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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sally of Missouri, by R. E. Young
+
+
+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: Sally of Missouri
+
+
+Author: R. E. Young
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 7, 2007  [eBook #23391]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALLY OF MISSOURI***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Martin Pettit and the Project Gutenberg Online
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+
+
+SALLY OF MISSOURI
+
+by
+
+R. E. YOUNG
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+New York: McClure, Phillips & Co.: Mcmiii
+
+Copyright, 1903, by
+McClure, Phillips & Co.
+
+Published, October, 1903
+
+
+
+
+_Dedicated to Florence Wickliffe_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                           PAGE
+
+    I. STEERING OF NEW YORK,                         3
+
+   II. PINEY OF THE WOODS,                          23
+
+  III. THE PROMISED LAND,                           36
+
+   IV. FOR THE BENEFIT OF CARINGTON,                62
+
+    V. BOOM TIME IN THE TOWN THAT JACK BUILT,       73
+
+   VI. FATHER AND DAUGHTER,                         95
+
+  VII. THE GARDEN OF DREAMS,                       109
+
+ VIII. WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF,                  119
+
+   IX. GOOD-BYE!                                   137
+
+    X. WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?                     153
+
+   XI. TALL THINGS,                                170
+
+  XII. THE COLOSSUS OF CANAAN,                     194
+
+ XIII. MISS SALLY MADEIRA'S SWEETHEART,            203
+
+  XIV. WHEN THE MEAL GAVE OUT,                     222
+
+   XV. A MISTAKE SOMEWHERE,                        242
+
+  XVI. MADEIRA'S PEACE,                            251
+
+ XVII. JUST A BOY,                                 258
+
+XVIII. A PRETTY PRECARIOUSNESS,                    268
+
+  XIX. WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE,                      274
+
+
+
+
+SALLY OF MISSOURI
+
+
+
+
+PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THE STORY
+
+
+      Steering, of New York
+
+      Old Bernique, of French St. Louis
+
+      Piney, of the Woods
+
+      Crittenton Madeira, of Canaan
+
+      Sally, of Missouri
+
+   _There are also some kind-hearted people:_
+_Farmers, Housewives, Store-keepers, Miners, etc._
+
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter One_
+
+STEERING OF NEW YORK
+
+
+"Hoo-ee-ow-ohme!"
+
+It was half a sob, half a laugh, and, half sobbing, half laughing, the
+young man stopped his horse on the crest of the Tigmore Hills, in the
+Ozark Uplift, raised in his stirrups, and looked the country through and
+through, as though he must see into its very heart. In the brilliant
+mid-afternoon light the Southwest unrolled below him and around him in a
+ragged bigness and an unconquered loneliness. As far as eye could reach
+tumbled the knobs, the flats, the waste weedy places, the gullies, the
+rock-pitted sweeps of table-land and the timbered hills of the Uplift.
+The buffalo grass trembled across the lowlands in long, shaking billows
+that had all the effect of scared flight. From the base of the Tigmores
+a line of river bottom stretched westward, and beyond the bottom curved
+a pale, quiet river. In the distance wraiths of blue smoke falteringly
+bespoke the presence of people and cabins; on a cleared hill an object
+that might be horse or dog or man was silhouetted, small and vague; and
+in the farthest west the hoister of a deserted zinc mine cut up against
+the sky a little lonely way. The near and dominant things were
+constantly those tremulous, fleeing billows of grass, the straight
+strong trees, the sullen rocks, the silent, shivering water.
+
+"_Hoo-ee-ow!_"
+
+It was too vast, too urgent. Waiting, ready, it lay there aggressively,
+like a challenge. As the young man faced it, it claimed him, forcing
+back his past life, his old habits, his old haunts, into the realm of
+myth and moonshine. His old habits! His old haunts! They hung aloof in
+his consciousness, shadow pictures, colourless and remote.... That
+zestful young life at New Haven, the swift years of it, the fine last
+day of it, Yale honours upon him, his enthusiasms cutting away into the
+future, his big shoulders squared, his face set toward great things, the
+righting of wrongs, grand reforms, the careers of nations.... A bachelor
+hotel; a club whose windows looked out on the avenue; an office where
+Carington and he had pretended to work down on Nassau Street;
+drawing-rooms where Carington and he had pretended to be in love, on
+various streets; the whole gay, meaningless panorama of his life as a
+homeless, unplaced New York sojourner, who had considered that he had
+too much money to be anything seriously and too little money to do
+anything effectively.... Then another picture, jerking, mazy, a study in
+kinematics--"Crazy Monday" on the Street, Carington and he swept along
+in that day's whirlwind of speculation.... A blank in the panorama while
+he got used to things and thought things out.... Then a wintry twilight
+at the club, Carington and he by the window, talking it over, looking
+out upon the drifted light of the city, loving the city, in the way of
+New Yorkers. Then Carington's voice saying, "Bruce? Bruce, m' son? Why
+don't you try Missouri?" Saying it with that in his voice to indicate
+that there was nothing else left to try. Then the long thoughtful talk,
+Carington and he still by the window, while he showed Carington how
+little chance he had even in Missouri; then Carington's strong-hearted
+insistence that, in view of the agitation over the ore discoveries at
+Joplin, he go on "out there" and prospect; and then Carington's
+foolishly irrelevant heel-piece, "Miss Gossamer sails for Europe
+Saturday!" and the sudden appeal of the notion to go "out there," its
+sharp striking-in.... Carington and he taking counsel with some of the
+other fellows in his rooms later on, all the deep voices roaring at
+once, all the boys insulting him at once, belittling his cigars, saying
+sharp things about his pictures, that being their way of showing him
+that they were badly broken up over his leaving them; all their eyes
+shining interest in him and hope for him and even envy of him, as the
+young man who was "going out West," while the great soft fluff of smoke
+in the room made the past a dream and the present an illusion and the
+future a phantasm.... Then the long journey overland, the little impetus
+toward the new life flickering drearily, while he gripped up his heart
+for any fate, growing quieter and quieter, but more and more determined
+to take Missouri as she came.... Then Missouri herself, the stop at St.
+Louis, the dip into the State southwestward, toward the lead and zinc
+country and his own debatable land; good-bye to the railroad; by team,
+in company with other prospectors, through the sang hills, up and down
+stony ridges, along vast cattle ranges.... And now here, quite alone,
+twenty miles from the railroad, Missouri on all sides of him,
+close-timbered, rock-ribbed, gulch-broken, mortally lonely, billowing
+around him, over him, possessing him.
+
+That sense of being possessed by Missouri, committed to her, had grown
+upon him intolerably all day. All day he had been fighting it and
+resenting it. At various points along the rocky ridge road he had come
+upon hill cabins and hill people, and, facing them, his fight and his
+resentment had been momentarily vicious.
+
+"Gudday, stranger!" the people had called from the porches of the hill
+cabins, "Hikin' over the Ridge?"
+
+"Yes, friend," Steering had called back, and had then projected his
+unfailing, anxious question: "Can you tell me how far it is to
+Poetical?"
+
+At that the people from the porches had got up and come across the baked
+weeds of the cabin yard. Assembled at the stile-block in front of him,
+the people invariably lined up as a long, gaunt farmer, a thin,
+flat-chested woman, a troop of dusty children, and a yellow dog.
+
+"Yass, I cand tell you. It's six sights and a right smart chanst f'm
+here to Poetical, stranger," the long, gaunt farmer had invariably
+drawled, with more accommodation than information.
+
+"Six sights--six sights and a right what _what_?"
+
+"W'y," the Missourian had explained forbearingly, blinking toward the
+sun, and waving his loosely jointed arms westward, "it's
+this-a-way--you'll git sight of Poetical f'm six hills, an' whend you
+git to the bottom of the sixt' hill they's a right smart chanst you
+won't be to Poetical evum yit awhile. You cand see far in this air. It's
+some mild f'm here to Poetical, an' sharp ridin' at that."
+
+Each time that Steering had heard that, little varied in phraseology,
+save for the number of "sights," according to his progress, he had felt
+so dismal and looked so dismal that, each time, the native before him
+had added quickly, "Better git off an' spin' the night with us. Aint got
+much, but what we got's yourn."
+
+Each time the house beyond the stile-block had looked miserably
+uninviting,--a plough on the front porch, harness on the porch posts;
+all around the house the yard litter of cheap farm life, a broken-down
+harrow, broken-backed furniture, straw, corn-shucks, ghosts of past
+winters and past summers on the farm, that had shuffled out there and
+died there; each time the cleared patches beyond the house had looked
+lean; each time the native had been sallow and toil-worn; but each time
+that welcome word had been a finely perfect thing, good to hear.
+
+Steering had noticed that in declining each invitation he had suddenly
+stopped short in his inner fight and resentment and assumed his best
+manner, as though his finest and highest courtesy had responded
+instinctively to something in kind.
+
+Idling on for a more expansive moment at each cabin door, the
+conversation had usually shaped itself like this:
+
+"Two has already rid over the Ridge to-day--Old Bernique and the
+tramp-boy. Old Bernique he's on the trail ag'in. The tramp-boy he's kim
+along so far with Old Bernique." In saying this, or something very like
+it, the hill farmer who spoke had always seemed to want it definitely
+understood that the neighbourhood had its excitements, and seemed to
+argue that if the stranger knew anything he must know Old Bernique and
+the tramp-boy. Proceeding leisurely and reflectively, as though he had
+decided in his own mind how to classify the stranger, the farmer had
+generally added, "Lots of prospectors ride by nowadays. They head in to
+the relroad f'm here,--you know you aint a-goin' to ketch the relroad at
+Poetical?"
+
+"Yes, I know, but when I left my friends at Bessietown yesterday I was
+hoping I could make it all the way across country to Canaan before
+to-night."
+
+"Oh, you goin' on to Canaan?"
+
+"Yes, going on to Canaan." Each time the words had echoed through
+Steering's head with an old-time promise in a mocking refrain, "Going on
+to Canaan! Going on to Canaan!"
+
+Immediately the hill tribe had eyed him with renewed interest. "Going on
+to Canaan!" the farmer at their head had repeated, an impressive esteem
+in his treatment of the word Canaan. "Gre't taown, Canaan! You strike
+the relroad tha' all righty. Dog-oned ef th'aint abaout ev'thing tha'.
+Got the cote-haouse an' all, the relroad an' all--Miss Sally Madeira,
+Mist' Crit Madeira's daughter, _she_ lives tha'."
+
+It had gone like that every time. Not once in the last twenty miles had
+Steering exchanged a word with man or woman without this sort of
+reference to Canaan and, collaterally, to Miss Sally Madeira. Miss
+Sally, he had perceived early, excited in the hill-farm people a species
+of awe, as though she were on a par with the circus, thaumaturgic,
+almost too good to be true.
+
+"The court house, the railroad and Miss Sally!" he had finally learned
+to murmur, in order to meet the demands of the situation.
+
+"Yass, oh yass." The farmer had given his head a dogged twist, and
+looked as though he were cognisant of the fact that in certain essential
+particulars Canaan did not have to yield an inch of her title to
+equality with the biggest and best anywhere. "Yass, saouthwest
+Mizzourah's hard to beat in spots; th'aint no State in the Union quite
+like her. She's different," he had said, rocking on his heels, his chest
+lifting.
+
+"I think you must be right about that," Steering had answered, every
+time with profounder emphasis.
+
+Off here alone on the ridge road now, Missouri's unspeakable difference
+was coming over him in great submerging waves. Though he tried bravely
+to face the State and have it out with her, he couldn't do it.
+
+"Missouri," he said at last to himself, and to her confidentially, "I'd
+like to cry. I'd give five hundred plunkerinos if I might be allowed to
+cry." Then he flicked his riding-crop over his leg in a devilishly
+nonchalant way, and rode straight forward.
+
+The road went on interminably, its dust-white line, with the rocky ridge
+through the middle, dipping and rising and getting nowhere. The horse
+grew nervous and shied repeatedly from sheer loneliness. The road
+entered a wood. Deep in its leafy fastness wild steers heard the beat of
+the horse's hoofs, laid back their ears and galloped into safer depths,
+bellowing with alarm. Steering gave up, as helplessly homesick as a
+baby, his head dropped forward on his chest in a settled melancholy,
+from which he did not rouse until he had cleared the timber; and then
+only because he saw a horseman down the ridge road ahead of him. What
+instantly attracted Steering's attention was the man's back. It was a
+small but proud back. It had none of the hill stoop. It was erect,
+sinewy, soldierly. Steering was so lonely that he would have welcomed
+companionship with a chipmunk. The chance of companionship with a man
+who had an interesting back grew luminous. He urged his horse forward
+eagerly, almost hysterically glad of his opportunity.
+
+"Good-afternoon," he called, having recourse to his well-tried form of
+greeting. "Can you tell me how far it is to Poetical?"
+
+The man addressed half turned, disclosing a thin and delicate face to
+Steering. Then he reined his horse in gently. "Good-evening, sair. Is it
+that you inquire to Poetical? It is a vair' long five miles f'm here,
+sair."
+
+Steering rode up beside the man, more and more pleased, regarding and
+analysing. The man's hickory shirt, his warped boots, his blue jean
+trousers, his heavy buskins were mean and earth-stained, but inherent in
+the quality of his low, musical voice and courteous manner was an
+intangible suggestion of something different, some bigger and happier
+past, to which, go where he would and clothe himself as he might, voice
+and manner had remained true.
+
+"I wonder," said Steering, almost sighing, "if you will mind a little of
+my company. The road is terribly lonely, sir. The country is terribly
+lonely in fact."
+
+"Yes, sair, a tr-r-ue word that. It is lonely. But sair, what will you
+of this particulaire portion? It is vair' yong in the Tigmores. It
+cannot be populate' in a day, a year. You, sair, come from the East,
+hein? Sair, relativement, effort against effort, they have not done as
+much in the East in feefty years as we have done in the Southwest in
+twenty,--believe that, sair." It was that same feeling for the State,
+that quick, leaping passion of nativity that Steering had thus far found
+in every Missourian with whom he had come in contact.
+
+"You are a Missourian, I see," said Steering, to keep his companion
+talking along the line of this enlivening enthusiasm.
+
+"Indeed, sair, yes. From that Saint Louis--François Placide DeLassus
+Bernique, at your service."
+
+"Thank you. My name is Steering, from New York, if you please, but very
+deeply interested in Missouri just now, sir."
+
+From that on they made easy progress into acquaintance. Bernique proved
+talkative, full of anecdotes about Missouri's past, and full of belief
+in her future. In his rich loquacity he roamed the history of the State
+painstakingly for the edification of Steering, as one who stood at
+Missouri's gates, inquiring of her true inwardness. He told Missouri's
+history back to Spain and France, forward to unspeakable splendour. He
+was intelligent, naïve, unusual. Steering, responsive to the attraction
+that was by and by to hold them strongly together, listened delightedly.
+
+"Yessair,"--through Bernique's speech ran a reminiscence of his native
+tongue, faint, sweet, fleeting, like the thought of home,--"yessair, it
+is I know the fashion in the eastern States to considaire all the West
+as vair' yong countree, and it is tr-r-ue, sair, that you, par example,
+have come upon the most yong part of thees gr-r-eat State of Missouri,
+but it is to be remembaire that this Missouri is not all rocks and wood,
+uncultivate', standing toward the future, but that her story date back
+to a remoter period and a fuller and finer civilisation, in that day
+when France and Spain held sway over the province of Louisiana, than
+does the story of many of the eastern States who hold this countree new,
+raw, uncivilise'. I myself,"--continued the speaker, spreading out one
+slender hand with an exquisite grace,--"have gr-r-own up in this State
+of Missouri, at that St. Louis, with the most profound convincement,
+aftaire much travel and observation, that for elegance we have in that
+city the most to it belong people in the United States of America,
+yessair!"
+
+"Ah, well," admitted Steering, borne along rapidly on the vehement
+current of Bernique's ardour, "with your sort of spirit in the people of
+Missouri, whatever she was and whatever she is can be but a mighty
+promise of what she will become----"
+
+"Ah, there you have it, the note!" interrupted François Placide DeLassus
+Bernique eagerly, "What she will become! That is the gr-r-and thought,
+sair. I who say it have preserve' my belief in what she will become
+through the discouragement ter-r-ible. I who speak have prospec' this
+land from end to end. I know her largesse. Believe me, sair, the
+tr-r-easures that were sought by the Castilian knights of old through
+all thees parts are indeed to be found here,--not the white silvaire of
+Castilian dreams, but iron! Coppaire! Lead! Zinc!"
+
+"I suppose," ventured Steering, "that it would be foolish to hope for
+deposits in this part of the State similar to the deposits about Joplin,
+and all through the thirty-mile stretch?"
+
+"Pouf!" Old Bernique made one of his pretty gestures, but said nothing.
+
+"You have," went on Steering, "you have to the west here the Canaan
+Tigmores, Mr. Bernique?"
+
+"Eh? Yessair, the Canaan Tigmores," repeated old Bernique, looking out
+over the ridges of hills and the flats listlessly; so listlessly that,
+by one of those flashes of intuitive perception that light us far along
+waiting paths, Steering knew suddenly that he had to deal with a man
+whose experience had somehow crossed the Canaan Tigmores.--"And also,
+Mistaire Steering, we have to the far south the Boston Range, in
+Arkansas, and far to the west the Kiamichi, in the Territoree."
+
+"Yes, but about these Canaan Tigmores, Mr. Bernique," insisted Steering,
+not at all deflected by Bernique's effort, "what about your Canaan
+Tigmores, Mr. Bernique?" Steering's experience with the French
+Missourian had been too fragmentary for anything but conjecture to come
+of it, and his own plans were too immature and too heavily conditioned
+for him to project them directly, but he had a feeling that he should
+want to know Bernique better some fine day, and he was moved to get some
+sort of grip upon the old man's interest while the chance lasted. "The
+Canaan Tigmores are not as far away as the Boston Mountains, Mr.
+Bernique. Much nearer than the Kiamichi. What's your idea about the
+Canaan Tigmores--in relation to zinc, Mr. Bernique?"
+
+"Pouf!" The old man made airy rings of smoke from the cigar with which
+Steering had furnished him. He would not talk about the Canaan Tigmores
+at all. "You will see Mr. Crittenton Madeira in Canaan about all that,"
+he said. "And now, sir, I have the regret to leave you. Our roads part
+at the sign-post yonder. I ride east."
+
+"Well, tell you what I wish!" cried Steering, with the pertinacity that
+was a part of him. "I am on my way to Mr. Crittenton Madeira now, and I
+wish you would come to me in Canaan some soon day and let me tell you
+the result of my business with him." Time was limited, for the horses
+were close to the cross-roads sign-post. "The Canaan Tigmores won't
+always belong to old Bruce Grierson, Mr. Bernique!" It was a random
+shot, but it told against Bernique's glumness.
+
+"Pouf! The bat-fool! The blind mole!"
+
+"The Canaan Tigmores are entailed, Mr. Bernique! The next owner may have
+eyes!"
+
+"God grant!" growled Old Bernique.
+
+"Grey eyes, eh, Mr. Bernique?" Steering flashed his own eyes smilingly
+at the French Missourian. The horses were at the sign-post.
+
+"Eh, what?" cried Old Bernique, "is it that----?"
+
+"We shall meet again, Mr. Bernique?"
+
+"I ride east for many a day, I think," said Bernique dubiously.
+
+"But you come back to Canaan?"
+
+"Ah, God in Heaven, yes!" cried the old man then, with a sudden fierce
+impetuosity, "I ride east, ride west, ride the wide world ovaire, but
+always I come back,--come back to Canaan." He stopped abruptly, as
+though afraid of himself, and faced Steering for a silent moment.
+
+Up to the silence, cleaving it gently, musically, there came
+unexpectedly the notes of a rollicking song:
+
+"_The taters grow an' grow, they grow!_"
+
+On the instant old Bernique's face relaxed pleasantly. He half grunted,
+half laughed. "The potato song!" he cried, his eyes gay, his mouth
+twitching. "Mistaire Steering, if you will ride on a little way you will
+have fine company. That is the tramp-boy yondaire. He is in the woods
+above the gulch there. He will have emerge' to the road presently. The
+yong scamp is musical, sair!"
+
+"Aye, hear that!" cried Steering appreciatively, "gloriously musical!"
+Out of the great green timber mounted the tenor notes, piercingly sweet,
+pure, true, like a bird-call:
+
+"_A tater's good 'ith 'lasses._"
+
+Bernique's horse was growing restless. The old man rode a little nearer
+Steering and regarded him searchingly. "Good-bye, sair," he said then,
+"it shall be what you say. I shall come back to you in Canaan."
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Bernique. I'm glad to have you decide that way." Steering
+clung to his notion that he and Bernique were to know each other better.
+They shook hands under the cross-roads sign-post with understanding.
+
+The rain was coming on fast. All the east lay grey behind Steering, all
+the west grey before him as he moved away from the cross-roads. But out
+of the west rolled the melody of the carolling boy, the voice of one
+singing in the wilderness, young and undismayed.
+
+Under the cross-roads sign-post old Bernique sat his horse motionless
+for a time, looking after Steering. From Steering his eyes roamed afar
+toward the Canaan Tigmores. A little shiver caught him. "The man that
+was expect'," he mused, "the man that was expect'!" Then he, too, rode
+away.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Two_
+
+PINEY OF THE WOODS
+
+
+Where the ridge road dropped down close to the pale river at a dip in
+the hills, Steering overtook the tramp-boy, hallooed to him, and watched
+him, as he turned his pony about and sat waitingly. He was a youth of
+sixteen or seventeen, and from under the peak of his felt hat, slouched
+and old, peered out a slim young gypsy face, crowned by a thick mop of
+black hair that tumbled about wide temples. Motionless there, the
+tremble of his song still on his lips and the gladness of youth and
+health on his face, the tramp-boy made Steering think of the rosy young
+shepherd Adonis, he was so glowing, so fine and fresh.
+
+"I have been right after you all the way from the cross-roads,"
+explained Steering, by way of a beginning, riding up to the lad's side,
+"I have just parted from a friend of yours,--Mr. Bernique,--so you see
+we are almost friends ourselves."
+
+"A'most." The boy smiled, showing white teeth. He seemed to like Bruce's
+method of dealing with him. "Wuz Unc' Bernique cross because I didn't go
+rat back like I said I'd do?" he queried slily.
+
+"No, I think not. And for my part, I am glad you didn't, for I am hoping
+that if you are going toward Poetical you won't mind my company. You
+see, it's pretty dog-on lonely." A very little of the ridge road
+sufficed to make Bruce sick for comradeship, and his voice showed it.
+The boy turned an impressionable, sympathetic face.
+
+"Come rat along," he said. He looked at Bruce a moment questioningly
+before adding, "Reckin's haow you aint usen to the quiet yit. Taint so
+lonely, the woods an' the hills whend you know um." He twisted his head
+like a bird and looked out across the extensive sweep of the land and
+the long slow curve of the river, a deep inspiration swelling his chest.
+"Simlike they up an' talk to you, the woods an' the hills an' the quiet,
+whend you know um," he said.
+
+All on the instant Steering knew that, as in the case of Old Bernique,
+here again was character. "Character" seemed distinctly the richest and
+the pleasantest thing in Missouri. He rode in a little closer to his
+companion, drawn to him irresistibly, recognising in him the sweet,
+untutored poetry of a wildwood nature, whose young timidity was
+trembling and steadying into the placating, magnetic assurance of a boy,
+fresh-hearted as a berry. Steering had encountered the same sort of
+poetry in other unspoiled boys, splendid child-men whom he had known in
+other walks of life, and he had a quick affection for it. It was always
+as though on its crystal clearness a man might see the white sails of
+his own youth set back toward him.
+
+"Yes," he answered, "I think you are right about that. They do talk, the
+hills and the woods and the quiet,--only a fellow grows dull, gets his
+ears full of electric gongs and push-bells, and forgets to listen."
+
+The boy looked up with quick-witted question. "Y'aint f'm this part of
+the kentry, air you?" he asked.
+
+"No. I am from--well, from Bessietown last. Where are you from?"
+
+The boy laughed and glanced gaily at his briar-torn clothes. "F'm the
+woods," he said.
+
+"My name is Bruce Steering."
+
+"Mine's Piney."
+
+They fell then to talking of many things, as they rode toward Poetical,
+but inevitably they spoke chiefly of the great State of Missouri. On the
+subject of Missouri the boy talked, as old Bernique had talked, with
+expansive naïveté. In his roamings he had ridden the State up and down,
+and had found much to love in it. "You'll like her, too, all righty," he
+told Bruce confidently, "whend you git broke to her." On one of youth's
+candid impulses to speak up for the life on the inside, the cherished
+desire, the gallant ideal, the buoyant fancy, he made a supple, sudden
+divergence in the conversation. "D'you know," he said, "they aint _no_
+place whur I'd drur be than Mizzourah ceppen only one."
+
+"Where's that?" asked Bruce, and to his immense astonishment the boy
+answered quickly:
+
+"Italy."
+
+"Why, how does that happen, Piney? Ever been there?"
+
+"Nope. Hearn Unc' Bernique tell abaout it, thass all. It 'ud suit me,
+though. I know that." His eyes grew dreamy and he seemed to be looking
+far beyond Missouri. One could almost see the fine, illusory spell of
+the far Latin land upon him, the spiritual bond, the pull of temperament
+that made the hill boy at one with Italy, blest of poetry. "I d'n know
+huccome I want to go so bad," he went on with a deep breath, "wouldn'
+turn araoun' th'ee times on my heels to go anywhur else, but I shoo do
+want to go to Italy."
+
+"Were your people Italians, Piney?"
+
+"Nope. Kim f'm S'loois. But still, I got that feelin' abaout Italy.
+Simlike I'd be--oh, sorta at home tha'. Had that same feelin' ev' since
+Unc' Bernique begand to tell me abaout Italy. I'm a-goin' tha', tew,
+some day, all righty," he concluded at last, waking up from his little
+dream slowly. "Goin' to be long over to Poetical, Mist' Steerin'?" he
+diverged again, with his lively mental agility.
+
+"No, son. From Poetical I am going on to"--Bruce stopped to gather
+strength to project the word with the large and cadenced inflection he
+had enjoyed in the hill farm people,--"going on to Canaan!"
+
+"Gre't gosh!" said the boy, and something in the way he said it made
+Bruce look at him quickly. Piney's brows were lifted and his lips were
+pulled back. He seemed to try to be as much impressed as Bruce expected
+him to be. To Steering this sort of comradeship was growing golden.
+
+"Well, now," he said, playing with the little joy of being understood,
+"haven't they the court-house at Canaan? And the railroad? And haven't
+they Miss Betsy,--or Miss--Miss----"
+
+"Sally."
+
+"Ah, yes, Sally! Know Sally, son?"
+
+"Ev'body in the Tigmores knows her."
+
+"I am beginning to want to know Sally myself." Bruce let his eyes go
+drowsing toward the pale river up which the slow rain was beating, and
+talked foolishness idly: "Red-cheeked Sally! Freckled Sally! Roly-poly
+Sally! What's a Missouri girl like anyway, Piney?"
+
+"Wy, people think she's purty," protested the boy with a quick palpitant
+shyness, "an' most people l----," he stopped trying to talk, laughing
+brusquely and flushing with a very young man's self-consciousness.
+
+"All of which goes to prove me an ass," cried Bruce, "for talking about
+a lady whom I have never seen." Looking repentantly at Piney, he felt a
+sudden ache for him. He was not very familiar with conditions in Canaan,
+but it occurred to him suddenly that even in Canaan there might be
+social gradations, and that the tramp-boy, rare little chap though he
+seemed to be, was probably miles away from the daughter of the promoter,
+Mr. Crittenton Madeira. "I retract, Piney," he added gravely.
+
+"Aw!--not as I keer whut you say abaout her,--or whut anybody says."
+Piney slashed at some brilliant sumach by the wayside and his mobile
+lips jerked and quivered.
+
+"I should have supposed that she was older--well, than you," said Bruce,
+trying to set himself right.
+
+"May be in what she knows,--aint in what she feels,--not as I keer----"
+The boy was so deliciously new to his own emotions that they flashed
+away beyond his control, minute by minute. His eyes looked misty, with
+a little spark of high light cutting bravely through. He would not
+finish his sentence. "Did Unc' Bernique say whend he's comin' back to
+Canaan?" he asked moodily.
+
+"No, he didn't, though I urged him to. That's a fine old man, Piney."
+
+Piney's eyes softened beautifully. "Takes mighty good keer of me," he
+said.
+
+"Is he kin to you?"
+
+"I d'n know abaout that. He's took my side always. Y'see, I aint got no
+people an' I just ride araoun'. Y'see,"--Piney quivered with boyish
+fire,--"I just _got_ to ride araoun'. I cayn't stay on no farm an' in no
+haouse. Kills me. I got to git to the woods an' the hills. An' Unc'
+Bernique he stands by me, an' keeps me in his shack whend they's any
+trouble abaout it. Y'see, some people think I oughter--oughter work!"
+Piney laughed from the gay, melodious depths of his vagabond heart and
+Bruce laughed with him. "An' Unc' Bernique has he'ped me abaout that,"
+explained the tramp-boy. He let his dancing eyes dart off to the west
+where the hills were shouldering into a thickening drift of grey. "Hi,
+look yonder!" he cried. "We got to cut and run to git to Poetical
+before that rain."
+
+So they cut and ran, the boy setting the pace and singing lustily, with
+that high melody of voice, as of temperament, of his, as they dashed
+down the road in the first cool scattering pelt of the rain. "Want to go
+to the _ho_tel, don't you?" he called over his shoulder, and Bruce
+called yes. It was grey, rainy twilight now, and through the gloom five
+or six houses sprawled out across the little plateau toward which the
+road twisted. Some geese flew up under the feet of the horses, squawking
+wildly, some "razor-back" hogs grunted from the dust-wallows, some
+cow-bells tinkled, some small yellow spheres of light shone through
+windows.
+
+"How far from Poetical, Piney?" shouted Steering.
+
+"'Baout a foot," answered Piney. He made his lightning-like pony go more
+slowly so that Bruce's horse might come alongside, and he shook his
+head, his ready sympathy again on his face. "Say, it's goin' to be
+kinder tough on you to stay here to-night, aint it? This is ev' spittin'
+bit there is tew Poetical. Here's the _ho_tel."
+
+They drew rein before a rickety two-story frame building and Bruce
+lifted his shoulders shudderingly. A man came out on the hotel porch,
+said "Howdy," and waited.
+
+"Say,"--Piney in a lower tone, voiced a notion that evidently drifted in
+to him on the high tide of his sympathy,--"why don't you ride over to
+Mist' Crit Madeira's? Taint so far. I'll show you the way. They cand
+take care of you over tha'. They'd be glad to have you. You cand caount
+on that. It's that-a-way in Mizzourah." The boy's conscientious
+earnestness was sweet. He was in good spirits again and he whisked one
+roughly-booted foot out of its stirrup and laid it across his
+saddle-horn, while he regarded Bruce. "You cand git ter see Miss Sally
+ef you do that," he added, pursing up his lips, a subtle sense of humour
+on his face. "You cand see what Mizzourah girls are like."
+
+"Now come, Piney, you know I've been thinking everything beautiful about
+Miss Sally since I found out--something----"
+
+"Aw! Tisn't no such thing. She jes likes to hear me sing. _You're
+crazy!_" The tramp-boy's young voice had its fashion of breaking and
+shrilling into a high soprano, like a girl's, for emphasis; he was as
+red as a beet, and he put his foot back in the stirrup, thrust out his
+under jaw and looked at the stirrup as though he had to determine how
+much wood had gone into its making. Again Bruce was conscious of a
+little ache for the boy. "But you go on over tha'," insisted Piney.
+
+"No! Thank you for trying to look out for me, son, but I shouldn't like
+to do that. Oh, I can stand this all right," cried Bruce, with a flare
+of big bravery and, turning to face the hotel, was seized by his
+loneliness so violently that he shuddered again. "Here Piney!" he cried
+on a sudden inspiration, "why won't you come in and stay with me? Huh?
+How would that suit you? We can talk and smoke."
+
+"Naw," Piney extended his hand and shook his head, as though to push the
+hotel out of the range of possibilities for him, "I couldn't. Much
+oblige'. But I cayn't sleep in haouses. Got to git back to the shack in
+the woods. Wisht you'd go on over to Madeira's."
+
+"No. I'll buck it out here alone," lamented Bruce. He hated to lose
+Piney and take up the gloomy, rainy evening alone on this little, high,
+remote place in the Missouri hills.
+
+"See you again some day, then," Piney promised in final farewell. "I'm
+up an' daown the Ridge rat frequent, I'll run 'crosst you."
+
+"Well now, I should hope so," cried Bruce cordially. "Don't you ever
+come to Canaan?"
+
+"Nope. Hate a taown! But me an' Unc' Bernique will strike you sometime,
+somewheres along the trail. S'long!"
+
+"So long, Piney, so long!"
+
+The boy turned his pony to the hills. The man on the porch came on out
+to take charge of Bruce and Bruce's horse. Black night settled down.
+Through the darkness cut the sound of the squawking geese, the tinkling
+cow-bells, the grunting hogs. Lonely, lonely Missouri! Bruce went
+inside, to sit in a little room upstairs, with his chin in his hand, his
+eyes staring through the window, his thoughts roaming after Carington,
+the office on Nassau Street, a girl who was a dainty fluff of lace and
+silk. In his ears rang the sound of Carington's voice: "Why don't you
+try Missouri,--Miss Gossamer sails,--Why don't you try Missouri,--Miss
+Gossamer sails--" a faint, recedent measure, and intermingling with it
+the sound of a boy's voice singing gaily on the misty hills:
+
+"_A tater's good 'ith 'lasses._"
+
+Steering leaned far out of the window, eager for the lad's music. It was
+so sweet.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Three_
+
+THE PROMISED LAND
+
+
+From the remotest beginning of things for the Southwest, Canaan had been
+a "gre't taown." From the beginning she had been the county seat, and
+from the beginning there had poured through her one long street, with
+its two or three short tributaries, the whole volume of business of
+Tigmore County; the strawberries, the chickens, the ginseng. Almost from
+the beginning, too, she had had the newspaper and the hotel and some
+talk about a bank. Canaanites held their heads high. So high that when
+it began to be rumoured that the railroad was showing a disposition to
+curve down toward Tigmore County, the Canaanites, unable to see past
+their noses, appointed a committee to go up to Jefferson City to protest
+to the Legislature against the proposed innovation. The committee
+contended to the Legislature that the railroad would cut off trade by
+starting up rival towns. It also contended that ox-teams had been used
+for many years and were reliable, rain or shine, whereas in wet weather
+the railroad tracks would get slick and be impracticable. Moreover, and
+moreunder, there was no danger of an ox-team blowin' up and bustin' and
+killin' somebody.
