IF You BELIEVE IT, Irs So BY PERLEY POORE SHEEHAN ILLUSTRATED BY ADA WILLIAMSON and PAUL STAHR New York THE H. K. FLY COMPANY Publishers LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS COPYBIGHT, 1919, BT THE H. K. FLY COMPANY TO A. W. S. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Lost Money . 9 II. As Among Friends 16 III. Into the Night 25 IV. The Book of Revelation 32 V. Remission 39 VI. Near Chatham Square 45 VII. The Big Idea 51 VIII. Testimental 56 IX. "Sky-blue" 62 X. Sniffing the Asphodel 68 XI. Spring 76 XII. "Flowery Harbor" 82 XIII. As Seen and Overheard 88 XIV. Mr. Richard Davies 94, XV. Up the Street _ 100 XVI. Against All Comers 107 XVII. The Peace Angel 113 XVIII. The Touch Divine .120 XIX. Bound Hand and Foot 126 XX. Partners 132 XXI. " Welcome to Our City " 138 XXII. Justice: That's All 145 XXIII. The Quality of Mercy 150 XXIV. Small Voices 155 XXV. Friend Emerson 160 XXVI. The Beating Heart 166 XXVII. Eye to Eye 173 CONTENTSCONTINUED CHAPTER PAGE XXVIII. Us Two 181 XXIX. Starlight and Graft 187 XXX. High Praise 193 XXXI. Compensations . 198 XXXII. Positive and Negative 203 XXXIII. Alvah Listens 211 XXXIV. Into the Depths 217 XXXV. The High Tower 224 XXXVI. Pardon 230 XXXVII. "The Old Homestead" 236 XXXVIII. Hesitations 242 XXXIX. Acid and Alkali 248 XL. "I am the Printing-Press" 253 XLI. Faith and Mortgages 259 XLII. Far Thunder 265 XLIII. Lightning 271 XLIV. Before the Storm 276 XLV. Shelter 281 XLVI. The Guiding Light 287 XLVII. Armageddon 292 XLVIII. "This Is My Friend" 297 XLIX. Face to Face 304 L. Skin for Skin _.310 LI. Tooth and Claw 315 LII. The Return of the Shade 321 LIII. The Last Believer 328 LIV. The Dawn of Glory 334 LV. Epilogue 340 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE "He's the finest man in the world," the girl flamed from the midst of her trouble .... Frontispiece "Honest and on the level, how long do you think it's goin' to be before you all get yours?" ... 53 "But, Chicky," said the old man; "I wasn't tryin' to hornswaggle you. Hain't I said all along we were splitting fifty fifty?" . .... . . . 311 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO CHAPTER I LOST MONEY LATE afternoon, and the usual ebb and flow, back wash and cross-currents of humanity in the Grand Central Station. The complication was rendered still more complex by the thousands of commuters leaving for their homes in the suburbs, by yet thousands of other suburbanites arriving for a dinner in town and an evening at the theater. A muffled hubbub filled the place, somewhat like that one hears in a concert hall when a big orchestra is settling into place all the instruments more or less in tune, yet emitting different notes, some of them high and some of them low, some of them tiny and shrill and some of them hugely vibrant. "Kiss Mabel for me and tett her " "Ah'll Jcerry yo 9 beggage." "Great guns! We've missed "There now, I'll be back." And then a diversion, not very loud, not very notice able in that vast concourse: "My money! It's gone! I I've lost my money." 9 10 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO Not much louder and not much more noticeable, say, than the crushing of a Stradivarius would have been; but a disaster of equal import, to judge by the quality of the speaker's voice and the appearance of the victim himself. He was an elderly man, still broad and powerful, yet with shoulders manifestly stooped with years of hard work. He had a rugged, kindly face, in which there were soft tints of pink and brown; clear, blue eyes, in which, even now, there was more of kindly innocence than consternation. For the rest, he was very clean, freshly shaved, and dressed in his Sunday clothes. He had been carrying a large but not very full valise of imitation black leather. He had placed this on the polished stone floor at his feet while he used both hands to search his pockets. He stood right in the middle of one of the main drifts of mixed humanity hurrying to and from the trains. "What will mother say? She told me to be keerful !" Perhaps a hundred two hundred pedestrians passed him by, no more conscious of his existence than they would have been of any other obstacle to be auto matically avoided. Then, an undersized messenger-boy paused and looked at him with detached interest. Two Hunkies, outward-bound for a labor-camp and still with an hour or so to wait, also decided to become spectators. Three small children, with eyes like robins, lingering on their way to the drinking-fountain, forgot their thirst. This was the audience that the old man addressed. LOST MONEY 11 "I wouldn't mind it so much I suppose whoever finds it will bring it back but it wasn't really ours." He was panting as lie said it. He had pushed back his broad-brimmed, soft felt hat, and a fine sweat was already making his white hair stick to his temples. There was no mistaking his desperation, yet he sought to cover this with a smile. "Yuh'd better look out," said the messenger-boy, with a lurch of sly wisdom, "er they'll be swipin' yer grip." Even this small nucleus of a crowd, however, had now been sufficient to attract others from the shuttling throngs commuters still with a minute to spare, a porter or two, prospective diners, idlers, they that had just said good-by to friends. In the midst of this growing crowd the old man still stood there stricken, a little dazed, taking account of his pockets. He had a big, clean handkerchief in one of his hands, and this was constantly getting into his way. He worked a large, old-fashioned snap-purse from a trouser-pocket and opened this and peered into it and then forgot to put it back. The crowd, enthralled, began to vocalize : " 'Smatter, pop?" "What's he advertising "Somebuddy's gypped his roll." "You should worry. Come on 'r we'll miss the five ten: 9 A special policeman, soft-spoken, smooth as oil, came through the crowd without visible effort, and reached the old man's side. 12 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "What appears to be the trouble?" While the old man explained, the man in uniform made a slight signal to a regular policeman who was drawing near. "Come on now," said the regular cop, as he began to shoo the crowd away. "Move along. They ain't nothin' happened. Come on, now. Move al-long!" And the crowd was drifting into motion again, its interest already on other things. "Did you see what the Reds done in the third?" "Yeh, she's beginning to talk. Says: 'Dada! Dada!' " "Oscar win " "But, my Gawd, Lows, she's not over seventeen!' 9 The old man looked at the two policemen, the special and the regular. "Mother Martha she's my wife," he recommenced, breathlessly, apologetically, with contrition and grief, "she 'lowed I'd better have it sewed in my pocket. She's generally right." Had he received a bullet through the chest he would have looked like that breast heaving, the color drain ing from his face, his mild eyes those of one who con fronts the ultimate catastrophe. He made a mighty effort to pull himself together. He touched his tem ples with the wadded handkerchief. He was grasping for familiar realities to hold him up. "Mr. Dale he's the president of our bank told me I'd better let him send a draft." He was speaking only with the utmost difficulty. "Mother she thought so, too only she wanted LOST MONEY 13 me to see New York again. Been working pretty steady. Hadn't seen the place for thirty years." By one of those peculiar shifts in the human whirl pool of the railroad terminus, the recent vortex where they stood was now almost completely quiet. Over there, fresh passengers and clinging friends were hud dling for the departure of a great express. Nearer, an iron gate opened and at once, like the waters of a sluice, the people flowed away in yet another current. "Maybe you got it in your hip-pocket, rj said the regular policeman with practical sympathy. The old man made another examination, fumbling, hopeless, yet thorough. "I got my purse," he said. "It ain't that but the wallet." The wallet, it appeared, was old ; one that his daugh ter had given him years ago. He spoke of this daugh ter as "our little girl." No, it didn't have his name on it, but he'd recognize it anywhere about eight inches long by four wide, and the leather used to be red, but now was a sort of shiny brown. He could have told it blindfolded, he had handled it so much. He could almost recognize it by its smell like old, blind Rex, a worn-out, ancient dog of his back home. The special officer disappeared in the direction of the train-shed. The policeman was taking notes. Of all those who had been lingering there the typ ical New York crowd, amateurs of emotion only two remained. One was the messenger-boy who had origin ally discovered the sensation. Mere profundity of thought, rather than an active interest, seemed to be U IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO holding him. It wouldn't have been so easy to guess what held the other onlooker there. He was a strangely handsome youth, this other a little too handsome, almost, with classic features, large, dark eyes, a general expression of alert but brooding intelligence ; only, a closer look revealed a certain unwholesomeness about him, such as comes to both men and plants that lack sufficient sunshine. So it was with his clothes almost too elegant, and yet, if scrutinized, showing a certain note of cheap luxury and underlying shabbiness. This youth strolled away a dozen steps. He came back again. He took casual note of others who came and went. And sometimes this was with an all-but- imperceptible start, as if he recognized them, or saw something about them that pricked his interest. But, again and again, his attention reverted to the old man who had lost his money. The special policeman returned from the train-shed, reporting the result of an inquiry: "I guess it's a larceny, all right." "Guess we'd better go with him to the desk, Bill," the regular policeman proposed. "I don't yet," the old man gasped miserably, "see how it happened." "Happens every day," the special replied with Stoic philosophy. "Don't it, Joe? This way, sir. First, you'll want to make a complaint." "Yes, and sometimes twice a day if not oftener," Joe cheerfully averred. LOST MONEY 15 "Hey, youse's fergittin' yer grip," the young mes senger called out. "Well, just see!" The old man took the grip from the boy's hand, but immediately set it down again. Once more he opened the ancient purse that had been spared him. He, trem bling, opened this. He sought a coin. The messen ger's lethargic face assumed an expression of astute expectancy. "Here's a nickel for you, bub. I suppose I really should give you more." The messenger was not averse, but the law inter vened. "Gwan, now ; beat it," Joe advised ; and the messen ger skipped away not intoxicated, precisely, but mol lified. The two officers and he who had lost his money his broad old shoulders a trifle more bent than ever started off in the direction of the precinct police-sta tion. The young man he of the dark eyes appeared to hesitate. He came to a decision. He started in pursuit. CHAPTER II AS AMONG FRIENDS "ELEVEN hundred dollars, Mr. Officer," the old man was saying to the chubby-faced lieutenant back of the high desk. The official bent and wrote, his face shin ing redly in the electric light. From the midst of his labors he rumbled. "Name?" "Ezra Wood." "Address?" "Rosebloom this State. We've lived there, mother, and me, for nigh onto sixty years." "Was it before, or after, you got off the train " "After, I reckon ; right after, Mr. Officer. You see, I was sort of thinking about the folks at home, and what my wife said about me being keerful. I touched the wallet in my pocket. It was there. She says to me something about New York not being like Rose- bloom ; but we're all born of women, have our trou bles " "Notice any one specially who might Ve taken it?" "Done what, sir?" "Why, took your roll " "You mean I was robbed?" He'd taken off his hat as soon as he entered the 16 AS AMONG FRIENDS 17 high bare room of the police-station, and he stood there now uncovered his silky, white hair stirring a little in the draft of the place, his benignant face graven deep with lines of pain and patience and simple goodness. The official light shone down upon him, covering him with a halo. And such a different picture did he make from those usually presented by the strangers who stood before this unholy judgment-seat, that most of the policemen who passed through the room paused there to listen. Anyway, it was at an hour when there wasn't much to do a new detail just gone on duty, the old platoon coming in. It was to the room at large, and those who listened there, as much as to the lieutenant back of the high desk, that the old man addressed himself when he next spoke. He had raised his face. There was a new calm and a new courage there. "I suppose it's all for the best,'* he labored. He had a fleeting breath of hope. "Maybe it wasn't stolen after all. I've always been kind of absent-minded about letting things lay around. Maybe some one will find it give it back." "Maybe," droned the lieutenant, with the flicker of an eyelid at those who were standing by. "We're go ing to try to find it for you, cap; but they said it, all right, all right, when they told you that this burg ain't no Rosebloom. The train and the whole platform over there at the depot has been searched, and you can bet your life, after what you've said, your roll ain't among the stuff they find. If it was, we'd have heard about it before this. The depot staff's all right. 18 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO They've got to be. We got 'em trained. YouVe bee* rolled by a dip had your pocket picked." "You must know, Mr. Officer." "I'll get this report down to headquarters" and he passed the thing he had written to a sergeant "and if your crook's to be got they'll get him." "I'd hate to think I had something to do with send ing any one to the lockup." "That's where he'll go," the lieutenant laughed. "Say, if he's lucky, that guy'll get only about fifteen years." "But we don't know how he was tempted. Perhaps he was hungry, and old, was driven to it." Some half-dozen policemen were in the room by this time. The old man's presence and the lieutenant's indulgent mood had relaxed discipline just a trifle. There was a gurgle of derision. One of the policemen turned to the dark-eyed youth who had lingered near. "Ain't he a sketch ?" the policeman inquired. "Don't want to do nothing now to the gink that nicked him." The youth of the dark eyes smiled. He knew many policemen. But he didn't speak. He brooded. He watched. He listened. "Fergit it," the lieutenant was advising, jovially. "It wasn't no old geezer turned this trick. This is the work of some fresh young boy. The big town keeps turnin' 'em out faster 'n we can trim 'em. Of course, sooner or later, we make the pinch." "A young man?" "Sure! They're the only kind that can work New York ; and even they slip up and then, good night f AS AMONG FRIENDS 19 "I don't believe that I could send a boy to prison right at the beginning of his career to break his mother's heart." "Well, what do they do when they catch a crook up in your part of the world?" "There be none. No, sir! Not in Rosebloom. We raise our boys and girls to be God-fearing citizens, up there. Oh, the boys'll take a few apples, now and then; but that ain't stealing. And I suppose the girls are about like all other girls poor little, innocent things. But nobody locks their doors up there. Every one trusts every one else lends a hand in case of misfortune." "Say," the lieutenant exclaimed, with an eye on his audience, "if I ever got located in a burg like that, believe me, I'd stick ! What did you leave it for, with all that money?" "It was foolish of me," the old man answered, gently. "But that money was owing on a mortgage for nigh two-score years. Mother and I borrowed it from old Major Higginbotham at the time our little girl took sick. And then, when the first mortgage ran out at about the time the old major died, and we weren't in a position to clear it off, why, we renewed it with the major's son that's Mr. Edgar Higginbotham and he's been carrying it ever since. I wanted to see him - tell him how much mother and I appreciate his kind ness. You see, hard as we'd try, we weren't always quite ready to meet the payments. Our little girl died a beautiful and saintly creature when she was bare ly thirty. But the Lord's been good to us. He has. 20 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO We've done better these past six years put by more'n a thousand dollars. This eleven hundred dollars was the last we owed." He halted in what he was saying. He stood there with his mouth open as if he wanted to say something more. "Now what do you know about that?" the policeman in the back of the room whispered hoarsely to the dark- eyed youth. "Some yarn!" the youth answered from the corner of his mouth. It was a barely audible whisper that came from Ezra Wood: "Stand fast in the faith ! Stand fast in the faith ! I will, O Lord; but will Martha be able to bear it?" "You don't want to take it so hard," said the lieuten ant with kindly intent. "Why, somebody's gettin' theirs every time the clock ticks, here in New York." He turned a leaf of the official blotter. He read : " 'Mamie Martin, white, eleven, run over by brewery- truck, both legs -fractured, internal injuries. Bettevue.' " 'Gus Pemberton and so forth lacerations prob ably blinded. 9 " 'Max Mendelbaum, attempted suicide, ar rested ' ' 'Body unidentified girl ' "Get me?" the lieutenant demanded. "That sort of stuff day in and day out, every day in the year, Sun days and all." "The Lord have pity on us all!" said Ezra Wood, bracing himself like a soldier shaking his pack into AS AMONG FRIENDS 21 place. "In my own trouble I forgot about the trouble of others." "That's all right," said the lieutenant. "You got your troubles, all right. So's every one else that goes up against this town. Y' understand? Unless they're tough like an elephant, which a lot of 'em are, or strong like hairy gorillas, or slick like the snakes in the zoo they all get theirs! Either that, or you've got a brain on you like Thomas A. Edison, or a good thing, like me old friend, John D. Get me? Because, if you ain't, sooner or later, this big town's going to eat you alive." "The Lord have pity on us all!" Ezra Wood re peated. "I suppose my loss is nothing only only, you see " "Uncle," the lieutenant said, more softly, with a burst of unprofessional sympathy, "if I was you, I'd go and get something to eat and then lay me down for a good night's sleep. There ain't nothing you can do. Leave it to us. Cheer up. Say, we'll have the commissioner himself on the job. If your roll's to be got, we'll get it. Won't we, boys?" "Surest thing you know." "We're wit' you, lute." "I can't tell you how I appreciate your kindness," said Mr. Wood. "I told mother Martha that's my wife we've been married nigh onto fifty years that folks down here were no different from our folks up in Rosebloom. I wish that you gentlemen any of you could pay us a visit some time. We'd give you a royal welcome." 22 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Get that?" whispered the policeman in the back of the room. "Peeled of all he's got sooner'n he can get out of the depot, and yet he comes back wit* an all- round invite to pay him a visit." The youth of the dark eyes appeared to be too absorbed to answer. He was listening, one would have said, with a sort of fascination. "You're all to the good," the lieutenant averred. And he so far forgot official dignity as to come around from the other side of the desk. "Now doncha weaken. We're on the job." "And I appreciate your advice. I'm still a little dazed. Let's see. I've got three dollars minus a nickel and my return ticket home. Maybe you can recommend some modest sort of place where I could get a room." The lieutenant meditated, but not for long. "Tim," he said, "you got to pass the Boone House. Suppose you show cap, here, where it is. You can get a room there for a dollar," he enlightened Ezra Wood ; "and sleep hearty, without fear of nobody going through your clothes." He had an afterthought. "Of course," he added, "there ain't no bath goes with the room." "That's all right," said old Mr. Wood; "I took a bath before I come." "And in the mean time," the lieutenant added, "if anything breaks, I'll let you know." "The Lord bless you, Mr. Officer," said Ezra Wood, "and all you gentlemen. You know the old saying: 'No kind thing was ever done in vain.' " He turned AS AMONG FRIENDS 2$ again to the lieutenant and gripped the officer's out stretched hand. "And I hope you'll thank the commis sioner for me. You tell him how sorry I am to give him this extra trouble. Only, you see, we'd worked so hard for that money, and skimped, and strove, and we'd waited so long for this time to come, and thinking we could sort of let up a little, and not have anything more to worry about-; " "I getcha," the lieutenant murmured. "And now New York's taken it. New York! New York!" It was almost a sob, but the cry was soft. "You're right. New York lives on what it takes from the country. And its fodder ain't only the wheat and the corn and the fruit that we send to it, either; but our faith and our hopes ! our dreams and our children ! Where'd you come from ?" he suddenly demanded, whirl ing on the lieutenant. "Galway, Ireland !" "And you?" "Three Rivers, Michigan." "And you?" "Iowa." He flamed his questions at the various policemen standing there, and they answered him. "And you?" His eyes for a moment gleamed into those of the strange youth who had followed him here from the station. "I was born here," the young man said. "What are you doing? What are your dreams? 24 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO What are your ideals? What is this town doing to you?" 'Hie old man didn't await an answer. After a fashion the questions had been answered as soon as asked by the boy's silence and the look in the boy's face. "That's it," Ezra Wood intoned with a soft but surprising intensity. "That's it. That's what New York does takes a little dream, or an ambition, or an ideal from Galway, or Michigan, or Iowa and breaks its legs! Lacerates and blinds The body of an unidentified girl ! Fresh young boys ! flung into the hopper of asylums and prisons! 'Tain't mere money I am grieving for. Only only " "Twas all he had!" "Only, when it was lost taken from me stolen those 'leven hundred dollars that were our sweat and our blood; but, most of all, her sweat and her blood, and she a helpin' every one that needed help, and com- fortin' the afflicted " He broke off. "I forget myself," he said with dignity. "You'll not forget to thank the commissioner." CHAPTER III INTO THE NIGHT EVEN at this early hour there was something grue some in the quality of the night. The day had held a promise of spring, but now the wind had shifted around to the northeast, bringing with it a dampness and a chill. The poorest of the city's workers were hurrying home the men and women, and the girls, who work on through to six and half-past six in the shops and factories. There is a lightness and a joy about a good many of those workers who leave their tasks at five. They still have a residue of strength and gaiety. Those who quit at half-past five are always duller, sadder, with still less power to react from the drudgery just ended. But those who quit their jobs still later are the utterly forlorn, the utterly fatigued. These flowed eastward now a black and turgid cur rent. The current gave tongue and spoke with all the languages of the world, but through the babble there was always an undertone of weariness. "Is it always like this?" asked Ezra Wood. "It is at this hour," said Tim, the policeman who himself was almost as gray and old as the man from Rosebloom. " 'Tis what the lieutenant said it was a slaughter-house for body and soul.'