; CHAUNCEY WETMORE WELLS 1872-1933 This book belonged to Chauncey Wetmore Wells. He taught in Yale College, of which he was a graduate, from 1897 to I 9 OI > an ^ from 1901 to 1933 at this University. Chauncey Wells was, essentially, a scholar. The range of his read ing was wide, the breadth of his literary sympathy as uncommon as the breadth of his human sympathy. He was less concerned with the collection of facts than with meditation upon their sig nificance. His distinctive power lay in his ability to give to his students a subtle perception of the inner implications of form, of manners, of taste, of the really disciplined and discriminating mind. And this perception appeared not only in his thinking and teaching but also in all his relations with books and with men. Collier <0rajmm THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER AND OTHER STORIES. i2mo, $1.25 STORIES OF THE FOOT-HILLS i6mo, $1.25 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK The Wizard s Daughter and Other Stories The V Daughter a >fBet; Stories By Margaret Collier Graham BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY CtitersiDc press, ambriti0e 1905 , c COPYRIGHT IQOS BY MARGARET COLLIER GRAHAM , < ( ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published September rtjoj IN MEMORIAM C, U CONTENTS PAGE The Wizard s Daughter i Marg et Ann ...... 67 At the Foot of the Trail 133 Lib 169 For Value Received 181 The Face of the Poor 205 86S70O The Wizard s Daughter The Wizard s Daughter THERE had been a norther during the day, and at sunset the valley, seen from Dysart s cabin on the mesa, was a soft blur of golden haze. The wind had hurled the yellow leaves from the vineyard, exposing the gnarled deformity of the vines, and the trail ing branches of the pepper-trees had swept their fallen berries into coral reefs on the southerly side. A young man with a delicate, discontented face sat on the porch of the Dysart claim cabin, looking out over the valley. A last gust of lukewarm air strewed the floor with scythe-shaped eucalyptus-leaves, and Mrs. Dysart came out with her broom to sweep them away. She was a large woman, with a crease at her waist that buried her apron-strings, and the little piazza, creaked ominously as she 3 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER walked about. The invalid got up with a man s instyn-ciiv-s distrust of a broom, and begau to ;irtove away. " Don t disturb yourself, Mr. Palmerston," she said, waving him back into his chair with one hand, and speaking in a large, level voice, as if she were quelling a mob, "don t disturb yourself; I won t raise any dust. Does the north wind choke you up much ? " "Oh, no," answered the young fellow, carelessly; " it was a rather more rapid change of air than I bargained for, but I guess it s over now." " Sick folks generally think the north wind makes them nervous. Some of them say it s the electricity; but I think it s because most of em s men-folks, and being away from their families, they naturally blame things on the weather." Mrs. Dysart turned her ample back toward her hearer, and swept a leaf-laden cobweb from the corner of the window. The young man s face relaxed. " I don t think it made me nervous," he said. " But then, I m not very ill. I m out 4 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER here for my mother s health. She threatened to go into a decline if I did n t come." " Well, you ve got a consumptive build," said Mrs. Dysart, striking her broom on the edge of the porch, " and you re light-com plected; that s likely to mean scrofula. You d ought to be careful. California s a good deal of a hospital, but it don t do to depend too much on the climate. It ain t right; it s got to be blessed to your use." Palmerston smiled, and leaned his head against the redwood wall of the cabin. Mrs. Dysart creaked virtuously to and fro behind her broom. " Is n t that Mr. Dysart s team ? " asked the young man, presently, looking down the valley. His companion walked to the edge of the porch and pushed back her sunbonnet to look. "Yes," she announced, "that s Jawn; he s early." She piled her cushiony hands on the end of the broom-handle, and stood still, gazing absently at the approaching team. S THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER " I hope your mother s a Christian wo man," she resumed, with a sort of corpulent severity. The young man s face clouded, and then cleared again whimsically. "I really never inquired," he said lightly; " but I am inclined to think she is. She is certainly not a pagan." "You spoke as if she was a good deal wrapped up in you," continued his hostess, addressing herself unctuously to the land scape. " I was thinkin she d need some thing to sustain her if you was to be taken away. There s nothing but religion that can prepare us for whatever comes. I won der who that Jawn s a-bringin now," she broke off suddenly, holding one of her fat hands above her eyes and leaning forward with a start. " He does pick up the queerest lot. I just held my breath the other day when I saw him fetchin you. I d been wantin a boarder all summer, and kind of lookin for one, but I was n t no more ready for you than if you d been measles. It does seem sometimes as if men-folks take a satis- 6 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER faction in seem how they can put a woman to." Mrs. Dysart wabbled heavily indoors, where she creaked about unresignedly, put ting things to rights. Palmerston closed his eyes and struggled with a smile that kept breaking into a noiseless laugh. He had a fair, high-bred face, and his smile empha sized its boyishness. When the wagon rattled into the acacias west of the vineyard, he got up and saun tered toward the barn. John Dysart saw him coming, and took two or three steps toward him with his hand at the side of his mouth. " He s deaf," he whispered with a violent facial enunciation which must have assailed the stranger s remaining senses like a yell. " I think you 11 like him ; he s a wonderful talker." The newcomer was a large, seedy-looking man, with the resigned, unexpectant manner of the deaf. Dysart went around the wagon, and the visitor put up his trumpet. " Professor Brownell," John called into it, THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER " I want to make you acquainted with Mr. Palmerston. Mr. Palmerston is a young man from the East, a student at Cambridge no, Oxford" " Ann Arbor," interrupted the young man, eagerly. Dysart ignored the interruption. " He s out here for his health." The stranger nodded toward the young man approvingly, and dropped the trumpet as if he had heard enough. "How do you do, Mr. Palmerston?" he said, reaching down to clasp the young fel low s slim white hand. " I ? m glad to meet a scholar in these wilds." Palmerston blushed a helpless pink, and murmured politely. The stranger dismounted from the wagon with the awkwardness of age and avoirdupois. John Dysart stood just behind his guest, describing him as if he were a panorama: " I never saw his beat. He talks just like a book. He s filled me chuck-full of science on the way up. He knows all about the in side of the earth from the top crust to China. 8 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER Ask him something about his machine, and get him started." Palmerston glanced inquiringly toward the trumpet. The stranger raised it to his ear and leaned graciously toward him. " Mr. Dysart is mistaken," called Palmer ston, in the high, lifeless voice with which we all strive to reconcile the deaf to their afflic tion ; " I am a Western man, from Ann Arbor." " Better still, better still," interrupted the newcomer, grasping his hand again ; "you 11 be broader, more progressive < the heir of all the ages, and so forth. I was denied such privileges in my youth. But nature is an open book, sermons in stones. " He turned to ward the wagon and took out a small leather valise, handling it with evident care. Dysart winked at the young man, and pointed toward the satchel. "Jawn," called Mrs. Dysart seethingly, from the kitchen door, "what s the trou ble?" John s facial contortions stopped abruptly, as if the mainspring had snapped. He took 9 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER off his hat and scratched his head gingerly with the tip of his little finger. He had a round, bald head, with a fringe of smooth, red-brown hair below the baldness that made it look like a filbert. " I m coming, Emeline," he called, glan cing hurriedly from the two men to the vicinity of his wife s voice, as if anxious to bisect himself mentally and leave his hospi tality with his guest. " I 11 look after Professor Brownell," said Palmerston ; " he can step into my tent and brush up." Dysart s countenance cleared. "Good," he said eagerly, starting on a quick run toward the kitchen door. When he was half-way there he turned and put up his hand again. " Draw him out! " he called in a stentorian whisper. " You d ought to hear him talk ; it ? s great. Get him started about his machine." Palmerston smiled at the unnecessary ad monition. The stranger had been talking all the time in a placid, brook-like manner while he felt under the wagon-seat for a 10 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER second and much smaller traveling-bag. The young man possessed himself of this after having been refused the first by a gentle motion of the owner s hand. The visitor accepted his signal of invitation, and followed him toward the tent. " Our universities and colleges are useful in their way; they no doubt teach many things that are valuable: but they are not practical; they all fail in the application of knowledge to useful ends. I am not an ed ucated man myself, but I have known many who are, and they are all alike shallow, superficial, visionary. They need to put away their books and sit down among the everlasting hills and think. You have done well to come out here, young man. This is good; you will grow." He stopped at the door of the tent and took off his rusty hat. The breeze blew his long linen duster about his legs. " Have you looked much into electrical phe nomena? " he asked, putting up his trumpet. Palmerston moved a step back, and said: " No; not at all." Then he raised his hand ii THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER to possess himself of the ear-piece, and col ored as he remembered that it was not a telephone. His companion seemed equally oblivious of his confusion and of his reply. " I have made some discoveries," he went on; "I shall be pleased to talk them over with you. They will revolutionize this coun try." He waved his hand toward the mesa. " Every foot of this land will sometime blos som as the rose ; greasewood and sage-brush will give place to the orange and the vine. Water is king in California, and there are rivers of water locked in these mountains. We must find it; yes, yes, my young friend, we must find it, and we can find it. I have solved that. The solution is here." He stooped and patted his satchel affectionately. " This little instrument is California s best friend. There is a future for all these valleys, wilder than our wildest dreams." Palmerston nodded with a guilty feeling of having approved statements of which he intended merely to acknowledge the receipt, and motioned his guest into the white twi light of the tent. 12 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER "Make yourself comfortable, professor," he called. " I want to find Dysart and get my mail." As he neared the kitchen door Mrs. Dy- sart s voice came to him enveloped in the sizzle of frying meat. "Well, I don t know, Jawn; he may n t be just the old-fashioned water-witch, but it ain t right; it s tamperin with the secrets of the Most High, that s what I think." " Well, now, Emeline, you had n t ought to be hasty. He don t lay claim to anything more n natural ; he says it s all based on scientific principles. He says he can tell me just where to tunnel Now, here s Mr. Palmerston; he s educated. I m going to rely on him." " Well, I m goin to rely on my heavenly Fawther," said Mrs. Dysart solemnly, from the quaking pantry. Palmerston stood in the doorway, smil ing. John jumped up and clapped his hand vigorously on his breast pockets. "Well, now, there! I left your mail in the wagon in my other coat," he said, hook- 13 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER ing his arm through the young man s and drawing him toward the barn. " Did you get him turned on? " he asked eagerly, when they were out of his wife s hearing. " How does he strike you, anyway? Doesn t he talk like a book ? He wants me to help him find a claim show him the corners, you know. He s got a daughter down at Los Angeles; she 11 come up and keep house for him. He says he 11 locate water on shares if I 11 help him find a claim and do the tunneling. Emeline she s afraid I 11 get left, but I think she ll come round. Is n t it a caution the way he talks sci ence?" Palmerston acknowledged that it was. " The chances are that he is a fraud, Dy- sart," he said kindly; "most of those peo ple are. I d be very cautious about com mitting myself." " Oh, I m cautious," protested John; " that s one of my peculiarities. Emeline thinks because I look into things I m not to be trusted. She s so quick herself she can t understand anybody that s slow and care- 14 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER ful. Here s your letters quite a batch of em. Would you mind our putting up a cot in your tent for the professor ? " " Not at all," said the young fellow good- naturedly. " It s excellent discipline to have a deaf man about; you realize how little you have to say that s worth saying." "That s a fact, that s a fact," said Dysart, rather too cheerfully acquiescent. " A man that can talk like that makes you ashamed to open your head." Palmerston fell asleep that night to the placid monotone of the newcomer s voice, and awoke at daybreak to hear the same conversational flow just outside the tent. Per haps it was Dysart s explosive " Good-morn ing, professor ! " which seemed to have missed the trumpet and hurled itself against the canvas wall of the tent close to the sleeper s ear, that awoke him. He sat up in bed and tried to shake off the conviction that his guest had been talking all night. Dysart s greeting made no break in the cheerful opti mism that filtered through the canvas. " Last night I was an old man and 15 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER dreamed dreams; this morning I am a young man and see visions. I see this thirsty plain fed by irrigating-ditches and covered with bearing orchards. I am impatient to be off on our tramp. This is an ideal spot. With five acres of orange-trees here, pro ducing a thousand dollars per acre, one might give his entire time to scientific in vestigation." " He d want to look after the gophers some," yelled Dysart. " I am astonished that this country is so little appreciated," continued Brownell, blindly unheeding. " It is no doubt due to the reckless statements of enthusiasts. It is a wonderful country wonderful, wonder ful, wonderful! " There was a diminuendo in the repeated adjective that told Palmerston the speaker was moving toward the house; and it was from that direction that he heard Mrs. Dysart, a little later, assuring her visitor, in a high, depressed voice, that she had n t found the country yet that would support anybody without elbow-grease, and she did n t expect 16 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER to till it was Gawd s will to take her to her heavenly home. John Dysart and his visitor returned from their trip in the mountains, that evening, tired, dusty, and exultant. The professor s linen duster had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston s tent door, his finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content. " This is certainly the promised land," he said gravely, " a land flowing with milk and honey. Nature has done her share lavishly: soil, climate, scenery everything but wa ter; yes, and water, too, waiting for the brain, the hand of man, the magic touch of science the one thing left to be conquered to give the sense of mastery, of possession. This country is ours by right of conquest." He waved his hands majestically toward the val ley. " In three months we shall have a stream flowing from these mountains that will trans form every foot of ground before you. These 7 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER people seem worthy, though somewhat nar row. It will be a pleasure to share prosper ity with them as freely as they share their poverty with me." Palmerston glanced conversationally to ward the trumpet, and his companion raised it to his ear. " Dysart is a poor man," shouted Palmer ston, " but he is the best fellow in the world. I should hate to see him risk anything on an uncertainty." Brownell had been nodding his head back ward and forward with dreamy emphasis; he now shook it horizontally, closing his eyes. "There is no uncertainty," he said, lowering his trumpet; "that is the advan tage of science: you can count upon it with absolute certainty. I am glad the man is poor very glad; it heightens the pleasure of helping him." The young man turned away a trifle im patiently. "A reservoir will entail some expense," the professor rambled on; "but the money will come. < To him that hath shall be given. 18 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER Palmerston s face completed the quota tion, but the speaker went on without open ing his eyes: "When the water is once flowing out of the tunnel, capital will flow into it." " A good deal of capital will flow into the tunnel before any water flows out of it," growled Palmerston, taking advantage of his companion s physical defect to relieve his mind. Later in the evening Dysart drew the young man into the family conference, rely ing upon the sympathy of sex in the effort to allay his wife s misgivings. " The tunnel won t cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do myself," main tained the little man, " and the professor says we 11 strike water that 11 drown us out before we ve gone a hundred feet Erne- line here she s afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her it s pure science. It is n t any more wonderful than a needle traveling toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off it is, something like a compass I don t un- 19 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER derstand it, but I can see that it ain t any more meraculous than a telegraph. It s sci ence." " Oh, yes, I know," mourned Mrs. Dysart, who overflowed a small rocking-chair on the piazza; " there s folks that think the creation of the world in six days is nothin but sci ence, but they re not people for Christians to be goin pardners with. If Gawd has put a hundred feet of dirt on top of that water, I tell Jawn he had his reasons, and I can t think it s right for anybody whose treasure ought to be laid up in heaven to go pryin into the bowels of the earth huntin for things that our heavenly Fawther s hid." " But there s gold, Emeline." "Oh, yes; I know there s gold, and I know the love of money is the root of all evil. I don t say that the Lord don t reign over the inside of the earth, but I do say that people that get their minds fixed on things that s underground are liable to forget the things that are above." " Well, now, I m sure they had n t ought," protested Dysart. " I m sure the earth is 20 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER the Lord s, and the fullness thereof, Erne- line." Mrs. Dysart sank slowly back in her chair at this unexpected thrust from her own wea pon, and then rallied with a long, corpulent sigh. "Well, I don t know. You recollect that old man was up here last winter, hammerin around among the rocks as if the earth was a big nut that he was tryin to crack ? I talked with him long enough to find out what he was; he was an atheist" Mrs. Dysart leaned forward and whis pered the last word in an awe-struck tone, with her fat eyes fixed reproachfully upon her husband. "Oh, I guess not, Emeline," pleaded John. Mrs. Dysart shut her lips and her eyes very tight, and nodded slowly and affirmatively. " Yes, he was. He set right in that identi cal spot where Mr. Palmerston is a-settin , and talked about the seven theological peri ods of creation, and the fables of Jonah and the whale and Noah s ark, till I was all of a 21 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER tremble. Mebbe that s science, Jawn, but / call it blasphemin ." Dysart rested his elbows on his knees and looked over the edge of the porch as if he were gazing into the bottomless pit. " Oh, come, now, Mrs. Dysart," Palmer- ston broke in cheerfully; "I m not at all afraid of Mr. Dysart losing his faith, but I m very much afraid of his losing his money. I wish he had as good a grip on his purse as he has on his religion." Mrs. Dysart glanced at the young man with a look of relief to find him agreeing with her in spite of his irreverent commingling of the temporal and the spiritual. " Well, I ? m sure we ve lost enough al ready, when it comes to that," she continued, folding her hands resignedly in her convex lap. " There was that artesian well down at San Pasqual " "Well, now, Emeline," her husband broke in eagerly, " that well would have been all right if the tools had n t stuck. I think yet we d have got water if we d gone on." " We d a got water if it had V been our 22 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER heavenly Fawther s will," announced Mrs. Dysart, with solemnity, rising slowly from her chair, which gave a little squeak of re lief. " I ve got to set the sponge," she went on in the same tone, as if it were some sacred religious rite. " I wish you d talk it over with Mr. Palmerston, Jawn, and tell him the offer you ve had from this perfessor I m sure I don t know what he s perfessor of. He ain t a perfessor of religion I know that." She sent her last arrow over her wide shoulder as she passed the two men and creaked into the house. Her husband looked after her gravely. " Now that s the way with Emeline," he said; "she s all faith, and then, again, she has no faith. Now, I m just the other way." He rubbed his bald head in a vain attempt to formulate the obverse of his wife s char acter. " Well, anyway," he resumed, accept ing his failure cheerfully, " the professor he wants to find a claim, as I was telling you, but he wants one that s handy to the place he s selected for the tunnel. Of course he won t say just where that is till we get 23 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER the papers made out, but he gave me a kind of a general idea of it, and the land around there s all mine. He d have to go way over east to find a government section that has n t been filed on, and of course there d be a big expense for pipe; so he offers to locate the tunnel for half the water if we get ten inches or over, and I m to make the tunnel, and deed him twenty acres of land." " Suppose you get less than ten inches what then ? " " Then it s all to be mine ; but I m to deed him the land all the same." " How many inches of water have you from your spring now ? " " About ten, as near as I can guess." " Well, suppose he locates the tunnel so it will drain your spring; are you to have the expense of the work and the privilege of giving him half the water and twenty acres of land is that it?" John rubbed the back of his neck and re flected. " The professor laughs at the idea of ten inches of water. He says we 11 get at least 24 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER a hundred, maybe more. You see, if we were to get that much, I d have a lot of water to sell to the settlers below. It u d be a big thing." "So it would; but there s a big if in there, Dysart. Do you know anything about this man s record ? " "I asked about him down in Los An geles. Some folks believe in him, and some don t. They say he struck a big stream for them over at San Luis. I don t go much on what people say, anyway; I size a man up, and depend on that. I like the way the pro fessor talks. I don t understand all of it, but he seems to have things pretty pat. Don t you think he has ? " "Yes; he has things pat enough. Most swindlers have. It s their business. Not that I think him a deliberate swindler, Dy sart. Possibly he believes in himself. But I hope you 11 be cautious." " Oh, I m cautious," asserted John. " I d be a good deal richer man to-day if I had n t been so cautious. I Ve spent a lot of time and money looking into things. I 11 get 2 5 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER there, if caution 11 do it. Now, Emeline she s impulsive; she has to be held back; she never examines into anything: but I m just the other way." In spite of Palmerston s warning and Mrs. Dysart s fears, temporal and spiritual, nego tiations between Dysart and Brownell made rapid progress. The newcomer s tent was pitched upon the twenty acres selected, and gleamed white against the mountain-side, suggesting to Palmerston s idle vision a sail becalmed upon a sage-green sea. " Dysart s ship, which will probably never come in," he said to himself, looking at it with visible indignation, one morning, as he sat at his tent door in that state of fuming indolence which the male American calls taking a rest. " Practically there is little difference be tween a knave and a fool," he fretted; " it s the difference between the gun that is loaded and the one that is not: in the long run the unloaded gun does the more mischief. A self-absorbed fool is a knave. After all, dis honesty is only abnormal selfishness; it