weren't she wouldn't be engaged to that thief who
+masquerades as a gentleman.  She isn't blind, and she's going to marry
+him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are positively violent, Cal," reproved his sister.  "And your
+reference to Barbara does not do you credit.  If I were your wife I
+suppose I'd rise coldly now and sweep upstairs to leave you alone with
+your bad mood.  But being merely your sister I remain to hear you
+apologize.  Barbara is not yet married to Wickersham, I might add."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am exceedingly sorry," said Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And, without any reason for it, save my womanly intuition, I feel very
+certain that she will never marry him," Miss Sarah went on.  "But you
+spoke about Steve having no one upon whom he could depend for
+assistance, and it was really a helpful hint to me.  Did I fail to hear
+you say how they seemed to get on together?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She didn't think he was good enough for her, ten years ago," growled
+Caleb.  "She wouldn't think so, now.  He cares for her, so she treats
+him like a dog, of course."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah had to smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I think it is high time I did something about it," she stated
+thoughtfully.  "For she is a lovable girl, and she hasn't any mother of
+her own.  She's very pretty and little and finer than any girl I know.
+If she weren't, Steve would not be in love with her, I am sure.  And
+Dexter Allison is no doubt an estimable man in many ways, even though,
+as you feel positive, he has a tendency to acquisitiveness which is
+deplorable.  Your continued regard for him convinces me of that.  I
+wish, however, that Steve was not so entirely dependent upon what he
+earns.  There are many beautiful things&mdash;beautiful and intimate and
+feminine things&mdash;which no man can remain happy in seeing paid for by
+other money than his own, for the woman he loves."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ten minutes after it was done Caleb could not have told what impulse
+was to blame for the deed, but he rose forthwith and went to his
+strong-box, to return with the legal-looking document and the bunch of
+tax-receipts which he had found among Old Tom's papers, years and years
+before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's the deed to some thousands of acres of the finest timber in
+this country," he announced challengingly, "all ship-shape in the name
+of Stephen O'Mara, 2nd!  Old Tom bought them for the boy he hid away
+with him, in the days when timber-lands were going for a song.  He paid
+the taxes until he was drowned, and I&mdash;I've paid 'em since, my dear!
+Three or four hundred thousand dollars, or more, ought to buy quite an
+amount of&mdash;er&mdash;feminine necessities, it seems to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With delicately thin fingers Miss Sarah leafed the papers through.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have never told me of this matter before, Cal," she murmured.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Never told anybody!" chirruped Caleb triumphantly.  "I tried to find
+the boy&mdash;both of us did, that is&mdash;and we failed.  And when he turned up
+of his own accord&mdash;well, I knew a half year more of ignorance
+concerning his legacy wouldn't see him starve.  Sarah, I wanted to see
+how that boy of ours would behave, without any backing.  I wanted to be
+sure of the stuff he is made of!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had finished a much interrupted meal, but Miss Sarah lingered a
+moment at table.  With incredible calm she had listened to the secret
+which her brother had been keeping to himself so long.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A very good reason," she agreed, "one that would seem to have many
+points to excuse it.  And although it is not within the letter of the
+law I&mdash;I think, Cal, I shall become an accessory before the fact.  Very
+shamelessly I am going to ask you to see that no one knows of this
+property of Steve's, for a little longer, at least.  I have spoken with
+the utmost confidence concerning Barbara; your reference to all that
+she said to Steve in a childish burst of passion years ago does not
+affect my attitude at all.  But I have not been blind to what might be
+her&mdash;opinion now, either, impossible and ignoble though it seems.  You
+will not tell Stephen of this matter for a while, Cal, for it would
+please me to know, without room for doubt, just what stuff she is made
+of, too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She straightened her diminutive body and started upstairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She will be over to bid us good-bye to-night," she added.  "Will you
+see that she comes directly up to me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And once more, from the landing, she spoke over her shoulder:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You said that she treated him like a dog, Cal," she managed to keep
+her features grave, "and being a woman I can understand exactly why
+that is so.  The joy of a breathless pursuit, it is often said, is the
+only choice left for the female.  But can you tell me why a man hunts
+out the deepest, most comfortable chair he can find and ensconces
+himself therein, once he had overtaken the idol of his fancy?  They
+often do, you know, sometimes for the rest of their lives."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb lighted his pipe and cast about for his paper.  "Maybe it's only
+the natural consequence," he retorted, his face turned away, "of such a
+pursuit as you mention.  Maybe he feels the need of a long, long rest!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then Miss Sarah laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+An hour later, when she ran upstairs, Barbara found Caleb's tiny
+spinster sister, in negligee and boudoir cap, sitting cross-legged like
+a girl in the middle of the floor.  There was an orderly litter of
+papers around her, and a confusion of clothes; and Barbara hesitated on
+the threshold until Miss Sarah nodded her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come in, my dear," she invited.  "I'm indulging in one of the few joys
+left to advanced, unmarried years, that is all.  But even memories need
+prodding with more material things, at times, I find."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dark-eyed girl crossed and found a clear spot and seated herself.
+Without seeming to look at her, Miss Sarah saw that those eyes were
+vaguely troubled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm leaving to-morrow," Barbara began after a minute.  "I came over to
+say good-bye."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah went on with her sorting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'll see you again soon," she suggested pleasantly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was trouble in the girl's voice, too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&mdash;don't think so."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's a very pretty country&mdash;a hard country to forget."  Miss Sarah
+very wisely gave no heed to the woebegone note.  "Perhaps," archly,
+"perhaps you'll be returning as the new Mrs. Wickersham?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara flushed duskily.  Miss Sarah, however, was gazing at a
+dog-eared picture&mdash;a very old-fashioned picture of a youth in brave and
+resplendent garb of a period long dead.  No one but herself and her
+brother had seen that photograph for many years, and he only because he
+had rummaged in a pigeon-hole in which he had no licence to look.  His
+sister's eyes, as well as her posture, were girlish when she laid it
+aside to hold up to view a battered black velvet suit with wide collars
+and cuffs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wonder if you could ever guess who once wore this?" she laughed
+lightly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Politely Barbara examined it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm sure I couldn't," she answered.  And, very slowly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam is going to marry Garry Devereau.  She is disgracefully happy
+about it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The older woman received this irrelevance with composure.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How charming," she said.  "And I am sure that they will continue to be
+as happy as I hope you will be soon.  This suit was Steve's&mdash;little
+Steve's.  Dear me, what a day that was!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After a moment of hesitation Barbara leaned forward to examine the
+silver buttons.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It&mdash;it doesn't seem possible," she faltered.  "What sort of a&mdash;a day?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, with smooth, serious face upturned, she listened to Miss
+Sarah's tale&mdash;her own story of how she had dressed a gloomy-faced boy
+in half-century-old finery and sent him townward for eggs.  When it was
+finished and she had decided, abruptly, that she must be going,
+suddenly, wet-eyed, she wheeled in the doorway and went blindly back to
+the older woman's arms.  Miss Sarah hugged her once; then stood her
+away at arm's length.  She knew how few women weep, without hiding
+their heads.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There, we mustn't be temperamental," she chided.  "It's only for a
+winter, at most.  Remember, I love you very dearly, Barbara; write to
+me whenever you are lonely.  And be a very good girl."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a brave bit of comfort, but Caleb's tiny sister, whose face had
+never lost its pink-and-whiteness, looked suddenly tired and old when
+she was alone again.  As blindly as Barbara had come into her arms, she
+reached for the dog-eared picture and held it to her flat breasts.
+There is no greatness of soul save there be simplicity.  Very directly,
+very simply Miss Sarah stood there in the middle of her girlish room
+and spoke to her Creator.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not mean to meddle, dear God," she whispered, with tears
+squeezing from beneath tight lids.  "I only want to help a little, if I
+may.  You see, I've never had a baby of my own."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The door of the ground floor room which served Dexter Allison as an
+office was ajar when Barbara re-entered the house beyond the hedge.
+There was a streak of light running out across the floor of the dim
+hall from within, and the girl lingered on her hurried way to her own
+room to bid her father good-night.  But she found Wickersham alone when
+she pushed wider the door.  The light was behind him and she could not
+see how distorted was his face, yet as she paused on the threshold and
+a thin and pungent odor crinkled her nostrils, she sensed, somehow,
+that he had not been long alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Father gone to bed?" she called.  "Well, that's wise.  You'd better
+come, too; it's time you were asleep."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She did not remember, just then, that other night when he had addressed
+those same words to her.  She only knew that his features became
+suffused with purple even before she had finished.  And then she
+realized quickly that it was alcohol she smelled; knew, too, that it
+was not Wickersham who had been drinking, even though Wickersham had
+trouble with his tongue.  And while she waited, puzzled and frowning,
+the man gave up an attempt at his usual nicety of phrase and blurted
+out all that which had been many days hidden behind his impassivity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We haven't yet set a certain date for our marriage, Barbara," his
+voice was strained.  "Don't you think it is high time we did?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl colored.  It was, at least, very unexpected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, no, we haven't," she admitted.  "But we can if you wish it.  Have
+you thought of a day you'd prefer?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have," he stated.  "Would the first of May be too early for you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Often, afterward, she wondered at her humility of that night, for
+whatever the quick thought might have been which made her reach out one
+hand to touch the doorframe beside her, her words were merely mild.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is, rather.  But I think I can manage it, if it will please you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham had come to his feet, but he would not turn so that she
+might see his face.  He spoke with eyes averted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It would," he answered with an effort, "and&mdash;and in the interim I am
+going to be very sure, now, that no thoughtlessness of yours will be
+derogatory, either to my profound respect for you or your own respect
+for yourself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The small hand closed then until it was clutching whitely the woodwork
+beneath it.  She understood at last how much Wickersham had seen; she
+was never to understand entirely her mood of that moment.  For had she
+waited she would have left him with finger ringless.  Instead she
+wheeled without a word and climbed, white-lipped, upstairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miriam Burrell loomed in one window of her bedroom when she entered&mdash;a
+different Miriam than the one who had once sat in just such an
+attitude, gazing into the north.  The older girl's gladness of heart
+throbbed in her voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't want to leave it, Bobs," she sighed.  "I love every brawling
+rapid and sulky, ragged old peak.  Did you ever see a more perfect
+night?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Through the gloom the younger girl's answer lashed back, reckless of
+what hurt she might do.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I hate it!" she gasped vehemently.  "I hate it&mdash;hate it!  And I must
+ask you, please&mdash;I want to go to bed."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is a poise which comes only with hard-bought knowledge of one's
+self.  It was Miss Sarah's; Miriam had acquired it, too.  Without a
+hint of resentment in her manner she rose and withdrew.  But Barbara
+did not go to bed.  She took that vacated seat at the window.  And long
+after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still
+wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with
+elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who
+found it hard to keep his feet.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap19"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIX
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+Her letter came to him a week later, though she had posted it the
+morning she took the train from Morrison.  It had lain for days in the
+post-office box of the East Coast Company, waiting the day when one of
+the teamsters should call and carry it in overland.  Steve had never
+before seen her handwriting.  It was his first letter from her; yet he
+recognized it the instant Big Louie put it in his hand.  And he was
+glad that night that both Fat Joe and Garry were absent from the
+up-river camp&mdash;glad that he was to have the next hour alone.  But when
+he broke the flap of it Big Louie, who lingered uneasily in the open
+doorway&mdash;even Big Louie, whose wits were not particularly keen&mdash;knew
+from the expression which passed over his superior's face that this
+heavy envelope which he had brought had not contained good news.  The
+quick contraction of muscles which tightened his jaw was too much like
+a spasm of pain.  For her first letter, so the sentence ran, was to be
+her last; she wrote "less kindly than she would have wished to write,"
+that she and Mr. Wickersham had decided upon the first of May, and
+after the silence had become a throbbing thing Big Louie decided,
+instinctively, that he would let go until later the demand which he had
+planned to make for a raise to meet that raise which, so he had heard
+it gossiped in town, was being paid the men in the northern
+lumber-camps.  He stumbled going out and lost his balance so that the
+door crashed to behind him, violently.  But Steve stood as he had stood
+when his eye's sought the first line of her note, nor did the crash
+penetrate his ears.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Repeatedly, in the interval which had elapsed since she had bidden him
+good-bye, the latter had told himself that she would not write, but the
+repetition had been unconvincing.  He knew that now.  With the note
+which smelled faintly of her there in his hand he realized that he had
+gone beyond mere expectation of a letter; he had dared to hope
+concerning its contents.  How was he to know that she, too, after
+mailing it, had suffered as keenly as he was suffering that moment,
+wishing that she had employed less abrupt phrases, rebelliously
+regretting that she had sent it at all?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That night his fingers closed until the monogrammed sheet was reduced
+to a crumpled ball.  The edges of the paper took fire slowly, then it
+exploded softly into flame upon the bed of coals in the fireplace where
+he had tossed it.  And at that he laughed aloud, a harsh taunt for his
+own high hopes, without thinking how much his mirth of that moment was
+like what Garry's once had been.  He lowered himself into a chair, and
+he was still there, motionless before a dead fire, when morning dawned
+greyly.  His face had become less hard; he even found it possible to
+smile a little when the cook-boy, starting at the sight of him fully
+dressed at that hour, advised with alarmed volubility that breakfast
+would be ready immediately.  But the few men who still remained at
+Thirty-Mile, felling and hauling the piles which were to carry the
+track across the swamp, noticed a difference in their chief that
+morning which made them careful to hear him, the first time he spoke an
+order.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara did not write again, and in this, at least, the man who loved
+her anticipated her correctly.  The letters, however, which Garrett
+Devereau received each day from Miriam&mdash;bulky, extra-postage
+epistles&mdash;brought often news of her; and these fragments Garry, knowing
+without being told for whom they were meant duly delivered to Steve, in
+weekly or fortnightly instalments, whenever the latter's duties brought
+him to Morrison.  For Garry and Fat Joe, who had been transferred to
+the lower end of the work, along with the bulk of the up-river force,
+had noticed that difference too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam says for me to keep my feet dry this cold weather," he'd tell
+the other man, laughingly, "and Barbara sends her regards to all of us,
+and hopes that we are making splendid headway."  Or again: "Barbara's
+looking a little pale, Miriam writes.  She says she's&mdash;er&mdash;trying to do
+altogether too much for her endurance."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whatever the bit of news was Garry passed it on religiously, a little
+guiltily, sometimes, because of his own great happiness.  Once he had
+failed, signally, to read behind his friend's moody silences; his
+surmise concerning the reason for Steve's changed bearing was not so
+wide of the mark this time.  Often, within himself, Garry's wrath
+seethed hot, but he was no longer as ready as he had once been with
+verbal, cynical criticism.  Only to Fat Joe did he dare pour out his
+soul with that vivid incisiveness which always held Joe spellbound.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's eating his heart out over <I>her</I>," he'd explode, "over a girl who
+is proving every day that she isn't worth a minute's heart-ache of a
+man like him.  I used to think she had brains, if any of them did; I
+used to think that Barbara Allison was something besides a fluffy
+little fool!  Why can't he see for himself that she's just as worthless
+as most of the rest of them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And from there, without knowing how truly funny such argument sounded,
+coming from his lips, he would soar to wonderful heights of profanity.
+But save for the pleasure which he took in the pyrotechnics, his
+outbursts made little impression upon Fat Joe.  The latter maintained a
+sort of placid superiority, perhaps because he had learned early that
+this attitude aggravated Garry's rages; perhaps because he was so very
+certain of his man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wouldn't go to getting all stirred up like this, so early in the
+game," he'd reply with unvaried calm.  "Shucks, it's too early to begin
+counting either man's pile of chips&mdash;" either man to both minds meaning
+Steve and Wickersham, without the naming of names.  "You are too liable
+to premature enthusiasms or discouragements, Garry.  That's why I
+mostly manage to beat you as easy as he beats me, whenever we throw a
+hand or two.  Ain't you never going to learn that a man must gamble a
+bit on the cards still waiting to be dealt?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And again, confidently:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's worried&mdash;of course he is!  He ain't enjoyin' his meditations a
+little bit these days, but he's enjoyin' 'em more all by himself than
+he would be if we were up there with him, forcin' him to look
+everlastingly like four aces, when it's deuces at present he's holding.
+He's worried, and that's why I don't grow nervous myself.  Because it
+is only the man who is too sure who is awful likely to finish broke.
+Don't you waste any pity on him yet, and I wouldn't let him hear me
+passing uncomplimentary words concerning his girl, either, if I was
+you.  Lightning ain't particular where it strikes when it's been a long
+time cooped up.  Every man to his own taste in such matters, says
+I&mdash;and shucks, man, can't you tell, just from seein' 'em together that
+they was made for each other?  If a man quit every time a woman began
+to put him over the jumps we'd have a dangerous decrease in marriage
+licences staring us in the face.  He's just learning to care more for
+her, that's all, and caring a lot about anybody never was a comfortable
+state to be in.  It's entirely too uncertain and unsettling&mdash;but you
+wouldn't enjoy not caring about anybody at all, yourself, would you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Garry admitted that he wouldn't.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, then, don't waste your time pitying him."  A cold gleam
+flickered in those bleached blue eyes.  "Don't you suppose I'd have
+taken apart long ago this animated ice-chest who is making all the
+trouble, just to see what makes him so cold, if I didn't know I'd be
+spoiling the big show?  Couldn't you see, without my tellin' you, that
+I'd rise up some day and leave him looking like a premature blast,
+after all I've learned he's plannin' to slip us, if I wasn't sure that
+he's going to get it, worse than I could ever give it to him, from that
+girl herself?  Well, I would.  He makes me shiver, that man; makes me
+crawl and itch to take his head in one hand and his throat in the other
+and exert a little strength in opposite directions.  Give our entry
+time!  The game is running dead against him at present, I'll admit, but
+he's husbanding his chips.  He ain't drawing wild and squandering his
+chances.  And he's only <I>begun</I> to play."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Which, in part, was very, very true; in part not so close to the facts.
+Before snow came that fall Steve had recovered his outward confidence,
+at least; he had begun to hope again, while he waited and labored
+prodigiously against the coming of spring.  But in his heart he was no
+longer sure; he could not summon back that serene self-surety which,
+toward the end, had shaken even the girl's certainty in herself.  He
+could no longer argue convincingly with a vision of her, as he had
+often argued with Barbara herself, that his way would be her way in the
+end.  For he had begun to realize the width of that gulf which he knew
+must seem to exist between them, if not to her then to the eyes of
+others of her world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was his memories which gave him consolation those long nights, but
+they also gave him doubt.  Remembering the daintiness of her as she had
+come to him, the night of her party, recalling the things to which she
+had been accustomed since she had opened her eyes on the first light of
+day, he began to ask himself as every man like him has asked who ever
+loved a woman, how in any fairness he could expect her to accept the
+little which he could offer in return.  To Steve and Fat Joe, to the
+men of his gang, his confidence was that of the old, old Steve who, ten
+years before, had cocked his head at one of Allison's switch engines
+and promised gravely, "I'll hev to be gittin' one of them for myself,
+some-day."  But his heart ached.  And when that ache became so leaden
+that he couldn't endure it any longer in silence, he carried it to the
+one person in his life who was best calculated to understand.
+Diffidently he broached the subject with Miss Sarah, approaching it in
+a roundabout fashion least likely to deceive that bright-eyed little
+lady.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Garry is saving his money against the fatal day," he laughed one
+night.  "He has become a rank miser!  Joe says he goes for days at a
+time, borrowing his tobacco, and he won't play anything but penny-ante
+now, when he can be coaxed to play at all!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah was too kind to look at him directly that evening.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The regeneration of Garry is one of the things which had made my life
+most happy," she answered.  And then, paving the way for what she knew
+was on his mind.  "I suppose you will be surprising us yourself, one of
+these days.  And no doubt you'll be just as happily positive as Garry
+is, that your choice is the only one in the world."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They were alone in the big living-room.  Caleb was still in town,
+gossiping with Hardwick Elliott.  And Steve's bruised smile clutched at
+Miss Sarah's heart.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I!" he overdid his amusement.  "I have lived too much alone, I'm
+afraid, ever to prove very attractive to any woman's fancy.  Bachelors
+are not always born; they are sometimes the habits of loneliness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stuff and nonsense!" the good woman ridiculed him.  "Why&mdash;why, if it
+weren't for a suspicion that you might have your eye on some small
+person or other, I'd drop everything and hunt one up for you, myself.
+Why, Stephen, what a remark for me to hear from you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both were silent for a moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Marriage is a mighty&mdash;expensive proposition," he commented at length,
+profoundly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Is Garry such a plutocrat any more?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That is not a fair illustration for us to employ," he countered, and
+Barbara Allison was not the only woman who loved his lazily final
+statements.  "Both Garry and Miriam have been taught that there are
+worse things than the hardship of making last year's limousine do for
+another season."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah laughed at this drollery.  She was a better antagonist than
+most.  She had practiced on Caleb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can't one girl learn what another has been taught?" she wanted to
+know.  "Stephen, do you mean to sit there and infer that you could
+continue to <I>care</I> for a girl who could not care for you, just for
+yourself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His reply told her how tired he had become in trying to stem the tide
+of doubt alone.  It warned her, too, that she had gone too close, for
+he veered off sharply.  Steve persisted in generalities, but he wanted
+to talk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have been wondering if that is not an old-fashioned attitude," he
+said.  "Women, they tell, us, have broadened since they usurped many
+places in the business world once held by men.  They are looking mighty
+keen-eyed toward the vote now, and a share in the legislation of their
+growing affairs, or at least so they explain.  You have heard many men
+say 'business is business.'  Maybe you have watched quite a few
+charming brides walk to the altar, and wondered if that wasn't their
+sentiment, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She chose to be suddenly vexed with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not like such humor, and of course you are joking.  I have heard
+Garrett Devereau talk in just such a strain too often to be amused by
+it.  And if you mean&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I meant it, I was crying the baby," stated the man coldly, and Miss
+Sarah knew that he was rebuking himself.  "I could care for such a
+girl&mdash;yes.  But I doubt if I would marry a woman who had even the
+smallest doubt.  There are too many sharp places to be smoothed over,
+without chancing that tragedy of discontent.  It's merely habit that's
+to blame again, that's all."  He cast about for a parallel.  "One does
+not miss sugar so very much from a meal, until he knows he can't have
+it.  And then&mdash;well, Miss Sarah, I have many times talked peevishly,
+for a man, because there was none to be had."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are talking of women.  What about salt?" she inquired quickly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That is very indispensable, too, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of the two which do you always take care shall not be missing from
+your pack, whenever you turn into the woods?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see where you are heading, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not like dissemblance, Stephen," she warned.  "You know without
+the salt of love the sugar of life can grow sickeningly cloying."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He did not win his argument, but defeat gave him far more happiness
+than could have come from victory.  Leaving her that night, he closed
+his hand over her delicate fingers in a clasp which left her smiling in
+wonder after he had gone.  She watched horse and rider disappear into
+the whiteness of the new winter till both were lost to her sight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bless the boy," she murmured then.  "Bless the boy!"  And to Caleb,
+her brother, when he came stamping in: "I surely must take a hand with
+these children.  They have been left to their own devices long enough."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb had recovered his good-natured view of the whole affair; he was
+given to grinning those days at her flutterings.  On more than one
+occasion he told her, none too flatteringly, that she made him think of
+an officious hen with a brood which a high rate of mortality and
+prowling night-raiders had left bereft of all save two of her hatch.
+But this particular witticism did not bother her in the least, perhaps
+because she realized how pat the comparison was.  Instead of silencing
+him she showed him the letter which she constructed some days
+later&mdash;constructed most painstakingly, the second week in December.
+She deigned to read it aloud to him, before she dispatched it on its
+journey.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+"Barbara, dear child," she wrote, "this is the appeal of a lonesome
+spinster lady who finds that winter, still only a lusty infant here, is
+the season for younger, warmer pulses.  I am very tired of Caleb's
+continued company; that is, with nothing to leaven it.  The keenest of
+epigrammarians, my dear, becomes very commonplace, you know, to ears
+too long tuned to one voice.  So I am writing you in dignified
+desperation to come to me this holiday season&mdash;Caleb is not always as
+epigrammatic as I could wish.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+"I am going to be positive that you will come, unless you have already
+made other plans.  And, on second thought, if you have already done so,
+I am going to fall back upon the privileged tyranny of one who once
+carried you in her arms.  You must come to me this Christmas!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+There was another whole paragraph of rambling, repeated arguments, and
+then a full page devoted to the beauties of the hills and season.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+"The days are diamond brilliant," she wrote, "and the nights as drily
+cold and crisp as Caleb's few last cherished bottles of champagne.  We
+have a foot of snow, two feet in the ell of the house where the
+mint-bed lies, and that has afforded Caleb much peace of mind, too.
+The roots will live nicely under their warm blanket, you see&mdash;all of
+which must read frivolously to you, coming from staid Miss Sarah.  I
+can only plead that already I must be less lonely for anticipation of
+your arrival.  Are you well?  You will find new roses for your cheeks
+in this climate.  And you may telegraph your acceptance, this once, if
+you are too busy to write, although you know I deplore the lack of
+those punctillios which once made of all custom and etiquette a most
+charming thing."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It was signed, "Yours, my dear, Sarah Hunter."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a quaint twist to the letter S; sharp angles in the
+chirography which a newer decade of femininity might have found sadly
+lacking in a largeness of loops now indispensable as indication of
+"character."  And there was a postscript, of course.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+"Stephen O'Mara has been several times to dinner, since your departure.
+He is working very hard, but most successfully, I am sure, for he
+appears to be very happy.  He is thinner than he was, but who could
+have guessed that the boy he was would grow to be such a handsome man!
+Men with eyes like his and such voices used to break the hearts of
+susceptible maids, when I was sixteen.  Do come!  S. H."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+She read it aloud from beginning to end, nor did she falter much when
+Caleb greeted the postscript with a shout of joy.  Caleb was most
+high-spirited those days, for the line in regard to the progress of
+Steve's work was in truth an under-statement if anything, even though
+the assurance of his happiness might have been called a misconstruance
+of facts.  Caleb had almost begun to think that he had done Dexter
+Allison, his friend, an injustice.  He had begun to congratulate
+himself on having said nothing to him directly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you think of it?" his sister asked pleasantly, when she had
+finished reading.  "Will it&mdash;do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you mean&mdash;will it fetch her, I can only say Heaven knows!"  Indeed
+he was enjoying himself.  "You feel positive that she cares for him,
+you say?&#8230;  But I thought you were always inclined to believe Steve
+rather easy to look at, even as a boy?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was!" maintained Miss Sarah.  Her voice grew girlish.  "Do you
+remember the night you gave him my old hunting coat, Cal, and he went
+to sleep with it in his arms?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Some of the teasing note left her brother's voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then why do you tell Barbara&mdash;why do you seem to infer&mdash;" he foundered
+hopelessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Stupid!" said Miss Sarah.  "Will she come?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She won't!" he stated solidly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When he spoke in that tone Miss Sarah always chose to believe the
+contrary, and events in this instance proved her right.  Barbara did
+not wire.  She wrote a long letter full of little twists and turns
+which led at last to the subject which Miss Sarah had mentioned so
+parenthetically.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P CLASS="letter">
+"I am delighted at the prospect of getting away from town for a week,"
+she closed as she had opened her reply&mdash;"delighted at Mr. O'Mara's
+splendid success.  Last night I overheard father telling some business
+associates that he would one day be the biggest power in the north
+country, unless something happened to check him soon.  That was very
+flattering, wasn't it?  It will make you very proud, I know.  Tell Mr.
+O'Mara I wished to be recalled to him.  As I have already warned you in
+this letter, father insists on coming with me.  I think he must be a
+little tired of the city himself, for he is very restless.  And remind
+Uncle Cal that I am to have the wish-bone, or I will not come at all!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+This reply Miss Sarah also read aloud to her brother, in a voice that
+was not quite Christian, however, for it was gloating in tone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There!" she breathed, "and, Cal, aren't you ashamed sometimes to have
+your judgment so often refuted by a mere woman?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb had been reading in the Morrison Standard that the East Coast
+Company had made unbelievable strides in its work, in spite of many
+conspiring hard-luck circumstances; he was frowning over that oddly
+veiled compliment of Allison's, which his daughter had so innocently
+repeated, but he was glad to hear that Dexter, too, planned to run up
+for the year-end.  He was a bit bored himself.  Now he grinned over
+another thought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She fails to mention whether she ever noticed the color of his eyes,"
+he choked a little, "or&mdash;or the heart-breaking quality of his voice!
+Maybe she hasn't noticed 'em yet herself, eh?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah scorned to answer.  She went upstairs to her desk and she
+wrote two letters that night, before she retired.  One went back to
+Barbara.  The other had not so far to travel, but it was longer in
+reaching its destination.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap20"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XX
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+The world was snow-bound&mdash;all that small world which lay between the
+hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile.  For two days it had been snowing,
+great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making
+one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under
+the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling
+the elements.  For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved
+but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before
+Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather
+cleared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the
+afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she
+would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he
+was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself,
+upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the
+holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the
+snow.  It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of
+supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over
+the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch.
+Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the
+seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so
+stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind.  Fallon was driving;
+Shayne was beating his arms across his chest.  And the second team was
+fagged and caked with frozen lather.  Big Louie had been breaking trail
+for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from
+spent&mdash;not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their
+heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables.  Big Louie loved horses
+as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world.  Sober he fed them
+bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have
+understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who
+might chance to maltreat them.  That was the reason Steve had made Big
+Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house
+door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew
+that they were too weary to unload that night.  And he was still there
+at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead,
+hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came
+straight toward his own shack.  He opened the door and bade them enter
+before they had had a chance to knock.  The swagger in the shoulders of
+two of them told him what to expect.  Big Louie was only clumsy, as
+usual.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always
+addressed him.  His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was
+in part a question, in no wise a welcome.  "Well?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no
+hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We've come for our time," he growled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve nodded gravely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see," he murmured.  "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They were the satellites of Harrigan.  Because of that he had kept them
+all where his eyes could find them at times.  And even though their
+arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he
+listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps."  Fallon should not
+have gloated.  "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut.  We're
+going back to the river."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I see," again observed Steve.  "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as
+long as you want to work."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We want our time," Fallon reiterated.  "This is going to be a man's
+year on the river!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You, also?" Steve inquired of Shayne.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That worthy gloated too.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, me also," he came back, "an' a hundred others, before the ice
+goes out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was
+with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man.  "I need
+you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know.  You are
+worth three a day to me.  Do you care to think it over?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold.
+They were that now.  He started to turn toward the window for a look at
+the stables, and then thought better of it.  Resolutely, for him, he
+shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am done&mdash;me," he muttered.  "I work for no company that will leave
+honest men to starve."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was hopeless from the start, yet Steve tried again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can promise you work as long as you are able to hold a rein," he
+offered, but he moved nearer the door while he was speaking.  "That is
+all I can promise."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps Fallon believed that Big Louie was weakening; perhaps he felt
+that the situation was too highly dramatic to be wasted, for he made a
+wide flourish with one hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We want our time, and we want it now," he threatened.  "We're going to
+show you who bosses this river, before we're done with you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fallon shouldn't have gloated; he shouldn't have threatened.  And
+Shayne shouldn't have smiled.  Steve had slipped the latch loose.  Now
+he swung open the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Call for your time at the Morrison office," he said evenly, "and if
+you're going&mdash;why, go!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By collar and belt he swung him back and drove him sprawling into a
+drift.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Are you in a hurry, too, Shayne?" he asked pleasantly, and Shayne
+buried his head beside Fallon's in the snow.  Then Steve closed the
+door carefully and turned again to Big Louie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Louie," he said, "I make it a rule to urge no man who does not wish to
+stay.  If it needs persuasion to keep you, I do not want you here.  But
+you are running with the wrong crowd, Louie; you'll learn it
+someday&mdash;but someday may be too late."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The big, dreamy-eyed man was hardly listening, but he gestured toward
+the door.  And Steve treated his departure kindly, as he had always
+treated his presence.  Outside where Shayne and Fallon had picked
+themselves up, Big Louie hesitated and fumbled in his pocket with a
+cold-cramped hand.  He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to
+him, before he went down the hill.  There are many men like Big Louie
+who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects.
+Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss
+Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty,
+Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted
+trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on
+their feet.  Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of
+the stables.  There were words between them, for Steve saw the huge
+man's arm lift to strike Shayne to the ground, and then drop harmlessly
+back to his side.  And Steve knew what that bit of pantomime meant.
+Big Louie had been to bid his team good-bye.  There was a smudge of
+brown sugar across his coat, though the watcher was too far away to see
+that.  But he knew that Big Louie had been crying, knew that Shayne had
+smiled.  It was the second time that Shayne had smiled that
+evening&mdash;his second bad mistake.  Long after they had disappeared into
+the north toward the Reserve Company's camps, Steve wondered that it
+had not cost him his life.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah's note which had been almost a week on the way was very
+primly correct, but the inevitable postscript which under-ran it
+sounded a more intimate note.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are not excessively formal as a rule, Stephen," she wrote, "so a
+dinner jacket will be adequate.  As I am expecting two other guests
+besides your friends, Mr. Morgan and Garrett Devereau, I must ask you
+to let no business matters interfere with your promptness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve dared not let himself wonder who those other guests would prove
+to be, Miriam Burrell, he knew, had already written Garry that this was
+to be the saddest Christmas, and the merriest, that she had ever known,
+giving as respective reasons her inability to be with him, and the fact
+that she was so entirely his.  Because he would not let himself hope
+this time he was not disappointed, or at least so he told himself, when
+he found only Dexter Allison with Caleb, the next afternoon near six.
+And on a sudden thought his eyes went roving around the room then,
+looking for Archibald Wickersham; but Miss Sarah gave him no time for a
+protracted scrutiny.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your room is ready, Stephen," she told him, and steered him toward the
+stairs.  "You have an hour in which to dress&mdash;and you know already that
+I am old-maidenishly strict."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Surely Archibald Wickersham was the other guest whom they were
+expecting.  Allison's very presence argued that.  Yet Steve's nose
+played him a startling trick as he mounted upward.  He could have sworn
+that he smelled that faint perfume which always made him remember, now,
+his first letter from her; had he not been afraid to hope he would have
+been positive that there was a flurry of skirts retreating above him.
+But he knew that she could not have come.  He knew it!  And then,
+three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again
+to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for
+him to appear.  In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her
+slenderness&mdash;made her appear even smaller than she was&mdash;she gave him an
+elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at him her
+laughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Merry Christmas, Sir Galahad," she called.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just as he had paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen
+O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him.
+It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in
+conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they
+had been on that remoter day.  But Steve did not even see her glowing
+face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison
+either, who watching Steve's eyes, had suddenly ceased to smile.  Caleb
+knew what his sister's thoughts were, however, for he was recalling
+that black velvet suit with silver buttons himself.  While Steve and
+Barbara were shaking hands he gained her ear in whispered admiration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sarah," he commented, "Sarah, you are clever!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah was on the point of taking Dexter Allison's arm to lead the
+way to table.  Her reply was tuned to Caleb's ear alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She had thought of him in terms of blue flannel and corduroy long
+enough," she said.  "If you please, Dexter&mdash;Stephen, do you and Barbara
+want any dinner?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Those two were still shaking hands.  Steve, who was only dimly aware of
+the fact that Garry and Fat Joe had arrived, the latter guilty of his
+first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at
+Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a
+word she spoke.  Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him.  "Am I so
+pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought you looked like&mdash;shall I tell you what I thought?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Most certainly," she was forced to insist.  "Wasn't it a bald enough
+invitation for a pretty speech?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve
+leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe
+leaned over and nudged Garry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What'd I tell you?" he demanded.  "What'd I tell you?  Say, ain't he
+working well to-night?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such
+as he had decried in Garry.  For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's
+phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy,
+until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in
+the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by
+the clothes he wore.  The very light in his eyes, whenever she
+contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind
+his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself
+to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen
+it.  More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the
+general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon
+O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was
+his custom when deeply perplexed.  Complications scarcely ever troubled
+Dexter Allison.  He was beginning to awake to one now which already
+worried him more than he cared to admit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over.  She
+ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and
+skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way.  And Steve, who had
+changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a
+crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white
+one twisted about her throat.  With much approval Miss Sarah noted,
+while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to
+his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some
+future date.  Caleb had very pronounced views regarding the lack of
+vanity in men's dress.  But for the time being she was content to go
+upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence.
+They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the
+higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white,
+before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She needed no explanation of his mood.  To a woman there is no subtler
+flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability.  He
+talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was
+vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The
+work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the
+severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night.
+Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of
+himself&mdash;that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction
+that she was beyond his reach.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about
+Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and
+a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is too bad," he said slowly.  "I have been sorrier for him myself,
+since his going, than I've been over anything for years.  I do not know
+just why, but I'm afraid for him.  The others&mdash;"  He stopped there,
+catching himself before he had said too much.  "I could always tell Big
+Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of
+doubt that he would stick to my orders.  But that is the trouble with
+his kind.  Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend
+upon the ideas which other men supply him.  And there is no guarantee
+whether they will be good or bad ideas."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From the first he talked fitfully that night.  On other occasions she
+had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to
+another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back
+again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread
+of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and
+delightful wisdoms to her ears.  But to-night his grave-voiced
+divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he
+had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, should be
+the one to be trusted.  "He was never able to go fifty rods into the
+brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was
+born in these hills, at that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring,
+before she understood quite what he meant.  But he abandoned that
+trend, freakishly, the very next moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered.  "To a man who has come
+into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all
+safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the
+flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest
+thing there is.  He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the
+land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars.  But the other
+one&mdash;the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many
+miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that
+many in the morning&mdash;why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until
+night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected
+for a camp-fire."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his
+spirit&mdash;and she wanted him to go on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It must be a terrible thing to&mdash;to know that one is lost."  Her hands
+were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with
+his stride.  "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his
+smile was absent-minded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating
+it for a time.  "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who
+loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up.  Big Louie was that way.
+He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad
+with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue.  He had been running in
+a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see
+that we were friends.  He'd been listening to the night noises, you
+see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire,
+until his brain was no longer any use to him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was
+waiting for her to speak.  Yet his answer persisted in adding to that
+word-image which his mind was molding.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything
+is following you!"  He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was
+talking at himself.  "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and
+the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear.  The wise man
+stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself
+collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by
+exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself.  And he sleeps if
+he can.  Anyhow he lies quiet and rests.  And when morning comes he
+uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play
+him false.  He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the
+sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by
+the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+This time the girl did not interrupt him.  She was watching his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one
+little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused.  "When a man's
+instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's
+afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle
+around before it gets too dark to search for fuel.  But at that it
+isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again.
+It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't shine; sometimes
+day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too
+strongly.  Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been
+times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some
+object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight."  He stopped short
+and faced her.  "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would
+try hard to discipline yourself.  You would never go rushing blindly
+into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity
+down.  Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him.  And&mdash;and I
+have always been able to find my way myself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She knew now toward what point he had been talking.  Mentally he had
+been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide
+circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was
+hurting her, even while it was making her happy.  He had taken the
+example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the
+girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than
+was hers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly.  "If ever I am
+lost I&mdash;I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes
+to the fore."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten
+a thong slipping from one webbed foot.  Below them stretched a plain of
+shimmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber.
+Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily;
+somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a
+sense of the mystery of his wilderness&mdash;its friendship for those who
+love it&mdash;its implacable enmity for those who do not understand.  And he
+looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is wonderful&mdash;wonderful&mdash;wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out
+both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well.  "Now
+I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its
+spell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly
+again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a
+speech.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to
+say in reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if
+throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome.  He laughed aloud,
+and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was
+more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again.  But his attack
+no longer made her fear herself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go
+in that night.  "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could
+stand in the way.  But that is the reason I know I do not care."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake
+it off.  There was doubt in his answer now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because I am not&mdash;&mdash;"  But he could not force himself to ask it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care
+who marries you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why.  Pity is a
+very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were
+dogged.  "Loving me more than you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at
+Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye.  Other long
+tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his attitude
+remained much the same.  Whimsically at times he shared his innermost
+thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness
+in the telling that made it hard for her to listen.  Barbara least of
+all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week
+had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to
+his sister's attention.  "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him
+this trip that he hasn't a chance."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss
+Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to
+view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her
+again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her.  "Proxy
+bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly
+interested."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will," she promised meekly.  And then, wide eyes vague with fear:
+"Aunt Sarah, I&mdash;I'm not sure that I want to be&mdash;married at all!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="60%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the
+train.  "You will be back in the spring?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think so," she faltered in return.  "I mean to come and see the
+completion of your work, if father will let me."  She knew a moment of
+confusion.  "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the
+hills."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications
+were small.  The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of
+blue flannel and corduroy.  But that was not the most disturbingly
+vivid memory which she carried away with her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling
+out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so
+reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch
+engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She did not want to go.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap21"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXI
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+SETTING THE STAGE
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+There are two interviews which should be mentioned here, if for no
+other reason then merely because they were both so entirely the outcome
+of Miss Sarah's Christmas party.  Neither of them were long; the last
+one which took place between Wickersham and the girl he was to marry
+was the briefer of the two.  But her prettily serious argument that the
+first of May was too early a date for their wedding, in view of the
+work which he had to do and her own state of unpreparedness, left him
+so white of face that she felt guiltily sorry for him for many days to
+follow&mdash;felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had
+established that reprieve.  The other interview was longer, and took
+place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald
+Wickersham.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his
+daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon
+his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night
+of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen
+O'Mara's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison had never professed a knowledge of women.  Like her mother,
+Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often
+taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve.  Partly
+because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had
+taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice
+neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham.  The two
+had grown up from childhood together&mdash;Barbara and the man whom she was
+engaged to marry&mdash;and more than once her father had assured himself
+that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings
+to make for safety in the long run.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle
+course of non-interference.  And he had never liked the boy; never
+learned to like the man he had grown to be.  Underneath Dexter
+Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would
+have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of
+spleen.  Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy&mdash;little
+rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap&mdash;without
+beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and
+twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months.  He
+believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram
+to the contrary.  He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of
+the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of
+rank and a thing of ranker repute.  But after his first shock at the
+realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself
+that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised
+that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the
+title in full.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach.  Allison had
+taken pains to ascertain that.  But beyond that he did not let himself
+go; he neither allowed himself to wonder at, nor regret, her choice.
+He was too honest to decry in another much which he knew would not
+measure up to Golden Rule standards in himself.  And he had a really
+great man's unshakable faith in his own flesh and blood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet he had been troubled more than a little since his Christmas trip to
+Morrison.  When he turned a page he turned it for all time, but in the
+last day or two he had caught himself surrepticiously trying to steal a
+glance at some which had only just rustled into place.  Dexter Allison
+had left brilliant men of cross-examination panting impotently at the
+barrenness of their efforts; he had known it and enjoyed it to the
+full.  But he knew, too, that he could never face, jauntily or
+otherwise, one reproach in the dusky eyes of the girl with whom he had
+more than once played truant, to breakfast with Caleb and Miss Sarah.
+And he was facing that thought, nearer to panic than he had ever been
+before, the night before New Year's, when Wickersham was announced at
+nine.  He was thinking of Barbara's mother when he beckoned his guest
+to a chair, shook his head over his red cheeks, and offered a cigar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Devilish cold weather," he grunted, none too graciously, for he had
+not wanted to be disturbed just then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The younger man admitted that it was.  His mind, plainly, was not upon
+the weather, but he found difficulty in introducing a topic of his own
+choosing.  Outspokenness had never been one of Archie Wickersham's
+boldest characteristics, so Allison assisted him now.  Allison liked a
+man to be outspoken.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it.  What's on your mind?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There are times when hatred will betray 'most any man.  Hatred now led
+Wickersham to speak not wisely but with venom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want you to refuse to renew your name on the East Coast notes," he
+said.  "They are due on the second."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Few men had ever said "I want you to" to Dexter Allison and, as he put
+it, "gotten away with it to any great extent."  And of all nights this
+one in particular was the least likely to prove propitious for such an
+attempt.  That was Wickersham's oversight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So!" said Dexter, "so!  Well, now for your reason."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham had not learned until after Barbara's departure that she was
+spending the holidays in Morrison, for he had himself expected to be
+away.  And it is only fair to the girl to say that she had honestly
+forgotten to apprise him of her plan, in her real excitement at going.
+But finding it out for himself had not made the fact any pleasanter to
+Wickersham.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It should be clear enough without explanation," he enunciated each
+word nicely, "if you want that road they are building."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison glanced up, surprised at the tone employed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Meaning of course I do," he mused.  "And yet&mdash;and yet, I don't know!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Fear burned in the tall, thin man's eyes that night&mdash;fear that made his
+hatred for the absent man who was teaching him fear anything but a
+pretty thing to watch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've tried to buy off their men."  He was holding himself with an
+effort that made him tremble.  "I've held up their supplies on every
+track that we control, but they've had the luck with them.  They've
+made up lost time by working day and night.  I've&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've set a drunken fool to steal his plans," drawled the other with
+deadly sarcasm, "like a second-rate, one-night-stand villain.  Don't
+forget to mention that, too!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In many ways it resembled an earlier conference which they had shared
+together; in many points it differed from it.  For if Allison had
+goaded the other man, on that former occasion, largely from a malicious
+delight in stirring him to verbal violence, such a thought was farthest
+from his mind now.  Allison was talking from a new angle.  If a turned
+page was a turned page to him, at least his memory was good.  His
+lounging body shifted a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Archie, do you remember what I told you about that woods-rat, as you
+called him once?  Did I tell you that he would fight?  Well, listen and
+listen closely while I repeat it for you.  He hasn't even warmed to it
+yet!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham went yellow at that, but his icy self-control held firm.  He
+did not break into vituperation this night; he smiled, though his voice
+was only a whisper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Men have dropped out of sight before now, in those woods," he husked.
+"I'll win, or I'll see that he lies and rots in one of his own
+sink-holes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A big voice is a wonderful weapon at times.  Allison's booming bass
+made Wickersham's threat seem only mean and hollow when the heavy man
+leaped to his feet and shook a finger under that high-bridged nose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No you won't!" he snapped.  "No you won't!  And if I didn't know,
+after hearing you talk, that you haven't stuff enough in you to be
+dangerous, I'd fix you so you'd be in no condition to bushwhack anybody
+for the next six months.  I'm in a bad mood to-night.  Drop out of
+sight, eh?  You'll play this fair&mdash;fair at least as I see it by my
+standards, and they are better standards than yours.  You've come
+dictating to me, ordering me to slip a knife into their backs.  Are you
+that kind of a sneak?  Did you think I was?  Now listen again, and
+listen well, for I mean what I say!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want that railroad, if the man who is building it is too weak to
+keep me from taking it away from him.  But if I don't get it on such a
+basis, I'll know that there is a man at the head of it who is big
+enough to take care of my share of it.  Have you got that?  Very well.
+And now go back to your melodrama, if you want to.  Steal his men, if
+he will let you; fight him every inch of his construction&mdash;that is your
+job&mdash;and I'll still insist that it is his fault if he is tardy on the
+first of May.  But it's you and O'Mara from now on, Archie.  I'll be a
+spectator now!  And, by Gad, don't you ever come near me again with a
+request that I&nbsp;&#8230; don't you ever let me hear you threaten that
+you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison's face was suffused before he finished, and Wickersham,
+astounded past utterance, slid from his chair away from that
+flourishing hand which had become a fist.  It was no scene to take
+place between a man and his prospective son-in-law.  Realizing that
+Allison tried to laugh, deprecatingly, at his temper.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go out and get him, Archie," he invited.  "I'll be watching, don't
+doubt that.  And I know how much you want to win.  It's a bigger stake
+than most folks realize!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like Barbara he tried to make his side of the interview kindly at the
+end, but he sent the other man away wondering whether he had understood
+that last remark, and afraid to think that he had.  And two other
+things Allison had done.  For once he had started to pay hush money to
+his conscience.  Once and for all, like Fat Joe, he had registered at
+last a refusal to interfere in any way that might spoil the climax of
+the "big show" for which Fate or Chance or Destiny, or whatever men may
+call it, was setting the stage, with an unhurried calm that contrasted,
+ironically, with the mad haste of her actors.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But he watched, as he had promised he would.  The same day that more
+than half of O'Mara's men went on strike and deserted to the Reserve
+Company's payroll, the news reached him that a trainload of laborers
+had been shot in to take their places&mdash;those very types of laborers
+which Steve himself had warned Elliott would not last an hour, in the
+event of trouble.  For a week Allison wondered that there was no clash
+between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone
+and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end
+of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but
+just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could damn a
+man merely by bidding him good-morning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe
+would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the
+night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have
+learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham
+was missing no chances.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told
+Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip.  "They are turning
+their attention to their float dams, now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch
+he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on
+strike.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pass on to his
+daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is,
+all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time,
+and not to the opposition which he was meeting.  Her excitement was a
+bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a
+war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into
+position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time
+destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful
+intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness.  She saw
+less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs
+were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend
+most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who
+appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship.  Always she insisted
+that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers
+with both of them, in anticipation of their journey north, against the
+first of May.  But there was one bit of news which her father had not
+been able to pass on to her.  For Dexter Allison had had no way of
+learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had
+finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and
+forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the bitterest January that the hill country had known in twenty
+years; but mile by mile that month the twin lines of steel crept
+steadily into the north under the urgings of Garry's smooth voice.  The
+snowfall for February broke all records for half that period; but
+Steve, with his handful of men at Thirty-Mile, put his piling down.
+And then it rained&mdash;it rained until small brooks ran torrents and the
+river tumbled white and thunderous its entire length.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The snow went off the last of March that spring and the gorges could
+not carry away the water.  The sun turned summer hot; it burned the
+higher ridges dry while the valleys still lay hidden in flood.  It was
+August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara
+stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at
+Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the
+strain they had been under.  They were few, they were unshaven and
+dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had
+once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent
+combat.  Fat Joe was no longer plump.  Steve was worn down to actual
+thinness.  And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the
+chief from their ranks that Sunday.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The huge timbers had dropped into place like bits of jig-sawed puzzle.
+At three in the afternoon, too tired both in body and soul for elation,
+Steve watched them drive home the last spike and heard their hoarse
+effort at a cheer.  He had turned to start toward his shack, not like a
+man who knows that the end of a well-nigh hopeless task is in sight,
+but like a beaten man.  The first of May meant more to Steve than any
+clause of the East Coast Company's contract could convey.  He had not
+had even one letter since he put her upon her train.  Wickersham's
+appearance on horseback, at the head of the valley, picking his way
+around the flooded meadow, halted him in his heavy-footed climb.  A
+whistle shrilled, far to the south of them, down the completed track.
+And then, after ten years and more, they were face to face again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That bridge will have to go down!"  Wickersham was breathing hard, for
+all that he had been riding.  "I'm going through with my drive to-day!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had dismounted.  Steve smiled at him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're a whole week previous, Wickersham," he said, wearily.  "I'll be
+signaling for your first load of logs in less than sixty hours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Archibald Wickersham wished that he could have believed it impossible,
+for it would have given him courage and lent conviction to his stand.
+But he knew just how fast those few remaining miles of open roadbed
+would be spanned.  His eyes were furtive; there was no body to his
+voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My men are on the banks," he blustered.  "My first head of logs has
+started down.  It's too late to argue now&mdash;too late for your promises
+that none but fools ever believed!"  The sure irrevocability of what he
+was saying blanched his cheeks.  "I cannot wait for a miracle to be
+performed.  My timber must come out on this flood."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Stephen O'Mara had whipped him once, but men had interfered.  This day
+Chance or Destiny or Fate&mdash;whatever you may choose to call it&mdash;saved
+him from destruction.  The lean and weary man who had not been out of
+his clothes for three days and three nights, save for a plunge in the
+icy river, had taken his first step forward, when the whistle screamed
+a nearer warning.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had told him that she would come to see the finish of his race, but
+he had long since stopped believing that.  And now when she stood and
+waved her hand at him from the brass-railed observation platform of
+Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the
+grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only
+stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway.
+Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder.  And Wickersham,
+who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them,
+stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit.  Wickersham was
+smiling; Wickersham was safe again.  For Fate or Chance or Destiny who
+had been setting the stage was bringing on her principals.  She would
+brook no <I>ad lib</I> now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A low mutter in the north became an ominous murmur while Steve was
+following slowly in Wickersham's steps, and he realized what it meant.
+He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to
+listen, too.  Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his
+own inferiority which he could never understand.  And a minute later,
+when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure
+with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt
+about her ankles and laughingly refused his assistance, and jumped to
+the ground unaided.  She was far too excited to know what she was
+doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act
+spelled much to him.  His hands were grimy, his face stubbly and
+streaked with sweat and mud, and he had been months alone with his
+too-sensitive spirit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You should not be here," was all he said to her.  "This is no place
+for you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He shook hands with the men, mechanically&mdash;Allison quizzical, Elliott
+concerned.  He went back to his bridge.  The water had come up a half
+foot in the last few minutes some one&mdash;Fat Joe, perhaps&mdash;told him; it
+was sucking greedily at the piles.  And in the north the ominous murmur
+had become a rhythmic roar.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham's men were driving the river.  They were singing "Harrigan,
+That's Me!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap22"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+It is said that men remember many things when death is imminent; and
+for days and days something had been dying hard in Stephen O'Mara's
+breast.  His step was slow that afternoon when he drew apart to take up
+his position alone upon a bit of higher ground, his shoulders heavy and
+drooping; yet his brain was feverishly active.  Recollection of many
+long gone days&mdash;thoughts of many things&mdash;came darting to his mind; but
+they were not thoughts of desperate, last-minute expedients which might
+stave off this present crisis.  For if he had believed that force alone
+would win for him; if he had had faith that mere numbers could save his
+construction, he would not have left Garry Devereau with his scores of
+laborers, busy five miles to the south.  Steve was not thinking of his
+construction now; it had become a dim and remote consideration.  It had
+lost its importance in his scheme of things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They came slowly at first&mdash;Wickersham's logs&mdash;thudding heavily, one by
+one, into the underpinnings of the bridge, sliding free or lodging
+cross-current as the case might be; then in a thicker and thicker tide
+that ground and up-ended and settled with the weight of the
+coffee-colored flood behind it.  In the beginning the handful of men
+who had put those timbers into place set themselves, doggedly, to save
+their completed structure, until the man who had worked with them,
+shoulder to shoulder, through the night called them with a nod back to
+the bank.  Obediently then they collected in a small knot behind him,
+murmurous, gutterally grumbling; waiting his further word they squatted
+on their haunches, staring hungrily at their chief who stood in seeming
+surrender, head bowed before them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The coming of Wickersham's men was not a thing of degrees.  They poured
+into view through the brush fringe at the north edge of the marsh and
+halted, but only for an instant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is your friend at the time when you need a friend?&mdash;&mdash;Harrigan,
+that's me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The maudlin menace of that chorus rocketed from ridge to ridge.  Then,
+a tight-ranked mass of humanity, they had formed and were sweeping
+forward again, stepping out to the beat of the ragtime which was their
+marching hymn.  And still the man who stood apart from the rest gave no
+sign that he was aware of their approach.  Once he did straighten; when
+separate faces began to be distinguishable in that reeling mob he
+turned and gazed, emptily, toward the group a few yards
+away&mdash;Wickersham putty-skinned before this storm which he had brewed;
+Allison himself pale; and the girl whose eyes were staring back at him
+with no clear understanding in their depths.  He made no move toward
+action, not even when the singing pack surged up and spread out before
+him, until a jostling crescent, straggling at the points, half
+encircled him and swallowed up as well the little knot behind which had
+come bristling to its feet.  Their onslaught had seemed an irresistible
+thing, bent upon instant violence; and yet little by little their
+syncopated defiance died away until they, too, were staring uncertainly
+at that worn and mud-stained figure which seemed to hang its head.  His
+very inertia robbed them of their impetus.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Harrigan, that's me!" they faltered now, and there came a lull in the
+valley at Thirty-Mile, broken only by heavy breathing and the crunch of
+logs jamming beneath the bridge, and the ugly swirl of backed-up water.
+It held quiet while Steve looked up, mildly, and scanned the ring in
+front of him and nodded in recognition to a sullen few; then oaths
+broke that silence, and a command for room to pass.  An upheaval
+disrupted the crescent's centre.  Steve saw Big Louie's face high above
+the heads of his shorter companions; he watched him plow heavily
+forward.  Shayne he glimpsed, automatically, and Fallon, faithful
+henchmen.  And then Harrigan stood forth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Long arms dangling, palms back, almost to his knees, that red-headed
+one minced forward on the balls of his feet.  Harrigan was redeeming a
+promise many weeks overdue.  It was spring, and Harrigan had come back!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm here," he spoke to that bowed head, "if you are afther carin' to
+welcome me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've been expecting you, Harrigan."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again that startling mildness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There is little wonder that it deceived the riverman.  Listening,
+watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie
+Wickersham's dared flash in triumph.  And Harrigan's went savagely
+exultant.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted.  "Is it so difficult you
+find it now to speak up so I can hear?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled
+at what Steve took in silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade
+ended.  "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started
+at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys.  You've made a gr-reat
+success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should
+have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime.  For when you aimed to
+turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something
+too big for you to finish.  I'm taking it off your hands, now.  Can't
+you even talk back like a man?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated
+with an irrelevance strange even to himself&mdash;and that reference to her
+surely was not needed!  Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind
+Twin-face; people should be more careful whore they dropped matches in
+an unseasonably hot spring like this&mdash;and Harrigan's sneer for the boy
+who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the
+picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly
+squandered viciousness now.  Past and present they trouped before him,
+thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet
+long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he
+was going to answer it.  He didn't have to debate that, and
+deliberation only gave him the keener joy of anticipation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+All his life opposition had been a familiar of his.  Days of hunger he
+had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so
+black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear.
+But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Circumstance had been his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought
+to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end
+Custom was laughing in his face.  Beside those intangible antagonists
+which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and
+swaggering and cheap.  But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was
+an entity&mdash;a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's
+bitter intoleration.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve had stopped thinking; he had had too much of thought.  Suddenly
+that question which had been a riddle to him was a riddle no longer.
+He had the answer, and could see himself as others no doubt had seen
+him&mdash;a fool who had believed in the supremacy of fineness; a boy who
+had reached for the moon.  But it left the issue clearer now.  He, too,
+was a riverman; the degree was different, that was all.  And rivermen
+did not vex their brains with abstract problems; they fought with their
+hands.  His bowed head came back then, and the mass of men, catching
+sight of the mad, glad light that flared in his eyes, rolled back to
+give them room.  He laughed at Harrigan.  He was laughing at himself.
+They heard and marveled at the pleasantry of his answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe you are right, Harrigan," he said.  "You may be&mdash;I do not know.
+I have started big things and left them unfinished.  But you are wrong
+for the rest of it, Harrigan, for I am going&mdash;to&mdash;finish&mdash;you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Men tell of that encounter now; it is already epic on the river.  One
+may listen to its details, and he chance into any of a half dozen
+places:&mdash;Mulcahy's, Laduc's, or Whitted's that once was Brown's.  And
+always one will hear different details, but always one accord of
+verdict.  They will tell you that no man ever went through worse
+vengeance and stayed a living man.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For like a blast of wrath O'Mara lifted and struck him.  Harrigan's
+hands had not left his hips before he met the ground, and he was back
+on his feet like a bounding ball only to go down again before the
+smashing impact of those blows.  Caution he tried to use in rising and
+they searched out his face, his chin, and drove him hither and yon.
+Open fighting was not the river style of fighting and he closed this
+time and wrapped his gorilla arms about this fury who fought with
+lightning strokes to keep him off.  His greater weight o'erbore them
+both; he broke away and his hob-nailed boots, lashing out, bit the
+flesh of O'Mara's temple&mdash;they tore the turf where his face had been.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was madness in Harrigan's hideous roarings of hate, madness in
+his blind rushes; but his bull-strength availed at first.  He weathered
+destruction and managed to close again.  This time the lighter man was
+ready for the scuff of those armed boots; he twisted and covered his
+face with his shoulder, and only his shirt ripped open to let blood
+stream from the rent.  On their feet they rocked&mdash;to their knees!
+Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away.  And always
+Harrigan came back and found him, blindly.  Once his hairy hands
+searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of
+fingers tearing at his eye-sockets.  Dropping he escaped that gouging
+grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Harrigan squandered his strength in drunken rushes, his breath in
+screams of hate.  He tore forward when the other had already stepped
+aside, and Steve, shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets
+into his eyes, met him returning.  There came a time when Harrigan's
+enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had
+to stand up and fight.  And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which
+made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set
+himself to chop his face to pieces.  Flail-like blows he side-stepped,
+and whipped to the other's eyes.  That open guard he feinted wider and
+laid flesh open raw.  Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were
+puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles.
+He could only sob, great groaning gasps for breath&mdash;and then he
+couldn't see!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And now Steve was laughing aloud.  He knew that <I>she</I> was watching;
+knew what loathing was in her eyes.  And he&mdash;he was a riverman!
+Sobbing himself for air, dripping crimson from forehead and shoulder,
+he set himself and swung from the waist.  Like a pole-axed ox, Harrigan
+stopped as he was lurching in.  His mouth sagged; his eyes flew wide in
+a fixed and stupid stare.  Then his legs folded under him and he swayed
+limply down.  But that blast of wrath would not let him lie!  It raised
+him and beat him down again; raised him and beat him down.  By his
+throat Steve swung him up&mdash;by throat and buckled belt.  High over his
+head he swung that bulk and lashed forward from his heels.  And
+Harrigan went back to his panting followers; twisting and spinning, his
+body swept Shayne and Fallon to the ground.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Allison had not stirred, nor putty-faced Wickersham, nor the girl who
+stood with hands at breasts.  And now toward them Stephen O'Mara
+wheeled.  His legs would fail him, and he steadied them; blood blinded
+him, and he wiped it away.  Swaying giddily, he managed, somehow, a
+smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wickersham, I have met the man whom you hired to fight for you," he
+called clearly, "and he has earned his wage!  Are you man enough to
+step forward now and fight for yourself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield
+his face.  Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded
+him he put the girl between him and his fear.  And then weakness seized
+upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her&mdash;to the unspeakable
+horror in her eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands
+as those.  Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his
+sight.  Fat Joe caught him as he fell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him
+up the hill.  Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the
+others he lay ignored.  It was a mob without a leader until, as is the
+way in all crises, a new leader arose.  Big Louie, stolid face no
+longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the
+unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed.  "That bridge&mdash;she still
+is hold!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment
+ever came.  And Elliott and Allison watched now.  They were sheep no
+longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning.  Like wolves they
+followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam.  Wickersham's men
+were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold!  And
+while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound,
+blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing,
+and walked blindly into the brush.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and
+cry for her.  It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on
+the hillside that she was missing.  And when men had been beating the
+woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no
+word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep
+his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged.  At daybreak Joe
+waked him and told him Barbara was lost.  They tried to argue with him,
+for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body
+seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him
+that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already
+found her, perhaps.  But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he
+threw off the hands that tried to detain him.  And it was Steve who
+found her, as he had known it would he, just before a second night of
+dread was closing in upon her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In circles of ever increasing radius he traveled at a foxtrot which
+thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon;
+but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled
+like a wild thing before him.  Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to
+the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up
+with her.  She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her
+loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to her feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Please," she whimpered, "Oh, please&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet when he spoke her name her head leaped back and she recognized him
+instantly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I tried to wait," she chattered with all the voice she had left.  "I
+tried to sit still until someone came for me, but I thought I knew the
+way.  I tried not to listen to the noises; I remembered about the
+stars; and I knew I shouldn't run.  But I thought you were&mdash;I thought
+you were&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Remembered terror choked her.  Consciousness slipped away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he
+carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the
+crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight,
+though in the wrong direction.  But it was long after dark when the
+river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and glassy in the
+deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles.  A
+grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to
+him; and Steve had to travel slowly.  His head was spinning from
+fatigue and the throb of the jagged tear above his temple when the log
+building, streaked white with clay chinking, loomed up ahead, and yet
+involuntarily he stopped there a moment with his burden.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had pictured, many times, a night when he would bring her there,
+with both of them watching the moon in the rapids and listening to the
+waves lipping the banks.  This was not that night; that night would
+never be.  But the rebellion and bitterness was gone from his heart.
+After he had removed her wet shoes and stockings and brush-whipped suit
+and sheer black blouse, and she slept the sleep of exhaustion into
+which she had slipped from unconsciousness without even opening her
+eyes, he built a fire and sat before it until morning came.  And when
+it dawned and she waked dazedly while he was preparing breakfast, he
+had finished reconstructing many things.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her eyes went from wall to wall, frightened still and questioning at
+first, so he merely nodded and went outside and left her to remember
+alone.  Returning with wood on his arm he found recollection of much in
+her gaze.  She was looking at the thin heeled, buttoned boots before
+the fireplace; the stockings and furred garments cleaned of mud and
+dried on the backs of chairs.  A cloud of color stole up from the
+blanket edge at her throat to the line of her hair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You were wet," he explained simply, "and you were too spent to help
+yourself.  I could not let you sleep in them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I understand," her answer faltered a little.  "I was just
+thinking.&#8230;  I knew such things happened, but I thought it was only
+in books."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Drowsily she watched him bending over frying pan and coffee pot,
+content herself to lie and rest.  But after a time, with fuller
+awakening, the bandage about his head claimed her attention.  To her it
+seemed impossible that this smoothly shaven man in clean blue shirt
+could be the same one who had emerged from a struggle still sickeningly
+brutish to her.  Involuntarily she shuddered a little without knowing
+that he watched.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am going to the spring for fresh water," he told her then.  "There
+will be time for you to dress; and breakfast will be ready when I come
+back."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Submissive before his tone she replied that she was hungry; that she
+would be ready, too.  She had donned blouse and skirt and stocking and
+shoes and finished braiding her hair when he re-entered.  He showed her
+a tin basin outside filled with icy water for her face and hands.  And
+then they sat down in silence to breakfast.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once he had dreamed what their first meal together in that room would
+be like.  This morning when she insisted upon pouring the coffee and
+scorched her hand in the attempt and chided him for careless
+housekeeping, pain showed in his smile.  But she did not immediately
+understand.  She only realized how sombre he was; how thin he looked
+and tired.  Again her eyes went to the bandage around his head.  It had
+a fascination for her, even though it filled her with repulsion for a
+decision which, she knew now, might have been hers, two days before.
+But eventually it was to that topic she turned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have been very good to me," she said.  "Far better than I was to
+you&mdash;the day before yesterday.  I can never hope to thank you enough
+for coming to help me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Wistful she had seen him, and grave and sober-eyed, but never sad until
+now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I should have helped you," she went on.  "I would have, only I had
+come expecting&nbsp;&#8230;  I thought to see&mdash;&mdash;"  Two days before when she
+alighted from her father's car, her heart a tumult in her ears, she
+could have told him perhaps.  She could not tell him now.  "I am not
+used to such things," she finished weakly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know," was all he replied, but the words were final, somehow.  They
+thrust her back, roughly, from any share in his thoughts.  They ate
+again in silence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Miriam would have helped," she forgot herself and argued aloud once.
+"She would not have failed.  But&mdash;blood sickens me, I think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was neither a pretty nor prepossessing sight," he helped to excuse
+her, but excuse nor pardon was not what she wanted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I told you that you would find out someday," she murmured.  "I warned
+you you would wake suddenly and see how shallow I am."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Until she had finished eating he would not talk.  But she had finished
+now.  He faced her with an abruptness that startled her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Waking has been no sudden thing with me!  I finished with dreams a
+long time back, but you are what you have been always in my thoughts.
+It's conditions I've waked to, not you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With unwitting gruffness he had sometimes spoken to her, but never with
+constrained vehemence such as that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why should I find fault in anything you have done, or failed to do?"
+he demanded of both her and himself.  "Why should you be apologetic or
+regretful.  Such a thing as I had to do two days ago has held no place
+in your world, and never could, but I can't find it in myself to be
+apologetic, either, because it is a part of mine.  I meant to kill
+him&mdash;wanted to kill him&mdash;because I was certain of your scorn!  That was
+vindictive; that was foolish for a man.  But as for the rest of it&mdash;I
+know I may have it all to do over again, any day.  It was a vulgar
+brawl to you; to me&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not just a brawl," she contradicted quickly, anxious to be understood.
+"Just&mdash;oh, so needlessly brutal.  At first it left me only dazed and
+nauseated, but after I had had time to think, I made myself see your
+side of it.  You must crush insubordination.  And still it seems as
+though there might have been a less horrible way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He had balked my work," he told her sternly.  "He has fired upon me
+from cover, when he dared not come out into the open.  He has been
+taking money for his work from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+cost.  Could I ask him please not to spoil my bridge?  Is that your
+idea of a man's way?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had given no thought to Wickersham until that moment, and now she
+thought of him only in connection with a night when she had found him
+alone in her father's office and wondered at the stale odor of alcohol.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not know," she hesitated.  "I am not sure, only&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You should know!"  But he was less vehement now.  Wearily he set
+himself to get at it in his own fashion.  "Some men are only physical
+cowards," he went on.  "But you have almost made a moral coward of me.
+Yes, you had nearly made me afraid to be the man I must be, if I am to
+do my work."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There are other fields&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He would not let her argue that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is no other field for me at present.  This is my work and while
+I continue in it men who oppose me with their brains I will fight with
+my brain.  But men who force me to meet them with fists I must beat
+with like weapons.  There is no alternative.  I have no choice&mdash;unless
+I quit.  And that is the reason I know that this is the end, for you
+and me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Sadness she had never known before in his voice, nor the edge which was
+cutting all it came against.  Now it grew gentler, with that gentleness
+he saved for her alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Once we argued whether I was 'good enough' for you, and we wasted many
+words that day, for 'good enough' can cover too many qualities to be a
+safe basis for general comparison.  I have been arguing it with myself,
+blind to the vital question, but I am blind no longer.  Combat which
+sickened you has cleared my eyes.  What if I did believe that I was not
+good enough to touch your little finger?  What if you believed that
+too?  Would that have hindered us, in the end?  You know it wouldn't;
+you have seen too many women give themselves to men whom they knew were
+unworthy in a hundred ways, because they could not help themselves.
+But that way would never have done for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It isn't that," she cut in desperately.  "I know you are big and fine
+and clean.  It isn't that&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But he knew better than she did what it was she could not phrase.  He
+left her dry of lip now, for he had read her thoughts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My ways would have had to be your ways, and we have learned at last
+what I have feared for long and long.  They lie too far apart for them
+ever to meet.  My man's way is not your woman's way, but I could not
+stay a man in your eyes if I let it become secondary to yours; and I
+would have to do just that to earn you.  Once I thought that there was
+no height I could not scale to gain your side.  I worked for you, but
+that is no way for a man to work.  He must work because he is a man and
+needs must win as big as he can to keep his own self-respect.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I promised to teach you to love me, and I've failed.  And knowing that
+my failure is not all my own fault is not going to make it any easier
+for me.  You've taught me loneliness I'm never going to forget as long
+as I live, but I don't love you any the less for that.  I dreamed big
+dreams for both of us."  His voice was dreary of a sudden.  "I promised
+I'd make those dreams come true, because I thought my life could be
+your life.  I've not done so; that thing could never be.  I've talked
+bigger than I could practice, and that is not going to help my
+self-confidence any, but as it stands now I can earn it back.  I
+couldn't have done that if I had married you, and waked some day to
+find you shrinking from me.  It would have killed it, and my
+self-respect too, to have learned too late that you believed still in
+your own greater fineness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I tell you it is not that," she cried out.  "Can't I make you
+understand&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have made me understand till I am sure," he stated.  "I am no
+longer vexing myself with trivial things.  Birth?  My name means as
+much as yours.  Education?  You would not tell me, would you, that I am
+not wiser in most ways you'd think to mention.  I'd break any man who
+gave to your ears many things I have learned."  He was whimsical for a
+flash.  "I could outspell you without an effort; books have been my
+partners when you had rather dance.  Oh, you could not lose me, no
+matter where you strayed in fields like that.  In any way you care to
+mention I have outstripped you, for I decided long ago that I must know
+more than you.  Yet I have not forgotten how to play, either.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have been uncertain; I have seen that.  You are certain now.  And
+the fundamental thing remains unchanged.  In me there is that man who
+once man-handled Harrigan&mdash;and you didn't want me to touch you!  You
+don't have to tell me any more that you can't love me.  When you drew
+away from me, that was enough."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His voice held a question, but the girl couldn't answer at first.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Wasn't it?" he repeated very gently, for he would have it from her own
+lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her face lifted.  Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she nodded in
+affirmation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So roughly that the dishes rattled he rose.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not want your pity," he ended it.  "I am the wrong sort of a man
+for you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sat and watched him put the room in order, and that hurt her more
+than anything else, for he would not let her help.  He made her change
+her high-heeled boots for moccasins which he brought and laced upon her
+feet; but the remainder of the day it was the old Steve who helped her
+over the bad bits of going and talked disconnectedly of many things
+meanwhile.  And yet no longer the old Steve, who had been so entirely
+her own.  Hers was the sad face when they entered the clearing at
+Thirty-Mile and a hoarse shout saluted her return.  In her father's
+embrace she clung and wondered that she did not cry.  And two pages had
+turned for her that day, for she sent Wickersham back his ring the same
+night the private car rolled down to Morrison.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Harrigan was with Archibald Wickersham when the package, unaccompanied
+by explanation, reached the latter in his hotel room in town.  Harrigan
+was waiting for a reply to a question which he had just asked, when
+Wickersham opened the box and sat fingering for a while the thin hoop
+of gold with its single brilliant stone.  Once Fat Joe had spoken
+prophetically; this was the hour he had foreseen.  And when Wickersham
+raised his head the riverman's battered face lighted shockingly with
+triumph.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go out and get him," said Wickersham.  "And see that you get him&mdash;for
+good!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap23"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXIII
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+TO-MORROW&mdash
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+For two days and two nights the girl fought on alone against the outcry
+of her own heart, and as on a former occasion she chose again the open
+roads for her battlefield.  While she pounded Ragtime mercilessly over
+the little-traveled northern highways, she struggled rebelliously with
+stubborn arguments which only left her more and more bewildered, the
+more conclusive they became.  She summoned parallels by the score to
+her support, but she lacked the trick of facile finality, somehow,
+which had always marked his usage of such argument.  Hard moments she
+knew when she closed her teeth tight upon her decision and told herself
+that it was final, but the next moment, after she had laid whip across
+the black horse's flank and faced homeward, she was biting her lips in
+shaken, panic contemplation of another thought which would not be
+denied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were times without number when Barbara hated the one whose very
+gentleness toward her was making her position hardest to maintain;
+times when she hated the work which, absorbing him by day at least,
+must be making his suffering less difficult to endure.  For she
+understood that there was still much for him to do, although the
+hill-country was already ringing with his victory.  And throughout
+every hour she hated herself most of all for that spirit behind the
+doubt which was swinging her, pendulum-like, between brain's reason and
+heart's desire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara needed her mother in those days of wretchedness, for she came
+and went as blind to the helpless misery which followed her always from
+the eyes of her father as she was heedless of who might read the misery
+in her own.  She turned a chill, set face to the one attempt to help
+made by Miriam Burrell, who, at the first inkling of violence on the
+river and possible danger to Garry Devereau, had come rushing overnight
+into the hills, purposed never to leave them again unless it was with
+him, as the wife of the man she loved.  Barbara wanted her mother, and
+when that occurred to Miss Sarah, the latter could no longer continue
+in passive sympathy.  Without compunction or loss of more time, she
+reversed a decision at which she had arrived herself only a short time
+before.  For Miss Sarah had stopped campaigning.  Caleb, with fire in
+his eye, had brought her the story of how "her boy" Steve had broken
+Harrigan with his bare hands.  She had had little to say concerning
+that episode, but her brother, noting that she did not condemn it as
+regrettable, wondered too that he had never noticed before how hard his
+sister's eyes could be.  The news that Barbara was lost had reached
+Miss Sarah hours before Allison's private car brought the girl and her
+father and Hardwick Elliott back to Morrison.  Thereupon, with her
+first glimpse of Barbara's wanly mute and suffering face, she had
+pieced the details together; she had told herself, with sorrow and
+understanding in her heart, that she must no longer interfere.  And
+now, though she did summon Barbara to her, the end of the second
+endless day, it was with no thought for evasion or finesse.  Barbara
+obeyed that summons reluctantly.  In the face of an almost sullen light
+in the girl's eyes when she entered on lagging feet, the older woman
+knew that she could not have persisted in such an attempt, even had she
+planned to employ it.  Additional warning was not needed, but Barbara's
+first words told her that the hour was long past for such methods.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At first the girl refused to sit down.  She wandered aimlessly around
+the room, switching nervously at her booted ankles with her
+riding-crop, to stop suddenly and raise a pale and stormy face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know why you sent for me," she exclaimed, "and I know just what you
+think of me.  But I must tell you, Miss Sarah, that there is nothing
+which can alter now, the least little bit, a decision which I know is
+wisest and best!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So she had the first word, never dreaming that Miss Sarah had seen to
+that.  Nor did the latter smile or seem to proffer argument at first.
