path: root/67357-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67357 ***

[Illustration: “PICKED UP SOME OF THE SHREDS” [P. 150]




                         THE MISSIONARY SHERIFF
                                  BEING
                  _INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A PLAIN MAN
                        WHO TRIED TO DO HIS DUTY_

                                   BY
                              OCTAVE THANET

                             ILLUSTRATED BY
                    A. B. FROST AND CLIFFORD CARLETON

                             [Illustration]

                                NEW YORK
                      HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
                                  1897

                 Copyright, 1897, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                         _All rights reserved._




CONTENTS


                                    PAGE

    THE MISSIONARY SHERIFF             1

    THE CABINET ORGAN                 51

    HIS DUTY                          97

    THE HYPNOTIST                    131

    THE NEXT ROOM                    167

    THE DEFEAT OF AMOS WICKLIFF      217




ILLUSTRATIONS


    “PICKED UP SOME OF THE SHREDS”                 _Frontispiece_

    “TORE THE LETTER INTO PIECES”                 _Facing p._ 20

    THE THANKSGIVING BOX                               ”      30

    “SHE PAUSED BEFORE MRS. SMITH’S SECTION”           ”      46

    “SHE LEANED HER SHABBY ELBOWS ON THE GATE”         ”      56

    “‘SOMEBODY THREW THESE THINGS AT OUR WINDOW’”      ”      70

    “‘NOW, BOYS, LET’S COME AND PLAY ON THE ORGAN’”    ”      74

    “‘THEY HAVE ENGAGED _ME_’”                         ”      94

    “HARNED HID HIS FACE”                              ”     116

    “‘IT WON’T BE SUCH A BIG ONE IF THE DOOR HOLDS’”   ”     126

    “‘SHE MUST LOOK AT IT’”                            ”     146

    “‘HE’S SCARED NOW, THE COWARD’”                    ”     158

    “‘I’LL ACT AS HIS VALET’”                          ”     162

    “‘_I’LL_ GIVE THE KITTY SOMETHING TO EAT’”         ”     180

    THE FAREWELL                                       ”     232




THE MISSIONARY SHERIFF




THE MISSIONARY SHERIFF


Sheriff Wickliff leaned out of his office window, the better to watch the
boy soldiers march down the street. The huge pile of stone that is the
presumed home of Justice for the county stands in the same yard with the
old yellow stone jail. The court-house is ornate and imposing, although a
hundred active chimneys daub its eaves and carvings, but the jail is as
plain as a sledge-hammer. Yet during Sheriff Wickliff’s administration,
while Joe Raker kept jail and Mrs. Raker was matron, window-gardens
brightened the grim walls all summer, and chrysanthemums and roses
blazoned the black bars in winter.

Above the jail the street is a pretty street, with trim cottages and
lawns and gardens; below, the sky-lines dwindle ignobly into shabby one
and two story wooden shops devoted to the humbler handicrafts. It is
not a street favored by processions; only the little soldiers of the
Orphans’ Home Company would choose to tramp over its unkempt macadam.
Good reason they had, too, since thus they passed the sheriff’s office,
and it was the sheriff who had given most of the money for their
uniforms, and their drums and fifes outright.

A voice at the sheriff’s elbow caused him to turn.

“Well, Amos,” said his deputy, with Western familiarity, “getting the
interest on your money?”

Wickliff smiled as he unbent his great frame; he was six feet two inches
in height, with bones and thews to match his stature. A stiff black
mustache, curving about his mouth and lifting as he smiled, made his
white teeth look the whiter. One of the upper teeth was crooked. That
angle had come in an ugly fight (when he was a special officer and
detective) in the Chicago stock-yards, he having to hold a mob at bay,
single-handed, to save the life of a wounded policeman. The scar seaming
his jaw and neck belonged to the time that he captured a notorious gang
of train-robbers. He brought the robbers in—that is, he brought their
bodies; and “That scar was worth three thousand dollars to me,” he was
wont to say. In point of fact it was worth more, because he had invested
the money so advantageously that, thanks to it and the savings which
he had been able to add, in spite of his free hand he was now become a
man of property. The sheriff’s high cheek-bones, straight hair (black
as a dead coal), and narrow black eyes were the arguments for a general
belief that an Indian ancestor lurked somewhere in the foliage of his
genealogical tree. All that people really knew about him was that his
mother died when he was a baby, and his father, about the same time, was
killed in battle, leaving their only child to drift from one reluctant
protector to another, until he brought up in the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home
of the State. If the sheriff’s eyes were Indian, Indians may have very
gentle eyes. He turned them now on the deputy with a smile.

“Well, Joe, what’s up?” said he.

“The lightning-rod feller wants to see you, as soon as you come back to
the jail, he says. And here’s something he dropped as he was going to his
room. Don’t look much like it could be _his_ mother. Must have prigged
it.”

The sheriff examined the photograph, an ordinary cabinet card. The
portrait was that of a woman, pictured with the relentless frankness
of a rural photographer’s camera. Every sad line in the plain elderly
face, every wrinkle in the ill-fitting silk gown, showed with a brutal
distinctness, and somehow made the picture more pathetic. The woman’s
hair was gray and thin; her eyes, which were dark, looked straight
forward, and seemed to meet the sheriff’s gaze. They had no especial
beauty of form, but they, as well as the mouth, had an expression of
wistful kindliness that fixed his eyes on them for a full minute. He
sighed as he dropped his hand. Then he observed that there was writing on
the reverse side of the carte, and lifted it again to read.

In a neat cramped hand was written:

    “To Eddy, from Mother.                       _Feb. 21, 1889._

    “The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make His face to
    shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; the Lord lift up
    His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

Wickliff put the carte in his pocket.

“That’s just the kind of mother I’d like to have,” said he; “awful nice
and good, and not so fine she should be ashamed of me. And to think of
_him_!”

“He’s an awful slick one,” assented the deputy, cordially. “Two years
we’ve been ayfter him. New games all the time; but the lightning-rods
ain’t in it with this last scheme—working hisself off as a Methodist
parson on the road to a job, and stopping all night, and then the runaway
couple happening in, and that poor farmer and his wife so excited and
interested, and of course they’d witness and sign the certificate; wisht
I’d seen them when they found out!”

“They gave ’em cake and some currant wine, too.”

“That’s just like women. Say, I didn’t think the girl was much to brag on
for looks—”

“Got a kinder way with her, though,” Wickliff struck in. “Depend on it,
Joseph, the most dangerous of them all are the homely girls with a way
to them. A man’s off his guard with them; he’s sorry for them not being
pretty, and being so nice and humble; and before he knows it they’re
winding him ’round their finger.”

“I didn’t know you was so much of a philosopher, Amos,” said the deputy,
admiring him.

“It ain’t me, Joe; it’s the business. Being a philosopher, I take it,
ain’t much more than seeing things with the paint off; and there’s
nothing like being a detective to get the paint off. It’s a great
business for keeping a man straight, too, seeing the consequences of
wickedness so constantly, especially fool wickedness that gets found
out. Well, Joe, if this lady”—touching his breast pocket—“is that guy’s
mother, I’m awful sorry for her, for I know she tried to train him right.
I’ll go over and find out, I guess.”

So saying, and quite unconscious of the approving looks of his
subordinate (for he was a simple-minded, modest man, who only spoke out
of the fulness of his heart), the sheriff walked over to the jail.

The corridor into which the cells of the unconvicted prisoners opened was
rather full to-day. As the sheriff entered, every one greeted him, even
the sullen-browed man talking with a sobbing woman through the bars, and
every one smiled. He nodded to all, but only spoke to the visitor. He
said, “I guess he didn’t do it this time, Lizzie; he won’t be in long.”

“That’s what I bin tellin’ her,” growled the man, “and she won’t believe
me; I told her I promised you—”

“And God A’mighty bless you, sheriff, for what you done!” the woman
wailed. The sheriff had some ado to escape from her benedictions
politely; but he got away, and knocked at the door of the last cell on
the tier. The inmate opened the door himself.

He was a small man, who still was wearing the clerical habit of his
last criminal masquerade; and his face carried out the suggestion of
his costume, being an actor’s face, not only in the clean-shaven cheeks
and lips, but in the flexibility of the features and the unconscious
alertness of gaze. He was fair of skin, and his light-brown hair was
worn off his head at the temples. His eyes were fine, well shaped, of a
beautiful violet color, and an extremely pleasant expression. He looked
like a mere boy across the room in the shadow, but as he advanced,
certain deep lines about his mouth displayed themselves and raised his
age. The sunlight showed that he was thin; he was haggard the instant he
ceased to smile. With a very good manner he greeted the sheriff, to whom
he proffered the sole chair of the apartment.

“Guess the bed will hold me,” said the sheriff, testing his words by
sitting down on the white-covered iron bedstead. “Well, I hear you wanted
to see me.”

“Yes, sir. I want to get my money that you took away from me.”

“Well, I guess you can’t have it.” The sheriff spoke with a smile, but
his black eyes narrowed a little. “I guess the court will have to decide
first if that ain’t old man Goodrich’s money that you got from the note
he supposed was a marriage certificate. I guess you better not put any
hopes on that money, Mr. Paisley. Wasn’t that the name you gave me?”

“Paisley’ll do,” said the other man, indifferently. “What became of my
friend?”

“The sheriff of Hardin County wanted the man, and the lady—well, the lady
is here boarding with me.”

“Going to squeal?”

“Going to tell all she knows.”

Paisley’s hand went up to his mouth; he changed color. “It’s like her,”
he muttered—“oh, it’s just like her!” And he added a villanous epithet.

“None of that talk,” said Wickliff.

The man had jumped up and was pacing his narrow space, fighting against a
climbing rage. “You see,” he cried, unable to contain himself—“you see,
what makes me so mad is now I’ve got to get my mother to help me—and I’d
rather take a licking!”

“I should think you would,” said Wickliff, dryly. “Say, this your
mother?” He handed him the photograph, the written side upward.

“It came in a Bible,” explained Paisley, with an embarrassed air.

“Your mother rich?”

“She can raise the money.”

“Meaning, I expect, that she can mortgage her house and lot. Look here,
Smith, this ain’t the first time your ma has sent you money, but if I was
you I’d have the last time _stay_ the last. She don’t look equal to much
more hard work.”

“My name’s Paisley, if you please,” returned the prisoner, stolidly, “and
I can take care of my own mother. If she’s lent me money I have paid it
back. This is only for bail, to deposit—”

“There is the chance,” interrupted Wickliff, “of your skipping. Now, I
tell you, I like the looks of your mother, and I don’t mean she shall run
any risks. So, if you do get money from her, I shall personally look out
you don’t forfeit your bail. Besides, court is in session now, so the
chances are you wouldn’t more than get the money before it would be your
turn. See?”

“Anyhow I’ve got to have a lawyer.”

“Can’t see why, young feller. I’ll give you a straight tip. There ain’t
enough law in Iowa to get you out of this scrape. We’ve got the cinch on
you, and there ain’t any possible squirming out.”

“So you say;” the sneer was a little forced; “I’ve heard of your game
before. Nice, kind officers, ready to advise a man and pump him dry,
and witness against him afterwards. I ain’t that kind of a sucker, Mr.
Sheriff.”

“Nor I ain’t that kind of an officer, Mr. Smith. You’d ought to know
about my reputation by this time.”

“They say you’re square,” the prisoner admitted; “but you ain’t so stuck
on me as to care a damn whether I go over the road; expect you’d want
to send me for the trouble I’ve given you,” and he grinned. “Well, what
_are_ you after?”

“Helping your mother, young feller. I had a mother myself.”

“It ain’t uncommon.”

“Maybe a mother like mine—and yours—is, though.”

The prisoner’s eyes travelled down to the face on the carte. “That’s
right,” he said, with another ring in his voice. “I wouldn’t mind half so
much if I could keep my going to the pen from her. She’s never found out
about me.”

“How much family you got?” said Wickliff, thoughtfully.

“Just a mother. I ain’t married. There was a girl, my sister—good sort
too, ’nuff better’n me. She used to be a clerk in the store, type-writer,
bookkeeper, general utility, you know. My position in the first place;
and when I—well, resigned, they gave it to her. She helped mother buy the
place. Two years ago she died. You may believe me or not, but I would
have gone back home then and run straight if it hadn’t been for Mame.
I would, by ⸺! I had five hundred dollars then, and I was going back to
give every damned cent of it to ma, tell her to put it into the bakery—”

“That how she makes a living?”

“Yes—little two-by-four bakery—oh, I’m giving you straight goods—makes
pies and cakes and bread—good, too, you bet—makes it herself. Ruth
Graves, who lives round the corner, comes in and helps—keeps the books,
and tends shop busy times; tends the oven too, I guess. She was a great
friend of Ellie’s—and mine. She’s a real good girl. Well, I didn’t get
mother’s letters till it was too late, and I felt bad; I had a mind to go
right down to Fairport and go in with ma. That—_she_ stopped it. Got me
off on a tear somehow, and by the time I was sober again the money was
’most all gone. I sent what was left off to ma, and I went on the road
again myself. But she’s the devil.”

“That the time you hit her?”

The prisoner nodded. “Oughtn’t to, of course. Wasn’t brought up that way.
My father was a Methodist preacher, and a good one. But I tell you the
coons that say you never must hit a woman don’t know anything about that
sort of women; there ain’t nothing on earth so infernally exasperating
as a woman. They can mad you worse than forty men.”

It was the sheriff’s turn to nod, which he did gravely, with even a
glimmer of sympathy in his mien.

“Well, she never forgave you,” said he; “she’s had it in for you since.”

“And she knows I won’t squeal, ’cause I’d have to give poor Ben away,”
said the prisoner; “but I tell you, sheriff, she was at the bottom of the
deviltry every time, and she managed to bag the best part of the swag,
too.”

“I dare say. Well, to come back to business, the question with you is how
to keep these here misfortunes of yours from your mother, ain’t it?”

“Of course.”

“Well, the best plan for you is to plead guilty, showing you don’t mean
to give the court any more trouble. Tell the judge you are sick of your
life, and going to quit. You are, ain’t you?” the sheriff concluded,
simply; and the swindler, after an instant’s hesitation, answered:

“Damned if I won’t, if I can get a job!”

“Well, that admitted”—the sheriff smoothed his big knees gently as
he talked, his mild attentive eyes fixed on the prisoner’s nervous
presence—“that admitted, best plan is for you to plead guilty, and maybe
we can fix it so’s you will be sentenced to jail instead of the pen.
Then we can keep it from your mother easy. Write her you’ve got a job
here in this town, and have your letters sent to my care. I’ll get you
something to do. She’ll never suspect that you are the notorious Ned
Paisley. And it ain’t likely you go home often enough to make not going
awkward.”

“I haven’t been home in four years. But see here: how long am I likely to
get?”

The sheriff looked at him, at the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and
narrow chest—all so cruelly declared in the sunshine; and unconsciously
he modulated his voice when he spoke.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, if I was you. You need a rest. You are
run down pretty low. You ain’t rugged enough for the life you’ve been
leading.”

The prisoner’s eyes strayed past the grating to the green hills and the
pleasant gardens, where some children were playing. The sheriff did not
move. There was as little sensibility in his impassive mask as in a
wooden Indian’s; but behind the trained apathy was a real compassion. He
was thinking. “The boy don’t look like he had a year’s life in him. I bet
he knows it himself. And when he stares that way out of the window he’s
thinking he ain’t never going to be foot-loose in the sun again. Kinder
tough, I call it.”

The young man’s eyes suddenly met his. “Well, it’s no great matter, I
guess,” said he. “I’ll do it. But I can’t for the life of me make out why
you are taking so much trouble.”

He was surprised at Wickliff’s reply. It was, “Come on down stairs with
me, and I’ll show you.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes; go ahead.”

“You want my parole not to cut and run?”

“Just as you like about that. Better not try any fooling.”

The prisoner uttered a short laugh, glancing from his own puny limbs to
the magnificent muscles of the officer.

“Straight ahead, after you’re out of the corridor, down-stairs, and turn
to the right,” said Wickliff.

Silently the prisoner followed his directions, and when they had
descended the stairs and turned to the right, the sheriff’s hand pushed
beneath his elbow and opened the door before them. “My rooms,” said
Wickliff. “Being a single man, it’s handier for me living in the jail.”
The rooms were furnished with the unchastened gorgeousness of a Pullman
sleeper, the brilliant hues of a Brussels carpet on the floor, blue
plush at the windows and on the chairs. The walls were hung with the
most expensive gilt paper that the town could furnish (after all, it
was a modest price per roll), and against the gold, photographs of the
district judges assumed a sinister dignity. There was also a photograph
of the court-house, and one of the jail, and a model in bas-relief of
the Capitol at Des Moines; but more prominent than any of these were two
portraits opposite the windows. They were oil-paintings, elaborately
framed, and they had cost so much that the sheriff rested happily content
that they must be well painted. Certainly the artist had not recorded
impressions; rather he seemed to have worked with a microscope, not
slighting an eyelash. One of the portraits was that of a stiff and stern
young man in a soldier’s uniform. He was dark, and had eyes and features
like the sheriff. The other was the portrait of a young girl. In the
original daguerreotype from which the artist worked the face was comely,
if not pretty, and the innocence in the eyes and the timid smile made it
winning. The artist had enlarged the eyes and made the mouth smaller,
and bestowed (with the most amiable intentions) a complexion of hectic
brilliancy; but there still remained, in spite of paint, a flicker of
the old touching expression. Between the two canvases hung a framed
letter. It was labelled in bold Roman script, “Letter of Capt. R. T.
Manley,” and a glance showed the reader that it was the description of a
battle to a friend. One sentence was underlined. “We also lost Private A.
T. Wickliff, killed in the charge—a good man who could always be depended
on to do his duty.”

The sheriff guided his bewildered visitor opposite these portraits and
lifted his hand above the other’s shoulder. “You see them?” said he.
“They’re _my_ father and mother. You see that letter? It was wrote by
my father’s old captain and sent to me. What he says about my father is
everything that I know. But it’s enough. He was ‘a good man who could
always be depended on to do his duty.’ You can’t say no more of the
President of the United States. I’ve had a pretty tough time of it in my
own life, as a man’s got to have who takes up my line; but I’ve tried
to live so my father needn’t be ashamed of me. That other picture is my
mother. I don’t know nothing about her, nothing at all; and I don’t need
to—except those eyes of hers. There’s a look someway about your mother’s
eyes like mine. Maybe it’s only the look one good woman has like another;
but whatever it is, your mother made me think of mine. She’s the kind of
mother I’d like to have; and if I can help it, she sha’n’t know her son’s
in the penitentiary. Now come on back.”

As silently as he had gone, the prisoner followed the sheriff back to his
cell. “Good-bye, Paisley,” said the sheriff, at the door.

“Good-bye, sir; I’m much obliged,” said the prisoner. Not another word
was said.

That evening, however, good Mrs. Raker told the sheriff that, to her
mind, if ever a man was struck with death, that new young fellow was; and
he had been crying, too; his eyes were all red.

“He needs to cry,” was all the comfort that the kind soul received from
the sheriff, the cold remark being accompanied by what his familiars
called his Indian scowl.

Nevertheless, he did his utmost for the prisoner as a quiet intercessor,
and his merciful prophecy was accomplished—Edgar S. Paisley was permitted
to serve out his sentence in the jail instead of the State prison. His
state of health had something to do with the judge’s clemency, and the
sheriff could not but suspect that, in his own phrase, “Paisley played
his cough and his hollow cheeks for all they were worth.”

“But that’s natural,” he observed to Raker, “and he’s doing it partially
for the old lady. Well, I’ll try to give her a quiet spell.”

“Yes,” Raker responds, dubiously, “but he’ll be at his old games the
minute he gits out.”

“You don’t suppose”—the sheriff speaks with a certain embarrassment—“you
don’t suppose there’d be any chance of really reforming him, so as he’d
stick?—he ain’t likely to live long.”

“Nah,” says the unbelieving deputy; “he’s a deal too slick to be
reformed.”

The sheriff’s pucker of his black brows and his slow nod might have meant
anything. Really he was saying to himself (Amos was a dogged fellow):
“Don’t care; I’m going to try. I am sure ma would want me to. I ain’t a
very hefty missionary, but if there is such a thing as clubbing a man
half-way decent, and I think there is, I’ll get him that way. Poor old
lady, she looked so unhappy!”

During the trial, Paisley was too excited and dejected to write to his
mother. But the day after he received his sentence the sheriff found him
finishing a large sheet of foolscap.

It contained a detailed and vivid description of the reasons why he had
left a mythical grocery firm, and described with considerable humor the
mythical boarding-house where he was waiting for something to turn up.
It was very well done, and he expected a smile from the sheriff. The red
mottled his pale cheeks when Wickliff, with his blackest frown, tore the
letter into pieces, which he stuffed into his pocket.

[Illustration: “TORE THE LETTER INTO PIECES”]

“You take a damned ungentlemanly advantage of your position,” fumed
Paisley.

“I shall take more advantage of it if you give me any sass,” returned
Wickliff, calmly. “Now set down and listen.” Paisley, after one helpless
glare, did sit down. “I believe you fairly revel in lying. I don’t.
That’s where we differ. I think lies are always liable to come home to
roost, and I like to have the flock as small as possible. Now you write
that you are here, and you’re helping _me_. You ain’t getting much
wages, but they will be enough to keep you—these hard times any job is
better than none. And you can add that you don’t want any money from
her. Your other letter sorter squints like you did. You can say you are
boarding with a very nice lady—that’s Mrs. Raker—everything very clean,
and the table plain but abundant. Address you in care of Sheriff Amos T.
Wickliff. How’s that?”

Paisley’s anger had ebbed away. Either from policy or some other motive
he was laughing now. “It’s not nearly so interesting in a literary point
of view, you know,” said he, “but I guess it will be easier not to have
so many things to remember. And you’re right; I didn’t mean to hint for
money, but it did look like it.”

“He did mean to hint,” thought the sheriff, “but he’s got some sense.”
The letter finally submitted was a masterpiece in its way. This time the
sheriff smiled, though grimly. He also gave Paisley a cigar.

Regularly the letters to Mrs. Smith were submitted to Wickliff. Raker
never thought of reading them. The replies came with a pathetic
promptness. “That’s from your ma,” said Wickliff, when the first letter
came—Paisley was at the jail ledgers in the sheriff’s room, as it
happened, directly beneath the portraits—“you better read it first.”

Paisley read it twice; then he turned and handed it to the sheriff, with
a half apology. “My mother talks a good deal better than she writes.
Women are naturally interested in petty things, you know. Besides, I used
to be fond of the old dog; that’s why she writes so much about him.”

“I have a dog myself,” growled the sheriff. “Your mother writes a
beautiful letter.” His eyes were already travelling down the cheap thin
note-paper, folded at the top. “I know,” Mrs. Smith wrote, in her stiff,
careful hand—“I know you will feel bad, Eddy, to hear that dear old
Rowdy is gone. Your letter came the night before he died. Ruth was over,
and I read it out loud to her; and when I came to that part where you
sent your love to him, it seemed like he understood, he wagged his tail
so knowing. You know how fond of you he always was. All that evening he
played round—more than usual—and I’m so glad we both petted him, for in
the morning we found him stiff and cold on the landing of the stairs, in
his favorite place. I don’t think he could have suffered any, he looked
so peaceful. Ruth and I made a grave for him in the garden, under the
white rose tree. Ruth digged the grave, and she painted a Kennedy’s
cracker-box, and we wrapped him up in white cotton cloth. I cried, and
Ruth cried too, when we laid him away. Somehow it made me long so much
more to see you. If I sent you the money, don’t you think you could come
home for Christmas? Wouldn’t your employer let you if he knew your mother
had not seen you for four years, and you are all the child she has got?
But I don’t want you to neglect your business.”

The few words of affection that followed were not written so firmly as
the rest. The sheriff would not read them; he handed the letter back to
Paisley, and turned his Indian scowl on the back of the latter’s shapely
head.

Paisley was staring at the columns of the page before him. “Rowdy was
my dog when I was courting Ruth,” he said. “I was engaged to her once.
I suppose mother thinks of that. Poor Rowdy! the night I ran away he
followed me, and I had to whip him back.”

“Oh, you ran away?”

“Oh yes; the old story. Trusted clerk. Meant to return the money. It
wasn’t very much. But it about cleaned mother out. Then she started the
bakery.”

“You pay your ma back?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That’s a lie.”

“What do you ask a man such questions for, then? Do you think it’s
pleasant admitting what a dirty dog you’ve been? Oh, damn you!”

“You do see it, then,” said the sheriff, in a very pleasant, gentle tone;
“that’s one good thing. For you have _got_ to reform, Ned; I’m going to
give your mother a decent boy. Well, what happened then? Girl throw you
over?”

“Why, I ran straight for a while,” said Paisley, furtively wiping first
one eye and then the other with a finger; “there wasn’t any scandal.
Ruth stuck by me, and a married sister of hers (who didn’t know) got
her husband to give me a place. I was doing all right, and—and sending
home money to ma, and I would have been all right now, if—if—I hadn’t
met Mame, and she made a crazy fool of me. Then Ruth shook me. Oh, I
ain’t blaming her! It was hearing about Mame. But after that I just went
a-flying to the devil. Now you know why I wanted to see Mame.”

“You wanted to kill her,” said the sheriff, “or you think you did. But
you couldn’t; she’d have talked you over. Still, I thought I wouldn’t
risk it. You know she’s gone now?”

“I supposed she’d be, now the trial’s over.” In a minute he added: “I’m
glad I didn’t touch her; mother would have had to know that. Look here;
how am I going to get over that invitation?”

“I’ll trust you for that lie,” said Wickliff, sauntering off.

Paisley wrote that he would not take his mother’s money. When he could
come home on his own money he would gladly. He wrote a long affectionate
letter, which the sheriff read, and handed back with the dry comment,
“That will do, I guess.”

But he gave Paisley a brier-wood pipe and a pound of Yale Mixture that
afternoon.

The correspondence threw some side-lights on Paisley’s past.

“You’ve got to write your ma every week,” announced Wickliff, when the
day came round.

“Why, I haven’t written once a month.”

“Probably not, but you have got to write once a week now. Your mother’ll
get used to it. I should think you’d be glad to do the only thing you can
for the mother that’s worked her fingers off for you.”

“I _am_ glad,” said Paisley, sullenly.

He never made any further demur. He wrote very good letters; and more
and more, as the time passed, he grew interested in the correspondence.
Meanwhile he began to acquire (quite unsuspected by the sheriff) a queer
respect for that personage. The sheriff was popular among the prisoners;
perhaps the general sentiment was voiced by one of them, who exclaimed,
one day, after his visit, “Well, I never did see a man as had killed so
many men put on so little airs!”

Paisley began his acquaintance with a contempt for the slow-moving
intellect that he attributed to his sluggish-looking captor. He felt
the superiority of his own better education. It was grateful to his
vanity to sneer in secret at Wickliff’s slips in grammar or information.
And presently he had opportunity to indulge his humor in this respect,
for Wickliff began lending him books. The jail library, as a rule,
was managed by Mrs. Raker. She was, she used to say, “a great reader,”
and dearly loved “a nice story that made you cry all the way through
and ended right.” Her taste was catholic in fiction (she never read
anything else), and her favorites were Mrs. Southworth, Charles Dickens,
and Walter Scott. The sheriff’s own reading seldom strayed beyond the
daily papers, but with the aid of a legal friend he had selected some
standard biographies and histories to add to the singular conglomeration
of fiction and religion sent to the jail by a charitable public. On
Paisley’s request for reading, the sheriff went to Mrs. Raker. She
promptly pulled _Ishmael Worth, or Out of the Depths_, from the shelf.
“It’s beautiful,” says she, “and when he gits through with that he can
have the _Pickwick Papers_ to cheer him up. Only I kinder hate to lend
that book to the prisoners; there’s so much about good eatin’ in it, it
makes ’em dissatisfied with the table.”

“He’s got to have something improving, too,” says the sheriff. “I guess
the history of the United States will do; you’ve read the others, and
know they’re all right. I’ll run through this.”

He told Paisley the next morning that he had sat up almost all night
reading, he was so afraid that enough of the thirteen States wouldn’t
ratify the Constitution. This was only one of the artless comments that
tickled Paisley. Yet he soon began to notice the sheriff’s keenness of
observation, and a kind of work-a-day sense that served him well. He fell
to wondering, during those long nights when his cough kept him awake,
whether his own brilliant and subtle ingenuity had done as much for him.
He could hardly tell the moment of its beginning, but he began to value
the approval of this big, ignorant, clumsy, strong man.

Insensibly he grew to thinking of conduct more in the sheriff’s fashion;
and his letters not only reflected the change in his moral point of
view, they began to have more and more to say of the sheriff. Very soon
the mother began to be pathetically thankful to this good friend of her
boy, whose habits were so correct, whose influence so admirable. In her
grateful happiness over the frequent letters and their affection were
revealed the unexpressed fears that had tortured her for years. She asked
for Wickliff’s picture. Paisley did not know that the sheriff had a
photograph taken on purpose. Mrs. Smith pronounced him “a handsome man.”
To be sure, the unscarred side of his face was taken. “He looks firm,
too,” wrote the poor mother, whose own boy had never known how to be
firm; “I think he must be a Daniel.”

“A which?” exclaimed the puzzled Daniel.

“Didn’t you ever go to Sunday-school? Don’t you know the verses,

    “‘Dare to be a Daniel;
    Dare to make a stand’?”

The sheriff’s reply was enigmatical. It was: “Well, to think of you
having such a mother as that!”

“I don’t deserve her, that’s a fact,” said Paisley, with his flippant
air. “And yet, would you believe it, I used to be the model boy of the
Sunday-school. Won all the prizes. Ma’s got them in a drawer.”

“Dare say. They thought you were a awful good boy, because you always
kept your face clean and brushed your hair without being told to, and
learned your lessons quick, and always said ‘Yes, ’m,’ and ‘No, ’m,’ and
when you got into a scrape lied out of it, and picked up bad habits as
easy and quiet as a long-haired dog catches fleas. Oh, I know your sort
of model boy! We had ’em at the Orphans’ Home; I’ve taken their lickings,
too.”

Paisley’s thin face was scarlet before the speech was finished. “Some of
that is true,” said he; “but at least I never hit a fellow when he was
down.”

The sheriff narrowed his eyes in a way that he had when thinking; he put
both hands in his pockets and contemplated Paisley’s irritation. “Well,
young feller, you have some reason to talk that way to me,” said he. “The
fact is, I was mad at you, thinking about your mother. I—I respect that
lady very highly.”

Paisley forced a feeble smile over his “So do I.”

But after this episode the sheriff’s manner visibly softened to the young
man. He told Raker that there were good spots in Paisley.

“Yes, he’s mighty slick,” said Raker.

Thanksgiving-time, a box from his mother came to the prisoner, and among
the pies and cakes was an especial pie for Mr. Wickliff, “From his
affectionate old friend, Rebecca Smith.”