s a question of degree. Hello, Dysart! " he said 26 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER aloud, as his host appeared around the tent. " How goes it?" "Slow," said John emphatically, "slow. I m feeling my way like a cat, and the pro fessor he ? s just about as cautious as I am. We re a good team. He s been over the canon six times, and every time that machine of his n gives him a new idea. He s getting it down to a fine point. He wanted to go up again to-day, but I guess he can t." "What s up?" inquired Palmerston in differently. "Well, his daughter wrote him she was coming this afternoon, and somebody 11 have to meet her down at Malaga when the train comes in. I ve just been oiling up the top-buggy, and I thought maybe if you " "Why, certainly," interrupted Palmer ston, responding amiably to the suggestion of John s manner; " if you think the young lady will not object, I shall be delighted. What time is the train due ? " "Now, that s just what I told Emeline," said John triumphantly. " He d liever go 27 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER than not, says I; if he would n t then young folks has changed since I can remember. The train gets there about two o clock. If you jog along kind of comfortable you 11 be home before supper. If the girl s as smart as her father, you 11 have a real nice visit." Mrs. Dysart viewed the matter with a pessimism which was scarcely to be dis tinguished from conventionality. " I think it s a kind of an imposition, Mr. Palmerston," she said, as her boarder was about to start, " sendin you away down there for a total stranger. It s a good thing you re not bashful. Some young men would be terribly put out. I m sure Jawn would a been at your age. But my father would n t have sent a strange young man after one of his daughters he knowed us too well. My, oh! just to think of it! I d have fell all in a heap." Palmerston ventured a hope that the young lady would not be completely un nerved. " Oh, I m not frettin about her" said his 28 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER hostess. " I don t doubt she can take care of herselt. If she ? s like some of her folks, she 11 talk you blind." Palmerston drove away to hide the smile that teased the corners of his mouth. " The good woman has the instincts of a chaperon, without the traditions," he re flected, letting his smile break into a laugh. " Her sympathy is with the weaker sex when it comes to a personal encounter. We may need her services yet, who knows ? " Malaga was a flag-station, and the shed which was supposed to shelter its occa sional passengers from the heat of summer and the rain of winter was flooded with afternoon sunshine. Palmerston drove into the square shadow of the shed roof, and set his feet comfortably upon the dashboard while he waited. He was not aware of any very lively curiosity concerning the young woman for whom he was waiting. That he had formed some nebulous hypothesis of vulgarity was evidenced by his whimsical hope that her prevailing atmosphere would not be musk; aggressive perfumery of some 29 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER sort seemed inevitable. He found himself wondering what trait in her father had led him to this deduction, and drifted idly about in the haze of heredity until the whistle of the locomotive warned him to withdraw his feet from their elevation and betake himself to the platform. Half a minute later the en gine panted onward and the young man found himself, with uplifted hat, confront ing a slender figure clad very much as he was, save for the skirt that fell in straight, dark folds to the ground. " Miss Brownell ? " inquired Palmerston smiling. The young woman looked at him with evident surprise. " Where is my father ? " she asked abruptly. " He was unable to come. He regretted it very much. I was so fortunate as to take his place. Allow me " He stooped to ward her satchel. "Unable to come is he ill?" pursued the girl, without moving. "Oh, no," explained Palmerston hastily; 3 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER " he is quite well. It was something else some matter of business." " Business! " repeated the young woman, with ineffable scorn. She turned and walked rapidly toward the buggy. Palmerston followed with her satchel. She gave him a preoccupied " Thank you " as he assisted her to a seat and shielded her dress with the shabby robe. " Do you know anything about this busi ness of my father s ? " she asked as they drove away. "Very little; it is between him and Mr. Dysart, with whom I am boarding. Mr. Dy- sart has mentioned it to me." The young man spoke with evident reluctance. His companion turned her clear, untrammeled gaze upon him. " You need n t be afraid to say what you think. Of course it is all nonsense," she said bitterly. Palmerston colored under her intent gaze, and smiled faintly. " I have said what I think to Mr. Dysart. 31 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER Don t you really mean that I need not be afraid to say what you think ? " She was still looking at him, or rather at the place where he was. She turned a little more when he spoke, and regarded him as if he had suddenly materialized. " I think it is all nonsense," she said gravely, as if she were answering a ques tion. Then she turned away again and knitted her brows. Palmerston glanced covertly now and then at her profile, un willingly aware of its beauty. She was handsome, strikingly, distinguishedly hand some, he said to himself; but there was something lacking. It must be femininity, since he felt the lack and was masculine. He smiled to think how much alike they must appear he and this very gentlemanly young woman beside him. He thought of her soft felt hat and the cut of her dark- blue coat, and there arose in him a rigidly subdued impulse to offer her a cigar, to ask her if she had a daily paper about her, to She turned upon him suddenly, her eyes full of tears. 32 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER "I am crying! she exclaimed angrily. " How unspeakably silly! " Palmerston s heart stopped with that nameless terror which the actual man always experiences when confronted by this phase of the ideal woman. He had been so serene, so comfortable, under the unexpected that there flashed into his mind a vague sense of injury that she should surprise him in this way with the expected. It was inconsiderate, inexcusable; then, with an inconsistency worthy of a better sex, he groped after an excuse for the inexcusable. " You are very nervous your journey has tired you you are not strong," he pleaded. " I am not nervous," insisted the young woman indignantly. "I have no nerves I detest them. And I am quite as strong as you are." The young fellow winced. " It is not that. It is only because I cannot have my own way. I cannot make people do as I wish." She spoke with a heat that seemed to dry her tears. Palmerston sank back and let the case go 33 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER by default. " If you like that view of it better " " I like the truth," the girl broke in vehe mently. "I am so tired of talk! Why must we alwa}^ cover up the facts with a lot of platitudes ? " " Oh, I don t know," said Palmerston lightly. " I suppose there ought to be a skeleton of truth under all we say, but one does n t need to rattle his bones to prove that he has them." The girl laughed. Palmerston caught a glimpse of something reassuring in her laugh. " It might not be cheerful," she admitted, " but it would be honest, and we might learn to like it. Besides, the truth is not always disagreeable." " Would n t the monotony of candor appal us ? " urged Palmerston. " Is n t it possible that our deceptions are all the individuality we have ? " "Heaven forbid!" said his companion curtly. They drove on without speaking. The 34 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER young man was obstinately averse to break ing the silence, which, nevertheless, annoyed him. He had a theory that feminine chatter was disagreeable. Just why he should feel aggrieved that this particular young woman did not talk to him he could not say. No doubt he would have resented with high dis dain the suggestion that his vanity had been covertly feeding for years upon the anxiety of young women to make talk for his diver sion. " Do you think my father has closed his agreement with this man of whom you were speaking this Mr. Dysart?" asked Miss Brownell, returning to the subject as if they had never left it. "I am very certain he has not; at least, he had not this morning," rejoined Palmer- ston. " I wish it might be prevented," she said earnestly, with a note of appeal. " I have talked with Dysart, but my argu ments fail to impress him; perhaps you may be more successful." Palmerston was aware of responding to 35 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER her tone rather than to her words. The girl shook her head. " I can do nothing. People who have only common sense are at a terrible disadvantage when it comes to argument. I know it is all nonsense; but a great many people seem to prefer nonsense. I believe my father would die if he were reduced to bare facts." "There is something in that," laughed Palmerston. " A theory makes a very com fortable mental garment, if it is roomy enough." The young woman turned and glanced at him curiously, as if she could not divine what he was laughing at. " They are like children such people. My father is like a child. He does not live in the world; he cannot defend himself." Palmerston s skepticism rushed into his face. The girl looked at him, and the color mounted to her forehead. "You do not believe in him! " she broke out. "It cannot be you cannot think you do not know him ! " "I know very little of your father s theo- 36 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER ries, Miss Brownell," protested Palmerston. "You cannot blame me if I question them; you seem to question them yourself." " His theories I loathe them ! " She spoke with angry emphasis. " It is not that; it is himself. I cannot bear to think that y OU that any one " "Pardon me," interrupted Palmerston; " we were speaking of his theories. I have no desire to discuss your father." He knew his tone was resentful. He found himself wondering whether it was an excess of egotism or of humility that made her ignore his personality. "Why should we not discuss him?" she asked, turning her straightforward eyes upon him. "Because" Palmerston broke into an impatient laugh " because we are not dis embodied spirits; at least, I am not." The girl gave him a look of puzzled in comprehension, and turned back to her own thoughts. That they were troubled thoughts her face gave abundant evidence. Palmer ston waited curiously eager for some mani- 37 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER festation of social grace, some comment on the scenery which should lead by the wind ing path of young-ladyism to the Mecca of her personal tastes and preferences; should unveil that sacred estimate of herself which she so gladly shared with others, but which others too often failed to share with her. " I wish you would tell me all you know about it," she said presently, " this proposi tion my father has made. He writes me very indefinitely, and sometimes it is hard for me to learn, even when I am with him, just what he is doing. He forgets that he has not told me." The young man hesitated, weighing the difficulties that would beset him if he should attempt to explain his hesitation, seeing also the more tangible difficulties of evasion if she should turn her clear eyes upon him. It would be better for Dysart if she knew, he said to himself. They had made no secret of the transaction, and sooner or later she must hear of it from others, if not from her father. He yielded to the infection of her candor, and told her what she asked. She 38 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER listened with knitted brows and an intro spective glance. "Mr. Dysart might lose his work," she commented tentatively. Palmerston was silent. The girl turned abruptly. " Could he lose anything else ? " The color swept across her face, and her voice had a half-pathetic men ace in it. "Every business arrangement is uncer tain, contains a possibility of loss." Palmerston was defiantly aware that he had not answered her question. He empha sized his defiance by jerking the reins. "Don t! "said the girl reproachfully. "I think his mouth is tender." " You like horses ? " inquired the young man, with a sensation of relief. She shook her head. " No; I think not. I never notice them except when they seem uncomfortable." " But if you did n t like them you would n t care." "Oh, yes, I should. I don t like to see anything uncomfortable." 39 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER Palmerston laughed. "You have made me very uncomfortable, and you do not seem to mind. I must conclude that you have not noticed it, and that conclusion hurts my vanity." The young woman did not turn her head. " I try to be candid," she said, " and I am always being misunderstood. I think I must be very stupid." Her companion began to breathe more freely. She was going to talk of herself, after all. He was perfectly at home when it came to that. "Not at all," he said graciously; "you only make the rest of us appear stupid. We are at a disadvantage when we get what we do not expect, and none of us expect candor." "But if we tell the truth ourselves, I don t see why we should n t expect it from others." " Oh, yes, if we ourselves tell the truth." " I think you have been telling me the truth," she said, turning her steadfast eyes upon him. 40 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER "Thank you," said Palmerston lightly. " I hope my evident desire for approval does n t suggest a sense of novelty in my position." Miss Brownell smiled indulgently, and then knitted her brows. "I am glad you have told me," she said; " I may not be able to help it, but it is better for me to know." They were nearing the Dysart house, and Palmerston remembered that he had no de finite instruction concerning the newcomer s destination. " I think I will take her directly to her father s tent," he reflected, "and let Mrs. Dysart plan her own attack upon the social situation." When he had done this and returned to his boarding-place, there was a warmth in the greeting of his worthy hostess which suggested a sense of his recent escape from personal danger. " I m real glad to see you safe home, Mr. Palmerston," she said amply. " I don t won der you look fagged; the ride through the dust was hard enough without having all 41 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER sorts of other things to hatchel you. I do hope you won t have that same kind of a phthisicky ketch in your breath that you had the other night after you overdone. I think it was mostly nervousness, and, dear knows, you Ve had enough to make you nervous to-day. I told Jawn after you was gone that I d hate to be answerable for the conse quences." Two days later John Dysart came into Palmerston s tent, and drew a camp-stool close to the young man s side. " I m in a kind of a fix," he said, seating himself and fastening his eyes on the floor with an air of profound self-commiseration. " You see, this girl of Brownell s she came up where I was mending the flume yester day, and we got right well acquainted. She seems friendly. She took off her coat and laid it on a boulder, and we set down there in our shirt-sleeves and had quite a talk. I think she means all right, but she s vision ary. I can t understand it, living with a prac tical man like the professor. But you can t always tell. Now, there s Emeline. Em- 42 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER eline means well, but she lets her prejudices run away with her judgment. I guess women generally do. But, someway, this girl rather surprised me. When I first saw her I thought she looked kind of reasonable ; maybe it was her cravat I don t know." John shook his head in a baffled way. He had taken off his hat, and the handkerchief which he had spread over his bald crown to protect it from the flies drooped pathetically about his honest face. "What did Miss Brownell say?" asked Palmerston, flushing a little. John looked at him absently from under his highly colored awning. "The girl? Oh, she don t understand. She wanted me to be careful. I told her I d been careful all my life, and I was n t likely to rush into anything now. She thinks her father s most too san guine about the water, but she does n t un derstand the machine I could see that. She said she was afraid I d lose something, and she wants me to back out right now. I m sure I don t know what to do. I want to treat everybody right." 43 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER "Including yourself, I hope," suggested Palmerston. " Yes, of course. I don t feel quite able to give up all my prospects just for a no tion; and yet I want to do the square thing by Emeline. It s queer about women especially Emeline. I ve often thought if there was only men it would be easier to make up your mind; but still, I suppose we d ought n t to feel that way. They don t mean any harm." John drew the protecting drapery from his head, and lashed his bald crown with it softly, as if in punishment for his seeming disloyalty. " You could withdraw from the contract now without any great loss to Mr. Brownell," suggested Palmerston. John looked at him blankly. " Why, of course he would n t lose anything; I d be the loser. But I have n t any notion of doing that. I m only wondering whether I ought to tell Emeline about the girl. You see, Emeline s kind of impulsive, and she s took a dead set against the girl because, you 44 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER see, she thinks," John leaned forward con fidentially and shut one eye, as if he were squinting along his recital to see that it was in line with the facts, " you see, she thinks well, I don t know as I d ought to take it on myself to say just what Emeline thinks, but I think she thinks well, I don t know as I d ought to say what I think she thinks, either; but you d understand if you d been married." " Oh, I can understand," asserted the young man. " Mrs. Dysart s position is very natu ral. But I think you should tell her what Miss Brownell advises. There is no other woman near, and it will prove very uncom fortable for the young lady if your wife re mains unfriendly toward her. You certainly don t want to be unjust, Dysart." John shook his head dolorously over this extension of his moral obligations. "No," he declared valiantly; "I want to be square with everybody; but I don t want to prejudice Emeline against the professor, and I m afraid this would. You see, Eme line s this way well, I don t know as I d 45 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER ought to say just how Emeline is, but you know she s an auoful good woman!" John leaned forward and gave the last three words a slow funereal emphasis which threatened his companion s gravity. " Oh, I know," Palmerston broke out quickly ; " Mrs. Dysart s a good woman, and she s a very smart woman, too j she has good ideas." "Yes, yes; Emeline ? s smart," John made haste to acquiesce ; " she s smart as far as she knows, but when she don t quite un derstand, then she s prejudiced. I guess women are generally prejudiced about ma chinery ; they can t be expected to see into it: but still, if you think I d ought to tell her what this Brownell girl says, why, I m a-going to do it." John got up with the air of a man harassed but determined, and went out of the tent. The next afternoon Mrs. Dysart put on her beaded dolman and her best bonnet and panted through the tar-weed to call upon her new neighbor. Palmerston watched the good woman s departure, and awaited her return, 46 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER taunting himself remorselessly meanwhile for the curiosity which prompted him to place a decoy-chair near his tent door, and exult ing shamefacedly at the success of his ruse when she sank into it with the interrogative glance with which fat people always commit themselves to furniture. " Well, I ve been to see her, and I must say, for a girl that s never found grace, she s about the straightforwardest person I ever came across. I know I was prejudiced." Mrs. Dysart took off her bonnet, a sacred edifice constructed of cotton velvet, frowzy feathers, and red glass currants, and gazed at it penitentially. " That father of hers is enough to prejudice a saint. But the girl ain t to blame. I think she must have had a prayin mother, though she says she does n t remember anything about her exceptin her clothes, which does sound worldly." Mrs. Dysart straightened out the varnished muslin leaves of her horticultural head-gear, and held the structure at arm s length with a sigh of gratified sense and troubled spirit. " I invited her to come to the mothers 47 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER meetin down at Mrs. Stearns s in the wash with me next Thursday afternoon, and I m goin to have her over to dinner some day when the old perfessor ? s off on a tramp. I try to have Christian grace, but I can t quite go him, though I would like to see the girl brought into the fold." Palmerston remembered the steadfast eyes of the wanderer, and wondered how they had met all this. His companion replaced the bonnet on her head, where it lurched a little, by reason of insufficient skewering, as she got up. " Then you were pleased with Miss Brownell ? " the young man broke out, rather senselessly, he knew aware, all at once, of a desire to hear more. Mrs. Dysart did not sit down. "Yes," she said judicially; "for a girl without any bringin up, and with no reli gious inflooences, and no mother and no father to speak of, I think she s full as good as some that ? s had more chances. I ve got to go and start a fire now," she went on, with an air of willingness but inability to 48 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER continue the subject. " There s Jawn comin after the milk-pail; I do wish he could be brought to listen to reason." Palmerston watched the good woman as she labored down the path, her dusty skirts drawn close about her substantial ankles, and the beaded dolman glittering unfeelingly in the sun. " I hope she has a sense of humor," he said to himself. Then he got up hastily, went into the tent, and brought out a letter, which he read carefully from the beginning to the signature scribbled in the upper corner of the first page " Your own Bess." After that he sat quite still, letting his glance play with the mists of the valley, until Mrs. Dysart rang the supper-bell. " If she has a sense of humor, how much she must enjoy her! " he said to himself, with the confusion of pronouns we all allow our selves and view with such scorn in others. When a man first awakes to the fact that he is thinking of the wrong woman, it is always with a comfortable sense of certainty that he 49 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER can change his attitude of mind by a slight effort of the will. If he does not make the effort, it is only because he is long past the necessity of demonstrating himself to himself, and not from any fickleness of fancy on his own part. It was in this comfortable state of certainty that Sidney Palmerston betook him self, a few days later, to the Brownell tent, armed with a photograph which might have been marked " Exhibit A " in the case which he was trying with himself before his own conscience. If there was in his determination to place himself right with Miss Brownell any trace of solicitude for the young woman, to the credit of his modesty be it said, he had not formulated it. Perhaps there was. A be lief in the general overripeness of feminine affection, and a discreet avoidance of shaking the tree upon which it grows, have in some way become a part of masculine morals, and Sidney Palmerston was still young enough to take himself seriously. Miss Brownell had moved a table out side the tent, and was bending over a map fastened to it by thumb-tacks. 