+Oh, Miss Sarah had the true instincts of a big soul!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara," she answered quietly, after her formal firmness had
+prevailed and the girl had seated herself, "Barbara, when I sent for
+you it was not with a belief that I might influence you, for both of us
+know that this is your problem alone.  I merely hoped to comfort, that
+was all.  More than once I have been guilty of trying to manage you a
+little, but you will forgive me, I know, when I tell you that I have
+loved Stephen almost all his life, as though he were my own, and hoped
+as long for his great happiness.  On more than one occasion I contrived
+situations which I thought might make your choice my happiness, too.  I
+know now that I was no better than any other meddling old woman, whose
+efforts are well meant but dangerous for all that.  And I will meddle
+no more.  But&mdash;but my heart aches a little, too, to-day, Barbara.  May
+I just talk to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara blinked in surprise at the subdued sadness in the older woman's
+voice.  But her lips remained sullen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is nothing more to be said," she reiterated uncompromisingly.
+"I tell you I am sure!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And from that statement, minutes before she had thought to hear it,
+Miss Sarah learned, thankfully, just how deep was the girl's
+uncertainty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I need not fear that I may sway you one inch from your own way of
+reasoning."  Her gentle voice might have held relief.  "For you will
+not consider it argument when I agree with you that hard and fast
+reasoning is not always a dependable guide for a woman."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl was switching her ankles again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why isn't it?" she demanded abruptly, hungry for it now that the
+other, ostensibly, did not want to argue.  "If reason is no guide, what
+else is there left?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My dear, I do not know," acknowledged Miss Sarah.  "Intuition is a
+much over-worked word.  And yet, had hard and fast reason been your
+guide, you would not have refused Stephen, I am sure.  For it would be
+difficult to name one particular in which he is not entirely a man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The violet eyes grew quickly hostile.  The girl was keen enough to
+argue, but she was in no mood for refutation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am afraid that I do not follow you?" came coldly from her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There comes a day in every woman's life, of course," Miss Sarah
+ignored sweetly the interruption, "when she has to leave girlhood
+behind.  And lest that sound bromidic and trite, I will add that I do
+not mean the trivial material things of immaturity, but rather the
+happy irresponsibility which has no place in a woman's life."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That statement offered a plain enough opening.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Am I responsible for his unhappiness?" Barbara flashed out.  "Is the
+fault entirely mine because&mdash;&mdash;"  She faltered, ashamed of her
+abruptness which had brought a hurt bit of color to Miss Sarah's
+cheeks.  "I never gave him to understand&mdash;I told him always I could not
+care!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Please bear with me a little to-day."  Miss Sarah's sweetness had
+become humble.  "I seem vagarious, I know.  And we are not considering
+Stephen, Barbara.  If you had been doing so, all these hours while you
+have been wasting your nervous energy in tearing around the
+country-side, it would be different.  But women never consider the man
+in such a situation, do they?  Aren't they too entirely heedless for
+that?  I was merely trying to tell you that the day has come when you
+must consider well your own happiness."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Instantly Barbara condemned such a doctrine.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If that is true of others," she retorted, "they are even more
+despicable than I know myself to be."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Until that moment Caleb Hunter's tiny sister had kept her brave eyes
+clear.  They clouded now.  They went beyond that pale and sullen and
+stormily pretty visage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was a woman like that," she said, with her quaint simplicity of
+accent.  "Do you look upon me with any such degree of scorn?  I was
+face to face with such a decision; and yet not the same either, for
+mine was far simpler than yours.  But I considered neither his
+happiness nor my own, simply because I lost sight of the years and
+years to come, in the momentary joy I found in his&mdash;his importunity.
+He was very big and strong and cheerful, like Stephen, Barbara, and I
+was sure he would not grudge me my last moment of girl-vanity, when I
+did surrender&mdash;to-morrow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There the quaint voice caught and broke.  The girl's eyes flew wider
+and hotter shame for her sulkiness stained her cheeks.  For suddenly
+Miss Sarah was fighting against tears.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I did not know," Barbara breathed her contrition.  "I never
+dreamed&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No one ever does," faltered Miss Sarah.  "I&mdash;I am an old, faded,
+hopelessly unmarried woman to you, my dear&mdash;oh, child, you need not
+protest a kinder opinion!  I am just 'Caleb Hunter's spinster sister'
+to the people of this village.  But to&mdash;to myself, Barbara, I am at
+times the same girl who waited, roses in her hair and roses in her
+cheeks, for him to come, so that I might tell him that I was his, body
+and soul.  And he never came!  Oh, my dear, I do not mean to break down
+like this, for you have your own heart-ache.  But I trusted to reason.
+I told myself that to-morrow would be soon enough.  And when to-morrow
+came&mdash;they let me&mdash;go to him.  He died very bravely, Barbara, to save
+the life of another.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Since you are so sure, I can tell you this without seeming to warn
+you&mdash;without being accused of attempting to influence you.  But now you
+know why I say that every woman, if heedlessness for which she is
+perhaps not to blame will not let her consider the happiness of the man
+she loves, should still take care that she does not barter for an hour
+of quickened pulses the happiness of her whole life.  I was innocent
+enough.  It was harmless play to me.  But I have paid&mdash;and paid&mdash;and
+paid!  I would not have you, whom I cherish, rise each morning and
+wonder why you had to be the only one to suffer out of thousands who
+played the same way.  And now will you please forgive me this
+uncontrolled moment?  I usually inflict them upon no one; I hide them
+in my room.  But, Barbara, I was so proud of him&mdash;so sure&mdash;so positive
+that he was the only man in the world!  And I lost my chance to tell
+him how much I cared."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The riding-crop lay neglected on the floor.  It had slipped and
+clattered down while Barbara sat and stared at the tiny woman who was
+dabbing at her eyes with a very girlish square of linen.  And then
+slowly Barbara rose and took an uncertain step or two.  She sank to her
+knees and pillowed her head upon Miss Sarah's lap.  Momentarily she had
+forgotten the struggle which was going on in her own heart.  Now even
+pity for the other could not keep her from turning hack to it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But I do not know," she gasped.  "I&mdash;sometimes I think I must care,
+and then I am afraid&mdash;&mdash;"  She lifted a face dry-eyed and tense.  "I
+ought to be proud of him, too.  If I loved him I would be, wouldn't I?
+If I cared I wouldn't ask anything more than just what he is.  Don't
+you see I'm only petty and rotten with snobbishness?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah sniffed, ever so delicately.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What a sentimental old woman I am!" she exclaimed.  "And, my dear, you
+talk as though you had just discovered a new and terribly perplexing
+complication.  Don't you know that it is as old as the feminine mind
+itself?"  Her handkerchief came down, then, disclosing eyes that were
+very bright and very tender.  "Why, a woman never loves a man merely
+for what he is!  She always reserves a few little things, at least,
+which she means&mdash;well, to rearrange.  She loves him just a bit more for
+what she secretly promises herself he shall be."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara's sullenness was gone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know," she whispered.  "I thought of that, too, long ago.  But it
+isn't just a&mdash;little thing.  A few days ago, Miss Sarah, when we took
+the train to go up north, I could scarcely wait for the engine to draw
+us there.  I think I counted every click of the rails, I know I sang
+his name in my heart with every click.  And then, when I wanted to walk
+straight off the steps of the car into his arms&mdash;when I&nbsp;&#8230;  Why do
+you sit there and listen and not say that you loathe me as I do myself?
+I know that he is all man, but his work and my world&mdash;oh, when that
+terrible thing happened, and he came lurching toward me, instead of
+helping him, do you know what I did?  I was sick at the sight of
+him&mdash;sick at the reck and grime and blood of him!  I just wanted to get
+away, and&mdash;and shudder at the thought of&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah's composure had returned, but her face grew more sober
+still.  This was a different, a graver thing, even than she had
+expected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your world?"  Deliberately now she dared to argue.  "Barbara, didn't
+you know, from the beginning, that his world would have to be yours?
+Did you ever think that you could change him&mdash;that way?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara moved her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I wanted both," she said.  "I wanted all I have&mdash;and him, too.  I
+learned that night he took care of me how much I cared; I know he'd be
+as careful of me, all his life.  But I had thought that he might be
+able to do as father has done and let other men handle the&mdash;&mdash;  But he
+knows now!  He understands me!  I tell you I'm no good.  I've no
+backbone.  I'm just pink and white flesh without any spirit!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The other woman sat and smoothed the bright head and wished she knew
+what to say.  "It would please me to know just what stuff she is made
+of, too," Miss Sarah had once admitted to her brother.  She wondered if
+at last she knew.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I do not know what to tell you," she murmured slowly.  "I thought if I
+talked with you I might be able to help you, but I am afraid now that I
+cannot.  He is a better man than you are woman, Barbara; because he has
+builded with his hands, he has reared him a soul as well.  He knows the
+depths, and the heights are far more wonderful for such knowledge.  Oh,
+dear me, I wish I knew&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She paused there, shaken by her own impotence.  Doubt and aching regret
+were overwhelming her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have told Mr. Wickersham that I will not marry him."  The brown head
+burrowed lower and muffled the words.  "I know that I could let no
+other man so&mdash;so much as touch me now.  Is that&mdash;caring enough?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Miss Sarah only half heard the question.  She was expecting no
+surrender now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"&mdash;&mdash;Nor how to advise you," she struggled on.  "For you have lived as
+all girls like you live.  You've lived for yourself; hoped for
+yourself; prayed for yourself&mdash;as all women pray, I suppose, directly
+or indirectly.  And yet is merely a question of whether you could live
+with him in his world, day for day and night for night?  Is it as
+simple as that?  I have told you what difference one day made with me.
+Have you thought what it might mean to wake and realize that you must
+live <I>without</I> him, all the rest of your life?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah had stopped hoping.  And so there was sheer amazement in the
+triumph which rose and drove the regret from her faded pink-and-white
+face when the girl's dark-fringed eyes lifted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Since Stephen O'Mara had brought her back to her father, Barbara had
+wondered why she did not cry.  Great tears were sliding noiselessly
+down her cheeks when she raised her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've tried to think&mdash;I haven't dared," Barbara sobbed.  "But he
+doesn't want me now.  He doesn't want the kind of a girl I am any more!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Thus in her moment of capitulation did the girl's heart cry aloud the
+one thought which, unknown to her, had been her unbearable pain.  And
+straightway Miss Sarah's illuminated countenance became a glorification
+of her spirit.  Silently she leaned over and folded the kneeling one
+round.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Later she found it possible to speak.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have convinced me forever of the futility of all snap judgments,"
+said she, and she marveled at the shyness in her own voice, "but you
+could never convince me of that.  You may go home now, Barbara, for you
+have worn yourself out.  But to-morrow I would suggest that you&mdash;ask
+him for corroboration, if you still hold to such an opinion."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Instantly Barbara rose and bobbed her head.  She had always been a slim
+creature of moods mercurial; she would always be that.  And now her
+violet eyes radiated anticipation, perverse and impish and far, far
+different from the sullen dullness which had filled them an hour
+before.  Miss Sarah had spoken with well-seasoned wisdom, as was her
+wont: there are sometimes big moments which are the bigger for lack of
+analysis.  The girl did not know why, all in one breath, she no longer
+feared nor doubted&mdash;but she <I>knew</I>!  And that was a world and all of
+joy.  She bobbed her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ask him?" she echoed, demurely confused.  "Ask&mdash;<I>him</I>!  To-morrow I am
+going to dare him to ask <I>me</I>&mdash;again!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But she did not obey Miss Sarah's suggestion that she return home and
+rest.  On winged feet she flew back through the hedge-gap and ordered
+Ragtime saddled once more; yet when she touched that splendid beast
+with the crop and sent him at a gallop down the drive, there was no
+longer any sting in the lash.  Even the groom, with critical eye,
+noticed the difference in the girl's seat that afternoon; for days and
+days to come he was the better contented with the companionship of
+horses, which was his lot, in dwelling upon the crazy moods of women.
+And Miriam Burrell, sighting Barbara's face as the latter wheeled
+toward the hills, flew from her window to scratch off a note to
+Garry&mdash;her third note that day, for she seemed always omitting most
+important things which needed saying.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's come," she scrawled in delighted haste, "and Miss Sarah is a
+visiting angel from Heaven!&#8230;  When are we going to be married?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Others knew of it almost as soon as she did herself, but knowledge of
+that did not mar Barbara's rosy contemplation of this new-found,
+totally unbelievable happiness.  Once before she had ridden that road
+with him alone in her thoughts; now she realized that she had loved him
+then as she must have loved him always, and marveled at such blindness.
+Once, on that other day, she had told herself that all ignoble and
+unworthy comparisons of herself and him were done and gone.  Now she
+did not need such reassurance, when her lips were tremulous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rest?  Pressing steadily into the north that afternoon, first at a
+gallop, then more and more slowly until Ragtime was picking his own
+gait, the girl smiled in pity for Miss Sarah and her day which had
+never dawned.  But there was scant room for sadness in her present
+mood.  Tomorrow?  She let herself be afraid for an instant, to tremble
+in delicious mock-terror, because there was nothing for her to fear now
+in the whole wide world.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She grew pensive at times; at times in an abandon of gaiety she
+chattered back at a quarrelsome squirrel in the thicket.  She could
+rest later; and if she could not go to him immediately, at least every
+step the horse took was bringing them, for a little while, closer
+together.  And her to-morrow was only one twilight and one dawn away;
+her to-morrow would be his, as utterly as was she herself.  Dusk came,
+and regretfully she told herself that she must be turning back home.
+Two rifle shots, sharp and startlingly close, whipped through the quiet
+of that lazy afternoon, but they meant nothing to her.  She had reached
+the height of land, where he had found her the day her roan mare
+strayed off while she sat mooning on a log; she was holding out both
+arms toward the spot where the valley of Thirty-Mile must lie, when a
+team of heavy horses broke around a turn in the road, slowed to a trot
+at the sight of her, and came to an abrupt standstill.  When the girl
+rode nearer to them, merely surprised and curious at first, they
+snorted and showed the whites of their eyes and shied back nervously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Something chill clutched at Barbara's heart while she spoke
+pre-emptorily to Ragtime, who was dancing in sympathetic panic.  There
+was nothing to tell her, but she knew that these were Big Louie's
+horses.  And Big Louie was a dreamy incompetent&mdash;he had left them for a
+moment, that was all, and they had become frightened and bolted.  But
+Big Louie never neglected his team&nbsp;&#8230; they were not wet&nbsp;&#8230; they
+had not been running far.  And their fright became less when she
+dismounted and approached them, soothing them with her voice until they
+let her touch their sleek sides, without rearing away.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dusk had come and gone, for it was growing dark.  Uncertain, more and
+more unnerved as she stood and gazed at the forbidding, black-shadowed
+ridges beyond her, the girl had to fight suddenly against an impulse to
+turn and race back to the lower country and Morrison and home.  Even
+then the rifle shots meant nothing to her&mdash;and pride would not let her
+run.  She remounted and rode on a rod or two, and stopped to look back
+at the team which was watching her; she pressed on and rounded the
+curve.  Ragtime reared and snorted there, and she barely stifled the
+cry which his strange behavior brought to her lips.  Because of her
+senseless panic she punished him the more severely, and sent him on.
+And then she saw what the horse had already seen.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A blue-shirted figure lay half in the road, half in the undergrowth
+that fringed it, one arm crooked under him and his face prone in the
+dust; a bulkier mass was stretched wholly within the trail&mdash;and she
+recognized him, too.  Big Louie's face was upturned, and the
+explanation of the two rifle reports and the driverless team was here.
+For Big Louie's hand still clutched the handle of a canvas pail.  They
+had stopped to water the horses; they had been shot down from behind.
+And first of all, unable to move, while horror parched her lips, the
+girl remembered words which the limp one, half in the road and half in
+the underbrush, had spoken to her in a moment of sternness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has fired upon me from cover," the man who loved her had said.  "He
+has been taking money from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+price!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Giddiness rose and swayed her, and she beat Ragtime mercilessly for his
+fear.  Instinct clamored flight, and she forced herself to wait,
+panting for that other shot which might leave her, too, lying in the
+road.  But even in that first frozen moment she began to reason
+clearly.  Back with the sleek team which welcomed her with questioning
+eyes she left Ragtime, for he would stand there, and retraced her way
+on foot.  She could not do it, she sobbed drily&mdash;but she raced to him
+and knelt and searched with swift fingers before the words were past
+her lips.  Her hand found moisture beneath his right shoulder; it was
+stained red when she held it up and stared at it.  And then she was
+closest to fainting.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Blood sickens me!" she whimpered aloud.  "Blood sickens me!"  But she
+managed to turn him over upon his back.  With brown head against his
+heart, she listened&mdash;listened and would not believe that her to-morrow
+might come too late.  And then she caught the slack pound of his pulse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From there on she was less panic-stricken; she gained control of
+faculties shocked for a time into uselessness.  Method marked her
+acts&mdash;deliberation mechanical but sure.  She was horribly afraid of Big
+Louie, but she finally disentangled the handle of the pail from those
+loose fingers, and ran to the brook which babbled near at hand.
+Returning, she drenched Steve's face with icy water; she lifted his
+head and propped it, as comfortably as she might, upon one thigh, and
+opened his flannel shirt.  The ball had passed through, for back and
+front the shirt became immediately wetter with fresh blood.  Blood
+sickened her, but she whipped off the coat of her boyish riding-habit
+and wrenched the sleeves from her linen blouse.  They were desperately
+scant, yet they provided pads with which to check that dreadful oozing.
+And when they were in place she turned again to bathing his forehead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A folded sheet of paper came to view when she tried once to ease his
+heavy body from the position which was numbing her leg, and she seized
+upon it fiercely.  It was only a brief line, bidding him come to her,
+but it bore her name.  With instant, bodiless clarity which had marked
+all her mental processes so far, its purport was hers.  She had not
+written&mdash;the hand that had traced her signature had been unstrung for
+once.  She understood, though such knowledge seemed of little moment
+now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She kept the pads cold and wet; she went for fresh water and stumbled
+and fell more than once, because of the treacherous footing in the
+deepening shadows.  But she was no longer afraid of the dark; she had
+grown to fear Big Louie less, even though there was no help for Big
+Louie any more.  It was the first time that Barbara had looked upon the
+face of a man who had died in violence.  Big Louie's face was growing
+indistinct now, but she knew that he was smiling&mdash;knew that his eyes
+were dreamy and mild.  Death, like Life, had been a quite
+incomprehensible puzzle to that slow-witted one who had no name.  But
+he had smiled seldom in life.  In death his smile was almost childish,
+almost sweet, and questioning beyond all else.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Alone with him who still lived, the pallid girl sat and waited and
+wondered how long&mdash;or how soon&mdash;it would be.  But she wasn't afraid
+now.  They were his hills; it was his wilderness.  And could any harm
+come out of them equal to separation from him?  This was only the
+beginning of one night of darkness, and Miss Sarah had endured with
+patience and bravery through a whole lifetime of days and nights as
+black.  "Your face was the first&nbsp;&#8230; it will be the last thing I'll
+see, as long as there is sight in my eyes!" had been his words to her.
+She waited and she prayed shamelessly for herself&mdash;for one more
+chance&mdash;as Miss Sarah had said women always prayed.  But he was looking
+at her, when she opened her eyes after a long and incoherent appeal; at
+her first word he tried to rise and she had trouble in persuading him
+to lie back again.  She heard herself scolding, while she rearranged
+the bandages so that they would cover both wounds, and he listened,
+hot-eyed, without recognizing her.  Yet when she bade him wait, until
+she could bring the team, he nodded his comprehension; he was watching
+for her return.  And he came to his feet with a readiness that made her
+heart leap with hope; but he fell twice before she lifted him, half
+with her hands, half with her voice, to the seat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She crawled in beside him, and the next moment she had to struggle
+madly to prevent his returning to Big Louie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He will wait quiet until we come for him," she protested.  "There
+isn't room for Big Louie&mdash;and he won't mind&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her logic made an impression upon him, for he smiled.  There was no
+sequence in his acquiescence, however.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have always been afraid for him," he told her in reply, as
+studiously grave as though he had been conscious of what he was saying.
+"The others&mdash;they can take care of themselves.  They are wrong ones
+together.  But Big Louie is only a child&mdash;but he won't mind&mdash;he'll
+understand&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She thought then that he had recognized her; she dared to hope that his
+brain was clearing.  But when the team went forward, nervously
+unmanageable at first, then more decorous as they drew away from him
+who would never feed them brown sugar again, the man beside her only
+persisted vacantly with his topic.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Big Louie never could find his way alone," he mused, "and that is
+strange, too, for he was born in these hills.  He was always getting
+lost&mdash;&mdash;"  And with that he must not desert Louie!  She had even more
+trouble with him this time.  "He will lose his head," he expostulated
+mildly&mdash;his old, unfailing attitude of gentleness toward her.  "He will
+lose his head and waste his strength in running from things which do
+not exist."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Big Louie will find his way this time."  She was whimpering again in
+her helplessness.  "He is&mdash;already home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There she learned that her voice could control him when her arms
+availed not at all against even his dead weight.  And so she talked as
+steadily as she was able while she drove.  Once he lurched against her;
+when he pulled himself together he was so sanely apologetic of a sudden
+that she searched his face with hungry eyes.  But he was talking now to
+himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I must not touch her!" he stated firmly.  And then, drearily: "I am
+sick.&#8230;  I have never been so sick&mdash;before."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With that he subsided, but his silence was far more dreadful than his
+wanderings had been; and as fast as she dared she pushed the heavy team
+on, with Ragtime following behind like a dog.  He slipped back against
+her almost immediately, and this time he had not the strength with
+which to apologize nor lift himself erect.  With his head heavy in the
+hollow of her arm, they came at length to the open pasture hills; they
+topped the rise and faced the loops on loops of highway that ran down
+to Morrison at the river-edge.  And so she brought him home.  At the
+sight of his "city" she sobbed aloud, but he, sunken and slack, was
+conscious neither of distance covered nor change of country.  He
+climbed down from the seat, however, in response to her urgings, when
+the team halted before Caleb Hunter's white-columned house&mdash;he turned
+and started stubbornly back the way they had come.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She ran after him and clung to his arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You promised that you would come back to me," she cried up at him.
+"Oh, you cannot leave me now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That halted him, momentarily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I must go back to my bridge," he explained, plainly nonplussed.  "But
+then I'll surely come back to you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She pleaded with him&mdash;raged at him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I must go back to my bridge," he reiterated gruffly now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her arms went around him in desperation, and then, with one swing, he
+had swept her yards away, reeling before his blazing wrath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Take your fingers from my eyes, Harrigan," he gasped in sudden agony.
+"I am going to kill you now&mdash;and <I>she</I> is looking on!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl was afraid of him; she dared not try to hold him.  She
+screamed wildly for help, and screamed again.  And he had gone on, and
+wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her
+father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap24"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXIV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+&mdash;AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him,
+quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed.  They stood there,
+dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room,
+coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs.  And
+at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than
+their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's
+stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once
+Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient.  The girl refused,
+point-blank, to go.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply
+to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you,
+surely my staying now need not!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the
+phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in
+what she knew to be useless argument.  And though the girl grew sick
+and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and
+started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her
+remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah knew what to do; and she worked with unhurried thoroughness.
+They had sent for the doctor, and after ages had passed for the girl,
+maddeningly cool and unruffled, he arrived.  But his first words, too,
+were an order that she leave the room, and unable to combat his
+professional bleakness, meekly she had to obey.  Little and wholly
+hopeless she stole downstairs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb and her father were confronting each other before the fireplace
+when she reached the lower floor, but the queer note of restraint in
+their voices meant nothing to her, until she heard her father cry out
+in sudden anguish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Cal," he cried, "Cal, you don't think I was a party to this attempt at
+murder?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, at Caleb's reply, which went hurtling back at him, the girl was
+crouching, white and still, and clutching at the stair-rail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Party!  Attempt!  Because you did not pull the trigger are you any the
+less guilty?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you believe that I would murder the man my girl loves?" Dexter
+Allison moaned now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Barbara gasped at the deadly anger which crossed Caleb Hunter's face.
+Caleb had lifted a hand in righteous accusation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have dealt in crookedness," he thundered.  "You have thrived on
+cunning.  And, being a law unto yourself in this country, you have gone
+unpunished until now.  You aided and abetted a vicious and unscrupulous
+scoundrel in his villainy; and now you have looked upon the result of
+your works.  Law has never touched you, sir&mdash;reprisal has passed you
+by.  But, by God, sir, I warn you if that boy dies&mdash;if he dies&mdash;I shall
+see that you meet me at thirty paces the next morning.  And I shall not
+miss&mdash;I shall be your law!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had been friends for close to forty years, yet they were worse
+than strangers now.  Dexter Allison could not answer; he could not
+speak aloud.  Caleb's finger had swung toward the door in a gesture
+unmistakable.  Allison turned, and, ghastly of face, met the eyes of
+his daughter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara," he appealed to her, frantically.  "Baby&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But she shrank, a huddled heap of misery, away from him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You&mdash;too?" she whispered.  "You!"  And then, dully: "And you're my
+father!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The shoulders beneath the garish plaid rose and fell, pitifully.  This,
+then, was the moment which he feared.  He gulped aloud and hung his
+head, and turned his feet toward home.  Barbara rose after he had gone
+and crept into a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One after another they tried to persuade the girl to rest.  Miriam came
+and talked to her, and Caleb; and even Miss Sarah, passing through the
+room, stopped to urge her again to go to bed.  But she met them all
+with the same wordless refusal; she was waiting for him when the
+doctor, descending in the morning, tried to combine, diplomatically,
+praise for what she had done with disapproval of her obstinacy.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My dear child, this insubordination will help no one," he said, "and
+it may end in your collapse at just the moment when you are needed
+most."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will he live?" was all she would say.  "Will he live?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And before such hopelessness the doctor could not lie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He is hard hit and very, very weak," he had to admit.  "The shock is
+great and the tissue damage&mdash;unpromising.  It is far worse than I
+expected, but he is still alive, and most men would have been already
+dead.  And his vitality is a marvel, even to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He might have comforted her, but with no other statement could he have
+told the truth.  He failed also in his effort to persuade her to go to
+bed; he had breakfast with Caleb, and she refused to eat.  And she was
+still there in her chair, asking only to be let alone, when Garry
+Devereau and Fat Joe arrived.  She rose and ran to meet the latter, but
+the doctor who knew how many such situations the pudgy riverman had
+weathered, summoned him immediately, and Barbara had to wait an hour
+before Joe came back downstairs.  By the lapels of his coat she clung
+to him then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's mighty sick," reluctantly Joe, too, told the truth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The doctor said that it was worse than he expected," she droned.
+"They sent me away, but if he isn't going to live I won't let them keep
+me from him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe's sympathy was unspoiled by professionalism.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sick is one thing,"&mdash;his confidence was almost convincing,&mdash;"and dyin'
+is another.  And&mdash;&mdash;  Shucks!  I ain't going to let no book-taught
+medico worry me yet!  Men get well because they are bound to get well,
+or they die because it's their time to die&mdash;and he's got too much to
+live for now!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her hopeless face made deception impossible, but Joe comforted her,
+just the same.  He persuaded her to eat with him, and when he found
+that his conversation made the waiting easier for her, he waxed quite
+garrulous.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, he's been hurt almost as bad as this, once before," he rambled
+on, "but he's still alive, ain't he?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The girl's eyes livened at that.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Once, down on the island, he mixed in an affair in which most men
+would not have meddled.  And he got it from behind that time, too, only
+it was with a knife."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He never told me," murmured the girl.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It ain't likely he would," the other stated with finality.  "It was
+over a woman, and not a particularly pretty story, any way you look at
+it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her dark eyes widened.  She bit her lip.  It came to her how little of
+his life she had shared.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh!" she barely breathed.  And again, falteringly: "Oh!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From that halting monosyllable Joe judged that something was amiss.
+Observation had never been a slow or painful process of concentration
+with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He didn't even know who she was.  He'd never even seen her before,"
+quickly he put her right.  "She was just a public dancer, that was all.
+But a man&mdash;mistreated her&mdash;and Steve, he just interfered&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Indeed, Joe had found the way to comfort her and still tell the truth,
+even though he found it foolishly difficult to swallow food and watch
+at the same time the warmth which his words kindled.  So for an hour he
+lingered at table and told her many things concerning the man she loved
+which she would never have learned from his own lips.  And it was Joe's
+jocularity which in the end subdued her rebel spirit.  She yielded at
+last and promised to go home and rest, but only after he had promised
+first in a fashion which could leave no doubt in her heart, that he
+would come for her if things grew worse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before she left him that morning she told Joe of Big Louie, whom she
+had had to leave in the road; but he interrupted her before she could
+finish.  They had already found Big Louie.  Then she gave him the note
+which she had discovered crushed beneath Steve's body.  This Joe
+scanned ferociously; he flashed a strange glance at her from bleached
+blue eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Some one traced your name," he put into words the first thought that
+had been hers.  "Some one who had your signature to copy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She nodded, whitely, in horror.  Joe folded the paper and tucked it
+into a pocket.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We can touch nobody," he averred regretfully, "unless we catch
+Harrigan!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she
+giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to
+increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet.  The ground
+persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to
+Caleb's arm.  And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate.  But
+at the sight of her father, sunk in silence Upon his desk in the ground
+floor "office," she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb's arm and
+went swiftly across to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Barbara," he beseeched her brokenly, the moment her cheek touched his.
+"You mustn't believe that I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have been a very foolish and hysterical child," she said.  "I'll try
+to behave more like a woman now.  And you and Uncle Cal have been
+only&mdash;absurd!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed
+upstairs; but her head seemed steady enough.  It was only after she had
+reached her own room that she complained querrulously of the failing
+lights.  Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On the floor below, her father had turned again to his desk, his head
+bowed upon his arms.  And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter
+Allison when a hand touched, awkwardly, his shoulder.  He looked up
+heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter.  Caleb stuttered
+furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him.  Then a happy
+thought showed the way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he
+made of it a ceremonial.  "Do you think you would&mdash;care to join me,
+sir?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common
+tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity.  Dexter came to his feet;
+he reached out and crushed the other man's hand within his soft, white
+fingers.  Nor was his reply quite according to formula.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank God&nbsp;&#8230; I
+don't mind if I do!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house.  And they kept
+close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that
+followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such
+companionship.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay in the room which Miss
+Sarah had always kept waiting for him.  Fever strode upon him, while
+the girl who had brought him home slept in complete exhaustion.   At
+times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he
+called crisply for Fat Joe&mdash;he feared for his bridge&mdash;and Joe had to
+exert every iron muscle to hold him down.  And always he spoke
+Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the
+verge of collapse.  But he continued to live, through that day and the
+next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go
+for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity.  He
+continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he
+was no longer delirious.  Stephen O'Mara opened his eyes and gazed
+feebly but very understandingly into the eyes of Fat Joe, who was
+watching at that moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know," he pronounced each word with calculated effort.  "I have been
+very sick, and I must not waste my strength.  But I have to be clear,
+first, on one point.  Have I dreamed it, Joe, or&mdash;or did she bring me
+home?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With his voice alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his
+friend alive.  The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so.
+And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an
+explosive thing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Didn't I tell her so?" he demanded in his whining tenor.  "Didn't I
+say so, all along?  And I let that doctor worry <I>me</I>, just because he's
+got a diploma in a frame, hanging on his wall!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then he answered Steve's question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"She found you," he said.  "She brought you home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A long time the sick man lay and pondered.  And finally he found it
+possible to smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have not cared whether I lived or died," he said in little more than
+a whisper.  "All along I have seemed to know how near I was&mdash;to going
+across; and I have been near to quitting&mdash;at times.  For I was happier
+than I'd ever dared let myself be, before&mdash;and then, with the first
+shot that dropped Big Louie, I knew&mdash;&mdash;"  He shook his head, still
+smiling vaguely.  "I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at
+things&mdash;more like a man now.&#8230;  You need not worry any longer, Joe.
+I'll sleep a little while, I think; and then I'll put my mind hard on
+getting well, when I awake."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while
+he was talking, the fever began to abate.  He "put his mind on getting
+well," when he awoke, twelve hours later.  Strength was flowing in a
+steady tide back into his body long before Barbara's knees would again
+bear her weight.  For she had squandered her endurance without counting
+the cost, and she paid the full penalty.  She lay three days and three
+nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all; and even
+then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles
+beneath her eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied
+the seething town of men; he returned the same day Barbara was about
+again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won
+clear.  And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which
+straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture.  Some said
+that they must have managed to cross the border; others maintained that
+they had found sanctuary in the lumber-camps of the lake country to the
+west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood
+unchanged.  For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is
+always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb
+and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to
+touch him.  Harrigan had disappeared from the ken of men, and
+Wickersham delayed only until his departure could no longer be
+construed as flight.  Then one evening modestly he boarded a train.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason;
+until it was best for her to go to him, she would wait as patiently as
+she was able.  And in the meantime, in a luxury of loneliness, wisely
+the girl spent her days out of doors, climbing oftenest to that
+hill-top where they had stood together, in the snow, the night of Miss
+Sarah's Christmas party.  From that point she could see Morrison and
+the river basin, and even the steam that jetted ever and again from the
+whistles of the engines clattering over his railroad which lanced into
+the north.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But no discordant note of haste could reach her ears from so great a
+distance.  That whole vast panorama, suggestive least of all of
+violence, lay blanketed in a sleepy silence that matched the subdued
+security of her mood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient;
+and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during
+that period.  For with returning strength there came to him
+recollection of many things which required his attention.  He fretted
+over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make
+daily reports as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such
+visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, assured his
+chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by
+carping authority.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But he lay and brooded, no humor in his eye, when he was left alone.
+Fat Joe had assured him that she had brought him home; but Fat Joe, who
+was ever averse to anti-climax, had told him no more than that.  His
+efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days
+because of the soberness of his friend's face.  And then, the same day
+that Joe raised him against the pillows so that he might watch a string
+of flat-cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her
+go to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew
+was McLean's paen of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over
+the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him, when he turned
+and saw her standing on the threshold.  She had come on diffident,
+mouse-like feet.  She was watching him.  And before he believed it
+really was she, Barbara faltered his name.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was only a wisp of a sound&mdash;an aching, throbbing bit of tenderness
+lighter even than the breath that bore it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Steve!" she breathed again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But thereupon, with a headlong little rush that scattered spools of
+bandage and rolls of lint, and set the bottles upon his table jingling
+dangerously, she flew to him and came, somehow, into his arms.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They had not told him&mdash;at first he could not speak.  Dumbly he sat, his
+face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms.  She had told
+herself that she was a woman now&mdash;yet her first words were all girl.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tell me just once that I'm pretty," she quavered.  "Say that I am
+still&mdash;half boy&mdash;to you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her
+on that other day; and watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his
+eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one,
+from his lips.  But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch
+of her mouth&mdash;nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and brimming
+eyes.  She remembered his wincing shoulder then; her arms crept higher
+about his neck.  And now her face was uplifted and there was no more
+need for words.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Afterward, when they spoke of Big Louie, she loved him more for the
+sorrow which he did not try to hide.  From Fat Joe he had already
+learned of Big Louie's last dereliction.  Out of a deeper silence,
+Steve spoke gravely&mdash;an epitaph for the man to whom he had been
+unfailingly kind.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Most any kind of a failure can live," he said, "but it takes a man&mdash;to
+smile and die."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+He let himself marvel aloud at her littleness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Their first hour together was only the happier for that moment of
+sadness they shared.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap25"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXV
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+IN REAL LIFE TOO
+</H3>
+
+
+<P>
+There was no longer any objection raised by Miss Sarah; and Barbara
+spent every hour of her days with him.  It grew warmer with aging
+spring&mdash;and almost immediately he was able to sit with her and watch
+the stream of logs coming in over the line from Thirty-Mile and beyond.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Miriam and Garry were married in that week which followed directly
+Steve's first days of convalescence.  The former had returned with
+Garry to the northern valley, and already a note had come from her to
+the younger girl, in which she bewailed the servant question, as
+represented by the cook-boy whom her husband had inherited, along with
+the cabin at headquarters.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Over that particular paragraph Barbara allowed herself to show
+amusement.  She tilted her nose, however, in vast disdain at the tenor
+of the rest of the letter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"From the way Miriam raves on and on," she exclaimed, "one would think
+that Garry had saved the day."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They were at the window together on this occasion, Steve outwardly
+still a little pale and haggard, but for the rest his old serene self
+again.  He managed not to smile at her small and serious face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It certainly has not strengthened my vanity a little bit, either,"
+said he, "to learn how smoothly things can move along without me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Day by day the girl was finding her way deeper into that innermost
+heart of him which he had never shared with other woman or man.  Hour
+by hour she was learning to know him better, and yet his whimsical
+gravity still could deceive her&mdash;she was sometimes thoughts behind his
+thoughts.  Hard upon his reply her eyes flashed with indignation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pooh!" she scoffed, "Pooh!  Most any old clock will run, after
+somebody's wound it up!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a trick of speech that she had learned from him, but his
+employment of parallel, lazily amiable for the most part, had never
+been so hotly partisan as was hers at that moment.  And suddenly
+self-conscious&mdash;suddenly confused and warmly disconcerted at the
+quality of his gaze&mdash;she had to hide her head.  But she hid it upon a
+shoulder most conveniently at hand.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Spring gave way to early summer&mdash;and now Steve was able to be on his
+feet again, so absurdly uncertain of balance at first, however, that
+she ridiculed him unmercifully one moment, only to rush to him in a
+panic of solicitude the next.  There came long walks, and longer trips
+in the saddle; came hours of silence that were the more wonderful for
+want of words&mdash;hours in which, in a hushed voice, she gave him shyly of
+her plans.  But always, too, the interruptions grew more and more
+frequent and insistent.  Fat Joe and McLean, and even Hardwick Elliott,
+made more and more pressing demands upon his time, until finally he
+insisted that he could no longer play, shamelessly, the invalid.  He
+must look in upon the works up-river, if only for the moral effect
+which it would have upon the men.  She assented, grudgingly; it would
+be but a day or two.  And then&mdash;then he would come back to her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The next morning, at the moment when Barbara and Steve were mounting
+their horses, for she wanted to ride with him a little way, Dexter
+Allison chose to disclose something which had been but lately in the
+process of preparation.  He joined them at the edge of the lawn, before
+the white-columned house on the hill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Easing back into harness, I understand," he began, not quite
+comfortably, however, for he was aware of a gleam of disapproval in his
+daughter's eyes, at this interruption.  "Well, there's no great rush,
+but it's wise, no doubt, to see that things don't lag."  He hesitated,
+and shifted heavily to the other foot.  "We'll want to start through to
+the border by fall, I suppose?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'll be ready," Steve had to laugh at his lack of ease.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt&mdash;no doubt!"  Again Dexter hesitated, momentarily.  And then
+there came to the surface that proneness to accept men for what they
+were, in a man's world, which had long before convinced Caleb Hunter of
+Allison's inherent bigness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Elliott resigned the Presidency of the East Coast Company last night."
+The statement was brief to actual crispness.  "I merely tell you this
+so that you can begin to lay tentative plans accordingly.  Because, in
+view of the immediate need of filling that vacancy, I feel sure that
+there will be too many demands upon your time, here at the Morrison
+office, for you to plan on much field work for yourself in the future."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+To Barbara, at the beginning, the speech seemed merely another of her
+father's rather involved, entirely labored attempts at the facetious.
+But when she saw the blood steal up and stain Stephen O'Mara's face,
+she realized that it was the very sort of a suggestion from which, on
+her lips, he had turned roughly away.  Coming from the lips of her
+father, Steve accepted gravely, with a matching briefness that could
+not hide a surge of triumph.  A month before Barbara would have been
+unable to understand why there was any difference, simply because the
+suggestion came from another.  Now, when it could no longer make or mar
+her happiness, she understood very well indeed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She rode with him that day until he told her that it was time for her
+to turn back.  With Ragtime standing quiet, she laid her face against
+his, and complained that he had promised her she should never be
+allowed to go more than arms' length away from him, once she was his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is the last time," he told her, in a voice vibrant and low.
+"This is the last time&mdash;for you and me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He held her closer for a moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You will be ready when I come back?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She bobbed her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ready&mdash;and waiting," she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sat and put up a hand to him, wistfully disconsolate, before he
+disappeared beyond a twist in the trail.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="60%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The next night, in the cabin up-river, after Miriam had left them alone
+to what she termed their complacent silence, Garry Devereau and Steve
+sat a long while before the former raised a face alight with his rare
+mirth.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Remember Joe's one proposed journey into the realms of romance?" he
+asked suddenly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Openly Steve grinned, and nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Remember how Joe threatened to close the last chapter?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Steve nodded again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, here we are!" chuckled Garry.  "I, poor but honest, already in
+the toils of matrimony; and you, a plutocrat in sudden danger of a
+government investigation, I'm told, and hovering on the brink!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here we are!" echoed Steve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And that was as close as either of them came to outspoken emotion.
+With a lightness somewhat self-conscious, Garry had alluded to the
+property which Caleb Hunter had turned over to Steve.  There was a
+trace of like humor in the latter's reply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I certainly am oppressed with the cares of sudden wealth," said he.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They were silent again, and then they heard lifted at a distance a thin
+and reedy tenor.  Joe was still humming his inevitable ballad, when he
+entered and closed the door behind him, with an alarming flourish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Evenin', folks," he saluted, but he did not seek a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before then they had seen him primed for a sensation; never until that
+moment had he failed to aggravate their curiosity.  He circled the room
+but once, before he confronted them in a fashion that would have been
+challenging, had it not been for his fiery face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, you may as well congratulate me," he invited, "and have done
+with it.  Because the suspense is over for me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Both men straightened in their chairs; both understood instantly.  But
+Garry was the quicker in speech.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not Cecile?" he inquired, in feigned consternation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why not?" Joe was quickly belligerent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, dear!" mourned Garry.  "Oh, dear!  I wish you had consulted me&mdash;or
+some other married man first.  Compatibility and common tastes, you
+know, Joe, and all that sort of thing.  She's a little Parisienne, and
+you&mdash;well, you're only a riverman, like me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Joe condescended to draw up a chair.  And his verbal condescension was
+large.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sometimes you're fair," he spoke with scornful superiority, "and
+sometimes you are so amateurish you make me homesick for Steve to come
+back."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+<HR WIDTH="60%" ALIGN="center">
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+She was waiting for him at the twist in the road.  She was ready, two
+days later, as she had promised to be.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Only her father and Miss Sarah and Caleb were present when they were
+married.  And then, and not alone because she knew he wished it, but
+because it was the dearest wish of her own heart, they turned their
+faces towards the cabin on the balsam knoll.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That day was theirs alone to be shared with no other living thing, save
+the lesser brethren of the wilderness.  Noon found them far north of
+the foothills, deep in the hushed and higher ridges; twilight had come
+and gone and the first of the stars were already blurred points of
+light in the riffles, when they raised the river ahead.  And there he
+checked his horse, to point out the cabin, white-streaked with clay
+chinking against a wall of green&mdash;he dismounted and lifted her to the
+ground, for suddenly she wanted to go the rest of the way on foot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She let her weight lie against him, the top of her head scarce higher
+than his chin, and sighed a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tired?" he asked with that gentleness he saved for her alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The bright head shook.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Happy?" he asked again, as gently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She swung around and clung to him then.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm so happy!" she whispered.  "Do you suppose that anyone will ever
+be as happy again?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was ineffable content in her question.  Whimsically her own
+phrase rose to his lips.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," he said, "maybe sometime&mdash;in books!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She lifted her face then.  He had the dusky glory of her eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe," she echoed, her voice tremulous,&mdash;"sometime.  But this time in
+real life, too."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU***</p>
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,12508 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Then I'll Come Back to You, by Larry Evans,
+Illustrated by Will Stevens
+
+
+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: Then I'll Come Back to You
+
+
+Author: Larry Evans
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 22, 2006  [eBook #18894]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 18894-h.htm or 18894-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/8/9/18894/18894-h/18894-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/8/9/18894/18894-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+by
+
+LARRY EVANS
+
+Author of
+Once to Every Man
+
+Illustrated by Will Stevens
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: "I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I
+Ain't Never Seen More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't
+Never Been Outen the Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More
+Now--Before I Get Done."]
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+Copyright, 1915, by
+The H. K. Fly Company.
+Copyright, 1915, by
+The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
+
+
+
+
+To the Memory of
+
+My Mother
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+Chapter
+
+     I. I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
+    II. THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
+   III. THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
+    IV. I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
+     V. THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+    VI. MY MAN O'MARA
+   VII. HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
+  VIII. GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
+    IX. A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
+     X. NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
+    XI. I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
+   XII. THAT WOODS-RAT
+  XIII. THIS LITERARY THING
+   XIV. A GIRL LIKE HER
+    XV. LAW AND LUMBER
+   XVI. ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
+  XVII. HONEY!
+ XVIII. I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
+   XIX. SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
+    XX. BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
+   XXI. SETTING THE STAGE
+  XXII. IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
+ XXIII. TO-MORROW--
+  XXIV. --AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
+   XXV. IN REAL LIFE TOO
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I Ain't Never Seen
+More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't Never Been Outen the
+Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More Now--Before I Get
+Done." . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+
+"I've Always Had to Wait a Long Time for Everything I've Wanted," the
+Boy Answered, "But I Always Get It, Just the Same, if I Only Want it
+Hard Enough."
+
+"Blessings, My Children," He Called to the Two in the Shadow.  "My
+Felicitations! and E'en though I know Not Your Identity, Still I May
+Sense Your Fond Confusion."
+
+"Oh, I Can't Tell You How Glad I Am to See You So--So Well!"
+
+
+
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
+
+That year no rain had fallen for a score of days in the hill country.
+The valley road that wound upward and still upward from the town of
+Morrison ran a ribbon of puffy yellow dust between sun-baked,
+brown-sodded dunes; ran north and north, a tortuous series of loops on
+loops, to lose itself at last in the cooler promise of the first
+bulwark of the mountains.  They looked cooler, the distant wooded
+hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the
+gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines
+which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's
+rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss,
+shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even
+chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks that brawled in miniature
+rocky canyons.  And they made the gasping heat of the valley a little
+more unendurable by very contrast.
+
+Since early afternoon Caleb Hunter had been sitting almost immobile in
+the shade of the trellis which flanked the deep verandas of his huge
+white, thick-pillared house on the hill above the river.  It was
+reminiscent of another locality--the old Hunter place on the valley
+road.  When Caleb Hunter's father had come north, back when his loyalty
+to a flag and his pity for a gaunt and lonely figure in the White House
+had been stronger than bonds of blood, he had left its counterpart down
+on the Tennessee.  Afterward, with one empty sleeve pinned across his
+breast, he had directed with the other hand the placing of the columns.
+And finally, when he had had to leave this home in turn, along with its
+high, white painted walls and glossy green shutters, he had passed down
+to his son his inborn love of the warmth, his innocent delight in
+indolence--and an unsurpassed judgment of mint.  The mint bed still lay
+where he had located it, to the west of the house, moist and fragrant
+in the shadow.
+
+Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
+chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his
+comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat.  The lazy day was in his
+blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
+more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
+surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him.  Tiny dots of men in
+flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across
+the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
+lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
+veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
+altitude of the mercury.  He, without being analytical about it, would
+have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
+both were by the distance.
+
+Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
+white-columned house that hill above the river.  In those days it had
+been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
+self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might
+be added, ambition or seeming need of one.  The Basin where the river
+widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
+father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs
+of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then
+and smoked incessantly.  And now even the low-lying foothills in which
+the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to
+the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer given over to
+pasturage.  They had taken on an entirely different aspect.
+
+The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
+those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
+and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
+But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in
+the coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than
+half way.  From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
+brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
+across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before.  And just
+beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
+stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres of
+green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.
+
+To Dexter Allison's blame or credit--the nature of the verdict
+depending entirely upon whether it was rendered by the older or the
+newer generation--was laid the transformation of Morrison, the town
+proper.  Caleb Hunter had known Allison at college, where the latter
+had been prominent both because of the brilliance of his wardrobe and
+the reputed size of his father's steadily accumulating resources.
+Since that time seven-figure fortunes such as the younger Allison had
+inherited, had become too general to be any longer spectacular.  But
+Dexter Allison's garments had always retained their insistent note.
+Hunter himself had sold Allison the ground upon which the stucco house
+stood; he had heartily agreed that it was an ideal spot for a loafing
+place--and the fishing was good, too!  Now whenever Caleb thought of
+those first conferences which had preceded the sale, and recalled
+Allison's accentuation of the natural beauties of the spot, Caleb
+allowed himself to smile.
+
+The fishing was still far above reproach, a little further back
+country--and Dexter Allison owned the sawmills that droned in the
+valley.  His men drove his timber down from the hills in the north; his
+men piled the yellow planks upon his flat cars which ran in over his
+spur line that had crept up from the south.  His hundreds and hundreds
+of rivermen already trod the sawdust-padded streets of the newer
+Morrison that had sprung into being beyond the bend; they swarmed in on
+the drives, a hard-faced, hard-shouldered horde, picturesque,
+proficient and profane.  They brought with them color and care-free
+prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the
+whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden, swift
+encounters which were as silent as they were deadly.  And they spent
+their money without stopping to count it.
+
+The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out the
+virtues of this vice.  And after a time, when the older generation
+found that the rivermen preferred their own section of the town,
+ignoring as though they had never existed the staid and sleepy
+residential streets above, they heaved a sigh of partial relief and
+tried to forget their proximity.
+
+Little more than a year had been required for that transformation.  The
+boards of some of the newer shacks down river were still damp with
+pitch.  And twice during that period Dexter Allison had come into the
+hills to take up a transitory abode in the stucco house which had been
+quite six months in the building:--once, two years before, when he had
+disappeared into the mountains upon a prolonged fishing trip, to return
+fishless but with an astonishing mass of pencilled data and contour
+maps; and the second time for an even longer stay, a year ago when the
+mill was being erected.
+
+Since then the stucco and timber place had been closed, with no one but
+a doddering old caretaker and a gardener or two about the premises,
+until early that last hot August week.  On Monday Caleb Hunter had
+noticed that the blinds had been thrown open to the air; on Wednesday,
+from his point of vantage upon the porch, he had watched a rather
+astounding load of trunks careen in at the driveway, piloted by a mill
+teamster who had for two seasons held the record for a double-team load
+of logs and was making the most of that opportunity to prove his skill.
+And the next morning the tumult raised by a group of children racing
+over the shorn lawns had awakened him; he had descended to be hailed by
+Dexter Allison's own booming bass from behind the intervening high box
+hedge.
+
+It was the hottest day of the hottest fortnight that the hill country
+had known in years.  The very temperature gave color to Allison's
+statement that the heat had driven them north from the shore--him and
+his wife and Barbara, their daughter of ten, and the half-dozen or more
+guests whose trunks, coming on the next day, made an even more imposing
+sight than had Allison's own.  And yet as he sat there in the shadow,
+methodically pulling upon his pipe, Caleb Hunter smiled from time to
+time, reminiscently.  He last of all would have been the one to admit
+that the owner of the big stucco place and the mills, and--yes, of the
+newer Morrison itself--had not given a good account of the talents and
+tens of talents which had been passed down to him.  But the use of so
+much evasion, where no evasion at all seemed necessary, rather puzzled
+as well as amused Caleb; and yet, after all, this merely branded him as
+old-fashioned, so far as the newer business methods were concerned
+which were crowding into Morrison.  Allison's way of going about a
+thing made him think of the old valley road that wound north in its
+series of loops on loops; and yet, reflecting upon that parallel, he
+had to admit to himself, too, that the road achieved final heights
+which, in a straightaway route across country would have necessitated
+more than a few wearisome and heart-breaking grades.
+
+The comparison pleased Caleb.  He was nodding his head over it as he
+buried his nose in the mint-sprayed glass again, when a haze of dust to
+the north caught his vagrant attention.  Quite apparently it was raised
+by a foot-traveler, and the latter were not frequent upon that road,
+especially foot-travelers who came from that direction.  Trivial as it
+was, it piqued his interest, and he lay back and followed it from
+lazily half-closed eyes.  It topped a rise and disappeared--the dust
+cloud--and reappeared in turn, but not until it had advanced to within
+a scant hundred yards of him could he make out the figure which raised
+it.  And then, after one sharp glance, with a quick intake of breath,
+he rose and went a trifle hastily out across his own lawn toward the
+iron picket fence that bordered the roadside.  He went almost hurriedly
+to intercept the boy who came marching over the brow of the last low
+hill.
+
+Caleb Hunter, particularly in the last year or so, had seen many a
+strange and brilliant costume pass along that wilderness highway, but
+as he hung over the front gate he remembered that none of them had ever
+before drawn him from his deep chair in the shadow.  For him none of
+them had ever approached in sensationalism the quite unbelievable garb
+of the boy who came steadily on and on--who came steadily nearer and
+nearer.
+
+With a little closer view of him the watching man understood the reason
+for the dense cloud of dust above the lone pedestrian.  For when the
+boy raised his feet with each stride, the man-sized, hob-nailed boots
+which encased them failed to lift in turn.  Indeed, the toes did clear
+the ground, but the heels, slipping away from the lean ankles, dragged
+in the follow-through.  And the boy's other garments, save for his
+flannel shirt and flapping felt hat, were of a size in keeping with the
+boots.
+
+His trousers had once been white cotton drill, but the whiteness had
+long before given up the unequal struggle against grime and grease and
+subsided to a less conspicuous, less perishable grey.  They had been
+cut off just below the knees and, unhemmed, hung flapping with every
+step he took above a stretch of white-socked, spindly shanks.  But it
+was the coat he wore which held Caleb spellbound.  It was of a style
+popularly known as a swallowtail, faced with satin as to lapels and
+once gracefully rounded to a long, bisected skirt in the rear.  The
+satin facings were gone and the original color of the fabric, too, had
+faded to a shiny, bottle-green.  But the long skirts--at least all that
+was left of them--still flapped bravely, as did the trousers.  For
+they, like the nether garments, had been cut off, with more regard for
+haste than accuracy, so that the back of the coat cleared the ground by
+a good foot and a half.  The sleeves, rolled back from two slender,
+browned wrists, were cuffed with a six-inch stretch of striped, soiled
+lining.
+
+For a time Caleb had been at a loss to make out the object which the
+boy carried upon one shoulder, balanced above a blanket tight-rolled
+and tied with string.  Not until the grotesque little figure was within
+a dozen paces of him did he recognize it, and then, at the same moment
+that he caught a glimpse of an old and rusted revolver strapped to the
+boy's narrow waist, he realized what it was.  The boy was toting a
+double-springed steel trap, big enough it seemed to take all four feet
+of any bear that ever walked--and it was beautifully dull with oil!
+
+Caleb stood and stared, mouth agape.  A moment or two earlier he had
+had to fight off an almost uncontrollable desire to roar with laughter,
+but that mood had passed somehow as the boy came nearer.  For the
+latter was not even aware of his presence there behind the iron fence;
+he was walking with his head up, thin face thrust forward like that of
+a young and overly eager setter with the bird in plain sight.  The
+world of hunger in that strained and staring visage helped Caleb to
+master his mirth, and when, at a tentative cough from him, the small
+figure halted dead in his tracks and wheeled, even the vestige of a
+smile left the wide-waisted watcher's lips.  Then Caleb had his first
+full view of the boy's features.
+
+There were wide, deep shadows beneath the grey eyes, doubly noticeable
+because of the heavy fringe of the lashes that swept above them; there
+was a pallid, bluish circle around the thin and tight-set lips.  And
+the lean cheeks were very, very pale, both with the heat of the sun and
+a fatigue now close to exhaustion.  But the eyes themselves, as they
+met Caleb's, were alight with a fire which afterward, when he had had
+more time to ponder it, made him remember the pictured eyes of the
+children of the Crusades.  They fairly burned into his own, and they
+checked the first half-jocular words of greeting which had been
+trembling upon his lips.  His voice was only grave and kindly when he
+began to speak.
+
+"You--you look a trifle tired, young man," he said then.  "Are
+you--going far?"
+
+The boy touched his lips delicately with the point of his tongue.  His
+gravity more than matched that of his questioner.
+
+"Air--air thet the--city?"
+
+The words were soft of accent and a little drawling; there was an
+accompanying gesture of one thumb thrown backward over a thin shoulder.
+But Caleb had to smile a little at the breathless note in the query.
+
+"The city?" he echoed, a little puzzled.  "The city!  Well, now--I----"
+and he chuckled a bit.
+
+The boy caught him up swiftly, almost sharply.
+
+"Thet's--ain't thet Morrison?" he demanded.
+
+And then Caleb had a glimmer of comprehension.  He nodded.
+
+"Yes," he answered quietly.  "That's the city.  That's Morrison down
+there."
+
+The shoulders of the ancient coat lifted and fell with a visible sigh
+as the strange little figure turned again, head keenly forward, to gaze
+hungrily down at the town in the valley.  And Caleb translated that
+long-drawn breath correctly; without stopping to reason it out, he knew
+that it meant fulfillment of a dream most marvelous in anticipation,
+but even more wonderful in its coming true.  Words would have failed
+where that single breath sufficed.  The man remained quiet until the
+boy finally turned back to him, eased the heavy trap to his other
+shoulder and wet his lips once more.
+
+"I thought it war," he murmured, and a thread of awe wove through the
+words.  "I thought it est nachelly _hed_ to be!  Haow--haow many houses
+would you reckon they might be daown--daown in thet there holler?"
+
+The owner of the white-columned house gave the question its meed of
+reflection.
+
+"Well, I--I'd say quite a few hundred, at least."
+
+The odd little figure bobbed his head.
+
+"Thet's what Old Tom always sed," he muttered, more to himself than to
+his hearer.  "An'--an' I guess I ain't never rightly believed him till
+naow."  And then: "Is--is New Yor-rk any bigger?" he asked.
+
+The man at the picket fence smiled again, but the smile was without
+offense.
+
+"Well, yes," he answered.  "Yes, considerably bigger, I should judge.
+Twice as large, at least, and maybe more than that."
+
+The boy did not answer.  He just faced about to stare once more.  And
+then the miracle came to pass.  Around a far bend in Dexter Allison's
+single spur track there came careening an ashmatic switch engine with a
+half-dozen empty flats in tow.  With a brave puffing and blowing of
+leaky cylinder heads, it rattled across an open space between piles of
+timber in the mill-yard and disappeared with a shrill toot of warning
+for unseen workmen upon the tracks ahead.  The boy froze to
+granite-like immobility as it flashed into view.  Long after it had
+passed from sight he stood like a bit of a fantastic figure cut from
+stone.  Then a tremor shook him from head to foot, and when it came
+slowly about Caleb saw that his small face was even whiter than it had
+been before beneath its coat of tan and powdery dust.
+
+He swallowed hard, and tried to speak--and had to swallow again before
+the words would come.
+
+"Gawd--I--may--die!" ho broke out falteringly then.  "There goes a
+injine!  A steam injine--wan't it?"
+
+Long afterward, when he had realized that the boy's life was to bring
+again and again a repetition of that sublime moment of realization--a
+moment of fulfillment unspoiled by surfeit or sophistication or a
+blunted capacity to marvel, which Caleb had seen grow old and stale
+even in the children he knew, he wondered and wished that he might have
+known it himself, once at least.  Years of waiting, starved years of
+anticipation, he felt after all must have been a very little price to
+pay for that great, blinding, gasping moment.  But at the time, amazed
+at the boy's white face, amazed at the hushed fervor in the words he
+forgot,--he spoke before he thought.
+
+"But haven't you ever seen an engine before?" he exclaimed.
+
+As soon as the question had left his lips he would have given much to
+have had it back again; but at that it failed to have the effect which
+he feared too late to check.  Instead of coloring with hurt and shame,
+instead of subterfuge or evasion, the boy simply lifted his eyes
+levelly to Caleb's face.
+
+"I ain't never seed nuthin'," he stated patiently.  "I ain't never seed
+more'n three houses together in a clearin' before.  I--I ain't never
+been outen the timber--till today.  But I aim to see more, naow--before
+I git done!"
+
+The man experienced a peculiar sensation.  The boy's low, passionlessly
+vehement statement somehow made him feel that it wasn't a boy to whom
+he was talking, but a little and grave old man.  And suddenly the
+desire seized him to hear more of that low, direct voice; the impulse
+came to him and Caleb, whose whole life had been as free from erratic
+snap-judgments as his broad face was of craft, found joy in acting upon
+it forthwith, before it had time to cool.
+
+"The view is excellent from my veranda," he waved a hand behind him.
+"And--you look a little warm and tired.  If your business is not of too
+pressing a nature--have you----" he broke off, amazed at his helpless
+formality in the matter--"have you come far?"
+
+And he wondered immediately how the boy would receive that suggestion
+that he hesitate, there with the "city" in front of him, a fairy-tale
+to be explored.  And again he was allowed to catch a glimpse of age-old
+spirit--a glimpse of a man-sized self-discipline--beneath the childish
+exterior.
+
+The boy hesitated a moment, but it was his uncertainty as to just what
+Caleb's invitation had offered, and not the lure of the town which made
+him pause.  He took one step forward.
+
+"I been comin' since last Friday," he explained.  "I been comin' daown
+river for three days naow--and I been comin' fast!"
+
+Again that measuring, level glance.
+
+"An' I ain't got no business--yit," he went on.  "Thet's what I aim to
+locate, after I've hed a chance to look around a trifle.  But I am
+tired a little, an' so if you mean thet you're askin' me to stop for a
+minit--if you mean thet you're askin' me that--why, then . . . then, I
+guess I don't mind if I do!"
+
+"That's what I mean," said Caleb.
+
+And the little figure preceded him across his soft, cropped lawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
+
+Caleb Hunter had never married, and even now, at the age of forty and
+odd, in particularly mellow moments he was liable to confess that,
+while matrimony no doubt offered a far wider field for both general
+excitement and variety, as far as he himself was concerned, he felt
+that his bachelor condition had points of excellence too obvious to be
+treated with contumely.  Perhaps the fact that Sarah Hunter, four years
+his senior, had kept so well oiled the cogs of the domestic machinery
+of the white place on the hill that their churnings had never been
+evidenced may have been in part an answer to his contentment.
+
+For Sarah Hunter, too, had never married.  To the townspeople who had
+never dared to try to storm the wall of her apparent frigidity, or been
+able quite to understand her aloof austerity, she was little more than
+a weekly occurence as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun
+itself.  Every Sunday morning a rare vision of stately dignity for all
+her tininess, assisted by Caleb, she descended from the Hunter equipage
+to enter the portals of the Morrison Baptist church.  After the service
+she reappeared and, having complimented the minister upon the sagacity
+of his discourse, again assisted by Caleb, she mounted to the rear seat
+of the surrey and rolled back up the hill.
+
+That was as much as the townspeople ever saw of "Cal Hunter's maiden
+sister" unless there happened to be a prolonged siege of sickness in
+the village or a worse accident than usual.  Then she came and camped
+on the scene until the crisis was over, soft-voiced, soft-fingered and
+serenely sure of herself.  Sarah had never married, and even though she
+had in the long interval which, year by year, had brought to Caleb a
+more placid rotundity grown slender and slenderer still, and
+flat-chested and sharp-angled in face and figure, Caleb knew that
+underneath it all there had been no shrinkage in her soul--knew that
+there were no bleak expanses in her heart, or edges to her pity.
+
+They often joked each other about their state of single blessedness,
+did Caleb and his sister.  Often, hard upon his easy boast of
+satisfaction with things as they were, she would quote the fable of the
+fox and the high-hanging grapes, only to be taunted a moment later with
+her own celibacy.  But the taunt and the fable had long been stingless.
+For Sarah Hunter knew that one end of Caleb's heavy gold watch chain
+still carried a bit of a gold coin, worn smooth and thin from years of
+handling; she knew that the single word across its back, even though it
+had long ago been effaced so far as other eyes were concerned, was
+still there for him to see.  And Caleb, rummaging one day for some lost
+article or other, in a pigeonhole in Sarah's desk in which he had no
+license to look, had come across a picture of a tall and black-haired
+lad, brave in white trousers and an amazing waistcoat.  Caleb
+remembered having been told that he had died for another with that same
+smile which the picture had preserved--the tall and jaunty youngster.
+And so their comprehension was mutual.  They understood, did Caleb and
+his sister.
+
+But sure as he was of Sarah's fundamental kindness, Caleb experienced a
+twinge of guilty uncertainty that August afternoon as he closed the
+iron gate behind the grotesque little figure which had already started
+across his lawn.  For the moment he had forgotten that the sun was low
+in the west; he had overlooked the fact that it was customary for the
+Hunter establishment to sup early during the warm summer months.  But
+when he turned to find Sarah watching, stiff and uncompromising, from
+the doorway, he remembered with painful certainty her attitude toward
+his propensity to pick up any stray that might catch him in a moment of
+too pronounced mellowness--stray human or feline or lost yellow dog.
+
+Sarah's gaze, however, was not for her brother at that moment.  Her
+eyes were fixed unswervingly upon the figure in the once-white drill
+trousers and bobbed swallow-tail coat and shuffling boots.  She was
+staring from wide and, Caleb noted, rather horror-stricken eyes at the
+huge steel trap above the blanket pack.  But the boy who must have
+received her glance full in his face had not faltered a step in his
+advance.  He went forward until he stood at the foot of the low steps
+which mounted to the veranda; and there he stopped, looking up at her,
+and removed his battered hat.  Caleb ranged awkwardly up alongside him
+and looked up at her in turn.  He, searching desperately for a neat and
+cleverly casual opening speech, could not know that beneath her
+forbidding manner a peal of soft laughter was struggling for utterance;
+could not know that, at that moment, she was telling herself that, of
+the two, Caleb was far the younger.
+
+At last he cleared his throat, oratorically, and then she promptly
+interrupted him.
+
+"Supper is served, Cal," she drawled in her gentle, almost lisping
+voice.
+
+Caleb received the statement as if it were an astounding bit of
+hitherto undreamed-of news.
+
+"Comin', Sarah!" he chirped briskly.  "Comin' this blessed minute!"
+
+And then, with an attempt at disingenuousness:
+
+"I--I've a friend here, Sarah, whom I'd like to--er--present to you!
+This is my sister, Miss Hunter," he announced to the silent boy, "and
+this young man, Sarah, this young man is--er--ah--Mr.----"
+
+"I'm Steve," said the boy, mildly.  "I'm just Stephen O'Mara!"
+
+"Certainly!" gasped Caleb.   "Quite so--quite so!  Sarah, this is just
+Steve."
+
+The frail little woman with her quaint dignity of another decade failed
+to move; she did not unbend so much as the fraction of an inch.  But
+hard upon the heels of Caleb's last words the boy went forward
+unhesitatingly.  Hat in the hand that balanced his big steel trap, he
+stopped in front of her and offered one brown paw.
+
+"Haow dye do, Miss Hunter," he saluted her, gravely.  And with a slow
+smile that discovered for her a row of white and even teeth: "Haow dye
+do?  I--I reckon you're the first--dressed-up lady I ever did git to
+know!"
+
+The calm statement took what little breath there had been left in
+Caleb's lungs; it left Sarah breathless, too.  But after an
+infinitesimal moment of waiting she held out her own delicate fingers
+and took the outstretched hand.
+
+"Haow dye do, Steve?" she answered, and Caleb was at a loss to
+interpret the suppressed quality of her voice.  "And I--some day I am
+sure it will be a great pleasure to remember that I was the--first!"
+
+Then she faced her brother.
+
+"Will you--will your friend, Mr.--Steve--remain for supper, Cal?" she
+asked.
+
+And Caleb, quick to see an opening, made the most of this one.
+
+"Stay for supper," he repeated her question, and he laughed.
+"Stay--for--supper!  Well, I should hope he would.  Why--why, he's
+going to stop for the night!"
+
+From the vantage place there at the top of the steps Sarah stood and
+surveyed her brother's wide and guileless face for a second.  Then her
+lips began to twitch.
+
+"Very clever, Cal," she told him.  "Quite clever--for you!"
+
+And she nodded and withdrew to see that the table was laid for three.
+
+Caleb, chuckling, watched her go; then with a nod to the boy, he
+started to follow her in.  But Steve paused at the threshold, and when
+the man stopped and looked back to ascertain the cause of his delay he
+found that the boy was depositing the bear trap upon the porch
+floor--found him tugging to free the rusty old revolver from his belt.
+
+"I'll leave Samanthy here," the one called Steve stated, and Caleb
+understood that he meant the trap.  "An' I reckon I'd better not lug my
+weapon into the house, neither, hed I?  She might----"  He nodded in
+the direction of Sarah's disappearance--"Old Tom says womin folks
+that's gentle born air kind-a skittish about havin' shootin' irons
+araound the place.  And I don't reckon it's the part of men folks to
+pester 'em."
+
+Caleb didn't know just what to say, so he merely nodded approval.
+Again he had been made to feel that it was not a boy but some little
+old man who was explaining to him.  Silently he led the way upstairs,
+and after he had seen the blanket pack deposited in one corner of
+Sarah's beloved guest-room, after he had seen the rusty coat peeled off
+as a preface to removing the dust accumulation of the long hot day from
+hands and face, an inspiration came to him.  While the boy was washing,
+utterly lost to everything but that none-too-simple task, he went out
+of the room on a still-hunt of his own, and came back presently with
+the thing for which he had gone searching.  He found the boy wrestling
+a little desperately with a mop of wavy chestnut hair which only grew
+the more hopeless with every stroke of the brush.
+
+"Never mind that."  Caleb met the misapprehension in the boy's eyes.
+"Never mind that!  And I--I've taken the liberty of digging out this
+old canvas shooting coat.  It's one I got for Sarah--for my
+sister--but, as you say, women folks are mighty skittish about anything
+that has to do with a gun.  She never would go even so far as to try it
+on, but if you don't mind----  That coat of yours must be a trifle hot
+for this weather, I should say."
+
+Steve reached out a hand that trembled a little and took the coat.  He
+took it and stared at it with that same strained and hungry look which
+he had bestowed a half hour before upon the "City."
+
+"Do you mean," he asked, and his lips remained parted breathlessly upon
+the question, "do you mean--this yere's for me?"
+
+Caleb thought of the "injine"--the "_steam_ injine."
+
+"I mean just that, if you'll have it," he replied.  The boy slipped his
+little body into the garment and wheeled to survey himself in a mirror.
+In comparison with the dismembered swallowtail it was the purple of a
+Solomon.  There was a cartridge web across its front, with loops, and
+after he had looked long and long at his reflection, the boy thrust
+both his thumbs into the belt it made.
+
+Then: "Them's fer ketridges," he announced solemnly.
+
+He scowled judiciously and nodded.
+
+And, "I'll hev to git me some, the first thing in the mornin'," he said.
+
+That was his only remark then, and yet Caleb felt amply repaid.  Later
+he had more to say, but for the time being he merely followed Caleb
+back downstairs, walking very stiff and straight except when, with
+every few steps, he leaned over the better to see the looped webbing
+across his middle.
+
+And at table that evening the man came to know another trait in the odd
+little stranger's odd makeup which, coupled with those which he had
+already mentally tabulated for future private contemplation, set him to
+wondering more than a little.
+
+With the appearance of the first dish upon the table that night the boy
+was very frankly nonplussed at the array of implements upon each side
+of his plate, placed there for him to manipulate.  He scarcely knew one
+from the other, and the separate uses for each not at all.  But the way
+in which he met the problem made Caleb lift his eyes and meet Sarah's
+inscrutable glance with something akin to triumph.  For there was no
+awkwardness in the boy's procedure, no flushing embarrassment, no
+shame-facedness nor painfully self-conscious attempt to cover his
+ignorance.  Instead, he sat and waited--sat and watched openly until
+Miss Sarah had herself selected knife or fork, as the case might
+be--and then, turning back to those beside his own place, frowning
+intently, he made painstaking selection therefrom.  Nor did he once
+make a mistake.  And Caleb, after he had begun to mark a growing
+softness in the color of his sister's thin cheeks, ventured to draw
+into conversation their small guest.
+
+The boy talked freely and openly, always with his wide eyes upon the
+face of his questioner, always in the grave and slightly drawling
+idioms of the woods.  Again he confided that he had never before been
+out of the timber; he explained that "Old Tom's" untimely taking-off a
+fortnight back had been alone responsible for this pilgrimage.  And
+that opened the way for a question which Caleb had been eager to ask
+him.
+
+"I suppose this--this 'Old Tom' was some kin of yours?" he observed.
+
+The boy shook his head.
+
+"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin.  I ain't never hed
+nobody--father ner mother, neither!"
+
+Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips.  But the
+bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.
+
+"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to
+catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized
+that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was.  "I ain't
+never hed nobody but Old Tom.  And he was--he wasn't nuthin' but what
+he called my--my"--the sentence was broken while he paused to get the
+phrase correctly--"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"
+
+Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy,
+but he had to ask it just the same.
+
+"Still, I suppose his--his taking-off must have been something in the
+nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.
+
+The boy pursed his lips.
+
+"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly.  "No-o-o!  I can't
+say's it was.  We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon.  Old Tom, he
+often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin'
+drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids--and two weeks ago he
+done so!"
+
+And the rest of the words were quite casual.
+
+"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion,
+"if they'd hev been a trifle more water.  But the rocks was too close
+to the surface fer comfortable swimmin'.  The Jenkinses found him down
+in the slack water, Sunday noon or thereabouts, and they sed he'd never
+be no deader, not even if he'd a-died in a reg'lar bed, with a doctor
+helpin' him along."
+
+Caleb threw his sister one lugubriously helpless glance.  Sarah had
+choked, apparently upon a crumb of bread, and was coughing,
+stranglingly.  And Caleb made to change the drift of the conversation,
+but he was not quick enough.
+
+"I ain't never been much of a hand for licker," Steve finished naively.
+"Old Tom sed he never could understand it in me, neither, but he
+reckoned it was lucky in a way fer both of us.  He sed he'd whale the
+life outen me if he ever caught me even smellin' of a cork; and as fer
+him--well, it come in handy for him, havin' a sober hand round the
+shack when he wan't quite hisself!"
+
+This time when Caleb lifted his eyes he met a startled gleam behind
+Sarah's half dropped lashes.  She was peering steadily into the boy's
+lean, untroubled face.  Caleb voiced the query which he knew must be
+behind her quiet intentness.
+
+"You said your name was O'Mara, I believe.  I suppose that was--ah--Old
+Tom's last name, too?"
+
+Steve laughed; he laughed frankly for the first time since he had
+halted, hours before, outside in the dusty road.
+
+"Why, Old Tom had a dozen different names in the last few years," he
+replied.  "He had a new one every time he went outen the woods fer a
+trip.  But he always sed he mostly favored Brown or Jones or Smith,
+they bein' quiet and common and not too hard to remember.  He just
+changed names whenever he got tired of his old one, Old Tom did.  But
+he always did say, too, that if he'd hed as good a one as O'Mara, he'd
+a kept it--and kept it proud."
+
+At the conclusion of that statement it was Miss Sarah's gaze which went
+searching across the table for her brother's eyes.  But the boy just
+ran on and on, totally oblivious to their glances.
+
+He told them of his lonely days in the woods shack, when Old Tom went
+down river and was three or four weeks in returning; he dwelt upon
+blissful days in the spring when he had been allowed to play a man's
+part in the small drives which he and Old Tom and the "Jenkinses"
+began, and which Old Tom and the Jenkinses alone saw through to market
+in Morrison.  He touched lightly and inconsequentially upon certain
+days when Old Tom would hang for hours over an old tin box filled with
+soiled and ink-smeared memoranda, periods which were always followed by
+days of moody silence and a week or more of "lessons" in a tattered and
+thumbed reader which the woodsman had brought up-river--lessons as
+painful and laborious to Old Tom as they were delightful to the starved
+mentality of the pupil.  And Old Tom, the boy explained, was pretty
+likely to be "lickered up fer quite a spell" after such a session which
+invariably began with an exploration of the battered tin box.
+
+The boy told Caleb of days and nights on the trail--boasted
+unconsciously of Old Tom's super-cunning with trap and deadfall, and
+even poison bait.  And that brought him to the beautifully oiled bear
+trap which he had left outside the door.
+
+"I brung Samanthy along with me," he stated.  "I brung her just because
+somehow I kind-a thought mebby Old Tom'd be glad if I did.  Next to me
+he always sed he set a heap o' store on thet ole critter.  He sed
+Samanthy was as near to hevin' a woman around the house as anything he
+knew on--she hed a voice like a steel trap, and when she got her teeth
+sot in a argument she never did let up.  I brung her along with me, and
+the gun he give me, but I didn't take nuthin' else."
+
+Caleb waited there until he knew that the boy had finished.
+
+"You never bothered about that old tin box?" he inquired casually.
+
+The boy shook his head again.
+
+"Old Tom, whenever he went away for a spell, always sed I wan't to
+meddle with it," he explained.  "This time I reckoned his goin' was
+just about the same thing, only he won't be comin' back, so I--I just
+locked the box up in the cubberd and hitched the staple into the door
+and come down myself."