+
+The railroad was melted to acquiescence by the appeal, and went its way
+some ten miles west of Canaan. Towns sprang into being along the line of
+the serpent's coil. Canaan said all right, but wait till the spring
+rains come. The rains came, the trains went by over the slick tracks
+gracefully. Canaan said all right, but wait till something busts. Time
+passed, nothing busted. The County was careening westward. There was no
+stopping it. Canaan kept her head high, but her heart grew as cold as
+ice. Then the paper up at the new railroad station of Shaleville crudely
+referred to Canaan as "that benighted hamlet." It was too much. When
+Crittenton Madeira reached Canaan from St. Louis, the first thing that
+he proposed for the city of his adoption was the Canaan Short Line, and,
+coming at the opportune moment, the consummation of that proposition
+placed Madeira at the head of Canaan's municipal life for the rest of
+his days. In a very short time after he came to Canaan, Canaan not only
+had a railroad, but her own railroad. Reassured, bland, she caught step
+with progress, by and by saw that she was progress, and settled back
+into her old superiority. Her trade prospered anew, the cotton came to
+her depot, she got accustomed to the noise of her two trains daily, and
+had lived through many contented years when the twentieth of September
+of 1899 opened up like a rose, fair, fragrance-laden, warm, around her.
+
+Out on the face of the day there was nothing to suggest change or
+crisis, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be hopeful for, a day like
+yesterday, like to-morrow, a golden link in a golden monotony. At Court
+House Square, a few farm-teams, strapping mules and big Studebakers,
+stood at the hitching rail. A few people came and went up and down and
+across the Square. Occasionally a mean-natured man said "huh-y!" to a
+cow or "soo-y!" to a hog in the middle of Main Street. Some coatless
+clerks, with great elbow-deep sleeve protectors on their arms and large
+lumps of cravats at their throats, lounged in store doors. The most
+conspicuous, as the most institutional, feature of the landscape was the
+group idling on boxes in front of the old Grange store--just as they had
+idled on boxes before the war. They were the same men, it was the same
+store, and it was not inconceivable that they were the same boxes. As
+the men idled they spat, somewhat to the menace of the passers-by,
+though in defence of this avocation it may be argued that any truly
+agile person, by watching carefully and seizing opportunity
+unhesitatingly, could get by undefiled. Sometimes a vehicle rolled into
+the street toward the Square, and when this happened it was amusement to
+the men to say whose vehicle without looking up--jack-knives,
+watch-fobs, and other valuables occasionally changing hands on an erring
+guess between the slow, solemn trot of Mr. Azariah's Pringle's Bess and
+the duck-like waddling of Mrs. Molly Jenkins' Tom, or between the
+swinging canter of Miss Sally Madeira's Kentucky blacks and the running
+walk of the small-hoofed Texas ponies from We-all Prairie. Once a great
+waggon, piled high with cotton, creaked by; once a burnt-skinned boy,
+hard as a nut, shrieking with an irrepressible sense of being alive,
+loped past on a mustang. Once a small, old man, in mean clothes and with
+a fine bearing, crossed the Square, cracking his whip nervously, his
+spur clicking on his boot as he walked. Once a large florid man and a
+tall girl came down the street and entered the door of a two-story brick
+building next the Grange. The man had an expansive, blustering way. The
+girl looked as though she were accustomed to admire the man and to
+badger him; her face was turned up to his adoringly, while her
+fun-hunting eyes, just sheathed under her lids, gleamed gaily. The
+building had a plate-glass window across the front of it, and on the
+window, in gold letters bordered in black, two legends were flung to the
+public:
+
+
+                          BANK OF CANAAN
+
+                        CRITTENTON MADEIRA
+
+
+When the man and the girl had gone into the Bank of Canaan, the group at
+the Grange stopped gambling on the incoming teams and talked less
+drowsily.
+
+"Looks like that girl gets purdier and purdier."
+
+"Mighty pleasant ways she keeps. Never gone back on her raisin'. Never
+got too good for Mizzourah."
+
+"As far as I go, I like her ways better'n her pappy's ways."
+
+"Crit _is_ a little toploftical."
+
+"They mighty fond of each other, though. Seems like she's not in a hurry
+to marry and leave her pappy."
+
+"Wall naow, I shouldn't be s'prised ef Miss Sally never did git married,
+talkin' abaout marryin'. 'Twould not s'prise me a-tall, 'twouldn't." Mr.
+Quin Beasley was talking. Mr. Beasley was the keeper of the Grange store
+and admittedly a man of fine conversational powers. His jaws worked on
+and he seemed able to get nutriment out of his ruminations long after a
+cow would have gone back to grass hungrily. "Aint sayin' I never am
+s'prised, becuz am, but do say that that wouldn't s'prise me, an' no
+more would it." Mr. Beasley brought his jaws in from their loose
+meanderings just as the clatter of a horse's hoofs became audible down
+the side street that, a little way along, became the road to Poetical.
+
+"Name the comer, Beasley. Up to the sugar-tree about now. Name-er,
+name-er!" The challenger took from his pocket a huge horn knife, covered
+it with his hand and shook it in the face of Mr. Beasley, who
+responsively got his hand into his pocket and drew forth a knife, which
+he held covered after the manner of his opponent.
+
+"Unsight, unseen," said Mr. Beasley. "It's Price Mason's pony."
+
+The challenger chuckled deprecatingly over the carelessness of judgment
+evinced: "Price Mason's pony comes down with a hippety-hop," he remarked
+pityingly--"lemme listen--it's--no, taint, aint favorin' his right front
+foot--it's--wy!" the challenger suddenly twisted his head to one side
+and held it there like a lean-crawed chicken deciding where to peck.
+Simultaneously the other men glanced down the side street where it came
+into the Square, and when someone said, or whistled, "Wy, who the
+h-e-double-l _is_ it?" everybody was waiting for an answer.
+
+They had not long to wait. The horseman in question galloped straight
+toward the group and drew rein in front of them only a few minutes
+later. He was a big fellow, broad and lithe of shoulder and chest, and
+young and alert of face.
+
+"Gentlemen," he called from his horse's back, "I want to find Mr.
+Crittenton Madeira. Ah!" he laughed, a deep, rich note, as he saw the
+gold and black sign, "gentlemen, I have found Mr. Madeira!" He leaped
+from his horse and began to tether him to a staple, set in the pavement
+in front of the Grange.
+
+"Yes," replied a member of the Grange group, all of whom rose sociably,
+"Crit and Miss Sally,"--the young man laughed again, softly, as though
+he could not help it,--"Crit and Miss Sally jes went into the bank; I
+don't reckin they've come out again."
+
+"Miss Sally's come out again," interposed another Granger, "because I
+seen her."
+
+"It's the father that I want to see," said the horseman, with smiling
+emphasis, "not the daughter, not Miss Sally." He passed through the bank
+door, still smiling, and the Grange group looked at each other, rife
+with speculation on the instant.
+
+"Hadn't-a said not, I'd-a said it wuz Miss Sally he wanted to see.
+Looks to me like he might be one of her beaux. Wears sumpin the same
+clothes."
+
+"Looked like a Yank to me."
+
+"Uh-huh, betchew he lets his biscuits cool before he butters 'em."
+
+"Haven't heard Crit say he was looking for a stranger."
+
+"Reckon if you keep up with Crit's business, my friend, you'll have to
+walk faster."
+
+While the Grangers were wondering, supposing, reckoning, the man who
+probably let his biscuits cool before he buttered them entered the Bank
+of Canaan.
+
+When the cage for the clerical force had been put into the Bank of
+Canaan, there was not a great deal of the bank left, so the man stopped
+where he thought he was least apt to be scraped, in the little space in
+front of the Force's window. The Force put his pen behind his ear, and,
+without waiting for inquiry or request, called off to the rear of the
+room.
+
+"Mist' Madeira! He's here! Can he come on in? If you'll go right down
+there"--went on the Force,--"to that door in front of you, you can go
+through it."
+
+The thing seemed feasible, as the door was half open, so the visitor
+attempted it. As he reached the door, however, his way was temporarily
+blocked by a big red-faced man who held out both hands to him and took
+possession of him with violent cordiality.
+
+"God bless my soul! Howdy, howdy, howdy!" cried the big man. "Been
+looking for you for a week. Only last night I told Sally that I wasn't
+going to look for you any longer. Just eternally gave you up. How in the
+Sam Hill have you taken so long to get here? Come on in and have a
+seat."
+
+As he talked, the Missourian led his guest inside a small private
+office, handed him to a chair and stood up before him, big, colossal,
+dominating the younger man, or at least meaning to.
+
+"I am very rapidly concluding that you are Mr. Madeira, and that you
+know that I am Steering," smiled the visitor, sinking into a chair
+adaptably, though he realised that, for two men who had never seen each
+other before, the meeting had been unusual. He also realised that, off
+somewhere in the sphere of imponderable influences, the effect when his
+hand clasped the big man's hand had been exactly that of the clashing of
+two swords.
+
+"Oh, God love you, there's no black magic about my knowing you for
+Steering--only stranger that's been expected in Canaan for six weeks!"
+cried Madeira, "and as for your guessing that I'm Madeira, you don't
+deserve a bit of credit for it. My sign's out." His manner conveyed that
+his sign was quite as much his personality as the black and gold letters
+on the window. "Yes, I'm Madeira, and you are Steering, and we both
+might as well own up to it. And now what's kept you so long on the road?
+How'd you manage to put in a whole week between here and Springfield?"
+Madeira seated himself in a swivel chair in front of his desk and eyed
+his visitor with that aggressive geniality, that tremendous sense of
+himself, warm and vivid in his face and manner. And, as in the moment
+when he had faced Missouri from the top of the Tigmore Hills, Steering
+had a feeling that he was being claimed, absorbed.
+
+"Why, the explanation is of the simplest. At the very last minute,
+there at Springfield, too late to get a word of advice out to you, I
+fell in with some fellows who were going to ride across country toward
+the Canaan Tigmores, and I joined them. They gave out at Bessietown, but
+I've come every foot of the way over the Ridge on horseback, and alone
+at that. I wanted to see Missouri, get acquainted with the home of my
+ancestors, at close range, as it were."
+
+Madeira chuckled. "God bless you, you certainly went in at the back door
+to do it," he said. Madeira's God-bless-you's and God-love-you's were
+valuable crutches to his conversation. With them and his bluster he
+seemed able to cover a great deal of ground.
+
+"And then I didn't hurry," went on Steering, "because I thought, from
+what you wrote me, that it would, without doubt, be some weeks before
+that amiable relative of mine could be dragged around to any real
+attention to our projects."
+
+"Ah, but that's where you missed out!" cried Madeira, a great ring of
+triumph in his voice. He crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, and
+pushed out his chest. "That's where you didn't know C. Madeira. Young
+man, I've been hammering at Bruce Grierson night and day ever since I
+got you interested in this scheme,"--Steering looked at Madeira with a
+little quick motion of inquiry, but Madeira's arrangement of subject and
+object was evidently advised; Madeira showed that it was by repeating,
+"ever since _I_ got _you_ interested, I've been trying to get Grierson
+interested. We couldn't move hand or foot without him, you know that.
+The land is his, you know, even though you are the heir apparent, and
+there was no use trying to do anything with the land without him. I had
+got you into it without much trouble,"--Madeira paused just long enough
+to take the cigar that Steering offered him. (Steering could always see
+better through smoke.) "Yes, I had got you!" cried Madeira, biting off
+the end of the cigar with a sharp snap of his teeth, "and having got
+you, the next thing was to get Grierson. Well, I got him, got him since
+you left New York." He chuckled his spill-over chuckle again, swung
+around to his desk and took from one of its pigeon-holes an envelope
+addressed to him in a deep-gouging hand. The expression of geniality
+lingered about the wings of his nose and the corners of his mouth, as
+though it had been moulded there by long habit, but his eyes narrowed
+and the play of light from them was by now like the whisk of a sharp
+knife through the air. "You know I chased that old fellow all over
+Colorado with my letters about my scheme to open up the Tigmores, until
+I got him mad," he said, holding the letter up to say it, as though the
+contents would be illumined by his saying it. Then he handed it to
+Steering, who took it from its cover, flapped it open, and read:
+
+
+     "DEAR CRIT:
+
+     "Use this power of attorney to open up hell if you want to, but
+     don't you write to me.
+
+                    "Your obedient servant,
+
+                                     "B. GRIERSON."
+
+
+It was the sort of letter to make a man laugh, and Steering laughed.
+Then the phrase "open up hell" caught his eye again, like a sign of
+sinister warning.
+
+"I've never been able to understand," he began with a questioning
+inflection in his voice, "what's the trouble with the scion of the house
+of Grierson. Why is he so indifferent to a project for the development
+of his property that may mean a million to him?"
+
+"Aw, you know he's cracked!" replied Madeira quickly and harshly.
+
+"No, I don't know him at all, you will remember. Never saw him, never
+had a line from him."
+
+"Well, he's cracked. He fooled around here in the Tigmores for twenty
+years hunting silver, God bless you! Spent everything he had riding that
+hobby, then got another hunch, for zinc this time, borrowed money, sank
+it, borrowed more, sank that, then got a feeling that he was abused and
+went away from here declaring that the Canaan Tigmores could slide into
+the Di before he would ever raise a finger to stop them. That's why he
+wouldn't write you. I've handled his affairs--what's left of them--for
+years, and I've had enough trouble handling them, let me tell you." He
+took the letter from Steering and replaced it in the pigeon-hole. "But
+I've got him settled now," he said, "and we can go right on--oh! for the
+matter of going on, things are pretty far on already." He began
+rummaging through his desk in other pigeon-holes. "I'll just show you
+what I've drawn up."
+
+Steering found himself unable to keep up with Madeira. He took his cigar
+from his mouth, conscious of a sensation that he was being jerked along
+by the hair. He tried to get the best of the sensation by leaning back
+comfortably in his chair and observing Madeira leisurely. He tried to
+feel that he was following Madeira voluntarily, that he didn't have to
+if he didn't want to. When he had quitted New York he had been sustained
+by an idea that he had, in his correspondence, put before Madeira a plan
+that had some merit and promise in it, in the way that it got around the
+terms of a will, under which he was heir apparent to a vast acreage of
+land whose title now rested in another man, his relative. He and
+Carington had worked the thing over conscientiously, and, there in New
+York, they had taken some pride in the thought that they had hacked out
+a good base for the operations of a potential Steering-Grierson Mining
+and Development Company. Here, in Missouri, in Madeira's office, before
+the on-roll of Madeira's manner, Steering was no longer sure that he
+and Carington had had anything to do with the case.
+
+"Here's my prospectus," Madeira was saying, his voice ringing
+triumphantly again, "and here are the articles. God bless you, we are
+right up to the point where we can effect the organisation and issue the
+first one hundred thousand shares of stock. There are some Tigmore
+County men that I want you to meet, some fellows who can be used to fill
+out the directorate, and, first thing you know, we'll be filing an
+application for a charter, my boy."
+
+"Just so," said Steering absently. He had the papers in his hand, and
+was running them over. Both men were pulling at their cigars with strong
+puffs, and the room was so vaporous with smoke that Steering was
+beginning to see very clearly indeed, as he went through the papers.
+They were couched in good, clear English, the succinct English that
+Carington used, with admirable changes here and there, which brought out
+Carington's points still more clearly. "I am familiar with these," said
+Steering, looking up presently. "You seem to have let it stand about as
+we drafted it in the New York office. What changes you have made I
+like."
+
+"Oh, God bless you! you can rely upon liking the things of this kind
+that I do." Madeira's assumption was comprehensive and bland. There was
+absolutely no sense in going against that manner of his at this stage of
+developments. Steering began to ask questions and to wait.
+
+"Now, according to what we set forth here,"--Steering tapped the
+paper,--"the object and purpose of our corporation will be the mining of
+zinc and lead ore in the Canaan Tigmores. We are projecting upon the
+hypothesis that there is ore in the Tigmores, but we can't go too far
+upon hypothesis. There in New York it seemed worth while to take up the
+idea that, as there was ore all around through southwestern Missouri,
+there might be ore in the Canaan Tigmores. Then, being equipped for
+theorising only, Carington and I passed easily into the consideration of
+the possibilities _if_ there were ore in the Canaan Tigmores. You say
+that we are ready to organise, but it looks to me just now as though
+before we organise it might be in order to solidify hypothesis into
+fact. I don't think organisation is the next step at all; the next
+step, according to my notion, is to get off paper into the ground.
+Question now is, _is_ there any ore in the Canaan Tigmores?"
+
+"Question now is," interrupted Madeira baldly, "are there enough fools
+in the United States to donate us a fortune while we are finding out
+whether there is or isn't ore in the Canaan Tigmores? Oh, God bless you,
+my boy, you must bear in mind that gold isn't the only thing that can be
+minted! You can mint a man's thirst for gold, if you are up to it. The
+Southwest is zinc crazy right now. The time is as ripe as a nut----"
+
+"Well, one minute--what's your private opinion about the chance for ore
+in the Canaan Tigmores, Mr. Madeira?"
+
+"I d'n know a thing about it. And God bless you, I don't care a thing
+about it. I know that old Bruce Grierson butted his brains out on the
+Tigmore rocks, on the jack-trail, for twenty years, and I know, that all
+over the country,--not here in Tigmore County, but farther
+southwest,--men are drilling into rock that looks rich, and cuts blind,
+quick enough to ruin them; and I know that we are not going into this
+thing to lose money, but to make it, coming and going; I know that we've
+got to stand to win, coming and going. That's business."
+
+Face to face with this sort of frank self-commitment to "business,"
+Steering was impressed into silence, and Madeira took advantage of the
+silence to push on in the big way he had that was like the
+broad-paddling, tooting vehemence of a river steamer. "I'm for getting a
+drill into the hills right away, just as much as ever you can be, my
+boy, understand. It will look better. We'll do it. But Lord love you, we
+won't hold back the organisation for that. Just leave these things to
+me. I've got a programme arranged here that will suit you, I think.
+First thing is to take you around and let you see that document in the
+recorder's office,--I believe you said you wanted to read the Bruce
+Peele will,--then you can come out and have dinner with Sally and me.
+I've got a nice place three miles out, and I've got a daughter that is
+not to be beat, in New York or out of it. Then this evening we'll get
+together some of the fellows that I handle around here, and take up some
+of the preliminary business."
+
+Madeira had risen, preparatory to conducting Steering to the recorder's
+office in accord with the first number of his programme, and Steering
+got up, too. While Madeira shut up his desk, Steering threw away the
+stump of his cigar and brought his flexed arms back to his shoulders
+with an expansive pull on his chest that sent a big influx of air into
+his lungs. After his séance with Madeira he felt as though he had been
+pummelled down flat. Madeira had to open his desk again for something he
+had forgotten and Steering passed on to the door, impatient for some
+outside air. As he opened the door, with his eyes rather thoughtfully
+fixed upon the floor, he saw, peeping around the curve where the Force's
+cage elbowed its way out into the room, a foot. Being a slender foot, in
+a well-fitting walking boot, it held him an unconscionably long time,
+then drew him on mandatorily, up the little space between the Force's
+cage and the wall, until he had rounded the curve and had come out by
+the Force's window, where a bare-headed girl leaned, talking merrily,
+gouging a hat-pin into the hat that she had taken off.
+
+"Oh, it's Mr. Steering,--isn't it?" she asked at once, and put her hand
+out to him. "I heard Father say that he was expecting you. And then,
+too, a friend of yours, who seemed much concerned about your fate over
+at Poetical, rode to our house last night and made me promise to welcome
+you to Canaan. I am Sally Madeira."
+
+"Hi, Pet, you there?" Madeira's big voice came through the door of the
+private office and took possession of the minute and the
+girl--"entertain the New Yorker until I get through here, will you? I
+got to monkey with this blasted lock again."
+
+"Yes, Father, I'm entertaining him," Madeira's daughter called back,
+while Bruce held helplessly to the hand she had given him. A peculiar
+mistiness had come over his senses. He could have sworn that through it
+he saw a picture that had been with him a good deal during the past year
+of his life, a picture of a woman's flower face, her fluffiness,--as of
+silk and lace,--lose colour, outline, significance, like a daguerreotype
+in the sunlight. A swift joy that he was in Canaan possessed him. All he
+could say was, "So you are Miss Sally?" It sounded very dull, so dull
+that he hastened to add, "So you know Piney?--Awfully kind of Piney to
+attract your attention to me." Remembering with horror some of his
+conversation with Piney about Miss Madeira, he repeated solemnly,
+"Awfully kind."
+
+"Well, I think you can give the little vagabond credit for a kind
+heart." Miss Madeira laughed softly.
+
+"I give him credit for much more than that," said Bruce. He was envying
+Piney, seeing that the tramp-boy's intuitive appreciations matched his
+vigorous young beauty, that he was far more poet than vagabond, that he,
+Bruce, had attempted to play clownishly upon what was a worthy and
+lovely idyl in the boy's heart. As though she, too, had some faint,
+perturbing consciousness of Piney, the girl flushed a little, laughed a
+little, and turned the subject readily.
+
+"I know yet another friend of yours," said she.
+
+"I am glad of that." Bruce had released her hand, forgotten the business
+that had brought him to Missouri, forgotten Crittenton Madeira, and
+stood with his arms folded, looking down upon her, glad that she was so
+tall, glad that he was taller, glad about everything.
+
+"Yes, another friend," she nodded with fleeting meaning, "I was at
+Vassar with Elsie Gossamer."
+
+Face to face with a woman like Sally Madeira the thought of a woman like
+Miss Gossamer must necessarily stay hazy in a man's brain. As with
+another Romeo, Rosaline had but laid the velvet up which came the surer
+feet of Juliet. "Well," said Steering happily, "all this is going to
+make us acquainted, isn't it?"
+
+"It may, if you like." She had a splendid comradeship of manner. Her
+father's energy stopped short of bluster in her. Borne up on her breezy
+westernism was a fragrant reserve, a fine reticence that disengaged a
+tantalising promise.
+
+"Oh, I'll like!" cried Bruce with conviction. "Do you live in Canaan?"
+
+"Out at Madeira Place. Father said you were to come out to dine with us
+to-day. I hope you will."
+
+"He will, he will! Trust me for that!" Madeira came through the space
+between the wall and the Force's cage noisily. For the first time that
+morning Steering felt no repugnance to that disposition of Madeira's to
+take charge of him, and he went off with Madeira, a moment later, across
+Court House Square to the recorder's office, with tread elastic and eyes
+sparkling.
+
+When the two men had left her, the girl moved over to the plate-glass
+window and watched Steering, a little smile on her lips, an adequate
+enjoyment of his undoing dancing mercilessly in her long amber-hued
+eyes.
+
+Steering stopped behind Madeira at the door of the recorder's office
+and, looking back at the plate-glass window unexpectedly, saw the girl's
+eyes fixed demurely on the floor where her boot showed under the hem of
+her long straight gown. It was a very little moment that they stood
+thus, he with his eyes on her, she with her eyes on her boot, but it was
+an electric moment. With him it was a cycle of self-abuse for the
+unadvised rot that he had talked to Piney, an era of gratitude to Piney
+for being the sort who would not report any of it to Miss Madeira. (Even
+so little did Steering understand that a boy like Piney would
+necessarily have to tell a woman like Miss Madeira about all that he
+knew; tell it exuberantly, bubblingly, without ever being quite
+conscious that he was telling anything.) Steering followed Madeira
+inside the recorder's office slowly, and the girl went on standing at
+the plate-glass window, studying her foot.
+
+"Yes, indeed, sir," she began calling to him soundlessly, and broke off
+abruptly and stood there at the window for a time, motionless and
+thoughtful. She was a tall girl, of a broad-shouldered, athletic type, a
+college girl by the sign of the austere cut of her gown, but a western
+girl by the sign of the flying ends of the scarf about her throat, the
+unafraid looseness of her bright hair. Her face, lit by her amber eyes
+and crowned by those loose masses of hair, had a rare, dusky-gold
+beauty. Despite her hair she was dark-skinned, smooth and warm like
+bisque, and that same gold-dusted radiance that was in her hair and that
+same amber-gold light that was in her eyes glowed ineffably from beneath
+her skin. She was a pulse of light, colourful and vibrant. "Yes, indeed,
+sir," she resumed after a while, jabbing the hat-pin into the hat
+relentlessly, "_this_ is what a Missouri girl is like!"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Four_
+
+FOR THE BENEFIT OF CARINGTON
+
+
+My dear Carry:
+
+I should have written you sooner, save that the developments here have
+given me so little that is pleasant to write about. My experience with
+Grierson's agent has been too exasperating for description, and I should
+have given up and have got out at once had it not been for the Missouri
+in me, and had I not got a feeling of encouragement from other
+experiences.
+
+To begin with: When I reached Missouri, I lit out for the southwestern
+part of the State by train. At Springfield I fell in with some English
+fellows who are over at Joplin in the interests of a Welsh company. They
+had an expedition all planned to take in some of the Southwest by team
+on their way back to Joplin, and as they were going to push down pretty
+close to my objective point, I joined the expedition. There was a great
+deal of enthusiasm among us about zinc,--jack they call it down
+here,--and the talk at first was all of the stupidity of Missourians in
+not getting at this part of their State, as well as the section about
+Joplin, in the search for ore. I noticed that as we got into the
+rough-going of the ridge roads, and the hills got steeper and the woods
+denser and the rocks thicker, the opinion seemed to grow upon us that
+Missourians might understand their country better than we did. We had a
+driver who knew the roads well, when he could find them. We had a
+geological expert who got sadder and sadder every time we spilled out of
+the waggons and speared around in the rocks for a little while. And we
+had a great deal of bacon. Still, when we reached Bessietown, where we
+struck the steam-cars, the Joplin crowd broke for the train on a run.
+From Bessie there was a straight trail over the Ridge to Canaan and I
+decided to make the trip on horseback. I had got stubborn.
+
+Well, by and by, and more and more full of bacon, I was at Canaan, and
+had found Crittenton Madeira, that agent with whom we had the
+correspondence. I walked in upon Madeira with a pretty little notion
+that you and I had had something to do with the projection of a plan
+for developing and mining the Tigmores; I could have sworn that we
+originated the idea of hypothecating my heirship to the Canaan Tigmores;
+I remembered that in New York the fact that I would inherit from
+Grierson seemed to make my association with any enterprise for the
+development of the Tigmores of vital importance. I had not forgotten
+that that was our argument, and I was nursing a feeling that I was
+fairly necessary to any permanency of operations in the Tigmores. I am
+all straightened out on that score now, thanks to Madeira. The situation
+that I find here is this: Madeira has calmly taken over our ideas, and
+his plans of organisation are about complete. He is qualified to act for
+Grierson absolutely. The company that he will organise is to be known as
+The Canaan Mining and Development Company. He appreciates stingily that
+it may be some advantage to have me associated with the company, for the
+purpose of imparting a feeling of confidence to investors, but he does
+not begin to attach the importance to me that you and I did. He will let
+me in if I want to come in, but it is quite evident that he can get
+along without me, and yet more evident that if he takes me in, I must
+resign myself to his dictation,--dictating is his strong suit. To the
+gentleman who expected to be the president of the Steering-Grierson
+Company, that is not a pleasant programme; yet, my dear Carington, my
+circumstances are so precarious that I might attempt to fill it, if I
+did not see through Madeira's lack of principle, negatively
+speaking,--rascality, positively speaking. Now, I may have winked one
+eye occasionally during my business career, but I have never yet been
+able to shut both at once. It may be taste and it may be morals.
+Heretofore I have taken business too casually really to know how I am
+equipped for it. I have never before really met myself, spoken to
+myself, as I hustled through the few commercial hours of each day of my
+life. But out here business has become a thing of wider import on the
+instant, and already I am face to face with something stiff and hard on
+the inside of me that promises not to be very malleable under Madeira's
+hands. Madeira's hands, my dear boy, are pot-black. The plan that with
+us was a fair and square enterprise has become with him a clap-trap
+scheme to rob investors. I don't know how he means to do it, but he will
+do it. There is a chance that the company may get good money out of the
+Canaan Tigmores in zinc, but there is a much richer chance that Madeira
+will get good money out of the company, zinc or no zinc.
+
+So here I am in a pleasant situation. I can take my choice between a
+block of shares in the new company, my vote to be in Madeira's control,
+and a place far back, where I can watch Madeira operate my land to his
+profit while I wait for old Grierson to die. I am holding off as yet,
+dazzled by both prospects. Meantime the organisation of Madeira's
+company is being effected among the local capitalists, the store-keepers
+and the substantial farmers, and it's only a question of a few days
+until the directorate shuts in my face. Madeira is to take me over to
+Joplin to-morrow,--to let the showing there have its effect upon me, to
+let me catch the ore fever, I suspect.
+
+Immediately upon my arrival here, I looked into the history of my
+relationship to Grierson, and also looked up the record of the Peele
+will. Grierson is the grandson of one of the sisters of old Bruce
+Peele, while I am the great-great-grandson of another sister. My
+great-grandfather did not like pioneer life and went back East to live
+and cultivate the Steering family-tree into me, as the last, topmast,
+splendid blossom. The Grierson family stayed in Missouri and petered out
+into this Bruce Grierson. He is of my grandfather's generation, though
+he is a much younger man than a grandfather of mine could possibly be
+with the record of my age and my father's age to be accounted for.
+
+[Illustration: Two branches of the family tree.]
+
+I got profoundly excited in studying out the two branches of the family
+that are involved in the entail. Here is a map of the relationship for
+your benefit.
+
+You can understand from that, can't you, Carington?[1]
+
+The Peele will is simple. Old Bruce Peele lived a long life as a
+bachelor, with a strong aversion to matrimony. Toward the end he
+suffered one of those revolutions in valuations that sometimes upturn
+people of extreme prejudices. His will sets forth emphatically that he
+came tardily to realise that posterity is the best thing a man can leave
+behind him. He had two sisters, both of whom were well along in life,
+unmarried, and possessed of their brother's disinclination to marry. To
+encourage them to cross the Rubicon he made the will that entailed the
+Canaan Tigmores to the heirs, first of one and then the other, under the
+following provisions: the land was to go to the male heirs of his sister
+Nancy Peele, from oldest son to oldest son so long as there were male
+heirs, provided that in each generation the oldest male representative
+of Nancy married before he reached the age of thirty-five. If, in any
+generation, Nancy's representative fails to marry at thirty-five, the
+Canaan Tigmores pass to the male representative of Kate Peele, upon the
+death of the man who failed. Nancy Peele married a Grierson, and so
+pronounced was the inherited aversion to matrimony in the house of
+Grierson that compliance with the terms of the will has lasted through
+two generations only. The present Bruce Grierson let the time-limit
+overtake and pass him twenty years ago, but, unmarried and grouchy, he
+has stood between me and the Canaan Tigmores ever since. I don't count
+until he dies, and not then unless I am married before I am thirty-five.
+(However, I feel that I might be more disposed to meet the will's
+requirements than the Griersons have been.)
+
+The present Grierson is utterly unapproachable. He has not lived in this
+section for many years. He is particularly unapproachable on the subject
+of the Canaan Tigmores because he spent a great part of his youth
+prospecting through these hills, hoping and being disappointed. At last
+he turned his back upon Canaan, bitterly disillusioned, and he has been
+a wanderer upon the face of the earth ever since, sometimes hunting gold
+in the Rockies, sometimes after silver in Mexico. Half the time even
+Madeira does not know where he is.
+
+The queerest thing about the mining business, Carington, is the
+"hunches." The Englishmen told me that down at Joplin a man would rather
+have a dream that he walks two miles sou'-sou-west, turns around three
+times on his heels and finds ore under his left heel, than to have a
+geologist assure him that his house sits on a ledge of Cherokee
+limestone that ought to be all right for zinc. I have met great numbers
+of miners who are hunchers. The most interesting is a man named
+Bernique, an old chap of education and refinement from St. Louis. He has
+a hunch about the Canaan Tigmores--at least so far in my intercourse
+with him I have not found anything more tangible than a hunch. I fell in
+with him just before I reached Canaan, and though he then declared his
+intention of being absent for some days, he did not go away, sought me
+out in Canaan next day and has spent a good deal of time with me ever
+since. He is a splendid old character. Missouri is chuck full of
+character, for the matter of that. Besides old Bernique, I have made
+another friend, named Piney. Isn't that a pretty nice name? He is a sort
+of gipsy lad who roams the woods in company with old Bernique. I have
+seen him nearly every day since I have been here, because old Bernique
+and I ride about the Tigmores, and Piney is sure to fall in with us
+somewhere along the road. I have also met some others.
+
+You can have no conception, Carry, of the strength of pull that Missouri
+can exert over a fellow. You stand up on a hill and look at her, and
+something, your dead forefathers maybe, comes up to you in waves of
+influence. "Come back to your own!" says the Something, "I am waiting
+for you! By me conquer!" The longer I stay in Missouri, the longer I
+mean to stay. I have accepted the challenge of this great unconquered,
+waiting land. It is my own country.
+
+Sorry to have kept you so long over all this, but I thought that you
+ought to know. Shall write you the out-look after the Joplin trip. I
+have a notion that things will be adjusted toward the future after that.