* 25 26 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "You've stood it, friend," said Ezra Wood. "I have," said Tim, "by the grace of God!" The Boone House was a little old-fashioned hotel on one of the side streets just off Third Avenue. There was a plate-glass window to either side of its sooty entrance. One of these revealed the office and sitting-room, where sad gentlemen, respectable but homeless, sometimes sat. The other window, partly curtained, was that of the once almost-famous Boone House restaurant, which still did a fairly good occa sional trade. But, despite the vicissitudes that had come to the old hotel, it looked good to Ezra Wood, and his heart warmed again in gratitude to the friendly police. "I thank you, sir," he said, shaking hands with the old officer who had shown him the way; "and I hope you'll tell the lieutenant not to worry too much if he is unable to recover the money." Officer Tim looked at the other gravely for a dozen seconds. "I'll tell him," he said. "And I've got a feeling that 'twill be all right with you, most likely in some way we can't foresee." Himself like a strange fish in the home-flowing cur rent of workers, that youth with the dark eyes who had already followed the old man of Rosebloom to the police-station had set out to follow him again. He also noticed the chill and the darkness of the night. For that matter, he noticed also as if he were seeing it now for the first time the heavily undulating drift INTO THE NIGHT 27 of workers. Their voices reached him Yiddish and Greek, Italian, Slovak, and Hun but he found that he was translating all this into the things he had heard the lieutenant and the old man say: "Even they slip up and then good night!" "The Lord have pity on us all!" "This big town's going to eat you alive" He kept Ezra Wood and the policeman in sight, al though he knew that there was no necessity for doing this. He knew where they were going. Only, he seemed to derive some benefit from the mere spectacle of the old man. After a manner, he was like a boy who follows a circus parade fascinated, getting visions of a world unknown, yet conscious all the time that he's going to get home late for supper. He turned into the splotched illumination of Third Avenue not far behind the two old men. He paused. He stared for a moment into a pawn-broker's window. Overhead, an Elevated train thundered on its way to Harlem. The surface-cars screeched. The crowds flowed by on foot. He started to follow again. He was at the office-window of the Boone House when the policeman was recommending the citizen of Rosebloom to the clerk, and tarrying there for a few more words. The old man had taken off his hat again, his white hair shining through the dimness. "Good night !" the youth exclaimed under his breath, and he was off in the direction of Third Avenue, going fast, at first, then more slowly, more slowly yet, until he came to an indecisive halt. What was the matter 28 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO with him? What was biting him anyway? "Good night," he murmured again like a sesame against the spell that was holding him. But instead of wavering forward he wavered back. The next time that he looked into the front win dows of the Boone House he saw that the old man was eating his supper in the restaurant. It occurred to the youth that he himself was hungry. Why not eat here? He lingered at the entrance. He again walked away swiftly, but dwindled off to a standstill. He had to eat ! He was ravenous. There was an oyster-booth on the corner of the avenue, and presently he had given his order here for a couple of sandwiches. But scarcely had he taken a bite out of the first sandwich than he found that he wasn't so hungry after all. He paused to think and forgot to chew. He wished he hadn't ordered anything at all. While he stood there, an old, old woman, dressed in black and very dirty, crept up with the unction of a hungry cat. "Have a sandwich?" said the youth. A slow smile came into her puckered face. Her breathless voice had an echo of sweetness in it. "It's been a long time," she said, "since a young gentleman's invited me to dine." She was still smiling as she hid the proffered sand wich under her shawl. "Here's a buck to go with it," said the youth. She accepted the dollar with the same smiling suavity and rewarded him with the gleam in her rheumy old INTO THE NIGHT 29 eyes. And she was telling him something again an intimate confession of sorts that called for an occa sional grimace of modesty on her highly informed old mask. But he didn't hear her for two reasons. One reason was that the Elevated trains and the screeching cars made a din that smothered her voice. The other reason was that, louder yet, came the lieutenant's words : "They aU get theirs!" Like this old dame, like so many others he had known, like a projection of himself in the no-distant future. The old lady was still mumbling autobiographical bits with the oysterman for audience now; only, the oysterman, having heard many old ladies like this hold forth on similar themes, was not listening particularly when the youth started off down Third Avenue. He went as far as the next corner. He stopped there to let an auto pass and found himself unable to go on his impulse gone invisible hands upon him to turn him back once more in the direction he had come. "Suppose I telephone!" He meditated this. He knew that there wasn't a chance in a million of the old man's going out. Yes, this was the idea. Maybe, like that, he'd raise the curse that had put the nippers on him. There was a cheap little tobacco-shop, a few doors away, with a blue telephone sign on its window. "But what'll I say?" He entered the place. He bought a package of 30 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO cigarettes. He took his time about lighting one of these. With an impulsive, clinching movement, he turned to the telephone-book and opened it. " 'Boone Boone House' and I'm a nut !" He squared his flat and shapely shoulders. He arched his neck, pulled in his chin. He strode on out of the place, and, at the door, almost bumped into the old lady of the oyster-booth. She peered up at him. Perhaps she didn't recognize him at all, but she smiled at him, graciously, with the echo of an ancient gracious- ness. And what was that the old man had said about "No kind act " He bit his cigarette in two. He hurled it to the sidewalk. This was certainly fierce. And here he was, once more, in the street that had called him. Ezra Wood had gone up to his room in the Boone House. It was a large room, as New York hotel rooms go. It was on the third floor, with a certain air of faded splendor about it and if he could have a room like this for a dollar, possibly he might have got a room that was good enough for fifty cents; but he didn't like to ask, now that they had taken the trouble to give him this one. And, besides, there was no telling when he would receive a visitor from headquarters perhaps from the commissioner himself. He would have liked to go to bed at once, but he scarcely dared. He wondered how long he ought to wait up. The room was in the rear, with two windows in it INTO THE NIGHT 31 that commanded a dim vista of neighboring yards and the backs of houses, and the glimmering lights of these; and the human noises that came from them of speech, and laughter, and squabbling quarrels all fretted the strings of his homesick heart with a heavy hand. He had taken off his boots and his coat, and drawn one of the squashy old chairs up to a window he had opened. And he seated himself there smelling the night, hearing its strange squeals and thunders, yet battling himself betimes to overcome the mounting tumult in his breast. The thing to do, he argued, was to be brave and strong, to "stand fast in the faith." But he moaned: "Oh, God Almighty!" His mind came reeling back to a consciousness of present things. Some one was knocking at the door. CHAPTER IV THE BOOK OF REVELATION "COME in, sir! Come right in!" said Ezra Wood. "I was sort of expecting you. Although I don't look it," he added, apologetically, with reference to his un dress. He could see that the young man in the hall was not a member of the hotel-staff, although the light was dim, for the stranger wore a hat one of those velours hats, with the brim pulled down on one side. The light in the hall was dim, and the hat further shaded the stranger's face, all of which gave him a certain air of mystery. But detectives were men of mystery. The touch of mystery was heightened by the stranger's reticence. He appeared to be in no hurry to come in. There, for a fleeting moment or so, he seemed to be on the point of betaking himself away. "Be you waiting for some one else?" Mr. Wood inquired. The Boone House was not one of those hotels which announce the arrival of visitors. There was no way of telling whether there was one or two. What was that the stranger said? It was a sibilant whisper at the best, inarticulate. Anyway, he was inside; and, once inside, he lost no time. While Mr. 32 THE BOOK OF REVELATION S3 Wood was still closing the door, with patient effort, for the lock was somewhat out of order, the stranger went swiftly to the window that was closed and drew the blind, then went with equal speed, smoothly, without noise, to the window that was open. There he paused for a pair of seconds, close to it, but a little to one side, looking out. Then he closed the window and lowered the shade. All this in the time that it had taken the elder man to close and latch the door. "Did you come from the commissioner, or did the lieutenant ask you to come?" Mr. Wood inquired. "In any case, I'm glad to see you. Won't you make your self comfortable?" And he motioned to a chair. As yet, both of them were standing; and, like that, they certainly made a very striking contrast old Ezra Wood, his white hair uncovered and slightly ruffled, his bent old frame loosely clad in black, except for his white shirt-sleeves and his gray, home-knitted socks; and then this stranger slender, dark, shabbily dapper from his velours hat on down to his pointed, light-tan, cloth-top shoes. He still wore his hat. From under it his dark eyes gleamed. Mr. Wood was willing that his guest should take his own time about speaking. He was eager to put the young man at ease. He pulled a heavy old gold watch from his vest-pocket and carefully opened it not noticing the visitor's glance of avid interest. "What's the time?" the young man asked. "It is now just eight o'clock." "I didn't know it was so late." 34 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO He spoke like a man who has but a moment to stay. "That's the hour," said Mr. Wood with calm de cision. "This watch is a marine-chronometer. My uncle sailed his ship thrice around the globe and no end of times to China and back with this to go by." "What's it worth?" '''It's priceless to me because of him who owned it Reminds me of him, true-running, never-failing, a mas terpiece of gold and steel. Let's see! The store price? Oh, maybe five hundred maybe six hundred dollars. Like to look at it?" He undid the watch from its guard. He passed it over. "Sit down! Sit down!" The stranger slid down to the edge of a chair. HP put his hat on the floor. He had taken the watch and he studied it while Ezra Wood benignantly studied him. The benignant gaze did not falter when the youth suddenly shifted his eyes, but not his position, that made me realize our blessings." He was still speaking like that, absorbed, as the youth silently, stealthily crossed the room in the direc tion of the door. The old man hadn't noticed him. The visitor's movements were as light and swift as a shadow's. He put his hand on the knob. But there he paused. CHAPTER V REMISSION HE turned and looked back of him. He could see nothing of the old man but a crown of white hair above the shabby back of an antiquated easy chair. The visitor drew something- from the breast-pocket of his elegant but somewhat soiled coat. He thrust it back again. He silently opened the door, as silently closed it again. Pie looked around him. Almost within reach of his hand there was a small marble-topped table of a design once fashionable. The only thing on this was a dusty little coverlet of white cotton. With a movement so deft and lightning-quick that it would have served a sleight-of-hand performer m carrying through his most difficult illusion, the visitor had taken something once more from his breast-pocket and hidden it under the coverlet. Even so, he was none too quick. The old man had turned, was peering over at him. Had the old man seen anything the visitor didnt want him to see? It was hard to tell. Most likely he had not. Mr. Wood got up from his chair bent* rugged, absorbed. He came over to the young man* 39 40 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Will I see you again?" he asked. "I don't know." "Fd like to see you again. I sort of feel as if you and I were neighbors." "When V you pullin' out?" "I suppose it will be to-morrow. It hurts me, but I'll have to see Mr. Higginbotham. Did they tell you about it? He's " "Yeh! I got all that." The visitor gave a quick glance, unobserved, at the marble-topped table. "It hurts me, but I'll have to tell him what's hap pened." "Was the money for him ?" "Yes." "Ain't he one of those rich guys ?" "I believe his father left him quite a bit of money." , "Well, what did he need this for?" "He may not have needed it, but it was his." "You wouldn't have got no benefit from it?" And the visitor shifted his position somewhat away from the door. The old man let one of his hard and twisted hands rest on the marble-topped table. His fingers toyed with the dusty coverlet. "Only the benefit of a debt paid," he answered sweetly. "And now I suppose you think that the gun who copped your leather owes you something." "Do you?" The youth who had given his name as Charley REMISSION 41 Harris turned abruptly to the door. His sudden movement had disarranged the table-cover. "I'm not thinkin'," he flung back savagely. "To hell with thinkin'. It costs too much." He was putting something back into his pocket into the inside pocket of his somewhat shabby but stylish coat. And, in spite of all his manifest embar rassment and indecision, his movements had remained as swift and baffling as those of a wild animal at bay. He would have been out of the door right then and that the end of the episode but the crazy old latch refused to function properly. The delay was sufficient to permit the old man to react from his surprise. "Charley ! The word was an appeal. At the same time it was something of a command, full of quiet dignity, also with a friendly but perfect authority. It seemed to penetrate the back of the boy at the door and fasten him as surely as a harpoon would have done. The youth turned. He did this slowly. He slued around and stood there panting slightly, like one utterly exhausted. "What?" he gasped. The old man merely contemplated him. "What do you want?" the youth repeated. "To help you." "I don't know what you mean." "You're young," said Ezra Wood, softly. "You're struggli% boy. You're strugglin' 'twixt right and wrong." "Where do you get that?" 4 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "I can see it in your eyes. Boy and man, I've seen God's critters struggle like that. I've struggled like that myself wrestled through the night. If ye look for it, the Almighty's 'most always there ready to lend a hand." The words were gently, calmly spoken, yet with a certain thrill of exaltation in them. The dark eyes of the youth glowed steadily as if they were unable to leave the other's face. The boy was breathing deeply. He slowly returned his right hand to the inside pocket of his coat. He let it rest on the contents of the pocket. As one who watches for the manifestations of some terrible and tragic phenomenon, he drew from the pocket that thing he had recently hidden under the table-cover. The thing was an old wallet, shiny and brown. There was a moment of silence. More than a mo ment. There, for almost a minute, silence was dripping about the two of them like something palpable like rain. "Mine !" breathed Ezra Wood, with an intake of his breath. The visitor held it out to him did this weakly, as if all his, so to speak, feline strength and speed had de serted him. His own face was going as white as the old man's face had been over there in the railway- station. His life was concentrated in his eyes. With out haste, without other apparent excitement than that shown by his visibly shaking hand, Ezra Wood re ceived the thing he had lost. REMISSION 46 "Count it !" The old man slowly opened the wallet. There were eleven bank-notes in it, each for one hundred dollars. "So you were from headquarters, after all," the old man said softly. "Sure !" There was nothing to indicate that the symbolism of this occurred to either of them. "And you were tempted." "What do you think! It was easy money .** "Even our Lord Jesus was tempted." "I got to beat it. If I don't say, what d'yuh mean shakin' a wad like that in a fellah's face if yuh don't want him to nick yuh handin' him a ticker 'at's good for another five hundred?" "Are you in such need?" "Sure!" "Will you take what you need? Charley, I had a son, but he was born in the country, he had his parents unworthy but he had our love. I know now I had forgotten that the country is a protection that it's sweet, and tender, and pure. There are some, I suppose, that can live without it. Our boy couldn't. If he'd stayed in the country we might have saved him. But here, not even our love, nor his early training, were enough. He wasn't strong, and if you're not strong " "Yuh got it right 'strong like a hairy gorilla* " "The city's not the place for you. Just think! Spring is here the apple-orchards all drifted with white, and the birds bluebirds and redbirds, robins 44 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, ITS SO and finches swelling their little breasts with song and the meadows getting deeper and deeper with grass and, by and by, the grass will be just filled with wild strawberries. All this under a sky that would make you understand why men call it heaven blue and friendly only a few fleecy clouds to serve as ships for your dreams. "And after spring, the summer's there; with every day 'most a hundred years long, each year a happy lifetime sunshine, and a smell of mint, of hay and apples, and the big woods there to give you coolness and shade, a spring to drink from, a brook making music, and at last a sunset proclaiming the glory of God, and the stars His long-suffering mercy. "Son, were you ever in the country in the autumn? "That's the time of the harvest crops coming in, pumpkins in the corn, stock all fat and slick for the county fair, plenty for every one, folks laying in their supplies for the winter. And I've always loyed the winters burning hickory, parching corn, smoke-house perfuming the valley with a smell of new bacon. But, no it wa'n't this that has always made me love the winter so. I loved it for the big, clean winds and the miles of untrodden snow, for the sparkly nights when every star might be the star of Bethlehem ; and I loved it for the kitchen stove, where Martha and I have always sat on winter nights and sort of had our little children back. "But it's spring in the country now. Can't you sort of hear it calling? I can : to me, all ye that are heavy laden!' 9 CHAPTER VI NEAE CHATHAM SQUAEE IN the meantime, New York's change of weather had culminated in a sleety rain, and the city had become, more than ever, a place of disconcerting contrast of mortuary black and garish color ; of dripping trees in haunted parks and juggernaut traiHc in howling streets ; of shivering poor in places that were damp and dark, and of blatant luxury in places that were warm and brMliant. Moreover, it was Wednesday with here and there, in somfeer neighborhoods, an oasis of yeUow light where a church presented its mild invitation to prayer-meet ing. But, unless all signs failed, the devil also was keeping open huse dirty and discreet, sinister and cordial- there where the rear doors of saloons were open, and where the scarlet lobbies of obscure hotels insinuated secrecy and welcome, and Oriental restaurants, stealthy clubs, throbbing dance-halls, and noisy but secretive flats, al] offered forgetfulncss and mystery. Night, for much of the world; but the day was just beginning for a certain saloon, especially in the back room thereof. 45 46 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Where's Chick?" "Ain't seen him. What'll you have?" "Hello, there, Solly!" " *Lo, Phil! Have a drink." "Watchures?" "Me? I'm takin' a little old-fashioned mixed." "That's good enough for me." "Two mixed ales, Eddie. Seen Chick?" Outside and overhead, an Elevated train squealed through its thunder as it rounded the curve in Chatham Square. "Came here to see him myself," said Phil, glancing about the back room of the Commodore. He was a well-favored youth, engaging, vicious. Both he and Solly were better dressed than the other male customers present. Phil shot the next question at Sollj from the corner of his mouth: "Goin' to join the mob?" "Whose Chick's?" Solly was a cherub, pink, two hundred pounds. The other gave him a glance of cynical amusement. Solly was so used to playing the part of dull innocence that he couldn't drop it even among friends. But a glint of hard wisdom flickered for an instant in Solly's baby- blue eyes. It was answer enough. "Here's luck," said Phil, picking up one of the glasses that Eddie placed on their table. "Drink hearty!" Over the receding thunder of the Elevated train and the maudlin racket of the room, they could hear a thump of tambourines and then a crescendo chorus: NEAR CHATHAM SQUARE 4? "At the cross, at the cross, Where I fir-rest saw the light." At the door to the dark hallway leading to the street appeared a slim young girl with brilliant eyes and other indications of consumption about her delicate and pretty face. She was dressed in black. Her brown hair was waved plainly down over her ears in that style once made famous by Cleo de Merode. And her hat might have, almost, belonged to one of those singers out there in the army of salvation. She advanced to the table where Solly and Phil were seated. "My God !" she said. "What a night !" "Hello, Belle!" said SoUy. "Hello, Irene!" said Phil. But there was no disagreement when they asked her to sit down, state her wishes in the matter of refresh ment. The girl herself seemed to attach no importance at first to the fact that they had called her by different names. The barkeep came forward, swinging his shoulders like a boxer feinting for a lead. "Hello, Eddie !" she greeted him. "Hello, Blanche!" "Say, you boys call me Myrtle after this, will you?" The girl reflected. "Rock-and-rye, Eddie!" And she added : "I want to change my luck. Where's Chick ?" "Maybe he's been pinched," Phil suggested with a grin. "Him?" cried Myrtle. "The bull ain't been born that'll get anything on Chick." 