+
+By the time that meal was finished the boy's eyes were so heavy-lidded
+that, fight as he would, they still persisted in drooping till the long
+lashes curled over his cheeks.  And in spite of Caleb's remonstrance it
+was Sarah who saw him upstairs and into the huge guest-room with its
+four-poster and high-boy and spindle-backed chairs.
+
+When she came back downstairs her eyes were shining more than a little
+and the flush upon her cheeks was undeniably rose.  Her brother, from
+his seat before the unlighted fireplace, puffed methodically upon his
+pipe and barely lifted his head at her coming.  He was deep in
+meditation.  She stood looking at him for a time from the foot of the
+stairway.
+
+"He's asleep," she began finally in a very little voice.  "He fell
+asleep almost before his cheek touched the pillow."
+
+Caleb made no answer.  He nodded but his eyes were vacant with thoughts
+of his own.
+
+"Cal," she went on, "did you give him that old coat of mine?"
+
+Caleb nodded again--an affirmative.
+
+"Well, the last thing he asked before he slept was that I deliver a
+message to you.  'Tell him thanks for me,' he said.  'Tell him I clean
+forgot it til now!'  And as for me, Cal--why--why, 'he'd git me
+anuther, anytime I took the notion thet I wanted one!'"
+
+And still Caleb nodded.  The room was quiet for a long time.
+
+"Sarah," he murmured at last.
+
+"Yes, Cal," she answered.
+
+"Has that boy's--yarn--set you to thinking a little?"
+
+"It was very interesting and unusual," she admitted.  Then she rose and
+crossed over to his chair and perched herself, with odd, elfish,
+girlish grace upon its arm.
+
+"Do you mean Old Tom's tin box?" she asked gently.
+
+And he nodded.
+
+"Yes, in part--yes," he said.  "But not just that alone, either.  I
+mean everything, Sarah.  The way he handles himself; the way he looks
+one in the face when he is talking.  The--the--now what are you
+grinning over?"
+
+She stroked his sparse hair.
+
+"Cal, you old romancer, you.  Who'd ever suspect it in a man of your
+age and--and avoirdupois!"
+
+"Avoirdupois!" he snorted.  "Can't a man continue to have ideas now and
+then, even if he does become a--a trifle plump.  And that boy--why,
+Sarah I tell you----!"
+
+And then his sister put one hand over his lips.
+
+"I know, Cal," she interrupted placidly.  "I know!  You're going to
+tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that
+backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless
+bronze--or--or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and
+provided with the chance.  It sounds--it sounds very big and grand and
+romantic, Cal, but has it ever occurred to you that anyone big enough
+for things like those would find the way himself?"
+
+Immediately, jerkily, Caleb started to straighten up.
+Argumentatively--and then she checked him.
+
+"Oh, I know you don't believe it and I--I don't think I do myself, Cal.
+A man has to know what opportunity is before he can go out and hunt up
+his own big chance.  I just said it for the sake of argument, Cal.
+I--I'm like Samanthy--ole Samanthy, you know!  I'm a woman, and when I
+git my teeth sot in a argumint I never do let up.  Have your dreams,
+you--you boy!  And in the meantime, if you have any plans, tell me,
+please, what are you going to do with him in the morning?"
+
+Caleb Hunter bobbed his head, vehemently.  Rapidly he related to her
+the episode of the switch engine in Dexter Allison's millyards.
+
+"And I believe what I believe," he insisted, doggedly.  "And to-morrow
+I aim to give that boy a ride in one of Allison's 'steam injine' cabs,
+if it's all I do!"
+
+"I thought so," said Miss Sarah.
+
+For a time she sat there upon his arm chair.  Neither spoke, nor felt
+the need for words.  Just before she rose to go upstairs, she broke
+that quiet.
+
+"He has an odd, strange, half-wild beauty," she mused aloud.  "A beauty
+that is quite unusual, I should say, in children of his--his station.
+His hair is silken and, oh so thick!  And his eyes and square chin with
+that little cleft.  And his nose--his nose, I should say, might be said
+to denote estheticism--and--a--a--ah----"
+
+Caleb Hunter threw back his head at the telltale little quaver in the
+voice and found Sarah Hunter smiling down at him, whimsically.
+
+"Get all the amusement out of it that you can," he invited her.
+"And--and trust a woman to take note of such points as you have
+mentioned!"
+
+From the stairs she gave him one backward glance.
+
+"Forgive me, Cal," she hogged.  "I meant it all--truly!  Even the
+estheticism, which I only included to tease you.  And if you don't want
+to trust to a woman's judgment on such points as I have mentioned, I
+would suggest that you peep in on him when you retire, and--and confirm
+them for yourself."
+
+Hours later Caleb acted upon her suggestion.  Every characteristic
+which Sarah had mentioned he found and noted in that half-lighted
+moment or two while he stood at the bedside.
+
+And he noted more than just that.  Sarah's old canvas hunting coat was
+folded into a small bundle and lay, guarded by one outflung,
+loose-fingered brown hand, beside the sleeping boy's face on the pillow.
+
+Caleb went to bed with a half dozen wild notions whirling in his head,
+and a strange something tugging at his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
+
+Saturday morning dawned as hot and dry and windless as had been the
+other days of the week which had preceded it.  Caleb Hunter, rising
+from an uneasy night, blamed his sleeplessness upon the weather.  It
+was fully an hour before his usual, not-too-early hour of rising, when
+he slowly descended the wide stairway; and yet he was but little
+surprised to find the boy already there before him, seated upon the top
+step of the verandah, when he strolled outside.
+
+The little stranger with the grave voice, who had introduced himself as
+Stephen O'Mara, had not heard Caleb's step and the latter stood for a
+time in the doorway, contemplating the small, square-set shoulders in
+the canvas coat which had been his sister Sarah's, and the small,
+shapely head above them.
+
+Throughout the night while he lay awake pondering the fantastic
+possibilities which the boy's story had stirred him into half
+believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in
+which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing
+analysis of him, her brother.  Before morning came he had told himself
+a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer,
+who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a
+Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to
+have big eyes.  Merely because they had so persistently denied him
+sleep--those thoughts of Old Tom and his cherished tin box and the
+boy's own unmistakable poise and surety of self which even the
+shuffling boots and ragged clothes had only made the more
+impressive--merely because they persisted in endless procession through
+his brain, while he rolled and tossed and re-arranged the pillow, he
+had grown more and more peevishly eager to discount and discredit them,
+during the darkness.  But when morning came, and he rose and went into
+the big guest room to find it empty, he experienced a moment of panicky
+disappointment; suddenly anxious for another opportunity to verify all
+that which, in the hours of sleepless pro's and con's, had become
+figment-like and whimsical, he wondered if the boy really could have
+gone without even waiting to bid them good-bye.  He could not make that
+abrupt sort of a leave-taking harmonize with the rest of the
+youngster's actions--and then he caught a glimpse of him, motionless
+there on the verandah steps.
+
+The boy did not hear Caleb's coming that morning.  His head was tilted
+forward in that keen attitude of straining intentness which to the man
+had already become eloquently characteristic of his hungry spirit.  And
+for a time Caleb withheld his greeting; instead of speaking he stood
+and studied him, and while he studied it all came back again, until the
+illusion, if such it were, was far more vivid, far more compelling than
+it had been the night before.  Caleb told himself that to look only
+meant the discovery of new and compelling "points" both in feature and
+body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
+variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes.  And
+then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
+looking down into the town in the valley.
+
+Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
+direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
+although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
+silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof.  Caleb heard
+voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
+perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
+Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
+hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn.  And Caleb Hunter's
+brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
+black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
+gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
+days, flashed through behind him.  For Caleb heard the short gasp which
+came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
+darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
+hand at him.
+
+Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
+quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
+what had been holding so closely his attention.  He understood
+absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
+help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
+help but think----  His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
+from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
+wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
+absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
+the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.
+
+All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
+Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
+daughter, Barbara.  No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
+Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
+had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
+for his body.  Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
+moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force.  He
+recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
+adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
+recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
+party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
+morning garb.  But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was
+to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above
+spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and
+grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.
+
+To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her
+through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a
+mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly
+alive.  Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she
+was to be--of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was
+there in the promise of the years.  And he who was fond of insisting to
+his sister Sarah, that there was many a boy back in those hills who,
+with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized
+how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the
+fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to
+approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was
+typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter.
+
+He was no snob--Caleb Hunter--and yet the little girl's bearing at that
+moment doubly accented for him the gulf which lay between her and the
+hills-boy, by name Steve.  For though she did pause to stare at his
+white drill trousers and unbelievable man-sized boots with frankly
+childish astonishment, the next instant she had recovered herself and
+without another glance preceded her father across the grass.  Quite as
+though Steve had not been there at all she passed him, to hesitate
+demurely at Caleb's side.
+
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she greeted him.
+
+And then, quite suddenly, Caleb didn't feel so very sorry after all for
+his little visitor.  He stopped pitying him.  Steve's eyes had not
+wavered once from the little girl's face, from the time she appeared in
+the hedge gap until she mounted the steps, utterly oblivious to his
+nearness; but when she brushed against his elbow, the boy rose and
+stood, hat in hand, gravely quiet, gravely possessed, and silently sure
+of himself.
+
+Even after he had answered Barbara Allison's greeting and turned with
+his grown-up, ponderous courtesy to present the boy to her, only to be
+left with the words hanging upon tongue-tip by her instant
+disappearance inside in search of Sarah, Caleb caught no hint of the
+thoughts behind those impassive and steady eyes.  And yet he knew that
+Steve had risen in order that he might bow as he had the night before,
+when Caleb introduced him to his sister.
+
+Dexter Allison, coming up in less airy fashion across the lawn,
+surprised Caleb with his mouth still open.
+
+"Well?" said Dexter Allison--and Caleb recovered himself.
+
+"Well?" he countered; and then they both laughed softly and shook
+hands.  It was their unvaried formula of greeting, whether they had not
+seen each other for twenty-four hours or twenty-four months.
+
+And while they were shaking hands the boy turned quietly and re-seated
+himself upon the top step.  But Allison gave him more notice than had
+his daughter Barbara.  He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets,
+gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the
+scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of
+seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at
+Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was
+looking the other way.  After a time Allison raised quizzical eyes to
+Caleb's face.
+
+"Wel-l-l?" he intoned, and with a little reluctance as reasonless as it
+was unnoticed, Caleb answered the inferred question.
+
+"This--this is a little friend of mine, Dexter," he said, "down from
+the hills.  He's in to have a look at the city which you have been so
+instrumental in arousing to its present state of teeming activity.
+This is Stephen O'Mara.  Steve--this is Mr. Allison, Steve!"
+
+Then the boy turned and again rose to his feet, and at that moment
+Caleb could have hugged him for his deliberation.  The boy inclined his
+head; he bowed, without a word.  And it was Dexter Allison who first
+offered a hand.
+
+"Glad to make your acquaintance, Stephen," the latter exclaimed with
+quite violent good humor.  "And how are you?"
+
+Steve took the hand and closed his brown fingers hard upon the puffy
+white ones.  For an instant he stood, his eyes, grave and inscrutable,
+full upon Allison's smaller ones.  "I'm tol-lable," he drawled soberly.
+"And--haow be you--yourself?"
+
+Allison gasped, stood with mouth agape, and then burst into one of his
+rather too-frequent, too-hearty laughs.
+
+"Well, I'm----" he began his favorite phrase of ejaculation, and then
+stopped to look down again into the small face before him.  "Well,
+I'm----" and he stopped to chuckle.  Then he turned back to Caleb.
+
+"I suppose, Cal, you know what this early morning call presages?" he
+suggested.
+
+Caleb recalled himself with an effort from a contemplation of the
+sudden, prideful something which had warmed him while Steve was shaking
+hands.  He smiled, mechanically.
+
+"I suppose it's the usual raid upon the commissary," he answered.
+
+Allison mounted heavily to the verandah.
+
+"Right!" he exclaimed.  "Right!  You'll notice that Barbara has already
+gone on ahead.  She's the skirmish line--scouts--videttes--whatever you
+please to call 'em.  There's no-one up yet--none of the family--over to
+our place.  We are hungry, Cal.  I hope this is waffle morning?"
+
+Caleb smiled at him, less impersonality in the mirth.  It was a regular
+custom, this truancy of Barbara Allison and her father--one of the
+little human foibles which Caleb often told himself accounted, in part
+at least, for his real liking of the man.
+
+"Waffles it is," he said, and he turned toward the boy.
+
+"Would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" he asked.  "Will you tell
+her, please, that we are to be subjected to another neighborly
+imposition?"
+
+After the boy had disappeared Caleb followed the larger man to a chair.
+And this time it was Caleb who met Allison's silence with a
+challenging, "Well?"
+
+"Where did you get him, Cal?" Allison demanded.  "Where _did_ you get
+him?  Those shoes, and those trousers--pants, I guess is the word, eh?
+And say, how that little beggar did squeeze my hand!  Look here!"
+
+He held one soft hand up for inspection.  There were faint red welts
+still visible across the finger joints.
+
+"Friend of yours, did you say?"
+
+Without stopping to think about it, Caleb was not so keen to enlarge
+upon the boy's obvious "points" as he had been with Sarah.  He omitted
+to mention his thoughts of the night before, and he omitted any
+reference to Old Tom, except for the most hazy explanation that the boy
+had no immediate kin.  But with an increasing eagerness he dilated upon
+the small foot traveler's first view of the "city," his breathless
+reception of Allison's own switch engine, and his avowed intention to
+"look around a trifle," before he located something to do.
+
+"I thought I'd take him down this morning and get McLean to give him a
+ride in the cab of one of those sheet-iron steam relics of yours," he
+finished.
+
+If Caleb had expected his unadorned recitation of the boy's appearance
+to make any impression upon his hearer he would have been disappointed.
+But, without any confessed reason for so doing, Caleb had aimed rather
+at the opposite effect.  And Allison turned from it with a large,
+matter-of-fact indifference, to rise and bow to Sarah Hunter, who
+appeared that moment in the doorway.
+
+"Surely--surely," he echoed Caleb's suggestion.  "Take him down and
+give him a ride!  McLean'll be glad of the chance to show someone his
+pet buzz-saws and things.  I'll walk down with you, myself, after
+breakfast.  I may be away for a day or two, and I want to leave
+directions for changes to be incorporated while I'm gone."
+
+At the table that morning Caleb noted that there was no hesitation in
+Steve's selection from the silver beside his plate, no waiting to
+follow in the lead of Sarah Hunter's choice.  He noticed, too, that the
+boy's eyes did not once lift to those of Barbara Allison, opposite him.
+And while the little girl from time to time joined in the conversation,
+he not once opened his mouth to speak, until they were almost ready to
+rise from their places.
+
+Allison had been growling genially at the lack of water and the
+prolonged drouth which was burning the pasturage to a crisp and
+juiceless brown.
+
+"If that everlasting sun would only stop shining for a while," he said,
+"if it'd only rain a bit, I'd like to take a trip back north,
+a-fishing, before it gets too late in the season."
+
+"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north,
+don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.
+
+Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about
+methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.
+
+"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.
+
+Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.
+
+"I suppose so," he admitted.  "In the general course of things it'll
+come, no doubt, but----"
+
+The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.
+
+"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and
+it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"
+
+And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.
+
+"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly.
+"Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as
+good as the next man's."
+
+Once more the boy shook his head.
+
+"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed.  "Ner I ain't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til
+Wednesday, fer sure!"
+
+Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager
+two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's
+well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash
+offer.  Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but
+foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was
+based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.
+
+Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill
+that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one
+of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy
+tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.
+
+"All right, then," he gave in.  "If you want to come as much as all
+that, but--but you--now run along, then, with Stephen."
+
+On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.
+
+"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon
+being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives.  But the
+other sex is beyond me!  She's always turned up her dainty nose at the
+noise and dirt before, and--and now she's ready to cry because I
+suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"
+
+Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the
+road.  The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara
+walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort.
+Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes
+must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he
+understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's
+chin.  For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to
+inattention.  Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.
+
+"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent,"
+he mused.  "And she--she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful
+female person I ever did know."
+
+As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill
+superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one
+of his voluble tours of the premises.  But when Caleb had explained the
+main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of
+the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a
+wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.
+
+"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he
+asked then.  And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to
+hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"
+
+Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were.  It
+was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
+before him.
+
+"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.
+
+"Well, thin, we'll see."  McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
+in the diminutive cab.  "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
+he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"
+
+He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
+one foot upraised, hung back.  He faced toward Caleb and, without a
+glance in the girl's direction, said:
+
+"Mebby she--mebby she'd like to go, too?"
+
+Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
+her hand within that of her father.
+
+"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.
+
+Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
+and his face went pink.  Without another word he clambered up beside
+the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
+the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
+When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
+somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
+the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.
+
+"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
+assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.
+
+Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand.  As
+grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.
+
+"She--she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered.  And then,
+cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
+fer myself, some day!"
+
+McLean chuckled--he chuckled in deep delight within his white
+whiskers--and led the way to the mills.  But once there the amusement
+in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
+the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
+technically as did the mill boss himself.  And he knew timber; knew it
+with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
+border upon the uncanny.
+
+It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
+which was being discarded.
+
+"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
+asked.
+
+Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
+his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.
+
+"She's holler," he stated succintly.  "Dry rotten above the stub!"
+
+And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one
+hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.
+
+"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin'
+where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin
+the need arises!"
+
+A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram
+which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his
+attention.  They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara
+Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side.  After a brief
+examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders;
+then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his
+shoulder.
+
+"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith
+that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av
+quarter inch stuff--and three-quarters av an inch wide."
+
+The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling,
+empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.
+
+"The blacksmith says he ain't got no--no iron three-quarters of an inch
+wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths.  "But
+he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths.  Shall I--shall I git some
+o' that?"
+
+He waited the word, poised to go.
+
+McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground.  Now he rose
+and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with
+eagerness, uplifted to his.  Quiet endured for a long time, and then,
+at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled--he wheeled just in time to
+see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little
+smile.  And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.
+
+Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the
+boy's face.  The eager light faded from the gray eyes, until they were
+purple where they had been gray before.  And Caleb had never seen a
+face grow so white--so white and set and dangerous.  Stephen O'Mara's
+head drooped, he turned and wavered away a step or two.  Allison
+stopped laughing, abruptly.  Then McLean spoke.
+
+"'Twas funny, mebby," he muttered.  "But it was not so damned funny,
+aither!  An' I--I'll be goin' down now to teach that smith to kape his
+funny jokes till afther hours."
+
+He started toward the shop, and stopped again.
+
+"It's all right, buddy," he said.  "'Tis nothing that you need feel
+badly about, for 'twas I who made the mistake.  I should have sint you
+out to estimate whether our spruce would cut two million feet or less,
+an' you'd have come as close as mor-rtal man could, I'll wager.  'Twas
+a trivial thing, lad.  What's a little matter av figures between min av
+the river, eh?  We'll leave that to the capitalists who laugh at our
+dinseness, me bhoy!"
+
+With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.
+
+Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill.  Not once
+did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak
+whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself.  He only knew
+that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of
+mirth.  Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own
+gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark
+whatsoever.
+
+"I--you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that
+three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he
+tried to comfort him.  "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite
+of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."
+
+Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of
+laughter.  He whirled--the boy--and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed,
+bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones.  He shook with the very vehemence of
+the words that came through twitching lips.
+
+"_She_ didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out.  "If
+I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between
+them figgers, and _hedn't_ knowed, she could'a smiled.  But I--I ain't
+hed my chance--yit!"
+
+He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way
+upstairs.
+
+Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought
+uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely
+woman-wise.  A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to
+himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling
+up in the southwest.  One long finger of black cloud was already poked
+up over the horizon.  He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast
+table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and
+he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing
+trip on Monday--the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.
+
+He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of
+misery.  Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him
+the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly,
+come Monday!
+
+And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him
+alone for a while--alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than
+the spare little body which housed it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
+
+It rained that night.  The storm which hung for hours, a threatening
+bank of black in the south, finally tore north at sundown, to break
+with vicious fury.  And again Caleb spent a sleepless night, this time
+alone before the fireplace, but the thoughts which kept him awake
+failed to grow fantastic and romantically absurd with prolonged
+contemplation, as they had the night before.
+
+Never until that day had he considered his oft-repeated theory that
+there was many a boy in those back-woods who, with a chance, might go
+far, as anything but an idealistic truth, in the abstract.  The
+realization that a chance had come to test it, in the concrete, stunned
+him at first.
+
+Dispassionately he summed up all the boy's characteristics that night
+and reviewed them, one by one: His poise and utter lack of
+self-consciousness, his fearless directness and faith in himself, in
+all that he said or did; and they came through the mental assay without
+fault or flaw.
+
+He had already decided that he must go up-river and explore the old tin
+box which had been left there, locked in the "cubberd," but he was a
+little proud to make his decision before he learned all that it might,
+or might not, reveal; he was proud to believe that he knew a
+thorough-bred, without a pedigree for confirmation.  And when Sunday
+morning dawned and the floodlike downpour had subsided to a gray and
+steady rainfall, even Caleb, none too weatherwise, knew that it had
+come to "stay fer a spell."  He knew that the boy who had come marching
+down the valley road, two days before, was going to stay, too, if it
+lay within his power to persuade him.
+
+Steve was most taciturn at the table the following morning; his moody
+silence puzzled even Sarah Hunter.  But when the latter, whose Sunday
+schedule no storm could alter, came home from church and found Caleb
+and the boy immersed in a mass of flies and leaders, and lines which
+had been skeined to dry, her thorough disapproval loosed the boy's
+tongue.  She stood in the doorway surveying with a frown their
+preoccupied industry.
+
+"It seems to me, Cal," she commented, "that even if _you_ haven't any
+regard for the Sabbath, you might do better than lead those younger
+than yourself into doing things which might better be left for days
+which were meant for such things."
+
+She swished upstairs before Caleb had a chance to answer.  But minutes
+after she had gone Steve looked up from a line he was spooling.
+
+"She ain't particularly pleased, I take it," he remarked.
+
+"Not particularly," Caleb chuckled.  "It's funny, too, because I do
+most of this sort of work on Sunday.  You'd think she'd become resigned
+to it, but she doesn't."
+
+The boy thought deeply for a while.
+
+"Didn't--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" he asked
+presently.
+
+Up shot Caleb's head.
+
+"Huh-h-h?" he gasped.
+
+"I sed--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" Steve repeated.
+"Seems to me they did, but I can't just rec'lict now what chapter it
+was in."
+
+Caleb pulled his face into a semblance of sobriety.
+
+"Seems to me they did," he agreed, a little weakly, "now that you
+mention it.  I don't just recollect where it occurred, either, at the
+moment, but we'll have to look it up, because, as a case of precedent,
+it'll be a clincher for Sarah."
+
+He chuckled for a full hour over the thought before he forgot it.  The
+boy, however, upon whom Sarah's disapproval had made a more lasting
+impression, recalled it to him later.
+
+Allison joined them Monday morning at daybreak.  All day they drove
+through the seeping rain--drove north in Caleb's buckboard, to turn off
+finally upon a woods trail that ran into the cast, along the lesser
+branch of the river.  During the ride Steve's bearing toward the third
+member of the party was too plain to escape notice, for he never looked
+at nor directed a word to Allison unless it was in reply to a direct
+question, and then his answers were almost monosyllabic.  But Allison,
+who, as usual, gave his undivided attention to the country through
+which they were passing, in attitude toward the boy was even more
+remarkable.
+
+Once when they had halted at noon he pointed out a hillside of pine,
+black beneath the rain, close-clustered and of mastlike straightness.
+
+"There's a wonderful stand of pine, Cal," he remarked.  "I'd venture to
+say that it would cut at least two million feet."
+
+Instantly, although the remark was addressed to him, Caleb knew that it
+was Stephen's comment for which Allison was angling.  And hard upon his
+casual statement the boy's head came sharply around.
+
+"She'll run nigh double that," he swallowed the bait.  "She'll run
+double--and mebby a trifle more."
+
+Nor did Allison even smile now.
+
+"What makes you think so?" he asked.
+
+Again there came the boy's pat answer.
+
+"I ain't thinkin'," he said.  "It's jest there!  They're close
+set--them trees--and they're clear, clean to the tops.  There ain't a
+stump there that won't run near ten standard."
+
+Allison squinted and finally nodded his head.
+
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe."
+
+But later Caleb saw him enter some figures in his small, black-bound
+notebook.
+
+That night the episode was repeated with a bit of variation.  They had
+set up their tent and made camp, a little before nightfall.  Far below
+them, hidden by the trees, the east branch cut a threadlike gash
+through the center of a valley broad enough and round enough to have
+been a veritable amphitheater of the gods.  The whole great hollow was
+clothed with evergreen, a sea of dripping tops in the semi-gloom, and
+Allison, when he had set aside his plate and lighted his pipe, lifted a
+hand in a gesture which embraced it all.
+
+"If you weren't so lazy-brained, Cal," he said, "that sight would stir
+in you something more than a mere appreciation of what you call the
+'sublimity of sheer immensity.'  For the man who can look ahead ten or
+a dozen years there is an undreamed of fortune right here in this
+alley."
+
+Caleb yawned.
+
+"No doubt," he agreed.  "But I didn't coin that phrase for immense
+fortunes.  I guess I'm old-fashioned enough to like it a whole lot
+better just as it is."
+
+Then he became suddenly aware of the tense earnestness with which
+Stephen O'Mara was listening.  And when Allison, thinking aloud, mused
+that the cost of driving the timber down the shallow stream to the
+far-off mills would be, perhaps, prohibitive, words fairly leaped to
+the boy's lips.
+
+"But they--they won't be drivin' that timber by floods, when they git
+to tacklin' these here valleys," he exclaimed.  "Old Tom ses when they
+really git to lumberin' these mountains they'll skid it daown to the
+railroad tracks and yank it out by steam!"
+
+That sober statement in the piping voice had a strange effect upon
+Allison.  He leaned forward, a sort of guarded astonishment in his
+attitude, to peer at the childish face in the fire-glow.  Then he
+seemed to remember that it was just a bit of a woods-waif who had
+spoken.  But Caleb, who was lazy-brained in some matters, sensed that
+Steve had put into words Allison's own unspoken thought, just as
+Allison at that moment voiced the question which he was about to utter
+himself.
+
+"I suppose it was this--this Old Tom who taught you all these things
+you know about timber?" he said, curious.
+
+Steve pondered the question.
+
+"Wal-l-l, yes," he answered at last.  "Old Tom learned me some,
+but--but most of it I kind of feel as if I always knowed."
+
+The boy was fast asleep, curled up beneath the blankets, when Caleb
+finally broached, that night, the matter which had kept him awake the
+entire night before.  And when he had finished Allison sat quiet for a
+long time before he offered any reply.
+
+"You mean----" he began, at length.
+
+"I just mean that I'm going to give him his chance," Caleb cut in.  His
+voice was hushed, but vehement.  "Why, man, think what he has this
+minute, to start with!  A brain as clear as a diamond, absolutely
+fresh, absolutely unspoiled or fagged with the nonsensical fol-de-rol
+which makes up the bulk of the usual boy's education of his age, and a
+working knowledge, for instance, of this north country which most men
+might envy.  Why, the possibilities are limitless!"
+
+Allison puffed his pipe in silence.
+
+"No doubt you're right," he admitted.  "In ten years, with a technical
+education to back up his practical knowledge, he might prove priceless
+to someone who had need of such a specialist.  Always assuming, of
+course, that he developed according to promise.  But the possibilities
+are limitless, too, in the other directions, aren't they?"
+
+"Meaning?" invited Caleb.
+
+"Well, you don't know any too much concerning his antecedents, do you?"
+Allison suggested.  "And still----"
+
+"I don't have to," Caleb interrupted, "not after one look at him!"
+
+"--And still, if you catch a boy young enough," Allison finished
+serenely, "you can make a fairly presentable gentleman out of almost
+any material, with time enough and money enough to teach him what to
+do."
+
+"You can," Caleb came back, "but no matter how much money you spend,
+you can't make the sort of a gentleman out of him, that knows without
+being taught, what _not_ to do!  They--they have to be born to that,
+Dexter."
+
+And there they let it drop.  But the next morning, when they were alone
+upon the brook, Caleb, after several false starts managed to re-open
+the subject with the boy himself.
+
+"Has it ever occurred to you, Steve," he asked, "that all these things
+you know about the woods might be valuable, some day, to--to men who
+pay well for such knowledge?"
+
+Steve paid no apparent heed to the question until he had landed a trout
+which he had hooked a moment before.  It was a heavy fish--and Caleb
+had promised to teach him how to handle that fly-rod!  Then he looked
+up.
+
+"Once Old Tom sed they'd be payin' me more'n he ever earned in his
+lifetime, jest to go a-raound and tell 'em how much good lumber they
+was in standin' trees.  Is that--is that what you mean?"
+
+"Partly--partly, but not entirely, either," Caleb went on.  "You said
+last night that when they got to lumbering these mountains, they'd be
+taking it out by steam.  When they do they'll want men who know the
+woods--but they'll have to know how to bridge rivers and cross swamps,
+too, won't they?"
+
+The boy promptly forgot his fishing.  Knee-deep in the stream he faced
+squarely around toward Caleb, and from that glowing countenance the man
+knew that he had only repeated something which, long before, had
+already fired the boy's imagination.
+
+"They's places where I kin git 'em to learn me them things, ain't
+they?" he demanded.
+
+"Yes," said Caleb.  "There are places.  And you--you were thinking of
+going to school?"
+
+"Thinkin' of it?" echoed Steve.  "I always been thinkin' of it.  Why,
+thet's all I come outen the timber fer!"
+
+"But you said you meant to locate something to do," the man argued,
+nonplussed, "after you had looked around a trifle."
+
+Steve's eyes dropped toward the white drill trousers and big boots, the
+latter half-hidden from sight by the swirling water.
+
+"I got to earn money first," he explained patiently.  "I--I jest
+couldn't git to go to school--in these here clothes!"
+
+"Oh!" murmured Caleb.  "Oh!"  And then, recovering himself: "That'll
+take a long time," he ventured.
+
+The boy smiled, strangely--the first smile of man's sophistication
+which Caleb had seen upon his face.
+
+"I've always hed to wait a long time fer everything I've wanted," he
+answered, "but I always git it, just the same, if I only want it hard
+enough."
+
+[Illustration: "I've always hed to wait a long time for everything I've
+wanted," the boy answered, "but I always get it, just the same, if I
+only want it hard enough."]
+
+Caleb cleared his throat, self-consciously.
+
+"Still," he argued again, "it would waste some very valuable years.
+Now--now what do you think of staying with me, and--and starting in
+this fall?"
+
+The boy's lips fell apart while he stood and gaped up into Caleb's
+slightly red face.
+
+"You mean," he breathed, "you mean--jest live--with you?"
+
+"That was my idea," said Caleb.
+
+And then, slowly, the boy's head dropped again, as it had when he bowed
+to gaze at his uncouth, begrimed clothes.  The man thought that he
+caught the inference of that moment of silence.
+
+"We can fix up the matter of clothes later," he made haste to forestall
+any objection in that direction.  "That doesn't amount to anything,
+anyway."
+
+The clear eyes lifted again, steady and wide and very, very grave.
+
+"I always knowed it was comin'," said Stephen O'Mara.  "I always knowed
+it was a-comin'--this chance--even when I didn't know _haow_ it would
+come.  Ner I wa'n't thinkin' about my clothes.  I reckon I kin learn
+jest as fast in these as in any.  I was jest thinkin' about Miss Sarah.
+She--she might not like it, hevin' two men folks a-raound the house,
+under foot."
+
+It was Caleb's turn to stand, agape.
+
+"Miss Sarah?" he faltered, astonished--and then he remembered.  He
+laughed, unsteadily, with relief.  For an instant he had been
+inexplicably afraid that the boy was going to refuse his offer.
+
+"Why, you musn't mind what Sarah said yesterday," he rushed on.
+"She--she--well, she's a Baptist, Steve, and you know what that means."
+
+He leaned forward a little, his voice quite stealthily confidential.
+
+"But I can fix that all right," he promised.  "I can surely fix that.
+For I'll tell her--I'll tell her you're a Baptist, too!  Will you--will
+you stay?"
+
+And after a time solemnly Steve nodded.  Later, when alone, Caleb
+chuckled mountainously over his reply.
+
+"Thet's--thet's what I cal'late I be," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
+
+On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehearsed a half score of speeches
+with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken;
+but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the
+entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the
+facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything
+else.  It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily
+swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah
+had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the
+rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped
+from cold.  So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace
+when Caleb made known his decision.
+
+"I've never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know,
+Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct.  "And this
+seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have.  You--you
+like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"
+
+While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
+the face, once at least.  It was hard to know what she was thinking
+when she sat like that, staring into the fire.  He waited, not without
+grave misgivings, for her reply.
+
+"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.
+
+"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.
+
+"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.
+
+There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
+gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.
+
+"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured.  "It is
+pretty sudden--but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."
+
+And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother.  Her eyes were
+unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.
+
+"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered.  "Why, I knew you
+were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
+veranda behind him.  I was certain of it, even then.  And if you hadn't
+decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
+came back from that endless fishing-trip!"
+
+And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
+perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste.  For it was
+Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening.  She ran on and
+on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
+prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
+dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
+the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
+beside her woman-hunger.  It astonished him, when he mentioned the
+subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
+deed.
+
+"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
+caught up his suggestion.  "To-day I explored for hours and found some
+of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
+worn at all.  I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
+in the morning.  And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
+like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"
+
+The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
+he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she
+mentioned had been in vogue.  Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the
+gurgle in her throat.  And so, the next morning, when a little figure
+in velvet jacket and pantaloons--velvet of the same jet hue in which
+Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two
+before--stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed
+of not one whit of its sensationalism.
+
+Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever
+have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have
+stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance.  There were
+red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been
+encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of
+sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver
+buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which
+fastened it across his small chest--silver buttons to match upon the
+quaintly short sleeves.
+
+Stephen O'Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he
+started methodically down the stairs.  And immediately Caleb's
+amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him
+gave way to a newer wonder.  For the boy, in spite of the fact that his
+small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness
+of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable.  Then Caleb realized how
+great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in
+the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good
+mornings he led the way to the table.
+
+There was something in Sarah's fluttering delight over the boy's
+appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her
+brother.  For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the
+boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss
+Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his
+first appearance.  They had a word together--Sarah and Caleb--after
+breakfast.
+
+"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
+"Did you!  Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"
+
+Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.
+
+"I never did," he admitted.  And then, offhandedly: "What--did he say
+anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this
+morning."
+
+"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little.  "No.  But he--Cal, he just sat
+and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time.  He made me
+think somehow of a puppy that knows he's going to be scrubbed and--and
+dreads it exceedingly.  It's because of those dreadful things he's been
+wearing, don't you suppose so?"
+
+"No doubt of it," her brother said.  "No doubt!  And now I'm going over
+to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him.  I was telling
+him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."
+
+When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he
+searched the house through without finding the boy.  In his perplexity
+he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.
+
+"Where's Stephen?" he asked.
+
+Sarah nodded to Allison.
+
+"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought
+you wouldn't be back for a while, I sent him downtown--I sent him to
+the village----"
+
+Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.
+
+"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed.  "Did he--did he change
+his clothes?"
+
+"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.
+
+"And of course he didn't!"  Suddenly her brother's face alarmed her.
+"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven't done anything I shouldn't have done,
+have I?"
+
+Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.
+
+"In--that--outfit!" he groaned.  "Down to the village, and it's a
+lumber town!  He's gone, and if he doesn't have to fight his way back
+then I----"
+
+Sarah's alarm changed to fear instantly.  She stepped out upon the
+porch.
+
+"I never thought of that," she whispered.  "But you don't really
+think----"
+
+In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction.  But Allison,
+after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an
+expansive smile of anticipation upon his face, propped his feet upon
+the rail.
+
+"I think," he assured her, with no comfort in the assurance, "that this
+will be well worth watching through to the finish!"
+
+They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned.  As he
+appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat,
+half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair.  And even to
+Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit
+with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck.  The coat had
+been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as
+the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till
+the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric
+which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o'er-spread with egg.
+
+After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet
+and retreated none too steadily into the house.  But it wasn't the
+condition of the boy's clothes which held Caleb's gaze.  He was
+watching his face.  For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous
+whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man.  His lips
+were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in
+one corner.  And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
+Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach
+before Caleb spoke.  And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half
+to see the two men who were waiting his coming.
+
+"Well?" faltered Caleb.
+
+The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head.  Both men heard that
+breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.
+
+"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again.  "Where have you
+been?"
+
+He hardly recognized the boy's voice.
+
+"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words.  "I been daown to
+git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs--and I run into trouble--daown
+there--a-gittin' 'em!"
+
+"I--I should assume that you had," murmured Caleb.  "But you've brought
+the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren't
+in particularly edible condition."
+
+That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of
+laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath.  And Steve,
+teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.
+
+"You'd better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised
+him then.  "And I'll get you something less--less dangerous to wear
+before night."
+
+But the boy stood rigid still.
+
+"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"
+
+Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.
+
+"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket
+and handed the coin to the boy.  "Now what do you----Here, where are
+you going now?"
+
+Steve had turned and was marching down the steps.  He paused a minute
+to explain, however.
+
+"Why, I'm goin' back daown to the city," he grated out.  "I'm goin'
+back after Miss Sarah's eggs!"
+
+And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which
+held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer's
+counter.
+
+"Well I'm--I'm damned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the
+house.  "I _am_ damned!  You'll have to bring that youngster over, Cal,
+and introduce him to the children."
+
+Caleb couldn't help it.
+
+"I told you so!" he said.
+
+That was only a beginning.  The next fortnight was filled with more new
+experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
+be crammed into twenty times that duration.  And Caleb spent most of
+his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
+astonishing traits which he found in the boy.
+
+Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
+day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
+and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
+Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
+But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
+impressed itself upon Caleb.  As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
+over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
+after Caleb himself had suggested it.  And more often than not he would
+be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
+in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills.  It puzzled Caleb
+mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.
+
+Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
+of frank and undisguised wonder and worship.  Whatever they did, no
+matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
+bobbed head.  For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
+her for approbation.  And in return for that worship Barbara's
+treatment of him was truly feminine.  He out-ran the other boys as a
+deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
+an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
+dark-eyed Barbara.  She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
+eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
+with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
+understanding.  More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the
+little girl's disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve's reluctance to
+leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
+about it.
+
+"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
+there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
+of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
+thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares
+enough for her so that she can really hurt him!  If that Barbara was a
+boy I'd catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"
+
+At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
+asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.
+
+"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
+so much."  The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb.  "That
+isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them.  They have been
+laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
+openly--mocking his speech and--and manners!  All of them, that is,
+save Garry Devereau."
+
+Caleb's face hardened.
+
+"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
+
+"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed.  "And you musn't mention it to him.  I just
+gathered it from something he let drop the other day.  You know, Cal,
+he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
+marvelous.  He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
+and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
+didn't talk as--as he read.  He didn't know what I meant at first, but
+he understood the minute I tried to explain.
+
+"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.
+
+"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
+face began to go red.
+
+"'Do--do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk--like
+books?'
+
+"So you see!  And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
+idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
+mental process which is habit with him."  Sarah's face grew resentful.
+"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place.  We
+should have known!  For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
+which he doesn't catch.  And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
+depths of his sensitiveness."
+
+"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly.  "We'll keep him away from
+them."  And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
+heard him say in her presence.
+
+But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home.  Without some
+suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
+own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
+veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
+the voices behind the high hedge.  More and more often Garry Devereau
+came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
+daily trips down to the mills.  A quick intimacy had grown up between
+the two boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
+because of the very contrast between them.
+
+Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
+the matter of knowledge.  Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
+was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father.  For
+the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
+boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
+the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
+trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game."  The
+skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile.  And Caleb
+often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
+rather than at him.  The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
+exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
+all that.  It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
+
+Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
+all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter.  It seemed to him then that he
+should have foreseen it from the very first.  But as it was, when the
+denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
+with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.
+
+From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
+he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
+and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases.  But it was
+the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
+he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
+the pages.  And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
+came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand.  After she had
+caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
+had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
+of the Round Table.  His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
+and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
+brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
+old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
+appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
+
+Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
+again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
+the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
+echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge.  And after
+dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly,
+that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while.  Allison
+himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting,
+stopped to shake hands with him gravely.  So it came about that they
+were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when
+Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears.  They
+waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set
+them to running across the lawn.  But the scene which met Caleb's eyes
+when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
+
+There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon
+the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic--all save Garry
+Devereau.  He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer,
+crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable
+Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the
+infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
+An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison
+frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of
+fists--a man's contempt for another man who does not take his
+punishment in silence.  For the howls of the Honorable Archie were
+louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little
+girls who were watching.
+
+Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot
+make his feet obey the commands of his brain.  It was only when Barbara
+Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and
+legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little
+hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to
+him.  He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his
+weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar,
+jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave.  That effort raised the
+Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his
+antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
+
+It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering
+sternly down into his battle-streaked features.  Allison strode quietly
+up in that moment.
+
+"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
+"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
+
+The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to
+rearranging his crumpled raiment--fell to dabbling at a bruised and
+swollen nose.  When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief
+he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for
+Steve's answer.
+
+Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not
+have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question.
+The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead
+with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
+
+"Nuthin'--nuthin' much," he qualified the statement.  "Only we was
+goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table!  He
+wanted to be her knight"--an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the
+Honorable Archie--"and--and so did I."  This time his eyes went to
+Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip.  "He wanted to
+be her knight--an'--an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of
+trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her!  He couldn't fight good
+enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better.  I--I just
+licked him to prove it!"
+
+And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.
+
+Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the
+boy away from his shrieking rival.  But while he stood there, looking
+down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a
+situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope.  Already
+it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison--but it
+seemed symbolic to Caleb.  He sensed how close it lay to tragedy
+itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which
+he had thought to deliver.
+
+"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained
+ponderously, "the--the fair ladies always chose their own knights,
+didn't they?"
+
+But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy.  For,
+instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face,
+it only softened it.  Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe
+of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his
+shoulders and faced Barbara full.  The move was unmistakable--he was
+just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice.  And,
+instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled
+her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.
+
+"You--you--_my_ knight?" she half whispered, "_You_!"  And she turned
+her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.
+
+Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious
+amusement, at the livid change which came over Steve's face with that
+answer which she flung at him.  The boy fell away a step before her
+fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her
+fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before.  And then her meaning
+struck him like a blow between the eyes.
+
+Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and
+started for the gap in the hedge.  Caleb could not move, nor did
+Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things.  But Garry
+Devereau followed and overtook his friend.  He did not speak to him; he
+merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders.  And yet the men,
+had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was
+in that second of contact.  For it proved electrical in its effect.
+Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now--back to the
+group which had not moved.  Straight up to Barbara he went and faced
+her once again.
+
+"I wa'n't good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a
+hushed and vibrant voice.  "I--I don't know enough, ner I can't talk
+good enough, to be your knight.  I ain't good enough fer you!  But I'm
+a-goin' to be--do you hear?  I'm a-goin' to be--an' when I am . . .
+when I am . . . then I'll come back to you!"
+
+This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight.  Caleb stood
+staring at the ground.  Allison stood and stared at the horizon.
+
+And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the
+stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home.  It was the
+first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in
+anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all
+that was his!
+
+Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless
+face had told Sarah too much and too little.  After her brother had
+explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.
+
+"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said.  "It has
+been coming for days, this thing.  I think I knew it would come--but
+how could we have stopped it, Cal?  And you won't believe me, but it's
+because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy's little finger than she
+could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she--she said what she did.
+Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can't tell you why!"
+
+Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed
+to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his
+room, fear in their hearts.  The bed had not been slept in; the sheets
+were not even disarranged, but there was a scrap of paper pinned to one
+pillow-slip.  It wasn't written in "book language"--that short
+message--for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:
+
+
+I'm a-comin' back--I'm comin' back to you, someday when they won't be
+no need fer you to be ashamed fer me.  I'm takin' my new clothes with
+me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to--and the shoes, too.  I'm
+askin' you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her--and Miss
+Sarah ain't got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o'
+myself.
+
+
+It was signed "Stephen O'Mara."
+
+Sarah's face went white when she had read it through.  Her knees
+weakened under her and she had to sit down.
+
+"Why, Cal--why, Cal, he's--he's gone," she quavered.
+
+And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.
+
+"Yes--he--he's gone," he breathed.
+
+Sarah swallowed hard.  Then two bright tears crept out from under her
+eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks.  She rose and groped her way
+to her own room.
+
+Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still
+numb from the shock, went back downstairs.  She came up to him and
+stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the
+other.
+
+"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.
+
+Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.
+
+"Steve isn't here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.
+
+The child didn't understand.
+
+"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly.  "I'm to tell
+him that I'm sorry.  But I--I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn't
+have him for my knight--I--I wouldn't ever have any knight at all!"
+
+Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.
+
+"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.
+
+A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.
+
+"He'll be back for breakfast, won't he?" she asked, hopefully.
+
+"I'm afraid not, Barbara.  I'm afraid now that he may never come
+back--again."
+
+She didn't understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to
+explain.  But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper
+there was no further need of explanation.  She ran then and threw
+herself in a passion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner.  Caleb
+found his chair.  And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
+sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.
+
+"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
+"Please--please!  Because he _is_ coming back!  He told me he would--he
+told me he would, himself!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MY MAN O'MARA
+
+For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country.  He
+whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might
+overtake the boy who had gone in the night.  But none of the farmers on
+the outlying roads had seen pass their way a little foot traveler such
+as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.
+
+When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed
+than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears,
+had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away
+during the night.  Allison's concern was too genuine to be feigned; and
+Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor's amusement
+at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his sturdy
+gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of
+things which were as sealed books to Dexter.
+
+Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the
+country, until they both realized that the search was useless.  And at
+last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into
+that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely
+designated as "up-river."
+
+He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
+"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
+If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
+wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
+that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
+branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
+before.  But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
+ridge alone, by trail.  And even then, when he did locate the
+"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
+convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
+one.  Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
+another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
+in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll.  And they stood and stared
+in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather
+puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
+box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
+shut behind him.
+
+Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
+yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
+existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
+there came an opportunity to spend it.  And Sarah was waiting at the
+door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
+dusk, two days later.
+
+"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
+entered the hall.
+
+Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.
+
+"No, I haven't found _him_, Sarah," he said gently enough.  "But
+I--I've found out _who he is_!"
+
+They forgot their supper that night.  With heads close together they
+hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
+yielded up.  Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
+handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
+called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
+was very, very clear.
+
+There was one picture--a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
+hair.  Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable.  Sarah found that
+and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
+remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts.  These
+puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
+a folded and legal-looking document.  He opened that and then he
+understood--he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
+Tom had been able to earn.  After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
+refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
+it to Sarah at all.  Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
+to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
+reason was there.  At length he turned to his sister.
+
+"It's not hard to understand now, is it?" he said.  "It's pretty plain
+now why he had to go.  And we, Sarah--we who were going to 'make
+something of him'--why, we should have known absolutely, without this
+evidence.  They laughed at him; they made fun of him--and there isn't
+any better blood than flows in that boy's veins!  He was Stephen
+O'Mara's son, and no more brilliant barrister than O'Mara ever
+addressed a jury of a prisoner's peers and--and broke their very hearts
+with the simplicity of his pleading."
+
+Sarah folded her thin hands over the woman's picture.
+
+"I like his mother's face," she murmured, faintly.  "And I'm jealous of
+her, Cal!  You don't have to remind me of the rest of it, either, for I
+recall it all.  She died, and he--he went all to pieces.  They said, at
+his death, that he was destitute.  And when he did follow
+her--across--they hunted everywhere, didn't they, and never found the
+boy?  Didn't some of the newspapers argue that a servant--a
+gardener--had stolen him?"
+
+Caleb nodded his head.
+
+"Most of them ridiculed the suggestion, but it was true, just the same.
+That servant was Old Tom.  And the only defense he makes is just one
+line or so in--in this."  Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible
+pages.  "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the
+boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had
+made of his father's.  And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't
+help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have
+prosecuted was the best thing he could have done?  I'll take these
+things, now, and lock them in the safe for the boy, until he--until he
+comes back home!"
+
+But Sarah Hunter kept the picture of Stephen O'Mara's mother separate
+from the rest; she took it upstairs with her when she went, white and
+tired-faced, to bed.  And it was Sarah's faith which outlasted the
+years which followed.  She never weakened in her belief that some day
+the boy would come back--she and one other whose faith in his last
+boyish promise, phrased in bitterness, also endured.  For during the
+next five years there was not a summer which brought Allison into the
+hills but what the first question of his daughter Barbara, motherless
+now herself, was of Steve.
+
+"Has--has Stephen come back?" she asked invariably.
+
+At first the query was marked by nothing more than a child's naive
+eagerness; and later, when it was brought up in a casual, by-the-way
+fashion, it was, nevertheless, tinged with hope.  Five years lengthened
+into ten, and still Steve did not come.  But whenever Barbara asked
+that question Caleb remembered, as though it had happened only
+yesterday, that morning when she first appeared to the boy.
+
+He wondered sometimes what Steve's reception of her would be now--if he
+did come back!  The thought supplied many idle hours with food for
+speculation for Barbara Allison, year by year, had grown into that
+slender, dark-eyed creature of more than usual beauty whom Caleb had
+seen, as through the boy's own eyes, in the promise of the years.
+Caleb had long before given up all hope, but he wondered just the same.
+And then there came a morning when he didn't have to wonder any more.
+There came a morning when that self-same scene was staged again by
+Chance--staged with Caleb for an audience.  There came a morning when
+Stephen O'Mara did return.
+
+More than a few times in those intervening years the Hunter home had
+been closed.  Sarah Hunter developed an uneasy restlessness which would
+have worried her brother had it not been for the light of wistful
+expectancy which never left her eyes.  She developed what her brother
+termed a habit of "seeing America first and last, and in the interval
+between."  But he, beneath his jocularity, was glad enough to accompany
+her upon those rambling journeys which, without itinerary, led them
+from coast to coast and he never smiled--at least not so that she might
+see him--even though he was certain that she, in her simplicity of
+spirit, was really looking for the boy.
+
+All winter and throughout the summer, too, the Hunter place had been
+closed, until that day in late October.  It had been a warm week--a
+week of such unseasonable humidity for the hills that Caleb, rising
+somewhat before his usual hour, had blamed his sleeplessness, as usual,
+upon the weather.  He was glad to be home again that morning; he had
+been so lonely away from home that he was warmed unaccountably by the
+thought that Allison was in the hills, too.  And he was sure of that
+fact, for the night before, when their train pulled into the station
+which occupied the spot where Allison's mill-yards had stood before,
+the bright brass work upon the private car of the owner of the stucco
+place next his own had been unmistakable.
+
+Caleb was even wondering if Barbara would be with her father on this
+trip.  Barbara had, he knew, been two years on the continent,
+"finishing," Allison called it, always with a wry face and a gesture
+toward his wallet pocket.  He was wondering, as he came down the
+stairs, if she would ask him again if--if . . . and then, at the sight
+of a seated figure outside on the top step of the veranda, he pulled up
+sharp in the doorway.
+
+Caleb didn't have to wonder any longer!
+
+The attitude of that figure before him was so like the picture which
+time had been unable to erase--so absolutely identical in everything
+save garb and size alone--that the man, recoiling a little, dragged one
+hand across his forehead as though he doubted his own eyes.  But when
+he looked again it was still there, sitting chin in palm, small head
+under a rather weather-beaten felt hat thrust slightly forward, gazing
+fixedly toward the stucco house beyond the shrubbery.  And before Caleb
+could move, before he was more than half aware of the painful pulse in
+his throat, it all happened again, just as it had happened years and
+years before.
+
+Caleb heard voices in the adjoining grounds, and as he half turned in
+that direction Allison's bulky form, vivid in a far more vivid plaid,
+appeared in the hedge gap.  While Caleb stared another figure flashed
+through ahead of him, laughter upon her lips, and paused a-tip-toe, to
+wave a hand in greeting.  And instantly, as they had a dozen years
+before, Barbara Allison's eyes swung in instant scrutiny of the one who
+was seated at Caleb's feet.  She hesitated, and recovered herself.  But
+when, with quite dignified deliberation, she finally came forward to
+pass that motionless figure upon the steps, every pulse in her body was
+beating consciousness of his nearness.  And yet, at that, when she
+paused at Caleb's side and bobbed her head with a characteristic
+impetuosity which she had never lost she seemed completely oblivious to
+the presence of anyone save Caleb and herself.
+
+"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she murmured, very demurely.
+
+Then the man upon the steps moved; he rose and turned and swept his
+rather weather-beaten hat from his head.  His hair was still wavy,
+still chestnut in the shadows.  And Caleb, though he could not force a
+word from his tightened throat, marveled how tall the boy had
+grown--how paradoxically broad of shoulder and slender of body he
+seemed to be.
+
+It was a man's face which was lifted to his, tanned and wrinkled a
+little at the corners of the eyes by much exposure to sun and wind.
+But the eyes themselves hadn't changed a bit.  They were still the same
+steady and unwavering gray.  A smile crept into them, a smile crept
+across the even lips, and for all the change there was in that slow
+mirth it might have been the little figure of other days--the boy in
+the white drill trousers and uncouth boots--who was smiling up at Caleb.
+
+Standing there in his blue flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, clasped
+tight to knee by high brown boots below them, Stephen O'Mara held out a
+sinewy brown hand.  His voice was a little unsteady, but the mimicry of
+his own drawling speech of former years held an echo of boyhood--a
+twanging, boyish echo--which dragged at Caleb's very heartstrings.
+
+"Haow--haow d'ye do, Uncle Cal?" he quavered.
+
+Barbara had turned and started indoors in search of Miss Sarah.  Now
+she halted, her slim back toward the two men at the veranda's edge, and
+stood motionless at the sound of that voice.  When, little by little,
+she faced around at last, it was fairly to feel those grave gray eyes
+resting upon her own face.  The blood of a sudden came storming up into
+Barbara's cheeks.  And Caleb, even if he did not know what all of the
+girl's emotions were at that moment, knew that he knew one of them at
+least.  Caleb had just learned himself what it was to see a ghost.
+
+Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his
+daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open.  Ho
+found her staring, velvet eyed and pink of face, at a tall figure in
+blue flannel and corduroy, and although he had never seen him in all
+the months that the latter had been in his employ, Allison knew this
+must be the one in whose keeping lay, directly or indirectly, the
+success or failure of the biggest thing he had ever attempted in this
+north country--the man to whom he always referred, whenever he boasted
+of his exploits, as "my man O'Mara."
+
+Beyond that point, however, Allison's immediate recognition did not go.
+The past interested him but little, except as a matter for precedent or
+a record of past performances.  But memory fairly clamored in the
+girl's ears that morning.  There was not one tiniest detail of the
+strangely intense, sturdily confident little hill-boy's bearing but
+what came back to her at that moment.  She remembered them all, and
+seconds later, when Steve's fingers had closed over her own
+outstretched hand, she realized that she was staring at him in a
+childishly concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the
+undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the
+eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight.  And she realized
+suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even
+though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable.
+
+"I always told them that you would come back," she murmured then.
+"Just as you--you said you would."
+
+The remark was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon
+its utterance she caught her breath in anger at herself for her own
+senseless confusion, which had led her into saying the one thing she
+least of all had wanted to voice.  Even an inane remark concerning the
+weather would have been better than that girlish naivete which she felt
+seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a
+promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but
+a quaint episode not untinged with absurdity.
+
+She realized that her hand still lay in his; she grew hotly conscious
+of her father's rather perplexed survey of the tableau.  And in that
+instant when Allison's first words reached her burning ears, even
+before Steve could reply to her greeting, she wrung free her fingers
+with an abruptness which, when she remembered it afterward, only added
+to her fury at her absurd confusion.
+
+"Hum-m-m," puffed Allison.  "Hum-m-m!"  He spoke directly to Stephen
+O'Mara, who half turned his head at the first heavily facetious
+syllable.  "So you did get my message, eh?  I rather thought that it
+wouldn't reach you, up-river, until to-day."  An ample smile embraced
+the tall figure in riverman's garb and his own daughter's crimson
+countenance--a most meaningful smile of roguery.  "Well, from what I've
+heard," he stated, "and what I've . . . seen, I should say that you are
+my man, O'Mara.  Mr. Elliott himself has informed me that your quite
+spectacular success in one or two vital campaigns has been entirely due
+to the fact that you are an--er--opportunist!  I agree with Mr.
+Elliott, absolutely--that is, if my first premise is correct."
+
+And his laughter rumbled softly.
+
+Barbara's face had cooled a little in that moment since Steve's eyes
+had left her face.  Now she forgot her confusion--forgot to be annoyed,
+even at her father's clumsy banter.
+
+"_Your_ man, O'Mara!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "_Your_ man!  Why,
+he--he's _my_--" and that was as far as she went.
+
+Her voice thinned into nothingness, but words were not necessary to
+tell either Caleb or Steve that she had been about to assert a prior
+claim which dated back years and years.
+
+The man whose smile was still that of the boy turned slowly back to
+Barbara.  His quiet mirth, which crinkled the corners of his eyelids,
+seemed totally detached and impersonal; and yet it hinted, too, at an
+intimate enjoyment of the situation which they alone could appreciate.
+Steve merely held out his hand again and took her slim fingers within
+his own.
+
+"I have always insisted to Mr. Elliott," he said, "that the solution of
+all the difficulties, which he chooses to view as gloriously romantic
+tilts with Destiny, depends one-half upon luck, and the other half on
+being on the ground personally, when the--affair--starts."  He half
+faced toward Allison.  "I am O'Mara," he finished very briefly, "your
+man, O'Mara--if you happen to be the East Coast Development and Timber
+Company?"
+
+There was at most no more than the barest suggestion of it in Steve's
+crisp question, but Caleb sensed immediately that Allison's placid
+appropriation of the blue flannel-shirted one as his own particular
+property was not a mutually accepted status.  Dexter, however, failed,
+or chose, to read nothing in the drawling question.
+
+"I'm it," he agreed, jovially.  "That is--I and two or three others,
+including Mr. Elliott, our esteemed president."
+
+He mounted the steps heavily and stood contemplating the small hand
+still within the larger, browner one.
+
+"The introductions seem to have outstripped me," he remarked,
+"but--er--any objection to shaking hands with me, too, Mr. O'Mara?"
+
+Stephen laughed aloud.  Allison's attempted lugubrity was really funny.
+From the door Barbara echoed his laughter in bubbling, throaty
+amusement at it all.
+
+"Poor, blind papa!" she chanted mockingly, and disappeared on swift
+feet.
+
+Allison scowled after her.
+
+"Not so blind as some--the unprincipled jade!" he retorted.  "But
+that's another thing I've heard about you, Mr. O'Mara, if you will
+pardon a garrulous old gossip's personalities.  They tell me that you
+aren't particularly--susceptible?"
+
+And then the bantering tone was dropped entirely.  In the rest of
+Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's
+whole make-up--his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had
+done or might do, in a man's world.
+
+"I've heard much of you, Mr. O'Mara; I've looked forward to this
+meeting," he said, as he shook hands.  "Now I want to tell you that I
+am proud to know you.  And so you didn't get my message, after all?"
+
+The handclasp left Allison staring ruefully at his reddened fingers.
+Steve shook his head.
+
+"I had to come down river, yesterday," he explained.  "Your telegram
+found me here, and I waited over until this morning, as you suggested."
+
+"Surely . . . surely!  I see . . . I see!"  Allison emphasized his
+comprehension.  "Not that it was anything of vital importance.  I just
+wanted a short conference with you, yourself, that was all.  Elliott's
+own reports on the work are so tinged with his eternal optimism, so
+colored by what you aptly termed his romantic zest for the game, that I
+wanted your own opinion concerning the possibility of the East Coast
+Company finishing that railroad in time to fulfil their contracts.  No
+hurry about it; but that's my house over yonder.  You were just one
+place too far north to find me."
+
+He turned to face Caleb.  There was a flood of questions upon the
+latter's lips.  Caleb wanted to seize the boy by the shoulder, and spin
+him around toward the light and stare and stare into his face; but he
+waited because he found much that was hugely diverting in Dexter's
+bland ignorance, which had even accepted Steve's presence there as a
+case of misdirection.
+
+"I suppose you know what this early morning call presages, Cal?"
+Allison challenged.
+
+Before Caleb could reply Steve knew what the answer was to be.  The
+request found him already at the door, grinning broadly.
+
+"Would you--would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" Caleb asked.
+"Will you tell her, please, that we are to be subjected to
+another--neighborly imposition!"
+
+Steve's going left Allison frowning a little.
+
+"We've played this farce through a hundred times, Cal," he murmured,
+"and it wasn't according to formula--that last remark of yours.  But,
+do you know, just for a minute it sort of reminded me of
+something--something that seems to have happened before, and I can't
+recall just what."
+
+He shook his head and led the way to a chair.
+
+"It wasn't our nonsense that affected me, either," he finished.  "I
+believe it was O'Mara himself who . . . but I didn't know that you were
+acquainted with him, Cal.  Have you known him long?"
+
+"Um-m-m--yes!" Caleb weighed his reply.  "Quite some time, I think I
+might say."
+
+He shook with scarcely suppressed laughter, but Allison ignored his
+senseless mirth.
+
+"I'd like to claim that boy as my own discovery," he avowed, "but I
+can't--not without fear of successful contradiction on Elliott's part.
+And in point of service it isn't fair to call him a boy, either, though
+I suppose both of us are old enough to be his father.  He's Elliott's
+find.  Elliott suggested him as the one man for this job, when I
+consolidated with the Ainnesley crowd and they took up the contract to
+move the Reserve timber from Thirty-Mile and the valleys above.
+Elliott knew of him, but I've been looking up his record pretty
+closely, since he took hold in earnest.
+
+"He's in his twenties, as near as I can make out, but he's come through
+on one of two jobs that might well make an old campaigner envious.  He
+took a fortune in hard woods out of San Domingo for a Berlin concern;
+he was the only man on the St. Sebastian River job who said the
+construction was too light.  He said it wouldn't stand when the ice
+began to move in the spring--and it didn't!  Oh, he knows his business!
+But it wasn't his successes which caught Elliott's eye.  It's the way
+he has failed a couple of times, fighting right back to the last
+ditch--and fighting and fighting!--when all the rest had quit, that
+made me anxious to get a look at him.  Perhaps there are older men who
+can outfigure him on loads and stresses, but as a field general he
+stands alone.  He can handle men.  And, when it comes to meeting
+conditions just as they arise, Elliott says he's a wonder--he can
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!"
+
+There was grave appreciation in Allison's voice--honest appreciation of
+a man who had himself achieved, for another man's achievement.  And yet
+Caleb, in spite of the proud pumping of his heart, in spite of his
+desire to murmur, "But I told you so, Dexter, years ago," still found
+room to wonder at a thin strain of speculation which seemed to underrun
+the speaker's words.  In his reiteration of O'Mara's qualities Allison
+seemed almost to be assuring himself that infallibility was not a human
+attribute.  And his next remark only served to heighten that suggestion.
+
+"That's why the East Coast Co. brought him up here to build their bit
+of road," he went on slowly.  "They've got to move that Reserve Company
+timber.  They have a contract that'll break 'em--break us--if we fall
+down.  And do you know, Cal, I--I can't help but believe that the thing
+is beyond the pale of possibility.  I believed it six months ago, when
+Elliott and Ainnesley and the rest of them were so keen for it, and I
+believe it still, even though I have seen Elliott's engineer and know
+what he has already accomplished.  That track'll never go through on
+schedule--and that's why I'm up here for the winter.  It's going to be
+a hot little race against time, with some millions for a purse.  It'll
+break the East Coast Co. if he fails, and"--his voice became oddly
+intense--"and I tell you again that it--can't--be--done!"
+
+Then Allison became aware of Caleb's mild astonishment at his vehemence.
+
+"An amateur's opinion, of course, Cal," he laughed, "which is strictly
+_entre nous_.  But, win or lose, this man O'Mara will be a valuable man
+to have around after the thing is decided."
+
+"You said that he reminded you of something," Caleb began rather
+heavily.  "It recalled something to me, too.  I wonder if you remember
+a little fishing trip that we took, some ten or twelve years ago,
+Dexter, up into the hills?  It was to the headwaters of the cast
+branch, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Reserve Company's
+holdings, I should say."
+
+"Why, yes," the other answered, off-handedly.  "Why, yes, now that you
+mention it, I do remember.  May I ask your reason for speaking of it?"
+
+"No reason in particular," Caleb hesitated.  "Only this O'Mara reminded
+me of something, too--something that you said, that night at the
+camp-fire."
+
+"Well?"
+
+Allison's monosyllable was coolly noncommittal.
+
+"Can you remember what it was?" Caleb asked, positively uncomfortable
+now.
+
+"I think I remarked that there was a fortune for some man in that
+valley, if he was far-sighted enough.  Was that it?"
+
+Then Caleb understood the challenge in his friend's voice.  He thought
+he understood.  The names of the stockholders of the Reserve Company
+were all strange to Caleb save one.  The Honorable Archibald
+Wickersham, who was said to represent huge foreign interests, he had
+known as a boy.  And Caleb had seen Dexter indescribably sore, before
+this, from having overlooked, as he termed it himself, "a sure thing
+bet."  He laughed, more like his placid self again.
+
+"Bless you, no!" he exclaimed.  "What have I ever done to make you
+believe that a mere commercial estimate would remain with me this long?
+It--it was something that you said concerning the making of a
+gentleman.  I just wondered if you were of your early way of thinking.
+I wondered if you would consider that--that----"
+
+Allison lay back in his chair and breathed deeply, slowly--and Miss
+Sarah appeared that moment in the doorway, pinker of cheek and more
+tremulous of lip than her brother had ever seen her before.  She
+dropped Allison an old-fashioned curtsy, which was an exceedingly
+frivolous performance for Sarah.
+
+"Breakfast is served, Cal," she fairly chortled, "and there are two
+very hungry children inside."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
+
+Never before had the air of that long, paneled room been so surcharged
+with half-suppressed hilarity.  At first her father merely scowled at
+Barbara's intermittent little gurgles, which refused to stay entirely
+pent-up; he frowned at her seemingly inane interruptions of the
+technical discussion into which he had immediately plunged with the
+East Coast Company's engineer, until he could no longer ignore the
+smile which pulled at the lips of the latter, too, at every fresh
+attempt of the girl to swing the conversation into an utterly
+irrelevant channel.  He looked around the table then and caught the
+gleam in Caleb's eyes; he took note of Miss Sarah's illuminated face,
+and gave way to a burst of querulousness not all simulation.
+
+"_What_ is the joke?" he demanded in a voice that set them all to
+rocking in their chairs.  "Let me in on it--let me laugh, too--if there
+is anything worth laughing at.  Cal, you're growing old--old and
+feeble-witted!"
+
+He turned sternly to his daughter, but the darkly glowing eyes which
+she lifted to his absolutely silenced him for an instant.  Twin devils
+of mischief fairly danced in their shimmering, liquid depths.  The
+girl's face, even to him who had long before grown overfamiliar with
+its beauty, was a wonderfully lovely thing.  Allison sat and stared at
+her for a moment, blankly, and when he went on his voice had become
+less testy.
+
+"And you," he growled, "you have interrupted me a dozen times already,
+always with some nonsense of which I can make neither rime nor reason.
+Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get Mr. O'Mara's reason for
+establishing his headquarters at Thirty-Mile, instead of directing the
+work from Morrison, which would seem to be far more convenient."
+
+Barbara bobbed her head, meekly.  Her giggle, however, was shameless.
+
+"But Mr. O'Mara has been trying to tell you," she defended in a
+suffocated small voice, "that it's because the work at this end is not
+so difficult.  There are several miles of swamp work, I think he said,
+and a bridge or something, which promises trouble.  I--I am sorry if I
+interrupted.  I only wanted to ask Mr. O'Mara a question myself--a--a
+very unimportant question, I'm afraid!"
+
+Allison had had experience with his daughter's seeming meekness.
+Moreover, the working of Caleb's and Sarah's faces baffled him.  He
+waited, fuming.
+
+"Just before you and Uncle Cal came in we--we were talking about the
+weather," the girl struggled on.  "Mr. O'Mara predicted it would rain
+soon and I just wanted to ask him what made him think so."
+
+"Yes?" Allison temporized.
+
+It was very quiet for a moment.  Steve sat, a little red of face
+himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.
+
+"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.
+
+Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
+half-closed his eyes.  He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
+solemn, quaintly boyish treble.
+
+"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
+will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
+Wednesday, for sure!"
+
+At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
+apart.  They remained open long after Steve had finished.  Once he
+started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
+There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query.  At
+last he got to his feet and padded around the table.  With a hand on
+either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
+own.
+
+"You," he murmured, weakly.  "You!  And Elliott said that you could
+outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!  Well, I--I'm damned!"
+
+They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
+scant opportunity to make himself heard at all.  Even the reticence
+which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
+before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
+promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.
+
+"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
+to face," she rallied her father.  "It was dense enough of me not to
+have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
+endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.'  I, at least, should have
+known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do,
+in books!"
+
+It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason
+of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
+her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
+to which her mother had objected.  She still employed it, she
+explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.
+
+It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
+than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
+Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
+veranda.  They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam
+injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.
+
+"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly.  I know it
+was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it--there's always a woman,
+of course--but I can't recall----"
+
+He paused to ponder--paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's
+swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness.  Then it all
+returned to him with a rush.  He had his turn.
+
+"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled.  "Why, of course--_of course_!  It
+was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair!  But who was it whose
+choice conflicted with your own?"
+
+He cocked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to
+pounding his knee and roared with laughter.
+
+"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted.  "Archie Wickersham--oh, Lord!  I
+never really appreciated that _melee_ until this minute.  And you
+promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and--well, b'gad, here you
+are!  And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state
+that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently
+beneath the table for renewed composure.  I am not going to expound Mr.
+O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those
+which have brought him back.  But please shake hands again--Steve.
+And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to assure you that it was
+some battle!"
+
+If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.
+It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the
+episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely
+reduced to terms of farce-comedy.  When the men rose, after breakfast,
+to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of
+accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing.  She crossed
+the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss
+Sarah watching from the door.  Both men walked for a time in silence,
+their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater
+beside the taller one in blue flannel before them.  And, as usual,
+Allison was the first to speak.
+
+"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west
+branch, Cal," he said.  "And you were right.  It does take stuff to
+make that sort of a gentleman.  Isn't there anything more to tell me?
+I am truly interested, Cal."
+
+So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box.  And while he was
+explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to
+that day-before-yesterday now many years gone.  There was a quality of
+camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of
+tongue that morning that was entirely boyish.  Her very unconsciousness
+of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze
+rarely left her warm face.  And more than once she caught herself
+watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his
+eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at
+that new and quite frivolous mood of hers.  But when Steve finally
+asked for Devereau--Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the
+hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed
+shoulder--the light went from Barbara's eyes.  And Stephen O'Mara, who
+did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped
+smiling, too.
+
+"I liked him," Steve said simply.  "I've always remembered and liked
+him.  Thinking of him and--and--has often kept me from being too lonely
+nights when I was lonely enough."
+
+That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note
+which had come from his lips.  Barbara did not answer immediately, and
+Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply.  He could not know
+that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of
+diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having
+wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely
+indeed.
+
+"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were
+here?" she asked finally.  "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing
+named Mary Graves?"
+
+Stephen nodded.
+
+"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her?  He
+was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored
+us entirely, but never her."
+
+Again the inclination of the head.
+
+"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully.  "One
+never could tell what was behind his indifference or--or flippancies.
+He mocked at things . . . customs and courses of action, which we have
+come to accept and . . . and recognize.  But he was always gentle with
+her, and kind, and--oh, I think reverend is the right word!  Now,
+knowing Garry as I do--as you will, when you see him again--the phrase
+may seem a strange one to apply to him.  And yet it describes best his
+bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."
+
+She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.
+
+"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except
+just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than
+she was when you knew her.  I don't know whether you know it--of course
+you don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
+utterly.  And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
+even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry
+so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated.  It
+seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
+himself.  It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
+was his just by--by instinct.
+
+"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
+almost without a word of explanation to him.  Nobody ever cited Garry
+as a shining example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an
+unspeakable record!  Her family made the match--the newspapers call it
+a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
+Well, he had them--and she married him.  And Garret Devereau dropped
+out of the world for a long time.
+
+"It was a year before he came back.  People had already begun to talk
+about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.
+O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
+return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more.  I never knew
+before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
+man as I know Garry to be.  It's not just his face and his rather
+dreadful silence.  It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
+shows it, pitifully.  It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
+could so deliberately commit suicide.
+
+"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
+But I'll always care for him deeply.  That's why I have asked him up
+this fall.  Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
+have to go back into the woods before then?  I'm going to have a party
+for some week-end guests--a masque dance.  Garry needs his friends now,
+more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you,
+please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"
+
+Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
+contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
+clear-eyed boy.  He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
+as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
+finenesses of him whom they had known together.  Steve nodded his
+comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then.  But
+they found conversation somehow less easy after that.  It was not until
+they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
+and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
+lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
+girl regained in part her former vivacity.
+
+Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years.  A railroad
+station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
+the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
+south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
+odd miles below.  And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
+the town was different.  The men still swarmed in on the drives,
+brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
+wide streets.  Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
+prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
+simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
+mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish.  The
+dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
+sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
+the change which had taken place.  Even the vices of the older
+Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
+complicated, too.  It was no longer a river village.  Morrison was a
+city now.
+
+Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
+week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
+them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
+her companion and clutched his arm.  The red-shirted one fell to
+singing after they had passed.  A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
+That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner.  Steve
+looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.
+
+"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
+roaring good time.  His name is Harrigan.  He works on the Reserve
+Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
+had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song.  He's willing
+to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"
+
+The girl continued to gaze up at him.  His short laugh failed entirely
+to clear her face of apprehension.
+
+"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.
+
+"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted.  "Not when he is in that frame of
+mind!"
+
+"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her
+hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve.  "Did you know that
+your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant?  I never knew that
+anyone's arm could grow as hard as that.  And is that the way you
+always prepare to receive your--friends?"
+
+Steve colored a little.
+
+"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied.  "But it has to be hard.  It
+constitutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"
+
+Then her face lighted up again.  The delighted bob of her head with
+which she greeted that name astonished the man.
+
+"Do you--why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.
+
+Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.
+
+"Joe Morgan," she laughed.  "'Fat Joe,' isn't it?  And of course I have
+heard of him.  You don't realize it, but I know more about this East
+Coast work and--and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea
+myself.  Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once
+wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the
+files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, assistant
+to Chief O'Mara'!"
+
+Steve's chuckle of appreciation was answer enough.
+
+"I didn't know," he admitted, "but it's like him.  And it was no more
+than reasonable, either--that request--even if it is funny.  He has
+been cook for me; but he's been doctor and nurse and countless other
+things in as many crises.  He's the most trustworthy and capable
+adviser, too, that any man ever had."
+
+She scanned his face closely at the timbre of those words.  Then, with
+face averted, "Didn't he embroider you a--a sofa-cushion, too, once?"
+she inquired, quite demurely.
+
+Steve grew very red.
+
+"Who told you that?" he blurted, and Barbara giggled again.
+
+"Mr. Ainnesley, I think.  Then it is true?  I--I never believed it
+before."
+
+Watching the blood creep up beneath his tanned skin, she told herself
+that she did like more than a little the way his eyelids crinkled when
+he grinned.
+
+"We were in San Domingo that year," he explained none too composedly.
+"It was near Christmas, and Joe wouldn't consider any of the native
+wares as a gift.  So he--he worked it himself in--in yellow worsted on
+a red background.  I have it still, displayed in a conspicuous place in
+the shack up-river.  But now I'll wager that you can't guess what the
+motto is across its front.  He told me that he didn't care for it
+particularly himself, but it was the only one he could find.  You can't
+guess, but you are permitted to try."
+
+And he gasped when she threw back her head and burst into her gurgling,
+throaty laugh.
+
+"'What is home without a father?'" she sing-songed.  And when they were
+both sober-faced again she added:
+
+"I want to know him, please!  Can't I meet him, Mr. O'Mara?"
+
+Side by side they turned in at the millyard, between towering piles of
+aromatic raw planks.  Behind them Caleb and Allison had lost still more
+ground while the latter paused to speak a peremptory word in the ear of
+a mildly intoxicated, red-headed riverman who was pouring forth his
+whole soul in the refrain of "Harrigan, That's Me!"  And almost
+immediately, in answer to Barbara's question, Steve pointed across to a
+short, plump figure in conversation with McLean, the mill
+superintendent.  Even at that distance his broad face gleamed from the
+closeness of a recent shave; even at that distance it was quickly
+apparent to the girl that his garb was as near a replica of O'Mara's
+own clothes as his lack of height and extra weight would permit.
+
+"Will you bring him?" she asked eagerly.  "Will he come?"