[Illustration: THE THANKSGIVING BOX]

The sheriff spent fully two hours communing with a large new _Manual of
Etiquette and Correspondence_; then he submitted a letter to Paisley.
Paisley read:

    “DEAR MADAM,—Your favor (of the pie) of the 24th inst. is
    received and I beg you to accept my sincere and warm thanks.
    Ned is an efficient clerk and his habits are very correct. We
    are reading history, in our leisure hours. We have read Fisk’s
    Constitutional History of the United States and two volumes of
    Macaulay’s History of England. Both very interesting books.
    I think that Judge Jeffreys was the meanest and worst judge
    I ever heard of. My early education was not as extensive as
    I could wish, and I am very glad of the valuable assistance
    which I receive from your son. He is doing well and sends his
    love. Hoping, my dear Madam, to be able to see you and thank
    you personally for your very kind and welcome gift, I am, with
    respect,

                        “Very Truly Yours,

                                                “AMOS T. WICKLIFF.”

Paisley read the letter soberly. In fact, another feeling destroyed any
inclination to smile over the unusual pomp of Wickliff’s style. “That’s
out of sight!” he declared. “It will please the old lady to the ground.
Say, I take it very kindly of you, Mr. Wickliff, to write about me that
way.”

“I had a book to help me,” confessed the flattered sheriff. “And—say,
Paisley, when you are writing about me to your ma, you better say
Wickliff, or Amos. Mr. Wickliff sounds kinder stiff. I’ll understand.”

The letter that the sheriff received in return he did not show to
Paisley. He read it with a knitted brow, and more than once he brushed
his hand across his eyes. When he finished it he drew a long sigh, and
walked up to his mother’s portrait. “She says she prays for me every
night, ma”—he spoke under his breath, and reverently. “Ma, I simply have
_got_ to save that boy for her, haven’t I?”

That evening Paisley rather timidly approached a subject which he had
tried twice before to broach, but his courage had failed him. “You said
something, Mr. Wickliff, of paying me a little extra for what I do,
keeping the books, etc. Would you mind telling me what it will be? I—I’d
like to send a Christmas present to my mother.”

“That’s right,” said the sheriff, heartily. “I was thinking what would
suit her. How’s a nice black dress, and a bill pinned to it to pay for
making it up?”

“But I never—”

“You can pay me when you get out.”

“Do you think I’ll ever get out?” Paisley’s fine eyes were fixed on
Wickliff as he spoke, with a sudden wistful eagerness. He had never
alluded to his health before, yet it had steadily failed. Now he would
not let Amos answer; he may have flinched from any confirmation of his
own fears; he took the word hastily. “Anyhow, you’ll risk my turning out
a bad investment. But you’ll do a damned kind action to my mother; and
if I’m a rip, she’s a saint.”

“_Sure_,” said the sheriff. “Say, do you think she’d mind my sending her
a hymn-book and a few flowers?”

Thus it came to pass that the tiny bakery window, one Christmas-day,
showed such a crimson glory of roses as the village had never seen; and
the widow Smith, bowing her shabby black bonnet on the pew rail, gave
thanks and tears for a happy Christmas, and prayed for her son’s friend.
She prayed for her son also, that he might “be kept good.” She felt that
her prayer would be answered. God knows, perhaps it was.

That night before she went to bed she wrote to Edgar and to Amos. “I am
writing to both my boys,” she said to Amos, “for I feel like _you_ were
my dear son too.”

When Amos answered this letter he did not consult the Manual. It was
one day in January, early in the month, that he received the first bit
of encouragement for his missionary work palpable enough to display
to the scoffer Raker. Yet it was not a great thing either; only this:
Paisley (already half an hour at work in the sheriff’s room) stopped,
fished from his sleeve a piece of note-paper folded into the measure of a
knife-blade, and offered it to the sheriff.

“See what Mame sent me,” said he; “just read it.”

There was a page of it, the purport being that the writer had done what
she had through jealousy, which she knew now was unfounded; she was
suffering indescribable agonies from remorse; and, to prove she meant
what she said, if her darling Ned would forgive her she would get him out
before a week was over. If he agreed he was to be at his window at six
o’clock Wednesday night. The day was Thursday.

“How did you get this?” asked Amos. “Do you mind telling?”

“Not the least. It came in a coat. From Barber & Glasson’s. The one Mrs.
Raker picked out for me, and it was sent up from the store. She got at it
somehow, I suppose.”

“But how did you get word where to look?”

Paisley grinned. “Mame was here, visiting that fellow who was taken up
for smashing a window, and pretended he was so hungry he had to have a
meal in jail. Mame put him up to it, so she could come. She gave me the
tip where to look then.”

“I see. I got on to some of those signals once. Well, did you show
yourself Wednesday?”

“Not much!” He hesitated, and did not look at the sheriff, scrawling
initials on the blotting-pad with his pen. “Did you really think, Mr.
Wickliff, after all you’ve done for me—and my mother—I would go back on
you and get you into trouble for that—”

“’S-sh! Don’t call names!” Wickliff looked apprehensively at the picture
of his mother. “Why didn’t you give me this before?”

“Because you weren’t here till this morning. I wasn’t going to give it to
Raker.”

“What do you suppose she’s after?”

“Oh, she’s got some big scheme on foot, and she needs me to work it. I’m
sick of her. I’m sick of the whole thing. I want to run straight. I want
to be the man my poor mother thinks I am.”

“And I want to help you, Ned,” cried the sheriff. For the first time he
caught the other’s hand and wrung it.

“I guess the Lord wants to help me too,” said Paisley, in a queer dry
tone.

“Why—yes—of course he wants to help all of us,” said the sheriff,
embarrassed. Then he frowned, and his voice roughened as he asked, “What
do you mean by that?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” said Paisley, smiling; “you’ve always known
it. It’s been getting worse lately. I guess I caught cold. Some mornings
I have to stop two or three times when I dress myself, I have such fits
of coughing.”

“Why didn’t you tell, and go to the hospital?”

“I wanted to come down here. It’s so pleasant down here.”

“Good—” The sheriff reined his tongue in time, and only said, “Look here,
you’ve got to see a doctor!”

Therefore the encouragement to the missionary work was embittered by
divers conflicting feelings. Even Raker was disturbed when the doctor
announced that Paisley had pneumonia.

“Double pneumonia and a slim chance, of course,” gloomed Raker. “Always
so. Can’t have a man git useful and be a little decent, but he’s got to
die! Why couldn’t it ’a’ been that tramp tried to set the jail afire?”

“What I’m a-thinking of is his poor ma, who used to write him such
beautiful letters,” said Mrs. Raker, wiping her kind eyes. “They was so
attached. Never a week he didn’t write her.”

“It’s his mother I’m thinking of, too,” said the sheriff, with a groan;
“she’ll be wanting to come and see him, and how in—” He swallowed an
agitated oath, and paced the floor, his hands clasped behind him, his lip
under his teeth, and his blackest Indian scowl on his brow—plain signs
to all who knew him that he was fighting his way through some mental
thicket.

But he had never looked gentler than he looked an hour later, as he
stepped softly into Paisley’s cell. Mrs. Raker was holding a foaming
glass to the sick man’s lips. “There; take another sup of the good nog,”
she said, coaxingly, as one talks to a child.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” said Paisley. “Queer how I’ve thought so often
how I’d like the taste of whiskey again on my tongue, and now I can have
all I want, I don’t care a hooter!”

His voice was rasped in the chords, and he caught his breath between his
sentences. Forty-eight hours had made an ugly alteration in his face; the
eyes were glassy, the features had shrunken in an indescribable, ghastly
way, and the fair skin was of a yellowish pallor, with livid circles
about the eyes and the open mouth.

Wickliff greeted him, assuming his ordinary manner. They shook hands.

“There’s one thing, Mr. Wickliff,” said Paisley: “you’ll keep this from
my mother. She’d worry like blazes, and want to come here.”

There was a photograph on the table, propped up by books; the sheriff’s
hand was on it, and he moved it, unconsciously: “‘To Eddy, from Mother.
The Lord bless and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee,
and be gracious unto thee—’” Wickliff cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t
know, Ned,” he said, cheerfully; “maybe that would be a good thing—kind
of brace you up and make you get well quicker.”

Mrs. Raker noticed nothing in his voice; but Paisley rolled his eyes
on the impassive face in a strange, quivering, searching look; then he
closed them and feebly turned his head.

“Don’t you want me to telegraph? Don’t you want to see her?”

Some throb of excitement gave Paisley the strength to lift himself up
on the pillows. “What do you want to rile me all up for?” His voice
was almost a scream. “Want to see her? It’s the only thing in this
damned fool world I do want! But I can’t have her know; it would kill
her to know. You must make up some lie about it’s being diphtheria and
awful sudden, and no time for her to come, and have me all out of the
way before she gets here. You’ve been awful good to me, and you can do
anything you like; it’s the last I’ll bother you—don’t let her find out!”

“For the land’s sake!” sniffed Mrs. Raker, in tears—“don’t she know?”

“No, ma’am, she don’t; and she never will, either,” said the sheriff.
“There, Ned, boy, you lay right down. I’ll fix it. And you shall see her,
too. I’ll fix it.”

“Yes, he’ll fix it. Amos will fix it. Don’t you worry,” sobbed Mrs.
Raker, who had not the least idea how the sheriff could arrange matters,
but was just as confident that he would as if the future were unrolled
before her gaze.

The prisoner breathed a long deep sigh of relief, and patted the strong
hand at his shoulder. And Amos gently laid him back on the pillows.

Before nightfall Paisley was lying in Amos Wickliff’s own bed, while
Amos, at his side, was critically surveying both chamber and parlor under
half-closed eyelids. He was trying to see them with the eyes of the
elderly widow of a Methodist minister.

“Hum—yes!” The result of the survey was, on the whole, satisfactory. “All
nice, high-toned, first-class pictures. Nothing to shock a lady. Liquors
all put away, ’cept what’s needed for him. Pops all put away, so she
won’t be finding one and be killing herself, thinking it’s not loaded. My
bed moved in here comfortable for him, because he thought it was such a
pleasant room, poor boy. Another bed in my room for her. Bath-room next
door, hot and cold water. Little gas stove. Trained nurse who doesn’t
know anything, and so can’t tell. Thinks it’s my friend Smith. _Is_ there
anything else?”

At this moment the white counterpane on the bed stirred.

“Well, Ned?” said Wickliff.

“It’s—nice!” said Paisley.

“That’s right. Now you get a firm grip on what I’m going to say—such a
grip you won’t lose it, even if you get out of your head a little.”

“I won’t,” said Paisley.

“All right. You’re not Paisley any more. You’re Ned Smith. I’ve had you
moved here into my rooms because your boarding-place wasn’t so good.
Everybody here understands, and has got their story ready. The nurse
thinks you’re my friend Smith. You are, too, and you are to call me Amos.
The telegram’s gone. ’S-sh!—what a way to do!”—for Paisley was crying.
“Ain’t I her boy too?”

One weak place remained in the fortress that Amos had builded against
prying eyes and chattering tongues. He had searched in vain for “Mame.”
There was no especial reason, except pure hatred and malice, to dread her
going to Paisley’s mother, but the sheriff had enough knowledge of Mame’s
kind to take these qualities into account.

From the time that Wickliff promised him that he should have his
mother, Paisley seemed to be freed from every misgiving. He was too
ill to talk much, and much of the time he was miserably occupied with
his own suffering; yet often during the night and day before she came
he would lift his still beautiful eyes to Mrs. Raker’s and say, “It’s
to-morrow night ma comes, isn’t it?” To which the soft-hearted woman
would sometimes answer, “Yes, son,” and sometimes only work her chin and
put her handkerchief to her eyes. Once she so far forgot the presence
of the gifted professional nurse that she sniffed aloud, whereupon that
personage administered a scorching tonic, in the guise of a glance, and
poor Mrs. Raker went out of the room and cried.

He must have kept some reckoning of the time, for the next day he varied
his question. He said, “It’s to-day she’s coming, isn’t it?” As the day
wore on, the customary change of his disease came: he was relieved of
his worst pain; he thought that he was better. So thought Mrs. Raker
and the sheriff. The doctor and the nurse maintained their inscrutable
professional calm. At ten o’clock the sheriff (who had been gone for a
half-hour) softly opened the door. The sick man instantly roused. He half
sat up. “I know,” he exclaimed; “it’s ma. Ma’s come!”

The nurse rose, ready to protect her patient.

There entered a little, black-robed, gray-haired woman, who glided swift
as a thought to the bedside, and gathered the worn young head to her
breast. “My boy, my dear, good boy!” she said, under her breath, so low
the nurse did not hear her; she only heard her say, “Now you must get
well.”

“Oh, I _am_ glad, ma!” said the sick man.

After that the nurse was well content with them all. They obeyed her
implicitly. It was she rather than Mrs. Raker who observed that Mr.
Smith’s mother was not alone, but accompanied by a slim, fair, brown-eyed
young woman, who lingered in the background, and would fain have not
spoken to the invalid at all had she not been gently pushed forward by
the mother, with the words, “And Ruth came too, Eddy!”

“Thank you, Ruth; I knew that you wouldn’t let ma come alone,” said Ned,
feebly.

The young woman had opened her lips. Now they closed. She looked at him
compassionately. “Surely not, Ned,” she said.

But why, wondered the nurse, who was observant—it was her trade to
observe—why did she look at him so intently, and with such a shocked pity?

Ned did not express much—the sick, especially the very sick, cannot; but
whenever he waked in the night and saw his mother bending over him he
smiled happily, and she would answer his thought. “Yes, my boy; my dear,
good boy,” she would say.

And the sheriff in his dim corner thought sadly that the ruined life
would always be saved for her now, and her son would be her good boy
forever. Yet he muttered to himself, “I suppose the Lord is helping me
out, and I ought to feel obliged, but I’m hanged if I wouldn’t rather
take the chances and have the boy get well!”

But he knew all the time that there was no hope for Ned’s life. He
lived three days after his mother came. The day before his death he was
alone for a short time with the sheriff, and asked him to be good to
his mother. “Ruth will be good to her too,” he said; “but last night I
dreamed Mame was chasing mother, and it scared me. You won’t let her get
at mother, will you?”

“Of course I won’t,” said the sheriff; “we’re watching your mother every
minnit; and if that woman comes here, Raker has orders to clap her in
jail. And I will always look out for your ma, Ned, and she never shall
know.”

“That’s good,” said Ned, in his feeble voice. “I’ll tell you something:
I always wanted to be good, but I was always bad; but I believe I would
have been decent if I’d lived, because I’d have kept close to you. You’ll
be good to ma—and to Ruth?”

The sheriff thought that he had drifted away and did not hear the answer,
but in a few moments he opened his eyes and said, brightly, “Thank you,
Amos.” It was the first time that he had used the other man’s Christian
name.

“Yes, Ned,” said the sheriff.

Next morning at daybreak he died. His mother was with him. Just before he
went to sleep his mind wandered a little. He fancied that he was a little
boy, and that he was sick, and wanted to say his prayers to his mother.
“But I’m so sick I can’t get out of bed,” said he. “God won’t mind my
saying them in bed, will He?” Then he folded his hands, and reverently
repeated the childish rhyme, and so fell into a peaceful sleep, which
deepened into peace. In this wise, perhaps, were answered many prayers.

Amos made all the arrangements the next day. He said that they were going
home from Fairport on the day following, but he managed to conclude
all the necessary legal formalities in time to take the evening train.
Once on the train, and his companions in their sections, he drew a long
breath.

“It may not have been Mame that I saw,” he said, taking out his
cigar-case on the way to the smoking-room; “it was merely a glimpse—she
in a buggy, me on foot; and it may be she wouldn’t do a thing or think
the game worth blackmail; but I don’t propose to run any chances in this
deal. Hullo—excuse me, miss!”

The last words were uttered aloud to Ruth Graves, who had touched him on
the arm. He had a distinct admiration for this young woman, founded on
the grounds that she cried very quietly, that she never was underfoot,
and that she was so unobtrusively kind to Mrs. Smith.

“Anything I can do?” he began, with genuine willingness.

She motioned him to take a seat. “Mrs. Smith is safe in her section,” she
said; “it isn’t that. I wanted to speak to you. Mr. Wickliff, Ned told me
how it was. He said he couldn’t die lying to everybody, and he wanted me
to know how good you were. I am perfectly safe, Mr. Wickliff,” as a look
of annoyance puckered the sheriff’s brow. “He told me there was a woman
who might some time try to make money out of his mother if she could find
her, and I was to watch. Mr. Wickliff, was she rather tall and slim, with
a fine figure?”

“Yes—dark-complected rather, and has a thin face and a largish nose.”

“And one of her eyes is a little droopy, and she has a gold filling in
her front tooth? Mr. Wickliff, that woman got on this train.”

“She did, did she?” said the sheriff, showing no surprise. “Well, my dear
young lady, I’m very much obliged to you. I will attend to the matter.
Mrs. Smith sha’n’t be disturbed.”

“Thank you,” said the young woman; “that’s all. Good-night!”

“You might know that girl had had a business education,” the sheriff
mused—“says what she’s got to say, and moves on. Poor Ned! poor Ned!”

Ruth went to her section, but she did not undress. She sat behind the
curtains, peering through the opening at Mrs. Smith’s section opposite,
or at the lower berth next hers, which was occupied by the sheriff. The
curtains were drawn there also, and presently she saw him disappear by
sections into their shelter. Then his shoes were pushed partially into
the aisle. Empty shoes. She waited; it could not be that he was really
going to sleep. But the minutes crept by; a half-hour passed; no sign of
life behind his curtains. An hour passed. At the farther end of the car
curtains parted, and a young woman slipped out of her berth. She was
dark and not handsome, but an elegant shape and a modish gown made her
attractive-looking. One of her eyelids drooped a little.

[Illustration: “SHE PAUSED BEFORE MRS. SMITH’S SECTION”]

She walked down the aisle and paused before Mrs. Smith’s section, Ruth
holding her breath. She looked at the big shoes on the floor, her lip
curling. Then she took the curtains of Mrs. Smith’s section in both hands
and put her head in.

“I must stop her!” thought Ruth. But she did not spring out. The sheriff,
fully dressed, was beside the woman, and an arm of iron deliberately
turned her round.

“The game’s up, Mamie,” said Wickliff.

She made no noise, only looked at him.

“What are you going to do?” said she, with perfect composure.

“Arrest you if you make a racket, talk to you if you don’t. Go into that
seat.” He indicated a seat in the rear, and she took it without a word.
He sat near the aisle; she was by the window.

“I suppose you mean to sit here all night,” she remarked, scornfully.

“Not at all,” said he; “just to the next place. Then you’ll get out.”

“Oh, will I?”

“You will. Either you will get out and go about your business, or you
will get out and be taken to jail.”

“We’re smart. What for?”

“For inciting prisoners to escape.”

“Ned’s dead,” with a sneer.

“Yes, he’s dead, and”—he watched her narrowly, although he seemed
absorbed in buttoning his coat—“they say he haunts his old cell, as if
he’d lost something. Maybe it’s the letter you folded up small enough to
go in the seam of a coat. I’ve got that.” He saw that she was watching
him in turn, and that she was nervous. “Ned’s dead, poor fellow, true
enough; but—the girl at Barber & Glasson’s ain’t dead.”

She began to fumble with her gloves, peeling them off and rolling them
into balls. He thought to himself that the chances were that she was
superstitious.

“Look here,” he said, sharply, “have an end of this nonsense; you get off
at the next place, and never bother that old lady again, or—I will have
you arrested, and you can try for yourself whether Ned’s cell is haunted.”

For a brief space they eyed each other, she in an access of impotent
rage, he stolid as the carving of the seat. The car shivered; the great
wheels moved more slowly. “Decide,” said he; not imperatively—dryly,
without emotion of any sort. He kept his mild eyes on her.

“It wasn’t his mother I meant to tell; it was that girl—that _nice_ girl
he wanted to marry—”

“You make me tired,” said the sheriff. “Are you going, or am I to make a
scene and take you? I don’t care much.”

She slipped her hand behind her into her pocket.

The sheriff laughed, and grasped one wrist.

“_I_ don’t want to talk to the country fools,” she snapped.

“This way,” said the sheriff, guiding her. The train had stopped. She
laughed as he politely handed her off the platform; the next moment the
wheels were turning again and she was gone. He never saw her again.

The porter came out to stand by his side in the vestibule, watching the
lights of the station race away and the darkling winter fields fly past.
The sheriff was well known to him; he nodded an eager acquiescence to the
officer’s request: “If those ladies in 8 and 9 ask you any questions,
just tell them it was a crazy woman getting the wrong section, and I took
care of her.”

Within the car a desolate mother wept the long night through, yet thanked
God amid her tears for her son’s last good days, and did not dream of the
blacker sorrow that had menaced her and had been hurled aside.




THE CABINET ORGAN




THE CABINET ORGAN


It was a June day. Not one of those perfervid June days that simulate
the heat of July, and try to show the corn what June can do, but one of
Shakespeare’s lovely and temperate days, just warm enough to unfurl the
rose petals of the Armstrong rose-trees and ripen the grass flowers in
the Beaumonts’ unmowed yard.

The Beaumonts lived in the north end of town, at the terminus of the
street-car line. They did not live in the suburbs because they liked
space and country air, nor in order to have flowers and a kitchen-garden
of their own, like the Armstrongs opposite, but because the rent was
lower. The Beaumonts were very poor and very proud. The Armstrongs were
neither poor nor proud. Joel Armstrong, the head of the family, owned the
comfortable house, with its piazzas and bay-windows, the small stable
and the big yard. There was a yard enclosed in poultry-netting, and a
pasture for the cow, and the elderly family horse that had picked up so
amazingly under the influence of good living and kindness that no one
would suspect how cheaply the car company had sold him.

Armstrong was the foreman of a machine-shop. Every morning at half-past
six Pauline Beaumont, who rose early, used to see him board the
street-car in his foreman’s clothes, which differs from working-men’s
clothes, though only in a way visible to the practised observer. He
always was smoking a short pipe, and he usually was smiling. Mrs.
Armstrong was a comely woman, who had a great reputation in the
neighborhood as a cook and a nurse. In the family were three boys—if one
can call the oldest a boy, who was a young carpenter, just this very day
setting up for master-builder. The second boy was fifteen, and in the
high-school, and the youngest was ten. There were no daughters; but for
helper Mrs. Armstrong had a stout young Swede, who was occasionally seen
by the Beaumonts hiding broken pieces of glass or china in a convenient
ravine. The Beaumont house was much smaller than the Armstrongs’, nor was
it in such admirable repair and paint; but then, as Henriette Beaumont
was used to say, “_They_ had not a carpenter in the family.”

It will be seen that the Beaumonts held themselves very high above the
Armstrongs. They could not forget that twenty-five years ago their father
had been Lieutenant-Governor, and they had been accounted rich people in
the little Western city. Father and fortune had been lost long since.
They were poor, obscure, working hard for a livelihood; but they still
kept their pride, which only increased as their visible consequence
diminished. Nevertheless, Pauline often looked wistfully across at the
Armstrongs’ little feasts and fun, and always walked home on their side
of the street. Pauline was the youngest and least proud of the Beaumonts.

To-day, as usual, she came down the street, past the neat low fence of
the Armstrongs; but instead of passing, merely glancing in at the lawn
and the house, she stopped; she leaned her shabby elbows on the gate,
where she could easily see the dining-room and sniff the savory odors
floating from the kitchen. “Oh, doesn’t it smell good?” she murmured.
“Chickens fried, and new potatoes, and a strawberry shortcake. They have
such a nice garden.” She caught her breath in a mirthless laugh. “How
absurd I am! I feel like staying here and smelling the whole supper!
Yesterday they had waffles, and the day before beefsteak—such lovely,
hearty things!”

She was a tall girl, too thin for her height, with a pretty carriage and
a delicate irregular face, too colorless and tired for beauty, but not
for charm. Her skin was fine and clear, and her brown hair very soft.
Her gray eyes were alight with interest as she watched the finishing
touches given the table, which was spread with a glossy white cloth, and
had a bowl of June roses in the centre. Mrs. Armstrong, in a new dimity
gown and white apron, was placing a great platter of golden sponge-cake
on the board. She looked up and saw Pauline. The girl could invent no
better excuse for her scrutiny (which had such an air of prying) than to
drop her head as if in faintness—an excuse, indeed, suggested by her own
feelings. In a minute Mrs. Armstrong had stepped through the bay-window
and was on the other side of the fence, listening with vivid sympathy to
Pauline’s shamefaced murmur: “Excuse me, but I feel so ill!”

“It’s a rush of blood to the head,” cried Mrs. Armstrong, all the
instincts of a nurse aroused. “Come right in; you mustn’t think of going
home. Land! you’ll like as not faint before I can get over to you. Hold
on to the fence if you feel things swimming!”

[Illustration: “SHE LEANED HER SHABBY ELBOWS ON THE GATE”]

Pauline, in her confusion, grew red and redder, while, despite
inarticulate protestations, she was propelled into the house and on to a
large lounge.

“Lay your head back,” commanded the nurse, appearing with an
ammonia-bottle in one hand and a fan in the other.

“It’s nothing—nothing at all,” gasped Pauline, between shame and the
fumes of ammonia. “The day was a little warm, and I walked home, and I
was so busy I ate no lunch”—as if that were a change from her habits—“and
all at once I felt faint. But I’m all right now.”

“Well, I don’t _wonder_ you’re faint,” cried Mrs. Armstrong; “you
oughtn’t to do that way. Now you just got to lie still—— Oh, that’s only
Ikey. Ikey, you get a glass of wine for this lady; it’s Miss Beaumont.”

The tall young man in the gray suit and the blue flannel shirt blushed a
little under his sunburn as he bowed. “Pleased to meet you, miss,” said
he, promptly, before he disappeared.

“This is a great day for us,” continued the mother, releasing the
ammonia from duty, and beginning to fan vigorously. “Ike has set up as
master-builder—only two men, and he does most of the work; but he’s got
a house all to himself, and the chance of some bigger ones. We’re having
a little celebration. You must excuse the paper on the lounge; I put it
down when we unpacked the organ.”

“Oh, did the organ come?” said the son.

“It surely did, and we’ve played on it already.”

“Why, did you get the music? Was it in the box, too?”

“Oh, we ’ain’t played _tunes_; we just have been trying it—like to see
how it goes. It’s got an awful sweet sound.”

“And you ought to hear me play a tune on it, ma.”

“You! For the land’s sake!”

“Yes, me—that never did play a tune in my life. Anybody can play on
that organ.” He turned politely to Pauline, as to include her in the
conversation. “You see, Miss Beaumont, we’re a musical family that can’t
sing. We can’t, as they say, carry a tune to save our immortal souls.
The trouble isn’t with the voice; it’s with our ears. We can hear well
enough, too, but we haven’t an ear for music. I took lessons once, trying
to learn to sing, but the teacher finally braced up to tell me that he
hadn’t the conscience to take my money. ‘What’s the matter?’ says I.
‘You’ve lots of voice,’ says he, ‘but you haven’t a mite of ear.’ ‘Can’t
anybody teach me to sing?’ says I. ‘Not unless they hypnotize you, like
Trilby,’ says he. So I gave it up. But next I thought I would learn to
play; for if there’s one thing ma and the boys and I all love, it’s
music. And just then, as luck would have it, this teacher wanted to sell
his cabinet organ, which is in perfect shape and a fine instrument. And I
was craving to buy it, but I knew it was ridiculous, when none of us can
play. But I kept thinking. Finally it came to me. I had seen those zither
things with numbers on them; why couldn’t he paint numbers on the keys of
the organ just that way, and make music to correspond? And that’s just
the way we’ve done. You’re very musical. I—I’ve often listened to your
playing. What do you think of it?” He looked at her wistfully.

“I think it very ingenious—very,” said Pauline. She had risen now, and
she thanked Mrs. Armstrong, and said she must go home. In truth, she was
in a panic at the thought of what she had done. Henriette never would
understand. Her heart beat guiltily all the way home.

There were three Beaumonts—Henriette, Mysilla, and Pauline. Henriette
and Mysilla were twins, who had dressed alike from childhood’s hour,
although Mysilla was very plain, a colorless blonde, of small stature
and painfully thin, while Henriette was tall, with a stately figure and
a handsome dark face that would have looked well on a Roman coin. Yet
Henriette was a woman of good taste, and she spent many a night trying
to decide on a gown which would suit equally well Mysie’s fair head and
her glossy black one. Both the black and the brown head were gray now,
but they still wore frocks and hats alike. Henriette held that it was the
hall-mark of a good family to clothe twins alike, and Henriette did not
have her Roman features for nothing. Mysilla had always adored and obeyed
Henriette. She gloried in Henriette’s haughty beauty and grace, and she
was as proud of both now that Henriette was a shabby elderly woman, who
had to wear dyed gowns and darned gloves, as in the days when she was
the belle of the Iowa capital, and poor Jim Perley fought a duel with
Captain Sayre over a misplaced dance on her ball-card. Henriette promised
to marry Jim after the duel, but Jim died of pneumonia that very week.
For Jim’s sake, John Perley, his brother, was good to the girls. Pauline
was a baby when her father died. She never remembered the days of pomp,
only the lean days of adversity. John Perley obtained a clerkship for
her in a music-store. Henriette gave music lessons. She was a brilliant
musician, but she criticised her pupils precisely as she would have done
any other equally stupid performers, and her pupils’ parents did not
always love the truth. Mysilla took in plain sewing, as the phrase goes.
She sometimes (since John Perley had given them a sewing-machine) made as
much as four dollars a week. They invariably paid their rent in advance,
and when they had not money to buy enough to eat they went hungry. They
never cared to know their neighbors, and Pauline cringed as she imaged
Henriette’s sarcasms had she seen her sister drinking the Armstrongs’
California port. Henriette had stood in the hall corner and waved Pauline
fiercely and silently away while the unconscious Mrs. Armstrong thumped
at the broken bell outside, and at last departed, remarking, “Well, they
must be gone, or _dead_!”

Therefore rather timidly Pauline opened the door of the little room
that was both parlor and dining-room. Any one could see that the room
belonged to people who loved music. The old-fashioned grand-piano was
under protection of busts of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner; and Mysie’s
violin stood in the corner, near a bookcase full of musical biographies.
An air of exquisite neatness was like an aroma of lavender in the room,
and with it was fused a prim good taste, such as might properly belong
to gentlewomen who had learned the household arts when the rule of three
was sacred, and every large ornament must be attended by a smaller one
on either side. And an observer of a gentle mind, furthermore, might
have found a kind of pathos in the shabbiness of it all; for everything
fine was worn and faded, and everything new was coarse. The portrait of
the Lieutenant-Governor faced the door. For company it had on either
side small engravings of Webster and Clay. Beneath it was placed the
tea-table, ready spread. The cloth was of good quality, but thin with
long service. On the table a large plate of bread held the place of
importance, with two small plates on either corner, the one containing a
tiny slice of suspiciously yellow butter, and the other a cone of solid
jelly. Such jelly they sell at the groceries out of firkins. A glass
jug of tea stood by a plated ice-water jug of a pattern highly esteemed
before the war. Henriette was stirring a small lump of ice about the
sides of the tea-jug. She greeted Pauline pleasantly.

