The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London

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Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories

Author: Jack London

Release Date: July 31, 2008 [eBook #1089]
[Most recently updated: February 8, 2022]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, and Andrew Sly.
Revised by Richard Tonsing.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***




MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES


By Jack London




CONTENTS


     MOON-FACE
     THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY
     LOCAL COLOR
     AMATEUR NIGHT
     THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
     THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
     ALL GOLD CANYON
     PLANCHETTE




MOON-FACE


John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones
wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the
perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a
dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly
he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to
be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been
superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at
the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to
defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things
at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain
individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed;
and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: “I do not like that
man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that
we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John
Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was
always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other
men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh
myself—before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and
would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping
it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like
an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to
spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when
the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the
forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! ha!” and “Ho! ho!” rose
up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the
lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came
his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe
and clench my nails into my palms.

I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his
fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out
again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor, dumb beasties are not to be
blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”

He had a dog he called “Mars,” a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound
and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to
him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day,
when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him
with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John
Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face
as much like the full moon as it always had been.

Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.

“Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on
trout.”

Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in
his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face
of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess
of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested,
no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown
long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile
but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for
existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.

I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

“I fight you? Why?” he asked slowly. And then he laughed. “You are so
funny! Ho! ho! You’ll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!”

What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I
hated him! Then there was that name—Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it
absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I
asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown,
or Jones—but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to
yourself—Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of
it—Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask of you. “No,”
 you say. And “No” said I.

But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn
destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd,
close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage
transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced
the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law
allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels
from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for
he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his
saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face
till it was as a full-risen moon.

“Ha! ha! ha!” he laughed. “The funniest tike, that youngster of mine!
Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the
edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. ‘O
papa!’ he cried; ‘a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.’”

He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

“I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went
sour.

He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light,
glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft
and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh—“Ha! ha! That’s
funny! You don’t see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn’t see it! Why,
look here. You know a puddle—”

But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand
it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The
earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear
his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.

Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill
John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should
not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate
brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man
with one’s naked fist—faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab,
or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not
only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such
manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed
against me.

To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound
incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water
spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her
training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked that this
training consisted entirely of one thing—RETRIEVING. I taught the dog,
which I called “Bellona,” to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and
not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing
with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to
deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and
leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught
me. She was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness
that I was soon content.

After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to
John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little
weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he was
regularly and inveterately guilty.

“No,” he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. “No, you
don’t mean it.” And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his
damnable moon-face.

“I—I kind of thought, somehow, you didn’t like me,” he explained.
“Wasn’t it funny for me to make such a mistake?” And at the thought he
held his sides with laughter.

“What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.

“Bellona,” I said.

“He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”

I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”

Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he
exploded with: “That was my other dog. Well, I guess she’s a widow now.
Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!” he whooped after me, and I turned and fled
swiftly over the hill.

The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away
Monday, don’t you?”

He nodded his head and grinned.

“Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you
just ‘dote’ on.”

But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m
going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.”

Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
myself with rapture.

Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and
Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out
by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the
mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along
for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the
little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large
and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup
of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my
pipe.

Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed
of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high
feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes.
Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from
his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to
be a stick of “giant”; for such was his method of catching trout. He
dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the “giant” tightly
in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive
into the pool.

Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked
aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted
her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the
stick of “giant” in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for
shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger, and started to
run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after
him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a
sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed
on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the
stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed
that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona
hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up,
he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a
sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and
dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big
hole in the ground.

“Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing.” That was the
verdict of the coroner’s jury; and that is why I pride myself on the
neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There
was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in
the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his
infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat
moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night’s
sleep deep.




THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY


He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent
voice, gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some
deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look
it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of
performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences
by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on
a scale commensurate with the thrills he produced.

As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,
and anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a
sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently
borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but
he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance in his
gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills—nothing but a gray
sameness and infinite boredom.

Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to
do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an
ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him
on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with
his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he
grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose again. That
was all.

With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed
me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a
tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could
see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His right arm,
from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing
machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was
nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him somewhat when rainy
weather came on.

Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.

“I suppose you’ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?”
 he asked.

He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.

“Got the toothache,” he explained. “Well, the lion-tamer’s big play to
the audience was putting his head in a lion’s mouth. The man who hated
him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion
crunch down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years
went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew
old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had
waited for. The lion crunched down, and there wasn’t any need to call a
doctor.”

The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
would have been critical had it not been so sad.

“Now, that’s what I call patience,” he continued, “and it’s my style.
But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin,
sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called
himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive
from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as
you please.

“De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as
quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him
a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved
him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act,
so quick the ring-master didn’t have time to think, and there, before
the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking
them into the wood all around the ring-master so close that they passed
through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.

“The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no
one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit
of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.

“But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into
the lion’s mouth. He’d put it into the mouths of any of them, though
he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be
depended upon.

“As I was saying, Wallace—‘King’ Wallace we called him—was afraid
of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I’ve seen him
drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that’d turned nasty,
and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on
the nose.

“Madame de Ville—”

At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was
a divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the
partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to
pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end
longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey’s mates were
raising a terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man
stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose
with the light cane he carried, and returned with a sadly apologetic
smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no
interruption.

“—looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville
looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us,
as he laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville’s head into a
bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.

“De Ville was in a pretty mess—I helped to scrape him off; but he was
cool as a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in
his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went
out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did
not look so much in Madame de Ville’s direction after that.

“Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to
think it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in
‘Frisco. It was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was
filled with women and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the
head canvas-man, who had walked off with my pocket-knife.

“Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the
canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn’t there, but directly in
front of me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on
with his cage of performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a
quarrel between a couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people
in the dressing tent were watching the same thing, with the exception
of De Ville whom I noticed staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred.
Wallace and the rest were all too busy following the quarrel to notice
this or what followed.

“But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his
handkerchief from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from
his face with it (it was a hot day), and at the same time walked past
Wallace’s back. The look troubled me at the time, for not only did I see
hatred in it, but I saw triumph as well.

“‘De Ville will bear watching,’ I said to myself, and I really breathed
easier when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and
board an electric car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the
big tent, where I had overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing
his turn and holding the audience spellbound. He was in a particularly
vicious mood, and he kept the lions stirred up till they were all
snarling, that is, all of them except old Augustus, and he was just too
fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over anything.

“Finally Wallace cracked the old lion’s knees with his whip and got him
into position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth
and in popped Wallace’s head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just
like that.”

The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away
look came into his eyes.

“And that was the end of King Wallace,” he went on in his sad, low
voice. “After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent
over and smelled Wallace’s head. Then I sneezed.”

“It ... it was...?” I queried with halting eagerness.

“Snuff—that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed.”




LOCAL COLOR


“I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
information to account,” I told him. “Unlike most men equipped with
similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is—”

“Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.

“Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”

But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
dismissed the subject.

“I have tried it. It does not pay.”

“It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was
also honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”

“The Hobo?” I ventured.

“The Hobo—” He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
while he cast his definition. “The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for
that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are
assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.
The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois—there’s
the French of it. Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English
it becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I
believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in
‘Henry IV’—

    “‘The case of a treble hautboy
     Was a mansion for him, a court.’

“From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
used the terms interchangeably. But—and mark you, the leap paralyzes
one—crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy,
becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one
understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and
musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!
The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man
without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically,
it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then,
as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick
cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is
wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn’t it?”

And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in
my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me
with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my
best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
discriminating eye.

He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
Foundation of Society.”

“I like to talk with you,” he remarked. “You are not indifferently
schooled. You’ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of
history, as you choose to call it” (this with a sneer), “eminently fits
you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments
are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived
it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it,
the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
passage. Listen!”

And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and
lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject,
introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had
ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox
and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—in short,
flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile
dull and heavy and lifeless.

It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now
Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she
was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the
back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But
that a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the sanctity of her
kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place for him in the
warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the Sunflower went
to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith
Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes,
whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague
words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.

“Surely I shall never miss it,” I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books—books
that had spoiled more than one day’s fishing sport.

“I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”

But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”

“The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite
often. I—I intended wearing it to-night.”

“You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”

“Shiny!”

“It—it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he—”

“Has seen better days.”

“Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are
threadbare. And you have many suits—”

“Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
draggled pockets.”

“And he has none, no home, nothing—”

“Not even a Sunflower,”—putting my arm around her,—“wherefore he is
deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear—nay, the best
one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be
compensation!”

“You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”

And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
and apologetic.

“I—I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton
thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so
slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
caps—”

“Old ones!”

“Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”

It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.

And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did
not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn,
he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away
into that great mysterious underworld he called “The Road.”

“I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
open hand and heart,” he said, on the night he donned my good black
suit.

And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly
and carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known
better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for
many nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus
the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying
him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him
for the Son of Anak’s sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for
myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone,
of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the
Lovable. Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that
he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And
he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him
once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with
the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle a
sense-delight for the problem’s sake?

He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic
and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in
speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and
polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But
there was something glimmering; there which I never caught—flashes
of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could
grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man
behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never
knew.

“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”

“Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.

“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty
thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and
women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as
fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once
entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that
they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific
satire—”

I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.

“I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the
genesis of the action,” he explained. “However, the idea came. What
was the matter with a tramp sketch for the daily press? The
Irreconcilability of the Constable and the Tramp, for instance? So I hit
the drag (the drag, my dear fellow, is merely the street), or the high
places, if you will, for a newspaper office. The elevator whisked me
into the sky, and Cerberus, in the guise of an anaemic office boy,
guarded the door. Consumption, one could see it at a glance; nerve,
Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted; dead inside the year.

“‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum,
to the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’

“He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.

“‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’

“‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’

“‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic?
Sportin’? Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News?
Editorial? Wich?’

“Which, I did not know. ‘THE Editor,’ I proclaimed stoutly. ‘The ONLY
Editor.’

“‘Aw, Spargo!’ he sniffed.

“‘Of course, Spargo,’ I answered. ‘Who else?’

“‘Gimme yer card,’ says he.

“‘My what?’

“‘Yer card—Say! Wot’s yer business, anyway?’

“And the anaemic Cerberus sized me up with so insolent an eye that I
reached over and took him out of his chair. I knocked on his meagre
chest with my fore knuckle, and fetched forth a weak, gaspy cough; but
he looked at me unflinchingly, much like a defiant sparrow held in the
hand.

“‘I am the census-taker Time,’ I boomed in sepulchral tones. ‘Beware
lest I knock too loud.’

“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sneered.

“Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.

“‘Well, whatcher want?’ he wheezed with returning breath.

“‘I want Spargo, the only Spargo.’

“‘Then leave go, an’ I’ll glide an’ see.’

“‘No you don’t, my lily-white.’ And I took a tighter grip on his collar.
‘No bouncers in mine, understand! I’ll go along.’”

Leith dreamily surveyed the long ash of his cigar and turned to me.
“Do you know, Anak, you can’t appreciate the joy of being the buffoon,
playing the clown. You couldn’t do it if you wished. Your pitiful little
conventions and smug assumptions of decency would prevent. But simply to
turn loose your soul to every whimsicality, to play the fool unafraid of
any possible result, why, that requires a man other than a householder
and law-respecting citizen.

“However, as I was saying, I saw the only Spargo. He was a big, beefy,
red-faced personage, full-jowled and double-chinned, sweating at his
desk in his shirt-sleeves. It was August, you know. He was talking into
a telephone when I entered, or swearing rather, I should say, and
the while studying me with his eyes. When he hung up, he turned to me
expectantly.

“‘You are a very busy man,’ I said.

“He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.

“‘And after all, is it worth it?’ I went on. ‘What does life mean that
it should make you sweat? What justification do you find in sweat? Now
look at me. I toil not, neither do I spin—’

“‘Who are you? What are you?’ he bellowed with a suddenness that was,
well, rude, tearing the words out as a dog does a bone.

“‘A very pertinent question, sir,’ I acknowledged. ‘First, I am a
man; next, a down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither
profession, trade, nor expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless.
My residence is everywhere; the sky is my coverlet. I am one of the
dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology
addressed to your understanding, a tramp.’

“‘What the hell—?’

“‘Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements
and multifarious—’

“‘Quit it!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’

“‘I want money.’

“He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed
a revolver, then bethought himself and growled, ‘This is no bank.’

“‘Nor have I checks to cash. But I have, sir, an idea, which, by your
leave and kind assistance, I shall transmute into cash. In short, how
does a tramp sketch, done by a tramp to the life, strike you? Are you
open to it? Do your readers hunger for it? Do they crave after it? Can
they be happy without it?’

“I thought for a moment that he would have apoplexy, but he quelled the
unruly blood and said he liked my nerve. I thanked him and assured him I
liked it myself. Then he offered me a cigar and said he thought he’d do
business with me.

“‘But mind you,’ he said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into
my hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, ‘mind you, I won’t
stand for the high and flighty philosophical, and I perceive you have
a tendency that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of
sentiment perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social
strata or such stuff. Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go
and life, crisp and crackling and interesting—tumble?’

“And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.

“‘Don’t forget the local color!’ he shouted after me through the door.

“And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.

“The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. ‘Got the bounce,
eh?’

“‘Nay, pale youth, so lily-white,’ I chortled, waving the copy paper;
‘not the bounce, but a detail. I’ll be City Editor in three months, and
then I’ll make you jump.’

“And as the elevator stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair
of maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage
consigned me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck
and was unafraid, and he knew, as well as I, that death clutched him
close.”

“But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”

Leith laughed dryly. “My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you
your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master
you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational
judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle,
a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of
breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem.
There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never
arrived. Nor did Cerberus. Now for a really pretty problem—”

“But the local color?” I prodded him.

“That’s right,” he replied. “Keep me in the running. Well, I took my
handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color),
dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a
box-car, and ran off the stuff. Of course I made it clever and brilliant
and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the state and my
social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to dissatisfy the
average citizen.

“From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was
particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good
people. It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs
the community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail,
than to send them as guests, for like periods of time, to the best
hotel. And this I developed, giving the facts and figures, the constable
fees and the mileage, and the court and jail expenses. Oh, it was
convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly humorous fashion
which fetched the laugh and left the sting. The main objection to the
system, I contended, was the defraudment and robbery of the tramp. The
good money which the community paid out for him should enable him to
riot in luxury instead of rotting in dungeons. I even drew the figures
so fine as to permit him not only to live in the best hotel but to smoke
two twenty-five-cent cigars and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day,
and still not cost the taxpayers so much as they were accustomed to pay
for his conviction and jail entertainment. And, as subsequent events
proved, it made the taxpayers wince.

“One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain
Sol Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the
seas. And this I say out of a vast experience. While he was notorious
in local trampdom, his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying
reproach to the townspeople. Of course I refrained from mentioning name
or habitat, drawing the picture in an impersonal, composite sort of
way, which none the less blinded no one to the faithfulness of the local
color.

“Naturally, myself a tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest
against the maltreatment of the tramp. Cutting the taxpayers to the pits
of their purses threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the
sentiment, lumps and chunks of it. Trust me, it was excellently done,
and the rhetoric—say! Just listen to the tail of my peroration:

“‘So, as we go mooching along the drag, with a sharp lamp out for John
Law, we cannot help remembering that we are beyond the pale; that our
ways are not their ways; and that the ways of John Law with us are
different from his ways with other men. Poor lost souls, wailing for a
crust in the dark, we know full well our helplessness and ignominy. And
well may we repeat after a stricken brother over-seas: “Our pride it is
to know no spur of pride.” Man has forgotten us; God has forgotten us;
only are we remembered by the harpies of justice, who prey upon our
distress and coin our sighs and tears into bright shining dollars.’

“Incidentally, my picture of Sol Glenhart, the police judge, was good.
A striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like
this: ‘This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy’; ‘this civic sinner, this
judicial highwayman’; ‘possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an
honor which thieves’ honor puts to shame’; ‘who compounds criminality
with shyster-sharks, and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and
impecunious to rotting cells,’—and so forth and so forth, style
sophomoric and devoid of the dignity and tone one would employ in a
dissertation on ‘Surplus Value,’ or ‘The Fallacies of Marxism,’ but just
the stuff the dear public likes.

“‘Humph!’ grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. ‘Swift gait
you strike, my man.’

“I fixed a hypnotic eye on his vest pocket, and he passed out one of his
superior cigars, which I burned while he ran through the stuff. Twice or
thrice he looked over the top of the paper at me, searchingly, but said
nothing till he had finished.

“‘Where’d you work, you pencil-pusher?’ he asked.

“‘My maiden effort,’ I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
simulating embarrassment.

“‘Maiden hell! What salary do you want?’

“‘Nay, nay,’ I answered. ‘No salary in mine, thank you most to death. I
am a free down-trodden American citizen, and no man shall say my time is
his.’

“‘Save John Law,’ he chuckled.

“‘Save John Law,’ said I.

“‘How did you know I was bucking the police department?’ he demanded
abruptly.

“‘I didn’t know, but I knew you were in training,’ I answered.
‘Yesterday morning a charitably inclined female presented me with three
biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a funereal slab of chocolate cake, all
wrapped in the current Clarion, wherein I noted an unholy glee because
the Cowbell’s candidate for chief of police had been turned down.
Likewise I learned the municipal election was at hand, and put two
and two together. Another mayor, and the right kind, means new police
commissioners; new police commissioners means new chief of police; new
chief of police means Cowbell’s candidate; ergo, your turn to play.’

“He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I
put them away and puffed on the old one.

“‘You’ll do,’ he jubilated. ‘This stuff’ (patting my copy) ‘is the first
gun of the campaign. You’ll touch off many another before we’re done.
I’ve been looking for you for years. Come on in on the editorial.’

“But I shook my head.

“‘Come, now!’ he admonished sharply. ‘No shenanagan! The Cowbell must
have you. It hungers for you, craves after you, won’t be happy till it
gets you. What say?’

“In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
an hour the only Spargo gave it up.

“‘Remember,’ he said, ‘any time you reconsider, I’m open. No matter
where you are, wire me and I’ll send the ducats to come on at once.’

“I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy—dope, he called it.

“‘Oh, regular routine,’ he said. ‘Get it the first Thursday after
publication.’

“‘Then I’ll have to trouble you for a few scad until—’

“He looked at me and smiled. ‘Better cough up, eh?’

“‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.’

“And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear
Anak), and I pulled my freight ... eh?—oh, departed.

“‘Pale youth,’ I said to Cerberus, ‘I am bounced.’ (He grinned with
pallid joy.) ‘And in token of the sincere esteem I bear you, receive
this little—’ (His eyes flushed and he threw up one hand, swiftly, to
guard his head from the expected blow)—‘this little memento.’

“I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
he was too quick for me.

“‘Aw, keep yer dirt,’ he snarled.

“‘I like you still better,’ I said, adding a second fiver. ‘You grow
perfect. But you must take it.’

“He backed away growling, but I caught him round the neck, roughed what
little wind he had out of him, and left him doubled up with the two
fives in his pocket. But hardly had the elevator started, when the two
coins tinkled on the roof and fell down between the car and the shaft.
As luck had it, the door was not closed, and I put out my hand and
caught them. The elevator boy’s eyes bulged.

“‘It’s a way I have,’ I said, pocketing them.

“‘Some bloke’s dropped ‘em down the shaft,’ he whispered, awed by the
circumstance.

“‘It stands to reason,’ said I.

“‘I’ll take charge of ‘em,’ he volunteered.

“‘Nonsense!’

“‘You’d better turn ‘em over,’ he threatened, ‘or I stop the works.’

“‘Pshaw!’

“And stop he did, between floors.

“‘Young man,’ I said, ‘have you a mother?’ (He looked serious, as though
regretting his act! and further to impress him I rolled up my right
sleeve with greatest care.) ‘Are you prepared to die?’ (I got a stealthy
crouch on, and put a cat-foot forward.) ‘But a minute, a brief minute,
stands between you and eternity.’ (Here I crooked my right hand into a
claw and slid the other foot up.) ‘Young man, young man,’ I trumpeted,
‘in thirty seconds I shall tear your heart dripping from your bosom and
stoop to hear you shriek in hell.’

“It fetched him. He gave one whoop, the car shot down, and I was on the
drag. You see, Anak, it’s a habit I can’t shake off of leaving vivid
memories behind. No one ever forgets me.

“I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my
shoulder:

“‘Hello, Cinders! Which way?’

“It was Chi Slim, who had been with me once when I was thrown off a
freight in Jacksonville. ‘Couldn’t see ‘em fer cinders,’ he described
it, and the monica stuck by me.... Monica? From monos. The tramp
nickname.

“‘Bound south,’ I answered. ‘And how’s Slim?’

“‘Bum. Bulls is horstile.’

“‘Where’s the push?’