+
+But the question was unnecessary.  Joe Morgan--Fat Joe to the
+river-front and the construction squad--was already hustling in their
+direction, even before Steve, with that slow smile tugging at his lips,
+had finished assuring her that it was never necessary to summon Joe
+into the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex.  He came
+without being called.  Barbara had a closer and closer view of him,
+until he stopped at last directly in front of them and bowed.  She
+wanted to laugh at that wide face--at the grandiloquent flourish with
+which he removed his hat--and would have had she not recalled the grave
+respect with which the man beside her had referred to him a moment
+before.  His eyes were palest blue, his nose a smooth pink mound in an
+expanse of pink, pink cheeks.  She noted that his teeth were as white
+and even as those of O'Mara himself.  Fat Joe bowed again.
+
+"Morning, Chief," he saluted, in that thin and reedy tenor which none
+but fat men have.
+
+Then Barbara laughed.
+
+Steve managed the presentation with extreme punctility and left them.
+When he returned, almost an hour later, he heard them both laughing
+long before he came into view, and on the way back up the hill the girl
+detailed for him much of her conversation with Fat Joe.
+
+"Hereafter I shall be more dignified when in your presence," she
+informed him in as deep a bass as she could summon.  "I had no idea how
+great and important a man was escorting me when I came down this hill!
+But Mr. Morgan has enlightened me."
+
+With that she discovered that she could still tease him, almost as
+easily as she had teased the sturdy small boy of the uncouth shoes and
+napping trousers.
+
+"Joe is necessarily prejudiced in his opinion," he argued, "and
+therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously."
+
+"He told me that you had one regrettable characteristic, however," the
+girl went on.  "He lamented your strength at the ancient and honorable
+pastime of stud-poker!  And he also bewails your taste in literature.
+Why, he tells me that you are indicted to Dickens and Dumas--he didn't
+pronounce it that way, either--and even fall back upon Shakespeare, in
+dark and dour hours.  No, I am positive that Mr. Morgan docs not
+approve of such fiction.  He confided to me that he finds more
+entertainment, of a winter's night, in perusing a Sears-Roebuck or a
+Montgomery-Ward catalogue.  And--and do you know what I admitted to
+him?  No?  Well, I told him that some of the happiest moments of my
+life had been spent in just such fashion.  I've always thought they
+were fascinating!"
+
+She badgered him on the way back up the hill that morning, but when
+they paused for a moment at the edge of the close-cropped lawn which
+rolled back to the stucco and timber house facing the river, she
+abandoned her facetiousness.
+
+"Why should there be any--any element of personal danger in this work
+you are doing, Mr. O'Mara?" she asked.  "And did I do wrong in
+mentioning to Mr. Morgan how that man came out of that--place, and
+glared so at you?"
+
+His rejoinder should have been very reassuring.
+
+"So Joe has been hinting at that mystery stuff again, has he?  After
+listening to him one is almost compelled to believe that I run daily a
+veritable gauntlet of nameless perils."
+
+Barbara stood, small fists buried in her sweater pockets, studying his
+smile of amusement.
+
+"I shouldn't like to believe so," her voice was faintly diffident.
+"And you--you haven't accepted my invitation for Friday.  May I expect
+you?  I didn't tell you, but Archie--Archibald Wickersham--will be
+there, as well as Garry.  So--so you won't be entirely unacquainted."
+
+And then, at those words, his face changed.  All in one fleet second,
+in spite of the whole morning's quick intimacy of mood and the spirit
+of companionship which to her had seemed a delightfully new yet
+time-tried thing, Barbara found that she could not read an inch behind
+those grave gray eyes.  She found his quiet countenance as unreadable
+as that of the utmost stranger might have been.  And while she waited,
+not entirely certain how displeased she was at his deliberation, a
+blackest of black horses soared splendidly over a fence to the north
+and came cantering down the road.  The rider, a tall, bare-headed girl,
+lifted her crop in salute as she caught sight of them.
+
+"My friend, Miriam Burrell," the girl murmured in explanation to Steve,
+and something had gone from her voice and left it conventionally
+impersonal.  "She's riding Ragtime, and isn't he a beauty--almost as
+much a beauty as she is herself?"
+
+The horse came on, to be reined up at last directly in front of the two
+at the roadside.  Stephen O'Mara met for a moment the level, measuring
+glance of its rider, before Miriam Burrell turned to Barbara.
+
+"I've enjoyed exceedingly our morning canter, Bobs," her alto voice
+drawled.
+
+Then, before Barbara could reply, she threw one booted leg from the
+stirrup and dismounted.  With the reins looped over her elbow she faced
+the man in blue flannel and corduroy, a tall, lithe figure with coppery
+red hair and whitest skin and doubly vivid lips.
+
+"You're Stephen O'Mara," she said, and the calmly direct statement
+might have been overbrusk had it not been for the modulation of her low
+voice.  "You're Stephen O'Mara, for a thousand!"
+
+And she held out a gauntleted hand, the clasp of which corroborated the
+suggestion of wirelike strength in that lithely straight body.
+
+Barbara Allison had never been able to analyze her preference for
+Miriam Burrell.  Even the girl's undeniable beauty of face had often
+puzzled her, for, taken each feature by itself, it was far more
+striking than beautiful.  There was no color in her pale skin; her red
+mouth, if anything, was a trifle too wide, and her wide-set eyes were
+tip-tilted in an almost Oriental slant.  Her utter lack of hypocrisy,
+her unsparing arraignment of fundamental motives--her own and those of
+all with whom she came in contact--often resulted in calmly direct
+comments which were stunningly disastrous to casual conversation.  For
+Miriam Burrell told the truth to others, which was unusual enough to
+puzzle more than a few; she did not lie to herself, and that was an
+enigma to almost all.  It resulted, of course, in a reputation for
+"unconventionalism."
+
+There was scarcely a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate
+dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or
+sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool
+voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through
+the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain
+beneath.  Barbara did not know just why she cared so deeply for Miriam
+Burrell--we scarcely ever realize that such a regard can be based only
+upon the deepest of deep-founded faith--but at that moment, while she
+and Steve were shaking hands so soberly, she felt very little, very
+much ignored; felt as though she did not share at all the understanding
+in their eyes.
+
+"I've just asked Mr. O'Mara to come to my dance, Miriam," she said,
+"and how did you know him, pray?  I've asked him, but he is
+unflatteringly long in accepting."
+
+"Know him?" she echoed.  "Know him!  Oh, Mr. O'Mara and I have met
+before.  I think just before the fall of the Roman Empire, wasn't it,
+Mr. O'Mara?  Weren't they dragging me in at the wheel of a chariot one
+afternoon, when you were dealing out a gold piece to each of your
+legionaries?"
+
+She laughed, dryly, and Barbara felt smaller and more forlorn and
+lonelier still.
+
+"No doubt Mr. O'Mara hasn't time to be flattering, Bobs," she
+commented.  "But you will have time to come Friday, for a little while,
+won't you?" she asked.
+
+Steve glanced down at the hand which still felt the pressure of her
+buckskin clad fingers.
+
+"I have to work--day and night--some weeks when things break badly," he
+told her simply.  "If I can"--and he turned to Barbara--"if I can, I
+want to come."
+
+Miriam nodded her head with brisk finality.
+
+"If you can," she agreed.  "Barbara, no doubt, has been telling you
+about Garret Devereau, hasn't she?  Yes--come if you can.  I have
+heard, Mr. O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of
+the dark, when everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to
+talk with--a specialist in such campaigns!"
+
+Stephen O'Mara had read a meaning in the words of that contained, often
+abrupt, straightly tall girl of which Barbara Allison had not even
+dreamed.  He stood watching them when they turned up the driveway, the
+horse Ragtime muzzling the woolly white sweater and following like a
+dog.  But he wasn't thinking of Miriam Burrell or of Garry Devereau,
+while he waited for Caleb and Dexter Allison to come up with him.  He
+was wondering about Archie Wickersham--the Honorable Archie--thinking
+about that funny brawl of years before, which had not been so funny
+after all--wondering if----
+
+It was past twelve that night when Miriam Burrell's door was pushed
+softly open by a slim white figure which hesitated on the threshold;
+but the night-light was still burning upon the table.  Barbara stood
+for a moment, staring at her friend, who was sitting bolt upright in
+bed.
+
+"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered.  "Are you--reading?"
+
+The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in
+that mist of loosened hair.
+
+"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were
+bookless.  "Yes, I'm reading.  I'm having a little squint at this
+puzzle-scroll they call Life."
+
+She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.
+
+"I--may I turn off the light?" she asked.
+
+Miriam snapped the button.
+
+"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice.
+"And I--I wanted--Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown
+girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me!  From the moment when
+I first recognized him and became so--tangled up--I've just chattered
+and chattered.  You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do
+you?"
+
+"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the
+uncompromising voice she knew so well.
+
+"Are you--you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated.  "Because
+I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at.  And I have poise.  I
+am not a child.  But looking back now, I can't quite account for all
+my--shall I call it cordiality?  Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was
+because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when
+he was a boy?"
+
+"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.
+
+"Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice.  "And,
+do you know, all day, even when we seemed so--such good friends, I
+still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a
+slight.  I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just
+the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party.  It
+was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who--who'd
+almost charter a liner to come--if I'd invite them.  It would have
+sounded conceited, but I wanted to _jolt_ him!  And he just said he'd
+come if he could!"
+
+"He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that
+wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't
+understand.  "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot
+more worth asking, if they had to work, too.  I wish every man had
+to--work--hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!"
+Her voice slurred and she recovered it.  "I don't know whether he
+remembers or not.  Probably not!  You've just had a unique experience
+for one of our kind, that's all.  You've met a man!"
+
+Barbara raised herself upon one elbow.
+
+"You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie
+Wickersham or my other friends, or--or Garry, aren't men?"
+
+"Males!" snapped the other girl.  "Just males!  But"--and she seemed to
+be arguing with herself--"but Garry might have been, though--he might
+have been!"
+
+Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.
+
+"It's odd," she murmured once, "but we did seem so--so congenial.  I
+can't remember when my brain has been so quick to catch a thought or
+supplement one.  Have you ever wondered, Miriam, why we--we can't seem
+to marry one who brings out the best in us, like that?"
+
+"Can't?  You mean, dear child, that we don't!  Some of us because the
+'best that is in us' is far, far too decently unexciting for daily
+diet.  And some of us--oh, just because we haven't the sand and
+backbone, I guess!"
+
+But Barbara was too nearly asleep to catch the bitterness of that
+reply.  Just once again, before she slept, she asked a question.
+
+"Should I have told Mr. O'Mara that my engagement to Archibald
+Wickersham was to be announced at the party?" she murmured.
+
+"Why should you have?" Miriam crisply wanted to know.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she mused.  "Only I thought he might be interested.
+You don't seem to realize that we are--very old friends!"
+
+And long after Barbara was sound asleep, her face buried in the palm of
+one hand, Miriam Burrell lay stiffly awake.  Once she smiled a little,
+for such perplexities which, of themselves, must work out inevitably.
+When dawn came it found her still struggling stubbornly with her own,
+for which it seemed there could be no solution now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
+
+It was late that night when Steve climbed into the rig which was
+waiting with Pat Joe at the reins and they turned north into the hills.
+For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in
+the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that
+ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years
+before, in the shack up-river.  And the latter was surprised at
+learning how much of it was no longer news.
+
+"Yes, I know," Steve told them, after Caleb had finished relating, with
+quite ponderous pride, many things which he ascertained concerning the
+Stephen O'Mara who had gone before.  "I know!  Four or five years ago,
+when I found out that it was--customary for one to be certain as to
+such things, I started to look it up myself.  And when I found out from
+the records that a boy by that name had disappeared--perhaps been
+stolen by an old servant--I remembered instantly, of course, the box
+over which Old Tom used to hang, hour after hour.  I came back into the
+woods looking for it that summer and found it gone and nothing left of
+the Jenkins' cabin but a pile of charred logs.  On my way out I stopped
+here--somehow I thought that maybe you might have it--but the house was
+closed.  And no one seemed to know where you had gone or when you would
+return."
+
+Caleb nodded, and his eyes turned to Sarah.
+
+"We were sleuthing, Steve," he explained as soberly as he was able.
+"We were ranging from border to border and coast to coast, looking for
+you."  He stopped to scan the browned face closely for an instant.
+"But couldn't you have written--or--or tried again?  We've been
+waiting--boy!"
+
+Steve's face colored a little.
+
+"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't
+have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or--or clothes,
+either.  I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of
+those visits, after I had tramped in overland.  The house was closed
+both times I came.  And then I did write once--that was from San
+Domingo--the third year after I left college.  I was so lonesome down
+there that I had to write, I think.  But there--wasn't any reply, so I
+sort of thought perhaps----"
+
+He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough.  Caleb faced about
+abruptly, his face sternly accusing.
+
+"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want----"
+and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head.  "We
+didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished.  "If we only had we--we
+would have been less lonely waiting, too."
+
+Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.
+
+"I should have known that," he faltered.  "I should have known that
+there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going,
+for the mails to be infallible.  But I wasn't just sure----"
+
+Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.
+
+"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
+almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
+which he has neglected to mention."
+
+She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
+picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
+with less difficulty than he had during her absence.  For a second or
+so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
+loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
+tucked away in his own iron box.  Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
+and long at his mother's picture.  When he finally raised his head
+again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.
+
+"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
+murmured.  "I can only tell you that I didn't know--I didn't
+understand----"
+
+Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand.  She did not
+need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.
+
+"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered.  "I
+am going to ask far more than that of you.  I've kept her picture
+always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
+it greatly if I were not to see it often.  Do you mind leaving it here,
+in your room upstairs?  I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
+mind doing so, then I--I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
+the--the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
+you good-night now."
+
+The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
+cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
+world could ever have been.  After she had left them alone Steve turned
+and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.
+
+"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
+said slowly.  "I wondered then if there could be other women with
+voices just as kind.  And I--I'm wondering now."
+
+Caleb smiled.
+
+"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked.  "And I
+don't know.  I don't know!  Sarah is pretty human--even for a Baptist,
+eh?"
+
+They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
+sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
+took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
+had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box.  Even if he had not
+been entirely certain of it that first day when he had neglected to
+show them to Sarah, he knew now just what reason underlay his secrecy.
+Like Old Tom, he felt that his action was in a way more or less
+extenuated by circumstance.  And still mindful of Dexter Allison's odd
+moment or two of guarded antagonism that very morning, he gradually led
+the conversation around to more recent things.
+
+"I suppose you have had your conference with Mr. Allison, Steve?" he
+suggested in a matter-of-fact way.
+
+Instantly at that question all the boyishness left the other's face.
+He looked away and looked back again, very deliberately.
+
+"No more than a word," he answered.  "He asked me to come down again,
+toward the end of the week, if I could get away.  He said no doubt I
+would want to spend all the time I could to-day with you and Miss
+Sarah."
+
+"Of course," Caleb exclaimed, "of course!  I see.  Is it--is it
+unethical if I ask, privately, your opinion of this job which the East
+Coast Company has on its hands?  Do you believe they can swing it in
+time to fulfill all their obligations?"
+
+Again there followed a moment's pause while Steve's eyes roved
+thoughtfully around the room.
+
+"Mr. Elliott wouldn't have risked every cent he has," he finally
+replied, "unless I had assured him that it wasn't so very much more
+than a man-sized gamble.  Nor Mr. Ainnesley, either, I think.  So that
+puts it up to me pretty squarely, doesn't it?  We'll have to win
+through--because we have to, now!"
+
+"Quite so!" murmured Caleb again.
+
+He studied a long time over his next words, and it was a very vivid
+vision of a rigid little figure in a wrecked black velvet suit--a
+vision of a bleak-faced boy with bruised lips who had insisted upon
+going back downtown for Miss Sarah's eggs--which eventually overbore
+his distaste for anything that might savor of disloyalty to a friend.
+
+"Of course there could arise unforeseen circumstances," he ventured.
+"Unforeseen interference which, unless one guarded against it, might
+defeat every effort."
+
+The room seemed very, very quiet.
+
+"Of course," came the calm answer at last; and Caleb could not see
+Steve's face behind the cupped hands at his pipe bowl, "of
+course--unless one more or less guarded against it."
+
+And there, just as calmly, they dropped it.  The topic was not
+discussed again that night, unless a bit of news which Fat Joe Morgan
+himself delivered might be construed as somehow relative.  Fat Joe had
+been driving for an hour, silent some of the time, but for the most
+part devoted to a whole-hearted rendition of "Home, Sweet Home," in his
+thin and bell-like tenor, when he broke off in the middle of a stanza
+to chuckle.
+
+"Say, Chief," he exclaimed, "I've got news for you that'll just fill
+you plumb full of happiness and good cheer.  I hired another hand
+to-day who'll be a distinct addition to our gang up-river.  Just to
+while away the dark hours I'll let you guess for a while who he is.
+I'll let you guess from here to Last Oak, above the cypress bend at the
+rapids.  One, two, three--and the contest is on!"
+
+The man beside Fat Joe stirred and opened his eyes.  Fat Joe couldn't
+see it, for it was too dark, but Steve frowned somewhat at the levity
+which had interrupted him.  He had just been thinking about the tight
+grip of a slender hand which had fallen upon his arm that afternoon
+when a red-headed riverman lurched drunkenly from a doorway ahead.
+Joe's words were exactly coincident with that thought and the answer
+came mechanically.
+
+"Harrigan," grunted Steve.
+
+And in the darkness Fat Joe sighed mournfully.
+
+"Bull's-eye," he whimpered, "and there goes the whole evenin's
+entertainment!  Why didn't you cast around, sort of fruitless for a
+while, and prolong the excitement?  But you're right.  Harrigan, that's
+him!  He'd just met up with that fat party who owns the plaster palace
+on the hill--just met up with him, down the road a piece, and Allison
+had fired him for keeps, he said.  He asked me if we didn't have room
+for a nice steady hand, so I hired him.  And I'll leave it to you if it
+ain't Harrigan's feet that's mostly unsteady, at that.  He seemed awful
+cheerful for a man who'd just been allowed to resign, but who was I to
+entertain dark doubts?  I hired him; I thought you might like the touch
+of color his hair'll lend to the landscape.  It'll be comfortin', too,
+havin' him around where we can have a look at him any time we take the
+notion.  Don't you think so?"
+
+Steve's grunted reply was hardly intelligible, but it seemed to satisfy
+Fat Joe.  The latter had long before learned to read the signs; he knew
+when his best efforts were only wasted words, and once more he gave his
+attention to the jogging horses and his neglected melody.
+
+Caleb Hunter, wondering after Steve had gone just how much he might
+have seemed to insinuate, regretted that he had spoken at all.
+Recollection of Allison's bluff cordiality with O'Mara only made him
+the more ashamed of his suspicion, and yet the next morning at table he
+attempted, covertly, to sound Sarah for an opinion, too.  She
+invariably solved his perplexities or relegated them to the limbo of
+gentle ridicule.
+
+"Just why should he want this East Coast job to fail?" he puzzled
+aloud.  "He's in it, along with Elliott and Ainnesley, even if he isn't
+in so deep.  That is, of course, assuming that he does want it to fail."
+
+The preoccupied gleam in Miss Sarah's eyes promised a reply that might
+be worth considering, but when it came Caleb found trouble in
+assimilating it.
+
+"They did look so well together," she murmured absently.  "He's so much
+broader--and a whole head taller, too!"
+
+It didn't seem to be exactly a relevant answer, but Caleb nodded
+patiently.
+
+"Taller, yes," he admitted judiciously.  "But he isn't half so big
+around."
+
+Sarah sat, fork poised, and gazed at him.
+
+"Not half so big as who?" she neglected her sentence structure.
+
+"Why--Dexter!" said Caleb.  "Isn't that what we were talking about?"
+
+"Maybe you were," Miss Sarah sniffed.  "But I was not discussing
+Dexter's height or girth either.  I was referring to his daughter
+and--and our boy, Stephen.  I was going to ask you if you thought she
+could be entirely disinterested in him.  I don't believe any woman
+forgets a man who has ever thought enough of her to fight for her."
+
+"I suppose not," agreed Caleb humbly.
+
+"And I was wondering, if that argument ever came up again--I'm
+wondering if Archibald Wickersham wouldn't come out second best, just
+as he did before?"
+
+Then her brother understood.  He threw back his head and laughed until
+Sarah's face registered a trace of vexation.
+
+"Sarah," he saluted her, "I'm a mere babe in arms when it comes to
+finesse, in comparison with you.  But since you have introduced the
+subject I might remark that there are two individuals to be considered.
+Maybe she might be--interested--as you so delicately phrase it.  But
+the boy--well, he's had one mighty pointed lesson, you know."
+
+But there was no mirth in Sarah's eyes.  She was most serious.
+
+"That's the very thing which perplexes me," she confessed.  "I was
+going to ask you about that.  For it was hurt pride that sent him away
+and he hasn't forgotten the hurt, even yet.  He was going to tell us,
+last night when I stopped him, that he hadn't written again because he
+wasn't certain that we wanted to hear; and he was painfully conscious
+of how childish it would sound in words, too.  Some men quit when they
+are whipped once, but don't some of them refuse to recognize that
+they've ever been whipped at all, Cal?  And then, she told me that she
+had asked him to her party, Friday night.  If he comes I think I'll be
+better able to tell just what----"
+
+"He won't!" cut in Caleb flatly, and when she taxed him for it he
+proceeded to elaborate at considerable length the reason for his
+certainty.  His argument was rather tight and so, just because of that,
+woman-fashion she believed the contrary.
+
+All day Friday she watched the hills' road.  Not until the orchestra in
+the lodge beyond the hedge had begun tunelessly to strum their
+instruments, to insure their later tunefulness, did she reluctantly
+abandon her position at the window.  But then, from his chair at the
+fire, Caleb noticed how wistfully disappointed her face was.
+
+It turned much colder with nightfall; a wind sharp with the tang of
+autumn was blowing in off the river when Barbara, muffled from throat
+to ankle in a sapphire fur-edged wrap, slipped in at the door, having
+stolen away ostensibly to display to them her costume.  It was after
+the hour of ten, but the girl lingered a little after she had executed
+that mission; she stopped again in the door, indecisively worrying her
+lip with small teeth, when she finally turned to depart.
+
+"We are very sorry that Mr. O'Mara could not come," she hesitated.  "I
+had promised both Garry and Archie Wickersham that he would be down."
+
+The older woman nodded and accepted the statement for what it was--a
+question which the girl's eyes failed to conceal.
+
+"We haven't heard from him since he went back into camp," she answered.
+"He, no doubt, has been unable to get away."
+
+Barbara turned without replying and passed out, less airily than she
+had entered.  But Miss Sarah's eyes were no longer disappointed as she
+again took her place at a window.  And a second later, when she had
+drawn back suddenly into the room with a muffled exclamation, her
+brother was astonished at her beaming face.  A moment earlier he would
+have sworn that it was only wistful, but before she went upstairs,
+exclaiming still further at the lateness of the hour, it began to look
+more than a little like veritable triumph to him.
+
+Barbara Allison recrossed the lawn very slowly that night; she retraced
+her steps with head bent, the fall of her slippered feet muffled by the
+carpet of thick, unfrosted grass.  Vaguely troubled, vaguely disturbed
+at herself for her inability to analyze that strange mood which, twice
+in the last few nights, had sent her with aching throat and wet cheeks
+into Miriam's room, she was within arm's length of the dark figure in
+the hedge gap through which she had just come, before she was aware of
+its presence.  Stephen O'Mara, weatherbeaten hat in hand, was standing
+there in her path, peering steadily at the stucco and timber lodge
+alight from end to end like a huge and sprawling glow-worm.
+
+Even in that first moment when she stopped and caught her breath,
+audibly, from sheer surprise, the girl sensed the indecision in the
+attitude of the man before her.  But she could not know that it was not
+a thing of the moment--that irresolution; could not know that
+throughout the week Steve had periodically abused himself for his
+inability to settle the question once and for all, and leave his brain
+free for more important things.  Just as often as he told himself that
+he would not go, he had found himself reopening the mental discussion,
+and yet--and strangely enough--it was not the recollection of Barbara's
+repeated invitations, or even her distress over Garry Devereau, who had
+been ceaselessly in his thoughts ever since she had spoken of him,
+which finally achieved the decision.  An insistent desire again to meet
+the Honorable Archibald Wickersham in the end led him to request Fat
+Joe to hook up the team, that day at noon, for the long drive down
+river.  With Steve himself handling the reins, they had rolled the
+thirty miles at a speed which might have mildly surprised Fat Joe had
+he not been accustomed to putting two and two together to make six or
+eight or more.  And Fat Joe's thin tenor was just drifting faintly off
+down the hill--a mournful rendition of "Home, Sweet Home"--when the
+girl stepped noiselessly forward and put a hand, feather-light, upon
+the man's arm.
+
+Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a
+step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled.  She
+even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face.  And then, the
+cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and
+shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him--a laugh a
+little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the
+spirit of youth itself.
+
+"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked.
+
+The man just stood and stared at her--stared much as if he mistrusted
+his own ears and eyes.
+
+"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
+words were tinged with doubt.  "Not all my friends," he said.
+
+And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness.  He
+was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
+head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
+from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
+her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
+blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
+above them.  Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
+lain for a moment upon his arm.
+
+"So you are--you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers.  "I
+wasn't--just sure."
+
+The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous
+affirmative.  She looked down at the hand holding her own,
+contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
+fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
+his big palm.
+
+Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
+in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
+speak.
+
+"Then it--must be you, too," she faltered.  "I wasn't sure, either,
+even when I knew it must be.  I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
+forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . .  Will you please say that you
+forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than
+you can know?"
+
+It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request.  The words were
+stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand.  Silence
+came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond.  Once,
+in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
+object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mache
+pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the
+pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
+costume to him.
+
+His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
+Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
+white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
+which had come creeping over his face.  She saw it surge up in his
+eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
+which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's
+wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping.  She caught
+her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though
+they had gone dry of a sudden.  Involuntarily she stepped toward him,
+that single pace which she had fallen away.  And above the tumult of
+her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how
+unsteady the effort was.
+
+"Then you do forgive me?" she breathed.  "Do I--pass inspection?  Do
+you like me--in my masquerade?"
+
+Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened,
+conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking.
+
+"There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his
+voice grave.  "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have
+been that, always, yourself.  And you are not permitted to ask
+forgiveness from me, nor pardon.  Men do not admit that there can be
+need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped
+you.  You knew I was coming. . . .  I've been coming ten years now.
+But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."
+
+The words were blurred as a far-off echo in her ears.  She started to
+speak, but all that she would have said caught in her throat and hurt
+her, and only her unsteady breath came from parted lips.  Her head
+drooped forward again, while the small fist twisted and searched and
+found and clasped tight one finger of the hand that held it.  She
+realized that his free arm was lifted toward her.  As she started
+forward, her ankles became entangled in the soft pile of satin at her
+feet, and she stopped to free them--and started forward again.  But
+when, at her inarticulate effort at speech, he bent his head to her
+swiftly upflung face, her whole slender body tightened at the rough
+contact of blue flannel against her cheek.  Almost before they held her
+she struggled madly from the circle of his arms.  White of face, white
+of lip, she broke away from him and darted through the gap in the
+hedge, only to shrink back against him in panic the next instant before
+the black shape upon a blacker horse, between her and the lights.
+
+He was gazing in their direction--the man upon the horse.  He was
+laughing softly.  And when he thrust back the black cowl that hid his
+face and began to speak, Stephen O'Mara recognized that terribly pale,
+terribly drawn face.  Garry Devereau rocked a little in the saddle and
+waved a gracefully unsteady hand.
+
+"Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the shadow, and his
+tongue was not thick, but only wavering.  "My felicitations!  And e'en
+though I know not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion.
+And yet--why blush, dear unknowns?  'Tis in the air to-night.  Even I
+myself have yielded to spirit of frivolity.  Two hours ago I appeared
+masked in these dingy vestments as Love's Young Dream; but with me the
+mood has passed.  Fellow romancers, you have witnessed a metamorphosis;
+you are now gazing upon the Wrath of God, about to thunder forth upon a
+coal black charger.  I merely paused to bid you haste inside, lest you
+miss the crux of the evening.  When I withdrew the Honorable Archie was
+already searching, with bravely concealed distraction, for the fair
+daughter of the house.  The hour has struck--it's masks off--masks off,
+from eyes and hearts!"
+
+[Illustration: "Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the
+shadow.  "My felicitations!  And e'en though I know not your identity,
+still I may sense your fond confusion."]
+
+He laughed again, a low and ugly chuckle.  Sparks flew from Ragtime's
+hoofs when he touched the sleek flanks with his heels and the splendid
+animal quivered and bunched hard thigh muscles and spurned the gravel.
+White face whiter still against the background of his somber vestments,
+debonaire and drunkenly insecure in the saddle, Garret Devereau tore
+out into the main road and thundered off into the night.
+
+Barbara Allison stood a long time motionless, her back to the
+motionless man so near her.  She stood and stared, pale as had been
+that black-robed horseman, straight ahead of her.  Then a tremor shook
+her.  Mechanically she started forward, but at the first step Steve's
+hand reached out and found her arm and drew her back to him.  She faced
+about, and waited.
+
+"Is that--true?" he asked her, quietly.
+
+She made no move to answer.
+
+"Is that true?" his low and gentle voice commanded this time.  "You
+still mean to--marry--him?"
+
+She recovered her voice then.  All her confusion and stunned
+realization was swallowed up by that tide of fiercely unreasoning,
+deadly resentment which his very gentleness evoked.  There was nothing
+girlish in his reply--nothing boyish in that high-held chin and
+stiffened body.  A hard note marred her utterance, a perfection of
+insolence edged with scorn, which Steve's world did not know.  She
+wanted but one thing in that moment; she knew but one impulse--a mad
+desire to cut and tear and rend savagely his gravely possessed
+kindliness.
+
+"What I have done to-night I can never hope to explain," she told him.
+"I can only hope that some day I may cease to despise myself as utterly
+as you have taught me to, at this minute.  And since you choose to
+regard it now as your right to ask that question, I'll answer it for
+you.  I do not _mean_ to marry him.  I shall be proud to be his wife!"
+
+The light that streamed over her shoulder fell full upon his face.  She
+saw the blood pour up, staining throat and cheek and brow, and then ebb
+away.  She gave him time to answer, but he did not speak; and suddenly
+she knew what scene of another day he was remembering.  Her eyes
+dropped to her imprisoned hand.
+
+"You are--detaining me," she said.
+
+He released her immediately, and yet she did not move.  And while she
+waited he turned and stooped and turned to her again.  She stood like
+stone while he wrapped her fur-edged sapphire cloak about her and
+fastened it close beneath her uptilted chin.  He waited, bare of head,
+in the hedge gap until she had crossed the lawn to the house that lay a
+sprawling glow-worm in the darkness.  A tumult of voices leaped out to
+him when she opened the door--a lilting crash of syncopated melody.
+And then it was quiet again.
+
+After a glimpse of his chief's eyes that night, Fat Joe essayed not so
+much as one facetious protest against turning the fagged team homeward
+with scarcely any rest at all.  And hour after hour he drove in
+silence, checking himself apologetically once or twice when he forgot
+himself long enough to burst into the opening strains of his inevitable
+ballad.  He remained as quiet as that too quiet man beside him, until
+Steve himself opened his lips.
+
+"It's a--lonesome night," mused the latter at length.
+
+Fat Joe could not have endured it much longer.  His pent-up spirit
+leaped fervidly forth in reply.
+
+"Lonesome!" he ejaculated.  "Man, it's lonesomer'n hell!  Hear that
+damn wind sighin' in the branches, as your poets say.  Hear her moan!
+And look at them clouds edgin' in on the moon like they was thugs
+a-packin' blackjacks and waitin' for an openin' to whale in.  Lonesome?
+Say, it gives me chills, a night like this.  It don't seem to have no
+heart, somehow, nor mercy nor nuthin', does it?  It's all wrong!  It
+ain't dark enough, and it ain't light enough; it's too quiet, and the
+wind makes too much noise.  It keeps whisperin' over your shoulder,
+tauntin' yuh with somethin' you can't understand.  No, sir, this kind
+of a night ain't popular with me, at, all, at all! . . .  Say, Steve,
+how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"
+
+Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
+speech were opened for Joe.
+
+"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
+wanted to be certain sure.  It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
+of her name, any way you look at it.  And not that I've reached that
+state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either.  I just aim to
+be prepared, that's all."
+
+He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
+was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
+to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
+loomed up ahead.  And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
+long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
+through the darkness.  At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
+he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
+but he knew that the latter had not heard.  And when that night-bird's
+call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
+tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
+laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
+breastwork of trees.
+
+Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of their first
+plunge; and then he saw what Fat Joe had seen a second before.  High up
+on the hillside there was a light glowing from the windows of the shack
+which served the chief engineer of the East Coast job as office and
+domicile, too.  While Fat Joe laid on the whip a man came hurtling past
+the outflung door, sprang to his feet and, running low to the ground,
+disappeared into the blackness of the brush.  Joe swung the horses up
+in a galloping curve and with one catlike leap, incredibly light for a
+man of his chunky build, was down from the seat and crashing through
+the bushes on the trail of that fugitive whose noisy flight had already
+become a faint crackle in the distance.
+
+Flame poured from Fat Joe's revolver.  Two whiplike reports shattered
+the night quiet before Stephen O'Mara moved.  Then he lifted himself
+heavily from the seat.  Something nuzzled his shoulder while he stood
+listening to the diminishing tumult of the pursuit; and even before he
+turned he knew what it was.  He paused a moment to stroke the soft nose
+of the black horse standing there with reins a-trail.  It was Ragtime,
+wet with lather and caked with dust.  But even then he was not prepared
+for the sight which met him when he entered the shack.  Seconds must
+have passed while he stood staring from the threshold, for Fat Joe came
+puffing back from his fruitless chase in time to see him bend and lift
+a black-robed, lifelessly limp body from the floor and stagger with it
+toward a bunk.  Fat Joe's steady flow of profanity, oddly, double
+vicious in his thin, complaining voice, was checked short.  He, too,
+stood and stared from the doorway--stood and lifted his nose and
+sniffed.
+
+"Seems to be our night for callers," he remarked with bad mildness;
+"and, say, this one's got a peach of a load, ain't he?"
+
+Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and
+the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's
+temple.
+
+"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly
+again.  "So that's it!  But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put
+up a tidy little battle, was he?  Funny about that, too, but I could
+always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about
+half-over myself."
+
+His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf
+of blue-prints from a corner.
+
+"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when
+we busted in.  Steve, them's our bridge estimates--and there wa'n't no
+copies of 'em, either.  It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to
+replace 'em neither--not more'n two precious, priceless weeks.  I'm
+only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more
+than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea
+or somethin'.  I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be
+home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."
+
+Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had
+finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all.  He had
+finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own
+bunk.  He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat
+Joe joined him at the bedside.  The latter's thick fingers were as
+delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been.  He,
+too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids.  He shook
+his head, dubiously.
+
+"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but
+it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right
+now.  For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it
+was someone I'd a little prefer dead!  It ain't that scratch on the
+head that's got him slippin', either."  Joe paused and turned to
+address Garry Devereau's still white face itself.  "You sat in an'
+backed my game like a gentleman born," he said, "and now I'm a-goin' to
+play yourn, blue chips and white and yello'.  But this is goin' to be
+your last celebration, friend of mine, even if we do win through, or
+you'll be holdin' your next one where the company ain't so select and
+the climate nuthin' to compare with ourn!"
+
+And while he talked he worked, for it was Fat Joe who gave the orders
+that night.  He called for ammonia, for brandy, for a half-dozen drugs
+from the camp hospital chest; and each of them Steve brought in an
+automatic fashion that finally penetrated even Fat Joe's professional
+pleasure in the struggle.
+
+"Friend of yourn?" he asked in an interval while they rested.
+
+"A friend," Steve repeated with a tightening of his jaws, and Joe knew
+what that tone meant.
+
+After that they fought on in silence, side by side--sometimes waiting,
+sometimes fighting, both of them, to hold that horribly racked man upon
+the bed.  He fought them with every pound of strength in his emaciated
+body.  He moaned up at them, screamed at them, cursed them frothingly,
+and Fat Joe hung on and cursed him back--cursed him and promised him
+profanely that he would not let him die.  Steve's face was gray, sweat
+was pouring from Fat Joe's scarlet face when the life-tide ebbed lowest
+and there came a sudden cessation in that stream of babbled madness,
+Garry Devereau lay so quiet that an oath jerked huskily from Fat Joe's
+lips; but when he had listened at the motionless chest he lifted his
+head and smiled, seraphically.
+
+"There, by God," he stated in his high, complaining tenor, "there, by
+God!  And if I ain't created a vacancy in the angel chorus aloft, then
+I'm a liar!"
+
+And his explosive diagnosis proved to be as correct as it was utterly
+unprofane in spirit.  Before day broke there came an hour when Garry
+Devereau lifted himself upon one elbow and opened his eyes to stare
+half wildly, but very sanely, about the room.  His gaze flitted
+wonderingly from wall to wall before it rested, fearfully fixed, upon
+Steve's brown face.  Instantly he looked away, flinchingly, and met Fat
+Joe's voluminous grin--and looked back again, cunningly cautious.
+Finally he reached out a timid, blue-veined, pitifully unsteady hand
+and plucked at Steve's blue flannel sleeve.  And his words were an echo
+of those which Stephen O'Mara had heard before that night from other
+lips.
+
+"Then you--are you," he framed the words laboriously.  "I wasn't
+sure--even when I knew it must be."
+
+And Garry Devereau tried to smile--his slow smile of sophistry.
+
+"Greetings, Sir Galahad!" he faltered.  "And how are you, Steve--and
+who might your--fat friend be?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
+
+Of all the fragmentary pictures which those crowded twelve hours left
+registered upon Stephen O'Mara's brain, none proved more enduring than
+did the change which Garry Devereau's first haltingly weak but very sane
+greeting wrought in the expression on Fat Joe's pink visage that morning.
+The banter in Garry's labored words was so characteristic of the mocking
+spirit of the man who had come back the same inexplicably intimate friend
+which the boy had been, that it left Steve's dry throat speechless for
+the moment.  The visible effect upon Fat Joe was even more positive.
+
+Almost before he had finished his facetious query as to the identity of
+the one who had dragged him through that bad night Gary fell asleep; he
+slipped off into slumber, the very calmness of which guaranteed that the
+crisis had passed.  But the lugubrious astonishment which the question
+had evoked consumed more time in fading from Joe's face.  The latter's
+jaw had sagged open; he dragged a sleeve across his damp forehead while
+he stood and gazed in a sort of dumb dismay down at those pale and
+handsome features.  Then he chuckled suddenly; his whole squat body shook
+with comprehensive mirth.
+
+"Now what do you think of that!" he gurgled in admiration.  "What do you
+think of that?  A-hangin' on all night, alive once in a while, maybe, but
+the best you could say for him the rest of the time was a hope that he
+wasn't dead.  And now coming at us with the airy persiflage, the first
+regular breath he's drawed.  Fat!  It was me he meant to indicate, wasn't
+it?  He was joshin' me!  Say, Steve, ain't he the merry little joker?
+_Me--fat_!  Now that's real funny--I'll leave it to you if it ain't."
+
+Fat Joe leaned over and drew a blanket a little higher across the
+sleeping man's shoulder, while Steve continued silently to study Garry's
+face.  Even in unconsciousness a faintly crooked smile of skepticism
+still clung to the lips.
+
+"It was like him," Steve remarked at last, very soberly.  "Somehow, the
+minute he began to speak I knew it was exactly the sort of thing I
+expected him to say.  The probability of death is a much more amusing
+prospect to some men, Joe, than the perplexity of living."
+
+Fat Joe flashed a swift, half-puzzled glance at his chief's face; he
+started to ask a question, then scowled and checked himself and turned
+instead to kindle a fire in the stove of the lean-to kitchen of the
+cabin.  But a half-hour later he was still murmuring the last phrase over
+to himself, perplexedly, when Steve came leading the horse Ragtime up to
+the open door.  Saddled and with reins a-trail, the animal had been
+wandering throughout the night about the upper end of the construction
+camp clearing.  At the sound of hoofbeats outside Fat Joe left the stove
+and the half-cooked breakfast he had set himself to prepare.  From the
+doorway he stared through narrowed lids.
+
+For the moment Joe had half forgotten those night birds whose mournful
+hooting along the trail, a few hours back, had first stirred him to alert
+suspicion.  While he was struggling with Garry Devereau's faltering heart
+he had had scant leisure to devote to the problem of the other man's
+identity--that shadowy figure which had come plunging out of the cabin
+door and gone crashing off into the brush, a noisy but invisible target
+for his revolver.  Now recognition and a light of partial understanding
+rose and intermingled in his eyes.
+
+"So that's the way one of 'em come," he murmured.  "I was wondering some.
+Last night I didn't notice the horse, being a mite too hurried to give
+ample attention to details, as it were.  But ain't--ain't this one of
+Allison's horses?"
+
+Steve straightened from an examination of a deep scratch in one of
+Ragtime's knees and stood, back to the door, slowly stroking the soft
+black nose.  Just as well as though it had been voiced he caught the
+unphrased inference in the plump one's query.  After a time he shook his
+head, absently, in negation.
+
+"No, Joe," he answered heavily.  "He is from Allison's stables, but we
+have him to thank, just the same, along with Garry, for our blue-prints
+and estimates.  It was Mr. Devereau whom he brought up here last night,
+and in fairly good time I should judge, too, from the pace at which they
+set out.  Garry turned him into the hill-road, and he must have stuck to
+it blindly until he struck our fork."  And, after a longer pause: "The
+horse is Miss Allison's own property," he added quietly.
+
+Joe pursed his lips.  Instantly, at the mention of the girl's name, he
+felt himself better equipped to understand both the lack of immediate
+action and the seeming preoccupied indifference of his superior which, in
+the face of the night's developments, would have been otherwise utterly
+unaccountable that morning.
+
+There had been more than one instance of gross neglect and misinterpreted
+orders, particularly in the last week or so, that might have resulted
+disastrously if luck had not been with them; but Fat Joe had been unable
+to convince the chief engineer of the East Coast Company that their
+repetition was in any way a thing of sinister import.  Steve had merely
+smiled at his dogged belief in a veiled campaign of opposition, blaming
+the minor catastrophes upon blundering incompetence which they could hope
+to combat by unflagging vigilance alone.  And now, when the finding of
+the roll of estimates upon the floor and the blood clotted crease in
+Garry Devereau's forehead made further argument superfluous, his
+listlessness would have left Fat Joe alarmed had it not been for a
+recollection of the light he had glimpsed in Steve's eyes at the
+beginning of their sudden and unexplained return to camp the night
+before, and his brooding silence on the road.  At the mention of Barbara
+Allison's name it all recurred to Joe in nicely balanced and comforting
+sequence.  Fat Joe confessed shamelessly to a romantic soul.  And it
+helped him now to choose his own course of action, even though he had,
+for once, misread the other's mood.
+
+For if Steve had not forgotten the picture which Garry Devereau had made,
+robed and cowled and areel in the saddle, any more than he could ever
+hope to forget the slim, shimmering figure who had shrunk back against
+him in panic, there in the shadow of the hedge, both pictures had
+momentarily given way to an even more vivid memory.  He was thinking of
+Miriam Burrell's face and her last words to him: "I have heard, Mr.
+O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of the dark, when
+everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to talk with--a
+specialist in such campaigns!"
+
+The probable nearness of him who had gone bounding away empty-handed from
+the lighted shack was of far less moment than the possible identity of
+the one who had furnished the inspiration of that night raid.  And to
+Steve the need of assuring that tall girl with the vivid lips and coppery
+hair of Garry Devereau's safety bulked quite as important as did the
+advisability of seeking immediately an informal interview with Dexter
+Allison, such as the latter himself had so genially suggested.
+
+But Fat Joe, squinting at his chief's broad back, misread the signs that
+morning.  From where he stood in the doorway he could see the men of the
+upper camp already swarming out over the works, some of them mere dots
+across the expanse of swamp-land.  The rhythmic beat of pile-drivers
+thudded in his ears; raucous echoes of shouted orders floated up from the
+nearest gang-bosses, and punctuating it all came the intermittent boom of
+dynamite explosions from far north in the deep cut alongside the river
+edge.
+
+The construction camp had been nearly two hours awake; the race against a
+well-nigh impossible time limit which would brook neither mistake nor
+miscalculation had been picked up automatically at daybreak, where it had
+hesitated at nightfall the day before.  While he stared down at this
+activity, a realization of the months of bitter toil which stood between
+them and ultimate, uncertain success, crept over Fat Joe.  Little by
+little his features took on that look of hard and dangerous setness which
+always seemed so doubly threatening upon his placidly round countenance.
+And as casually as he was able he elected to go upon that errand of which
+his chief must have lost sight, in a dulled and moody contemplation of an
+entirely different matter.
+
+"Maybe," Joe suggested vaguely, "maybe I'll just ask you to watch these
+things on the stove a while, Steve.  I've got the fire to drawin' and
+some coffee set on, because I knew we'd need 'em before that cook-boy got
+his eyes open wide enough to see his way up here.  It ain't exactly a
+fancy repast, neither, so it won't tax your culinary skill none to tend
+it.  I--there's something I'd like to look into a little--something I
+sort of lost sight of while we were soothing our mutual friend in yonder.
+But I'll be back in a minute.  I'll just run down and see if everybody's
+onto his job."
+
+Hard on the heels of that explanation he started rapidly down the long
+bare slope and Steve watched his departure without comment.  While Joe
+was gone he tethered the black horse at the door frame, found a nose-bag
+and methodically presented the grateful beast with his breakfast.  And
+when Fat Joe returned he had finished preparing the meal which the former
+had begun; in absent-minded inattention that resulted in more than one
+perilously close call, with one hand he was placing brimming cups of
+blistering hot coffee beside the plates of food and condensed milk-cans
+upon the table, while he leafed slowly through the sheaf of blue-prints
+with the other, satisfying himself that they were untampered with.  Fat
+Joe shook his head mournfully over this last exhibition and dropped into
+a chair.
+
+They ate in silence that morning--a silence so heavy that the faint
+breathing of Garry in the bunk beyond them sounded almost stentorian at
+times.  More than once Joe's gaze went to that colorless face; just as
+often it searched Steve's gravely unreadable countenance, and it was Fat
+Joe who first found the silence no longer endurable.
+
+"What," he ventured to interrupt the other's brooding, "what is it,
+Steve, you call one of them little, gangling, bow-spectacled guys that
+fools his waking hours away studyin' the customs and morals and suchlike
+of birds and things?"
+
+Almost immediately Steve's face grew less blank at that bland question,
+and although his eyes failed to shift from the invisible point beyond Joe
+at which he was staring, his lips did curl a little.  He had long before
+learned to play up, solemnly, to those unprefaced and disingenuous leads.
+
+"Ornithologist?" he inquired soberly.  "Ornithologist--if that is what
+you mean."
+
+Joe nodded briskly.
+
+"That's it!" he exclaimed.  "I knew it was ornery something-or-other,
+and--and that makes it fit the case all the prettier, now don't it?
+Because in the last half-hour or so, since I left you here to tend to the
+cookin', I've been studying the birds somewhat myself.  And having been a
+little successful, so to speak, I'm ornerier'n even before I commenced."
+He stopped to swallow half the steaming coffee in his cup, and if when he
+began again his voice had hardened perceptibly, it was nevertheless still
+elaborately guileless.  "Steve," he said, "have _you_ ever stopped to
+consider real close and earnest any of the peculiarities of our feathered
+friends?  Say--well, say owls, for instance?"
+
+Then Steve ceased to smile.  He thought a moment, but his reply remained
+tuned to the other's artless key.
+
+"Why, yes," he drawled.  "Yes, and no.  As for the latter, however, I
+will admit that I have always believed their reputation for--er--wisdom
+to be a greatly overestimated thing."
+
+Widely Fat Joe grinned his pleasure.  His chief's eyes were no longer
+vague nor blank.
+
+"Which just bears out my own personal research in the field," he stated.
+"Not that I'm saying I've been real thorough in the matter, because I
+ain't had the time.  But what I've done I accomplished because I just
+naturally dote on that kind of thing."  His eye flitted carelessly toward
+a window.  "I happened to run into Harrigan, too, this morning," he
+murmured.
+
+As disinterestedly as had Joe, Steve now drained his coffee cup and
+waited.
+
+"He was down to the cook shanty," Fat Joe rambled on.  "It's an hour
+since he'd ought to have been out there with the powder squad in the
+north cut, and when I asks him if he was feelin' indisposed this morning
+he says no, but the supply teams was going out and one of the drivers had
+told him that I was sending him along to help with the loadin'.  He had
+such a nice, frank, open-faced way of lying that I couldn't bring myself
+to correct him.  I just let it stand that way and told him such was the
+arrangement."  Joe saw swift satisfaction play across Steve's face.
+"And--and then, after that, him and me--why, we just drifted off into a
+real interestin' and scientific discussion about them birds I been
+mentionin' to you.  We--somehow we got to discoursing about owls.
+
+"I told him I'd never noticed 'em to hoot so close together and
+persistent as they did last night, down along the trail, and wondered if
+by any chance he'd heard 'em, too.  And he said he had.  He's a nice
+smooth talker, Harrigan is, when he ain't too sober and not too drunk.
+Oh, yes, he'd heard 'em, being wakeful, he explained, what with worrying
+all night whether we'd ever get this line of steel laid before our
+contract run out on us!  Now wasn't that interestin'--wasn't it,
+especially coming from him?  Neatly put and self-possessed, I call it.
+He was worried because he's dreadful superstitions.  [Transcriber's note:
+superstitious?]  He claims when them birds gets to hedgin' in on each
+other's solos like they did last night it's a sign of bad luck or an
+accident for somebody, sure.  That give me an opening to ask him if the
+accident hadn't happened already, him having a bandage around his head
+not much different from this one our friend here is wearing.  But he
+couldn't see it that way.  A scratch he called it--just a scratch from a
+twig."
+
+The room was very quiet for a breath.  That thin note had crept into Fat
+Joe's tenor voice--thin and chill and menacing.  And there as abruptly as
+he had assumed it, he flung aside his mask of disingenuous irrelevance.
+Fat Joe wheeled, put both elbows upon the table edge and leaned forward
+heavily.  It was much as though he were setting himself to shoulder by
+sheer weight through the discouraging wall of indifference behind which
+the other was apparently withdrawing once more.
+
+"But as for me," his high voice rang a little, "but as for me--well, I
+always did pride myself that I could shoot some, whether it was by
+daylight or dark!"
+
+And the only result which that statement achieved was an answering,
+meditative nod.  Fat Joe subsided.  All that he could say had been said,
+and they finished breakfast as they had begun it, in absolute silence.
+But when Steve, with a word, halted him in the doorway as Joe was on the
+point of returning to the work in the valley, the latter turned to find
+the slow smile which he knew so well hovering upon the younger man's
+lips.  He fairly gulped in his sudden relief.
+
+"Joe," Stephen O'Mara began, and the words were suspiciously unsteady for
+those of a man who was bearing up bravely under a hidden sorrow, "Joe,
+you've missed your calling, I'm afraid.  As a naturalist you might have
+scored an instant and sensational success, in spite of the fact that you
+are neither bow-spectacled nor--er--gangling, as no doubt Mr. Devereau's
+reference to you has this morning made plain."
+
+He stopped to touch a match to the dry grains of tobacco which he had
+been tamping into the bowl of his pipe; he swung slowly around toward the
+inert figure on the bunk.  When he spoke again the thread of raillery was
+gone from his voice.
+
+"He'll sleep the day through, I think," he said, "and the night, perhaps.
+But I'd advise you to look in on him now and then, just the same.  He did
+us a good turn last night.  It's the second good turn he's done for me,
+Joe.  And now perhaps the chance has come to even up the score a little.
+You would know, wouldn't you, Joe, just how many drinks to prescribe for
+a man who has been as--as ill as Garry has?"
+
+Fat Joe's face commenced to shine, and at that he was only beginning to
+understand.
+
+"Ain't I the doctor?" he demanded aggrievedly.  "You don't have to go no
+deeper into technicalities with me.  And I told you last night, anyway,
+didn't I, that it would have to be his last little celebration, unless he
+was figurin' on a longer journey than he's ever took before.  Well, I've
+handled so many cases just like his that there ain't even a little
+enjoyable novelty in 'em any more for me."
+
+Steve received the statement with another nod.
+
+"That's it," he mused.  "That's it exactly.  It would have to be his
+last, unless he is figuring on a longer journey than he has ever taken
+before."
+
+He crossed and leaned over the thin and motionless form of his friend.
+He laid one hand gently upon the sleeping man's shoulder.
+
+"He did that for me once, Joe," he spoke quietly.  "He dropped his hand
+on my shoulder like that, and I never forgot the weight of it.  You watch
+him, Joe--watch him closely for a while, because--because, you see, a man
+does stray along once in so often who's so badly bewildered and trail
+weary, so tired of trying and--and hurt in soul, that the thought of such
+a journey as you speak of begins to seem the shortest route after all to
+an end of thoughts which even alcohol can't wipe out.  You take care of
+him, and if he wakes before I get back, explain to him a little just how
+he came here, and thank him a lot for what he did.  Ask him to wait until
+I come back from Morrison, will you?"
+
+For a moment Joe just stood and blinked, dumfounded.
+
+"Huh!" he blurted at last.  "Huh!  So that's what you been hintin' at all
+the time, is it?  I didn't just get you right until now.  But, do you
+know, it did seem to me once or twice while we were working over
+him--once or twice when the goin' was pretty bad--that his spirit wasn't
+heaving real hearty into the traces.  And, say, ain't that a poor idea
+for a guy to get into his head?  Now ain't it?"  And then, as the purport
+of the rest of Steve's words struck home: "Do you mean you are going to
+Morrison to have a----"
+
+Steve recrossed to the door and began to unfasten the feed-bag from
+Ragtime's nose.
+
+"And now about this ornithological problem, Joe," he cut in with a
+blandness that outdid Joe's best effort.  "About owls in particular!
+Your research work was illuminating; in view of its casual nature it was
+unbelievably helpful.  But personally I feel that a thorough sifting of
+the matter requires slightly different methods.  One should endeavor to
+get at the thing in its embryonic state, as--as it were.  Don't you think
+so?  If one could locate the place of incubation, the--er--nest from
+which these night birds of yours first stretched their wings, it might
+prove really worth while--no?  And--and at the same time I'll just return
+Miss Allison's horse to her, too, this morning."
+
+He leaned over to lengthen a stirrup; stopped again to light his pipe.
+
+"Watch things," he called, as he swung to the saddle and put Ragtime to
+the slope.  "Watch things!"  His voice drifted up from below, clear and
+eager, and alive with mirth.  "And drive 'em, Joe--drive 'em--drive 'em
+from daylight till dark!"
+
+From the threshold Fat Joe watched him until horse and rider disappeared
+beyond the line of timber; with broad face aglow he stood, head cocked
+upon one side.
+
+Then, "He was figurin'," he muttered in blithe delight, "he was
+a-figurin' to himself, all the time I thought he was thinking about her!
+I guess my own mind has lately got to dwelling too insistent on trivial
+things, for a laboring man. . . .  He's taking her back her horse--real
+broke up and sorrowful like over the prospect of seein' her again so
+soon, too, now wasn't he?  And me--me sympathizin' with _him_!
+Sometimes, Joe, your lack of penetration is plumb aggravatin' to me.  You
+talk a lot, but you don't say much!  You got to learn to listen."
+
+He stepped forward, remembered and turned back into the cabin.  There was
+womanish solicitude in the scrutiny he bent upon Garry Devereau's
+crookedly smiling face.
+
+"You and me was ordained to be friends," he declared oratorically,
+"because anybody that Steve O'Mara calls friend is good enough for me.
+And so I'll just naturally have to persuade you to put off indefinitely
+this idea of a prolonged excursion, won't I--convince you maybe of the
+unnumbered delights of our own earthly suburb, as it were.  And fat, eh?
+You think I'm fat, do you?  Well, that's a matter we'll have to thrash
+out when you come to--that and one other which ain't going to be half so
+amusin' nor congenial while under consideration.  About the best I can
+promise you for both of them arguments is that you ain't got a chance to
+win either.  I got my orders to take care of you."
+
+He tiptoed to the door and went with his oddly light and cat-footed tread
+down the hill.  Just once more he paused, halfway between the
+headquarters of the East Coast Company's chief engineer and the thudding
+pile-drivers at the edge of the swamp.
+
+"It won't be so lonesome, having him for company," he told himself.
+"It'll be a new mind to delve into,--that is, if he'll only listen a
+little to reason, when he wakes up.  And I wonder if he takes kindly to a
+little friendly game.  I wonder, now--I wonder!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
+
+Barbara Allison's presence upon the dusty hill-road that morning was
+more than the result of a merely casual whim, even though, when she
+turned her mount north into that mountain highway a scant two hours
+before, the choice had been made without actual thought for the route
+which she was selecting.  And yet, conscious or instinctive, the choice
+had brought her the things for which both brain and spirit were ahunger
+that morning: A silence so profound that the vague, crackling wood
+noises which disturbed it from time to time were not noises at all, but
+only a part of its very being; a solitude so breathlessly big and
+sweeping that she must needs throw out both slim arms finally in a
+childishly eager effort to embrace a tithe of it--and a chance to be
+alone!
+
+The night before, as soon as she had re-entered hurriedly the glowing
+lodge asprawl upon the hill, the impulse had first come to her--a swift
+and almost blind desire to turn and escape, if only for a little while,
+from the roomful of chatter and laughter and bright-eyed badinage
+loosed upon her immediately after the unmasking, by Dexter Allison's
+perfectly cadenced announcement of his daughter's engagement.  All in a
+breath the huge room had become stiflingly oppressive; the gaiety
+unbearable.  And at the end of the first half-hour following her
+truancy she might have yielded to the impulse, pleading the first
+flimsy excuse which would have purchased an opportunity to reconstruct
+that hysterically mad minute or two with him whom she had just left a
+little before in the hedge-gap, had not Miriam Burrell, at the very
+moment of decision, stung her into realization of what meaning such an
+act might convey to other less generous minds.
+
+That tall and lithe-bodied and abrupt-tongued friend of hers, colorless
+cheeks even paler against the black background, of her Mongolian
+costume, still had eyes for the change which had come over the younger
+girl, in spite of the terror which had been congealing her own heart
+since the moment of unmasking.  Her vivid lips were still able to
+smile, stiffly, when she finally drew Barbara into a corner and under
+cover of her lacquered fan mockingly pinched a little color into her
+wan cheeks.  But that strange girl failed to realize how much of scorn
+for a thing she labeled her own cowardice, she put into her words that
+night.
+
+"Please remember, dear child," she whispered, "that you are on
+exhibition as the ingenuously happy bride-to-be.  If you are going to
+play the game this way, like the rest of them, why not be a good sport
+and play it for all there is in it?  One owes it to one's partner, you
+know, not to reveal entirely the weakness of the hand that's just been
+dealt.  You should smile--at least a little!"
+
+Barbara, brain already hopelessly entangled, wheeled in astonishment at
+the almost viciously satirical suggestion, refusing even while her face
+flamed to believe that she had caught correctly the impossibly cynical,
+unbelievably unkind insinuation of this girl who was her closest
+friend.  But Miriam's eyes silenced the demand for an explanation,
+which had risen with an hitherto unknown coldness to her lips.  Instead
+Barbara reached out impetuously and took the girl's icy wrist in both
+her own hands.
+
+"Miriam, child, what is it?" she breathed.  "What is the matter, dear?
+You're ill--you're cold as death!"
+
+And at that the lash of scornful intolerance for all things
+hypocritical, the flick of which Barbara had never known before, was
+gone from Miriam's tongue.  She moistened her lips and tried to speak,
+and had to try again before her voice would come.
+
+"Have you--seen Garry?" she asked huskily.  "Do you know where he went?"
+
+The hopelessness of the query made possible but one interpretation of
+all that lay behind it, and yet Barbara, who had not so much as guessed
+at it until now, refused the thought as too fantastic for credence.
+Again a wave of conscious color stained her face.
+
+"Do you mean since--since----"  Her lips refused to phrase it, but
+Miriam finished it for her.
+
+"Since he went swinging out into the dark on Ragtime."  She, too,
+strained at the sentence, but for an entirely different reason.  "I was
+looking for him, but I was too late.  Bobs, all evening his eyes have
+been mad--his mood insane!  I heard just his last word or two to you
+and--Mr. O'Mara, out there on the lawn.  His father, you know--but you
+don't think. . . .  Barbara, I'm frightened--I'm so terribly
+frightened!"
+
+It ended in a little moan of fear.  And now, astounded past all belief,
+Barbara understood.  But before she could speak the seeming need of
+woman reassurance, no matter how illogical, was gone.  Amazingly, all
+in an instant, the living dread disappeared from Miriam's face; she
+stiffened and threw back her head with that short laugh which contained
+so little of mirth, so much that was hard to translate.  And the
+Honorable Archibald Wickersham, appearing the same instant at Barbara's
+elbow, frowned at its note of derision.
+
+"I've just been warning Barbara," the tall girl was already drawling
+with consummate impudence, "that the record of past performances are
+all against your finishing the distance without coming a cropper in
+these international matrimonial hurdles.  Just what is your opinion,
+Archibald?"
+
+Wickersham had never liked Miriam Burrell.  Now he smiled a trifle
+wryly into her insolently uptilted face, without attempting to answer
+the question.  And during the next dance with Barbara he unburdened
+himself, rather positively for him, of his distaste for her.  The
+pronounced frown, however, remained even longer upon his countenance.
+
+But that one moment had served where everything else might have failed.
+For the rest of the evening Barbara was again a creature of moods so
+frothy, so evanescent that she swept aside even Wickersham's habit of
+precision.  And if the spur that brightened her eyes and quickened her
+laughter was, after all, nothing more nor less than a hot contempt for
+herself--for the stolen moment in the hedge-gap and the inexplicable
+impulse upon which she had all but acted following it--her merriment
+was none the less a palpitant thing.
+
+And yet afterward, alone in her room, when the last treble note had
+died away and she had dismissed Cecile, her sleepy-eyed maid, the sense
+of oppression had returned redoubled.  She did not want to sleep; she
+was glad of her wide-eyed wakefulness, but in the darkness walls and
+ceiling and floor seemed fairly to close in upon her and hedge in soul
+and brain as well as body.  It was the first time the girl had ever
+known the need--the driving desire--to be alone out of doors, where
+there was nothing but sky and skyline to bound her thoughts.  And at
+last, when her restlessness became no longer bearable, while the
+remainder of the house still slept behind drawn curtains, she rose and
+slipped into boots and breeches and riding coat, and descended to order
+a not too wide-awake groom to saddle a horse.  And in the very middle
+of his sensational report of Ragtime's empty stall she swung to the
+saddle and turned toward the north.
+
+She rode hard at first.  She put the small roan mare between her knees
+to a pounding gallop, pulling to a walk only after the rushing air had
+whipped back into her cheeks a part at least of the glow which the
+sleepless night had robbed from them.  And if the tang of the trees and
+the solitude and the warmth of the sun did their work slowly, they
+nevertheless did it well.  Little by little her tense body relaxed; the
+line of her lips softened.  Almost before she realized it that morning,
+she had relegated her anxiety over Garry Devereau and her astonishment
+at the confession which she had beheld in Miriam's eyes to a rather
+hazy background, and turned to those very thoughts against which she
+had fought so fiercely throughout the night.  She drifted into a
+surprisingly unanalytical and most femininely inquisitive wonder
+concerning a tall figure in blue flannel and corduroy.  She suddenly
+found herself pondering the very incidents which, a few hours before,
+had set her small fists to clenching in a tide of incomprehensible
+resentment--against herself or him she could not for the life of her
+tell.
+
+Mile after mile, the roan mare placidly choosing the pace, she rode
+with one leg dangling over the pummel of the saddle, everything else
+forgotten in that preoccupied endeavor to review each moment she had
+shared with him.  Again she felt his arm harden threateningly under her
+startled clasp as a red-headed and very drunk river-man lurched out of
+a doorway ahead of them; with breath softly audible between arched lips
+she tried to recall the gentleness of his hands when he was refastening
+her cloak beneath her rigidly upflung chin.  And when the higher
+morning sun found her far beyond the rolling pasture land, miles in the
+heavy timber, she had dismounted, there where the highest loop in the
+road commanded its breath-taking sweep of country, and was sitting
+cross-legged upon the trunk of a fallen tree at the road edge.
+Frowning a little over the vexing uncertainty of details, Barbara was
+wondering just what their next meeting would be like; she had just
+finished picturing his man's discomfort and self-consciousness and lack
+of ease and, with a soberness so childish it would have dumbfounded her
+had she given it thought, was nodding approvingly over a contemplation
+of her own kind cordiality, when that very blue-shirted figure itself
+rounded a near corner in the narrow lane between the trees.  Stephen
+O'Mara, in the flesh, appeared before her, astride Ragtime and leading
+her roan, which, contentedly cropping the bush tops, had disappeared a
+full quarter of an hour before.
+
+The girl gasped at the suddenness of his coming; she half started to
+rise before she remembered the instability of her perch, and then
+crouched even lower than before when she saw that he was not yet aware
+of her nearness.  It was not at all like the encounter which she had so
+ably managed in her imagination an instant before, and somehow that
+graciously kind greeting of hers was lost completely through the
+perversity of an utterly different mood.  She waited, eyes gleefully
+bright, until he was almost opposite her before she coughed, ever so
+faintly.  Then she tilted her nose aloft in enchanting mimicry of his
+lean and forward-thrust face.
+
+"We never speak," she confided dolefully to the empty air in front of
+her, "we never speak as we pass by."  He whirled.  So swiftly that it
+took her breath he was out of the saddle and across the road, and
+standing knee-deep in the undergrowth beside her.  Only his profile had
+been visible to her at first.  Now the white line of his jaw and the
+light in the eyes that searched her face chilled her, even while they
+sent the blood singing in every vein.  Only a few hours before she had
+seen that same cold fear in Miriam Burrell's eyes; and yet not the
+same, either, for hers had been a panic of lost hope, and the gleam in
+the man's eyes was already only partly dread of disaster and partly a
+great and unmistakable glow of thankfulness.  Barbara remembered then,
+with a twinge of guilt, that she could have forgotten it so completely,
+the black-robed figure that had gone thundering off on the same mount
+which Stephen O'Mara was riding now.  She half lifted both hands to
+him, apprehensively.
+
+"You aren't going to tell me, are you," she asked, "that anything
+dreadful has happened to Garry?"
+
+Dumbly, but most reassuringly, Steve shook his head.  From the top of
+her hatless, wind-tossed, brown-crowned head to the tips of the
+absurdly small boots tucked up beneath her, he scanned her slim body.
+Barbara realized that he was trying to speak and finding the effort
+hard.  Slowly he removed his hat and passed one hand across his
+forehead.
+
+"Man," he ejaculated fervidly to himself, "but that's the longest
+hundred yards you've ever traveled, on foot or a-horseback!"  And
+abruptly, accusingly, to her: "Do you know that I've been months and
+years and ages rounding that bend to--to find you a little crumpled-up
+heap in the road?"
+
+After all, her unaccountably high spirits may have been only the
+natural reaction from the hours of depression through which she had
+lately passed.  But whatever the reason behind it, Barbara's levity was
+a totally spontaneous, deliciously colored thing.  She sat and tilted
+her head at him in audacious provocation; she assumed as chastened an
+expression as she could in the face of her very real relief at the news
+of Garry's safety.
+
+"I'm sorry," she murmured humbly.  "I'm sorry to--disappoint you.  But,
+you see, I didn't know----"
+
+She laughed at him.  Her lips curled, petal-like, in a gurgling peal of
+enjoyment at his shame-faced grin.
+
+"I found your horse rolling," he explained, and his gravity was dogged
+in the face of her brightness.  "How I knew it was yours I don't know,
+but I did just the same.  I thought she had thrown you; I'd already
+made up my mind, if there was one scratch on your body, to take that
+mare's head between my hands and break her neck!  You see, I believed I
+knew already just what it would mean to me if anything ever happened to
+you.  But it's a lot different imagining the world without
+you--and--and facing the actual possibility of it.  Was I--fairly
+tragic?"
+
+And now it was his turn to laugh over her pink-faced disconcernment.
+Most decidedly it was not the sort of an encounter which she had been
+contemplating a moment earlier.  There was no discomfort in that big,
+loose-limbed body.  She had imagined him as just a little moody and
+sad-eyed, at least.  And now she realized that she had never seen the
+latter so easy to read as they were at that minute.  Gray as the
+shadowed silver thread of the river far below in the valley, they
+glowed with a great gladness for her safety, and far, far more than
+just that.  The alarming cheerfulness of his gaze was too confusing to
+sustain.
+
+"Of course you've found Garry," she hastened to swing the conversation
+to a less personal quarter.  "Is he--will you tell me about it, please?"
+
+One small, gauntleted hand made an almost imperceptible gesture toward
+the unoccupied space beside her on the fallen tree.  But he chose the
+ground at her feet.  And after he had disposed his long length to his
+liking he answered her hurried question--answered it with an amiably
+lazy deliberation that promised a sure return to a topic of his own
+choosing, in his own good time.
+
+"No," he stated, and there was something lugubrious in the baldness of
+the statement.  "He found me.  And it was the biggest stroke of luck
+that he did.  I grow more and more lucky this morning, wouldn't you say
+so?"
+
+The question was quite innocently direct.  No, decidedly he was not
+discomfited--not ill at ease at all!  Apparently he found it much
+easier to look at her than at any of the points of interest in the
+landscape toward which her glances persisted in flitting.  While he
+marveled, without any manifestations of sorrow whatever, at the curve
+of her throat and the satin texture of that cheek turned toward him, he
+told her drawlingly all there was to tell of the night before.  And
+after a time Barbara forgot her warm face and the too plain message
+there in his eyes, in her growing excitement over that recitation.
+When he stopped her first question instinctively pounced upon the one
+detail he had purposely withheld.
+
+"But you must have an inkling as to the man's identity," she cried.
+"Why, you've got to find that out, before he does more harm next time.
+Haven't you a suspicion, even?"
+
+One foot swung free; she leaned forward in her eagerness, a slender and
+entirely boyish figure in diminutive breeches and boots and
+straight-lined coat.  And the man laughed aloud up into her flushed
+face, softly and not quite steadily at her hostile indignation, her
+intuitive feminine curiosity, and most of all, most unsteadily, at his
+wonder of her, herself.
+
+"Why, yes," he admitted.  "Both Joe and I do believe we know who it
+was, but we aren't sure because we don't understand yet what that man's
+motive might be.  I'd tell you, only I don't like to accuse anybody
+until there is cause for it.  But that's what brought me down here this
+morning--that and because I wanted to tell Miss Burrell that Garry is
+safe, and will continue to be from now on, I hope.  Those were two of
+my reasons for coming, at least.  I had a more important one than
+either, but----"
+
+Barbara did not wait for him to tell her what it was.  She was staring
+at him in unfeigned surprise.
+
+"To tell Miriam?" she echoed.  "Do you--you can't mean that you knew
+she cared for Garry?"
+
+"Didn't you?"
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+"Never, until just a little while ago!  I--do you know, in the last few
+days I've begun to realize how much more you--other people--observe
+than I do.  I've begun to wonder if I haven't been very blindly
+self-sufficient.  For I never dreamed of such a thing, until something
+happened after I left you last night."  Her voice faltered, but her
+eyes clung resolutely to his.  "She came to me and asked me if I knew
+where he had gone.  She had seen him ride away, too, Mr. O'Mara.  And I
+learned it then, just from the terror in her face.  But I didn't know
+until later how much she cared.
+
+"She came into my room this morning, and that, although you can't know
+it, was more than odd in itself, because I have always been the one to
+carry my woes to her.  It must have been between four and five, for I
+had counted a clock striking four; and yet she was still dressed in her
+party costume.  Have you guessed what she had been doing?  Mr. O'Mara,
+she had been out looking for him!  She had slipped out and been waiting
+because she was sure Ragtime would bolt and--and come back home,
+dragging him by a stirrup!  Wasn't that a horrible thing to wait for,
+alone in the dark?"
+
+With a little shudder the girl put her hands over her eyes, as if to
+shut out the picture.
+
+"She wasn't hysterical, either.  She was--just--ice!  And wringing wet
+and blue with cold.  Cool, proud, intolerant Miriam Burrell--and I'd
+never dreamed of her caring for anybody, until that minute.  I sent her
+to bed and I think I hated Garry Devereau for an hour or two.  Why, Mr.
+O'Mara, I'd never believed that a girl could care that much for any
+man!"
+
+He stopped toying with a handful of dry twigs and let them slip away
+between his fingers.  She saw his head come up; saw his eyes narrow.
+Then her own body stiffened as she realized what she had said.  And yet
+it was, after all, only a part of something she had decided she must
+make clear to him, ever since he had surprised her there at the road
+edge; it was part of an explanation which, without quite knowing why,
+she felt was due to him.  But she had not meant to employ that abrupt
+confession as a preface.  That made it inconceivably harder, it seemed.
+And he, silent at her feet, stared out at the blue rim of the hills and
+gave her no assistance now--not so much as a smile.  She sat a long
+time, nursing one slim knee between her palms.
+
+"Mr. O'Mara," she appealed to him at last, "how might one reopen a--a
+rather difficult subject with--with a suddenly most difficult
+conversationalist?"
+
+Without turning his head he made answer:
+
+"I think Fat Joe's method is as good as any," he suggested.  "Joe says
+the only way to reopen any argument is to take a running jump and land
+all spraddled out, right in the middle of it.  He insists that such
+procedure leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone that the discussion is
+about to be resumed."
+
+She laughed a little.
+
+"Then shall we consider that I've taken--the--the jump, and landed?"
+
+Just when she was wishing most that she could see his face he swung
+around toward her.  Again his gravity was a totally gentle thing.  It
+made her remember the self-possessed kindliness with which he had met
+her unreasoning rage the night before.
+
+"You don't have to explain," he told her, "unless you are sure you want
+to.  Sometimes, you see, I understand things without any special
+explanation.  It's a trick one learns from living alone a lot with
+one's own thoughts.  I told you, last night, that I wouldn't have you
+saying 'I'm sorry' to me.  And now I'll tell you that nothing you can
+ever say, now, is going to stop me from----"
+
+"I want to, please," she interrupted him vehemently.  "I--have to!  And
+I'm not going to make believe that I don't know what you are going to
+tell me--what you have been saying to me, all morning.  But it can't do
+any good.  Why, I'm just realizing that something which has been
+hurting me for hours was just--just sorrow for you.  It can't do any
+good, oh, truly!  But will you let me talk first, if I promise to
+listen afterward?"
+
+He promised.
+
+"Twice I've been bitterly unkind to you," she began again.  "Once a
+long time ago--and--and once last night.  And on both occasions you had
+just tried to tell me, indirectly at least, that you cared, hadn't you?"
+
+"Indirectly?" he murmured.  "Was I as obscure as that?"  And then,
+whimsically: "Won't you call that explanation enough, and let me tell
+it to you again--so you can't misunderstand?"
+
+"I've asked you to forgive me the first offense," she hurriedly denied
+his appeal.  "And the second--Mr. O'Mara, last night Miriam said
+something to me, something that she wouldn't have said if she hadn't
+been half mad with fear.  It was unkind, unfair, but it made me wonder
+if, perhaps, you might not be thinking the same thing, too.  Years ago
+you told me I didn't think you good enough to--to be my knight.  My
+outburst was only childish temper that day, but did you think last
+night that I still underrated you?"
+
+Steve finally shook his head when she persisted in waiting for his
+answer.
+
+"You just have to finish now," he warned her, however.  "It was your
+own bargain.  I'm not going to tell you one single bit of what I think
+of you until it comes my turn!"
+
+She tried to laugh at his stubbornness, but she had trouble with this
+explanation, which grew more vexingly intricate and involved the
+further she went.
+
+"Then we'll say you didn't," she continued.  "I told you last night,
+less kindly than I might have, that I was engaged to Mr. Wickersham.
+And I've just confessed, too, that I didn't know a girl could care for
+any man as unutterably, as blindly and pridelessly, as Miriam cares for
+the man Garry is.  That is the truth.  For quite a long, long time it
+has been understood that I was to marry Mr. Wickersham.  I have always
+admired him--found him above petty things.  But, Mr. O'Mara, I have
+always been sure, for just as long a time, that the ability to care for
+anyone the--the way I think you believed last night I might care for
+you, was left out of me.  And so it wasn't you who awoke my contempt,
+even though I did turn it against you.  It was I, myself.  It was I,
+and not you, who was not 'good enough'!  For even if I am the kind of a
+girl who can't love anybody, very much, except, perhaps, herself, I
+should at least play fair.  Isn't--isn't that so?"
+
+Minute after minute passed while she sat plaiting the cloth
+tight-stretched over one knee.  Lips softly aquiver, she waited,
+earnest, eager that he understand from her explanation that which she
+did not yet understand at all herself.  Again she wished that he would
+turn; she wanted greatly to see whatever there might be behind his
+heavy silence.
+
+"Isn't it?" she faltered timidly.
+
+And yet, when his head did come around she found she couldn't face him.
+
+"Is it my turn now?" he asked.
+
+Her answer was barely audible.
+
+"If--if you have to--have it.  But I've told you how useless it is."
+
+"Would you mind looking at me, just a minute?" said Steve.
