EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE <\- Every Man His Chance EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE MATILDA WOODS STONE BOSTON RICHARD G. BADGER "Cbc Oorbam press 1909 Copyright 1908 by MATILDA WOODS STONE All rights reserved THE GORHAM PRESS BOSTON, U. 3. A. BOOK ONE 2138437 Every Man His Chance CHAPTER I IN the brightness of a clear June morning 1881, the stage which was to bring Catharine Paine and Mrs. Allen into Rapid, put out from Pierre, South Dakota. Catharine walked through the combination bar- room, office, and parlor of the Hanson House, held her skirts aside from the saw-dust spit box near the door and passed out to the edge of the rough board porch, where she stood watching Ellis Hall make the last preparations for departure. On her east the brown prairie reached out to a pale blue sky line; on her west the cotton woods along the banks of the Missouri made a scragged patch of green; behind her rose the flat bare front of the unpainted two-story building. She steadied her- self at the end of one of the erratic projections of the irregular length planks that formed the squat piazza. The wind blew her skirts out behind and she poised herself sturdily against it. The com- panion allotted her the night before as a bed-fellow 8 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE came up and laid a friendly hand on her shoulder; whereupon she shook back the sun bonnet she had chosen as a protection on her journey and received the wind in her face and hair. She was taller than the girl beside her almost by a head. Her features as the lines of her body, were sharply marked, each seemingly too prominent for the others. From the square chin to the full forehead, it was a decisive face unfavored with any obvious means whereby to manifest animation. The dark skin was color- less and a smile came none too easily. But trans- forming face and figure to a character of their own were the indefinable marks of youth. Even more did the same subtle harmonizer of parts dominate the presence of Mildred Larsh. Her plump, well-rounded figure and rosy cheeks brought forth a vision of a plenteous Iowa farm from which full ripened fruits go forth to market and bright ribbons come back. The night before an impromptu ball took place in the one public room of the hotel. Mildred was the only woman and danced in turn with a score of men. Catharine, neutrally genial, contributed the music. Mildred lingered, rollickingly bent on more fun when Catharine withdrew. Although neither of the girls experienced a magnetic drawing toward the other, yet neither was untouched by the bond of their sex and their youth. Under their red blanket, in the late sleepiness of the previous evening, they agreed to discard all formality in address. They were to be "Mildred" and "Catharine" to each other. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 9 "Mr. Tyler and I are going to shoot quail and prairie chickens. When we don't shoot, we are to play penuchle," Mildred announced. Catharine turned indifferently and nodded to Mr. Tyler who had joined them. Her glance took in the complication of lines out of which he made a smile, the cigarette between the first and second fingers of his small right hand, and the curl of his lips; if not wicked, it was hateful. "I ride outside with Mr. Hall," she answered loftily, and stepping out upon the ground, went toward him. The swing of her body had something in common with the sweep of the prairie and with Ellis HalPs careless nod of assent when she spoke to him. Fred Tyler's eyes followed her dreamily and the mocking creases in his face assumed an aspect of pain. Then he laid his hand familiarly on Mil- dred's arm. "Where are your traps?" he asked. "We're about ready to move." Catharine had been lifted to her place just back of the horses. Mildred and Fred were arranging bags and shawls and jackets and baskets in the back seat of the coach, when the fourth passenger for Rapid, having issued from the hotel at an in- conspicuous moment, stood presenting herself for transportation. Catharine looked down upon her in puzzled scrutiny. She comprehended Mr. Hall, his face bearded almost to his eyes, his kind gruff voice, and intermittent spurts of tobacco juice. She had passed lenient judgment upon Mildred and 10 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE severe upon Mr. Tyler. But there was nothing in her experience by which to interpret the glaringly manifest tokens of characterization in the woman before her. All that might be gathered from her face and dress was outside Catharine's world. But in the self righteous cruelty of her seventeen years, she turned her eyes away with an instinctive im- pulse of disdainful withdrawal. CHAPTER II THE following morning at the first relay station, Catharine crept out of the interior cf the coach and in the chill of the disap- pearing night, looked back to the east. Between the unbroken brown-gray of the prairie and the blue-gray of the sky, the sun rise glowed from north to south. Before her, a man sleepy yet auto- matically alert held four harnessed horses. Ellis Hall swung down from his seat, and Catharine climbed up unaided. In wordless harmony, the men moved with deft swiftness. The straps that bound them fell from the tired horses, and in an instant the waiting ones were fastened in their places. Ellis Hall pulled the buckle of the last strap firm, folded his black snake in his hand with exact precision, and in two long steps drew himself up beside the girl. She caught one glance behind where the first rich red of dawn was breaking into spreading day- light, one at the unbrightened dusk before, and one at the man alone between, who with his hand on the horses' bridles waiting, had watched for the coach to come and waiting watched for it to go. Ellis Hall let out his black snake till its tip touched 11 12 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE the foremost horse. Catharine bent quickly. "Good- bye," she cried. The man below turned his head startled. "Oh! Good-bye." They were beyond hear- ing when he got it out. But Catharine's eyes were still intent on the solitary figure, standing in the circle of the horizon, only the horses, the stable shed, and living shack about him. She waved. His hands held the horses but he smiled to himself. Catharine drew the buffalo skin before her. Sitting very still she breathed deeply. The swift clatter of the horses hoofs and the passing of the changeless prairie, and the long draughts of cold air filled her with an exhilaration and with a strength to retain it. Almost an hour passed. The east had lost its color and the west was filled with light, when she whispered, "There is no pause on the prairie." Her companion shook his head. Above his beard- ed face, his eyes regarded her and she felt that she was answered. She reached for the black snake she had learned to wield the day before, folded it with at- tentive care, then threw it out with gleeful skill. Her dark skin glowed as the horses raced in ready response. "I should like to be the foremost", she breathed. Ellis Hall nodded. "You love it," she accused. The man looked unswervingly before him. "The strange woman was good to me in the night," she stated abruptly. The fact rose within her, distinct, indubitable, rooted in the full life of EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 18 the moment. She spoke it childishly as something to be explained. "Ah!" he replied equivocally, his face turned to her. "Yes," the girl answered, wide eyed in the clear openness of the early hour and the immeasurable scope of world within the range of her vision. "She wrapped me up in the middle seat. I was sleepy and let her be uncomfortable cluttered up with my things and hers on the back one. Once when I awakened, I saw her face all wrinkled, that queer faded hair, and her eyes bright like muffled search lights in the dark. You'd think I'd have been afraid but I wasn't. If there had been a hold-up, she would have protected me." "You may drive," Ellis Hall evaded the question- ing in her voice and put the four lines in her hands. Where he had been unmoved by constant solicitation the day before, he voluntarily favored her now. "Oh!" she thanked him arranging them in imita- tion of all his expert precaution. The day was well into the morning when she yield- ed them to him again, and leaned back looking stead- ily before her; weary and thoughtful, sat gazing across the immense sameness of the priarie. Gra- dually an endless variety of shadings came out upon its brownness like the moods of a great calm soul that cannot be stirred. Following the direction of rolling draws and rounded elevations, stretched long shadow lines, faintly yet differently tinted. Far off where the eyes gre.w wearied by the distance, palest 14 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE blue died into faded pink and clay red shone dimly through the grass in the sun. Against white fringes of rainless clouds a milky gypsum ledge capped the last slope. Nearby the grass was lighted to straw bright yellow. "It comes to one," she mused, "only by much look- ing." Ellis Hall answered her with the comprehending silence of the prairie. CHAPTER III BY the morning of the third day Mildred had joined Catharine on the driver's seat. She was justly incensed against Mr. Tyler. After holding out to her the diversion of shooting game along the way, he complacently accepted the manifest absurdity of doing so through the coach window. By way of consolation he had then regaled her with the possibility of a hold-up. But the journey neared its end and no robbers had swept upon them in the darkness of either night. "We are almost there," she accused him that last morning. His lip curled in assent. "I shall never speak to you again," she condemn- ed him. "You are a deceitful man." He did not dispute the point or beg a mitigation of the punishment, even assisted in placing her be- yond the opportunity to rescind. So it happened that from the same point, at the same moment each girl caught her first view of Rapid. The coach came slowly down a long descent, left the upward slope of prairie behind; and the horses quickened, racing out upon the open level terrace. 15 16 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE Before them, a circular dip within the hills around, lay the level site for a city. Catharine stood up holding to Ellis Hall's staid shoulder, and swayed to the swift motion precariously poised. The sun bon- net was discarded and loosened locks of straight hair fell against her cheeks. Standing there, strong and daring, her hand gripping the man's coat, her eager face turned to the hills, all grace and beauty in the setting which became her, she might have been the spirit of the boom bearing down upon the town. But the boom was yet far off. One moment her eyes rested upon the group of low unpainted buildings that huddled in the middle of the space and straggled sparsely out to the east ; then she looked straight over them to where the rift in the foot hills opened to the mountains be- yond. Piled behind the giant gateway were banks of blue, light below and clearer ; further back deep- er hued, with distance and darkening pines, till the highest and furthest towered almost black against the pale blue sky. From the base of the blueness, Rapid creek came forth, and laid its silvery length eveningly coiled through the barren brown of the prairie grass. No willows or thick stemmed weeds lined its banks. The site for Rapid was verdant- less. Mildred saw the smallness of its beginning, the emptiness of the dip, the foot hills stark and naked that bounded it in, and gulped back a home- sick sigh. Catherine rested against the edge of the seat, reached for the whip and laughed that it was refused her. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 17 "I know why you men come. It isn't for money; it isn't for your families. It is to begin again, where there is nothing to be put right; where there is no one to whom you have seemed what you are not; where you have only strength and opportunity, good will and a world to win." Behind the man's whiskers was the non-commit- tal muscular contraction. Catharine caught Mil- dred's hand and squeezed it heartily. "May be we shall have a jolly time," Mildred res- ponded, brightening. They passed a log house and a two-roomed shack. Each looked to have arrived full-built and weather- faded without disturbing the surrounding prairie. Catharine smiled at the women and children, who gathered at the doors. Once, at the cross roads, they encountered a group of cow boys ; and Mildred dimpling shook out her handkerchief. Then, scarce- ly realizing that the outskirts had been reached, they were in the midst of Rapid, drew up abruptly in front of the American House. There, one r third of the population stood as if each man expected a brother or a sister. Near one of the two-by-four pillars that sustained the upper piazza of the hotel, Mildred caught sight of two men, one it nrght be, in the early twenties, the other in the late. They differed from the major- ity of the gathering in the hairlessness of their faces, in the point where their trousers met their boots, and the reliable and invisible support given this garment. The elder held his tall slender figure 18 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE with devilish grace. The cigar in the corner of his mouth protruded jauntily, seemingly longer than cigars are wont to be. His long face with regular features was patrician and cruel. The other was a youth of open countenance, his whole appearance preferably less distinctive. Fred Tyler opened the stage door for himself; and, seeing the two stand- ing apart, went toward them. The elder laid his hand on his shoulder with a hearty grip and shake. But Fred Tyler's own hand went out to the younger man. The strange woman did not emerge from the in- terior of the coach till Ellis Hall held the door open and pushed his head in inquisitively. As she step- ped out into Rapid, her moment's uncertainty was not timid but wary. Her eyes swept the crowd with hunted keenness till they came to the circle of three. Then she went, forthwith, into the American House, and at the door, the eldest of the three men caught sight of her vanishing back. "By the Blood of Christ, you skin boned devil, what's that you've brought from Jerusalem?" he burst out in his clear sneering voice. His hold on Fred's shoulder tightened with something more than hearty fellowship. Fred grinned. "She turned up at Pierre," he answered succintly. The clean-faced boy mcved away with the irrita- tion of slighted incomprehension. Catharine had seen the coming together of the three, had seen likewise the strange woman's hesi- EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 19 tancy. Meanwhile, she and Mildred were assisting each other over the high wheel. As the strange wo- man entered the American House, a thick set, kind- ly eyed man with soft gray hair, and ample gray whiskers, came out. Taking Mildred's hand pro- tectingly, Catharine went forward and kissed him without caress. "Father," she said, "this is Mildred Larsh. She is to teach school." "Umhum," he responded, shaking Mildred's hand and looking at his daughter. "And, now you are here, what are you going to do?" In a moment of bother he had consented to that for which, now he fain would shift the responsibility upon the object of his annoyance. Catharine accepted it unpreturbed. "How can I tell?" she answered, "till I look around a bit?" Many eyes followed the two girls as they went into the hotel, with their bags in their hands. In the presence of the predominant masculinity about them each was supported by the presence of the other. Mildred was flushed and conscious of their importance. Catharine unaware met the men's faces turned to them with impartial openness. She led the way to the desk of the clerk ; and, reach- ing it, spoke across the room to her father who slow- ly followed "Must we sign?" she asked. He nodded and the strange woman, turning away, handed her the pen. She took it with the appro- priate thanks. However, when she looked down, she observed and was surprised that the space 20 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE under the date of the day was vacant. There was no woman's name on the page. "Oh! You have not signed," she apologized offer- ing to return the pen. "No," the other answered, "I can wait," and with stealthy quickness, she was nearing the door at which she had just entered. Catharine looked after her. To the end she al- ways wondered, if she had signed, what name it would have been. CHAPTER IV DR. Gillette's office was on the ground floor of the Schnasse block, next door to Pete Swift's joint. Frequently the very elite of those who frequented the joint drifted into the office for a more orderly game of cards than could be had in the indiscriminate hospitality of the Irishman's bar-room. Very little paraphernalia indi- cative of his profession could be seen in the scantily furnished apartment. There was a table, a few chairs, the white washed walls, and the bare floor. A bulky treatise on eye and ear diseases kept com- pany on the narrow window sill with a greasy kero- sene lamp. At the corner of the table rested an open, half filled box of properly flavored cigars. The meagreness of his professional equipment was not due to ignorance nor to an impecunious struggle. By preference, he relied upon reckless ingenuity, in devising make-shifts where surgical attention was demanded; and an indifferent policy of kill or cure simplified the treatment of all other cases. By a peculiar twist of reasoning, other communities as well as this one, made of his unconcern a guarantee of brilliancy. By neglect, it was admitted he had 21 22 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE been responsible for the death of more than one man, but of erroneous diagnosis, he had never been guilty. Thus his reputation profited from his in- humanity. When the youngest of the three men withdrew from the circle that had been formed in front of the American House, the other two, Fred and Dr. Gil- lette, crossed the street and entered the office. A half hour later they were still there. Dr. Gillette sat with one long leg crossed over the knee of the other, the invariable full length cigar projecting from the corner of his mouth. The other leg tilted his chair back from the small square table before him. Fred leaned forward ; his stubby cigarrette fit- ted into the yellowed marks on his first and second finger. Enjoyment marked the hateful smile of his small wrinkled face. Dr. Gillette accepted his amusement with the same gracious ease with which he so often lost in the early stages of an evening at cards. "Damn you," he laughed, not without affection, "you little cur, you don't gain anything." "Diversion, perhaps," Fred drawled. Being seated so that he could see a slight distance up the street he realized to some extent how this diversion was to be presently heightened. The strange woman stepped noiselessly through the open door way and sank into the vacant chair on the side of the table opposite to Dr. Gillette. He dropped the tilted front legs of his own chair, thrust his EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 23 thumbs into his vest pockets and by way of greeting, exclaimed, "God deliver us !" Her set lips smiled in quick hauteur, and the hollows in her cheeks deepened beneath the painted spots above. It was a broad face that once in the past must have been frankly open. It was open, now, brazen; and the large features stood out with prominent sharpness. Only the clear blue of the eyes was unwasted. They were large and un- swerving, and held the man before her steadily. His own dropped to where he knocked the ashes from the end of his cigar against the flat surface of the heel across his knee. Fred observed with interest that it was Dr. Gillette who winced. A shiver pass- ed over the woman but it moved her no more than the blizzard wind flinging its swift fury against the granite mountain side can in a moment alter the surface of its scars. "Well," he demanded, unequal to the strain of the silence. Her reply came hard, emotionless, "I have fifty thousand dollars and I have come to marry you." "Fifty thousand ! Holy Lucifer !" The man pulled his thumbs out of his pockets and leaned forward. His voice sank to the low sharp level of her own, and he scrutinized her as if weighing the money against the encumbrance. The result of the consideration was evidently unfavorable to the transaction. He laughed. Uncertain bravado replaced the assured waywardness of his bearing. The hauteur in her face leaped into relentless power. The twist of the 24 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE body with which he shifted the weight from one hip to the other might be called a squirm. Contempt en- forced her realization of mastery. The sneer in his voice lost its fascinating quality of unruffled compo- sure. It was marred by an assumed assertiveness in the tone of its insult. A shamed caution made mockery turned against himself out of his flippant retort. "Well now, I don't know as I care to about marrying. I'll be a son to you, but a husband, Great God!" "You will marry me or you will not get out of this town," she answered. He dropped both feet on the floor and leaned over the table asking in genuine bewilderment, "Will you tell me why, in the deuce, you want to marry me?" "Yes," she answered, and her intensity took un- seemly control of her voice, "I'll tell Fred also. He will understand. A man sometimes gets glutted with the indulgence for which one skulks; puts it behind him, holds his head up and no one looks for the vestige of contamination. If he has a mind, a force, a power to win people, it is enough. None would push him back into what has become a slough of disgust. Even you, who haven't put it behind you, who never will, come in here where everybody has just arrived, and nobody knows anybody else; you fasten out your shingle, and have money to invest. Who asks what you were in the states? Who cares? While folks are jostling into their places, and fixing their opinions of each other, half of them won't know the difference between the air that is brought EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 25 from the palace salon and the air that is brought from the clean, swell drawing room. Because you spurn the standards that frighten them, men think you are splendidly daring. And I," Once more the shiver passed over her. "I come with fifty thousand dollars. I am ready to buy respect and live as other women live. People say, 'What's she here for? Hasn't she any folks.' Someone comes up from Cheyenne and says, 'Oh!' throws intimations of what he could tell if he weren't too generous, or it might be you, when you began to feel safe and wanted to be rid of me. Others fill in the facts making them not facts of the past but of all time. If you marry me, well, first I fix you ; even you couldn't carry off a gibe at your own wife. Then I have your name, it doesn't matter how you've smirched it. It won't matter to the world of men about the rumors concerning me; if one man has passed them over, who should judge? It will give me my chance. I am forty ; at fifty I shall have re- trieved my birth right." She had ceased speaking to Dr. Gillette and he no longer listened to her. It was to herself she made the vow, it was Fred who heard it. There was a quizical sweetness in Fred's small face when she caught his glance. "Why do you chose me?" Dr. Gillette asked. He was gnawing the end of his cigar, the light of which had gone out. "There is no one else but Fred," she answered, "and I am not afraid of Fred. I have nothing 26 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE against Fred. He was never ashamed to be square with an accomplice even though she were a woman. I might worst Fred, filch a big hand out of his very grasp, and he'd never open his mouth about what went before if he had nothing to do with the game in hand. Then Fred wouldn't be so adaptable to respectibility. He'd do now but when Rapid had a hundred thousand people, Fred wouldn't be equal to my position. The two men looked at each other. All three laughed with the amiability that must be present in the recognition of a perfect understanding what- ever its nature. CHAPTER V IN the pause that held the mirthless humour of their unvoiced laughter, Dr. Gillette shoved back his chair, threw out his hands, and in four long strides reached the door of the office, laid forcible hands upon John Allen and pulled him in from the street. The youth drawn thus into the room almost by physical compulsion, stood good-na- turedly awaiting an explanation. He was young, between twenty and twenty-five, of medium height and thickness. There was a careless droop to his shoulders, a keenness in his eyes, and, to be noted as an after thought, a slight heaviness of the under- lip. "John, I'm going to do you a good turn," Dr. Gil- lette announced. He lifted a chair from the far side of the table and adroitely dropped it firm on its legs immediately behind the boy. John seated himself. "I reckon you are for what you can get out of it," he replied unsmiling. Dr. Gillette leaned against the corner of the table, one leg swung out in unguarded elation. "What do you think would give you a start in the world?" he 27 28 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE put forth in high spirits. "What would you reckon a man with a head for "business, not befuddled by any superfluous stuffing of science, law or litera- ture, but with an amazing sane judgment and a way of going slow and getting there, a fellow on this pattern," and he slapped John's unresponsive shoulder, what do you estimate he'd need for a be- ginning, to hold off hand, as a nest egg for a mil- lion?" Two incipient creases came down between the slight elevations that protruded above John's eye- brows. He was pondering figures. "Well with people throwing everything at a man's head when there's a cry of gold, ten thousand would be enough," he asserted authoritively. That Dr. Gillette enter- tained some nefarious purpose was patently evident but to John that did not invalidate the astute cor- rectness of the summary of his own precocious business discretion. In his own mind, the clear headed recognition of some design rendered him immune from any danger it might contain. More- over, the glance of the strange woman contributed to his self esteem just the aliment that had been lately denied it. He had suffered recent indignity from a mere slip of a short-sighted maid. The sud- den discovery of this other woman's clear blue eyes fixed upon him, with the wisdom of the world and admiration for himself, brought uppermost in his consciousness, his latent resolve "to show" the fool- ish one. "Oh! I say," Fred arose, paused, and waited for EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 29 John to join him. But John refused to be led away. He was not gifted in the art of loafing and ordi- narily would have accompanied the departing mem- ber of the group. However, today, in detecting Fred's protective impulse, he experienced an outrag- ed aggregation of manhood dignity, and bolstered it with tenacious obstancy. Fred resumed his seat. Fred did not conceal defeat. His offer had not been expressed in words. His resolve, if he could not pre- vent "it," "to see it out" was equally as silent. Dr. Gillette's leg hung