XVI

"I've got something for you," Gordon said suddenly.

"I hope it's pretty," she replied, leaning forward, resting against his shoulder.

He brought from his pocket the slender, looped necklace of seed pearls. It was faintly visible in the dark, the diamond clasp made a small glint. She took it eagerly from him. "I'll light a match," he told her. In the minute, orange radiance the pearls shimmered in her fingers.

"But it's wonderful!" she exclaimed, unable to suppress her surprise at his unerring choice; "it's exactly right. Have you been to Stenton? however could you get this here?"

"Oh, I know a few things," he assured her; "I got an eye. Let me put it on for you." He took it from her, and his hands fumbled about her smooth throat. He required a long time to fasten it. The intoxication of the subtlety of her sex welled from hand to head. He kissed her still lips until he ceased from sheer lack of breath. He drew her close to him, with an arm about her pliant waist.

"I've been thinking of you in those pretty clothes," he admitted.

"All lace and webby pink silk and ribbands underneath," she reminded him; "but only for you, and satin trains and diamonds for the others."

Her words winged like little flames into his imagination. He whispered in her ear, "Richmond." She stiffened in his arms as if that single word had the power to freeze her. "We'll see, we'll see," he added hastily, fearing to dispel her complacency. "Paris is a long way ... a man could never come back."

"I didn't know you were so cautious," she challenged; "I thought you were bolder—that's your reputation in Greenstream, a bad one for a man or woman to cross."

"So I've been," he acknowledged; "I told you I wouldn't have hesitated a while back."

"What is holding you now—your wife? She would soon get over it. She's only a girl, she hasn't had enough experience to hold a man. Besides, she must know by now that you only married her for money; she must know you don't care for her; women always find out."

The bald, incontestable statement of his reason for marrying Lettice disconcerted him. He had never made the acknowledgment of putting it into words to himself, and no one else had openly guessed, had dared....

Suddenly it appeared to him in the light of a possible act of cowardice—Lettice, a girl, blinded by affection. And, equally, it was undeniably true that he did not care for her ... he did not care for her? that realization too carried a slight sting. But neither did he care for Meta Beggs; something different attracted him to the latter; she—she brought him out, that was it; she ministered to his pleasure, his desire, his—

"Don't," she said firmly.

His balked feelings overmastered him, and he disregarded her prohibition. She slipped from his grasp as lithely as the serpentine pearls had run through his fingers.

"Haven't you learned," she demanded, standing, "that I can't be bought with silk stockings or a little necklace? Or, perhaps, you are cheap, and I have been entirely wrong.... I'm going to get something to eat, with the people who brought me from Greenstream. I will be back here in two hours, but it will be for the last time. You must decide one way or the other while I am gone. You may stay or leave; I'm going to leave. Remember—no more penny kisses, no more meetings like this; it must be all or nothing. Some man will take me to Paris, have me." She dissolved against the dark of the maple grove.



XVII

But, curiously, sitting alone, he gave little consideration to the decision, immediate and irrevocable, which confronted him. His thoughts evaded, defied, him, retreated into night-like obscurity, returned burdened with trivial and unexpected details of memory. It grew colder, the rich monotone of mountain and sky changed to an impenetrable, ugly density above which the constellations wheeled without color. His back was toward the maple grove; the removed, disembodied voices mingled in a sound not more intelligible than the chorus of frogs. It occurred to him suddenly that, perhaps, in a week, a month, he might not be in Greenstream, nor in the mountains, but with the white body of Meta Beggs in the midst of one of those vast, fabulous cities the lust of which possessed her so utterly.... Or she would be gone.

He thought instinctively of the little cemetery on the slope above the village. One by one that rocky patch was absorbing family and familiars. Life appeared to be a stumbling procession winding through Greenstream over the rise and sinking into that gaping, insatiable chasm. He was conscious of an invisible force propelling him into that sorry parade, toward those unpretentious stones marked with the shibboleth of names and dates. A desperate anxiety to evade this fate set his soul cowering in its fatal mask of clay. This, he realized, was unadulterated, childish fear, and he angrily aroused himself from its stifling influence.

Meta Beggs would be back soon; she would require an answer to her resolve ... all or nothing. The heat, chilled by the night and loneliness, faded a little from his blood. She demanded a great deal—a man could never return. He bitterly cursed his indecision. He became aware of a pervading weariness, a stiffness from his prolonged contact with the earth, and he rose, moved about. His legs were as rigid, as painful, as an old man's; he had been leaning on his elbow, and the arm was dead to the fingers. The nerves pricked and jerked in infinitesimal, fiery agonies. He swung his arms, stamped his feet, aiding his stagnating circulation. The frogs ceased their complaint abruptly; the concerted jangle of voices in the grove rose and fell. The replenished fires poured their energy over the broad bottoms of the sap kettles.

The night faded.

The change, at first, was imperceptible: as always the easterly mountains grow visible against a lighter sky. The foliage of the maples, stripped of the looping stars, took the form of individual branches brightening from black to green. There was a stir of dim figures about the impatient horses. Meta Beggs came swiftly to him. He could see her face plainly now, and was surprised at its strained, anxious expression. Her hand closed upon his arm, she drew him to her:

"Which?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he dully replied.

"Save me," she implored; "take me away." She whispered maddeningly in his ear, summoning the lust within him, the clamor in his brain, the throbbing in his throat, his wrists. He shut his eyes, and, when he opened them, the dawn had arrived. It forced her from him. Her gown changed to vivid red; about her throat the graceful pearls were faintly iridescent.

"I don't know," he repeated wearily.

Over her shoulder he saw a buggy approaching across the grass. It was disconcertingly familiar, until he recognized, beyond any doubt, that it was his own. Sim, he assured himself, had learned of his presence at the sap-boiling, and, in passing, had stopped to fetch him home. But there was no man in the buggy ... only two women. Meta Beggs, intercepting his intent gaze, turned and followed it to its goal ... Gordon saw now that Mrs. Caley was driving, and by her side ... Lettice! Lettice—riding over the rough field, over the dark stony roads, when now, so soon ... in her condition ... it was insanity. Simeon Caley's wife should never have allowed it.

The horse, stolidly walking over the sod, stopped before them. Mrs. Caley held a rein in either hand, her head, framed in a rusty black bonnet and strings, was as dark, as immobile as iron. Lettice gathered her shawl tightly about her shoulders; she had on a white waist and her head was bare. She descended clumsily from the buggy and walked slowly up to Gordon. Her face was older than he had ever seen it, and pinched; in one hand she grasped a small pasteboard box.



XVIII

Gordon Makimmon made one step toward her. Lettice held the box in an extended hand:

"Gordon," she asked, "what was this for? It was in the clothes press last evening: it couldn't have been there long. You see—it's a little jewellery box from the post-office; here is the name on the lid. Somehow, Gordon, finding it upset me; I couldn't stop 'til I'd seen you and asked you about it. Somehow there didn't seem to be any time to lose. I asked for you last night in the village, but everybody had gone to the sap-boiling ... I sat up all night ... waiting ... I couldn't wait any longer, Gordon, somehow. I had to come out and find you, and everybody had gone to the sap-boiling, and—"

"Why, Lettice," he stammered, more disconcerted by the sudden loss of youth from her countenance than by her words; "it wasn't—wasn't much."

"What was it, Gordon?" she insisted.

Suddenly he was unable to lie to her. Her questioning eyes held a quality that dispelled petty and casual subterfuges. The evasion which he summoned to his lips perished silently.

"A string of pearls," he muttered.

"Why did you crush the pretty box if they were for—for me or for your sister, if it was to be a surprise? I can't understand—"

"It, it was—"

"Who were they for, Gordon?"

A blundering panic swept over him; Lettice was more strange than familiar; she was unnatural; her hair didn't shine in the sunlight streaming into the shallow, green basin; in the midst of the warm efflorescence she seemed remote, chill.

"For her," he moved his head toward Meta Beggs.

She withdrew her burning gaze from Gordon Makimmon and turned to the school-teacher.

"For Miss Beggs," she repeated, "why ... why, that's bad, Gordon. You're married to me; I'm your wife. Miss Beggs oughtn't ... she isn't anything to you."

Meta Beggs stood motionless, silent, her red cotton dress drawing and wrinkling over her rounded shoulders and hips. The necklace hung gracefully about the slender column of her throat.

The two women standing in the foreground of Gordon Makimmon's vision, of his existence, summed up all the eternal contrast, the struggle, in the feminine heart. And they summed up the duplicity, the weakness, the sensual and egotistical desires, the power and vanity and vain-longing, of men.

Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment, for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed voluptuousness relaxed in the scented spray of pagan baths; the woman with piled and white-powdered hair in a gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute with a pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the Maison Doree. She was as old as the first vice, as the first lust budding like a black blossom in the morbidity of men successful, satiated.

She was old, but Lettice was older.

Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects and airs.

Standing in the flooding blue flame of day they opposed to each other the forces fatally locked in the body of humanity. Lettice, with her unborn child, her youth haggard with apprehension and pain, the prefigurement of the agony of birth, gazed, dumb and bitter in her sacrifice, at the graceful, cold figure that, as irrevocably as herself, denied all that Lettice affirmed, desired all that she feared and hated.

"Why, that's bad, Gordon," she reiterated, "I'm your wife. And Miss Beggs is bad, I'm certain of that." A spasm of suffering crossed her face like a cloud.

"You ought not to have come, Lettice. Lettice, you ought not to have come," he told her. His dull voice reflected the lassitude that had fallen upon him, the sudden death of all emotion, the swift extinguishing of his interest in the world about him; it reflected, in his indifference to desire, an indifference to Meta Beggs.

"Do you love her, Gordon?" his wife asked.

"No, I don't," he answered, perceptibly impatient at the question.

"Do you like her better than you like me?"

The palpable answer to her query, that he thought of himself more than either, evaded him. "I don't like her better than I like you," he repeated baldly.

Lettice turned to the other woman. "There's not much you can say," she declared, "caught like this trying to steal somebody's husband. And you set over a school of children!"

"I don't choose to be," Meta Beggs retorted. "I hate it, but I had to live. If you hadn't had all that money to keep you soft, yes, and get you a husband, you would have had to fight and do, too. You might have been teaching a roomful of little sneaks, and sick to death of it before ever you began ... or you might be on the street—better girls have than you."

"And you bought her a necklace, Gordon, her—"

All that he now desired was to get Lettice safely home. Another wave of pain rose whitely over her countenance. "Come on, Lettice," he urged; "just step into the buggy." He waved toward the vehicle, toward the peacefully grazing horse, Mrs. Caley sitting upright and sallow.

"And take him right along with you," Meta Beggs added; "your money's tight around his neck."

Resentment at the implied ignominy penetrated his self-esteem.

"We're going right on now, Lettice," he continued; "we must drive as careful as possible."

"I don't know that I want you," his wife articulated slowly.

"You can decide that later," he returned; "we're going home first."

She relaxed her fingers, and dropped the pasteboard box on the turf. She stood with her arms hanging limply, breathing in sharp inspirations. She gazed about at the valley, the half-distant maple grove: suddenly the youth momentarily returned to her, the frightened expression of a child abruptly conscious of isolation in an alien, unexpected setting.

"Gordon," she said rapidly, "I had to come—find you ... something—" her voice sharpened with apprehension. "Tell me it will be all right. It won't ... kill me." She stumbled toward him, he caught her, and half carried her to the buggy, where he lifted her over the step and into the seat. A red-clad arm was supporting her on the other side: it was Meta Beggs.

"You drive," he directed Mrs. Caley. He held Lettice with her face hidden against his shoulder. The valley was refulgent with early summer, the wheat was swelling greenly, the meadows, threaded by shining streams were sown with flowers, grazed by herds of cattle with hides like satin, the pellucid air was filled with indefinite birdsong. The buggy lurched over a hillock of grass, his wife shuddered in his arms, and an unaccustomed, vicarious pain contracted his heart. Where the fields gave upon the road the buggy dropped sharply; Lettice cried out uncontrollably. He cursed Mrs. Caley savagely under his breath, "Can't you drive," he asked; "can't you?"

The ascent to the crown of the ridge was rough, but beyond, winding down to the Greenstream valley, it was worse. The buggy, badly hitched, bumped against the flank of the horse, twisted over exposed boulders, brought up suddenly in the gutters cut diagonally by the spring torrents. Gordon Makimmon forgot everything else in the sole desire to get Lettice safely to their house. He endeavored, by shifting her position, to reduce the jarring of the uneven progress. He realized that she was in a continual agony, and, in that new ability to share it through the dawning consciousness of its brute actuality in Lettice, it roused in him an impotent fury of rebellion. It took the form of an increasing passion of anger at the inanimate stones of the road, against Mrs. Caley's meager profile on the dusty hood of the buggy. He whispered enraged oaths, worked himself into an insanity of temper. Lettice grew rigid in his arms. For a while she iterated dully, like the beating of a sluggish heart "bad ... bad ... bad." Then dread wiped all other expression from her face; then, again, pain pinched her features.

The buggy creaked down the decline to their dwelling. Gordon supported Lettice to their room; then he stood on the porch without, waiting. The rugged horse, still hitched, snatched with coarse, yellow teeth at the grass. Suddenly Mrs. Caley appeared at a door: she spoke, breaking the irascible silence of months, dispelling the accumulating ill-will of her pent resentment, with hasty, disjointed words:

"... quick as you can ... the doctor."



XIX

A hoarse, thin cry sounded from within the Makimmon dwelling. It fluctuated with intolerable pain and died abruptly away, instantly absorbed in the brooding calm of the valley, lost in the vast, indifferent serenity of noon. But its echo persisted in Gordon's thoughts and emotions. He was sitting by the stream, before his house; and, as the cry had risen, he had moved suddenly, as though an invisible hand had touched him upon the shoulder. He sat reflected on the sliding water against the reflection of the far, blue sky. One idea ran in a circle through his brain, his lips formed it soundlessly, he even spoke it aloud:

"It ain't as though I had gone," he said.

The possible consequence to Lettice of what had been a mere indecision seemed to him out of any proportion. No, he thought, I wouldn't have gone when the time came; when the minute came I'd have held back. Then again, it ain't as though I had gone. A species of surprise alternated with resentment at the gravity of the situation which had resulted from his indiscreet conduct; the agony of that cry from within the house was too deep to have proceeded from ... it wasn't as though he had gone ... he wouldn't have gone, anyway.

He heard footsteps on the porch, and turned, recognizing Doctor Pelliter. He half rose to go to the other with an inquiry; but he dropped quickly back on the bank, looked away.—Some time before the doctor had tied a towel about his waist ... it had been a white towel.

His mind returned to Lettice and the terrible mischance that had been brought upon her; that he had brought on her. He tested the latter clause, and attempted to reject it: he had done nothing to provoke such a terrible actuality. He rehearsed the entire chain of events which had resulted in the purchase of the pearl necklace; he followed it as far back as the evening when, from the minister's lawn, he had seen Meta Beggs undressing at her window. He could nowhere discover any desperate wrong committed. He knew men, plenty of them, who were actually unfaithful to their wives: he had done nothing of that sort. He endeavored to grow infuriated with Meta Beggs, then with Mrs. Caley; he endeavored to place upon them the responsibility for that attenuated, agonized sound from the house; but without success. He had made a terrible blunder. But, in a universe where the slightest fairness ruled, he and not Lettice would pay for an error purely his own.

Lettice was so young, he realized suddenly.

He recalled her as she sat alone, under the lamp, with her shawl about her shuddering shoulders, waiting for the inevitable, begging him to assure her that it would be all right. It would, of course, be all right in the end. It must! Then things would be different. He made himself no extravagant promises of reform, no fevered reproaches; but things would be different.—He would take Lettice driving; he had the prettiest young wife in Greenstream, and he would show people that he realized it. She had been Lettice Hollidew, the daughter of old Pompey, the richest man in the county.

The importance of that latter fact had dimmed; the omnipotence of money had dwindled: for instance, any conceivable sum would be powerless to still that cry from within. In a way it had risen from the very fact of Pompey Hollidew's fortune—Meta Beggs would never have considered him aside from it. He endeavored to curse the old man's successful avarice, but without any satisfaction. Every cause contributing to the present impending catastrophe led directly back to himself, to his indecision. The responsibility, closing about him, seemed to shut out the air from his vicinity, to make labored his breathing. He put out a hand, as though to ward off the inimical forces everywhere pressing upon him. He had seen suffering before—what man had not?—but this was different; this unsettled the foundations of his being; it found him vulnerable where he had never been vulnerable before; he shrunk from it as he would shrink from touching a white-hot surface. He was afraid of it.

He thought of the ghastly activities inside the house; they haunted him in confused, horrid details amid which Lettice suffered and cried out.

He was unaware of the day wheeling splendidly through its golden hours, of the sun swinging across the narrow rift of the valley. At long intervals he heard muffled hoof-beats passing on the dusty road above. He watched a trout slip lazily out from under the bank, and lie headed upstream, slowly waving its fins. It recalled the trout he had left on the porch of Hollidew's farmhouse on the night when he had attempted to ... seduce ... Lettice!