+
+The brown head drooped even lower over the restless fingers.  It shook,
+ever so faintly.
+
+"I'd rather not. . . .  I'm listening!"
+
+His laugh lilted recklessly in sheer joy at her refusal.
+
+"Then I'll have to tell you," he stated, "that I'm smiling in spite of
+the hopelessness.  I'm smiling, even though my throat is aching and my
+lips pretty dry.
+
+"You've just finished trying to argue my man's case from your woman's
+point of view--one of the hardest, least satisfactory things that could
+be attempted, no doubt.  And if it were possible, I know I'd be loving
+you right now even more than I did before, just because you've been so
+entirely unsuccessful at it.  Maybe I could straighten out a point or
+two that must have been not quite clear to you; maybe--but I don't want
+to argue back at you now.
+
+"You say my telling you all I must tell you can't help my case a little
+bit.  All right--we'll let it stand like that, for the moment.  And you
+say you are going to marry Mr. Wickersham.  All right again--but better
+prophets than either of us have made mistakes before now!  If he hadn't
+forced on me one condition which I would have liked to be different,
+I'd rather have had to mention no other man at all.  This isn't the way
+I'd have chosen to tell you how much I care.  I'd rather have told you,
+a little at a time, but there isn't time for that now.  So maybe it'll
+sound crude to you.  I've not rehearsed it with any other woman, you
+see.  And if it does sound that way it won't help me much, either, will
+it?  But you're going to believe what I say!
+
+"You started back a dozen years or so, in order to make your
+explanation clear.  I'm starting there myself, so I'll be sure you
+understand.  You've been grieving because you hurt me--hurt me twice.
+Will you stop now, if I tell you that I wouldn't exchange those
+two--shall we call them wounds--for all the kindnesses of all the other
+women in the world?  I did believe that you didn't think me good
+enough, that first time.  That was why I was cut deeper than you'll
+ever know, because I knew it was only the truth.  I admitted
+it--remember?  I admitted it when I said I was coming back.  Well, I'm
+back now--and I'm still not good enough, and not because I haven't
+tried to be, either.  I'm just not admitting any man alive could be
+that.  But I'm telling you, too, in the same breath, that the man who
+takes you will have to prove he's a whole lot better--before I stand
+aside!"
+
+For the first time since he had begun the girl moved.  Her head leaped
+back; she half lifted one hand in protest, but the very gladness in his
+face silenced her.
+
+"My turn," he reminded her quizzically.  "You made the bargain, you
+know.  You've just finished a rather involved bit of reasoning
+concerning the way other women love, a lot of which I'll have to
+confess I didn't attend as closely as I should have.  Perhaps that's
+because no man's method of caring has ever interested me a great deal,
+except my own.
+
+"I loved you when you were a little bit of a girl--because I loved you!
+And I love you that way now.  Your face was the first woman face I ever
+looked on--and--really--saw.  And since that first morning it's been
+with me--been with me a lot of times when I didn't have anything else
+to look up to.  I've been less hungry, for thought of you; less
+thirsty, when the road got pretty long at times.  I--I worshiped you,
+do you hear?  Why, I've prayed to you, dumbly, wordlessly, out of black
+bitterness, when it seemed that any other divinity must be too busy to
+give any heed to--to the ragged little tad I was.  Now do you think I
+haven't known what it was, long before this, to go on when there wasn't
+any hope?"
+
+He waited.  Her breath came in a long and quivering gasp.  And yet he
+did not realize that she was crying.
+
+"I--I don't think that I want to--listen any more," she faltered.
+
+His face went white at that--and then he was smiling again.
+
+"I told you I'd have chosen to tell you differently," the drawling
+gentleness was unaltered, "but I'll have to finish this way now.  There
+may not be many chances for me to speak, for I've come back to you
+almost too late.  And I don't want to hurt you; why, I'm going to keep
+the laughter in your eyes and heart as long as you live.  For I thought
+it would be a woman I'd find when I came back, and I've found you still
+all girl--all save in those moments when you've seemed half boy to me.
+And that is strange, too, isn't it--strange that I never knew how much
+I wanted you to be like that, until you taught me the wonder of it
+yourself?  My--eyes are stinging.  I don't talk quite plainly.  My
+throat is too tight for easy speech.  For it's just the old wonder of
+you, after all--just the same--reverence, isn't it?  I'll never let you
+grow up now.  You'll have to stay girl--Boy--all the rest of your life!
+I've learned to be fairly sure of myself, but I'm not asking to be sure
+of you yet.  I'd never want to be too sure of you unless all the rest
+of my whole world had come tumbling down.  And then--then I'd need to
+know always that I could stake my soul on your keeping faith.  I'd want
+to know that I could reach out and find your hand searching for mine in
+the dark.  Your face was the first, girl--it's been the only one.
+It'll be the last thing I'll see, the last moment there is sight in my
+eyes!"
+
+His slow, infinitely gentle voice stopped.  He sat head up, before her.
+And then her choking sob answered him through that blind silence.  He
+was on his feet then; he started forward, and remembered again.  And as
+if that slim-limbed, huddled little figure had been a boy indeed, he
+dropped one arm reassuringly over her bowed shoulders.
+
+"Pity, Barbara?" he asked quietly.  "Are you crying from pity?  Because
+if it's that--it--it beats me!"
+
+She shook her head vehemently.
+
+"I'm not crying because of anything," she sniffed.  "I'm just
+crying--that' all!"
+
+One hand went searching through pocket after pocket; one elbow came up
+to shield her eyes.  She slid from the tree-trunk and swayed
+unsteadily, and groped out and found his arm.  And it was the boy he
+had just tried to comfort who curled both hands tightly around his
+flannel sleeve and hid a wet face against his shoulder.
+
+"I--I'm sorry.  I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.  I shouldn't have let
+you start to tell me--I knew it all along.  But I'm not pitying--big
+Stephen O'Mara; it--it was just little Steve who made me cry, I think."
+Again that long, sobbing breath.  "Will you--will you--I can't find my
+handkerchief," she gasped.
+
+Long after they had remounted and turned their horses toward the south
+Barbara rode with head bowed, slim shoulders turned toward the man
+beside her, a shield for her averted face.  From time to time she
+dabbled furtively at her eyes with the big, crisp square of linen with
+which Steve had answered the wailed announcement of the loss of her own
+handkerchief.  Once or twice she caught her breath, unsteadily.  And
+yet in spite of the fact that the actual desire was furthest of all
+things from her heart at that instant, when she did finally grow
+curious at his long silence and turn to steal a sidelong glance at him,
+the utter gloom upon Steve's face awoke within her an irresistible
+impulse to mirth.
+
+It was partly hysterical, partly the sudden realization that he was not
+the only one who had, that morning, found much in his companion which
+was insistently boyish.  For until then she had not glimpsed this side
+of that grown-up spirit which, in the boy, had evinced more than once a
+confidence in self so serenely unshakable that it had bordered on
+doggedness at times.
+
+In those days it had always irritated her, and set her small fists to
+clenching in a childish antagonism.  More than once she had answered it
+with superior little, child-woman smiles which had sent him marching,
+white of face and lip, back through the hedge gap, never realizing
+herself that her own pique sprang from the belief that his promises of
+conquest dealt only with material things--splendidly visioned, most
+vaguely detailed conquests which set his eyes afire but seemed to hold
+no place for the feminine of her.  She had never understood that he,
+with quite masculine bindness [Transcriber's note: blindness?], had
+taken for granted her comprehension that each and every conquest was to
+be solely a glorification of her, any more than she understood now why
+his black discouragement awakened in her a sudden warmth as different
+from her old perversity as the pulse in her throat was painful.  And
+yet she couldn't stifle that impulse.  She giggled aloud.  And when he
+turned--when he wheeled and encountered her shining eyes, still wet and
+brimming above the screen of his own handkerchief, she sensed
+immediately that he was flushing as little, too-sensitive Steve had
+flushed years before, when she had laughed at him less kindly.
+
+The girl was not conscious of it; she had no actual realization yet of
+how very deeply her unwilling readjustment of fundamental values had,
+in the last twenty-four hours, undermined her hitherto unquestioning
+acceptance of those inbred standards which, to all her world save
+Miriam Burrell, were creed and code of conduct.  That morning she only
+knew she was unaccountably glad because there was no malice in her
+mirth; had she given it thought she would have insisted that, in her
+heart, there no longer lurked a ghost, ignoble or otherwise, of what
+had once been a childishly snobbish belief in her inherent superiority.
+And as suddenly as she had giggled she now laughed aloud at the
+expression she had surprised there on his face.  Again, for an instant,
+the very spontaneity of her swift changing mood gave the situation into
+her hands.
+
+"Please," she begged him mockingly, "please, I did have to laugh, a
+little.  I had to!  It just occurred to me, all in a breath, that
+perhaps there is another of us who--who hasn't entirely grown up.  You
+looked so morbidly disheartened.  And I know it won't sound logical,
+but all this time during which I supposed you were smiling upon my--my
+absurd tears with that benign surety of yours, it hurt--hurt like
+everything--just knowing that it was all so hopeless for you.  But now
+that I have seen that you do understand, do we have to be so gloomy any
+longer?  Are we going to be so tragic, every time we meet?  They tell
+me it is an admission of unformed, unbalanced youth, Mr. O'Mara.  And,
+whether that is so or not, I do know that it is a great strain upon my
+complexion."
+
+Momentarily her effrontery had given the situation into her hands--but
+only momentarily.  For even while she was speaking the corners of
+Steve's eyelids began to crinkle; before she had finished mocking at
+him in a voice that still caught unsteadily in her throat, it was her
+up-turned face which had grown pink under his gravely amused scrutiny.
+
+"Was it as bad as that?" he asked.  "I don't know that I mind the
+'benign' part so very much, but as for my 'surety'--well, now I must
+set you right.  I have seen men holding four aces sit with faces so sad
+and hopeless that they might have earned their fortunes as professional
+mourners, could their expressions have been rendered permanent.  I've
+seen men with straight flushes bow their heads in sorrow over the cards
+they held.  And I think the one beatific visage it has been my good
+luck to behold belonged to Fat Joe, one night when the rest of the
+table had raised his very feet out from under him.  He sat and beamed;
+he radiated good cheer--now and then he chuckled with positively
+insulting self-confidence, while he was pushing forward all the chips
+he owned . . . and he had two deuces and four spades to back it up!
+
+"You'll find that most men play that way--most men, I mean, who play
+for big stakes and play to win.  And so--but I've told you already that
+I'm going to put all my cards on the table, with you.  You're going to
+know, always, the hand I hold.  Why, I told you I wasn't sure, even a
+little bit.  I've been smiling just to make it easy for you to
+understand that I know how to lose, if it has to come to that.  And do
+you suppose I'd have let you weep into my handkerchief, if I'd been
+half way certain, even?  Do you?  Because I wouldn't.  I have a pair of
+arms and two shoulders that have been reserved for that
+purpose--reserved, oh, for years and years."
+
+Barbara had lifted the handkerchief again.  The explanation which Steve
+had begun in half-assumed soberness ended in drawling, unmistakable
+gravity.
+
+"Perhaps it wasn't a particularly good parallel to use," he went on,
+even more slowly, when she failed to answer.  "I only wanted to make
+you see--to have you know----"
+
+Her brown head flashed up then, radiantly eloquent of entire
+understanding.
+
+"It was a very good parallel," she defended spiritedly.  "I liked it
+immensely.  I was thinking that some day when I get involved with
+Miriam in a particularly erudite discussion, I'd employ it myself.  But
+just now the one point which interests me most is this.  Did--did Fat
+Joe win?"
+
+His single quick word that checked Ragtime brought her roan mount also
+to a standstill.  Lightly Steve swung out and took both her gloved
+hands in a grip that made her draw back a little.
+
+"If you weren't the _girl_ to whom I'd just told my love," he stated,
+"I'd be telling you, right now, that I like you best of all the _men_ I
+know!"  He sat and looked at her.  "And since I don't remember clearly
+whether I've said it already this morning, I'll chance repeating it.
+You're the one prettiest thing in all this world--and it's not an
+unhandsome world this morning, either."
+
+For a moment longer her mood lasted while she surveyed him with
+dark-eyed audacity, head poised on one side in that attitude of wholly
+happy intimacy with which he had seen her many times greet Caleb Hunter.
+
+"For a man who claims to be strictly an amateur," she murmured, "I can
+only reply--you do extremely well, sir!"
+
+And then, as if her words had rung too cheaply flippant in her own
+ears, she took both hands impetuously from his.  She started her horse
+abruptly.  And it was yards before he overtook her, rods before she
+dropped back to a walk.  Her face had become wistful in its earnestness.
+
+"That was pretty, and sincere, and--and like you," she mused.  "I
+wonder why my answer sounded not quite so innately fine?  Do you
+suppose it was because I've already become accustomed to meeting
+flippancy with flippancy?  For if that isn't the reason then how would
+you explain my--my persistent tendency toward frivolity with you?
+Because it exists, you know.  Truly it does!  If I yielded to the
+impulse that is always with me, I--I'd coquette with you,
+disgracefully.  Doesn't that--even surprise you?  Now you _are_
+laughing at me . . . why, you weren't listening at all!"
+
+His shamefacedness was an admission of guilt, but he shook his head in
+contradiction.
+
+"Not at you," he corrected her.  "I wasn't laughing very heartily, or
+very steadily, was I?  And I'm trying to listen; I am trying to pay
+attention to everything you say.  It just isn't an easy thing to do,
+that's all, when--when I'm looking at you, too.  But I promised you
+that you were always going to be sure of me.  Couldn't that be reason
+enough; can't we just say you'd sensed it, yourself, even without my
+telling you so?"
+
+She bobbed her head, most anxious for his gravity now that she was not
+sure whether it was real or not.
+
+"I knew that must be it," she argued seriously.  "I thought it must be,
+anyway.  I just feel safe with you.  And yet I don't want you ever to
+believe, either, that I am deliberately playing.  It's just--oh, in my
+heart I know that you haven't any more than those two deuces, and--and
+the deal is mine.  Do you understand what I'm trying to say?  They
+always say it in--in books, Mr. O'Mara.  They always agree to be the
+'best of friends,' and it reads so funny and flat.  But that is exactly
+what I am trying to put into words.  It couldn't be anything more,
+ever, and yet I want this friendship which is different from everything
+I've ever known before.  I like you very, very much.  Listen, and I'll
+make a confession, too!  I used to watch and hope you'd come back,
+after I'd sent you home, heart-sick, years ago.  Do you suppose we
+might say the--the 'best of friends' in real life, too, and not sound
+instantly absurd?"
+
+"We might try it out," he suggested.
+
+Then she was positive that his face was too stiffly sober, but she
+ignored it--ignored, too, the tinge of whimsicality in his voice.
+
+"If I weren't so sorry for you I might not be so sure; but I am sorry.
+If you weren't so dismayingly cheerful about it, I wouldn't feel so
+badly.  But I've begun to understand how very long you have been
+playing your cards and smiling over them, no matter what might be dealt
+you.  And that is some improvement over the girl I've been, isn't it?
+For I've never had to struggle very hard for anything I've wanted.  I
+want to be friends, but I'm not silly enough to think you won't tell me
+again that you--care.  I want to be friends, but not at the price of
+your heart-ache and disappointment, and--why, I wonder, do I get all
+tangled up when I try to explain myself to you?  It's just this: I'm
+not going to be unkind to little Steve any more, Mr. O'Mara, or--or big
+Steve, either.  But I--I want to see you sometimes, too, and--and I
+just won't let myself cry any more this morning!"
+
+Her voice had grown very small toward the end.  It trailed off into a
+stifled but unmistakable sniff.  And a moment later, when she ceased
+fumbling with the reins and glanced with resolute brightness up at him,
+the film of hot tears in his eyes brought her hands to her throat.  But
+even then in the face of that light which she had never before glimpsed
+in any man's eyes for her, she was conscious of his use of her
+name--vaguely conscious of how different it sounded on his lips.
+
+"Barbara," Steve faltered, "Barbara, you blessed child, you!"  And
+there, dumbly, he shook his head over his stumbling utterance and tried
+to laugh to cover it.  "Sorry?  Sorry for me?  Why, God bless you,
+girl, you refuse me whenever you want to--whenever you have to!  I'm
+not asking you to help.  And don't you suppose after last night I know
+how near to losing out I am?  I understand.  Why, you're going to get
+quite a few refusals ahead of me, no doubt, before--before I catch up
+with you!  But don't you waste one bit of worry on me.
+
+"It would be your telling me that you did care, and then telling me
+that you didn't, that would about break me.  I have to keep on asking
+you; I have to keep on trying, but you can tell me 'no chance'
+whenever, in your heart, you believe it to be the truth, and I'll take
+it smiling.  Just don't let it become mechanical, that's all I ask,
+will you?  And--and if some day after I've gone, you suddenly begin to
+wish, even the tiniest bit, that you hadn't made the last refusal
+quite--quite so final, you needn't let that worry you, either.  Because
+I'll be back!  You can know that I'll come back, next day--next
+month--next year--thirty miles or three hundred--oh, just to see if my
+chances haven't improved any!  That does make you smile, doesn't it?  I
+reckon experienced match-makers would tell me that that isn't the way
+for me to talk if I'm going to win out.  But it's the way I like best.
+I want you to know that there is one person you can be sure of, all the
+days of your life.  I began a dozen years ago--I've only started loving
+the whiteness of you."
+
+She rode with wide eyes fastened upon his now wholly smiling face; rode
+with lips parted, all else submerged in that wonder which quickened her
+breath.  Once she leaned toward him as if to speak, and then shook her
+head at the inadequacy of the words.  They topped the last rise in the
+dusty, winding road and raised the river basin and the town itself in
+that long period of silence.  There, once more, she checked the roan
+mare.
+
+"If women could care like that," she told him quietly.  "If I believed
+that I could ever----"  She shook her head with a sad little smile.
+"Since you have come home you've made me feel very insignificant and
+petty at times.  You've made me wish I might have been as--as wonderful
+as you say I am to you.  But I know, you see."  She lifted one slim arm
+toward the newer Morrison stretched out along the river front.  "Do you
+remember the first day you saw the village it used to be, that day when
+you first came down river?"
+
+Steve knew what she was going to say.  She read amused anticipation in
+his eyes and grew self-conscious at it.
+
+"I thought yours was a perfectly good parallel," she asserted stoutly.
+"And you'll have to admit that you did believe it was wonderful then.
+Uncle Cal has told me how breathlessly you called it the 'city.'  But
+is it as wonderful, now?  Hasn't familiarity with real bigness dimmed
+its wonder a little?"
+
+For the first time that day his attitude was frankly challenging.
+
+"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe!  And maybe I like it better than ever, for
+the others I've seen!"  He frowned and shook his head.  "I'm quite
+likely to stick to first conclusions," he finished, "and your inference
+is basically wrong.  I do not need to look at other women to make me
+surer of the wonder of you.  A man doesn't have to live in a desert all
+his life to know what thirst is, you know.  And it's not bad--not bad
+as cities go!"
+
+As they had begun the morning they now finished it, on a plane of
+thorough comradeship which years and years alone cannot achieve.
+
+"Not bad," she echoed throatily.  "Not bad, at all!  It's marvelous
+too, how towns and people and--and things in general can improve, once
+they awake to their own importance in the scheme of things, isn't it?"
+
+Quite on a mutual impulse they clasped hands and laughed into each
+other's eyes; quite unnecessarily it may have appeared to the small
+group on the veranda of the stucco and timber place halfway down the
+slope between them and town.  And there on the crest of the hill,
+suddenly conscious of those eyes, the girl drew back as swiftly as she
+had swung toward him.
+
+"What in the world will they think!" she breathed.  "I've been gone
+since daybreak, without saying a word that I was going.  And it must be
+noon by now.  Come--no, don't hurry!  It's too late to hurry now!"
+
+Her chin came up; the line of her lips lost its soft fullness.  It was
+his hot face which made her aware of how surely her imperiously quick
+orders had stung him.  Then she was back, knee to knee, at his side.
+
+"That wasn't fair," she said.  "That was most unfair, to me.  You
+didn't think, did you, that I----"
+
+His interruption surprised her.
+
+"If I shouldn't inquire," he asked, "will you please tell me so, and
+forget I asked the question?  May I know when you--you and Mr.
+Wickersham are to be----"
+
+Barbara's face went slowly crimson, flushed to the nape of her neck.
+
+"It's not a certainty yet, the date," she answered kindly.  "Just late
+in the spring, I think."
+
+He nodded.  Again she knew how wholly unreadable his eyes could be.
+
+"Late in the spring," he repeated, so softly that he might have been
+talking to himself.  "Late in the spring I'll have two time limits run
+out on me."
+
+Wickersham himself was coming across the lawn to meet them when they
+drew rein at the head of the driveway.  With a deliberation so
+proprietary that it set Barbara suddenly to gnawing her lip, he unbent
+his long legs and straightened from his place on the top step of the
+veranda; and even though the wicker chairs behind him were filled he
+stood forth quite alone, extremely tall and straight, perfectly poised
+and entirely immaculate.  And without one outward sign of animosity to
+give it ground, that other man sitting loose-thighed upon Ragtime's
+back knew that he was wondering where she had been--why she had chosen
+to go alone.  Without exhibiting a trace of it upon his long face,
+Wickersham still radiated a swift and chilling jealousy which, now that
+he saw it again, Stephen O'Mara knew had never been entirely absent
+from the face of the Archibald Wickersham he had known many years
+before.  Just as Miriam Burrell, with a studied deliberation that
+matched that of the tall figure ahead of her, in turn detached herself
+from the throng and came down the steps, Barbara's eyes raised to
+Steve's.  She did not stop to reason it; she couldn't have made it
+sound reasonable had she tried, but she did not want those two to meet
+again just then--those two whose boyhood quarrel had centered about
+herself.
+
+"Won't you keep Ragtime until you come back to Uncle Cal's to-night?"
+she asked.  "I've kept you loitering for hours and hours on the way.
+But it will save you a little time."
+
+And this time Steve understood.  He nodded in reply.
+
+"Not a chance?" he asked her quietly.  "Not a chance?"
+
+She was wheeling the roan.
+
+"Not a chance," she whispered.  "Not a chance in the world!  But
+we--Mr. Elliott promised to show us the works this afternoon," she
+added in the next breath.  "Can you--do you suppose you can come?"
+
+And then, as she turned the mare and went skimming up the drive toward
+the stable, she wondered why he laughed.
+
+In his turn Steve set Ragtime's head toward the town in the valley.
+And therefore he did not see that Archibald Wickersham was left
+standing alone a moment in the middle of the lawn.  But Miriam Burrell
+saw and understood the black rage that shadowed his face.  Long before
+then she had penetrated to the layer of vanity beneath his air of
+boredom.  More than once she had used that knowledge maliciously, to
+stir him.  And she knew how unending could be his hatred for anyone who
+had ever made him appear ridiculous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
+
+Stephen O'Mara found Hardwick Elliott lunching alone in the East Coast
+Company's main Morrison office, a big unpainted shack that stood half
+lost in a maze of high-piled ties, midway between the saw-mills at the
+river edge and the first snarled network of switches converging on one
+reddish streak of steel that lanced into the north.  With moodily
+indifferent interest Elliott scarcely more than glanced up at the
+horseman's approach across the open plot of raw earth, hard-packed to a
+cement-like surface by the endless passage and repassage of countless
+hob-nailed, heavy-booted feet, but with that first glance his forehead
+began to smooth a little.  His face had lost something of its hint of
+gauntness, even before his chief engineer had swung down from the
+saddle.  Elliott had been exhibiting scant appetite for the cold food
+half buried in the pile of papers on his desk top; and though he smiled
+his characteristically courteous, mildly abstracted greeting when Steve
+loomed in the doorway, his attitude was still very patently that of a
+man who attempts to conceal his own perplexities lest they compound
+those of another whose perplexities are already more than enough.  He
+rose and held out a finely tapered hand.
+
+"Now, this is fine," he exclaimed.  "This is really fine, Mr. O'Mara.
+Rather odd, too--coincidence and that sort of thing, I mean.  Because I
+was just this instant wondering whether I had better send for you or
+wait until you just happened down river again."
+
+In many ways the president of the East Coast Company reminded Steve of
+Caleb Hunter, even though there could be no two things more in contrast
+than the latter's calm and comfortable bigness and Elliott's thin and
+wiry and extremely nervous exterior.  It was a similarity due entirely
+to the innate honesty of both men--such honesty as makes of every
+attempt at dissimulation an assured non-success.  And Miss Sarah had
+never anticipated her brother's clumsiest finesse with greater ease
+than did Steve sense, that afternoon, the weight of worry behind his
+employer's first effort at jauntiness.  He nodded, hopefully, it seemed.
+
+"Something else gone wrong?" he asked.  "Or are you going to tell me
+that McLean is still having trouble with that curve of his."
+
+Elliott, too, shook his head, but his negative nod was less brisk, less
+hopeful.
+
+"No," he replied.  "No, we've got that laid, or at least practically
+so.  It's not anything so satisfyingly material that I wanted to talk
+about.  I wish it were, because--well, the fact is, now that you are
+here it appears I may have considerable trouble in making you believe
+that I'm not merely developing a most womanish case of nerves.  Cold
+feet, I suppose, might not be far from correct, if we put it in the
+proper gender.  No, it's not the work itself.  You know the first few
+miles at this end afford pretty plain sailing.  We figured on that: or
+we wouldn't stand any chance of finishing the job.  And we are quite
+nicely ahead of our schedule, so far.  But have you--I was wondering if
+you, by any chance, have noticed any signs of discontent in your own
+squad at Thirty Mile?"
+
+Elliott eased himself back into his chair at the finish of the
+question.  Repugnantly he jerked a thumb in silent invitation toward a
+plate of sandwiches.  It indicated most clearly the state of his
+appetite--that gesture--and Steve could not help but smile a little as
+he refused.
+
+"No more than the usual disturbances," he answered.  "I have more or
+less trouble holding them--some of them--over the week-ends, of course.
+But then that's always to be expected.  They aren't the sort of men
+that go to make up the general run of construction squads.  One of my
+main reasons for wanting them was the fact that they were rivermen,
+hardened to swamping and white-water work and that kind of thing.  In a
+pinch they're good for twenty-four hours a day, over stretches that
+would take the heart out of most gangs.  I don't know of anything that
+can beat a lumber-jack on a squeeze job, once you get him to realize
+that he's up against long odds.  It's this ten-hour-a-day thing and too
+much ready money every pay-day; it's a town too temptingly close that
+makes them a--a trifle temperamental, Mr. Elliott.  Is that what you
+mean?"
+
+Elliott pondered for a moment.
+
+"That entirely duplicates what McLean said just a day or so ago."  On
+any other lips Elliott's deliberate neatness of phrase might have
+sounded solemnly funny.  "Thoroughly logical, of course,--thoroughly
+possible.  And yet, somehow it doesn't fit the case.  We've had the
+usual Monday morning vacancies, right along, as you know; but the
+delinquents always turned up before the five o'clock whistle blew, or
+at least reported Tuesday morning.  But this is the end of the week and
+we're short right this minute very close to thirty men.  They aren't
+coming back, Mr. O'Mara; on the contrary, they continue to dribble
+away, a few every day.  And though they appear to do nothing but talk
+their time away in the saloons in the lower end of the town, they seem
+to have just as much money to spend, as they did when they were getting
+their time checks from us."
+
+Steve leaned over and with nice deliberation selected a sandwich.
+
+"What sort of talking?" he wanted to know, suddenly.
+
+Again Elliott smiled in self-deprecation.
+
+"That's just it," he exclaimed.  "Their talk leads nowhere.  I went
+down and attempted to find out what their grievance might be, but they
+close up like clams whenever I come within earshot.  They stare at the
+ceiling, rub their chins, and laugh when there's nothing to laugh at.
+This morning, however, I finally convinced McLean that something was
+radically wrong.  So he took one of them who had just decided to quit
+and pinned him up against the embankment--but you know McLean and his
+methods!  He shoved his jaw up within an inch of the other's nose and
+invited him to talk, and--well, he found out enough to make him begin
+to worry, too.  Somebody's been talking to them, Mr. O'Mara; somebody
+has put the fool notion into their heads that this strip of railroad
+will mean the end of all lumber operations in this country--the
+old-time river drives, of course.  And some of them are beginning to
+believe--whoever was responsible for that statement.
+
+"You know and I know how absurd it is.  We know that this road will
+mean work for every riverman in this section, as often as he wants to
+work.  But it isn't going to help us any if they can't see it that way.
+It isn't going to replace the men who quit.  I've been deliberating one
+point.  Don't you suppose we might import a regular squad of
+construction men now, before it's too late?"
+
+"It's too late now," Steve told him, his words none the less final for
+all that they were absently quiet.  "It was too late the day we began
+operations.  And yesterday at this time I wouldn't have given much
+worry to this particular brand of trouble.  They're an odd lot; they're
+the hardest working, hardest living crowd of big men that ever failed
+entirely to grow up."  Steve stopped and looked down at the sandwich
+untouched in his hand, much as though he were surprised to find it
+there.  "But since yesterday--since yesterday--who, did you say, was
+responsible for that statement, as you call it?"
+
+"I didn't say." Elliott brushed away a persistent bluebottle fly, a
+lonesome survivor which the unseasonably warm day had reawakened.  The
+insect's droning wings as it persisted again and again back to the
+sandwich plate made the only sound in that big, bare room.  "And if
+I--if I had to guess----"  The hand passed across his eyes now.
+"O'Mara, do you know how deeply Mr. Ainnesley and myself are involved
+in this prospect?"
+
+After a long search the engineer of the East Coast Company had finally
+located his pipe.
+
+"I don't believe I have ever given it much actual thought," he said.
+"I never viewed it as any of my affair.  But I haven't forgotten the
+last time we talked the plans over, that you couldn't go into it to
+lose."
+
+Punctiliously Elliott proffered a lighted match for the other's filled
+pipe; he lighted a long and thin and very black cigar for himself.
+Steve noted then for the first time that the man's hand was shaking a
+little.
+
+"Of course," the latter answered quickly.  "Of course--of course!"  He
+seemed groping for a fresh beginning, then gave up suddenly all attempt
+at circuity and blurted it out much as though he had lived with the
+thought too long to endure it longer alone.
+
+"I'm in up to my last dollar," he stated.  "And Ainnesley--why,
+Ainnesley wouldn't have a roof over his head if we failed in our
+obligations!  You must know as well as I do why the banking interests
+took our paper to those amounts which made it possible for us to drive
+the first spike."
+
+When he failed to go on Steve understood that the last sentence had
+been a question.
+
+"Mr. Allison, I suppose."  His voice became utterly impersonal.
+"Without doubt you mean Mr. Allison?"
+
+"They would have laughed at us," the older man came back instantly.
+"And what is more, they did!  They wouldn't touch the proposition,
+until Allison came in with us.  And then--but you know what Dexter
+Allison has done already in this country.  I don't know what he started
+with.  I do know that all that Ainnesley and I had scraped up between
+us looked like a shoe-string to him.
+
+"We couldn't move until he, of his own accord, expressed his enthusiasm
+for the plan and asked for a share in the holdings.  You know, perhaps,
+how he can laugh, too.  Well, he laughed that way and confessed that we
+had just beaten him to it.  He said it would tap a gold mine--this
+'strip of steel,' as he called it.  He even told us that he'd parallel
+our road with a competitor, jokingly to be sure, if we hadn't tied up
+the only available and practicable right of way.
+
+"He came in.  He opened up, merely through his own name and all there
+is behind it, loan possibilities for which we might have struggled
+uselessly the rest of our lives without his help.  Between us Mr.
+Ainnesley and I just managed to hold the balance of stock control
+and--and that's how deep we are in, Mr. O'Mara."
+
+Both men sat and smoked, each avoiding, elaborately, the other's eyes.
+After a long pause, Elliott cleared his throat, laboriously.
+
+"This morning," he continued slowly, "this morning I am in receipt of a
+communication from Mr. Ainnesley himself, advising me that another
+right of way has been applied for, for a single track road here in the
+north.  The gossip which chanced to come his way was rather obscure.
+Little could be learned about the whole affair save that it was being
+put forward with a view to tapping the ore and timber lands all the way
+to and beyond the border.  But as nearly as he could ascertain the
+southern terminus of such a road would seem to be about--about at the
+mouth of that valley southernmost in the Reserve Company's timber
+holdings.  Rather a remarkable choice for a railroad terminus, Mr.
+O'Mara--wouldn't you say so?"
+
+Steve leaned toward him.
+
+"Do you mean that they've thrown out your earlier application for just
+such a grant?"
+
+"That would be a rather harshly definite way of putting it," Elliott
+smiled wryly.  "Ours is apparently just tabled--oh, tabled pending
+certain immaterial changes in the form!  You asked me a moment ago--or
+did I offer to guess who might be responsible for the report which is
+costing us our men?  I wonder if I need to tell you who controls this
+new northern route?"
+
+"Maybe you've been telling me," Steve came back coolly.  "You have
+already mentioned----"
+
+"Wickersham!" Hardwick Elliott corrected.  "Wickersham--that is,
+through allied interests which he represents or controls.  O'Mara, I
+doubt if I would even insinuate this to anyone else; I haven't even
+intimated it to Ainnesley as yet.  Wickersham is reputed to represent
+huge moneyed foreign interests.  But have you ever stopped to wonder
+whether he might not represent big local interests as well?"
+
+The tanned face opposite him was so gravely blank that Elliott once
+more laughed nervously, deprecatingly.
+
+"Doubt of any man's loyalty such as that query would imply is not one
+of my characteristics.  I would rather have left this thing unattempted
+than to have undertaken it in partnership with any man whom I felt I
+had to watch.  But I just thought that I'd better put it all on the
+table for you to consider.  I'd like to ask you--what do you think?"
+
+The man in blue flannel and corduroy tapped the sodden heel from his
+pipe and loaded it afresh.
+
+"Yesterday," he answered, "yesterday--Well I couldn't guarantee just
+what I might have thought, twenty-four hours back.  But doesn't one
+fact remain unchanged still, no matter what we think?  Suppose we admit
+that some one else does want this stretch of track we're laying?
+Suppose somebody is figuring on picking it up cheap, at a bankruptcy
+price, if we forfeit to the Reserve Company?  You know yourself that
+you would never have begun it simply for the profit there will be in
+moving the Reserve logs and the millions on millions of feet of lumber
+both to the east and west, which can't be touched at anything but a
+prohibitive figure, without this road.  We were going through to the
+border, too.  And if some one else is betting that we don't; if some
+one else is betting that we can't yank a trainload of logs down to this
+end of the line, before the first of May, that doesn't alter our case
+any, does it?  Even though we suspect that some man is playing us to
+lose, do we have to know exactly who he is?"
+
+Slowly but very surely the older man's face began to smooth.
+
+"Once or twice," he stated, "I've thought to anticipate you, perhaps
+because I have it on you a little, as they say, in the matter of years.
+I'm not going to attempt it any more.  For I thought that this
+conversation would be at least a surprise to you.  You sit there and
+take it very quietly, for a man who has been badly startled."
+
+"Fat Joe has been preaching it for a month."  Oddly enough, Stephen
+O'Mara chose that point at which to laugh, softly.  "And I, for a
+month, have been ridiculing him.  That's one of Fat Joe's pet
+diversions, you know.  When all other excitement fails Joe invariably
+falls back upon an imagination too totally vivid to be wasted on
+technical things.  I laughed at him, until last night.  Do you--but of
+course you know Garry Devereau?" he finished.
+
+"Knew his father," Elliott answered succinctly.  "Know him well!  Good
+blood--good brains--big hearts!  Why?"
+
+And then, for the second time that day, Steve related the salient
+points of that episode which had opened with the trio of owls along the
+trail and ended with the first gray streaks of returning day.  During
+the recital the expressions which chased across Elliot's face were as
+varied as they were full of concern.
+
+"Then I wasn't merely hysterical, was I?" he brooded after Steve had
+finished.  "Who--who did you say you thought might be behind the man
+who would have had your plans, had it not been for Mr. Devereau?"
+
+"I didn't say," replied Steve, and for the first time since his
+entrance there was mirth in the unison of their laughter.
+
+"It all brings us back to the point from which we started," the younger
+man went on when they were grave again.  "It's a plain enough issue, so
+far as we are concerned.  We've got to be at the mouth of that lower
+valley by May.  We're going to be!  And as I see it, wasting time and
+energy in--shall we call it sleuthing, Mr. Elliott?--won't help us
+much.  We thought that lack of time and the general nature of this
+country were going to be handicap enough.  But now your money is in and
+I--I never did like to be beaten.  Can't we let it stand like that, at
+least until some one else makes a plainer move?  We know the cards we
+hold.  If others care to sit in, perhaps we'll all come to a show-down,
+next spring at Thirty Mile.  It'll be easy enough to explain just how
+we did it.  Alibis based on veiled opposition wouldn't interest the
+Reserve people much, if we left their timber there to rot. . . .  And
+I'm trying not to overlook any bets, Mr. Elliott."
+
+Hastily the iron-gray man thrust his hat back from his forehead.  He
+came to his feet and crossed and clapped one hand upon Steve's shoulder.
+
+"Next May!" he barked.  "O'Mara, I'm glad you came down this morning.
+I've been carrying a lot of those ideas around in my head until they
+had become nightmarish.  But I'm through now.  You won't hear me croak
+again.  I staked what I had on you, months ago; I'd do it again this
+minute.  What's the odds, after all, who it is that's playing us to
+lose.  It's only the fact that somebody may be fighting us that needs
+to occupy our attention.  I'm done worrying, do you hear?  But what
+about those men who are quitting us?  You are sure it would be unwise
+to import labor?  It's cheaper, you know."
+
+Steve, too, had risen.
+
+"We'd have the prettiest kind of a scrap on our hands, the first day we
+tried to use them," he explained.  "It would be dear enough before we
+got through.  I guess I'd better run right out and have a talk with
+McLean.  He knows these men even better than I do, and I'm almost one
+of them, you know.  And I'll get a line on some of these delinquents
+who are crying calamity for the countryside.  I'd better, because we'll
+need them.  They simply haven't become thoroughly interested yet,
+that's all.  It will take something to jolt them; something to set them
+on fire.  And then--then just watch my plaid-shirted boys go!  They'll
+eat up your sledge-swingers!"
+
+Something of that promised fire was reflected now in Hardwick Elliott's
+eyes.
+
+"By Gad," he exclaimed, "by Gad, if it wasn't for Ainnesley I'd say the
+thing was worth it, win or lose, just for the game itself.  You go
+ahead and see McLean.  I'll be out there later, myself.  I promised
+Allison that I'd show the works to some of the young folks up there on
+the hill.  His daughter--but I keep forgetting that you've known her
+longer than I have.  There's quite a party of them.  She announced her
+engagement to Mr. Wickersham last night, I believe.  Heard that this
+morning--was too busy to go up last night myself.  Maybe you'll find
+time to help me play the host."
+
+Steve turned toward the door.
+
+"So I heard," he replied, without facing around.  "I'll try to be on
+hand."
+
+He stood for another instant on the threshold.
+
+"I'm going to ask you to see that my horse is fed and watered," he
+requested evenly.  "And I reckon you'd better eat your own lunch,
+yourself."
+
+But the man behind him had already anticipated that suggestion.
+Through a generous bite of sandwich he made answer.
+
+"I'll see that he is taken care of," he called cheerfully.  "See you
+later, Mr. O'Mara----  Pshaw, the coffee's cold!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THAT WOODS-RAT
+
+Between Dexter Allison's monopoly of his time and the persistence with
+which Miriam Burrell clung to Stephen O'Mara, Barbara Allison had
+opportunity for little more than a perfunctory word or two of greeting
+that afternoon, during the first hour or two that followed a jolting
+ride on the flat car which trundled them to the head of operations.
+Almost as soon as her feet touched the ground Miriam's eager survey
+singled out a tall figure at the edge of the farthest embankment; and
+in spite of the fact that he was at the moment in sober conversation
+with white-haired, white-bearded McLean, she crossed instantly to take
+possession of both Steve's arms and his undivided attention.  Barbara,
+at Wickersham's side, glancing now and then in their direction, knew
+well what subject was engrossing them to the exclusion of all else.
+But Allison's acceptance of that arrangement as time passed grew less
+patient.
+
+For a time he was content to stroll along with the rest--content with
+his facetious comments on Elliott's explanation of this matter or that.
+Yet whenever his eyes strayed toward Miriam and that other figure whom
+a week or two before he had designated as "my man, O'Mara," his
+jovialty faltered a little, his manner grew restive.  After a time he,
+too, detached himself and sauntered in the direction of that wholly
+preoccupied pair.
+
+"See here, my lady," he accosted the girl, who turned extremely bright
+eyes upon his approach.  "This won't do at all.  How do you suppose I
+am going to get a minute with Mr. O'Mara, here, if you persist in
+clinging to his elbow?  You'll have to run along--you run over and
+listen, with the rest, to Elliott's heroic tale of this scarring of the
+face of nature.  I've waited a good many days to talk business with Mr.
+O'Mara; I'm not going to lose him, now I've got him cornered."
+
+Had Dexter Allison been less occupied with other thoughts, the face
+which Miriam Burrell turned toward him would have surprised him, if
+only because of the unusual color burning in her cheeks.  At that he
+was vaguely aware that he had never before seen that quiet,
+self-contained girl so pulsingly happy.  She stood and gazed at him a
+moment, then made him a low and mocking obeisance.
+
+"Don't flatter yourself that I haven't noted your covetous glances,"
+she flashed.  "I've been talking very fast, because I knew this
+interruption was coming.  But we've finished, thank you, so I'll leave
+you to--to bore him now!"
+
+She turned back toward O'Mara.  "And thank you," she murmured not very
+audibly.  "Thank you, more than I ever thanked anybody before in my
+life.  You've made me very, very happy."
+
+No one could have missed the depth of real thankfulness in those last
+words.  Even Allison stood astonished at it, mouth open, following her
+rapid withdrawal toward the group fifty yards away.
+
+"Huh-h-h," he snorted.  "Huh-h-h.  A mighty strange girl!"  And then,
+as abruptly as he had interrupted their low conversation, "Well, how
+does it go, Chief?  How does it look to you, as far as you've gone?"
+
+No man's good humor could be more infectious than was that of this big,
+noisily garbed man.  Steve smiled and met his cordiality more than half
+way.
+
+"Not too bad," he answered.  "Not too bad."  He swept the ground before
+them with a short gesture.  "You aren't beginning to worry, too, are
+you?"
+
+"Worry?"  Allison's frown was barely perceptible.  "Why should I?  I
+never let anything worry me.  Who is beginning to fret?  You aren't,
+are you?  You don't look--much disturbed."
+
+"Not a particle!"  Steve still smiled.  "I never do either, unless that
+there is something worth while to make me.  I just thought perhaps you
+might have contracted it from Mr. Elliott.  He's been bothered, you
+see, by the way some of the men are acting.  We're short a lot of labor
+this week."
+
+The big man wheeled and squinted at the droves of men sweating under
+the unseasonably hot sun; he peered keenly at each clump of laborers,
+some of them scarcely distinguishable knots of humanity in the distance.
+
+"Not very short," he stated comfortably.  "I don't claim to be a wholly
+competent judge, but it looks to me as though they would be in one
+another's way if there were any more of them.  What's wrong?"
+
+The chief engineer's answer was drawling in its deliberation.
+
+"I wish I knew," he replied.  "I wish I could be positive.  And there
+aren't too many of them; they are altogether too few.  We're going to
+need them, and more, too, before we finish, Mr. Allison.  Perhaps I'd
+better figure on--perhaps if they continue to quit on us, by twos and
+threes, as they have in the last week--I'll have to----"
+
+His pause seemed almost an invitation that the other suggest a remedy;
+and whether it was or not Dexter Allison was quick to seize the
+opening.  His suggested solution was heartily bluff.
+
+"Import some more," he said.  "When you've employed these men as long
+as I have--the type of man who has worked all his life on the
+river--you'll know as well as I do just how uncertain and unreliable
+they are.  What you need is a gang that doesn't want to think for
+itself.  This crowd has too much imagination for a grind like this."
+
+Steve nodded very thoughtfully.
+
+"If it is all imagination," he wondered.  "But they're not merely
+discontented, you see, Mr. Allison.  They--they are misleading
+themselves.  They seem to think, from what I've gathered from McLean
+and a few with whom I have talked, that they are working themselves out
+of a job for good, when they help to build this strip of railroad.
+They think so--they have been convinced that such is the truth.
+Personally, however, I feel sure that between us, we can correct that
+impression."
+
+Even though he was looking in the direction of a heavy smoke-cloud that
+had followed a sharp blast to the north of them, Steve felt the weight
+of Allison's questioning glance.
+
+"We," he echoed.  "Where do I figure in it?"
+
+The younger man's upward glance was seemingly surprised.
+
+"You?  Why, you're a stockholder.  It means as much to you as it does
+to Mr. Ainnesley and Mr. Elliott."
+
+Allison interrupted him.
+
+"Of course," he exclaimed.  "Surely!  I see!  What I mean was how in
+the world can I make them understand that such a fool idea is all
+wrong?  So far as this constructive work is concerned, I'm not an
+active member.  I--I had that understood with Elliott when I went into
+this thing!"
+
+"Of course," Steve in turn broke in.  "I understand that.  But they
+know you; they know that Morrison would be nothing more than a street
+of well-kept lawns and cow-pastures, if you hadn't seen its
+possibilities.  And so I've already told some of them, Mr. Allison;
+I've gone even further, and given a lot of them my word that you'll
+guarantee, yourself, that this is the biggest thing for the good of
+this section that has yet happened."
+
+The speaker smiled frankly into the bigger man's eyes.
+
+"And that was all they needed, was it?" Allison queried, at length.
+"That fixed it, did it?"
+
+"Absolutely!"  Steve's cheeriness should have been infectious.
+"Absolutely, Mr. Allison.  A lot of people have come to look on your
+word as law in this country, you know--a lot of them!"
+
+"Hum-m-m," replied Allison.  "Hum-m-m."
+
+Both of them were quiet for a time.  Steve's next remark brought
+Allison's head up sharply.
+
+"I meant to bring some of my estimates and plans down with me, when I
+came," he told him.  "You spoke of wanting to run over the whole
+proposition with me, you'll remember, the first day you arrived."
+
+Allison nodded shortly.
+
+"I remember."
+
+"I'll bring them, next trip," Steve finished.  "I came so near to
+losing them last night that I'm taking no chances until they're in
+duplicate.  We can run over them later?"
+
+Allison wheeled and gazed meditatingly toward the group who were slowly
+moving their way.  His daughter Barbara, with Wickersham at her side,
+was in the lead.
+
+"Any time," he agreed.  "There's no particular hurry."
+
+And then a moment later, just when she was beginning to wonder whether
+he was purposely avoiding her, Barbara was surprised at the calm ease
+with which Steve took her away from her tall escort.  She had noticed
+that Wickersham and Steve had not touched hands when they first met, an
+hour or two before, nor even hinted at such a salute.  But now, as
+earlier in the day when her dash toward the stables had left him
+standing rigid in the middle of the lawn, she failed to see the
+expression that settled upon Wickersham's long face.  It was Dexter
+Allison this time who noticed it, and hours later, when he and
+Wickersham sat and faced each other in the downstairs room in the house
+on the hill, which served as Allison's office, he remembered and
+recognized it.
+
+"You wanted to talk with me?" Wickersham inquired as he entered the
+room that evening.
+
+Somehow Wickersham's unending politeness had always irritated Allison.
+That night his smoothly infectionless question nettled him.
+
+"Your damned fool, Harrigan, bungled last night!" he blurted out.  "He
+messed things up, beautifully.  He not only failed, but he failed to
+get away without being seen.  That's what comes of entrusting a job
+like that to a drunken sot."
+
+Wickersham seated himself--sat and caressed a cigarette.  Coolly he
+waited and blinked his eyelids.
+
+"My man?" he murmured.  "My man?"
+
+"Ours then," Allison corrected sharply.  "Ours."  Then he seemed to
+recollect himself and his voice became less abrupt.  "Listen.  This
+afternoon I had a talk with O'Mara.  That is, I started to have a talk
+with him, but--but he beat me to it.  And in just about three minutes
+he told me that he'd caught Harrigan on the job--not mentioning any
+names, I don't mean--but he didn't need to, And he told me more than
+that.  He as good as gave me to understand that he'd know where to
+place the blame, if there was any more interference with his men."
+
+Wickersham crossed a long leg and blew a thin blue streamer of smoke.
+
+"Yes?" he intoned bodilessly.
+
+It brought a blaze to Allison's eyes--that nerveless monosyllable.
+
+"That doesn't interest you, eh?" he snapped.  "Doesn't interest you at
+all!  Well, it does me.  Three months ago I bought into this affair
+because I was as sure as any man could be that I'd collect a hundred
+per cent on my money, next spring.  Elliott and Ainnesley?  Pah!--Nice
+gentle old ladies, when it comes to a game like this.  They're
+anachronists; they are honest business men, twenty years behind the
+times.  You've heard of taking candy from children.  Well, that's what
+it looked like then.  But it doesn't look that way any longer.  Talk
+with you?  Yes, I did want to talk.  I wanted to tell you that if you'd
+like to switch I'm willing, right now.  I wanted to tell you that if
+you'd rather be a good little boy and get into line, I'm willing and
+more than willing.  Because I can promise you, since I talked it over
+with O'Mara this afternoon, that we haven't any nice, dead-sure thing
+on our hands any longer.
+
+"Oh, you can sit there and smile your cold-blooded smile!  And if you
+think I'm experiencing pangs of conscience you're mistaken.  All I
+have, I got from other men who--who weren't strong enough to hang on to
+it.  There isn't any friendship in business--or if there is I never
+played it that way.  I'm just telling you that now is our one
+opportunity, if we want to join hands and hurrah with the rest of them
+for the completion of this job by next May.  We lose a railroad at a
+bargain, perhaps, but we've still got a mighty good right-of-way to the
+border, that will insure our welcome in the ranks.  Maybe we lose
+and--and maybe--well, I never did like to be beaten!  Nor do I say that
+such an argument will have any weight with you, but it's a chance to be
+on the dead level, for once.  What do you say?  Do we switch?"
+
+Then Allison remembered the expression which had flitted over
+Wickersham's face when Stephen O'Mara coolly appropriated Barbara.  But
+that expression had been a totally gentle thing beside the pale fury
+which now slowly overspread his features.  Wickersham twisted the
+cigarette to fragments--flung them from him, and the very gesture was
+vicious.
+
+"Switch," he snarled.  And he leaned forward, face bloodless, and beat
+upon a chair arm.  "Switch now!"  He laughed shrilly.  "Why, I'm going
+to beat that damned woods-rat in his matinee-idol costume so bad
+between now and next May that he'll be walking the roads for his next
+job.  Switch?  I'm going to brand him as the worst incompetent that
+ever dragged two poor fools down into pauperism.  I'll see him broke.
+I'll wipe that damned smooth smile from his lips, by God, if I have
+to----"
+
+Wickersham gasped; he came to his feet panting all in an instant with
+the rage that set his dry lips writhing.  But at that point he, too,
+remembered himself.  He swallowed and faced Allison, and the latter,
+sitting pop-eyed before his outbreak, gaped now at the change that came
+back over that twisted face.  Wickersham smiled.  Once more his bearing
+was the very essence of perfect poise and self-control.
+
+"If you--if you are afraid----" he inferred.  "If you----"
+
+Allison's laugh was big and booming, for all that the astonishment had
+not yet left his eyes.
+
+"Cold feet," he rumbled.  "Cold feet!  Me!"  And suddenly his gust of
+mirthless laughter made petty the other's insolence.  "Wickersham, I've
+broken better crooks than you'll ever be.  A man has to have a big
+heart to be a big crook and you--and you--well, sometimes I wonder
+whether there wasn't some sort of an oversight in that line, when they
+put you together."
+
+He couldn't have explained why the thought came to him at that moment
+any more than he understood his swiftly malicious impulse to use it;
+but all in a flash there came back to him a recollection of that day
+when he and Caleb had burst through the hedge to find the boy, Stephen
+O'Mara, pummeling a bigger prostrate boy who shrieked under the earnest
+thoroughness of that pummeling.  Allison, too, rose to his feet.
+
+"I only wanted to give you a chance," he stated dryly.  "I reckon I can
+take care of myself.  I always could.  And you--well, you know as well
+as I do what sort of a scrap that--that woods-rat can put up, or you
+ought to.  He gave you a sort of a demonstration, once, if I remember
+correctly.  I stick!  I never was overly squeamish.  But don't fool
+yourself, Archie, don't fool yourself.  If we light, we're fighting
+with a regular guy, your insinuation to the contrary.  I merely wanted
+you to realize what I know now.  We'll think we've been in a battle
+before we come to a finish!"
+
+His hand was on the door knob when the door itself flashed open.
+Dexter Allison's daughter hesitated, surprised, on the threshold.  Her
+eyes, brilliantly alight, leaped from her father's face to that of the
+man half toward her and back again.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed uncertainly, "I didn't know you were busy.  I saw
+the light.  I'd been over to Uncle Cal's, just for a minute.  I wanted
+to tell you--good night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THIS LITERARY THING
+
+It was dark, the night of that second day, when Stephen O'Mara came
+quietly up to the open door of his own lighted shack and stopped for a
+moment to gaze in at the two men whose faces were touched by the glow
+of the lamp on the table.  There had been more than one moment in those
+forty-eight hours which had elapsed since he had lifted that
+black-robed, inert figure from the floor in which Steve had wondered
+whether Garry Devereau would even await his return to Thirty-Mile; more
+than once he had smiled whimsically to himself, during the trip back
+up-river, over the scene which he was certain would meet his eyes, had
+Garry chosen to wait.
+
+But there were no poker chips in front of Fat Joe that night.  Round
+face propped upon one hand, the latter was staring motionless at a
+thick pad of yellow paper flat before his eyes.  And Garry himself was
+sitting with his back toward the light, staring as motionlessly into
+the cold fireplace.  Merely from their attitudes, Steve knew that they
+had been a long time silent; he knew that Fat Joe would have been
+making conversation, no matter how desperately footless it might have
+been, had he been conscious of the quality of the other's moody quiet.
+And then, as he was himself about to go forward, barely in time to
+check the word of greeting on his lips, Joe lifted pensive eyes to the
+other's back.  When Joe spoke his words were none too plain; he was
+gnawing a pencil tip in most evident perplexity.
+
+"Say," he broke that heavy silence, "say, Garry, how do you spell
+reconciliation?"
+
+Immediately the man outside in the dark decided not to announce himself
+just yet.  And much of his own puzzlement was mirrored in the worn face
+which Garry turned toward his questioner.
+
+"Reconciliation?" Garry repeated blankly.  "What in thunder----"
+
+"Of course I'd ought to be able to handle it," Joe cut in blandly
+apologetic.  "I just dismember whether it goes with a 'c' or a 'k.'"
+
+Garry tried not to grin; but outside in the dark Steve allowed his
+appreciation to spread and spread across his face.
+
+"With a 'c,'" the man before the fireplace told him soberly.  "Are
+you--what are you doing, Joe, making out reports?"
+
+With much care Joe transcribed it upon the virgin sheet before him;
+with a painful precision that brought the tip of his tongue beyond one
+corner of his lips, he rounded out the letters to his complete
+satisfaction.
+
+"No," his answer was mumbled in his abstraction.  "No, I ain't writing
+a report.  I'm--I'm just beginning my novel."
+
+Steve heard Garry gasp; he saw a gleam of pleased anticipation flash
+into his eyes, and knew instantly at what degree of friendship those
+two had already arrived.
+
+"Will you--will you please say that again, Joe?" Garry begged him, very
+earnestly.  "I wasn't paying attention.  I'm afraid I was thinking of
+something else too hard to hear you correctly."
+
+Joe's smile as he looked up had in it all of that quality which at
+times made it almost seraphic.  His answer seemed irrelevant at first.
+
+"I wonder if you know that Cecile person who works down to that big
+plaster house at Morrison--Allison's place on the hill?" he inquired.
+
+"Dexter Allison's?"  Garry thought a moment.  "Why, you must mean Miss
+Allison's little French maid, don't you, Joe?  Yes, I know who she is,
+if she's the one.  But what has she to do with it?"
+
+Joe laid down his pencil and set himself to be frankly explanatory.
+
+"Well, it's like this," he stated.  "She and I, now--we've got more or
+less acquainted in the last week or two, so to speak.  And that ain't
+bad progress when you figure out that she can't understand more'n a
+dozen or two of all the words I speak to her, and as for me--well, when
+she gets to talking back it just makes me dizzy, that's all.  But we're
+pretty good friends, when you consider that handicap.  The thing that
+really bothers me is that the only folks she seemed to have been real
+neighborly with, back in Paree--that's the way you say it, ain't
+it?--was mostly sculptors and painters and writers, and such lot.  So
+that would let me out of the running, right at the start, you see.
+
+"I figured I didn't class at all, at first, because about the best
+thing I can say for myself is that there ain't a man on the river who
+ever rode white water better.  I'm mostly a lumber jack, coming or
+going, whichever way you take me, although I've punched cattle and
+placer mined for variety.  But to-night--to-night since you been
+setting there quiet--I got to thinking, too.  She's a real nice girl.
+We get along fine together.  And I kind of think we would, anyhow, even
+if we could understand each other better.  I got to thinking to-night
+that maybe I'd better not quit cold, just yet.  Now--I can't sculp, and
+somehow I never was strong for them guys who sit straddle of a little
+chair and paint cows and posies and things on a strip of muslin hooked
+over a frame.  But, say, I've seen lots of writers who didn't look a
+whole lot more intelligent than me!  I--I just got to thinking,
+to-night, that I'd take a fall out of this literary thing!"
+
+Steve always held it to his friend's credit that he did not laugh.
+Indeed, Garry's soberness at that moment was almost woebegone.
+
+"I see, Joe," he answered.  "Not a bad idea.  May I ask what your
+story--your novel is to deal with?"
+
+"Deal with?  What do you mean?"
+
+"Why, they always deal with some problem, Joe," Garry squared around.
+"They always attack the rottenness of the rich, or sob over the
+rottenness of the poor.  They always expound the crime of divorce, or
+attack the error of matrimony.  Now which of----"
+
+"Then I ain't dealing with nothing," stated Joe.  "What I'm figurin' on
+doing is a regular love story.  I thought maybe I'd have a nice young
+chap who--who's building a railroad or something, fall in love with a
+real nice girl who's the daughter of a fat man who's a crook.  I mean
+the fat man's the crook, not the daughter.  And--and----"
+
+"And then what?" asked Garry Devereau.
+
+Fat Joe, unlike the man outside, did not notice that a new note,
+dangerously hard and wickedly edged with ridicule, had replaced the
+amusement in Garry's voice.  He grew a little more enthusiastic.
+
+"Well, that's as far as I've got, right up to now," he admitted with an
+explosive sigh.  "But it looks like a good enough beginning, at that.
+All I got to do now is run 'em through three or four hundred pages,
+with him a-talkin' to her and her a-talkin' at him.  All I got to do,
+accordin' to all the books I've ever read, is see that it don't all
+come too easy for him, and still turns out all right.  I expect I'll
+run 'em into a clinch with another guy standin' around eatin' his heart
+out with jealousy.  It'll serve him right; he's just that mean sort,
+you know.  Oh, I'll just marry 'em, along toward the end of the last
+chapter, and that'll kind of close it up."
+
+Stephen O'Mara had been watching Joe's face while the latter talked,
+and therefore he was no more prepared than was Joe himself for the
+burst of harsh laughter that came from Garry's lips.  It seemed utterly
+illogical that all actual humor should so swiftly fade from that
+situation with the first really audible expression of mirth.  Steve
+himself believed it was only simulated, until his eyes swung to Garry's
+face.  But he knew then what thoughts had been with Garret Devereau,
+all evening, before he had come up unheard to the door.
+
+"Why, you poor simple scholar of nature!"  The wan-faced one's lips
+curled.  "You're years behind your day!  If you submitted such a screed
+to a publisher now, he'd think you'd written a history of archaic
+American types."
+
+He stopped to sneer.
+
+"Listen," he went on.  "Listen, and I'll give you a plot, gratis,
+which, if you handle it right, will make you, overnight!  Take your
+girl--a nice girl, to be sure, sweet and unsophisticated and--and
+childishly innocent, Joe, and--and well, you'll have to describe her,
+first, won't you?  Let's dress her up, then--dress her up in an evening
+confection that leaves little to the imagination in front and--and
+ground for amazement in back.  That's a fair starter.  If you care to
+be analytical you can insist that the reason she dresses like that
+is--oh, just because she's so innocent that she doesn't know any
+better, eh!
+
+"All right!  That establishes her very well.  And then we can do just
+what you planned to do with your dear lady.  We'll run her through
+three or four hundred pages, but with just a trifling change or two.
+Every chapter or so I'd leave her, Joe, in a situation that ends with a
+gasp--no pause even for a caramel!  Three or four hundred pages, and
+then, if you have to marry her off why, let's be honest about it--no?
+Marry her off to the sort of a chap whom you'd man-handle to a pulp,
+Joe, if he came near--say a sister of yours.  A nice, white-skinned,
+red-lipped, sweet, innocent sort of a little girl, Joe--and--and that
+finish will keep her true to type!"
+
+At the beginning Fat Joe had been all eager attention.  His face became
+heavy with amazement long before Garry's hard voice was still.
+
+"But--but that ain't the kind of a yarn I'm figurin' on," he argued,
+his high voice faint but dogged.  "This ain't going to be any of that
+tabasco stuff.  Nope, I like it better the way I've got it planned.
+It--it leaves a better taste in your mouth, too."
+
+Again Garry laughed, to himself it seemed, this time.
+
+"Have your own way," he muttered.  "But if you're going to stick to it
+you'd better label it a romance!  Because there's only one kind of a
+woman, Joe, in reality.  Just the kind who's killed what used to be a
+demand for decent men."
+
+And then, outside in the dark, Stephen O'Mara forgot how sick the other
+man had been.  He was across the threshold in a single stride, and Fat
+Joe came lightly to his feet as he saw his chief's set face that night.
+It wiped, the smile from Garry's lips, too.  Squarely in front of the
+latter Steve halted and spoke with monotonous lack of haste.
+
+"You're going to tell me that you didn't mean that, Garry," he said
+quietly.  "For I'm going to marry one of those women myself."
+
+Garret Devereau's face had been white.  It went whiter now.  He too
+came squarely to his feet, his body stiff but very frail in the
+oversize garments from Steve's wardrobe which he was wearing.  He stood
+and stared emptily into his friend's eyes until something close akin to
+dreary defiance rose and marked his numbed comprehension.
+
+"What I said," he answered as quietly, "I'd alter for no man.  My
+opinions are my own."
+
+He turned and passed outside.
+
+For longer than he realized Steve stood gazing down into the burnt-out
+fireplace, until another thought, swifter even than the impulse that
+had lifted him across the threshold and thrust him into speech which,
+already, he would have given much to recall, whirled him around again.
+There was a light in the near end of the storehouse building just above
+his own cabin, and as he hurried toward it he knew Fat Joe must have
+fitted it up for the third man's quarters.  He knocked at the door, and
+when there came no response, unbidden he lifted the latch and entered.
+
+Garry was sitting on the edge of his blanketed bunk--sitting with
+shoulders slumped forward and head bowed low.  He did not look up, for
+he had not heard Steve's entrance.  He was pondering over the cylinder
+of a heavy, blued revolver, spinning beneath his transparent fingers.
+But Steve's first inarticulate effort at speech brought his head
+around.  Garry smiled up at him--a smile reminiscent of his rare smile
+of years before.
+
+"I didn't mean anything, Steve," he said in a hushed voice.  "I'm
+damned sorry I spoke as I did.  You see--you see, I just didn't know it
+would hit you, that's all."
+
+Again Steve swallowed.  Dumbly he pointed at the gun.
+
+"What are you doing with that?" he demanded hoarsely.
+
+Garry's eyes dropped.  He stared at the revolver in his hand in mild
+perplexity, much as though he, too, were surprised to find it there.
+
+"Why, nothing--nothing.  I often take a notion to--to look at it like
+this."
+
+Then his face went crimson.
+
+"You've heard the news, I see."  He tried to hide the bitterness behind
+the words, but one lip corner twitched and quivered.  "They posted you
+in advance, did they?  But you did not believe I was as bad as that,
+did you?  You didn't think, did you, Steve, that I--I'd go out leaving
+you to blame yourself even a little bit?"
+
+His question was curiously wistful--wistful and as unsteady as the hand
+which now proffered that blunt-barreled, huge-bore gun.
+
+"Here, you take it, if--if you'll sleep the sounder.  And don't you
+worry over me.  I'll see you in the morning, Steve."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A GIRL LIKE HER
+
+Save for a short and casual "see you in the morning, Garry," Stephen
+O'Mara turned without a word that night and left the improvised
+sleeping-quarters in the storehouse shack.  It was a man's
+leave-taking, short to abruptness, so badly stereotyped that it denied
+utterly any consciousness of threatened, reckless tragedy and cordially
+intimate only because in all man-to-man speech there is less and less
+of actual sincerity in a multiplicity of words.  But he might have
+talked till daylight and still have failed to register the binding
+acceptance of Garry's promise, which his silence, unaided, achieved.
+
+Soundlessly, unemotionally, Steve closed the door on that figure on the
+bunk edge which, suddenly slack of limb and shoulder, had averted its
+face.  But then, there in the darkness, with the gun swinging heavily
+between loose fingers, he hesitated in his very first step back from
+the threshold.  And twice, head bowed in indecision, he halted in his
+slow progress from that door to the lighted one of his own cabin which
+framed Fat Joe's immobile form--halted each time as though he would
+return--and each time went slowly forward again.  Fat Joe's eyes barely
+flitted over Steve's face that night; they clung in a fixed, pale blue
+stare of fear to the weapon in his hand.  And long after Steve had
+drawn up a chair next the one which Garry had vacated and fallen to
+filling his pipe, he stood, shifting from foot to foot in awkward,
+uncomfortable silence.  He crossed after a time and slipped into the
+empty seat.  His tongue was as haltingly guilty as his face was pink
+with shame when he began to speak.
+
+"Steve," he stammered, "Say, Steve, I--I didn't know I was going to
+start anything like that when I begun talking my ideas of art and
+literature and such like.  I didn't see where it was leading us to--not
+for a minute.  Why, Steve, every blessed hour of the days and nights
+since you've been away, I've been dodgin' every topic of conversation I
+thought might hit him hard.  I'm just several assorted kinds of
+fool--and you followed him that quick and quiet!"  The apology was
+tinged with pride.  "I just didn't think----  But ain't he got a poor
+opinion of women folks, though?  Was it--a close decision?"
+
+Steve shook his head; he smiled and the returning surety in his face
+did much to clear Joe's features.
+
+"No," Steve answered, "not very.  Somehow I know already that I needn't
+have followed at all, so far as that contingency was concerned.  And it
+was my fault, Joe, not yours.  I should have told you exactly how such
+things stood in Garry's mind--would have, if I had had the time.  His
+opinion of women isn't very high.  And it's odd, too, isn't it, that
+both the very highest and very lowest of such opinions are always held
+by men who base them upon what they have been taught by one woman
+alone.  Tell me, Joe, what's happened?  How have you and Garry hit it
+off, since I went down river? . . .  Trouble?"
+
+The fat man's eager denial was still self-consciously defensive.
+
+"Not a bit!" he stated.  "Not one little wrangle, even.  Of course I
+was expectin' it.  I've watched 'em come around too many times not to
+know how they can cuss a man cold one minute, and then make him plumb
+ashamed of mankind in general, with beggin' and pleadin'.  I just beat
+him to it the morning he woke up; I told him what he could have, and
+what he couldn't, and he took it calmly enough.  He just set there,
+pretty blue and shaky, and not quite clear in his head, and smiled that
+slow grin of his that's hardly any smile at all.
+
+"I don't mean that he didn't swear!  O my--O my!  It's nice, ain't
+it, to have the gift of ease and eloquence in speech?  He made me
+feel sort of amateurish and inadequate--me!  But he didn't beg.
+Not--one--peep--out--of--him!  He told me what he thought of me just as
+polite and cool as could be and let it go at that.  He said he guessed
+I was boss, for a while at least, and asked for chopped fine!"  Fat Joe
+hesitated.  His color grew higher again.  "After what's just happened,"
+he added, "I'm almost ashamed to mention it, but--but ain't this friend
+of yours one of them chaps they call 'thoroughbreds' in novels?"
+
+Steve flashed a glance at that earnest face.  For a moment he had
+forgotten the first glimpse he had caught of Joe that evening, bent
+double over the block of yellow paper--a glimpse which still seemed
+funny and yet not very funny either.
+
+"He comes of a very old family," he replied.  "Old as they are reckoned
+in this country."  And his answer held a question.
+
+Joe shook his head.
+
+"That ain't quite what I mean.  I've seen lots of the younger sons of
+them old families.  I've run into them in Yokohoma and Buenos Ayres;
+I've met up with them along the Yukon and down on the Mexican border.
+They're scattered all around, out through the Panhandle, ridin' calico
+ponies, with jingly spurs and more than a bushel of doo-dads on the
+saddle.  They all come from old families, and I suppose after all it
+was a blessing that they had that much in their favor.  Because if most
+of them hadn't had a family tree to lean up against at times, they
+never could have kept their feet at all."
+
+"No, that wasn't what I meant, Steve.  I figured he was kind of a
+regular chap--the hero guy that's too hot proud to bat an eye, you
+know, even when he's--well, I just can't get it straight in words, but
+this is what I'm driving at.  The first night after you had gone he was
+settin' right here where I'm settin' now, looking quiet into the fire.
+I didn't ask him what was on his mind, not because I've learned not to
+go trackin' across other men's mental preserves, but simply because I
+didn't even have to guess more than once.  He's a nice lookin' boy,
+ain't he?  Sort of fine cut and tight built, and clean and decent
+looking.  I'd been thinkin' of that, too; thinkin' he didn't look like
+the others I've seen drop off so sudden it left me gasping.  Nor like
+them who went over so screamin' mad it left my palms wet and clammy
+from hangin' on to myself while they were going.  He looked different,
+settin' here and staring into the fire, and hell burning inside him,
+and saying nothing.  I sort of got to figurin' over him about
+then--sort of begun to wonder, even before I hunted up a deck of cards.
+
+"Oh, you can smile if you want to, but you'll have to admit, just the
+same, that it's helped you stay sane once or twice yourself, figurin'
+whether or not I had an ace in the hole.  Lonesomeness like what we've
+both seen ain't so very different from what he was fightin' at that
+very moment--not if the thing you're lonesome for and the thing you're
+thirsty for are things you know you can't have.
+
+"I invited him to set in for a bit of intellectual pastime; I had to
+invite him twice, but he smiled then and agreed just as though he was
+glad to.  And then, careless and off-hand, I asked him would he care to
+name the stakes.
+
+"He waited quite a while before he answered me.  You know how quiet it
+can be here in the timber, Steve, when it starts out to be quiet.
+Well, I could just feel the silence right here in this room.  And then
+he laughed!  It wasn't hardly any sound at all he made, and yet it
+might have been a blast, it hit me that sudden.  I don't like that kind
+of laughter.
+
+"'Stakes?' he says after me, just as precise as could be.  'Why,
+surely!  I should be happy to back my play, but I'm afraid that my
+present supply of cash would hardly stand a very heavy drain.'
+
+"He didn't have to explain even that much.  Right along I'd been
+certain enough that he didn't have a copper with him.  I'd put his
+watch away where he couldn't find it and--and maybe swap it with one of
+the hands for a half a pint.  But I let on to be thinkin' for a while,
+until I brightened up as if the idea just hit me.
+
+"It wasn't exactly fair, I'll admit.  It wasn't what either of us would
+call a straight play, but--but--oh, I'd been watching him, just as I've
+told you.  I knew he would about pay his soul for the drink that was
+due him in fifteen or twenty minutes; he was eyein' the bottle on the
+shelf right that minute.  But I'd never seen a man's face give the lie
+to his spirit, either, the way his did, if he was the kind that would
+quit cold.
+
+"'Cash ain't no consideration with me,' I told him, generous enough.
+'But, personally, I've reached that degree of excellence where I can't
+play the game just for the sake of the technique of it any more.  It's
+a quarter to nine,' says I, 'and in just fifteen minutes you get your
+gill of Three Star.  Now, how much--how much, figurin' on the present
+state of supply and demand--would you reckon that drink appeals to you,
+in dollars and cents, U. S. A.?"
+
+"Steve, you know he wasn't too steady.  His hands were shaking--oh,
+you've seen 'em, too.  But there he sits and looks back across the
+table at me, monkeyin' with a stack of chips, and giving me smile for
+smile.
+
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink,' he murmured, 'I wouldn't sell it
+for . . . well'--and he licked his lips that were dry as leather.
+
+"That was enough!  I knew as well as he did how much he wanted it, but
+I was kind of disappointed, too.  I'd been hopin'--I thought
+maybe--Say, don't you just naturally hate to have your judgment of
+human nature miss the whole blamed target, just when you think you've
+scored a bulls-eye?  I do.  It hurts my self-confidence; makes me
+wonder if I ain't growin' careless of details.  And then, right there,
+I found out how close I'd come, and shootin' off-hand at that, mind
+you!  Right there he gave me my next lesson.  The nice, gentle way he
+cussed me out, that morning, was the first.  Maybe he'd read the
+disappointment in my face, because he laughed again, not quite so
+sudden this time.
+
+"'I wouldn't sell that drink for any price,' he repeats.  'But when it
+resolves itself to a gamble, I suppose, Joe, no gentleman should refuse
+the issue.  If I understand you correctly, if cash is no consideration,
+then suppose we say that one drink against the rest of the bottle, chip
+for chip and stack for stack.  Your confidence is not entirely
+reassuring to me, and yet perhaps I should tell you beforehand that
+I've always thought I could play this game half way well myself.'"
+
+Fat Joe rose and crossed to the table for a match.
+
+"Now wasn't that meeting me half way?" he continued, when he was seated
+again.  "Wasn't it neatly done?  Why, for a moment I was most ashamed
+to go through with it.  I wouldn't have, only he sat there, smilin' so
+easy and confident.  But we played.  We played until daylight came
+around.  And accordin' to the way he scored it, just before we went
+down to the works in the morning, he didn't have a drink comin' to him
+for the next forty-eight hours!  I play a real involved and scientific
+game, Steve--but that ain't what I'm drivin' at.  When we'd got
+done--when we'd finished--I tried to make him take the glass that had
+been comin' to him at nine.  And he needed it, don't doubt that.  He
+needed it and could have had it, for I made it just as easy as anybody
+could. . . .  Steve, he ain't had a drink since that first night.  That
+was what I meant when I spoke about him being what they call a
+thoroughbred."
+
+They sat for a time in silence after Joe had finished.
+
+"Pride!" Stephen O'Mara exploded softly.  "Pride!  And Garry thinks his
+is dead; he thinks he has killed it himself.  But it was there on his
+face to-night, too, laughing up at me, Joe, just as it did at
+you--laughing at me, all amused at itself, out of that crooked smile of
+his.  And it'll never die.  It'll live as long as he does!"
+
+He looked down at the gun on his knee.
+
+"That's all, Joe?"
+
+Fat Joe cleared his throat.
+
+"I--I gave him a job the next morning," lamely.  "We seemed to be
+getting along together fine so I----  Shucks, I was just afraid to have
+him go!  That's the flat truth of it.  And you told me to keep him, if
+I could.  So I set him to checking up the stock in the storeroom and
+put him on keepin' time for the squad up here.  He's drawin' eighteen a
+week, Steve.  Was that all right?  You were figurin' on keeping him
+here?"
+
+And then Joe Morgan saw Steve's eyes light up.  He saw a swift
+something flash out from within, which, once or twice before in the
+years of their friendship, had set his face to burning.
+
+"Joe," Steve exclaimed, "you're right about that matter of family
+trees.  I know a man right now who doesn't have to go back one minute
+in his pedigree to prove that he's a gentleman.  I've left some tough
+propositions for you to solve, Joe.  Lots of times, when I couldn't see
+the way out, I've put it up to you.  If I merely say 'thanks, Joe,' and
+let it go at that, do you think it will do?"
+
+"Suits me!" Joe's jauntiness was large.  "And it goes double on the
+rebound.  But how--how do you suppose any woman ever came to set a--boy
+like that to slipping?  Or why didn't he sit down where it was quiet
+and figure it all out for himself?  One bad guess don't make the whole
+world wrong.  And say, wouldn't it be lucky, though, if he could meet a
+real nice girl about now?"
+
+Steve leaned back and gave way to rare and subdued laughter.  It was
+much as though he did not want the sound to penetrate to that dark end
+room in the shack beyond.  And then he was quickly sober-faced again.
+
+"I think he is going to, Joe.  I think I may promise that he is likely
+to, very, very soon.  And it will make a difference--a mighty big
+difference for Garry.  For, if you don't mind my mentioning the matter
+again, in spite of the preachments of many of your novelists to the
+contrary, it's just about as Garry has argued it to be.  Most men are
+just as fine--just as decent--as women demand they shall be."
+
+He lifted the revolver and tossed it negligently across the room.  It
+struck with a thud in the middle of his own bunk.
