Title: The Soldier of the Valley
Author: Lloyd, Nelson, 1873-1933
Language: English
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THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY

by

NELSON LLOYD

Illustrated by A. B. Frost



[Frontispiece: They called to me as a boy.]



Charles Scribner's Sons
New York ------------ 1904
Copyright, 1904, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Published, September, 1904



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


   They called to me as a boy . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

   "Welcome home--thrice welcome!"

   Tim and I had stopped our ploughs to draw lots and
     he had lost

   "Well, old chap!"

   Josiah Nummler

   He did not stop to hear my answer

   Swearing terrible oaths that he will never return

   No answer came from the floor above

   The tiger story

   He had a last look at Black Log

   "He pumped me dry"

   "Nanny is likely to get one of her religious spells
     and quit work"

   I was back in my prison

   "'At my sover-sover-yne's will'"

   Perry Thomas stands confronting the English warrior

   "You'll begin to think you ain't there at all"

   I saw a girl on the store porch

   Aaron Kallaberger

   Leander

   "Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the house of Binn,
     the Binns of Turkey Walley"

   William had felt the hand of "Doogulus"

   "Aren't you coming?" young Colonel seemed to say

   Sat little Colonel, wailing

   The main thing was proper nursing

   Well, ain't he tasty

   "But there are no ghosts," I argued

   "Of course it hurts me a bit here"

   "An seein' a light in the room, I looked in"

   Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate

   The horse went down

   "And I'm his widder"

   Then Tim came

   Old Captain

   When we three sit by the fire



THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY


I

I was a soldier.  I was a hero.  You notice my tenses are past.  I am a
simple school-teacher now, a prisoner in Black Log.  There are no bars
to my keep, only the wall of mountains that make the valley; and look
at them on a clear day, when sunshine and shadow play over their green
slopes, when the clouds all white and gold swing lazily in the blue
above them, and they speak of freedom and of life immeasurable.  There
are no chains to my prison, no steel cuffs to gall the limbs, no guards
to threaten and cow me.  Yet here I stay year after year.  Here I was
born and here I shall die.

I am a traveller.  In my mind I have gone the world over, and those
wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I
know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth,
and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su.
Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have
pierced the African jungles and surveyed the Arctic ice-floes.  Often
the mountains call me to come again, to climb them, to see the real
world beyond, to live in it, to be of it, but I am a prisoner.  They
called to me as a boy, when wandering over the hills, I looked away to
them, and over them, into the mysterious blue, picturing my India and
my China, my England and my Russia in a geographical jumble that began
just beyond the horizon.

Then I was a prisoner in the dungeons of Youth and my mother was my
jailer.  The day came when I was free, and forth I went full of hope,
twenty-three years old by the family Bible, with a strong, agile body
and a homely face.  I went as a soldier.  For months I saw what is
called the world; I had glimpses of cities; I slept beneath the palms;
I crossed a sea and touched the tropics.  Marching beneath a blazing
sun, huddling from the storm in the scant shelter of the tent, my
spirits were always keyed to the highest by the thought that I was
seeing life and that these adventures were but a fore-taste of those to
come.  But one day when we marched beneath the blazing sun, we met a
storm and found no shelter.  We charged through a hail of steel.  They
took me to the sea on a stretcher, and by and by they shipped me home.
Then it was that I was a hero--when I came again to Black Log--what was
left of me.

My people were very kind.  They sent Henry Holmes's double phaeton to
the county town to meet my train, and as I stumbled from the car, being
new to my crutches, I fell into the arms of a reception committee.  Tim
was there.  And my little brother fought the others off and picked me
up and carried me, as I had carried him in the old days when he was a
toddling youngster and I a sturdy boy.  But he was six feet two now and
I had wasted to a shadow.  Perry Thomas had a speech prepared.  He is
our orator, our prize debater, our township statesman, and his
frock-coat tightly buttoned across his chest, his unusually high and
stiffly starched collar, his repeated coughing as he hovered on the
outskirts of the crowd, told me plainly that he had an address to make.
Henry Holmes, indeed, asked me to stand still just one minute, and I
divined instantly that he was working in the interest of oratory; but
Tim spoiled it all by running off with me and tossing me into the
phaeton.

So in the state-coach of Black Log, drawn by Isaac Bolum's
lemon-colored mules, with the committee rattling along behind in a
spring wagon, politely taking our dust, I came home once more, over the
mountains, into the valley.

Sometimes I wonder if I shall ever make another journey as long as that
one.  Sometimes I have ventured as far as the gap, and peeped into the
broad open country, and caught the rumble of the trains down by the
river.  There is one of the world's highways, but the toll is great,
and a crippled soldier with a scanty pension and a pittance from his
school is wiser to keep to the ways he knows.

And how I know the ways of the valley!  That day when we rode into it
every tree seemed to be waving its green arms in salute.  As we swung
through the gap, around the bend at the saw-mill and into the open
country, checkered brown and yellow by fields new-ploughed and fields
of stubble, a flock of killdeer arose on the air and screamed a
welcome.  In their greeting there seemed a taunting note as though they
knew they had no more to fear from me and could be generous.  I saw
every crook in the fence, every rut in the road, every bush and tree
long before we came to it.  But six months had I been away, yet in that
time I had lived half my life, and now I was so changed that it seemed
strange to find the valley as fat and full as ever, stretched out there
in the sunshine in a quiet, smiling slumber.

"Things are just the same, Mark, you'll notice," said Tim, pointing to
a hole in the flooring of the bridge over which we were passing.

The valley had been driving around that same danger spot these ten
years.  There was a world of meaning to the returning wanderer in that
broken plank, and it was not hard to catch the glance of my brother's
eye and to know his mind.

Henry Holmes on the front seat, driving, caught the inflection of Tim's
voice and cried testily: "You are allus runnin' the walley down.  Why
don't you tell him about the improvements instead of pintin' out the
bad spots in the road?"

"Improvements?" said I, in a tone of inquiry.

"Theop Jones has bought him a new side-bar buggy," replied the old man.
"Then the Kallabergers has moved in from the country and is fixin' up
the Harmon house at the end of the town."

"And a be-yutiful place they're makin' of it," cried Isaac Bolum;
"be-yutiful!"

"They've added a fancy porch," Henry explained, "and are gittin' blue
glass panes for the front door."

"We've three spring-beds in town now," put in Isaac in his slow, dreamy
way.  "If I mind right the Spikers bought theirs before war was
declared, so you've seen that one.  Well, Piney Martin he has got him
one--let me see--when did he git it, Henery?"

Old Holmes furrowed his brow and closed one eye, seeking with the other
the inspiration of the sky.

"July sixth," he answered.  "Don't you mind, Ike, it come the same day
and on the wery same stage as the news of the sinkin' of the Spaynish
fleet?"

"Nonsense," retorted Isaac.  "You're allus mixin' dates, Henery.
You're thinkin' of Tip Pulsifer's last baby.  He come July six, for
don't you mind how they called him Cevery out of pity and generosity
for the Spayniards?  Piney's spring-bed arrived the same day and on the
same stage as brung us the news of Mark here havin' his left leg shot
off."

"Mebbe--mebbe--mebbe," muttered Henry, shaking his head dubiously.  "It
certainly do beat all how things happens all at once in this world.
Come to think of it, the wery next day six of my sheep was killed by
dogs."

"It's good you're gittin' your dates cleared," snapped old Bolum.  "On
history, Henery Holmes, you are the worst."

Henry retorted with an angry protest against the indictment, declaring
that he was studying history when Bolum was being nourished on "soft
food."  That was true.  Isaac admitted it frankly.  He wasn't his
mother's keeper, that he could regulate his own birthday.  Had that
been in his power he would certainly have set it a half century earlier
or later to avoid being constantly annoyed by the "onreasonablest
argeyments" Six Stars had ever heard.  This made old Holmes smile
softly, and he turned and winked at me.  The one thing he had ever been
thankful for, he said, was that his life had fallen with that of Isaac
Bolum.  Whenever he done wrong; whenever the consciousness of sin was
upon him and he needed the chastisin' rod, he just went to the store
and set and listened to Ike.  To this Isaac retorted that it was a
wonder the rod had not worn out long ago; it was pleasing to know, at
least, that he was made of tough old hickory.  Henry admitted this to
be a "good 'un" on him--an unusual one, considering the source--but
that did not settle the exact date of the arrival of Piney Martin's
spring-bed.

It was time for me to protest that it mattered little whether the event
occurred on July sixth or a week later, since what really interested me
was the question as to who was the owner of the third of these
luxuries.  Isaac's serious, self-conscious look answered me, but I
pressed the inquiry to give him an opportunity to sing the praises of
this newest of his household gods.  Mr. Bolum's pleasure was evident.
Once launched into an account of the comfort of springs as compared to
a straw-tick on ropes, he would have monopolized our attention to the
end of the journey, but the sagacious Henry blocked him rudely by a tug
at the reins which almost threw the lemon-colored mules on their
haunches.

We were at the foot of the slope where the road to Buzzards Glory
branches from the pike.  The Arkers had spied us coming, and ran down
from the tannery to greet us.  Arnold, after he had a dozen times
expressed his delight at my return, asked if I had seen any shooting.
His son Sam's wife nudged him and whispered in his ear, upon which he
apologized abruptly, explaining that he had dropped his spectacles in
the tanning vat.  Sam sought to extricate his father from these
imaginary difficulties by demanding that I go coon-hunting with him on
the next night.  This set Sam's wife's elbow going again very
vigorously, and the further embarrassment of the whole family was saved
by Henry Holmes swinging the whip across the backs of the mules.

On went the state-coach of Black Log.  We clattered quickly over the
last level stretch.  We dragged up the last long hill, and from its
brow I looked on the roofs of Six Stars rising here and there from the
green bed of trees.  I heard the sonorous rumble of the mill, and above
it a shrill and solitary crow.  On the state-coach went, down the
steep, driving the mules madly before it.  Their hoofs made music on
the bridge, and my journey was ended.

Home again!  Even Tip Pulsifer was dear to me then.  He was between the
wheels when we stopped, and I planted a crutch on one of his bare feet
and embraced him.

He grinned and cried, "Mighty souls!"

That embrace, that grin and that heart-born exclamation marked the
entrance of the Pulsifer family into my life.  Theretofore I had
regarded them with a suspicion born of a pile of feathers at the door
of their shanty on the ridge, for they kept no chickens.  Now the six
little Pulsifers, all with the lower halves of their faces washed and
their hair soaped down, were climbing around me, and the latest comer,
that same Cevery who arrived with Piney Martin's spring-bed, was
hoisted into kissing distance by his mother, who was thinner and more
wan than ever, but still smiling.  But this was home and these were
home people.  My heart was open then and warm, and I took the seven
little Pulsifers to it.  I took old Mrs. Bolum to it, too, for she
tumbled the clamoring infants aside and in her joy forgot the ruffles
in the sleeves of her wonderful purple silk.  At her elbow hovered the
tall, spare figure of Aaron Kallaberger.  Mindful of the military
nature of the occasion he appeared in his old army overcoat, in spite
of the heat.  Rare honor, this!  And better still, he hailed me as
"Comrade," and enfolding my hand in his long horny fingers, cried
"All's well, Mark!"

The mill ceased its rumbling.  Already the valley was rocking itself to
sleep.  Out of the darkening sky rang the twanging call of a
night-hawk, and the cluck of a dozing hen sounded from the foliage
overhead.  A flock of weary sheep pattered along the road, barnward
bound, heavy eyed and bleating softly.  The blue gate was opened wide.
My hand was on Tim's shoulder and Tim's arm was my support.

"All's well!" I cried.  For I was hobbling home.



II

Perry Thomas still had his speech to deliver.  He hovered around the
rocking-chair in which they had enthroned me, and with one hand he kept
clutching violently at his throat as though he were suppressing his
eloquence by muscular effort.  His repeated coughing seemed a constant
warning that at any moment he might be vanquished in the struggle for
becoming silence.  There was a longing light in his eyes and a look of
appeal whenever our glances met.  My position was embarrassing.  He
knew that I realized his predicament, but how could I interrupt the
kindly demonstrations of the old friends who pressed about me, to
announce that the local orator had a formal address of welcome that was
as yet unspoken?  And an opportunity like this might never again occur
in Perry's life!  Here were gathered not only the people of the
village, but of the valley.  His words would fall not alone on the ears
of a few choice spirits of the store forum, or the scoffing pedants of
the literary society, for crowded into that little room were old men
whose years would give weight to the declaration that it was the
greatest talking they had ever heard; were young children, who in after
years, when a neglected gravestone was toppling over all that was left
of the orator, would still speak of the wonders of his eloquence; were
comely women to whom the household was the world and the household task
the life's work, but who could now for the moment lift their bent forms
and have their dulled eyes turned to higher and better things.
Moreover, there were in that room a score of deep eyes that could not
but quicken at the sight of a slender, manly figure, clad in scholastic
black, of a thin, earnest face, with beetled brows and a classic
forehead from which swept waves of black hair.  Little wonder Perry was
restless under restraint!  Little wonder he grew more melancholy and
coughed louder and louder, as the light without faded away, and the
faces within were dimmed in the shadow!

From the kitchen came the clatter of dishes and pans and a babel of
women's voices, the shrill commands of old Mrs. Bolum rising above
them.  The feast was preparing.  Its hour was at hand.  Apollo never
was a match for Bacchus, and Perry Thomas could not command attention
once Mrs. Bolum appeared on the scene.  He realized this.  Her cries
came as an inspiration to action.  In the twilight I lost him, but the
lamp-light disclosed him standing over Henry Holmes, who had been
driven into a corner and was held prisoner there by a threatening
finger.  There was a whispered parley that ended only when the old man
surrendered and, stepping to the centre of the room, rapped long and
loud on the floor with his cane.

Henry is always blunt.  He has a way of getting right at the heart of
things with everyone except Bolum.  For Isaac, he regards
circumlocution as necessary, taking the ground that with him the
quantity and not the quality of the words counts.  So when he had
silenced the company, and with a sweep of his cane had driven them into
close order about the walls, he said: "Mr. Thomas is anxious to make an
address."

At this moment Mr. Thomas was about to step into the zone of fire of a
hundred eyes.  There was a very audible titter in the corner where
three thoughtless young girls had squeezed themselves into one
rocking-chair.  The orator heard it and brought his heels together with
a click.

"Mind what I told you, Henery," he whispered very loud, glaring at Mr.
Holmes.

"Oh, yes," Henry returned in a casual tone.

He thumped the floor again, and when the tittering had subsided, and
only the snuffling of Cevery Pulsifer broke the silence, he said: "In
jestice to Mr. Thomas, I am requested to explain that the address was
originally intended to be got off at the railroad.  It was forgot by
accident, and him not havin' time to change it, he asks us to make
believe we are standin' alongside of the track at Pleasantville just as
the train comes in."

Isaac Bolum had fixed himself comfortably on two legs of his chair,
with the projecting soles of his boots caught behind the rung.  Feet
and chair-legs came to the floor with a crash, and half rising from the
seat, one hand extended in appeal, the other at his right ear, forming
a trumpet, he shouted: "Mr. Chairman!  Mr. Chairman!"

"This ain't a liter'ry meetin', Mr. Bolum.  The floor is Mr. Thomas's,
I believe," said Henry with dignity.

"But I didn't catch the name of the station you said we was to imagine."

"I said Pleasantville," cried Henry angrily.

"I apologize," returned Isaac.  "I thought you said Meadowville, and
never havin' been there, I didn't see how I could imagine the station."

"It seems to me, Isaac Bolum," retorted Henry with dignified asperity,
"that with your imagination you could conjure up a whole railroad
system, includin' the freight-yard.  But Mr. Thomas has the floor."

"See here, Henery Holmes," cried Isaac, "it's all right for us old
folks, but there's the children.  How can they imagine Pleasantville
station when some of 'em ain't yet seen a train?"

This routed even Henry Holmes.  At the store he would never have given
in, but he was not accustomed to hearing so loud a murmur of approval
greet the opposition.  He realized that he had been placed in a false
position by the importunities of Mr. Thomas, and to him he now left the
brunt of the trouble by stepping out of the illumined circle and losing
himself in the company.

The fire-swept zone had no terrors for Perry.  With one hand thrust
between the first and second buttons of his coat, and the other raised
in that gesture with which the orator stills the sea of discontent, he
stepped forward, and turning slowly about, brought his eyes to bear on
the contumacious Bolum.  He indicated the target.  Every optic gun in
the room was levelled at it.  The upraised hand, the potent silence,
the solemn gaze of a hundred eyes was too much for the old man to bear.
Slowly he swung back on two legs of his chair, caught the rungs again
with the projecting soles, turned his eyes to the ceiling, closed them,
and set himself to imagining the station at Pleasantville.  The rout
was complete.

Perry wheeled and faced me.  The hand was lowered slowly; four fingers
disappeared and one long one, one quivering one, remained, a whip with
which to chastise the prisoner at the bar.

"Mark Hope," he began, in a deep, rich, resonant voice, "we welcome you
home.  We have come down from the valley, fourteen mile through the
blazin' noonday sun, fourteen mile over wind-swept roads, that you,
when agin you step on the soil of our beloved county, may step into
lovin' hands, outstretched to meet you and bid you welcome.  Welcome
home--thrice welcome--agin I say, welcome!"

[Illustration: "Welcome home--thrice welcome!"]

Both of the orator's hands swung upward and outward, and he looked
intently at the ceiling.  He seemed prepared to catch me as I leaped
from a second-story window.  The pause as he stood there braced to
receive the body of the returning soldier as it hurtled at him, gave
Isaac Bolum an opportunity to be magnanimous.  He clapped his hands and
cheered.  In an instant his shrill cry was drowned in a burst of
applause full of spirit and heart, closing with a flourish of wails
from Cevery Pulsifer and the latest of the Kallabergers.  Perry's arms
fell gracefully to his side and he inclined his head and half closed
his eyes in acknowledgment.  Then turning to Isaac, measuring every
word, in a voice clear and cutting, his long forefinger shaking, he
cried: "From the bloody battlefields of Cuby, from her tropic camps
where you suffered and bled, you come home to us to-day.  You have
fought in the cause of liberty.  To your country you have give a
limb--you----"

Poor Bolum!  Awakened from the gentle doze into which he had fallen the
instant Cevery Pulsifer relieved him of the duty of leading the
applause, he brought his chair down on all four legs, and slapped both
knees violently.  Satisfied that they were still there, he looked up at
the orator.

"You have give a limb," repeated Perry, emphasizing the announcement by
shaking his finger at the old man.

Isaac's mouth was half open for a protest, when he remembered, and
leaning over seized the toe of each boot in a hand and wriggled his
feet.  When we saw his face again he was smiling gently, and swinging
back, he nestled his head against the wall and closed his eyes once
more.

"You would have give your life," cried Perry.

But the only sign old Bolum made was to twirl the thumbs of his clasped
hands.

"Six months ago, six short, stirrin' months ago you left us, just a
plain man, at your country's call."  Perry was thundering his rolling
periods at us.  "To-day, a moment since, standin' here by the track, we
heard the rumblin' of the train and the engyne's whistle, and we says a
he-ro comes--a he-ro in blue!"

Had Perry looked my way, he might have noticed that I was clad in
khaki, but he was addressing Henry Holmes, whose worthy head was
nodding in continual acquiescence.  The old man stood, with eyes
downcast and hands clasped before him, a picture of humility.  The
orator, carried away by his own eloquence, seemed to forget its real
purpose, and in a moment, sitting unnoticed in my chair with Tim at my
side, I became a minor figure, while half a hundred were gathered there
to do honor to Henry Holmes.  Once I even forgot and started to applaud
when Perry raised his hand over the gray head as though in blessing and
said solemnly: "He-ro in blue--agin we bid you welcome!"

A little laugh behind me recalled me to my real place, and with a
burning face I turned.

I have in my mind a thousand pictures of one woman.  But of them all
the one I love most, the one on which I dwell most as I sit of an
evening with my pipe and my unopened book, is that which I first saw
when I sought the chit who noticed my ill-timed applause and laughed at
me.  I found her.  I saw that she laughed with me and for me, and I
laughed too.  We laughed together.  An instant, and her face became
grave.

The orator, now swelling into his peroration, was forgotten.  The
people of the valley--Tim--even Tim--all of them were forgotten.  I had
found the woman of my firelight, the woman of my cloudland, the woman
of my sunset country down in the mountains to the west.  She, had
always been a vague, undefined creature to me--just a woman, and so
elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman
whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through
eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who
ofttimes worn, or perhaps feigning weariness, rested on my shoulder a
little head, crowned with a glory of hair sometimes black, and
sometimes golden or auburn, and not infrequently red, a dashing, daring
red.  Sometimes she was slender and elf-like, a chic and clinging
creature.  Again she was tall and stately, like the women of the
romances.  Again she was buxom and blooming, one whose hand you would
take instead of offering an arm.  She had been an elusive,
ever-changing creature, but now that I had looked into those grave,
gray eyes, I fixed the form of my picture, and fixed its colors and
fired them in to last for all my time.

Now she is just the woman that every woman ought to be.  Her hair is
soft brown and sweeps back from a low white forehead.  She has tried to
make it straight and simple, as every woman should, but the angels seem
to have curled it here and mussed it there, so that all her care cannot
hide its wanton waves.  Her face is full of life and health, so open,
so candid, that there you read her heart, and you know that it is as
good as she is fair.

She stood before me in a sombre gown, almost ugly in its gray color and
severe lines, but to me she was a quaint figure such as might have
stepped out of the old world and the old time when men lived with a
vengeance, and godliness and ugliness went arm in arm, for Satan had
preempted the beautiful.  Against her a homely garb failed.  She was
beautiful in spite of her clothes and not because of them.  But this is
generally true with women.  This one, instead of sharing our admiration
with her gown, claimed it all for herself.  Her face had no rival.

I did not turn away.  I could not.  The gray eyes, once flashing with
the light of kindly humor, now softened with sympathy, now glowed with
pity.  Pity!  The thought of it stirred me with anger.  The justice of
it made me rage.  She saw in the chair a thin, broken figure, a drawn
brown face, a wreck of a man.  Yesterday--a soldier.  To-day--a hero.
To-morrow--a crippled veteran, and after that a pensioner drifting fast
into a garrulous dotage.  She, too, was looking into the future.  She
knew what I had lost.  She saw what I dreaded.  Her eyes told me that.
She did not know what I had gained, for she came of a silly people
whose blood quickened only to the swing of a German hymn and who were
stirred more by the groans of a penitent sinner than the martial call
of the bugle.

So it came that I struggled to my crutches and broke rudely in on Perry
Thomas's peroration.  I had gathered all my strength for a protest
against the future.  The people of the valley were to know that their
kindness had cheered me, but of their pity I wanted none.  I had played
a small part in a great game and in the playing was the reward.  I had
come forth a bit bruised and battered, but there were other battles to
be fought in this world, where one could have the same fierce joy of
the conflict; and he was a poor soldier who lived only to be toted out
on Decoration days.  I was glad to be home, but gladder still that I
had gone.  That was what I told them.  I looked right at the girl when
I said it, and she lifted her head and smiled.  They heard how in the
early spring in the meadow by the mill-dam Tim and I had stopped our
ploughs to draw lots and he had lost.  He had to stay at home, while I
went out and saw the world at its best, when it was awake to war and
strife, and the mask that hid its emotion was lifted.  They heard a
very simple story and a very short one, for now that I came to recount
it all my great adventure dwindled to a few dreary facts.  But as best
I knew I told them of the routine of the camp and of the endless drills
in the long spring days down there at Tampa before the army took to
sea.  I spoke of the sea and the strange things we saw there as we
steamed along--of the sharks that lolled in our wake, of the great
turtles that seemed to sun themselves on the wave-crests, of the
pelicans and the schools of flying fishes.  Elmer Spiker interrupted to
inquire whether the turtles I had seen were "black-legs, red-legs, or
yaller-legs."  I had not the remotest idea, and said that I could not
see how the question was relevant.  He replied that it was not, except
that it would be of interest to some of those present to learn that
there were three distinct kinds of "tortles"--red-legs, black-legs, and
"yaller-legs."  They were shipped to the city and all became
"tarripine."  This annoyed me.  Elmer is a great scholar, and it was
evident that he was simply airing his wisdom, and rather than give him
a second opportunity I tried to hurry to land; but Isaac Bolum awoke
and wanted to know if he had been dreaming.

"I thot I heard some one speakin' of flyin' fishes," he said.

[Illustration: Tim and I had stopped our ploughs to draw lots and he
had lost.]

It was reckless in me to mention these sea wonders, for now in defence
of my reputation for truthfulness, I had to prove their existence.  The
fabric of my story seemed to hang on them.  Elmer Spiker declared that
he had heard his grandfather tell of a flying sucker that inhabited the
deep hole below the bridge when he was a boy, but this was the same
grandfather who had strung six squirrels and a pigeon on one bullet in
the woods above the mill in his early manhood.  There Elmer winked.
Isaac Bolum allowed that they might be trout that had trained
themselves in the use of wings, but he did not believe that any
ordinary fish such as a chub or a pike or a sunny would care to leave
its natural element to take up with the birds.  Perry Thomas began to
cough.  That cough is always like a snake's warning rattle.  Before he
had time to strike, I blocked the discussion by promising that if the
company suspended judgment I would in the near future prove the
accuracy of my statements on flying fishes by the encyclopaedia.  This
promise met with general approval, so I hurried over the sea to the dry
land where I knew the ways better and was less likely to arouse higher
criticism.  I told them of the stirring times in Cuba, till the day
came when we stormed the hill, and they had to carry me back to the
sea.  I told them how lucky I was to get to the sea at all, for often I
had closed my eyes, worn out by the pain and the struggle for life,
little caring whether ever again I opened them to the light.  Then
strength came, and hope, and I turned my face to the North, toward the
valley and home.  It was hard to come back on crutches, but it was
better than not to come at all.  It was best, to have gone away, else I
had never known the joy of the return, and I was pretty sure to stay,
now that I was home, but if they fancied me dozing away my life at the
store stove they were mistaken; not that I scorned the learned
discussion there, but the frosts were coming soon to stir up sluggish
blood, and when the guns were barking in the woods, and the hounds were
baying along the ridges, I would be with them.

I looked right at the girl when I said it.  I was boasting.  She knew
it.  She must see, too, what a woful figure I should make with
strong-limbed fellows like Tim there, and strong-limbed hounds like old
Captain, who was lying at my side.  But somehow she liked my vaunting
speech.  I knew it when our eyes met.



III

The gate latch clicked.  From the road Henry Holmes called a last
good-night, and Tim and I were alone.  We sat in silence, watching
through the window the old man's lantern as he swung away toward home.
Then the light disappeared and without all was black.  The village was
asleep.

By the stove lay my hound, Captain, snoring gently.  He had tried to
keep awake, poor beast!  For a time he had even struggled to hold one
eye open and on his master, but at last, overcome by weariness, his
head snuggled farther and farther down into his fore paws, and the
tired tail ceased its rhythmic beating on the floor.

What is home without a dog!  Captain is happy.  He smiles gently as he
sleeps, and it seems that in that strange dog-dreamland he and I are
racing over the ridges again, through the nipping winds, on the trail
of a fox or a rabbit.  His master is home.  He has wandered far to
other hunting grounds, but now that the tang is in the air that
foretells the frost and snow, he has come again to the dog that never
misses a trail, the dog that never fails him.

The hound raised his head and half opened one eye.  He was sure that I
was really there, and the gleam of white teeth showed a broadening
dog-smile.  And once more we were away on the dreamland trail--Captain
and I.

"He's been counting the days till you got home, Mark," said Tim,
holding a burning match over my pipe.  "It was a bit lonely here, while
you were gone, so Captain and I used to discuss your doings a good deal
after the rest of the place had gone to bed.  And as for young Colonel,
why he's heard so much of you from Captain there, I'm afraid he'll
swallow you when he gets at you in the morning."

Young Colonel was the puppy the returning soldier had never seen.  He
had come long after I had gone away, and as yet I knew him only by his
voice, for I had heard his dismal wails down in the barn.  In the
excitement of the evening I had forgotten him, but now I raised a
warning finger and listened, thinking that I might catch the appealing
cry.  And is there any cry more appealing than that of a lonely puppy?
There was not a sound outside, and I turned to Tim.

My brother lighted his pipe, and leaned back in his chair, and looked
at me.  I looked at him very, very hard.  Then we both began to blow
clouds of smoke in each other's faces.  Hardly a word had Tim and I
passed since that day in the field when I drew the long twig that sent
me away and left him behind to keep our home.  What a blessing a pipe
is at a time like this!  Tim says more by the vigor of his smoking than
Perry Thomas could express in a year's oration.  So we enshrouded our
emotions in the gray cloud; but if he did not speak, I knew well what
he would be saying, and the harder I puffed the easier did he divine
what was uppermost in my mind.  For we were brothers!  This was the
same room that for years had been our world; this the same carpet over
which we had tumbled together at our mother's feet.  There was the same
cupboard that had been our mountain; here the same chairs that formed
our ridges and our valleys.  At the table by my side, by the light of
this very lamp, we sat together not so very long ago, boys, spelling
out with our father, letter by letter, word by word, the stories of the
Bible.  Here we had lived our little lives; here we were to live what
was to come; and where life is as simple as it is with us we grow a bit
like the animals about us.  We sit together and smoke; we purr, as it
were, and know each other's mind.  Tim and I purred.  Incident by
incident, year by year, we travelled down the course of our lives
again, over the rough ways, over the smooth ways, smoking and smoking,
until at last we brought up together at the present.  Not a word had
either of us spoken, but at last when our reminiscent wanderings were
over and we paused on the threshold of the future, Tim spoke.

"Attractive?" he said in a tone of inquiry.

He was looking at me with eyebrows arched, curiously, and there was a
faint suggestion of hostility in the set of his mouth.

Poor Tim!  He has seen so little of women!  We have them in our valley,
of course.  But he and I lived much in the great book-land beyond the
hills.  We had read together of all the heroines of the romances, and
we knew their little ways and their pretty speeches as well as if we
had ourselves walked with them through a few hundred pages and lived
happily ever after.  They had been the women of our world as distinct
from the women of our valley.  The last we knew as kindly, honest
persons with a faculty for twisting their English and a woful ignorance
of well-turned speeches.  They never said "Fair Sir" nor "Master."  But
I had gone from that book-world and had seen the women of the real
world.  Here I had the advantage of my brother.  Into his life a single
woman had come from the real world.  She was different from the women
of our valley.  I had known that the moment our eyes met, and by the
way Tim smoked now, and by the tone of his terse inquiry, I knew that
he had met a woman who had said "Fair Sir" to him, and I feared for
him.  It was disturbing.  I felt a twinge of jealousy, but whether for
the tall, strong young fellow before me, to whom I had been all, or for
the fair-faced girl, I could not for the life of me tell.  It seemed to
be a bit of both.

"I remarked that she was attractive," said Tim aggressively, for I had
kept on smoking in silence.

"Rather," I answered carelessly.  "But who is she--a stranger here?"

"Rather," repeated Tim hotly.  "Well, you are blind.  I suppose you
judged her by that ugly gray gown.  You thought she was some pious
Dunkard."

"I am no enemy of piety," I retorted.  "In fact, I hardly noticed her
clothes at all, except to think that their simplicity gave her a sort
of Priscilla air that was fetching."

Tim softened.  "That's it exactly," he said.  "But, Mark, you should
have seen Mary Warden when she came here."

"From where?" I asked.

"From Kansas.  She lived in some big town out West, and when her mother
died there was no one left to her but Luther Warden, her uncle.  He
sent for her, and now she is living with him.  The old man sets a great
store by her."