+
+  Give my love to the fellows.
+              Yours,              B. S.
+
+P. S. Please express me one of those fold-up, carry-around-with-you
+bath-tubs.
+
+
+When Carington, in the office down on Nassau Street, had read that, all
+of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its
+blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "Had I not got a feeling of
+encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was
+still afflicted with a sense of something lacking.
+
+"Now where the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried Carington
+fretfully. "Psha! he has not put that in at all!"
+
+As a matter of entity and quiddity, it is well-nigh impossible to put
+into a letter the little quivering lift of spirit that may come to a man
+just because a girl's hair is lustrous, her eyes winey, her voice
+delicious, her smile one of gay fellowship.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] Carington could not.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Five_
+
+BOOM TIME IN THE TOWN THAT JACK BUILT
+
+
+"Here we are! This is the town that jack built, this is the town the
+poet wrote about!" Madeira was leaning forward from the rear seat of a
+high road-cart to talk to Steering, who sat on the front seat beside the
+driver. Madeira had the back seat by himself, but, leaning forward, with
+both arms spraddled out behind Steering and the driver, he seemed now
+and then to take possession of the front seat, too.
+
+"Yes!" cried the driver, who, fearless, confident, glowing, was managing
+her spirited horses skilfully, "at Joplin's gates, you must chant the
+classic, 'Hey this, what's this?'"
+
+"And up from the city rolls the triumphant answer, 'This is the town
+that jack built!'" declaimed Steering, glancing down into the driver's
+face with accordant appreciation. He felt accordant and he felt
+appreciative. He had enjoyed the little railway journey from Canaan in
+company with the Madeiras. He had enjoyed the night before, which he had
+spent at the house of a Joplin friend of the Madeiras. He was enjoying
+the ride now. The friend of the Madeiras had put good horses at
+Madeira's disposal and Miss Sally Madeira could get speed out of good
+horses as easily as other women get a purr out of a kitten. Even
+Madeira, just behind him, crowding forward upon him, did not very much
+bother Steering. It was all enjoyable.
+
+They were on a long wide street that presented violently contrasted
+activities, hard to encompass with one pair of eyes. For blocks the
+buildings lined off on either side, low, flimsy and hastily
+constructed--mining-camp architecture, that gave way at abrupt intervals
+to tall and sightly brick-and-stone structures, built for the future
+metropolis rather than for the present camp. A section of an electric
+railway that was thirty-two miles long ran through the street, and the
+handsomely equipped cars on it clipped past mud-encrusted mule teams
+from distant hill farms, prairie schooners, and dilapidated carryalls.
+The scene was tremendously, occidentally irregular, setting forth that
+merciless clutch of the future upon the past that makes the present mere
+transition. The town was hard pushed to catch up with its own vast
+possibilities. A small place, set suddenly forward as one of the world's
+great ore markets, it could not even house the mining business that had
+poured in upon it, and that made of its main thoroughfare a tossing,
+turbulent stream of people. Almost every building that Steering saw was
+crowded to the doors with mining brokers' desks, mining brokers' desks
+spilled out on the side-walk, desks could be seen at the doors of the
+retail stores and desks kept banking-house doors from shutting. The
+windows of the newspaper offices and of the mineral companies were
+crowded with displays of ore. The hub-bub about these places was fierce,
+unbearable. Young men, with their handkerchiefs in their collars,
+hurried from one office to another, warm with excitement, flapping great
+bunches of letters and memoranda in their hands as they hurried.
+Messenger boys ran up and down the streets with telegrams. Buyers from
+the Kansas smelters, smelters in Illinois, smelters up about St. Louis,
+smelters in Indiana, smelters in Wales, nosed around like ferrets. Fine
+young men, who were supposed to look after the interests of the big
+foreign companies, sauntered out of bar-rooms, doing violence to the
+supposition. Map-sellers whacked their hands with folders. Wooden booths
+flung signs to the streets bigger than the booths themselves: "Mineral
+Companies Promoted," "Mining and Smelting," "Mines, Options,
+Leases,"--there was no end to the variations of the eternal theme of
+mining. Town lots, switches of flats, and hill ridges were being swapped
+and sold and leased from the curb-stone; leases were being made from
+buggies and options were being granted from a horse's back.
+
+"Whewee!" marvelled Steering, with a little itch of fear for the ore-mad
+people, "legal forms are being put to fearful strains, are they not,
+with all this heedless buying and selling?"
+
+Madeira laughed loudly, "God bless you, legal forms! All that a man who
+wants to sell has to do is to throw a plank, any little rotten plank,
+across the chasm of future litigation and ten buyers will walk it with
+nerves of steel." He patted Steering's shoulder. "My boy, it's this
+headlong impetus that assures the success of the Canaan Company. If I
+get that thing started once, all I have to do is to advertise it down
+here a week. The stock will go like hot-cakes. People don't care what
+they buy, just so they buy. They've got no sense of value left. Why, a
+man found an outcrop of a zinc lode under his chicken-coop
+yesterday--and to-day the price of chicken-coops has gone up." Madeira
+patted Steering's shoulder again and laughed again, pleased at his
+aptness in figuring the thing out.
+
+"He's just exactly right," said the girl, nodding at Steering. "Over
+here the average man needs a guardian to keep him out of the clutches of
+the 'boodlers.' I almost hate to see this sort of excitement come into
+Canaan. Father has been pretty busy all his life looking after infant
+men, but from now on his plight is going to be pitiable. I saw that
+yesterday afternoon, Dad, when the farmers were filing into the bank to
+put their money into your hands." The girl, turning back to smile at
+Madeira, was the cause of Steering's turning back, too, and he was
+surprised to see a patriarchal, benign expression on Madeira's face, as
+though a reflection of the girl's illusions about his character lay
+warm upon him.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind my job as nurse for the Canaanites, Pet," said Madeira
+softly, and then waved one hand out toward the city and changed the
+subject. "Pretty good for a lazy semi-southern State, eh, Steering?" He
+nudged the girl next and added: "Before we are through with him we'll
+have convinced the New Yorker that a good deal happens outside New York.
+Won't we, Pet?"
+
+"Yes, sirree," said the girl, imitating her father's manner adroitly, as
+she put her horses through the crowded thoroughfare, "the United States
+of America has more than one way of living the life strenuous, and
+Broadway, New York, doesn't begin to be the only place where she lives
+it. Look abroad, look abroad!" She was altogether fascinating as she
+pointed out to Steering little typical features that he would have
+missed without her humourous, boastful sallies.
+
+As they continued on their way, Madeira and the girl bowed and smiled to
+acquaintances, and once the horses were stopped at the curb to enable
+Madeira to talk to some man whom he knew well. While waiting, with the
+road-cart drawn up close to the curb, Steering and the girl could hear
+talk all about them,--zinc and lead, jack, jack, jack! Flying chips of
+conversation assailed their ears as the people scurried by; references
+to old companies and their latest projects, and to new companies and new
+finds; talk about the menace of the runs pinching out, and talk about
+the danger of over-stocking the world's zinc markets; grumbling talk
+about the wildcat exploitation going on at every corner, and envious
+talk about a report that some wildcat promoter had just succeeded in
+selling a face of ore that had cut blind under the drill of the buyer in
+a few lamentable days; condemnatory talk about what an extremely
+gold-brick country this was, and awed talk about the remarkable prices
+that some of the gold bricks fetched. All the talk was frankly of
+millions. The scale was gigantic. Even poor men seemed to have acquired
+a familiarity with the sound of great sums that made them take
+themselves as somehow richer and bigger. Voices shook with eagerness and
+avidity; hands worked constantly at button-holes, or at lapels, or with
+watch-guards. When acquaintances passed on the street they did not say
+"how-do-you-do"; they looked at each other's bulging pockets and said,
+"lemme see your rock." What Steering and the girl heard as they waited
+in the road-cart was fragmentary but significant: "Scotch Company will
+divide off another one hundred thousand acres, so they say--No,
+sirree-bob, no more hand-jigging for me--Wouldn't take one-quarter of a
+million for it, if you'd give it to me--Boston Company is bound to make
+millions--Yes, that's Madeira,--Canaan Tigmores--Oh, he will mint money
+out of it, no doubt in the world about that he goes in to win----"
+
+The girl turned to Steering with pleased pride. "You see? He always
+wins. People expect him to." Madeira was over at the edge of his seat,
+talking earnestly to the man on the curb. Steering, beside the girl,
+looking down at her, not seeing Madeira because of her, nodded
+approvingly, the approval being for her honesty, her sweetness, her
+vitality. Something, perhaps the near climax for her father's enterprise
+at Canaan, seemed to have keyed her to a high pitch. Steering, who by
+now had had opportunities to see her often, had never seen her so
+beautiful, nor so quick of expression in word and look. Her voice
+thrilled him; and while he was thrilling, Madeira's voice came on to
+him: "You needn't hold back on that account," Madeira was saying: "God
+bless you, I've got the next heir in the deal, too."
+
+"Oh-ho," said the girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted,
+aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the
+habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to
+exercise the habit while he could.
+
+Madeira was turning from the man on the curb: "All right, I'll allot you
+one thousand shares, eh? Good-day.--Pet, you'd better drive on out to
+Chitwood, lickety-split."
+
+Miss Madeira put the whip to her horses, and they left the Joplin
+streets behind them, and sped out a gritty white road that crossed a
+lean sweep of prairie. Ahead of them Steering could see presently a sort
+of settlement; wooden sheds, wide and low; hoister shafts, tall and
+slim, on stilts; scaffolding; pipes; chimneys; tramways; surface
+railways. His eyes leaped from moundlike piles of tailings, the powdery
+crush spit out by the concentrating mills, to boulder-like heaps of
+rocks that had been wheeled away to save the teeth of the mills, and his
+ears turned distraught from the groaning clank of unwieldy iron tubs,
+swinging up through skeleton shafts, to the sputtering plunk-plunk of
+drill engines and the booming roar of machinery.
+
+"Hard to keep up with, eh? God bless us, it certainly _is_ hard to keep
+up with!" cried Madeira. "Drive into the enclosure there at the
+Howdy-do, Pet, Throcker will be expecting us. I telephoned him. Yes,
+sir, this is the place to see what zinc means." Madeira was leaning
+forward again, one arm about his daughter and the other arm fathering
+Steering. "This is the place to understand what can be done by seeing
+what has been done." He seemed to want to fire Steering with the idea
+that just such another astounding development could be wrought out down
+there in the Canaan Tigmores, and though Steering was aware that he
+would soon be at a crisis where he would need an austere strength of
+judgment, uncoloured by enthusiasm of any kind, he could not help
+responding to the aura of enthusiasm into which he was entering. The
+great plant of the Howdy-do mine disseminated enthusiasm in shaking
+vibrations. Milled enthusiasm stood about in cars, ready for the
+smelters. Enthusiasm roared and whirred from the concentrating mill
+where wheels were turning and bands were slipping; where a tub,
+ore-laden, was jerking and clanking through the hoister shaft; where men
+on an upper platform were shovelling the dump from the tub into great
+crusher rolls; where the rolls were grinding and pounding, and the water
+was fashing and gurgling down the jigs. The whirr of it all, the whizz
+and bang of it, the whole effect of it all, was, to any man interested
+in the development of ore, a great forward impetus that swung him far
+out, limp and dizzy.
+
+"Waiting for you, Mr. Madeira!" cried a man, who fairly shone with
+enthusiasm, and whose voice tinkled gladly as he came across to the
+hitching rail where Miss Madeira had stopped her horses. "Mighty glad to
+see you, Miss Sally--Mr. Steering, glad to meet you, sir. Here you,
+Mike! come and look after these horses. Miss Sally, I'm a-going to have
+to take you round to the tool-house for some covers, please ma'am." The
+accommodating and friendly mine-boss of the Howdy-do led Madeira's party
+to a shed opposite his mill and there outfitted them with rubber coats
+and caps, talking to them all the while in that tinkling voice, with the
+glad note singing in it.
+
+"God bless my soul, Throcker, how much did the last blast bring down?"
+Madeira turned to Steering before Throcker could reply. "Whenever a
+miner's voice shakes and sings like that, his last blast has meant a
+heap."
+
+"You are right, sir!" cried Throcker, "we opened up a face yesterday
+that,--well, it's going to take us weeks to handle even the loose ore
+we've brought down, sir. Come this way, Miss Sally, please ma'am."
+
+Steering began to wish that the mine-boss were not so happy. It had an
+electric effect upon him. And he began to wish that he himself were not
+so happy. He dreaded developments that would surely be change.
+
+"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the
+Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs in
+his pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing,
+tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of
+whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's
+manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to
+"run up here."
+
+In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss
+Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four
+corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it,
+so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no
+place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it
+like that.
+
+But there came a jolt and a jar, the cage settled upon the stope, and
+the journey was over. Throcker led the way through a thick underground
+gloom. Great masses of crush-rock slid under foot, there was a black
+drip from ceiling and walls, and the excavation was filled with the
+hollow boom of the water-and air-pumps. With lights flaring uncertainly,
+they followed the mine-boss out upon a rocky crag that gave upon a deep
+abyss, faintly illuminated by the flicker of the lamps of the working
+force below and by torches set in the wall. There was an upward slope in
+the formation of the ledge from the bottom of the cavern to the spur
+upon which they stood, but it was made by irregular juttings with ugly,
+saw-tooth projections. Unless they were very near the edge they could
+not follow the dim outline of the slope at all. Throcker in his
+eagerness to point out the ore, shining like specks of gold all up and
+down the slope, worked dangerously near the edge, but he was accustomed
+and recovered his balance easily when a piece of his support crumbled
+away under his feet. Steering, who was agile and athletic, had no
+difficulty in keeping up with the miner, but Madeira had to be watchful.
+The miner would not let Miss Madeira come far out on the crag, though he
+let the men follow him, calling warnings to them as they came.
+
+"From where you stand, Miss Sally," Throcker turned toward the girl who
+waited below the summit of the crag, "from where you stand up to here,
+the loose ore is worth about sixty-five thousand dollars!"
+
+The girl looked up at them responsively. Standing there under the
+strange flickering light of her torch, with the black folds of the
+rubber coat swathing her, her face, with its fine eyes, was cut out for
+Steering sharp as a cameo.
+
+"I am delighted for your sake, Mr. Throcker," she called gaily, but with
+a little uneasiness in her voice. "Father, please be careful."
+
+"Sixty-five thousand dollars! Why, Lord love you, Throcker, a hundred
+thousand, if one." Madeira, taking charge of the probabilities in the
+case, moved toward the edge to support his estimate by measuring with
+his eye the distance down the crag.
+
+"Father, please be careful. Watch him, Mr. Steering,--O-h-h-h!" A
+woman's cry of horror rang though the tunnelled walls as Madeira's great
+frame toppled on the edge of the crag, and disappeared.
+
+Throwing out his right arm protectingly, as though in answer to the girl
+below, Steering had been able to knot the sinewy fingers of one hand
+about Madeira's collar as the latter fell. The force of the fall brought
+Steering to his knees, then flat out across the ledge, to get all the
+purchase power he could. Madeira's weight was terrific, even after
+Steering had brought his other hand into requisition; and though
+Throcker sprang to the rescue, Throcker was a weak man and the best aid
+that he could render was to assume a small share of Madeira's weight by
+getting down flat upon the ledge, after Steering's fashion. In the black
+hole below the miners saw what had happened and two burly men began to
+clamber up the treacherous slope.
+
+"Gently, boys, gently," warned Throcker, as the men came on; he and
+Steering could feel the rock upon which they lay vibrate; there was a
+rending and splitting going on all through the ledge. "Can you hold on a
+minute alone, sir?" gasped Throcker suddenly. "I have a bad heart and
+it's going back on me,"--he fell weakly beside Steering.
+
+"Yes, I can hold on alone." Steering's face was in the loose crush, and
+his lips were cut by the rock when he opened them, so he stopped trying
+to talk.
+
+"Get back, Mr. Throcker--let me get my hands down and help Mr.
+Steering." It was the girl's voice, and the girl was beside Steering,
+quiet and capable.
+
+"Oh, you?" said Steering. He had known all these seconds that he was
+doing this for her, but the strain that he was on had somehow pulled him
+beyond the comprehension of her as actual; for the last ten seconds she
+had been rather a big abstraction, a high principle of his soul, a good
+desire in his heart. To see her there before him was to see abstraction,
+principle, desire becoming adequately incarnate. "No, you mustn't try to
+reach down here,--your arms aren't long enough,--the commotion on the
+edge here is dangerous,--if you will just put something, your
+handkerchief, under my face where the sharp little rocks are at it,--ah,
+you should not have done _that_!"--she had slipped her hands beneath his
+face, and the touch of her fingers was like velvet as she worked away
+the sticking, stinging bits of ore and rock that worried him. He had not
+known how chief a part in his sensation of discomfort those bits had
+played until he could bury his face in the relief of her soft hands. As
+a matter of fact, with those bits out of his cheeks,--and his face in
+her hands,--he felt no great discomfort at all. If it had not been for
+her shivering sigh of relief he would have been sorry when the miners
+drew Madeira up. Madeira had not spoken, and he was purple as they
+carried him to a place of safety some distance back on the ledge.
+
+"He is just the sort of man physically who ought not to be subjected to
+choking experiences," said Steering. One of the miners had brought
+water, and Steering and Miss Madeira were reviving Madeira with it.
+Madeira did not seem to be unconscious, but his senses were obtunded,
+and it was some minutes before he could sit up.
+
+"God bless my soul! God bless my soul!" he said, at last, and shivered.
+Then he turned to Steering: "My boy, you know how to hold on. I believe
+you've got as much stick-to-it-iveness as I have." It was his supremest
+form of acknowledgment, and, in making it, he made, too, an impression
+upon Steering that he resented the circumstances that compelled him to
+make it.
+
+They got back to the upper air presently, followed by a cheer from the
+mine force below. The miners had watched Steering perform one of those
+supernatural feats of strength and endurance that an onlooker can never
+explain afterward. Usually the performer knows that the thing was a
+matter of motive and will, not muscle.
+
+Up in the daylight again, Madeira was quickly himself again. He resumed
+charge of affairs in his comprehensive way, and though the mine-boss,
+frightened and remorseful, was limp now, all his enthusiasm gone,
+Madeira's welled up again strong within him. They went back to their
+horses without loss of time, and, waving adieux to Throcker and some of
+his men who had gathered about, they were soon journeying back down the
+white road toward Joplin. Miss Madeira's hands were in bad condition for
+driving, Steering thought, but she had taken the reins just the same.
+
+"We are all dilapidated for the matter of that," she said. "Father is as
+grey-faced as a rat, your cheeks are all cut and pricked--my hands don't
+count."
+
+Twilight was coming on and a full moon was rising. The great sweep of
+flat stretched out about them in a mesh of soft light. The ride back
+was gay, and when they stopped at the house of the Joplin man, who was
+their host, all three were still in nervously high spirits. A negro
+servant came out for the horses, and Steering helped Miss Madeira to
+alight. The girl had drawn off her driving gauntlets, and the ungloved
+hand that she gave him was scratched and scarred across its brown back.
+
+"Isn't that shameful,--and you did it for me!" mourned Steering.
+
+"Oh, if I could have done more!" she cried breathlessly, "if I could do
+more,--as much as you have done for me! If I have not thanked you, you
+know,"--what she was saying was fragmentary and confused, but her eyes
+were shining sweetly upon him,--"it's because I can't. You must
+understand that. I never can talk when I am busy feeling. How are your
+shoulders?"
+
+"I don't know that I have any," replied Steering, with wretched
+prevarication.
+
+"Come on, Honey, come on." Madeira was at the stone steps of the Joplin
+house, and the girl took his arm and climbed the steps with him. At the
+top Madeira turned back to Steering, who was a step behind. "Well, old
+man, let's have it out now, before we go in and get mixed up with these
+strangers. What about those shares? Coming in with us, I reckon?" It was
+like Madeira to select a position of advantage like that, a higher place
+from which he could look down and dominate, with his daughter beside
+him, and it was like him to select a moment like that, a moment when the
+three were close, on the very summit of their friendship and sympathy.
+"We are to be all together on that deal, aren't we?"
+
+Though the girl, her arm linked through her father's, was waiting for
+his answer, and though Steering saw that she expected his acquiescence
+as the right and natural thing, her influence upon him, despite that,
+was all for the rejection of Madeira's proposition. She looked so young,
+so straight, so honest, that, as an influence, she was ranged against
+Madeira, even though, in her ignorance, she imagined herself to be in
+harmony with him. Steering, looking at her first and Madeira next, knew
+that she really fashioned his answer, that it was really all because of
+her that his words came, swiftly, earnestly:
+
+"Don't allot me any shares at all, Mr. Madeira. I have decided not to go
+into the company."
+
+Madeira emitted a breezy "All right. God bless you, all right." The girl
+looked sorry and puzzled. Steering came on up the steps behind them,
+with a sense of mingled elation and sadness, and the three passed
+through the door of the Joplin man's house.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Six_
+
+FATHER AND DAUGHTER
+
+
+Madeira Place was the old Peele Farm, whose square brick house had been
+the boast of Canaan township ever since it had been put up,--out of
+brick hauled by team across three counties,--by the man who had
+established, but failed, despite his effort, to make permanent the
+fortunes of his family. When the grandnephew, Bruce Grierson, came on,
+the brick house was plastered with a mortgage that somehow passed
+eventually into the hands of the then alert young sapling land-agent,
+Crittenton Madeira. Crittenton took the house, and, by and by, Bruce
+Grierson, the second, took himself, with money borrowed from Madeira,
+out of Canaan, never to return. It was not long after this that
+Crittenton Madeira, who was still a slight man, with a young wife and a
+pretty baby out at the brick house, began to be named "our esteemed
+fellow townsman" by the _Canaan Call_. Madeira built a hotel for
+Canaan, promoted the Canaan Short Line, and established the Bank of
+Canaan. His wife died, and his little girl grew, and he became large of
+girth. It was not until his daughter was twelve that he had to share
+honours with anyone as the foremost personage of Tigmore County. At
+twelve the daughter began to show that she had inherited her father's
+vitality, though the sphere of her activities was different. He bought
+and sold and made money. She lassoed heifers, broke colts, and rode up
+and down the Di in rickety skiffs. The community took as much pride in
+her adventures as it did in his achievements.
+
+The Madeiras were very happy together all through those days, and very
+proud of each other. She recognised that her father was superior to the
+Canaan men, that they did what he told them to do, and he recognised
+that she was the most wonderful child, and the most beautiful, that had
+ever come into the world. His convictions on that score were so profound
+that they seemed to him something surer and bigger than the customary
+paternal pride and affection. As the girl grew older he spent a great
+deal of his money on her education and pleasure--at first blindly,
+guided only by a big impulse to have her as good as the best, an impulse
+that resulted in some funnily pathetic scenes where the little girl,
+frightfully over-dressed, wandered through the St. Louis shops, holding
+to the big man's finger, trying to think up something else that she
+might possibly want. Later, under the girl's own direction, the money
+went to better purpose.
+
+His daughter's way of spending the money early became, in Madeira's
+manner of getting at the thing, a sort of balance-wheel to his way of
+making it. Although he had made money in the same way before she was
+born, and although he would have made it in the same way had she never
+been born, he grew to like the feeling that what he did he did for her,
+and that his desire to make money had a soul in his desire to have her
+spend it. This feeling was in the ascendant always when he was with her.
+Unconsciously she fanned it within him. She had spent her young life
+couched rosily on his love for her and hers for him; at home she was
+lonely; at home Madeira was well-nigh perfect, and the girl's
+imagination made all her ideals live in the big, handsome, assertive
+man who was at once father to her and hero. Perceiving this, Madeira,
+with her, entered into a sort of world of make-believe, and, with her,
+was sometimes able to take himself for what she held him, a man whose
+honour matched his ability, and, with her, sometimes surprised in
+himself the little glow that she seemed to get when she was profoundly
+appreciating him.
+
+One Sunday afternoon they were sitting, father and daughter, in the
+garden, behind the brick house, he with a St. Louis paper on his knee,
+his head bare, his waistcoat loose, his feet in slippers. His chair was
+tilted back against a crab-apple tree at the side of one of the garden
+walks. For several weeks his face had been showing some sort of strain,
+but at this moment he looked comfortable. She had been telling him that
+she was glad that he had put up the new watering trough in Court House
+Square, and the way she had talked about it had made him feel sure that
+he had had some notion, when he did it, of benefiting the community,
+instead of insuring that the farmers would stop in front of the Grange
+store, in which he was interested.
+
+She sat on a bench near him, quite idle; her gown, a tawny drapery,
+whose half-hidden suggestions of blue were like shy spring flowers, was
+sheathed closely about her; her eyes were following the pale wide river
+below the garden; her hair, so light that it made her eyes seem lighter,
+was piled above the warm, creamy tan of her forehead; there was a little
+drowsy droop on her face; the dusky-gold radiance was all about her.
+
+"Daddy," she said, by and by, "do you know that I swam the Di once?" He
+laughed sleepily. He remembered. "I wonder if I could do it now--I was
+pretty awful as a youngster, wasn't I, Daddy?"
+
+"You certainly had a reputation," he admitted.
+
+"Do you know that I still have a good deal of a reputation"--she turned
+upon him with more directness and a little laughing pugnacity--"as
+though I were the same terrible child, up to the same riotous tricks as
+when I was twelve!"
+
+"Hump-mmh, hump-mmh!" He looked at her from under his slanted lids and
+shook his head, while his big face quivered with amusement. "You haven't
+given up all your riotous tricks even yet--don't tell me." He spoke
+with the indulgence that had allowed free rein to her caprices all her
+life.
+
+"Never you mind, I do precious little that is riotous any more; I am
+getting used to harness," she made answer, and looked as though she did
+not mean to be interfered with in the precious little that was riotous
+that she still clung to, and then looked as though she were threatening
+herself with sweeping reform. "Go back to sleep, Daddy. You will be in
+my way presently, anyhow."
+
+"Anybody coming?"
+
+"Your Mr. Steering."
+
+"'My!'" Madeira's face clouded over, and he thrust out his jaw
+grimacingly. "If he _were_ mine, you know what I should do with him?" he
+asked, in a sharp voice.
+
+"No, I don't know. What would you do with him?"
+
+"I should send him packing back East. This country don't need,--aw, the
+people of this country are good enough for the country and the country
+is good enough for them. We don't need outsiders."
+
+He was so vehement that she regarded him questioningly. "Don't you like
+him any more?" she inquired, with a little dubious shake of her head.
+
+"I don't like"--Madeira got up and walked back and forth under the
+crab-apple tree--"I don't like for a man without any practical knowledge
+or experience to get a lot of ideas about a thing and bring them to a
+field and try to push other chaps out, other chaps who are already in
+the field."
+
+"Yes, but----" It occurred to her that she was defending Steering--"but
+if he brings the ideas, he ought to have the credit for originating the
+ideas, oughtn't he?"
+
+"No! No!" Madeira's voice rang up, urgent, strident; he did not seem
+conscious that he was talking to her; he seemed rather to be having
+something out with himself. The strain of the past weeks had come back
+to his face. "Plenty of people before this Steering have thought of ore
+in the Canaan Tigmores. Look at old Grierson himself! Originate the
+idea! Grierson had the idea before Steering was born! We can get ideas
+in this country, and work 'em out, too, without any help from
+outsiders."
+
+"Mr. Steering is not exactly an outsider, is he?"
+
+"Yes, he is, too. He hasn't any more claim to this land now than you
+have; it isn't any more his business what's done here during Grierson's
+lifetime than it's Rockefeller's business. Not a bit. Let Steering wait
+till the land is his."
+
+"Well,"--she was troubled,--"in the meantime, what is old Grierson going
+to do?"
+
+Madeira seemed to be trying to quiet himself. He went down to the garden
+fence and looked at the oak forest on the other side of the Di, puckered
+up his mouth, as though to whistle, but stopped short of it, and came
+sauntering back toward his daughter. "He is going to do what I tell him
+to do, Honey," he made answer. "And I'm telling him to put the Canaan
+Mining and Development Company into the Tigmores after zinc."
+
+"I should think, though," she said then, slowly, "that even if the
+matter is in your hands now, it would be to your ultimate advantage to
+have Mr. Steering in with you. He is the next owner, and, if old
+Grierson should die, whatever work you have done on the Tigmores would
+go for nothing. I should think it would be almost essential for you and
+Mr. Steering to be together."
+
+He let his chair down angrily. "There isn't a big enough scheme in the
+universe to accommodate Steering and me together! He is a blamed idiot,"
+he said doggedly. And it became clear to her that in his bull-headed way
+he had forged all the links of one of his intense antagonisms. He had
+been like that all his life; of pronounced personality himself, he had
+never been able to abide pronounced personality in those with whom he
+came in contact. He had ridden rough-shod over inferior men all his
+life; he liked to ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path
+crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had
+accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed
+idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually,
+his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull
+Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with
+that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you
+wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my kind of people. I
+shouldn't mind if, now that you've given him a good high swing, you'd
+let him drop."
+
+"Why, Father! You oughtn't to forget that there was one time in your
+life when he might have let you drop--and didn't!"
+
+He saw that he had got himself before her in too keen a light.
+
+"Yes, but you don't expect me to let him hold me up by the collar
+forever, do you, Pet? That's his dog-on way, anyhow--wants to dictate. I
+can't stand a man who wants to dictate. I think we've had enough of him.
+That's what I mean, and all I mean." He patted her hands and got up from
+his chair again. "There comes Samson with the mail," he said nervously.
+
+A negro man rode up through the big gate at the front of the grounds and
+came on to Madeira, who took two letters from him. "One for you, Sally,"
+said Madeira, "and one for me."
+
+"Oh, from Elsie Gossamer!" she cried, and took her letter and sat,
+unobservant of him, for several moments, the little frown that his words
+had brought out still on her brow. Presently she looked up and saw that
+he had read his letter, and had put it in his pocket; he was tilted
+back against the crab-apple tree again, his forehead knit, his eyes
+brilliant, a peculiar fixity in their gaze. "Oh, here!" she cried
+protestingly, "you look as though you had just decided to become the
+President of the United States of America! Stop scowling and listen;
+Elsie is after me again to join her in Europe. She is fairly eloquent
+with the project----"
+
+He broke in upon her with a sudden intensity of interest: "Do it!" he
+cried. "It's the very thing. You go. You go and have a good time."
+
+"I don't want to go so awfully," she began hesitatingly. "I've been away
+from you a lot in the last two years. I don't care so much about it."
+
+"Yes, you do; you go." He was always keen for her pleasure, but in the
+present case he seemed especially earnest.
+
+"Want to get rid of me, huh?"
+
+"No; you know I'll half die without you. But I am going to be fearfully
+busy from now on,"--his mouth seemed hot and dry as he talked,--"it will
+suit better now than ever. You go."
+
+"Well, maybe," she said. She was accustomed to let her own fancy settle
+such questions for her. "Maybe I'll go. Maybe I shan't." There was a
+click at the front gate. "I expect that's Mr. Steering," she announced.
+
+Madeira got out of his chair quickly. "If it is, I don't want to see
+him," he said, "he--oh, he irritates me, that man,--always wanting to
+dictate. I'll go in. Don't want ever to see him again,--and say, Pet?"
+
+"Well, Dad?"
+
+"I'd be glad if you would never see him again. Just stop where you are,
+will you?"
+
+She drew a long sighing breath. "Just stop where I am? Well, I'll see,"
+she said, laughing and flushing in the warm, rich fashion of her skin,
+but there was the faint far call of uneasiness in her laughter, like a
+wind-whisper of coming rain. "Tell Samson to bring Mr. Steering out here
+to me," she commanded, and Madeira went off toward the house and
+disappeared through the green-latticed porch.
+
+Inside the house he retired to the room that was known as his office,
+locked the door and came over to his desk. As he did it a peculiar
+consciousness of himself suffused him like the first fumes of a deadly
+narcotic. He began to see that he was lifting his feet stealthily,
+advancing them stealthily, stealthily setting them down, with the
+soundless fall of a cat's foot on velvet. Reaching his desk, he half
+fell into a chair there, a thin line of white froth between his lips,
+his big face purplish. "Eh, God?" he cried, "what's this? what's this?"
+
+The seizure passed as suddenly as it had come. By and by he heard
+Steering pass through the house under Samson's escort. When the sound of
+Steering's foot-steps had died away, Madeira took a letter from his
+pocket, spread it open before him and read it over and over.
+
+
+"Dear Crit," [the letter said] "I have thought this thing to a finish. I
+want you to turn the Tigmores over to my cousin, Bruce Steering. Let him
+start at once on the jack trail, that primrose path of dalliance. As for
+me, my dear sir, by the time this reaches you, I shall be on the long
+trail. You needn't blow any trumpets about it, for B. G. will have no
+funeral. The name that I gave you as the name that I live here under is
+good enough to die here under. The certain fact for your consideration
+is that I die at once, and that the question of this property entail is
+now confided to you to arrange for my heir, young Steering. Write to the
+clerk of Snow Mountain County for the documents that I have left with
+him for you. They establish everything. Tell my cousin that, besides the
+Tigmores, I bequeath him my debts to you. This leaves me not at all
+envious of the job ahead of him, and, as ever,
+
+                     "Your blindly devoted servant,
+
+                                      "BRUCE GRIERSON."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Seven_
+
+THE GARDEN OF DREAMS
+
+
+Crittenton Madeira's daughter wandered down the garden path, singing
+softly, after her father had left her, but there was in her song, as
+there had been in her laughter, a little tremble of unrest. The garden
+was a delicious place, whose fragrance beat up in waves of sweetness at
+every turn. All the flowers were in their luxuriant last bloom. There
+were great roses and sweet elysium, mignonette, peppermint pinks, crêpe
+myrtle, riotous vines and creepers. Long ago she had taken everything
+out of the garden that was not sweet. She had a fancy that fragrance was
+one of the spirit's tremulous paths into heaven, and out in the garden
+she liked to shut her eyes and, with her little straight nose in the
+air, go drifting off toward what was infinitely good, fine, strong,
+imperishable. It sometimes seemed to her that the most intimate and
+exquisite happinesses of her life had come to her with her eyes shut in
+that garden. She called it the Garden of Dreams.