“‘At the hang-out. I’ll put you wise.’

“‘Who’s the main guy?’

“‘Me, and don’t yer ferget it.’”

The lingo was rippling from Leith’s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
“Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.”

“Certainly,” he answered cheerfully. “Slim is in poor luck. Bull means
policeman. He tells me the bulls are hostile. I ask where the push is,
the gang he travels with. By putting me wise he will direct me to where
the gang is hanging out. The main guy is the leader. Slim claims that
distinction.

“Slim and I hiked out to a neck of woods just beyond town, and there was
the push, a score of husky hobos, charmingly located on the bank of a
little purling stream.

“‘Come on, you mugs!’ Slim addressed them. ‘Throw yer feet! Here’s
Cinders, an’ we must do ‘em proud.’

“All of which signifies that the hobos had better strike out and do some
lively begging in order to get the wherewithal to celebrate my return to
the fold after a year’s separation. But I flashed my dough and Slim sent
several of the younger men off to buy the booze. Take my word for it,
Anak, it was a blow-out memorable in Trampdom to this day. It’s amazing
the quantity of booze thirty plunks will buy, and it is equally amazing
the quantity of booze outside of which twenty stiffs will get. Beer
and cheap wine made up the card, with alcohol thrown in for the
blowd-in-the-glass stiffs. It was great—an orgy under the sky, a
contest of beaker-men, a study in primitive beastliness. To me there is
something fascinating in a drunken man, and were I a college president
I should institute P.G. psychology courses in practical drunkenness. It
would beat the books and compete with the laboratory.

“All of which is neither here nor there, for after sixteen hours of it,
early next morning, the whole push was copped by an overwhelming
array of constables and carted off to jail. After breakfast, about ten
o’clock, we were lined upstairs into court, limp and spiritless, the
twenty of us. And there, under his purple panoply, nose crooked like a
Napoleonic eagle and eyes glittering and beady, sat Sol Glenhart.

“‘John Ambrose!’ the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of
long practice, stood up.

“‘Vagrant, your Honor,’ the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, ‘Ten days,’ and Chi Slim sat
down.

“And so it went, with the monotony of clockwork, fifteen seconds to the
man, four men to the minute, the mugs bobbing up and down in turn like
marionettes. The clerk called the name, the bailiff the offence, the
judge the sentence, and the man sat down. That was all. Simple, eh?
Superb!

“Chi Slim nudged me. ‘Give’m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.’

“I shook my head.

“‘G’wan,’ he urged. ‘Give ‘m a ghost story The mugs’ll take it all
right. And you kin throw yer feet fer tobacco for us till we get out.’

“‘L. C. Randolph!’ the clerk called.

“I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
the judge, and the bailiff smiled.

“‘You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?’ his Honor
remarked sweetly.

“It took me by surprise, for I had forgotten the Cowbell in the
excitement of succeeding events, and I now saw myself on the edge of the
pit I had digged.

“‘That’s yer graft. Work it,’ Slim prompted.

“‘It’s all over but the shouting,’ I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
the article, was puzzled.

“‘Your Honor,’ I answered, ‘when I can get work, that is my occupation.’

“‘You take quite an interest in local affairs, I see.’ (Here his Honor
took up the morning’s Cowbell and ran his eye up and down a column I
knew was mine.) ‘Color is good,’ he commented, an appreciative twinkle
in his eyes; ‘pictures excellent, characterized by broad, Sargent-like
effects. Now this ... this judge you have depicted ... you, ah, draw from
life, I presume?’

“‘Rarely, your I Honor,’ I answered. ‘Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
types, I may say.’

“‘But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,’ he continued.

“‘That is splashed on afterward,’ I explained.

“‘This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
believe?’

“‘No, your Honor.’

“‘Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?’

“‘Nay, more, your Honor,’ I said boldly, ‘an ideal.’

“‘Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to
ask how much you received for this bit of work?’

“‘Thirty dollars, your Honor.’

“‘Hum, good!’ And his tone abruptly changed. ‘Young man, local color is
a bad thing. I find you guilty of it and sentence you to thirty days’
imprisonment, or, at your pleasure, impose a fine of thirty dollars.’

“‘Alas!’ said I, ‘I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.’

“‘And thirty days more for wasting your substance.’

“‘Next case!’ said his Honor to the clerk.

“Slim was stunned. ‘Gee!’ he whispered. ‘Gee the push gets ten days and
you get sixty. Gee!’”

Leith struck a match, lighted his dead cigar, and opened the book on his
knees. “Returning to the original conversation, don’t you find,
Anak, that though Loria handles the bipartition of the revenues with
scrupulous care, he yet omits one important factor, namely—”

“Yes,” I said absently; “yes.”




AMATEUR NIGHT


The elevator boy smiled knowingly to himself. When he took her up, he
had noted the sparkle in her eyes, the color in her cheeks. His little
cage had quite warmed with the glow of her repressed eagerness. And now,
on the down trip, it was glacier-like. The sparkle and the color were
gone. She was frowning, and what little he could see of her eyes
was cold and steel-gray. Oh, he knew the symptoms, he did. He was an
observer, and he knew it, too, and some day, when he was big enough,
he was going to be a reporter, sure. And in the meantime he studied
the procession of life as it streamed up and down eighteen
sky-scraper floors in his elevator car. He slid the door open for her
sympathetically and watched her trip determinedly out into the street.

There was a robustness in her carriage which came of the soil rather
than of the city pavement. But it was a robustness in a finer than the
wonted sense, a vigorous daintiness, it might be called, which gave an
impression of virility with none of the womanly left out. It told of
a heredity of seekers and fighters, of people that worked stoutly with
head and hand, of ghosts that reached down out of the misty past and
moulded and made her to be a doer of things.

But she was a little angry, and a great deal hurt. “I can guess what you
would tell me,” the editor had kindly but firmly interrupted her lengthy
preamble in the long-looked-forward-to interview just ended. “And you
have told me enough,” he had gone on (heartlessly, she was sure, as
she went over the conversation in its freshness). “You have done no
newspaper work. You are undrilled, undisciplined, unhammered into shape.
You have received a high-school education, and possibly topped it off
with normal school or college. You have stood well in English. Your
friends have all told you how cleverly you write, and how beautifully,
and so forth and so forth. You think you can do newspaper work, and you
want me to put you on. Well, I am sorry, but there are no openings. If
you knew how crowded—”

“But if there are no openings,” she had interrupted, in turn, “how did
those who are in, get in? How am I to show that I am eligible to get
in?”

“They made themselves indispensable,” was the terse response. “Make
yourself indispensable.”

“But how can I, if I do not get the chance?”

“Make your chance.”

“But how?” she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a
most unreasonable man.

“How? That is your business, not mine,” he said conclusively, rising
in token that the interview was at an end. “I must inform you, my dear
young lady, that there have been at least eighteen other aspiring young
ladies here this week, and that I have not the time to tell each and
every one of them how. The function I perform on this paper is hardly
that of instructor in a school of journalism.”

She caught an outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had
conned the conversation over and over again. “But how?” she repeated to
herself, as she climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where
she and her sister “bach’ed.” “But how?” And so she continued to put the
interrogation, for the stubborn Scotch blood, though many times removed
from Scottish soil, was still strong in her. And, further, there was
need that she should learn how. Her sister Letty and she had come up
from an interior town to the city to make their way in the world. John
Wyman was land-poor. Disastrous business enterprises had burdened his
acres and forced his two girls, Edna and Letty, into doing something for
themselves. A year of school-teaching and of night-study of shorthand
and typewriting had capitalized their city project and fitted them for
the venture, which same venture was turning out anything but
successful. The city seemed crowded with inexperienced stenographers and
typewriters, and they had nothing but their own inexperience to offer.
Edna’s secret ambition had been journalism; but she had planned a
clerical position first, so that she might have time and space in which
to determine where and on what line of journalism she would embark. But
the clerical position had not been forthcoming, either for Letty or
her, and day by day their little hoard dwindled, though the room rent
remained normal and the stove consumed coal with undiminished voracity.
And it was a slim little hoard by now.

“There’s Max Irwin,” Letty said, talking it over. “He’s a journalist
with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he
should be able to tell you how.”

“But I don’t know him,” Edna objected.

“No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.”

“Y-e-s,” (long and judicially), “but that’s different.”

“Not a bit different from the strange men and women you’ll interview
when you’ve learned how,” Letty encouraged.

“I hadn’t looked at it in that light,” Edna conceded. “After all,
where’s the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some
paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice,
too. I’ll go and look him up in the directory.”

“Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance,” she announced
decisively a moment later. “I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if
you know what I mean.”

And Letty knew and nodded. “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.

“I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let
you know inside forty-eight hours.”

Letty clapped her hands. “Good! That’s the newspaper spirit! Make it
twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”

    *       *       *

“—and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement of
her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.

“Not at all,” he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. “If you
don’t do your own talking, who’s to do it for you? Now I understand your
predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want
to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first
place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a
line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or
fall by your own ability. There’s Senator Longbridge, for instance,
and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney—” He
paused, with voice suspended.

“I am sure I know none of them,” she answered despondently.

“It’s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one
that knows any one else that knows them?”

Edna shook her head.

“Then we must think of something else,” he went on, cheerfully. “You’ll
have to do something yourself. Let me see.”

He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled
forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue
eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened.

“I have it! But no, wait a minute.”

And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did,
till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze.

“You’ll do, I think, though it remains to be seen,” he said
enigmatically. “It will show the stuff that’s in you, besides, and it
will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines
from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to
do Amateur Night at the Loops.”

“I—I hardly understand,” Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
meaning to her. “What are the ‘Loops’? and what is ‘Amateur Night’?”

“I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better,
if you’ve only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression,
and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid.
The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,—a place of
diversion. There’s a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert
band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so
forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy
themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves
by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic,
fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that’s what the Loops are.

“But the theatre is what concerns you. It’s vaudeville. One turn follows
another—jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers,
coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental
soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional
vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently
paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an
opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and
so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the
country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to
attract many aspirants.

“Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted
what is called ‘Amateur Night’; that is to say, twice a week, after
the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to
the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace
becomes the arbiter of art—or it thinks it does, which is the same
thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and
Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management.

“But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that
these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their
turn. At the best, they may be termed ‘professional amateurs.’ It stands
to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant
audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes
mad. It’s great fun—for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and
it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two
turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns,
and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer.”

“But—but,” she quavered, “I—I—” and there was a suggestion of
disappointment and tears in her voice.

“I see,” he said kindly. “You were expecting something else, something
different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the
admiral of the Queen’s Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up
the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of
apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?”

The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she
faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken
his face.

“In a way it must be considered a test,” he added encouragingly. “A
severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?”

“I’ll try,” she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the
directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was
coming in contact.

“Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details
imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and
divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You
are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It’s not particularly
great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you’re made of, and you’ll get
a call for better work—better class and better pay. Now you go out this
afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns.”

“But what kind of turns can I do?” Edna asked dubiously.

“Do? That’s easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don’t need to sing. Screech,
do anything—that’s what you’re paid for, to afford amusement, to give
bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take
some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about
among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph
them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of
it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit,
the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That’s what
you’re there for. That’s what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer
want to know.

“Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in
similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize
upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint
those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold
of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story.
Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and
in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end,
so if they’re crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere,
reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There,
that’s enough. Study the rest out for yourself.”

They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm
and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to
know.

“And remember, Miss Wyman, if you’re ambitious, that the aim and end of
journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a
trick. Master it, but don’t let it master you. But master it you must;
for if you can’t learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do
anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside
of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to
you.”

They had reached the door and were shaking hands.

“And one thing more,” he interrupted her thanks, “let me see your
copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and
there.”

Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled
man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an
absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst
thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes.

“Whatcher turn?” he demanded, ere half her brief application had left
her lips.

“Sentimental soloist, soprano,” she answered promptly, remembering
Irwin’s advice to talk up.

“Whatcher name?” Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.

She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that
she had not considered the question of a name at all.

“Any name? Stage name?” he bellowed impatiently.

“Nan Bellayne,” she invented on the spur of the moment.
“B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that’s it.”

He scribbled it into a notebook. “All right. Take your turn Wednesday
and Saturday.”

“How much do I get?” Edna demanded.

“Two-an’-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after
second turn.”

And without the simple courtesy of “Good day,” he turned his back on her
and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered.

Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope
basket her costume—a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the
washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a
gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed
the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing
broken-heartedly after her wandering boy.

Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main
performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience
intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the
working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing
rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else’s way.
This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried
themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior
toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And
Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her
basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all.

A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur
“ladies,” who were “making up” with much noise, high-pitched voices, and
squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was
quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed
truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her
shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook
in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage.

A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted,
was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin
little voice singing something or other about somebody or something
evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a
large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely
past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to
the side. “Bloomin’ hamateur!” she hissed as she went past, and the next
instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while
the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes.

“Hello, girls!”

This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every
syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump.
A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly.
His “make-up” was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though
the inevitable whiskers were lacking.

“Oh, it don’t take a minute to slap’m on,” he explained, divining the
search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question.
“They make a feller sweat,” he explained further. And then, “What’s yer
turn?”

“Soprano—sentimental,” she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease.

“Whata you doin’ it for?” he demanded directly.

“For fun; what else?” she countered.

“I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain’t
graftin’ for a paper, are you?”

“I never met but one editor in my life,” she replied evasively, “and I,
he—well, we didn’t get on very well together.”

“Hittin’ ‘m for a job?”

Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her
brains for something to turn the conversation.

“What’d he say?”

“That eighteen other girls had already been there that week.”

“Gave you the icy mit, eh?” The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped
his thighs. “You see, we’re kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers ‘d
like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and
the manager don’t see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it.”

“And what’s your turn?” she asked.

“Who? me? Oh, I’m doin’ the tramp act to-night. I’m Charley Welsh, you
know.”

She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her
complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely,
“Oh, is that so?”

She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face,
but concealed her amusement.

“Come, now,” he said brusquely, “you can’t stand there and tell me
you’ve never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I’m
an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I’m
everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by
doin’ the amateur.”

“But what’s an ‘Only’?” she queried. “I want to learn.”

“Sure,” Charley Welsh said gallantly. “I’ll put you wise. An ‘Only’ is
a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better’n any other
feller. He’s the Only, see?”

And Edna saw.

“To get a line on the biz,” he continued, “throw yer lamps on me. I’m
the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act.
It’s harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it’s acting, it’s
amateur, it’s art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team
song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I’m Charley Welsh, the Only
Charley Welsh.”

And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman
warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed
in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much
miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away
for the Sunday Intelligencer.

“Well, tra la loo,” he said suddenly. “There’s his highness chasin’
you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just
finish yer turn like a lady.”

It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing
from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else.
But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear
the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises
of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation.

“Go ahead,” Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side
came the peremptory “Don’t flunk!” of Charley Welsh.

But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against
a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice
from the house piped with startling distinctness:

“Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!”

A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the
strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick,
powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm
had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation,
thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the
terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the
violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin
in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for
the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward
learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing
the orchestra).

But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to
dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of
laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and
angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and,
without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her
arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in
the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely
went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable
time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear,
suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been
making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips
moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had
been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in
acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for
her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage
in Letty’s arms.

The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about
among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing,
finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley
Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well
did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt
fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do
two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in
the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions
that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with
her telescope basket and Letty.

The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of
relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her,
and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous
ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw
Charley Welsh deliberately wink.

But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced
to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove
greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give
Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three
other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed,
and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was
thrown on the mystery.

“Hello!” he greeted her. “On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin’ your
way.”

She smiled brightly.

“Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw’m layin’
himself out sweet an’ pleasin’. Honest, now, that ain’t yer graft, is
it?”

“I told you my experience with editors,” she parried. “And honest now,
it was honest, too.”

But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. “Not that I care
a rap,” he declared. “And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of
notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all
right anyway. Yer not our class, that’s straight.”

After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old
campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice
things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point.

“You’ll treat us well, I hope,” he said insinuatingly. “Do the right
thing by us, and all that?”

“Oh,” she answered innocently, “you couldn’t persuade me to do another
turn; I know I seemed to take and that you’d like to have me, but I
really, really can’t.”

“You know what I mean,” he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing
manner.

“No, I really won’t,” she persisted. “Vaudeville’s too—too wearing on
the nerves, my nerves, at any rate.”

Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
further.

But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for
the two turns, it was he who puzzled her.

“You surely must have mistaken me,” he lied glibly. “I remember saying
something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but
we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out
of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid
nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous.
However, here’s fifty cents. It will pay your sister’s car fare also.
And,”—very suavely,—“speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you
for the kind and successful contribution of your services.”

That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her
typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his
head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory
remarks: “Good!—that’s it!—that’s the stuff!—psychology’s all
right!—the very idea!—you’ve caught it!—excellent!—missed it a
bit here, but it’ll go—that’s vigorous!—strong!—vivid!—pictures!
pictures!—excellent!—most excellent!”

And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out
his hand: “My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have
exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are
a journalist, a natural journalist. You’ve got the grip, and you’re sure
to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you
too. They’ll have to take you. If they don’t, some of the other papers
will get you.”

“But what’s this?” he queried, the next instant, his face going serious.
“You’ve said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that’s
one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you’ll
remember.”

“It will never do,” he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had
explained. “You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let
me think a moment.”

“Never mind, Mr. Irwin,” she said. “I’ve bothered you enough. Let me use
your ‘phone, please, and I’ll try Mr. Ernst Symes again.”

He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.

“Charley Welsh is sick,” she began, when the connection had been made.
“What? No I’m not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister
wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for
him?”

“Tell Charley Welsh’s sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning,
and drew his own pay,” came back the manager’s familiar tones, crisp
with asperity.

“All right,” Edna went on. “And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she
and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne’s pay?”

“What’d he say? What’d he say?” Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung
up.

“That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister
could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot.”

“One thing, more,” he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her
previous visit. “Now that you’ve shown the stuff you’re made of, I
should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the
Intelligencer people.”




THE MINIONS OF MIDAS


Wade Atsheler is dead—dead by his own hand. To say that this was
entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say
an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed
the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible
subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility
is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it
seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the
time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the
fact of his great trouble. I use “great trouble” advisedly. Young,
handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale,
the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to
complain of fortune’s favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow
and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had
watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under
brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the
hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater
avidity—who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods
into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from
height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn
lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot
with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with
some unknown danger.

He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask.
But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help
and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose
confidential secretary he was—nay, well-nigh adopted son and full
business partner—he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that
our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown
that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us.
Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben
Hale’s will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to
his employer’s many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this
great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or
hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny
of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man’s relatives. As for his direct
family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to
dispense to Eben Hale’s wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his
judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there
been any scandal in the dead man’s family, or had his sons been wild
or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in
this most unusual action; but Eben Hale’s domestic happiness had been
proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide
to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters.
While his wife—well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly
termed “The Mother of the Gracchi.” Needless to state, this inexplicable
will was a nine day’s wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed
in that no contest was made.

It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately
marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed
in this morning’s paper. I have just received through the mail a letter
from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself
into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in
his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and
facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me,
is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to
society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens
its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in
which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in
full:

It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation,
that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet
learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened
the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had
looked it over, I also laughed, saying, “Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale,
and one in very poor taste.” Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate
of the letter in question.

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast
holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars.
This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will
note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish to hurry
you in this matter. You may even, if it be easier for you, pay us
in ten, fifteen, or twenty instalments; but we will accept no single
instalment of less than a million.

Believe us, dear Mr. Hale, when we say that we embark upon this course
of action utterly devoid of animus. We are members of that intellectual
proletariat, the increasing numbers of which mark in red lettering the
last days of the nineteenth century. We have, from a thorough study
of economics, decided to enter upon this business. It has many merits,
chief among which may be noted that we can indulge in large and
lucrative operations without capital. So far, we have been fairly
successful, and we hope our dealings with you may be pleasant and
satisfactory.

Pray attend while we explain our views more fully. At the base of the
present system of society is to be found the property right. And this
right of the individual to hold property is demonstrated, in the last
analysis, to rest solely and wholly upon MIGHT. The mailed gentlemen of
William the Conqueror divided and apportioned England amongst themselves
with the naked sword. This, we are sure you will grant, is true of
all feudal possessions. With the invention of steam and the Industrial
Revolution there came into existence the Capitalist Class, in the modern
sense of the word. These capitalists quickly towered above the ancient
nobility. The captains of industry have virtually dispossessed the
descendants of the captains of war. Mind, and not muscle, wins in
to-day’s struggle for existence. But this state of affairs is none the
less based upon might. The change has been qualitative. The old-time
Feudal Baronage ravaged the world with fire and sword; the modern
Money Baronage exploits the world by mastering and applying the world’s
economic forces. Brain, and not brawn, endures; and those best fitted to
survive are the intellectually and commercially powerful.

