"A merciful man, Powhatan, is merciful to——"

"Yes, deah; Oh, I had the hoss in mind too; indeed I had! Do you know, my deah, I can tend to business betteh when I have ow son along? I'm gett'n' to feel like as if I'd left myself behind when he's not with me."

"You've always been so, Judge March." Her smile was sad. "Oh! no, I mustn't advise. Take him along if you're determined to."



XII.

JOHN THINKS HE IS NOT AFRAID

"Son," said the father as they rode, "I reckon you've often wondered why, owning ow hund'ed thousand an' sixty acres, we should appeah so sawt o' reduced; haven't you?"

"Sir?"

The father repeated the question, and John said, dreamily:

"No, sir."

"Well, son, I'll tell you, though I'd rather you'd not mention it—in school, faw instance—if we can eveh raise money to send you to school.

"It's because, in a sense, we a-got so much lan'. Many's the time I could a-sole pahts of it, an' refused, only because that particulah sale wouldn't a-met the object fo' which the whole tract has always been held. It was yo' dear grandfather's ambition, an' his father's befo' him, to fill these lan's with a great population, p'osp'ous an' happy. We neveh sole an acre, but we neveh hel' one back in a spirit o' lan' speculation, you understan'?"

"Sir?—I—yes, sir."

"The plan wa'n't adapted to a slave State. I see that now. I don't say slavery was wrong, but slave an' free labor couldn't thrive side by side. But, now, son, you know, all labor's free an' the time's come faw a change.

"You see, son, that's where Gen'l Halliday's village projec' is bad. His villages are boun' han' an' foot to cotton fahmin' an' can't bring forth the higher industries; but now, without concealin' anything fum him or anybody—of co'se we don't want to do that—if we can get enough of his best village residenters fum Leggettstown an' Libbetyville to come up an' take lan' in Widewood—faw we can give it to 'em an' gain by it, you know; an' a site or two faw a church aw school—why, then, you know, when capitalists come up an' look at ow minin' lan's—why, first thing you know, we'll have mines an' mills an' sto'es ev'y which away!"

They met and passed three horsemen armed to the teeth and very tipsy.

"Why, if to-morrow ain't election-day ag'in! Why, I quite fo'gotten that!"

At the edge of the town two more armed riders met them.

"Judge March, good mawnin', seh." All stopped. "Goin' to Suez?"

"We goin' on through into Blackland."

"I don't think you can, seh. Our pickets hold Swanee River bridge. Yes, sah, ow pickets. Why ow pickets, they're there. 'Twould be strange if they wa'n't—three hund'ed Blackland county niggehs marchin' on the town to burn it."

"Is that really the news?"

"That's the latest, seh. We after reinfo'cements." They moved on.

Judge March rode slowly toward Suez. John rode beside him. In a moment the Judge halted again, lifted his head, and listened. A long cheer floated to them, attenuated by the distance.

"I thought it was a charge, but I reckon it's on'y a meet'n of ow people in the square." He glanced at his son, who was listening, ashy pale.

"Son, we ain't goin' into town. I'm going, but you needn't. You can ride back a piece an' wait faw me; aw faw further news which'll show you what to do. On'y don't in any case come into town. This ain't yo' fight, son, an' you no need to get mixed in with it. You hear, son?"

"I"—the lad tried twice before he could speak—"I want to go with you."

"Why, no, son, you no need to go. You ain't fitt'n' to go. Yo' too young. You a-trembling now fum head to foot. Ain't you got a chill?"

"N-no, sir." The boy shivered visibly. "I've got a pain in my side, but it don't—don't hurt. I want to go with you."

"But, son, there's goin' to be fight'n'. I'm goin' to try to p'vent it, but I shan't be able to. Why, if you was to get hurt, who'd eveh tell yo' po' deah mother? I couldn't. I jest couldn't! You betteh go 'long home, son."

"I c-c-can't do it, father."

"Why, air you that sick, son?"

"No, sir, but I don't feel well enough to go home—Father—I—I—t-t-told—I told—an awful lie, one time, about you, and——"

"Why, son!"

"Yes, sir. I've been tryin' for seven years to—k—own up, and——"

"Sev—O Law, son, I don't believe you eveh done it at all. You neveh so much as told a fib in yo' life. You jest imagine you done it."

"Yes, I have father, often. I can't explain now, but please lemme go with you."

"Why, son, I jest can't. Lawd knows I would if I could."

"Yes, you can, father, I won't be in the way. And I won't be af-raid. You don't think I would eveh be a-scared of a nigger, do you? But if the niggers should kill you, and me not there, I wouldn't ever be any account no more! I haven't ever been any yet, but I will be, father, if you'll——"

Three pistol shots came from the town, and two townward-bound horsemen broke their trot and passed at a gallop. "Come on, Judge," laughed one.

"I declare, son, I don't know what toe do. You betteh go 'long back."

"Oh, father, don't send me back! Lemme go 'long with you. Please don't send me back! I couldn't go. I'd just haf to turn round again an' follow you. Lemme go with you, father. I want to go 'long with you. Oh—thank you, sir!" They trotted down into the town. "D' you reckon C'nelius 'll be there, father?—I—hope he will." The pallor was gone.

As the turnpike became a tree-shaded street, they passed briskly by its old-fashioned houses set deep in grove gardens. Two or three weedy lanes at right and left showed the poor cabins of the town's darker life shut and silent. But presently,

"Father, look there!"

The Judge and his son turned quickly to a turfy bank where a ragged negro lay at the base of a large tree. He was moaning, rocking his head, and holding a hand against his side. His rags were drenched with blood. The white eyes rolled up to the face of the Judge, as he tossed his bridle to his son.

"Wateh," whispered the big lips, "wateh."

John threw his father's bridle back, galloped through a gate, and came with a gourd full.

"Gimme quick, son, he's swoonin' away." The draught brought back some life.

"Shan't I get a doctor, father?"

"Tain't a bit of use, son."

"No," moaned the negro. "I'm gwine fasteh dan docto's kin come. I'm in de deep watehs. Gwine to meet my Lawd Jesus. Good-by, wife; good-by, chillun. Oh, Jedge March, dey shot me in pyo devilment. I was jist lookin' out fo' my boy. Dey was comin' in to town an dey sees me, an awdehs me to halt, an' 'stid o' dat I runs, thinkin' that'd suit 'em jist as well. Oh, Lawd!—Oh, Lawd! Oh!" He stared into the Judge's face, a great pain heaved him slowly, his eyes set, and all was over. A single sob burst from the boy as he gazed on the dark, dead features. The Judge hasted to mount.

"Now, son, I got to get right into town. But you see now, you betteh go along back to yo' motheh, don't you?"

"I'm goin' with you."



XIII.

FOR FANNIE

They came where two men sat on horses in the way. "Sorry, Judge, but them's orders, seh; only enrolled men can pass."

But the speakers presently concluded that it could never have been intended to shut out such a personage as Judge March, and on pledge to report to Captain Shotwell, at the Swanee Hotel, or else to Captain Champion at the court-house, father and son proceeded. Montrose Academy showed no sign of life as they went by.

Yet John had never seen the town so populous. Saddled horses were tied everywhere. Men rode here or there in the yellow dust, idly or importantly, mounted, dismounted, or stood on the broken sidewalks in groups, some sober, some not, all armed and spurred, and more arriving from all directions. Handsome Captain Shotwell, sitting in civil dress, a sword belted on him and lying across his lap, explained to the Judge.

"Why, you know, Judge, how ow young men ah; always up to some ridiculous praank, jest in mere plaay, you know, seh. Yeste'd'y some of 'em taken a boyish notion to put some maasks on an' ride through Leggettstown in 'slo-ow p'ocession, with a sawt o' banneh marked, 'SEE YOU AGAIN TO-NIGHT.' They had guns—mo' f'om fo'ce o' habit, I reckon, than anything else—you know how ow young men ah, seh—one of 'em carry a gun a yeah, an' nevah so much as hahm a floweh, you know. Well, seh, unfawtunately, the niggehs had no mo' sense than to take it all in dead earnest. They put they women an' child'en into the church an' ahmed theyse'ves, some thirty of 'em, with shotguns an' old muskets—yondeh's some of 'em in the cawneh. Then they taken up a position in the road just this side the village, an' sent to Sherman an' Libbetyville fo' reinfo'cements.

"Well, of co'se, you know, seh, what was jes' boun' to happm. Some of ow ve'y best young men mounted an' moved to dislodge an' scatteh them befo' they could gatheh numbehs enough to take the offensive an' begin they fiendish work. Well, seh, about daay-break, while sawt o' reconnoiterin' in fo'ce, they come suddenly upon the niggehs' position, an' the niggehs, without the slightes' p'ovocation, up an' fi-ud! P'ovidentially, they shot too high, an' only one man was inju'ed—by fallin' from his hawss. Well, seh, ow boys fi-ud an' cha'ged, an' the niggehs, of co'se, run, leavin' three dead an' fo' wounded; aw, accawdin' to latest accounts, seven dead an' no wounded. The niggehs taken shelteh in the church, ow boys fallen back fo' reinfo'cements, an' about a' hour by sun comes word that the niggehs, frenzied with raage an' liquo', a-comin' this way to the numbeh o' three hund'ed, an' increasin' as they come.—No, seh, I don't know that it is unfawtunate. It's just as well faw this thing to happm, an' to happm now. It'll teach both sides, as Garnet said awhile ago addressin' the crowd, that the gov'ment o' Dixie's simply got to paass, this time, away f'om a raace that can't p'eserve awdeh, an' be undividedly transfehed oveh to the raace God-A'mighty appointed to gov'n!"

Judge March's voice was full of meek distress. "Captain Shotwell, where is Major Garnet, sir?"

"Garnet? Oh, he's over in the Courier office, consultin' with Haggard an' Jeff-Jack."

"Do you know whether Gen'l Halliday's in town, sir?"

The Captain smiled. "He's in the next room, seh. He's been undeh my—p'otection, as you might say, since daylight."

"Gen'l Halliday could stop all this, Captain."

"Stop it? He could stop it in two hours, seh! If he'd just consent to go under parole to Leggettstown an' tell them niggehs that if they'll simply lay down they ahms an' stay quietly at home—jest faw a day aw two—all 'll be freely fo'givm an' fo'gotten, seh! Instead o' that, he sits there, ca'mly smilin'—you know his way—an' threatenin' us with the ahm of the United States Gov'ment. He fo'gets that by a wise p'ovision o' that Gov'ment's foundehs it's got sev'l ahms, an' one holds down anotheh. The S'preme Cote—Judge March, you go in an' see him; you jest the man to do it, seh!"

John waited without. Presently father and son were seen to leave Captain Shotwell's headquarters and cross the square to the Courier office. There a crowd was reading a bulletin which stated that scouting parties reported no negro force massed anywhere. At the top of a narrow staircase the Judge and his son were let into the presence of Major Garnet and his advisers.

Here John had one more good gaze at Ravenel. He was in the physical perfection of twenty-six, his eyes less playful than once, but his smile less cynical. His dress was faultlessly neat. Haggard was almost as noticeable, though less interesting; a slender, high-strung man, with a pale face seamed by a long scar got in a duel. One could see that he had been trying to offset the fatigues of the night with a popular remedy. Garnet was dictating, Haggard writing.