tentatively. The strange woman caught her breath. "You might introduce a fellow," John suggested. He began to feel as if he and the strange woman had been left alone, and the others were observing them through glass walls. "Well," Dr. Gillette held him off. "It isnt pre- cisely a social affair we have in hand. It may be social elements will appear later, but there's time enough for ceremony." "Are you in the business?" John addressed the woman with boyish openness. He was altogether unconscious of anything unusual about her. The marks that differentiated her from the great mass of respectable women were as unknown to his world as to Catharine's. In him, however, she excited no unaccountable repulsion. It may be there was not such a great divergency between this woman and others. Later in life Catharine sometimes was equally repelled by unimpeachable members of her sex. Yet in return for his obtuseness, an eager 80 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE gratitude leaped into the strange woman's face, as if by choice he had been the first to yield her the re- sults of her chance. "I am half of it," she answered. Dr. Gillette meditatively lifted his foot and reach- ed it back until the toe touched the floor under the table, then stretched it out in front. "She is a third of it," he corrected and went on, "This lady arrived a few hours ago with fifty thousand to invest. She is to let me have twenty-five of it. We have had dealings in the past and she considers it advisable that we do not entirely sever business relations as long as we are in the vicinity of one another." Here Dr. Gillette felt discomfort borne upon him straight from the direction of the woman's clear blue eyes. But there were four directions in the room and, finding a corner where his own eyes could rest, he continued placidly, "The other twenty-five she will give to you for a very reasonable security." "No," she broke hastily, "Dr. Gillette takes all or nothing. Or perhaps," she modified, "in case he obtains for me elsewhere the security which I de- mand of him, I might sign to him certain transfer- able property, but to the gift the open records of the county shall furnish evidence for all time. If no agreement is reached, Mr. Allen and Fred may have the fifty thousand free of obligation. Neither Dr. Gillette nor I will have need of money. For us, the state will provide." To Dr. Gillette it was as if manacles were slipped around his wrists from behind, and there was a EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 31 moment's pause before they were snapped. "Oh well," he retreated hastily with a distortion of his long thin body, "Allen, it seems you are to have it all." "He is a boy," she protested drawing back at the threshold of desire. "He shall not be duped. "It would be a fair deal with us." "I guess not," Dr. Gillette laughed seeing John's face flush. "Of course we couldn't. You seem to think he wouldn't know how to take care of himself I guess he'd catch up on us if we tried any tricks of deception on him." "You could snare the Devil, himself, to make him go one better than he meant to go," she groaned. The offer of something so much better than she had resolved upon conflicted with a demand for re- nunciation. And she was not incapable of renun- ciation. Blindly she had thrown away her first youth in profitless abnegation. She was foolishly strong and in return life battered her weaknesses till they dragged her down. There were moments of heroism in her desolate young days; but heroism without the fiber web and woof of a hero, may be the beginning of destruction. In the plentitude of life she bartered the future for a thrill of holy joy; and wasted the years that followed in reckless effort to filch from to-day what had been lost the day before. The impulse of sacrifice rose within her, one second, then went down before the hardened determination with which she crossed the prairie, to destroy for herself all hope or gain her chance in the world, 82 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE a belated chance, still she was only forty. She look- ed at the clean faced youth. Was not this a better chance? And she might serve him, that too was a chance. It would not be the armored struggle of disdain for disdain. In the moment she made the new world for herself. That prescience which gives the knowledge of what is to come before decision has opened the way to the movements of events, told her that it was to be not Dr. Gillette but John Allen whose name she was to bear ; that she was to live once more the pains and joys of emotions, she had thought subdued. She was to bind and be bound by other laws than computations of give and receive. The shell of heartless calculation was too small to protect. The old law of her being impelled her. She was to give of herself, find herself in giv- ing and have the gift thrown back by the lesser soul. "A woman would hardly trick a man into marry- ing her," she said with crude extravagance of inten- sity. But the boy had no acquaintance with the power of reserve in histronic art and was not offended. "Do you want to marry me?" he laughed in amaze- ment. " I want to give you fifty thousand dollars," she evaded. "Who in the deuce, were you going to give them to before I came in?" he ventured. "How are you carrying this fifty thousand dollars about, I'd like to know? Got it in that lunch basket, there?" "Shouldn't wonder!" Dr. Gillette chuckled. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 33 "It's in New York drafts," she replied, glad that the question had two parts. The boy continued to look at her exactingly. "She was going to give it to me", Dr. Gillette put in jocosely. "Lord knows why I brought you in here." 'Stop lying, Doc. Give us the straight of it, Fred," John demanded. "Tell him, Fred. Tell him the truth," the woman cried. Fred shook his head sardonically. The woman wet her lips. "Then I'll tell you. There are tough characters in Rapid, I'll wager. But leaving out Dr. Gillette, there isn't one that could stand up to my record. I came in to buy a legal name for myself, a name and a little more. The man who marries me must give me every recogni- tion before the town that any other man must give his wife. And I shall do my part. I am done with such men as Doc. Oh! I'll help my husband in Rapid. Clear the way, and I'll turn its own weapons against the world, and in addition, she laid a long envelope on the table, and sat waiting with her hand upon it. "It is a clear proposition, sure," John mused. He felt the woman's desire turned toward him. He thought of the homesteads along Rapid creek going for a mere song, of the new irrigation craze that must prove feasible and make them more to be de- sired than Iowa farms. Through it all passed the image of the girl who had cast him off. CHAPTER VI 0," she maintained, "it must be a minis- ter of the Gospel." It was to Dr. Gil- lette she made her demands and he, abandoning the pretense of argument and grasping admiringly the wisdom of her far seeing precau- tions, responded with a growing terrorized zeal. Fred had declined to take part in the transaction, but at this point his inspiration broke through his unmoved poise. "There's Warner," he laughed. "On your life," and Dr. Gillette was out of his seat as if he had been pushed. John had wandered off for his delayed dinner. And the departure of Dr. Gillette left Fred and the strange woman together. They looked at each other as they had done across Catharine Paine's sleeping face in the stage coach. "You must have something to eat," Fred said humanely. "Doc can get it when he comes back," she ans- wered. Fred arose and paced the floor. She caught his eyes on one of his backward turns. "If you had been a few inches taller and if my 34 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 35 father had found someone other than his fourteen year old daughter to drum the piano in his dance hall ," She turned her face from the curious eyes of a passer-by at the window. Fred's brow wrinkled savagely, a disproportion- ate lump of knots gathering on one side. "Oh, I guess the devil had his claims anyhow," he renoun- ced all desire for exoneration with careless gruff- ness. But he stayed his steps and laughed in that strange ashamedness at deviating from a make- shift code of morals. "It's queer," he mused, "that two such arch-fiends as ourselves never connived together and never undermined the schemes of each other,-but at this master stroke of yours, I have half a mind to squash it." "I'll hurt him no more than you", she flared wretchedly, under her breath, for Dr. Gillette was ushering in the clergyman. The vocation of the Reverend Warner might be inferred from the low round cut of his collar and the high round cut of his vest. He was a short, round-faced Englishman, skin weather browned and face unshaved since the Sunday two days pass- ed. His brown eyes twinkled in good humoured, non-committal indulgence with the frailties of human nature, he had much first hand acquaint- ance. "Be seated," Dr. Gillette invited him hospitably, but without deference. In his dealings with the Reverend Warner, the others ministerial dignity played no part. He heartily approved of the clergy- 36 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE man's methods in evangelical work. By indis- criminate acceptance of raw material, Mr. Warner was steadily corralling an assortment of strays into a flock. Content for the change of heart and even the shedding of the wolf's skin to be postponed to a convenient season, he presented a scheme of salva- tion by gradual decrease of ungodly practices, which agreed wonderfully with Dr. Gillette's conception of divine expediency. For himself, Dr. Gillette did not care to be implicated in any scheme of salvation however accommodating, and Mr. Warner appre- ciatively respected his aversion. In business mat- ters each of the men found the other readily able to comprehend his view of the reasonable. Dr. Gillette seated himself square in his chair and went at the matter in hand expeditiously. His voice was slightly hoarse and nervous. He addressed the wo- man who turned from a keen survey of Mr. War- ner. "Mr. Warner, here, is an Episcopal clergyman, ordained and salaried. He has all the requisites for his vocation except a congregation and a build- ing to house it, and he is getting together the stuff for both at a fairly good rate. When the subscrip- ion list for the church is well under way, very likely you would add your own and Mr. Allen's name for such amounts as ." "It might be you both would be drawn to join yourselves to the congregation of the Lord," Mr. Warner interposed. An unassumed seriousness in his face and voice struck a cord of response in the EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 37 woman, revealed an opening in his creed whereby one need not commit himself too far, yet just so far as his daily peace craved, might be associated with those joined together for the purpose of good works and chastening thoughts. Whether it was an impulse of sport toward this turn of the interview or merely a desire to drive some part of his designs to a point of actual agree- ment was not evident. Dr. Gillette, ignoring the interruption, demanded, "In case Mr. Warner mar- ries you and John Allen, you will hardly be content with a normal fee?" "When we can be more privately situated," the strange woman answered, "I shall be glad to give Mr. Warner a thousand dollars to be used absolute- ly at his discretion, in putting through his plans for his church. As for the marriage fee " She waved it off with grim humour. "It is hardly for me to pay the marriage fee." CHAPTER VII DR Gillette afterward declared, with a modi- fying phraesology of his own, that it was through a trick of Mr. Warner by which he took on sanctity and radiated churchiness forthwith upon assuming the surplice, that, at the clinch- ing of this transaction, the participants and and the witnesses found themselves transposed the scoffing traffic of the market place to a hushed holy of holies. No slip of levity dis- pelled the grave silence with which he con- ducted them into his sanctuary. It was a small hall over Pete's saloon. They entered it in the darkness of early evening. Mrs. Warner opened the door just as they reached it, and the party of five entered, and four of its members stood awkward and embarrassed. Even Dr. Gillette was ill at ease. Mr. Warner's bustling little wife had been busy transferring such part of her household furnishings as could be suitably placed ; and across the Brussels rug, the chanceled end of the room presented itself to these defilers, very simple and suggestive in the softened light of a shaded piano lamp. There was the pine railing, pathetically crude in day time, but 38 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 39 to them, in the mellowed brightness, the intimation of an unknown barrier. From the altar with its embroidered cloth and candles, and from the great Bible out of which the long mark fell in stately fashion, emanated some of that reverence that has been gathered into them in the centuries when if men approached them wantonly, they did not own it even to themselves. Mrs. Warner greeted the bridal party, then drew back, a modest hand maid to the occasion. And the man and woman found themselves at the altar. However Mr. Warner may have dealt with the divine spirit of his own soul which God gave into his keeping, the ritual, which the Church intrusted to his care, he never debased. It ever took hold of him with a dignity of its own. There also that ceremony, to which gen- erations have bequeathed their heritage of deep emotion, laid its awe upon them who had come to it so lightly. At Mr. Warner's word they knelt; and, in