We, the M. of M., are not content to become wage slaves. The great
trusts and business combinations (with which you have your rating)
prevent us from rising to the place among you which our intellects
qualify us to occupy. Why? Because we are without capital. We are of the
unwashed, but with this difference: our brains are of the best, and we
have no foolish ethical nor social scruples. As wage slaves, toiling
early and late, and living abstemiously, we could not save in threescore
years—nor in twenty times threescore years—a sum of money sufficient
successfully to cope with the great aggregations of massed capital which
now exist. Nevertheless, we have entered the arena. We now throw down
the gage to the capital of the world. Whether it wishes to fight or not,
it shall have to fight.

Mr. Hale, our interests dictate us to demand of you twenty millions of
dollars. While we are considerate enough to give you reasonable time in
which to carry out your share of the transaction, please do not delay
too long. When you have agreed to our terms, insert a suitable notice
in the agony column of the “Morning Blazer.” We shall then acquaint you
with our plan for transferring the sum mentioned. You had better do this
some time prior to October 1st. If you do not, in order to show that
we are in earnest we shall on that date kill a man on East Thirty-ninth
Street. He will be a workingman. This man you do not know; nor do we.
You represent a force in modern society; we also represent a force—a
new force. Without anger or malice, we have closed in battle. As you
will readily discern, we are simply a business proposition. You are the
upper, and we the nether, millstone; this man’s life shall be ground
out between. You may save him if you agree to our conditions and act in
time.

There was once a king cursed with a golden touch. His name we have taken
to do duty as our official seal. Some day, to protect ourselves against
competitors, we shall copyright it.

We beg to remain,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

I leave it to you, dear John, why should we not have laughed over such
a preposterous communication? The idea, we could not but grant, was well
conceived, but it was too grotesque to be taken seriously. Mr. Hale said
he would preserve it as a literary curiosity, and shoved it away in a
pigeonhole. Then we promptly forgot its existence. And as promptly, on
the 1st of October, going over the morning mail, we read the following:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—Your victim has met his fate. An hour ago, on East
Thirty-ninth Street, a workingman was thrust through the heart with a
knife. Ere you read this his body will be lying at the Morgue. Go and
look upon your handiwork.

On October 14th, in token of our earnestness in this matter, and in case
you do not relent, we shall kill a policeman on or near the corner of
Polk Street and Clermont Avenue.

Very cordially,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

Again Mr. Hale laughed. His mind was full of a prospective deal with a
Chicago syndicate for the sale of all his street railways in that city,
and so he went on dictating to the stenographer, never giving it a
second thought. But somehow, I know not why, a heavy depression
fell upon me. What if it were not a joke, I asked myself, and turned
involuntarily to the morning paper. There it was, as befitted an obscure
person of the lower classes, a paltry half-dozen lines tucked away in a
corner, next a patent medicine advertisement:

Shortly after five o’clock this morning, on East Thirty-ninth Street,
a laborer named Pete Lascalle, while on his way to work, was stabbed to
the heart by an unknown assailant, who escaped by running. The police
have been unable to discover any motive for the murder.

“Impossible!” was Mr. Hale’s rejoinder, when I had read the item aloud;
but the incident evidently weighed upon his mind, for late in the
afternoon, with many epithets denunciatory of his foolishness, he asked
me to acquaint the police with the affair. I had the pleasure of being
laughed at in the Inspector’s private office, although I went away with
the assurance that they would look into it and that the vicinity of Polk
and Clermont would be doubly patrolled on the night mentioned. There it
dropped, till the two weeks had sped by, when the following note came to
us through the mail:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—Your second victim has fallen on schedule time. We are in no
hurry; but to increase the pressure we shall henceforth kill weekly. To
protect ourselves against police interference we shall hereafter inform
you of the event but a little prior to or simultaneously with the deed.
Trusting this finds you in good health,

We are,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to
me this account:

A DASTARDLY CRIME

Joseph Donahue, assigned only last night to special patrol duty in the
Eleventh Ward, at midnight was shot through the brain and instantly
killed. The tragedy was enacted in the full glare of the street lights
on the corner of Polk Street and Clermont Avenue. Our society is indeed
unstable when the custodians of its peace are thus openly and wantonly
shot down. The police have so far been unable to obtain the slightest
clue.

Barely had he finished this when the police arrived—the Inspector
himself and two of his keenest sleuths. Alarm sat upon their faces, and
it was plain that they were seriously perturbed. Though the facts were
so few and simple, we talked long, going over the affair again and
again. When the Inspector went away, he confidently assured us that
everything would soon be straightened out and the assassins run to
earth. In the meantime he thought it well to detail guards for the
protection of Mr. Hale and myself, and several more to be constantly on
the vigil about the house and grounds. After the lapse of a week, at one
o’clock in the afternoon, this telegram was received:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 21, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—We are sorry to note how completely you have misunderstood
us. You have seen fit to surround yourself and household with armed
guards, as though, forsooth, we were common criminals, apt to break in
upon you and wrest away by force your twenty millions. Believe us, this
is farthest from our intention.

You will readily comprehend, after a little sober thought, that your
life is dear to us. Do not be afraid. We would not hurt you for the
world. It is our policy to cherish you tenderly and protect you from all
harm. Your death means nothing to us. If it did, rest assured that we
would not hesitate a moment in destroying you. Think this over,
Mr. Hale. When you have paid us our price, there will be need of
retrenchment. Dismiss your guards now, and cut down your expenses.

Within minutes of the time you receive this a nurse-girl will have
been choked to death in Brentwood Park. The body may be found in
the shrubbery lining the path which leads off to the left from the
band-stand.

Cordially yours,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

The next instant Mr. Hale was at the telephone, warning the Inspector of
the impending murder. The Inspector excused himself in order to call
up Police Sub-station F and despatch men to the scene. Fifteen minutes
later he rang us up and informed us that the body had been discovered,
yet warm, in the place indicated. That evening the papers teemed with
glaring Jack-the-Strangler headlines, denouncing the brutality of
the deed and complaining about the laxity of the police. We were also
closeted with the Inspector, who begged us by all means to keep the
affair secret. Success, he said, depended upon silence.

As you know, John, Mr. Hale was a man of iron. He refused to surrender.
But, oh, John, it was terrible, nay, horrible—this awful something,
this blind force in the dark. We could not fight, could not plan, could
do nothing save hold our hands and wait. And week by week, as certain as
the rising of the sun, came the notification and death of some person,
man or woman, innocent of evil, but just as much killed by us as
though we had done it with our own hands. A word from Mr. Hale and the
slaughter would have ceased. But he hardened his heart and waited, the
lines deepening, the mouth and eyes growing sterner and firmer, and
the face aging with the hours. It is needless for me to speak of my
own suffering during that frightful period. Find here the letters and
telegrams of the M. of M., and the newspaper accounts, etc., of the
various murders.

You will notice also the letters warning Mr. Hale of certain
machinations of commercial enemies and secret manipulations of stock.
The M. of M. seemed to have its hand on the inner pulse of the business
and financial world. They possessed themselves of and forwarded to us
information which our agents could not obtain. One timely note from
them, at a critical moment in a certain deal, saved all of five millions
to Mr. Hale. At another time they sent us a telegram which probably was
the means of preventing an anarchist crank from taking my employer’s
life. We captured the man on his arrival and turned him over to the
police, who found upon him enough of a new and powerful explosive to
sink a battleship.

We persisted. Mr. Hale was grit clear through. He disbursed at the rate
of one hundred thousand per week for secret service. The aid of the
Pinkertons and of countless private detective agencies was called in,
and in addition to this thousands were upon our payroll. Our agents
swarmed everywhere, in all guises, penetrating all classes of society.
They grasped at a myriad clues; hundreds of suspects were jailed, and at
various times thousands of suspicious persons were under surveillance,
but nothing tangible came to light. With its communications the M. of
M. continually changed its method of delivery. And every messenger
they sent us was arrested forthwith. But these inevitably proved to be
innocent individuals, while their descriptions of the persons who had
employed them for the errand never tallied. On the last day of December
we received this notification:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., December 31, 1899.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—Pursuant of our policy, with which we flatter ourselves you
are already well versed, we beg to state that we shall give a passport
from this Vale of Tears to Inspector Bying, with whom, because of our
attentions, you have become so well acquainted. It is his custom to be
in his private office at this hour. Even as you read this he breathes
his last.

Cordially yours,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

I dropped the letter and sprang to the telephone. Great was my relief
when I heard the Inspector’s hearty voice. But, even as he spoke, his
voice died away in the receiver to a gurgling sob, and I heard faintly
the crash of a falling body. Then a strange voice hello’d me, sent me
the regards of the M. of M., and broke the switch. Like a flash I called
up the public office of the Central Police, telling them to go at once
to the Inspector’s aid in his private office. I then held the line, and
a few minutes later received the intelligence that he had been
found bathed in his own blood and breathing his last. There were no
eyewitnesses, and no trace was discoverable of the murderer.

Whereupon Mr. Hale immediately increased his secret service till a
quarter of a million flowed weekly from his coffers. He was determined
to win out. His graduated rewards aggregated over ten millions. You have
a fair idea of his resources and you can see in what manner he drew upon
them. It was the principle, he affirmed, that he was fighting for, not
the gold. And it must be admitted that his course proved the nobility of
his motive. The police departments of all the great cities cooperated,
and even the United States Government stepped in, and the affair became
one of the highest questions of state. Certain contingent funds of
the nation were devoted to the unearthing of the M. of M., and every
government agent was on the alert. But all in vain. The Minions of Midas
carried on their damnable work unhampered. They had their way and struck
unerringly.

But while he fought to the last, Mr. Hale could not wash his hands of
the blood with which they were dyed. Though not technically a murderer,
though no jury of his peers would ever have convicted him, none the less
the death of every individual was due to him. As I said before, a word
from him and the slaughter would have ceased. But he refused to give
that word. He insisted that the integrity of society was assailed; that
he was not sufficiently a coward to desert his post; and that it was
manifestly just that a few should be martyred for the ultimate welfare
of the many. Nevertheless this blood was upon his head, and he sank into
deeper and deeper gloom. I was likewise whelmed with the guilt of an
accomplice. Babies were ruthlessly killed, children, aged men; and
not only were these murders local, but they were distributed over
the country. In the middle of February, one evening, as we sat in the
library, there came a sharp knock at the door. On responding to it I
found, lying on the carpet of the corridor, the following missive:

OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., February 15, 1900.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—Does not your soul cry out upon the red harvest it is
reaping? Perhaps we have been too abstract in conducting our business.
Let us now be concrete. Miss Adelaide Laidlaw is a talented young woman,
as good, we understand, as she is beautiful. She is the daughter of your
old friend, Judge Laidlaw, and we happen to know that you carried her in
your arms when she was an infant. She is your daughter’s closest friend,
and at present is visiting her. When your eyes have read thus far her
visit will have terminated.

Very cordially,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

My God! did we not instantly realize the terrible import! We rushed
through the dayrooms—she was not there—and on to her own apartments.
The door was locked, but we crashed it down by hurling ourselves against
it. There she lay, just as she had finished dressing for the opera,
smothered with pillows torn from the couch, the flush of life yet on her
flesh, the body still flexible and warm. Let me pass over the rest of
this horror. You will surely remember, John, the newspaper accounts.

Late that night Mr. Hale summoned me to him, and before God did pledge
me most solemnly to stand by him and not to compromise, even if all kith
and kin were destroyed.

The next day I was surprised at his cheerfulness. I had thought he would
be deeply shocked by this last tragedy—how deep I was soon to learn.
All day he was light-hearted and high-spirited, as though at last he had
found a way out of the frightful difficulty. The next morning we
found him dead in his bed, a peaceful smile upon his careworn
face—asphyxiation. Through the connivance of the police and the
authorities, it was given out to the world as heart disease. We deemed
it wise to withhold the truth; but little good has it done us, little
good has anything done us.

Barely had I left that chamber of death, when—but too late—the
following extraordinary letter was received:

OFFICE OF THE M. of M., February 17, 1900.

MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:

Dear Sir,—You will pardon our intrusion, we hope, so closely upon the
sad event of day before yesterday; but what we wish to say may be of
the utmost importance to you. It is in our mind that you may attempt
to escape us. There is but one way, apparently, as you have ere this
doubtless discovered. But we wish to inform you that even this one
way is barred. You may die, but you die failing and acknowledging your
failure. Note this: WE ARE PART AND PARCEL OF YOUR POSSESSIONS. WITH
YOUR MILLIONS WE PASS DOWN TO YOUR HEIRS AND ASSIGNS FOREVER.

We are the inevitable. We are the culmination of industrial and
social wrong. We turn upon the society that has created us. We are the
successful failures of the age, the scourges of a degraded civilization.

We are the creatures of a perverse social selection. We meet force with
force. Only the strong shall endure. We believe in the survival of the
fittest. You have crushed your wage slaves into the dirt and you have
survived. The captains of war, at your command, have shot down like
dogs your employees in a score of bloody strikes. By such means you have
endured. We do not grumble at the result, for we acknowledge and have
our being in the same natural law. And now the question has arisen:
UNDER THE PRESENT SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, WHICH OF US SHALL SURVIVE? We
believe we are the fittest. You believe you are the fittest. We leave
the eventuality to time and law.

Cordially yours,

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.

John, do you wonder now that I shunned pleasure and avoided friends?
But why explain? Surely this narrative will make everything clear. Three
weeks ago Adelaide Laidlaw died. Since then I have waited in hope and
fear. Yesterday the will was probated and made public. To-day I was
notified that a woman of the middle class would be killed in Golden Gate
Park, in faraway San Francisco. The despatches in to-night’s papers give
the details of the brutal happening—details which correspond with those
furnished me in advance.

It is useless. I cannot struggle against the inevitable. I have been
faithful to Mr. Hale and have worked hard. Why my faithfulness should
have been thus rewarded I cannot understand. Yet I cannot be false to my
trust, nor break my word by compromising. Still, I have resolved that
no more deaths shall be upon my head. I have willed the many millions I
lately received to their rightful owners. Let the stalwart sons of Eben
Hale work out their own salvation. Ere you read this I shall have passed
on. The Minions of Midas are all-powerful. The police are impotent.
I have learned from them that other millionnaires have been likewise
mulcted or persecuted—how many is not known, for when one yields to the
M. of M., his mouth is thenceforth sealed. Those who have not yielded
are even now reaping their scarlet harvest. The grim game is being
played out. The Federal Government can do nothing. I also understand
that similar branch organizations have made their appearance in Europe.
Society is shaken to its foundations. Principalities and powers are as
brands ripe for the burning. Instead of the masses against the classes,
it is a class against the classes. We, the guardians of human progress,
are being singled out and struck down. Law and order have failed.

The officials have begged me to keep this secret. I have done so, but
can do so no longer. It has become a question of public import, fraught
with the direst consequences, and I shall do my duty before I leave this
world by informing it of its peril. Do you, John, as my last request,
make this public. Do not be frightened. The fate of humanity rests in
your hand. Let the press strike off millions of copies; let the electric
currents sweep it round the world; wherever men meet and speak, let them
speak of it in fear and trembling. And then, when thoroughly aroused,
let society arise in its might and cast out this abomination.

Yours, in long farewell,

WADE ATSHELER.




THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH


When I look back, I realize what a peculiar friendship it was. First,
there was Lloyd Inwood, tall, slender, and finely knit, nervous and
dark. And then Paul Tichlorne, tall, slender, and finely knit, nervous
and blond. Each was the replica of the other in everything except color.
Lloyd’s eyes were black; Paul’s were blue. Under stress of excitement,
the blood coursed olive in the face of Lloyd, crimson in the face of
Paul. But outside this matter of coloring they were as like as two peas.
Both were high-strung, prone to excessive tension and endurance, and
they lived at concert pitch.

But there was a trio involved in this remarkable friendship, and the
third was short, and fat, and chunky, and lazy, and, loath to say, it
was I. Paul and Lloyd seemed born to rivalry with each other, and I to
be peacemaker between them. We grew up together, the three of us, and
full often have I received the angry blows each intended for the other.
They were always competing, striving to outdo each other, and when
entered upon some such struggle there was no limit either to their
endeavors or passions.

This intense spirit of rivalry obtained in their studies and their
games. If Paul memorized one canto of “Marmion,” Lloyd memorized two
cantos, Paul came back with three, and Lloyd again with four, till each
knew the whole poem by heart. I remember an incident that occurred
at the swimming hole—an incident tragically significant of the
life-struggle between them. The boys had a game of diving to the bottom
of a ten-foot pool and holding on by submerged roots to see who could
stay under the longest. Paul and Lloyd allowed themselves to be bantered
into making the descent together. When I saw their faces, set and
determined, disappear in the water as they sank swiftly down, I felt
a foreboding of something dreadful. The moments sped, the ripples died
away, the face of the pool grew placid and untroubled, and neither black
nor golden head broke surface in quest of air. We above grew anxious.
The longest record of the longest-winded boy had been exceeded, and
still there was no sign. Air bubbles trickled slowly upward, showing
that the breath had been expelled from their lungs, and after that the
bubbles ceased to trickle upward. Each second became interminable, and,
unable longer to endure the suspense, I plunged into the water.

I found them down at the bottom, clutching tight to the roots, their
heads not a foot apart, their eyes wide open, each glaring fixedly at
the other. They were suffering frightful torment, writhing and twisting
in the pangs of voluntary suffocation; for neither would let go and
acknowledge himself beaten. I tried to break Paul’s hold on the root,
but he resisted me fiercely. Then I lost my breath and came to the
surface, badly scared. I quickly explained the situation, and half a
dozen of us went down and by main strength tore them loose. By the
time we got them out, both were unconscious, and it was only after much
barrel-rolling and rubbing and pounding that they finally came to their
senses. They would have drowned there, had no one rescued them.

When Paul Tichlorne entered college, he let it be generally understood
that he was going in for the social sciences. Lloyd Inwood, entering
at the same time, elected to take the same course. But Paul had had
it secretly in mind all the time to study the natural sciences,
specializing on chemistry, and at the last moment he switched over.
Though Lloyd had already arranged his year’s work and attended the first
lectures, he at once followed Paul’s lead and went in for the natural
sciences and especially for chemistry. Their rivalry soon became a noted
thing throughout the university. Each was a spur to the other, and they
went into chemistry deeper than did ever students before—so deep, in
fact, that ere they took their sheepskins they could have stumped any
chemistry or “cow college” professor in the institution, save “old”
 Moss, head of the department, and even him they puzzled and edified more
than once. Lloyd’s discovery of the “death bacillus” of the sea toad,
and his experiments on it with potassium cyanide, sent his name and that
of his university ringing round the world; nor was Paul a whit
behind when he succeeded in producing laboratory colloids exhibiting
amoeba-like activities, and when he cast new light upon the processes
of fertilization through his startling experiments with simple sodium
chlorides and magnesium solutions on low forms of marine life.

It was in their undergraduate days, however, in the midst of their
profoundest plunges into the mysteries of organic chemistry, that Doris
Van Benschoten entered into their lives. Lloyd met her first, but within
twenty-four hours Paul saw to it that he also made her acquaintance.
Of course, they fell in love with her, and she became the only thing in
life worth living for. They wooed her with equal ardor and fire, and so
intense became their struggle for her that half the student-body took
to wagering wildly on the result. Even “old” Moss, one day, after an
astounding demonstration in his private laboratory by Paul, was
guilty to the extent of a month’s salary of backing him to become the
bridegroom of Doris Van Benschoten.

In the end she solved the problem in her own way, to everybody’s
satisfaction except Paul’s and Lloyd’s. Getting them together, she said
that she really could not choose between them because she loved them
both equally well; and that, unfortunately, since polyandry was not
permitted in the United States she would be compelled to forego the
honor and happiness of marrying either of them. Each blamed the other
for this lamentable outcome, and the bitterness between them grew more
bitter.

But things came to a head enough. It was at my home, after they had
taken their degrees and dropped out of the world’s sight, that the
beginning of the end came to pass. Both were men of means, with little
inclination and no necessity for professional life. My friendship and
their mutual animosity were the two things that linked them in any
way together. While they were very often at my place, they made it
a fastidious point to avoid each other on such visits, though it was
inevitable, under the circumstances, that they should come upon each
other occasionally.

On the day I have in recollection, Paul Tichlorne had been mooning all
morning in my study over a current scientific review. This left me
free to my own affairs, and I was out among my roses when Lloyd Inwood
arrived. Clipping and pruning and tacking the climbers on the porch,
with my mouth full of nails, and Lloyd following me about and lending a
hand now and again, we fell to discussing the mythical race of invisible
people, that strange and vagrant people the traditions of which have
come down to us. Lloyd warmed to the talk in his nervous, jerky fashion,
and was soon interrogating the physical properties and possibilities of
invisibility. A perfectly black object, he contended, would elude and
defy the acutest vision.