48 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Many a good man's got his," mused Solly, pa ternal. "I wonder where he is," said the girl. "Out enjoyin' a stroll," said Phil, he being a hu morist. "He's planning some new riot," Solly averred. Solly was right. The youth of the dark eyes had torn himself away rather abruptly from the old gentleman in the Boone House. He had done this with the instinctive panic of a man who finds himself at grips with a power that he cannot comprehend. He had never read the story of Jacob and the Strange Man, and the wrestling- match that lasted till dawn, but he was feeling a good deal as Jacob must have felt. Why should be have lost his nerve in this old man's presence? No, it wasn't a matter of nerve. He had kept his nerve, all right, or he couldn't have followed the old man to the police-station, stuck around during all that followed. Why hadn't he been able to make his getaway when there was nothing to stop him? Why did he come over here to the Boone House right at the time when a flick from headquarters was due to show up? Since he had shown up, how camcj it that he hadn't palmed the old geezer's watch? That was the way his thoughts ran. But back of these superficial riddles there remained NEAR CHATHAM SQUARE 41) an instinctive, unshaken knowledge to the effect that some great change had occurred in his life, that he would never hereafter be the same. Again like Jacob only this boy didn't know it his thigh was out of joint, but he was blessed. Beyond the door at which he still lingered, he could still see with the eye of his mind the old man he had just left, could see him in his shirt-sleeves and his stocking feet, an innocent, bewildered old hick, absolutely helpless, a child in need of a guardian. "A poor old rube!" That was what he was trying to tell himself. But all the time that he was trying to tell himself this there was another voice that shamed him, that presented to him this man in there in the semblance of no man he had ever seen before bigger than most men, white and shining, with power to do with other men as he willed. The same voice was telling him that he would never see this white and shining giant in there again, but that this would make no difference. He had been thrown, and thrown hard. There would be a limp in his make-up forever more. But he had been blessed! He never did quite know how he got out into the street again. He was so absorbed in wondering what had happened to him that it was only some time later that he noticed the sleety rain, the mortuary black and the garish color of the New York he had always known remembered that he had a date with friends. 50 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO Far down-town, where Park Row and the Bowery meet like a rowdy old beau and a beldame with a past the young man of the dark eyes left the Elevated train that had brought him south. He was shaken. He was muttering to himself. "Comin' down fer a card of hop," was the com ment of a gateman who saw him pass. But he felt as if he had been drugged already, if the truth were known. So much to think about! Yet thought almost impossible! Still he was thinking, thinking, with such intensity that he passed them by and noticed them not the slippered Chinamen, the coal-stained men of the sea, the befuddled women, the lurking gangsters. The sleet smote him. He merely lowered his head. He entered the "family-entrance" of the Commodore. He also paused at that door where the girl in black had stood a while ago. "And there's Chick now!" said Myrtle. CHAPTER VII THE BIG IDEA CHICK came over to the table where his friends were seated, slid the vacant chair into position, dropped into it. Since that first glance from the other side of the room he hadn't looked at his friends. During most of the conversation that followed, his eyes were elsewhere. There was no special occasion for it, per haps, but hardly at any time would his voice have car ried beyond the table. As for his friends, neither Solly nor Phil had given him more than a shifty glance. But Myrtle looked at him, frankly, openly, except when he happened to look at her. Neither did they speak loudly. "Hello!" said Chick. "How's the boy?" Solly wanted to know. "Watcha been pullin'?" Phil demanded. "Been here an hour." Eddie, the bartender, came up, rolling his shoulders. He had a smile for Chick, a scowl for a noisy cus tomer at another table. "Ask 'em what they want," said Chick. "Bring me a schooner-glass of milk with a couple of eggs in it." He slanted a look at Myrtle. "Coughin* again, ain't- 51 52 IP YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO cha, kid? Bring a glass of milk for her, Eddie, but make it hot." "Gotcha," said Eddie, and sidled away. " 'Smatter with the boy?" asked Solly. "Needs some booze to cheer him up," Phil volun teered. "Wait till he's had his breakfast," Myrtle recom mended, without reference to the hour. "Can't you see that he hasn't had anything to eat? You'd be that way, too, if you'd just got up." "You got me wrong," said Chick. "All of you." "What's the answer?" "Nothin's the matter with me. I don't need no booze. I didn't just get up. I've just been doin' a little thinkin', that's all. I got a big idea." "If it's like that last big idea of yours when we worked the wine-agents' ball," said Solly, "come across.'* "Nothin' doin' along that line." "Another mill in Madison Square?" guessed Phil. "Wait'll he's had his breakfast." "I'm goin' to hand it straight to you three," saJd Chick. "You've treated me straight. You're about the only ones that ever did. You're the only pals I have." He paused. An aged drunk was squabbling with himself in a corner. Strained through the windows of the place, between the intermittent rumble and roar of Elevated trains, there came the discordant, nasal whine of a Chinese flageolet. ' I Honest, and on the level, how long do you think it is goin' to be before you al get yours f' THE BIG IDEA 53 "Honest and on the level, how long do you think it's goin' to be before you all get yours?" It was as if all sounds stopped. The effect of Chick's question was silence. The silence was absolute, so far as the four at the table were concerned. Solly took out a cigar, bit the end from it, spat out the end, struck a match, then looked at Chick through the bobbing flame as he lighted up. Phil gave Chick a lingering look from the corner of his eyes; his thin mouth went cruel. Myrtle stared wide-eyed, startled, a little frightened. Solly was the first to recover himself. "Oh, I don't know," he said. "Maybe I'll retire, or something ; start a saloon ; go over and live in England or France. I will, when I get the big stake." "What's bitin* yuh?" asked Phil. Chick stuck to his line of thought. "Where's Silver Smith? Joliet! Roscoe Flynn, who stalled for him? Up the river! Where's Curly, and Clivvers, and Big Jones ; Mary Mack, and Boston Sue? Ask the island or the morgue." "My God, Chick, don't!" said Myrtle. "You get it, kid," said Chick. "They was thrown by their crooked pals,'* said Phil. "Either that, or the old stuff got >em, or the snow." "You ain't comparing yourself, Chick, with that bunch of rummies, are you? Not to mention ourselves." "They were all as good as any, in their day." "But not like you!" "Not in one respect. They stayed too long." 54 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "And they didn't have the chances you got," said Solly. "Why, boy " "You make me sick," Chick broke in. "Chances ! Chances! What chances did I ever have? Brought up by a wood-merchant learned how to swipe every thing I could get my hands on before I was ten years old; taken on by Blodgett, the Dutch house man, and almost got beaten to death; and would have been if Muscowsky hadn't taken me to help him work the lofts ; and after Muscowsky, the Hessian, for stores ; and after the Hessian, young Billy Gin, for store-win dows; and after Billy Gin, Old Doc, the cleverest dip of 'em all. "Chances! "I've had my luck in not getting mine when the bull dropped Blodgett from the roof, or when Muscow sky was shot. Where's the Hessian? Twenty stretches. Billy Gin? Makin' faces in a straight- jacket! Old Doc ? Dead at thirty-three ! "I've never had no chances. Has any one worked harder than me ? Has any one tried to play straighter with his pals? Haven't I left the booze alone?" He gave Myrtle a look that made her drop her eyes. "Haven't I been straight and fair in other ways? Have I ever broke trainin' always been able to do my turn in the ring as a stall at havin' a profession? And what's the result of it all? I'm broke. This old town's broke me. You got to have a thinker on you like Thomas A. Edison or a good thing like Rockefeller get me? Or tough like an elephant, or strong like THE BIG IDEA 55 a monk, or slick like a snake, and then some get me? Or this old town'll eat you alive !" Solly dropped a slow wink at Phil, and Phil grinned cruelly. "Eat your breakfast, Chick," Myrtle urged. "Drink hearty !" said Solly, lifting his glass. "Lookin' atcha," said Phil. There was another comparative lull in the noises of the night. The aged bacchanal in the corner was mumbling now. As the youth of the dark eyes looked at him, perhaps there was a dissolving away of the coarser colors and the coarser lines until, under the same sort of white hair that he had seen once before, this night, there appeared a milder, kindlier face. He flashed his eyes at Solly. Solly grinned. He hadn't liked Chick's talk, but he was getting his cherubic humor back. "If it was any one but the boy," he said, "I'd back me guess that he'd got a green pill. It's the weather that's got to you, my boy. Let Eddie put a finger of rum in the slop." "Leave him alone," said Myrtle. "I've talked to you fair and on the level," said Chick. "There's the big auto meet down at the bay next week. I suppose you boys'll be there." "With bells on," said Phil. "And what's the big idea?" asked Sol. "Oh, nothin' very much," said Chick, but his voice quivered. "I'm quitting. That's all ! I'm blowin' the game!" CHAPTER VIII TESTIMENTAL IP there had been an effect of silence following Chick's words a little while before, his words now were in the nature of a sputtering fuse preliminary to an explosion. Nothing deadly. Something in the way of fireworks. Solly let out a guffaw. Phil stiffly turned his head for another sidelong glance, derisive, his thin mouth expanded in a snake- like grin. Myrtle rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her hands, her wide eyes staring, the fine vapor of the drink in front of her slowly exhausting itself like some tenuous, disappearing hope. That was all for a while. The Chinese musician played. There was the sound of a brief but vigorous encounter between two belligerent thugs in the street. Through the odorous air, of the room there crept an added aroma of chop-suey and incense. "I'm blowin* the game," Chick repeated in a whisper, and his fashion of saying it indicated that he said what he did for his own enlightenment as much as that of the others. Also there was an implication that he was surprised by the declaration as much as any one ; yet, that he understood it perfectly, that it was the result 56 TESTIMENTAL 57 of all his hard thinking groping; thought which at the time had seemed to be blind. "Yuh talk about me having chances," he said with soft but passionate intensity. "No guy's ever had a chance unless he got started right. There's only one place where yuh can get started right there's only one place where most of us can keep right get me? And that's out in the country." "He's wisin* up," said Phil, "to what I tells him about Saratoga and French Lick." Chick did not reply. He hadn't even heard. To one who could have understood, his dark eyes would have told the tale eyes that saw a vision. The sordid walls of the back room had disappeared blue paint, dirty plaster, fly-blown lithographs of prize-fighters, burlesque queens, and once-famous horses; these had disappeared, and in their place was a melting prospect of apple-orchards white with bloom, then a sunset, then a wide sky, silent, fiery and nebulous with the billion stars. Perhaps, even, the mingled reek of beer and tobacco, chop-suey and incense, yielded to a cleaner breath. Most of the visions that men have are atavis tic, have nothing to do with present experience. "What do you know about the country?" Solly asked. "NothinV "What do yuh think it is just a sort of zoo full of hicks waitin' to be trimmed?" "I never been outside of New York City in my life," said Chick, absorbed. He faced them, a little sullen, ready to fight. "But I know I'm goin'. That's all. 58 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO We're the rubes and the hicks if yuh come down to it us guys that stick around here in the slums waitin' for the cell-block, or the island, or the morgue. Get me? I gives you the dope. This big town eats yuh alive." "Chick's lost his noive," Phil grinned. "He's made a bad play. It's trun a scare into him." ''Guess again," Chick countered, with a subdued but deadly menace that was to put Philly out of the argu ment for a while. "I put one over to-day at the Grand Central 'at 'd made you swell out your chest for the rest of your natural. I'm out in the train-shed see? with a local comin' in. I pipes one of these rubes comin' down the steps. Bulls and specials all around smoke-porters swarmin' not a chance in a million to make the getaway. And I touches the rube for one thousand bones !" "For the love of Mike !" "My Gawd!" "Me lost my nerve ? Fergit it ! I listens in when the hick makes his squeal I tails him to the house I gets my hunch I hands him back his roll I'm through !" "Do you mean to say, my boy," Solly inquired, "that you nicked the jay for a thousand?" "One thousand one hundred." "And you make your getaway?" "Clean." "An' 'en you hand it to him back?" "You heard me." Solly looked at Phil. "You get your other gueas, all right. Chick ain't lost his nerve nor nothin'. Say, TESTIMENTAL 59 it'd take the nerve of a dentist to pull a thing like that then tell it!" "Yuh fat gonef " Myrtle interposed. "Say, ain't Solly the limit? Neither him nor Phil's got a brain for anything higher'n a ham sandwich. I'll go to the country with you, Chick, if you want me to. The doctor says I ought to go." Chick looked at the girl. She tried to brazen him out, but there was a shade of wistfulness about her. She wavered. She shrank. "You're all right, Myrtle," he said to her, almost as if there was no one else there to hear. "Yuh got your faults, but yuh got a heart, and y' ain't dead from the neck up. And, so far's I know, you're still as straight as they make 'em. Keep that way, kid. Do you know what I'm goin' to do for you? I'm goin' to take you up to the Penn Depot and give yuh a shove 'at'll put yuh in Denver. Ain't that the place the doctor said?" "Yes, but " "I'm goin' to stake yuh. That's all for you. If yuh ever think about me again, just sort of pull for me, kid, because I'll be needin' it, maybe, more'n you." The little speech, and the simple, mortal directness of Chick's mood, impressed the other two men. Solly was moved to further speech, but he was subdued. "The boy ain't sore at his old pal!" For a moment, however, Chick ignored him. Chick was still addressing Myrtle, ostensibly, although Myrtle was apparently letting her interest waver. Myrtle, it 60 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO seemed, had got something in her eye and was having trouble to extract it. "You're going to do what I tell yuh, kid. Go out West where the cowboys are. A year from now, and yuh can put it over on this here Daughter of the Gods. Get me? And some nice young feller's going to pick you out and find he's got a winner. Cut out the guys like me and Solly and Phil. You know the wise ones! so damn wise they can't see what's comin' to 'em even when they get the straight tip." Solly was sober, but he was cynical. "So it's the old reform!" he droned, tongueing his cigar and taking Chick in with narrowed eyes. "What yuh got against it?" "Nothing! Nothing!" Solly's voice registered weary patience. "Only, what's the use of your takin' to the bushes? Get a political job here in New York like a lot o' others." "Yeh and keep on bein' a crook like them !'* But Chick could see that his friend was sincere. "I want to get away from the crooks and the crooked stuff be fore it gets me," he explained with desperate persistence. "I want to get out where the apples grow, and the little birds are red and blue and know how to sing. Get me? And where the people are so honest that they don't have to lock their doors at night. Why, say ! Here in New York a guy can't get into his own house without a bunch of pass-keys, and every other guy you meet in the street is a bull or a gun, or somethin'. How do yuh expect a feller to keep straight when he's up against no thin' but bull-con and flimflam, rough- TESTIMENTAL 61! house and fakes, sniffs and smokes, creepers and ah, what's the use ! Yuh know what I mean !" "If yuh mean," said Solly, "that your rubes are a bunch of plaster angels with wings on their backs, some body's been handin' yuh the wrong line o* dope. I know. I was born in the country myself. And for all your dirty, low-down crooks, Chicky, gimme your hick crook skinnin' each other out of peanuts ; hookin' pennies from old women ; sousin' on the sly ; takin' dirty money with both mitts on week-days and wearin* white neckties on Sunday." "That ain't the kind I'm goin' up against," said Chick m his slightly stifled voice. "Where are you goin' to, then?" Solly inquired. "The moon?" "No, I ain't goin' to the moon," Chick replied with a dogged grip on his vision or his hunch. "But I'm goin'' back get me? 'Way back!" "And who is this," came a paternal voice, "who speaks f going back 'way back?" CHAPTER IX "GRANDPA !" Solly almost sobbed. To judge by Solly's accent, and the expression in Solly's cherubic face, the newcomer really was some cherished relative ancient and beloved one whose presence was a gift from Heaven almost too good to be true. " 'Way Hack ! 'Way back !" And he solemnly wagged his head. He would have been a remarkable personage in any place of assembly, but most of all in the back room of the Commodore. Phil was the next to recognize him. Into Phil's cynical but well-favored countenance there came a touch of amazement, also of respect flavored with awe. "Sky-blue!" breathed Phil. At the pronouncement of that fabulous name Chick turned. His first impression was of a cascade of white whis kers, then of black broadcloth and a gold chain. It was only an instant later that he met the friendly twinkle of a pair of the brightest and keenest eyes his own eyes had ever met. They belonged to a man who couldn't have been much less than seventj. His 62 "SKY-BLUE" 63 ministerial and hoary benevolence was rather empha sized by the fact that he wore a peculiar hat shaped like a plug hat, but of stiff, black felt and that his necktie, when it could be seen, which wasn't often on account of his whiskers, was a particularly flat, black Ascot. The tie was, however, ornamented with a jet-and-gold scarf pin big enough to serve a lady for a brooch. "Sit down," begged Solly, getting to his feet. But Eddie, the bar-boy, had his eye on the new arrival. In Eddie's face also there was a look of happy surprise. At the slightest gesture from the old gentleman, indicating that he was willing to join the party, Eddie had stepped forward swiftly with a chair, held this in place while the patriarch seated himself. Eddie breathed his willingness to be of further use: "What kin I bring yuh, bishop?" The bishop reflected, with an alert appliance of thought. "Bring me" he paused, then pronounced the rest of it like a scientist stating a complex theorem "a cocktail containing two parts Bacardi rum. Hold on, now! You tell him who it's for, and tell him that I don't want lemon but lime, and that he's to put the lime and the sugar in before the rum. Hold on !" He reflected, benevolently. He thrust a finger and thumb into the pocket of his well-filled vest. He thoughtfully extracted a fifty-cent piece. "Well, go on," he said. "I'll see how you get me 64 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO that order filled before no, here ! You give me forty cents. Quick !" He didn't have to speak twice. He picked up the four wet dimes Eddie had left in exchange for the larger coin which Eddie had seized in his rush for the bar. Then the bishop looked around at his table companions. He smiled. He blandly winked. "I bet," he said, complacently, "that's the first phony coin Eddie's took in for quite a spell. Solly, my child, I haven't seen you since you was a little shaver selling lemonade at the Muzee." He cast an indulgent glance toward Phil and Myrtle. But it was to Chick that he addressed himself with kindly interest: "Was you thinking of leaving New York?" Chick was momentarily embarrassed, but Solly an swered for him. "You ought to 'a' been here, grandpa. The boy here's a little sour on the game hands us a line of dope about how everybody gets it in the neck if they stick around too long. Say, it was in my mind to ask him how about you. Nobody ever got nothing on you; did they, grandpa? You ain't got any kick at how the world's been treatin' you ; have you, grandpa ?" The bishop was placid, but before he could formulate his answer Phil contributed to the conversation. "The old reform-bug's bit him." Myrtle turned on him. "You should worry," she flared. "Yeh," Solly mocked, as the humor of the situation got the better of him ; "says he ain't never had a chance because he wasn't raised up a rube. He ought to know "SKY-BLUE" 65 somethin' about rubes like you do ; oughtn't he, grand pa?" "Was you aiming to go out in the country, son?" "Yes." Chick answered softly, still embarrassed somewhat. It was all right for Solly to play the familiar with this old man, but there was something about him, as there is apt to be about any celebrity that one sees for the first time, to cause the mind to recoil for a better look. "Sky-Blue!" "The Bishop!" There were a dozen other war names that belonged to this patriarch. His fame extended from coast to coast. This, Chick knew, but only in a general way. Now, here was the great man himself looking at him, taking a sympa thetic interest in his plans. Solly also diverted his interest to Chick. "Say," he whispered from the side of his mouth, "they ain't a bull in the world that'd dream o' hangin' anything on grandpa !" Before the interesting colloquy could develop further, Eddie came back with the bishop's beverage on a sloppy tray. In Eddie's face was a look of consterna tion carefully held in check. Eddie set the drink on the table and tentatively drew out the half-dollar the elder had given him. But Eddie's opportunity to put in a claim was deferred. The bishop lifted the glass. He smelled it. He took a copious swallow. He appeared to masticate the liquid before it got down. He turned to Eddie with a glint of rage so subdued and deadly and cold that even Eddie winced. 