The details of that occasion returned vivid, complete, unsparing. It was a memory profoundly regrettable because of an obscure connection with Lettice's present danger; it too—although he was unable to discover why it should—took on the dark aspect of having helped to bring the other about. As the memory of that night recurred to him he became conscious of an obscure, traitorous force lurking within him, betraying him, leading his complacency into foolish and fatal paths, into paths which totally misrepresented him.... He would not really have gone away with Meta Beggs.

He was a better man than all this would indicate! Yet—consider the result; he might as well have committed a foul crime. But, in the end, it would be all right. Doctors always predicted the darkest possibilities.

He turned and saw Doctor Pelliter striding up the slope to where his team was hitched on the public road. A swift resentment swept over Gordon Makimmon as he realized that the other had purposely avoided him. He rose to demand attention, to call; but, instinctively, he stifled his voice. The doctor stopped at the road, and saw him. Gordon waved toward the house, and the other nodded curtly.



XX

He passed through the dining room to the inner doorway, where he brushed by Mrs. Caley. Her face was as harsh and twisted as an old root. He proceeded directly to the bed.

"Lettice," he said; "Lettice."

Then he saw the appalling futility of addressing that familiar name to the strange head on the pillow.

Lettice had gone: she had been destroyed as utterly as though a sinister and ruthless magic had blasted every infinitesimal quality that had been hers. A countenance the color of glazed white paper seemed to hold pools of ink in the hollows of its eyes. The drawn mouth was the color of stale milk. Nothing remained to summon either pity or sorrow. The only possible emotion in the face of that revolting human disaster was an incredulous and shocked surprise. It struck like a terrible jest, a terrible, icy reminder, into the forgetful warmth of living; it mocked at the supposed majesty of suffering, tore aside the assumed dignity, the domination, of men; it tampered ferociously with the beauty, the pride, the innocent and gracious pretensions, of youth, of women.

Gordon Makimmon was conscious of an overwhelming desire to flee from the white grimace on the bed that had been Lettice's and his. He drew back, in a momentary, abject, shameful cowardice; then he forced himself to return.... The fleering lips quivered, there was a slight stir under the counterpane. A little sound gathered, shaped into words barely audible in the stillness of the room broken only by Gordon's breathing:

"It's ... too much. Not any more ... hurting. Oh! I can't—"

He found a chair, and sat down by her side. The palms of his hands were wet, and he wiped them upon his knees. His fear of the supine figure grew, destroying the arrogance of his manhood, his sentient reason. He was afraid of what it intimated, threatened, for himself, and of its unsupportable mockery. He felt as an animal might feel cornered by a hugely grim and playful cruelty.

The westering sun fell through a window on the disordered huddle of Lettice's hastily discarded clothes streaming from a chair to the floor—her stockings, her chemise threaded with a narrow blue ribband. His thoughts turned to the little white garments she had fashioned in vain.

It had been wonderfully comfortable in the evening in the sitting room with Lettice sewing. He recalled the time when he had first played the phonograph in order to hear the dog "sing." Lettice had cried out, imploring him to stop; well—he had stopped, hadn't he? The delayed realization of her patience of misery rankled like a barb. The wandering thoughts returned to the long fabrication he had told her of the loss of his money in Stenton, of the fictitious agent of hardware. He had snared the girl in a net of such lies; scornful of Lettice's innocence, her "stupid" trust, he had brought her to this ruinous pass. It hadn't been necessary.

The window was open, and a breath of early summer drifted in—a breath of palpable sweetness. Mrs. Caley entered and bent over the bed, an angular, black silhouette against the white. She left without a word.

If Lettice died he, Gordon Makimmon, would have killed her, he had killed more ... he recognized that clearly. The knowledge spread through him like a virus, thinning his blood, attacking his brain, his nerves. He lifted a shaking hand to wipe his brow; and, for a brief space, his arm remained in air; it looked as though he were gazing beneath a shielding palm at a far prospect. The arm dropped suddenly to his side, the fingers struck dully against the chair. He heard again the muffled beat of horse's hoofs on the road above; the sun moved slowly over the narrow, gay strips of rag carpet on the floor: life went on elsewhere.

His fear changed to loathing, to absolute, sick repulsion from all the facts of his existence. With the passing minutes the lines deepened on his haggard countenance, his expression perceptibly aged. The stubble of beard that had grown since the day before grizzled his lean jaw; the confident line of his shoulders, of his back, was bowed.

He looked up with a start to find the doctor once more in the room. He rose. "Doc," he asked in a strained whisper, "Doc, will it be all right?" He wet his lips. "Will she live?"

"You needn't whisper," the other told him; "she doesn't know ... now. 'Will she live?' I can only tell you that she wanted to die a thousand times."

Gordon turned away, looking out through the window. It gave upon the slope planted with corn; the vivid, green shoots everywhere pushed through the chocolate-colored soil; chickens were vigorously scratching in a corner. The shadow of the west range reached down and enfolded the Makimmon dwelling; the sky burned in a sulphur-yellow flame. When he turned the doctor had vanished, the room had grown dusky. He resumed his seat.

"I didn't do right," he acknowledged to the travesty on the bed; "there was a good bit I didn't get the hang of. It seems like I hadn't learned anything at all from being alive. I'm going to fix it up," he proceeded, painfully earnest. "I'm—" He broke off suddenly at the stabbing memory of the doctor's words, "She wanted to die a thousand times." He thought, I've killed her a thousand times already. The fear plucked at his throat. He rose and walked unsteadily to the door and out upon the porch.

The evening drew its gauze over the valley, the shrill, tenuous chorus of insects had begun for the night, the gold caps were dissolving from the eastern peaks. He saw Simeon Caley at the stable door; Sim avoided him, moving behind a corner of the shed. His pending sense of blood-guiltiness deepened. The impulse returned to flee, to vanish in the engulfing wild of the mountains. But he realized vaguely that that from which he longed to escape lay within him, he would carry it—the memories woven inexplicably of past and present, dominated by this last, unforgettable specter on the bed—into the woods, the high, lonely clearings, the still valleys. It was not remorse now, it was not simple fear, but the old oppression, increased a thousand-fold.

He sat in the low rocking chair that had held his mother and Clare, and, only yesterday, Lettice, and its rockers made their familiar tracking sound over the uneven boards of the porch. At this hour there was usually a stir and smell of cooking from the kitchen; but now the kitchen window was blank and still. Darkness gathered slowly about him; it obscured the black and white check, the red thread, of his suit; it flowed in about him and reduced him to the common greyness of the porch, the sod, the stream. It changed him from a man with a puzzled, seamed visage into a man with no especial, perceptible features, and then into a shadow, an inconsequential blur less important than the supports for the wooden covering above.



XXI

After a while he rose, impelled once more within. A lamp had been lit in the bedroom, and, in its radiance, the countenance on the pillow glistened like the skin of a lemon. As before, Mrs. Caley left the room as he entered; and he thought that, as she passed him, she snarled like an animal.

He sat bowed by the bed. A moth perished in the flame of the lamp, and the light flickered through the room—it seemed that Lettice grimaced, but it was only the other. Her face had grown sharper: it was such a travesty of her that, somehow, he ceased to associate it with Lettice at all. Instead he began to think of it as something exclusively of his own making—it was what he had done with things, with life.

The sheet lay over the motionless body like a thin covering of snow on the turnings of the earth; it defined her breasts and a hip as crisply as though they were cut in marble effigy on a tomb of youthful dissolution. He followed the impress of an arm to the hand; and, leaning forward, touched it. A coldness seemed to come through the cover to his fingers. He let his hand stay upon hers—perhaps the warmth would flow back into the cold arm, the chill heart; perhaps he could give her some of his vitality. The possibility afforded him a meager comfort, instilled a faint glow into his benumbed being. His hand closed upon that covered by the linen like a shroud. He sat rigid, concentrated, in his effort, his purpose. The light flickered again from the fiery perishing of a second moth.

A strange feeling crept over him, a deepened sense of suspense, of imminence. He fingered his throat, and his hand was icy where it touched his burning face. He stood up in an increasing, nameless disturbance.

A faint spasm crossed the drained countenance beneath him; the mouth fell open.

He knew suddenly that Lettice was dead.

There her clothes lay strewn on the chair and floor, the long, black stockings and the rumpled chemise strung with narrow blue ribband. She had worn them on her warm, young body; she had tied the ribband in the morning and untied it at night, untied it at night ... it was night now.

A slow, exhausted deliberation of mind and act took the place of his late panic. He smoothed the sheet where he had grasped her hand in the futile endeavor to instil into her some of his warmth. He gazed at her for a moment, at the shadows like pools of ink poured into the caverns of her eyes, at a glint of teeth no whiter than the rest, at the dark plait of her hair lying sinuously over the pillow. Then he went to the door:

"Mrs. Caley," he pronounced. The woman appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. "Mrs. Caley," he repeated, "Lettice is dead."