“Color is a sensation,” he was saying. “It has no objective reality.
Without light, we can see neither colors nor objects themselves. All
objects are black in the dark, and in the dark it is impossible to see
them. If no light strikes upon them, then no light is flung back from
them to the eye, and so we have no vision-evidence of their being.”

“But we see black objects in daylight,” I objected.

“Very true,” he went on warmly. “And that is because they are not
perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it
were, we could not see them—ay, not in the blaze of a thousand suns
could we see them! And so I say, with the right pigments, properly
compounded, an absolutely black paint could be produced which would
render invisible whatever it was applied to.”

“It would be a remarkable discovery,” I said non-committally, for the
whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.

“Remarkable!” Lloyd slapped me on the shoulder. “I should say so. Why,
old chap, to coat myself with such a paint would be to put the world at
my feet. The secrets of kings and courts would be mine, the machinations
of diplomats and politicians, the play of stock-gamblers, the plans
of trusts and corporations. I could keep my hand on the inner pulse of
things and become the greatest power in the world. And I—” He broke
off shortly, then added, “Well, I have begun my experiments, and I don’t
mind telling you that I’m right in line for it.”

A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there,
a smile of mockery on his lips.

“You forget, my dear Lloyd,” he said.

“Forget what?”

“You forget,” Paul went on—“ah, you forget the shadow.”

I saw Lloyd’s face drop, but he answered sneeringly, “I can carry a
sunshade, you know.” Then he turned suddenly and fiercely upon him.
“Look here, Paul, you’ll keep out of this if you know what’s good for
you.”

A rupture seemed imminent, but Paul laughed good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t
lay fingers on your dirty pigments. Succeed beyond your most sanguine
expectations, yet you will always fetch up against the shadow. You can’t
get away from it. Now I shall go on the very opposite tack. In the very
nature of my proposition the shadow will be eliminated—”

“Transparency!” ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. “But it can’t be achieved.”

“Oh, no; of course not.” And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled
off down the briar-rose path.

This was the beginning of it. Both men attacked the problem with all
the tremendous energy for which they were noted, and with a rancor and
bitterness that made me tremble for the success of either. Each trusted
me to the utmost, and in the long weeks of experimentation that followed
I was made a party to both sides, listening to their theorizings and
witnessing their demonstrations. Never, by word or sign, did I convey to
either the slightest hint of the other’s progress, and they respected me
for the seal I put upon my lips.

Lloyd Inwood, after prolonged and unintermittent application, when the
tension upon his mind and body became too great to bear, had a strange
way of obtaining relief. He attended prize fights. It was at one of
these brutal exhibitions, whither he had dragged me in order to tell his
latest results, that his theory received striking confirmation.

“Do you see that red-whiskered man?” he asked, pointing across the ring
to the fifth tier of seats on the opposite side. “And do you see the
next man to him, the one in the white hat? Well, there is quite a gap
between them, is there not?”

“Certainly,” I answered. “They are a seat apart. The gap is the
unoccupied seat.”

He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. “Between the red-whiskered
man and the white-hatted man sits Ben Wasson. You have heard me speak
of him. He is the cleverest pugilist of his weight in the country. He
is also a Caribbean negro, full-blooded, and the blackest in the United
States. He has on a black overcoat buttoned up. I saw him when he came
in and took that seat. As soon as he sat down he disappeared. Watch
closely; he may smile.”

I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd’s statement, but he restrained
me. “Wait,” he said.

I waited and watched, till the red-whiskered man turned his head as
though addressing the unoccupied seat; and then, in that empty space, I
saw the rolling whites of a pair of eyes and the white double-crescent
of two rows of teeth, and for the instant I could make out a negro’s
face. But with the passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the
chair seemed vacant as before.

“Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,”
 Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me
well-nigh convinced.

I visited Lloyd’s laboratory a number of times after that, and found
him always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments
covered all sorts of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized
vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized
animal substances.

“White light is composed of the seven primary colors,” he argued to me.
“But it is itself, of itself, invisible. Only by being reflected from
objects do it and the objects become visible. But only that portion
of it that is reflected becomes visible. For instance, here is a
blue tobacco-box. The white light strikes against it, and, with one
exception, all its component colors—violet, indigo, green, yellow,
orange, and red—are absorbed. The one exception is BLUE. It is not
absorbed, but reflected. Wherefore the tobacco-box gives us a sensation
of blueness. We do not see the other colors because they are absorbed.
We see only the blue. For the same reason grass is GREEN. The green
waves of white light are thrown upon our eyes.”

“When we paint our houses, we do not apply color to them,” he said at
another time. “What we do is to apply certain substances that have the
property of absorbing from white light all the colors except those
that we would have our houses appear. When a substance reflects all the
colors to the eye, it seems to us white. When it absorbs all the colors,
it is black. But, as I said before, we have as yet no perfect black. All
the colors are not absorbed. The perfect black, guarding against high
lights, will be utterly and absolutely invisible. Look at that, for
example.”

He pointed to the palette lying on his work-table. Different shades of
black pigments were brushed on it. One, in particular, I could hardly
see. It gave my eyes a blurring sensation, and I rubbed them and looked
again.

“That,” he said impressively, “is the blackest black you or any mortal
man ever looked upon. But just you wait, and I’ll have a black so black
that no mortal man will be able to look upon it—and see it!”

On the other hand, I used to find Paul Tichlorne plunged as deeply into
the study of light polarization, diffraction, and interference, single
and double refraction, and all manner of strange organic compounds.

“Transparency: a state or quality of body which permits all rays of
light to pass through,” he defined for me. “That is what I am seeking.
Lloyd blunders up against the shadow with his perfect opaqueness. But I
escape it. A transparent body casts no shadow; neither does it reflect
light-waves—that is, the perfectly transparent does not. So, avoiding
high lights, not only will such a body cast no shadow, but, since it
reflects no light, it will also be invisible.”

We were standing by the window at another time. Paul was engaged
in polishing a number of lenses, which were ranged along the sill.
Suddenly, after a pause in the conversation, he said, “Oh! I’ve dropped
a lens. Stick your head out, old man, and see where it went to.”

Out I started to thrust my head, but a sharp blow on the forehead
caused me to recoil. I rubbed my bruised brow and gazed with reproachful
inquiry at Paul, who was laughing in gleeful, boyish fashion.

“Well?” he said.

“Well?” I echoed.

“Why don’t you investigate?” he demanded. And investigate I did. Before
thrusting out my head, my senses, automatically active, had told
me there was nothing there, that nothing intervened between me and
out-of-doors, that the aperture of the window opening was utterly empty.
I stretched forth my hand and felt a hard object, smooth and cool and
flat, which my touch, out of its experience, told me to be glass. I
looked again, but could see positively nothing.

“White quartzose sand,” Paul rattled off, “sodic carbonate, slaked lime,
cutlet, manganese peroxide—there you have it, the finest French plate
glass, made by the great St. Gobain Company, who made the finest plate
glass in the world, and this is the finest piece they ever made. It cost
a king’s ransom. But look at it! You can’t see it. You don’t know it’s
there till you run your head against it.

“Eh, old boy! That’s merely an object-lesson—certain elements, in
themselves opaque, yet so compounded as to give a resultant body which
is transparent. But that is a matter of inorganic chemistry, you say.
Very true. But I dare to assert, standing here on my two feet, that in
the organic I can duplicate whatever occurs in the inorganic.

“Here!” He held a test-tube between me and the light, and I noted the
cloudy or muddy liquid it contained. He emptied the contents of another
test-tube into it, and almost instantly it became clear and sparkling.

“Or here!” With quick, nervous movements among his array of test-tubes,
he turned a white solution to a wine color, and a light yellow solution
to a dark brown. He dropped a piece of litmus paper into an acid, when
it changed instantly to red, and on floating it in an alkali it turned
as quickly to blue.

“The litmus paper is still the litmus paper,” he enunciated in the
formal manner of the lecturer. “I have not changed it into something
else. Then what did I do? I merely changed the arrangement of its
molecules. Where, at first, it absorbed all colors from the light but
red, its molecular structure was so changed that it absorbed red and all
colors except blue. And so it goes, ad infinitum. Now, what I purpose
to do is this.” He paused for a space. “I purpose to seek—ay, and to
find—the proper reagents, which, acting upon the living organism,
will bring about molecular changes analogous to those you have just
witnessed. But these reagents, which I shall find, and for that matter,
upon which I already have my hands, will not turn the living body to
blue or red or black, but they will turn it to transparency. All light
will pass through it. It will be invisible. It will cast no shadow.”

A few weeks later I went hunting with Paul. He had been promising me for
some time that I should have the pleasure of shooting over a wonderful
dog—the most wonderful dog, in fact, that ever man shot over, so he
averred, and continued to aver till my curiosity was aroused. But on
the morning in question I was disappointed, for there was no dog in
evidence.

“Don’t see him about,” Paul remarked unconcernedly, and we set off
across the fields.

I could not imagine, at the time, what was ailing me, but I had a
feeling of some impending and deadly illness. My nerves were all awry,
and, from the astounding tricks they played me, my senses seemed to have
run riot. Strange sounds disturbed me. At times I heard the swish-swish
of grass being shoved aside, and once the patter of feet across a patch
of stony ground.

“Did you hear anything, Paul?” I asked once.

But he shook his head, and thrust his feet steadily forward.

While climbing a fence, I heard the low, eager whine of a dog,
apparently from within a couple of feet of me; but on looking about me I
saw nothing.

I dropped to the ground, limp and trembling.

“Paul,” I said, “we had better return to the house. I am afraid I am
going to be sick.”

“Nonsense, old man,” he answered. “The sunshine has gone to your head
like wine. You’ll be all right. It’s famous weather.”

But, passing along a narrow path through a clump of cottonwoods, some
object brushed against my legs and I stumbled and nearly fell. I looked
with sudden anxiety at Paul.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Tripping over your own feet?”

I kept my tongue between my teeth and plodded on, though sore perplexed
and thoroughly satisfied that some acute and mysterious malady had
attacked my nerves. So far my eyes had escaped; but, when we got to the
open fields again, even my vision went back on me. Strange flashes of
vari-colored, rainbow light began to appear and disappear on the
path before me. Still, I managed to keep myself in hand, till the
vari-colored lights persisted for a space of fully twenty seconds,
dancing and flashing in continuous play. Then I sat down, weak and
shaky.

“It’s all up with me,” I gasped, covering my eyes with my hands. “It has
attacked my eyes. Paul, take me home.”

But Paul laughed long and loud. “What did I tell you?—the most
wonderful dog, eh? Well, what do you think?”

He turned partly from me and began to whistle. I heard the patter of
feet, the panting of a heated animal, and the unmistakable yelp of a
dog. Then Paul stooped down and apparently fondled the empty air.

“Here! Give me your fist.”

And he rubbed my hand over the cold nose and jowls of a dog. A dog it
certainly was, with the shape and the smooth, short coat of a pointer.

Suffice to say, I speedily recovered my spirits and control. Paul put
a collar about the animal’s neck and tied his handkerchief to its tail.
And then was vouchsafed us the remarkable sight of an empty collar and
a waving handkerchief cavorting over the fields. It was something to see
that collar and handkerchief pin a bevy of quail in a clump of locusts
and remain rigid and immovable till we had flushed the birds.

Now and again the dog emitted the vari-colored light-flashes I have
mentioned. The one thing, Paul explained, which he had not anticipated
and which he doubted could be overcome.

“They’re a large family,” he said, “these sun dogs, wind dogs, rainbows,
halos, and parhelia. They are produced by refraction of light from
mineral and ice crystals, from mist, rain, spray, and no end of things;
and I am afraid they are the penalty I must pay for transparency. I
escaped Lloyd’s shadow only to fetch up against the rainbow flash.”

A couple of days later, before the entrance to Paul’s laboratory, I
encountered a terrible stench. So overpowering was it that it was easy
to discover the source—a mass of putrescent matter on the doorstep
which in general outlines resembled a dog.

Paul was startled when he investigated my find. It was his invisible
dog, or rather, what had been his invisible dog, for it was now plainly
visible. It had been playing about but a few minutes before in all
health and strength. Closer examination revealed that the skull had been
crushed by some heavy blow. While it was strange that the animal should
have been killed, the inexplicable thing was that it should so quickly
decay.

“The reagents I injected into its system were harmless,” Paul explained.
“Yet they were powerful, and it appears that when death comes they force
practically instantaneous disintegration. Remarkable! Most remarkable!
Well, the only thing is not to die. They do not harm so long as one
lives. But I do wonder who smashed in that dog’s head.”

Light, however, was thrown upon this when a frightened housemaid brought
the news that Gaffer Bedshaw had that very morning, not more than an
hour back, gone violently insane, and was strapped down at home, in
the huntsman’s lodge, where he raved of a battle with a ferocious and
gigantic beast that he had encountered in the Tichlorne pasture. He
claimed that the thing, whatever it was, was invisible, that with his
own eyes he had seen that it was invisible; wherefore his tearful wife
and daughters shook their heads, and wherefore he but waxed the more
violent, and the gardener and the coachman tightened the straps by
another hole.

Nor, while Paul Tichlorne was thus successfully mastering the problem of
invisibility, was Lloyd Inwood a whit behind. I went over in answer to a
message of his to come and see how he was getting on. Now his laboratory
occupied an isolated situation in the midst of his vast grounds. It was
built in a pleasant little glade, surrounded on all sides by a dense
forest growth, and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic
path. But I have travelled that path so often as to know every foot of
it, and conceive my surprise when I came upon the glade and found no
laboratory. The quaint shed structure with its red sandstone chimney
was not. Nor did it look as if it ever had been. There were no signs of
ruin, no debris, nothing.

I started to walk across what had once been its site. “This,” I said to
myself, “should be where the step went up to the door.” Barely were the
words out of my mouth when I stubbed my toe on some obstacle, pitched
forward, and butted my head into something that FELT very much like a
door. I reached out my hand. It WAS a door. I found the knob and turned
it. And at once, as the door swung inward on its hinges, the whole
interior of the laboratory impinged upon my vision. Greeting Lloyd, I
closed the door and backed up the path a few paces. I could see nothing
of the building. Returning and opening the door, at once all the
furniture and every detail of the interior were visible. It was indeed
startling, the sudden transition from void to light and form and color.

“What do you think of it, eh?” Lloyd asked, wringing my hand. “I slapped
a couple of coats of absolute black on the outside yesterday afternoon
to see how it worked. How’s your head? you bumped it pretty solidly, I
imagine.”

“Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations. “I’ve something
better for you to do.”

While he talked he began to strip, and when he stood naked before me he
thrust a pot and brush into my hand and said, “Here, give me a coat of
this.”

It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over
the skin and dried immediately.

“Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had
finished; “but now for the real stuff.”

I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see
nothing.

“It’s empty,” I said.

“Stick your finger in it.”

I obeyed, and was aware of a sensation of cool moistness. On withdrawing
my hand I glanced at the forefinger, the one I had immersed, but it had
disappeared. I moved and knew from the alternate tension and relaxation
of the muscles that I moved it, but it defied my sense of sight. To all
appearances I had been shorn of a finger; nor could I get any visual
impression of it till I extended it under the skylight and saw its
shadow plainly blotted on the floor.

Lloyd chuckled. “Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.”

I dipped the brush into the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long
stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living
flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was
a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by
stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd Inwood into nothingness. It
was a creepy experience, and I was glad when naught remained in sight
but his burning black eyes, poised apparently unsupported in mid-air.

“I have a refined and harmless solution for them,” he said. “A fine
spray with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.”

This deftly accomplished, he said, “Now I shall move about, and do you
tell me what sensations you experience.”

“In the first place, I cannot see you,” I said, and I could hear his
gleeful laugh from the midst of the emptiness. “Of course,” I continued,
“you cannot escape your shadow, but that was to be expected. When you
pass between my eye and an object, the object disappears, but so unusual
and incomprehensible is its disappearance that it seems to me as though
my eyes had blurred. When you move rapidly, I experience a bewildering
succession of blurs. The blurring sensation makes my eyes ache and my
brain tired.”

“Have you any other warnings of my presence?” he asked.

“No, and yes,” I answered. “When you are near me I have feelings similar
to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And
as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel
the loom of your body. But it is all very vague and intangible.”

Long we talked that last morning in his laboratory; and when I turned to
go, he put his unseen hand in mine with nervous grip, and said, “Now
I shall conquer the world!” And I could not dare to tell him of Paul
Tichlorne’s equal success.

At home I found a note from Paul, asking me to come up immediately, and
it was high noon when I came spinning up the driveway on my wheel. Paul
called me from the tennis court, and I dismounted and went over. But the
court was empty. As I stood there, gaping open-mouthed, a tennis ball
struck me on the arm, and as I turned about, another whizzed past my
ear. For aught I could see of my assailant, they came whirling at me
from out of space, and right well was I peppered with them. But when
the balls already flung at me began to come back for a second whack, I
realized the situation. Seizing a racquet and keeping my eyes open, I
quickly saw a rainbow flash appearing and disappearing and darting over
the ground. I took out after it, and when I laid the racquet upon it for
a half-dozen stout blows, Paul’s voice rang out:

“Enough! Enough! Oh! Ouch! Stop! You’re landing on my naked skin, you
know! Ow! O-w-w! I’ll be good! I’ll be good! I only wanted you to see
my metamorphosis,” he said ruefully, and I imagined he was rubbing his
hurts.

A few minutes later we were playing tennis—a handicap on my part, for I
could have no knowledge of his position save when all the angles between
himself, the sun, and me, were in proper conjunction. Then he
flashed, and only then. But the flashes were more brilliant than the
rainbow—purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all
the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond,
dazzling, blinding, iridescent.

But in the midst of our play I felt a sudden cold chill, reminding me
of deep mines and gloomy crypts, such a chill as I had experienced that
very morning. The next moment, close to the net, I saw a ball rebound in
mid-air and empty space, and at the same instant, a score of feet away,
Paul Tichlorne emitted a rainbow flash. It could not be he from whom
the ball had rebounded, and with sickening dread I realized that Lloyd
Inwood had come upon the scene. To make sure, I looked for his shadow,
and there it was, a shapeless blotch the girth of his body, (the sun was
overhead), moving along the ground. I remembered his threat, and felt
sure that all the long years of rivalry were about to culminate in
uncanny battle.

I cried a warning to Paul, and heard a snarl as of a wild beast, and an
answering snarl. I saw the dark blotch move swiftly across the court,
and a brilliant burst of vari-colored light moving with equal swiftness
to meet it; and then shadow and flash came together and there was the
sound of unseen blows. The net went down before my frightened eyes. I
sprang toward the fighters, crying:

“For God’s sake!”

But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.

“You keep out of this, old man!” I heard the voice of Lloyd Inwood from
out of the emptiness. And then Paul’s voice crying, “Yes, we’ve had
enough of peacemaking!”

From the sound of their voices I knew they had separated. I could not
locate Paul, and so approached the shadow that represented Lloyd. But
from the other side came a stunning blow on the point of my jaw, and I
heard Paul scream angrily, “Now will you keep away?”

Then they came together again, the impact of their blows, their groans
and gasps, and the swift flashings and shadow-movings telling plainly of
the deadliness of the struggle.

I shouted for help, and Gaffer Bedshaw came running into the court. I
could see, as he approached, that he was looking at me strangely, but he
collided with the combatants and was hurled headlong to the ground. With
despairing shriek and a cry of “O Lord, I’ve got ‘em!” he sprang to his
feet and tore madly out of the court.

I could do nothing, so I sat up, fascinated and powerless, and watched
the struggle. The noonday sun beat down with dazzling brightness on the
naked tennis court. And it was naked. All I could see was the blotch of
shadow and the rainbow flashes, the dust rising from the invisible feet,
the earth tearing up from beneath the straining foot-grips, and the wire
screen bulge once or twice as their bodies hurled against it. That was
all, and after a time even that ceased. There were no more flashes, and
the shadow had become long and stationary; and I remembered their set
boyish faces when they clung to the roots in the deep coolness of the
pool.

They found me an hour afterward. Some inkling of what had happened got
to the servants and they quitted the Tichlorne service in a body.
Gaffer Bedshaw never recovered from the second shock he received, and
is confined in a madhouse, hopelessly incurable. The secrets of their
marvellous discoveries died with Paul and Lloyd, both laboratories being
destroyed by grief-stricken relatives. As for myself, I no longer care
for chemical research, and science is a tabooed topic in my household. I
have returned to my roses. Nature’s colors are good enough for me.




ALL GOLD CANYON


It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from
the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little
sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness
and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its
turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the
water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated,
many-antlered buck.