66 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Git me the bottle !" the bishop commanded. Eddie disappeared. He was almost instantly back, bringing the bottle with him. Sky-Blue took this and studied it patiently. "It's Bacardi," he pronounced with mild surprise. He pulled the cork. He decanted enough of the liquor into his glass to make up for the swallow lie had taken. He turned to Eddie. "Leave it here," he said. "I'll settle with you later." Eddie withdrew, but only as far as the next table, which happened to be empty. There he paused long enough to bounce his coin a couple of times on the table-top. The bishop refreshed himself with another swallow. He was mellow. He was suave. He slowly wagged his head. He watched, with a glint of kindly but detached interest, while Eddie, responsive to an inspira tion, slipped the bad coin into the return change of a tipsy customer on the other side of the room. Then, once again he addressed the group: "The country's good. I've always found it pleas ant." He went reminiscent. "My first wife was a country girl wooed her and wen her out in Missouri. " "Was she " Solly began. He hesitated, possibly for fear of committing an indelicacy. But Sky-Blue, abstracted, nodded his head. "Yes, that was her who later posed as the Princess Clementine or something up in Duluth." "Whatever became of her?" "I don't know," the bishop drawled. "Ain't she " "SKY-BLUE" 67 "No; she divorced me, or I divorced her I don't remember which. The lawyers could tell you. There's a bunch of rascals for you. I never could get the straight of it. But, speaking about the country. I was addressing a grange out in North Dakota not more than two weeks ago. And blooie, but it was cold!" He drained his glass and, absent-mindedly, filled it up again, this time with the Bacardi straight. "And I spoke of the blessings of the country. One of the most successful sermons I've got !" "One of the what?" gasped Solly. The bishop eyed him musingly. "Solly, my child," he said, "you always was a materialist." Myrtle dared speak. "I was tellin' him the same thing. I'm leaving for the country myself." "A good idea," Sky-Blue averred, taking her in with his bright and kindly eyes. "Oh, the great country ! It's so rich in sympathy ! Just let a bank president out there, or somebody, know that you are a young widder, genteel, and in reduced circumstances, and not knowing which way to turn next ! Oh, this great and generous land !" He turned once more to Chick. "But you go alone, my son," he said gently. "What line of reform was you aiming to manipulate?" CHAPTER X SNIFFING THE ASPHODEL POSSIBLY for the first time in his life, Chick was let ting his embarrassment get the better of him. He was on strange ground. That was the trouble. But his courage came to his rescue. He dared tell the truth even to Sky-Blue. "It ain't no line," he said. "I'm goin' straight. That's all. I got a hunch that I can do it, too, but only out in the country." Neither Chick nor the bishop paid any attention to Solly's snort of laughter nor Phil's reptilian smile. Chick was looking at the bishop, and the bishop was looking at his glass. He meditatively filled this from the bottle again. He was about to raise the glass when he halted his movement with a look of consternation. "Where are my manners?" he exclaimed, apologet ically. He summoned Eddie with a finger. "Why don't you take the orders of this lady and these gentlemen?" he demanded reprovingly. "Bring them bring them let's see a bottle of your best Catawba wine." He dismissed Eddie and momentarily gave his attention to Myrtle. "I'm going to ask them to make you a package of an extra bottle of that for 68 SNIFFING THE ASPHODEL 69 you to take away with you, and I want you to listen to what I say. You take your bottle of Catawba wine and open it and put in about a dozen tenpenny nails wrought nails don't let them give you cut nails wrought nails! and then cork your bottle and let it stand for about a fortnight a month would be better. Got that? Catawba wine and then your wrought nails !" "Yes," said Myrtle at a loss. "Then, what's she to do with it, grandpa?'* Solly inquired. "Poison the banker?" The bishop ignored him. "A dear old soul out in Juniata, Pennsylvania, gave me that prescription," he said. "She had a daughter that looked something like you, only she wasn't so good looking, and I asked her, says I: 'How comes it that Angelica,' says I, 'who used to be so slim and white now looks like one of those corn-fed girls,' says I, 'like they raise 'em where I come from,* I says, 'out Cincinnati way ?' " "Do you come from Cincinnati?" asked Myrtle. "Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't," said the bishop. "It all depends. Well, as I was telling you, the dear old soul, she says, says she : 'I'm giving An gelica a tonic,' and she tells me about that. So you needn't be afraid of it doing you any harm, my child. I've given the prescription to five thousand people if I've given it to one; and all I ever got out of it was a case of whisky from a liquor-house; but it did them all good. Wine and iron! Nature's gift to suffering man!" 70 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "You must do a lot of good," said Myrtle, to show her gratitude. The bishop emptied his glass. He made an atro cious face, as the stuff went down, but he filled his glass again. "Solly," he said, "it's nothing to me, but suppose you propose the smokes. You're looking fairly pros perous." "Gotcha," said Solly, and he playfully displayed a small roll of bills. "Here, Eddie, take their orders for the smokes." The bishop was in a reverie as he saw Solly's money. "You was sayin' " Solly suggested when Eddie had gone. "Oh, yes," said the bishop. But any one could have seen that it was still several seconds before he fully re covered his line of thought. "As I was saying, that's the advice I'd give to any young man. Why stay around where all the sinners flee to, when you can go to a sweeter, purer clime, where the lambs ain't all grew horns and whiskers yet nor learned how to eat tin cans?" "There's as many suckers here in New York, grand pa, as there are billy-goats," laughed Sol; "or nanny- goats either." "Tell it to Sweeny," countered the bishop promptly. He drained his glass, gathering philosophical force. "You'll make a success of this reform business, my son," he said, smiling at Chick. "You believe in good ness. That's the secret of success." He laughed in his beard. "Oh, this sweet, sweet appeal to benign flap- SNIFFING THE ASPHODEL 71 doodle and mellifluous balderdash! But you must be sincere. You must believe it yourself. Be good and you'll be happy. Oh, how I suffered before I learned the truth. Let us spread the truth to others not so fortunate as us. Let us carry the sweetness of this broad land to the besotted unfortunates of the wicked Babylon, to the end that they also, brothers and sisters, may be blessed like us and sniff the asphodel!" "He's gettin' a little stewed," breathed Solly. To Chick it seemed that there was a gleam of alert intelligence in Sky-Blue's eye, notwithstanding the ground for Solly's judgment. And the bishop himself followed with the wise suggestion that they all be go ing their several ways. Myrtle had her package of wine. There was nothing more especially pressing either to do or to talk about. "Solly, my child," said the bishop, with a trembling note in his voice that hadn't been there before, "I'm get ting too old to trust myself, but I can trust you. Eddie, here, is waiting to get back at me on account of that little joke I played on him. We'll fool him again. You settle and let me know how much it is. You wouldn't lie to me about it. Would you, Solly?" "What do you think?" They went out on to the sidewalk, leaving Sollj to follow. The rain had stopped, but the night had continued to be damp and unseasonably cool. Crowded up into a dismal but more or less sheltered corner of the bar room entrance they saw a little slum girl with an 72 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO armful of untidy flowers which she had evidently been trying to sell. It was the bishop who saw her first. 'Well, well, well!" he exclaimed. "What have we here?" The little girl looked up at him. She had a smile in her hollow eyes. She tried to repeat the formula of her salesmanship. Her lips moved, but her voice was inaudible. The bishop thrust his fingers into various pockets. He turned to Phil. "She says her flowers are worth two dollars," he announced, with cheerful sympathy, all trace of weakness now having disappeared. "Slip the little lady two dollars until I settle with Sol." Phil was obedient to the higher law. "There's your two dollars," said the bishop play fully to the child. "Now you're free to go home. Where'd you say it was?" He bowed his patriarchal head until his ear was on a level with the little girl's lips. "Ah, Cherry Street ! I shall have the honor of sending you there in a cab." And Chick remembered vaguely some tradition as to why this old man had been called Sky-Blue. It was because he was always doing things like this. He saw the bishop summon the night-hawk cabby, put the little maid into the vehicle no, he wouldn't take her flowers ; they had been rained on enough to freshen them up, and the weather was cool, so that she could sell them all to-morrow and saw him give the cabman a bill with a request that the cabman keep the change. The bishop was in a softer mood than erer when SNIFFING THE ASPHODEL 73 he returned from the little adventure. He was smiling, but his eye was a little moist. He ignored Phil with a slight hint of asperity. He seemed to be drawn to Chick. "See how little it costs to be kind to spread a little sweetness on our pathway through the world, as the poet says." "It looks to me like it sets you back quite a bit," said Chick. Sky-Blue dropped his voice to a confidential tone. "I'm going to let Phil keep that two dollars to his credit," he said ; "and the child will get home in safety in safety and happiness poor little sparrow, even if that was a punk dollar bill I handed over to the jehu." Solly came out and joined his friends. "It was eight fifty, grandpa," he announced. "What was?" the bishop inquired with polite in terest. "The drinks ; and I had to let out a roar to keep it that low." "Well, you were always good at that, Solly, when it came to paying for anything. But I don't quite under stand. I'm getting a little old. What's it all about? You'll have to make yourself clear." "You owes me eight fifty," said Solly. "Is that clear?" "Solly, my child," said Sky-Blue, with sincere re gret, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you've been a little fresh all evening, calling me 'grandpa* and everything. Now, let us have an end of this non- 74 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO He turned to Chick. "And that's the way of the world," he said, linking his arm into that of the younger man. "There is a scheme in things. Come on, Solly, and you, Phil. I'm taking you all to supper. Don't be afraid. I have a friend who will pay for it, and maybe show you how to get a little stake. I knew you'd smile at that. Good money ! Bad money ! We all get our share of each, and what we get we pass along. You're right. Go where the good money is 'way back!" "Way back! 'Way back!" For a long time after he was alone that night. Chick's mind was in confusion, a jumble of the words and the phrases he had heard this day from the lieu tenant of police, from the old man who had been his victim and his master, from his friends, from Sky- Blue; a jumble of fragmentary pictures also of the back room of the Commodore, of a hill white with bloom, of Solly's fat face, mocking but not unkind; Phil's face, friendly but cruel; Myrtle's face, oddly transfigured, as he had seen her last at the Pennsyl vania Station when he bade her good-by; the face of Ezra Wood ; the bishop's ! But through all this double confusion, like the sound of a bell through the noises of a street came the echo : " 'Way lack! 'Way back!" He didn't know where he was going. It didn't mat ter very much. The whole of America lay to the north and west and south of him. He had given Myrtle about all the money that he had, and he had a vague idea SNIFFING THE ASPHODEL 75 that this was going to bring him luck. The pawn shops would open at 7 A.M. an hour fixed by the police. Then he would pawn all he had. It wouldn't yield him much, but it would be sufficient to carry him far from New York, far from the only life he had ever known, far from all the people he had ever known. There, for a time, he regretted it a little that he hadn't talked this thing over with old Ezra Wood. Or, suppose that he himself went to Rosebloom. No, everything that had thus far entered into his life he would put behind him. New York had mauled him, shaken him down, begun to eat him alive. He could see it now. He would begin all over again like an innocent babe among other innocents 'way back! CHAPTER XI SPRING THE whole country was busy about something. It was an activity which paralleled and confirmed an activity within himself. The idea kept coming back to him wherever he went, and the further he went the stronger the idea grew. He went to the westward, slowly, by easy stages, without any particular design. The big towns made no appeal to him whatsoever. It was the open country and the villages that ensnared his interest, set up a vibration in his own heart that was in perfect accord with the vast but muted tremolo of the cosmic orchestra. The opening note of a new composition a new sym phonic poem. Not all of a man's feelings are reduced to speech. And for much of the time Chick's moods were wordless. But all this was what he felt. There was an underlying strain of philosophy and poetry in his nature which he had always known existed there. The wizard touch of old Ezra Wood had identified it for him. That was all. What Chick saw with his eyes translated itself largely in the words that the old man had used in speaking of the country. There 76 SPRING 77 was that wider sense, however, that had nothing to do with merely physical sensation. "God's own country!" The familiar phrase of a sometimes cheap and tawdry patriotism took on a wider meaning 1 and expressed somewhat this feeling of harmony. And he drew on other sources of expression songs and sentiments that had been planted in his heart 'way back in school-days. He was not without education. No child of the New York streets is. My native country, thee, Land of the noble free. It was as if the seeds of a new growth had been planted there in some seer October, or in the dark of some winter now past and that these were now springing up, covering everything with green, delivering a promise of blossom and future harvest. Chance, as much as anything, carried him a little to the south as well as west right toward the heart of the country; or, if not its heart, at least its lungs a corpuscle going back in the veins of the body politic to be revivified, although he didn't think of it that way. Only that feeling that he was a part of some great scheme persisted and made itself clear. His course led him down through the Delaware Water Gap, which is a region of wooded hills, carpeted valleys, glimmering rivers and misty cascades. He had told the truth when he said that he had never been out of New York. Even New York he had never seen as some people see it. New York was that screaming 78 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO monster where it was mostly night, where the skj was frontiered by high roofs and smoke-stacks, or shut out altogether by the "L." There were times when Chick was telling himself that he had never seen the sky before not since some dimly remembered past. You can't see the sky when your business keeps your eyes on the things of the street. Nor had he ever seen the earth before. The sidewalks, the granite pavements, the asphalt, the slippery mosaics and soiled carpets that his feet had hitherto trod these were not the earth. He had been gone from New York for almost a month. This particular night he had slept in the open. He hadn't slept very much, but this was not due to any lack of comfort. Discomfort could never keep him awake. He had slept in all sorts of places, and this place was better than any of them under the low boughs of a purple beech, where the grass none the less grew fine and long, springy and thick, on the rim of a wide valley that stretched away into hazy nothing ness, as if this were the end of the world. He had found this place at sunset, when he was traveling on foot, decided, this time, to test the new world of his discovery to the utmost. He had passed many a night in New York City "out in the open" "flying the banner," as they called it, back there; and what would it be like to "fly the banner" here in the country? Now he had tried it, and he felt, as he had never felt before, that he finally belonged to the open places. He had been initiated. No longer was the SPRING 79 country holding out on him. He knew the days. He knew the nights. At sunset, though, the whole valley had been so flooded with red and golden light, especially straight ahead of him, that many of the details of it had es caped him. After that, it was the purpling twilight, getting so thick that it floated the eyes of his head and the eyes of his mind right up to where the stars were coming out. It was not until the dawn that he saw that there was a town in the valley. It looked almost like his mental picture of Rosebloom, the place old Ezra Wood came from. He would have to see this town. He took his time about his toilet. It may have been the result of his night in the open air, but there was a picnic-feeling in his heart a feel ing that engulfed him and permeated all things that this was a holiday. There was a hint of happy ad venture about it, as well. The birds were singing about him as he washed himself in the rock wash-bowl of a tiny brook. The birds were celebrating some thing which was about to come to pass. He changed his linen. He scrupulously brushed his clothes. He polished his shoes with strands of grass. "Be you a stranger in these parts?" He turned and saw an old, old man at the top of a tussocky slope. And, for all any one could have judged from the appearance of him, the old man had been there all the time, just like an old stump, or one of those shy, wild creatures which know how to emerge 80 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO from a hiding-place and then rest silent and motionless for hours. "I sure be," the New Yorker replied. "And where do you come from ?" "Well now," said the ancient, "since you've asked me, I ain't a goin' to tell you no lie. I just come from the medder back there that Uncle Newt Parker stoled from Henry Smith in 1882. Hold on, now. I don't want to tell no lie. It wa'n't in 1882, neither. It was in 1883. Yes, sir. It were in the fall of the year, 1883." All the time that the ancient was saying this, he kept his eyes gimleting the distance, as an aid to ab struse thought. "Live there?" The native swung his small eyes on Chick with a start. "Where the medder?" "Yeh." The ancient once more let his sight go into the far places. "Now, if you'd asked me in the first place where I lived and not where I come from, I'd 'a' told you right out. A fair answer fer a fair question. That's my motto. That's what I was tellin' one of these here In dian doctors who went through here last fall and wanted to know if I ever suffered from chilblains. A fair answer fer a fair question. Stranger, do you see that town over there?" "Yes. Is that where you live?" SPRING 81 "Hold your horses. Hold your horses. I ain't goin' to lie to you. I lived there once." "What's the name of it?" "Well, if they ain't changed it since I been there, the name of that town over there, since you been ask ing me, stranger, is St. Clair." CHAPTER XII "FLOWERY HARBOR" RIGHT where St. Clair and the open country merged, there was a large old frame house in a large old gar den. Both showed signs of decay. There were gaps in the white paling fence. The fruit and decorative trees had all grown into black and scrawny old age. There was a dry fountain also white originally wherein a badly scarred infant throttled a swan. As for the house, it could have known neither paint nor carpentry for twenty years at least. Yet the whole place still radiated a certain mellow dignity, even a certain homely beauty honeysuckle running over the fence; a hundred varieties of flower ing weeds and bushes drifting perfume and color else where; wrens, robins, and martins contributing their note of cheerfulness and life. And that well-known truth that any man's home is in the nature of a portrait of himself was amply exempli fied in the present instance, when Colonel Evan Williams appeared through the front door of the mansion. He always called it a mansion. For the colonel call him that ; every one else did likewise suggested a sort of decorative decay. And he was garbed in raiment singularly suggestive, to any 82 "FLOWERY HARBOR" 83 one with a grain of imagination, of the same state of affair*. He and his clothes were equally well suited to each other. There was nothing sordid about them nothing that wasn't dignified, yet homelike and friendlj. The colonel had a red face and a white mustache one of those antebellum mustaches, very heavy, that descend far below the chin. He had a droopy blue eye that was at once belligerent and jovial. His whole face was jovial, albeit dignified especially his nose, which was inclined to be pendulous and was certainly more highly colored than the rest of his countenance. He must have been a man of splendid presence in his day. In fact, there was still ample evidence of this, but now he was inclined to sag a little, was a trifle heayy on his feet just like this old house of his. He stood there at the top of the broad stoop like an honored heirloom from another generation. He wore a black slouch hat. He carried a gnarled, black cane. He appeared to be waiting for something, or to have fallen into a reverie you couldn't have told which, from his drooping, thoughtful immobility. Then, with a surprising hint of alertness, he cocked his head and listened. From somewhere in the back of the house there sounded forth a girl's clear, strong soprano : "He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never sound retreat ; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on !" 