an instant of dazed wonderment at the solemnity that encompassed them and their deed, they kissed, and then drew back in a kind of terror at the strangeness of the touch. She was frightened for the boy, he for himself, when in the very tone of God's agent and with the gravity of binding the indissoluble, the Reverend Warner pro- nounced them man and wife. Before they could escape Mrs. Warner came for- ward and in turn shook the hand of everyone en- thusiastically; and by an imperious little touch of the arm for one, and an imperious motion of the 40 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE head for another, gathered them cozily uncomfort- able in the small parlor at the rear of the Church; where, insistently, with felicitous intimation of the past and present, obstantly adhering to the hypo- thesis of an invariable element, present in variable proportions in every such a situation, in the spirit of proper rejoicing, she fed them on very thin cakes and coffee to be taken from very thin small cups. Dr. Gillette threw off the effects of what he called "Warner's incantation" and became jovially congratulatory. Fred, solemn, and painfully wrinkled, put down his full cup and untasted cake, excused himself with the candid as- sertion that he must meet an engagement for a game of monte, and withdrew. However, Dr. Gil- lette, following to "Pete's," the rendez-vous that was always understood when no other had been named, failed to find him ; nor did he appear during the entire evening. When John and Mrs. Allen came out upon the street together, they turned and walked aimlessly away from the lighted windows. They were like two robbers carrying off plunder; having brought themselves out of danger, each suddenly becomes filled with uncertainty of the other, yet is held to him by a pledge of constancy, and the bond of half- repented comradeship. From the shadow of the low buildings, they came into the open moonlight. His face was turned from her lest the slightest in- clination be taken for a concession that was careful- ly withheld. By pampering a mood of dull disgust EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 41 in the situation, he seemed to be making himself an unchosen part of it. His companion stopped and held him at the muzzle of his deed. "Where are we going?" she asked. At the abrupt pause, he unconsciously stopped also. Perforce they looked at each other and from her face the actuality of their new relation went out and gripped him. "I have a shack," he began. The thought of it had risen to her demand. Yet he did not voluntari- ly hand it over to the emergency. "Fred and I bunked there," he concluded. "Is it this way," she asked. "Yes," he answered ; and they walked on. CHAPTER VIII MILDRED ran up the steps of the hotel, hur- ried through the uncarpeted hall, and burst into the room where she and Catha- rine lived. Her body bent forward and swayed sideways a little on the stairs. Still hastening, she had turned at the first landing, to call back to a man below. When she opened the door her cheeks were flushed with health and flurry. In staid disregard of the Sabbath, Catharine was darning her father's socks. After the old fashioned method, she used no ball but held the emptiness smoothly unstretched between the thumb and first finger of her left hand. However, her cotton had the silk gloss; and she was just considering that the inserted portion was of superior quality to the orig- inal material, when Mildred's approach began to make its rather premature demand upon her atten- tion. Having an acute hearing, she followed it from the entrance of the vestibule till her compan- ion stood before her. Something like resentment stirred with the nearing steps. It was an irritation that brought dissatisfaction with self. To Mildred, she had reached out for a realization of her seven- 42 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 43 teen-year-old anticipation of friendship-love. But with Mildred the delights of youth were only the plays of childhood with the glamour of imaginative imitation replaced by a certain mature design. Sit- ting alone, her eyes on the hills, Catharine was con- tent with the dre,am-assurance of the time when human eyes should look back at her as she looked at the mountains. But the announcement of Mildred's arrival insinuated the vague fear that it was not in her to find the response of her longing. "Was it for some trivial reason that she did not love Mil- dred?" the desire of her nature was asking. She did not come of a stock that curtailed the list of its dear ones because of an unseemly volume of voice or a laxity of muscular control. Her mother prac- ticed Christianity as she practiced darning, follow- ing obsoletely difficult and exact standards irres- pective of the material upon which applied. Her father had picked his trust-worthy friends from the sturdy muscled, restless, spirited men that ever seek the frontier line. She looked up at Mildred wistfully. "Haven't you heard?" Mildred exclaimed in the open doorway. "Aren't you going to the Sunday- school?" "Sunday school? Where?" Catharine answered. Mildred came in and sat down on the edge of the bed, laughing and endeavoring to get her breath, leaned back on one hand and caught her chest with the other. "You heathen," she commented, "Darn- ing on Sunday! You missed it not being outside. 44 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE There was a dreadful stampede of cattle up the street. They were milling right in front of the post-office. Bobbie Doone almost got ground up. Guess he would have, only he knew his bronco. But, come on. Mr. Warner is waiting. He has a church up over the saloon. That woman that came in on the coach with us is all right. She's married to Mr. Allen. He's that dandy young fellow with the thick hair and the red tie that we saw with Doc Gillette in at the Chinaman's, night before last. I don't see what he wanted to marry for just as we came in. Well, Mrs. Allen, she is now, whoever she was before, and Mrs. Warner are rounding up the children. We'll go halves on the primary class. You can have the girls. I'll take the boys." Catharine threw her work on the bed and five minutes later they were going down the stairs arm in arm; and, in another two, had joined Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Warner at the foot of the steps on the other side of the street. There, by a system of nods and pats, eight or nine non-descript children were being herded into the passage way. Catharine caught two lights of wonderment set in a fair freckled face, swung a clean washed bunch of baby flesh to her shoulder and went ahead. Mrs. Warner stretched her pastor-wife tentacles in the direction of Mildred. "We shall depend on you girls. A young girl has more influence than she thinks Harry help your sister. There that's a little man " Setting a stumbling impediment EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 45 to the procession on its feet, she continued. "We shall be real merry together, also. I believe in a good time as does Mr. Warner." "So do I," Mildred answered impressively with the air of grasping a novel sentiment. Mrs. Warner was a small dark woman, dressed neither in style nor out of it. She was one of the most zealous Martha's in the service of the Lord. How she sorted and seated and arranged that Sun- day-school; played the organ, started the songs, brought forth Bibles, pamphlets, and little picture cards ; moved chairs, tables, and the small pawns of flesh and blood first this way and then that, bring- ing each into orderly relation to herself, the cen- tral point. Incidentally she instructed Mildred in what was unique in the instruction in an Episcopal Sunday school ; and discreetly as if sliding over the perfectly familiar, made hurried but very definite suggestions to Mrs. Allen. Both the woman and the girl proved wonderfully adaptable. One learn- ed many things to appear thence forth as if she had always known them; the other conformed to ex- ample without learning anything. Catharine in her corner, put aside the lesson sheet and told the story of Joseph and his wicked, jealous brothers; and at the end forgot the moral. "Charmingly original!" Mrs. Warner commented concerning her to Mrs. Allen when the hour was over and she had departed escorting three children to their homes. Later Mrs. Allen caught up with her just outside the door opening into the street. 46 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE She had returned for a small stray and was leaving a second time. With the child between them, they passed the saloon where John, Fred, Dr. Gillette and half a dozen other men lounged in the doorway. It was those in the dark as to the facts who were making efforts at sport over John's recent mar- riage. Dr. Gillette grinned encouragingly but held his tongue. Fred sank into his corner. John bare- ly succeeded in hiding his mounting rage, beneath a glum silence. The jests as to Dr. Gillette's part were according to the standards of the speakers not uncomplimentary but for John there was the most humiliating of all implications, that of having been duped. The insinuations were too remotely phrased to occasion physical attack from one not quick of wit in retaliatory retort. Even as a boy moreover, John never fought out his anger. In the pause when rancor vitalizes into pugilistic energy at the end of the knuckles, occasion had ever opened to him a more assuredly comfortable return to self esteem, brought a momentary discountenancing of his adversaries which left him with an afterglow of unperturbed dignity. It was in this pause that Mrs. Allen and Catharine Paine passed. The ap- pearance of Mrs. Allen heightened the significance of all that was implicit in the moment. Mrs. Allen felt herself the fulcrum of jeering amusement and unbalanced tempers, the subject of mocking scru- tiny. As a shield, itself invulnerable to scar, that might glance aside their contempt, she detained Catharine over a matter of little moment, bent and EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 47 retied the bonnet of the child whose hand Catharine held. Before Dr. Gillette, Fred, and John, she demonstrated a point of common interest between herself and Mose Paine's daughter. She did not flaunt a spurious friendship. She only made evi- dent that they had met and found one another ac- ceptable. When the child's bonnet was adjusted, Catharine said "good-morning" the least bit curtly; and crossed the street, displeased, she knew not why. She had looked for a wild, honest, blatant wickedness at the end of the stage-coach journey. But the puzzle of those grown wise in the old wise world had followed the young girl into the new land. She looked down the broad empty street, through the gap off to the mountain piled blue upon blue then down at the round face all unfrightened and confiding. At her glance, a burden of commu- nication poured all at once into a chatter of incom- prehensible words. Then just below her own face and above the little one, Fred Tyler's greeted her; and behind the pain of his wrinkles, she saw the message from the mountains and from the bady voice transcribed into a winning sadness. "You should have been to our Sunday school, Mr. Tyler," she said. "Sunday school?" he mused. "No, I could not attend your Sunday school. I could not endure the sacrilege of being there." When Catharine left her, Mrs. Allen stood at the corner and did not lift her eyes. She was not imme- diately before them but could be plainly seen by the 48 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE group in front of the saloon. If she had challenged him there before them all, John Allen would have disowned her; but a chastened yearning turned her head away, while she waited and the tensity of her craving soared up to the faith of prayer. In John Allen the manly tenderness that can swell within a boyish egotism, answered to her need. He straightened himself and stepped out from those who derided him; touched his hat, prefunctorily courteous, and was at the side of the woman who was his wife. Indeed a touch of high souled chival- ry exalted the act and the silence upon which it rested. One glance back at the baffled smiles of his tormentors, and one at the gladness quivering in the woman's face, the sensations with which he walked away were predominately pleasant, so much so that it was a moment he never forgot and he al- ways recalled it as one of unadulterated generosity. CHAPTER IX f l^ATHER?" Catharine came up to him in 1 ""* the midst of the wagons and the buffalo skins scattered on the ground. "I want to go back with the train", she announced. Mose Paine ignored the interruption and conti- nued to shake out the hides. Having arranged them at the end of the nearest wagon bed, he began to pack and after a space also to give voice to his an- noyances. "I wish you'd tell me, Catharine, what's been the gain of your staying here for a month," he demanded. "It'll be two months since I left when I get home," Catharine corrected. "I am glad I came, father." He bent down and dragged the entire mass of skins nearer the wagon ; then in the fretted discom- fort of the exertion, addressed her accusingly, "You don't know what it means to cross the prairie in a freight train. There's the weather and the Indians. You won't have anything to eat but beans and bacon and biscuit. The fords are high. The men swear and curse if they want to." "You'll be there," she threw in. 49 50 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "It may take thirty days. Your mother'll be anxious," he continued not heeding her. "Father, you know, unloaded going back, it takes no time at all. Mother worries about you. She won't know I'm coming until I arrive." There were