"His mother—" interjected the Young Doctor. "Her of the plumage—her! Shure, she's not livin' in this wurruld. She's only visitin' it. She's got no responsibility. If iver there was a child of a fairy tale, that wumman's the child. I belave she'd think her son was doin' right if he tied the ould fella up to a tree an' stuck him as full of Ingin arrows as a pin-cushion, an' rode off with the lovely little lady in beyant there. That's my mind about her. It isn't on her you can rely. If ye want the truth, y'r anner, them two young people have had words together and plenty of them, whether it's across the hall—her room from his; or in his room; or through the windy or down the chimney-shure, I don't care! They've spoke. There's that between them wants watchin'. Not that there's wrong in aither of them—divil a bit! I've got me own mind about Mr. Orlando Giggles. As for her, the purty thing, she doesn't know what wrong is—that's the worst of it!"

The Young Doctor tapped Kernaghan's head gently with his whip. "Patsy," said he, "you talk a lot. There's no greater talker between here and Donegal. But still I think you know what to say and whom to say it to."

Kernaghan's cap came off. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked at the other with a primitive intelligence which showed him to be what the Young Doctor knew him to be—better than his looks, or his place in the world, or his reputation.

"Thank you kindly, y'r anner," he said, softly. "I'm troubled about things here, I am. That's why I spoke to ye. I'm afraid of the old fella, for his place is not in the pen wid that young thing, an' he'll break her heart, or kill her, if he gets to know the truth."

"What do you mean by 'the truth,' Patsy?" was the sharp query.

"I mean nothin' at all, save that in there wild youth is spakin' to wild youth—honest and dacint and true. But there's manny a tragedy comes out of that, y'r anner."

"Orlando has been sitting up for two days," said the Young Doctor meditatively, "and in two days more he can be removed. Patsy, you are staying on here.—I know, and I trust you. The girl and the young man have both been my patients. I think as much of both of them as I can think of any man or woman. He's straight and—"

"But a girl's mad when the love-song rises in her heart," interjected Kernaghan.

"Yes, I know, Patsy, but it isn't so bad as you think. I had a talk with her to-day. Perhaps we can get him away to-morrow. Meanwhile, there can't much happen."

"Can't much happen, wid that ould wuman in the garden there, an' the young wife upstairs, an' the fine young fella sittin' alone in his room achin' for the sound of her voice! Shure, they're together at this minnit, p'r'aps."

The Young Doctor tapped Kernaghan again on the head with his whip. "You're a wild Irishman still," he said, "but I think none the worse of you for that. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. Keep your head, Patsy." And whipping up his horse, he nodded and drove on.

It may be that Kernaghan's instinct was no truer than his own. It may be the Young Doctor knew Kernaghan's instinct to be true; and it also may be that what Kernaghan thought possible, the Young Doctor thought possible; but he also felt that things must be as they must be.

In any case Kernaghan was right; for while the little flamboyant lady from Slow Down Ranch was busy in the front garden, Louise Mazarine was with her wounded guest, with the man who had saved her husband's money and perhaps his life. The wounded guest regarded his wound as a blessing almost. Perhaps that was why he did not notice that his host had only been silently grateful.



CHAPTER VIII

THE ORIENTAL WAY OF IT

Orlando Guise's mother was lacking in the caution which mothers generally have where their men-children are concerned. If she had had sense, she would have insisted on removing Orlando to Slow Down Ranch at the earliest possible moment, even at some risk to his physical well-being. She ought to have seen that Joel Mazarine was possessed of a jealousy as unreasoning as that of an animal; she ought to have discouraged Louise's kindnesses. If the kindnesses had been only the ordinary acts of a mistress of a house to a guest who had saved her husband's life—dishes made by her own hand, strengthening drinks, flowers picked and arranged by herself—there could have been no cause for nervousness. Each thing done by Louise, however, came from a personally and emotionally solicitous interest. It was to be seen in the glance of the eye, in the voice a little unsteady, in girlish over-emphasis, in that shining something in the face, which, in Ireland, they call the love-light.

So great was Mrs. Guise's vanity, so intense her content in her son, so proud was she of other people's admiration of him, no matter who they were, that she welcomed Louise's attentions. Kernaghan was wrong. Mazarine had not forbidden Louise to enter Orlando's room. That was the contradictory nature of the man. His innate savagery made him brood wickedly over her natural housewifery attentions to the man who had probably saved his own life, and certainly had saved him six thousand dollars; yet it was as though he must see the worst that might happen, must even encourage a danger which he dreaded. When the Methodist minister from Askatoon came to offer prayer for Orlando, Joel joined in it with all the unction of a class-leader, while every word of the prayer trembled in an atmosphere of hatred. As Patsy Kernaghan said, he himself watched, and he paid the Chinaman to watch, in the vain belief that money would secure faithful service.

The Young Doctor had told him that his powerful medicine had brought back the bloom to his young wife's cheeks and the light to her eyes, but how much he believed, he could not himself have said. One thing he did know: it was that Orlando seemed quite indifferent to everything except his mother, the state of the crops and the reports on his own cattle. Also Orlando had made a good impression when he resented with a funny little oath and a funnier little giggle, but with some heat in his cheek, Joel's ostentatious proposal to pay the Young Doctor's bill for attendance.

The offer had been made when Louise was standing in the doorway; but the old man did not notice that Louise coloured in sympathy with the flush in Orlando's face. It was as though a delicate nerve had been touched in each of them; but it was a nerve that had never been sensitive until they had met each other for the first time. Orlando's mother dealt with the situation in her own way. She said in a somewhat awkward pause, following the old man's proposal, that a doctor's bill was a personal thing, and she would as soon allow some one else to pay it as to pay for her washing. At this Orlando giggled again, and ventured the remark that no doctor could dispense enough medicine in a year to pay her laundry bill for a month—which pleased the old lady greatly and impelled her to swing her skirt kittenishly.

It was at this point that Li Choo came knocking at the open door with a message for Mazarine. It related to a horse-accident at what was known as One Mile Spring; and Mazarine, having frowned his wife out of the doorway, made his way downstairs and prepared for his short journey to the Spring. Before he left, however, he called Li Choo aside, and what he said caused Li Choo to answer: "Me get money, me do job. Me keep eyes open. Me tell you."

From a window Louise had watched the colloquy, and she knew, as well as though she stood beside them, what was being said. Li Choo had told the truth: he had got the cash, and he would do the job. But not alone from Joel Mazarine did he get money. Only two mornings before, Louise, for all the extra work he had had to do during Orlando's illness and without thought of bribery, had given him a beautiful gold ten-dollar-piece with a hole in it. If the piece had been minus the hole, Li Choo would have returned it to her, for he would have served her for nothing till the end of his days, had it been possible. Because there was a hole in it, however, and he could put a string through it and wear it round his neck inside his waistcoat, he took it, blinking his beady eyes at her; and he said:

"Me watch most petic'ler, mlissy. Me tell boss Mazaline ev'lytling me see!" And he giggled almost as Orlando might have done.

After which Li Choo slip-slopped away to his work behind the kitchen. When he saw Orlando's mother in the garden and the Young Doctor drive to Askatoon, and Patsy Kernaghan mount an aged cayuse and ride off, he clucked with his tongue and then went into the kitchen and prepared a tray on which he placed several pieces of a fine old set of China, which had belonged to Mazarine's grandmother and was greatly prized by the old man. Then he clucked to the half-breed woman, and she made ready as sumptuous a tea as ever entered the room of a convalescent.

Like a waiter at a seaside hotel, Li Choo carried the tray above his head on three fingers to the staircase, and as he mounted to the landing, called out, "Welly good tea me bling gen'l'man." This was his way of warning Orlando Guise, and whoever might be with him, of his coming.

He need not have done so, for though Louise was in Orlando's room, she was much nearer to the door than she was to Orlando. She hastened to place a table near to Orlando, for the tray which Li Choo had brought, and, as she did so, remarked with a shock at the cherished china upon the tray.

"Li Choo! Li Choo!" she gasped, reprovingly, for it was as though the Ark of the Covenant had been burgled. But Li Choo, clucking, slip- slopped out of the room and down the stairs as happy as an Oriental soul could be. What was in the far recesses of that soul, where these two young people were concerned, must remain unrevealed; but Li Choo and the halfbreed woman in their own language—which was almost without words— clucked and grunted their understanding.

Left alone again, Louise found herself seated with only the table between herself and Orlando, pouring him tea and offering him white frosted cake like that dispensed at weddings; while Orlando chuckled his thanks and thought what a wonderful thing it was that a bullet in a man's side could bring the unexpected to pass and the heart's desire of a man within the touch of his fingers.

Their conversation was like that of two children. She talked of her bird Richard, which she had sent to him every morning that it might sing to him; of her black cat Nigger, which sat on his lap for many an hour of the day; of the dog Jumbo, which said its prayers for him to get well, for a piece of sugar-that was a trick Louise had taught it long ago. Orlando talked of his horses and of his mother—who, he declared, was the most unselfish person on the whole continent; how she only thought of him, and spent her money for him, and gave to him, never thinking of herself at all.