Luther Warden is rich.  He has accumulated a fine lot of property above
Six Stars--several good farms, a mill and a tannery; but even the
chance of inheriting all these did not seem fair compensation for being
his niece and having to live with him.  He was good to a fault.  He
exuded piety.  Six days of the week he worked, piling up the passing
treasures of this world.  One whole day he preached, striving for the
treasures in that to come.  You could not lay a finger on a weak spot
in his moral armor, but Tip Pulsifer protected from the assaults of
Satan only by a shield of human skin, always seemed to me the better of
the two.  Tip wore leaky boots all last winter, but when spring came he
bought Mrs. Pulsifer a sewing machine.  Have you ever worn leaky boots
when the snow was banked fence high?  Luther Warden's boots never leak.
They are always tight and well tallowed.  His horses and his cows
waddle in their fat, and the wool of his flocks is the longest in the
valley.  Luther gets up with the sun and goes to bed with it.  Some in
our valley think his heavy crops come from his six days of labor, and
some from his one day of preaching.  He says that the one day does it
all; but he keeps on getting out with the sun on the other six.  I knew
that the poor girl from Kansas must get up with the sun, too, for her
uncle was not the man to brook any dawdling.  I knew, further, that
Sunday could not be a day of rest for her, for of all his people she
would have to listen to his preaching.

That was why I murmured in a commiserative tone, "Luther's niece--poor
girl!"

"You needn't pity her," Tim snapped.  "She knows a heap more about the
world than you or I do.  She--"

"She is not a Dunkard, then?" I interrupted.

"Not a bit," Tim answered.  "I don't know what she was in Kansas, but
Luther has preached so much on worldliness and the vanity of fine
clothes that it wouldn't look right for his niece to go flaunting
frills and furbelows about the valley.  That plain gray gown is a
concession to the old man.  He'd like her to wear a prayer-cap and a
poke bonnet, I guess, but she has a mind of her own.  I think she drew
the line there."

She had not given up so much, I thought.  Perhaps in her self-denial
there was method, and her simple garb became her best.  Even a
prayer-cap might frame her face the fairest; but she must know.  And I
had seen that in the flash of her eye and the toss of her head that
told me that a hundred Luther Wardens, a hundred Dunkard preacher
uncles, could not abate her beauty one jot.

"She's rich," said Tim.

He blurted it out.  As long as I had seen her and found her beautiful,
this announcement seemed uncalled for.  Had she been plain of face and
figure it might have served a purpose, were my brother endeavoring to
excuse the sentimental state of mind he had disclosed to me.  He knew
that the place he held in my heart was first.  This had always been
true, and in our lonely innocence we had promised it should be true to
the end.  There was to be a fair return.  He had promised it, and now
he was learning how hard it was to keep faith.  His attitude was one of
half penitence, half defiance.  Had I not seen the girl, had he told me
that she was beautiful, and even rich and good, all our boyish pledges
would have been swept aside, and I should have cheered him on.  But I
had seen her.  She had laughed with me.  Somehow we had understood each
other.  And now I cared not so much what he felt for her as how she
looked on him.  For once in our lives Tim and I were fencing.

"She's pretty, Tim," said I, "and rich, you say?"

"Mary has several thousand dollars," he answered.  "Besides that,
she'll get all old man Warden has to leave, and that's a pretty pile."

"Little wonder she wears that Dunkard gown," said I with the faintest
sneer.

It angered Tim.

"That's not fair," he cried.  "She's not that kind.  Luther Warden is
all she has of kin, and if it makes him any happier to see her togged
out in that gawky Dunkard gown-----"

"Gawky?" said I.  "Why, man, on a woman like that a plain dress is
simply quaint.  She looks like an old Dutch picture.  You must not let
her change it."

The insinuation of his authority made Tim pound the table with his
pipe.  He was striving to be angry, but I knew what that furious flush
of his face meant.  He tried to conceal it by smoking again, but ended
in a laugh.

"Oh, nonsense!" he said.  Then he laughed again.

"Tell me," I went on, following up my advantage, "when is she coming
here, or when are you going to move up there?"

My brother recovered his composure.

"It's all silly, Mark.  There is no chance of a girl like that settling
down here with a clumsy fellow like me--a fellow who doesn't know
anything, who's never been anywhere, who's never seen anything.  Why,
she's travelled; she's from Kansas; she's lived in big cities.  This is
nothing but a lark for her.  She'll go away some day, and she'll leave
us here, grubbing away on our bit of a farm and spending our savings on
powder and shot--until we get to the happy hunting grounds."

Tim laughed mournfully.  "I've been just a little foolish," he went on,
"but I couldn't help it, Mark.  It doesn't amount to anything; it never
did and never will, and now that you're here and the rabbit season will
soon be in, we'll have other things to think of.  But you must remember
I'm not the only man in the world who's been a bit of a fool in his
time."

"No," said I.  "May I be spared myself, but see here, Tim, how does it
feel?"

"How does what feel?" snapped Tim.

"To be in love the way you are," I answered.

"Oh!" he exclaimed.

He had been taken back, and hesitated between anger and amusement.
When Tim hesitates he loses his temper as a sensible man should lose
it--he buries it, and his indomitable good humor wins.

"Tip Pulsifer says it's like religion," he answered.  "At first it
makes you feel all low-down like, and miserable, and you don't care.
Then you either get over it entirely or become so used to it you don't
feel it at all."

"May I be spared!" I cried, "and may you get over it."

But the youngster refused to commit himself.  He just smiled and
smoked, and it seemed as though in his suffering he was half happy.  I
smoked, too.  We smoked together.  The silence startled Captain, for
the clock struck, and yawning, he arose, trotted to my side, and with
one leap he brought his ponderous paws into my lap.

You can trust your dog.  He never fails you.

"Well, old chap," I said, as I scratched his nose ever so gently, "you
at least have no one to think of but me and Tim there, eh?"

[Illustration: "Well, old chap!"]

"No," cried Captain heartily.

That was not the exact word that he used, but he expressed it by
beating his tail against the table and giving a long howl.

"And if Tim, there, goes dawdling after a woman, we shall stick to the
ridges, and the foxes, and the rabbits.  We can't go as fast as we used
to, Captain, but we can go together, eh?"

"The same as ever and the same forever," cried Captain.

Those were not his exact words, but I saw his answer in his eyes, for
he had climbed higher and they were close to mine.  He seemed ready to
swallow me.

"And when he brings her home, Captain," said I, "and fills the whole
house with young ones who'll pull your tail and tickle your ears and
play horse with my crutches, we shall sit outside and smoke our pipes
alone, in peace and quiet, eh, Captain?"

"Oho!" cried Captain.  "That we will, and you never need want, Mark,
for I've many a fine bone buried away against old age and rainy
weather."

"Spoken like a man," said I, slapping the hound on the back.

Tim had lighted a candle.  Now he blew out the lamp and stood over me
in the half-light, holding out a hand.

"Come," he said.  "That's right, put your hand on my shoulder, for the
stairs are steep and will trouble you.  That's the way.  Come along,
Captain; to-night we'll all go up together.  And when she comes--that
woman--we'll go to your house--all three of us--the same as now--eh,
Captain?"



IV

"I love soldiers--just love 'em," she said.

"The sentiment is an old one with women," said I.  "Were it not so,
there would be no soldiers."

"And for that reason you went to war?" she said.

"In part, yes," I answered.

"How I should like to see the woman!" she cried.  "How proud she must
be of you!"

"Of me?" I laughed.  "The woman?  Why, she doesn't exist."

"Then why did you turn soldier?"

"I feared that some day there might be a woman, and when that day came
I wished to be prepared.  I thought that the men who fought would be
the men of the future.  But I have learned a great deal.  They will be
the men of the past in a few months.  The memory of a battle's heroes
fades away almost with the smoke.  In a little while, to receive our
just recognition we old soldiers will have to parade before the public
with a brass band, and the band will get most attention.  Would you
know that Aaron Kallaberger was a hero of Gettysburg if he didn't wear
an army overcoat?"

"Oh, yes," she said.  "I have heard about it so often.  He has told me
a hundred times."

"I suppose you have told a hundred other persons of Aaron's prowess?"
said I.

"No-o-o," she answered.

"And so," said I, "when Perry Thomas finished his oration last night, I
had to catch it up; and if my soldiering is to result in any material
good to me I must keep that oration moving to the end."

"But will you?" she asked.

How I liked the way she put it!  It was flattering--subtly so.  She
seemed to imply that I was a modest soldier, and if there is a way to
flatter a man it is to call him modest.  Modesty is one of the best of
policies.  To call a man honest is no more than to call him healthy or
handsome.  These are attributes of nearly everyone at some time in his
life.  But to do a great deed or a good deed, and to rejoice that it
has been done and the world is better for it, and not because you did
it and the world knows it, that is different.  So often our modesty
consists in using as much effort to walk with hanging head and sloping
shoulders as we should need for a majestic strut.

She called me modest.  Yet there I sat in my old khaki uniform.  It was
ragged and dirty, and I was proud of it.  It was a bit thin for a
chilly autumn day, but in spite of Tim's expostulation I had worn it,
refusing his offers of a warmer garb.  I was clinging to my glory.
While I had on that old uniform, I was a soldier.  When I laid it
aside, I should become as Aaron Kallaberger and Arnold Arker.  A year
hence people would ask me if I had been a railroad man in my time.

She called me modest.  That very morning Tim told me she was coming.
She had made some jellies, so she said, for the soldier of the valley.
They were her offering to the valley's idol.  She thought the idol
would consume them, for bachelor cooking was never intended for
bachelor invalids.  Tim had mentioned this casually.  I suspected that
he believed that the visit to me was simply a pretence and that she
knew he was to be working in the field by the house.  But I took no
chances.  In the seclusion of my room I brushed every speck off the
uniform and made sure that every inch of it fitted snugly and without
an unnecessary wrinkle.  Then when my hair had been parted and smoothed
down, I crowned myself with my campaign hat at the dashingest possible
tilt.  Thus arrayed I fixed myself on the porch, to be smoking my pipe
in a careless, indifferent way when she came.  An egotist, you say--a
vain man.  No--just a man.  For who when She comes would not look his
best?  We prate a lot about the fair sex and its sweet vanities.  Yet
it takes us less time to do our hair simply because it is shorter.

When Mary comes!  The gate latch clicked and I whistled the
sprightliest air I knew.  Down in the field Tim appeared from the maze
of corn-stalks and looked my way beneath a shading hand.  There were
foot-falls on the porch.  Had they been light I should have kept on
whistling in that careless way; but now I looked up, startled.  Before
me stood not Mary, but Josiah Nummler.

[Illustration: Josia Nummler.]

It was kind of Josiah to come, for he is an old man and lives a full
mile above the village, half way up the ridge-side.  He is very fat,
too, from much meditation, and to aid his thin legs in moving his bulky
body he carries a very long stick, which he uses like a paddle to
propel him; so when you see him in the distance he seems to be standing
in a canoe, sweeping it along.  Really he is only navigating the road.
He had a clothes-prop with him that day, and pausing at the end of the
porch, he leaned on it and gasped.  I ought to have been pleased to see
Josiah.

"Well, Mark," he said, "I am glad you're home.  Mighty! but you look
improved."

He gasped again and smiled through his bushy beard.

"Thank you," said I, icily, waving him toward a chair.

Josiah sat down and smiled again.

"It just does me good to see you," he said, having completely recovered
his power of speech.  "I should have come down last night, Mark.  I
'pologize for not doin' it, but it's mighty troublesome gittin' 'round
in the dark.  The last time I tried it, I caught the end of my stick
between two rocks and it broke.  There I was, left settin' on the Red
Hill with no way of gittin' home.  I was in for comin' down here to
receive you--really I was--but my missus says she ain't a-goin' to have
me rovin' 'round the country that 'ay agin.  'Gimme an extry oar,' I
says.  And she says: 'Does you 'spose I'll let you run 'round lookin'
like a load of wood?'  And I says----"

The gate latch clicked.  Again Tim appeared from the maze of corn and
stood shading his eyes and gazing toward the house.  Now the footfalls
were light.  And Mary came!  But how could I look careless and dashing,
with Josiah Nummler in the chair I had fixed so close to mine?  Rising,
I bowed as awkwardly as possible.  I insisted on her taking my own
rocker, while I fixed myself on the floor with a pillar for a
back-rest.  Not a word did the girl say, but she sat there clutching
the little basket she held in her lap.

"Eggs?" inquired Josiah.

She shook her head, but did not enlighten him.

"I should judge your hens ain't layin' well, figurin' on the size of
the basket," said the old man, ignoring her denial.  "There's a
peculiarity about the hens in this walley--it's somethin' I've noticed
ever since I was a boy.  I've spoke to my missus about it and she has
noticed the same thing since she was a girl--so it must be a
peculiarity.  The hens in this walley allus lays most when the price of
eggs is lowest."

This was a serious problem.  It is not usual for Josiah to be serious,
either, for he is generally out of breath or laughing.  Now he was
wagging his head solemnly, pulling his beard, and over and over
repeating, "But hens is contrary--hens is contrary."

Mary contrived to drop the basket to her side, out of the old man's
sight.

"Speakin' of hens," he went on.  "My missus was sayin' just yesterday
how as----"

Tim was shouting.  He was calling something to me.  I could not make
out what it was, for the wind-was rustling the corn-shocks, but I arose
and feigned to listen.

"It's Tim," said I.  "He's calling to you, Josiah.  It's something
about your red heifer."

"Red heifer--I haven't no red heifer," returned the old man.

"Did I say heifer?  I should have said hog--excuse me," said I, blandly.

"But I have killed all my hogs," Josiah replied, undisturbed.

Tim shouted again, making a trumpet of his hands.  To this day I don't
know what he was calling to us, but when this second message reached
Josiah's ears, it concerned some cider we had, that Tim was anxious to
know if he would care for.  At the suggestion Josiah's face became very
earnest, and a minute later he was hurrying down the field to the spot
where Tim's hat and Tip Pulsifer's shaggy hair showed above the wreck
of a corn-shock.

"How could you hear what Tim was saying?" Mary asked.

It was almost the first word she had spoken to me, and I was in my
chair again, and she was where I had planned so cunningly to have her.

"I know my brother's voice," I answered gravely.

"I couldn't make out a word," said she, "but it isn't like him to let
an old man go tottering over fields to see him.  He would have come up
here."

"I guess he would."  There was a twinkle in her eyes and I knew it was
useless to dissemble.  "Tim and I are different.  I never hesitate to
use strategy to get my chair, even at the expense of a feeble old man."

"How gallant you are," she said with a touch of scorn.

"You must not scold," I cried.  "Remember I had reason, after all.  You
did not come to see Josiah Nummler."

She was taken by surprise.  It was brutal of me.  But somehow the old
reckless spirit had come back.  I was speaking as a soldier should to a
fair woman, bold and free.  That's what a woman likes.  She hates a man
who stutters love.  And while I did not own to myself the least passion
for the girl, I had seen just enough of her on the evening before and I
had smoked just enough over her that morning to be in a sentimental
turn of mind that was amusing.  And I gained my point.  She turned her
head so as almost to hide her face from me, and I heard a gentle laugh.

"All's fair in love and war," I said, "and were Josiah twice as old, I
should be justified in using those means to this end."

Then I rocked.  There is something so sociable about rocking.  And I
smoked.  There is something so sociable about smoking.  For a moment
the girl sat quietly, screening her face from me.  Then she began
rocking too, and I caught a sidelong glance of her eye, and the color
mounted to her cheeks, and we laughed together.

So it came that she suddenly stopped her rocking, and dropping the
little basket at my feet, exclaimed: "I love soldiers--just love them!"

Then I told her that I must keep Perry Thomas's oration going to the
end, and she leaned toward me, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on
mine and asked: "But will you?"

"I can make no promises," I answered.  "They say our bodies change
entirely every seven years.  Mark Hope, age fifty, will be a different
man from Mark Hope, age twenty-three.  He may have nothing to boast
about himself, and his distorted mind may magnify the deeds of the
younger man.  Now the younger man refuses to commit himself.  He will
not be in any way responsible for his successors."

"How wise you are!" she cried.

"Wise?" I exclaimed, searching her face for a sign of mockery.  But
there was none.

"I mean you talk so differently from the others in the valley.  Either
they talk of crops or weather, or they sit in silence and just look
wise.  I suppose you have travelled?"

"As compared to most folks in Black Log I am a regular Gulliver," I
answered.  "My father was a much-travelled man.  He was an Englishman
and came to the valley by chance and settled here, and to his dying day
he was a puzzle to the people.  That an Englishman should come to Six
Stars was a phenomenon.  That Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes should be
born here was no mere chance--it was a law of nature."

"And this English father?"

"He married, and then Tim and I came to Black Log."

"Like Isaac Bolum and Henry Holmes?"

"Exactly; and we should have grown like them, but our father was a
bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and
Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the
books, he told us all about them.  He'd seen them all, so we got to
know his country pretty well.  Once he took us to Harrisburg, and by
multiplying everything we saw there, Tim and I were able to picture all
the great cities of the world--for instance, London is five hundred
times Harrisburg."

"But why didn't you go to see the places yourself?"

"Why doesn't everybody in Black Log go to Florida in winter or take the
waters at Carlsbad?  We did plan a great trip--father and mother and
Tim and I--we were going to England together when the farm showed a
surplus.  We never saw that surplus.  I went to Philadelphia once.
It's a grand place, but I had just enough of money to keep me there two
days and bring me home.  Then the war came.  And now Tim thinks I've
been around the world.  He's jealous, for he has never been past
Harrisburg; but I've really gone around a little circle.  I've seen
just enough of flying fishes to hanker after Mandalay, just enough of
Spaniards to long for a sight of Spain.  But they've shipped me home
and here I am anchored.  Here I shall stay until that surplus
materializes; and you know in our country we have neither coal nor oil
nor iron."

"But they tell me that you are to teach the school," she said.

"For which I am grateful," I answered.  "Twenty dollars a month is the
salary, and school keeps for six months, so I shall earn the large sum
of $120 a year."

"But your pension?"

"With my pension I shall be a nabob in Six Stars.  Anywhere else I
should cut a very poor figure.  But after all, this is the best place,
for is there any place where the skies are bluer; is there any place
where the grass is greener; is there any place where the storms are
wilder than over our mountains?"

"Sometimes I would say in Kansas," the girl answered.  "Here the world
seems to end at the top of the mountain.  It is hard to picture
anything beyond that.  Out there you raise yourself on tiptoe, and you
see the world rolling away for miles and miles, and it seems to have no
ending."

"I suppose you will not be able to endure your imprisonment.  Some day
you will go back to Kansas."

"Some day--perhaps," she laughed.  "But now I am a true Black Logger.
Look at my gown."

It was the gray Dunkard dress--the concession to her uncle's beliefs on
worldliness.  It was the first time I had noticed it.

"That is not the garb of Black Log," I said.  "It was designed long ago
in Germany, after patterns from Heaven."

"And designed by men," said Mary, laughing; "forced by them on a sex
which wears ribbons as naturally as a bird does feathers."

"In other words, when you came to live with your pious uncle, he picked
you?"

"Exactly," she said; "but I submitted humbly.  I came here, as I
supposed, a fairly good Christian, with an average amount of piety and
an average number of faults.  My worldliness shocked my uncle, and
being a peaceful person, I let him pick me.  But I rebelled at the
bonnet--spare me from one of those coal-scuttles--I'll go to the stake
first."

In her defiance she swung her own straw hat wildly around on the
string.  Pausing, she smoothed out the gray gown and eyed it critically.

"Was such a thing ever intended for a woman to wear!" she exclaimed.

"For most women, surely not," said I.  "Few could carry that handicap
and win.  But after all, your uncle means it kindly.  He acts from
interest in your soul's welfare."

Mary's face became serious.

"Yes," she said, "he has paid me the highest compliment a man can pay
to a woman--he wants to meet me in Heaven."

How could I blame Luther Warden?

I had forgotten my uniform and my glory, my hair and my hat, and was
leaning forward with my eyes on the girl.  And she was leaning toward
me and our heads were very close.  The rebellious brown hair was almost
in the shade of my own dashing hat-brim.

Then I said to myself in answer to the poet, "Here's the cheek that
doth not fade, too much gazed at."  For its color was ever changing.
And again I said to myself and to the poet, when my glance had met
hers, and the color was mounting higher: "Here's the maid whose lip
mature is ever new; here's the eye that doth not weary."  And now
aloud, forgetfully, leaning back in my chair and gazing at her from
afar off--"Here's the face one would meet in every place."

Mary's chair flew back, and it was for her to gaze at me from afar off.

"What were you saying?" she demanded in a voice not "so very soft."

"Was I saying anything?" I answered, feigning surprise.  "I thought I
was only thinking.  But you were speaking of Luther Warden."

"Was I?" she said, more quietly, but in an absent tone.

"You said he had paid you a great compliment, but do you know----"

I paused, being a bit nervous, and flushed, for she was looking right
at me.  Not till she turned away did I finish.

"Do you know," I went on, "last night when I saw you, I thought we must
have met before, and I thought if I had met you anywhere before, it
must have been in Heaven."

I had expected that at a time like this Josiah Nummler would appear.
In that I was disappointed.  In his place, with a bark and a bound,
came a lithe setter, a perfect stranger to me, and Mary seized the long
head in her hands and cried: "Why, Flash--good Flash."

She completely ignored my last remark, and patted the dog and talked to
him.

"Isn't he a beauty?" she cried.  "He is Mr. Weston's."

"Whose?" I asked, concealing my irritation.  "Mr. Weston--and who is
Mr. Weston?"

Mary held up a warning finger.  There were footfalls on the gravel walk
around the house.

"Sh," she whispered, "here he comes--no one knows who he is."

To this day Robert Weston's age is a mystery to me; I might venture to
guess that it is between thirty and fifty.  Past thirty all men begin
to dry up or fatten, and he was certainly a lean person.  His face was
hidden beneath a beard of bristling, bushy red, and he had a sharp hook
nose and small, bright eyes.  From his appearance you could not tell
whether he was a good man or a bad one, wise or stupid, kind-hearted or
a brute.  He seemed of a neutral tone.  His clothes marked him as a man
of the city, for we do not wear shooting jackets, and breeches and
leather leggings in our valley.  In the way he wore them there was
something that spoke the man of the world, for in such a costume we of
Black Log should feel dressed up and ill at ease; but his clothes
seemed a part of him.  They looked perfectly comfortable and he was
unconscious of them.  This is where the city men have an advantage over
us country-breds.  I can carry off my old clothes without being
awkward.  I could enter a fine drawing-room in the patched blouse I
wear a-hunting with more ease than in that solemn-looking frock-coat I
bought at the county town five years ago.  In that garment I feel that
"I am."  No one could ever convince me that I am a mere thought, a
dream, a shadow.  Every pull in the shoulders, every hitch in the back,
every kink in the sleeves makes me a profound materialist.  But I don't
suppose Weston would bother spreading the tails out when he sat down.
I doubt if he would know he had it on.  He is so easy in his ways.  I
saw that as he came swinging around the house, and I envied him for it.

"Well, I am in luck!" he cried cheerfully.  "Here I came to see the
valley's soldier and I find him holding the valley's flower."

This to me was rather an astounding thing to say, and if he intended to
disable me in the first skirmish he succeeded admirably, for my only
answer was a laugh; and the more I laughed the more foolish and
slow-witted I felt.  I wanted to run to Mary's aid, but I did not know
how, and while I was rummaging my brain for some way to meet him, she
was answering him valiantly.

"Almost, but not quite," she said.  "But he has earned the right to
hold the valley's flower entirely--whoever she may he.  It's a pity,
Mr. Weston, you have not been doing so, too, instead of loafing around
the valley all summer long."

She did not speak sharply to him, and that angered me.  She was smiling
as she spoke, and he did not seem to mind it at all.

"I came to see the veteran," he said, "and not to be scolded."

"You may have my chair then."  Mary was rising.  "I shall leave you to
the veteran--if he does not object."

She was moving away.

"Then I shall have to go with you," said the stranger calmly, "if the
veteran doesn't object.  He knows a woman should not go unattended
around the valley.  He'd rather see me doing my duty than having a
sociable pipe with him and hearing about the war.  How about it, Hope?"

He did not stop to hear my answer.  Had he waited a moment instead of
striding after the girl, with his dog at his heels, he might have seen
my reply.

[Illustration: He did not stop to hear my answer.]

I raised my pipe above my head and hurled it against the fence, where
it crashed into a score of pieces.



V

"Who is Robert Weston?" I asked of Tim.

"If you can answer that question Theophilus Jones will give you a
cigar," replied my brother.  "He has tried to find out; he has
cross-questioned every man, woman, and child that comes to his store,
and he admits that he is beaten."

"When Theop can't find out, the mystery is impenetrable."  I recalled
our suave storekeeper and his gentle way of drawing from his customers
their life secrets as he leaned blandly over the counter with his sole
thought apparently to do their commands.  Theophilus had known that I
was going to enlist long before I had made up my own mind.  He had told
Tim that I was coming home before he had handed him the postal card on
which I had scrawled a few lines announcing my return.  So when I heard
that Weston was still a puzzle to him I knew that Six Stars had a
mystery.  For Six Stars to have a mystery is unusual.  Occasionally we
are troubled with ghosts and such supernatural demonstrations, which
cause us to keep at home at night, but we soon forget these things if
we do not solve them.  But for our village to number among its people a
man whose whole history and whose family history was not known was
unheard of.  For such a man to be here six weeks and not enlighten us
was hardly to be dreamed of.  Robert Weston had dared it.  Even Tim
regarded the matter as serious.

"It is suspicious," he said, shaking his head gravely.

He was cleaning up the supper dishes at the end of the table opposite
me.  By virtue of my recent return I had not fallen altogether into our
household ways as yet, and sat smoking and watching him.

"It's mighty odd," he went on.  "At noon one day, about six weeks ago,
Weston rode up to the tavern on a bicycle and told Elmer Spiker he was
going to stay to dinner.  He loafed about all that afternoon, and
stayed that day and the next, and ever since.  First there came a trunk
for him, and then a dog.  You see him about all the time, for when he
isn't walking, he's loafing around the tavern, or is over at the store,
arguing with Henry Holmes or Isaac Bolum.  Yet all we know about him is
that he's undecided how long he'll stay and that he has lived in New
York."

"Has no one asked him point-blank what he is doing here?"

"No.  Isaac Bolum declares every day that he is going to, but when the
time comes he breaks down.  Every other means of finding out has been
taken."

"Josiah Nummler told me to-day he believed Weston was a detective."

"That was Elmer Spiker's theory.  But, as Theop says, who is he
detecting?"

Theophilus settled that theory conclusively, in my mind, at least, for
I knew every man, woman, and child in the valley; and taking a mental
census, I could find no one who seemed to require watching by a
hawkshaw.

"Perry Thomas guessed he was an embezzler," said Tim, putting the last
dish in the cupboard and sitting down to his pipe.  "Perry says Weston
is the best-learned man he ever met, and that embezzlers are naturally
educated or they would not be in places where they could embezzle."

"A truly Perryan argument," said I; "and after all, a reasonable one,
for no one would think of looking here for a fugitive."

"That's just what Perry says," rejoined Tim.  "But Theop has read every
line in the papers for weeks, and he swears that no embezzlers are
missing now."

"Perhaps his crime is still concealed," I ventured.

"That was just what Isaac Bolum thought," Tim answered.  "But Henry
Holmes says no missing criminal is likely to have a setter dog shipped
to him.  He says such a man might send for his clothes, but he would
draw the line on dogs."

"Perhaps he has deserted his wife," I said, seeing at last a possible
solution of the mystery.

"That's what Arnold Arker suggested just a few days ago," returned Tim;
"but Tip Pulsifer allowed that no fellow would have to come so far to
desert his wife."

"Tip ought to know," said I, "for he deserts his once a year,
regularly."

"He always comes back the next day," retorted Tim stoutly.

My brother has always been Tip's champion in his matrimonial
disagreements, and whenever Pulsifer flees across the mountain,
swearing terrible oaths that he will never return, Tim goes straight to
the clearing on the ridge and talks long and seriously to the deserted
wife about her duty.

[Illustration: Swearing terrible oaths that he will never return.]

But there was reason in Tip's contention regarding Weston.  Indeed,
from Tim's account of events, I could see that the store had very
thoroughly threshed out the whole case and that the problem was not one
that could be solved by abstract reasoning.  There was only one person
to solve it, and that was Robert Weston himself.

I knew enough of the world to know that it was not an unheard-of thing
for a man to settle for a time in an out-of-the-way village.  I knew
enough of men to understand that he might consider it nobody's business
why he cared to live among us.  I had enough sense of humor to see that
he might find amusement in enveloping himself in mystery and sparring
with the sly sages of the store and tavern.  By right I should have
stood by and watched the little game; I should have encouraged Isaac
Bolum and Henry Holmes to apply the interrogating probe; I should have
warned Weston of the plotting at the store to lay bare the secret of
his life; I should have brought the contending parties together and
enjoyed the duello.  Instead, I had to admit to myself a curiosity as
to the stranger's identity that equalled, if it did not surpass, that
of Theophilus Jones.  His was curiosity pure and simple; mine was
something more.  Weston had come quietly into my own castle, had taken
complete possession of it for a moment, and then calmly walked away
with the fairest thing it held--and all so quietly and with an air that
in a thousand years of practice, I or none other in the valley could
have simulated.  The picture was still sharp in my mind as I sat there
smoking and drawing Tim out; for when I had vented my anger on my pipe
that morning I had hurried to the gate to watch my departing visitors
as they swung down the village street.  Weston, lanky and erect, moved
with a masterful stride, not unlike the lean and keen-witted setter
that flashed to and fro over the road before him.  At his side was the
girl, a slender body in drab, tossing her hat gayly about at the end of
its long string.  They passed the store and the mill, and at the bend
were lost to my view.  They seemed to find themselves such good
company!  Even Tim, so fine and big, had in this homely, lanky man a
rival well worth watching.

And who was the quiet, lanky man?  Over and over I asked myself the
question, and when I touched its every phase I found that Henry Holmes
or Isaac Bolum, some one of the store worthies, had met defeat there
before me.  At last I gave up, and by a sudden thought arose and pulled
on my overcoat, and got my hat.  Tim was surprised.

"You are not going out?" he said.

"I think I'll stroll down to the tavern and see this stranger," I
replied carelessly.  "No, you needn't come.  I can find my way alone
all right, for the moon will be up and it's only a step."

It did seem to me that Tim might insist on bearing me company, knowing
as he did that I was still a bit rickety; but he saw fit to take my one
refusal as final, and muttered something about reading.  Then, I left
him.

It has been years since they have had a license at our tavern, so there
was a solitary man in the bar-room when I entered.  Elmer Spiker, mine
host of the inn, was huddled close to the stove, and was reading by the
light of a lamp.  Pausing at the threshold before opening the door, the
sonorous mumble sounding through the deal panels misled me.  Believing
the Spiker family at prayers, I stood reverently without until the
service seemed to last too long to be one of devotion.  Then I opened a
crack and peeked in.  Seeing a lone man at the distant end of the room,
I entered.  Elmer's back was toward me and my presence was unnoticed.
His eyes were on the paper before him.

"W. J. Mandelberger, of Martins Mills, was among us last Friday," he
read, slowly, distinctly, measuring every word.  "He paid his
subscription for the year and informed us that Mrs. Mandelberger had
just presented him with a bouncing baby boy.  Congratulations, W. J."

I coughed apologetically, but Elmer rattled the paper just then, and
did not notice me.

He went rumbling on: "William Arker, of Popolomus, and Miss Myrtle
McGee, of Turkey Valley, were united in the holy bonds of matrimony on
the sixth ultimo."

"Elmer," I said sharply, thumping the floor with a crutch.

Spiker turned slowly.

"Oh," he exclaimed, "is that you?  Excuse me; I was reading the news.
Everybody ought to keep up with what's happenin'.  The higher up we
gits on the ladder of human intelligence, the more news we have--we can
see furder."

Having evolved this sage remark, Elmer twisted back to his old position
and raised the paper.

"Now mind this," he said.  "Jonas Parker and his wife and four of his
children were----"

"See here," I cried, pounding the floor again.  "I don't care for Jonas
Parker and all of his children.  Where is Mr. Weston?"

"Oh," said Elmer, "excuse me.  I thought you had come to see me.  It's
Weston, eh?  Well, his room's just there at the head of the stairs."

He pointed to the door which gave an entrance to the rear hall, but as
I wished to be a bit formal in my call on the stranger, I suggested
that Mr. Spiker might oblige me by seeing if the gentleman was at home.
This seemed entirely unnecessary to mine host, and he wanted to argue
the point.  But I insisted, and he arose with a sigh, and taking the
lamp in his hand, disappeared, leaving me in utter darkness.  The door
banged shut behind him and I heard him at the foot of the stairs
roaring "Ho-ho-there-ho!"