5 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER " I am trying to find out what my father is doing," she said, looking straight into Pal- merston s eyes without a word of greeting. " I suppose you know they are about to be gin work on the tunnel." The young man was beginning to be a trifle tired of the tunnel. " Dysart mentioned it yesterday," he said. "May I sit down, Miss Brownell ? " She gave a little start, and went into the tent for another chair. When she reappeared, Palmerston met her at the tent door and took the camp-chair from her hand. "I want to sit here," he said willfully, turning his back toward the table. " I don t want to talk about the tunnel; I want to turn the conversation upon agreeable things myself, for instance." She frowned upon him smilingly, and put her hand to her cheek with a puzzled ges ture. " Have I talked too much about the tun nel?" she asked. "I thought something might be done to stop it." Palmerston shook his head. " You have 5 1 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER done everything in your power. Dysart has been fairly warned. Besides, who knows?" he added rather flippantly. "They may strike a hundred inches of water, as your father predicts." " I have not been objecting merely to rid myself of responsibility; I have never felt any. I only wanted I hoped " She stopped, aware of the unresponsive chill that always came at mention of her father. "I know he is honest." " Of course," protested Palmerston, with artificial warmth; "and, really, I think the place for the work is well selected. I am not much of an engineer, but I went up the other day and looked about, and there are certainly indications of water. I " he stopped sud denly, aware of his mistake. The girl had not noticed it. " I wish I could make people over," she said, curling her fingers about her thumb, and striking the arm of her chair with the soft side of the resultant fist, after the manner of women. Her companion laughed. "Not every person, I hope; not this one, 52 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER at least." He drew the photograph from his breast pocket and held it toward her. She took it from him, and looked at it absently an instant. " What a pretty girl ! " she said, handing it back to him. " Your sister? " The young man flushed. "No; my fian cee." She held out her hand and took the card again, looking at it with fresh eyes. " A very pretty girl," she said. " What is her name ? " " Elizabeth Arnold." " Where does she live ? " Palmerston mentioned a village in Michi gan. His companion gave another glance at the picture, and laid it upon the arm of the chair. The young man rescued it from her indifference with a little irritable jerk. She was gazing unconsciously toward the hori zon. " Don t you intend to congratulate me ? " he inquired with a nettled laugh. She turned quickly, flushing to her fore head. " Pardon me. I said she was very 53 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER pretty I thought young men found that quite sufficient. I have never heard them talk much of girls in any other way. But perhaps I should have told you: I care very little about photographs, especially of wo men. They never look like them. They always make me think of paper dolls." She halted between her sentences with an ungirlish embarrassment which Palmer- ston was beginning to find dangerously at tractive. " But the women themselves you find them interesting ? " " Oh, yes ; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers meeting. I thought that very interesting." "Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling of mo therless children will add zest to the assem blage." They both laughed, and the young man s laugh ended in a cough. The girl glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the valley. 54 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER " Mr. Palmerston," she said, " the fog is driving in very fast, and it is growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft gray shawl. " I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your shoulders." She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front of him with her forehead on a level with his lips. "Now hurry!" A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the nar row path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by be coming very cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him; but the shawl hung upon his arm and re minded him of many things not altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if he had not been busy 55 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER assuring himself that he had no confession to make. He had done his duty, he said to him self; but there was something else which he did not dare to say even to himself some thing which made him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been sympathetic ; well- bred women were always sympathetic, he argued, arriving at his conclusion by an un answerable transposition of adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether color blind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want her to care, after all ? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or, what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was an gry with himself for his interest in these peo- 56 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER pie, as he styled them in his lofty self-abase ment. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation as if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice. He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive conscience. And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girl ish analysis of the writer s love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid inter est in the "queer people " among whom her lover s lot was cast. " It is very hard, my dear," she wrote, " to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it 57 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER bravely, since it is to make you strong and well." Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley. " After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; " she has nothing to gain by saving Dysart, except " he smiled grimly " her rascally father s good name." The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm from the south east, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to their elders. The leafless poin- settia flaunted its scarlet diadem at Palmer- ston s tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the acacias west of the 58 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a night. The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John watched its pro gress with the feverish eagerness of an inex perienced gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart s pious soul beyond endurance. " Now listen to that, Emeline! " said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inunda tions. " He s a-singin the doxology. Now /believe he s a Christian." Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience. " Singin is the easiest part of the Chris tian religion, Jawn. As for that," she 59 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply, "it s soundin brass; that s what I d say if I was settin in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I m not." " Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrele vance ; " they seem to be gettin pretty thick." Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open win dow with piously restrained curiosity. " I m sorry for that girl," she said; " she s got one man more n she can manage now, without tacklin another." " Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know." There was in John s voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth. " Yes; and they 11 be old folks, too, which most of em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple. Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There 60 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER was the odor of spring, the warmth of sum mer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the canon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth s fore shortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted 61 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the canon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the canon and min gled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things. The girl paused and peered down into the canon inquiringly. " Do you think of leaping ? " asked Palmer- ston. She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we have no more." Palmerston laughed. " Do you always think of practical things ? " he asked. She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile. "I do not think much about what I think," she said; " I am too busy thinking." 62 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in the path. Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands. "I I love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a voice when he thinks himself alone. The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes. " You love me ? " she repeated with slow questioning. " How can you? " Palmerston smiled rather miserably. " Far more easily than I can explain why I have told you," he answered. " If it is true, why should you not tell me ? " she asked, still looking at him steadily. Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the naked truth : " Because I cannot ask you to love me in return because I have promised to marry another woman, and I must keep my pro mise." THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death where he might easily have chosen dishonor. His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of the canon at the snow of San Antonio. " You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl, who loves you, and live a lie? " she asked without look ing at him. "My God! but you make it hard!" groaned Palmerston. She faced about haughtily. "I make it hard!" she exclaimed. "I have been afraid of you not for myself, but for for others, about something in which one might be mistaken. And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman out of her life, a girl who loves you who promised to marry you be cause you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of your love for her. And this is what men call honor! Do you know what I intend to do? I intend to write to this girl and tell her 6 4 THE WIZARD S DAUGHTER what you have told me. Then she may marry you if she wishes. But she shall know. You shall not feed her on husks all her life, if I can help it. And because I in tend to do this, even if even if I loved you, I could never see you again! " Palmerston knew that he stood aside to let her pass and walk rapidly out of the canon. The call of insects and the twitter of lin nets seemed to deepen into a roar. A faint " halloo " came from far up the mountain side, and in the distance men s voices rang across the canon. A workman came running down the path, almost stumbling over Palmerston in his haste. " Where s the old man where s Dy- sart? " he panted, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. " We Ve struck a flow that s washing us into the middle of next week. The old professor made a blamed good guess this time, sure." Marg et Ann i Marg et Ann T was sacrament Sabbath in the little Seceder congregation at Blue Mound. Vehicles denoting various degrees of pros perity were beginning to arrive before the white meeting-house that stood in a patch of dog-fennel by the roadside. The elders were gathered in a solemn, bareheaded group on the shady side of the building, arranging matters of deep spiritual portent connected with the serving of the tables. The women entered the church as they arrived, carrying or leading their fat, sunburned, awe-stricken children, and sat in subdued and reverent silence in the unpainted pews. There was a smell of pine and pepper mint and last week s gingerbread in the room, and a faint rustle of bonnet strings and silk mantillas as each newcomer moved down the aisle; but there was no turning of heads or vain, indecorous curiosity concerning 69 MARG ET ANN arrivals on the part of those already in the pews. Outside, the younger men moved about slowly in their creased black clothes, or stood in groups talking covertly of the corn planting which had begun ; there was an ev ident desire to compensate by lowered voices and lack of animated speech for the manifest irreverence of the topic. Marg et Ann and her mother came in the farm wagon, that the assisting minister, the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who was to preach the "action sermon," might ride in the buggy with the pastor. There were four wooden chairs in the box of the wagon, and the floor was strewn with sweet-scented tim othy and clover. Mrs. Morrison and Miss Nancy McClanahan, who had come with her brother from Cedar Township to communion, sat in two of the chairs, and Marg et Ann and her younger sister occupied the others. One of the boys sat on the high spring seat with his brother Laban, who drove the team, and the other children were distributed on the hay between their elders. 70 MARG ET ANN Marg et Ann wore her mother s change able silk made over and a cottage bonnet with pink silk strings and skirt and a white ruche with a wreath of pink flowers in the face trimming. Her brown hair was combed over her ears like a sheet of burnished bronze and held out by puff combs, and she had a wide embroidered collar, shaped like a halo, fastened by a cairngorm in a square set ting of gold. Miss Nancy McClanahan and her mother talked in a subdued way of the Fast Day ser vices, and of the death of Squire Davidson, who lived the other side of the creek, and the probable result of Esther Jane Skinner s trouble with her chest. There was a tacit avoidance of all subjects pertaining to the flesh except its ailments, but there was no long-faced hypocrisy in the tones or manner of the two women. Marg et Ann listened to them and watched the receding perspective of the corn rows in the brown fields. She had her token tied securely in the corner of her handkerchief, and every time she felt it she thought regretfully of Lloyd Archer. 7 1 MARG ET ANN She had hoped he would make a confession of faith this communion, but he had not come before the session at all. She knew he had doubts concerning close communion, and she had heard him say that certain complications of predestination and free will did not appear reasonable to him. Marg et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have thought of criticising the Cre ator for making the sky blue instead of green as for any of His immutable decrees as set forth in the Confession of Faith. It did not prevent her liking Lloyd Archer that her father and several of the elders whom he had ventured to engage in religious discussion pronounced him a dangerous young man, but it made it impossible for her to marry him. So she had been quite anxious that he should see his way clear to join the church. They had talked about it during intermis sion last Sabbath; but Marg et Ann, having arrived at her own position by a process of complete self-abnegation, found it hard to know how to proceed with this stalwart sin- 72 MARG ET ANN ner who insisted upon understanding things. It is true he spoke humbly enough of him self, as one who had not her light, but Marg et Ann was quite aware that she did not believe the Catechism because she un derstood it. She had no doubt it could be understood, and she thought regretfully that Lloyd Archer would be just the man to un derstand it if he would study it in the right spirit. Just what the right spirit was she could not perhaps have formulated, except that it was the spirit that led to belief in the Catechism. She had hoped that he would come to a knowledge of the truth through the ministrations of the Rev. Samuel Mc- Clanahan, who was said to be very power ful in argument; but he had found fault with Mr. McClanahan s logic on Fast Day in a way that was quite disheartening, and he evi dently did not intend to come forward this communion at all. Her father had spoken several times in a very hopeless manner of Lloyd s continued resistance of the Holy Spirit, and Marg et Ann thought with a shiver of Squire Atwater, who was an infidel, 73 MARG ET ANN and was supposed by some to have commit ted the unpardonable sin. She remembered once when she and one of the younger boys had gone into his meadow for wild straw berries he had come out and talked to them in a jovial way, and when they were leaving, had patted her little brother s head, and told him, with a great, corpulent laugh, to " ask his father how the devil could be chained to the bottomless pit." She did not believe Lloyd could become like that, but still it was dangerous to resist the Spirit. Miss Nancy McClanahan had a bit of mint between the leaves of her psalm-book, and she smelled it now and then in a niggardly way, as if the senses should be but moderately indulged on the Sabbath. She had on black netted mitts which left the enlarged knuckles of her hands exposed, and there was a little band of Guinea gold on one of her fingers, with two almost obliterated hearts in loving juxtaposition. Marg et Ann knew that she had been a hardworking mother to the Rev. Samuel s family ever since the death of his wife, and she wondered vaguely how it 74 MARG ET ANN would seem to take care of Laban s children in case Lloyd should fail to make his peace with God. When they drove to the door of the meet ing-house, Archibald Skinner came down the walk to help them dismount. Mrs. Mor rison shook hands with him kindly and asked after his sister s cough, and whether his Grandfather Elliott was still having trouble with his varicose veins. She handed the chil dren to him one by one, and he lifted them to the ground with an easy swing, replacing their hats above their tubular curls after the de scent, and grinning good-naturedly into their round, awe-filled, freckled countenances. Miss Nancy got out of the wagon back wards, making a maidenly effort to keep the connection between the hem of her black silk skirt and the top of her calf-skin shoes inviolate, and brushing the dust of the wagon wheel from her dress carefully after her safe arrival in the dog-fennel. Marg et Ann ig nored the chair which had been placed beside the wagon for the convenience of her elders, and sprang from the wheel, placing 75 MARG ET ANN her hands lightly in those of the young man, who deposited her safely beside her mother and turned toward her sister Rebecca with a blush that extended to the unfreckled spaces of his hairy, outstretched hands, and explained his lively interest in the disem barkation of the family. Laban drove the team around the cor ner to a convenient hitching-place, and the women and children went up the walk to the church door. Mrs. Morrison stopped a mo ment on the step to remove the hats of the younger boys, whose awe of the sanctuary seemed to have deprived them of volition, and they all proceeded down the aisle to the minister s pew. The pastor and the Rev. Samuel McClan- ahan were already in the pulpit, their pre sence there being indicated by two tufts of hair, one black and the other sandy, which arose above the high reading-desk; and the elders having filed into the room and distrib uted themselves in the ends of the various well-filled pews, the young men and boys followed their example, the latter taking a 76 MARG ET ANN sudden start at the door and projecting them selves into their places with a concentration of purpose that seemed almost apoplectic in its results. There was a deep, premonitory stillness, broken only by the precentor, who covertly struck his tuning-fork on the round of his chair, and held it to his ear with a faint, ac cordant hum; then the minister arose and spread his hands in solemn invocation above the little flock. " Let us pray." Every one in the house arose. Even old Mrs. Groesbeck, who had sciatica, allowed her husband and her son Ebenezer to assist her to her feet, and the children who were too small to see over the backs of the pews slipped from their seats and stood in down cast stillness within the high board inclosures. After the prayer, Mr. Morrison read the psalm. It was Rouse s version: " 1 joy d when to the house of God, Go up, they said to me. Jerusalem, within thy gates Our feet shall standing be. 77 MARG ET ANN Jerus lem as a city is Compactly built together. Unto that place the tribes go up, The tribes of God go thither." The minister read it all and " lined out " the first couplet. Then the precentor, a tall, thin man, whose thinness was enveloped but not alleviated by an alpaca coat, struck his tuning-fork more openly and launched into the highly rarefied atmosphere of " China," being quite alone in his vocal flight until the congregation joined him in the more acces sible regions of the second line. Marg et Ann shared her psalm-book with Laban, who sat beside her. He had hurt his thumb shelling seed corn, and his mother had made him a clean thumb-stall for Sab bath. It was with this shrouded member that he held the edge of the psalm-book awkwardly. Laban s voice was in that un certain stage in which its vagaries astonished no one so much as its owner, but he joined in the singing. "Let all the people praise Thee " was a command not to be lightly set aside for worldly considerations of harmony 78 MARG ET ANN and fitness, and so Laban sang, his callow and ill-adjusted soul divided between fears that the people would hear him and that the Lord would not. Marg et Ann listened for Lloyd Archer s deep bass voice in the Amen corner. She wished his feet were standing within the gates of Jerusalem, as he so resonantly announced that they would be. But what ever irreverence there might be in poor Laban refusing to sing what he did not dream of doubting, there was no impiety to these devout souls in Lloyd Archer s join ing with them in the vocal proclamation of things concerning which he had very serious doubts. Not that Jerusalem, either new or old, was one of these things; the young man himself was not conscious of any heresy there; he believed in Jerusalem, in the church militant upon earth and triumphant in heaven, and in many deeper and more devious theological doctrines as well. Indeed, his heterodoxy was of so mild a type that, viewed by the in candescent light of to-day, which is not half 79 MARG ET ANN a century later, it shines with the clear blue radiance of flawless Calvinism. If the tedious " lining out," traditionally sacred, was quite unreasonable and super fluous, commemorating nothing but the days of hunted Covenanters and few psalm-books and fewer still who were able to read them, perhaps the remembrance of these things was as conducive to thankfulness of heart as David s recital of the travails and triumphs of ancient Israel. Certain it is that profound gratitude to God and devotion to duty char acterized the lives of most of these men and women who sang the praises of their Maker in this halting and unmusical fashion. Marg et Ann sang in a high and somewhat nasal treble, compassing the extra feet of Mr. Rouse s doubtful version with skill, and glid ing nimbly over the gaps in prosody by the aid of his dextrously elongated syllables. Some of the older men seemed to dwell upon these peculiarities of versification as being distinctively ecclesiastical and there fore spiritually edifying, and brought up the musical rear of such couplets with long- So MARG ET ANN drawn and profoundly impressive "shy-un s" and " i-tee s ; " but these irregularities found little favor in the eyes of the younger people, who had attended singing-school and learned to read buckwheat notes under the direction of Jonathan Loomis, the precentor. Marg et Ann listened to the Rev. Mr. McClanahan s elaborately divided discourse, wondering what piece of the logical puzzle Lloyd would declare to be missing; and she glanced rather wistfully once or twice toward the Amen corner where the young man sat, with his head thrown back and his eager eyes fixed upon the minister s face. When the intermission came, she ate her sweet cake and her triangle of dried apple pie with the others, and then walked toward the graveyard behind the church. She knew that Lloyd would follow her, and she prayed for grace to speak a work in season. The young man stalked through the tall grass that choked the path of the little inclos- ure until he overtook her under a blossoming crab-apple tree. He had been " going with " Marg et Ann 81 MARG ET ANN more than a year, and there was generally supposed to be an understanding between them. She turned when he came up, and put out her hand without embarrassment, but she blushed as pink as the crab-apple bloom in his grasp. They talked a little of commonplace things, and Marg et Ann looked down and swallowed once or twice before she said gravely, " I hoped you d come forward this sacra ment, Lloyd." The young man s brow clouded. " I ve told you I can t join the church with out telling a lie, Marg et Ann. You would n t want me to tell a lie," he said, flushing hotly. She shook her head, looking down, and twisting her handkerchief into a ball in her hands. " I know you have doubts about some things 5 but I thought they might be removed by prayer. Have you prayed earnestly to have them removed ? " She looked up at him anxiously. 82 MARG ET ANN " I Ve asked to be made to see things right," he replied, choking a little over this unveiling of his holy of holies; " but I don t seem to be able to see some things as you do." She pondered an instant, looking absently at the headstone of " Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy s two beloved wives, then she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish ancestry were not given to glib talking of sacred things : " I suppose doubts are sent to try our faith; but we have the promise that they will be removed if we ask in the right spirit. Are you sure you have asked in the right spirit, Lloyd?" " I have prayed for light, but I have n t asked to have my doubts removed, Marg et Ann; I don t know that I want to believe what does n t appear reasonable to me." The girl lifted a troubled, tremulous face to his. " That is n t the right spirit, Lloyd, you know it is n t. How can God remove your doubts if you don t want him to ? " The young man reached up and broke off 83 MARG ET ANN a twig of the round, pink crab-apple buds and rolled the stem between his work-hard ened hands. " I Ve asked for light," he repeated, " and if when it comes I see things different, I 11 say so ; but I can t want to believe what I don t believe, and I can t pray for what I don t want." The triangle of Marg et Ann s brow be tween her burnished satin puffs of hair took on two upright, troubled lines. She unfolded her handkerchief nervously, and her token fell with a ringing sound against tired Heph- zibah s gravestone and rolled down above her patiently folded hands. Lloyd stooped and searched for it in the grass. When he found it he gave it to her silently, and their hands met. Poor Marg et Ann! No hunted Covenanter amid Scottish heather was more a martyr to his faith than this rose-cheeked girl amid Iowa cornfields. She took the bit of flattened lead and pressed it between her burning palms. " I hope you won t get hardened in unbe lief, Lloyd," she said soberly. 