The hours grew older. At the head of the hall the musicians manifested more signs of their inexorable purpose. A sad, protesting squeal came from the accordion. The violins moaned, but were held firm. The worst might be precipitated at any moment.

But again there was a transfer of the general attention toward the upper end of the hall. The door once more opened, and there appeared a little group of three persons, on whom there was fixed a regard so steadfast and so silent that it might well have been seen that they were strangers to all present. Indeed, there was but one sound audible in the sudden silence which fell as these three entered the room. Sam, the driver, scraped one foot unwittingly upon the floor as he half leaned forward and looked eagerly at them as they advanced.

Of the three, one was a tall and slender man, who carried himself with that ease which, itself unconscious, causes self-consciousness in those still some generations back of it. Upon the arm of this gentleman was a lady, also tall, thin, pale, with wide, dark eyes, which now opened with surprise that was more than half shock. Lastly, with head up and eyes also wide, like those of a stag which sees some new thing, there came a young woman, whose presence was such as had never yet been seen in the hotel at Ellisville. Tall as the older lady by her side, erect, supple, noble, evidently startled but not afraid, there was that about this girl which was new to Ellisville, which caused the eye of every man to fall upon her and the head of every woman to go up a degree the higher in scorn and disapprobation. This was a being of another world. There was some visitation here. Mortal woman, woman of the Plains, never yet grew like this. Nor had gowns like these—soft, clinging, defining, draping—ever occurred in history. There was some mistake. This creature had fallen here by error, while floating in search of some other world.

Astonished, as they might have been by the spectacle before them of the two rows of separated sex, all of whom gazed steadfastly in their direction; greeted by no welcoming hand, ushered to no convenient seat, these three faced the long, half-lit room in the full sense of what might have been called an awkward situation. Yet they did not shuffle or cough, or talk one with another, or smile in anguish, as had others who thus faced the same ordeal. Perhaps the older lady pressed the closer to the gentleman's side, while the younger placed her hand upon his shoulder; yet the three walked slowly, calmly, deliberately down into what must have been one of the most singular scenes hitherto witnessed in their lives. The man did not forsake his companions to join the row of unfortunates. As they reached the head of the social rank, where sat Mrs. McDermott, the wife of the section boss and arbiter elegantiarum for all Ellisville, the gentleman bowed and spoke some few words, though obviously to a total stranger—a very stiff and suspicious stranger, who was too startled to reply.

The ladies bowed to the wife of the section boss and to the others as they came in turn. Then the three passed on a few seats apart from and beyond the other occupants of that side of the house, thus leaving a break in the ranks which caused Mrs. McDermott a distinct sniff and made the red-headed girl draw up in pride. The newcomers sat near to the second lamp from the musicians' stand, and in such fashion that they were half hid in the deep shadows cast by that erratic luminary.

There was now much tension, and the unhappiness and suspense could have endured but little longer. Again the accordion protested and the fiddle wept. The cornet uttered a faint note of woe. Yet once more there was a pause in this time of joy.

Again the door was pushed open, not timidly, but flung boldly back. There stood two figures at the head of the hall and in the place of greatest light. Of these, one was tall and very thin, but upright as a shaft of pine. Over his shoulder hung a cloak, which he swept aside over his arm with a careless and free gesture of unconcern. He was clad in dark garments; thus much might be said. His face, clean shaven but for the long and pointed mustaches and goatee, was high and bold, his gaze confident and merry. His waistcoat sat high and close. At wrist and neck there showed a touch of white, and a bit of white appeared protruding at the bosom of his coat. His tread was supple and easy as that of a boy of twenty. "Ned, me boy," he whispered to his companion as they entered, "I'm feelin' fine the night; and as for yerself, ye're fit for the court o' St. James at a diplomats' ball."

Franklin, indeed, deserved somewhat of the compliment. He was of that rare figure of man which looks well whether clad for the gymnasium or the ball, upon which clothing does not merely hang, but which fills out and dignifies the apparel that may be worn. In height the ex-captain was just below the six-foot mark which so often means stature but not strength, and he carried every inch of his size with proportions which indicated vigour and activity. He walked now with the long, easy hip-stride of the man whose sides and back are not weak, but strong and hardened. His head, well set upon the neck, was carried with the chin unconsciously correct, easily, not stiffly. His shoulders were broad enough to hang nicely over the hips, and they kept still the setting-up of the army drill. Dressed in the full uniform of a captain, he looked the picture of the young army officer of the United States, though lacking any of the arrogance which might come from the purely military life. Simply, easily, much as had the little group that immediately preceded himself and friend, Franklin passed on up into the hall, between the batteries which lined the walls.

Any emergency brings forward its own remedy. The times produce the man, each war bringing forth its own generals, its heroes, its solvers of great problems. Thus there came now to these persons assembled, deadlocked, unguided, unhappy, who might else have sat forever rooted to this spot, the man who was to save them, to lead them forth out of their wilderness of incertitude.

None had chosen Battersleigh to the leadership. He came as mere guest, invited as were the others. There had been no election for master of ceremonies, nor had Battersleigh yet had time to fully realize how desperate was this strait in which these folk had fallen. It appeared to him merely that, himself having arrived, there was naught else to cause delay. At the centre of the room he stopped, near by the head of the stern column of womanhood which held the position on the right as one entered the hall. Here Battersleigh paused, making a deep and sweeping bow, and uttered the first open speech which had been heard that evening.

"Ladies and gintlemen," he said in tones easily distinguishable at all parts of the room, "I'm pleased to meet ye all this evenin'. Perhaps ye all know Battersleigh, and I hope ye'll all meet me friend Captain Franklin, at me side. We claim the inthroduction of this roof, me good friends, and we welcome everybody to the first dance at Ellisville. Ladies, yer very dutiful servant! It's well ye're lookin', Mrs. McDermott; and Nora, gyurl, sure ye're charmin' the night. Kittie, darlin', how do ye do? Do ye remember Captain Franklin, all of ye? Pipe up, ye naygurs—that's right. Now, thin, all hands, choose yer partners fer the gr-rand march. Mrs. McDermott, darlin', we'll lead the march, sure, with Jerry's permission—how'll he help himself, I wonder, if the lady says yis? Thank ye, Mrs. McDermott, and me arm—so."

The sheepish figures of the musicians now leaned together for a moment. The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the assistant instrument less tentative. All at once the slack shoulders straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three musicians fell to the work and reeled off the opening bars.

A sigh went up from the assembly. There was a general shuffling of shoes, a wide rustling of calico. Feet were thrust forward, the body yet unable to follow them in the wish of the owner. Then, slowly, sadly, as though going to his doom, Curly arose from out the long line of the unhappy upon his side of the room. He crossed the intervening space, his limbs below the knees curiously affected, jerking his feet into half time with the tune. He bowed so low before the littlest waiter girl that his neck scarf fell forward from his chest and hung before him like a shield. "May I hev the honour, Miss Kitty?" he choked out; and as the littlest waiter girl rose and took his arm with a vast air of unconcern, Curly drew a long breath.

In his seat Sam writhed, but could not rise. Nora looked straight in front. It was Hank Peterson, who led her forth, and who, after the occasion was over, wished he had not done so, for his wife sat till the last upon the row. Seeing this awful thing happen, seeing the hand of Nora laid upon another's arm, Sam sat up as one deeply smitten with a hurt. Then, silently, unobserved in the confusion, he stole away from the fateful scene and betook himself to his stable, where he fell violently to currying one of the horses.

"Oh, kick!" he exclaimed, getting speech in these surroundings. "Kick! I deserve it. Of all the low-down, d——n cowards that ever was borned I sure am the worst! But the gall of that feller Peterson! An' him a merried man!"

When Sam left the ballroom there remained no person who was able to claim acquaintance with the little group who now sat under the shadow of the swinging lamp at the lower end of the hall, and farthest from the door. Sam himself might have been more courteous had not his mental perturbation been so great. As it was, the "grand march" was over, and Battersleigh was again walking along the lines in company with his friend Franklin, before either could have been said to have noticed fully these strangers, whom no one seemed to know, and who sat quite apart and unengaged. Battersleigh, master of ceremonies by natural right, and comfortable gentleman at heart, spied out these three, and needed but a glance to satisfy himself of their identity. Folk were few in that country, and Sam had often been very explicit in his descriptions.

"Sir," said Battersleigh, approaching and bowing as he addressed the stranger, "I shall make bold to introjuce meself—Battersleigh of Ellisville, sir, at your service. If I am not mistaken, you will be from below, toward the next town. I bid ye a very good welcome, and we shall all hope to see ye often, sir. We're none too many here yet, and a gintleman and his family are always welcome among gintlemen. Allow me, sir, to presint me friend Captain Franklin, Captain Ned Franklin of the—th' Illinois in the late unplisantness.—Ned, me boy, Colonel—ye'll pardon me not knowin' the name?"

"My name is Buford, sir," said the other as he rose. "I am very glad to see you gentlemen. Colonel Battersleigh, Captain Franklin. I was so unlucky as to be of the Kentucky troops, sir, in the same unpleasantness. I want to introduce my wife, gentlemen, and my niece, Miss Beauchamp."

Franklin really lost a part of what the speaker was saying. He was gazing at this form half hidden in the shadows, a figure with hands drooping, with face upturned, and just caught barely by one vagrant ray of light which left the massed shades piled strongly about the heavy hair. There came upon him at that moment, as with a flood-tide of memory, all the vague longing, the restlessness, the incertitude of life which had harried him before he had come to this far land, whose swift activity had helped him to forget. Yet even here he had been unsettled, unhappy. He had missed, he had lacked—he knew not what. Sometimes there had come vague dreams, recurrent, often of one figure, which he could not hold in his consciousness long enough to trace to any definite experience or association—a lady of dreams, against whom he strove and whom he sought to banish. Whom he had banished! Whom he had forgotten! Whom he had never known! Who had ever been in his life a vague, delicious mystery!

The young woman rose, and stood out a pace or two from the shadows. Her hand rested upon the arm of the elder lady. She turned her face toward Franklin. He felt her gaze take in the uniform of blue, felt the stroke of mental dislike for the uniform—a dislike which he knew existed, but which he could not fathom. He saw the girl turn more fully toward him, saw upon her face a querying wonder, like that which he had known in his own dreams! With a strange, half-shivering gesture the girl advanced half a step and laid her head almost upon the shoulder of the elder woman, standing thus for one moment, the arms of the two unconsciously entwined, as is sometimes the way with women. Franklin approached rudeness as he looked at this attitude of the two, still puzzling, still seeking to solve this troubling problem of the past.

There came a shift in the music. The air swept from the merry tune into the minor from which the negro is never musically free. Then in a flash Franklin saw it all. He saw the picture. His heart stopped!

This music, it was the wail of trumpets! These steps, ordered, measured, were those of marching men. These sounds, high, commingling, they were the voices of a day gone swiftly by. These two, this one—this picture—it was not here, but upon the field of wheat and flowers that he saw it now again—that picture of grief so infinitely sad.

Franklin saw, and as he gazed, eager, half advancing, indecision and irresolution dropped from him forever. Resolved from out the shadows, wherein it had never in his most intimate self-searching taken any actual form, he saw the image of that unformulated dream which had haunted his sub-consciousness so long, and which was now to haunt him openly and forever.



CHAPTER XV

ANOTHER DAY

The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon another world.

The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as usual to the Cottage—all these departed with the more or less recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new significance. Really this was Magna Charta. All those who, tired and sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something had been done. Each might have told you in his way that a new web of human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom. Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.

There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to tolerance, if they be spared contempt. They are but provincials themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called intolerance. The city is no better than the town, the town is no better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from the other. Everywhere the problems are the same. Everywhere it is Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured, to be enjoyed. Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.

Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains admittedly a town. A sun had set, and a sun had arisen. It was another day.

In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination. They told the boy that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the myriad stars. He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the Edge. No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the figures be conclusive. They told him of the positive and negative poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres of force. Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told him—men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told him—that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was Love. He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since ever time began. But it seemed to him that this union must never be that of mere chance. There could be but one way right and fit for the meeting of the two halves of life. He looked about him in the little village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the women who were there for them to marry. They had never sailed across seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?" Seeing that this was the way of human beings, he was ashamed. It aroused him to hear of this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry, and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who forthwith did marry her. To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found. With some men this delusion lasts very late. With some women it endures forever. For these there may be, after all, another world somewhere in the recurrent quotient which runs indefinitely out into the stars.

With these vague philosophizings, these morbid self-queryings, there came into conflict the sterner and more practical side of Franklin's nature, itself imperious and positive in its demands. Thus he found himself, in his rude surroundings on the Plains, a man still unsettled and restless, ambitious for success, but most of all ambitious with that deadly inner ambition to stand for his own equation, to be himself, to reach his own standards; that ambition which sends so many broken hearts into graves whose headstones tell no history. Franklin wondered deliberately what it must be to succeed, what it must be to achieve. And he wondered deliberately what it must mean to love, to find by good fortune or by just deserts, voyaging somewhere in the weltering sea of life, in the weltering seas of all these unmoved stars, that other being which was to mean that he had found himself. To the searcher who seeks thus starkly, to the dreamer who has not yielded; but who has deserved his dream, there can be no mistaking when the image comes.

Therefore to Edward Franklin the tawdry hotel parlour on the morning after the ball at Ellisville was no mere four-square habitation, but a chamber of the stars. The dingy chairs and sofas were to him articles of joy and beauty. The curtains at the windows, cracked and seamed, made to him but a map of the many devious happinesses which life should thenceforth show. The noises of the street were but music, the voices from the rooms below were speech of another happy world. Before him, radiant, was that which he had vaguely sought. Not for him to marry merely the neighbour's daughter! This other half of himself, with feet running far to find the missing friend, had sought him out through all the years, through all the miles, through all the spheres! This was fate, and at this thought his heart glowed, his eyes shone, his very stature seemed to increase. He wist not of Nature and her ways of attraction. He only knew that here was that Other whose hand, pathetically sought, he had hitherto missed in the darkness of the foregone days. Now, thought he, it was all happily concluded. The quotient was no indefinite one; it had an end. It ended here, upon the edge of the infinite which he had sought; upon the pinnacle of that universe of which he had learned; here, in this brilliant chamber of delight, this irradiant abode, this noble hall bedecked with gems and silks and stars and all the warp and woof of his many, many days of dreams!

Mr. and Mrs. Buford had for the time excused themselves by reason of Mrs. Buford's weariness, and after the easy ways of that time and place the young people found themselves alone. Thus it was that Mary Ellen, with a temporary feeling of helplessness, found herself face to face with the very man whom she at that time cared least to see.



CHAPTER XVI

ANOTHER HOUR

"But it seems as though I had always known you," said Franklin, turning again toward the tall figure at the window. There was no reply to this, neither was there wavering in the attitude of the head whose glossy back was turned to him at that moment.

"It was like some forgotten strain of music!" he blundered on, feeling how hopeless, how distinctly absurd was all his speech. "I surely must always have known you, somewhere!" His voice took on a plaintive assertiveness which in another he would have derided and have recognised as an admission of defeat.

Mary Ellen still gazed out of the window. In her mind there was a scene strangely different from this which she beheld. She recalled the green forests and the yellow farms of Louisburg, the droning bees, the broken flowers and all the details of that sodden, stricken field. With a shudder there came over her a swift resentment at meeting here, near at hand, one who had had a share in that scene of desolation.

Franklin felt keenly enough that he was at disadvantage, but no man may know what there is in the heart of a girl. To Mary Ellen there seemed to be three ways open. She might address this man bitterly, or haughtily, or humorously. The latter course might have been most deadly of all, had it not been tempered with a certain chivalrousness which abode in Mary Ellen's heart. After all, thought she, here was a man who was one of their few acquaintances in this strange, wild country. It might be that he was not an ill sort of man at heart, and by all means he was less impossible of manner than any other she had seen here. She had heard that the men of a womanless country were sometimes suddenly disconcerted by the appearance of womankind upon their horizon. There was a certain quality about this man which, after all, left him distinctly within the classification of gentleman. Moreover, it would be an ill thing for her to leave a sore heart on the first day of her acquaintance in this town, with which her fortunes were now apparently to be so intimately connected.

Mary Ellen turned at length and seated herself near the window. The light of which many women are afraid, the cross-light of double windows on the morning after a night of dancing, had no terrors for her. Her eye was clear, her skin fresh, her shoulders undrooping. Franklin from his seat opposite gazed eagerly at this glorious young being. From his standpoint there were but few preliminaries to be carried on. This was the design, the scheme. This was what life had had in store for him, and why should he hesitate to enter into possession? Why should he delay to speak that which was foremost in his soul, which assuredly at that very moment must be the foremost concern in all the interlocking universe of worlds? After his fashion he had gone straight. He could not understand the sickening thought that he did not arrive, that his assertion did not convince, that his desire did not impinge.

Mary Ellen turned toward him slowly at length, and so far from seeming serious, her features bore the traces of a smile. "Do you know," said she, "I think I heard of a stage-driver—wasn't it somewhere out West—who was taking a school-teacher from the railroad to the schoolhouse—and he—well, that is to say—"

"He said things—"

"Yes, that is it. He said things, you know. Now, he had never seen the school-teacher before."

"Yes, I have heard of that story," said Franklin, smiling as he recalled the somewhat different story of Sam and the waiter girl. "I don't just recollect all about it."

"It seems to me that the stage-driver said something—er, like—maybe he said it was 'like forgotten music' to him."

Franklin coloured. "The story was an absurdity, like many others about the West," he said. "But," he brightened, "the stage-driver had never seen the school-teacher before."

"I don't quite understand," said Mary Ellen coldly. "In my country it was not customary for gentlemen to tell ladies when they met for the first time that it was 'like a strain of forgotten music'—not the first time." And in spite of herself she now laughed freely, feeling her feminine advantage and somewhat exulting in spite of herself to see that even here upon the frontier there was opportunity for the employment of woman's ancient craft.

"Music never forgotten, then!" said Franklin impetuously. "This is at least not the first time we have met." In any ordinary duel of small talk this had not been so bad an attack, yet now the results were something which neither could have foreseen. To the mind of the girl the words were shocking, rude, brutal. They brought up again the whole scene of the battlefield. They recalled a music which was indeed not forgotten—the music of that procession which walked across the heart of Louisburg on that far-off fatal day. She shuddered, and upon her face there fell the shadow of an habitual sadness.

"You have spoken of this before, Captain Franklin," said she, "and if what you say is true, and if indeed you did see me—there—at that place—I can see no significance in that, except the lesson that the world is a very small one. I have no recollection of meeting you. But, Captain Franklin, had we ever really met, and if you really cared to bring up some pleasant thought about the meeting, you surely would never recall the fact that you met me upon that day!"

Franklin felt his heart stop. He looked aside, his face paling as the even tones went on:

"That was the day of all my life the saddest, the most terrible. I have been trying ever since then to forget it. I dare not think of it. It was the day when—when my life ended—when I lost everything, everything on earth I had."

Franklin turned in mute protest, but she continued:

"Because of that day," said she bitterly, "to which you referred as though it were a curious or pleasant thought, since you say you were there at that time—because of that very day I was left adrift in the world, every hope and every comfort gone. Because of Louisburg—why, this—Ellisville! This is the result of that day! And you refer to it with eagerness."

Poor Franklin groaned at this, but thought of no right words to say until ten hours afterward, which is mostly the human way. "I know—I could have known," he blundered—"I should not be so rude as to suppose that—ah, it was only you that I remembered! The war is past and gone, The world, as you say, is very small. It was only that I was glad—"

"Ah, sir," said Mary Ellen, and her voice now held a plaintiveness which was the stronger from the droop of the tenderly curving lips—"ah, sir, but you must remember! To lose your relatives, even in a war for right and principle—and the South was right!" (this with a flash of the eye late pensive)—"that is hard enough. But for me it was not one thing or another; it was the sum of a thousand misfortunes. I wonder that I am alive. It seems to me as though I had been in a dream for a long, long time. It is no wonder that those of us left alive went away, anywhere, as far as we could, that we gave up our country—that we came even here!" She waved a hand at the brown monotony visible through the window.

"You blame me as though it were personal!" broke in Franklin; but she ignored him.

"We, our family," she went on, "had lived there for a dozen generations. You say the world is small. It is indeed too small for a family again to take root which has been torn up as ours has been. My father, my mother, my two brothers, nearly every relative I had, killed in the war or by the war—our home destroyed—our property taken by first one army and then the other—you should not wonder if I am bitter! It was the field of Louisburg which cost me everything. I lost all—all—on that day which you wish me to remember. You wish me to remember that you saw me then, that I perhaps saw you. Why, sir, if you wished me to hate you, you could do no better—and I do not wish to hate any one. I wish to have as many friends as we may, here in this new country; but for remembering—why, I can remember nothing else, day or night, but Louisburg!"

"You stood so," said Franklin, doggedly and fatuously, "just as you did last night. You were leaning on the arm of your mother—"

Mary Ellen's eyes dilated. "It was not my mother," said she.

"A friend?" said Franklin, feelingly as he might.

"The mother of a friend," said Mary Ellen, straightening up and speaking with effort. And all the meaning of her words struck Franklin fully as though a dart had sunk home in his bosom.

"We were seeking for my friend, her son," said Mary Ellen. "I—Captain Franklin, I know of no reason why we should speak of such things at all, but it was my—I was to have been married to the man for whom we were seeking, and whom we found! That is what Louisburg means to me. It means this frontier town, a new, rude life for us. It means meeting you all here—as we are glad and proud to do, sir—but first of all it means—that!"

Franklin bowed his head between his hands and half groaned over the pain which he had cost. Then slowly and crushingly his own hurt came home to him. Every fibre of his being, which had been exultingly crying out in triumph at the finding of this missing friend—every fibre so keenly strung—now snapped and sprang back at rag ends. In his brain he could feel the parting one by one of the strings which but now sang in unison. Discord, darkness, dismay, sat on all the world.

The leisurely foot of Buford sounded on the stair, and he knocked gaily on the door jam as he entered.

"Well, niece," said he, "Mrs. Buford thinks we ought to be starting back for home right soon now."

Mary Ellen rose and bowed to Franklin as she passed to leave the room; but perhaps neither she nor Franklin was fully conscious of the leave-taking. Buford saw nothing out of the way, but turned and held out his hand. "By the way, Captain Franklin," said he, "I'm mighty glad to meet you, sir—mighty glad. We shall want you to come down and see us often. It isn't very far—only about twenty-five miles south. They call our place the Halfway Ranch, and it's not a bad name, for it's only about halfway as good a place as you and I have always been used to; but it's ours, and you will be welcome there. We'll be up here sometimes, and you must come down. We shall depend on seeing you now and then."

"I trust we shall be friends," mumbled Franklin.

"Friends?" said Butord cheerily, the smiling wrinkles of his own thin face signifying his sincerity; "why, man, here is a place where one needs friends, and where he can have friends. There is time enough and room enough, and—well, you'll come, won't you?" And Franklin, dazed and missing all the light which had recently made glad the earth, was vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long.



BOOK III

THE DAY OF THE CATTLE

CHAPTER XVII

ELLISVILLE THE RED

Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was. Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far out in the plains, assuring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the stars. The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving Ellisville title to unique distinction among all the cities of the plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college. They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key, and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild, wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions, of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West—Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine. Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the rancherias, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on. Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man. The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed. The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life was wide. There was no time for small exactness. A newspaper, so called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar, or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink was never established, since that was something never called for. For a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men, acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young. Money and life—these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.

With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? In this riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously on through its brief, brazen day.



CHAPTER XVIII

STILL A REBEL

In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near; and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new goddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted friends—wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a real woman.

For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their life. Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg (with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was blither in bed than he had ever been at table. Ike Wallace, down with a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty was their only god. They told her, simply as children, of deeds which now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm, and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best traditions of her own earlier land and time. They were knights-errant, and for all on the Ellisville trail there was but one lady. So hopeless was the case of each that they forbore to argue among themselves.

"No broadhorn there," said Pinky Smith, after he got well, and assumed the envied position of oracle on matters at the Halfway House. "That ain't no range stock, I want to tell you all. What in h——l she doin' out yer I give it up, but you can mark it down she ain't no common sort."

"Oh, she like enough got some beau back in the States," said another, grumblingly.

"Yes, er up to Ellis," said Pinky, sagely. "Thet lawyer feller up there, he come down to the ranch twict when I was there, and I 'low he's shinin' round some."

"Well, I dunno," said the other, argumentatively, as though to classify lawyers and cow-punchers in much the same category.

"But, pshaw!" continued Pinky. "He don't seem to hold no edge neither, fur's I could see. It was him that was a-doin' all the guessin'. She just a-standin' pat all the time, same fer him as fer everybody else. Reckon she ain't got no beau, an' don't want none."

"Beau be d——d!" said his friend. "Who said anything about beau? First thing, feller's got to be fitten. Who's fitten?"

"That's right," said Pinky. "Yet I shore hope she's located yer fer keeps. Feller says, 'They's no place like home,' and it's several mile to another ranch like that'n', er to another gal like her."

"D——n the lawyer!" said the other, after a time of silence, as they rode on together; and Pinky made understanding reply.

"That's what!" said he. "D——n him, anyhow!"

As for Edward Franklin himself, he could not in his moments of wildest egotism assign himself to a place any better than that accorded each member of the clans who rallied about this Southern lady transplanted to the Western plains. Repulsed in his first unskilled, impetuous advance; hurt, stung, cut to the quick as much at his own clumsiness and failure to make himself understood as at the actual rebuff received. Franklin none the less in time recovered sufficient equanimity to seek to avail himself of such advantages as still remained; and he resolved grimly that he would persist until at least he had been accepted as something better than a blundering boor. Under Major Buford's invitation he called now and again at the Halfway Ranch, and the major was gladder each time to see him, for he valued the society of one whose experiences ran somewhat parallel with his own, and whose preferences were kindred to those of his natural class; and, moreover, there was always a strange comradery among those whose problems were the same, the "neighbours" of the sparsely settled West. Mrs. Buford also received Franklin with pleasure, and Mary Ellen certainly always with politeness. Yet, fatal sign, Mary Ellen never ran for her mirror when she knew that Franklin was coming. He was but one of the many who came to the Halfway House; and Franklin, after more than one quiet repulse, began to know that this was an indifference grounded deeper than the strange haughtiness which came to be assumed by so many women of the almost womanless West, who found themselves in a land where the irreverent law of supply and demand assigned to them a sudden value.

Of lovers Mary Ellen would hear of none, and this was Franklin's sole consolation. Yet all day as he laboured there was present in his subconsciousness the personality of this proud and sweet-faced girl. Her name was spelled large upon the sky, was voiced by all the birds. It was indeed her face that looked up from the printed page. He dared not hope, and yet shrunk from the thought that he must not, knowing what lethargy must else ingulf his soul. By day a sweet, compelling image followed him, until he sought relief in sleep. At night she was again the shadowy image of his dreams. Reason as well as instinct framed excuses for him, and he caught himself again arguing with the world that here was destiny, here was fate! Wandering blindly over all the weary intervening miles, weak and in need of strength to shelter her, tender and noble and gentle, worthy of love and needing love and care in these rude conditions for which she was so unfit—surely the stars had straightened out his life for him and told him what to do! He heard so clearly the sweet, imperious summons which is the second command put upon animate nature: First, to prevail, to live; second, to love, to survive! Life and love, the first worthless without the latter, barren, flowerless, shorn of fruitage, branded with the mark of the unattained. As tree whispers unto tree, as flower yearns to flower, so came the mandate to his being in that undying speech that knows no change from the beginning to the end of time.

Against this overwhelming desire of an impetuous love there was raised but one barrier—the enduring resistance of a woman's will, silent, not strenuous, unprotesting, but unchanged. To all his renewed pleadings the girl said simply that she had no heart to give, that her hope of happiness lay buried on the field of Louisburg, in the far-off land that she had known in younger and less troubled days. Leaving that land, orphaned, penniless, her life crushed down at the very portal of womanhood, her friends scattered, her family broken and destroyed, her whole world overturned, she had left also all hope of a later happiness. There remained to her only the memory of a past, the honour that she prized, the traditions which she must maintain. She was "unreconstructed," as she admitted bitterly. Moreover, so she said, even could it lie in her heart ever to prove unfaithful to her lover who had died upon the field of duty, never could it happen that she would care for one of those who had murdered him, who had murdered her happiness, who had ruined her home, destroyed her people, and banished her in this far wandering from the land that bore her.

"Providence did not bring me here to marry you," she said to Franklin keenly, "but to tell you that I would never marry you—never, not even though I loved you, as I do not. I am still a Southerner, am still a 'rebel.' Moreover, I have learned my lesson. I shall never love again."



CHAPTER XIX

THAT WHICH HE WOULD

Poor medicine as it is, work was ever the best salve known for a hurting heart. Franklin betook him to his daily work, and he saw success attend his labours. Already against the frank barbarity of the cattle days there began to push the hand of the "law-and-order" element, steadily increasing in power. Although all the primitive savage in him answered to the summons of those white-hot days to every virile, daring nature, Franklin none the less felt growing in his heart the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization, that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his own face in the primeval mirror here held up to him, Franklin turned away. It was sure to him that he must set his influence against this unorganized day of waste and riotousness. He knew that this perfervid time could not endure, knew that the sweep of American civilization must occupy all this land as it had all the lands from the Alleghenies to the plains. He foresaw in this crude new region the scene of a great material activity, a vast industrial development. The swift action of the early days was to the liking of his robust nature, and the sweep of the cattle trade, sudden and unexpected as it had been, in no wise altered his original intention of remaining as an integer of this community. It needed no great foresight to realize that all this land, now so wild and cheap, could not long remain wild and cheap, but must follow the history of values as it had been written up to the edge of that time and place.

Of law business of an actual sort there was next to none at Ellisville, all the transactions being in wild lands and wild cattle, but, as did all attorneys of the time, Franklin became broker before he grew to be professional man. Fortunate in securing the handling of the railroad lands, he sold block after block of wild land to the pushing men who came out to the "front" in search of farms and cattle ranches. His own profits he invested again in land. Thus he early found himself making much more than a livelihood, and laying the foundation of later fortune. Long since he had "proved up" his claim and moved into town permanently, having office and residence in the great depot hotel which was the citadel of the forces of law and order, of progress and civilization in that land.

The railroad company which founded Ellisville had within its board of directors a so-called "Land and Improvement Company," which latter company naturally had the first knowledge of the proposed locations of the different towns along the advancing line. When the sale of town lots was thrown open to the public, it was always discovered that the Land and Improvement Company had already secured the best of the property in what was to be the business portion of the town. In the case of Ellisville, this inner corporation knew that there was to be located here a railroad-division point, where ultimately there would be car shops and a long pay roll of employees. Such a town was sure to prosper much more than one depending solely upon agriculture for its support, as was to be the later history of many or most of these far Western towns. Franklin, given a hint by a friendly official, invested as he was able in town property in the village of Ellisville, in which truly it required the eye of faith to see any prospect of great enhancement. Betimes he became owner of a quarter-section of land here and there, in course of commissions on sales. He was careful to take only such land as he had personally seen and thought fit for farming, and always he secured land as near to the railroad as was possible. Thus he was in the ranks of those foreseeing men who quietly and rapidly were making plans which were later to place them among those high in the control of affairs. All around were others, less shrewd, who were content to meet matters as they should turn up, forgetting that

"The hypocritic days Bring diadems and fagots in their hands; To each they offer gifts after his will."

Everywhere was shown the Anglo-Saxon love of land. Each man had his quarter-section or more. Even Nora, the waitress at the hotel, had "filed on a quarter," and once in perhaps a month or so would "reside" there overnight, a few faint furrows in the soil (done by her devoted admirer, Sam) passing as those legal "improvements" which should later give her title to a portion of the earth. The land was passing into severalty, coming into the hands of the people who had subdued it, who had driven out those who once had been its occupants. The Indians were now cleared away, not only about Ellisville but far to the north and west. The skin-hunters had wiped out the last of the great herds of the buffalo. The face of Nature was changing. The tremendous drama of the West was going on in all its giant action. This torrent of rude life, against which the hands of the law were still so weak and unavailing, had set for it in the ways of things a limit for its flood and a time for its receding.

The West was a noble country, and it asked of each man what nobility there was in his soul. Franklin began to grow. Freed from the dwarfing influences of army life, as well as from the repressing monotony of an old and limited community, he found in the broad horizon of his new surroundings a demand that he also should expand. As he looked beyond the day of cattle and foresaw the time of the plough, so also he gazed far forward into the avenues of his own life, now opening more clearly before him. He rapidly forecast the possibilities of the profession which he had chosen, and with grim self-confidence felt them well within his power. Beyond that, then, he asked himself, in his curious self-questioning manner, what was there to be? What was to be the time of his life when he could fold his hands and say that, no matter whether it was success or failure that he had gained, he had done that which was in his destiny to do? Wherein was he to gain that calmness and that satisfaction which ought to attend each human soul, and entitle it to the words "Well done"? Odd enough were some of these self-searchings which went on betimes in the little office of this plainsman lawyer; and strangest of all to Franklin's mind was the feeling that, as his heart had not yet gained that which was its right, neither had his hand yet fallen upon that which it was to do.

Franklin rebelled from the technical side of the law, not so much by reason of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness, its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness. In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable, stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or a pack of wolves, and not as brethren labouring, suffering, performing a common destiny, yielding to a common fate. He saw in the law no actual recognition of the individual, but only the acknowledgment of the social body. Thus, set down in a day miraculously clear, placed among strong characters who had never yet yielded up their souls, witnessing that time which knew the last blaze of the spirit of men absolutely free. Franklin felt his own soul leap into a prayer for the continuance of that day. Seeing then that this might not be, he fell sometimes to the dreaming of how he might some day, if blessed by the pitying and understanding spirit of things, bring out these types, perpetuate these times, and so at last set them lovingly before a world which might at least wonder, though it did not understand. Such were his vague dreams, unformulated; but, happily, meantime he was not content merely to dream.



CHAPTER XX

THE HALFWAY HOUSE

"Miss Ma'y Ellen," cried Aunt Lucy, thrusting her head in at the door, "oh, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I wish't you'd come out yer right quick. They's two o' them prai' dogs out yer a-chasin' ouah hens agin—nasty, dirty things!"

"Very well, Lucy," called out a voice in answer. Mary Ellen arose from her seat near the window, whence she had been gazing out over the wide, flat prairie lands and at the blue, unwinking sky. Her step was free and strong, but had no hurry of anxiety. It was no new thing for these "prairie dogs," as Aunt Lucy persisted in calling the coyotes, to chase the chickens boldly up to the very door. These marauding wolves had at first terrified her, but in her life on the prairies she had learned to know them better. Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered game that had come in upon the range. With plenteous words of admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the preservation of the fowls of their "hen ranch." Once inside the protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.

"It's that same Domineck, isn't it, Lucy?" said Mary Ellen, leaning over the fence and gazing at the fowls.

"Yess'm, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul! She's mo' bother'n she's wuf. I 'clare, ever' time I takes them er' chickens out fer a walk that ole Sar' Ann hen, she boun' fer to go off by herse'f somewheres, she's that briggotty; an' first thing I knows, dar she is in trouble again—low down, no 'count thing, I say!"

"Poor old Sarah!" said Mary Ellen. "Why, Aunt Lucy, she's raised more chickens than any hen we've got."

"Thass all right, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too. We kin git two dollahs fer her cooked, an' seems like long's she's erlive she boun' fer ter keep me chasin' 'roun' after her. I 'clare, she jest keep the whole lot o' ouah chickens wore down to a frazzle, she traipsin 'roun' all the time, an' them a-follerin' her. Jess like some womenfolks. They gad 'roun' so much they kain't git no flesh ontoe 'em. An', of co'se," she added argumentatively, "we all got to keep up the reppytation o' ouah cookin'. I kain't ask these yer men a dollah a meal—not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones—no, ma'am."

Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to authority. The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the table was dependent upon the resources of this "hen ranch," whose fame was spread abroad throughout the land. Saved by the surpassing grace of pie and "chicken fixings," the halting place chosen for so slight reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for those who had established it. It was, after all, the financial genius of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.

At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping. His family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned in the same day. Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw, new country. At best he could get no product from the land for many months, and then but a problematical one. He was in a region where each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at hand to be done. It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay. Had Aunt Lucy asked the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid it gladly. Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the latter would have been laid down.

From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible. And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned, beweaponed, hungry men. At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an important cattle market, the hotel accommodations were more pretentious than comfortable, and many a cowman who had sat at the board of the Halfway House going up the trail, would mount his horse and ride back daily twenty-five miles for dinner. Such are the attractions of corn bread and chicken when prepared by the hands of a real genius gone astray on this much-miscooked world.

Many other guests were among those "locators," who came out to Ellisville and drove to the south in search of "claims." These usually travelled over the route of Sam, the stage-driver, who carried the mail to Plum Centre during its life, and who never failed to sound the praises of the Halfway House. Thus the little Southern family quickly found itself possessed of a definite, profitable, and growing business. Buford was soon able to employ aid in making his improvements. He constructed a large dugout, after the fashion of the dwelling most common in the country at that time, This manner of dwelling, practically a roofed-over cellar, its side-walls showing but a few feet above the level of the earth, had been discovered to be a very practical and comfortable form of living place by those settlers who found a region practically barren of timber, and as yet unsupplied with brick or boards. In addition to the main dugout there was a rude barn built of sods, and towering high above the squat buildings rose the frame of the first windmill on the cattle trail, a landmark for many miles. Seeing these things growing up about him, at the suggestion and partly through the aid of his widely scattered but kind-hearted neighbours, Major Buford began to take on heart of grace. He foresaw for his people an independence, rude and far below their former plane of life, it was true, yet infinitely better than a proud despair.

It was perhaps the women who suffered most in the transition from older lands to this new, wild region. The barren and monotonous prospect, the high-keyed air and the perpetual winds, thinned and wore out the fragile form of Mrs. Buford. This impetuous, nerve-wearing air was much different from the soft, warm winds of the flower-laden South. At night as she lay down to sleep she did not hear the tinkle of music nor the voice of night-singing birds, which in the scenes of her girlhood had been familiar sounds. The moan of the wind in the short, hard grass was different from its whisper in the peach trees, and the shrilling of the coyotes made but rude substitute for the trill of the love-bursting mocking bird that sang its myriad song far back in old Virginia.

