"Elder Butts will lead in prayer."

It was a long prayer and was proceeding smoothly, until, in its midst, from the front row, Archie B.'s head bobbed cautiously up. Keeping one eye on his father, the praying Elder, he went through a pantomime for the benefit of the young Hillites around him, who, like himself, had had enough of prayer. Before coming to the meeting he had cut from a black sheep's skin a gorgeous set of whiskers and a huge mustache. These now adorned his face.

There was a convulsive snicker among the young Hillites behind him. The Elder opened one eye to see what it meant. They were natural children, whose childhood had not been dwarfed in a cotton mill, and it was exceedingly funny to them.

But the young Cottontowners laughed not. They looked on in stoical wonder at the presumption of the young Hillites who dared to do such a deed.

Humor had never been known to them. There is no humor in the all-day buzz of the cotton factory; and fun and the fight of life for daily bread do not sleep in the same crib.

The Hillites tittered and giggled.

"Maw," whispered Miss Butts, "look at Archie B."

Mrs. Butts hastily reached over the bench and yanked Archie B. down. His whiskers were confiscated and in a moment he was on his knees and deeply devotional, while the young Hillites nudged each other, and giggled and the young Cottontowners stared and wondered, and looked to see when Archie B. would be hung up by the thumbs.

The Bishop was reading the afternoon chapter when the animal in Archie B. broke out in another spot. The chapter was where Zacharias climbed into a sycamore tree to see his passing Lord. There was a rattling of the stove pipe in one corner.

"Maw," whispered Miss Butts, "Jes' look at Archie B.—he's climbin' the stove pipe like Zacharias did the sycamo'."

Horror again swept over Cottontown, while the Hillites cackled aloud. The Elder settled it by calmly laying aside his spectacles and starting down the pulpit steps. But Archie B. guessed his purpose and before he had reached the last step he was sitting demurely by the side of his pious brother, intently engaged in reading the New Testament.

Without his glasses, the Elder never knew one twin from the other, but presuming that the studious one was Ozzie B., he seized the other by the ear, pulled him to the open window and pitched him out on the grass.

It was Ozzie B. of course, and Archie B. turned cautiously around to the Hillites behind, after the Elder had gone back to his chapter, and whispered:

"Venture pee-wee under the bridge—bam—bam—bam."

Throughout the sermon Archie B. kept the young Hillites in a paroxysm of smirks.

Elder Butts' legs were brackets, or more properly parentheses, and as he preached and thundered and gesticulated and whined and sang his sermon, he forgot all earthly things.

Knowing this, Archie B. would crawl up behind his father and thrusting his head in between his legs, where the brackets were most pronounced, would emphasize all that was said with wry grimaces and gestures.

No language can fittingly describe the way Elder Butts delivered his discourse. The sentences were whined, howled or sung, ending always in the vocal expletive—"ah—ah."

When the elder had finished and sat down, Archie B. was sitting demurely on the platform steps.

Then the latest Scruggs baby was brought forward to be baptised. There were already ten in the family.

The Bishop took the infant tenderly and said: "Sister Scruggs, which church shall I put him into?"

"'Piscopal," whispered the good Mrs. Scruggs.

The Bishop looked the red-headed young candidate over solemnly. There was a howl of protest from the lusty Scruggs.

"He's a Cam'elite," said the Bishop dryly—"ready to dispute a'ready"—here the young Scruggs sent out a kick which caught the Bishop in the mouth.

"With Baptis' propensities," added the Bishop. "Fetch the baptismal fount."

"Please, pap," said little Appomattox Watts from the front bench, "but Archie B. has drunk up all the baptismal water endurin' the first prayer."

"I had to," spoke up Archie B., from the platform steps—"I et dried mackerel for breakfas'."

"We'll postpone the baptism' till nex' Sunday," said the Bishop.



CHAPTER IX

THE RETURN

It was Sunday and Jack Bracken had been out all the afternoon, hunting for Cap'n Tom—as he had been in the morning, when not at church. Hitching up the old horse, the Bishop started out to hunt also.

He did not go far on the road toward Westmoreland, for as Ben Butler plodded sleepily along, he almost ran over a crowd of boys in the public road, teasing what they took to be a tramp, because of his unkempt beard, his tattered clothes, and his old army cap.

They had angered the man and with many gestures he was endeavoring to expostulate with his tormentors, at the same time attempting imprecations which could not be uttered and ended in a low pitiful sound. He shook his fist at them—he made violent gestures, but from his mouth came only a guttural sound which had no meaning.

At a word from the Bishop his tormentors vanished, and when he pulled up before the uncouth figure he found him to be a man not yet in his prime, with an open face, now blank and expressionless, overgrown with a black, tangled, and untrimmed beard.

He was evidently a demented tramp.

But at a second look the Bishop started. It was the man's eyes which startled him. There was in them something so familiar and yet so unknown that the Bishop had to study a while before he could remember.

Then there crept into his face a wave of pitying sorrow as he said to himself:

"Cap'n Tom—Cap'n Tom's eyes."

And from that moment the homeless and demented tramp had a warm place in the old man's heart.

The Bishop watched him closely. His tattered cap had fallen off, showing a shock of heavy, uncut hair, streaked prematurely with gray.

"What yo' name?" asked the Bishop kindly.

The man, flushed and angered, still gesticulated and muttered to himself. But at the sound of the Bishop's voice, for a moment there flashed into his eyes almost the saneness of returned reason. His anger vanished. A kindly smile spread over his face. He came toward the Bishop pleadingly—holding out both hands and striving to speak. Climbing into the buggy, he sat down by the old man's side, quite happy and satisfied—and as a little child.

"Where are you from?" asked the Bishop again.

The man shook his head. He pointed to his head and looked meaningly at the Bishop.

"Can't you tell me where you're gwine, then?"

He looked at the Bishop inquisitively, and for a moment, only, the same look—almost of intelligence—shone in his eyes. Slowly and with much difficulty—ay, even as if he were spelling it out, he said:

"A-l-i-c-e"—

The old man turned quickly. Then he paled tremblingly to his very forehead. The word itself—the sound of that voice sent the blood rushing to his heart.

"Alice?—and what does he mean? An' his voice an' his eyes—Alice—my God—it's Cap'n Tom!"

Tenderly, calmly he pulled the cap from off the strange being's head and felt amid the unkempt locks. But his hands trembled so he could scarcely control them, and the sight of the poor, broken, half demented thing before him—so satisfied and happy that he had found a voice he knew—this creature, the brave, the chivalrous, the heroic Captain Tom! He could scarcely see for the tears which ran down his cheeks.

But as he felt, in the depth of his shock of hair, his finger slipped into an ugly scar, sinking into a cup-shaped hollow fracture which gleamed in his hair.

"Cap'n Tom, Cap'n Tom," he whispered—"don't you know me—the Bishop?"

The man smiled reassuringly and slipped his hand, as a child might, into that of the old man.

"A-l-i-c-e"—he slowly and stutteringly pronounced again, as he pointed down the road toward Westmoreland.

"My God," said the Bishop as he wiped away the tears on the back of his hand—"my God, but that blow has spiled God's noblest gentleman." Then there rushed over him a wave of self-reproach as he raised his head heavenward and said:

"Almighty Father, forgive me! Only this morning I doubted You; and now, now, You have sent me po' Cap'n Tom!"

"You'll go home with me, Cap'n Tom!" he added cheerily.

The man smiled and nodded.

"A-l-i-c-e," again he repeated.

There was the sound of some one riding, and as the Bishop turned Ben Butler around Alice Westmore rode up, sitting her saddle mare with that natural grace which comes only when the horse and rider have been friends long enough to become as one. Richard Travis rode with her.

The Bishop paled again: "My God," he muttered—"but she mustn't know this is Cap'n Tom! I'd ruther she'd think he's dead—to remember him only as she knowed him last."

The man's eyes were riveted on her—they seemed to devour her as she rode up, a picture of grace and beauty, sitting her cantering mare with the ease of long years of riding. She smiled and nodded brightly at the Bishop, as she cantered past, but scarcely glanced at the man beside him.

Travis followed at a brisk gait:

"Hello, Bishop," he said banteringly—"got a new boarder to-day?"

He glanced at the man as he spoke, and then galloped on without turning his head.

"Alice!—Alice!"—whispered the man, holding out his hands pleadingly, in the way he had held them when he first saw the Bishop. "Alice!"—but she disappeared behind a turn in the road. She had not noticed him.

The Bishop was relieved.

"We'll go home, Cap'n Tom—you'll want for nothin' whilst I live. An' who knows—ay, Cap'n Tom, who knows but maybe God has sent you here to-day to begin the unraveling of the only injustice I've ever knowed Him to let go so long. It 'ud be so easy for Him—He's done bigger things than jes' to straighten out little tangles like that. Cap'n Tom! Cap'n Tom!" he said excitedly—"God'll do it—God'll do it—for He is just!"

As he turned to go a negro came up hurriedly: "I was fetchin' him to you, Marse Hillard—been lookin' for yo' home all day. I had gone to the spring for water an' 'lowed I'd be back in a minute."