84 MARG ET ANN The congregation was drifting toward the church again, and the young people turned. Lloyd touched the iridescent silk of her wide sleeve, " You ain t a-going to let this make any difference between you and me, are you, Marg et Ann ? " he pleaded. " I don t know," wavered the girl. " I hope you 11 be brought to a sense of your true condition, Lloyd." She hesitated, smoothing the sheen of her skirt. "It would be an awful cross to father and mother." The young man fell behind her in the narrow path, and they walked to the church door in unhappy silence. Inside, the elders had accomplished the spreading of the tables with slow-moving, awkward reverence. The spotless drapery swayed a little in the afternoon breeze, and there was a faint fruity smell of communion wine in the room. The two ministers and some of the older communicants sat with bowed heads, in deep spiritual isolation. The solemn stillness of self-examination 85 MARG ET ANN pervaded the room, and Marg et Ann went to her seat with a vague stirring of resent ment in her heart toward the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who, with all his learning, could not convince this one lost sheep of the error of his theological way. She put aside such thoughts, however, before the serving of the tables, and walked humbly down the aisle behind her mother, singing the one hundred and sixteenth psalm to the quaint rising and falling cadences of " Dundee." Once, while the visiting pastor addressed the communicants, she thought how it would simplify matters if Lloyd were sitting oppo site her, and then caught her breath as the minister adjured each one to examine him self, lest eating and drinking unworthily he should eat and drink damnation to himself. It was almost sunset when the service ended, and as the Morrisons drove into the lane the smell of jimson-weed was heavy on the evening air, and they could hear the clank of the cow bells in the distance. Marg et Ann went to her room to lay aside her best dress and get ready for the milking, 86 MARG ET ANN and Mrs. Morrison and Rebecca made haste to see about supper. Miss Nancy McClanahan walked about the garden in her much made-over black silk, and compared the progress of Mrs. Morrison s touch-me-nots and four-o clocks with her own, nipping herself a sprig of tansy from the patch under the Bowerly apple-tree. She shared Marg et Ann s room that night, and after she had taken off her lace head dress and put a frilled nightcap over her lone some little knot of gray hair and said her prayers, she composed herself on her pillow with a patient sigh, and lay watching Marg et Ann crowd her burnished braids into her close-fitting cap without speaking; but after the light was out, and her companion had lain down beside her, the old maid placed her knotted hand on the girl s more shapely one, and said: "There s worse things than living single, Marg et Ann, and then again I suppose there s better. Of course every girl has her chances, and the people we make sacrifices for don t always seem quite as grateful as we 87 MARG ET ANN calculated they d be. I m not repinin , but I sometimes think if I had my life to live over again I d do different." Marg et Ann pressed the knotted fingers, that felt like a handful of hickory nuts, and touched the little circle with its two worn- out hearts, but she said nothing. She had heard that the Rev. Samuel Mc- Clanahan was going to marry the youngest Groesbeck girl, now that his children were " getting well up out of the way," and she knew that her mother had been telling Miss Nancy something about her own love affair with Lloyd Archer. Whatever Mrs. Morrison may have con fided to Miss Nancy McClanahan concerning Marg et Ann and her lover must have been entirely suppositional and therefore liable to error; for the confidence between parent and child did not extend into the mysteries of love and marriage, nor would the older woman have dreamed of intruding upon the sacred precinct of her daughter s feelings toward a young man. She had remarked once or twice to her husband that she was 88 MARG ET ANN afraid sometimes that there was something between Lloyd Archer and Marg et Ann; but whether this something was a barrier or a bond she left the worthy minister to divine. That he had decided upon the latter was evidenced, perhaps, by his reply that he hoped not, and his fear, which he had expressed be fore, that Lloyd was getting more and more settled in habits of unbelief; and Mrs. Mor rison took occasion to remark the next day in her daughter s hearing that she would hate to have a child of hers marry an unbeliever. Marg et Ann did not, however, need any of these helps to an understanding of her par ents position. She knew too well the dan ger that was supposed to threaten him who indulged in vain and unprofitable question ings, and she had too often heard the vanity of human reason proclaimed to feel any pride in the readiness with which Lloyd had an swered Squire Wilson in the argument they had on foreordination at Hiram Graham s infare. Indeed, she had felt it a personal rebuke when her father had said on the way 89 MARG ET ANN home that he hoped no child of his would ever set up his feeble intellect against the eternal purposes of God, as Lloyd Archer was doing. Marg et Ann knew perfectly well that if she married Lloyd in his present unregenerate state she would, in the esti mation of her father and mother, be endan gering the safety of her own soul, which, though presumably of the elect, could never be conclusively so proved until the gates of Paradise should close behind it. She pondered on these things, and talked of them sometimes with Lloyd, rather un satisfactorily, it is true; for that rising theo logian bristled with questions which threw her troubled soul into a tumult of fear and uncertainty. It was this latter feeling, perhaps, which distressed her most in her calmer moments; for it was gradually forcing itself upon poor Marg et Ann that she must either snatch her lover as a brand from the burning or be herself drawn into the flames. She had taken the summer school down on Cedar Creek, and Lloyd used to ride 90 MARG ET ANN down for her on Friday evenings when the creek was high. Rebecca and Archie Skinner were to be married in the fall, and her mother, who had been ailing a little all summer, would need her at home when Rebecca was gone. Still, this would not have stood in the way of her marriage had everything else been satisfac tory; and Lloyd suspected as much when she urged it as a reason for delay. " If anybody has to stay at home on your mother s account, why not let Archie Skin ner and Becky put off their wedding a while ? They re younger, and they have n t been going together near as long as we have," said Lloyd, in answer to her excuses. They were riding home on horseback one Friday night, and Lloyd had just told her that Martin Prather was going back to Ohio to take care of the old folks, and would rent his farm very reasonably. Marg et Ann had on a slat sunbonnet which made her profile about as attractive as an " elbow " of stovepipe, but it had the ad vantage of hiding the concern that Lloyd s 9 1 MARG ET ANN questioning brought into her face. It could not, however, keep it out of her voice. " I don t know, Lloyd," she began hesitat ingly; then she turned toward him suddenly, and let him see all the pain and trouble and regret that her friendly headgear had been sheltering. " Oh, I do wish you could come to see things different! " she broke out trem ulously. The young man was quiet for an instant, and then said huskily, " I just thought you had something like that in your mind, Mar- g et Ann. If you ve concluded to wait till I join the church we might as well give it up. I don t believe in close communion, and I can t see any harm in occasional hearing, and I have n t heard any minister yet that can reconcile free will and election; the more I think about it the less I believe; I think there is about as much hope of your changing as there is of me. I don t see what all this fuss is about, anyway. Arch Skinner is n t a church member! " It was hard for Marg et Ann to say why Archie Skinner s case was considered more 92 MARG ET ANN hopeful than Lloyd s. She knew perfectly well, and so did her lover, for that matter, but it was not easy to formulate. " Ain t you afraid you 11 get to believing less and less if you go on arguing, Lloyd?" she asked, ignoring Archie Skinner alto gether. "I don t know," said Lloyd somewhat sullenly. They were riding up the lane in the scant shadow of the white locust trees. The corn was in tassel now, and rustled softly in the fields on either side. There was no other sound for a while. Then Marg et Ann spoke. " I 11 see what father thinks " " No, you won t, Marg et Ann," broke in Lloyd obstinately. " I think a good deal of your father, but I don t want to marry him; and I don t ask you to promise to marry the fellow I ought to be, or that you think I ought to be; I ve asked you to marry me. I don t care what you believe and I don t care what your father thinks ; I want to know what you think." 93 MARG ET ANN Poor Lloyd made all this energetic avowal without the encouragement of a blush or a smile, or the discouragement of a frown or a tear. All this that a lover watches for anx iously was hidden by a wall of slats and green-checked gingham. She turned her tubular head covering to ward him presently, however, showing him all the troubled pink prettiness it held, and said very genuinely through her tears, " Oh, Lloyd, you know well enough what I think!" They had reached the gate, and it was a very much mollified face which the young man raised to hers as he helped her to dis mount. " Your father and mother would n t stand in the way of our getting married, would they?" he asked, as she stood beside him. " Oh, no, they would n t stand in the way," faltered poor Marg et Ann. How could she explain to this muscular fellow, whose pale-faced mother had no creed but what Lloyd thought or wanted or liked, that it was their unspoken grief that made it 94 MARG ET ANN hard for her? How shall any woman explain her family ties to any man ? Marg et Ann did not need to consult her father. He looked up from his writing when she entered the door. " Was that Lloyd Archer, Marg et Ann ? " he asked kindly. "Yes, sir." " " I d a little rather you would n t go with him. He seems to be falling into a state of mind that is likely to end in infidelity. It troubles your mother and me a good deal." Marg et Ann went into the bedroom to take off her riding skirt, and she did not come out until she was sure no one could see that she had been crying. Mrs. Morrison continued to complain all through the fall; at least so her neighbors said, although the good woman had never been known to murmur; and Marg et Ann said nothing whatever about her engagement to Lloyd Archer. Late in October Archie Skinner and Re becca were married and moved to the Martin Prather farm, and Lloyd, restless and chaf- 95 MARG ET ANN ing under all this silence and delay, had no longer anything to suggest when Marg et Ann urged her mother s failing health as a reason for postponing their marriage. Before the crab-apples bloomed again Mrs. Morrison s life went out as quietly as it had been lived. There was a short, sharp illness at the last, and in one of the pauses of the pain the sick woman lay watching her daughter, who was alone with her. " I m real glad there was nothing between you and Lloyd Archer, Marg et Ann," she said feebly; "that would have troubled me a good deal. You ? 11 have your father and the children to look after. Nancy Helen will be coming up pretty soon, and be some help; she grows fast. You ll have to manage along as best you can." The girl s sorely troubled heart failed her. Her eyes burned and her throat ached with the effort of self-control. She buried her face in the patchwork quilt beside her mother s hand. The woman stroked her hair tenderly. " Don t cry, Marg et Ann," she said, " don t cry. You 11 get on. It s the Lord s will." 96 MARG ET ANN The evening after the funeral Lloyd Archer came over, and Marg et Ann walked up the lane with him. She was glad to get away from the Sabbath hush of the house, which the neighbors had made so patheti cally neat, taking up the dead woman s task where she had left it, and doing every thing with scrupulous care, as if they feared some vision of neglected duty might disturb her rest. The frost was out of the ground and the spring plowing had begun. There was a smell of fresh earth from the furrows, and a red-bud tree in the thicket was faintly pink. Lloyd was silent and troubled, and Marg et Ann could not trust her voice. They walked on without speaking, and the dusk was deepening before they turned to go back. Marg et Ann had thrown a little homespun shawl over her head, for there was a memory of frost in the air, but it had fallen back and Lloyd could see her profile with its new lines of grief in the dim light. "It don t seem right, Marg et Ann," he 97 MARG ET ANN began in a voice strained almost to coldness by intensity of feeling. " But it is right, we know that, Lloyd/ interrupted the girl; then she turned and threw both arms about his neck and buried her face on his shoulder. " Oh, Lloyd, I can t bear it I can t bear it alone you must help me to be to be reconciled ! " The young man laid his cheek upon her soft hair. There was nothing but hot, un spoken rebellion in his heart. They stood still an instant, and then Marg et Ann raised her head and drew the little shawl up and caught it under her quivering chin. " We must go in," she said staidly, chok ing back her sobs. Lloyd laid his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him again. " Is there no help, Marg et Ann ? " he said piteously, looking into her tear-stained face. In his heart he knew there was none. He had gone over the ground a thousand times since he had seen her standing beside her mother s open grave with the group of frightened children clinging to her. 98 MARG ET ANN 4 God is our refuge and our strength, In straits a present aid ; Therefore, although the earth remove We will not be afraid," repeated the girl, her sweet voice breaking into a whispered sob at the end. They walked to the step and stood there for a mo ment in silence. The minister opened the door. " Is that you, Marg et Ann," he asked. " I think we d better have worship now; the children are getting sleepy." Almost a year before patient, tireless Esther Morrison s eternal holiday had come, a man, walking leisurely along an empty mill-race, had picked up a few shining yel low particles, holding in his hand for an instant the destiny of half the world. Every restless soul that could break its moorings was swept westward on the wave of excite ment that followed. Blue Mound felt the magnetism of those bits of yellow metal along with the rest of the world, and wild stories were told at singing-school and in harvest 99 MARG ET ANN fields of the fortunes that awaited those who crossed the plains. Lloyd Archer, eager, restless, and discon tented, caught the fever among the first. Marg et Ann listened to his plans, heartsore and helpless. She had ceased to advise him. There was a tacit acknowledgment on her part that she had forfeited her right to influ ence his life in any way. As for him, uncon sciously jealous of the devotion to duty that made her precious to him and unable to solve the problem himself, he yet felt in jured that she could not be true to him and to his ideal of her as well. If she had left the plain path and gone with him into the by ways, his heart would have remained forever with the woman he had loved, and not with the woman who had so loved him; and yet he sometimes urged her to do this thing, so strange a riddle is the " way of a man with a maid." Lloyd had indulged a hope which he could not mention to any one, least of all to Marg et Ann, that the minister would marry again in due season. But nothing pointed to 100 MARG ET ANN a fulfillment of this wish. The good man seemed far more interested in the abolition of slavery in the South than in the release of his daughter from bondage to her own flesh and blood, Lloyd said to himself, -with the bitterness of youth. Indeed; the house hold had moved on with so little "oh&ngfe m the comfort of its worthy head that a know ledge of Lloyd s wishes would have been quite as startling to the object of them as the young man s reasons for their indulgence. The gold fever had seemed to the minister a moral disorder, calling for spiritual reme dies, which he had not failed to administer in such quantity and of such strength as cor responded with the religious therapeutics of the day. Marg et Ann hinted of this when her lover came to her with his plans. She was making soap, and although they stood on the windward side of the kettle, her eyes were red from the smoke of the hickory logs. "Do you think it is just right, Lloyd?" she asked, stirring the unsavory concoction IOI MARG ET ANN slowly with a wooden paddle. " Is n t it just a greed for gold, like gambling ? " Lloyd put both elbows on the top of the ash hopper and looked at her laughingly. H;e.had on a straw hat lined with green cal ico, arid "his trousers were of blue jeans, held iip-by "galluses" of the same; but he was a handsome fellow, with sound white teeth and thick curling locks. " I don t know as a greed for gold is any worse than a greed for corn," he said, trying to curb his voice into seriousness. " But corn is useful it is food and, besides, you work for it." Marg et Ann pushed her sunbonnet back and looked at him anxiously. "Well, I ve planted a good deal more corn than I expect to eat this year, and I was calculating to sell some of it for gold, you would n t think that was wrong, would you, Marg et Ann ? " "No, of course not; but some one will eat it, it s useful," maintained the girl earnestly. " I have n t found anything more useful IO2 MARG ET ANN than money yet," persisted the young man good-naturedly; "but if I come home from California with two or three bags full of gold, I 11 buy up a township and raise corn by the wholesale, that 11 make it all right, won t it?" Marg et Ann laughed in spite of herself. "You re such a case, Lloyd," she said, not without a note of admiration in her re proof. When it came to the parting there was little said. Marg et Ann hushed her lover s assurances with her own, given amid blind ing tears. " I 11 be just the same, Lloyd, no matter what happens, but I can t let you make any promises ; it would n t be right. I can t ex pect you to wait for me. You must do what ever seems right to you; but there won t be any harm in my loving you, at least as long as you don t care for anybody else." The young man said what a young man usually says when he is looking into trustful brown eyes, filled with tears he has caused and cannot prevent, and at the moment, in 103 MARG ET ANN the sharp pain of parting, the words of one were not more or less sincere than those of the other. The years that followed moved slowly, weighted as they were with hard work and monotony for Marg et Ann, and by the time the voice of the corn had changed three times from the soft whispering of spring to the hoarse rustling of autumn, she felt herself old and tired. There had been letters and messages and rumors, more or less reliable, repeated at huskings and quiltings, to keep her informed of the fortunes of those who had crossed the plains, but her own letters from Lloyd had been few and unsatisfactory. She could not complain of this strict compliance with her wishes, but she had not counted upon the absence of her lover s mother, who had gone to Ohio shortly after his departure and de cided to remain there with a married daugh ter. There was no one left in the neighbor hood who could expect to hear directly from Lloyd, and the reports that came from other 104 MARG ET ANN members of the party he had joined told lit tle that poor Marg et Ann wished to know, beyond the fact that he was well and had suffered the varying fortunes of other gold- hunters. There were moments of bitterness in which she tried to picture to herself what her life might have been if she had braved her par ents disapproval and married Lloyd before her mother s death; but there was never a moment bitter enough to tempt her into any neglect of present duty. The milking, the butter-making, the washing, the spinning, all the relentless hard work of the women of her day, went on systematically from the beginning of the year to its end, and the younger children came to accept her patient ministrations as unquestioningly as they had accepted their mother s. She wondered sometimes at her own anx iety to know that Lloyd was true to her, re proaching herself meanwhile with puritanic severity for such unholy selfishness; but she discussed the various plaids for the chil dren s flannel dresses with Mrs. Skinner, I0 5 MARG ET ANN who did the weaving, and cut and sewed and dyed the rags for a new best room carpet with the same conscientious regard for art in the distribution of the stripes which was displayed by all the women of her acquaint ance ; indeed, there was no one among them all whose taste in striping a carpet, or in "piecing and laying out a quilt," was more sought after than Marg et Ann s. " She always was the old-fashionedest little thing," said grandmother Elliott, who had been a member of Mr. Morrison s con gregation back in Ohio. " I never did see her beat." The good old lady s remark, which was considered highly commenda tory, and had nothing whatever to do with the frivolities of changing custom, was made at a quilting at Squire Wilson s, from which Marg et Ann chanced to be absent. " It s a pity she don t seem to get mar ried," said Mrs. Barnes, who was marking circles in the white patches of the quilt by means of an inverted teacup of flowing blue; " she s the kind of a girl Pd a thought young men would a took up with." 106 MARG ET ANN "Marg et Ann never was much for the boys," said grandmother Elliott, disposed to defend her favorite, " and dear knows she has her hands full; it ? s quite a chore to look after all them children." The women maintained a charitable si lence. The ethics of their day did not re cognize any womanly duty inconsistent with matrimony. " A disappointment " was con sidered the only dignified reason for remain ing single. Grandmother Elliott felt the weakness of her position. " I m sure I don t see how her father would get on," she protested feebly; "he ain t much of a hand to manage." " If Marg et Ann was to marry, her father would have to stir round and get himself a wife," said Mrs. Barnes, with cheerful lack of sentiment, confident that her audience was with her. " I Ve always had a notion Marg et Ann thought a good deal more of Lloyd Archer than she let on, at least more than her folks knew anything about," asserted Mrs. Skinner, stretching her plump arm under the 107 MARG ET ANN quilt and feeling about carefully. " I should n t wonder if she d had quite a disappointment." " I would have hated to see her marry Lloyd Archer," protested grandmother El liott; " she s a sight too good for him; he s always had queer notions." "Well, I should a thought myself she could a done better," admitted Mrs. Barnes, "but somehow she has n t. I tell Lisha it s more of a disgrace to the young man than it is to her." Evidently this discussion of poor Marg et Ann s dismal outlook matrimonially was not without precedent. One person was totally oblivious to the facts and all surmises concerning them. The oretically, no doubt, the good minister es teemed it a reproach that any woman should remain unmarried; but there are theories which refinement finds it easy to separate from daily life, and no thought of Marg et Ann s future intruded upon her father s deep and daily increasing distress over the wrongs of human slavery. Marg et Ann was con scious sometimes of a change in him; he 1 08 MARG ET ANN went often and restlessly to see Squire Kirk- endall, who kept an underground railroad station, and not infrequently a runaway negro was harbored at the Morrisons . Strange to say, these frightened and stealthy visitors, dirty and repulsive though they were, ex cited no fear in the minds of the children, to whom the slave had become almost an object of reverence. Marg et Ann read her first novel that year, a story called " Uncle Tom s Cabin," which appeared in the " National Era," read it and wept over it, adding all the inten sity of her antislavery training to the enjoy ment of a hitherto forbidden pleasure. She did not fail to note her father s eagerness for the arrival of the paper; and recalled the fact that he had once objected to her reading " Pilgrim s Progress " on the Sabbath. " It s useful, perhaps," he had said, " use ful in its way and in its place, but it is fiction nevertheless." There were many vexing questions of church discipline that winter, and the Rev. Samuel McClanahan rode over from Cedar 109 MARG ET ANN Township often and held long theological discussions with her father in the privacy of the best room. Once Squire Wilson came with him, and as the two visitors left the house Marg et Ann heard the Rev. Samuel urging upon the elder the necessity of "hold ing up Brother Morrison s hands." It was generally known among the congre gation that Abner Kirkendall had been be fore the session for attending the Methodist Church and singing an uninspired hymn in the public worship of God, and it was whis pered that the minister was not properly im pressed with the heinousness of Abner s sin. Then, too, Jonathan Loomis, the precentor, who had at first insisted upon lining out two lines of the psalm instead of one, and had carried his point, now pushed his dangerous liberality to the extreme of not lining out at all. The first time he was guilty of this start ling innovation, " Rushin through the sawm," as Uncle John Turnbull afterwards said, " without deegnity, as if it were a mere hu man cawmposeetion," two or three of the older members arose and left the church; no MARG ET ANN and the presbytery was shaken to its founda tions of Scotch granite when Mr. Morrison humbly acknowledged that he had not no ticed the precentor s bold sally until Brother Turnbull s departure attracted his attention. It is true that the minister had preached most acceptably that day from the ninth and twelfth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of Job : " By reason of the multitude of oppres sions they make the oppressed to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty. . . . There they cry, but none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men." And it is possible that the zeal for freedom that burned in his soul was rather gratified than otherwise by Jonathan s bold singing of the prophetic psalm: " He out of darkness did them bring And from Death s shade them take, Those bands wherewith they had been bound Asunder quite he brake. u O that men to the Lord would give Praise for His goodness then, And for His works of wonder done Unto the sons of men." in MARG ET ANN But such absorbing enthusiasm, even in a good cause, argued a doctrinal laxity which could not pass unnoticed. " A deegnifyin of the creature above the Creator, the sign above the thing seegnified," Uncle Johnnie Turnbull urged upon the ses sion, smarting from the deep theological wound he had suffered at Jonathan s hands. A perceptible chill crept into the ecclesi astical atmosphere which Marg et Ann felt without thoroughly comprehending. Nancy Helen was sixteen now, and Marg et Ann had taught the summer school at Yankee Neck, riding home every evening to superintend the younger sister s house keeping. Laban had emerged from the period of unshaven awkwardness, and was going to see Emeline Barnes with ominous regularity. There was nothing in the affairs of the household to trouble Marg et Ann but her father s ever increasing restlessness and pre occupation. She wondered if it would have been different if her mother had lived. There was no great intimacy between the father and 112 MARG ET ANN daughter, but the girl knew that the wrongs of the black man had risen like a dense cloud between her father and what had once been his highest duty and pleasure. She was not, therefore, greatly surprised when he said to her one day, more humbly than he was wont to speak to his children: " I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few." " What will you do, father ? " Marg et Ann asked the question hesitat ingly, dreading the reply. The minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolu tion into words. " If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg et Ann, they are our iniquities, indirectly, child." 