She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and he turned aside and walked heavily out onto the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon's father had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon, heard them sounding in the night. But no other Makimmon would ever listen to the persistent birds, the eternal whisper of the water, because he, the last, had killed his wife ... he had killed their child.

He trod down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant sod, and made his way to where a thread of light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on a box, the lantern at his feet casting a pale flicker over his riven face and the horse muzzling the trough. Gordon sat down upon the broken chair.

"She's dead," he said, after a minute. Simeon Caley made no immediate reply, and he repeated in exactly the same manner:

"She's dead."

A sudden bitterness of contempt flamed in the other's ineffable blue eyes. "God damn you to hell!" he exclaimed; "now you got the money and nothing to hinder you."

His resentment vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He rose and picked up the lantern, and with their puny illumination they went out together into the dark.



THREE

I

On an afternoon of the second autumn following Lettice's death Gordon was fetching home a headstall resewn by Peterman. The latter, in a small shed filled with the penetrating odor of dressed leather at the back of the hotel, exercised the additional trade of saddler. General Jackson ambled at Gordon's heel.

The dog had grown until his shoulder reached the man's knee; he was compact and powerful, with a long, heavy jaw and pronounced, grave whiskers; the wheaten color of his legs and head had lightened, sharply defining the coarse black hair upon his back.

October was drawing to a close: the autumn had been dry, and the foliage was not brilliantly colored, but exhibited a single shade of dusty brown that, in the sun, took the somber gleams of clouded gold. It was warm still, but a furtive wind, stirring the dead leaves uneasily over the ground, was momentarily ominous, chill.

The limp rim of a felt hat obscured Gordon's features, out of the shadow of which protruded his lean, sharp chin. His heavy shoes, hastily scraped of mud, bore long cuts across the heels, while shapeless trousers, a coat with gaping pockets, hung loosely about his thin body and bowed shoulders. He passed the idlers before the office of the Bugle with a scarcely perceptible nod; but, farther on, he stopped before a solitary figure advancing over the narrow footway.

It was Buckley Simmons. He was noticeably smaller since his injury at the camp meeting; he had shrivelled; his face was peaked and wrinkled like the face of a very old man; the shadows in the sunken cheeks did not resemble those on living skin, but were dry and dusty like the autumn leaves. His gaze was fixed upon the ground at his feet; but, as he drew up to Gordon, he raised his head.

Into the dullness of his eyes, his slack lips, crept a dim recognition; among the ashes of his consciousness a spark glowed—a single, live coal of bitter hate.

"How are you, Buckley?" Gordon pronounced slowly.

The other's hands clenched as the wave of emotion crossed the blank countenance. Then the hands relaxed, the face was again empty. He continued, oblivious of Gordon's salutation, of his presence, upon his way.

Gordon Makimmon stood for a moment gazing after him. Then, as he turned, he saw that there was a small group of men on the Courthouse lawn; he saw the sheriff standing facing them from the steps, gesticulating.



II

The purpose of this gathering was instantly apparent to him, it stirred obscure memories into being.—A property was being publicly sold for debt.

The trooping thoughts of the past filled his mind; thoughts, it seemed to him, of another than himself. Surely it had been another Gordon Makimmon that, sitting before the Bugle office, had heard the sheriff enumerating the scant properties of the old freehold by the stream to satisfy the insatiable greed of Valentine Simmons. It had been a younger man than himself by fifteen years. Yet, actually, it had been scarcely more than three years since the storekeeper had had him sold out.

That other Makimmon had been a man of incredibly vivid interests and emotions. Now it appeared to him that, in all the world, there was not a cause for feeling, not an incentive to rouse the mind from apathy.

Stray periods reached him from the sheriff's recounting of "a highly desirable piece of property." His loud, flat voice had not changed by an inflection since he had "called out" Gordon's home; the merely curious or materially interested onlookers were the same, the dragging bidding had, apparently, continued unbroken from the other occasion. The dun, identical repetition added to the overwhelming sense of universal monotony in Gordon Makimmon's brain. He turned at the corner, by Simmons' store, while the memories faded; the customary greyness, like a formless drift of cloud obscuring a mountain height, once more descended upon him.

At the back of the store a small open space was filled with broken crates, straw and boxes—the debris of unpacking. And there he saw a youthful woman sitting with her head turned partially from the road. As he passed a suppressed sob shook her. It captured his attention, and, with a slight, involuntary gasp, he saw her face. The memories returned in a tumultuous, dark tide—she reminded him vividly of Lettice. It was in the young curve of her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, and a sameness of rounded proportions, that the resemblance lay.

He stopped, without formulated reason, and in spite of her obvious desire for him to proceed.

"It's hardly fit to sit here and cry before the whole County," he observed.

"The whole County knows," she returned in the egotism of youthful misery.

Her voice, too, was like Lettice's—sweet with the premonition of the querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all good women.

A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn.

"They're selling you out," he hazarded, "for debt."

She nodded, with trembling lips. "Cannon is," she specified.

Cannon was the storekeeper for whom his brother-in-law clerked. He thought again, how monotonous, how everlastingly alike, life was. "You just let the amount run on and on," he continued; "you got this and that. Then, suddenly, Cannon wanted his money."

Her eyes opened widely at his prescience. "But there was sickness too," she added; "the baby died."

"Ah," Gordon said curtly. The lines in his worn face deepened, his mouth was inscrutable.

"If it hadn't been for that," she confided, "we could have got through. Everything had started fine. Alexander's father had left him the place: there isn't a better in the Bottom. Alexander says Mr. Cannon has always wanted it. Now ... now ..." her blue gaze blurred with slow tears.

Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent—she presented the same order, her white shirtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling down upon him.

And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons' store, brought the buried memories back into light. They disconcerted him, sweeping through the lassitude of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of fear.... The voice of the sheriff carried to them, describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.

"I nailed all the tar-paper on the—the chicken house," she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness, the tears spilling over her round, flushed cheeks.

It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had gone; it assumed the aspect of an intentional reproach, of Lettice returned to bother him with her pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on his way. But, almost immediately, he stopped.

"Your name?" he demanded.

"Adelaide Crandall."

The Crandalls, he knew, were a reputable family living in the valley bottom east of Greenstream village. Matthew Crandall had died a few years before, and, as this girl had indicated, had left a substantial farm to each of his sons. Cannon would get this one, and it was more than probable, the others.

The old enmity against Valentine Simmons, directed at Cannon, flamed afresh. Simmons or the other—what did the name matter? they were the same, a figurative apple press crushing the juice out of the country, leaving but a mash of hopes and lives. He stood irresolute, while Adelaide Crandall fought to control her emotions.

The badgering voice of the sheriff sounded again on his hearing. He crossed the road, pushed open the grinding iron gate of the fence that enclosed the Courthouse lawn, and made his way through the sere, fallen leaves to the steps.



III

"Twenty-seven hundred and ninety dollars," the sheriff reiterated; "only twenty-seven ninety ... this fine bottom land, all cleared and buildings in best repair. Going! Going!"

"Three thousand," a man called from the group facing the columned portico.

"Three thousand! Three thousand! Sale must be made. Going—"

"Thirty-one hundred," Gordon pronounced abruptly.

A stir of renewed interest animated the sale. Gordon heard his name pronounced in accents of surprise. He was surprised at himself: his bid had been unpremeditated—it had leaped like a flash of ignited powder out of the resurrected enmity to Valentine Simmons, out of the memories stirred by the figure that resembled Lettice.

The sheriff immediately took up his bid. "Thirty-one hundred! thirty-one, gentlemen; only thirty-one for this fine bottom land, all cleared—"

There was a prolonged pause in the bidding, during which even the auctioneer grew apathetic. He repeated the assertion that the buildings were in the best repair; then, abruptly, concluded the sale. Gordon had purchased the farm for thirty-one hundred dollars.

He despatched, in the Courthouse, the necessary formalities. When he emerged the group on the lawn had dwindled to three people conversing intently. A young man with heavy shoulders already bowed, clad in unaccustomed, stiff best clothes, advanced to meet him.

"Mr. Makimmon," he began; "you got my place.... There's none better. I've put a lot of work into it. I'll—I'll get my things out soon's I can. If you can give me some time; my wife—"

"I can give you a life," Gordon replied brusquely. He walked past Alexander Crandall to his wife. She turned her face from him. He said:

"You go back to the Bottom. I've fixed Cannon ... this time. Tell your husband he can pay me when it suits; the place is yours." He swung on his heel and strode away.