No answer came from the floor above.  Again sounded the stentorian
tones.

"Mark says as if you are there, you're to come down; he wants to see
you."

A last "Ho-there-ho"; a long silence; the door opened.  There was light
again and Elmer was before me.

"He ain't there, I guess," he said.  "Still, if you want me to make
sure, I'll go up."

[Illustration:  No answer came from the floor above.]

Inasmuch as mine host's cries must still be echoing in the uttermost
parts of the house, it seemed needless to compel him to take the climb.
Spiker agreed with me.  It was not surprising that Weston was out, for
he was an odd one, always spooking around somewhere, investigating
everything, and asking questions.  His room was full of books in
various languages, and when he wasn't wandering about the valley, he
would be sitting reading far into the night--sometimes as late as
half-past ten.  There was a fellow named Goth, who seemed to be
Weston's favorite writer.  This Goth was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and
as Elmer's own ancestors were from Allentown, he thought he'd like to
take up the language, so he'd borrowed from his guest a book called
"The Sorrows of Werther."  Of all the rubbish that was ever wrote, them
"Sorrows" were the poorest.  Elmer had only figured out a page and a
half, but that gave him enough insight into their character to convince
him that a man who could set reading them till half-past ten was--here
mine host tapped his forehead and winked.  Curious chap, Weston.  Elmer
had seen a heap of men in his time and never met the like.  There's no
way to get to see men and understand them like keeping a hotel.  When
you've "kept" for about forty years, there's hardly a man comes along
that you can't set right down in his particular class before he's even
registered.  But Weston had blocked him at every turn.  Elmer knew no
more of the man now than on the day he came.  In fact, he was getting
more and more tangled up about him all the time.  For instance, why
should one who could read Goth and understand the "Sorrows," want to
set around the store and argue with such-like ignoramuses as Ike Bolum
and Hen Holmes?  Spiker was willing to bet that right now Weston was
over the way trying to prove to them that two and two was four.

The suggestion seemed a likely one, so I interrupted the flow of
Elmer's troubled thoughts to say good-night, and went out.  I paused a
moment on the porch.  A lamp was blazing in the store and I could
plainly see everyone gathered along the counter.  Henry Holmes was
standing with his back to the stove, one hand wagging up and down at
the solemn line of figures on the bench.  But Weston was not there.
And in our valley, when a man is not at home o'night he should be at
the store, else there is a mystery to be solved.  To solve this one I
stopped on the tavern steps, leaned against a pillar, and gazed through
the dozing village.

At the head of the street where our house stood a bright light burned.
There Tim was and there I should be also.  A hundred times down South
on my post at night, with my back on the rows and rows of white tents,
I had sought to pierce the black gloom before me as if there I could
see that same light--the home light.  Often I fancied I saw it, and in
its bright circle Tim was bending over his book.  Here it was in truth,
calling me, but I turned from it and looked away over the flats, where
another light was winking on the hillside.

Behind that hill, on the eastward ridge, a great ball is glowing, fiery
red.  Higher and higher it rises, into the tree-tops, then over them;
higher and higher, bathing the valley in soft, white light, uncovering
the gray road that climbs the ridge-side; higher and higher, until the
pines on the ridge-top stand out boldly, fringing into the sky; higher
and higher, casting mysterious shadows over the meadows, touching with
light the hillside, new-ploughed and naked; clear and white lies the
road over the flats to the hill there--clear and white and smooth.  On
the hillside the light is burning.  It is only a short half mile, and
the way is easy.  In the old house at the end of the street another
light is blinking solemnly.  Beneath it Tim is waiting.  He misses me.
He wonders why I am so long.  Soon he will be coming.  Base deserter,
truly!  But for once--this once--for the white road over the flat and
up the hillside leads to the light!



VI

"Why, Mark, but you did give me a start!" cried Luther Warden, laying
down his book and hurrying forward to greet me.

It was not surprising that the good man should be taken back, for in
all the years we had lived together in the valley this was my first
evening visit.  So unusual an occurrence required an explanation, so I
said that I just happened to be taking a stroll and dropped in for a
minute.  I glanced at Mary to see if she understood my feeble
subterfuge, but I met only a frank smile, as though, like her uncle,
she believed that I was likely to go hobbling about on moonlight nights
this way.  Luther never doubted me.

"It's good of you to drop in," he said, after he had fixed me in his
own comfortable chair and drawn up the settee for himself.  "When I was
livin' alone up here I often used to wish some of you young folks would
come in of an evenin' and keep me company and join me in readin' the
Good Book.  It used to be lonely sometimes, but since I've got Mary it
ain't so bad.  But I hope her bein' here won't make no difference, and
now as you've started you'll come just the same as if I was alone."

I assured him that I would come just the same.  That made Mary laugh.
She had been sitting in the lamp-lit circle, and now she rocked back
into the shade, so, craning my neck, I could just see the dark outline
of her face.  She made some commonplace but kindly speech of welcome,
and I was about to engage her, seeking to draw her from the shadow,
when her uncle suddenly interposed himself between us and took a book
from the table.  Drawing the settee closer to the light, he opened the
great volume across his knees and adjusted his spectacles.  Throwing
back his head and looking at me benignly from under his glasses, he
said: "It's peculiarly fortunate you come to-night, Mark.  When you
knocked I was readin' aloud to Mary.  We read together every night now,
her and me, and most instructin' we find it."

I told Luther that it was too much for me to allow him to wear out his
eyes reading to me; much as I should enjoy it, I could not hear of it,
but I would ask him to let me have the volume when he had finished with
it.  It did seem that this should bring Mary into the light again, and
that she would support my protests; but calmly and quietly she spoke
from the darkness, like a voice from another world, "Go on, Uncle
Luther; I want Mr. Hope to hear this."

Now had Mary Warden called me by my Christian name she would have
followed the custom of our valley and it would have passed unnoticed;
but when she used that uncalled-for "Mister" her uncle looked around
sharply.  First he tried to pierce the shadows and see her, but she
drew farther and farther into the darkness.  So he gazed at me.  He was
beginning to suspect that after all I had not come to see him.  Had
Mark Hope become proud?  Was Mary falling again into the ways of the
wicked world from which he was striving so hard to wean her, that she
should thus address one of the humblest of God's creatures, a mere man?
Old Luther rubbed his spectacles very carefully and slowly; blowing on
them and rubbing them again; finally adjusting them, he leaned forward
and tried to study the girl's face, to find there some solution of the
puzzle.

"Read to Mr. Hope," she said clearly, and with just a touch of defiance.

Had she used some endearing term the old man could not have frowned
harder than when he turned on me then, and eyed me through his great
spectacles.

"Yes, read to us, Luther," said I calmly; "Miss Warden and I will
listen."

"God has been very good to me," said the old man solemnly, "and I've
not yet heard Him call me Mister Luther Warden.  I s'pose with you and
your kind, when He comes to you, He calls you Mister Mark Hope."

This rather took me back, and I stammered a feeble protest, but he did
not heed me.  Turning to Mary, he went on: "And you, Mary Warden, I
s'pose at such times you are 'Miss.'  What wanity!  What wanity!
Politeness, they calls it.  Politeness?  Well, in the great eternity,
up above, where they speaks from the heart, you'll be just Mark and
just Mary.  But down yander--yander, mind ye--the folks will probably
set more store by titles."  The old preacher was pointing solemnly in
the direction of the cellar.

There was a long pause, an interval of heavy silence.  Then from Mary
in the darkness came, "Well, Uncle, let us hope that when we reach that
great eternity, Mark and I will be good enough friends to lay aside
such vanities."

"Right!" cried Luther, smiling again, and speaking real heartily.

"Right," said I; "and we'll begin eternity to-day, won't we, Mary?"

"We will," said she.

And in my heart I blessed Luther Warden.  Guilelessly, the old man, in
a few words, had swept away the barrier Mary and I had raised between
us.  He had added years to our friendship.  So had he stopped there it
would have been wonderfully well; but he had to go floundering
innocently on.  He was laughing softly.

"Do you know, Mark," he said, rubbing his spectacles nervously, "she
made me jealous of you when she talked that way.  I thought she'd set
her cap for you, I did.  Whenever a man and woman gits polite, whenever
they has to bow and scrape that way, a-misterin' and a-missin' one
another, they're hiding somethin'; they ain't actin' open.  So I was
beginnin' to think mebbe she wanted to marry you and----"

"Go on reading--please read to us," pleaded Mary.

"Yes, do read to us," I echoed, for the position was a new one to me,
and at best I am awkward and slow-witted where women are concerned.  I
could not adroitly turn the old man's wandering speculation into a
general laugh as Weston would have done.  My best was to break in
rudely.

"Well--if I must," Luther said, opening the great book across his knees.

A long silence followed.  I heard the solemn ticking of the clock on
the mantel behind me; I heard Mary laughing softly in her retreat
beyond the table; I heard Luther, now bending over his book, mumbling
to himself a few words of the text.

"It is about the faymine in Injy," he said at last, holding his place
on the page with a long, thin forefinger, and looking up at me.  "There
are three volumes, and this is the second.  The third is yit to come.
I pay a dollar a year and every year I gits a new volume.  It's a grand
book, too, Mark.  It was wrote by one of our brethren, Brother Matthias
Pennel, who went to Injy in charge of a shipload of grain gathered by
our people for the sufferin' heathen.  The first volume tells all about
the gittin' up of the subscription and the sailin' of the wessel.
Brother Matthias is a grand writer, and he tells all about Injy and the
heathen, and how the wessel reached the main place there--what's the
place, Mary?--you're allus good on geography!"

"Calcutta," prompted Mary.

"Yes, I mind now--Calcutty.  Well, from there Brother Matthias went up
into the country called--I can't just mind the exact name--oh, here it
is--B-a-l-l-e-r-r-a-d Ballerrad--e-r-a-d--Ballerraderad."

Luther paused and sighed.  "Them names--them names!" he exclaimed.  "If
there is one thing that convinces me that the story of the Tower of
Babel is true, it is the names of the towns in Injy."

It seemed to me that perhaps from the viewpoint of the East Indian, the
same thing might be said of our "villes" and "burgs," and I was about
to raise my voice in behalf of the maligned heathen, when my host
resumed his discourse.

"When you come in, I was readin' about a poor missionary woman in
Baller--Baller--Ballerraderad--whose Sunday-school had been largely eat
up by taggers.  Her name was Flora Martin, Brother Matthias says, and
she was one of the saintliest women he ever seen.  He tells how the
month before he come to Baller--Baller--Baller-daddad--an extry large
tagger had been sneakin' around the mission-house, a-watchin' for
scholars, and how one day, when, according to Brother Matthias, this
here Flora Martin, armed only with a rifle and girded about with the
heavenly sperrit--how this here Flora----"

There was a ponderous knock on the door, and then the knob began to
rattle violently.  The bolt had been shot, so Luther had to rise in
haste to admit the new-comer, leaving Flora Martin with nothing but the
rifle and the heavenly spirit.

Perry Thomas stepped in.

"I just happened to be passin' and thought I'd drop in for a spell," he
said, with a profound bow to Mary, who arose to greet him.

This apology of Perry's was as absurd as mine had been, for he lived a
mile on the other side of the village; and as the next house was over
the ridge, a good three miles away, it was odd that he should be
wandering aimlessly about thus.  Besides, he had on his new Prince
Albert, and there was a suspicion of a formal call in the smoothly
oiled hair and tallowed boots.  He carried his fiddle, too.  There was
to my mind every evidence that the visit had been preconceived, and to
this point had been carried out with an eye on every detail.  Had the
contrary been true, there would have been no cause for Perry to glare
at me as he did.  The he-ro in blue was anything but welcome now.
Indeed, it seemed that could Perry's wish have been complied with, I
should be back on the "lead-strewn fields of Cuby."

Mary was most cordial.  She seized his fiddle and his hat and stowed
them carefully away together, while Luther, pushing the latest visitor
to a place at his side on the settee, told him how fortunate he was to
drop in just at that time, as he would hear a few interesting things
about the famine in India.

Perry was positively ungrateful.  He declared that he could only stay a
minute at the most, and that it was really not worth Luther's while to
begin reading.  Mary said that she would not hear of him leaving.  She
had hidden his hat and would insist on his playing; that was, if I did
not mind and her uncle gave his permission.  Perry smiled.  There was
less fire in his eyes when I vowed that not till I had listened again
to the song of his beloved violin would I stir from my chair.  So he
settled back to pay the price and hear the story of Flora Martin and
the tiger.

Luther repeated his account of the book and the story of Brother
Matthias Pennel.  He told Perry of Sister Flora and her saintly
character, and of the devastation by the fierce king of the Bengal
jungle.  He brought us again to where the frail little woman determined
to fight death with death.  And here, in low, rumbling tones, letter by
letter, word by word, we took up the narrative of the adventurous
Dunker brother.

"Thus armed with only a heavy elephant rifle, the property of the
foreign missionary society, and clad only in grace, Flora Martin began
her lonely vigil on the roof of the mission-house, which is used both
as a dwelling and Sunday-school by those who are carrying light to the
heathen in Ballerraderad, which, we must remember, is one of the most
populous provinces in all Injy.  This combined dwelling and church
edifice stands at the far end of the little village, and as the lonely
Indian moon was just rising above the horizon, Sister Flora heard a
series of catlike footsteps along the veranda beneath her--for we must
remember that in this part of our globe the nights are strangely still
and the sounds therefore carry for a great distance.  Breathlessly
Flora Martin, mindful of the slumbering innocent charges sleeping below
her, and over whom she was watching, leaned out over the roof, rifle in
hand.  The footsteps came nearer and nearer and----"

There was a gentle rat-tat-tat on the door.  It was so gentle that
Luther thought his ears were deceiving him, for while he stopped
reading, he made no motion to rise, but sat listening.  Again they
came, three polite taps, seeming to say, "I should like to get in, but
pray don't disturb yourself."

"Come in," shouted the old preacher, not even looking around, for he
still seemed to doubt his sense of hearing.

The door opened quietly and Mr. Robert Weston appeared before us.  Mary
had slipped from her place to meet him, and in Weston's greeting to her
I had my first lesson in what the world calls manner.  How clumsy
seemed my own excuses for coming at all, compared to his pleasure at
finding her at home!  He had been looking forward all afternoon to
seeing her again.  As he shook hands with Luther, he was so hearty that
the old man took his guest by the shoulders and declared fervidly that
he was rejoiced that he had come.  Weston did not glare at Perry
Thomas, nor at me either.  We but added to his pleasure.  Truly his cup
of joy was overflowing!  And the famine in India--indeed--indeed!  The
subject was one which interested him deeply, and if Mr. Warden cared
for it, he would send him several books on the far East which he had in
his library at home.  He hoped that in return he might some time have
the pleasure of reading carefully, cover to cover, the fat volume that
Luther had spread across his knees.  Meantime, he would insist on not
interrupting.  But Mary must be comfortably seated before he could take
the place on the settee that Luther had arranged for him, and he must
hear all over again the story of the book, of Brother Matthias Pennel
and Sister Flora Martin.  How I envied him!  What must Perry and I seem
beside this lanky man with his kindly, easy ways!  Perry, of course,
did not see it.  He was smiling, for Weston was telling him that he had
stood at the Thomas gate for a half hour the very evening before,
listening to the strains of a violin.  He hoped to hear that melody
again, when Mr. Warden had finished the story of the brave missionary
of Ballerraderad.

The Dunker preacher was beaming.  He forgot the great doctrine of
humility, and declared that "Mister" Weston should have the volume that
very night.  There was nothing better to give a clear view of the
character of the work than Brother Matthias Pennel's account of the
heroism of Sister Flora.  So we composed ourselves again to hear of the
battle to the death between the noble missionary woman and the mighty
Bengal.

"Nearer and nearer came the footsteps," read Luther, pausing at each
word to make sure of it.  "Furder and furder out over the top of the
mission-house leaned Sister Flora, and as she leaned she thought how
much depended on her that night; for she must remember that there were
sleeping within the walls of the mission-house forty-seven children,
thirty of which were females under the age of eleven years, and
seventeen males, of whom not one-half had reached the age of nine
years.  Next she saw a dark object crouching below her.  She saw two
fiery eyes; she saw the tiger gather himself preparatory to springing.
She----"

Perry Thomas's knock had been ponderous, thunderous, and clumsy.
Weston's had been self-assured, but polite.  Now came a series of raps,
now loud, now low, now quick, now slow, keeping time to a martial air.
Evidently there was a rollicking fellow outside.  No one moved.  We sat
there, all five of us, eyes wide open in surprise, trying to guess, who
this could be playing tunes on the door, and never seeking to solve the
simple problem by turning the knob.

It was Tim.  There was a sudden oppressive silence.  Then he entered,
gravely bowing.

"Good evening, Mr. Warden," he said mockingly.  "You have a delightful
way here of greeting the stranger at your gate, closing your ears to
his appeals and letting him break in.  And Miss Warden too--why, this
is a surprise.  I had supposed you'd be at a ball.  And Mr.
Weston--delighted--I'm sure----"

"What, Mark?"  There was genuine surprise in Tim's voice as he saw me
sitting quietly in the shadow.  His mock elegance disappeared, and he
stood gaping at me.  "I thought you'd gone to see Mr. Weston," he
blurted out.

"He came to see me instead," said Mary laughing.  "And so did Mr.
Weston and Mr. Thomas, and so I hope you did.  And if you sit down
there by Uncle Luther and be quiet, you shall hear about the famine in
India."

Tim just filled the settee.  In my dark corner, in my comfortable
chair, I could smile to myself as I watched his plight and that of his
companions.  I could not see Mary well, for the lamp and the long table
separated us, but I fancied that in her retreat she, too, was laughing.
Poor Tim had the end of the bench.  He sat very erect, with his head
up, his eyes on the wall before him, his folded hands resting on his
knees, after the company manner of Black Log.  Mr. Perry Thomas, at the
other end, was his counterpart, only the orator drew his chin into his
collar, furrowed his brow, and gazed wisely at the floor.  He was where
Mary could see him!

Weston had none of our stiff, formal ways, but was making himself as
much at home as possible in such trying circumstances.  He spread out
all over the narrow space allotted him between Luther and my brother.
But curiously enough, he really seemed interested.  It was he who told,
in greatest detail, to Tim the story of Brother Matthias Pennel and of
the trials of the saintly Flora Martin.  When he had recounted her
adventures to the very instant she caught the gleam of the tiger's
eyes, he calmly swung one lank leg over the knee of the other, slid
down in his seat so he could hook his head on the hard back, and said,
cheerily, "Now, Mr. Warden, go on reading and let no one interrupt."

Perry was coughing feebly, as he always does when he is plotting to
speak.

"No, no," cried Weston in protest; "I insist, Mr. Thomas, that you stay
and play the violin to us when we have heard the end of this
interesting story."

It was with mingled feelings that I regarded Brother Matthias Pennel.
As I had stood on the tavern porch that night, looking up the white
road that led to Mary's home, I had dared to picture to myself a
different scene from the one before me.  From that scene Luther Warden
had been removed entirely.  Of Robert Weston, of Perry Thomas, of Tim,
I had taken no account.  They had not even been dreamed of, for Mary
and I were to sit alone in the quiet of the evening.  The flash of her
eyes was to be for me--for me their softer glowing.  At my calling the
rich flames would blaze on her cheeks.  I was to light those flames.  I
was to fan them this way and that way.  I was to smother them, kindle
them, quench them.  Playing with the fire of a woman's face!  Dangerous
work, that!  And up the white road I had hobbled to the fire, as a
simple child crawls to it.  But Luther Warden was there to guard me
with Brother Matthias Pennel, and in my inmost heart I hated them both
for it.  Then Perry Thomas blundered in, and compared to him, old
Luther and his learned brother were endurable.  As to Robert Weston, I
knew that beside him Matthias Pennel was my dearest friend.  Then Tim
came! and as I looked at the long settee where Luther was droning on
and on through the story of Sister Flora, where Perry Thomas seemed to
sit beneath the judgment seat, where Weston shifted wearily to and fro,
where Tim was suffering the tortures of the thumb-screw, I cried to my
inmost self, "Verily, Brother Matthias, thou art a mighty joker!"

It took a long time to kill that tiger.  There was so much recalling to
be done, so much remembering needed, and reviewing of statistics
concerning the flora and the fauna of the far East, that when at last
the rifle's cry rang out on the still night air, which, as we had
learned, in India carries sound to a much greater distance than in our
cold, Northern climes; when the mighty Bengal reeled and fell dying,
and Sister Flora sprang from her hiding place on the roof to sing a
hymn of praise; when all this had been told, Luther Warden banged the
book shut, arose, and looked at the clock.

[Illustration: The tiger story.]

"Mighty souls!" he cried.  "It's long past bed-time.  It's half-past
nine."

Back over the white road we went, Weston and Perry, Tim and I.

"Good-night, boys!" called the strange man cheerily from the gloom of
the tavern porch.

It was the first word he had spoken on our walk home.

"Is it two million five hundred and sixty thousand, or two hundred and
fifty-six thousand persons that are bitten annually by snakes in
India?" cried Tim, suddenly awaking from his moody silence.

"You can go back to-morrow and find out," came from the porch.

"Good-night, Mr. Weston," returned my brother sharply.

Perry Thomas parted from us at the gate, and we stood watching his
retreating figure till we lost it at the bend.  Then we went in.

Standing at the foot of the stairs, with a lighted candle in his hand,
Tim turned suddenly to me and said, "I thought you were going to see
Weston."

"I thought you were sitting at home waiting for me to get back," I
retorted.

"Can I help you upstairs?" he said.

"No, I'm going to sit awhile and smoke," I answered jauntily, "and
talk--to Captain."



VII

Tim was leaving the valley.  We tied his tin trunk on the back of the
buggy and he climbed to the seat beside me.  Tip Pulsifer handed him a
great cylindrical parcel, bound in a newspaper, and my brother held it
reverently in his lap; for it was a chocolate cake, six layers high,
that Mrs. Tip had baked from the scanty contents of the Pulsifer flour
barrel.  Tim was going to the city, and all the city people Mrs. Tip
had ever seen were lean, quick-moving and nervous, a condition which
she concluded was induced by starvation.  So she had done her best to
provide Tim against want.  Her mind was the mind of Six Stars.  All the
village was about the buggy.  Josiah Nummler had rowed down from his
hill-top, and the bulge in Tim's pocket was caused by the half dozen
fine pippins which the old man had brought as his farewell gift.  Even
Theophilus Jones left the store unguarded, and hurried over when the
moment arrived that the village was to see the last of its favorite
son.  Mrs. Tip Pulsifer is always red about the eyes, and no way was
left her to show her emotion but to toss her apron convulsively over
her face and swing Cevery wildly to and fro, so that the infant's cries
arose above the chorus of "good-bys" as we drove away.

"Farewell, comrade."  We heard Aaron Kallaberger's stentorian tones as
we clattered around the bend.  "Head up--eyes front--for'a'd!"

Tim turned and waved his hat to the little company at the gate, to all
the friends he had ever known, to the best he ever was to know; to Mrs.
Bolum and her Isaac, feebly waving the hands that had so often helped
him in time of boyish trouble; to Nanny Pulsifer and Tip; to all the
worthies of the store.

Tim was off to war.  He was going to take part in a greater battle than
I had ever seen, for I had been one of thousands who had marched
together on a common enemy.  He was going forth as did Launcelot and
Galahad, alone, to meet his enemies at every turn, to be sore pressed,
and bruised and wounded; not to be as I was, a part of a machine, but
to be the machine and the god in it, too.  How I envied him!  He was
going forth to encounter many strange adventures, and while he was in
the press, laying about him in all the glory of his strength, fighting
his way against a mob, to fame and fortune, I should be dozing life
away with Captain.

"Did it feel that way when you left?" said Tim.  He spoke for the first
time when we passed the tannery lane, and his voice was a wee bit husky.

"I suppose it's the same with everybody when they turn the bend," I
answered.

"That's it exactly--at the turn in the road--when you can't see home
any more--when you'd give all the world to turn back, but dare not."
Tim had faced about and was looking over the valley as we climbed the
long slope of the ridge.  "It's just like being torn in two, isn't it?"
he said.

"Naturally," said I.  "Home and home people are as much a part of you
as head and limbs.  When I dragged you away, binding you here in the
buggy with your tin trunk and your ambition, something had to snap."

"And it snapped at the bend," Tim said grimly; "when I saw the last of
the house and the rambo tree at the end of the orchard."

My brother took to whistling.  He started away bravely with a
rollicking air, keeping time to the creaking of the buggy and the slow
crunching of the horse's feet on the gravel road.  Even that failed
him.  We were at the crest of the hill; we were turning another bend;
we were in the woods, and through the trees he had a last look at Black
Log.  And it's such a little valley, too, that it would hardly seem
worth looking back on when the rich fields of Kishikoquillas roll away
before one!  The lone pine on the stone cap of Gander Knob waved its
farewell, and we clattered down the long slope into the great world.

[Illustration: He had a last look back at Black Log.]

"It's all over at last," said Tim, smiling, "and now I am glad I've
come; for Black Log is a good place, but it's so little, after all."

"I'm afraid you will find it bigger than a desk in Western's office,
and a tiny room on a cramped city street," said I.

My brother recovered his old spirit and refused to be discouraged by my
pessimistic view of his expedition.  He laughed gayly and pointed
across the country where half a dozen spires of smoke were rising.
There was the railroad.  There was the great highway where his real
journey was to start.  There was the beginning of his great adventure.
I was the last outpost of the friendly land, and he was going into the
unknown.  There we were to part!  It was my turn to whistle and to
watch the wheels as, mile by mile, they measured off the road to that
last bend, where I should see no more of Tim.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

There was something strange in my brother's resolve to leave Six Stars
and try his fortunes in the city.  Just as I had settled down to the
old easy ways which my absence had made doubly dear to me, when we
should have been drawn closer to each other than ever, and my
dependence on him was greatest, he announced his purpose.  It was only
yesterday.  I returned from my accustomed afternoon visit to the
Wardens to find him rummaging the house for a few of his more personal
belongings and stowing them away in a small, blue tin trunk that a
little while before had adorned the counter in the store.

"I am going to New York," he said, not giving me time to inquire into
his strange proceeding.

I laughed.  Tim was joking.  This was some odd prank.  He had borrowed
the tin trunk and was giving me a travesty on Tip Pulsifer fleeing over
the mountain from his petulant spouse: for last night Tim and I had had
a little tiff.  For the first time I had forgotten the post-prandial
pipe, and undismayed by the horrors of the famine in India or the
tribulations of Sister Flora Martin, journeyed up the road to sit at
Mary's side.

"Over the mountain, eh, Tim?" I laughed.  "And is Tip going?"

My brother caught my meaning, but he did not smile.

"Honest," he said.  "I am going to New York."

"To New York!" I cried.  My crutches clattered to the floor as I sank
into my chair.

"Yes," said Tim, speaking so quietly that I knew it was the truth.
"Mr. Weston has given me a position in his store.  It's a tea importing
concern, and he owns it, though he doesn't spend much time at his
business."

"I didn't think you'd leave me alone."  The words were hardly spoken
till I regretted them.  I had spoken in spite of my better self, for
what right had I to stand between my brother and a broader life?  When
I had gone away to see the world, he had plodded on patiently in the
narrow valley to keep a home for me.  Now that I was back, it was
justly his turn to go beyond the mountains and learn something more
than the dull routine of the farm and the sleepy village.

"I hate to leave you, Mark," he said.  "But you have felt as I feel
about getting away and seeing something.  Still, if you really want me
to stay, I'll give it up.  But you are a good deal to blame.  You have
told me of what you saw when you were in the army.  You have showed me
that there are bigger things in this world than plodding after a
plough, and more exciting chases than those after foxes.  I want to do
more than sit on a nail-keg in the store and discuss big events.  I
want to have a little part in them myself--you understand."

"Yes, Tim," said I, "you are right, and I'll get along first rate."

"That's the way to talk," he cried cheerfully, slapping me on the
shoulder.  "You won't be half as lonely here as I shall down there in a
strange city; and when you clean away the supper dishes and light your
pipe and think of me, I'll be lighting mine and thinking of you
and----"  He stopped.  Captain had trotted in, and was sitting close
by, looking first at one and then at the other of us quizzically.
"You'll have Captain," added Tim, laughing, "and then by and by, when I
am making money, you and Captain will come down to the city and we'll
all smoke our pipes together--eh, Captain?"

The hound leaped up and Tim caught his forepaws and the two went
dancing around the room until a long-drawn howl warned us that such
bipedic capers were not to the dog's liking.

"Captain isn't going to leave home, Tim," I cried.  "You mustn't expect
him to take so active a part in your demonstrations of joy."

"It wasn't the delight of leaving home made me dance," returned the
boy.  "It was the contemplation of the time we'll have when we get
together again."

"Then why go away at all?"

"There you are.  A minute ago you agreed with me; you were right with
me in my plan to do something in this world.  Now you are using your
cunning arguments to dissuade me.  But you can't stop me, Mark.  I've
accepted the place.  Mr. Weston has sent word that I am coming, and
there you are.  I must keep to my bargain."

"When did Weston arrange all this for you?"

"This morning.  We were on Blue Gum Ridge hunting squirrels, and we got
to talking over one thing and another.  I guess I kind of opened
up--for he's a clever man, Mark.  Why, he pumped me dry.  We hadn't sat
there on a log very long till he knew the whole family history and
about everything I had ever learned or thought of.  He asked me if I
intended to spend all my life here, and I said it looked that way, and
then I told him how I wanted to go and do something and be somebody."

[Illustration: "He pumped me dry."]

Tim stopped suddenly, and winked at Captain.  "I told him I wanted to
go away and see something as you had done, for I was weary of listening
to your accounts of things you'd seen.  It's awful to have to listen to
another's travels.  It must be fine to tell about your own."

"Well, is it my talking that's driving you away, or is it Weston's
alluring offers?"

"Alluring?"  Tim laughed.  "I'll say for Weston, he is frank.  He told
me that to his mind business was worse than death.  He was born to it.
His father left it to him and he has to keep it going to live; but he
lets his partner look after it mostly, and he is always worrying lest
his partner should die and leave him with the whole thing on his hands.
He told me I'd have to drudge in a dark office over books for ten hours
a day, and that it would be years before I began to see any rewards.
By that time I would probably decide that the old-fashioned scheme of
having kings born to order was more sensible than making men wear their
lives out trying to become rulers.  A cow was contented, he said,
because it was satisfied to stand under a tree and breathe the free
air, and look up into the blue skies and over the green fields, and
chew the cud.  As long as the cow was satisfied with one cud it would
be contented; but once the idea got abroad in the pasture that two cuds
were required for a respectable cow, peace and happiness were gone
forever."

"Our lanky stranger seems a wise man," said I.  "In the face of all
that, what did you say?"

"I told him I wasn't a cow," Tim answered.

There was no controverting such a reply, and though my sympathies were
with the pessimistic Weston, I dared not raise my voice in defence of
his logic as against this young brother.  Tim seemed to think that the
fact that he was not a cow turned from him all the force of Weston's
philosophy, and insisted on going blindly on in search of another cud.

"He laughed when I said that," Tim continued, "and he said he guessed
there was no sense in using figures of speech to me, but he was willing
to bet that some time I would come to his way of thinking.  I told him
that perhaps I would when I had seen as much of men and things as he
had; but now I looked about me with the mind and the eye of a yokel.
That was just what I wanted to escape.  He was himself talking to me
from a vantage-point of superior knowledge, and the consciousness of my
own inferiority was one of the main things to spur me on."

"At that he gave you up?" said I.

"He gave me up," Tim answered; "and after all, Mark, old Weston is a
fine fellow.  He said that there was just one thing for me to do, and
that was to see and learn for myself.  So he wrote to his partner
to-day, and I go in the morning."

"But must you go on a day's notice?"