times when the man almost repented Catharine's existence. Now was one of them. When she should have been at home nursing the younger children, baking and dusting against the time of his arrival, she was asking to go back with the train. "Mother crossed from Colorado when I was a baby," she said. "I never wanted you to come, Catharine, he per- sisted irreverently. "Then you don't want me to stay," she pressed with sound logic. He smoothed another skin methodically precise. There was no freighter in the West that could get more goods into a given compass than Mose Paine and from habit he was economical of space although there were ten unloaded wagons for a few dozen hides. Catharine watched him quietly. "I could do it faster, father," she mildly remarked. "Faster! I guess you could!" He missed the humour and the smile that brightened her face. An amusingly pathetic bit of hurt indignation was in his tone. "I suppose you must be taken back some way." He spoke as if she were a cumbersome article of freight inflicted upon him. She was standing on a skin and with unconscious perverseness, his hand EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 51 passing over several nearer ones reached for it, and he waited in abused resignation till she stepped back. "Why don't he say 'yes' or 'no' she was question- ing. Then it occured to her that it might be 'no' and laughing inwardly at the effect of the possibility, she condoned his non-committal antagonism. "Then, father, I shall find out what I need, and equip myself," she stated moving away. He lifted worried eyes to her, but she was gone. But for Mr. Paine there were compensations in Catharine although he never recognized them for such. That evening when she came into the poorly lighted dining-room of the American House, he caught the admiration that followed her as Catha- rine herself did not catch it. He furtively observed her take her seat, rested in the assurance that she was a girl who required no looking after and smiled upon her benignly. She began to talk of her pre- parations for the overland journey and his expres- sion of complaisant satisfaction was changed to one of annoyance. Yet in the morning she discovered that all was arranged for her accommodation and comfort; a private apartment was ingeniously fitted out in one of the empty wagons, and for diversion between walking, and snail pace riding in wagons, a bronco of comparatively reputable character had been added to the mules and oxen of the train. "Father," she thanked him touching his arm timidly, "if you seemed to care to do it and for me !" He shook her off briskly, and she put her arms around the neck of the bronco. BOOK TWO CHAPTER I / / JOUSTED, Miss?" 1 The porter poised his brush solicitous- *-^ ly and Catharine arose. "Mighty ner' ther' now," the darkie volunteered. "We take water and coal her', and then run right up to Rapid. Reckon you're glad to get home. E'er been her* 'fore?" Catharine nodded, smiled, shook her head, and dropped a twenty-five cent piece into his receptive palm ; then sank down in the seat, put her elbows on the sill and looked out the car window. She was awed and thrilled with the monstrous bleakness of the prairie. On either side it stretched back in an endless succession of draws and low rolling eleva- tions. Here and there was a deserted ranch house, a colorless skeleton of a living place, or a few whit- ened bones and a dingy hide told where a coyote and a cow had struggled and one had fallen. But each token of life was swallowed up into a single tremen- dous suggestion of passive strength. Before her where the prairie sweep would have touched the horizon, the Black Hills rose above it almost as dark as the name that has been given them. Henry Burton, across the isle came over to the 55 56 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE . seat opposite her. She turned from the window and waited for him to speak but he hesitated before the expectancy in her face. He was a tall, fair man with all the symmetry in face and figure that Catha- rine lacked. Leaning forward slightly, his arm on his knee, his large blue eyes looked openly into hers and the smile on his lips pleasantly anticipated whatever she might say. Two days before at Missouri Valley, they found themselves the only occupants of the Pullman, and the conductor, standing in the aisle between, made known that Rapid was the destination of each. "We are a select company," Catharine ventured when the conductor had passed on. "The best of everything is going toward Rapid." Henry Burton laid down the Chicago Record Herald and asked the privilege of sharing her seat. "I didn't know it," he said. "I only knew that it contained a State School of Mines and that I was to be the professor of assaying." They then discovered that he was an A. M. from Columbia and she was freshly graduated from Vassar. They began with remarks on the respec- tive campuses, touched upon college sports, songs common friends, the latest comic opera and favo- rites of the stage; and the evening before reached their covertly cherished expectations of the new life and talked of the town to whose making their own young vitality was to contribute. Catharine knew all about it. She had not been back since she came home with the train. But for the last three* years EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 57 all the letters from mother, father, and little brother and sister had come from Rapid. The Journal had been sent and photographs of each new building. That short visit six years ago had given the basis for working out just how the town was built, and where each building was situated. There was no- thing she could not tell him about it and its people. The girl had loved college and would not yield the memory of its wholesome frolics and its heritage of friendship love. But she would not have it pro- longed to the exclusion of the sequel that should succeed. At the end of the long day of travel the man had caught a glimpse of the homely yearnings of the girl who had been called a "shark" at college. Her mother and the children had "come on" for the sum- mers and they spent the vacations together in the East, but for them in the home in Rapid, she would make no effort to put its meaning into words. Yet, for himself, she warned the man against disappoint- ment. He must not judge the town from a stand- point of intrinsic valuation, for the present attain- ment was only a promise of the future. Making light of her credulity, he incited her to equip a dwelling place for his own hopes, and she was equal to the hint of encouragement in his feigned inock- cry. If he did his part, the School of Mines would give scope to his utmost ability, and in the proper garb of allusive phraesology, she had dared the in- ference that he would command the greatest oppor- tunity the school might offer. "Impossible!" he had turned the flattery against 58 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE her teasingly. "You are still undaunted?" he asked as they sat facing each other waiting for Rapid to appear. "Such a dreary nothingness." "Such a sublime approach!" she retorted. "Per- haps this is more to your taste?" The train had slowed and a round red water tank cut them off from the prairie behind and the town before. "The School of Mines!" she exclaimed nodding back to- ward two brick buildings. They were good sized, substantial structures, gauntly unadorned, without trees, grass, or walks around them. "They are large," he laughed, "but where did they come from? Where are they put? Did they drop there, like meteoric stones? They lack envi- ronment." "The Park Hotel is neighborly unless one has my- opic vision or impeded gait," her answer came quickly. By turning his back to her and leaning his face against the glass, he succeeded in seeing the wing of another ostentatious brick building half a mile in the direction of Rapid. "It is opposite the station," she informed him. "The station, one would expect to have some prox- imity to the town," was his complaint. "You have no imagination. The town would grow over it and we'd be moving it out every year. The use of the we excluded him. She was tingling with the home coming joy ; and at the end of the journey, was preoccupied. The nearness of Rapid filled her so completely that there was no place for the inti- EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 59 macy that had been drawing them the day before. "But you admitted yesterday that in the other visit to Rapid you were disappointed in the West," he challenged. "Surely not!" she answered thoughtfully. "Yes," he maintained, as if reminding her. "Oh ! But there I was looking for the wrong thing. Can grape vines flourish in gold-mixed sand? Do Kantian theories formulate between the plunges of an unbroken bronco? It was because I found so much that I lamented because I was not altogether satisfied." At that point the train lurched, then stopped again for coal. Sounds of a commotion intruded upon the conversation. "You're right she is," the porter was saying. "This way young man." Catharine stood up unheeding that her purse and handkerchief dropped to the floor. A boy of twelve and a girl of ten rushed down the aisle and the tall girl knelt between them. "Walter you are spoiling Kitty's hat," the girl child pushed her brother away with her elbow and her small fingers reverently adjusted the dislocated aigrette of Catharine's turban. The boy thus re- lieved from further demonstration of greeting, an- nounced, "We've got to get out of here double quick. Our cart is outside." Margie nestled closer to her sister. "Perhaps you will drive back to the station alone," Catharine suggested to Walter. 60 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Most assuredly," he consented expeditiously, standing very short and slight in his white starched waist with its wide collar and red tie. Turning, he hastened down the aisle, restraining himself with difficulty from a run. Margie fitted cozily against Catharine's arm and timidly submitted to an intro- duction to Henry Burton. CHAPTER II TWO days later Henry called at the Paine resi- dence and was investigated by the mascu- line members of the household. Walter met him at the door and conducted him through a succession of rooms, that were differentiated only by a diversity in carpeting and wall paper, and brought him at last to an evident terminus. A pine wood fire blazed in the fireplace, a book of poems lay face down on a chair and music rested on the open piano. A palm stood in a windowed alcove. An inviting air of welcome had been added, and Henry realized a degree of opulence in the furnishings. Walter instructed him as to the most comfortable chair, and selected a hassock for his small person. "Kitty says this is her room. You came to see Kitty didn't you?" Henry nodded and the boy took up another line of conversation. "Do you like that bronc, you've bought?" "How do you know I've bought a bronc?" Henry smiled leaning forward his hand on his knee. It was a mannerism with him, that often accompanied a quizzical expression. "Oh, I thought I saw you on that one Jim Hale owned." 61 62 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Well, I did purchase it," Mr. Burton admitted. "You want to look out for those broncs," the boy admonished. "They're tricky. You'll go along a week or so, may be, nice as you please, then in a jiffy, they're balking, kicking up, rolling over, up to any old deviltry." Mr. Burton enjoyed the last word from the pretty lips above the immaculate white waist. "How does our gas strike you?" was the next question. "Looks to me about the same as any other gas," and he observed the chandelier seriously. His mirth was modified by the sudden thought of a kerosene affliction in his own room at the Harney hotel. "Well, now that's just where you're off," Walter caught him up gleefully. "There isn't any other gas in town. Dick Fulton, right across the road, hadn't ever seen gas till we lighted up. We make it our- selves or we put the stuff in and the machine does the work. Kitty don't approve of it. She says it's stealing a march on the prosperity of the town. Say don't you think Kitty's a dandy?" Henry lowered his voice. It was full of fun and music, "Between you and me, I do," he answered. Just here Mr. Paine cautiously put his head around the portiere. Mr. Burton turned with the consciousness of a third person's presence, and arose quickly. Mr. Paine came forward, shook his hand with heartiness at the same time revealing com- plete ignorance as to his identity. He took a seat and began with mild directness, to put to him lead- EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 68 ing questions as to his business in Rapid. Having got his guest "placed" he proceeded to a dissertation upon the prospects of Rapid. "I'll tell you what, young man, I watched the beginning of Denver. Rapid has exactly the corresponding position. These people don't know what Rapid is going to be. You've got a good thing there. Plenty of men will be want- ing to learn the stuff you've got to give them. Just hold on to it. There's no use getting mad though. Denver wasn't built in a day. No matter what's coming, pure speculation ain't the way to get rich. Men don't get anything in this world without work. The free range brings about as good money as will be coming to anyone for some time yet. For all that, one ought to put himself in the way of taking in a share of the honest rake off that'll be coming from Rapid's sudden building up." Catharine laughed between the portieres. "We Paines all feel the same way about Rapid but for the sake of argument and diversity we say it different- ly. She had one arm full of photographs of irregu- lar shapes and sizes, and sat down with