University of California Berkeley JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA ETHEL JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA by Chester Bailey Fernald Author of "The Cat and the Cherub" WITH FRONTISPIECE BY C. D. WILLIAMS NEW YORK THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY MCMVII Copyright, 1906, 1907, by THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England A II rights reserved CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGS I SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME . . V I II IN THE MIST 19 III THE OLDER WOMAN . . . . . 38 IV A VISIT TO CHAN Kow .... 54 V A SOURCE OF INFORMATION ... 72 VI MEETING A HARD FACT . 81 VII THE HOUSE ON THE BRINK . 93 VIII SOME INDICATIONS 106 IX A GENERAL ENGAGEMENT . . . .119 X A WHIRL IN OBSCURITY . . . .133 XI Two HOME-GOINGS 145 XII A CHOICE OF ALLIES 156 XIII Two KINDS OF WEATHER . . . .168 XIV Two LETTERS 179 XV A TRANSACTION IN OXYGEN . . .187 XVI RICH YOUNG MEN 198 XVII THE DESERT OF DOUBT .... 210 XVIII A SPRIG OF CEANOTHUS . . . .221 XIX A CHANCE TO DRIFT 230 XX AN IMPORTANT PROMISE .... 236 XXI A NEW MARY . . .248 539113 VI CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXII A SIMILAR EXCURSION . 264 XXIII KENDRY'S WILL . . . 274 XXIV ETHEL'S PLAN . 287 XXV THE VEILED LADY .... . 302 XXVI A SELF-DISCOVERY .... 309 XXVII A MIND AND A PAIR OF PISTOLS . 325 XXVIII THE BEGINNING 335 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA CHAPTER I SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME THE world will conform with reason when it ceases to conform with chance. Some irrelevant person had abandoned a liqueur bottle on a spur of the mountain halfway to the summit from the sea. Some other irrel- evant person, happening there in the passing years had hurled the bottle against a bowlder. Where the bot- tom section of it lodged unfractured amid the other fragments was a slope to southwestward covered with a clayey soil congenial to the oat. Farther up, a rounded oak spread its branches close to the ground; and farther down a green border of cascara and young laurel ran. The mountain top was hidden by an ascending brow to eastward. To westward, across the canon depths, was the long and nearly even height whose yonder terrace footed in the sea. The round- topped hollow cone on the bottle bottom indented in order that a gallon of liquid might fill six reputed quarts lay surrounded by the jagged points of its glass walls. It lay pointed to a spot in the JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA heavens through which the sun passes twice a year in spring and autumn. For ten years this exhibit stayed undisturbed, the lens-like top of the cone converging the daylight into a small focus on the earth beneath it. The oat half buried there sprouted into the dome and died for lack of room. As the years went by the winds sifted bits of broken straw and silky down from plants into the space beneath the lens. But when the sun might have shone directly through the axis of the bottle it happened that for years either the ground lay rain saturated or a cloud covered the mountain. When, however, chance saw fit to use this mechanism for its effect upon the lives of several mortals it chose a day in early spring when against the custom of nature the ground was dry and the backward young blades of the oats had not yet topped the sere stalks of autumn. The air was warm in the sun and cool in the shade. A bright moistureless wind blew out of the north and huddled the tinder under the lens, through which, at a certain moment in the afternoon, the sun's rays, with a minimum of diffusion, shone gathered in a spot of white heat. The tinder turned black. A jack- rabbit bounded from the smell of smoke, his tall ears cocked. A thin red line crackled in a widening circle and made the ground-owl hide in his borrowed hole. Soon the oak stood unrelieved in a space of black, with a crisp fringe of straw-color about its lower branches. The bays shot up like flaming swords, roaring and pouring pungent smoke at an angle through the flaw- SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 3 less air to southward. But the scrub oaks and the cas- cara, less oily and full of watery sap, refused passage to the flame. The time was not yet when the long dry heat of the rainless season made them easy prey. The fire died away beyond the bays. It left a wide, irregu- lar patch of charred remains on the abused slope, wait- ing for the rains to bring it quickly back to verdure. A young man on a trail higher than this had caught the sight of the smoke and had rushed across a rough stretch of stones dotted with cypress for a better view. His anxious thought had been for the ancient redwoods down in the canons. Now he was on his back beneath a wind-blown cypress. He had not gone far from the trail. There was a red abrasion on his temple and he lay white and still. He wore fawn-colored corduroy trousers folded into boots that came half way to his knees. In a girl of twenty, wondering whether he would ever speak again, this first encounter with him must have aroused a certain respect and touched a sympathetic chord of youth. She noticed the shapeliness of his hands, which began to twitch and enliven her hopes. For him indefinite forms were beginning to shift before his closed eyes. A web was drawing across his con- sciousness, passing with points of light and spaces of darkness, to the hard pumping of his arteries. He made a sound of bodily and of mental distress. The elements of sky and stone and foliage entered con- JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA fusedly into his parted lids. The faint scent of all the sun-warmed weeds crept into his senses ; the line of the distant ridge and its points of solitary upstanding trees arranged themselves with greater sharpness. But his eyes stayed dim as to the space immediately before him, where lines and tones were intercepted by a khaki- colored patch, brighter than the dried grass, yet with- out the form and texture of landscape. It rose inexplicably out of the same resilient manzanita that supported his own head ; it curved in agreeable sym- metry to a narrower, darker band, then curved out again in vaguer folds that suggested something round and definite within. These folds were not motionless, but regularly rose and fell. A crimson kerchief was above the moving space. A bush-tit twittered in the silence of the cypress branches and caused him to look up into a pair of questioning blue eyes. They were restful, like some deep unruffled pool reflecting the sky. He was dully willing to be refreshed by them. The air had become motionless ; the girl was kneeling and the disk of the low sun was behind her head, glistening through the edges of her hair. Some- thing echoed in his ears : a voice. It was a voice full, even, cool like the air after a rain. He could not recall the words; they did not matter. She must have spoken long ago. " Yes," he heard himself say. Her lashes widened and showed the clear white spaces above the irises. She leaned back with a sigh of relief. SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 5 " Thank you! " he was moved to say to this. Then her lips parted and her eyelids rose again at the sight of his black anger overs weeping him. " I was knocked down ! " he dug his palm into the gravel. " The fellow hid his face behind his hat. I had no suspicion! Where is he?" The girl shook her head. " I've been here a long time," she said. Her look of uncertainty lingered; she was not unlike a doe, fascinated by some new object that disturbed her. But to him, who sank back suffering the vivider memory of his ambushment, only her voice became a distant quantity to his retreating consciousness. The cypress whirled in the sky and his elbow yielded to his weight. He felt a canteen at his lips while her ringers held his head. The brandy tore his throat. " A man ought to slink like a beast, expecting to be murdered," he panted. " You don't know where he went?" She held his shoulder down. " You must lie still," she said. She sat staring at him, as before. He let her voice take possession of his will, while he returned her gaze. His heart began to regain some rhythm; his harsher emotions began to melt in his pleasure at the young perfection of her skin, her teeth, her hair. " I don't object to lying still," he faintly said. Her gaze did not falter; but she turned away to the ridge beyond the canon, without having matched 6 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA his smile. Her head was bare ; her sleeves were rolled to the elbow; her skin was translucently browned. He noticed these things while his anger reverberated at the back of his thoughts. She was not taking him for granted. He wondered why. " Do you love this mountain ? " he said. " Does it mean a great lot of things to you ? " She came back from the skyline, her cool face brightening. " Why doesn't it to you ? " she said. "But it does!" he marveled. "It's my mother. It's my place of refuge from all the unpleasantness in the world or, I thought it was until " he bolted up : " if you don't mind my saying that you are a compensation for being sandbagged ? " he said gravely. Her mouth stirred, but she made no acknowledgment. " Have you a mother," she said, " who isn't a moun- tain of refuge ? " Kendry shook his head. " She's dead," he said. " Is yours ? " She shook her head likewise, while they gazed un- abashedly at each other. " Why do you think I don't love the mountain ? " he demanded. She flushed, but came back at him with directness. " I didn't suppose," she said, " that private detectives came from preference to places like this." " Private detectives ! " He started up with a sud- denness that made his head spin. " Oho ! You think I'm a private detective ? " Her look wavered, then returned accusatively. " Extraordinary ! " he frowned, SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 7 with his hand to his brow. " I didn't dream that I resembled one's idea of a private detective." " They generally try not to, don't they ? " she said, without altering. She saw his amazement cloud with returning faint- ness. He sank back and she came with the canteen. " Not a detective ! " he murmured, face down. He was long silent; the brandy seemed in vain. He lay motionless while she looked upon him, undecided, unsatisfied, yet compassionate and, presently, with a sudden pallor. The blue ether was too brilliantly lighted; the broken stones, half fresh, half oxidized, were too vivid green and pink in the slant beyond them; the dash and dip of the birds from bough to canon, the savor of the living trees all were little in keeping with his ashen face. She thought his heart had stopped beating. Her look went over the bright unpeopled surface of the land. She yielded to the moment, without thinking. He saw her eyes through her tears. He closed his own again. " You must eat something," she said, clearing her throat. " I ought to have thought of that." Yet again, while he dutifully ate her bread and cheese, a better color began to warm him, he vaguely felt her bearing alter, through something more than a girl's constraint in a chance acquaintanceship, to