On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow,
a cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the
frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up
to meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope—grass that was
spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and
purple and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. There was no view. The
walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks,
moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and
boughs of trees. Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big
foothills, pine-covered and remote. And far beyond, like clouds upon
the border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the Sierra’s
eternal snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.

There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and
virginal. The grass was young velvet. Over the pool three cottonwoods
sent their scurvy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air. On the slope
the blossoms of the wine-wooded manzanita filled the air with springtime
odors, while the leaves, wise with experience, were already beginning
their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer. In the open
spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita,
poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths
suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here
and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to
be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red,
breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells.
Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies-of-the-valley, with
the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime.

There was not a sigh of wind. The air was drowsy with its weight of
perfume. It was a sweetness that would have been cloying had the
air been heavy and humid. But the air was sharp and thin. It was
as starlight transmuted into atmosphere, shot through and warmed by
sunshine, and flower-drenched with sweetness.

An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light
and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain
bees—feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the
board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little
stream drip and ripple its way through the canyon that it spoke only in
faint and occasional gurgles. The voice of the stream was as a drowsy
whisper, ever interrupted by dozings and silences, ever lifted again in
the awakenings.

The motion of all things was a drifting in the heart of the canyon.
Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of
the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the
drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making
of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place.
It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing
life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action,
of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with
struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of
the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of
prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars.

The red-coated, many-antlered buck acknowledged the lordship of the
spirit of the place and dozed knee-deep in the cool, shaded pool. There
seemed no flies to vex him and he was languid with rest. Sometimes his
ears moved when the stream awoke and whispered; but they moved lazily,
with, foreknowledge that it was merely the stream grown garrulous at
discovery that it had slept.

But there came a time when the buck’s ears lifted and tensed with swift
eagerness for sound. His head was turned down the canyon. His sensitive,
quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not pierce the green
screen through which the stream rippled away, but to his ears came the
voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong voice. Once the
buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the sound he snorted
with a sudden start that jerked him through the air from water to
meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet, while he pricked his
ears and again scented the air. Then he stole across the tiny meadow,
pausing once and again to listen, and faded away out of the canyon like
a wraith, soft-footed and without sound.

The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and
the man’s voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became
distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard:

    “Turn around an’ tu’n yo’ face
    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
      (D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).
    Look about an’ look aroun’,
    Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’
      (Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”

A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place
fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was
burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the
sloping side-hill. He was a deliberate sort of man. He took in the scene
with one embracing glance, then ran his eyes over the details to verify
the general impression. Then, and not until then, did he open his mouth
in vivid and solemn approval:

“Smoke of life an’ snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood
an’ water an’ grass an’ a side-hill! A pocket-hunter’s delight an’ a
cayuse’s paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people
ain’t in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting-place for
tired burros, by damn!”

He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed
the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to
inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas
chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His
hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless
as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had
gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were
laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of
the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm
self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and
experience of the world.

From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a
miner’s pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawled out himself into
the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with
hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness
and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and
camp-smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene
and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon-garden
through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes
narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and
his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud:

“Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me!
Talk about your attar o’ roses an’ cologne factories! They ain’t in it!”

He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions
might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard
after, repeating, like a second Boswell.

The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its
water. “Tastes good to me,” he murmured, lifting his head and gazing
across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back
of his hand. The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his
stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a
practised eye that travelled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall
and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his
feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.

“Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
gold-pan.

He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to
stone. Where the sidehill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of
dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in
his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted
to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and
out through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles
worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of
the pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite
matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large
pebbles and pieces of rock.

The contents of the pan diminished rapidly until only fine dirt and the
smallest bits of gravel remained. At this stage he began to work very
deliberately and carefully. It was fine washing, and he washed fine and
finer, with a keen scrutiny and delicate and fastidious touch. At
last the pan seemed empty of everything but water; but with a quick
semicircular flirt that sent the water flying over the shallow rim into
the stream, he disclosed a layer of black sand on the bottom of the pan.
So thin was this layer that it was like a streak of paint. He examined
it closely. In the midst of it was a tiny golden speck. He dribbled a
little water in over the depressed edge of the pan. With a quick flirt
he sent the water sluicing across the bottom, turning the grains of
black sand over and over. A second tiny golden speck rewarded his
effort.

The washing had now become very fine—fine beyond all need of ordinary
placer-mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up
the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so
that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over
the edge and away. Jealously, bit by bit, he let the black sand slip
away. A golden speck, no larger than a pin-point, appeared on the rim,
and by his manipulation of the riveter it returned to the bottom of the
pan. And in such fashion another speck was disclosed, and another. Great
was his care of them. Like a shepherd he herded his flock of golden
specks so that not one should be lost. At last, of the pan of dirt
nothing remained but his golden herd. He counted it, and then, after all
his labor, sent it flying out of the pan with one final swirl of water.

But his blue eyes were shining with desire as he rose to his feet.
“Seven,” he muttered aloud, asserting the sum of the specks for which he
had toiled so hard and which he had so wantonly thrown away. “Seven,”
 he repeated, with the emphasis of one trying to impress a number on his
memory.

He stood still a long while, surveying the hill-side. In his eyes was
a curiosity, new-aroused and burning. There was an exultance about his
bearing and a keenness like that of a hunting animal catching the fresh
scent of game.

He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.

Again came the careful washing, the jealous herding of the golden
specks, and the wantonness with which he sent them flying into the
stream when he had counted their number.

“Five,” he muttered, and repeated, “five.”

He could not forbear another survey of the hill before filling the pan
farther down the stream. His golden herds diminished. “Four, three, two,
two, one,” were his memory-tabulations as he moved down the stream. When
but one speck of gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire
of dry twigs. Into this he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it
was blue-black. He held up the pan and examined it critically. Then he
nodded approbation. Against such a color-background he could defy the
tiniest yellow speck to elude him.

Still moving down the stream, he panned again. A single speck was his
reward. A third pan contained no gold at all. Not satisfied with this,
he panned three times again, taking his shovels of dirt within a foot
of one another. Each pan proved empty of gold, and the fact, instead of
discouraging him, seemed to give him satisfaction. His elation increased
with each barren washing, until he arose, exclaiming jubilantly:

“If it ain’t the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour
apples!”

Returning to where he had started operations, he began to pan up the
stream. At first his golden herds increased—increased prodigiously.
“Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six,” ran his memory
tabulations. Just above the pool he struck his richest pan—thirty-five
colors.

“Almost enough to save,” he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
to sweep them away.

The sun climbed to the top of the sky. The man worked on. Pan by pan, he
went up the stream, the tally of results steadily decreasing.

“It’s just booful, the way it peters out,” he exulted when a shovelful
of dirt contained no more than a single speck of gold.

And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up
and favored the hillside with a confident glance.

“Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!” he cried out, as though to an auditor hidden
somewhere above him beneath the surface of the slope. “Ah, ha! Mr.
Pocket! I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin’, an’ I’m shorely gwine to get yer!
You heah me, Mr. Pocket? I’m gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain’t
cauliflowers!”

He turned and flung a measuring glance at the sun poised above him in
the azure of the cloudless sky. Then he went down the canyon, following
the line of shovel-holes he had made in filling the pans. He crossed the
stream below the pool and disappeared through the green screen. There
was little opportunity for the spirit of the place to return with its
quietude and repose, for the man’s voice, raised in ragtime song, still
dominated the canyon with possession.

After a time, with a greater clashing of steel-shod feet on rock, he
returned. The green screen was tremendously agitated. It surged back and
forth in the throes of a struggle. There was a loud grating and clanging
of metal. The man’s voice leaped to a higher pitch and was sharp with
imperativeness. A large body plunged and panted. There was a snapping
and ripping and rending, and amid a shower of falling leaves a horse
burst through the screen. On its back was a pack, and from this trailed
broken vines and torn creepers. The animal gazed with astonished eyes at
the scene into which it had been precipitated, then dropped its head to
the grass and began contentedly to graze. A second horse scrambled into
view, slipping once on the mossy rocks and regaining equilibrium
when its hoofs sank into the yielding surface of the meadow. It was
riderless, though on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle, scarred
and discolored by long usage.

The man brought up the rear. He threw off pack and saddle, with an
eye to camp location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze. He
unpacked his food and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot. He gathered an
armful of dry wood, and with a few stones made a place for his fire.

“My!” he said, “but I’ve got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an’
horseshoe nails an’ thank you kindly, ma’am, for a second helpin’.”

He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of
his overalls, his eyes travelled across the pool to the side-hill. His
fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and
the hand came out empty. The man wavered perceptibly. He looked at his
preparations for cooking and he looked at the hill.

“Guess I’ll take another whack at her,” he concluded, starting to cross
the stream.

“They ain’t no sense in it, I know,” he mumbled apologetically. “But
keepin’ grub back an hour ain’t goin’ to hurt none, I reckon.”

A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second
line. The sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened,
but the man worked on. He began a third line of test-pans. He was
cross-cutting the hillside, line by line, as he ascended. The centre of
each line produced the richest pans, while the ends came where no
colors showed in the pan. And as he ascended the hillside the lines grew
perceptibly shorter. The regularity with which their length diminished
served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so
short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come only
a point. The design was growing into an inverted “V.” The converging
sides of this “V” marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt.

The apex of the “V” was evidently the man’s goal. Often he ran his eye
along the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the
apex, the point where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided
“Mr. Pocket”—for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
above him on the slope, crying out:

“Come down out o’ that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an’ agreeable, an’
come down!”

“All right,” he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
“All right, Mr. Pocket. It’s plain to me I got to come right up an’
snatch you out bald-headed. An’ I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” he would
threaten still later.

Each pan he carried down to the water to wash, and as he went higher
up the hill the pans grew richer, until he began to save the gold in an
empty baking-powder can which he carried carelessly in his hip-pocket.
So engrossed was he in his toil that he did not notice the long twilight
of oncoming night. It was not until he tried vainly to see the gold
colors in the bottom of the pan that he realized the passage of time. He
straightened up abruptly. An expression of whimsical wonderment and awe
overspread his face as he drawled:

“Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn’t plumb forget dinner!”

He stumbled across the stream in the darkness and lighted his
long-delayed fire. Flapjacks and bacon and warmed-over beans constituted
his supper. Then he smoked a pipe by the smouldering coals, listening to
the night noises and watching the moonlight stream through the canyon.
After that he unrolled his bed, took off his heavy shoes, and pulled the
blankets up to his chin. His face showed white in the moonlight, like
the face of a corpse. But it was a corpse that knew its resurrection,
for the man rose suddenly on one elbow and gazed across at his hillside.

“Good night, Mr. Pocket,” he called sleepily. “Good night.”

He slept through the early gray of morning until the direct rays of
the sun smote his closed eyelids, when he awoke with a start and looked
about him until he had established the continuity of his existence and
identified his present self with the days previously lived.

To dress, he had merely to buckle on his shoes. He glanced at his
fireplace and at his hillside, wavered, but fought down the temptation
and started the fire.

“Keep yer shirt on, Bill; keep yer shirt on,” he admonished himself.
“What’s the good of rushin’? No use in gettin’ all het up an’ sweaty.
Mr. Pocket’ll wait for you. He ain’t a-runnin’ away before you can get
yer breakfast. Now, what you want, Bill, is something fresh in yer bill
o’ fare. So it’s up to you to go an’ get it.”

He cut a short pole at the water’s edge and drew from one of his pockets
a bit of line and a draggled fly that had once been a royal coachman.

“Mebbe they’ll bite in the early morning,” he muttered, as he made his
first cast into the pool. And a moment later he was gleefully crying:
“What’d I tell you, eh? What’d I tell you?”

He had no reel, nor any inclination to waste time, and by main strength,
and swiftly, he drew out of the water a flashing ten-inch trout. Three
more, caught in rapid succession, furnished his breakfast. When he came
to the stepping-stones on his way to his hillside, he was struck by a
sudden thought, and paused.

“I’d just better take a hike down-stream a ways,” he said. “There’s no
tellin’ what cuss may be snoopin’ around.”

But he crossed over on the stones, and with a “I really oughter take
that hike,” the need of the precaution passed out of his mind and he
fell to work.

At nightfall he straightened up. The small of his back was stiff
from stooping toil, and as he put his hand behind him to soothe the
protesting muscles, he said:

“Now what d’ye think of that, by damn? I clean forgot my dinner again!
If I don’t watch out, I’ll sure be degeneratin’ into a two-meal-a-day
crank.”

“Pockets is the damnedest things I ever see for makin’ a man
absent-minded,” he communed that night, as he crawled into his blankets.
Nor did he forget to call up the hillside, “Good night, Mr. Pocket! Good
night!”

Rising with the sun, and snatching a hasty breakfast, he was early
at work. A fever seemed to be growing in him, nor did the increasing
richness of the test-pans allay this fever. There was a flush in his
cheek other than that made by the heat of the sun, and he was oblivious
to fatigue and the passage of time. When he filled a pan with dirt, he
ran down the hill to wash it; nor could he forbear running up the hill
again, panting and stumbling profanely, to refill the pan.

He was now a hundred yards from the water, and the inverted “V” was
assuming definite proportions. The width of the pay-dirt steadily
decreased, and the man extended in his mind’s eye the sides of the “V”
 to their meeting-place far up the hill. This was his goal, the apex of
the “V,” and he panned many times to locate it.

“Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an’ a yard to the
right,” he finally concluded.

Then the temptation seized him. “As plain as the nose on your face,”
 he said, as he abandoned his laborious cross-cutting and climbed to the
indicated apex. He filled a pan and carried it down the hill to wash. It
contained no trace of gold. He dug deep, and he dug shallow, filling
and washing a dozen pans, and was unrewarded even by the tiniest golden
speck. He was enraged at having yielded to the temptation, and cursed
himself blasphemously and pridelessly. Then he went down the hill and
took up the cross-cutting.

“Slow an’ certain, Bill; slow an’ certain,” he crooned. “Short-cuts to
fortune ain’t in your line, an’ it’s about time you know it. Get wise,
Bill; get wise. Slow an’ certain’s the only hand you can play; so go to
it, an’ keep to it, too.”

As the cross-cuts decreased, showing that the sides of the “V” were
converging, the depth of the “V” increased. The gold-trace was dipping
into the hill. It was only at thirty inches beneath the surface that
he could get colors in his pan. The dirt he found at twenty-five inches
from the surface, and at thirty-five inches, yielded barren pans. At the
base of the “V,” by the water’s edge, he had found the gold colors at
the grass roots. The higher he went up the hill, the deeper the gold
dipped.

To dig a hole three feet deep in order to get one test-pan was a task
of no mean magnitude; while between the man and the apex intervened
an untold number of such holes to be. “An’ there’s no tellin’ how much
deeper it’ll pitch,” he sighed, in a moment’s pause, while his fingers
soothed his aching back.

Feverish with desire, with aching back and stiffening muscles, with pick
and shovel gouging and mauling the soft brown earth, the man toiled up
the hill. Before him was the smooth slope, spangled with flowers and
made sweet with their breath. Behind him was devastation. It looked like
some terrible eruption breaking out on the smooth skin of the hill. His
slow progress was like that of a slug, befouling beauty with a monstrous
trail.

Though the dipping gold-trace increased the man’s work, he found
consolation in the increasing richness of the pans. Twenty cents, thirty
cents, fifty cents, sixty cents, were the values of the gold found in
the pans, and at nightfall he washed his banner pan, which gave him a
dollar’s worth of gold-dust from a shovelful of dirt.

“I’ll just bet it’s my luck to have some inquisitive cuss come buttin’
in here on my pasture,” he mumbled sleepily that night as he pulled the
blankets up to his chin.

Suddenly he sat upright. “Bill!” he called sharply. “Now, listen to me,
Bill; d’ye hear! It’s up to you, to-morrow mornin’, to mosey round an’
see what you can see. Understand? To-morrow morning, an’ don’t you forget
it!”

He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. “Good night, Mr. Pocket,”
 he called.

In the morning he stole a march on the sun, for he had finished
breakfast when its first rays caught him, and he was climbing the wall
of the canyon where it crumbled away and gave footing. From the outlook
at the top he found himself in the midst of loneliness. As far as he
could see, chain after chain of mountains heaved themselves into his
vision. To the east his eyes, leaping the miles between range and range
and between many ranges, brought up at last against the white-peaked
Sierras—the main crest, where the backbone of the Western world
reared itself against the sky. To the north and south he could see more
distinctly the cross-systems that broke through the main trend of the
sea of mountains. To the west the ranges fell away, one behind the
other, diminishing and fading into the gentle foothills that, in turn,
descended into the great valley which he could not see.

And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the
handiwork of man—save only the torn bosom of the hillside at his feet.
The man looked long and carefully. Once, far down his own canyon, he
thought he saw in the air a faint hint of smoke. He looked again
and decided that it was the purple haze of the hills made dark by a
convolution of the canyon wall at its back.

“Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!” he called down into the canyon. “Stand out from
under! I’m a-comin’, Mr. Pocket! I’m a-comin’!”

The heavy brogans on the man’s feet made him appear clumsy-footed, but
he swung down from the giddy height as lightly and airily as a mountain
goat. A rock, turning under his foot on the edge of the precipice, did
not disconcert him. He seemed to know the precise time required for the
turn to culminate in disaster, and in the meantime he utilized the false
footing itself for the momentary earth-contact necessary to carry him on
into safety. Where the earth sloped so steeply that it was impossible to
stand for a second upright, the man did not hesitate. His foot pressed
the impossible surface for but a fraction of the fatal second and gave
him the bound that carried him onward. Again, where even the fraction of
a second’s footing was out of the question, he would swing his body
past by a moment’s hand-grip on a jutting knob of rock, a crevice, or
a precariously rooted shrub. At last, with a wild leap and yell, he
exchanged the face of the wall for an earth-slide and finished the
descent in the midst of several tons of sliding earth and gravel.

His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold.
It was from the centre of the “V.” To either side the diminution in
the values of the pans was swift. His lines of crosscutting holes were
growing very short. The converging sides of the inverted “V” were only a
few yards apart. Their meeting-point was only a few yards above him. But
the pay-streak was dipping deeper and deeper into the earth. By early
afternoon he was sinking the test-holes five feet before the pans could
show the gold-trace.

For that matter, the gold-trace had become something more than a trace;
it was a placer mine in itself, and the man resolved to come back after
he had found the pocket and work over the ground. But the increasing
richness of the pans began to worry him. By late afternoon the worth of
the pans had grown to three and four dollars. The man scratched his head
perplexedly and looked a few feet up the hill at the manzanita bush that
marked approximately the apex of the “V.” He nodded his head and said
oracularly:

“It’s one o’ two things, Bill; one o’ two things. Either Mr. Pocket’s
spilled himself all out an’ down the hill, or else Mr. Pocket’s that
damned rich you maybe won’t be able to carry him all away with you. And
that’d be hell, wouldn’t it, now?” He chuckled at contemplation of so
pleasant a dilemma.

Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with
the gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.

“Wisht I had an electric light to go on working,” he said.

He found sleep difficult that night. Many times he composed himself and
closed his eyes for slumber to overtake him; but his blood pounded with
too strong desire, and as many times his eyes opened and he murmured
wearily, “Wisht it was sun-up.”

Sleep came to him in the end, but his eyes were open with the first
paling of the stars, and the gray of dawn caught him with breakfast
finished and climbing the hillside in the direction of the secret
abiding-place of Mr. Pocket.

The first cross-cut the man made, there was space for only three
holes, so narrow had become the pay-streak and so close was he to the
fountainhead of the golden stream he had been following for four days.

“Be ca’m, Bill; be ca’m,” he admonished himself, as he broke ground for
the final hole where the sides of the “V” had at last come together in a
point.

“I’ve got the almighty cinch on you, Mr. Pocket, an’ you can’t lose me,”
 he said many times as he sank the hole deeper and deeper.

Four feet, five feet, six feet, he dug his way down into the earth. The
digging grew harder. His pick grated on broken rock. He examined the
rock. “Rotten quartz,” was his conclusion as, with the shovel, he
cleared the bottom of the hole of loose dirt. He attacked the crumbling
quartz with the pick, bursting the disintegrating rock asunder with
every stroke.

He thrust his shovel into the loose mass. His eye caught a gleam of
yellow. He dropped the shovel and squatted suddenly on his heels. As a
farmer rubs the clinging earth from fresh-dug potatoes, so the man, a
piece of rotten quartz held in both hands, rubbed the dirt away.

“Sufferin’ Sardanopolis!” he cried. “Lumps an’ chunks of it! Lumps an’
chunks of it!”