+
+"Where did he get that six-shooter?  It looks like one of yours?"
+
+"It is," said Joe.  "Nothing gaudy nor ornamental, but a right handy
+thing.  And, there!  That's another error I made, ain't it?  I reckon
+it's going to be difficult for me to get used to the idea of any man
+being a dangerous enemy to himself.  I gave it to him the first day he
+went to work."
+
+Joe's eyes traveled across to the object under discussion.
+
+"Harrigan came back before you did," his explanation seemed to veer to
+another quarter.  "He was most punctual, I'd say, wouldn't you?  He
+came in tuned up real melodious on the last load with Big Louie.  He
+sung big-voiced that night; he's been talkin' big-voiced since, I'm led
+to understand."  Again that mental shift.  "Gun-play always did seem
+awful foolish to me--to talk about!  When men start to advertisin'
+trouble to come, by word o' mouth, it never does worry me particularly.
+I just gave your friend the gun to keep around handy, if he should
+happen to need it.  Did you know he could make the ace of spades look
+shopworn and weary at thirty paces with one of those toys?  Well, he
+can."
+
+Steve smiled.
+
+"You're not totin' one of them yourself, yet, I see?" he remarked
+lazily.
+
+Fat Joe spat in vast contempt.  He clenched one pudgy hand and sat
+watching the knuckles pale, iron-hard, beneath the seeming softness.
+
+"Are you?" he countered.
+
+This time Steve's laughter was soundless.
+
+"Scarcely!  We're going to hear some of them yap lots louder than they
+do now, before the winter is over.  But you might give that one back to
+Garry in the morning.  And, as for the rest of it, I suppose we'll be
+quite likely to forget, won't we, Joe, that either of us has so much as
+seen or thought of a gun to-night?"
+
+Both of them had risen.  Joe puckered his lips.
+
+"Forget it?  How can we," he demanded, "when we don't even know
+anything to forget!  Why, as I reckon it, we'll both get up in the
+morning and regard it as a dream just too foolish even to bother to
+relate."
+
+Their eyes held for a moment, before Steve turned again toward the
+door.  And perhaps his manner was a little too unconcerned that
+evening, a little too carefully careless, for almost before he had
+lifted the latch Fat Joe stepped forward, one quick, protesting step,
+and then stopped on second thought.
+
+"You ain't goin'----" he began, and suffered that spoken protest also
+to remain uncompleted.
+
+"It's not late," Steve's voice was thoughtful.  "It's not late, but
+it's surely very quiet."  He stood gazing out into the gloom.  "Maybe
+I'd best run down and see what ails our soloist to-night.  Somehow, the
+more I've thought about it, the more I've come to fear that he is
+temperamental, Joe--too temperamental, for such a wearing proposition
+as this one is likely to be.  And you haven't slept much since I've
+been gone.  Oh, that was easy, just from your eyes!  So you'd better
+turn in.  I'll just stroll down and let them know that I'm back home."
+
+It is odd how much of finality there can be in the quietest of
+statements.  Eyes narrowed, Joe stood in the middle of the floor and
+watched him depart without further objection.  But the moment the
+blackness had swallowed him up he backed to the bunk, fumbled for the
+gun which Steve had tossed upon the blankets, and followed out into the
+dark.
+
+Stephen O'Mara stood a long time outside the door of the men's
+bunkhouse that night, fingers upon the latch, before he made any move
+to enter.  But neither a wish to eavesdrop nor a desire to frame,
+experimentally, the words he meant to speak was the reason behind that
+pause.  It was in itself a new thing to find the long, low building
+lighted at that hour, even though, as he had himself put it to Joe an
+instant before, it was hours from being late.  That night the almost
+absolute silence beyond the closed door was an even more unusual state
+of affairs.  The voice of one man only was audible; the words he spoke
+indistinguishable altogether.  But sudden bursts of laughter,
+punctuating the recital which he could not clearly follow, were
+indication enough to the man outside of what manner of tale was holding
+the ears of that roomful of rivermen.  Stephen O'Mara, who had long
+ceased to wonder at the discovery in them, of new and impulsive
+finenesses which bordered close upon inherent nobility, knew fully as
+well how utterly and unspeakably gross could be the premeditated
+coarseness of those same men.
+
+There was no movement to mark his entrance when he finally pressed the
+latch and swung the door open; not so much as a single glance to
+indicate that his presence was noted.  Under the yellow light of
+flickering oil lamps the eyes of all those scores of gaudy-shirted
+figures lounging against the walls were fixed eagerly upon the face of
+him who held the middle of their stage--him who talked from where he
+half-lay, propped on one elbow, in his bunk at the end of the room.
+Harrigan, red-shirted, red-headed, was lounging at case, waiting for
+the last gurgle of appreciation to subside, before he gave them the
+close of the story--the last titbit, the savor of which already had set
+him noisily to licking his lips.  And in the doorway Steve, rigid of a
+sudden, sensed what that climax was to be.
+
+"--Her fi-an-say inside," the droningly indistinguishable words were
+very plain now, "her fi-an-say inside, consoomed with pr-ride and
+anticipation, tellin' all who had come to dance that she had pr-romised
+to be his, for-river more!  And her, at that same minute outside with
+him--and both av thim. . . ."
+
+Harrigan did not hurry it in the telling.  And if his portrayal of
+Archibald Wickersham was unmistakably deliberate, neither did he fail
+for want of sufficient detail, to make the other picture clear.  Vilely
+he gave them the complete imagery of his vile brain.
+
+A shout went up, a louder, hoarser outcry of applause which rocked the
+room.  And then that rigid figure in the doorway had started forward.
+Between those lanes of suddenly silent men Steve passed in silence, to
+stand before him who had achieved his climax a breath before.  And at
+his coming Harrigan slid from the bunk, started to reach within the
+blanket pack at the head of what had been his bed, and then thought
+better of such impulse.  Bravado intermingled with blank surprise, he
+came haltingly to his feet.  The voices of few men have been as
+unhurriedly deadly as was that of him who Harrigan that night.
+
+"That was wise, Harrigan," Steve told him slowly--far too gently.
+"That was wise to let your knife lie safe within your pack.  For if
+you'd touched it, I'd have killed you--as I ought to kill you now.  But
+you're drunk, Harrigan!  You were drunk a minute ago when you lied your
+lie. . . .  You're soberer now.  You're sober enough to start again and
+tell me you're a liar!"
+
+They waited--the roomful of rivermen.  Nothing stirred save the clouds
+of filmy blue smoke floating against the rafters--that and a bulky blot
+of shadow outside which shifted a little, noiselessly, just beyond the
+patch of light that streamed through the door.  They waited,
+heavy-breathed, while Harrigan began to recover from the disconcertment
+into which O'Mara's coming had flung him.  Slowly the former's lips
+twisted into a mocking leer; mockery rose and swam with the hatred in
+his inflamed eyes.  He would have spoken, sparring for time, when
+Steve's hand leapt in and made of the joking effort only a rattle in
+his throat.  Beneath the stiff red stubble the flesh was livid where
+those fingers had been, when he was able to draw breath again.
+
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke," he gasped, and gulped and swallowed hard.
+"'Twas only a bit av a joke I was tellin' the bhoys, about seein' you
+an'----"
+
+Steve's voice bit in and cut him short.
+
+"Your turkey's ready, Harrigan!"  He pointed at the pack toward which
+the other had groped and then thought better of the impulse.  "You were
+going, of your own accord, I see.  Well, I'm telling you to go, now!
+The door's open; I left it so for you, when I came in.  And I'm telling
+you too, before you leave, that you'll do well not to come back.
+There's not room for both of us on this river any more, Harrigan!"
+
+The riverman's eyes shifted.  Furtively they flitted from face to face
+in those rows of faces at the walls.  But whatever he thought or hoped
+to find--fleeting flash of support or encouragement--was hidden behind
+a common mask of astonishment as blank as had been his own.  They were
+waiting for his answer; he knew they were waiting for that as he
+crossed to the door.  And when he paused there, to turn in sudden
+savagery, he realized that his tardiness had robbed him of his chance.
+It was too late to talk back then.
+
+"You're tellin' me," he rasped out, "and I was going--sur-re!  But
+things ar-re not yet finished between you and me.  For I'm pr-romisin'
+you that I'll be back; I'm pr-romisin' you I'll be wid ye again.  I'll
+be wid ye again, come spring!"
+
+He disappeared.  And hard upon his going Steve wheeled and fronted
+those scores of silent men.  His eyes leaped from point to point, as
+Harrigan's had craftily flitted.  Briefly, crisply, he accompanied the
+sweeping survey with a voice that was loud enough for all of them to
+hear.
+
+"Big Louie! . . .  Fallon! . . .  Shayne!  This is your chance to say
+so, if you're going to be lonesome, now that your song-bird has flown.
+Speak up!  I came down tonight just to hear you talk."
+
+Nothing but an indistinguishable murmur answered him, a low growl that
+was neither argument nor evasion.  For those hottest partisans, whose
+names had been called aloud, knew with Harrigan's going toward whom the
+chill finger had been pointed, even though Death had entered and
+stalked through their ranks and slipped back out at the door almost
+before they realised its nearness.
+
+Rebellion was still a long way ahead for most of them.  They had not
+yet had time to talk themselves to the pitch of open revolt.  They had
+merely begun to listen to Harrigan whose disciples in dissatisfaction
+they were.  And now, in his absence, they stirred uncomfortably under
+the gaze of him who remained; they dropped their heads and searched for
+matches.  But Steve felt the weight of unspoken thoughts when he, too,
+faced back in the doorway.  This time there was no naming of names; he
+embraced the whole room when he spoke.
+
+"They tell me, boys," he said, "that there's talk among you of no more
+work on the river when we've put this railroad through.  I've heard it
+said that some of you think you are cutting the ground out from under
+your feet with every shovelful of earth you lift.  You ought to know
+better than that; you ought to know for yourselves that there'll be
+need for more men in these woods than there has ever been before.  But
+if you don't; if you can't see it that way, why not come around and let
+me have a fair chance to talk things over with you, myself, before you
+decide to turn on this job?  I want you to remember that a man who is a
+liar in one thing is mighty likely to talk loose-tongued, no matter
+what he preaches."
+
+And there, without lifting his eyes from the floor, Big Louie cleared
+his throat and made answer.
+
+"Maybe," he retorted.  "Maybe.  And maybe not so sure, either!  I have
+listened to big words before now, me, that have put no food under my
+belt, no coat to my back."
+
+Steve's smile was unruffled and kind.  No matter what the hidden
+verdict of the rest of that room might be, he had known already that
+Big Louie was past saving.  For there were not so many like him among
+those hills but what the type was instantly recognizable, wherever it
+was encountered.  He had the frame of a giant--Big Louie--the splendid
+legacy of generations of men who had lived out of doors.  But there was
+no depth in his seal-brown eyes which always seemed to brood; no
+decision in any move of his ponderous body.  He had little chin; he had
+no name, save Big Louie which his size alone had sired.  And Steve was
+very patient in making answer.
+
+"If it's only food and shelter, and clothes for your back, Big Louie,
+you'll not have to worry.  But I'm not promising either, mind, that
+there'll be easy money to blow on white whiskey.  Were you expecting
+any?"
+
+That brain which could cope with but one idea at a time was fertile
+ground for seed which such a one as Harrigan might sow.  Big Louie
+failed to reply.  He sat quiet, deep in thought when Stephen O'Mara
+closed the door noiselessly behind him.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was minutes after Steve had gone back up the hill before Garry
+Devereau reached out a hand in the darkness and touched,
+experimentally, what had seemed to be only a shapeless black blotch at
+the edge of light, a rod or two from the door.  And instantly at his
+touch the shadow was galvanized into life.  It reared and plunged and
+enveloped the slighter man in a crushing embrace and bore him over
+backward.  With the muzzle of a revolver chafing his ear Garry managed
+to worry his head high enough to free his mouth and nostrils from dirt.
+
+"Get off me!  Get off me, you fat romancer, you!" he whispered fiercely.
+
+An explosive grunt of dismay answered him, before Fat Joe let him rise.
+In a thin and profane tenor he was bidden to explain his presence there.
+
+"I couldn't sleep," Garry replied, his voice still peevish, "so I came
+out for a breath of air.  I saw him start this way--saw you following
+him with that gun in your hand.  I just slipped over, too, in case
+there might be doings.  What's the row, Joe?"
+
+Joe took him ungently by the elbow, turned him about and started him up
+the rise.
+
+"An old grudge," he deigned an ungracious explanation.  "It's years and
+years old.  Steve licked him once.  Once when they were boys the folks
+that live down next to Allison's dressed Steve up like a picture-book,
+the nearest I can make out, and sent him to town a-shoppin'.  Harrigan,
+he----"
+
+"I know!  I remember!"  Garry's eager whisper interrupted.  "That is, I
+didn't know that Harrigan was one of the mob Steve whipped that day.
+But that wasn't what I meant.  Who was the--the girl Harrigan was
+talking about, when Steve--when Steve----"
+
+Joe's fingers tightened a little as the other evinced a tendency to lag.
+
+"Hurry a bit, will you?" he urged complainingly.
+
+"Show a little speed!  I'm supposed to be up there asleep."  And then,
+gruffly: "It was the Allison girl, of course."
+
+In spite of the hand upon his elbow Garrett Devereau stopped short in
+his tracks.
+
+"Barbara!" he stammered.  "Barbara Allison?  Joe, was that the girl he
+meant to-night, when he said he was going to 'marry one of those women
+himself?'"
+
+Joe peered at him, trying to make out the expression upon his face.
+
+"Why not?" he wanted to know.  "Why not?  Ain't he good enough for her?"
+
+There came a pause--then Garry's stunned rejoinder.
+
+"Good enough!" he repeated senselessly.   "Good enough?"  He laughed
+half wildly, as though he had suddenly hit upon a very funny thought
+indeed.  "That man in love with a girl like her. . . .  Good Lord!"
+
+And Fat Joe, who had failed to understand, swore again beneath his
+breath because there was no time left in which to argue the matter.
+His face was still very red from his struggle for self-restraint, and
+his whole mental balance so disturbed that he forgot entirely to
+conceal the blued revolver dangling in one hand when he re-entered the
+cabin a moment later.  The latter object ruined the effect of his
+insouciant rendition of "Home, Sweet Home."
+
+"Thought you were going to retire, Joe?"
+
+Steve was already undressed and crawling into bed.  His question was
+slow-worded and a trifle stifled.
+
+"I was," Joe assured him hastily.  "I was.  I just stepped out to see
+that everything was tight and tidy for the night, that's all."
+
+Quizzical eyes contemplated the revolver now.
+
+"Taken to carrying a weapon, after all, eh?  Well, perhaps that's
+wisest.  And blow out the light, will you, Joe?  I'm tired.  You'll
+have to undress in the dark."
+
+Then Steve buried his face in his pillow.  But sundry sounds, escaping,
+were unmistakably hysterical.  Joe's mouth opened and closed, fishlike.
+He stood and stared down at his side, in beautifully eloquent
+profanity, if a stare can be both eloquent and profane.
+
+"You need a nurse," he stated sulkily at last.  He finished the light
+with a vicious blast.  "You need a chaperon!"
+
+But once again, just before he slept, Steve heard him mutter to
+himself, less injuredly, as he heaved over in his bunk.
+
+"This has been a very busy evening," he opined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+LAW AND LUMBER
+
+Rain fell the following fortnight in a steady downpour that did not
+cease, even for an hour.  Ragged, smokelike clouds hung over the valley
+at Thirty-Mile, dragged so low by their own weight that they not only
+hid the upper peaks but shrouded the lower ridges as well.  They drove
+by in interminable files of grey, making sluiceways of every cut and
+drenching continually the men of the construction gang who, in spite of
+the chill of that downfall, still sweated at their labor.  But both
+Steve and Fat Joe, for all that they caught each day a deeper note in
+the hoarse complaints of those same men--a note no less ominous than
+was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river--nevertheless were
+duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining.  It
+might have snowed.
+
+Each morning now as he stepped outside the shack Joe turned
+methodically toward the north, to cock his head and squint and sniff,
+questioningly.  He was waiting for the first flurry which would herald
+those months of bitter whiteness to follow; and each morning his short
+nod was a brief of satisfaction at the continued height of the mercury.
+They made the most of that open fall, bad as was the weather.  Without
+pause they toiled forward those wet days, or rather backward, for they
+had stopped, there at the edge of the river, in the work on that
+section of the rail-bed which, none too even-surfaced but almost
+arrow-straight, ran from the upper end of their valley to the very
+mouth of the Reserve Company's country.
+
+A month earlier it had been Steve's plan to span that mile or so of
+swamp and bridge the river before the cold weather set in.  Nor was his
+altered order of campaign due in any way to the storm which had raised
+the river and made of the alder-dotted stretch of flat bog-meadow an
+oozing, quaking morass.  It no longer represented merely a positive not
+too alluring problem in engineering--that strip of swamp and open
+water.  It had taken on a newer, strategic importance.  And the change
+in Steve's plans, so far as the work at Thirty-Mile was concerned, was
+as much due to the news which Fat Joe brought home with him, one night
+toward the end of the next week, as it was the result of the interview
+which he had held with Hardwick Elliott himself.
+
+Joe had been a whole day absent on the north end of the line.  Alone he
+had been over every foot of that all but completed stretch which ended
+at the border of swampland, there at headquarters, troubling himself
+not at all over the unevenness of the roadbed, satisfied entirely with
+the surety he gained with every inspected mile, that a train-load of
+logs or a dozen train-loads, would stay on the rails when the rails
+were laid, and the day came to set wheels rolling.  But the further
+report he brought back with him was far less reassuring.
+
+"I wonder," Joe mused aloud that night, "I wonder, now, why any man who
+knows anything about handling timber should go to work bothering
+himself with skidways leadin' down to the river, when he knows, as well
+as Harrigan should know, that it ain't comin' out that way?  It don't
+seem good sense nor logic to me, unless----"
+
+He stopped there and left his own opinion unfinished.  Since the
+evening Harrigan had stepped out of the main bunkhouse and disappeared,
+black rage in his face and a promise to return upon his lips, that
+lumberman's red head had been conspicuous only because it was absent
+from the landscape.  So far Harrigan had failed to reappear and Fat
+Joe's method of apprising his chief of his return to the Reserve
+Company's pay-roll was distinctly characteristic.  But Steve's
+reception of the news was little more than listless.  He seemed to
+change the subject entirely.
+
+"I don't see why it wouldn't be just as easy, or easier," he replied,
+"to cross here on pilings, practically the whole distance, as it would
+be to fill and bridge, too.  And if we were to look at it in that
+light, then why wouldn't it be still easier to drive those piles, say
+next February or March, while the swamp is still crusted over and hard.
+It would afford us some sort of a footing to work on then, other than
+black ooze and lilypads.  Wouldn't it seem so to you?"
+
+Garry Devereau's agreement was quick with enthusiasm, but Fat Joe who
+was better schooled in those slow-syllabled discussions, barely nodded
+his head.
+
+"We'd still have that track north of here to lay," he advised, "when we
+work in from the south with steel."
+
+"Surely," Steve admitted.  "Of course.  But wouldn't that be a better
+bet than to stand to see our embankment and bridge----"
+
+He broke off there, just as Joe had hesitated a moment before.  The
+undercurrent of meaning for which the latter's ears were waiting came
+to the surface, however, when Steve began again.
+
+"Suppose, Joe," he pursued lazily, "suppose you had contracted with a
+railroad--an infant road too young even to be named--to move for you
+more timber than either of us will ever own; contracted in apparent
+good faith, when all along in your heart you were certain that the
+railroad itself would never be able to fulfill its half of the bargain?
+Granting such a state of affairs, Joe, what do you suppose you would
+do?"
+
+Garry was not quite certain that evening which was uppermost--the
+earnestness or quiet amusement which surely underlay that question.  He
+only knew that both existed.  But Fat Joe understood.  As he had done
+many times before now he wrinkled his forehead and pondered.
+
+"Maybe I'd hire me a red-headed river-dog," came his answer pat.
+"Maybe I'd hire me a bully-boy boss of white water, to build me some
+skidways to the nearest floodwater, so's I could teach the infant
+railroad you mention that business was business, contract or no
+contract."
+
+"Of course you would!" Steve agreed instantly, and he might have been
+complimenting a first primer favorite so pleased was his tone.  "Of
+course you would.  I'm afraid that was too easy for you, wasn't it,
+Joe?  But now suppose you were bent on proving to everybody, and
+particularly to those who had fathered it, what an unfortunate weakling
+this immature, unnamed child of constructive silence really was.  In
+that event how do you figure you'd conduct yourself?"
+
+Joe smiled oddly, a little balefully.  It was magic-quick, that change
+in his expression--as swift as was the thought behind it.
+
+"I'd have my logs all cut and ready to haul as an excuse, wouldn't I?"
+he inquired with simulated anxiety.  "Could I tell folks, through the
+newspapers for instance, that I wasn't strong for letting my timber lie
+for the grubs to lunch on, if I had to square myself?"
+
+"Quite naturally."  Until then Steve's face had kept its preternatural
+gravity.  He grinned ever so faintly now.  "Very naturally you'd want
+to save your winter cut."
+
+"Then I'd like to have 'em build a bridge somewheres along the river I
+aimed to drive--a bridge and a nice dirt embankment, all dressed up
+with rails and ties and things on top.  I'm allowed to suppose I've got
+an awful long standin' score, ain't I, along with all this timber?
+Well, that's what I'd like to have 'em do, then.  And when I opened her
+up, a few miles up river, and she began to roar; when that first head
+of water hit the bridge and the sticks begun to grind, I suppose I'd
+take up my position on the bank where I could watch real well.  I'd
+light me a long, black cigar and murmur, sort of languid and
+sympathetic, 'There goes your railroad, gents!'"
+
+Before the finish of that speech was reached Garry had begun to follow.
+When Joe drew down one corner of his mouth and puffed aloft an
+imaginary cloud of smoke by way of added vividness, his own laughter
+mingled with Steve's quieter appreciation.  But his contribution to the
+conversation was not as complacent as Fat Joe's had been.
+
+"Such a move in itself would be outside the letter of the contract," he
+expostulated.  "Why, they wouldn't dare do anything; they wouldn't dare
+to begin driving the river before your time was up, much less do damage
+to your completed work.  What excuse--what legal excuse--could they
+give, even though they were morally certain that you were bound to
+fail?"
+
+Very slowly, almost pityingly, Joe turned toward him.
+
+"Legal!" he droned.  "Moral?"  And then he laughed his clear tenor
+outburst which barely escaped being a giggle.  "Dear child, judiciously
+speaking, law and lumber and morals and mill-feet don't mix.  They
+don't mix at all, in this section of the country.  If they wanted to
+bother their heads with an alibi, they could say it was top of flood,
+and they weren't eager to be hung up, just because a brass-buttoned
+conductor promised 'em a through express in the morning.  They could
+say--  But what good would explanations do us, huh, if they sent a half
+million logs sky-hootin' into our bridge?  It wouldn't save our
+construction, would it?"
+
+He wheeled back to Steve, his manner brisk.
+
+"Do we leave that stretch open?" he asked.  "Is that the way you have
+it figured?"
+
+"I'm afraid we'd better," Steve said.
+
+And from the very deliberation of that reply Garry Devereau realized
+how vital was the point which they had been weighing so irresponsibly.
+
+That was as close as they came to anything resembling a discussion of
+the change which was growing more and more noticeable in the bearing of
+the men at Thirty-Mile.  As far as all outward evidence was concerned,
+Steve seemed to ignore it utterly, to retreat oftener and oftener
+behind his habit of silence which even Fat Joe, after several
+unsuccessful, garrulous attempts, gave over trying to penetrate.  And
+even Garry, who had greater respect for the other man's preoccupation
+because he felt that he understood it better, tried also to hide all
+evidence of the bitterness which it was re-awakening in him.  Yet, at
+that, Garry's surmise was erroneous; his conclusion wide of the mark.
+
+For it was not the hunger of his own heart; it was neither intolerance
+of restraint nor mental rebellion against the duties which were holding
+him so close up-river, that had caused the chief engineer of the East
+Coast work to withdraw so completely within himself, although, many
+times each day, his eyes did wander toward the south and Morrison.
+During that bleak period, as Garry had guessed, Steve's thoughts were
+often of Barbara, but they were not sombre thoughts.  The very hardness
+of his life schooling had taught him too well how little of wisdom
+there is in fretting against the day of action, when that day cannot be
+hurried nor controlled.  Steadfastedly he refused to let himself brood.
+If he could not go to her he would not, nevertheless, allow himself to
+dwell upon that impossibility.  Instead his spirit ranged ahead to a
+hopeful, more or less indefinite and not too distant date when his
+absence might not seem to threaten too great a cost to those whose
+matters lay in his trust.
+
+Garry's conclusion, borne of his own lesson in doubt, was wide of the
+mark.  It was not heartache.  The thoughts Steve had of her were his
+serenest thoughts, those days during which his body labored
+prodigiously and his brain groped for the solution of an affair that
+had not been his own, until he had chosen to make it so.  It was the
+problem of Garrett Devereau which lay behind Stephen O'Mara's hours of
+gravity--that perplexing problem which Miriam Burrell, level of eye and
+brave of tongue, had brought to him for help.  And in the end, as is
+usually the way, events of themselves finally gave Steve the
+opportunity to say all that he knew could not be introduced by him.
+Time showed the way just when he had reached the point of acknowledging
+that such an opportunity was beyond his own power to bring about.
+
+He had had little chance for conversation with Garry in those days,
+except for a word or two over a hastily snatched breakfast, or perhaps
+at supper at night, and at night he was usually too tired to talk.  But
+the other's growing restlessness had not escaped his notice.  For a
+while Garry had seemed to accept his continuance there at camp as a
+matter of course, and for that very reason neither Fat Joe nor Steve
+had dignified the thought of his possible departure by so much as a
+single spoken word.  Garry's own actions first began to indicate how
+incessantly he was debating that question within his own brain.
+
+There came, times without number, an uneasy, far-focused look into his
+eyes; came hours on end when he would sit, every debonaire effort at
+lightness abandoned, staring moodily into the fire, motionless save for
+his nervous hands which never seemed to rest.  Joe found it harder to
+entice him with the poker deck; oftener than not Steve had to repeat
+his question a second time, seeking to inveigle him into a discussion
+of what-not, before Garry even heard.  And one night toward the end of
+the week the latter finally reached the point of voicing for their ears
+a decision which was old in anticipation to them.  They were on the
+point of going to bed.  Garry had risen, and then paused.  He hesitated
+and crooked his arms and yawned, a trifle too carelessly that evening.
+
+"Well, this finishes another day," he remarked, nor did he realize how
+soulful were the words.  "And I cleaned up the last of the stock-room
+to-day, Joe.  A swift but accurate workman, eh?  I'll leave behind a
+record unblemished by oversight or sloth.  And now--now it's about
+time, I suppose, I was going back to town."
+
+It was out, nor could the yawn conceal his eagerness.  His back was
+turned, but Steve knew what light was in his eyes.  Steve's
+carelessness was a far neater thing than Garry's had been.
+
+"What's your hurry?" he inquired easily.  "Why rush away?  And if you
+think your industry has betrayed you into idleness, you're reasoning
+poorly to-night.  Want another job?"
+
+Bantering indifference was the keynote of that reply.  Mutually they
+had adopted it from the very first.  It smacked of the free-masonry
+which always marked Steve's conversations with Fat Joe, were they
+earnest or frivolous beneath the surface.  It is always recognizable in
+the speech of friends such as they, differentiated from actual
+indifference by an intimacy of inference between the lines which makes
+such discourse almost foreign to uninitiated ears.  But Garry's answer
+was not in kind.  Steve was caught so far off his guard by the question
+which came flinging back at him that he was glad Garry had not turned.
+
+"What else is there I could do?"
+
+No man save one who was very, very tired could have spoken in such a
+tone; no man except one who has tried himself in the highest of
+courts--his own opinion of himself--could have put such a degree of
+contempt into so simple a query.
+
+"Why--why----" Steve faltered, and then he took command of his own wits
+again.  "There's work enough, don't doubt that," he exclaimed, and
+laughed a little.  "Joe, here, will be another week or ten days
+finishing with the fill up yonder; he'll do well if he manages it by
+then, and that too with every available hand we have.  I don't want to
+rob him of a single man, if I can help it, but I've got to go ahead
+with the line to the south.  To put it concretely, I'm in need of a
+rodman.  Do you think you'd care to oblige?"
+
+Again the hint of banter persisted, but Garry's jaw was tight when he
+faced suddenly around.
+
+"I will!" he flashed back, hoarsely.  "I will, if it's a man's job.
+But I'm done with filling a dinky pad with rows of figures, all day
+long.  I'm finished with this damned tallying of cans of beans and soap
+and yards of rope!  Do you understand?  What _work_ would I have to do?"
+
+Out of the corners of his eyes Steve saw consternation o'erspread Fat
+Joe's face.  His own was only amused.
+
+"You'll have to swing an axe," he enumerated slowly, "and you'll have
+to lug a rod and tripod.  You'll wade through bog and fight your way
+through underbrush.  And then, for variety, swing an axe some more.  If
+you've never learned yet what it is to be really tired, Garry; if
+you've never known what it is to go to bed wishing morning would never
+come, you'll find out what that's like, too."
+
+As soon as it was spoken Steve recognized the slip.  Watching Garry's
+eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also.  For a moment a
+torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips.  And then he swallowed
+and nodded shortly.  The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully
+as electrical as the threatened outburst might have been.
+
+"I'll try it," he said, very simply.  "I'll have a try at it,
+to-morrow."
+
+And he pivoted on his heel and passed out.
+
+Some minutes after he had gone Fat Joe, still a little dazed, rose
+softly and unostentatiously, crossed to a shelf shoulder-high on the
+wall and reached to remove a quart bottle of brandy which Steve,
+returning home soaked through and through, had brought out and left
+standing there.  But Steve checked him in the very middle of that act.
+
+"Let it stand, Joe," he directed.  "Leave it where it is."
+
+As slowly as he had reached for it Joe started to put the bottle back.
+The very briefness of that order should have been warning enough, but
+Joe found it impossible to keep to himself his disapproval.
+
+"All right," he acquiesced, "only I can't help remindin' you, just the
+same, that when a horse is runnin' his heart out it's kind of
+superfluous to lay on the whip."
+
+And then the whole accumulation of those days of silent perplexity, of
+indecision and fruitless mental forays, spilled over upon Fat Joe's
+entirely innocent head.  Steve shot around and levelled a pre-emptory
+finger.
+
+"Whip--hell!" he barked.  "Put that bottle back!"
+
+Joe's fingers came away as though the glass had blistered them.
+
+"Lands' sakes!" he exclaimed; and in a voice that was chastened and
+meek when he had caught his breath: "Please, and it's back!"
+
+Chronic ill-temper could hardly have persisted in the face of that
+reply, and Steve's had been but a mood.  His first chuckle was in
+itself a plea for pardon.  He supplemented it, aloud.
+
+"I'm sorry, Joe--I'm worried.  I've got a job on my hands that bothers
+me.  It appears to be simple enough, until I get to planning how to
+tackle it, and then I can't make any headway at all.  But there isn't
+anything to be gained in hiding that stuff; that's one of the things I
+need to know.  It's better where it is."
+
+Joe waved a hand in bland dismissal of the apology.
+
+"My mistake," he averred, "though your harsh words have hurt me sore.
+I don't quite savvy it yet, but it's your affair, not mine.  You're
+dealin' and bankin' the chips.  And before now I've seen lots of
+well-meanin' bystanders get all mussed up from trying to horn into
+another man's pastime.  At my age I'd ought to have knowed better!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
+
+In itself that decision of Garry's to remain a little longer at
+Thirty-Mile was scarcely significant enough to be called sensational,
+and yet it proved to be the first of a series of events which, growing
+more and more sensational as they progressed, finally resulted in the
+hour for which Steve was biding his time.
+
+Garry entered upon his new duties the following morning in a spirit
+anything but reassuring to his companion.  Up to that time he had made
+his own industry the butt of much good-natured ridicule, viewing it
+apparently as a sort of vacation novelty amusing enough while the
+novelty lasted.  But he went from task to task that next day in a
+methodical, dogged fashion that was farthest of all from amiability.
+Two or three times Steve, trying to spare him needless effort,
+attempting to show him how to favor blistered hands and aching back,
+met with rebuffs so curt that he learned to keep his advice to himself.
+He knew what end Garry was working to achieve; he would have allowed
+himself to smile over the thought that the other man would be tired
+enough, before night came, without trying to make that work any harder,
+only he did not dare venture that smile.
+
+Times without number there were when Garry's monumental fit of sulks
+bordered close on the ridiculous, but the needed triviality which would
+have precipitated the whole fabric to a terra-firma of absurdity failed
+to materialize.  He cursed the rain, cursed it with his fluent
+precision which already had earned Fat Joe's admiring comment.  He
+complained, querulously, like a half-aged boy, over the treacherous
+footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded.  And once when he had
+felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of
+Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive
+diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things--a short
+discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's
+admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully
+concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and then died out
+in Garry's eyes when the hemlock only grazed him.
+
+Now and again Steve saw his lips move and then crook in cynical
+amusement, and knew that Garry was talking to himself and finding such
+communion most absorbing.  But he waited, outwardly patient at least,
+nor tried to hurry the issue.  He knew the woods; he knew what the
+silence and solitude could do.  For no man endures mutely the spell of
+the wilderness.  He talks, or he goes mad.  Put two men on a two-months
+trail and, be they the worst of enemies, they will still find a topic
+which each may approach.  Trap them for a winter in a snow-buttressed
+valley where no other man can penetrate and they will have bared
+jealous secrets before spring sets them free to go again their roads of
+doubled hatred.  And when dusk came--dusk and a fatigue which made it
+difficult to drag one foot after the other on the homeward
+journey--Garry had reached the point where he had to speak his thoughts
+aloud.
+
+The woods were new to that paler, slighter man.  He had to talk, but
+his beginning was circuitous.  He had been gazing down at his
+rain-soaked length, grotesquely thin in the flapping garments borrowed
+from Steve's wardrobe, to look up at last and smile, wryly.
+
+"I was just thinking," he began.  "I was just thinking if they could
+only see me now--the crowd down at Morrison for instance.  They used to
+gibe me.  They called me the immaculate Garry, once.  Aren't you a lot
+heavier than you look?"
+
+Plodding along beside him Steve nodded as though the whole day had been
+common with just such conversation.
+
+"No.  Those clothes were built with an eye to largeness of movement
+which scarcely insured shape or draping, even upon me."
+
+It was irrelevant, but it was a beginning.  And the reference to the
+crowd at Morrison made Garry's next remark clear.
+
+"Wouldn't it jolt them, if they could see me?  I thought of it this
+morning when I was walking a log without so much as a waver.  That
+phrase relative to walking a chalk-line is weak and inadequate, after a
+man has tried to work his way along a peeled hemlock.  If anyone wants
+to measure sobriety by word of mouth, there's his standard.  It
+involves the last degree in sure-footedness."
+
+Again Steve bowed his head, but not so immediately this time.  For
+already he realized that this was not to be the opportunity for which
+he was waiting.  And the other man was quick to catch that uncertainty.
+
+"The other evening----" he laughed unpleasantly--"that night when you
+came back to camp in time to hear of Joe's proposed novelistic effort,
+I think I mentioned it to you.  I'm not sure.  But whether I did or
+not, it was, no doubt, scarcely introduced in the spirit in which I
+should ask it now. . . .  I suppose they have given you a fairly
+thorough report of my--career, since we were knights bold and ladies
+fair, haven't they?"
+
+Without waiting for a reply he answered the question himself.
+
+"Of course they have," he exclaimed, "because I recognized your fine
+hand in Joe's attitude toward me, the very minute I waked up, back a
+week or so ago, the morning after I'd done my Phil Sheridan stunt from
+Allison's to your shack.  But do you mind telling me what your own
+opinion is?"
+
+Stephen O'Mara knew they were not going to get far if they followed
+that lead.  There was a challenge in Garry's voice which too closely
+resembled a snarl.
+
+"Why--no."  The pre-occupied note was uppermost in his answer.  "I'd
+not mind at all."
+
+But he offered no more than that.
+
+"Nor the reason why you've been so insistent that I stay on up here?"
+
+"Why not?  I've not forgotten my manners, even though I've lived some
+months in the back-brush!"
+
+No attempt at levity, however, could parry the other's deliberate
+insolence.  Garry worked nearer to what had lain all day behind his bad
+silence.
+
+"A man is wasting his time trying to reform another man," he
+vouchsafed, "if that other man has no desire for reformation."
+
+"That is very, very true," Steve agreed with even gravity.
+
+"Unless that man has the desire within himself, he need never waste his
+time even hoping to come back!"
+
+"I'm forced to admit that there is no room for argument in that,
+either," said Steve.  "Only it has to be more than a desire.  It must
+have become determination."
+
+He hesitated, and the whimsical note crept in and dulled the threatened
+edge of hardness in his voice.
+
+"I know of a case in point, that happened right here in these woods.
+One of the finest sportsmen who ever hunted or fished over this country
+had a favorite guide--Long John LeClaire was his name.  In fact, he
+never went into camp without him, for upward of a score of years, and
+he claimed there never was a better cook, between here and the border.
+But Long John had one bad failing.  As long as one kept to the timber
+with him it was plain sailing, but strike a town and it meant a week's
+delay in sobering that guide up.  Town and a spree were synonymous in
+Long John's mind; and after trying both mental and physical suasion the
+sportsman I mentioned finally hit upon another plan.  He persuaded Long
+John to take the 'cure'; more than that, he put him on a train himself
+and saw him off.  But there was nothing enthusiastic about John's
+departure.  You see, way down deep in his heart, he was just a little
+afraid this proposed treatment would be successful.
+
+"He went, but his going was reluctant.  And then, a month later he came
+back again, and, oh, what a difference there was in his return!  It
+took the conductor and two train-men to put him off at the station;
+they were considerably marked up in the operation.  Once safely landed
+on the platform, however, Long John spread out his feet to steady his
+wavering body and waved a hand in hearty greeting to the crowd which
+had assembled to welcome him home.  His hat was gone; he had a
+discolored eye, but the reluctance was gone from his carriage.  And he
+made a speech which for expressive briefness surpasses anything I've
+ever heard, before or since:
+
+"'There!' he declared his triumph.  'There!  And now I guess I've
+showed 'em no sanatorium could ever cure me!'"
+
+But Garry did not laugh.  His smile was mirthlessly sardonic.
+
+"Then why the devil have you tried to keep me up here?"
+
+Any man might well have objected to the manner of that question; many
+men would have spoken too hastily, forgetting that there are worse ills
+than those of the body.  But Steve was not ready to hit back yet.  He
+was thinking of Miriam Burrell; he lied with skillful smoothness.
+
+"I told you last night," he said.  "I need men.  And then, too, it's a
+long time since I've seen you.  I've not made so many friends, you
+know, Garry."
+
+Garrett Devereau would have stopped there, dripping as he was, in the
+middle of the timber, had not Steve held to his stride.  And he must
+have caught a momentary glimpse of that self which he was exhibiting to
+his companion, for his next words were a little mollified.
+
+"Perspective is an excellent thing," he murmured.  "It's been said
+before, but I'm repeating it.  It's not only illuminating in just the
+matter of view, but it unsettles one's sense of values, doesn't it?  I
+mean the Bignesses and Smallnesses of things--and creatures.  When I
+went away, or rather when you did, back I don't remember how many
+years, you were tugging at the bit to be up and at things.  That used
+to perplex me, although you may not have known it; I never really
+caught your angle or viewpoint.  But now that you are in the thick of
+it I'm puzzled to know whether you find it--well, sufficient in itself."
+
+O'Mara laughed softly over his shoulder.
+
+"Sufficient!" he echoed.  "Wouldn't you, if you were fact
+[Transcriber's note: face?] to face every day with some problem or
+other that had you stumped?  Wouldn't you, if you were playing a game
+that shifted so rapidly from point to point that it kept you dodging
+and ducking and swearing to hold your feet?"
+
+Garry drew a deep breath.
+
+"That's what I've been trying to establish in my own mind," he
+faltered.  "I've been thinking perhaps--but, pah!"  He spat out a
+fragment of laughter as though it were bitter to his tongue.  "I tried
+one job--I tried once!  I ought to know better than to wonder even,
+now.  And if a man can see no reason for living his life, it's his to
+quit, if he wants to!"
+
+And then Steve abandoned his air of tolerance; he changed his style of
+play.  The contempt in his retort could not have been more measured,
+even had it been other than a premeditated thing.
+
+"Quit is the right word," he came back coolly.  "I wasn't quite sure
+until now.  You asked me if the others had told me what sort of man you
+had become.  And if silence is affirmation, you had your answer.  You
+inquired concerning my own opinion and I withheld it.  Whatever it was
+doesn't matter now.  Maybe I was guilty of bad judgment, but you have
+set me right."
+
+Each word was tipped with scorn.  Again, with deliberate intent,
+Stephen O'Mara lied.
+
+"And I tell you now that had I been sure you wanted that hemlock to get
+you, I'd have left you where you stood.  The world is all cluttered up
+with fools, as it is."
+
+It came so quickly that Garry was not immediately aware of the attack.
+He smiled, covertly.
+
+"Accidents will happen," he feigned a protest.
+
+Abruptly the taller man wheeled, lids a-droop.
+
+"--Fools, and quitters, too," he supplemented, levelly.  "Quitters and
+men who show a streak of yellow that doesn't assay even a little bit of
+pure gold.  A minute ago I gave you one reason for my attempt to keep
+you here.  But I made a bad mistake there, too.  It's men I need!"
+
+He couldn't have straightened the other any more quickly had he swung
+and slapped his face.  Garrett Devereau went paper white.  They reached
+the edge of the heavier timber and came out upon the soggy sod of the
+clearing in the hush which followed that wickedly barbed speech.  Steve
+always stopped there, whenever he came back to the cabin alone.  He
+liked to look up at Joe's light, waiting in the window.  And now, a
+pace or two in the lead, Garry turned back and stared widely into
+Steve's cold eyes.  It had taken heat lightning to clear that brain
+which had been all day befogged.
+
+"That was frank, and altogether plain," he said.  "Joe took it upon
+himself to hire me, during your absence--the figure mentioned was
+eighteen a week.  Now, quite as frankly, I am admitting his lack of
+authority."
+
+Dusk comes quickly in the woods; twilight is only the briefest of
+pauses between daylight and dark.  In the half-light as he stood there
+it would have been very easy to have mistaken Garry Devereau for the
+man whose clothes he wore.  And while they waited, strained and tense,
+facing each other, a lone sapling between them and the eastern fringe
+of the clearing swung frantically earthward as if stricken by an
+invisible hand, and then thrashed upright again.  A fragment of green
+bark flew aloft.  They heard the deflected bullet go whining away.
+Then the tardy bark of a rifle.
+
+It was instant-quick, and yet little quicker than the expression that
+sped over Garry's features.  He turned and faced the thicket from which
+the report had come; he lifted his chin and opened his arms and laughed
+aloud.  The second time that day Steve reached out and jerked him
+viciously from his feet.  This time the bullet missed the sapling.
+They felt the air shock of its passage.
+
+There was nothing deliberate nor premeditated in the outburst which
+Steve loosed upon the man who had gone to his knees beneath the grip of
+his hands.
+
+"You fool!" he grated.  "You crazy-brained madman!"
+
+Garry rose and made as if to dust his knees.
+
+"Poor work," he criticised, easily.  "Too hurried--the first shot.
+There should have been no excuse for a second."
+
+With angry roughness Steve thrust him back into the deeper shadow.
+
+"Wait here!" he commanded.
+
+But Garry was only a step behind him when, a moment later, the former
+leaned over the spot where that invisible marksman had stood.  There
+were deep imprints in the forest mold--an empty shell upon the leaves.
+And by that time Steve had regained his grave composure.
+
+"Some idiot of a hunter," he ventured quietly, when he had straightened
+from a glance at those marks.  "One of those enthusiasts who shoot in
+haste at any rustle in the brush, and investigate at leisure."
+
+Momentarily the intimacy which had existed in other days between them
+was restored.  Garry's answer held no more of antagonism than had
+Steve's calm comment.  He tried to follow the tracks that led into the
+deeper timber.  It was too dark to follow far.
+
+"This is a hunter in a hurry, then," he remarked.  "Too much of a
+hurry, even, to investigate."
+
+"Hungry, and late for supper," suggested Steve.  "And we'll be late,
+ourselves, unless we travel along."
+
+He faced about and started straight across the clearing, and he
+maintained the lead in spite of Garry's effort to supplant him.  Before
+they reached the door of the cabin reserve that amounted to actual
+coolness once more cloaked them both.  Only once did either of them
+offer to speak.
+
+"You might do well to vary your costume a little," Garry observed
+impersonally, "if your nimrod friend who hunts at dusk is going to
+persist in mistaking you for a deer."
+
+He drank hard that night from the bottle which Fat Joe, in obedience to
+Steve's command, had left standing upon the shoulder-high shelf--drank
+first in a self-conscious fashion with a mumbled excuse to Joe that the
+rainfall had chilled him; then more and more openly, until he forgot
+that he had ever felt the need of an excuse.  Not one of the three men
+had made a move to go to bed, and before midnight came around Garry's
+black fit of absorbtion had given way to another mood.  Blithely he
+chafed Fat Joe one minute, blind to that one's sullen reception of his
+jocularity; the next moment he turned eyes that had long before lost
+their enmity in a glassier light of goodwill upon Steve, working over a
+drawing-board at the other end of the table, impatient yet elaborately
+approving of his industry.  And when Steve finally laid aside his work,
+signifying with a sigh that he had finished, Garry rose and lifted a
+half-emptied glass and made him a rollicking toast.
+
+"Here's to young Virtue's triumph, Steve," he chanted, "and damnation
+to the opposition!  I may be leaving you--I'll be on my way back to
+town to-morrow at this time--but I'm leaving my moral support behind
+me."
+
+Steve's reception of that flourish was in no way like what Fat Joe had
+expected.  He smiled cordially--a little absently.
+
+"Thanks, Garry," he said.  "And I guess I'll be needing all the support
+I can find, both moral and otherwise, before spring comes.  So you're
+not figuring on stopping off at Morrison?  Planning on going straight
+through, eh?"
+
+Garry made a gesture which was meant to embrace the whole chain of
+hills outside.
+
+"Absolutely!" he emphasized.  "This country is all right for those who
+were born to it--purple hills and purling brooks and silence brooding
+over all!--but it's too intense for your effete comrade.  Too
+quiet--too easy to think!  I'm going away from here just as fast as
+steam will haul me."
+
+The other man stretched his arms and swung one foot negligently over
+the chair arm.  His unqualified agreement brought sudden alarm to Joe's
+eyes.
+
+"I suppose you're right," he drawled.  "It does get on any man's
+nerves.  Right this minute I'm as tired of it as I ever dare let myself
+get.  I've sloughed around in the mud enough for one session."
+
+Garry frowned, perplexed.  His fast numbing brain refused to
+reconstruct clearly, and yet dimly he knew that this sentiment was not
+the one which he had heard a few hours before from Steve's lips.
+
+"Too true," he was content to reply sadly.  "Too true!"
+
+"We've both earned a vacation."  Steve's gentle smile never left his
+lips.  "To-day I couldn't help but think that it was a shame to miss
+such perfect hunting weather as this.  I wonder if I couldn't persuade
+you to postpone your going for just a day or two longer.  I can show
+you some deer, Garry."
+
+The frown upon the latter's forehead deepened with his effort at
+recollection.  Then he brightened with happy satisfaction.
+
+"Deer!" he chuckled, addressing himself to Joe.  "Hunter took me for a
+deer, thinking I was Steve."  He blinked, for the statement did not
+entirely please him.  "Doesn't sound logical," he pondered, "but it's
+so.  Fired twice and missed both shots.  Poor work--very poor work
+indeed!"
+
+Joe squared around, his perplexed scrutiny an accusation now.  Steve
+had neglected to apprise him of that incident which had happened on the
+way home, and Joe had not heard the rifle reports.  But O'Mara clung to
+the subject which he had introduced.
+
+"That's the trouble with hunting right here in the front yard," he
+admitted.  "There are too many gunners anxious to hear their rifles go
+off.  We might swing over toward the west branch, though.  As long as
+this rain holds on the leaves will be quiet as a carpet.  You've never
+seen my own private shooting box, either, have you Garry?"
+
+The questioned one tried hard to pay attention, but the attempt was no
+more than an indifferent success, for he was still grumbling to himself
+over that unknown marksman's lack of skill.
+
+"Never knew you had one," he answered.
+
+"My inheritance," laughed Steve.  From his manner he might have been
+talking to a sober man.  "And also the haunt of my boyhood days.  It's
+the shack, you know, where I spent a good many years with Old Tom.  It
+lies a half dozen miles through the woods from here.  I've made it
+weather-tight and dry.  I spend a day or so up there whenever I have a
+chance to get away.  We're sure of a shot if we still-hunt over in that
+direction--sure of a tight roof and good beds, too.  How does it appeal
+to you?"
+
+Garry spilled over his glass and had to fill it again, with many
+apologies for his clumsiness, so ardent was his acceptance of the
+invitation.  He rose and insisted upon shaking hands.
+
+"A personally conducted tour," he stammered gayly.
+
+"A pilgrimage to the nest from which young genius first spread its
+wings, personally conducted by my friend, Mr. O'Mara."  But his moods
+were growing more and more uncertain and changeable, now.  He bent a
+baleful glance upon Fat Joe.  "Is this--person going to accompany us,"
+offensively he wanted to know.
+
+Steve shook his head.
+
+"Joe'll have to stay here and hold things down until we return," he
+explained.
+
+Garry resumed his seat.
+
+"Then I'll go," he stated.  The baleful light was slow in leaving his
+eyes.  And, after a rambling, muttered something to himself: "Too
+officious . . . wouldn't let me have but one drink every three
+hours . . . better we left him alone.  He might shoot somebody,
+too--looks as though he might shoot and investigate at leisure."
+
+With that he turned once more to thoughts of him who, firing from
+ambush, had left a trail of hob-nails to voice mutely the haste of his
+retreat.  It had a fascination for him; his mind went back to it
+automatically, the only idea apparently upon which he found it possible
+to center his faculties.  Now and then he referred to it aloud, in
+jumbled and meaningless ejaculations.  Both men knew that he did not
+know what he was saying, and yet his reference to Fat Joe had left a
+hint of pain in the latter's eyes.  It was still there when Joe arose,
+an hour later, and jerked his head toward Garry's quarters.
+
+"If you need me, sing out," he said.  "There's whiskey locked in the
+medicine chest--and I'll be sleeping light."
+
+The words meant nothing to Garry, but he noted Joe's departure.  Steve
+saw that his eyes were fixed, his lips crusted with fever, when he too
+came to his feet in a supreme effort, and steadied himself by the back
+of his chair.
+
+"I've been most thoughtless, Steve," he apologized charmingly.  It was
+the spirit of the old Garry talking through the flesh of the Garry he
+had become.  "I've been unpardonably selfish.  You must be tired; you
+have worked hard to-day."
+
+In turn he made as if to cross to the door.  Steve drew him back.
+
+"Joe's taken your bed," he explained.  "He's been an hour asleep by
+now.  We'll be getting away at daybreak, and he always did hate to be
+waked an instant before his hour, so you'll have to occupy his bunk."
+
+It took Garry a minute or two to assimilate that.
+
+"Surely," he agreed.  "Daybreak."  Then, drearily, with no knowledge of
+what he was saying: "I wish I could go to sleep--I wish it was
+daybreak, now!"
+
+Yet he was almost sober again when Steve shook him awake at four the
+next morning, his first inquiry concerning the state of the weather
+proving that he recalled their plans of the night before.  But his
+politeness had given way to a pallid stubbornness that would not budge
+an inch until he had had a drink and filled a pair of flasks with all
+that the fresh bottle from the medicine chest contained.  He refused
+breakfast with sickened finality; declined even the coffee which Steve
+tried to press upon him.  When the latter handed him Joe's rifle and a
+handful of extra shells, however, his eagerness to be away showed in
+his eyes.
+
+Steve did not like that gleam any more than he understood it, and he
+did not understand it at all.  It went around him--through him--much as
+though Garry was peering cunningly at a far-off, bodiless something
+which the other man could not see.  And throughout the whole morning
+Steve was conscious of it whenever they met after skirting a swamp, or
+slipped noiselessly over a hardwood knoll, to rejoin each other.  The
+day was half gone before Steve realized that it was the telltale sign
+of a brain no longer sober, even though Garry's body continued to
+maintain an incredible steadiness.
+
+Long after it seemed that eyes such as his had become must needs be
+sightless the latter went on picking his way carefully over rough bits
+of going; when he had reached a condition where he no longer heard the
+word or two which, now and then, Steve addressed to him, he still
+flattened his body and crouched at the expected nearness of game.  It
+became an uncanny exhibition of mechanics after a while--a
+sleep-walking sort of thing which wore upon Steve's nerves until he was
+more than once at the point of taking possession of Joe's repeater.
+And yet it was Garry who jumped a spike-horn buck, just before
+nightfall.  It was he who fired twice before Steve's rifle reached his
+shoulder.  But they found only blood on the leaves when they hastened
+forward.
+
+"You hit him!"  Steve leaned over to examine those crimson stains.
+"You must have found him with both shots, judging from the way he's
+bleeding.  He's gone into that cedar swamp; he won't travel far, and I
+hate to let him crawl in there, wounded like that, to die."
+
+Indecisively he paused, not sure just what to do.  In that moment of
+quiet Garry lifted a flask to his lips and finding it empty let it slip
+heedlessly to the ground.
+
+"Two shots," he muttered darkly.  "Two, where one should have been
+enough."
+
+That echo of the night before helped the other man to decide.
+
+"This strip of dark timber runs straight west to the river--are you
+listening, Garry?" he asked.  "Straight to the river--it's only a scant
+mile--and you'll find the cabin on the rise of ground in a clump of
+balsams, three or four rods to the right.  I'm going to take your
+gun--you look fagged out.  You skirt around the edge of the bad going
+and I'll drive straight through.  It may be only a scratch, after all,
+although it doesn't seem possible, with all this blood.  I'll take your
+gun and, now, are you sure you can make it--sure you won't get turned
+around?  It'll be dark in half an hour, you know."
+
+Garry gave up his rifle without a sign of demur.  His eyes were burning
+with some sort of feverish anticipation, but his answer was clear
+enough.
+
+"I'll wait for you at the river," he said, and he started forthwith
+toward the west.
+
+Steve watched him out of sight before he turned to take up,
+irresolutely, the trail that zig-zagged into the cedar brake.  But once
+he had started he went ahead rapidly, jumping the wounded buck within
+five minutes and giving him no time to lie down again.  And after he
+had covered a quarter of a mile Steve saw that it was much as he had
+told Garry it might be; it was a flesh wound that bled profusely and
+that was all.  For the deer, holding to a direct line down the middle
+of the swamp, continued to travel strongly.  Steve had all but reached
+the river-edge where they were to stop for the night, before he
+detected a stirring in the bushes ahead of him and his ear caught the
+crackle of a dry branch.
+
+Instantly he forgot everything save the quarry he was running down;
+forgot Garry and the strange persistence with which the latter had gone
+back, after twelve hours, to quote himself word for word.  With rifle
+poised he edged forward a step and halted; he stooped and laid Garry's
+gun at the foot of a tree and went on again.  Once he made out a
+movement behind a nearer tangle and saw the branches shake before a
+heavy body that was forcing slowly through them.  His own rifle came
+up; his finger was on the trigger when he thought better of it.  Old
+Tom, more than a half-score of years before, had switched him well, not
+so very far from that very spot, because he had not made certain first
+of the target at which he was firing.
+
+There was an open patch to the left.  If the buck held to that quarter
+he would have to cross that clear.  Rock-steady the muzzle came down
+and covered the first indistinct brown bulk which entered the notch of
+the sights.  And then, with an oath, Steve let the gun slip to the
+ground at his feet and stood shaking, checks gone white.  Garret
+Devereau, wearing an old tan canvas coat which he had unearthed in the
+cabin peered slyly around a bush which he had been stirring gently with
+one hand.
+
+"Go ahead 'n' shoot," he ordered aggrievedly.  "Hunter'sh alwaysh shoot
+at rush'le in the dark.  Good joke on hunter'sh--good joke on my good
+frien', Misther O'Mara!  Think'sh's got deer until he inves'gates at
+leisure.  Best joke of all'sh on myself."
+
+The muscles which all day had been a marvel of firmness beneath him
+gave way altogether.  Without a sound he pitched forward upon his face.
+A second later Steve reached his side, but the horror had not faded
+from his own eyes after he had picked that prostrate figure up and
+carried it into the clay-clinked shack.  His memory played him an odd
+trick during that moment.  A vivid picture came back to him of the
+grave-faced boy he had been, struggling to steady Old Tom's helpless
+feet up that same rise.
+
+Garry was limp and blue and pulseless when Steve stretched him out,
+inside.  The second flask stood there where Garry had left it, upon a
+table, and while he was loosening the latter's clothing Steve shook it,
+experimentally, and found it empty.  He swung it aloft and drove it
+through a window.  The crash of shivered glass made the other stir.  He
+opened his eyes and stared vacantly up into his friend's face.
+
+"Steve," he moaned.  "Steve, I'm cold!"
+
+And that was the burden of the complaints which he lifted, time and
+again, throughout the first part of the night.  Even after Steve had
+wrapped him in everything which the bare room afforded he still
+continued to whimper like a sick boy.  But his body held strong.  Just
+as, all day, it had been his brain which had shown the effects of the
+alcohol which he had consumed, so now, all night, it was his brain
+which suffered most.  Again and again he called aloud a woman's name,
+in a voice which Stephen O'Mara had never before heard from his lips.
+In inconceivable tenderness he whispered it--the name of Mary
+Graves--only to cry aloud, "Steve--Steve," in accents of heartbreak the
+next.
+
+Long before morning came his pulse was steady--a little jumpy but
+reassuringly rhythmic.  But the sunlight was two hours old upon the
+floor before the silent watcher saw the white lids flutter and then
+part with a gaze that was once more sane.  Garry's smile had always
+been mocking; it was shamed and wistful now.  The clearness with which
+he remembered was a miraculous thing.
+
+"You see, Steve," he faltered.  "You see now, don't you, that I'm not
+worth trying to save?  Oh, you've tried hard; I knew how hard you were
+trying!  That's why I did--what I did.  I'm no good; there's no use,
+friend of mine.  Why don't you let me go?"
+
+Steve groped and found the hand groping for his.  He nodded his head,
+bruskly, to hide his eyes.  But his voice was not brusk.
+
+"I almost shot you, Garry," he said, and there was a husky echo of
+horror in the words.  "In another minute I'd have killed you.  Right
+now I don't know just what kept me from firing."
+
+"And I meant you to," Garry murmured almost inaudibly, "I planned that
+you should--started to plan last night.  I--I've been hating you for
+twelve hours--hating you because you were making me ashamed to do the
+thing I wanted to do most."
+
+He tried to rise and fell back, slack.  But his voice was stronger with
+sudden, swelling bitterness.
+
+"It wasn't for myself, Steve," he cried.  "It wasn't for what I might
+get out of it, or--or what it might bring me, I used to scoff at
+whatever others considered big and fine and clean, but I played it
+straight, just the same.  I played it as well as I knew how--straighter
+than you'd believe.  I thought it would make her happier, because I
+tried that hard.  And she . . .  Steve, if I had been a woman--a woman
+like what I thought she was, little and clean and white--I couldn't
+have let a man like him so much as touch my little finger!  And she--by
+God, she married him!"
+
+The agonized voice broke there--the voice of a boy who had had to learn
+that it is woman and not women who is fastidious.  Garry sat and
+swallowed, fighting for self-control.  His eyes were numb, but Steve's
+had taken fire, for he knew that the hour for which he had been waiting
+had come at last.
+
+"You've been trying to help me," Garry found his voice again, "you've
+been trying to throw me a line.  And, for a day or two, I tried to
+catch it, Steve.  But it isn't in me to try that hard, any more.  Some
+men do things for what there is in it--the pecuniary reward, I mean;
+some men--you for instance--because their self respect won't let them
+stop, win or lose.  But now and then there happens one who keeps on
+trying only because there is one other person, at least, who may be the
+gladder for his success.  I don't expect you to understand; I know it
+will sound small and cowardly to you. . . .  It's too lonesome living,
+Steve, when there's no one who cares whether you live or not!"
+
+"That does not fit your case," Steve objected instantly, "when your
+danger or your safety keeps a woman watching, white-faced with terror
+through the night, for your return."
+
+Garry propped himself upon one elbow, the better to see the speaker's
+countenance.
+
+"My safety?" he repeated, blankly.  "My return?"  And then, wanly
+grateful: "You are not the sort of man who lies convincingly, Steve."
+
+And then Stephen O'Mara let him have it--all the story which had lain
+so many days in his heart.  There were times when Garry went even paler
+during the short recital; times when everything else was submerged by
+the incredulity that flooded his face.  But before Steve had finished
+the last trace of doubt was gone.  Before the end came Garry had bowed
+his head, this time in flushed, self-conscious wonder which
+transfigured him.
+
+"Miriam Burrell!" he breathed.  "Proud, intolerant----"
+
+His head came up.  The next instant he voiced the words which Steve
+most wanted to hear.
+
+"You shouldn't have told me this," said he.  "You had no right,
+unless----"
+
+Steve laughed at him.
+
+"God bless you, boy," he exclaimed.  "I asked her if I might.  Why,
+don't you understand that she meant to, herself, if I didn't?  You see,
+she is--far, far braver than you are, Garry."
+
+Garry lifted his hands and hid his face.
+
+So quietly that his exit made no sound Steve slipped to his feet and
+passed outside.  It had stopped raining; the hardwood ridges, touched
+by frost, were flaming streaks of color against the rainwashed
+evergreens, when he picked his way down to the river and found a dry
+stone for a seat.  An hour and more he sat there, while his thoughts
+went back over the trail of the years--the trail which had led him from
+that cabin to a pair of violet eyes and lips that arched like a boy's.
+
+Steve let his mind turn again, unreservedly, to his own problem that
+morning; he tried to face, sure-eyed, the road which still stretched
+ahead.  He did not know that Garrett Devereau, the debonaire, the
+cynical, the world-weary and world-wise, had broken down and was
+sobbing noiselessly, as men sob, in the room which he had left--shaking
+with deep and terrible gasps that racked his very soul.  But it was
+already daybreak; it was trail's-end now for Garry.  It does make a
+difference if one knows that someone cares.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HONEY!
+
+Upon their return to Thirty-Mile, two nights later, Joe's attitude of
+criticism was the first thing which piqued Steve's interest.  There was
+something ludicrous in the former's voice as he sat and anathematized
+the food which the cook-boy brought to the table, even though he
+devoured hungrily all that his plate would hold.  And because Joe was
+so obviously primed for a sensation that evening, out of sheer
+perversity Steve struggled to draw him into a discussion of a topic,
+which, just as obviously, had no appeal just then.
+
+"What I hope to do," he confided gravely to Garry, "is to finish up at
+Morrison and make possible the transfer of some of those men up here.
+We are working only one shift now.  With two I figure we could sail
+along a-fogging.  How does that strike you, Joe?"
+
+That was only one of his many attempts, but all of them, save for the
+inner laughter which they afforded; were totally without result.  Joe's
+answers were monosyllabic--his attention wandering at best.  To that
+particular question he nodded his head, spiritlessly.
+
+"This butter ain't none too fresh," he growled sourly, "and I wonder if
+that cook-boy thinks we dote on ham every meal?  I don't for one.  It
+may be all right, if a man's plumb starving to death, but it don't lend
+no real elegance to a repast."
+
+That gloomy complaint brought little more than a sparkle to Steve's
+eyes, but it made Garry lean forward in his place.  Throughout the meal
+while the other two fenced in just such fashion he forgot his own food
+to listen, delighted anticipation in every feature.  And when they had
+finished supper and pushed back their chairs, he stood grinning a
+little, watching Joe survey that littered room which served as office
+and sleeping-quarters for the chief engineer of the East Coast Company.
+Fat Joe's gaze swung from wall to wall, from littered corner to
+heaped-up chair.  Then he shook his head in despair.
+
+"It looks to me, Steve," he grunted, "as though you ain't never had no
+real training in tidiness, have you?  There don't seem to be no system
+at all in the way you leave your things around.  There's one boot over
+in that corner; it's got a mate, I know, because I saw you take them
+off last night.  I wouldn't be certain otherwise.  And it's the same
+way with all your things.  Just look at this room!  A nice place to
+receive callers in, now ain't it?"
+
+That was the first lead he tendered them, but Steve, rather than
+gratify him with a direct question, chose to go forward in the dark.
+He leaned over and followed his usual custom when he wanted to think.
+He tapped out his pipe.
+
+"But I can always find everything," he defended, "that is, unless you
+have taken the trouble to put things away.  Then it's a toss-up that
+something or other will never be found, until it turns up of its own
+accord.  It's not so bad, Joe."  He, too, swung to survey the room.
+"Not so bad!  Just a little unsettled, that's all.  Are we likely to
+have any callers, do you think, who would object to this layout?"
+
+Joe snorted, but his eyes were mournful.  He knew that there was
+nothing else to do but yield, a part at least.
+
+"We ain't likely to," he murmured.  "We're just naturally bound to have
+'em.  They're comin' in to-morrow, and I ask you again, ain't this a
+pleasing prospect to greet 'em?"
+
+For all that he seemed to be staring ruefully down the room, he was
+watching for the surprise that darted across Steve's face.  Momentarily
+the latter had forgotten his assumed air of placidity.
+
+"To-morrow?  Who?"  And then Steve laughed.  "Go ahead and tell us,
+Joe.  I'm beat!  I'll admit that I'm panting with curiosity."
+
+Joe pulled up a chair and dropped into it.  It appealed to him--this
+method--whenever he had the time to spare.  His pink face was still
+innocent of guile.
+
+"I don't mind the men-folks," he resumed.  "That fat party, I mean, who
+wears the plaid suits, nor Caleb Hunter, either.  Both of them are used
+to such truck as this.  And I reckon it'll tickle the ladies, too.  But
+I can see Honey sticking his nose in the air and sniffin', supercilious
+like, the first minute he gets his nose in the door.  He ain't going to
+approve at all, at all--not any way you look at it."
+
+"Honey!"
+
+Both Steve and Garry ignored the rest of Joe's explanation to gasp that
+single word in concert.
+
+"Who in the world do you mean by 'Honey'?"
+
+"Who could I mean?" Joe demanded collectedly.  "I didn't give him the
+name, did I?  I mean that chap Wickersham who owns the timber north of
+us.  Foreign, ain't he?  Sure, I thought so?  Well, every time I run
+across that man's path my heart swells with patriotism.  I guess I'm
+just as glad to be born plain United States."
+
+The first part of that statement was listened to closely enough by both
+men; the last sentence or two, for all that it was heartfelt and
+sincere, was lost upon them both.  And Steve's mirth was even more
+hysterical than was that of Garry Devereau.
+
+"Honey!" he panted.  "Now isn't that a wonder?  Joe, you're too good!
+You are altogether too good to be wasted on these timbered solitudes.
+Men pay two dollars a seat, Joe, to hear performers work who are rank
+amateurs in comparison with you."
+
+The riverman's eyes grew belligerent.
+
+"Funny, is it?  So awful funny!  Well, perhaps you think I can't read
+plain print yet, never havin' enjoyed a liberal education.  But take a
+look for yourself."
+
+He pulled up a pile of newspapers which had come in since their
+absence, sorted out one that was creased open, and handed it to Steve.
+It was an announcement of Barbara Allison's engagement to the Hon.
+Archibald Wickersham--that column to which Fat Joe had folded the
+sheet--a many-days-old announcement, now.  But the smile did not even
+stiffen upon Steve's lips.  The picture which accompanied it was a poor
+one, heavy-shadowed and smeared and lacking in detail, yet Barbara's
+face was unmistakable.  The room became quiet.  In that hush Garry
+realized that Joe's mistaken translation of the title had not been, as
+Joe had himself suggested, due to lack of knowledge, but to a desire to
+apprise his employer, delicately, of that which he believed was still
+news to him.  And yet, from the easy way in which he read it, word for
+word, Garry was positive that all this which the New York daily
+blazoned forth with its customary mixture of snobbishness and vulgarity
+was no longer news to Steve.  The latter's eyes lifted and dwelt long
+upon Fat Joe's face.
+
+"So that's where you got it, was it, Joe?" he asked evenly.  "You make
+it 'Honey,' do you?  And when do they come in, Joe?"
+
+"To-morrow night.  One of the teamsters brought word this afternoon,
+just before you got back.  Honey is going to have a look at his trees
+and things, the way I understand it.  And the rest of them, I take it,
+want to look us over in our wild state.  Where are we going to put them
+girls?"
+
+Steve's answer was long in coming.
+
+"Miss--Allison?" he wanted to know.
+
+"--and her maid," Joe corrected promptly.  "Her maid, Cecile.  She's
+comin', too, and that tall, red-headed one.  I don't remember her name?"
+
+As studiously as he had done a moment before, Garry again avoided
+Steve's eyes.
+
+"Miriam Burrell," the latter supplied the omission.  "And that's fine,
+isn't it?  How long are they going to stay, Joe?"
+
+But Joe had finished with trifling.
+
+"Where are we going to put them?" he insisted doggedly.
+
+"Why, we have a couple of shelter tents somewhere in the duffle,
+haven't we?  We might pitch those if----" he looked about,
+ruminatively--"if you think this is too squalid."
+
+Joe turned appealingly to Garry, only to meet eyes flaring with
+deviltry.
+
+"If you think that I'm going to give up my quarters for a troup of
+curious sight-seers, you're mistaken.  If that's what you turned toward
+me for, don't allow yourself to dwell upon it another minute.  I'm a
+laboring man and I have to have decent rest at nights. . . .  Do you
+suppose Cecile would really mind a tent?"
+
+And then Joe's face went red.
+
+"Now ain't you the pair of rough jokers?" he whined.  "Ain't you,
+though?  But what's it going to be--this room or Garry's?  The way I
+look at it we're elected to camp out ourselves.  We're hardened sons of
+the wilderness, you know.  That's what they always call us in print.
+But how am I going to get this place cleaned up?"
+
+For another hour Joe argued it, and at last settled upon the
+store-house building as the likeliest for sleeping quarters for the
+feminine portion of the visitors.
+
+"We have to eat in here, anyhow," he argued, "so I guess it's the best
+arrangement we can hit on.  Honey won't be here much to meals, either.
+That'll be one nice thing about it.  He'll be going north directly.
+And now--now I guess I'll go out and have a look at the pantry, even if
+it does make me feel sort of faint every time I think of the grub we've
+got on hand.  Canned beans and boiled potatoes, and ham and bacon, to
+round out a banquet.  Why couldn't a couple of mighty hunters like you
+bring home more than one little haunch of venison?  Bacon and beans!
+Steve, you sure have been living mighty low-down on this job!"
+
+He went out with a great show of haste, but returned almost
+immediately, forgot the urgency of matters in general in finding Garry
+idly shuffling a deck of cards.  Throughout the evening Joe had
+exhibited an unwillingness to meet the third man's glances directly,
+but it was impossible for him to remain oblivious to the clicking of
+the chips.  He balanced first on one foot and then on the other for a
+moment; then diffidently drew up a chair.
+
+"Just a friendly hand or two, I suppose," he suggested, when the other
+made no move to begin.  "Low limit and wide open, eh?"
+
+Garry still toyed with the cards.
+
+"I don't suppose you've ever forgotten the first game in which we
+indulged, have you, Joe?" he asked at length.  Joe was not comfortable.
+
+"Scarcely," he admitted.  "Scarcely."
+
+"Nor the--stakes?" pursued Garry.
+
+"I--I seem to recall 'em, faintly."
+
+Garry's peal of amusement was as rollicking as a boy's.
+
+"So do I," he exclaimed.  "And if I remember rightly you stated on that
+occasion that cash was no consideration with you.  Does that still hold
+good?"
+
+It was the first good look Joe had had at the other's face.  The change
+he found in it seemed to perplex him more than a little.
+
+"I take it that it does."  Garry did not wait for his reply.  "And
+now--what do you say to that same full bottle against a--a ninety-nine
+year blanket restriction, with me at the wrong end of the odds?"
+
+Joe slitted his eyes.
+
+"When they tuck a ninety-nine year clause into a franchise they mean
+it's forever, don't they?" he wanted to know.
+
+"Forever, to all intents and purposes!" said Garry.
+
+Joe's chest sank and rose in a long, long breath.
+
+"It's no word to trifle with," he cautioned at last.  "If you lose
+it'll be a considerable drouth."
+
+"Cut!" invited Garry, and they started to play.
+
+That other night Garry's stack of chips had lasted far longer than they
+did on this second occasion.  A half hour later, when he rose to go to
+bed, his ninety-nine year promise of abstinence was piled symmetrically
+before Fat Joe.  But his good-night was gay.  For a time after his
+departure Joe eyed Steve, sidewise.
+
+"Hum-m-m," he cleared his throat.  "Hum-m-m!  And I was expectin' you
+to turn up any hour of the last twenty-four with a request that I come
+and help bring home the remains.  You must be quite a silver-tongued
+exhorter, aren't you, Steve?"
+
+Stephen O'Mara was silent over the paper which Joe had handed him
+earlier in the evening, and the lack of any offer on his part to go
+into details did not trouble his questioner.  Fat Joe sat and bobbed
+his head over what would never cease to be a miracle in his eyes.
+
+"And he'll stick this time," he vented his wonder aloud.  "He's surely
+going to stick!" Then he smiled widely.  "And I reckon you'll have to
+admit that I handled the small part that come my way with ease and
+dispatch, when I tell you that he didn't catch so much as one lonesome
+pair, all the time I was dealing.  I'm ashamed of myself.  I haven't
+seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I come East!"
+
+Garry was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to
+their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to
+the man whom he was assisting.  But neither his silence nor his
+nervousness any longer worried Steve.  Instead, the latter let himself
+smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his
+thoughts were on Garry at all.  For the latter's diffidence as the day
+aged became a flushed and warm-checked thing, until at four in the
+afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which
+wordlessly, Garry was asking.
+
+"Joe was more than half right," he remarked, one eye to his level, "in
+spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously.  We can't let
+those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable,
+so perhaps you'd better run ahead now, Garry, and see what he has
+accomplished.  I don't want to leave this spot myself until I have some
+figures upon which I know I can rely.  But you might run ahead, if you
+will.  I'll be along later."
+
+It was couched in the form of a request, but Garry's face flamed.  He
+went, albeit a bit reluctantly.  And he stopped more than a few times
+in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve's shack.
+But once he had passed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably
+trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment; he was on the
+point of going back outside to scan the bowl of the valley when a tall,
+short-skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous apron which Fat Joe in
+a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook-boy, flashed
+through the passage-way from the kitchen annex and barely missed
+catapulting into his arms.  Miriam Burrell, pink-faced from the heat of
+the roaring wood-stove, and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek,
+lifted her apron and swung it like a flag of victory.
+
+"I've found it," she sang triumphantly.  "I've found out what was the
+matter!  I'd just forgotten the baking-powder, that was all!  Next
+time----"
+
+Then she recognized him.  With outstretched hands still clutching the
+edge of her apron, she stood, almond eyes widening, and scanned him
+from head to foot.  Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had
+noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry's
+appearance.  To the girl who had not seen him for weeks, that flushed,
+self-conscious man was a different Garry than she had ever known
+before.  Hungrily her gaze went from open shirt to caked boots, from
+steady hands to clear eyes which made her own eyes shy.  And then
+Miriam Burrell, cool and poised Miriam, did what many another maid in a
+checkered apron has done in similar situations.  She lifted that stiff
+gingham to hide her unutterable happiness.  But before he could speak
+she found her voice; nor was it very steady, at that.
+
+"I thought you were that party of idlers come back," she hesitated.
+"How--how tanned you are becoming, Garry!  I thought they--oh, I can't
+tell you how glad I am to see you so--so well.  I'm making biscuits for
+supper--that is, I've just been practising until now.  It seemed as
+though I'd forgotten something that was necessary to the recipe,
+because they were flatter after they were cooked than when I put them
+in the oven.  And most marvelously heavy, too!  But it was just the
+baking-powder, that was all.  Do you--do you think you'd care to help?"
+
+[Illustration: "Oh, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you--so
+well."]
+
+Steve was very late in returning to camp that night.  Throughout the
+rest of the afternoon he set himself a pace, knee-deep in slushy mud,
+which Garry could not have maintained.  But when he paused there in the
+dark where he always stopped for a moment and a tumult of voices swept
+down to meet him, he forgot his fatigue.  He had lifted his battered
+hat from his head, striving to distinguish a single note in all that
+treble of girlish laughter when, framed suddenly against the background
+of light within, he saw a slender silhouette take up its station in the
+doorframe.  Barbara was still peering out across the darkness when he
+came up to her.