"Captains Shotwell and Champion will move their forces at once in opposite circuits—through the disturbed villages—and assure all persons—of whatever race or party—that the right of the people peaceably to bear arms—is vindicated—and that order is restored—and will be maintained." A courier waited.

"At the same time," said Ravenel, indolently, "they can ask if the rumor is true that Mr. Leggett and about ten others are going to be absent from this part of the country until after the election, and say we hope it's so."

Haggard cast a glance at Garnet, Garnet looked away, the postscript was made, and the missive sent.

"Brother March, good-morning, sir." The Major kept the Judge's hand as they moved aside. But presently the whole room could hear—"Why, Brother March, the trouble's all over!—Oh, of course, if Halliday feels any real need to confer with us he can do so; we'll be right here.—Oh—Haggard!"

The editor, in the doorway, said he would be back, and went out. He was evidently avoiding Halliday. Judge March felt belittled and began to go.

"If you're bound for home, Brother March, I'll be riding that way myself, presently. You see, in a few minutes Suez'll be as quiet as it ever was, and I sent word to General Halliday just before you came in, that no one designs, or has designed, to abridge any personal liberty of his he may think safe to exercise." The speaker suddenly ceased.

Both men stood hearkening. Loud words came up the stairs.

"Your son stepped down into the street, Judge," said Ravenel. The next instant the three rushed out and down the stairway.

John had gone down to see the two armed bands move off. They had been gone but a few minutes when he noticed General Halliday, finely mounted, come from a stable behind the hotel and trot smartly toward him. The few store-keepers left in town stared in contemptuous expectation, but to John this was Fannie's father, and the boy longed for something to occur which might enable him to serve that father in a signal way and so make her forever tenderly grateful. The telegraph office was up these same stairs on the other side of the landing opposite the Courier office; most likely the General was going to send despatches. John's gaze followed the gallant figure till it disappeared in the doorway at the foot of the staircase.

Near the bottom the General and the editor met and passed. The editor stopped and cursed the General. "You jostled me purposely, sir!"

Halliday turned and smiled. "Jim Haggard, why should you shove me and then lie about it? can't you pick a fight for the truth?"

"Don't speak to me, you white nigger! Are you armed?"

"Yes!"

"Then, Launcelot Halliday," yelled the editor, backing out upon the sidewalk and drawing his repeater, "I denounce you as a traitor, a poltroon, and a coward!" Men darted away, dodged, peeped, and cried—

"Look out! Don't shoot!" But John ran forward to the rescue.

"Put that thing up!" he called to the editor, in boyish treble. "Put it up!"

"Jim Haggard, hold on!" cried Halliday, following down and out with his weapon pointed earthward. "Let me speak, you drunken fool! Get that boy——"

"Bang!" went the editor's pistol before he had half lifted it.

"Bang!" replied Halliday's.

The editor's weapon dropped. He threw both hands against his breast, looked to heaven, wheeled half round, and fell upon his face as dead as a stone.

Halliday leaped into the saddle, answered one shot that came from the crowd, and clattered away on the turnpike.

John was standing with arms held out. He turned blindly to find the doorway of the stairs and cried, "Father! father!"

"Son!"

He started for the sound, groped against the wall, sank to his knees, and fell backward.

"Room, here, room!" "Give him air!" "By George, sir, he rushed right in bare-handed between 'em, orderin' Haggard"—"Stand back, you-all, and make way for Judge March!"

"Oh, son, son!" The father knelt, caught the limp hands and gazed with streaming eyes. "Oh, son, my son! air you gone fum me, son? Air you gone? Air you gone?"

A kind doctor took the passive wrist. "No, Judge, he's not gone yet."

Ravenel and the physician assumed control. "Just consider him in my care, doctor, will you? Shall we take him to the hotel?"

Garnet supported Judge March's steps. "Cast your burden on the Lord, Brother March. Bear up—for Sister March's sake, as she would for yours!"

Near the top stairs of the Ladies' Entrance Ravenel met Fannie.

"I saw it all, Mr. Ravenel; he saved my father's life. I must have the care of him. You can get it arranged so, Mr. Ravenel. You can even manage his mother."

"I will," he said, with a light smile.

Election-day passed like a Sabbath. General Halliday returned, voted, and stayed undisturbed. His opponent, not Garnet this time, was overwhelmingly elected. On the following day Haggard was buried "with great eclat," as his newspaper described it. Concerning John, the doctor said:

"Judge March, your wife should go back home. There's no danger, and a sick-room to a person of her——"

"Ecstastic spirit—" said the Judge.

"Exactly—would be only——"

"Yes," said the Judge, and Mrs. March went. To Fannie the doctor said,

"If he were a man I would have no hope, but a boy hangs to life like a cat, and I think he'll get well, entirely well. Move him home? Oh, not for a month!"

Notwithstanding many pains, it was a month of heaven to John, a heaven all to himself, with only one angel and no church. As long as there was danger she was merely cheerful—cheerful and beautiful. But when the danger passed she grew merry, the play of her mirth rising as he gained strength to bear it. He loved mirth, when others made it, and always would have laughed louder and longer than he did but for wondering how they made it. A great many things he said made others laugh, too, but he could never tell beforehand what would or wouldn't. He got so full of happiness at times that Fannie would go out for a few moments to let him come back to his ordinary self.

Two or three times, when she lingered long outside the door, she explained on her return that Mr. Ravenel had come to ask how he was.

Once Halliday met this visitor in the Ladies' Entrance, departing, and with a suppressed smile, asked, "Been to see how 'poor Johnnie' is?"

"Ostensibly," said the young man, and offered a cigar.

The General overtook Fannie in the hallway. He shook his head roguishly. "Cruel sport, Fan. He'll make the even dozen, won't he?"

"Oh, no, he'd like to make me his even two dozen, that's all."

When the day came for the convalescent to go home, he was not glad, although he had laughed much that morning. As he lay on the bed dressed and waiting, he was unusually pale. Only Fannie stood by him. Her hand was in both his. He shut his eyes, and in a desperate, earnest voice said, under his breath, "Good-by!" And again, lower still,—"Good-by!"

"Good-by, Johnnie."

He looked up into her laughing eyes. His color came hot, his heart pounded, and he gasped, "S-say m-my John! Won't you?"

"Why, certainly. Good-by, my Johnnie." She smiled yet more.

"Will—will"—he choked—"will you b-be my—k—Fannie—when I g-get old enough?"

"Yes," she said, with great show of gravity, "if you'll not tell anybody." She held him down by gently stroking his brow. "And you must promise to grow up such a perfect gentleman that I'll be proud of my Johnnie when"—She smiled broadly again.

—"Wh-when—k—the time comes?"

"I reckon so—yes."

He sprang to his knees and cast his arms about her neck, but she was too quick, and his kiss was lost in air. He flashed a resentful surprise, but she shook her head, holding his wasted wrists, and said, "N-no, no, my Johnnie, not even you; not Fannie Halliday, o-oh no!" She laughed.

"Some one's coming!" she whispered. It was Judge March. His adieus were very grateful. He called her a blessing.

She waved a last good-by to John from the window. Then she went to her own room, threw arms and face into a cushioned seat and moaned, so softly her own ear could not catch it—a name that was not John's.



XIV.

A MORTGAGE ON JOHN

As John grew sound and strong he grew busy as well. The frown of purpose creased at times his brow. There was a "perfect gentleman" to make, and only a few years left for his making if he was to be completed in the stipulated time. Once in a while he contrived an errand to Fannie, but it was always in broad day, when the flower of love is never more than half open. The perfect transport of its first blossoming could not quite return; the pronoun "my" was not again paraded. Only at good-by, her eyes, dancing the while, would say, "It's all right, my Johnnie."

On Sundays he had to share her with other boys whom she asked promiscuously,

"What new commandment was laid on the disciples?"—and——

"Ought not we also to keep this commandment?"

"Oh! yes, indeed!" said his heart, but his slow lips let some other voice answer for him.

When she asked from the catechism, "What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?" ah! how he longed to confess certain modifications in his own case. And yet Sunday was his "Day of all the week the best." Her voice in speech and song, the smell of her garments, the flowers in her hat, the gladness of her eyes, the wild blossoms at her belt, sometimes his own forest anemones dying of joy on her bosom—sense and soul feasted on these and took a new life, so that going from Sabbath to Sabbath he went from strength to strength, on each Lord's day appearing punctually in Zion.

One week-day when the mountain-air of Widewood was sweet with wild grapes, some six persons were scatteringly grouped in and about the narrow road near the March residence. One was Garnet, one was Ravenel, two others John and his father, and two were strangers in Dixie. One of these was a very refined-looking man, gray, slender, and with a reticent, purposeful mouth. His traveling suit was too warm for the latitude, and his silk hat slightly neglected. The other was fat and large, and stayed in the carryall in which Garnet had driven them up from Rosemont. He was of looser stuff than his senior. He called the West his home, but with a New England accent. He "didn't know's 'twas" and "presumed likely" so often that John eyed him with mild surprise. Ravenel sat and whittled. The day was hot, yet in his suit of gray summer stuffs he looked as fresh as sprinkled ferns. In a pause Major Garnet, with bright suddenness, asked:

"Brother March, where's John been going to school?"

The Judge glanced round upon the group as if they were firing upon him from ambush, hemmed, looked at John, and said:

"Why,—eh—who; son?—Why,—eh—to—to his mother, sir; yes, sir."

"Ah, Brother March, a mother's the best of teachers, and Sister March one of the most unselfish of mothers!" said Garnet, avoiding Ravenel's glance.

The Judge expanded. "Sir, she's too unselfish, I admit it, sir."

"And, yet, Brother March, I reckon John gets right smart schooling from you."

"Ah! no, sir. We're only schoolmates together, sir—in the school of Nature, sir. You know, Mr. Ravenel, all these things about us here are a sort of books, sir."

Ravenel smiled and answered very slowly, "Ye-es, sir. Very good reading; worth thirty cents an acre simply as literature."

Thirty cents was really so high a price that the fat stranger gave a burst of laughter, but Garnet—"It'll soon be worth thirty dollars an acre, now we've got a good government. Brother March, we'd like to see that superb view of yours from the old field on to the ridge."

Ravenel stayed behind with the Judge. John went as guide.

"Judge," Ravenel said, as soon as they were alone, "how about John? I believe in your school of nature a little. Solitude for principles, society for character, somebody says. Now, my school was men, and hence the ruin you see——"

"Mr. Ravenel, sir! I see no ruin; I——"

"Don't you? Well, then, the ruin you don't see."

"Oh, sir, you speak in irony! I see a character——"

"Yes "—the speaker dug idly in the sand—"all character and no principles. But you don't want John to be all principles and no character? He ought to be going to school, Judge." The father dropped his eyes in pain, but the young man spoke on. "Going to school is a sort of first lesson in citizenship, isn't it?—'specially if it's a free school. Maybe I'm wrong, but I wish Dixie was full of good, strong free schools."

