"Then you are my own!" said Paul, his face transformed. "God was our witness. Life of my life—for life and death!" Solemnly he took a bridegroom's kiss from her lips.

"How do you know that it is life that parts?"

"Speak so I can understand you!" Moya cried. "Ah, if I might! A man must not have secrets from his wife. Secrets are destruction, don't you think?"

Moya waited in silence.

"Now we come to this bondage!" He let the words fall like a load from his breast. "This is a hideous thing to tell you, but it will cut us apart unless you know it. It compels me to do things." He paused, and they heard a door down the passage open,—the door of his mother's room. A step came forward a few paces. Silence; it retreated, and the door closed again stealthily.

"She has not slept," Paul murmured. "Poor soul, poor soul! Now, in what I am going to say, please listen to the facts, Moya dear. Try not to infer anything from my way of putting things. I shall contradict myself, but the facts do that.

"The—the guide—John, we will call him, had a long fever in the woods. It would come on worse at night, and then—he talked—words, of a shocking intimacy. They say that nothing the mind has come in contact with under strong emotion is ever lost, no matter how long in the past. It will return under similar excitement. This man had kept stored away in his mind, under some such pressure, the words of a woman's message, a woman in great distress. Over and over, as his pulse rose, countless times he would repeat that message. I went out of the hut at night and stood outside in the snow not to hear it, but I knew it as well as he did before we got through. Now, this was what he said, word for word.

"'Do not blame me, my dear husband. I have held out in this place as long as I can. Don't wait for anything. Don't worry about anything. Come back to me with your bare hands. Come!—to your loving Emmy!'

"'Come, come!' he would shout out loud. Then in another voice he would whisper, 'Come back to me with your bare hands!' And he would stare at his hands and his face would grow awful."

Moya drew a long sigh of scared attention.

"Those words were all over the cabin walls. I heard them and saw them everywhere. There was no rest from them. I could have torn the roof down to stop his talking, but the words it was not possible to forget. And where was the horror of it? Was not this what we had asked, for years, to know?"

"You need not explain to me," said Moya, shuddering.

"Yes; but all one's meanest motives were unearthed in a place like that. Would I have felt so with a different man? Some one less uncouth? Was it the man himself, or his"—

"Paul, if anything could make you a snob, it would be your deadly fear of being one!"

"Well, if they had found us then, God knows how that fight would have ended. But I won it—when there was nothing left to fight for. I owned him—in the grave. We owned each other and took a bashful sort of comfort in it, after we had shuffled off the 'Mister' and 'John.' I grew quite fond of him, when we were so near death that his English didn't matter, or his way of eating. I thought him a very remarkable man, you remember, when he was just material for description. He was, he is remarkable. Most remarkable in this, he was not ashamed of his son."

"Do please let that part alone. I want to know what he was doing, hiding away by himself all these years? I believe he is an impostor!"

"We came to that, of course; though somehow I forgave him before he could answer the question. In the long watch beside him I got very close to him. It was not possible to believe him a deserter, a sneak. Can you take my word for his answer? It was given as a death-bed confession and he is living."

"I would take your word for anything except yourself!" Moya did not smile, or think what she was saying.

"That answer cleared him, in my mind, with something over to the credit of blind, stupid heroism. He is not a clever man. But, speaking as one who has teen face to face with the end of things, I can say that I know of no act of his that should prevent his returning to his family—if he had a family—not even his deserting them for twenty years. If, I say!

"When the soldiers found us we were too far gone to realize the issue that was upon us. He was the first to take it in. It was on the march home, at night, he touched me and began speaking low in our corner of the tent. 'As we came in here, so we go out again, and so we stay,' he said. I told him it could not be. To suppress what I had learned would make the whole of life a lie, a coward's lie. That knowledge belonged to my mother. I must render it up to her. To do otherwise would be to treat her like a child and to meddle with the purposes of God. 'No honest man robs another of his secrets,' he said. He was very much excited. She was the only one now to be considered—and what did I know about God's purposes? He refused to take my scruples into consideration, except such as concerned her. But, after a long argument, very painful, weak as we were and whispering in the dark, he yielded this much. If I were bent on digging up the dead, as he called it, it must be done in such a way as to leave her free. Free she was in law, and she must be given a chance to claim her freedom without talk or publicity. Absolute secrecy he demanded of me in the mean time. I begged him to see how unfair it was to her to bring her face to face with such a discovery without one word of preparation, of excuse for him. She would condemn him on the very fact of his being alive. So she would, he said, if she were going to judge him; not if she felt towards him as—as a wife feels to her husband. It was that he wanted to know. It was that or nothing he would have from her. 'Bring me face to face with her alone, and as sudden as you like. If she knows me, I am the man. And if she wants me back, she will know me—and that way I'll come and no other way.' Was not that wonderful? A gentleman could hardly have improved on that. Whatever feeling he might be supposed to have towards her in the matter we could never touch upon. But I think he had his hopes. That decision was hanging over us—and I trembled for her. Day before yesterday, was it, I persuaded her to see the sick guide. She wondered why I was faint as she kissed me good-by. I ought to have prepared her. It was a horrible snare. And yet he meant it all in delicacy, a passionate consideration for her. Poor fool. How could I prepare him! How could he keep pace with the changes in her! After all, it is externals that make us,—habits, clothes. Great God! Things you could not speak of to a naked soul like him. But he would have it 'straight,' he said—and straight he got it. And he is gone; broke away like an animal out of a trap. And I am going to find him, to see at least that he has a roof over his head. God knows, he may not die for years!"

"She has got years before her too."

"She!—What am I saying! We have plunged into those damnable inferences and I haven't given you the facts. Wait. I shall contradict all this in a moment. I thought, she must have done this for her children. She must be given another chance. And I approached the thing on my very knees—not to let her know that I knew, only to hint that I was not unprepared, had guessed—could meet it, and help her to meet the problems it would bring into our lives. Help her! She stood and faced me as if I had insulted her. 'I have been your father's widow for twenty-two years. If that fact is not sacred to you, it is to me. Never dare to speak of this to me again!'"

"Ah," said Moya in a long-drawn sigh, "then she did not"—

"Oh, she did, explicitly! For I went on to speak of it. It was my last chance. I asked her how she—we—could possibly go through with it; how with this knowledge between us we could look each other in the face—and go on living.

"'Put this hallucination out of your mind,' she said. 'That man and I are strangers.'"

"Was that—would you call that a lie?" asked Moya fearfully.

"You can see your answer in her face. I do not say that hers was the first lie. It must always be foolish, I think, to evade the facts of life as we make them for ourselves. He refused to meet his facts, from the noblest motives;—but now I'm tangling you all up again! Rest your head here, darling. This is such a business! It is a pity I cannot tell you his whole story. Half the meaning of all this is lost. But—here is a solemn declaration in writing, signed John Hagar, in which this man we are speaking of says that Adam Bogardus was his partner, who died in the woods and was buried by his hand; that he knew his story, all the scenes and circumstances of his life in many a long talk they had together, as well as he knew his own. In his delirium he must have confused himself with his old partner, and half in dreams, he said, half in the crazy satisfaction of pretending to himself he had a son, he allowed the delusion to go on; saw it work upon me, and half feared it, half encouraged it. Afterwards he was frightened at the thought of meeting my mother, who would know him for an impostor. His seeming scruples were fear of exposure, not consideration for her. This was why he guarded their interview so carefully. 'No harm's been done,' he says, 'if you'll act now like a sensible man. I'll be disappointed in you if you make your mother any trouble about this. You've treated me as square as any man could treat another. Remember, I say so, and think as kindly as you can of a harmless, loony old impostor'—and he signs himself 'John Hagar,'—which shows again how one lie leads to another. We go to find 'John Hagar.'"

"Have you shown your mother this letter? You have not? Paul, you will not rob her of her just defense!"

"I will not heap coals of fire on her head! This letter simply completes his renunciation, and he meant it for her defense. But when a man signs himself 'John Hagar' in the handwriting of my father, it shows that somebody is not telling the truth. I used to pore over the old farm records in my father's hand at Stone Ridge in the old account books stowed away in places where a boy loves to poke and pry. I know it as well as I know yours. Do you suppose she would not know it? When a man writes as few letters as he does, the handwriting does not change." Paul laid the letter upon the coals. "It is the only witness against her, but it loses the case."

"She never could have loved him. I never believed she did!" said Moya.

"She thinks she can live out this deep-down, deliberate—But it will kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him altogether or not at all. There is a hell for meddlers, and the ones who meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest damned, I think."