113 MARG ET ANN He got up and walked across the rag-car peted floor. Marg et Ann sat still in her mother s chair,. looking down at the stripes of the carpet, dark blue and red and " hit or miss, " her mother had made them so pa tiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little. The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke. " Is n t it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us, for Abolition ists, I mean; I have heard that it was." " Dangerous ! " The preacher s face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy of martyrdom; poor Marg et Ann had touched the wrong chord. " It cannot be worse for me than it is for them, I must go," he broke out im patiently; " do not say anything against it, child!" And so Marg et Ann said nothing. Really there was not much time for words. There were many stitches to be taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as ignorant and indifferent as 114 MARG ET ANN a child, before she packed it all in the old car pet sack and nerved herself to see him start. He went away willingly, almost cheer fully. Just at the last, when he came to bid the younger children good-by, the father seemed for an instant to rise above the re former. No doubt their childish unconcern moved him. " We must think of the families that have been rudely torn apart. Surely it ought to sustain us, it ought to sustain us," he said to Laban as they drove away. Two days later they carried him home, crippled for life by the overturning of the stage near Cedar Creek. He made no complaint of the drunken driver whose carelessness had caused the accident and frustrated his plans; but once, when his eldest daughter was alone with him, he looked into her face and said, ab sently, rather than to her, "Patience, patience; I doubt not the Lord s hand is in it." And Marg et Ann felt that his purpose was not quenched. MARG ET ANN In the spring Lloyd Archer came home. Marg et Ann had heard of his coming, and tried to think of him with all the intervening years of care and trial added; but when she saw him walking up the path between the flowering almonds and snowball bushes, all the intervening years faded away, and left only the past that he had shared, and the present. She met him there at her father s bedside and shook hands with him and said, " How do you do, Lloyd? Have you kept your health ? " as quietly as she would have greeted any neighbor. After he had spoken to her father and the children she sat before him with her knitting, a very gentle, self-con tained Desdemona, and listened while he told the minister stories of California, men tioning the trees and fruits of the Bible with a freedom and familiarity that savored just enough of heresy to make him seem entirely unchanged. When Nancy Helen came into the room he glanced from her to Marg et Ann; the two sisters had the same tints in hair and 116 MARG ET ANN cheek, but the straight, placid lines of the elder broke into waves and dimples in the younger. Nancy Helen shook hands in a limp, half-grown way, blushingly conscious that her sleeves were rolled up, and that her elders were maturely indifferent to her suf ferings; and Lloyd jokingly refused to tell her his name, insisting that she had kissed him good-by and promised to be his little sweetheart when he came back. Marg et Ann was knitting a great blue and white sock for Laban, and after she had turned the mammoth heel she smoothed it out on her lap, painstakingly, conscious all the time of a tumultuous, unreasonable joy in Lloyd s presence, in the sound of his voice, in his glance, which assured her so unmistakably that she had a right to rejoice in his coming. She did not see her lover alone for several days. When she did, he caught her hands and said, " Well, Marg et Ann ? " taking up the unsettled question of their lives where they had left it. And Marg et Ann stood still, with her hands in his, looking down at 117 MARG ET ANN the snow of the fallen locust-bloom at her feet, and said, "When father is well enough to begin preaching again, then I think perhaps Lloyd" But Lloyd did not wait to hear what she thought, nor trouble himself greatly about the "perhaps." The minister s injuries were slow to mend. They were all coming to understand that his lameness would be permanent, and there was on the part of the older children a tense, pained curiosity concerning their father s feeling on the subject, which no word of his had thus far served to relieve. There was a grave shyness among them concern ing their deepest feelings, which was, per haps, a sense of the inadequacy of expression rather than the austerity it seemed. Marg et Ann would have liked to show her sympathy for ker father, and no doubt it would have lightened the burdens of both; but any be trayal of filial tenderness beyond the dutiful care she gave him would have startled the n8 MARG ET ANN minister, and embarrassed them both. Life was a serious thing to them only by reason of its relation to eternity 5 a constant under rating of this world had made them doubtful of its dignity. Marg et Ann felt it rather light-minded that she should have a lump in her throat whenever she thought of her father on crutches for the rest of his life. She wondered how Laban felt about it, but it was not likely that she would ever know. Laban had made the crutches himself, a rude, temporary pair at first, but he was at work on others now that were more carefully made and more durable 5 and she knew from this and the remarks of her father when he tried them that they both understood. It was not worth while to talk about it of course, and yet the household had a dull ache in it that a little talking might have relieved. Marg et Ann had begged Lloyd not to speak to her father until the latter was " up and about." It seemed to her unkind to talk of leaving him when he was helpless, and Lloyd was. very patient now, and very tract- 119 MARG ET ANN able, working busily to get the old place in readiness for his bride. Mr. Morrison sat at his table, reading, or writing hurriedly, or gazing absently out into the June sunshine. He was sitting thus one afternoon, tapping the arms of his chair ner vously with his thin fingers, when Marg et Ann brought her work and sat in her mo ther s chair near him. It was not very dainty work, winding a mass of dyed carpet rags into a huge, madder-colored ball, but there were delicate points in its execution which a restless civilization has hurried into ob livion along with the other lost arts, and Marg et Ann surveyed her ball critically now and then, to be sure that it was not develop ing any slovenly one-sidedness under her deft hands. The minister s crutches leaned against the arm of his painted wooden chair with an air of mute but patient helpfulness. Marg et Ann had cushioned them with patch work, but he had walked about so much that she already noted the worn places beginning to show under the arms of his faded dressing- gown. He leaned forward a little and glanced I2O MARG ET ANN toward her, his hand on them now, and she put down her work and went to his side. He raised himself by the arms of his chair, sigh ing, and took the crutches from her patient hand. " I am not of much account, child, not of much account," he said wearily. Marg et Ann colored with pain. She felt as a branch might feel when the trunk of the tree snaps. " I m sure you re getting on very well, father ; the doctor says you 11 be able to begin preaching again by fall." The minister made his way slowly across the room and stood a moment in the open door; then he retraced his halting steps with their thumping wooden accompaniment and seated himself slowly and painfully again. One of the crutches slid along the arm of the chair and fell to the floor. Marg et Ann went to pick it up. His head was still bowed and his face had not relaxed from the pain of moving. Standing a moment at his side and looking down at him, she noticed how thin and gray his hair had become. She 121 MARG ET ANN turned away her face, looking out of the win dow and battling with the cruelty of it all. The minister felt the tenderness of her silent presence there, and glanced up. " I shall not preach any more, Marg et Ann, at least not here, not in this way. If I might do something for those down-trod den people, but that is perhaps not best. The Lord knows. But I shall leave the minis try for a time, until I see my way more clearly." His daughter crossed the room, stooping to straighten the braided rug at his feet as she went, and took up her work again. Cer tainly the crimson ball was a trifle one-sided, or was it the unevenness of her tear-filled vision? She unwound it a little to remedy the defect as her father went on. "Things do not present themselves to my mind as they once did. I have not decided just what course to pursue, but it would certainly not be honorable for me to occupy the pulpit in my present frame of mind. You ve been a very faithful daughter, Mar g et Ann," he broke off, " a good daughter." 122 MARG ET ANN He turned and looked at her sitting there winding the great ball with her trembling fingers; her failure to speak did not suggest any coldness to either of them; response would have startled him. " I have thought much about it," he went on. " I have had time to think under this affliction. Nancy Helen is old enough to be trusted now, and when Laban marries he will perhaps be willing to rent the land. No doubt you could get both the summer and winter schools in the district; that would be a great help. The congregation has not been able to pay much, but it would be a loss " He faltered for the first time; there was a shame in mentioning money in connection with his office. " I have suffered a good deal of distress of mind, child, but doubtless it is salutary it is salutary." He reached for his crutches again rest lessly, and then drew back, remembering the pain of rising. Marg et Ann had finished the ball of car pet rags and laid it carefully in the box with 123 MARG ET ANN the others. She had taken great pains with the coloring, thinking of the best room in her new home, and Lloyd had a man s liking for red. And now the old question had come back; it was older than she knew. Doubtless it was right that men should always have opinions and aspirations and principles, and women only ties and duties and heartaches. It seemed cruel, though, just now. She choked back the throbbing pain in her throat that threatened to make itself seen and heard. " Of course I must do right, Marg et Ann." Her father s voice seemed almost pleading. Of course he must do right. Marg et Ann had not dreamed of anything else. Only it was a little hard just now. She glanced at him, leaning forward in his chair with the crutches beside him. He looked feeble about the temples, and his patched dressing-gown hung loose in wrinkles. She crossed the room and stood beside him. Of course she would stay with him. She did not ask herself why. She did not reason that it was because motherhood underlies wife- 124 MARG ET ANN hood and makes it sweet and sufficing; makes every good woman a mother to every dependent creature, be it strong or weak. I doubt if she reasoned at all. She only said, " Of course you will do right, father, and I will see about the school; I think I can get it. You must not worry; we shall get on very well." Out in the June sunshine Lloyd was com ing up the walk with Nancy Helen. She had been gathering wild strawberries in the meadow across the lane, and they had met at the gate. Her sunbonnet was pushed back from her crinkly hair, and her cheeks were stained redder than her finger-tips by Lloyd s teasing. Marg et Ann looked at them and sighed. After her brother s return from presbytery Miss Nancy McClanahan borrowed her sis ter-in-law s horse and rode over to visit the Morrisons. It was not often that Miss Nancy made a trip of this kind alone, and Marg et Ann ran down the walk to meet her, rolling down her sleeves and smoothing her hair. I2 S MARG ET ANN Miss Nancy took the girl s soft cheeks in her hands and drew them into the shadow of her cavernous sunbonnet for a withered kiss. " I want to see your father, Margie," she whispered, and the gentle constraint of spirit ual things came into Marg et Ann s voice as she answered, "He s in the best room alone; I moved him in there this morning to be out of the sweeping. You can go right in." She lingered a little, hoping her old friend s concern of soul might not have obscured her interest in the salt-rising bread, which had been behaving untowardly of late; but Miss Nancy turned her steps in the direction of the best room, and Marg et Ann opened the door for her, saying, " It s Miss McClanahan, father." The minister looked up, wrinkling his forehead in the effort to disentangle himself from his thoughts. The old maid crossed the room toward him with her quick, hitching step. " Don t try to get up, Joseph," she said, 126 MARG ET ANN as he laid his hand on his crutches; "I ll find myself a chair." She sat down before him, crossing her hands in her lap. The little worn band of gold was not on her finger, but there was a smooth white mark where it had been. " Samuel got home from presbytery yes terday; he told me what was before them. I thought I d like to have a little talk with you." Her voice trembled as she stopped. A faint color showed itself through the silvery stubble on the minister s cheeks; he patted the arms of his chair nervously. " I m hardly prepared to discuss my opin ions. They are vague, very vague, at best. I should be sorry to unsettle the faith " " I don t care at all about your opinions," Miss Nancy interrupted, pushing his words away with both hands ; " I only wanted to speak to you about Marg et Ann." "Marg et Ann!" The minister s relief breathed itself out in gentle surprise. "Yes, Marg et Ann. I think it s time somebody was thinking of her, Joseph." 127 MARG ET ANN Miss Nancy leaned forward, her face the color of a withered rose. " She s doing over again what I did. Perhaps it was best for you. I believe it was, and I don t want you to say a word, you must n t, but I can speak, and I m not going to let Marg et Ann live my life if I can help it." " I don t understand you, Nancy." The minister laid his hands on his crutches and refused to be motioned back into his chair. He stood before her, looking down anxiously into her thin, eager face. " I know you don t. Esther never under stood, either. You did n t know that Marg et Ann gave up Lloyd Archer because he had doubts, but I knew it. I wanted to speak then, but I couldn t to her Esther, and now you don t know that she s going to give him up again because you have doubts, Joseph. That s the way with women. They have no principles, only to do the hardest thing. But I know what it means to work and worry and pinch and have nothing in the end, not even troubles of your own, they would be some comfort. And I ? m going to 128 MARG ET ANN save Marg et Ann from it. I m going to come here and take her place. I ve got a little something of my own, you know; I always meant it for her." She stopped, looking at him expectantly. The minister turned away, rubbing his hands up and down his polished crutches. There was a soft, troubled light in his eyes. "Why, Nancy!" His companion got up and moved a step backward. Her cheeks flushed a pale, faded red. " Oh, no," she said, with a quick, impatient movement of her head, "not that, Joseph; that died years ago, you are the same to me as other men, excepting that you are Marg et Ann s father. It s for her. It s the only way I can live my life over again, by letting her live hers. I don t know that it will be any better; but she will know, she will have a certainty in place of a doubt. I don t know that my life would have been any better; I know yours would not, and anyway it s all over now. I know I can get on with the children, and I don t think peo- 129 MARG ET ANN pie will talk. I hope you re not going to object, Joseph. We Ve always been very good friends." He shook his head slowly. " I don t see how I can, Nancy. It s very good of you. Perhaps," he added, looking at her with a wistful desire for contradiction, "perhaps I ve been a little selfish about Marg et Ann." " I don t think you meant to be, Joseph," said the old maid soothingly; "when any body s so good as Marg et Ann, she does n t call for much grace in the people about her. I think it s a duty we owe to other people to have some faults." Outside the door Marg et Ann still lin gered, with her anxiety about the bread on her lips and the shadow of much serving in her soft eyes. Miss Nancy stopped and drew her favorite into the shelter of her gaunt arms. " I m coming over next week to help you get ready for the wedding, Margie," she said, " and I m going to stay when you re gone and look after things. They don t need me 130 MARG ET ANN at Samuel s now, and I 11 be more comfort able here. I ve got enough to pay a little for my board the rest of my life, and I don t mean to work very hard, but I can show Nancy Helen and keep the run of things. There, don t cry. We 11 go and look at the sponge now. I guess you d better ride over to Yankee Neck this afternoon, and tell them you don t want the winter school There, there!" At the Foot of the Trail At the Foot of the Trail THE slope in front of old Mosey s cabin was a mass of purple lupine. Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiaea, waving on long, glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing the blue sky beyond. In the corral between the house and the mountain-side stood a dozen or more burros, wearing that air of patient resignation com mon to very good women and very obstinate beasts. Old Mosey himself was pottering about the corral, feeding his stock. He stooped now and then with the unwilling ness of years, and erected himself by slow, rheumatic stages. The donkeys crowded about the fence as he approached with a 35 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL forkful of alfalfa hay, and he pushed them about with the flat of the prongs, calling them by queer, inappropriate names. A young man in blue overalls came around the corner of the house, swinging a newly trimmed manzanita stick. Hello, Mosey! " he called. Here I am again, as hungry as a coyote. What s the lay-out? Cottontail on toast and patty de foy grass,? " The old man grinned, showing his worn, yellow teeth. " I 11 be there in a minute," he said. "Just set down on the step." The young fellow came toward the corral. " I ve got a job on the trail," he said. " I m going down-town for my traps. Who named em for you ? " he questioned, as the old man swore softly at the Democratic candidate for President. " Oh, the women, mostly. They take a lot of interest in em when they start out; they re afraid I ain t good to them. They don t say so much about it when they get back." " They re too tired, I suppose." 136 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " Yes, I s pose so." " You let out five this morning, did n t you ? I met them on my way down. The girl in bloomers seemed to be scared; she gave a little screech every few minutes. The others did n t appear to mind." "Oh, she wasn t afraid. Women don t make a noise when they re scared; it s only when they want to scare somebody else." The young fellow leaned against the fence and laughed, with a final whoop. A gray donkey investigated his hip pocket, and he reached back and prodded the intruder with his stick. " You seem to be up on the woman ques tion, Mosey. It s queer you ain t married." The old man was lifting a boulder to hold down a broken bale of hay, and made no reply. His visitor started toward the cabin. The old man adjusted another boulder and trotted after his guest, brushing the hay from his flannel shirt. A column of blue- white smoke arose from the rusty stovepipe in the cabin roof, and the smell of overdone coffee drifted out upon the spiced air. AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " I was just about settin down," said the host, placing another plate and cup and sau cer on the blackened redwood table. " I 11 fry you some more bacon and eggs." The visitor watched him as he hurried about with the short, uncertain steps of hos pitable old age. " By gum, Mosey, I d marry a grass- widow with a second-hand family before I d do my own cooking." The young fellow gave a self-conscious laugh that made the old man glance at him from under his weather-beaten straw hat. " Your mind seems to run on marryin ," he said, " guess you re hungry. Set up and have some breakfast." The visitor drew up a wooden chair, and the old man poured two cups of black coffee from the smoke-begrimed coffee-pot and returned it to the stove. Then he took off his hat and seated himself opposite his guest. The latter stirred three heaping teaspoon- fuls of sugar into his cup, muddied the re sulting syrup with condensed milk, and drank it with the relish of abnormal health. 