them in her lap, folded her hands above them, and smiled at the two men, merrily appreciative of the incongruity of the types; and wondered in the vaguest, indefinite way, if they could ever really "hit it off." A question of like nature made for her an under- current of enjoyment during the remainder of the evening. No sooner had Mr. Paine and Walter withdrawn than Fred and Mildred arrived. Catha- rine presented her old friends to her new one, and 64 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE neither could have detected a shade of partiality in her cordial gladness at doing it. It occured to her, as Fred and Mildred followed her to the room she had stamped for her own, that one of the men might not be able to discover any virtue in the other ; and the question of which would thus reveal his limita- tions made of the meeting a situation to her. But any casual anticipation as to the effect of an intro- duction, was startlingly overreached. Mr. Burton stiffened with indignation, his fair head lifted dis- dainfully. Fred was maliciously suave. During the entire evening, as if in social exoneration, and as a refuge from Fred, Henry graciously devoted him- self to Mildred. Fred comfortably settled his small figure in a very large chair and after a few harras- sing sallies became benignly resigned to the retri- bution of a despised but complacent sinner. Catha- rine arrived at the conclusion at the evening pro- ceeded, that Fred behaved much the better of the two. Catharine and Mildred had kissed at the door and came through the rooms with their arms around each other's waists. When they were seated before the fireplace, Catharine looked at her friend, with the same condening disapproval as of old, but there was no wistfulness in her face. The craving that Mildred could not satisfy had been fed. "You are not changed at all," she commented thoughtfully. It was the same plump figure, the same coarse abundant hair, deep colored cheeks, and alertness for 'fun.' " EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 65 "And six years of teaching. That's a record," Mildred responded. "Don't you remember?" Catharine recalled, "After the first week, you said you were looking for an opening into woman's true vocation !" "So I did," and her full laughter emphasized the resolution. "I don't know as I have altered any there. I'd have taken to the home making trade before this only there has always promised to be a new influx of men to choose from. First it was the railroad coming and then the boom." "I wish you could have gone to Vassar with me," Catharine mused in sincere belief that there was fertile soil that had grown up in weeds. "She might have been toned down," she would have expressed it. "I wish I could have," Mildred responded cheer- fully. "What have you got here?" and she lifted the top photograph from the table where the assort- ment had been placed. There were pictures of col- lege dramatics, the girl's rooms, the campus, basket ball teams, and glee clubs. Mildred ran over them hurriedly, shoving each to the bottom till she had returned to the one with which she started, whereupon she generously remarked, "A pretty lot of girls," and pushing them back, got up, seated her- self on the piano stool, and began to drum out the latest rag time. Fred took the abandoned photo- graphs and passed them carelessly through his hands. Catharine watched him drawn by an un- emotional attraction, an inexplicable claim for pity. 66 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE He caught her glance and, placed the photographs on the table behind him. Mildred whirled on the piano stool and desired to know with what further rendition she might favor them. Fred and Mildred finally departed and Henry lingered only until they had gone. He had put on his coat and gloves and held his hat in his hand. They stood in the hallway. "I hope," he said, "that I have not been rude to your guest." "You are not democratic enough," she replied slowly. "We are not eclectic in Rapid except per- haps as to what portion of a man we shall choose for our intercourse. We exclude no one, well, al- most no one, from comradship, because he has ob- noxious parts. We succeed in finding a congenial fragment. Fred Tyler may be all bad but he has the grace to know it. In fact I suspect there are really manly traits which he secretively disowns out of shame for "the company they keep. You must see my mother's friend, Mrs. Allen, then stand at the street corner some day when there are whiffs of heinous gossip in the air to know how generous we can be." "You mistake," the man replied. "It was not the villainy of it. It was that they mistook me for their kind. When one belongs to a family and has lived in its midst, he comes to think that he carries on his brow the marks of its probity. To be undeceived is a shock to his conceit." Catharine laughed. "It wasn't you, it was your EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 67 position. They believe that is what the assayer at the school is for, to give fictitious reports on their specimens. It is disloyal to the section to conform to the moderation of scientific analysis. Still, I thought Fred would know his man." "It wasn't he who approached me, but he's in the gang." "Oh," her face was bright with comprehension. "Dr. Gillette is one man you will not meet in this house." Henry observed the girl cautiously aware that he had seemed to tell more than he meant to reveal. "How do you know such things?" he asked. "How will father know in a week's time that you turned them down? Their deal won't go through and the zealously righteous member of the board of trustees will be writing back to know if their in- formation that you are wretchedly incompetent, and negligent, is true or the fiction of enmity, Oh, it'll all be plain enough. But you'll stay? Won't you?" "Stay, of course I'll stay," and Henry said his goodnight with a gaiety he hardly felt. CHAPTER III THE day before Catharine had come in with Margie from a climb to Hangman's Hill and found Mrs. Allen presiding at a guild meet- ing in her mother's parlor. She slipped off her coat and hat, handed the basket of shooting stars to Margie, with a whispered suggestion as to the fitting vase that would contain them, moved a chair inside the room, sat down and listened to her mother who was praying. As she followed the prayer, she was suddenly struck with the purity of its English and the tellingly figurative turns in its expression. Except for these rarer qualities, she would have noted first its over emotionalized earnestness. Deferentially holding her hand above one eye brow, she looked out from under it with ad- miration that quickened into covert tenderness. She ceased to follow the prayer; and, in the innu- merable, indecisive wrinkles of the face, the mouth that quivered as easily, the trustful, pleading, con- fidential tone of the voice, the girl began to find the key to a charm she had only half divined. The prayer ended and Mrs. Allen arose. She did not speak for several seconds and in the pause was 68 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 69 a reverent "Amen" to the subtler tokens of old time sanctity, that from the few who could detect the quality brought to Mrs. Paine a bit of the adoration with which the Mediaeval man regarded the saints. In the silence Catharine did not recognize Mrs. Allen. She spoke and the girl remembered. Her mother was older, ten years perhaps and the other might have been the sterner, hardier battle-strength- ened sister. Her hair was parted as was Mrs. Paine's. Her gown was more severely simple but of softened grays and whites. Her features were larger as was her body. The clearness of her blue eyes was keener, yet, to one not blinded by the prominently striking, there was behind their bright directness the same depth of troubled brooding that was most readily noted in Mrs. Paine's glance. When Mrs. Allen looked up, her eyes betrayed no secret, and if she had been moved to tenderness, the emotion in no wise mastered her. When she spoke, the voice was full, cheerful, and positive. "Mrs. Warner will tell us of her plans for the county fair," she stated. Mrs. Warner had already begun to arise. Trans- fering her handkerchief, gloves, pencil and memo- randa slips from her lap to the chair she had occu- pied, she stepped out and presented the situation. The little chapel was built, in a month when the bishop came it would be quite completed. Bounteous friends in the East had been generous, people in Rapid had helped, five hundred dollars more and the debt would be paid ; the church would be dedicated, 70 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE after the dedication there would be the confirmation service and also, she hinted, there would be a mar- riage. What she proposed was not a stupid church fair but a farcical county fair. Old settlers' picnics, bronco breaking performances, free lasso contests and Indian war dances had left no demand for the real county fair in the Black Hills. But its imita- tion would be a reminiscence of back East, down South, or up North. Everybody came from some- where. The admission fee would be purely nominal, twenty five cents, say, small articles of fabulous uti- lity would be offered for sale, demonstrations of home mixed baking powder and a newly arrived brand of coffee would furnish the refreshments. She only offered illustrative suggestions. It was the sort of play to which Catharine was accustomed. Mrs. Warner was mindful of the girl as she began to sort her memoranda. She picked up first one piece of paper, then another, and when the names of the committees were finally read, Catharine, hearing her own repeated so frequently, suspected an impromptu revision of the lists. When the meeting was over, Mrs. Warner, strew- ing hasty inquiries, conciliatory postponements of appointments, inclusive little nods of the head, and hurried squeezes of the hand, made her way to Ca- tharine. "Kitty Paine, we've been waiting for you/' she exclaimed. "I don't believe that, but I'll help. It'll be fun," Catharine held the hand Mrs. Warner had lent her, as one girl holds another's. ".You shan't get away EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 71 with a passing fabrication, if there were a dozen church fairs," she teased cordially. Catharine was evading a summons from her mother but Mrs. War- ner would not be detained. "Yes, I can, Kitty Paine, get away even from you because your mother wants you", and she moved on, leaving Catharine isolated. The girl turned re- luctantly. The pride of her mothers voice had become imperious. "Mrs. Allen remembers you, dear", the mother said pulling the two together with manifest affec- tion for each. "Yes", Catharine answered, "I remember Mrs. Allen." If the woman felt the emphasis the girl did not try to keep out of her voice, she gave no sign. Mrs. Paine was in a flutter of anxious de- light. Between the two, Catharine experienced an irritating sense of inadequacy. Mrs. Allen was smil- ing upon her and taking her moral measurements, She excused herself abruptly with the pretext of directing Margie and Walter in the distribution of coffee and cake. That night at the dinner table, when the children had retired for a game of marbles on the back parlor floor, Catharine introduced the subject. "Father, what do you think of Mrs. Allen?" "He bent his eyes furtively, saw its uselessness, yet employed his customary evasion when, in the circle of his family, dealing with certain open knowledge of the street. "She is a very nice lady, isn't she? Doesn't she always conduct herself 72 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE modestly?" "Such part of her bearing as she has fashioned after mother's is ideal. As to what isn't copied from mother, I shall judge when I discover the model. I think she is is a very thin crucible where an experiment in suffusion is in its early stages." "Your talk is too learned to be understood", Mr. Paine scoffed and arose without ceremony. Catharine leaned her elbows on the table. She was fretted with her father's evasion and rebuff. She had not meant to speak other than simply. She knew that he would at any time listen down town with relish to the scandal upon which she had broached. Her mother's blue eyes looked at her from behind her glasses. "I guess the suffusion has resulted in a rich, clear character that it just her own." There was a little of the sharpness of reproof in her words but she went on after a moment very gently. "Catharine," she admonished, "when you know Mrs. Allen as well as I do you will not believe what you seem to now. She is a brave, splendid woman. I don't know what people say. People say anything. I don't know how she and John Allen happened to marry. But they are very happy together and very devoted to each other." "Are they?" Catharine received the statement as a novel turn in the complication. "I wonder," she meditated plucking a large grape from a full bunch and sucking it. Her head drooped thoughtfully. That evening owing to the abrupt departure of a EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 73 recalcitrant servant, Mrs. Allen was washing the dinner dishes and John was placing them on the shelves for her. "Did you know Catharine Paine was home from college?" she asked. "Yes, I stopped in at the skating-rink last night and she was there with Fred. Dandy girl, don't you think?" He spoke with almost a bachelor interest as to a devoted older sister. Mrs. Allen rescued a painted Havelin plate from a pile of blue and white menial dishes. "She has the outward marks of a fine woman but is too un- worthily wise to touch the hem of her mother's garments." "Well, you think Mrs. Paine is too good for this world, anyway. But you