"You're not wrong, Mr. Ravenel! You're eminently right, sir."

Mr. Ravenel only smiled, was silent for a while, and then said, "But even if it were—I had an impression that you thought you'd sort o' promised John to Rosemont?"

The Judge straightened up, distressed. "Mr. Ravenel, I have! I have, sir! It's true; it's true!"

"I don't think you did, Judge, you only expressed an intention."

But the Judge waived away the distinction with a gesture.

"Judge," said the young man, slowly and gently, "wouldn't you probably be sending John to Rosemont if Rosemont were free?"

The Judge did not speak or look up. He hunted on the ground for chips.

"Why don't you sell some land and send him?"

"Oh, Mr. Ravenel, we can't. We just can't! It's the strangest thing in the world, sir! Nobody wants it but lumbermen, and to let them, faw a few cents an acre, sweep ove' it like worms ove' a cotton field—we just can't do it! Mr. Ravenel, what is the reason such a land as this can't be settled up? We'll sell it to any real sett'ehs! But, good Lawd! sir, where air they? Son an' me ain't got no money to impote 'em, sir. The darkies don't know anything but cotton fahmin'—they won't come. Let me tell you, sir, we've made the most flattering offers to capitalists to start this and that. But they all want to wait till we've got a good gov'ment. An' now, here we've got it—in Clearwateh, at least—an' you can see that these two men ain't satisfied!"

"What do you reckon's the reason?"

"Mr. Ravenel, my deah sir, they can't tell! The fat one can't and the lean one won't! But politics is at the bottom of it, sir! Politics keeps crowdin' in an' capital a-hangin' back, an'——"

"Johnnie doesn't get his schooling," said Ravenel.

The response was a silent gesture, downcast eyes, and the betrayal of an emotion, not of the moment, but of months and years of physical want and mental distress.

"We all get lots of politics," said Ravenel.

"Not son! not fum me, sir. Oh, my Lawd, sir, that's one of the worst parts of it! I don't dare teach him mine, much less unteach him his mother's. She's as spirited as she's gentle, sir."

"Whatever was is wrong," drawled the young man. "That's the new creed."

"Oh, sir, a new creed's too painful a thing fo' jest. Ow South'n press, Mr. Ravenel, is gett'n' a sad facility fo' recantin'. I don't say it's not sincere, sir—least of all ow Courier since it's come into the hands of you an' President Garnet!"

"Garnet! Oh, gracious!" laughed Jeff-Jack. "Sincere—Judge, if you won't say anything about sincerity, I'll tell you what I'd like to do for John, sir. I'll take your note, secured by land, for the money you need to put John through Rosemont, and you needn't pay it till you get ready. If you never get ready, I reckon John'll pay it some day."

The moment the offer began to be intelligible, Judge March tried to straighten up and look Jeff-Jack squarely in the face, but when it was completed his elbows were on his knees and his face in his slender brown hands.

Up in the old field Garnet had talked himself dizzy. Northern travelers are by every impulse inquirers, and Southern hosts expounders; they fit like tongue and groove. On the ridge he had said:

"Now, Mr. Fair, here it is. I don't believe there's a finer view in the world."

"Hm!" said the slender visitor.

The two guests had been shown the usual Sleeping Giant, Saddle Mountain, Sugar Loaf, etc., that go with such views. John had set Garnet right when he got Lover's Leap and Bridal Veil tangled in the bristling pines of Table Rock and the Devil's Garden, and all were charmed with the majestic beauty of the scene. On the way back, while Garnet explained to Mr. Gamble, the heavier guest, why negroes had to be treated not as individuals but as a class, John had been telling Mr. Fair why it was wise to treat chickens not as a class but as individuals, and had mentioned the names and personal idiosyncrasies of the favorites of his own flock; Mr. Fair, in turn, had confessed to having a son about John's age, and wished they knew each other. Before John could reply, the party gayly halted again beside his father and Mr. Ravenel. As they did so Mr. Fair saw Ravenel give a little nod to Garnet that said, "It's all arranged."

On another evening, shortly after this, father and son coming to supper belated, John brought his mother a bit of cross-road news. The "Rads" had given a barbecue down in Blackland, just two days before the visit of Jeff-Jack and those others to Widewood—and what did she reckon! Cornelius Leggett had there made a speech, declaring that he was at the bottom of a patriotic project to open a free white school in Suez, and "bu'st Rosemont wide open."

"Judge March," said the wife, affectionately, "I wonder why Mr. Ravenel avoided mentioning that to you. He needn't have feared your sense of humor. Ah! if you only had a woman's instincts!"

John said good-night and withdrew. He wished his mother loved his father a little less. They would all have a so much better time.

"No," Mrs. March was presently saying, "Mr. Ravenel's motives are not those that concern me most. Rosemont, to me, must always signify Rose Montgomery. It is to her presence—her spell—you would expose my child; she, who has hated me all her life. Ah! no, it's too late now to draw back, he shall go. Yes, without my consent! Oh! my consent! Judge March, you're jesting again!" She lifted upon him the smile of a heart really all but broken under its imaginary wrongs.

There was no drawing back. The mother suffered, but the wife sewed, and when Rosemont had got well into its season's work and November was nearly gone, John was ready for "college." One morning, when the wind was bitter and the ground frozen, father and son rode side by side down their mountain road. A thin mantle of snow made the woods gray, and mottled the shivering ranks of dry cornstalks. At each rider's saddle swung an old carpet-bag stuffed with John's clothes. His best were on him.

"Maybe they're not the latest cut, son, or the finest fit, but you won't mind; you're not a girl. A man's dress is on'y a sort o' skin, anyhow; a woman's is her plumage. And, anyhow, at Rosemont you'll wear soldier clothes. Look out son, I asked yo' dear motheh to mend——"

The warning came too late; a rope handle of one of the carpet-bags broke. The swollen budget struck the unyielding ground and burst like a squash. John sprang nimbly from the saddle, but the Judge caught his leg on the other carpet-bag and reached the ground in such a shape that his horse lost all confidence and began to back wildly, putting first one foot and then another into the scattered baggage.

One, or even two, can rarely get as much into a bursted carpet-bag, repacking it in a public road and perspiring with the fear that somebody is coming, as they can into a sound one at a time and place of their own choice. There's no place like home—for this sort of task; albeit the Judge's home may have been an exception. Time flew past while they contrived and labored, and even when they seemed to have solved their problem one pocket of John's trousers contained a shirt and the other was full of socks, and the Judge's heart still retained an anxiety which he dared neither wholly confess nor entirely conceal.

"Well, son, it's a comfort to think yo' precious motheh will never have the mawtification of knowin' anything about this."

"Yass, sir," drawled John, "that's the first thing I thought of."



XV.

ARRIVALS AT ROSEMONT

The air was mild down on the main road which, because it led from Suez to Pulaski City, was known as the Susie and Pussie pike. The highway showed a mere dusting of snow, and out afield the sun had said good-morning so cavalierly to some corn-shocks that the powder was wholly kissed off one sallow cheek of each. The riders kept the pike northwesterly a short way and then took the left, saying less and less as they went on, till the college came into view, their hearts sinking as it rose.

The campus was destitute of human sounds; but birds gossiped so openly on every hand concerning the tardy intrusion that John was embarrassed, and hardly felt, much less saw, what rich disorder the red and yellow browns of clinging and falling leaves made among the purple-gray trunks and olive-dappled boughs, and on the fading green of the sod.

The jays were everywhere, foppish, flippant, the perfection of privileged rudeness.

It seemed a great way through the grove. At the foot of the steps John would have liked to make the acquaintance of some fat hens that were picking around in the weak sunshine and uttering now and then a pious housewifely sigh.

There was an awful stillness as the two ascended the steps, carrying the broken carpet-bag between them. Glancing back down the campus avenue, John hoped the unknown woman just entering its far gate was not observing. So mild was the air here that the front door stood open. In the hall a tall student, with a sergeant's chevrons on his gray sleeve, came from a class-room and led them into a small parlor. Major Garnet was in Suez, but Mrs. Garnet would see them.

They waited. On the mantel an extremely Egyptian clock—green and gilt—whispered at its task in servile oblivion to visitors. John stared at a black-framed lithograph, and his father murmured,

"That's the poet Longfellow, son, who wrote that nice letteh to yo' dear motheh. This colo'ed picture's Napoleon crossing the Alps."

A footstep came down the hall, and John saw a pretty damsel of twelve or thirteen with much loose red-brown hair, stop near the door of the reception-room and gaze at someone else who must have been coming up the porch steps. He could not hear this person's slow advance, but presently a voice in the porch said, tenderly, "Miss Barb?" and gave a low nervous laugh.

Barbara shrank back a step. The soft footfall reached the threshold. The maiden retreated half a step more. Behind her sounded a faint patter of crinoline coming down the hall stairs. And then there came into view from the porch, bending forward with caressing arms, a slim, lithe negress of about nineteen years. Her flimsy dress was torn by thorns, and her hands were pitifully scratched. Her skirt was gone, the petticoat bemired, and her naked feet were bleeding.

"Miss Barb," said the tender voice again. From the inner stairs a lady appeared.

"What is it, son?" Judge March asked, and rising, saw the lady draw near the girl with a look of pitying uncertainty. The tattered form stood trembling, with tears starting down her cheeks.

"Miss Rose—Oh, Miss Rose, it's me!"

"Why, Johanna, my poor child!" Two kind arms opened and the mass of rags and mud dashed into them. The girl showered her kisses upon the pure garments, and the lady silently, tenderly, held her fast. Then she took the black forehead between her hands.

"Child, what does this mean?"

"Oh, it means nothin' but C'nelius, Miss Rose—same old C'nelius! I hadn't nowhere to run but to you, an' no chance to come but night."

"Can you go upstairs and wait a moment for me in my room? No, poor child, I don't think you can!" But Johanna went, half laughing, half crying, and beckoning to Barbara in the old-time wheedling way.

"Go, Barbara."

The child followed, while John and his father stood with captive hearts before her whom the youths of the college loved to call in valedictory addresses the Rose of Rosemont. She spent a few moments with them, holding John's more than willing hand, and then called in the principal's first assistant, Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew, a smallish man of forty, in piratical white duck trousers, kid slippers, nankeen sack, and ruffled shirt. Irritability confessed itself in this gentleman's face, which was of a clay color, with white spots. Mr. Pettigrew presently declared himself a Virginian, adding, with the dignity of a fallen king, that he—or his father, at least—had lost over a hundred slaves by the war. It was their all. But the boy could not shut his ear to the sweet voice of Mrs. Garnet as, at one side, she talked to his father.

"Sir?" he responded to the first assistant, who was telling him he ought to spell March with a final e, it being always so spelled—in Virginia. The Judge turned for a lengthy good-by, and at its close John went with his preceptor to the school-room, trying, quite in vain, to conceive how Mr. Pettigrew had looked when he was a boy.



XVI.