"She has the youngest heart of anyone in the world," said Orlando.

Louise did not even smile at that. No one with a heart that was not infantile could dress and talk as Orlando's mother dressed and talked; and so Louise said softly: "I am sure her heart is a thousand years younger than mine—or younger than mine was." And then she blushed, and Orlando blushed, for he understood what was in her mind—that until they two had met, she was, as the Young Doctor said, a victim to senile decay.

That was the nearest they had come as yet to saying anything which, being translated, as it were, through several languages, could mean love- making. Their love-making had only been by an inflection of the voice, by a soft abstraction, by a tuning of their spirits to each other. They were indeed like two children; and yet Li Choo was right when, in his dark soul, he conceived them to be lovers, and thought they would do what lovers do—hold hands and kiss and whisper, with never an end to a sentence, never a beginning.

It was not that these things were impossible to them. It was not that their beating pulses, and the throbbing in them, was not the ancient passion which has overturned an empire, or made a little spot of earth as dear as Heaven above. It was that these were forbidden things, and Louise and Orlando accepted that they were forbidden.

How long would this position last? What would the future bring? This was only the fluttering approach of two natures, from everlasting distances. The girl had been roused out of sleep; from her understanding the curtains had been flung back so that she might see. How long would it last, this simple, unsoiled story of two lives?

Orlando reached out his hand to put his cup back upon the tray. As her own hand was extended to take it, her fingers touched his. Then her face flushed, and a warm cloud seemed to bedim her eyes. There flashed into her mind the deep, overwhelming fact that for three long years a rough, heavy hand had held her captive by day, by night, in a pitiless ownership. She got to her feet suddenly; her breath came quickly, and she turned towards the door as though she meant to go.

At that instant Li Choo slid softly into the room, caught up the tray, poised it on his three fingers over his head and said: "Old Mazaline, he come. Be queeck!"

They heard the heavy footsteps of Joel Mazarine coming into the hall-way just below.

The old man, as though moved by some uncanny instinct, had come back from One Mile Spring by a roundabout trail. As the Chinaman came out upon the landing at the top of the stairs, Joel appeared at the bottom, in the doorway which gave upon the staircase. Two or three steps down shuffled the Chinaman; then, as it were by accident, he stumbled and fell, the tray with the beautiful china crashing down to the feet of Joel Mazarine, followed by the tumbling, chirruping Li Choo.

Oriental duplicity had made no wrong reckoning. The old man fell back into the hall-way from the crashing china and tumbling Oriental, who plunged out into the hall-way muttering and begging pardon, cursing his soul in good Chinese and bad English.

Looking down on the wreck, Mazarine saw his treasured porcelain shattered. With a growl of rage he stooped and seized Li Choo by the collar, flung him out of the door, and then with his heavy boot kicked him once, twice, thrice, a dozen times, anywhere, everywhere!

Li Choo, however, had done his work well. Joel Mazarine never knew the reason for the Chinaman's downfall on the stairway, for, in the turmoil, Louise had slipped away in safety. His rage had vented itself; but, if he had seen Li Choo's face an hour after, as he talked to the half-breed woman in the kitchen, he might have had some qualms for his cruel assault. Passion and hatred in the face of an Oriental are not lovely things to see.



CHAPTER IX

THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES

"It's been a great day—great."

Orlando Guise leaned lazily on the neck of the broncho he was riding, peering between its ears, over the lonely prairie, to the sunset which was making beautiful the western sky. It was as though there was a golden fire behind vast hills of mauve and pink, purple and saffron; but the glow was so soft as to suggest a flame which did not burn; which only shed radiance, colour and an ethereal mist. All the width of land and life between was full of peace as far as eye could see. The plains were bountiful with golden harvest, and the activities of men were lost among the corn. Horses and cattle in the distance were as insects, and in the great concave sky stars still wan from the intolerant light of their master, the Sun, looked timidly out to see him burn his way down to the under-world.

"Great—but it might have been greater!" added Orlando, gazing intently at the sunset.

Yet, as he spoke, his eyes gazed at something infinitely farther away than the sunset-even to the goal of his desire. He was thinking that, great as the day had been, with all he had done and seen, it lacked a glimpse of the face he had not seen for a whole month. The voice, he had not heard it since it softly cried, "Oh, Orlando!" when the Chinaman crashed down the staircase with the tray of cherished porcelain, and had been maltreated by the owner of Tralee.

How many times since then had those words rung in his ears! Louise had never called him by name save that once, and then it was the cry of a soul surprised, the wail of one who felt a heart-break coming on, the approach of merciless Fate. It was the companionship of trouble; it was the bird, pursued by a hawk, calling across the lonely valley to its mate. "Oh, Orlando!" He had waked in the morning with the words in his ears to make him face the day with hope and cheerfulness. It had sounded in his ears at night as he sat on the wide stoop watching the moon and listening to the night-birds, or vaguely heard his mother babbling things he did not hear.

It is a memorable moment for a man when he hears for the first time his "little name," as the French call it, spoken by the woman he loves. It is as the sound of a bell in the distance, a familiar note with a new meaning, revealing new things of life in the panorama of the mind. By those two words Orlando knew what was in the mind of Louise. They were a prayer for protection and a cry for comradeship.

When Louise first clasped hands with the Young Doctor on her arrival at Askatoon, the soft appeal of her fingers had made him understand that loneliness where she lived, and to bear which she sought help. But the "Oh, Orlando!" which was wrung from her, almost unknowingly, was the cry of one who, to loneliness, had added fear and tragedy. Yet behind the fear, tragedy and loneliness there was the revelation of a heart.

A courtship is a long or a short ceremonial or convention, a make- believe, by which people pretend that they slowly come to know and love each other; but lovers know that each understands the other by one note or inflection of the voice, by one little act of tenderness. These, or one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by which men and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the lightning-lie by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the disillusioned soul.

This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age of the world made life a rare sensation. The man who has not chased the wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in the West, "Hell for leather," down the steep hillside, over the rock and the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or a baboon, has failed to find one of life's supreme pleasures.

In the foothills, many miles away from Slow Down Ranch and Tralee, there lived a herd of wild ponies, and it had been the ambition of a dozen ranchmen and broncho-busters thereabouts to capture one or many. More than once Orlando had seen a little gray broncho, with legs like the wrists of a lady, with a tail like a comet, frisking among the rocks and the brushwood, or standing alert, moveless and alone upon some promontory, and he had made up his mind that if, and when, there came a day of broncho-busting, he would become a hunter of the little gray mare. When the news came that the ranchmen for miles around were preparing for the drive of the hills, he determined to take part in it, against the commands of the Young Doctor, who said that he would run risk in doing so, for, though his wound was healed, he should still avoid strain and fatigue.

There is no fatigue like that of broncho-busting. It is not galloping on the turf; it is being shaken and tossed in a saddle which the knees can never grip, on the back of something gone mad—for the maddest, wisest, carefullest thing on earth is a broncho, which itself was once a wild pony of the hills, and has been hunted down, thrown by the lasso, saddled, bridled and heart-broken all in an hour. When the broncho which was once a wild pony sets out on the chase after its own, there is nothing like it in the world; and so Orlando found.

The veteran broncho-busters and ranchmen gave him no vociferous welcome as he appeared among them. Had it not been for the reputation which he already gained for courage, such as he had shown in the recent affair when he had driven off the men who were robbing Joel Mazarine, and also for an idea, steadily spreading, that he was masquerading, and that behind all, was a curly-headed, intrepid, out-door "white man," he would not have had what he called a great day.

He could not throw the lasso as well as many another, but he could ride as well as any man that ever rode; and the broncho given him to ride that day was one sufficiently unreliable in character and sure-footed in travel to test him to the utmost. He had endured the test; he had even got his little gray mare, lassoing her like a veteran. He had helped to break her, and had sent her home from the improvised corral by one of his men. He had then parted from the others, who had dispersed to their various ranches with their prizes, and had ridden away on the broncho with which he had done such a good day's work. He had had the thrill of the hunter, riding like any wild Indian through the hills; he had had the throb of conquest in his veins; but while other men had shouted and happily blasphemed as they rode and captured, he had only giggled in excitement.

As he looked now into the sunset, he was thinking of the little gray mare, with the legs like the wrists of a lady and the soft, bright, wild eye, which had fought and fought to resist subjection; but which, overpowered by the stronger will of man, had yielded like a lady, and had been ridden away to Slow Down Ranch, its bucking over for ever, captive and subdued.

Orlando was picturing the little gray mare with Louise on its back. He had no right to think of Louise; yet there was never an hour in which he did not think of her. And Louise had no right to think of Orlando; yet, sleeping and waking, he was with her. Their homes were four miles apart, although, in one sense, they were a million miles apart by law and the convention which shuts a woman off from the love of men other than her husband; and yet in thought they were as near together always as though they had lain in the same cradle and grown up under the same rooftree.

