fii
 
 297 C
 
 3-6
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 GEORGE KIBBE TURNER 
 
 Published, August, 1921 
 Second Printing, September, 1921 
 
 PRINTED IN THK UNITED STATES OT AMERICA
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 2138488 '
 
 1 L T IS the custom of our country, old Judge 
 Cato Pendleton used to assert, for the matrons 
 to lead in and offer up the marriageable 
 virgins at three main seasons of the year, set apart 
 by our unwritten tribal laws for that purpose. 
 The first of these, he held, is established just 
 preceding the winter solstice, when the male youth 
 are gathered back to their family altars for the 
 women's and children's festival of Christmas ; the 
 second anticipates the ancient preparation for 
 the vernal equinox in the period of joy and feast- 
 ing just preceding Lent; while the 'third, the 
 largest and most successful day of sacrifice, though 
 local in its scope, is also doubtless due to the fixed 
 climatic mutations of the year. I am alluding 
 now to our Pageant, of the Roses, set by wise pre- 
 cedent in the last of May, when the songs of our 
 mocking birds, the blossoms of our Southland and 
 the complexions of our women are at their best, 
 and all alike invite to the immemorial spring feasts 
 and sacrifices of love. 
 
 It is upon this last festival at the height of the 
 9
 
 10 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 mating season that the minds and purposes of our 
 women focus throughout the year. Here is, in 
 fact, the fixed centre of our women's calendar 
 especially for unusually successful mothers with 
 unusually attractive daughters. For though there 
 is no explicit award in set terms for the best offer- 
 ing of the season, yet there is a very close approxi- 
 mation to this in the choice by old custom of the 
 Empress of the Roses the main figure of the 
 central tableau vivant of that day ; and a distinc- 
 tion of this kind, I need not point out to any ra- 
 tional mother, has advantages to any marriage- 
 able daughter much more permanent than the as- 
 sumption of a crown of flowers as the ruler of one 
 May day. 
 
 It was in connection with this chief women's 
 festival that I myself observed, as a close witness, 
 the rather remarkable enterprise or speculation 
 in the main business of women, with the details of 
 which I am now about to acquaint you. 
 
 In the pageant of 1919 an unusual and unfortu- 
 nate event took place from the standpoint of 
 local mothers. The winner of the chief honour 
 of the day was a stranger from out of town a 
 girl who, it was' charged, was brought to Carthage 
 by her mother for the obvious and open purpose 
 of matrimony; and who was soon known, by her 
 critical and hostile contemporaries, as White or
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 11 
 
 Snowy Shoulders a name bestowed upon her, I 
 was given to understand, because of the over insist- 
 ence of her somewhat astonishing mother upon the 
 irresistible charms of that portion of her person. 
 Her real name, or the name given out by her at 
 that time, was Virginia Fairborn. 
 
 Women strange or otherwise are not at my 
 time of life the subjects of such eager scrutiny as 
 they may have been at some earlier period. I am 
 well by the first sweet expectancies of spring. 
 But, being human, I could scarcely have avoided the 
 observation of this striking girl and her no less 
 striking though very different mother nor, if I 
 had done this, could I have missed the other wo- 
 men's whispering about them from the first mo- 
 ment when the two arrived with their many and 
 houselike trunks and stirred to the depths the ex- 
 clusive boarding house of Mrs. Tusset, where for 
 many years now I have held my residence. 
 
 I heard the other women more or less from the 
 first whispering about them among themselves, 
 "Who are they? Where do they come from?" 
 as women have always whispered among themselves, 
 I assume, concerning stranger women since before 
 Babylon; especially in socially guarded centres 
 like the boarding house of Mrs. Tusset. In time 
 this whispering usually abates and new feminine 
 alliances take place. But in this case the whisper-
 
 12 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 ing, instead of dying, grew louder and more sus- 
 tained. The two strangers still remained objects 
 of inquiry to the other women not yet explained, 
 or accepted, or forgiven, probably, for their in- 
 trusion. 
 
 "Who are they?" grew very soon to "Did you 
 ever see anything like them in your life?" And 
 they stood alone outside, so far as the women 
 though not the men could arrange it. 
 
 For the girl that Snowy Shoulders this was 
 a ma/tter apparently of small concern. From 
 the first she was the still, white, silent, unsocial 
 creature she remained smiling but never laugh- 
 ing, talking little, sitting much alone a strange 
 unheard-of thing apparently a girl dumb and 
 laughless in girlhood. Yet in a way her manner 
 was an added attraction ; her indifference, together 
 with her beauty, proved irresistible to the men, 
 who as any woman will tell you love to love the 
 mysterious qualities which they themselves invent 
 and place behind the fine eyes of beautiful and 
 silent women. 
 
 "She may be handsome, but she never had an idea 
 in her life," I could hear the whispering women 
 passing judgment on her day after day. "She 
 takes no more thought of the morrow than a lily 
 of the field," was one more opinion I remember. 
 "And she has just exactly as much sense."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 13 
 
 The mother was just the opposite of the girl 
 a mystery at the other pole; rosy, where the girl 
 was white and especially after three o'clock in the 
 afternoon for she rouged wantonly and abomi- 
 nably; strident, where the girl was still; strange 
 and suspected, not from her silence but her much 
 speaking; insistent beyond all precedent in her 
 breaking into every conversation and her advertis- 
 ing of her wondrous daughter; and known soon 
 and generally behind her back with that keen 
 concern for the sensibilities of others which pre- 
 vails 1 in boarding houses by a name equally as 
 kindly and striking as her daughter's as the Scar- 
 let Cockatoo. 
 
 These then were the two strangers, the two in- 
 vaders of the matrimonial territory of our own 
 women the two rakish craft, as old Sam Barsam 
 would have said, who, appearing suddenly, had 
 started poaching, contrary to all women's law, in 
 the still, protected mare clauswm of the women of 
 Carthage. 
 
 I can recall with considerable sharpness and ac- 
 curacy the information concerning them and their 
 purposes which I received while reading my paper 
 from time to time in the big hall before dinner, 
 from the whispering women who were wont to 
 gather there to exchange the results of their study
 
 14 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 of the two more especially as the date of the 
 Pageant of the Roses was approaching. 
 
 "Who are they? Who knows who they are, 
 anyway any more than on the first day that 
 they came?" one woman would inquire, turning 
 her head in the direction of the stairway, down 
 which the mother and daughter were soon to come 
 to dinner. 
 
 "Mrs. Tusset knows you can bet your life on 
 that," another one would say that black-eyed, 
 up-and-coming Belle Davis. 
 
 "Yes, I know," said a third one that Mrs. 
 Ella Armitage, the grass widow called a beauty 
 once herself and spoken of for the beauty prize 
 in her day. "But what can even Mrs. Tusset 
 really know?" 
 
 "They're adventuresses that's all we do know," 
 added Julia Blakelock, the first speaker, again. 
 Though scarcely a candidate herself at this some- 
 what late hour, she had, I had been informed, a 
 niece who had been mentioned as a possible ruler 
 of the roses. 
 
 "No, we don't. We don't know that either," 
 said the positive, downright Belle Davis. "All 
 we know is 1 what they showed Mrs. Tusset where 
 they came from. They're Fairborns 'from Fair- 
 born Courthouse, Dell County, ma'am,' " she went 
 on, mocking a sharp voice sufficiently familiar now
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 15 
 
 to all of us. " 'From the old Fairborn plantation 
 the largest with two or three exceptions in old 
 Dell County, ma'am.' " 
 
 "Where's Dell County?" inquired the thin-lipped 
 Julia Blakelock. "What's Fairborn Courthouse? 
 Do you know?" 
 
 "Yes. Certainly I know," replied Belle Davis. 
 
 "When were you ever there?" asked Ella Armi- 
 tage, surprised. 
 
 "I never was. But I know jutft the same, just 
 what it's like an old run-down county with a 
 courthouse in a little old run-down town, with two 
 or three spotted pigs in the main road, and a jail, 
 and an old-time country hotel with pillars, and 
 a livery stable where they all put up their horses 
 when they come in from the plantations twice a 
 year, when there's a court session." 
 
 "Yes," said Ella Armitage. "I've seen it myself 
 near enough, anyhow. But how do we know 
 they even come from there?" 
 
 "They showed that much to Mrs. Tusset. They 
 must have to ever get in here, I believe." 
 
 "I don't," said Julia Blakelock; "I don't be- 
 lieve anything of the kind." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "For one mighty good reason." 
 
 "What reason's that?" 
 
 "Those dresses. That wardrobe of the girl."
 
 16 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 I stopped reading now gave up trying to and 
 sat there behind my paper drinking in, as Sam 
 Barsam would have said, the quaint, ancient lore of 
 the whispering women's trade secrets dresses, 
 appearances, little manners the things the women 
 talk about when they are considering and trying 
 to estimate another member of their craft. 
 
 "Well, what of it ?" Belle Davis wanted to know. 
 
 "They never came from Fairborn Courthouse 
 nor any other place like you describe. You can 
 make up your mind to that not those extreme 
 latest dresses on that girl !" 
 
 "And yet her mother's did. It's written all 
 over them and her. She's just nothing but a 
 regular old-time small-town Southern belle all 
 loose ends and ribbons and pink parasol. 
 
 "And the girl herself might have come from 
 there too," said Ella Armitage. "Maybe that's 
 why she don't talk any more to cover that up." 
 
 "No," said Belle Davis in that positive, down- 
 right way of hers. 
 
 "They might have done this," contributed Ella 
 Armitage. Having been a beauty once herself she 
 could, I assume, speak with some authority. 
 "They could have taken her to sbme good dress- 
 maker " 
 
 "Good dressmaker !" said Julia Blakelock some- 
 what sniffingly.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 17 
 
 "Yes. Good dressmaker!" said Belle Davis. 
 
 "They must have cost a small fortune," said Ella 
 Armitage. 
 
 "Yes. But who'd wear them?" 
 
 "I would and you would," stated Belle Davis. 
 
 "Yes. If we wanted to be conspicuous." 
 
 "All I was going to say," said Ella Armitage, 
 going back, "was that they might have taken the 
 girl to some dressmaker in St. Louis or Louisville 
 and given her carte blanche to fit her out." 
 
 "Some theatrical dressmaker maybe or some- 
 thing like that," said Belle Davis, nodding. 
 
 "Accustomed to getting up women for the 
 stage." 
 
 "And told her to go ahead." 
 
 "Yes," said Ella Armitage, the author of the 
 theory. 
 
 "Oh, you make me tired, with all your mysterious 
 old talk about these people !" said Julia Blakelock. 
 "They never saw Dell County, either of them. 
 She's just a common adventuress with a big, com- 
 mon, striking daughter for sale. It's a case of a 
 girl for sale, that's all. It's written all over both 
 of them. One calls out and auctioneers and the 
 other poses. I've seen hundreds just like them." 
 
 "The woman's common enough," said Ella Ar- 
 mitage. "You see her all over the South." 
 
 "But there's nothing common about that girl,"
 
 18 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 stated Belle Davis. "Don't you fool yourself. I 
 never saw anything like her in all my life. She 
 sits there day after day like a girl cf ivory." 
 
 "Not an idea in her head." 
 
 "No. That isn't it." 
 
 "Not an expression not a particle of expres- 
 sion in her face." 
 
 "That's more it," said Belle Davis. "That's 
 what I was trying to say." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "That it isn't whajt's there so much (that's! 
 strange as what isn't there what's lacking." 
 
 "Brains," suggested Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "No." 
 
 "What is' it, then?" 
 
 "I don't know. I can't tell you exactly. Only 
 it isn't natural for a girl of that age. I can't 
 explain it exactly. But it's like all the life all 
 the spring had gone out of her." 
 
 "That's perfectly true," said Ella Armitage, 
 "but what's strange about it?" 
 
 "It's terrible, I think," said Belle Davis ; "per- 
 fectly terrible." 
 
 "Terrible?" 
 
 "That expression on her face. I sit and study 
 it. Do you know what I think it is sometimes?" 
 Belle Davis asked them. 
 
 "What?"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 19 
 
 "Fear." 
 
 "Fear?" 
 
 "Yes in both of them. But in that girl that 
 pale-faced girl especially. Did you ever notice 
 them," she asked "especially the Cockatoo 
 just before the postman comes every day?" 
 
 "I don't know as I have," s"aid Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "I don't know what you mean," said Ella Armi- 
 tage. 
 
 "The one screaming louder and louder." 
 
 "And the other one stiller and whiter like 
 marble. Or getting away out of sight entirely." 
 
 "It may be all my imagination," started Belle 
 Davis, "but " 
 
 "Hush! Here they come now," said Julia 
 Blakelock. 
 
 And the door upstairs closed and the two 
 strange women were coming down the stairs the 
 chattering mother first, the white silent daughter 
 following her. 
 
 That was the first hint I received that conver- 
 sation of the real situation as it developed.
 
 II 
 
 TO the best of my knowledge and belief it 
 was two nights after that when the first of 
 the telegrams arrived; an occasion which 
 I myself witnessed and still can recall with con- 
 siderable fullness of detail. 
 
 It was the night of some species of rehearsal for 
 the now fast approaching pageant. The girl had 
 come out silent and alone from the dining room 
 and sat silent and alone and indifferent to her sur- 
 roundings in one corner of the room, noticing no 
 one, thinking of herself, or of nothing at all or 
 of s'ome fearful vision, according as you wanted 
 to believe. 
 
 The mother was having what was denoted in the 
 boarding house as one of her "wonderful nights" 
 'screaming with exultation or apprehension or 
 relief or whatever emotion it was that really drove 
 her, and calling attention even more plangently 
 than usual to the wonderful charms of her wonder- 
 ful child. 
 
 The reason for this exalted mood was not un- 
 known or unadvertised to the other women of the 
 
 House. The girl and her mother were both waiting 
 
 20
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 21 
 
 for the appearance of young Clayborne Gordon 
 Captain Gordon now who was to be the partner 
 or opposite of the girl in the main tableau of that 
 year, the tableau of Victory ; and whose personal 
 capture by these invaders of our peaceful matri- 
 monial seas was expected now by competent ob- 
 servers to be announced as a final climax for the 
 two strangers* day of triumph. That interpreta- 
 tion certainly received more or less corroboration 
 from the manner on that particular night of the 
 leader in the matrimonial raid that so-called 
 Scarlet Cockatoo. 
 
 The woman raved on as the current phrase 
 went about the girl, in shriller and louder ac- 
 cents, I should have said myself, that night than 
 ever before. 
 
 "Isn't she wonderful, ma'am, at that angle?" 
 she inquired in that piercing whisper of the groupi 
 she was holding up to talk to. "Just as she sits 
 there now? So unconscious of everything of 
 all of us." 
 
 It was scarcely credible to any sane mind that 
 the girl did not hear her, but neither in motion 
 nor in manner did she give the slightest evidence 
 of having done so. She sat colour, attitude and 
 expression unchanged looking off in the cold, im- 
 passive and almost stupid manner that she had, 
 gazing at another corner of the room, like some
 
 22 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 one, I should sometimes have said myself, who 
 had been drugged. It was the one defect in her 
 really remarkable beauty the lack of any ap- 
 parent interest or zest in life. 
 
 Apparently her mother must have sensed this 
 too. 
 
 "Virginia!" she called sharply across the room. 
 "Virginia, isn't Captain Gordon rather late?" 
 
 By this I assume she was killing two birds with 
 one stone announcing for the benefit of the other 
 women the approaching advent of that very desir- 
 able young man and stirring her exhibit up to 
 a somewhat needed display of life. You may have 
 seen horse trainers flick blooded horses so, maybe, 
 pasbing by the judges' stand. 
 
 The girl responded at best indifferently. 
 
 "I don't know, mother, I am sure," she answered 
 in her slow rich voice, lapsed again into her moody 
 silence and sat there silent until finally her escort 
 came. 
 
 Each spring, as Omar Khayyam has, I think, 
 neglected to point out, brings forth its crop of 
 bridegrooms as well as' brides ; and with us an 
 Emperor in fact, if not in name as well as an 
 Empress of the Roses. And Clayborne Gordon, 
 though somewhat hard at times to bear, was un- 
 questionably the Emperor of that May. He had 
 been across at war "near though not too near
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 23 
 
 the Front," as was said by our rosy friend, Cupid 
 Calvert, the women's licensed jester, whom our 
 boarding house, like all other boarding houses, 
 possessed. And, returning late, he still wore his 
 uniform with an exaggerated valour and stiffness, 
 which marked him even more than before the Great 
 War from his fellow men. He was, as some one 
 quite rightly said of him, a very Gordon of the 
 very Gordons ; born, it might easily be believed, 
 with a slightly lifted nostril, which made him some- 
 thing of an impediment to joy in general social 
 life. Yet after all he was what he was well born, 
 well connected, w'ell supplied with means by the re- 
 cent bounteous provision of Nature and war for 
 us Southerners in our war cotton; and they were 
 few and far between who failed to bow down be- 
 fore him. 
 
 He greeted the gathering in Mrs. Tusset's hall 
 with a courteous indifference. So doubtless Ju- 
 piter might have bowed to villages when in pursuit 
 of some temporarily favoured maid. And the two 
 went together to their rehearsal for the Victory 
 tableau and the possible greater victory for the 
 Scarlet Cockatoo and her white child, with the 
 parrot's voice of the mother screaming wonderfuls 
 after them like a litany. It was a wonderful 
 night, it seemed, for a wonderful rehearsal for 
 what was to be a wonderful affair, she knew.
 
 24. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Have a wonderful time!" she screamed after 
 them as they passed through the entrance, and 
 then turned back again to twang still further upon 
 the already twitching nerves of her auditors. 
 
 "You just ought to see her in her costume as 
 Victory," she stated in a general and somewhat 
 ominous silence. "She is simply wonderful, 
 ma'am! Her shoulders oh, I never saw them so 
 wonderful as they are in that so snowy white!" 
 
 "Stop, ma'am," said Cupid Calvert, jumping 
 up in mock alarm from where he was sitting, "be- 
 fore proceeding any further. Remember there 
 are gentlemen present." 
 
 "You may laugh, sir," she told him playfully, 
 relieved no doubt at any answer whatever from the 
 circumambient silence, "but let me tell you that 
 girl has the most wonderful skin in all the world. 
 I am her mother and I know. Not a blemish 
 not a blemish anywhere," she announced, including 
 the women in her statement, "on her whole per- 
 son." 
 
 "Pardon me," cried the amuser of the women, 
 starting towards the door and stumbling heavily 
 over his feet, "I must be going, ma'am ; it isn't 
 safe for me to stay." 
 
 The guarded laugh which followed him cheered 
 on the woman to further efforts in her advertising. 
 
 "No," she said to him when he turned back
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 25 
 
 again grinning his broad and foolish grin. "But 
 truly, all joking aside, isn't she wonderful? Is 
 it any wonder I am so proud and happy, sir, as 
 her mother, after bringing her up and rearing 
 her tenderly all these years myself; and lavishing 
 everything that her heart desired on her and all 
 that? How can I be anything else but proud to 
 see how it's all come out? How all the men are 
 crazy over her ! Just as you were yourself and 
 are right now!" she ended, touching him on his 
 coat lapel and drawing away. 
 
 There was another laugh following this effort 
 a real laugh, with the genuine, somewhat tart fla- 
 vour of laughs at a professional laugher. For the 
 career and personal ambitions of Cupid Calvert 
 as a squire of dames, or a fusser, as I understand 
 is the more contemporary expression, were more 
 than a matter of common report; they were a 
 subject of general jest. And no one present had 
 forgotten the ill success of the youth's earlier 
 efforts to awaken the attention of the cold and 
 indifferent girl, nor his silent and somewhat red- 
 dened retreat after various specific attacks. 
 
 "You know it. You're like all the rest of the 
 men. All of you are just the same," said the 
 mother and exhibitor of Snowy Shoulders, clearly 
 encouraged and emboldened by the rare stimulus 
 of a general appreciation of her conversational
 
 26 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 powers and by her opponent's unreadiness of im- 
 mediate reply. "You simply can't resist her. Oh, 
 I know. I was just like her at her age," she added 
 for heaping good measure. "All admirers and 
 beaux and ribbons and dances. All the wonderful 
 times a real Southern girl has when she's popular. 
 Ain't that just the simple truth?" she asked in a 
 general appeal to the other women. 
 
 And just at that moment the height of exu- 
 berance and playfulness fate, it seemed, chose 
 to strike; and that first telegram arrived. The 
 messenger boy must have passed the golden girl 
 herself as she went down the outside walk with her 
 golden escort; and must have been standing there 
 outside, waiting for the mother to finish her shrill 
 ecstasies, ringing vainly at the bell, for when 
 nobody answered his voice called out through the 
 screen door: "A telegram." 
 
 "Who for?" 
 
 "Mis' Fairborn. Mis' Leonora Fairborn." 
 
 The woman that Scarlet Cockatoo whose 
 real name, as I have neglected to state so far, this 
 was supposed at that time to be, stopped talking 
 suddenly, her smile frozen on her painted face, 
 like a scared clown, as Cupid Calvert stated after- 
 ward. 
 
 After a moment she stepped out and took the 
 telegram herself at the door. 
 
 "Sign here," said the boy.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 27 
 
 And then, when she had signed with, I thought, 
 a somewhat shaky hand and started to turn away, 
 "It's collect," said the boy. 
 
 "Collect !" she said after him, in a voice that was 
 sharp and faint at the same time. 
 
 She hadn't the money with her for it. I remem- 
 ber that quite clearly, for I myself loaned her the 
 necessary sum, which she afterward failed to re- 
 member to repay. 
 
 She settled with the boy with my change and 
 turned away without opening the yellow envel 
 ope yet. 
 
 "Any answer?" the messenger boy asked her. 
 
 "Why ?" she asked, more shrill than before. 
 
 "They told me there might be." 
 
 "Wait," she told him. "HI see." 
 
 Her voice sounded still sharper and more appre- 
 hensive. 
 
 The other women turned themselves away with 
 a somewhat exaggerated and vivacious indiffer- 
 ence, talking together, watching her out of the 
 corners of their eyes. 
 
 "Have you got a pencil, Judge Dalrymple?" 
 she asked me. 
 
 I didn't have one. 
 
 "Here's one, lady," said the messenger boy, 
 and handed her the miserable old dirty stub 
 that a messenger boy usually carries.
 
 28 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 She took it and went over to the writing desk 
 in the corner. Her telegram was not opened 
 yet. 
 
 She was delaying opening it, it seemed to me. 
 
 But now she tore it open with a flourish and 
 read it with a fixed and steady smile. And then, 
 after a pause, seeing, I assume, the eyes of the 
 other women on her, she threw back her head and 
 laughed. It was a mistake in judgment, so all the 
 other women agreed afterward. The laugh was 
 too sharp ; almost hysterical, I thought myself. 
 
 "What's the joke?" caUed Cupid, looking 
 curiously across the room. 
 
 "Oh, nothing. Nothing," she said ; and put her 
 telegram in the bosom of her dress and started 
 answering it, planting the blank the boy had given 
 her down on the desk with a decided motion, &s 
 though all ready to start, and then putting the 
 point of the pencil to her lips and sitting there, 
 considering. 
 
 For a minute maybe two minutes she sat 
 there, the soiled stub of the messenger boy at hei 
 scarlet lips, a fixed steady smile on her face, but 
 no motion to write. The eyes of the whispering 
 women, who were gathered round a bridge table 
 now, were all the time furtively regarding her, as 
 she doubtless was well aware. 
 
 She was unable to write her reply that was
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 29 
 
 clear finally; evidently not being able to collect 
 her thoughts. 
 
 "Won't the little pretty words come to 
 mamma?" inquired Cupid, pushing in, as usual, 
 as far as advisable. 
 
 She broke off her writing and got up almost 
 with a jerk. 
 
 "Let me answer it for you, ma'am," continued 
 Cupid. "Let me do it for you." 
 
 "No," she said with hectic gaiety, "I'm going 
 to save money. I'm going to answer this thing 
 by mail." 
 
 She gave the messenger back his pencil stub and 
 blank and sent him off. And then, if I remember 
 rightly, she started back across the hall, going 
 toward the stairway. 
 
 "You ain't going," asked Cupid Calvert, still 
 pushing her, "without telling us the good news?" 
 
 "What news?" she asked back, her voice sharp- 
 ening again, it appeared to me now, in spite of all 
 she could do. 
 
 "What you were laughing at. What made 
 you so terrible mighty happy in your telegram." 
 
 "Certainly I'll tell you. Certainly," she an- 
 swered him with a simple offhand gaiety. "It's 
 just word from another old flame of Virginia's; 
 sending felicitations on her first stage appearance, 
 saying he'd certainly be here on the great day"
 
 30 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "The day of the great victory," said Cupid, 
 grinning with easy significance. 
 
 The woman laughed again with that extraordi- 
 nary half hysteria. And the other women almost 
 stopped talking at her somewhat striking 
 blunder. 
 
 "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Cupid," 
 said Belle Davis, filling in the sudden silence ; "al- 
 ways going butting into other folks' business like 
 you do 1" 
 
 "You don't mind, do you?" Cupid asked the 
 mother of Virginia with a mock languorous look. 
 By this time the woman had gotten over to the 
 stairway, still wearing her fixed and rigid smile, 
 and stood temporarily with her hand clasping the 
 baluster. 
 
 "Oh, no. No, certainly not," she said. 
 "Nothing like that with you, Cupid! But one 
 thing I wish you would do- for me all of you !" she 
 added, taking in her breath so sharp that it was 
 distinctly noticeable. "I wish you wouldn't speak 
 of this this message to Virginia ; or allude to it 
 in any way, please. I want the whole thing to be 
 to be a surprise to her." 
 
 "Oh, certainly not, Mrs. Fairborn," the other 
 women told her warmly. 
 
 And then she smiled that hectic smile of hers 
 "bright roses on the withered snow," as Cupid said
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 31 
 
 concerning her complexion and passed brightly 
 up the stairs, her step, however, it appeared to me, 
 lagging considerably as she approached the top. 
 
 "Collect!" said Belle Davis, almost before the 
 woman's door upstairs was closed. "Felicitations 
 collect!" 
 
 "From another old flame," said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "How humouresque !" said Cupid, that being the 
 expression he was most favouring with his prefer- 
 ence at that time. 
 
 "What a fool !" added Julia Blakelock. 
 
 And the women went on then, tearing to pieces 
 the other woman's awkward hurried lie. 
 
 "What a fool she is!" said Julia Blakelock 
 again through her thin lips. 
 
 "No," said Belle Davis. 
 
 "What is she, then?" 
 
 "You know what I've been telling you all the 
 time about the postman how she acted just be- 
 fore he came?" 
 
 "What of it?" 
 
 "Did you see her hands go when she first took 
 that thing that telegram?" 
 
 "I did," said Mrs. Armitage. 
 
 "And how she sat there afterward, with that 
 old pencil in her mouth like she was a paralysed 
 woman ?" 
 
 "What of it?" the Blakelock girl asked again.
 
 32 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "That woman's scared to death, that's all," 
 asserted Belle Davis. "So scared she didn't know 
 what she was doing or saying and don't yet!" 
 
 "I think that too," said another one the quiet 
 little older woman whom Cupid Calvert named the 
 Sibyl or the Pessimist of Our Boarding House. 
 
 "It must have been quite tol'able excitin'," said 
 Cupid, "whatever it was. She must have been ex- 
 pecting something right interestin'. She was 
 shiverin' and shakin' long before she started open- 
 in' it." 
 
 "A guilty conscience, that's all, probably," as- 
 serted Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "She was scared, that's all," Belle Davis said 
 again, "from first to last, so she didn't hardly 
 know her name!" 
 
 "What do you expect was in that thing that 
 telegram?" asked Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "I wish I knew," said Ella Annitage. "I'd give 
 a right smart piece of money to." 
 
 "I certainly would," said Belle Davis. 
 
 "You just made up your mind to know, 
 chillun?" inquired Cupid Calvert, who fell easily 
 into negro dialect in his more humourous moods. 
 "Is your mouth just waterin' to find out?" 
 
 "Certainly is," said Belle Davis. "Why so?" 
 
 "'Cause if you is, honey, here's the boy, maybe, 
 who kin find the way to git it for you ; who's got
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 33 
 
 a special particular means that ev'ybody don' 
 have at his 'sposal." 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Belle Davis. "I know it. 
 I know the special means myself. It has yellow 
 hair and peekaboo waists and stands looking out 
 the telegraph-office window all day long, eating 
 on a lead pencil." 
 
 "Ne'mind. Ne'mind," said Cupid, who prided 
 himself rather than otherwise, I always claimed, 
 on the diversification of his interests in the fair 
 sex. "Only you just watch this boy!" 
 
 "What do you think, judge?" asked Belle 
 Davis, bringing me into it finally. 
 
 "Think about what?" 
 
 "About that telegram. Was she scared or 
 wasn't she?" 
 
 "'She'd better be, if she isn't now," I said. 
 "With all you whispering women after her with 
 your trained sleuth hound." 
 
 "Our reputation hound, eh, judge?" Belle Davis 
 asked me, laughing. 
 
 "Yes ma'am," I said. "You hit it there ex- 
 actly. That's just the title. They'll never es- 
 cape you and your reputation hound. He'll run 
 them down before he's finished." 
 
 "How humouresque you are, judge," said 
 Cupid Calvert.
 
 m 
 
 WHETHER or not the chain of events 
 proceeding from this first telegram 
 might under other circumstances have 
 resulted otherwise and less disastrously for the 
 two women, I am unprepared to state. Yet in 
 few circumstances that I can represent to myself 
 would the hunt that started after them with the 
 coming of that document have been organized so 
 expeditiously and got under way so fast. 
 
 "Curiosity," old Sam Barsam used to remark, 
 "is the strongest appetite of the human soul. It 
 lures the budding mind of the infant to its sweet 
 unfolding; it drives the parched and sandy 
 traveller through the tawny wastes of the Sahara. 
 When all else has failed when teeth are gone and 
 eyesight, and reason totters, and ears threaten to 
 fall off still curiosity remains unshaken on its 
 throne, a pledge and presage of immortality; and 
 reaches its grandest height in some senile woman 
 in a boarding house." 
 
 In any boarding house, he might have said, in 
 
 my opinion. In any place where woman meets 
 
 34
 
 35 
 
 woman face to face continually under one common 
 roof, observing each other's souls and bodies and 
 complexions in dishabille, curiosity must and will 
 be served and most especially in an exclusive 
 and careful boarding house like Mrs. Tusset's 
 in the fierce light which shines upon social centres. 
 
 I cannot speak for others, but I felt reasonably 
 assured myself that our smiling friend, Cupid 
 Calvert, would arrive that evening with the con- 
 tents of that fateful telegram while I sat reading 
 my paper in the hall before dinnertime. No 
 better social retriever could be invented than this 
 jovial young dog. He had, in fact, the so-called 
 social gift, the many opportunities of the jovial 
 for collecting information, and with his special 
 opportunity in this particular case he could 
 scarcely fail to bring back to his waiting friends 
 and patrons, the whispering women, the news mat- 
 ter he could get for them from their sister, that 
 massive blonde with stately figure and gold hair 
 piled up like a great golden pitcher on her head, 
 with whom I had not infrequently myself seen him 
 conversing in the telegraph office. 
 
 It was evident to me at least from the mere dis- 
 play of teeth as he came in the door that evening 
 that he had not been unsuccessful in the main 
 business of his day. 
 
 "Guess what papa brought you home tonight?"
 
 36 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 he asked the waiting group who were there upon 
 his entry. 
 
 "We know !" said the lively Belle Davis. "We 
 know!" 
 
 And Julia Blakelock came forward, without 
 further or unnecessary remark. 
 
 "You never would betray me, would you?" he 
 asked them, chuckling and holding them off. 
 "Cross your heart. You never would let on you 
 heard from me? 'Cause this is serious business, 
 you understand." 
 
 "Never. Never. Nobofly'll ever know from 
 us!" Belle Davis promised him. 
 
 "Well, here it is!" he told them finally. "I 
 went and copied it down my own self." And he 
 brought it out for them to read. 
 
 That Belle Davis, being the quickest of the lot, 
 grabbed it first and started reading. Her full 
 round face got red with excitement. 
 
 "My good Lord!" she said. 
 
 "Read it," said Cupid. 
 
 "Go ahead. Read it. Out loud," said Julia 
 Blakelock. And she did. 
 
 It ran, to the best of my memory, this way: 
 
 "So you should make a get-away? Now you 
 come through. Five hundred by Saturday. 
 Or letters start. Wire answer. A. G."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 37 
 
 "What's this?" asked Ella Armitage. 
 
 "A get-away? What's a get-away?" inquired 
 Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "It sounds to me like a city slum," said Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 "It is, I expect," Cupid Calvert told her. 
 
 "A get-away?" asked the Blakelock girl again. 
 "What is it? Tell me." 
 
 "Don't pretend you don't know, Julia," Belle 
 Davis told her. 
 
 "I don't. Do you?" 
 
 "It's just cheap talk for escape, Julia dear," 
 explained Cupid Calvert. 
 
 "Escape?" said the Blakelock woman. "Who 
 from?" 
 
 "From A. G., probably." 
 
 "A. G.?" Belle Davis asked him. "Who's 
 A. G.?" 
 
 "You kin search me," said Cupid. "All I 
 know's just what you see from just right there. 
 A. G. from St. Louis." 
 
 "Is that where it's dated from?" asked Mrs. 
 Armitage. 
 
 "See!" said Belle Davis, reading the date line 
 and going over the thing again. "Five hundred 
 by Saturday ! You know what it is, don't you? 
 It's blackmail." 
 
 "You might think thataway," said Cupid,
 
 38 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "By some criminal some low-down creature," 
 stated Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "How do you make that out? How do you get 
 all this?" the Davis girl asked her back. 
 
 "It's right there, isn't it plain as day? Just 
 the way that's written." 
 
 "Blackmail!" said Ella Armitage, speculating. 
 "What power could a man like that have over 
 them?" 
 
 "That's just it," said Belle Davis. 
 
 "There's nothing very strange or mysterious 
 about it that I can see," stated the Blakelock 
 woman. "It's just what I said from the begin- 
 ning. They're just two common adventuresses 
 from St. Louis that's what they are. Only 
 worse, probably, than we suspected at first. 
 Two creatures from the slums of St. Louis." 
 
 "You sure are ridiculous, Julia," said Belle 
 Davis, "when you once get started, ain't you?" 
 
 "Not this time, I'm not. I said, and I'll say 
 it again, they never saw Dell County in this world. 
 They're just two common low-down adventuresses 
 from St. Louis." 
 
 "I don't believe it," said Belle Davis. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I know they're not, that's all. The way 
 they act the way they are. The girl's dresses 
 might have come from St. Louis ; but she never did
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 39 
 
 nor her mother. And I don't believe they are 
 that kind the girl certainly isn't." 
 
 "What did they come here for?" asked Ella 
 Armitage, "it " 
 
 "That's easy," Julia Blakelock answered, 
 "Men for the girl!" 
 
 "One will be enough," said Cupid Calvert. 
 
 "I'm not so sure about that, either," said the 
 Blakelock woman. 
 
 "Don't be a fool, Julia," said Belle Davis, get- 
 ting red. "They're here to sell off the girl maybe 
 but no more." 
 
 "I believe that," said Ella Armitage. 
 
 "And even then the girl don't do her part 
 even at that. She never runs after the men 
 you've got to say that." 
 
 "She don't have to," said Julia Blakelock. 
 "Her part is to pose while her mother pulls 
 them in." 
 
 And they went back to the telegram again. 
 
 "A. G. that's all you know?" Belle Davis 
 asked Calvert. "Cross your heart?" 
 
 "Yes, ma'am. That's all I could find out 
 here," said Calvert. 
 
 "No wonder she's restless," observed Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 "Who's that?" asked young Calvert all of a 
 sudden, looking in my direction.
 
 40 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Oh, that's just the judge," Belle Davis said, re- 
 assuring him, and came over to me in my corner. 
 
 "What do you think, judge?" she asked me. 
 
 "Think about what?" 
 
 "Oh, you know well enough ! About those two 
 women the White Shoulders and her mother?" 
 
 And she started showing me the telegram. 
 
 "Take it away," I said to her. "I don't want 
 to be implicated in this. I can't afford to be 
 when they bring you up before me from the Grand 
 Jury." 
 
 "The Grand Jury!" they said after me. 
 
 "Yes, ma'am. For going in and stealing mes- 
 sages from the telegraph company. Don't you 
 know that's an indictable offence or ought to be 
 if it isn't?" 
 
 "You're fooling now, judge," said Calvert, with 
 a kind of crooked grin on his face. He wasn't 
 a very stout-hearted animal. 
 
 "You'll see," I told him. 
 
 "But look, judge!" said Belle Davis, bold and 
 undismayed as ever. "Ain't it right, when you 
 know folks are doing wrong, to try and expose 
 them?" 
 
 "All I know is, " I said, "you want to be careful 
 and step kind of light. You might get in trouble 
 yourself!" And I went upstairs and washed my 
 hands for dinner.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 41 
 
 However, I knew now about the telegram like 
 everybody else did; and watched with the rest 
 those two go along with whatever it was hanging 
 over them. The time to their day of victory as 
 it was now quite commonly called was growing 
 mighty short. It was on Saturday of that week. 
 And as it came along the strain must have 
 grown pretty strong especially on the Scarlet 
 Cockatoo. 
 
 Every day, it seemed, the contrast between the 
 mother and daughter got sharper and sharper. 
 The mother talked, always louder and more 
 shrill concerning the old plantation, and the 
 raising and the dressing of the wonderful girl from 
 her beginning, the exceeding great whiteness of her 
 skin, her ribbons, her hats, her French knots upon 
 her baby clothes, the lavishing upon her of all that 
 heart could desire from a child and the wild appre- 
 ciation of it now by all the men. 
 
 And all the time t]jat this was going on within 
 earshot, to say the least the girl, White Should- 
 ers, would sit alone, oblivious, indifferent, appar- 
 ently impervious; thinking her own thoughts 
 more silent and statuesque than ever. 
 
 "Is she an absolute fool?" the Blakelock woman 
 kept asking. "She must know about that tele- 
 gram whatever it is there that's driving the 
 mother screaming crazy."
 