Moya came and wreathed her arm in his, and they paced the room in silence. At length she said, "If we go to find John Hagar, shall we not be meddling again? A man who respects a woman's freedom must love his own. It is the last thing left him. Don't hunt him down. I believe nothing could hurt him now like seeing you again."

"He shall not see me unless he wants to, but he shall know where I stand on this question of the Impostor. It shall be managed so that even he can see I am protecting her. No, call himself what he will, the tie between him and me is another of those facts."

"But do you love him, Paul?"

"Oh—I cannot forget him! He is—just as he used to be—'poor father out there in the cold.' We must find him and comfort him somehow."

"For our own peace of mind? Forgive me for arguing when everything is so difficult. But he is a man—a brave man who would rather be forever out in the cold than be a burden. Do not rob him of his right to be John Hagar if he wants to, for the sake of those he loves. You do not tell me it was love, but I am sure it was, in some mistaken way, that drove him into exile. Only love as pure as his can be our excuse for dragging him back. He did not want shelter and comfort from her. Only one thing. Have we got that to give him?"

"Well then, I go for my own sake—it is a physical necessity; and I go for hers. She has put it out of her own power to help him. It will ease her a little to know I am trying to reach him in his forlorn disguise."

"But you were not going to tell her?"

"In words, no. But she will understand. There is a strange clairvoyance between us, as if we were accomplices in a crime!"

Moya reflected silently. This search which Paul had set his heart upon would equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy, which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot break the thread.

They kissed each other solemnly like little children on the eve of a long journey full of awed expectancy.

Mrs. Bogardus stood holding her door ajar as Moya passed on her way downstairs. "You are very late," she uttered hoarsely. "Is nothing settled yet?"

"Everything!" Moya hesitated and forced a smile, "everything but where we shall go. We will start—and decide afterwards."

"You go together? That is right. Moya, you have a genius for happiness!"

"I wish I had a genius for making people sleep who lie awake hours in the night thinking about other people!"

"If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep."

"May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?"

"You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not sleep."

Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the icy roses on her wedding dress.

Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals. She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.

"Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the last hour."

"If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not keep him up talking half the night," the colonel growled softly. "Do you see what time it is?"

Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had passed. "It will be very soon," she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked her own. "You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay—with father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!"



XVII

THE HIDDEN TRAIL

Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: "We are doing the best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood."

They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search. They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines. Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would hold themselves gratefully responsible.

At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his mother—a woman's letter, every page shining with happiness and as free from apparent forethought as a running brook.

They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows from his lonely hearth.

Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.

It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the office, the carriage at the door, when a letter—pigeon-holed and forgotten since received some three weeks before—was put into Paul's hand.

I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,

J. STRATTON.

It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners, emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of enterprise.

Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case of hard luck.

"That's a good axe ye have there," pointing suggestively to a new one sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. "Ye better l'ave that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy new axes ye can't be broke entirely." Or: "Slip the halter on that calf behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it droppin' on the road." Or, he would try sarcasm: "Well, we'll be shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry and see if they'll trust ye there." Or: "Why wasn't ye workin' on the Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!"

On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here and there showed where earlier appetites had had their destined hour and gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every brand dear to the cowboy, including the "surrup-jug" adhering to its saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist male thumb.

"Catchee plenty," the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. "Bymbye plenty come. Pretty col' now."

"You'll be getting a large hump on yourself, Han, me boy. 'T is a cash crowd we have here—and a lady, by me sowl!" Thus Jimmy exhorted his household. Times were looking up. They would be a summer resort before the Ditch went through; it should be mentioned in the Ditch company's prospectus. Jimmy had put his savings into land-office fees and had a hopeful interest in the Ditch.

A spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Without a word from "the boss" Han had found time to shave and powder and polish his brown forehead and put on his whitest raiment over his baggiest trousers. There was loud panic among the fowls in the corral. The cat had disappeared; the jealous dogs hung about the doors and were pushed out of the way by friends of other days.

Seated by the office fire, Paul was conferring with Jimmy, who was happy with a fresh pipe and a long story to tell to a patient and paying listener. He rubbed the red curls back from his shining forehead, took the pipe from his teeth, and guided a puff of smoke away from his auditor.

"I seen him settin' over there on his blankets,"—he pointed with his pipe to the opposite shore plainly visible through the office windows,—"but he niver hailed me, so I knowed he was broke. Some, whin they're broke, they holler all the louder. Ye would think they had an appointment wit' the Governor and he sint his car'iage to meet them. But he was as humble, he was, as a yaller dog.—Out! Git out from here—the pack of yez! Han, shut the dure an' drive thim bloody curs off the piazzy. They're trackin' up the whole place.—As I was sayin', sor, there he stayed hunched up in the wind, waitin' on the chanst of a team comin', and I seen he was an ould daddy. I stud the sight of him as long as I cud, me comin' and goin'. He fair wore me out. So I tuk the boat over for 'im. One of his arrums he couldn't lift from the shoulder, and I give him a h'ist wit' his bundle. Faith, it was light! 'Twinty years a-getherin',' he cackles, slappin' it. 'Ye've had harrud luck,' I says. ''T is not much of a sheaf ye are packin' home.' 'That's as ye look at it,' he says.

"I axed him what way was he goin'. He was thinking to get a lift as far as Oriana, if the stages was runnin' on that road. 'Then ye 'll have to bide here till morning,' I says, 'for ye must have met the stage goin' the other way.' 'I met nothing,' says he; 'I come be way of the bluffs,'—which is a strange way for one man travelin' afoot.

"The grub was on the table, and I says, 'Sit by and fill yourself up.' His cheeks was fallin' in wit' the hunger. With that his poor ould eye begun to water. 'Twas one weak eye he had that was weepin' all the time. 'I've got out of the habit of reg'lar aitin',' he says. 'It don't take much to kape me goin'.' 'Niver desave yourself, sor! 'T is betther feed three hungry men than wan "no occasion."' His appetite it grew on him wit' every mouthful. There was a boundless emptiness to him. He lay there on the bench and slep' the rest of the evening, and I left him there wit' a big fire at night. And the next day at noon we h'isted him up beside of Joe Stratton. A rip-snorter of a wind was blowin' off the Silver City peaks. His face was drawed like a winter apple, but he wint off happy. I think he was warm inside of himself."

"Did you ask him his name?"

"Sure. Why not? John Treagar he called himself."

"Treagar? Hagar, you mean!"

"It was Treagar he said."

"John Hagar is the man I am looking for."

"Treagar—Hagar? 'T is comin' pretty close to it."

"About what height and build was he?"

"He was not to say a tall man; and he wasn't so turrible short neither. His back was as round as a Bible. A kind of pepper and saltish beard he had, and his hair was blacker than his beard but white in streaks."

"A dark man, was he?"

"He would be a dark man if he was younger."

"The man I want is blue-eyed."

"His eyes was blue—a kind of washed-out gray that maybe was blue wanst; and one of them always weepin' wit' the cold."

"And light brown hair mixed with gray, like sand and ashes—mostly ashes; and a thin straggling beard, thinner on the cheeks? A high head and a tall stooping figure—six feet at least; hands with large joints and a habit of picking at them when"—

"Ye are goin' too fast for me now, sor. He was not that description of a man, nayther the height nor the hair of him. Sure't is a pity for ye comin' this far, and him not the man at all. Faith, I wish I was the man meself! I wonder at Joe Stratton anyhow! He's a very hasty man, is Joe. He jumps in wit' both feet, so he does. I could have told ye that."

* * * * *

Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on with an embarrassed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of life's and nature's ironies.



XVIII

THE STAR IN THE EAST

So the search paused, while the searchers rested and revised their plans. Spring opened in the valley as if for them alone. There were mornings "proud and sweet," when the humblest imagination could have pictured Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along the sky,—wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers spread so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of Iris fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into its muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed their spring garments in its tide.

Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings; wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of their throaty call was like a beating in the air,—the pulse of spring. They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley passed before them in forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam: the handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at dinner opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy, dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers with the appetites of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and the dust of three counties on his garments.

The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's cri du coeur. One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and yet the house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search were mapped out with Jimmy's indifferent assistance. For good reasons of his own, Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain that his maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to stage routes. "See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five year ago, on account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't make it wid'out ye took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and when ye come to it, it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails, if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the grass-seeds into the next county."

When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself—less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the pure joy of living.

The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback rides and took morning walks instead, following the shore-paths lazily to shaded coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two to make. Or, they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable vast horizon, and thought perhaps of their errand with that pang of self-reproach which, when shared, becomes a subtler form of self-indulgence.