IV

The fitful wind had, apparently, driven the warmth, the sun, from the earth. The mountains rose starkly to the slaty sky.

Gordon Makimmon lighted a lamp in the dining room of his dwelling. The table still bore a red, fringed cloth, but was bare of all else save the castor, most of the rings of which were empty. The room had a forlorn appearance, there was dust everywhere; Gordon had pitched the headstall into a corner, where it lay upon a miscellaneous, untidy pile.

"I reckon you want something to eat," he observed to General Jackson. He proceeded, followed by the dog, to the kitchen. It revealed an appalling disorder: the stove was spotted with grease, grey with settled ashes; a pile of ashes and broken china rose beyond; on the other side coal and wood had been carelessly stored. A table was laden with unwashed dishes, unsavory pots, crusted pans.

Gordon stood in the middle of the floor, a lamp in his hand, surveying the repellent confusion. It had accumulated without attracting his notice; but now, suddenly detached from the aimless procession of the past months, it was palpable to him, unendurable. "It's not fit for a dog," he pronounced.

An expression of determination settled on his seamed countenance; he took off his coat and hung it on a peg in the door. Outside, by an ash-pit, he found a bucket and half-buried shovel. A minute after the kitchen was filled with grey clouds as he shoveled the ashes into the bucket for removal. He worked vigorously, and the pile soon disappeared; the wood and coal followed, carried out to where a bin was built against the house. Then he raked the fire from the stove.

It was cold within, but Gordon glowed with the heat of his energy. He filled a basin with water, and, with an old brush and piece of sandsoap, attacked the stove. He scrubbed until the surface exhibited a dull, even black; then, in a cupboard, he discovered an old box of stove polish, and soon the iron was gleaming in the lamplight. He laid and lit a fire, put on a tin boiler of water for heating; and then carried all the movables into the night. After which he fed General Jackson.

He flooded the kitchen floor and scrubbed and scraped until the boards were immaculate. Then, with a wet towel about a broom, he cleaned the walls and ceiling; he washed the panes of window glass. The dishes followed; they were dried and ranged in rigid rows on the dresser; the pots were scoured and placed in the closets underneath. Now, he thought vindictively, when he had finished, the kitchen would suit even Sim Caley's wife—the old vinegar bottle.

The Caleys had left his house the morning following Lettice's funeral. Mrs. Caley had departed without a word; Sim with but a brief, awkward farewell. Since then Gordon had lived alone in the house; but he now realized that it was not desirable, practicable. Things, he knew, would soon return to the dirt and disorder of a few hours ago. He needed some one, a woman, to keep the place decent. His necessity recalled the children of his sister.... There was only Rose; the next girl was too young for dependence. The former had been married a year now, and had a baby. Her husband had been in the village only the week before in search of employment, which he had been unable to secure, and it was immaterial where in the County they lived.



V

The couple grasped avidly at the opportunity to live with him. The youth had already evaporated from Rose's countenance; her minute mouth and constantly lifted eyebrows expressed an inwardly-gratifying sense of superiority, an effect strengthened by her thin, affected speech. Across her narrow brow a fringe of hair fell which she was continually crimping with an iron heated in the kitchen stove, permeating the room with a lingering and villainous odor of burned hair.

William Vibard was a man with a passion—the accordion. He arrived with the instrument in a glossy black paper box, produced it at the first opportunity, and sat by the stove drawing it out to incredible lengths in the production of still more incredible sounds. He held one boxlike end, with its metallic stops, by his left ear, while his right hand, unfalteringly fixed in the strap of the other end, operated largely in the region of his stomach.

He had a book of instructions and melodies printed in highly-simplified and explanatory bars, which he balanced on his knee while he struggled in their execution.

He was a youth of large, palpable bones, joints and knuckles; his face was long and preternaturally pale, and bore an abstracted expression which deepened almost to idiocy when bent above the quavering, unaccountable accordion.

The Vibard baby was alarmingly little, with a bluish face; and, as if in protest against her father's interminable noise, lay wrapped in a knitted red blanket without a murmur, without a stir of her midgelike form, hour upon hour.



VI

Some days after the Vibards' arrival Gordon Makimmon was standing by the stable door, in the crisp flood of midday, when an ungainly young man strode about the corner of the dwelling and approached him.

"You're Makimmon," he half queried, half asserted. "I'm Edgar Crandall, Alexander's brother." He took off his hat, and passed his hand in a quick gesture across his brow. He had close-cut, vivid red hair bristling like a helmet over a long, narrow skull, and a thrusting grey gaze. "I came to see you," he continued, "because of what you did for Alec. I can't make out just what it was; but he says you saved his farm, pulled it right out of Cannon's fingers, and that you've given him all the time he needs to pay it back—" He paused.

"Well," Gordon responded, "and if I did?"

"I studied over it at first," the other frankly admitted; "I thought you must have a string tied to something. I know Alexander's place, it's a good farm, but ... I studied and studied until I saw there couldn't be more in it than what appeared. I don't know why—"

"Why should you?" Gordon interrupted brusquely, annoyed by this searching into the reason for his purchase of the farm, into the region of his memories.

"I didn't come here to ask questions," the other quickly assured him; "but to borrow four thousand dollars."

"Why not forty?" Gordon asked dryly.

"Because I couldn't put it out at profit, now." Edgar Crandall ignored the other's factitious manner: "but I can turn four over two or three times in a reasonable period. I can't give you any security, everything's covered I own; that's why I came to you."

"You heard I was a fool with some money?"

"You didn't ask any security of Alexander," he retorted. "No, I came to you because there was something different in what you did from all I had ever known before. I can't tell what I mean; it had a—well, a sort of big indifference about it. It seemed to me perhaps life hadn't got you in the fix it had most of us; that you were free."

"You must think I'm free—with four thousand dollars."

"Apples," the other continued resolutely. "I've got the ground, acres of prime sunny slope. I've read about apple growing and talked to men who know. I've been to Albermarle County. I can do the same thing in the Bottom. Ask anybody who knows me if I'll work. I can pay the money back all right. But, if I know you from what you did, that's not the thing to talk about now.

"I want a chance," he drove a knotted fist into a hardened palm; "I want a chance to bring out what's in me and in my land. I want my own! The place came to me clear, with a little money; but I wasn't content with a crop of fodder. I improved and experimented with the soil till I found out what was in her. Now I know; but I can't plant a sapling, I can't raise an apple, without binding myself to the Cannons and Hollidews of the County for life.

"I'd be their man, growing their fruit, paying them their profits. They would stop at the fence, behind their span of pacers, and watch me—their slave—sweating in the field or orchard."

"You seem to think," Gordon observed, "that you ought to have some special favor, that what grinds other men ought to miss you. Old Pompey sold out many a better man, and grabbed richer farms. And anyhow, if I was to money all that Cannon and Valentine Simmons got hold of where would I be?—Here's two of you in one family, in no time at all.... If that got about I'd have five hundred breaking the door in."

The animation died from Edgar Crandall's face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. "I might have known such things ain't true," he said; "it was just a freak that saved Alec. There's no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam' mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream's the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, I'll let the ground rot, I won't work my guts out for any one else."

He turned sharply and disappeared about the corner of the dwelling. Gordon moved to watch him stride up the slope to where a horse was tied by the public road. Crandall swung himself into the saddle, brought his heels savagely into the horse's sides, and clattered over the road.

Gordon Makimmon's annoyance quickly evaporated; he thought with a measure of amusement of the impetuous young man who was not content to grow a crop of fodder. If the men of Greenstream all resembled Edgar Crandall, he realized, the Cannons would have an uneasy time. He thought of the brother, Alexander, of Alexander's wife, who resembled Lettice, and determined to drive soon to the Bottom and see them and the farm. He would have to make a practicable arrangement with regard to the latter, secure his intention, avoid question, by a nominal scheme of payment.



VII

He knew, generally, where Alexander Crandall's farm lay; and, shortly after, drove through the village and mounted the road over which plied the Stenton stage. In the Bottom, beyond the east range, he went to the right and passed over an ill-defined way with numerous and deep fords. It was afternoon; an even, sullen expanse of cloud hid the deeps of sky through which the sun moved like a newly-minted silver dollar. A sharp wind drew through the opening; the fallen leaves rose from the road in sudden, agitated whirling; the gaunt branches, printed sharply on the curtain of cloud, revealed the deserted nests of past springs.

He drove by solitary farms, their acres lying open and dead among the brush; and stopped, undecided, before a fenced clearing that swept back to the abrupt wall of the range, against which a low house was scarcely distinguishable from the sere, rocky ascent. Finally he drove in, over a faintly marked track, past a corner of the fence railed about a trough for sheep shearing, to the house. A pine tree stood at either side of the large, uncut stone at the threshold; except for a massive exterior chimney the somberly painted frame structure was without noticeable feature.