84 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Dear child! Sweet child!" the colonel murmured. "If I could only spare you this!" But there was an unmistakable craftiness about his movements, and of judgment matured through bitter re flection, in what followed. He was sentimental, but no sentimentality could master him. From the tail pocket of his frayed Prince Albert he brought a rectangle of pasteboard. He had thought of everything. It wasn't for nothing that he had been reckoned one of the leading young lawyers of the South. There was even a loop of string through a hole in the pasteboard convenient for its suspension on the old bell-pull. He hung the card in place. He did this to the rousing chorus: "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" Still standing there, he drew a handkerchief, also from a tail pocket there were two of these pock ets and each appeared to be big enough to bin a sack of meal. He wiped his eyes. He blew his nose. He returned the handkerchief to its place and brought out, in turn, something that might have been a flask. "Medicine, sir ! by my physician's order ! the only prescription you could induce a physician himself to take!" He kept his back turned while he tilted his head. He cleared his throat. He returned the thing that might have been a flask to the storage place at the "FLOWERY HARBOR" 85 rear. He straightened up. He turned and marched with becoming dignity down the decrepit steps. And all who would might read that here in the man sion there was a ROOM TO LET. It was the right and beautiful thing. You could tell it bj the colonel's walk. Dignified, thoughtful, his coat-tails swinging rhythmically, he passed on down the garden walk to the unhinged front gate. He passed on up the street. It wasn't much of a street just a sort of country lane, formalized to some extent by other fences far ther on and occasional bits of sidewalk. But such houses as there may have been were mostly hidden by trees and shrubbery. A bluebird sang. There was a flash of red where a cardinal passed. The whole country roundabout, and, for that matter, the town itself except for two or three church steeples, was smothered in bloom of sorts drifts of white and pink, where the apples or the dogwoods, the peaches or the Judas-trees, were calling to the bees. The bees and the birds and that as yet invisible girl furnished about all the sound there was a world, therefore, set to music. In spite of all this predicated solitude, the colonel's sortie and his subsequent movements had, none the less, been duly noticed duly and severely noticed. From the hedge of Osage orange, on the other side of the street, a pair of eyes had studied him with all 86 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO the alert intelligence of a squirrel's. And these were the eyes of Mrs. Meckley, who lived over there in a little cottage as carefully concealed and, you might say, as arboreal, as any squirrel's house. A professional widow, Mrs. Meckley perpetually lonely, according to what she herself always said, yet given to close observation, and numerous calls. "Room to let!" she cried to herself when she made out the colonel's sign. "The old reprobate! The old miser I" She would have departed then to spread the tidings, only, with a twinge of exquisite excitement, she saw that her news budget was in a fair way of becoming duly amplified. "He's goin' in!" This second comment was inspired by the sight of a stranger an event in itself sufficient to enrich any day. The stranger had come into the street from the direction of the open country. And yet there was a certain citified air about him as there usually was about strangers, after they had been measured and weighed by local standards. The stranger carried a dress-suit case. His clothes were rather badly worn and in need of pressing; still there was an impression of nattiness about them from his velours hat, with the brim turned down on one side, right on to his light-tan, cloth-topped shoes. Mrs. Meckley saw him pause at the sagging gate, saw him look after the retreating form of the colonel as if half persuaded to run after him, then drop his "FLOWERY HARBOR" 87 glance at a faded little plank at the side of the gate which proclaimed that this was FLOWERY HARBOR. "By crickety," whispered Mrs. Meckley, becoming profane in her excitement ; "he's goin' in !" She wasn't mistaken. Moreover, there was an odd suggestion of romance not only in the stranger's youth and the fashion in which he was dressed, but also in the way he appeared to be impressed by all he heard and saw. Just a vague impression that came to Mrs. Meckley, something which hadn't escaped her bright and squirrel- like eyes her whole face and even her body were squir rel-like and yet something that she didn't wholly com prehend. CHAPTER XIII AS SEEN AND OVERHEARD ALVAH MORLEY, singing as she scrubbed the kitchen, heard the door-bell ring which wasn't surprising, in view of the fact that the bell was mounted on a spiral spring against the kitchen wall and was designed to be heard throughout the house. She stopped short in the middle of a "hallelujah." She sat back on her heels and looked at the bell with the most perfect astonish ment, as at a phenomenon that had never occurred before. But her astonishment held her for only a second or two. While the bell was still jangling she scrambled to her feet, and untied the apron that enveloped her. She was nineteen or so, slim, plain rather than pretty, with straw-colored hair and not very rich in color otherwise still with a measure of that beauty which always goes with youth and flushed excitement. She looked down at her skimpy, blue calico dress. It was clean at any rate. Her black shoes and stock ings were passable. They were, for this time of day when folks were supposed to be working, anyway. But who could be ringing the door-bell at this hour? She ran over to a corner of the kitchen where there 88 AS SEEN AND OVERHEARD 89 were a towel and a small looking-glass and other toilet accessories. She jerked some water into an enameled basin from a half-filled bucket. She rinsed her hands and smoothed her hair, all with a nervous energy so speedy that she had completed the operation by the time that the old bell was just quivering back into silence. Around in front, the stranger who had rung the bell stood there at the top of the rickety stoop and pa tiently waited. He knew that there was some one home. There had been the song of the girl. He knew that his ring had been heard. He had heard it him self and the song had stopped. And he didn't even wonder what the girl looked like. Nor did he greatly care. So there was a room to let in Flowery Harbor! Some name ! And that old gent with nerve enough to take a swig on his front door-step and still swing his coat-tails like that would most likely be the landlord. Say, this old man was human! He stood there like that with the smell of honey suckle in his nose and the echo of the girl's voice still in his ears and a propitious impression of the colonel on the surface of his brain. He felt the first subtle creep of a hunch he had been waiting for. "I I beg your pardon!'* He turned. Some instinct of caution or some other instinct less easily defined had sent Alvah to scurrying around the side of the house through the garden instead of through 90 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO the gloomy interior of the house itself. She stood there now at the corner of the building there where the mossy brick path passed under a tunnel more or less well defined of clematis, syringa and lilac. "How do you do?" said the stranger. He had set his suit-case down. He jerked his right hand to his hat, but he left the hat in place. This was no lady standing over there. This was nothing but a kid. "How do you do?" said the kid, plainly at a loss. "Is your mother in?" "No, sir." "I came to see about the room. Maybe you can tell me about it." "What room?" "Say, do you live here?" "My home is in Bangor, Maine." "Well, do you work here, then? I want to find out about this here room." "There's nobody home." "You said it! No, honestly! Ain't nobody here?" All this was just nuts and candy for old Mrs. Meek- ley across the way. She could get most of the con versation by straining a lot, and she was straining. "The girl's a flirt," she passed judgment. "She ought to be switched." "Only me," Alvah was saying. Despite the sagacious deduction of Mrs. Meckley from what had already transpired, Alvah had an ap pearance of timidity of timidity touched with doubt and not a little fear, as if she were not quite certain AS SEEN AND OVERHEARD 91 but that she was in the presence of some one slightly deranged. She was reassured to some extent, however, by the stranger's next move. He calmly seated himself on the none-too-solid rail ing of the stoop. "Good night !" he exclaimed, in spite of the manifest morning. "When are you expecting the old gent back?" "He was going to the post-office. He won't be long." "Birdie's there with the goods this time, anyway. All right, Birdie. I'll wait." Greek to Alvah; but nothing unpleasant about it. Now that the stranger wasn't looking at her, she could look at him. She discovered that he wasn't hard to look at. His face rather fascinated her. He cer tainly had wonderful eyes. His voice and his lan guage were unmistakably American, but he looked like a- foreigner. She dared advance a step. As she did so, she saw that there was something sus pended on the bell-pull. She advanced some more. The next time that the stranger looked at her he saw that she was standing as if hypnotized, staring at the announcement that here there was a room to let. There was a touch of drama in her appearance that did not escape him the unaffected pose of her slight frame, her hands folded against her meager breast ; and he no ticed, without exactly appraising them, the fine line of her cheek and chin, the whiteness and nobility of her forehead. All this, nevertheless, with a touch of con- 92 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO descension on his part as an older and wiser person annoyed by the persistent ignorance of a dull child. "What's the matter?" he asked. "That sign it isn't so some one put it there for a joke." "I guess you got another think," he said, without dis courtesy. "I see the old gent hangin' it up himself not ten minutes ago." "My uncle?" "Gee, it takes a long time to get it across. Sure! The old gent that just came out of here. What's the matter?" The girl had continued to stare at the sign, with scarcely another glance for the visitor. But now she looked at him, squarely, the while a warmer coloring came into her face and a shadowy brightness into her hitherto rather cool, gray eyes. "You are certain you saw my uncle put that sign there?" "Sure ! That's what I'm tellin' you takes it out of his pocket and hangs it up just before he beats it up the street. I ain't stringin' you." "But, oh, he didn't mean it." She was no longer afraid of the stranger. She ran lightly up the stoop. She took the sign from the place where it hung, hid the letters of it against her breast. "What's the idea?" the young man inquired, softly, with a direct invitation to confidence. "What's wrong? Ain't he got a right to rent a room if he wants to? Is the place so overcrowded? Has everybody got too much coin? Or don't he own the house? Or what?" AS SEEN AND OVERHEARD 93 The questions merely bewildered the girl. At the same time it was evident that most of them went home. "You don't understand," she answered, appealingly. "You said it." "My uncle's not always himself." The confession hurt her ; still, some sort of explana tion was in order. "You mean he's sort of hittin* up the booze?" Her troubled eyes were her only answer. It was affirmation enough. "You don't want to let that worry you, Mabel " "My name is Alvah Alvah Morley." "Glad to meet you, Alvah. That's what I'm tellin' you. The old gent looked all to the good to me." "He's the finest man in the world," the girl flamed from the midst of her trouble. "Only, there are times like the present when he does things that he wouldn't do if only " "Look " the stranger began. Hnt there came a diversion. The girl, with an ex- clamation^o^^mingled relief and consternation, ran down the steps> She was out of the gate. She had seen her unck coming back from the post-office. All this was as good as a play to Mrs. Meckley, orer there behind her screen of Osage orange. CHAPTER XIV MR. RICHARD DA VIES THE youth on the stoop had had a moment of hesita tion. He came down the steps, however, and met the girl and the old gentleman half-way to the gate. "Ah!" the old gentleman exclaimed. "I see the sign. I come in. I ring the bell " "I told him " the girl began. "Sir, I have the honor"; and the old gentleman, re moving his hat and thrusting his stick under his arm, offered his hand. There was a suggestion in the move that "got to" the stranger, as he himself would have said got to him in a pleasant sort of way. The stranger had also pulled his hat, had taken the proffered hand, had done this with a quick but not ungraceful bow. "Permit me to introduce myself," said the elder, "al though that may not be necessary. I am rather widely known. Perhaps you have heard of the Williamses. We've had a fairly active part in the history of our country." "Sure ! Everybody's heard about the Williamses." "I am Evan Williams." "Glad to meet you, colonel." "Ah! I see that you are familiar with my honorary title." 04 MR. RICHARD DA VIES 95 "Sure!" replied the young man, who didn't under stand. "And may I be so bold as to ask you to refresh my memory? It seems to me that we have met." "I don't believe so, colonel." "Your name is?" There was a perceptible pause. "My name?" They were still locking hands in the original grasp. Their eyes had met. "Davies," the young man answered. "A splendid name ! One that makes you doubly wel come, sir. I dare say the Williamses and the Davies were fighting side by side long centuries ago." "I'll take your word for it." "And your Christian name, if I may ask?" "Richard !" "Richard Davies! Why, sir! Is it possible? You are doubtless a descendant of that celebrated Bishop Richard Davies do you recall? whom Queen Eliza beth called her 'second St. David.' " "You may be right, at that." "For you are Cymric. Pardon the personality, but I could tell it by your appearance even if it were not for your fine old Cambrian name." "Do I get the room?" "I shall be delighted. Let us inspect the premises, Mr. Davies." "Uncle!" Colonel Williams turned to his niece with mellow good humor. 96 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "What will the neighbors say?" she demanded, con fused. "Say! A most stirring event! A Davies become a guest in the house of a Williams ! A Celtic reunion ! Didn't I tell you all the time that it would be well with us if we accepted a lodger or two ? Come in, sir ! We'll seal our acquaintance as gentlemen should !" He made a pawing movement with his hand to assure him self that his flask was in the old familiar place. " 'Tis none too early in the morn to touch the lyre!'* There was space enough in the Williams mansion for many guests. Beyond the front door there was a broad hall, high and long, up two sides of which ran a flight of steps to the second floor. Four large rooms opened off the hall. "On the left, the drawing-room," said the colonel, while Alvah Morley looked on, wide-eyed, shrinking, yet with a touch of rebellion in her attitude. "On the right, the library. Back of the drawing-room, our parlor or living-room, and opposite that, the dining- room. I regret the absence of servants, and my in ability to keep the place up." "It looks good to me," breathed Mr. Richard Davies. "As soon as I can get the estate settled the estate of my brother, Abner, sir, to which I have devoted, not unwillingly, the best years of my life, I shall pro ceed to the refurnishing of the house." "It looks good to me,'* the one-time Chick repeated. He was glad now that he had given his one and only true name to the old gentleman. The hall reared its gloomy grandeur about him. There were no carpets MR. RICHARD DA VIES 97 on the floor. The paper on the wall was stained by time and leakage, for it was evident that the roof of the mansion was no longer at its best. But there was a solemnity about this acceptance of him in a home like this that at once weighed upon him and lifted him up. The place not only looked good to him; it looked al most too good. "There's only one thing, colonel," he broke out softly, as soon as the girl had disappeared into the cavernous shadows at the rear of the hall ; "you haven't said any thing about the price." "Of what, sir?" "The room." "My dear sir, you are my guest as long as you care to remain. I am honored." "Oh, say!" "Not a word, sir!" The colonel also had noticed the retirement of his niece. He cast a further glance to assure himself that they were alone. He brought his flask from its hiding- place. He uncorked it, elaborately wiped its gullet with his hand. "As our ancestors did under Rhodri Mawr !" he in vited. "Not for mine ! I'm on the wagon." "You mean?" "Thanks ! I'm leavin' it alone." "Sir, I honor you. But, thirty years ago, my physi cian it was " "Look out," the younger man whispered. "There's the young lady !" 98 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO The colonel cleared his throat and put the bottle away. It was to a bedroom on the second floor that Mr. Richard Davies eventually carried his suit-case a room that was larger than the back room of the Com modore, near Chatham Square ; and there were windows in it that gave both on the old garden and on the far country beyond. "It looks good to me," said the lodger. Looked good to him? It all looked so good that it almost hurt. This was the thing he had come out to find. Lonely? Sure! Ever since he had left New York. But he wasn't going to weaken. Not yet! Maybe, after a while he'd duck. Maybe! Why not con himself along? Maybe, after a while, he'd just naturally get sick of trying to make a living by selling soap, or other things, and nick some rube for his roll for keeps, this time! And then, right then, from the combination of all the things that were coming to him through the open window sky and earth, air and bird-song came some thing that recalled old Ezra Wood, not as a rube, but as a white and shining giant who had exerted a strange influence over him. It was almost as if he could hear that good old man speak again: "The Lord have pity on us all!" "Every day 'most a hundred years long, each year a happy lifetime." "If he'd stayed in the country we might have saved him" MR. RICHARD DA VIES 99 "Ah, hell !" he said. "This is fierce ! I wonder what Phil and Solly are pullin' to-day? And old Sky-Blue? And Myrtle?" 'Way back? Say! This was it. 'Way back a million miles! And he had become Mr. Richard Davies. He was glad that he had laid that name aside and kept it clean laid it aside so many years ago that he could hardly remember when ; but he did remember, indistinctly, the dark-eyed woman who had been his mother, and, more indistinctly yet, mistily, the gray specter who had been his father ; the specter of a distinguished man who had been Mr. Richard Davies also. Then the night of flame and smoke wherein his parents disappeared. They must have been living in a poor neighborhood. Old Denny, the wood-merchant, had become his foster-par ent, and that was when he was eight years old. "Mr. Davies!" The girl was calling him. He stepped over to the door so swiftly, and opened it so deftly, that it frightened her. "My uncle wants to know," she recited, "if you will do us the honor of taking tea with us." "Sure ! Much obliged." "It'll be at about dark," she said. "Uncle likes to eat his supper by candle-light." "Tell him I'll be there, and much obliged." He stood there at his door and watched her go away, a pale shape disappearing in the shadows to ward the back of the upper hall. Now that he thought of it, he somehow or other felt sorry for this kid. CHAPTER XV UP THE STREET BUT, also, he felt sorry for himself. He couldn't help it. There was something about this very room that recalled that vaguely remembered home of his child hood when his parents were still alive bare walls with broken plaster, no carpet on the floor, a somewhat caved-in bed in the corner of the room. There was even something reminiscent in the flowers, the greenery, and the bird-song. He guessed the truth. There was a geranium on the window-sill of that earlier home. A neighbor had a canary in a cage. He pulled off his shoes. He partly undressed him self. He cast a longing gaze at the bed. It seemed to him that he hadn't slept since leaving the old town back there, and he always did prefer sleeping in the daytime. A dreaminess drew him. He wasn't hungry. He had eaten a hearty meal not much more than an hour ago, at a farmer's house, a mile or so back along the road, and the farmer had refused to take a cent for his hospitality. None the less, memory of this meal brought up a hundred souvenirs of savory Chinese and Italian dishes in the city he had left. Wouldn't it be 100 UP THE STREET 101 great, after all, to wake up and find a dish of chow- mein at his side? He crawled onto the bed and let himself go. He slept the afternoon away. And, instantly, when he awoke, there flashed into his thought a clear and concise record of the girl of this house, and of the colonel, her uncle, and of the house itself. The record brought with it a little mental groan. What was he that he should thus let them think that he was their equal? That he should take a room in this house of theirs? Set himself up as the son, or the grandson, or something, of a bishop? The only answer to these questions was a pang of homesickness so poignant that he could have wept. Then he listened to the silence, and the silence weighed upon him as the earth might weigh upon the chest of a man buried alive. There for a minute or so the silence was absolute. Not even a bird twittered. Not a wheel turned. No one spoke. "I got to get back," he whispered. "I'll stick it out a day or so longer. But I got to get back !" He crept over to the window in his bare feet and looked down into the garden. He saw Alvah Morley down there. She was picking flowers. He saw that she had changed her dress. He wondered why. And he noticed that she wasn't such a kid as he had be lieved her to be. More like a school-teacher she was a white cotton dress, fresh and crinkly from the wash, her straw-colored hair drawn back in a smooth knot and ornamented with a blue silk ribbon. What if she knew the sort of life he had led ! 102 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO He wondered where her uncle was. The colonel might hit up the booze, but he was none the less the gentleman. "What am I to rub elbows with him? Even if I am Mr. Richard Davies !" And wasn't the colonel a prince when it came to speaking English? He was ! "My uncle hasn't come home yet," said the girl, as he came down-stairs after a while. "I suppose that we shall have to wait for him unless you're in a hurry." "Me in a hurry? Say, what do you do around here at night?" "After supper we talk sometimes and sometimes I try to play the organ, only it's not in very good condi tion. Sometimes I read to uncle. Sometimes he reads to me." There was almost always that provisional sometimes in all she said. As she spoke, moreover, she turned, now with acute expectancy, again with lingering pa tience, to look in the direction whence she expected her uncle to appear. "Where's he gone the post-office again?" "He can't have gone to the post-office," said the girl, "for St. Clair only gets one mail a day, and that's the first thing in the morning." The sun had gone down. It was getting so dark that Mrs. Meckley, from behind her screen of Osage orange, could not make out much any more but two dim figures, one of them pale and one of them dark, seated on the steps of the stoop across the way. "Scandalous, I call it," she repeated repeated it UP THE STREET 103 over and over, always as if with the lurking hope that the phrase would serve as an incantation to bring some thing scandalous about. The crickets had been singing since a long time a chirring pulsation of sound, as if it were the sound of a mill which itself was manufacturing the material of the night. Now and then a frog croaked in. And, across the deepening blue where the stars were begin ning to shimmer, a few bats zigzagged, reeled, wavered swiftly out of sight. "Do you want me to go and find out where he is ?" Davies asked. The girl shook her head. "Aren't you afraid somethin' might 'a' happened to him?" She sat motionless. It was so dark by this time that he could not see her expression. If she had answered, he had not heard. "What are those queer little chippies scootin' around up there?" Her voice reached him, strangled. "Those are bats." The conversation lapsed. "Say," he exclaimed at last; "I don't want you to think I'm fresh, or trying to butt in; understand? But I sort of feel that the colonel's a friend of mine; see? And I'm going out to look for him." "Will you?" she panted. "Oh, if I were a man !" "I'm a man! What's the answer?" The clairvoyance of the strain she was under helped her to understand. 