But at night, all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky and blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening—the dawn of those white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke again. All that was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling voice in the coyote's hunting-call.

In a hollow concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable. Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the alkali crust into thin-lipped wavelets. But once upon the floor itself the resemblance to water vanished. The warpings and Grumblings took the shape of earth as made by water and baked by fire. Moya compared it to a bit of the dead moon fallen to show us what we are coming to. They paced it soft-footed in tennis shoes lest they should crumble its talc-like whiteness. But they read no horoscopes, for they were shy of the future in speaking to each other,—and they made no plans.

One evening Moya had said to Paul: "I can understand your mother so much better now that I am a wife. I think most women have a tendency towards the state of being unmarried. And if one had—children, it would increase upon one very fast. A widow and a mother—for twenty years. How could she be a wife again?"

Paul made no reply to this speech which long continued to haunt him; especially as Moya wrote more frequently to his mother and did not offer to show him her letters. In their evening walks she seemed distrait, and during the day more restless.

One night of their nightly pacings she stopped and stood long, her head thrown back, her eyes fixed upon the dizzy star-deeps. Paul waited a step behind her, touching her shoulders with his hands. Suddenly she reeled and sank backwards into his arms. He held her, watching her lovely face grow whiter; her eyelids closed. She breathed slowly, leaning her whole weight upon him.

Coming to herself, she smiled and said it was nothing. She had been that way before. "But—we must go home. We must have a home—somewhere. I want to see your mother. Paul, be good to her—forgive her—for my sake!"



XIX

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS

Aunt Polly Lewis was disappointed in the latest of her beneficiaries. It was nine years since her husband had locked up his savings in the Mud Springs ranch, a neglected little health-plant at the mouth of the Bruneau. If you were troubled with rheumatism, or a crick in the back, or your "pancrees" didn't act or your blood was "out o' fix, why, you'd better go up to Looanders' for a spell and soak yourself in that blue mud and let aunt Polly diet ye and dost ye with yerb tea."

When Leander courted aunt Polly in the interests of his sanitarium, she was reputed the best nurse in Ada County. The widow—by desertion—of a notorious quack doctor of those parts: it was an open question whether his medicine had killed or her nursing had cured the greater number of confiding sick folk. Leander drove fifty miles to catechise this notable woman, and finding her sound on the theory of packs hot and cold, and skilled in the practice of rubbing,—and having made the incidental discovery that she was a person not without magnetism,—he decided on the spot to add her to the other attractions of Mud Springs ranch; and she drove home with him next day, her trunk in the back of his wagon.

The place was no sinecure. Bricks without straw were a child's pastime to the cures aunt Polly and the Springs effected without a pretense to the comforts of life in health, to say nothing of sickness. Modern conveniences are costly, and how are you to get the facilities for "pay patients" when you have no patients that pay! Prosperity had overlooked the Bruneau, or had made false starts there, through detrimental schemes that gave the valley a bad name with investors. The railroad was still fifty miles away, and the invalid public would not seek life itself, in these days of luxurious travel, at the cost of a twelve hours' stage-ride. However, as long as the couple had a roof over their heads and the Springs continued to plop and vomit their strange, chameleon-colored slime, Leander would continue to bring home the sick and the suffering for Polly and the Springs to practice on. Health became his hobby, and in time, with isolation thrown in, it began to invade his common sense. He tried in succession all the diet fads of the day and wound up a convert to the "Ralston" school of eating. Aunt Polly had clung a little longer to the flesh-pots, but the charms of a system that abolished half the labor of cooking prevailed with her at last, and in the end she kept a sharper eye upon Leander at mealtime than ever he had upon her.

The ignorant gorgings of their neighbors were a head-shaking and a warning to them, and more than once Leander's person was in jeopardy through his zealous but unappreciated concern for the brother who eats in darkness.

He had started out one winter morning from Bisuka, a virtuous man. His team had breakfasted, but not he. A Ralstonite does not load up his stomach at dawn after the manner of cattle, and such pious substitutes for a cup of coffee as are permitted the faithful cannot always be had for a price. At Indian Creek he hauled up to water his team, and to make for himself a cinnamon-colored decoction by boiling in hot water a preparation of parched grains which he carried with him. This he accomplished in an angle of the old corral fence out of the wind. There is no comfort nor even virtue in eating cold dust with one's sandwiches. Leander sunk his great white tushes through the thick slices of whole-wheat bread and tasted the paste of peanut meal with which they were spread. He ate standing and slapped his leg to warm his driving hand.

A flutter of something colored, as a garment, caught his eye, directing it to the shape of a man, rolled in an old blue blanket, lying motionless in a corner of the tumble-down wall. "Drunk, drunk as a hog!" pronounced Leander. For no man in command of himself would lie down to sleep in such a place. As if to refute this accusation, the wind turned a corner of the blanket quietly off a white face with closed eyelids,—an old, worn, gentle face, appealing in its homeliness, though stamped now with the dignity of death. Leander knelt and handled the body tenderly. It was long before he satisfied himself that life was still there. Another case for Polly and the Springs. A man worth saving, if Leander knew a man; one of the trustful, trustworthy sort. His heart went out to him on the instant as to a friend from home.

It was closing in for dusk when he reached the Ferry. Jimmy was away, and Han, in high dudgeon, brought the boat over in answer to Leander's hail. He had grouse to dress for supper, inconsiderately flung in upon him at the last moment by the stage, four hours late.

"Huh! Why you no come one hour ago? All time 'Hullo, hullo'! Je' Cli'! me no dam felly-man—me dam cook! Too much man say 'Hullo'!"

The prospect was not good for help at the Ferry inn, so, putting his trust in Polly and the Springs, Leander pushed on up the valley.

When Aunt Polly's patients were of the right sort, they stayed on after their recovery and helped Leander with the ranch work. But for the most part they "hit the trail" again as soon as their ills were healed, not forgetting to advertise the Springs to other patients of their own class. The only limit to this unenviable popularity was the size of the house. Leander saw no present advantage in building.

But in case they ever did build—and the time was surely coming!—here was the very person they had been looking for. Cast your bread upon the waters. The winter's bread and care and shelter so ungrudgingly bestowed had returned to them many-fold in the comfortable sense of dependence and unity they felt in this last beneficiary, the old man of Indian Creek whom they called "Uncle John."

"The kindest old creetur' ever lived! Some forgitful, but everybody's liable to forgit. Only tell him one thing at once, and don't confuse him, and he'll git through an amazin' sight of chores in a day."

"Just the very one we'll want to wait on the men patients," Aunt Polly chimed in. "He can carry up meals and keep the bathrooms clean, and wash out the towels, and he's the best hand with poultry. He takes such good care of the old hens they're re'lly ashamed not to lay!"

It was spring again; old hopes were putting forth new leaves. Leander had heard of a capitalist in the valley; a young one, too, more prone to enthusiasm if shown the right thing.

"I'm going down to Jimmy's to fetch them up here!" Leander announced.

"Are there two of them?"

"He has brought his wife out with him. They are a young couple. He's the only son of a rich widow in New York, and Jimmy says they've got money to burn. Jimmy don't take much stock in this 'ere 'wounded guide' story—thinks it's more or less of a blind. He's feeling around for a good investment—desert land or mining claims. Jimmy thinks he represents big interests back East."

Aunt Polly considered, and the corners of her mouth moistened as she thought of the dinner she would snatch from the jaws of the system on the day these young strangers should visit the ranch.

"By Gum!" Leander shouted. "I wonder if Uncle John wouldn't know something about the party they're advertising for. That'd be the way to find out if they're really on the scent. I'll take him down with me—that's what I'll do—and let him have a talk with the young man himself. It'll make a good opening. Are you listening, Polly?" She was not. "I wish you'd git him to fix himself up a little. Layout one o' my clean shirts for him, and I'll take him down with me day after to-morrow."

"I'll have a fresh churning to-morrow," Aunt Polly mused. "You can take a little pat of it with you. I won't put no salt in it, and I'll send along a glass or two of my wild strawberry jam. It takes an awful time to pick the berries, but I guess it'll be appreciated after the table Jimmy sets. I don't believe Jimmy'll be offended?"

"Bogardus is their name," continued Leander. "Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus, from New York. Jimmy's got it down in his hotel book and he's showing it to everybody. Jimmy's reel childish about it. I tell him one swallow don't make a summer."

Uncle John had come into the room and sat listening, while a yellow pallor crept over his forehead and cheeks. He moved to get up once, and then sat down again weakly.