He discovered immediately from the youthful feminine figure awaiting him at the door that he was not at fault. Mrs. Crandall's face radiated her pleasure.

"Mr. Makimmon!" she cried; "there's just no one we'd rather see than you. Step right out, and Alexander'll take your horse. He's only at the back of the house.... Alec!" she called; "Alec, what do you suppose?—here's Mr. Makimmon."

Alexander Crandall quickly appeared, in a hide apron covered with curlings of wood. A slight concern was visible upon his countenance, as though he expected at any moment to see revealed the "string" of which his brother had spoken.

Gordon adequately met his salutation, and turned to the woman. He saw now that she was more mature than Lettice: the mouth before him, although young and red, was bitten in at the corners; already the eyes gazed through a shadow of care; the capable hands were rough and discolored from toil and astringent soaps.

"Come in, come in," Crandall urged, striving to banish the sudden anxiety from his voice.

"And you go right around, Alec," his wife added, "and twist the head off that dominicker chicken. Pick some flat beans too, there's a mess still hanging on the poles. Go in, Mr. Makimmon."

He was ushered into the ceremonious, barely-furnished, best room. There was a small rag carpet at the door, with an archaic, woven animal, and at its feet an unsteady legend, "Mary's Little Lamb"; but the floor was uncovered, and the walls, sealed in resinous pine, the pine ceiling, gave the effect, singular and depressing, of standing inside a huge box.

"It's mortal cold here," Mrs. Crandall truthfully observed; "the grate's broken. If you wouldn't mind going out into the kitchen—"

In the kitchen, from a comfortable place by the fire, Gordon watched her deft preparations for an early supper. Crandall appeared with the picked dominicker, and sat rigidly before his guest.

"I don't quite make out," he at last essayed, "how you expect your money, what you want out of it."

"I don't want anything out of it," Gordon replied with an almost bitter vigor; "leastways not any premium. I said you could pay me when you liked. I'll deed you the farm, and we'll draw up a paper to suit—to suit crops."

The apprehension in Alexander Crandall's face turned to perplexed relief. "I don't understand," he admitted; "but I haven't got to. It's enough to know that you pulled us out of ruination. Things will come right along now; we can see light; I'm extending the sheep-cots twice."

Supper at an end he too launched upon the lack of opportunity in Greenstream. "Some day," he asserted, "and not so far off either, we'll shake off the grip of these blood-money men; we'll have a state lawed bank; a rate of interest a man can carry without breaking his back. There's no better land than the Bottom, or the higher clearings for grazing ... it's the men, some of 'em...."



VIII

It was dark when Gordon closed the stable door and turned to his dwelling. A light streamed from a chink in the closed kitchen shutter like a gold arrow shot into the night. From within came the long-drawn quaver of William Vibard's performance of the Arkansas Traveller. He was sitting bowed over the accordion, his jaw dropped, his eyes glazed with the intoxication of his obsession. Rose was rigidly upright in a straight chair, her hands crossed at the wrists in her meager lap.

The fluctuating, lamentable sounds of the instrument, Rose's expression of conscious virtue, were suddenly petty, exasperating; and Gordon, after a short acknowledgment of their greeting, proceeded through the house to the sitting room beyond.

No fire had been laid in the small, air-tight stove; the room had a closed, musty smell, and was more chill than the night without; his breath hung before him in a white vapor. Soon he had wood burning explosively, the stove grew rapidly red hot and the chill vanished. He saw beyond the lamp with its shade of minute, variously-colored silks the effigy of Mrs. Hollidew dead. Undisturbed in the film of dust that overlaid the table stood a pink celluloid thimble ... Lettice had placed it there....

His thoughts turned to Alexander Crandall and his wife, to the extended sheep-cots, and the "light" which they now saw. He recalled the former's assertion that the land was all right, but that the blood-money men made life arduous in Greenstream. He remembered Edgar Crandall's arraignment of the County as "the littlest, meanest place on earth," a place where a man who wanted his own, his chance, was helpless to survive the avarice of a few individuals, the avarice for gold. He had asked him, Gordon Makimmon, to give him that chance. But, obviously, it was impossible ... absurd.

His memory drifted back to the evening in the store when Valentine Simmons had abruptly demanded payment of his neglected account, to the hopeless rage that had possessed him at the realization of his impotence, of Clare's illness. That scene, that bitter realization of ruin, had been repeated across the breadth of Greenstream. As a boy he had heard men in shaking tones curse Pompey Hollidew; only last week the red-headed Crandall had sworn he would let his ground rot rather than slave for the breed of Cannon. It was, apparently, a perpetual evil, an endless burden for the shoulders of men momentarily forgetful or caught in a trap of circumstance.

Yet he had, without effort, without deprivation, freed Alexander Crandall. He could have freed his brother, given him the chance his rebellious soul demanded, with equal ease. He had not done that last, he had said at the time, because of the numbers that would immediately besiege him for assistance. This, he realized, was not a valid objection—the money was his to dispose of as he saw fit. He possessed large sums lying at the Stenton banks, automatically returning him interest, profit; thrown in the scale their weight would go far toward balancing the greed of Valentine Simmons, of Cannon.

He considered these facts totally ignorant of the fact that they were but the reflection of his own inchoate need born in the anguish of his wife's death; he was not conscious of the veering of his sensibility—sharpened by the hoarse cry from the stiffening lips of Lettice—to the world without. He thought of the possibility before him neither as a scheme of philanthropy nor of revenge, nor of rehabilitation. He considered it solely in the light of his own experience, as a practical measure to give men their chance, their own, in Greenstream. The cost to himself would be small—his money had faded from his conceptions, his necessities, as absolutely as though it had been fairy gold dissolved by the touch of a magic wand. He had never realized its potentiality; lately he had ignored it with the contempt of supreme indifference. Now an actual employment for it occupied his mind.

The stove glowed with calorific energy; General Jackson, who had been lying at his feet, moved farther away. The lamplight grew faint and reddish, and then expired, trailing a thin, penetrating odor. In the dark the heated cylinder of the stove shone rosy, mysterious.

Gordon Makimmon was unaware of his own need; yet, at the anticipation of the vigorous course certain to follow a decision to use his money in opposition to the old, established, rapacious greed, he was conscious of a sudden tightening of his mental and physical fibers. The belligerent blood carried by George Gordon Makimmon from world-old wars, from the endless strife of bitter and rugged men in high, austere places, stirred once more through his relaxed and rusting being.

He thought, aglow like the stove, of the struggle that would follow such a determination, a struggle with the pink fox, Valentine Simmons. He thought of himself as an equal with the other; for, if Simmons were practised in cunning, if Simmons were deep, he, Gordon Makimmon, would have no necessity for circuitous dealing; his course would be simple, unmistakable.—He would lend money at, say, three per cent, grant extensions of time wherever necessary, and knock the bottom out of the storekeepers' usurious monopoly, drag the farms out of Cannon's grasping fingers.

"By God!" he exclaimed, erect in the dark; "but Edgar Crandall will get his apples."

The dog licked his hand, faithful, uncomprehending.



IX

On an afternoon of mid-August Gordon was sitting in the chamber of his dwelling that had been formerly used as dining room. The table was bare of the castor and the red cloth, and held an inkpot, pens upright in a glass of shot, and torn envelopes on an old blotter. An iron safe stood against the wall at Gordon's back, and above it hung a large calendar, advertising the Stenton Realty and Trust Company.

A sudden gloom swept over the room, and Gordon rose, proceeded to the door. A bank of purple cloud swept above the west range, opened in the sky like a gigantic, menacing fist; the greenery of the valley was overcast, and a white flash of lightning, accompanied by a shattering peal of thunder, stabbed viciously at the earth. There was no rain. An edge of serene light followed in the west a band of saffron radiance that widened until the cloud had vanished beyond the eastern peaks. The sultry heat lay like a blanket over Greenstream.

He turned back into the room, but, as he moved, he was aware of a figure at the porch door. It was a man with a round, freshly-colored countenance, bland eyes, and a limp mustache, clad in leather boots and a worn corduroy gunning coat. Gordon nodded familiarly; it was the younger Entriken from the valley beyond.

"I came to see you about my note," he announced in a facile candor; "I sh'd take it up this month, but times are terrible bad, Gordon, and I wondered if you'd give me another extension? There's no real reason why you sh'd wait again; I reckon I could make her, but it would certainly be accommodating—" he paused interrogatively.