+
+When Steering found her, she was waiting for him, her arms on an old
+vine-covered stump, that dusky-gold radiance of hers playing over her
+and from her, the most beautifully, glowingly alive woman in the world.
+What he said to her was "How-do-you-do?" But what he wanted to say was,
+"Oh, stand there so forever, and let every grace, every beauty burn into
+my brain, so that all my life I may carry you about with me, your
+wine-warm eyes, your sunlit hair, the whole sweet glow of you,--having
+you perfectly, knowing you perfectly everywhere, everyhow, near, far, in
+the sunshine, in the dark!" And when a man wants to talk like that
+"how-do-you-do" is as good a catchphrase as the next to keep his tongue
+discreet.
+
+"I do very well," she told him, smiling at him, maddening him, "I always
+do well, here in my garden,--but you, you put my sense of well-being to
+shame. You look so glad!"
+
+"I am the gladdest man on earth," Bruce told her, knowing chiefly that
+he had her hand in his. He barely remembered in time that she was rich
+in gold and lands and cattle, and that he was poor, and that the
+positivism of his personality had already incurred the ill-will of her
+father. "Still, I don't think there is any doubt in the world how it is
+all going to end," he said hazily. He still had her hand. She had the
+hardest hand to put down that he had ever taken up.
+
+"I don't quite follow? All what?" She bit her lip; her eyes flashed off
+across the Di, bright and swift as mating birds, as she drew her hand
+gently away.
+
+"I was only thinking that a man may go on and on through so many
+meaningless years, of no special significance to himself or to anybody
+else and then suddenly,--think everything is going to be all right some
+day." He clasped his hands and leaned on the other side of the
+vine-covered stump and looked at her wishfully, and she laughed at him,
+with her eyes still on the pale river.
+
+"How do you like my garden?" she asked divertingly. For answer he shut
+his eyes and breathed deeply. "Oh, how good!" she cried, satisfied,
+"that's the only way really to follow the path of fragrance,--that's my
+own way!" He blessed his stars that he had sniffed at the roses. "Where
+did the path lead you?" she queried, as he opened his eyes dreamily upon
+her golden beauty. "Into heaven," he murmured with sublime conviction,
+and she clasped her slender hands, delighted at their mystical
+congeniality.
+
+"I am so glad that we like the same thing," she continued, hurrying a
+little; "haven't you noticed?--we both like the garden,--and we both
+like Piney. When did you see Piney?"
+
+"Piney? Oh, I see Piney often." He rather wished that she had not
+mentioned Piney. Since he had come to know the tramp-boy better his
+first ache for him had become sharper and sharper. "Piney and I were out
+on the hills together only yesterday. Poor Piney!"
+
+"Why," she took his hand and led him forward through a tangle of
+rose-bushes; she would not look at him, but the bewildering sweetness of
+her hair, her gown, the curve of her cheek came back to him--"why _poor_
+Piney?" She was guiding him to a bench of twisted grape-vines from which
+they might look down upon the river. "Sit down," she said, "and tell me
+why poor Piney?"
+
+"Well," he sat down and looked at the river, half-frowning, "it has
+seemed to me--I've had a notion--oh, I don't know. I suppose it is not
+poor Piney after all."
+
+"Tell me," she insisted, "tell me what you started to tell me."
+
+"Well, it has seemed to me ever since I first met Piney that he was in
+the way of trouble," he dashed on more abruptly, thinking only of Piney
+for a moment--"I have come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to
+him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own
+boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the
+woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity.
+At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody
+of living--and--oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all
+wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made
+Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him
+forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he
+were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes
+seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man's heart, Miss Madeira. He will
+have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor'
+Piney; because he will have to love."
+
+"Would that be so terrible?" The flash from the amber eyes that she
+turned up to him made the world go zig-zagging through a long space
+while Steering looked on with a great tremulous intake of breath. Then
+he steadied again to what he wanted to say to her and could say to her
+for Piney's sake.
+
+"It would be for Piney. Piney is going to love hopelessly," he saw that
+a little shiver caught her and he was glad of it. "Yes, it would be
+terrible to love hopelessly, wouldn't it?" he said, to strengthen his
+hidden appeal for Piney. He wanted to make her realise what she was
+doing for Piney, realise that for sheer kindness, kindness as to a dumb
+thing, she should never let the lad come near her. He had forgotten the
+woman in her when he began to formulate that appeal. She laughed a
+light, mocking laugh.
+
+"I believe that you think that Piney loves me!" she cried. "Piney, the
+spirit of the oaks! the song of the night-wind! Piney suffer! Piney
+love!" Steering was sorry to hear the note of evasion in her voice. No
+woman, he remembered, too late, could be brought to treat man's love or
+boy's love quite honestly. His eyes clouded. He felt masculinely, sanely
+sympathetic with Piney.
+
+"I wish," he said gloomily, "that you would sometimes put yourself in
+the place of a man who loves you, put yourself in Piney's place."
+
+Her eyes crinkled up again. "I'll just do it," she said gaily, "I'll do
+it now. Presto," she shut her eyes. "Now I have his point of view. Now
+I'm seeing what he sees--that Miss Sally Madeira likes to hear him sing,
+and humours him and pets him because he is gay and glad to be alive, and
+because Uncle Bernique says that he needs somebody to mother him. I
+mother Piney. Can't you see that." She laughed again and arose and stood
+in front of him, gay, mocking, nonchalant. "Piney love! And if Piney
+could love, that you should fancy that he might dare love Salome
+Madeira!"
+
+He forgot about Piney. She blocked his farther vision like a shaft of
+light. He could not see an inch beyond her. Madeira's voice rang down
+the garden walk. Steering did not hear it. "Salome! Salome!" he
+murmured, "Is that it, Salome?"
+
+"Yes, that's it, Salome. Isn't it foolish? The Di down there is the
+Diaphanous, too. Some pioneer poet named it for its shimmer, but what
+good did it do? Missouri promptly called it the 'Di.' No more good is it
+to name a child Salome in the backwoods of Missouri. She's bound to grow
+up Sally. I've always been Sally, except at school. I'll always be Sally
+down here with my own people."
+
+"No, you won't always be Sally--no you won't always be down here with
+your own people either,"--he leaned back on the bench and watched her,
+his eyes half shut, his whole sense of being illumined by her, his
+tongue playing audaciously with his discretion.
+
+"Yes, I shall always be Sally, too." That bisque-warm skin of hers
+flushed wondrously and she seemed to talk out of a little confused
+audacity of her own. Madeira's voice rang down the walk again. "Yes,
+Father!--and down here with my own people, too. Yes, Father!"
+
+"Company's here, Sally."
+
+"All right, Father, coming."
+
+"And I have to go?" asked Steering piteously.
+
+"Oh no, come up to the house and meet our sixteen-to-one congressman,
+Quicksilver Sam."
+
+"No--I'll go," chose Steering. "Say, can't I get through from the garden
+here, and go down the river road?"
+
+"Yes, you can. Samson shall bring your horse around, if you like.
+There's a bridle-path down to the river; it's Piney's way."
+
+"Well, if you will be so good as to have the horse brought, I'll take
+Piney's path. I'm going to the hills to try to find Piney and Uncle
+Bernique. Think I'll sleep in the hills with them to-night. I feel so
+sad. When may I come back?"
+
+"Well, you see," the trouble crept into her voice again, misty,
+tremulous--"you see, I may go away."
+
+"Oh!" he cried, and then again, "Oh!" a bitter wailing note.
+
+"Yes, I may," she said hastily. "You see, your friend, Miss Gossamer,
+wants me to join her in Europe. She is very insistent about it."
+
+"And you may go?"
+
+"And I may go."
+
+He knew that she said that she would see him again before going, if it
+came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with
+the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to
+thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that
+afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant
+brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a
+bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing
+was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the
+mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:
+
+"_Damn Miss--Europe!_"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Eight_
+
+WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF
+
+
+Sally Madeira went to her own room early that Sunday night. It was a
+large room, sheer and white, with its wall space broken here and there
+by cool, calm etchings, cows knee-deep in clover, sunsets on small
+rivers, old windmills, wheat fields in harvest, hills where the snow lay
+thick. When she had lit her lamp a rosy light suffused the room through
+the tinted globe. The pictures on the walls looked so tonefully tender,
+intimate, in the soft glow, that the girl, noticing them for the
+thousandth time, moved from one to another, admiring and loving them.
+They were, in a way, sign-posts of her development. She had begun to buy
+them when she had stopped working in colour with a man who had a famous
+studio in New York. One day she had gone with the man to an exhibition
+of oil paintings which were infused with a matchless poetry of colour.
+
+"If I paint all my life am I ever going to be able to paint like that?"
+she had asked of the man earnestly.
+
+"No, my child, you are not," he had answered, quite as earnestly.
+
+"I wonder why I should try to do something poorly that someone else can
+do so well?" she had mused.
+
+And then, because she had talent, and, finest of all, an exquisite
+temperament in whose pulses the sense of colour beat in veritable tides
+of joy, the man from the studio had encouraged her with warm words of
+praise. "You will some day paint well enough to win a high place," he
+had reminded her.
+
+But she had stayed thoughtful, and a day or two later had talked to him
+again.
+
+"I don't believe, since I have thought it all out, that I can get what's
+in life for me out of it in a high place," she had said, shy but eager.
+Then, on that line, she had forged on to a swift and comprehensive
+conclusion. "You have told me," she had continued to the studio man,
+"that what I have in me for painting is not the real thing, and since I
+have seen the real thing I know for myself that colour is too rich and
+assertive, too apt to run away with one, for any but master hands to
+use it. I feel that I don't want even to see poor colouring on canvas
+any more. I shan't ever even have poor colour pictures around me. I can
+get my colour stories outside. Inside, the stories shall all be told in
+light and shadow. And I am not going to paint bad pictures myself any
+more."
+
+"Ah, but the work, the beautiful work!" cried the painter.
+
+"Well, as for me, do you know, I've come to believe that my work is just
+living--for a time anyhow."
+
+"Well, then, the fame!" cried the painter.
+
+"I don't seem to care for the fame."
+
+It had gone much like that with her music. She had a fine voice, and her
+New York teacher had told her over and over that she "must go on." She
+had been pleased with his praise and had worked hard for a time. Then
+she had gone to him, too, one day, open-eyed and inquiring.
+
+"Go on to what?" she had asked.
+
+"Why, to glory," the singer had said.
+
+She had shaken her head, unconvinced. "I don't seem to care for the
+glory," she had said. And beyond learning to use her voice well she
+would not work with it. "It is not that I am lazy," she had protested to
+the singer, "but I couldn't get what's in life for me out of it by
+singing."
+
+"What's in life for you?" queried the singer, interested, for the girl
+was beautiful and rich and aspirant.
+
+"Ah, I don't quite know yet," said the girl, the pretty pathos of youth
+and waiting upon her, "but some day I shall find myself; then I shall
+know."
+
+All through her college days she had been looking for herself. When the
+time had come that she had gone to Elsie Gossamer's house to visit, and
+there had met men--college boys at first and later on men of a larger
+world--she had still been looking for herself. But though in the
+meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably,
+Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer,
+since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little
+interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she
+had not found herself.
+
+As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly
+and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking
+were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just
+what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of
+knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength
+and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach
+of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the
+straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl
+could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant
+health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood
+before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung
+over her shoulder, her body assumed a rare natural poise, classically,
+ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little
+reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the
+window.
+
+"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was
+why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"
+
+Beyond the window a Missouri tempest was rising. The girl, responsive
+as a reed to the wind, sat down in a low chair, the subtle quiver of
+consciousness intensified within her, and watched the lightning that
+began to play over the hills, and the rain that began to beat through
+the trees. Strangely enough, as she sat there, in the flashes she could
+see little, but in the dark--a warm, wind-blown, sweet-smelling
+dark--she saw several things. For one thing, she saw that, most
+probably, she would never again in her life spend an evening with a
+sixteen-to-one congressman. It had been a very tiresome evening. For
+another thing, she saw that she was not going to Europe. Her father
+needed her; or if he didn't he ought to. For a third thing, she saw
+that, in some way, she was going to have to make her father like Bruce
+Steering again. Then she saw the fourth thing. There had not been a
+flash for some minutes. Seeing that fourth thing, in the intense dark,
+she gave a trembling sigh, put one of her hands on top of the other on
+her breast and pushed, as though she were pushing her heart down. Then
+presently the pressure of her hands relaxed, her head dropped down until
+her chin touched her fingers, and a great flush that was like a charge
+from something electric surged through her.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "oh, is it you! Have you come!" It was a triumphant,
+shy, thrilling greeting to something, something that she had been
+waiting for, born for. The dark grew intenser, sweeter, warmer. She
+lifted her arms and held them out yearningly toward the Tigmore hills,
+half-leaning out the window, catching the rain on her eager young face,
+in her shining hair, on her broad low breast. "I am so glad of it!" she
+panted, in a singing whisper, "I am so glad----" A great sheet of
+lightning unrolled across the Tigmore hills and held steadily
+magnificent for a moment, revealing everything to everybody, so it
+seemed to Sally Madeira. She crept into bed shaking, ecstatic, afraid.
+
+Next morning she made her toilet away from the mirror as much as was
+possible, not being quite ready to face her whole found self as yet. But
+before she went downstairs she crossed to the window and looked out at
+the tumbling Tigmore line, a kissing sigh on her lips.
+
+When she reached the dining room she found that Madeira had not yet
+come down, so she walked out into the garden, where she stood for a
+little while by the vine-covered stump, her eyes closed, her little
+straight nose in the air, the broad daylight beating down on her. Then
+presently she opened her eyes determinedly. "Yes, I can stand it," she
+said, as though she had been afraid that she couldn't, and looked
+straight up into the rain of light over-head. "I can stand it, in the
+daytime as in the dark, from now on forever."
+
+In the air was an autumn mellowness that had not been there the day
+before. It nipped, with a strong, winey flavour, as it went down. All
+around her lay drifts of petals, rain-beaten roses, ragged lilies. The
+storm had stolen the garden's glory. "To put it into my heart!" cried
+the girl, in her all-conquering joy. "Oh, you Garden of Dreams, you!
+See, my eyes are wide open, and this, _this_ is better than dreams!"
+
+She went back to the house with her arms full of the very last roses.
+"For now, I must go bring my father around," she said.
+
+Madeira had had a bad night. He had not slept at all as far as he could
+tell. For hours he had had to lie on his bed and face the dark, with
+Bruce Grierson's letter under his pillow, licking out at his temples
+like a tongue of flame. But he had not taken the letter away all night
+long. "Let it burn," he had said. "Let it find out who's stronger, me or
+it. That's my way." All night long he had made plans, with his face set
+toward the dark. When he got to the dining room that morning he went to
+the window and stood there waiting for Sally, revolving one of the
+night's plans in his head, deciding with how much force to project it,
+how to hit the mark patly with it. "For I won't have him here at my
+house again," Madeira was telling himself there at the window. "God! I
+_can't_ have him here." He caught at the vest pocket above his heart.
+His teeth were chattering. His daughter, with the roses in her arms,
+entered the room just then.
+
+As long as she lived Sally Madeira never forgot the way the dining room
+looked that morning, as she came into it from the Garden of Dreams: the
+dull green wall spaces, broken by some of her beloved cool etchings, and
+by great walnut panels that deepened and toned and strengthened the
+room beautifully; the old walnut side-board that had been her mother's
+mother's; in the centre of the room the heavy round table, unlaid,
+snowy, waiting for her effective interference; Madeira, her big handsome
+father, idling by the window, his fine physical maturity cut out
+strongly against the light, his deep chest, his great height, his wide,
+well-featured face, his good clothes, the adaptability with which he
+wore them; and on beyond Madeira, outside the window, the satin green
+foliage of the pet magnolia tree. It was all finely satisfying. She had
+tried her hardest to kiss the foolish gladness out of her eyes and voice
+into the roses in her hands, but things grew so increasingly pleasant
+that all her endeavour went for nothing. As soon as her father saw her
+and heard her, he said:
+
+"Well, Honey-love, are you as happy as _that_?"
+
+She put her roses into an old blue bowl and went over to him, and he sat
+down in one of the big chairs by the window and drew her to his knee.
+Then they fell into a caressing habit of theirs, he with both arms about
+her body, she with both arms about his neck, half-choking him with
+tenderness, rumpling his thick hair with the tip of her chin. She
+looked as much mother as child like that.
+
+"What a big girl you are, Pet!"
+
+"I have a big excuse for it, Dad."
+
+"But your mother, now, was little, Sally. My, yes, reckon that was why I
+loved her so. Such a little, little thing!"
+
+"And I'm so big--'reckon' that's why you love me so, huh?"
+
+"Reckon," he said. They sat on for a moment silent, looking out of the
+window. There was a lost cardinal whisking among the satin leaves of the
+pet magnolia, gazing wistfully at an old nest that swung in the branches
+like the ragged ghost of a summer's completeness and happiness. The nest
+seemed to arouse memories and hopes in the cardinal's breast. He had to
+flirt about it nervously for some minutes before he could satisfy
+himself that his housekeeping notions were unseasonable. Finally he
+perched himself on an humble syringa bush and stared at the nest, quiet,
+depressed.
+
+"Are you betting on the magnolia tree with anybody this winter?" she
+asked, her eyes, too, on the high nest.
+
+"No one left to bet with, Pet. Everybody knows now that it can live
+through the worst that can come to it. Let's see, it's twenty years
+since I planted it there, and I've won twenty jack-knives betting that
+it would live, twenty different winters. Twenty years! Sally, that's a
+good while, my honey. Why, twenty years ago you didn't come knee-high to
+a puddle-duck. We had just moved down here from St. Louis, your mother
+and I, twenty years ago."
+
+As he talked, the moment shaped itself for Madeira as a little
+negligible interim, wedged in between the restless night, with its
+defined purposes, and the next hour, when he should have consummated at
+least one of the night's purposes.
+
+"That mother of yours was a lovely little thing, Sally."
+
+The girl was sure of it. She had felt the loveliness of her mother all
+her life. Once she had gone to her mother's old Kentucky home, and
+though her mother's people were all dead long ago, the great Kentucky
+house was still there, and, standing before it, she had been almost able
+to see the aura of influence that it had been in the moulding of the
+loveliness of her mother, the southern girl, lifting from it to ensphere
+her, the western girl.
+
+"I know she was lovely," said Sally.
+
+"Oh my, yes,--just about at her loveliest twenty years ago. But as for
+twenty years, Sally, why, I can go a lot farther back than that. I can
+go back forty years, close to my beginning. This is all sort of
+different from my beginning, Sally." Out beyond the window, into the
+September sunshine, rolled the fat corn lands, hundreds upon hundreds of
+acres, the wheat flats, the miles of cattle range of Madeira Place.
+Around them shut the strong walls of the old Peele house, a memorable
+house in its way, massive and wide-porched and staunch.
+
+"You can hardly imagine anything more different from this than was my
+beginning," went on Madeira. "This is pretty luxurious, isn't it? In its
+way, though it is down here on the Di, it's just about as good for a
+country house as the places you saw on the Hudson, aint it?"
+
+"Oh, it has a lot more soul and story than the Hudson places," she
+acquiesced at once. Sometimes she could feel that desire of his to give
+her as good as the best palpitate like a pulse through his words.
+
+"Well, anyhow, Lord knows it's mighty different from what I began with,
+Sally. Why, Honey, in my boy-days living on a farm in Missouri was
+mighty much like living on the fringes of hellen-blazes. Br-r-rt!" He
+clamped and unclamped his big hand, watching the strong muscle-play in
+it. "I can feel my fingers burn to this day where the frozen fodder
+sawed and rasped 'em in winter and the hot plough-handles bit and
+blistered 'em in summer. And then, afterwards, those old St. Louis days
+meant hard pulling, too, of another kind. From grocery clerk, to
+dry-goods clerk, to old Peele's real estate office, it was pull, pull,
+if not over one thing, over another. Takes a thundering lot of pulling
+to pull out in this world, Sally." All in a minute his voice sounded
+perplexed and resentful.
+
+"Well, you did it, didn't you? You pulled out. I'm proud of you. I like
+the way you did it."
+
+"Do you, Pet? Do you like me?" he queried with a peculiar anxiety.
+
+"Yes, sir, I do."
+
+Black Chloe, who had been making slow trips between kitchen and
+dining-room for some minutes, stopped now to say, in a sort of Arabian
+Nights measure, "Ef you raddy fuh yo' brekfus, yo' brekfus raddy fuh
+you."
+
+"Better than anybody?" pursued Madeira, but his daughter was drawing him
+to the table, and he did not notice that her only answer was a quivering
+laugh.
+
+They sat down to a breakfast-table whose delightful appearance was due
+to that sense of colour in Sally Madeira's temperament. Both ate some
+fruit, because it was juicy and went down easily, and both looked at
+their coffee-cups.
+
+"Why don't you eat your breakfast, Daddy?"
+
+"Why don't you?" Perhaps if he had waited for her to tell him, her
+gladness would have sent her story bubbling to her lips, but he did not
+wait. "I'm bothered, Honey, that's why I can't eat."
+
+"What's the bother, Dad?"
+
+Madeira, considering that this was his opportunity, closed in
+determinedly, with that iron grip of his. "It's that man Steering,
+Honey."
+
+"Taken a foolish old dislike to him, haven't you, Dad?" She was ready
+for him, eager to get her case before him, to make her points quickly
+and surely.
+
+"Foolish," Madeira gasped and put his hand to his vest pocket. "Sally,
+girl, it's a matter of life and death, I take it." He rose from his
+chair, his face grey. Staggering a little to the left, he moved to the
+window, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the
+Garden of Dreams. Behind him the girl sat on quietly. She had put one
+hand to her chin, so that her face was up-tilted. The light from the
+window was strong on it.
+
+"Sally," began Madeira again, "I've never asked very much of you, have
+I? Always let you do as you please, haven't I? And it's too late now to
+try to force you to do anything, isn't it? Besides, I wouldn't do it
+anyway. I wouldn't like it that way. But I'm going to ask you to do
+something for me. Then I'm going to leave the doing wholly to you. I'm
+going to ask you to drop that man Steering. I thought it all out last
+night, Sally. I know that he and I are going to mix up if he doesn't
+keep well out of my sight. I'm going to ask you to drop him, for my
+sake, Pet."
+
+He came back toward her, and again he half reeled as he started. With
+one hand on her shoulder, he looked down at her. By now she was staring
+unseeingly at the bird that stared at the nest in the magnolia tree.
+"Are you going to do what I want, Honey?" His hand shook on her shoulder
+and when she turned to look up at him the ashen hue of his face
+frightened her. She nestled her cheek into his hand. "It's the God's
+truth I'm telling you, Sally," went on Madeira, "it's life or death, I
+think. I've got to get rid of Steering--I--I--oh, I hate him so."
+
+"And you won't tell me why, Daddy?"
+
+"And I won't--I can't--there's reason enough, Sally, that's all I can
+say. Can't you let it go at that, and help me out?"
+
+"Yes, Dad, yes," she said. "You've done such a lot for me, you've helped
+me out--it--be--a pity,"--her voice went astray in her throat, and in
+the strong light Madeira saw a wild pain on her upturned face--"pity if
+I couldn't do anything you ask me to--wouldn't it?" She got up suddenly
+and ran to the door.
+
+"Sally!" he called, "Sally, you don't mean--you don't--it isn't
+that"--but she was gone.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Nine_
+
+GOOD-BYE!
+
+
+Madeira went off in the buckboard late that morning, and, having left
+word with black Chloe that he might have dinner at the Canaan Hotel, did
+not come home at all at noon.
+
+His daughter stayed in her room all morning, and far past her lunch
+hour. About the middle of the afternoon she got up from the bed where
+she had been lying and sat by the window that looked out across the
+Tigmores. Her father's face, in its frame of entreaty, trouble, unrest,
+hung between her and the hills, so that, for a time, she saw nothing but
+Madeira. Little by little, however, the hills themselves became
+insistent. They were very beautiful, a long, massed glory of colour, red
+and gold and green, all looped about by the silver cord of the Di. As
+the girl watched, a lone horseman came out of one of the wooded knobs
+and galloped down the ridge road toward Canaan. She could see him
+plainly, his breadth of shoulders, his high-headedness, his good
+horsemanship. She got up quickly, swaying toward the window, her hands
+over her heart, with the strange little pushing gesture, as though she
+must push her heart down. The horseman went on down the road toward
+Canaan.
+
+"Oh!" cried the girl presently, pleadingly, "if I may see him just once
+again! If I just don't have to lose him all at once!" She ran then
+across the room to another window, through which she whistled shrilly at
+the negro man dozing in the succulent grass in front of the stable.
+
+"Samson!" she shouted, "saddle Ribbon the quickest you ever did in your
+life!" And when she saw that the negro had roused sufficiently to
+execute her commands, she turned from the window hurriedly, went to her
+clothes-closet hurriedly, changed her house gown for a riding-habit
+hurriedly, and was out in the yard at the mounting block as the saddle
+mare was led up from the stable. Taking the bridle from the negro's
+hand, she leaped into the saddle and was off across the yard like a
+flash, while the lip of the astonished Samson sagged with impotent
+inquiry.
+
+Out on the ridge road, she urged the mare to a gallop. All the way she
+was talking to Madeira, almost praying to him. His face with its trouble
+and pain still moved before her. "Ah, but you will forgive me!" she was
+saying to it. "You wait. Wait and see how this ride turns out. I'm going
+to give myself just one chance, Dad. I'm going to find him, and I'm
+going riding with him. And I'm not going to say anything. But I look
+nice, don't I, when I'm riding--and loving--and hoping--and maybe he
+can't stand it, and if he can't stand it, and rides up close, and stops
+his horse and tells me--oh, what I hope he will tell me--why, Daddy,
+dear, I _must_ lean over into his arms for just one minute, mustn't I?
+You see that, don't you? And maybe after that, everything will be all
+right, and we can all be happy ever after. I don't see how we could help
+being happy ever after that, Dad!"
+
+And, praying so, on the galloping mare, Sally Madeira came into the main
+street of Canaan, and drew rein at last in front of her father's bank.
+Madeira saw her at once and hurried out to her.
+
+"I'm going to take a little last ride with Mr. Steering, Dad," she said,
+her head as high as a queen's and her voice strong and sweet. "I didn't
+want you to think that I was deceiving you. I wanted you to know about
+it before I did it." Often there was a good deal of the child in Sally's
+straight gaze, and Madeira saw it there now and loved it.
+
+"You do just exactly whatever you want to, Honeyful," he said. "I don't
+know--I----" He could not go on at all for a minute, and when he could
+go on he said abruptly, "I'm going to see Steering, too, before I quite
+bust up with him, Sally." Then he went quickly back to the bank, and the
+girl passed on down the street to the post-office, in front of which she
+saw Steering's horse at the hitching-rail. She sent a bare-footed boy
+inside to post a letter to Elsie Gossamer and to ask Mr. Steering to
+come out to her.
+
+While she waited, she could see Steering at the pen-and-ink desk,
+loitering there, one arm on the desk, watching the thin stream of
+people that went by him to the convex glass-and-pine booth where the
+post-office boxes were. The men from the Canaan stores, a lonely drummer
+from the hotel, some belated farmers and several Canaan young ladies
+passed Steering, the young ladies seeming not to see him, but, in some
+subtly feminine way, making it impossible for Steering not to see
+them--their glowing young faces, their enormous hats, the way their
+gowns didn't fit, the slip-shod carriage of their bodies, all the
+differences between them and the only other real western girl he knew.
+None of the people went out of the post-office at once, all idling at
+the door for a few minutes. From time to time there was quite a little
+crush at the door, so that Steering did not see Miss Madeira until her
+messenger reached him. Then he ran out to her quickly.
+
+"I shan't get down," she told him, speaking in a lower tone than the
+listening Canaanites approved of. "I was hoping that I might find you
+here. Get on your horse and let's go to the woods. Wouldn't you like to?
+The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her
+prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped
+like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in
+a lyric tune:
+
+"Ah, what fortune! Just to be young and alive and off on the hills with
+you!" he said, and vaulted to his horse's back from the curb, so easily
+that even the Missourians who were candidly watching and listening,
+remarked, "Oh, well, it's because he's got some Missouri in him, that's
+why-for."
+
+Side by side, the horses moved down Main Street. At the bank Crittenton
+Madeira was standing at the plate-glass window. He had his thumbs in his
+trousers pockets, and he was rocking to and fro, shifting his weight
+from his heels to the balls of his feet peculiarly, as though seeking
+for balance. His eyes were moodily thoughtful, and he kept snapping at
+his lower lip with his big white teeth.
+
+"Why, God bless you, Steering!" he cried pleasantly, moving out to the
+curb as the horses came up, "I made a mistake in missing you at the
+house yesterday. Want to see you again, as soon as I can. What about
+to-night, young man? Going to get in home early, aren't you, Sally?"
+
+"Yes, Dad, early."
+
+"Well then, my boy, you just stop by the bank, when you get in from the
+hills, will you? I shan't leave the bank before eight o'clock. Shan't be
+home to supper, Honeyful."
+
+"All right, Mr. Madeira, I'll come," assented Steering; "look for me
+sometime before eight."
+
+"All right, my boy. So long, Honeyful."
+
+Again the horses moved off, side by side. Soon the town lay far behind
+the riders, who were following the shimmering Di around the blue hills.
+Where the road ran up the bluff into heavy timber they got into deep
+odorous silences, the silences of young unspoiled places; musical, too,
+somehow, over and beyond the stillness. Where the road came down to the
+bottom land along the river the silence shook with the river's silver
+mystery. No matter where the road ran, always off beyond them lay the
+hills, ridge upon ridge, beautiful, glorious.
+
+"Aren't they tremendous?" said the girl, "Aren't you glad they are
+almost yours?" A sense of possession was indeed mounting into a cry of
+rejoicing within Steering. He admitted it and then laughed at it.
+
+"It's the house of Grierson that should rejoice," he said longingly.
+
+"Wait until I bring you out above Salome Park," said the girl. "I, too,
+have some land up here that's worth while. From my land you can look
+straight across the country for miles, back again into your land."
+
+Sometimes, as they journeyed, they passed log cabins backed up against
+the long hills, or squatting close to the shining river. Sometimes, as
+they journeyed, the red bluffs beetled up above them, tall and frowning.
+Sometimes the trees, trailing long green veils, all but met across the
+Di below them. Once they passed a saw-mill, set and buzzing; once they
+had to wait in the woods while a string of cattle stampeded by; once
+they saw a man in a skiff far down the Di. He raised his hand and waved
+to them for loneliness' sake. He looked sick with loneliness.
+
+"You know your Missouri by heart," Steering commented admiringly, as she
+led him through bridle-paths and by short cuts with a fine woodsmanship.
+
+"Well, I ought to. The times that I have been over it, with Piney, a
+ragged Robin-goodfellow at my heels! This is the apple-jack country that
+we are in now. Did you know that? Apple-jack stands for our big red
+apples and for zinc. There's some of both down here, see!" She stopped
+him on a high spur in the ridge road and waved her riding whip toward
+the flats below, whose miles upon miles of apple trees made him wonder.
+"But wait for Salome Park," she insisted, and led him on.
+
+Riding along beside her, listening to her, forgetful of his
+complications, his hills billowing toward him, Steering grew intensely
+happy. Just to look at her was enough to make a man happy. Her black,
+semi-fitting riding-habit outlined her graces of form enchantingly, the
+admirable litheness of her broad deep chest, her firmly-knit back. In
+her vigour of well-shaped bone and sinew and muscle she constantly
+emphasised the unpoetic nuisance of superfluous flesh. Beneath her
+little black hat her burnished hair lay coiled in soft smooth masses low
+on her neck. The wonderful vitality that beat through her veins brought
+the red colour to her cheeks in delicate waves. In her sunny amber eyes
+the high lights danced far back, dazzlingly.
+
+"Now," she cried at last, "one more climb, and here we are at the
+summit! Fine, isn't it? That's Salome Park, all of it, as far as you can
+see, until you see the Tigmores curving around way off yonder to the
+west again. Ah, yes, I thought you would like it!"
+
+From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there
+spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces
+where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here
+and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in
+between.
+
+"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.
+
+"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you
+can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away
+off down there run the Kiamichi--you will have to take my word for it,
+you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the
+Territory come together, is off that way, too."
+
+The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting
+the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering,
+and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This
+is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"
+
+"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land
+upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell
+upon her.
+
+"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers,
+and pleading with them.
+
+"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even
+like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she
+was confidential, but a little remote.
+
+Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held
+his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he
+sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills
+outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the
+deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was
+hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had
+come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day
+by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or
+moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in
+him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally
+Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in
+him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him.
+To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her
+from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege.
+The force of his self-conflict took all the colour from his lips, all
+the light from his eyes. "My God! My God!" he cried, a short, sharp cry,
+that beat up the Tigmores and broke and splintered into the big
+loneliness futilely. Then he jerked his horse about abruptly. "We must
+go back now," he said.
+
+But the girl, who had been watching, turned her eyes from him and held
+her horse still for a short moment. The glory of the hills came on
+across the wide park to her and enfolded her, met in kind by the
+radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The
+joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous
+hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture
+of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large,
+impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had
+known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father.
+She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his
+face, his voice. And even while her heart filled and quivered with
+knowing it, some higher power of divination made her know, too, that he
+was caught between his love of her and his difficulty with her father in
+an inexplicable, soul-shaking way.
+
+When Steering, a few feet below her, turned again towards her, she
+looked finer, fairer, more immortally young and strong than he had ever
+seen her look. She rode down to him fearlessly and put her hand out.
+"Sometimes the thing to do is just to stand steady," she said, "isn't
+that it?"--bridging all the unspoken thought and feeling between them,
+understanding, helping.