get pretty near to her yourself, don't you?" "I let her think so but actually, I worship at a distance, No, leave those. Don't hold that tray in that fashion. Mary has it all over finger marks as it is." "Yes, I see you worshipping anywhere," he grum- bled but obeyed her whistling boyishly as he did so." CHAPTER IV HENRY BURTON turned into Library Hall in anticipation not so much of the fair as of Catharine Paine. He was very tall and erect and the long straight lines of his gar- ments and the gracious ease of his bearing made him to some a reminder of abandoned delights and to others a hint of the inexperienced. In the entrance way he began to pull off his gloves, and looked around, as if for a place where he might check his hat and outdoor coat, then caught sight of Catha- rine's head at the ticket window. Framed by the limits of the square aperture, it was the caricature of her part. Little knobs of glass hung by invisible threads from her ears. A bonnet of tinsel paper adorned with a scraggly black ostrich plume, was tied under her chin by flowing strings of tulle. Her jaws worked with an energy wearisome to observe, over a wad of gum. Expeditiously, with haughty in- difference as to personality, as if her arm worked on hinges at the shoulder and elbow, her hand shoved out the ticket, received the money and dropped it into the cigar box before her. After waiting his turn, Mr. Burton reached the window and present- 74 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 75 ed a dollar. "Change?" she inquired unsmilingly holding to her part. "No," was the magnanimous re- sponse. "Next," she dismissed him, but by that in- visible language which has no symbols of signs or sounds she at the same time, told him to wait till the present influx of people had passed. Then she bent down and smiled. He realized with pleasure that, in spite of large features, she assumed the tawdry without danger of it in the slightest appear- ing as ought but a travesty. "The entire family is inside," she said. "Walter and I have a place under the gallery where he will hide your coat and other encumbrances. He was inquiring for you a moment ago. Mildred is to take my carbuncles and my rooster tail presently and Mr. Allen and I shall be demonstrating for Mrs. War- ner's baking powder. In the recess you and I can overlook the fair and the company. There's Walter. He'll tell you more than I ever dreamed of know- ing." Again she assumed her glassy expression and began the angular action of her arm. "Thank you," Mr. Burton answered as he moved inside. He was thinking, "She and Mr. Allen going to demonstrate!" Catharine was firmly rejecting a Canadian quarter. That Catharine was to co-operate with Mr. Allen in the cooking and serving of waffles and maple syrup was as much a puzzle to her as to Henry. It was to have been Mr. Allen and Mildred who were to sell the baking powder ; then Mildred had been re- legated to the ticket window at the hour, when every 76 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE one who would be likely to come had arrived, and Catharine was to preside at the gasoline range. Both girls were displeased. It was Mrs. Paine who had delivered the message that forced the transfer. Catharine did not remonstrate, but during the re- mainder of the hour at the window, worked out a modification of the arrangements. And when Mil- dred appeared, disgruntled and out of humour, she submitted her revision of the orders from headquar- ters. Taking off her gewgays, Catharine stood very richly gowned, in dark red. She pinned down her hat and began to work on her gloves. "You needn't stay, Mildred," she asserted. We'll give the funds to Mrs. Warner, and Walter can play around out here. If anyone arrives he can put the money in his pocket. That's what I meant to do. It's foolish for you to waste your sweetness on the desert air. Of course, while the caravans go by, it's different. I'll get Fred and v/e four can sell the baking powder and the coffee all together. The two are allied, since there are hot biscuit in one and waffles in the other." "You are a trump, Kitty," Mildred exclaimed. "Is Mrs. Allen afraid John will like me that she wants to be so mean?" "Nonsense!" Catharine dismissed it. However, she resolved that at any rate Mrs. Allen should have no opportunity to be jealous of her. She joined Mr. Burton and as they walked down the hall, he felt her stateliness far more than his own. Her lofty indifference to the plainess of her large featured EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 77 face, and the easy carriage of her tall figure, trans- formed her homeliness into a dignity of personality. Library Hall was Rapid's one public building. It consisted of a gallery, a stage and a flat intervening space; was used for lectures, dramatic performan- ces or dances. In its newness, it was a clean place small and crudely furnished, but withal equal to the entertainments it housed. That day the stage had been made pretty after the standard of church fairs with booths of baby clothes, painted china, embroidered tray cloths and doilies; and in happy substitution for the output of conservatories, the splendid richness of the mountain wild flowers had been strikingly arranged. There had been a lavish use of the more gorgeous and a telling economy of the delicate sorts. "It is artistically done," Henry said fronting it. "Whose work?" Catharine waited soberly. She was desirous of communicating the truth and knew that he would translate the wording of it into a modest evasion. "I executed," she said, "but Margie directed. It's rather in this order of thing that her sister excels," and Catharine turned to the floor. Here were only the farcial displays and sales carried out with admirable zest. Hairpins, electric combs, novel egg beaters, pigs-in-the-clover puzzles, were presented with the customary panto- mine exemplification of merits. In much the same way as at actual fairs, groups passed from one to the other, laughed at the verbal and bodily contor- tions of the actors ; caught the contagion of buying or passed by indifferently, only to return to in- 78 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE crease the size of a crowd already appreciative. Catharine and Henry moved from one end of the room to the other, enjoying it all with a common and exclusive basis of judgment that had been establish- ed between them. Catharine was planning to draw an audience about a worthy and neglected table, when Mrs. Warner flurried up to them, "Kitty Paine, we are so late. Do go right to work or people will get away without eating and people will pay anything to eat when they can have a good laugh free. Isn't it going well? Come right along," and Catharine was pulled away and Henry turned to speak to her mother. It was, in the end, Henry who was installed in the baking powder demonstration. Catharine in an effort to marshal her force and collect the parapher- nalia came upon Fred and Mildred in the boarded up corner at the rear of the stage that in certain emer- gencies served for a "lady's dressing room." They were seated on a dry goods box, and Fred was shak- ing his head. "I'll eat your cakes, but I won't cook them," he asserted, and silently refused to justify his position. "Sometimes, Fred, I think you are the most can- tankerous man," Mildred declared. "Very correctly," he agreed. Catharine arrived in time to overhear the compli- ment and Fred included her in the confidence of his confession. Mildred made room and she took the other end of the box. "He says he'll eat our cakes but he won't cook EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 79 them," Mildred explained. Catharine by refraining from comment always inspired Fred with an impulse to defend his stand in an allegorical way. "Oh, I'll eat anything that's palatable. I'd have eaten the miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes; but I wouldn't have passed the baskets." "You wouldn't have liked to feel the contents dwindle on your hands as stock bought at a pre- mium going down," Catharine began lightly; then flushed and added, "Yet why not take the risks? You take enough in other lines." "Well, well," Mildred mused irreverently, "I think Catharine is about to approach the question of Fred's redemption. To my notion he is a lot more fun as an unsaved sinner, but for the present I sincerely hope that he may be brought to a more accommodating frame of mind. I'll go light the gasoline." Mildred's healthy beauty impressed them both as she stood for a moment tossing her banter, thoughtlessly impervious to any deeper meaning to the moment than the organization of a congenial company for cooking biscuits and waffles. "Mildred is just the same as when we came in on the stage," Catharine said when she was gone. "No," Fred differed. "She is six years nearer thirty." "I won't admit your implication," Catharine maintained. "We are only as old as we feel." "After a certain point, perhaps"; Fred conceded, "but Mildred has not reached it. .You will know 80 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE what I mean when she is thirty." Catharine tacitly yielded her point and they were silent. It was one of the pauses out of which springs life-long wealth or ^poverty /in human relations. Catharine could detect the nature of such moments and stop to take their offering in the busiest hours. The small smutty lamp on the board that served for a toilet table was smoking its chimney; she reach- ed up her daintily clothed arm, gingerly turned down the wick, and waited. "It is I who am the same," he said at last slowly, "you, who have over topped us all. Your charity has broadened to take me in. Before, there was only room for Mildred." "Do you demand a broader charity?" she asked, "or merely a different one?" He bent quickly and the lines of his face were lost in one comprehensive sweep of pain. "Do you know?" he asked in that abruptness with which a close kept suffering once or twice in a life time breaks its bounds, "I was four feet six inches high until I was twenty-two. Even the most kindly men tossed me in sport. Then as if for a taunt at what had been made of me, I grew to this normal small- ness. Do you know what that meant to a boy, to a man?" "I can imagine," she answered, and she dared to look at him. Her glance did not hurt him. "It was a chance for heroism," she condemned him. "Then these extra inches would have been the crowning blessing and not belated justice, ironic emphasis of EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 81 perverted discipline. Most of us are common place mortals. A few have your choice." If her words were cruel, her tone held only forgiving regret that he had missed his great opportunity. "I have thought of that," he answered sweetly, without courage, and then with calm acceptance, "If I had been the hero, Henry Burton never would have known you." "Oh, Fred," she took it without evasion and out of unacknowledged emotions nascent in herself, leapt the far-reaching significance of his loss. "Isn't it another, a bigger chance?" Fred shook his head. "From the beginning it has seemed life was hopeless, that it was too late to try, that I had lost out, before I began to fight." "I wonder if I should feel that way." Some an- swer evidently came from within, and she went on, "But even if I wouldn't I have had such a start." "You'd be the hero," he declared. "But we'll hope I'll never have to be," It was from her vivid comprehension of what heroism de- manded that, as in fright at a premonition, she held her impotent human desire against it. "We'll hope you'll never have to be," he agreed with winning gentleness. "But if I do, Fred, I'll have you," she said, "not that other way," she hastened with the relentless honesty of her nature, "But this way." They had risen and held each other's hands, "I'll have you to give me what I am giving you." "Yes," he said, "if you must carry it, I shall give 82 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE you what you are giving me who have refused the burden of the hero's crown." Mildred was returning along the rear of the stage "Very well, Fred Tyler, it serves you right. We don't need you and you couldn't come if you wanted to. You shan't have Kitty either for consolation in your desolate obstancy." She pulled Catharine away and Fred, standing as they left him, listened to the information she divulged as they went. "Mr. Bur- ton is to cook the waffles. I never thought he would but Mrs. Warner inveigled him into it. He is good fun too. We've got him rigged up and in his white apron and cap, he is even handsomer than in his prince Albert. I'd like mighty well to cut you out, Kitty." Fred shook his slight frame shiveringly. He was tired as he often was after he had put through a tough deal. Hunting his way through boxes, scenery wings pushed back from the stage, papers, d ; scarded flowers, and other debris, he crept down the back entrance and out into the street. In the distribution of parts, it was Henry Burton who worked with Mildred, and John with Catharine. How such an arrangement came about was not clear to any one of those most nearly concerned. Mildred was highly del'ghted and "joshed" and "jollied" Mr. Burton with rollicking heartiness. After a short period of awkward timidity on his part, Catharine established comfortable relations with John. He seemed to her an open-minded unsophisticated youth, and entered into the play with almost childish EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 83 gusto. From across the room, Mrs. Allen watched with beaming approbation inclusive of them both. She was never more absolutely at peace than when, herself unobserved, her real interest ensconced be- hind some busy preoccupation, she followed a