138 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " I tell you what, Mosey," he said, reach ing for a slice of bacon and dripping the grease across the table, "there ain t any flies on the women when it comes to house keeping. Now, a woman would turn on the soapsuds and float you clean out of this house; then she d mop up, and put scalloped noospapers on all the shelves, and little white aprons on the windows, and pillow-shams on your bunk, and she d work a doily for you to lay your six-shooter on, with God bless our home in the corner of it; and she d make you so comfortable you would n t know what to do with yourself." " I m comfortable enough by myself," said the old man uneasily. "When you work for yourself, you know who s boss." "Naw, you don t, Mosey, not by a long shot; you don t know whether you re boss or the cookin . I tried bachin once " the speaker made a grimace of reminiscent dis gust; "the taste has n t gone out of my mouth yet. You re a pretty fair cook, Mosey, but you d ought to see my girl s biscuits; she makes em so light she has to put a napkin 39 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL over em to keep em from floating around like feathers. Fact! " He reached over and speared a slice of bread with his fork. " If I keep this job on the trail, maybe you 11 have a chance to sample them biscuits. I m goin to send East for that girl." " Where you goin to live ? " "Well, I didn t know but we could rent this ranch and board you, Mosey. Seems to me you ought to retire. It ain t human to live this way. If you was to die here all by your self, you d regret it. Well, I must toddle." The visitor stood a moment on the step, sweeping the valley with his fresh young glance; then he set his hat on the back of his head and went whistling down the road, waving his stick at old Mosey as he disap peared among the sycamores in the wash. The old man gathered the dishes into a rusty pan, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle. " I believe I 11 do it," he said, as he fished the hot saucers out by their edges and turned them down on the table; "it can t do no harm to write to her, no way." 140 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL II Mrs. Moxom put on her slat sunbonnet, took a tin pan from the pantry shelf, and hurried across the kitchen toward the door. Her daughter-in-law looked up from the corner where she was kneading bread. She was a short, plump woman, and all of her convexities seemed emphasized by flour. She put up the back of her hand to adjust a loosened lock of hair, and added another high light to her forehead. " Where you going, mother? " she called anxiously. The old woman did not turn her head. "Oh, just out to see how the lettuce is coming on. I had a notion I d like some for dinner, wilted with ham gravy." "Can t one of the children get it?" There was no response. Mrs. Weaver turned back to her bread. " Your grandmother seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue paper of an enervating 141 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal reminiscences of a ship that never returned. " Oh, well, mother," said that young per son comfortably, " let her alone. I think we all tag her too much. I hate to be tagged myself." " Well, I m sure I don t want to tag her, Ethel ; I just don t want her to overdo." Mrs. Weaver spoke in a tone of mingled injury and self-justification. " Oh, well, mother, she is n t likely to put her shoulder out of joint pulling a few heads of lettuce." The girl broke out again into cheerful interrogations concerning the disaster at sea: " Did she neverr returren? No, she never r returrened." Mrs. Weaver gave a little sigh, as if she feared her daughter s words might prove prophetic, and buried her plump fists in the puffy dough. Old Mrs. Moxom turned when she reached the garden gate and glanced back at the 142 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL house. Then she clasped the pan to her breast and skurried along the fence toward the orchard. Once under the trees, she did not look behind her, but went rapidly toward the field where she knew her son was plow ing. The reflection of the sun on the tin pan made him look up, and when he saw her he stopped his team. She came across the soft brown furrows to his side. " I d have come to the fence when I saw you, if I had n t had the colt," he said kindly. "What s wanted?" The old woman s face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one trem bling hand. "Jason," she said, with a little jerk in her voice, "your paw s alive." The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt s back; then he took off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment. " I expect you d most forgot all about him," pursued the old woman, with a vague reproach in her tone. AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " I had n t much to forget," answered the man, resentment rising in his voice. " He has n t troubled himself about me." " Well, he did n t know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon after we was married. It s a dreadful position to be placed in. It u d be awfully embarrassing to to the Moxom girls." The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak of his half- sisters in that way before. "They re so kind of high-toned," she went on, "just as like as not they d blame me. I m sure I don t know what to do." Jason kicked the soft earth with his sun burnt boot. " Where is he ? " he asked sullenly. " In Calif ornay." " How d you hear ? " " I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs. Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle Samuel s folks, and they put it in another en velope and backed it to me here. I thought at first I would n t say anything about it, 144 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL but it seemed as if I d ought to tell you; it doesn t hurt you any, but it s awful hard on the the Moxom girls." The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot. " Well, I d just give him the go-by," he announced resolutely. " You re a decent man s widow, and that s enough. He s never " " Oh, I ain t saying anything against your step-paw, Jason," the old woman broke in anxiously. " He was an awful good man. It seems queer to think it was the way it was. Dear me, it s all so kind of confusing!" The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her matrimo nial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by twins. " I m sure I don t see how I could help thinking he was dead," she went on after a little silence, " when he wrote he was going off on that trip and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And then, you know, AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL I did n t get married again till you was most ten years old, Jason. I m sure I don t know what to do. I don t want to mortify anybody, but I d like to know just what s my dooty." " Well, I can tell you easy enough." The man s voice was getting beyond control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. "Just drop the whole thing. If he s got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can man age for the rest of the time." " But it ain t so easy managin when you begin to get old, Jason. I know how that is." Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start. " I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don t you, Jason?" she asked humbly. " Don t know as I did," answered the man, without enthusiasm. "Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered your paw this quarter-section if he d stay here in loway; but he had his heart set on going to Califor- nay, and did n t want it; so after it turned 146 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me this farm, and I done very well with it. That s the reason your step-paw insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he died." " Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself." The man said the word " father " half de fiantly. " Mr. Moxom ? Oh, yes, he was a first- rate manager, and the kindest man that ever drew breath. I remember when your sis ter Angie was born oh, dear me ! " the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an instant, " it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we d better just drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma did n t like my coming for lettuce. She 11 think I ve planted some, and am waitin for it to come up." She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to him she walked more feebly than when she came out AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL "That s awful queer," he said, shaking his head, " calling her own daughters ( the Moxom girls. " III Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village, and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his monotonous life. The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous " Oh, Barney, you goose! " as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with the disrespect born of comprehension. 148 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL As they turned into the lane west of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by the proximity of oats. " Ed! " called the girl, "the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish you d put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down the hill by Arbuckle s." Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her to dismount. " They have n t any quart jars over at the store, mother," said Ethel, entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat. "They re expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of Endor!" she exclaimed, twisting her loos ened rope of hair and skewering it in place with a white celluloid pin. " That colt acted as if he was possessed." " Oh, I m sorry about the jars," said Mrs. 149 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL Weaver regretfully. "I wanted to finish putting up the curr n s to-morrow." " Did you get any mail ? " quavered grand mother Moxom. " I got a letter from Rob." There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face. "Is he well?" ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her daughter-in-law. "Yes, he s well; he s got steady work on some road up the mountain. He writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him old Mosey. They re keeping bach to gether. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says they tasted like castor oil." As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair. AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl, bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy. " Why, Ethel ! " Mrs. Weaver s voice was full of astonished disapproval. " I should think you d be ashamed to say such a thing." "I didn t say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little grimace at herself in the glass. " Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a girl. If a girl s worth having, she s worth coming after." Mrs. Weaver made this latter announce ment with an air of triumph in its triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of con tempt. " Well, if a fellow s worth having, is n t he worth going to ? " she asked with would-be flippancy. "Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter s name slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense of her worth. " I never did hear the like." AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her mother. " It 11 cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to California, and a hun dred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up. Besides, he 11 lose his job. I d just as soon go out there as have him come here. If people don t like it they they need n t." The girl s fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in restless search of diversion from impending tears. "Well, girls do act awful strange these days." Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter s tone and divided her disapproval by multiplying its denominator. " Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense," retorted Ethel huskily. " Well, I don t know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man, even if you re engaged to him; do you, mother?" Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law s appeal. "Well, it does seem a long way to go 152 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL on on an uncertainty, Ethel," she fal tered. The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother. "Well, I hope you don t mean to call Rob an uncertainty ? " she demanded angrily. "Oh, no; I don t mean that," pleaded the old woman. " I have n t got anything agen Rob. I don t suppose he s any more uncer tain than than the rest of them. I " "Why, grandmother Moxom," interrupted the girl, " how you talk ! I m sure father is n t an uncertainty, and there was n t any thing uncertain about grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they re just about as certain as we are." The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless industry. " It s awful hard to know what to do sometimes," she said, indulging in a gener ality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering. " Well, it is n t hard for me to know this time," said Mrs. Weaver, her features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. "No S3 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL girl of mine shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose chase." Ethel got up and moved toward the stair way, her tawny head thrown back, and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread. " I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and wasteful," she said over her shoulder, " so they can have some thing to nag them about. I m sure I " She slammed the door upon her voice, which seemed to be carried upward in a little whirl wind of indignation. Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in- law for sympathy, but the old woman re fused to meet her gaze. " I m just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and getting Ethel all worked up," clucked the younger woman anxiously. Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it. " Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning," she said apologetically. " To think of them poor things trying to AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL keep house and the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma." Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity. " I don t mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done decent. I don t intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she was n t worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits! " She lifted her chin and looked at her com panion over the barricade of conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with none of her daughter-in-law s satisfac tion in it. " I m sure I don t know," she said drear ily; " sometimes it ain t easy to know your dooty at a glance." Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to such lax uncertainty. "The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night, " you d have thought she sided with Ethel." AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the proprieties in the face of his wife s disapproval, so he grunted an amiable acquiescence in that spirit of jus tifiable hypocrisy known among his kind as " humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to exult in his daughter s spirit and good sense, and so long as these admira ble qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness. "Well, Dot, how s Rob ?" he asked jo vially one evening at supper about a month later. "Does he still think he s worth run ning after ? " "I don t know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. 56 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " He s well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke his leg, and Rob has to take care of him." Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in her lap hope lessly. "Well, now, what made him go and do that? " she asked, with a fretful quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw. " I don t know, grandmother," answered Ethel cheerfully. " As soon as he s well enough to be moved, they re going to take him to the county hospital. I guess that s the poorhouse. But Rob says he s so old they re afraid the bone won t knit ; he suffers^ like everything. Poor old man, I m awful sorry for him. Rob has to do all the cooking." The old woman pushed back her chair and brushed the crumbs from her apron. " I guess I 11 go upstairs and lay down awhile, Emma. I been kind of light-headed all afternoon. I guess I set too long over them carpet rags." She got up and crossed the room hur riedly. Her son looked after her with anx- AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL ious eyes. Presently they heard her toiling up the stairs with the slow, inelastic tread of infancy and old age. " I don t know what s come over your mother, Jason," said his wife. " She has n t been herself all summer. Sometimes I think I d ought to write to the girls." " Oh, I guess ^he 11 be all right," said Jason, with masculine hopefulness. "Dot, you d better go up by and by and see if grandmother wants anything." Safe in her own room, Mrs. Moxom sank into a chair with a long breath of relief and dismay. "The poorhouse!" she gasped. "That seems about as mortifying as to own up to your girls that you was n t never rightly married to their father." She got up and wandered across the room to the bureau. " I expect he s changed a good deal," she murmured. She took a daguerreotype from the upper drawer, and gazed at it curiously. " Yes, I expect he s changed quite a good deal," she repeated, with a sigh. 158 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL IV " Why, mother Moxom! " Mrs. Weaver sank into her sewing-chair in an attitude of pulpy despair. " Well, I don t see but what it s the best thing for me to do," asserted the old woman. " The cold weather 11 be coming on soon, and I always have more or less rheumatism, and they say Californay s good for rheuma tism. Besides, I think I need to stir round a little; I ve stayed right here most too close; and as long as Ethel has her heart set on going, I don t see but what it s the best plan. If I go along with her, I can make sure that everything s all right. If you and Jason say she can t go, why, then, I don t see but what I 11 just have to start off and make the trip alone." " Why, mother Moxom, I just don t know what to say ! " Mrs. Weaver s tone conveyed a deep- seated sense of injury that she should thus be deprived of speech for such insufficient cause. AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " T is n t such a very hard trip," pursued the old woman doggedly. " They say you get on one of them through trains and take your provision and your knitting, and just live along the road. It is n t as if you had to change cars at every junction, and get so turned round you don t know which way your head s set on your shoulders." Mrs. Weaver s expression began to dis solve into reluctant interest in these de tails. " Well, of course, if you think it 11 help your rheumatism, and you ve got your mind made up to go, somebody 11 have to go with you. Have you asked Jason ? " "No, I haven t." Mrs. Moxom s voice took on an edge. " I can t see just why I ve got to ask people; sometimes I think I m about old enough to do as I please." " Why, of course, mother," soothed the daughter-in-law. " Would you go and see the girls before you d start ? " " No, I don t believe I would," answered the old woman, her voice relaxing under this acquiescence. " They d only make a fuss. 160 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL They Ve both got good homes and good men, and they re married to them right and lawful, and there s nothing to worry about. Besides, I d just get interested in the chil dren, and that d make it harder. I Ve done the best I knew how by the girls, and I don t know as they ve got any reason to complain " "Why, no, mother," interrupted the daughter-in-law, with rising feathers, " I never heard anybody say but what you d done well by all your children. I only thought they d want to see you. I think they d come over if they knew it well, of course, Angie could n t, having a young baby so, but Laura she d come in a minute." " Well, I don t believe I want to see them," persisted Mrs. Moxom. " It 11 only make it harder. I guess you need n t let them know I m goin . Ethel and I 11 start as soon as she can get ready. Seems like Rob s having a pretty hard time. He could n t come after Ethel now if he wanted to. It would n t be right for him to leave that that old gen tleman." 161 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL "Well, I wouldn t want the girls to have any hard feelings towards me." " The Moxom girls ain t a-going to have any hard feelings towards you, Emma/ as serted the old woman, with emphasis. " She has the queerest way of talking about your sisters, Jason," Mrs. Weaver con fided to her husband later. " It makes me think, sometimes, she s failing pretty fast." As the road to the foot of the trail grew steeper, Rob Kendall found an increasing difficulty in guiding his team with one hand. His bride drew herself from his encircling arm reluctantly. " You d better look after the horses," she said, with a vivid blush. " What 11 grand mother think of us ? " The young fellow removed the offending arm and reached back to pat the old lady s knee. " I ain t afraid of grandmother," he said joyously. " Grandmother s a brick. If she 162 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL stays out here long, she 11 soon be the young est woman on the mesa. I should n t won der if she d pick up some nice old gentle man herself how s that, grandmother?" He bent down and kissed his wife s ear. " Catch me going back on grandmothers after this ! " " You have n t changed a bit, Rob," said Ethel fondly; "has he, grandmother?" She turned her radiant smile upon the withered face behind her. The old woman did not answer. The newly wedded couple resumed their raptur ous contemplation of each other. " How s that funny old man, Rob ? " asked Ethel, smoothing out her dimples. "Old Mosey? He s pretty rocky. I m afraid he won t pull through." Rob strove to adjust his voice to the subject. " I d a got a house down in town, but I did n t like to leave him. We 11 have to go pretty soon, though. I m afraid you 11 be lonesome up here." The old woman on the back seat leaned forward a little. The young couple smiled 163 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL exultantly into each other s eyes, with superb scorn of the world. "Lonesome!" sneered the girl. Her husband drew her close to him with an ecstatic hug. " Yes, lonesome," he laughed, his voice smothered in her bright hair. The old woman settled back in her seat The team made their way slowly through the sandy wash between the boulders. When they emerged from the sycamores, Rob pointed toward the cabin. " That s the place ! " he said triumphantly. The sunset was sifting through the live- oaks upon the shake roof. Two tents gleamed white beside it, frescoed with the shadow of moving leaves. Ethel lifted her head from her husband s shoulder, and looked at her home with the faith in her eyes that has kept the world young. " I ? ve put up some tents for us," said the young fellow gleefully; "but you mustn t go in till I get the team put away. I won t have you laughing at my housekeeping be hind my back. Old Mosey s asleep in the 164 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL shanty; the doctor gives him something to keep him easy. You can go in there and sit down, grandmother; you won t disturb him." He helped them out of the wagon, linger ing a little with his wife in his arms. The old woman left them and went into the house. She crossed the floor hesitatingly, and bent over the feeble old face on the pillow. "It s just as I expected; he s changed a good deal," she said to herself. The old man opened his eyes. " I was sayin you d changed a good deal, Moses," she repeated aloud. There was no intelligence in his gaze. " For that matter, I expect I ve changed a good deal myself," she went on. " I heard you d had a fall, and I thought I d better come out. You was always kind of hard to take care of when you was sick. I remember that time you hurt your foot on the scythe, just after we was married; you would n t let anybody come near you but me " " Why, it s Angeline ! " said the old man dreamily, with a vacant smile. 165 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL " Yes, it s me." He closed his eyes and drifted away again. The old wife sat still on the edge of the bed. Outside she could hear the sigh of the oaks and the trill of young voices. Two or three tears fell over the wrinkled face, written close with the past, like a yellow page from an old diary. She wiped them away, and looked about the room with its meagre belongings, which Rob had scoured into expectant neatness. "He doesn t seem to have done very well," she thought; "but how could he, all by himself?" She got up and walked to the door, and looked out at the strange land scape with its masses of purple mountains. " I ve got to do one of two things," she said to herself. " I ve just got to own up the whole thing, and let the girls be mortified, or else I Ve got to keep still and marry him over again, and pass for an old fool the rest of my life. I don t believe I can do it. They ve got more time to live down dis grace than I have. I believe I 11 just come out and tell everything. Ethel ! " she called. 