+
+"We've been waiting dinner for you for almost an hour," she rebuked
+him, in place of what might have been a commonplace greeting.  "We've
+been waiting in the face of Mr. Morgan's insistence that it was
+practically useless.  He has been telling us that when a man here in
+the hills fails to turn up for a meal you never bother to look for him;
+you know that the worst has happened."
+
+Over her head the first eyes that Steve encountered that evening were
+those of Archibald Wickersham.  While shaking hands with the girl, he
+bowed in grave welcome to the tall figure in leather puttees and
+whipcord riding-breeches, and Wickersham, from the far side of the
+room, bowed back in equal gravity.  Then Caleb Hunter grasped Steve's
+elbow and spun him around toward the light and peered at him
+accusingly.  Barbara had not noticed until then how tired Steve looked.
+
+"Before the others get to talking," said Caleb, "before the tide grows
+too strong for my weak voice, young man, I want to deliver a message.
+Miss Sarah wants it explicitly understood that unless you stop in to
+say hello on your next trip down, she herself will take the trail up
+here.  And lest that ultimatum sound too little threatening, I might
+add that when Miss Sarah takes the trail she never travels with less
+than six trunks."
+
+Caleb clung so tightly to his arm that it brought a tinge of color to
+Steve's cheeks.  It was minutes before he could get away to change his
+wet clothes, and in that minute or two he could not help but contrast,
+grimly, his own mud-spattered attire with that of Archie Wickersham.
+The tired blue circles beneath his eyes wore even more noticeable when
+he returned, to be ushered with much ceremony by Fat Joe to the head of
+the table.
+
+It was an utterly irresponsible gathering that leaned over the red
+tablecloth that night--an oddly assorted group which, from the very
+first, Joe realized was not at all to Wickersham's liking.  Dexter
+Allison himself, fairly radiating good-will, sat at the foot of the
+table, with his son-in-law-to-be on one side and Barbara's little maid,
+Cecile, on the other.  And between Cecile and Barbara, who sat opposite
+Garry and Miriam, Fat Joe leaned both elbows upon the table edge and
+monopolized the conversation.  The seating arrangement was Joe's; it
+was his party.  And the absolute inattention to detail, the large
+indifference to veracity which his discourse disclosed before that
+noisy supper was over, grew to be an astonishing thing.  His nights of
+fancy left Steve aghast in more than one instance; they even forced a
+stiff smile to Wickersham's lips, and that is saying much for Joe's
+success as an entertainer, for in the bearing of those two men toward
+each other there had been evident from the first a chill antipathy
+which amounted, actually, to armed truce.  And the color in Miriam's
+cheeks, whenever his gaze strayed to that side of the table, helped
+Steve to forget, temporarily, much that he found not pleasant to recall
+at all.
+
+For Miriam's tongue was no less irresponsible than was Joe's.  Her mood
+was so mercurial that she drew, time and again, the eyes of all at the
+table.  She chattered with an abandon that scandalized Barbara; broke
+in and interrupted every argument with hoydenish trivialities, in one
+breath, to appeal to Garry the next for refutation.  And Garry, the
+light-tongued and quick-witted, sat almost dumb of lip before her happy
+garrulity.  But his eyes never left her; they spoke his thought aloud.
+The quick lift and droop of her eyelids, the brilliancy of her lips,
+made Miriam's face a living thing of happiness--made Barbara's silence
+seem even more profound.  For the latter's withdrawal from the
+hilarity, dominated half the time by her father's booming bass, was
+nearly as complete as was that of Wickersham himself.
+
+Just once, shortly before they withdrew for the night, Steve caught a
+gleam of mischief in the dark eyes she turned toward him.  She rose the
+next moment and started slowly around the room, poking demurely into
+corners and closetted nooks.  Every eye was following her when she
+finally found the thing for which she was searching.  She drew a red
+felt, yellow-mottoed cushion from beneath the deer-hide covering a
+chair, and held it up so that all might read.  "What Is Home Without a
+Father?" it ran, and when the joy that stormed through the room made it
+sure that the exhibition needed no interpreter, Fat Joe turned and hid
+his face.  Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an
+examination of his handiwork.  Smooth face tinted by the firelight,
+copper hair almost dishevelled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely
+lovely thing.  In her alto voice she expressed her opinion.
+
+"It's an entirely new stitch to me, Bobs," she averred.  "I don't think
+I have ever before seen just this method employed."  And she turned to
+Stephen O'Mara.  "Do you suppose, Mr. O'Mara," she asked, "that I might
+learn it from the one who did this work for you?  It's rather"--and her
+head tilted to one side--"it's rather a pretty thing!"
+
+Again they succumbed to mirth, and then Joe rose, bristling, and went
+forward much as a gamecock might step out to do battle.  He took the
+cushion from the hands of the girls, who no longer had strength enough
+even to hold it.
+
+"If you are aiming to do any sewing around this camp," he stated, "you
+can start in sewing on buttons.  This kind of work is entirely too
+nerve-wearing for amateurs."
+
+He carried the cushion across the room and placed it, not where it had
+been hidden by the deer-hide, but in colorful prominence against the
+back of the chair.  Long after he had crossed with Steve and Garry to
+their tents he continued to explode with soft chuckles.
+
+"I never did say," he defended himself, "that that sentiment was
+strictly appropriate.  I always stated that it was the best I could.
+And as for my technique--well, either of you guys try it some time!
+You just take a needleful of that yellow worsted and start tracking
+across a couple of yards of red and pathless desert, and see where you
+come out.  I know, because I've done it.  I'm a pioneer.  But if I ever
+tackle another job like that it's going to be a crazy-quilt!"
+
+And Joe considered, in spite of the din which answered him, that his
+challenge was ample.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
+
+It was fully an hour after Fat Joe and Garry had rolled themselves up
+in their blankets when Steve, who had elected to sit up for one last
+pipe even though his body was aching with fatigue, heard behind him the
+approach of her footsteps.  Outside at the top of the rise some fifty
+yards in front of the tents, he had seated himself on a log, chin
+buried in one palm and eyes vacantly steady before him; but even before
+he turned--before he rose slowly to his feet--he knew who was coming,
+knew and realized that she should not have come.  Wrapped in a long
+heavy coat, face half-hidden by the upturned collar, bare of head,
+Barbara came quietly down to where he waited.  And without word of
+greeting on the part of either of them, they sat down together, facing
+the silvered bowl of the valley.
+
+Time passed before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake
+of breath.
+
+"I never dreamed it could be so big," she murmured in awe.  "And then
+to think that some day--within a few months in reality--engines will go
+screeching their signals across this very place.  It doesn't seem
+possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it, too."
+
+Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help
+but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself,
+since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just
+then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most
+apparent to him.
+
+"I've felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully.  "I
+like it better myself, as it is.  It does appear to be a long way
+ahead, doesn't it--that day of completion which you cover in the
+screech of the whistles?  Only to-day, when we were scrambling about
+down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I
+possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but
+thicket now.  But as for the bigness of it"--he laughed
+deprecatingly--"it isn't so very big, you know.  It's just a--a mean
+sort of proposition."
+
+Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
+She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness
+in those words.
+
+"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal!  Why, I thought the work at
+Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there--there isn't
+even a beginning or an ending here.  There's nothing but woods and
+water."
+
+She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow
+under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
+
+"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know.  "Is that the
+direction in which Mr. Wickersham's timber lies?"
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"Just a few miles up through that notch," he told her.  "That's the end
+of the rail-bed which we have been building along the river-edge."
+
+Her next words made him start and then try to cover that moment with a
+readjustment of his long body.
+
+"I'm going up there to-morrow.  Mr. Wickersham has asked me to ride
+with him, in the morning."  She waited a moment or two.  "That--that's
+why I came out here to-night.  We'll be going back to town the next day
+or two, and I wanted to have a chance to bid you good-bye, before I
+left Morrison for the winter."
+
+He had known that she would not be likely to remain in the hills much
+longer.  He had realized that each day which he checked off, always
+hopeful that the next might open the way for him to see her again, was
+steadily bringing nearer the date of her departure.  But he had not let
+himself think that it would come so soon.  There was no doubt this time
+about the heaviness of his voice.
+
+"I see," he said.  "I see."
+
+There came another long silence.  Rising out of it, Barbara's voice
+sounded very, very little.
+
+"I've never known a sky in which the stars were so thick.
+They're--they're like a field of buttercups.  And have you ever seen
+such an irrepressibly happy creature as Miriam was to-night.  She was
+radiant--positively shameless!  Did you know that Garry knows----"
+
+"I told him, myself," said Steve, simply.
+
+The girl faced around in her surprise.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Most certainly!  Why not?"  His voice was not quite so unenthusiastic
+now.  "It's one of the few unmistakable opportunities I've ever had to
+make two people permanently as happy as Miriam was to-night.  I'd feel
+guilty all my life if I didn't help all I could, knowing how happy I am
+going to be, myself!"
+
+Thus did he work around, quite without abruptness, to a renewal of that
+discussion which she had thought to close, weeks before.
+
+"Are you trying to infer that I am to be a part of that happiness?" she
+asked none too promisingly.
+
+"You ought to know.  I said 'all my life.'"
+
+And there, suddenly, Barbara laughed.
+
+"I suppose now they'll marry and live happily ever after!" she
+exclaimed with an attempt at airiness.
+
+"Most certainly," asserted Steve, although her mirth puzzled him.  "Why
+is it funny to you?"
+
+"It isn't, but--yes it is too, now that it's no longer a thing one need
+worry about.  That's always the trouble with emotions which are too
+intense.  They're either very sad to contemplate, or very, very absurd.
+And they will persist in exchanging faces, to the confusion of the
+on-lookers.  Garry was so dangerously in love with Mary Graves, you
+see!"
+
+"He was in love with an idea," the man contradicted flatly.  "He was in
+love with just that.  And it is not safe for any man to live alone with
+an abstract conception of anything.  He's bound, sooner or later, to
+lose his grip on tangible things if he does.  He's likely to start
+destroying property to further the cause of labor, or liable to turn to
+shooting men who were born to jobs I'm certain some of them never
+wanted--kings and that sort, I mean--figuring on solving the social
+problems of men and women who must solve that problem themselves.
+Perfection is a fine thing to anticipate; expectations of it are
+dangerous.  And women aren't made that way."
+
+"No?" her voice slid coolly upward.
+
+"No," he told her, and smiled with that serenity she had come to know
+so well.  "Not even you, though I suppose I'd about annihilate anyone
+else if he ever hinted at it."  He chose to be didactic in tone.  "No,
+you're not perfect; you've too much intelligence for that.  Why, right
+now you're fighting with your brain against the dictates of your heart,
+and if you were above mortal error in judgment you'd know that you are
+wasting your time."
+
+The girl forgot entirely that she, too, had promised herself that their
+leave-taking should not cross the border of personalities.  And with
+that lazy joy of her on his tongue she might not have been quite so
+quick to hold that she could love no man, had she stopped to give it
+thought.  Her advance to the skirmish was most spirited.
+
+"Your opinion has the merit of sincerity," she said, "although, looking
+back upon a--a certain day, I can't help but wonder whether you haven't
+been guilty of mouthing pretty nothings for my poor ears."
+
+"That proves my point right now."  He was imperturbable.  "You're
+begging the question to gain----"
+
+"You said----" she flashed, and then grew red.
+
+"I said I'd let you ask no pardon of me.  I said I'd let myself find no
+flaw in you.  But how does that embarrass my present argument?
+Flawless perfection would be a mighty difficult thing to live with, day
+in and day out.  Living with a woman who never made a mistake could
+have no appeal for me.  She'd always be emphasizing my own
+shortcomings.  You become consistent and you'll catch me yawning some
+day; grow logical and you'll almost scare me off!  Why, you're a girl!"
+
+Her laughter was like a bell on the still air.
+
+"And you--you still sit there and insist that perfection has no
+attraction for you?  When you've just described, without knowing it,
+the--the sort of a girl you think is perfect."
+
+His lips curled in a way to quicken any woman's pulse.
+
+"You have me beaten," he laughed.  His eyes, dark as was the shadow
+upon his face, made her breath unsteady.  "I would like to watch you
+play poker with Fat Joe.  Your game would puzzle him more than a
+little.  Yes, you've surely left me without a leg on which to hobble
+off, because it would be small spirited in me, wouldn't it, if I were
+to tell you that you are the exception that makes my general rule hold
+sound?  I wouldn't, however, prescribe such a degree of perfection for
+any other man's daily diet.  It would prove his destruction."
+
+"Your own superiority, of course, rendering you immune?"
+
+"Maybe."  At least, whether she knew it or not, she loved his serenity.
+"Maybe--and maybe I'm an exception too."
+
+He sat very still.  She had turned away once more.
+
+"You'll be back again in the spring?" he asked with that gentleness he
+saved for her alone.
+
+"I hope--I think so."  The smallness of her voice angered her.  She
+feigned a short, carefree laugh.  "Unless I am too busy.  Getting
+married seems to become a more and come complicated problem of proper
+costuming, doesn't it, with every passing season!"
+
+She couldn't have told why she said it; she was trying to think of
+something else to say which would be kinder by far.  And then, half
+lifting her, he had swung her around to him.  For a moment he held her,
+face close to that small, frightened face buried in its deep collar,
+while she struggled uselessly against those hard arms which tried not
+to hurt her.  Her lips continued to rebel, long after her eyes had
+closed--long after body and brain were quiescent.
+
+"You mustn't!" she gasped.  "Oh, I can't let you . . . the moon . . .
+we--we're sure to be seen!"
+
+His lips on hers silenced that last incoherent resistance.  She sat,
+wavy brown head bowed, when he had set her free.
+
+"I was going to ask you not to forget!"  There was no weariness now in
+his voice.  "I had planned to ask you just that, a little ago, and it
+would have been a weak and useless request, wouldn't it?  Any man who
+has to beg to be remembered is not the sort to remain long in any
+woman's brain.  So I have taught you to remember, instead.  You aren't
+going to forget, ever, now!  You're coming back in the spring, and
+you're coming to stay!  And now _I'm_ telling _you_ good-bye.  It's
+time you were asleep."
+
+He helped her to her feet.  Together they turned--and Archibald
+Wickersham, tall to gauntness in the moonlight, was coming across
+toward them from the direction of the cabin.  The girl's slim body
+stiffened, but Steve saw her chin come up.  His own body grew lazier
+still, it seemed, in length and limb.
+
+Wickersham's approaching steps were crisply precise; he stopped an
+arm's length in front of them, and his words were an echo of that last
+sentence of Steve's.
+
+"It's time you retired," he said, ignoring the other man's presence
+entirely.  "It's cold, and you have a long, hard ride ahead of you
+to-morrow."
+
+For a barely perceptible moment, with the eyes of both men upon her,
+Barbara kept her place.  Neither of them saw that her teeth were
+tightly closed over one full lip; neither knew that she had closed her
+eyes, dizzily, for an instant.  And then, without a word, she put her
+hand upon the arm which Wickersham offered her; but Steve, on the other
+side, walked with her that night, as far as the door of the storehouse
+shack.  Miriam herself opened the door and snatched Barbara within, and
+then laughed with her consummate impudence into both men's faces.
+
+"G'lang wid ye's now," she flung at them, "an' quit disturbin' dacint
+folks that likes to sleep o' nights!"
+
+She slammed the door upon them.
+
+They stood there a second or two, Wickersham an inch or more taller and
+inches narrower in shoulder and girth of chest.  Perfunctorily they
+nodded, each to the other, and wheeled silently upon their heels.
+
+Steve did not respond the next morning when Joe summoned the rest with
+a long spoon applied heartily to the flat of a huge tin basin; and over
+the breakfast table Joe explained to the assembled guests the reason
+for his absence.  Before daybreak a rider had come from Morrison,
+bearing word from Hardwick Elliott that Ainnesley was on from Manhattan
+and wanted to talk with him; before the camp was fairly awake he had
+ridden away into the south.  And returning two days later, travelling
+the lower, lesser trails that followed the river, in order to save
+time, Steve missed her party going out.  So, in the last moment, after
+days and days of patient waiting, did Chance trick him sadly.
+
+How much or how little Wickersham might have overseen the night before
+he betrayed not at all at breakfast the next morning, either by word or
+look.  And throughout that day, and the day that followed, while she
+rode at his side, undetermined whether she should attempt an
+explanation, Barbara found his face inscrutable.  It was a week later,
+the night preceding her departure from the hills, long after the girl
+had ceased to think of him at all in connection with the incident,
+before she learned how much he really knew.
+
+Miss Sarah had found her brother most uncommunicative upon his return
+from Thirty-Mile.  In response to her first question concerning Steve
+he had assured her, lifelessly, that the latter was looking very well
+indeed, and let it go at that.  Because she was a very remarkable
+woman, Miss Sarah had been able to curb her curiosity for several days,
+but on that particular evening she found it impossible calmly to wait
+longer.
+
+"You have not told me yet, Cal," she reproached him at dinner, in her
+slightly lisping voice, "how much progress Steve seems to have made.
+You know how interested I am, and you must realize how undignified a
+thirty-mile dash on horseback would be on my part, in order to find
+out, myself."
+
+While up-river Caleb had found much time in which to talk with Garry
+Devereau--that is to say, quite a little time, in view of the fact that
+Miriam Burrell, in boots and mackinaw, had insisted upon following
+Garry wherever he went.  And since his return to Morrison he had been
+spending a surprisingly large share of his days in conference with
+Hardwick Elliott and his partner, Ainnesley.  Now his reply to his
+sister's query was startlingly fervid.
+
+"Progress!" he exclaimed.  "Progress!  I tell you he's going to win
+out, in spite of all of them, damn 'em!"
+
+Miss Sarah froze in her chair.
+
+"Caleb!" she expostulated.  "Caleb!"
+
+And Caleb's face went hot.
+
+"I am very sorry," he muttered contritely.  "But I couldn't help it.
+When I think of the way that boy has plugged on alone, all his life,
+with no one to give him a lift, it--it angers me to think that the very
+man whom I have prized as a friend should be the one to make his
+problem harder."
+
+"Would you mind explaining, lucidly?" Miss Sarah requested.  "And if it
+is business to which you are referring, will you please try to make it
+as brief and non-technical as possible?"
+
+Once he started to tell her, Caleb realized that it was just what he
+had needed to do all along, without knowing it.  Briefly as she had
+requested, he sketched for her the facts which, so far as he was
+concerned, had made of his first sneaking suspicion an absolute
+certainty.  And he waxed wroth in the recital.
+
+"It's treachery," he snapped, "rank, contemptible treachery.  And the
+worst part of it all is that, even now, when I am morally certain of
+his culpability, I--I can't bring myself to despise the man.  He's been
+my friend for thirty years, Dexter has, and damn it----  I beg your
+pardon, Sarah--but, damn it, I keep on thinking of him, in soft
+moments, as my friend now.  I sit by the hour trying to foist the blame
+upon Archie Wickersham, and he's no more guilty than Dexter.  Dexter's
+merely good-natured about his crookedness; wholesome about it, somehow.
+And Wickersham's a sneak!"
+
+In all the years they had lived together Miss Sarah had never heard her
+brother talk so bitterly.  Yet her voice remained soft.
+
+"It's very unpleasant, no doubt," she sympathized, "although I can't
+quite see why they don't all join hands and try to make a success of
+the project between them.  Surely it seems feasible.  And, somehow,
+even after listening to you, I don't seem to find myself greatly
+perturbed about our boy, Steve.  He's very big and strong, Cal,
+and--and I am very old-fashioned.  I still believe in the might of
+right.  It may sound very feminine to you, but I do not find myself
+worried at all over his lack of assistance in his work.  And I must
+confess that I did not have it in mind, at all, when I asked in regard
+to his progress."
+
+Caleb looked up, suspiciously.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"I meant how--how did he and Barbara appear to--get on together?"
+
+Caleb spilled a spoonful of soup.
+
+"Her!" he exploded with no regard for his grammar.  "Why, she is true
+to her blood!  If she weren't she wouldn't be engaged to that thief who
+masquerades as a gentleman.  She isn't blind, and she's going to marry
+him!"
+
+"You are positively violent, Cal," reproved his sister.  "And your
+reference to Barbara does not do you credit.  If I were your wife I
+suppose I'd rise coldly now and sweep upstairs to leave you alone with
+your bad mood.  But being merely your sister I remain to hear you
+apologize.  Barbara is not yet married to Wickersham, I might add."
+
+"I am exceedingly sorry," said Caleb.
+
+"And, without any reason for it, save my womanly intuition, I feel very
+certain that she will never marry him," Miss Sarah went on.  "But you
+spoke about Steve having no one upon whom he could depend for
+assistance, and it was really a helpful hint to me.  Did I fail to hear
+you say how they seemed to get on together?"
+
+"She didn't think he was good enough for her, ten years ago," growled
+Caleb.  "She wouldn't think so, now.  He cares for her, so she treats
+him like a dog, of course."
+
+Miss Sarah had to smile.
+
+"Then I think it is high time I did something about it," she stated
+thoughtfully.  "For she is a lovable girl, and she hasn't any mother of
+her own.  She's very pretty and little and finer than any girl I know.
+If she weren't, Steve would not be in love with her, I am sure.  And
+Dexter Allison is no doubt an estimable man in many ways, even though,
+as you feel positive, he has a tendency to acquisitiveness which is
+deplorable.  Your continued regard for him convinces me of that.  I
+wish, however, that Steve was not so entirely dependent upon what he
+earns.  There are many beautiful things--beautiful and intimate and
+feminine things--which no man can remain happy in seeing paid for by
+other money than his own, for the woman he loves."
+
+Ten minutes after it was done Caleb could not have told what impulse
+was to blame for the deed, but he rose forthwith and went to his
+strong-box, to return with the legal-looking document and the bunch of
+tax-receipts which he had found among Old Tom's papers, years and years
+before.
+
+"There's the deed to some thousands of acres of the finest timber in
+this country," he announced challengingly, "all ship-shape in the name
+of Stephen O'Mara, 2nd!  Old Tom bought them for the boy he hid away
+with him, in the days when timber-lands were going for a song.  He paid
+the taxes until he was drowned, and I--I've paid 'em since, my dear!
+Three or four hundred thousand dollars, or more, ought to buy quite an
+amount of--er--feminine necessities, it seems to me."
+
+With delicately thin fingers Miss Sarah leafed the papers through.
+
+"You have never told me of this matter before, Cal," she murmured.
+
+"Never told anybody!" chirruped Caleb triumphantly.  "I tried to find
+the boy--both of us did, that is--and we failed.  And when he turned up
+of his own accord--well, I knew a half year more of ignorance
+concerning his legacy wouldn't see him starve.  Sarah, I wanted to see
+how that boy of ours would behave, without any backing.  I wanted to be
+sure of the stuff he is made of!"
+
+They had finished a much interrupted meal, but Miss Sarah lingered a
+moment at table.  With incredible calm she had listened to the secret
+which her brother had been keeping to himself so long.
+
+"A very good reason," she agreed, "one that would seem to have many
+points to excuse it.  And although it is not within the letter of the
+law I--I think, Cal, I shall become an accessory before the fact.  Very
+shamelessly I am going to ask you to see that no one knows of this
+property of Steve's, for a little longer, at least.  I have spoken with
+the utmost confidence concerning Barbara; your reference to all that
+she said to Steve in a childish burst of passion years ago does not
+affect my attitude at all.  But I have not been blind to what might be
+her--opinion now, either, impossible and ignoble though it seems.  You
+will not tell Stephen of this matter for a while, Cal, for it would
+please me to know, without room for doubt, just what stuff she is made
+of, too!"
+
+She straightened her diminutive body and started upstairs.
+
+"She will be over to bid us good-bye to-night," she added.  "Will you
+see that she comes directly up to me?"
+
+And once more, from the landing, she spoke over her shoulder:
+
+"You said that she treated him like a dog, Cal," she managed to keep
+her features grave, "and being a woman I can understand exactly why
+that is so.  The joy of a breathless pursuit, it is often said, is the
+only choice left for the female.  But can you tell me why a man hunts
+out the deepest, most comfortable chair he can find and ensconces
+himself therein, once he had overtaken the idol of his fancy?  They
+often do, you know, sometimes for the rest of their lives."
+
+Caleb lighted his pipe and cast about for his paper.  "Maybe it's only
+the natural consequence," he retorted, his face turned away, "of such a
+pursuit as you mention.  Maybe he feels the need of a long, long rest!"
+
+And then Miss Sarah laughed.
+
+An hour later, when she ran upstairs, Barbara found Caleb's tiny
+spinster sister, in negligee and boudoir cap, sitting cross-legged like
+a girl in the middle of the floor.  There was an orderly litter of
+papers around her, and a confusion of clothes; and Barbara hesitated on
+the threshold until Miss Sarah nodded her head.
+
+"Come in, my dear," she invited.  "I'm indulging in one of the few joys
+left to advanced, unmarried years, that is all.  But even memories need
+prodding with more material things, at times, I find."
+
+The dark-eyed girl crossed and found a clear spot and seated herself.
+Without seeming to look at her, Miss Sarah saw that those eyes were
+vaguely troubled.
+
+"I'm leaving to-morrow," Barbara began after a minute.  "I came over to
+say good-bye."
+
+Miss Sarah went on with her sorting.
+
+"We'll see you again soon," she suggested pleasantly.
+
+There was trouble in the girl's voice, too.
+
+"I--don't think so."
+
+"It's a very pretty country--a hard country to forget."  Miss Sarah
+very wisely gave no heed to the woebegone note.  "Perhaps," archly,
+"perhaps you'll be returning as the new Mrs. Wickersham?"
+
+Barbara flushed duskily.  Miss Sarah, however, was gazing at a
+dog-eared picture--a very old-fashioned picture of a youth in brave and
+resplendent garb of a period long dead.  No one but herself and her
+brother had seen that photograph for many years, and he only because he
+had rummaged in a pigeon-hole in which he had no licence to look.  His
+sister's eyes, as well as her posture, were girlish when she laid it
+aside to hold up to view a battered black velvet suit with wide collars
+and cuffs.
+
+"I wonder if you could ever guess who once wore this?" she laughed
+lightly.
+
+Politely Barbara examined it.
+
+"I'm sure I couldn't," she answered.  And, very slowly:
+
+"Miriam is going to marry Garry Devereau.  She is disgracefully happy
+about it."
+
+The older woman received this irrelevance with composure.
+
+"How charming," she said.  "And I am sure that they will continue to be
+as happy as I hope you will be soon.  This suit was Steve's--little
+Steve's.  Dear me, what a day that was!"
+
+After a moment of hesitation Barbara leaned forward to examine the
+silver buttons.
+
+"It--it doesn't seem possible," she faltered.  "What sort of a--a day?"
+
+And then, with smooth, serious face upturned, she listened to Miss
+Sarah's tale--her own story of how she had dressed a gloomy-faced boy
+in half-century-old finery and sent him townward for eggs.  When it was
+finished and she had decided, abruptly, that she must be going,
+suddenly, wet-eyed, she wheeled in the doorway and went blindly back to
+the older woman's arms.  Miss Sarah hugged her once; then stood her
+away at arm's length.  She knew how few women weep, without hiding
+their heads.
+
+"There, we mustn't be temperamental," she chided.  "It's only for a
+winter, at most.  Remember, I love you very dearly, Barbara; write to
+me whenever you are lonely.  And be a very good girl."
+
+It was a brave bit of comfort, but Caleb's tiny sister, whose face had
+never lost its pink-and-whiteness, looked suddenly tired and old when
+she was alone again.  As blindly as Barbara had come into her arms, she
+reached for the dog-eared picture and held it to her flat breasts.
+There is no greatness of soul save there be simplicity.  Very directly,
+very simply Miss Sarah stood there in the middle of her girlish room
+and spoke to her Creator.
+
+"I do not mean to meddle, dear God," she whispered, with tears
+squeezing from beneath tight lids.  "I only want to help a little, if I
+may.  You see, I've never had a baby of my own."
+
+The door of the ground floor room which served Dexter Allison as an
+office was ajar when Barbara re-entered the house beyond the hedge.
+There was a streak of light running out across the floor of the dim
+hall from within, and the girl lingered on her hurried way to her own
+room to bid her father good-night.  But she found Wickersham alone when
+she pushed wider the door.  The light was behind him and she could not
+see how distorted was his face, yet as she paused on the threshold and
+a thin and pungent odor crinkled her nostrils, she sensed, somehow,
+that he had not been long alone.
+
+"Father gone to bed?" she called.  "Well, that's wise.  You'd better
+come, too; it's time you were asleep."
+
+She did not remember, just then, that other night when he had addressed
+those same words to her.  She only knew that his features became
+suffused with purple even before she had finished.  And then she
+realized quickly that it was alcohol she smelled; knew, too, that it
+was not Wickersham who had been drinking, even though Wickersham had
+trouble with his tongue.  And while she waited, puzzled and frowning,
+the man gave up an attempt at his usual nicety of phrase and blurted
+out all that which had been many days hidden behind his impassivity.
+
+"We haven't yet set a certain date for our marriage, Barbara," his
+voice was strained.  "Don't you think it is high time we did?"
+
+The girl colored.  It was, at least, very unexpected.
+
+"Why, no, we haven't," she admitted.  "But we can if you wish it.  Have
+you thought of a day you'd prefer?"
+
+"I have," he stated.  "Would the first of May be too early for you?"
+
+Often, afterward, she wondered at her humility of that night, for
+whatever the quick thought might have been which made her reach out one
+hand to touch the doorframe beside her, her words were merely mild.
+
+"It is, rather.  But I think I can manage it, if it will please you."
+
+Wickersham had come to his feet, but he would not turn so that she
+might see his face.  He spoke with eyes averted.
+
+"It would," he answered with an effort, "and--and in the interim I am
+going to be very sure, now, that no thoughtlessness of yours will be
+derogatory, either to my profound respect for you or your own respect
+for yourself."
+
+The small hand closed then until it was clutching whitely the woodwork
+beneath it.  She understood at last how much Wickersham had seen; she
+was never to understand entirely her mood of that moment.  For had she
+waited she would have left him with finger ringless.  Instead she
+wheeled without a word and climbed, white-lipped, upstairs.
+
+Miriam Burrell loomed in one window of her bedroom when she entered--a
+different Miriam than the one who had once sat in just such an
+attitude, gazing into the north.  The older girl's gladness of heart
+throbbed in her voice.
+
+"I don't want to leave it, Bobs," she sighed.  "I love every brawling
+rapid and sulky, ragged old peak.  Did you ever see a more perfect
+night?"
+
+Through the gloom the younger girl's answer lashed back, reckless of
+what hurt she might do.
+
+"I hate it!" she gasped vehemently.  "I hate it--hate it!  And I must
+ask you, please--I want to go to bed."
+
+There is a poise which comes only with hard-bought knowledge of one's
+self.  It was Miss Sarah's; Miriam had acquired it, too.  Without a
+hint of resentment in her manner she rose and withdrew.  But Barbara
+did not go to bed.  She took that vacated seat at the window.  And long
+after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still
+wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with
+elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who
+found it hard to keep his feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
+
+Her letter came to him a week later, though she had posted it the
+morning she took the train from Morrison.  It had lain for days in the
+post-office box of the East Coast Company, waiting the day when one of
+the teamsters should call and carry it in overland.  Steve had never
+before seen her handwriting.  It was his first letter from her; yet he
+recognized it the instant Big Louie put it in his hand.  And he was
+glad that night that both Fat Joe and Garry were absent from the
+up-river camp--glad that he was to have the next hour alone.  But when
+he broke the flap of it Big Louie, who lingered uneasily in the open
+doorway--even Big Louie, whose wits were not particularly keen--knew
+from the expression which passed over his superior's face that this
+heavy envelope which he had brought had not contained good news.  The
+quick contraction of muscles which tightened his jaw was too much like
+a spasm of pain.  For her first letter, so the sentence ran, was to be
+her last; she wrote "less kindly than she would have wished to write,"
+that she and Mr. Wickersham had decided upon the first of May, and
+after the silence had become a throbbing thing Big Louie decided,
+instinctively, that he would let go until later the demand which he had
+planned to make for a raise to meet that raise which, so he had heard
+it gossiped in town, was being paid the men in the northern
+lumber-camps.  He stumbled going out and lost his balance so that the
+door crashed to behind him, violently.  But Steve stood as he had stood
+when his eye's sought the first line of her note, nor did the crash
+penetrate his ears.
+
+Repeatedly, in the interval which had elapsed since she had bidden him
+good-bye, the latter had told himself that she would not write, but the
+repetition had been unconvincing.  He knew that now.  With the note
+which smelled faintly of her there in his hand he realized that he had
+gone beyond mere expectation of a letter; he had dared to hope
+concerning its contents.  How was he to know that she, too, after
+mailing it, had suffered as keenly as he was suffering that moment,
+wishing that she had employed less abrupt phrases, rebelliously
+regretting that she had sent it at all?
+
+That night his fingers closed until the monogrammed sheet was reduced
+to a crumpled ball.  The edges of the paper took fire slowly, then it
+exploded softly into flame upon the bed of coals in the fireplace where
+he had tossed it.  And at that he laughed aloud, a harsh taunt for his
+own high hopes, without thinking how much his mirth of that moment was
+like what Garry's once had been.  He lowered himself into a chair, and
+he was still there, motionless before a dead fire, when morning dawned
+greyly.  His face had become less hard; he even found it possible to
+smile a little when the cook-boy, starting at the sight of him fully
+dressed at that hour, advised with alarmed volubility that breakfast
+would be ready immediately.  But the few men who still remained at
+Thirty-Mile, felling and hauling the piles which were to carry the
+track across the swamp, noticed a difference in their chief that
+morning which made them careful to hear him, the first time he spoke an
+order.
+
+Barbara did not write again, and in this, at least, the man who loved
+her anticipated her correctly.  The letters, however, which Garrett
+Devereau received each day from Miriam--bulky, extra-postage
+epistles--brought often news of her; and these fragments Garry, knowing
+without being told for whom they were meant duly delivered to Steve, in
+weekly or fortnightly instalments, whenever the latter's duties brought
+him to Morrison.  For Garry and Fat Joe, who had been transferred to
+the lower end of the work, along with the bulk of the up-river force,
+had noticed that difference too.
+
+"Miriam says for me to keep my feet dry this cold weather," he'd tell
+the other man, laughingly, "and Barbara sends her regards to all of us,
+and hopes that we are making splendid headway."  Or again: "Barbara's
+looking a little pale, Miriam writes.  She says she's--er--trying to do
+altogether too much for her endurance."
+
+Whatever the bit of news was Garry passed it on religiously, a little
+guiltily, sometimes, because of his own great happiness.  Once he had
+failed, signally, to read behind his friend's moody silences; his
+surmise concerning the reason for Steve's changed bearing was not so
+wide of the mark this time.  Often, within himself, Garry's wrath
+seethed hot, but he was no longer as ready as he had once been with
+verbal, cynical criticism.  Only to Fat Joe did he dare pour out his
+soul with that vivid incisiveness which always held Joe spellbound.
+
+"He's eating his heart out over _her_," he'd explode, "over a girl who
+is proving every day that she isn't worth a minute's heart-ache of a
+man like him.  I used to think she had brains, if any of them did; I
+used to think that Barbara Allison was something besides a fluffy
+little fool!  Why can't he see for himself that she's just as worthless
+as most of the rest of them?"
+
+And from there, without knowing how truly funny such argument sounded,
+coming from his lips, he would soar to wonderful heights of profanity.
+But save for the pleasure which he took in the pyrotechnics, his
+outbursts made little impression upon Fat Joe.  The latter maintained a
+sort of placid superiority, perhaps because he had learned early that
+this attitude aggravated Garry's rages; perhaps because he was so very
+certain of his man.
+
+"I wouldn't go to getting all stirred up like this, so early in the
+game," he'd reply with unvaried calm.  "Shucks, it's too early to begin
+counting either man's pile of chips--" either man to both minds meaning
+Steve and Wickersham, without the naming of names.  "You are too liable
+to premature enthusiasms or discouragements, Garry.  That's why I
+mostly manage to beat you as easy as he beats me, whenever we throw a
+hand or two.  Ain't you never going to learn that a man must gamble a
+bit on the cards still waiting to be dealt?"
+
+And again, confidently:
+
+"He's worried--of course he is!  He ain't enjoyin' his meditations a
+little bit these days, but he's enjoyin' 'em more all by himself than
+he would be if we were up there with him, forcin' him to look
+everlastingly like four aces, when it's deuces at present he's holding.
+He's worried, and that's why I don't grow nervous myself.  Because it
+is only the man who is too sure who is awful likely to finish broke.
+Don't you waste any pity on him yet, and I wouldn't let him hear me
+passing uncomplimentary words concerning his girl, either, if I was
+you.  Lightning ain't particular where it strikes when it's been a long
+time cooped up.  Every man to his own taste in such matters, says
+I--and shucks, man, can't you tell, just from seein' 'em together that
+they was made for each other?  If a man quit every time a woman began
+to put him over the jumps we'd have a dangerous decrease in marriage
+licences staring us in the face.  He's just learning to care more for
+her, that's all, and caring a lot about anybody never was a comfortable
+state to be in.  It's entirely too uncertain and unsettling--but you
+wouldn't enjoy not caring about anybody at all, yourself, would you?"
+
+Garry admitted that he wouldn't.
+
+"Well, then, don't waste your time pitying him."  A cold gleam
+flickered in those bleached blue eyes.  "Don't you suppose I'd have
+taken apart long ago this animated ice-chest who is making all the
+trouble, just to see what makes him so cold, if I didn't know I'd be
+spoiling the big show?  Couldn't you see, without my tellin' you, that
+I'd rise up some day and leave him looking like a premature blast,
+after all I've learned he's plannin' to slip us, if I wasn't sure that
+he's going to get it, worse than I could ever give it to him, from that
+girl herself?  Well, I would.  He makes me shiver, that man; makes me
+crawl and itch to take his head in one hand and his throat in the other
+and exert a little strength in opposite directions.  Give our entry
+time!  The game is running dead against him at present, I'll admit, but
+he's husbanding his chips.  He ain't drawing wild and squandering his
+chances.  And he's only _begun_ to play."
+
+Which, in part, was very, very true; in part not so close to the facts.
+Before snow came that fall Steve had recovered his outward confidence,
+at least; he had begun to hope again, while he waited and labored
+prodigiously against the coming of spring.  But in his heart he was no
+longer sure; he could not summon back that serene self-surety which,
+toward the end, had shaken even the girl's certainty in herself.  He
+could no longer argue convincingly with a vision of her, as he had
+often argued with Barbara herself, that his way would be her way in the
+end.  For he had begun to realize the width of that gulf which he knew
+must seem to exist between them, if not to her then to the eyes of
+others of her world.
+
+It was his memories which gave him consolation those long nights, but
+they also gave him doubt.  Remembering the daintiness of her as she had
+come to him, the night of her party, recalling the things to which she
+had been accustomed since she had opened her eyes on the first light of
+day, he began to ask himself as every man like him has asked who ever
+loved a woman, how in any fairness he could expect her to accept the
+little which he could offer in return.  To Steve and Fat Joe, to the
+men of his gang, his confidence was that of the old, old Steve who, ten
+years before, had cocked his head at one of Allison's switch engines
+and promised gravely, "I'll hev to be gittin' one of them for myself,
+some-day."  But his heart ached.  And when that ache became so leaden
+that he couldn't endure it any longer in silence, he carried it to the
+one person in his life who was best calculated to understand.
+Diffidently he broached the subject with Miss Sarah, approaching it in
+a roundabout fashion least likely to deceive that bright-eyed little
+lady.
+
+"Garry is saving his money against the fatal day," he laughed one
+night.  "He has become a rank miser!  Joe says he goes for days at a
+time, borrowing his tobacco, and he won't play anything but penny-ante
+now, when he can be coaxed to play at all!"
+
+Miss Sarah was too kind to look at him directly that evening.
+
+"The regeneration of Garry is one of the things which had made my life
+most happy," she answered.  And then, paving the way for what she knew
+was on his mind.  "I suppose you will be surprising us yourself, one of
+these days.  And no doubt you'll be just as happily positive as Garry
+is, that your choice is the only one in the world."
+
+They were alone in the big living-room.  Caleb was still in town,
+gossiping with Hardwick Elliott.  And Steve's bruised smile clutched at
+Miss Sarah's heart.
+
+"I!" he overdid his amusement.  "I have lived too much alone, I'm
+afraid, ever to prove very attractive to any woman's fancy.  Bachelors
+are not always born; they are sometimes the habits of loneliness."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" the good woman ridiculed him.  "Why--why, if it
+weren't for a suspicion that you might have your eye on some small
+person or other, I'd drop everything and hunt one up for you, myself.
+Why, Stephen, what a remark for me to hear from you!"
+
+Both were silent for a moment.
+
+"Marriage is a mighty--expensive proposition," he commented at length,
+profoundly.
+
+"Is Garry such a plutocrat any more?"
+
+"That is not a fair illustration for us to employ," he countered, and
+Barbara Allison was not the only woman who loved his lazily final
+statements.  "Both Garry and Miriam have been taught that there are
+worse things than the hardship of making last year's limousine do for
+another season."
+
+Miss Sarah laughed at this drollery.  She was a better antagonist than
+most.  She had practiced on Caleb.
+
+"Can't one girl learn what another has been taught?" she wanted to
+know.  "Stephen, do you mean to sit there and infer that you could
+continue to _care_ for a girl who could not care for you, just for
+yourself?"
+
+His reply told her how tired he had become in trying to stem the tide
+of doubt alone.  It warned her, too, that she had gone too close, for
+he veered off sharply.  Steve persisted in generalities, but he wanted
+to talk.
+
+"I have been wondering if that is not an old-fashioned attitude," he
+said.  "Women, they tell, us, have broadened since they usurped many
+places in the business world once held by men.  They are looking mighty
+keen-eyed toward the vote now, and a share in the legislation of their
+growing affairs, or at least so they explain.  You have heard many men
+say 'business is business.'  Maybe you have watched quite a few
+charming brides walk to the altar, and wondered if that wasn't their
+sentiment, too."
+
+She chose to be suddenly vexed with him.
+
+"I do not like such humor, and of course you are joking.  I have heard
+Garrett Devereau talk in just such a strain too often to be amused by
+it.  And if you mean----"
+
+"If I meant it, I was crying the baby," stated the man coldly, and Miss
+Sarah knew that he was rebuking himself.  "I could care for such a
+girl--yes.  But I doubt if I would marry a woman who had even the
+smallest doubt.  There are too many sharp places to be smoothed over,
+without chancing that tragedy of discontent.  It's merely habit that's
+to blame again, that's all."  He cast about for a parallel.  "One does
+not miss sugar so very much from a meal, until he knows he can't have
+it.  And then--well, Miss Sarah, I have many times talked peevishly,
+for a man, because there was none to be had."
+
+"We are talking of women.  What about salt?" she inquired quickly.
+
+"That is very indispensable, too, but----"
+
+"Of the two which do you always take care shall not be missing from
+your pack, whenever you turn into the woods?"
+
+"I see where you are heading, but----"
+
+"I do not like dissemblance, Stephen," she warned.  "You know without
+the salt of love the sugar of life can grow sickeningly cloying."
+
+He did not win his argument, but defeat gave him far more happiness
+than could have come from victory.  Leaving her that night, he closed
+his hand over her delicate fingers in a clasp which left her smiling in
+wonder after he had gone.  She watched horse and rider disappear into
+the whiteness of the new winter till both were lost to her sight.
+
+"Bless the boy," she murmured then.  "Bless the boy!"  And to Caleb,
+her brother, when he came stamping in: "I surely must take a hand with
+these children.  They have been left to their own devices long enough."
+
+Caleb had recovered his good-natured view of the whole affair; he was
+given to grinning those days at her flutterings.  On more than one
+occasion he told her, none too flatteringly, that she made him think of
+an officious hen with a brood which a high rate of mortality and
+prowling night-raiders had left bereft of all save two of her hatch.
+But this particular witticism did not bother her in the least, perhaps
+because she realized how pat the comparison was.  Instead of silencing
+him she showed him the letter which she constructed some days
+later--constructed most painstakingly, the second week in December.
+She deigned to read it aloud to him, before she dispatched it on its
+journey.
+
+
+"Barbara, dear child," she wrote, "this is the appeal of a lonesome
+spinster lady who finds that winter, still only a lusty infant here, is
+the season for younger, warmer pulses.  I am very tired of Caleb's
+continued company; that is, with nothing to leaven it.  The keenest of
+epigrammarians, my dear, becomes very commonplace, you know, to ears
+too long tuned to one voice.  So I am writing you in dignified
+desperation to come to me this holiday season--Caleb is not always as
+epigrammatic as I could wish.
+
+"I am going to be positive that you will come, unless you have already
+made other plans.  And, on second thought, if you have already done so,
+I am going to fall back upon the privileged tyranny of one who once
+carried you in her arms.  You must come to me this Christmas!"
+
+
+There was another whole paragraph of rambling, repeated arguments, and
+then a full page devoted to the beauties of the hills and season.
+
+
+"The days are diamond brilliant," she wrote, "and the nights as drily
+cold and crisp as Caleb's few last cherished bottles of champagne.  We
+have a foot of snow, two feet in the ell of the house where the
+mint-bed lies, and that has afforded Caleb much peace of mind, too.
+The roots will live nicely under their warm blanket, you see--all of
+which must read frivolously to you, coming from staid Miss Sarah.  I
+can only plead that already I must be less lonely for anticipation of
+your arrival.  Are you well?  You will find new roses for your cheeks
+in this climate.  And you may telegraph your acceptance, this once, if
+you are too busy to write, although you know I deplore the lack of
+those punctillios which once made of all custom and etiquette a most
+charming thing."
+
+
+It was signed, "Yours, my dear, Sarah Hunter."
+
+There was a quaint twist to the letter S; sharp angles in the
+chirography which a newer decade of femininity might have found sadly
+lacking in a largeness of loops now indispensable as indication of
+"character."  And there was a postscript, of course.
+
+
+"Stephen O'Mara has been several times to dinner, since your departure.
+He is working very hard, but most successfully, I am sure, for he
+appears to be very happy.  He is thinner than he was, but who could
+have guessed that the boy he was would grow to be such a handsome man!
+Men with eyes like his and such voices used to break the hearts of
+susceptible maids, when I was sixteen.  Do come!  S. H."
+
+
+She read it aloud from beginning to end, nor did she falter much when
+Caleb greeted the postscript with a shout of joy.  Caleb was most
+high-spirited those days, for the line in regard to the progress of
+Steve's work was in truth an under-statement if anything, even though
+the assurance of his happiness might have been called a misconstruance
+of facts.  Caleb had almost begun to think that he had done Dexter
+Allison, his friend, an injustice.  He had begun to congratulate
+himself on having said nothing to him directly.
+
+"What do you think of it?" his sister asked pleasantly, when she had
+finished reading.  "Will it--do?"
+
+"If you mean--will it fetch her, I can only say Heaven knows!"  Indeed
+he was enjoying himself.  "You feel positive that she cares for him,
+you say? . . .  But I thought you were always inclined to believe Steve
+rather easy to look at, even as a boy?"
+
+"I was!" maintained Miss Sarah.  Her voice grew girlish.  "Do you
+remember the night you gave him my old hunting coat, Cal, and he went
+to sleep with it in his arms?"
+
+Some of the teasing note left her brother's voice.
+
+"Then why do you tell Barbara--why do you seem to infer--" he foundered
+hopelessly.
+
+"Stupid!" said Miss Sarah.  "Will she come?"
+
+"She won't!" he stated solidly.
+
+When he spoke in that tone Miss Sarah always chose to believe the
+contrary, and events in this instance proved her right.  Barbara did
+not wire.  She wrote a long letter full of little twists and turns
+which led at last to the subject which Miss Sarah had mentioned so
+parenthetically.
+
+
+"I am delighted at the prospect of getting away from town for a week,"
+she closed as she had opened her reply--"delighted at Mr. O'Mara's
+splendid success.  Last night I overheard father telling some business
+associates that he would one day be the biggest power in the north
+country, unless something happened to check him soon.  That was very
+flattering, wasn't it?  It will make you very proud, I know.  Tell Mr.
+O'Mara I wished to be recalled to him.  As I have already warned you in
+this letter, father insists on coming with me.  I think he must be a
+little tired of the city himself, for he is very restless.  And remind
+Uncle Cal that I am to have the wish-bone, or I will not come at all!"
+
+
+This reply Miss Sarah also read aloud to her brother, in a voice that
+was not quite Christian, however, for it was gloating in tone.
+
+"There!" she breathed, "and, Cal, aren't you ashamed sometimes to have
+your judgment so often refuted by a mere woman?"
+
+Caleb had been reading in the Morrison Standard that the East Coast
+Company had made unbelievable strides in its work, in spite of many
+conspiring hard-luck circumstances; he was frowning over that oddly
+veiled compliment of Allison's, which his daughter had so innocently
+repeated, but he was glad to hear that Dexter, too, planned to run up
+for the year-end.  He was a bit bored himself.  Now he grinned over
+another thought.
+
+"She fails to mention whether she ever noticed the color of his eyes,"
+he choked a little, "or--or the heart-breaking quality of his voice!
+Maybe she hasn't noticed 'em yet herself, eh?"
+
+Miss Sarah scorned to answer.  She went upstairs to her desk and she
+wrote two letters that night, before she retired.  One went back to
+Barbara.  The other had not so far to travel, but it was longer in
+reaching its destination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
+
+The world was snow-bound--all that small world which lay between the
+hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile.  For two days it had been snowing,
+great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making
+one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under
+the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling
+the elements.  For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved
+but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before
+Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather
+cleared.
+
+Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the
+afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she
+would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he
+was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself,
+upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the
+holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the
+snow.  It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of
+supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over
+the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch.
+Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the
+seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so
+stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind.  Fallon was driving;
+Shayne was beating his arms across his chest.  And the second team was
+fagged and caked with frozen lather.  Big Louie had been breaking trail
+for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from
+spent--not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their
+heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables.  Big Louie loved horses
+as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world.  Sober he fed them
+bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have
+understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who
+might chance to maltreat them.  That was the reason Steve had made Big
+Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.
+
+From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house
+door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew
+that they were too weary to unload that night.  And he was still there
+at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead,
+hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came
+straight toward his own shack.  He opened the door and bade them enter
+before they had had a chance to knock.  The swagger in the shoulders of
+two of them told him what to expect.  Big Louie was only clumsy, as
+usual.
+
+"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always
+addressed him.  His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was
+in part a question, in no wise a welcome.  "Well?" he asked.
+
+Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no
+hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.
+
+"We've come for our time," he growled.
+
+Steve nodded gravely.
+
+"I see," he murmured.  "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."
+
+They were the satellites of Harrigan.  Because of that he had kept them
+all where his eyes could find them at times.  And even though their
+arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he
+listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.
+
+"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps."  Fallon should not
+have gloated.  "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut.  We're
+going back to the river."
+
+"I see," again observed Steve.  "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as
+long as you want to work."
+
+Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.
+
+"We want our time," Fallon reiterated.  "This is going to be a man's
+year on the river!"
+
+"You, also?" Steve inquired of Shayne.
+
+That worthy gloated too.
+
+"Yes, me also," he came back, "an' a hundred others, before the ice
+goes out."
+
+Big Louie he had given up for lost long before that, and yet it was
+with Big Louie that Steve made a sincere effort.
+
+"I'd like to have you stay, Louie," he faced the third man.  "I need
+you, for you can do more with horses than any man I know.  You are
+worth three a day to me.  Do you care to think it over?"
+
+Big Louie's eyes had been mournful when he stumbled in out of the cold.
+They were that now.  He started to turn toward the window for a look at
+the stables, and then thought better of it.  Resolutely, for him, he
+shook his head.
+
+"I am done--me," he muttered.  "I work for no company that will leave
+honest men to starve."
+
+It was hopeless from the start, yet Steve tried again.
+
+"I can promise you work as long as you are able to hold a rein," he
+offered, but he moved nearer the door while he was speaking.  "That is
+all I can promise."
+
+Perhaps Fallon believed that Big Louie was weakening; perhaps he felt
+that the situation was too highly dramatic to be wasted, for he made a
+wide flourish with one hand.
+
+"We want our time, and we want it now," he threatened.  "We're going to
+show you who bosses this river, before we're done with you!"
+
+Fallon shouldn't have gloated; he shouldn't have threatened.  And
+Shayne shouldn't have smiled.  Steve had slipped the latch loose.  Now
+he swung open the door.
+
+"Call for your time at the Morrison office," he said evenly, "and if
+you're going--why, go!"
+
+By collar and belt he swung him back and drove him sprawling into a
+drift.
+
+"Are you in a hurry, too, Shayne?" he asked pleasantly, and Shayne
+buried his head beside Fallon's in the snow.  Then Steve closed the
+door carefully and turned again to Big Louie.
+
+"Louie," he said, "I make it a rule to urge no man who does not wish to
+stay.  If it needs persuasion to keep you, I do not want you here.  But
+you are running with the wrong crowd, Louie; you'll learn it
+someday--but someday may be too late."
+
+The big, dreamy-eyed man was hardly listening, but he gestured toward
+the door.  And Steve treated his departure kindly, as he had always
+treated his presence.  Outside where Shayne and Fallon had picked
+themselves up, Big Louie hesitated and fumbled in his pocket with a
+cold-cramped hand.  He delivered the letter which had been entrusted to
+him, before he went down the hill.  There are many men like Big Louie
+who are pitifully faithful until events outstrip their intellects.
+Steve was sorry for him; and a half hour later, after he had read Miss
+Sarah's prim note requesting his presence at dinner at seven-thirty,
+Christmas eve, he grew sorrier still while he watched the ill-assorted
+trio meet once more, blanket-packs upon their backs and snow-shoes on
+their feet.  Big Louie had joined the other two from the direction of
+the stables.  There were words between them, for Steve saw the huge
+man's arm lift to strike Shayne to the ground, and then drop harmlessly
+back to his side.  And Steve knew what that bit of pantomime meant.
+Big Louie had been to bid his team good-bye.  There was a smudge of
+brown sugar across his coat, though the watcher was too far away to see
+that.  But he knew that Big Louie had been crying, knew that Shayne had
+smiled.  It was the second time that Shayne had smiled that
+evening--his second bad mistake.  Long after they had disappeared into
+the north toward the Reserve Company's camps, Steve wondered that it
+had not cost him his life.
+
+Miss Sarah's note which had been almost a week on the way was very
+primly correct, but the inevitable postscript which under-ran it
+sounded a more intimate note.
+
+"We are not excessively formal as a rule, Stephen," she wrote, "so a
+dinner jacket will be adequate.  As I am expecting two other guests
+besides your friends, Mr. Morgan and Garrett Devereau, I must ask you
+to let no business matters interfere with your promptness."
+
+Steve dared not let himself wonder who those other guests would prove
+to be, Miriam Burrell, he knew, had already written Garry that this was
+to be the saddest Christmas, and the merriest, that she had ever known,
+giving as respective reasons her inability to be with him, and the fact
+that she was so entirely his.  Because he would not let himself hope
+this time he was not disappointed, or at least so he told himself, when
+he found only Dexter Allison with Caleb, the next afternoon near six.
+And on a sudden thought his eyes went roving around the room then,
+looking for Archibald Wickersham; but Miss Sarah gave him no time for a
+protracted scrutiny.
+
+"Your room is ready, Stephen," she told him, and steered him toward the
+stairs.  "You have an hour in which to dress--and you know already that
+I am old-maidenishly strict."
+
+Surely Archibald Wickersham was the other guest whom they were
+expecting.  Allison's very presence argued that.  Yet Steve's nose
+played him a startling trick as he mounted upward.  He could have sworn
+that he smelled that faint perfume which always made him remember, now,
+his first letter from her; had he not been afraid to hope he would have
+been positive that there was a flurry of skirts retreating above him.
+But he knew that she could not have come.  He knew it!  And then,
+three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again
+to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for
+him to appear.  In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her
+slenderness--made her appear even smaller than she was--she gave him an
+elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at him her
+laughter.
+
+"Merry Christmas, Sir Galahad," she called.
+
+Just as he had paused there a half-score of years before, Stephen
+O'Mara paused now, with Caleb and Miss Sarah again gazing up at him.
+It was the first time Sarah Hunter had seen the grown-up Steve in
+conventional black and white; her emotions were much the same as they
+had been on that remoter day.  But Steve did not even see her glowing
+face below him in that instant, nor Caleb's, nor that of Allison
+either, who watching Steve's eyes, had suddenly ceased to smile.  Caleb
+knew what his sister's thoughts were, however, for he was recalling
+that black velvet suit with silver buttons himself.  While Steve and
+Barbara were shaking hands he gained her ear in whispered admiration.
+
+"Sarah," he commented, "Sarah, you are clever!"
+
+Miss Sarah was on the point of taking Dexter Allison's arm to lead the
+way to table.  Her reply was tuned to Caleb's ear alone.
+
+"She had thought of him in terms of blue flannel and corduroy long
+enough," she said.  "If you please, Dexter--Stephen, do you and Barbara
+want any dinner?"
+
+Those two were still shaking hands.  Steve, who was only dimly aware of
+the fact that Garry and Fat Joe had arrived, the latter guilty of his
+first dinner jacket and enormously proud of his guilt, stood looking at
+Barbara while she was chattering at him, without hearing distinctly a
+word she spoke.  Miss Sarah's question helped to bring him back.
+
+"You look as though I were a wraith," the girl accused him.  "Am I so
+pale after a few weeks of sophisticated city air?"
+
+But her man had taken command of himself again, by then.
+
+"I thought you looked like--shall I tell you what I thought?"
+
+"Most certainly," she was forced to insist.  "Wasn't it a bald enough
+invitation for a pretty speech?"
+
+"I thought you looked like a small pink bon-bon," responded Steve
+leisurely, and while the rest laughed at her discomfiture, Fat Joe
+leaned over and nudged Garry.
+
+"What'd I tell you?" he demanded.  "What'd I tell you?  Say, ain't he
+working well to-night?"
+
+But for once Joe had himself been misled into premature enthusiasm such
+as he had decried in Garry.  For if Barbara had, in Miss Sarah's
+phrase, been thinking of Steve in terms of blue flannels and corduroy,
+until then, before the dinner ended she was aware of a difference in
+the attitude of this man who loved her, too great to be explained by
+the clothes he wore.  The very light in his eyes, whenever she
+contrived to catch him gazing at her, convinced her of what was behind
+his new restraint; and then, immediately, perversely, she set herself
+to break it down by those very methods best calculated to strengthen
+it.  More than once that evening Dexter Allison withdrew from the
+general conversation to watch the play of his daughter's glances upon
+O'Mara's tanned face; several times he fell to chewing his lip as was
+his custom when deeply perplexed.  Complications scarcely ever troubled
+Dexter Allison.  He was beginning to awake to one now which already
+worried him more than he cared to admit.
+
+There was no keeping the girl within doors after dinner was over.  She
+ran upstairs and changed into moccasins and white blanket coat, and
+skirt that barely met the moccasin tops half-way.  And Steve, who had
+changed too and was waiting for her when she came down, had knotted a
+crimson scarf about the middle of his belted jacket to match the white
+one twisted about her throat.  With much approval Miss Sarah noted,
+while she watched them away on snow shoes, the bit of color it added to
+his soberer garb; she promised herself to recall it to Caleb at some
+future date.  Caleb had very pronounced views regarding the lack of
+vanity in men's dress.  But for the time being she was content to go
+upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.
+
+The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence.
+They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the
+higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white,
+before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.
+
+"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.
+
+She needed no explanation of his mood.  To a woman there is no subtler
+flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability.  He
+talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was
+vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The
+work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the
+severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night.
+Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of
+himself--that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction
+that she was beyond his reach.
+
+It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about
+Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and
+a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.
+
+"It is too bad," he said slowly.  "I have been sorrier for him myself,
+since his going, than I've been over anything for years.  I do not know
+just why, but I'm afraid for him.  The others--"  He stopped there,
+catching himself before he had said too much.  "I could always tell Big
+Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of
+doubt that he would stick to my orders.  But that is the trouble with
+his kind.  Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend
+upon the ideas which other men supply him.  And there is no guarantee
+whether they will be good or bad ideas."
+
+From the first he talked fitfully that night.  On other occasions she
+had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to
+another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back
+again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread
+of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and
+delightful wisdoms to her ears.  But to-night his grave-voiced
+divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.
+
+"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he
+had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, should be
+the one to be trusted.  "He was never able to go fifty rods into the
+brush himself, without getting completely turned around, and he was
+born in these hills, at that."
+
+Then he had to tell her that it was Big Louie to whom he was referring,
+before she understood quite what he meant.  But he abandoned that
+trend, freakishly, the very next moment.
+
+"It doesn't seem complicated," he pondered.  "To a man who has come
+into the world with his sense of north and south and east and west all
+safely relegated to his backbone instead of having to depend upon the
+flighty functions of his brain for his guide, it's about the simplest
+thing there is.  He finds his way without thinking about the lay of the
+land, or moss on the trees, or the sun or stars.  But the other
+one--the one who has to stop and reason that he must travel so many
+miles to the west to reach home in the afternoon, because he came that
+many in the morning--why, he even gets to doubting his compass, until
+night catches him without a roof over his head and no wood collected
+for a camp-fire."
+
+Long before then she had learned how sensitive a thing was his
+spirit--and she wanted him to go on.
+
+"It must be a terrible thing to--to know that one is lost."  Her hands
+were buried deep in her pockets; she found it hard to keep pace with
+his stride.  "I am always afraid of the night noises in the woods."
+
+It was the girl in her which had spoken at which he smiled, but his
+smile was absent-minded.
+
+"That is very strange, too," he accepted her lead, after contemplating
+it for a time.  "It is always the one who can't trust his compass who
+loses his head, once he knows he's mixed up.  Big Louie was that way.
+He was lost once, for two days, before we found him; he was half mad
+with terror and pretty near dead with fatigue.  He had been running in
+a big circle for hours, and we had to corner him before he would see
+that we were friends.  He'd been listening to the night noises, you
+see; dwelling on the blackness and the silence and his lack of a fire,
+until his brain was no longer any use to him."
+
+"What should one do?" she asked him faintly, when she knew that he was
+waiting for her to speak.  Yet his answer persisted in adding to that
+word-image which his mind was molding.
+
+"Quit letting yourself look back over your shoulder, to see if anything
+is following you!"  He was suddenly gruff, and she knew that he was
+talking at himself.  "Quit dwelling on the crackle in the brush, and
+the darkness, and the things you are afraid to fear.  The wise man
+stops when he knows he's lost his bearings; he busies himself
+collecting wood for a fire, if not to keep the chill from his body by
+exercise, then because it keeps his mind off himself.  And he sleeps if
+he can.  Anyhow he lies quiet and rests.  And when morning comes he
+uses his reason better for having rested, if his instincts still play
+him false.  He has a look at the stars before daybreak; he watches the
+sun come up, and he holds a straight line by the height of land, or by
+the river flow, and he hits familiar country soon."
+
+This time the girl did not interrupt him.  She was watching his face.
+
+"And that doesn't apply just to one little corner of the woods, or one
+little corner of life, either, does it?" he mused.  "When a man's
+instinct fails him, he can stop and get his bearings back; when he's
+afraid he can kindle a fire within him, always, if he'll only rustle
+around before it gets too dark to search for fuel.  But at that it
+isn't so very easy, in life, to get one's bearings straight again.
+It's stormy, some nights, maybe, and the stars don't shine; sometimes
+day dawns cloudy and the sun is not advertising its location too
+strongly.  Instinct has always been strong in me, but there have been
+times, too, when I have had to hold my eyes mighty steady on some
+object far beyond me, to keep my line dead straight."  He stopped short
+and faced her.  "You would be afraid, yes," he told her, "but you would
+try hard to discipline yourself.  You would never go rushing blindly
+into a worse tangle, spending your strength and breaking your sanity
+down.  Big Louie is a child; discipline is wasted on him.  And--and I
+have always been able to find my way myself."
+
+She knew now toward what point he had been talking.  Mentally he had
+been wandering, as Big Louie once wandered in the flesh, in a wide
+circle that fetched up again against that doubt in himself which was
+hurting her, even while it was making her happy.  He had taken the
+example of Big Louie and applied it to his own life, and suddenly the
+girl realized how infinitely greater was his philosophy thereof than
+was hers.
+
+"I shall try to remember that," she answered soberly.  "If ever I am
+lost I--I shall try to wait confidently for daylight, and keep my eyes
+to the fore."
+
+She was near to tears when he stooped and knelt in the snow to tighten
+a thong slipping from one webbed foot.  Below them stretched a plain of
+shimmering frost-points, bounded by inscrutable walls of black timber.
+Somewhere within the warmer heart of a swamp a fox yapped hungrily;
+somewhere within her own heart his whimsical discourse had awakened a
+sense of the mystery of his wilderness--its friendship for those who
+love it--its implacable enmity for those who do not understand.  And he
+looked up just when that emotion came flooding into her face.
+
+"It is wonderful--wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed, throwing out
+both arms with that ecstatic impulsiveness which he knew so well.  "Now
+I know why you said men always return to it, once they have felt its
+spell."
+
+"You are lovelier than you know!" came back from him, almost gruffly
+again; and she could not parry with lightness so swift and strained a
+speech.
+
+"You always tell me very pretty things," was all she could think of to
+say in reply.
+
+But then, rising, he flung back his head and shook himself as if
+throwing off a burden too restraining and irksome.  He laughed aloud,
+and from that minute until he loosed her feet from the snowshoes he was
+more like her "blue flannel and corduroy" lover again.  But his attack
+no longer made her fear herself.
+
+"If I cared for you, yes," he made her admit before he would let her go
+in that night.  "If I cared for you, my engagement to no man could
+stand in the way.  But that is the reason I know I do not care."
+
+She had seen him grave with doubt that night; seen him fight to shake
+it off.  There was doubt in his answer now.
+
+"Because I am not----"  But he could not force himself to ask it.
+
+"Because I could never care as you would demand the woman should care
+who marries you."
+
+She wanted to help him a little, she didn't know just why.  Pity is a
+very dangerous emotion, when pity is not sought.
+
+"You are loving me that way this minute," he said, but his words were
+dogged.  "Loving me more than you know."
+
+There was neither reference to her letter nor mention of that night at
+Thirty-Mile when she had stolen out to bid him good-bye.  Other long
+tramps followed, on other pale and zero nights, but his attitude
+remained much the same.  Whimsically at times he shared his innermost
+thoughts with her; always he told her that he cared, with a gentleness
+in the telling that made it hard for her to listen.  Barbara least of
+all realized what those days were doing to her, but before that week
+had run its course even Caleb's eyes were opened to the change in Steve.
+
+"I told you so," he said, but he took no delight in recommending it to
+his sister's attention.  "If he didn't know it before, she's taught him
+this trip that he hasn't a chance."
+
+"Your sensation is ancient history, Cal," was all she would reply.
+
+And even though, so far as Steve's peace of mind was concerned, Miss
+Sarah's scheming had not helped at all, that tiny lady still chose to
+view her activities complacently the day Barbara took leave of her
+again.
+
+"Write me every detail of your plans," Miss Sarah ordered her.  "Proxy
+bridal preparations are better than none, my dear, and I am madly
+interested."
+
+At the last minute Barbara bobbed her dark head in reply.
+
+"I will," she promised meekly.  And then, wide eyes vague with fear:
+"Aunt Sarah, I--I'm not sure that I want to be--married at all!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"You will be coming back," he told her again the day he put her on the
+train.  "You will be back in the spring?"
+
+It was his old, hopeful challenge, with all the hope left out.
+
+"I think so," she faltered in return.  "I mean to come and see the
+completion of your work, if father will let me."  She knew a moment of
+confusion.  "I wonder, many nights, if you are safe, up here in the
+hills."
+
+Indeed, Miss Sarah had made progress, though the surface indications
+were small.  The girl would never think of him again simply in terms of
+blue flannel and corduroy.  But that was not the most disturbingly
+vivid memory which she carried away with her.
+
+"I love you," he framed the words silently as the train was pulling
+out, and although their positions were reversed, the moment was so
+reminiscent of that day when he had leaned out of her father's switch
+engine cab and asked if she wanted a ride, that it made her throat ache.
+
+She waved a small gloved hand to him on the platform.
+
+She did not want to go.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SETTING THE STAGE
+
+There are two interviews which should be mentioned here, if for no
+other reason then merely because they were both so entirely the outcome
+of Miss Sarah's Christmas party.  Neither of them were long; the last
+one which took place between Wickersham and the girl he was to marry
+was the briefer of the two.  But her prettily serious argument that the
+first of May was too early a date for their wedding, in view of the
+work which he had to do and her own state of unpreparedness, left him
+so white of face that she felt guiltily sorry for him for many days to
+follow--felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had
+established that reprieve.  The other interview was longer, and took
+place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald
+Wickersham.
+
+Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his
+daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon
+his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night
+of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen
+O'Mara's face.
+
+Allison had never professed a knowledge of women.  Like her mother,
+Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often
+taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve.  Partly
+because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had
+taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice
+neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham.  The two
+had grown up from childhood together--Barbara and the man whom she was
+engaged to marry--and more than once her father had assured himself
+that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings
+to make for safety in the long run.
+
+His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle
+course of non-interference.  And he had never liked the boy; never
+learned to like the man he had grown to be.  Underneath Dexter
+Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would
+have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of
+spleen.  Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy--little
+rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap--without
+beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and
+twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months.  He
+believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram
+to the contrary.  He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of
+the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of
+rank and a thing of ranker repute.  But after his first shock at the
+realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself
+that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised
+that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the
+title in full.
+
+Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach.  Allison had
+taken pains to ascertain that.  But beyond that he did not let himself
+go; he neither allowed himself to wonder at, nor regret, her choice.
+He was too honest to decry in another much which he knew would not
+measure up to Golden Rule standards in himself.  And he had a really
+great man's unshakable faith in his own flesh and blood.
+
+Yet he had been troubled more than a little since his Christmas trip to
+Morrison.  When he turned a page he turned it for all time, but in the
+last day or two he had caught himself surrepticiously trying to steal a
+glance at some which had only just rustled into place.  Dexter Allison
+had left brilliant men of cross-examination panting impotently at the
+barrenness of their efforts; he had known it and enjoyed it to the
+full.  But he knew, too, that he could never face, jauntily or
+otherwise, one reproach in the dusky eyes of the girl with whom he had
+more than once played truant, to breakfast with Caleb and Miss Sarah.
+And he was facing that thought, nearer to panic than he had ever been
+before, the night before New Year's, when Wickersham was announced at
+nine.  He was thinking of Barbara's mother when he beckoned his guest
+to a chair, shook his head over his red cheeks, and offered a cigar.
+
+"Devilish cold weather," he grunted, none too graciously, for he had
+not wanted to be disturbed just then.
+
+The younger man admitted that it was.  His mind, plainly, was not upon
+the weather, but he found difficulty in introducing a topic of his own
+choosing.  Outspokenness had never been one of Archie Wickersham's
+boldest characteristics, so Allison assisted him now.  Allison liked a
+man to be outspoken.
+
+"Well," he demanded, "let's hear it.  What's on your mind?"
+
+There are times when hatred will betray 'most any man.  Hatred now led
+Wickersham to speak not wisely but with venom.
+
+"I want you to refuse to renew your name on the East Coast notes," he
+said.  "They are due on the second."
+
+Few men had ever said "I want you to" to Dexter Allison and, as he put
+it, "gotten away with it to any great extent."  And of all nights this
+one in particular was the least likely to prove propitious for such an
+attempt.  That was Wickersham's oversight.
+
+"So!" said Dexter, "so!  Well, now for your reason."
+
+Wickersham had not learned until after Barbara's departure that she was
+spending the holidays in Morrison, for he had himself expected to be
+away.  And it is only fair to the girl to say that she had honestly
+forgotten to apprise him of her plan, in her real excitement at going.
+But finding it out for himself had not made the fact any pleasanter to
+Wickersham.
+
+"It should be clear enough without explanation," he enunciated each
+word nicely, "if you want that road they are building."
+
+Allison glanced up, surprised at the tone employed.
+
+"Meaning of course I do," he mused.  "And yet--and yet, I don't know!"
+
+Fear burned in the tall, thin man's eyes that night--fear that made his
+hatred for the absent man who was teaching him fear anything but a
+pretty thing to watch.
+
+"I've tried to buy off their men."  He was holding himself with an
+effort that made him tremble.  "I've held up their supplies on every
+track that we control, but they've had the luck with them.  They've
+made up lost time by working day and night.  I've----"
+
+"You've set a drunken fool to steal his plans," drawled the other with
+deadly sarcasm, "like a second-rate, one-night-stand villain.  Don't
+forget to mention that, too!"
+
+In many ways it resembled an earlier conference which they had shared
+together; in many points it differed from it.  For if Allison had
+goaded the other man, on that former occasion, largely from a malicious
+delight in stirring him to verbal violence, such a thought was farthest
+from his mind now.  Allison was talking from a new angle.  If a turned
+page was a turned page to him, at least his memory was good.  His
+lounging body shifted a little.
+
+"Archie, do you remember what I told you about that woods-rat, as you
+called him once?  Did I tell you that he would fight?  Well, listen and
+listen closely while I repeat it for you.  He hasn't even warmed to it
+yet!"
+
+Wickersham went yellow at that, but his icy self-control held firm.  He
+did not break into vituperation this night; he smiled, though his voice
+was only a whisper.
+
+"Men have dropped out of sight before now, in those woods," he husked.
+"I'll win, or I'll see that he lies and rots in one of his own
+sink-holes."
+
+A big voice is a wonderful weapon at times.  Allison's booming bass
+made Wickersham's threat seem only mean and hollow when the heavy man
+leaped to his feet and shook a finger under that high-bridged nose.
+
+"No you won't!" he snapped.  "No you won't!  And if I didn't know,
+after hearing you talk, that you haven't stuff enough in you to be
+dangerous, I'd fix you so you'd be in no condition to bushwhack anybody
+for the next six months.  I'm in a bad mood to-night.  Drop out of
+sight, eh?  You'll play this fair--fair at least as I see it by my
+standards, and they are better standards than yours.  You've come
+dictating to me, ordering me to slip a knife into their backs.  Are you
+that kind of a sneak?  Did you think I was?  Now listen again, and
+listen well, for I mean what I say!
+
+"I want that railroad, if the man who is building it is too weak to
+keep me from taking it away from him.  But if I don't get it on such a
+basis, I'll know that there is a man at the head of it who is big
+enough to take care of my share of it.  Have you got that?  Very well.
+And now go back to your melodrama, if you want to.  Steal his men, if
+he will let you; fight him every inch of his construction--that is your
+job--and I'll still insist that it is his fault if he is tardy on the
+first of May.  But it's you and O'Mara from now on, Archie.  I'll be a
+spectator now!  And, by Gad, don't you ever come near me again with a
+request that I . . . don't you ever let me hear you threaten that
+you----"
+
+Allison's face was suffused before he finished, and Wickersham,
+astounded past utterance, slid from his chair away from that
+flourishing hand which had become a fist.  It was no scene to take
+place between a man and his prospective son-in-law.  Realizing that
+Allison tried to laugh, deprecatingly, at his temper.
+
+"Go out and get him, Archie," he invited.  "I'll be watching, don't
+doubt that.  And I know how much you want to win.  It's a bigger stake
+than most folks realize!"
+
+Like Barbara he tried to make his side of the interview kindly at the
+end, but he sent the other man away wondering whether he had understood
+that last remark, and afraid to think that he had.  And two other
+things Allison had done.  For once he had started to pay hush money to
+his conscience.  Once and for all, like Fat Joe, he had registered at
+last a refusal to interfere in any way that might spoil the climax of
+the "big show" for which Fate or Chance or Destiny, or whatever men may
+call it, was setting the stage, with an unhurried calm that contrasted,
+ironically, with the mad haste of her actors.
+
+But he watched, as he had promised he would.  The same day that more
+than half of O'Mara's men went on strike and deserted to the Reserve
+Company's payroll, the news reached him that a trainload of laborers
+had been shot in to take their places--those very types of laborers
+which Steve himself had warned Elliott would not last an hour, in the
+event of trouble.  For a week Allison wondered that there was no clash
+between the displaced men who believed that the river was theirs alone
+and this new corps which Garry Devereau was handling at the lower end
+of construction, not by physical prowress, as Fat Joe had ruled, but
+just as surely and all because, as Joe himself put it, he could damn a
+man merely by bidding him good-morning.
+
+"Honey crossed north to-day to have a look at his winter cut," Joe
+would observe to his chief at supper at Thirty-Mile; and before the
+night was many hours older Allison too, in Manhattan, would have
+learned by wire in less picturesque phraseology, that Archie Wickersham
+was missing no chances.
+
+"They have now finished hauling their logs to the river," Joe told
+Steve one night after a prolonged scouting trip.  "They are turning
+their attention to their float dams, now!"
+
+And when that news was relayed to the big man who never ceased to watch
+he understood why there had been no violence when the rivermen went on
+strike.
+
+With a clumsiness that shamed him Allison contrived to pass on to his
+daughter all such bits of gossip which dribbled down to him; that is,
+all which appertained strictly to Stephen O'Mara's race against time,
+and not to the opposition which he was meeting.  Her excitement was a
+bubbling thing, innocent of suspicion or premonition, but he was like a
+war-worn veteran who stands watching column after column wheel into
+position, waiting the word to go in, and knows he cannot respond.