+
+He clung to her hand, and its answering pressure was that of a
+comrade's, strong and reassuring. "Miss Madeira," he said, at last,
+simply, "things are so bad with me that if I don't stand steady and face
+them exactly as they come, not giving in an inch anywhere along the
+line, I shan't be able to stand at all."
+
+"Ah, but you will stand that way--steady," she said, and drew her hand
+from his, and led the way homeward. She had accepted her fate to wait
+and endure while he "faced things."
+
+They went back into the sunset together, almost silent. Far and wide
+rolled the hills in their flaunting glory, and, now and again, the
+girl's breath trembled and stung her,--that tidal sense of colour
+leaping and rioting within her, perhaps. Now and again the man's jaws
+set together more firmly. When they talked at all it was of little
+things.
+
+"Why didn't I ever meet you at Miss Gossamer's?" he asked once.
+
+"You were in Philadelphia when I was visiting Elsie, that was why.
+Neither you nor Mr. Carington were in New York that month. I remember
+that I got an idea that Elsie missed Mr. Carington, or you, or both. Mr.
+Carington was in love with her, wasn't he?"
+
+"Yes, he's always been in love with her, I think.--Do you like the
+East?" he asked again, not caring for the subject of Miss Gossamer.
+
+"To get an education in."
+
+"You are well educated," he said, as though making comparisons.
+
+In that matter of education, her selective abilities had been indeed
+good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and
+used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she
+was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich
+to have any separate use for the things of art and learning, she had
+seized upon and welded all her inclinations and accomplishments into an
+harmonious, delightful completeness as Woman. In the result, her
+education seemed to be one of the especial reasons that you liked her.
+
+"But as for that," said Steering, speaking his thought aloud, "reasons
+don't count. There are plenty of reasons, but one really never gets at
+the biggest reason of all."
+
+"You hardly expect me to understand that," she said, laughing frankly, a
+musical laugh that had in it the shaking, white flash of a rock-fluted
+hill-stream.
+
+"No, no! I don't expect you to understand that," he said.
+
+They went on through the deep, odorous wood, down close to the river's
+pale, shallow mystery again, and so back to the big gate at Madeira
+Place. There at the gate the girl put out her hand to him again.
+
+"Good-bye!" she said softly, "good-bye!"
+
+As he bent to kiss the hand his breath came hard. "It is not good-bye,"
+he said. "It shall not be. I swear it."
+
+Then he dashed on down the ridge road toward Canaan, to find Crittenton
+Madeira.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Ten_
+
+WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?
+
+
+That Monday was hard on Madeira. It was his normal mental habit to come
+to a conclusion instantly, and cut a way for it across other people's
+ideas and notions with the impetus and onslaught of a cannon-ball. That
+Monday his mentality was below--or above--normal. He kept telling
+himself that he was mixed. His desire to crush Steering, pick him up and
+crumple him and thrust him aside, stood before him constantly, like the
+picture of the physical thing. Up to the time that he had seen his
+daughter run out of the dining-room that morning, her face averted, the
+desire had been steadily taking on colour and size. But, with the girl's
+brave broken cry, there had come on to him an intolerable question. For
+a long time he would not let the question get into words, or in any way
+define itself within his brain. Still, all morning long, he recognised
+that the question and that desire of his to crush Steering were ranged
+before him in some sort of fierce competitive effort. A thousand times
+he wished that he had had the courage to ask Sally candidly just what
+she had meant, just where she stood with regard to Steering, but he knew
+that he could never have asked her. Good friends though he and his
+daughter were, there was between them the definite reserve that lies
+between all good friends in the sphere of the big things of life. He
+could not have asked her, and she could not have told him if he had
+asked her.
+
+He fretted through a busy morning in a terrible uncertainty. When Sally
+had come by the bank to tell him of her proposed ride with Steering, he
+had watched her with painful, anxious scrutiny. But the girl's control
+had become perfect by that hour, and Madeira had to go back into the
+bank with the uncertainty still thickly upon him. Pausing there in the
+bank at the plate-glass window for a reflectful moment, he came to a
+swift resolve. He saw that he could not afford to make any mistake. He
+resolved to give Steering another chance to get right on the company
+matter. When he had gone out to the curb to make an appointment for the
+evening with Steering, he had told himself that it was because the boy
+might as well have the chance as not have it, and, when he had gone
+back, he had known that, lie to himself about it as he might, it was
+because he was afraid for Sally Madeira, afraid that this Steering was
+about to mean something in her life, afraid that he, as the girl's
+father, might bring some unhappiness upon her.
+
+All the long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the
+torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it
+was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time
+pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping
+the time toward the evening's appointment with Steering. As he got it
+shaped he grew more peaceful. He was arranging things so that he could
+win out with Steering. Little by little he came to accept the winning
+out as an assured thing, and in accepting it his grievance against
+Steering lightened, finally appearing to him as an easy thing to dispose
+of. Even the letter in his pocket grew less scorching. Sometimes he
+forgot, for minutes together, that it was there. Upon the hypothesis
+that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting
+securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with
+which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all
+right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for
+you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.
+
+At six o'clock, still shaping the day toward the appointment with
+Steering, he took a great bevy of men, farmers, stockmen, storekeepers,
+to the Canaan Hotel for supper. Headed by Madeira,--who kept close to
+him a man named Salver, to whom he constantly referred as "our
+engineering friend from Joplin,"--the party stamped into the hotel
+dining-room. And though various members of the party were heavily
+booted, big, brawny, and in other ways cut out as assertive, it was much
+as though they were not there, so completely did Madeira fill the room.
+In the hotel office, after the supper had been disposed of, though every
+man had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, it seemed as though Madeira were
+really doing all the smoking, so insistently did the smoke wreaths twist
+about his big face, as the others edged nearer him and closed in upon
+him. On the outside, on the way back up town, the street seemed full of
+Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and
+scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug
+store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was
+definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that
+could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit.
+
+The superintendent of the Tigmore County schools, a long, lean man with
+a trick of covert sarcasm, happened to be in Canaan that day, and he
+cracked a joke about Madeira's "galley-gang," as the bevy of men swept
+past him on their way back to the bank. In Canaan almost any joke had a
+fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn
+repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the
+street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven
+o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears. At eight o'clock the
+superintendent was one of seven men who sat in conference with Madeira
+in the private office of the bank. That was Madeira's way. Besides
+Salver, the Joplin man, and the superintendent, there were at the
+conference Larriman, a man who counted his acres by the thousands in
+We-all Prairie; Heinkel, the German sheep-raiser from the southern part
+of the county; Shelby, from the cotton lands of the Upper Bottom;
+Pegram, the Canaan postmaster, and Quin Beasley, from the Grange store.
+
+They were all still there when Steering came in. Fresh from the hills,
+young, alert, deep-lunged, brown-faced, Steering was a good sort to look
+at as he strode into the room. He had ridden on into Canaan to the tune
+of high, purposeful music, after parting with Sally Madeira. His
+experience with her out there on the hills, his profounder impression of
+her fineness, had acted upon him like unbearably sweet harmonies,
+urgent, inspirational. He was this minute keen for something to do,
+something hard, earnest, momentous. If the whole truth were told, he
+wanted to fight.
+
+Madeira got up and shook hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily
+because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's
+consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated
+him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both
+vigorous, both determined, there was yet a fine line of distinction
+between them. On one side of the line stood the younger man with his
+ideals. On the other side stood Madeira, without any ideals.
+
+"Come in, Steering, my boy!" In spite of himself, in spite of the "my
+boy," Madeira's voice rang harshly. "Lord love us, we are having a
+little preliminary meeting here. You know all these gentlemen, I think?
+I'm just reading to them some matter that I have got ready. I'll go on
+reading, if you don't mind. Sit down over there and listen."
+
+And, Steering, shaking hands with the men nearest him, and bowing to the
+men farthest from him, sat down and listened.
+
+As Madeira resumed his chair at his desk, he seemed to brace himself
+toward some sort of finality. His voice, when he spoke, was ominously
+quiet for a noisy man's voice. "Here's something about the country in
+general," he began slowly, dispassionately, "that I think might interest
+a fellow who is considering coming down here either to mine or to farm.
+See what you think of this: 'It was in 1874 that the first carload of
+zinc ore went up to the zinc works in Illinois. That was the beginning.
+Heretofore Missouri had been supposed to be agricultural only, but here
+was a new Missouri, whose wheat and corn and fruit wealth was found to
+be supplemented by a mineral wealth of mammoth greatness. Settlers who
+wanted to mine began to come in, towns to spring up, and capital to be
+invested. The country was developed with lightning-like speed. From the
+Joplin stretch as a nucleus, lines of development have been steadily
+projected since 1874 to this day. There are not a great many undeveloped
+big acreages of land left in any of the southern Missouri counties. Of
+the few that remain by far the largest and most promising is the country
+known as the Tigmore Stretch. A remarkable feature of this region,
+besides its great agricultural possibilities, is that the surface
+exposure in the hillsides shows distinct mineral-bearing horizons, beds
+of zinc carbonates, whose promise of zinc sulphide at a greater depth is
+absolutely reliable. That it needs only deep shafting and drilling to
+unearth more remarkable riches than even Missouri herself has as yet
+yielded up, is evident from the outcrops'--by the way, gentleman,"
+Madeira here interrupted himself to say, still in his quiet,
+dispassionate tone, "Salver has spent a good many days in the hills
+lately, and he has decided that the deeper-seated sulphides are just as
+surely in the hills as are the carbonates. He has done a lot of
+verifying. Aint that right, Salver?"
+
+Salver shuffled his feet and said yes, that was right, and Madeira read
+again from his notes, picking out bits here and there, and beginning
+each time, "Now take this. See what you think of this," his voice
+staying monotonously even.
+
+"'But, besides the zinc and lead and iron and coal, Missouri's
+well-improved farms invite the intending settler.'" (Steering thought of
+the lean hill farms as he listened.) "'There is an abundance of timber,
+in itself a great saving to the house-builder, and there are innumerable
+streams and water-courses and lakes. The altitude is over one thousand
+feet above the sea-level, and the climate is the healthiest in the
+United States. Both mining and farming can be carried on the year
+round.' ... And now, lastly, about this form letter that I have drafted
+for intending investors--it runs like this: 'Dear Mr. So-and-So,' (I
+mean to have the name filled in in each one, I want it to be a personal
+letter) 'May I ask you to examine the status of our Canaan Mining and
+Development Company, as set forth briefly in the enclosed pamphlet. A
+careful reading will convince you that we are organised for legitimate
+business and development, rather than for speculation. From personal
+knowledge, I am able to vouch for all the representations made by the
+Company. There are a half hundred Tigmore County men already in the
+Company'--which will, of course, be the fact when the letter is sent,"
+explained Madeira. "'If you are not already one of them, I should like
+for you to be. I think you know my record in this part of the country,
+as well as the record of the enterprises for which I have stood sponsor,
+and I am confident that when you begin to feel interested in the mining
+developments through this section, you will investigate the Canaan
+Company before investing with the other companies that are sure to
+spring up like mushrooms in our track.' ... And then, this: 'The chief
+working properties of the Canaan Company, the Tigmores, can without
+doubt be made to pay from one hundred to five hundred per cent, on any
+investment within the first year. The Canaan Company will not have to
+depend upon shallow sheets of mineral against dead rock, as do many of
+the speculative enterprises of the mining section. The Canaan Company
+will not cut blind. It knows its field, it knows its chances, it knows
+its future'--and so on, and so on--how do you think it goes, boys?"
+
+They thought it went rapidly, and they said so with loud endorsement.
+
+"Well, I decided I'd get the thing moving here at home first,"
+elaborated Madeira; "when all's said and done, a fellow likes to see his
+own place and people profit by what's going on. I'm going to send that
+letter out first to the Tigmore County people, and then move out in
+wider circles later. Shouldn't you think that was the way to work it
+out?"
+
+Yes, they thought that was the way. Indeed, the way seemed such a good
+one, and the work was evidently to be so carefully, so conscientiously
+performed that, to Steering, as he had listened, the crying shame of it
+all had been not that it wasn't true,--it might be true, there was no
+telling,--but that Madeira, its promoter, didn't care a rap whether it
+was true or not. Or, after all, was he, Steering, wrong about that? Had
+Madeira changed about? Been himself convinced that the actual prospects
+were so good that it was senseless not to depend upon them, without any
+of the wings that his fancy might give them? Had the thing become with
+Madeira, during these more recent days, something larger, something
+legitimate? All the other men were taking Madeira's attitude seriously.
+They showed that they were by the emotionalism, effusive, admiring, with
+which they hung upon Madeira for a few last words, by their blind
+dependence, their awe. When the séance broke up finally, they strayed
+away from him haltingly, like lost sheep.
+
+The impression of Madeira upon the men, as he let them out of the door,
+was so profound that it came on to Steering with the value of a
+reflection. He felt himself growing a little hopeful that the thing
+really was to be right and straight, as he watched Madeira turn from the
+door.
+
+For his part, Madeira came back toward his desk with a peculiar
+revulsion of feeling upon him. This effort of his to bring Steering
+around by strategy was galling him. He resented that any such effort
+should ever have been saddled upon him. He considered that from the
+start Steering should have been with him. Most fiercely of all he
+resented that he, Crittenton Madeira, should have let himself get into
+the position of trying to mollify Steering. "By God!" he was saying to
+himself with a convulsive anger, "Me to have to mollify! By God! Me!"
+Then the thought of Sally came back to him, goading him and confusing
+him. On a sudden impulse of candour he cried out to Steering, as he came
+on to his desk.
+
+"Steering! God love you, why do you want trouble between you and me?
+Don't you see that I have this thing here under my thumb? Don't you see
+that you mustn't go against me, my boy? Here's your chance back again.
+I'm handing it out to you. Stand by me. You won't be sorry. All my plans
+are made now. I have once or twice in my life thought the thing to do
+down here was to stir up a furore over some of the lakes and the springs
+and the scenery and make a health resort out of the region, but I have
+settled away from that now, settled straight at zinc. But Lord bless
+you! zinc or no zinc we can't fail to make a pile of money out of this.
+Why do you want to be a fool and hold back from me when I'm willing to
+pull you along? You ought to see by now that you can't do anything
+without me, or go against me. 'Tisn't everybody I'm willing to pull
+along, Steering. Why, boy, from the start, I've treated you on the
+square, let you know me on the inside--let--and, here and now, I'm still
+willing to pull you along, if you'll come along!--eh, what?"
+
+With Madeira's words, matching Madeira's excitement, blazing furiously
+and whitely, out leaped the slower, stronger fire of the younger man's
+personality.
+
+"See here!" shouted Steering, "twice now I've done my best to hope that
+somehow, somewhere you were going to throw me one line of commercial
+honesty and decency. I haven't asked you to measure up to very high
+standards, I'd have been satisfied with damned little; I've waited on
+you and hoped for you and let you try to bull-doze me, but by God! I'm
+done. You hear, I'm done!" He got up and the lean strength of his
+determination and the long reach of his body were all-powerful. "Don't
+you try this game with me again, Mr. Madeira! Don't you ever try any
+game with me again--No! Keep back! Not that either!"
+
+Madeira had gone crazy for the time. Possessed only by that desire to
+crush the thing that opposed him, he lifted his big clenched fists
+straight up over his head and came at Steering, fiery-eyed, perfervid
+with relish of the moment when he could close down on his enemy and make
+an end of him. He panted as he came, and as he came the veins in his
+temples stood out, purple and knotted. A little line of froth lay upon
+his lower lip.
+
+"Eh, God! You!--Wait there!--You!--You!----"
+
+Steering, with the old prowess that had made the boys on the gridiron
+stand aside and howl for him, reached up and brought Madeira's arms down
+with a circling, sweeping blow, then caught the bulky, staggering body
+and thrashed it into a chair, forgetful that it was Madeira, forgetful
+of Sally Madeira, forgetful of everything for one red instant save a
+savage masculine joy in his own strength.
+
+Then he took out a cigar and lit it, and his mental readjustment
+followed quickly. "Mr. Madeira," he said, puffing slowly at the cigar,
+the match's yellow light on his face showing that he was pale, "I am
+sorry that you made me do that, sir. Still, I must add this to what I've
+said,--don't, please, ever try to pull me along with you again. I guess
+I'm going in a different direction. This leaves everything settled
+between us. Our paths aren't apt to cross again. You aren't hurt, I
+hope? There is nothing that I can do for you?"
+
+Madeira made no answer. He was sitting, a wooden figure, in front of his
+desk where Steering had thrashed him down. His temples were still
+purplish, but the crazy light was no longer in his eyes. They were dull
+and fishy. Steering had gone to the office door, then the bank door had
+clanked to behind him before Madeira moved. He began working his fingers
+then, watching them questioningly, stupidly. They felt stiff and numb.
+Suddenly he leaned forward exhausted. His head rolled on the desk.
+"Sally?" he whimpered, in a furtive, scared way, "Sally?"
+
+Then, all in a moment, he jumped to his feet, clutching at the pocket
+that held the Grierson letter, while words came from his mouth in
+vehement staccato yelps:
+
+"Eh, God! He'll go against me, will he? Wait. I'll show him. Who's got
+the Tigmores? Answer me that now? Who's got the Tigmores?" Off beyond
+his window tumbled the long Tigmore line. He crossed the room, all his
+strength back with him, and looked out upon the high black hills. "Eh,
+God!" he shouted, and beat at his chest where the letter lay, "Dead men
+tell no tales! _I've got the Tigmores!_"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Eleven_
+
+TALL THINGS
+
+
+One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of
+tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the
+trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black
+tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes
+darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were
+aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his
+voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back
+with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers
+interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed
+swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a
+frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and
+cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and
+there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over
+the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the
+whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's
+tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses
+what colour vibrations are to the eye.
+
+The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the
+burden of the reading:
+
+"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first
+love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional
+philosophy,--namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited
+individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence,
+and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the
+man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care,
+"'and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition?--a
+sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more
+commonly called passional affinity.'--I have a notion that that may mean
+something or other, Piney?"
+
+"Don't ast me."
+
+The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally
+explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something
+differentiating the beloved from all other women,--something
+corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent,
+but suddenly lighted and defined,'--an inherited ideal--something
+differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader
+earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long
+silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp,
+suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal
+that he was.
+
+"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"
+
+"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence
+remained unbroken for another long period.
+
+"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass
+in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,--I
+couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike
+f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen
+happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn
+notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds
+the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"
+
+"There ought not to be, Piney, son."
+
+"Well, but they gen'ly is, hmh?" Bruce straightened out one foot with an
+impatient kick. Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted
+talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort
+of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light,
+fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to
+Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly
+skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held
+transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's memory for Bruce. Three
+hypotheses had presented to Bruce in the way of explanation: one, that
+he himself was possessed by a little embarrassed consciousness that he
+should have had any past at all in view of the present; another, that
+Miss Sally Madeira had just possibly set Piney on to worry him about
+Miss Gossamer; and the last, that Piney, divining that a man could
+hardly reach Bruce's age without some pages of romance behind him, was
+forever, out of his own perspicacity, trying to make Bruce re-read those
+pages, so that this new page, that had been turned under the hand of
+Sally Madeira, might not be written.
+
+"Piney," Bruce answered at last regretfully, "it's a pagan world. Men
+make mistakes. I think it's largely because they want so much to love
+that they love somebody, anybody, till the right person comes along."
+
+"Should think they 'ud wait," demurred Piney stubbornly.
+
+"Well, n--o, that's the notion of a man who has met the right person
+exactly in the beginning; or it's a woman's notion; but it isn't the
+notion of a man who, with a sense for beauty and sweetness, waits, like
+a harp for its music, out in the open where beauty and sweetness beat
+down upon him. Out in the open a man gets blind. Lord!" went on
+Steering, remembering Miss Gossamer again, and trying to explain her to
+himself, "how can a man help loving prettiness! That's what a man loves
+often and always, Piney, prettiness, grace, vivacity--and then once in
+his life he loves a woman--Hah!" cried Steering, as though he had at
+last got the best of Miss Gossamer, "that's it--that sounds good."
+
+"Well, d'you think," went on Piney, jerking his spear of grass
+viciously, "d'you think that a man cand fall in love with a lady rat
+off, just knowin' her a few weeks?" This was one of Piney's ways of
+manifesting the jealousy that disquieted him, slurring covertly, and
+with his lips flickering peculiarly, at Steering's brief acquaintance
+with Miss Madeira. He was always showing in innumerable ways the hold
+that Bruce had taken upon his young affections, but he could not help
+showing, too, the sore spot of his valuation of Steering's regard for
+Miss Madeira. Though they mentioned Miss Madeira between them only
+casually, Bruce knew for himself that Piney, in his crude but vehement
+way, was living through a boy's own high tragedy of love for a woman
+older than he and beyond his reach, and Piney knew for himself that
+Steering, in the most perfect flower of his capacity, had attained his
+destiny as a perfect lover, under circumstances most unpropitious. The
+fact that the woman who was the object of the boy's enraptured fancy had
+levied royal tribute upon the man's love in the same purple-mannered
+fashion brought boy and man close. Tacitly they recognised that the bond
+between them was strong enough to bear the weight of Piney's jealousy,
+and, both watching, they allowed the boy to depend from it, swing on it
+and strain it just enough to make both conscious that the bond was
+there.
+
+"You know what I think, Piney," said Steering after a long wait, in
+which he had been busy remembering the fulness of one moment in the Bank
+of Canaan. "I think that if she is the right woman a man can fall in
+love in one minute. And I think that if she is the right woman all
+eternity will not give him time to fall out of love with her and no sort
+of hell of bad situations will ever be wide enough to keep his thoughts
+away from her." Steering spoke with a well-ordered restraint, but a
+sense of the combination of situations that he himself had come into
+lent a ringing, protesting resonance to his voice, and Piney forgot to
+be jealous and flashed him a long, keen look of delight. Steering
+realised that he sometimes put into words the things that Piney yearned
+toward and dreamed, but could not express; and he also realised, from
+the added satisfaction that he got out of his words because of Piney's
+satisfaction in them, that Piney sometimes enlivened and enriched his
+own emotions for him. Their romancing made boy and man delicately
+complementary to each other. Steering had taken Piney's love for the
+girl who was beyond him as a fine and simple thing, and, taken in that
+way, it played up to Bruce's love with the rich imageries and colours of
+youth, and made Bruce younger, quicker for it. Piney, on his side, had a
+keen, shy consciousness of immaturity and inexperience that made him
+attend upon Bruce's outbursts of passion as upon an illumination of what
+this thing of man's love could be and should be at its biggest and best.
+
+"That's just exactly the truth," maintained Steering earnestly. It was
+remarkable how earnest he could be on this line of opinion. Miss Elsie
+Gossamer would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed
+with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long
+time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each
+other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very
+reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower
+face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on
+your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him.
+Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled about
+restlessly and considered.
+
+From where he and Piney were they could hear the sound of a steam-drill,
+thud-thud-thudding into the heart of a distant knob of the Canaan
+Tigmores. That notion of Carington's and his about getting into the
+hills had undeniably balled up into the veriest nonsense under the
+pressure of Crittenton Madeira's control of the Tigmores. Steering
+pounded on the ground with one fist and clenched his hands tightly about
+his knees. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst.
+There was also by now the bitterest sort of animosity toward him on
+Madeira's part. Old Bernique, who was very fond of Miss Madeira and
+loathed her father, had commented to Steering upon that being Madeira's
+way with everyone who promised to be too much for him to handle--bah! it
+made Steering angry to consider that Madeira should ever have tried to
+"handle" him. He loosed the clench of his hands about his knees and
+jumped to his feet. That was not the worst, and he might as well face
+the worst. Naturally enough the daughter had had to go with the father.
+That ride across the sunset glory of the Tigmores had been good-bye
+after all. It had been two weeks since he had stood with her on the spur
+above Salome Park, and he had seen her twice since; once at the
+post-office, where she had said, "Good-morning, Mr. Steering"; once on
+Main Street in front of her father's bank, where she had said,
+"Good-evening, Mr. Steering."
+
+But for all these things, he was not done with Missouri yet. Even now he
+was waiting for old Bernique. When Bernique should come they would be
+off again on a long prospect. Bernique and he had been in the hills for
+two weeks, skirting the Grierson entail, picking, digging, sniffing for
+ore by day, sleeping long sleeps on forest leaves, heaped and aromatic,
+by night. He had that day ridden into Canaan for some clean clothes, and
+was beating back toward Old Bernique now, having picked up Piney down
+the river road.
+
+"Well, Piney, son," Steering invaded the rush of his own thoughts
+ruthlessly, "I expect I ought to be toddling. Going to ride part of the
+way with me? I think we shall fall in with Uncle Bernique up-stream a
+mile or so."
+
+"Why, yes," assented Piney, rising; he made a keen calculation of the
+time by the sun, as he got to his feet; "I'll go a-ways with you. I'd
+like to see Unc' Bernique--aint seen him simlike fer a long time."
+
+Their horses were tethered in a little glade below them and they went
+into the glade as they talked. "We like Uncle Bernique, don't we,
+Piney?" suggested Steering, relishing Piney's reference to the old
+Frenchman.
+
+"Best old man in the world," answered Piney, with the soft, sweet
+shyness, like a girl's, that was always in his voice when he let his
+affections find expression.
+
+Before this Steering had heard, from old Bernique himself, the short
+story that had connected the affections of the tramp-boy and the
+wandering prospector. Piney, Old Bernique had said, was the child of a
+woman whom he had known in St. Louis in the old days. Old Bernique, who
+was only middle-aged Bernique then, had lived as a neighbour to the
+woman, whom he had loved very much. But the woman had married another
+man, and had gone away to the Southwest. And, later on, Old Bernique had
+followed. And in these later days, since the woman's death, it had been
+given him to keep watch and ward over her child, Piney. Piney's parents
+had not been Italians at all, so Old Bernique told Steering, just plain,
+everyday Americans, from up "at that St. Louis," quite poor and always
+on the move. The father had been known throughout the country-side as a
+"blame' good fiddler" and the mother had been, oh a vair' wonderful
+woman, if one could believe Old Bernique. But there was no Italian blood
+in Piney. His feeling for Italy had to be explained in another way. It
+was the great sweet note of poetry, music and beauty, of that far
+country, vibrating across the years and the miles, taken up as a memory
+in the Missouri hills by Old Bernique and, through him, reaching a
+Missouri boy's heart, all tuned and pitched for it. That was all there
+was to Piney's story. It was only a fragment.
+
+Reaching their horses in the glade, Steering and Piney mounted and
+started up the river road. "Can't you come with us for the rest of the
+week, son?" asked Bruce, as they journeyed.
+
+"Nope. Goin' trampin' by myse'f." It was Piney's habit to disappear for
+days, gipsy that he was. Perhaps the habit was growing upon him a little
+of late. He had no abiding place; sometimes he referred to one hill
+shanty, sometimes to another, as home; but the home-feeling with him was
+at its fullest and strongest when he was "trampin'." Ostensibly his
+vocation was that of a travelling farm-hand, but it was all ostentation.
+Piney would not work. Not while the pony could carry him from hospitable
+farm-house to hospitable farm-house. He was a knight of the saddle, the
+uncrowned king of the woods, and Bruce, riding along beside him now,
+regarding him, enjoying him, would not have exchanged comradeship with
+the boy's simple, high-tuned relish of life for comradeship with kings.
+
+"Miss Madeira is going to Europe, I hear, Piney," adventured Steering.
+
+"Yass." Piney said nothing more for some time. He looked very
+thoughtful. "Y'see," he went on after a bit, "I'm a-thinkin' abaout
+ridin' off--some'ere--over the Ridge,--bein' gone fer a long time."
+
+"Oh, Lord!" groaned Steering. He very well knew what was taking Piney
+away. It was hard on him that the boy's plan for absence should pile up
+on Sally Madeira's plan, but he could understand that it would be harder
+on the boy to stay in the Tigmores with the inspiration of the Tigmores
+hushed and gone.
+
+"Not thinking of going to Italy yet, Piney?" It had come to be an
+accepted joke with them, that penchant of Piney's for Italy. The boy was
+willing to laugh about it, but his eyes always sobered dreamily in the
+end, and invariably he wound up with, "but I'm a-goin', all righty, an'
+don't you fergit it." He did now. "But y'see, whilst I'm a-waitin' I git
+kinda tired the hills, Mist' Steerin'," he complained, trying to explain
+how it was with him without telling anything. "Lots er times I go off
+an' don't come back fer a long time." Not till Miss Madeira comes home,
+Bruce added out of his own intuition. "Git sorta tired the hills,"
+repeated Piney stubbornly.
+
+"Do they stop talking to you, the hills and the woods and the quiet?"
+
+"Yass, they do, sometimes, when I'm pestered--not as I pester much," he
+laughed and broke off suddenly in his laughter, with a little sobbing
+shake in his breath, and passed on ahead of Steering, who looked away
+from him up the bridle road that cut into the Canaan Tigmores.
+
+"There comes Uncle Bernique!" cried Steering then, glad of a chance to
+divert Piney. Gazing toward Bernique welcomingly, he was diverted
+himself. The old man made no answer to the shouts that Piney and
+Steering sent out to him. He peered straight toward them, through them,
+his eyes dry and brilliant. He seemed hardly able to sit on his horse,
+because of a sort of enervating restlessness; he paid no attention
+whatever to his bridle; both of his hands were in the pockets of the
+tattered old coat that covered his body.
+
+"Hi there, Pard!" hallooed Piney, with a boy's rich assurance that
+recognises neither class nor age.
+
+"Found!" the old man tried to speak, but made a dry, clicking sound
+instead. He took his hands from his pockets and held up in each hand a
+lump of mineral earth. As he came toward them in that way, both hands
+upheld, the wild fever light in his eyes, his thin body electrified with
+a strange new vitality, to Steering, who saw all at once what it meant,
+his movement was that of the last full strain of the miner's epic.
+"Found! Found!" he repeated, as though the sound was blessed, and he
+held up the rocks, as though the sight was heaven. When they reached
+him, trembling by now themselves, they had to help him from his horse
+and quiet and rest him by the roadside before he could tell his tale.
+Waiting nervously, Bruce took the nuggets and regarded them; beautiful
+specimens, one stratum opaque, and seaming on to that stratum another,
+reddish and glinting, like the spiked fire of gold; and on that stratum
+another, grey and silver-faceted.
+
+"Pretty splendid," cried Steering, and sat down suddenly and weakly. It
+was not to be forgotten that Old Bernique had emerged from the
+bridle-path in the Canaan Tigmores.
+
+"When did you make the find, Uncle Bernique?" he asked hoarsely.
+
+"Thees minute," control was coming back to the old man, he raised his
+head from Piney's shoulder and leaned toward Bruce--"only thees minute!
+And for twenty year I have known that it must be here, the ore, lead and
+zinc, in the gr-r-eat quantity! For twenty year! And just thees minute
+have I found it!" At the wailing sound of time lost, life lost, in
+Bernique's voice, long lines of ghostly, bent-backed miners, with
+ghostly, unavailing picks and shovels, seemed to defile down the
+bridle-path from the Canaan Tigmores in historic illustration, conjured
+up by the hypnosis of the old man's words.
+
+"The troub' has been," went on Bernique feverishly, "that we have not
+looked for the ore in that place where the ore is----"
+
+"That's always the troub'," muttered Piney. He had got his composure
+back and he seemed now rather good-naturedly contemptuous. Piney's was
+not a nature to accommodate itself to the exaltation of an ore find.
+
+"The mother lode runs through the Canaan Tigmores," went on Bernique
+hurriedly, "of that I am now convince', but it comes to the surface,--it
+comes to the surface,--ah, God above! I expire with it,--let us go to
+Choke Gulch, and I will show you where it comes to the surface!"
+
+He was insistent, his breath had come back to him, and they let him have
+his way, following him up the bridle-path into the long shadow of the
+Canaan Tigmores. On the top of the first bluff they tied their horses
+again and took a foot trail where the bluff, having rolled back a mile
+from the river, tumbled precipitately into a deep yawning gully. From
+the timbered eminence the prospect below was as dank and gloomy as a
+paleolithic fern forest. Sodden, mossy, and almost impenetrable, the
+hill split and dropped into Choke Gulch. From far down within the black
+and tangled fastnesses came the solemn ripple of slow-running water. A
+veil of weird loneliness hung over the cavernous place and the air that
+shivered up to the three was cool and laden with damp, sweet odours. Old
+Bernique began to descend. As they proceeded, the old man's sense of
+something stupendous impressed itself more and more upon his companions.
+Farther on down, the solemn quiet of the Gulch became unbearable, but no
+one spoke. Little sunlight penetrated the dense curtain of brown and
+red leaves overhead, and what little flickered through had an electric
+brightness against the dead brown of the leaf-carpeted ground and the
+grey and hoary tree-trunks. Every bird that came to the tree-tops sang
+once, but it was only when he discovered his mistake, lifted his wings
+and careened away gladly into the upper light.
+
+"Whayee!" Piney found a shivering voice at last, "ef I never git rich
+till I come down into an ugly hole fer riches I'll be mighty pore all my
+days." Bruce smiled absently at the boy's susceptibility, but threw a
+reassuring arm about his shoulder. He smiled again when presently Piney
+drew away. That was Piney's habit, as affectionate in instinct as a
+kitten, and as timid of manifestation as a wild doe.
+
+Old Bernique called his little party to a halt at the bottommost dip of
+the Gulch, where a deep, clear and rock-bound spring wound murmurously
+over a rocky bed. Two red spots came out in the old man's cheeks, his
+eyes began fairly to flame again, his breath came in wheezy gasps, and
+his old face pinched up sharp and sensitive as a pointer's nose. He
+pointed to the débris of shattered rock about the spring. "The wataire
+fell over a cap-rock here," he said brusquely, the nervous constriction
+of his throat making it hard for him to say anything. "The strata
+underneath were soft and had been worn away by the wataire. I put a
+duck-nest of dynamite in there this morning,--and--see--there!"
+
+Anybody could see; the zinc and lead ores were disseminated, rich and
+warm, in the loose rocks of the out-cropping. "It's a vein thirty inches
+thick and it runs,--it runs str-r-aight through the Canaan
+Tigmores,--sometimes sinking many feet from the surface,--but always
+there,--I am vair' sure of that,--str-r-aight through the Canaan
+Tigmores----" The old man's breath began to jerk with a sick, sobbing
+sound.
+
+"Well,"--Steering was not so unaccustomed a miner by now but what the
+sight there in the Gulch had its effect upon him,--"Well," he said
+gingerly, "if you are right, Uncle Bernique, if the face doesn't cut
+blind, why, Mr. Crittenton Madeira and old Grierson have a good thing,
+haven't they?"
+
+"Urg-h-h!" Old Bernique made a gnashing sound and leaned his head
+listeningly. The thud of the stream-drill reached them faintly from its
+place afar in the Canaan Tigmores. "They come fas'!" he said mournfully.
+
+"Wisht I wuz aouter this," interrupted Piney, shivering.
+
+"I have been track' thees mother lode,"--began old Bernique again, his
+feverish gaze again seeking out Bruce,--"I think,"--he stopped and fell
+to musing,--"What you gawn do, Mistaire Steering," he queried suddenly,
+with his weary old head twisted to one side, "what you gawn do about
+thees?"
+
+"Lord, Uncle Bernique, I can't do anything. You might do something for
+yourself. You might sell your rights of discovery, might not you?"
+
+"Non! Non! There is othaire thing,--there is a most good
+possibilitee,--thees mother lode, Mistaire Steering, it come out,--I
+think it come out somewhere, eh?--Mistaire Steering, have you got leetle
+mawney?"
+
+"That's exactly how much, Uncle Bernique, a little."
+
+"Mistaire Steering, eef you got leetle mawney to buy leetle land, I
+think I know good land to buy."
+
+"I have told you all along to consider my money your money, Uncle
+Bernique."
+
+"We must be vair' quiet about all thees, Mistaire Steering,--Piney, you
+compr-r-ehend that we tr-r-us' you, as I have always tr-r-us' you,
+absolutement! We must be vair' quiet. Thees leetle piece land run down
+close to the rivaire, below Poetical, at those Sowfoot Crossing, and eet
+ees not vair' good land for the farming----"
+
+Thud! Thud! The old man caught his temples with both hands. "I am 'most
+craze' by that steam-drill," he whispered. "Eet come so close to our
+secret. Let us get away. That sound cr-r-aze me. Found! Found! Vair'
+large lode, Mistaire Steering.--Sacré! The sound of that steam-drill is
+to me the most worse thing. That lode run through and come out by the
+rivaire, eef I am not mistake', Mistaire Steering. I go to buy that land
+to-night. You go back with Piney, please sair. Eef you come with me, you
+excite the question and the price. To me it will be sold without
+question. I am eccentrique, they say. You return to Canaan and have
+your mawney ready for me, Mistaire Steering. That bat Grierson, Mistaire
+Steering! When I think----"
+
+Old Bernique was still throwing out riches of castigation at Grierson,
+Madeira, himself, fate, still half incoherent, when the three friends at
+last got back to their horses, and separated. Down at the foot of the
+bluff again, Steering, a little sore-headed with the ache of
+anticipation, hope, doubt, sat his horse in Piney's company and watched
+the old man ride off up the river unattended. Steering felt excited and
+exalted himself, but the old Frenchman was really, as he said, "craze'."
+Piney was the only sensible one left. Piney was not at all enthused and
+stayed very quiet until he parted with Bruce some distance out from
+Canaan. Bruce went on back to town to wait for Old Bernique at the
+hotel.
+
+Piney took the path that led up to the bluff behind Madeira Place. As he
+came through the Madeira grounds Crittenton Madeira came out of the
+house and stood on the back porch, regarding him quizzically. Piney had
+a peculiar, poorly hidden dislike of Madeira that, taken with the boy's
+charm of personality, more or less amused the Canaan capitalist.
+
+"Where have you been, young man?"
+
+"In the woods."
+
+"Look here, learning anything when you are out with that man Steering?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+"What, for instance?"
+
+"Not to talk."
+
+Madeira laughed carelessly. "You go and get Miss Madeira to sing, young
+Impudence," he said. "I'd just as soon hear the tenor, too. I am going
+to rest,"--he sighed deeply,--"I'm going to try to rest out here in the
+garden. I'd like some music."
+
+Madeira went to the garden and stretched out on a bench, the smile that
+he had given Piney staying on his face, crinkling in automatically with
+the grievous strain that was about his eyes and mouth in these days.
+After a little he closed his eyes softly, enjoyingly. From the library
+came the carolling sweetness of Piney's tenor. And by and by, following
+it, soaring up with it, the glorious fulness of Salome Madeira's velvety
+soprano.
+
+Bruce, far down the river road, heard, too.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Twelve_
+
+THE COLOSSUS OF CANAAN
+
+
+After Crittenton Madeira had organised the Canaan Mining and Development
+Company the _Canaan Call_ sent him in one leaping, exultant paragraph
+out of his position as "our esteemed fellow townsman" into a position of
+far more classic significance by naming him the "Colossus of Canaan."
+Madeira was a man of lightning-like execution of a plan, once he had got
+hold of his plan, and Bruce Steering, sharpened by circumstances into a
+consideration of every chance about him and even beyond him, had brought
+Madeira the plan from far away New York. Throwing his immense energies
+toward the prospect of ore in the Canaan Tigmores, bringing forward
+every dollar of his fortunes,--as usual not so large as they were
+accredited with being,--to finance his new projects, Madeira had
+accomplished wonders within an incredibly short time. There were those,
+unacquainted with the contents of an envelope in Madeira's vest pocket,
+who marvelled that a sharp man should let his projects be entangled with
+entailed property, but for the most part Canaanites were too accustomed
+to follow where Madeira led to marvel, or to ask foolish questions. Even
+for those so inclined Madeira had good answers. On the one side, he
+could show, from the progress already made, that there must be such a
+great quantity of ore in the Canaan Tigmores that it would be possible
+to take fortunes out of them during old Grierson's possession of the
+hills, even though the old man lived but a few years. On the other side
+he could show that it was not in the Canaan Tigmores alone that he was
+pushing the search for ore, but in the outlying land that had passed
+into his control as well. It was true that he had put a steam-drill into
+the Canaan Tigmores, but it was equally true that he had put
+steam-drills up the Di at two or three points far beyond the Tigmores.
+He made it as plain as day that the operations of the Canaan Mining and
+Development Company would extend all over that section, and that the
+Company's chances could not be taken away even by the death of
+Grierson. And he made it equally and cheerfully plain that Grierson
+would not die.
+
+Out on the streets of Canaan, among the puppets who danced at his touch
+upon the strings, Madeira never faltered in his exposition of the
+Company's affairs and enterprises, and in the Company's offices behind
+the Bank of Canaan, his direction was steady, resourceful and
+comforting. He could build up potential profits for the investing
+Canaanites and build down potential failure in a manner so satisfying
+that the Canaanites gladly gave him their money and fondly hung upon
+him.
+
+It was Mr. Quin Beasley, that conclusive reasoner, who said, "Simlike ef
+you talk to Crit fer abaout th'ee bats of your eye he cand show you that
+ef innybody,--don't keer who,--would putt, wall say,--wall, don't keer
+haow much you say,--as much as tin thousand,--in the Comp'ny an' leave
+it slumber fer say--wall, don't keer haow long you say,--as much as fo',
+five months,--it 'ud be wuth,--be wuth,--wall, I don't keer to
+over-fetch, but I reckin f'm whut Crit says, th'aint no tellin' whut it
+_would_ be wuth."
+
+And it was the _Canaan Call_ that endorsed Mr. Madeira in that emphatic
+editorial, which is herewith reproduced, just as it was doled out
+relentlessly to the few Canaan sulkers, under the caption of
+
+
+                     "IT WILL BE DRAMATIC, BY GOSH!
+
+     "When Crit Madeira, the Colossus of Canaan, accomplishes what he
+     surely shall accomplish, when the roar of mill machinery begins to
+     reverberate through the hills of the future Joplin, arousing the
+     vast energies and resources of We-all, Pewee and Big Wheat, let us
+     be generous. If there was a sponge, kicker, shirk or drone, let us
+     cover his selfishness with the mantle of charity. Leave him under
+     the beating light of progress to wrestle with whatever remnant of a
+     conscience he may happen to have. If he can stand by and coolly
+     watch us work our gizzards out for the common good, and then reach
+     out to share the fruits of our sacrifices, energies and enterprise,
+     without a qualm, we can remember that there are many things in this
+     world worth far more than money, one of which is that sense of
+     having done our neighbour's share as well as our own. It will be
+     enough for us to watch when, bewildered by the lusty life and
+     growth and the maze of new-made streets of the future city, the
+     laggard stands debating with that other self, that genius that has
+     kept him what he is. Fancy his striking attitude, thumbs in
+     arm-pits and eyes rolling up to some tall spire, crying out to his
+     other self, 'Thou canst not say I helped do this! Shake not thy
+     towseled locks at me!'--By gosh, it will be dramatic!"[2]
+
+
+Within a month after Bruce Steering had entered the portals of Missouri,
+Madeira had put his first steam-drill into the hills. Within two more
+weeks he had put in another. It took him less time to do the things that
+other men think about and talk about and put off than any man Steering
+had ever known. One day, not so very long after old Bernique's find in
+Choke Gulch, word had gone over Canaan like an eagle's scream that ore
+had been struck in the Canaan Tigmores. Old Bernique had wrung his
+hands, and Steering had gone grimly back to a little up-river shack, at
+Redbud, below Sowfoot Crossing, where he was spending a great deal of
+his time these later days.
+
+As the winter broke, Madeira's ability to seize the pivotal point on
+which to turn theory into practice wrought so surely and so swiftly as
+to be inexplicable to anyone unaware of the fever that drove him on. His
+first face of ore had cut blind, but he only put two more drills to
+work, and in the early spring one of the drills struck ore again, a
+small face, but ore. They had not found the big lode yet, but every
+indication was that much to the good. The _Canaan Call_ became so
+jubilant over the second find that even the sulkers lost sight of the
+fact that the find was on entailed property. Confidence in Madeira went
+to high pitch, a supreme tension that a touch might snap.
+
+All Canaan was waking up in these days, all Tigmore County was nervous.
+Town and county were in a pleased, tortured, ante-boom consciousness
+that, first thing you know, there would be a new Canaan. Some new
+streets were laid out; a number of people bought chenille portières; and
+though Crittenton Madeira quietly drew his money out of the Grange, for
+other and weightier uses, the Grange secured new capital elsewhere and
+flourished mightily. For farmers from We-all Prairie and Pewee and Big
+Wheat Valley, cotton raisers from the "Upper Bottom" and corn and cattle
+men from the "Lower Bottom" came into Canaan "to trade," and filled the
+aisles of the Grange, gossiping, getting information about the ore
+developments, then crossing swiftly and determinedly to Madeira's bank
+to leave their money with the president of the Canaan Mining and
+Development Company.
+
+Out at his house, in his office, in the garden, on horseback, on foot,
+Madeira kept his daughter Sally near him. He watched his daughter almost
+constantly, just for the satisfaction of seeing her. As the girl went
+about her household duties, or walked in the garden with her long,
+supple stride, or rode the high-tempered horses from the stable, or
+drove with him, the fine glow on her face, her magnificent health and
+honesty and strength radiating from her, she was, for Madeira, a
+continual justification.
+
+"Catch me taking anything away from a girl like that to give it to a
+damn Yankee like Steering," he would tell himself over and over. "Won't
+she do the most good with it? It'll be hers soon. Won't she do the most
+good? Answer me that, now."
+
+So much for the outside where Madeira lived in the world of realities
+and met the various demands of each day's relations capably and coolly.
+Inside his private office behind the bank, at his desk, he lived in
+another world, a world where shadow became substance, possibility became
+actuality and fear made facts out of fancy.
+
+At night, after Canaan had put its lights out and had lapsed into the
+shroud-like stillness of a country town's sleep, Madeira was there, with
+his ghost, in his office,--figuring, figuring. On the roll-top of his
+desk he kept a letter spread out in front of him. It always happened
+that he took that letter out of his vest pocket for the purpose of
+destroying it, and it always happened that when he got up, far into the
+night, he picked the letter up and replaced it in his pocket. If the
+words of the letter had been seared across eternity with the red-hot
+iron of fate they could not have been more indestructible.
+
+Besides the letter, Madeira always had on the desk maps, geological
+surveys, time estimates. Von Moltke never figured half so carefully nor
+on half so many shaky hypotheses as did Madeira in his office during
+these nights. He came to know, through awful, blood-sweating hours, that
+with so much blasting, so much pick-and-shovel work, allowing for so
+many back-sets from water and blind rock, so many shifts of men could
+progress to certain points, in so many days. He sometimes realised that
+all this was unnecessary; that it was aging him and crazing him; that he
+could put his work through on the Tigmores long before word of old
+Grierson's death would, by any unfortuitous accident, leak into Canaan,
+if it ever got there; that he would never have to resort to the subways
+that he was figuring on to steal the ore out of the Canaan Tigmores;
+that all this ceaseless, merciless calculation was but the reaction of a
+conscience, stalking, gaunt and lunatic, through the charnel-house of
+its own experience. But for all that he had to go on crossing bridges
+that he was never to reach, covering black tracks that he was never to
+make. Often at his desk there, his mind became strangely obtunded and he
+babbled vapidly; his big face pinched up till it seemed lean and grey,
+and he pitched forward, face down, upon the desk.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] The author acknowledges a conspicuous indebtedness to a Southwestern
+weekly for this editorial.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Thirteen_
+
+MISS SALLY MADEIRA'S SWEETHEART
+
+
+Miss Sally Madeira, trying to make her way down Main Street one Saturday
+afternoon, in the early spring of the year 1900, had to go very slowly
+because of the country people in front of the Grange. Occasionally some
+of the farm-wives called to her shily. The road was noisy and dusty with
+the passing of mule-teams, buggies, buckboards, riders on horseback. Out
+of the continuous rattle a child's voice piped shrilly. The owner of the
+voice was a little girl who wore a hat with a bunch of cherries on it.
+She stood up in the bed of a farm-waggon and screamed at Miss Madeira,
+who at once made her way to the edge of the side-walk of broken bricks
+and waited for the little girl's waggon to come in to the curb. The
+waggon was full of children, but Miss Madeira was somehow able to call
+them all by name.
+
+"He gimme fifty cents!" was what the cherry-hat little girl said
+immediately, with some genius for steering conversation toward the
+things that interested her.
+
+"You rich thing!" cried Miss Madeira, and then foolishly, and
+unnecessarily, inquired, "who is he?"
+
+"Yo' sweetheart."
+
+Miss Madeira lowered her voice in such a suggestive manner that when the
+little girl spoke again her voice was lowered, too.
+
+"When did you see him?" asked Miss Madeira.
+
+"See him ev' day. I cand go daown to Sowfoot by myse'f. He's sick." Miss
+Madeira looked quickly at some of the older members of the family in the
+waggon. They were a hill farm family from Sowfoot Crossing
+neighbourhood. "Yep, he's been sick,--with the malary simlike," was what
+the older members had to say upon the subject. Miss Madeira quickly left
+the subject and talked about the corn crop and the price of chickens for
+a little while, then presently went on down Main Street toward her
+father's bank, where her black horses were hitched.
+
+Far down Main Street, in front of one of the frame houses that edged
+the street on either side, some children were enjoying a bonfire of dead
+leaves, front doors were opening and women were coming out to watch the
+fire; and, by their interest-lit eyes and by what they called to each
+other across the slumberous afternoon air, were showing that they were
+skilled in getting diversion out of smaller things than bonfires. It was
+the neighbourhood of Canaan's biggest and best. The doors that had
+opened had shown glimpses of the finest three-ply carpets in all Tigmore
+County, and though the women who had come out on the porches had
+grammatical peculiarities of their own, they were distinctly
+unapologetic and assured. You could easily imagine them laughing, with a
+consciousness of advantage, at the other grades of grammar and carpets
+in Canaan.
+
+"Smells real good, don't it?" called one who was comfortable and portly,
+and who had her apron wrapped about her hands, "always makes me feel
+that spring's came when the rakin' and burnin' begin."
+
+"Mrs. Pringle told me that they had some big fires aout toward the Ridge
+las' night. Burned the rakin' aout to Madeira Place. I missed that.
+D'you see it? I mighta seen it just as well's not from my back porch,
+tew!" shrilled another woman, in whose words a well-defined jealousy was
+patent, the jealousy of the person whose life is too small for her to
+afford to miss any of it.
+
+"Yes, you oughta saw it," chimed in another. "Cert'n'y was no
+little-small flame. I could see Sally movin' araoun' in the flare. Had
+that tramp-boy taggin' abaout with her. I declare, if he di'n' look like
+a gipsy!"
+
+The neighbourly throng was at this moment augmented by the appearance of
+two ladies who fluttered out on the porch of a rose-trellised cottage,
+like small, proud pouter pigeons. They were the Misses Marion,
+twin-sisters, quite inseparable, and, because their minds had run in
+exactly the same groove for all of their lives and because they were of
+about equal mental readiness, apt to get the same impression at exactly
+the same time, and apt to attempt expression in exactly the same breath.
+
+Occasionally this was trying, both to the Misses Marion and to their
+hearers, and it was particularly trying when the two now called
+simultaneously from the rose-embowered porch to the women in the
+neighbouring yards:
+
+"Have you heard----"
+
+"Have you heard----"
+
+Miss Shelley Marion turned to Miss Blair Marion with delicate courtesy:
+"Continue, sister," she said, just as Miss Blair said, "Sister,
+continue."
+
+"Have we heard what, for goodness' sake?" snapped one of the would-be
+hearers, breaking in rawly upon the soft waves of the hand and the
+imploring taps with which each of the two gentlewomen was endeavouring
+to make way for the other.
+
+"I continued last time, sister."
+
+"I think not, Blair; I think I did. Proceed."
+
+"Have you heard the news?" Miss Blair having yielded with great
+self-rebuke to Miss Shelley, the question gurgled liquidly from yard to
+yard, like a small twisting brook.
+
+The two women whose yards adjoined the Misses Marions' yard came down to
+the separating fences and leaned their arms on the paling rails
+waitingly; the third woman moved up to the corner of her yard which was
+nearest the Misses Marion. She was the woman who had deplored missing
+the hill fires, and there was a resolute look on her face.
+
+"Talk loud, Miss Blair," she said commandingly. But before Miss Blair
+could get her mouth open to talk at all there was the sound of horses'
+hoofs from up toward Court House Square, and a light vehicle, drawn by
+two powerful Kentucky blacks, rolled into view.
+
+"Lawk, it's Sally Madeira!" cried Miss Blair impulsively, and then
+looked immediately convicted, for Miss Shelley had got only as far as
+"Lawk!"
+
+When the slender equipage, with its spirited, long-tailed horses, and
+its high springy seat, with the erect young figure on it, had gone by,
+the women looked at each other, with pursed lips and knowing eyes.
+
+"There, aint I been sayin'," cried the fat one, "she's a-lookin'
+peaked!"
+
+Then somebody noticed that the Misses Marion were in the throes of
+another spasm of courtesy, and, reminded by that of the critical
+juncture where Miss Blair had left off a few minutes before, one of the
+women called to her:
+
+"What news was that, Miss Blair? Say, you! Miss Blair! What news?"
+
+"Why," said Miss Blair, having finally effected some sort of
+affectionate compromise with Miss Shelley, "why, these news,--they say
+that that N'York man _is_ Sally Madeira's sweetheart, tew!"
+
+"Lan' alive! I've heard that m'self!" said Mrs. Beasley, the wife of the
+Grange storekeeper. She had heard no such thing, but Mrs. Beasley was an
+idealist of no mean order, and she at once got a feeling about the
+matter that was little short of knowledge, and went on with headlong
+impetus, "I've heard that m'self. Yes, he's her sweetheart."
+
+"The men up to the Grange said not, at first."
+
+"Men never know."
+
+
+Meantime, out beyond the town, Miss Madeira had circled around to the
+river road, and, coming up behind Madeira Place, passed it at a smart
+clip.
+
+Farther along, the river road left the river to bend through Poetical on
+its little plateau, and the gait at which Miss Madeira went through
+Poetical was disturbing to the geese and hogs there. East of Poetical
+she got back to the river. It was very still along the Di. She could
+hear her own heart beating. Once it occurred to her that life would have
+been much simpler if she had gone to Europe the past fall, as Miss Elsie
+Gossamer had insisted upon her doing. Once she murmured, "It would be
+all right if he would only tell me,--I can't do anything until he tells
+me--what _can_ a woman do until he tells her!" On ahead of her she could
+see a little shack perched up the bluff, and in front of the shack, on a
+log that served for a bench, a man sat, making something out of
+something. His hands were busy.
+
+He got to his feet a little unsteadily as she came toward him. It seemed
+to him that there was a blue veil across his eyes, but he winked it away
+quickly enough, shook the ache out of his shoulders, put down the
+shoe-string that he was making out of a squirrel's skin, and stood in
+front of the shack waiting, with his hat in his hand. He had on a
+mud-stained corduroy hunting suit and big buckskin leggings, and there
+was a week's growth of beard on his face. He looked not unlike a highly
+civilised bear, and he felt his looks. She did not seem to see him until
+she was close upon him.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "I was not expecting to find you here," and when that
+sounded a little bald, added quickly, "I heard that you were sick and I
+thought it likely that you were up in Canaan."
+
+"Oh, no, I am not sick," he told her, hastening down to the trap, the
+delicious excitement that possessed him well restrained, "and since you
+have found me here, won't you get out and have some,--well, let me
+see,--some coffee and bacon? And I can make a lovely corn-dodger. Also I
+have some kind of good stuff in a can, though I can't get the can open.
+Do please stop and dine." Steering, sick, gaunt, gay, mocking at
+hardship, hope deferred and far-reaching disappointment, was at his
+best. Her eyes slipped away from his as he pressed his invitation. Then
+she laughed softly, with the little shake of her laughter when a notion
+appealed to her happily.
+
+"I'm going to accept," she said, "I'll cook things and you can eat
+them."
+
+"I'll make a sacred duty of my part," he promised gravely; he was
+lifting her from the buggy; her hands were on his shoulders; for a
+little delirious minute she was in his arms; he could not keep his hands
+from closing about her sweet body lingeringly as he lifted her; her eyes
+were looking into his, her face was coming down close to his; he had a
+wild fleeting hallucination that she----
+
+"Don't imagine," she began, and his senses came back to him and he set
+her down, "don't imagine that I can't cook. Where's your range?"
+
+He showed her a scooped-out place in the side of the bluff. "There are
+two bricks in the back, two on each side and two on the top," he
+explained with some pride.
+
+"I am afraid you have brought foolish habits of luxury out of the East
+with you," was her reply. She made him build her a fire and bring some
+water and meal and then she took things entirely out of his hands.
+
+"It's a picnic," she said. Her gown she had folded back and pinned up
+until a little tangle of silk and lace frou-froued beneath it
+bewilderingly; her sleeves she had rolled back until the creamy tan of
+her round slim arms showed to the elbow; her hat she had taken off, and
+the sun danced in the gold lustres of her hair. She was all aglow; she
+belonged out in the fresh air and the sunlight like this; she could
+stand it; that dusky-gold radiance played from her like a burnish.
+Steering sat down on the log bench and watched her, hypnotised by her
+into haunting fancies of something, somebody, somewhere. She was one of
+those beings whose rich magnetism of face and personality brings them
+close to you, not only for the present, but also for the past, one of
+those people who are apt to make you feel that you have known them
+before, forever, a feeling that flowers into elusive fragrances,
+suggestions, reminiscences, flown on the first stir of a thought to
+catch them.
+
+"What a long time since I even so much as saw you," he sighed happily,
+happy because here before him in the body again she was exactly the girl
+he remembered, exactly the girl he had dreamed of all winter. "What have
+you done all winter?" he asked.
+
+"Nursed Father. He has stayed at home with me a good deal. It was a
+lovely winter, wasn't it?"
+
+Steering thought of the long, quiet, lonely days, the weeks, the months
+during which he had seen her only to bow to her. Then he thought of the
+calendar inside his office. Every day that he had seen her on his rare
+trips up river to Canaan was marked with an imitation of the rising sun.
+There were only eight rising suns for the whole winter. Then he thought
+how the memory of those sun days had stayed with him and made him feel
+blessed. Then he answered, "Yes, it has been lovely,--nice, open
+weather. I have been out on the Di in a skiff almost every day." He did
+not add that every day his journey had been to the upper water near
+Madeira Place; but he might have.
+
+"Once or twice I have seen you." She did not add that she had stood at
+her window, behind a partly drawn blind, gazing after him through slow
+tears; but she might have. "What a very long time indeed since we saw
+each other,--and talked to each other!"
+
+"Oh, about two thousand years," he answered with careful calculation.
+
+"I wonder if you remember the ride across country into the sunset?"
+
+Should he ever forget it? Then the spring wind blew up to them from off
+the Di with a coolish, dampening touch. "What do you hear from Elsie?"
+he asked, heeding the wind's touch.
+
+"She is in love. What do you hear from Mr. Carington?"
+
+"That same. It seems very right and fit. Carington and Elsie are well
+mated. The wedding will happen in July. Carry wants me to come back to
+him for it."
+
+She was stirring the meal and water together briskly, with her back half
+turned to him. At his words she stopped in her work and put her hand up
+to her heart with her strange little pushing gesture, as though she must
+push her heart down. "And you will go, I suppose?"
+
+"No, I shan't go."
+
+She took her hand down and laughed lightly. He could not hear the joyful
+relief in the laugh, but she could. "My, but you have become attached to
+Redbud, haven't you? Hasn't it been lonely for you here?"
+
+"Well, the cherry hat little girl up above Sowfoot has been a comfort.
+And then I've studied a heap."
+
+"Studied what?"
+
+"Mizzourah!"
+
+"Redbud and Sowfoot are good teachers," she laughed; then her face
+sobered quickly, "but I don't think you should stay down here by the
+river when you are ill," she said. Her sweet, wistful interest was
+balsamic to him. For a moment he tried to look sicker than he was.
+
+"Oh, it's nothing, nothing," he protested in a gone voice.
+
+"Yes, it is something," she had the corn-dodgers going over a slow fire
+and was dubiously regarding a second skillet that he had brought her.
+"Don't you ever try water for it?" she interrupted herself to ask. He
+admitted that he was not as careful of the skillet as he should be, and
+she went back to her first anxiety, "Why do you stay here when you are
+ill?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not ill a bit, not really." He had forgotten to be ill.
+Regarding her dreamily from his bench he was wishing that the moment
+could be eternity, that he could be hungry forever and that forever she
+could make corn-dodgers for him.
+
+"I think you are sick. _Something_ is the matter with you?"
+
+"Yes," he changed his position a little on the bench, "something is the
+matter with me."
+
+"Well, why don't you go on and say what?" She put the skillet on some of
+the coals and the coffee-pot on the skillet, being too busy to look
+around at him.
+
+"Oh!"--he wanted to tell her, but his pride saved him in time. She was
+in rich in gold and land and cattle, in ore, too now; and he? He didn't
+know how he was going to fill his meal sack the next time it was empty.
+That was where matters had got with him. "I think I won't go on and say
+what, after all; let's not bother. Let's just be happy for the minute.
+That's something I have learned out here in Missouri, just to be happy
+when you get the chance, minute by minute, no matter what sort of hours
+are to come after. This, now, is so much more than I had hoped for. I
+hadn't really hoped to see you again before----"
+
+"Before what?"
+
+"Well, a fellow can't go on like this forever, can he? I expect I am
+going to cut all this."
+
+"_What!_ And leave Uncle Bernique?"
+
+"Uncle Bernique can hold the claim alone, you know. And I'm wasting hope
+and energy here. What's the use in staying longer?"
+
+She was very busy with the bacon now and he did not see her face. There
+was a wild quiver on it, of grief, fright, dismay.
+
+"You ought not to leave Uncle Bernique and Piney, I am sure of that,"
+she said at last earnestly, almost commandingly.
+
+"Heigh-ho! I think Bernique is getting restless, too. He will be
+drifting off soon on that tidal wave of ore fever that comes over him;
+Piney has been gone for a great while. It's pretty lonely. It's getting
+on my nerves. Of course I shouldn't pet my nerves if I had any hope
+about the run here, but I haven't. I think that the work we have carried
+on is fairly conclusive."
+
+"But wait a minute, didn't you buy this land? Didn't you put some money
+in it?"
+
+Steering laughed blithely. "Not much," he said. The thing that made him
+laugh was the fact that though it was not much it was all that he had,
+and it was, in a way, amusing to consider how he was to get away from
+Canaan. Looking at Sally Madeira, who suggested luxury nonchalantly,
+trouble about ways and means was bound to be untimely and laughable.
+Indeed, looking at Sally Madeira all troubles were more or less
+laughable.
+
+"You haven't gone to Europe?" he reminded her, after he had drunk her
+health in the coffee.
+
+"No! I haven't gone."
+
+"Are you going?"
+
+"Not unless Father's health improves."
+
+"Isn't he well?"
+
+"No," her face clouded sadly, "he is over-working. Oh, you don't know
+how sorry I am," she began, and faltered.
+
+"Sorry? for him?"
+
+"Yes. And for you. And for m-- and because things have come around like
+this."
+
+"Let's not be sorry just now," said Steering. "Won't you, please, talk
+about glad things now. It's so pleasant to have you here." Since she was
+unhappy, he took charge of her unhappiness, and would not be serious any
+longer about anything. When she brought him his corn-dodger on a
+shingle and more coffee in a tin dipper, he was foolish with happiness,
+kept his own spirits high and overcame every little disposition to
+seriousness on her part until their picnic had to come to an end, and
+she must be starting back down the river road.
+
+"Do you feel like doing something for me?" she asked, her hand in his,
+as she made ready to go.
+
+"Something? Everything."
+
+"Then wait just as long as you can, will you?"
+
+"Yes, I will, gladly, since you ask it, just as long as I can."
+Steering's voice sang as he answered.
+
+She would not let him accompany her on her homeward journey, but went on
+down the river road alone, and Steering returned to the shack, and
+carefully measured the amount left in his meal sack, and carefully
+counted the money in his wallet. There was just about enough in the sack
+to last ten days, flanked by the potatoes and the bacon, and there was
+so little in the wallet that any kind of emotion about it seemed a
+waste. Still, he did not appear to appreciate the extremity of the
+situation as yet. His face was all lit up and the sound of his own voice
+pleased him.
+
+"I will wait, just as long as I can," he repeated at the end of his
+calculations, "and I can till the meal gives out."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Fourteen_
+
+WHEN THE MEAL GAVE OUT
+
+
+Steering sat on his bunk in his shack with his elbows on his knees, his
+head in his hands, and his eyes upon an empty bag that hung from the
+bough of a weeping-willow tree. He had just written Carington to explain
+that it could not be said that he had conquered Missouri, and that he
+was leaving next day for Colorado to try his luck at gold on the Cripple
+Creek circuit. He had not explained to Carington that he would walk the
+greater part of the way. By some strange perversity of pride a man never
+does explain a thing of that kind to anybody, least of all to Carington,
+best friend and close sympathiser.
+
+Arrangements for his journey were about complete. Before he had left New
+York he had turned everything into ready cash that could be so turned,
+so that even when he first reached Missouri his personal effects had not
+made travel a burden to him. During the past weeks all the balance of
+his belongings that possessed any negotiability whatsoever had been
+turned into meal. And his meal sack was empty! By no sort of
+foreknowledge can a man accustomed to enough money for current
+expenses,--a goodly budget as recognised by the class of which Steering
+was an exemplar,--imagine, during his easy circumstances, how he would
+feel if ever things should so go against him that he would be left
+staring into an empty meal sack. Steering felt an awkward incompetence
+to realise the case now. He had looked at the sack at close range,
+patted it, as though to mollify its consequences to him, pooh-poohed it,
+taken it philosophically, taken it smilingly, but he had been all the
+time unable to get his eyes off it, even though he had finally carried
+it down to the river's edge and hung it upon the bough of the weeping
+willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at
+long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it,
+getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to
+stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what
+next and how next.
+
+He got up and went to the door of the shack and looked out. By and by
+it occurred to him that the case would be much worse if there were
+anyone besides himself concerned. All the vague fleeting sympathies that
+had ever been aroused within him by newspaper stories of starving
+families, the nearest he had ever come to the actuality of starving
+families, quivered and stirred within him. The first thing he knew, he
+was feeling infinitely relieved that he had no starving family. He had a
+sensitive and active imagination, and, as he pictured the hungry little
+children that he did not have, tears of gratitude came into his eyes,
+and he blew gay kisses to those airy little folks.
+
+It was glorious weather. Wild spring flowers were abundant, and there
+were cheerful whiskings among the trees where the birds and squirrels
+were busy again. The young shoots strained with the urge of the sap,
+making little popping noises. Steering started now and again and held
+his head waitingly. He had been watching and hoping for Piney for days,
+and was on the alert. Every noise, however, resolved itself into the
+noise of bird, squirrel, or sapling. There was never the voice nor the
+footfall of the human. Once that very afternoon, he had been so sure
+that he had heard Piney's pony up on the bluff that he had gone up there
+searchingly, joyfully. But except for a little scatter, that he took to
+be the lift of a covey of quail somewhere off in the Gulch bushes, not a
+sound or sign came up to the bluff. Steering mourned for Piney. If the
+tramp-boy had not gone away, things might have been more bearable. But
+the lad's jealousy and his love for Steering were in battle royal now,
+and Piney kept far from his hero, on the misty hills. Uncle Bernique was
+off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this
+present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless
+loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in
+dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have
+devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer. Up at Dade farm they kept
+telling him, when he went up there for one of his visits to the little
+girl with the cherries on her hat, that he had "malary." It did not seem
+to him a very able diagnosis, but, as he had admitted to Miss Madeira,
+something was the matter with him, and it had now become his notion that
+the quicker he got out of Missouri the quicker he would be cured of the
+something. He was all ready to commence his treatment; he had
+corn-dodgers for supper that night, and for breakfast next morning, and
+with the morning sun he meant to travel on. The only reason that he did
+not start now, this minute, was because--well, she had come up the river
+road about this hour once, and he was waiting. Circumstanced as he was
+now, with the only three people whom he could count as friends in
+Missouri almost always away from him, life had come to mean little but
+this feverish, alert waiting. He went out and sat down by the shivering
+Di for his very last wait for any of the three.