"The quicker the better, Mark; and you see I haven't been letting any
grass grow under my feet.  When Weston and I reached our conclusion, I
went to the store and got the trunk.  In the interval of packing, I've
gone over to Pulsifer's and arranged for Tip to work regularly for you
this winter, looking after the farm.  He wanted to go up to Snyder
County and dig for gold.  He knows where there's gold in Snyder County
and you may have trouble there; but when you see any signs of a break
you are to tell Mrs. Tip.  She says she'll head him off all right.
Nanny Pulsifer, by the way, will come every day and straighten up the
house.  I saw Mrs. Bolum, and she said she would keep an eye on Nanny
Pulsifer, for Nanny is likely to get one of her religious spells and
quit work.  When you hear her singing hymns around the house, you are
to tell Mrs. Bolum."

[Illustration: "Nanny is likely to get one of her religious spells and
quit work."]

"Who will look after Mrs. Bolum?  To whom must I appeal when I see
signs there?"

"When Mrs. Bolum fails you, Mark, write to me," Tim answered.  "When
you see signs of her neglecting you, drop me a line and I'll be home in
three days."

"I may have to appeal to you to save me from my friends," I said, "if
Tip Pulsifer goes digging gold and Nanny Pulsifer gets religion and old
Mrs. Bolum belies her nature and forgets me.  But anyway, if Captain
and I sit here at night knee-deep in dust and cobwebs, at least we can
swell our chests and talk about our brother in the city, who is
making--how much?"

"Seven dollars a week!" cried Tim.  "Think of it, Mark, seven dollars a
week.  That's more than you made as a soldier."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"We are near the last bend, Tim.  Yes--I'll say good-by to Mary for
you.  I'll tell her that in the hurry you forgot her.  And she will
believe me!  Why didn't you go up the hill last night, instead of
sneaking off this way?--for you know you didn't forget her.  That last
smoke--that's right--you and Captain and I, and our pipes.  I fear she
did pass from our minds, but we had many things to talk over in those
last hours.  I promise you I will go up to-night and explain.  Tell
Weston about that fox on Gander Knob--of course I shall.  School starts
tomorrow, else I'd be after him myself; but on Saturday we'll hie to
the mountain, Weston and Captain and I.  You, Tim, shall have the skin,
a memento of the valley.  I'll say good-by to Captain again, and I'll
keep the guns oiled, and Piney Carter shall have the rifle whenever he
wants it--provided he cleans it every hunting night.  And I'll tell old
Mrs. Bolum--but the train is going to start.  Are you sure you have
your ticket, and your check, and your lunch?  Yes, I'll say good-by to
Mary for you.--Good-by, Tim!"

And Tim went around the bend.



VIII

Books!  Books!  Eternal, infernal books!  The sun was printing over the
floor the shadow skeleton of the juniper-tree by the westerly window.
That always told me it was one o'clock.  And one o'clock meant books
again--three long hours of wrangling with dull wits, of fencing with
sharper ones; three long hours of a-b-abs, of two-times-twos and
three-times-threes; hours of spelling and of parsing, hours of bounding
and describing.  With it all, woven through it, now swelling, now dying
away, now broken by a shrill cry of pain or anger, was the ceaseless
buzzing of the school.  There was no rest for the eye, even.  The walls
were white, their glare was baneful, and through the chalk-dust mist the
rustling field of young heads suggested anything but peace and repose to
one of my calling.  That was the field I worked in.

I had been with Tim.  His letter from New York was in my hands, and over
and over I had read it, until I knew every twist in the writing.  In the
reading I had been carried away from myself, and seemed to be beside him
in his battle in the world, laying about with him right lustily.  Then by
force of habit I had looked up and had seen the shadow of the
juniper-tree.  I was back in my prison.  And it was books!

[Illustration: I was back in my prison.]

"Brace up there, Daniel Arker, and quit your blubbering!" I cried.

Daniel was a snuffler.  Whenever I had a companion in the schoolhouse at
the noon recess, it was generally this lad, and when he was there he was
nursing a wound and snuffling.  If there was any trouble to be got into,
if there was a flying ball to come in contact with, ice to break through
or a limb to snap, Daniel never failed to be on hand.  Then he would
burst rudely into my solitude and while I sopped cold water over his
injured members, he would blubber.  When I turned from him to my own
corner by the window, the blubber would die away into a snuffle, and
there he would sit, his head buried in his hands, snuffling and snuffling
until books.

Now I spoke sharply to the boy.  He raised his head and fixed one red eye
on me, for the other was hidden by his hand.

"I guesst you was never hit on the eye by a ball, was ye?" he stuttered.

"I guess I have been," was my reply.  "I was a good round-town player,
and you never saw me crying like that, either."

"I was playin' sock-ball," snuffled the boy, and a solitary tear rolled
down his snub nose.  He flicked it away with his right hand, and this act
disclosed to me a great bluish swelling, from under which a bit of eye
was twinkling mournfully at me.  The boy was hurt; my heart went out to
him, for the memory of my own sock-ball and tickley-bender days came back
to me.

"Come, come," I said more kindly, laying a hand on the black head.
"Brace up, Daniel, for I must call the others in, and you don't want them
to see you crying.  Dare to be like the great Daniel, who wasn't even
afraid of the wild beasts."

"But Dan'el in the Lion's Den never played sock-ball," whimpered the boy,
covering each eye with a chubby fist as he rubbed away the traces of his
tears.

Beware, Daniel Arker!  Form not in my mind such a picture as that of the
mighty prophet in his robes being "it."  Over the mantel in our parlor we
have a picture of the lion's den, and it is one of the choicest of our
family treasures.  Whence it came, we do not know.  Even my mother,
familiar as she was with the minutest detail of our family history as far
back as my grandfather's time, could not tell me that; but we always
believed it to be one of the world's great pictures that by some strange
chance had come into our possession.  How well I remember my keen
disappointment on learning that it was not a photograph.  It took years
to convince Tim of that, and we consoled ourselves that at least it had
been drawn by one who was there.  Else how could he have done it so
accurately?  For the likeness of Daniel was splendid.  The great prophet
of Babylon must have looked just like that.  He must have sat on a
boulder in the middle of the rocky chamber, his eyes fixed on the
ceiling, one hand resting languidly on the head of a mighty lion, a
sandalled foot using another hoary mane as a footstool.  There were lions
all around him, and how they loved him!  You could see it in their eyes.
Tip Pulsifer once told me that Daniel had them charmed, and that he was
looking so intently at the ceiling because he was repeating over and over
again the mystic words--probably Dutch--that his grandfather had taught
him.  One slip--and I should see the fiery flash return to the eyes of
the beasts!  One slip--and they would be upon him!  To Tip I replied that
this was preposterous, as Babylon lived before there was any Dutch, and
there being no Dutch, how could there be effective charms?  Daniel was
saved by a miracle.  But Tip is slow-witted.  Charms were originally
called miracles, he said.  The miracle was the father of the charm.
Folks would say there were no charms to-day, yet they would believe in
charms that were worked a few thousand years ago, only they called them
miracles.  It was useless to argue with a thick fellow like Tip.  I had
always preferred to think of Daniel stilling the wild beasts by the
grandeur of his soul, and the suggestion that I drag him from his throne,
king of men and king of beasts, and picture him playing sock-ball, doing
a double shuffle with his sandalled feet, tossing his long robe wildly
about, now leaping, now dodging, to avoid the flying sphere--it was too
much.  It angered me.

"You should be ashamed of yourself, Daniel Arker!" I cried.  "The idea of
a boy that comes of good church folks like yours talking that way about
one of the prophets!  I'll dally with you no more.  The boys shall see
you as you are.  It's books!"

I threw the window open and shouted, "Books!"  I pounded on the ledge
with my ruler and shouted, "Books!"

For a minute the boys feigned not to see me, and played the harder,
trying to drown my cries in their yells to the runners on the bases.  But
the girls took up my call and came trooping schoolward.  The little boys
began to break away, and soon the school resounded with the shuffle of
feet, the clatter of empty dinner pails, and the banging of desk tops.

"It's books, William; hurry," I cried to the last laggard.

I knew this boy well.  He was the biggest in the school, and to hold his
position among his fellows he had to defy me.  As long as I watched him,
he must lag.  The louder I called, the deafer he must seem to be.  His
post was hemmed around by tradition.  It was his by divine right, and it
involved on its holder duties sometimes onerous, often dangerous; but for
him to abate one iota of his privileges would be a reflection on his
predecessors, an injustice to his heirs.  It would mean scholastic
revolution.  He knew that I must yell at him.  My position also was
hemmed about by tradition.  To appear not to fear the biggest boy was one
of the chief duties of a successful pedagogue.  We understood each other.
So I yelled once more and closed the window.  The moment my back was
turned he ran for the door.

"It is," Daniel Arker was shouting.

"It ain't," Samuel Carter retorted, sticking out his tongue.

"Boys, be quiet!" I commanded.

"He said his eye was swole worse 'an mine oncet," cried Daniel.

His good eye was blazing, his shoulders were squared back, and his fists
were clenched.  There was no sign of a snuffle about him now.  Heaven,
but he looked fine!  All this time I had wronged Daniel.  I had only
known him as he crawled to me broken and bruised after the conflict.  I
had never known the odds he had encountered, for when I questioned him he
just snuffled.  Now I saw him before the battle, ready to defend his
honor against a lad of more than his years and size, and the wickedest
fighter in the school.  I believed that had I let him loose there he
would have whipped.  But one in my position is hemmed in by tradition, so
in my private capacity I was patting the boy's head with the same motion
that I used in my public capacity to push him into his seat, while with a
crutch I made a feint at Samuel that sent him scurrying to his place.

The biggest boy in the school sauntered in.  He carefully upset three
dinner pails from the shelves in the rear as he hung up his hat.  I
reprimanded him most severely, but I finished my lecture before he had
replaced the cans.  Then he shuffled to his place and got out a book as a
sign that school might begin.

Now, I always liked that biggest boy.  He knew his position so well.  He
knew just how far it was proper for him to go, and never once did he
overstep those bounds.  He held the respect and fear of his juniors
without making any open breach with the teacher.  But in one way William
Bellus had been peculiarly favored.  His predecessors had to deal with
Perry Thomas, and in spite of his gentle ways and intellectual cast,
Perry is active and wiry.  He is a blacksmith by trade, and is the
leading tenor in the Methodist choir.  This makes a combination that for
staying powers has few equals.  My biggest boy's predecessor had been
utterly broken.  Even the girls jeered at him until he quit school
entirely.  But William had another problem.  It was the disappointment of
his life that Perry Thomas retired just as he came into power.  He had
declared at a mass-meeting behind the woodshed that it was a gross
injustice on the part of the directors to put a crippled teacher in
charge of the school.  Where now was glory to be gained?  They would have
a school-ma'am next, like they done up to Popolomus, and none but little
boys, and girls not yet out of plaits, would be so servile as to suffer
such domination.  Mark Hope, the soldier, he honored!  Mark Hope, the
veteran, he revered!  Mark Hope, the teacher, he despised; for his
crutches made him a safe barricade against which no Biggest Boy with a
spark of honor would dare to hurl himself.  There might be in the school
boys base enough to charge that he lacked spirit in his attitude of armed
neutrality.  Let those traducers step forward, whether they be two or a
dozen.  What would follow, the Biggest Boy did not say; but he had pulled
off his coat, and there was none to dispute him.  His position was
established.  Thereafter he assumed toward me a calm indifference.  He
was never openly offensive.  He always kept within certain carefully laid
bounds of supercilious politeness.  At first he was exasperating, and I
longed to have him forget himself and overstep those bounds, that I might
make up for his disappointment in being cheated out of Perry Thomas.  But
he never did.

To-day William Bellus really opened the school, for not till he had
buried his face in his book did the general buzz begin.

That buzz was maddening.  For three long hours I had to sit there and
listen to the children as they droned over and over their lessons.  Yet
this was my life's work.  To my care Six Stars had intrusted her young,
and I should be proud of that trust and earnest in its fulfilment.  But
Tim's letter was in my pocket.  It was full of the big things of this
life.  It told of great struggles for great prizes, and the chalk dust
choked me when I thought of him, and then turned to myself as I stood
there, trying to demonstrate to half a dozen girls and boys that the
total sum of a single column of six figures was twenty-four.  Tim had
been promoted and was a full-fledged clerk now.  There were many steps
ahead for him, but he was going to climb them rung by rung; and what joy
there is in drawing one's self up by one's own strength!  I was at the
top of my ladder--at the very pinnacle of learning in Black Log.  Even
now I was unfolding to the marvelling eyes of the children of the valley
the mysteries of that great science, physical geography.  I was
explaining to them the trend of the Rockies and the Himalayas, and of
other mountains I should never see; I was telling them why it snowed, and
unfolding the phenomena of the aurora borealis.  Alexander with no more
worlds to conquer was a sorry spectacle.  We pedagogues who have mastered
physical geography are Alexanders.  But if I was bound to the pinnacle of
learning so that I could neither fly nor fall, I could at least watch Tim
as he struggled higher and higher.  And Mary was watching with me!  That
was what made my work that day seem doubly irksome and the hours trebly
long; for she was waiting to hear from him, and when the sun seemed to
rest on the mill gable I should be free to go to her.  So the minutes
dragged.  It made me angry.  Ordinarily I speak quietly to the scholars,
but now I fairly bellowed at Chester Holmes, who was reading in such a
loud tone that he disturbed me and called me to the real business of the
moment.

"Don't say Dooglas!" I cried.

"That's the way Teacher Thomas used to say it," retorted Chester, sitting
down on the long bench where the Fifth Reader class was posted.

"D-o-u-g--dug--Douglas," I snapped.

"'Douglas round him drew his cloak.'  Now, Ira Snarkle, you may read five
lines, beginning with the second stanza."

Ira was very tall for his sixteen years.  His clothes had never caught up
to him, for his trousers always failed by two inches to grasp his
shoe-tops, and his coat had a terrible struggle to touch the top of his
trousers.  For the shortness of the sleeves he partly compensated with a
pair of bright red worsted wristers.  When he bent his elbows the sleeves
flew up his arms, and these wristers became the most conspicuous thing in
his whole attire.

Ira was holding his book in the correct position now, so I saw a length
of bare arms embraced at the wrists by brilliant bands of red.

"'My manors, halls, and bowers shall still be open at my soveryne's
will,'" chanted the boy.

He paused, and to illustrate the imperious humor of the Scot, he waved
his fingers and a red wrister at me.  The gesture unnerved him for a
moment, and he had to go thumbing over the page to find his place.  He
caught it again and chanted on--"'At my sover-sover-yne's will.  To each
one whom he lists, however unmeet to be the owner's peer.'"

Again the boy waved the fingers and the red wrister at me.  Again he
paused, gathering himself for the climax.  That gesture was abominable,
but at such a time I dared not interrupt.

"'My castles are my king's alone from turret to foundation stone,'" he
cried.  The red wrister flashed beneath my eye.  Ira had even forgotten
his book and let it fall to his side.  He took a step forward; paused
with  one knee bent and the other stiff; extended his right arm and
shouted, "'The hand of Dooglas is his own, and never shall in friendly
grasp the hand of sech as Marmyyon clasp.'"

[Illustration: "'At my sover-sover-yne's will.'"]

Well done, Ira!  The proud Marmion must indeed have trembled until his
armor rattled if the Scot bellowed at him in that way and shook a red
wrister so violently under his very nose.  Excellent, Ira; you put spirit
in your reading.  One can almost picture you beneath Tantallion's towers,
drawing your cloak around you and giving cold respect to the stranger
guest.  But why say "Dooglas"?

"S-o-u-p spells soup," answered Ira loftily to my question.  "Then
D-o-u-g must spell doog."

"I tell you it's Douglas.  'The hand of Douglas is his own,'" I cried.
At the mention of the doughty Scot I pounded the floor with my crutch and
repeated "Dug--dug--dug."

"But Teacher Thomas allus said Doog," exclaimed Chester Holmes.

"I don't care what Teacher Thomas said," I retorted.  "You must say
Dug--Dug--Douglas."

"But Teacher Thomas is the best speaker they is," piped in Lulu Ann
Nummler from the end of the bench.

"I don't care if Teacher Thomas can recite better than Demosthenes
himself," I snapped.  "In this school we say Douglas."  My crutch
emphasized this mandate, but I could not see how it was received, for
every scholar's face was hidden from me by a book.

"Now, Abraham, six lines."

Abraham Lincoln Spiker was two years younger than Ira Snarkle, but he
seemed much taller and correspondingly thinner.  In our valley the boys
have a fashion of being born long, and getting shorter and fatter as they
grow older.  Abraham's mother in making his clothes had provided against
the day when he would weigh two hundred pounds, and consequently his
garments hung all around him, giving him an exceedingly dispirited look.
His hair relieved this somewhat, for it was white and always stood gaily
on end, defying brush and comb.  Daniel Arker, a sturdy black-haired lad,
would have done fuller justice to the passage that fell to Abraham, for
the Spiker boy with his gentle lisp never shone in elocution; but our
reading class is a lottery, as we go from scholar to scholar down the
line.  The lot falling to him, Abraham pushed himself up from the bench,
grasped his book fiercely with both hands, and fixed his eyes intently on
the ceiling.

"Go on," I commanded kindly.

"'Fierth broke he forth,'" lisped the boy.

"Louder.  Put some spirit in it," I cried.  "'Fierce broke he forth!'"
And my crutch beat the floor.

"'Fierth broke he forth, and durtht thou then to bared----"

"To beard," I corrected.

"'Bared the lion in hith den--the Doog-dug-lath----'"  Abraham stopped
and took a long breath.  I just gazed at him.

"'In hith hall,'" he shouted.  "'And h-o-p-hop-e-s-t-hopest thou then
unthscathed to go?'"

The boy's knees began to bend under him, and he was reaching a long, thin
arm out behind hunting for the bench.  He was fleeing.  I knew it.  I
warned him.

"No--go on--read on."

Abraham sighed and drew his sleeve across his mouth from the elbow to the
tips of his fingers.  Then he sang:

"'Noby--Thent Bride--ofBoth--wellno--updraw--bridgegrooms--whatward--erho
--lettheportculluthfall!'"

Young Spiker collapsed.

"'Lord Marmion turned; well was his need,'" I cried, "if Douglas ever
addressed him in that fashion."

"Now watch me, boys," I added.  And with as much fire as I could kindle
in so short a time and under conditions so dampening, I thundered the
resounding lines: "'No, by St. Bride of Bothwell, no!  Up drawbridge,
grooms--what, warder, ho!'"

"'Let the portcullis fall!'"  This last command rang from the back of the
room.  Perry Thomas stood there smiling.

"I couldn't have done it better myself, Mark," he said.  "It's a splendid
piece--that Manny-yon--ain't it--grand--noble.  I love to say it."

"Teacher Thomas, Teacher Thomas," came in the shrill voice of Chester
Holmes, "ain't it Dooglas?"

Perry was at my side, smiling benignly on the school.  He really seemed
to love the scholars; but Perry is a pious man, and seeks to follow the
letter of the Scriptures, and the command is to love our enemies.

"Doogulus--Doogulus," he said.  "Of course, boys, it's Doogulus."

The word seemed to taste good, he rolled it over and over so in his mouth.

"Teacher Hope says you ain't such a fine speaker after all," cried Lulu
Ann Nummler from the distant end of the bench.

She is fifteen and should have known better, but the people of our valley
are dreadfully frank sometimes, and this girl spoke in the clear, sharp
voice of truth that cut through one.  Perry turned quick as a flash and
eyed me.

For a moment all I could do was to thump the floor and cry "Order!
Silence!  Lulu Ann Nummler, when you want to speak, you must hold up
three fingers."

The three fingers shot up at once and waved at me, but I pretended not to
see them and turned to my guest.

"I said, Perry, that you were not quite so great a speaker as
Demosthenes," I stammered.  Chester Holmes had three fingers up and Ira
Snarkle was waving both hands, but I went calmly on: "They were telling
me how beautifully you recited, and I was trying to instil into the piece
a little of your spirit.  But now that we have you here, I insist on your
showing me and the school just how it is done."

Perry frowned fiercely on Lulu Ann Nummler, and the three fingers
disappeared.  On me he smiled.

"It's a great pleasure to me to be able to recite," he said.  "To be able
to repeat great po-ems at will, is to have a treasure you can allus carry
with you while your voice lasts."  All this was to the scholars.  "There
are three great arts in this world--singin', hand-paintin', and last but
not least, speakin'.  I try my hand at all of them except hand-paintin',
and I wish to impress on all you scholars what a joy it is to oneself and
one's friends to have mastered one of these muses.  Singin' and speakin'
are closely allied, startin' from the same source.  And hand-painting it
allus seemed to me, is really elocution in oils; for a be-yutiful picture
is a silent talker.  What suggestions it brings to us as we look upon a
paintin' of a wreath of flowers, or fruit, or a handsome lady!  This art
is lastin'.  Speakin' and singin' is over as soon as they is done.  So I
have often thought that had I only time I'd hand-paint; but bein' a busy
man I've had to content myself with but two of the muses."

Perry paused a moment to rub his hands and smile.  I did not miss this
opportunity to break in, for I had no intention of listening to a
dissertation on art as well as to a recitation.

"Now let us have your 'Marmion,'" I said.

He had forgotten all about "Marmion," and came back to the knight with a
start and a cough.  Then he gazed long at the floor.  The school buzz
died away, and you could hear the ticking of my little clock.  Perry
coughed again and I knew that he was started, so I settled down in my
chair and gazed out of the window.

"'But Doogulus round him drew his cloak,'" Perry was buttoning the two
top buttons of his Prince Albert as his voice rang out.  "'Folded his
arms and thus he spoke.'"

Annagretta Holmes is only three years old.  They send her to school to
keep her warm and out of mischief.  She sat on the very front row, right
under Perry's eye.  The poor child didn't understand why Teacher Thomas
should stare so at her, and she let out one long, unending bleat.  This
gave me a chance to send Lulu Ann Nummler out of the room in charge of
the infant, and I rested easier when Perry drew his Prince Albert around
him once more and spoke.

A grand figure Perry would have made in Tantallion's towers.  I forgot
the school, and the village and the valley, as I sat there looking out of
the window into the sky.  I am in those towers when Marmion stops to bid
adieu, but in place of the proud Scottish noble, Perry Thomas stands
confronting the English warrior.  What a pair they make--the knight armed
cap-a-pie, at his charger's side, and Perry in that close-fitting, shiny
coat that has seen so many great occasions in the valley.  There is a
gracious bigness about the Englishman forgetting the cold respect with
which he has been treated and offering a mailed hand in farewell.  But
Perry buttons his Prince Albert, waves his brown derby under the very
vizor of the departing guest, rests easily on his right leg, bends the
left knee slightly, folds his arms and speaks.  "Burned Marmion's swarthy
cheek like fire."  Little wonder!  If Perry Thomas spoke to me like that
I'd cleave his head.  But Marmion spares proud Angus.  He beards the
Doogulus in his hall.  He dashes the rowels in his steed, dodges the
portcullis, and gallops over the draw.  And Perry Thomas is left standing
with folded arms, gazing through the chalk-dust haze into the solemn,
wide open eyes of the children of Six Stars.

[Illustration: Perry Thomas stands confronting the English warrior.]



IX

Perry's head was close to mine, over my table.  The school was studying
louder than ever, and our voices could not have gone beyond the
platform; but my friend was cautious.  The scholars might well have
thought that the whispered conference boded them ill; that the new
teacher and the old teacher were hatching some conspiracy against them.
It must have looked like it.  Perry's elbows were on the table, and my
elbows were on the table.  My chin rested in my hands, but his hands
were waving beneath my chin as he unfolded to me the plot he had just
discovered against his hopes and his happiness.  But the school was
good.  The second grammar class had been relieved from a recitation by
this confab, and somehow Perry had a subduing influence.  Even the
Biggest Boy opened his desk quietly and never once looked up from his
geography except for a cautious glance out of the corner of his left
eye.

"There was a pile of 'em that high, Mark," said Perry, waving his hands
about a foot above the table.  "There was some books of po-ems and
novels and such.  He'd sent them all to her in one batch--all new, mind
ye, too--and it pleased her most to death.  Well, it made me feel flat,
I tell you--so flat that when she asked me if I didn't think it was
lovely of him, I burst right out and said it was really.  What I should
'a' done was kind of pass it off as if it didn't amount to much."

"Who is the young woman?" I asked.

"I ain't mentionin' names," Perry replied, "and I ain't givin' the name
of the other man; but I have an idee you could guess if you kep' at it."

Our valley does not bloom with beautiful young women.  We always have a
few, but those few can be counted on one's fingers.  Our valley does
not number among its men many who can supplement their sentimental
attentions with gifts of books.  I knew of one.  So it did not require
much guessing on my part to divine the cause of Perry's heart-sickness;
but as long as the other persons in his drama were anonymities, he
would speak freely, so I relieved him by declaring solemnly that never
in the world could I guess.  I had always supposed him a lover of all
women, a slave of none.

Perry smiled.

"I have kep' a good deal of company," he said.  "On account of my
fiddlin', and singin', and recitin' I've always had things pretty much
my own way.  It's opposition that's ruination.  That's what shatters a
man's heart and takes all his sperrit.  As long as the game's between
just a man and a girl there's nothin' very serious.  One or the other
loses, and you can begin a new game somewheres else.  But when two men
and one girl get a playin' three handed, then it is serious; then it's
desperate.  A man has to th'ow his whole heart and mind into it, if
he'd whip, and he gets so worked up he thinks his whole happiness to
the end of time depends on his drivin' the other fellow to drownin'
himself in the mill-dam."

"In other words, if you had not found another laying piles of books and
such gifts at the feet of this fair one, whose name I can never guess,
you would have fiddled to her and sung to her and recited to her until
she said 'I love you.'  Then you would have sought new heavens to
conquer."

"That's about it," said Perry, smiling feebly.  His face brightened.
"You know how it is yourself, Mark.  Mind how you kep' company once
with Emily Holmes and nothin' come of it.  She went off to normal
school in desperation--you mind that, don't ye?--and she married a
school-teacher from Snyder County--you mind that, don't ye?  Now
supposin' you and that Snyder County chap had been opposin' one another
instead of you and Emily Holmes--I allow her name would have been
changed to Emily Hope long ago, or you'd 'a' drownded yourself."

"But I never had any intention of marrying Emily Holmes," I protested.

"I know you didn't," Perry replied, thumping the table in triumph.
"That's just the pint.  If the world was popilated by one man and one
woman, they'd be a bachelor and an old maid.  If there was two men and
one woman, then one of the men would marry the old maid sure."

"Your meaning is more clear," I said.

Though Perry did not know it, I was meeting the same opposition that so
aroused his ire.  In part there was truth in what he said, for while
opposition does not increase one's love, it surely quickens it.  I
doubt if I should have been making a journey nightly up the hill if I
had not expected to find Weston there.  Of Perry I had no fear, and it
was not egotism in me to be indifferent to him.  He lives so far down
the valley.  It's a long walk from Buzzards Glory to Six Stars, and the
road has many chuck-holes.  Perry is our man-about-the-valley _par
excellence_, but he is discreet, so it had chanced we met but once at
Warden's, and that was on the night when we heard the story of Flora
Martin and the famine in India.  He knew me still as a friend, and not
regarding him as a rival, I treated him as a companion in arms.  To be
sure, I could not see where he could be of much assistance; but we had
a common aim and a common foe.  That made a bond between us.  With that
common foe disposed of, the bond might snap.  Till then I was Perry's
friend.

"I agree with you partly," I said.  "Still, it seems to me a man should
love a woman for herself--wholly, entirely for herself, and not because
some other fellow has set his heart on her."

"You are right there, in part," Perry answered.  "I have set my heart
on a particular young lady, but the fact that another--a lean,
cadaverous fellow with red whiskers and no particular looks or
brains--is slowly pushing himself between us makes it worse.  It
aggravates me; it affects my appetite."  Perry smiled grimly.  "It
drives away sleep.  You know how it 'ud have been if that Snyder County
teacher had been livin' in Six Stars when you was keepin' company with
Emily Holmes."

"I don't know how it would have been at all," I retorted hotly.

"Well, s'posin' when you'd walked four miles to set up with her, and
thought you had her all to yourself, s'pose this Snyder County teacher
with red whiskers, and little twinklin' eyes, and new clothes, come
strollin' in, and stretched out in a chair like he owned her, and begin
tellin' about all the countries he'd seen--about England and Rome, Injy
and Africa--and she leaned for'a'd and looked up into his eyes and just
listened to him talk, drank it all in like--s'pose all that, and then
s'pose----"

"I'll suppose anything you like," said I, "except that I am in love
with Emily Holmes and that the Snyder County teacher is cutting me out.
For example, let us put me in your place.  I am enamored of this fair
unknown--of course I can't guess her name--and this second man, also
unknown--he of the red whiskers, is my rival.  Let us suppose it that
way."

"If you insist," Perry replied.  "Well then, you are settin' up with
her.  You've invited her to be your lady at the next spellin' bee
between Six Stars and Turkey Walley, and she has said she'll think
about it.  Then you've told her that there is something wrong with you.
You don't know what it is, 'ceptin' you feel all peekit like for no
special reason; you can't eat no more, and sleep poorly and has sighin'
spells.  Then she kind of peeks at you outen the corner of her eye and
smiles.  S'posin' just then in comes this man and bows most polite, and
tells you he is so delighted to see you, and makes her move from the
settee where you are, to a rocker close to him; and leans over her and
asks about the health of all the family as if they was his nearest and
dearest; inquires about her dog; tells her she looks just like the
portrates of his great-grandma.  S'posin' she just kind of looks at the
floor quiet-like or else up to him--you'll begin to think you ain't
there at all, won't you?  Then you'll concide that you are there but
you oughtn't to be, and kind of slide out without your hat and forget
your fiddle.  I tell you, Mark, it's then love becomes a consumin'
fire."

[Illustration: "You'll begin to think you ain't there at all."]

Perry looked at me appealingly.  Men hesitate to speak of love--except
to women.  He had already shown a frankness that was surprising, but
then with a certain deftness he had placed me in the position of the
sentimental one with a problem to solve.  He was seeking for himself a
solution of that problem, and was appealing to me to help him.

"Suppose again," said I, "that going another day to see the girl, I
found her poring over a pile of books--all new books--just given her by
this same arrogant interloper."  Perry was silent, but when I paused
and looked at him, I saw in his face that I was arguing along the right
line.  "Then the question arises, what shall I do?"

Perry nodded.

"What would you do?" he said.  "That's it exact."

"I'd meet him at his own game," I answered.

"With what?" he asked.

"With what?" I repeated.

There was the rub!  With what?  I sat with my head clasped between my
hands trying to answer him.

"With what?" I repeated, after a long silence.

"S'posin' I got her a wreath."  Perry offered the suggestion, and in
his enthusiasm he forgot that in our premise I was the person
concerned; but I was not loath to let him take on himself the burden of
our perplexity.

"Is she dead?" I asked.

"I needn't get one of that kind," he solemnly replied.  "Somethin' in
autumn leaves ought to be nice."

"You might do better."

"A hand-paintin', then," he ventured timidly.

I smiled on this with more approval.

"They have some be-yutiful ones at Hopedale," he said with more heart.
"The last time I was down I was lookin' at 'em.  They've fine gold
frames and----"

"Why send her a picture of a tree when the finest oak in the valley is
at her door?" I protested.  "Why send her a picture of a slate-colored
cow when a herd of Durhams pastures every day right under her eye?"

"That's true," Perry answered.  "Hand-paintin's is meant for city
folks.  But what can a fellow get?  A statue!"  His eyes brightened.
"That's just the thing--a statue of Washington or Lincoln or General
Grant--how's that for an idee, Mark?"

"Excellent, if you are trying to make an impression on her uncle," I
answered.

Perry shook his hands despairingly.

"You have come to a poor person at such business, Perry," said I.
"What little I know of courting I have from books, and it seems to me
that the usual thing is flowers--violets--roses."

My friend straightened up in his chair and gazed at me very long and
hard.  From me his eyes wandered to the calendar that hung behind my
desk.

"November--November," he muttered.  "A touch of snow too--and violets
and roses."

He leaned toward me fiercely.  "Violets come in May," he said.  "This
here is a matter of weeks."

"I'm serious, Perry," said I.  "Books are the thing, and flowers; not
wreaths and statues and paintings.  You must send something that
carries some sentiment with it."

He saw that I was in earnest, and his countenance became brighter.