a deeper distrust of him. " I'll tell you what I am, though," he proffered. " Everybody ought to be willing to tell that. My name 8 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA is Kendry John Kendry. I was born not far from this mountain. But I've lived away, off and on. I've been traveling, trying to get my perspective. I came up here to think: to hammer all my experiences into some kind of plan for a career. It's a handful ! " he laughed. His so frankly plunging in perhaps made him seem to seek an effect on her. " Of course, most people are forced along into something; but I had a lot of money left me, and that gave me a free choice and that's the trouble." He mused on, as if in a fair way to forget her. Suddenly he sat up. " I think I have it ! It's been muddling about my head for a long time, and that fellow's knocked it into shape." She did not ask the question that would have proved her interest and her acceptance of this confidence. She leaned against the low bough of the cypress, her head obscured in its foliage. He stared at the lines of her waist flowing in their natural course without the lac- ing that solicits the idea of femininity and diminishes its purer charm. The fact stood to him for a point of view flattering to his own. He clasped his hands more comfortably behind his head, with a lock of hair pulled down over his wound. " Over there," he waved toward the city, " most of the people I know are trying to get richer. Not so much for the money, but because it's the only game they know the only one they think there is. They are like ants: they are dreadfully busy and organized; but they haven't the least idea as to what it's all SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 9 about; they are too satisfied to be able to evolve. For myself, I .want to move in more dimensions. I want to be a conscious evolver does that sound wordy ? " he smiled. The girl was seated on the bough ; she gravely shook her head from her receptive silence. His audience pleased him ; he resumed with gravity : " Of course I shall go through most of my father's experiences in life; but at least in one dimension, I want to begin where he left off. I want to take some- thing he brought to me and carry it forward and deliver it in improved condition to some other chap by the same family name. That ought to be good sport a sort of egg and spoon race," he interrupted irreverently, " with an evergreen egg. That over there," he waved to the city, " strikes me as I think it must strike the mountain. If you sat here a thou- sand years and saw the web of time drawn by you'd begin to distinguish between the woof and the warp. All these ants, that scuttle horizontally from one edge of the web to the other, with a visible beginning and end they'd be woofs; and all the people with devel- oped souls and with the wish and capacity for growing toward infinity they'd be warps. Is this getting too thick for your taste ? " he sympathetically paused. Her eyes widened ; she shook her head. " Well," said Kendry, with an agreeable sigh, " I don't think there's any fun in being a woof; and I do think it would be immense to be a warp." 10 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA He made it a period for her. She was leisurely; her foot swung once. " How shall you be a warp ? " she said. He pondered. " You see, a lady warp is born ; she simply grows. But a man warp has to make himself ; he has to prove to himself that he is a warp and that's the trouble. I told my idea to an old miser yesterday. He's a son of the wild hyena the kind that's born starving and eats off his brother's tail and gets to be the Grand Plutocrat. He grew quite tender with me : said I was perhaps just recovering from the measles. He asked me what I was going to do about it. He's a woof ! " Kendry offered for her confirmation. Her foot swung slowly twice again. " What are you going to do ? " she suffered herself to say. Now he got her profile sharply cut against the northern tones of the sky. He studied her for a moment. " Something big," he was easily able to say, with his eyes on her. " I may get myself into a position of trust with the people a position where I can sell them out for millions and then stay honest instead. Or I may go gunning after the criminal rich. To my mind that's the truest sport there is, for a gentle- man living under a republic. It's much more difficult and dangerous than tigers. Anyway, I'm going to do something big," he glowed, with youth's vagueness. " Instead of being a rich hand to mouth woof I am SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 11 going to live with the constant knowledge of being a conscious part of the the whole Continuous Per- formance," he waved at the sky and waters, with a grin. He waited her verdict while she gazed thoughtfully across his shoulder at the sharp shadows of the rocks. " How shall you begin? " "That's what the wild hyena said," Kendry nodded. " Couldn't answer him yesterday, but I can now. Yesterday I hadn't been thumped in the noddle by this other woof," he waved at the hidden places of the woods. " And I hadn't been put together again by a very kind queen of warps," he added mischievously. She flushed and made herself look up at the tree top. Kendry turned to where he imagined his assail- ant had fled. " I'd like to meet that woof again, though," he hardened, with a distending of the veins of his forehead. The girl responded more quickly. * You'd recognize him if you saw him ? " " I can put him in his class without recognizing him," said Kendry. " He works for the wild hyena, but he doesn't know it. He's the saloon element ; he's the floating vote, the jail, the morgue, the scareheads in the newspapers. He's the enemy, he's the hope of the monarchs who want to see us handed over to the Grand Plutocrat. That dates back to my last thesis at college don't be alarmed," said Kendry. " But it's true. Of course he's the chap to round out my 12 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA idea. I ought to thank him; but I shall not," he appealed to her ominously. The girl was avoiding him. What might be a return of her first suspicion brought her eyelids nearer together. He wondered if he had grown tiresome. " If you think my mind is wandering," he said, " it all comes to this : The acts of a warp must tend to improve himself by giving a lift to civilization; and my new inspiration is that I will begin at once, like a force of nature, on the very nearest thing that needs me, even if it's you," he irresponsibly interjected. She brought her shoulder blades a little together and surveyed him neutrally. " But of course not unless you were pursued by an evil woof," he hastened. " That's the whole story," he smiled. For this he received something steadier than a casual glance, followed by the girl's resuming her contempla- tion of the green depths of the canon. He became aware that for some reason he was no longer succeed- ing with her. He noticed the fineness of her nose, of the poise of her head. Her hair was the color of sun- light through rich amber. Only the satisfaction of examining her while she gave him this full opportunity sufficed for the touch she was laying on his pride. " I'm deeply obliged for the brandy," he said pleas- antly, his voice drawing off a shade. She rather penetratingly eyed him for a moment; but she did not answer. He pulled himself up on his stiffened legs. SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 13 " I am really keeping you," he remembered. " I'm quite able to go on to the summit." He willingly sat back on a rock, while he tried to look vigorous. " Do you go my way? " " When you are stronger." She calmly surveyed him. She kept her seat and returned her attention to the seaward ridge. It was early in the season for a sea fog; but the white bank had begun to peep from behind, preparing for an assault upon the evening slopes to landward. To landward all was smiling and clear ; but from the west the mist would soon begin to spill down over the summits of the first canon and up the slope where Kendry waited. The sun approached the edge of the fog's cottony border. It shone directly behind her head once more, giving metallic luster to the threads of her hair and recalling the moment when first she had loomed upon his senses. The birds were flying in straighter, wider courses. The two human shadows lengthened in altered hues over the stones. The young woman who chose to be so uncommunica- tive still seemed willing that the mist should hide them together on a lonely mountainside. They were two hours' walk from a habitation. His own silence, his increasing mystification, did not disturb her; nor did the sight of the sun dipping into the crimsoned fog. He buttoned his coat against the rapid cooling of the air. It was a moment comfortably to dwell on the other consideration of equal importance for him with 14 JOHN KENDRTS IDEA his own career. Mary Eastwood and her mother would have thought to find him anticipating their arrival at the tavern on the summit. Such an eager- ness on his part he believed would have counted to her summers of seniority as a striking quality of his comparative youth. She would find that he had changed in the intervening two years. The place in his life to which he had assigned Mary Eastwood with- out, as yet, her sanction, she would find preserved for her, but adjusted within maturer bounds. He would come at a man's gait, with reasonable regard for the interesting phenomena by the wayside. The girl whose averted face took on a wistfulness in the softening light beneath the cypress was of capital interest. Beneath her the redwood spires on the seaward slopes were sinking in the mist. The first thin vapors blew across her cheek and vanished as if her warm blood dispelled them. To eastward sky and land and water stood clear in the evening light; to westward all the forms receded into thinner planes and vaguer distances. The fresh wind blew with a faint savor of the ocean, sweeping the mist across the dulled stones and through the trees. " Could you find your way now? " she said, jump- ing down. " I don't think you could," she answered for him. Immediately she led off toward the beaten path. In the silence she seemed to suggest, he followed, dwelling on the straightness, the completeness of her SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 15 figure. The gloom was beginning to make it dimmer. The trail wound off through the tall chaparral. He saw her snatch off occasional branchlets and crumple the leaves to her nostrils, while she kept the pace of their Indian file at something slower than he thought her wont. When they passed around into the shadow of a height which he calculated was about an hour and a half from the summit all behind and below them had been swallowed in the mist, which was pierced by tree tops and by eminences gradually sinking. It was like some dissolving view of wooded isles and far dim shores soon to give place to barren sea. They would soon have left the level stretch and started their climb. The girl's movement was faster. She had not spoken. Kendry marveled. Why did she carry a can- teen of brandy? Why had she so obviously awaited the fog ? It