There was something about the gray pony, with the look of a captive in its eye, a wildness in subjection, like the girl at Tralee—the girl suddenly come to be woman, with her free soul born into understanding, yet who was as much a captive as though in prison, and guarded by a warder with a long beard, a carnivorous head, and boots greased with tallow.

Since they had parted, the day after Li Choo had averted a domestic "scene" or tragedy, the search had gone on by the Mounted Police-"the Riders of the Plains"—for the men who had attempted to rob Mazarine, and to put Orlando out of action by a bullet. Suspicion had been directed against the McMahons, but Joel Mazarine had declared that it was not the McMahons who had attacked him, although they were masked. There was nothing strange in that, because, as the Inspector of the Riders said "That lot is too fly to do the job themselves; you bet they paid others to do it."

Orlando had no wish to see the criminals caught or punished. Somehow, secretly, he looked upon the assault and his wound as a blessing. It had brought him near to his other self, his mate in the scheme of things. There was something almost pagan and primitive, something near to the very beginning of things in what these two felt for each other. It was as though they really belonged to a world of lovers that "lived before the god of Love was born."

As Orlando sat watching the sunset, Louise's last words to him, "Oh, Orlando!" kept ringing in his ears. He thought of what had happened that very morning before he started for the hills. Soon after daybreak, Li Choo the Chinaman had come slip-slopping to him at Slow Down Ranch, and had said to him without any preliminaries, or any reason for his coming:

"I bling Mlissy Mazaline what you like. She cly. What you want me do, I do. That Mazaline, gloddam! I gloddam Mazaline!"

Orlando had no desire for intrigue, but Li Choo stood there waiting, and the devotion the Chinaman had shown made him tear a piece of paper from his pocket-book and write on it the one word "Always." He then folded the paper up until it was no bigger than a waistcoat button, and gave it to Li Choo. Also, he offered a five-dollar bill, which Li Choo refused to take. When he persisted, the Chinaman opened his loose blue jacket and showed a ten-dollar gold-piece on a string around his neck.

"Mlissy Mazaline glive me that; it all plenty me," he said. "You want me come, I come. What you say do, I do. I say gloddam Mazaline!"

That scene came to Orlando's mind now, and it agitated him as the incident itself had not stirred him when it happened. The broncho he was riding, as though the disturbance in Orlando's breast had passed into its own wilful body, suddenly became restless to be off, and as Orlando gave no encouragement, showed signs of bucking.

At that moment Orlando saw in the distance, far north of both Tralee and Slow Down Ranch, a horse, ridden by a woman, galloping on the prairie. Presently as he watched the headlong gallop, the horse came down and the rider was thrown. He watched intently for a moment, and then he saw that the woman did not move, but lay still beside the fallen horse.

He dug his heels into the broncho's side, and although it had done its day's work, it reached out upon the trail as though fresh from the corral. It bucked malevolently as it went, but it went.

It was apparent that no one else had seen the accident. Orlando had been at a point of vantage on a lonely rise about eighty feet above the level of the prairie. Where horse and rider lay was a good two miles, but within seven minutes he had reached the spot.

Flinging the bridle over the broncho's neck, he dismounted. As he did so, a cry broke from him. It was, as it were, an answer to the "Oh, Orlando!" which had been ringing in his ears. There, lying upon the ground beside the horse, with its broken leg caught in a gopher's hole, was Louise.

Orlando's ruddy face turned white; something seemed to blind him for an instant, and then he was on his knees beside her, lifting up her head, feeling her heart. Presently the colour came back to his face with a rush. Her heart was beating; her pulse trembled under his fingers; she was only unconscious. But was there other injury? Was arm or leg broken? He called to her. Then with an exclamation of self-reproach, he laid her down again on the ground, ran to his broncho; caught the water- bottle from the saddle, lifted her head, and poured some water between the white lips.

Presently her eyes opened, and she stared confusedly at Orlando, unable to realize what had happened. Then memory came back, and with it her very life-blood seemed to flow like water through the opening gates of a flume, with all the weight of the river behind. As her face flooded, she shivered with emotion. She was resting against his knee; her head was upon his arm; his face was very near; and there was that in his eyes which told a story that any woman, loving, would be thrilled at seeing. What restrained him from clasping her to his breast? What kept her arms by her side?

The sun was gone, leaving only a glimmer behind; the swift twilight of the prairie was drawing down. Warm currents of air were passing like waves of a sea of breath over the wide plains; the stars were softly stinging the sky, and a bright moon was asserting itself in the growing dusk. Here they were who, without words or acts, had been to each other what Adam and Eve were in the Garden, without furtiveness, and guiltless of secret acts which poison Love. What restrained them was native, childlike camaraderie, intense, unusual and strange. The world would call them romancists, if they believed that this restraint could be. But there was something more. With all their frank childlikeness, there was also a shyness, a reserve, which would not have been, if either had ever eaten of the Fruit of Understanding until they met each other for the first time.

"Are you—are you hurt?" he asked, his voice calmer than his spirit, his heart beating terribly hard. "I'm all right," she answered. "I fell soft. You see, I'm very light."

"No bones broken? Are you sure?" he asked solicitously.

She sat erect, drawing away from his arms and the support of his knee." Don't you see my legs and arms are all right! Help me up, please," she added, and stretched out a hand.

Then, all at once, she saw the horse lying near. Again she shivered, and her hand was thrown out in a gesture of pain.

"Oh, see-see!" she cried. "His leg is broken." She loved animals far more than human beings. There were good reasons for it. She had fared hard in life at the hands of men and women, because the only ones with whom, in her seclusion, she had had to do, had sacrificed her, all save one-the man beside her. Animal life had something in it akin to her own voiceless being. Her spirit had never been vocal until Orlando came.

"Oh, how wicked I've been!" she cried. . . . "I couldn't bear it any longer. He wouldn't let me ride alone, go anywhere alone. I had to do it. I'd never ridden this horse before. My own mare wasn't fit.

"See-see. It's my ankle that ought to be broken, not his."

Orlando got to his feet. "Look the other way," he said. "Turn round, please. I'll put him out of pain. He bolted with you, and he'd have killed you, if he could; but that doesn't matter. He can't be saved. Turn round, don't look this way."

She had been commanded to do things all her life, first by her mother, tyrant-hearted and selfish, and then by her husband, an overlord, with a savage soul; and she had obeyed always, because she always seemed to be in the grasp of something against which no pressure could avail. She was being commanded now, but there was that in the voice which, while commanding her, made her long to do as she was bid. It was an obedience filled with passion, resigning itself to the will of a force which was all gentleness, but oh, so compelling!

She buried her face in her hands, and presently Orlando had opened a vein in the chestnut's neck, and its life-blood slowly ebbed away.

As he turned towards her again, Orlando was startled by a sudden action on the part of his broncho. Whether it was the smell of blood which frightened it, or death itself, which has its own terrors to animal life, or whether it was as though a naked, shivering animal soul passed by, the broncho started, shied and presently broke into a trot; then, before Orlando could reach it, into a gallop, and was away down the prairie in the direction of Slow Down Ranch.

"That's queer," he said, and he gave a nervous little laugh. "It's the worst of luck, and—and we're twelve miles from Tralee," he added slowly.

"It's terrible!" Louise said, her fingers twisting together in an effort at self-control. "Don't you see how terrible it is?" she asked, looking into Orlando's troubled face but cheerful eyes.

"You couldn't walk that distance, of course," he remarked.

She endeavoured to get to her feet, but seemed to give way. He reached out his hands. She took them, and he helped her up. His face was anxious. "Are you sure you're not hurt?" he asked. "There's nothing broken," she answered. "No bones, anyway. But I don't feel—" She swayed. He put an arm around her.

"I don't feel as if I could walk even a mile," she continued. "It's shaken me so."

"Or else you're hurt badly inside," he said apprehensively.

"No, no, I'm sure not," she answered. "It's only the shock."

"Can you walk a little?" he asked. "This poor horse—let's get away from it. There's a good place over there—see!" He pointed to a little rise in the ground where were a few stunted trees and some long grass and shrubs. "Can you walk?"

"Oh, yes, I'm all right," she answered nervously. "I don't need your arm. I can walk by myself."

"I think not—well, not yet, anyhow," he answered soothingly. "Please do as you're told. I'm keeping my arm around you for the present."

Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth. Now her youth seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience—as though it were the wine of life itself. She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul from ever so far away: "Close—close to him! Home is in his arms."

With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that in her which was pure maidenliness. For, married as she was, she had never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle. She had been the victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.

Yet she knew and could realize to the full that a power which had her in control, which possessed her by the rights of the law, prevented her—and would prevent her by whatever torture was possible—from friendship, alliance, or whatever it might be, with Orlando. She knew the law: one wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the right nor to the left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to the south, but to remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet, the housewife, the sole property of her husband, no matter what that husband might be— vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other things, good or bad.

"Why don't you look glad when you see me come in?" Joel Mazarine remarked to her suddenly the day before. "If you'd had some husbands, you might have reason for bein' the statue and the dummy you are. Am I a drunkard? Am I a thief? Am I a nighthawk? Do I go off lookin' for other women? Don't I keep the commandments? Ain't you got a home here as good as any in the land? Didn't I take you out of poverty, and make you head of all this, with people to wait on you and all the rest of it?"