166 AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL "Come here, you and Rob; I Ve got some thing to tell you." The young couple stood with locked arms, looking out over the valley. At the sound of her voice they clasped each other close in an embrace of passionate protest against the intrusion of this other soul. Then they turned toward the sunset, and went slowly and reluctantly into the house. Lib Lib A YOUNG woman sat on the veranda of a small redwood cabin, putting her baby to sleep. The infant displayed that aggressive wide-awakeness which seems to characterize babies on the verge of somno lence. Now and then it plunged its dim pled fists into the young mother s bare white breast, stiffened its tiny form rebelliously, raised its head, and sent gleams of defiance from beneath its drooping eyelids. It was late in March, and the ground about the cabin was yellow with low-grow ing composite. The air was honey-sweet and dripping with bird-song. Inside the house a woman and a girl were talking. " Oh, he s not worrying," said the latter. " What s he got to worry about? He lets us do all that. Lib s got the baby and we Ve got to bear all the disgrace. I " "Myrtie," called a clear voice from the 171 LIB veranda, " shut up ! You may say what you please about me, and you may say what you please about him, but nobody s going to call this baby a disgrace." She caught the child up and kissed the back of its neck with passionate vehemence. The baby struggled in her embrace and gave a little cry of outraged dignity. Indoors the girl looked at her mother and bit her lip in astonished dismay. " I did n t know she could hear," she whispered. A tall young woman came up the walk, trailing her tawdry ruffles over the fragrant alfileria. " Is Miss Sunderland " She colored a dull pink and glanced at the baby. " I m Lib Sunderland. Won t you come in ? " said Lib. The newcomer sank down on the upper step and leaned against the post of the veranda. " No. I don t want to see any one but you. I guess we can talk here." The baby sat up at the sound of the stran- 172 LIB ger s voice and stared at her with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes. " Maybe you 11 think it strange for me to come," she began, " but I did n t know what else to do. I m Ruby Adair." She waited a little, but her statement awoke no response in Lib s noncommittal face. " I don t know whether you know what they re saying over at the store or not," the visitor went on haltingly. "No," said Lib, with dry indifference; there ain t any men in our family to do the loafin and gossipin for us." " Since you moved over here from Bunch Grass Valley, they re saying that Thad Farnham is the is you know he was in the tile works over there a year or more ago." 73 LIB " Yes, I know." Lib s voice was like the crackling of dead leaves under foot. "I think it s pretty hard/ continued Miss Adair, gathering courage, and glancing from under the surf of her hair at her listener s impassive face; "him and me s engaged! " Lib s eyes narrowed, and the velvety down on her lip showed black against the whiteness around her mouth. " What does he say? " she asked. " What can he say? " Thad s fiancee broke out nervously, " except that it ain t so. But that does n t shut people s mouths. Nobody can do that but you. I think " she raised her chin virtuously and twisted her gloves tight in her trembling hands "that you ought to come out plain and tell who the man is I mean the you know what I mean ! " " Yes," said Lib dully, " I know what you mean." There was a little silence, broken only by the mad twitter of nesting linnets in the pas sion-vine overhead. "Of course," resumed the stranger, "I LIB would n t want you to think but what I m sorry for you. You ve been treated awful mean by somebody." A surprised look grew in the eyes Lib fixed upon her visitor. The baby stirred in its sleep, and she bent down and rubbed her cheek against its hair. " You need n t waste any time being sorry for me," she said. "It s too bad," continued Miss Adair, intent upon her own exalted charity, " but that does n t make it right for you to get other folks into trouble. You d ought to remember that." " If you think he s all right, why don t you go ahead and marry him?" asked Lib. " My folks would make such a fuss, and besides I don t know as it would be just right for me to act like I did n t care, after all that s been said and me a church- member ! " Miss Ruby bent her head a little forward, as if under the weight of her moral obliga tions. 75 LIB " Has he joined the church ? " inquired Lib in a curious voice. " He s been going to the union meetings regular with me, and he s stood up twice for prayers, but I dunno s they d take him into the church with all these stories going about. You d ought to think of that, too you may be standing in the way of saving his soul." " If his soul was lost, it would be awful hard to find," said Lib quietly. Her listener s weak mouth slackened. " Wh-at? " she asked, with a little stuttering gasp. " Oh, I dunno. Some things are hard to find when they re lost, you know." " And you 11 speak up and tell the truth ? " The visitor arose, gathering her flounces about her with one hand. " If I speak up, I 11 tell the truth, you can bet on that," said Lib. Miss Adair waited an instant, as if for some assurance which Lib did not vouch safe. Then she writhed down the walk in her twisted drapery and disappeared. 176 LIB Thad Farnham and his father had been cutting down a eucalyptus-tree. The two men looked small and mean clambering over the felled giant, as if belonging to some species of destructive insect. The tree in its fall had bruised the wild growth, and the air was full of oily medicinal odors. Long strips of curled cinnamon-colored bark strewed the ground. The father and son confronted each other across the pallid trunk. The older man s face was leathery-red with anger. " The story s got around that the kid s yours, anyway," he announced. "I don t care who started it, but if it s true, you 11 make a bee-line for the widow s and marry the girl. D you hear ? " Thad dropped his eyes sullenly and made a feint of examining the crosscut saw. " I don t go much on family," continued old Farnham, " and I never lowed you d set anything on fire excepting maybe yourself, but I m not raising sneaks and liars, and what little I ve got hain t been scraped to gether to fatten that kind of stock! " "Who said I lied?" 177 LIB " Nobody. But I m going to take you over to face that girl and see what she says. If you don t foller peaceable, I 11 coax you along with a hatful of cartridges. I hear you ve been whining around the revival meetings. I never suspected you till I heard that ! " " I don t see why you suspect a feller for lookin after the salvation " " Oh, damn your salvation 1 " broke in the old man. "Well, Idunno" " Well, I do ! " roared the father; " I know you can t make an angel without a man to start with, and I 11 do what I can to furnish the man, seein I m responsible for you bein born in the shape of one, and the preachers may put in the wing and the tail feathers if they can! Now start that saw! " Old Farnham and his son sat in the small front room of the widow Sunderland s cabin. The old man s jaw was set, and he grasped his knees with his big hairy hands as if to steady himself. Neither of the men arose when Lib came 178 LIB into the room with the baby. The old man s eyes followed her as she seated herself with out so much as a glance at his companion. "My name s Farnham," he began hoarsely. "This is my son Thad. You ve met him, maybe ? " He stopped and cleared his throat. Lib did not turn her head. " Yes, I ve met him," she said quietly. The old man s face turned the color of dull terra-cotta. "They say he took advantage of you. I don t know. I was n t much as a young fel ler, but I was n t a scrub, and I don t savvy scrubs. I fetched him over here to-day to ask you if it s true, and to say to you if it is, he 11 marry you or there 11 be trouble. That don t square it, but it s the best I can do." There was a tense stillness in the little room. The baby gave a squeal of delight and kicked a small red stocking from its dimpled foot. The old man picked it up and laid it on Lib s lap. She looked straight into his face for a while before she spoke. " I guess you re a good man, Mr. Farn- 179 LIB ham," she said slowly. " I would n t mind being your daughter-in-law, if you had a son that took after you. I think the baby would like you very well for a grandpap, too. The older he grows, the more particular I m getting about his relations. I did n t think much about anything before he came, but I ve done a lot of thinkin since. I guess that ? s generally the way with girls." She turned toward Thad, and her voice cut the air like a lash. " Suppose you ivas the father of this baby, and had to be drug here by the scruff of the neck to own it, would n t you think I d done the poor little thing harm enough just by by that, without tackin you onto him for the rest of his life? No, sir!" She stood up and took a step backward. " You go and tell everybody tell Ruby Adair, that I say this child has n t any father; he never had any, but he s got a mother, and a mother that thinks too much of him to disgrace him by marrying a coward, which is more than she 11 be able to say for her children if she ever has any! Now go! " 180 For Value Received For Value Received A SOFT yellow haze lay over the San Jacinto plain, deepening into pur ple, where the mountains lifted themselves against the horizon. Nancy Watson stood in her cabin door, and held her bony, moist ened finger out into the tepid air. " I believe there s a little breath of wind from the southeast, Robert," she said, with a desperate hopefulness; "but the air doesn t feel rainy." " Oh, I guess the rains 11 come along all right ; they gener lly do." The man s voice was husky and weak. " Anyway, the bar ley 11 hold its own quite a while yet." " Oh, yes; quite a long while," acquiesced his wife, with an eager, artificial stress on the adjective. " I don t care much if the harvest is n t earlier n usual; I want you to pick up your strength." She turned into the room, a strained smile 183 FOR VALUE RECEIVED twitching her weather-stained face. She was glad Robert s bed was in the farthest corner away from the window. The barley-field that stretched about the little redwood cabin was a pale yellowish green, deeper in the depres sions, and fading almost into brown on the hillocks. There had been heavy showers late in October, and the early sown grain had sprouted. It was past the middle of Novem ber now, and the sky was of that serene, cloudless Californian blue which is like a perpetual smiling denial of any possibility of rain. " Is the barley turning yellow any ? " quer ied the sick man feebly. Nancy hesitated. " Oh, not to speak of," she faltered, swal lowing hard. Her husband was used to that gulping sob in her voice when she stood in the door. There was a little grave on the edge of the barley-field. He had put a bit of woven- wire fence about it to keep out the rabbits, and Nancy had planted some geraniums inside the small inclosure. There were some of the 184 FOR VALUE RECEIVED fiery blossoms in an old oyster can at the head of the little mound, lifting their brilliant smile toward the unfeeling blue of the sky. " There s pretty certain to be late rains, anyway," the man went on hoarsely. " Leech would let us have more seed if it was n t for the mortgage." His voice broke into a strained whisper on the last word. Nancy crossed the room, and laid her knotted hand on his forehead. " You hain t got any fever to-day," she said irrelevantly. "Oh, no; I m gettin on fine; I ll be up in a day or two. The mortgage 11 be due next month, Nancy," he went on, looking down at his thin gray hands on the worn coverlet; "Icalc lated they d hold off till harvest, if the crop was comin on all right." He glanced up at her anxiously. The woman s careworn face worked in a cruel convulsive effort at self-control. "It ain t right, Robert!" she broke out fiercely. " You ve paid more n the place is worth now; if they take it for what s back, it ain t right!" 185 FOR VALUE RECEIVED Her husband looked at her with pleading in his sunken eyes. He felt himself too weak for principles, hardly strong enough to cope with facts. " But they ain t to blame," he urged ; " they lent me the money to pay Thomson. It was straight cash; I guess it s all right." " There s wrong somewhere," persisted the woman, hurling her abstract justice recklessly in the face of the evidence. " If the place is worth more, you ve made it so workin when you was n t able. If they take it now, I 11 feel like burnin down the house and choppin out every tree you ve planted ! " The man turned wearily on his pillow. His wife could see the gaunt lines of his unshaven neck. She put her hand to her aching throat and looked at him helplessly; then she turned and went back to the door. The barley was turning yellow. She looked toward the little grave on the edge of the field. More than the place was worth, she had said. What was it worth ? Suppose they should take it. She drew her high shoulders forward and shivered in the warm air. The 186 FOR VALUE RECEIVED anger in her hard-featured face wrought itself into fixed lines. She recrossed the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed. "How much is the mortgage, Robert ?" she asked calmly. The sick man gave a sighing breath of relief, and drew a worn account-book from under his pillow. "It ll be $287.65, interest an all, when it s due," he said, consulting his cramped figures. Each knew the amount perfectly well, but the feint of asking and telling eased them both. "I m going down to San Diego to see them about it," said Nancy; "I can t ex plain things in writing. There s the money for the children s shoes; if the rains hold off, they can go barefoot till Christmas. Mother can keep Lizzie out of school, and I guess Bobbie and Frank can tend to things out side." A four-year-old boy came around the house wailing out a grief that seem to abate sud denly at sight of his mother. Nancy picked him up and held him in her lap while she took a splinter from the tip of his little grimy 187 FOR VALUE RECEIVED outstretched finger; then she hugged him almost fiercely, and set him on the doorstep. " What s the matter with gramma s baby ? " called an anxious voice from the kitchen. " Oh, nothing, mother; he got a sliver in his finger; I just took it out." " He s father s little soldier," said Robert huskily; " he ain t a-goin to cry about a little thing like that." The little soldier sat on the doorstep, striving to get his sobs under military dis cipline and contemplating his tiny finger ruefully. An old woman came through the room with a white cloth in her hand. " Gramma 11 tie it up for him," she said soothingly, sitting down on the step, and tearing off a bandage wide enough for a broken limb. The patient heaved a deep sigh of con tent as the unwieldiness of the wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to accommodate the su perfluity of rag. "There, now," said the old woman, rub- 188 FOR VALUE RECEIVED bing his soft little gingham back fondly; " gramma 11 go and show him the tur keys." The two disappeared around the corner of the house, and the man and woman came drearily back to their conference. " If you go, Nancy," said Robert, essaying a wan smile, " I hope you 11 be careful what you say to em; you must remember they don t think they re to blame." " I won t promise anything at all," as serted Nancy, hitching her angular shoul ders; " more n likely, I 11 tell em just what I think. I ain t afraid of hurtin their feelin s, for they hain t got any. I think money s a good deal like your skin; it keeps you from feelin things that make you smart dreadfully when you get it knocked off." Robert smiled feebly, and rubbed his moist, yielding hand across his wife s mis shapen knuckles. " Well, then, you had n t ought to be hard on em, Nancy; it s no more n natural to want to save your skin," he said, closing his eyes wearily. 189 FOR VALUE RECEIVED " Robert Watson ? " The teller of the Merchants and Fruit growers Bank looked through the bars of his gilded cage, and repeated the name reflec tively. He did not notice the eager look of the woman who confronted him, but he did wonder a little that she had failed to brush the thick dust of travel from the shoulders of her rusty cape. The teller was a slender, immaculate young man, whose hair arose in an alert brush from his forehead, which was high and seemed to have been polished by the same process that had given such a faultless and aggres sive gloss to his linen. He turned on his spry little heel and stepped to the back of the inclosure, where he took a handful of long, narrow papers from a leather case, and ran over them hastily. Nancy did not think it possible that he could be reading them; the setting in his ring made a little streak of light as his fingers flew. She watched him with tense earnestness; it seemed to her that the beating of her heart shook the polished counter she leaned against. She hid her cot- 190 FOR VALUE RECEIVED ton-gloved hands under her cape for fear he would see how they trembled. The teller returned the papers to their case, and consulted a stout, short-visaged man, whose lips and brows drew themselves together in an effort of recollection. The two men stood near enough to hear Nancy s voice. She pressed her weather- beaten face close to the gilded bars. " I am Mrs. Watson. I came down to see you about it; my husband s been poorly and could n t come. We d like to get a little more time; we ve had bad luck with the barley so far, but we think we can make it another season." The men gave her a bland, impersonal attention. " Yes ? " inquired the teller, with tentative sympathy, running his pencil through his upright hair, and tapping his forefinger with it nervously. " I believe that s one of Bart- lett s personal matters," he said in an under tone. The older man nodded, slowly at first, and then with increasing affirmation. 191 FOR VALUE RECEIVED " You re right," he said, untying the knot in his face, and turning away. The teller came back to his place. " Mr. Bartlett, the cashier, has charge of that matter, Mrs. Watson. He has not been down for two or three days: one of his chil dren is very sick. I 11 make a note of it, how ever, and draw his attention to it when he comes in." He wrote a few lines hurriedly on a bit of paper, and impaled it on an already overcrowded spindle. " Can you tell me where he lives ? " asked Nancy. The young man hesitated. "I don t believe I would go to the house; they say it s something contagious " " I m not afraid," interrupted Nancy grimly. The teller wrote an address, and slipped it toward her with a nimble motion, keeping his hand outstretched for the next comer, and smiling at him over Nancy s dusty shoulder. The woman turned away, suddenly aware that she had been blocking the wheels of 192 FOR VALUE RECEIVED commerce, and made her way through the knot of men that had gathered behind her. Outside she could feel the sea in the air, and at the end of the street she caught a glimpse of a level blue plain with no purple moun tains on its horizon. Someway, the mortgage had grown smaller; no one seemed to care about it but herself. She had felt vaguely that they would be expecting her and have themselves steeled against her request. On the way from the station she had thought that people were looking at her curiously as the woman from " up toward Pinacate " who was about to lose her home on a mortgage. She had even felt that some of them knew of the little wire-fenced grave on the edge of the barley- field. She showed the card to a boy at the cor ner, who pointed out the street and told her to watch for the number over the door. "It isn t very far; bout four blocks up on the right-hand side. Yuh kin take the street car fer a nickel, er yuh kin walk fi cents cheaper," he volunteered, whereupon 93 FOR VALUE RECEIVED an older boy kicked him affectionately, and advised him in a nauseated tone to " come off." Nancy walked along the smooth cement pavement, looking anxiously at the houses behind their sentinel palms. The vagaries of Western architecture conveyed no impres sion but that of splendor to her uncritical eye. The house whose number corresponded to the one on her card was less pretentious than some of the others, but the difference was lost upon her in the general sense of grandeur. She went up the steps and rang the bell, with the same stifling clutch on her throat that she had felt in the bank. There was a little pause, and then the door opened, and Nancy saw a fragile, girl-like woman with a tear-stained face standing before her. " Does Mr. Bartlett live here ? " faltered the visitor, her chin trembling. The young creature leaned forward like a flower wilting on its stem, and buried her face on Nancy s dusty shoulder. " Oh, I m so glad to see you," she sobbed; 194 FOR VALUE RECEIVED " I thought no one ever would come. I did n t know before that people were so afraid of scarlet fever. They have taken my baby away for fear he would take it. Do you know anything about it? Please come right in where she is, and tell me what you think." Nancy had put her gaunt arm around the girl s waist, and was patting her quivering shoulder with one cotton-gloved hand. Two red spots had come on her high cheek-bones, and her lips were working. She let herself be led across the hall into an adjoining room, where a yellow-haired child lay restless and fever stricken. A young man with a haggard face came forward and greeted her eagerly. " Now, Flora," he said, smoothing his wife s disordered hair, "you don t need to worry any more; we shall get on now. I m sure she s a little better to-day; don t you think so?" He appealed to Nancy, wistfully. " Yes ; I think she is," said Nancy stoutly, moving her head in awkward defiance of her own words. " There, Flora, that s just what the doctor said," pleaded the husband. FOR VALUE RECEIVED The young wife clung to the older woman desperately. " Oh, do you think so ? " she faltered. " You know, I never could stand it. She s all well, of course, there s the baby but oh you see you know I never could bear it! " She broke down again, sobbing, with her arms about Nancy s neck. " Yes, you can bear it," said Nancy. " You can bear it if you have to, but you ain t a-goin to have to she s a-goin to get well. An you Ve got your man you ought to recollect that " she stifled a sob " he seems well an hearty." The young wife raised her head and looked at her husband with tearful scorn. He met her gaze meekly, with that ready self-efface ment which husbands seem to feel in the presence of maternity. " Have you two poor things been here all alone ? " asked Nancy. "Yes," sobbed the girl-wife, this time on her husband s shoulder ; " everybody was afraid, we could n t get any one, and I don t know anything. You re the first wo- 196 FOR VALUE RECEIVED man I Ve seen since oh, it s been so long!" " Well, you re all nervous and worn out and half starved," announced Nancy, unty ing her bonnet-strings. " I Ve had sickness, but I Ve never been this bad off. Now, you just take care of the little girl, and I 11 take care of you." It was a caretaking like the sudden still ing of the tempest that came to the little household. The father and mother would not have said that the rest and order that per vaded the house, and finally crept into the room where the sick child lay, came from a homely woman with an ill-fitting dress and hard, knotted hands. To them she seemed the impersonation of beauty and peace on earth. That night Nancy wrote to her husband. The letter was not very explicit, but limited expression seems to have its compensations. There are comparatively few misunderstand ings among the animals that do not write at all. To Robert the letter seemed entirely satisfactory. This is what she wrote : 197 FOR VALUE RECEIVED I have not had much time to see about the Morgage. One of their children is very sick and I will have to stay a few days. If the cough medisine gives out tell mother the directions is up by the Clock. I hope you are able to set up. Write and tell me how the Barley holds on. Tell the children to be good. Your loving wife, NANCY WATSON. " Nancy was always a great hand around where there s sickness," Robert commented to his mother-in-law. " I hope she won ? t hurry home if she ? s needed." He wrote her to that effect the next day, very proud of his ability to sit up, and urging her not to shorten her stay on his account. " Ime beter and the Barly is hold ing its own," he said, and Nancy found it ample. "This Mrs. Watson you have is a trea sure," said the doctor to young Bartlett; " where did you find her ? " "Find her? I thought you sent her," an swered Bartlett, in a daze. 198 FOR VALUE RECEIVED "No; I couldn t find any one; I was at my wits end." The two men stared at each other blankly. " Well, it does n t matter where she came from," said the doctor, " so she stays. She s a whole relief corps and benevolent society in one." Young Bartlett spoke to Nancy about it the first time they were alone. " Who sent you to us, Mrs. Watson? " he asked. Nancy turned and looked out of the win dow. " Nobody sent me I just came." Then she faced about. " I don t want to deceive nobody. I come down from Pinacate to see you about some some business. They told me at the bank that you was up at the house, so I come up. When I found how it was, I thought I d better stay that s all." " From Pinacate about some business ? " queried the puzzled listener. "Yes; I didn t mean to say anything to you; I don t want to bother you about it 199 FOR VALUE RECEIVED when you re in trouble an all wore out. I told them down at the bank; they ll tell you when you go down." And with this the young man was obliged to be content. It was nearly two weeks before the child was out of danger. Then Nancy said she must go home. The young mother kissed her tenderly when they parted. " I m so sorry you can t stay and see the baby," she said, with sweet young selfish ness; "they re going to bring him home very soon now. He s so cute ! Archie dear, go to the door with Mrs. Watson, and re member" She raised her eyebrows sig nificantly, and waited to see that her husband understood before she turned away. The young man followed Nancy to the hall. " How much do I owe " He stopped, with a queer choking sensation in his throat. Nancy s face flushed. " I always want to be neighborly when there s sickness," she said; " most anybody does. I hope you 11 get on all right now. Good-by." 200 FOR VALUE RECEIVED She held out her work-hardened hand, and the young man caught it in his warm, prosperous grasp. They looked into each other s eyes an instant, not the mortgagor and the mortgagee, but the woman and the man. " Good-by, Mrs. Watson. I can never " The words died huskily in his throat. " Papa," called a weak, fretful little voice. Nancy hitched her old cape about her high shoulders. "Good-by," she repeated, and turned away. Robert leaned across the kitchen table, and held a legal document near the lamp. " It s marked Satisfaction of mortgage * on the outside," he said in a puzzled voice; " and it must be our mortgage, for it tells all about it inside; but it says" he unfolded the paper, and read from it in his slow, husky whisper, " < The debt secured thereby having been fully paid satisfied and discharged. I don t see what it means." 