was growing difficult to keep her shadowy figure within sight around the turns without running into prickly foliage on either side. " We are going down," he discovered. " Are we on the wrong trail ? " " You'd have preferred the other ? " he heard her sweetly say, over her shoulder. Her answer seemed reassuring. Even should he return to the open spaces and perhaps to the other trails they had passed he doubted if he could find the one he had counted on. He tried to make up the gap his hesitancy had widened between them and he was startled by the speed of her descent. Their direction, he began to be certain, was 16 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA away from the summit. The decline was continuous. Despite his efforts she was drawing away. It did not occur to him to judge his position by the facts, throwing out his prejudice in favor of so fresh and charming a young woman. He might have recalled one or two chance alluring women in other parts of the world, to whose guidance he would have been too well informed to trust himself in the blind darkness of a mountainside where for some unaccount- able reason already he had been ambushed. But stum- bling after her, his hands stretched out in the darkness before him, his feet sliding on the loose stones, he reflected merely that she had shown an inexplicable suspicion of him. Now perhaps she wished to be rid of him. A rolling stone brought him down heavily on his side against the stock of a scrub oak. He lay still and could not hear her. Only a dim difference between the space overhead and the walls of the chapar- ral indicated the direction of the trail. It turned sharply a little ahead. Either she waited without stirring or she had gone too far in advance to hear him fall. The trail now curved back toward his proper destination. He groped along it, eyes and ears alert. The shades and dim outlinings of the bushes took strange forms that thinned to nothing at approach. The big owl hooted from a far tree top; all the rest was stillness like that of a land covered with snow. The fine particles of the mist wafted now and then against his cheek, as if stirred by hidden knowing agencies. SOME FLAMES AND A FLAME 17 A few feet on either side his sight was lost in the gray tenuous region of uncertainty into which the girl seemed vanished. He moved softly, pausing, a smile upon his lips. A long time appeared to elapse. His fingers pressed into the soft figure of the girl, so that he started back and brought down a shower of mois- ture upon them from the shrub under which she stood. "You were listening? You thought you heard something? " her voice came. " No ! " he puzzled. He distinguished an uncer- tainty in her breathing, and then the note of prepara- tion. " You can't lose your way on this trail," she pronounced. " You'll be there in two hours." Her in- tonation stiffened for the speech she had arranged. " I shall never know whether you are not unusually clever ! " she finished, with a little laugh, not at ease. "Good night!" He could not note in the moment all the wavering of purpose she had flattened out of this accusing speech. He heard her moving away. His quick im- pulse was not to follow her, not to answer. But he heard her steps slowing nearly ceasing. " I'm not so sure but that I've been the more genu- ine," he said gently. He heard her pluck a leaf from a young laurel. " I've left the canteen for you," she called. Rushing after her his foot struck the canteen, but he came against nothing more. Somewhere he heard 18 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA the bushes crashing, on the slope below the trail. But he could find no opening through the stiff growth there. The sound of the parted chaparral diminished and stopped. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear. CHAPTER II IN THE MIST NEVERTHELESS he held the canteen by the strap, still warm from her ringers. It was important enough to warrant him in seeking her out to return it; it was trivial enough to warrant the surprise she might show at his taking the trouble. It had the quality of " legal " tender in the transactions of women with men; that is, it had value, viewed from one side and was worth- less when viewed from the other side and it was the feminine prerogative to view it solely with the side up which best suited an occasion, or to hold it indefinitely balanced on its edge. He owned an instinct as to how best he could present such tender at its source for redemption. That would be with outward assumption of its worthlessness and with inward expectation of receiving at least another tender of equal ambiguity. He knew that if he presented it with the " good " side up it would be turned over and looked upon from the other side. It bade him continue without further search for her. If he was mistaken and a purely impersonal compassion had prompted the gift of the stimulant, then his pur- suit of her through the bramble, even if he caught 20 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA her, would yield his interest nothing more. If the can- teen was a tender of good will, some lapse of time would not diminish its significance. The trail wound from the inner slopes of a ravine to the descending ridge that marked its outer edge. Here the vegetation, rooted in thinner soil, was too low to add gloom to the gray obscurity. It gave a feeling of open space which he paused to enjoy. The mist was even and still. He thought it showed at one point a more tenuous quality, as if a break in the fog existed beyond. He stepped down off the trail to satisfy himself. If there was a light glimmering there it was possible that he was on the wrong side of the mountain where the only houses he could remember lay scat- tered at its base ; in which case the girl had started him, not toward the summit, but toward the sea. Yet, on the south side he should have heard the fog-horn moaning at the Gate and the warning signals of the ferryboats. Nothing broke the silence ; but the lumin- osity increased as he went farther down. It might be from a candle or from a conflagration, so much the particles of the mist diffused the light. He more cau- tiously picked his way over barren intervals of shale, avoiding the crushing of the shrubs. A faint resinous odor began to be carried on the air. The light took on a yellow tinge and the dim shadows of redwoods rose into the line of his softly descending vision. The shadows enlarged and deepened. The crackle of a fire came to his ears, along with a voice. IN THE MIST 21 It was a man's voice, familiar not because it be- longed to an individual, but because it belonged to a type of the multitude. It carried him back to the moment when, with his ears attuned to foreign ways and foreign accents, he had stepped down the gang- plank at New York into the longing arms of porters and cabmen. Perhaps the voice best would be de- scribed by saying that many of his countrymen would not have understood what was being said by any one who attempted to describe it ; for it was a voice with- out self-consciousness or self-knowledge perhaps the only thing left without those attributes in a land where every one so closely examines himself with a view to betterment. It was in this case differentiated by a grieved insistence, an injured argumentativeness ; but it still told him nothing within wide limits, of the breeding, the education, relative to the mass, of its owner. Kendry advanced to where he could hear the words. The proximity of a man sent throbbing the scar on his forehead. The voice ceased. Perhaps Kendry had been heard crunching the stones. When the hidden conversation resumed it was from another voice, smooth and clear across the silence. " If you've done nothing against the law, why do you hide here ? " said the girl. " The law ! I was wishing I had the Revised Stat- utes to start this blaze with ! " the man laughed. " You're ' the people '; you're easy! You'd sit down 22 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA under the statue of Justice and get your pocket picked. Did you ever notice that Justice was blind? Well, she's paralyzed too. All she can do is to throw a fit now and then and bite the man nearest. That's on ' page one ' ! " he finished. The girl made no answer. " I notice you didn't bring the l nose-paint/ ' he complained presently. " That's how you think of me ! " " Was the brandy all you wanted me to come for?" " Oh, tut ! " He rose. " I guess, after a week on this God-forsaken hill, I wanted to see you ! " " It isn't a God-forsaken hill," said the girl. " If you wanted to see me, why didn't you come to the God-forsaken town ? " " Yes * why didn't ' I ! I guess you could answer that, if you were sworn in. I did think you'd have a letter, though," he said in disappointment. " If you want to hear from them," the girl coldly said, " why don't you go to see them ? Why do you hide?" There was annoyance in his tone. " Why, now sup- pose your Law hauls off with her sword at those thugs and splits my head open with the back swing? They haven't any case. But they want to ask me ques- tions on the witness stand. It's my reputation they're after. They think they can make me look queer. I offered to compromise the business end of it. They wanted four times as much." IN THE MIST 23 Her manner seemed to nettle him. " Even so, why are you afraid to face them?" " Because I'm making a bluff that's worth good money ! " his voice strained. " You just want to throw it into me, don't you? You're a big pretty kid, and you know you say what you like. You think I'm run- ning. Well, I'm not running anything except a bluff. There's no man on God's footstool that can face me down I want to tell you that! The woman that ties up to me is in luck, if I do say it. I'm not an Adonis and I'm not a Hercules; but that's not the kind of machine that keeps the road in this century. The woman that gets me gets protected. I'll cut a swath through that old town for her to walk through where no man will speak to her twice. That's the kind I am ; and I guess you know it ! " " Yes," she breathed. The man paused as if to fathom her thought. " Yes, and you want to say I'm a tough," he com- plained. " I don't know where you get your ideas. You don't know anybody. I'm going to tell your mother to cut out some of those novels. Oh, well," he veered, " I wouldn't interfere. I guess you know I'd scour the town for you. But I want to tell you you're wrong, the way you talk to me. You're sure wrong," his tenderness was not unconvincing. " Why, you talk like a graduate of some bunco millionaire's Sunday-school. The real Christians are all dead. They took the short end of the bargain, as the Book told 24 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA 'em to centuries ago. And they trotted off to heaven, without bothering the Probate Court. That's evolu- tion. Everybody's got to look to his bargain, and everybody does. You never buy a yard of ribbon but somebody gets the best of the bargain. Who gives away colleges and hospitals? Why the fakir that's always got the best of his bargains. Who built the Coliseum ? Why, the chap who'd annexed about every- thing in sight and wanted to keep the people busy and fooled ! It's the same thing now. Along comes Mr. Bunco and builds a spire to Learning, or Health, or Morals, or some fad. And he tells you: * Look up there and admire that, while I rip off your scalp and take it to my tannery.' He's running a bluff. So am I. So is everybody. You're a woman ; I guess you know that. I had to study the law to find it out." " I'm trying to discover," she said impatiently, " why you wanted me to come here." " Well," he answered, after some hesitation, " be- cause you'll have to go and see the Chinaman." "Ah, no!" she breathed, decidedly. " Wait till you savey ! It's your business, Beauty, just as much as mine," he said, satisfied that he could convince her. " I can't help knowing certain things I know; but I can help telling 'em and I've got to. I wouldn't even tell you ; and if I did, you'd misunder- stand. If they get a judgment by default they'll open my safe deposit drawer. They'll find nothing there. IN THE MIST 25 But if they search my room, they'll find all I've got and all you've got too." " But they can't take what belongs to my mother and me." !< There isn't a scrap of paper in the world to prove they are yours. I couldn't see a mix-up like this com- ing," he said in his injured tone. " You'll have to go and do your best to compromise with them, or you stand to lose." He tossed a stick into the blaze. The sparks shot up into the foliage; the firelight gave a bluish cast to the green. " In your room," she said, " where did you hide our things?" " So's you can go there and have them follow and snatch it out of your hands? That fellow you turned away from your door for me who do you suppose he was? Who was it nosing after me on the mountain to-day? They've got me located; I shift out of this region before daylight. No; you'll have to go to Chinatown; and take my advice, go looking as hand- some as you know how. If anybody says anything to you, you're a tourist from the East." Kendry heard the girl rise. Her voice, long coming, faltered as though from a child disposed to weep. " I'm going home now," she said. " Better sit down till I tell you how to talk to those people," he said, with some doubt as to her intentions. Her feet pressed the dry brush. 26 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA 11 1 shall not go to them," she said, with a breath. " I shall consider the money as lost. I shall not say anything I know up till now if I do know anything against you. But after to-night you mustn't count on me. I shall have nothing more to do with it," she came out. " Don't be a fool ! " he cried. He was exasperated, but still unconvinced. " Your mother would under- stand it; she'd take it from me that this is what to do why can't you? Why can't you realize that you'll be losing every cent you've got ! " He rose. " It wasn't much," she said, with a softness that heightened his anger. " There's never a loss without some gain. I'm strong. It wasn't enough to pay," she dwelt on the word, " for the pretense, the false- hood, the slinking I've had to use to get here to-night. Oh, you can't budge me ! I'm not so solitary in my way of thinking about this world. Mother's too old; she's too weak-willed. I'm going! " Kendry saw the man's shadow darken the firelight. " By God, you're not going! " he said. " This don't fool me. Some one's been afoul of your mind. You've had it in for me for months. Now, when you think I can't come back to town, you're going to give me the merry laugh ! Well, I will be back in town ; when I go, you'll go with me. I don't trust you. Sit down ! " Kendry's knees trembled. " Arthur ! " He heard her struggle. " Arthur ! " The scuffle ceased at the sound of Kendry breaking IN THE MIST 27 through the brush. The brush grew denser toward the bottom of the ravine ; a fire had once destroyed the greater redwoods and a thick growth of young ones seemed to encircle the fireplace without a break. "Hello there?" he called. There was no answer. He discovered a thin, dry water course, closely bor- dered by the saplings, leading through. He stumbled over its rounded stones and came into the lighted circle. The girl had identified him. She stood across the space, pale and avoiding his glance. The man stepped out from behind her. He was in the early thirties. He wore a stiff hat jammed over his forehead and carried a cigar crowded into the corner of his mouth. He sauntered toward Kendry with his hands in his side pockets and his not large eyes looking closely past a nose that rose too rapidly at the base and finished too trivially at the tip. An aggressive and intelligent alertness were set upon his face as if in defiance to a hostile and contemptible world. Kendry looked down an inch upon this older head so forwardly carried on the shoulders. A cynical self-confidence drew up one corner of the man's mouth. " My name's Paulter," it said, as Kendry might be hesitating to ask. " What do you want? " He stood revolving the cigar in his lips. Kendry subdued his instinct to an apologetic smile. " I've walked off the trail in the fog," he said. " You won't mind my drying off a bit ? " He saluted the 28 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA girl, then thought best to seem to ignore her. Paul- ter gave no response to his smile. He stood motion- less, keeping one hand in his pocket. He looked at Kendry's scar. " What brings you around here ? " he said, as if he expected a falsehood in answer. "Just the walk," said Kendry. To affect to find nothing threatening in Paulter's manner he put down the canteen and took off his coat and held it to the heat. He felt Paulter's eyes traveling the outlines of his pockets. Nothing like a weapon was in evidence there. Paulter thoughtfully chewed his cigar. Per- haps something in Kendry's way of speech made him seem from too foreign a place to warrant suspicion. The cigar came from the mouth to the hand that had stayed so closely in the pocket ; something like a smile flickered over the irregular mouth. Suddenly the cigar shot back again. Paulter stepped offensively near him. " Where did you get that canteen ? " he said. It was the tone of a man who gave no one the benefit of a doubt. An unpleasant heat rose at the back of Kendry's head; his fingers closed on the coat. From the corner of his eye he dimly saw the girl turned toward him. He smiled. " Stumbled on it," he said. " If it's yours, you'll miss some of the brandy," he shrugged, good- naturedly. He held the coat at arm's length toward the fire and IN THE MIST 29 continued his gaze genially, but as steadily as he could, into Paulter's eye. He had come on the girl's account and he was under necessity of peace, even had his taste been in the least for brawling. He knew that a point might be reached where his pretense of not noticing the other's malevolence would become so transparent as to defeat its own end. He had passed through one encounter where the memory of his own inertness oppressed him ; now he was suffering a similar stress. To have to turn on the man who awaited his least movement, and who too certainly concealed a pistol, would bring the situation to no better pass than it was when he had attempted to better it, apart from his regard for his own life. But to smile was to pull up a weight from his vitals by a thread. It brought up a sigh along with it; the sound disconcerted him it seemed to suggest anxiety or fear. While he main- tained his gaze on Paulter he wondered if it was fear. He knew he was not calm. He had never laid hands on a man in anger. His willing understanding had, so far, borne him over places where mere calculative tact might have failed. He had now to learn how much more depressing it is to consume in the blood the venom which rage produces than to turn this venom into violence. His falsehood about the canteen, made without a glance at the girl, advisable though he felt it, sickened him with a sense of its moral disadvantage. Paulter's rapid looks from Kendry to her and back again seemed penetrating the history of their after- 30 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA noon and coloring it with the man's own cynical sur- misals. Her flush had paled. She faced Paulter with- out faltering, yet without breathing. Kendry's mouth began to dry. He saw her sink with uneven respira- tion to a fallen tree trunk. The relief of a muscular movement offered itself to him. " Won't you put on my coat? " he asked her. Paulter was gruffly before him. " You keep your coat," he said over his shoulder. He took off his own and transferred the automatic pistol from it, with a full glance at Kendry. Paulter was not clad for the wilds ; brushed and smoothed to the prosperous appear- ance in which he had reached the mountain, he would have passed in some drawing-rooms until he should speak for one of their admissible but less-inspiring quantities. It was peculiar to American life that he was inferior to his clothes and superior to his manner of speech. Paulter threw his coat over the girl's knees. Kendry had decided that the man had gone too far in contempt of him. " Both of them," he smiled, following Paulter's coat with a proffer of his own. He moved away from the two, acknowledging the girl's faint thanks. He heard Paulter in pursuit of him. This was the man, he could not doubt, to whom he owed the wound that smarted anew upon his forehead. Kendry tightened his teeth on the necessity, the apparent impossibility, of finding what should avert a speech, an act more insolent than could be answered save with his fists. IN THE MIST 31 The mouth which so suggested a blow leaned over to him tonelessly: " You want to know what I think about that can- teen?" The question gave time for an answer. Paulter's coolness, perhaps overbuilt on Kendry's long-suffer- ing, added to the probable ease of knocking him into the fire. The girl's fingers were gripping the bark of the fallen redwood, her eyes widened in a message Kendry could not gather. He wavered; he heard a call from out the fog. It was an Oriental voice, pronouncing Paulter's name with assurance. Paulter had defensively started to put Kendry between it and himself, but he stopped. A canny speculativeness entered his eyes ; but he made his answer sound indifferent. " Nothing to stop you from coming down," he said. There was the rustle of two men pushing their way down through the chaparral. For the moment the situation was relieved for Kendry, whether or not the odds were now to become three to one against him. Nothing from the girl illuminated that point. Paul- ter's coat slipped from her knee. She left the log and stood looking down into the fire. The small move- ments of her nostrils could not conceal the stirring of something new within her. It might have been by a natural inadvertence that she had folded Kendry's coat under her arm. Paulter had not noticed it. He waited at the edge of the circle, listening conjecturally 32 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA toward the oncomers, his mouth unevenly drawn, his back half turned to the girl. Kendry sought some sign from her. The coals were pinkening her cheeks and enforcing the blue of her irises. The smoke was going straight into the misty stillness whose particles took the shadow. The fire lay in the bed of what in winter would be a pool, bottomed with gravel, receiving waters due for the lake a thousand feet below. The taller redwoods overhung in darknesses outlined by feathery branching curves. Against the thought of Paulter and his emanations stood the slim soft figure of the girl, with the blood beating in her cheek. There was nothing of hysteria there, consuming though she might be. There was an increasing set of the teeth, a movement of the eye through the smallest arc of a circle at the nearing of the others. If they were still more to threaten her dignity, Kendry's fingers strained for some decisive act. He stole a glance at Paulter, then sought with his glistening eyes to bid her go, while he sprang through the fire and kicked its embers into Paulter's startled face. She held him for an instant with a look where all the history of her predicament seemed to lie open to him had he time to read. He was to be motionless, to be silent, the one shake of her head implored. He turned to Paulter. The same voice called from close at hand, asking the way to the fire in accents unmis- takably Chinese. The girl sprang through the line of IN THE MIST 33 Kendry's sight, over the coals and into the foliage of the younger trees. Their branches swung back into the circle. Paulter wheeled to hear her whipping through the outer saplings. He tore after her with a profane muttering, a beating down of branches and a crashing of dead undergrowth such that the sound of her own going was drowned. To follow him in the way he broke would have seemed like a threat of attack on an armed man. Kendry ran out of the circle by the way he had come. He butted through the dense and darkening maze, reckless of hair, of skin, of clothing. He battled out of the redwoods into the oaks and on into the man- zanita, still higher than his head, each tougher. He laughed silently with the joy of being in action and at the success he felt would come to the plan he had. He emerged on the higher ground where the shrubs rose but waist high. He stood still. The firelight. was dif- fused over a broad space in the fog. Paulter was behind, lower down, cursing the deeper stretch of crooked, wiry stocks that caught him. He heard Paulter stop and listen. There was no other sound; the girl must be kneeling somewhere with the hope that he would pass her. Kendry began to move on as if in stealth, but he made the manzanita scratch against his boots loud enough for the ear of Paulter. He smiled at the sound of Paulter dashing after him, guided by this scratching, and at his own easy control of the distance that should be maintained between 34 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA them. To keep Paulter well behind he was presently running through the darkness, kicking through the stiff low chaparral. He made a blind leap and landed in the branches of a larger thing that closed over him and let him gently to the ground. He crouched and held his breath. The firelight had dimmed to almost its first faint luminous wash in the distance. He heard Paulter panting as he came in the fancied trail of the girl, now through less obstruction and at greater speed ; he heard the voices of the two Chinese speculating to each other by the fire ; he heard the hoot of an owl a mile away, all against the gray silence. Paulter came and stopped where Kendry could have touched him. It was as if the man knowingly stood over him, weapon in hand, deliberating whether to ease the rage that boiled in his throat. But he moved a step away, seem- ingly with his back turned. Kendry waited with a hand upon the shale, his ringers trembling with the temptation to even matters with the man who had ambushed him. He saw the dim form make as if to start toward the lower part of the slope. If Paulter found the girl it would be in that direction, Kendry believed. He clenched his fists : what had been a temp- tation seemed about to become a duty. Then Paulter halted again and muttered his profane comment. "She'll pay me for that!" he added. He turned slowly back to the fire. Soon the only sound was his plaintive monotone addressed to his two visitors by the fire. With her knowledge of the mountainside the girl IN THE MIST 35 must be well away. Kendry staggered up a hundred feet and threw himself on the edge of the trail. He was faint, but he was pleased. He had what might suggest a theory to explain the whole of the girl's behavior. He no longer held the canteen; but she had gone with his coat. It would be the link which the canteen might have been, save that the initiative by which it should serve him for another interview must lie with her. To-night it would be impossible to find her. .She would flee at any sound of footsteps. The dampness bade him take up his way to the summit. He should manage to see her in any case. She was beautiful which meant for John Kendry that her per- fection penetrated throughout. She was in distress and without true friends. She had a mother who was feeble of body and weak of will which would elucidate the intrusion of Paulter into their lives. She was solitary, and she loved the woods. She had tried to explain existence, and it meant to her nothing that Paulter stood for. She was unhappy and she was beautiful. His seeing her would add to the interest of the epi- sode as he intended to recount it to Mary Eastwood It might mean his also seeing Paulter, who was evi- dently jealous and unscrupulous. But the enmity of unscrupulous men Kendry did not expect to avoid in his projected career. If there had been the impetuous in what he had said to the girl about this choice of 36 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA career it now stood the test of further thinking. Under her gaze he had vaguely said what he expected to evolve into a precise programme for his life. He could not see into the future ; it was as undefined as the mist through which he pushed his way toward the summit. But he had said at random that his departure might begin with her, and the words echoed prophetically. The way might always lead through obscurity and no fame accompany the achievements time might let him place to the credit of his idea. But the idea itself would be enough. An idea that should itself be enough was what he had been seeking. The way might lead him through great trials, even to death; but all ways do, he said to himself in the gloom. But its beginning perhaps could be generously, beautifully impersonal with this girl. He was glad when he reached the tavern and saw himself in a mirror that Mary Eastwood and her mother had early retired. His dishevelment, his hag- gardness, would have been too disturbing. Mary's presence seemed to linger about the corridors. Her signature went across the page of the register with the precision of fine lace somewhat starched. It brought back to him with a freshness possible only to such proximity the atmosphere that was as if created by her as his refuge from the rude world. When she had learned to understand her value to him she would become unwilling not to enjoy it. That he could not doubt. IN THE MIST 37 He drew his bed to the window and raised the shade. A flood of moonlight surprised him. The sky was cold and sparkling. Below, on the level where he had entered, stretched the white upper surface of the fog. Only the summit of the mountain stood above its compacted billows; the rest was the cottony drift, blue-shadowed in its irregularities by the moon-dis- tance, silent, motionless distance without end. Somewhere in the underlying gloom the girl was making her way toward a late train and ferry to the city she, too, alone in a resolution which should change her life. He shook his head at the empty dis- tance. He could imagine her advancing toward his window, magnified, but real, treading the floor of the mist. Her hair glistened in the moon ; her eyes re- flected the vault above her ; she smiled forward to him, as one approaching in the unconditioned confidence of a child. CHAPTER III THE OLDER WOMAN WHEN, the next noon, Kendry descended the moun- tain on a gravity car and took the electric train toward the ferry for the city, the comparative sharpness of his overnight abstractions began to dim in the detail of practical life. From the mountain existence could be viewed in perspective: sea, sky, summit, and the city appeared as symbols of definite meaning, simple and cool to the mind. But as he left the higher alti- tude and mixed with his kind, the mere incidents of so inconsiderable a journey began to enfever him with innumerable small reactions, each involving his attitude toward a person or thing, each reaction capable of its moment's problem for a lively conscience and an active mind. Amid so many drifts and eddies how was he to keep his course trimmed to the idea? While he had stared up at the ceiling from his bed, his refreshed brain had gone over the processes through which the idea had grown, and they had seemed to him without flaw. In his memorable talks with his father, spreading through Kendry's adoles- cence, he had formed the habit of considering himself always in distant but certain relation to a conception 38 THE OLDER WOMAN . 39 of the universe, and in that relation he had found his most stimulating sources of thought. To some men such considerations led on to religious access, to devoutness in established worship, to acceptance of one prophet or another, and thus to a point of relative rest from speculation as to how to live. There had never been an atom of superstitious misgiving for Kendry while he had spent some of the meditative hours of his youth in stripping from present Chris- tianity its husk of formalities, its accretion of doubtful history, its dead tissue of uncompromising injunction. Back of all these he came to Christ the Preacher, who first roundly voiced the morality that inevitably had evolved from human experience. But history had afforded no prophet who, as a lover, a husband, a father, a citizen, had become a commanding pattern for all time. According to Kendry, the one thing true of all life was motion, and the prime instinct of a live man was to go somewhere and do something; and if the man had a live spirit, his instinct was to go and do some- thing with a new element, which would tend toward the progress of the race to a higher state. For most men the struggle for a competency determined the direction of their going; it regulated their humanity, it bounded their hopes, it checked the keenness of their conjectures as to the unseen, the unknown. But to Kendry, sharing a modest two or three millions with a married sister who lived in Rome he did not know 40 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA quite how much he possessed the struggle for exist- ence gave place to the struggle for felicity. Where he was beginning life, was for most men the goal and limit of their aspirations. For nine-tenths of the remainder, to which Kendry belonged, the struggle for felicity consisted in trying to turn the two or three millions into twenty or thirty millions, with the accompanying increase of a certain power over the unwilling and with the accompanying vexation of their envious hatred. With the acqui- sition of twenty or thirty millions would come the desire for two or three hundred millions. The objec- tion to all this for a symmetrical mind was that the direction of such an aim was circular, bending no- where but upon itself ; and that it was monotonous and without imaginative vitality. It involved such an expenditure of energy upon such an inadequate exten- sion of purpose as to suggest a dog chasing its tail. It was in logic viewed as a way of escape from eventual ennui equal to a man's endeavor to run away from a splinter which is in his foot. If this formula of a fixed radius, in which his rich friends stupidly trotted, was not enough for Kendry, what would produce for him the transcendental curve that leads to better satisfactions? By youth and temperament he was cheerful in his regard of humanity as a going concern. He believed that it was ascending, partly from new wisdom out of experience, partly from greater conscious exertion THE OLDER WOMAN 41 of will. Somewhere in the sense of having contributed to this upward movement lay the deepest, most endur- ing satisfaction possible to an individual. But for a man of twenty-four to stand upon a mountain and to announce, even to himself : " I will improve this world ! " opens to so many possibilities of dogmatism, of priggishness, of self-righteousness, that one may congratulate Kendry upon his instinctive perception of this danger. If he felt some confidence in his reasoning powers, he was not so sure of his capacity in a practical world. Already among his generation of rich young men vice fairly well had marked the toll it would take; and the strong among the survivors were immersed in large undertakings, where such new ideas as came to them went regularly through trial to success or to relin- quishment. Their judgment as to what was feasible, at a point where his purposes and theirs might inter- sect, would be supported by more rigid tests of prac- tice than he yet could refer to. Yet, if his life did not lead him with equal activity across the lines of theirs, it would lead him into the backwaters of mere abstraction. Even professed philanthropists and those who made their careers in works of charitable benevo- lence, moved more or less in the approach to these backwaters, as against the swift currents where men dwelt on even terms with the strong and the fortunate. It was among those boiling waters that Kendry's father had made his money. Kendry had no dis- 42 JOHN KENDRTS IDEA taste for a plunge in them; he had only an objection to making them his vital element. He did not want more money, more power, more distinction, than he possessed; yet he did not want to lose his fellowship with other men who were striving for those things. But he did want to devote himself to a strengthening of his will, a broadening of his conscious perception, a general extension of his being along the path that has its known beginning in protoplasm and its end in infinity. He had been still without the definite appli- cation of this desire necessary to give it living value. He believed, as he lay staring at the ceiling, that for the girl of his overnight adventure there was something he could perform that would focus the beginning of his career and that would lift his purposes from the threat of a wearisome vagueness. For the success of his plan he counted on Mary Eastwood; between her and himself the process, he hoped, would forge another link. He had jumped up full of the recountal he would make to her of his yesterday's adventure. But after having seen the hag- gardness of his unshaven face, the tatters of his gar- ments, he had not been displeased to find that Mary Eastwood and her mother, apparently unaware of his arrival, had returned to town on the morning train. Dishevelment was distasteful to Mary. Probable ap- proach to it, as in a strong wind, a wet pavement, a warm walk up a San Francisco hill, she scented afar and skillfully avoided. She was ever correct and blem- THE OLDER WOMAN 43 ishless, cool and colorless of skin, and utterly hooked and eyed in her simple richness of costume and coiffure. It gave her for his eye a classic mold, a sense of her being a refuge in restraint. There was little of that in the quickness of her judgments, of her facial play, of her reaction against what she did not approve of; but there was much of it in her aloofness as to all that lay within the sensual line. She was seven years his senior, but she had never referred to this fact. To suggest it to Kendry as an objection to his marrying her, would have been to meet his scorn. With his affection for her and with his idea he had started down the mountain, feeling like a craft stanchly stowed for a journey. In an hour and a half he had passed from these pleasant reflections to a beholding of the expectoration, the. profanity, the familiarity, the obesity, of a crowd on the front of the ferryboat approaching the dock at the city. The crowd had risen and patiently begun to stand long before the boat had turned in from the roadway. Among them he was recognized by some women in fine raiment, a capitalist or two, and an artist; and he distinguished many types of humanity, of many nationalities, all bent on purposes which had in common that these purposes were different from his own. The numerical argument smote him ; whether there was not something quixotic, whether always there is not, in trying to do precisely what no one else is trying to do. Against this, he summoned the soft vitality of the 44 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA girl, her gentle wistfulness, her blue-eyed mystery. It prevailed and he believed it would prevail with Mary Eastwood. The odor of sewage emptying into the bay at low tide assailed his nostrils. The mountain departed from the distant view, shut off by a row of splintered piles. The crowd poured forth through a precarious looking shed, it deposited Kendry in the midst of drays and street cars, of risen dust and hurry- ing feet, of shouts and clangor and rumbling, of jostling and importunities, where the one important thoroughfare debouched meanly to the water-front. Kendry's mind went back to the mountain, the clean chaparral, the air laden with wild-lilac bloom. He depressedly entered a cab. In America he generally regarded such a thing as extravagance. The cab bounced over sink holes and loose paving stones up the broad street lined with wholesale business houses ; it interfered with the cross traffic and with the cable cars, taking advantage where it could and giving way where it must. The build- ings were a heterogeneous mixture, some new and massive, ranging to positive beauty, others old and without the possibilities of the picturesque, all in the clash of undigested progress. Against its ephemeral total, its untidiness, the obstruction of the sidewalks, the compacted chaotic colorlessness of an American city, the cheerful sun rose from a clear sky, and a brisk breeze from the sea, sweeping loose papers and the debris of packing THE OLDER WOMAN 45 cases, enlivened the heart with a certain inclination to irresponsibility. Gradually the scene bettered ; the cab turned off at a point where the buildings had begun to be of the largest size and importance. Kendry looked up to the top of the structure that most impressively represented the Eastwood fortune. It stood a monu- ment to the late Mark Eastwood ; it reflected the per- sonality of his son and it was the financial background of his daughter. It was ornate and heavily corniced and bore the window signs of great corporations. It was imposing enough as an answer to an idea that might be suspected of altruism. It looked down upon Kendry as if smiling with its ability to crush him and his little millions by the vast preponderance of men and money represented within. His cab stopped be- fore a stuccoed building dating back to the bonanza days, beslitted with windows high and narrow. Shops covered most of the ground floor. The lobby of the hotel was gloomy with mahogany and cold with mar- ble tiles ; but in his room he had arranged colors that overcame the memory of the approach. They served to soften the harsh impression of his return to the city until he issued in another garb and hurried to find Mary Eastwood. The painted redwood structure of the Eastwoods, with its cupola, its lathe-work, its sanded balustrade, clung to a steep decline, from whose top it looked back over many hills and forth along the brief plane occupied by the houses of the millionaires of the era 46 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA of the railroad and of the mines. A half acre of sward distributed about it, added to the considerable open spaces in the neighborhood. The house stood in the well-kept respectability of a past fashion, neither beautiful nor cheerful, but spacious. To Kendry, mounting its steps at this stage of his suppliancy for the favor of its single daughter, its aspect was familiar but still formal. He hoped her mother would be there. He always had been at ease with Mrs. Eastwood; he had been at ease, though he was aware of her eye traveling between him and her daughter, at moments when their speech illuminated their state of sentiment toward each other. If Mrs. Eastwood desired a man of twenty-four to marry her daughter, her acts were apparently in accordance; her presence never endured but a few moments; her mood was of perpetual acquiescence to their plans for going to places together. If she wisely intended to add no fuel of opposition to a flame she might think to detect in her daughter, such an inter- pretation was beyond Kendry's habit of mind. It was Henry Eastwood, however, who received him. His manner was of cordiality overflowing from a heavy face and a large frame, which at thirty-three was of coming adipose. "You're never at your office, old chap," he said. " Two things I want to see you about. There's your lot back of Mab's on Mission street ; why don't you put a joint building on the two frontages ? It's a cinch ! " THE OLDER WOMAN 47 " Does Mary want to? " said Kendry. " Get in and make her want to ! " said Eastwood, on a rising scale, with his confidence, his winning manner which was an asset in his business. He leaned forward massively. " Make it another bond in your friendship with Mab! I can't help feeling how much our two estates would gain if we played our hands a little closer together. You know how our governors used to hobnob? Drop into the office, and let me show you another cinch or two ! " " You see, I don't spend the income, as it is ; and I've just got it all where I can operate it in about two hours' work a day," said Kendry. "I don't think " " Needn't say so now," Eastwood waved cheerfully. " The other thing I wanted to talk about was Mary. You can't operate her in two hours a day! Have a drink ? Now here's a friendly tip just how to operate Mab. Mind " " Go on," said Kendry, with good nature. " I came here to see her." " Well," Eastwood drawled, leaning back in his chair, "she's come home with a grouch a Pullman grouch ; some trouble with the nigger. She's got neu- rasthenia, sesthesia and Europomania. Nothing to her discredit," he said, with a look to Kendry. " It's a fashionable complaint. She wants to sell out her end of everything here and buy consols, at two and a half per cent., and never have to come back to this country on business. The trouble is that if Mab wants 48 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA to, she can ! Now, of course, I don't know what kind of affinity you are pursuing with Mab that's her affair. But you say you've come back here to stay. Well, she says she's come back to pull up her stakes. That all " he finished, twinkling wisely. Kendry heard the swish of silk petticoats in the corridor; he feared that his cheeks were warming. Eastwood rose lightly on his heavy legs. At the door he winked and lowered his voice. " You'll want all your steam ! " he grinned. He made his escape without formality, as his sister and her mother entered the adjoining room. Kendry had a moment's look at Mary's long straight lines converging faintly at the waist, her full dark hair, the agreeable perfection of her raiment. She gave an exclamation of long suffering, and threw herself wearily into a chair before she saw him. Kendry met her at the threshold, his heart beating too swift a measure, his determination to be a man of forty submerged in the fervor of his greeting. " It's a great joy to see you again ! " he said, to the cool touch of her fingers. She shook her head to him, in the obsession she had brought with her. " Isn't it too hideous ! " she waved through the open window at the hills of housetops, while he went for- ward to her mother. " How have you stood this place so long! It's stupefying! We're marooned here, for two months ! " " You find no compensation in the sunshine, the sea THE OLDER WOMAN 49 breeze, that line of mountains ? " said Kendry. Her frown mixed with astonishment at him. " What's to compensate me for those four days in a Pullman, for the insolent servants, for those dread- ful citizens, dinning their illiteracy in one's ears? What is there on earth to compensate for your spurious New York? It's too far out of London! And for Chicago it's too near into Hell ! " she calmly observed. Kendry laughed. Mrs. Eastwood watched him. Her iron-gray hair had never been the color of her daughter's. The less obvious current of her emotions was from temperament, not from middle age. She did not join in his indulgence. " A little habituation and one discovers the pleas- anter side of it," Kendry appealed to her. " A little tolerance and one loves the good side of it," Grace Eastwood said. Mary glanced at her pity- ingly. " I haven't the least intention of getting to love it ! " she said, to the maid who took her hat. Her determination stood in the pressure of her lips. Their thin line of slight curve, the high narrowness of her forehead, the slenderness of her nose in its regular descent, meant for Kendry her invincible virtue. " Will you tell me what there is here but food for a bourgeoisie? " she said. " Is there any art, any music, anything to soothe a single one of one's offended senses? It's a country where there's no conversation. 50 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA I shall go out to-morrow night, and talk Heaven knows what twaddle with the women in one corner, while the men crowd into another corner and talk real estate. I shall go to a cotillion and be led through a dance by the gentleman whose firm has done the catering for the evening. I shall go to the theater and see an English drawing-room drama played by persons who never set foot in a proper drawing-room, and who can't speak the English language, even through their noses. I shall go I shall go back to the Continent as soon as I can ! " she dismissed it. " How do you do ? " " Bursting with health ! " said Kendry. It belied the effects of his strain the night before. " Have you settled in California ? " Mrs. Eastwood startled him. Kendry made his answer boldly to her daughter. " Yes," he said. " I've discovered things to do here." He began the story of his day on Tamalpais, lightening the assault he had suffered and dwelling on the spiritual process that had worked itself through his strange encounters. He did not feel called upon to follow the irresponsible workings of his mind in a dream, where a girl with blue eyes became confused with a woman whose gray eyes now followed him with a touch of amusement and condescension. Her mother sat longer than her custom, taking him in. There had been in her youth a great power in her approving smile ; she had been beautiful and had moved things by her beauty rather than by the edged tools of intellect. He THE OLDER WOMAN 51 remembered, when he awakened to her having made her noiseless withdrawal, her remark that it was well for him to stay a good American rather than become a man without a country. She was on his side in that, he comfortably felt. Mary listened, with her fingers tapping the arm of the chair. He emerged into his plea for those blue eyes. " I want to change her environment, to let in the air and the sun. She'll meet her opportunities or rather, they'll come after her, no gainsaying that ! " said Kendry. " I rely on you to help me." Mary con- sulted her fingers. " Could she serve at a breakfast table ? " She looked up, with some preparation for his demurring. " Oh, I must have quite failed to describe her ! " said Kendry. " She's a personage ; she has majesty. She'd carry it all off here," he waved at the room. " Her voice is enough in itself ; it's like a cool waterfall in a far little canon. But it's her beauty that will suffice you. What I'm getting at is, that you'll want to model her." ' You mean on even terms," said Mary. " You mean I'm to introduce her into society. She can't ; she won't have any clothes." " She transcends clothes," said Kendry. "Then she isn't a she," said Mary. "But this rough; this person whom she follows about with a canteen of brandy am I to ask him to dinner ? " said Mary. 52 JOHN KENDRTS IDEA " Exactly not ! " said Kendry. " Don't you see, it is her being hedged into places where he can follow her that is spoiling her life. If we rescue her from that, if we create a natural environment for her, the air will be too rarefied for him to breathe. He'll simply expire. She'll blossom into her proper destiny. It will be as much a rescue as if she were drowning. She is drowning; and to save her will be the most tremendous satisfaction. It's the one sort of true satisfaction the world affords, I've become convinced. And what doubles it for me, is the thought that you and I should share it together." She faintly rose to his warmth. " You've fallen in love with a California cabbage-rose, from the out- side, I think," she said judicially. " I have never seen a girl of fine instincts who went hunting crim- inals in the wilderness at night, to give them brandy. But one doesn't have to follow the matter up be- yond convenience. It might while away one's exile. What's her name?" " I don't know. I don't even know where she lives," said Kendry. " It's my first purpose to find that out. I'm going at it now," he said, with a fine determination for restraint in his visits at the East- wood house. Mary surveyed him with interest, as he rose. His heart beat a little faster at the success of this first step with her. At the door of the drawing- room he suddenly fell from his resolve. He felt that he should get a return for his ardor. THE OLDER WOMAN 53 " It's going to be one more bond between us! " he said. " That's what I most want ! " She drew her hand away. " Don't ! " she said. " You must remember how this place gets on my nerves, and you must keep sane." He endeavored to smile collectedly. " Good-by ! " he flushed, trying to bridge the gap with warmth despite her. He murmured some disconnected sylla- bles. On the steps, he ground his teeth for having leaped the barriers; it had been callow, awkward, ridiculous. He must work for the moment when it would be she to step outside of them, even against her will. He was determined that such a moment should come. There was nothing to interrupt him from keeping on in that determination. CHAPTER IV A VISIT TO CHAN ROW THE girl with the blue eyes knew his name and could discover his address and return his coat. But Kendry was not in a mood to wait for anything. He had his programme, and he would demonstrate to Mary that he could carry it out with reference to the girl and by so much more, probably, with reference to Mary her- self. He stared out through the curtains of a window at his club. Chance might let him spend a lifetime before it favored him again as- it had on the mountain ; chance had him in its grip, powerless but defiant. Yet it was not extraordinary, considering the location of his club, that presently he saw her, unmistakably her from that poise of head, that richness of hair, gliding by in a blue dress on the open end of an electric car. Upon his precipitous return to the pavement, her car had drawn a block away ; but another followed it. He crowded to a standing place on the forward footrail. Presently she had alighted and was on another car, shooting up a hill, at right angles to him. Five min- utes later she changed again. Her car slid down a steep hill through Chinatown, and now he could best follow her on foot. Evidently something had oc- curred to alter her destination. She had traveled 54 A VISIT TO CHAN KOW 55 over three sides of a rectangle in a way that for any purpose was decidedly a roundabout. Kendry swung down through the Japanese fringe of the Chinese quarter with a zest. He saw her alight at Kearney Street and go rapidly to the north. Soon he was gaining on her by cutting across the square. She turned about once and swept a glance across the sward, so that he could not understand why she did not take account of the marked raising of his hat. Immediately she hurried down a narrow street and was lost to sight. When he reached the corner she had disappeared. He continued to another crossing, then turned back, looking into the entrances for one likely to have swal- lowed her. The halls were dusty and dingy ; some of them bore the ancient placards of small business con- cerns and minor factories. On one corner was the police headquarters and the morgue. Other open- ings led to cheap restaurants and saloons. The street was on the edge of Chinatown and of the Latin quarter at that point and its atmosphere incongruous with the girl. He could not knock at all the doors up the various stairs and ask for a young woman whose name he did not know. But he was certain that she had not gone beyond these narrow bounds and he resolved to wait. He took up a position in the square, where he could see whosoever issued forth. Chinatown came down on three sides of the square, with its signs in red or black and gold, and its painted 56 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA balconies. Across the square in the breeze that rarely fails, the bronze galleon of the Stevenson monument swept full-sailed. But for the box-like proportions of the inclosure the scene would have been of a pic- turesqueness complete. It grew dusk, and Kendry kept in mind the character of the girl's blue serge gown, of her simple straw hat, and of her distinguished bearing, which triumphed over a costume that was neither distinguished nor new. In his imagination he saw her dressed by Mary Eastwood's genius. For an hour he paced up and down. He became hungry and less confident as to the direction of her vanishing. It ended in his resolving on dinner, at one of the Bohemian restaurants near by, for a diversion from his disappointment. He bought one of the evening papers, observing that it was a sign of a relaxed will for him to do so. Its scareheads mocked his intelligence and belied his tastes, and he knew that part of its contents would arouse his contempt. But he entered the restaurant, and sat down at one of the crowded tables to run it over for its amount of important news while he ate. When he had finished and chanced again to glance at it, he saw that one of its scareheads contained the name of Arthur Paulter. Paulter's room had been robbed of sixteen thousand dollars' worth of securi- ties, mainly unregistered bonds. A Chinese cook employed on the premises was missing. Such a theft on the part of a Chinaman from a white man was A VISIT TO CHAN KOW 57 unprecedented, and the police were inclined to doubt that he was the thief. But Paulter accused the cook of having been in collusion with a firm of Chinese jewelers to whom Paulter had supplied silver bullion, certain bars of which they claimed had been cored and filled with baser metal. Paulter had denied respon- sibility for this ; but a criminal suit had been brought against Paulter and he had evaded summons by leav- ing town. In his absence the matter had been com- promised out of court. Now, on his return, he charged that the theft had been arranged in order to compensate the Chinese for their relinquishments of part of their claim against him, as well as to mulct him in a large additional sum. These securities, then, were, as he had overheard Paulter say, all that the girl and her mother possessed. The loss completed her as a vision appealing to his imagination, his generosity. If at the moment he could have found Paulter, he would have attempted by a sweet reasonableness to make his way to the girl. She would take some employment, of course, and Kendry must see that it was of the most desirable sort. From that he must go on to the upbuilding of her opportunities. Her beauty was the outward sign for him of a quantity the most desirable in the world, addressing itself to him for preservation and care. Helping her, as one cultivates the soil for the lily, would add to the sum total of human joy and welfare, whatsoever it cost in the neglect or the uprooting of 58, JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA unlovely weeds. It was a great enterprise, this devout recognition and setting in its proper sphere of a lovely work of nature; and, according to Kendry, one of its wonders was to be the beautifully impersonal part he himself would play. He would be the god behind the cloud, godlike in his powers and in his remoteness. Where he sat one could see down the busy space with the rows of small tables and a broad frieze of con- tinuous Pompeiian red. Drawn in sharp contrasting colors on this frieze was a series of scenes and figures, with inscriptions, quotations and cabalistic words, sug- gesting the dreams of one who had read cheerfully of a droll Balzac and had dined and smoked with lib- erality in a company whose mood was for complete jocular abandonment. On the ceiling, from above the door, the prints of a pair of masculine feet were drawn, proceeding thence along to four prints of the legs of a table, between which waited two smaller footprints that were not masculine. At a longer table in the center of the room dined the group who popu- larly were supposed to sail under these emblazon- ments, and who gave the restaurant its literary and artistic vogue and made it " a place to go." They stood out rather well defined from the more elaborate personages who filled most of the tables along the sides, and who commented upon them in varying spirit, but generally with some envy of the prominence and gayety of the group. Kendry had but little acquaint- ance among them and but little sympathy for them, A VISIT TO CHAN ROW 59 because, for want of a better reason, they appeared to dine perpetually in one place. He thoughtfully tore out of the newspaper the reference to Paulter and folded it away. " Interested in that case? " said the little man at his elbow. Kendry for the first time examined him. The man had entered shortly after himself; he had extra- ordinarily large ears and small pale eyes that shifted with a certain intelligence beneath huge shaggy brows. He wore a suit of shoddy and a scarlet tie that nearly hid his collar. He breathed audibly through his nose. "Perhaps you know Paulter?" said Kendry. " I saw you putting away that article," said the little man. " Got business in Chinatown, I suppose " "You seem interested in the case," said Kendry, with some enjoyment of the man's persistency. " Perhaps you are acquainted in Chinatown." The man across the table grinned. He was bronzed and wiry, with close-cropped hair and with a fouled anchor tattooed on the back of his hand. A black- haired Pole sat next him, with a waxy skin and hollow dreamy eyes. The four at the table made a mixture unusual even in this Bohemian resort. The little man met Kendry's evasion with a full glance, then smiled good naturedly, pulling at his brushy mustache. Ken- dry was in the whimsical mood to pass him his cigar case. The man with the ears and the sailor un- hesitatingly accepted his choice tobacco. The Pole searched in his waistcoat pocket. 60 JOHN KEN DRY'S IDEA " I will accept one of yours, sir, if you will accept one of mine/' he pronounced in excellent English. His pricked fingers held forth a black suspicious weed which Kendry gravely bowed to. The two others twinkled. " You don't mind my taking one of my lighter ones first ? " Kendry politely said. " I don't mind your throwing it into the gutter, sir," said the Pole, without expression on his face. " It's the same privilege I have with yours," he ex- plained, putting Kendry's in his mouth. The four looked at each other while the matches were passed. " Well, gentlemen," the little man puffed, " speak- ing of Chinamen ; if you do a Chink white he won't do you no dirt. I don't know what your sentiments are " he deferred to Kendry. Kendry thought- fully surveyed him. He was being approached, he felt, and as with most rich men experience had taught him to be wary. The sailor filled the pause by laying on the table the two chopped halves of a silver dollar. " You can have my sentiments for nothing," he said. They all looked at the ruined coin. " Case for a coroner's jury? " said Kendry. " It is," said the sailor, " and you can take it from me; the best part of a heathen Chinee is the horse- hair of his cue and pigskin of his hide. I've gone agin him in all the plague-ports of the world, and I say: have no business with him till ye have his ear nailed to the doorpost ! " " Let us know the worst," said Kendry. A VISIT TO CHAN ROW 61 " Why, me and a friend of mine come ashore the other day and thought we'd have our fortunes told/' said the sailor. " There was a sign in Fish Alley : ' Ah Ma has the double eye 3 (meaning second sight, I suppose). 'Plenty good fortune tell!! Price: one bit girl, two bit boy, three bit lady, four bit man. 9 " We climbed three flights of stairs that shook like ratlines, and come out on the roof. 'Twas a tannery up there, laid out with cat and dog skins; and there was a four by seven cabin, with every kind of an unmatched stick you could pick up in a lumber yard. ,Here was old Ah Ma with a pair of specs as big as door knobs and nothing else more to speak of ; for he was mending a hole in the bilge of his old silk breeches. He had a stove made of an oil can on top of a stool outside and was stewing pig's liver and rice on the top of some charcoal ; and inside he had a bunk the size of a bachelor, with a turkey red comforter, and the walls lined with Sunday supplements to keep out the wind. He had shelves all around it, with bottles of dried snakes, horned toads, and sea-horses. There was an old crow hung by the neck in a glass jar of gin, and every kind of bad-looking bug and worm and every other sort of poisonous thing ye can pick off the ground for your health. He had a cat with no eyes, and a Waterbury clock, and a fat China joss tied on the wall, smelling with joss-sticks. Across the door, to keep you from minding his business, he had a table with an ink slab and brushes and half a 62 JOHN KENDRY'S IDEA dozen bamboo cylinders filled with fortune sticks, and a red luck calendar with blue silk strings. " He bows very solemn and sticks the needle in a safe place in his breeches and lowers himself down into 'em and was ready for business. Then I handed him out some China lingo." " Pidgin coo?" said Kendry. " Not at all/' said the sailor. " I hashed up the names of the treaty ports with a little Chinook jargon and tonsilitis and then sang it up in contralto with a kind of bow-string movement to my gizzard. Twas fluent with him. I finished every sentence with * Hankow ' ; and it made him think I was from that place. All these Chinese are from Canton and can no more sabbee Hankow dialect than you could smoke that cigar the tailor here just give you. So says Ah Ma: " * You talkee Melican ? You wanchee fortune tell?' " * YouVe hit it in the eye, Mama/ says I. For a joke I took my friend by the nape of the neck. ' My friend here is deaf, dumb and daffy no fashion can talkee do, no fashion can sabbee. But the poor idiot thinks you can tell his fortune and draw the map of his life. He don't care about his life, Mama/ says I, ' but he would like to know the name of his future wife in order to avoid making her acquaintance/ "Old Mama, he picks up a little gong and tells my friend to keep striking it, which I made show of say- A VISIT TO CHAN KOW 63 ing it to him in sign language. Then while the music was going on, old Mama he picks up a telescope and looks through the little end of it into my friend's ear. Then he shuts his eyes and pulled out a stick from the cylinder and finds the number and looks up the number in his calendar and begins to write, with me and my friend nodding to the gong as solemn as sea-cows. ' You might read that, Mama,' says I, ' for I left my gold spectacles at Hankow/ The old man never cracks a human expression on his face. * This fortune tell,' says he, * one piece wife catchee two year more. Two boy catchee, two year more. Maybe one piece girl catchee bimeby, lookout! Bimeby one tousan dollar catchee/ Then he sits back as blank as an empty plate. ' Is that all ? ' says I. He makes no answer. ' Is that all for climbing them stairs and not being in- vited to luncheon a la pig's liver ? ' says I. He looks at me ; then he measures up my friend. ' How much pay ? ' says he. ' Why, " four bit man," ' says I. Then the old man smiles with his eye toward me and frowns with the eye toward my friend. * S'pose make him pay fi' dollar/ says the old man to me. ' Two dollar hop you ; two dollar hop me/ ' Two dollar hop what, what ? ' says I. Old Mama he points at my friend. ' One piece man four bit/ he nods. ' One piece damn fool, ft dollar. You take a hop, me take a hop/ " We sat staring at him a bit, helpless with our feel- ings. ' No more time talkee/ says the ol