That was the way he had talked, and somehow she had not seemed able to bear it; and she had said to him, in unexpected revolt, that her tongue was her own, and what was in her mind was her own, even if her body wasn't.

Then, in a fury, he had caught his riding-whip from the wall to lash her with it, just when Li Choo the Chinaman appeared with a message which he delivered at the appropriate moment, though he had had it to deliver for some time. It was to the effect that the Clerk of the Court in the neighbouring town of Waterway wished to see him at once on urgent business. The message had been left by a rancher in passing.

As Li Choo delivered the word, he managed to put himself between Mazarine and his wife in such a way as to enrage the old man, who struck the Chinaman twice savagely across the shoulders with the whip, and then stamped out of the house, invoking God to punish the rebellious and the heathen, while Li Choo, shrinking still from the cruel blows, clucked in his throat. There was something in the sound which belonged to the abyss dividing the Eastern from the Western races.

That night Louise had refused to go to bed; but at last, fearing physical force, had obeyed, and had lain with her face to the wall, close up to it, letting the cold plaster cool her hot palms, for now she burned with a fire which was consuming the debris of an old life—the fire of knowledge, for which she had to pay so heavily.

"You couldn't walk even a little of the way to Tralee, could you?" asked Orlando, when they had reached a shrub-covered hillock.

"No, I couldn't walk it, I'm so shaken. I'm terribly weak; I tremble all over," she added, as she sat down upon a stone. "But if I don't—if I don't go back—oh, you know!"

"Yes, I know," answered Orlando. "He's the sort that would horsewhip a woman."

"He started to do it yesterday," she answered, "but Li Choo came in time, and he horsewhipped Li Choo instead."

"I wouldn't myself be horsewhipping Chinamen much," said Orlando. "They're a queer lot."

Suddenly she got to her feet. "I won't stand it. I won't stand it any longer," she cried. "That is why to-day, although he told me I mustn't ride, I took that new chestnut, and saddled it and rode—I didn't care where I rode. I didn't care how fast the horse went. I didn't care what happened to me. And here I am, and—But oh, I do care what happens to me!" she added, her voice breaking. "I'm—I'm frightened of him—I'm frightened, in spite of myself. . . . He doesn't treat me right," she added. "And I'm terribly frightened."

She raised her eyes to Orlando's face in the growing dusk—there is no twilight in that prairie land—and there was that in it which made her feel that she must not give way any further. In Orlando's veins was Southern sap, mixed with Northern blood; in Orlando's eyes was a sudden look belonging to that which defies the law.

"Don't—don't look like that," she exclaimed. "Oh, Orlando!"

Once more he heard her speak his name, and it was like salve to a wound. He put a hand upon himself. "I'll go to Tralee," he said, "if you don't mind waiting here alone."

"I can't. I will not wait alone. If you go, then I'll go too somehow.... It's twelve miles. You couldn't get there till midnight, and you couldn't get back here with a wagon for another couple of hours from that. It would be daylight then. I can't stay here alone. I'm frightened, and I'm cold."

"Wait a minute," said Orlando.

He ran back to the dead horse, unloosed the saddle from its back, detached from it a rain-coat strapped to the pommel, and brought it to her.

"This will keep you warm," he said. "It isn't cold to-night. You only feel cold because you're upset and nervous."

"I'm frightened," she answered; "frightened of everything. Listen! Don't you hear something stirring—there!" She peered fearfully into the dusk behind them.

"Probably," he answered. "There are lots of prairie dogs and things about. The more you listen, the more you hear on the prairie, especially at night."

There was silence for a moment, and then he added: "My broncho'll steer straight for Slow Down Ranch, and that'll bring my men. You can be quite sure there'll be a search-party out from Tralee, too, at the first streak of dawn. You can't make the journey, so the only thing to be done is to wait here. That coat will keep you from getting cold, and I'll cut a lot of long grass and make you a bed here. Also, the grass is warm, and I'll cover you with it and with pine branches."

"I can't lie down," she answered. "No, I can't; I'm afraid. It's all so strange, and to-morrow, he—"

"There's nothing to be frightened about," he interrupted. "Nothing at all, Louise."

It was the first time he had ever addressed her by name, and it made her shiver with a new feeling. It seemed to tell a long, long story without words.

"You must do what I ask you to do—whatever I ask you to do," he repeated. "Will you?"

"Yes, anything you ask me I'll do," she answered, and then added quickly, "For you won't ask me to do anything I don't want to do. That's the difference. You understand, Orlando."

A few minutes later he had found a suitable place to make a kind of bed of grass for her, and had prepared it, with his knife, cutting the branches of small shrubs and grass and the scanty branches of the pine. When it was finished, he came to her and said:

"It's all ready. Come and lie down, and I'll cover you up."

She got to her feet slowly, for she was in pain greater than she knew, so absorbed was her mind in this new life suddenly enveloping her, and then she said in a low voice: "No, not yet; I can't yet. I want to sit here. I've never felt the night like this before. It's wonderful, and I'm not nearly so cold now. I know I oughtn't to be cold at all, in the middle of summer like this." She paused, and seemed lost in contemplation of the sky. After a moment she added: "I never knew I could feel so far away from all the world as I do tonight. But the sky seems so near, and the moon and the stars so friendly."

"You haven't slept out of doors as I have hundreds of times," he answered. "The night and I are brothers; the stars are my little cousins; and the moon"—he giggled in his boyish way—"is my maiden aunt. She's so prudish and so kind and friendly, as you say. She's like an aunt I had—Aunt Samantha. She was my father's sister. I used to love her to visit my mother. She always brought me things, and she gave them to me as if they were on silver dishes—like a ceremony. She was so prim, I used to call her Aunt Primrose. She made me feel as if I could do anything I liked and break any law I pleased. But all the time, like a saint in a stained-glass window, she always seemed to be saying, 'Yes, you'd like to, but you mustn't.' She was just like the moon. I'm well acquainted with the moon, and—"

"Hush!" Louise interrupted. "Don't you hear something stirring—there, behind us?"

He laughed. "Of course something's always 'stirring behind us' on the prairie, and things you can't hear at all in the day are almost loud at night. There are thousands of sounds that never get to your ears when the sun is busy, but when Aunt Primrose Moon is saying, 'Hush! Hush!' to the naughty children of this world, you can hear a whole new population at work, cracking away like mad. Say, ain't I letting myself go to- night?" he added, giggling again and sitting down beside her. "I'm going to give you just half an hour, and at the end of that half-hour you've got to go to sleep."

"I can't—I can't," she said scarcely above a whisper. As though in response to an unspoken thought, he said casually: "I'm going to walk awhile when you've lain down, and then—" He pointed to a spot about twenty yards away. "Do you see the two big stones there? Well, when I've finished my walk and my talk with Aunty Primrose"—he laughed up at the moon—"I'm going to sit down there and snooze till daylight." He pointed again: "Right over there beside those two rocks. That's my bed. Do you see?"

She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips. "You'll be cold," she said.

"No, it's a hot night," he answered. "I'm too hot as it is." And he loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.

"If I've got to go to bed in half an hour," she said presently, "tell me more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy—tell me everything about yourself."

She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his hand against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only that she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can so easily forget!

"You want to hear? You really want to hear?" he asked. "Say, it won't be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the broncho- busting today."

"No, I want to hear about yourself." She looked intently at him for an instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek. There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too had delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.

It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss the lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon. He knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee to-morrow; that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow he would not have the courage to say the things he must say to the evil-hearted master of Tralee, who, he knew, would challenge them with ugly accusations. He must be able to look old Mazarine fearlessly in the face; he would not be the slave of opportunity. He was going to fight clean. She was here beside him in the warm loneliness of the northern world, and he was full-grown in body and brain, with all the human emotions alive in him; yet he would fight clean.

Not for a half-hour, but for nearly an hour he told her what she wished to know, while she listened in a happy dream; and when at last she lay down, she refused his coverlet of dry grass, saying that she was quite warm. She declared that she did not even need the coat he had taken from the saddle of the dead horse, but he wrapped it around her, and, saying "Goodnight" almost brusquely, marched away in the light of the dying moon.

The night wore on. At first Louise's ears were sensitive to every sound, and there were stirrings in the hillock by which she slept, but she comforted herself with the thought that they were the stirrings of lonely little waifs of nature like herself. Though she dared not let the thought take form, yet she feared, too, the sound of human footsteps. By and by, however, in the sweet quiet of the night and the somnolent light of the moon, sleep captured her. When at last Orlando's footsteps did crush the dry grass, the sound failed to reach her ears, for it was then not very far from daylight, and she had slept for several hours. Sleep had not touched Orlando's eyes when, sitting down by the stones which were to mark his resting-place, he waited for Louise to wake.



ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Highsterics, they call it World was only the size of four walls to a sick person



WILD YOUTH

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.

X. THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE XI. LOUISE XII. MAN UNNATURAL XIII. ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING XIV. FILION AND FIONA—ALSO PATSY KERNAGHAN XV. OUTWARD BOUND XVI. AT THE CROSS TRAILS XVII. THE SUPERIOR MAN XVIII. YOUTH HAS ITS WAY



CHAPTER X

THE MOON WAS NOT ALONE

Out on the prairie under the light of the stars a man had fought the first great battle of his life, and had emerged victorious. There are no drawn battles in the struggles of the soul. As Orlando fought, he was tortured by the thought that none would believe the truth to-morrow when it was told; and that there would be penalty though there was no crime.

As for Louise, she could have returned, almost blindly defiant, to her world, hand in hand with Orlando; and yet, when morning came, and her eyes opened on the prairie at day-break, with life stirring everywhere, she was glad of the victory—though the shadow of a great trouble to come was showing in her eyes.

She knew what she had to face at Tralee, and that she had no proof of her perfect innocence. It was of little use for them to call upon Heaven to witness what the night had been; and Joel Mazarine, who distrusted every man and woman, would distrust her with a sternness which guilt only could effectively defy!

Orlando's enforced gaiety as he invited her to a breakfast of a couple of biscuits, left from yesterday's broncho-busting, heartened her; yet both were conscious of the make-believe. They realized they were helpless in the grip of harsh circumstance. It was almost enough to make them take advantage of calumny and the traps set for them by Fate, and join hands for ever.

As they looked into each other's eyes, the same hopeless yet reckless thought flickered—flickered, and vanished. Yet as they looked out over the prairie towards Tralee, to which Louise must presently return, a rebellious sort of joy possessed them.

.........................

The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had passed at Tralee. There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine. He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able to summon his slaves, and to know that they would come—Chinaman, half- breed, wife. Now he called, and the wife did not come. On the new chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman had said, as hard as he could go. He had scanned the prairie till night came, without seeing a sign of her.

His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might do. It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned the half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and then he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they said; and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse and galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing to himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain malignant. He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he arrived at Slow Down Ranch.

There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true, for Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to meet; they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were those of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words burst over the head of Orlando's mother like shrapnel.

For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than herself, and declared that her son had never run away from, or with, anything in his life; that he—Joel Mazarine—had never had anything worth her son's running away with; and that her son, when he came back, would make him ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.

Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote for pious purposes.

Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could give—money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed, caused him to rage like any heathen. His monstrous egotism made him like some infuriated bull in the arena, with the banderillos sticking in his hot hide.

The two people whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies. Just such a helpless rage held Joel Mazarine, and his religion did not suggest seeking comfort at that Throne of Grace to which he had so publicly prayed on occasions.

Night held him prowling in his own coverts; morning found him yellow and mottled, malicious, but now silent. He somehow felt that he would know the truth and the whole truth soon. He ate his pork and beans for breakfast with the appetite of a ravenous animal. He put pieces of the pork chop in his mouth with his fingers; he gulped his coffee; but all the time he kept his eyes on the open door, as though he expected some messenger to announce that Providence had stricken his rebellious wife by sudden death. It seemed to him that Nature and Jehovah must unite to avenge him.

After three hours of further waiting he determined to go into Askatoon. He would have bills printed advertising for Louise as he had done for stray cattle; he would have notices put in the newspapers proclaiming that his wife was strayed or stolen and must be put in pound when discovered. At the moment he decided thus, he caught sight of a wagon approaching from the north. It was near enough for him to see that there was a woman in it; and the eyes of the half-breed hired woman, possessing the Indian far-sight, saw that it was Louise, and told her master so.

Ten minutes later Louise stood in front of the Master of Tralee, and the Master of Tralee filled the doorway. "What you want here?" he asked of her with blurred rage in his voice.

"I want to go to my room," Louise answered quietly but firmly. "Please stand aside."

Now that Louise was face to face with her foe, a new spirit had suddenly possessed her; and standing beside his broncho, a hand on its neck, Orlando almost smiled, for this was Louise with a new nature. There was defiance and courage in her face, not the apprehension which had almost overwhelmed her as they started back to Tralee, having been rescued by the search-party from Slow Down Ranch. The night had done something to Louise which was making itself felt.

"You think you can come back here after what you've done—after where you've been—the likes of you!" Mazarine snarled unmoving. "You think you can!"

Louise turned swiftly to look at Orlando and the three men, one riding and two in the wagon, as though to call them in evidence of her innocence; but there came to her eyes a sudden fire of courage, and she turned again to Mazarine and said:

"I'm your wife by the law—just as much your wife to-day as yesterday. You treat me before strangers as if I were a criminal. I'm not going to be treated that way. I've got my rights. Stand back and let me in— stand back, Joel Mazarine," she said, and she took a step forward, child though she was, as if she would strike him. Something had transformed her.

To Orlando she seemed scarcely real. The shrinking, colourless child of a few weeks had suddenly become a woman—and such a woman!

"I'll tell you in my own time where I've been and what I've done," she continued. "I want to go upstairs. Stand out of the doorway."

There was a movement behind her. A man in the wagon and the one on his horse seemed to grow angry and threatening. The ranchman dropped from his horse. Only Orlando stood cool, quiet and ominously watchful. Mazarine did not fail to notice the movement of the two men.

Presently Orlando's voice said slowly and calmly: "Stand back, Mazarine. Let her go to her room. This is a free country, and she's free in her own house. It's her house until you've proved she's got no right there." Then he added with sharp insistence and menace: "Stand back—damn you, Mazarine!"

Orlando did not move as he spoke, but there was a look in his face which an enemy would not care to see. Mazarine, in spite of his rage, quailed before the sharp, menacing voice so little in tune with its reputation for giggling, and stepping back, he let Louise pass. Then he plunged forward out of the doorway.

"That's right. Come outside," said Orlando scornfully. "Come out into the open." His voice became lower. There was something deadly in it, boy as he was. "Come out, you hypocrite, and listen to what I've got to say. Listen to the truth I've got to tell you. If you don't listen, I'll horsewhip you, that'd horsewhip a woman, till you can't stand—you loathsome old dog. . . . Yes, he took his horsewhip to her yesterday," he added to the spectators, who muttered angrily, for the West is chivalrous towards women.

Something near to madness possessed Orlando. No one had ever seen him as he was at that moment. Down through generations had come to him some iron thing that suddenly revealed itself in him, as something had just suddenly revealed itself in Louise.

The other three men—two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared at him as though they had seen him for the first time. They were unready for the passion that possessed him. Not a muscle of his body appeared to move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree. But in his eyes and his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said afterwards, "Hell—and then some more."

"Listen to me," he said again, and his voice was low and husky now. "Yesterday I was broncho-busting—"

Thereupon he told the whole story of what had happened since he had seen Louise thrown from her chestnut on the prairie. He told how Louise was too shaken and ill to attempt the journey back to Tralee, and how they had camped where they were, near the dead horse.

As Orlando talked, the old man was seized by terrible hatred and jealousy. "You needn't tell me the rest," he broke in, his hands savagely opening and shutting. "I guess I understand everything."

The words had scarcely left his mouth when from the wagon a man said: "Wait—wait, Mister. I got something to say."

He sprang to the ground, and ran between Mazarine and Orlando.

"This is where I come in," he said, as Louise's face appeared at an upper window, and she listened. "You don't know me. Well, I know you. Everybody knows you, and nobody likes you. I know what happened last night. I'm a brother of your fellow Christian Rigby, the druggist, over there in Askatoon. He's a Methodist. I'm not. I'm only good. I been a lot o' things, and nothing in the end. Well, you hearken to my tale.

"I was tramping with my bundle on my back acrost the prairie to Askatoon from Waterway. I'm a sundowner, as they say in Australia. When the sun goes down, I down to my bed wherever I be on the prairie. I was asleep- I'd been half drunk—when the chestnut threw your wife and broke its leg; but I was awake when he rode up." He pointed to Orlando. "I was awake, and so I watched. I knew who she was; I knew who he was." He pointed to Orlando again. "I guessed I'd see something. I did.

"I watched them two people all night. There was a moon. I could see. I wasn't fifteen feet from her all night, and I jined the others when they come to rescue. I guess I got the truth, and I guess if you want any evidence about me you can get it. Lots of people know me out here. I ain't got any house or any home, and I get drunk sometimes, and I ain't got money to buy meals with, lots of times, but nobody ever knowed me lie. That's what ruined me—I been too truthful. Well, I'm not lying now, Mister. I'm telling you the God-help-me truth. He's a gentleman." He pointed again to Orlando. "He's a gentleman from away back in God's country, wherever that is, and she's the best of the best of the very best.

"You can bet your greasy old boots and ugly face that you've got a bigger fortune in that wife of yours than you've any right to. Say, she's a queen, Mister, and don't you forget it, and"—he drawled out his words— "you go inside your house and get down on your knees, same as you do in the Meeting House, and thank the Lord you love so well for all his blessings. As my friend here said a little while back"—he pointed to Orlando again—"'Damn you, Mazarine!' Go and hide yourself."