104 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "There's a place you go up this street to the sec ond corner, and then you turn to your left until you come to the last building on the left. I'm sure he's there." "I'll just tell him you're sort of waiting." "He may not want to come home." "They never do. But, say " He started to explain that he had been handling booze-fighters all his life, both friend and foe, but he checked himself. The girl wouldn't understand. He wound up by won dering where he had left his hat. She brought it to him. "Don't weaken," he said. "Keep a stiff upper lip." "I will," she whispered. But say, he wondered, what could it be like when the girl was all alone and the old gent out on a spree like this. He could see it all. The colonel had begun to get his spree properly started early in the day maybe the night before, as it usually happened. One thing was sure. He himself was feeling uncom monly fit. Apart from the fact that he was a little hungry, he had never felt in better shape in his life. This training out in the country was sure the real thing. His wind was perfect. His muscles had suppled up and hardened. The long sleep of the afternoon had ironed out his nerves. It was a pity that there wasn't a mill on with an open challenge. Say, feeling like this, he could just about lick anything between welter and light-heavy. He was so absorbed in his thought, and the general fragrant quality of the night, that he barely noticed UP THE STREET 105 what there was to be seen of this town he had stumbled into. Not much to be seen, anyway a few lighted windows dimly visible through black bushes and trees, a smelly grocery store dimly lit by a kerosene-lamp, a white church closed and dark, more houses in the midst of yards, then a barber-shop, and this was the second corner the girl had mentioned. He turned to the left. It was the supper-hour, evidently, and every one in doors. He didn't meet a soul. Say, if the yeggs ever did discover this burg, it would be good-night-nurse for the local bank or anything else they'd want to crack. But the air was sure all right. He breathed deeply. He was feeling so good that he shadow-boxed a little. He may have been Welsh, as the colonel had declared him to be. And the Welsh have the reputation of being a mystic race. Was there some divine urge in all this^spontaneous, unconscious preparation? And preparation for what, if not for some sort of a combat as Richard Davies his right name just now in his heart had hankered for? He had just come in sight of what must have been the place the girl had mentioned, the last building up this street, brilliantly lighted as compared with the rest of the town by a number of oil-lamps with reflec tors. A road-house or hotel, apparently well-patron ized, with a dozen muddy autos and farm-wagons parked along its front. But what Davies particularly noticed was that there was a row in progress at that end of the building devoted to its bar. 106 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO He could hear the squabble of voices and laughter. He could catch a fleeting effect of shadows on the window shadows that moved rapidly. He felt an in stant surge of something almost like happiness, at first. This was the life. Say, this was almost like the Bow ery. And he started to run. But he was still a dozen yards from the door of the barroom when the nature of the thing that was hap pening struck him full tilt, stopped him and stopped his breath. A familiar figure was being hustled through the door. That was the colonel they were flinging out, as Davies saw. The colonel was flung out. He stumbled. He fell. He rolled. "Oh!" A quick intake of the breath; and Davies felt as if he himself had been fouled kicked hit be low the belt! CHAPTER XVI AGAINST ALL COMERS THE colonel's slouch hat and his cane followed him followed him so fast that they were in the dirt of the road at the colonel's side even before Davies himself got there. He was enough of the fighter, both instinctive and trained, not to lose his temper. Anyway, it wasn't anger that was actuating him yet so much as sorrow. In that spectacle of the old man thrown into the street he saw the wreck of a lot of things of pride and edu cation, and of the affectionate hopes of that girl that poor little kid who was waiting now, all dressed up in her picnic clothes, back there in the big old house. He was at the old man's side before the colonel him self could make a movement of recovery. "Are you hurt?" "Alvah!" "This ain't Alvah. This is your old friend, Dick. Gimme your hand. What did those bums do 'to you?" He wasn't asking the question for information pre cisely. He had seen well enough what had been done to the colonel. But he had to say something while he 107 108 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO was getting the colonel to his feet had to do it to stifle his own mind if for no other reason. The door of the barroom was becoming jammed by those who wanted to get the most out of the spectacle. Some had been pushed out of the door even, by friends behind who were struggling to get a better view. Most of the spectators were convulsed. This was the fun niest thing they had seen for a long time. Gus sure had landed the colonel on his ear. But had you seen the colonel try to fight back? This would be a good lesson for the old rummy. Him talking about his honor! and fighting duels! Some one should have landed him on his ear before. Davies heard all this. The colonel must have heard it, too. The colonel was meek and humiliated. He wasn't greatly hurt in a physical way. None the less he had become the tottering old man. He hadn't been so drunk after all, or perhaps the misadventure had sobered him. Anyway, he cast a look of such utter chagrin, shame, weakness, appealing despair at this one last friend he had left in the world, that Davies felt something crack inside his heart. He turned and walked straight over toward the group at the barroom door. He was so calm, and smooth, and swift that no one could have suspected what was up. Besides, Davies wasn't looking at any one in particular. His dark eyes were off at a slant. Still, he could see everything. He saw the two nearest members of the jovial mob. They were both big men as to weight and stature. Both were laughing. AGAINST ALL COMERS 109 "Go on and laugh !" Davies advised. He swung with his right and gave a straight-arm jolt with his left. The right landed on whiskers and a jaw. The left went on and on into the region of a solar plexus, but finally stopped against a weight so heavy that it was all he could do to push it over. At that, he still had time and strength to shove an open-handed jab into another grinning face and jerk his elbow up under the chin of some one else. "Laugh, you bunch of mutts!" "He's hit the commissioner! Kill him!" "Git out o 9 my way!" "Grab him., boys! Get him! Look out! You're walk-in' on Mr. Crane!" "Fit learn you to rough-hou$e, yuli stiffs!" "Look out, ding-dern ye! Help!" But it was not until he was in the barroom itself that Davies clearly perceived what he had come to seek. There was already a movement among those who had lingered at the bar to join the riot at the door. Davies had an eye for these. He sized them up en masse. He saw that they could have made up the average bar room crowd almost anywhere in New York as much as in any village riffraff, heavy respectables, light weight sports and weaklings. But it was not for these that his attention was predestined. He saw the bulking form of a man dressed in dirty white, bullet-headed, thick in the neck, making his way around the end of the bar, and he needed no label at all to tell him that this was the original victor in the fight with the colonel. 110 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO Everything had been going so fast that there had been no time as yet for readjustments. They were still jostling each other over at the door trying to get a line on what had happened. Those at the bar were only sure of one thing, thus far, and that was that the colonel had been thrown out on his neck. Gus had told them so. And Gus himself may have thought that this fresh throb of excitement back of him was merely some sort of a fresh demonstration of enthusiasm for the prowess he had shown. Then the lightning struck. It was blinding at first dazzling making it hard to see just what had happened. But Gus seemed to know. Rough-house, as he him self would have said, was his middle name. Nature had endowed him with the thews and the constitution of a bull, yet he had passed his life in saloons in labor- camps and mill-towns, in the black valleys of Penn sylvania, along the waterfronts of Boston, Clereland, San Francisco. "Loofc out!" Some one at the bar had that much sense. Gus ducked. He turned a little to see that a stran ger had entered the bar, and that the stranger was out for blood. Why hadn't some one tipped him off that the colonel had a son or something somebody who was likely to come back? The slob had almost pasted him one while his back was turned. But Gus was equal to the occasion or thought that he was. He slid his bulk back of the bar, still crouch ing, conscious that on occasions like this somebody AGAINST ALL COMERS 111 was likely to shoot. He hoped that the mirror wouldn't be smashed. Still, it was better to have a smashed mir ror than a bullet through the neck. While all this was glancing through his elemental mind, his big paw had nevertheless shot out in the direc tion of his bung-starter a slender mallet of heavy wood and a weapon as he had been trained to. But he didn't get the chance to use it. That enemy of his also knew something about bar room tactics knew that there was apt to be an arsenal of sorts behind the wet counter. Say, this was just like a gang-fight, only he would have to be the gang all by himself. And Davies took a short cut in an effort to reach the arsenal first. He slid right over the bar and landed on his feet. The next moment he had his two hands locked on the big barkeep's throat and was pushing him back toward the open. It was desperate work a welterweight against a heavy and no room to manoeuver about in. Gus flailed and kicked. "I show you!" "Will yuh?" There was a crash of glass jangling down from a polished pyramid of glasses that had stood on the shelf back of the bar, and a trickle of red from the side of Gus's face. And there they were in the open. They stood there, face to face, a couple of yards between them, in the middle of the barroom sawdust IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO on the floor, a drift of blue tobacco-smoke in the air, a subsidence of racket and confusion about them. In the midst of it all, Davies heard a number of voices : "Rush him!" "Git the marshal!" "Git a gun! Git a roper It was evident that he wasn't going to have very much time to do whatever he had to do. A look of pain came into his face. He grabbed his left shoulder with his hand, lurched a little. A feint! Gus rushed him, believing the stranger already hurt. As he did so, however, Davies sidestepped and met him with a left hook to the chin. Then he heaved all his strength and weight into another right swing for the big man's neck. He landed. Something whirled past Davies's head and smashed itself against the wall. Then the mob was invading the ring. "Missed him! Rush him! Help! Help! 'K'out, er tfll be hittin' Gust" Davies's mind flashed him a picture of something like this that had happened before a mill in a frowzy little fighting club, and the favorite getting the worst of it, and then the riot, with himself and his seconds fighting against such odds as these. CHAPTER XVII THE PEACE ANGEL HE did now what he did then. He zigzagged, too shifty and quick for anything to hit him except by accident. He didn't have far to go. And he had a chair. Just in time to wallop it down on the back of Gus's neck and shoulders, and the chair collapsed. So did Gus for the moment he did sprawled right on in the direction he had been going, legs spraddling, hands out. Here is the thing that stamped itself on Davies's mind: Gus was falling just as the colonel had fallen. Yea, bo, Gus had got his ! A long way of stating and yet the only way to state it the concept of an instant. And then the crowd, as much as Davies himself, was aware that the collapsed chair was a very dangerous weapon more dangerous than it was before it col lapsed., for Davies had jerked it apart. He flung the back of it like a whirling boomerang, and, before he heard the shattering of the mirror if he heard it at all he had jerked the solid seat of the chair straight into the welter of shapes in front of him. What he did with the rest of the chair 113 114 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO he never did exactly know. But there he was, at last, with a leg of the thing in his hand and also the pain ful but certain knowledge in his brain that the next step might be murder. He was ready for it. There are times when no man can turn back. This was one of them. There was a momentary truce, at any rate. "The next of youse guys," he panted, "who makes a false move gets this!" There was sufficient inspiration for a truce, es pecially on the part of the crowd this stranger standing there like a black panther at bay, Gus sprawled on the floor, three or four other friends and neighbors scattered about bruised and bleeding, the big bar-mirror splintered, glasses smashed, all this as the swift sequence of a little low comedy natural to the ejection of an undesirable old customer. But the truce couldn't possibly, in the nature of things, last very long. Another explosion was bound to follow. And one did. Only it wasn't the kind they had looked for. Davies saw it first. His attention had to be every where. The attention of the others was concentrated on him only. He saw old Colonel Evan Williams coming in through the outer door, which was open. He saw that the colonel was not alone saw that he was accompanied by Alvah Morley, his niece and that Alvah, still in her picnic dress and without a hat, her straw-colored hair tied with a blue ribbon, was very stiff and very white. She was just like a dead girl who had come .THE PEACE ANGEL 115 to life and come walking into this place to make men feel ashamed of themselves. She came accompanied by music, so far as Davics was concerned. In the tomblike silence that wallowed over everything 1 and everybody like a descent of noise less water, he could hear a fine, remote, phonographic record of that song she had sung in the morning: "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" She stared about her, whitely. She saw Davies, spoke to him with all emotion repressed: "I am sorry that I let you come for my uncle. I waited a while, then thought that I had better come my self.'* She was making a simple explanation. Her voice was cold and clear, soft yet penetrating. Some one bawled: "You'd do better to keep him hum." The girl gave a slow glance in the direction the voice came from, and silence descended again. Once more she turned to Davies. "Go on!" he adjured. "It's all right. Take the colonel home ! I'll 'tend to this mob !" All the time that he spoke and his sentences came out sharp and fast he scattered his glances over the others in the room. Some were looking at the girl. Some looked at him. There was a tremor of suspended action. Peril in the air. Yellow light. Sawdust floor, with Gus sprawled in 116 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO the center of it. Bar in the background. A stupid, bewildered crowd. Tragedy ! Drama ! Say, was this the village of St. Clair or the big man-eating, soul-mauling city whence he had fled? It was a thought that frightened him, right then and there, in the midst of all this excitement. The crowd scuffled and muttered. "Serves 9 m right!" "Who right?" "Gust" "The colonel /" "What's happened?" "What's 'at she says?' 9 "Qwt jwsltin'." And then, Davies, thinking that he saw a movement to crowd the girl, jumped forward with his stick. "Git back !" he grated, "er I'll send yuhs all to hell!" There was a brief stampede which gave him elbow room. Yet the crowd was growing, swelled by fresh arrivals from other parts of the building and the street outside. "This gentleman is my friend," the colonel cried. "Take him out," Davies told the girl. She eyed the crowd. She looked at him. All this was transpiring in lurid moments. The girl had put out her hand to his arm. There may have been some slight hint that she was losing her splendid grip on herself. "I found him outside," she said. "He was trying to THE PEACE ANGEL 117 get in. He wouldn't go without you. Are you ready to leave?" Davies, still ready for action, eyed the crowd. "Sure!" Some one else spoke up. "He don't leave here except he's dead er grin' to jati!" Again the girl turned. "You needn't hide, Sam Bosely ! I suppose your folks will be glad to know you were here drinking again when you swore you wouldn't, and that on your bended knees." "I did not," snarled Sam. But there were cries of "Shut up!" and "Get out of the way." A number of the citizens were salving the fallen barkeeper. In the midst of their efforts, Gus under his own power, so to speak got up as far as a sitting position. "Bring him some whisky!" Gus let out a roar: "Nobody go behind that bar but me." He moaned and rocked. He felt the back of his head. The girl was letting her cool eyes focus on face after face. Some of the men she looked at backed away and made ready to depart. "Beat it," said Davies. "This is my scrap. I don't need any help." "This is my battle, sir," the colonel broke in. There may have been those present who thought that 118 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO this was a signal for a resumption of the comedy. It was about time for a reaction. And they were right in a way, but not altogether. The colonel had broken away from his niece. He was completely sobered. That was evident. He stood there solidly, with his feet wide apart, his gnarled cane gripped in one hand, his slouch hat in the other. But again the girl interposed. "I know you all," she said. "If you do anything to this young man you'll all be there as witnesses you, Mr. Snow, with your sister-in-law as a character witness; and you, Hank Purvy, expecting to marry a woman whose husband's not dead yet ; and you, Caspar Clark, after breaking your mother's heart." " 'Tam't so!" "She's got ye, Harik!" "Ye'er a liar!" But the girl's quiet voice dominated the other voices. "Your license goes" she was facing Gus, who was still staggered, but able to stand "if it takes the rest of my life." "My God !" bellowed Gus. "As if I ain't got trouble enough." "Close yer yip," said a tough young farmer, shifting his eyes from the girl to Gus. "Close yer yip, yuh big fat ferriner. If yuh don't " The girl turned coldly to her uncle and Davies. "Come on," she said, "we'll go." They went. They left the barroom without haste, and not a word or a hand was raised to stay them. Davies even THE PEACE ANGEL 119 lingered a moment. It was to speak a word to the tough young farmer. Just one word : "Thanks!" But the young farmer was even too tough for such brief amenities. He looked away. And Davies, smil ing slightly, but still with that chair-leg in his hand in case of emergency, followed the colonel and his niece out into the night. CHAPTER XVIII THE TOUCH DIVINE THEY walked in silence, and they walked slowly, until they were well beyond the zone of light and sound that encompassed the hotel. At first, the colonel was between Davies and the girl. They were supporting him, for he still tottered. He was like one who would have collapsed, and would have done so willingly, were it not for the strength they were lending him. "Richard," said the colonel, weakly. "Yes, sir." "I trust that you were not hurt." "They never touched me." "They were cowards," breathed the girl with sup pressed tumult. "Not cowards," the colonel protested. "They de fied me. But they were not gentlemen. They took me unawares." "If it hadn't been for you folks," Davies declared with ebbing passion, "I would have just about croaked a couple of those yahoos and taken my chance at the chair." "I beg pardon," said the colonel. He explained: "I'm a little deaf in my right ear, Richard. Let me walk on the other side of you." They shifted their 120 THE TOUCH DIVINE 121 positions, and Davies was next to the girl. "You be haved with the utmost gallantry," the colonel pursued. "You showed your Welsh descent. 'Twas thus they fought your ancestors and mine under Rhodri Mawr and Owen Glendower." "They were easy." "Easy for one who bears the name of Richard Da- vies. Blood will tell. One gentleman like you is al ways worth a score from the mob." Davies was silent. Should he speak up tell them who he was and where he came from ? What sort of a life he had lived? Who his associates had been? Why not? He couldn't go on fooling a friend. And this old man was his friend. It made him feel ashamed of himself. Why not come right out and tell the colonel all about it, then make a getaway? While he was thus debating with himself, and the colonel was talking on and on, in an effort to cover up the awkwardness of the situation and conceal his own confusion, something happened that held Davies silent, caused a faint tremor to run through him to run through him body and soul, so he himself would have confessed had he been given to that form of speech. And yet it was nothing much, this thing that had happened. At first it was a mere touch on his arm. "My father and mother passed out when I was pretty young," he had begun. And then Alvah had taken his arm. The light and slender curve of her palm was about his elbow. At first IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO he thought that this was a mere gesture of impulse. Then the pressure, although still light, became fixed and real. "It is a pity, Richard," the colonel said. 'They would have been proud of you." Davies could not tear his attention away from the feel of the girl's light hand. She trusted him as much as the colonel did. That was clear. Should he let her also know that he had been a crook all his life, one of the most expert pickpockets if he did say it him self! that even New York had known? But right on top of this question came some fierce assertion from his heart that she was right in trusting him, that he was to be trusted. It was still early, but the dark village lay somnolent about them. The maple-trees that lined the path and the vines and bushes rose and honeysuckle, syringa and lilac that filled the dewy front yards transformed the street into a temple, dusky, mysterious, where miracles might be performed. All this impressed itself on Davies somewhat like the charge of a spiritual mob. Should he prove himself any less of a fighter in the presence of this mob than he had in the presence of that other ? He deliberately looked at the girl, although his glance was brief. He wondered how he could have thought of her as a kid. He couldn't even think of her as a woman not in the terms of womanhood such as he had always known. Tall, slender, dimly white, a look of pain and grief THE TOUCH DIVINE and desire on her face, all these veiled to some extent by a dominant courage. "My parents also died when I was young," she said. And her eyes met Richard's. Only for a second, and yet for a long time after he was looking ahead again he could recall the look. "I've lived a pretty hard life," he said. This time, Alvah did press his arm. There was no mistaking it. Nor was there any mistaking of the meaning of it. "Brace up!" was what the pressure said. All this time the colonel was speaking, but his words had become a monologue with himself for audience. As for Davies, he walked alone with this girl at his side. It was almost as if she herself did not exist not as an earthly entity so far as Davies was concerned. What if his friends and pals back in New York could see him now? Wouldn't they laugh? They would. They'd wonder what he was up to. They wouldn't understand. They wouldn't understand that the touch of this clean and decent hand on his arm was something wonderful and strange. Perhaps the street had become a temple where mir acles could be wrought. Inwardly, Davies was panting. It was with a stress of emotion which he did not analyze. As soon as he could, he went up to his room with the small brass lamp that the girl told him would be his. He closed the door. He found that there were wooden shutters at the window, still more or less ef fective despite the absence of numerous slats. He closed 124 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO the shutters. He put the lamp on the floor and brought out his suit-case from where he had shoved it under the bed. There was some spare linen and a few toilet articles in the suit-case, not much. Its principal contents com prised about half a hundred cakes of soap in small and savory packages of polished and gaily printed paper. This thing of being a soap-agent had struck him as just a trifle better than anything else when he was getting away from New York. A former friend had given him the tip, long ago, that a soap-agent's path led to pleasure and profit, should he ever care to disappear from the big town for any length of time. Only the motive had been different from those his friend had implied. He had been starting clean, and soap meant cleanliness. And soap was something that he could talk about, urge folks to use. It was some thing that he liked and was fond of using himself. He looked at the supply on hand. Should he take it with him, or should he leave it? It was heavy. Word was likely to be sent for miles around, to the marshals and constables, the sheriffs and small-town police, to be on the lookout for a soap- agent who had roughed things in St. Clair. And yet, if he left his soap behind, wouldn't he be bidding good-by right then to this new life of his? Wouldn't he? And how long would it be before he was back at the old trade again ? Easy money ! Again, in imagination, he could feel the touch of Alvah Morley's hand on his arm. Say, that was THE TOUCH DIVINE 125 what he was running away from. And yet he would take it with him. It would be there always. Yep! Just when he was going to gyp somebody's leather, there would come that touch on his arm and he would lose his nerve. CHAPTER XIX BOUND HAND AND FOOT HE closed the suit-case and strapped it. He took a bill-fold from his hip-pocket and from this extracted a five-dollar bill. He put the lamp on the decrepit night-table and the bill under the lamp where the girl would be sure to find it. He blew out the light. He picked up his heavy suit-case and made his way -silently out into the hall. He hated to leave like this. He would have liked to say good-by. But what was the use? His conscience was clear. The five would cover everything. He was half-way down the stairs on his way to the front door, moving with all the caution he could master, when a sound of movement and voices made him halt and hold his breath. The colonel and the girl were down there. He had believed them to be in their rooms, possibly asleep. They hadn't even come upstairs. At least, the colo nel hadn't. From the girl's first words it was evident that she had been looking for the colonel, had just found him. "You mustn't stay there in the dark," she said gently. "Come, now. Go to bed and sleep. To morrow you will be feeling better." 