+
+Many times Barbara tried to write to Steve in those days and each time
+destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful
+intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness.  She saw
+less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs
+were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend
+most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who
+appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship.  Always she insisted
+that Stephen O'Mara would win through; she made happy, petty wagers
+with both of them, in anticipation of their journey north, against the
+first of May.  But there was one bit of news which her father had not
+been able to pass on to her.  For Dexter Allison had had no way of
+learning of a night when the man who was most in their thoughts had
+finally lifted a bleak face from his arms, in his cabin up-river, and
+forced himself, hard-eyed, to acknowledge one defeat.
+
+It was the bitterest January that the hill country had known in twenty
+years; but mile by mile that month the twin lines of steel crept
+steadily into the north under the urgings of Garry's smooth voice.  The
+snowfall for February broke all records for half that period; but
+Steve, with his handful of men at Thirty-Mile, put his piling down.
+And then it rained--it rained until small brooks ran torrents and the
+river tumbled white and thunderous its entire length.
+
+The snow went off the last of March that spring and the gorges could
+not carry away the water.  The sun turned summer hot; it burned the
+higher ridges dry while the valleys still lay hidden in flood.  It was
+August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara
+stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at
+Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.
+
+There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the
+strain they had been under.  They were few, they were unshaven and
+dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had
+once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent
+combat.  Fat Joe was no longer plump.  Steve was worn down to actual
+thinness.  And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the
+chief from their ranks that Sunday.
+
+The huge timbers had dropped into place like bits of jig-sawed puzzle.
+At three in the afternoon, too tired both in body and soul for elation,
+Steve watched them drive home the last spike and heard their hoarse
+effort at a cheer.  He had turned to start toward his shack, not like a
+man who knows that the end of a well-nigh hopeless task is in sight,
+but like a beaten man.  The first of May meant more to Steve than any
+clause of the East Coast Company's contract could convey.  He had not
+had even one letter since he put her upon her train.  Wickersham's
+appearance on horseback, at the head of the valley, picking his way
+around the flooded meadow, halted him in his heavy-footed climb.  A
+whistle shrilled, far to the south of them, down the completed track.
+And then, after ten years and more, they were face to face again.
+
+"That bridge will have to go down!"  Wickersham was breathing hard, for
+all that he had been riding.  "I'm going through with my drive to-day!"
+
+He had dismounted.  Steve smiled at him.
+
+"You're a whole week previous, Wickersham," he said, wearily.  "I'll be
+signaling for your first load of logs in less than sixty hours."
+
+Archibald Wickersham wished that he could have believed it impossible,
+for it would have given him courage and lent conviction to his stand.
+But he knew just how fast those few remaining miles of open roadbed
+would be spanned.  His eyes were furtive; there was no body to his
+voice.
+
+"My men are on the banks," he blustered.  "My first head of logs has
+started down.  It's too late to argue now--too late for your promises
+that none but fools ever believed!"  The sure irrevocability of what he
+was saying blanched his cheeks.  "I cannot wait for a miracle to be
+performed.  My timber must come out on this flood."
+
+Stephen O'Mara had whipped him once, but men had interfered.  This day
+Chance or Destiny or Fate--whatever you may choose to call it--saved
+him from destruction.  The lean and weary man who had not been out of
+his clothes for three days and three nights, save for a plunge in the
+icy river, had taken his first step forward, when the whistle screamed
+a nearer warning.
+
+She had told him that she would come to see the finish of his race, but
+he had long since stopped believing that.  And now when she stood and
+waved her hand at him from the brass-railed observation platform of
+Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the
+grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only
+stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.
+
+The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway.
+Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder.  And Wickersham,
+who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them,
+stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit.  Wickersham was
+smiling; Wickersham was safe again.  For Fate or Chance or Destiny who
+had been setting the stage was bringing on her principals.  She would
+brook no _ad lib_ now.
+
+A low mutter in the north became an ominous murmur while Steve was
+following slowly in Wickersham's steps, and he realized what it meant.
+He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to
+listen, too.  Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his
+own inferiority which he could never understand.  And a minute later,
+when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure
+with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt
+about her ankles and laughingly refused his assistance, and jumped to
+the ground unaided.  She was far too excited to know what she was
+doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act
+spelled much to him.  His hands were grimy, his face stubbly and
+streaked with sweat and mud, and he had been months alone with his
+too-sensitive spirit.
+
+"You should not be here," was all he said to her.  "This is no place
+for you."
+
+He shook hands with the men, mechanically--Allison quizzical, Elliott
+concerned.  He went back to his bridge.  The water had come up a half
+foot in the last few minutes some one--Fat Joe, perhaps--told him; it
+was sucking greedily at the piles.  And in the north the ominous murmur
+had become a rhythmic roar.
+
+Wickersham's men were driving the river.  They were singing "Harrigan,
+That's Me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
+
+It is said that men remember many things when death is imminent; and
+for days and days something had been dying hard in Stephen O'Mara's
+breast.  His step was slow that afternoon when he drew apart to take up
+his position alone upon a bit of higher ground, his shoulders heavy and
+drooping; yet his brain was feverishly active.  Recollection of many
+long gone days--thoughts of many things--came darting to his mind; but
+they were not thoughts of desperate, last-minute expedients which might
+stave off this present crisis.  For if he had believed that force alone
+would win for him; if he had had faith that mere numbers could save his
+construction, he would not have left Garry Devereau with his scores of
+laborers, busy five miles to the south.  Steve was not thinking of his
+construction now; it had become a dim and remote consideration.  It had
+lost its importance in his scheme of things.
+
+They came slowly at first--Wickersham's logs--thudding heavily, one by
+one, into the underpinnings of the bridge, sliding free or lodging
+cross-current as the case might be; then in a thicker and thicker tide
+that ground and up-ended and settled with the weight of the
+coffee-colored flood behind it.  In the beginning the handful of men
+who had put those timbers into place set themselves, doggedly, to save
+their completed structure, until the man who had worked with them,
+shoulder to shoulder, through the night called them with a nod back to
+the bank.  Obediently then they collected in a small knot behind him,
+murmurous, gutterally grumbling; waiting his further word they squatted
+on their haunches, staring hungrily at their chief who stood in seeming
+surrender, head bowed before them.
+
+The coming of Wickersham's men was not a thing of degrees.  They poured
+into view through the brush fringe at the north edge of the marsh and
+halted, but only for an instant.
+
+"Who is your friend at the time when you need a friend?----Harrigan,
+that's me!"
+
+The maudlin menace of that chorus rocketed from ridge to ridge.  Then,
+a tight-ranked mass of humanity, they had formed and were sweeping
+forward again, stepping out to the beat of the ragtime which was their
+marching hymn.  And still the man who stood apart from the rest gave no
+sign that he was aware of their approach.  Once he did straighten; when
+separate faces began to be distinguishable in that reeling mob he
+turned and gazed, emptily, toward the group a few yards
+away--Wickersham putty-skinned before this storm which he had brewed;
+Allison himself pale; and the girl whose eyes were staring back at him
+with no clear understanding in their depths.  He made no move toward
+action, not even when the singing pack surged up and spread out before
+him, until a jostling crescent, straggling at the points, half
+encircled him and swallowed up as well the little knot behind which had
+come bristling to its feet.  Their onslaught had seemed an irresistible
+thing, bent upon instant violence; and yet little by little their
+syncopated defiance died away until they, too, were staring uncertainly
+at that worn and mud-stained figure which seemed to hang its head.  His
+very inertia robbed them of their impetus.
+
+"Harrigan, that's me!" they faltered now, and there came a lull in the
+valley at Thirty-Mile, broken only by heavy breathing and the crunch of
+logs jamming beneath the bridge, and the ugly swirl of backed-up water.
+It held quiet while Steve looked up, mildly, and scanned the ring in
+front of him and nodded in recognition to a sullen few; then oaths
+broke that silence, and a command for room to pass.  An upheaval
+disrupted the crescent's centre.  Steve saw Big Louie's face high above
+the heads of his shorter companions; he watched him plow heavily
+forward.  Shayne he glimpsed, automatically, and Fallon, faithful
+henchmen.  And then Harrigan stood forth.
+
+Long arms dangling, palms back, almost to his knees, that red-headed
+one minced forward on the balls of his feet.  Harrigan was redeeming a
+promise many weeks overdue.  It was spring, and Harrigan had come back!
+
+"I'm here," he spoke to that bowed head, "if you are afther carin' to
+welcome me!"
+
+"I've been expecting you, Harrigan."
+
+Again that startling mildness.
+
+There is little wonder that it deceived the riverman.  Listening,
+watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie
+Wickersham's dared flash in triumph.  And Harrigan's went savagely
+exultant.
+
+"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted.  "Is it so difficult you
+find it now to speak up so I can hear?"
+
+"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"
+
+Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled
+at what Steve took in silence.
+
+"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade
+ended.  "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started
+at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys.  You've made a gr-reat
+success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should
+have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime.  For when you aimed to
+turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something
+too big for you to finish.  I'm taking it off your hands, now.  Can't
+you even talk back like a man?"
+
+There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated
+with an irrelevance strange even to himself--and that reference to her
+surely was not needed!  Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind
+Twin-face; people should be more careful whore they dropped matches in
+an unseasonably hot spring like this--and Harrigan's sneer for the boy
+who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the
+picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly
+squandered viciousness now.  Past and present they trouped before him,
+thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet
+long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he
+was going to answer it.  He didn't have to debate that, and
+deliberation only gave him the keener joy of anticipation.
+
+All his life opposition had been a familiar of his.  Days of hunger he
+had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so
+black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear.
+But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.
+
+Circumstance had been his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought
+to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end
+Custom was laughing in his face.  Beside those intangible antagonists
+which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and
+swaggering and cheap.  But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was
+an entity--a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's
+bitter intoleration.
+
+Steve had stopped thinking; he had had too much of thought.  Suddenly
+that question which had been a riddle to him was a riddle no longer.
+He had the answer, and could see himself as others no doubt had seen
+him--a fool who had believed in the supremacy of fineness; a boy who
+had reached for the moon.  But it left the issue clearer now.  He, too,
+was a riverman; the degree was different, that was all.  And rivermen
+did not vex their brains with abstract problems; they fought with their
+hands.  His bowed head came back then, and the mass of men, catching
+sight of the mad, glad light that flared in his eyes, rolled back to
+give them room.  He laughed at Harrigan.  He was laughing at himself.
+They heard and marveled at the pleasantry of his answer.
+
+"Maybe you are right, Harrigan," he said.  "You may be--I do not know.
+I have started big things and left them unfinished.  But you are wrong
+for the rest of it, Harrigan, for I am going--to--finish--you!"
+
+Men tell of that encounter now; it is already epic on the river.  One
+may listen to its details, and he chance into any of a half dozen
+places:--Mulcahy's, Laduc's, or Whitted's that once was Brown's.  And
+always one will hear different details, but always one accord of
+verdict.  They will tell you that no man ever went through worse
+vengeance and stayed a living man.
+
+For like a blast of wrath O'Mara lifted and struck him.  Harrigan's
+hands had not left his hips before he met the ground, and he was back
+on his feet like a bounding ball only to go down again before the
+smashing impact of those blows.  Caution he tried to use in rising and
+they searched out his face, his chin, and drove him hither and yon.
+Open fighting was not the river style of fighting and he closed this
+time and wrapped his gorilla arms about this fury who fought with
+lightning strokes to keep him off.  His greater weight o'erbore them
+both; he broke away and his hob-nailed boots, lashing out, bit the
+flesh of O'Mara's temple--they tore the turf where his face had been.
+
+There was madness in Harrigan's hideous roarings of hate, madness in
+his blind rushes; but his bull-strength availed at first.  He weathered
+destruction and managed to close again.  This time the lighter man was
+ready for the scuff of those armed boots; he twisted and covered his
+face with his shoulder, and only his shirt ripped open to let blood
+stream from the rent.  On their feet they rocked--to their knees!
+Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away.  And always
+Harrigan came back and found him, blindly.  Once his hairy hands
+searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of
+fingers tearing at his eye-sockets.  Dropping he escaped that gouging
+grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.
+
+Harrigan squandered his strength in drunken rushes, his breath in
+screams of hate.  He tore forward when the other had already stepped
+aside, and Steve, shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets
+into his eyes, met him returning.  There came a time when Harrigan's
+enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had
+to stand up and fight.  And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which
+made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set
+himself to chop his face to pieces.  Flail-like blows he side-stepped,
+and whipped to the other's eyes.  That open guard he feinted wider and
+laid flesh open raw.  Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were
+puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles.
+He could only sob, great groaning gasps for breath--and then he
+couldn't see!
+
+And now Steve was laughing aloud.  He knew that _she_ was watching;
+knew what loathing was in her eyes.  And he--he was a riverman!
+Sobbing himself for air, dripping crimson from forehead and shoulder,
+he set himself and swung from the waist.  Like a pole-axed ox, Harrigan
+stopped as he was lurching in.  His mouth sagged; his eyes flew wide in
+a fixed and stupid stare.  Then his legs folded under him and he swayed
+limply down.  But that blast of wrath would not let him lie!  It raised
+him and beat him down again; raised him and beat him down.  By his
+throat Steve swung him up--by throat and buckled belt.  High over his
+head he swung that bulk and lashed forward from his heels.  And
+Harrigan went back to his panting followers; twisting and spinning, his
+body swept Shayne and Fallon to the ground.
+
+Allison had not stirred, nor putty-faced Wickersham, nor the girl who
+stood with hands at breasts.  And now toward them Stephen O'Mara
+wheeled.  His legs would fail him, and he steadied them; blood blinded
+him, and he wiped it away.  Swaying giddily, he managed, somehow, a
+smile.
+
+"Wickersham, I have met the man whom you hired to fight for you," he
+called clearly, "and he has earned his wage!  Are you man enough to
+step forward now and fight for yourself?"
+
+Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield
+his face.  Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded
+him he put the girl between him and his fear.  And then weakness seized
+upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her--to the unspeakable
+horror in her eyes.
+
+"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"
+
+He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands
+as those.  Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his
+sight.  Fat Joe caught him as he fell.
+
+Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him
+up the hill.  Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the
+others he lay ignored.  It was a mob without a leader until, as is the
+way in all crises, a new leader arose.  Big Louie, stolid face no
+longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the
+unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.
+
+"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed.  "That bridge--she still
+is hold!"
+
+Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment
+ever came.  And Elliott and Allison watched now.  They were sheep no
+longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning.  Like wolves they
+followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam.  Wickersham's men
+were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold!  And
+while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound,
+blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing,
+and walked blindly into the brush.
+
+The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and
+cry for her.  It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on
+the hillside that she was missing.  And when men had been beating the
+woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no
+word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep
+his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged.  At daybreak Joe
+waked him and told him Barbara was lost.  They tried to argue with him,
+for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body
+seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him
+that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already
+found her, perhaps.  But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he
+threw off the hands that tried to detain him.  And it was Steve who
+found her, as he had known it would he, just before a second night of
+dread was closing in upon her.
+
+In circles of ever increasing radius he traveled at a foxtrot which
+thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon;
+but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled
+like a wild thing before him.  Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to
+the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up
+with her.  She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her
+loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to her feet.
+
+"Please," she whimpered, "Oh, please----"
+
+Yet when he spoke her name her head leaped back and she recognized him
+instantly.
+
+"I tried to wait," she chattered with all the voice she had left.  "I
+tried to sit still until someone came for me, but I thought I knew the
+way.  I tried not to listen to the noises; I remembered about the
+stars; and I knew I shouldn't run.  But I thought you were--I thought
+you were----"
+
+Remembered terror choked her.  Consciousness slipped away.
+
+By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he
+carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the
+crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight,
+though in the wrong direction.  But it was long after dark when the
+river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and glassy in the
+deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles.  A
+grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to
+him; and Steve had to travel slowly.  His head was spinning from
+fatigue and the throb of the jagged tear above his temple when the log
+building, streaked white with clay chinking, loomed up ahead, and yet
+involuntarily he stopped there a moment with his burden.
+
+He had pictured, many times, a night when he would bring her there,
+with both of them watching the moon in the rapids and listening to the
+waves lipping the banks.  This was not that night; that night would
+never be.  But the rebellion and bitterness was gone from his heart.
+After he had removed her wet shoes and stockings and brush-whipped suit
+and sheer black blouse, and she slept the sleep of exhaustion into
+which she had slipped from unconsciousness without even opening her
+eyes, he built a fire and sat before it until morning came.  And when
+it dawned and she waked dazedly while he was preparing breakfast, he
+had finished reconstructing many things.
+
+Her eyes went from wall to wall, frightened still and questioning at
+first, so he merely nodded and went outside and left her to remember
+alone.  Returning with wood on his arm he found recollection of much in
+her gaze.  She was looking at the thin heeled, buttoned boots before
+the fireplace; the stockings and furred garments cleaned of mud and
+dried on the backs of chairs.  A cloud of color stole up from the
+blanket edge at her throat to the line of her hair.
+
+"You were wet," he explained simply, "and you were too spent to help
+yourself.  I could not let you sleep in them."
+
+"I understand," her answer faltered a little.  "I was just
+thinking. . . .  I knew such things happened, but I thought it was only
+in books."
+
+Drowsily she watched him bending over frying pan and coffee pot,
+content herself to lie and rest.  But after a time, with fuller
+awakening, the bandage about his head claimed her attention.  To her it
+seemed impossible that this smoothly shaven man in clean blue shirt
+could be the same one who had emerged from a struggle still sickeningly
+brutish to her.  Involuntarily she shuddered a little without knowing
+that he watched.
+
+"I am going to the spring for fresh water," he told her then.  "There
+will be time for you to dress; and breakfast will be ready when I come
+back."
+
+Submissive before his tone she replied that she was hungry; that she
+would be ready, too.  She had donned blouse and skirt and stocking and
+shoes and finished braiding her hair when he re-entered.  He showed her
+a tin basin outside filled with icy water for her face and hands.  And
+then they sat down in silence to breakfast.
+
+Once he had dreamed what their first meal together in that room would
+be like.  This morning when she insisted upon pouring the coffee and
+scorched her hand in the attempt and chided him for careless
+housekeeping, pain showed in his smile.  But she did not immediately
+understand.  She only realized how sombre he was; how thin he looked
+and tired.  Again her eyes went to the bandage around his head.  It had
+a fascination for her, even though it filled her with repulsion for a
+decision which, she knew now, might have been hers, two days before.
+But eventually it was to that topic she turned.
+
+"You have been very good to me," she said.  "Far better than I was to
+you--the day before yesterday.  I can never hope to thank you enough
+for coming to help me."
+
+Wistful she had seen him, and grave and sober-eyed, but never sad until
+now.
+
+"I should have helped you," she went on.  "I would have, only I had
+come expecting . . .  I thought to see----"  Two days before when she
+alighted from her father's car, her heart a tumult in her ears, she
+could have told him perhaps.  She could not tell him now.  "I am not
+used to such things," she finished weakly.
+
+"I know," was all he replied, but the words were final, somehow.  They
+thrust her back, roughly, from any share in his thoughts.  They ate
+again in silence.
+
+"Miriam would have helped," she forgot herself and argued aloud once.
+"She would not have failed.  But--blood sickens me, I think."
+
+"It was neither a pretty nor prepossessing sight," he helped to excuse
+her, but excuse nor pardon was not what she wanted.
+
+"I told you that you would find out someday," she murmured.  "I warned
+you you would wake suddenly and see how shallow I am."
+
+Until she had finished eating he would not talk.  But she had finished
+now.  He faced her with an abruptness that startled her.
+
+"Waking has been no sudden thing with me!  I finished with dreams a
+long time back, but you are what you have been always in my thoughts.
+It's conditions I've waked to, not you!"
+
+With unwitting gruffness he had sometimes spoken to her, but never with
+constrained vehemence such as that.
+
+"Why should I find fault in anything you have done, or failed to do?"
+he demanded of both her and himself.  "Why should you be apologetic or
+regretful.  Such a thing as I had to do two days ago has held no place
+in your world, and never could, but I can't find it in myself to be
+apologetic, either, because it is a part of mine.  I meant to kill
+him--wanted to kill him--because I was certain of your scorn!  That was
+vindictive; that was foolish for a man.  But as for the rest of it--I
+know I may have it all to do over again, any day.  It was a vulgar
+brawl to you; to me----"
+
+"Not just a brawl," she contradicted quickly, anxious to be understood.
+"Just--oh, so needlessly brutal.  At first it left me only dazed and
+nauseated, but after I had had time to think, I made myself see your
+side of it.  You must crush insubordination.  And still it seems as
+though there might have been a less horrible way."
+
+"He had balked my work," he told her sternly.  "He has fired upon me
+from cover, when he dared not come out into the open.  He has been
+taking money for his work from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+cost.  Could I ask him please not to spoil my bridge?  Is that your
+idea of a man's way?"
+
+She had given no thought to Wickersham until that moment, and now she
+thought of him only in connection with a night when she had found him
+alone in her father's office and wondered at the stale odor of alcohol.
+
+"I do not know," she hesitated.  "I am not sure, only----"
+
+"You should know!"  But he was less vehement now.  Wearily he set
+himself to get at it in his own fashion.  "Some men are only physical
+cowards," he went on.  "But you have almost made a moral coward of me.
+Yes, you had nearly made me afraid to be the man I must be, if I am to
+do my work."
+
+"There are other fields----"
+
+He would not let her argue that.
+
+"There is no other field for me at present.  This is my work and while
+I continue in it men who oppose me with their brains I will fight with
+my brain.  But men who force me to meet them with fists I must beat
+with like weapons.  There is no alternative.  I have no choice--unless
+I quit.  And that is the reason I know that this is the end, for you
+and me!"
+
+Sadness she had never known before in his voice, nor the edge which was
+cutting all it came against.  Now it grew gentler, with that gentleness
+he saved for her alone.
+
+"Once we argued whether I was 'good enough' for you, and we wasted many
+words that day, for 'good enough' can cover too many qualities to be a
+safe basis for general comparison.  I have been arguing it with myself,
+blind to the vital question, but I am blind no longer.  Combat which
+sickened you has cleared my eyes.  What if I did believe that I was not
+good enough to touch your little finger?  What if you believed that
+too?  Would that have hindered us, in the end?  You know it wouldn't;
+you have seen too many women give themselves to men whom they knew were
+unworthy in a hundred ways, because they could not help themselves.
+But that way would never have done for me."
+
+"It isn't that," she cut in desperately.  "I know you are big and fine
+and clean.  It isn't that----"
+
+But he knew better than she did what it was she could not phrase.  He
+left her dry of lip now, for he had read her thoughts.
+
+"My ways would have had to be your ways, and we have learned at last
+what I have feared for long and long.  They lie too far apart for them
+ever to meet.  My man's way is not your woman's way, but I could not
+stay a man in your eyes if I let it become secondary to yours; and I
+would have to do just that to earn you.  Once I thought that there was
+no height I could not scale to gain your side.  I worked for you, but
+that is no way for a man to work.  He must work because he is a man and
+needs must win as big as he can to keep his own self-respect.
+
+"I promised to teach you to love me, and I've failed.  And knowing that
+my failure is not all my own fault is not going to make it any easier
+for me.  You've taught me loneliness I'm never going to forget as long
+as I live, but I don't love you any the less for that.  I dreamed big
+dreams for both of us."  His voice was dreary of a sudden.  "I promised
+I'd make those dreams come true, because I thought my life could be
+your life.  I've not done so; that thing could never be.  I've talked
+bigger than I could practice, and that is not going to help my
+self-confidence any, but as it stands now I can earn it back.  I
+couldn't have done that if I had married you, and waked some day to
+find you shrinking from me.  It would have killed it, and my
+self-respect too, to have learned too late that you believed still in
+your own greater fineness."
+
+"I tell you it is not that," she cried out.  "Can't I make you
+understand----"
+
+"You have made me understand till I am sure," he stated.  "I am no
+longer vexing myself with trivial things.  Birth?  My name means as
+much as yours.  Education?  You would not tell me, would you, that I am
+not wiser in most ways you'd think to mention.  I'd break any man who
+gave to your ears many things I have learned."  He was whimsical for a
+flash.  "I could outspell you without an effort; books have been my
+partners when you had rather dance.  Oh, you could not lose me, no
+matter where you strayed in fields like that.  In any way you care to
+mention I have outstripped you, for I decided long ago that I must know
+more than you.  Yet I have not forgotten how to play, either.
+
+"You have been uncertain; I have seen that.  You are certain now.  And
+the fundamental thing remains unchanged.  In me there is that man who
+once man-handled Harrigan--and you didn't want me to touch you!  You
+don't have to tell me any more that you can't love me.  When you drew
+away from me, that was enough."
+
+His voice held a question, but the girl couldn't answer at first.
+
+"Wasn't it?" he repeated very gently, for he would have it from her own
+lips.
+
+Her face lifted.  Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she nodded in
+affirmation.
+
+So roughly that the dishes rattled he rose.
+
+"I do not want your pity," he ended it.  "I am the wrong sort of a man
+for you."
+
+She sat and watched him put the room in order, and that hurt her more
+than anything else, for he would not let her help.  He made her change
+her high-heeled boots for moccasins which he brought and laced upon her
+feet; but the remainder of the day it was the old Steve who helped her
+over the bad bits of going and talked disconnectedly of many things
+meanwhile.  And yet no longer the old Steve, who had been so entirely
+her own.  Hers was the sad face when they entered the clearing at
+Thirty-Mile and a hoarse shout saluted her return.  In her father's
+embrace she clung and wondered that she did not cry.  And two pages had
+turned for her that day, for she sent Wickersham back his ring the same
+night the private car rolled down to Morrison.
+
+Harrigan was with Archibald Wickersham when the package, unaccompanied
+by explanation, reached the latter in his hotel room in town.  Harrigan
+was waiting for a reply to a question which he had just asked, when
+Wickersham opened the box and sat fingering for a while the thin hoop
+of gold with its single brilliant stone.  Once Fat Joe had spoken
+prophetically; this was the hour he had foreseen.  And when Wickersham
+raised his head the riverman's battered face lighted shockingly with
+triumph.
+
+"Go out and get him," said Wickersham.  "And see that you get him--for
+good!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+TO-MORROW--
+
+For two days and two nights the girl fought on alone against the outcry
+of her own heart, and as on a former occasion she chose again the open
+roads for her battlefield.  While she pounded Ragtime mercilessly over
+the little-traveled northern highways, she struggled rebelliously with
+stubborn arguments which only left her more and more bewildered, the
+more conclusive they became.  She summoned parallels by the score to
+her support, but she lacked the trick of facile finality, somehow,
+which had always marked his usage of such argument.  Hard moments she
+knew when she closed her teeth tight upon her decision and told herself
+that it was final, but the next moment, after she had laid whip across
+the black horse's flank and faced homeward, she was biting her lips in
+shaken, panic contemplation of another thought which would not be
+denied.
+
+There were times without number when Barbara hated the one whose very
+gentleness toward her was making her position hardest to maintain;
+times when she hated the work which, absorbing him by day at least,
+must be making his suffering less difficult to endure.  For she
+understood that there was still much for him to do, although the
+hill-country was already ringing with his victory.  And throughout
+every hour she hated herself most of all for that spirit behind the
+doubt which was swinging her, pendulum-like, between brain's reason and
+heart's desire.
+
+Barbara needed her mother in those days of wretchedness, for she came
+and went as blind to the helpless misery which followed her always from
+the eyes of her father as she was heedless of who might read the misery
+in her own.  She turned a chill, set face to the one attempt to help
+made by Miriam Burrell, who, at the first inkling of violence on the
+river and possible danger to Garry Devereau, had come rushing overnight
+into the hills, purposed never to leave them again unless it was with
+him, as the wife of the man she loved.  Barbara wanted her mother, and
+when that occurred to Miss Sarah, the latter could no longer continue
+in passive sympathy.  Without compunction or loss of more time, she
+reversed a decision at which she had arrived herself only a short time
+before.  For Miss Sarah had stopped campaigning.  Caleb, with fire in
+his eye, had brought her the story of how "her boy" Steve had broken
+Harrigan with his bare hands.  She had had little to say concerning
+that episode, but her brother, noting that she did not condemn it as
+regrettable, wondered too that he had never noticed before how hard his
+sister's eyes could be.  The news that Barbara was lost had reached
+Miss Sarah hours before Allison's private car brought the girl and her
+father and Hardwick Elliott back to Morrison.  Thereupon, with her
+first glimpse of Barbara's wanly mute and suffering face, she had
+pieced the details together; she had told herself, with sorrow and
+understanding in her heart, that she must no longer interfere.  And
+now, though she did summon Barbara to her, the end of the second
+endless day, it was with no thought for evasion or finesse.  Barbara
+obeyed that summons reluctantly.  In the face of an almost sullen light
+in the girl's eyes when she entered on lagging feet, the older woman
+knew that she could not have persisted in such an attempt, even had she
+planned to employ it.  Additional warning was not needed, but Barbara's
+first words told her that the hour was long past for such methods.
+
+At first the girl refused to sit down.  She wandered aimlessly around
+the room, switching nervously at her booted ankles with her
+riding-crop, to stop suddenly and raise a pale and stormy face.
+
+"I know why you sent for me," she exclaimed, "and I know just what you
+think of me.  But I must tell you, Miss Sarah, that there is nothing
+which can alter now, the least little bit, a decision which I know is
+wisest and best!"
+
+So she had the first word, never dreaming that Miss Sarah had seen to
+that.  Nor did the latter smile or seem to proffer argument at first.
+Oh, Miss Sarah had the true instincts of a big soul!
+
+"Barbara," she answered quietly, after her formal firmness had
+prevailed and the girl had seated herself, "Barbara, when I sent for
+you it was not with a belief that I might influence you, for both of us
+know that this is your problem alone.  I merely hoped to comfort, that
+was all.  More than once I have been guilty of trying to manage you a
+little, but you will forgive me, I know, when I tell you that I have
+loved Stephen almost all his life, as though he were my own, and hoped
+as long for his great happiness.  On more than one occasion I contrived
+situations which I thought might make your choice my happiness, too.  I
+know now that I was no better than any other meddling old woman, whose
+efforts are well meant but dangerous for all that.  And I will meddle
+no more.  But--but my heart aches a little, too, to-day, Barbara.  May
+I just talk to you?"
+
+Barbara blinked in surprise at the subdued sadness in the older woman's
+voice.  But her lips remained sullen.
+
+"There is nothing more to be said," she reiterated uncompromisingly.
+"I tell you I am sure!"
+
+And from that statement, minutes before she had thought to hear it,
+Miss Sarah learned, thankfully, just how deep was the girl's
+uncertainty.
+
+"Then I need not fear that I may sway you one inch from your own way of
+reasoning."  Her gentle voice might have held relief.  "For you will
+not consider it argument when I agree with you that hard and fast
+reasoning is not always a dependable guide for a woman."
+
+The girl was switching her ankles again.
+
+"Why isn't it?" she demanded abruptly, hungry for it now that the
+other, ostensibly, did not want to argue.  "If reason is no guide, what
+else is there left?"
+
+"My dear, I do not know," acknowledged Miss Sarah.  "Intuition is a
+much over-worked word.  And yet, had hard and fast reason been your
+guide, you would not have refused Stephen, I am sure.  For it would be
+difficult to name one particular in which he is not entirely a man."
+
+The violet eyes grew quickly hostile.  The girl was keen enough to
+argue, but she was in no mood for refutation.
+
+"I am afraid that I do not follow you?" came coldly from her.
+
+"There comes a day in every woman's life, of course," Miss Sarah
+ignored sweetly the interruption, "when she has to leave girlhood
+behind.  And lest that sound bromidic and trite, I will add that I do
+not mean the trivial material things of immaturity, but rather the
+happy irresponsibility which has no place in a woman's life."
+
+That statement offered a plain enough opening.
+
+"Am I responsible for his unhappiness?" Barbara flashed out.  "Is the
+fault entirely mine because----"  She faltered, ashamed of her
+abruptness which had brought a hurt bit of color to Miss Sarah's
+cheeks.  "I never gave him to understand--I told him always I could not
+care!"
+
+"Please bear with me a little to-day."  Miss Sarah's sweetness had
+become humble.  "I seem vagarious, I know.  And we are not considering
+Stephen, Barbara.  If you had been doing so, all these hours while you
+have been wasting your nervous energy in tearing around the
+country-side, it would be different.  But women never consider the man
+in such a situation, do they?  Aren't they too entirely heedless for
+that?  I was merely trying to tell you that the day has come when you
+must consider well your own happiness."
+
+Instantly Barbara condemned such a doctrine.
+
+"If that is true of others," she retorted, "they are even more
+despicable than I know myself to be."
+
+Until that moment Caleb Hunter's tiny sister had kept her brave eyes
+clear.  They clouded now.  They went beyond that pale and sullen and
+stormily pretty visage.
+
+"I was a woman like that," she said, with her quaint simplicity of
+accent.  "Do you look upon me with any such degree of scorn?  I was
+face to face with such a decision; and yet not the same either, for
+mine was far simpler than yours.  But I considered neither his
+happiness nor my own, simply because I lost sight of the years and
+years to come, in the momentary joy I found in his--his importunity.
+He was very big and strong and cheerful, like Stephen, Barbara, and I
+was sure he would not grudge me my last moment of girl-vanity, when I
+did surrender--to-morrow."
+
+There the quaint voice caught and broke.  The girl's eyes flew wider
+and hotter shame for her sulkiness stained her cheeks.  For suddenly
+Miss Sarah was fighting against tears.
+
+"I did not know," Barbara breathed her contrition.  "I never
+dreamed----"
+
+"No one ever does," faltered Miss Sarah.  "I--I am an old, faded,
+hopelessly unmarried woman to you, my dear--oh, child, you need not
+protest a kinder opinion!  I am just 'Caleb Hunter's spinster sister'
+to the people of this village.  But to--to myself, Barbara, I am at
+times the same girl who waited, roses in her hair and roses in her
+cheeks, for him to come, so that I might tell him that I was his, body
+and soul.  And he never came!  Oh, my dear, I do not mean to break down
+like this, for you have your own heart-ache.  But I trusted to reason.
+I told myself that to-morrow would be soon enough.  And when to-morrow
+came--they let me--go to him.  He died very bravely, Barbara, to save
+the life of another.
+
+"Since you are so sure, I can tell you this without seeming to warn
+you--without being accused of attempting to influence you.  But now you
+know why I say that every woman, if heedlessness for which she is
+perhaps not to blame will not let her consider the happiness of the man
+she loves, should still take care that she does not barter for an hour
+of quickened pulses the happiness of her whole life.  I was innocent
+enough.  It was harmless play to me.  But I have paid--and paid--and
+paid!  I would not have you, whom I cherish, rise each morning and
+wonder why you had to be the only one to suffer out of thousands who
+played the same way.  And now will you please forgive me this
+uncontrolled moment?  I usually inflict them upon no one; I hide them
+in my room.  But, Barbara, I was so proud of him--so sure--so positive
+that he was the only man in the world!  And I lost my chance to tell
+him how much I cared."
+
+The riding-crop lay neglected on the floor.  It had slipped and
+clattered down while Barbara sat and stared at the tiny woman who was
+dabbing at her eyes with a very girlish square of linen.  And then
+slowly Barbara rose and took an uncertain step or two.  She sank to her
+knees and pillowed her head upon Miss Sarah's lap.  Momentarily she had
+forgotten the struggle which was going on in her own heart.  Now even
+pity for the other could not keep her from turning hack to it.
+
+"But I do not know," she gasped.  "I--sometimes I think I must care,
+and then I am afraid----"  She lifted a face dry-eyed and tense.  "I
+ought to be proud of him, too.  If I loved him I would be, wouldn't I?
+If I cared I wouldn't ask anything more than just what he is.  Don't
+you see I'm only petty and rotten with snobbishness?"
+
+Miss Sarah sniffed, ever so delicately.
+
+"What a sentimental old woman I am!" she exclaimed.  "And, my dear, you
+talk as though you had just discovered a new and terribly perplexing
+complication.  Don't you know that it is as old as the feminine mind
+itself?"  Her handkerchief came down, then, disclosing eyes that were
+very bright and very tender.  "Why, a woman never loves a man merely
+for what he is!  She always reserves a few little things, at least,
+which she means--well, to rearrange.  She loves him just a bit more for
+what she secretly promises herself he shall be."
+
+Barbara's sullenness was gone.
+
+"I know," she whispered.  "I thought of that, too, long ago.  But it
+isn't just a--little thing.  A few days ago, Miss Sarah, when we took
+the train to go up north, I could scarcely wait for the engine to draw
+us there.  I think I counted every click of the rails, I know I sang
+his name in my heart with every click.  And then, when I wanted to walk
+straight off the steps of the car into his arms--when I . . .  Why do
+you sit there and listen and not say that you loathe me as I do myself?
+I know that he is all man, but his work and my world--oh, when that
+terrible thing happened, and he came lurching toward me, instead of
+helping him, do you know what I did?  I was sick at the sight of
+him--sick at the reck and grime and blood of him!  I just wanted to get
+away, and--and shudder at the thought of----"
+
+Miss Sarah's composure had returned, but her face grew more sober
+still.  This was a different, a graver thing, even than she had
+expected.
+
+"Your world?"  Deliberately now she dared to argue.  "Barbara, didn't
+you know, from the beginning, that his world would have to be yours?
+Did you ever think that you could change him--that way?"
+
+Barbara moved her head.
+
+"I wanted both," she said.  "I wanted all I have--and him, too.  I
+learned that night he took care of me how much I cared; I know he'd be
+as careful of me, all his life.  But I had thought that he might be
+able to do as father has done and let other men handle the----  But he
+knows now!  He understands me!  I tell you I'm no good.  I've no
+backbone.  I'm just pink and white flesh without any spirit!"
+
+The other woman sat and smoothed the bright head and wished she knew
+what to say.  "It would please me to know just what stuff she is made
+of, too," Miss Sarah had once admitted to her brother.  She wondered if
+at last she knew.
+
+"I do not know what to tell you," she murmured slowly.  "I thought if I
+talked with you I might be able to help you, but I am afraid now that I
+cannot.  He is a better man than you are woman, Barbara; because he has
+builded with his hands, he has reared him a soul as well.  He knows the
+depths, and the heights are far more wonderful for such knowledge.  Oh,
+dear me, I wish I knew----"
+
+She paused there, shaken by her own impotence.  Doubt and aching regret
+were overwhelming her.
+
+"I have told Mr. Wickersham that I will not marry him."  The brown head
+burrowed lower and muffled the words.  "I know that I could let no
+other man so--so much as touch me now.  Is that--caring enough?"
+
+But Miss Sarah only half heard the question.  She was expecting no
+surrender now.
+
+"----Nor how to advise you," she struggled on.  "For you have lived as
+all girls like you live.  You've lived for yourself; hoped for
+yourself; prayed for yourself--as all women pray, I suppose, directly
+or indirectly.  And yet is merely a question of whether you could live
+with him in his world, day for day and night for night?  Is it as
+simple as that?  I have told you what difference one day made with me.
+Have you thought what it might mean to wake and realize that you must
+live _without_ him, all the rest of your life?"
+
+Miss Sarah had stopped hoping.  And so there was sheer amazement in the
+triumph which rose and drove the regret from her faded pink-and-white
+face when the girl's dark-fringed eyes lifted.
+
+Since Stephen O'Mara had brought her back to her father, Barbara had
+wondered why she did not cry.  Great tears were sliding noiselessly
+down her cheeks when she raised her head.
+
+"I've tried to think--I haven't dared," Barbara sobbed.  "But he
+doesn't want me now.  He doesn't want the kind of a girl I am any more!"
+
+Thus in her moment of capitulation did the girl's heart cry aloud the
+one thought which, unknown to her, had been her unbearable pain.  And
+straightway Miss Sarah's illuminated countenance became a glorification
+of her spirit.  Silently she leaned over and folded the kneeling one
+round.
+
+Later she found it possible to speak.
+
+"You have convinced me forever of the futility of all snap judgments,"
+said she, and she marveled at the shyness in her own voice, "but you
+could never convince me of that.  You may go home now, Barbara, for you
+have worn yourself out.  But to-morrow I would suggest that you--ask
+him for corroboration, if you still hold to such an opinion."
+
+Instantly Barbara rose and bobbed her head.  She had always been a slim
+creature of moods mercurial; she would always be that.  And now her
+violet eyes radiated anticipation, perverse and impish and far, far
+different from the sullen dullness which had filled them an hour
+before.  Miss Sarah had spoken with well-seasoned wisdom, as was her
+wont: there are sometimes big moments which are the bigger for lack of
+analysis.  The girl did not know why, all in one breath, she no longer
+feared nor doubted--but she _knew_!  And that was a world and all of
+joy.  She bobbed her head.
+
+"Ask him?" she echoed, demurely confused.  "Ask--_him_!  To-morrow I am
+going to dare him to ask _me_--again!"
+
+But she did not obey Miss Sarah's suggestion that she return home and
+rest.  On winged feet she flew back through the hedge-gap and ordered
+Ragtime saddled once more; yet when she touched that splendid beast
+with the crop and sent him at a gallop down the drive, there was no
+longer any sting in the lash.  Even the groom, with critical eye,
+noticed the difference in the girl's seat that afternoon; for days and
+days to come he was the better contented with the companionship of
+horses, which was his lot, in dwelling upon the crazy moods of women.
+And Miriam Burrell, sighting Barbara's face as the latter wheeled
+toward the hills, flew from her window to scratch off a note to
+Garry--her third note that day, for she seemed always omitting most
+important things which needed saying.
+
+"It's come," she scrawled in delighted haste, "and Miss Sarah is a
+visiting angel from Heaven! . . .  When are we going to be married?"
+
+Others knew of it almost as soon as she did herself, but knowledge of
+that did not mar Barbara's rosy contemplation of this new-found,
+totally unbelievable happiness.  Once before she had ridden that road
+with him alone in her thoughts; now she realized that she had loved him
+then as she must have loved him always, and marveled at such blindness.
+Once, on that other day, she had told herself that all ignoble and
+unworthy comparisons of herself and him were done and gone.  Now she
+did not need such reassurance, when her lips were tremulous.
+
+Rest?  Pressing steadily into the north that afternoon, first at a
+gallop, then more and more slowly until Ragtime was picking his own
+gait, the girl smiled in pity for Miss Sarah and her day which had
+never dawned.  But there was scant room for sadness in her present
+mood.  Tomorrow?  She let herself be afraid for an instant, to tremble
+in delicious mock-terror, because there was nothing for her to fear now
+in the whole wide world.
+
+She grew pensive at times; at times in an abandon of gaiety she
+chattered back at a quarrelsome squirrel in the thicket.  She could
+rest later; and if she could not go to him immediately, at least every
+step the horse took was bringing them, for a little while, closer
+together.  And her to-morrow was only one twilight and one dawn away;
+her to-morrow would be his, as utterly as was she herself.  Dusk came,
+and regretfully she told herself that she must be turning back home.
+Two rifle shots, sharp and startlingly close, whipped through the quiet
+of that lazy afternoon, but they meant nothing to her.  She had reached
+the height of land, where he had found her the day her roan mare
+strayed off while she sat mooning on a log; she was holding out both
+arms toward the spot where the valley of Thirty-Mile must lie, when a
+team of heavy horses broke around a turn in the road, slowed to a trot
+at the sight of her, and came to an abrupt standstill.  When the girl
+rode nearer to them, merely surprised and curious at first, they
+snorted and showed the whites of their eyes and shied back nervously.
+
+Something chill clutched at Barbara's heart while she spoke
+pre-emptorily to Ragtime, who was dancing in sympathetic panic.  There
+was nothing to tell her, but she knew that these were Big Louie's
+horses.  And Big Louie was a dreamy incompetent--he had left them for a
+moment, that was all, and they had become frightened and bolted.  But
+Big Louie never neglected his team . . . they were not wet . . . they
+had not been running far.  And their fright became less when she
+dismounted and approached them, soothing them with her voice until they
+let her touch their sleek sides, without rearing away.
+
+Dusk had come and gone, for it was growing dark.  Uncertain, more and
+more unnerved as she stood and gazed at the forbidding, black-shadowed
+ridges beyond her, the girl had to fight suddenly against an impulse to
+turn and race back to the lower country and Morrison and home.  Even
+then the rifle shots meant nothing to her--and pride would not let her
+run.  She remounted and rode on a rod or two, and stopped to look back
+at the team which was watching her; she pressed on and rounded the
+curve.  Ragtime reared and snorted there, and she barely stifled the
+cry which his strange behavior brought to her lips.  Because of her
+senseless panic she punished him the more severely, and sent him on.
+And then she saw what the horse had already seen.
+
+A blue-shirted figure lay half in the road, half in the undergrowth
+that fringed it, one arm crooked under him and his face prone in the
+dust; a bulkier mass was stretched wholly within the trail--and she
+recognized him, too.  Big Louie's face was upturned, and the
+explanation of the two rifle reports and the driverless team was here.
+For Big Louie's hand still clutched the handle of a canvas pail.  They
+had stopped to water the horses; they had been shot down from behind.
+And first of all, unable to move, while horror parched her lips, the
+girl remembered words which the limp one, half in the road and half in
+the underbrush, had spoken to her in a moment of sternness.
+
+"He has fired upon me from cover," the man who loved her had said.  "He
+has been taking money from a man who was bent on beating me at any
+price!"
+
+Giddiness rose and swayed her, and she beat Ragtime mercilessly for his
+fear.  Instinct clamored flight, and she forced herself to wait,
+panting for that other shot which might leave her, too, lying in the
+road.  But even in that first frozen moment she began to reason
+clearly.  Back with the sleek team which welcomed her with questioning
+eyes she left Ragtime, for he would stand there, and retraced her way
+on foot.  She could not do it, she sobbed drily--but she raced to him
+and knelt and searched with swift fingers before the words were past
+her lips.  Her hand found moisture beneath his right shoulder; it was
+stained red when she held it up and stared at it.  And then she was
+closest to fainting.
+
+"Blood sickens me!" she whimpered aloud.  "Blood sickens me!"  But she
+managed to turn him over upon his back.  With brown head against his
+heart, she listened--listened and would not believe that her to-morrow
+might come too late.  And then she caught the slack pound of his pulse.
+
+From there on she was less panic-stricken; she gained control of
+faculties shocked for a time into uselessness.  Method marked her
+acts--deliberation mechanical but sure.  She was horribly afraid of Big
+Louie, but she finally disentangled the handle of the pail from those
+loose fingers, and ran to the brook which babbled near at hand.
+Returning, she drenched Steve's face with icy water; she lifted his
+head and propped it, as comfortably as she might, upon one thigh, and
+opened his flannel shirt.  The ball had passed through, for back and
+front the shirt became immediately wetter with fresh blood.  Blood
+sickened her, but she whipped off the coat of her boyish riding-habit
+and wrenched the sleeves from her linen blouse.  They were desperately
+scant, yet they provided pads with which to check that dreadful oozing.
+And when they were in place she turned again to bathing his forehead.
+
+A folded sheet of paper came to view when she tried once to ease his
+heavy body from the position which was numbing her leg, and she seized
+upon it fiercely.  It was only a brief line, bidding him come to her,
+but it bore her name.  With instant, bodiless clarity which had marked
+all her mental processes so far, its purport was hers.  She had not
+written--the hand that had traced her signature had been unstrung for
+once.  She understood, though such knowledge seemed of little moment
+now.
+
+She kept the pads cold and wet; she went for fresh water and stumbled
+and fell more than once, because of the treacherous footing in the
+deepening shadows.  But she was no longer afraid of the dark; she had
+grown to fear Big Louie less, even though there was no help for Big
+Louie any more.  It was the first time that Barbara had looked upon the
+face of a man who had died in violence.  Big Louie's face was growing
+indistinct now, but she knew that he was smiling--knew that his eyes
+were dreamy and mild.  Death, like Life, had been a quite
+incomprehensible puzzle to that slow-witted one who had no name.  But
+he had smiled seldom in life.  In death his smile was almost childish,
+almost sweet, and questioning beyond all else.
+
+Alone with him who still lived, the pallid girl sat and waited and
+wondered how long--or how soon--it would be.  But she wasn't afraid
+now.  They were his hills; it was his wilderness.  And could any harm
+come out of them equal to separation from him?  This was only the
+beginning of one night of darkness, and Miss Sarah had endured with
+patience and bravery through a whole lifetime of days and nights as
+black.  "Your face was the first . . . it will be the last thing I'll
+see, as long as there is sight in my eyes!" had been his words to her.
+She waited and she prayed shamelessly for herself--for one more
+chance--as Miss Sarah had said women always prayed.  But he was looking
+at her, when she opened her eyes after a long and incoherent appeal; at
+her first word he tried to rise and she had trouble in persuading him
+to lie back again.  She heard herself scolding, while she rearranged
+the bandages so that they would cover both wounds, and he listened,
+hot-eyed, without recognizing her.  Yet when she bade him wait, until
+she could bring the team, he nodded his comprehension; he was watching
+for her return.  And he came to his feet with a readiness that made her
+heart leap with hope; but he fell twice before she lifted him, half
+with her hands, half with her voice, to the seat.
+
+She crawled in beside him, and the next moment she had to struggle
+madly to prevent his returning to Big Louie.
+
+"He will wait quiet until we come for him," she protested.  "There
+isn't room for Big Louie--and he won't mind----"
+
+Her logic made an impression upon him, for he smiled.  There was no
+sequence in his acquiescence, however.
+
+"I have always been afraid for him," he told her in reply, as
+studiously grave as though he had been conscious of what he was saying.
+"The others--they can take care of themselves.  They are wrong ones
+together.  But Big Louie is only a child--but he won't mind--he'll
+understand----"
+
+She thought then that he had recognized her; she dared to hope that his
+brain was clearing.  But when the team went forward, nervously
+unmanageable at first, then more decorous as they drew away from him
+who would never feed them brown sugar again, the man beside her only
+persisted vacantly with his topic.
+
+"Big Louie never could find his way alone," he mused, "and that is
+strange, too, for he was born in these hills.  He was always getting
+lost----"  And with that he must not desert Louie!  She had even more
+trouble with him this time.  "He will lose his head," he expostulated
+mildly--his old, unfailing attitude of gentleness toward her.  "He will
+lose his head and waste his strength in running from things which do
+not exist."
+
+"Big Louie will find his way this time."  She was whimpering again in
+her helplessness.  "He is--already home."
+
+There she learned that her voice could control him when her arms
+availed not at all against even his dead weight.  And so she talked as
+steadily as she was able while she drove.  Once he lurched against her;
+when he pulled himself together he was so sanely apologetic of a sudden
+that she searched his face with hungry eyes.  But he was talking now to
+himself.
+
+"I must not touch her!" he stated firmly.  And then, drearily: "I am
+sick. . . .  I have never been so sick--before."
+
+With that he subsided, but his silence was far more dreadful than his
+wanderings had been; and as fast as she dared she pushed the heavy team
+on, with Ragtime following behind like a dog.  He slipped back against
+her almost immediately, and this time he had not the strength with
+which to apologize nor lift himself erect.  With his head heavy in the
+hollow of her arm, they came at length to the open pasture hills; they
+topped the rise and faced the loops on loops of highway that ran down
+to Morrison at the river-edge.  And so she brought him home.  At the
+sight of his "city" she sobbed aloud, but he, sunken and slack, was
+conscious neither of distance covered nor change of country.  He
+climbed down from the seat, however, in response to her urgings, when
+the team halted before Caleb Hunter's white-columned house--he turned
+and started stubbornly back the way they had come.
+
+She ran after him and clung to his arm.
+
+"You promised that you would come back to me," she cried up at him.
+"Oh, you cannot leave me now!"
+
+That halted him, momentarily.
+
+"I must go back to my bridge," he explained, plainly nonplussed.  "But
+then I'll surely come back to you."
+
+She pleaded with him--raged at him.
+
+"I must go back to my bridge," he reiterated gruffly now.
+
+Her arms went around him in desperation, and then, with one swing, he
+had swept her yards away, reeling before his blazing wrath.
+
+"Take your fingers from my eyes, Harrigan," he gasped in sudden agony.
+"I am going to kill you now--and _she_ is looking on!"
+
+The girl was afraid of him; she dared not try to hold him.  She
+screamed wildly for help, and screamed again.  And he had gone on, and
+wavered and crashed over upon his face, when Caleb Hunter and her
+father came running heavily across the lawn in answer to her shrieks.
+
+Between them they lifted him and carried him into the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+--AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
+
+They carried him into the house and bore him upstairs, and laid him,
+quiet now and almost pulseless, upon the bed.  They stood there,
+dumfounded, at the bedside, until Miss Sarah, re-entering the room,
+coolly ordered them from underfoot and sent them back downstairs.  And
+at that their unprotesting obedience was of greater assistance than
+their hands could have been; but when, after one glance at the girl's
+stricken face, she tried the next instant to dismiss Barbara, for once
+Miss Sarah's will alone proved insufficient.  The girl refused,
+point-blank, to go.
+
+"He half undressed me and put me to bed," Barbara flung back in reply
+to the spinster's final objection, "and if that did not shock you,
+surely my staying now need not!"
+
+The refusal itself brought a glint to the older woman's eyes and the
+phrasing thereof a flush to her cheeks, but she wasted no more words in
+what she knew to be useless argument.  And though the girl grew sick
+and sicker still while Miss Sarah cut away the sodden shirt and
+started, with competent skill, to cleanse the wound, the latter let her
+remain and hold a basin of antiseptic and replenish it when necessary.
+
+Miss Sarah knew what to do; and she worked with unhurried thoroughness.
+They had sent for the doctor, and after ages had passed for the girl,
+maddeningly cool and unruffled, he arrived.  But his first words, too,
+were an order that she leave the room, and unable to combat his
+professional bleakness, meekly she had to obey.  Little and wholly
+hopeless she stole downstairs.
+
+Caleb and her father were confronting each other before the fireplace
+when she reached the lower floor, but the queer note of restraint in
+their voices meant nothing to her, until she heard her father cry out
+in sudden anguish.
+
+"Cal," he cried, "Cal, you don't think I was a party to this attempt at
+murder?"
+
+Then, at Caleb's reply, which went hurtling back at him, the girl was
+crouching, white and still, and clutching at the stair-rail.
+
+"Party!  Attempt!  Because you did not pull the trigger are you any the
+less guilty?"
+
+"Do you believe that I would murder the man my girl loves?" Dexter
+Allison moaned now.
+
+Barbara gasped at the deadly anger which crossed Caleb Hunter's face.
+Caleb had lifted a hand in righteous accusation.
+
+"You have dealt in crookedness," he thundered.  "You have thrived on
+cunning.  And, being a law unto yourself in this country, you have gone
+unpunished until now.  You aided and abetted a vicious and unscrupulous
+scoundrel in his villainy; and now you have looked upon the result of
+your works.  Law has never touched you, sir--reprisal has passed you
+by.  But, by God, sir, I warn you if that boy dies--if he dies--I shall
+see that you meet me at thirty paces the next morning.  And I shall not
+miss--I shall be your law!"
+
+They had been friends for close to forty years, yet they were worse
+than strangers now.  Dexter Allison could not answer; he could not
+speak aloud.  Caleb's finger had swung toward the door in a gesture
+unmistakable.  Allison turned, and, ghastly of face, met the eyes of
+his daughter.
+
+"Barbara," he appealed to her, frantically.  "Baby----"
+
+But she shrank, a huddled heap of misery, away from him.
+
+"You--too?" she whispered.  "You!"  And then, dully: "And you're my
+father!"
+
+The shoulders beneath the garish plaid rose and fell, pitifully.  This,
+then, was the moment which he feared.  He gulped aloud and hung his
+head, and turned his feet toward home.  Barbara rose after he had gone
+and crept into a chair.
+
+One after another they tried to persuade the girl to rest.  Miriam came
+and talked to her, and Caleb; and even Miss Sarah, passing through the
+room, stopped to urge her again to go to bed.  But she met them all
+with the same wordless refusal; she was waiting for him when the
+doctor, descending in the morning, tried to combine, diplomatically,
+praise for what she had done with disapproval of her obstinacy.
+
+"My dear child, this insubordination will help no one," he said, "and
+it may end in your collapse at just the moment when you are needed
+most."
+
+"Will he live?" was all she would say.  "Will he live?"
+
+And before such hopelessness the doctor could not lie.
+
+"He is hard hit and very, very weak," he had to admit.  "The shock is
+great and the tissue damage--unpromising.  It is far worse than I
+expected, but he is still alive, and most men would have been already
+dead.  And his vitality is a marvel, even to me."
+
+He might have comforted her, but with no other statement could he have
+told the truth.  He failed also in his effort to persuade her to go to
+bed; he had breakfast with Caleb, and she refused to eat.  And she was
+still there in her chair, asking only to be let alone, when Garry
+Devereau and Fat Joe arrived.  She rose and ran to meet the latter, but
+the doctor who knew how many such situations the pudgy riverman had
+weathered, summoned him immediately, and Barbara had to wait an hour
+before Joe came back downstairs.  By the lapels of his coat she clung
+to him then.
+
+"He's mighty sick," reluctantly Joe, too, told the truth.
+
+"The doctor said that it was worse than he expected," she droned.
+"They sent me away, but if he isn't going to live I won't let them keep
+me from him!"
+
+Joe's sympathy was unspoiled by professionalism.
+
+"Sick is one thing,"--his confidence was almost convincing,--"and dyin'
+is another.  And----  Shucks!  I ain't going to let no book-taught
+medico worry me yet!  Men get well because they are bound to get well,
+or they die because it's their time to die--and he's got too much to
+live for now!"
+
+Her hopeless face made deception impossible, but Joe comforted her,
+just the same.  He persuaded her to eat with him, and when he found
+that his conversation made the waiting easier for her, he waxed quite
+garrulous.
+
+"Why, he's been hurt almost as bad as this, once before," he rambled
+on, "but he's still alive, ain't he?"
+
+The girl's eyes livened at that.
+
+"Once, down on the island, he mixed in an affair in which most men
+would not have meddled.  And he got it from behind that time, too, only
+it was with a knife."
+
+"He never told me," murmured the girl.
+
+"It ain't likely he would," the other stated with finality.  "It was
+over a woman, and not a particularly pretty story, any way you look at
+it."
+
+Her dark eyes widened.  She bit her lip.  It came to her how little of
+his life she had shared.
+
+"Oh!" she barely breathed.  And again, falteringly: "Oh!"
+
+From that halting monosyllable Joe judged that something was amiss.
+Observation had never been a slow or painful process of concentration
+with him.
+
+"He didn't even know who she was.  He'd never even seen her before,"
+quickly he put her right.  "She was just a public dancer, that was all.
+But a man--mistreated her--and Steve, he just interfered----"
+
+Indeed, Joe had found the way to comfort her and still tell the truth,
+even though he found it foolishly difficult to swallow food and watch
+at the same time the warmth which his words kindled.  So for an hour he
+lingered at table and told her many things concerning the man she loved
+which she would never have learned from his own lips.  And it was Joe's
+jocularity which in the end subdued her rebel spirit.  She yielded at
+last and promised to go home and rest, but only after he had promised
+first in a fashion which could leave no doubt in her heart, that he
+would come for her if things grew worse.
+
+Before she left him that morning she told Joe of Big Louie, whom she
+had had to leave in the road; but he interrupted her before she could
+finish.  They had already found Big Louie.  Then she gave him the note
+which she had discovered crushed beneath Steve's body.  This Joe
+scanned ferociously; he flashed a strange glance at her from bleached
+blue eyes.
+
+"Some one traced your name," he put into words the first thought that
+had been hers.  "Some one who had your signature to copy."
+
+She nodded, whitely, in horror.  Joe folded the paper and tucked it
+into a pocket.
+
+"We can touch nobody," he averred regretfully, "unless we catch
+Harrigan!"
+
+Caleb himself took Barbara home, and on the way across the lawn she
+giggled suddenly at the funny way in which the distance seemed to
+increase and then lessen between her eyes and her feet.  The ground
+persisted in rising to meet her, she said, until she had to cling to
+Caleb's arm.  And the outer steps proved difficult to negotiate.  But
+at the sight of her father, sunk in silence Upon his desk in the ground
+floor "office," she drew her hand from the crook of Caleb's arm and
+went swiftly across to him.
+
+"Barbara," he beseeched her brokenly, the moment her cheek touched his.
+"You mustn't believe that I----"
+
+She hushed him with gentle fingers laid upon his lips.
+
+"I have been a very foolish and hysterical child," she said.  "I'll try
+to behave more like a woman now.  And you and Uncle Cal have been
+only--absurd!"
+
+She had to laugh again at the behavior of her feet as she climbed
+upstairs; but her head seemed steady enough.  It was only after she had
+reached her own room that she complained querrulously of the failing
+lights.  Miriam had to help Cecile undress and put her to bed.
+
+On the floor below, her father had turned again to his desk, his head
+bowed upon his arms.  And total breakdown was imminent for Dexter
+Allison when a hand touched, awkwardly, his shoulder.  He looked up
+heavily to meet this time the eyes of Caleb Hunter.  Caleb stuttered
+furiously at first, for sentimentality shamed him.  Then a happy
+thought showed the way.
+
+"Dexter, I secured a few sprigs of very superior mint, yesterday," he
+made of it a ceremonial.  "Do you think you would--care to join me,
+sir?"
+
+They had been friends for close to forty years, not because of common
+tastes, but in spite of innate dissimilarity.  Dexter came to his feet;
+he reached out and crushed the other man's hand within his soft, white
+fingers.  Nor was his reply quite according to formula.
+
+"I don't mind if I do, Cal," he accepted fervidly, "Thank God . . . I
+don't mind if I do!"
+
+Arm in arm, they recrossed to the white-columned house.  And they kept
+close, each to the other, throughout the hours of suspense that
+followed, finding a potent though unconfessed reassurance in such
+companionship.
+
+Delirium came again upon the sick man who lay in the room which Miss
+Sarah had always kept waiting for him.  Fever strode upon him, while
+the girl who had brought him home slept in complete exhaustion.   At
+times Steve lay quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he
+called crisply for Fat Joe--he feared for his bridge--and Joe had to
+exert every iron muscle to hold him down.  And always he spoke
+Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the
+verge of collapse.  But he continued to live, through that day and the
+next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go
+for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity.  He
+continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he
+was no longer delirious.  Stephen O'Mara opened his eyes and gazed
+feebly but very understandingly into the eyes of Fat Joe, who was
+watching at that moment.
+
+Joe tried to hush him, but he would talk a little.
+
+"I know," he pronounced each word with calculated effort.  "I have been
+very sick, and I must not waste my strength.  But I have to be clear,
+first, on one point.  Have I dreamed it, Joe, or--or did she bring me
+home?"
+
+With his voice alone, when all else seemed failing, Joe had kept his
+friend alive.  The doctor believed it; Miss Sarah knew it to be so.
+And first of all Joe had to voice his thankfulness, for it was an
+explosive thing.
+
+"Didn't I tell her so?" he demanded in his whining tenor.  "Didn't I
+say so, all along?  And I let that doctor worry _me_, just because he's
+got a diploma in a frame, hanging on his wall!"
+
+Then he answered Steve's question.
+
+"She found you," he said.  "She brought you home."
+
+A long time the sick man lay and pondered.  And finally he found it
+possible to smile.
+
+"I have not cared whether I lived or died," he said in little more than
+a whisper.  "All along I have seemed to know how near I was--to going
+across; and I have been near to quitting--at times.  For I was happier
+than I'd ever dared let myself be, before--and then, with the first
+shot that dropped Big Louie, I knew----"  He shook his head, still
+smiling vaguely.  "I have not wanted to live, but I am looking at
+things--more like a man now. . . .  You need not worry any longer, Joe.
+I'll sleep a little while, I think; and then I'll put my mind hard on
+getting well, when I awake."
+
+That marked the end of delirium, and with sleep which came almost while
+he was talking, the fever began to abate.  He "put his mind on getting
+well," when he awoke, twelve hours later.  Strength was flowing in a
+steady tide back into his body long before Barbara's knees would again
+bear her weight.  For she had squandered her endurance without counting
+the cost, and she paid the full penalty.  She lay three days and three
+nights railing at her weakness before she could get up at all; and even
+then Cecile, her little maid, clucked discreetly at the dark circles
+beneath her eyes.
+
+Joe was several days absent on that errand which had all but emptied
+the seething town of men; he returned the same day Barbara was about
+again, forced to admit that Harrigan and Fallon and Shayne had won
+clear.  And there was nothing left to the disgruntled groups which
+straggled in behind him, save tall and heated conjecture.  Some said
+that they must have managed to cross the border; others maintained that
+they had found sanctuary in the lumber-camps of the lake country to the
+west, but no matter which guess was right the net result stood
+unchanged.  For it is upon the one who runs away that the blame is
+always laid, and Archibald Wickersham knew fully as well as did Caleb
+and Allison and Fat Joe that, without Harrigan, they could not hope to
+touch him.  Harrigan had disappeared from the ken of men, and
+Wickersham delayed only until his departure could no longer be
+construed as flight.  Then one evening modestly he boarded a train.
+
+After she had rested Barbara proved almost humbly amenable to reason;
+until it was best for her to go to him, she would wait as patiently as
+she was able.  And in the meantime, in a luxury of loneliness, wisely
+the girl spent her days out of doors, climbing oftenest to that
+hill-top where they had stood together, in the snow, the night of Miss
+Sarah's Christmas party.  From that point she could see Morrison and
+the river basin, and even the steam that jetted ever and again from the
+whistles of the engines clattering over his railroad which lanced into
+the north.
+
+But no discordant note of haste could reach her ears from so great a
+distance.  That whole vast panorama, suggestive least of all of
+violence, lay blanketed in a sleepy silence that matched the subdued
+security of her mood.
+
+Miss Sarah ordered a week of unbroken quiet and rest for her patient;
+and Steve, and not Barbara, proved the difficult one to manage during
+that period.  For with returning strength there came to him
+recollection of many things which required his attention.  He fretted
+over his work; he swore humorously at Fat Joe, who, coming to make
+daily reports as soon as Miss Sarah realized that the good in such
+visits far exceeded the benefits of sleep and solitude, assured his
+chief that they had accomplished much, unhampered as they were by
+carping authority.
+
+But he lay and brooded, no humor in his eye, when he was left alone.
+Fat Joe had assured him that she had brought him home; but Fat Joe, who
+was ever averse to anti-climax, had told him no more than that.  His
+efforts at entertainment were only the more spontaneous those days
+because of the soberness of his friend's face.  And then, the same day
+that Joe raised him against the pillows so that he might watch a string
+of flat-cars, high piled with logs, roll into the yards, they let her
+go to him.
+
+Steve was listening to the shrill salute of the whistle which he knew
+was McLean's paen of victory; he was smiling a little wistfully over
+the memory which, with McLean, always recurred to him, when he turned
+and saw her standing on the threshold.  She had come on diffident,
+mouse-like feet.  She was watching him.  And before he believed it
+really was she, Barbara faltered his name.
+
+"Steve!"
+
+It was only a wisp of a sound--an aching, throbbing bit of tenderness
+lighter even than the breath that bore it.
+
+"Steve!" she breathed again.
+
+But thereupon, with a headlong little rush that scattered spools of
+bandage and rolls of lint, and set the bottles upon his table jingling
+dangerously, she flew to him and came, somehow, into his arms.
+
+They had not told him--at first he could not speak.  Dumbly he sat, his
+face bowed upon that brown head pillowed in his arms.  She had told
+herself that she was a woman now--yet her first words were all girl.
+
+"Tell me just once that I'm pretty," she quavered.  "Say that I am
+still--half boy--to you!"
+
+His tongue unsteadied with joy, he told her again, as he had told her
+on that other day; and watching the old, old wonder of her grow in his
+eyes, she listened as though she were taking the words, one by one,
+from his lips.  But there was nothing boyish in the crooked little arch
+of her mouth--nothing boyish in the depths of her dark and brimming
+eyes.  She remembered his wincing shoulder then; her arms crept higher
+about his neck.  And now her face was uplifted and there was no more
+need for words.
+
+Afterward, when they spoke of Big Louie, she loved him more for the
+sorrow which he did not try to hide.  From Fat Joe he had already
+learned of Big Louie's last dereliction.  Out of a deeper silence,
+Steve spoke gravely--an epitaph for the man to whom he had been
+unfailingly kind.
+
+"Most any kind of a failure can live," he said, "but it takes a man--to
+smile and die."
+
+
+He let himself marvel aloud at her littleness.
+
+Their first hour together was only the happier for that moment of
+sadness they shared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+IN REAL LIFE TOO
+
+There was no longer any objection raised by Miss Sarah; and Barbara
+spent every hour of her days with him.  It grew warmer with aging
+spring--and almost immediately he was able to sit with her and watch
+the stream of logs coming in over the line from Thirty-Mile and beyond.
+
+Miriam and Garry were married in that week which followed directly
+Steve's first days of convalescence.  The former had returned with
+Garry to the northern valley, and already a note had come from her to
+the younger girl, in which she bewailed the servant question, as
+represented by the cook-boy whom her husband had inherited, along with
+the cabin at headquarters.
+
+Over that particular paragraph Barbara allowed herself to show
+amusement.  She tilted her nose, however, in vast disdain at the tenor
+of the rest of the letter.
+
+"From the way Miriam raves on and on," she exclaimed, "one would think
+that Garry had saved the day."
+
+They were at the window together on this occasion, Steve outwardly
+still a little pale and haggard, but for the rest his old serene self
+again.  He managed not to smile at her small and serious face.
+
+"It certainly has not strengthened my vanity a little bit, either,"
+said he, "to learn how smoothly things can move along without me."
+
+Day by day the girl was finding her way deeper into that innermost
+heart of him which he had never shared with other woman or man.  Hour
+by hour she was learning to know him better, and yet his whimsical
+gravity still could deceive her--she was sometimes thoughts behind his
+thoughts.  Hard upon his reply her eyes flashed with indignation.
+
+"Pooh!" she scoffed, "Pooh!  Most any old clock will run, after
+somebody's wound it up!"
+
+It was a trick of speech that she had learned from him, but his
+employment of parallel, lazily amiable for the most part, had never
+been so hotly partisan as was hers at that moment.  And suddenly
+self-conscious--suddenly confused and warmly disconcerted at the
+quality of his gaze--she had to hide her head.  But she hid it upon a
+shoulder most conveniently at hand.
+
+Spring gave way to early summer--and now Steve was able to be on his
+feet again, so absurdly uncertain of balance at first, however, that
+she ridiculed him unmercifully one moment, only to rush to him in a
+panic of solicitude the next.  There came long walks, and longer trips
+in the saddle; came hours of silence that were the more wonderful for
+want of words--hours in which, in a hushed voice, she gave him shyly of
+her plans.  But always, too, the interruptions grew more and more
+frequent and insistent.  Fat Joe and McLean, and even Hardwick Elliott,
+made more and more pressing demands upon his time, until finally he
+insisted that he could no longer play, shamelessly, the invalid.  He
+must look in upon the works up-river, if only for the moral effect
+which it would have upon the men.  She assented, grudgingly; it would
+be but a day or two.  And then--then he would come back to her.
+
+The next morning, at the moment when Barbara and Steve were mounting
+their horses, for she wanted to ride with him a little way, Dexter
+Allison chose to disclose something which had been but lately in the
+process of preparation.  He joined them at the edge of the lawn, before
+the white-columned house on the hill.
+
+"Easing back into harness, I understand," he began, not quite
+comfortably, however, for he was aware of a gleam of disapproval in his
+daughter's eyes, at this interruption.  "Well, there's no great rush,
+but it's wise, no doubt, to see that things don't lag."  He hesitated,
+and shifted heavily to the other foot.  "We'll want to start through to
+the border by fall, I suppose?"
+
+"We'll be ready," Steve had to laugh at his lack of ease.
+
+"No doubt--no doubt!"  Again Dexter hesitated, momentarily.  And then
+there came to the surface that proneness to accept men for what they
+were, in a man's world, which had long before convinced Caleb Hunter of
+Allison's inherent bigness.
+
+"Elliott resigned the Presidency of the East Coast Company last night."
+The statement was brief to actual crispness.  "I merely tell you this
+so that you can begin to lay tentative plans accordingly.  Because, in
+view of the immediate need of filling that vacancy, I feel sure that
+there will be too many demands upon your time, here at the Morrison
+office, for you to plan on much field work for yourself in the future."
+
+To Barbara, at the beginning, the speech seemed merely another of her
+father's rather involved, entirely labored attempts at the facetious.
+But when she saw the blood steal up and stain Stephen O'Mara's face,
+she realized that it was the very sort of a suggestion from which, on
+her lips, he had turned roughly away.  Coming from the lips of her
+father, Steve accepted gravely, with a matching briefness that could
+not hide a surge of triumph.  A month before Barbara would have been
+unable to understand why there was any difference, simply because the
+suggestion came from another.  Now, when it could no longer make or mar
+her happiness, she understood very well indeed.
+
+She rode with him that day until he told her that it was time for her
+to turn back.  With Ragtime standing quiet, she laid her face against
+his, and complained that he had promised her she should never be
+allowed to go more than arms' length away from him, once she was his.
+
+"This is the last time," he told her, in a voice vibrant and low.
+"This is the last time--for you and me."
+
+He held her closer for a moment.
+
+"You will be ready when I come back?"
+
+She bobbed her head.
+
+"Ready--and waiting," she said.
+
+She sat and put up a hand to him, wistfully disconsolate, before he
+disappeared beyond a twist in the trail.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The next night, in the cabin up-river, after Miriam had left them alone
+to what she termed their complacent silence, Garry Devereau and Steve
+sat a long while before the former raised a face alight with his rare
+mirth.
+
+"Remember Joe's one proposed journey into the realms of romance?" he
+asked suddenly.
+
+Openly Steve grinned, and nodded.
+
+"Remember how Joe threatened to close the last chapter?"
+
+Steve nodded again.
+
+"Well, here we are!" chuckled Garry.  "I, poor but honest, already in
+the toils of matrimony; and you, a plutocrat in sudden danger of a
+government investigation, I'm told, and hovering on the brink!"
+
+"Here we are!" echoed Steve.
+
+And that was as close as either of them came to outspoken emotion.
+With a lightness somewhat self-conscious, Garry had alluded to the
+property which Caleb Hunter had turned over to Steve.  There was a
+trace of like humor in the latter's reply.
+
+"I certainly am oppressed with the cares of sudden wealth," said he.
+
+They were silent again, and then they heard lifted at a distance a thin
+and reedy tenor.  Joe was still humming his inevitable ballad, when he
+entered and closed the door behind him, with an alarming flourish.
+
+"Evenin', folks," he saluted, but he did not seek a chair.
+
+Before then they had seen him primed for a sensation; never until that
+moment had he failed to aggravate their curiosity.  He circled the room
+but once, before he confronted them in a fashion that would have been
+challenging, had it not been for his fiery face.
+
+"Well, you may as well congratulate me," he invited, "and have done
+with it.  Because the suspense is over for me!"
+
+Both men straightened in their chairs; both understood instantly.  But
+Garry was the quicker in speech.
+
+"Not Cecile?" he inquired, in feigned consternation.
+
+"Why not?" Joe was quickly belligerent.
+
+"Oh, dear!" mourned Garry.  "Oh, dear!  I wish you had consulted me--or
+some other married man first.  Compatibility and common tastes, you
+know, Joe, and all that sort of thing.  She's a little Parisienne, and
+you--well, you're only a riverman, like me!"
+
+Joe condescended to draw up a chair.  And his verbal condescension was
+large.
+
+"Sometimes you're fair," he spoke with scornful superiority, "and
+sometimes you are so amateurish you make me homesick for Steve to come
+back."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+She was waiting for him at the twist in the road.  She was ready, two
+days later, as she had promised to be.
+
+Only her father and Miss Sarah and Caleb were present when they were
+married.  And then, and not alone because she knew he wished it, but
+because it was the dearest wish of her own heart, they turned their
+faces towards the cabin on the balsam knoll.
+
+That day was theirs alone to be shared with no other living thing, save
+the lesser brethren of the wilderness.  Noon found them far north of
+the foothills, deep in the hushed and higher ridges; twilight had come
+and gone and the first of the stars were already blurred points of
+light in the riffles, when they raised the river ahead.  And there he
+checked his horse, to point out the cabin, white-streaked with clay
+chinking against a wall of green--he dismounted and lifted her to the
+ground, for suddenly she wanted to go the rest of the way on foot.
+
+She let her weight lie against him, the top of her head scarce higher
+than his chin, and sighed a little.
+
+"Tired?" he asked with that gentleness he saved for her alone.
+
+The bright head shook.
+
+"Happy?" he asked again, as gently.
+
+She swung around and clung to him then.
+
+"I'm so happy!" she whispered.  "Do you suppose that anyone will ever
+be as happy again?"
+
+There was ineffable content in her question.  Whimsically her own
+phrase rose to his lips.
+
+"Maybe," he said, "maybe sometime--in books!"
+
+She lifted her face then.  He had the dusky glory of her eyes.
+
+"Maybe," she echoed, her voice tremulous,--"sometime.  But this time in
+real life, too."
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #18894 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18894)