The old man stood for a moment dumbfounded; then, without a word, he turned and hunched inside the house.

"He raised his horsewhip ag'in' a woman, did he?" said one of Orlando's ranchmen. "Ain't that a matter we got to take notice of?"

"Boys," said Orlando as he motioned them to be off, "Mrs. Mazarine can take care of herself. You'll forget what's happened, if you want to play up to her. If she needs you, she'll be sure to let you know."

A moment afterwards they were all on their way on the road leading to Slow Down Ranch.

"He didn't giggle much that time," said one of the ranchmen of Orlando, as they moved on.



CHAPTER XI

LOUISE

The Young Doctor had had a trying day. Certain of his cases had given him anxiety; his drives had been long and fatiguing; he had had little sleep for several nights; and he was what Patsy Kernaghan had called "brittle"; for when Patsy was in a vexed condition, he used to say, "I'm so brittle I'll break if you look at me." As the Young Doctor drew his chair up to the supper-table and looked at his food with a critical air, he was very brittle.

For one born in Enniskillen he had an even nature, but its evenness was more the result of mental control than temperament. He sighed as he looked at the marrow bones which, as a rule, gave him joy when their turn came in the weekly menu; he eyed askance the baked potatoes; and the salad waiting for his skilled hand only gave him an extra feeling of fatigue.

Most men in a like state say, "I don't know what's the matter with me," and yet many a one has been stimulated out of it, away from it, by the soft voice and friendly hand of a woman.

There was, however, no woman to distract the overworked Young Doctor by her freshness, drawn from the reservoir of her vitality; and that was a pity, because, as Patsy Kernaghan many a time said: "Aw, Doctor dear, what's the good of a tongue to a wagon if there's only wan horse to draw it! Shure, you'll think a lot more of yourself whin you're able to stand at the head of your own table and say grace for two at least, and thanksgiving for manny, if it's the will of God."

The Young Doctor did not know why he was so brittle, but the truth is he was feeding on himself, and that is a poor business. Every dog knows it is good to feed on the knuckle of a goat if he hasn't got a beefbone, and every real man knows—though to know anything at all he must have been married—that any marriage is better than no marriage at all; because whether it's happy or unhappy, it makes you concerned for some one besides yourself, if you have any soul or sense at all.

The Young Doctor was under the delusion that he loved his lonely table and the making of a simple salad for a simple man, but then he came from Ireland and had imagination; and that is always a curse when it isn't a blessing, for there is nothing between the two. At the end of his troubled day he almost cursed the salad as it crinkled in the dish just slightly rubbed with garlic. He was turning away in apathy from it—from the bones with the marrow oozing out of the ends, from the bursting baked potatoes, from the beautiful crusts of brown bread, when he heard the door-bell ring. At the sound his face set as though it were mortar. He wanted no patients this night; but from the peremptory sound of the bell he was sure some one had come who needed medicine or the knife, and he could refuse neither; for was he not at everybody's beck and call, the Medicine Man whose door was everybody's door!

"Damnation!" he said aloud, and turned towards the door expectantly.

Then he bitted himself to wait; and he did not wait long. Presently he heard a voice say, "I must see him," and the door opened wide, and Louise Mazarine stepped into the room. Her face was pale and distraught; her blue eyes, with their long, melancholy lashes, stared at him in appealing apprehension. Her lips were almost white; her hands trembled out towards him.

"I've come—I've come!" she said. It had the finality of the last chapter of a book.

The Young Doctor closed the door, ignoring for the instant the hands held out to him. After all, he was a very sane Young Doctor, and he had the faculty of keeping his head, and his heart, and his own counsel. Also he knew there was an inquisitive old servant in the hallway.

When the door was closed, he turned round on Louise slowly, and then he held out his hands to her, for she was shrinking away, as though he had repulsed her. He pressed her trembling hands in the way that only faithful friendship shows, and said:

"Yes, I know you've come, but tell me what you've come for."

"I couldn't bear it any longer," she said brokenly. "I'm not made of steel or stone. It's been terrible. He doesn't speak to me except to order me to do this or that. I haven't done anything wrong, and I won't be treated so. I won't! When he made me kneel down by him in the trail and tried to make me pray to be forgiven of my sins, I couldn't stand it. I don't know what my sins are, and I won't be converted if I don't want to. I'm not a slave. I'm of age. I'm twenty."

There was no sign of fatigue now in the Young Doctor's face. Something had called him out of himself, and this human need had done what a wife's hand might have done, or the welcome of a child.

"No, you're not twenty," he declared, with a friendly smile. "You aren't ten. You are only one. In fact, I think you're only just born!"

He did not speak as lightly as the words read. In his voice there was that compassionate irony with which men shield those for whom they care. It means protection and defence. Somehow she seemed to him like a small bird on its first flight from the nest, or, as Patsy Kernaghan would have said, "a tame lamb loose in a zoolyogical gardin."

"So because you won't pray and can't bear it any longer, you run away from him, and come to me!" the other remarked with a sorry smile, pouring out a glass of wine from a decanter that stood on the table.

"Drink this," he said presently, pushing her down gently into a chair with one hand and holding the glass to her lips. "Drink it every drop. As I said, you've only run away from one master to fall into another master's hands. You're a wicked girl. Drink it—every drop. . . . That's right."

He took the empty glass from her, put it on the table, and then stood and looked at her meditatively, fastening her eyes with his own. More than her eyes were fastened, however. Her mind was also under control: but that was because she believed in him so.

"Yes, you're a wicked girl," he said decisively.

She shuddered and shrank back. In her eyes was a helpless look, very different from that which she had given not so many days before when, with Orlando Guise behind her, she had defied her aged husband in his doorway, and her defiance had moved him from her path. Then she had been inspired by the fact that the man she loved was near her, that she had been wrongfully accused and was ready to fight. Afterwards, however, when she was alone, the sterile presence of Joel Mazarine, his merciless eyes, his hopeless religious tyranny, had worn upon her as his past violence had never done.

"Wicked!" Did this man, then, believe her guilty? Did he, of all men, think that the night upon the prairie alone with Orlando had been her undoing? Had not the brother of Rigby the chemist borne witness with his own eyes to her complete innocence? If the Young Doctor disbelieved, then indeed she was undone.

"You don't think that of me—of me!" she gasped, her lips all white again. She got to her feet excitedly. "You shall not believe it of me."

"No, I did not say I believed that," the other remarked almost casually. "But if I did believe it, I don't know that it would make much difference to me. Fate, or God Almighty, or whatever it was, had stacked the cards against you. When I said it was wicked, I meant you did wrong in rushing away from your husband and coming to me. I suppose you have definitely left your husband—eh? You've 'left' him, as they say?"

He had an incorrigible sense of humour, as well as an infinite common sense. He wanted to break this spell of tense emotion which possessed her. So he pursued a new course.

"Don't you think it's rather hard on me?" he continued. "I'm a lone man in this house, with only one old woman to protect me, and I'm unmarried. I've a reputation to lose, and there are lots of mothers and daughters hereabouts. Besides, a medical practice is hard to get and not easy to keep. What do you mean by making a refuge of me, when there's nothing for me in it, not even the satisfaction of going into the Divorce Court with you? You wicked Mrs. Mazarine!"

"Oh, don't speak like that!" Louise interjected. "Please don't. Don't scold me. I had to come. I was going mad."

The Young Doctor had the case well in hand. He had eased the terrible tension; he was slowly reducing her to the normal. It was the only thing to do.

"What did Mazarine do or say to you that made you run away? Come now, didn't you first make up your mind to go to Slow Down Ranch—to Orlando?"

She flushed. "Yes, but only for a minute. Then I thought of you, because I knew you could help me as no one else could. Everybody believes in you. But then Li Choo—"

"Oh, Li Choo! So Li Choo comes into this, eh? So he said fly to Orlando, eh? Well, that's what he would do. But why Li Choo— a Chinaman? Tell me, what does Li Choo know?"

Quickly she told him the story of the day when Joel Mazarine had almost surprised her in Orlando's room; how Li Choo had saved the situation by falling down the staircase with the priceless porcelain, and how Mazarine had kicked him—"manhandled" him, as they say in the West.

"Chinamen don't like being kicked, especially Chinamen of Li Choo's station," remarked the Young Doctor meditatively. "You don't know, of course, that Li Choo was a prince or a big bug of some sort in his own country. Why he left China I don't know, but I do chance to know that if another Chinky meets Li Choo carrying a basket on his shoulders, or a package in his hand, he kow-tows, and takes it away from him, and carries it himself. . . . No, I don't know why Li Choo is here in Askatoon, or why he's such a slave to Mrs. Mazarine; but I do know that he's a different-looking man when a Chinky runs up against him than when he's choring at Tralee. A sick Chinaman told me only a week ago that Li Choo was 'once big high boss Chinaman in Pekin.' . . . And so the mandarin advised you to fly to Orlando, did he? I wonder if it's a way they have in China."

"But I wouldn't go. I've come to you—Patsy Kernaghan brought me," Louise urged.