"Why, it's Eph," said the Bishop. "Come on to my home, Eph, we'll take keer of Cap'n Tom."

It was Sunday night. They had eaten their supper, and the old man was taking his smoke before going to bed. Shiloh, as usual, had climbed up into his lap and lay looking at the distant line of trees that girdled the mountain side. There was a flush on her cheeks and a brightness in her eyes which the old man had noticed for several weeks.

Shiloh was his pet—his baby. All the affection of his strong nature found its outlet in this little soul—this motherless little waif, who likewise found in the old man that rare comradeship of extremes—the inexplicable law of the physical world which brings the snow-flower in winter. The one real serious quarrel the old man had had with his stubborn and ignorant old wife had been when Shiloh was sent to the factory. But it was always starvation times with them; and when aroused, the temper and tongue of Mrs. Watts was more than the peaceful old man could stand up against. And as there were a dozen other tots of her age in the factory, he had been forced to acquiesce.

Long after all others had retired—long after the evening star had arisen, and now, high overhead, looked down through the chinks in the roof of the cabin on the mountain side, saying it was midnight and past, the patient old man sat with Shiloh on his lap, watching her quick, restless breathing, and fearing to put her to bed, lest he might awaken her.

He put her in bed at last and then slipped into Captain Tom's cabin before he himself lay down.

To his surprise he was up and reading an old dictionary—studying and puzzling over the words. It was the only book except the Bible the Bishop had in his cabin, and this book proved to be Captain Tom's solace.

After that, day after day, he would sit out under the oak tree by his cabin intently reading the dictionary.

Eph, his body servant, slept on the floor by his side, and Jack Bracken sat near him like a sturdy mastiff guarding a child. Sympathy, pity—were written in the outlaw's face, as he looked at the once splendid manhood shorn of its strength, and from that day Jack Bracken showered on Captain Tom all the affection of his generous soul—all that would have gone to little Jack.

"For he's but a child—the same as little Jack was," he would say.

"Put up yo' novel, Cap'n Tom," said the old man cheerily, when he went in, "an' let's have prayers."

The sound of the old man's voice was soothing to Captain Tom. Quickly the book was closed and down on their knees went the three men.

It was a queer trio—the three kneeling in prayer.

"Almighty God," prayed the old man—"me an' Cap'n Tom an' Jack Bracken here, we thank You for bein' so much kinder to us than we deserves. One of us, lost to his friends, is brought back home; one of us, lost in wickedness but yestiddy, is redeemed to-day; an' me that doubted You only yestiddy, to me You have fotcht Cap'n Tom back, a reproach for my doubts an' my disbelief, lame in his head, it is true, but You've fotcht him back where I can keer for him an' nuss him. An' I hope You'll see fit, Almighty God, You who made the worl' an' holds it in the hollow of Yo' han', You, who raised up the dead Christ, to give po' Cap'n Tom back his reason, that he may fulfill the things in life ordained by You that he should fulfill since the beginning of things.

"An' hold Jack Bracken to the mark, Almighty God,—let him toe the line an' shoot, hereafter, only for good. An' guide me, for I need it—me that in spite of all You've done for me, doubted You but yestiddy. Amen."

It was a simple, homely prayer, but it comforted even Captain Tom, and when Jack Bracken put him to bed that night, even the outlaw felt that the morning of a new era would awaken them.



CHAPTER X

THE SWAN-SONG OF THE CREPE-MYRTLE

It was twilight when Mrs. Westmore heard the clatter of horses' hoofs up the gravelled roadway, and two riders cantered up.

Richard Travis sat his saddle horse in the slightly stooping way of the old fox-hunter—not the most graceful seat, but the most natural and comfortable for hard riding. Alice galloped ahead—her fine square shoulders and delicate but graceful bust silhouetted against the western sky in the fading light.

Mrs. Westmore sat on the veranda and watched them canter up. She thought how handsome they were, and how well they would look always together.

Alice sprang lightly from her mare at the front steps.

"Did you think we were never coming back? Richard's new mare rides so delightfully that we rode farther than we intended. Oh, but she canters beautifully!"

She sat on the arm of her mother's chair, and bent over and kissed her cheek. The mother looked up to see her finely turned profile outlined in a pale pink flush of western sky which glowed behind her. Her cheeks were of the same tinge as the sky. They glowed with the flush of the gallop, and her eyes were bright with the happiness of it. She sat telling of the new mare's wonderfully correct saddle gaits, flipping her ungloved hand with the gauntlet she had just pulled off.

Travis turned the horses over to Jim and came up.

"Glad to see you, Cousin Alethea," he said, as she arose and advanced gracefully to meet him—"no, no—don't rise," he added in his half jolly, half commanding way. "You've met me before and I'm not such a big man as I seem." He laughed: "Do you remember Giant Jim, the big negro Grandfather used to have to oversee his hands on the lower place? Jim, you know, in consideration of his elevation, was granted several privileges not allowed the others. Among them was the privilege of getting drunk every Saturday night. Then it was he would stalk and brag among those he ruled while they looked at him in awe and reverence. But he had the touch of the philosopher in him and would finally say: 'Come, touch me, boys; come, look at me; come, feel me—I'm nothin' but a common man, although I appear so big.'"

Mrs. Westmore laughed in her mechanical way, but all the while she was looking at Alice, who was watching the mare as she was led off.

Travis caught her eye and winked mischievously as he added: "Now, Cousin Alethea, you must promise me to make Alice ride her whenever she needs a tonic—every day, if necessary. I have bought her for Alice, and she must get the benefit of her before it grows too cold."

He turned to Alice Westmore: "You have only to tell me which days—if I am too busy to go with you—Jim will bring her over."

She smiled: "You are too kind, Richard, always thinking of my pleasure. A ride like this once a week is tonic enough."

She went into the house to change her habit. Her brother Clay, who had been sitting on the far end of the porch unobserved, arose and, without noticing Travis as he passed, walked into the house.

"I cannot imagine," said Mrs. Westmore apologetically, "what is the matter with Clay to-day."

"Why?" asked Travis indifferently enough.

"He has neglected his geological specimens all day, nor has he ever been near his laboratory—he has one room he calls his laboratory, you know. To-night he is moody and troubled."

Travis said nothing. At tea Clay was not there.

When Travis left it was still early and Alice walked with him to the big gate. The moon shone dimly and the cool, pure light lay over everything like the first mist of frost in November. Beyond, in the field, where it struck into the open cotton bolls, it turned them into December snow-banks.

Travis led his saddle horse, and as they walked to the gate, the sweet and scarcely perceptible odor of the crepe-myrtle floated out on the open air.

The crepe-myrtle has a way of surprising us now and then, and often after a wet fall, it gives us the swan-song of a bloom, ere its delicate blossoms, touched to death by frost, close forever their scalloped pink eyes, on the rare summer of a life as spiritual as the sweet soft gulf winds which brought it to life.

Was it symbolic to-night,—the swan-song of the romance of Alice Westmore's life, begun under those very trees so many summers ago?

They stopped at the gate. Richard Travis lit a cigar before mounting his horse. He seemed at times to-night restless, yet always determined.

She had never seen him so nearly preoccupied as he had been once or twice to-night.

"Do you not think?" he asked, after a while as they stood by the gate, "that I should have a sweet answer soon?"

Her eyes fell. The death song of the crepe-myrtle, aroused by a south wind suddenly awakened, smote her painfully.

"You know—you know how it is, Richard"—

"How it was—Alice. But think—life is a practical—a serious thing. We all have had our romances. They are the heritage of dreaming youth. We outlive them—it is best that we should. Our spiritual life follows the law of all other life, and spiritually we are not the same this year that we were last. Nor will we be the next. It is always change—change—even as the body changes. Environment has more to do with what we are, what we think and feel—than anything else. If you will marry me you will soon love me—it is the law of love to beget love. You will forget all the lesser loves in the great love of your life. Do you not know it, feel it, Sweet?"

She looked at him surprised. Never before had he used any term of endearment to her. There was a hard, still and subtle yet determined light in his eyes.

"Richard—Richard—you—I"—

"See," he said, taking from his vest pocket a magnificent ring set in an exquisite old setting—inherited from his grandmother, and it had been her engagement ring. "See, Alice, let me put this on to-night."

He took her hand—it thrilled him as he had never been thrilled before. This impure man, who had made the winning of women a plaything, trembled with the fear of it as he took in his own the hand so pure that not even his touch could awaken sensuality in it. The odor of her beautiful hair floated up to him as he bent over. A wave of hot passion swept over him—for with him love was passion—and his reason, for a moment, was swept from its seat. Then almost beside himself for love of this woman, so different from any he had ever known, he opened his arms to fold her in one overpowering, conquering embrace.

It was but a second and more a habit than thought—he who had never before hesitated to do it.

She stepped back and the hot blood mounted to her cheek. Her eyes shone like outraged stars, dreaming earthward on a sleeping past, unwarningly obscured by a passing cloud, and then flashing out into the night, more brightly from the contrast.

She did not speak and he crunched under his feet, purposely, the turf he was standing on, and so carrying out, naturally, the gesture of clasping the air, in establishing his balance—as if it was an accident.

She let him believe she thought it was, and secured relief from the incident.

"Alice—Alice!" he exclaimed. "I love you—love you—I must have you in my life! Can you not wear this now? See!"

He tried to place it on her finger. He held the small beautiful hand in his own. Then it suddenly withdrew itself and left him holding his ring and looking wonderingly at her.

She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came.

"You had better go, Richard," was all she said.

"I'll come for my answer—soon?" he asked.

She was silent.

"Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup—"soon—and to claim you always, Alice."

He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back, her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.

Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his life. It could not come. With him all life had been a passion flower, with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated blossoms.

And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the bees stagger as they pass through it and disdain to stop and shovel, for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.

But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle—O love which never dies—how differently it grows and lives and blooms!

In color, constant—a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of love blooms in the very lap of Winter.

O love that defies even the breath of death!

The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the beautiful petals of this cluster of love-cells, all so daintily transparent, hanging in pink clusters of loveliness with scalloped lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life. And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it flutters to the patter of their little feet.

All things of Nature love it—the clouds, the winds, the very stars, and sun, because love—undying love—is the soul of God, its Maker.

The rose is red in the rich passion of love, the lily is pale in the poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.

O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled it—none but a lover ever knew!

She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on her knees—the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it—she knew it—its very bark.

She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and her cheek.

"O Tom—Tom—why—why did you make me love you here and then leave me forever with only the memory of it?"

"Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,—can not my love bloom like it—twice?"

"A-l-i-c-e!"

The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.

The blood leaped and then pricked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and they all seemed to freeze around and prick around her heart. She could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on her and smothered her....

When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head while her brother was rubbing her arms.

"You must be ill, darling," said her mother gently. "I heard you scream. What—"

They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently—her head swam.

"Did you call me before—before"—she was excited and eager.

"Why, yes"—smiled her mother. "I said, 'Alice—Alice!'"

"It was not that—no, that was not the way it sounded," she said as they led her into the house.



CHAPTER XI

THE CASKET AND THE GHOST

Richard Travis could not sleep that night—why, he could not tell.

After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his cocktail, and tidied up his room, and beat up the feathers in his pillows and bed—for she believed in the old-fashioned feather-bed and would have no other kind in the house.

The old clock in the hall—that had sat there since long before he, himself, could remember—struck ten, and then eleven, and then, to his disgust, even twelve.

At ten he had taken another toddy to put himself to sleep.

There is only one excuse for drunkenness, and that is sleeplessness. If there is a hell for the intellectual it is not of fire, as for commoner mortals, but of sleeplessness—the wild staring eyes of an eternity of sleeplessness following an eon of that midnight mental anguish which comes with the birth of thoughts.

But still he slept not, and so at ten he had taken another toddy—and still another, and as he felt its life and vigor to the ends of his fingers, he quaffed his fourth one; then he smiled and said: "And now I don't care if I never go to sleep!"

He arose and dressed. He tried to recite one of his favorite poems, and it angered him that his tongue seemed thick.

His head slightly reeled, but in it there galloped a thousand beautiful dreams and there were visions of Alice, and love, and the satisfaction of conquering and the glory of winning.

He could feel his heart-throbs at the ends of his fingers. He could see thoughts—beautiful, grand thoughts—long before they reached him,—stalking like armed men, helmeted and vizored, stalking forward into his mind.

He walked out and down the long hall.

The ticking of the clock sounded to him so loud that he stopped and cursed it.

Because, somehow, it ticked every time his heart beat; and he could count his heart-beats in his fingers' ends, and he didn't want to know every time his heart beat. It made him nervous.

It might stop; but it would not stop. And then, somehow, he imagined that his heart was really out in the yard, down under the hill, and was pumping the water—as the ram had done for years—through the house. It was a queer fancy, and it made him angry because he could not throw it off.

He walked down the hall, rudely snatched the clock door open, and stopped the big pendulum. Then he laughed sillily.

The moonbeams came in at the stained glass windows, and cast red and yellow and pale green fleckings of light on the smooth polished floor.

He began to feel uncanny. He was no coward and he cursed himself for it.

Things began to come to him in a moral way and mixed in with the uncanniness of it all. He imagined he saw, off in the big square library across the way, in the very spot he had seen them lay out his grandfather—Maggie, and she arose suddenly from out of his grandfather's casket and beckoned to him with—

"I love you so—I love you so!"

It was so real, he walked to the spot and put his hands on the black mohair Davenport. And the form on it, sitting bolt upright, was but the pillow he had napped on that afternoon.

He laughed and it sounded hollow to him and echoed down the hall:

"How like her it looked!"

He walked into Harry's room and lit the lamp there. He smiled when he glanced around the walls. There were hunting scenes and actresses in scant clothing. Tobacco pipes of all kinds on the tables, and stumps of ill-smelling cigarettes, and over the mantel was a crayon picture of Death shaking the dice of life. Two old cutlasses crossed underneath it.

On his writing desk Travis picked up and read the copy of the note written to Helen the day before.

He smiled with elevated eyebrows. Then he laughed ironically:

"The little yellow cur—to lie down and quit—to throw her over like that! Damn him—he has a yellow streak in him and I'll take pleasure in pulling down the purse for him. Why, she was born for me anyway! That kid, and in love with Helen! Not for The Gaffs would I have him mix up with that drunken set—nor—nor, well, not for The Gaffs to have him quit like that."

And yet it was news to him. Wrapped in his own selfish plans, he had never bothered himself about Harry's affairs.

But he kept on saying, as if it hurt him: "The little yellow cur—and he a Travis!" He laughed: "He's got another one, I'll bet—got her to-night and by now is securely engaged. So much the better—for my plans."

Again he went into the hall and walked to and fro in the dim light. But the Davenport and the pillow instantly formed themselves again into Maggie and the casket, and he turned in disgust to walk into his own room.

Above his head over the doorway in the hall, on a pair of splendid antlers—his first trophy of the chase,—rested his deer gun, a clean piece of Damascus steel and old English walnut, imported years before. The barrels were forty inches and choked. The small bright hammers rested on the yellow brass caps deep sunk on steel nippers. They shone through the hammer slit fresh and ready for use.

He felt a cold draught of air blow on him and turned in surprise to find the hall window, which reached to the veranda floor, open; and he could see the stars shining above the dark green foliage of the trees on the lawn without.

At the same instant there swept over him a nervous fear, and he reached for his deer gun instinctively. Then there arose from the Davenport coffin a slouching unkempt form, the fine bright eyes of which, as the last rays of the moonlight fell on them, were the eyes of his dead cousin, Captain Tom, and it held out its hands pleadingly to him and tenderly and with much effort said:

"Grandfather, forgive. I've come back again."

Travis's heart seemed to freeze tightly. He tried to breathe—he only gasped—and the corners of his mouth tightened and refused to open. He felt the blood rush up from around his loins, and leave him paralyzed and weak. In sheer desperation he threw the gun to his shoulder, and the next instant he would have fired the load into the face of the thing with its voice of the dead, had not something burst on his head with a staggering, overpowering blow, and despite his efforts to stand, his knees gave way beneath him and it seemed pleasant for him to lie prone upon the floor....

When he awakened an hour afterwards, he sat up, bewildered. His gun lay beside him, but the window was closed securely and bolted. No night air came in. The Davenport and pillow were there as before. His head ached and there was a bruised place over his ear. He walked into his own room and lit the lamp.

"I may have fallen and struck my head," he said, bewildered with the strangeness of it all. "I may have," he repeated—"but if I didn't see Tom Travis's ghost to-night there is no need to believe one's senses."

He opened the door and let in two setters which fawned upon him and licked his hand. All his nervousness vanished.

"No one knows the comfort of a dog's company," he said, "who does not love a dog?"

Then he bathed his face and head and went to sleep.

It was after midnight when Jack Bracken led Captain Tom in and put him to bed.

"A close shave for you, Cap'n Tom," he said—"I struck just in time. I'll not leave you another night with the door unlocked." Then: "But poor fellow—how can we blame him for wandering off, after all those years, and trying to get back again to his boyhood home."



CHAPTER XII

A MIDNIGHT GUARD

Jack Bracken rolled himself in his blanket on the cot, placed in the room next to Captain Tom, and prepared to sleep again.

But the excitement of the night had been great; his sudden awakening from sleep, his missing Captain Tom, and finding him in time to prevent a tragedy, had aroused him thoroughly, and now sleep was far from his eyes.

And so he lay and thought of his past life, and as it passed before him it shook him with nervous sleeplessness.

It hurt him. He lay and panted with the strong sorrow of it.

Perhaps it was that, but with it were thoughts also of little Jack, and the tears came into the eyes of the big-hearted outlaw.

He had his plans all arranged—he and the Bishop—and now as the village blacksmith he would begin the life of an honest man.

Respected—his heart beat proudly to think of it.

Respected—how little it means to the man who is, how much to the man who is not.

"Why," he said to himself—"perhaps after a while people will stop and talk to me an' say as they pass my shop: 'Good mornin', neighbor, how are you to-day?' Little children—sweet an' innocent little children—comin' from school may stop an' watch the sparks fly from my anvil, like they did in the poem I onct read, an' linger aroun' an' talk to me, shy like; maybe, after awhile I'll get their confidence, so they will learn to love me, an' call me Uncle Jack—Uncle Jack," he repeated softly.

"An' I won't be suspectin' people any mo' an' none of 'em will be my enemy. I'll not be carryin' pistols an' havin' buckets of gold an' not a friend in the worl'."

His heart beat fast—he could scarcely wait for the morning to come, so anxious was he to begin the life of an honest man again. He who had been an outlaw so long, who had not known what it was to know human sympathy and human friendship—it thrilled him with a rich, sweet flood of joy.

Then suddenly a great wave swept over him—a wave of such exquisite joy that he fell on his knees and cried out: "O God, I am a changed man—how happy I am! jus' to be human agin an' not hounded! How can I thank You—You who have given me this blessed Man the Bishop tells us about—this Christ who reaches out an' takes us by the han' an' lifts us up. O God, if there is divinity given to man, it is given to that man who can lift up another, as the po' outlaw knows."

He lay silent and thoughtful. All day and night—since he had first seen Margaret, her eyes had haunted him. He had not seen her before for many years; but in all that time there had not been a day when he had not thought of—loved—her.

Margaret—her loneliness—the sadness of her life, all haunted him. She lived, he knew, alone, in her cottage—an outcast from society. He had looked but once in her eyes and caught the lingering look of appeal which unconsciously lay there. He knew she loved him yet—it was there as plain as in his own face was written the fact that he loved her. He thought of himself—of her. Then he said:

"For fifteen years I have robbed—killed—oh, God—killed—how it hurts me now! All the category of crime in bitter wickedness I have run. And she—once—and now an angel—Bishop himself says so."

"I am a new man—I am a respectable and honest man,"—here he arose on his cot and drew himself up—"I am Jack Smith—Mr. Jack Smith, the blacksmith, and my word is my bond."

He slipped out quietly. Once again in the cool night, under the stars which he had learned to love as brothers and whose silent paths across the heavens were to him old familiar footpaths, he felt at ease, and his nervousness left him.

He had not intended to speak to Margaret then—for he thought she was asleep. He wished only to guard her cabin, up among the stunted old field pines—while she slept—to see the room he knew she slept in—the little window she looked out of every day.

The little cabin was a hallowed spot to him. Somehow he knew—he felt that whatever might be said—in it he knew an angel dwelt. He could not understand—he only knew.

There is a moral sense within us that is a greater teacher than either knowledge or wisdom.

For an hour he stood with his head uncovered watching the little cabin where she lived. Everything about it was sacred, because Margaret lived there. It was pretty, too, in its neatness and cleanliness, and there were old-fashioned flowers in the yard and old-fashioned roses clambered on the rock wall.

He sat down in the path—the little white sanded path down which he knew she went every day, and so made sacred by her footsteps.

"Perhaps, I am near one of them now," he said—and he kissed the spot.

And that night and many others did the outlaw watch over the lonely cabin on the mountain side. And she, the outcast woman, slept within, unconscious that she was being protected by the man who had loved her all his life.



CHAPTER XIII

THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD

The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.

Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.

For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as "a petty old bundle of botheration"—and storming around at the children—all by sun-up—this was not work at all.

It was merely an appetizer.

The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their beds—Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do everything—learned it while working all day between the whirl of the spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.

The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo—touched as it was by the splendid flush of the East.

It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the poverty of work, and the two—poverty and work—had already had their effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been in the mill long enough to be automatonized.

Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of there.

"Wouldn't it be fine, Mattox," she cried, "if we didn't have to work at the mill to-day an' cu'd run up on the mountain an' pick up that star? I seed one fall onct an' I picked it up."

For a moment the little face was thoughtful—wistful—then she added:

"I wonder how it would feel to spen' the day in the woods onct. Archie B. says it's just fine and flowers grow everywhere. Oh, jes' to be 'quainted with one Jeree—like Archie B. is—an' have him come to yo' winder every mornin' an' say, 'Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet! Wake up, Pet!' An' then hear a little 'un over in another tree say, 'So-s-l-ee-py—So-s-l-ee-py!'"

Her chatter ceased again. Then: "Mattox, did you ever see a rabbit? I seen one onct, a settin' up in a fence corner an' a spittin' on his han's to wash his face."

She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened faces.

"I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine," drawled Bull Run.

Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between his teeth, into the fireplace.

There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed upon.

For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch. This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of tin.

They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle called them to their work.

Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and shuddered.

Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.

To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within, the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and pulsation of its heart.

She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence, broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.

Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the half-formed framework of that little life.

As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near the door she almost cried out in affright—her little heart grew tight, her lips were drawn.

"Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh," said her sister pulling her along. "You'll be all right when you get inside."

There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.

Within, she was reassured; for there was her familiar spinning frame, with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the room was full of people, many as small as she.

The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.

Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.

Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places, it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.

To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New England and knew the harm of it—morally, physically. Travis had even made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family, did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,—and worse than all, the lack of any state law on the subject,—had brought about the pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton mills.

There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was permitted to talk. No singing—for songs come from the happy heart of labor, unshackled. No noise of childhood, though the children were there. They were flung into an arena for a long day's fight against a thing of steel and steam, and there was no time for anything save work, work, work—walk, walk, walk—watch, forever watch,—the interminable flying whirl of spindle and spool.

Early as it was, the children were late, and were soundly rebuffed by the foreman.

The scolding hurt only Shiloh—it made her tremble and cry. The others were hardened—insensible—and took it with about the same degree of indifference with which caged and starved mice look at the man who pours over their wire traps the hot water which scalds them to death.

The fight between steel, steam and child-flesh was on.

Shiloh, Appomattox and Atlanta were spinners.

Spinners are small girls who walk up and down an aisle before a spinning-frame and piece up the threads which are forever breaking. There were over a hundred spindles on each side of the frame, each revolving with the rapidity of an incipient cyclone and snapping every now and then the delicate white thread that was spun out like spiders' web from the rollers and the cylinders, making a balloon-like gown of cotton thread, which settled continuously around the bobbin.

All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles, piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.

It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which, unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power, but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk—as children walk—and watch—as age should watch.

No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.

Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the quickness of its stroke.

For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart—a flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread—up in the left hand flies the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin, thrust over the spindle by the right.

It is all done with two quick movements—a flash and a jerk of one hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble, to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand revolutions in a minute.

Snap—bang! Snap—bang! One hundred and twenty times—Snap—bang! and back again, went the deft little workers pushing their cart before them.

Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another machine.

It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.

Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory. Up and down she walked—up and down, watching these endless whirling figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds with a whip of fire.

In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his people to conquer the world.

And in the Beast's body was a heart!

Ay, and the man was a man—a trained gladiator—and he was nerved by the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.

And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for bread and life.

But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless. Steel—that by which the old gladiator conquered—that is the heart of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers—the glamour of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of its own voice—in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which drives the Steel Beast on.

Seven o'clock—eight o'clock—Shiloh's head swam—her shoulders ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.

Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness, through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.

Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!

Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to work.

She listened again—yes, it did sound something like a bluebird, peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the staccato of some rusty spindle.

But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.

Ten o'clock—the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.

Eleven o'clock—oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!—she saw them all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery and—....

She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling itself around a separator. She had dreamed but a minute—half a dozen threads had broken.

It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.

This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,—a Sunday School song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not hear it—no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's Den—nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,—but she knew from the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.

Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood—ay, her life—going on by the Beast Thing and his men.

God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an instinct there.

Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious roar which drowned all others.

Then it purred and paused for breath—purred softer and softer and—slept at last.

It was noon.

The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.

And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.

They sat in a circle, these five children—and ate their lunch of cold soda biscuits and fat bacon.

Not a word did they say—not a laugh nor a sound to show they were children,—not even a sigh to show they were human.

Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then—O men and women who love your own little ones—look!

Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle. Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that he went to sleep as he tried to climb into it.

In other parts of the mill, other little ones slept and even large girls and boys, after eating, dozed or chatted. Spoolers, weavers, slubbers, warpers, nearly grown but all hard-faced, listless—and many of them slept on shawls and battings of cotton.

They were awakened by the big whistle at twenty minutes to one o'clock. At the same time, Jud Carpenter, the foreman, passed down the aisles and dashed cold water in the sleeping faces. Half laughingly he did it, but the little ones arose instantly, and with stooped forms, and tired, cowed eyes, in which the Anglo-Saxon spirit of resentment had been killed by the Yankee spirit of greed, they looked at the foreman, and then began their long six hours' battle with the bobbins.

Three o'clock! The warm afternoon's sun poured on the low flat tin roof of the mill and warmed the interior to a temperature which was uncomfortable.

Shiloh grew sleepy—she dragged her stumbling little feet along, and had she stopped but a moment, she had paid the debt that childhood owes to fairy-land. The air was close—stifling. Her shoulders ached—her head seemed a stuffy thing of wood and wooly lint.

As it was she nodded as she walked, and again the song of the bluebird peeped dreamily from out the unoiled spindle. She tried to sing to keep awake, and then there came a strange phantasy to mix with it all, and out of the half-awake world in which she now staggered along she caught sight of something which made her open her eyes and laugh outright.

Was it—could it be? In very truth it was—

Dolls!

And oh, so many! And all in a row dressed in matchless gowns of snowy white. She would count them up to ten—as far as she had learned to count.... But there were ten,—yes, and many more than ten— ... and just to think of whole rows of them— ... all there— ... and waiting for her to reach out and fondle and caress.

And she—never in her life before had she been so fortunate as to own one....

A smile lit up her dreaming eyes. Rows upon rows of dolls.... And not even Appomattox and Atlanta had ever seen so many before; and now how funny they acted, dancing around and around and bobbing their quaint bodies and winking and nodding at her.... It was Mayday with them and down the long line of spindles these cotton dolls were dancing around their May Queen, and beckoning Shiloh to join them....

It was too cute—too cunning—! they were dancing and drawing her in—they were actually singing— ... humming and chanting a May song....

O lovely—lovely dolls!...

Jud Carpenter found her asleep in the greasy aisle, her head resting on her arm, a smile on her little face—a hand clasping a rounded well-threaded doll-like bobbin to her breast.

It is useless to try to speak in a room in which the Steam Beast's voice drowns all other voices. It is useless to try to awaken one by calling. One might as well stand under Niagara Falls and whistle to the little fishes. No other voice can be heard while the Steam Beast speaks.

Shiloh was awakened by a dash of cold water and a rough kick from the big boot of that other beast who called himself the overseer. He did not intend to jostle her hard, but Shiloh was such a little thing that the kick she got in the side accompanied by the dash of water shocked and frightened her instantly to her feet, and with scared eyes and blanched face she darted down to the long line of bobbins, mending the threads.

If, in the great Mystic Unknown,—the Eden of Balance,—there lies no retributive Cause to right the injustice of that cruel Effect, let us hope there is no Here-after; that we all die and rot like dogs, who know no justice; that what little kindness and sweetness and right, man, through his happier dreams, his hopeful, cheerful idealism, has tried to establish in the world, may no longer stand as mockery to the Sweet Philosopher who long ago said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me...."

They were more dead than alive when, at seven o'clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home.

Outside the stars were shining and the cool night air struck into them with a suddenness which made them shiver. They were children, and so they were thoughtless and did not know the risk they ran by coming out of a warm mill, hot and exhausted, into the cool air of an Autumn night. Shiloh was so tired and sleepy that Bull Run and Seven Days had to carry her between them.

Everybody passed out of the mill—a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession. Byrd Boyle, with a face and form which seemed to belong to a slave age, carried his twins in his arms.

Their heads lay on his shoulders. They were asleep.

Scarcely had the children eaten their supper of biscuit and bacon, augmented with dandelion salad, ere they, too, were asleep—all but Shiloh.

She could not sleep—now that she wanted to—and she lay in her grandfather's lap with flushed face and hot, over-worked heart. The strain was beginning to tell, and the old man grew uneasy, as he watched the flush on her cheeks and the unusual brightness in her eyes.

"Better give her five draps of tub'bentine an' put her to bed," said Mrs. Watts as she came by. "She'll be fittin' an' good by mornin'."

The old man did not reply—he only sang a low melody and smoothed her forehead.

It was ten o'clock, and now she lay on the old man's lap asleep from exhaustion. A cricket began chirping in the fireplace, under a hearth-brick.

"What's that, Pap?" asked Shiloh half asleep.

"That's a cricket, Pet," smiled the old man.

She listened a while with a half-amused smile on her lips:

"Well, don't you think his spindles need oilin', Pap?"

There was little but machinery in her life.

Another hour found the old man tired, but still holding the sleeping child in his arms:

"If I move her she'll wake," he said to himself. "Po' little Shiloh."

He was silent a while and thoughtful. Then he looked up at the shadow of Sand Mountain, falling half way down the valley in the moonlight.

"The shadow of that mountain across that valley," he said, "is like the shadow of the greed of gain across the world. An' why should it be? What is it worth? Who is happier for any money more than he needs in life?"

He bowed his head over the sleeping Shiloh.

"Oh, God," he prayed—"You, who made the world an' said it might have a childhood—remember what it means to have it filched away. It's like stealin' the bud from the rose-bush, the dew from the grass, hope from the heart of man. Take our manhood—O God—it is strong enough to stand it—an' it has been took from many a strong man who has died with a smile on his lips. Take our old age—O God—for it's jus' a memory of Has Beens. But let them not steal that from any life that makes all the res' of it beautiful with dreams of it. If, by some inscrutable law which we po' things can't see through, stealin' in traffic an' trade must go on in the world, O God, let them steal our purses, but not our childhood. Amen."



CHAPTER XIV

UNCLE DAVE'S WILL

The whistle of the mill had scarcely awakened Cottontown the next morning before Archie B., hatless and full of excitement, came over to the Bishop with a message from his mother. No one was astir but Mrs. Watts, and she was sweeping vigorously.

"What's the matter, Archie B.?" asked the old man when he came out.

"Uncle Dave Dickey is dyin' an' maw told me to run over an' tell you to hurry quick if you wanted to see the old man die."

"Oh, Uncle Dave is dyin', is he? Well, we'll go, Archie B., just as soon as Ben Butler can be hooked up. I've got some more calls to make anyway."

Ben Butler was ready by the time the children started for the mill. Little Shiloh brought up the rear, her tiny legs bravely following the others. Archie B. looked at them curiously as the small wage-earners filed past him for work.

"Say, you little mill-birds," he said, "why don't you chaps come over to see me sometimes an' lem'me show you things outdoors that's made for boys an' girls?"

"Is they very pretty?" asked Shiloh, stopping and all ears at once. "Oh, tell me 'bout 'em! I am jus' hungry to see 'em. I've learned the names of three birds myself an' I saw a gray squirrel onct."

"Three birds—shucks!" said Archie B., "I could sho' you forty, but I'll tell you what's crackin' good fun an' it'll test you mor'n knowin' the birds—that's easy. But the hard thing is to find their nests an' then to tell by the eggs what bird it is. That's the cracker-jack trick."

Shiloh's eyes opened wide: "Why, do they lay eggs, Archie B.? Real eggs like a hen or a duck?"

Archie B. laughed: "Well, I should say so—an' away up in a tree, an' in the funniest little baskets you ever saw. An' some of the eggs is white, an' some blue, and some green, an' some speckled an' oh, so many kind. But I'll tell you a thing right now that'll help you to remember—mighty nigh every bird lays a egg that's mighty nigh like the bird herself. The cat bird's eggs is sorter blue—an' the wood-pecker's is white, like his wing, an' the thrasher's is mottled like his breast."

Ben Butler was hitched to the old buggy and the Bishop drove up. He had a bunch of wild flowers for Shiloh and he gave it with a kiss. "Run along now, Baby, an' I'll fetch you another when I come back."

They saw her run to catch up with the others and breathlessly tell them of the wonderful things Archie B. had related. And all through the day, in the dust and the lint, the thunder and rumble of the Steam Thing's war, Shiloh saw white and blue and mottled eggs, in tiny baskets, with homes up in the trees where the winds rocked the cradles when the little birds came; and young as she was, into her head there crept a thought that something was wrong in man's management of things when little birds were free and little children must work.

As she ran off she waved her hand to her grandfather.

"I'll fetch you another bunch when I come back, Pet," he called.

"You'd better fetch her somethin' to eat, instead of prayin' aroun' with old fools that's always dyin'," called Mrs. Watts to him from the kitchen door where she was scrubbing the cans.

"The Lord will always provide, Tabitha—he has never failed me yet."

She watched him drive slowly over the hill: "That means I had better get a move on me an' go to furagin'," she said to herself.

"Hillard Watts has mistuck me for the Almighty mighty nigh all his life. It's about time the blackberries was a gittin' ripe anyway."

The Bishop found the greatest distress at Uncle Dave Dickey's. Aunt Sally Dickey, his wife, was weeping on the front porch, while Tilly, Uncle Dave's pretty grown daughter, her calico dress tucked up for the morning's work, showing feet and ankles that would grace a duchess, was lamenting loudly on the back porch. A coon dog of uncertain lineage and intellectual development, tuned to the howling pitch, doubtless, by the music of Tilly's sobs, joined in the chorus.

"Po' Davy is gwine—he's most gone—boo—boo-oo!" sobbed Aunt Sally.

"Pap—Pap—don't leave us," echoed Tilly from the back porch.

"Ow—wow—oo—oo," howled the dog.

The Bishop went in sad and subdued, expecting to find Uncle Davy breathing his last. Instead, he found him sitting bolt upright in bed, and sobbing even more lustily than his wife and daughter. He stretched out his hands pitiably as his old friend went in.

"Most gone"—he sobbed—"Hillard—the old man is most gone. You've come jus' in time to see your old friend breathe his las' an' to witness his will," and he broke out sobbing afresh, in which Aunt Sally and Tilly and the dog, all of whom had followed the Bishop in, joined.

The Bishop took in the situation at a glance. Then he broke into a smile that gradually settled all over his kindly face.

"Look aheah, Davy, you ain't no mo' dyin' than I am."

"What—what?" said Uncle Davy between his sobs—"I ain't a dyin', Hillard? Oh, yes, I be. Sally and Tilly both say so."

"Now, look aheah, Davy, it ain't so. I've seed hundreds die—yes, hundreds—strong men, babes—women and little tots, strong ones, and weak and frail ones, given to tears, but I've never seed one die yet sheddin' a single tear, let alone blubberin' like a calf. It's agin nature. Davy, dyin' men don't weep. It's always all right with 'em. It's the one moment of all their lives, often, that everything is all right, seein' as they do, that all life has been a dream—all back of death jes' a beginnin' to live, an' so they die contented. No—no, Davy, if they've lived right they want to smile, not weep."

There was an immediate snuffing and drying of tears all around. Uncle Davy looked sheepishly at Aunt Sally, she passed the same look on to Tilly, and Tilly passed it to the coon dog. Here it rested in its birthplace.

"Come to think of it, Hillard," said Uncle Dave after a while, "but I believe you are right."

Tilly came back, and she and Aunt Sally nodded their heads: "Yes, Hillard, you're right," went on Uncle Davy, "Tilly and Sally both say so."

"How come you to think you was dyin' anyway?" asked the Bishop.

"Hillard,—you kno', Hillard—the old man's been thinkin' he'd go sudden-like a long time." He raised his eyes to heaven: "Yes, Lord, thy servant is even ready."

"Last night I felt a kind o' flutterin' of my heart an' I cudn't breathe good. I thought it was death—death,—Hillard, on the back of his pale horse. Tilly and Sally both thought so."

The Bishop laughed. "That warn't death on the back of a horse, Davy—that was jus' wind on the stomach of an ass."

This was too much for Uncle Davy—especially when Tilly and Sally made it unanimous by giggling outright.

"You et cabbages for supper," said the Bishop.

Uncle Davy nodded, sheepishly.

"Then I sed my will an' Tilly writ it down an', oh, Hillard, I am so anxious to hear you read it. I wanter see how it'ull feel fer a man to have his will read after he is dead—an'—an' how his widder takes it," he added, glancing at Aunt Sally—"an' his friends. I wanter heah you read it, Hillard, in that deep organ way of yours,—like you read the Old Testament. In that In-the-Beginning-God-Created-the-Heaven-an'-the-Earth-Kinder voice! Drap your voice low like a organ, an' let the old man hear it befo' he goes. I fixed it when I thought I was a-dyin'."

"Makin' yo' will ain't no sign you're dyin'," said the Bishop.

"But Tilly an' Aunt Sally both said so," said Uncle Davy, earnestly.

"All yo' needs," said the Bishop going to his saddle bags, "is a good straight whiskey. I keep a little—a very, very little bit in my saddle bags, for jes' sech occasions as these. It's twenty years old," he said, "an' genuwine old Lincoln County. I keep it only for folks that's dyin'," he winked, "an' sometimes, Davy, I feel mighty like I'm about to pass away myself."

He poured out a very small medicine glass of it, shining and shimmering in the morning light like a big ruby,—and handed it to Uncle Davy.

"You say that's twenty years old, Hillard?" asked Uncle Davy as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and again held the little glass out entreatingly:

"Hillard, ain't it mighty small for its age—'pears to me it orter be twins to make it the regulation size. Don't you think so?"

The Bishop gave him another and took one himself, remarking as he did so, "I was pow'ful flustrated when I heard you was dyin' again, Davy, an' I need it to stiddy my nerves. Now, fetch out yo' will, Davy," he added.

As he took it the Bishop adjusted his big spectacles, buttoned up his coat, and drew himself up as he did in the pulpit. He blew his nose to get a clear sonorous note:

"I've got a verse of poetry that I allers tunes my voice up to the occasion with," he said. "I do it sorter like a fiddler tunes up his fiddle. It's a great poem an' I'll put it agin anything in the Queen's English for real thunder music an' a sentiment that Shakespeare an' Milton nor none of 'em cud a writ. It stirs me like our park of artillery at Shiloh, an' it puts me in tune with the great dead of all eternity. It makes me think of Cap'n Tom an' Albert Sidney Johnston."

Then in a deep voice he repeated:

"'The muffled drum's sad roll has beat The soldier's last tattoo— No more on earth's parade shall meet That brave and fallen few. On Fame's eternal camping ground Their silent tents are spread And glory guards with solemn sound The Bivouac of the Dead.'"

"Now give me yo' will."

Uncle Davy sat up solemnly, keenly, expectantly. Tilly and Aunt Sally sat subdued and sad, with that air of solemn importance and respect which might be expected of a dutiful daughter and bereaved widow on such an occasion. It was too solemn for Uncle Davy. He began to whimper again: "I didn't think I would ever live to see the day when I'd hear my own will read after I was dead, an' Hillard a-readin' it around my own corpse. It's Tilly's handwrite," he explained, as he saw the Bishop scrutinizing the testament closely. "I can't write, as you kno', but I've made my mark at the end, an' I want you to witness it."

Pitching his voice to organ depths, the Bishop read:

"'In the name of God, amen: I, Davy Dickey, of the County of ——, and State of Alabama, being of sound mind and retentive memory, but knowing the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death, do hereby make and ordain this—my last will and testamen—'"

Uncle Davy had lain back, his eyes closed, his hands clasped, drinking it all in.

"O, Hillard—Hillard, read it agin—it makes me so happy! It does me so much good. It sounds like the first chapter of Genesis, an' Daniel Webster's reply to Hayne an' the 19th Psalm all put together."

The Bishop read it again.

"So happy—so happy—" sobbed Uncle Davy, in which Aunt Sally and Tilly and the coon dog joined.

"'First,'" read on the Bishop, following closely Tilly's pretty penmanship; "'Concerning that part of me called the soul or spirit which is immortal, I will it back again to its Maker, leaving it to Him to do as He pleases with, without asking any impertinent questions or making any fool requests.'"

The Bishop paused. "That's a good idea, Davy—Givin' it back to its Maker without asking any impert'n'ent questions."

"'Second,'" read the Bishop, "'I wills to be buried alongside of Dan'l Tubbs, on the Chestnut Knob, the same enclosed with a rock wall, forever set aside for me an' Dan'l and running west twenty yards to a black jack, then east to a cedar stump three rods, then south to a stake twenty yards and thence west back to me an' Dan'l. I wills the fence to be built horse high, bull strong and pig tight, so as to keep out the Widow Simmon's old brindle cow; the said cow having pestered us nigh to death in life, I don't want her to worry us back to life after death.

"'Third. All the rest of the place except that occupied as aforesaid by me an' Dan'l, and consisting of twenty acres, more or less, I will to go to my dutiful wife, Sally Ann Dickey, providing, of course, that she do not marry again.'"

"David?" put in Aunt Sallie, promptly, wiping her eyes, "I think that last thing mout be left out."

"Well, I don't kno'," said Uncle Davy—"you sho'ly ain't got no notion of marryin' agin, have you, Sally?"

"No—no—" said Aunt Sallie, thoughtfully, "but there aint no tellin' what a po' widder mout have to do if pushed to the wall."

"Well," sagely remarked Uncle Davy, "we'll jes' let it stan' as it is. It's like a dose of calomel for disorder of the stomach—if you need it it'll cure you, an' if you don't it won't hurt you. This thing of old folks fallin' in love ain't nothin' but a disorder of the stomach anyhow."

Aunt Sally again protested a poor widow was often pushed to the wall and had to take advantage of circumstances, but Uncle Davy told the Bishop to read on.

At this point Tilly got up and left the room.

"'Fourth. I give and bequeath to my devoted daughter, Tilly, and her husband, Charles C. Biggers, all my personal property, including the crib up in the loft, the razor my grandfather left me, the old mare and her colt, the best bed in the parlor, and—'"

The Bishop stopped and looked serious.

"Davy, ain't you a trifle previous in this?" he asked.

"Not for a will," he said. "You see this is supposed to happen and be read after you're dead. You see Charles has been to see her twice and writ a poem on her eyes."

The Bishop frowned: "You'll have to watch that Biggers boy—he is a wild reckless rake an' not in Tilly's class in anything."

"He's pow'ful sweet on Tilly," said Aunt Sallie.

"Has he asked her to marry him?" asked the Bishop astonished.

"S-h-h—not yet," said Uncle Davy, "but he's comin' to it as fast as a lean hound to a meat block. He's got the firs' tech now—silly an' poetic. After a while he'll get silly an' desperate, an' jes' 'fo' he kills hisse'l Tilly'll fix him all right an' tie him up for life. The good Lord makes every man crazy when he is ripe for matrimony, so he can mate him off befo' he comes to."

The Bishop shook his head: "I am glad I came out here to-day—if for nothin' else to warn you to let that Biggers boy alone. He don't study nothin' but fast horses an' devilment."

"I never seed a man have a wuss'r case," said Aunt Sally. "Won't Tilly be proud of herse'f as the daughter of Old Judge Biggers? An' me—jes' think of me as the grandmother of Biggerses—the riches' an' fines' family in the land."

"An' me?—I'll be the gran'pap of 'em—won't I, Sally?"

"You forgit, Davy," said Aunt Sally—"this is yo' will—you'll be dead."

"I did forgit," said Uncle Davy sadly—"but I'd sho' love to live an' take one of them little Biggerses on my knees an' think his gran'pap had bred up to this. Me an' old Judge Biggers—gran'paws of the same kids! Now, you see, Hillard, he met Tilly at a party an' he tuck her in to supper. The next day he writ her a poem, an' I think it's a pretty good start on the gran'pap business."

The Bishop smiled: "It does look like he loves her," he added, dryly. "If I was the devil an' wanted to ketch a woman I'd write a poem to her every day an' lie between heats. Love lives on lies."

"Now, I've ca'culated them things out," said Uncle Davy, "an' it'll be this away: Tilly is as pretty as a peach an' Charlie is gittin' stuck wus'n wus'n every day. By the time I am dead they will be married good an' hard. I am almost gone as it is, the ole man he's liable to drap off any time—yea, Lord, thy servant is ready to go—but I do hope that the good master will let me live long enough to hold one of my Biggers grandboys on my knees."

"All I've got to say," said the Bishop, "is jus' to watch yo' son-in-law. Every son-in-law will stan' watchin' after the ceremony, but yours will stan' it all the time."

"'Lastly,'" read the Bishop, "'I wills it that things be left just as they be on the place—no moving around of nothing, especially the well, it being eighty foot deep, and with good cool water; and finally I leave anything else I've got, mostly my good will, to the tender mercies of the lawyers and courts.'"

The Bishop witnessed it, gave Uncle Davy another toddy, and, after again cautioning him to watch young Biggers closely, rode away.



CHAPTER XV

EDWARD CONWAY

Across the hill the old man rode to Millwood, and as he rode his head was bent forward in troubled thought.

He had heard that Edward Conway had come to the sorest need—even to where he would place his daughters in the mill. None knew better than Hillard Watts what this would mean socially for the granddaughters of Governor Conway.

Besides, the old preacher had begun to hate the mill and its infamous system of child labor with a hatred born of righteousness. Every month he saw its degradation, its slavery, its death.

He preached, he talked against it. He began to be pointed out as the man who was against the mill. Ominous rumors had come to his ears, and threats. It was whispered to him that he had better be silent, and some of the people he preached to—some of those who had children in the mill and were supported in their laziness by the life blood of their little ones—these were his bitterest enemies.

To-day, the drunken proprietor of Millwood sat in his accustomed place on the front balcony, his cob-pipe in his mouth and ruin all around him.

Like others, he had a great respect for the Bishop—a man who had been both his own and his father's friend. Often as a lad he had hunted, fished, and trapped with the preacher-overseer, who lived near his father's plantation. He had broken all of the stubborn colts in the overseer's care; he had ridden them even in some of their fiercest, hardest races, and he had felt the thrill of victory at the wire and known the great pride which comes to one who knows he has the confidence of a brave and honest man.

The old trainer's influence over Edward Conway had always been great.

To-day, as he saw the Bishop ride up, he thought of his boyhood days, and of Tom Travis. How often had they gone with the old man hunting and fishing! How he reverenced the memory of his gentleness and kindness!

The greatest desire of Hillard Watts had been to reform Edward Conway. He had prayed for him, worked for him. In spite of his drunkenness the old man believed in him.

"God'll save him yet," he would say. "I've prayed for it an' I kno' it—tho' it may be by the crushing of him. Some men repent to God's smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist. I'm afraid it will take a blow to save Ned, po' boy."

For Ned was always a boy to him.

Conway was drunker than usual to-day. Things grew worse daily, and he drank deeper.

It is one of the strangest curses of whiskey that as it daily drags a man down, deeper and deeper, it makes him believe he must cling to his Red God the closer.

He met the old overseer cordially, in a half drunken endeavor to be natural. The old man glanced sadly up at the bloated, boastful face, and thought of the beautiful one it once had been. He thought of the fine, brilliant mind and marveled that with ten years of drunkenness it still retained its strength. And the Bishop remembered that in spite of his drinking no one had ever accused Edward Conway of doing a dishonorable thing. "How strong is that man's character rooted for good," he thought, "when even whiskey cannot undermine it."

"Where are the babies, Ned?" he asked, after he was seated.

The father called and the two girls came running out.

The old man was struck with the developing beauty of Helen—he had not seen her for a year. Lily hunted in his pockets for candy, as she had always done—and found it—and Helen—though eighteen and grown, sat thoughtful and sad, on a stool by his side.

The old man did not wonder at her sadness.

"Ned," he said, as he stroked Helen's hand, "this girl looks mo' like her mother every day, an' you know she was the handsomest woman that ever was raised in the Valley."

Conway took his pipe out of his mouth. He dropped his head and looked toward the distant blue hills. What Memory and Remorse were whispering to him the old man could only guess. Silently—nodding—he sat and looked and spoke not.

"She ain't gwineter be a bit prettier than my little Lil, when she gits grown," said a voice behind them.

It was Mammy Maria who, as usual, having dressed the little girl as daintily as she could, stood nearby to see that no harm befell her.

"Wal, Aunt Maria," drawled the Bishop. "Whar did you come from? I declar' it looks like ole times to see you agin'."

There is something peculiar in this, that those unlettered, having once associated closely with negroes, drop into their dialect when speaking to them. Perhaps it may be explained by some law of language—some rule of euphony, now unknown. The Bishop unconsciously did this; and, from dialect alone, one could not tell which was white and which was black.

Aunt Maria had always been very religious, and the Bishop arose and shook her hand gravely.

"Pow'ful glad to see you," said the old woman.

"How's religion—Aunt Maria," he asked.

"Mighty po'ly—mighty po'ly"—she sighed. "It looks lak the Cedars of Lebanon is dwarfed to the scrub pine. The old time religin' is passin' away, an' I'm all that's lef' of Zion."

The Bishop smiled.

"Yes, you see befo' you all that's lef' of Zion. I'se been longin' to see you an' have a talk with you—thinkin' maybe you cud he'p me out. You kno' me and you is Hard-shells."

The Bishop nodded.

"We 'blieves in repentince an' fallin' from grace, an' backslidin' an' all that," she went on. "Well, they've lopped them good ole things off one by one an' they don't 'bleeve in nothin' now but jes' jin'in'. They think jes' jin'in' fixes 'em—that it gives 'em a free pass into the pearly gates. So of all ole Zion Church up at the hill, sah, they've jes' jined an' jined around, fust one church an' then another, till of all the ole Zion Church that me an' you loved so much, they ain't none lef' but Parson Shadrack, the preacher, sister Tilly, an' me—We wus Zion."

"Pow'ful bad, pow'ful bad," said the Bishop—"and you three made Zion."

"We wus," said Aunt Maria, sadly—"but now there ain't but one lef'. I'm Zion. It's t'arrable, but it's true. As it wus in the days of Lot, so it is to-day in Sodom."

"Why, how did that happen?" asked the Bishop.

Aunt Maria's eyes kindled: "It's t'arrable, but it's true—last week Parson Shadrack deserts his own wife an' runs off with Sis Tilly. It looked lak he mouter tuck me, too, an' kept the fold together as Abraham did when he went into the Land of the Philistines. But thank God, if I am all that's lef', one thing is mighty consolin'—I can have a meetin' of Zion wherever I is. If I sets down in a cheer to meditate I sez to myself—'Be keerful, Maria, for the church is in session.' When I drink, it is communion—when I bathes, it is baptism, when I walks, I sez to myself: 'Keep a straight gait, Maria, you are carryin' the tabbernackle of all goodness.' Aunt Tilly got the preacher, but thank God, I got Zion."

"But I mus' go. Come on, Lily," she said to the little girl,—"let ole Zion fix up yo' curls."

She took her charge and curtsied out, and the Bishop knew she would die either for Zion or the little girl.

The old man sat thinking—Helen had gone in and was practising a love song.

"Ned," said the Bishop, "I tell you a man ain't altogether friendless when he's got in his home a creature as faithful as she is. She'd die for that child. That one ole faithful 'oman makes me feel like liftin' my hat to the whole nigger race. I tell you when I get to heaven an' fail to see ole Mammy settin' around the River of Life, I'll think somethin' is wrong."

The Bishop was silent a while, and then he asked: "Ned, it can't be true that you are goin' to put them girls in the factory?"

"It's all I can do," said Conway, surlily—"I'll be turned out of home soon—out in the public road. Everything I've got has been sold. I've no'where to go, an' but for Carpenter's offer from the Company of the cottage, I'd not have even a home for them. The only condition I could go on was that—"

"That you sell your daughters into slavery," said the Bishop quietly.

"You don't seem to think it hurts your's," said Conway bluntly.

"If I had my way they'd not work there a day,"—the old man replied hastily. "But it's different with me, an' you know it. My people take to it naturally. I am a po' white, an underling by breedin' an' birth, an' if my people build, they must build up. But you—you are tearing down when you do that. Po' as I am, I'd rather starve than to see little children worked to death in that trap, but Tabitha sees it different, and she is the one bein' in the world I don't cross—the General"—he smiled—"she don't understand, she's built different."

He was silent a while. Then he said: "I am old an' have nothin'."

He stopped again. He did not say that what little he did have went to the poor and the sorrow-stricken of the neighborhood. He did not add that in his home, besides its poverty and hardness, he faced daily the problem of far greater things.

"If I only had my health," said Conway, "but this cursed rheumatism!"

"Some of us has been so used to benefits," said the old man, "that it's only when they've withdrawn that we miss 'em. We're always ready to blame God for what we lose, but fail to remember what He gives us. We kno' what diseases an' misfortunes we have had, we never know, by God's mercy, what we have escaped. Death is around us daily—in the very air we breathe—and yet we live.

"I'll talk square with you, Ned—though you may hate me for it. Every misfortune you have, from rheumatism to loss of property, is due to whiskey. Let it alone. Be a man. There's greatness in you yet. You'd have no chance if you was a scrub. But no man can estimate the value of good blood in man or hoss—it's the unknown quantity that makes him ready to come again. For do the best we can, at last we're in the hands of God an' our pedigree."

"Do you think I've got a show yet?" asked Conway, looking up.

"Do I? Every man has a chance who trusts God an' prays. You can't down that man. Your people were men—brave an' honest men. They conquered themselves first, an' all this fair valley afterwards. They overcame greater obstacles than you ever had, an' in bringin' you into the world they gave you, by the very laws of heredity, the power to overcome, too. Why do you grasp at the shadow an' shy at the form? You keep these hound dogs here, because your father rode to hounds. But he rode for pleasure, in the lap of plenty, that he had made by hard licks. You ride, from habit, in poverty. He rode his hobbies—it was all right. Your hobbies ride you. He fought chickens for an hour's pastime, in the fullness of the red blood of life. You fight them for the blood of the thing—as the bred-out Spaniards fight bulls. He took his cocktails as a gentleman—you as a drunkard."

The old man was excited, indignant, fearless.

Conway looked at him in wonder akin to fear. Even as the idolaters of old looked at Jeremiah and Isaiah.

"Why—why is it"—went on the old man earnestly, rising and shaking his finger ominously—"that two generations of cocktails will breed cock-fighters, and two generations of whiskey will breed a scrub? Do you know where you'll end? In bein' a scrub? No, no—you will be dead an' the worms will have et you—but"—he pointed to the house—"you are fixin' to make scrubs of them—they will breed back.

"Go back to the plough—quit this whiskey and be the man your people was. If you do not," he said rising to go—"God will crush you—not kill you, but mangle you in the killin'."

"He has done that already," said Conway bitterly. "He has turned the back of His hand on me."

"Not yet"—said the Bishop—"but it will fall and fall there." He pointed to Helen, whose queenly head could be seen in the old parlor as she trummed out a sad love song.

Conway blanched and his hand shook. He felt a nameless fear—never felt before. He looked around, but the old man was gone. Afterwards, as he remembered that afternoon, he wondered if, grown as the old man had in faith, God had not also endowed him with the gift of prophecy.



CHAPTER XVI

HELEN'S DESPAIR

An hour afterward, the old nurse found Helen at the piano, her head bowed low over the old yellow keys. "It's gittin' t'wards dinner time, chile," she said tenderly, "an' time I was dressin' my queen gal for dinner an sendin' her out to get roses in her cheeks."

"Oh, Mammy, don't—don't dress me that way any more. I am—I am to be—after this—just a mill girl, you know?"

There was a sob and her head sank lower over the piano.

"You may be for a while, but you'll always be a Conway"—and the old woman struck an attitude with her arms akimbo and stood looking at the portraits which hung on the parlor wall.

"That—that—makes it worse, Mammy." She wiped away her tears and stood up, and her eyes took on a look Aunt Maria had not seen since the old Governor had died. She thought of ghosts and grew nervous before it.

"If my father sends me to work in that place—if he does—" she cried with flaming eyes—"I shall feel that I am disgraced. I cannot hold my head up again. Then you need not be surprised at anything I do."

"It ain't registered that you're gwine there yet," and Mammy Maria stroked her head. "But if you does—it won't make no difference whar you are nor what you have to do, you'll always be a Conway an' a lady."

An hour afterwards, dressed as only Mammy Maria could dress her, Helen had walked out again to the rock under the wild grape vine.

How sweet and peaceful it was, and yet how changed since but a short time ago she had sat there watching for Harry!

"Harry"—she pulled out the crumpled, tear-stained note from her bosom and read it again. And the reading surprised her. She expected to weep, but instead when she had finished she sat straight up on the mossy rock and from her eyes gleamed again the light before which the political enemies of the old dead Governor had so often quailed.

Nor did it change in intensity, when, at the sound of wheels and the clatter of hoofs, she instinctively dropped down on the moss behind the rock and saw through the grape leaves one of Richard Travis's horses, steaming hot, and stepping,—right up to its limit—a clipping gait down the road.

She had dropped instinctively because she guessed it was Harry. And instinctively, too, she knew the girl with the loud boisterous laugh beside him was Nellie.

The buggy was wheeled so rapidly past that she heard only broken notes of laughter and talk. Then she sat again upon her rock, with the deep flush in her eyes, and said:

"I hate—him—I hate him—and oh—to think—"

She tore his note into fragments, twisted and rolled them into a ball and shot it, as a marble, into the gulch below.

Then, suddenly she remembered, and reaching over she looked into a scarred crevice in the rock. Twice that summer had Clay Westmore left her a quaint love note in this little rock-lined post-office. Quaint indeed, and they made her smile, for they had been queer mixtures of geology and love. But they were honest—and they had made her flush despite the fact that she did not love him.

Still she would read them two or three times and sigh and say: "Poor Clay—" after every reading.

"Surely there will be one this afternoon," she thought as she peeped over.

But there was not, and it surprised her to know how much she was disappointed.

"Even Clay has forgotten me," she said as she arose hastily to go.

A big sob sprang up into her throat and the Conway light of defiance, that had blazed but a few moments before in her eyes, died in the depths of the cloud of tears which poured between it and the open.

A cruel, dangerous mood came over her. It enveloped her soul in its sombre hues and the steel of it struck deep.

She scarcely remembered her dead mother—only her eyes. But when these moods came upon Helen Conway—and her life had been one wherein they had fallen often—the memory of her mother's eyes came to her and stood out in the air before her, and they were sombre and sad, and full, too, of the bitterness of hopes unfulfilled.

All her life she had fought these moods when they came. But now—now she yielded to the subtle charm of them—the wild pleasure of their very sinfulness.

"And why not," she cried to herself when the consciousness of it came over her, and like a morphine fiend carrying the drug to his lips, she knew that she also was pressing there the solace of her misery.

"Why should I not dissipate in the misery of it, since so much of it has fallen upon me at once?

"Mother?—I never knew one—only the eyes of one, and they were the eyes of Sorrow. Father?"—she waved her hand toward the old home—"drunk-wrecked—he would sell me for a quart of whiskey.

"Then I loved—loved an image which is—mud—mud"—she fairly spat it out. "One poor friend I had—I scorned him, and he has forgotten me, too. But I did know that I had social standing—that my name was an honored one until—now."

"Now!"—she gulped it down. "Now I am a common mill girl."

She had been walking rapidly down the road toward the house. So rapidly that she did not know how flushed and beautiful she had become. She was swinging her hat impatiently in her hand, her fine hair half falling and loose behind, shadowing her face as rosy sunset clouds the temple on Mt. Ida. A face of more classic beauty, a skin of more exquisite fairness, flushed with the bloom of youth, Richard Travis had never before seen.

And so, long before she reached him, he reined in his trotters and sat silently watching her come. What a graceful step she had—what a neck and head and hair—half bent over with eyes on the ground, unconscious of the beauty and grace of their own loveliness.

She almost ran into his buggy—she stopped with a little start of surprise, only to look into his clean-cut face, smiling half patronizingly, half humorously, and with a look of command too, and of patronage withal, of half-gallant heart-undoing.

It was the look of the sharp-shinned hawk hovering for an instant, in sheer intellectual abandon and physical exuberance, above the unconscious oriole bent upon its morning bath.

He was smiling down into her eyes and repeating half humorously, half gallantly, and altogether beautifully, she thought, Keats' lines:

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams and health and Quiet breathing...."

Even Helen could not tell how it was done nor why she had consented....

"No—no—you are hot and tired and you shall not walk.... I will give you just a little spin before Mammy Maria calls you to dinner.... Yes, Lizzette and Sadie B. always do their best when a pretty girl is behind them."