"Well," Gordon hesitated, "I'm not in a hurry for the note, if it comes to that. But the fact is ... I've got a lot of money laid out. What's been the matter?—the weather has been good, it's rained regular—"

"That's just it," Entriken interrupted; "it's rained too blamed regular. It is all right for crops, but we've got nothing besides cattle, and steers wouldn't hardly put on anything the past weeks. Of course, in a way, grass is cattle, but it just seems they wouldn't take any good in the wet."

"I suppose it will be all right," Gordon Makimmon assented; "but I can hardly have the money out so long ... others too."



X

The heat thickened with the dusk. The wailing clamor of William Vibard's accordion rose from the porch. He had, of late, avoided sitting with Rose and her husband; they irritated him in countless, insignificant ways. Rose's superiority had risen above the commonplace details of the house; she sat on the porch and regarded Gordon with a strained, rigid smile. After a pretense at procuring work William Vibard had relapsed into an endless debauch of sound. His manner became increasingly abstracted; he ate, he lived, with the gestures of a man playing an accordion.

The lines on Gordon's thin, dark face had multiplied; his eyes, in the shadow of his bony forehead, burned steady, pale blue; his chin was resolute; but a new doubt, a constant, faint perplexity, blurred the line of his mouth.

From the road above came the familiar sound of hoof-beats, muffled in dust, but it stopped opposite his dwelling; and, soon after, the porch creaked under slow, heavy feet, and a thick, black-clad figure knocked and entered.

It was the priest, Merlier.

In the past months Gordon had been conscious of an increasing concord with the silent clerical. He vaguely felt in the other's isolation the wreckage of an old catastrophe, a loneliness not unlike his, Gordon Makimmon's, who had killed his wife and their child.

"The Nickles," the priest pronounced, sudden and harsh, "are worthless, woman and man. They would be bad if they were better; as it is they are only a drunken charge on charity and the church. They have been stewed in whiskey now for a month. They make nothing amongst their weeds.—Is it possible they got a sum from you?"

"Six weeks back," Gordon replied briefly; "two hundred dollars to put a floor on the bare earth and stop a leaking roof."

"Lies," Merlier commented. "When any one in my church is deserving I will tell you myself. I think of an old woman now, but ten dollars would be a fortune." Silence fell upon them. Then:

"Charity is commanded," he proceeded, "but out of the hands of authority it is a difficult and treacherous virtue. The people are without comprehension," he made a gesture of contempt.

"With age," the deliberate voice went on, "the soul grows restless and moves in strange directions, struggling to throw off the burden of flesh. But I that know tell you," Merlier paused at the door, "the charity of material benevolence, of gold, will cure no spiritual sores; for spirit is eternal, but the flesh is only so much dung." He stopped abruptly, coughed, as though he had carried his utterance beyond propriety. "The Nickles," he repeated somberly, "are worthless; they make trouble in my parish; with money they make more."



XI

The year, in the immemorial, minute shifting of season, grew brittle and cold; the dusk fell sooner and night lingered late into morning.

William Vibard moved with his accordion from the porch to beside the kitchen stove. He was in the throes of a new piece, McGinty, and Gordon Makimmon was correspondingly surprised when, as he was intent upon some papers, Rose's husband voluntarily relinquished his instrument, and sat in the room with him.

"What's the matter," Gordon indifferently inquired; "is she busted?"

William Vibard indignantly repudiated that possibility. A wave of purpose rose to the long, corrugated countenance, but sank, without finding expression in speech. Finally Gordon heard Rose calling her husband. That young man twitched in his chair, but he made no other move, no answer. Her voice rose again, sharp and urgent, and Gordon observed:

"Your wife's a-calling."

"I heard her, but I'd ruther sit right where I am."

She appeared in the doorway, flushed and angry.

"William," she commanded, "you come straight out here to the kitchen. I got a question for you."

"I'll stay just where I am for a spell," he replied, avoiding her gaze.

"You do as I tell you right off."

A stubborn expression settled over his face and shoulders. He made her no further reply. Rose's anger gathered in a tempest that she tried in vain to restrain.

"William," she demanded, "where is it? It's gone, you know what."

"I ain't seen it," he answered finally; "I really ain't, Rose."

"That's a story, only you knew. Come out here."

"Get along," Gordon interrupted testily. "How can I figure in this ruction?"

"I ain't agoing a step," William told them both; "I'm going to stop right here with Uncle Gordon."

"Well, then," the latter insisted, "get it through with—what is it?"

"I'll tell you what it is," William Vibard stammered; "it's a hundred and forty dollars Rose held out on you and kept in a drawer, that's what!"

Rose's emotion changed to a crimson consternation.

"Why, William Vibard! what an awful thing to say. What little money I had put by was saved from years. What a thing to say about me and Uncle Gordon."

"'Tain't no such thing you saved it; you held it out on him, dollars at a time. You didn't have no more right to it than I did."

Gordon's gaze centered keenly upon his niece's hot face. She endeavored to sustain, refute, the accusation successfully; but her valor wavered, broke. She disappeared abruptly. He surveyed Vibard without pleasure.

"You're a ramshackle contraption," he observed crisply.

"I got as good a right to it as her," the other repeated.

"A hundred and forty dollars," Gordon said bitterly; "that's a small business. Well, where is it? Have you got it?"

"No, I ain't," William exploded.

"Well—?"

"You can't never tell what might happen," the young man observed enigmatically; "the bellowses wear out dreadful quick, the keys work loose like, and then they might stop making them. It's the best one on the market."

"What scrabble's this? What did you do with the money?"

"They're in the stable," William Vibard answered more obscurely than before. "With good treatment they ought to last a life. They come cheaper too like that."

Gordon relinquished all hope of extracting any meaning from the other's elliptical speech. He rose. "If 'they're' in the stable," he announced, "I'll soon have some sense out of you." He procured a lantern, and tramped shortly to the stable, closely followed by Rose's husband.

"Now!" he exclaimed, loosening the hasp of the door, throwing it open.

The former entered and bent over a heap in an obscure corner. When he rose the lantern shone on two orderly piles of glossy black paper boxes. Gordon strode across the contracted space and wrenched off a lid.... Within reposed a brand new accordion. There were nine others.

"You see," William eagerly interposed; "now I'm fixed good."

At the sight of the grotesque waste a swift resentment moved Gordon Makimmon—it was a mockery of his money's use, a gibing at his capability, his planning. The petty treachery of Rose added its injury. He pitched the box in his hands upon the clay floor, and the accordion fell out, quivering like a live thing.

"Hey!" William Vibard remonstrated; "don't do like that ... delicate—" He knelt, with an expression of concern, and, tenderly fingering the instrument, replaced it in the box.

Gordon turned sharply and returned to the house. Rose was in her room. He could hear her moving rapidly about, pulling at the bureau drawers. Depression settled upon him; he carried the lantern into the bedroom, where he sat bowed, troubled. He was aroused finally by the faint strains of William's latest melodic effort drifting discreetly from the stable.

The next morning the Vibards departed. Rose was silent, her face, red and swollen, was vindictive. On the back of the vehicle that conveyed them to the parental Berrys was securely tied the square bundle that had "fixed good" William Vibard musically for life.



XII

Gordon Makimmon, absorbed in the difficult and elusive calculations of his indefinable project was unaware of the change wrought by their departure, of the shifting of the year, the familiar acts and living about him. He looked up abruptly from the road when Valentine Simmons, upon the platform of the store, arrested his progress homeward.

Simmons' voice was high and shrill, as though time had tightened and dried his vocal cords; his cheeks were still round and pink, but they were sapless, the color lingered like a film of desiccated paint.

The store remained unchanged: Sampson, the clerk, had gone, but another, identical in shirt sleeves upheld by bowed elastics, was brushing the counters with a turkey wing; the merchandise on the shelves, unloaded from the slow procession of capacious mountain wagons, flowed in endless, unvaried stream to the scattered, upland homes.

Valentine Simmons took his familiar place in the glass enclosure, revolving his chair to fix on Gordon a birdlike attention.

"As an old friend," he declared, "an old Presbyterian friend, I want to lay some of my experience before you. I want to complain a little, Gordon; I have the right ... my years, Pompey's associate. The fact is—you're hurting the County, you're hurting the people and me; you're hurting yourself. Everybody is suffering from your—your mistaken generosity. We have all become out of sorts, unbalanced, from the exceptional condition you have brought about. It won't do, Gordon; credit has been upset, we don't know where we stand, or who's who; it's bad.

"I said you suffered with the rest of us, but you are worse off still. How shall I put it?—the County is taking sad advantage of your, er—liberality. There's young Entriken; he was in the store a little time ago and told me that you had extended his note again. He thought it was smart to hold out the money on you. There's not a likelier farm, nor better conditioned cattle, than his in Greenstream. He could pay twenty notes like yours in a day's time. I hate to see money cheapened like that, it ain't healthy.