126 BOUND HAND AND FOOT 127 The colonel's response was an indistinct murmur. Alvah was carrying a lamp. She and the colonel ap peared from the back parlor. They paused at the foot of the opposite flight of the double stairway. They were so close that Davies did not dare to move one way or the other. At least, he was in comparative darkness. As for Alvah and her uncle, they had the light of the lamp in their eyes. "I am overwhelmed," the colonel confessed. He looked it. He was flabby. Shriveled would be the better word. Ten years had been added to his age. He was a man not yet recovered from a deadly sickness. His voice had that sort of feebleness about it that betokens a lack of breath. "You shouldn't be overwhelmed," Alvah chided as she might have spoken to a misguided child. "Alvah!" "Yes, uncle, dear." "I must tell you." "What?" "I tried to keep it from you." Alvah put down her lamp on one of the upper steps. "You mean about there being no more money left?" she demanded softly. She even tried to put a playful note into the words. She put out her two hands and took her uncle's hands in hers. "I know. I knew it the moment I saw the sign you put out. I was merely a little slow to believe." "It is all gone." "I can work, earn enough for both of us." "The drink was my ruination." 128 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "And then," Alvah hurried on, still with that as sumption of consoling 1 lightness "and then, the sign did serve a good purpose." "I muddled on, expecting the lightning somehow to strike/' "And didn't it?" Alvah drew her uncle down to a place on the steps. She seated herself at his feet. She smiled up into his face wistfully. "What better good fortune could have befallen us than to have Mr. Davies come when he did? We'll put out the sign again." The old man awoke from his depression. "Mr. Davies ! God bless the boy !" Davies, standing on the steps across the hall, felt a little creep of goose-flesh on his body. It was as if some one had tickled him. He cursed himself without the use of words for being where he was. He wanted to speak, but he couldn't speak. It was impossible for him to move. "Could we want a better lodger?" "He was a friend to me. He was a son. But now he'll be leaving us. It is only right that he should. It is what I should advise him to do. He was a son to me, and I have driven him away." "Nonsense! Do you think that he's the sort who runs away?" "No; he's as brave as a lion." "What then?" "He is a gentleman. I have disgraced him." "He knows you're sorry. There's no disgrace. Fight on! Isn't that the motto you've been following all these years you've been here in St. Clair trying to BOUND HAND AND FOOT 129 settle up Uncle Abner's estate? Haven't you told me that that was what the Welsh what the Cymry did under Rhodri Mawr ? and what Stonewall Jackson did during the 'seven days' ? Don't you suppose don't you suppose," she demanded, while her voice fell to little more than a thrilling whisper, "that there's a Higher Power that knows all about your needs ? Who can tell but that it was that Higher Power who sent Mr. Davies here." Da vies heard all this. And he had the time to meditate it, too. For there was a long silence, and in this the girl's words reechoed. "Aye ! He came as one sent by the Lord. To-night I stood at Armageddon, and it was as if I had been among the spirits of devils, and they were gathered to the battle of God Almighty, His day. And Richard came to me, Alvah came to me like one of the seven angels bearing the vials of the wrath of God." The colonel was running into a mystic mood. "He taught them a lesson," said Alvah. "It was a lesson they needed. It was a lesson that they'll never forget." "God moves in a mysterious way. I little thought, when I saw Mr. Davies this morning, that no, I did know it. Something told me the moment that I saw his face that here was a friend, that here was some one destined to play a part in the lives perhaps of both of us. What is that the Good Book says? 'Be not forgetful to entertain strangers' it all comes back to me 'for thereby some have entertained angels un- ISO IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO Again the silence settled down. Again Davies found liimself as in a state of suspended animation. He felt as a spirit might feel when hovering over the dead body that had belonged to it during the earthly incarnation. There was one choked voice speaking from the si lence: "They've got me wrong!" But there was another voice, small and clear : "Why Why not be the thing they were believing him to It was as if he stood on the edge of a measureless gulf and contemplated the possibility of flight. "Did you notice," the girl asked, "how they were all afraid to move or speak as we went away?" It was a mere whisper, a question not calling for an answer. ""They were afraid." The colonel had dropped his head forward and rested it in his hands. The girl did not disturb his reflection. She sat motionless and looked off into the shadows. The lamplight shone down on the two of them and made a picture that slowly burned itself into Richard Davies's memory. What was he that he should be treated to a picture like this? What right had he to look at it? He stood there, flattened against the wall, and he "was like some one or some thing that has been anni hilated. Who was this they had talked about? It couldn't 3be himself, although they had used his name ; and this Ho mere sobriquet of the streets, either, but the name Kis father had borne before him. He looked back on his immediate past, but the one BOUND HAND AND FOOT 131 big fact that stuck out of it like a peak from a cloud was the girl's hand on his arm. She had shown then the sort of faith that she had in him. It wasn't the old Chick whose arm she had taken. It was the arm of some one named Mr. Richard Davies. Yet, who was this Mr. Richard Davies ? "Me!" "JVo; it cMt you." "But it will be." For, as yet, he was still annihilated in every respect except that of his fluttering, disrupted thought. His mouth was open. Then the colonel straightened up. He spoke to the girl, but he did not look at her. He also peered off into the shadows. "Alvah, you are right. Altogether right. But most right in keeping your faith in the Power that sent us this friend in need. The Lord was watching over me, even while I was writing that card. It was He who brought Mr. Davies to our door." The girl put out her hand and caressed his face. As the colonel slowly turned his head and looked at her, Davies could see the grief and contrition in the old man's eyes. It recalled the look he had seen in the face of old Ezra Wood, and it summoned to his own heart the same vague hunger the same white awe that had been there that night in the Boone House. "Alvah," the colonel said, "let's you and me get down on our knees here and now and thank Him for sending us such a friend and gentleman as Mr. Davies." CHAPTER XX PAETNERS DA VIES fled. He went up the stairs taking his suit-case with him. But he went like a ghost, making no more noise than a shadow. Perhaps he wouldn't have cared so very much if he had made a noise. There are crises in the lives of every one when the ordinary conventions and even the ordinary decencies, so called count for noth ing. And this was one of them. He reached the room he had deserted only a few minutes before. He went in. He closed the door behind him. He dropped his suit-case on the floor. He wilted back against the door and stood there, men tally haggard if not physically haggard, and stared un- seeingly into the gloom. But he was not altogether bereft of vision. Only what he saw was the series of pictures he had brought back with him from the hall, chiefly the last picture of all, wherein an old man and a young girl were kneeling side by side humbly thanking God for sending them such a friend as Mr. Richard Davies. By and by, Davies recovered possession of himself to such an extent that he picked up his suit-case and thrust it back into the place from which he had taken 132 PARTNERS 133 it. He relighted the lamp. Several times he paced the length of the room. He stepped over to the door, finally, and opened it wide. It was not long before the thing happened which he had expected. There was a knock at the side of the door, and there was the voice of Colonel Williams asking him if he had not yet retired. "Come in," Davies invited. The colonel came in. He said something about the possible desirability of extra covers for the bed, the unseasonable coolness of the night. Davies smiled upon him, thrust forward the single chair in the room, which was near the bed. He held the chair while the colonel eased his weight into it. Then Davies seated himself on the bed. "The covers and everything are all right, colonel. But I'm glad you came. I was wanting to talk to you." For the first time since the colonel had entered the room, their eyes met and held. "Richard, I have come to apologize." "No apologies are needed not from you." "As one gentleman to another " "Wait a minute, colonel." Davies was still smiling, but there was a whiteness in his smile, as he himself could feel. What he could not feel, perhaps, was how deeply brilliant his dark eyes burned in the yellow twilight made by the little lamp. The colonel, looking at him, must have had a vision of mystic warriors on Welsh battle-fields. But the colonel waited. "I've got to tell you something," Davies went on. 134. IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "My parents were all right. I believe they were. I know they were. See? But I've spent most of my life among grafters and thieves." He lurched out the rest of it hurriedly. "I was one myself." The old colonel wasn't looking at him any longer. He hadn't shifted his eyes, precisely. It was rather a change of focus. The colonel was looking, mistily, through him and beyond him. His old face misty eyes, droopy nose, white and monumental mustache had become a portrait of earthly wisdom. It was a very human face, humorous and sad. The colonel had made a slight gesture with his hand. Otherwise he did not express himself. But Davies was finding it easier to go on than he may have expected. "It was the easy money that made it seem so good to me," he said. "Easy money, even when I was a little shaver and could swipe a tool or something from a new building or a sidewalk where I was supposed to be collecting firewood. A trip to John the Junkman, and there you were ! And there were two or three times when I thought that I was going straight, but it was easy money that always switched me back in a phony gambling-house where I put down a ten and saw it turn into fifty, and I left the fifty and saw it run to a thousand. But I never went back. I was always too wise for that. I would never get caught. And it was like that when I brushed up against a young swell in the Polo Grounds and almost everything he had dropped right out of his pocket into mine. Easy money ! Easy money !" The colonel nodded his head slowly several times, and PARTNERS 135 at the end of a nod, with his head lowered, he kept it that way and remained motionless. "Until at last," said Davies, "I did take a tumble to what it all meant and what it was all leading to. "You never get anything for nothing. You've got to pay the price for everything you get. I saw it right. I saw it whole. "And if I didn't want to pay the price like all the other thieves and grafters or almost all it was me for the country where I could work it out some thing of what I owed or all of it, even square my self you understand out here in the country where? the decent people live, and you don't have to lock your doors at night, and where every other person that you meet ain't a grafter or a crook." "I understand," the colonel murmured, and he slowly tugged at his silvery mustache as a preliminary to fur ther expression of his own. "I understand." "I wanted to tell you this," Davies continued, hist voice going smaller. "I may be sticking around here for a while, you know, just to see how things turn out. But I couldn't do it and let you folks go on believing that I was something that I ain't." His diminishing voice came to a rather abrupt pause-* as if he had suddenly discovered that he had said every-, thing that he had to say. The colonel was looking at him again out of the? top of his eyes. "I understand, Richard," the colonel announced., "I've known all along what you were. What you've: 136 IP YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO been telling me has merely confirmed my first judgment of you." "You knew " The colonel slowly reached for something that made a weight in the tail-pocket of his coat. It was some thing that did not come easily. It required consider able time and effort to extract it. When it did come, it revealed itself as the colonel's flask. There was still a finger or so of whisky in it. The colonel held the flask up where it would catch the light. He slowly rocked the liquor back and forth. There, for an interval, Davies may have been expect ing the colonel to pull the cork, invite him again to take a drink. There would have been nothing surprising about such an action. In the world Davies came from this was the usual climax to an emotional passage. But the colonel, still with the flask in his hand, got thoughtfully to his feet. " knew that you were sent," he murmured. He trudged over to one of the shuttered windows opening on the garden. He pushed a shutter open. Davies, watching him, saw the colonel uncork the flask and empty its contents into the outer darkness. He saw the old man remain there, apparently absorbed in thought for yet a moment or so longer, then toss the flask away. A midnight funeral! The flask fell into a bed of pansies that Alvah Morley had been cultivating down there ever since her advent in the old house. The pansies grew lush, and were gen erous with their flowers purple and soft and faintly PARTNERS 137 fragrant. There can be no earthly record of what the pansies thought when the bottle arrived among them. But they accepted it without protest, received it tenderly gladly, one would be tempted to believe the expiatory sacrifice of some fragile human flower ! Pansies for thoughts ! The colonel remained for a rather long time at the window, letting the breeze of the night blow in upon him. It stirred his white mustache and the folds of his coat. When he turned, there was a different look in his face. His expression conveyed an appearance of en lightenment, of added wisdom a wisdom no less hu man than was habitual to him, but not quite so ter restrial perhaps. He smiled gently at the youth who was watching him. He put out his hand. Wondering a little, yet touched with understand ing, thrilled not a little with some quiver of relief that was almost joy, Richard Davies got up and seized the colonel's hand. "My boy," said the colonel, a my boy " "I was afraid " "A man need never fear any one but himself." "I couldn't let you believe " "A man is not hurt by lies, sir, but by the truth; and the truth won't hurt him when he's right. God bless you and good night!" CHAPTER XXI "WELCOME TO OUR CITY" THERE may have been something in that aphorism of the colonel's about the truth being salutary so long as a man was right. The news of what had happened at the hotel the night before had spread. This news alone would have been enough to make Davies a person of note in St. Clair one to be considered and looked up to, especially by the ladies of the town; and, far from being hurt by the inevitable untruths stitched onto the fabric of fact, these added details merely increased his renown. But Davies wasn't caring very much what people said, either one way or the other. "A man is injured not by lies, sir, but by the truth ! And the truth won't hurt him when he's right." That was good enough for him. And he prepared to set forth on his day's work. So did Mrs. Meckley. Mrs. Meckley had gone to bed late and had risen early. She had done this with a pleasant conscious ness of duty. Some one had to keep St. Clair posted as to the doings across the street. It was barely nine o'clock when she sallied forth. She had already caught a distant glimpse of her neighbor, Mrs. Sanders, trowel- 138 "WELCOME TO OUR CITY" 139 ing bulbs in her front yard a hundred yards farther on toward the center of town. "I just saw that young man," Mrs. Meckley began. "Who? The one that kicked up the rumpus last night at the hotel?" Mrs. Sanders turned to the black earth and scooped out another bulb. "What say?" "Thought everybody in town knew about it by this time." "I just saw him saying good-by," Mrs. Meckley per sisted weakly. "Better say good-by. I reckon he's about done his share." "You mean flirting " "Serves *em right, guzzlin' an' smokin'!" Mrs. Meckley thought she saw a lead. She dropped her voice, narrowed her eyes. "There was a light in his window till after midnight," she tempted. But Mrs. Sanders hadn't wasted all her ammuni tion, not by a jugful. She gathered up her bulbs in a small box, made a straining effort, and got to her feet. "I'm talkin' about Deacon Crane and County Com missioner Miller gettin* their faces smacked, and that little squirt of an Ed Hall I should think his mother would go out with a new silk dress on every week gettin' his lip split; not to speak of the riffraff that usually does hang around the saloon, all gettin' a tannin'." "Milly Sanders!" 140 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Learn 'em a lesson. They ought to 'a' knowed he was the colonel's adopted son." It wasn't long before Mrs. Meckley discovered that she was in a hurry that she was already late, in fact on an errand that would take her further on her way. Even so, she wasn't quick enough. She saw that she was behind her schedule the moment her eyes lit on the faces of the Beverly sisters. They also had the news. Only, this time, Mrs. Meckley wasn't unprepared. She whispered something into the somewhat wilted ears of the sisters. "But he hasn't ever been married," said the elder Miss Beverly. "That's what I'm telling you," said Mrs. Meckley, and she whispered again. "And I think it's just scan dalous, the old reprobate aiming to marry off the girl like this to his own son. Well, good-by, both of you. I got to be trotting along." She trotted, and the Beverly sisters decided that they would go out in the back garden to see whether Mrs. Mintner was still at her curtain frames. "I don't see why she persists in calling the judge a reprobate," said the younger Miss Beverly with a touch of malice. "No," said the elder, with perfect understanding. "She's been setting her cap for Colonel Williams long enough, goodness knows !" "And he never would look at her," said the younger Miss Beverly, pinking up. Meantime, Mr. Richard Davies, with that aphorism "WELCOME TO OUR CITY" 141 of the colonel's in mind and conscious that he had come off first best in the proceedings of the night before whatever might be said about it, started out to see what sort of an impression he could make on the town as a soap-agent. He remembered the instructions that had been handed to him on a printed card at the soap- headquarters in Greenwich Street: Work every house. If they look poor, remember the poor are easy. If they look rich, tell them so, and they'll fall. He had his suit-case with the half-hundred cakes in it, also a deck of business-cards. His first try was the house right across the street a little house back of a high hedge; but no one was home and he had to leave a card. The next house he tried was up the street, where a woman was digging bulbs. "Good morning," he said. "Harvesting your onions?" The woman looked up from her work, recognized him as the town's latest arrival. She smiled as she said: "These were early tulips." "I know you don't need it," he said amiably; "but I'm introducing the new Saporino line of Mexican mys tery soaps. The name sounds rather bunk ; but they really are good soaps ; use them myself." He gave Mrs. Sanders the help of his hand. She was old enough to compliment him frankly: "You're a good advertisement." Any one would have been justified in saying as much. IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO He was clean, immaculate, even though he was a little shabby. "Well, you see," he confessed, "I love this soap so much I feel as if I was doing folks a favor by letting them have it twenty-five a cake and better than a novel or a play." "He ain't the bruiser they were makin' him out to be," said Mrs. Sanders, looking after him. He had made the sale. He could have cleaned out his entire stock to the Beverly sisters. He knew that he could, the moment that they pounced upon him with their eyes. It was evident that he had been well advertised. The ruction at the hotel had been a good thing after all. The elder of the two addressed him from the porch : "Good morning, Mr. Williams." "What's that?" "Aren't you Colonel Williams's er " Davies got a portion of her meaning. "No relation," he smiled. "I wish I was. I'm intro ducing the Saporino line " And he recited his familiar patter. "Isn't it rather expensive?" "Use ordinary soap to get the rough dirt off, al though we recommend our customers to use the Sapo rino line exclusively. Ah, go on, and take a dozen cakes. Two bits per ! I could tell right away that you ladies had been to New York and knew all about the Sapo rino line " With Mrs. Meckley as an advance agent, his fame was reaching into quarters where it hadn't reached "WELCOME TO OUR CITY" 143 before. But Davies was cautious. It was almost too good to be true, this glad-hand welcome he was get ting wherever he went. He scented something in the air. Nor was he very long in finding out that he was right, and what the danger was. He had just sold his last cake of soap when he saw a familiar figure sauntering along the maple-shaded street. It was that tough young farmer who had threatened to give Gus a wallop on his own account the night before. Davies was glad to see him. He was tired of talk ing to women. He strolled up to meet him. "Hello," he said. "Hello," and the young farmer, with a shrewd glance, backed up to lean against the fence. "Come and have a cigar with me," Davies invited. "Don't care if I do." There was a small cigar and candy store across the street. "Give us a couple of your best cigars," said Davies to the alert but unshaven young merchant behind the counter. "Nickel straight," said the merchant, taking two cigars from a box in the glass case. And his eyes were as keen as a hawk's until he had his dime. "Here comes the bus for Pleas antville," the farmer remarked softly and casually when they were outside again. "Let her come," said Davies, only mildly interested. "I guess this town will hold me for a while." 144 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO The other snorted softly. "It'll hold you longer'n you think, if you don't watch out." "On account of what happened at the hotel?" "That's what started it. But nobody wants nothing done about that for fear of gettin' drug into court themselves, like Miss Morley said. But they've got the constable primed up to run you in for sellin' without a license." He shot a swift glance up the street toward the center of town. His voice speeded up a notch. "And here he comes now !" CHAPTER XXII His first instinct was to run away. Without looking particularly he could see that his chances for flight were good. The street was loosely gardened to left and right. The open country at no place was far away meadows, flowing cornfields, patches of wood. His suit-case was empty. There would be no great loss if he abandoned it. He had always hated the pros pect of jail. Now, with a splurge of feeling, he knew that he was hating it more than ever even though it should mean but a day or two on such a feeble charge as peddling soap without a license. His mind was working fast. The constable, moreover, was taking his time. Davies flashingly reviewed his previous life, the change that had come into it and that change par ticularly which he had experienced since his arrival at Flowery Harbor. It helped him to check his instinct to run. It helped him to check that other instinct, which was to bluff play the indignant, assume the role of injured in nocence, threaten reprisals in a political way. "What are ybu going to do about it?" the young farmer asked. 145 146 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Square myself," Davies replied. "So long! Thanks!" Davies met the constable at the side of a low fence fringing a garden. Beyond the garden was a lane. There was another lane just across the way, and this ran off down a slope between other garden fences to a willowy hollow. There was still a good chance to get away, but all the time Davies was getting a better grip on himself. He and the man of the law surveyed each other. The constable was a man of middle age a trifle fat, a trifle dirty, but keen-eyed and efficient. He was chewing tobacco. He slowly masticated. He spat to one side. His eyes came back to Davies's eyes. "I reckon," he said, without other preliminaries, "you know who I am." "You're the constable." The other squinted down at a nickel-plated badge on the lapel of his coat. He burnished it with his sleeve. "And you're the young feller," he said, as if an nouncing a happy surprise, "who's been sellin' inside the corporate limits without a license. I guess I'll have to ask you to step along with me." "I'm ready." "You seem to take it sort of cool." "Why shouldn't I? I haven't been doing anything wrong. I didn't know I had to have a license." "Ignorance of the law ain't no defense," the con stable recited. "I'm willing to get a license." JUSTICE: THAT'S ALL 147 "I suppose so," said the constable, with a flash of malice, "now that the crime has been committed.'* The constable was still leisurely. There was an air about him of preoccupation, of not having said all that he had to say. And Davies noticed this. "What do you think I'd better do about it?" "That's for the squire to say, although he do gen erally follow my recommend." "And what's that?" "The lock-up." He snapped out the words. "It largely depends on what I say and on what you might call public sentiment." "With no chance to get off with a fine?" The constable slanted a meaning look at Davies. He casually glanced up and down the all but deserted street. "Now you're beginning to say somethin'," he mused. Again he shot a look at Davies. "Well, come along," he said. "We'll be gettin' off to the lock-up." "Have a cigar," said Davies. "Don't mind if I do." He took the cigar that the prisoner offered and bit the end from it. Davies held a match for him. "Do you mean that I might get off all right with a fine?" "How much money you got?" "I don't know; but it ought to be enough." The constable lowered his voice, spoke a little more quickly than he had spoken hitherto. "I ain't one of these here officers that won't listen 148 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO to reason," he averred with a touch of nervous eager ness. "I'm broad-minded enough, if it comes to that. Got to be, b' heck! I got a family." He wasn't al together hardened. He appeared to be a little discon certed. He ran on, with a trace of nervous laughter. "Some folks went through here just the other day, bustin' the speed-limits in one of these here big purple cars, and they'd been goin' on like that yet if I hadn't nabbed them, and the feller who was steerin', he says to me, just like that, says he: 'Be you one of these here officers that won't listen to reason?' 'How so?' says I. 'Why,* says he, 'if you ain't,' says he, 'mebbe you'll let me pay the fine right here and now,' says he." "How much was the fine?" Davies inquired. "In his particular case, it was a five-dollar bill." "Can't I pay my fine right here?" "Not right here," the constable whispered, "unless you're mighty keerful about it." "I'll be careful." Davies was as good as his word. He cast a cautious look about him. He turned his face to the fence and deftly drew his billfold. He counted out five one-dollar bills. But the constable was not so cautious. At any rate, the sight of the stranger's money seemed to in terest him more than any chance of some one discover ing his method of executing the law. His keen eyes counted the five bills as Davies counted them, and also took note of all the other money in the fold. "I reckon," he breathed, "that your fine will be just twice that much." "You ought to go to some bigger town," said Davies JUSTICE: THAT'S ALL 149 briefly, after the transfer had been made. But he kept his temper. "How do I know that they won't make trouble for me when I go to get my license even now?" The constable was in high good humor. "I guess you needn't worry about that," he said. "Just let on like nothings happened. Keep your mouth shut, and nothin's goin' to hurt you. Catch the four seventeen." "But I want to be all on the square," said Davies. "I expect to stay here a while. I'm not going out on the four seventeen." "Oh, you're not!" "You've let your cigar go out," said Davies. He lit a fresh match. "And you've let some ashes fall on your coat." He brushed the constable's collar lightly while that officer was busy with the match and the gift cigar. "Can't you go around to the town hall with me and tell them there that I'm all right?" "I'm sorry," said the officer; "but it's just about my dinner-time." They sauntered along together for perhaps a dis tance of fifty paces, and all this time there was a sort of buzzing in Davies's brain. Then, what was that the colonel had said about men being hurt by the truth, unless they happened to be right? Davies eyed the constable. . "I thought," he said carelessly, "that you had a badge." CHAPTER XXIII THE QUALITY OF MERCY "Miss TESSIE," said the constable, about a quarter of an hour later, "this young 1 man's a friend of mine, Mr. Richard Davies, recently of New York, and he wants a license to sell goods in St. Clair. I reckon you can fix him out all right." "Indeed I can,'* said Miss Tessie. She was a blond creature of a sort which can be adequately described only by the use of the phrase "magnificently developed." At the dinner hour midday in St. Clair she was about the only one left in the town hall, and, with nothing else to do, she had re marked the advent of the constable and the dark-eyed stranger with a flutter of interest. "Thanks," said Davies. He had turned to the con stable and thrust out his hand. As the constable's hand took Davies's, the officer felt the smooth surface of his lost badge against the palm of his hand. He mastered his astonishment to some extent. "I told you you'd find your badge as soon as you'd square me here in the town hall," Davies whispered. "Are you and me going to be friends from now on?" Perhaps the constable understood precisely what had 150 THE QUALITY OF MERCY 151 happened. Possibly he guessed that this stranger had deftly relieved him of his badge back there in the street when presumably brushing the ashes from his coat. But it isn't likely. It didn't matter very much. The man of the law had his ten dollars in his pocket and now he had his badge as well. He was in a softened mood. He looked at the New Yorker, and over his face came the expression of an upright friend. "Count on me," said the constable. "I ain't afraid of these local politicians. I've just been elected, and my job's still got two years to run." The constable again addressed himself to the young lady beyond the office railing. "I'll leave you young folks together," he declared. Davies's own attention had become riveted on Miss Tessie. He believed, and it may have been true, that he had never seen any creature more beautiful. Her smile was so frank and inviting, moreover, that he made no attempt to conceal his admiration. "Why do you look at me like that?" she softly in quired. "Can you blame me?" he breathed. "I could keep right on looking at you forever, Miss Tessie." "My name is Miss Wingate, thank you." "You could call me Sweeny, if you wanted to." "I thought Mr. Winch said you were Mr. Richard Davies." "Dick, for short." "I think you're awful," she said, "to tease a poor, innocent, little country girl like that." 152 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "Rosy cheeks and a shiny eye," Davies quoted. "Shiny nose, you mean," she countered. She had a little purse with a mirror in the top of it, and she looked at herself in this. Quite unabashed, she dusted her nose with a small powder-puff. "Anyway," he said, "I'm glad to meet you." The noon-hour was quiet in St. Clair no traffic to speak of in the several streets, every one gone home to dinner with the exception of a few loafers here and there, a few somnolent clerks in the stores, Miss Tessie Wingate the sole tenant of the town hall against such time as Simp Fisher, the village auditor, should come back chewing his tooth-pick. The girl had surren dered her smooth pink fingers to Davies's hand and allowed them to linger there. For an eternal moment Davies had a rather giddy feeling that this was New York, and that a spell had fallen upon the world, and that he and this girl were the only ones left awake in it. Her voice came to him on an accompaniment of bird-music; it was like a vo calization of the warm and fragrant lazy air that drifted in through the open windows. "What can I be thinking of, and you such a terrible person !" "Why, terrible?" "The way you cleaned out the hotel barroom, last night." "So you know about it, too?" "Of course I do. The whole town knows about it." "I'm sorry." "Sorry ! I think it's wonderful." THE QUALITY OF MERCY 15* She engulfed him in a look from her large, blue eyes. "You're the wonderful thing," he asserted sincerely. "How many other girls have you told that to?" "None." "I've always been just dying to go to New York." "Don't." "It must be awfully exciting." "Just like it is for a chicken getting the ax." Miss Tessie jerked her hand away suddenly. A tall young man, exceedingly thin, lightly dressed, his straw hat on the back of his head as if to relieve the pressure on his bulging and scantily thatched fore head, strolled into the room with an air of belonging there. He had a thin mustache, and this only partly concealed the difficult trick he was performing of turn ing a toothpick, end over end, with lips and tongue unaided by his hands. He had no look for the others there as he slouched through the gate in the railing, nor did Miss Wingate have more than a glance for him. He slumped into a chair beside a desk, propped up his feet and began to file his nails. Miss Wingate busied herself with the stamped paper Davies had come to get and then handed it over to him with a languishing smile. "Who's your friend?" he whispered. The girl shrugged and sniffed. But she called out: "Oh, Simp! I'd like to have you meet Mr. Davies, the gentleman from New York." Simp lowered his feet. He pocketed his knife. He took his tooth-pick from his mouth and examined it 154 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO before tossing it away. He got up and came forward with a certain regretfulness. It was not until then that Davies recognized him. It was Simp's chin that had got in the way of his elbow the night before at the tavern door. "Oh, how do you do?" said Mr. Fisher languidly, and he put out a limp hand. "No hard feelings," said Davies. The other did not answer. He permitted a vague smile to drift across his features. He retired to his place behind the desk. The girl made a slight grimace. "He's enthusiastic like a dead eel," Davies com mented softly. He responded to the girl's smile. "Good-by Tessie!" "Good-byDick!" "We'll see each other again.'* She waved him a plump and shapely palm as he passed through the door. CHAPTER XXIV SMAI/L VOICES HER smile went with him out into the street. The town was no longer quite what it was before. Something had been added to it a friendliness, a hue of tender ness. It was something that at once emboldened him and yet softened him. Suppose he went over to the hotel and ate his dinner there, just to show them what sort of a man he was ! But a milder inspiration pos sessed him as he was about to pass a butcher-shop. He went in. "Give me a couple of pounds of pork-chops," he ordered. Even the butcher appeared to know who he was. The butcher was all flustered attention. He disap peared into his ice-box. He cut the meat with nervous haste. "What else?" "What have you got?" "Potatoes." "Sure!" and he indicated one of the measures that the man held up. The meat, the potatoes, the butcher himself all these also had become the notes of a symphony of pink and white. Those were her colors. Tessie's ! Her 155 156 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO throat and her nose and her wrists were white. Her lips and her cheeks and her finger-tips were pink. Even her dress had been pink and white. "What else?" "What do I need?" "Maybe some lard." "All right." "How much?" "A couple of pounds." It was sweet this preliminary training for the fam ily life. He stowed away the things he had purchased in his now empty suit-case, paid his bill and went out once more into the shady fragrance of the maple-trees. The noon lull still lasted. The town was still. Overhead was a sky that appeared to be bluer than any sky he had hitherto seen. And there were a few white clouds adrift up there, just like the clouds that Ezra Wood had mentioned ships to bring dreams in from distant ports, or to carry other dreams away away into the blue. In the stillness, a hen in some neighboring back yard fluted her melancholy intention to set ; there was a tiny squabble of sparrows in the eaves of the nearest house ; there came the faint nasal drone of a woman's voice, singing some old song to the time of a recurrent creak as she rocked her baby to sleep. Davies stopped where he was and breathed deeply a couple of times, alert yet brooding. There was a foundation-smell of sun-warmed vegita- tion, heavy and tepid and sweet; but over this was a fabric of other smells of new milk, of fried meat, of SMALL VOICES 1T fresh earth which made no less an appeal to his in nermost nature. And then, some lurking thought unfolded itself and was suddenly in full flower. All this was what he had come to seek. It was a homing instinct that had brought him. There wa something in all this that was native to him. He wasn't meant for Chatham Square, for the back room of the Commodore, for the roaring Bowery, for the cell-block or the hospital bed. No man was. These were his people the old colonel and the col onel's niece, and, most of all, Tessie Tessie Win- gate! He stood there and heard a huckster in some distant part of the village wailing unintelligibly the things that he had for sale ; from a bit of woodland beyond a field there came the thud of an ax followed by a rustling crunch of falling branches ; a school-bell softly clanged. And these things were music to his ears. At the far end of the street he saw the colonel appear at his gate and peer in his direction, and he knew that the colonel was waiting for him. "We took the liberty," said the colonel, "of holding dinner for you, Richard." It may have been a matter of mood, but it seemed to Davies that the colonel was tremulous, glad almost beyond words to see him, as if he had been fearing that the guest might not come at all. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting," Davies said. *1 stopped to buy a couple of things." 158 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO "We thought you'd like to try our boiled greens. It's getting a little late for dandelions, but the poke and the purslane are in their prime." "Pork chops," Davies announced, indicating his suit case. The colonel was a little hard of hearing. "I don't know whether you've ever tried sassafras tea." "The old grip's full of spuds." "If you'd like to go to your room, I'll tell Alvah "I ought to see her myself. I'm afraid this lard will run away on me.'* "I trust you met no further unpleasantness." "Me ! I met some of the finest people in the world." He stopped. Either the colonel or Alvah had once more hung the "Room to Let" sign on the door-pull. Davies looked at it. An impulse stirred within him and he obeyed it without pausing to question the meaning of it. He walke4 up the steps of the stoop. He took the sign from its place. He carefully tore it into four pieces, put the pieces into his pocket. The colonel was just back of him. "We thought " the colonel began. He was embarrassed under the younger man's glance, although Davies's look was one of friendly assurance "You're not going to need that sign any more." "Richard!" "I'm here to stay." From the back of the house came a lilt of music : "Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State." SMALL VOICES 159 He and the colonel entered the wide front door of the mansion side by side, and there, with the door closed behind them, the colonel turned and put his hands on Da,vies's shoulders. "Richard," he faltered. "Cheer up, colonel!" "What have you done?" There were tears in the old gentleman's eyes. His jaw sagged a little under his ante-bellum mustache. "You're not sore, are you, colonel?" "You are even as Barnabas," said the colonel hoarsely; "Barnabas, the son of consolation." CHAPTER XXV FRIEND EMERSON ALVAH also must have been impressed to some extent, but she had a care about how she showed it. A deepen ing of the light in her eye, a trace of extra color about her jaw and throat, a certain restriction and stiff ness of movement as she took the things from the suit case and that was all. "If you care to wait for about half an hour longer," she said, "I can give you a dinner worth waiting for." "How about it, Richard?" "Fine!" And that was all, for the present; only, before very long, Richard heard the girl singing again. The words came to him, remote, yet distinct, from the kitchen : "Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State; Sail on, O Union, strong and great. Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate." The words and music and the voice of the girl com bined to strengthen the hitherto unexpressed yearning that was in his heart. He wished he had the power of speech. Not his kind of speech. The colonel's kind. Or her kind Tessie Wingate's! 160 FRIEND EMERSON 161 He strolled into that room that the colonel had told him was the library, and he saw that a good part of its walls were covered with books. There must have been a thousand of them, two thousand, a dazzling number. What could any one do with such a lot of books as these especially when they were old, as most of these books appeared to be, with nothing in them, and no body but a junk-dealer ready to make an offer for them? The presence of so many books nevertheless stirred his reverence. There was almost something about them that frightened him. He went over and carefully pulled a volume from its place. "Emerson's Essays." He opened it. He read: 'Trust thyself.' " " What followed, confused him; but it didn't greatly matter. It was as if he had asked ah 1 this assembled wisdom here, as represented by these stacks of books, the riddle of this new life that was unfolding before him, and that a clear voice had given him answer. "I'm on, Emerson," he said. " 'Trust thyself!' " There was a peculiar fascination in this access to wis dom. What wouldn't he know if he could read these books ? Through the silence of his reverie the girl's voice reached him again: "Our hearts and hopes, our ways, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears." With the book still in his hand he turned to find the colonel at the door. The colonel was in his shirt- 162 IF YOU BELIEVE IT, IT'S SO sleeves, but he carried a garment over his arm, and this proved to be a coat. "I wanted to honor the occasion," he said he was a trifle breathless, apparently as a result of some re cent effort and also, possibly, on account of a touch of excitement "I wanted to honor the occasion by putting this on." And he held the coat up with his two hands in front of him and regarded it with a mingled affection and regret. It was a handsome coat, with lines of dignity and grace even when thus shown at a disadvantage. The color of it was a dark blue, but it had cuffs and collar of black velvet. The design of it was what may be called a heavy cutaway. "What the French would call un frac de ceremonie" the colonel elucidated. "Want me to help you on with it?" "If you would be so kind." It took something of an effort from the two of them to get the colonel into it. The coat was heavy and it was stiff. Even after the colonel did get it on, the coat adhered to the lines of some nobler mold. The velvet collar reared aloft and back. There was a swanlike line of beauty down the back. The waist of it swept in with a suggestion of slenderness, then swept out again. "Some coat!" "It was a perfect fit when I last had it on," the colonel said gently. "It was made for me by certainly the best tailor in Mobile." FRIEND EMERSON He slowly turned, looking down at himself, trying to get a proper idea of how the coat looked on him. "Swell!" said Davies.