It was only half rock he held in his hand. The other half was virgin
gold. He dropped it into his pan and examined another piece. Little
yellow was to be seen, but with his strong fingers he crumbled the
rotten quartz away till both hands were filled with glowing yellow. He
rubbed the dirt away from fragment after fragment, tossing them into
the gold-pan. It was a treasure-hole. So much had the quartz rotted away
that there was less of it than there was of gold. Now and again he found
a piece to which no rock clung—a piece that was all gold. A chunk,
where the pick had laid open the heart of the gold, glittered like a
handful of yellow jewels, and he cocked his head at it and slowly turned
it around and over to observe the rich play of the light upon it.

“Talk about yer Too Much Gold diggin’s!” the man snorted contemptuously.
“Why, this diggin’ ‘d make it look like thirty cents. This diggin’
is All Gold. An’ right here an’ now I name this yere canyon ‘All Gold
Canyon,’ b’ gosh!”

Still squatting on his heels, he continued examining the fragments and
tossing them into the pan. Suddenly there came to him a premonition of
danger. It seemed a shadow had fallen upon him. But there was no shadow.
His heart had given a great jump up into his throat and was choking him.
Then his blood slowly chilled and he felt the sweat of his shirt cold
against his flesh.

He did not spring up nor look around. He did not move. He was
considering the nature of the premonition he had received, trying to
locate the source of the mysterious force that had warned him, striving
to sense the imperative presence of the unseen thing that threatened
him. There is an aura of things hostile, made manifest by messengers
refined for the senses to know; and this aura he felt, but knew not how
he felt it. His was the feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun.
It seemed that between him and life had passed something dark and
smothering and menacing; a gloom, as it were, that swallowed up life and
made for death—his death.

Every force of his being impelled him to spring up and confront the
unseen danger, but his soul dominated the panic, and he remained
squatting on his heels, in his hands a chunk of gold. He did not dare to
look around, but he knew by now that there was something behind him and
above him. He made believe to be interested in the gold in his hand.
He examined it critically, turned it over and over, and rubbed the dirt
from it. And all the time he knew that something behind him was looking
at the gold over his shoulder.

Still feigning interest in the chunk of gold in his hand, he listened
intently and he heard the breathing of the thing behind him. His eyes
searched the ground in front of him for a weapon, but they saw only
the uprooted gold, worthless to him now in his extremity. There was his
pick, a handy weapon on occasion; but this was not such an occasion.
The man realized his predicament. He was in a narrow hole that was seven
feet deep. His head did not come to the surface of the ground. He was in
a trap.

He remained squatting on his heels. He was quite cool and collected; but
his mind, considering every factor, showed him only his helplessness.
He continued rubbing the dirt from the quartz fragments and throwing
the gold into the pan. There was nothing else for him to do. Yet he knew
that he would have to rise up, sooner or later, and face the danger that
breathed at his back.

The minutes passed, and with the passage of each minute he knew that by
so much he was nearer the time when he must stand up, or else—and his
wet shirt went cold against his flesh again at the thought—or else he
might receive death as he stooped there over his treasure.

Still he squatted on his heels, rubbing dirt from gold and debating in
just what manner he should rise up. He might rise up with a rush and
claw his way out of the hole to meet whatever threatened on the even
footing above ground. Or he might rise up slowly and carelessly, and
feign casually to discover the thing that breathed at his back. His
instinct and every fighting fibre of his body favored the mad, clawing
rush to the surface. His intellect, and the craft thereof, favored the
slow and cautious meeting with the thing that menaced and which he could
not see. And while he debated, a loud, crashing noise burst on his ear.
At the same instant he received a stunning blow on the left side of
the back, and from the point of impact felt a rush of flame through his
flesh. He sprang up in the air, but halfway to his feet collapsed. His
body crumpled in like a leaf withered in sudden heat, and he came down,
his chest across his pan of gold, his face in the dirt and rock, his
legs tangled and twisted because of the restricted space at the bottom
of the hole. His legs twitched convulsively several times. His body was
shaken as with a mighty ague. There was a slow expansion of the lungs,
accompanied by a deep sigh. Then the air was slowly, very slowly,
exhaled, and his body as slowly flattened itself down into inertness.

Above, revolver in hand, a man was peering down over the edge of the
hole. He peered for a long time at the prone and motionless body beneath
him. After a while the stranger sat down on the edge of the hole so that
he could see into it, and rested the revolver on his knee. Reaching
his hand into a pocket, he drew out a wisp of brown paper. Into this
he dropped a few crumbs of tobacco. The combination became a cigarette,
brown and squat, with the ends turned in. Not once did he take his eyes
from the body at the bottom of the hole. He lighted the cigarette and
drew its smoke into his lungs with a caressing intake of the breath. He
smoked slowly. Once the cigarette went out and he relighted it. And all
the while he studied the body beneath him.

In the end he tossed the cigarette stub away and rose to his feet. He
moved to the edge of the hole. Spanning it, a hand resting on each edge,
and with the revolver still in the right hand, he muscled his body
down into the hole. While his feet were yet a yard from the bottom he
released his hands and dropped down.

At the instant his feet struck bottom he saw the pocket-miner’s arm leap
out, and his own legs knew a swift, jerking grip that overthrew him. In
the nature of the jump his revolver-hand was above his head. Swiftly
as the grip had flashed about his legs, just as swiftly he brought
the revolver down. He was still in the air, his fall in process of
completion, when he pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening
in the confined space. The smoke filled the hole so that he could
see nothing. He struck the bottom on his back, and like a cat’s the
pocket-miner’s body was on top of him. Even as the miner’s body passed
on top, the stranger crooked in his right arm to fire; and even in that
instant the miner, with a quick thrust of elbow, struck his wrist. The
muzzle was thrown up and the bullet thudded into the dirt of the side of
the hole.

The next instant the stranger felt the miner’s hand grip his wrist. The
struggle was now for the revolver. Each man strove to turn it against
the other’s body. The smoke in the hole was clearing. The stranger,
lying on his back, was beginning to see dimly. But suddenly he was
blinded by a handful of dirt deliberately flung into his eyes by his
antagonist. In that moment of shock his grip on the revolver was broken.
In the next moment he felt a smashing darkness descend upon his brain,
and in the midst of the darkness even the darkness ceased.

But the pocket-miner fired again and again, until the revolver was
empty. Then he tossed it from him and, breathing heavily, sat down on
the dead man’s legs.

The miner was sobbing and struggling for breath. “Measly skunk!” he
panted; “a-campin’ on my trail an’ lettin’ me do the work, an’ then
shootin’ me in the back!”

He was half crying from anger and exhaustion. He peered at the face of
the dead man. It was sprinkled with loose dirt and gravel, and it was
difficult to distinguish the features.

“Never laid eyes on him before,” the miner concluded his scrutiny. “Just
a common an’ ordinary thief, damn him! An’ he shot me in the back! He
shot me in the back!”

He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.

“Went clean through, and no harm done!” he cried jubilantly. “I’ll bet
he aimed right all right, but he drew the gun over when he pulled the
trigger—the cuss! But I fixed ‘m! Oh, I fixed ‘m!”

His fingers were investigating the bullet-hole in his side, and a shade
of regret passed over his face. “It’s goin’ to be stiffer’n hell,” he
said. “An’ it’s up to me to get mended an’ get out o’ here.”

He crawled out of the hole and went down the hill to his camp. Half an
hour later he returned, leading his pack-horse. His open shirt disclosed
the rude bandages with which he had dressed his wound. He was slow and
awkward with his left-hand movements, but that did not prevent his using
the arm.

The bight of the pack-rope under the dead man’s shoulders enabled him
to heave the body out of the hole. Then he set to work gathering up his
gold. He worked steadily for several hours, pausing often to rest his
stiffening shoulder and to exclaim:

“He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!”

When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a
number of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.

“Four hundred pounds, or I’m a Hottentot,” he concluded. “Say two
hundred in quartz an’ dirt—that leaves two hundred pounds of gold.
Bill! Wake up! Two hundred pounds of gold! Forty thousand dollars! An’
it’s yourn—all yourn!”

He scratched his head delightedly and his fingers blundered into an
unfamiliar groove. They quested along it for several inches. It was a
crease through his scalp where the second bullet had ploughed.

He walked angrily over to the dead man.

“You would, would you?” he bullied. “You would, eh? Well, I fixed you
good an’ plenty, an’ I’ll give you decent burial, too. That’s more’n
you’d have done for me.”

He dragged the body to the edge of the hole and toppled it in. It struck
the bottom with a dull crash, on its side, the face twisted up to the
light. The miner peered down at it.

“An’ you shot me in the back!” he said accusingly.

With pick and shovel he filled the hole. Then he loaded the gold on his
horse. It was too great a load for the animal, and when he had gained
his camp he transferred part of it to his saddle-horse. Even so, he
was compelled to abandon a portion of his outfit—pick and shovel and
gold-pan, extra food and cooking utensils, and divers odds and ends.

The sun was at the zenith when the man forced the horses at the screen
of vines and creepers. To climb the huge boulders the animals were
compelled to uprear and struggle blindly through the tangled mass of
vegetation. Once the saddle-horse fell heavily and the man removed the
pack to get the animal on its feet. After it started on its way again
the man thrust his head out from among the leaves and peered up at the
hillside.

“The measly skunk!” he said, and disappeared.

There was a ripping and tearing of vines and boughs. The trees surged
back and forth, marking the passage of the animals through the midst
of them. There was a clashing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and now and
again an oath or a sharp cry of command. Then the voice of the man was
raised in song:—

    “Tu’n around an’ tu’n yo’ face
    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
      (D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).
    Look about an, look aroun’,
    Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’
      (Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”

The song grew faint and fainter, and through the silence crept back the
spirit of the place. The stream once more drowsed and whispered; the hum
of the mountain bees rose sleepily. Down through the perfume-weighted
air fluttered the snowy fluffs of the cottonwoods. The butterflies
drifted in and out among the trees, and over all blazed the quiet
sunshine. Only remained the hoof-marks in the meadow and the torn
hillside to mark the boisterous trail of the life that had broken the
peace of the place and passed on.




PLANCHETTE


“It is my right to know,” the girl said.

Her voice was firm-fibred with determination. There was no hint of
pleading in it, yet it was the determination that is reached through a
long period of pleading. But in her case it had been pleading, not of
speech, but of personality. Her lips had been ever mute, but her face
and eyes, and the very attitude of her soul, had been for a long time
eloquent with questioning. This the man had known, but he had never
answered; and now she was demanding by the spoken word that he answer.

“It is my right,” the girl repeated.

“I know it,” he answered, desperately and helplessly.

She waited, in the silence which followed, her eyes fixed upon the light
that filtered down through the lofty boughs and bathed the great redwood
trunks in mellow warmth. This light, subdued and colored, seemed almost
a radiation from the trunks themselves, so strongly did they saturate
it with their hue. The girl saw without seeing, as she heard, without
hearing, the deep gurgling of the stream far below on the canyon bottom.

She looked down at the man. “Well?” she asked, with the firmness which
feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.

She was sitting upright, her back against a fallen tree-trunk, while
he lay near to her, on his side, an elbow on the ground and the hand
supporting his head.

“Dear, dear Lute,” he murmured.

She shivered at the sound of his voice—not from repulsion, but from
struggle against the fascination of its caressing gentleness. She had
come to know well the lure of the man—the wealth of easement and rest
that was promised by every caressing intonation of his voice, by the
mere touch of hand on hand or the faint impact of his breath on neck
or cheek. The man could not express himself by word nor look nor touch
without weaving into the expression, subtly and occultly, the feeling as
of a hand that passed and that in passing stroked softly and soothingly.
Nor was this all-pervading caress a something that cloyed with too great
sweetness; nor was it sickly sentimental; nor was it maudlin with love’s
madness. It was vigorous, compelling, masculine. For that matter, it was
largely unconscious on the man’s part. He was only dimly aware of it.
It was a part of him, the breath of his soul as it were, involuntary and
unpremeditated.

But now, resolved and desperate, she steeled herself against him. He
tried to face her, but her gray eyes looked out to him, steadily, from
under cool, level brows, and he dropped his head upon her knee. Her hand
strayed into his hair softly, and her face melted into solicitude and
tenderness. But when he looked up again, her gray eyes were steady, her
brows cool and level.

“What more can I tell you?” the man said. He raised his head and met
her gaze. “I cannot marry you. I cannot marry any woman. I love you—you
know that—better than my own life. I weigh you in the scales against
all the dear things of living, and you outweigh everything. I would
give everything to possess you, yet I may not. I cannot marry you. I can
never marry you.”

Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was
sinking back to her knee, when she checked him.

“You are already married, Chris?”

“No! no!” he cried vehemently. “I have never been married. I want to
marry only you, and I cannot!”

“Then—”

“Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”

“It is my right to know,” she repeated.

“I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”

“You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.

“I know, I know,” he broke in.

“You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
my people because of you.”

“I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said
bitterly.

“It is true. They can scarcely tolerate you. They do not show it to you,
but they almost hate you. It is I who have had to bear all this. It was
not always so, though. They liked you at first as ... as I liked you. But
that was four years ago. The time passed by—a year, two years; and then
they began to turn against you. They are not to be blamed. You spoke no
word. They felt that you were destroying my life. It is four years, now,
and you have never once mentioned marriage to them. What were they to
think? What they have thought, that you were destroying my life.”

As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.

“They did like you at first. Who can help liking you? You seem to draw
affection from all living things, as the trees draw the moisture from
the ground. It comes to you as it were your birthright. Aunt Mildred and
Uncle Robert thought there was nobody like you. The sun rose and set in
you. They thought I was the luckiest girl alive to win the love of a man
like you. ‘For it looks very much like it,’ Uncle Robert used to say,
wagging his head wickedly at me. Of course they liked you. Aunt Mildred
used to sigh, and look across teasingly at Uncle, and say, ‘When I think
of Chris, it almost makes me wish I were younger myself.’ And Uncle
would answer, ‘I don’t blame you, my dear, not in the least.’ And then
the pair of them would beam upon me their congratulations that I had won
the love of a man like you.

“And they knew I loved you as well. How could I hide it?—this great,
wonderful thing that had entered into my life and swallowed up all my
days! For four years, Chris, I have lived only for you. Every moment was
yours. Waking, I loved you. Sleeping, I dreamed of you. Every act I have
performed was shaped by you, by the thought of you. Even my thoughts
were moulded by you, by the invisible presence of you. I had no end,
petty or great, that you were not there for me.”

“I had no idea of imposing such slavery,” he muttered.

“You imposed nothing. You always let me have my own way. It was you
who were the obedient slave. You did for me without offending me. You
forestalled my wishes without the semblance of forestalling them, so
natural and inevitable was everything you did for me. I said, without
offending me. You were no dancing puppet. You made no fuss. Don’t you
see? You did not seem to do things at all. Somehow they were always
there, just done, as a matter of course.

“The slavery was love’s slavery. It was just my love for you that made
you swallow up all my days. You did not force yourself into my thoughts.
You crept in, always, and you were there always—how much, you will
never know.

“But as time went by, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew to dislike you. They
grew afraid. What was to become of me? You were destroying my life. My
music? You know how my dream of it has dimmed away. That spring, when I
first met you—I was twenty, and I was about to start for Germany. I
was going to study hard. That was four years ago, and I am still here in
California.

“I had other lovers. You drove them away—No! no! I don’t mean that. It
was I that drove them away. What did I care for lovers, for anything,
when you were near? But as I said, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew afraid.
There has been talk—friends, busybodies, and all the rest. The time
went by. You did not speak. I could only wonder, wonder. I knew you
loved me. Much was said against you by Uncle at first, and then by Aunt
Mildred. They were father and mother to me, you know. I could not defend
you. Yet I was loyal to you. I refused to discuss you. I closed up.
There was half-estrangement in my home—Uncle Robert with a face like
an undertaker, and Aunt Mildred’s heart breaking. But what could I do,
Chris? What could I do?”

The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
reply.

“Aunt Mildred was mother to me, yet I went to her no more with my
confidences. My childhood’s book was closed. It was a sweet book, Chris.
The tears come into my eyes sometimes when I think of it. But never
mind that. Great happiness has been mine as well. I am glad I can talk
frankly of my love for you. And the attaining of such frankness has been
very sweet. I do love you, Chris. I love you ... I cannot tell you how.
You are everything to me, and more besides. You remember that Christmas
tree of the children?—when we played blindman’s buff? and you caught
me by the arm so, with such a clutching of fingers that I cried out
with the hurt? I never told you, but the arm was badly bruised. And such
sweet I got of it you could never guess. There, black and blue, was the
imprint of your fingers—your fingers, Chris, your fingers. It was
the touch of you made visible. It was there a week, and I kissed the
marks—oh, so often! I hated to see them go; I wanted to rebruise the
arm and make them linger. I was jealous of the returning white that
drove the bruise away. Somehow,—oh! I cannot explain, but I loved you
so!”

In the silence that fell, she continued her caressing of his hair, while
she idly watched a great gray squirrel, boisterous and hilarious, as
it scampered back and forth in a distant vista of the redwoods. A
crimson-crested woodpecker, energetically drilling a fallen trunk,
caught and transferred her gaze. The man did not lift his head. Rather,
he crushed his face closer against her knee, while his heaving shoulders
marked the hardness with which he breathed.

“You must tell me, Chris,” the girl said gently. “This mystery—it is
killing me. I must know why we cannot be married. Are we always to be
this way?—merely lovers, meeting often, it is true, and yet with the
long absences between the meetings? Is it all the world holds for you
and me, Chris? Are we never to be more to each other? Oh, it is good
just to love, I know—you have made me madly happy; but one does get so
hungry at times for something more! I want more and more of you, Chris.
I want all of you. I want all our days to be together. I want all the
companionship, the comradeship, which cannot be ours now, and which will
be ours when we are married—” She caught her breath quickly. “But we
are never to be married. I forgot. And you must tell me why.”

The man raised his head and looked her in the eyes. It was a way he had
with whomever he talked, of looking them in the eyes.

“I have considered you, Lute,” he began doggedly. “I did consider you at
the very first. I should never have gone on with it. I should have gone
away. I knew it. And I considered you in the light of that knowledge,
and yet ... I did not go away. My God! what was I to do? I loved you.
I could not go away. I could not help it. I stayed. I resolved, but
I broke my resolves. I was like a drunkard. I was drunk of you. I was
weak, I know. I failed. I could not go away. I tried. I went away—you
will remember, though you did not know why. You know now. I went away,
but I could not remain away. Knowing that we could never marry, I came
back to you. I am here, now, with you. Send me away, Lute. I have not
the strength to go myself.”

“But why should you go away?” she asked. “Besides, I must know why,
before I can send you away.”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Tell me,” she said, her voice tenderly imperative.

“Don’t, Lute; don’t force me,” the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
his eyes and voice.

“But you must tell me,” she insisted. “It is justice you owe me.”

The man wavered. “If I do ...” he began. Then he ended with
determination, “I should never be able to forgive myself. No, I cannot
tell you. Don’t try to compel me, Lute. You would be as sorry as I.”

“If there is anything ... if there are obstacles ... if this mystery does
really prevent....” She was speaking slowly, with long pauses, seeking
the more delicate ways of speech for the framing of her thought. “Chris,
I do love you. I love you as deeply as it is possible for any woman to
love, I am sure. If you were to say to me now ‘Come,’ I would go with
you. I would follow wherever you led. I would be your page, as in the
days of old when ladies went with their knights to far lands. You are my
knight, Chris, and you can do no wrong. Your will is my wish. I was once
afraid of the censure of the world. Now that you have come into my life
I am no longer afraid. I would laugh at the world and its censure for
your sake—for my sake too. I would laugh, for I should have you, and
you are more to me than the good will and approval of the world. If you
say ‘Come,’ I will—”

“Don’t! Don’t!” he cried. “It is impossible! Marriage or not, I cannot
even say ‘Come.’ I dare not. I’ll show you. I’ll tell you.”

He sat up beside her, the action stamped with resolve. He took her hand
in his and held it closely. His lips moved to the verge of speech. The
mystery trembled for utterance. The air was palpitant with its presence.
As if it were an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear.
But the man paused, gazing straight out before him. She felt his hand
relax in hers, and she pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly. But
she felt the rigidity going out of his tensed body, and she knew that
spirit and flesh were relaxing together. His resolution was ebbing. He
would not speak—she knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness
of faith, that it was because he could not.

She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as
though hope and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down
through the warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical,
absent way. She looked at the scene as from a long way off, without
interest, herself an alien, no longer an intimate part of the earth and
trees and flowers she loved so well.

So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity,
strangely impersonal, in what lay around her. Through a near vista she
looked at a buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered
it for the first time. Her eyes paused and dwelt upon a yellow cluster
of Diogenes’ lanterns that grew on the edge of an open space. It was the
way of flowers always to give her quick pleasure-thrills, but no thrill
was hers now. She pondered the flower slowly and thoughtfully, as a
hasheesh-eater, heavy with the drug, might ponder some whim-flower
that obtruded on his vision. In her ears was the voice of the stream—a
hoarse-throated, sleepy old giant, muttering and mumbling his somnolent
fancies. But her fancy was not in turn aroused, as was its wont; she
knew the sound merely for water rushing over the rocks of the deep
canyon-bottom, that and nothing more.