“Iced tea?” said Pauline. “I thought we were to have hot tea and sausages
and toast. I gave Mysie twenty-five cents for them this morning.” She
did not say that it was the money for more than one day’s luncheon.

“Yes, Mysie said something about it,” said Henriette, “but it didn’t seem
worth while to burn up so much wood merely to heat the water for tea; and
toast uses up so much butter.”

“But I gave Mysie a dollar to buy a little oil-stove that we could use
in summer; and there was the sausage; I don’t mean to find fault, sister
Etty, but I’m ravenously hungry.”

“Of course, child,” Henriette agreed, benignly; “you are _always_ hungry.
But I think you’ll agree I was lucky not to have bought that stove and
those sausages this morning. Who do you think is coming to this town next
week? Theodore Thomas, with his own orchestra! And just as I was going
into that store to buy your stove—though I didn’t feel at all sure it
wouldn’t explode and burn the house down—John Perley came up and gave
me a ticket, an orchestra seat; and I said at once, ‘The girls must go
too’; but I hadn’t but twenty-five cents, and no more coming in for a
week. Then it occurred to me like a flash, there was this money you had
given me; and, Paula, I made such a bargain! The man at Farrell’s, where
they are selling the tickets, will get us three seats, not very far
back in the gallery, for my orchestra seat and the money, and we shall
have enough money left to take us home in the street cars. Now do you
understand?” concluded Henriette, triumphantly.

“Yes, sister Etty; it will be splendid,” responded Pauline, but with less
enthusiasm than Henriette had expected.

“Aren’t you glad?” she demanded.

“Oh yes, I’m glad; but I’m so dead tired I can hardly talk,” said
Pauline, as she left the room. She felt every stair as she climbed it;
but her face cleared at the sight of Mysie coming through the hall.

“It’s a lovely surprise, Mysie, isn’t it?” she cried, cheerfully. She
always called Mysie by her Christian name, without prefix. Henriette,
although of the same age, was so much more important a person that she
would have felt the unadorned name a liberty. But nobody was afraid of
Mysie. Pauline wound one of her long arms about her waist and kissed her.

Mysie gave a little gasp of mingled pleasure and relief, and the burden
of her thoughts slipped off in the words, “I knew you ’lotted on that
oil-stove, Paula, but Etty said you would want me to go—”

“I wouldn’t go without you,” Pauline burst in, vehemently, “and I’d live
on bread and jelly for a week to give you that pleasure.”

“There was the sausage, too; I did feel bad about that; you ought to have
good hot meals after working all day.”

“No more than you, Mysie.”

“I’m not on my feet all day. And I did think of taking some of that
seventy-five cents we have saved for the curtains, but I didn’t like to
spend any without consulting you.”

“It’s your own money, Mysie; but anyhow I suppose we need the curtains.
Go on down; Henriette’s calling. I’ll be down directly.” But after she
heard her sister’s uncertain footstep on the stair she stood frowning out
of the window at the Armstrong house. “It’s hideous to think it,” she
murmured, “but I don’t care—we have so much music and so little sausage!
I wish I had the money for my ticket to the concert to spend on meat!”

Then, remorsefully, she went down-stairs, and after supper she played all
the evening on the piano; but the airs that she chose were in a simple
strain—minstrel songs of a generation ago, like “Nelly was a lady” and
“Hard times come again no more,” from a battered old book of her mother’s.

“Wouldn’t you like to try a few Moody and Sankeys?” Henriette jeered
after a while. “Foster seems to me only one degree less maudlin and
commonplace. He makes me think of tuberoses!” Pauline laughed and went to
the window. The white porcupine of electric light at the corner threw out
long spikes of radiance athwart the narrow sidewalk, and a man’s shadow
dipped into the lighted space. The man was leaning his arms on the fence.
“Foolish fellow!” Pauline laughed softly to herself. That night, shortly
after she had dropped asleep, she was awakened out of a dream of staying
to supper with the Armstrongs, and beholding the board loaded with
broiled chickens and plum-pudding, by a clutch on her shoulder. “It was
_quite_ accidental,” she pleaded; “it really was, sister Etty!” For her
dream seemed to project itself into real life, and there was Henriette, a
stern figure in flowing white, bending over her.

“Wake up!” she cried. “Listen! There’s something awful happening at the
Armstrongs’.”

Pauline sat up in bed as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box. Then she gave
a little gasp of laughter. “They are all right,” said she; “they are
playing on their organ. That’s the way they play.”

The organ ceased to moan, and Henriette returned to her couch. In ten
minutes she was back again, shaking Pauline. “Wake up!” she cried. “How
can you sleep in such a racket? He has been murdering popular tunes by
inches, and now what he is doing I don’t know, but it is _awful_. You
know them best. Get up and call to them that we can’t sleep for the noise
they make.”

“I suppose they have a right to play on their own organ.”

“They haven’t a right to make such a pandemonium anywhere. If you won’t
do something, I’m going to pretend I think it’s cats, and call ‘Scat!’
and throw something at them.”

“You wouldn’t hit anything,” Pauline returned, in that sleepy tone which
always rouses a wakeful sufferer’s wrath. “Better shut your window. You
can’t hear nearly so well then.”

“Yes, sister, I’ll shut the window,” Mysie called from the chamber, as
usual eager for peace.

“You let that window alone,” commanded Henriette, sternly. A long
pause—Henriette seated in rigid agony at the foot of the bed; the
Armstrongs experimenting with the Vox Humana stop. “Pauline, do you mean
to say that you can sleep? Pauline! _Pauline!_”

“What’s the matter now?” asked Pauline.

“I am going to take my brush—no, I shall take _your_ brush, Pauline
Beaumont—and hurl it at them!”

“Oh, sister, please don’t,” begged Mysie from within, like the voices on
a stage.

Henriette spoke not again; she strode out of the room, and did even as
she had threatened. She flung Pauline’s brush straight at the organist
sitting before the window. Whether she really meant to injure young
Armstrong’s candid brow is an open question; and, judging from the
result, I infer that she did not mean to do more than scare her sister;
therefore she aimed afar. By consequence the missile sped straight into
the centre of the window. But not through it; the window was raised, and
a wire screen rattled the brush back with a shivering jar.

“What’s that? A bat?” said Armstrong, happily playing on. His father and
mother were beaming upon him in deep content—his father a trifle sleepy,
but resolved, the morrow being Sunday, to enjoy this musical hour to the
full, his mother seated beside him and reading the numbers aloud.

“You see, Ikey,” she had explained, “that’s what makes you slow. While
you’re reading the numbers, you lose ’em on the organ; and while you’re
finding the numbers on the keys, you loose ’em on the paper. I’ll read
them awful low, so no one would suspect, and you keep your whole mind on
those keys. Now begin again; I’ve got a pin to prick them—2-4-3, 1-3—no,
1-8, 1-8—it’s only one 1-8; guess we better begin again.”

So Mrs. Armstrong droned forth the numbers and Ikey hammered them on
the organ, pumping with his feet, whenever he did not forget. The two
boys slept peacefully through the weird clamor. The neighbors, with one
exception, were apparently undisturbed. That exception, named Henriette
Beaumont, heard with swelling wrath.

“I’ve thrown the brush,” said she. No response from the pillow. “Now I’m
going to throw the broken-handled mug,” continued Henriette, in a tone of
deadly resolve; “it’s heavy, and it may kill some one, but I can’t help
it!” Still a dead silence. _Crash! smash!_ The mug with the broken handle
had sped against the weather-boarding.

“Now what was _that_?” cried Ike, jumping up. Before he was on his feet a
broken soap-dish had followed the mug. Up flew the sash, and Ike was out
of the window. “What are you doing that for? What do you mean by that?”
he yelled, to which the dark and silent house opposite naturally made no
reply. Ike was out in the road now, and both his parents were after him.
The elder Armstrong had been so suddenly wakened from a doze that he was
under the impression of a fire somewhere, and let out a noble shout to
that effect. Mrs. Armstrong, convinced that a dynamite bomb had missed
fire, gathered her skirts tightly around her ankles—as if bombs could run
under them like mice—and helped by screaming alternately “Police!” and
“Murder!”

Henriette gloated silently over the confusion. It did her soul good to
see Ike Armstrong running along the sidewalk after supposititious boys.

The Armstrongs did not return to the organ. Henriette heard their
footsteps on the gravel, she heard the muffled sound of voices; but
not again did the tortured instrument excite her nerves, and she sank
into a troubled slumber. As they sat at breakfast the next morning, and
Henriette was calculating the share due each cup from the half-pint of
boiled milk, the broken bell-wire jangled. Pauline said she would go.

“It can’t be any one to call so early in the morning,” said Henriette;
“you may go.”

[Illustration: “‘SOMEBODY THREW THESE THINGS AT OUR WINDOW’”]

It was young Armstrong, in his Sunday clothes. Pauline’s only picture of
him had been in his work-a-day garb; it was curious how differently he
impressed her, fresh from the bath and the razor, trigly buttoned up in a
perfectly fitting suit of blue and brown, with a dazzling rim of white
against his shapely tanned throat, and a crimson rose in his button-hole.
“How handsome he is!” thought Pauline. She had never been satisfied with
her own nose, and she looked at the straight bridge of his and admired
it. She was too innocent and ignorant herself to notice how innocently
clear were his eyes; but she thought that they looked true and kind, and
she did notice the bold lines of his chin and jaw, and the firm mouth
under his black mustache. Unaccountably she grew embarrassed; he was
looking at her so gravely, almost sternly, his new straw hat in one hand,
and the other slightly extended to her and holding a neat bundle.

He bowed ceremoniously, as he had seen actors bow on the stage. “Somebody
threw these things at our window last night,” said he; “I think they
belong to you. I couldn’t find all the pieces of the china.”

“They weren’t all there,” stammered Pauline, foolishly; and then a wave
of mingled confusion and irritation at her false position—there was her
monogram on the ivory brush!—and a queer kind of amusement, swept over
her, and dyed her delicate cheek as red as Armstrong’s rose. And suddenly
he too, flushed, and his eyes flashed.

“I’m sorry I disturbed your sister,” said he, “but I hope she will not
throw any more things at us. We will try not to practise so late another
night. Good-morning.”

“I _am_ sorry,” said Pauline; “tell your mother I’m sorry, please. She
was so kind to me.”

“Thank you,” Armstrong said, heartily; “I will.” And somehow before he
went they shook hands.

Pauline gave the message, but she felt so guilty because of this last
courtesy that she gave it without reproach, even though her only good
brush disclosed a pitiful crack.

“Well, you know why I did it,” said Henriette, coolly; “and does the man
suppose his playing isn’t obnoxious any hour of the day as well as night?
But let us hope they will be quiet awhile. Paula, have you any money? We
ought to go over those numbers for the concert beforehand, and we must
get Verdi’s Requiem. Mysie has some, but she wants it to buy curtains.”

“I’m sorry, sister Etty, but I haven’t a cent.”

“Then the curtains will have to wait, Mysie,” said Henriette, cheerfully,
“for we must have the music to-morrow.”

Mysie threw a deprecating glance at Pauline. “There was a bargain in
chintzes,” she began, feebly, “but of course, sister, if Paula doesn’t
mind—”

“I don’t mind, Mysie,” said Pauline.

Why should she make Mysie unhappy and Henriette cross for a pair of
cheap curtains? The day was beautiful, and she attended church. She was
surprised, looking round at the choir, to discover young Armstrong in
the seat behind her. She did not know that he attended that church. But
surely there was no harm in a neighbor’s walking home with Mysie and her.
How well and modestly he talked, and how gentle and deferential he was to
Mysie! Mysie sighed when he parted from them, a little way from the house.

“That young man is very superior to his station,” she declared, solemnly;
“he must be of good though decayed family.”

“His grandfather was a Vermont farmer, and ours was a Massachusetts
farmer,” retorted Pauline; “I dare say if we go back far enough we shall
find the Armstrongs as good as we—”

“Oh, pray don’t talk that way before Etty, dear,” interrupted Mysie,
hurriedly: “she thinks it so like the anarchists; and if you get into
that way of speech, you _might_ slip out something before her. Poor Etty,
I wish she felt as if she could go to church. I hope she had a peaceful
morning.”

Ah, hope unfounded! Never had Miss Henriette Beaumont passed a season
more rasping to her nerves. Looking out of the window, she saw both the
younger Armstrongs and their mother. The boys had been picking vegetables.

“Now, boys,” called Mrs. Armstrong, gayly, “let’s come and play on the
organ.”

Henriette’s soul was in arms. Unfortunately she was still in the robes
of rest (attempting to slumber after her tumultuous night), and dignity
forbade her shouting out of the window.

The two boys passed a happy morning experimenting on the different stops,
and improvising melodies of their own. “Say, mummy, isn’t that kinder
like a _tune_?” one or the other would exclaim. Mrs. Armstrong listened
with pride. The awful combination of discords fell sweetly on her ear,
which was “no ear for music.”

“It’s just lovely to have an organ,” she thought.

When Miss Beaumont could bear no more she attired herself and descended
the stairs. Then the boys stopped. In the afternoon several friends of
the Armstrongs called. They sang Moody and Sankey hymns, until Henriette
was pale with misery.

“I think I prefer the untutored Armstrong savages themselves, with their
war-cries,” she remarked.

“Perhaps they will get tired of it,” Mysie proffered for consolation.
But they did not tire. They never played later than nine o’clock at
night again, but until that hour the music-loving and unmusical family
played and sang to their hearts’ content. And the Beaumonts saw them at
the Thomas concert, Ike and his mother and Jim, applauding everything.
Henriette said the sight made her ill.

[Illustration: “‘NOW, BOYS, LET’S COME AND PLAY ON THE ORGAN’”]

Time did not soften her rancor. She caught cold at the concert, and for
two weeks was confined to her chamber with what Mrs. Armstrong called
rheumatism, but Henriette called gout. During the time she assured Mysie
that what she suffered from the Armstrong organ exceeded anything that
gout could inflict.

“Do let me speak to Mrs. Armstrong,” begged Mysie.

“I spoke to that boy, the one with the freckles, myself yesterday,”
replied Henriette, “out of the window. I told him if they didn’t stop I
would have them indicted.”

“Why, how did you see him?” Mysie was aghast, but she dared not criticise
Henriette.

“He came here with a bucket of water. Said his mother saw us taking
water out of the well, and it was dangerous. The impertinent woman, she
actually offered to send us water from their cistern every day.”

“But I think that was—was rather kind, sister, and it would be dreadful
to have typhoid fever.”

“I would rather _die_ of typhoid fever than have that woman bragging to
her vulgar friends that she gives the Beaumonts, Governor Beaumont’s
daughters, _water_! I know what her _kindness_ means.” Thus Henriette
crushed Mysie. But when the organ began, and it was evident that Tim
Armstrong intended to learn “Two Little Girls in Blue,” if it took him
all the afternoon, Mysie rose.

“Mysie,” called Henriette, “don’t you go one step to the Armstrongs’.”

Mysie sat down, but in a little while she tried again.

“I wish you’d let Paula, then; she is going by there every day, and she
has had no dispute with them. She often stops to talk.”

“Talk to whom?” said Henriette, icily.

“Oh, to any of them—Tim or Pete or Mrs. Armstrong.”

“Does she talk to them long?”

“Oh no, not very long—just as she goes by. I think you’re mistaken,
sister. They don’t think such mean things. Truly they are—nice; they seem
very fond of each other, and they almost always give Paula flowers.”

“What does she do with the flowers?”

“She puts them in the vases, and wears them.”

“Do they give her anything else?” Henriette’s tone was so awful that
Mysie dropped her work.

“Do they?” persisted Henriette.

“They sent over the magazines a few times, but that was just borrowing,
and once they—they—sent over some shortcake and some—bread.”

Henriette sat bolt-upright in bed, reckless of the pain every movement
gave her.

“Mysilla Beaumont, do you see where your sister is drifting? Are you both
crazy? But I shall put a stop to this nonsense this very day. I am going
to write a note to John Perley, and you will have to take it. Bring me
the paper. If there isn’t any in my desk, take some out of Pauline’s.”

“Oh, Henriette,” whimpered Mysie, “_what_ are you going to do?”

“You will soon see, and you will have to help me. After they have been
disgraced and laughed at, we’ll see whether she will care to lean over
their fence and talk to them.”

It was true that Pauline did talk to the Armstrongs; she did lean over
the Armstrong fence. It had come to pass by degrees. She knew perfectly
well it was wrong. Henriette never allowed her to have any acquaintances.
But Henriette could not see her from the bed, and Mysie did not mind; and
so she fell into the habit of stopping at the Armstrong gate to inquire
for Mrs. Armstrong’s turkeys, or to ask advice about the forlorn little
geraniums which fought for life in the Beaumont yard, or to lend her
own nimble fingers to the adorning of Mrs. Armstrong’s bonnets. She saw
Ike often. Once she actually ventured to enter “those mechanics’” doors
and play on the detested organ. Her musical gifts could not be compared
to her sister’s. A sweet, true voice, op no great compass, a touch that
had only sympathy and a moderate facility—these the highly cultivated
Beaumonts rated at their very low artistic value; but the ignorant
Armstrongs listened to Pauline’s hymns in rapture. The tears filled Mrs.
Armstrong’s eyes: impulsively she kissed the girl. “Oh, you dear child!”
she cried. Ike said nothing. Not a word. He was standing near enough to
Pauline to touch the folds of her dress. His fingers almost reverently
stroked the faded pink muslin. He swallowed something that was choking
him. Joel Armstrong nodded and smiled. Then his eyes sought his wife’s.
He put out his hand and held hers. When the music was done and the young
people were gone, he puffed hard on his dead pipe, saying, “It’s the best
thing that can happen to a young man, mother, to fall in love with a real
good girl, ain’t it?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“And I guess you’d have the training of this one, mother; and there’s
plenty of room in the lot opposite that’s for sale to build a nice little
house. They’d start a sight better off than we did.”

“But we were very happy, Joe, weren’t we?”

“That we were, and that we are, Sally,” said Armstrong. “Come on out in
the garden with your beau; we ain’t going to let the young folks do all
the courting.”

Mysie and Henriette saw the couple walking in the garden, the husband’s
arm around his wife’s waist, and the soft-hearted sister sighed.

“Oh, sister, don’t you kinder wish you _hadn’t done it_?” she whispered.
“They didn’t mean any harm.”

“Harm? No. I dare say that young carpenter would be willing to marry
Pauline Beaumont!” cried Henriette, bitterly.

Mysie shook her gray head, her loose mouth working, while she winked away
a tear. “I don’t care, I don’t care”—thus did she inwardly moan out a
spasm of dire resolution—“I’m just going to tell Pauline!”

Perhaps what she told set the cloud on the girl’s pretty face; and
perhaps that was why she looked eagerly over the Armstrong fence every
night; and the cloud lifted at the sound of Mrs. Armstrong’s mellow voice
hailing her from any part of the house or yard.

But one night, instead of the usual cheerful stir about the house, she
found the Swede girl alone in the kitchen, weeping over the potatoes.
To Pauline’s inquiries she returned a burst of woe. “They all tooken to
chail—all!” she wailed. “I don’t know what to do if I get supper. The
mans come, the police mans, and tooken them all away. _I hela verlden!_
who ever know such a country? Such nice peoples sent to chail for play on
the organ—their own organ! They say they not play right, but I think to
send to chail for not play right on the organ that sha’n’t be right!”

Pauline could make nothing more out of her; but the man on the corner
looked in at one particularly dolorous burst of sobs over poor Tim
and poor Petey and tendered his version: “They’ve gone, sure enough,
miss. Your sisters have had them arrested for keeping and committing
a nuisance. Now, I ain’t stuck on their organ-playing, as a general
rule, myself, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a nuisance. But the
Fullers ain’t on the best of terms; old Fuller is a crank, and there’s
politics between him and Armstrong and the Delaneys, who have just moved
into the neighborhood, mother and daughter—very musical folks, they say,
and nervous; they have joined in with your sister—”

“Where have they gone?” asked Pauline, who was very pale.

“To the police court. They were mighty cunning, if you’ll excuse me,
miss. They picked out that old German crank, Von Reibnitz, who plays in
the Schubert Quartet, and loves music better than beer.”

The man was right. Henriette had chosen her lawgiver shrewdly. At this
very moment she was sitting in one of the dingy chairs of the police
court, with the mien of Marie Antoinette on her way to execution. Mysie
sat beside her in misery not to be described; for was she not joined
with Henriette in the prosecution of the unfortunate Armstrongs? and had
she not surreptitiously partaken of hot rolls and strawberry jam that
very day, handed over the fence to her by Mrs. Armstrong? She could not
sustain the occasional glare of the magistrate’s glasses; and, unable to
look in the direction of the betrayed Armstrongs, for the most part she
peered desolately at the clerk. The accused sat opposite. Mr. Armstrong
and Ike were in their working-clothes. Hastily summoned, they had not
the meagre comfort of a toilet. The father looked about the court, a
perplexed frown replacing at intervals a perplexed grin. When he was not
studying the court-room, he was polishing the bald spot on his head with
a large red handkerchief, or rubbing the grimy palms of his hands on
the sides of his trousers. He had insisted upon an immediate trial, but
his wits had not yet pulled themselves out of the shock of his arrest.
The boys varied the indignant solemnity of bearing which their mother
had impressed on them with the unquenchable interest of their age. Mrs.
Armstrong had assumed her best bonnet and her second-best gown. She was
a handsome woman, with her fair skin, her wavy brown hair, and brilliant
blue eyes; and the reporter looked at her often, adding to the shame
and fright that were clawing her under her Spartan composure. But she
held her head in the air bravely. Not so her son, who sat with his hands
loosely clasped before him and his head sunk on his breast through the
entire arraignment.

Behind the desk the portly form of the magistrate filled an arm-chair
to overflowing, so that the reporter wondered whether he could rise
from the chair, should it be necessary, or whether chair and he must
perforce cling together. His body and arms were long, but his legs were
short, so he always used a cricket, which somehow detracted from the
dignity of his appearance. He had been a soldier, and kept a martial gray
mustache; but he wore a wig of lustrous brown locks, which he would push
from side to side in the excitement of a case, and then clap frankly
back into place with both hands. There was no deceit about Fritz Von
Reibnitz. He was a man of fiery prejudices, but of good heart and sound
sense, and he often was shrewder than the lawyers who tried to lead him
through his weaknesses. But he had a leaning towards a kind of free-hand,
Arabian justice, and rather followed the spirit of the law than servilely
questioned what might be the letter. Twirling his mustachios, he leaned
back in his chair and studied the faces of the Armstrong family, while
the clerk read the information slowly—for the benefit of his friend the
reporter, who felt this to be one of the occasions that enliven a dusty
road of life.

“State of Iowa, Winfield County. The City of Fairport _vs._ Jos. L.
Armstrong, Mrs. J. L. Armstrong, Isaac J. Armstrong, Peter Armstrong,
and Timothy Armstrong. The defendants” (the names were repeated, and at
each name the mother of the Armstrongs winced) “are accused of the crime
of violating Section 2 of Chapter 41 of the ordinances of said city.
For that the defendants, on the 3d, the 10th, the 15th, and 23d day of
July, 18—, in the city of Fairport, in said county, did conspire and
confederate together to disturb the public quiet of the neighborhood, and
in pursuance of said conspiracy, and aiding and abetting each other, did
make, then and there, loud and unusual noises by playing on a cabinet
organ in an unusual and improper manner, and by singing boisterously
and out of tune; and did thereby disturb the public quiet of the
neighborhood, contrary to the ordinances in such case provided.”

“You vill read also the ordinance, Mr. Clerk,” called the magistrate,
with much majesty of manner, frowning at the same time on the younger
lawyers, who were unable to repress their feelings, while the reporter
appeared to be taken with cramps.

The clerk read:

“Every person who shall unlawfully disturb the public quiet of any
street, alley, avenue, public square, wharf, or any religious or other
public assembly, or building public or private, or any neighborhood,
private family, or person within the city, by giving false alarms of
fire” (Mrs. Armstrong audibly whispered to her husband, “We _never_ did
that!”), “by loud or unusual noises” (Mrs. Armstrong sank back in her
corner, and Joseph Armstrong very nearly groaned aloud), “by ringing
bells, blowing horns or other instruments, etc., etc., shall be deemed
guilty of a misdemeanor, and punished accordingly.”

Then up rose the attorney for the prosecution to state his case. He
narrated how the Armstrong family had bought an organ, and had played
upon it almost continually since the purchase, thereby greatly annoying
and disturbing the entire neighborhood. He said that no member of the
Armstrong family knew more than two changes on the organ, and that
several of them, in addition to playing, were accustomed to sing in a
loud and disagreeable voice (the Armstrong family were visibly affected),
and that so great was the noise and disturbance made by the said organ
that the prosecuting witness, Miss Beaumont, who was sick at the time,
had been agitated and disturbed by it, to her great bodily and mental
damage and danger. That although requested to desist, they had not
desisted (Tim and Pete exchanged glances of undissembled enjoyment), and
therefore she was compelled in self-defence to invoke the aid of the law.

Ike listened dully. There was no humor in the situation for him. He
felt himself and his whole family disgraced, dragged before the police
magistrate just like a common drunk and disorderly loafer, and accused
of being a nuisance to their neighborhood; the shame of it tingled to
his finger-tips. He would not look up; it seemed to him that he could
never hold up his head again. No doubt it would all be in the paper next
morning, and the Armstrongs, who were so proud of their honest name,
would be the laughing-stock of the town. Somebody was saying something
about a lawyer. Ike scowled at the faces of the young attorneys lolling
and joking outside the railing. “I won’t fool away any money on those
chumps,” he growled; “I want to get through and pay my fine and be done.”

Somebody laughed; then he saw that it was the sheriff of the county, a
good friend of his. He looked appealingly up at the strong, dark face; he
grasped the big hand extended.

“I’m in a hole, Mr. Wickliff,” he whispered.

“Naw, you’re not,” replied Wickliff; “you’ve a friend in the family. She
got onto this plot and came to me a good while ago. We’re all ready.
I’ve known her since she was a little girl. Know ’em all, poor things!
Say, let _me_ act as your attorney. Don’t have to be a member of the bar
to practise in _this_ court. Y’Honor! If it please y’Honor, I’d like to
be excused to telephone to some witnesses for the defence.”

Ike caught his breath. “A friend in the family!” He did not dare to
think what that meant. And Wickliff had gone. They were examining the
prosecuting witnesses. Miss Mysilla Beaumont took the oath, plainly
frightened. She spoke almost in a whisper. Her evident desire to deal
gently with the Armstrongs was used skilfully by the young attorney
whom John Perley (his uncle) had employed. Behold (he made poor Mysie’s
evidence seem to say) what ear-rending and nerve-shattering sounds these
barbarous organists must have produced to make this amiable lady protest
at law! Mysie fluttered out of the witness-box in a tremor, nor dared to
look where Mrs. Armstrong sat bridling and fanning herself. Next three
Fullers deposed to more or less disturbance from the musical taste of the
Armstrongs, and the Delaney daughter swore, in a clarion voice, that the
playing of the Armstrongs was the worst ever known.

“It ain’t any worse than her scales!” cried Mrs. Armstrong, goaded into
speech. The magistrate darted a warning glance at her.

Miss Henriette Beaumont was called last. Her mourning garments, to
masculine eyes, did not show their age; and her grand manner and
handsome face, with its gray hair and its flashing eyes, caused even
the magistrate’s manner to change. Henriette had a rich voice and a
beautiful articulation. Every softly spoken word reached Mrs. Armstrong,
who writhed in her seat. She recited how she had spent hours of “absolute
torment” under the Armstrong instrumentation, and she described in the
language of the musician the unspeakable iniquities of the Armstrong
technique. Her own lawyer could not understand her, but the magistrate
nodded in sympathy. She said she was unable to sleep nights because of
the “horrible discords played on the organ—”

“I declare we never played it but two nights, and they weren’t discords;
they were nice tunes,” sobbed Mrs. Armstrong.

The justice rapped and frowned. “Silence in der court!” he thundered.
Then he glared on poor Mrs. Armstrong. “Anybody vot calls hisself a laty
ought to behave itself like sooch!” he said, with strong emphasis. The
attorneys present choked and coughed. In fact, the remark passed into
a saying in police-court circles. Miss Henriette stepped with stately
graciousness to her seat.

“Und now der defence,” said the justice—“der Armstrong family. Vot has
you got to say?”

“Let me put some witnesses on first, Judge,” called Wickliff, “to show
the Armstrongs’ character.” He was opening the door, and the hall behind
seemed filled.

“Oh, good land, Ikey, do look!” quavered Mrs. Armstrong; “there’s pa’s
boss, and the Martins that used to live in the same block with us, and
Mrs. O’Toole, and all the neighbors most up to the East End, and—oh,
Ikey! there’s Miss Pauline herself! Our friends ’ain’t deserted us; I
knew perfectly well they _wouldn’t_!”

Ike did look up then—he stood up. His eyes met the eyes of his
sweetheart, and he sat down with his cheeks afire and his head in the air.

“In the first place,” said Wickliff, assuming an easy attitude, with
one hand in a pocket and the other free for oratorical display, “I’ll
call Miss Beaumont, Miss Henriette Beaumont, for the defence.” Miss
Beaumont responded to the call, and turned a defiant stare on the amateur
attorney.

“You say you were disturbed by the Armstrongs’ organ?”

“I was painfully disturbed.”

“Naturally you informed your neighbors, and asked them to desist playing
the organ?”

“I did.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

“To whom did you speak?”

“I told the boys to tell their mother.”

“Are you passionately fond of music?”

“I am.”

“Are you sensitive to bad music—acutely sensitive?”

“I suppose I am; a lover of music is, of necessity.”

The magistrate nodded and sighed.

“Are you of a particularly patient and forbearing disposition?” Henriette
directed a withering glance at the tall figure of the questioner.

“I am forbearing enough,” she answered. “Do I need to answer questions
that are plainly put to insult me?”

“No, madam,” said the magistrate. “Mr. Wickliff, I rules dot question
out.”

Nothing daunted, Wickliff continued: “When you gave the boys warning,
where were they?”

“In my house.”

“How came they there?”

“They had brought over a bucket of water.”

“Why?”

“Because we had only well-water, they said.”

“That was rather kind on the part of Mrs. Armstrong, don’t you think? In
every respect, besides playing the organ, she was a kind neighbor, wasn’t
she?”

“I don’t complain of her.”

“Wasn’t she rather noted in the neighborhood as a lady of great kindness?
Didn’t she often send in little delicacies—flowers, fruit, and such
things—gifts that often pass between neighbors to different people?”

“She may have. I am not acquainted with her.”

“Hasn’t she sent in things at different times to _you_?”