201 FOR VALUE RECEIVED Nancy rested her elbows on the table, and looked across at him anxiously. " It must be a mistake, Robert. I never said anything to them except that we ? d like to have more time." He went over the paper again carefully. " It reads very plain," he said. Then he fixed his sunken eyes on her thoughtfully. " Do you suppose, Nancy, it could be on account of what you done ? " "Me!" The woman stared at him in as tonishment. Suddenly Robert turned his eyes toward the ceiling, with a new light in his thin face. "Listen!" he exclaimed breathlessly, " it s raining ! " There was a swift patter of heralding drops, and then a steady, rhythmical drum ming on the shake roof. The man smiled, with that ineffable delight in the music which no one really knows but the tiller of the soil. Nancy opened the kitchen door and looked out into the night. " Yes," she said, keeping something out of 202 FOR VALUE RECEIVED her voice; "the wind s strong from the southeast, and it s raining steady." Nancy Watson always felt a little lone some when it rained. She had never men tioned it, but she could not help wishing there was a shelter over the little grave on the edge of the barley-field. The Face of the Poor The Face of the Poor MR. ANTHONY attached a memoran dum to the letter he was reading, and put his hand on the bell. " Confound them ! " he said under his breath, " what do they think I ? m made of ! " A negro opened the door, and came into the room with exaggerated decorum. " Rufus, take this to Mr. Whitwell, and tell him to get the answer off at once. Is any one waiting ? " " Yes, suh, several. One man s been there some time. Says his name s Busson, suh." Send him in." The man gave his head a tilt forward which seemed to close his eyes, turned piv- otally about, and walked out of the room in his most luxurious manner. Rufus never imitated his employer, but he often regretted that his employer did not imitate him. Mr. Anthony s face resumed its look of 207 THE FACE OF THE POOR prosperous annoyance. The door opened, and a small, roughly dressed man came toward the desk. " Well, here I am at last," he said in a tone of gentle apology; " I suppose you think it s about time." The annoyance faded out of Mr. Anthony s face, and left it blank. The visitor put out a work-callous hand. "I guess you don t remember me; my name s Burson. I was up once before, but you were busy. I hope you re well ; you look hearty." Mr. Anthony shook the proffered hand, and then shrank back, with the distrust of geniality which is one of the cruel hardships of wealth. " I am well, thank you. What can I do for you, Mr. Burson ? " The little man sat down and wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. He was bearded almost to the eyes, and his bushy brows stood out in a thatch. As he bent his gaze upon Mr. Anthony it was like some gen tle creature peering out of a brushy covert. 208 THE FACE OF THE POOR " I guess the question s what I can do for you, Mr. Anthony," he said, smiling wistfully on the millionaire; "I hain t done much this far, sure." " Well ? " Mr. Anthony s voice was dryly interrogative. " When Edmonson told me he d sold the mortgage to you, I thought certain I d be able to keep up the interest, but I have n t made out to do even that; you ve been kept out of your money a long time, and to tell the truth I don t see much chance for you to get it. I thought I d come in and talk with you about it, and see what we could agree on." Mr. Anthony leaned back rather wearily. " I might foreclose," he said. The visitor looked troubled. "Yes, you could foreclose, but that would n t fix it up. To tell the truth, Mr. Anthony, I don t feel right about it. I have n t kep up the place as I d ought; it s been running down for more n a year. I don t believe it s worth the mortgage to-day." Some of the weariness disappeared from 209 THE FACE OF THE POOR Mr. Anthony s face. He laid his arms on the desk and leaned forward. "You don t think it s worth the mort gage ? " he asked. " Not the mortgage and interest. You see there s over three hundred dollars interest due. I don t believe you could get more n a thousand dollars cash for the place." " There would be a deficiency judgment, then," said the millionaire. " Well, that s what I wanted to ask you about. I supposed the law was arranged some way so you d get your money. It s no more n right. But it seems a kind of a pity for you and me to go to law. There ain t no thing between us. I had the money, and you the same as loaned it to me. It was money you d saved up again old age, and you d ought to have it. If I d worked the place and kep it up right, it would be worth more, though of course property s gone down a good deal. But mother and the girls got kind of discouraged and wanted me to go to peddlin fruit, and of course you can t do more n one thing at a time, and do it justice. Now if you 210 THE FACE OF THE POOR had the place, I expect you could afford to keep it up, and I would n t wonder if you could sell it ; but you d have to put some ready money into it first, I m afraid." Mr. Anthony pushed a pencil up and down between his thumb and forefinger, and watched the process with an inscrutable face. His visitor went on: " I was thinking if we could agree on a price, I might deed it to you and give you a note for the balance of what I owe you. I m getting on kind of slow, but I don t believe but what I could pay the note after a while." Mr. Anthony kept his eyes on his lead pencil with a strange, whimsical smile. " Edmonson owed me two thousand dol lars," he said, " the mortgage really cost me that ; at least it was all I got on the debt." The visitor made a regretful sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "You don t say so! Well, that is too bad." The thatch above the speaker s eyes stood out straight as he reflected. "You re worse off than I thought," he 211 THE FACE OF THE POOR went on slowly, " but it don t quite seem as if I ought to be held responsible for that. I had the thousand dollars, and used it, and I d ought to pay it ; but the other it was a kind of a trade you made I can t see you don t think" Mr. Anthony broke into his hesitation with a short laugh. " No, I don t think you re responsible for my blunders," he said soberly. "You say property has gone down a good deal," he went on, fixing his shrewd eyes on his listener. " A good many other things have gone down. If my money will buy more than it would when it was loaned, some people would say I should n t have so much of it. Perhaps I m not entitled to more than the place will bring. What do you think about that ? " There was a quizzical note in the rich man s voice. Burson wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief, dropped it into his hat, and shook the hat slowly and reflectively, keeping time with his head. " If you d kep your money by you, allow- in that you loaned it to me, because you 212 THE FACE OF THE POOR the same as did, if you d kep it by you or put it in the bank and let it lay idle, you d a had it. It would n t a gone down any. You had n t ought to lose anything, that I can see, except of course for your mistake about Edmonson. That kind of hurts me about Ed- monson. I wouldn t a thought it of him. He always seemed a clever sort of fellow." " Oh, Edmonson s all right," said Mr. Anthony; " he went into some things too heavily, and broke up. I guess he 11 make it yet." Burson looked relieved. " Then he 11 straighten this up with you, after all," he said. Mr. Anthony whistled noiselessly. " Well, hardly. He considers it straightened." Burson turned his old hat slowly around between his knees. "He s a fair-spoken man, Edmonson; I kind of think he 11 square it up, after all," he said hopefully. " Anyway, it does n t be come me to throw stones till I ve paid my own debts." The hair that covered the speaker s mouth 213 THE FACE OF THE POOR twitched a little in its effort to smile. He glanced at his companion expectantly. " Could you come out and take a look at the place? " he asked. Mr. Anthony slid down in his chair, and clasped his hands across his portliness. " I believe I 11 take your valuation, Bur- son," he answered slowly; " if I find there s nothing against the property but my mort gage, and you 11 give me a deed and your note for the interest, or, say, two hundred and fifty dollars, we 11 call it square. It will take a few days to look the matter up, a week, perhaps. Suppose you come in at the end of the week. Your wife will sign the deed ? " he added interrogatively. Burson had leaned forward to get up. At the question he raised his eyes with the look that Mr. Anthony remembered to have seen years ago in small creatures he had driven into corners. " Mother did n t have to sign the mort gage," he said, halting a little before each word, " the lawyer said it was n t necessary. I don t know if she 11" 214 THE FACE OF THE POOR Mr. Anthony broke into his embarrass ment. " Let me see." He put his hand on the bell. " Ask Mr. Evert to send me the mortgage from Burson to Edmonson, assigned to me," he said when Rufus appeared. The negro walked out of the room as if he were carrying the message on his head. " Mother does n t always see things just as I do," said Burson ; " she was willing to sign the mortgage, though," he added, " only she did n t need to ; she wanted me to get the money of Edmonson." He put his hand into his pocket, and a light of discovery came into his face. " Have a peach," he said convivially, lay ing an enormous Late Crawford on the corner of the desk. Mr. Anthony gave an uncom prehending glance at the gift. " Hain t you got a knife?" asked Burson, straightening himself and drawing a bone-handled imple ment from his pocket; " I keep the big blade for fruit," he said kindly, as he laid it on the desk. Mr. Anthony inspected the proffered re- 215 THE FACE OF THE POOR freshment with a queer, uncertain smile ; then he took the peach from the desk, drew the wastebasket between his knees, opened the big blade of the knife, and began to remove the red velvet skin. The juice ran down his wrists and threatened his immaculate cuffs. He fished a spotless handkerchief from his pocket with his pencil and mopped up the encroaching rivulets. His companion smiled upon him with amiable relish as the dripping sections disappeared. " I errigated em more than usual this year, and it makes em kind of sloppy to eat," he apologized; "it does n t help the flavor any, but most people buy for size. When you re out peddling and haven t time to cultivate, it s easy to turn on the water. It s about as bad as a milkman putting water in the milk, and I always feel mean about it. I tell mother errigating s a lazy man s way of farming, but she says water costs so much here she does n t think it s cheating to sell it for peach-juice." Rufus came into the room, and bore down upon the pair with deferential disdain. Mr. 216 THE FACE OF THE POOR Anthony gave his fingers a parting wipe, and took the papers from the envelope. "It s all right, Burson," he said after a little, " you need n t mind about your wife s signature. I 11 risk it. Come back in about a week, say Thursday, Thursday at ten, if that suits you. I 11 have my attorney look into it." Burson got up and started out. Then he turned and stood still an instant. " Of course, I mean to tell mother about the deed," he said; "I would n t want you to think" " Oh, certainly, certainly," acquiesced Mr. Anthony with an almost violent waiving of domestic confidence. " Good-afternoon, Mr. Burson." He whirled his revolving chair toward the desk with a distinct air of dismis sal, and picked up the package of papers. After the door closed he sat still for some time, looking thoughtfully at the mortgage; then he made a memorandum in ink, with his signature in full, and attached it to the document. Rufus opened the door. " Mr. Darnell and two other gentlemen, suh." 217 THE FACE OF THE POOR The millionaire set his jaws. " Show them in, Rufus. Damn it," he said softly, " damn it, why can t they be honest!" " Do you mean to tell me, Erastus Burson, that you deeded him this place, and gave him your note for two hundred and fifty dol lars you did n t owe him? " "Why, no, mother; didn t I explain to you there d be a deficiency judgment? " "Well, I should say there was. But if anybody s lackin judgment I d say it was you, not him. The idea! Why he s as rich as cream, and you re as poor " " Well, his being rich and me being poor has n t got anything to do with it, mother; we re just two men trying to be fair with each other, don t you see ? You and the girls would n t want me to be close-fisted and overreachin , even if I am poor. I think we fixed it up just as near right as a wrong thing can be fixed. Of course I don t like to feel the way I do about Edmonson, but Mr. Anthony don t seem to lay up anything again him, and he s the one that has the right to. 218 THE FACE OF THE POOR Edmonson treated him worse than anybody ever treated me. I don t know just how I d feel toward a man if he d treated me the way Edmonson treated Mr. Anthony." Mrs. Burson laid the overalls she was mending across her knee in a suggestive attitude. " I don t call it close-fisted or overreachin to keep a roof over your family s head," she argued; "if the place isn t ours, I suppose we 11 have to leave it." " No ; Mr. Anthony wants us to stay here, and take care of the place for the rent. I feel as if I d ought to keep it up better, but if I m to peddle fruit and try to pay off the note, I 11 have to hustle. I want to do the square thing by him. He s certainly treated me white." Mrs. Burson fitted a patch on the seat of the overalls, and flattened it down with rather unnecessarily vigorous slaps of her large hand. " I would n t lose any sleep over Mr. An thony; I guess he s able to take care of him self," she said, closing her lips suddenly as 219 THE FACE OF THE POOR if to prevent the escape of less amicable sen timents. " Well, he does n t seem to be," urged her husband, " the way Edmonson *s over reached him. My ! but I d hate to be in that fellow s shoes: doin dirt to a man that a way!" Mrs. Burson sighed audibly, and gave her husband a hopelessly uncomprehending look. " You do beat all, Erastus," she said wearily. " Here s your overalls. I guess you can be trusted with em. They re too much patched to give to Mr. Anthony." Burson returned her look of uncompre- hension. Fortunately the marital fog through which two pairs of eyes so often view each other is more likely to dull the outline of faults than of virtues. Mrs. Burson watched her husband not unfondly as he straddled into his overalls and left the room. " A man does n t have to be very sharp to get the better of Erastus," she said to her self, " but he has to be awful low down; and I s pose there s plenty that is." The winter came smilingly on, tantalizing 220 THE FACE OF THE POOR the farmer with sunny indifference concern ing drouth, and when he was quite despond ent sending great purple clouds from the southeast to wash away his fears. By Christ mas the early oranges were yellowing. There had been no frost, and Burson s old spring- wagon and unshapely but well-fed sorrel team made their daily round of the valley, and now and then he dropped into Mr. Anthony s office to make small payments on his note. Pitifully small they seemed to the mortgagee, who appeared nevertheless always glad to receive them, and gave orders to Rufus, much to that dignitary s disgust, that the fruit-ven der should always be admitted. The handful of coin which he so cheerfully piled on the corner of the rich man s desk always remained there until his departure, when Mr. Anthony took an envelope from the safe, swept the payment into it without counting, and re turned it to its compartment, making no in dorsement on the note. " I d feel better satisfied if you ? d drive out some time and take a look at things," said Burson to his creditor during one of these 221 THE FACE OF THE POOR visits; "you d ought to get out of the office now and then for your health." " Maybe I will, Burson," replied the cap italist. " You re not away from home all the time?" " Oh, no, but I s pose Sunday s your day off; it s mine. Mother and the girls generally go to church, but I don t. I tell m I 11 watch, and they can pray. I can t very well go," he added, making haste to counteract the pos sible shock from his irreverence; "there ain t but one seat in the fruit-wagon, and when the women folks get their togs on, three s about all that can ride. Come out any Sun day, and stay for dinner. We mostly have chicken." The following Sunday Mr. Anthony drew up his daintily -stepping chestnut at the fruit-peddler s gate. Before he had de scended from his shining road-wagon, his host ran down the walk, pulling on his shabby coat. " Well, now, this is something like ! " he exclaimed. "Got a hitching-strap ? Just wait till I open the gate; I believe I d better 222 THE FACE OF THE POOR take your horse inside. There s a post by the kitchen door. My, ain t he a beauty! " Burson led the roadster through the gate, and Mr. Anthony walked by his side. When the horse was tied, the two men went about the place, and Erastus showed his guest the poultry and fruit trees, commenting on the merits of Plymouth Rocks and White Leg horns as layers, and displaying modest pride in the condition of the orchard. " I ve kep it up better this year. The rains come along more favorable and the weeds did n t get ahead of me the way they did last winter. Look out, there ! " he cried, as Mr. Anthony laid his hand on the head of a Jersey calf that backed awkwardly from under his grasp. " Don t let her get a hold of your coat-tail; she chawed mine to a frazzle the other day; the girls pet her so much she has no manners." When the tour of the little farm was fin ished the two men came back to the veranda, and Erastus drew a rocking-chair from the front room for his guest. It was hung with patchwork cushions of " crazy " design, but 223 THE FACE OF THE POOR Mr. Anthony leaned his tired head against them in the sanest content. " Now you just sit still a minute," Erastus said, " and I m a-going to bring you some thing you hain t tasted for a long time." He darted into the house, and returned with a pitcher and two glasses. " Sweet cider! " he announced, with a tri umphant smile. " I had a lot of apples in the fall, not big enough to peddle, you know our apples ain t anything to brag of, and I just rigged up a kind of hand-press in the back yard, and now and then I press out a pitcher of cider for Sunday. I never let it get the least bit hard; not that I don t like a little tang to it myself, but mother belongs to the W. C. T. IL, and it d worry her." He darted into the house again, and emerged with a plate of brown twisted cakes. " Mother usually makes cookies on Satur day, but I can t find anything but these doughnuts. Maybe they won t go bad with the cider." He poured his guest a glass, and Mr. Anthony drank it, holding a doughnut in 224 THE FACE OF THE POOR one hand, and partaking of it with evident relish. " It s good, Burson," he said. " May I have another glass and another doughnut ? " His host s countenance fairly shone with delighted hospitality as he replenished the empty glass. There were crumbs on the floor when the visitor left, and flies buzzed about the empty plate and pitcher as Mrs. Burson and her daughters came up the steps. " Mr. Anthony s been here," said Erastus cheerfully; "I m awful sorry you missed him. We had some cider and doughnuts." The three women stopped suddenly, and stared at the speaker. "Why, Paw Burson!" ejaculated the el der daughter, " did you give Mr. Anthony doughnuts and cider out here on this porch ? " " Why, yes, Millie," apologized the father; " I looked for cookies, but I could n t find any. He said he liked doughnuts, and he did seem to relish em; he eat several." " That awful rich man ! Why, Paw Bur- son!" The young woman gave an awe-stricken 225 THE FACE OF THE POOR glance about her, as if expecting to discover some lingering traces of wealth. " Doughnuts! " she repeated helplessly. "Why, Millie/ faltered the father, mildly aggressive, "I don t see why being rich should take away a man s appetite ; I m sure I hope I 11 never be too rich to like dough nuts and cider." " Did n t you give him a napkin, paw ? " queried the younger girl. " No," said the father meekly, " he had his handkerchief. I coaxed him to stay to dinner, but he couldn t; and I asked him to drive out some day with his wife and daughter he has n t but one they lost a little girl when she was seven" The man s voice quivered on the last word, and died away. Mrs. Burson went hurriedly into the house. She reappeared at the door in a few minutes without her bonnet. " Erastus," she said gently, " will you split me a few sticks of kindling before you put away the team ? " Mrs. Burson was fitting a salad-green 226 THE FACE OF THE POOR bodice on her elder daughter. That young woman s efforts to see her own spine, where her mother was distributing pins with solemn intentness, had dyed her face a somewhat unnatural red, but the hands that lay upon her downy arms were much whiter than those that hovered about her back. A dining- table, bearing the more permanent part of its outfit, was pushed into a corner of the room, and covered with a yellow mosquito-net, and from the kitchen came a sound of crockery accompanied by an occasional splash and a scraping of tin. Now and then the younger girl appeared in the doorway and gazed in a sort of worshipful ecstasy at her sister s splendor. " Do you think you 11 get it finished for the Fiesta, maw? " she asked, between deep breaths of admiration. Mrs. Burson nodded absently, exploring her bosom for another pin with her outspread palm. Her husband came into the room, and seated himself on the edge of the rep lounge. His face had a strange pallor above the mask of his beard. 227 THE FACE OF THE POOR "You re home early, Erastus," she said; then she looked up. "Are you sick?" she asked with anxiety. " Mr. Anthony is dead," Burson said hus kily. "Dead! Why, Erastus ! " Mrs. Burson held a pin suspended in the air and stared at her husband. " Yes. He dropped dead in his chair. Or rather, he had some kind of a stroke, and never came to. It happened more than a week ago. I went in to-day, and Rufus told me." Mrs. Burson returned the pin to her bosom, and motioned her daughter toward the bed room door. " Go and take it off, Millie," she said so berly. She was shamefacedly conscious of something different from the grief that stirred her husband, something more sordid and personal. "It hurt me all over," Burson went on, " the way some of them talked in town. They looked queer at me when I said what I did about him. I don t understand it." 228 THE FACE OF THE POOR " I guess there s a good many things you don t understand, Erastus," ventured the wife quietly. A carriage stopped at the gate, and a young woman alighted from it, and came up the walk. Erastus saw her first, and met her in the open doorway. She looked at him with eager intentness. " Is this Mr. Burson ? " she asked gently. " I am Mr. Anthony s daughter." Mrs. Burson got up, holding the scraps of green silk in her apron, and offered the vis itor a seat. Erastus held out his hand, and tried to speak. The two faced each other in tearful silence. " I wanted to bring you this myself," the girl faltered, " because because of what is written on the outside." She held a package of papers toward him. " I have heard him speak of you, I think. Any friend of my fa ther must be a good man. We want to thank you, my mother and I " " To thank me ? " Erastus questioned, " to thank me ! You certainly don t know " " I know you were my father s friend," the 229 THE FACE OF THE POOR girl interrupted; "I don t care about the rest. Possibly I could n t understand it. I know very little about business, but I knew my father." She got up, holding her head high in grief- stricken pride, and gave her hand to her host and hostess. The younger Burson girl emerged from the kitchen, a dish-towel and a half-wiped plate clasped to her breast, and watched the visitor as she went down the path. " Her silk waist does n t begin to touch Millie s for style," she said pensively, " and her skirt does n t even drag; but there s something about her." " Yes," acquiesced Mrs. Burson, " there is something about her." Erastus sat on the edge of the old rep lounge, looking absently at the papers. " In the event of my death, to be delivered to my friend Erastus Burson," was written on the package. His wife came and stood over him. " I don t know just what it means, mother," he said, " there s a deed, and my note marked 230 THE FACE OF THE POOR Paid, and a lot of two-bit and four-bit pieces. I 11 have to get somebody to explain it." He sat quite still until the woman laid her large hand on his bowed head. Then he looked up, with moist, winking eyes. " I don t feel right about it, mother," he said. " I wish now I d a dropped in oftener, and been more sociable. It s a strange thing to say, but I think sometimes he was lone some ; and I m sure I don t know why, for a kinder, genialer man I never met." (Cbe Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton 6* Co. Cambridge, Mast., U.S.A. OVERDUE- jj) 2 l-lOOrn-8, 34 YB 863700 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY