The dog, a mongrel, liver-spotted cur with hound's ears, chose to be of this companionship, and he was always waiting at the orchard gate when Tom fared forth. For the unsympathetic analyst of dog motives there will be sufficient reason in expectation, since Tom never failed to share his noon-time snack of bread and meat with Caesar. Yet Deer Trace set a good table, and there were bones with meat on them to be had without following a gunsman who never shot anything, miles on end on the mountain side.

Then there were children,—a brood of dusty-haired, barelegged shynesses at a mountaineer's cabin in a cove far beyond the rock of the shadowing cedars, where Tom sometimes stopped to beg a drink of water from the cold spring under the dooryard oaks. They were not afraid of the strong-limbed, duck-clad stranger, whose manner was the manner of the town folk, but whose speech was the gentle drawl of the mountain motherland. Once he had eaten with them in the single room of the tumble-down cabin; and again he had made a grape-vine swing for the boys, and had ridden the littlest girl on his shoulder up to the steep-pitched corn patch where her father was plowing. We may bear this in mind, since it has been said that there is hope still for the man of whom children and dogs have no fear.

In these forest-roaming weeks, business, or the carking thought of it, seemed furthest from him; it is within belief that he heard the news of the rapidly succeeding tragedies at Gordonia only through the dinner-table monologues of his father, since his wanderings never by any chance took him within eye-or ear-shot of them.

Caleb's ailment based itself chiefly on broken habit and the lack of something to do, and in a manner the trouble at Gordonia was a tonic. What a man beloved of his kind, and loving it, could do toward damping the fierce fires of passion and hatred and lawlessness alight at the lower end of Paradise, he was doing daily, going where the armed guards and the sheriff's deputies dared not go, and striving manfully to do his duty as he saw it.

Tom was always a silent listener at the dinner-table recountings of the day's happenings; attentive, but only filially interested: willing to encourage his father to talk, but never commenting.

Why he was so indifferent, so little stirred by the tale of the tragedies, was the most perplexing of the puzzles he presented, and was always presenting, to Caleb, the simple-hearted. Thomas Jefferson, the small boy who had threatened to die if he should not be permitted to be in and of the struggle with the railway invaders, was completely and hopelessly lost in this quiet-eyed, reticent young athlete who ate heartily and slept soundly and went afield with his gun and the borrowed dog while Rome was burning. So said Caleb in his musings; which proves nothing more than that a father's sense of perspective may not be quite perfect.

But Tom's indifference was only apparent. In reality he was eagerly absorbing his father's daily report of the progress of the game of extinction—and triumphing hard-heartedly.

It was on an evening a fortnight after the furnace had gone out of blast for lack of fuel that Caleb filled his after-dinner pipe and followed his son out on the veranda. The Indian summer was still at its best, and since the first early frosts there had been a return of dry weather and mild temperatures, with warm, soft nights when the blue haze seemed to hold all objects in suspension.

Tom had pushed out a chair for his father and was lighting his own pipe when he suddenly became aware that the still air was once more thrumming and murmuring to the familiar sob and sigh of the great furnace blowing-engines. He started up quickly.

"What's that?" he demanded. "Surely they haven't blown in again?"

Caleb nodded assent.

"I reckon so. Colonel Duxbury allowed to me this mornin' that he was about out o' the woods—in spite of you, he said; as if you'd been the one that was doin' him up."

"But he can't be!" exclaimed Tom, so earnestly and definitely that the mask fell away and the father was no longer deceived.

"I'm only tellin' you what he allowed to me, son. I reckoned he was about all in, quite a spell ago; but you can't tell nothing by what you see—when it's Colonel Duxbury. He got two car-loads o' new men to-day, the Lord on'y knows where from; and he's shippin' Pocahontas coke, and gettin' it here, too."

Tom sat glooming over it for a time, shrouding himself in tobacco smoke. Then he said:

"You feazed me a little at first; but I think I know now what has happened."

Caleb took time to let the remark sink in. It carried inferences.

"Buddy, I been suspectin' for a good while back that you know more about this sudden smash-up than you've let on. Do you?"

"I know all about it," was the quiet rejoinder.

"You do? What on top o' God's green earth—"

Tom held up his hand for silence. A man had let himself in at the roadway gate and was walking rapidly up the path to the house. It was Norman; and after a few hurried words in private with Tom, he went as he had come, declining Caleb's invitation to stay and smoke a pipe on the veranda.

When the gate latch clicked at Norman's outgoing, Tom had risen and was knocking the ash from his pipe and buttoning his coat.

"I was admitting that I knew," he said. "I can tell you more now than I could a moment ago, because the time for which I have been waiting has come. You remarked that you thought the Farleys were at the end of their rope. They were not until to-day, but to-day they are. Every piece of property they have, including Warwick Lodge, is mortgaged to the hilt, and this afternoon Colonel Duxbury put his Chiawassee stock into Henniker's hands as security for a final loan—so Norman tells me. Perhaps it would interest you a trifle to know something about the figure at which Henniker accepted it."

"It would, for a fact, Buddy."

"Well, he took it for less than the annual dividend that it earned the year we ran the plant; and between us two, he's scared to death, at that."

"Heavens and earth! Why, Buddy, son! we're plum' ruined—and so's old Major Dabney!"

Tom had finished buttoning his coat and was settling his soft hat on his head.

"Don't you worry, pappy," he said, with a touch of the old boyish assurance. "Our part, since Colonel Duxbury saw fit to freeze us out, is to say nothing and saw wood. If the Major comes to you, you can tell him that my word to him holds good: he can have par for Ardea's stock any time he wants it, and he could have it just the same if Chiawassee were wiped off of the map—as it's going to be."

"But Tom; tell me—"

"Not yet, pappy; be patient just a little while longer and you shall know all there is to tell. I'm leaving you with a clear conscience to say to any one who asks that you don't know."

Caleb had struggled up out of his chair, and now he laid a hand on his son's shoulder.

"I ain't askin', Buddy," he said, with a tremulous quaver in his voice; "I ain't askin' a livin' thing. I'm just a-hopin'—hopin' I'll wake up bime-by and find it's on'y a bad dream." Then, with sudden and agonizing emphasis: "My God, son! they been butcherin' one 'nother down yonder for four long weeks!"

"I can't help that!" was the savage response. "It's a battle to the death, and the smoke of it has got into my blood. If I believed in God, as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical thieves,—thugs,—sandbaggers,—hit the bottom!"

He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and presently came back.

"I said you should know after a little: you may as well know now. I planned this thing; I set out to break them; and, as it happened, I wasn't a moment too soon. In another week you and Major Dabney would have had a chance to sell out for little or nothing, or lose it all. Farley had it fixed to be swallowed by the trust, and this is how it was to be done. Farley stipulated that the stock transaction should figure as a forced sale at next to nothing, in which all the stock-holders should participate, and that the remainder of the purchase price, which would have been a fair figure for all the stock, should be paid to him and his son individually as a bonus!"

The old iron-master groaned. In spite of the hard teaching of all the years, he would have clung to some poor shadow of belief in Duxbury Farley if he could have done so.

"That's all," Tom went on stridently: "all but the turning of the trick that put them in the hole they were digging for you and the Major. Vint Farley had no notion of letting Ardea bring her money into the family of her own free will: he planned to rob her first and marry her afterward. Now, by God, I'm going down to tell them both what they're up against! Don't sit up for me."

He had taken a dozen strides down the graveled path when he saw some one coming hurriedly across the lawns from Deer Trace, and heard a voice—the voice of the woman he loved—calling to him softly in the stillness:

"Tom! O Tom!" it said, "please wait—just one minute!"

But there are lusts mightier, momentarily, than love, and the lust of vengeance is one. He made as if he did not see or hear; and lest she should overtake him, left the path to lose himself among the trees and to vault the low boundary wall into the pike at a point safely out of sight from the gate.



XXXV

A SOUL IN SHACKLES

The blue autumn night haze had almost the consistency of a cloud when Gordon leaped the wall and set his face toward the iron-works. Or rather it was like the depths of a translucent sea in which the distant electric lights of Mountain View Avenue shone as blurs of phosphorescent life on one hand, and the great dark bulk of Lebanon loomed as the massive foundations of a shadowy island on the other.

Farther on, the recurring flare from the tall vent of the blast-furnace lighted the haze depths weirdly, turning the mysterious sea bottom into fathomless abysses of dull-red incandescence for the few seconds of its duration—a slow lightning flash submerged and half extinguished.

Gordon was passing the country colony's church when one of the torch-like flares reddened on the night, and the glow picked out the gilt cross at the top of the sham Norman tower. He flung up a hand involuntarily, as if to put the emblem, and that for which it stood, out of his life. At the same instant a whiff of the acrid smoke from the distant furnace fires tingled in his nostrils, and he quickened his pace. The hour for which all other hours had been waiting had struck. Love had called, and religion had made its silent protest; but the smell in his nostrils was the smoky breath of Mammon, the breath which has maddened a world: he strode on doggedly, thinking only of his triumph and how he should presently compass it.

The two great poplar-trees, sentineling what had once been the gate of the old Gordon homestead, had been spared through all the industrial changes. When he would have opened the wicket to pass on to the log-house offices, an armed man stepped from behind one of the trees with an oath in his mouth and his gun-butt drawn up to strike. Before the blow could fall, the furnace flare blazed aloft like a mighty torch, and the man grounded his weapon.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gordon; I—I took ye for somebody else," he stammered; and Tom scanned his face sharply by the light of the burning gases.

"Whom?—for instance," he queried.

"Why-e-yeh—I reckon it don't make any diff'rence—my tellin' you; you'd ought to have it in for him, too. I was layin' for that houn'-dog 'at walks on his hind legs and calls hisself Vint Farley."

"Who are you?" Tom demanded.

"Kincaid's my name, and I'm s'posed to be one o' the strike guards; leastwise, that's what I hired out for a little spell ago. I couldn't think of nare' a better way o' gettin' at the damned—"

Gordon interrupted bruskly. "Cut out the curses and tell me what you owe Vint Farley. If your debt is bigger than mine, you shall have the first chance."

The gas-flash came again. There was black wrath in the man's eyes.

"You can tote it up for yourself, Tom-Jeff Gordon. Late yeste'day evening when me and Nan Bryerson drove to town for your Uncle Silas to marry us, she told me what I'd been mistrustin' for a month back—that Vint Farley was the daddy o' her chillern. He's done might' nigh ever'thing short o' killin' her to make her swear 'em on to you; and I allowed I'd jest put off goin' back West till I'd fixed his lyin' face so 'at no yuther woman'd ever look at it."

Gordon staggered and leaned against the fence palings, the red rage of murder boiling in his veins. Here, at last, was the key to all the mysteries; the source of all the cruel gossip; the foundation of the wall of separation that had been built up between his love and Ardea. When he could trust himself to speak he asked a question.

"Who knows this, besides yourself?"

"Your Uncle Silas, for one: he allowed he wouldn't marry us less'n she told him. I might' nigh b'lieve he had his suspicions, too. He let on like it was Farley that told him on you, years ago, when you was a boy."

"He did? Then Farley was one of the three men who saw us up yonder at the barrel-spring?"

"Yes; and I was another one of 'em. I was right hot at you that mornin'; I shore was."

"Well, who else knows about it?"

"Brother Bill Layne, and Aunt M'randy, and Japhe Pettigrass. They-all went in town to stan' up with me and Nan."

Then Tom remembered the figure coming swiftly across the lawns and the call of the voice he loved. Had Japheth told her, and was she hastening to make such reparation as she could? No matter, it was too late now. The fierce hatred of the wounded savage was astir in his heart and it would not be denied or silenced.

"Give me that gun, and you shall have your first chance," he conceded. "I make but one condition: if you kill him, I'll kill you."

Kincaid laughed and gave up his weapon.

"I was only allowin' to sp'ile his face some, and a rock'll do for that. You can have what's left o' him atter I get thoo—and it'll be enough to kill, I reckon."

At the moment of weapon-passing there came sounds audible above the sob and sigh of the blowing-engines—a clatter of horses' hoofs and the grinding of carriage wheels on the pike. Gordon signed quickly to Kincaid and drew back carefully behind the bole of the opposite poplar.

It was the Warwick Lodge surrey, and it stopped at the gate. Two men got out and went up the path, and an instant later, Kincaid followed stealthily.

Gordon waited for the next gas-flare, and by the light of it he threw the breech-block of the repeating rifle to make sure the cartridge was in place. Then he, too, passed through the wicket and went to stand in the shadow of the slab-floored porch, redolent of memories. He had forgotten the lesser vengeance in the thirst for the greater,—that he had come to fling their misfortunes into the faces of the father and the son, and to tell them that the work was his. He heard only the voice of the savage in his heart, and that was whispering "Kill! kill!"

* * * * *

It was close on midnight when the door giving on the porch opened and two men stood on the threshold. The younger of the two was speaking.

"It's quieter than usual to-night. That was a good move—getting Ludlow and the two Helgersons jailed. I was in hopes we could snaffle old Caleb with the others. He pretends to be peacemaking, but as long as he is loose, these fools will hang to the idea that they're fighting his battle against us."

"It is already fought," said the older man dejectedly. "My luck has gone. When Henniker puts us to the wall, we shall be beggars."

The young man's rejoinder was an exclamation of contempt.

"You've lost your nerve. What you need most is to go to bed and sleep. Wait for me till I've made a round of the guards, and we'll go home. Better ring up the surrey right now."

He left the porch on the side nearest the furnace, and Gordon saw an active figure glide from the shelter of a flask-shed and go in pursuit. He followed at a distance. It was needful only that he should know where to find Farley when Kincaid should have squared his account.

The leisurely chase led the round of the great gates first, and thence through the deserted and ruined coke yard to the foot of the huge slag dump, cold now from the long shut-down.

Tom looked to see Farley turn back from the toe of the dump. There were no gates on that side of the yard, and consequently no guards.

But the short cut to the office was up the slope of the dump and along the railway track over which the drawings of molten slag were run out to be spilled down the face of the declivity. There had been no slag-drawing since the new "blow-in" earlier in the day; but while he was watching to keep Farley in sight in the intervals between the gas-flares, Gordon was conscious of the note of preparation behind him: the slackening of the blast, the rattle and clank of the dinkey locomotive pushing the dumping ladle into place under the furnace lip.

Farley had taken two or three scrambling steps up the rough-seamed declivity when the workmen tapped the furnace. There was a sputtering roar and the air was filled with coruscating sparks.

Then the stream of molten matter began to pour into the great ladle, a huge eight-foot pot swung on tilting trunnions and mounted on a skeleton flat-car; and for Gordon, standing at the corner of the ore shed with his back to the slag drawers, the red glow picked out the man scrambling up the miniature mountain of cooled scoria,—this man and another man running swiftly to overtake him.

He looked on coldly until he saw Kincaid head off the retreat and face his adversary. Instantly there was a spurt of fire from a pistol in Farley's right hand, a brief flash with the report swallowed up in the roar from the furnace lip. Then the two men closed and rolled together to the bottom of the slope, and Gordon turned his back.

When he looked again the trampling note of the big blast-engines had quickened to its normal beat, the blow-hole was plugged with its stopper of damp clay, and a red twilight born of the reflection from the surface of the great pot of seething slag had succeeded to the blinding glare. Where there had been two men locked in struggle there was now only one, and he was lying quietly with one leg doubled under him. Gordon set his teeth on an angry oath of disappointment. Had Kincaid broken his compact?

The first long-drawn exhaust of the dinkey engine moving the slag kettle out to its spilling place ripped the silence. Gordon heard—and he did not hear: he was watching the prone figure at the dump's toe. When it should rise, he meant to fire from where he stood under the eaves of the ore-shed. The murder-thought contemplated nothing picturesque or dramatic. It was merely the dry thirst for the blood of a mortal enemy, as it is wont to be off the stage or out of the pages of the romancers.

The puffing locomotive had pushed the slag-pot car half-way to the track-end before Farley sat up as one dazed and seemed to be trying to get on his feet. Twice and once again he essayed it, falling back each time upon the bent and doubled leg. Then he looked up and saw the slag-car coming; saw and cried out as men scream in the death agony. The end rails of the dumping track were fairly above him.

Gordon heard the yell of terror and witnessed the frenzied efforts of the doomed man to rise and get out of the path of the impending torrent. Whereupon the murder devil whispered in his ear again. Farley's foot was caught in one of the many scars or seams in the lava bed. It was only necessary to wait, to withhold the merciful bullet, to go away and leave the wretched man to his fate.

That fate was certain, lacking a miracle to avert it. There were no workmen in that part of the yard; and the two men in charge of the slag kettle were on the opposite side of the engine where the dumping mechanism was connected. Farley was screaming again, but now the safety-valve of the locomotive was blowing off steam with a din to drown all.

Gordon tossed the gun aside and turned away. It was better so. Possibly at the climaxing instant he might have lacked the firmness to aim and press the trigger. This was simpler, easier, more in keeping with Vincent Farley's deserts; more satisfying to the thirst for vengeance.

Was it? Like a bolt from the heavens, into the very midst of the cold-blooded, murderous triumph, came a long-neglected form of words, writing itself in flaming letters in his brain: Thou shall do no murder. And after it another: But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.

He put his hands before his eyes, stumbled blindly and fell down, groveling in the yellow sand of the ore floor, as that one of old whom the possessing devils tore and rended. Hell and the furies!—was this to be the end of it? Did the old, time-worn fables planted in the lush and mellow soil of childhood wait only for the moment of superhuman trial to assert themselves truth of the very truth? God in Heaven! must he be flogged back into the ranks he had deserted when every drop of blood in his veins was crying out for shame?

Something gripped him and stood him on his feet, and before he realized what he was doing he was running, gasping, tripping and falling headlong, only to spring up and run again, with all thoughts trampled out and beaten down by one: would he still be in time?

There was something wrong with the dumping machinery of the slag-car, and two men were working with it on the side away from the spilling slope. Gordon had not breath wherewith to shout; moreover the safety-valve was still screeching to gulf all human cries. Farley was lying face down and motionless, with the twisted foot still held fast in a wedge-shaped crack in the cooled slag. Tom bent and lifted him; yelled, swore, tugged, strained, kicked fiercely at the imprisoned shoe-heel. Still the vise-grip held, and the great kettle on the height above was creaking and slowly careening under the winching of the engine crew. If the molten torrent should plunge down the slope now, there would be two human cinders instead of one.

Suddenly the frenzy, so alien to the Gordon blood, spent itself, leaving him cool and determined. Quite methodically he found his pocket-knife, and he remembered afterward that he had been collected enough to choose and open the sharper of the two blades. There was a quick, sure slash at the shoe-lacing and the crippled foot was freed. With another yell, this time of glad triumph, he snatched up his burden and backed away with it in the tilting half-second when the deluge of slag, firing the very air with shriveling heat, was pouring down the slope.

Then he fell in a heap, with Farley under him, and fainted as a woman might—when the thing was done.



XXXVI

FREE AMONG THE DEAD

The skirmish-line rivulets of melted slag had crept to within a few feet of the two at the toe of the dump when the men of the engine crew ran with water to drench them.

Tom recovered consciousness under the dashing of the water, and was one of the bearers who carried Vincent Farley on a hastily improvised stretcher to the surrey waiting at the office gate.

Afterward, he went for Doctor Williams, deriding himself Homerically for playing the second act in the drama of the Good Samaritan, but playing it, none the less. And not to quit before he was quite through, he drove with the physician to Warwick Lodge, and sat in the buggy till the other Good Samaritan had performed his office.

"Nothing very serious, is it, Doctor?" he asked, when the old physician took the reins to drive his horse-holder home.

"H'm; he'll be rather badly scarred, and there is a chance that he will lose the sight of one eye," was the reply. Then: "It's none of my quarrel, Tom, but you hammered him pretty cruelly—with a stone, too, I should say."

"Did I?" grinned Tom. He was willing to bear the blame until Kincaid should have ample time to disappear.

"Yes; and with all due allowance for your provocation, it was a good bit beneath you, my boy."

The younger man laughed grimly. "Wait till you know the full size of the provocation, Doctor. I'm not half as bad as I might be. Another man would have left him to burn—here and hereafter."

The doctor said no more. It was not his province to make or meddle in the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was silent, having many things to render him reflective.

When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.

What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!—with the love of a woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her loyalty.

That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. Tom decided that not even Ardea's pride and fortitude could face the looks askance of the Mountain View Avenue folk.

He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him. Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the Farley sins would become too multitudinous for the broadest mantle of charity to cover.

"Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe. "They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O Lord!"—rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms overhead,—"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to write a book and call it Saints Inveterate. It would have simplified things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all."

* * * * *

Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down of all the industries at Gordonia.

Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct, the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.

"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged, with Mr. Farley's consent to our anticipating the maturity of his notes. But"—with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-glasses—"I'm not sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold it and bid it in."

Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's.

"I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct."

"Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've kept this mighty quiet, among you!"

"Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel—like a man who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?"

But the president was already pressing the button of the electric bell that summoned the cashier. There was no time like the present when the fate of a considerable bank asset hung on the notion of a smiling young man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye.

With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one.

When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of '93. With this check in his pocket he went home—for the first time in two weeks.

It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace. No word had passed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,—counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance.

How would she receive him? Not too coldly, he hoped. It was known that Vincent's assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard: also that Mr. Gordon—they gave him his courtesy title now—had saved Vincent from a terrible death. Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea.

It did. She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday:

"O Tom! I knew you had it in you! It was fine!"

"Hold on," he said, a bit unsteadily. "There must be no more misunderstandings. What happened that night three weeks ago, had to happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him. And I fully meant to do it."

She shuddered.

"I—I was afraid," she faltered. "I knew, you know—Japheth had told me, in—in justice to you. That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you."

The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going. Another word and he would be trespassing again. To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major's peculiar possession in the music-room.

After a little he said: "Play something, won't you?—something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn't kill him."

"The idea!" she said. But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him. When the final chord of the Wanderlied had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.

"I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?—to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers? The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know."

"Of course I care," she assented.

"Well, to begin with, I'm no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you've been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked. I've hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven't scrupled to sink to their level. The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I'm responsible for everything that has happened."

"I know it," she said. "Mr. Norman has told me."

"Looking it all over, I don't see that there is much to choose between me and the men I've been hunting down. They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the—on the night when you called to me and I wouldn't answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there. I met a man at the gate who told me what Japheth told you. It made a devil of me, Ardea. I took the man's gun and followed Vincent around the yard. I meant to kill him."

She nodded complete intelligence.

"The provocation was very great," she said evenly. "Why didn't you do it, Tom?"

"Now you've cornered me: I don't know why I didn't. I had only to walk away and let him alone when the time came. The slag-spilling would have settled him. But I couldn't do it."

"Of course you couldn't," she agreed convincingly. "God wouldn't let you."

"He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter."

"Not one of those who have named His name, Tom—as you have."

He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But it doesn't. Where is the proof?"

She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.

"Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?"

"I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it."

She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?"

He frowned up at her.

"I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?"

"No—I don't know," she confessed.

He was smiling now.

"You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has passed."

"But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking."

He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths.

"They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts—those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it."

She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see.

"You are going away?" she asked.

"Yes; out to the 'beyond' in northern Arizona. There is a new iron field out there to be prospected, and Mr. Clarkson wants me to go and report on it. And that brings us back to business. May I talk business—cold money business—to you for a minute or two?"

"If you like," she permitted. "Only I think the other kind of talk is more profitable."

"Wait till you hear what I have to say in dollars and cents. That ought to interest you."

"Why should it—particularly?"

"Because you are going to marry a poor man, and—"

She turned away from him quickly and stood facing the window. But he went on with what he had to say.

"That's all right; I can say it to your back, just as well. You know, I suppose, that your—that the Farleys have lost out completely?"

"Yes,"—to the window-pane.

"Well, a curious thing has come to pass—quite a miraculous thing, in fact. Chiawassee will pay the better part of its debts and—and redeem its stock; or some of it, at least." He rose and stood beside her. "Isn't it a thousand pities that Colonel Duxbury couldn't have held on to his shares just a little longer?"

"Yes; he is an old man and a broken one, now." There was a sob in her voice, or he thought there was. But it was only the great heart of compassion that missed no object of pity.

"True; but the next best thing is to have the young woman who marries into the family bring it back with her, don't you think? Here is a check for what Mr. Farley's stock would have sold for before the troubles began. It's made payable to you because—well, for obvious reasons; as I have said, he lost out."

She turned on him, and the blue eyes read him to his innermost depths.

"You are still the headlong, impulsive boy, aren't you?" she said, not altogether approvingly. "You are paying this out of your own money."

"Well, what if I am?"

"If you are, it is either a just restitution, or it is not. In either case, I can not be your go-between."

"Now look here," he argued; "you've got to be sensible about this. There'll be four of you, and at least two incompetents; and you've got to have money to live on. I made Colonel Duxbury lose it, and—"

She stopped him with the imperious little gesture he knew so well.

"Not another word, if you please. I can't do your errand in this, and I wouldn't if I could."

"You think I ought to be generous and give it to him, anyway, do you?"

"I don't presume to say," was the cool rejoinder. "When you have come fully to your right mind, you will know what to do, and how to go about it."

He crumpled the check, thrusting it into his pocket, and made two turns about the room before he said:

"I'll see them both hanged first!"

"Very well; that is your own affair."

He fell to walking again, and for a full minute the silence was broken only by the murmur of men's voices in the library adjoining. The Major had company, it seemed.

"This is 'good-by,' Ardea; I'm going to-morrow. Can't we part friends?" he said, when the silence had begun to rankle unbearably.

"You've hurt me," she declared, turning again to the window.

"You've hurt me, more than once," he retorted, raising his voice more than he meant to; and she faced about quickly, holding up a warning finger.

"Mr. Henniker and Mr. Young-Dickson are in the library with grandpa. They will hear you."

"I don't care. I came here to-night with a heart full of what few good things there are left in me, and you—you are so wrapped up in that beggar that I didn't kill—"

"Hush!" she commanded imperatively. "Grandfather has not heard: he knows nothing, and he must nev—"

The murmur of voices in the adjoining room had suddenly become a storm, with the smooth tones of Mr. Henniker trying vainly to allay it. In the thick of it the door of communication flew open and a white-haired, fierce-mustached figure of wrath appeared on the threshold. For a moment Tom's boyish awe of the old autocrat of Deer Trace came uppermost and he was tempted to run away. But the wrath was not directed at him. Indeed, the Major seemed not to see him.

"What's all this I'm hearing now for the ve'y first time about these heah low-down, schemin' scoundrels that want to mix thei-uh white-niggeh blood with ouhs?" he roared at Ardea, quite beside himself with passion. "Wasn't it enough that they should use my name and rob my good friend Caleb? No, by heavens! That snivelin' young houn'-dog must pay his cou't to you while he was keepin' his—"

The Major's face had been growing redder, and he choked in sheer poverty of speech. Moreover, Tom had come between; had taken Ardea in his arms protectingly and was fronting the firebrand Dabney like a man.

"That's enough, Major," he said definitely. "You mustn't say things you'll be sorry for after you cool down a bit. Miss Ardea is like the king: she can do no wrong."

There was a gasping pause, the sound of a big man breathing hard, followed by the slamming of the door, and they were alone together again, Ardea crying softly, with her face hidden on the shoulder of shielding.

"Oh, isn't it terrible?" she sobbed; and Tom held her the closer.

"Never mind," he comforted. "He was crazy-mad, as he had a good right to be. You know he will be heart-broken when he comes to himself. You are his one ewe lamb, Ardea."

"I know," she faltered; "but O Tom! it was so unnecessary; so wretchedly unnecessary! It's—it's more than two whole months since—since Vincent Farley broke the engagement, and—"

He held her at arm's length to look at her, but she hid her face in her hands.

"Broke the engagement!" he exclaimed, almost roughly. "Why did he do that?"

She stood before him with her hands clasped and the clear-welled eyes meeting his bravely.

"Because I told him I could not marry him without first telling him that I loved you, Tom; that I had been loving you always and in spite of everything," she said.

And what more she said I do not know.



XXXVII

WHOSE YESTERDAYS LOOK BACKWARD

"Tom, isn't this the same foot-log you made me walk that day when you were trying to convince me that you were the meanest boy that ever breathed?" asked Ardea, gathering her skirts preparatory to the stream crossing.

"It is. But you didn't walk it, as you may remember: you fell off. Wait a second and give me those azaleas. I'll go first and take your hand."

Tom Gordon, lately home from a full half-year spent in the unfettered solitudes of the Carriso iron fields, to be married first, and afterward to start up—with Caleb for superintendent—the idle Chiawassee plant as a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying himself for the long exile.

On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and some of us are still young,—God grant,—in heart if not in years.

It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:

"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had not pulled me out?"

He laughed.

"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You could have waded out."

She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.

"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you—and Hector!" she said reproachfully.

"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat down to rest—they had often to do this, lest the way should prove shorter than the happy afternoon—on the end of the bridge log.

"Money?"—flippantly.

"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what love is."

His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.

"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman. Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women do. I wish I might give you something as great."

"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman. It is the lever that moves the world—what little it does move—up the hill to the high planes."

"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the chain binding cause to effect."

His smile was lovingly tolerant.

"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea—a full-grown belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"

"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a shadow of doubt.

"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.

"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."

"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that. Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin; hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the music-room at Deer Trace changed me—changed my point of view. You haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it, since I came home, have you?"

"No."

"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough to live in—to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness. There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of that sort."

She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.

"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County, and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."

She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on the edge of things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of them."

He shook his head.

"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your woman's love that changed the world for me."

"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come for you before our day of days, Tom."

He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.

"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you as my torch-bearer," he asserted.

"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"

He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of truth.

"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking of you at all, just at that one moment."

"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike."

But again he was shaking his head dubiously.

"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a poseur, like all the others."

She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line.

"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?—don't I always and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them."

"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."

"'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly; and then—O rarest of women!—she did not enlarge on it. Instead—

Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a small asking.

"Mr. Morelock is coming out to-morrow to hold service in St. John's, and I shall go to play for him. Will you go with me, Tom?"

He smiled out of the gold and sapphire depths of a lover's reverie.

"One week from the day after the day after to-morrow—and it will be the longest week-and-two-days of my life, dearest—your grandfather will take you to church, and I shall bring you away. Won't that be enough?"

She took him quite seriously.

"I shall never be a Felicita Young-Dickson, and drag you," she promised. "But, O Tom! I wish—"

"I know," he said gently. "You are thinking of the days to come; when the paths may diverge—yours and mine—ever so little; when there may be children to choose between their mother's faith and their father's indifference. But I am not indifferent. So far from it, I am only anxious now to prove what I was once so bent on disproving."

"You yourself are the strongest proof," she interposed. "You will see it, some day."

"Shall I? I hope so; and that is an honest hope. And really and truly, I think I have come up a bit—out of the wilderness, you know. I am willing to admit that this is the best of all possible worlds; and I want to do my part in making it a little better because I have lived in it. Also, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than protoplasm."

Her smile was of the kind which stands half-way in the path to tears, but she spoke bravely to the doubt in his reply.

"You do believe, Tom, dear; you have never seen the moment when you did not. It was the doubt that was unreal. When the supreme test came, it was God's hand that restrained you; you know it now—you knew it at the time. And afterward it was His grace that enabled you to do what was just and right. Haven't you admitted all this to yourself?"

They had crossed the white pike to the manor-house gates and were turning aside from the driveway into the winding lawn path when he said:

"To myself, and to one other." Then, very softly: "I sat at my mother's knee last night, Ardea, and told her all there was to tell."

Ardea's eyes were shining. "What did she say, Tom, dear—or is it more than I should ask?"

"There is nothing you may not ask. She said—it wasn't altogether true, I'm afraid—but she put her arms around my neck and cried and said: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."

She slipped her arm in his, and there was a little sob of pure joy at the catching of her breath. The moon was just rising above the Lebanon cliff-line, and the beauty of the glorious night-dawn possessed her utterly. Ah, it was a good world and a generous, bringing rich gifts to the steadfast! Instinctively she felt that Tom's little confession did not require an answer; that he was battling his way to the heights which must be taken alone.

So they came in the sacred hush of the young night to a great tulip-tree on the lawn, and where a curiously water-worn limestone boulder served as a rustic seat wide enough for two whose hearts are one they sat down together, still in the companionship that needs no speech. It was Tom who first broke the silence.

"I have been trying ever since that night last winter to feel my way out," he said slowly. "But what is to come of it? I can't go back to the boyhood yesterdays; in a way I have hopelessly outgrown them. Let us admit that religion has become real again; but Ardea, girl, it isn't Uncle Silas's religion, or—or my mother's, or even yours. And I don't know any other."

She laid a hand on one of his.

"It is all right, dear; there is only the one religion in all Christendom—perhaps in all the world, or in God's part of it. The difference is in people."

"But this thing that has been slowly happening to me—this thing I am trying to call convincement: shall I wake up some day and find it gone, with all the old doubts in the saddle again?" he asked it almost wistfully.

"Who can tell?" she said gently. "But it will make no difference; the immutable fact will be there just the same, whether you are asleep or waking. We can't always stand on the Mount of Certainty, any of us; and to some, perhaps, it is never given. But when one saves his enemy's life and forgives and forgets—O Tom, dear! don't you understand?"

But now his eyes are love-blinded, and the white-gowned figure beside him fills all horizons.

"I can't see past you, Ardea. Nevertheless, I'm going to believe that I feel the good old pike solid underfoot ... and they say that the House Beautiful is somewhere at the mountain end of it. If you will hold my hand, I believe I can make out to walk in it; blindfolded, if I have to—and without thinking too much of the yesterdays."

"Ah, the yesterdays!" she said tenderly. "They are precious, too; for out of them, out of their hindrances no less than their helpings, comes to-day. Kiss me, twice, Tom; and then I must go in and read to Major Grandpa."

THE END