Henriette’s throat began to form the word no; then she remembered the
shortcake, she remembered the roses, she remembered her oath, and she
choked. “I don’t know much about it; perhaps she may have,” said she.

“That will do,” said Wickliff. “Call Miss Mysilla Beaumont.” Wickliff’s
respectful bearing reassured the agitated spinster. He wouldn’t detain
her a moment. He only wanted to know had neighborly courtesies passed
between the two houses. Yes? Had Mrs. Armstrong been a kind and
unobtrusive neighbor?

“Oh yes, sir; yes, indeed,” cried poor Mysie.

“Were you yourself much disturbed by the organ?”

“No, sir,” gasped Mysie, with one tragic glance at her sister’s stony
features. She knew now what Jeanie Deans must have suffered.

“That will do,” said Wickliff.

Then a procession of witnesses filed into the narrow space before the
railing. First the employer of the elder Armstrong gave his high praise
of his foreman as a man and a citizen; then came the neighbors, declaring
the Armstrong virtues—from Mrs. Martin, who deposed with tears that Mrs.
Armstrong’s courage and good nursing had saved her little Willy’s life
when he was burned, to Mrs. O’Toole, an aged little Irish woman, who
recited how the brave young Peter had rescued her dog from a band of
young torturers. “And they had a tin can filled with fire-crackers, yer
Honor (an’ they was lighted), tied to the poor stoompy tail of him; but
Petey he pulled it aff, and he throwed it ferninst them, and he made them
sorry that day, he did, for it bursted. He’s a foine bye, and belongs to
a foine family!”

“Aren’t you a little prejudiced in favor of the Armstrongs, Mrs.
O’Toole?” asked the prosecuting attorney, as Wickliff smilingly bade him
“take the witness.”

“Yes, sor, I am,” cried Mrs. O’Toole, huddling her shawl closer about her
wiry little frame. “I am that, sor, praise God! They paid the rint for me
whin me bye was in throuble, and they got him wur-rk, and he’s doin’ well
this day, and been for three year. And there’s many a hot bite passed
betwane us whin we was neighbors. Prejudeeced! I’d not be wuth the crow’s
pickin’s if I wasn’t; and the back of me hand and the sowl of me fut to
thim that’s persecuting of thim this day!”

“Call Miss Pauline Beaumont,” said Wickliff. “That will do, grandma.”

Pauline’s evidence was very concise, but to the point. She did not
consider the Armstrong organ a nuisance. She believed the Armstrongs, if
instructed, would learn to play the organ. If the window were shut the
noise could not disturb any one. She had the highest respect and regard
for the Armstrongs.

“There’s my case, your Honor,” said Wickliff, “and I’ve confidence
enough in it and in this court to leave it in your hands. Say the
same, Johnny?”—to the young lawyer. Perley laughed; he was beginning
to suspect that not all the case appeared on the surface. Perhaps the
Beaumont family peace would fare all the better if he kept his hands off.
He said that he had no evidence to offer in rebuttal, and would leave the
case confidently to the wisdom of the court.

“And I’ll bet you a hat on one thing, Amos,” he observed in an undertone
to the amateur attorney on the other side, “Fritz’s decision on this case
may be good sense, but it will be awful queer law.”

“Fritz has got good sense,” said Amos.

The magistrate announced his decision. He had deep sympathy, he said, for
the complainant, a gifted and estimable lady. He knew that the musical
temperament was sensitive as the violin—yes. But it also appeared from
the evidence that the Armstrong family were a good, a worthy family,
lacking only a knowledge of music to make them acceptable neighbors.
Therefore he decided that the Armstrong family should hire a competent
teacher, and that, until able to play without giving offence to the
neighbors, they should close the window. With that understanding he would
find the defendants not guilty; and each party must pay its own costs.

Perley glanced at Amos, who grinned and repeated, “Fritz has got good
sense.”

[Illustration: “‘THEY HAVE ENGAGED _ME_’”]

“I’d have won my hat,” said Perley, “but I’m not kicking. Just look at
Miss Beaumont, though.”

Henriette had listened in stony calm. She did not once look at Pauline,
who was standing at the other side of the room. “Come, sister,” she said
to Mysie. Mysie turned a scared face on Henriette. She drew her aside.

“Did you hear what he said?” she whispered. “Oh, Henriette, _what_ shall
we do? We shall have to pay the costs—”

“The Armstrongs will have to pay them too,” said Henriette, grimly.

“Theirs won’t be so much, because none of their witnesses will take a
cent; but the Fullers and Miss Delaney want their fees, and it’s a dollar
and a half, and there’s—”

“We shall have to borrow it from John Perley,” said Henriette.

“But he isn’t here, and maybe they’ll put us in jail if we don’t pay. Oh,
Henriette, why did you—”

This, Mysie’s first and last reproach of her sovereign, was cut short by
the approach of Pauline.

At her side walked young Armstrong. And Pauline, who used to be so timid,
presented him without a tremor.

“I wanted to tell you, Miss Beaumont,” said Ike, “that I did not
understand that we were disturbing you so much when you were sick. Not
being musical, we could not appreciate what we were making you suffer.
But I beg you to believe, ma’am, that we are all very sorry. And I didn’t
think it no more than right that I should pay all the costs of this
case—which I have done gladly. I hope you will forgive us, and that we
may all of us live as good neighbors in future. We will try not to annoy
you, and we have engaged a very fine music-teacher.”

“They have engaged _me_,” said Pauline. And as she spoke she let the
young man very gently draw her hand into his arm.




HIS DUTY




HIS DUTY


Amos Wickliff little suspected himself riding, that sunny afternoon,
towards the ghastliest adventure of an adventurous life. Nevertheless,
he was ill at ease. His horse was too light for his big muscles and his
six feet two of bone. Being a merciful man to beasts, he could not ride
beyond a jog-trot, and his soul was fretted by the delay. He cast a scowl
down the dejected neck of the pony to its mournful, mismated ears, and
from thence back at his own long legs, which nearly scraped the ground.
“O Lord! ain’t I a mark on this horse!” he groaned. “We could make money
in a circus!” With a gurgle of disgust he looked about him at the glaring
blue sky, at the measureless, melancholy sweep of purple and dun prairie.

“Well, give _me_ Iowa!” said Amos.

For a long while he rode in silence, but his thoughts were distinct
enough for words. “What an amusing little scamp it was!”—thus they ran—“I
believe he could mimic anything on earth. He used to give a cat and puppy
fighting that I laughed myself nearly into a fit over. When I think of
that I hate this job. Now why? You never saw the fellow to speak to him
more than twice. Duty, Amos, duty. But if he is as decent as he’s got
the name of being here, it’s rough—Hullo! River? Trees?” The river might
be no more than the lightening rim of the horizon behind the foliage,
but there was no mistake about the trees; and when Wickliff turned the
field-glass, which he habitually carried, on them he could make out not
only the river and the willows, but the walls of a cabin and the lovely
undulations of a green field of corn. Half an hour’s riding brought him
to the house and a humble little garden of sweet-pease and hollyhocks.
Amos groaned. “How cursed decent it all looks! And flowers too! I have
no doubt that his wife’s a nice woman, and the baby has a clean face.
Everything certainly does combine to ball me up on this job! There she
is; and she’s nice!”

A woman in a clean print gown, with a child pulling at her skirt, had run
to the gate. She looked young. Her freckled face was not exactly pretty,
but there was something engaging in the flash of her white teeth and her
soft, black-lashed, dark eyes. She held the gate wide open, with the
hospitality of the West. “Won’t you ’light, stranger?” she called.

“I’m bound for here,” replied Amos, telling his prepared tale glibly.
“This is Mr. Brown’s, the photographer’s, ain’t it? I want him to come to
the settlement with me and take me standing on a deer.”

“Yes, sir.” The woman spoke in mellow Southern accents, and she began to
look interested, as suspecting a romance under this vain-glory. “Yes,
sir. Deer you shot, I reckon. I’ll send Johnny D. for him. Oh, Johnny D.!”

A lath of a boy of ten, with sunburnt white hair and bright eyes, vaulted
over a fence and ran to her, receiving her directions to go find uncle
after he had cared for the gentleman’s horse.

“Your nephew, madam?” said Amos, as the lad’s bare soles twinkled in the
air.

“Well, no, sir, not born nephew,” she said, smiling; “he’s a little
neighbor boy. His folks live three miles further down the river; but I
reckon we all think jest as much of him as if he was our born kin. Won’t
you come in, sir?”

By this time she had passed under the luxuriant arbor of honeysuckle
that shaded the porch, and she threw wide the door. The room was large.
It was very tidy. The furniture was of the sort that can be easily
transported where railways have to be pieced out with mule trails.
But it was hardly the ordinary pioneer cabin. Not because there was a
sewing-machine in one corner, for the sewing-machine follows hard on the
heels of the plough; perhaps because of the white curtains at the two
windows (curtains darned and worn thin by washing, tied back with ribbons
faded by the same ministry of neatness), or the square of pretty though
cheap carpet on the floor, or the magazines and the bunch of sweet-pease
on the table, but most because of the multitude of photographs on
the clumsy walls. They were on cards, all of the same size (not more
than 8 by 10 inches), protected by glass, and framed in mossy twigs.
Some of the pictures were scenes of the country, many of them bits of
landscape near the house, all chosen with a marvellous elimination of
the usual grotesque freaks of the camera, and with such an unerring eye
for subject and for light and shade that the artist’s visions of the
flat, commonplace country were not only picturesque but poetic. In the
prints also were an extraordinary richness and range of tone. It did
not seem possible that mere black and white could give such an effect
of brilliancy and depth of color. An artist looking over this obscure
photographer’s workmanship might feel a thrill like that which crinkles a
flower-lover’s nerves when he sees a mass of azaleas in fresh bloom.

Amos was not an artist, but he had a camera at home, and he gave a
gulp of admiration. “Well, he _is_ great!” he sighed. “That beats any
photographic work I ever saw.”

The wife’s eyes were luminous. “Ain’t he!” said she. “It ’most seems
wicked for him to be farming when he can do things like that—”

“Why does he farm?”

“It’s his health. He caynt stand the climate East.”

“You are from the South yourself, I take it?”

“Yes, sir, Arkansas, though I don’t see how ever you guessed it. I met
Mist’ Brown there, down in old Lawrence. I was teaching school then,
and went to have my picture taken in his wagon. Went with my father,
and he was so pleasant and polite to paw I liked him from the start. He
nursed paw during his last sickness. Then we were married and came out
here—You’re looking at that picture of little Davy at the well? I like
that the best of all the ten; his little dress looks so cute, and he has
such a sweet smile; and it’s the only one has his hair smooth. I tell
Mist’ Brown I do believe he musses that child’s hair himself—”

“Papa make Baby’s hair pitty for picture!” cried the child, delighted to
have understood some of the conversation.

“He’s a very pretty boy,” said Amos. “’Fraid to come to me, young feller?”

But the child saw too few to be shy, and happily perched himself on the
tall man’s shoulder, while he studied the pictures. The mother appeared
as often as the child.

“He’s got her at the best every time,” mused the observer; “best side
of her face, best light on her nose. Never misses. That’s the way a man
looks at his girl; always twists his eyes a little so as to get the best
view. Plainly she’s in love with him, and looks remarkably like he was in
love with her, damn him!” Then, with great civility, he asked Mrs. Brown
what developer her husband used, and listened attentively, while she
showed him the tiny dark room leading out of the apartment, and exhibited
the meagre stock of drugs.

“I keep them up high and locked up in that cupboard with the key on top,
for fear Baby might git at them,” she explained. She evidently thought
them a rare and creditable collection. “I ain’t a bit afraid of Johnny
D.; he’s sensible, and, besides, he minds every word Mist’ Brown tells
him. He sets the world by Mist’ Brown; always has ever since the day
Mist’ Brown saved him from drowning in the eddy.”

“How was that?”

“Why, you see, he was out fishing, and climbed out on a log and slipped
someway. It’s about two miles further down the river, between his
parents’ farm and ours; and by a God’s mercy we were riding by, Dave and
the baby and I—the baby wasn’t out of long-clothes then—and we heard
the scream. Dave jumped out and ran, peeling his clothes as he ran. I
only waited to throw the weight out of the wagon to hold the horses, and
ran after him. I could see him plain in the water. Oh, it surely was a
dreadful sight! I dream of it nights sometimes yet; and he’s there in the
water, with his wet hair streaming over his eyes, and his eyes sticking
out, and his lips blue, fighting the current with one hand, and drifting
off, off, inch by inch, all the time. And I wake up with the same longing
on me to cry out, ‘Let the boy go! Swim! _Swim!_’”

“Well, _did_ you cry that?” says Amos.

“Oh no, sir. I went in to him. I pushed a log along and climbed out on it
and held out a branch to him, and someway we all got ashore—”

“What did you do with the baby?”

“I was fixing to lay him down in a soft spot when I saw a man was on the
bank. He was jumping up and down and yelling: ‘I caynt swim a stroke! I
caynt swim a stroke!’ ‘Then you hold the baby,’ says I; and I dumped poor
Davy into his arms. When we got the boy up the bank he looked plumb dead;
but Dave said: ‘He ain’t dead! He caynt be dead! I won’t have him dead!’
wild like, and began rubbing him. I ran to the man. If you please, there
that unfortunate man was, in the same place, holding Baby as far away
from him as he could get, as if he was a dynamite bomb that might go off
at any minute. ‘Give me your pipe,’ says I. ‘You will have to fish it out
of my pocket yourself,’ says he; ‘I don’t dast loose a hand from this
here baby!’ And he did look funny! But you may imagine I didn’t notice
that then. I ran back quick’s I could, and we rubbed that boy and worked
his arms and, you may say, blowed the breath of life into him. We worked
more’n a hour—that poor man holding the baby the enduring time: I reckon
_his_ arms were stiff’s ours!—and I’d have given him up: it seemed awful
to be rumpling up a corpse that way. But Dave, he only set his teeth and
cried, ‘Keep on, I _will_ save him!’”

“And you _did_ save him?”

“_He_ did,” flashed the wife; “he’d be in his grave but for Dave. I’d
given him up. And his mother knows it. And she said that if that child
was not named Johnny ayfter his paw, she’d name him David ayfter Mist’
Brown; but seeing he was named, she’d do next best, give him David for
a middle. And as calling him Johnny David seemed too long, they always
call him Johnny D. But won’t you rest your hat on the bed and sit down,
Mister—”

“Wickliff,” finished Amos; but he added no information regarding his
dwelling-place or his walk in life, and, being a Southerner, she did not
ask it. By this time she was getting supper ready for the guest. Amos
was sure she was a good cook the instant his glance lighted on her snowy
and shapely rolls. He perceived that he was to have a much daintier meal
than he had ever had before in the “Nation,” yet he frowned at the wall.
All the innocent, laborious, happy existence of the pair was clear to him
as she talked, pleased with so good a listener. The dominant impression
which her unconscious confidences made on him was her content.

“I reckon I am a natural-born farmer,” she laughed. “I fairly crave to
make things grow, and I love the very smell of the earth and the grass.
It’s beautiful out here.”

“But aren’t you ever lonesome?”

“Why, we’ve lots of neighbors, and they’re all such nice folks. The Robys
are awful kind people, and only four miles, and the Atwills are only
three, on the other side. And then the Indians drop in, but though I try
to be good to them, it’s hard to like anybody so dirty. Dave says Red
Horse and his band are not fair samples, for they are all young bucks
that their fathers won’t be responsible for, and they certainly do steal.
I don’t think they ever stole anything from us, ’cept one hog and three
chickens and a jug of whiskey; but we always feed them well, and it’s a
little trying, though maybe you’ll think I’m inhospitable to say so, to
have half a dozen of them drop in and eat up a whole batch of light bread
and all the meat you’ve saved for next day and a plumb jug of molasses at
a sitting. That Red Horse is crazy for whiskey, and awful mean when he’s
drunk; but he’s always been civil to us—There’s Mist’ Brown now!”

Wickliff’s first glance at the man in the doorway showed him the same
undersized, fair-skinned, handsome young fellow that he remembered; he
wanted to shrug his shoulders and exclaim, “The identical little tough!”
but Brown turned his head, and then Amos was aware that the recklessness
and the youth both were gone out of the face. At that moment it went to
the hue of cigar ashes.

“Here’s the gentleman, David; my husband, Mist’ Wickliff,” said the wife.

“Papa! papa!” joyously screamed the child, pattering across the floor.
Brown caught the little thing up and kissed it passionately; and he held
his face for a second against its tiny shoulder before he spoke (in a
good round voice), welcoming his guest. He was too busy with his boy, it
may be, to offer his hand. Neither did Amos move his arm from his side.
He repeated his errand.

Brown moistened his blue lips; a faint glitter kindled in his haggard
eyes, which went full at the speaker.

“_That’s_ what you want, is it?”

“Well, if I want anything more, I’ll explain it on the way,” said Amos,
unsmilingly.

Brown swallowed something in his throat. “All right; I guess I can go,”
said he. “To-morrow, that is. We can’t take pictures by moonlight; and
the road’s better by daylight. Won’t you come out with me while I do my
chores? We can—can talk it over.” In spite of his forced laugh there was
undisguised entreaty in his look, and relief when Amos assented. He went
first, saying under his breath, “I suppose this is how you want.”

Amos nodded. They went out, stepping down the narrow walk between the
rows of hollyhocks to one side and sweet-pease to the other. Amos
turned his head from side to side, against his will, subdued by the
tranquil beauty of the scene. The air was very still. Only afar, on the
river-bank, the cows were calling to the calves in the yard. A bell
tinkled, thin and sweet, as one cow waded through the shallow water under
the willows. After the dismal neutral tints of the prairie, the rich
green of corn-field and grass looked enchanting, dipped as they were in
the glaze of sunset. The purple-gray of the well-sweep was painted flatly
against a sky of deepest, lustreless blue—the sapphire without its gleam.
But the river was molten silver, and the tops of the trees reflected the
flaming west, below the gold and the tumbled white clouds. Turn one way,
the homely landscape held only cool, infinitely soft blues and greens and
grays; turn the other, and there burned all the sumptuous dyes of earth
and sky.

“It’s a pretty place,” said Brown, timidly.

“Very pretty,” Amos agreed, without emotion.

“I’ve worked awfully hard to pay for it. It’s all paid for now. You saw
my wife.”

“Nice lady,” said Amos.

“By ⸺, she is!” The other man swore with a kind of sob. “And she believes
in me. We’re happy. We’re trying to lead a good life.”

“I’m inclined to think you’re living as decently and lawfully as any
citizens of the United States.” The tone had not changed.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Brown burst forth, as if he could bear
the strain no longer.

“I’m going to do my duty, Harned, and take you to Iowa.”

“Will you listen to me first? All you know is, I killed—”

But the officer held up his hand, saying in the same steady voice, “You
know whatever you say may be used against you. It’s my duty to warn—”

“Oh, I know you, Mr. Wickliff. Come behind the gooseberry bushes where my
wife can’t see us—”

“It’s no use, Harned; if you talked like Bob Ingersoll or an angel, I
have to do my duty.” Nevertheless he followed, and leaned against the
wall of the little shed that did duty for a barn. Harned walked in front
of him, too miserably restless to stand still, nervously pulling and
breaking wisps of hay between his fingers, talking rapidly, with an
earnestness that beaded his forehead and burned in his imploring eyes.
“All you know about me”—so he began, quietly enough—“all you know about
me is that I was a dissipated, worthless photographer, who could sing
a song and had a cursed silly trick of mimicry which made him amusing
company; and so I was trying to keep company with rich fellows. You
don’t know that when I came to your town I was as innocent a country lad
as you ever saw, and had a picture of my dead mother in my Bible, and
wrote to my father every week. He was a good man, my father. Lucky he
died before he found out about _me_. And you don’t know, either, that at
first, keeping a little studio on the third story, with a folding-bed in
the studio, and doing my cooking on the gas-jet, I was a happy man. But
I was. I loved my art. Maybe you don’t call a photographer an artist.
I do. Because a man works with the sun instead of a brush or a needle,
can’t he create a picture? And do you suppose a photographer can’t
hunt for the soul in a sitter as well as a portrait-painter? Can’t a
photographer bring out light and shade in as exquisite gradations as an
etcher? Artist! Any man that can discover beauty, and can express it in
any shape so other men can see it and love it and be happy on account
of it—_he’s_ an artist! And I don’t give a damn for a critic who tries
to box up art in his own little hole!” Harned was excitedly tapping the
horny palm of one hand with the hard, grimy fingers of the other. Amos
thought of the white hands that he used to take such pains to guard, and
then he looked at the faded check shirt and the patched overalls. Harned
had been a little dandy, too fond of perfumes and striking styles.

“I was an artist,” said Harned. “I loved my art. I was happy. I had begun
to make reputation and money when the devil sent him my way. He was an
amateur photographer; that’s how we got acquainted. When he found I could
sing and mimic voices he was wild over me, flattered me, petted me,
taught me all kinds of fool habits; ruined me, body and soul, with his
friendship. Well, he’s dead; and God knows she wasn’t worth a man’s life;
but he did treat me mean about her, and when I flew at him he jeered at
me, and he took advantage of my being a little fellow and struck me and
cuffed me before them all; then I went crazy and shot him!” He stopped,
out of breath. Wickliff mused, frowning. The man at his mercy pleaded on,
gripping those slim, roughened hands of his hard together: “It ain’t
quite so bad as you thought, is it, Mr. Wickliff? For God’s sake put
yourself in my place! I went through hell after I shot him. You don’t
know what it is to live looking over your shoulder! Fear! fear! fear!
Day and night, fear! Waking up, maybe, in a cold sweat, hearing some
noise, and thinking it meant pursuit and the handcuffs. Why, my heart was
jumping out of my mouth if a man clapped me on the shoulder from behind,
or hollered across the street to me to stop. Then I met my wife. You
need not tell me I had no right to marry. I know it; I told myself so
a hundred times; but I couldn’t leave her alone with her poor old sick
father, could I? And then I found out that—that it would be hard for
her, too. And I was all wore out. Man, you don’t know what it is to be
frightened for two years? There wasn’t a nerve in me that didn’t seem to
be pulled out as far as it would go. I married her, and we hid ourselves
out here in the wilderness. You can say what you please, I have made her
happy; and she’s made me. If I was to die to-night, she’d thank God for
the happy years we’ve had together; just as she’s thanked Him every night
since we were married. The only thing that frets her is me giving up
photography. She thinks I could make a name like Wilson or Black. Maybe
I could; but I don’t dare; if I made a reputation I’d be gone. I have to
give it up, and do you suppose that ain’t a punishment? Do you suppose
it’s no punishment to sink into obscurity when you know you’ve got the
capacity to do better work than the men that are getting the money and
the praise? Do you suppose it doesn’t eat into my heart every day that I
can’t ever give my boy his grandfather’s honest name?—that I don’t even
dare to make his father’s name one he would be proud of? Yes, I took his
life, but I’ve given up all my chances in the world for it. My only hope
was to change as I grew older and be lost, and the old story would die
out—”

“It might; but you see he had a mother,” said Wickliff; “she offers five
thousand—”

“It was only one thousand,” interrupted Harned.

“One thousand first year. She’s raised a thousand every year. She’s a
thrifty old party, willing to pay, but not willing to pay any more than
necessary. When it got to five thousand I took the case.”

Harned looked wistfully about him. “I might raise four thousand—”

“Better stop right there. I refused fifty thousand once to let a man go.”

“Excuse me,” said Harned, humbly; “I remember. I’m so distracted I can’t
think of anything but Maggie and the baby. Ain’t there anything that will
move you? I’ve paid for that thing. I saved a boy’s life once—”

“I know; I’ve seen the boy.”

“Then you know I fought for his life; I fought awful hard. I said to
myself, if he lived I’d know it was the sign God had forgiven me. He did
live. I’ve paid, Mr. Wickliff, I’ve paid in the sight of God. And if it
comes to society, it seems to me I’m a good deal more use to it here than
I’d be in a State’s prison pegging shoes, and my poor wife—”

He choked; but there was no softening of the saturnine gloom of
Wickliff’s face.

“You ought to tell that all to the lawyer, not to me,” said Wickliff.
“I’m only a special officer, and my duty is to my employer, not to
society. What’s more, I am going to perform it. There isn’t anything that
can make it right for me to balk on my duty, no matter how sorry I feel
for you. No, Mr. Harned, if you live and I live, you go back to Iowa with
me.”

[Illustration: “HARNED HID HIS FACE”]

Harned in utter silence studied the impassive face, and it returned his
gaze; then he threw his arm up against the shed, and hid his own face in
the crook of his elbow. His shoulders worked as in a strong shudder,
but almost at once they were still, and when he turned his features were
blank and steady as the boards behind them.

“I’ve just one favor to ask,” said he; “don’t tell my wife. You have got
to stay here to-night; it will be more comfortable for you, if I don’t
say anything till after you’ve gone to bed. Give me a chance to explain
and say good-bye. It will be hard enough for her—”

“Will you give me your parole you won’t try to escape?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nor kill yourself?”

Harned started violently, and he laughed. “Do you think I’d kill myself
before poor Maggie? I wouldn’t be so mean. No, I promise you I won’t
either run away or kill myself or play any kind of trick on you to-night.
Does it go?”

“It goes,” responded Amos, holding out his hand; “and I’ll give you a
good reputation in court, too, for being a good citizen now. That will
have weight with the judge. And if you care to know it, I’m mighty sorry
for you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wickliff,” said Harned; but he had not seemed to see the
hand; he was striding ahead.

“That man means to kill himself,” thought Amos; “he’s too blamed
resigned. He’s got it all planned before. And God help the poor beggar!
I guess it’s the best thing he can do for himself. Lord, but it’s hard
sometimes for a man to do his duty!”

The two men walked along, at first both mute, but no sooner did they come
well in view of the kitchen door than they began to talk. Amos hoped
there was nothing in the rumors of Indian troubles.

“There’s only one band could make trouble,” said Harned. “Red Horse is
a mean Indian, educated in the agency schools, and then relapsed. Say,
who’s that running up the river-bank? Looks like Mrs. Roby’s sister.
She’s got the baby.” His face and voice changed sharply, he crying out,
“There’s something wrong with that woman!” and therewith he set off
running to the house at the top of his speed. Half-way, Amos, running
behind him, could hear a clamor of women’s voices, rising and breaking,
and loud cries. Mrs. Brown came to the doorway, beckoning with both
hands, screaming for them to hurry.

When they reached the door they could see the new-comer. She was huddled
in a rocking-chair, a pitiful, trembling shape, wet to the skin, her dank
cotton skirts dripping, bareheaded, and her black hair blown about her
ghastly face; and on her breast a baby, wet as she, smiling and cooing,
but with a great crimson smouch on its tiny shoulder. Near her appeared
Johnny D.’s white head. He was pale under his freckles, but he kept
assuring her stoutly that uncle wouldn’t let the Indians get them.

The woman was so spent with running that her words came in gasps. “Oh,
git ready! Fly! They’ve killed the Robys. They’ve killed sister and
Tom. They killed the children. Oh, my Lord! children! They was clinging
to their mother, and crying to the Indians to please not to kill them.
Oh, they pretended to be friendly—so’s to git in; and we cooked ’em up
such a good supper; but they killed every one, little Mary and little
Jim—I heard the screeches. I picked up the baby and run. I jumped into
the river and swum to the boat—I don’t know how I done it—oh, be quick!
They’ll be coming! Oh, fly!”

Harned turned on Amos. “Flying’s no good on land, but maybe the
boat—you’ll help?”

“Of course,” said Amos. “Here, young feller, can you scuttle up to the
roof-tree and reconnoitre with this field-glass?—you’re considerably
lighter on your feet than me. Twist the wheel round here till you can see
plain. There’s a hole, I see, up to the loft. Is there one out on the
roof? Then scuttle!”

Mrs. Brown pushed the coffee back on the stove. “No use it burning,” said
she; and Amos admired her firm tones, though she was deadly pale. “If we
ain’t killed we’ll need it. Dave, don’t forget the camera. I’ll put up
some comforters to wrap the children in and something to eat.” She was
doing this with incredible quickness as she spoke, while Harned saw to
his gun and the loading of a pistol.

The pistol she took out of his hands, saying, in a low, very gentle
voice, “Give that to me, honey.”

He gave her a strange glance.

“They sha’n’t hurt little Davy or me, Dave,” she answered, in the same
voice.

Little Davy had gone to the woman and the baby, and was looking about
him with frightened eyes; his lip began to quiver, and he pointed to the
baby’s shoulder: “Injuns hurt Elly. Don’t let Injuns hurt Davy!”

The wretched father groaned.

“No, baby,” said the mother, kissing him.

“Hullo! up there,” called Amos. “What do you see?”

The shrill little voice rang back clearly, “They’re a-comin’, a terrible
sight of them.”

“How many? Twenty?”

“I guess so. Oh, uncle, the boat’s floated off!”

“Didn’t you fasten it?” cried Harned.

“God forgive me!” wailed the woman, “I don’t know!”

Harned sat down in the nearest chair, and his gun slipped between his
knees. “Maggie, give us a drink of coffee,” said he, quietly. “We’ll have
time for that before they come.”

“Can’t we barricade and fight?” said Amos, glaring about him.

“Then they’ll get behind the barn and fire that, and the wind is this
way.”

“We’ve _got_ to save the women and the kids!” cried Amos. At this moment
he was a striking and terrible figure. The veins of his temple swelled
with despair and impotent fury; his heavy features were transfigured in
the intensity of his effort to think—to see; his arms did not hang at his
sides; they were held tensely, with his fist clinched, while his burning
eyes roamed over every corner of the room, over every picture. In a flash
his whole condition changed, his muscles relaxed, his hands slid into his
pockets, he smiled the strangest and grimmest of smiles. “All right,”
said he. “Ah—Brown, you got any whiskey? Fetch it.” The women stared,
while Harned passively found a jug and placed it before him.

“Now some empty bottles and tumblers.”

“There are some empty bottles in the dark room; what do you mean to do?”

“Mean to save you. Brace up! I’ll get them. And you, Mrs. Brown, if
you’ve got any paregoric, give those children a dose that will keep them
quiet, and up in the loft with you all. We’ll hand up the kids. Listen!
You must keep quiet, and keep the children quiet, and not stir, no matter
what infernal racket you may hear down here. You _must_! To save the
children. You must wait till you hear one of us, Brown or me, call. See?
I depend on you, and you _must_ depend on me!”

Her eyes sought her husband’s; then, “I’m ready, sir,” she said, simply.
“I’ll answer for Johnny D., and the others I’ll make quiet.”

“That’s the stuff,” cried Amos, exultantly. “I’ll fix the red butchers.
Only for God’s sake _hustle_!”

He turned his back on the parting to enter the dark room, and when he
came back, with his hands full of empty bottles, Harned was alone.

“I told her it was our only chance,” said Harned; “but I’m damned if I
know what our only chance is!”