"What is it you're after, Gordon? Is it at the incorruptible, the heavenly, treasure you're aiming? But if it is I'll venture this—that the Lord doesn't love a fool. And the man with the talents, don't overlook him."

"I'm not aiming at anything," Gordon answered, "I'm just doing."

"And there's that Hagan that got five thousand from you, it's an open fact about him. He came from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk, to get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment, of a kin in Greenstream and left for parts unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn't love a fool."

"I may be a fool as you see me," Gordon contended stubbornly; "and the few liars that get my money may laugh. But there's this, there's this, Simmons—I'm not cursed by the dispossessed and the ailing and the plumb penniless. I don't go to a man with his crop a failure on the field like, well—we'll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand for his breath. I've put a good few out of—of Cannon's reach. Did you forget that I know how it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps, call out my place for debt? Did you forget that I sat in this office while you talked of old Presbyterian friends and sold me into the street?"

"Incorrigible," Valentine Simmons said, "incorrigible; no sense of responsibility. I had hoped Pompey's estate would bring some out in you. But I should have known—it's the Makimmon blood; you are the son of your father. I knew your grandfather too, a man that fairly insulted opportunity."

"We've never been storekeepers."

"Never kept much of anything, have you, any of you? You can call it what you've a mind to, liberality or shiftlessness. But there's nothing saved by names. There: it seems as if you never got civilized, always contemptuous and violent-handed ... it's the blood. I've studied considerable about you lately; something'll have to be done for the good of all."

"What is it you want of me?"

"Call in your bad debts," the other promptly responded; "shake off the worthless lot hanging to your pocket. Put the money rate back where it belongs. Why, in days gone by," Valentine Simmons chuckled, "seventy per cent wasn't out of the way for a forced loan, forty was just so-so. Ah, Pompey and me made some close deals. Pompey multiplied his talents. The County was an open ledger to him."

"Didn't you ever think of the men who had to pay you seventy per cent?" Gordon asked, genuinely curious.

"Certainly," Simmons retorted; "we educated them, taught 'em thrift. While you are promoting idleness and loose-living.... But this is only an opening for what I wanted to say.—I had a letter last week from the Tennessee and Northern people, the Buffalo plan has matured, they're pushing the construction right along."

"I intended to come to you about that."

"Well?"

"I ain't going on with our agreement."

Simmons' face exhibited not a trace of concern.

"I may say," he returned smoothly, "that I am not completely surprised. I have been looking for something of the kind. I must remind you that our partnership is a legal and binding instrument; you can't break it, nor throw aside your responsibility, with a few words. It will be an expensive business for you."

"I'm willing to pay with what I've got."

The other held up a palm in his familiar, arresting gesture. "Nothing of that magnitude; nothing out of the way; I only wanted to remind you that a compensation should follow your decision. It puts me in a very nice position indeed. I gather from your refusal to continue the partnership that you do not intend to execute singly the original plan; it is possible that you will not hold the options against the coming of transportation."

"You've got her," Gordon declared; "I'm not going to profit seventy times over, tie up all that timber, from the ignorance of men that ought to rightly advantage from it. I—I—" Gordon rose to his feet in the harassing obscurity of his need; "I don't want to make! I don't want to take anything ... never again! I want—"

"You forget, unfortunately, that I am forced to be accessory to your—your change of heart. I may say that I shall have to pay dearly for your—your eleventh hour conversion. Timber will be—unsteady."

"Didn't you mention getting something out of it?"

"A mere detail to my effort, my time. What my timber will be worth, with what you throw on the market hawking up and down ... problematic."

Gordon Makimmon hesitated, a plan forming vaguely, painfully, in his mind. Finally, "I might buy you out," he suggested; "if you didn't ask too dam' much. Then I could do as I pleased with the whole lot."

"Now that," Valentine Simmons admitted, dryly cordial, "is a plan worth consideration. We might agree on a price, a low price to an old partner. You met the Company's agents, heard the agreement outlined; a solid proposal. And, as you say, with the timber control in your own hands, you could arrange as you pleased with the people concerned."

He grew silent, enveloped in thought. Then:

"I'll take a hundred thousand for all the options I bought, for my interest in the partnership."

"I don't know as I could manage that," Gordon admitted.

An unassumed astonishment marked the other's countenance. "Why!" he ejaculated, "Pompey left an estate estimated at—" he stopped from sheer surprise.

"Some of the investments went bad," Gordon continued; "down in Stenton they said I didn't move 'em fast enough. Then the old man had a lot laid out in ways I don't hold with, with people I wouldn't collect from. And it's a fact a big amount's got out here lately. Of course it will come back, the most part."

Simmons' expression grew skeptical.

"I know you too," Gordon added; "you'll want the price in your hand."

"I'm getting on," the storekeeper admitted; "I can't wait now."

"I don't know if I can make it," Gordon repeated; "it'll strip me if I do."

Valentine Simmons swung back to his desk. "At least," he observed, "keep this quiet till something's settled."

Gordon agreed.



XIII

Even if he proved able to buy out Simmons, he thought walking home, it would be a delicate operation to return the timber rights to where he thought they belonged. He considered the possibility of making a gift of the options to the men from whom they had been wrongfully obtained. But something of Simmons' shrewd knowledge of the world, something of the priest's contemptuous arraignment of material values, lingering in Gordon's mind, convinced him of the potential folly of that course. It would be more practical to sell back the options to those from which they had been purchased at the nominal prices paid. He had only a vague idea of his balances at the Stenton banks, the possibilities of the investments from which he received profit. He was certain, however, that the sum asked by Valentine Simmons would obliterate his present resources. Yet he was forced to admit that it did not seem exorbitant.

He continued his altruistic deliberations throughout the evening at his dwelling. It might be well, before investing such a paramount sum, to communicate with the Tennessee and Northern Company, receive a fresh ratification of their intention. Yet he could not do that without incurring the danger of premature questioning, investigation. It was patent that he would have to be prepared to make an immediate distribution of the options when his intention became known in Greenstream. He was aware that when the coming of a railroad to the County became common knowledge the excitement of the valley would grow intense.

Again, it might be better first to organize the timber of Greenstream, so that a harmonious local condition would facilitate all negotiations, and avert the danger, which Valentine Simmons had pointed out, of individual blindness and competition. But, in order to accomplish that, he would have to bring into concord fifty or more wary, suspicious, and largely ignorant adults. He would have to deal with swift and secret avarice, with vain golden dreams born of years of bitter poverty, privation, ceaseless and incredible toil. The magnitude of the latter task appalled him; fact and figure whirled in his confused mind. He was standing, and he suddenly felt dizzy, and sat down. The giddiness vanished, but left him with twitching fingers, a clouded vision. He might get them all together, explain, persuade.... Goddy! it was for their good. They needn't be cross-grained. There it would be, the offer, for them to take or leave. But, if they delayed, watch out! Railroad people couldn't be fooled with. They might get left; that was all.

This, he felt, was more than he could undertake, more than any reasonable person would ask. If he paid Valentine Simmons all that money, and then let them have back their own again, without a cent to himself, they must be content. They should be able to bargain as well as he—who was getting on and had difficulty in adding figures to the same amount twice—with the Tennessee and Northern.

The following morning he departed for Stenton.



XIV

Gordon paid Valentine Simmons eighty-nine thousand dollars for the latter's share of the timber options they had held in common. They were seated in the room in which Gordon conducted his peculiar transactions. He turned and placed Simmons' acknowledgment, the various papers of the dissolved partnership, in the safe.

"That finishes all I had in Stenton," he observed.

Valentine Simmons made no immediate reply. He was intent, with tightly-folded lips, on the cheque in his hand. His shirt, as ever, was immaculately starched, the blue button was childlike, bland; but it was cold without, and hot in the room where they sat, and the color on his cheeks resembled dabs of vermilion on buffers of old white leather; the tufts of hair above his ears had dwindled to mere cottony scraps.

"Prompt and satisfactory," he said at last. "I tell you, Gordon, you can see as far as another into a transaction. Promises are of no account but value received ..." he held up the cheque, a strip of pale orange paper, pinched between withered fingers.

Suddenly he was in a hurry to get away; he drew his overcoat of close-haired, brown hide about his narrow shoulders, and trotted to the door, to his buggy awaiting him at the corner of the porch.



XV

Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency, presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the slightly-varying sums paid—the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original, individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.

Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal, often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, "The piney trees on Pap's and mine but not Henny's for nineteen years." Another bore, above the date, "In this year of Jesus Christ's holy redemption."

The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record, the signatures were all witnessed.