A GROUP OF NEW INFLUENCES

All Rosemonters were required to sit together at Sunday morning service, in a solid mass of cadet gray. After this there was ordinary freedom. Thus, when good weather and roads and Mrs. March's strength permitted, John had the joy of seeing his father and mother come into church; for Rosemont was always ahead of time, and the Marches behind. Then followed the delight of going home with them in their antique and precarious buggy, and of a day-break ride back to Rosemont with his father—sweetest of all accessible company. Accessible, for his mother had forbidden him to visit Fannie Halliday, her father being a traitor. He could only pass by her gate—she was keeping house now—and sometimes have the ecstasy of lingeringly greeting her there.

"Oh, my deah, she's his teacheh, you know. But now, suppose that next Sunday——"

"Please call it the sabbath, Powhatan."

"Yes, deah, the sabbath. If it should chance to rain——"

"Oh, Judge March, do you believe rain comes by chance?"

"Oh, no, Daphne, dear. But—if it should be raining hard——"

"It will still be the Lord's day. Your son can read and meditate."

"But if it should be fair, and something else should keep us fum church, and he couldn't come up here, and should feel his loneliness——"

"Can't he visit some of our Suez friends—Mary and Martha Salter, Doctor Coffin, or Parson Tombs, the Sextons, or Clay Mattox? I'm not puritanical, nor are they. He's sure of a welcome from either Cousin Hamlet Graves or his brother Lazarus. Heaven has spared us a few friends still."

"Oh, yes, indeed. Dead loads of them; if son would only take to them. And, Daphne, deah,"—the husband brightened—"I hope, yet, he will."

School terms came and went. Mrs. March attributed her son's failure to inherit literary talent to his too long association with his father. He stood neither first, second, nor last in anything. In spiritual conditions he was not always sure that he stood at all. At times he was shaken even in the belief that the love of fun is the root of all virtue, and although he called many a droll doing a prank which the law's dark lexicon terms a misdemeanor, for weeks afterward there would be a sound in his father's gentle speech as of that voice from which Adam once, in the cool of the day, hid himself. In church the sermons he sat under dwelt mainly on the technical difficulties involved in a sinner's salvation, and neither helped nor harmed him; he never heard them. One clear voice in the midst of the singing was all that engaged his ear, and when it carolled, "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," the notes themselves were to him the cooling shower.

One Sabbath afternoon, after a specially indigestible sermon which Sister Usher said enthusiastically to Major Garnet ought to be followed by a great awakening—as, in fact, it had been—Barbara, slim, straight, and fifteen, softly asked her mother to linger behind the parting congregation for Fannie. As Miss Halliday joined them John, from the other aisle, bowed so pathetically to his Sunday-school teacher that when she turned again to smile on Barbara and her mother she laughed, quite against her will. The mother and daughter remained grave.

"Fannie," said Mrs. Garnet, her hand stealing into the girl's, "I'm troubled about that boy." Barbara walked ahead pretending not to hear, but listening hard.

"Law! Cousin Rose, so'm I! I wish he'd get religion or something. Don't look so at me, Cousin Rose, you make me smile. I'm really trying to help him, but the more I try the worse I fail. If I should meet him on the straight road to ruin I shouldn't know what to say to him; I'm a pagan myself."



XVII.

THE ROSEMONT ATMOSPHERE

About this time Barbara came into new surroundings. She had been wondering for a month what matter of disagreement her father and mother were trying to be very secret about, when one morning at breakfast her father said, while her mother looked out the window:

"Barb, we've decided to send you to Montrose to stay." And while she was still gazing at him speechlessly, a gulping sob came from behind her mother's chair and Johanna ran from the room.

Barbara never forgot that day. Nor did her memory ever lose the picture of her father, as he came alone to see her the next day after her entrance into the academy, standing before the Misses Kinsington—who were as good as they were thin, and as sweet as they were aristocratic—winning their impetuous approval with the confession that the atmosphere of a male college—even though it was Rosemont—was not good for a young girl. While neither of the Misses Kinsington gave a hand to him either for welcome or farewell, when Mademoiselle Eglantine—who taught drawing, history, and French—happened in upon father and daughter a second time, after they had been left to say good-by alone, the hand of Mademoiselle lingered so long in his that Barbara concluded he had forgotten it was there.

"She's quite European in her way, isn't she, Barb?"

The daughter was mute, for she had from time to time noticed several women shake hands with her large-hearted father thus.

Twice a week Barbara spent an afternoon and night at Rosemont. Whether her father really thought its atmosphere desirable for her or not, she desired it, without ceasing and most hungrily. On Sunday nights, when the house had grown still, there would come upon her door the wariest of knocks, and Johanna would enter, choose a humble seat, and stay and stay, to tell every smallest happening of the week.

Not infrequently these recitals contained points in the history of John March.

* * * * *

Rosemont gave one of its unexpected holidays. John March and another senior got horses and galloped joyously away to Pulaski City, where John's companion lived. The seat of government was there. There, too, was the Honorable Mr. Leggett, his party being still uppermost in Blackland. He was still custodian, moreover, of the public school funds for the three counties.

Very late that night, as the two Rosemonters were about to walk past an open oyster saloon hard by the Capitol, John caught his fellow's arm. They stopped in a shadow. Two men coming from an opposite direction went into the place together.

"Who's that white man?" whispered John. The other named a noted lobbyist, and asked,

"Who's the nigger?"

"Cornelius Leggett." John's hand crept, trembling, to his hip pocket.

His companion grasped it. "Pshaw, March, are you crazy?"

"No, are you? I'm not going to shoot; I was only thinking how easy I could do it."

He stepped nearer the entrance. The lone keeper had followed the two men into a curtained stall. His back was just in sight.

"Let's slip in and hear what they say," murmured John, visibly disturbed. But when his companion assented he drew back. His fellow scanned him with a smile of light contempt. There were beads of moisture on his brow. Just then the keeper went briskly toward his kitchen, and the two youths glided into the stall next to the one occupied.

"Yass, seh," Cornelius was tipsily remarking, "the journals o' the day reputes me to have absawb some paucity o' the school funds. Well, supposen I has; I say, jess supposen it, you know. I antagonize you this question: did Napoleon Bonapawt never absawb any paucity o' otheh folks' things? An' yit he was the greates' o' the great. He's my patte'n, seh. He neveh stole jiss to be a-stealin'! An' yit wheneveh he found it assential of his destiny to steal anything, he stole it!

"O' co'se he incurred and contracted enemies; I has mine; it's useless to translate it. My own motheh's husban'—you riccolec' ole Unc' 'Viticus, don't you?—Rev'en' Leviticus Wisdom—on'y niggeh that eveh refused a office!"—he giggled—"Well, he ensued to tu'n me out'n the church. Yass, seh, faw nothin' but fallin' in love with his daughteh—my step-sisteh—sayin' I run her out'n the county!

"But he couldn't p'ocure a sufficient concawdence o' my fellow-citizens; much less o' they wives—naw evm o' mine! No, seh! They brought in they verdic' that jess at this junction it'd be cal'lated to ungendeh strife an' could on'y do hahm." He giggled again.

"My politics save me, seh! They always will. An' they ought to; faw they as pyo as the crystial fountain."

The keeper brought a stew of canned oysters. The lobbyist served it, and Mr. Leggett talked on.

"Thass the diffunce 'twixt me and Gyarnit. That man's afraid o' me—jess as 'fraid as a chicken-hawk is of a gun, seh!—an' which nobody knows why essep' him an' me. But thass jess the diff'ence. Nobody reputes him to steal, an' I don't say he do. I ain't ready to say it yit, you un'stan'; but his politics—his politics, seh; they does the stealin'! An' which it's the low-downdest kind o' stealin', for it's stealin' fum niggers. But thass the diff'ence; niggers steals with they claws, white men with they laws. The claws steals by the pound; the laws steals by the boatload!"

The lobbyist agreed.

"Jess so!" cried Mr. Leggett. "Ef Gyarnit'd vote faw the things o' one common welfare an' gen'l progress an' program, folks—an' niggers too—could affode faw him to vote faw somepm fat oncet in a while an' to evm take sugar on his vote—an' would sen' him to the ligislatur' stid o' me. Thass not sayin' I eveh did aw does take sugar on my vote. Ef I wins a bet oncet in a while on whether a certain bill 'll pass, why, that, along o' my official emoluments an' p'erequisites evince me a sufficient plenty.

"Wife?—Estravagant?—No!—Oh! you thinkin' o' my secon' wife. Yes, seh, she was too all-fired estravagant! I don't disadmire estravagant people. I'm dreadful estravagant myseff. But Sophronia jess tuck the rag off'n the bush faw estravagance. Silk dresses, wine, jewelry—it's true she mos'ly spent her own green-backs, but thass jess it, you see; I jess had to paht with her, seh! You can asphyxiate that yo'seff, seh.

"Now this wife I got now—eh? No, I ain't never ezac'ly hear the news that the other one dead, but I suspicioned her, befo' she lef', o' bein' consumpted, an'—O anyhow she's dead to me, seh! Now, the nex' time I marries—eh?—O yes, but the present Mis' Leggett can't las' much longeh, seh. I mistakened myseff when I aspoused her. I'm a man o' rich an' abundant natu'e an' ought to a-got a spouse consistent with my joys an' destinies. I may have to make a sawt o' Emp'ess Josephine o' her—ef she lives.

"Y'ought to see the nex' one!—Seh?—Engaged?—No, not yit; she as shy as a crow an'—ezac'ly the same colo'!—I'm done with light-complected women, seh.—But y'ought to see this-yeh one!—Shy as a pa't'idge! But I'm hot on her trail. She puttend to be tarrible shocked—well, o' co'se thass right!—Hid away in the hills—at Rosemont. But I kin git her on a day's notice. All I got to espress myself is—Majo' Gyarnit, seh!—Ef you continues faw twenty-fo' hours mo' to harbor the girl Johanna, otherwise Miss Wisdom, the Black Diana an' sim'lar names, I shall imbibe it my jewty to the gen'l welfare an' public progress to renovate yo' rememb'ance of a vas'ly diff'ent an' mo' financial matteh, as per my letteh to you of sich a date about seven year' ago an' not an's'd yit, an' tell what I know about you. Thass all I'll say. Thass all I haf to say! An' mebbe I won't haf to say that. Faw I'm tryin' love lettehs on her; wrote the fus' one this evenin'; on'y got two mo' to write. My third inevasively fetches 'em down the tree, seh!"

The lobbyist revived the subject of politics, the publican went after hot water for a punch, and the eavesdroppers slipped away.

Early the following week Mr. Leggett reclined in his seat in the House of Representatives. His boots were on his desk, and he tapped them with his sword-cane while he waited to back up with his vote a certain bet of the Friday night before. A speaker of his own party was alluding to him as the father of free schools in Blackland and Clear water; but he was used to this and only closed his eyes. A page brought his mail. It was small. One letter was perfumed. He opened it and sat transfixed with surprise, and a-tremble between vanity and doubt, desire and trepidation. He bent his beaded eyes close over the sweet thing and read its first page again and again. It might—it might be an imposture; but it had come in a Rosemont envelope, and it was signed Johanna Wisdom.

The House began to vote. He answered to his name; the bill passed, his bet was won. Adjournment followed. He hurried out and away, and down in a suburban lane entered his snug, though humble, "bo'd'n' house," locked his door, and read again.

Two or three well-known alumni of Rosemont and two or three Northern capitalists—railroad prospectors—were, on the following Friday, at the Swanee Hotel to be the guests of the Duke of Suez, as Ravenel was fondly called by the Rosemont boys. To show Suez at its best by night as well as by day, there was to be a Rosemont-Montrose ball in the hotel dining-room. Major Garnet opposed its being called a ball, and it was announced as a musical reception and promenade. Mr. Leggett knew quite as well as Garnet and Ravenel that the coming visitors were behind the bill he had just voted for.

Johanna, the letter said, would be at the ball as an attendant in the ladies' cloak-room. It bade him meet her that night at eleven on the old bridge that spanned a ravine behind the hotel, where a back street ended at the edge of a neglected grove.

"Lawd, Lawd! little letteh, little letteh! is you de back windeh o' heavm, aw is you de front gate o' hell? Th' ain't no way to tell but by tryin'! Oh, how kin I resk it? An' yit, how kin I he'p but resk it?

"Sheh! ain't I resk my life time an' time ag'in jess for my abstrac' rights to be a Republican niggeh?

"Ef they'd on'y shoot me! But they won't. They won't evm hang me; they'll jess tie me to a tree and bu'n me—wet me th'oo with coal-oil, tech a match—O Lawd!" He poured a tremendous dram, looked at it long, then stepped to the window, and with a quaking hand emptied both glass and bottle on the ground, as if he knew life depended on a silent tongue in a sober head.

And then he glanced once more at the letter, folded it, and let it slowly into his pocket.

"'Happy as a big sun-floweh,' is you? I ain't. I ain't no happier'n a pig on the ice. O it's mawnstus p'ecipitous! But it's gran'! It's mo'n gran'; it's muccurial! it's puffic'ly nocturnial!" With an exalted solemnity of face, half ardor, half anguish, he stiffened heroically and gulped out,

"I'll be thah!"

* * * * *

Friday came. John March and half-a-dozen other Rosemonters, a committee to furnish "greens" for garlanding the walls and doorways, hurried about in an expectancy and perturbation, now gay, now grave, that seemed quite excessive as the mere precursors of an evening dance. They gathered their greenery from the grove down beyond the old bridge and ravine, where the ground was an unbroken web of honeysuckle vines.

On this old bridge, at the late night hour fixed in the letter, Cornelius met a counterfeit, thickly-veiled Johanna, and swore to marry her.

"Black as you is? Yass! The blackeh the betteh! An' yit I'd marry you ef you wuz pyo white!—Colo' line!—I'll cross fifty colo' lines whenev' I feels like it!"

By midnight every Rosemonter at the ball had heard this speech repeated, and knew that it had hardly left the mulatto's throat before he had fled with shrieks of terror from the pretended ghosts of his earlier wives, and with the curses of a coward's rage from the vain clutches of his would-be captors.—But we go too fast.



XVIII.

THE PANGS OF COQUETRY

Night fell. The hotel shone. The veranda was gay with Chinese lanterns. The muffled girls were arriving. The musicians tuned up. There were three little fiddles, one big one, a flageolet, and a bassoon.

"Twinkling stars are laughing, love, Laughing on you and me"

—sang the flageolet and little fiddles, while the double bass and the bassoon grunted out their corroborative testimony with melodious unction. Presently the instruments changed their mood, the flageolet pretended to be a mocking-bird, all trills, the fiddles passionately declared they were dreaming now-ow of Hallie—tr-r-r-ee!—dear Hallie—tr-r-r-ee!—sweet Hallie—tr-r-r-ee! and the bassoon and double bass responded from the depths of their emotions, "Hmmh! hmmh! hm-hm-hmmh!"

Ravenel and his guests appeared on the floor; Major Garnet, too. He had been with them, here, yonder, all day. Barbara remained at home, although her gowns were the full length now, and she coiled her hair. General Halliday and Fannie arrived. Her dress, they said, was the prettiest in the room. Jeff-Jack introduced everybody to the Northerners. The women all asked them if Suez wasn't a beautiful city, and the guests praised the town, its site, its gardens, "its possibilities," its ladies—!—and its classic river.

Try to look busy or dignified as he might, all these things only harried John March. He kept apart from Fannie. Indeed, what man of any self-regard—he asked his mangled spirit—could penetrate the crowd that hovered about her, ducking, fawning, giggling, attitudinizing—listening over one another's shoulders, guffawing down each other's throats? It hurt him to see her show such indiscriminating amiability; but he felt sure he knew her best, and hoped she was saying to herself, "Oh, that these sycophants were gone, and only John and I and the twinkling stars remained to laugh together! Why does he stay away?"

"O my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away," wept the fiddles, and "Who? who? who-who-who?" inquired the basses in deep solicitude.

Well, the first dance would soon come, now; the second would shortly follow, and then he and Fannie could go out on the veranda and settle all doubts. With certainty established in that quarter, whether it should bring rapture or despair, he hoped to command the magnanimity to hold over a terrified victim the lash of retribution, and then to pronounce upon him, untouched, at last, the sentence of exile. He spoke aloud, and looking up quickly to see if anyone had heard, beheld his image in a mirror. He knew it instantly, both by its frown and by the trick of clapping one hand on the front of the thigh with the arm twisted so as to show a large seal-ring bought by himself with money that should have purchased underclothes for his father. He jerked it away with a growl of self-scorn, and went to mingle with older men, to whom, he fancied, the world meant more than young women and old scores.

He stopped in a part of the room where two Northerners were laughing at a keen skirmish of words between Garnet and Halliday. These two had gotten upon politics, and others were drawing near, full of eager but unplayful smiles.

"Never mind," said Garnet, in retort, "we've restored public credit and cut the rottenness out of our government."

The Northerners nodded approvingly, and the crowd packed close.

"Garnet," replied the general, with that superior smile which Garnet so hated, "States, like apples—and like men—have two sorts of rottenness. One begins at the surface and shows from the start; the other starts from the core, and doesn't show till the whole thing is rotten."

For some secret reason, Garnet reddened fiercely for an instant, and then, with a forced laugh, addressed his words to one of the guests.

Another of the strangers was interested in the severe attention a strong-eyed Rosemont boy seemed to give to Halliday's speech. But it was only John March, who was saying, in his heart:

"She's got a perfect right to take me or throw me, but she's no right to do both!"

Only the Northerners enjoyed Halliday. The Suez men turned away in disdain.

The music struck a quadrille, sweetly whining and hooting twice over before starting into doubtful history,

"In eighteen hundred and sixty-one—to the war! to the war!"

The dance springs out! Gray jackets and white trousers; tarlatan, flowers, and fans; here and there a touch of powder or rouge; some black broadcloth and much wrinkled doeskin. Jeff-Jack and Fannie move hand in hand, and despite the bassoon's contemptuous "pooh! pooh! poo-poo-pooh!" the fiddles declare, with petulant vehemence, that—

"In eighteen-hundred-and-sixty-one, the Yankees they the war begun, but we'll all! get! blind! drunk! when Johnnie comes marching home."

"You see we play the national—oh! no, I believe that's not one—but we do play them!" said a native.

John didn't march home, although when some one wanted a window open which had been decorated to stay shut, neither he nor his committee could be found. He came in, warm and anxious, just in time to claim Fannie for their schottische. At ten they walked out on the veranda and took seats at its dark end. She was radiant, and without a sign of the mild dismay that was in her bosom. When she said, "Now, tell me, John, why you're so sad," there was no way for him to see that she was secretly charging herself not to lie and not to cry.

"Miss Fannie," he replied, "you're breaking my heart."

"Aw, now, John, are you going to spoil our friendship this way?"

"Friendship!—Oh, Fannie!"

"Miss Fannie, if you please, Mister John."

"Ah! has it come to that? And do you hide that face?"—For Fannie had omitted to charge herself not to smile at the wrong time—"Have you forgotten the day we parted here five years ago?"

"Why, no. I don't remember what day of the week it was, but I—I remember it. Was it Friday? What day was it?"

"Fannie, you mock me! Ah! you thought me but a boy, then, but I loved you with a love beyond my years; and now as a man, I——"

"Oh! a man! Mr. March, there's an end to this bench. No! John, I don't mock you; I honor you; I've always been proud of you—Now—now, John, let go my hand! John, if you don't let go my hand I'll leave you; you naughty boy!—No, I won't answer a thing till you let me go! John March, let go my hand this instant! Now I shall sit here. You'll keep the bench, please. Yes, I do remember it all, and regret it!" She turned away in real dejection, saying, in her heart, "But I shall do no better till I die—or—or get married!"

She faced John again. "Oh, if I'd thought you'd remember it forty days it shouldn't have occurred! I saw in you just a brave, pure-hearted, sensible boy. I thought it would be pleasant, and even elevating—to you—while it lasted, and that you'd soon see how—how ineligible—indeed I did!" Both were silent.

"Fannie Halliday," said John at last, standing before her as slim and rank as a sapling, but in the dignity of injured trust, "when year after year you saw I loved you, why did you still play me false!"

"Now, Mr. March, you're cruel."

"Miss Fannie Halliday, have you been kind?"

"I meant to be! I never meant to cheat you! I kept hoping you'd understand! Sometimes I tried to make you understand, didn't I? I'm very sorry, John. I know I've done wrong. But I—I meant well. I really did!"

The youth waved an arm. "You've wrecked my life. Oh, Fannie, I'm no mere sentimentalist. I can say in perfect command of these wild emotions, 'Enchantress, fare thee well!'"

"Oh, fare thee fiddlesticks!" Fannie rose abruptly. "No, no, I didn't mean that, John, but—aw! now, I didn't mean to smile! Oh, let's forget the past—oh! now, yes, you can! Let's just be simple, true friends! And one of these days you'll love some sweet, true girl, and she'll love you and I'll love her, and—" she took his arm. He looked down on her.

"I love again!—I—? Ah! how little you women understand men! Oh, Fannie! to love twice is never to have loved. You are my first—my last!"

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Fannie, blithely and aloud, as they reentered the room. Then softly, behind her fan, "I've a better one in store for you, now!"

"Two!" groaned the bass viol and bassoon. "Two! two! two-to-to-two!" and with a propitiative smile on John's open anguish, Fannie, gayer in speech and readier in laughter, but not lighter in heart, let a partner waltz her away. As John turned, one of his committee seized his arm and showed a watch.



XIX.

MR. RAVENEL SHOWS A "MORE EXCELLENT WAY"

Urged by all sorts and on all sides, the Northerners lingered a day or two more, visiting battle-fields and things. At Turkey Creek Halliday was talkative, Garnet overflowed with information, Captains Champion and Shotwell were boyish, and Colonel Proudfit got tight. They ate cold fried chicken and drank—

"Whew!—stop, stop!—I can't take—Why, half that would"—etc.

"Where's Mr. Ravenel?"

"Who, Jeff-Jack? Oh, he's over yonder pickin' blackberries—no, he seldom ever touches—he has to be careful how he—Yes, sometimes he disremembers."

In town again, Halliday led the way to the public grammar and high schools. Garnet mentioned Montrose boastfully more than once.

"Why don't we go there?" asked one of the projectors, innocently.

"Oh—ah—wha'd you say, Colonel Proudfit? Yess, that's so, we pass right by it on ow way to Rosemont"—and they did, to the sweet satisfaction of the Misses Kinsington, who were resolved no railroad should come to Suez if they could prevent it.

At Rosemont Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew told each Northerner, as soon as he could get him from Mrs. Garnet's presence, that Virginia was the Mother of Presidents; that the first slaves ever brought to this country came in Yankee ships; that Northern envy of Southern opulence and refinement had been the mainspring of the abolition movement; and—with a smile of almost womanly heroism—that he—or his father at least—had lost all his slaves in the war.

At Widewood, whither Garnet and Ravenel led, the travelers saw only Judge March and the scenery. He brought them water to the fence in a piggin, and with a wavering hand served it out in a gourd.

"I could 'a' served it in a glass, gentlemen, but we Southe'ne's think it's sweeteh drank fum a gode."

"We met your son at the cotillion," said one, and the father lighted up with such confident expectation of a compliment that the stranger added, cordially, "He's quite noted," though he had not heard of the affair with Leggett.

On the way back Garnet praised everything and everybody. He wished they could have seen Daphne Dalrymple! If it were not for the Northern prejudice against Southern writers, her poems would—"See that fox—ah! he's hid, now."

But the wariest game was less coy than the poetess. She wrote, that day,

"O! hide me from the Northron's eye! Let me not hear his fawning voice, I heard the Southland matron sigh And saw the piteous tear that" ...

Thus it ended; "as if," said Garnet to John, who with restrained pride showed him the manuscript, "as if grief for the past choked utterance—for the present. There's a wonderful eloquence in that silence, March, tell her to leave it as it is; dry so."

John would have done this had he not become extremely preoccupied. The affair at the old bridge was everybody's burning secret till the prospectors were gone. But the day after they left it was everybody's blazing news. Oddly enough, not what anybody had done, but what Leggett had said—in contempt of the color line—was the microscopic germ of all the fever. From window to window, and from porch to porch, women fed alarm with rumor and rumor with alarm, while on every sidewalk men collaborated in the invention of plans for defensive vengeance.

"Well, they've caught him—pulled him out of a dry well in Libertyville."

"I beg your pardon, he crossed the Ohio this morning at daylight."

John March was light-headed with much drinking of praise for having made it practicable to "smash this unutterable horror in the egg!"

Ravenel, near the Courier office, stopped at the beckon of Lazarus Graves and Charlie Champion. John was with them, laboring under the impression that they were with him. They wanted to consult Ravenel about the miscreant, and the "steps proper to be taken against him."

"When found," suggested Ravenel, and they pleasantly assented.

"Oh, yes," he said again, as the four presently moved out of the hot sun, "but if the color line hadn't been crossed already there wouldn't be any Leggett."

"But he threatens to cross it from the wrong side," replied John, posing sturdily.

Ravenel's smile broadened. "Most any man, Mr. March, could be enticed across."

The mouth of the enticer opened, but his tongue failed.

"A coat of tah and feathers will show him he mustn't even be enticed across," rejoined Lazarus.

Ravenel said something humorous about the new Dixie and a peace policy, and John's face began to show misgivings; but Captain Champion explained that the affair would be strictly select—best citizens—no liquor—no brawl—no life-taking, unless violent resistance compelled it; in fact, no individual act; but——

"Yes, I know," said Ravenel, "you mean one of those irresistable eruptions of a whole people's righteous indignation, that sweeps before it the whining hyper-criticisms of effeminated civilizations," and the smile went round.

"Gentlemen, there's an easier way to get rid of Cornelius; one, Captain, that won't hurt more by the recoil than by the discharge."

They were all silent. John folded his arms. Presently Graves said, meditatively,

"We don't care to hang him, just at——"

"This juncture," said Ravenel; "no, better give him ten years in the penitentiary—for bigamy."

Sunshine broke on Mr. Graves's face, and he murmured, "Go 'way!"

Champion, too, was radiant. "Hu-u-ush!" he said, "who'll get us the evidence?"

"Old Uncle Leviticus."

The more questions they asked the more pleased with the plan were John's two companions. "Why didn't you think of that?" asked each of the other in mock contempt. The youth felt his growing insignificance reach completeness as Ravenel said,

"In that case you'll not need Mr. March any longer."

"No, of course not," said John, quickly. "I was"—he forced a cough.

The other two waved good-by, and he turned to go with them, but was stopped.

"Don't you want to see me about something else, Mr. March?" said Ravenel, to detain him.

"No, sir," replied John, innocently. "Oh, no, I was——"

There came between them, homeward bound, an open parasol, a mist of muslin as sweet as a blossoming tree, a bow to Mr. Ravenel, and then a kinder one to John.

"Go," said Ravenel, softly. "Didn't you see? She wants you."

John overtook the dainty figure, lifted his military cap, and slackened his pace.

"Miss Fannie?" he caught step with her.

"Oh!—why good morning." She was delightfully cordial.

"Did you want to see me?" he asked. "Mr. Ravenel thought you did."

Fannie raised her brows and laughed.

"Why, really, Mr. Ravenel oughtn't to carry his thinking to such an excess. Still, I'm not sorry for the mistake—unless you are." She glanced at him archly. "Come on," she softly added, "I do want to see you."



XX.

FANNIE SUGGESTS

"Don't look so gruesome." She laughed.

John walked stiffly, frowned, and tried to twist the down on his upper lip. When only fenced and gardened dwellings were about them she spoke again.

"John, I'm unhappy."

"You, Miss Fannie?"

"Yes. As I passed you, you were standing right where you fell five years ago. For three days I've been thinking how deep in debt to you I've been ever since, and—how I've disappointed you."

The youth made no answer. He felt as if he would give ten years of his life to kneel at her feet with his face in her hands and whisper, "Pay me a little love." She laid her arm on her cottage gate, turned her face away, and added,

"And now you're disappointing me."

"I've got a right to know how, Miss Fannie, haven't I?"

Fannie's averted face sank lower. Suddenly she looked fondly up to him and nodded. "Come, sit on the steps a minute"—she smiled—"and I'll pick you a rose."

She skipped away. As she was returning her father came out.

"Why, howdy, Johnnie—Fan, I reckon I'll go to the office."

"You promised me you wouldn't!"

"Well, I'm better since I took some quinine. How's y' father, Johnnie?"

"Sir? Oh, she's not very well. She craves acids, and—Oh!—Father? he's very—I ain't seen him in a right smart while, sir. He's been sort o' puny for——"

"Sorry," said the General, and was gone.

Fannie held the rose.

"Thank you," said John, looking from it to the kindness in her eye. But she caressed the flower and shook her head.

"It's got thorns," she said, significantly, as she sat down on a step.

"Yes, I understand. I'll take it so."

"I don't know. I'm afraid you'll not want it when"—she laid it to her lips—"when I tell you how you've disappointed me."

"Yes, I will. For—oh! Miss Fannie——"

"What, John?"

"You needn't tell me at all. I know it already. And I'm going to change it. You shan't be disappointed. I've learned an awful lot in these last three days—and these last three hours. I've done my last sentimentalizing. I—I'm sure I have. I'll be too good for it, or else too bad for it! I'll always love you, Miss Fannie, even when you're not—Miss Fannie any more; but I'll never come using round you and bothering you with my—feelings." He jerked out his handkerchief, but wiped only his cap—with slow care.

"As to that, John, I shouldn't blame you if you should hate me."

"I can't, Miss Fannie. I've not done hating, I'm afraid, but I couldn't hate you—ever. You can't conceive how sweet and good you seem to anyone as wicked as I've been—and still am."

"You don't know what I mean, John."

"Yes, I do. But you didn't know how bad you were f-fooling me. And even if you had of—it must be mighty hard for some young ladies not to—to——"

"Flirt," said Fannie, looking down on her rose. "I reckon those who do it find it the easiest and prettiest wickedness in the world, don't they?"

"Oh, I don't know! All my wickedness is ugly and hard. But I'm glad you expected enough of me to be disappointed."

"Yes, I did. Why, John, you never in your life offered me a sign of regard but I felt it an honor. You've often tripped and stumbled, but I—oh, I'm too bad myself to like a perfect boy. What I like is a boy with a conscience."

"My guiding star!" murmured John.

"Oh! ridiculous!—No, I take that back! But—but—why, that's what disappoints me! If you'd made me just your first mile-board. But it hurts me—oh, it hurts me! and—far worse—it's hurting Cousin Rose Garnet! to—now, don't flush up that way—to see John March living by passion and not by principle!"

"H—oh! Miss Fannie!" He strained up a superior smile. "Is passion—are passions bound to be ignoble? But you're making the usual mistake——"

"How, John?" She put on a condescending patience.

"Why, in fancying you women can guide a man by——"

"Preaching?" the girl interrupted. Her face had changed. "I know we can't," she added, abstractedly. John was trying to push his advantage.

"Passion!" he exclaimed. "Passion? Miss Fannie, you look at life with a woman's view! We men—what are we without passion—all the passions? Furnaces without fire! Ships without sails!"

"True! John. And just as true for women. But without principles we're ships without rudders. Passion ought to fill our sails, yes; but if principles don't steer we're lost!"

"Now, are you not making yourself my guiding star?"

"No! I won't have the awful responsibility! I'm nothing but a misguided girl. Guiding star! Oh, fancy calling me that when your dear old——"

"Do—o—on't!"

"Then take it back and be a guiding star yourself! See here! D'you remember the day at the tournament when you were my knight? John March, can you believe it? I! me! this girl! Fannie Halliday! member of the choir! I prayed for you that day. I did, for a fact! I prayed you might come to be one of the few who are the knights of all mankind; and here you—John, if I had a thousand gold dollars I'd rather lose them in the sea than have you do what you're this day——"

"Miss Fannie, stop; I'm not doing it. It's not going to be done. But oh! if you knew what spurred me on—I can't expl——"

"You needn't. I've known all about it for years! I got it from the girls who put you to bed that night. But no one else knows it and they'll never tell. John," Fannie pushed her gaiter's tip with her parasol, "guess who was here all last evening, smoking the pipe of peace with pop."

"Jeff-Jack?"

"I mean besides him. Brother Garnet! John, what is that man mostly, fox or goose?"

"Oh, now, Miss Fannie, you're unjust! You're—you're partisan!"

"Hmm! That's what pop called me. He says Major Garnet means well, only he's a moss-back. Sakes alive! That's worse than fox and goose in one!" Her eyes danced merrily. "Why, that man's still in the siege of Vicksburg, feeding Rosemont and Suez with its mule meat, John."

"Miss Fannie, it's my benefactor you're speaking of."

"Aw! your grandmother! Look here. Why'd he bring Mr. Ravenel here—for Mr. Ravenel didn't bring him—to pow-wow with pop? Of course he had some purpose—some plan. It's only you that's all sympathies—no plans."

"Why, it's not an hour," cried John, rising, "since Jeff-Jack told me he wasn't a man of plans, other men's plans were good enough for him!"

Fannie's mouth opened and her eyes widened with merriment. "Oh—oh—mm—mm—mm." She looked up at the sky and then sidewise at the youth. "Sit down, sit down; you need the rest! Oh!" She rounded her mouth and laughed.

"Now, see here, John March, you've no right to make me behave so. Listen! I have a sneaking notion that, with some reference to your mountain lands, Brother Garnet—whom, I declare, John, I wouldn't speak to if it wasn't for Cousin Rose—has for years built you into his plans, including those he brought here last night. In a few days you'll at last be through Rosemont; but I believe he'd be glad to see you live for years yet on loves, hates, and borrowed money. Oh! for your father's sake, don't please that man that way! Why can't you plan? Why don't you guide? You plan fast enough when passion controls you; plan with your passions under your control. Build men—build him—into your plans. Why, John, owning as much of God's earth as you do, you're honor bound to plan."

"I know it, Miss Fannie. I've been feeling it a long time; now I see it." He started to catch up the rose she had dropped, but the laugh was hers; her foot was on it.

"You—don't you dare, sir! John, there's my foot's sermon. D'you see? Everybody should put his own rose and thorn, both alike, under his own foot. Shod or unshod, sir, we all have to do it. Now, why can't you bring Mr. Ravenel to see pop with a plan of your own? I believe—of course I don't know, but I suspect—Brother Garnet has left something out of his plan that you can take into yours and make yours win. Would you like to see it?" She patted her lips with her parasol handle and smiled bewitchingly.

"Would I—what do you mean, Miss Fannie?"

"Why, I've got it here in the house. It's a secret, but"—lips and parasol again, eyes wickeder than ever—"it's something that you can see and touch. Promise you'll never tell, never-never-never?"

He promised.

"Wait here." She ran into the house, trolling a song. As John sat listening for her return, the thought came abruptly, "Hasn't Jeff-Jack got something to do with this?" But there was scarcely time to resent it when she reopened the door coyly, beckoned him in, passed out, and closed it; and, watchworn, wasted, more dead than alive, there stood before John the thing Garnet was omitting—Cornelius Leggett.

When John passed out again Fannie saw purpose in his face and smiled.

"Well?—Can you build him in?—into your plans?"

The youth stared unintelligently. She laughed at him.

"My stars! you forgot to try!"

* * * * *

It was late at night when Lazarus Graves and Captain Champion, returning from Pulaski City, where they had been hurrying matters into shape for the prosecution of Leggett, rode down the Susie and Pussie Pike toward Suez. Where the Widewood road forked off into the forest on their left they stopped, having unexpectedly come upon a third rider bound the other way. He seemed quite alone and stood by his horse in deep shade, tightening the girth and readjusting blanket and saddle. Champion laughed and predicted his own fate after death.

"Turn that freckled face o' yo's around here, Johnnie March; we ain't Garnet and Pettigrew, an' th' ain't nothin' the matteh with that saddle."

"Howdy, Cap'm," said John, as if too busy to look up.

"Howdy yo'seff! What new devilment you up to now? None? Oh, then we didn't see nobody slide off fum behine that saddle an' slip into the bushes. Who was it, John? Was it Johanna, so-called?"

"No, it was Leggett," said John.

"Oh, I reckon!" laughed the Captain.

"Come on," grumbled Graves, and they left him.



XXI.

MR. LEGGETT'S CHICKEN-PIE POLICY

THE youth whistled his charge out of the brush and moved on, sometimes in the saddle with the mulatto mounted behind, sometimes, where the way was steep, walking beside the tired horse. When both rode he had to bear a continual stream of tobacco-scented whisperings poured into his ear.

"Mr. March, that crowd wouldn't do me this a-way if they knowed the patri'tisms I feels to 'em. You see, it's they financialities incur the late rise in Clairwateh County scrip. Yass, seh; which I catch the fo'cas' o' they intentions in time to be infested in a good passle of it myseff."

"So that now your school funds are all straight again?"

"Ezac'ly! all straight an' comp'ehensive. An' what shell we say then? Shell we commit sin that grace may aboun'? Supposin' I has been too trancadillious; I say jis' supposin' I may have evince a rather too wifely pretendencies; what does they care fo' that? No, seh, all they wants is to git shet o' me."

"And do you think they're wrong?"

"Mr. March, I does! Thass right where they misses it. Why, they needs me, seh! I got a new policy, Mr. March. I 'llowed to espound it las' week on the flo' of the house, same day the guvneh veto that bill we pass; yass, seh. The guvneh's too much like Gyarnit; he's faw the whole hawg or none. Thass not my way; my visions is mo' perspectral an' mo' clairer. Seh? Wha'd you say?"

"Oh, nothing," laughed John. "Only a shudder of disgust."

"Yass, seh. Well, it is disgusting ev'm to me. You see, I discerns all these here New Dixie projeckin'. I behole how they all a-makin' they sun'ry chicken-pies, which notinstanin' they all diff'ent, yit they all alike, faw they all turnovers! Yass, seh, they all spreads hafe acrost the dish an' then tu'n back. I has been entitle Slick an' Slippery Leggett—an' yit what has I always espress myseff? Gen'lemen, they must be sufficiend plenty o' chicken-pie to go round. An', Mr. March, if she don't be round, she won't go round. 'Tis true the scripter say, To them what hath shell be givened, an' to them what hath not shell be takened away that which seem like they hath; but the scripter's one thing an' chicken-pie's anotheh."

"Listen," whispered John, stopping the horse; and when Mr. Leggett would have begun again—"Oh, do shut your everlasting——"

"P-he-he-he-he!" tittered the mulatto under his breath. John started again and Leggett resumed.

"Whew! I'm that thusty! Ain't you got no sawt o' pain-killeh about yo' clo'es? Aw! Mr. March, mos' sholy you is got some. No gen'leman ain't goin' to be out this time o' night 'ithout some sawt o' corrective—Lawd! I wisht you had! Cayn't we stop som'er's an' git some? Lawd! I wisht we could! I'm jest a-honin' faw some sawt o' wetness.

"But exhumin' my subjec', Mr. March, thass anotheh thing the scripters evince—that ev'y man shall be judge' by his axe. Yass, seh, faw of co'se ev'y man got his axe to grime. I got mine. You got yo's, ain't you?—Well, o' co'se. I respec' you faw it! Yass, seh; but right there the question arise, is it a public axe? An' if so, is it a good one? aw is it a private axe? aw is it both? Of co'se, ef a man got a good public axe to grime, he espec'—an' you espec' him—to bring his private axe along an' git hit grime at the same junction. Thass natchiul. Thass all right an' puffiely corrosive. On'y we must take tu'ns tunnin' the grime-stone. You grime my axe, I grime yo's. How does that strack you, Mr. March?"

John's reply was enthusiastic. "Why, it strikes me as positively mephitic."

"Mr. March, thass what it is! Thass the ve'y word! Now, shell me an' you fulfil the scripter—'The white man o' the mountains an' the Etheropium o' the valleys shell jine they han's an' the po' man's axe shell be grime'?' Ain't them words sweet? Ain't they jess pufficly syruptitious? My country, 'tis of thee! Oh, Mr. March, ef you knowed how much patri'tism I got!—You hear them Suez fellehs say this is a white man's country an' cayn't eveh be a rich man's country till it is a white man's——"

"See here, now; I tell you for the last time, if you value your life you'd better make less noise."

"Yass, seh. Lawd, I cayn't talk; I'm that thusty I'm a-spitt'n' cotton!—No, seh! White man ain't eveh goin' to lif hisseff up by holdin' niggeh down, an' that's the pyo chaotic truth; now, ain't it?"

"Best way is to hang the nigger up."

"Aw, Mr. March, you a-jokin'! You know I espress the truth. Ef you wants to make a rich country, you ain't got to make it a white man's country, naw a black man's country, naw yit mix the races an' make it n yaller man's country, much less a yaller woman's; no, seh! But the whole effulgence is jess this: you got to make it a po' man's country! Now, you accentuate yo' reflections on that, seh!—Seh?"

"I say that's exactly what Widewood is."

"No, seh! no, seh! I means a country what's good faw a po' man, an' Widewood cayn't even be that 'ithout school-houses, seh! But thass what me an' you can make it, Mr. March. Why, thass the hence an' the whence that my constituents an' coefficients calls me School-house Leggett. Some men cusses me that I has mix' the races in school. Well, supposin' I has—a little; I'se mix' myseff. You cayn't neveh mix 'em hafe so fas' in school as they mixes 'em out o' school. Yit thass not in the accawdeons o' my new policy. Mr. March, I'm faw the specie o' schools we kin git an' keep——"

John laughed again. "Oh, yes, you're sure to keep all the specie you get."

Mr. Leggett giggled. "Aw! I means that kine o' school. An' jiss now that happ'm to be sep'ate schools. I neveh was hawgish like myfrien' Gyarnit. Gyarnit's faw Rosemont an' State aid toe Rosemont, an' faw nothin' else an' nobody else, fus', las', an' everlastin'. Thass jess why his projeckin' don't neveh eventuate, an' which it neveh will whilse I'm there to preventuate! Whoever hear him say, 'Mr. School-house Leggett, aw Mr. March, aw Mr. Anybody-in-God's-worl', pass yo' plate faw a piece o' the chicken pie?' What! you heard it? Oh, Mr. March, don't you be fool'! An' yit I favo's Rosemont——"

"Why, you've made it your standing threat to burst Rosemont wide open!"

"Yass, te-he! I has often prevaricate that intention. But Law'! that was pyo gas, Mr. March. I favors Rosemont, an' State aid toe Rosemont—perwidin'—enough o' the said thereof to go round, an' the same size piece faw ev'y po' man's boy as faw ev'y rich man's boy. Of co's with gals it's diff'ent. Mr. March, you don't know what a frien' you been a-dislikin'!"

"They say you're in favor of railroads."

"Why, o' co'se! An' puttickly the Pussie an' Susie an' Great South Railroad an' State mawgage bawns in accawdeons—perwidin!—one school-house, som'er's in these-yeh th'ee counties, faw ev'y five mile' o' road they buil; an' a Leggettstown braynch road, yass, seh. An', Mr. March, yit, still, mo'over, perwiddin' the movin' the capital to Suez, away fum the corrup' influence of Pulaski City. Faw, Mr. March, the legislatu'e will neveh be pyo anywher's else esceptin' in Suez, an' not evm myseff! Whew! I'm that thusty——"



XXII.

CLIMBING LOVER'S LEAP

The woods grew dense and pathless, and the whispering gave place to a busy fending off of the strong undergrowth. Presently John tied the horse, and the riders stepped into an open spot on a precipitous mountain side. At their left a deep gorge sank so abruptly that a small stone, casually displaced, went sliding and rattling beyond earshot. On their right a wasted moon rose and stared at them over the mountain's shoulder; while within hand's reach, a rocky cliff, bald on its crown, stripped to the waist, and draped at its foot in foliage, towered in the shadow of the vast hill.

"Why, good Lawd, Mr. March, this is Lover's Leap! We cayn't neveh climb up here!"

"We've got to! D' you reckon I brought you here to look at it? Come on. We've only got to reach that last cedar yonder by the dead pine."

The mulatto moaned, but they climbed. As they rose the black gorge seemed to crawl under them and open its hungry jaws.

"Great Lawd! Mr. March, this is sut'n death! Leas'wise it is to me. I cayn't go no fu'ther, Mr. March; I inglected to tell you I'se got a pow'ful lame foot."

"Keep quiet," murmured John, "and come on. Only don't look down."

The reply was a gasp of horror. "Oh! mussy me, you spoke too late! Wait jess a minute, Mr. March, I'll stan' up ag'in in a minute. I jess mus' set here a minute an' enjoy the view; it's gr-gran'!

"Yass, seh. I'se a-comin', seh. I'll rise up in a few minutes; I'm sick at my stomach, but it'll pass off if I kin jiss set still a shawt while tell it passes off."

The speaker slowly rose, grabbling the face of the rock.

"Mr. March, wait a minute, I w-want to tell you. Is-is-is you w-waitin'? Mr. March, this is pufficly safe and haza'dous, seh, I feels that, seh, but I don't like this runnin' away an' hidin'! It's cowardly; le's go down an' face the thing like men! I'm goin' to crawl down back 'ards; thass the skilfullest way."

"Halt!" growled John, and something else added "tick-tick."

"Oh! Mr. March, faw God's sake! Ef you mus' shoot me, shoot me whah I won't fall so fuh! Why, I was a-jokin'! I wa'n't a-dreamin' o' goin' back! Heah I come, seh, look out! Oh, please put up that-ah naysty-lookin' thing!—Thank you, seh!—Mr. March, escuse me jiss a minute whilse I epitomize my breath a little, seh, I jess want to recover my dizziness—This is fine, ain't it? Oh, Lawd! Mr. March, escuse my sinkin' down this a-way! Oh, don't disfunnish yo'seff to come back to me, seh; I's jiss faint and thusty. Mr. March, I ain't a-scared; I'm jiss a-parishin' o' thust! Lawd! I'm jiss that bole an' rackless I'd resk twenty lives faw jiss one hafe a finger o' pyo whiskey. I dunno what'll happm to me ef I don't git some quick. I ain't had a drap sence the night o' the ball, an' thass what make this-yeh flatulency o' the heart. Oh! please don't tech me; ev'm ef you lif' me I cayn't stan'. Oh, Lawd! the icy han' o' death is on me. I'll soon be in glory!"

"Glory!" answered an echo across the gorge.

John laughed. "We're nearly to the cave. If I have to carry you it 'll double the danger."

"Oh, yass, seh! you go on, I'll jine you. I jis wants a few minutes to myseff faw prayer."

"Cornelius," said the cautiously stooping youth, "I'm going to take you where I said I would, if I have to carry you there in three pieces. Here—wait—I'd better tote you on my back. Put your arms around my neck. Now give me your legs. That's it. Now, hold firm; one false step and over we go."

He slowly picked his way. Once he stopped, while a stone which had crumbled from under his tread went crashing through the bushes and into the yawning gulf. The footing was terribly narrow for several rods, but at length it widened. He crouched again. "Now, get off; the rest is only some steep climbing in the bushes."

"Mr. March, I ain't eveh goin' to git down to God's blessed level groun' ag'in!"

"Think not? You'll be there in five seconds if you take hold of any dead wood. Come on."

They climbed again, hugged the cliff while they took breath, climbed once more, forebore to look down, and soon, crowding into what had seemed but a shallow cleft, were stooping under the low roof of a small cavern. Its close rocky bounds and tumbled floor sparkled here and there in the light of the matches John struck. From their pockets the pair laid out a scant store of food.

"Now I must go," said John. "I'll come again to-morrow night. You're safe here. You may find a snake or two, but you don't mind that, do you?"

"Me? Law, no! not real ones. Di'mon'-back rattlesnake hisself cayn't no mo' scare me 'n if I was a hawg. Good-by, seh."

How the heavy-eyed youth the next day finished his examinations he scarcely knew himself, but he hoped he had somehow passed. He could not slip away from Rosemont until after bedtime, and the night was half gone when he reached the cliff under Lover's Leap. A light rain increased the risk of the climb, but he reached the cave in safety only to find it deserted. On his way down he discovered ample signs that the promiscuous lover, an hour or two before, had slowly, safely, and in the "skilfullest way" reached the arms of his most dangerous but dearest love; "cooned it every step," John said, talking to his horse as they trudged back toward Rosemont. "What the rattle-snakes couldn't do," he added, "the bottle-snake has done."

Mr. Leggett's perils might not be over, but out of the youth's hands meant off his indulgent conscience, and John returned to his slighted books, quickened in all his wilful young blood by the knowledge that a single night of adventurous magnanimity had made him henceforth master of himself, his own purposes, and his own mistakes.



XXIII.

A SUMMONS FOR THE JUDGE

Baccalaureate Sunday. It was hot, even for Suez. The river seemed to shine with heat. Yet every convenient horse-rack was crowded with horses, more than half of them under side-saddles, and in the square neighing steeds, tied to swinging limbs because too emotionally noble to share their privileges with anything they could kick, pawed, wheeled, and gazed after their vanished riders as if to say, "'Pon my word, if he hasn't gone to church."

The church, Parson Tombs's, was packed. Men were not few, yet the pews and the aisles, choked with chairs from end to end, were one yeast of muslins, lawns, and organdies, while everywhere the fans pulsed and danced a hundred measures at once in fascinating confusion.

In the amen pews on the right sat all Montrose; facing them, on the left, sat all Rosemont, except the principal; Garnet was with the pastor in the pulpit. The Governor of Dixie was present; the first one they of the old regime had actually gotten into the gubernatorial chair since the darkies had begun to vote. Two members of the Governor's staff sat in a front pew in uniform; blue!

"See that second man on the left?" whispered Captain Shotwell to an old army friend from Charleston; "that handsome felleh with the wavy auburn hair, soft mustache, and big, sawt o' pawnderin' eyes?"

"What! that the Governor? He can't be over thirty or thirty-one!"

"Governor, no! he wouldn't take the governorship; that's Jeff-Jack Ravenel, editor of the Courier, a-ablest man in Dixie. No, that's the Governor next to him."

"That old toad? Why, he's a moral hulk; look at his nose!"

"Yes, it's a pity, but we done the best we could—had to keep the alignment, you know. His brother leases and sublets convicts, five stockades of 'em, and ought to be one himself.

"These girls inside the altar-rail, they're the academy chorus. That one? Oh, that's Halliday's daughter. Yass, beautiful, but you should 'a' seen her three years ago. No use talkin', seh—I wouldn't say so to a Yankee, but—ow climate's hard on beauty. Teach in the acad'? Oh! no, seh, she jus' sings with 'em. Magnificent voice. Some Yankees here last week allowed they'd ruther hear her than Adelina Patti—in some sawngs.

"She's an awful man-killeh; repo'ted engaged to five fellehs at once, Jeff-Jack included. I don't know whether it's true or not, but you know how ow Dixie gyirls ah, seh. An' yet, seh, when they marry, as they all do, where'll you find mo' devoted wives? This ain't the lan' o' divo'ces, seh; this is the lan' o' loose engagements an' tight marriages.

"D' you see that gyirl in the second row of Montroses, soft eyes, sawt o' deep-down roguish, round, straight neck, head set so nice on it? That's Gyarnet's daughteh. That gyirl's not as old as she looks, by three years."

He ceased. The chorus under the high pulpit stood up, sang, and sat again. Parson Tombs, above them, rose with extended arms, and the services had begun. The chorus stood again, and the church choir faced them from the gallery and sang with them antiphonally, to the spiritual discomfort of many who counted it the latest agony of modernness. In the long prayer the diversity of sects and fashions showed forth; but a majority tried hard not to resent any posture different from their own, although Miss Martha Salter and many others who buried their faces in their own seats, knew that Mr. Ravenel's eyes were counting the cracks in the plastering.

Barbara knelt forward—the Montrose mode. She heard Parson Tombs confess the Job-like loathsomeness of everyone present; but his long-familiar, chanting monotones fainted and died in the portals of her ears like a nurse's song, while her sinking eyelids shut not out, but in, one tallish Rosemont senior who had risen in prayer visibly heavy with the sleep he had robbed from three successive nights. The chirp of a lone cricket somewhere under the floor led her forth in a half dream beyond the town and the gleaming turnpike, across wide fields whose multitudinous, tiny life rasped and buzzed under the vibrant heat; and so on to Rosemont, dear Rosemont, and the rose mother there.

Her fan stops. An unearthly sweetness, an unconditioned bliss, a heavenly disembodiment too perfect for ecstasy, an oblivion surcharged with light, a blessed rarefaction of self that fills the house, the air, the sky, and ascends full of sweet odors and soothing sounds, wafts her up on the cadenced lullaby of the long, long prayer. Is it finished? No.

"Oh, quicken our drowsy powers!" she hears the pastor cry on a rising wave of monotone, and starts the fan again. Is she in church or in Rosemont? She sees Johanna beckoning in her old, cajoling way, asking, as in fact, not fancy, she had done the evening before, for the latest news of Cornelius, and hearing with pious thankfulness that Leggett has reappeared in his official seat, made a speech that filled the house with laughter and applause, put parties into a better humor with each other than they had been for years, and remains, and, for the present, will remain, unmolested.

Still Parson Tombs is praying. The fan waggles briskly, then more slowly—slowly—slowly, and sinks to rest on her white-robed bosom. The head, heavy with luminous brown hair, careens gently upon one cheek; that ineffably sweet dissolution into all nature and space comes again, and far up among the dream-clouds, just as she is about to recognize certain happy faces, there is a rush of sound, a flood of consternation, a start, a tumbling in of consciousness, the five senses leap to their stations, and she sits upright fluttering her fan and glancing round upon the seated congregation. The pastor has said amen.

Garnet spoke extemporaneously. The majority, who did not know every line of the sermon was written and memorized, marvelled at its facility, and even some who knew admitted it was wonderful for fervor, rhetorical richness and the skill with which it "voiced the times" without so much as touching those matters which Dixie, Rosemont's Dixie, did not want touched. Parson Tombs and others moaned "Amen," "Glory," "Thaynk Gawd," etc., after every great period. Only General Halliday said to his daughter, "He's out of focus again; claiming an exclusive freedom for his own set."

The text was, "But I was born free."

Paul, the speaker said, was as profound a believer in law as in faith. Jealous for every right of his citizenship, he might humble himself, but he never lightly allowed himself to be humbled. Law is essential to every civil order, but the very laying of it upon a man makes it his title-deed to a freedom without which obedience is not obedience, nor citizenship citizenship. No man is entirely free to fill out the full round of his whole manhood who is not in some genuine, generous way an author of the laws he obeys. "At this sacred desk and on this holy day I thank God that Dixie's noble sons and daughters are at last, after great tribulations, freer from laws and government not of their own choice than ever before since war furled its torn and blood-drenched banner! We have taught the world—and it's worth the tribulation to have taught the world—under God, that a people born with freedom in the blood cannot be forced even to do right! 'What you order me to do, alien lawmaker, may be right, but I was born free!' My first duty to God is to be free, and no freedom is freedom till it is purged of all indignity!