"Geraniums," he  muttered; thumping the table.  "I'll get Mrs. Arker to
let me have one of them window-plants of hers, and I'll put it in a new
tomato-can and paint it.  How's that for a starter?"

"I've never read about men sending geraniums," I replied.  "It's odd,
but I never have.  I suppose the can makes them seem a little
unwieldly.  Still----"

"I had thought of forty-graph album."  Perry spoke timidly again.

I had no mind to let him venture any more suggestions.  His was too
fickle a fancy, and I had settled on an easy solution of the problem.
He was to send her a geranium.  Somehow, I knew deep down in my own
heart, ill versed as I was in such things, that I should never send her
such a gift myself.  I would climb to the top of Gander Knob for a wild
rose or rhododendron; I would stir the leaves from the gap to the river
in search of a simple spray of arbutus for her.  But step before her
with my arms clasping a tin can with a geranium plant r Heaven forbid!
Perry was different.  The suggestion pleased him.  He was rubbing his
hands and smiling in great contentment.

"I might send a po-em with it," he said.  "I've allus found that poetry
kind of catches ahold of a girl when you are away.  It keeps you in her
mind.  It must be sing-song, though, kind of gettin' into her head like
quinine.  It must keep time with the splashin' of the churn and the
howlin' of the wind.  I mind when I was keepin' company with Rhoda
Spiker--she afterward married Ulysses G. Harmon, of Hopedale--I sent
her a po-em that run somethin' like this: 'I live, I love, my Life, my
Light; long love I thou, Sweetheart so bright'----"

Perry's po-em never got into my brain, for as he repeated the
captivating lines, I was gazing over his shoulder, out of the window,
down the road to the village.  I saw a girl on the store porch,
standing by the door a moment as if undecided which way to go.  Then
she turned her head into the November gale and came rapidly up the
road.  In a minute more she would be passing the school-house door.
Tim's letter was in my pocket and the sun was still high over the gable
of the mill.

[Illustration: I saw a girl on the store porch.]

"Rhoda sent me a postal asking me to write her a po-em full of Ks or Xs
or Ws, just so as she could get the Ls out of her head, and----"

"Perry!"  I broke right into his story and seized the lapel of his
waistcoat as though he were my dearest friend.  "My girl is going by
the school-house door this very minute.  Now you help me.  Take the
school for the rest of the afternoon."

"Your girl?" cried Perry.  His voice broke from the smothered
conference tone and the school heard it and tittered.  He recovered
himself and poked me in the chest.

"Oh!" he said, "Widow Spoonholler--I seen you last Sunday singin' often
the same book--I seen you.  Hurry, Mark, hurry; and luck to you!
You've done me most a mighty good turn."



X

Mary sat knitting.  Beware of a woman who knits.  The keenest lawyer in
our county is not so clever a cross-examiner as his sister when she
sits with her needles and yarn.  Questions directed at one can be
parried.  You expect them and dodge.  The woman knits and knits, and
lulls you half to sleep, and then in a far-away voice asks questions.
They come as a boon, a gracious acknowledgment that you exist, and
though in her mind your place is secondary to the flying needles and
the tangled worsted, still you are there and she is half listening to
what you have to say.  So you tell her twice as much as is wise.  You
have no interest for her.  Her eyes are fixed on her work.  She asks
you the secret of your life, and then bends farther over, seeming to
forget your existence.  Desperate, you shout it at her, and she looks
up and smiles, a wondering, distraught smile; then goes on knitting.

There were some things in Tim's letter that I did not intend to tell
Mary.  He had written to me in confidence.  A man does not mind letting
one of his fellows know that he is in love with a woman, but to let a
woman know it is different.  She will think him a fool, unless she is
his inspiration.  I knew Tim.  I knew that he was no fool, and I did
not wish her to get such an impression.  I loved a pretty woman.  So
did Tim.  But Mary would not understand it in Tim's case.  That was why
I folded the letter when I had read the first four pages.

But Mary was knitting.  "It is fine to think he is getting along so
well," she said.

She looked up, but not at me.  Her face was turned to the window; her
eyes were over the valley which was growing gray, for the sun was down.
What she saw there I could not tell.  A drearier sight is hard to find
than our valley when the chill of the November evening is creeping over
it as the fire in the west goes out.  Night covers it, and it sleeps.
But the winter twilight raises up its shadows.  In the darkness all is
hidden.  In the half-light there is utter loneliness.

I turned from the window to the letter, and Mary looked at me for the
first time in many minutes.

"Are you going to read the rest of the letter?" she demanded.

"You have heard 'most all of it," I replied evasively.

"And the rest?" she said.

"Is of no interest," I answered.  "It's just a few personal,
confidential things.  Perhaps some time I can tell you."

"Oh," she exclaimed carelessly, and went on knitting, drawing closer to
the lamplight.

"How long is it since he left?" she asked at last, reaching down to
untangle the worsted from the end of the rocker.

"Six weeks," said I.  "It's just six weeks coming to-morrow since Tim
and I parted at Pleasantville.   To think he has been promoted already!
At that rate he should be head of the firm in a year or two."

"Mr. Weston has been very kind," said she.  "Of course he has seen that
Tim had every chance.  He is the most thoughtful man I ever knew.
He----"

Weston's excellent qualities were well known to me.  I had discovered
them long ago, and I did not care to hear Mary descant on them at
length.  He had done much for Tim, but it was what Tim had done for
himself that I was proud of, so I interrupted her rather rudely.

"Yes, he got Tim his place; but you must remember Mr. Weston has hardly
been in New York a day since the boy left.  He doesn't bother much
about business, so, after all, Tim is working his way alone."

"Yes," said Mary.  She had missed a stitch somewhere, and it irritated
her greatly.  That was evident by the way she picked at it.  She
remedied the trouble somehow, recovered her composure, and went on
knitting.

"Is it eight dollars he is making, did you say?" she asked.

"Yes, eight," I replied, verifying the figure with a glance at the
letter.

"A week or a month?"

"A week.  Just think of it--that is more than I got in the army."

But Mary was not a bit impressed.  I remembered that she came from
Kansas, and in Kansas a dollar is not so big as in our valley.

"Living is so expensive in the city," she said absently.  "With eight
dollars a week here Tim would be a millionaire.  But in New York--"  A
shrug of the shoulder expressed her meaning.

"True," said I, a bit ruefully.

I had expected her to clasp her hands, to look up at me and listen to
my stories of Tim's success, and hear my dreams for his future.
Instead, she went on knitting, never once raising her eyes to me.  It
exasperated me.  In sheer chagrin I took to silence and smoking.  But
she would not let me rest long this way, though I was slowly lulling
myself into a state of semi-coma, of indifference to her and calm
disdain.

"Of course Tim has made some friends," she said, glancing up from her
work very casually.

"Of course he has," I snapped.

"That's nice," she murmured--knitting, knitting, knitting.

I expected her to ask who his friends were, and how he had made them.
That was all in the letter.  Moreover, it was in the part I had not
read to her.  But she abruptly abandoned this line of inquiry.  She did
not care.  She let me smoke on.

Suddenly she dropped her work and asked, "Is that a footstep on the
porch?"

"Footsteps!  No--why, who did you think was coming?" I said.

"Mr. Weston promised to drop in on his way home from hunting--but I
guess he'll disappoint me.  I hoped it was he."  She fell to her task
again, only now she began to hum softly, thus shutting me off entirely.

For a very long while I endured it, but the time came when action of
some kind was called for.  We were not married, that I could sit
forever smoking while she hummed.  Even in Black Log, etiquette
requires that a man talk to a woman when in her company; and when the
woman ceases to listen, the wise man departs.  That was just what I did
not want to do, and only one alternative was left me.  I got out the
letter and held it under the light.

"You were asking about Tim's friends, Mary," said I.

"Was I?" she returned.  "I had forgotten.  What did I say?"

"You asked if he had made any friends," I replied, as calmly as I
could.  "I was going to read you what he said."

"Oh!" she cried.  And at last she dropped her knitting, and resting her
elbows on her knees, clasping her chin in her hands, she looked up at
me from her low chair.  "I thought it was forbidden," she said.

"Tim didn't say anything about not reading it," I answered.  "At first,
though, it seemed best not to; but you'll understand, Mary.  Of course,
we mustn't take him too seriously, but it does sound foolish.  Poor
Tim!"

"Poor Tim!" repeated the girl.  "He must be in love."

"He is," said I.

"Then don't read it!" she cried.  "Surely he never intended you to read
it to me."

"Of course he did," I laughed, for at last I had aroused her, and now
her infernal knitting was forgotten; she no longer strained her ears
for Weston's footfalls.  Her eyes were fixed on me.  "Poor old Tim!
Well, let's wish him luck, Mary.  Now listen."

So I read her the forbidden pages.

"'You should see Edith Parker, Mark.  She is so different from the
girls of Black Log.  Her father is head book-keeper in the store, and
he has been very good to me.  Last week he took me home to dinner with
him.  He has a nice house in Brooklyn.  His wife is dead, and he has
just his daughter.  We have no women in Black Log that compare to her.
She is tall and slender and has fair hair and blue eyes.'"

"I hate fair-haired women," broke in Mary with some asperity.  "They
are so vain."

"I agree with you," said I.  "That is invariably the case, and dark
hair is so much more beautiful; but we must make allowance for Tim.
Let us see--'fair hair and blue eyes and the sweetest face'--I do
believe that brother of mine is out of his head to write such stuff."

"He certainly is," said Mary, very quietly.

"Poor Tim!  But go on."

"'We played cards together for a while, till old Mr. Parker went asleep
in his chair, and then Edith and I had a chance to talk.  You know,
Mark, I've always been a bit afraid of women, and awkward and ill at
ease around them.  But Edith is different from the girls of Black Log.
We were friends in a minute.  You don't know what it is to talk to
these girls who have been everywhere, and seen everything, and know
everything.  They are so much above you, they inspire you.  For a girl
like that no sacrifice a man can make is too great.  To win a girl like
that a man must do something and be something.  Now up in Black
Log----'"

"Yes, up in Black Log the women are different," said Mary in a quiet
voice.  "They have to work in Black Log, and it's the men they work
for.  If they sat on thrones and talked wisdom and looked beautiful,
the kitchen-fires would die out and the children go naked."

"Tim doesn't say anything disparaging to the people of our valley," I
protested.  "He says, 'in Black Log the girls don't understand how to
dress.  They deck themselves out in gaudy finery.  Now Edith wears the
simplest things.  You never notice her gown.  You only see her figure
and her face.'"

"Do I deck myself out in gaudy finery, Mark?" Mary's appeal was direct
and simple.

A shake of the head was my only answer.  I wanted to tell her that Tim
was blind.  I wanted to tell her the boy was a fool; that Edith, the
tall, thin, pale creature, was not to be compared to one woman in our
valley; that I know who that woman was; that I loved her.  I would have
told her this.  With a sudden impulse I leaned toward her.  As suddenly
I fell back.  My crutches had clattered to the floor!

A battered veteran!  A pensioner!  A back-woods pedagogue!  That I was.
That I must be to the end.  My place was in the school-house.  My place
was on the store bench, set away there with a lot of other broken
antiquities.  That I should ask a woman to link her life with mine, was
absurd.  A fair ship on a fair sea soon parts company with a
derelict--unless it tows it.  A score of times I had fought this out,
and as often I had found but one course and had set myself to follow
it, but there was that in Mary's quiet eyes that shook my resolution.
There was an appeal there, and trust.

"I am glad, anyway, I am not so much above you, Mark," she said, now
laughing.

I gathered up my crutches and the letter.  I gathered up my wits again.

"There's where I feel like Tim, indeed," I said.

"I don't think I should like this lofty Edith," the girl exclaimed.
"What a pompous word it is--Edith!  Tim is ambitious.  I suppose he
rolls that name over and over in his mind."

It seemed that Mary was unnecessarily sharp toward a young woman she
had never seen and of whom she had as yet heard nothing but good.
While for myself I felt a certain resentment at Tim for his praise of
this girl and the condescending references to my misfortune in never
having seen her like, I had for him a certain keen sympathy and hope
for his success.  I had a certain sympathy for Edith, too, for a man in
love, if unrestrained in his praise, will make a plain, sensible,
motherly girl look like a frivolous fool.  Perhaps in this case Edith
was the victim.  I suggested this to Mary, and she laughed softly.

"Perhaps so," she said.  "But I must admit it irritates me to see our
Tim lose his head over a stranger.  I can only picture her as he
does--a superior being, who lives in Brooklyn, whose name is Edith, and
who wears her hair in a small knot on top of her head.  Can you
conceive her smile, Mark, if she saw us now--if this fine Brooklyn girl
with her city ways dropped down here in Black Log?"

"That's all in Tim's letter," I cried.  "Listen.  'She asked all about
my home and you.  I told her of the place and of all the people, of
Mary and Captain.  Last night I took over that picture of you in your
uniform, and I won't tell you all the nice things she said about you,
and----'"

"She's a flatterer," cried Mary.

"I am beginning to love her myself," said I.  "But listen to Tim.  'She
told me she hoped to see Black Log some day, and to meet the soldier of
the valley.  I said that I hoped she would, too, but I didn't tell her
that a hundred times a day, as I worked over the books in the office, I
vowed that soon I'd take her there myself.'"

"As Mrs. Tim," Mary added, for I was folding up the letter.

"As Mrs. Tim, evidently," said I.  "Poor old Tim!  It's a very bad
case."

"Poor old Tim!" said Mary.

She took up her needles and her work, and fell to knitting.

"I suppose they must be very rich--the Parkers, I mean."  This was
offered as a wedge to break the silence, for the needles were going
very rapidly now, and the stitches seemed to call for the closest
watching.

"Yes," said Mary.

I lighted my pipe again.

"What a grand man Tim will be when he comes back home." I suggested
this after a long silence.  "He'll look fine in his city clothes, for
somehow those city men do dress differently from us country chaps.  Now
just picture Tim in a--in a----"

Mary was humming softly to herself.



XI

The county paper always comes on Thursday.  This was Thursday.  Elmer
Spiker sat behind the stove, in a secluded corner, the light of the
lamp on the counter falling over his left shoulder on the leading
column of locals.  Elmer was reading.  There was a store rule
forbidding him to read aloud, which caused him much hardship, for as he
worked his way slowly down the column, his right eye and left ear kept
twitching and twitching as though trying to keep time with his lips.

Josiah Nummler's long pole rested on the counter at his side, and his
great red hands were spread out to drink in the heat from the glowing
bowl of the stove.

"It's a-blowin' up most a-mighty, ain't it?" he said, cheerfully.  "Any
news, Elmer?"

"Oh now, go home," grunted Mr. Spiker, rolling his pipe around so the
burning tobacco scattered over his knees.  "See what you've done!" he
snapped angrily, brushing away the sparks.

"I didn't notice you was in the middle of a word, Elmer, really I
didn't," pleaded old Mr. Nummler.

"I wasn't in the middle of a word," retorted Elmer, as he drove his
little finger into his pipe in an effort to save some of the tobacco.
"I was just beginnin' a new piece.  Things is gittin' so there ain't a
place left in this town for a man to read in peace and comfort.  Here I
am, tryin' to post up on the local doin's, on polytics and religion,
and ringin' in my ears all the time is 'lickin' the teacher, lickin'
the teacher, lickin' the teacher.'  S'pose every man here did lick the
teacher in his time--what of it, I says, what of it?"

"Yes, what of it?" said I, closing the door with a bang.

I was plodding home from Mary's.  She had hummed me out at last, and I
had tucked Tim's letter in my pocket and hobbled back to the village.
The light in the store had drawn me aside and I stopped a moment just
to look in.  The store is always a fascinating place.  There is always
something doing there, and I opened the door a crack to hear what was
under discussion.  Catching the same refrain that troubled Elmer
Spiker, I entered.

"What of it?" I demanded, facing the company.  "I don't believe there
is a man here who ever thrashed the teacher."

Theophilus Jones raised himself from the counter on which he was
leaning, and waved a lighted candle above his head.

"Here comes the teacher--make way for the teacher!"

Josiah Nummler pounded the floor with his long pole.

"See the conquerin' hero comes," he cried.  "A place for him--a place
for him!"  And with the point of his stick he drove the six men on the
bench so close together as to give me an excellent seat.

"Thrice welcome, noble he-ro, as Perry Thomas says!" shouted Aaron
Kallaberger, thrusting his hand into his bosom in excellent imitation
of the orator.

"He's lookin' pretty spry yet, ain't he, boys?" said Isaac Bolum.  He
stood before me, leaning over till his hands clasped his knees, and
peered into my face, smiling.  "The teacher ain't changed a bit."

"Thank you for the reception," said I.  "But explain.  What's this all
about?"

Elmer Spiker folded the county paper and came around to our side of the
stove.  There he struck his favorite attitude, which was always made
most effective by the endless operation of putting his spectacles in
their case--pulling them out--waving them--_ad infinitum_.  For in our
valley spectacles are the sceptre of the sovereign intellect.

"They was talkin' about lickin' the teacher," Elmer said, "and sech
talkin' I never heard.  It was the nonsensicalest yet.  The way them
boys was tellin' about the teachers they had knowed made me feel for
your life when I seen you come in.  I thought they'd fall on you like
so many wolves."

"Now see here, Elmer Spiker," shouted Henry Holmes, "that's an
injestice.  I never said I'd licked the teacher when I was a boy.  I
only said I'd tried it."

"You give me to understand that the teacher was dead now," returned
Elmer severely.

"He is," cried Henry.

"And you claim you done it."

"I done it," shouted Mr. Holmes, pounding the floor with his cane.  "I
done it!  You think I'm a murderer?  Why, old Gilbert Spoonholler was
ninety-seven year old when he went away.  He was only forty when him
and me had it out."

"That's different," said Elmer calmly.  "I understood from your
original account that he died in battle."

"I tho't so too, Henery," put in Isaac Bolum.  "You misled me,
complete.  'Here,' says I, 'at last I have met a man who has licked the
teacher.'  And all the time you was tellin' about it, we was admirin'
you--Joe Nummler and me--and now we finds Gil Spoonholler lived
fifty-seven year after that terrible struggle."

"I can't just fetch my memory back to that particular incident,
Henery," said Josiah, "but my recollection is that Gil Spoonholler held
the school-house agin all comers, and that's sayin' a good deal, for we
was tough as hickory when we was young."

"The modern boys is soft," Aaron Kallaberger declared.  "They regards
the teacher in a friendlier light than they used to.  They are
weakenin'.  The military sperrit's dyin' out.  The spectacle is
conquerin' the sword."

[Illustration:  Aaron Kallaberger.]

This was too direct a slap at Elmer Spiker to pass unnoticed; Elmer was
too old an arguer to use any ponderous weapon in return.  He even
smiled as he punctuated his sentences with his battered spectacle-case.

"You never said a truer word, Aaron.  It allus was true.  It allus will
be true.  It's just as true to-day as when Henery Holmes tackled old
Gilbert Spoonholler, as when Isaac Bolum yander argyed with Luke
Lampson that five times eleven was forty-five; as when you refused to
admit to the same kind teacher that Harrisburg was the capital of
Pennsylwany."

"And as to-day when William Belkis--"  Theophilus Jones was acting
strangely.  He was bowing politely at me.

I was mystified.  Why at a time like this I should be treated as a
subject of so much distinction was a puzzle, and I was about to demand
an explanation, when Josiah Nummler interrupted.

"It's true," he said.  "Teachers ain't changed and the boys ain't
changed.  I'm eighty year old within a week, and all my life I've heard
boys blowin' about how they was goin' to lick the teacher, and I've
heard old men tell how they done it years and years before--but I've
never seen an eye-witness--what I wants is an eye-witness."

"You've been talkin' to Elmer Spiker," said Henry Holmes, plaintively.
"He's convinced you.  He'd convince anybody of anything.  He's got me
so dad-twisted I can't mind no more whether I went to school even."

"You never showed no signs, Henery."  Isaac Bolum spoke very quietly.

"I guess you otter know it as well as anybody," Henry retorted angrily.
"Your ma was allus askin' me to take care of you, and you was a
nuisance, too, you was, Isaac.  You was allus a-blubberin' and
a-swallerin' somethin'.  You mind the time you swallered my copper
cent, don't you?  You mind the fuss your ma made to my ma about it,
don't you?  Why, she formulated regular charges that I 'tempted to
pizon you--she did, and----"

"Don't rake up them old, old sores," said Josiah Nummler soothingly,
"Ike'll give you back your copper cent, Henery."

"All Ike's property to-day ain't as val'able to me now as that cent was
then," Mr. Holmes answered solemnly.  "It was the val'ablest cent I
ever owned.  I never expect to have another I'd hate so to see
palpitatin' in Isaac Bolum's th'oat between his Adam's apple and his
collar-band."

"We're gittin' away from the subject," said Josiah.  "You're draggin'
up a personal quarrel between you and Isaac Bolum, when we was
discussin' the great problem that confronts every scholar in his
day--that of thrashin' the teacher."

"It's a problem no scholar ever solved in the history of this walley,
anyway," declared Elmer Spiker.

"It ain't on the records," said Kallaberger.

"There are le-gends," Isaac Bolum said.  He pointed at Henry Holmes
with his thumb.  "Sech as his."

"Yes," said Josiah Nummler, "we have sech le-gends, comin' mostly from
the Indians and Henery Holmes.  But there's one I got from my pap when
I was a boy, and I allus thought it one of the most be-yutiful fairy
stories I ever heard--of course exceptin' them in the Bible.  It was
about Six Stars school, here, and the boy's name was Ernest, and the
teacher's Leander.  It was told to my pap by his pap, so you can see
that as a le-gend it was older than them of Henery Holmes."

"It certainly sounds more interestin'," exclaimed Isaac Bolum.

Old Mr. Holmes started to protest, but Aaron Kallaberger quieted him
with an offering of tobacco.  By the time his pipe was going, Josiah
was well into his story.

"Of all the teachers that ever tot in Six Stars this here Leander was
the most fe-rocious.  He was six foot two inches tall in his stockin's,
and weighed no more than one hundred and thirty pound, stripped, but he
was wiry.  His arms was like long bands of iron.  His legs was like
hickory saplin's, and when he wasn't usin' them he allus kept them
wound round the chair, so as to unspring 'em at a moment's notice and
send himself flyin' at the darin' scholar.  His face was white and all
hung with hanks of black hair; his eyes was one minute like still
intellectual pools and the next like burnin' coals of fire--that was my
pap's way of puttin' it.  Ernest was just his opposite.  He was a
chunky boy with white hair and pale eyes.  He was a nice boy when let
alone, but in the whole fifteen years of his life he'd never had no
call to bound Kansas or tell the capital of Californy outside of school
hours, so he regarded Leander with a fierce and childlike hatred.  But
Ernest had a noble streak in him, too.  For himself he would 'a'
suffered in silence.  It was the constant oppression of the helpless
little ones that saddened him.  It was maddenin' to have to sit silent
every day while tiny girls, no older than ten, was being hounded from
one end of the g'ography to the other.  He seen small boys, shavers
under eight, scratchin' holes in their heads with slate-pencils, tryin'
to make out why two and two was four; he seen girls, be-yutiful young
girls of his own age, drove almost to distraction by black-boards full
of diagrams from the grammar-book.  And allus before him, the inspirin'
note of the whole systematic system of torturin' the young, was the
rod; broodin' over it all, like a black cloud, was Leander's
repytation, was the memory of the boys as had gone before.  For years
Ernest bore all this.  Then come a time when he was called to a
position of responsibility in the school.  One after another, the
biggest boys had fallen.  A few had gradyeated.  Others had argyed with
the teacher and become as broken reeds, was stedyin' regular and bein'
polite like.  In them years, whether he wanted it or not, Ernest had
rose up.  His repytation was spotless.  His age entitled him to the
Fifth Reader class, but he was still spellin' out words in the Third;
fractions was only a dream to him, and he couldn't 'a' told you the
difference between a noun and a wild carrot.  But through it all he'd
been so humble and polite that Leander looked on him as a kind of
half-witted lamb."

[Illustration: Leander.]

"This here is the longest fairy story I ever heard tell of," said Elmer
Spiker, "We haven't even had a sign of the prin-cess."

"And there is a prin-cess in this here le-gend," returned Josiah.  "She
was a be-yutiful one, too.  Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the
house of Binn, the Binns of Turkey Walley.  She had the reddish hair of
the Binns and the pearl-blue eyes of the Rummelsbergers from over the
mountains.  Her ma was a Rummelsberger.  She wasn't too spare, nor was
she too fleshy; she was just rounded right; and when she smiled--ah,
boys, when Pinky Binn smiled at Ernest from behind her g'ography his
heart went like its spring had broke.  Yet he never showed it.  It
would have been ruination for him to let it be known by sign or act
that Pinky Binn was other than the general class of weemen; for is
there anything worse than weemen in general?  It's the exceptions,
allus the exceptions, raises trouble with a man.  Pinky Binn was
Ernest's exception.  But the time of his great trial come, and he was
true.  He stepped forth in his right light before all the school; he
showed himself what he was--the gentle lover, the masterful fighter,
the heroic-est scholar Six Stars school had ever seen."

[Illustration: "Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the house of Binn,
the Binns of Turkey Walley."]

"He whipped the teacher, I know," cried Henry Holmes.  "I told you,
Ike--he licked the teacher."

"This here is a fairy story, Henery," returned Isaac reprovingly.

"Even in a fairy story it 'ud be ridiculous to let a boy of fifteen
beat a trained teacher," said Josiah Nummler.  "He didn't quite, and it
come this way.  Leander asked Pinky Binn if he had eleven apples and
multiplied them by five how many was they left.  She says sixty-five.
'Figure it out agin,' he says, wery stern.  So she works her fingers
and her lips a-while, like she was deef and dumb.  'Five-timsone is
five,' she says, 'and five-timsone agin is five and one to carry is
six--sixty-five,' she says.  'Well, I'll be Scotch-Irished,' says
Leander gittin' wery angry.  'Sech obtusety' (Leander allus used fancy
words) 'is worthy of Ernest yander.'  He pinted his long finger at
Ernest and says, 'How much is five times eleven apples?  Ernest gits up
and faces the teacher, wery ca'am and wery quiet.  'Sixty-five,' says
he.  'It's fifty-five,' Leander shouts.  Then says Ernest, wery cool,
'Pinky Binn says it's sixty-five, and Pinky Binn ain't no storyteller,
and you hadn't otter call her one.'  That takes all the talk out of the
teacher.  He just sets there wrappin' his legs round the chair and
glarin'.  Ernest's voice rings clear above the school now, like the
Declaration of Independence.  'In Turkey Walley, teacher,' he says,
'five times eleven apples is sixty-five.  They raises bigger apples
there.'

"Leander's legs unsprung.  He ketched Ernest by the hair and lifted him
to the platform.  Boys, you otter 'a' seen it.  It was David and
Goliath all over agin, only fightin' fair.  Havin' Leander holdin' his
hair give the boy an advantage--it was two hands agin one.  Leander had
but the one to operate his stick with, while Ernest was drivin' both
fists right into the darkness in front of him.  The stick was making no
impression, and some of the small boys that didn't know no better begin
to cheer.  Boys, you otter 'a' been there.  You'd have enjoyed it,
Henery.  Leander seen what he needed was tactics, and his regular
tactics was to hold the scholar at arm's length by the hair.  He tried
it and it didn't work.  Ernest was usin' tactics too.  He wasn't
wastin' strength and beatin' his arms around.  He just smiled.  That
smile aroused the teacher in Leander agin.  He couldn't stand it.  He
had never had a boy do that before; he forgot himself and sailed in.
Boys, that was fightin' then.  You'd have enjoyed it, Henery.  Still, I
guess it couldn't have been much to watch, for there was nothin' to see
but dust--a rollin', roarin' cloud of it, backward and forward over the
platform.  I don't know just what happened.  Pap couldn't tell.
Leander couldn't 'a' told you.  Ernest couldn't 'a' told you.  There
was war--real war, and after it come peace."

"Ernest whipped, I know," cried Henry Holmes.

"The teacher was licked--good--good!" shouted Isaac Bolum.

"No, boys," said Josiah solemnly, "that couldn't have been.  Even in
fairy stories sech things couldn't happen.  But when the dust cleared
away, Leander's body lay along the floor, and towerin' over him, one
foot on his boosom, stood the darin' scholar.  I guess the teacher had
been took ill."

"Mebbe it was appleplexy," suggested Elmer Spiker.

"Mebbe it was," said Josiah.  "It must have been somethin' like that;
but whatever it was, there stood the boy.  'You is free,' he says,
addressin' the scholars.  And the children broke from the seats and
started for'a'd to worship him.  And Pinky Binn was almost on her knees
at his feet, when a strange thing happened.

"There was music.  It come soft first, and hushed the school, and froze
the scholars like statutes.  Louder it come and louder--a heavenly
choir--the melodium, the cordine, and the fiddle.  Then a great white
light flooded the school-room.  It blinded the boys, and it blinded the
girls.  The music played softer and softer--the melodium, the cordine,
and the fiddle--and with it, keepin' time with it, the light come
softer, too; so lookin' up the scholars seen there in the celestial
glow, a solemn company gethered round the boy--the he-roes of
old--Hercules and General Grant, Joshuay and Washington--all the mighty
fighters of history.  Just one glimpse the scholars had, for the music
struck up louder, and the light glowed brighter and brighter till it
blinded them.  Softer and softer the music come--the melodium, the
cordine, and the fiddle.  It sounded like marchin', they said, and they
heard the tramp, tramp, tramp of the sperrit soldiers.  Then there was
quiet--only the roarin' of the stove and the snuffin' of the little
ones.  And when they looked up Leander was alone--settin' there on the
platform, kind of rubbin' his eyes--alone."

There was silence in the store.  Josiah Nummler's pipe was going full
blast, and while the white cloud hid him from the others, I could see a
gentle smile on his fat face.

"Mighty son's!" cried Henry Holmes, "that there's unpossible."

Josiah planted his pole on the floor and lifted himself to his feet.

"It's only a fairy story, Henery," he said.

"What does it illustrate?" cried Aaron Kallaberger.  "Nothin', I says.
We was talkin' about Mark and William Bellus, and you switches off on
Leander and Ernest.  To a certain pint your story agrees with what my
boy told me of the doin's in the school this afternoon."

"What doing's?" I exclaimed.  This talk puzzled me, and I was
determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

"Why, wasn't you there?" cried Isaac Bolum.  "Wasn't it you and
William?"

"No," I fairly shouted.  "Perry Thomas had the school."

Josiah Nummler's pole clattered to the floor, and he sank into a chair.

"I see--I see," he gasped.  "Poor William!"

"I see--I see," said I.  "Poor William!"

For William had felt the hand of "Doogulus!"

[Illustration: William had felt the hand of "Doogulus."]



XII

It was young Colonel's first day of life.  He had been born six months
before, but for him that had been simply the beginning of existence.
Now he was to live.  He was to go with Captain, and with Betsy his
mother, with Arnold Arker's Mike and Major, the best of his breed, to
learn to take the trail and follow it, singing as he ran.

It was young Colonel's first day of life.  He was out in the great dog
world, and about him were the mighty hunters of the valley.  Arnold
Arker was there with his father's rifle, once a flint-lock, always a
piece of marvellous accuracy, and a hero as guns go, and the old man
patted the puppy and pulled his silky ears.  Tip Pulsifer approved of
him.  Tip shut one eye and gazed at him long and earnestly; he ran his
bony fingers down the slender back to the very end of the agitated
tail.  One by one he took the heavy paws in his hands and stroked them.
Then Tip smiled.  Murphy Kallaberger smiled too, and declared that the
young un took after his pa; clarifying this explanation he pointed his
fat thumb over his shoulder to old Captain, beating around the
underbrush.

It was young Colonel's first day of life.  And what a day to live, I
thought, as I stroked his head and wished him luck!  He could not get
it into his puppy brain that I was to wait there while the others went
racing down the slope into the wooded basin below, so he lingered, to
sit before me on his haunches, his head cocked to one side, eyeing me
inquisitively.  There was a tang in the air.  The wind was sweeping
along the ridge-top and the woods were shivering.  All about us rattled
Nature's bones, in the stirring leaves, in the falling pig-nuts, in the
crash of the belated birds through the leafless branches.  The sun was
over us, and as I looked up to drink with my eyes of the warm light, I
was taking a draught of God's best wine from off yonder in the north,
of the wine that quickens the blood and drives away the brain-clouds.
A day of days this was to race over the ridges while the music of the
hounds rang through them; a day of days to dash from thicket to
thicket, over the hills and through the hollows, leaping logs and
vaulting fences, with every sense keyed to the highest; for the fox is
a clever general.  So young Colonel was puzzled, for there I was on a
log, at the crest of the ridge, with my crutches at one side and my gun
at the other, when I should be away after old Captain, the real leader
of the sport, after Arnold and Tip and Betsy.  This was the best I
could do, to sit here and listen and hope--listen as the chase went
swinging along the ridges; hope that a kind fate and an unwise Reynard
would bring them where I could add the bark of my rifle to the song of
the hounds.  You can't explain everything to a dog.  With a puppy it is
still harder.  So Colonel was restless.  He looked anxiously down the
hill; then he lifted those soft, slantwise eyes to mine very wistfully.

"Go, Colonel," I commanded, pointing to the hollow.

Instead, he came to me and lifted to my knee one of those ponderous
feet of his, and tried to pull me from my log.

"Aren't you coming?" he seemed to say.

"No, old chap," I answered, pulling the long ears gently till he
smiled.  "I prefer it here where I can look over the valley, and from
here I can see where Mary lives--down yonder on the hillside; that's
the house by the clump of oaks, where the smoke is curling up so thick."

The slantwise eyes became grave, and the long tail paused.  The second
ponderous paw came crashing on my knee.

"Aren't you coming?" young Colonel seemed to say.

[Illustration: "Aren't you coming?" young Colonel seemed to say.]

I was flattering myself that the puppy was choosing my company to the
hunt, for I always value the approval of a dog.  Now I found myself
hoping that with a little coddling the young hound would forget the
great doings down in the hollow and would stay with me on the
ridge-top.  But I should have known better.  There is an end even to a
dog's patience.  The place for the strong-limbed is in the thick of the
chase.  You can't interest a puppy in scenery when his fellows are
running a fox.

"Look, Colonel," said I, pointing over the valley, "yonder's where Mary
lives, and I suspect that at this very minute she is looking out of the
window to this very spot, and----"

The call of a hound floated up from the hollow.  Old Captain was on a
trail.  With a shrill cry young Colonel answered.  This was no time to
loaf with a crippled soldier.  With a long-drawn yelp, a childish
imitation of his father's bay, he was off through the bushes.  Young
Colonel was living.  And I was left alone on my log.

But this was my first day of life, too.  Some twenty-four years before
I had been born, but those years were simply existence.  Now I was
living.  I had a secret.  I had hinted at it to young Colonel.  Had he
stayed, I would have told him more, but like a fool he had gone
jabbering off through the bushes, cutting a ludicrous figure, too, I
thought, for his body had not yet grown up to his feet and ears, and he
carried them off a bit clumsily.  Had he stayed I might have told him
all, and there never was a bit of news quite so important as that the
foolish puppy missed; never a story so romantic as that he might have
heard; never in the valley's history an event of such interest.  He had
scorned it.  Now he was with the dog mob down there in the gulch.  I
could hear them giving tongue, and I knew they were on an old trail.
Soon they would be in full cry, but I did not care.  It was fine to be
in full cry, of course, but from my post on the ridge-top, I could at
least keep in sight of the house by the clump of oaks on the hillside.
Last week I should have moped and fumed here, and cursed my luck in
being bound to a log on a day like this.  Now I turned my face to the
sunlight and drank in the keen air.  Now I whistled as merry a tune as
I knew.

"You seem to take well with solitude," came a voice behind me.

Looking about, I saw Robert Weston fighting his way through the thicket.

"I take better to company," I said.  "Why have you deserted the others?"

Weston sat down at my side with his gun across his knees.

"Arnold Arker says there is a fox in that hollow," he answered.  "You
can hear the dogs now, and he thinks if they start him, this is as good
a place as any, as he is likely to run over on Buzzard ridge, and
double back this way, or he'll give us a sight of him as he breaks from
the gully.  Then as we went away, I looked back and saw you sitting
here and I envied you, for yours is the most comfortable post in all
the ridges."

"When you could be somewhere else, yes," said I.  "Having to sit here,
I should prefer running closer to the dogs."

"As you have to stay here, I'd rather sit with you, and after all what
could be better?" Weston laughed.  "You know, Mark, in all the valley
you are the man I get along with best."

"Because I've never tried to find out why you were here."

"For that reason I told you," said he.  "How simple it was, too.  There
was no cause for mystery."

"It would still be a mystery to Elmer Spiker, say.  He can't conceive a
man living in the country by choice."

"To Elmer Spiker--indeed, to most of the folks around here, the city is
man's natural environment.  It's just bad luck to be country-born."

"Exactly," said I.

Weston is a keen fellow.  There was a quiet, cynical smile on his face
as he sat there beating a tattoo on his leggings with a hickory twig.

"Look at your brother," he exclaimed after a while.  "I always told Tim
that if he knew what was best he'd stay right here and----"

"If you told him that now, he would laugh at you," I interrupted.

Weston looked surprised.

"Does he like work?" he exclaimed.

"The boy is in love," I answered.

Weston dropped the hickory twig, and turning, gazed at me.

"I knew that," he said.  "I knew that long ago."

"With Edith Parker," I hastened to explain.  "You know her?"

"Oh--oh," he muttered.

He pulled out a cigar-case and a box of matches and spent a long time
getting a light.

Then with a glance of inquiry, he said, "Edith Parker?"

"Why, don't you know her?" I asked.

"I know a half a hundred Parkers," he replied.  "I may know Edith
Parker, but I can't recall her."

"This one is your book-keeper's daughter," I said with considerable
heat.

"Indeed," said he calmly.  "Parker--Parker--I thought our book-keeper's
name was Smyth.  Yes--I'm quite sure it's Smyth."

"But Tim says it's Parker," said I.  "Tim ought to know."

"Tim should know," laughed Weston.  "I guess he does know better than
I.  A minute ago I would have sworn it was Smyth; but to tell the
truth, I never gave any attention to such details of business.  Well,
Edith is my book-keeper's daughter."

"She lives in Brooklyn," said I, "and she is very beautiful.  Every
letter I get from Tim, the more beautiful she becomes, for in all my
life I never heard of a fellow as frank as he is.  Usually men hide
what sentiment they have except from a few women, but his letters make
me blush when I read them."

"They are so full of gush," said Weston, calmly smoking.

He seemed very indifferent, and to be more listening to the cries of
the dogs working around the hollow than to the affairs of the Hope
family.

"Gush is the word for it," I answered.  "Tim never gives me a line
about himself.  It's all Edith--Edith--Edith."

"And he is engaged to Miss Smyth?"  Weston struck his legging a sharp
blow with his stick.  "Confound it!" he cried, "I can't get it out of
my head that our book-keeper's name is Smyth."

"But Tim knows, surely," said I.

"Yes--he must," answered Weston.  "Of course I'm wrong.  But this Miss
Parker--are they engaged?"

"I can't tell from his last letter," I replied.  "It seems that they
must be pretty near it--that's what Mary says, too."

Weston started.  Then he rose to his feet very slowly, and wheeling
about looked down on me and smoked.

"Mary says so too," he repeated.  "How in the world does Mary know?"

"I read her the letter," said I, apologetically.  It did seem wrong to
read Tim's letter that way.  From my standpoint it was all right now,
but Weston did not know that, so he whistled softly to himself.

From the hollow came the long-drawn cry of the hound.  It was old
Captain.  Betsy joined in, then Mike; and now the ridges rang with the
music of the chase.  They were on a fresh trail; they were away over
hill and hollow, singing full-throated as they ran.

"They've found him," I cried, rising to hear the song of the hounds.

Weston sat down on the log.

"They are making for the other ridge," said I, pointing over the narrow
gully.  "Hark!  There's young Colonel."

But Weston went on smoking.  "Poor Tim!" I heard him say.

Full and strong rang the music of the dogs, as they swung out of the
hollow, up the ridge-side.  For a moment, in the clearing, I had a
glimpse of them, Captain leading, with Betsy at his haunches, and Mike
and Major nose and nose behind them.  Far in the rear, but in the
chase, was little Colonel.  A grand puppy, he!  All ears and feet.  But
he runs bravely through the tangled brush.  Many a stouter dog comes
from it with flanks all torn and bloody.  I waved my hat wildly,
cheering him on.  I called to him loudly, in the vain hope he might
look back, as though at a time like this a hound would turn from the
trail.  On he went into the woods--nose to the ground and body low--all
feet and ears--and a stout heart!

"Now we must wait," I said, "and watch, and hope."

Already they had turned the crest of the hill, and fainter and fainter
came the sound of the chase.

"Mark," Weston began, "I hope this affair of Tim's turns out all right.
What little I can do shall be done, and to-night I'm going to write to
the office that they must help him along.  He deserves it."

"But the poorer men are, the greater their love," I laughed.  "With
money to marry, Tim might think that after all he'd better look around
more--take a choice."

"But Tim is the most serious person that ever was," returned Weston.
"I have found that out.  Once he makes up his mind, there is no
changing it.  He is full of ideas.  He actually thinks that a man who
is in business is doing something praiseworthy; that a man who has
bought and sold merchandise at a profit all his life can fold his hands
when he dies and say; 'I have not lived in vain.'  He does not know yet
that the larger estate a man leaves to his relatives the more useful
his life has been.  Now I suppose he hopes some day to be a tea-king.
Perhaps he will.  I hope so.  I don't want the job.  But once he has
picked out his queen, you can't change him by making marriage a
financial impossibility."

"Well, I'm certainly not protesting against your raising his salary,"
said I.

"You needn't.  To tell the truth, it's too late.  I wrote to the office
about that yesterday."

It was of no use to thank Weston for anything.  I tried to, but he
brushed it aside airily and told me to attend to my own affairs and
light one of his cigars.  When we were smoking together, his mood
became more serious, and as he spoke of Tim and Tim's ambition, and of
his interest in the boy, he was carried back to his own earlier life.
So for the first time I came to understand his prolonged stay in the
valley.

Like Elmer Spiker, in my heart Weston's conduct puzzled me.  When he
told me that he had come here simply because he liked the country I
believed him that far, but I suspected some deeper reason to keep a man
of his stamp dawdling in a remote valley.  Now it was so simple.  The
foundation of Weston's fortunes had been laid in one small saloon; its
bulk had been built on a chain stretching from end to end of the city.
Its founder had been a coarse, uneducated man, but his success in the
liquor trade had been too great to be forgotten, even years after he
had abandoned it and built up the great commercial house that bore his
name.  His ambition for his son had been boundless.  He had spared
nothing to make him a better man in the world's eye than his father.
He had succeeded.  But the world had persisted in remembering the
parental bar.  Robert Weston had never seen that bar, for he had
entered on the scene when there was a chain of them, and his father had
brought him up almost in ignorance of their very existence.  Even at
the university he had little reason to be ashamed of them.  It was
after he had spent years in rounding out his education abroad, and had
returned to take his place in those circles which he believed he was
entitled to enter, that he found that the world persisted in pointing
to the large revenue stamp that seemed to cling to him.  A stronger man
would have fought against odds like those and won for himself a place
that would suffer no denial.  But Weston was physically a delicate man.
By nature he was retiring, rather than aggressive.  If those who were
his equals would have none of him because of his father's faults, then
he would not seek them.  Equally distasteful were those who equalled
him in wealth alone, for by a strange contradiction, the very fact that
the rumshop did not jar on their sensibilities, marked them for him as
coarse and uncongenial.  Weston had turned to himself.  It is the study
of oneself that makes cynics.  The study of others makes egotists.
Then a woman had come.  Of her Weston did not say much, except that she
had made him turn from himself for a time to study her.  He had become
an egotist and so had dared to love her.  She had loved him, he
thought, for she said so, and promised to become his wife.  Things were
growing brighter.  But they met an officious friend.  They were in
Venice at the time, he having joined her there with her family.  The
officious friend joined the family too, and he held up his hands in
horror when he heard of it.  Didn't the family know?  Oh, yes, Bob was
himself a fine fellow; but he was Whiskey Weston!

"Of course, no good woman wants to be Mrs. Whiskey Weston," said my
friend grimly.  "Still, I think she did care a bit for me; but it was
all up.  Back I came, and here I am, Mark, just kind of stopping to
stretch my legs and rest a little and breathe.  I came on a wheel, for
I had ridden for miles and miles trying to get my mind back on myself
the way it used to be."

Then he smoked.

"Is that the dogs again?" I said, to break the oppressive silence.

Weston did not heed me, but pointed down the valley to the house by the
clump of oaks.

"Do you know sometimes I think that Mary there, with all her bringing
up, would edge away from me if she knew that my father had kept saloons
and gambling places and all that."  Weston spoke carelessly, puffing at
his cigar, for he had recovered his easy demeanor.  "I think a world of
Mary, Mark.  She is beautiful, and good, and honest.  Sometimes I
suspect that I've stayed here just for her.  Sometimes I think I will
not leave till she goes--"  Weston sprang to his feet.  "It's the dogs!
Hear them!" he cried.

I was up too.  Away down the ridge we heard the bay of the hounds again.

"I want to tell you something," I said, pointing to the house by the
clump of oaks.  "I wish for your sake that there were two Marys,
Weston.  But there is only one, and she is good and beautiful, and for
some reason--Heaven only knows why--she is going to be my wife."

Weston stepped hack and gazed at me.  I did not blame him.  He seemed
to study me from head to foot, and I knew that he was trying to find
some reason why the girl should care for me.  It was natural.  I had
puzzled over the same problem and I had not solved it.  Now I did not
care.

"Stare on," I cried, laughing.  "You can't think it queerer than I do.
It's hard for me to convince myself that it is true."

"I am glad," he said, taking my hand in a warm grasp.  "It isn't
strange at all, Mark, for Mary is a wise woman."

"There are the dogs," said I; "they are getting nearer."

"They are coming our way at last," he returned quietly.  "But what's
that to us when you are to be married?  I wish you joy and I shall be
at the wedding, and it must be soon, too, and Tim shall be here."  He
was speaking very rapidly; his face was pale and his hand trembled in
mine.  "I'll send for him.  Tim must have a holiday, and perhaps he'll
bring Miss--Miss Smyth."  Weston laughed.  "Parker," he corrected.
"He'll bring Miss Parker or Mrs. Tim."

Full and strong the bay of the hounds was ringing along the ridges.
Nearer and nearer they were coming.  Now I could hear old Captain's
deep tones, and the shorter, sharper tongue of Betsy, Mike, and Major.
The fox was keeping to the ridge-top and in a few moments he would be
sweeping by us.  I pointed through the woods to a bit of clearing made
by a charcoal burner.  If he kept his course the fox would cross it,
and that meant a clear shot.  Weston knew the place, and without a word
he picked up his gun and hurried through the woods.

Nearer and nearer came the hounds.  The woods were ringing with their
music, and the sound of the chase swung to and fro, from ridge to
ridge.  Now I could hear the crashing of the underbrush.

Weston fired.  The report rattled from hill to hill.

My own gun sprang to the shoulder, but it was too late.  The fox,
seeing me, veered down the slope, and swept on to safety or to death,
for six more anxious hunters were watching for him somewhere in those
woods.

The dogs swept by, old Captain as ever leading, with Betsy at his
haunches and Mike and Major neck and neck behind.

I watched for little Colonel.  A minute passed and he did not come.
Poor puppy!  He had learned that to live was to suffer.  Somewhere in
these woods he must be lying, resting those ponderous paws and licking
his bloody flanks.

The hollow was alive with the bay of dogs; the ridges were ringing with
the echoes of a gunshot; but above them all I heard a plaintive wail
over there in the charcoal clearing.  I called for Weston and I got no
answer, only the cry of the little hound.  I called again and I got no
answer.  Through the hushes I tore as fast as my crutches would take
me, calling as I ran and hearing only the wail of the puppy, till I
broke from the cover into the open.

On his haunches, his slantwise eyes half closed, his head lifted high
in the bright sunlight, sat little Colonel, wailing.  He heard me call.
He saw me.  And when I reached him he was licking the white face of
Whiskey Weston.

[Illustration: Sat little Colonel, wailing.]



XIII

Hindsight is better than foresight.  A foolish saying.  By foresight we
do God's will.  By hindsight we would seek to better His handiwork.
Things are right as they are, I say, as I sit quietly of an evening
smoking my pipe on my porch, watching the mountains in the west bathe
in the gold and purple of the descending sun.  What might have been,
might also have been all wrong.  A foolish saying, says Tim, for if
what might have been should actually be, then we should have the
realization of our fondest dreams.  And with that realization might
come a dreadful awakening from our dreams, say I.  You might have
become a tea-king, Tim, and measure your fortune in millions.  I might
have turned lawyer instead of soldier; I might have made a great name
for myself in Congress by long speeches full of dry facts and figures,
or short ones puffed up with pompous phrases.  The fact that Six Stars
existed might have gone beyond our valley because here you and I were
born, and for a time we honored the place with our presence.  Suppose
all that had been, and you the tea-king and I the great lawyer sat here
together as we sit now, smoking, could you add one note to the evening
peace; would the night-hawk pay us homage by a single added ring as he
circles among the clouds; would the bull-frogs in the creek sing louder
to our glory; would the bleating of the sheep swing in sweeter to the
music of the valley?  And look at God's fireplace, I cry, pointing to
the west, where the sun is heaping the glowing cloud coals among the
mountains.  God's fireplace? says Tim, with a queer look in his eyes.
Yes, say I, and the valley is the hearthstone.  The mountains are the
andirons.  Over them, piled sky high, the cloud-logs are glowing, and
never logs burned like those, all gold and red.  Night after night I
can sit here and warm my heart at that fireside.  Could you, tea-king,
buy for my eyes a picture more wonderful?  The fire is dying.  The
cloud coals grow fainter--now purple; and now in ashes they float away
into the chill blue.  But they will come again.  Could your millions,
tea-king, buy for me a sweeter music than the valley's heart throb as
it rocks itself to sleep?

"No," Tim answers, "but suppose----"

"And could I have better company to watch and listen with?" I exclaim.
"For with you a tea-king, Tim, and I a lawyer, it would be just the
same, would it not?"

"That's just what I was trying to get at," says Tim.  "Suppose that day
of the fox-hunt you had not carried Weston----"

I hold up my hand to check him.

"Were it to happen a hundred times over, I would take him to Mary's," I
cry.  "Else he would have died."

"You are right, Mark," Tim says.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

I took Weston to Mary's house that day when I found him lying in the
charcoal clearing, with little Colonel standing over him wailing.
Tearing open his coat and shirt, I stanched his wound as best I could.
Then I called the others to me.  Tip and Arnold picked him up and
carried him, while Murphy Kallaberger and I broke a path through the
bushes, and Aaron ran on to Warden's to tell them of the accident and
have them prepare for the wounded man.  Warden's was the nearest house,
but that was a mile from the clearing, and in the woods our progress
was slow.  Once free of the ridges and in the open fields the way was
easy, and Murphy could lend a hand to the others.

"He's monstrous light," Tip said.  "He doesn't seem no more than skin
and bones in fancy rags."

It is strange how even our clothes go back on us when we are down.
Weston I had always known as a lanky man, but about his loosely fitting
garments there had been an air of careless distinction.  Now that he
was broken, they hung with such an odd perversion as to bring from its
hiding-place every sharp angle in the thin frame.  The best nine
tailors living could not have clothed him better for that little
journey, nor lessened a whit the pathos of the thin arms that lay
limply across the shoulders of Tip and Arnold.

"He's a livin' skelington," old Arker whispered, as I plodded along at
his side.  "Poor devil!"

"Poor devil!" said I.  For looking at the almost lifeless man I thought
of my own good fortune.  This morning I had envied him.  Now he had
nothing but his wealth, and his hold on that was weakening fast.  I had
everything--life and health, home and friends--I had Mary.  As we
parted a few minutes before, up there in the woods, I had pitied him.
He had seemed so lonely, so bitter in his loneliness, and yet at heart
so good.  Now his eyes half opened as they carried him on, his glance
met mine in recognition, and it seemed to me that he smiled faintly.
But it was the same bitter smile.  "Poor devil!" I said to myself.

And we carried him into Mary's house.

She was waiting for us, and without a word led us upstairs to a room
where we laid him on a bed.

"I stumbled, Mark, I stumbled," he whispered, as I leaned over him.
"The fox came and I ran for it--then I fell--and then the little hound
came, and then----"

Mary was bathing his forehead, and for the first time he saw her.

"I stumbled, Mary," he whispered.  "I swear it."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

It was nearly ten o'clock when I left Weston's room.  The doctor was
with him and was preparing to bivouac at the patient's side.  He was a
young man from the big valley.  Luther Warden had driven to the county
town and brought him back to us.  The first misgivings I had when I
caught sight of his youthful, beardless face were dispelled by the
business-like way in which he went about his work.  He had been in a
volunteer regiment, he told me, as an assistant surgeon, but had never
gone past the fever camps, as this was his first case of a gunshot
wound.  He had made a study of gunshot wounds, and deemed himself
fortunate to be in when Mr. Warden called.  Truly, said I to myself,
one man's death is another man's practice.  But it was best that he was
so confident, and I found my faith in him growing as he worked.  The
wound was a bad one, he said, and the ball had narrowly missed the
heart, but with care the man would come around all right.  The main
thing was proper nursing.  The young doctor smiled as he spoke, for
standing before him in a solemn row were half the women of Six Stars.
Mrs. Bolum was there with a tumbler of jelly; Mrs. Tip Pulsifer had
brought her "paytent gradeated medicent glass," hoping it would be
useful; Mrs. Henry Holmes had no idea what was needed, but just grabbed
a hot-water bottle as she ran.  Elmer Spiker's better half was there to
demand her injured boarder at once; he paid for his room at the tavern;
it was but right that he should occupy it and that she should care for
him.  When she found that she could not have him entirely, she
compromised on the promise that she would be allowed to watch over him
the whole of the next day.  In spite of the jar of jelly, the doctor
chose Mrs. Bolum to help him that night, and when I left them the old
woman was sitting in a rocker at the bedside, her eyes watching every
movement of the sleeping patient's drawn face.

[Illustration: The main thing was proper nursing.]

Outside, the wind was whistling.  The steady heating of an oak branch
on the porch roof told me it was blowing hard.  It sounded cold.  Mary
stood tiptoe to reach my collar and turn it up.  Then she buttoned me
snug around the neck.  It was the first time a woman had ever done that
for me.  How good it was!  I absently turned the collar down again and
tore my coat open.  Then I smiled.

Again she raised herself tiptoe before me, and with a hand on each
shoulder, she stood looking from her eyes into mine.

"You fraud!" she cried.

Then I laughed.  Lord, how I laughed!  Twenty-four years I had lived,
and until now I had never known a real joke, one that made the heart
beat quicker, and sent the blood singing through the veins; that made
the fingers tingle, the ears burn, and brought tears to the eyes.  I
don't suppose that other people would have thought this one so amusing.
The young doctor upstairs might not have feigned a smile, for instance.
That was what made it all the better for me, for it was my own joke and
Mary's, and in all the world I was the only man who could see the fun
of it.

"When you turn that collar up again I am going," said I.

So she sprang away from me, laughing, and quick as I reached out to
seize her, she avoided me.

"You know I can't catch you," I cried, taunting her, "so I must wait."

As she stood there before me quietly, her hands clasped, her eyes
looking up into mine, I saw how fair she was, and I wondered.  The
picture of Weston in the woods, standing off there gazing at me, came
back then, and with it a vague feeling of fear and distrust.  I saw
myself as Weston saw me, and I marvelled.

"Mary," I said, "this morning up there in the woods I told Robert
Weston everything, and he stood off just as you are standing now.  It
seemed to me he wondered how it could be true, and now I wonder too.
Maybe it's all a mistake."

"It's not a mistake, Mark," the girl said, and she came to me again and
put a hand on each shoulder and looked up.  "If I did not care for you
I'd never have given you the promise I did last night.  But I do care
for you, Mark, more than for anyone else in the world.  You are big and
strong and good--that's why--it's all any woman can ask.  You are true,
Mark--and that's more than most men----"

"But, Mary, there's Tim," I protested, for I did not care to usurp to
myself the sum of all the virtues allotted to my sex.

"Tim?" said she lightly, as though she had never heard of him.

"Yes, Tim," I said shortly.  "Why did you choose me instead of a lad
like Tim?"

"Mark, I care for you more than anyone else in the world," said Mary.

"But do you love me?" I asked quickly.

"I think I do," she said.  But reaching up, she turned my collar again
and buttoned my coat against the storm.



XIV

Tim was home in three days.  His few months of town life had wrought
many changes in him, and they were for the better.  I was forced to
admit that, but I could not help being just a little in awe of him.  He
was not as heavy as of old, but there was more firmness in his face and
figure.  Perhaps it was his clothes that had given him a strange new
grace, for in the old days he was a ponderous, slow-moving fellow.  Now
there was a lightness in his step and quickness in his every motion.
Had I not known him, I should have seen in the scrupulous part in his
hair a suggestion of the foppish.  But I knew him, and while I liked
him best with his old tousled head, and tanned face, and homely hickory
shirt, I felt a certain pride that he had taken so well with the world
and was learning the ways of the town as well as those of the field and
wood.  His gloves did seem foolish, for it was a bitter December day
when the blood had best had full swing in the veins, but he held out to
me a hand pinched in a few square inches of yellow kid.  The grasp was
just as warm though, and I forgave that.  When he threw aside his silly
little overcoat and stood before me, so tall and strong, so clean-cut
and faultless, from the part in his hair to the shine on his boot-tips,
I cried, "Heigh-ho, my fine gentleman!"

Then he blushed.  I suspected that it pleased him vastly.

"Do you think it an improvement?" he faltered, standing with his back
to the fireplace and lifting himself to his full height.

Before I could reply, the door flew open without the formality of a
knock, and old Mrs. Bolum ran in.  When she saw him, she stopped and
stared.

"Well, ain't he tasty!" she cried.

[Illustration: Well, ain't he tasty.]

Then she courtesied most formally.  "How do you do, Mr. Hope?" she said.

"And how is Mrs. Bolum?" returned Tim gravely, advancing toward her
with his hand outstretched.

The old woman rubbed her own hand on her apron, an honor usually
accorded only to the preacher, and held it out.  Tim seized it, but he
brought his other arm around her waist and lifted her from the floor in
one mighty embrace.

"You'll spoil your Sunday clothes," panted Mrs. Bolum, when she reached
the floor again.  Stepping back, she eyed him critically.  "You look
handsomer than a drummer," she cried admiringly.

"Thank you, ma'am," said Tim very meekly.

"I'm so sorry I left my spectacles at home," she went on.  "My eyes
ain't as good as they used to be and I can't see you plain as I'd like.
Mebbe it's my sight as is the trouble, but it seems to me, as I see you
now without my glasses, you're just about the prettiest man that ever
come to Six Stars."

"Lord, ma'am," protested Tim.  "And how is Mr. Bolum?"

"And such a lovely suit," continued the old woman, cautiously
approaching and moving her hand across my brother's chest.  "Why, Tim,
you must have on complete store clothes--dear, oh, dear--to think of
Tim Hope gittin' so fine and dressy!  Now had it 'a' been Mark I
wouldn't 'a' been so took back, for he allus was uppy and big feelin'.
But Tim!"

Mrs. Bolum shook her head and held her hands up in astonishment.

"And how is Mr. Bolum?" shouted Tim.

"Never was better, 'ceptin' for his rheumatism and asphmy," was the
answer, but the good woman was not to be turned aside that way.  "And a
cady," she cried, for her eyes had caught Tim's hat and the silly
yellow overcoat on the chair where I had thrown them.  "A cady, too!
Now just put it on and let me see how you look."

Tim obeyed.  Mrs. Bolum stepped hack to get a better effect.

"It ain't as pretty as your coon-skin," she said critically; "you'd
look lovely in that suit with your coon-skin cap--but hold on--don't
take it off--I want Bolum to see you."

She ran from the room and we heard her calling from the porch:
"Bo-lum--Bo-lum--Isaac Bo-oh-lum."

Isaac was at the store.  It seemed to me that his wife should have
known that without much research.  The little pile of sticks by the
kitchen-door showed that his day's work was done, for when he had split
the wood for the morrow it was the old man's custom to put aside all
worldly care and start on a tour of the village, which generally ended
on the bench at Henry Holmes's side.

It was almost dusk.  Tim had come on a mission to Robert Weston.  I had
sent word to him of the accident, that Weston's friends might know, and
the first thought of the injured man's partner was to hurry to Six
Stars, but my second despatch, announcing that our friend was well on
the road to recovery, led to the change in plans that brought Tim to
us.  Mrs. Bolum did not succeed in alarming the village before he and I
were well up the road, past the school-house and climbing the hill to
Warden's.

Tim had a great deal to tell me in that short walk.  I had much to tell
him, but I was silent and let him chatter on, giving but little
attention to what he said, for I was planning a great surprise.  The
simplest thing would have been to tell him my secret then, but I had
pictured something more dramatic.  I wanted Mary to witness his
dumfounding when he heard the news.  I wanted her to be there when its
full import broke upon him; then the three of us, Mary and Tim and I,
would do a wild jig.  What boon companions we should be--we three--to
go through life together!  And Edith?  Four of us--so much the better!
I had never seen this Edith, but Tim is a wonderful judge of women.

So I let him talk, on and on about the city and his life there, until
we reached the house.  We found that Mrs. Spiker had secured her
rights, and was on duty that day as nurse.  The young doctor was there,
too, as were Mrs. Tip Pulsifer and a half dozen others, a goodly
company to greet us.

"Hello, Mary!" Tim cried, breaking through the others, when he caught
sight of her, standing at the foot of the stairs with a lighted candle
in her hand.

"Hello, Tim!" cried Mary.  "And where is Edith?"

"Edith?" Tim exclaimed, stopping as if to collect the thoughts her
sudden taunting question had scattered.  "I left her behind this time,
but when I come again you shall see her."  Tim, with arms akimbo, stood
there laughing.

"We country girls, I understand, cannot compare with her," said Mary,
tilting her chin.

She had started up the stairs, and now paused, looking down on us.  And
I looked up at her face showing out of the darkness in the half light,
and I laughed, wondering what Tim thought, wondering if he was blind,
or was this Edith really bewildering.

"Did I say that?" cried Tim.  "Then I must have meant it when I said
it.  To-night I have learned better, Mary, but you know I never saw you
standing that way before--on the stairs above me--kind of like an angel
with a halo----"

"Indeed!" retorted Mary; "but we women of Black Log deck ourselves out
in gaudy finery, Mr. Tim, I believe.  We women of Black Log do not
inspire a man, like your Edith."

"Confound my Edith!" Tim exclaimed hotly.  "Why, Mary, can't you see I
was joking?  The idea of comparing Edith with you--why, Mary----"

Tim in his protest started to mount the stairs, and there was an
earnestness in his tone that made me think it high time he knew our
secret, for his own sake and for Edith's.  It seemed to me unfair of
him to desert her so basely in the presence of an enemy.  He should
have stood by her to the very end, and had he boldly declared that as
compared to her Mary was a mummy I should have admired him the more; I
should have understood; I should have known he was mistaken, but
endured it.  Now I seized him by the coat and pulled him back.

"Tim," I said solemnly, "I have something to tell you."

My brother turned and gave me a startled look.

"Mary and I have something to tell you," I went on.

That should have given him a clew.  I had expected that at this point
he would embrace me.  But he didn't.

"I suppose you think I've been a fool about Edith?" he muttered
ruefully.

"No, it isn't that," I laughed.  "Mary, will you tell him?"

But we were in darkness!  She had dropped the candle, and down the
stairs the stick came clattering.  It landed on the floor and went
rolling across the room.  Tim made a dive for it.  He groped his way to
the corner where its career had ended.  Then he lighted it again.

Behind us stood the doctor, and Mrs. Tip Pulsifer, and Elmer Spiker's
much better half.  Mary was at the head of the stairs.

"Come, Tim," she called.  "Mr. Weston wants to see you."

"Weston does want to see you very much, Tim," the wounded man said
smiling, lifting a thin hand from the bed for my brother; "I heard you
chattering downstairs, and I thought you were never coming."

"It was Mary's fault," Tim said.  "I came back as soon as I could, sir.
Mr. Mills sent me up on the night train--out this afternoon in a livery
rig--here afoot just as fast as Mark would let me--then Mary blocked
the way.  Mark was going to tell me something when she dropped the
candle."

"Why, don't you know--" began Weston.

But over my brother's shoulders I shook my head sternly at him and he
stopped and broke into a laugh.

Mrs. Elmer Spiker was standing by him; the young doctor was moving
about the room, apparently very busy; Mrs. Tip Pulsifer was peeping in
at the door.

"Didn't you know," said Weston, "how I'd shot myself all to pieces, and
how there's a live fox in the hollows across the ridge?"

"Mark told me of it," answered the innocent Tim, "and I'm glad to find
it is not serious.  They were worried at the store.  Mr. Mills was for
coming right away, but we got word you were better, and he thought I
should run up anyway for a day to see if we could do anything.  I'm to
go back to-morrow."

"It was good of you to come," Weston said, "but there is nothing to be
done.  Just tell Mills the whole valley is nursing me; tell him that
I've one nurse alone who is worth a score."  Mrs. Spiker looked very
conscious, but Weston smiled at Mary.  Then he quickly added: "Tell him
that Mrs. Bolum and Mrs. Spiker and Mrs. Pulsifer--" he paused to make
sure that none was missed--"and Mark here are a hospital corps, taken
singly or in a body."

"I've told him that already," said Tim.  "He knows everybody in Six
Stars, I guess, and he says as soon as you get well and come back to
the office, he will take a holiday himself, fox hunting."

"Poor little Colonel!" murmured Weston.  "He'll have a melancholy
career.  And Mary, too, she'll----"

"But it was when I told him about Mary that he made up his mind to
come," Tim said.

"Indeed."  The girl spoke very quietly.  "And, perhaps, Tim, you'll
send Edith along to help us.  We women of Black Log are so clumsy."

"A good idea," said Weston.  "Capital.  You must bring Miss Smyth up,
too, Tim."

"Parker," I corrected, "Edith Parker."

"But is it Parker?" Weston appealed to my brother.  "Mark tells me
she's the book-keeper's daughter.  Has old Smyth gone?"

"No," Tim stammered, very much confused.  "I guess you don't know
Parker.  He's come lately."

"That explains it, then," said Weston.

But he turned and looked away from us, his brow knitted.  Something
seemed to puzzle him, for he was frowning, but by and by the old
cynical smile came back.

He said suddenly: "Tim, I wish you luck.  I'm glad anyway it isn't
Smyth's daughter.  That was what I couldn't understand.  Ever see
Smyth's  daughter?  No.  Well, you needn't bemoan it.  I dare say Miss
Parker is all you picture her, and I hope you'll win."

"Don't you think you'd better rest now?" asked Tim, with sudden
solicitation.  Though he addressed himself to Weston, his eyes were
appealing to the doctor.

"I think I had," Weston answered, not waiting for the physician to
interpose any order.  "I get tuckered out pretty easily these days,
with this confounded bullet-hole in me--but stay a moment, Tim.
They've got a letter from me at the office by this time.  It may
surprise them; it may surprise you, but I wanted you to know I'd fixed
it all right for you, my boy.  I did it for Edith's sake."

Tim, with face flushed and hands outstretched in protest, arose from
his chair and went to the bedside.

"But don't you see it's all a joke," he cried.  "I can't take it.
Won't you believe me this time?  There isn't any Edith!"

"I knew that long ago, Tim," Weston answered quietly.  "But there may
be some day."

He turned his back to us.

"Please go," he said brusquely.  "I want to rest.  Don't stand over me
that way, Tim.  Why, you look like little Colonel!"

      *      *      *      *      *      *

At the school-house door Tim halted suddenly.

"I'm going back, Mark," he whispered, "just for a minute.  Weston will
think I'm a fraud and I want to tell him something.  Now that the
others have left I may have a chance.  Confound these kind-hearted
women that overrun the house!  Why, a fellow couldn't say a word
without a dozen ears to hear it."

"I'll go back with you," said I.

We had fallen a few steps behind the others, but somehow they divined
our purpose and stopped, too.

"You needn't," said Tim.  "I'll only be a minute."

"But I've something to tell you--a secret--and Mary----"

He was gone.

"I'll be back in a minute," he called.  "Go on home."

He was lost in the darkness, and I started after him.

"Ain't you comin'?" cried Nanny Pulsifer.

"I must go back to Warden's," I answered.

"Then we'll go with you," said Mrs. Spiker firmly.

"Can't you go on home?" I said testily.  "There's no use of your
troubling yourself further."

"Does you think we'll walk by that graveyard alone?" demanded the
tavern-keeper's wife.

"But there are no ghosts," I argued.

[Illustration: "But there are no ghosts," I argued.]

"We know that," returned Mrs. Pulsifer.  "Everybody knows that, but
it's never made any difference."

"A graveyard is a graveyard even if there is no bodies in it," said
Mrs. Spiker, planting herself behind me so as to cut off further
retreat.

Tim must have caught some echoes of the argument on the spirit world,
for down the hill, through the darkness, came his call.

"Go on home, Mark--I'll be back in a minute."

I believed him, and I obeyed.



XV

Tim's minute?  God keep me from another as long!

I had my pipe in my chair by the fire, and knocking the ashes out, I
went to the door, and with a hand to my ear listened for his footsteps.
Tim's minutes are long!  Another pipe, and the clock on the mantel
marked nine.  Still I smoked on.  He had had a long talk with Weston,
perhaps, and had stopped downstairs for a minute with Mary.  She had
told him all.  How astounded the boy must be!  Why, it would take her a
half hour at least to convince him that she spoke the truth when she
told him she was to marry his wreck of a brother; then when he believed
it, another half hour would hardly be enough for him to welcome her
into the family of Hope, and to talk over the wonderful fortunes of its
sons.  Doubtless he had felt it incumbent on himself to sing my
praises, for he had always been blind to my faults.  In this
possibility of his tarrying to display my virtues there was some
compensation for my sitting alone, with old Captain and young Colonel,
both sleeping, and only my pipe for company.  Of course, I should
really be there with Tim, but Nanny Pulsifer and Mrs. Spiker had
decreed otherwise.  Who knows how great may be my reward for bringing
them safely past the graveyard!

The third pipe snuffled out.  I opened the door and listened.  Tim's
minutes are long, for the last light in the village is out now.  I went
to the gate and stood there till I caught the sound of foot-falls.
Then I whistled softly.  There was no reply, but in a moment Perry
Thomas stepped into the light of our window.

"Good-evening," he said cheerfully.   "It's rather chilly to be
swinging on the gate."

"I was waiting for Tim," I answered.

Perry gave a little dry cackle.  "Let's go in," he said.  "It's too
cold out here to discuss these great events."

I did not know what he meant, neither did I much care, for Perry always
treated the most trivial affairs in the most elegant language he knew.
But now that he stood there with his back to the fire, warming his
hands, he made himself more clear.

"Well, Mark," he said, "I congratulate you most heartily."

I divined his meaning.  It did not seem odd that he had learned my
secret, for I was lost in admiration of his having once weighed an
event at its proper value.  So I thanked him and returned to my chair
and my pipe.

"Of course it hurts me a bit here," said he, laying his hand on his
watch-pocket.  "I had hopes at one time myself, but I fear I depended
too much on music and elocution.  Do you know I'm beginnin' to think
that a man shouldn't depend so much on art with weemen.  I notice them
gets along best who doesn't keep their arms entirely occupied with
gestures and workin' the fiddle."

[Illustration: "Of course it hurts me a bit here."]

Perry winked sagely at this and cackled.  He rocked violently to and
fro on his feet, from heel to toe and toe to heel.

"Yet it ain't a bit onreasonable," he went on.  "The artist thinks he
is amusin' others, when, as a matter of fact, he is gettin' about
ninety per cent. of the fun himself.  We allus enjoys our own singin'
best.  I see that now.  I thought it up as I was comin' down the road
and I concided that the next time I seen a likely lookin' Mrs. Perry
Thomas, she could do the singin' and the fiddlin' and the elocution,
and I'd set by and look on and say, 'Ain't it lovely?'"

"You bear your disappointments bravely," said I.

"Not at all," Perry responded.  "I'm used to 'em.  Why, I don't know
what I'd do if I wasn't disappointed.  Some day a girl will happen
along who won't disappoint me, and then I'll be so set back, I allow I
won't have courage to get outen the walley.  Had I knowd yesterday how
as all the courtin' I've done since the first of last June was to come
tumblin' down on my head to-night like ceilin' plaster, not a wink of
sleep would I 'a' had.  Now I know it.  Does I look like I was goin' to
jump down the well?  No, sir.  'Perry,' I says, 'you've had a nice time
settin' a-dreamin' of her; you've sung love-songs to her as you
followed the plough; you've pictured her at your side as you've strayed
th'oo fields of daisies and looked at the moon.  Now in the natural
course of events she's goin' to marry another.  When she's gettin'
peekit like trying to keep the house goin' and at the same time prevent
her seven little ones from steppin' into the cistern or fallin' down
the hay-hole, you can make up another pretty pickter with one of the
nine hundred million other weemen on this globe as the central figger!'"

At the conclusion of this philosophic speech my visitor adjusted his
thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, brought himself to rest with a click
of his heels and smiled his defiance.

"But I congratulate you truly, heartily," he added.

"Thank you, Perry," I answered.  "In spite of your trifling way of
regarding women, I hope that some day you may find another as good as
Mary Warden."

"The same to you, Mark," said he.

"The same to me?" I cried, with a touch of resentment.

"Of course," he replied.  "I says to myself to-night, 'I hope Mark is
as fortunate,' I says, when I saw them two a----"

"What two?" I exclaimed, lifting myself half out of my chair in my
eagerness.

"Why, Tim and her," Perry answered.  "Ain't you heard it yet, Mark?  Am
I the first to know?"

"Tim and her," I cried.  "Tim and Mary?"

"Yes," said Perry.

He saw now that he was imparting strange news to me.  In my sudden
agitation he divined that that news had struck hard home, and that I
was not blessed with his own philosophic nature.  The smile left his
face.  He stepped to me, as I sat there in the chair staring vacantly
into the fire, and laid a hand on my shoulder.

"I thought of course you knowd it," he said gently.  "I thought of
course you knowd all about it, and when I seen them up there to-night,
her a-holdin' to him so lovin', says I to myself, 'How pleased Mark
will be--he thinks so much of Tim and Mary.'"

Tim's minute!  I knew now why it was so long.  I should have known it
long ago.  I feared to ask Perry what he had seen.  I divined it.  I
had debated with myself too much the strangeness of Mary's promise, and
often in the last few days there had come over me a vague fear that I
was treading in the clouds.  She had told me again and again that she
cared for me more than for anyone else in the world.  But that night
when I had asked her if she loved me, she had turned my collar up.  I
believed that when she spoke then it was what she thought the truth.
She had pledged herself to me and I had not demanded more.  I had been
selfish enough to ask that she link herself to my narrow life, and she
had looked at me clear in the eye.  "You are strong, Mark, and good,
and true," she had said, "and in all the world there is none I trust
more.  I'll love you, too.  I promise."

On that promise I had built all my hopes and happiness, and it had
failed me.  It was not strange.  I had been a fool, a silly dreamer,
and now I had found it out.  A soldier?  Paugh!  Away back somewhere in
the past, I had gone mad at a bugle-call.  A hero?  For a day.  For a
day I had puffed myself up with pride at my deeds.  And now those deeds
were forgotten.  I was a veteran, a crippled pensioner, an humble
pedagogue, a petty farmer.  This was the lot I had asked her to share.
She had made her promise, and that promise made and broken was more
than I deserved.  From a heaven she had smiled down on me, and I had
climbed to the clouds, reaching out for her.  Then her face was turned
from me, and down I had come, clattering to common earth, cursing
because I had hurt myself.

I turned to my pipe and lighted it again.  Old Captain came and rested
his head on my knee and looked up at me, as I stroked it slowly.

"Poor dog," I said.  It was such a relief, and Perry misunderstood.

"Has he been hurt?" he asked sympathetically.

"Yes," I answered, still stroking the old hound's head.  "Very badly.
But he'll be all right in a few days--and we'll go on watching the
mountains--and thinking--and chasing foxes--to the end--the end that
comes to all poor dogs."

"It's curious how attached one gets to a dog," said Perry sagely,
resuming his rocking from heel to toe and toe to heel.

"It is curious," I said, smoking calmly.  I even forced a grim smile.

Now that I could smile, I was prepared to hear what Perry had to tell
me, for after all I had been drawing conclusions from what might prove
to be but inferences of his.  But he had been so positive that in my
inmost heart I knew the import of all he had to say.

"Well, Perry," I said, "you did give me a surprise.  I didn't know it,
and, to tell the truth, was taken back a bit, for it hurt me here."  I
imitated his effective waistcoat-pocket gesture, which caused him much
amusement.  "I had hopes myself--you know that, and as I neither
fiddled nor recited poetry your own conclusions may be wrong."

"But Tim didn't do nothin'," Perry cackled.  "He just goes away and
lets her pine.  When he comes back she falls right into his arms and
gazes up into his eyes, and--"  Perry stopped rocking and looked into
the fire.  "You know, Mark," he said after a pause, "it must be nice
not to be disappointed."

"It must be very nice," said I, smoking harder than ever.

"That's what I said to myself as I looked in the window and seen them."

"You looked in the window--you peeped!" I fairly shouted, making a
hostile demonstration with a crutch.

"Why, yes" said Perry, looking hurt that I should question his action
in the least.  "I didn't mean to.  Comin' from over the ridge I passed
Warden's and thought I'd stop in and warm up and see how Weston was.
So I stepped light along the porch, not wantin' to disturb him, and
seein' a light in the room, I looked in before I knocked.  But I never
knocked, for I says to myself, 'I'll hurry down and tell Mark; it'll
please him.'"

[Illustration: "And seein' a light in the room, I looked in."]

"And you saw Tim and Mary," said I.

"I should say I did," said Perry, "till I slipped away.  But says I to
myself, 'It must be nice not to be disappointed.'"

"You said you saw Tim and Mary," said I, a trifle angrily.

"I should say I did," Perry answered, chuckling and rocking again on
his feet.  "The two of 'em, standin' there in the lamplight by the
table, him a-lookin' down like he was dyin', her a-lookin' up like she
was dyin' and holdin' on to him like he was all there was left for her
in the world.  It made me swaller, Mark, it made me swaller."

There was a lump in Perry's throat at that moment, and he stopped his
rocking and turned to the fire, so his back was toward me.

"Of course you knocked," said I, after a silence.

"Of course I didn't," he snapped.  "Do you suppose I was wanted then?
'No, sir,' I says, 'for them there is only two people in all the
world--there's Tim and there's Mary.'"

Perry was putting on his overcoat, winding his long comforter about his
neck and drawing on his mittens.

"To tell the truth," he said, with a forced laugh, "I don't feel as
chipper as I usually do under such like circumstances.  It seems to me
you ain't so chipper as you might be, either, Mark."

"Good-night, Perry," I said, smoking very hard.

"Good-night," he answered.  At the door he paused and gazed at me.

"Say, Mark," he said, "them two was just intended for one another--you
know it--I see you know it.  God picked 'em out for one another.  I
know it.  You know it, too.  But it's hard not to be picked
yourself--ain't it?"

Tim's minute!  God keep me from such another!

      *      *      *      *      *      *

It was all so plain now.  The fire was dying away.  The hands of the
clock were crawling off another hour, and still he did not come.  But
what did I care?  All in the world that I loved I had lost--Mary and my
brother--and Tim had taken both.  He who had so much had come in his
strength and robbed me, left me to sit alone night after night, with my
pipe and my dogs and my crutches.  Had he told me that night when I
came back to the valley that he loved the girl in all truth, I should
have stood aside and cheered him on in his struggle against her, but I
had not measured the depth of his mind nor given him credit for
cunning.  Perry Thomas saw it.  He had gone away from her and wounded
her by his neglect.  In the fabrication of the other girl, the
beautiful Edith, whose charms so outshone all other women, he had hit
at the heart of her vanity; and now he had come back so gayly and
easily to take from me what I might not have won in a lifetime.  Losing
her, I cared little that what he had done had been in ignorance that I
loved her and that she was plighted to me.  Losing her, I had no
thought of blame for the girl, for when she told me that in all the
world she cared for none so much as me, she meant it, for she believed
that he had passed out of her life.

By the fireplace, so close that I could put my hand upon the arm, was
the rocking-chair I had placed for her, and many a night had I sat
there watching it and smiling, and picturing it as it was to be when
she came.  There would Mary be, sewing beneath the lamplight; there the
fire burning, with old Captain and young Colonel, snuggling along the
hearthstone; here I should be with my pipe and my book, unread, in my
lap, for we should have many things to talk of, Mary and I.  We should
have Tim.  As he played the great game, we should be watching his every
move.  And when he won, how she and I would smile over it and say "I
told you so!"  When he lost--Tim was never to lose, for Tim was
invincible!  Tim was a man of brain and brawn.  His arm was the
strongest in the valley; in all our country there was no face so fine
as his; in all the world few men so good and true.

Now he had come!  The chair there was empty.  So it would always be.
But here I should always be with my pipe and my crutches, and the dogs
snuggling by the fire.

Tim had come!  The clock hands were crawling on and on.  His minute had
better end.  I hurled my pipe into the smouldering coals; I tossed a
crutch at little Colonel, and the dog ran howling from the room.  Old
Captain sat up on his haunches, his slantwise eyes wide open with
wonder.

Aye, Captain, men are strange creatures.  Their moods will change with
every clock-tick.  One moment your master sits smoking and watching the
flames--the next he is tearing hatless from the house; and it is cold
outside and the wind in the chimney is tumbling down the soot.  When
the wind sings like that in the chimney, it is sweeping full and sharp
down the village street, and across the flats by the graveyard, whither
he goes hobbling.

Little Colonel comes cautiously into the room, hugging the wall till he
is back at the fireside.  With his head between his fore-paws and one
eye closed, he watches the tiny tongue of flame licking up the last
coal.  There are worse lives than a dog's.



XVI

Tim came whistling down the road.  He whistled full and clear, and
while he was still at the turn of the hill the wind brought me a bit of
his rollicking tune as I huddled on the school-house steps, waiting.
The world was going well with him.  He had all that the wise count
good; he was winning what the foolish count better.  With head high and
swinging arms he came on, the beat of his feet on the hard road keeping
time to his gay whistling.  Tim was winning in the game.  While his
brother was droning over the reader and the spelling-book with
two-score leather-headed children, he was fighting his way upward in
the world of commerce.  While his brother was wringing a living from a
few acres of niggardly soil and a little school, he was on the road to
riches; while his brother was wrangling with the worthies of the store
over the momentous problems of the day, he was where those problems
were being worked out and standing by the men who were solving them.
All in this world worth having was Tim's, and now even what was his
brother's he had taken.  To him that hath!  From him that hath not!  He
had all.  I had nothing.  Now as he came swinging on so carelessly, I
knew that I had lost even him.

Never once had there come to my mind the thought of doing my brother
any bodily harm.  My emotions were too conflicting for me to know just
why I had come at all into the night to meet him.  Now it was against
him that the violence of my anger would vent itself.  Now it was
against myself, and I cursed myself for an idle, dreaming fool.  Then
came over me, overwhelming me, a sense of my own utter loneliness, and
against it Tim stood out so bold and clear-cut and strong; that I felt
myself crying out to him not to desert me and let a woman take him from
me.  I thought of the old days when he and I had been all in all to
each other, and I hated the woman who had come between us, who had
lured me from him, who had lured him from me.  Then as against my
misery, she stood out so bold and good, so wholly fair, that I cursed
Tim for taking her from me.  I wanted to see him in the full heat of my
anger to tell him to his face how he had served me; to stand before him
an accuser till he slunk from me and left me alone, as I would be alone
from now to the end.

So I had quickened my pace, hobbling up the starlit road to the
school-house.  There I was driven by sheer exhaustion to the shelter of
the doorway, and in the narrow refuge I huddled, waiting and listening.
The keen wind found me out and seemed to take joy in rushing in on me
in biting gusts and then whirling away over the flat.  By and by it
brought me the rollicking air my brother whistled, and then came the
sound of foot-falls.  In a moment he would be passing, and I arose,
intending to hail him.  It was easy enough when I heard only his
whistling to picture myself confrating him in anger, but now that in
the starlight I could see his dark form coming nearer and nearer; now
that he had broken into a snatch of a song we had often sung together,
my courage failed me and I slunk farther into my retreat.

So Tim passed me.  He went on toward the village, singing cheerfully
for company's sake, and I stood alone, in the shadow of the
school-house woods, listening.  His song died away.  I fancied I heard
the beat of his stick on the bridge; then there was silence.

I turned.  Through the pines on the eastward ridge the moon was
climbing, and now the white road stretched away before me.  It was the
road to her house.  The light that gleamed at the head of the hill was
her light, and many a night in this same spot I had stopped to take a
last look at it.  It used to wink so softly to me as I waved a hand in
good-night.  Now it seemed to leer.  The friendly beacon on the hill
had become a wrecker's lantern.  A battered hulk of a man, here I was,
stranded by the school-house.  As the ship on the beach pounds
helplessly to and fro, now trying to drive itself farther into its
prison, now struggling to break the chains that hold it, so tossed
about my love and anger, I turned my face now toward the hill, now
toward the village.  The same impulse that caused me to draw into the
darkness of the doorway instead of facing Tim made it impossible for me
to follow him home.  Angry though I was, I wanted no quarrel, yet I
feared to meet him lest my temper should burst its bounds.  But I had a
bitter wind to deal with, too, and if I could not go home, neither
could I stand longer in the road, turning in my quandary from the
beacon on the hill, where she was, to the light that gleamed in our
window in the village, where he was.

The school-house gave me shelter.  I groped my way to my desk and there
sank into my chair, leaned my head on my hands, and closed my eyes.  I
wanted to shut out all the world.  Here in the friendly darkness, in
the quiet of the night, I could think it all out.  I could place myself
on trial, and starting at the beginning, retracing my life step by
step, I would find again the course my best self had laid down for me
to follow.  For the moment I had lost that clear way.  Blinded by my
seeming woes, I had been groping for it, and I had searched in vain.
But now the dizziness was going, and as I sat there in the darkness, my
eyes closed to shut out even the blackness about me, the light came.

After a long while I looked up to see the moon high over the pines on
the eastward ridge, and its yellow light poured into the room, casting
dim shadows over the white walls, and bringing up before me row on row
of spectre desks.  The chair I sat in, the table on which I leaned were
real enough.  They were part of my to-day, but that dim-lighted room
was the school-house of my boyhood.  The fourth of those spectre desks
measuring back from the stove, was where Tim and I sat day after day
together, with heads bowed over open books and eyes aslant.  That was
not the same Tim who had passed me a while before, swaggering and
singing in the joy of his conquest; that was not the same Tim who had
stood before me that very afternoon in all the pomp of well-cut
clothes, drawing on his whitened hands a pair of woman's gloves; that
was not the same Tim who by his artful lies had won what had been
denied my stupid, blundering devotion.  My Tim was a sturdy little
fellow whose booted legs scarce touched the floor, whose tousled black
head hardly showed above the desk-top.  His cheeks would turn crimson
at the thought of woman's gloves on those brown hands.  His tongue
would cleave to his mouth in a woman's presence, let alone his lying to
her.  That was the real Tim--the rare Tim.  To my eyes he was but a
small boy; to my mind he was a mighty man.  The first reader that
presented such knotty problems to his intellectual side was but part of
the impedimenta of his youth, and was no fair measure of his real size.
That very day he had fought with me and for me; not because I was in
the right, but because I was his brother.

A lean, cadaverous boy from along the mountain, a born enemy of the
lads of the village, had dared me.  I endured his insults until the
time came when further forbearance would have been a disgrace, and then
I closed with him.  In the front of the little circle drawn about us,
right outside there in the school-yard, Tim stood.  As we pitched to
and fro, the cadaverous boy and I, Tim's shrill cry came to me, and
time and again I caught sight of his white face and small clinched
hands waving wildly.  I believe I should have whipped the cadaverous
boy.  I had suffered his foul kicks and borne him to the ground; in a
second I should have planted him fairly on his back, but his brother,
like him a lank, wiry lad and singly more than my match, ran at me.  My
head swam beneath his blows, and I released my almost vanquished enemy
to face the new foe with upraised fists.  Then Tim came.  A black head
shot between me and my towering assailant.  It caught him full in the
middle; he doubled like a staple and with a cry of pain toppled into
the snow.  This gave me a brief respite to compel my fallen enemy to
capitulate, and when I turned from him, his brother was still
staggering about in drunken fashion, gasping and crying, "Foul!"  Tim
did not know what he meant, but was standing alert, with head lowered,
ready to charge again at the first sign of renewed attack.  He knew
neither "fight foul" nor "fight fair"; he knew only a brother in
trouble, and he had come to him in his best might.

That was the real Tim!

"I guess me and you can whip most anybody, Mark," he said, as he looked
up at me from his silly spelling-book that day.

"As long as we stick together, Tim," I whispered in return.

He laughed.  Of course we would always stand together.

That was long ago.  Life is an everlasting waking up.  We leave behind
us an endless trail of dreams.  The real life is but a waking moment.
After all, it was the real Tim who had gone singing by as I crouched in
the shadow of the school-house.  The comrade of my school-days, who had
fought for me with eyes closed and with the fury of a child, the
companion of the hunt, racing with me over the ridges with Captain
singing on before us, the brother at the fireside at night, poring over
some rare novel--he was only a phantom.  Between me and the real man
there was no bond.  He had grown above the valley; I was becoming more
and more a part of it, like the lone pine on Gander Knob, or the
piebald horse that drew the stage.  His clothes alone had made wider
the breach between us.  At first I had admired him.  I was proud of my
brother.  But Solomon in all his glory was dressed in his best; from
Dives to Lazarus is largely a matter of garments.  Tim had made himself
just a bit better than I, when he donned his well-fitting suit and
pulled on his silly gloves.  Beside him I was a coarse fellow, and to
me he was not the old Tim.

This fine man had come back to the valley to take from me all that made
life good.  He had struck me over the heart and stunned me and then
gone singing by.  In Mary's eyes he was the better man of the two.  To
my eyes he was, and I hated him for it.  He could go his way and I
should go mine, for we must stand alone.  In the morning he would go
away and leave me with the Tim I loved, with the boy who sat with me at
yonder desk, who raced with me over the ridges, who read with me at the
fireside.

The shadows deepened in the school-room, for a curtain of clouds was
sweeping across the moon.  Peering through the window, over the flats,
I saw a light gleaming steadily at the head of the village street.  It
was my light burning in the window, and I knew that Tim was there,
waiting for me.  All the past rose up to tell me that he was still the
comrade of my school-days, my companion of the hunt, my brother of the
fireside.

My head sank to the table and my hands clasped my eyes to shut out the
blackness.  But the blackness came again.



XVII

Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate.  Crowning the post at his side was his
travelling bandanna, into which he had securely clasped by one great
knot all his portable possessions.  It was very early in the morning,
in that half-dark and half-dawn time, when the muffled crowing begins
to sound from the village barns and the dogs crawl forth from their
barrels and survey the deserted street and yawn.  Tip was not usually
abroad so early, but in his travelling bandanna and solemn face, as he
leaned on his elbows and smoked and smoked, I saw his reason for
getting out with the sun.  He was taking flight.  The annual Pulsifer
tragedy had occurred; the head of the house had tied together his few
goods, and, vowing never to trouble his wife again, had set his face
toward the mountain.  But on my part I had every reason to believe that
Tip would show surprise when I hobbled forth from the misty gloom.

[Illustration: Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate.]

Just a few minutes before I had awakened.  I had lifted my head from my
desk, half-dazed, and gazed around the school-room.  I had rubbed my
eyes to drive away the veils that hid my scholars from me.  I had
pounded the floor with a crutch and  cried:  "It's books."  The silence
answered me.  I had not been napping in school, nor was I dreaming.
The long, miserable night flashed back to me, and I stamped into the
misty morning.  Weary and dishevelled, I was crawling home, purposeless
as ever, now vowing I would break with my brother, now quickening my
steps that I might sooner wish him all the joy a brother should.  A few
dogs greeted me and then Tip, calmly smoking as though it were my usual
time to be about of a morning.

"You are going over the mountain, Tip?" said I.

"Yes," he answered, throwing open the gate.  "This is the last Six
Stars will see of me.  I'm done.  The missus was a-yammerin' and
a-yammerin' all day yesterday.  If it wasn't this, it was that she was
yammerin' about.  Says I, 'I'm done.  I'm sorry,' says I, 'but I'm
done.'  At the first peek of day I starts over the mountain.  This is
as fur as I've got.  You've kep' me waitin'."

"Me--I've kept you waiting?" I cried.  "Do you think I'm going over the
mountain, too?"

"No," said Tip, with a grim chuckle.  "You ain't married.  You've
nothin' to run from, 'less you've been yammerin' at yourself; then the
mountain won't do you no good.  I didn't figure on your company, but
Tim kep' me."

"Is Tim out at this hour?" I asked.

"At this hour?" Tip retorted.  "You'll have to get up earlier to catch
him.  He's gone--up and gone--he is."

I sat down very abruptly on the door-step.  "Tim gone?" I said.

"Gone--and he told me to wait and say good-by to you--to tell you he'd
set late last night for you, till he fell asleep.  He was sleepin' when
I come, Mark.  I peeped in the window and there he was, in that chair
of yours, fast asleep.  I rapped on the window and he woke up with a
jump.  He was off on the early train, he said, and had just time to
cover the twelve mile with that three-legged livery horse that brought
him out.  He was awful put out at not findin' you.  He thought you was
in bed, but you wasn't, and I told him mebbe you'd gone up to the
Warden's to lend a hand with Weston."

For the first time Tip eyed me inquisitively.

"I was up the road," I said evasively.  "But tell me about Tim--did he
leave no word?"

"He left me," said Tip, grinning.  "He hadn't time to leave nothin'
else.  We figgered he'd just cover that twelve mile and make the train.
That's why I'm here.  As we was hitchin' he told me particular to wait
till you come; to tell you good-by; to tell you he'd watched all
night--waited and waited till he fell asleep."

"And overslept in the morning so he had no time to drop me even a
line--I understand," said I.  "And now, Tip, having performed your
duty, you are going over the mountain?"

"To Happy Walley," Tip cried, lifting the stick he always carried in
these nights and pointing away toward Thunder Knob.  "I'm done with
Black Log.  I'm goin' where there is peace and quiet."

"You lead the life of a hermit?" I suggested.

"A what?" Tip exclaimed.

"You live in a cave in the woods and eat roots and nuts and meditate,"
I explained.

"You think I'm a squirrel," snapped the fugitive.  "No, sir, I live
with my cousin John Shadrack's widder."

"Ah!" I cried.  "It's plain now, Tip, you deceiver.  So there's the
attraction."

"The attraction?"  Tip's brow was furrowed.

"Mrs. John Shadrack," I said.

The fugitive broke into a loud guffaw.  He leaned over the gate and let
his pipe fall on the other side and beat the post violently with his
hands.

"I allow you've never seen John Shadrack's widder," said he.

"I'd like to, Tip.  Will you take me with you to Happy Valley?"

The smile left Tip's face, and he gazed at me, open-mouthed with
astonishment.

"You would go over the mountain?" he said, drawling every word.

Over the mountain there is peace!  It is cold and gray there in the
early morning, and the hills are bleak and black, but I remember days
when from this same spot I've watched the deep, soft blue and green;
I've sat here as the hills were glowing in the changing evening lights
and our valley grew dark and cold.  What a fair country that must be
where the sun sets!  And we stay here in our dim light, in our dull
monotones, when, to the westward, there's a land all capped with clouds
of red and gold.  There is Tip's Valley of Peace.  John Shadrack's
widow may not be a celestial being, but that is my sunset country.  In
journeying to it, I shall leave myself behind; in the joy of the road,
in the changing landscape and skyscape, in the swing of the buggy and
the rattle of the wheels, I shall forget myself and Mary and Tim for a
time, and when I come back it will be with wound unhealed, but the
throbbing pain will have passed, and I can face them with eyes clear
and speech unfaltering.

"I'll go with you to Happy Valley, Tip," I said, rising and turning to
the door.  "You hitch the gray colt in the buggy and----"

"We are goin' to ride," cried Tip.  He had always made his flights
afoot before that, and the prospect of an easy journey caused him to
smile.

"Do you think I'll walk?" I growled.  "Get the gray colt and I'll give
you a lift over the mountain, but I'll bring you back on Monday, too."
Tip shook his head sullenly at this threat.  "While you hitch, I'll
drop a line to Perry Thomas to take the school.  Now hurry."

Tip shuffled away to the barn, and I went into the house, and, after
making a hasty breakfast and getting together a few clothes, sat down
at the table, where Tim had rested his drowsy head all night.  I wrote
two notes.  One was to Perry and was very brief.  The other was brief,
but it was to Mary.  When I took up the pen it was to tell her all I
knew and felt.  When at last I sealed the envelope it was on a single
sheet of paper, bearing a few formal words, while the scuttle by the
fireplace held all my fine sentiments in the torn slips of paper I had
tossed there.  I told Mary that I knew that she did not care for me and
had found herself out.  If it was her wish, we would begin again where
we were that night when I saw her first, and I would guide myself into
the future all alone, half happy anyway in the knowledge that it was
best for her and best for Tim.  Was I wrong, a single word would bring
me back.  I was to be away for three days, and when I returned I should
look by the door-sill for her answer.  If none was there, it was all I
had a right to expect.  If one was there--I quit writing then--it
seemed so hopeless.

      *      *      *      *      *      *

Tip and I crossed Thunder Knob at noon.  As we turned the crest of the
hill and began the descent into the wooded gut, my companion looked
back and waved his hand.

"Good-by to Black Log," he cried.  "It's the last I'll ever see of you."

He turned to me and tried to smile, but a deep-set frown took
possession of his face, and he hung his head in silence, watching the
wheels as we jolted on and on.

We wound down the steep way into the gut, following a road that at
times seemed to disappear altogether, and leave us to break our way
through the underbrush.  Then it reappeared in a broken corduroy that
bridged a bog for a mile, and lifted itself plainly into view again
with a stony back where we began to climb the second mountain.  The sun
was ahead of us when we reached the crest of that long hill.  Behind
us, Thunder Knob lifted its rocky head, hiding from us the valley of
our troubles.  Before us, miles away, all capped with clouds of gold
and red was the sunset country, but still beyond the mountains.  The
gray colt halted to catch his breath, and with the whip I pointed to
the west, glowing with the warm evening fires.

"Yonder's Happy Valley, Tip," I said, "miles away still.  It will take
us another day to reach it."

"It will take you forever to reach it," was the half-growled retort.
"I ain't chasin' sunsets.  Here's Happy Walley--my Happy Walley, right
below us, and the smoke you see curlin' up th'oo the trees is from the
John Shadrack clearin'."

A great wall, hardly a mile away, as the crow flies, the third mountain
rose, bare and forbidding.  Below us, a narrow strip of evergreen wound
away to the south as far as our eyes could reach, and at wide intervals
thin columns of smoke sifting through the trees marked the abodes of
the dwellers of Tip's Elysium.  Peace must be there, if peace dwells in
a land where all that breaks the stillness seems the drifting of the
smoke through the pine boughs.  The mountain's shadow was over it and
deepening fast, warning us to hurry before the road was lost in
blackness.  But away off there in the west, where a half score of peaks
lifted their summits above the nearer ranges, all purple and gold and
red, a heap of cloud coals glowed warm and beautiful over the sunset
land.  My heart yearned for that land, but I had to turn from the
contemplation of its distant joys to the cold, gloomy reality below me.

The whip fell sharply across the gray colt's back, and he jumped ahead.
Down the steep slope, over rocks and ruts we clattered, the buggy
swinging to and fro, and Tip holding fast with both hands, muttering
warnings.  The gray colt broke into a run.  All my strength failed to
check him.  Faster and faster we went, and now Tip was swearing.  I
prayed for a level stretch or a bit of a hill, for the wagon had run
away too, and where the wagon and the horse join in a mad flight there
must come a sudden ending to their career.  The mountain-road offered
me no hope.  Steeper and steeper it was as we dashed on.  Tip became
very quiet.  Once I glanced from the fleeing horse to him, and I saw
that his face was white and set.

"Get out, Tip," I cried.  "Jump back, over the seat."

"Not me," said he, grimly.  "We come to Happy Walley together, me and
you, and together we'll finish the trip."

He lent a hand on the reins, but it was useless, for the wagon and the
horse were running away together, and there was nothing to do but to
try to guide them.

"Pull closer to the bank at the bend ahead," Tip cried.

Almost before the warning passed his lips we had shot around the
projecting rock, where the road had been cut from the mountain-side.
We were near our journey's end then, for at the foot of the embankment
that sheered down at our left we heard the swish of a mountain-stream.
The horse went down.  There was a cry from Tip--a sound of splintering
wood--something seemed to strike me a brutal blow.  Then I lay back,
careless, fearless, and was rocked to sleep.

[Illustration: The horse went down.]



XVIII

She sat smoking.

Had I never heard of her before, had I opened my eyes as I did that day
to see her sitting before me, I should have exclaimed, "It's John
Shadrack's widder!"

So, with the crayon portrait, gilt-framed, that hung on the wall behind
her, I should have cried, "And that is John Shadrack!"

This crayon "enlargement" presented John with very black skin and
spotless white hair.  His head was tilted back in a manner that made
the great bushy beard seem to stick right out from the frame, and gave
the impression that the old man was choking down a fit of uproarious
laughter.  I knew, of course, that he had been posed that way to better
show his collar and cravat.  Though Tip had described him to me as a
rather gloomy, taciturn person, the impression gained in the long
contemplation of his picture as I lay helpless on the bed never
changed.  To me he was the ideal citizen of Happy Valley, and the
acquaintance I formed then and there with his wife served only to
endear him to me.

She sat smoking.  I contemplated her a very long while and she gazed
calmly back.  A score of times I tried to speak, but something failed
me, and when I attempted to wave my hand in greeting to her I could not
lift it from the bed.

At last strength came.

"This is John Shadrack's house?" I said.

"Yes," said she, "and I'm his widder."

[Illustration: "And I'm his widder."]

She came to my side and stood looking down at me very hard.  I saw a
woman in the indefinable seasons past fifty.  In my vague mental
condition, the impression of her came slowly.  First it was as though I
saw three cubes, one above the other, the largest in the middle.  Then
these took on clothing, blue calico with large polka dots, and the
topmost one crowned itself with thin wisps of hair, parted in the
middle and plastered down at the side.  So, little by little, John
Shadrack's widow grew on me, till I saw her a square little old woman,
with a wrinkled, brown face, a perpetual smile and a pipe that snuffled
in a homely, comfortable way.

I smiled.  You couldn't help smiling when Mrs. John Shadrack looked
down at you.

"It's been such a treat to have you," she cried.  "I've been enjoyin'
every minute of your visit."

This was puzzling.  How long Mrs. John Shadrack had been entertaining
me, or I had been entertaining her, I had not the remotest idea.  A
very long while ago I had seen a spire of smoke curling through the
trees in Happy Valley, and I had been told that it was from her hearth.
Then we had gone plunging madly down the hill to it, Tip, the gray colt
and I.  We had turned a sharp bend, we had heard the swish of a
mountain-stream.  There my memory failed me.  I had awakened to find
myself helpless on a bed, strangely hard, but, oh, so restful!  Then
she had appeared, sitting there smoking.

"You are the first stranger as has been here since the tax collector
last month," she said, beginning to clear away the mystery.  "I love
strangers."

"How long have I been here?" I asked.

"Since last Wednesday," she answered.

"And this is what?"

"The next Saturday.  I've had you three days.  You was a bit wrong here
sometimes."  She tapped her head solemnly.  "But I powwowed."

"You powwowed me," I cried with all the spirit I could muster, for such
treatment was not to my liking.  I never had any faith in charms.

"Of course," she replied.  "Does you think I'd let you die?  Why, when
me and Tip pulled you out of the creek you was a sight, you was, and
you was wrong here."  Again she tapped her head.  "You needn't
complain.  Ain't you gittin' well agin?  Didn't the powwow do it?"

Hardly, I thought.  I must have recovered in spite of it.  But the old
woman spoke with pride of her skill, and if she had not saved me by her
occult powers, she had at least helped to drag me from the creek.  For
that I was grateful, so I smiled to show my thanks.

"What did you powwow for?" I asked, after a long while.

She had seated herself on the edge of the bed and was contemplating me
gravely.

"Everything," she answered.  "I never had a case like yours.  I never
had a patient who was run away with, and kicked on the head, and
drownded.  So I says to Tip, I says, 'I'll do everything.  I'll treat
for asthmy, erysipelas and pneumony, rheumatism and snake-bite, for the
yallers and----'"

"Hold on," I pleaded.  "I haven't had all that."

"You mought have had any one of 'em," she said firmly.  "You should 'a'
seen yourself when we found you down there in the creek.  Can't you
feel that bandage?"  She lifted my hand to my head gently.  I seemed to
have a great turban crowning me.  "That's where you was kicked," she
went on.  "You otter 'a' seen that spot.  I used my Modern Miracle
Salve there.  It's worked wonderful, it has.  I was sorry you had no
bones broken so I could 'a' tried it for them, too."

"I'm satisfied with what I have," said I quietly.  "It was pretty lucky
I got off as well as I did after a runaway, and the creek and the
kick."  Then, to myself, I added, "And the powwowing and the salve."

I tried to lift my head, but could not.  At first I thought it was the
turban, but a sharp pain told me that there was a spot there that might
be well worth seeing.  For a long time I lay with my eyes closed,
trying not to care, and when I opened them again, John Shadrack's widow
was still on the edge of the bed, smoking.

"Feel better now?" she asked calmly.

"Yes," I answered.  "The ache has gone some."

"I was powwowin' agin!" she said.  "Couldn't you hear me saying Dutch
words?  Them was the charm."

"I guess I was sleeping," I returned a bit irritably.

How the store would have smiled could it have seen me there on the bed,
in that bare little room in John Shadrack's widow's clutches!  Many a
night, around the stove, Isaac Bolum, and Henry Holmes and I had had it
tooth and nail over the power of the powwow.  In the store there was
not always an outspoken belief in the efficacy of the charm, but there
was an undercurrent of sentiment in favor of the supernatural.  Against
this I had fought.  Perhaps it was merely for the joy of the argument
that so often I had turned a fire of ridicule on the dearest traditions
of the valley.  Time and again, when some credulous one had lifted his
voice in honest support of a silly superstition, I had jeered him into
a grumbled, shamefaced disavowal.  Once I sat in the graveyard at
midnight, in the full of the moon, just to convince Ira Spoonholler
that his grandfather was keeping close to his proper plot.  And here I
was, prone and helpless, being powwowed not for one ailment, but for
all the diseases known in Happy Valley.  How I blessed Tip!  When we
started he should have told me of the powers of our hostess.  I would
rather have undergone a hundred runaways than one week with that old
woman muttering her Dutch over my senseless form.  But I liked the good
soul.  Her intentions were so excellent.  She was so cheery.  Even now
she was offering me a piece of gingerbread.

I ate it ravenously.

Then I asked, "Where is Tip?"

"He's gone down the walley to my brother-in-law, Harmon Shadrack's.
He's tryin' to borry a me-yule."

"A what?"

"A me-yule.  The colt was dead beside you in the creek.  Him and me
fixed up the buggy agin, and he's gone to borry Harmon's me-yule so as
you uns can git back to Black Log."

"Tip's left Black Log forever," I said firmly.

Then John Shadrack's widow laughed.  She laughed so hard that she blew
the ashes out of her pipe, and they showered down over my face, and
made me wink and sputter.

"There--there," she said solicitously, dusting them away with her hand.
"But it tickled me so to hear you say Tip wasn't goin' back.  Why, he's
been most crazy since you come.  He's afraid his wife'll marry agin
before he gits home.  I've been tellin' him how nice it was to have you
both, and that jest makes him roar.  He's never been away so long
before."

"He thinks maybe Nanny will give him up this time?"

"Exact."

The old woman smoked in silence a long while.  Then she said suddenly,
"She must be a lovely woman."

"Who?" I asked.

"Tip's wife."

"Who told you?" I demanded.

"Tip."

This was strange in a fugitive husband, one who had fled across the
mountains to escape a perpetual yammering.

"Tip!" I said.

"Yes, Tip," she answered.  "Him and me was settin' there in the kitchen
last night, and you was sleepin' away in here, and he told me all about
Black Log.  It must be a lovely place--Black Log--so different from
Happy Walley.  There's no folks here, that's the trouble.  There's
Harmonses a mile down the walley, and below him there's the Spinks a
mile, and up the walley across the run there's my brother, Joe Smith,
and his family--but we don't often have strangers here.  The tax
collector, he was up last month, and then you come.  You have been a
treat.  I ain't enjoyed anything so much for a long time.  There's
nothin' like company."

"Even when it can't talk?" I said.

"But I could powwow," she answered cheerily.  "Between fixin' up the
buggy, and cookin' and makin' you and Tip comfortable and powwowin'
you, I ain't had a minute's time to think--it's lovely."

"What has Tip been doing all this while?"

"Talkin' about his wife.  She _must_ be nice.  Did you ever hear her
sing?"

"I should say I had," I answered.

The whining strains of "Jordan's Strand" came wandering out of the
past, out of the kitchen, joining with the sizzle of the cooking and
the clatter of the pans.

"I should say I had," I said again.

"She must be a splendid singer," John Shadrack's widow exclaimed with
much enthusiasm.  "Tip says she has one of the best tenor voices they
is.  He says sometimes he can hear her clean from his clearin' down to
your barn."

"Farther," said I.  "All the way to the school-house."

"Indeed!  Now that's nice.  I allow she must be very handsome."

"Handsome?" said I, a bit incredulous.

"Why, Tip says she's the best-lookin' woman in the walley, and that
she's a terrible tasty dresser."

"Terrible," I muttered.

"Indeed!  Now that's nice.  And is she spare or fleshy?"

"Medium," I said.  "Just right."

"That's nice.  But what'll she run to?  It makes a heap of difference
to a woman what she runs to.  Now I naterally take on."

"I should say Nanny Pulsifer would naturally lose weight," I answered.

"That's nice.  It's so much better to run to that--it's easier gittin'
around.  Tip says she has a be-yutiful figger.  There's nothin' like
figger.  If there's anythin' I hate to see it's a first-class gingham
fittin' a woman like it was hung there to air.  But about Tip's wife
agin--she must have a lovely disposition?"

"Splendid," I said.

"That's what Tip says.  He told me that oncet in a while when he was
kind of low-down she'd git het-up and spited like, but ordinarily, he
says, she's jest a-singin' and a-singin' and makin' him comf'table and
helpin' the children.  And them children!  I'm jest longin' to see 'em.
They must be lovely."

"From what Tip says," I interjected.

"From what Tip says," she went on.  "He was tellin' me about Earl and
Alice Eliza, and Pearl and Cevery and the rest of 'em.  He says it's
jest a pickter to see 'em all in bed together--a perfect pickter."

"A perfect picture," said I sleepily.

"Tip must have a lovely home.  Why, he tells me they have a
sewin'-machine."

"Lovely," said I.  "And a spring-bed."

"And a double-heater stove," said she.

"And an accordion," said I.

"And a washin'-machine," said she.

"And two hogs."

"And he tells me he's going to git her a melodium."

"Indeed," said I.  "Why, I thought he was never going back."

"To sech a lovely home?"  The old woman held up her hands.  "He's goin'
jest as soon as he gets that me-yule and you're able."  She laid her
hand on my forehead.  "There," she cried, "it's painin' you again, poor
thing--that terrible spot."

It was hurting, despite the Modern Miracle, and I closed my eyes to
bear it better.  Over me, away off, as if from the heavens, I heard a
sonorous rumble of mystery words.  I felt a hand softly stroking my
brow.  But I didn't care.  It was only Dutch, a foolish charm, a
heritage of barbarity and ignorance, but I was too weary to protest.
It entertained John Shadrack's widow, and I was going to sleep.

Tip was waiting for me to awake.

"I've got the mule," he said, when I opened my eyes, "and I thought you
was never goin' to quit sleepin'; I thought the widder was joshin' me
when she said you was all right; I thought mebbe she had drumpt it, she
sees so much in dreams."

"What day is this?" I asked.

"Sunday," Tip answered.  "I 'low we'll start at daybreak to-morrow, and
by sundown we'll be in Six Stars."

"In Six Stars!" said I.  "I thought you'd left Six Stars forever."

"That ain't here nor there," he snapped.  "I've got to git you back."

"Then you won't go to-morrow," said I.  "Look here--I can just lift my
hands to my head--that's all.  It'll take a whole week's powwowing to
get me to sit up even."

"What did I tell you, Tip?" cried John Shadrack's widow.  She handed me
a piece of gingerbread just to chew on till she got some breakfast for
me, and while I munched it, Tip and I argued it out.

"Nanny'll think I've left her," Tip said.

"You did, Tip," said I.  "You ran away forever."

"She'll be gittin' married agin," pleaded Tip.

"Serves you right," said I.  Then, to myself, "Not unless the other
man's an utter stranger."

"She hasn't enough wood chopped to last a week," said Tip.

"She chopped the last wood-pile herself," said I.

"There's Cevery," pleaded Tip.  "Cevery never done me no harm, and
who'll dandle him?"

"The same good soul that dandled him the day you rode over the
mountain," I answered.

"But it's a good half mile from our house to the spring," Tip said,
"and who'll carry the water?"

"Earl and Pearl and Alice Eliza," I replied.  "They've always done it;
why worry now?"

"Well, I don't care nohow," Tip cried, stamping the floor.  "I want to
go back to Black Log."

"So do I, Tip," I said; "but--there's that bad spot on my head again."

"Now see what you've done with your argyin', Tip Pulsifer," cried the
old woman, running to me.  "Poor thing--ain't the Miracle workin'?"

"I guess it is, but that's an awful bad spot--that's right, Widow,
powwow it."

      *      *      *      *      *      *

For ten long days more Mrs. Tip Pulsifer chopped her own wood, Cevery
went undandled, and Earl and Pearl and Alice Eliza carried the water
that half mile from the spring.  For nine long days more John
Shadrack's widow entertained the two strangers who had sought a refuge
in Happy Valley, and found it.  Rare pleasure did John Shadrack's widow
have from our visit.  There seemed no way she could repay us.  It did
her old heart good to have someone to whom she could recount the
manifold virtues of her John--and a wonderful man John was, I judge.
Had I not come, she might have lost the Heaven-given gift of powwowing,
for there is no sickness in Happy Valley--the people die without it.
It was a pleasure to have Mark settin' around the kitchen; it was
elevatin' to hear Tip tell of his home and his wife and children; and
as for cooking, it was no pleasure to cook for just one.

"You must come agin," she cried, on the morning of that ninth day, as
she stood in the doorway of her little log-house and waved her apron at
us.  "It's been a treat to have you."

So we went away, Tip and I, with Harmon Shadrack's mule and the
battered buggy.  Our backs were turned to the Sunset Land.  Our faces
were toward the East and the red glow of the early morning.  When we
saw Thunder Knob again, Happy Valley was far below us, and only the
thin spire of smoke drifting through the pines marked the Shadrack
clearing.  I kissed my hand in farewell salute to it.  Perhaps John's
widow saw me--she sees so much in her dreams.

"There's no place like Black Log," said Tip, as we turned the crest of
Thunder Knob.  "Mind how pretty it is--mind the shadders on the ridge
yon--and them white barns.  Mind the big creek--there by the kivered
bridge--ain't it gleamin' cheerful?  There's no place like our walley."



XIX

It was dark when I reached home.  Opening the door, I groped my way
across the room till I found the lamp and lighted it.  Then I sat down
a minute to think.  Two weeks is a very short time, but when you have
been over the mountains and back, when you have hovered for days close
to the banks of the Styx, when you have huddled for days close to the
Shadrack stove, listening to the widow's stories of her John and Tip's
praise of his wife, then a fortnight seems an age.  But everything was
as I had left it.  Even the pen leaned against the inkwell and the
scraps of paper littered the floor where I had tossed them that
morning, when Tip and I started over the mountain.  Those scraps were
part of the letter I did not send to Mary.  They flashed to me the
thought of the one I had sent, and of the answer I never expected.  It
was foolish to look, but I had told her to slip her note under the
door, if she did send it, and I was taking no chances.  Seizing the
lamp, I hobbled to the kitchen, and laughing to myself at the whole
absurd proceeding, leaned over and swept the floor with the light.

Right on the sill it lay, a small white envelope!  I did not waste time
hobbling back to my chair and the table.  I sat right down on the floor
with the lamp at my side, and tore open the note and read it.

"Dear Mark.  Please come to me."

That was all she said.  It was enough.  It was all I wanted in the
world.

Once I had been disappointed, but now there was no mistaking it.
Upside down, backward and forward I read it, right side up and
criss-cross, rubbing my eyes a half a hundred times, but there was her
appeal--no question of it.  After all, all was well.  And when Mary
calls I must go, even if I have crossed two mountains and am
supperless.  All the bitterness had gone.  All those days of brooding
were forgotten, for I could go again up the road, my white road, to the
hill, and the light there would burn for me.

Then Tim came!

[Illustration: Then Tim came.]

I was still sitting on the floor when he came, reading the note over
and over, with the lamp beside me.

With Captain and Colonel at his heels he burst in upon me.

"Well, Mark, you scoundrel," he cried, laughing, as he caught me by the
arm and lifted me up.  "Where have you been?"

"Travelling," I answered grimly.  "And you--what are you doing here?"

"I came to find you," he said.  "Do you suppose you can disappear off
the face of the earth for two weeks and that I will not be worried?
Why, I came from New York to hunt you up--just got here this afternoon
and was over at Bolum's when we saw the light.  Now give an account of
yourself."

"It isn't necessary," said I, smiling complacently.  I put the lamp on
the table and picked up my hat.  "I'll be back in a while," I said.
"I'm going up to see Mary."

"To see Mary?" Tim cried.

"Yes, to see Mary," I answered.

Then, with a little flourish of triumph, I handed him her note.

Tim read it.  His face became very grave, and he looked from it to me,
and then turned and, with an elbow resting on the mantel, stood gazing
down into the empty fireplace.

"Well?" I exclaimed, angered by his mood.

"This is two weeks old, Mark," he said, handing me the paper.

"What of it?" I cried querulously, putting on my hat and moving to the
door.

My hand was on the knob turning it, when Tim said, "Mary has left the
valley."

It did not bother me much when he said that.  I was getting so used to
being knocked about that a blow or two more made little difference.
The knob was not turned though.  It shot back with a click, and I
leaned against the door, staring at my brother.

"And when did she go?" I asked.  "And where--back to Kansas?"

"To New York," Tim answered, "and with Weston--she has married Weston."

I was glad the door was there, for that trip over the mountain, with
the creek, and the powwowing and all that, had left me still a little
wobbly.  Tim's announcement was not adding to my spirit.  Long I gazed
at his quiet face; and I knew well enough that he was speaking the
truth.  And, perhaps, after all, the truth was best.  It was all over,
anyway, and we were just where we started before she came to the valley.

I was just where I was before I found that note lying on the door-sill.
I had been foolish, sitting there on the floor reading that message of
hers that she had belied.  But that was only for a minute, and I would
never be foolish again.  Trust me for that.

"She has married Weston," I said.  "Well, the little flirt!"

Tim got down on the hearth and began piling paper and kindling and logs
in the fireplace.  He started the blaze, and when it was going cheerily
he looked up to find me in my old chair by the table, with Captain
beside me, his head on my knee as I stroked it.

"The little flirt!" I said again, bound that he should hear me.

He heard.  He took his old chair, and resting his elbows on the table,
resting his chin in his hands, a favorite attitude of his, he sat there
eying me quietly.

"The little what, Mark?" he said at last.

"Flirt," I snapped.

It was simply a braggart's way.  I knew it.  Tim knew it, too.  He
seemed to look right through me.  I was angry with him, I was jealous
of him, because she had cared for him.  I knew she had.  I knew why she
had.  Tim and I were far apart.  But he had made the breach.  All the
wrong wrought was his, and yet he sat there, calmly eying me, as though
he were a righteous judge and I the culprit.

"Why did you say flirt?" he asked quietly.

"She promised to marry me," I said.

"Yes."

"She loved you, Tim."

"Yes--and how did you know it?"

"Perry Thomas saw you that night when you went to stay a minute."

The color left Tim's face and he leaned back in his chair, away from
the light into the shadow, and whistled softly.

"You knew it, then," he said, after a long while.  "I didn't intend you
should, Mark.  I didn't intend you ever should."

"Naturally," said I in an icy tone.

"Naturally," said he.  His face came into the light again, and he
leaned there on the table, watching me as earnestly as ever.

"Naturally," he said again.  "I was going away, Mark, never to bother
you nor her.  Did I know then that you loved her?  Had you ever told
me?  Was I to blame for that moment when I knew I loved the girl and
that she loved me?"

"No.  I never told you--that's true," I said.

"And yet I knew you cared for her, Mark.  I could see that.  I saw it
all those nights when you would leave me to go plodding up the hill.
That's why I went away."

"Why did you go away?" I cried.  "You went to see the world and make
money----"

"I went because I loved the girl and you did, too," said Tim.  And
looking into those quiet eyes, I knew that he spoke the truth and I had
been blind all this time.  "Weston knew it," he went on.  "He saw it
from the first.  That's why he helped me."

"You are not at all an egotist," I sneered, trying to bear up against
him.

"Entirely so," he said calmly.  "I even thought that I might win, Mark.
But then I had so much and you so little chance, I went away to forget.
Weston knew that.  He knew, too, that there was no Edith Parker."

"And what has Edith Parker to do with all this?" I asked more gently,
for he was breaking down my barriers.

"She might have done much for you had I not come back when Weston was
shot.  Couldn't you see, Mark, how angry Mary was with me for
forgetting her?  But Weston knew it.  And that night--that minute--I
only wanted to explain to Mary, and she saw it all, Mark, and I saw it
all--and we forgot.  Then she told me of you."

"She told you rather late," said I.

"But she would have kept her promise.  Couldn't you forgive her, Mark,
for that one moment of forgetting?  It was just one moment, and I left
her then forever.  We thought you'd never know."

"And thinking that, you came whistling down the road that night," I
sneered.  "You came whistling like a man mightily pleased with his
conquest--or, perhaps you sang so gayly from sheer joy in your own
goodness.  It seems to me at times like that a man would----"

"A man would whistle a bit for courage," Tim interrupted.  "Couldn't he
do that, Mark?  Couldn't he go away with his head up and face set, or
must he totter along and wail simply because he is doing a fair thing
that any man would do?"

"Why, in Heaven's name, couldn't you keep her for yourself?" I cried,
pounding the floor with my crutch.

Then, in my anger I arose and went stamping up and down the room, while
Tim sat there staring at me blankly.  At last I halted by the fireplace
and stood there looking down at him very hard.  I looked right into his
heart and read it.  He winced and turned his face from me.  I was the
righteous judge now and he the culprit.

"You left her, Tim," I said hotly.  "You might have known the girl
could never marry me after that minute.  You might have known she was
not the girl to deceive me--she would have told me; and then, Tim, do
you think that I would have kept her to her promise?  Why didn't you
come to me and tell me?"

"For your sake, Mark, I didn't," Tim answered, looking up.

"And for my sake you left the girl there--you turned your back on her
and went away.  Then in her perplexity she looked to me again, and I
had gone.  I didn't know.  I went away for her sake, and when she sent
for me I had forsaken her, too.  That's a shabby way to treat a woman.
Do you wonder she turned to Weston?"

"No," Tim said, "for Weston is a man of men, he is--and he cared for
her--that's why he stayed in the valley."

"I knew that," said I, "for I saw it that day when he went away from me
to the charcoal clearing."

"Then think of the lonely girl up there on the hill, Mark," Tim said.
He joined me at the fireplace, and we stood side by side, as often we
had stood in the old days, warming our hands, and watching the
crackling flames.  "Do you blame her?  I had gone, vowing never to come
back again till she kept her promise to you; you had fled from her--she
wrote, and no word came.  And Weston is a wise man and a kind man, and
when she turned to him she found comfort.  Do you blame her?"

"No," I said, half hesitating.

"After all, it's better, too," Tim went on.  "What could you have given
her, Mark--or I, compared to what his wealth means to a woman like
Mary?"

Wealth was not happiness.  Money was not peace.  Etches were a
delusion.  Now she had them.  That was what Weston would give her, and
I wished her joy.  True, he loved the girl.  True, he offered her just
what I did, and with it he gave those fleeting joys that wealth brings.
She should be happy--just as much so as if she had made herself a
fellow-prisoner with me here in the little valley.  For what had I to
offer her?  The love of a crippled veteran; the wealth of a petty
farmer; the companionship of a crotchety pedagogue.  What joy it would
give her ambitious soul as the years went on to watch her husband
develop; to see him growing in the learning of the store; to have him
ranking first among the worthies of the bench; to greet him as he
hobbled home at night after a busy day at nothing!  It was better as it
was--aye--a thousand times.

But there was Tim.  What a man Tim was, and how blind I had been and
selfish!  He stood before me tall and strong, watching me with his
quiet eyes, and as I looked at him I thought of Weston, the lanky
cynic, with his thin, homely face and loose-jointed, shambling walk.
Then I wondered at it all.  Then I said to myself, "Is it best?"

"What makes you so quiet, Mark?" asked Tim.

"I was wishing, Tim," I answered, laying a hand on each of his broad
shoulders, "I was wishing you had kept her when you had her."

Tim laughed.  It was his clear, honest laugh.

"It is best as it is," he said.  "It's best for her and best for us,
for she'll be happy.  But supposing one of us had won--would it have
been the same--the same as it was before she came--the same as it is
now?"

"No," I answered.

"No," he cried.  "Now for supper--then our pipes--all of us
together--you in your chair and I in mine--and Captain and
Colonel--just as it used to be."



XX

Tim has gone back to the city after his first long vacation and here I
am alone again.  He wants me to be with him and live down there in a
brick and mortar gulch where the sun rises from a maze of tall chimneys
and sets on oil refineries.  I said no.  Some day I may, but that day
is a long way off.  In the fall I am to go for a week and we are to
have a fine time, Tim and I, but Captain and Colonel will have to be
content to hear about it when I get back.  Surely it will give us much
to talk of in the winter nights, when we three sit by the fire
again--Captain and Colonel and I.

[Illustration: Old Captain.]

Tim says it is lonely for me here.  Lonely?  Pshaw!  I know the ways of
the valley, and there is not a lonely spot in it from the bald top of
Thunder Knob to the tall pine on the Gander's head.  I would have Tim
stay here with me, but he says no.  He wants to win a marble mausoleum.
I shall be content to lie beneath a tree.  Tim is ambitious.

Just a few nights ago, we sat smoking in the evening, warming our
hearts at the great hearth-stone.  Thunder Knob was all aglow, and the
cloud coals were piled heaven-high above it, burning gold and red.
Down in the meadow Captain and Colonel raced from shock to shock on the
trail of a rabbit, and a flock of sheep, barnward bound, came bleating
along the road.

[Illustration: When we three sit by the fire.]

Tim began to suppose.  He was supposing me a great lawyer and himself a
great merchant and all that.  I lost all patience with him.

Suppose it all, Tim, I said.  Suppose that you, the great tea-king, and
I, the statesman, sat here smoking.  Would the cloud coals over there
on Thunder Knob blaze up higher in our honor?  And the quail, perched
on the fence-stake, would she address herself to us or to Mr. Robert
White down in the meadow?  Would the night-hawk, circling in the
clouds, strike one note to our glory?  Could the bleating of the sheep
swing in sweeter to the music of the valley as she is rocked to sleep?





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