"Yes, I see you've come to me," remarked the Young Doctor dryly, "and you've stayed about long enough for me to feel your pulse and diagnose your case. And now you're going back with Patsy Kernaghan to your own home."

She trembled; then she seemed to strengthen herself in defiance. What a change it was from the child of a few weeks ago—indeed, of a few moments ago! The same passionate determination which seized her when she faced Mazarine with Orlando, possessed her again. With her whole being palpitating, she said: "I will not go back. I will not go back. I will kill myself first."

"That would be a useless sacrifice of yourself and others," the Young Doctor answered quietly. Seeing that the new thing in her was not to be conquered in a moment, he quickly made up his mind what to do.

"See," he continued, "you needn't go back to Tralee to-night, but you're not going to stay here, dear child. I'll take you over to Nolan Doyle's ranch, to Mrs. Doyle. You'll spend the night there, and we'll think about to-morrow when to-morrow comes. You certainly can't stay here. I'm not going to have it.

"Bless you, you're neither so young nor so old as all that!"

Suddenly he grasped both her arms and looked her in the face. "My dear young lady," he said gently, "I'm not your only friend, but I'm a stout friend—so stout that there isn't a mount can carry us both together. When you ride, I walk; when I ride, you walk—you understand? We don't walk or ride together. I'm taking care of you. Your life is too good to be ruined by rashness. You're in a 'state,' as my old housekeeper would say, but you'll be all right presently. As soon as I've made a salad, and had a marrowbone, you and I and Patsy Kernaghan are going to Nolan Doyle's ranch. . . . My dear, you must do what I say, and if you do, you'll be happy yet. I don't see how, quite, but it is so; and meanwhile, you mustn't make any mistakes. You must play the game. And now come and have some supper."

She waved her hand in protest. "I can't eat," she said. "Indeed, I can't."

"Well, you can drink," he answered. "You shall not leave this house alive unless you have a pint of milk with a little dash of what Patsy calls 'oh-be-joyful' in it."

He left the room for a moment, while she sat watching the door as a prisoner might watch for the return of a friendly jailer. He had a curious influence over her. It was wholly different from that of Orlando. Presently he returned.

"It's all right," he said. "Patsy and you and I will be at Nolan Doyle's ranch in another hour. I've sent word to Mrs. Doyle. I've ordered your milk-punch too, and now I think I'll make my salad. You never saw me make a salad," he added, smiling. "I've done some successful operations in my day; I've played about with bones and sinews, proud of my work sometimes, but the making of a perfect salad is the proud achievement of a master-mind." He laughed like a boy. "'Come hither, come hither, my little daughter, and do not tremble so,'" he said so cheerfully as to be almost jeering.

His cheerfulness was not in vain, for a smile stole to her lips, though it only flickered for an instant and was gone. For all that, he knew he had saved the situation, and that another chapter of the life-history of Orlando and Louise had been ended. A fresh chapter would begin tomorrow; but sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.



CHAPTER XII

MAN UNNATURAL

Mazarine discovered the flight of Louise soon after she had gone. He had not been five hundred yards from the house since she returned with Orlando after the night spent upon the prairie, save when he had been obliged to go in to Askatoon and had taken her with him, dumb and passive. She had been a prisoner, tied to the stirrups of her captor; and he had berated her, had preached at her. As Louise had said, once on the way to Askatoon, he had even tried to make her kneel down in the dust of the trail and plead with Heaven to convict her of sin.

On the evening of Louise's flight, however, he had been forced to go to a neighbouring ranch, and had commanded Li Choo to keep a strict watch at the windows of her room to see that she did not attempt escape. She could not escape by the door of the room because he had the key in his pocket. Li Choo was not a stern jailer, however. Mazarine had not been gone three minutes before the Chinaman had touch with Louise. He did more; he threw up into the open window of her room a screw-driver, with which she took the old-fashioned door off its hinges, after half an hour's work. Then, leaving a note on the table of the dining-room, to say that she could not bear it any longer, that she would never come back, and that she meant to be free, she summoned Patsy Kernaghan and fled to the Young Doctor.

When Mazarine returned and found her note, he plunged up the stairs to her bedroom, his pious wrath gurgling in his throat, only to find the door locked; for Li Choo had promptly restored it to its hinges after Louise had gone, afterwards dropping from the high window like a cat, without hurt.

Li Choo, blinking, opaque, immobile, save for his piercing and mysterious eyes, had no explanation to give. All he said was, "Me no see all sides house same time"; so suggesting that, as the room had windows on all three sides, Louise must have escaped while he made his supposed sentry- go, slip-slopping round the house. Mazarine showed what he thought by spitting in Li Choo's face, and then rushing into the house to get the raw-hide whip with which he had punished the Chinaman before, and with which he had threatened his wife.

When he returned a moment afterwards, Li Choo was nowhere to be seen; but in his place were two other Chinamen who had, as it were, fallen from the skies, standing where Li Choo had stood, immobile, blinking and passive like Li Choo, their hands lost in the long sleeves of their coats, their pigtails so tightly braided as, in seeming, to draw their slanting eyelids still to greater incline, and to give a look of petrified intentness to their faces.

Something in their attitude gave Mazarine apprehension. It was as though Li Choo had been transformed by some hellish magic into two other Chinamen. The rage of his being seemed to stupefy him; he could not resist the sensation of the unnatural.

"What do you want? How did you come here?" he asked of the two in a husky voice.

"We want speak Li Choo. We come see Li Choo," answered one of the Chinamen impassively.

"He was here a minute ago," answered Mazarine gruffly.

Then he turned away, going swiftly toward the kitchen, and calling to Li Choo. As he went, he was conscious of low, cackling laughter, but when he turned to look, the two Chinamen stood where he had left them, blinking and immobile.

The uncanny feeling possessing him increased; the thing was unnatural. He lurched on, however, looking for Li Choo. The Chinaman was not to be found in the kitchen, in the woodshed, in the cellar, in the loft, or in his own attic room; and the half-breed, Rada, declared she had not seen him. He could not be at the stables, for they were too far away to be reached in the time; and there were no signs of him between the house and the stables. When Mazarine returned to the front of the house, the two Chinamen also had vanished; there were no signs of them anywhere. Search did not discover them.

Mingled anger and fear now possessed Mazarine. He would search no longer. No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his hiding-place, wherever it was. Why had the Chinamen come? What were they after? It did not matter for the moment. What he wanted was Louise, his bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from him. Where would she go? Where, but to Slow Down Ranch? Where, but to her lover, the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with the ring on his finger and the Cupid mouth! Where would she go but to the man with whom she had spent the night on the prairie!

Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception. Even the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.

A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was his passion. He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room, where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his great- grandfather. He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it for passages of violence and denunciation. Now holy superstition seized him in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an almost medieval instinct. He seized the ancient book, as it were to deliver its incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing from him that which he prized beyond all earthly things.

Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five years, and what was left for him? She was the garden of spring in which his old age roamed at ease luxuriously. She was the fruit of the tree of pleasure. She was that which made him young again, renewed in him youth and the joys of youth. Take her away, the flower that smelled so sweet and luscious, the thing that he had held so often to his lips and to his breast? Take away what was his, by every holy right, because it was all according to the law of the land and of the Holy Gospel, and what was left? Only old age, the empty house bereft of a fair young mistress, something to smile at and to curse, if need be, since it was his own by the laws of God and man.

Take her away, and the two wives that he had buried long years ago, with their gray heads and lank, sour faces, from which the light of youth had fled with the first child come to them—their ghosts would seek him out. They would sit at his table, and taunt him with his vanished Louise, asking him if he thought she was anything more than one of the trolls that tempted men aforetime; one of the devil's wenches that lured him into the secret garden, only at last to leave him scorned and alone.

Where had she gone, his troll, with the face of an angel? Where had she gone? Where would she go, except to her devil's lover at Slow Down Ranch?

He had just started for Slow Down Ranch armed with his greasy, well- thumbed Bible like a weapon in his pocket, when he heard a voice call him. It was full of the devil's laughter. It was the voice of Burlingame, the lawyer, on his horse. Burlingame had had a weary day and was refreshing himself by a canter on the prairie.

"Where are you going?" asked Burlingame, as he cantered up to Mazarine's wagon.

"To Slow Down Ranch?"

He saw the look of the drowned man in the face of Mazarine, over whom the flood of disaster had passed, and he guessed at once the cause of it; for Burlingame had the philosophy of a Satanic mind, and he knew the things that happen to human nature.

"So, she's gone again, has she?" he added deliberately, with intent to put a knife into the old man's feelings and to turn it in the thick of them. He wanted to hurt, because Mazarine had only a short time before dispensed with his services as a lawyer, and had blocked the way to that intimacy which he had hoped to establish with Tralee and its mistress. Besides, his pride as a professional man had been hurt, and he had been deprived of income which now went to his most hated professional rival. Mazarine's jealous soul had cut him off, on coming to know Burlingame's dark reputation. He had not liked the look Burlingame had given Louise when they met.