“Never mind that,” retorted Amos, briskly. He was entirely calm; indeed,
his face held the kind of grim elation that peril in any shape brings to
some natures. “You toss things up and throw open the doors, as if you all
had run away in a big fright, while I’ll set the table.” And, as Harned
feverishly obeyed, he carefully filled the bottles from the demijohn. The
last bottle he only filled half full, pouring the remains of the liquor
into a tumbler.

“All ready?” he remarked; “well, here’s how,” and he passed the tumbler
to Harned, who shook his head. “Don’t need a brace? I don’t know as you
do. Then shake, pardner, and whichever one of us gets out of this all
right will look after the women. And—it’s all right?”

“Thank you,” choked Harned; “just give the orders, and I’m there.”

“You get into the other room, and you keep there, still; those are the
orders. Don’t you come out, whatever you hear; it’s the women’s and the
children’s lives are at stake, do you hear? And no matter what happens
to _me_, you stay _there_, you stay _still_! But the minute I twist the
button on that door, let me in, and be ready with your hatchet—that will
be handiest. Savez?”

“Yes; God bless you, Mr. Wickliff!” cried Harned.

“Pardner it is, now,” said Wickliff. They shook hands. Then Harned shut
himself in the closet. He did not guess Wickliff’s plan, but that did not
disturb the hope that was pumping his heart faster. He felt the magnetism
of a born leader and an intrepid fighter, and he was Wickliff’s to the
death. He strained his ears at the door. A chair scraped the boards;
Wickliff was sitting down. Immediately a voice began to sing—Wickliff’s
voice changed into a tipsy man’s maudlin pipe. He was singing a war-song:

    “‘We’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,
    Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom!’”

The sound did not drown the thud of horses’ hoofs outside. They sounded
nearer. Then a hail. On roared the song, all on one note. Wickliff
couldn’t carry a tune to save his soul, and no living man, probably, had
ever heard him sing.

    “‘And we’ll drive the savage crew from the land we love the best,
    Shouting the battle-cry—’

“Hullo! Who’s comin’? Injuns—mean noble red men? Come in, gen’lemen all.”

The floor shook. They were all crowding in. There was a din of guttural
monosyllables and sibilant phrases all fused together, threatening and
sinister to the listener; yet he could understand that some of them were
of pleasure. That meant the sight of the whiskey.

“P-play fair, gen’lemen,” the drunken voice quavered, “thas fine whiskey,
fire-water. Got lot. Know where’s more. Queer shorter place ever did see.
Aller folks skipped. Nobody welcome stranger. Ha, ha!—hic!—stranger found
the whiskey, and is shelerbrating for himself. Help yeself, gen’lemen. I
know where there’s shum—shum more—plenty.”

Dimly it came to Harned that here was the man’s bid for his life. They
wouldn’t kill him until he should get the fresh supply of whiskey.

“Where Black Blanket gone?” grunted Red Horse. Harned knew his voice.

“Damfino,” returned the drunken accents, cheerfully. “L-lit out, thas all
I know. Whas you mean, hitting each orrer with bottles? Plenty more. I’ll
go get it. You s-shay where you are.”

The blood pounded through Harned’s veins at the sound of the shambling
step on the floor. His own shoulders involuntarily hunched themselves,
quivering as if he felt the tomahawk between them. Would they wait,
or would they shy something at him and kill him the minute his back
was turned? God! what nerve the man had! He was not taking a step the
quicker—ah! Wickliff’s fingers were at the fastening. He flung the door
back. Even then he staggered, keeping to his rôle. But the instant he was
over the threshold the transformation came. He hurled the door back and
threw his weight against it, quick as a cat. His teeth were set in a grin
of hate, his eyeballs glittered, and he shook his pistol at the door.

“Come on now, damn you!” he yelled. “We’re ready.”

Like an echo to his defiance, there rose an awful and indescribable
uproar from the room beyond—screams, groans, yells, and simultaneously
the sound of a rush on the door. But for a minute the door held.

The clatter of tomahawk blades shook it, but the wood was thick; it held.

“Hatchet ready, pard?” said Wickliff. “When you feel the door give, slip
the bolt to let ’em tumble in, and then strike for the women and the
kids; strike hard. I’ll empty my pop into the heap. It won’t be such a
big one if the door holds a minute longer.”

“What are they doing in there?” gasped Harned.

[Illustration: “‘IT WON’T BE SUCH A BIG ONE IF THE DOOR HOLDS’”]

“They’re _dying_ in there, that’s what,” Wickliff replied, between his
teeth, “and dying fast. _Now!_”

The words stung Harned’s courage into a rush, like whiskey. He shot the
bolt, and three Indians tumbled on them, with more—he could not see how
many more—behind. Then the hatchet fell. It never faltered after that one
glimpse Harned had of the thing at one Indian’s belt. He heard the bark
of the pistol, twice, three times, the heap reeling; the three foremost
were on the floor. He had struck them down too; but he was borne back. He
caught the gleam of the knife lurching at him; in the same wild glance
he saw Wickliff’s pistol against a broad red breast, and Red Horse’s
tomahawk in the air. He struck—struck as Wickliff fired; struck not at
his own assailant, but at Red Horse’s arm. It dropped, and Wickliff fired
again. He did not see that; he had whirled to ward the other blow. But
the Indian knife made only a random, nerveless stroke, and the Indian
pitched forward, doubling up hideously in the narrow space, and thus
slipping down—dead.

“That’s over!” called Wickliff.

Now Harned perceived that they were standing erect; they two and only
they in the place. Directly in front of them lay Red Horse, the blood
streaming from his arm. He was dead; nor was there a single living
creature among the Indians. Some had fallen before they could reach the
door at which they had flung themselves in the last access of fury; some
lay about the floor, and one—the one with the knife—was stiff behind
Harned in the dark room.

“Look at that fellow,” called Harned. “I didn’t hit him; he may be
shamming.”

“I didn’t hit him either,” said Wickliff, “but he’s dead all the same.
So are the others. I’d been too, I guess, but for your good blow on that
feller’s arm. I saw him, but you can’t kill two at once.”

“How did you do it?”

“Doped the whiskey. Cyanide of potassium from your photographic drugs;
that was the quickest. Even if they had killed you and me, it would work
before they could get the women and children. The only risk was their
not taking it, and with an Indian that wasn’t so much. Now, pardner, you
better give a hail, and then we’ll hitch up and get them safe in the
settlement till we see how things are going.”

“And then?” said Harned, growing red.

Amos gnawed at the corners of his mustache in rather a shamefaced way.
“Then? Why, then I’ll have to leave you, and make the best story I can
honestly for the old lady. Oh yes, damn it! I know my duty; I never went
back on it before. But I never went back on a pardner either; and after
fighting together like we have, I’m not up to any Roman-soldier business;
nor I ain’t going to give you a pair of handcuffs for saving my life! So
run outside and holler to your frau.”

Left alone, Wickliff gazed about him in deep meditation, which at last
found outlet in a few pensive sentences. “Clean against the rules of war;
but rules of war are as much wasted on Injuns as ‘please’ on a stone-deaf
man! And I simply _had_ to save the women and children. Still it’s a
pretty sorry lay-out to pay five thousand dollars for the privilege of
seeing. But it’s a good deal worse to not do my duty. I shall never
forgive myself. But I never should forgive myself for going back on
a pardner either. I guess all it comes to is, duty’s a cursed blind
trail!”




THE HYPNOTIST




THE HYPNOTIST


There were not so many carriages in the little Illinois city with
chop-tailed horses, silver chains, and liveried coachmen that the clerks
in the big department shop should not know the Courtlandt landau, the
Courtlandt victoria, and the Courtlandt brougham (Miss Abbie Courtlandt’s
private equipage) as well as they knew Madam Courtlandt, Mrs. Etheridge,
or Miss Abbie. Two of the shop-girls promptly absorbed themselves in
Miss Abbie, one May morning, when she alighted from the brougham. For an
instant she stood, as if undecided, looking absently at the window, which
happened to be a huge kaleidoscope of dolls.

A tall man and two ragged little girls were staring at the dolls also.
Both the girls were miserably thin, and one of them had a bruise on her
cheek. The man was much too well clad and prosperous to belong to them.
He stroked a drooping black mustache, and said, in the voice of a man
accustomed to pet children, whether clean or dirty, “Like these dolls
better than yours, sissy?”—at the same time smiling at the girl with the
bruised cheek.

A sharp little pipe answered, “I ’ain’t got no doll, mister.”

“No, she ’ain’t,” added the other girl; “but _I_ got one, only it ’ain’t
got no right head. Pa stepped on its head. I let her play with it, and we
made a head outer a corn-cob. It ain’t a very good head.”

“I guess not,” said the man, putting some silver into her hand; “there,
you take that, little sister, and you go in and buy two dolls, one for
each of you; and you tell the young lady that waits on you just what you
told me. And if there is any money left, you go on over to that bakery
and fill up with it.”

The children gave him two rapid, bewildered glances, clutched the money,
and darted into the store without a word. The man’s smiling eyes as they
turned away encountered Miss Abbie’s, in which was a troubled interest.
She had taken a piece of silver from her own purse. He smiled, as
perceiving a kindly impulse that matched his own; and she, to her own
later surprise, smiled too. The smile changed in a flash to a startled
look; all the color drifted out of her face, and she took a step forward
so hastily that she stumbled on her skirt. Recovering herself, she
dropped her purse; and a man who had just approached went down on one
knee to pick it up. But the tall man was too quick for him; a long arm
swooped in between the other’s outstretched hand and the gleaming bit
of lizard-skin on the bricks. The new-comer barely avoided a collision.
He did not take the escape with good-humor, scowling blackly as he made
a scramble, while still on his knee, at something behind the tall man’s
back. This must have been a handkerchief, since he immediately presented
a white flutter to Miss Courtlandt, bowing and murmuring, “You dropped
this too, I guess, madam.”

“Yes, thank you,” stammered Miss Courtlandt; “thank you very much, Mr.
Slater.” She entered the store by his side, but at the door she turned
her head for a parting nod of acknowledgment to the other. He remained
a second longer, staring at the dolls, and gnawing the ends of his
mustache, not irritated, but sharply thoughtful.

Thus she saw him, glancing out again, once more, when inside the store.
And through all the anguish of the moment—for she was in a dire
strait—she felt a faint pang that she should have been rude to this kind
stranger. In a feeble way she wondered, as they say condemned criminals
wonder at street sights on the way to the gallows, what he was thinking
of. But had he spoken his thought aloud she had not been the wiser, since
he was simply saying softly to himself, “Well, wouldn’t it kill you dead!”

Miss Abbie stopped at the glove-counter to buy a pair of gloves. As she
walked away she heard distinctly one shop-girl’s sigh and exclamation to
the other, “My, I wish I was her!”

A kind of quiver stirred Miss Abbie’s faded cold face. Her dark gray eyes
recoiled sidewise; then she stiffened from head to heel and passed out of
the store.

To a casual observer she looked annoyed; in reality she was both
miserable and humiliated. And once back in the shelter of the brougham
her inward torment showed plainly in her face.

Abigail Courtlandt was the second daughter of the house; never so admired
as Mabel, the oldest, who died, or Margaret, the youngest, who married
Judge Etheridge, and was now a widow, living with her widowed mother.

Abigail had neither the soft Hayward loveliness of Mabel and her mother,
nor the haughty beauty of Margaret, who was all a Courtlandt, yet she
was not uncomely. If her chin was too long, her forehead too high, her
ears a trifle too large, to offset these defects she had a skin of
exquisite texture, pale and clear, white teeth, and beautiful black brows.

She was thin, too thin; but her dressmaker was an artist, and Abbie
would have been graceful were she not so nervous, moving so abruptly,
and forever fiddling at something with her fingers. When she sat next
any one talking, it did not help that person’s complacency to have her
always sink slightly on the elbow further from her companion, as if
averting her presence. An embarrassed little laugh used to escape her
at the wrong moment. Withal, she was cold and stiff, although some keen
people fancied that her coldness and stiffness were no more than a mask
to shield a morbid shyness. These same people said that if she would
only forget herself and become interested in other people she would be a
lovable woman, for she had the kindest heart in the world. Unfortunately
all her thoughts concentred on herself. Like many shy people, Abbie was
vain. Diffidence as often comes from vanity, which is timid, as from
self-distrust. Abbie longed passionately not only to be loved, but to be
admired. She was loved, assuredly, but she was not especially admired.
Margaret Etheridge, with her courage, her sparkle, and her beauty,
was always the more popular of the sisters. Margaret was imperious,
but she was generous too, and never oppressed her following; only the
rebels were treated to those stinging speeches of hers. Those who loved
Margaret admired her with enthusiasm. No one admired poor Abbie with
enthusiasm. She was her father’s favorite child, but he died when she was
in short dresses; and, while she was dear to all the family, she did not
especially gratify the family pride.

Her hungry vanity sought refuge in its own creations. She busied herself
in endless fictions of reverie, wherein an imaginary husband and an
imaginary home of splendor appeased all her longings for triumph. While
she walked and talked and drove and sewed, like other people, only a
little more silent, she was really in a land of dreams.

Did her mother complain because she had forgotten to send the Book Club
magazines or books to the next lawful reader, she solaced herself by
visions of a book club in the future which she and “he” would organize,
and a reception of distinguished elegance which “they” would give, to
which the disagreeable person who made a fuss over nothing (meaning the
reader to whom reading was due) should not be invited—thereby reducing
her to humility and tears. But even the visionary tears of her offender
affected Abbie’s soft nature, and all was always forgiven.

Did Margaret have a swarm of young fellows disputing over her card at a
ball, while Abbie must sit out the dances, cheered by no livelier company
than that of old friends of the family, who kept up a water-logged
pretence of conversation that sank on the approach of the first new-comer
or a glimpse of their own daughters on the floor, Abbie through it all
was dreaming of the balls “they” would give, and beholding herself
beaming and gracious amid a worshipping throng.

These mental exercises, this double life that she lived, kept her
inexperienced. At thirty she knew less of the world than a girl in her
first season; and at thirty she met Ashton Clarke. Western society is
elastic, or Clarke never would have been on the edges even; he never did
get any further, and his morals were more dubious than his position; but
he was Abbie’s first impassioned suitor, and his flattering love covered
every crack in his manners or his habits. Men had asked her to marry them
before, but never had a man made love to her. For two weeks she was a
happy woman. Then came discovery, and the storm broke. The Courtlandts
were in a rage—except gentle Madam Courtlandt, who was broken-hearted and
ashamed, which was worse for Abbie. Jack, the older brother, was summoned
from Chicago. Ralph, the younger, tore home on his own account from Yale.
It was really a testimony to the family’s affection for Abbie that she
created such a commotion, but it did not impress her in that way. In the
end she yielded, but she yielded with a sense of cruel injustice done her.

Time proved Clarke worse than her people’s accusations; but time did not
efface what the boys had said, much less what the girls had said. They
forgot, of course; it is so much easier to forget the ugly words that we
say than those that are said to us. But she remembered that Jack felt
that Abbie never did have any sense, and that Ralph raged because she
did not even know a cad from a gentleman, and that Margaret, pacing the
floor, too angry to sit still, would not have minded so much had Abbie
made a fool of herself for a _man_; but she didn’t wait long enough to
discover what he was; she positively accepted the first thing with a
mustache on it that offered!

Time healed her heart, but not her crushed and lacerated vanity. And it
is a question whether we do not suffer more keenly, if less deeply, from
wounds to the self-esteem than to the heart. Generally we mistake the
former for the latter, and declare ourselves to have a sensitive heart,
when what we do have is only a thin-skinned vanity!

But there was no mistake about Abbie’s misery, however a moralist might
speculate concerning the cause. She suffered intensely. And she had no
confidant. She had not even her old fairyland of fancy, for love and
lovers were become hateful to her. At first she went to church—until an
unlucky difference with the rector’s wife at a church fair. Later it was
as much her unsatisfied vanity and unsatisfied heart as any spiritual
confusion that led her into all manner of excursions into the shadowy
border-land of the occult. She was a secret attendant on table-tippings
and séances; a reader of every kind of mystical lore that she could buy;
an habitual consulter of spiritual mediums and clairvoyants and seventh
sons and daughters and the whole tribe of charlatans. But the family had
not noticed. They were not afraid of the occult ones; they were glad to
have Abbie happy and more contented; and they concerned themselves no
further, as is the manner of families, being occupied with their own
concerns.

And so unguarded Abbie went to her evil fate. One morning, with her maid
Lucy, she went to see “the celebrated clairvoyant and seer, Professor
Rudolph Slater, the greatest revealer of the future in this or any other
century.”

Lucy looked askance at the shabby one-story saloons on the street, and
the dying lindens before the house. Her disapproval deepened as they went
up the wooden steps. The house was one of a tiny brick block, with wooden
cornices, and unshaded wooden steps in need not only of painting but
scrubbing.

The door opened into an entry which was dark, but not dark enough to
conceal the rents in the oil-cloth on the floor or the blotches on the
imitation oak paper of the walls.

Lucy sniffed; she was a faithful and affectionate attendant, and she used
considerable freedom with her mistress. “I don’t know about there being
spirits here, but there’s been lots of onions!” remarked Lucy. Nor did
her unfavorable opinion end with the approach to the sorcerer’s presence.
She maintained her wooden expression even sitting in the great man’s room
and hearing his speech.

Abbie did not see the hole in the green rep covering of the arm-chair,
nor the large round oil-stain on the faded roses of the carpet, nor the
dust on the Parian ornaments of the table; she was too absorbed in the
man himself.

If his surroundings were sordid, he was splendid in a black velvet jacket
and embroidered shirt-front sparkling with diamonds. He was a short man,
rather thick-set, and although his hair was gray, his face was young and
florid. The gray hair was very thick, growing low on his forehead and
curling. Abbie thought it beautiful. She thought his eyes beautiful also,
and spoke to Lucy of their wonderful blue color and soul-piercing gaze.

“I thought they were just awful impudent,” said Lucy. “I never did see a
man stare so, Miss Abbie; I wanted to slap him!”

“But his hair _was_ beautiful,” Abbie persisted; “and he said it used to
be straight as a poker, but the spirits curled it.”

“Why, Miss Abbie,” cried Lucy, “I could see the little straight ends
sticking out of the curls, that come when you do your hair up on irons.
I’ve frizzed my hair too many times not to know _them_.”

“But, Lucy,” said Abbie, in a low, shocked voice, “didn’t you feel
_something_ when he put on those handcuffs and sat before the cabinet in
the dark, and his control spoke, and we saw the hands? What do you think
of that?”

“I think it was him all the time,” said Lucy, doggedly.

“But, Lucy, _why_?”

“Finger-nails were dirty just the same,” said Lucy. Nor was there any
shaking her. But Abbie, under ordinary circumstances the most fastidious
of women, had not noted the finger-nails; one witching sentence had
captured her.

The moment he took her hand he had started violently. “Excuse me, madam,”
said he, “but are you not a medium _yourself_?”

“No—at least, I never was supposed to be,” fluttered Abbie, blushing.

“Then, madam, you don’t perhaps realize that you yourself possess
marvellous psychic power. I never saw any one who had so much, when it
had not been developed.”

To-day Abbie ground her teeth and wrung her hands in an impotent agony of
rage, remembering her pleasure. He would not take any money; no, he said,
there had been too much happiness for him in meeting such a favorite of
the spiritual influences as she.

“But you will come again,” he pleaded; “only don’t ask me to take money
for such a great privilege. _You_ caynt see the invisible guardians that
hover around you!”

His refusal of her gold piece completed his victory over Abbie’s
imagination. She was sure he could not be a cheat, since he would not
be paid. She did come again; she came many times, always with Lucy, who
grew more and more suspicious, but could not make up her mind to expose
Abbie’s folly to her people. “Think of all the things she gives me!”
argued Lucy. “Miss Abbie’s always been a kind of stray sheep in the
family; they are all kind of hard on her. I can’t bear to be the one to
get her into trouble.”

So Lucy’s conscience squirmed in silence until the fortune-teller
persuaded Abbie to allow him to throw her into a trance. The wretched
woman in the carriage cowered back farther into the shade, living over
that ghastly hour when Lucy at her elbow was as far away from her
helpless soul as if at the poles. How his blue eyes glowed! How the flame
in them contracted to a glittering spark, like the star-tip of the silver
wand, waving and curving and interlacing its dazzling flashes before her
until her eyeballs ached! How of a sudden the star rested, blinking at
her between his eyes, and she looked; she must look at it, though her
will, her very self, seemed to be sucked out of her into the gleaming
whirlpool of that star!

She made a feeble rally under a woful impression of fright and misery
impending, but in vain; and, with the carelessness of a creature who is
chloroformed, she let her soul drift away.

When she opened her eyes, Lucy was rubbing her hands, while the
clairvoyant watched the two women motionless and smiling.

The fear still on her prompted her first words, “Let me go home now!”

“Not now,” begged the conjurer; “you must go into a trance again. I want
you to see something that will be very interesting to you. Please, Miss
Courtlandt.” He spoke in the gentlest of tones, but there was a repressed
assurance about his manner that was infuriating to Lucy.

“Miss Abbie’s going home,” she cried, angrily; “we ain’t going to have
any more of this nonsense. Come, Miss Abbie.” She touched her on her
arm, but trembling Abbie fixed her eyes on the conjurer, and he, in that
gentle tone, answered:

“Certainly, if she wishes; but she _wants_ to stay. You want to stay,
Miss Courtlandt, don’t you?”

“Yes, I want to stay,” said Abbie; and her heart was cold within her, for
the words seemed to say themselves, even while she struggled frantically
against the utterance of them.

[Illustration: “‘SHE MUST LOOK AT IT’”]

“Do you mean it, Miss Abbie?” the girl repeated, sorely puzzled.

“Certainly, just once more,” said Miss Abbie. And she sat down again in
her chair.

What she saw she never remembered. Lucy said it was all nonsense she
talked, and, anyhow, she whispered so low that nobody could catch more
than a word, except that she seemed to be promising something over and
over again. In a little while the conjurer whispered to her, and with
a few passes of his hand consciousness returned. She rose, white and
shaken, but quite herself again. He bade the two good-bye, and bowed
them out with much suavity of manner. Abbie returned not a single word.
As they drove home, the maid spoke, “Miss Abbie, Miss Abbie—you won’t go
there again, will you?”

“Never,” cried Abbie—“_never_!”

But the next morning, after a sleepless night, there returned the same
horrible, dragging longing to see him; and with the longing came the same
fear that had suffocated her will the day before—a fear like the fear of
dreams, formless, reasonless, more dreadful than death.

Impelled by this frightful force that did not seem to have anything to do
with her, herself, she left the house and boarded a street-car. She felt
as if a demon were riding her soul, spurring it wherever he willed. She
went to a little park outside the city, frequented by Germans and almost
deserted of a week-day. And on her way she remembered that this was what
she had promised him to do.

He was waiting to assist her from the car. As he helped her alight, she
noticed his hands and his nails. They were neat enough; yet she suddenly
recalled Lucy’s words; and suddenly she saw the man, in his tasteless,
expensive clothes, with his swagger and the odor of whiskey about him,
as any other gentlewoman would have seen him. Her fright had swept all
his seer’s glamour away; he was no longer the mystical ruler of the
spirit-world; he was a squalid adventurer—and her master!

He made her realize that in five minutes. “You caynt help yourself, Miss
Courtlandt,” he said, and she believed him.

Whether it were the influence of a strong will on a hysterical
temperament and a morbidly impressible fancy, or whether it were a black
power from the unseen, beyond his knowledge but not beyond his abuse,
matters little so far as poor Abbie Courtlandt was concerned; on either
supposition, she was powerless.

She left him, hating him as only slavery and fear can hate; but she
left him pledged to bring him five hundred dollars in the morning and
to marry him in the afternoon; and now, having kept her word about the
money, she was driving home, clinching in her cold fingers the slip of
paper containing the address of a justice of the peace in the suburbs,
where she must meet him and be bound to this unclean vulture, who would
bear her away from home and kindred and all fair repute and peace.

A passion of revolt shook her. She _must_ meet him? Why must she? Why not
tear his address to bits? Why not drive fast, fast home, and tell her
mother that she was going to Chicago about some gowns that night? Why
not stay there at Jack’s, and let this fiend, who harried her, wait in
vain? She twisted the paper and ground her teeth; yet she knew that she
shouldn’t tear it, just as we all know we shall not do the frantic things
that we imagine, even while we are finishing up the minutest details the
better to feign ourselves in earnest. Poor, weak Abbie knew that she
never would dare to confess her plight to her people. No, she could never
endure another family council of war.

“There is only one way,” she muttered. Instead of tearing the paper she
read it:

“_Be at Squire L. B. Leitner’s, 398 S. Miller Street, at 3 p.m. sharp._”

And now she did tear the odious message, flinging the pieces furiously
out of the carriage window.

The same tall, dark, square-shouldered man that she had seen in front of
the shop-window was passing, and immediately bent and picked up some of
the shreds. For an instant the current of her terror turned, but only for
an instant. “What could a stranger do with an address?” She sank into the
corner, and her miserable thoughts harked back to the trap that held her.

Like one in a nightmare, she sat, watching the familiar sights of the
town drift by, to the accompaniment of her horses’ hoofs and jingling
chains. “This is the last drive I shall ever take,” she thought.

She felt the slackening of speed, and saw (still in her nightmare) the
broad stone steps and the stately, old-fashioned mansion, where the
daintiest of care and the trimmest of lawns had turned the old ways of
architecture from decrepitude into pride.

Lunch was on the table, and her mother nodded her pretty smile as she
passed. Abbie had a box of flowers in her hand, purchased earlier in the
morning; these she brought into the dining-room. There were violets for
her mother and American Beauties for Margaret. “They looked so sweet I
had to buy them,” she half apologized. Going through the hall, she heard
her mother say, “How nice and thoughtful Abbie has grown lately!” And
Margaret answered, “Abbie is a good deal more of a woman than I ever
expected her to be.”

All her life she had grieved because—so she morbidly put it to
herself—her people despised her; now that it was too late, was their
approval come to her only to be flung away with the rest? She returned to
the dining-room and went through the farce of eating. She forced herself
to swallow; she talked with an unnatural ease and fluency. Several
times her sister laughed at her words. Her mother smiled on her fondly.
Margaret said, “Abbie, why can’t you go to Chicago with me to-night and
have a little lark? You have clothes to fit, too; Lucy can pack you up,
and we can take the night train.”

“I _would_,” chimed in Mrs. Courtlandt. “You look so ill, Abbie. I think
you must be bilious; a change will be nice for you. And I’ll ask Mrs.
Curtis over for a few days while you are gone, and we will have a little
tea-party of our own and a little lark for ourselves.”

Never before had Margaret wished Abbie to accompany her on “a little
lark.” Abbie assented like a person in a dream; only she must go down to
the bank after luncheon, she said.

Up-stairs in her own chamber she gazed about the pretty furnishings
with blank eyes. There was the writing-desk that her mother gave her
Christmas, there glistened the new dressing-table that Margaret helped
her about finishing, and there was the new paper with the sprawly flowers
that she thought so ugly in the pattern, and took under protest, and
liked so much on the walls. How often she had been unjust to her people,
and yet it had turned out that they were right! Her thoughts rambled on
through a thousand memories, stumbling now into pit-falls of remorse over
long-forgotten petulance and ingratitude and hardenings of her heart
against kindness, again recovering and threading some narrow way of
possible release, only to sink as the wall closed again hopelessly about
her.

For the first time she arraigned her own vanity as the cause of her long
unhappiness. Well, it was no use now. All she could do for them would be
to drift forever out of their lives. She opened the drawer, and took a
vial from a secret corner. “It is only a little faintness and numbness,
and then it is all over,” she thought, as she slipped the vial into the
chatelaine bag at her waist. In a sudden gust of courage she took it out
again; but that instinctive trusting to hope to the last, which urges
the most desperate of us on delay, held her hand. She put back the vial,
and, without a final glance, went down the stairs. It was in her heart to
have one more look at her mother, but at the drawing-room door she heard
voices, and happening to glance up at the clock, she saw how near the
time the hour was; so she hurried through the hall into the street.

During the journey she hardly felt a distinct thought. But at intervals
she would touch the outline of the vial at her waist.

The justice’s office was in the second story of a new brick building that
twinkled all over with white mortar. Below, men laughed, and glasses
and billiard-balls clicked behind bright new green blinds. A steep,
dark wooden stairway, apparently trodden by many men who chewed tobacco
and regarded the world as their cuspidor, led between the walls up to
a narrow hall, at the farther end of which a door showed on its glass
panels the name L. B. Leitner, J.P.

Abbie rapped feebly on the glass, to see the door instantly opened by
Slater himself. He had donned a glossy new frock-coat and a white tie.
His face was flushed.

“I didn’t intend you should have to enter here alone,” he exclaimed,
drawing her into the room with both hands; “I was just going outside to
wait for you. Allow me to introduce Squire Leitner. Squire, let me make
you acquainted with Miss Courtlandt, the lady who will do me the honor.”

He laughed a little nervous laugh. He was plainly affecting the manner of
the fortunate bridegroom, and not quite at ease in his rôle. Neither of
the two other men in the room returned any answering smile.

The justice, a bald, gray-bearded, kindly, and worried-looking man, bowed
and said, “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” in a tone as melancholy as his
wrinkled brow.

“Squire is afraid you are not here with your own free-will and consent,
Abbie,” said Slater, airily; “but I guess you can relieve his mind.”

At the sound of her Christian name (which he had never pronounced before)
Abbie turned white with a sort of sick disgust and shame. But she raised
her eyes and met the intense gaze of the tall, dark man that she had seen
before. He stood, his elbow on the high desk and his square, clean-shaven
chin in his hand. He was neatly dressed, with a rose in his button-hole,
and an immaculate pink-and-white silk shirt; but he hardly seemed (to
Abbie) like a man of her own class. Nevertheless, she did not resent
his keen look; on the contrary, she experienced a sudden thrill of
hope—something of the same feeling she had known years and years ago,
when she ran away from her nurse, and a big policeman found her, both her
little slippers lost in the mud of an alley, she wailing and paddling
along in her stocking feet, and carried her home in his arms.

“Yes, Miss Courtlandt”—she winced at the voice of the justice—“it is my
duty under the—hem—unusual circumstances of this case, to ask you if you
are entering into this—hem—solemn contract of matrimony, which is a state
honorable in the sight of God and man, by the authority vested in me by
the State of Illinois—hem—to ask you if you are entering it of your own
free-will and consent—are you, miss?”

Abbie’s sad gray eyes met the magistrate’s look of perplexed inquiry; her
lips trembled.

“Are you, Abbie?” said the clairvoyant, in a gentle tone.

“Yes,” answered Abbie; “of my own free-will and consent.”

“I guess, professor, I must see the lady alone,” said the justice, dryly.

“You caynt believe it is a case of true love laffs at the aristocrats,
can you, squire?” sneered Slater; “but jest as she pleases. Are you
willing to see him, Abbie?”

“Whether Miss Courtlandt is willing or not,” interrupted the tall man, in
a mellow, leisurely voice, “I guess _I_ will have to trouble you for a
small ‘sceance’ in the other room, Marker.”

“And who are you, sir?” said Slater, civilly, but with a truculent look
in his blue eyes.

“This is Mr. Amos Wickliff, of Iowa, special officer,” the justice said,
waving one hand at the man and the other at Abbie.

Wickliff bowed in Abbie’s direction, and saluted the fortune-teller with
a long look in his eyes, saying:

“Wasn’t Bill Marker that I killed out in Arizona your cousin?”

“My name ain’t Marker, and I never had a cousin killed by you or
anybody,” snapped back the fortune-teller, in a bigger and rounder voice
than he had used before.

Wickliff merely narrowed his bright black eyes, opened a door, and
motioned within, saying, “Better.”

The fortune-teller scowled, but he walked through the door, and Wickliff,
following, closed it behind him.

Abbie looked dumbly at the justice. He sighed, rubbed his hands
together, and placed a chair against the wall.

“There’s a speaking-tube hole where we used to have a tube, but I took
it out, ’cause it was too near the type-writer,” said he. “It’s just
above the chair; if you put your ear to that hole I guess it would be the
best thing. You can place every confidence in Mr. Wickliff; the chief of
police here knows him well; he’s a perfect gentleman, and you don’t need
to be afraid of hearing any rough language. No, ma’am.”

Abbie’s head swam; she was glad to sit down. Almost mechanically she laid
her ear to the hole.

The first words audible came from Wickliff. “Certainly I will arrest
you. And I’ll take you to Toronto to-night, and you can settle with the
Canadian authorities about things. Rosenbaum offers a big reward; and
Rosenbaum, I judge, is a good fellow, who will act liberally.”

“I tell you I’m not Marker,” cried Slater, fiercely, “and it wouldn’t
matter a damn if I was! Canada! You caynt run a man in for Canada!”

Wickliff chuckled. “Can’t I?” said he; “that’s where you miss it, Marker.
Now I haven’t any time to fool away; you can take your choice: go off
peacefully—I’ve a hack at the door—and we’ll catch the 5:45 train for
Toronto, and there you shall have all the law and justice you want; or
you can just make one step towards that door, or one sound, and I’ll
slug you over the head, and load you into the carriage neatly done up in
chloroform, and when you wake up you’ll be on the train with a decent
gentleman who doesn’t know anything about international law, but does
know _me_, and wouldn’t turn his head if you hollered bloody murder. See?”

“That won’t go down. You caynt kidnap me that way! I’ll appeal to the
squire. No, no! I _won’t_! Before God, I won’t—I was jest fooling!”

The voice of terror soothed Abbie’s raw nerves like oil on a burn. “He’s
scared now, the coward!” she rejoiced, savagely.

“There’s where we differ, then,” retorted Wickliff; “_I_ wasn’t.”

“That’s all right. Only one thing: will you jest let me marry my
sweetheart before I go, and I’ll go with you like a holy lamb; I will,
by—”

“No swearing, Marker. That lady don’t want to marry you, and she ain’t
going to—”

“_Ask_ her,” pleaded Slater, desperately. “I’ll leave it with her. If she
don’t say she loves me and wants to marry me, I’ll go all right.”

Abbie’s pulses stood still.

“Been trying the hypnotic dodge again, have you?” said Wickliff,
contemptuously. “Well, it won’t work this time. I’ve got too big a curl
on you.”

[Illustration: “‘HE’S SCARED NOW, THE COWARD’”]

There was a pause the length of a heart-beat, and then the hated tones,
shrill with fear: “I _wasn’t_ going to the window! I wasn’t going to
speak—”

“See here,” the officer’s iron-cold accents interrupted, “let us
understand each other. Rosenbaum hates you, and good reason, too; _he’d_
much rather have you dead than alive; and you ought to know that _I_
wouldn’t mind killing you any more than I mind killing a rat. Give me a
good excuse—pull that pop you have in your inside pocket just a little
bit—and you’re a stiff one, sure! See?”

Again the pause, then a sullen voice: “Yes, damn you! I see. Say, won’t
you let me say good-bye to my girl?”

Abbie clinched her finger-nails into her hands during the pause that
followed. Wickliff’s reply was a surprise; he said, musingly, “Got any
money out of her, I wonder?”

“I swear to God not a red cent!” cried the conjurer, vehemently.

“Oh, you _are_ a scoundrel, and no mistake,” laughed Wickliff. “That
settles it; you _have_! Well, I’ll call her—Oh, Miss Courtlandt!”—he
elevated his soft tones to a roaring bellow—“please excuse my calling
you, and step out here! Or we’ll go in there.”

“If it’s anything private, you’ll excuse me,” interposed a mild voice at
her elbow; and when she turned her head, behold a view of the skirts of
the minister of justice as he slammed a door behind him!

A second later, Wickliff entered, propelling Slater by the shoulder.

“Ah! Squire stepped out a moment, has he?” said the officer, blandly.
“Well, that makes it awkward, but I may as well tell you, madam, with
deep regret, that this man here is a professional swindler, who is most
likely a bigamist as well, and he has done enough mischief for a dozen,
in his life. I’m taking him to Canada now for a particularly bad case
of hypnotic influence and swindling, etc. Has he got any money out of
you?” As he spoke he fixed his eyes on her. “Don’t be afraid if he has
hypnotized you; he won’t try those games before me. Kindly turn your back
on the lady, Johnny.” (As he spoke he wheeled the fortune-teller round
with no gentle hand.) “He has? How much?”

It was strange that she should no longer feel afraid of the man; but
his face, as he cowered under the heavy grasp of the officer, braced
her courage. “He has five hundred dollars I gave him this morning,” she
cried; “but he may keep it if he will only let me go. I don’t want to
marry him!”

“Of course you don’t, a lady like you! He’s done the same game with nice
ladies before. Keep your head square, Johnny, or I’ll give your neck a
twist! And as to the money, you’ll march out with me to the other room,
and you’ll fish it out, and the lady will kindly allow you fifty dollars
of it for your tobacco while you’re in jail in Canada. That’s enough,
Miss Courtlandt—more would be wasted—and if he doesn’t be quick and
civil, I’ll act as his valet.”

The fortune-teller wheeled half round in an excess of passion, his
fingers crooked on their way to his hip pocket; then his eye ran to the
officer, who had simply doubled his fist and was looking at the other
man’s neck. Instinctively Slater ducked his head; his hand dropped.

“No, no, please,” Miss Courtlandt pleaded; “_let_ him keep it, if he will
only go away.”

“Beg pardon, miss,” returned the inflexible Wickliff, “you’re only
encouraging him in bad ways. Step, Johnny.”

“If you’ll let me have that five hundred,” cried Slater, “I’ll promise
to go with you, though you know I have the legal right to stay.”

“You’ll go with me as far as you have to, and no farther, promise or no
promise,” said Wickliff, equably. “You’re a liar from Wayback! And I’m
letting you keep that revolver a little while so you may give me a chance
to kill you. Step, now!”

Slater ground his teeth, but he walked out of the room.

“At least, give him a hundred dollars!” begged Miss Courtlandt as the
door closed. In a moment it opened again, and the two re-entered.
Slater’s wrists were in handcuffs; nevertheless, he had reassumed a
trifle of his old jaunty bearing, and he bowed politely to Abbie,
proffering her a roll of bills. “There are four hundred there, Miss
Courtlandt,” said he. “I am much obliged to you for your generosity, and
I assure you I will never bother you again.” He made a motion that she
knew, with his shackled hands. “You are quite free from me,” said he;
“and, after all, you will consider that it was only the money you lost
from me. I always treated you with respect, and to-day was the only day
I ever made bold to speak of you or to you by your given name. Good-bye,
Miss Courtlandt; you’re a real lady, and I’ll tell you now it was all a
fake about the spirits. I guess there are real spirits and real mediums,
but they didn’t any of ’em ever fool with _me_. Good-afternoon, ma’am.”

[Illustration: “‘I’LL ACT AS HIS VALET’”]

Abigail took the notes mechanically; he had turned and was at the door
before she spoke. “God forgive you!” said she. “Good-bye.”

“That was a decent speech, Marker,” said Wickliff, “and you’ll see I’ll
treat you decent on the way. Good-morning, Miss Courtlandt. I needn’t
say, I guess, that no one will know anything of this little matter from
the squire or me, not even the squire’s wife. _I_ ’ain’t got one. I wish
you good-morning, ma’am. No, ma’am”—as she made a hurried motion of
the money towards him—“I shall get a large reward; don’t think of it,
ma’am. But if you felt like doing the civil thing to the squire, a box
of cigars is what any gentleman is proud to receive from a lady, and I
should recommend leaving the brand to the best cigar-store you know.
Good-morning, ma’am.”

Barely were the footsteps out of the hall when the worthy justice, very
red and dusty, bounced out of the closet. “Excuse me,” gasped he, “but I
couldn’t stand it a minute longer! Sit down, Miss Courtlandt; and don’t,
please, think of fainting, miss, for I’m nearly smothered myself!” He
bustled to the water-cooler, and proffered water, dripping over a tin
cup on to Abbie’s hands and gown; and he explained, with that air of
intimate friendliness which is a part of the American’s mental furniture,
“I thought it better to let Wickliff _persuade him_ by himself. He is a
remarkable man, Amos Wickliff; I don’t suppose there’s a special officer
west of the Mississippi is his equal for arresting bad cases. And do
you know, ma’am, he never was after this Marker. Just come here on a
friendly visit to the chief of police. All he knew of Marker was from the
newspapers; he had been reading the letter of the man Marker swindled
in Canada, and his offer of a reward for him. Marker’s picture was in
it, and a description of his hair and all his looks, and Wickliff just
picked him out from that. I call that pretty smart, picking up a man
from his picture in a newspaper. Why, I”—he assumed a modest expression,
but glowed with pride—“_I_ have had my picture in the paper, and my wife
didn’t know it. Yes, ma’am, Wickliff is at the head of the profession,
and no mistake! Didn’t have a sign of a warrant. Just jumped on the job;
telegraphed for a warrant to meet him at Toronto.”

“But will he take him safely to Canada?” stammered Miss Abigail.

“Not a doubt of it,” said the justice. And it may be mentioned here that
his prediction came true. Wickliff sent a telegram the next day to the
chief of police, announcing his safe arrival.

Miss Courtlandt went to Chicago by the evening train. She is a happier
woman, and her family often say, “How nice Abbie is growing!” She has
never seen the justice since; but when his daughter was married the whole
connection marvelled and admired over a trunk of silver that came to the
bride—“From one to whom her father was kind.”

The only comment that the justice made was to his wife: “Yes, my dear,
you’re right; it _is_ a woman, a lady; but if you knew all about it, how
I never saw her but the once, and all, you wouldn’t mind Bessie’s taking
it. She was a nice lady, and I’m glad to have obliged her. But it really
ought to go to another man.”




THE NEXT ROOM




THE NEXT ROOM


It was as much the mystery as the horror that made the case of Margaret
Clark (commonly known as Old Twentypercent) of such burning interest to
the six daily journals of the town. I have been told that the feet of
tireless young reporters wore a separate path up the bluff to the site
of old Margaret’s abode; but this I question, because there were already
two paths made for them by the feet of old Margaret’s customers—the
winding path up the grassy slope, and the steps hewn out of the sheer
yellow bluff-side, sliced down to make a backing for the street. These
are the facts that, whichever the path taken, they were able to glean:
Miss Margaret lived on the bluff in the western part of town. The street
below crosses at right angles the street running to the river, which
is of the kind the French term an “impasse.” It is a street of varied
fortunes, beginning humbly in a wide and treeless plain, where jimson,
dock, and mustard weed have their will with the grass, passing a number
of houses, each in its own tiny yard, creeping up the hill and the social
scale at the same time, until it is bordered by velvety boulevards and
terraces and lawns that glow in the evening light, and pretty houses
often painted; then dropping again to a lonely gully, with the flaming
kilns of the brick-yard on one side, and the huge dark bulk of the
brewery on the other, reaching at last the bustle and roar of the busiest
street in town. The great arc-light swung a dazzling white porcupine
above the brewery vats every night (when the moon did not shine), and
hung level with the crest of the opposite bluff. By day or night one
could see the trim old-fashioned garden and the close-cropped lawn and
the tall bur-oaks that shaded the two-story brown cottage in which for
fifteen years Margaret Clark had lived. Here she was living at the time
of these events, with no protector except her bull-dog, the Colonel (who,
to be sure, understood his business, and I cannot deny him a personal
pronoun), and no companion except Esquire Clark, her cat. She did not
keep fowls—judging it right and necessary to slay them on occasion, but
never having the heart to kill anything for which she had cared and
which she had taught to know her. Therefore she bought her eggs and her
“frying chickens” of George Washington, a worthy colored man who lived
below the hill, and who kept Margaret’s garden in order. Although he had
worked for her (satisfactory service given for satisfactory wage) during
all these fifteen years, he knew as little about her, he declared, as the
first week he came. Nor did the wizened little Irishwoman who climbed the
clay stairway three times a week to wash and scrub know any more. But she
stoutly maintained “the old lady was a rale lady, and the saints would
be good to her.” One reporter, more curious, discovered that Margaret
several times had helped this woman over a rough pass.

The only other person (outside of her customers) who kept so much as a
speaking acquaintance with Margaret was the sheriff, Amos Wickliff. And
what he knew of her he was able to keep even from the press. As for the
customers, her malicious nickname explains her business. Margaret was an
irregular money-lender. She loaned money for short periods on personal
security or otherwise. It should speak well for her shrewdness that she
rarely made a bad debt. Yet she was not unpopular; on the contrary,
she had the name of giving the poor a long day, and, for one of her
trade, was esteemed lenient. Shortly after her accident, also (she had
the ill-hap to fall down her cellar-way, injuring her spine), she had
remitted a number of debts to her poorest debtors.

The accident occurred of a Wednesday morning; Wednesday afternoon
her nephew called on her, having, he said, but just discovered her
whereabouts. The reporters discovered that this nephew, Archibald Cary
Allerton by name, was not an invited and far from a welcome guest,
although he gave out that his mother and he were his aunt’s sole living
kindred. She would not speak to him when he visited her, turning her head
to the wall, moaning and muttering, so that it was but kindness to leave
her. The nurse (Mrs. Raker, the jailer’s wife, had come up from the jail)
said that he seemed distressed. He called again during the evening, after
Wickliff, who spent most of the evening with her alone, was gone, but he
had no better success; she would not or could not speak to him. Thursday
morning she saw Amos Wickliff. She seemed brighter, and gave Amos, in the
presence of the nurse, the notes and mortgages that she desired released.
Thursday evening, about eight o’clock, Amos returned to report how he
had done his commissions. He found the house flaming from roof-tree to
sills! There was no question of his saving the sick woman. Even as he
panted up the hill-side the roof fell in with a crash. Amos screamed to
the crowd: “Where is she? Did you save her?” And the Irish char-woman’s
wail answered him: “I wint in—I wint in whin it was all afire, and the
fire jumped at me, so I run; me eyebrows is gone, and I didn’t see a
sign of her!” Then Amos betook himself to Mrs. Raker, whom he found only
after much searching; nor did her story reassure him. She was violently
agitated between pity and shock, but, as usual, she kept her head on
her shoulders and her wits on duty. She was not in the house when the
catastrophe had happened. Allerton had come to see his aunt. He told the
nurse that she might go to her sister, her sister’s child being ill, and
that he would stay with his aunt. Wickliff was expected every moment. And
the patient had added her word, “Do go, Mrs. Raker; it’s only a step; and
take a jar of my plum jelly to Sammy to take his medicine in!” So Mrs.
Raker went. She saw the fire first, and that not half an hour from the
time she left the house. She saw it flickering in the lower windows. It
was she sent her brother-in-law to give the alarm, while she ran swiftly
to the house. The whole lower story was ablaze when she got up the hill.
To enter was impossible. But Mrs. O’Shea, the char-woman, and she did
find a ladder, and put it against the wall and the window of Miss Clark’s
chamber, which window was wide open, and Mrs. Baker held the ladder
while Mrs. O’Shea, who was of an agile and slimmer build, clambered up
the rounds to look through the smoke, already mixed with flame. And the
room was empty. Amos at once had the neighborhood searched, hoping that
Allerton had conveyed his aunt to a place of safety. There was no trace
of either aunt or nephew. But Amos found a boy who confessed (after some
pressure) that he had been in Miss Margaret’s yard, in the vineyard
facing her room. He had been startled by a kind of rattling noise and a
scream. Involuntarily he cowered behind the vines and peered through at
the house. The windows of Miss Clark’s room were closed, or maybe one was
open very slightly; but suddenly this window was pushed up and Allerton
leaned out. He knew it was Allerton by the square shoulders. He did not
say anything, only turned his head, looking every way. The boy thought it
time to run. He was clear of the yard and beginning to descend the bluff,
when he looked back and saw Allerton running very swiftly through the
circle of light cast by the electric lamp. All the reporters examined the
lad, but he never altered his tale. “Mr. Allerton looked frightened—he
looked awful frightened,” he said.

Amos was on the point of sending to the police, when Allerton himself
appeared. The incredible story which he told only thickened the
suspicions beginning to gather about him.

He said that he had found his aunt disinclined to talk. She told him to
go into the other room, for she wished to go to sleep; and although he
had matters of serious import to discuss with her, he could not force
his presence on a lady, and he obeyed her. He went into the adjoining
room, and there he sat in a chair before the door. The door was the sole
means of exit from the bedchamber. The two rooms opened into each other
by the door; and the second room, in which Allerton sat, had a door
into a small hall, from which the staircase led down-stairs. Allerton
was ready to swear to his story, which was that he had sat in the chair
before the door until he heard a singular muffled scream from the other
room. Instantly he sprang up, opened the door, and ran into the other
room. The bed was opposite the door. To his terror and amazement, the
bed was empty, the room was empty. He ran frantically round the room,
and then flung up the window, looking out; but there was nothing to
be seen. Moreover, the room was twenty feet from the ground, nor was
there so much as a vine or a lightning-rod to help a climber. It was
past believing that a decrepit old woman, who could not turn in bed
alone, should have climbed out of a window and dropped twenty feet to
the ground. Besides, there was the boy watching that side of the house
all the time. He had seen nothing. But where was Margaret Clark? The
chief of police took the responsibility of arresting Allerton. Perhaps
he was swayed to this decisive step by the boy’s testimony being in a
measure corroborated by a woman of unimpeachable character living in
the neighborhood, who had heard screams, as of something in mortal pain
or fear, at about the time mentioned by the boy. She looked up to the
house and was half minded to climb the steps; but the sounds ceased, the
peaceful lights in the house on the hill were not disturbed, and, chiding
her own ears, she passed on.

The fire broke out a little later, hardly a quarter of an hour after
Allerton went away. This was established by the fact that the boy, who
ran at the top of his speed, had barely reached home before he heard the
alarm-bells. The flames seemed to envelop the whole structure in a flash,
which was not so much a matter of marvel as other things, since the
house was of wood, and dry as tinder from a long drought.

It was possible that Allerton was lying, and that while he and the boy
were gone the old woman had discovered the fire and painfully crawled
down-stairs and out of the burning house; but, in that case, where was
she? How could a feeble old woman thus vanish off the face of the earth?
The next day the police explored the ruins. They half expected to find
the bones of the unfortunate creature. They did not find a shred of
anything that resembled bones. If Allerton had murdered his aunt, he
had so contrived his crime as to destroy every vestige of the body;
and granting him a motive to do such an atrocious deed, why should so
venturesome and ingenious a murderer jeopard everything by a wild fairy
tale? The reporters found themselves before a blank wall.

“Maybe it _ain’t_ a fairy tale,” Amos Wickliff suggested one day, two
days after the mystery. He was giving “the boys” a kind word on the
court-house steps.

“It’s to be hoped it is a true story,” said the youngest and naturally
most hardened reporter, “since then he’ll die with a better conscience!”

“They never can convict him on the evidence,” interrupted another man.
“I don’t see how they can even hold him.”

“That’s why folks are mad,” said the youngest reporter, with a pitying
smile.

“There’s something in the talk, then?” said Amos, shifting his cigar to
the other side of his mouth.

“_Are_ they going to lynch that feller?” asked another reporter.

“Say so,” the first young man remarked, placidly; “a lot of the old
lady’s chums are howling about stringing him up. They’ve the notion that
she was burned alive, and they’re hot over it.”

“That’s _your_ paper, old man; you had ’most two columns, and made it out
Mrs. Kerby heard squealing _after_ the boy did; and pictured the horrible
situation of the poor old helpless woman writhing in anguish, and the
fire eating nearer and nearer. Great Scott! it made _me_ crawl to read
it; and I saw a crowd down-town in the park, and if one fellow wasn’t
reading your blasted blood-curdler out loud; and one woman was crying
and telling about the old party lending her money to buy her husband’s
coffin, and then letting her off paying. That made the crowd rabid.
At every sentence they let off a howl. You needn’t be grinning like a
wild-cat; it ain’t funny to that feller in jail, I bet. Is it, Amos?”

“You boys better call off your dogs, if you can get ’em,” was all the
sheriff deigned to answer, and he rose as he spoke. He did not look
disturbed, but his placid mask belied him. Better than most men he knew
what stormy petrels “the newspaper boys” were. And better than any man
he knew what an eggshell was his jail. “I’d almost like to have ’em
bust that fool door, though,” he grimly reflected, “just to show the
supervisors I knew what I was talking about. I’ll get a new jail out of
those old roosters, or they’ll have to get a new sheriff. But meanwhile—”
He fell into a perplexed and gloomy reverie, through which his five
years’ acquaintance with the lost woman drifted pensively, as a moving
car will pass, slowly revealing first one familiar face and then another.
“I suppose I’m what the lawyers would call her next friend—hereabouts,
anyhow,” he mused, “and yet you might say it was quite by accident we
started in to know each other, poor old lady!” The cause of the first
acquaintance was as simple as a starved cat which a jury of small boys
were preparing to hang just under the bluff. Amos cut down the cat, and
almost in the same rhythm, as the disciples of Delsarte would say,
cuffed the nearest executioner, while the others fled. Amos hated cats,
but this one, as if recognizing his good-will (and perhaps finding some
sweet drop in the bitter existence of peril and starvation that he knew,
and therefore loath to yield it), clung to Amos’s knees and essayed a
feeble purr of gratitude. “Well, pussy,” said Amos, “good-bye!” But
the cat did not stir, except to rub feebly again. It was a black cat,
very large, ghastly thin, with the rough coat of neglect, and a pair of
burning eyes that might have reminded Amos of Poe’s ghastly conceit were
he not protected against such fancies by the best of protectors. He could
not remember disagreeably that which he had never read. “Pussy, you’re
about starved,” said Amos. “I believe I’ve got to give you a stomachful
before I turn you loose.”

“_I’ll_ give the kitty something to eat,” said a voice in the air.

Amos stared at the clouds; then he whirled on his heel and recognized
both the voice, which had a different accent and quality of tone from
the voices that he was used to hear, and the little, shabby, gray-headed
woman who was scrambling down to him.

[Illustration: “‘_I’LL_ GIVE THE KITTY SOMETHING TO EAT’”]

“_Will_ you?” exclaimed Amos, in relief, for he knew her by repute,
although they had never looked each other in the face before. “Well,
that’s very nice of you, Miss Clark.”

“I’ll keep him with pleasure, sir,” said the old woman. “I’ve had a
bereavement lately. My cat died. She was ’most at the allotted term, I
expect, but so spry and so intelligent I couldn’t realize it. I couldn’t
somehow feel myself attracted to any other cat. But this poor fugitive——
Come here, sir!”

To Amos’s surprise, the cat summoned all its forces and, after one futile
stagger, leaped into her arms. A strange little shape she looked to him,
as she stood, with her head too large for her emaciated little body,
which was arrayed in a coarse black serge suit, plainly flotsam and
jetsam of the bargain counter, planned for a woman of larger frame. Yet
uncouth as the woman looked, she was perfectly neat.

“I’m obliged to you for saving the poor creature,” she said.

“I’m obliged to you, ma’am, for taking it off my hands,” said Amos. He
bowed; she returned his bow—not at all in the manner or with the carriage
to be expected of such a plain and ill-clad presence. Amos considered the
incident concluded. But a few days later she stopped him on the street,
nervously smiling. “That cat, sir,” she began in her abrupt way—she
never seemed to open a conversation; she dived into it with a shiver, as
a timid swimmer plunges into the water—“that cat,” said she, “that cat,
sir, is a right intelligent animal, and he has pleased the Colonel. He’s
so fastidious I was afraid, though I didn’t mention it; but they are very
congenial.”

“I’m glad they’re friendly,” says Amos; “the Colonel would make
mince-meat of an uncongenial cat. What do you call the cat?”

“I couldn’t, on account of circumstances, you know, call him after my
last cat, Miss Margaret Clark, so I call him Esquire Clark. He knows his
name already. I thank you again, sir, for saving him. I just stopped you
so as to tell you I had a lot of ripe gooseberries I’d be glad to have
you send and pick.”

“Why, that’s good of you,” said Amos. “I guess the boys at the jail would
like a little gooseberry sauce.”

She nodded and turned round; the words came over her shoulder: “Say,
sir, I expect you wouldn’t give them jam? It’s a great deal better than
sauce, and—_I_ don’t mind letting you have the extra sugar.” Amos was
more bewildered than he showed, but he thanked her, and did, in fact,
come that afternoon with a buggy. The first object to greet him was the
large white head and the large black jaws of the Colonel, chained to a
post. Amos, who is the friend of all dogs, and sometimes has an uninvited
following of stray curs, gave the snarling figure-head a nod and a
careless greeting: “All right, young feller. Don’t disturb yourself. I’m
here, all proper and legal. How are you?” The redoubtable Colonel began
to wag his tail; and as Amos came up to him he actually fawned on him
with manifestations of pleasure.

“I guess he’s safe to unloose, ma’am,” said Amos.

Old Twentypercent was looking on with a strange expression. “He likes
you, sir; I never saw him like a stranger before.”

“Well, most dogs like me,” said Amos. “I guess they understand I like
them.”

“I reckon you’re a good man,” said Old Twentypercent, solemnly. From this
auspicious beginning the acquaintance slowly but steadily waxed into a
queer kind of semi-friendship. Amos always bowed to the old woman when
he met her on the street. She sent the prisoners in the jail fruit every
Sunday during the season; and Amos, not to be churlish, returned the
courtesy with a flowering plant, now and then, in winter. But he never
carried his gifts himself, esteeming that such conduct would be an
intrusion on a lady who preferred a retired life. Esquire Clark, however,
was of a social turn. He visited the jail often. The first time he came
Amos sent him back. The messenger, Mrs. Raker, was received at the door,
thanked warmly, sent away loaded with fruit and flowers, but not asked
over the threshold, which made Amos the surer that he was right in not
going himself. Nevertheless, he did go to see Miss Clark, but hardly on
his own errand. A carpenter in the town, a good sort of thriftless though
industrious creature, came to Amos to borrow some money. He explained
that he needed it to pay interest on a debt, and that his tools were
pledged for security. The interest, he mourned, was high, and the debt of
long standing. The creditor was Old Twentypercent.

“It’s a shame I ’ain’t paid it off before, and that’s a fact,” he
concluded; “but a feller with nine children can’t pay nothing—not even
the debt of nature—for he’s ’fraid to die and leave them. And the blamed
thing’s been a-runnin’ and a-runnin’, like a ringworm, and a-eatin’ me
up. Though my wife she says we’ve more’n paid her up in interest.” Amos
had an old kindness for the man, and after a visit to his wife—he holding
the youngest two of the nine (twins) on his knees and keeping the peace
with candy—he told the pair he would ask Miss Clark to allow a third
extension, on the payment of the interest.

“Well, but I don’t know’s he’s even got that,” said the wife, anxiously.
“We’d a lot of expenses; I don’t s’pose we’d orter had the twins’
photographs taken this month, but they was so delicate I was ’fraid we
wouldn’t raise ’em; and Mamie really couldn’t go to school without new
shoes. Children’s a blessing, I s’pose, but it’s a blessing poor folks
had got to pay for in advance!”

“_So!_” says Amos. “Well, we’ll have to see to that much, I guess. I’ll
go this night.” He betook himself to his errand in a frame of mind only
half distasteful. The other half was curious. His visit fell on a summer
night, a Sunday night, when the air was soft and still and sweet with
the tiny hum of insects and the smell of drying grass and the mellow
resonance of the church-bells. Amos climbed the clay stairs. The white
porcupine blazed above the bluffs. It gave light enough to see the
color of the grass and flowers; yet not a real color, only the ghost of
scarlet and green and white, and only a ghost of the violet sky, while
all about the devouring shadows sank form and color alike in their
olive blacks. The stars were out in the sky and the south wind in the
trees. Amos stepped across the lawn—he was a light walker although a
heavy-weight—and stopped before the front door, which had long windows
on either side. He had his arm outstretched to knock; but he did not
knock, he stood and watched the green holland shade that screened the
window rise gradually. He could see the room, a large room, uncarpeted,
whereby the steps of the inmate echoed on the boards. He could see
a writing-desk, a table, and four or five chairs. These chairs were
entirely different from anything else in the room; they were of pretty
shape and extremely comfortable. Immediately the curtain descended at a
run, and the old woman’s voice called, “You’re a _bad_ cat; don’t you
do that again!” The voice went on, as if to some one present: “Did you
ever see such a trying beast? Why, he’s almost human! Now, you watch; the
minute I turn away from that window, that cat will pull up the shade.” It
appeared that she was right, for the curtain instantly rolled up again.
“No, honey,” said Miss Clark, “you mustn’t encourage the kitty to be
naughty. ’Squire, if I let that curtain stay a minute, will you behave!”
A dog’s growl emphasized this gentle reproof. “You see the Colonel
disapproves. Don’t pull the dog’s tail, honey. Oh, mercy! _’Squire!_”
Amos heard a crash, and in an instant a flame shot up in a cone; and
he, with one blow dislodging the screen from the open window, plunged
into the smoke. The cat had tipped over the lamp, and the table was in a
blaze. Amos’s quick eye caught sight of the box which served Esquire for
a bed. He huddled feather pillow and rug on the floor to invert the box
over the blaze. The fire was out in a moment, and Margaret had brought
another lamp from the kitchen. Then Amos had leisure to look about him.
There was no one in the room. Yet that was not the most pungent matter
for thought. Old Margaret, whom he had considered one of the plainest
women in the world, as devoid of taste as of beauty, was standing before
him in a black silk gown. A fine black silk, he pronounced it. She had
soft lace about her withered throat, and a cap with pink ribbons on her
gray hair, which looked silvery soft. Her skin, too, seemed fairer and
finer: and there were rings that flashed and glowed on her thin fingers.
It was not Old Twentypercent; it was a stately little gentlewoman that
stood before him. “How did you happen to come, sir?”—she spoke with
coldness.

“I came on an errand, and I was just at the door when the curtain flew up
and the cat jumped across the table.”

She involuntarily caught her breath, like one relieved; then she smiled.
“You mustn’t be too hard on ’Squire; he’s of a nervous temperament; I
think he sees things—things outside our ken.”

Meanwhile Amos was unable not to see that there had been on the table a
tumbler full of some kind of shrub, four glasses, and a decanter of wine.
And there had been wine in all the glasses. But where were the drinkers?
There were four or five plates on the table, and a segment of plum-cake
was trodden underfoot on the floor. Before she did anything else, old
Margaret carefully, almost scrupulously, gathered up the crumbs and
carried them away. When she returned she carried a plate of cake and a
glass of wine. This refreshment was proffered to Amos.

“It’s a domestic port,” she said, “but well recommended. I should be
right glad to have you sit down and have a glass of wine with me, Mr.
Sheriff.”

“Perhaps you mayn’t be so glad when you hear my errand,” said Amos.

She went white in a second, and her fingers curved inward like the
fingers of the dying; she was opening and shutting her mouth without
making a sound. He had seen a man hanged once, and that face had worn
the same ghastly stare of expectation.

“If you knew I was come to beg off one of your debtors, for instance,” he
went on; “that’s my errand, if you want to know.”

Her face changed. “It will go better after a glass of wine,” said she,
again proffering the wine by a gesture—she didn’t trust her hand to pass
the tray.

Amos was a little undecided as to the proper formula to be used, never
having taken wine with a lady before; he felt that the usual salutations
among “the boys,” such as “Here’s how!” or “Happy days!” or “Well, better
luck next time!” savored of levity if not disrespect; so he grew a little
red, and the best he could do was to mumble, “Here’s my respects to you,
madam!” in a serious tone, with a bow.

But old Margaret smiled. “It’s a long while,” said she, “since I have
taken wine with a—a gentleman outside my own kin.”

“Is that so?” Amos murmured, politely. “Well, it’s the first time I have
had that pleasure with a lady.” He was conscious that he was pleasing
her, and that she was smiling about her, for all the world (he said to
himself) as if she were exchanging glances with some one. A new idea came
to him, and he looked at her compassionately while he ate his cake,
breaking off bits and eating it delicately, exactly as she ate.

She offered him no explanation for the wineglasses or for the
conversation that he had overheard. He did not hear a sound of any other
life in the house than their own. The doors were open, and he could see
into the bedroom on one side and into the kitchen on the other. She had
lighted another lamp, enabling him to distinguish every object in the
kitchen. There was not a carpet in the house, and it seemed impossible
that any one could be concealed so quickly without making a sound.

Amos shook his head solemnly. “Poor lady!” said he.

But she, now her mysterious fright was passed, had rallied her spirits.
Of her own motion she introduced the subject of his errand. “You spoke of
a debtor; what’s the man’s name?”

Amos gave her the truth of the tale, and with some humor described the
twins.

“Well, I reckon he has more than paid it,” she said at the end. “What do
you want? Were you going to lend him the money?”

“Well, only the interest money; he’s a good fellow, and he has nine
children.”

“Who have to be paid for in advance?” She actually tittered a feeble,
surprised little laugh, as she rose up and stepped (on her toes, in the
prim manner once taught young gentlewomen) across the room to the desk.
She came back with a red-lined paper in her meagre, blue-veined hand. She
handed the paper to Amos. “That is a present to you.”

“Not the whole note?”

“Yes, sir. Because you asked me. You tell Foley that. And if he’s got a
dog or a cat or a horse, you tell him to be good to it.”

This had been a year ago; and Amos was sure that Foley’s gratitude
would take the form of a clamor for revenge. Mrs. Foley dated their
present prosperity entirely from that day; she had superadded a personal
attachment to an impersonal gratitude; she sold Miss Clark eggs, and
little Mamie had the reversion of the usurer’s shoes. Amos sighed. “Well,
I can’t blame ’em,” he muttered. From that day had dated his own closer
acquaintance.

He now occasionally paid a visit at the old gentlewoman’s home. Once she
asked him to tea. And Raker went about for days in a broad grin at the
image of Amos, who, indeed, made a very careful toilet with his new blue
sack-coat, white duck trousers, and tan-colored shoes. He told Raker that
he had had a delightful supper. Mrs. O’Shea, the char-woman, was without
at the kitchen stove, and little Mamie Foley brought in the hot waffles
and jam. Esquire Clark showed his gifts by vaulting over the grape-arbor,
trying to enter through the wire screen, bent on joining the company, and
the Colonel wept audibly outside, until Amos begged for their admission.
Safely on their respective seats, their behavior, in general, was beyond
criticism. Only once the Colonel, feeling that the frying chicken was
unconscionably long in coming his way, gave a low howl of irrepressible
feeling; and Esquire Clark (no doubt from sympathy) leaped after Mamie
and the dish.

“’Squire, I’m ashamed of you!” cried Miss Clark; “Archie, _you_ know
better!” Amos paid no visible attention to the change of name; but she
must have noticed her own slip, for she said: “I never told you the
Colonel’s whole name, did I? It’s Colonel Archibald Cary. I’d like you
never to mention it, though. And ’Squire Clark is named after an uncle of
mine who raised me, for my parents died when I was a little girl. Clark
Byng was his name, and I called the cat by the first part of it.”

Amos did not know whether interest would be considered impertinent, so he
contented himself with remarking that they were “both pretty names.”

“Uncle was a good man,” said Miss Clark. “He was only five feet four in
height, but very fond of muscular games, and a great admirer of tall men.
Colonel Cary was six feet two. I reckon that’s about your height?”

“Exactly, ma’am,” said Amos.

She sighed slightly; then turned the conversation to Amos’s own affairs.

An instinct of delicacy kept him from ever questioning her, and she
vouchsafed him no information. Once she asked him to come and see her
when he wanted anything that she could give him. “I’m at home to you
every day, except the third of the month,” said she. On reflection Amos
remembered that it was on the third that he had paid his first visit to
Miss Clark.

“Well, ma,” he remarked, walking up and down in front of his mother’s
portrait in his office, as his habit was, “it is a queer case, ain’t it?
But I’m not employed to run the poor old lady to cover, and I sha’n’t let
any one else if I can help it.”

Had Amos been vain, he would have remarked the change in his singular
friend since their friendship had begun. Old Margaret wore the decent
black gown and bonnet becoming an elderly gentlewoman. She carried a silk
umbrella. The neighbors began to address her as “Miss Clark.” Amos,
however, was not vain, and all he told his mother’s picture was that the
old lady was quality, and no mistake.

By this time, on divers occasions, she had spoken to Amos of her South
Carolina home. Once she told him (in a few words, and her voice was
quiet, but her hands trembled) of the yellow-fever time on the lonely
plantation in the pine woods, and how in one week her uncle, her brother
and his wife, and her little niece had died, and she with her own hands
had helped to bury them. “It was no wonder I didn’t see things all right
after that,” she said. Another time she showed him a locket containing
the old-fashioned yellow photograph of a man in a soldier’s uniform. “He
was considered very handsome,” said she. Amos found it a handsome face.
He would have found it so under the appeal of those piteous eyes had it
been as ugly as the Colonel’s. “He was killed in the war,” she said;
“shot while he was on a visit to us to see my sister. He ran out of the
house, and the Yan—your soldiers shot him. It was the fortune of war. I
have no right to blame them. But if he hadn’t visited our fatal roof he
might be living now; for it was in the very last year of the war. I saw
it. I fell down as if shot myself—better if I had been.”

“Well, I call that awful hard,” said Amos; “I should think you would have
gone crazy!”

“Oh no, sir, no!” she interrupted, eagerly. “My mind was perfectly clear.”

“But how you must have suffered!”

“Yes, I suffered,” said she. “I never thought to speak of it.”

A week after this conversation her nephew came. The day was September 3d.
Nevertheless, on that Wednesday night she summoned Amos. He had been out
in the country; but Mrs. Raker had heard through little Minnie Foley,
who came for some crab-apples and found Miss Clark moaning on the cellar
floor. The jail being but a few blocks away, Mrs. Raker was on the scene
almost as soon as George Washington. By the time Amos arrived the two
doctors had gone and Miss Clark was in bed, and the white bedspread or
white pillows under her head were hardly whiter than her face.

“Mrs. Raker’s making some gruel,” said she, feebly, “and if you’ll stay
here I have something to say. It’s an odd thing, you’ll think,” she
added, wistfully, when he was in the arm-chair by her bed (it was one of
the chairs from the other room, he noticed)—“an odd thing for a miserable
old woman with no kin and no friends to be loath to leave; but I’m like
a cat, I reckon. It near tore my soul up by the roots to leave the old
place, and now it’s as bad here.”

“Don’t you talk such nonsense as leaving, Miss Clark,” Amos tried to
console her. But she shook her head. And Amos, recalling what the doctors
said, felt his words of denial slipping back into his throat. He essayed
another tack. “Don’t you talk of having no friends here either. Why, poor
Mrs. O’Shea has blued all my shirts that she was washing, so they’re a
sight to see—all for grief; and little Mamie Foley ran crying all the way
down the street.”

“The poor child!”

“And why are you leaving _me_ out?”

“I don’t want to leave you out, Mr. Sheriff—”

“Oh, say Amos when you’re sick, Miss Clark,” he cried, impulsively; she
seemed so little, so feeble, and so alone.

“You’re a kind man, Amos Wickliff,” said she. “Now first tell me, would
you give the Colonel and ’Squire a home as long as they need it?”

Amos gave an inward gasp; but it may be imputed to him for righteousness
some day that there was only an imperceptible pause before he answered,
“Yes, ma’am, I will; and take good care of them, too.”

“Here’s something for you, then; take it now.” She handed him a large
envelope, sealed. “It’s for any expenses, you know. And—I’ll send ’em
over to-morrow.”

He took the package rather awkwardly. “Now you know you have a nephew—”
he began.

“I know, and I know why he’s here, too. And in that paper is my will; but
don’t you open it till I’m dead a month, will you?”

Amos promised in spite of a secret misgiving.

“And now,” she went on, in her nervous way, “I want you to do something
right kind for me—not now—when Mrs. Raker goes; she’s a good soul, and I
hope you’ll give her the envelope I’ve marked for her. Yes, sir, I want
you to do something for me when she’s gone. Move in the four chairs from
down-stairs—the pretty ones—all the rest are plain, so you can tell; and
fetch me the tray with the wineglasses and the bottle of shrub—you’ll
find the tray in the buffet with the red curtains down-stairs in my
office. Then you go into the kitchen—I feel so sorry to have to ask a
gentleman to do such things, but I do want them—and you’ll see a round
brown box with Cake marked on it in curly gilt letters, and you’ll find
a frosted cake in there wrapped up in tissue-paper; and you take it out,
and get a knife out of the drawer, and fetch all those things up to me.
And then, Amos Wickliff, all the friend I’ve got in the world, you go
and stay outside—it ain’t cold or I wouldn’t ask it of you—you stay until
you hear my bell. Will you?”

Amos took the thin hand, involuntarily outstretched, and patted it
soothingly between both his strong brown hands.

“Of course I will,” he promised. And after Mrs. Raker’s departure he did
her bidding, saying often to himself, “Poor lady!”

When the bell rang, and he came back, the wineglasses and the decanter
were empty, and the cake was half gone. He made no comment, she gave him
no explanation. Until Mrs. Raker returned she talked about releasing some
of her debtors.

The following morning he came again.

“I declare,” thought Amos, “when I think of that morning, and how much
brighter she looked, it makes me sick to think of her as dead. She had
been doing a lot of things on the sly, helping folks. It was her has been
sending the money for the jail dinner on Christmas, and the ice-cream on
the Fourth, and books, too. ‘It’s so terrible to be a prisoner,’ says
she. Wonder, didn’t she know? I declare I _hate_ her to be dead! Ain’t it
possible—Lord! wouldn’t that be a go?” He did not express even to himself
his sudden flash of light on the mystery. But he went his ways to the
armory of the militia company, the office of the chief of police (which
was the very next building), and to the fire department. At one of these
places he wrote out an advertisement, which the reporters read in the
evening papers, and found so exciting that they all flocked together to
discuss it.

All this did not take an hour’s time. It was to be observed that at every
place which he visited he first stepped to the telephone and called up
the jail. “Are you all right there, Raker?” he asked. Then he told where
he was going. “If you need, you can telephone me there,” he said.

“I guess Amos isn’t taking any chances on this,” the youngest reporter,
who encountered him on his way, remarked to the chief of police.

The chief replied that Amos was a careful man; he wished some others
would be as careful, and as sure they were right before they went ahead;
a good deal of trouble would be avoided.

“That’s right,” said the reporter, blithely, and went his lightsome way,
while the chief scowled.

Amos returned to the jail. He found the street clear, but little knots
of men were gathering and then dispersing in the street facing the jail.
Amos thought that he saw Foley’s face in the crowd, but it vanished as
he tried to distinguish it. “No doubt he’s egging them on,” muttered
Amos. He was rather taken aback when Raker (to whom he offered his
suspicions) assured him, on ear evidence, that Foley was preaching peace
and obedience to the law. “He’s an Irishman, too,” muttered Amos; “that’s
awful queer.” He spent a long time in a grim reverie, out of which he
roused himself to despatch a boy for the evening papers. “And you mark
that advertisement, and take half a dozen copies to Foley”—thus ran his
directions—“tell him I sent them; and if he knows anybody would like to
read that ‘ad,’ to send a paper to _them_. Understand?”

“Maybe it’s a prowl after a will-o’-wisp,” Amos sighed, after the boy was
gone, “but it’s worth a try. Now for our young man!”

Allerton was sitting in his cell, in an attitude of dejection that would
have been a grateful sight to the crowd outside. He was a slim-waisted,
broad-shouldered, gentle-mannered young fellow, whose dark eyes were very
bright, and whose dark hair was curly, and longer than hair is usually
worn by Northerners not studying football at the universities. He had a
mildly Roman profile and a frank smile. His clothes seemed almost shabby
to Amos, who never grudged a dollar of his tailor’s bills; but the
little Southern village whence he came was used to admire that glossy
linen and that short-skirted black frock-coat.

At Amos’s greeting he ran forward excitedly.

“Are they coming?” he cried. “Say, sheriff, you’ll give me back my pistol
if they come; you’ll give me a show for my life?”

Amos shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “Your life’s all right,” said
he; “it’s how to keep from hurting the other fellows I’m after. The fire
department will turn out and sozzle ’em well, and if that won’t do they
will have to face the soldiers; but I hope to the Lord your aunt won’t
let it come to that.”

“Do you think my aunt is living?”

“I don’t see how she could be burned up so completely. But see here, Mr.
Allerton, wasn’t there no trap-door in the room?”

“No, sir; there was no carpet on the floor; she hadn’t a carpet in the
house. Besides, how could she, sick as she was, get down through a
trap-door and shut it after her? And you could _see_ the boards, and
there was no opening in them.”

“So Mrs. O’Shea says, too,” mused the sheriff; “but let’s go back. Had
your aunt any motive for trying to escape you?”

“I’m afraid she thought she had,” said the young man, gravely.

“Mind telling me?”

“No, sir. I reckon you don’t know my aunt was crazy?”

“I’ve had some such notion. She lost her mind when they all died of
yellow-fever—or was it when Colonel Cary was killed?”

“I don’t know precisely. I imagine that she was queer after his death,
and all the family dying later, that finished the wreck. There were some
painful circumstances connected with the colonel’s death—”

“I’ve heard them.”

“Yes, sir. Well, sir, my mother was not to blame—not so much to blame
as you may think. She was almost a stranger to her sister, raised in
another State; and she had never seen her or Colonel Cary, her betrothed;
and when she did see him—well, sir, my mother was a beautiful, daring,
brilliant girl, and poor Aunt Margaret timid and awkward. _She_ broke the
engagement, not Cary.”

“It was to see your mother he came to the plantation!”

“Yes, sir. And he was killed. Poor Aunt Margaret saw it. She came back to
the house riding in a miserable dump-cart, holding his head in her lap.
She wouldn’t let my mother come near him. ‘Now he knows which loved him
best,’ she said ‘He’s _mine_!’ And it didn’t soften her when my mother
married my father. She seemed to think that proved she hadn’t cared for
Colonel Cary. Then the yellow-fever came, and they all went. Her mind
broke down completely then; she used to think that on the day Colonel
Cary was shot they all came back for a while, and she would set chairs
for them and offer them wine and cake—as if they were visiting her. And
after they left she would pour the wine in the glasses into the grate
and burn the cake. She said that they enjoyed it, and ate really, but
they left a semblance. She got hold of some queer books, I reckon, for
she had the strangest notions; and she spent no end of money on some
spiritual mediums; greedy harpies that got a heap of money out of her.
My father and mother had come to Cary Hall, then, to live, and of course
they didn’t like it. The great trouble, my mother often said to me, was
that though they were sisters, they were raised apart, and were as much
strangers as—we are. You can imagine how they felt to see the property
being squandered. Ten thousand dollars, sir, went in one year—”

“Are you sure it did go?” said the sheriff.

“Well, the property was sold, and we never saw anything afterwards of the
money. And the estate wasn’t a bottomless well. It isn’t so strange,
sir, that—that they had poor Aunt Margaret cared for.”

“At an insane asylum?”

“Yes, sir, for five years. I confess,” said the young man, jumping up and
pacing the room—“I confess I think it was a horrible place, horrible.
But they didn’t know. It was only after she recovered her senses and
was released that we began to understand what she suffered. Not so much
then, for she was shy of us all. She was so scared, poor thing! And
then—we began to suspect that she was not cured of her delusions. Maybe
there _were_ consultations and talk about her, though indeed, sir, my
mother has assured me many times that there was no intention of sending
her back. But she is very shrewd, and she would notice how doors would
be shut and the conversation would be changed when she entered a room,
and her suspicions were aroused. She managed to raise some money on a
mortgage, and she ran away, leaving not a trace behind her. My mother has
reproached herself ever since. And we’ve tried to find her. It has preyed
upon my mother’s mind that she might be living somewhere, poor and lonely
and neglected. We are not rich people,” said the young man, lifting
his head proudly, “but we have enough. I come to offer Aunt Margaret
money, not to ask it. We’ve kept up the place, and bit by bit paid off
the mortgage, though it has come hard sometimes. And it was awkward the
title being in that kind of shape, and ma wouldn’t for a long time get it
quieted.”

“But how did you ever find out she was _here_?”

The young Southerner smiled. “I reckon I owe being in this scrape
at all to your gentlemen of the press. One of them wrote a kind of
character-sketch about her, describing her—”

“I know. He’s the youngest man on the list, and an awful liar, but he
does write a mighty readable story.”

“He did this time,” said Allerton, dryly; “so readable it was copied
in the papers all over, I expect; anyhow, it was copied in our local
sheet—inside, where they have the patent insides, you know. It was
entitled ‘A Usurer, but Merciful!’ I showed it to my mother, and she was
sure it was Aunt Margaret. Even the name was right, for her whole name is
Margaret Clark Cary. She hadn’t the heart to cast the name away, and she
thought, Clark being a common name, she wouldn’t be discovered.”

Amos, who had sat down, was nursing his ankle. “Do you suppose,” said he,
slowly—“do you suppose that taking it to be the case she wasn’t so much
hurt as the doctors supposed, that _then_ she could get out of the room?”

“I don’t see how she could. She was in the room, in the bed, when I went
out. I sat down before the door. She couldn’t pass me. I heard a screech
after a while, a mighty queer sound, and I ran in. Sir, I give you my
word of honor, the bed was empty! the room was empty!”

“How was the room lighted?”

“By a large lamp with a Rochester burner, and some fancy of hers had made
her keep it turned up at full blaze. Oh, you could see every inch of the
room at a glance! And then, too, I ran all round it before I ran to the
window, pushed it up, and looked out. I would be willing to take my oath
that the room was empty.”

“You looked under the bed?”

“Of course. And in the closet. I tell you, sir, there was no one in the
room.”

Amos sat for the space of five minutes, it seemed to the young man,
really perhaps for a full minute, thinking deeply. Then, “I can’t make it
out,” said he, “but I believe you are telling the truth.” He stood up;
the young man also rose. In the silence wherein the younger man tried to
formulate something of his gratitude and yet keep his lip from quivering
(for he had been sore beset by homesickness and divers ugly fears during
the last day), the roar of the crowd without beat through the bars,
swelling ominously. And now, all of an instant, the jail was penetrated
by a din of its own making. The prisoners lost their heads. They began
to scream inquiries, to shriek at each other. Two women whose drunken
disorder had gone beyond the station-house restraints, and who were
spending a week in jail, burst into deafening wails, partly from fright,
partly from pity, and largely from the general craving of their condition
to make a noise.

“Never mind,” said Amos, laying a kindly hand on young Allerton’s
shoulder, “the Company B boys are all in the yard. But I guess you will
feel easier if you go down-stairs. Parole of honor you won’t skip off?”

“Oh, God bless you, sir!” cried Allerton. “I couldn’t bear to die this
way; it would kill my mother! Yes, yes, of course I give my word. Only
let me have a chance to fight, and die fighting—”

“No dying in the case,” Amos interrupted; “but what in thunder are the
cusses cheering for? Come on; this needs looking into. _Cheering!_”

He hurried down the heavy stairs into the hall, where Raker, a little
paler, and Mrs. Raker, a little more flushed than usual, were examining
the bolts of the great door.

Amos flung a glare of scorn at it, and he snorted under his breath:
“Locks! No need of locking _You_! I could bust you with the hose!”

As if in answer, the cheering burst forth anew, and now it was coupled
with his name: “Wickliff! Amos! _Amos!_”

“Let me out!” commanded Wickliff, and he slipped back the bolts. He
stepped under the light of the door-lamp outside, tall and strong, and
cool as if he had a Gatling gun beside him.

A cheer rolled up from the crowd—yes, not only from the crowd, but from
the blue-coated ranks massed to one side, and the young faces behind the
bayonets.

Amos stared. He looked fiercely from the mob to the guardians of the law.
Then, amid a roar of laughter, for the crowd perfectly understood his
gesture of bewilderment and anger, Foley’s voice bellowed, “All right,
sheriff; we’ve got her safe!”

       *       *       *       *       *

They tell to this day how the iron sheriff, whose composure had been
proof against every test brought against it, and whom no man had ever
before seen to quail, actually staggered against the door. Then he gave
them a broad grin of his own, and shouted with the rest, for there in the
heart of the rush jailward, lifted up on a chair—loaned, as afterwards
appeared (when it came to the time for returning), from Hans Obermann’s
“Place”—sat enthroned old Margaret Clark; and she was looking as if she
liked it!

They got her to the jail porch; Amos pacified the crowd with free beer at
Obermann’s, and carried her over the threshold in his arms.

He put her down in the big arm-chair in his office, opposite the
portraits of his parents, and Esquire Clark slid into the room and purred
at her feet, while Mrs. Raker fanned her. It was rather a chilly evening,
the heat having given place to cold in the sudden fashion of the climate;
but good Mrs. Raker knew what was due to a person in a faint or likely to
faint, and she did not permit the weather to disturb her rules. Calmly
she began to fan, saying meanwhile, in a soothing tone, “There, there,
don’t _you_ worry! it’s all right!”

Raker stood by, waiting for orders and smiling feebly. And young Allerton
simply gasped.

“You were at Foley’s, then?” Amos was the first to speak—apart from Mrs.
Raker’s crooning, which, indeed, was so far automatic that it can hardly
be called speech; it was merely a vocal exercise intended to quiet the
mind. “You _were_ at Foley’s, then?” says Amos.

“Yes, sir,” very calmly; but her hands were clinching the arms of the
chair.

“And you saw my advertisement in this evening paper?”

“Yes, sir; Foley read it out to me. You begged M. C. C. to come back and
help you because you were in great embarrassment and trouble—and you
promised me nobody should harm me.”

“No more nobody shall!” returned Amos.

“But maybe you can’t help it. Never mind. When I heard about how they
were talking about lynching him”—she indicated her nephew—“I felt
terrible; the sin of blood guiltiness seemed to be resting on my soul;
but I couldn’t help it. Mr. Sheriff, you don’t know I—I was once in—in an
insane asylum. I was!”

“That’s all right,” said Amos. “I know all about that.”

“There, there, there!” murmured Mrs. Raker, “don’t think of it!”

“It wasn’t that they were cruel to me—they weren’t that. They never
struck or starved me; they just gave me awful drugs to keep me quiet;
and they made me sit all day, every day, week in, week out, month in,
month out, on a bench with other poor creatures, who had enough company
in their horrible dreams. If I lifted my hands there was some one to put
them down to my side and say, in a soft voice, ‘Hush, be quiet!’ That was
their theory—absolute rest! They thought I was crazy because I could see
more than they, because I had visitors from the spirit-land—”

“I know,” interrupted Amos. “I was there one night. But I—”

“You couldn’t see them. It was only I. They came to _me_. It was more
than a year after they all died, and I was so lonely—oh, nobody knows
how desolate and lonely I was!—and then a medium came. She taught me how
to summon them. At first, though I made all the preparations, though
I put out the whist cards for uncle and Ralph and Sadie, and the toys
for little Ro, I couldn’t seem to think they were there; but I kept on
acting as if I knew they were there, and having faith; and at last they
did come. But they wouldn’t come in the asylum, because the conditions
weren’t right. So at last I felt I couldn’t bear it any longer. I felt
like I was false to the heavenly vision; but I couldn’t stand it, and so
I pretended I didn’t see them and I never had seen them; and whatever
they said I ought to feel I pretended to feel, and I said how wonderful
it was that I should be cured; and that made them right pleased; and
they felt that I was quite a credit to them, and they wrote my sister
that I was cured. I went home, but only to be suspected again, and so I
ran away. I had put aside money before, thousands of dollars, that they
thought that I spent. They thought I gave a heap of it to that medium
and her husband; I truly only gave them five hundred dollars. So I went
forth. I hid myself here. I was happy here, where _they_ could come,
until—until I saw Archibald Allerton on the street and overheard him
inquiring for me. I was dreadfully upset. But I decided in a minute to
flee again. So I drew some money out of the bank, and I bought a blue
calico and a sun-bonnet not to look like myself; and I went home and
wrote that letter I gave you, Mr. Sheriff, with my will and the money.”

“The parcel is unopened still,” said Amos. “I gave you my word, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I knew you would keep your word. And it was just after
I wrote you I slipped down the cellar stairs. It came of being in a
hurry. I made sure I never _would_ get on my feet again, but very soon
I discovered that I was more scared than hurt. And I saw then there
might be a chance of keeping him off his guard if he thought I was like
to die, and that thus I might escape the readier. It was not hard to
fool the doctors. I did just the same with them I did with the asylum
folks. I said yes whenever I thought they expected it, and though I had
some contradictory symptoms, they made out a bad state of things with
the spine, and gave mighty little hope of my recovery. But what I hadn’t
counted on was that my _friends_ would take such good care of me. I
didn’t know I had friends. It pleased me so I was wanting to cry for joy;
yet it frightened me so I didn’t know which way to turn.”

“But, great heavens! Aunt Margaret,” the young Southerner burst out,
unable to restrain himself longer, “you had no need to be so afraid of
_me_!”

The old woman looked at him, more in suspicion than in hope, but she
went on, not answering: “The night I did escape, it was by accident. I
never would say one word to him hardly, though he tried again and again
to start a talk; but I would seem too ill; and he’s a Cary, anyhow, and
couldn’t be rude to a lady. That night he went into the other room. He
was so quiet I reckoned he was asleep, and, thinking that here might be a
chance for me, I slipped out of bed, soft as soft, and slipped over to
the crack of the door—it just wasn’t closed!—and I peeked in on him—”

“And you were behind the door when he heard the noise?” exclaimed Amos.
“But what made the noise?”

“Oh, I reckon just ’Squire jumping out of the window; he gave a kind of
screech.”

“But I don’t understand,” cried Allerton. “I went into the room, and it
was empty.”

“No, sir,” said Miss Cary, plucking up more spirit in the presence of
Wickliff—“no, sir; I was behind the door. You didn’t push it shut.”

“But I ran all round the room.”

“No, sir; not till you looked out of the window. While you were looking
out of the window I slipped out of the door; and I was so scared lest
you should see me that I wasn’t afraid of anything else; and I got
down-stairs while you were looking in the closet, and found my clothes
there, and so got out.”

“But I was _sure_ I went round the room first,” cried Allerton.

“Very likely; but you see you didn’t,” remarked Amos.

“It was because I remembered stubbing my toe”—Allerton was painfully
ploughing up his memories—“I am _certain_ I stubbed my toe, and it must
have been going round the—no; by—I beg your pardon—I stubbed it against
the bed, going to the window. I was all wrong.”

“Just so,” agreed Amos, cheerfully. “And then _you_ went to Foley, Miss
Cary. Trust an Irishman for hiding anybody in trouble! But how did the
house catch fire? Did you—”

But old Margaret protested vehemently that here at least she was
sackless; and Mrs. Raker unexpectedly came to the rescue.

“I guess I can tell that much,” said she. “’Squire came back, and he’s
got burns all over him, and he’s cut with glass bad! I guess he jumped
back into the house and upset a lamp once too often!”

“I see it all,” said Amos. “And then you came back to rescue your nephew—”

“No, sir,” cried Margaret Cary; “I came back because they said you were
in trouble. It’s wicked, but I couldn’t bear the thought he’d take me
back to the crazies. I’m an old woman; and when you’re old you want to
live in a house of your own, in your own way, and not be crowded. And
it’s so awful to be crowded by crazies! I couldn’t bear it. I said he
must take his chance; and I wouldn’t read the papers for fear they would
shake my resolution. It was Foley read your advertisement to me. And
then I knew if you were in danger, whatever happened to me, I would have
to go.”

Amos wheeled round on young Allerton. “Now, young fellow,” said he,
“speak out. Tell your aunt you won’t touch a hair of her head; and she
may have her little invisible family gatherings all she likes.”

Allerton, smiling, came forward and took his aunt’s trembling hand. “You
shall stay here or go home to your sister, who loves you, whichever you
choose; and you shall be as safe and free there as here,” said he.

And looking into his dark eyes—the Cary eyes—she believed him.

The youngest reporter never heard the details of the Clark mystery, but
no doubt he made quite as good a story as if he had known the truth.




THE DEFEAT OF AMOS WICKLIFF




THE DEFEAT OF AMOS WICKLIFF


“What’s the matter with Amos?” Mrs. Smith asked Ruth Graves; “the boy
doesn’t seem like himself at all.” Amos, at this speaking, was nearer
forty than thirty; but ever since her own son’s death he had been “her
boy” to Edgar’s mother. She looked across at Ruth with a wistful kindling
of her dim eyes. “You—you haven’t said anything to Amos to hurt his
feelings, Ruth?”

Ruth, busy over her embroidery square, set her needle in with great
nicety, and replied, “I don’t think so, dear.” Her color did not turn nor
her features stir, and Mrs. Smith sighed.

After a moment she rose, a little stiffly—she had aged since Edgar’s
death—walked over to Ruth, and lightly stroked the sleek brown head.
“I’ve a very great—_respect_ for Amos,” she said. Then, her eyes filling,
she went out of the room; so she did not see Ruth’s head drop lower.
Respect? But Ruth herself respected him. No one, no one so much! But
that was all. He was the best, the bravest man in the world; but that was
all. While poor, weak, faulty Ned—how she had loved him! Why couldn’t
she love a right man? Why did not admiration and respect and gratitude
combined give her one throb of that lovely feeling that Ned’s eyes used
to give her before she knew that they were false? Yet it was not Ned’s
spectral hand that chilled her and held her back. Three years had passed
since he died, and before he died she had so completely ceased to love
him that she could pity him as well as his mother. The scorching anger
was gone with the love. But somehow, in the immeasurable humiliation and
anguish of that passage, it was as if her whole soul were burned over,
and the very power of loving shrivelled up and spoiled. How else could
she keep from loving Amos, who had done everything (she told herself
bitterly) that Ned had missed doing? And she gravely feared that Amos had
grown to care for her. A hundred trifles betrayed his secret to her who
had known the glamour that imparadises the earth, and never would know it
any more. Mrs. Smith had seen it also. Ruth remembered the day, nearly
a year ago, that she had looked up (she was singing at their cabinet
organ, singing hymns of a Sunday evening) and had caught the look, not
on Amos’s face, but on the kind old face that was like her mother’s. She
understood why, the next day, Mrs. Smith moved poor Ned’s picture from
the parlor to her own chamber, where there were four photographs of him
already.

“And now she is reconciled to what will never happen,” thought Ruth,
“and is afraid it won’t happen. Poor Mother Smith, it never will!” She
wished, half irritably, that Amos would let a comfortable situation
alone. Of late, during the month or six weeks past, he had appeared beset
by some hidden trouble. When he did not reckon that he was observed his
countenance would wear an expression of harsh melancholy; and more than
once had she caught his eyes tramping through space after her with a look
that made her recall the lines of Tennyson Ned used to quote to her in
jest—for she had never played with him:

    “Right through’ his manful breast darted the pang
    That makes a man, in the sweet face of her
    That he loves most, lonely and miserable.”

Then, for a week at a time, he would not come to the village; he said he
was busy with a murder trial. He was not at their house to-day; it was
they who were awaiting his return from the court-house, in his own rooms
at the jail, after the most elaborate midday dinner Mrs. Raker could
devise. The parlor was less resplendent and far prettier than of yore.
Ruth knew that the change had come about through her own suggestions,
which the docile Amos was always asking. She knew, too, that she had not
looked so young and so dainty for years as she looked in her new brown
cloth gown, with the fur trimming near enough a white throat to enhance
its soft fairness. Yet she sighed. She wished heartily that they had not
come to town. True, they needed the things, and, much to Mother Smith’s
discomfiture, she had insisted on going to a modest hotel near the jail,
instead of to Amos’s hospitality; but it was out of the question not to
spend one day with him. Ruth began to fear it would be a memorable day.

There were his clothes, for instance; why should he make himself so
fine for them, when his every-day suit was better than other people’s
Sunday best? Ruth took an unconscious delight in Amos’s wardrobe. There
was a finish about his care of his person and his fine linen and silk
and his freshly pressed clothes which she likened to his gentle manner
with women and the leisurely, pleasant cadence of his voice, which to
her quite mended any breaks in her admiration made by a reckless and
unprotected grammar. Although she could not bring herself to marry him,
she considered him a man that any girl might be proud to win. Quite the
same, his changing his dress put her in a panic. Which was nonsense,
since she didn’t have any reason to suppose—The cold chills were stepping
up her spine to the base of her brain; _that_ was his step in the hall!

He opened the door. He was fresh and pressed from the tailor, he was
smooth and perfumed from the barber, and his best opal-and-diamond
scarf-pin blazed in a new satin scarf. Certainly his presence was
calculated to alarm a young woman afraid of love-making.

Nor did his words reassure her. He said, “Ruth, I don’t know if you have
noticed that I was worried lately.”

“I thought maybe you were bothered about some business,” lied Ruth, with
the first defensive instinct of woman.

“Yes, that’s it; it’s about a man sentenced to death.”

“Oh!” said Ruth.

“Yes, for killing Johnny Bateman. He’s applied for a new trial, and the
court has just been heard from. Raker’s gone to find out. If he can’t
get the hearing, it’s the gallows; and I—”

“Oh, Amos, no! that would be too awful! Not _you_!”

“—I’d rather resign the office, if it wouldn’t seem like sneaking. Ah!”
A rap at the door made Amos leap to his feet. In the rap, so muffled,
so hesitating, sounded the diffidence of the bearer of bad news. “If
_that’s_ Raker,” groaned Amos, “it’s all up, for that ain’t his style of
knock!”

Raker it was, and his face ran his tidings ahead of him.

“They refused a new trial?” said Amos.

“Yes, they have,” exploded Raker. “Oh, damn sech justice! And he’s only
got three days before the execution. And it’s _here_! Oh, ain’t it h—?”

“Yes, it is,” said Amos, “but you needn’t say so here before ladies.” He
motioned to the portrait and to Ruth, who had leaned out from her chair,
listening with a pale, attentive face.

“Please excuse me, ladies,” said Raker, absently; “I’m kinder off my
base this morning. You see, Amos, my wife she says if hanging Sol is my
duty I’ve jest got to resign, for she won’t live with no hangman. She’s
terrible upset.”

“It ain’t your duty; it’s mine,” said Amos.

“I guess you don’t like the job any more’n me,” stammered Raker, “and it
ain’t like Joe Raker sneakin’ off this way; but what can I do with my
woman? And maybe you, not having any wife—”

“No,” said Amos, very slowly, “I haven’t got any wife; it’s easier for
me.” Nevertheless, the blood had ebbed from his swarthy cheeks.

“But how did it happen?” said Ruth.

“’Ain’t Amos told you?” said Raker, whose burden was visibly lightened—he
pitied Amos sincerely, but it is much less distressful to pity one’s
friends than to need to pity one’s self. “Well, this was the way: Sol
Joscelyn was a rougher in the steel-works across the river, and he has
a sweetheart over here, and he took her to the big Catholic fair, and
Johnny was there. Johnny was the biggest policeman on the force and the
best-natured, and he had a girl of his own, it came out, so there was no
cause for Sol to be jealous. He says now it was his fault, and she says
’twas all hers; but my notion is it was the same old story. Breastpins
in a pig’s nose ain’t in it with a pretty girl without common-sense; and
that’s Scriptur’, Mrs. Raker says. But Sol felt awful bad, and he felt so
bad he went out and took a drink. He took a good many drinks, I guess;
and not being a drinkin’ man he didn’t know how to carry it off, and he
certainly didn’t have any right to go back to the hall in the shape he
was in. It was a friendly part in Johnny to take him off and steer him
to the ferry. But there was a little bad look about it, though Sol went
peaceful at last. Sol says they had got down to Front Street, and it was
all friendly and cleared up, and he was terrible ashamed of himself the
minnit he got out in the air. He was ahead, he says, crossing the street,
when he heard Johnny’s little dog yelp like mad, and he turned round—of
course he wasn’t right nimble, and it was a little while before he found
poor Johnny, all doubled up on the sidewalk, stabbed in the jugular
vein. He never made a sign. Sol got up and ran after the murderer. The
mean part is that two men in a saloon saw Sol just as he got up and ran.
Naturally they ran after him and started the hue-and-cry, and Sol was so
dazed he didn’t explain much. Have I got it straight, Amos?”

“Very straight, Joe. You might put in that the prosecuting attorney,
Frank Woods, is on his first term and after laurels; and that, unluckily,
there have been three murders in this locality inside the year, and by
hook or crook all three of the men got off with nothing but a few years
at Anamosa; and public sentiment, in consequence, is pretty well stirred
up, and not so particular about who it hits as hitting _somebody_; and
that poor Sol had a chump of a lawyer—and you have the state of things.”

“But why are you so sure he wasn’t guilty?” said Ruth. The shocked look
on her face was fading. She was thinking her own thoughts, not Amos’s,
Raker decided.

“Partly on account of the dog,” said Amos. “First thing Sol said when
they took him up was, ‘Johnny’s dog’s hurt too’; and true enough we found
him (for I was round) crawling down the street with a stab in him. Now, I
says, here’s a test right at hand; if the dog was stabbed by this young
feller he’ll tell of it when he sees him, and I fetched him right up to
Sol; but, bless my soul, the dog kinder wagged his tail! And he’s taken
to Sol from the first. Another thing, they never found the knife that did
it; said Sol might have throwed it into the river. Tommy rot!—I mean it
ain’t likely. Sol wasn’t in no condition to throw a knife a block or two!”

“But if not he, who else?” said Ruth.

Amos was at a loss to answer her exactly, and yet in language that he
considered suitable “to a nice young lady”; but he managed to convey to
her an idea of the villanous locality where the unfortunate policeman
met his death; and he told her that from the first, judging by the
character of the blow (“no American man—a decent man too, like Sol—would
have jabbed a man from behind that way; that’s a Dago blow, with a Dago
knife!”), he had suspected a certain Italian woman, who “boarded” in
the house beneath whose evil walls the man was slain. He suspected her
because Johnny had arrested “a great friend of hers” who turned out to be
“wanted,” and in the end was sent to the penitentiary, and the woman had
sworn revenge. “That’s all,” said Amos, “except that when I looked her
up, she had skipped. I have a good man shadowing her, though, and he has
found her.”

“And that was what convinced you?”

“That and the man himself. Suppose we take a look at him. Then I’ll have
to go to Des Moines. I suspected this would come, and I’m all ready.”

So the toilet was for the Governor and not for her; Ruth took shame to
herself for a full minute while Raker was speaking. Amos’s dejection came
from a cause worthy of such a man as he. Perhaps all her fancies....

“That will suit,” Raker was saying. “He has been asking for you. I told
him.”

“Thank you, Joe,” said Amos, gratefully.

“I don’t propose to leave _all_ the dirty jobs to you,” growled Raker.
And he added under his breath to Ruth, when Amos had stopped behind to
strap a bag, “Amos is going to take it hard.”

He led the way, through a stone-flagged hall, where the air wafted
the unrefreshing cleanliness of carbolic acid and lime, up a stone
and iron staircase worn by what hundreds of lagging feet! past grated
windows through which how many feverish eyes had been mocked by the
brilliant western sky! past narrow doors and the laughter and oaths of
rascaldom in the corridor, into an absolutely silent hall blocked by an
iron-barred door. There Raker paused to fit a key in the lock, and on
his commonplace, florid features dawned a curious solemnity. Ruth found
herself breathing more quickly.

The door swung inward. Ruth’s first sensation was a sort of relief, the
room looked so little like a cell, with its bright chintz on the bed and
the mass of nosegays on the table. A black-and-tan terrier bounded off
the bed and gambolled joyously over Amos’s feet.

“Here’s the sheriff and a lady to see you, Sol,” Raker announced.

The prisoner came forward eagerly, holding out his hand. All three shook
it. He was a short, cleanly built man, who held his chin slightly
uplifted as he talked. His reddish-brown hair was strewn over a high
white forehead; its disorder did not tally with the neatness of his
Sunday suit, which, they told Ruth afterwards, he had worn ever since
his conviction, although previously he had been particular to wear
his working-clothes. Ruth’s eyes were drawn by an uncanny attraction,
stronger than her will, to the face of a man in such a tremendous
situation. His skin was fair and freckled, and had the prison pallor,
face and hands. But the feature that impressed Ruth was his eyes. They
were of a clear, grayish-blue tint, meeting the gaze directly, without
self-consciousness or bravado, and innocent as a child’s. Such eyes are
not unfrequent among working-men, but the rest of us have learned to hide
behind the glass. He did not look like a man who knew that he must die
in three days. He was smiling. Looking closer, however, Ruth saw that
his eyelids were red, and she observed that his fingers were tapping the
balls of his thumbs continually.

“I’m real glad to see you,” he said. “Won’t you set down? Poker, you
let the lady alone”—addressing the dog. “He’s just playful; he won’t
bite. Mr. Wickliff lets me have him here; he was Johnny’s dog, and he’s
company to me. He likes it. They let him out whenever he wants, you
know.” His eyes for a second passed the faces before him and lingered on
the bare branches of the maple swaying between his window grating and
the sky. Was he thinking that he would see the trees but once, on one
terrible journey?

Raker blew his nose violently.

“Well, I’m off to Des Moines, Sol,” said Amos.

“Yes, sir. And about Elly going? I don’t want her to go to all that
expense if it won’t do no good. I want to leave her all the money I can—”

“You never mind about the money.” Amos took the words off his tongue with
friendly gruffness. “But she better wait till we see how I git along.
Maybe there’ll be no necessity.”

“It’s a kinder long journey for a young lady,” said Joscelyn, anxiously,
“and it’s so hard getting word of those big folks, and I hate to think of
her having to hang round. Elly’s so timid like, and maybe somebody not
being polite to her—”

“I’ll attend to all that, Joscelyn. She shall go in a Pullman, and
everything will be fixed.”

“Can you git passes? You are doing a terrible lot of things for me, Mr.
Wickliff; and Mr. Raker too, and his good lady” (with a grateful glance
at Raker, who rocked in the rocking-chair and was lapped in gloom). “It
does seem like you folks here are awful kind to folks in trouble, and if
I ever git out—” He was not equal to the rest of the sentence, but Amos
covered his faltering with a brisk—

“That’s all right. Say, ’ain’t you got some new flowers?”

Joscelyn smiled. “Those are from the boys over to the mill. Ten of them
boys was over to see me Sunday, no three knowing the others were coming.
I tell you when a man gits into trouble he finds out about his friends.
I got awful good friends. The roller sent me that box of cigars. And
there’s one little feller—he works on the hot-bed, one of them kids—and
he walked all the six miles, ’cross the bridge and all, ’cause he didn’t
have money for the fare. Why he didn’t have money, he’d spent it all
in boot-jack tobacco and a rosy apple for me. He’s a real nice little
boy. If—if things was to go bad with me, would you kinder have an eye on
Hughey, Mr. Wickliff?”

Amos rose rather hastily. “Well, I guess I got to go now, Sol.”

[Illustration: THE FAREWELL]

Ruth noticed that Sol got the sheriff’s big hand in both his as he said,
“I guess you know how I feel ’bout what you and Mr. Raker—” This time he
could not go on, his mouth twitched, and he brushed the back of his hand
across his eyes. Ruth saw that the palm had a great white welt on it, and
that the sinews were stiffened, preventing the fingers from opening wide.
She spoke then. She held out her own hand.

“I know you didn’t do it,” said she, very deliberately; “and I’m sure we
shall get you free again. Don’t stop hoping! Don’t you stop one minute!”

“I guess I can’t say anything better than that,” said Amos. In this
fashion they got away.

Amos did not part his lips until they were back in his own parlor, where
he spoke. “Did you notice his hand?”

Ruth had noticed it.

“A man who saw the accident that gave him those scars told me about it.
It happened two years ago. Sol had his spell at the roll, and he was
strolling about, and happened to fetch up at the finishing shears, where
a boy was straightening the red-hot iron bars. I don’t know exactly how
it happened; some way the iron caught on a joint of the bed-plates and
jumped at him, red-hot. He didn’t get out of the way quick enough. It
went right through his leg and curved up, and down he dropped with the
iron in him. Near the femoral artery, they said, too; and it would have
burned the walls of the artery down, and he would have bled to death in
a flash. Sol Joscelyn saw him. He looked round for something to take
hold of that iron with that was smoking and charring, but there wasn’t
anything—the boy’s tongs had gone between the rails when he fell. So
he—he took his _hands_ and pulled the red-hot thing out! That’s how both
his hands are scarred.”

“Oh, the poor fellow!” said Ruth; “and think of him _here_!”

Amos shook his head and strode to the window. Then he came back to her,
where she was trying to swallow the pain in the roof of her mouth. He
stretched his great hands in front of him. “How could I ever look at them
again if they pulled that lever?” he sobbed—for the words were a sob; and
immediately he flung himself back to the window again.

“Amos, I know they won’t hang him; why, they _can’t_. If the Governor
could only see him.” Ruth was standing, and her face was flushed. “Why,
Amos, _I_ thought maybe he might be guilty until I saw him! I know the
Governor won’t see him, but if we told him about the poor fellow, if we
tried to make him see him as we do?”

Amos drearily shook his head. “The Governor is a just man, Ruth, but he
is hard as nuts. Sentiment won’t go down with him. Besides, he is a great
friend of Frank Woods, who has got his back up and isn’t going to let me
pull his prisoner out. Of course he’s given _his_ side.”

“The girl—this Elly? If she were to see the Governor?”

“I don’t know whether she’d do harm or not. She’s a nice little thing,
and has stood by Sol like a lady. But it’s a toss up if she wouldn’t
break down and lose her head utterly. She comes to see him as often as
she can, always bringing him some little thing or other; and she sits
and holds his hand and cries—never seems to say three words. Whenever
she runs up against me she makes a bow and says, ‘I’m very much obliged
to you, sir,’ and looks scared to death. _I_ don’t know who to get to go
with her; her mother keeps a working-man’s boarding-house; she’s a good
soul, but—”

He dropped his head on his hand and seemed to try to think.

It was strange to Ruth that she should long to go up to him and touch his
smooth black hair, yet such a crazy fancy did flit through her brain.
When she thought that he was suffering because of her, she had not been
moved; but now that he was so sorely straitened for a man who was
nothing to him more than a human creature, her heart ached to comfort him.

“No,” said Amos; “we’ve got to work the other strings. I’ve got some
pull, and I’ll work that; then the newspaper boys have helped me out, and
folks are getting sorry for Sol; there wouldn’t be any clamor against it,
and we’ve got some evidence. I’m not worth shucks as a talker, but I’ll
take a talker with me. If there was only somebody to keep her straight—”

“Would you trust me?” said Ruth. “If you will, I’ll go with her
to-morrow.”

Amos’s eyes went from his mother’s picture to the woman with the pale
face and the lustrous eyes beneath it. He felt as stirred by love and
reverence and the longing to worship as ever mediæval knight; he wanted
to kneel and kiss the hem of her gown; what he did do was to open his
mouth, gasp once or twice, and finally say, “Ruth, you—you are as good as
they make ’em!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Amos went, and the instant that he was gone, Ruth, attending to her own
scheme of salvation, crossed the river. She entered the office of the
steel-works, where the officers gave her full information about the
character of Sol Joscelyn. He was a good fellow and a good workman,
always ready to work an extra turn to help a fellow-workman. She went to
his landlady, who was Elly’s mother, and heard of his sober and blameless
life. “And indeed, miss, I know of a certainty he never did git drunk
but once before, and that was after his mother’s funeral; and she was
bedfast for ten years, and he kep’ her like a lady, with a hired girl,
he did; and he come home to the dark house, and he couldn’t bear it, and
went back to the boys, and they, meaning well, but foolish, like boys,
told him to forget the grief.” Ruth went back to Sol’s mill, between
heats, to seek Sol’s young friend. She found the “real nice little boy”
with a huge quid in his cheek, and his fists going before the face of
another small lad who had “told the roller lies.” He cocked a shrewd
and unchildish blue eye at Ruth, and skilfully sent his quid after the
flying tale-bearer. “Sol Joscelyn? Course I know him. He’s a friend
of mine. Give me coffee outer his pail first day I got here; lets me
take his tongs. I’m goin’ to be a rougher too, you bet; I’m a-learnin’.
He’s the daisiest rougher, he is. It’s _grand_ to see him ketch them
white-hot bars that’s jest a-drippin’, and chuck ’em under like they was
kindling-wood. He’s licked my old man, too, for haulin’ me round by the
ear. He ain’t my own father, so I didn’t interfere. Say, you goin’ to see
Sol to-night? You can give him things, can’t you? I got a mince-pie for
him.”

Ruth consented to take the pie, and she did not know whether to laugh
or cry when, examining the crust, she discovered, cunningly stowed away
among the raisins and citron, a tiny file.

When she told Sol, he did not seem surprised. “He’s always a-sending of
them,” said he; “most times Mr. Raker finds ’em, but once he got one
inside a cigar, and I bit my teeth on it. He thinks if he can jest git a
_file_ to me it’s all right. I s’pose he reads sech things in books.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Amos went to Des Moines of a Monday afternoon; Tuesday night he walked
through the jail gate with his head down, as no one had ever seen the
sheriff walk before. He kept his eye on the sodden, frozen grass and the
ice-varnished bricks of the walk, which glittered under the electric
lights; it was cruelty enough to have to hear that dizzy ring of hammers;
he would not see; but all at once he recoiled and stepped _over_ the
sharp black shadow of a beam. But he had his composure ready for Raker.

“Well!—he wouldn’t listen to you?”

“No; he listened, but I couldn’t move him, nor Dennison couldn’t,
either. He’s honest about it; he thinks Sol is guilty, and an example is
needed. Finally I told him I would resign rather than hang an innocent
man. He said Woods had another man ready.”

“That will be a blow to Sol. I told him you would attend to everything.
He said he’d risk another man if it would make you feel bad—”

“_I_ won’t risk another man, then. But the Governor called my bluff.
Where’s Miss Graves?”

“Gone to Des Moines with Elly. Went next train after your telegram.”

“And Mrs. Smith?”

“She’s in reading the Bible to Sol. I don’t know whether it’s doing
him any good or not; he says ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘That’s right’ to every
question she asks him; but I guess some of it’s politeness. And he seems
kinder flighty, and his mind runs from one thing to another. But he says
he’s still hoping. He’s made a list of all his things to give away; and
he’s said good-bye to the newspaper boys. I never supposed that youngest
one had any feeling, but I had to give him four fingers of whiskey after
he come out; he was white’s the wall, and he hadn’t a word to say. It’s
been a terrible day, Amos. My woman’s jest all broke up; she wanted me
to make a rope-ladder. Me! Said she and old Lady Smith would hide him.
‘Polly,’ says I, ‘I know my duty; and if I didn’t, Amos knows his.’ She
’ain’t spoke to me since, and we had a picked-up dinner. Well, _I_ can’t
eat!”

“You best not drink much either, then, Joe,” said Amos, kindly; and he
went his ways. Dark and painful ways they were that night: but he never
flinched. And the carpenters on the ghastly machine without the gate (the
shadow of which lay, all night through, on Amos’s curtain) said to each
other, “The sheriff looks sick, but he ain’t going to take any chances!”

The day came—Sol’s last day—and there were a hundred demands for Amos’s
decision. In the morning he made his last stroke for the prisoner.
He told Raker about it. “I found the tool at last,” he said, “in the
place you suspected. Dago dagger. I’ve expressed it to Miss Graves and
telegraphed her. It’s in _her_ hands now.”

“Sol says he ’ain’t quit hoping,” says Raker. “Say, the blizzard flag is
out; you don’t think you could put it off for weather, being an outdoor
thing, you know?”

“No,” says Amos, knitting his black brows; “I know my duty.”

Towards night, in one of his many visits to the condemned man, Sol said,
“Elly’ll be sure to come back from Des Moines in—in time, if she don’t
succeed, won’t she?”

“Oh, sure,” said Amos, cheerfully. He spoke in a louder than common voice
when he was with Sol; he fought against an inclination to walk on tiptoe,
as he saw Raker and the watch doing. He wished Sol would not keep hold of
his hand so long each time they shook hands; but he found his hands going
out whenever he entered the room. He had a feeling at his heart as if a
string were tightening about it and cutting into it: shaking hands seemed
to loosen the string. From Sol, Amos went down-stairs to the telephone
to call up the depot. The electricity snapped and roared and buzzed, and
baffled his ears, but he made out that the Des Moines train had come in
two hours late; the morning train was likely to be later, for a storm was
raging and the telegraph lines were down. Elly hadn’t come; she couldn’t
come in time! Amos changed the call to the telegraph office.

Yes, they had a telegram for him. Just received; been ever since noon
getting there. From Des Moines. Read it?

The sheriff gripped the receiver and flung back his shoulders like a
soldier facing the firing-squad. The words penetrated the whir like
bullets: “Des Moines, December 8, 189-. Governor refused audience. Has
left the city. My sympathy and indignation. T. L. Dennison.”

Amos remembered to put the tube up, to ring the bell. He walked out of
the office into the parlor; he was not conscious that he walked on tiptoe
or that he moved the arm-chair softly as if to avoid making a noise.
He sank back into the great leather depths and stared dully about him.
“They’ve called my bluff!” he whispered; “there isn’t anything left I can
do.” He could not remember that he had ever been in a similar situation,
because, although he had had many a buffet and some hard falls from life,
never had he been at the end of his devices or his obstinate courage. But
now there was nothing, nothing to be done.

“By-and-by I will go and tell Sol,” he thought, in a dull way. No; he
would let him hope a little longer; the morning would be time enough....
He looked down at his own hands, and a shudder contracted the muscles of
his neck, and his teeth met.

“Brace up, you coward!” he adjured himself; but the pith was gone out of
his will. That which he had thought, looking at his hands, was that _she_
would never want to touch them again. Amos’s love was very humble. He
knew that Ruth did not love him. Why should she? Like all true lovers in
the dawn of the New Day, he was absorbed in his gratitude to her for the
power to love. There is nothing so beautiful, so exciting, so infinitely
interesting, as to love. To be loved is a pale experience beside it,
being, indeed, but the mirror to love, without which love may never find
its beauty, yet holding, of its own right, neither beauty nor charm. Amos
had accepted Ruth’s kindness, her sympathy, her goodness, as he accepted
the way her little white teeth shone in her smile, and the lovely depths
of her eyes, and the crisp melody of her voice—as windfalls of happiness,
his by kind chance or her goodness, not for any merit of his own. He was
grateful, and he did not presume; he had only come so far as to wonder
whether he ever would dare—But now he only asked to be her friend and
servant. But to have her shrink from him, to have his presence odious to
her ... he did not know how to bear it! And there was no way out. Not
only the State held him, the wish of the helpless, trusting creature
that he had failed to save was stronger than any law of man. He thought
of Mrs. Raker and her foolish schemes: that woman didn’t understand how
a man felt. But all of a sudden he found himself getting up and going
quickly to his father’s picture; and he was saying out loud to the
painted soldier: “I know my duty! I know my duty!” Without, the snow was
driving against the window-pane; that accursed Thing creaked and swayed
under the flail of the wind, but kept its stature. Within, the tumult
and combat in a human soul was so fierce that only at long intervals did
the storm beat its way to his consciousness. Once, stopping his walk, he
listened and heard sobs, and a gentle old voice that he knew in a solemn,
familiar monotony of tone; and he was aware that the women were in the
other room weeping and praying. And up-stairs Sol, who had never done a
mean trick in his life, and been content with so little, and tried to
share all he got, was waiting for the sweetheart who never could come,
turning that pitiful smile of his to the door every time the wind rattled
it, “trying to hope!”

He had not shed a tear for his own misery, but now he leaned his arm on
the frame of his mother’s portrait and sobbed. He was standing thus when
Ruth saw him, when she flashed up to him, cold and wet and radiant.

She was too breathless to speak; but she did not need to speak.

“You’ve got it, Ruth!” he cried. “O God, you’ve got the reprieve!”

“Yes, I have, Amos; here it is. I couldn’t telegraph because the wires
were down, but the Governor and the railroad superintendent fixed it
so we could come on an engine. I knew you were suffering. Elly is with
Mother Smith and Mrs. Raker, but I—but I wanted to come to you.”

If he had thought once of himself he must have heard the new note in her
voice. But he did not think once of himself; he could only think of Sol.

“But the Governor, didn’t he refuse to see you?” said he.

“No; he refused to see poor Mr. Dennison.” Ruth used the slighting pity
of the successful. “_We_ didn’t try to go to him; we went to his wife.”

Amos sat down. “Ruth,” he said, solemnly, “you haven’t got talent, you’ve
got genius!”

“Why, of course,” said Ruth, “he might snub _us_ and not listen to us,
but he would _have_ to listen to his wife. She is such a pretty lady,
Amos, and so kind. We had a little bit of trouble seeing her at first,
because the girl (who was all dressed up, like the pictures, in a black
dress and white collar and cuffs and the nicest long apron), she said
that we couldn’t come in, the Governor’s wife was engaged, and they were
going out of town that day. But when Elly began to talk to her she
sympathized at once, and she got the Governor’s wife down. Then I told
her all about Sol and how good he was, and I cried and Elly cried and
_she_ cried—we all cried—and she said that I should see the Governor, and
gave us tea. She was as kind as possible. And when the Governor came I
told him everything about Sol—about his mother and the little boy at the
mill and the dog, and how he saved the other boy, pulling out that big
iron bar red-hot—”

“But,” interrupted Amos, who would have been literal on his
death-bed—“but it wasn’t a very big bar. Not the bar they begin with—a
finished bar, just ready for the shears.”

“Never mind; it was big when I told it, and I assure you it impressed the
Governor. He got up and walked the floor, and then Elly threw herself
on her knees before him; and he pulled her up, and, don’t you know, not
exactly laughed, but something like it. ‘I can’t make out,’ said he,
‘from your description much about the guilt or innocence of Solomon
Joscelyn, but one thing is plain, that he is too good a fellow to be
hanged!’”

“And did you take the dagger I sent, and my telegram?”

“Your telegram? Dagger? Amos, I’m so sorry, but we didn’t go back to
our lodgings at all. We had our bags with us, and came right from the
Governor’s here!”

“Then you didn’t say anything about evidence?”

“Evidence?” Ruth looked distressed. “Oh, Amos! I forgot all about it!”

Amos always supposed that he must have been beside himself, for he
caught her hand and kissed it, and cried, “You darling!” Nothing more,
not a word; and he went abjectly down on his knees before her chair and
apologized, until, frightened by her silence, he looked up—and saw Ruth’s
eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

After all, the evidence was not at all wasted; for the Italian woman,
thanks to a cunning use of the dagger, made a full confession; and, the
public wrath having been sated on Sol, a more merciful jury sent the real
assassin to a lunatic asylum, which pleased Amos, who was not certain
whether he had not stepped from one hot box into another. Ruth told Amos,
when he asked her the inevitable question of the lover, “I don’t know
when exactly, dear, but I think I began to love you when I saw you cry;
and I was _sure_ of it when I found I could help you!”

Honest Amos did not analyze his wife’s heart; he was content to accept
her affection as the gift of God and her, and his gratitude included Sol
and Elly; wherefore it comes to pass that a certain iron-worker, on a
certain day in December, always dines with Amos Wickliff, his wife, and
Mother Smith. Amos is no longer sheriff, but a citizen of substance and
of higher office, and they live in what Mother Smith fears is almost
sinful luxury; and on this day there will be served a dinner yielding not
to Christmas itself in state; and after dinner the rougher will rise, his
wineglass in hand. “To our wives!” he will say, solemnly.

And Amos, as solemnly, will repeat the toast: “To our wives! Thank God!”


THE END

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 67357 ***