 42 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "That's where you're wrong," Belle Davis told 
 her. 
 
 "You mean to stand there and tell me that girl 
 don't know about what was in that telegram?" 
 
 "That's just exactly what I mean. She meant 
 just what she said the mother when she talked 
 to us that night. She don't want the girl to know 
 about that thing.'* 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I don't know thai, naturally. Unless she 
 might hope she could settle it herself some way 
 before the great event !" 
 
 For it was generally conceded now among the 
 whispering women that the victory day, the Pa- 
 geant of the Roses, was about to bring out the 
 announcement of the final chapter of the magnif- 
 icent and self-contained Captain Gordon. 
 
 "Somebody ought to tell him," observed Julia 
 Blakelock. 
 
 "Who?" asked the Davis girl. 
 
 "Clayborne Gordon." 
 
 "That's a nice idea. Why don't you?" asked 
 Belle Davis. 
 
 "Maybe I will," stated the Blakelock woman, 
 not backing down an inch. "Somebody certainly 
 ought to." 
 
 "I hope something will happen soon one way or 
 the other to end this thing and shut that mother 
 up," said little Mrs. Pennyworth, the small
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 43 
 
 little brown woman whom Cupid Calvert called the 
 Boarding-House Pessimist. "Or we'll go crazy 
 if she don't." 
 
 "She's so happy it hurts," said Cupid. 
 
 "Worse than that. It deafens you," said Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 "It's just driving me crazy, that's all," said the 
 Pessimist briefly. 
 
 And then, right after that, on the third day 
 after the first one, the second telegram arrived. 
 The Cockatoo had evidently done what she said 
 she would sent on her answer by mail. And the 
 second telegram was in answer to this. It ran 
 something about like this: 
 
 "Coming down to look you over. See you 
 later. A. G." 
 
 You might almost have known mere was some 
 new nervous strain from just sitting listening to 
 the Cockatoo to her terrific outbursts of joy 
 and laughter. 
 
 "Did you ever hear such a noise in your life?" 
 said Belle Davis, looking over across the room 
 where the woman was talking. 
 
 "And that girl what do you suppose she is 
 thinking about? How can you claim she don't 
 know what's going on those telegrams?" asked 
 Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "That would give her more brains than you
 
 44. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 claim she's got," Belle Davis answered her "if 
 she could act out indifference like that." 
 
 "Maybe she just thinks it's all part of the 
 coming nuptial noise. The praise service over 
 Clayborne Gordon," observed Ella Armitage. 
 
 "She looks worse to me every day," said Cupid 
 Calvert, who had stood studying the mother with 
 that calm brazen look he had when he wasn't grin- 
 ning. "Even with all that paint on. She looks 
 more like a scared clown than ever." 
 
 "She certainly sounds like one," said Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 "I wonder what he'll be like when he comes?" 
 asked Ella Armitage. 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 " A. G." 
 
 "What I wonder is, how we'll get to see him." 
 
 "Oh, you'll get to see him all right," I told them, 
 chiming in. "Leave that to our friend Cupid. 
 He'll know all about him. Your good old reliable 
 reputation hound will smell him out before the 
 ink's dry on the hotel register." 
 
 I left them exchanging speculations as to who 
 the blackmailer might be, what relation he had to 
 the women and what the two had done that he held 
 them with all the dark and racy possibilities 
 which lurked in the situation and no doubt 
 several more.
 
 IV 
 
 FOR awhile it looked to me as if the Fair- 
 born woman had slipped them; as if in 
 one way or another this A. G. this 
 blackmailer, as he was then believed to be might 
 have eluded the other women and their assistant. 
 The preparation with joy and laughter and gar- 
 lands for the festival the day of victory pro- 
 ceeded, the happy clamour of the Scarlet Cock- 
 atoo rising above all the rest. And still there was 
 no visible appearance of the mysterious telegra- 
 pher from St. Louis. 
 
 It was the day before the festival that evening 
 preceding supper when I saw finally that some- 
 thing had occurred, from the beaming countenance 
 of our jovial young friend Calvert. 
 
 "You're a nice crowd," he was telling the women 
 in the hallway. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Do you know who was here today?" 
 
 "No. Who?" 
 
 "He was." 
 
 "He who's he?" cried Belle Davis, all excite- 
 ment. 
 
 45
 
 46 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 He didn't even answer that. He knew she un- 
 derstood. 
 
 "Right here under your noses," he told her. 
 
 "Who?" she asked again. 
 
 "Here take a look at this!" he said, and 
 brought out that printed card, which they showed 
 me afterward: 
 
 A. GLUBER 
 
 183 N St., 
 
 St. Louis, Mo. 
 
 COSTUMES EASY PAYMENTS 
 
 "For heaven's sake ! A dressmaker !" said Belle 
 Davis, and stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth 
 to stop her laughing. 
 
 "A. Gluber. Costumes. Easy payments," the 
 Blakelock woman read over slowly. 
 
 "Weren't we the burbling boobs," asked Cupid, 
 "not to get it before?" 
 
 "The mysterious blackmailer," said Belle Davis. 
 "Ain't that the screamingest !" 
 
 "And that's all it was," said Julia Blakelock in 
 a little small voice like she was disappointed. "A 
 dressmaker !" 
 
 "Isn't that enough?" asked Ella Armitage. 
 "Isn't that enough?" 
 
 "No," said Cupid, "not for Julia. She was 
 looking for some real revelations."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 47 
 
 "There might be some yet," suggested Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 "Some what?" 
 
 "Revelations. Supposing they hadn't paid for 
 them all their instalments." 
 
 "Which is just what they haven't done, prob- 
 ably," said the Blakelock woman. 
 
 "And supposing he went and took them all 
 away !" 
 
 "And left her " 
 
 "Without!" 
 
 "Oh, that would be terrible !" 
 
 "You'd think so," stated Belle Davis, "if some- 
 body came and took all your clothes away the 
 day before what you'd planned for for weeks 
 to show yourself at the announcement of your 
 engagement." 
 
 "It would be funny, wouldn't it?" 
 
 "Pardon me?" asked Calvert, making up a face 
 like he was shocked. ''What?" 
 
 "If they took all that stuff back and left her 
 just a few old duds." 
 
 "What a crab you are, Julia," said Belle Davis 
 to her with her usual frankness. 
 
 And then they started questioning Calvert. 
 
 "Did you see him?" 
 
 "Who?" he asked them, pretending not to 
 understand.
 
 48 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "That dressmaker!" 
 
 "No. Not yet." 
 
 "Then how'd you get this?" 
 
 "Ne'mind. Ne'mind," he said, making a mys- 
 tery of it. 
 
 What he had done, it came out afterward, was 
 to bribe the second girl, that coffee-coloured ne- 
 gress, Lucy, and she had managed when she got the 
 card at the front door to keep it for him and just 
 announce the name to the Fairborn woman. 
 
 "Do you know, I heard her! I heard her go 
 down myself," said Edla Armitage, "now 1 you 
 speak of it!" 
 
 "And White Shoulders?" 
 
 "She wasn't here, I don't think," said Belle 
 Davis. "I'm pretty mighty certain she was out 
 all this afternoon over to the pageant grounds. 
 She just came in here a little while ago. Clay- 
 borne Gordon brought her over." 
 
 "So she doesn't know anything yet," said Mrs. 
 Armitage. 
 
 "So you say !" said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "We'll see anyhow at dinnertime." 
 
 "It certainly will be funny," said the Blakelock 
 woman. 
 
 The other woman that Scarlet Cockatoo 
 would have been surprised in spite of her long ex- 
 perience if she had realized that night how many
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 49 
 
 eyes were studying her and with what intimate 
 knowledge of her affairs. 
 
 "It's all over," Belle Davis was claiming when 
 I heard the whispering women comparing notes 
 in the hallway after dinner. "You'll have no 
 amusement tomorrow, Julia. Your day is 
 ruined." 
 
 "Ruined?" 
 
 '^She's fixed it up with the dressmaker." 
 
 "How do you know?" 
 
 "How can you help knowing from her voice. 
 From that laugh from just the look on her 
 face." 
 
 She confirmed what I had thought myself. The 
 girl was just as usual. The hectic joy of the 
 mother had abated to what it was before the com- 
 ing of the first mysterious telegram. 
 
 "How would she fix it up?" asked Julia Blake- 
 lock, still grudging and disputing. 
 
 "How could she help it when she had shown 
 the dressmaker about tomorrow the day of vic- 
 tory and the announcement that Clayborne Gor- 
 don is to pay her bills from this time forth?" 
 
 "Is that funny or not?" inquired Cupid Calvert, 
 grinning his blandest, most vacant grin. "You 
 talk about paying the bills for your own hang- 
 ing 1" 
 
 "Somebody ought to tell him," said Julia Blake-
 
 50 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 lock. "That's all. Before he falls into the hands 
 of those two imposters." 
 
 "I won't," said Cupid. "I love him too much !" 
 
 "There won't anybody," said Belle. "For just 
 that same reason." 
 
 It was the general belief among the women that 
 night that everything would go through that next 
 day, that day of victory, for the mother and 
 daughter, exactly as was now commonly under- 
 stood to be the program first the tableau of 
 Victory, the crowning of the Empress of the Roses 
 and then the formal announcement of the sur- 
 render and capture of Captain Gordon. 
 
 What did occur of course, though logical 
 enough, was due just to a chapter of accidents.
 
 THE Pageant of the Roses of that year took 
 place as it had in many others at 
 Bellevoir, the estate of our Colonel Rob- 
 ert Bragdon. I was there, together with all the 
 other residents of the town, with but few and tri- 
 fling exceptions. I sat well back in the temporary 
 amphitheater, which was eracted as usual under 
 the trees on the natural slope of the so-called 
 grotto. 
 
 At two-twenty-five, just five minutes before the 
 exercises were supposed to begin, I observed for 
 the first time the short squat man in striped clothes 
 three seats ahead of me. Cupid Calvert going by 
 called my attention to him. 
 
 "Did you get a good look at him?" he asked me. 
 
 "Who?" I inquired back. 
 
 "A. Gluber, of St. Louis." 
 
 "Who that?" I said. "A dressmaker!" 
 
 "Yes. The one with the ears." 
 
 "He looks like there might have been toads in 
 his ancestry," I told him. 
 
 "You see a lot of them like that," he said, "in 
 the cities in certain parts. Dressed up like that 
 too." 
 
 51
 
 52 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "I expect you do," I said, "if you frequent those 
 parts!" 
 
 "They've all seen him now. They're all talking 
 him over. They're all wise," he said, "about the 
 instalment dressmaker and his bill." 
 
 "Trust you," I told him. 
 
 He grinned like I had given him a compliment. 
 
 "All but Gordon," he said. 
 
 "It's an undying wonder to me," I told him, 
 "that you haven't let him know." 
 
 "Damn Gordon !" he said, grinning a little sour 
 grin. "Let him have her. He deserves her." 
 And he went on to pass along the good news to 
 others, I presume. 
 
 I could hear over the heads of the crowd the 
 Scarlet Cockatoo laughing, apparently in fine 
 feather. She couldn't see and didn't know, it 
 seems, that the man was there, nor suspect the 
 whispering that was going on behind her. And 
 then just before the thing began I heard that 
 Child of Hell of Cole Hawkins come up the drive, 
 barking like a great dog, and stop shut off 
 suddenly, the way he ran it. 
 
 "He'll kill somebody with that machine yet," 
 said my neighbour just beyond me, looking back. 
 
 Then just before the thing started the boy came 
 and flung himself into the seat beside me, his face 
 and neck red from hurrying. He had been drink- 
 ing again ; I saw that. He would have liquor, law
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 53 
 
 or no law; more, it seemed like some others 
 since the law was on than before. 
 
 "Hello," he said to me in that hoarse voice he 
 had when he was that way. 
 
 "Hello, Cole," I told him. And then the thing 
 started. 
 
 "I came late," he explained in an overload whis- 
 per, "so's to miss the cackling." 
 
 He had the reputation of a woman hater, 
 especially since he came back after his big dis- 
 appointment, his accident on the aviation field and 
 his grudge against the world in general. "The 
 squawking sex," he called them; "the cacklers," 
 and got out of the way and avoided them whenever 
 possible. 
 
 "Hush up !" I told him. "They're starting in." 
 
 The spring festival of love and matrimony was 
 under way once again the new crop of marriage- 
 able or almost marriageable daughters displayed 
 on the raised platform in the latest spring styles 
 of dress and posture. The mothers, with their 
 best hats and stiffest smiles and dresses, watched 
 principally their own offspring from below; all 
 making a curious and diverting study, as old 
 Judge Pendleton used to say about the affair, for 
 a traveller from the antipodes like all our tribal 
 customs dealing with matrimony. 
 
 The great change was accomplished, which our 
 portion of the race demands the lengthening of
 
 54 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 the skirt, the raising of the hair ; all the set tribal 
 advertisements that the noisy natural happy hu- 
 man child has now been broken for the bonds of 
 matrimony. But even more wonderful than this, 
 our traveller would observe, was the firm stoical 
 unconsciousness in the manners and the faces of 
 both the exhibitors and the exhibited of the real 
 and critical significance of this chief and most 
 trying ordeal of a woman's life of the great main 
 question of whether or not in the scant half dozen 
 years the new offering would be taken. 
 
 The Rose Pageant we were watching was no 
 different from those in other years, except for its 
 chief keynote, the military note, a note common 
 enough in that year, I assume, all over our land 
 as could be expected, especially when the well- 
 known piquancy which war costumes give to young 
 women's charms is considered. 
 
 Beginning with the younger and less practised, 
 then, the celebration moved always forward, with, 
 let us say, an increasing and cumulative display of 
 charm, the military motive furnishing a contrast 
 of exceptional success in the method of exhibit 
 beauty in armour soft, fragile flesh encased in 
 hard forbidding steel a masquerade attractive 
 to mankind since the first legend of the Amazons 
 and the grand old red-headed goddesses of Scan- 
 dinavia. 
 
 The enthusiasm arose then step by step as the
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 55 
 
 height and closing tableau approached the cli- 
 max of the day of victory ; and the hour drew near 
 for the chief heroine of our national victory and 
 that spring the final triumph of the girl, White 
 Shoulders. 
 
 A hush came as she appeared, followed by the 
 murmur which is the inarticulate voice a human 
 crowd gives to its emotions. The girl was cer- 
 tainly wonderful all that her mother had claimed, 
 and more. 
 
 She was Victory, panoplied and crested Vic- 
 tory in flesh and blood. Straight-gowned below, 
 steel-helmeted above, a spear and shield in her 
 hand and on her arm one white shoulder deeply 
 bared. Athena, of the ancient Greeks, had no 
 more triumphant or warlike beauty than this 
 strange, silent, suspected girl when she first 
 appeared. Even the women murmured their 
 approval. She was Victory herself as she moved 
 forward. Even the man beside me, the hater of 
 women, was stirred. 
 
 "She's a looker, ain't she?" said Cole Hawkins 
 to me in a loud stage whisper. 
 
 "Shut up, Cole!" I told him. 
 
 It was planned, as I learned afterward, that 
 Clayborne Gordon, as the triumphant hero, and 
 garbed also in Grecian costume, should approach 
 from the other side of the sylvan platform and be 
 in some way suitably rewarded by the goddess for
 
 56 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 his valor. He started out when (Victory had 
 established her final pose; all necks were craned. 
 
 There was another murmur of a different 
 kind; another statement of mass emotion by the 
 audience. 
 
 "What's this?" said Cole Hawkins, half aloud, 
 from beside me. 
 
 Victory had lost her pose, had turned half 
 around, was looking with dilated eyes at a place 
 in the audience. 
 
 I straightened up and saw the man myself his 
 striped coat, his flashing necktie pin as he raised 
 his short fat body from his chair to stare at her. 
 
 "No! No! No! I can't! I can't! Not 
 again !" cried Victory, in the voice of a half fren- 
 zied child. 
 
 And she crashed down upon her armour, her 
 helmet rolling from her black hair, her wonderful 
 bare white shoulder scratched and bleeding from 
 her fall upon her shield. 
 
 The words were perfectly distinct in the silence 
 were heard and remembered by at least a dozen 
 I spoke to. 
 
 And following that, by a fraction of a second, 
 rose the well-remembered voice of the Scarlet 
 Cockatoo : "Virginia ! Virginia ! My baby 1" 
 
 She was up on the stage before Captain Gordon 
 and the rest of them had taken her Victory, her 
 baby, to the anteroom.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 67 
 
 "Did you see that?" asked Cole Hawkins beside 
 me his face redder than red against his dead- 
 black hair. "That man she was looking at. 
 What the hell's going on here?" 
 
 The whole place was buzzing with the knowledge 
 that was so well disseminated now concerning the 
 strange dressmaker. The man sat there, brazen- 
 faced, like his kind are, bluffing it out, waiting for 
 developments, rather pleased than otherwise at the 
 attention he was receiving. I told my young 
 friend Hawkins about him what I knew in a 
 word or two. 
 
 "Is that so?" he said, with the ugly, insolent, 
 lingering emphasis upon the last word that's liable 
 in men of just his kind to come before some ugly 
 action. And before I knew it he was on his feet, 
 out of his seat by the aisle beside me. 
 
 "Cole," I said, "come back here!" I knew nat- 
 urally what he was capable of. 
 
 But he went straight up the aisle in silence. 
 
 In back of the flimsy dressing room you could 
 hear the voice of the Scarlet Cockatoo calling. 
 
 "My child! My child! Virginia! Virginia 
 wake up ! It's all right. It's all right." 
 
 The black-eyed, black-haired boy walked up the 
 aisle, with the little lameness from his accident 
 showing in his slow gait. He stood there by the 
 side of the stranger with the striped coat and the 
 diamond horse-shoe in his tie.
 
 58 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Stand up," he said in a thick low voice, with 
 his big hand on the man's shoulder. 
 
 It was an outrageous thing, on the face of it. 
 Several of the men sprang up, looking for trouble. 
 
 "Sit down," said Cole Hawkins in a low voice. 
 "This is my funeral." 
 
 They sat down. 
 
 "What do you think you're doing?" asked the 
 Stranger, turning a dark and rather puffy face up 
 at him. 
 
 "Stand up didn't I tell you?" said Cole Hawk- 
 ins ; and dragged him by main strength from the 
 chair. 
 
 "Cole, you fool!" I said, taking him by the 
 elbow. But he shook me off. 
 
 "Who do you think you are?" inquired A. Glu- 
 ber, staring at him. He was quite a strong look- 
 ing man, for a dressmaker. They are, quite often 
 I understand. But he didn't use strength if he 
 had it, preferring apparently to reply on his voice 
 and ugly look. "Who do you think you are?" 
 he inquired again trying to stare Hawkins 
 down. 
 
 "I'm the man that's here telling you about the 
 train service." 
 
 "Yeah ?" said A. Gluber, his stare still firm, but 
 with no physical action yet. 
 
 "I came to tell you," said Cole, still in a low 
 ivoice, staring back into his small dull eyes,
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 59 
 
 "there's a train goes up north in just about an 
 hour from now." 
 
 "Well, what of it?" asked the man. 
 
 "That's the one you're going on." 
 
 "I am, huh? Why am I?" 
 
 "Because I don't want you here in town." 
 
 "Is that right? Why?" 
 
 "I don't like your face, that's why. That's 
 all. Come on now." 
 
 Instead of another rough reply the man gave 
 out a sudden oath now. Hawkins had closed his 
 hand upon his arm. 
 
 Several of the women gave little cries. But the 
 talk was low ; no one could hear what was going on, 
 exactly, but those of us who stood near them. 
 
 "Now, lemme tell you something," said Cole 
 Hawkins. "I ain't going to urge you. But 
 lemme tell you something. I don't like your face 
 but I'm telling you this just for your own good. 
 Your going on the five o'clock train or at five-fif- 
 teen the angels will have a new dressmaker working 
 for them. Come now," he said, "come on over to 
 the hotel. We've just got about time." 
 
 A. Gluber looked round once or twice at the 
 other faces near him for moral support but 
 didn't get much. 
 
 "This ain't right," I did say to Cole, but he 
 shook me off once more. And they went out. 
 
 "You don't want to fool with him," said the man
 
 60 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 beside me, "When he's like that. You know what 
 he's done two or three times already. Besides, I 
 didn't care much for that fellow's looks myself." 
 
 "Some doin's, judge. Some doin's," said a 
 voice back of me, and I turned and saw Cupid 
 Calvert grinning. "Quite some day of victory!" 
 
 "What are they doing with the girl?" I asked 
 him. 
 
 "She's come to all right. They're taking her 
 and the Cockatoo over home in a machine." 
 
 "I didn't hear the mother," I said, "after the 
 first." 
 
 "No," he told me. "Wonderful thing, judge. 
 She's gone silent for a minute or two." 
 
 "It rather postpones," I said, remembering, 
 "the announcement of that engagement." 
 
 "Postpones!" he said. "Have you seen Gor- 
 don's face?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "It's just starting to sink in the meaning of it 
 all. He'll get it all before night." 
 
 "I'll bet on that," I said, looking at him. 
 
 "No more days of victory like this for me," 
 said Cupid, pretending to be wiping the perspira- 
 tion off his face with his handkerchief. "It's too 
 much for my frail condition, judge." 
 
 I went over to my office and sat there and 
 smoked and tried to work the evidence in the thing 
 over in my own mind, while the general populace
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 61 
 
 went home talking and whispering about it. 
 
 I could understand in the first place that I had 
 seen a curious thing a climax, and undoubtedly, 
 as it looked then, the collapse of a woman's 
 campaign; a strange, unusual speculation in 
 matrimony by these two strange figures mother 
 and daughter if that was what they really were. 
 For we were all at sea now. 
 
 They were adventuresses most likely, and 
 financed, we might conjecture, in their enterprise 
 by this fat dressmaker with the bloated face. But 
 there were many things not so simply explainable 
 by this theory. Who were they? Were they 
 city women, or what they looked country women 
 with city clothes? If so what was their relation 
 to A. Gluber, dressmaker or costumer? Why the 
 mother's noisy consternation at her telegram? 
 And why, above all, the white girl's sudden panic 
 terror when she saw that face in the audience and 
 pushed out her arms, palms outward, like a child 
 warding off a haunting danger in the dark, and 
 cried out: "No! No! No! I can't! I can't 
 Not again!" 
 
 The whole thing brought up many conjectures, 
 which to my mind were far from being solved by 
 the assumption of a debt to a dressmaker. How, 
 for example, would that explain the girl's outcry 
 the words of it: "I can't! Not again!"
 
 VI 
 
 IT WAS between sessions with me. The day 
 after the Rose Pageant, about three o'clock, 
 I was once again in my office in the Beaure- 
 gard Block when the door opened and there was 
 Cole Hawkins. 
 
 "Well," I said to him, "you certainly made a 
 fine public scene scaring that dressmaker out of 
 town." 
 
 "Maybe I did." 
 
 "What was your idea?" I asked him. "What 
 started you?" 
 
 "I told you, didn't I? I didn't like the looks of 
 his face." 
 
 "You'll kill somebody in this town," I said, "be- 
 fore you get through. It's God's mercy you 
 haven't already, in some of the things you've been 
 mixed up in," I told him. For he had broken up 
 one or two men already something scandalous. 
 "When are you going to let the liquor alone," I 
 asked him, "and stop being the town devil?" 
 
 "Look here, judge," he said, giving me that 
 black devil-may-care stare of his and not answer- 
 
 62
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 63 
 
 ing me, "what are these cackling women here try- 
 ing to do to that girl?" 
 
 I told him as much as I knew about the story, 
 the situation about that dressmaker, as we under- 
 stood it at that time. 
 
 "Since when," he wanted to know, "has it been 
 made a crime in this state to owe money to a dress* 
 maker a damned tailor? There'd be several of 
 them in jail right along if that was law," he 
 told me. 
 
 "There's some truth in that," I told him. "But 
 you've got to remember," I said, "they haven't 
 proved even the dressmaker's bill against her yet. 
 It's all conjecture and guessing still." 
 
 "And lying cackling gossip ! But that'll be 
 enough and plenty for the women." 
 
 "Cole," I said, "you don't always talk so re- 
 spectful about what you should the women es- 
 pecially." 
 
 "I'm sorry for that girl," he said, going along 
 his own line of thought as usual, "with everybody 
 after her. You heard the news, didn't you? 
 What they're saying this morning?" he asked me. 
 
 "No, sir. I don't know's I have." 
 
 "Clayborne Gordon, they say, is leaving town 
 today ; called off sudden on a business trip. You 
 know what that means." 
 
 "I expect I can guess."
 
 64 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "He's quit her already. He always was a yel- 
 low-bellied pup." 
 
 "That ain't the language of the polite drawing- 
 room, Cole," I told him. 
 
 "Who said it was?" he asked me back. "You 
 know what I'm going to do," he asked me after a 
 little bit, "if he's really gone? I'm going to give 
 her a good time myself, if she'll let me. I'll give 
 her a chance to show these screechers she ain't out 
 of a man, if she wants one." 
 
 I grinned a secret grin at that. And yet it was 
 just like him too. 
 
 "They'll be getting after you pretty quick 
 and your character, Cole," I said. "What'll all 
 your fine friends and relations say for you to 
 start beauing this strange girl round?" I asked 
 him. For in spite of his rough talk he belonged to 
 one of the first families in our county. 
 
 "To hell with all of them," he said. "And all 
 the women in this little mean-spirited town. I'd 
 do it for nothing else than to spite them. I hate 
 the whole squawking back-biting lot of them." 
 
 "Yes, I know you do," I said, grinning at him. 
 "But how'd you go about it? How would you 
 amuse a girl?" 
 
 "I could give her some excitement anyhow," he 
 told me. "That's more than Gordon could do 
 to anybody. I could give her a ride or two in the 
 old Child of Hell."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 65 
 
 "You don't expect," I asked him, "for a minute 
 that you'd get any woman in her right senses to 
 ride out with you in that murder car?" 
 
 "Well, she don't have to. If she don't want to 
 all she's got to do is to say so," he told me, and he 
 went out and shut the door after him. 
 
 I had to smile a small fraction of a smile after 
 seeing him watching and defending the girl the day 
 before, without the slightest provocation: and yet 
 I knew it wasn't just the looks of the girl, her 
 beauty, either. He was always that way, a gener- 
 ous great-hearted type of boy, from the tune he 
 got into long pants ; always willing and ready to 
 fight for anybody or anything that he believed was 
 getting worsted and more than ever since that 
 trouble of his own. In spite of all they said about 
 Cole, I always liked the boy and was sorry for 
 him; and more than ever since that great dis- 
 appointment he had had, that accident at the be- 
 ginning of the war. 
 
 In war, I always held, the first line out are the 
 natural fighters the ones who are really looking 
 to fight. There's always a certain percentage of 
 roving foot-loose, devil-may-care boys who just 
 jump at war as the one great big adventure. It 
 was just the same with us in this war as in the old 
 Civil War young boys begging and cheating and 
 lying to the Government to get out and get shot to 
 death. This Cole Hawkins was one of that kind
 
 66 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 always a natural-born, reckless, devil-take-the- 
 hindmost, harum-scarum fighter. 
 
 He was a double orphan, with all the money 
 that was good for him and a little more. One of 
 the kind that always go in for speed. For 
 horses, it was, in my day fast horses but now 
 it's gasoline. Ever since the automobile came he 
 had been round breaking speed laws in one. So 
 the first thing he Hid, naturally, when war came, 
 was to go in for this aeroplane flying death not 
 being sure and certain enough on the ground. 
 He was especially suited for it, they claimed too 
 good, too anxious and reckless. One day, as they 
 explained it, he stole in and got out his machine 
 against orders before he'd hardly learned to run 
 it and he was down on the ground again, it seems, 
 about as soon as he was up; through with flying 
 and all other warlike pursuits one leg shorter 
 than the other, and lucky to get off after months 
 spent in the hospital with his life. 
 
 Since then he had been drinking too much, to 
 put it plain and bald ; driving in that big red car 
 of his, that Child of Hell, that he had bought him- 
 self; staying by himself and reading the news- 
 papers on the war; and getting blacker and ug- 
 lier and louder, sitting at home, nursing his wrath, 
 like natural fighters have when they can't get into 
 a fight ever since the days of Achilles s He got
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 67 
 
 worse and worse as the war went on without his 
 assistance; every battle fought was a personal 
 insult to him because he wasn't in it. He was a 
 public menace to the town, riding round in that 
 roaring speedster, half drunk very likely, trying to 
 forget that way. 
 
 He was right I believed then and as it finally 
 turned out in what he had said about Gordon, 
 and what he had thought about him and the girl. 
 Gordon was gone, nobody knew for how long or 
 how far. He had not committed himself publicly 
 to any engagement to the girl, no matter what 
 might have been agreed between them for an- 
 nouncement on that day of victory. 
 
 Anyhow, whatever your theory might be, the 
 fact was that the situation was entirely changed. 
 Almost at once Gordon was gone, and the girl, 
 White Shoulders, whiter faced and stiller yet, was 
 taking her first ride with Cole Hawkins, the Lame 
 Duck, as Cupid Calvert kindly called him, but only 
 occasionally, to a select few, not desiring, I as- 
 sume, that appropriate and kindly name to get 
 back to its bearer as originating from his lips. 
 Yet if you are a humourist, I often notice, humour 
 will out regardless of consequences. 
 
 "She must be desperate, I'll say that for her," 
 said Julia Blakelock, "to go out in that death 
 trap with that drunken murderer."
 
 68 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 '^Without even taking out a death warrant," 
 said Cupid. 
 
 "Let me tell you something, Cupid," said Belle 
 Davis, "Cole Hawkins can drive better drunk and 
 asleep than you ever will with all your faculties. 
 I only wish he'd ask me to ride but he never will, 
 I expect. I've given up all hope now!" 
 
 "Speak for yourself," said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "I will. Don't you fret." 
 
 "I don't want to die yet awhile," said the 
 Blakelock woman. "But at the same time you 
 can't blame her, either. It was a godsend to her, 
 after that expose after that scandalous thing 
 about the dressmaker. If it wasn't for this new 
 man they'd both have been laughed out of 
 town the next day after the day of victory." 
 
 "It was a bitter end to a hard-fought cam- 
 paign," said Ella Armitage. 
 
 "It was a rout, I should say," Cupid Calvert 
 contributed, "with just one avenue of escape.'* 
 
 "A poor avenue," said Julia Blakelock. "You 
 know as well as I do how likely that devil of a Cole 
 Hawkins is to marry her or any other woman. 
 And how long they could live together if he did. 
 But what I don't see," said Julia Blakelock, going 
 on, "is how those two can stay here at all after 
 what's happened." 
 
 "Why not?" Belle Davis asked her.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 69 
 
 "After what has come out?" 
 
 "What has come out? What do you know?" 
 
 "We're practically certain," said the Blakelock 
 woman, "that they were just two adventuresses 
 who came up here to marry off the girl, with a 
 wardrobe they'd bought on instalments from that 
 terrible creature from St. Louis, who came up 
 here looking for his money. 
 
 "How do we know even that?" asked Belle Davis 
 again. 
 
 "We know it practically speaking," the other 
 woman told her. 
 
 "We don't know a thing that we can prove," 
 repeated Belle Davis, "except a stolen telegram 
 and a stolen business card and what we saw of 
 this man." 
 
 "Wasn't that enough?" 
 
 "No. We know there's something very strange 
 very funny there. But that's all we do know." 
 
 "It was enough for Clayborne Gordon, evident- 
 ly," said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "We don't know that either," Belle Davis in- 
 sisted. "For all you know he's gone away on a 
 business trip as he says." 
 
 "We can guess," said the Blakelock girl. 
 
 "Yes. That's all you can do about the whole 
 thing." 
 
 "There's one thing sure, anyhow," said the
 
 70 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 other woman, "and that's the reception they're 
 getting everywhere since the thing happened." 
 
 "I'm not so sure about that either as far as 
 I'm concerned!" Belle Davis told her, snapping 
 her black eyes. "I'm sorry for them, myself, and 
 especially for the girl. She looks more like a girl 
 of ivory than ever stiller and whiter. And her 
 face has got that kind of haunted look on it, 
 deeper than ever." 
 
 "That's one grand idea ! Haunted by a dress- 
 maker!" said Cupid Calvert. 
 
 "What do you think, judge," Belle Davis came 
 out suddenly at me, "sitting over there, wiser than 
 a barrelful of old owls, listening?" 
 
 "They're haunted, I expect, all right, Belle," I 
 told her, "with you all after them. They've got 
 that look. They look to me now like two lost 
 souls, as old Sam Barsam used to say; just two 
 short hops ahead of the devil." 
 
 "That's what the Cockatoo sounds like, any- 
 how, since the unfortunate event." 
 
 "Her gaiety does grow," I said, "a little ex- 
 cruciating, I'll have to say." 
 
 "Clayborne Gordon may come back," remarked 
 Mrs. Pennyworth, the Boarding-House Pessimist. 
 
 "Or they may be getting ready for a good old 
 breach-of-promise suit," suggested Julia Blake- 
 lock.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 71 
 
 "More business for you, judge," said Calvert. 
 
 "I believe we had all better shut up and keep 
 still till we know more," said Belle Davis, who was 
 taking the girl's part more and more now she was 
 down. 
 
 The exact fact was that there was nothing in 
 the testimony yet sufficient to warrant more than 
 a general arraignment in the women's courts of 
 the two women as suspicious characters, which 
 they had been all along. On the other hand, 
 there was something more to the point now in 
 evidence a warning to the men, especially to a 
 man of Clayborne Gordon's finer sensibilities ; and 
 so the probability that the women were right in 
 their belief that we were witnessing the last stages 
 of the matrimonial campaign. 
 
 The appearance and manner of the Scarlet 
 Cockatoo were the best evidence of this. Her 
 rouge was redder than sin, but not red enough to 
 cover up the purple circles round the eyes; and 
 her gaiety, aimed at those who would still listen 
 to it, was more hysterical than ever. She was 
 directing attention mostly now to the delicacy of 
 White Shoulders in her speech since that unfor- 
 tunate indisposition on that dreadful day that 
 terrible happening. 
 
 She reverted in detail to this how natural it 
 was, after all, in a girl who had been so delicately
 
 72 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 reared, so sheltered from everything that would 
 disturb a sensitive nature. She was discussing 
 this that night before her next misfortune 
 fell. 
 
 "What can you expect, sir," she was saying to 
 me, "when you care for them and shelter them the 
 way we Southern folks do?'* 
 
 She might be an imposter from St. Louis, I said 
 to myself, watching her and listening to her, but 
 she did not sound like it ; she talked like the gen- 
 uine old-time Southern country woman. 
 
 And then she went upstairs to get ready for 
 dinner again. And just precisely at that minute 
 Cupid Calvert was coming in grinning. I saw him 
 enter. 
 
 "Come over here," he called in a low voice, and 
 cocked his finger at Belle Davis and grinned a 
 kind of secret way. "Come over here," he said, 
 "in the corner. I've got something to show you." 
 
 "The judge won't mind," said Belle Davis, and 
 came over and sat on the arm of my easy-chair. 
 
 "It's the opening of the second act, dear 
 friends," said Calvert, and brought out that type- 
 written letter. 
 
 "What's this?" Belle Davis asked him, with her 
 eyes out on her cheek after reading it. 
 
 "Read it to Julia," said Cupid, "before she 
 blows up entirely."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 73 
 
 So she did. 
 
 "Just a word," it said, "to a wise boy. If 
 you're looking around for amusement, ask that 
 woman that calls herself Mrs. Fairborn if she ever 
 heard of the Pitman family the celebrated Pit- 
 man murder case." 
 
 "Murder!" whispered Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "It isn't signed?" asked Belle Davis. 
 
 "No. Nor dated." 
 
 "Just typewritten." 
 
 "The plot curdles," said Calvert, grinning one 
 of his happiest grins, from ear to ear. 
 
 "Just an anonymous letter," said the Davis 
 girl. "I don't believe it." 
 
 "Don't you understand yet?" Calvert asked 
 them. And the two looked at him. 
 
 "You're slow," he said. 
 
 "Oh," said Belle Davis, flushing up. "The tel- 
 egram !" 
 
 "Certain sure. Don't you remember? What 
 we couldn't understand at that time?" 
 
 "How was it it ran? I forget," said Belle 
 Davis. 
 
 'Tike this," he told her, taking it out of his 
 pocket once more and reading it : "So you should 
 make a get-away? Now you come through. 
 Five hundred by Saturday. Or letters start. 
 Wire answer. A. G."
 
 74. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Letters start!" said Julia Blakelock, nodding 
 her head. They were all naturally talking in 
 half whispers. 
 
 "That dressmaker!" said Belle Davis. 
 
 "Look," said Cupid, and turned the envelope 
 
 of the anonymous letter so they saw the postmark. 
 
 "St. Louis!" said Julia Blakelock, reading. 
 
 "And if he wrote it," Calvert went on, "there's 
 probably something somewhere behind it." 
 
 "Do you mean to say you think they are mur- 
 derers," asked Belle Davis "those two women?" 
 
 "Well, no. They wouldn't have to be, would 
 they, to be mixed up in it some way?" 
 
 "Did you talk to him?" asked Belle Davis, eying 
 him a little close. 
 
 "No; only just for a minute," Cupid Calvert 
 told her, his eyes turning off from hers the way 
 they did sometimes. 
 
 "Long enough so you exchanged names?" 
 
 "Why, yes, I expect so. I expect we did. We 
 would." 
 
 <f What'd you ask him? What'd you talk 
 about?" 
 
 "Oh, nothing," he told her. "We just passed 
 the time of the day. Honest that's all we did !" 
 he swore to her. 
 
 "Murder!" said Julia Blakelock under her 
 breath.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 75 
 
 "Look, judge," said Cupid, handing the thing 
 to me. "Here's something in your line." 
 
 "Not yet. Not anonymous letters," I said, 
 looking it over and passing it back. 
 
 "Did you ever hear of any Pitman murder 
 case?" 
 
 "Not to the best of my knowledge and belief," 
 I told him. 
 
 "He wouldn't," said Belle Davis. "Not if it 
 was committed in Dell County, in another state." 
 