"Gone again, has she?" Burlingame repeated sarcastically. "Well, you needn't go to Slow Down Ranch to find her. She isn't there, and you won't find him there either, for I saw him come by the Lark River Trail into Askatoon as I left, and a lady was with him. He booked this morning for the sleeper of the express going East to-night; so, if I were you, I'd turn my horse's nose to Askatoon, Mr. Mazarine. I don't know why I tell you this, as you're not my client now, but I go about the world doing good, Mr. Mazarine—only doing good."

There was a look in Burlingame's face which Heaven would not have accepted as goodness, and there was that in his voice which did not belong to the Courts of the Lord. Malice, though veiled, showed in face and sounded in voice. Even as he spoke, Joel Mazarine turned his horse's head towards Askatoon.

"You're sure a woman was with him? You're sure she was with him?" he asked in chaos of passion.

"I couldn't see her face; it was too far away," answered Burlingame suggestively, "but you can form your own conclusions—and the express is due in thirty minutes!"

He looked at his watch complacently. "What's the good, Mazarine? Why don't you say, 'Go and sin no more?' Or why don't you divorce her with the evidence about that night on the prairie? I could have got you a verdict and damages. Yes, I could have got you plenty of damages. He's rich. You took her back and condoned; you condoned, Mazarine, and now you'll neither have damages nor wife—and the express goes in thirty minutes!"

"The express won't take Mrs. Mazarine away tonight," the old man said, a look of jungle fierceness filling his face.

Burlingame laughed unpleasantly. "Yes, you'll foul your own nest, Mazarine, and then bring her back to live in it. I know you. It isn't the love of God in your heart, because you'll never forgive her; but you'll bring her back to the nest you fouled, just because you want her —'You damned and luxurious mountain goat,' as Shakespeare called your kind."

With another laugh, which somewhat resembled that of the two strange vanished Chinamen, Burlingame flicked his horse and cantered away. A little time afterwards, however, he turned and looked toward Askatoon, and he saw the old man whipping his horse into a gallop to reach Askatoon railway station before the express went East.

"It's true, Mazarine," he said aloud. "Orlando booked for the sleeper going East in thirty minutes; but the sleeper was for one only, and that one was his mother, you old hippopotamus. . . . But I wonder where she is—where the divine Louise is? She hasn't levanted with her Orlando. . . . Now, I wonder!" he added.

Then, with a sudden impulse, he dug heels into his horse's sides, and galloped back towards Askatoon. He wanted to see what would happen before the express went East.



CHAPTER XIII

ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING

Askatoon had never lost its interest for Mazarine and his wife since the day the Mayor had welcomed them at the railway station. Askatoon was not a petty town. Its career had been chequered and interesting, and it had given haven to a large number of uncommon people. Unusual happenings had been its portion ever since it had been the rail-head of the Great Transcontinental Line, and many enterprising men, instead of moving on with the railway, when it ceased to be the rail-head, settled there and gave the place its character. The town had never been lawless, although some lawless people had sojourned there.

It was too busy a place to be fussing about little things, or tearing people's characters to pieces, or gossiping even to the usual degree; yet in its history it had never gossiped so much as it had done since the Mazarines had come.

From the first the vast majority of folk had sided with Louise and denounced Mazarine. They knew well she had married too young to be self- seeking or intriguing; and, in any case, no woman in Askatoon or yet in the West, could have conceived of a girl marrying "the ancient one from the jungle," as Burlingame had called him.

Burlingame could never have been on the side of the Ten Commandments himself, even with a sure and certain hope of happiness on earth, and in Heaven also, guaranteed to him. Nothing could have condemned Mazarine so utterly as the coalition between the "holy good people," as Burlingame called them, and himself; and between the holy good people and himself were many who in their secret hearts would never have shunned Louise if, after the night on the prairie with Orlando, release had been found for her in the Divorce Court. Jonas Billings had put the matter in a nutshell when he said:

"It ain't natural, them two, at Tralee. For marrying her he ought to be tarred and feathered, and for the way he treats her he ought to be let loose in the ha'nts of the grizzlies. What he done to that girl is a crime ag'in' the law. If there was any real spunk in the Methodists, they'd spit him out like pus."

That was exactly what the Methodist body had decided to do on the very day that Louise had fled from Tralee and the old man pursued her in the wrong direction. The Methodist body had determined to discipline Mazarine, to eject him from their communion, because he had raised a whip against his wife; because he had maltreated Li Choo; and because he had used language unbecoming a Christian. They had decided that Mazarine had not shown the righteous anger of a Christian man, but of one who had backslided, and who, in the words of Rigby the chemist, "Must be spewed out of the mouth of the righteous into the dust of shame."

That was the situation when Joel Mazarine drove furiously into the town and made for the railway station. Men like Jonas Billings, who saw him, and had the scent for sensation, passed the word on downtown, as it is called, that something "was up" with Mazarine, and the railway station was the place where what was up could be seen. Therefore; a quarter of an hour before the arrival of the express which was to carry Orlando Guise's mother to her sick sister three hundred miles down the line, a goodly number of citizens had gathered at the station-far more than usually watched the entrance or exit of the express.

Mazarine's wagon and steaming horses were tied up outside the station, and inside on the platform Moses-not-much, as Mazarine had been called by Jonas Billings, marched up and down, his snaky little eyes blinking at the doorway of the station reception-room. People came and some of them nodded to him derisively. Some, with more hardihood, asked him if he was going East; if he was expecting anyone; if he was seeing somebody off.

A good many asked him the last question, because, as the minutes had passed, Burlingame had arrived. He had also disclosed his great joke to those who would carry it far and near, together with the news that Louise had taken flight. The last fact, however, was known to several people, because more than one had seen the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan taking Louise to Nolan Doyle's ranch.

It was dusk. The lamps of the station were being lighted five minutes before the express arrived, and as the lights flared up, Orlando entered the waiting-room of the station, with a lady on his arm, and presently showed at the platform doorway, smiling and cheerful. He did not blench when Mazarine came towards him. Mazarine had seen the flutter of a blue skirt in the waiting-room, and his wife had worn blue that day!

Orlando saw the heavy, offensive figure of Mazarine making for him. He, however, appeared to take no notice, though he watched his outrageous pursuer out of the corner of his eye, as he quietly gave orders to a porter concerning a little heap of luggage. When he had finished this, he turned, as it were casually, to Mazarine. Then he giggled in the face of the Master of Tralee. It was like the matador's waving of the scarlet cloth in the face of the enraged bull. Having thus relieved his feelings, Orlando turned and walked to the door of the reception-room, but was stopped by the old man rushing at him. Swinging round, Orlando almost filled the doorway.

"You devil's spawn," Mazarine almost shouted," get out of that doorway. I want my wife. You needn't try to hide her. You thief! You lecherous circus rider! Stand aside—leper!"

Orlando coolly stretched out his elbows till they touched the sides of the door, and as the crowd pressed, he said to them mockingly:

"Get back, boys. Give him air. Can't you see he's gasping for breath." Then he giggled again.

The old man looked round at the crowd, but he saw no sympathy—only aversion and ridicule. Suddenly he snatched his little black-bound Bible from his pocket, and held it up.

"What does this Book say?" he thundered. "It says that a wife shall cleave unto her husband until death. For the seducer and the betrayer death is the portion."

The whistle of the incoming train was heard in the distance.

The old man was desperate. It was clear he meant to assault Orlando. "You will only take her away over my dead body," he ground out in his passion. "The Lord gave, and only the Lord shall take away." He gathered himself together for the attack.

Orlando waved a hand at him as one would at a troublesome child. At that instant, his mother stepped up behind him in the reception-room.

"Orlando," she said in her mincing, piping little voice, "Orlando, dear, the train is coming. Let me out. I'm not afraid of that bad man. I want to catch my train."

Orlando stepped aside, and his mother passed through, to the consternation of Mazarine, who fell back. The old man now realized that Burlingame had tricked him. Laughter went up from the crowd. They had had a great show at no cost.

"'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,' Mr. Mazarine!" called someone from the crowd.

"It's the next train she's going by, old Moses-not-much," shouted a friend of Jonas Billings.

"She's had enough of you, Joel!" sneered another mocker.

"Wouldn't you like to know where she is, yellow-lugs?" queried a fat washerwoman.

For an instant Mazarine stood demused, and then, thrusting the Bible into his pocket, he drew himself up in an effort of pride and defiance.

"Judases! Jezebels!" he burst out at them all. Then he lunged through the doorway of the reception-room; but at the door opening on the street his courage gave way, and hunched up like one in pain, he ran towards the hitching-post where he had left his horses and wagon. They were not there. With a groan which was also a malediction, he went up the street like a wounded elephant, and made his way to the police-station through a town which had no pity for him.

During the hour he remained in the town, Mazarine searched in vain for his horses and wagon. He looked everywhere except the shed behind the Methodist Church. It was there the two wags who had played the trick on him had carefully hitched the horses, and presently they announced in town that they did it because they knew Mazarine would want to go to the prayer-meeting to lay his crimes before the Mercy Seat!