+
+It was there that old Bernique came upon him. Steering was shivering a
+little, too.
+
+"Dieu! You have the malaria!" was the Frenchman's greeting.
+
+"Go 'long, I have no such thing; I'm only as lonely as the devil."
+Steering got up and shook hands with the old man with so much energy
+that Bernique made a grimace of pain. "Come up here and talk," cried
+Steering, his eagerness to hear the sound of a human and friendly voice
+making him overlook the excitement under which Bernique laboured. He
+tied Bernique's horse to a bush and drew the old man up the bluff.
+"Where have you been this time? Where is Piney? Hello! what's the matter
+with you anyhow? struck another lode?"
+
+Old Bernique spread out his palms avertingly. "You go fas'," he
+protested. "Wait, I beg. I have again had those exper-r-ience that so
+much disturb me. But no, I have not found anothaire lode, though I have
+been on the hills vair' long time. Thees day I come a-r-round by the way
+of Canaan. At the pos'-office I am stop'." The old man was talking now
+with his eyes burning into Steering's eyes, an expression of horror
+flattening his face; he held the four fingers of one lean hand pressed
+to his mouth, so that his words came out inarticulate and broken, though
+they seemed to scorch his throat like balls of fire. "At the pos'-office
+one say to me, 'Here is lettaire for you!' I take the lettaire and
+read.... Now, I ask you, Mistaire Steering, to take it and read."
+Bernique drew forth a letter from his pocket and thrust it into
+Steering's hand with a finely dramatic gesture. He had the appreciation
+of his race for climax.
+
+The letter, Steering saw at once, was in the same gnarled handwriting as
+that letter which Crittenton Madeira had given him to read on the first
+day of his arrival in Canaan, and its contents made evident the same
+gnarled personality that had been made evident by that first letter.
+
+"Read it aloud," said Bernique, and Steering read:
+
+"'Deep Canyon, Colorado, September 23rd, 1899,' hey! what's the matter
+with the date, where's the slow-boy been?"
+
+"Read on, Mistaire Steering," said Bernique grimly. But Steering looked
+at the post-mark on the envelope in his hand before he read on.
+
+"Post-mark's dated April 23rd, 1900--why----"
+
+"Read on!" cried old Bernique. "It is explain'," and Steering read on.
+
+"'My dear Placide:--You and I were good friends in the days that we
+spent in prospecting over the Canaan hills, and, even though I incurred
+your displeasure when I abandoned the hills, I am depending upon the
+old friendship to influence you to do a last friendly act for me. It is
+not necessary for me to acquaint you with the detail of humiliations and
+persecutions to which I have been subjected by the man of whom I was
+once so foolish as to borrow money, any more than it is necessary for me
+to condone to you the desire that has developed within me to make him
+bite the dust, even as he has made me bite it. I am not remorseless in
+this. I gave him his chance to escape me, but, quite as I anticipated,
+he has fallen into the trap that I set for him; else would you not be
+reading this letter to-day, nearly a year after it was written.
+
+"'Look close now, friend Placide. Nearly a year prior to the date that
+you will get this, that is to say on the 23rd of last September, the
+same day that I write this letter to you, I wrote Crittenton Madeira
+that I should be dead when my letter reached him, dead under an assumed
+name, in a strange land. It was the God's truth. I was dead when the
+letter reached him. You are reading a letter from the dead now, friend
+Placide.'" Steering stopped for a moment with a little shiver, but
+Bernique urged him on, and he read again--"'Placide, in that letter to
+Madeira were my instructions to turn over the Canaan Tigmores to Bruce
+Steering, because, I being dead, the hills were due to pass on to my
+heir. Well, Placide, has Madeira done that? Has he carried out my
+instructions? Has he fulfilled his trust? Has Steering possession of the
+Canaan Tigmores?
+
+"'Like the thief that he is, Madeira has not done his part. Had he done
+it, you would not be reading this letter to-day. I wrote it and placed
+it with the clerk of Snow Mountain County, the county in which I died,
+to be mailed to you on the 23rd of April, 1900, only in case no inquiry
+had ever come from Madeira to verify my death. No inquiry has ever come!
+So the clerk of the county, who is my executor, mails this letter to
+you. This letter, Placide, is to attest that for seven months Crittenton
+Madeira has been in unlawful possession of the Canaan Tigmores,
+defrauding my heir and holding land under my name after being advised of
+my death and of the means of verifying the advice. There are now, in the
+keeping of the clerk of Snow Mountain County, two sealed envelopes, to
+be delivered by him, the one to you, the one to Crittenton Madeira.
+Madeira's has never been called for. See that yours is. In it you will
+find the credentials of my identity, my sworn statements, and the
+documents that prove my late encumbency of the entail. I am buried in
+the pauper's field in the cemetery of Deep Canyon. The stone slab that I
+have directed to be put over me bears the inscription, "James Gray, Died
+September 23, 1899."
+
+"'Get your proofs together, Placide, and carry them to the defrauded
+heir. I have not forgotten the letters that I received from him, nor his
+young eagerness to get at the land that is now his and that should have
+been his nearly a year ago. Put the proofs before him. And I pray that
+he may be quick and sure to deal out judgment and retribution. He is my
+kinsman. Let him for me, as well as for himself, wield the lash that I
+put in his hands.
+
+"'Do these things for me, friend Placide, and believe that even in the
+grave, I remain,
+
+             "'Very gratefully yours,
+
+                        "'BRUCE GRIERSON.'"
+
+
+The letter fell from Steering's hand and fluttered to the ground, while
+he sat with his hands hanging limply from his knees for a moment.
+"Grierson is dead! Grierson is dead!" he repeated. The funereal words
+rang through his ears like a grand Praise-God. He knew that he ought to
+be sorry and that he was inexpressibly glad, not because the grim old
+man was dead--dead, with his malevolence reaching out toward Madeira,
+spinning and twisting like a great cobweb snare from the grave--but
+because of what must now happen, because vistas of wonderful beauty were
+opening up through the long shadows of the Tigmores, because if the end
+had come to the house of Grierson, beginning had come to the house of
+Steering. Life, big, splendid, stretched out before him. Old Bernique
+had risen and was pacing the banks of the Di nervously. Steering, too,
+got to his feet. Going down to Bernique, he took the old man's hands in
+his. Neither heard a little rustle up the bluff in the leafy bushes.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Bernique!" said Steering, and stopped because of the wild
+sound of his own voice. He saw that it would be dangerous for him to
+try to talk with his mind in that high tremulous whirl. The old man
+clung to him, silent, too, for a teeming moment.
+
+"Now God above, why not Crit Madeira tell you that tr-r-ue way of
+things?" shouted Bernique at last fiercely. "Why not?"
+
+The two men looked into each other's eyes, Steering bearing up the old
+man, who clutched him feverishly. When the Frenchman began to talk again
+his teeth were chattering. "Why not? Hein? Because he t'ief. But God
+above! We got those proof! Dead for mont's. And Madeira know it! The
+Teegmores are yours for mont's, Mistaire Steering! And Madeira know it!
+We put that fine man where he belong. We jail him! He t'ief! We r-r-uin
+him, as he would r-r-uin you!"
+
+"Ruin him!" Bruce said the words over measuredly. "We can do it easily.
+Everything he has has gone into the company that is getting its chief
+encouragement out of the Tigmores. It will be easy to ruin him."
+
+"Yes, God above, it will be easy! We r-r-ruin him. We do that thing
+quick and glad." Bernique slid his lean hands up Steering's arms and
+held to him.
+
+"Wait! Wait!" The Frenchman's convulsive anger received a sudden check
+by the sound of Steering's voice. He clung more tightly to Steering's
+arms as he looked into Steering's face, then shrank back helplessly.
+
+"My God!" said the old man, "I forgot!"
+
+"Yes," answered Steering, no hesitation in his voice. "Yes, you forgot
+_her_. We must not do that, you know."
+
+After a while they sat down and talked it over at length from beginning
+to end, and then back again, from end to beginning. Up in the Tigmores
+Crit Madeira's drills beat and bore at the heart of the earth, deeper,
+deeper; by the Redbud shack, the two men, on the ground, bore into
+Madeira's trickery, deeper, deeper. By the light of that torch from the
+Rockies, they followed the twisting trail all the way from inception to
+finish. The tortuous, underhand curve of it now and then looked like the
+self-deceptive work of lunatic cunning. As they talked about it, they
+talked too earnestly for the little whisking movements in the growth up
+the bluff to reach their ears.
+
+"At least," cried old Bernique at last, "at least the Teegmores are
+yours! At last! At last!"
+
+At last! At last! Steering's eyes were travelling the long tumbling
+Tigmore line. "If they are," he said in that musing way he had developed
+within the last quarter of an hour, "if I take the Tigmores now, Uncle
+Bernique, I'll pull Madeira's house about him. That company of his is
+not so secure that it could stand a blow at its head. If I take the
+Tigmores,--Uncle Bernique, listen a minute," he was pleading, "she has
+been used to much all her life. I can't take her father's fortune away
+from him. Don't you see that? I can't do anything. You understand?" he
+was commanding. Bernique jumped to his feet.
+
+"God above, you mean----" The thought snapped in the old man's brain,
+the words stuck in his throat.
+
+"I mean that we must leave things as they are. I can't ruin her father.
+That's all I mean!"
+
+Bernique doubled up both fists. "I'll see him damn' before he shall
+keep those Teegmores! I can r-ruin him!" But Bruce caught the old man's
+arm in a grip that hurt. When Bernique spoke again it was to say
+breathlessly, "You take the Teegmores, Mistaire Steering, and protect
+Madeira's fortune. You can do that easy."
+
+"I know. It looks easy. But think back a little. Madeira is sure to
+fight. Grierson's death occurred months ago under an assumed name. To
+prove that he died we must prove when he died, where he died and who he
+was. To prove all that is to let the light in upon dark places. I hardly
+see how the light can be let in, Uncle Bernique, without cutting Madeira
+out sharp and keen as a rascal. Madeira would never allow,--at this
+juncture, he couldn't allow us to establish my claim to the Tigmores on
+my word and yours. He has done unwise, crazy things already. He would
+fight us. I know it, you know it. We could win. But where would our
+victory leave him, Uncle Bernique? Ah, you see?"
+
+The old man was shaking from head to foot. He clung close to Steering.
+"Oh, my God!" he moaned, "I will not let this thing be."
+
+"Yes, you will let it be! It is my affair even more than it is yours.
+You will do as I say about it, Uncle Bernique. Here and now, you shall
+swear this oath with me: I by my love for Sally Madeira, you by your
+love for Piney's young mother, that never, so help us God, shall one or
+the other of us carry word of these matters to anyone, least of all to
+Crittenton Madeira or his daughter Salome!"
+
+The old man's breath came gustily, his cheeks flamed, the hectic burned
+like fire in his shrivelled cheeks. He loosed his clinging hold and
+tried to shake Bruce off.
+
+"Swear," Bruce decreed again, his powerful grip on the old man, his eyes
+half shut, "I by my love for Sally Madeira, you by your love for Piney's
+young mother! Swear!" He held up his own right hand, and Bernique said
+brokenly:
+
+"God above, I swear!" The old man was crying. Neither heard the swish in
+the bluff growth, neither saw the brave light in the two eyes that
+peered through the bushes.
+
+"Why now, everything is all right," cried Bruce. "Are you going on into
+Canaan to-night, or shall you sleep here with me? I think that I shall
+take the skiff now and go up toward Madeira Place, then drift back
+down-stream, a sort of good-bye journey. What will you do meantime?"
+
+Old Bernique hardly knew. He was sore, bewildered. He thought he might
+spend the night on the hills, then again he might come back to the shack
+for the night. He wanted to go into Choke Gulch first thing.
+
+Bruce pushed away in the skiff through the swollen Di. Bernique got his
+horse and started off, climbing the yellow road up the bluff slowly,
+heading toward Choke Gulch. As he neared the top, he lifted his head and
+saw Piney and the pony outlined on the bald summit of the bluff. The boy
+made a trumpet of his hands and shouted to Bernique.
+
+"Hurry! For God's sake! So I cand talk to you!" Piney's was a reckless
+and impassioned young figure, cut out against the sky sharply, on a pony
+that danced like a dervish.
+
+The old man nodded, with a flash of pleasure at the sight of the boy,
+then let his head fall wearily upon his breast. He felt very powerless.
+When he reached Piney's side he put out his hand and held to the boy's
+hand as though he found its warmth and firmness sustaining.
+
+"Let's git into the timber," said Piney, and they rode forward a little
+way quite silent. "I don' want Mist' Steerin' to look back an' see me
+here," the boy explained. In the growth where the hills began to roll
+down toward Choke Gulch, Piney stopped short, with a detaining hand upon
+Bernique's bridle.
+
+"I hearn," he said. His young face was so grey and solemn that Bernique
+regarded him questioningly. "I was simlike half asleep up there in the
+bushes. Whend you begand to tell your story, I waked up an' I listened.
+I hearn all you said an' all he said. Ev'thing. Unc' Bernique, you
+cayn't tell nobody! Mist' Steerin', he cayn't tell nobody!--but Me!" the
+boy was breathing harder, his face was growing greyer, "Unc' Bernique,
+I'm f'm the hills, an' not like them," the blood began suddenly to come
+back to his lips; he raised in his stirrups and slashed at the branches
+of a black-jack tree with his riding switch, as though he cut a vow
+across the air, high up. "But what I can, I will!" he cried, and
+clenched his hands proudly. "Fer her an'--an' fer him!" he choked.
+Whatever he meant to do, his young passion for Salome Madeira and his
+young affection for Steering, his hero, leaped out on his face whitely.
+"She loves him, too, Unc' Bernique!" he cried in a final, broken
+crescendo.
+
+Old Bernique stared at the boy in exaltation. "God above!" he shouted,
+"if that is it, it begins to be hope in my old breast! All may come
+right yet, and no oaths broken!"
+
+"None broke!" cried Piney. "One more took! I'm a-ridin' saouth, to
+Madeira Place, Unc' Bernique;" he gathered up the reins from his pony's
+neck,--"I'm a-goin' to Miss Sally Madeira to tell her abaout Mist'
+Steerin';" he was blind with hot, young tears. "She'll do the rat thing
+whend she knows, Unc' Bernique;" he had put the pony about,--"I'll see
+you on the hills in the mornin'!" he was gone down the yellow road like
+a winged Mercury.
+
+On the hills behind him, Old Bernique, comprehending and envying,
+locked his hands on his saddle-horn in a vehement tension. His lips
+moved, and what he said seemed to float out after the flying figure of
+the boy like a benediction.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Fifteen_
+
+A MISTAKE SOMEWHERE
+
+
+The afternoon of that day was golden out at Madeira Place. Through the
+kitchen windows the sun streamed in, in broad, unfretted bands of light.
+Just beyond the window the crab-apple trees and the quince trees and the
+pear trees and the damson trees were rioting in blossom.
+
+The kitchen itself was a place to take comfort in. By a table sat fat
+black Chloe, seeding raisins, when she was not asleep. Before another
+table stood Sally Madeira, her brown, round arms bared to the elbow,
+flapping cake batter with a wooden paddle. With her sense of eternal
+fitness the girl was a fine housekeeper as easily as she was a sweet
+singer and a good horsewoman. She had kept the past beautifully intact
+in the old brick-floored room. Overhead hung strings of red peppers,
+streaks of scarlet on the heavy black rafters. Little white sacks of
+dried things, peas and beans and apples, depended from hooks. Against
+the walls were quaint old tin safes, their doors gone, their shelves
+covered with dark blue crockery. The tin and brass stuff shone brightly.
+On a low shelf stood a great piggin of water, a fat yellow drinking
+gourd sticking out of it. The whole picture was a kitchen pastel,
+delicately toned, a kitchen of the long ago, Sally Madeira fitting into
+it exquisitely, re-establishing the stately domesticity of an old régime
+by her fine adaptability and appreciation.
+
+Chloe brought the raisins over to Miss Madeira at last, and let them
+drop slowly into the crock, watching carefully for stray bits of stem.
+
+"Simlike nowadays ef he teef go agin a hardness spile he tas' fuh de
+cake," she said anxiously.
+
+"We do have to humour his poor appetite, don't we, Chloe? Never mind,
+he'll be better soon, I hope."
+
+"Whut madder wid he, Miss Sally, innyhow, Honey?"
+
+"Just overwork, I think, Chloe. Works all the time; in the office now,
+bent double over his desk."
+
+The darky shuffled restlessly on her flat feet. "Simlike to me he
+pester'd. I d'n know. Miss Sally, who else gwine eat dishyer cake
+tumorreh, Honey?"
+
+"I'm not expecting any company at all, Chloe. Father isn't really well
+enough to care to talk to people."
+
+"Miss Honey, simlike de house gittin' mighty lonesome nowadays. Taint
+like it uster be."
+
+"Do you feel it, Chloe? Do you know I've grown to like it better quiet."
+The girl's voice was wistful, she let the batter trickle recklessly
+while she gazed off out of the window. Then she sighed and began to beat
+the batter very hard.
+
+"Miss Honey-love?"
+
+"Yes, Chloe."
+
+"That tha' Mist' Steerin' aint ben come no mo' fuh gre't while, air he?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Samson he say he gwine ride down by Redbud this evenin'."
+
+"Well, Chloe, I'm sorry that I can't send an invitation to your
+favourite, but I'm afraid Father isn't well enough--oh, there's Piney,
+Chloe!"
+
+The boy had come up the bridle-path slowly, his mission weighting him
+and making him languid. At the latticed porch he jumped to the ground,
+turned the pony's nose into the grass and came into the kitchen.
+
+"Howdy, Miss Sally. Hi, Chloe. Cand I have a drink, please'm, Miss
+Sally?"
+
+He drank long and greedily from the gourd dipper, so long that Sally
+Madeira turned to him laughingly at last. "Well, Piney, son, got Texas
+fever?" she began, and then, being quick of wit, saw at once that the
+boy's pallor, his thirst, his absorption meant something especial. "I'm
+glad you came, Piney," she went on capably, and gave the batter paddle
+to Chloe. "I've been wanting to see you all day to have a little talk
+with you. Let's go out under the crab-apple tree."
+
+She took off the great apron and led the way from the kitchen, the boy
+following her with dragging feet. Under the crab-apple tree she drew him
+down upon a bench beside her. The orchard blooms shut them in close. The
+stillness was unbroken save for the warm sibilant droning of the insect
+life in the air. The shadows on the orchard grass were like lace-work.
+
+"Now, Piney, lad," began Miss Madeira at once, "what's the trouble?" Her
+voice sounded strong, maternal, to Piney, who had been wondering how he
+was to tell her, calling himself a fool for having undertaken to tell
+her, reminding himself that he couldn't for the life of him begin. Here,
+suddenly, the girl was making it easier for him, showing him that the
+way to begin was to begin.
+
+"I wouldn' tell you the trouble ef I could he'p it, Miss Sally," he said
+pleadingly, his hands shut about his knees, his eyes beseeching as a
+fawn's. "Ef they wuz inny way to make things come aout rat lessen I
+told, I wouldn' tell. But I don' see no way." It was easier to talk up
+to the thing and around the thing, than to get directly into it.
+
+"Is it your own trouble, Piney?" she asked, helping again.
+
+"No'm."
+
+"Whose trouble, Piney?"
+
+"Mist' Steerin's, Miss Sally."
+
+"Ah!" She leaned nearer Piney. "Tell me quickly, dearie," she said, "is
+he ill?"
+
+"Well'm, it's your trouble, too, Miss Sally."
+
+"Yes, surely, Piney, go on, go on!"
+
+"And your father's trouble, Miss Sally."
+
+"Something about the Tigmores, I suspect, then, Piney, go on."
+
+"Yes'm, abaout the hills." Then, fortunately for both, his youth made up
+in directness what it lacked in finesse. "It's this-a-way, Miss Sally,"
+he blurted savagely, "Ole Bruce Grierson is dead an' Mist' Steerin' owns
+the Tigmores."
+
+Her face shone with joy. "But, Piney, boy, where's the trouble in that?
+When did Mr. Grierson die? That's not trouble even for him, Piney. He
+was a weary old man. When did he die?"
+
+"Las' September, Miss Sally," answered the boy gravely.
+
+"Last September? _Last Septem_---- Why, where's the word been all this
+while, Piney? Why hasn't my father known?"
+
+"He--he has known, Miss Sally. Miss Sally, it was this-a-way, simlike:
+that ole man writtend Mist' Madeira he wuz goin' to die an' he tol'
+Mist' Madeira to give the hills to Mist' Steerin'. But I don't reckon
+your father believed ole Grierson, Miss Sally."
+
+The girl on the bench under the crab-apple tree was beginning to draw
+herself up proudly. "There is some mistake somewhere, I can see that,
+Piney, dear. Where did you learn all this?"
+
+"Wy, Miss Sally," cried the boy, a great, painful reluctance in his
+voice, "that old varmint Grierson writtend another letter to Unc'
+Bernique an' had a man hold it up an' not mail it till las' week. Then
+he lay daown an' died. An' here las' week the letter to Unc' Bernique
+was mailed, aouter ole Grierson's grave like--an' Unc Bernique he's jes
+got it, an' it tells him that ole Grierson died las' September an' that
+he writtend your father to say so."
+
+"I don't understand that, Piney. Mr. Grierson died last September and
+has written letters since he died, you are getting it all mixed, aren't
+you?"
+
+Very slowly and laboriously Piney told then what he knew, told it over
+and over until she had comprehended it, whether she believed it or not.
+When the boy had finished she was leaning back on the bench, dull and
+pale.
+
+"But it isn't true," she said, with white lips. "And Mr. Steering,
+Piney,--has Uncle Bernique told Mr. Steering this fantastic tale?"
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"And what did Mr. Steering say and do, Piney?"
+
+The memory of what Steering had said and done seemed to come on to Piney
+like an inspiration. "Miss Sally, he set his jaw an' he ketched Unc'
+Bernique by the arm an' helt him an' made him swear like this, 'You by
+your love for Piney's young mother, I by my love for Salome Madeira,
+that never, s'help us God, will you or I carry word of this to
+Crittenton Madeira and his daughter Salome'--sumpin like that, Miss
+Sally. I don' adzackly remember the words."
+
+The dulness had all gone out of her eyes, the colour beat back into her
+cheeks. She had forgotten Crittenton Madeira. "'I by my love for
+Salome'--are you sure, Piney?"
+
+"I'm sure, Miss Sally. An' so I thought as wuzn't nobody else to tell
+you, I'd tell you. I d'n know as I done rat," the boy's face was all
+a-quiver, too, as he looked up at the girl on the misty heights of her
+passion. His self-abnegation, his young heroism made him for the moment
+as finely luminous as she was. Sally Madeira took his head between her
+hands and gazed into his eyes tenderly, caressingly, and there was in
+her touch something large and sweet and tender that comforted and
+soothed the boy while it made his heart leap within him.
+
+"Ah, Darling," she said, "how bitter-sweet it is, this loving! But be
+patient. Some day it will all seem right." She took her hands away from
+him and stood up straightly.
+
+"I'm going in to my father now, Piney. There's a mistake somewhere. You
+wait for me here until I get it all explained. Wait here till I come
+back."
+
+She went off toward the house then, a fragrant shower of orchard
+blossoms falling upon her and shutting her away from the boy's eyes as
+she went.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Sixteen_
+
+MADEIRA'S PEACE
+
+
+Sally Madeira crept to the door of her father's study and listened. In
+the pallid light that was stealing up to her from Piney's story her face
+was shadowy, with hurtful doubt, ashamed fear, and she steadied herself
+by the wall with hands that shook. She had stopped to put on a white
+gown that her father loved and her lustrous hair lay banded closely, a
+halo, about her shapely head. Her face looked like a saint's.
+
+"It is not so much to save Bruce Steering's inheritance for him, it's to
+save my father for myself." Her lips moved stiffly as she whispered. "My
+old dream-father, my idol, I cannot live without him!" As she opened the
+door and passed in, she felt as though he had been away on a long
+journey and that this might be the hour of his return.
+
+Inside Madeira sat at his desk, Bruce Grierson's letter spread out
+before him, the ghost of his torture. At night he heard it move, with a
+spectral rustling, under his pillow where he kept it. By day it writhed,
+a small, hot thing, over his heart. He had tried again and again to
+destroy it. Everything else that had got in his way he had destroyed,
+but this he had not destroyed. He was trying to destroy it now, but he
+returned it to his pocket, unable to destroy it, ruled by it, when he
+raised his eyes and saw his daughter before him. She had not been
+without foresight even in her shame and sorrow. She had taken great
+pains to gown herself especially for him, especially to establish her
+influence over him. He held out his arms to her lovingly. In the
+sickness of soul and body now upon him he had turned more and more to
+her; she had to be with him almost constantly.
+
+"You look so sweet," he said. "You are sweetest like this. I love you
+like this." Despite the relief that came when with her, he talked
+nervously, his mouth jerking. His hands wandered to her head, and he
+held her face and peered at her. "Sally, I wish I was a girl like you,"
+he said, "girls look so peaceful. Business tangles a man,--just to have
+peace, Sally."
+
+"It will come Father, it will come. Father, Piney rode in from the hills
+just now, and he brought me news."
+
+He could feel the tremor of her lithe body against his breast, and he
+moved quickly and uneasily, suspecting danger. His dreams had so long
+been terror-fraught that he was all nerves and suspicion. "News of what,
+Sally?" The whitest, deadest voice, for so simple a question; on his
+face the most awful strain! She drew back on his knee and looked at him
+steadily, lovingly, and his eyes dropped and his hands began to drum on
+the chair-arm.
+
+"Father," she said, "Piney has heard a long story. He was hid on the
+bluff-side, up at Redbud, and he heard a letter read at the shack there,
+a dead man's letter."
+
+"A dead--oh, God bless you--wait--Sally, did that move? eh, what
+foolishness is this, a dead man's letter? What dead man? eh? what dead
+man?"
+
+"Bruce Grierson, father."
+
+"They lie! They lie! Let them prove it!"
+
+"Ah, that was what I told Piney, Father! I knew, I knew that you could
+explain it. And you can now, and you will, Father?" She was really
+beseeching him to rise up against her and the accusation against him,
+rise up in a great storm of indignation; she was praying that he would
+do that, expecting that he would, so firm were her convictions of his
+nobility. She drew back a little, to give him room, as it were; her
+hands fell upon his knee, and she leaned from him the better to see him,
+her face aglow with her fierce hope, her big belief, while she waited
+for that storm, that outraged denial, that tremendous vindication. And
+while she waited, erect, hopeful, eager, he shrank in upon himself;
+crumpled and wrinkled in upon himself until he looked weazened and
+small.
+
+"Let them prove it, let them," a whining mumble.
+
+"They will not, Father." She was leaning toward him again, her face
+quiet as the first frightened dawn of a grey morning; her voice was
+beaten and sad, but she went on dauntlessly. "The letter was to Uncle
+Bernique, Father. And Bruce Steering read it. And though it told him
+that he was the owner of the Tigmores, he and Uncle Bernique will not
+prove it." For a moment she paused, and then, with some new purpose on
+her face, she began again, "There was an oath to make all sure that they
+would not prove it. Listen, Father, these were the words of the oath:
+'Swear, I by my love for Salome Madeira, you by your love for Piney's
+young mother, that never, so help us God, shall one or the other of us
+carry word of this thing to anyone, least of all to Crittenton Madeira
+and his daughter, Salome!'"
+
+"Ah-h-h!" The words of the oath seemed to bring Madeira his first brief
+respite in a long torture. The girl shivered at such relief, then went
+on resolutely:
+
+"So now you see, Father, everything is safe. I have come to let you know
+that everything is safe, that you need not be troubled, sleeping or
+waking, any more about this thing. You may keep the Tigmores as long as
+you will," the light of her eyes beat upon him like a rain of pure gold,
+"you may be as rich as you like, Father. Mr. Steering is to leave here;
+you need never be dispossessed during your lifetime. It is all safe and
+sure. Uncle Bernique will not tell, Mr. Steering will not tell, Piney
+will not tell, I shall make no sign." The tragic strength of her
+endeavour to make him see that it was all with him; to leave it all to
+him; if so be that the better part were to be chosen, to make him choose
+it for himself; re-establish himself in so much as was possible for her
+loving regard, was in the hot clasp of the young hand that she laid upon
+him, the sweet earnestness of the face that leaned toward him. It was a
+strange fight, a battle of vast forces. He began to shake like an aspen
+leaf, but his eyes lifted to hers presently, to drink from them as from
+a fountain of life. His lips moved.
+
+"Just to have peace," he gasped hoarsely, "take that letter--take it
+from my pocket--send it to Steering."
+
+"Father!" It was the cry of victory well won. "Father! I am so glad!"
+over and over again. "All my life, Father, I have expected the good
+thing to happen because of you, the right thing, I am so glad!"
+Laughing, crying, she kissed him, took the letter and stole to the door.
+"Piney shall be its bearer," she cried as she went, "Piney shall take
+it; he will say the very best that there is to say!"
+
+She ran out, and the door swung quickly behind her, so that she did not
+see that he put his hand over his empty pocket and held his heart with a
+great relief; then pitched forward suddenly, his head on the desk, a
+look of late-come, profound peace on his face.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Seventeen_
+
+JUST A BOY
+
+
+It was not quite dark when Piney left Miss Sally Madeira in the garden
+back of Madeira Place, the Grierson letter in the inside band of his
+hat. The pretty spring day had closed in grey and sullen, and a high
+wind tore through the bluffs. Up in Canaan people were going anxiously
+to their windows, and trying to decide what was about to happen out
+there in that whirl of dust and wind and high-spattering rain. Down at
+Madeira Place it was grey, windy, and damp, but the rain had not come on
+yet. Piney went down the bridle-path from the Madeira grounds and out
+into the river road at a gallop, and the pony sped on like mad toward
+the little shack down stream at Redbud. All the way Piney kept a watch
+on the Di, which was sucking and booming. Long before he reached Redbud
+the boy had begun to hope that Steering had not put through his evening
+programme to that last number of going back to Redbud by water, after
+the haunting visit to the waters about Madeira Place. The river seemed
+very black and restless with the long urge of the spring rains within
+her. Now and again, he called loudly, prompted by some fear, he knew not
+what:
+
+"Steerin'! Steerin'! Steerin'!"
+
+He reached Redbud by and by, to find no Steering, only the little empty
+shack. The lean bunks, swaddled roughly in their bedding, looked
+strangely deserted. Piney sat down on Steering's bunk for a moment to
+take breath. Once his hand patted the covers, and once he stooped down
+and clung to the pillow.
+
+"Oh, may God bless you! For I love him, my dear Piney! Bless you, for I
+love him, my dear Piney!" he kept saying over and over, with an
+hysterical quaver in his voice, his lips pale and moving constantly.
+"Oh, may God bless you, for I love him, my dear Piney!" It was what
+Salome Madeira had said to him when he had left her, a white, angelic
+figure, swaying a little toward him, there in the garden back of Madeira
+Place. "Oh, may God--for I love him!"
+
+The odour of Bruce's cigars hung about the shack. Piney jumped up
+suddenly and went down close to the Di to wait and think. At Redbud the
+river seemed fiercer than farther up-stream. One of the two skiffs that
+rocked there usually was there now, swashing up and down in the current,
+but the other was gone. There was a strong eddy in front of Redbud. The
+bar, Singing Sand, and the Deerlick Rocks choked up the bed of the river
+and made the water dash vehemently through a narrow channel. Logs went
+by and branches of trees. Piney paced the bank in a rising fever of
+impatience, calling, calling; but for a long time his call was without
+avail, the wind roared so defeatingly in the trees. Close into Deerlick
+Rocks drifted a great fleet of logs.
+
+"Mist' Steerin'! Mist' Steerin'!" The sweet tenor broke again and again,
+but again and again Piney pitched a vast effort into it. And, at last,
+an answer:
+
+"Halloo! That you, Uncle Bernique? I've been----" The voice was
+wind-blown, and slipped weakly away.
+
+"It's ME! Where are you?" No answer. "Where are you? Hi! Is that you by
+the bar? Lif' your han' above the drif'-wood! Cayn't you lif' your
+han'?"
+
+A hand shot up from the back of a log that was well hidden by other
+flotsam, then fell back weakly. "Ay, here I am! Dead-beat, Piney----" A
+long roar of wind shut off the rest.
+
+"Hold to your log. I'm a-comin'! comin'! comin'!" The tenor rang and
+rang across the water as Piney loosed the skiff from its moorings, took
+up the oars, and pushed out into the Di. With the force in that whirl of
+black water he realised that there was danger; the skiff trembled and
+leaped as though some wrathful Ægir caught and shook it. It was well for
+Steering that Piney was strong, with the strength of the hills and the
+woods and the quiet.
+
+As he went on some sort of revulsion seized Piney. He stopped calling
+and began to mutter blackly. "Wisht you'd draown! Wisht you uz dead!
+Wish-to-hell, you never needa been!"
+
+The log, with its one lamed passenger was drifting slowly in toward
+Singing Sand, and Piney came on, hard after it. When he reached it at
+last, Steering was quite speechless, but, with the boy's help,
+scrambled into the skiff, where he slipped like water to the bottom, the
+fight back being altogether Piney's.
+
+When Steering could talk at all, he gasped out how it had happened. He
+had gone much farther up than Madeira Place, and had not put his boat
+about until two hours before; and then only because a great many logs
+were coming down, and he decided that he did not want to be caught among
+them when night should drop. He had got along all right until a log
+smashed into his skiff and overturned him. He thought he must have
+struck his head as he went over. At any rate, things were very mixed for
+a good while. He knew that he had swum for what seemed to be hours, and
+that then he had realised that he was numb, and had used what little
+strength he had left to climb upon another log that passed him. He had
+been on it ever since, flat out, an eternity.
+
+Piney was getting the skiff inshore fast, as Steering talked, and once
+Steering stopped to admire his youthful vigour. He was a strong man
+himself, and it was a new sensation to lie weakly admiring strength in
+somebody else. "Do you know, Piney, I'm dead-beat," he whispered.
+
+"You've had a good deal to stan' in more ways than one to-day," replied
+Piney.
+
+"What do you mean by that?" asked Steering.
+
+"We're a'most in."
+
+It was only a few minutes later that Piney effected his landing, and,
+river-lashed and dripping, both scrambled out and fell on the bank by
+the Redbud shack. For a little while, even Piney was past any further
+exertion, but when he could use himself again, he got up agilely, hunted
+up dry wood and made a roaring fire. The twilight had closed into night
+now; the rain had shifted with the wind and passed by Redbud. Piney
+brought a blanket from the shack and wrapped Steering in it. Before the
+fire, Steering lay with his eyes shut for a time, a smile on his face.
+"You are precious good to stand by me like this, Piney," he said once.
+"Where have you been for so long, you stingy nigger? Why have you cut me
+lately?"
+
+"Well, I--oh, I d'n know adzackly." Piney's voice was flat, his face
+tragic. He was heaping wood on the fire, and in the yellow flare he
+looked pale with the exhaustion of his work on the river and the
+excitement under which he was labouring. During this last half hour that
+he had been working hard to save Steering, taking care of him, helping
+him, he had had another revulsion of feeling that had swung him up close
+to his hero again. But crisis was still following crisis in his
+emotions.
+
+"Well, you turned up at just the right minute for me, Piney. How did you
+happen along?"
+
+"Oh, I wuz a-huntin' fer you, I reckon. I wuz sent aout to hunt fer you.
+I gotta letter fer you,--f'm--f'm Miss Madeira."
+
+Steering opened his drowsy eyes and regarded Piney.
+
+"Yes, I have. I gotta letter fer you. Y'see, Miss Sally, she's found
+aout sumpin--sumpin that you didn' want her to find aout." The fire
+leaped and crackled; Bruce leaned away from its scorch, nearer to Piney.
+"Y'see, she knows abaout the Tigmores naow," went on Piney steadily.
+"Unc' Bernique didn' tell her. I told her."
+
+"Piney!" Steering, warm with wrath, turned upon Piney savagely, "You
+little fool! You brutal little fool!" he cried fiercely. "It's a good
+thing that you're just a boy, Piney--and you, _you_! profess to
+love----"
+
+"Mist' Steerin'." Piney had a man's dignity all in a minute. "I didn'
+ast you fer no leave to tell her, an' I don't ast you fer nothin' naow.
+But she had to know. I hearn Unc' Bernique tellin' you abaout that
+Grierson letter. I hearn you read the letter. I hearn you an' Unc'
+Bernique swear. Then I swore, too. Then I went an' told her. And then
+she saw her father, an' she leffen it to her father to make things
+right, an' he's made things right. She told me I wuz to tell you that.
+She showed him that he was safe to keep the Tigmores if he wanted to
+keep 'em, but he didn't want to keep 'em. She told me to tell you that.
+An' she told me to give you this letter." Piney's young body rocked now
+with a hushed, sobbing fervour; he lifted his peaked hat from his head,
+took the letter from the inner band, and pushed it into Bruce's hand.
+"This letter kim to her father a long time ago, and she ast me to ast
+you to think of her father abaout it gentle as you can--an' I'm a-astin'
+you to think of him gentle," the lad's voice suddenly rose shrilly, and
+he jumped to his feet, "an' I'm _a-bustin'_ to have you say you won't
+think of him gentle, er sumpin 'at I cayn't stan' an 'll hit you fer!
+I'm jesta boy, Mist' Steerin', but good God!"
+
+Bruce got to his feet, too. When he caught Piney's flaming eye at last,
+they stood and faced each other a great moment, then Bruce put his hand
+out.
+
+"Piney," he said, "I wish I were half the man that you are."
+
+"Oh, Mist' Steerin'! Mist' Steerin'!" On Bruce's shoulder, he sobbed
+like a child until the terrific strain that he had been on for hours
+slackened, and he could talk again.
+
+"She's waitin' fer you," he said at last. "She's up yonder in the
+garden, waitin'. She loves you, Mist' Steerin'. Don't you go fergit
+that, with y'all's pride an' all. She loves you."
+
+"What? What's that you are saying, Piney?"
+
+"She loves you. I know it, Mist' Steerin'. An' I'm a-tellin' ev' durn
+thing I know!" declared Piney vehemently, with a high-toned, stubborn
+self-justification in his voice.
+
+"Dog-on you, old man," Bruce said, turning to grip Piney's hand again.
+He had it in mind to say a great many other things, in the way of
+appreciation, thanks, enthusiasms, but all he said was "dog-on you, old
+man, dog-on you," gripping Piney's hand as he said it. "You make
+yourself comfortable here in the shack to-night, will you, old man, and
+I'll go on up there. They are in a little trouble over this up there,
+Piney." Steering tore the Grierson letter to bits as he spoke, and,
+then, his eyes wet and shining, he found Piney's pony and went to her in
+the garden.
+
+Piney lay back on the ground beside the fire. The glow fell squarely
+over his features, relaxed and softened now. He looked very hopefully
+and comfortingly young. There was a big, shy gratification on his face.
+
+"'Old _man_,'" he muttered once or twice. "'Old _man_.'" A little sob
+shivered through him. He got up quickly and went into the shack bunk,
+where he fell asleep at once--because he was so young--and dreamed fine
+dreams of Italy--because he, too, was fine.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Eighteen_
+
+A PRETTY PRECARIOUSNESS
+
+
+As Bruce galloped up the river road toward Madeira Place, he found
+himself so weak with excitement and physical exhaustion, that he had to
+bow over the saddle-horn and cling there, like an old man. It was a ride
+to remember. Once he raised his head and looked out into the night. The
+storm had broken, and high in the quivering heavens the moon shone with
+a wild, palpitant glory. In the north and east the clouds had gathered
+with a mighty up-piling, from which the eye sank back affrighted, it
+towered so near heaven. The trees along the river, the shaking,
+shimmering river itself, were all shot with light. It was a grand scene,
+but removed, turbulent, unreal. Steering's strength failed him again,
+and he fell back over the saddle and hung on. There come times in a
+man's life, good times as well as bad times, when he can do nothing but
+hang on. On these dizzying peaks of happiness, Steering scarcely dared
+let himself look beyond the pony's nose. He was so high up, so near the
+consummation of--oh--of everything. It would be ridiculously easy to set
+matters straight now, in one way or another. She loved him! If that were
+true, it would make everything else come right. And that was true. Piney
+had been sure of it, and Piney had just left her. Everything else, all
+life, could be made to close around that salient, delicate fact like the
+rose-leaves close around the heart of the rose. Let her father keep the
+hills; he did not care, if he could have the girl. He did not care about
+anything, if he could have the girl. And he could have the girl. Thank
+God for that.
+
+Little by little he began to allow himself a meagre consciousness that
+he was drawing nearer, nearer! Now, just below the grounds of Madeira
+Place! Now, up along the bridle-path! Now, at the garden gate!
+
+He leaned over the pony's head, slipped the gate latch, and passed into
+the garden. Dismounting, he tied the pony, and turned toward the house.
+Dark, in the shadow of the trees behind it, the house lay very quiet,
+unlighted, infinitely peaceful. In front of the negro cabin at the side
+of the house, Bruce could see Samson, his chair tilted against the cabin
+wall, his pipe in his mouth, his bare feet swinging contentedly. From
+inside the cabin came the low croon of Samson's fat black wife. Some
+hens clucked sleepily in the hen-house. With the moonlight disintegrated
+and softened by the trees, everything up toward the house breathed
+peace. Out here in the garden, however, where the gold light beat down
+straightly, there was a sense of waiting, unrest, sweet and tumultuous.
+Out here in the garden it was glorious, but it was not peaceful. What
+was it that was responsible for that misty halation of incompleteness,
+longing? the shaking breath of the wide-lipped roses? the secrets within
+the bowed slender lilies? the tortured joy of the whole garden life of
+fragrance and beauty?
+
+Over by the old vine-covered stump there was a gleam of white, swaying a
+little, breathing a little, it seemed, and Steering went toward it,
+strength coming back into his limbs, his head lifting as he came, his
+arms outheld.
+
+"I hoped that you would come, Mr. Steering. I have been waiting a long
+time for you," she said, not moving, her eyes meeting his, something in
+her face, her rigidity, stopping him. Her hands were pale and still on
+the grey-green of the vines; her face had caught the wild, gold gleam of
+the moon. "I wanted to tell you myself about that letter, Mr. Steering.
+I wanted to tell you myself about the Tigmores being yours. I have grown
+afraid, out here in the dark, that Piney might not have been able to
+make you understand, might have misled you in some way about--what I
+said. I was very much excited when I talked to Piney, Mr. Steering, and
+I am not sure that I made it clear to him that I am very glad indeed
+that the hills are yours at last; glad because we are--or have
+been--such good friends, Mr. Steering, glad for that reason--for
+friendship's sake, and for nothing," her voice wandered, and the beat of
+her low broad breast was girlishly pitiful, "else, but friend----" she
+could not go on.
+
+"Ship," suggested Bruce, with a great desire to help her, but very much
+at sea. Was it to be failure, after all? Had Piney made a vast mistake?
+This proud, pale woman here--suddenly an awful timidity seized him, but
+he shook himself out of that brusquely and came on. "_She loves you,
+don't you go fergit that!_" Piney's admonition piped up to him on a high
+and tuneful memory. He realised that he was walking a path through the
+flower-tangled, pretty precariousness of romance as he came on toward
+her--potential lovers' quarrels, separation, the irate parent, a girl's
+pride, her foolish, solemn effort to fight him back for fear that she
+had led him on too far, a man's uneasy timidity, the complication of
+their circumstances--the memory of them all made little snares for his
+feet, as he came on toward her. But he came on, growing bolder as he
+came, deciding what to do as he came. It was a crisis for romance as he
+faced her across the old vine-covered stump. He put his hands down on
+the stump near her hands, and his face caught the gleam of the light
+overhead, as hers did.
+
+"Piney has just pulled me out of the river," he said in a wan voice,
+"and it was all I could do to get here. I--I am as shaky as a kitten."
+
+She looked up at him, betrayed into it by his careful conservation of
+that weakness in his voice, and, seeing how pale he was, her hands stole
+in under his. "Oh, but I am weak, _and_ sick!" he went on, pursuing his
+advantage mercilessly, his hands closing over hers, while her face
+leaned toward him, all lit and trembling, "I am weak, but I love you
+so!"
+
+"Ah--h!" she cried, a shaking, joyful cry, "you ought to have said that
+long ago, Bruce! Tying my hands all winter! _Now_, it doesn't matter
+which of us owns the old hills, does it?"
+
+It was there, under the pale, wild light of the moon, with the
+wide-lipped roses, the slender-bowed lilies, the tremulous fragrance,
+the delicate unrest, the tortured joy of the garden's life of beauty all
+around them, that she crept into his arms shyly and radiantly. The trees
+rustled with low glad music, and the night air seemed full of mystic
+influences, blessings, happinesses.
+
+From the quiet house beyond, there drifted toward them the sense of
+late-come, profound peace.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Nineteen_
+
+WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE
+
+
+There was a vast turmoil in Canaan. For the matter of that, there was a
+vast turmoil far out the road toward Poetical, and away across Big Wheat
+Valley, and all over We-all Prairie. The very air was a-tremble. In
+Canaan all the stores were closed or closing. Court House Square was
+full of vehicles that seemed poised at the very moment of departure;
+people were laughing or talking excitedly, with foolish good-humour, as
+though they did not know what they were saying, but realised that it
+made precious little difference whether they knew or not. Children were
+being lifted into waggons, surreys, buggies. Great hampers were being
+stowed and re-arranged under the seats of the vehicles, sometimes tied
+to the single-trees to swing there with solemn, heavy gaiety. Young men,
+very alert, in red neckties and unbuttoned kid gloves, wheeled and
+turned recklessly through the streets in light road sulkies, drawn by
+high-stepping trotters. Dogs trotted about with their tails in the air,
+sniffing, quivering; there was a warm, cutting smell of harness,
+axle-grease, horse-flesh. The sun beat down upon it all and into it till
+the whole scene hung electrified, etched out in light, a supreme moment
+on the very top of Canaan's history.
+
+Then a young boy, with a red sash strapped over his right shoulder and
+under his left arm, cantered up on a pony, pony and boy both
+tremendously important.
+
+"Piney's marshal er the day," said a big man, laughing indulgently.
+
+"D'you know the Steerin's air sendin' that tramp-scamp to Italy?" called
+another man with a bewildered, incredulous inflection in his voice.
+
+"Well he cand go fer all me. You couldn' pull me aouter Mizzourah with
+pothooks these days," declared the big man earnestly. "What's that the
+tramp-boy's sayin' naow?"
+
+The tramp-boy was making a trumpet of his hands. "All ready!" he
+shouted, with one of his high, musical yodels, "Le's start!"
+
+The lesser activities of stowing away hampers, locking store doors,
+wiping children's noses, broadened quickly into a wide concerted
+movement. Everybody was picking up his reins. Everybody was clucking to
+his horse. Every horse was starting. Everybody was gone. Canaan was
+deserted.
+
+A long irregular cavalcade crept out across the country toward Razor
+Ridge. And as it went it was constantly augmented at the cross-roads by
+farmers from We-all and Big Wheat and Pewee, until waggons and surreys
+and buckboards and buggies and horseback riders stretched out endlessly,
+the balloons of the children, the red neckties of the young men, the
+gaily flowered hats of the girls making the spectacle joyous. Then, too,
+everybody was laughing, everybody was glad about something.
+
+When the cavalcade began to defile past Madeira Place, wild cheers rang
+out. Samson at the side of the big house, inspanning the Kentucky
+blacks, took the demonstration to himself with hysterical joy, bowing
+and gesticulating, doubling over and holding his stomach, while he
+danced up and down, his white teeth showing, his eyes rolling.
+
+"Hurrah furrum! Hurrah furrum!" came in a great rollicking volume of
+sound from the road.
+
+"Thass all ri'. Yesseh! Thanky! Thass all ri'. Yasseh! You bet!" yelled
+Samson up by the house.
+
+A girl in a gauzy black gown and a drooping black hat came out on the
+front porch of the house and waved to the passing people.
+
+"We'll be along! Yes, we are coming! Yes, we'll hurry!" There were
+bright tears in the girl's eyes. A man came out of the house and stood
+behind her, his arm on the door post, his face smiling. She turned to
+him, the tears in her eyes, the smile on her lips.
+
+"Aren't they pretty splendid?" she cried, a fine enthusiasm on her face
+as she watched the people, "Look at them! There's something in them!
+There's the best of all America in them! And they will have their chance
+now."
+
+For answer the man put his arm about her. "Greatest State in the Union,
+this Missouri," he said with tremendous conviction. "Where's Uncle
+Bernique?"
+
+"Gone an hour ago."
+
+"Well then, can't we start, too?"
+
+The same tingle of impatience seemed to reach both at once. They ran
+back into the house.
+
+The cavalcade wound on up Ridge Road toward the Tigmores. At its
+far-away end now trotted the Kentucky blacks, drawing a light trap. The
+man on the box-seat was a big, deep-chested man, long and powerful of
+forearm. He held the exuberant, snorting blacks easily with one hand.
+The woman beside him was a good mate for him, firmly knit, strong in her
+movements. Under her black hat the burnish of her hair and skin made her
+look gold-dusted.
+
+They were high up Razor Ridge. Below the Ridge, Big Wheat Valley and
+We-all Prairie stretched away from the Tigmore foot-hills in broad
+strips of harvest gold. The sky was brilliantly blue; even Choke Gulch's
+glooms were flecked with light. The scrub-oak, the dog-wood, the
+chinca-pin, the walnut, the hickory, sumach and sassafras trailed over
+the Tigmores like a giant green veil. On beyond the Tigmores the pale
+wide Di ran slowly, goldenly, a molten river.
+
+As the procession went on up the hill the people called from one waggon
+to another, their tongues set going by the passing of Madeira Place and
+the advent of the Kentucky blacks into the procession.
+
+"They say Miss Sally, Miz Steerin', that is, feels mighty broke up
+because her paw didn' live to see all that's a-goin' on this day."
+
+"Yass, reckin's haow that's true."
+
+"Howdy, Miz Dade, haow you come on?"
+
+"Huccome you to come, Asa?"
+
+"They say the Steerin's air goin' away to-night. Goin' back East on a
+visit."
+
+"Yass, that's true. The tramp-boy is goin' along. D'you know that? Yass,
+goin' to N'York, on his way to Italy. The Steerin's air sendin' him."
+
+"Well, they cand all go whur they please, I wouldn' leave Mizzourah
+these days, not me. Wy, ev' farm in the Tigmores is liable to turn into
+a zinc mine any night. Say, do you know air the Steerin's to be long
+gone?"
+
+"Nope, not so long. Unc' Bernique's to run things while they away."
+
+"Oh, well, then."
+
+The cavalcade's forerunners had now reached the top of the Tigmore
+Uplift. They began to deploy into the woods overhanging Choke Gulch. A
+trail had been cut, the trees were down until it was possible to get
+through with the vehicles, though it was rough going. At the end of the
+newly made road a great clearing opened up to the on-coming people. The
+teams were driven over to a thicket and the people spilled out of the
+vehicles and swarmed over the clearing. One by one, then two by two, in
+their hurry, the teams came in, until everybody had arrived. The
+Kentucky blacks came last. Then there was a waiting, a restraint, the
+people looked at one another. Finally their uneasiness and unspoken
+question were answered by an edict from the mouth of a small upright
+Frenchman, who mounted a stump and declaimed with a great flourish of
+graceful pomposity:
+
+"'Tis the wish of Mistaire and Meez Steering that none go to the mill
+until that the bar-r-becue shall be end." He was generously applauded
+and his fine shoulders stiffened responsively. This was the sort of
+thing that François Placide DeLassus Bernique liked.
+
+The people contented themselves within the clearing the little time
+that remained of the morning. At one side of the clearing, fenced off by
+ropes, was a long trench, across which stretched poles of tough green
+hickory. On top of these poles lay great quarters of beeves, whole hogs,
+slit through the belly and spread wide till the dressed flesh wrinkled
+into the back-bone in thick layers, sheep, tongues, venison, an army's
+rations. Down in the trench glowed the red-hot coals of a vast Vulcan
+fire, set going the night before and fed and beaten all night into its
+present perfect equability. Up and down the sides of the trench walked
+men in great aprons, long-handled brushes, like white-wash brushes, in
+their hands. These brushes they dipped into buckets of salt and pepper,
+strung along the trench at regular intervals, and smeared the sizzling
+meat, a sort of Titanic seasoning process.
+
+Rough pine boards, supported on tree stumps, formed long lines of tables
+on which loaves of bread were piled two feet high. Beside the bread
+were great buckets of pickles, preserves, jams, whole churns of butter,
+cheeses, cakes, pies, hundreds and hundreds of them, as though the whole
+world had become one enormous maw with an enormous clamour for food.
+The rich aroma of the sizzling meat and the slow sweet scorch of the
+green hickory poles drifted up into the trees and hung there, a visible
+odour, tantalising, insistent. The men who had got into their wives'
+aprons and had begun to cut sandwiches at the long tables were invited
+to hurry up. The men who were varnishing the meat with salt and pepper
+were told that they were too slow. The boys who had begun cracking
+ice were applauded. The girls who had begun to squeeze lemons
+were offered help. The women who had begun to set out knives
+and forks and plates were interrupted and set back by hoots of
+encouragement. Children were stepped on and soothed, a continuous
+performance. The committee-on-cooking got in the way of the
+committee-on-washing-the-dishes; the committee-on-waiting-on-the-table
+almost came to blows with the committee-on-slicing-the-bread. Toward
+noon the scramble for places began. Then the people began to gorge.
+There was a constant reaching and grabbing. The clearing resounded with
+phrases of intricate politeness:
+
+"Thank you to trouble you fer one them pickles, Si."
+
+"Please'm gi' me a little your tongue, Miz Dade."
+
+"Reach me some more bread, if you don't care whut you do, Quin."
+
+Beyond the long tables little private parties sat here and there, ranged
+around red table-cloths, flat on the ground, stuffing, greasy-fingered,
+hospitable, happy.
+
+Beyond these little parties, off in the young trees, in the buggies and
+buck-boards, were still smaller parties, the red-necktie young men and
+the girls with bright flowers in their hats, two and two, two and two,
+all through the thicket, each duet very happy, drinking out of one tin
+cup, the red-necktie young man assiduously putting his lips to the cup
+on the spot where the girl's lips had touched it.
+
+Everybody ate incessantly. At first to appease hunger; then probably
+because of a dim prevision that by the middle of next week some
+reproachful memory might assail one if one did not do one's full part by
+the present abundance. It was not until the sun had long passed the
+zenith that the gorging and stuffing came to an end, and then it was
+only because word began to circulate among the people that "the mill
+was open"; that "the people could go down now," in fine, that the great
+hour of that great day had come. Following upon the rumour, François
+Placide DeLassus Bernique again mounted a stump. This time he said:
+
+"I am authorise' to make to you the announcement that the first mill of
+the Canaan Mining and Development Company is now to commence to r-r-un,
+and to invite you in the name of Mistaire Steering to assemble in the
+Choke Gulch, there to behold the begin' of a new e-r-a of pr-r-osperitee
+for thees gr-r-eat State of Missouri. But before that we go, I ask your
+attention for the one moment to those word of our fellow-citizen,
+Mistaire Steering!" He stopped, reluctantly but heroically, and
+Steering, quitting the side of the girl in black, mounted the stump.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," said Steering, "it was my wife's idea to make
+the opening of the first mill of the Canaan Mining and Development
+Company a gala day, a holiday, and I believe that you are all prepared
+to agree with me that it was a good idea. All that I want to say to you
+now for myself and for Mr. Carington, and for the eastern gentlemen
+whose money Mr. Carington represents, is just this: A great opportunity
+has opened up for us all down here. A new Missouri is about to be made.
+All our dreams are coming true. The golden harvest of our wheat fields
+has been found to be rooted deep in mines of wonderful richness. But
+just because we have found something inside these hills of ours, don't
+let's neglect the outside of the hills. We must cultivate and improve on
+the outside, while we dig down deep on the inside. Life is going to give
+us chances from now on that we have never had before. As a people we
+must rise to these chances all along the line. We must come up all along
+the line. We must get better schools, better houses, better barns,
+better farming implements, better kitchen implements, better roads. Our
+watchword down here in the Southwest must be to _come up_. Don't forget
+it. We've got our chance now, now we must come up!"
+
+Bruce sat down and the people, who had listened to him attentively, the
+faces of the farm-women especially keen and responsive, broke into
+another vast applause that set the leaves astir.
+
+Somebody began to insist then that somebody else ought to make a speech
+of thanks, appreciation, to the Steerings for the day, and for the
+general satisfaction and prosperity that had come into Canaan with the
+new régime of the Canaan Company's affairs. Everybody began to turn
+toward Mr. Quin Beasley. Those nearest him nudged him. Very slowly Mr.
+Beasley got to his feet, mounted the stump, fell off and mounted it
+again.
+
+"Frien's an'," Mr. Beasley's scared eye lit upon some children just
+beneath him who were regarding him with awe and the ecstatic hope that
+he would fall off again, and, encouraged by the awe, he levelled his
+next words at them powerfully, "Fellow Citizens! Taint fer me to say
+anythin' more ceppen only that ef I did say anythin', which I shan't, it
+'ud jes be to say over whut Mist' Steerin' has said as bein' the whole
+thing, an fer that reason I'll say nothin'."
+
+It was a master stroke! Never in his life before had Beasley refrained
+from saying anything because he had nothing to say. The Canaanites were
+impressed. They said, "Good! Good!" For fear of some anticlimax Bruce at
+once gave his signal and the people began to swarm down the hillside
+into Choke Gulch, defiling through the Gulch toward a great shed that
+stood backed up to the hillside arrogantly. Although all Canaan had
+watched the building and rigging day by day, in Choke Gulch, the sight
+of the shed made the people almost hysterical, as though they had never
+seen the "plant" of the Canaan Mining and Development Company before,
+the shack office, the tool-house, the big proud mill shed, the tramway,
+the hoister. There was a group already ranged at the door of the
+engine-room as the people came on. Bruce Steering and his wife, Old
+Bernique, and the tramp-boy were in the centre of the group.
+
+"We are all steamed up!" cried Bruce. "Make ready there, boys! Hurrah
+for the greatest zinc run in the greatest State in the Union! _Now_,
+Piney!"
+
+The tramp-boy, on his face an unaccustomed appreciation of this larger
+side of the workaday world, stepped back inside the engine-room, laid
+his hand on a throttle, and at the signal, as if by magic, there was a
+whirr of slipping bands, a mighty throb, the renewed fashing of water
+down the jigs, a grinding, a pounding, a crunching, a gurgling; and a
+long, resonant shout went up again and again from the elastic throats of
+the exalted Canaanites; for the first mill of the Canaan Mining and
+Development Company was running!
+
+Later on someone over in the crowd spoke. "Pity Mist' Crit Madeira aint
+here to see all this. Haow he woulda taken to it. That son-in-law of his
+woulda jes adzackly suited Mist' Crit. Pity he had to die off
+sudden-like jes whend ev'thing wuz comin' araoun'." It was a woman's
+voice and it was all softened with pity.
+
+"Yass, oh yass," said a man next her gingerly. He was a man who had not
+believed in Crit Madeira, but it occurred to him that this was not the
+time or the place to recall that.
+
+
+The evening of that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and
+beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric
+bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned
+amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in
+carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light
+is fragrant and flowers emit sparks of light.
+
+Steering and his wife stood in the Garden of Dreams and the hour swirled
+up to them out of the sunset, mystical, urgent, sweet. The house was
+shut and locked behind them. Below them was the shivering Di. Off beyond
+them tumbled the Canaan Tigmores. Canaan, the proud, lay to the West in
+a fecund waiting.
+
+"Do you know," said Steering, "I do not like to leave Missouri, Sally,
+not even for a little while, not even to show you to Carington and
+Elsie. We've no business along with brides and grooms anyway, we've been
+married two months. I wish we weren't going to leave Missouri, Sally."
+
+She turned her face up to him banteringly; her travelling hat was in her
+hand; above her black gown her bright hair shone with its beautiful
+lustres. "They must get along without you here for a little while, Mr.
+President of the Canaan Mining and Development Company. I need some
+clothes."
+
+"Lay hold on my title gently, please, Mrs. Steering. Every time I hear
+it I feel that it needs more glue."
+
+"Mrs. Steering! That's something of a title, too, isn't it? But, after
+all, who is so proud of newcome titles as the Superintendent of the
+Gulch Mine, François Placide DeLassus Bernique, eh, Mistaire Steering?"
+
+"Old chap's satisfaction is good to live in. Oh, we are all happy,
+happy! Elsie and Carington seem to be hitting it off well, too, don't
+they?" Steering heaved a benevolent sigh, as though he felt that he had
+missed something whose missing was little short of escape. He regarded
+the magnificent, glowing woman beside him worshipfully. "Hark!" he cried
+next, "Piney's happy too, dear boy. That's the best of all! Hear that!"
+
+From the river road below the garden came the sound of the pony's
+galloping feet and down by the sheen of the river, the tramp-boy was
+outlined presently, a gallant young figure, full of life and fire.
+
+"I'm a-goin' to meet you at the station," he called up to them. "I'm
+a-sayin' good-bye to Mizzourah! D'you think Italy's a-goin' to beat
+this, Miss Sally?" He indicated the shimmering river, the woods beyond,
+the wonderful sky in the west, with a half-homesick gesture, then dashed
+on down the river road, gay with anticipation again, carolling the
+potato song lustily:
+
+"_The taters grow an' grow, they grow!_"
+
+"That was a fine idea of yours, Sally, to send him to Italy. I suppose
+he will have to be disappointed, for Italy, with him, is all
+dream-stuff; still, life would never have been fulfilled for Piney
+without Italy."
+
+"No, it wouldn't. And he won't be disappointed. You see, it's the music
+in him. That will count big some day. And Italy is the place for him to
+find himself. He won't be disappointed, and we shan't be disappointed in
+him. He is worth his chance. But see how low the sun is, Bruce. We, too,
+must say good-bye to Missouri now, if we are to make the train. Take
+your last look until we come back to it all."
+
+The fragrance trembled about them. The pale wide Di quivered below them.
+Far to the west flamed the sunset. Down through the ether dropped great
+swaying draperies of orange and purple. Fair into the heart of heaven
+unrolled a path of violet and blue and rose.
+
+Young, ancestral, sweet, she stood there beside him, his. Steering
+turned his eyes from the dusky-gold radiance of her face and hair to the
+land beyond, where his hills billowed toward him with mighty promise,
+submerging him again, reclaiming him, as they had done on a lonely day
+not one year gone, making a Missourian of him, as it had done on that
+day. The girl, the land, he, all the world, seemed banded in a golden
+irradiation.
+
+"Oh, Missouri! Missouri!" he cried, with a joyful, trembling, upleaping
+of spirit, his arms shut close about his wife, his eyes coming back to
+her as to the spirit of this new and wonderful West, "You glorious
+State! You sweet, wide land! I adore you!"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+ADVERTISEMENTS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By Henry Harland
+
+Author of "The Cardinal's Snuff Box"
+
+MY FRIEND PROSPERO
+
+A novel which will fascinate by the grace and charm with which it is
+written, by the delightful characters that take part in it, and by the
+interest of the plot. The scene is laid in a magnificent Austrian castle
+in North Italy, and that serves as a background for the working out of a
+sparkling love-story between a heroine who is brilliant and beautiful
+and a hero who is quite her match in cleverness and wit. It is a book
+with all the daintiness and polish of Mr. Harland's former novels, and
+other virtues all its own.
+
+Frontispiece in colors by Louis Loeb.
+
+$1.50
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McClure, Phillips & Co.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By Stanley J. Weyman
+
+Author of "A Gentleman of France"
+
+THE LONG NIGHT
+
+Geneva in the early days of the 17th century; a ruffling young theologue
+new to the city; a beautiful and innocent girl, suspected of witchcraft;
+a crafty scholar and metaphysician seeking to give over the city into
+the hands of the Savoyards; a stern and powerful syndic whom the scholar
+beguiles to betray his office by promises of an elixir which shall save
+him from his fatal illness; a brutal soldier of fortune; these are the
+elements of which Weyman has composed the most brilliant and thrilling
+of his romances. Claude Mercier, the student, seeing the plot in which
+the girl he loves is involved, yet helpless to divulge it, finds at last
+his opportunity when the treacherous men of Savoy are admitted within
+Geneva's walls, and in a night of whirlwind fighting saves the city by
+his courage and address. For fire and spirit there are few chapters in
+modern literature such as those which picture the splendid defence of
+Geneva, by the staid, churchly, heroic burghers, fighting in their own
+blood under the divided leadership of the fat Syndic, Baudichon, and the
+bandy-legged sailor, Jehan Brosse, winning the battle against the armed
+and armored forces of the invaders.
+
+Illustrated by Solomon J. Solomon.
+
+$1.50
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McClure, Phillips & Co.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By Henry Seton Merriman
+
+Author of "The Sowers," etc.
+
+BARLASCH OF THE GUARD
+
+The story is set in those desperate days when the ebbing tide of
+Napoleon's fortunes swept Europe with desolation. Barlasch--"Papa
+Barlasch of the Guard, Italy, Egypt, the Danube"--a veteran in the
+Little Corporal's service--is the dominant figure of the story.
+Quartered on a distinguished family in the historic town of Dantzig, he
+gives his life to the romance of Desirée, the daughter of the family,
+and Louis d'Arragon, whose cousin she has married and parted with at the
+church door. Louis's search with Barlasch for the missing Charles gives
+an unforgettable picture of the terrible retreat from Russia; and as a
+companion picture there is the heroic defence of Dantzig by Rapp and his
+little army of sick and starving. At the last Barlasch, learning of the
+death of Charles, plans and executes the escape of Desirée from the
+beleaguered town to join Louis.
+
+Illustrated by the Kinneys.
+
+$1.50
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McClure, Phillips & Co.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By A. Conan Doyle
+
+Author of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"
+
+THE ADVENTURES OF GERARD
+
+Stories of the remarkable adventures of a Brigadier in Napoleon's army.
+In Etienne Gerard, Conan Doyle has added to his already famous gallery
+of characters one worthy to stand beside the notable Sherlock Holmes.
+Many and thrilling are Gerard's adventures, as related by himself, for
+he takes part in nearly every one of Napoleon's campaigns. In Venice he
+has an interesting romantic escapade which causes him the loss of an
+ear. With the utmost bravery and cunning he captures the Spanish city of
+Saragossa; in Portugal he saves the army; in Russia he feeds the
+starving soldiers by supplies obtained at Minsk; after a wonderful ride.
+Everywhere else he is just as marvelous, and at Waterloo he is the
+center of the whole battle.
+
+For all his lumbering vanity he is a genial old soul and a remarkably
+vivid story-teller.
+
+Illustrated by W. B. Wollen.
+
+$1.50
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McClure, Phillips & Co.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALLY OF MISSOURI***
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