"What's the matter, Uncle?" Aunt Polly eyed him sharply. "You been out there chopping wood too long in this hot sun. What did I tell you?"

She cleared the decks for action. Paler and paler the old man grew. He was not able to withstand her vigorous sympathies. She had him tucked up on the calico lounge and his shoes off and a hot iron at his feet; but while she was hurrying up the kettle to make him a drink of something hot, he rose and slipped up the outside stairs to his bedroom in the attic. There he seated himself on the side of his neat bed which he always made himself camp fashion,—the blankets folded lengthwise with just room for one quiet sleeper to crawl inside; and there he sat, opening and clinching his hands, a deep perplexity upon his features.

Aunt Polly called to him and began to read the riot act, but Leander said: "Let him be! He gits tired o' being fussed over. You're at him about something or other the whole blessed time."

"Well, I have to! My gracious! He'd forgit to come in to his meals if I didn't keep him on my mind."

"It just strikes me—what am I going to call him when I introduce him to those folks? Did he ever tell you what his last name is?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," Aunt Polly lowered her voice, "if he couldn't remember it himself! I've heard of such cases. Whenever I try to draw him out to talk about himself and what happened to him before you found him, it breaks him all up; seemingly gives him a back-set every time. He sort of slinks into himself in that queer, lost way—just like he was when he first come to."

"He's had a powerful jar to his constitution, and his mind is taking a rest." Leander was fond of a diagnosis. "There wasn't enough life left in him to keep his faculties and his bod'ly organs all a-going at once. The upper story's to let."

"I wish you'd go upstairs, and see what he is doing up there."

"Aw, no! Let him be. He likes to go off by himself and do his thinking. I notice it rattles him to be talked to much. He sets out there on the choppin'-block, looking at the bluffs—ever notice? He looks and don't see nothin', and his lips keep moving like he was learning a spellin'-lesson. If I speak to him sharp, he hauls himself together and smiles uneasy, but he don't know what I said. I tell you he's waking up; coming to his memories, and trying to sort 'em out."

"That's just what I say," Aunt Polly retorted, "but he's got to eat his meals. He can't live on memories."

Uncle John was restless that evening, and appeared to be excited. He waited upon Aunt Polly after supper with a feverish eagerness to be of use. When all was in order for bedtime, and Leander rose to wind the clock, he spoke. It was getting about time to roll up his blankets and pull out, he said. Leander felt for the ledge where the clock-key belonged, and made no answer.

"I was saying—I guess it's about time for me to be moving on. The grass is starting"—

"Are you cal'latin' to live on grass?" Leander drawled with cutting irony. "Gettin' tired of the old woman's cooking? Well, she ain't much of a cook!"

Uncle John remained silent, working at his hands. His mouth, trembled under his thin straggling beard. "I never was better treated in my life, and you know it. It ain't handsome of you, Lewis, to talk that way!"

"He don't mean nothing, Uncle John! What makes you so foolish, Looander! He just wants you to know there's no begrudgers around here. You're welcome, and more than welcome, to settle down and camp right along with us."

"Winter and summer!" Leander put in, "if you're satisfied. There's nobody in a hurry to see the last of ye."

Uncle John's mild but determined resistance was a keen disappointment to his friends. Leander thought himself offended. "What fly's stung you, anyhow! Heard from any of your folks lately?"

The old man smiled.

"Got any money salted down that needs turning?"

"Looander! Quit teasing of him!"

"Let him have his fun, ma'am. It's all he's likely to get out of me. I have got a little money," he pursued. "'T would be an insult to name it in the same breath with what you've done for me. I'd like to leave it here, though. You could pass it on. You'll have chances enough. 'T ain't likely I'll be the last one you'll take in and do for, and never git nothing out of it in return."

There was a mild sensation, as the speaker, fumbling in his loose trousers, appeared to be seeking for that money. Aunt Polly's eyes flamed indignation behind her tears. She was a foolish, warm-hearted creature, and her eyes watered on the least excuse.

"Looander, you shouldn't have taunted him," she admonished her husband, who felt he had been a little rough.

"Look here, Uncle John, d'you ever know anybody who wasn't by way of needing help some time in their lives? We don't ask any one who comes here"—

"He didn't come!" Aunt Polly corrected.

"Well, who was brought, then! We don't ask for their character, nor their private history, nor their bank account. I don't know but you're the first one for years I've ever took a real personal shine to, and we've h'isted a good many up them stairs that wasn't able to walk much further. I'd like you to stay as a favor to us, dang it!"

Leander delivered this invitation as if it were a threat. His straight-cut mustache stiffened and projected itself by the pressure of his big lips; his dark red throat showed as many obstinate creases as an old snapping-turtle's.

"I'm much obliged to you both. I want you to remember that. We—I—I'll talk with ye in the morning."

"That means he's going all the same," said Leander, after Uncle John had closed the outside door.

Sure enough, next morning he had made up his little pack, oiled his boots, and by breakfast-time was ready for the road. They argued the point long and fiercely with him whether he should set out on foot or wait a day and ride with Leander to the Ferry. It was not supposed he could be thinking of any other road. By to-morrow, if he would but wait, Aunt Polly would have comfortably outfitted him after the custom of the house; given his clothes a final "going over" to see everything taut for the journey, shoved a week's rations into a corn-sack, choosing such condensed forms of nourishment as the system allowed—nay, straining a point and smuggling in a nefarious pound or two of real miner's coffee.

Aunt Polly's distress so weighed with her patient that he consented to remain overnight and ride with Leander as far as the dam across the Bruneau, at its junction with the Snake. There he would cross and take the trail down the river, cutting off several miles of the road to the Ferry. As for going on to see Jimmy or Jimmy's "folks," the nervous resistance which this plan excited warned the good couple not to press the old man too far, or he might give them the slip altogether.

A strangeness in his manner which this last discussion had brought out, lay heavy on aunt Polly's mind all day after the departure of the team for the Ferry. She watched the two men drive off in silence, Leander's bush beard reddening in the sun, his big body filling more than his half of the seat.

"Well, by Gum! If he ain't the blamedest, most per-sistent old fool!" he complained to his wife that night. Their first words were of the old man, already missed like one of the family from the humble place he had made for himself. Leander was still irritable over his loss. "I set him down with his grub and blankets, and I watched him footing it acrost the dam. He done it real handsome, steady on his pins. Then he set down and waited, kind o' dreaming, like he used to, settin' on the choppin'-block. I hailed him. 'What's the matter?' I says. 'Left anything?' No: every time I hailed he took off his hat and waved to me real pleasant. Nothing the matter. There he set. Well, thinks I, I can't stay here all day watching ye take root. So I drove on a piece. And, by Gum! when I looked back going around the bend, there he went a-pikin' off up the bluffs—just a-humping himself for all he was worth. I wouldn't like to think he was cunning, but it looked that way for sure,—turning me off the scent and then taking to the bluffs like he was sent for! Where in thunder is he making for? He knows just as well as I do—you have heard me tell him a dozen times—the stages were hauled off that Wood River road five year and more ago. He won't git nowhere! And he won't meet up with a team in a week's walking."

"His food will last him a week if he's careful; he's no great eater. I ain't afraid his feet will get lost; he's to home out of doors almost anywhere;—it's his head I'm afraid of. He's got some sort of a skew on him. I used to notice if he went out for a little walk anywhere, he'd always slope for the East."



XX

A STATION IN THE DESERT

That forsworn identity which Adam Bogardus had submitted to be clothed in as a burial garment was now become a thing for the living to flee from. He had seen a woman in full health whiten and cower before it;—she who stood beside his bed and looked at him with dreadful eyes, eyes of his girl-wife growing old in the likeness of her father. Hard, reluctant eyes forced to own the truth which the ashen lips denied. Are we responsible for our silences? He had not spoken to her. Nay, the living must speak first, or the ghostly dead depart unquestioned. He asked only that he might forget her and be himself forgotten. If it were that woman's right to call herself Emily Bogardus, then was there no Adam her husband. Better the old disguise which left him free to work out his own sentence and pay his forfeit to the law. He had never desired that one breath of it should be commuted, or wished to accept an enslaving pardon from those for whose sake he had put himself out of the way. If he could have taken his own comparative spiritual measurement, he might have smiled at the humor of that forgiveness promised him in the name of the Highest by his son.

For many peaceful years solitude had been the habit of his soul. Gently as he bore with human obligations, he escaped from them with a sense of relief which shamed him somewhat when he thought of the good friends to whom he owed this very blessed power to flee. It was quite as Leander had surmised. He could not command his faculties—memory especially—when a noise of many words and questions bruised his brain.

The stillness of the desert closed about him with delicious healing. He was a world-weary child returned to the womb of Nature. His old camp-craft came back; his eye for distance, his sense of the trail, his little pet economies with food and fire. There was no one to tell him what to eat and when to eat it. He was invisible to men. Each day's march built up his muscle, and every night's deep sleep under the great high stars steadied his nerves and tightened his resolve.

He thought of the young man—his son—with a mixture of pain and tenderness. But Paul was not the baby-boy he had put out of his arms with a father's smile at One Man station. Paul was himself a man now; he had coerced him at the last, neither did he understand.

The blind instinct of flight began after a while to shape its own direction. It was no new leaning with the packer. As many times as he had crossed this trail he never had failed to experience the same pull. He resisted no longer. He gave way to strange fancies and made them his guides.

At some time during his flight from the hospital, in one of those blanks that overtook him, he knew not how, he had met with a great loss. The words had slipped from his memory—of that message which had kept him in fancied touch with his wife all these many deluding years. Without them he was like a drunkard deprived of his habitual stimulant. The craving to connect and hold them—for they came to him sometimes in tantalizing freaks of memory, and slipped away again like beads rolling off a broken thread—was almost the only form of mental suffering he was now conscious of. What had become of the message itself? Had they left it exposed to every heartless desecration in that abandoned spot?—a scrap of paper driven like a bit of tumble-weed before the wind, snatched at by spikes of sage, trampled into the mire of cattle, nuzzled by wild beasts? Or, had they put it away with that other beast where he lay with the scoff on his dead face? Out of dreams and visions of the night that place of the parting ways called to him, and the time was now come when he must go.

He approached it by one of those desert trails that circle for miles on the track of water and pounce as a bird drops upon its prey into the trampled hollow at One Man station—a place for the gathering of hoofs in the midst of the plain.

He could trace what might have been the foundation of a house, a few blackened stones, a hearthstone showing where a chimney perhaps had stood, but these evidences of habitation would never have been marked except by one who knew where to look. He searched the ground over for signs of the tragedy that bound him to that spot—a smiling desolation, a sunny nothingness. The effect of this careless obliteration was quieting. Nature had played here once with two men and a woman. One of the toy men was lost, the other broken. She had forgotten where she put the broken one. There were mounds which looked like graves, but the seeker knew that artificial mounds in a place like this soon sink into hollows; and there were hollows like open graves, filled with unsightly human rubbish, washed in by the yearly rains.

He spent three days in the hollow, doing nothing, steeped in sunshine, lying down to rest broad awake in the tender twilight, making his peace with this place of bitter memory before bidding it good-by. His thoughts turned eastward as the planets rose. Time he was working back towards home. He would hardly get there if he started now, before his day was done. He saw his mother's grave beside his father's, in the southeast corner of the burying-ground, where the trees were thin. All who drove in through the big gate of funerals could see the tall white shafts of the Beviers and Brodericks and Van Eltens, but only those who came on foot could approach his people in the gravelly side-hill plots. "I'd like to be put there alongside the old folks in that warm south corner." He could see their names on the plain gray slate stones, rain-stained and green with moss.

On the third May evening of his stay the horizon became a dust-cloud, the setting sun a ball of fire. Loomed the figure of a rider topping the heaving backs of his herd. All together they came lumbering down the slopes, all heading fiercely for the water. The rider plunged down a side-draw out of the main cloud. Clanking bells, shuffling hoofs, the "Whoop-ee-youp!" came fainter up the gulch. The cowboy was not pleased as he dashed by to see an earlier camp-fire smoking in the hollow. But he was less displeased, being half French, than if he had been pure-bred American.

The old man, squatting by his cooking-fire, gave him a civil nod, and he responded with a flourish of his quirt. The reek of sage smoke, the smell of dust and cattle rose rank on the cooling air. It was good to Boniface, son of the desert; it meant supper and bed, or supper and talk, for "Bonny" Maupin ("Bonny Moppin," it went in the vernacular) would talk every other man to sleep, full or empty, with songs thrown in. To-night, however, he must talk on an empty stomach, for his chuck wagon was not in sight.

"W'ich way you travelin'?" he began, lighting up after a long pull at his flask. The old man had declined, though he looked as if he needed a drink.

"East about," was the answer.

"Goin' far?"

"Well; summer's before us. I cal'late to keep moving till snow falls."

"Shucks! You ain' pressed for time. Maybe you got some friend back there. Goin' back to git married?" He winked genially to point the jest and the old man smiled indulgently.

"Won't you set up and take a bite with me? You don't look to have much of a show for supper along."

"Thanks, very much! I had bully breakfast at Rock Spring middlin' late this morning. They butcherin' at that place. Five fat hog. My chuck wagon he stay behin' for chunk of fresh pig. I won' spoil my appetide for that tenderloin. Hol' on yourself an' take supper wis me. No?—That fellah be 'long 'bout Chris'mas if he don' git los'! He always behin', pig or no pig!"

Bonny strolled away collecting fire-wood. Presently he called back, pointing dramatically with his small-toed boot. "Who's been coyotin' round here?" The hard ground was freshly disturbed in spots as by the paws of some small inquisitive animal. There was no answer.

"What you say? Whose surface diggin's is these? I never know anybody do some mining here."

"That was me"—Bonny backed a little nearer to catch the old man's words. "I was looking round here for something I lost."

"What luck you have? You fin' him?"

"Well, now, doos it reely matter to you, sonny?"

"Pardner, it don' matter to me a d—n, if you say so! I was jus' askin' myself what a man would look for if he los' it here. Since I strike this 'ell of a place the very groun' been chewed up and spit out reg'lar, one hundred times a year. 'T'is a gris' mill!"

"I didn't gretly expect to find what I was lookin' for. I was just foolin' around to satisfy myself."

"That satisfy me!" said Bonny pleasantly; and yet he was a trifle discomfited. He strolled away again and began to sing with a boyish show of indifference to having been called "sonny."

"Oh, Sally is the gal for me! Oh, Sally's the gal for me! On moonlight night when the star is bright— Oh"—

"Halloa! This some more your work, oncle? You ain' got no chicken wing for arm if you lif' this.—Ah, be dam! I see what you lif' him with. All same stove-lid." Talking and swearing to himself cheerfully, Bonny applied the end of a broken whiffletree to the blunt lip of the old hearthstone which marked the stage-house chimney. He had tried a step-dance on it and found it hollow. More fresh digging, and marks upon the stone where some prying tool had taken hold and slipped, showed he was not the first who had been curious.

"There you go, over on you' back, like snap' turtle; I see where you lay there before. What the dev'! I say!" Bonny, much excited with his find, extracted a rusty tin tobacco-box from the hole, pried open the spring lid and drew forth its contents: a discolored canvas bag bulging with coin and whipped around the neck with a leather whang. The canvas was rotten; Bonny supported its contents tenderly as he brought it over to the old man.

"Oncle, I ask you' pardon for tappin' that safe. Pretty good lil' nest-egg, eh? But now you got to find her some other place."

"That don't belong to me," said the old man indifferently.

"Aw—don't be bashful! I onderstan' now what you los'. You dig here—there—migs up the scent. I just happen to step on that stone—ring him, so, with my boot-heel!"

"That ain't my pile," the other persisted. "I started to build a fire on that stone two nights ago. It rung hollow like you say. I looked and found what you found."

—"And put her back! My soul to God! An' you here all by you'self!"

"Why not? The stuff ain't mine."

"Who is she? How long since anybody live here?"

"I don't know,—good while, I guess."

"Well, sar! Look here! I open that bag. I count two hondre' thirteen dolla'—make it twelve for luck, an' call it you' divvee! You strike her first. What you say: we go snac'?"

"I haven't got any use for that money. You needn't talk to me about it."

"Got no h'use!—are you a reech man? Got you' private car waitin' for you out in d' sagebrush? Sol' a mine lately?"

"I don't know why it strikes you so funny. It's no concern of mine if a man puts his money in the ground and goes off and leaves it."

"Goes off and die! There was one man live here by himself—he die, they say, 'with his boots on.' He, I think, mus' be that man belong to this money. What an old stiff want with two hondre' thirteen dolla'? That money goin' into a live man's clothes." Bonny slapped his chappereros, and the dust flew.

"I've no objection to its going into your clothes," said the old man.

"You thing I ain' particular, me? Well, eef the party underground was my frien', and I knew his fam'ly, and was sure the money was belong to him—I'd do differend—perhaps. Mais,—it is going—going—gone! You won' go snac'?"

The old man smiled and looked steadily away.

"Blas' me to h—l! but you aire the firs' man ever I strike that jib at the sight of col' coin. She don' frighten me!"

Bonny always swore when he felt embarrassed.

"Well, sar! Look here! You fin' you'self so blame indifferend—s'pose you so indifferend not to say nothing 'bout this, when my swamper fellah git in. I don' wish to go snac' wis him. I don' feel oblige'. See?"

"What you want to pester me about this money for!" The old man was weary. "I didn't come here, lookin' for money, and I don't expect to take none away with me. So I'll say good-night to ye."

"Hol' on, hol' on! Don' git mad. What time you goin' off in the morning?"

"Before you do, I shouldn't wonder."

"But hol'! One fine idea—blazin' good idea—just hit me now in the head! Wan' to come on to Chicago wis me? I drop this fellah at Felton. He take the team back, and I get some one to help me on the treep. Why not you? Ever tek' care of stock?"

"Some consid'able years ago I used to look after stock. Guess I'd know an ox from a heifer."

"Ever handle 'em on cattle-car?"

"Never."

"Well, all there is, you feed 'em, and water 'em, and keep 'em on their feets. If one fall down, all the others they have too much play. They rock"—Bonny exhibited—"and fall over and pile up in heap. I like to do one turn for you. We goin' the same way—you bring me the good luck, like a bird in the han'. This is my clean-up, you understand. You bring me the beautiful luck. You turn me up right bower first slap. Now it's goin' be my deal. I like to do by you!"

The packer turned over and looked up at the cool sky, pricked through with early stars. He was silent a long time. His pale old face was like a fine bit of carving in the dusk.

"What you think?" asked Moppin, almost tenderly. "I thing you better come wis me. You too hold a man to go like so—alone."

"I'll have to think about it first;—let you know in the morning."



XXI

INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE

A Rush of wheels and a spatter of hoofs coming up the drive sent Mrs. Dunlop to the sitting-room window. She tried to see out through streaming showers that darkened the panes.

"Isn't that Mrs. Bogardus? Why, it is! Put on your shoes, Chauncey, quick! Help her in 'n' take her horse to the shed. Take an umbrella with you." Chauncey the younger, meekly drying his shoes by the kitchen fire, put them on, not stopping to lace them, and slumped down the porch steps, pursued by his mother's orders. She watched him a moment struggling with a cranky umbrella, and then turned her attention to herself and the room.

Mrs. Bogardus made her calls in the morning, and always plainly on business. She had not seen the inside of Cerissa's parlor for ten years. This was a grievance which Cerissa referred to spasmodically, being seized with it when she was otherwise low in her mind.

"My sakes! Can't I remember my mother telling how her mother used to drive over and spend the afternoon, and bring her sewing and the baby—whichever one was the baby. They called each other Chrissy and Angevine, and now she don't even speak of her own children to us by their first names. It's 'Mrs. Bowen' and 'Mr. Paul;' just as if she was talking to her servants."

"What's that to us? We've got a good home here for as long as we want to stay. She's easy to work for, if you do what she says."

Chauncey respected Mrs. Bogardus's judgment and her straightforward business habits. Other matters he left alone. But Cerissa was ambitious and emotional, and she stayed indoors, doing little things and thinking small thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners. There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and finish of her clothes—mysterious in their simplicity, and not to be imitated cheaply.

When the two met, Cerissa was immediately reduced to a state of flimsy apology which she made up for by being particularly hot and self-assertive in speaking of the lady afterward.

"There is the parlor, in perfect order," she fretted, as she stood waiting to open the front door; "but of course she wouldn't let me take her in there—that would be too much like visiting."

The next moment she had corrected her facial expression, and was offering smiling condolences to Mrs. Bogardus on the state of her attire.

"It is only my jacket. You might put that somewhere to dry," said the lady curtly. Raindrops sparkled on the wave of thick iron-gray hair that lifted itself, with a slight turn to one side, from her square low brow. Her eyes shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had the straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives such a peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If one suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind that iron fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was some excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her well enough to perceive it. She merely thought her looking handsomer, and, if possible, more formidable than usual.

She sat by the fire, folding her skirts across her knees, and showing the edges of the most discouragingly beautiful petticoats,—a taste perhaps inherited from her wide-hipped Dutch progenitresses. Mrs. Bogardus reveled in costly petticoats, and had an unnecessary number of them.

"How nice it is in here!" she said, looking about her. Cerissa, with the usual apologies, had taken her into the kitchen to dry her skirts. There was a slight taint of steaming shoe leather, left by Chauncey when driven forth. Otherwise the kitchen was perfection,—the family room of an old Dutch farmhouse, built when stone and hardwood lumber were cheap,—thick walls; deep, low window-seats; beams showing on the ceiling; a modern cooking-stove, where Emily Bogardus could remember the wrought brass andirons and iron backlog, for this room had been her father's dining-room. The brick tiled hearth remained, and the color of those century and a half old bricks made a pitiful thing of Cerissa's new oil-cloth. The woodwork had been painted—by Mrs. Bogardus's orders, and much to Cerissa's disgust—a dark kitchen green,—not that she liked the color herself, but it was the artistic demand of the moment,—and the place was filled with a green golden light from the cherry-trees close to the window, which a break in the clouds had suddenly illumined.

"You keep it beautifully," said Mrs. Bogardus, her eyes shedding compliments as she looked around. "I should not dare go in my own kitchen at this time of day. There are no women nowadays who know how to work in the way ladies used to work. If I could have such a housekeeper as you, Cerissa."

Cerissa flushed and bridled. "What would Chauncey do!"

"I don't expect you to be my housekeeper," Mrs. Bogardus smiled. "But I envy Chauncey."

"She has come to ask a favor," thought Cerissa. "I never knew her so pleasant, for nothing. She wants me to do up her fruit, I guess." Cerissa was mistaken. Mrs. Bogardus simply was happy—or almost happy—and deeply stirred over a piece of news which had come to her in that morning's mail.

"I have telephoned Bradley not to send his men over on Monday. My son is bringing his wife home. They may be here all summer. The place belongs to them now. Did Chauncey tell you? Mr. Paul writes that he has some building plans of his own, and he wishes everything left as it is for the present, especially this house. He wants his wife to see it first just as it is."

"Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And how is his health now?"

"Oh, he is very well indeed. You will be glad not to have the trouble of those carpenters, Cerissa? Pulling down old houses is dirty work."

"Oh, dear! I wouldn't mind the dirt. Anything to get rid of that old rat's nest on top of the kitchen chamber. I hate to have such out of the way places on my mind. I can't get around to do every single thing, and it's years—years, Mrs. Bogardus, since I could get a woman to do a half-day's cleaning up there in broad daylight!"

Mrs. Bogardus stared. What was the woman talking about!

"I call it a regular eyesore on the looks of the house besides. And it keeps all the old stories alive."

"What stories?"

"Why, of course your father wasn't out of his head—we all know that—when he built that upstairs room and slep' there and locked himself in every night of his life. It was only on one point he was a little warped: the fear of bein' robbed. A natural fear, too,—an old man over eighty livin' in such a lonesome place and known to be well off. But—you'll excuse my repeating the talk—but the story goes now that he re'ly went insane and was confined up there all the last years of his life. And that's why the windows have got bars acrost them. Everybody notices it, and they ask questions. It's real embarrassin', for of course I don't want to discuss the family."

"Who asks questions?" Mrs. Bogardus's eyes were hard to meet when her voice took that tone.

"Why, the city folks out driving. They often drive in the big gate and make the circle through the grounds, and they're always struck when they see that tower bedroom with windows like a prison. They say, 'What's the story about that room, up there?'"

"When people ask you questions about the house, you can say you did not live here in the owner's time and you don't know. That's perfectly simple, isn't it?"

"But I do know! Everybody knows," said Cerissa hotly. "It was the talk of the whole neighborhood when that room was put up; and I remember how scared I used to be when mother sent me over here of an errand."

Mrs. Bogardus rose and shook out her skirts. "Will Chauncey bring my horse when it stops raining? By the way, did you get the furniture down that was in that room, Cerissa?—the old secretary? I am going to have it put in order for Mr. Paul's room. Old furniture is the fashion now, you know."

Cerissa caught her breath nervously. "Mrs. Bogardus—I couldn't do a thing about it! I wanted Chauncey to tell you. All last week I tried to get a woman, or a man, to come and help me clear out that place, but just as soon as they find out what's wanted—'You'll have to get somebody else for that job,' they say."

"What is the matter with them?"

"It's the room, Mrs. Bogardus; if I was you—I'm doing now just as I'd be done by—I would not take Mrs. Paul Bogardus up into that room—not even in broad daylight; not if it was my son's wife, in the third month of her being a wife."

"Well, upon my word!" said Mrs. Bogardus, smiling coldly. "Do you mean to say these women are afraid to go up there?"

"It was old Mary Hornbeck who started the talk. She got what she called her 'warning' up there. And the fact is, she was a corpse within six months from that day. Chauncey and me, we used to hear noises, but old houses are full of noises. We never thought much about it; only, I must say I never had any use for that part of the house. Chauncey keeps his seeds and tools in the lower room, and some of the winter vegetables, and we store the parlor stove in there in summer."

"Well, about this 'warning'?" Mrs. Bogardus interrupted.

"Yes! It was three years ago in May, and I remember it was some such a day as this—showery and broken overhead, and Mary disappointed me; but she came about noon, and said she'd put in half a day anyhow. She got her pail and house-cloths; but she wasn't gone not half an hour when down she come white as a sheet, and her mouth as dry as chalk. She set down all of a shake, and I give her a drink of tea, and she said: 'I wouldn't go up there again, not for a thousand dollars.' She unlocked the door, she said, and stepped inside without thinkin'. Your father's old rocker with the green moreen cushions stood over by the east window, where he used to sit. She heard a creak like a heavy step on the floor, and that empty chair across the room, as far as from here to the window, begun to rock as if somebody had just rose up from them cushions. She watched it till it stopped. Then she took another step, and the step she couldn't see answered her, and the chair begun to rock again."

"Was that all?"

"No, ma'am; that wasn't all. I don't know if you remember an old wall clock with a brass ball on top and brass scrolls down the sides and a painted glass door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle and a lake? The paint's been wore off the glass with cleaning, so the pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was carried feet foremost out of that room. But Mary said she could count the strokes go tick, tick, tick! She listened till she could have counted fifty, for she was struck dumb, and just as plain as the clock before her face she could see the minute-hand and the pendulum, both of 'em dead still. Now, how do you account for that!

"I told Chauncey about it, and he said it was all foolishness. Do all I could he would go up there himself, that same evening. But he come down again after a while, and he was almost as white as Mary. 'Did you see anything?' I says. 'I saw what Mary said she saw,' says he, 'and I heard what she heard.' But no one can make Chauncey own up that he believes it was anything supernatural. 'There is a reason for everything,' he says. 'The miracles and ghosts of one generation are just school-book learning to the next; and more of a miracle than the miracles themselves.'"

"Chauncey shows his sense," Mrs. Bogardus observed.

"He was real disturbed, though, I could see; and he told me particular not to make any talk about it. I never have opened the subject to a living soul. But when Mary died, within six months, folks repeated what she had been saying about her 'warning.' The 'death watch' she called it. We can't all of us control our feelings about such things, and she was a lonely widow woman."

"Well, do you believe that ticking is going on up there now?" asked Mrs. Bogardus.

Cerissa looked uneasy.

"Is the door locked?"

"I re'ly couldn't say," she confessed.

"Do you mean to say that all you sensible people in this house have avoided that room for three years? And you don't even know if the door is locked?"

"I—I don't use that part for anything, and cleaning is wasted on a place that's never used, and I can't get anybody"—

"I am not criticising your housekeeping. Will you go up there with me now, Cerissa? I want to understand about this."

"What, just now, do you mean? I'm afraid I haven't got the time this morning, Mrs. Bogardus. Dinner's at half-past twelve. It's a quarter to eleven"—

"Very well. You think the door is not locked?"

"If it is, the key must be in the door. Oh, don't go, please, Mrs. Bogardus. Wait till Chauncey conies in"—

"I wish you'd send Chauncey up when he does come in. Ask him to bring a screw-driver." Mrs. Bogardus rose and examined her jacket. It was still damp. She asked for a cape, or some sort of wrap, as her waist was thin, and the rain had chilled the morning air.

For the sake of decency, Cerissa escorted her visitor across the hall passage into the loom-room—a loom-room in name only for upwards of three generations. Becky had devoted it to the rough work of the house, and to certain special uses, such as the care of the butchering products, the making of soft soap and root beer. Here the churning was done, by hand, with a wooden dasher, which spread a circle of white drops, later to become grease-spots. The floor of the loom-room was laid in large brick tiles, more or less loose in their sockets, with an occasional earthy depression marking the grave of a missing tile. Becky's method of cleaning was to sluice it out and scrub it with an old broom. The seepage of generations before her time had thus added their constant quota to the old well's sum of iniquity.

Mrs. Bogardus had not visited this part of the old house for many years. After her father's death she had shrunk from its painful associations. Later she grew indifferent; but as she passed now into the gloomy place—doubly dark with the deep foliage of June on a rainy morning—she was afraid of her own thoughts. Henceforth she was a woman with a diseased consciousness. "What can't be cured must be seared," flashed over her as she set her face to the stairway.

These stairs, leading up into the back attic or "kitchen chamber," being somewhat crowded for space, advanced two steps into the room below. As the stair door opened outward, and the stairs were exceedingly steep and dark, every child of the house, in turn, had suffered a bad fall in consequence; but the arrangement remained in all its natural depravity, for "children must learn."

Little Emmy of the old days had loved to sit upon these steps, a trifle raised above the kitchen traffic, yet cognizant of all that was going on, and ready to descend promptly if she smelled fresh crullers frying, or baked sweet apples steaming hot from the oven. If Becky's foot were heard upon the stairs above, she would jump quick enough; but if the step had a clumping, boyish precipitancy, she sat still and laughed, and planted her back against the door. Often she had teased Adam in this way, keeping him prisoner from his duties, helpless in his good nature either to scold her or push her off. But once he circumvented her, slipping off his shoes and creeping up the stairs again, and making his escape by the roof and the boughs of the old maple. Then it was Emmy who was teased, who sat a foolish half hour on the stairs alone and missed a beautiful ride to the wood lot; but she would not speak to Adam for two days afterward.

Becky's had been the larger of the two bedrooms in the attic, Adam's the smaller—tucked low under the eaves, and entered by crawling around the big chimney that came bulking up to the light like a great tree caught between house walls. The stairs hugged the chimney and made use of its support. Adam would warm his hands upon it coming down on bitter mornings. From force of habit, Emily Bogardus laid her smooth white hand upon the clammy bricks. No tombstone could be colder than that heart of house warmth now.

The roof of the kitchen chamber had been raised a story higher, and the chimney as it went up contracted to quite a modern size. This elevation gave room for the incongruous tower bedroom that had hurt the symmetry of the old house, spoiled its noble sweep of roof, and given rise to so much unpleasant conjecture as to its use. It was this excrescence, the record of those last unloved and unloving years of her father's life, which Mrs. Bogardus would have removed, but was prevented by her son.

"You go back now, Cerissa," she said to the panting woman behind her. "I see the key is in the lock. You may send Chauncey after a while; there is no hurry."

"Oh!" gasped Cerissa. "Do you see that!"

"What?"

"I thought there was something—something behind that slit."

"There isn't. Step this way. There, can't you see the light?"

Mrs. Bogardus grasped Cerissa by the shoulders and held her firmly in front of a narrow loophole that pierced the partition close beside the door. Light from the room within showed plainly; but it gave an unpleasantly human expression to the entrance, like a furtive eye on the watch.

"He would always be there," Cerissa whispered.

"Who?"

"Your father. If anybody wanted to see him after he shut himself in there for the night, they had to stand to be questioned through that wall-slit before he opened the door. Yes, ma'am! He was on the watch in there the whole time like a thing in a trap."

"Are you afraid to go back alone?" Mrs. Bogardus spoke with chilling irony.

Cerissa backed away in silence, her heart thumping. "She's putting it on," she said to herself. "I never see her turn so pale. Don't tell me she ain't afraid!"

There was a hanging shelf against the chimney on which a bundle of dry herbs had been left to turn into dust. Old Becky might have put them there the autumn before she died; or some successor of hers in the years that were blank to the daughter of the house. As she pushed open the door a sighing draught swept past her and seemed to draw her inward. It shook the sere bundle. Its skeleton leaves, dissolving into motes, flickered an instant athwart the light. They sifted down like ashes on the woman's dark head as she passed in. Her color had faded, but not through fear of ghost clocks. It was the searing process she had to face. And any room where she sat alone with certain memories of her youth was to her a torture chamber.

* * * * *

"She's been up there an awful long time. I wouldn't wonder if she's fainted away."

"What would she faint at? I guess it's pretty cold, though. Give me some more tea; put plenty of milk so I can drink it quick."

Chauncey's matter of fact tone always comforted Cerissa when she was nervous. She did not mind that he jeered or that his words were often rude; no man of her acquaintance could say things nicely to women, or ever tried. A certain amount of roughness passed for household wit. Chauncey put the screw-driver in his pocket, his wife and son watching him with respectful anxiety. He thought rather well of his own courage privately. But the familiar details of the loom-room cheered him on his way, the homely tools of his every-day work were like friendly faces nodding at him. He knocked loudly on the door above, and was answered by Mrs. Bogardus in her natural voice.

"Bosh—every bit of it bosh!" he repeated courageously.

She was seated by the window in the chair with the green cushions. Her face was turned towards the view outside. "What a pity those cherries were not picked before the rain," she observed. "The fruit is bursting ripe; I'm afraid you'll lose the crop."

Chauncey moved forward awkwardly without answering.

"Stop there one moment, will you?" Mrs. Bogardus rose and demonstrated. "You notice those two boards are loose. Now, I put this chair here,"—she laid her hand on the back to still its motion. "Step this way. You see? The chair rocks of itself. So would any chair with a spring board under it. That accounts for that, I think. Now come over here." Chauncey placed himself as she directed in front of the high mantel with the clock above it. She stood at his side and they listened in silence to that sound which Mary Hornbeck, deceased, had deemed a spiritual warning.

"Would you call that a 'ticking'? Is that like any sound an insect could make?" the mistress asked.

"I should call it more like a 'ting,'" said Chauncey. "It comes kind o' muffled like through the chimbly—a person might be mistaken if they was upset in their nerves considerable."

"What old people call the 'death-watch' is supposed to be an insect that lives in the walls of old houses, isn't it? and gives warning with a ticking sound when somebody is going to be called away? Now to me that sounds like a soft blow struck regularly on a piece of hollow iron—say the end of a stove-pipe sticking in the chimney. When I first came up here, there was only a steady murmur of wind and rain. Then the clouds thinned and the sun came out and drops began to fall—distinctly. Your wife says the ticking was heard on a day like this, broken and showery. Now, if you will unscrew that clock, I think you will find there's a stove-pipe hole behind it; and a piece of pipe shoved into the chimney just far enough to catch the drops as they gather and fall."

Chauncey went to work. He sweated in the airless room. The powerful screws blunted the lips of his tool but would not start.

"I guess I'll have to give it up for to-day. The screws are rusted in solid. Want I should pry her out of the woodwork?"

"No, don't do that," said Mrs. Bogardus. "Why should we spoil the panel? This seems a very comfortable room. My son is right. It would be foolish to tear it down. Such a place as this might be very useful if you people would get over your notions about it."

"I never had no notions," Chauncey asserted. "When the women git talkin' they like to make out a good story, and whichever one sees the most and hears the most makes the biggest sensation."

Mrs. Bogardus waited till he had finished without appearing to have heard what he was saying.

"Where is the key to this door?" she laid her hand over a knob to the right of the stairs.

"I guess if there is one it's on the other side. Yes, it's in the key-hole." Chauncey turned the knob and shoved and lifted. The door yielded to his full strength, and he allowed Mrs. Bogardus to precede him. She stepped into a room hardly bigger than a closet with one window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad squalor which even a king's palace wears with time.

Chauncey tested the plumbing with a noise that was plainly offensive to his companion, but she bore with it—also with his reminiscences gathered from neighborhood gossip. "He wa'n't fond of spending money, but he didn't spare it here: this was his ship cabin when he started on his last voyage. It looked funny—a man with all his land and houses cooped up in a place like this; but he wanted to be independent of the women. He hated to have 'em fussin' around him. He had a woman to come and cook up stuff for him to help himself to; but she wouldn't stay here overnight, nor he wouldn't let her. As for a man in the house,—most men were thieves, he thought, or waiting their chance to be. It was real pitiful the way he made his end."

"Open that window and shut the door when you come out," said Mrs. Bogardus. "I will send some one to help you down with that secretary. Cerissa knows about it. It is to be sent up on the Hill."



XXII

THE CASE STRIKES IN

Christine's marriage took place while Paul and Moya were lingering in the Bruneau, for Paul's health ostensibly. Banks and Horace had been left to the smiling irony of justice. They never had a straight chance to define their conduct in the woods; for no one accused them. No awkward questions were asked in the city drawing-rooms or at the clubs. For a tough half hour or so at Fort Lemhi they had realized how they stood in the eyes of those unbiased military judges. The shock had a bracing effect for a time. Both boys were said to be much improved by their Western trip and by the hardships of that frightful homeward march.

Mrs. Bogardus had matched her gift of Stone Ridge to her son, which was a gift of sentiment, with one of more substantial value to her daughter,—the income from certain securities settled upon her and her heirs. Banks was carefully unprovided for. The big house in town was full of ghosts—the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her mother's face.

Mrs. Bogardus leased her house in town, and retired before the ghosts, but not escaping them; Stone Ridge must be put in order for its new master and mistress, and Stone Ridge had its own ghosts. She informed her absentees that, before their return, she should have left for Southern California to look after some investments which she had neglected there of late. It was then she spoke of her plan for restoring the old house by pulling down that addition which disfigured it; and Paul had objected to this erasure. It would take from the house's veracity, he said. The words carried their unintentional sting.

But it was Moya's six lines at the bottom of his page that changed and softened everything. Moya—always blessed when she took the initiative—contrived, as swiftly as she could set them down, to say the very words that made the home-coming a coming home indeed.

"Will Madam Bogardus be pleased to keep her place as the head of her son's house?" she wrote. "This foolish person he has married wants to be anything rather than the mistress of Stone Ridge. She wants to be always out of doors, and she needs to be. Oh, must you go away now—now when we need you so much? It cannot be said here on paper how much I need you! Am I not your motherless daughter? Please be there when we come, and please stay there!"

"For a little while then," said the lonely woman, smiling at the image of that sweet, foolish person in her thoughts. "For a little while, till she learns her mistake." Such mistakes are the cornerstone of family friendship.

* * * * *

It was an uneventful summer on the Hill, but one of rather wearing intensity in the inner relations of the household, one with another; for nothing could be quite natural with a pit of concealment to be avoided by all, and an air of unconsciousness to be carefully preserved in avoiding it. Moya's success in this way was so remarkable that Paul half hated it. How was it possible for her to speak to his mother so lightly; never the least apparent premeditation or fear of tripping; how look at her with such sweet surface looks that never questioned or saw beneath? He could not meet his mother's eyes at all when they were alone together, or endure a silence in her company.

Both women were of the type called elemental. They understood each other without knowing why. Moya felt the desperate truth contained in the mother's falsehood, and broke forth into passionate defense of her as against her husband's silence.

He answered her one day by looking up a little green book of fairy tales and reading aloud this fragment of "The Golden Key."

"'I never tell lies, even in fun.' (The mysterious Grandmother speaks.)

"'How good of you!' (says the Child in the Wood.)

"'I couldn't if I tried. It would come true if I said it, and then I should be punished enough.'"

Moya's eyes narrowed reflectively.

"How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done one thing, should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!"

Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought, to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise, and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.

But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. "She is a queen of mothers!" she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. "I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ask to be understood."

Paul was silent.

"And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all—in such despair and misery—all that is before me, with everything in the world to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't, don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!"

So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided. When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he wondered, "Has she been alone with it? Has it passed into another phase?"—as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.

Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time. It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors—certain neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.

All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever, but they had never taken him seriously. "Now, at last," they said, "he has done something like other people. He is coming out." Experienced matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was "different," but "all right." She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her "things" were surprisingly lovely—probably heirlooms; and army women are so clever about clothes.

Would they spend the winter in town?

Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go down till after the holidays.

What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of foolish chatter.

The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required? The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness.

Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country. The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.

"We are not living our own life yet," Paul would say; not adding, "We are protecting her." Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children—to give, and not to receive.

"But this is our Garden?" Moya would muse. "We are as nearly two alone as any two could be."

"If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know."

"Snake or Seraph—I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things."

"I?—what do I think?"

"You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could she"—

"Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know him;—she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty to the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed of, that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from God. Now we can never know how he would have risen to meet a nobler choice in her. He had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings, including piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the greatest spiritual opportunities,—such as come but once in a lifetime."

"Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not her opportunity. God is very patient with us, I believe."