 "Which it wasn't," said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "I'm not so sure about that," Belle Davis 
 answered. 
 
 "Why? What makes you say that?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," she told them. "I just 
 feel thataway somehow." 
 
 Julia Blakelock stood still, her thin lips closed 
 down, reading over the letter from where she had 
 taken it from Calvert. 
 
 "Who'll do it?" she came out finally. 
 
 "Who'll do what?" 
 
 "Who's going to ask them that?" 
 
 "You mean to say," Belle Davis cried, "you'd 
 have the nerve?" 
 
 "I certainly do," stated the Blakelock woman, 
 setting her lips together tighter than ever. 
 
 "It would be good and amusing, that's sure," 
 said Cupid.
 
 76 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "It would be more than amusing," said Julia 
 Blakelock. "If we've got that kind of characters 
 here we want to find it out and run them out." 
 
 "What characters?" Belle Davis asked her. 
 
 "That's what we're going to see," said Julia 
 Blakelock. 
 
 "You wouldn't " 
 
 "I certainly would! And I will," said Julia 
 Blakelock "and right off!" 
 
 "I should say, perhaps " I started telling 
 
 her. 
 
 "Never mind what you say," she told me. "I'm 
 old enough to take care of myself and do what I 
 think is right. You watch me." 
 
 We did, naturally. That's all we could do ; we 
 waited and watched and saw the blow starting to 
 fall, if it was to be a blow ! 
 
 The mother and daughter came down the stairs 
 in the usual order the mother chattering gay 
 nothings to her daughter, following her, appar- 
 ently not even hearing her; just coming with her 
 eyes down, silent and white and even delicate 
 looking now, in spite of her size. There was a new 
 way about her since her "unfortunate indisposi- 
 tion" on Victory Day; there was weariness and 
 silence and a certain look of shrinking, as if, I 
 thought sometimes, she felt some one was going to
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 77 
 
 strike her or worse. Her great eyes were cer- 
 tainly wider and her skin whiter than ever before. 
 
 They sat down in the dining room, Julia Blake- 
 lock watching them under her eyelids from her seat 
 across the table, waiting for the proper time for 
 her attack. The second course was almost over 
 before she launched it. 
 
 "Oh, Mrs. Fairborn," she said in that sweet, 
 high, dangerous voice that women use in verbal 
 warfare. 
 
 The Cockatoo looked up. She would, natural- 
 ly. The other woman almost never spoke to her. 
 
 "I almost forgot," the Blakelock girl was going 
 on, with her sharp eyes looking across above her 
 smile. "I had a friend from your state I was 
 writing to about you the other day " 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," said the Fairborn woman, wait- 
 ing in anxious silence. I could see the girl, that 
 White Shoulders, stop eating and stiffen in her 
 chair. 
 
 "And she told me," went on Julia Blakelock, as 
 sweetly as she could in that thin voice of hers, 
 "to ask you if you ever knew a Pitman family in 
 your county Dell County, isn't it?" 
 
 I saw the girl's hand go out, fumbling for her 
 water glass, and the frozen smile freeze harder 
 than ever on the face of the Cockatoo as full of
 
 78 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 mirth as the smile of a mummy. 
 
 "Oh, yes," she said after a second. "There was 
 a family of that name there. But I didn't know 
 them not well." 
 
 "Wasn't there something," asked Julia Blake- 
 lock, "about a trial? I didn't quite understand 
 it." 
 
 The Cockatoo, her eyes set on her face, her 
 mouth in a crescent-shape grimace, jumped out 
 her answer at once almost before the words had 
 left her mouth. She had courage anyhow. 
 
 "There was something something," she said. 
 "But I forget now just what it was. I was away 
 visiting at the time. I'm afraid I can't tell you," 
 she said, keeping on. "I'm sorry, but I never pay 
 much attention to such things. 
 
 And just then the girl's hand, fumbling, knocked 
 over her glass of water. 
 
 Belle Davis, on the other side of her, jumped 
 up. 
 
 "Oh, I'm terribly sorry! I'm terribly mad at 
 myself for that," she said. "I must have hit 
 your arm." 
 
 The lips of White Shoulders moved in some sort 
 of murmur. And everybody the women on both 
 sides of her were busy mopping up the water. 
 
 After they were through and the usual apology 
 and small excitement over such an accident were
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 79 
 
 done, the meal went through in silence. And 
 after it both the mother and daughter got up and 
 went up to their room. 
 
 "I'm afraid Virginia spilled some of that water 
 on her frock. I'm afraid it will stain. I'm going 
 to have her go up and take it off anyhow," the 
 mother volunteered, and they went upstairs to- 
 gether. 
 
 "Did you see that girl how she ate the rest 
 of the meal?" asked Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "She was as free and natural in all her motions 
 as the cuckoo on a cuckoo clock !" said Cupid. 
 
 "Do you know what that woman was doing to 
 her when Julia was talking?" asked Belle Davis. 
 "She was pinching her under the table. 
 
 "Why should you break in," asked Julia Blake- 
 lock back "before we saw what she'd do?" 
 
 "We saw enough," Belle Davis told her, "as it 
 was." 
 
 "They're certainly guilty," said the Blakelock 
 woman. "It was written all over them." 
 
 "Guilty of what?" Belle Davis asked her in that 
 blunt way of hers. "Of murder?" 
 
 "What would you say, judge?" Cupid Calvert 
 asked me. 
 
 "I doubt if they have committed more than two 
 or three murders at most," I told him. "It 
 wouldn't seem likely to me if they had killed too
 
 80 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 many we'd see them wandering round at large." 
 
 "You needn't tell me," said Belle Davis, "that 
 they are murderers or criminals especially that 
 girl. She looks to me like a great frightened 
 child. That's what she looks like to me." 
 
 "Well, they look very different to me, I can tell 
 you that!" said Julia Blakelock. "And they 
 always have!" 
 
 "We'll have to look into this case further, eh, 
 judge?" said Cupid Calvert. 
 
 "You will," I said. "It'll be quite a field for 
 your talents." 
 
 Neither of the women came down again into the 
 hall that night at least I didn't see them before I 
 went up to bed.
 
 VII 
 
 I WENT to my room that night rather late, as 
 usual. A boarding house bedroom is not, I 
 have always held, a place to heighten the 
 spirits of men well along in life who have the mis- 
 fortune to be alone in the world. I always pre- 
 ferred to cultivate my leisure either in my office or 
 with the folks downstairs. 
 
 It must have been, as nearly as I can place it, 
 about eleven o'clock when I went into my chamber 
 and lit up the gas the old house not being 
 equipped yet with electricity. When I had done 
 this I was more or less surprised to hear the loud- 
 ness of the voices in the next room. 
 
 fThe room next adj oining mine I had understood 
 was that of the girl White Shoulders her Beauty 
 Chamber, as her mother, with her unusual gift of 
 language, called it, The mother, I had under- 
 stood, slept by herself in a second smaller room 
 beyond and leading out of this. But now when I 
 entered my room she was evidently in the girl's 
 larger bedroom talking. At the side of my bed- 
 
 81
 
 82 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 room, away from the hall used before the some- 
 what rambling old dwelling was a boarding house 
 was a door which had been built to connect my 
 room with the chamber now occupied by the girl; 
 a door now bolted on both sides and covered on 
 my side, at least, by a drapery. The women must 
 have been sitting somewhere not far from this. 
 
 The indistinct murmur of voices from the next 
 room such as is often heard through bedroom 
 walls was familiar enough to me. I had even 
 distinguished words before then spoken by persons 
 near that old door. But that night I was sur- 
 prised at the distinctness of the two women's 
 voices. 
 
 They had talked little in the room when they 
 were once alone together, and then generally in 
 low tones especially the girl. But now I noticed 
 it was the girl who was speaking loudest in a 
 strained, hoarse, hurried voice, which, in fact, I 
 took at first to be the voice of a stranger. It was 
 the voice, I then came to the conclusion, of a 
 person under great excitement. And as I listened 
 I could tell from occasional words that she 
 was refusing to do something, in a voice that was 
 more and more hysterical. 
 
 I undressed and went to bed, thinking that they 
 would soon stop talking ; but in the dark and with 
 the ceasing of noises about the house and in the
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 83 
 
 street the voices grew louder and more plain 
 perhaps because the women moved even nearer to 
 that door. But more than all now, both women, 
 I should have said, were losing their heads, in the 
 growth of their excitement, whatever it might be. 
 I moved as noisily as I could, lay down heavily 
 in bed, to give them warning, but now as I lay 
 there I could hear with great distinctness those 
 two strained voices of women beyond the door. 
 
 The voice of the mother rose again sharper 
 and clearer than before. I could hear her per- 
 fectly arguing, apparently, with the girl. 
 
 "I've told you, and I've told you, and I've 
 told you, Virginia!" she repeated. "We can't! 
 We're down to our last three hundred dollars." 
 
 "Oh, mother!" cried the girl; and their voices 
 fell again. 
 
 "They are through, then!" I said to myself, 
 listening. "Their woman's speculation is done 
 for." 
 
 The voice of this woman, that so-called Scarlet 
 Cockatoo, rose again and reached me through 
 the darkness. 
 
 "We've got to stay. It's here or never. It's 
 the last absolutely the 'last chance, Virginia. 
 It's here or it's ruin, for all of us for you, for 
 Robert Lee, for your mother!" 
 
 "Robert Lee!" I said to myself. "What is
 
 84 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 this? What sort of gamble is this?" I thought, 
 listening now with all my ears in spite of myself. 
 
 "But I won't stay," the strange, unnatural 
 voice of the girl, that White Shoulders, an- 
 swered her. "I won't be stripped and dragged 
 naked again by that fiend. Never! I'll die 
 first. It would kill me anyhow." 
 
 "That devil Gluber I" said the mother's voice. 
 "If I could only kill him! That's the one we 
 ought to kiU." 
 
 "You know what he'll do again with those 
 letters! He'll never stop never! Oh, let me 
 go! Let me go! Let me go, mother! Please! 
 Please !" cried the girl's voice, like a young child's 
 in a general breakdown and craziness of fear. 
 "I'll do anything if you'll only let me!" 
 
 "You can't go, Virginia," her mother said 
 apparently taking hold of her, quieting her. 
 "You can't, honey. You can't. You've got to 
 stay, for all of us. You can't leave. You can't 
 desert now. Think of Robert Lee think of 
 yourself think of me a little !" 
 
 "Robert Lee !" I said to myself again. "Who's 
 Robert Lee? What's this new turn in this 
 thing?" And in the meanwhile the girl's voice 
 was going on. 
 
 "Think! Think! What do I do but think?" 
 she cried back. "It's hopeless, mother. It's
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 85 
 
 hopeless!" she cried, a newer and higher tone 
 coming into her voice. "We can't go ! We can't 
 stay! It's hopeless, that's all! It's hopeless! 
 We can't escape it !" 
 
 "No!" the mother's voice came answering her. 
 "I'm going again to Gluber." 
 
 And then I lost the conversation once more. 
 
 "But you can't," the girl was saying. "What 
 can you say to him?" 
 
 The mother's explanation I only partly heard. 
 But there was a mention now and then, I could 
 catch, of Gluber and then of Gordon's name. 
 
 "He won't believe that," the girl spoke up. 
 "It isn't true, anyhow." 
 
 "How do you know it isn't true?" the mother's 
 voice came back, growing sharp. 
 
 "I know. He isn't that kind." 
 
 "He'll have to come back you'll see!" the 
 sharp-voiced mother said, in the tone of arguing 
 with herself. "He'll have to. He'll never give 
 you up. He's just fascinated by your beauty." 
 
 "My beauty! My beauty!" the girl's voice 
 came back, the tone of hysteria coming back into 
 it again. "Don't talk like that don't! When 
 we are alone! Let me have that much peace. 
 My beauty !" 
 
 "And if not Gordon then there's that other 
 man."
 
 86 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "The black one with the automobile. He's 
 crazy about you." 
 
 "Oh, mother he's not !" 
 
 "Why did he come out and do what he did to 
 Gluber, then?" 
 
 "I don't know. But it isn't what you say 
 about me. He isn't crazy about me, nor any of 
 them, the way you say. They can't be 
 especially after this." 
 
 "You trust me, Virginia. You trust me. I 
 know men. Some one, somehow, is going to make 
 you marry them here. I know men. When they 
 see and get to care for a girl like you are, honey, 
 they can't forget them. They've got to come 
 back they can't any of them give up your looks, 
 your face, your gowns your whole beautiful 
 body." 
 
 "Oh, mother!" cried the girl again. I could 
 almost hear her cringing. "Don't ! Don't ! 
 Don't make it any worse than it has to be." 
 
 There was a silence then between them the 
 woman, I imagine, quieting and trying to soothe 
 the girl. 
 
 Then there was a new sound. The girl appar- 
 ently must have jumped to her feet. "I won't! 
 I won't ! I can't any longer !" she cried out.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 87 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "I won't be dragged round. It's too disgust- 
 ing. Marriage!" she said. "I hate and loathe 
 the name of marriage! I've been bred for mar- 
 riage like a horse for racing. I've heard 
 nothing but marriage, marriage since I was a 
 child and began to remember. It's disgusting! 
 It's loathsome! I hate the word." 
 
 "Virginia!" cried the other woman's voice. 
 But the hysterical voice of the girl went on. 
 
 "Always it's been what I could do, what we 
 could all do when I came to marry. What they 
 should have said was when I came to be sold. 
 All these dresses ! All those clothes ! Clothes, 
 clothes, clothes ! Lovely hair ! Lovely face ! 
 Lovely body! I wish I was dead!" 
 
 "Virginia! Virginia!" the mother was saying 
 to the frantic girl. 
 
 "I won't stay," the girl insisted. 
 
 "You can't go," said the mother, her voice 
 hardening. "How would you go? Where? You 
 haven't the money in the first place to go any- 
 where." 
 
 The girl lapsed suddenly into silence; did not 
 answer. 
 
 "What can you do?" her mother said again. 
 "No, there's only one thing to be done. We're
 
 88 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 Fairborns. We'll stay right here and fight it out 
 that's all that we can do. I can arrange with 
 Gluber, I know, so he won't go on and write again. 
 I know I can when I go up to St. Louis and see 
 him. I have a plan worked out to explain things 
 to him to show him how he will get no more than 
 we by what he's doing." 
 ^There was no answer now. 
 
 "There'll be no more letters," said the mother 
 
 . t 
 
 confidently, "from now on. And they'll never get 
 any wiser these fool women here. They'll never 
 go on and learn any more." 
 
 "No," said the girl in a low obstinate voice. 
 
 "It will all come all right, honey," said the 
 woman, coaxing her. 
 
 "No," said the voice of the girl. 
 
 "You'll see." 
 
 "No," said the girl again, in that dead voice. 
 "It's hopeless. I'll never go through that again. 
 Never." 
 
 "Do you forget everything? Robert Lee 
 and where he is now all fot the protection of 
 you?" 
 
 (t l don't forget anything ever. But it's hope- 
 less. I'm sure now," returned the girl's dead 
 voice again. 
 
 "You're a wicked, ungrateful girl."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 89 
 
 "Maybe I am. Maybe I am. But I won't stay 
 here to go through that again. I'm through. 
 We both are. Oh, can't you see, mother? I 
 can't stay here. I can't any longer sit ancJ 
 smile and be silent and know every minute may 
 be the last before I am dragged through that filth 
 again. Just ashamed, ashamed, ashamed 1" 
 
 Her voice slid up again into high-pitched 
 terror. And I could distinguish now not so 
 much by words as by tone the voice of her mother 
 trying her best to soothe a frightened child. 
 
 "It'll come right, honey. It'll all come right 
 finally." I made out at last the formula she was 
 repeating over and over again. 
 
 "It will never come right. Never, mother. It's 
 hopeless, absolutely hopeless and you know it." 
 
 Their arguing went on less loud, less violent 
 the woman trying to quiet the girl, but never, 
 it appeared, convincing her. In absence of their 
 exact words now my mind went off speculating on 
 the probable explanation of the matter trying to 
 arrange and go over in my own mind the new 
 evidence which had developed in the case during 
 the past few hours, since the coming of that anony- 
 mous letter from St. Louis, from that dressmaker 
 with the face of a criminal, or at least a criminal's 
 fence. It was quite apparent by this time that we
 
 90 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 were seeing developed under Mrs. Tusset's highly 
 respectable roof a somewhat baffling and possibly 
 serious chain of circumstances. 
 
 Women's speculations in matrimony are not 
 unknown even in our somewhat romantic section 
 of the earth's surface. Even here, in every town, 
 every evening from two-thirty to five-thirty 
 o'clock, Sam Barsam used to claim, the women's 
 matrimonial exchange is in session, watching the 
 market from Texas to South Carolina, sharper 
 than the Cotton Exchange at New Orleans ever 
 dreamed of watching the cotton crop. 
 
 These two women were doubtless, as the other 
 womenfolks had caught at once, two speculators, 
 two desperate gamblers in matrimony playing 
 the market on a shoe string, as the market term 
 goes, I understand; probably, from the evidence 
 so far, with the equipment and enhancement of 
 feminine charms furnished on credit by this dress- 
 maker or dealer in costumes, on instalment plan 
 this man Gluber, with the singularly repellent 
 countenance and manners, from St. Louis. 
 
 This speculation seemed to me to have been 
 fought to the last ditch lost by the almost tragic 
 course of events on that day of victory. Women 
 all but the most case-hardened manipulators 
 of matrimony or worse would scarcely have
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 91 
 
 remained to fight along beyond that apparently 
 hopeless ending. But here we found these two, 
 or the mother, rather, still forcing the fight from 
 sheer necessity, it now seemed, and not, as it might 
 have appeared from the surface, because of mere 
 hardness or lack of what might ordinarily 
 have been termed a decent and proper regard for 
 the opinion of others, such as is generally required 
 by sound human society. 
 
 The new evidence lay still in an undigested mass, 
 an inexplicable tangle in my mind. Could there 
 have been a murder a Pitman murder, as this 
 anonymous letter claimed dn which the women 
 were implicated? Assuming the letter to be 
 written by this forbidding dressmaker, it would 
 not necessarily be true far from it, judging from 
 my casual inspection of that face except that the 
 apparent probability that he was now using this 
 alleged crime for the purposes of blackmail would 
 tend to the conjecture that there might be at 
 least some truth in the intimation that he was 
 making. 
 
 And yet it appeared to me especially after the 
 enlightenment of the last few minutes from the 
 women's conversation most repugnant to the 
 general probabilities that these two women were 
 principals or deeply concerned in any murder.
 
 92 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 The attitude of the girl, the conversation of the 
 mother would both seem to deny this. And, 
 moreover, no mention, in set terms, had been made 
 in all their talk, as one would naturally have 
 expected, of any such overshadowing matter as a 
 murder would have been in their lives. 
 
 On the other hand, who was this Robert Lee, 
 who was introduced into my knowledge for the first 
 time, who had, it appeared, established this 
 obligation given this protection for which the 
 girl was now called upon to make her obviously 
 reluctant sacrifice, the last but very few that any 
 woman can be asked to make the sacrifice of her 
 soul and body for life in an utterly and frankly 
 mercenary marriage. 
 
 It was certainly an abstruse and knotty 
 problem with the evidence so far at hand. I saw 
 I could not solve it with my present knowledge 
 not until some further development of events, or 
 further information, which the whispering women 
 aad their assistant, Cupid Calvert, would no doubt 
 unearth later. 
 
 The sobbing of the girl in the next room had 
 died down and the mother had apparently gone 
 into her own chamber and to bed before I fell 
 asleep. 
 
 The girl, I thought afterward that I recalled, 
 sobbed again and stopped; and may have arisen
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 93 
 
 and struck heavily against some object in the 
 room. I am not entirely clear on this. 
 
 The next thing I remember with certainty is the 
 sound of light knocking and the low agonized voice 
 of the woman at my door and then in a moment 
 the faint sweet odour of illuminating gas.
 
 VIII 
 
 1WAS out of bed and had snatched my dressing 
 gown from the chair beside me before I was, I 
 expect, entirely awake. The smell of the gas 
 was a certainty now. I could hear the low insist- 
 ent knocking and the strained whisper of the 
 woman going on with that formula, like a reiter- 
 ated prayer, which had awakened me: "Judge! 
 Judge Dalrymple ! For God's sake, sir, open this 
 door!" 
 
 It was not the door into the hallway, I was 
 sufficiently awake now to understand. It must 
 be, then, the door into the adjoining chamber. 
 I ran over to it and started fumbling at the 
 unusual task of opening it. It was fastened, I 
 remembered now, on my side by an old-time iron 
 bolt. I assumed that the same contrivance must 
 have been on the other side. For as I unbolted 
 my bolt the latch apparently was unsprung and 
 the door was forced outward, and by me ; and the 
 woman pitched forward with it and the sickish 
 
 rush of illuminating gas burst in with her. 
 
 94
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 95 
 
 "I couldn't lift her. She'll die!" she said in 
 a hoarse whisper, and went down, half fainting, 
 upon the floor. 
 
 She was only partly overcome, however, for she 
 could still talk. 
 
 "Not me," she said. "Help her. Help her. 
 Hurry !" 
 
 I lifted her slightly aside and went into the 
 room. "Lie there," I said. "Wait." 
 
 If the door was once closed, I reasoned, being 
 still able to speak, the woman would probably 
 recover in the practically pure air of my room. 
 In any case the obvious thing for me to do was 
 to take the girl out of there. I took a deep 
 breath, went in and closed the door. 
 
 It was dark in that next room, and the location 
 of the furniture of the room was naturally 
 unfamiliar to me. I was confused just shaken 
 from sound sleep, not precisely in a normal state 
 of mind. That heavy, nauseating odour of illu- 
 minating gas was in my nostrils ; I could smell 
 it even if I need not immediately take it into my 
 lungs. I waited several moments, consequently, 
 before I could locate the bed where the girl was 
 probably lying. 
 
 There was an electric street light not far out- 
 side, which shone in through a window. This not 
 unnaturally was the first thing that caught my
 
 96 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 attention. Its rays struck first upon some 
 clothing, some woman's white clothing heaped 
 upon a chair, lit a glint of light upon a glass 
 ornament on a mantlepiece and painted a sharp, 
 irregular oblong of light upon the plain unpapered 
 wall. In the centre of this patch was the sharply 
 etched shadow of a branch or frond of a coarse- 
 leafed tree. A brisk breeze was blowing outside, 
 stirring the branches of the tree; and the coarse 
 and magnified frond of leaf moved back and forth, 
 reaching and retiring, it seemed to me for a 
 second, like a black and clutching claw. 
 
 Then, far quicker than the telling of this, 
 naturally, I observed that the patch of light and 
 its sinister-acting shadow was close to the great 
 old-fashioned bed, which lay, in contrast, covered 
 by the dim shadow from its high black footboard. 
 I groped into the shadow and my hand fell upon 
 the bare arm and lightly clad shoulder of the girl. 
 
 She lay, I could now see, with her arm trailing 
 down upon the floor and her head at the extreme 
 edge of the bed a position into which her mother 
 had dragged her undoubtedly when she had 
 reached the limit of her strength. I took the limp 
 and yielding body of the unconscious girl into my 
 arms and started for the door again. 
 
 By this time the necessity for breath had
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 97 
 
 become somewhat oppressive, and with the extreme 
 effort of carrying the girl's body it grew intensely 
 so. I knew, however, that I could hold out some- 
 what longer, and fortunately, I could now see, 
 there had been some use for my coming. The 
 girl was still alive ; I could feel her breathing in 
 my arms heavily and rather slowly but still 
 breathing regularly. 
 
 Then, as I was noticing this, through awkward- 
 ness and unfamiliarity with the dark room, I 
 walked against some low chair or stool stumbled, 
 staggered with the weight in my arms and before 
 I had caught myself, struck my unguarded head 
 against the wall of the room. With the jar I 
 almost dropped the girl, who was not light and 
 a not inconsiderable burden for me, I was finding. 
 I caught myself, though, before going quite down. 
 
 But another unfortunate development of my 
 accident was that unconsciously I had, I assume, 
 expelled my breath and taken into my lungs some 
 of that thick, sweet, nauseating gas which sur- 
 rounded me. At any rate, with this and the 
 long holding of my breath and the blow of my 
 head against the wall and no doubt also from 
 the effort of standing erect with my now quite 
 sufficient burden I lost for a second in the un- 
 familiar room my sense of direction in the dark
 
 98 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 and the exact location of the door which I must 
 find and open up again. I must have turned 
 somewhat in stumbling. 
 
 In any case, the chief impression I retained 
 when I straightened up was that I must get out 
 of there with whatever it was I was carrying and 
 that there was one chief object one point of 
 location in the room an angular oblong of 
 light upon the wall, which now appeared to be a 
 lighted window beyond which a black claw on a 
 long black arm shot irregularly back and forth, 
 with the obvious ultimate intention of strangling 
 me and relieving me of my burden an intention 
 which I was under serious obligation to defeat. 
 I was beginning to believe that I had made an error 
 in judgment in closing the door into my roon 
 when I entered the other. 
 
 Fortunately, however, I must have remembered 
 the location of the doorway from the chief white 
 spot in my consciousness that irregular lighted 
 window which had come in the wall. For in a 
 minute or two more I felt the cool slipperiness of 
 the old pottery door knob in my hand and started 
 fumbling it. As I did so, somewhat unsteady 
 and overbalanced with the rapidly growing burden 
 of the girl in my arms and my straining and now 
 almost convulsive effort not to breathe in the gas 
 again, I was struck, I recall, with a dazed surprise
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 99 
 
 and unexpected satisfaction to see the door open. 
 The mother of the girl, that so-called Scarlet 
 Cockatoo, had, it appeared, recovered sufficiently 
 in the fresh air of my room to crawl back to the 
 doorway on her knees and to open it when she 
 heard me coming. 
 
 I went in somewhat weakly, and was much 
 gratified to have shut out behind me the sickening 
 sweetness of the gas, the sense of suffocation and 
 the now almost frantic efforts of the frustated 
 black claw at the diamond-shaped window to 
 clutch us before we finally fled out through that 
 dangerous and suffocating dark. 
 
 It was with almost equal satisfaction that I 
 heard the door close behind me and expelled at 
 last the combination of used-up air and illu- 
 minating gas which clogged my lungs, and drank 
 in again the acute and too-little-appreciated 
 luxury of oxygen. After that my strength 
 was sufficient to lay the girl upon the bed and 
 start helping her mother help her. 
 
 "Thank God ! Thank God !" I heard the woman 
 whispering by me. 
 
 The shock of getting the girl back alive was 
 sufficient, it appeared, following the fresh air in 
 my room, to revive her. 
 
 The girl the so-called White Shoulders was 
 apparently breathing heavily, rather slowly, but
 
 100 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 still quite strongly. We could not, naturally, see 
 perfectly not yet daring to light the gas, even 
 there. There was, however, some light from the 
 street lamp on the street. 
 
 I started back again toward the door. 
 
 "Where to ?" asked the mother, whispering. 
 
 "The gas. I must turn that gas jet off," I 
 whispered again. 
 
 "Don't. I did that myself !" she said. 
 
 "But the windows," I said. "I mu&t open 
 them." 
 
 "There are two open," she said, "already one 
 in my room and one in hers." ^ 
 
 "In hers!" I said. 
 
 "Yes. It was never closed !" she told me. 
 
 That struck me as strange, naturally, then, but 
 naturally too I dismissed it right away with 
 other things to think of. 
 
 "Well then," I said, "I'll go down now and 
 telephone the doctor." 
 
 "No ! No !" she whispered back. "Wait. She's 
 coming to. See she's moving a little already." 
 
 The girl actually did move and gave a little 
 moan. She had all the advantages of youth and 
 perfect health, and the gas probably had never 
 been so dense in there as we had thought. By 
 this time all the windows in my room were open, 
 and the outside air, driven id by a strong breeze
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 101 
 
 was entirely pure and fresh. I started now to 
 light the gas. 
 
 "No. No. Please!" the woman said, pre- 
 venting me. 
 
 And again the white girl on the bed moved. 
 
 "But I must call a doctor," I said, still whisper- 
 ing. 
 
 "No. No," repeated the woman. Not if we 
 can possibly help, sir. Not now if we can 
 possibly help it." 
 
 "But, madam," I said, "all that poison in the 
 girl's system " 
 
 "No, sir," she told me, turning back from where 
 she was bending down above the girl. "I know 
 what to do. I saw one case before. We can do 
 all a doctor could now more from being right 
 here now. And besides, she's coming to now fast. 
 She was just trying to open her eyes. She's 
 almost " 
 
 "But, madam," I insisted, "a doctor is posi- 
 tively " 
 
 "Listen!" she whispered back sharply. 
 "There's somebody downstairs." 
 
 There was some one entering the house by the 
 front door. 
 
 "We can't have this known, judge. We can't 
 have it get out, sir," she told me in a strident 
 hurried whisper. "We can't do it, sir. I can't
 
 102 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 explain to you now. But it would be the last blow 
 for us. We'd better both be dead !" 
 
 As a matter of fact I saw the girl appeared to 
 be breathing much better now. We stood and 
 waited in the dark. The steps came up the stairs 
 very lightly, very carefully. I suspected, 
 naturally, who it would be Cupid Calvert back 
 again from another affair of the heart. 
 
 The steps came to the top of the stairway. 
 
 "He'll smell the gas," said the woman beside 
 me in a despairing whisper. "He'll certainly 
 smell the gas." 
 
 The steps stole by, started on toward the third 
 story, where Calvert had his room, wavered, 
 stopped, and then in a moment came stealing 
 over toward my side of the hall. 
 
 I could almost watch the woman cringe and 
 shrink together in the dark. I saw, too, that 
 something had to be done. I could only hope 
 that it was Calvert and he was in the not unusual 
 and not too clear state of mind in which he was 
 apt to find himself at this hour in the morning. 
 It must have been at that time about two o'clock. 
 
 It occurred to me, from the women's standpoint 
 or my own, if we were going to try to hush this 
 matter up the situation was not without elements 
 of embarrassment, I having these two women in my 
 room. In any case, Cupid Calvert was the last
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 103 
 
 human being we would want concerned in the 
 matter in any phase. 
 
 There was only one thing to do. I put my 
 finger on my lips, looked at the woman and walked 
 over and opened the door. I stepped out quickly 
 into the hall and closed the door after me. 
 
 "Who's prowling round out here ?" I said ; and I 
 grabbed him by the collar with what few remnants 
 of vigour I still possessed.
 
 IX 
 
 1WAS right in my conjecture and in my 
 action. It is something of a shock to be 
 grabbed like that in the dark especially 
 when you yourself are not particularly anxious 
 to create unnecessary disturbance. 
 
 "Listen," said a familiar voice in a quick ancl, 
 it seemed to me, somewhat frightened whisper. 
 "It's only me Calvertl" 
 
 "What were you," I asked him in a whisper 
 myself, "just peering through my keyhole for, 
 the view, or plotting to murder me in my bed?" 
 
 "Listen," he said. "Don't you smell it?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Gas." 
 
 I chuckled then managed to in the dark. 
 "Oh, that's it?" I said. "Well, I should say I 
 didl But I thought maybe I'd got it out by 
 this time." 
 
 "What what happened?" he wanted to know. 
 
 "Well, sir," I said to him we were both talking, 
 naturally, in whispers all the time "it was a 
 104
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 105 
 
 thing that never happened to me in my life before. 
 I was sitting there by that gas jet by the window 
 reading and fell asleep. And when I woke up 
 it was dark and the room was full of gas." 
 
 "Oh, was that it?" he said. 
 
 I could tell now from his voice, and breath as 
 well, that, quite fortunately, he was in a state 
 not generally considered best for clear-cut mental 
 operations. 
 
 "That heavy breeze blowing in the window!" I 
 said. "Is it strong out here," I asked him - 
 "the smeU of it?" 
 
 "I should say it was," he told me, in that 
 thick, somewhat damp whisper. 
 
 "Well, it's all over with now, anyhow," I said, 
 reaching back and taking hold of my door knob. 
 "And I expect you won't smell it much longer. 
 I've got all the windows open. Where've you 
 been?" I asked him. "Out on another amour?" 
 
 "Oh, no, judge. Nothing like that. Nothing 
 like that !" he said ; and I could almost hear him 
 grinning in the dark. 
 
 "Well," I told him, "crawl along upstairs or 
 we'll wake up the madam, standing gossiping 
 here. But I'll tell you what I'll do," I whispered, 
 "before you go. I'll sign articles of confed- 
 eration with you. I ain't proud of what 
 I've just done, exactly; and if you'll agree to
 
 106 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 overlook it when tempted to humour in jour 
 conversation tomorrow or thereafter I'll endeav- 
 our not to call the attention of Madam Tusset 
 to your continued devotion to late affairs of the 
 human affections, which I see you are still en- 
 tangled with." 
 
 "Oh, nothing like that, judge. You've got 
 me wrong this time," said Cupid. "But at 
 that you know I'd never give you away in any 
 of your little sins or shortcomings. And I know 
 you wouldn't me, either." 
 
 "That expresses my feelings exactly," I 
 whispered back. 
 
 And I knew when he turned and went along 
 that there would probably be nothing said from 
 that quarter. His tenure of station had grown 
 a little precarious in recent weeks from his various 
 protracted and late night excursions, which were 
 not to the taste of Madam Tus&et, who was 
 credited, in fact, with the intention of turning 
 him out from that highly respectable house on 
 the next and slightest evidence of any lapses 
 from high moral or social standards. 
 
 So he stole upstairs and I turned back into 
 the room. 
 
 "Now, then, -about the doctor," I said. "It 
 seems to me "
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 107 
 
 ''She's all right now," said the mother. "She's 
 coming out fine, sir." 
 
 "But " I started. 
 
 "Judge," she broke in on me, "please, sir, 
 don't insist on that. We can't do it. On top 
 of what's happened already, sir. It would 
 destroy us !" 
 
 I lighted the gas then finally and I turned with 
 her and looked at the girl on the bed. She did 
 seem almost recovered. Her face was somewhat 
 flushed, from the effects of the gas, I expect. But 
 she was breathing naturally and regularly. As 
 she lay there I thought she was pretty near the 
 most beautiful human creature I ever saw. 
 
 "You see, judge," said the mother, "she's 
 coming out all right. She's almost out already." 
 
 And as she said this the girl moved, opened 
 her great eyes, looked at us first her mother 
 and then me, steadily and with wonder and 
 spoke for the first time. 
 
 "I know, mother. I know," she said. "I had 
 no right to die!" she said faintly. "I won't 
 
 And her eyes closed heavily, as if to shut the 
 unwelcome world out once again. 
 
 Her mother was on her knees by the bedside 
 now.
 
 108 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "You wicked!, wicked girl!" she cried in that 
 continued whisper which we both still used, and 
 burst into a great silent paroxysm of weeping 
 of relief, no doubt, from her anxiety and terror. 
 
 I stood aside and let her weep it out, purge 
 her soul of its emotion; and thought meanwhile 
 of the girl's extraordinary greeting to returning 
 life. 
 
 "I had no right to die !" I said over to my- 
 self, and looked at that exquisite creature in 
 her sheer and exquisite white garments in my 
 bed, who wanted, for reasons of her own, 
 apparently, to give up life destroy herself. 
 
 "This certainly is a strange affair," I told 
 myself. 
 
 The beauty of the girl was all the more marked 
 by its contrast with the haggard, disheveled 
 person of the mother. The woman's not too 
 abundant hair was tangled upon her head; the 
 crow's-feet at her eyes and the stringy thinness 
 of her neck showed, undisguised; and the rouge 
 of her cheeks, bleared by her weeping, stared 
 out in strange red relief against her dry and 
 whitened skin in the trying greenish light which 
 comes from gas in a mantle burner. 
 
 "Madam," I said finally, when I saw she had 
 about completed her weeping, "you may be right. 
 You know your own affairs and your necessities.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 109 
 
 She is your own child. Suppose we do this sup- 
 pose we wait and see, a little longer, about the 
 doctor." 
 
 "You understand, don't you?" she asked, 
 catching me by the sleeve. "But no, you can't, 
 either! I'm not inhuman. I'm not an inhuman 
 mother, sir, but I'm a desperate one. I'm a 
 desperate woman in a desperate situation, and 
 the least thing more now would destroy us." 
 
 "It is not necessary, madam," I said, "to 
 explain. I'll take your word for it." 
 
 The girl had opened her eyes now and lay 
 staring at us. "She's done that before," her 
 mother explained to me. "When you were out- 
 side." 
 
 "I see. All right," I said. "And as far as 
 I go in this matter, you must not worry about 
 my discretion," I told her. I thought I would 
 reassure her. "In my business men are or 
 should be graveyards full of just such matters." 
 
 She murmured something about a mother's 
 blessing, a mother's gratitude, and tried to take 
 my hand. 
 
 "Tomorrow," she said! "or when I can I 
 want to see you to explain everything." 
 
 The girl now lay there, apparently rapidly 
 recovering, looking at us steadily with her wide- 
 opened eyes and then closing them calmly.
 
 110 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Any time, madam," I told her mother, "that 
 I can be of any assistance to you! But in the 
 meanwhile," I said, "I expect we'd better count on 
 letting matters stand as they are now on your 
 keeping my room for the rest of the night. And 
 I'll venture into your rooms now and find out how 
 much they are cleared out from gas. They should 
 be pretty well by this time especially with this 
 breeze that's blowing in here now. And if so, I 
 can go in there and stay after maybe you may 
 want to go into your own room yourself." 
 
 For she not only was a somewhat ghastly 
 revelation with her hair and smeared face but she 
 was clothed only in her night garments and some 
 sort of a ribboned dressing gown, and with th 
 recovery of the girl we were both becoming 
 conscious of the fact. 
 
 I went in there and found both their chambers 
 practicaDy free from the gas fumes. And the 
 woman this Mrs. Fairborn, so-called went in 
 then and made a hasty toilet in her room. 
 
 I sat there while she was gone, slightly away 
 from the bedside, watching that white young 
 creature in my bed. Her eyes opened occasionally 
 and gazed at me with the calm indifference of 
 folks who, at the edge of unconsciousnes or death, 
 seem interested in larger and more serene affairs. 
 