Aunt Lucy's soliloquizing songs, when she ceased the hymns of her fervid Methodism, turned always to that far-off, gentle land where life had been so free from anxiety or care. Of Dixie, of the Potomac, of old Kentucky, of the "Mississip'," of the land of Tennessee—a score of songs of exile would flow unconscious from her lips, until at last, bethinking to herself, she would fall to weeping, covering her face with her apron and refusing to be comforted by any hand but that of Mary Ellen, the "young Miss Beecham," whose fortunes she had followed to the end of the world.

Sometimes at night Mrs. Buford and her niece sang together the songs of the old South, Mary Ellen furnishing accompaniment with her guitar. They sang together, here beneath the surface of this sweeping sea of land, out over which the red eye of their home looked wonderingly. And sometimes Mary Ellen sang to her guitar alone, too often songs which carried her back to a morbid, mental state, from which not even the high voice of this glad, new land could challenge her. Very far away to her seemed even the graves of Louisburg. Father, mother, brothers, lover, every kin of earth nearest to her, had not death claimed them all? What was there left, what was there to be hoped here, cast away on this sea of land, this country that could never be a land of homes? Sad doctrine, this, for a young woman in her early twenties, five feet five, with the peach on her cheek in spite of the burning wind, and hands that reached out for every little ailing chicken, for every kitten, or puppy that wanted comforting.

But when the morning came and the sun rose, and the blue sky smiled, and all the earth seemed to be vibrant with some high-keyed summoning note—how difficult then it was to be sad! How far away indeed seemed the once-familiar scenes! How hard it was not to hope, here in this land of self-reliance and belief! It was the horror of Mary Ellen's soul that when this sun shone she could not be sad. This land, this crude, forbidding, fascinating land—what was there about it that swept her along against her will?



CHAPTER XXI

THE ADVICE OF AUNT LUCY

One day Aunt Lucy, missing Quarterly Meeting, and eke bethinking herself of some of those aches and pains of body and forebodings of mind with which the negro is never unprovided, became mournful in her melody, and went to bed sighing and disconsolate. Mary Ellen heard her voice uplifted long and urgently, and suspecting the cause, at length went to her door.

"What is it, Aunt Lucy?" she asked kindly.

"Nothin', mam; I jess rasslin' wit ther throne o' Grace er l'il bit. I don't wan' to 'sturb you-all."

"We don't want to disturb you, either, Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen gently.

"Thass hit, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass hit! It ain't fitten fer a ole nigger 'ooman to be prayin' erroun' whah white folks is. You kain't seem to let out good an' free; 'n ef I kain't let out good an' free, 'pears like I don't git no hol' on salvation. We all po' weak sinners, Miss Ma'y Ellen."

"Yes, I know, Lucy."

"An' does you know, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I sorter gits skeered sometimes, out yer, fer fear mer supplercashuns ain't goin' take holt o' heaven jess right. White folks has one way er prayin', but er nigger kain't pray erlone—no, mam, jess kain't pray erlone."

"I thought you were doing pretty well, Lucy."

"Yass'm, pretty well, but not nothin' like hit useter be back in ole Vehginny, when 'bout er hunderd niggers git to prayin' all to onct. Thass whut goin' to fotch the powah on er suffrin' human soul—yes, ma'm!"

"Now, Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen sagely, "there isn't anything wrong with your soul at all. You're as good an old thing as ever breathed, I'm sure of that, and the Lord will reward you if he ever does any one, white or black."

"Does you think that, honey?"

"Indeed I do."

"Well, sometimes I thinks the Lord ain' goin' to fergive me fer all ther devilment I done when I was l'il. You know, Miss Ma'y Ellen, hit take a life er prayer to wipe out ouah transgresshuns. Now, how kin I pray, not to say pray, out yer, in this yer lan'? They ain't a chu'ch in a hunderd mile o' yer, so fer's I kin tell, an' they shoh'ly ain't no chu'ch fer cullud folks. Law me, Miss Ma'y Ellen, they ain't ary nother nigger out yer nowheres, an' you don' know how lonesome I does git! Seems to me like, ef I c'd jess know er sengle nigger, so'st we c'd meet onct in er while, an' so'st we c'd jess kneel down togetheh an' pray comfer'ble like, same's ef 'twus back in ole Vehginny—why, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I'd be the happiest ole 'ooman ever you did see. Mighty bad sort o' feelin', when a pusson ain't right shore 'bout they soul. An' when I has to pray erlone, I kain't never be right shore!"

Mary Ellen rose and went to her room, returning with her guitar. She seated herself upon the side of the bed near Aunt Lucy—an act which would have been impossible of belief back in old Virginia—and touched a few low chords. "Listen, Aunt Lucy," she said; "I will play and you may sing. That will make you feel better, I think."

It was only from a perfect understanding of the negro character that this proposal could come, and only a perfect dignity could carry it out with grace; yet there, beneath the floor of the wide prairie sea, these strange exercises were carried on, the low throbbing of the strings according with the quavering minors of the old-time hymns, until Aunt Lucy wiped her eyes and smiled.

"Thank yer. Miss Ma'y' Ellen," she said; "thank yer a thousand times. You shoh'ly does know how toe comfort folks mighty well, even a pore ole nigger. Law bless yer, honey, whut c'd I do without yer, me out yer all erlone? Seems like the Lord done gone 'way fur off, 'n I kain't fotch him noways; but when white folks like Miss Ma'y Ellen Beecham come set down right side o' me an' sing wif me, den I know ther Lord, he standin' by listenin'. Yas'm, he shoh'ly goin' to incline his eah!"

Women are women. There is no synonym. Women, white and white, black and black, or, if need be, white and black, have sympathies and understandings and revealings which they never carry to the opposite sex. It is likely that no man ever explored the last intricacy of that sweet and wondrous maze, a woman's heart; yet the woman who marries, and who has with her a husband, sets herself for the time outside the circle of all other husbandless women who may be about her. Thus it was that—without any loss of self-respect upon the one side, or any forgetfulness upon the other of that immovable line between black and white which had been part of the immemorial creed of both—Mary Ellen and Aunt Lucy, being companionless, sometimes drifted together in the way of things.

On the morning following Aunt Lucy's devotional exercises that good soul seemed to be altogether happy and contented, and without any doubts as to her future welfare. She busied herself with the preparation of the food for the chickens, meantime half unconsciously humming a song in reminiscent minor. "Custard pie—custard pie," she sang, softly, yet unctuously, as she stirred and mingled the materials before her; "custard pie—custard pie. Hope ter eat hit twell I die—twell I die."

Mary Ellen was out in the open air, bonnetless and all a-blow. It was a glorious, sunny day, the air charged with some essence of vital stimulus. Tall and shapely, radiant, not yet twenty-three years of age, and mistress of earth's best blessing, perfect health—how could Mary Ellen be sad? All the earth and sky, and the little twittering ground birds, and the bustling fowls, forbade it. The very stir of life was everywhere. She walked, but trod as steps the wild deer, lightly, with confidence, high-headed.

"Chick-chick-chick-chickee!" called Mary Ellen, bending over the fence of the chicken yard, and noting with pleasure the hurrying, clacking throng of fowls that answered and swarmed about her. "Chick, chick, chick!"

"I'll be thah t'reckly wif ther feed, Miss Ma'y Ellen," called out Aunt Lucy from the kitchen. And presently she emerged and joined her mistress at the corral.

"Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen, "do you suppose we could ever raise a garden?"

"Whut's dat, chile—raise er gyarden? Kain't raise no gyarden out yer, noways."

"I was just thinking may be we could have a garden, just a little one, next year."

"Hit don' never rain ernuf, chile, in this yer country."

"I know, but couldn't we use the water from the well? The windmill is always pumping it up, and it only runs to waste. I was thinking, if we had a few peas, or beans, or things like that, you know—"

"Uh-huh!"

"And do you suppose a rose bush would grow—a real rose bush, over by the side of the house?"

"Law, no, chile, whut you talkin' 'bout? Nothin' hain't goin' to grow yer, 'less'n hit's a little broom cohn, er some o' that alfalafew, er that soht er things. Few beans might, ef we wortered 'em. My lan!" with a sudden interest, as she grasped the thought, "whut could I git fer right fraish beans, real string beans, I does wondeh! Sakes, ef I c'd hev string beans an' apple pies, I shoh'ly c'd make er foh'tune, right quick. Why, they tellin' me, some folks over ontoe that ther Smoky River, las' fall, they gethered 'bout hate er peck o' sour green crabapples, an' they trade hate o' them ornery things off fer a beef critter—'deed they did. String beans—why, law, chile!"

"We'll have to think about this garden question some day," said Mary Ellen. She leaned against the corral post, looking out over the wide expanse of the prairie round about. "Are those our antelope out there, Lucy?" she asked, pointing out with care the few tiny objects, thin and knifelike, crowned with short black forking tips, which showed up against the sky line on a distant ridge. "I think they must be. I haven't noticed them for quite a while."

"Yass'm," said Aunt Lucy, after a judicial look. "Them blame l'il goats. Thass um. I wish't they all wuzn't so mighty peart an' knowin' all ther time, so'st Majah Buford he c'd git one o' them now an' then fer to eat. Antelope tennerline is shoh'ly mighty fine, briled. Now, ef we jess had a few sweet 'taters. But, law! whut am I sayin'?"

"Yes," said Mary Ellen practically. "We haven't the antelope yet."

"I 'member mighty well how Cap'n Franklin sent us down er quarter o' an'lope," said Aunt Lucy. "Mighty fine meat, hit wuz. An' to think, me a brilin' a piece o' hit fer a low-down white trash cow-driver whut come yer to eat! Him a-sayin' he'd ruther hev chicken, cause he wuz raised on an'lope! Whut kin' o' talk wuz thet? He talk like an'lope mighty common. Takes Cap'n Franklin toe git ole Mr. An'lope, though.

"Er—Miss Ma'y Ellen," began Aunt Lucy presently, and apparently with a certain reservation.

"Yes?"

Aunt Lucy came over and sat down upon a sod heap, resting her chin upon her hand and looking fixedly at the girl, who still stood leaning against the post.

"Er—Miss Ma'y Ellen—" she began again.

"Yes. What is it, Lucy?"

"Does you know—?"

"Do I know what?"

"Does you know who's jess erbout ther fines' and likelies' man whut lives in all these yer pahts erroun' yer?"

Mary Ellen stopped tossing bits of bread to the chickens. "No, Aunt Lucy," she said. "I hadn't thought about that."

"Yes, you has!" cried Aunt Lucy, rising and shaking a bodeful forefinger. "Yes you has, an' yes you does! An' you don' 'preshuate him, thass whut. Him a wushshippin' you!"

Mary Ellen began tossing bread again. "How do you know that?" she asked.

"How does I know?—law me, jes listen to thet chile! How does I know? Ain' he done tole me, an' yo' an' Lizzie, an' Majah Buford—an' you? Ain' he done tole you a dozen times? Don' everybody know hit? Him ez fine er man you goin' toe see right soon, I tell you. Tall ez yo' fatheh wuz, an' strong ez er li'ne. He kin git ole Mr. An'lope. He kin ride ary beastis in this yer onery country. An' him a-wukkin' for ther railroad, an' a lawyeh, an' all that. He's shoh' boun' toe be rich, one o' these yer days. An' he's a gemman, too, mo'oveh; he's a gemman! Reckon I knows quality! Yas, sir, Cap'n Franklin, she shoh'ly am the bestes' man fer a real lady to choosen—bestes' in all this yer lan'. Uh-huh!"

"I never thought of him—not in that way," said Mary Ellen, not quite able to put an end to this conversation.

"Miss Ma'y Ellen," said Aunt Lucy solemnly, "I'se wukked fer you an' yo' fam'ly all my life, an' I hates to say ary woh'd what ain't fitten. But I gotto to tell you, you ain' tellin' the trufe to me, toe yo' old black mammy, right now. I tells you, an' I knows it, tha' hain't nary gal on earth ever done look at no man, I don't care who he wuz, 'thout thinkin' 'bout him, an' 'cidin' in her min', one way er otheh whetheh she like fer to mah'y that ther man er not! If er 'ooman say she do different f'om thet, she shoh'ly fergettin' o' the trufe, thass all! Ain' thought o' him! Go 'long!" Aunt Lucy wiped her hand upon her apron violently in the vehemence of her incredulity.

Mary Ellen's face sobered with a trace of the old melancholy.

"Aunt Lucy," she said, "you mean kindly, I am sure, but you must not talk to me of these things. Don't you remember the old days back home? Can you forget Master Henry, Aunt Lucy—can you forget the days—those days—?"

Aunt Lucy rose and went over to Mary Ellen and took her hand between her own great black ones. "No, I doesn't fergit nothin', Miss Ma'y Ellen," she said, wiping the girl's eyes as though she were still a baby. "I doesn't fergit Mas' Henry, Gord bless him! I doesn't fergit him any mo'n you does. How kin I, when I done loved him much ez I did you? Wuzn't I goin' to come 'long an' live wif you two, an' take keer o' you, same's I did to the old place? I was a-lookin' to ther time when you an' Mas' Henry wuz a-goin' ter be mah'ied. But now listen toe yo' ole black mammy, whut knows a heap mo'n you does, an' who is a-talkin' toe you because you ain't got no real mammy o' yer own no mo'. You listen toe me. Now, I done had fo' husban's, me. Two o' them done died, an' one distapeart in the wah, an' one he turn out no 'count. Now, you s'pose I kain't love no otheh man?"

Mary Ellen could not restrain a smile, but it did not impinge upon the earnestness of the other.

"Yas'm, Miss Ma'y Ellen," she continued, again taking the girl's face between her hands. "Gord, he say, it hain't good fer man toe be erlone. An' Gord knows, speshul in er lan' like this yer, hit's a heap mo' fitten fer a man toe be erlone then fer a 'ooman. Some wimmen-folks, they's made fer grievin', all ther time, fer frettin', an' worr'in', an' er-mopin' 'roun'. Then, agin, some is made fer lovin'—I don' say fer lovin' mo'n one man to er time; fer ther ain't no good 'ooman ever did thet. But some is made fer lovin'. They sech er heap o' no 'count folks in ther worl', hit do seem like a shame when one o' them sort don' love nobody, an' won't let nobody love them!"

Mary Ellen was silent. She could not quite say the word to stop the old servant's garrulity, and the latter went on.

"Whut I does say, Miss Ma'y Ellen," she resumed, earnestly looking into the girl's face as though to carry conviction with her speech—"whut I does say, an' I says hit fer yo' own good, is this; Mas' Henry, he's daid! He's daid an' buh'ied, an' flowehs growin' oveh his grave, yeahs 'n yeahs. An' you never wuz mahied toe him. An' you wan't nothin' but a gal. Chile, you don't know nothin' 'bout lovin' yit. Now, I says toe you, whut's ther use? Thass hit, Miss Ma'y Ellen, whut's ther use?"



CHAPTER XXII

EN VOYAGE

"I wish, Sam," said Franklin one morning as he stopped at the door of the livery barn—"I wish that you would get me up a good team. I'm thinking of driving over south a little way to-day."

"All right, Cap," said Sam. "I reckon we can fix you up. How far you goin'?"

"Well, about twenty-five or thirty miles, perhaps."

"Which will bring you," said Sam meditatively, "just about to the Halfway House. Seein' it's about there you'll be stopping I reckon I better give you my new buggy. I sort of keep it, you know, for special 'casions."

Franklin was too much absorbed to really comprehend this delicate attention, even when Sam rolled out the carriage of state, lovingly dusting off the spokes and with ostentation spreading out the new lap robe. But finally he became conscious of Sam, standing with one foot on the hub of a wheel, chewing a straw, and with a certain mental perturbation manifest in his countenance.

"Cap," said he, "I know just how you feel."

"What's that?" said Franklin.

"Well, I mean, I allow me and you is pretty much in the same boat."

"Eh?" said Franklin, puzzled.

"Why, both us fellers is fixed about the same."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand you."

"Well, now, er—that is, you know, we both got a girl, you know—I mean, we each has a girl—"

Franklin's face was not inviting, which fact Sam noticed, hastening with his apology.

"Oh, no offence, Cap," said he hurriedly, "but I was just a-thinkin'. You know that Nory girl over to the hotel. Well, now, I'm gone on that girl, the worst sort o' way. Honest, Cap, I ain't happy. I used ter eat an' sleep 'thout no sort of trouble, but now I'm all used up. I ain't right. An' it's Nory."

"Why don't you marry her?" asked Franklin calmly.

Sam gasped. "I—I—that's it, that's just it! I—can't ast her!" he said, with despair and conviction in his voice. "I've tried, and I can't say a word to her about it, nothin' more than mebbe to ast her to pass me the butter. She don't seem to understand."

"Well, what do you expect? Do you think she is going to ask you about it herself?"

"My God, Cap, I don't know! I ever she did, I know mighty well what I'd say. But she won't, and I can't. And there we are. I lose my nerve every time I try to speak to her. Now, I say this to you, man to man, you know, and no one the wiser; I can talk to anybody else about this, to anybody but just Nory. Now, you've been goin' down to this here Halfway House a-plenty for a long time, and I don't know as you seem much furder along 'an I am. So I allowed maybe you was hooked up a good deal the way I be. You go down there, an' set down and eat, an' you set around like, but can't seem to make no break—you don't dast to say what you want to say. Is that so?"

Franklin flushed, his first impulse being of distinct displeasure; yet he recognised the perfect good faith of the other's remarks and turned away without reply.

"An' what I was goin' to say," continued Sam, following after him, "is like this. Now, you ain't afraid of Nory, an' I ain't afraid of Miss Beecham. Turn about's fair play. I'll speak to Miss Beecham for you, if you'll just sort o' lay this here before Nory for me. You needn't say much, understand! If I ever onct get started, you know, I'll be all right. I could tell her all about it then, easy enough. Now, say, Cap, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Is it a go?"

Franklin could not keep back a smile. "Well, in regard to my half of it," he said, "I can neither affirm nor deny it. But if what you say were true, don't you think you might find it pretty hard to talk to Miss Beauchamp on this matter?"

"Not in a hundred!" said Sam eagerly. "I'd just as soon talk to Miss Beecham as not. I'd ruther. They ain't no feller around here that I think's any whiter than you be. An' Lord knows, that girl down there is handsome as ever looked through a bridle, and kind as she is handsome. I've seen her now, reg'lar, in my trips down there for quite a while, an' I promise you, she's a thoroughbred, an' high strung, but as even gaited as ever stepped. Yes, sir!"

"She is all that, I think, Sam," said Franklin soberly.

"Then it's a go, Cap?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Sam," said Franklin kindly, "maybe we'd better let it run along a little while as it is. You know, girls have odd notions of their own. Perhaps a girl would rather have a man speak for himself about that sort of thing. And then, the asking sometimes is the easiest part of it."

"Then you'll ast Nory for me?"

"Well, if I could say a word, just a hint, you know—"

"You won't!" exclaimed Sam bitterly, and in tones; of conviction. "You won't! There ain't nobody won't! I've tried, an' there won't nobody! There'll be some d——d cow-puncher blow in there some day and marry that Nory girl, an' I never will git to tell her the way I feel."

"Oh, yes, you will," said Franklin. "It'll come to you some time; and when it does, friend," he added gravely, laying a hand upon Sam's shoulder, "I hope she'll not say no to you forever."

"Forever, Cap?"

"Yes, it sometimes happens that way."

"Forever? Well, if Nory ever said no to me onct, that shore would settle it. I know what I'd do: I'd sell out my barn an' I'd hit the trail mighty quick. Do they ever do that way, Cap?"

"Yes," said Franklin, "they tell me that they sometimes do. They're strange creatures, Sam."

"An' that's no lie!" said Sam. "But here, I'm forgettin' of your span."

He disappeared within the barn, whence presently arose sounds of tumult. The "span" emerged with one half of its constituent parts walking on its hind legs and lashing out viciously in front.

"Well, I don't know about that black," said Franklin critically. "He's a bit bronco, isn't he?"

"What, him?" said Sam. "Naw, he's all right. You don't suppose I'd run in any wild stock on you, do you? He's been hitched up sever'l times, an' he's plumb gentle. May rare up a little at first, but he's all right. Of course, you want to have a little style about you, goin' down there."

Franklin got into the buggy, while Sam held the head of the "plumb gentle" horse. When cast loose the latter reared again and came down with his fore feet over the neck yoke. Nimbly recovering, he made a gallant attempt to kick in the dashboard. This stirred up his mate to a thought of former days, and the two went away pawing and plunging. "So long!" cried Sam, waving his hand. "Good luck!"

Franklin was for a time busy in keeping his team upon the trail, but soon they settled down into a steady, shuffling trot, to which they held for mile after mile over the hard prairie road. The day was bright and clear, the air sweet and bracing. An hour's drive from the town, and the traveller seemed in a virgin world. A curious coyote sat on a hill, regarding intently the spectacle of a man travelling with wheels beneath him, instead of the legs of a horse. A band of antelope lined up on the crest of a ridge and stood staring steadfastly. A gray-winged hawk swept wide and easily along the surface of the earth on its morning hunting trip. Near by the trail hundreds of cheerful prairie dogs barked and jerked their ceaseless salutation. An ancient and untroubled scheme of life lay all around him, appealing in its freshness and its charm. Why should a man, a tall and strong man, with health upon his cheek, sit here with brooding and downcast eye, heedless of the miles slipping behind him like a ribbon spun beneath the wheels?

Franklin was learning how fast bound are all the ways of life to the one old changeless way. This new land, which he and his fellow-men coveted, why was it so desired? Only that over it, as over all the world behind it, there might be builded homes. For, as he reflected, the adventurers of the earth had always been also the home-builders; and there followed for him the bitter personal corollary that all his adventure was come to naught if there could be no home as its ultimate reward. His vague eye swam over the wide, gray sea about him, and to himself he seemed adrift, unanchored and with no chart of life.



CHAPTER XXIII

MARY ELLEN

Lifting and shimmering mysteriously in the midday sun, as though tantalizing any chance traveller of that wide land with a prospect alluring, yet impossible, the buildings of the Halfway station now loomed large and dark, now sank until they seemed a few broken dots and dashes just visible upon the wide gray plain. Yet soon the tall frame of the windmill showed high above the earth, most notable landmark for many a mile, and finally the ragged arms of the corral posts appeared definitely, and then the low peak of the roof of the main building. For miles these seemed to grow no closer, but the steady trot of the little horses ate up the distance, and Franklin found himself again at the spot with which he was already so well acquainted that every detail, every low building and gnarled bit of wood, was tabulated surely in his mind. The creak of the windmill presently came to his ears as a familiar sound, but rasping and irritating on his strong nerves as the croak of the elder Fate.