Her gaze wandered on beyond the Diogenes’ lanterns into the open
space. Knee-deep in the wild oats of the hillside grazed two horses,
chestnut-sorrels the pair of them, perfectly matched, warm and golden
in the sunshine, their spring-coats a sheen of high-lights shot through
with color-flashes that glowed like fiery jewels. She recognized, almost
with a shock, that one of them was hers, Dolly, the companion of her
girlhood and womanhood, on whose neck she had sobbed her sorrows and
sung her joys. A moistness welled into her eyes at the sight, and
she came back from the remoteness of her mood, quick with passion and
sorrow, to be part of the world again.

The man sank forward from the hips, relaxing entirely, and with a groan
dropped his head on her knee. She leaned over him and pressed her lips
softly and lingeringly to his hair.

“Come, let us go,” she said, almost in a whisper.

She caught her breath in a half-sob, then tightened her lips as she
rose. His face was white to ghastliness, so shaken was he by the
struggle through which he had passed. They did not look at each other,
but walked directly to the horses. She leaned against Dolly’s neck while
he tightened the girths. Then she gathered the reins in her hand and
waited. He looked at her as he bent down, an appeal for forgiveness in
his eyes; and in that moment her own eyes answered. Her foot rested in
his hands, and from there she vaulted into the saddle. Without speaking,
without further looking at each other, they turned the horses’ heads and
took the narrow trail that wound down through the sombre redwood aisles
and across the open glades to the pasture-lands below. The trail became
a cow-path, the cow-path became a wood-road, which later joined with a
hay-road; and they rode down through the low-rolling, tawny California
hills to where a set of bars let out on the county road which ran
along the bottom of the valley. The girl sat her horse while the man
dismounted and began taking down the bars.

“No—wait!” she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.

She urged the mare forward a couple of strides, and then the animal
lifted over the bars in a clean little jump. The man’s eyes sparkled,
and he clapped his hands.

“You beauty! you beauty!” the girl cried, leaning forward impulsively
in the saddle and pressing her cheek to the mare’s neck where it burned
flame-color in the sun.

“Let’s trade horses for the ride in,” she suggested, when he had led
his horse through and finished putting up the bars. “You’ve never
sufficiently appreciated Dolly.”

“No, no,” he protested.

“You think she is too old, too sedate,” Lute insisted. “She’s only
sixteen, and she can outrun nine colts out of ten. Only she never cuts
up. She’s too steady, and you don’t approve of her—no, don’t deny it,
sir. I know. And I know also that she can outrun your vaunted Washoe
Ban. There! I challenge you! And furthermore, you may ride her yourself.
You know what Ban can do; so you must ride Dolly and see for yourself
what she can do.”

They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
diversion and making the most of it.

“I’m glad I was born in California,” Lute remarked, as she swung
astride of Ban. “It’s an outrage both to horse and woman to ride in a
sidesaddle.”

“You look like a young Amazon,” the man said approvingly, his eyes
passing tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“All ready!”

“To the old mill,” she called, as the horses sprang forward. “That’s
less than a mile.”

“To a finish?” he demanded.

She nodded, and the horses, feeling the urge of the reins, caught the
spirit of the race. The dust rose in clouds behind as they tore along
the level road. They swung around the bend, horses and riders tilted at
sharp angles to the ground, and more than once the riders ducked low to
escape the branches of outreaching and overhanging trees. They clattered
over the small plank bridges, and thundered over the larger iron ones to
an ominous clanking of loose rods.

They rode side by side, saving the animals for the rush at the finish,
yet putting them at a pace that drew upon vitality and staying power.
Curving around a clump of white oaks, the road straightened out before
them for several hundred yards, at the end of which they could see the
ruined mill.

“Now for it!” the girl cried.

She urged the horse by suddenly leaning forward with her body, at the
same time, for an instant, letting the rein slack and touching the neck
with her bridle hand. She began to draw away from the man.

“Touch her on the neck!” she cried to him.

With this, the mare pulled alongside and began gradually to pass the
girl. Chris and Lute looked at each other for a moment, the mare still
drawing ahead, so that Chris was compelled slowly to turn his head. The
mill was a hundred yards away.

“Shall I give him the spurs?” Lute shouted.

The man nodded, and the girl drove the spurs in sharply and quickly,
calling upon the horse for its utmost, but watched her own horse forge
slowly ahead of her.

“Beaten by three lengths!” Lute beamed triumphantly, as they pulled into
a walk. “Confess, sir, confess! You didn’t think the old mare had it in
her.”

Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly’s wet
neck.

“Ban’s a sluggard alongside of her,” Chris affirmed. “Dolly’s all right,
if she is in her Indian Summer.”

Lute nodded approval. “That’s a sweet way of putting it—Indian Summer.
It just describes her. But she’s not lazy. She has all the fire and none
of the folly. She is very wise, what of her years.”

“That accounts for it,” Chris demurred. “Her folly passed with her
youth. Many’s the lively time she’s given you.”

“No,” Lute answered. “I never knew her really to cut up. I think the
only trouble she ever gave me was when I was training her to open gates.
She was afraid when they swung back upon her—the animal’s fear of the
trap, perhaps. But she bravely got over it. And she never was vicious.
She never bolted, nor bucked, nor cut up in all her life—never, not
once.”

The horses went on at a walk, still breathing heavily from their run.
The road wound along the bottom of the valley, now and again crossing
the stream. From either side rose the drowsy purr of mowing-machines,
punctuated by occasional sharp cries of the men who were gathering the
hay-crop. On the western side of the valley the hills rose green and
dark, but the eastern side was already burned brown and tan by the sun.

“There is summer, here is spring,” Lute said. “Oh, beautiful Sonoma
Valley!”

Her eyes were glistening and her face was radiant with love of the
land. Her gaze wandered on across orchard patches and sweeping vineyard
stretches, seeking out the purple which seemed to hang like a dim smoke
in the wrinkles of the hills and in the more distant canyon gorges. Far
up, among the more rugged crests, where the steep slopes were covered
with manzanita, she caught a glimpse of a clear space where the wild
grass had not yet lost its green.

“Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?” she asked, her eyes still
fixed on the remote green.

A snort of fear brought her eyes back to the man beside her. Dolly,
upreared, with distended nostrils and wild eyes, was pawing the air
madly with her fore legs. Chris threw himself forward against her neck
to keep her from falling backward, and at the same time touched her with
the spurs to compel her to drop her fore feet to the ground in order to
obey the go-ahead impulse of the spurs.

“Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,” Lute began reprovingly.

But, to her surprise, the mare threw her head down, arched her back as
she went up in the air, and, returning, struck the ground stiff-legged
and bunched.

“A genuine buck!” Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
rising under him in a second buck.

Lute looked on, astounded at the unprecedented conduct of her mare, and
admiring her lover’s horsemanship. He was quite cool, and was himself
evidently enjoying the performance. Again and again, half a dozen times,
Dolly arched herself into the air and struck, stiffly bunched. Then she
threw her head straight up and rose on her hind legs, pivoting about and
striking with her fore feet. Lute whirled into safety the horse she was
riding, and as she did so caught a glimpse of Dolly’s eyes, with the
look in them of blind brute madness, bulging until it seemed they must
burst from her head. The faint pink in the white of the eyes was gone,
replaced by a white that was like dull marble and that yet flashed as
from some inner fire.

A faint cry of fear, suppressed in the instant of utterance, slipped
past Lute’s lips. One hind leg of the mare seemed to collapse, and for a
moment the whole quivering body, upreared and perpendicular, swayed back
and forth, and there was uncertainty as to whether it would fall forward
or backward. The man, half-slipping sidewise from the saddle, so as to
fall clear if the mare toppled backward, threw his weight to the front
and alongside her neck. This overcame the dangerous teetering balance,
and the mare struck the ground on her feet again.

But there was no let-up. Dolly straightened out so that the line of the
face was almost a continuation of the line of the stretched neck;
this position enabled her to master the bit, which she did by bolting
straight ahead down the road.

For the first time Lute became really frightened. She spurred Washoe Ban
in pursuit, but he could not hold his own with the mad mare, and dropped
gradually behind. Lute saw Dolly check and rear in the air again, and
caught up just as the mare made a second bolt. As Dolly dashed around a
bend, she stopped suddenly, stiff-legged. Lute saw her lover torn out of
the saddle, his thigh-grip broken by the sudden jerk. Though he had lost
his seat, he had not been thrown, and as the mare dashed on Lute saw him
clinging to the side of the horse, a hand in the mane and a leg across
the saddle. With a quick cavort he regained his seat and proceeded to
fight with the mare for control.

But Dolly swerved from the road and dashed down a grassy slope yellowed
with innumerable mariposa lilies. An ancient fence at the bottom was
no obstacle. She burst through as though it were filmy spider-web and
disappeared in the underbrush. Lute followed unhesitatingly, putting Ban
through the gap in the fence and plunging on into the thicket. She lay
along his neck, closely, to escape the ripping and tearing of the trees
and vines. She felt the horse drop down through leafy branches and into
the cool gravel of a stream’s bottom. From ahead came a splashing of
water, and she caught a glimpse of Dolly, dashing up the small bank and
into a clump of scrub-oaks, against the trunks of which she was trying
to scrape off her rider.

Lute almost caught up amongst the trees, but was hopelessly outdistanced
on the fallow field adjoining, across which the mare tore with a fine
disregard for heavy ground and gopher-holes. When she turned at a sharp
angle into the thicket-land beyond, Lute took the long diagonal, skirted
the ticket, and reined in Ban at the other side. She had arrived first.
From within the thicket she could hear a tremendous crashing of brush
and branches. Then the mare burst through and into the open, falling
to her knees, exhausted, on the soft earth. She arose and staggered
forward, then came limply to a halt. She was in lather-sweat of fear,
and stood trembling pitiably.

Chris was still on her back. His shirt was in ribbons. The backs of his
hands were bruised and lacerated, while his face was streaming blood
from a gash near the temple. Lute had controlled herself well, but now
she was aware of a quick nausea and a trembling of weakness.

“Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
sighed, “Thank God.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” he cried to her, putting into his voice all the
heartiness he could command, which was not much, for he had himself been
under no mean nervous strain.

He showed the reaction he was undergoing, when he swung down out of
the saddle. He began with a brave muscular display as he lifted his
leg over, but ended, on his feet, leaning against the limp Dolly for
support. Lute flashed out of her saddle, and her arms were about him in
an embrace of thankfulness.

“I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.

They left the horses standing untethered, and she led her lover into the
cool recesses of the thicket to where crystal water bubbled from out the
base of the mountain.

“What was that you said about Dolly’s never cutting up?” he asked, when
the blood had been stanched and his nerves and pulse-beats were normal
again.

“I am stunned,” Lute answered. “I cannot understand it. She never did
anything like it in all her life. And all animals like you so—it’s not
because of that. Why, she is a child’s horse. I was only a little girl
when I first rode her, and to this day—”

“Well, this day she was everything but a child’s horse,” Chris broke in.
“She was a devil. She tried to scrape me off against the trees, and to
batter my brains out against the limbs. She tried all the lowest and
narrowest places she could find. You should have seen her squeeze
through. And did you see those bucks?”

Lute nodded.

“Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”

“But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never
known to buck—never.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps,
long-lapsed and come to life again.”

The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she
said.

They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a
rigid examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth,
body—everything was as it should be. The saddle and saddle-cloth were
innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken. They
searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, but found
nothing.

“Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.

“Obsession,” Lute suggested.

They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century
products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in
the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where
superstition begins.

“An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I
should be so punished?”

“You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined. “It is more likely
some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done. You were a mere
accident. I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or
anybody.”

As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
it.

“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.

“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”

“No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what
has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”

But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and
halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the
aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.

“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has
happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.

It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of
towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down,
broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main
camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was
the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh
whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed
to keep the sun away.

“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had
returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and
that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew,
but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could
hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you,
nor know how it went with you.”

“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive
pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.

She turned her face up to his and met his lips.

“Good night,” she said.

“Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
among the shadows.

    *       *       *

“Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.

Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.

“We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.

“Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no
time.”

She shook her head.

“Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.

“Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.

“I don’t know,” came the voice. “I think Robert took him along
somewhere—horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what. There’s
really nobody left but Chris and you. Besides, it will give you an
appetite for dinner. You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day. And
Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”

“All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the
hammock.

A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses.
They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun,
and turned toward Glen Ellen. The little town slept in the sun, and the
somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long
enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.

An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along
a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into
camp.

“Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said,
as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. “Look at her.”

The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of
a quail in the thicket. Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears.
Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the
shoulder of his own horse.

“Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.

“Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not
after yesterday’s mad freak.”

“I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed. “It
is strange. My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever. I feel confident
so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her
back again. Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken. Look at that neck!
Isn’t he handsome! He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”

“I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly
betray me.”

They turned their horses out of the stream. Dolly stopped to brush a fly
from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of
the path. The space was too restricted to make him return, save with
much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on. Lute, riding behind, dwelt
with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare
neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.

Suddenly she reined in her horse. She could do nothing but look, so
brief was the duration of the happening. Beneath and above was the
almost perpendicular bank. The path itself was barely wide enough for
footing. Yet Washoe Ban, whirling and rearing at the same time, toppled
for a moment in the air and fell backward off the path.

So unexpected and so quick was it, that the man was involved in the
fall. There had been no time for him to throw himself to the path. He
was falling ere he knew it, and he did the only thing possible—slipped
the stirrups and threw his body into the air, to the side, and at the
same time down. It was twelve feet to the rocks below. He maintained an
upright position, his head up and his eyes fixed on the horse above him
and falling upon him.

Chris struck like a cat, on his feet, on the instant making a leap
to the side. The next instant Ban crashed down beside him. The animal
struggled little, but sounded the terrible cry that horses sometimes
sound when they have received mortal hurt. He had struck almost squarely
on his back, and in that position he remained, his head twisted partly
under, his hind legs relaxed and motionless, his fore legs futilely
striking the air.

Chris looked up reassuringly.

“I am getting used to it,” Lute smiled down to him. “Of course I need
not ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?”

He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths
of the saddle and getting the head straightened out.

“I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at
the time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”

She shuddered.

“Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at
the end of Ban’s usefulness.” He started around to come up by the path.
“I’ve been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.”

At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.

“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”

The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s
eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute’s eyes as they met
his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was
firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.

“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no
warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”

“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He
whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it
yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”

“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was
going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”

“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all
done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not
even your unconscious hand.”

“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”

He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.

Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable
end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris
coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.

“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.

The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.

“How do you do it?”

“Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears, sir.
And where the lines cross—”

“That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at the
second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”

    *       *       *

“Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
dinner. You are wanted immediately.”

Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
glowing fire.

“You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.

Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it
to Uncle Robert to-morrow.”

“But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause,
slipping her hand into his.

“He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him
myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him,
every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was
impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no
fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it
over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly,
nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon
it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it
took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.

“It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a
trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me.
Yet he did not hate me. He loved me ... as much as it is possible for a
horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you
can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”

“But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely
coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”

“That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But
why am I wanted urgently?”

“Planchette.”

“Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
when it was all the rage long ago.”

“So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her
favorite phantom, it seems.”

“A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black
eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s
magnetism.”

“Positively uncanny ... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She
gives me the creeps.”

“Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will
notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never
has the creeps. It gives the creeps. That’s its function. Where did you
people pick her up, anyway?”

“I don’t know—yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I
think—oh, I don’t know. At any rate, Mrs. Grantly came to California,
and of course had to visit Aunt Mildred. You know the open house we
keep.”

They halted where a passageway between two great redwood trunks gave
entrance to the dining room. Above, through lacing boughs, could be seen
the stars. Candles lighted the tree-columned space. About the table,
examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris’s gaze
roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused
for a moment on Lute’s Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe
middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He
passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and
halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray
temples belied the youthful solidity of his face.

“Who’s that?” Chris whispered.

“A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That’s why you didn’t see him at
dinner. He’s only a capitalist—water-power-long-distance-electricity
transmitter, or something like that.”

“Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”

“He can’t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it
and hire other men’s brains. He is very conservative.”

“That is to be expected,” was Chris’s comment. His gaze went back to the
man and woman who had been father and mother to the girl beside him. “Do
you know,” he said, “it came to me with a shock yesterday when you told
me that they had turned against me and that I was scarcely tolerated. I
met them afterwards, last evening, guiltily, in fear and trembling—and
to-day, too. And yet I could see no difference from of old.”

“Dear man,” Lute sighed. “Hospitality is as natural to them as the act
of breathing. But it isn’t that, after all. It is all genuine in their
dear hearts. No matter how severe the censure they put upon you when
you are absent, the moment they are with you they soften and are all
kindness and warmth. As soon as their eyes rest on you, affection and
love come bubbling up. You are so made. Every animal likes you.
All people like you. They can’t help it. You can’t help it. You are
universally lovable, and the best of it is that you don’t know it. You
don’t know it now. Even as I tell it to you, you don’t realize it, you
won’t realize it—and that very incapacity to realize it is one of the
reasons why you are so loved. You are incredulous now, and you shake
your head; but I know, who am your slave, as all people know, for they
likewise are your slaves.

“Why, in a minute we shall go in and join them. Mark the affection,
almost maternal, that will well up in Aunt Mildred’s eyes. Listen to the
tones of Uncle Robert’s voice when he says, ‘Well, Chris, my boy?’ Watch
Mrs. Grantly melt, literally melt, like a dewdrop in the sun.

“Take Mr. Barton, there. You have never seen him before. Why, you will
invite him out to smoke a cigar with you when the rest of us have gone
to bed—you, a mere nobody, and he a man of many millions, a man of
power, a man obtuse and stupid like the ox; and he will follow you
about, smoking; the cigar, like a little dog, your little dog, trotting
at your back. He will not know he is doing it, but he will be doing it
just the same. Don’t I know, Chris? Oh, I have watched you, watched you,
so often, and loved you for it, and loved you again for it, because you
were so delightfully and blindly unaware of what you were doing.”

“I’m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,” he laughed,
passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.

“Yes,” she whispered, “and in this very moment, when you are laughing at
all that I have said, you, the feel of you, your soul,—call it what you
will, it is you,—is calling for all the love that is in me.”

She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.

Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.

“Come, let us begin,” she said. “It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
are those children?”

“Here we are,” Lute called out, disengaging herself.

“Now for a bundle of creeps,” Chris whispered, as they started in.

Lute’s prophecy of the manner in which her lover would be received
was realized. Mrs. Grantly, unreal, unhealthy, scintillant with frigid
magnetism, warmed and melted as though of truth she were dew and he sun.
Mr. Barton beamed broadly upon him, and was colossally gracious. Aunt
Mildred greeted him with a glow of fondness and motherly kindness, while
Uncle Robert genially and heartily demanded, “Well, Chris, my boy, and
what of the riding?”

But Aunt Mildred drew her shawl more closely around her and hastened
them to the business in hand. On the table was a sheet of paper. On the
paper, rifling on three supports, was a small triangular board. Two of
the supports were easily moving casters. The third support, placed at
the apex of the triangle, was a lead pencil.

“Who’s first?” Uncle Robert demanded.

There was a moment’s hesitancy, then Aunt Mildred placed her hand on the
board, and said: “Some one has always to be the fool for the delectation
of the rest.”

“Brave woman,” applauded her husband. “Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your
worst.”

“I?” that lady queried. “I do nothing. The power, or whatever you care
to think it, is outside of me, as it is outside of all of you. As to
what that power is, I will not dare to say. There is such a power. I
have had evidences of it. And you will undoubtedly have evidences of
it. Now please be quiet, everybody. Touch the board very lightly, but
firmly, Mrs. Story; but do nothing of your own volition.”

Aunt Mildred nodded, and stood with her hand on Planchette; while the
rest formed about her in a silent and expectant circle. But nothing
happened. The minutes ticked away, and Planchette remained motionless.

“Be patient,” Mrs. Grantly counselled. “Do not struggle against any
influences you may feel working on you. But do not do anything yourself.
The influence will take care of that. You will feel impelled to do
things, and such impulses will be practically irresistible.”

“I wish the influence would hurry up,” Aunt Mildred protested at the end
of five motionless minutes.

“Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,” Mrs. Grantly
said soothingly.

Suddenly Aunt Mildred’s hand began to twitch into movement. A mild
concern showed in her face as she observed the movement of her hand and
heard the scratching of the pencil-point at the apex of Planchette.

For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:

“I don’t know whether I did it myself or not. I do know that I was
growing nervous, standing there like a psychic fool with all your solemn
faces turned upon me.”

“Hen-scratches,” was Uncle Robert’s judgement, when he looked over the
paper upon which she had scrawled.

“Quite illegible,” was Mrs. Grantly’s dictum. “It does not resemble
writing at all. The influences have not got to working yet. Do you try
it, Mr. Barton.”

That gentleman stepped forward, ponderously willing to please, and
placed his hand on the board. And for ten solid, stolid minutes he stood
there, motionless, like a statue, the frozen personification of the
commercial age. Uncle Robert’s face began to work. He blinked, stiffened
his mouth, uttered suppressed, throaty sounds, deep down; finally he
snorted, lost his self-control, and broke out in a roar of laughter.
All joined in this merriment, including Mrs. Grantly. Mr. Barton laughed
with them, but he was vaguely nettled.

“You try it, Story,” he said.

Uncle Robert, still laughing, and urged on by Lute and his wife, took
the board. Suddenly his face sobered. His hand had begun to move, and
the pencil could be heard scratching across the paper.

“By George!” he muttered. “That’s curious. Look at it. I’m not doing it.
I know I’m not doing it. Look at that hand go! Just look at it!”

“Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.

“I tell you I’m not doing it,” he replied indignantly. “The force has
got hold of me. Ask Mrs. Grantly. Tell her to make it stop, if you want
it to stop. I can’t stop it. By George! look at that flourish. I didn’t
do that. I never wrote a flourish in my life.”

“Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of
levity does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”

“There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
away. “Now let’s see.”

He bent over and adjusted his glasses. “It’s handwriting at any rate,
and that’s better than the rest of you did. Here, Lute, your eyes are
young.”

“Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And
look there, there are two different handwritings.”

She began to read: “This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this
sentence: ‘I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.’
Then follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and
harmony will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul—The other
writing breaks right in. This is the way it goes: Bullfrog 95, Dixie 16,
Golden Anchor 65, Gold Mountain 13, Jim Butler 70, Jumbo 75, North Star
42, Rescue 7, Black Butte 75, Brown Hope 16, Iron Top 3.”

“Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.

“Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.

“No, I’ve not,” he denied. “I only read the quotations. But how the
devil—I beg your pardon—they got there on that piece of paper I’d like
to know.”

“Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in
to-day’s paper.”

“No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”

“A day or a year is all the same in the subconscious mind,” said Mrs.
Grantly. “The subconscious mind never forgets. But I am not saying that
this is due to the subconscious mind. I refuse to state to what I think
it is due.”

“But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like
what I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”

“Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”

“Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.

“This puts you in touch with the mightier spirits,” Lute read. “You
shall become one with us, and your name shall be ‘Arya,’ and you
shall—Conqueror 20, Empire 12, Columbia Mountain 18, Midway 140—and,
and that is all. Oh, no! here’s a last flourish, Arya, from Kandor—that
must surely be the Mahatma.”

“I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.

Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a
message intended for some one else.”

“Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual
wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”

“It IS nonsense,” Mrs. Grantly said. “I never knew Planchette to behave
so outrageously. There are disturbing influences at work. I felt them
from the first. Perhaps it is because you are all making too much fun of
it. You are too hilarious.”

“A certain befitting gravity should grace the occasion,” Chris agreed,
placing his hand on Planchette. “Let me try. And not one of you must
laugh or giggle, or even think ‘laugh’ or ‘giggle.’ And if you dare
to snort, even once, Uncle Robert, there is no telling what occult
vengeance may be wreaked upon you.”

“I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may
I silently slip away?”

Chris nodded. His hand had already begun to work. There had been no
preliminary twitchings nor tentative essays at writing. At once his hand
had started off, and Planchette was moving swiftly and smoothly across
the paper.

“Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”

Chris betrayed disturbance at the sound of her voice, and thereafter
silence was maintained. Only could be heard the steady scratching of the
pencil. Suddenly, as though it had been stung, he jerked his hand away.
With a sigh and a yawn he stepped back from the table, then glanced with
the curiosity of a newly awakened man at their faces.

“I think I wrote something,” he said.

“I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.

“Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.

“Here it is, then. It begins with ‘beware’ written three times, and in
much larger characters than the rest of the writing. BEWARE! BEWARE!
BEWARE! Chris Dunbar, I intend to destroy you. I have already made two
attempts upon your life, and failed. I shall yet succeed. So sure am I
that I shall succeed that I dare to tell you. I do not need to tell you
why. In your own heart you know. The wrong you are doing—And here it
abruptly ends.”

Mrs. Grantly laid the paper down on the table and looked at Chris, who
had already become the centre of all eyes, and who was yawning as from
an overpowering drowsiness.

“Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.

“I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read
from the paper, which she was going over a second time.

“On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been
attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”

“Ah, my boy, you are thinking of flesh-and-blood men,” Uncle Robert
laughed. “But this is a spirit. Your life has been attempted by unseen
things. Most likely ghostly hands have tried to throttle you in your
sleep.”

“Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said
must have seized your rein!”

“But I was joking,” he objected.

“Nevertheless ...” Lute left her thought unspoken.

Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this
afternoon? Was your life in danger?”

Chris’s drowsiness had disappeared. “I’m becoming interested myself,”
 he acknowledged. “We haven’t said anything about it. Ban broke his back
this afternoon. He threw himself off the bank, and I ran the risk of
being caught underneath.”

“I wonder, I wonder,” Mrs. Grantly communed aloud. “There is something
in this.... It is a warning.... Ah! You were hurt yesterday riding Miss
Story’s horse! That makes the two attempts!”

She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.

“Nonsense,” laughed Uncle Robert, but with a slight hint of irritation
in his manner. “Such things do not happen these days. This is the
twentieth century, my dear madam. The thing, at the very latest, smacks
of mediaevalism.”

“I have had such wonderful tests with Planchette,” Mrs. Grantly began,
then broke off suddenly to go to the table and place her hand on the
board.

“Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”

The board immediately began to write. By this time all heads, with the
exception of Mr. Barton’s, were bent over the table and following the
pencil.

“It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
voice.

Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.

“It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”

“‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”

“By Jove, that’s remarkable!” Mr. Barton broke in. “The handwriting in
both instances is the same. Clever, I should say, really clever,” he
added admiringly.

“Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
“Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”

“But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”

“Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert
answered.

“He was Lute’s father,” Aunt Mildred supplemented. “Lute took our name.
She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my
brother.”

“Remarkable, most remarkable.” Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message
in her mind. “There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar’s life. The
subconscious mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the
accident to-day.”

“I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The
explanation is simple.”

“But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what
Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”

Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.

“Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”

She looked at him for verification.

He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”

But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and
the air was filled with phrases,—“psychic phenomena,” “self-hypnotism,”
 “residuum of unexplained truth,” and “spiritism,”—she was reviving
mentally the girlhood pictures she had conjured of this soldier-father
she had never seen. She possessed his sword, there were several
old-fashioned daguerreotypes, there was much that had been said of him,
stories told of him—and all this had constituted the material out of
which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.

“There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to
another mind,” Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute’s mind was
trooping her father on his great roan war-horse. Now he was leading
his men. She saw him on lonely scouts, or in the midst of the yelling
Indians at Salt Meadows, when of his command he returned with one man
in ten. And in the picture she had of him, in the physical semblance she
had made of him, was reflected his spiritual nature, reflected by her
worshipful artistry in form and feature and expression—his bravery,
his quick temper, his impulsive championship, his madness of wrath in
a righteous cause, his warm generosity and swift forgiveness, and his
chivalry that epitomized codes and ideals primitive as the days of
knighthood. And first, last, and always, dominating all, she saw in the
face of him the hot passion and quickness of deed that had earned for
him the name “Fighting Dick Curtis.”

“Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss
Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”

“No, no, I beg of you,” Aunt Mildred interposed. “It is too uncanny.
It surely is wrong to tamper with the dead. Besides, I am nervous. Or,
better, let me go to bed, leaving you to go on with your experiments.
That will be the best way, and you can tell me in the morning.” Mingled
with the “Good-nights,” were half-hearted protests from Mrs. Grantly, as
Aunt Mildred withdrew.

“Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my
tent.”

“It would be a shame to give it up now,” Mrs. Grantly said. “There is no
telling what we are on the verge of. Won’t you try it, Miss Story?”

Lute obeyed, but when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious
of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She
was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said,
was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that
arose in her—man’s inheritance from the wild and howling ages when
his hairy, apelike prototype was afraid of the dark and personified the
elements into things of fear.

But as the mysterious influence seized her hand and sent it meriting
across the paper, all the unusual passed out of the situation and she
was unaware of more than a feeble curiosity. For she was intent on
another visioning—this time of her mother, who was also unremembered
in the flesh. Not sharp and vivid like that of her father, but dim and
nebulous was the picture she shaped of her mother—a saint’s head in an
aureole of sweetness and goodness and meekness, and withal, shot
through with a hint of reposeful determination, of will, stubborn and
unobtrusive, that in life had expressed itself mainly in resignation.

Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
message that had been written.

“It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it
is signed. Who is Martha?”

Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does
she say?”

She had not been made sleepy, as Chris had; but the keen edge of her
vitality had been blunted, and she was experiencing a sweet and pleasing
lassitude. And while the message was being read, in her eyes persisted
the vision of her mother.

“Dear child,” Mrs. Grantly read, “do not mind him. He was ever quick of
speech and rash. Be no niggard with your love. Love cannot hurt you.
To deny love is to sin. Obey your heart and you can do no wrong. Obey
worldly considerations, obey pride, obey those that prompt you against
your heart’s prompting, and you do sin. Do not mind your father. He is
angry now, as was his way in the earth-life; but he will come to see
the wisdom of my counsel, for this, too, was his way in the earth-life.
Love, my child, and love well.—Martha.”

“Let me see it,” Lute cried, seizing the paper and devouring the
handwriting with her eyes. She was thrilling with unexpressed love for
the mother she had never seen, and this written speech from the grave
seemed to give more tangibility to her having ever existed, than did the
vision of her.

“This IS remarkable,” Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. “There was never
anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here
with us to-night.”

Lute shivered. The lassitude was gone, and she was her natural self
again, vibrant with the instinctive fear of things unseen. And it
was offensive to her mind that, real or illusion, the presence or the
memorized existences of her father and mother should be touched by these
two persons who were practically strangers—Mrs. Grantly, unhealthy and
morbid, and Mr. Barton, stolid and stupid with a grossness both of
the flesh and the spirit. And it further seemed a trespass that these
strangers should thus enter into the intimacy between her and Chris.

She could hear the steps of her uncle approaching, and the situation
flashed upon her, luminous and clear. She hurriedly folded the sheet of
paper and thrust it into her bosom.

“Don’t say anything to him about this second message, Mrs. Grantly,
please, and Mr. Barton. Nor to Aunt Mildred. It would only cause them
irritation and needless anxiety.”

In her mind there was also the desire to protect her lover, for she knew
that the strain of his present standing with her aunt and uncle would
be added to, unconsciously in their minds, by the weird message of
Planchette.

“And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued
hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”

“‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting
when Uncle Robert strode into the circle.

“Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”

“Too late,” Lute answered lightly. “No more stock quotations for you.
Planchette is adjourned, and we’re just winding up the discussion of the
theory of it. Do you know how late it is?”

    *       *       *

“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”

“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.

Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”

“Why, yes.”

“And a smoke?”

“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”

Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do.
Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had
come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with
you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you
are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut.
The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished
the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”

“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”

“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”

“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”

Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”

“He is a beauty,” Chris said.

But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
eyes.

“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the
perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines—why, what’s the
matter?”

“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really,
I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”

He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
eyes.

“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I
see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the
heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered
together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and
the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of
golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all
this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a
horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”

“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.

“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who
are always so abominably and adorably well!”

“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I
know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I
am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps
it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages
of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how,
reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the
correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted
your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice
been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I
say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in
it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the
unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too
subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and
formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very
doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too
much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and
that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward
superstition.

“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon
the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is
sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me,
constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in
the throes of it, before one awakes.”

“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled.
“It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace
more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of
Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and
Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is.
Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile,
and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house
afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked.
‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t
see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de
chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage
garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd
as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’
worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”

“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her
appreciation.

“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.

“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert
recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”

“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe
such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not
distant future.”

“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from
Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining
room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”

Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”

Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.

“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the
table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has
gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed
her hand on the board. “Now begin.”

For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she
hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her
hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message,
word by word, as it was written:

There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out
of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is
beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart,
my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then
laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have
faith in your lover.—Martha.

“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris
cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your
subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”

“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.

“And that?”

“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It
is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a
generation ago.”

“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
message from the dead?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”

“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he
is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I
laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of
the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!

“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on
Planchette.

On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
suddenness of it. The message was brief:

BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!

He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. “It is like a miracle play.
Death we have, speaking to us from the grave. But Good Deeds, where art
thou? And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all
the goodly company?”

But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her
face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.

“Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the
quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I
am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is
my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the
mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it.
There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my
father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to
protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”

“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly. “Listen to me. It is all a lark. We
are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena
which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young
a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might
say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated.
This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we
should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we
do not know, that is all. As for Planchette—”

He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had
placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been
seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the
paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.

“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was
completed. “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in
the flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”

She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just
punishment that is yours!”

“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his
hands at your throat. I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but
for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth;
I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it
all directed against you.”

She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.

“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said. “I didn’t think it would
affect you so strongly. But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly
a bit of suggestion thrown in—that and nothing more. And the whole
strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for
striking phenomena.”

“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path
they had run down. “What we are to do, I don’t know. Are we to go on, as
we have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?”

He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and
aunt.”

“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.

“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you. I have
no right to tell them more than I have told you.”

This time it was she that debated. “No, don’t tell them,” she said
finally. “They wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand, for that matter,
but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not
capable of this same implicit faith. You raise up before me a mystery
that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not
believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the
mystery. Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”

“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his
breath. “And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain
away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”

She caught her breath with a quick gasp. “It is like a bereavement to
hear you speak of going away and remaining away. I should never see you
again. It is too terrible. And do not reproach yourself for weakness.
It is I who am to blame. It is I who prevented you from remaining away
before, I know. I wanted you so. I want you so.

“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on
with it and let it work itself out somehow. That is one thing we are
sure of: it will work out somehow.”

“But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.

“I am happier when you are here.”

“The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.

“Go or stay—that will be part of the working out. But I do not want you
to go, Chris; you know that. And now no more about it. Talk cannot mend
it. Let us never mention it again—unless ... unless some time, some
wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: ‘Lute, all is well
with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.’ Until that time let
us bury it, along with Planchette and all the rest, and make the most of
the little that is given us.

“And now, to show you how prepared I am to make the most of that little,
I am even ready to go with you this afternoon to see the horse—though
I wish you wouldn’t ride any more ... for a few days, anyway, or for a
week. What did you say was his name?”

“Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”

    *       *       *

Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of
stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing
tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush,
the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy
descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched
up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of
rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green
foliage, of the golden brown of Lute’s corduroy riding-habit and of the
bay horse that moved beneath her.

She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied
lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the
slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath,
the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked
accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.

“It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him
down it.”

The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing,
irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore
legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness,
extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding
earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing
at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a
quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires
that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the
slide.

“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.

“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back,
as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of
rubble and into the trees again.

Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional
glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the
steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim
of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to
study the crossing.

Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of
the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from
the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gravel. A giant
boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain
it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully,
and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her
mind.

Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
meditated.

“Don’t tackle it,” he called.

“I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.

“He can’t make that side-jump to the gravel,” Chris warned. “He’ll
never keep his legs. He’ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a
thousand could do that stunt.”

“And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”

She gave the animal his head, and he leaped cleanly and accurately to
the ledge, striking with feet close together on the narrow space. On
the instant he struck, Lute lightly touched his neck with the rein,
impelling him to the left; and in that instant, tottering on the
insecure footing, with front feet slipping over into the pool beyond,
he lifted on his hind legs, with a half turn, sprang to the left, and
dropped squarely down to the tiny gravel bed. An easy jump brought him
across the stream, and Lute angled him up the bank and halted before her
lover.

“Well?” she asked.

“I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”

“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I
could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a
horse’s feet.”

“His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it
is impossible to get him down.”

“Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his
mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in
them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s
quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it!
You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic,
but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second
refusal.”

Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
the two horses.

“Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded
regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the
horse that is under the coat!”

Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:

“We won’t go straight back to camp.”

“You forget dinner,” he warned.

“But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to
the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”

“But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave,
what of our late-comings.”

“Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook,
but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”

They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the
Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley.
But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the
bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and
crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode
through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to
emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry
and cracked under the sun.

On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before
them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the
mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in
impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was
an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts
of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes. The
sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum
of mountain bees.

The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking
down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he
saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of
falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses.

“Look!” he cried.

Lute leaned well out from her horse to see. Beneath them the water slid
foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear—a
pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever
remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway
as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space
and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far
below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret
pool.

They had flashed past. The descending water became a distant murmur that
merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased. Swayed by a common
impulse, they looked at each other.

“Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive ... and to have you here by my side!”

He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.

All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch—the movement of
their bodies, at one with the moving bodies of the animals beneath them;
the gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with
the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing
over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing
them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world,
more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight
that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible
yet communicable by the flash of an eye and the dissolving of the veils
of the soul.

So looked they at each other, the horses bounding beneath them, the
spring of the world and the spring of their youth astir in their blood,
the secret of being trembling in their eyes to the brink of disclosure,
as if about to dispel, with one magic word, all the irks and riddles of
existence.

The road curved before them, so that the upper reaches of the canyon
could be seen, the distant bed of it towering high above their heads.
They were rounding the curve, leaning toward the inside, gazing before
them at the swift-growing picture. There was no sound of warning. She
heard nothing, but even before the horse went down she experienced
the feeling that the unison of the two leaping animals was broken. She
turned her head, and so quickly that she saw Comanche fall. It was not a
stumble nor a trip. He fell as though, abruptly, in midleap, he had died
or been struck a stunning blow.

And in that moment she remembered Planchette; it seared her brain as
a lightning-flash of all-embracing memory. Her horse was back on its
haunches, the weight of her body on the reins; but her head was turned
and her eyes were on the falling Comanche. He struck the road-bed
squarely, with his legs loose and lifeless beneath him.

It all occurred in one of those age-long seconds that embrace an
eternity of happening. There was a slight but perceptible rebound from
the impact of Comanche’s body with the earth. The violence with which
he struck forced the air from his great lungs in an audible groan. His
momentum swept him onward and over the edge. The weight of the rider on
his neck turned him over head first as he pitched to the fall.

She was off her horse, she knew not how, and to the edge. Her lover was
out of the saddle and clear of Comanche, though held to the animal by
his right foot, which was caught in the stirrup. The slope was too steep
for them to come to a stop. Earth and small stones, dislodged by their
struggles, were rolling down with them and before them in a miniature
avalanche. She stood very quietly, holding one hand against her heart
and gazing down. But while she saw the real happening, in her eyes was
also the vision of her father dealing the spectral blow that had smashed
Comanche down in mid-leap and sent horse and rider hurtling over the
edge.

Beneath horse and man the steep terminated in an up-and-down wall, from
the base of which, in turn, a second slope ran down to a second wall.
A third slope terminated in a final wall that based itself on the
canyon-bed four hundred feet beneath the point where the girl stood and
watched. She could see Chris vainly kicking his leg to free the foot
from the trap of the stirrup. Comanche fetched up hard against an
outputting point of rock. For a fraction of a second his fall was
stopped, and in the slight interval the man managed to grip hold of a
young shoot of manzanita. Lute saw him complete the grip with his other
hand. Then Comanche’s fall began again. She saw the stirrup-strap draw
taut, then her lover’s body and arms. The manzanita shoot yielded its
roots, and horse and man plunged over the edge and out of sight.

They came into view on the next slope, together and rolling over and
over, with sometimes the man under and sometimes the horse. Chris no
longer struggled, and together they dashed over to the third slope. Near
the edge of the final wall, Comanche lodged on a buttock of stone. He
lay quietly, and near him, still attached to him by the stirrup, face
downward, lay his rider.

“If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
the means of rescue.

But she saw Comanche begin to struggle again, and clear on her vision,
it seemed, was the spectral arm of her father clutching the reins and
dragging the animal over. Comanche floundered across the hummock, the
inert body following, and together, horse and man, they plunged from
sight. They did not appear again. They had fetched bottom.

Lute looked about her. She stood alone on the world. Her lover was gone.
There was naught to show of his existence, save the marks of Comanche’s
hoofs on the road and of his body where it had slid over the brink.

“Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.

Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees
and of running water.

“Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust
of the road.

She felt the touch of Dolly’s muzzle on her arm, and she leaned her head
against the mare’s neck and waited. She knew not why she waited, nor for
what, only there seemed nothing else but waiting left for her to do.




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