 I sat and watched that wonderful young girl, 

 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 111 
 
 with all her life, all her extraordinary beauty, 
 speculating, turning over in my mind the possible 
 reasons for her act and for those words that 
 first singular statement on her return to life: 
 "I had no right to die !" 
 
 She said 'nothing more, just lay there. Her 
 mother came in again dressed more normal. 
 After a few minutes more I went into her room 
 and left her with the girl. 
 
 About dawn we helped her back into her own 
 bed. 
 
 "Judge," said the mother in parting, "never, 
 sir, can I forget what you have done for us to- 
 night. You have put us under an obligation, 
 sir, which is more than we can ever repay. Aside 
 from saving my daughter's life, you have saved 
 us even more! More than you can ever know 
 not being a mother or a woman, sir. We were 
 more than fortunate in having come to our rescue 
 not only a hero, sir, but a gentleman and a man 
 of discretion." 
 
 "About my qualities as a hero, ma'am, I have 
 my doubts," I said, "but I am certain sure that 
 you can count on my discretion. And if there 
 is any other way in which I can serve you in 
 your affairs," I told her, "I hope you will com- 
 mand me." 
 
 "Bless you for that too," said the woman
 
 112 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 the natural normal effusiveness of the Scarlet 
 Cockatoo returning, with a return of hope and 
 vigour. "A mother's blessing will follow you for- 
 ever, sir, and I shall take advantage of what 
 you now say and see you in your office not later, 
 I hope, than tomorrow or today, I should say 
 sir." For the light of another morning was 
 now already well come. 
 
 Her restless, nervous manner had returned to 
 her with a return to taking up again the fixed 
 and pressing burdens of life. Her face showed 
 drawn and haggard in the light of a new dawn 
 the face, it occurred to me, of a small animal, 
 too weak for the forces round it, which must 
 make up, day and night, by nervous alertness 
 and vigilance and excitement what it lacks in 
 strength until in some mistake, maybe, it darts 
 finally of its own motion to its own destruction 
 into danger, out of life. 
 
 The girl was immediately lost in a deep and 
 peaceful sleep in the bed where we had laid her. 
 I was soon in my own room, in a rest as entire 
 and profound. 
 
 Of all of us three, in five minutes from the 
 time I had left them, only the mother, I believe, 
 was awake watching with strained eyes and 
 painted face the sleeping girl upon the great 
 old-time black-walnut bed.
 
 WHEN I came dowristairs finally, late 
 for breakfast, the woman, the Scarlet 
 Cockatoo, so-called, was there before 
 me, in full war paint, as Calvert would have 
 said; apparently no worse certainly no dif- 
 ferent to the naked eye than usual. She was 
 evidently just in receipt of her morning mail. 
 
 "I don't see your daughter down this morning, 
 ma'am," I said, bowing to her. "I trust she is 
 not ill." 
 
 "Just a headache, judge, thank you, sir," she 
 said, looking at me, straight in the eyes, "which 
 came on rather sudden in the night. But she's 
 a whole lot better now, and by noontime, sir, we 
 hope she will be up and downstairs for luncheon." 
 
 "I'm glad to hear that," I said. 
 
 And then the person, whoever il was, who was 
 standing near us, moved off. 
 
 "Judge," said the Fairborn woman in a lower 
 voice, "when are you going to be in your office 
 today during this morning, sir?" 
 
 "Madam," I answered, "any time. Just aa 
 113
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 soon as I get through here with mj breakfast." 
 
 "I'm afraid, sir," she said, in a lower voice 
 still, "I've got to pester you again with my 
 affairs. I hate to but this is imperative, sir. 
 I've had another thing this morning come to 
 bother me." 
 
 "Any time, ma'am," I told her. "It's a 
 pleasure." 
 
 "Would right away would nine-thirty be too 
 early?" 
 
 "No, ma'am," I said. "I'll be delighted to 
 see you at that hour." 
 
 I noticed then the extra sharpness of her voice 
 and that letter she held in her hand. 
 
 By nine-thirty we were closed up in conference 
 in my office. 
 
 "Your daughter, ma'am," I asked her, "is all 
 right, then?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, judge," she said, "with a thousand 
 thousand thanks to you, sir." 
 
 "I'm glad to hear that, ma'am," I told her. 
 
 "But now," she said, "that's scarcely over 
 when this comes up a part, sir, of what happened 
 last night the reason !" 
 
 "Go ahead, ma'am," I told her, sitting back 
 wondering if I was about to be let in and informed 
 on her mystery. 
 
 "It's about this letter," she told me, "which
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 115 
 
 just arrived this morning which I must have 
 your advice upon, sir, right off this morning." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 "Doubtless," she answered me, "sir, you've 
 heard about that man that dressmaker. You've 
 heard them whispering various ( stories, I expect, 
 about that man from St. Louis, who disturbed 
 my daughter so on the day of that festival." 
 
 "I knew it was believed, in some way," I told 
 her, "that man was in some way concerned in it. 
 Who was this man if that's a fair question, 
 ma'am?" 
 
 "Gluber, his name is," she told me. "He's a 
 dressmaker or rather, sir, a seller of dresses in 
 St. Louis." 
 
 "Yes," I said, and waited. 
 
 "That we," she went on "to put it frank and 
 open owe a heap of money to." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," I said. 
 
 "For my daughter's wardrobe." 
 
 I sat and waited. 
 
 "I want to tell you, judge, all I have time to 
 just now, sir. I want to make you my full con- 
 fidant and get your invaluable advice on what I 
 am confronted with, sir." 
 
 "My advice is your's, ma'am," I said, studying 
 her, "for the asking. I won't guarantee anything 
 about its value to you."
 
 116 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 She went on then and opened up one corner of 
 her woman's speculation to me. 
 
 "You've heard more or less, doubtless, sir, the 
 various comments on me and my daughter the 
 things they talk concerning us coming in here, sir, 
 trying to snatch away some man or other, some 
 husband from the other marriageable girls here. 
 Well, sir," she said, "I admit it, sir, so far as I 
 myself am concerned. I came here looking for a 
 husband for my girl. I make no shame nor 
 apology for it, sir. I'm doing just what every 
 sensible mother wants to do, if she speaks the truth 
 marry off her daughter to advantage. 
 
 "I want to tell you, judge," she went on, "I 
 was reared and trained up like you was, I expect, 
 in the good old-fashioned Southern way. I've seen 
 some of the new ways of these girls who start 
 on some new idea, to earn a living for themselves. 
 That may be all right for a while, sir, a certain 
 period. But finally, in the end, it all comes down, 
 with any real woman, to whether she's married 
 to advantage. That's a woman's real business, 
 getting married. And you know it and I do 
 and the more we recognize it the more sensible it's 
 apt to come out. And the better for her." 
 
 "Not always the most money, maybe," I said, 
 trying her. 
 
 "Do you think so, judge?" she said. "I
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 117 
 
 don't. Money's a mighty useful thing to have." 
 
 "Nobody can successfully refute that, I expect, 
 madam," I said. 
 
 "I know something, sir," she said, "about that 
 from hard experience. I married nothing for 
 love!" 
 
 "You mean to convey it wasn't a success, 
 ma'am?" 
 
 "No, sir, it was not," she told me. "I starved 
 to death for twenty years. I lost my looks and 
 the best part of my life planning, laughing, keep- 
 ing up and protecting appearances for an easy- 
 going, happy-go-lucky husband, who stayed with 
 me till he didn't like my looks, the looks he'd lost 
 me, working to keep him up a decent appearance 
 before the world by smiling and dragging along 
 his affairs and borrowing and begging for his 
 broken-down old plantation till he went off and 
 left me. And then afterward he died," she added. 
 "Oh, you can't tell me, judge," she went on, her 
 voice rising up and sharpening, "that there's any 
 fairness between men and women, because there's 
 not. After a woman's looks are gone she's gone 
 with them so far as you men are concerned. I 
 know that. You think I'm funny, I expect, 
 judge," she went on explaining herself now while 
 I watched her "my actions, my laughing and 
 carrying on. Everybody does; I know that.
 
 118 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 But they wouldn't, maybe, if they'd had to do it 
 themselves twenty-five years, as I have, for a 
 living. It gets engraved on you after awhile 
 into your nerves ; and when you do it you get 
 hysterical and get away from yourself. Oh, I 
 know! 
 
 "But anyhow," she went on after awhile, "what- 
 ever you may think about me, sir, when my little 
 girl came I made up my mind she'd never do what 
 I did. She'd never go through life smiling and 
 scraping and patching up appearances like I did 
 for a man, who would give nothing for her in the 
 end not even his love and affection. Not if I 
 could prevent it, anyway ! 
 
 "But this don't get us anywhere," she said then, 
 starting up and bringing out this letter. "Espe- 
 cially as I want to get away as my train gets 
 out now inside of two hours. 
 
 "You're going away!" I said, surprised. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered; "to St. Louis." 
 
 "And take the girl?" I asked her. 
 
 "Oh, no, sir," she said. "Just temporarily 
 on business. I'll be back tomorrow or the next 
 day. Now look at this, sir," she said, and spread 
 the typewritten letter before me, that abusive 
 screed from that dressmaker. 
 
 I took it and read it through to the last par- 
 agraph.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 119 
 
 It ran about like this : 
 
 So you should play a funny business on me, huh? 
 With your bunk stories on a marriage. Nix for 
 that. I'm no simp, to stand for that again. So 
 now we are going back and begin over again. 
 Youll dig up that $750 that's still coming from 
 somewhere, or the letters start again. Maybe 
 by this time you should hear from one already 
 the first one only. Come now, be sudden, or 
 you'll hear right off again from 
 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 A. Gluber. 
 
 "Who's that?" I asked, knowing right well who 
 it must be. 
 
 "The one that was here that's caused every- 
 thing that terrible thing last night!" 
 
 "Who? That dressmaker?" 
 
 "That fiend, Gluber, who's always hunting us." 
 
 "For what?" 
 
 "For that money we still owe him on account 
 that he's always chasing us around for." 
 
 "Tell me about it," I said to her. 
 
 And she went on then with the details and spec- 
 ifications of her disastrous adventure. 
 
 "I was left, sir," she said, "with this one boy 
 and one girl and this old mortgaged plantation
 
 120 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 I've been telling you about. We were the best 
 blood in the South my family, the Fairborns, 
 sir." 
 
 "Your family!" I said after her. "I thought 
 your married name was Fairborn." 
 
 "I took my family name back," she said, 
 "awjhile after the separation. But then, after 
 that, sir," she went on, "everything went wrong. 
 The plantation which was nothing in the first 
 place ran down and down. And then finally 
 my boy, my Robert Lee, got in this awful trouble. 
 He was nothing but a boy, sir. He shot a man. 
 Justifiably, everybody said, sir. He just had to! 
 But they sent him to the penitentiary, sir, never- 
 theless." 
 
 She stopped and wiped her lips in her excite- 
 ment. I could see the red spot from her painted 
 lips come off on her handkerchief. I asked 
 her nothing, let her go on, in her own time. 
 
 "So you see," she said evidently after a little 
 consideration of what she should say next "all 
 I had left, all there was of the Fairborn blood 
 that had made Dell County what it was that the 
 county seat was named for, sir was just my girl. 
 I was determined she should be something have 
 the chance I never did. I was determined she 
 should marry right and well to advantage to 
 a man who was her equal in blood and her superior
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 121 
 
 in fortune, sir. And it became clear to me that 
 that was the one way to keep the Fairborns and 
 the Fairborn name from sinking out of sight in 
 the ground, like so many of our best Southern 
 names have done, sir, forever. It was not only 
 for the girl, sir it was for the whole family 
 after those terrible disasters we had gone 
 through." 
 
 "I understand you, ma'am," I said when she 
 stopped and panted from excitement, appar- 
 ently, and weariness, partly, no doubt, I thought, 
 watching her, from that night before. 
 
 "You've seen the girl, sir," she said to me. 
 "She's a girl that anybody'd be proud to marry 
 any man in the whole world, sir. Ain't that 
 true, Judge Dalrymple, sir?" 
 
 "It certainly is," I told her. 
 
 "So I determined, some way, I would take her 
 out and away from home." 
 
 "Away from home?" I said after her. 
 
 "She couldn't stay there, could she, after that 
 awful affair of Robert Lee's that shooting? 
 Could she, sir?" she said to me. 
 
 I felt at that time, while she was talking, that 
 she knew as well as I that there was something 
 more there which I should have been informed 
 about. Right there, doubtless, I could under- 
 stand, very likely might be the murder that case
 
 122 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 referred to in the anonymous letter the Pitman 
 murder case. But I could feel her wince away 
 from it, I thought instinctively defending a sore 
 spot and I sat still as she went along, talking 
 fast, explaining her next move. 
 
 "So I made up my mind, sir, we'd go out to some 
 city where I could get letters to or get acquain- 
 ted in some way and Virginia should have her 
 chance like every girl should have." 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "You see," she said, speaking faster as she went 
 along, "she had we had just one thing left 
 out of everything. Her beauty. The Fairborns 
 were always noted, sir, for their lovely women. 
 But no one I ever saw or read about was just 
 like her." 
 
 "She is a wonderful fine girl," I said. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she went on. "That was about all 
 that was left to all the Fairborns this one girl. 
 So I said, sir, I'd take her to some other city to 
 some place where she would meet nice men the 
 kind that she should have and that should have 
 her. You know what marrying men there are in 
 a place like Dell County. There ain't any. So 
 I said she should go somewhere, if it took our 
 last cent. And then I made that terrible mistake 
 about " 
 
 "About what?" I said, prompting her finally.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 123 
 
 "This terrible dressmaker this fiend of a 
 Gluber." 
 
 "How so?" I asked her. 
 
 "I heard there were such things of men in 
 St. Louis and other cities who made it their 
 business, sir, to furnish clothes wardrobes of 
 clothes to various women such as women of the 
 stage, sir and let them pay them after awhile, 
 part at a time by giving some sort of notes or 
 papers." 
 
 "Some instalment plan, I presume." 
 
 "Yes, sir. Exactly, sir," she went on. "You'll 
 think I was foolish, but I was desperate. I was 
 determined, sir, that my baby, my Virginia, should 
 have her chance; and she couldn't ever hope to 
 have it unless I did something like that to get her 
 ready." 
 
 "Ready !" I said after her. 
 
 "To dress her up. All she had in the world 
 was just those few old rags of my old wardrobe 
 a few old country duds that I could afford to 
 buy her. Oh, you know that, judge!" she said. 
 
 "Know what?" 
 
 "You know how much you men have got to have 
 done for you by women dressing themselves up. 
 How much chance a girl would have with no 
 dresses or, worse yet, in country clothes. How 
 soon she'd get laughed out of town by the other
 
 124. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 women and the men and you yourself. It's 
 unfortunate, sir," she went along, "but you men 
 are pretty mighty exacting of us women in looks 
 and manners and behaviour and every way. More 
 so, I expect, than you have any idea of, sir. I 
 expect it's only natural, but it's true just the 
 same especially about looks. A girl's got to 
 have dresses nowadays to get anywhere. Oh, I 
 didn't go into this without thinking, judge. I 
 didn't act before I went down deep into the whole 
 thing and saw that if I was going to do any- 
 thing I'd have to do it right and big. I was 
 handicapped enough, as it was. I saw I'd have 
 to go through the whole thing right in order 
 to go with good people, the kind of people I'd want 
 to, that the Fairborns naturally would care to 
 associate their daughter with, sir; that I'd have 
 to act and live and dress her as near as possible as 
 they would." 
 
 "But let me ask you this," I asked her, when 
 she stopped a minute. "How'd you come to get in 
 with that Gluber that kind of cattle such aa 
 that dressmaker looks to be?" 
 
 "It was all my own doing, judge," she told me. 
 "I saw somewhere about there being such people 
 and I had to do something. And so I went up to 
 St. Louis, sir, and I went round and asked 
 questions till finally I found this man."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 125 
 
 "All right," I said. "So you got tied up with 
 this fellow this dressmaker in St. Louis for the 
 purpose of doing this." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "You took that gamble on your daughter's 
 looks?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. That's what it was, I expect. A 
 gamble for her sake and for ours." 
 
 "And this man this dealer in costumes 
 financed you, you might say." 
 
 "Yes, sir," she said, "that was it." 
 
 "And then what?" 
 
 "And then, sir, you see, it was this way. I paid 
 him, Gluber, down what I could, then." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am." 
 
 "I couldn't pay him all. I had to have money 
 to live on to travel with, you understand." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am, I understand." 
 
 "Of course I had pretty mighty little, sir, after 
 what I'd just been through; after my boy's trial, 
 and all that. And I had to keep quite a consider- 
 able amount for our expenses, sir. So I let the 
 plantation go for what I could realize on it, sir, 
 over and above the mortgages. It wasn't giving 
 us a living." 
 
 I whistled to myself, thinking it over that 
 woman's speculation and the logic back of it. 
 
 "And you set out with your girl," I said,
 
 126 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 prompting her along, now she had stopped again. 
 
 "Yes, sir; to Louisville, sir." 
 
 "And then what?" 
 
 "That's where our troubles began, judge. It 
 was this way. We'd just got established in Louis- 
 ville, you might say, meeting some fine lovely cul- 
 tivated people people with large means, sir 
 through letters and various ways I had, when this 
 dressmaker, this fiend of a Gluber, started in 
 against us." 
 
 "For his money?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. For the note I had given him. He 
 claimed I hadn't been fair that I'd misrepre- 
 sented things to him about what I had for prop- 
 erty, sir. Maybe I did, sir, some. I may have let 
 him think some ideas he had already about our 
 having more property than we actually had. 
 I won't say I didn't, sir. I had to have that 
 money I just had to." 
 
 "I understand," I said. "And then he took 
 after you in Louisville." 
 
 "Yes, sir. We were just getting started there. 
 Virginia was just getting acquainted with the 
 nicest young people when he came on asking for 
 this money that I couldn't pay him." 
 
 "What did you do then, ma'am?" 
 
 "What could I do, judge? I couldn't pay out
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 127 
 
 what money I had to pay for our expenses. I 
 couldn't do that and be left, sir " 
 
 "With both the dresses and the girl !" 
 
 "Yes, sir. Precisely. And nothing else." 
 
 "So what did you do?" 
 
 "I tried to hold him off, sir." 
 
 "And then what?" 
 
 "Then he started on those letters those anony- 
 mous letters, to other folks, to make me pay. He 
 thought, naturally, and still does, too, that we 
 could pay some way if we wanted to ; or we could 
 get some relation to somewhere for the sake of 
 family pride, sir. The Fairborns have always 
 held their heads high, sir, in our part of the 
 country. And it seems that's what he does all 
 the time dealing with women the way he does. 
 That's the way he works with them." 
 
 "How do you mean?" 
 
 "Scaring them, always scaring them different 
 ways. Married women who come to him secretly 
 scaring them that he'll tell their husbands ; and 
 stage women, other women scaring them all in 
 different ways, according to how he can best ter- 
 rify them. A regular bloodhound, sir always 
 hounding them down, scaring them to make them 
 pay him." 
 
 "A kind of blackmail enterprise."
 
 128 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "I expect you'd call it so." 
 
 "And what did he do with you with those 
 letters? How could he find out about whom to 
 write them to in the first place?" 
 
 "It seems, judge, he's been everywhere. It 
 seems he knows all the collection agencies all 
 the instalment folks that get part payments from 
 people. There's an army of them, all over. It's 
 a great big business, judge, sir, in all the cities, 
 they tell me." 
 
 "I understand so," I said, thinking. 
 
 "So he found out about us easy enough 
 where we were going in Louisville and the people 
 we knew from this kind of folks for a few 
 dollars or for friendship's sake. For they're all 
 kind of in together. And he'd gone down or sent 
 down and found about us at home, now, and all 
 our weak spots there." 
 
 "So he wrote these letters to folks to scare you 
 into paying. Is that it?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. That's it, judge. That's exactly 
 it, sir. Following us everywhere the way he'd 
 done from the beginning like a bloodhound. 
 Starting easy first, in these letters, and then 
 telling how he'd go stronger if I didn't pay up." 
 
 "What'd he write about?" I asked her, remem- 
 bering again, naturally, that one anonymous letter 
 from him that I had seen the hint of murder.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 129 
 
 "There were plenty of things to say, weren't 
 there, judge?" she asked me back, evading me 
 again, I thought, a little; coming again to that 
 territory she didn't care to enter. "If he said 
 nothing more than that our clothes weren't paid 
 for. And then too, judge, naturally, there was 
 that trial of my boy and all that." 
 
 "Naturally," I answered. 
 
 I could see from the way she touched it and 
 drew away that she was willing to avoid that 
 subject that shooting or murder, or whatever it 
 might be, as far as possible. And I had no inten- 
 tion of forcing its discussion on her, especially 
 if it wasn't necessary. 
 
 "And then what'd you do?" I asked her. 
 
 "What could I do, sir? I did something I 
 oughtn't to have done, I expect. I came away 
 from there in secret. I just ran away, thinking 
 to avoid him." 
 
 "With the dresses that you owed him for?" 
 
 "Yes. I was useless if I didn't have them, sir, 
 and I couldn't pay out all the money I had to 
 settle for them and keep on. And I intended 
 always, sir, so help me God, to pay the man his 
 bill some day. And besides, sir, if he never got 
 paid again anything he'd have more today 
 than the dresses were worth just from what I've 
 paid him already."
 
 130 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "And then you stole away from him?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. I managed to. There was quite a 
 little time there before he found out where we'd 
 gone to. But he found me he smelt me out 
 finally like the bloodhound he is! Like he 
 always does !" 
 
 "And now he's after you with his anonymous 
 letters, starting over again to get payment on that 
 note whatever it is he holds against you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Have you got it here?" I asked her. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she said. "That's what I came here 
 to talk with you about, mostly." 
 
 "Let me look at it," I told her. 
 
 And she took it out and went over it with me. 
 
 "Do you mean to say you signed that note with 
 that interest and those terms?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. That's just what I did. I had to, 
 I thought." 
 
 "Well, madam," I said, after examining it 
 through, "you didn't have to. And what's more, 
 he can't hold you on it. And what's still more, 
 madam," I said, "you can tell him right now that 
 this document is illegal and if he don't stop 
 threatening you or trying further to collect any- 
 thing like that you'll land him in jail, and you 
 can tell him, ma'am, I said so."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 131 
 
 The woman's face changed entirely while I 
 was giving her this information. 
 
 "Can I tell him that, judge," she asked me, 
 "as coming from you ?" 
 
 "You certainly can, ma'am," I said. "And put 
 it just as strong as you like. You've been pest- 
 ered and blackmailed and run round by a scoun- 
 drel, ma'am, on a perfectly worthless document, 
 and if you were my womenfolks it would be a 
 mighty short period before I'd land him in jail 
 between the two things, that note and the black- 
 mail." 
 
 The woman this Scarlet Cockatoo, so-called 
 was up on her feet now. 
 
 "Judge, sir," she said in her highest, brightest 
 voice, "you've made me terribly happy, sir. 
 You've told me just the one thing in the world I 
 was hoping and praying to hear. You've saved 
 me my life again, sir. I never can thank you 
 enough for this, and for everything else. But 
 now," she said, "I've got to go. I'm in a des- 
 perate hurry if I'm going to catch that train !" 
 
 "What train?" 
 
 "The train up to St. Louis," she told me. 
 
 "But your girl your Virginia is she all right 
 to leave now?" I asked her. 
 
 "She is, yes," she said. "Perfectly. And if
 
 132 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 she wasn't I'd have to fix it somehow so I could go. 
 I'd have to go somehow," she said, that sharp, 
 strident tone coming to her voice; that sharp, 
 hard, alert look back, permanent, in her eyes 
 again the look of a desperate and overextended 
 gambler. 
 
 She thanked me again in her hard nervous 
 voice and hurried out, starting to get ready for 
 her St. Louis train.
 
 THE next day, the next morning after that, 
 before she arrived back, I had another 
 visitor at my office whom I had not been 
 anticipating. The girl, this so-called White 
 Shoulders, had not appeared, it seemed, at lunch- 
 eon that noon after I had talked with her mother ; 
 but that evening she had been down to dinner, 
 after an all-day session with a furious headache, 
 having had her instructions doubtless to appear 
 in public as early as humanly possible. The next 
 morning after that she was able, it appeared, to 
 get down to my office. 
 
 "You oughtn't to have done this, Virginia," I 
 said to her. 
 
 "Judge," she answered, "I want to talk to you. 
 To thank you first " 
 
 "Don't," I said, "please, ma'am. I'll take that 
 for granted." 
 
 "All right, sir. But I've got to say something, 
 haven't I to show " 
 
 "If you won't, ma'am," I said. "Please." 
 
 "Well, all right," she told me. "But there is 
 
 another thing, for my own selfish interest, that 
 133
 
 134 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 I want to talk to you about, while she's gone 
 while I can. I may never have the chance 
 again." 
 
 "What's that?" I asked her. 
 
 "I want to talk to you about myself, judge," 
 she said, the blood coming up into her pale face; 
 "if you'll let me, sir. I don't want, I can't bear 
 after what you've done to have you think 
 as you must think I'm either all a bad woman 
 or a fool." 
 
 "My dear girl my dear Virginia," I tried to 
 say. 
 
 "I wanted if you'd let me to show you just 
 what a fix I'm in. So you'll understand. So you 
 won't think too hard of me, sir, when it all comes 
 out." 
 
 "I won't think hard of you, child," I told her. 
 "And your mother's told me all about it 1" 
 
 "Has she?" she said. "How much? Tell me, 
 please, if you will, judge." 
 
 I told her as far as I could, she listening, quiet 
 and silent and white again, with her hands still 
 in her lap about the dresses, the blackmailer, 
 the whole woman's speculation, as her mother 
 outlined it; and finally I touched in passing the 
 point I didn't understand the shooting scrape 
 whatever it was, the boy, Robert Lee, had been 
 in.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 135 
 
 "Did she tell you all about that?" the girl asked 
 me. 
 
 "No," I answered her. "I didn't press her to 
 naturally." 
 
 "Did she tell you what it was about the 
 shooting?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 The girl smiled that slow, supposedly indifferent 
 smile of hers. "No, she wouldn't do that ever," 
 she told me. 
 
 "What was it about?" 
 
 "It was about me." 
 
 "About you?" 
 
 "Yes," she said, "and that's w<hy I wanted to 
 talk to you, judge; to tell you just how things 
 really were, so you'll know when the story when 
 all the other versions do come out. And then, 
 too, I'm going to have the unusual luxury of talk- 
 ing about myself. I appreciate it, sir. It's a 
 real rare treat to me," she said, smiling that cold 
 slow smile again. 
 
 She was dressed fit to kill, in the gayest of 
 spring garments; she picked up, as she talked, 
 the gay-coloured, expensive parasol she had set 
 down beside my desk when she had come in. 
 
 "You thought, I expect, sir," she said, "with 
 all the rest, when you first saw us, that we were 
 just two common adventuresses."
 
 136 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "No, ma'am," I began. "I certainly " 
 
 "A sharp adventuress with a big loud-dressed 
 girl. 'Just two imposters," she broke in; and 
 went on again, before I had time for denying it. 
 
 "Well, you were right, if you did. Even our 
 name, or my name anyhow, is false." 
 
 "Your name!" I said after her. 
 
 "My name my father's name is Pitman." 
 
 "Pitman!" I said, remembering, naturally, the 
 anonymous letter and the alleged Pitman murder 
 case. "So your brother " 
 
 "You are thinking of the shooting, aren't you ?" 
 she asked, looking up. 
 
 "Maybe I was," I said "among other things." 
 
 "Yes. He was called that and is still," she 
 said. "We were always till we had to change 
 till we came to this last place here. And that's 
 what they call the trial always back home in 
 Dell County. The Pitman trial maybe because 
 our folks were so well known always. And that's 
 what they call me always there still, I expect 
 that Pitman girl !" 
 
 She stopped, motionless her still, hopeless- 
 looking hands in her white gloves folded over her 
 gay parasol, which lay crosswise in her lap. I let 
 her alone to talk when she was ready. 
 
 "It isn't so easy, judge, after all," she said 
 then, "to tell it. Maybe because I'm not very
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 137 
 
 much used to talking about myself." 
 
 "Take your time, Virginia. Take your time," 
 I told her. 
 
 "I'll tell it to you from the beginning if you 
 please, sir," she told me. 
 
 "Any way," I said. 
 
 Then she waited awhile. 
 
 "You've been there, judge," she said finally, 
 "in that part of the state. You know how they 
 run to raising race horses out there blooded 
 stock." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," I said. "That's quite a country 
 for horses, up that way." 
 
 "I used to love them when I was a little girl," 
 she said, flushing up again. "And we used to 
 have our own. I used to love to get on them when 
 I had the chance and ride and ride and ride! 
 
 "But what I was going to say was that I was 
 like them, I've thought sometimes, in a way. I was 
 reared, in a way, like they were useless, only 
 for a special fancy purpose." 
 
 "For what do you mean?" I asked her. 
 
 "For marriage. I was for sale at high 
 prices. Fancy blooded stock, pedigreed." 
 
 She laughed the harsh, resentful laugh of a 
 woman of fifty. 
 
 "Virginia, I don't like to hear you or any 
 other young girl talk thataway," I told her.
 
 138 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Why?" she said, resting her great big eyes on 
 me again. "It's true, isn't it of all girls, of 
 all women, in a way with our kind of folks? 
 They've got to find somebody who's willing to 
 support them to pay out money for having 
 them all their lives. Only they don't see it 
 or they don't say it, anyway. They just act it. 
 Their mothers especially. It's like all those big 
 things death and children and all like that we 
 don't talk about them, do we? We just go on 
 and take them for granted. And that's the way 
 I've thought about marriage. Maybe I'm wrong. 
 I'm not very old or very wise yet. I haven't 
 thought very deep, I expect." 
 
 "You're too old and wise," I thought to myself, 
 looking at her. "You've thought too much for 
 your age." If she had seemed still and heavy 
 before, she seemed anything but that now. I sat 
 still again waiting for her to go on when she 
 wanted to. 
 
 "Did women always, when you were young, talk 
 of nothing else but dresses and pretty looks and 
 getting engaged and married and having parties 
 to show them at, like fairs? Is that all the}' 
 talked about always ?" she asked me then. 
 
 "I expect they did some, ma'am. A good lot 
 of women are apt to." 
 
 "I never remember a time when I didn't hear
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 139 
 
 it all the time dresses, engagements, marriage. 
 I never remember when I didn't hear my mother 
 talking about a brilliant marriage." 
 
 "I've heard that kind of talk myself in my day," 
 I told her. 
 
 "That was what I drank in before my alphabet ; 
 with my toys, with all the dresses they loaded on 
 me. I've often wondered if it was the same with 
 other little girls. A brilliant marriage. I had no 
 idea what it was, but I was going to have one. I 
 was trained for it for nothing else in the world 
 when I was in the nursery. Yes, really I 
 mean it, judge, sir! With my first ribbons my 
 first fine little white shoes ! That was all I was 
 trained for all I was good for. And then when 
 I was almost ready to be what I was reared for 
 I was spoiled !" 
 
 "Spoiled !" I said after her. 
 
 "Absolutely. I was spoiled. A waste, for the 
 only thing on God's earth I was made for. With 
 all those dresses, with all she'd spent on me, I was 
 spoiled! I'm absolutely worthless. I'm a 
 waste." 
 
 "You/* I said, "with your looks, with every- 
 thing in this world ahead of you, complaining 
 like that. You ought to be ashamed, ma'am. If 
 it was me now at my age, there might be some logic 
 to it."
 
 140 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 She looked at me with those great still eyes of 
 hers. 
 
 "I'm not complaining, judge. I'm just stating 
 facts. I'm useless I'm spoiled for the only 
 thing I'm fitted for." 
 
 "Useless P' 
 
 "I'm raised to be married!" 
 
 "Say you are," I told her, "if you want to." 
 
 "Nobody could marry me. Nobody could," she 
 said in a low voice "if they only knew." And she 
 stopped still. 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" I asked her 
 finally. 
 
 She sat there for a little bit before she started 
 answering. Then I could see her hands tighten 
 on her big parasol again and she started talking. 
 
 "This man" talking slow and looking off 
 "the first one she started to marry me to, was 
 the richest man in our county. More than 
 twice <as old as I was then. I was only seventeen 
 that spring," she said, looking at me now with a 
 kind of appealing look under her big wide hat brim. 
 And then she stopped again. 
 
 "How old are you now?" I asked her. 
 
 "I'm nineteen," she said, and went on telling 
 me. "He had the most wonderful horses. I love 
 horses. I always did anything that could go 
 move fast and be free. You think you would
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 141 
 
 now that I'm stupid that I just love to sit 
 around in fine clothes and look stupid and pose. 
 I don't. I hate it ! I hate it ! I'm naturally big 
 and strong and active, sir. What I love more 
 than anything in this world, sir, is motion, free- 
 dom, horses something going somewhere! I've 
 had so much of the other thing, I expect, all my 
 life sitting round, looking nice and pretty ! 
 
 "Judge," she went on, "he gave me a wonder- 
 ful time that Colonel Singleton with his horses. 
 So far as I knew that was all everything! If 
 there was anything anything else any any 
 advances on his part I expect probably I would- 
 n't have known. I was too much of just a little 
 girl. All I thought was he gave me a wonderful 
 time with his saddle horses and that sometime, 
 maybe, so mother said, he'd probably marry me. 
 There'd be a brilliant marriage. I never thought 
 of it or anything else, except in a general sort of 
 far-off way. Or how she was spending all the 
 money she could rake up to dress me with to make 
 me attractive, so he'd want to have me." 
 
 She broke off then for a minute or two. 
 
 "I want to ask you something, judge, sir," she 
 said to me, "that I never yet understood. I 
 always wanted to ask somebody like you I 
 could trust. Is there nothing that's attractive to 
 a man, really and truly is a woman nothing to a
 
 142 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 man but dresses and looks and body ? Is that 
 all she can possibly be, sir ? Tell me honestly. I 
 want to know." 
 
 "No. I hope not," I said. "Why?" 
 
 "Oh I don't know. I hate you all some- 
 times!" she said. She stopped while I waited 
 and then she went on finally with her story. 
 
 "This man, it seems, this Colonel Singleton I 
 didn't know it how could I? This man was ter- 
 rible in every way. Only he was rich for our 
 country! Somebody who would have heaps of 
 money if you married him. But it seems every- 
 body was wondering sneering, laughing about 
 my mother's ever allowing me to go round with him 
 
 to say nothing of ! She was desperate, I 
 
 the way we are now for something for a 
 brilliant marriage, I believe. She thought I was 
 so wonderful. You know what I mean she 
 thought so ; not I ! She thought that when he saw 
 me, dressed the way she dressed me, he'd have to 
 have me to marry me !" 
 
 Her paleness was gone now ; her face was flushed. 
 Her great eyes stared into mine. 
 
 "Judge," she said, "please. Don't misunder- 
 stand me please. There was nothing, absolutely 
 nothing. He was perfectly nice to me every 
 way whatever else he had been to any other 
 woman. Only people laughed and whispered and
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 143 
 
 then finally sneered out loud at her trusting me 
 with that man that way. And finally they said 
 the man, when he had been drinking, it seemed, 
 laughed at us at mother what a fool she was, 
 the way she was throwing me at him. What he 
 could do, or onght, or might do with me ! Some 
 slandering talk, anyway. And then Robert 
 
 Lee " she said, and stopped, clutching tighter 
 
 at her parasol and swallowing. 
 
 "Robert Lee my brother, judge heard of it. 
 He was nothing but a child, j udge a boy, truly ! 
 He was just a year older than I was. But you 
 know how it is with Southerners with Fairborns, 
 and folks like that! All that old-time family 
 pride! He couldn't stand it, sir, when he heard 
 it. So one day, judge, sir, he went and got a 
 pistol, and he went over to this Colonel Singleton's, 
 and he asked him what he'd meant by all this talk. 
 And he just laughed and told him to mind his 
 business and go back to the nursery and roll his 
 hoops. And they got talking and arguing, judge, 
 and Robert Lee just pulled out that revolver 
 and shot him !" 
 
 "Shot him!" I said, looking back into her 
 staring eyes. 
 
 "Dead. Yes, sir. Dead!" she said, and 
 stopped again. 
 
 "Do you see how it was, judge, now?" she asked
 
 144 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 me. "How I was spoiled all of us but I espe- 
 cially. Especially me !" 
 
 "Go ahead, ma'am," I said, waiting, staring 
 "when you feel you want to." 
 
 "They tried him, of course; they tried Robert 
 Lee for murder. He was a right prominent man, 
 judge, this Colonel Singleton. Very rich for our 
 country and with heaps and heaps of powerful 
 friends and relations. They wanted revenge, sir. 
 They wanted to hurt us every possible way. 
 They wanted to damage us all they could. They 
 had all the money to hire the best lawyers the 
 most terrible that money could buy ! While ours, 
 naturally, was only what we could afford to pay 
 for." 
 
 "I know," I said, trying to steady her a little. 
 
 "So they tried him Robert Lee for murder; 
 and at the same time I don't understand law, 
 judge; I never did quite understand yet but they 
 tried me, it seemed like, all the time more even 
 than they tried Robert Lee. We claimed our 
 lawyer you see, judge, that he had slandered 
 me this man; and so brother was justified in 
 a way, you know and being so young, espe- 
 cially!" 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "But the other people that head lawyer, that 
 big expensive man " she said and suddenly
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 145 
 
 put her gloved hands to her ears. "I can hear 
 him now see him with that terrible hard, harsh, 
 hateful voice his thin face and eyes that hated 
 you and red hair and freckles and that great 
 high, snarling, hateful voice. I can hear him 
 any time ever since, talking, questioning, asking 
 me those dreadful questions about things I never 
 even heard of, judge! You believe me, judge!" 
 she cried out. "I never heard of such things 
 in my life!" 
 
 I tried to speak to her, but my mouth, I expect, 
 was too dry from sitting staring, listening to 
 the girl's high, hysterical voice. 
 
 "For he didn't try that lawyer to prove 
 that this man this Colonel Singleton hadn't 
 said what it was that made brother shoot him 
 that slander ! He even made it worse than he ever 
 said! He just tried. to claim it wasn't slander 
 about me! That what he said about me 
 couldn't be slander, sir!" 
 
 I sat and stared at her. It couldn't be the 
 same girl I had been seeing all those weeks that 
 silent, inert, what we thought posing, White 
 Shoulders. She couldn't be this woman with 
 dilated eyes and set face that was looking at me, 
 half beside herself with that memory. 
 
 "It wasn't true, judge. It wasn't. You believe 
 that, don't you? Or I couldn't be saying this
 
 146 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 to you. I couldn't! Why, judge I didn't 
 even know of such things. They only did it 
 for revenge for hate of us. The jury said so, 
 judge. They sentenced Robert Lee for a short 
 term they had to ; but they acquitted me. They 
 went out of their way to. For it was me it was 
 me that was being tried then even more than he 
 was. Was being hinted at and jeered and flouted 
 and held up and asked these hideous questions 
 by that hideous, thin-faced, snarling lawyer, 
 with those little greenish eyes, like a nasty cat 
 that hateful voice asking me talking about 
 me using names! Oh, judge, how can; they! 
 How could they let people say such things in 
 court to other folks about other people 
 those lawyers when courts are supposed to be for 
 justice and truth!" 
 
 "You poor child," I said, remembering other 
 women in other witness stands. "But they 
 acquitted you, you say," I told her, saying what 
 I could think of. 
 
 "They acquitted me, yes; they did really in 
 what the jury went out of the way to say about 
 me. But what was the use?" 
 
 "The use?" I said after her. 
 
 "They could acquit and acquit and acquit. It 
 would be all just the same. I was spoiled just 
 the same for the only thing I was made for
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 147 
 
 for marriage. Smeared all over my soul and 
 body !" 
 
 Her hands fell back limp and hopeless into her 
 lap again. "Oh, what's the use?" she said in a 
 voice not of a girl but of a hopeless woman of 
 fifty. "What's the use? I said I'd never do like 
 that again!" 
 
 She stopped a minute then, controlled herself 
 and went on finally in a quieter voice again. 
 
 "All it was, judge, I wanted to show you," she 
 said, "was I was spoiled. I was done for before 
 I started for the only thing I was fitted for - 
 trained for expected to do. They came from all 
 over Dell County for that trial like they do 
 for a holiday. I was stripped bare, smeared, drag- 
 ged before them. I was a name that was common 
 that they whispered and laughed at on the street 
 corners! You know men do some men and 
 women too ! Even the commonest girl of the 
 meanest white trash in the country was more 
 more salable for marriage than I was. I was 
 spoiled ruined for any man to marry." 
 
 She stopped now for a minute and gave a short 
 quick kind of dreadful laugh. 
 
 "You know how it is with fine horses, judge," 
 she said. "My mind always goes back to that, 
 I expect. I always loved horses so. I remember 
 when we had one when I was little a young colt
 
 148 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 we were raising to be a great race horse, we 
 thought. It fell not by its own fault either 
 by a trifling foolish groom we had and broke 
 its leg. You know what they do with horses 
 with a colt like that when it's no use any more !" 
 
 "Don't!" I told her. 
 
 "I shouldn't, judge," she said. "That's 
 excusing myself for what I just started to do, 
 I'm going to get the better of that only some- 
 times it seems so hopeless. And that trial, of 
 course that wasn't all that was only the begin- 
 ning." 
 
 "You don't have to go on," I said, "if you don't 
 feel like it. I can see a little from this on. 
 From what your mother said." 
 
 "No, judge," she said, "that's what I'm here 
 for to tell you. Because well, because I think 
 you ought to know after everything. It's only 
 right you should, sir. Because I want you to, 
 sir and it*s a satisfaction to me to tell it to you, 
 to have somebody understand I'm not quite either 
 a knave or a fool, sir. Especially after all these 
 months of sitting silent, masquerading. 
 
 "You see how it was, sir," she went on. "I was 
 spoiled hopelessly spoked. Instead; of being 
 worth something to my mother to the family, 
 after all its going down, all the terrible expense of
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 149 
 
 that trial I was just a detriment and expense. I 
 was worse than that really, you can see, judge, 
 probably, if you think. I was worse because my 
 mother is what she is. Not so bad really, judge. 
 She means well, but she never can understand 
 about me, truly. She'd planned, I expect, so 
 much, all those years that she had nothing and 
 expected so much for me. And then too, you 
 understand, sir," she told me, a faint smile coming 
 on her lips again. "You must remember she's a 
 Fairborn, sir, and Fairborns never give up fight 
 to the last ditch, sir." 
 
 "We have a great plenty of Fairborns in the 
 South," I said. "That's one thing they can't say 
 that we lack courage." 
 
 "No, sir," she answered. "But even mother 
 could see I couldn't marry not in Dell County 
 now. And so " 
 
 "She got out and came away," I broke in, mean- 
 ing to save her what I could. "Your mother told 
 me about that." 
 
 "Yes. So she decided to take me somewhere 
 else where it wasn't known where what she calls 
 my my good looks " 
 
 "Your great and remarkable beauty, ma'am," 
 I told her. 
 
 "Whatever it is!" she said. "But then, 
 naturally, we had to have dresses."
 
 150 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "And she got involved and tied up with this 
 dressmaker," I said, "the way she told me." 
 
 "Yes. And then we went on to Louisville," she 
 said, and stopped ; and I stopped with her. 
 
 "I wonder if you can understand if anybody 
 can understand," she asked me finally, "how I 
 felt then. I had just been through that thing 
 that trial. I was sore, bruised all over. There 
 was only one thing in the world I wanted to do ; to 
 
 run and hide and hide and hide! Instead '* 
 
 she said, and stopped again. 
 
 "She brought you forward," I prompted her. 
 
 "Instead, judge, I was stood up for sale. 
 Before every eye she could get on me. I could 
 hear her talking, chattering about me, my hair, 
 my clothes, my shoulders ! I don't want to blame 
 my mother, judge. She is a good woman she 
 means well. She thinks what she does is right, I 
 expect. Only she was reared that way thinking 
 of nothing but clothes and looks and marriage 
 that's all like a lot of others! And she was 
 nervous and high-strung and all excited by what 
 happened. And she's not herself, truly not the 
 way you saw her, judge chattering so. She's 
 not the way she used to be. But she kept on, 
 though, just the same, talking, chattering, just 
 the same about me. When all I wanted all 
 the time was to be buried covered up somewhere !
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 151 
 
 And all the time, too, I knew it was so perfectly 
 useless what she was trying to do. That sooner 
 or later it would catch up with her the real 
 truth what I was. It was all so perfectly silly 
 and useless and so dishonest." 
 
 "Dishonest?" 
 
 "If anybody had really married me and fourd 
 out afterward the way she meant to do !" 
 
 I sat and watched her till she went on again. 
 
 "But what could I do with her, and Robert Lee 
 everybody fixed like they were everything gone 
 smash with us ? And she always with the same old 
 idea in her head that I could help get us all out 
 the family by marrying making that old bril- 
 liant marriage she always talked and dreamed 
 about. Could I help going on when she begged 
 so and talked to me telling me after all that it 
 had happened, in a way, on account of me that 
 Robert Lee had acted just to protect me and the 
 Fairborn honour? 
 
 "And then, too, after all, what difference did it 
 make? I was gone nothing anyway now!" 
 
 She stopped, staring at the wall across from her. 
 
 "Did you ever have that dream that dream 
 they say almost everybody has sometime of run- 
 ning without your clothes on through some 
 public place? Some strange dreadful public place
 
 152 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 trying, trying to hide and you can't ! And all 
 the people whispering and pointing their fingers 
 at you?" 
 
 "I have, yes," I said. "I expect everybody 
 has sometime in their lives." 
 
 "Then you know how I felt, in a way day after 
 day, waiting for that thing that trial over 
 again that shame to come again. If it had 
 been any use, judge. If it hadn't been so perfectly 
 silly from the first. If it hadn't been so sure to 
 come out. 
 
 "And then it came right away it came out in 
 Louisville from that dressmaker, that disgusting 
 Gluber. But you can't blame him, either, judge 
 can you?" 
 
 "Why not?" I asked, keeping my eye always 
 on her her serious, tragic face, her expensive 
 clothes, her gay parasol in her lap not yet paid 
 for all still technically the property of A. Gluber, 
 Costumer. 
 
 "According to his lights," she said. "For I 
 don't doubt, judge, that mother gave him some 
 mighty queer ideas about our property how much 
 
 I nodded, and she went on, seeing that I under- 
 stood. 
 
 "And you can't blame her for that, either. 
 That's the strange thing to me, how everything's
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 153 
 
 happened always so natural just according to 
 what kind of folks we all were and this man, this 
 Gluber, was. That was his regular business do- 
 ing what he did; that was what he had always 
 done scaring women." 
 
 "Scaring women?" 
 
 "Yes. Selling clothes to women whose husbands 
 wouldn't give them what they wanted; to stage 
 women; and other women, I expect, judge, not so 
 good. Selling them more then they ought to have 
 and then scaring them every way by threatening, 
 by telegraphing, by writing anonymous letters 
 about anything he could to people they just 
 couldn't have know. It's strange," she said, 
 "how things happen how they go against you 
 out of nothing," she said; and stopped, thinking. 
 
 "And so this dressmaker," I said finally, "drove 
 you out of Louisville." 
 
 "Yes," she answered, waking up, "by those let- 
 ters. And so we changed our name back to 
 mother's and came here to this smaller town, 
 thinking Gluber wouldn't know wouldn't find us 
 maybe, Though I knew I was always sure 
 myself he would," she said, and stopped again 
 and went on. 
 
 "We had just this little bit of money left these 
 few hundreds of dollars I don't know exactly 
 how much ! And she had sold everything in Dell
 
 154 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 County now she had to. We'd burned our 
 bridges all behind us, judge. She'd just bet all she 
 had all we any of us had on that same old 
 thing, that brilliant marriage for me that she'd 
 never had for herself. 
 
 "Well," she said, "judge, that's all ! I expect 
 you know the rest how we came here and about 
 Mr. Gordon. How he fancied me and was 
 going to take me! And that was worse, judge." 
 
 "Worse?" 
 
 "It was cheating about me. Think how it 
 would have been when he found out about me, as 
 he would have to, some day. Think how you'd feel 
 in my place. Not just being sold, but cheating 
 when you sold yourself. But I didn't care by 
 that time. I was too desperate, I expect too 
 tired out, too kind of numb all over, sir, to care 
 about anything then. And mother couldn't see, 
 anyway and she was too desperate too, I 
 expect." 
 
 I thought of them while she was speaking the 
 two strange, strange-acting women this White 
 Shoulders and the Scarlet Cockatoo how they 
 had set us wondering and the women whispering in 
 the corners. 
 
 "And then finally," she was going on, "that 
 day came along that day of victory. For me !" 
 she said, stopping in a short hard laugh again.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 155 
 
 "And then you know how that Gluber came at the 
 end and I saw him there 1" 
 
 "Didn't she prepare you?" I asked her. 
 "Your mother? Didn't she give you any warn- 
 ing?" 
 
 "No, sir. She didn't expect him to stay ; he told 
 her he wouldn't. She thought she had it all 
 arranged. And then he stayed to make sure." 
 
 "Sure?" 
 
 "About Captain Gordon about my engage- 
 ment if it was the way she said. She'd told him 
 promised him so much in the past, I expect, he 
 thought he'd stay to see !" 
 
 "To see?" 
 
 "About announcing my engagement." 
 
 "Then it was true?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "That you were going to announce it that 
 day?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," she said. "But not now that's all 
 done of course. If she had only told me, warned 
 me," she went on, "I could have stood it, I believe. 
 But all at once, to look down into that face to see 
 it all rising up again that man that time in 
 Louisville that trial and that lawyer with the 
 red hair and those little green eyes and that 
 voice, asking me those terrible questions, judge. 
 I heard it all I went through it all over again 

 
 156 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 in those thirty seconds before I fainted then, sir. 
 I couldn't stand it, that's all." 
 
 She stopped a minute. 
 
 "And then you know mother told you the 
 letters started again, like they did at Louisville. 
 And then I did that foolish thing that caused 
 you so much trouble and danger that I'm here 
 to apologize for to you, sir." 
 
 "Apologize?" I said. 
 
 "Yes, sir, apologize a thousand times. For I 
 oughtn't to have done it, sir, I know. To have 
 made you all that trouble and to do that myself ! 
 To lay down and quit, sir. I'm utterly ashamed 
 of what I did. To quit like that especially, 
 sir, when you're a Fairborn," she said, with a 
 slow kind of smile, half mocking and half serious, 
 coming on her face again. 
 
 "You certainly," I told her, "don't have to 
 apologize to me, Virginia." 
 
 She sat looking off awhile before answering me. 
 
 "There is one thing though, judge," she said, 
 "that I reckon I might say for myself. Not to 
 excuse myself nothing could do that. But I do 
 want to say to you, sir, that I didn't do that that 
 night I didn't set out to do it purposely. In a 
 way it just happened by impulse. 
 
 "It's nights, judge," she went on explaining 
 after a little while more, "that's the worst ; that I
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 157 
 
 go over that trial again, sir. Especially that law- 
 yer talking about me. I can see him so, in the 
 dark hear his voice those questions those 
 names he called me. I expect he made scars all 
 over me ! Not my body ; deeper down. And when 
 I get through hearing him, judge, in the dark, 
 quite often I get up and light the gas to stop it, 
 sir." 
 
 "I understand," I said, studying her. 
 
 "Well, sir," she went on, "all it was, sir, was 
 that that night, after mother went, I got to 
 hearing him especially bad. He was talking again 
 especially bad about me; and I got to crying 
 and all worn out. I cried for an hour or so, and 
 then I got up finally to light the gas." 
 
 "Yes," I prompted her after awhile. 
 
 "And when I turned it on the match, sir, went 
 out through carelessness before I could light 
 it. And then I thought the thought came to 
 me, what if I didn't? What if I didn't light it?" 
 she said, after sitting thinking a minute. "And 
 then I didn't that's all! I didn't light it. I 
 just hurried back and stumbled over a chair and 
 crawled into bed and pulled the sheets over my 
 head like I did when I was a little girl and 
 waited P' 
 
 "And left the window open!" I said, under- 
 standing that part at last.
 
 158 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Wasn't it silly, judge?" she answered. "I 
 didn't think of that or anything, except how mis- 
 erable I was. How I couldn't keep on and go 
 through that again be stripped bare again be- 
 fore everybody for nothing!" 
 
 "You poor child," I said to her. For that's all 
 she was, I could see now naturally a poor des- 
 perate driven child in the body of a woman. 
 
 "I don't mean," she answered me after a minute 
 or so more, "to excuse myself. I can't. But I 
 really didn't set out to do it. I think you ought 
 to know that. And I certainly won't do it over 
 again. I want you to know that too. For I 
 want your good opinion, sir so far as I can have 
 it. For I value it a great heap, sir especially 
 after what you've done for me. And I wanted to 
 acquaint you, before it all comes out some way, 
 sir, with what little excuse I had for doing what 
 I did and just the fix I found myself in. I 
 wanted to show you just what I said at first was 
 true. I'm spoiled just like I told you I was at 
 first for living, for the only thing I was ever 
 made fit for for marrying for looks. I can't 
 marry, it's foolish to think so. Nobody could 
 now but just my mother! 
 
 "But on the other hand, judge," she said, "I've 
 found out another thing. I can't hope to live, 
 really, ever and be happy like other women are.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 159 
 
 I know that. But I can't honourably die, either. 
 I haven't got the right to die my life don't 
 belong to me not with mother and Robert Lee 
 fixed the way they are with the possibility that 
 somehow some strange miracle might happen 
 about me, for them !" 
 
 "Where is he now?" I asked her. 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "Robert Lee your brother?" 
 
 "He's in prison, sir. Penitentiary for just 
 a short term. He'll be out, sir, very soon now 
 and he'll have to be helped all we can to 
 start all over again. He never was a very strong- 
 acting boy. Mother spoiled him !" 
 
 "Let me ask you, Virginia," I said, "what do 
 you expect you can do now?" 
 
 "I'm going on, I expect," she said, with the 
 stolid hopeless look settling back again on her 
 face, "till this thing breaks out again some way. 
 But in the meanwhile I won't think until it 
 happens. I've had enough of thinking I can't 
 any more, judge. I'm just going on till it 
 comes." 
 
 "Your mother," I made the suggestion, "has 
 gone up to St. Louis." 
 
 "Yes, sir. She thinks she can put him off 
 that Gluber some way." 
 
 "I figured that would be it," I said.
 
 160 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Yes, sir. But even if she does, what can we 
 do?" 
 
 "I want to ask you something more, Virginia, 
 if you will permit me," I said, making a guess at 
 what she was thinking. "If you will permit a 
 man old enough to be your grandfather, Virginia. 
 Let me ask you a kind of delicate question." 
 
 "Go ahead, sir," she said, setting her big eyes 
 on me. 
 
 "Your money," I said "how is that going to 
 hold out?" 
 
 "It's getting pretty low, sir)," she told me. 
 
 "Now I've heard what you told me, Virginia," I 
 began to tell her, "with a lot of interest and 
 sympathy, ma'am, and while I don't know now just 
 what I can do, I'm going to help you all I can." 
 
 "You've helped me, sir," she told me. "More'n 
 you should already." 
 
 "No," I said. "Far from it," I told her. 
 "And as I was going to say to you, I don't see 
 just what other way I could be of any great ser- 
 vice to you, in any big way, like I'd like to be. 
 But there's one way I can see. If I can be of any 
 
 pecuniary assistance to you, at any time, " 
 
 I said. 
 
 "Judge, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I gave you 
 
 the impression, sir " she said, starting to 
 
 get up.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 161 
 
 << No, ma'am. No impression about it. I 
 simply thought if I could help !" 
 
 She stood there looking at me under her big 
 straw hat brim. 
 
 "I'm obliged to you, judge," she said. "I 
 certainly am. But there won't be anything you 
 can do. It'll be all out and all over in just a 
 little while now. And then we'll be through!" 
 
 "Maybe, then," I told her, "you might need 
 help of some kind more than ever." 
 
 And then she thanked me and refused again 
 "Nobody can help us, judge," she said. "Not 
 really, sir. Nothing. Nothing but a miracle." 
 
 "Will you do this, anyhow?" I asked her. 
 "Will you let me know, from time to time, how 
 things are going with you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, I will," she said finally. "I'll do that 
 and mighty gladly too. But that wasn't what 
 I came here for, sir not to beg or borrow any 
 help from you, sir. I came here to thank to 
 thank you and to apologize. And to show you 
 just the fix I was in. That I wasn't quite so bad 
 maybe, as I looked to you and might look later, 
 when this thing will all be coming out. That I 
 wasn't as bad as everybody will try to say. 
 
 That neither of us, sir, are really so bad " 
 
 she said, and stopped for the simple reason she 
 couldn't go on.
 
 162 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Virginia, my child," I said, "I want to tell 
 you something. I've lived a long while, my girl, 
 and I've seen a good many folks. And I haven't 
 sat watching men and women all my life without 
 knowing a good woman when I see one. I may 
 look that way. But I'm no such fool as that. I 
 like you. I'm sorry for you. I'm going to help 
 you somehow. And I'm free to say so." 
 
 And after that after she broke down a little 
 bit, the way women do she went away again, 
 with her face still and impassive and growing 
 pale again. I saw her from my window going 
 on down the street with her fine clothes and hat 
 and big bright-figured parasol that weren't paid 
 for. And all the men turning and looking at her 
 as she walked along, not looking at them or any- 
 thing else in particular; thinking, I expect, in 
 spite of herself, of what was coming next of the 
 snare she was in and couldn't get out of. 
 
 Then as I stood there in my window looking I 
 heard down the street back of her a familiar noise 
 the barking of that Child of Hell, that great 
 racing machine of Cole Hawkins. It came up and 
 stopped by the curb beside where the girl was 
 walking on alone stopped the way Cole Hawkins 
 managed it within a fraction of an inch of where 
 he wanted it to be. 
 
 He spoke to her, and after a minute more she
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 163 
 
 got in and they drove off sweeping round, turn- 
 ing back under my window again. She was smiling 
 at him, I could see a real genuine smile, the 
 smile of a young girl. 
 
 The men on the sidewalk stopped and looked 
 after them.
 
 XII 
 
 THE day following that the mother was 
 back from her trip her trip on business 
 to her old home town, as she told our 
 curious friends at the boarding house. 
 
 "You didn't mention St. Louis to any one, did 
 you, judge?" she said to me that afternoon when 
 she was in my office again. 
 
 "Madam," I said, "you can trust me, I expect, 
 that much in business matters, anyhow." 
 
 "I knew that, judge. I assumed that, sir," she 
 told me. "But if you had it would have been 
 utterly my fault, for I neglected to say one word 
 to you about it." 
 
 "How did you come out, ma'am," I asked her, 
 "on your mission?" 
 
 "Judge," she said, her face lighting up like I 
 hadn't seen it for days, not since before the day of 
 victory, anyhow, "you did me another very great 
 favour, sir, in that opinion you gave me. The 
 greatest favour, I believe, I ever had done to me. 
 I went right to him to Gluber and told him just 
 what you said I ought to do to him over that 
 
 contract." 
 
 164
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 165 
 
 I watched her. Her voice was more real and 
 genuine less forced ; her eyes were brighter even 
 the colour on her hat and the rouge on her cheeks 
 looked better. 
 
 "What did he do?" I asked her. "Cancel the 
 whole thing?" 
 
 "Well, no, sir," she said. "Not exactly that! 
 But something just as good. I made a kind of 
 compromise." 
 
 "I don't want to be inquisitive, ma'am," I said, 
 "but what is something just as good if you don't 
 mind about telling me? Did he cut it down the 
 amount of your debt?" 
 
 "Well, no, sir," she said, with a little hitch. 
 But he did something just as good for me. He's 
 arrangtd to wait for me till I get the money 
 handy." 
 
 "Well, ma'am," I held on, "I don't want to be 
 officious, but wouldn't it have been better wouldn't 
 you have made better terms if you'd been repre- 
 sented by a lawyer in that ?" 
 
 "Let me ask you something back, on that same 
 line," she said, looking up with those sharp black 
 eyes of hers, "before I answer that. If you'd 
 been in that case as a lawyer wouldn't you have 
 insisted on his getting out, giving up everything on 
 that claim?" 
 
 "I might very likely."
 
 166 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "That's just it. That's just what I wouldn't 
 take the risk of of getting him so he might go 
 and write those letters again which you could 
 never prove he did. Spoil everything for us!" 
 
 "If you went at him right," I started to say, 
 thinking how women always handled a thing like 
 that "if you went at that kind threatened him 
 with what would happen " 
 
 "Besides," she said, breaking in, "I got what I 
 wanted, anyway. I've got it fixed I've made a 
 new bargain, so I won't have to pay till it's 
 convenient for me, anyway. That's the one thing 
 I had to have, judge." 
 
 Her eyes looked up into mine again a sharp, 
 feverish look, like any other gambler's, I thought 
 to myself. "When it's convenient when will that 
 be?" I wondered to myself, but I didn't ask her 
 that, naturally if she didn't want to tell me by 
 herself. 
 
 "You threatened him with criminal suit?" I 
 asked her. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered. "And got just the 
 bargain that I wanted, thanks to you, sir!" 
 
 "Bargain," I thought to myself. "I wonder 
 what?" But that was for her to state of course 
 not for me to ask. 
 
 "Well, madam," I said, getting up, "I hope 
 I've been of some service, and I'm glad you're
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 167 
 
 satisfied and I'll watch 'how you come out with 
 more than ordinary interest, ma'am." 
 
 If she didn't want to take me into her confidence 
 about her future plans, that was her right, but it 
 seemed to me then it was fairly obvious that she 
 was excited with her old hopes once more her 
 expectations for the girl; on general principles, 
 perhaps, but more likely now in a particular quar- 
 ter. I wondered then if she didn't have her eye 
 on another possibility the possibility that seemed 
 to me so remote then that young devil, Cole Haw- 
 kins. He was not entirely unknown to the 
 world engaged now in dragging that girl round 
 in that car of his, that Child of Hell giving her 
 a good time, for pity's sake, for being sorry for 
 her, like he had said he would. But nothing cer- 
 tainly seemed less likely to me than any hope for 
 the girl in that direction if that was what the 
 woman had now in her feverish imagination. Not 
 with a boy with just his angle on women and the 
 only relation with the only kind of women that 
 that wild harum-scarum kind establishes espe- 
 cially when they are as reckless as he had been 
 since the war. 
 
 But I said nothing. After all, what business 
 was it of mine, especially if the woman, this Mrs. 
 Fairborn, or Mrs. Pitman, or the Scarlet Cockatoo 
 whatever you wanted to call her chose to push
 
 168 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 me out of her affairs, as she had in making her new 
 arrangement, which she had only told me part of 
 the part she wanted me to know? But naturally 
 now I could not help watching this new and not 
 entirely open turn in her speculation as it devel- 
 oped if it could develop. 
 
 The group in Mrs. Tusset's the watching, 
 whispering women and their secret-service agent, 
 Cupid Calvert were, I could see, not inactive in 
 investigating the matter along whatever lines of 
 research they could establish. They were trying 
 St. Louis now, I gathered, from several things I 
 overheard ; but, I judged by what I caught, with 
 poor success. Being on the inside myself, it was 
 more or less amusing to see them groping round 
 upon the matter. 
 
 I was, if the exact truth is required, not without 
 curiosity myself not only as to the outcome but 
 the details of the whole rather extraordinary 
 case. 
 
 It just so happened that I was in Louisville that 
 month, invited up to make a speech there before 
 the state bar association, and I inquired round, 
 and after dinner I found there was a man there 
 an attorney from round Dell County or that end 
 of the state; and I satisfied my curiosity to the 
 point of asking him about the Pitman case and 
 the part that this girl, this White Shoulders, had
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 169 
 
 taken in it. He bore her story out in all particu- 
 lars. 
 
 "That case, sir," he said to me, <c was a crime 
 against civilization. This Singleton this Colo- 
 nel Singleton, he called himself was a bad lot 
 a bad actor, as they speak of them today. He 
 was in politics some and business and he had a 
 lot of relations and friends and political debtors. 
 The old clan spirit was in the thing, sir, naturally. 
 It would be in this case. They were out just 
 as the girl told you to wreck them to get re- 
 venge, any way possible. And they worked it so 
 that they went outside and got a special prosecu- 
 tor to help out the local man. 
 
 "You know, I expect, judge, even better than I 
 do, how it is in these small back counties, where 
 nobody's got much on their mind for amusement 
 especially after the crops are in in court times. 
 A trial like that ain't a trial; it's more like a 
 horse race. All everybody turns out and drives 
 in, and they all take sides one way or the other. 
 It was worse this one more of it in this case 
 than I ever saw, sir. 
 
 "They went outside, sir, the prosecution, like 
 I told you to make sure. And they imported 
 this special man from outside an unprincipled 
 pup. If I'd seen my way to it he'd been disbarred 
 long ago. Vitriolic makes a specialty of vitriol !
 
 170 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 You know the kind. There's nothing he would 
 hesitate to bring up or put a witness through. 
 And the more he says the more it seems to infuriate 
 him against them, until he gets beside himself in 
 the kind of orgy of fury against the witness that 
 our courts too often allow a lawyer like that. An 
 indulgence of a personal taste for cruelty about 
 as brave and noble and as dangerous to the man 
 involved as a drunken poor white beating his 
 wife in a lonely backwoods cabin. But you know 
 the kind of lawyer I mean, judge, without specifi- 
 cations." 
 
 I nodded. I had seen them operating, naturally 
 plenty of them. 
 
 "Well, sir," he said, "the theory of the prose- 
 cution this man's theory of the case was that 
 the whole thing was a cold-blooded murder, arising 
 out of a family conspiracy to force this man to 
 marry the girl. And naturally they bent every- 
 thing possible toward proving that the actions of 
 everybody involved. And to tell the truth there 
 was some superficial corroboration of that theory 
 in the mother's acts. Everybody knew in the 
 district how she'd thrown the girl at him and 
 had laughed at it for months. But when it came to 
 the boy and the girl herself, there was nothing 
 not a scintilla of evidence against her. And that 
 made it worse for her in a way."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 171 
 
 "Worse?" I said. 
 
 "Yes. For the less his theory worked out in 
 the case the more this Fingart, this red-headed 
 vermin of an attorney, went after her. There 
 was nothing conceivable, sir, he didn't put that 
 girl through. It makes my gorge rise now to 
 think of it, and what that damned political judge 
 they had permitted. By God, sir, the girl wasn't 
 but seventeen and like a child. 
 
 "Finally, of course, this man Fingart over- 
 reached himself. The jury not only gave the boy 
 the lightest possible sentence but they went outside 
 their province and said something about the girl 
 disapproving the attacks and insinuations on her 
 till the judge stopped them. 
 
 "But that you know about how much good 
 that did. They'd acquitted her, you could say, 
 but what good was that to her now? After all, 
 men are a little sensitive about what folks 
 are going to say about the woman they are 
 going to marry. And you know what a lawyer can 
 do with a few questions ! There was no more 
 evidence against her than the Angel Gabriel. But 
 for all that, she was made public as the town jail, 
 and a young man round there was about as apt to 
 marry her as the public hangman. 
 
 "The girl," he went on, "was undoubtedly free 
 and clean and the boy, too from anything the
 
 172 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 prosecution claimed from any idea of conspiracy. 
 But the mother, of course, was different in a way. 
 There was no doubt that she hoped the man would 
 marry the girl for her looks." 
 
 "Did you know that the mother?" I asked him. 
 
 "Leonora Fairborn !" he told me. "I should say 
 I did ! I was raised with her. A lightweight 
 a bunch of ribbons. She never grew over sixteen 
 years old." 
 
 "She means well enough, I expect, from what 
 little I've seen of her," I said. 
 
 "Well, yes, she means well. But she never grew 
 up. They don't that kind. I tell you, judge," 
 he went on I could see he was quite a bit of a 
 theorist "I always held that there's not more 
 than one woman in three that's capable of bearing 
 and rearing a child especially a female child 
 and especially the mothers that have been raised 
 up and filled with that balderdash, Sir Walter 
 Scott romance, that's been such a curse and a 
 detriment to the women of our generation and our 
 section in general. After so long, I always claimed 
 the court ought to step in in about every two out 
 of three cases and take the child away from them 
 on the ground that the mother is mentally, morally 
 and sentimentally incompetent to rear them. 
 Like tliis case !" 
 
 "I expect the woman was desperate," I said
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 173 
 
 "the way things turned out with her, if I under- 
 stand, it right, after she married poorly herself." 
 
 "Yes. You can say that for her. She did 
 marry for love, for romance, herself. And from 
 all accounts Bob Pitman wasn't exactly a capital 
 prize in the marriage lottery," he told me. "And 
 after awhile, I believe, it got to be a kind of ob- 
 session with her marrying off that girl right. 
 I'll be mighty interested seeing how she works out 
 this present campaign that you've been telling me 
 about," he said. 
 
 "She's a resourceful and vigourous speculator in 
 matrimony," I told him. 
 
 "Desperate !" 
 
 "That's it," I told him.
 
 XIII 
 
 MRS. FAIRBORN'S speculation, I should 
 have said myself at that time, was never 
 more desperate; in fact it seemed it must 
 almost certainly now be coming to its final collapse. 
 They had, without a question, come in the first 
 place to the end of the financial shoe string on 
 which they were operating. Their money must be 
 about gone. No matter what bargain this Scarlet 
 Cockatoo, so-called, had made with her hounding, 
 blackmailing dressmaker, there must be from their 
 circumstances a distinct time limit to their oper- 
 ations in the local marriage market. 
 
 Not only that, however. Since their setback 
 and defeat on Victory Day their field was very 
 much restricted. The whispering women were still 
 active, and their sibilant suggestions were now more 
 generally accepted among the less suspicious and 
 more susceptible and idealistic men more so, at 
 least, in matters where women are concerned. The 
 reputation hounds, as Cupid Calvert called 
 them all generously sharing his own nickname 
 
 with others were now all hot on the trail. All 
 
 174
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 175 
 
 the local women those in Mrs. Tusset's in partic- 
 ular were busy trying to pick up the back scent 
 of the mysterious suspects especially since the 
 receipt of the anonymous letter with its sugges- 
 tion concerning the Pitman murder. And it could 
 be only a question of time when they would get 
 what they were working for; in fact they would 
 doubtless have already done this, I believe and 
 still believe, if it had not been for the women's 
 change of name and the inaccessibility of Dell 
 County from our section. 
 
 Fairborn Courthouse may have had postal 
 service; I assume it did have. But probably no 
 more ; and it was as yet not even sure froms 
 their viewpoint, I mean that the trial mentioned 
 in the letter was held there. And so, for the 
 moment, the hunt was suspended, while the Fair- 
 born or Pitman women moved as fast as possible 
 on with their own hunting. 
 
 They were fortunate in one respect in both their 
 operations in their selection of their men. If 
 Gordon, with his exclusive nature and high self- 
 esteem, was inaccessible to gossip and scandal 
 the last person in the world to hear it Cole 
 Hawkins was something more. If he learned it 
 he would take sharp satisfaction in denying it 
 and flouting it. It would' spur him on in the 
 opposite direction, defying the squawkers, as he
 
 176 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 profanely called our better local women ; and mak- 
 ing it a questionable and dangerous operation for 
 any man who might bring him information which 
 did not quite please him. 
 
 And he was especially ugly against the social 
 arbiters who took counsel together in the hall at 
 Mrs. Tusset's "that hen yard, cackling and 
 quacking and hissing together" with Cupid Cal- 
 vert, whom he particularly despised. 
 
 So the chief actor now concerned with the two 
 women's future could be counted not only to fly in 
 the face of the best-informed public opinion but, 
 if possible, to run a course directly contrary to it. 
 And this was a factor in the case, I have no doubt, 
 that the women especially that Mrs. Fairborn 
 understood long before I did or before I even 
 realized the temporary hopefulness of her fortune 
 as she now saw it. 
 
 "Do you know what's happening, judge, in that 
 thing?" Belle Davis asked me in the hallway 
 again before dinner. 
 
 "No, ma'am." 
 
 "It's the screamingest thing that ever came to 
 pass on this earth." 
 
 "What is?" 
 
 "They're reforming him !" she told me. "White 
 Shoulders and, the Cockatoo are breaking Cole 
 Hawkins of drinking."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 177 
 
 "Fact, judge!" said Cupid Calvert. "I know 
 it. He's cutting out the rude and riotous all 
 for the sake of White Shoulders 1" 
 
 "You ought not to allow that," I told him. 
 "You ought to discredit them and drive them out 
 of town somehow first !" 
 
 "You'd think, judge," said Julia Blakelock, "to 
 hear you talk, you were defending them." 
 
 "I'll say myself," Belle Davis came in, "if they 
 stop him from what he's been doing the past six 
 months if only from what he's been doing with 
 that machine that Child of Hell of his they'll 
 have done a big kindness to this town." 
 
 "If they keep him off the sidewalks and going 
 home looping the loops round the telephone poles 
 and lamp-posts, we'll have fewer little children to 
 pick out of his front wheels," Cupid contributed. 
 
 "He hasn't killed anybody yet, drunk or sober 
 you've got to admit that," I told him. 
 
 "No," he said; "he's a wizard with that thing. 
 You've certainly got to admit that. But you 
 always hate to see a drunk going staggering home 
 late at night eighty miles an hour. It makes you 
 kind of nervous. It does me." 
 
 "He's a menace to the whole community, judge," 
 said Julia Blakelock, "and you know it !" 
 
 "He certainly would be," I told her, "if half the 
 things they say about him are true."
 
 178 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 For what they said about him those last few 
 months was aplenty since he came back home, 
 with his chagrin and disappointment and I some- 
 times thought his shame for not getting into the 
 war; and his fool boy's hunger to show off what 
 he might have done if he'd been there ! 
 
 "War," old Sam Barsam used to say, "is just 
 nothing but the king of games that's all. It's 
 nothing but a playing against death like most 
 games that a boy of spirits wants to show he can 
 do breaking the worst colt or climbing the cliff 
 or swimming the river. You don't fight the enemy 
 so much in war as you fight death. There's your 
 real enemy to cheat and flout and slip away from, 
 thumbing your nose. You're fighting death the 
 same old boy's game in war. That's what always 
 makes it so popular with boys," he claimed. 
 
 It was that, I assume, that Cole Hawkins set 
 out to do in the stunts they claimed he tried with 
 that great motor car of his especially when he 
 had been drinking setting his brakes and whirl- 
 ing on slippery streets ; skidding round the cor- 
 ners, grazing niggers' wagons with his fenders, 
 scaring them hollering crazy; running up banks 
 and into yards. For he could handle the thing to 
 the fraction of an inch. It was an instrument of 
 precision in his hands. 
 
 If he couldn't loop the loop and show them
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 179 
 
 spinning nose dives in the air, anyhow he could 
 still show what he thought of death on wheels 
 and what he might have done if they'd ever 
 once let him loose on the Germans and incident- 
 ally the skill they might have had at their service if 
 they'd had sense enough to keep him, in spite 
 of his damaged leg, and sent him out in an aero- 
 plane to take Berlin single-handed. 
 
 One of the most amusing things they told about 
 him was about his handling of the so-called road 
 hogs, a thing which to my mind showed a lot 
 about him, in more than one way. He had a 
 special grudge against that kind of cattle always 
 seemed to hear about them and store his mind 
 with them, some way about every fat and in- 
 solent fellow with a heavy car that crowded a 
 poor farmer in his so-called flivver off the road. 
 And when he was a little drunk he would go out 
 looking for them. That was his amusement 
 to wipe off their brand-new shiny mud guards 
 from them with that battered heavy Child of 
 Hell. He was the terror of half the fat under- 
 bred drivers of cars, these so-called road hogs, in 
 the county. It was the talk of the section 
 the neatness and dispatch with which he did his 
 work on them. So much so that there was quite a 
 change in road manners in our vicinity. For 
 these folks not only hated to be banged up by him
 
 180 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 on the road but they hated still worse to come into 
 court and be laughed out again, with what he andi 
 his lawyers always seemed to know about them 
 and could prove up from other people. 
 
 "I've seen him myself," Cupid Calvert claimed, 
 "going home at night when he was drunk as a 
 boiled owl, go up and wipe off a nice new shiny 
 mud guard, as handy as you'd pick up your 
 napkin from the table." 
 
 "But now there's no more of that. He's got 
 company for his night riding," said Julia Blake- 
 lock. 
 
 That was how they were known now the two 
 at Mrs. Tusset's as The Night Riders. For 
 by this time they were out continually evenings 
 tearing round the country in that Child of Hell, 
 roaring down country roads like a scared thunder- 
 storm. 
 
 "Well, anyhow, if she can do that keep him 
 straight at night I'll say this," said Belle Davis 
 "she's done a big thing. And if she reforms 
 him gets him to quit drinking she's done a 
 miracle. If she straightens out Cole Hawkins, I 
 say she's entitled to him." 
 
 "She can have him, and welcome, for all of me," 
 said Julia Blakelock. 
 
 "I always knew it," said Cupid Calvert, with his 
 sunny smile to the Davis girl.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 181 
 
 "Knew what?" 
 
 "That you were of a deeply romantic nature, 
 Belle. That sometime sooner or later you'd let it 
 destroy your poor little sense of humour." 
 
 And Julia Blakelock laughed rather briefly. 
 
 'Two adventuresses," she said, "Belle, reform- 
 ing anybody Cole Hawkins especially! You're 
 funny !" 
 
 "It's more than funny, Belle," said Cupid. 
 "It's humouresque." 
 
 I must confess that at the time it seemed to me 
 myself a somewhat eccentric stroke of fate to put 
 it mildly for these two women, that girl, under 
 the circumstances her past and her present and 
 the few days remaining now to her in the town, in 
 all human probability to have started conscious- 
 ly or unconsciously a movement to reform Cole 
 Hawkins. 
 
 It might be a pose as my friends in Mrs. 
 Tusset's clearly intimated one of a variety of 
 poses which "that kind" would use to snare their 
 prey. The whispering women were better qual- 
 ified to give erpert testimony on that subject than 
 I. But it struck me, if it was true which I did 
 not know of my own knowledge then that it would 
 be a wicked situation to see develop; and a very 
 dangerous one from the standpoint of the two 
 women, working with a character just like Cole
 
 182 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 Hawkins, when he once came to know the truth. 
 
 I did see now that something was developing 
 there. It would have taken a blind man to miss it 
 finally even if the two, Hawkins and that Snowy 
 Shoulders, had not been together in that car all 
 the time merely from watching the facial expres- 
 sions of the principals of the transaction. Cole 
 Hawkins, if not reformed, was becoming at least 
 half broken, as Belle Davis said, to human society, 
 and the vociferous satisfaction of the mother, the 
 Scarlet Cockatoo, "back in her old voice," as Cal- 
 vert said, was scarcely more obvious' than the silent 
 pleasure or anticipation, or relief from grinding 
 apprehension, which showed in the face of White 
 Shoulders at the approach of the booming car on 
 the road and in our driveway. 
 
 I had a clew, I could assume, to the girl's feel- 
 ings in part, from her confidence to me concerning 
 that apparently unlikely but not really remarkable 
 hunger of hers for motion, freedom horses and, 
 I might assume, cars ; that girlish instinct, grown 
 stronger always intensified, it might be expected. 
 through those months of strain, sitting silent, 
 fearful in the centre of hostile watching eyes, 
 waiting for some new shame to overwhelm her. 
 
 In a way, if you analyse the probabilities of the 
 case, there were quite promising foundations for a 
 possible mutual understanding between these two.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 183 
 
 Their tastes were not so different ; they -were both 
 caught in a rather extraordinarily ugly corner, 
 for their time of life ; and with the more vigourous 
 reaction which youth gives to trouble they might 
 fairly bcth be said to be desperate young creatures 
 and so to have at least the mutual sympathy 
 of desperation, which might easily develop into a 
 sympathy of another more ardent kind. 
 
 They talked very little together, it was claimed 
 by those who observed them on their drives they 
 would naturally in that noisy machine. Merely 
 passed on their way by the staring bystanders 
 and everything else that moved upon the road 
 two silent, moody, striking figures, apparently 
 satisfied with the mere knowledge of each other's 
 presence and a general mutual delight in speed. 
 
 So it was not necessary, I concluded, upon final 
 consideration, to assume any further conscious 
 posing or trickery on the part of the girl at least 
 in the way of insincere and hypercritical 
 attempts at reforming our unregenerate young 
 fellow townsman, Cole Hawkins unlikely as that 
 conclusion might seem to the casual observer. 
 
 If you do not hold the theory that "the only 
 heaven we know about lies just in behind our eyes," 
 as the godless, free-thinking old Judge Cato 
 Pendleton used to remark, "in the illusions of the 
 individual human brain," yet you can scarcely
 
 184. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 doubt his claim that "the original angel factory 
 was the brain of the young male between sixteen 
 and, say, twenty-six. Put any nice, clean, sweet- 
 looking girl beside one long enough," he used to go 
 on, "and you have an angel provided she has 
 sufficient presence of mind not to talk with too 
 great freedom." 
 
 That process then that "spontaneous genera- 
 tion of an angel" of Judge Pendleton's was tak- 
 ing place, I believed I could begin to see, now that 
 the matter was being called to my attention 
 in the distinctly unangelic mind of Cole Hawkins. 
 It is that very kind, in fact, I have not infrequent- 
 ly observed, who tend to set up and glorify good 
 women beyond all reason and deserts maybe as a 
 kind of reaction from their own sins. This not 
 uncommon development manifested itself in Cole 
 Hawkins to me in the not unusual form for such 
 folks as he of self-abasement before the new 
 creation. 
 
 I saw the boy perhaps more than any other man 
 in the town did, and more intimately my office, 
 where I spend most of my own leisure, offering 
 maybe a convenient stopping place on the main 
 street for male callers of various kinds, including 
 quite a number of those loneliest of all human 
 creatures, the men of all ages who hang round 
 hotel corridors and cigar stores, because they
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 185 
 
 have no other place to go and lay their head. 
 
 The subject of the angel was approached as 
 usual, not directly, but, as it not unnaturally is, 
 by casual and theoretical discussion of purely 
 hypothetical cases, based upon a consideration of 
 the speaker's own character. 
 
 "When a man has lived as I have the past 
 year or two, in particular, judge," Cole Hawkins 
 asked me "what do you think? Do you think he 
 ever can be fit can he ever straighten himself up 
 so a nice, decent, pure, quiet girl would ever 
 think of marrying him?" 
 
 "It has been done, I expect, son," I said to him 
 smiling the fraction of a well-hidden smile under 
 my mustache. 
 
 "Yes, I know, judge," he told me. "If you 
 cover up everything and hide yourself as you 
 can, naturally, with a fine, pure, inexperienced' 
 girl. But that's one thing I hate above all things 
 on earth and I never stooped to yet: Lying; 
 showing out that I'm different than I really am." 
 
 "I'd go your bond on that, Cole," I said, "where 
 maybe I wouldn't on some other things like 
 assault and battery and mayhem and general 
 breach of the peace." 
 
 "I don't know, judge," he went on, shaking his 
 head, considering his sins. "I've been running 
 pretty mighty wild. especially here lately. I've
 
 186 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 been through hell the past twelve months, and take 
 my word for it, judge, I've been scraping bottom. 
 If there wasn't anything I could think of to do, 
 I'd hire a man to sit up nights and discover it for 
 me." 
 
 And about that time he would change the 
 subject. He was shy, like that species is apt to 
 be. 
 
 He couldn't help, though, speaking of the girl, 
 praising her, defending her against the attacks 
 he had heard at first about her a few attacks on 
 any good-looking girl, if they are not too bad, 
 being one of the most stimulating of all help in the 
 process of angel making. 
 
 "They make me laugh, those hens in council," he 
 told me, "those whispering women, as you call 
 them, judge, with their talk about those dress- 
 maker's bills. I expect if every woman that owes 
 dressmakers more than they could pay was put in 
 jail herself, the houses in this town would be kept 
 empty one time or another." 
 
 "There'd be quite an exodus, maybe," I agreed 
 with him. 
 
 "And for that matter," he went along, "you 
 know and I know it's the mother in that combi- 
 nation that's responsible for all that for the 
 dress part. That's clear on the face of it. That
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 187 
 
 girl don't care that for dressing ! She shows it by 
 her actions. She'd rather keep quiet and out of 
 sight any day than show herself round." 
 
 "I expect that's right," I told him. 
 
 "No, sir," he said, going on a little further. 
 "Let roe tell you something. I'm nobody's fool. 
 I know a good girl when I see one." 
 
 I looked at him. 
 
 "I ought to," he said. "I've seen enough of the 
 other kind the past few years." 
 
 He stopped, looking off with those moody black 
 eyes of his, trying to stop talking to me about her 
 and not able to yet. 
 
 "She's been through some big trouble she 
 won't tell just how much; that ain't her style to 
 holler, judge. But she's got more courage and 
 sand in her little finger than I have in my whole 
 body. She's made me quit drinking already, 
 judge. Maybe before she gets through she'll 
 make a man out of me !" 
 
 And then he sat awhile longer. "Oh, I know," 
 he went on then, "what I've been and am don't 
 fret and what she is. She's too good for me, 
 that's all." 
 
 "If it's my cue if you're calling on me for a 
 speech," I said when he stopped off and, stared at 
 the floor, "I'll say now that you might go some
 
 188 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 distance farther and fare considerably worse right 
 now than to get this girl you are now talking 
 about." 
 
 And that naturally didn't displease him. 
 
 "You're right there, judge," he told me warmly. 
 "And let me tell you something else if I ever hear 
 any loose talk round me, like there started there 
 for a minute after that day, that Pageant of the 
 Roses," he said, setting those black reckless eyes of 
 his on mine, "there'll be some trouble starting just 
 right after that in this town." 
 
 And following this remark he took up his hat 
 and clapped it on that black mop of hair of his and 
 went out thinking he'd shown his personal 
 feelings enough, probably, for that one session. 
 
 "A wounded angel," as old Judge Pendleton said 
 in that private lecture of his on the Illusions of 
 Courtship, "is about the most appealing object we 
 have to any right-minded young man." 
 
 I could begin to see then that we had a pretty 
 pronounced case of this in our midst ; and it began 
 to be a serious question already, in my mind, just 
 where this matter was going to lead us. 
 
 The whispering women, the whole pack of repu- 
 tation hounds, were certainly not, could not be far 
 distant, with Calvert's own able aid, from the trail 
 of the two women back through St. Louis to Dell 
 County. They were trying now, through Calvert,
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 189 
 
 I was quite sure, to get in touch with the infor- 
 mation that could be had through A. Gluber, 
 Costumer. And when they once achieved their 
 object and began spreading the glad news, compli- 
 cations might easily be at hand, I could now see 
 knowing Cole Hawkins generally and his present 
 state of mind, as I did which might be highly un- 
 pleasant, if not serious, to more parties than one.
 
 XIV 
 
 I WAS not prepared, though to be right) 
 frank and open with you for that next 
 turn that the affair took. 
 
 The woman, in fact, this Mrs. Fairborn, had 
 seemed in the past week or so to be taking on a 
 new lease of life. She had said nothing definite to 
 me on what was really in her mind, but her looks 
 had more than once told me, in practically so 
 many words : "It's coming out all right, sir." 
 
 It was consequently with considerable amaze- 
 ment that I beheld her walking into my office one 
 morning in the extraordinary state especially 
 for her of almost inarticulate excitement. 
 
 "Judge, sir," she said to me finally, "do you 
 know what's happened, what's occurred now, sir ?" 
 
 And before I could ask her what had, she had 
 started walking back and forth, back and forth, in 
 the limited confines of my office. 
 
 "What has, ma'am?" I managed to ask her 
 finally. 
 
 "That wicked, ungrateful child !" she said ; and 
 started walking on again, tearing a small lace 
 
 handkerchief into strips while she did so. 
 190
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 191 
 
 "Sit down, madam," I said to her. "Calm 
 yourself." 
 
 But she was beyond taking advice or even 
 hearing it. She marched up and down the room, 
 a distracted mass of ribbons ; her eyes were set, 
 her hair starting loose, her hat starting tilting a 
 little over her red and white face. 
 
 "After all these years that I've devoted myself 
 my whole life. I've lavished everything I've 
 had everything that heart could desire on her, 
 and now, in the end in my need " 
 
 "Madam," I said, going toward her, for I saw 
 now I was dealing with a person beside herself 
 "madam, take a hold on yourself." 
 
 "Do you know what that girl's done?" 
 
 "Who?" I asked her. 
 
 "Virginia." 
 
 "No. What?" 
 
 "She's refused refused the proposal of that 
 Mr. Hawkins. He's proposed, and she's refused 
 him! Not only that. She won't even see him. 
 Can't be got to see him again!" she said, and 
 started on her march once more. 
 
 The moisture even came out through the powder 
 on her vividly contrasted complexion ; I expect 
 she began crying some. There were stains of red 
 on her torn handkerchief where she dabbed at her 
 eyes.
 
 192 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Oh, I never thought dreamed it would come 
 to this ! That a child would turn, like this, on the 
 mother that bore her on her own mother on her 
 own happiness. I never dreamed that such things 
 could be!" 
 
 She stopped short, opposite me. "Judge, sir," 
 she said in a shrill appeal, "you've got to help me, 
 sir. I'm come to a desperate pass, sir. I'm in 
 desperate circumstances." 
 
 I'm willing," I told her, "madam, to do all that 
 I can. But I've got to know the circumstances 
 first, ma'am. And I can't advise you to advan- 
 tage, with you a-running and racing up and down 
 my office. Sit down, ma'am. Sit down," I said. 
 
 And finally I prevailed upon her to do so. 
 
 "Now then, ma'am," I told her, "let's begin 
 right. What are the circumstances?" 
 
 "You know what our circumstances are, judge. 
 Or I suppose you do. If not, I'll tell you now, 
 sir," she said. "I've got just seventy-five dollars 
 left in the world. That's my circumstances, sir!" 
 
 I waited, now she was launched. 
 
 "My boy, sir," she said, going on, "at present 
 is languishing in jail, sir, for circumstances which 
 are connected with my daughter, with the defence 
 and protection of this obstinate, ungrateful girl 
 against calumny."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 193 
 
 I waited again. 
 
 "Her family," she said, "is ruined. The Fair- 
 boms are gone forever sunk out of sight beneath 
 the waves of adversity and sorrow, sir, like many 
 another of our first families of the South before 
 the war all because of this mad, crazy, ungrate- 
 ful girl of mine. For she is crazy, sir, I believe. 
 I firmly believe it, sir !" she said staring at me 
 "If anybody had told me, sir, that this was possible 
 a year ago, I would have said he was mad." 
 
 "Just what " I started asking her. But she 
 
 hurried, again along her own line of thought. 
 
 "And this," she said in a wail, "is being a 
 mother! Judge," she said, appealing to me, "I 
 only want justice. I only want what's' reasonable* 
 But this is wrong absolutely wrong. I took 
 that child, sir. I was her mother. I lavished 
 everything on her my affection, my mind, my 
 soul ! I gave her everything that a young girl's 
 heart desires. Dresses, parties, lovely times. 
 She was the most beautiful child,, naturally ! And 
 no pains in the world were spared by us by me 
 to make her perfect, sir all a refined, high- 
 spirited Southern lady should be. All the little 
 refinements and delicacies that come to a Southern 
 girl, delicately reared in a refined atmosphere of a 
 Southern home. And now "
 
 194 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "And now?" I prompted, watching her as she 
 dabbed her face again with her reddened handjter- 
 chief. 
 
 "And now she is crazy ! She is going to ruin 
 us all. In the desperate circumstances that now 
 face us." 
 
 "You want me to help you, ma'am," I said, 
 checking her finally. "So you say." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Well then, if I'm going to," I said, "I'll have 
 to ask you, a little more in detail, just what your 
 circumstances are, I expect. You say all you 
 have left now is seventy-five dollars ?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. Exactly, sir." 
 
 "In the world?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "You have no property anywhere?" 
 
 "No, sir. Not a dollar. It was all disposed of 
 at the time of the trial and since the last of it. 
 And more than that, sir, every other morsel of 
 property every jewel or personal ornament I 
 possessed all the Fairborn heirlooms have all 
 gone now. You understand!, sir everything!" 
 
 I understood. 
 
 "Everything in the world, sir, to help to do 
 what I thought a mother should do to help this 
 ungrateful crazy daughter to be happy through- 
 out her life."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 195 
 
 "To help marry her, I understand you to mean." 
 
 "Yes, sir. To give her her chance to make a 
 good and honorable marriage to marry some 
 lovely high-bred man, worthy of her of her fam- 
 ily in mind and manners and means. To give 
 her the circumstances she should have, and her 
 mother never did!" 
 
 "And to do that," I kept on, "You mortgaged, 
 as I understand, you, your whole life your whole 
 future !" 
 
 "Exactly, judge. You've told it exactly right, 
 sir." 
 
 "And more than that, I expect," I said, draw- 
 ing her along, "you've got this debt this obli- 
 gation still to that dressmaker in St. Louis that 
 man Gluber for her dresses." 
 
 "Yes, judge. Yes." 
 
 "Just what was the bargain that last one you 
 made with him?" I asked her. "When you went 
 up that last time to St. Louis? You signed an- 
 other note, I assume," I said, when she waited, 
 "or something of the kind, to take the place of 
 your previous obligation to him." 
 
 "Yes, sir, that was it." 
 
 "For a larger sum, maybe," I said, guessing 
 now to that extent. 
 
 "Well, yes, sir. A little larger." 
 
 "In what form?" I asked her.
 
 196 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "It was in the form of a demand note," she 
 told me, with an obviously growing reluctance. 
 "But with an understanding about it between us." 
 
 "What understanding?" 
 
 "Well, in the first place, I demonstrated to him, 
 judge," she said "I told him what you said I 
 might concerning the illegality of his claim 
 what could be done to him for his actions. And 
 then I showed him that anyhow we had nothing 
 no money we could pay him nothing beyond the 
 dresses he had sold us." 
 
 "And so you let him make out a new note is 
 that it?" I asked her. 
 
 "Yes, sir for a compromise." 
 
 "Probably fixed over now so it will hold le- 
 gaily." 
 
 "I don't know about that, sir, but we have an 
 understanding between us." 
 
 "In writing?" I asked. 
 
 "No; Verbal, sir. Verbal. But he's fixed so 
 he will carry out our understanding he'll be com- 
 pelled to by circumstances. Because he can't do 
 anything else. He cant get anything else from 
 us. We haven't got it!" 
 
 "Just what was it your understanding with 
 this man?" I asked her. 
 
 "Well, I told, him what the chances were now. 
 How probable it was, if he didn't interfere with
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 197 
 
 us, that Virginia, sir, would get married. Would 
 be pretty sure to do so if we were given the 
 chance." 
 
 "To whom?" 
 
 "Well 4o that Mr. Hawkins, probably." 
 
 "And so he took the chance with you," I said, 
 "that you'd get the girl married to Hawkins or 
 somebody." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "In which case he would get a larger sum a 
 larger stake," I said, seeing the thing. "Where- 
 as in the case of failure he would still have all he 
 would have had before the right to take back the 
 dresses." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "With a new form of note that will be better, 
 we can assume, from his standpoint." 
 
 "No doubt, sir," she said, watching me. 
 
 "It was a good compromise," I said, "I expect, 
 from his standpoint!" 
 
 And she didn't say anything. 
 
 I sat myself then, thinking of the end the 
 narrowing end of the blind alley that these two 
 had about reached now the finish of the strange 
 operations of that female speculator. 
 
 "You have seventy-five dollars," I said to her 
 finally. "Enough to pay your board at Mrs. 
 Tusset's two weeks longer, maybe. Then what?"
 
 198 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "I don't know, sir. Unless the sidewalk." 
 
 "Haven't you a soul not a relation?'* 
 
 "Not a near relation, sir." 
 
 "And even the dresses of the girl go back to 
 Gluber, as soon as he hears about it," I said. 
 
 And she nodded, weeping now, with self-pity, 
 into her torn and reddened handkerchief. 
 
 "Well, madam," I said at length, "I could help 
 you somewhat, I expect, financially. You could 
 command me there to some extent." 
 
 And at that she did what I expected she might 
 do: She jumped up and fought me. 
 
 "No, sir !" she cried out. "No, sir ! We are no 
 objects of charity, sir. We're Fairborns!" 
 
 "What is it then?" I asked her. "What is it 
 you believe that I should do?" 
 
 "Just one thing that's all, sir. There's just 
 one thing to be done!" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "I want you to consent to see my girl, sir. I 
 want you to say that you'll tell her what she's 
 got to do for herself, for everybody. To give 
 up her crazy course, sir, and act sensible. She 
 respects you, judge. She respects your opinion 
 tremendously and values your friendiship, sir, and 
 she's promised me she would be willing to see and 
 talk with you, sir, if you will consent to see her 
 and advise with her, sir."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 199 
 
 "In the first place, madam," I said, "before we 
 go any further, I want to ask you a question: 
 Does this young man this Hawkins know all 
 your circumstances just what you and your 
 daughter have have encountered in the past few 
 years ?" 
 
 "Do you mean to say, sir," she wanted to know 
 "do you mean to insinuate that you think an 
 alliance with my Virginia with a Fairborn 
 would be beneath this young man or anybody 
 in this country, sir?" 
 
 "Madam," I said, "I wasn't opening up just 
 that question. I was just bringing before you 
 another question of fact and of policy which 
 sooner or later you and your daughter would have 
 to look in the face: That sooner or later this 
 man, if he married your daughter, would have to 
 know the circumstances of your daughter that 
 whole matter of the Pitman trial." 
 
 She gave a start when I said this. 
 
 "What do you know about that?" she inquired, 
 looking up quickly. 
 
 "Only what you and later your daughter 
 informed me; and what one subsequent informant 
 has told me." 
 
 "There was nothing against Virginia abso- 
 lutely. Even the jury " she started. 
 
 "I understand that," I told her. "All that I
 
 200 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 was directing your attention to at this time was 
 that very soon now the details are pretty mighty 
 sure to be known here. I have said nothing what- 
 ever myself, naturally, of what I know to a 
 living soul but I have reason to believe that oth- 
 ers # 
 
 "That Calvert 1" she said, going straight to the 
 mark. 
 
 " are making inquiries in St. Louis and 
 
 very likely in Dell County that in a very short 
 time now will doubtless produce results ; and then 
 naturally, this young man Hawkins would know." 
 
 "What difference would it make with that 
 harum-scarum boy ?" 
 
 "It might make a heap of difference, ma'am," 
 I said. "You can't tell. Especially if he knew 
 that you-all had been keeping the thing from him." 
 
 "He'd marry her tomorrow," she said. 
 
 "He might," I admitted. 
 
 "That's what he wanted her to do begged her 
 to. To run off with him in that car of his and get 
 married on the spot and she wouldn't do it. 
 And now she won't even see him. She's afraid to, 
 he's so crazy over her. He might drag her away 
 with him anyway." 
 
 "Now then, there's a second thing," I told her. 
 "The real main reason I can't interfere, or any one 
 else or have any right to. I certainly myself
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 201 
 
 can't be a party, madam, to a bargain to sell a girl 
 for you or Mr. Gluber or for the sake of any 
 circumstances no matter how desperate they are ; 
 to force your daughter to marry a man she doesn't 
 like!" 
 
 "But that's it !" she said, starting up like a wild 
 woman. "That's what's so crazy about the whole 
 thing." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "What she says. What she's doing. The 
 reason she gives for not marrying him !" 
 
 "What reason?" 
 
 "Because she loves him !" 
 
 "Won't marry him," I said, "because she loves 
 him?" 
 
 "She's mad,, that's all," said her mother. 
 "She's raving crazy. I think sometimes I am or 
 will be pretty quick !" she cried out, starting tear- 
 ing at the reddened shreds of her handkerchief. 
 
 I quieted her down finally ; and finally told her I 
 would see the girl if she wanted to call. 
 
 I sat there, after she had restored her complex- 
 ion and straightened her hat and gone, reflecting 
 deeply on where her tortuous path was taking her 
 and her extraordinary statement concerning the 
 attitude of the girl her alleged refusal to marry 
 the man she loved because she loved him !
 
 XV 
 
 THE girl was in to see me about half-past 
 three or four o'clock that very evening 
 dressed up again in one of the gayest of her 
 mortgaged gowns. 
 
 "Did you want to see me, judge?" she asked, me. 
 
 Her face was changed her whole appearance. 
 She had, it looked to me, more go, more deter- 
 mination to her than I had ever seen in her before. 
 
 "I always want to see you, Virginia," I told her. 
 "You're quite a pleasant thing to look at. I don't 
 get many ornaments like you in this old dust heap 
 of an office." 
 
 "Judge," she told me, right away, apologizing 
 with her voice, "I didn't mean to be impertinent, 
 sir, but mother did say you'd like to see me if I'd 
 come in." 
 
 "I would, yes, Virginia if you'd like to see 
 me." 
 
 "I always want to do that, judge," she told me. 
 
 "Sit down, daughter," I told her. "Let's have 
 an old-time chat. It won't do either one of us any 
 harm, I expect." 
 
 She sat down opposite me, in that light-coloured 
 
 gown with big flowers on it. She had more colour 
 202
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 203 
 
 in her face than I ever saw her have partly may- 
 be from the rose colour that the under part of the 
 brim of her great hat had on it. 
 
 "I thought maybe I could help you a little," I 
 said; "but I might be mistaken. If I could, I'd 
 like to." 
 
 "I know that, judge," she said. "And I appre- 
 ciate it, and I want you to know I do too. Go 
 ahead," she said "whatever you want. If you 
 want to say anything, or ask anything, go ahead, 
 sir." 
 
 "I'd like to ask you one or two things," I told 
 her, "if they're not of too personal a nature." 
 
 "Go ahead, judge just as far as you want to," 
 she said, settling herself down and looking at me 
 in the face. 
 
 She looked different to me; her whole way of 
 acting was different from that cold, impassive 
 White Shoulders I used to watch sitting round at 
 Mrs. Tusset's. It was a change for the better, 
 that was certain. 
 
 "I'm starting off taking you at your word," I 
 said. 
 
 "Go ahead." 
 
 "Your mother told me," I said then, "that you'd 
 just had a proposal of marriage from a young 
 friend of mine." 
 
 "Yes, sir," she said.
 
 204 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 The colour in her face now wasn't all a reflection 
 from that rose-coloured lining in her hat. But she 
 kept her eyes right up to mine. 
 
 "And you refused him." 
 
 "Yes, sir," she said, keeping her voice and eyes 
 steady. 
 
 "I'm sorry for that," I told her, looking up at 
 her suddenly. "I expect it's because you couldn't 
 bring yourself to fall in love with him?" 
 
 Her eyes dropped down at this and her face got 
 redder than ever. 
 
 "No, sir," she answered me in a low, distinct 
 voice. "That wasn't it." 
 
 "What your mother said can't be true, can it?" 
 I went on after a minute. "It can't be that you 
 love him like she said you did." 
 
 "Judge," she said in a slow, serious voice, look- 
 ing up again, "if you want the truth I dp." 
 
 "And you won't marry him like she said." 
 
 "No, sir." 
 
 "For that reason she gave. Because you do 
 love him or so she says. Is that correct?" 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered. "That's correct, 
 judge." 
 
 "You love him," I said over again, "and you 
 won't marry him for that reason! Is that it?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Why not, ma'am?" I asked her "How do
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 205 
 
 you reconcile those statements; or are you just 
 plain crazy?" 
 
 "No, sir," she said very quietly. "I'm not 
 crazy. I can't that's all. You wouldn't. No 
 one could. Why, judge, don't you see?" 
 
 "See what, ma'am?" I asked her. 
 
 "Suppose, judge," she said, "you yourself had 
 the best friend in the world we'll just say! 
 Would you ever think in the world, judge, of swin- 
 dling, of cheating him?" 
 
 "Cheating him?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. Cheating him with the biggest fraud 
 in the whole wide world, sir." 
 
 "What fraud's that? What are you driving 
 at?" I asked her. 
 
 "Is there any bigger fraud or harm that any- 
 body could put on anybody else than a swindle and 
 fraud in his wife? Is there anything possible 
 where you could harm anybody so much as that?" 
 
 I sat stock-still, looking at her. 
 
 "Judge," she said, "I'm a swindle from top to 
 toe, sir. My name, the very clothes on my back 
 everything about me. I'm just a swindle, sir, all 
 over. But I'm not that much of a swindle, sir. 
 I won't swindle the person I love. I'm not sunk 
 that low, sir." 
 
 "Look here, Virginia," I started out, "that ain't 
 the reasonable common-sense way to look "
 
 206 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Why not?" she broke in on me. She talked 
 now like a different girl sharp and quick and 
 alive. That was it like a girl brought to life. 
 "Why not?" she had to know from me. "The 
 fact is you are the one that wants to turn round 
 and be practical." 
 
 "How so?" I asked her. 
 
 "Isn't it certain sure almost is there any doubt 
 in the world that it's all coming out now in a 
 week or two about us what- we've been? Our 
 money's gone, for one thing; and for another, I 
 know I'm just as certain as I'm sitting here 
 that all those folks at the boarding house that 
 are peeking round and trying to hunt out some- 
 thing against us and have been now ever since 
 that Victory Day are just getting where they're 
 going to find out. In not longer than a week or 
 two. No, sir. In not longer than that it's got 
 to be public property about us." 
 
 "Well, suppose it is?" I said. 
 
 "Supposing it is?" she said back. "What kind 
 of a wife would I make for any man? What kind 
 of a feeling would he have for me then when he 
 knew? Especially Cole Hawkins!" 
 
 "I'm not so sure about that," I told her. "Not 
 about Cole Hawkins." 
 
 "I am," she replied. And you are. And 
 you know it. There's nothing that would set any-
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 207 
 
 body in the world back with him so much as one 
 thing thinking that they had fooled, swindled 
 or lied to him. You know that just as well as I 
 do." 
 
 "Look here," I said, going on combating her 
 trying to. "Do you think that Cole Hawkins is 
 in any kind of position to criticize? "Do you 
 think Cole Hawkins has been better than you 
 have?*' 
 
 "No, sir," she told me. "I think he's been a 
 thousand times worse in a lot of ways. He's told 
 me practically all about himself. But he's never 
 been tricky or deceiving, sir. That isn't him." 
 
 "Well, then," I argued, "if that's the way you 
 feel, why don't you do this: Why don't you just 
 do as he did, apparently come right out 
 straight and tell him your story? You told it 
 all to me," I said, "didn't you?" 
 
 She nodded, looking at me. 
 
 "It didn't strike me as such a horrible revelation 
 of sin," I said, smiling at her. "And I'm willing 
 to guarantee it won't him, either." 
 
 "What do you mean?" she asked me. 
 
 "I mean for you to go to him like he did to 
 you, evidently." 
 
 "Go to him?" she said. "And tell him I wanted 
 to explain to him myself? Judge," she said, 
 "it's easy to see you're not a woman by just the
 
 208 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 way you look at things. No woman no girl 
 could go to a man and explain about herself so's a 
 man would take her. And, besides, judge," she 
 said, sitting up straighter, "I wouldn't marry 
 him anyhow putting that all one side." 
 
 "Why not?" I said to her, smiling again try- 
 ing to. "Is this because you love him too? Be- 
 cause you don't feel you are good enough for that 
 wild boy Cole HawkinS?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, it is. That's just what it is." 
 
 "What have you done compared to him," I asked 
 her "ever?" 
 
 "I'll tell you what. I'll tell you why. You can 
 say what you want to, sir, a man's different from 
 a woman. More is expected of her. And I don't 
 think it's bad to say so. It's a compliment in a 
 kind of way to the woman." 
 
 She sat still then for a few minutes ; and I with 
 her. 
 
 "I've thought a lot about that, judge, natur- 
 ally," she said, "since that trial ; and I know I'm 
 right. A real wife is just one thing she's pure 
 white or she's nothing. She can't be a little dam- 
 aged or a little soiled. She's got to be white 
 clear through all over or she's just nothing at 
 all. And it don't make any difference either if 
 she isn't white about just how the spots got 
 there. They're there just the same. You never
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 209 
 
 get them out. Only a miracle could," she said, 
 talking slower and opening and clenching her 
 hands, and then stopping talking entirely for a 
 minute. 
 
 "No, sir. No, sir," she said, starting up from 
 her silence again after a little bit. "If I could 
 cleanse myself, if I could only make myself dean 
 from all I've been through." 
 
 "For no fault of yours absolutely," I said. 
 
 "That makes no difference, judge. It's there. 
 It's there. And it will never quite come off. 
 Only a miracle could do that, sir. And miracles 
 don't happen any longer. And I certainly am not 
 going to bring that kind of a wife to Cole Hawkins. 
 Let alone go and tell him about it. Explain my- 
 self. Go through that torture, judge for 
 nothing !" 
 
 " You're just plain crazy, that's all," I told her. 
 "You're just a crazy young fool. Two of you," I 
 said. "I've lived some years and I've seen some 
 crazy boys and girls and men and women in love ; 
 but I never saw anything crazier or more ridic- 
 ulous than you two. 
 
 "First him," I said, when she didn't answer, 
 "coming in here, mooning round, talking to me, 
 scared to death, because he knows he isn't fit for 
 you!" 
 
 "Did he tell you that, judge?" she said in a 
 quick, eager voice.
 
 210 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," I told her, "a hundred times. 
 In more ways than speech. And now you come 
 here trying to tell me the same thing. You talk 
 about the illusions and delusions and catalepsies 
 of youth !" I told her, arguing my case. "Here's 
 the height of it. You can imagine how it looks to 
 a person of my age, who's witnessing it. Two 
 crazy young fools with happiness just at their 
 finger tips for the grasping and backing 
 and refusing and shying away. Because," I said, 
 "they love each other too much to marry!" 
 
 "I can't that's all," she said, after a minute 
 or so, in a low voice. "It's no use talking now. 
 That's all settled, sir." 
 
 "Tel! me," I asked, thinking, "just what did you 
 do that night at that proposal he made to you 
 or was it night?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. It was night. We were out driving 
 together." 
 
 "As usual. And he asked you to marry him?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Right away, I expect. That would be about 
 like him. He'd want to tear away right off with 
 you to the end of the world." 
 
 "He would have run away, right there, I sup- 
 pose," she said, "and married me if I'd let him." 
 
 "He's just a little bit impatient by nature," I 
 told her, "in some ways !"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 211 
 
 "Yes, sir, he is," she said, and smiled a little 
 small fraction of a smile. 
 
 "And you refused him?" 
 
 "I did yes." 
 
 "How hard? How definitely? How final was 
 this thing?" I asked her. "That's what I'm aim- 
 ing at." 
 
 "It was pretty mighty final, judge," she said. 
 "I told him I never could marry him under any 
 circumstances. I was sorry. I liked him a heap. 
 But I couldn't marry him ever. And " 
 
 "Arid what then?" I asked, prompting her. 
 
 "And when he insisted on knowing why, and 
 all that I told him I expected we'd better not ride 
 together any more. I thought it would be better 
 all round if we stopped seeing each other at all." 
 
 "Seeing each other at all !" I repeated. 
 
 Her face got white again now white as it had 
 always been before and then red, with a great 
 flush and rush of red. 
 
 "Oh, judge," she said in a sudden louder voice, 
 "can't you see? The only thing I want now in 
 the whole world, sir? Can't you help me to get 
 it in some way?" 
 
 "What?" I asked, staring at her that look in 
 her face. 
 
 "To get away, sir. To leave town right away. 
 Now!"
 
 212 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Where would you go?" I asked her. "What 
 would you do?" 
 
 "I don't know, sir," she said. "That's what I 
 thought maybe you might tell me. Isn't there 
 some place, sir," she said, "some work somewhere 
 that I could get out and do? Isn't there, sir? 
 I'd be not much good, sir, at first. I never was, 
 sir. I was bred and reared for something else 
 for show. But I'd work I'd work my fingers to 
 the bone, sir. I'd learn. I can promise you, sir." 
 
 "Why, yes," I told her. "I expect somewhere 
 I would know somebody." 
 
 "Could you get me, do you think, to some great 
 big 1 city, sir, like New York or Chicago?" 
 
 "Why," I asked her, "such a large order to 
 start with?" 
 
 "Only this," she said : "There wouldn't be any- 
 body who would know me there. I could start 
 over as something new." 
 
 "You want to go and bury yourself, deep in 
 several million folks, so you'll never be seen?" 
 
 "By anybody that ever knew me." 
 
 "Well, it might be done, I expect," I said, think- 
 ing without any great enthusiasm about her alone 
 in a city. "But there are a number of things to 
 be considered first. What about your mother?" 
 
 Her hands dropped back into her lap. 
 
 "She might go and live with Robert Lee some-
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 213 
 
 where when he comes out," he suggested. 
 
 She sprang up suddenly then, her eyes dilated. 
 
 "But anyhow no matter what," she cried 
 "I can't stay here any longer. I won't! She 
 can't expect me to do that again. I'll do any- 
 thing anything! But I won't stay here any 
 longer not a minute !" she said, her big eyes open- 
 ing st.ill more. 
 
 "Why," I asked her, "must you go this minute? 
 Is there any reason that you know that's hew?" 
 
 "It's all coming out now any time!" she said. 
 
 "It hasn't yet," I told her. 
 
 "Oh, judge!" she said, "can't you see? Can't 
 you see yet? I can't stay here. I can't stay here 
 and go through all thait degradation and 
 shame, sir, now ! Before him !" 
 
 She broke down then sat down again, with her 
 big fancy hat down on my old desk, against some 
 sheepskin statute books. 
 
 "Don't take on so, Virginia," I said, patting 
 her on her arm. "Don't, daughter, it ain't nec- 
 essary. And it won't do you one particle of good. 
 You let me think it over till tomorrow or the 
 next day. You come here, say, the day after to- 
 morrow about four o'clock in the evening, and 
 we'll see." 
 
 "You see, don't you, judge?" she told me, sit- 
 ting up finally. "That's one thing. I can't be
 
 2H WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 here and face him ever see him again after he 
 learns about everything! How I've deceived 
 him all about my following him, deceiving him. 
 I've got to be spared that, anyhow. That would 
 be worse than death, a heap." 
 
 "Virginia," I said, when she straightened her- 
 self up and got herself together again, "I want 
 to tell you something, daughter. You're starting 
 out right, girl. You've got the real material 
 right there in you. You're making too much of 
 this," I said. "If you were ten times worse than 
 you are if you were as bad as you think you are 
 even you'd be a splendid fine woman. And now, 
 if you only have half a chance, you'll be one of the 
 finest I ever knew. And I'm going to see you have 
 a chance some day. And meanwhile I'm going to 
 say now to you I'm proud of you and Fm glad to 
 know you and be counted among your friends, and 
 I*m going to ask you to shake hands on that." 
 
 She flushed up. That pleased her, I could see 
 that. 
 
 "I expect, considering everything, judge," she 
 told me, "you're entitled to more'n that, sir." 
 
 And she came right over to me, and I took ad- 
 vantage of my privilege to my great satisfaction. 
 
 "Come round the day after tomorrow evening, 
 I told her. I'm kind of busy tomorrow, but by ; 
 that time I'll try and work out some way to help 
 you. Don't you fret. We'll fix it somehow."
 
 XVI 
 
 WE did not either of us suspect, natu- 
 rally, at that time, just how much that 
 next two days was destined to bring 
 forth. Though now, after the event, of course, I 
 look back upon the history of that next forty- 
 eight hours, as Sam Barsam would say, as perhaps 
 the most perfervid period in my autobiography. 
 
 The excitement began that evening, when I was 
 down in my office after dinner and along about 
 eight o'clock Cole Hawkins came drifting in. I 
 could see right off he had been drinking again. 
 
 "H'lo, judge," he said, flinging himself down 
 into a chair. 
 
 "Hello, Cole," I told him. 
 
 Then he sat there a minute or so without speak- 
 ing, looking at me with those bold black eyes, 
 under his heavy black eyebrows. 
 
 "You know that girl," he asked me finally, "up 
 at your boarding house that I've been going round 
 with some lately Miss Fairborn?" 
 
 "Yes, sir," I said, watching him, "I expect I 
 
 do." 
 
 215
 
 216 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 ''She's turned me down." 
 
 "I'm sorry to hear that," I said. 
 
 "So'm I," he answered, talking brief, the way 
 he did when he was getting drunk and ugly. 
 
 "I thought maybe she'd take you and make a 
 man out of you, Cole," I told him. 
 
 "To hell with me !" he said. "I'm nothing ; and 
 never have been. And she did just right to push 
 me back. I ain't fit for her to walk on and never 
 was. But there's one thing I wanted to ask you 
 about." 
 
 "Fire ahead," I told him. 
 
 "Did you ever hear lately that she and her 
 mother were going to leave town right off?" 
 
 "I just saw her mother yesterday," I told him, 
 lying as little as I could, "and she didn't say any- 
 thing. I should say she was figuring on staying 
 for all she told me." 
 
 "Well, they ain't. They're going, I under- 
 stand," he told me. 
 
 "Is that so?" I answered. "It must be some- 
 thing sudden." 
 
 "It is," he said right off, "or that's the way I 
 get it. Now look here, judge," he said, getting 
 his whiskey breath up a little nearer to me ; "now 
 I'm going to ask you something, and I want you 
 to tell me right. For I believe there's some special 
 reason for this thing their deciding to go so sud-
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 217 
 
 den if that's right. You know how that crowd 
 that cackling hen yard in the front parlour of 
 Mrs. Tusset's were talking and squawking about 
 her when that thing happened after that day of 
 the Rose Pageant." 
 
 "I do. Yes." 
 
 "Without a word of truth or substantiation 
 about any part of it except that they made up 
 a parcel of lies and told them till they believed 
 them." 
 
 "I believe you're right about that," I said. 
 
 "I know I'm right, judge. You may think I'm 
 a fool and I'm prejudiced because I went and fell 
 in love with the girl. But let me tell you some- 
 thing. I know I'm no fool if I do act that way 
 mostly. I don't need any diagram of the inside 
 of the soul of a girl, or a man either, to know them. 
 I know what I'm talking with, after just a little 
 and so do you ; when they're real and when they're 
 just shoddy. And there's the finest, straightest- 
 eyed girl you'll meet in all your days. I ain't 
 been so particular in my company with women as I 
 might have been, maybe, for my own good. But 
 just the same I know a good woman and respect 
 her when I meet her none the less for all that 
 more, I expect!" 
 
 "I don't doubt it," I told him. 
 
 And then he went on as the young are apt to
 
 218 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 do on the merits of their particular illusion in 
 the way of women. 
 
 "It isn't only that," he said. "I'm not fooling 
 myself. After all the talk about this girl at first, 
 naturally, I watched her and I tried her out. You 
 take the way she acts when you're on the road 
 taking a chance with a machine up against some 
 sharp corner in driving that's where you can tell 
 real folks, when they're in a corner ! Not a squeal, 
 not a whimper out of her when the rest of them 
 would be squawking their fool heads off. There's 
 a girl that's white straight through. I know it. 
 She couldn't trick or deceive you if she wanted to. 
 She wouldn't know how." 
 
 I moved just a little at that, recalling, naturally, 
 what the girl herself had been saying to me not 
 four hours before from the same position the 
 same chair about white wives and deceiving and 
 herself. 
 
 "No, sir," he said. "There's a girl some fine 
 man will get sometime, and she'll deserve him. 
 She's had a lot of trouble in her life, judge, that 
 girl. I know that though she never would tell 
 me what it was. She wouldn't. She isn't the kind 
 that would holler. But that mother of hers is 
 concerned in it any fool can see that what she's 
 tried to do with her. Ain't she the devil that 
 woman ?"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 219 
 
 "The illusions of one generation always look a 
 little odd to the next one," I told him, "especially 
 its styles it likes its women served in." 
 
 "You're probably right, judge," he told me, 
 giving me a stare, "though I don't know what you 
 mean." 
 
 "All you've got to do is to look at the fashion 
 plates and read the talk of the women in the novels 
 of the time of the Civil War and after," I said, 
 "to see when your mother and aunts were at the 
 height of their illusions. The women of one gen- 
 eration are queer sights to the next one. I don't 
 know anything that styles change quicker in than 
 women not only their clothes but themselves the 
 kind of soul it's fashionable for a woman to have." 
 
 "You're probably right, judge," he said, giving 1 
 me that fixed, indifferent stare under his black hair 
 and eyebrows. "I never was great on speculating 
 on such things. I ain't got the head to, I reckon." 
 
 "All I wanted to say was," I told him, "that 
 the mother is very likely acting according to her 
 lights even if you and I don't fancy them." 
 
 "Let it go at that," he said. "But here, what 
 I want to ask tonight I'm trying to find out just 
 what's behind their getting out of town so sudden 
 and unexpected if that story's true. It might 
 be there was some new lying scandal from that 
 crowd up at your place. Those educated hens and
 
 220 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 that king of the hen yard that Cupid Calvert. 
 I wanted to find that out. Because if there is," 
 he said, "lemme tell you something, judge: 
 There's going to be some fireworks start some 
 doings they'll want to put in when they're writing 
 up the town history." 
 
 "Let me tell you something now," I said. "I 
 don't know anything about what you claim here. 
 My belief is that there's nothing new of that kind. 
 If there is I haven't heard it. You're getting 
 suspicious, the way you're apt to when you're like 
 this when you're drinking. I tell you now, son, 
 straight," I said to him, "I'm sorry to see it. 
 You haven't been like this for weeks. And if this 
 girl has had something to do with pulling you up 
 as I more than suspect she has I'm twice sorry 
 that she's through with you." 
 
 "To hell with me!" he said. "What do I 
 amount to? I'm just a discard all round!" 
 
 And he went out after that with his hat pulled 
 down low over his ugly eyes. 
 
 The next development in that somewhat mem- 
 orable forty-eight hours came that next morning. 
 I was surprised in the middle of the morning to see 
 Cupid Calvert coming in my office door. I knew 
 then there must be some pressing news to 
 communicate. 
 
 "I was just passing by, judge," he told me, "and
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 221 
 
 I thought I'd run in and tell you something new 
 something real rich and riotous." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "Eureka, judge!" he said, taking out a large 
 blue strong-smelling letter from his pocket and 
 waving it. "Eureka which is the French for 
 follow little Cupid and see 1" 
 
 "See what?" 
 
 "You know the dope we've all been looking for?" 
 
 "Which?" I asked him. 
 
 "About Snowy Shoulders and the Cockatoo." 
 
 I didn't say a word. But I didn't have to. 
 
 "I've got it right here. It's a screamer, judge." 
 
 "Where'd you get it? Where'd you run it 
 down finally?" I asked, studying him. 
 
 "There's a girl I met here going through in 
 an opera company," he informed me. "She lived 
 in St. Louis, I remembered," he said, waving his 
 letter. 
 
 "I might have known," I said. "My nose might 
 have told me. It smells like somebody had opened 
 a bottle of cologne water in here." 
 
 "It's a frantic tale, judge," he said. "You'll 
 enjoy hearing it." 
 
 And he went on and gave me the outline of the 
 situation in St. Louis the relation of the women 
 to that Gluber, the dress salesman. 
 
 "You know what they are," he said, "if you go
 
 222 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 into a certain class of life in a big city. Those 
 fellows like that d'o business with flashy shopgirls 
 and theatrical folks and mechanics' wives and 
 some others we won't mention. Especially some 
 others." 
 
 "Women that have got more ambition to show 
 themselves off than they have sense," I said. 
 
 "Right, judge. He sells them flashy stuff at 
 three and. four profits and trusts to his wits and 
 his system for getting it all in. They've got a 
 great system, fellows like that. He has." 
 
 "A system?" I repeated. 
 
 "No set thing, only holds of different kinds that 
 he's got on the different kinds of women." 
 
 "Blackmail," I said, "for instance." 
 
 "Yes. Fear of one thing or another. That 
 somebody else will get to know something about 
 them or what they've done or just the fact that 
 they're spending money. He scares women 
 that's his business till they pay him. He has 
 been at it for years. He's got them down cold 
 all kinds. He has had them by the thousands 
 he runs a little women's hell of his own, with 
 branches in half a dozen cities. A nice profitable 
 little women's hell. And he's the king of it. And 
 they all shake and whimper when he gets after 
 them." 
 
 "I wish we had had him down here," I told him,
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 223 
 
 " j ust after the old war, when we got loose and well 
 fixed to deal with that kind of cattle for ourselves. 
 But look here," I said, trying him out to see, 
 "what else is there in this? Did you get any in- 
 formation about what hold it was just that this 
 sweet-faced, sweet-minded dressmaker had on these 
 two?" 
 
 "You mean that anonymous letter 'that Pit- 
 man murder thing?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "No, sir, I haven't, judge," he told me. 
 "That's coming later. Our eminent detective 
 force 19 working on that now, sir." 
 
 "I see. I understand," I told him. "And now 
 you've acquainted me with that fact, let me tell you 
 something give you some advice that may or 
 may not be of some use to you. But it'll come 
 cheap. It won't cost you anything." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "If I was you," I told him, "I don't believe I'd 
 go peddling round that news much." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Not so's it might get back to Cole Hawkins, 
 anyway." 
 
 "Oh," he said, with a big gleaming grin on his 
 round face, "now you mention that, judge, I've 
 got some more news for you. That's off, I believe. 
 I believe there's some row between those two !"
 
 224 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "You don't mean it ?" I said. 
 
 "Yes, sir, judge," he informed me. "The Night 
 Riders seem to have split up and gone out of busi- 
 ness. The last night or two Snowy Shoulders has 
 been staying at home and Cole Hawkins has been 
 out tearing round alone. You heard about last 
 night?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "He's been drinking again. He was out till 
 midnight in that Child of Hell, raging up and 
 down the road. Starting his old game wiping 
 the mud guards off the road hogs or the ones he 
 claims are lying over too much on the other man's 
 side of the road." 
 
 "They don't on his much, I expect." 
 
 "No. But he disciplines them for the others. 
 You know how and how as good a driver as he is 
 can manage to put the other fellow in wrong. 
 He'll kill somebody some day before he's through." 
 
 "Yes," I said, "I'm afraid so myself. But let 
 me tell you something more. He may be off with 
 that girl like you say but I'd still be a little 
 cautious and conservative about having any 
 remarks about her or her affairs get back to him 
 as starting and originating from me personally, if 
 I was in your place. I may be wrong. I'm just 
 telling you how I'd feel myself." 
 
 "Don't you worry, judge," said Cupid.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 225 
 
 "You know what he is," I warned him, "when 
 he's like this. What he's done two or three times 
 already in this town when he took a fancy 
 against one or two." 
 
 "He's a murderer, that's what he is," said 
 Calvert. "Somebody ought to put him back of 
 the bars." 
 
 "I was just telling you," I said to him. 
 
 "I want to tell you something too, judge," 
 Calvert told me. "I wasn't born yesterday." 
 
 He went on then, out to other places. I could 
 imagine just about how long what I'd said would 
 keep him from circulating his new information, 
 especially among the whispering women at the 
 boarding house. 
 
 It was night again, the next night, when the 
 next step came. I was in my office reading again 
 when this man I knew came rushing in. 
 
 "You know what's happened tonight, judge?" 
 he asked me, all out of breath. 
 
 "No, sir. What has?" I said, looking up. 
 
 "You know about Cole Hawkins how he's been 
 drinking again the last few days." 
 
 "I heard so, sir. Yes, sir." 
 
 "He's out tonight hunting young Cupid Cal- 
 vert swearing he's going to kill him on sight." 
 
 I got up on my feet. "You don't mean that?" 
 I said, sitting back again.
 
 226 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "I do, judge. I mean just that. And you 
 know what that signifies when he gets that way 1" 
 
 "I can reason it out," I said. "But what's the 
 matter?" I asked him, to see what he knew what 
 had come out so far. 
 
 "I don't know," he said. "Nobody seems to 
 know. Only some claim it's got something to do 
 with that girl up at your boarding house that 
 Fairborn girl, who made such a breakdown at the 
 last Rose Pageant." 
 
 "Where's Calvert?" I asked him. "What are 
 they doing about him?" 
 
 "They've got him out of the way, judge for to- 
 night'" 
 
 "That's good," I said. 
 
 "Look here, judge," he said to me then. "We 
 can't have this thing going on in this town a 
 shooting, like way back, years ago." 
 
 "No. sir," I said. "I don't say we can myself." 
 
 "And you're the man to stop it," he told me. 
 "You've got to go to Cole and hold him off. 
 You're the only man in the county that's got any 
 influence with him." 
 
 "I'll go, I expeict," I said, "and see what I can 
 do, anyway." 
 
 So I got my hat and went out.
 
 XVII 
 
 1 WALKED over to the hotel where Cole Haw- 
 kins was boarding then and asked for him. 
 "He just went out, judge," said the clerk. 
 "I expect you'll find him over at the garage. He 
 just started over there in that direction, sir." 
 
 They all stopped their talking. I could feel 
 their eyes on my back, looking at me, when I went 
 out. 
 
 So I went over to the garage and found Cole 
 just climbing into the long low red Child of Hell. 
 
 "Take me in that thing," I told him, "and drive 
 me over to my office. I've got something I want 
 to talk over with you." 
 
 He looked up at me under those black eyebrows 
 without answering. But he went. 
 
 "All right. Climb in," he said. 
 
 And we went snorting and barking over to my 
 office in about ten snorts. 
 
 "Now then," I said, when I had him upstairs 
 and sitting down by my desk again, "just what 
 is it you're trying to do now?" 
 
 "Do what?" he said, giving me an ugly look. 
 227
 
 228 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "You know what I mean," I told him. 
 
 "Maybe I do and maybe I don't !" he answered 
 back, still holding me off, looking black. 
 
 "Is it true," I asked him straight then "what 
 they're telling round town that you're out hunt- 
 ing young Calvert with a gun?" 
 
 "S'pose I was what of it?" 
 
 "Why? What's the object?" 
 
 "You've got your nerve with you!" he said to 
 me. I could smell his breath clear across the desk. 
 
 "Why?" I went on asking him. "What do you 
 want to kill him for?" 
 
 "He's lived long enough that's one reason," he 
 said. "And a good enough one too for most 
 people !" 
 
 I saw I had him started. 
 
 "I've been looking for that fat yelping poodle 
 dog for some time," he told me then, "if you want 
 to know." 
 
 "Look here, Cole," I said to him. "This ain't 
 Mexico. Folks ain't going round the streets of 
 Carthage any longer shooting each other full of 
 lead because they don't like the colour of each 
 other's hair. What's going on here, anyhow?" 
 
 "You know as well as I do," he said, loosening up 
 a little bit more. "Or if you don't you will before 
 long. But I ain't talking about that, either 1" he 
 said, stopping.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 229 
 
 "What is it, Cole ?" I asked him. "Come on now 
 "tell me. I want to know and you've got a 
 right to tell me." 
 
 "I'll tell you what it is," he said then finally, 
 staring back into my eyes, "if you've got to know ! 
 For your own information, strictly! You know 
 what I was telling you about that other evening, 
 about wanting to find out whether there were any 
 more false scandals started about that person I 
 was speaking to you of?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well I've found out, that's all. There were. 
 And it's that thing Calvert 1" 
 
 "Calvert!" I said after him. 
 
 "Yes, sir. You know how he is how he's been 
 in this town for years laughing and sneering and 
 lying about folks that he didn't fancy or had 
 turned him down or he just thought would make 
 good targets to aim his funny thoughts at or 
 start some scandal about." 
 
 I nodded, with my eye on him. 
 
 "Well, he's done his last slandering of women 
 round this place, that's all !" 
 
 "How so?" 
 
 "Well, this time he's done it once too often. 
 He's been round town here lately peddling a lot of 
 lies about this girl I'm talking to you about 
 shaming them out of town. And nobody's had
 
 230 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 the manhood to come out and tear his lying in- 
 sides out of him. But this is the time he's going 
 to be come up with. I'm after him this time," he 
 said, and stopped, holding his dangerous black 
 eyes into mine. "And I've sent word to him so." 
 
 "You mean to teh 1 me " I started saying. 
 
 "I've got the same compassion fop him," he said, 
 "as for a isick toad. He's driving them out 
 of town 'trying to," he said. "But he's going 
 out on a damned sight longer journey. They've 
 got him hid away somewhere now in some stink- 
 ing hole. But I ain't worried. I'll catch up 
 with him before I'm through. And when I do he's 
 going out on that long journey I was telling you 
 about to a damned sight warmer country. And 
 if I go with him so much the better. I'm getting 
 generally sick hanging round this world, being in 
 the way of others never making good! Maybe 
 they'll 'find some more use for me in hell." 
 
 "Cole," I told him, "you're a fool." 
 
 "Maybe I am, judge," he told me, very cool and 
 calm and ugly, "but nobody can say I don't do 
 what I say I will." 
 
 "You've been drinking again." 
 
 "Maybe I have." 
 
 "I thought you'd straightened out," 1 said, 
 "and done away with the drinking since you'd 
 been with that girl."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 231 
 
 "I did, judge while I Was with her. I would 
 now, if I still was, I expect. But that ain't any 
 business " 
 
 "Don't you know," I broke in on him, "that 
 anything like this isn't going to help the girl any 
 what you are doing now?" 
 
 "What I know is this," he told me "just this: 
 I'm through. I understand that. I may never 
 speak to her again. But just the same, nobody's! 
 going round circulating low-down lying scandals 
 about her and live." 
 
 "What were the scandals?" I asked him. 
 
 "I don't know. Some lie about her and her 
 mother coming on here from the slums of St. Louis 
 backed by that cheap crooked dressmaker. I 
 don't know some lie on the face of it to any- 
 body that knows the girl and ever talked with 
 her." 
 
 "Well, if it's a lie," I said, shivering inside to 
 see how the thing was going, "it'll kill itself. It 
 will " 
 
 "That's the trouble," he broke in on me. "It's 
 a damned plausible lie some ways, like everything 
 else he gets up. That's the worst of it. Now is 
 that all?" he said, getting to his feet. 
 
 "Look a here," I said, trying to keep him there. 
 But he wouldn't be kept. 
 
 "Is that all?" he repeated.
 
 282 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "You're making a mistake all round, Cole. Sit 
 down again," I begged of him. 
 
 "No. I ain't just in a real talkative mood to- 
 night," he told me, and went out the door. 
 
 I sat there thinking long after I heard him and 
 his Child of Hell go roaring and barking up the 
 street, patrolling round, maybe, for a sight of 
 Calvert. I was thinking of it a good part of the 
 night there in my office and in my bedroom. 
 I couldn't appear to work it out. If I couldn't 
 influence and hold him back, I didn't know who 
 could unless perhaps one person who wouldn't 
 naturally be available ! And, moreover, I couldn't 
 very well go to anybody else anyhow with what 
 I'd got in confidence. 
 
 It looked bad to me. It did the next morning. 
 It was all over town now about the two men 
 though the girl's name wasn't in it so very much 
 yet. Calvert was hid away still somewhere, they 
 said. He was away from the boarding house, 
 I knew that. Hawkins was still drunk, racing 
 down the road. 
 
 "He almost got another car last night," a man 
 called me up to say on the telephone. "Some- 
 thing's got to be done about him that's certain 
 sure." 
 
 And not two minutes afterward the phone rang 
 again, and I heard a woman's voice quick and 
 sharp and breathless on the wire.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 233 
 
 "Heilo, judge." 
 
 "Hello." 
 
 "This is Virginia." 
 
 "Why, hello, Virginia. Hello, girl. Ain't you 
 up kind of early this morning?" 
 
 "Judge," she said, not answering me, "I want 
 to come down to your office right now ! Are you 
 alone?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. "Come right down." 
 
 I suspicioned from her voice what it might be. 
 
 She was white when she came in ; more than ever 
 the girl of ivory they first talked about. 
 
 "Judge," she said, not sitting down, "is it true? 
 Is it true, sir that Cole Hawkins is hunting to 
 kill that Calvert?" 
 
 I didn't answer. 
 
 "For what he said about me?" 
 
 "Sit down first," I told her, "and tell me what 
 you're driving at, and then maybe 111 answer your 
 question." 
 
 She sat down and told me. That white-livered, 
 yellow-haired Calvert had sent word to her to 
 save his honery mean skin. 
 
 "What did he want you to do?" I asked her. 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 "He said he knew if I went to him to Cole 
 and told him to stop to tell him that he knew that 
 he was wrong "
 
 234 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Calvert knew, you mean?" 
 
 "Yes. And would apologize to me, or any- 
 body why, then, he knew, judge, that would fix 
 it with Cole for everybody. For me and my 
 reputation !" 
 
 "Your reputation!" I said. "The low-down 
 hound 1" 
 
 "Ye & , sir." 
 
 "But it wouldn't. It wouldn't fix it with Cole 
 Hawkins or yourgreputation either if he apol- 
 ogized a million times. I don't believe you can 
 hold Cole off him now." 
 
 She was almost whispering when she answered 
 me. 
 
 "I could stop him, judge," she said "in one 
 way 1" 
 
 "What way?" 
 
 "I could go and cell him he couldn't blame 
 Calvert," she said, talking even lower. 
 
 "Couldn't blame him !" I broke in. 
 
 "Because what he told was the truth !" 
 
 I sat and stared at her. 
 
 She straightened up a little and talked louder 
 then. "That would fix it, judge," she said. 
 
 "The truth!" I answered her. "You don't 
 know what Calvert's said. You don't know it is 
 the truth. It probably ain't." 
 
 "It's near enough, judge," she told me, with that
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 235 
 
 old hopeless tone she used to have at first coming 
 back into her voice, "so he won't be killing anybody 
 on my account any more !" 
 
 "Virginia. Girl," I said. "I won't sftand for 
 it. I won't stand for anything of the kind. I 
 won't allow you." 
 
 "You can't help yourself, I expect," she told me. 
 
 "No. You can't go to him not the way it is 
 with you two," I told her. "I'd go myself first 
 if that was the thing to be done 1" 
 
 "What good would that do, sir?" she asked me. 
 "He wouldn't believe you, you know that even if 
 you did tell him what I've been. He'd only want 
 to kill you, probably add you to Calvert! No, 
 sir," she said. "There's just one way and one 
 person. I've got to do it." 
 
 "That's no such thing," I said. "You know 
 yourself what you said about it about how that 
 was the only thing left for you now not to tell 
 him or see him even, after he knew. That it would 
 kill you even to stay and look him in the face 
 after he heard about you. And now you're pro- 
 posing to go yourself and " 
 
 "Don't make it any harder, judge," she told me, 
 "than it has to be for me. For it's going to be 
 done." 
 
 "Not for that cur, Calvert," I said. 
 
 "No, sir. No, sir," she said, very slow and
 
 236 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 quiet. "Not for him or for myself either." 
 
 "No," I said. "No! Cole Hawkins' ain't 
 worth that, either." 
 
 "Yes he is, judge," she said. "He is to me! 
 Let alone what he is to me now. He cared for 
 me he was kind to me not to my looks, my body. 
 To me ! The only man I ever knew I think. He 
 always did all kinds of things for me that first 
 time, when I was in trouble. Oh, I know how it 
 all started. 
 
 "Do you think after that," she went on after 
 awhile "after all he's been to me that I'm just 
 going to run away and let him get into any bad 
 trouble like this for me now? No, sir. Never!" 
 
 "Virginia," I said, getting to my feet, "stand up 
 here. I want to tell you, ma'am, right here and 
 now, you're the finest woman God ever made, 
 Girl. And I'm proud to know you. And I'd 
 like nothing better than to think you were my 
 daughter. I believe, as it is, I'll adopt you!" 
 
 "I wish you would, judge sometimes !" she said, 
 coming over toward me. 
 
 "I will," I said to her. "Right now!" 
 
 And she looked up after awhile from where I had 
 my arm about her and said: "After this, judge 
 'after I get this done can I go, sir, then ? Will 
 you help me off to some big place where I can 
 just hide and hide and hide myself forever?"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 237 
 
 "From everybody but me, you can," I told her, 
 comforting her. 
 
 "Yes, sir," she said after awhile more, and stood 
 back again and wiped her eyes. 
 
 "Where are you going now?" I asked her. 
 
 "Just to the telephone," she said. "That's all."
 
 xvin 
 
 I WOULDN'T be much surprised if she had 
 used that telephone number before. Anyhow 
 she hit the right place at the right time to find 
 the man she was calling for. I stood there star- 
 ing, listening to see what was going on. 
 
 She told him who it was. 
 
 "Who ?" came back his voice on the receiver. 
 
 I could hear it speaking out half across the 
 room. Eager and quick like a boy's voice 
 should be. 
 
 "Virginia," she said again. "I want to ask 
 you a favour." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am." 
 
 "Would you be willing to take me riding again 
 if I asked you ?" 
 
 "Would I be willing?" the voice in the receiver 
 came back the instrument blurring from its loud- 
 ness. "When?" 
 
 "Could you tonight?" 
 
 "Could I tonight? No. Not a bit! When?" 
 
 "The the same time." 
 
 "Right. Right," came the loud surprised voice 
 238
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 239 
 
 again. "That is, if that's the earliest time there 
 is." 
 
 "That will be the earliest the best, anyway, I 
 expect," she said, and closed him off with a short 
 laugh. 
 
 She came over to me with a very red face. "It 
 will be easier when I get started, I expect, judge 1" 
 she said to s*ay something, apparently! 
 
 "You're not going to do that," I told her. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "You're not going out riding with Cole Hawkins 
 today, tonight or any other time! You 
 know the way he's been lately. You must know 
 from Calvert, probably how he's been drinking." 
 
 "He won't be drinking, judge," she told me, 
 smiling a small confident little smile. "He never 
 has been not when he was driving out with me." 
 
 "I'm not so sure about that nor how much 
 better off he would be if he did get sober, after 
 the last two or three days. Why don't you see 
 him some other way if you've got to see him 
 instead of taking the chances of being all splin- 
 tered up by that wild devil in that car?" 
 
 "There are quite a few reasons, judge," she told 
 me. 
 
 "What, for instance?" 
 
 "Well, we always have been together that way." 
 
 "Yes," I said, waiting.
 
 240 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "It's about the only place we could be alone so 
 well !" she told me then. 
 
 "There are other places to be found, I believe, 
 in the civilized world as now known to man," I 
 answered her. 
 
 But she would'nt listen to me. 
 
 "What is the real reason," I said, "that you 
 want to go out with him in that machine and get 
 killed?" 
 
 "It would be easier, judge," she said finally, "if 
 you have to know, for me !" 
 
 "Easier?" 
 
 "I can talk to him," she said. "Tell him what 
 I've got to just as well, anyhow, when he's 
 occupied driving a little. It will be bad enough 
 without his eyes all the time on my face." 
 
 "Oh," I said. 
 
 "There'll be no danger. You'll see," she told 
 me. 
 
 I wasn't so sure myself. I sat there an hour or 
 so after she had gone, thinking it over, considering 
 what it was right for me to do under the 
 circumstances. 
 
 Finally I called Cole up on the telephone myself. 
 
 "Look a here, Cole," I said when I'd got him, 
 "you know who's talking, I expect." 
 
 "Yes," he said. His voice was still hoarse from 
 his drinking.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 241 
 
 "All right," I said. "Now you listen to me, for 
 Fve got some right important advice to give you." 
 
 He gave a kind of grunt over the wire, thinking, 
 I expect, that I was interfering in his business 
 again. 
 
 "Fve been brought in through special reasons 
 not specially of my own choosing into your 
 affairs," I said. "And I expect very likely you 
 don't care for it. But as I happen to know some 
 things I want to tell you about them." 
 
 "Fire ahead," he said, brief and' curt. 
 
 "Now let me tell you something, Cole," I said 
 then. "You're going out riding tonight with the 
 finest lady in this land. There never was a finer 
 one that ever stepped on God's green earth, sir. 
 And I want you to do what you should, do under 
 the circumstances; straighten up and tidy up 
 before that time so you can take her out 
 right." 
 
 I could hear him grunt again over the wire as 
 if he was getting mad. But I went right on 
 regardless. 
 
 "Now wait," I told him. "That ain't all! 
 This young woman this lady I'm talking to 
 you about is about to do a thing for you, sir, 
 that's the hardest any woman can do for any man, 
 sir. She's going to lower and humble and bow her- 
 self in the dust and she's going to do it for you,
 
 242 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 sir, and not for anybody else in this world!" 
 
 He didn't break in any more with any more 
 grunts, I noticed. I had him listening. 
 
 "Moreover," I went on, "I'm not at liberty to 
 tell you what she'll say to you, but I want to say 
 this to you that when you hear it and understand 
 it, you'll say if you're half the man I think you 
 are that what she tells you is a hundred times 
 to her credit where it's once to her detriment. 
 And if you don't understand it when she gets 
 through you come to me and I'll explain it all 
 to you." 
 
 He didn't say anything to that, either. 
 
 "And more than that, sir," I said "and this 
 is the last I'm going to tell you I'm going to 
 break confidence also to this extent. This girl 
 is going to do all this as you'll understand, if 
 you are half bright for just one reason. Be- 
 cause she loves you. She'll say she doesn't she'll 
 deny it. She's got a crazy idea that she shouldn't 
 ever marry you. She'll try to run away from you 
 if she can. But my advice to you is this, sir: 
 When she gets through telling you what she's 
 going to you brush it right aside. And you 
 ask her just two questions: 'Do you love me?' 
 and 'Will you marry me?' Don't you dispute or 
 argue. You hold her up to it right there! If 
 you lose her," I said, "you are a plain fool. And
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 243 
 
 if you harm one hair on her head you're a miser- 
 able, low-down dog and I'll come round and shoot 
 you myself. 
 
 "And that's all, sir," I told him. "Except 
 naturally these are confidences between gentlemen, 
 sir and I know will be regarded as such, as al- 
 ways. And in closing I'll just say this: She's 
 just ten thousand times better than you deserve, 
 sir. And you ought to spend the rest of this day 
 on your knees thanking God for bringing her to 
 you. If you have sense enough to take her, now 
 she's come!" 
 
 And then I shut down the phone, having now 
 stepped in and done all the harm I could in the 
 matter.
 
 XIX 
 
 IT was twilight, as I understand it late twi- 
 light when they started. I remember the 
 night myself a dull, smooth, muddy cloud 
 across the west. Lights began to show after they 
 had gone booming out the driveway the whisper- 
 ing women, curious at the man's absence and re- 
 turn, peering out after them in the corners of the 
 hall window. 
 
 "Where to ?" he asked her. 
 
 "South," she said. "On the old road." She 
 thought naturally it was her last ride with him. 
 
 And then as I piece the testimony together, 
 from their confidences, out a way when they had 
 gone out beyond the almshouse, both silent, he 
 waiting for her and she hating to begin, she 
 started in with what she had to do. 
 
 "I've got something," she said, "I've got to tell 
 you." 
 
 "What is it?" he asked gruffly. 
 
 He had been sobering up, getting ready all that 
 day, but his voice was still hoarse and his nerves 
 
 still raw and jerky. 
 
 244
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 245 
 
 "Is it true," she asked him "what they say 
 that you've been round threatening to shoot that 
 Calvert?" 
 
 "That ain't telling me anything," he said, look- 
 ing off ahead at his driving, his black eyes on the 
 road. "That's just asking me a question." 
 
 "To kill him on my account?" 
 
 He didn't say anything at all now which was 
 of course saying more than he could any other 
 way. 
 
 "Cole," she said, "you can't do it. You aren't 
 justified." 
 
 "That's my lookout," he said, speaking finally. 
 
 "No," she told him and stopped, hating and 
 dreading to go on. 
 
 "Suppose I told you," she said finally, forcing 
 herself, "that it was he that was justified." 
 
 "Justified?" he said after her, but not looking 
 round. 
 
 "Yes," she said in a faint voice. "That he 
 told the truth!" 
 
 "I'd say you were lying too," he told her, never 
 turning his eyes back from his driving. 
 
 "No," she said again, when her voice came back 
 to her. "Not if I heard it right what he said." 
 
 "How do you know what he said? Who told 
 you?" 
 
 "He did," she said after a minute.
 
 246 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "The dirty poodle !" he said with a great oath. 
 
 And they stopped talking again. 
 
 "He couldn't tell the truth standing before the 
 bright throne of God Almighty," he told her. 
 
 "He told the truth this time, I expect," she 
 answered him, controlling her voice again at last. 
 "Or near enough so it won't make any differ- 
 ence. 1 ' 
 
 And then she told him the story, starting back 
 with her childhood and the trial. 
 
 He said nothing; only now and then when she 
 touched on different points the car would jump 
 forward of a sudden, he expressing his feelings that 
 way involuntarily, his foot on the accelerator. 
 
 But when she got to that lawyer how he took 
 her character and wantonly and deliberately 
 defiled it in that public trial he broke his silence. 
 
 "Where is he?" he asked her. "Where is that 
 beast now?" 
 
 "Why?" she asked him. 
 
 "Never mind," he told her, but his voice told 
 her more. 
 
 "Oh, Cole," she cried out, "can't you think of 
 anything but bitterness and revenge and fighting?" 
 
 In answer to her he didn't say anything; but 
 the car jumped on again still faster on the 
 uneven rutty road, the headlights rushing, sweep-
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 24,7 
 
 ing on ahead on the dusty roadside bushes, great 
 clouds of yellow dust following. 
 
 "You'll have to stop, hold. back a little, Cole," 
 she said. "I can't stand this." 
 
 And, when he did she started on with her grind- 
 ing task again. 
 
 "We can't kill everybody that we don't like, 
 can we," she said, "or that insults us, nowadays? 
 That's gone by. It's not civilized. And besides, 
 he wasn't to blame entirely, from his lights." 
 
 "Who was?" 
 
 "Who is for anything?" she said. "I wonder 
 sometimes. He was just one link in a chain. 
 That's what life is, I've thought sometimes a 
 steel chain binding you down, one link coming 
 after another, each one not able by itself to do 
 anything, nothing but just one part of the whole. 
 He had some ground anyway to think or claim. 
 And before that, there was my mother I 
 expect." 
 
 And she told him about her mother's planning 
 for her and driving her and decorating her to 
 use that last surviving asset of the failing Fair- 
 borns, the girl's unusual beauty. 
 
 "I had to fight," she said "I've told you that 
 already for what girlhood I had against white 
 frocks and white shoes and fancy ribbons. I
 
 248 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 wasn't that, naturally, was I? I hope not." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Merchandise confectionery in pretty pack- 
 ages. I didn't mean to be." 
 
 "You never were," he growled, starting up the 
 Child of Hell again and easing her back when he 
 thought ! 
 
 And he added a few remarks on her mother as 
 he would, naturally, if he thought them and had 
 no doubt before. 
 
 "No," she said, defending her. "That's the 
 way she is was made. She couldn't be anything 
 else from what she was raised in. I expect none 
 of us can." 
 
 "I don't know as we can," he admitted, thinking 
 perhaps of himself. 
 
 And she went on again, telling him of her 
 mother's circumstances and her own. 
 
 "Anyhow," she said, "I was what I was 
 merchandise. And now, after that trial, I was 
 spoiled merchandise." 
 
 He cursed a denial under his breath. 
 
 "She had to do something," she told him about 
 her mother. "After our poor circumstances, 
 anyway all the money that that trial cost us. 
 And Robert Lee still in prison. She was des- 
 perate," she told him. And then she went on to 
 tell him the woman's wild, crazy speculation with 
 that A. Gluber.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 249 
 
 "Even he," she said, "wasn't to blame 
 altogether horrible as he is! I've no doubt she 
 told him or gave him to understand, anyway 
 we were propertied people, well able to pay, 
 except just for that moment. That's the way 
 she talks naturally always has !" 
 
 And Hawkins talked uncomplimentary again 
 about both the woman and the man. 
 
 "No," she said, disputing him. "But it was 
 about all I could bear," she admitted to him, "sit- 
 ting there, for sale, and hearing her and knowing 
 how they laughed and sneered and pointed at me 
 especially after that time in Louisville; know- 
 ing all the time that any minute one of those 
 anonymous letters might come and open it all up 
 again, and bare me, shame me all over again. 
 
 "I've wondered quite a lot," she said they were 
 going slower now; he was slowing down, listening 
 to her "whether in the old days, when my folks 
 back in Virginia raised negroes and negresses to 
 sell down this way whether this was a kind of 
 revenge whether the negroes ever felt like I did 
 had any horror, and shame anything like that 
 at all." 
 
 "I expect," she added, "I'm kind of foolish 
 that I'm trying to be sorry for myself to excuse 
 myself.'* 
 
 And then she told him about that gas that 
 matter I was mixed up in.
 
 250 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "I thought I couldn't go on," she said. "That's 
 what I blame myself most for." 
 
 "You blame yourself easier than you do other 
 folks, don't you?" he asked her. 
 
 "I was weak silly scared," she said. "I 
 didn't understand then that folks that were folks 
 didji't do that didn't have a right to especially 
 fixed the way we were. I had no right to die 
 with my mother and Robert Lee the way they 
 were, depending on me or believing they were, 
 anyway. It wasn't criminal it was worse; 
 it was a coward's trick. The only excuse to be 
 said for me was that I had been brought up mighty 
 soft and foolish." 
 
 They stopped talking then for a little bit. She 
 made him turn round. They were a good long 
 way out of town, and it was growing black from 
 these rain clouds in the west. It looked like a 
 thundershower a poor thing to be out in in that 
 open dish of a racing car. 
 
 "So then that's all," she said. "They were 
 justified Calvert was in what he said." 
 
 But he cursed him just as bitter as before, still 
 unconvinced. 
 
 "You'll do what I ask you, Cole?" she asked, 
 starting pleading with him. "You'll promise me 
 that you'll leave him alone ?" 
 
 "No," he told her.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 251 
 
 She went on begging him. 
 
 "What's your anxiety about him," he asked her 
 in an ugly voice "all of a sudden? What is he 
 to you?" 
 
 "Nothing. You know that, Cole. Nothing 1 
 and a heap less!" 
 
 "Then why are you mixing into this? For 
 whose sake?" 
 
 "You don't need to have me tell you that," she 
 said in a low, quiet voice. "Or you oughtn't to !" 
 
 But. she didn't convince him yet. They were 
 going back slowly, the boy dragging it out as long 
 as he could, in spite of that black solid wall rising 
 in the west, shot across with the distant fire of 
 lightning. But neither one minded it much, for 
 that matter or paid much attention yet. 
 
 "Cole," she said, appealing to him finally, "let's 
 let him alone then, and you ! Let me ask it from 
 you another way. You told me once you you 
 loved me." 
 
 "I do now," he said, "if that does you any good 
 to know and always will." 
 
 She stopped a minute before she went on 
 trusted herself to. 
 
 "Would you want me to go into court again, 
 through another trial?" she asked him. "Are you 
 so anxious to hurt somebody for my sake as 
 that?"
 
 252 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 And she covered her face up with her hands. 
 
 She convinced him finally then and he promised 
 her. She thanked him for it. 
 
 And then they were silent once more. The 
 storm was coming up fast, but he did not hurry. 
 He still lagged neither one, I expect, noticing it 
 too much, being too concerned with their own 
 affairs and feelings to notice a mere natural catas- 
 trophe. 
 
 "I wasn't trying to blame you, Cole," she told 
 him. "You mustn't think that." 
 
 "Nor anybody else, except yourself!" he an- 
 swered her. 
 
 "No," she said. "I ai excusing myself now, 
 I'm afraid. But you don't realize men don't, 
 I believe about what women are and have to be. 
 I've thought a heap about a heap of things maybe 
 you wouldn't naturally know in the last year or 
 two since that trial!" 
 
 And the boy swore again under his breath, 
 thinking of it. 
 
 "You don't realize what a fragile thing a woman 
 is what she really is, I mean to say ; her actions, 
 her character what she really has to be to be 
 anything. How fragile and how sort of compli- 
 cated, Cole, her life is. Everything counts against 
 her so every little common thought and action; 
 she's got to be so careful in these little things or
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 253 
 
 she's nothing. She's got to be perfect or she's 
 nothing even sometimes, maybe, when it isn't all 
 her own fault." 
 
 He was swearing once again under his breath, 
 thinking of the whole thing of what she was do- 
 ing now, for him ; of that chain of circumstances 
 she had talked about that had been forged by 
 her life, her ancestry, her whole surroundings, to 
 drag her down and hold her. 
 
 "I thought," she said, getting through, "I 
 couldn't tell you this. I'd rather you'd remember 
 me " 
 
 "Remember you!" he said, the car jumping on 
 again with the involuntary push of his foot on the 
 accelerator. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "But I am glad now I've 
 done what I have done. You'll remember me, 
 maybe, sometimes a little better more kindly, 
 when you think it over." 
 
 He didn't answer her. 
 
 "Of course now I couldn't expect," she said, 
 struggling on, "you'd think highly of me not 
 the way you did* I understand that, sir." 
 
 And still he held himself back. 
 
 "Is that all?" he asked, keeping all expression 
 out of his voice, when she was finally finished. 
 "All the sins you can think of you've got to 
 tell?"
 
 254. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Yes," she said, surprised. "Only this: You 
 don't believe," she said she had to say that much 
 "you don't believe I didn't give you the im- 
 pression that what they said about me that any- 
 thing they said in that trial was true could be 
 true!" 
 
 "What is this?" Cole Hawkins asked her. "An 
 insult?" A glare of lightning touched his hard- 
 set face when he said it. "Do you think that I'd 
 believe that?" 
 
 "I didn't. No," she said, in a very low voice 
 now. "We must hurry !" she said then, waking up 
 to the situation, now her part was done. "Look 
 what's coming!" 
 
 "We can wait a minute or two more, I expect," 
 he said, eying the sky. "We've got plenty of 
 speed. I've got something now I want to ask you 
 myself. You've told me the truth up to date 
 haven't you?" 
 
 "What!" she said sharply, drawing in her 
 breath. 
 
 "You have, haven't you?" 
 
 "Oh, Cole !" she said, looking up, not seeing his 
 trap. 
 
 "I believe you have. But I want you to tell 
 me one thing more.'* 
 
 "I'll I'll tell you anything, Cole," she said, 
 and stopped, waiting.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 255 
 
 "All right," he said. "It's very simple this 
 question. All I'm going to ask you is this: Do 
 you love me?" 
 
 "Oh!" she said with a quick, protesting cry. 
 "That isn't fair." 
 
 "No," he said. "I want to know." 
 
 "Supposing I did," she said, still avoiding him. 
 
 "No," he answered her. "You tell me!" 
 
 They were silent again, neither one noticing or 
 remembering that black storm that was coming 
 growling up after them. 
 
 "Yes," she said finally. "If if I hadn't I 
 wouldn't be here, would I?" 
 
 "Now let me tell you something," he told her. 
 "You've said all you want to now it's my turn 
 to talk for awhile. I'm going to marry you! 
 Understand?" 
 
 "Never," she said, rousing up. "Never!" 
 
 "You said you loved me." 
 
 "Yes," she said after awhile again. 
 
 "You know what'll happen to me if you don't ?" 
 he asked her. "You can promise yourself this 
 if you don't I'll go tearing into hell like a soul 
 afire. I don't have to tell you that." 
 
 She tried to deny it. 
 
 "You can't, that's all," he told her. "You 
 know it. You're not going to spoil both our lives 
 by your foolishness, not if I know it!"
 
 256 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "No," she said "Never. I'll never do it. 
 Never. You don't know what you're talking 
 albout not the way a woman would a girl! 
 I've thought it over too many times. It might 
 seem all right now but it isn't. I know. You'd 
 regret it always later. I know as you never 
 can." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "About a wife. A wife's all white or she's 
 nothing. I I think too much of you, Cole, to 
 bring you a wife that you'll have to explain and 
 defend all your life to your neighbours." 
 
 "What you've done," he told her in a loud 
 voice, "I'll hang up public and the neighbours 
 will bow down to it and be proud of it, just as I 
 am right now." 
 
 She smiled, happy to hear him say so, but not 
 changed in her own mind. 
 
 "No," she said, "you don't know what it is. 
 You can't the way I do !" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "To have whispering always following you and 1 
 fingers pointed behind your back. It would be 
 worse, I should think a thousand times about 
 your wife than about yourself !" 
 
 "I'd like to see them," he said, "just once, and 
 live!"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 257 
 
 "That's it, Cole. You see ? All I'd do would be 
 to make you suffer all the time." 
 
 But he wouldn't have it that way. 
 
 "No. No," she said, still denying him. "Don't 
 let's spoil the last minutes of our last ride to- 
 gether." 
 
 "Last ride !" he said with a rough laugh. "Yes 
 it is. It's the last ride we're going to take be- 
 fore you're married to me. Do you think I'll let 
 you go now I've got you?" he said, his voice 
 hoarsening. "Do you know what I'm going to do 
 now? I'm going to drive straight from here to 
 a minister and we're going to " 
 
 "Oh, Cole," she said. "Don't be such a boy !" 
 
 A great crack of thunder cut her off. 
 
 "Cole!" she cried out. "Look yonder! The 
 storm! It's going to be terrible." 
 
 "To hell with the storm," he said, but he did 
 start up a little when he caught the blackness and 
 heard the fear in her voice. 
 
 "But the first thing," he said, we're going to 
 decide is that you'll marry me now, tonight." 
 
 "No," she said again. "No. No! I'll bring 
 no man myself as a wife ; least of all, you, Cole ! 
 No," she said, repeating in a level voice that for- 
 mula she had worked out for herself, "a wife's all 
 white, Cole, or she's nothing! And nothing in
 
 258 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 the world can do that for me nothing could 
 change what people must always say about me 
 but a miracle and miracles don't happen nowa- 
 days any longer, Cole." 
 
 And just then, in the nick of time, her miracle 
 came along. 
 
 "Cole ! Cole !" she called to him, and sank down 
 into the low seat. "The storm !" 
 
 A great flare of wind beat the black trees over 
 them and filled her face and eyes with dust. A 
 big first spat of rain struck the car. He pressed 
 his foot on the accelerator, starting, it seems, for 
 a shelter which he had planned to reach before it 
 really broke. The great car jumped forward. 
 The dusty wind grew wilder. The rain began. 
 They were going now like the devil's express! 
 
 "Cole," she cried. "Did you see that?'* 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Something red lanterns there on the 
 ground !" 
 
 "That's nothing," he said. "They're just mak- 
 ing some little small repairs on this road. Not 
 much or it wouldn't be open at all." 
 
 And then they struck that open culvert.
 
 XX 
 
 WHEN she came to her senses she was 
 lying there on the surface of the road- 
 way the car, it seems, swerving as 
 it struck the farther side of the opening and throw- 
 ing her out forward, to one side. The rain was 
 slashing her face, the sky over her black as the in- 
 side of an iron pot. 
 
 "Cole! Cole!" she called, sitting up. 
 
 Another flash of lightning turned the sky above 
 the ragged jet-black trees into milk. She saw the 
 ditch, and when the lightning died she saw below 
 her the first small glow of fire starting. Then she 
 remembered dimly where she was, started up and 
 found without thinking of it one way or the other 
 that she was sound, apparently not seriously 
 hurt. 
 
 She stood then and stared over into the ditch 
 of the open culvert and saw what was probably 
 going to happen. And she knew she must do what- 
 ever was to be done herself. She was alone and 
 would be. All folks in their right senses had gone 
 scuttling home before that storm. For all she 
 
 knew she was entirely alone the boy was dead. 
 259
 
 260 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 The headlights were gone, the batteries and their 
 ^connections all smashed. But there was some faint 
 light from that fire just starting, as they say 
 they do, from the oil in the oil pan of the car be- 
 neath the engine. 
 
 Calling the boy's name still, White Shoulders 
 slid down into the ditch. It was only six or eight 
 feet high, but, striking the bottom in her fancy 
 shoes, she pitched forward on her face and hands. 
 Her hat fell and she snatched it off. Her wet 
 masses of hair came down. Her dress her mort- 
 gaged finery was plastered to her body by the 
 rain. She flung her hair back out of her face and 
 eyes and, leaning forward, she saw the boy at last. 
 
 He lay against one side of the ditch, the body 
 of the car half leaning against the bank but not 
 so as to crush him. She reached down, touched 
 him, found, with a great sob of happiness, that 
 he was alive, if not conscious but found too that 
 he was caught, held down. Then she came out 
 again and stared a second at the growing fire 
 underneath the hood fearing, naturally, first of 
 all, like she would, about the gasoline. 
 
 The rain poured down in solid sheets. On first 
 thought, it seemed to her, all she would need to do 
 would be to open the hood above the engine and let 
 the downpour in if she could find the way to do 
 it or the hood was not too crushed to allow it.
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 261 
 
 And then she thought she remembered dimly 
 the danger there might be in this. 
 
 If it were gasoline or oil which had started burn- 
 ing under there, the more water there was the more 
 the fire would spread, be carried along ; the quicker 
 the machine, the man, herself, the tank of gasoline 
 might be enveloped in a floating flame. 
 
 She knew practically nothing about an auto- 
 mobile but her decision, her whole instinct, was 
 to leave alone these things that she did not know 
 about might even very likely change for the 
 worse and hurry, make haste with all her soul, 
 to free the boy before the fire got him. 
 
 She crawled back again to see how she could do 
 this. He was caught, she found, in some way by 
 his arm and sleeve beneath the broken steering 
 wheel and the ditch wall. They were not, she 
 found, groping, held against masonry, but against 
 a fresh cut in the earth which, it appeared, had 
 been made for widening the old smaller culvert. 
 The smothered flame under the hood seemed to be 
 about the same. 
 
 The car lay on its side, only partly tipped over, 
 the front wheels on the outside away from the 
 wall, a foot and a half or two feet off the ground. 
 It had seemed to her when she first crawled up 
 upon the wreck that the machine might be balanced 
 as it lay, so that by standing out on its outside
 
 262 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 edge she might tip it back at least so much that 
 the weight from the steering wheel would be taken 
 off the unconscious boy. She tried this throwing 
 her whole weight on it. 
 
 The car, she thought for a minute, did move. 
 But then at once she saw, with sudden terror, 
 another thing. The motion that she caused 
 small as it was started oil or gasoline running 
 somewhere started the floating fire, which she had 
 feared. 
 
 By good luck, it appears, the fire did not flow 
 in the direction of the man she was trying to save, 
 but kept still fairly well under the engine though, 
 she was afraid, a little more than before under 
 the wooden body of the car. She stopped rack- 
 ing the car and starting up the flow of fire, how- 
 ever she had been doing it, and crawled carefully 
 back over the boy's body and started to dig against 
 the dirt bank. 
 
 The fire died down a little with the stopping of 
 the disturbance whatever it was she had done with 
 the gasoline or oil. The storm, with its sheets of 
 rain soaking the car body, held back to a great 
 extent the catching fire of the woodwork. 
 
 The girl dug frantically on bending over, 
 reaching down over the man's body clawing, first 
 with her bare fingers and then with a tool she had
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 263 
 
 put her hand on a sharp-mouthed wrench. It 
 was a question of time a race with fire. 
 
 Alone, drenched,, her clothing glued to her body, 
 she fought the fire and the storm. The rain 
 descended and the flood came; the lightning shot 
 down like blue devils out hunting sinners in the 
 dark; the afterclap of thunder shook loose the 
 iron bolts that clamp down the universe. And 
 from underneath a lot more fearful to her now! 
 than the storm came up, always more and more, 
 the smoke and smudge from that floating fire from 
 under her the catastrophe which threatened to 
 be the end of their universe at least, in the final 
 burning of the car or a sudden outburst from the 
 tank of gasoline. 
 
 She fought on alone, frantic, voiceless, desper- 
 ate a thing as primitive as the fire or the storm, 
 a human woman fighting for the thing she loved 
 and would easily and gladly by all the laws of 
 Nature give her life for. 
 
 The fire in the ruined machine was, it seemed to 
 her, growing now, from some cause. The leakage 
 or flow of gasoline might be increasing andl 
 the floating fire extending itself. Or the wood- 
 work in the car beneath might be at last catching. 
 For the smudge and heat beneath her, under the 
 car, were certainly growing. She dug on, tearing
 
 264. WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 with her crude tool, gasping but never stopping. 
 And it seemed to her at last she had the despair- 
 ing hope that very soon she would have that 
 thing that held him that wrist and coat sleeve 
 slipped out from under the comparatively slight 
 hold of the broken steering wheel. 
 
 And so she worked on and on. No longer White 
 Shoulders a confection, a whimsey built from 
 lace and ribbons, for the delectation of mankind; 
 something finer, older, more noble a woman. 
 Her clothing, soaked with rain, hung to her fine 
 limbs like draperies to a heroic statue not of 
 Victory; of Desperation, of Fighting Service, of 
 Eve, the primitive, who bore and reared the race 
 and fought and disobeyed God Almighty for the 
 thing she loved. 
 
 It was all naturally a matter of minutes, of 
 seconds all this though it had seemed hours. 
 The rain dropped off now finally quite a lot; 
 and the fire, though not spreading backward any 
 more maybe, was now evidently getting its hold 
 upon the car body. And from that, naturally, 
 would come the next and final danger the go- 
 ing of the tank of gasoline. 
 
 Then at last she saw the wrist and sleeve were 
 really coming free were free ! She cried out and 
 set to work to draw the boy's body out an awk- 
 ward thing to do. And as she pulled, and strained,
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 265 
 
 with some sudden pain, maybe, Cole Hawkins' 
 senses came back for one moment only. 
 
 "What's this?" he asked, his face close to hers 
 and fell limp again. 
 
 By now the flame real living fire was Start- 
 ing, showing through the cracks in the car bot- 
 tom. The girl's soaked clothing was fireproof 
 for the present at least; but the heat scorched 
 and blistered her, even burned her flesh, as she 
 tugged and lifted and dragged out her unconscious 
 load, struggling with all the strength of her wo- 
 man's body to pull the boy out of the tipped car, 
 to safety, the question always in her mind: 
 Could she do this before the gasoline tank went? 
 
 She moved him finally, dragged him a big, 
 strong, robust woman working at the top of her 
 nervous strength out from the machine ; out and 
 one side from the culvert to the soaked turf beside 
 the roadway, out of the danger of explosion from 
 the car when it came! That was the last the 
 final fierce expenditure of her strength. 
 
 They found them both there, side by side, when 
 the light of the burning car called out the people 
 from the nearest house. 
 
 The first I heard of it was at nine-twenty-one 
 o'clock. I can remember it from the impression 
 made on me by the hands of the office clock, which 
 I stared at while they were telling me the news on
 
 266 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 the telephone. For the folks that found them 
 near their place knew me and knew that I knev? 
 the boy quite intimately. 
 
 "Cole Hawkins and a girl have been killed out 
 here together in an auto accident !" this man called 
 over the wire. "I thought you'd want to know. 
 They were making over a culvert out here on the 
 main road," he said, telling me the particulars of 
 how it happened, "and they say the workmen must 
 have gone away after work in the evening and 
 forgotten to stop up the road where they'd been 
 driving the work teams in. The temporary fence 
 wasn't set up, and the red lanterns were just sit- 
 ting there, at one side on the ground. It must 
 have been raining, when they got there, and they 
 jumped right into the jaws of the thing. I'll 
 tell you more later," he said and shut off. 
 
 And right after that he called up again. 
 
 "More folks have just come in from out there," 
 he told me this time, "and they say they ain't 
 either of them dead. But they're going to take 
 them both right over to the hospital."
 
 XXI 
 
 THEY let me see the doctors after they were 
 through about as soon as anybody. 
 "He's coming out all right now," they 
 told me. "He's certainly tough. He was stunned 
 for awhile, and one wrist was crushed some but 
 not so we won't save it." 
 
 "What about her the girl?" 
 
 "She was burned a little but not deep. She 
 got him out in just about time. And natu- 
 rally she's bruised and battered. But she's not 
 hurt bad. She'll be all right. You can see them 
 both tomorrow sometime. But in the meantime 
 there's one thing I wish you could do I wish you 
 could keep that mother of the girl out of here. 
 She's too noisy; we can't have her in there with 
 the girl. And we can't have her prowling round 
 the corridors here like a hyena deprived of its 
 young. Those two are all right all they want 
 is rest the girl from her mother especially. 
 Judge, you come tell her so. Take her away. 
 Issue a subpoena or injunction or something and 
 take her home with you to your common habita- 
 tion at Mrs. Tusset's." 
 
 So I made myself useful and took her home and 
 267
 
 268 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 amused her let her talk to me till some three or 
 four o'clock in the morning, going over the rear- 
 ing of the girl, White Shoulders, from the begin- 
 ning of her education in finery and allurements. 
 
 The woman was rather violent at first. 
 
 "They've shut me out from my baby, my Vir- 
 ginia!" she wailed to me. "When she most needs 
 me!" 
 
 It occurred to me then finally entirely of my 
 own motion that never, as matters were now 
 shaping, would I have a better opportunity to 
 act in the capacity of the so-called god in the ma- 
 chine. Having apparently been forced into the 
 position of fate with these two youngsters, why not 
 take the longer view and do a real good lasting 
 job looking into their far future, as I conceived 
 it now about to be? 
 
 So the conversation not entirely unguided by 
 me moved in the direction of the other offspring 
 of Robert Lee, who, as I had suspected for 
 some days, seemed on the point of being released 
 from his short term in prison. 
 
 "I should expect, madam," I told his mother, 
 "that you will be going to be with him that 
 he will need you now, undoubtedly." 
 
 "He will judge," she told me, "I expect. I 
 reared him tenderly to depend on me."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 269 
 
 * I was going to say," I told her, "that very 
 likely, in case you felt like taking my assistance 
 and advice, I might be of some service to you in 
 that matter in getting the boy placed right when 
 he was free again." 
 
 "I would take your advice, judge," she an- 
 swered, complimenting me, "anywhere ! On any- 
 thing! I value it above all things. Would you 
 advise my going and waiting for him outside the 
 prison until he is released?" 
 
 Her mind ran like wildfire to the first sug- 
 gestion of romance and chivalry and heroic 
 postures. She lived all her life a maid with 
 long and unbound hair staring out a postern 
 window over a moat bounded by blood-red lilies. 
 
 "But what about the means for this?" she asked, 
 remembering. "And what about my child, my 
 Virginia? Are you so certain that she is to 
 survive this shock that she will surely recover? 
 
 "She will recover," I said, "absolutely. The 
 doctors assure me so." 
 
 "Unblemished? Unscarred?" 
 
 "I understand so," I told her. "The thing 
 now that you and I must look forward to is 
 beyond that to what may come out of this 
 present situation." 
 
 "I see, judge," she said, looking at me keenly
 
 270 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 over her pocket handkerchief, her rouge again in 
 a bad state of disrepair. 
 
 "I'm afraid, ma'am," I said, "you will think I 
 am too hard and practical in this matter, for 
 you, I know, are a good lot of a romanticist by 
 nature." 
 
 "I may be, judge, sir," she said. "Too much 
 so, I'm afraid. Go ahead, please." 
 
 "What I was going to say, ma'am," I told her 
 "was this: You find yourself in a somewhat 
 delicate position in your present situation." 
 
 "I do, yes," she assented. 
 
 "Your finances, in the first place, are in none 
 too good a shape. Several other matters are 
 coming up that may embarrass you, and I was 
 going to suggest a course of action, if you will 
 not consider it thrusting myself too much into 
 your affairs." 
 
 "Judge," she said, "nothing would please me 
 more than to have you handle them for me if 
 you would, sir. I consider it most generous of 
 you to offer, sir. What would you advise? I 
 have come to regard you, sir, as I would my own 
 brother. I depend on you in just that way." 
 
 "This matter," I told her then very gravely, 
 "it seems to me that I want to talk to you about 
 now marks a very critical juncture, if I may 
 say so, madam, in your affairs."
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 271 
 
 "Go ahead, please, sir," she directed me. 
 
 "Well, madam," I told her then, "if we start 
 at the beginning in your affairs, I expect we can 
 agree upon one thing." 
 
 "What's that, judge?" she asked me. 
 
 "That an advantageous marriage in fact this 
 particular marriage which may result from the 
 present situation would be an almost ideal 
 solution of the problems of your girl and, to 
 an extent, yourself. And perhaps, in fact, the 
 only possible one." 
 
 "Yes, sir," she told me. "There's no doubt 
 of that, sir." 
 
 "Now here," I told her, "is where I think I 
 may serve you if you will permit me. I am not 
 practiced, madam," I said, "in matchmaking. 
 But in this particular case, maybe, I might have 
 some advantages." 
 
 "Over me !" she said, catching my idea at once 
 
 "Over anybody," I said, "alive. I go so far, 
 ma'am, as to flatter myself." 
 
 "It's true, sir, I know it," she answered me. 
 
 "So, if you will leave this matter for the present 
 in my care if you will permit me, madam, for 
 the time being to act as sole director of this 
 romantic situation, it might be of very practical 
 advantage to you and your affairs. I feel I can 
 assure you, in fact, that it will be. Whereas,
 
 272 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 under some other circumstances, a false step or 
 bad management of any kind might prove fatal." 
 
 She looked at me understanding my intimation 
 fully, and still concealing its full meaning from 
 herself. Half romantic or romantically un- 
 balanced, as Sam Barsam would say; half or a 
 little more than half, with a clear eye on the 
 necessities, now so very sharp and pressing. 
 
 "And then, naturally," I hinted, "there might 
 be some advantages which I personally might 
 bring to you would be glad to, if you would 
 feel you could put the guidance of your affairs 
 more or less unreservedly into my|hands. If you, 
 for instance, should undertake your new duty 
 your now obvious obligation of taking up your 
 residence with your Robert Lee I might, I 
 expect, be of assistance in some ways in getting 
 your boy and yourself started in life." 
 
 "Judge," she said, "this is too much too much 
 of an added obligation, sir !" 
 
 "Not at all, ma'am. It will be a delight, 
 provided you feel you can put the rearrangement 
 of your affairs rather fully in my hands." 
 
 "If I only could, sir," she said. 
 
 "You can, certainly," I told her. 
 
 "I have made an awfii mess of them, sir, 
 haven't I?" she asked. 
 
 "It will certainly be a pleasure to me in more
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 273 
 
 ways than one," I told her, avoiding that 
 particular question. "For example, it will be a 
 delight, ma'am an unbounded delight to have 
 a free hand in dealing with that dressmaker 
 that scoundrel, A. Gluber, in St. Louis the 
 way I've got a plan to do, ma'am if you really 
 desire to put your affairs into my hands !" 
 
 "Oh, judge," she said with a little shudder, "if 
 you only will take them ! If you only will, sir 1" 
 
 I had given her the opportunity of withdrawing 
 from the present situation in which alone I was 
 interested with all the romantic honours of war ; 
 and the practical advantages of reprieve from a 
 desperate situation, thus satisfying her dual 
 personality on both sides. She had accepted. 
 Yet my own advantage, I could still see, had 
 not yet been pushed to its ultimate and logical 
 conclusion. I consequently pushed on from that 
 point. 
 
 "All this," I told her, "provided, naturally, 
 that we can bring about that I can bring about 
 what we both desire between your daughter and 
 my young friend Hawkins which is still some- 
 thing of a problem, considering the state of their 
 minds when I last knew about them. It will be a 
 delicate situation, in which I shall have to use my 
 judgment, you understand, ma'am, unhamp*- 
 ered."
 
 274 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 She looked at me some time without speaking. 
 
 "Judge," she said finally, "let us be frank. I 
 am a mother, sir, yet I have some sense, some 
 intelligence." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," I said, waiting. 
 
 "Judge," she said then after more hesitating, 
 "I think I believe I see what you mean, sir. You 
 mean to say that my presence at this time would 
 be a detriment rather than a help to the eventua- 
 tion of this marriage, sir." 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," I answered her. "If by that 
 you mean your actual physical presence." 
 
 "And even later when if if they become 
 married, sir?" 
 
 "Yes, ma'am, I'm afraid so," I told her, not 
 mincing matters. "Not, of course," I said, "your 
 entire absence. But your continued presence with 
 them for any length of time would be inadvisable." 
 
 She took it somewhat dramatically, speaking at 
 length of the passions and ambitions and sacrifices 
 of motherhood, yet not really hard after all. One 
 side at least of her nature her practical side 
 was satisfied. I gained at last the understanding 
 I aimed for perhaps the most forehanded act 
 of diplomacy in my life all in anticipation of 
 an event still in the deep calm shadow of the future. 
 
 Wild horses, I knew, would not have dragged
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 275 
 
 the boy away from the girl nothing would have 
 prevented him, not even that mother. But why, 
 as Sam Barsam said why not in times of pros- 
 perity lay the foundations for adversity? Why 
 not, while beginning, found the air castles of 
 young love and matrimony on a rock? This at 
 least was my reasoning in my one official promo- 
 tion and futherance of that "great law of Nature 
 which operates so inexorably upon the young. 
 
 I saw Cole Hawkins first at the hospital in the 
 morning sitting up in his bed, his arm in a sling. 
 
 "How is she?" he asked me first. "Are they 
 telling me the truth? Is she only hurt a little 
 like they say?'* 
 
 By that time I could assure him that she was. 
 
 "What if I'd killed her?" he asked, and stared 
 off again under that thick mop of hair of his. 
 "What a reckless fool I've always been," he said 
 finally ; and then he told me about what he'd been 
 intending to do that night before to make her 
 marry him then and there to carry her off with 
 him. "But she wouldn't, judge," he said, staring 
 off, "and do you know why ?" 
 
 "Why?" I asked him back, though he must 
 have known that I knew, if he had stopped to 
 think. 
 
 "Because she thought she wasn't good enough
 
 276 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 for me !" he said with a harsh laugh. "For me !" 
 he said, in a bitter, scornful laugh and stared 
 on out the window opposite him. 
 
 "You don't deserve quite so good luck, I'll say 
 myself, as that girl is," I told him. 
 
 "Judge," he said to me, "think of it ! What she 
 did last night for me. And that ain't all," he 
 said. "She dragged me out of hell once before." 
 And he told me again how she got him to stop 
 drinking. 
 
 "You didn't stay put very well, did you?" I 
 asked him. 
 
 "I would have, judge," he told me, fastening 
 those fiery black eyes on me, "if she hadn't quit me. 
 If I'd had her I'd have been all right. And I'm not 
 fooling myself in that either, judge. When I say 
 I can do a thing, sir, I can generally be counted 
 on to do it. You know that." 
 
 "You've got a mind of your own, I expect 
 when you get it set on anything," I agreed. 
 
 "What do they keep me here for?" he inquired, 
 lashing out with his feet under the bedclothes 
 instead of answering. "I'm not sick. Why 
 don't they let me up?" 
 
 "Maybe they want you to rest," I told him. 
 
 "Look a here, judge," he said finally. "Do you 
 suppose, anyway, I might still have a chance
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 277 
 
 after everything after last night, almost killing 
 her? Do you suppose I might have a chance 
 with her?" 
 
 "Some surface indications might point that 
 way," I told him. "Only for that idea that she's 
 got in her head that she won't marry you." 
 
 And he swore a little under his breath, and 
 threshed round in bed again. 
 
 "Look a here, judge," he said. "They'll let you 
 see her maybe, now. You say she's not so very 
 bad." 
 
 "See her?" grinning a little in spite of myself. 
 
 "Yes, sir. And find out, maybe how I stand 
 there now." 
 
 "Well now, sir," I told him, "as long as I seem 
 to be chosen by fate as Cupid, God of Love, and 
 in order to insure and promote the general peace 
 and welfare of Prendergast County, I'll make the 
 attempt sir if you say so." 
 
 "Go on judge," he begged, not cracking a smile 
 "Will you please, sir?" 
 
 So I went out into the hospital corridor again, 
 and they finally let me into her room, where she 
 was sitting up in bed, all bandaged up. 
 
 "Judge !" she called out, and held out her arms 
 to me. And I went over by her bedside. 
 
 "What do you think of me? How do you like
 
 278 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 these bandages?" she asked me when I stood up 
 again and sat down in the chair by her bed. Her 
 voice was almost gay. 
 
 "You look well enough to me," I said. "Why?" 
 
 "How would you like to look at these forever?" 
 
 "What?" I said. "Are you scarred?" 
 
 "Probably I am," she told me. 
 
 "Don't believe a word she says," the nurse said 
 to me. "There won't be a mark on her in two 
 weeks." 
 
 And then the nurse went out. 
 
 "You had a pretty narrow squeak of it, 
 daughter," I told Virginia. 
 
 "Yes," she said. 
 
 "But there's one thing, anyhow," I said, smiling 
 over at her. 
 
 "What's that?" she answered, smiling back. 
 
 "Your miracle's come at last." 
 
 "My miracle?" she said back. 
 
 "You know what I mean, ma'am," I said, 
 smiling. "The one thing you were always revert- 
 ing to that would clear up your insuperable 
 objections to matrimony." 
 
 "What is it you mean, sir?" she still asked me. 
 
 "That," I said, and I pointed round the room. 
 The place was full of flowers, banks and mounds 
 of them. "The opinion of your contemporaries,"
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 279 
 
 I told her. "Your standing in the public estima- 
 tion." 
 
 And I told her some of the nice things I had 
 heard about her in the town the general praise 
 and admiration of what she had done. 
 
 "I've come," I told her finally, "to you from 
 one of your many admirers to talk to you as an 
 ambassador." 
 
 "From who?" she said, her eyes shining, but 
 her voice dropping. 
 
 "Cole Hawkins," I told her, and waited for her 
 to speak. 
 
 "Well ?" I said when she refused to. 
 
 "Judge, I can't do it. I've thought it all over," 
 she insisted. But there was no flavour, no deter- 
 mination, to her voice. 
 
 "Don't be foolish, Virginia don't put by your 
 miracle when it comes right up to you," I said, 
 smiling at her. 
 
 "But he's told you, I expect," she went on, 
 persisting a little further, "what I told him last 
 night. I can't I can't bring him a wife he'd 
 have all his life to defend. x I can't bring him a 
 wife they'll all be pointing at and whispering 
 after." 
 
 "Whispering?" I said. "You're wrong." 
 
 "Wrong?" she said, watching me.
 
 280 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 "Whispering?" I told her. "No. They're 
 shouting since last night. If you want to know 
 about your present reputation if you want the 
 judgment and opinion of your contemporaries 
 there they stand all round you," I said, pointing 
 out the flowers in the room. "You've got more 
 admirers and friends today," I said, "than any 
 girl south of the Mason and Dixon's Line and 
 that's the strongest statement all history contains, 
 ma'am. What's more," I went on, "there's one 
 of them that's burning up now just to see you to 
 speak about four words in question form. 
 And I'm going out and get him dressed and bring 
 him in to see you." 
 
 "No, judge," she said in a faint voice. "No." 
 
 "This is under doctor's advice," I assured her. 
 "I'm acting as an expert. It will be the best 
 possible treatment for both your cases," I said, 
 "if he comes in here for just two minutes or so." 
 
 "Oh, I couldn't possibly, judge," she said. 
 "Not the way I look now !" 
 
 I stepped over to the door and called in the nurse 
 again from the anteroom. 
 
 "You help fix this young woman up," I said to 
 her. "Make her bandages look as sweet-pretty 
 and as ornamental as you can. But don't take off 
 one of them, understand. Put some more on if 
 you can. I'm going to bring in a visitor in about
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 281 
 
 ten minutes who will think those bandages are 
 the finest ornaments a woman ever wore in this 
 world. Which I do myself," I said, turning round 
 to go. 
 
 But she made me lean over once more till she 
 kissed me. 
 
 "Don't hurry. Don't hurry too much," she 
 said in a flustered voice when I went out. "Not 
 in less than half an hour, anyhow." 
 
 When I left I stumbled over two or three more 
 great bouquets being brought in for which two 
 or three more gardens had been ravished. 
 
 I went back into the room where I had left Cole 
 Hawkins. He was shaking all over. 
 
 "You're a real bad man, ain't you?" I said to 
 him. "You're a dangerous-looking customer." 
 
 "Quit your fooling, judge," he said. "What 
 did she say to you?" 
 
 "I expect," I told him, "she might see you 
 in about half an hour from now. Now wait 
 a minute," I said. "Hold on! You've got to 
 wait for us to get your clothes on before you go. 
 And don't knock that arm, either! There's 
 plenty of time twenty-five minutes anyhow before 
 she can see you." 
 
 I stayed with him till his time was up. 
 
 "You'll need a best man," I said, "to take 
 you over there."
 
 282 WHITE SHOULDERS 
 
 And I went with him down the corridor and 
 knocked at the door. 
 
 "Stop shivering and shaking," I said to him. 
 "Haven't I told you it's all right?" 
 
 And then the nurse opened the door and it closed 
 after them. 
 
 I saw old Judge Pendleton on the street that 
 noon, the first time I'd seen him off his old plan- 
 tation for years. The whole town had come down 
 to see that black and twisted Child of Hell backed 
 up in the culvert. 
 
 "Well, sir," he said, "judge, I came out to 
 see that thing that auto accident, where that girl 
 saved young Cole Hawkins alone, with all the 
 chances against her. And I want to say to you, 
 sir, that was a magnificent act! 
 
 "By God, sir, I went through the Civil War, sir. 
 I've seen considerable of life and I'm no sentimen- 
 talist or idealist, sir. But sir, that was the 
 bravest, most desperate act of hers digging him 
 out alone from that burning car I ever heard of. 
 You wouldn't believe looking at that black wreck 
 there, and what she must have done to get him out 
 that human nature was capable of it, sir let 
 alone a delicately reared Southern woman, sir. 
 You wouldn't have said it could be done." 
 
 "Judge," I said, "you know, and I know,
 
 WHITE SHOULDERS 283 
 
 better, sir! You know a good woman is capable 
 of anything any sacrifice, sir reasonable or 
 unreasonable for the man she loves. That's 
 what makes them what they are to us, sir. The 
 finest thing in this hard and desperate world." 
 
 THE END