friend- ly enjoyment shared by John and some woman younger than herself, the finer the woman, the greater was her content. Contrary to her anticipation, Catharine, when she left the fair that night, found John Allen by her side carrying a table, a mixing pan, and a bunch of tiger lilies. Mrs. Allen was to follow with her mother but she was detained. They had hardly reached the Paine house when Henry and Mildred dropped in to rest their arms. A half hour later the telephone rang and Mrs. Allen said to tell John that she had gone home and he need not hurry. The four young people made a very merry party. When John finally entered his own establishment some minutes after twelve, Mrs. Allen greeted him with the plans for a picnic. Laying out the list for inspection, she read it off. "The Paines and us, the new high school teacher elect, yes, and Henry Bur- ton and Mildred," Mrs. Allen added the last name, the tardiness of its mention receiving explanation by the matter of fact intonation as if it had been taken for granted. "And Fred," she scratched the last two names at the end of the list. "Well, we are the company," she laughed, "let us make out a crowd." CHAPTER V CATHARINE and Henry rode out from the en- trance of the canyon, where the red rocks went up straight and dark, rugged and tree- less. They had of necessity gone single file through the rough irregular road way that had been picked through the bolder strewn opening between the granite walls. Soon as the canyon broadened out he came abreast, and they went together along a smooth gravel path. The canyon stretched back in steep thickly wooded slopes, still wild with the added wildness of dark pines, while the narrow gulches that cut crosswise at diverse angles each suggested an infinite diversity of the unexplored. "Did you ever see a mountain before?" Catha- rine asked with assumed naivete. "The Catskills," he answered . "The Catskills," she scoffed. "All undulation, moderation, blending, outlines lost in abundance of wooded greenness, great swelings of the common place. Here, has worked a force that could not be resisted, that has left scars which can never be effaced. "How you do love your own," he said admiringly. 84 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 85 "You are personal," she accused him, but referred more to the tribute in his eyes than to his words. "Yes, I am personal," he admitted with sudden de- cision. Her whip played with the rose bushes by the way- side. There was a direct simplicity about Henry Burton that kept his thought clear and found for it an unhaulting expression. A furtive glance from Catharine caught a smile of winning assurance that strangely did not offend. There was no coquet- ry in the girl's nature. She was not yearning to be flatteringly wooed but to be loved. Just here, Walter, panting for himself and his supposedly foam-covered steed, cutting the air with his quirt in a fine pretense of lashing his pony, dashed through the rock strewn mouth of the canyon at a truly reckless speed. His slight figure leaned forward in the saddle. "Did you see three Indian Bucks peering from the brink of yon sharp precipice?" His voice rose to the tragedy of the inquiry but the quirt lopped in boorish refusal of being put to dramatic gesticulation. "Three! man, thirty rather," Henry also rose in his saddle and his whip followed the swift straight lift of his hand, with such impressively striking precision, that Walter wondered whether, after all, a quirt was the proper thing to carry in one's right hand when riding. "A band of Red Skins lie hid in the treacherous cavern," Henry's slender raw hide continued to point nowhere. "The women shall be rescued, unless perchance 86 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE I fall into an ambush. " Walter dug his newly ac- quired spurs into the sides of his bronco with a chivalrous enthusiasm that might presently have landed him on a rock by the roadside except that the irritation of the animal worked itself out in a fran- tic gallop. "Now I", Henry remarked, "should have said the woman shall be rescued." "He has abandoned Margie to be scalped, I pre- sume," Catharine answered. "Yes but she has escaped," Henry replied; for Margie, Fred, John, Mildred, and the pretty high school teacher came single file through the pass and then bunched socially around Henry and Catha- rine in the space beyond. Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Paine had also turned back in their carriage. The Indian scout who escorted them was invited down from his saddle to make sure that the plug in the ice cream freezer was snug. After a brief conference as to routes, he was consoled for this degradation from his role by being ordered ba"ck to direct the in- mates of the carriages that followed to, "as they valued their lives," Henry interpolated follow the road to the right beyond the Red Hill. An hour later Fred and Walter deposited the ice cream freezer on a provisional foundation built up by two rocks against the sloping surface of a bowl- der. Mildred and Catharine followed with pillows and a hammock. Fred mopped his face. In the shade of the bowlder and in the pause from their exer- tions, they were fairly chilled, but, "To see the sun EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 87 blistering the rocks opposite will prevent our taking cold", Mildred commented. The carriages and horses had been left far below and the party had climbed up through the pathless canyon, picking a way over the chaotic tumble of earth's hardened de- bris, and avoiding the course which had been picked by the tiny stream that was now lost in innumera- ble ramifications, then gathered to spread its small volume over a width of sharpened ledge, and col- lected below in shallow-seeming, moss-trimmed, rock-lined cisterns. Each one of the climbers at some time inadvertently slipped on a dampened rock, or one treacherously appearing firm but easily tilted, and fell into the water. But the hot July sun made the discomfort of hardly longer duration than the laughter. "Hush", Walter hissed upon a silence with a pene- trating stage whisper. "Do you hear the stealthy tread of hands and feet in the bed of the stream?" John after two awkward efforts regained an as- sured foothold and shook the boy severely, but good- humoredly. "I say we stay here, or consume part of the luggage before we go on", he proposed. He was very boyish standing there, shaking his leg in- side his wet trouser and looking down at the hamper which by a frantic contortion of his arms and body, he had held above the water at the expense of his apparel. Walter was throwing pebbles at him to provoke a renewal of their skirmish. "We can stay here", Catharine asserted. She stood up. "It has been moved and seconded that 88 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE our destination is reached. All in favor." "I. I. I," came up from the toilers who were still far down in the canyon. Whereupon, those around the ice cream freezer began to scramble up the slope behind to a wooded, level place that might be called a miniature plateau or the first landing of a giant stairway. "I volunteer to gather the fuel, if Miss Paine will build the fireplace and make the coffee," John an- nounced. "They don't teach that at Vassar," Mildred ob- jected. "I accept the challenge," Catharine answered. When John brought his hat full of dry cones, he laughed at her kiln, and without apology, went to work to make it over. "Mine would have done quite as well," Catharine pouted, meeting his chil- dishness childishly, as he beamingly called upon her to note the success of his revision of her handiwork. Without noting her words or her tone, he continued enthusiastically to poke cones into the opening under the tin bucket. "Oh, yes, it is done so," he insisted pouring the two gallon bucket full of water and taking the coffee out of the cans by the handfuls. "You always have your way?" Catharine asked yielding her theories of coffee making to his appro- priation of the performance. "It is the way," John argued. "You'll see, it'll be good." And she did see when the time to drink it arrived, that it was supremely good. For the EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 89 present, she turned to assist Fred in the squeezing of lemons. "What a delightful boy John is," she mused. Everyone called him John and Catharine used the given name thoughtlessly. "Well, yes, at a picnic," Fred assented. "Don't you like him?" Catharine queried. "Too many things come his way." "He don't have to bait his hook when he goes fishing?" "No, not even cast his line," Fred added. "Then it must be, he's a bait in himself. Some people are." "He seems to be," Fred admitted. "It isn't envy?" Catharine looked up archly. "No, it isn't envy," when Fred spoke the truth he emphasized it. It was for what followed that he laughed with his sneer. "John disappointed me very sorely at one time. He wounded my delicately discriminating sense of honor." "Oh, you had standards of virtue for John?" "And he did a thing I wouldn't have done myself," Fred stated it as an extreme accusation. "I will even slander my friends, you see." Catharine pressed her palms together over a lemon. The open tenderness of her glance was a solace and a goading pain to the man. "No," she said, "you would not have done what he did." "Kitty! Kitty! Come see," Margie called. Catharine poured some water from the bucket 90 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE over her fingers, wiped them on the tissue paper from around the lemons and obeyed the summons. Under the supervision of Mrs. Warner, the older women had spread a long white cloth almost ban- quet fashion, and arranged the courses easily ac- cessible upon the surrounding rocks. Margie and Henry had fashioned place cards of birch bark, gathered ferns and mariposas, garnished and deco- rated. Catharine stood with Henry while Margie ran to reproduce an effect that had been destroyed by a misplaced rock. "You have made it beautiful, you and Margie. Margie is the talented Paine," she said thoughtfully, "and she will be beautiful." She was feeling with a vague regret for Henry that the woman who could complete his life should be fair and gifted. "She is a charming child" he agreed carelessly. He was not looking at the child. What Catharine saw in his face was not a comprehension of ought that had prompted her words, but it stirred in her a keener desire that he might have had what she could never give him. Late in the afternoon they had climbed a pinnacle height where a lone pine tree seemed to have forced its way up through a crevice and in gaunt isolation, triumphed above the barrenness around. Catharine dropped down with her back against its trunk, smil- ing and struggling for breath, clasped her hands across her knee and looked into the gorge beneath. A little further up a narrowing of the sides and an inward curve, interposed a wall, behind which most EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 91 of the picnicers had departed for a tramp. The mingled notes of their voices were dying into indis- tinctness. Far, far below was the tumble of rocks and the sometimes stream. Here and there a wood- ed spot nestled within a stockade of stone or a sin- gle pine held itself unguarded, and evidently supe- rior to nearby source of nourishment. Margie and Walter were wading in the water adventurously feeling for greater depths. Her mother lay in the hammock and Mrs. Allen, sitting on a carriage seat, leaning on the pillows against the tree in front, read to her or talked. Henry threw himself on the smooth surface of the rock and looked at the sky or at Catharine or at both in the same upward glance. His large white hand broke the dried pine needles between the fingers. From the children and her mother, the girl's eyes shifted to the face below her. At its message she would have turned away; but a persistency in her nature had fostered a habit of restrain before any impulse of timorous withdrawal. "Do you take it in?" she asked steadily. "Do you see how tauntingly wild and strong it all is? How surpassingly beautiful?" "I only see that you are beautiful," he answered. "I beautiful!" Again there was no coquetry in her manner. She accepted the honestly given tri- bute joyously. Yet from another man it would have shamed her as if what she so manifestly lacked were so important that it must be lyingly attributed to her. It was an accepted verity in the Paine house- hold that she was uncomely of person but that the 92 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE fact was of little moment. "Your saying it is like a prayer bought gift of the Gods, better than the thing itself thrown in with the unasked bounty of nature ever could be. Can you locate it? I know where it isn't." "It radiates," he replied solemnly. She smiled down into the canyon. Margie dis- covering a pool, slipped and doused her skirts. Wal- ter was pulling her out hilariously sympathetic at the predicament. Slowly Catharine brought her eyes to rest upon the man, held them there steadfast though there was a tremor in her strong lips that made him draw his breath. Yes, he had expected to be loved. No momentous craving had ever been denied satisfaction. But now, he did not know, yet he might have known, that against the attainment, it was a paltry desire he had cherished. Margie and Walter had come out and dried their clothes in the sun, found four stockings and, after much controversy, got them sorted into pairs. Finally, the two women and the children went up the canyon and out of sight. "We have the whole canyon to ourselves," he said. "Yes," she answered. Her hand lay dormantly responsive in his. "Catharine, you are deliciously terrifying," he felt her hand in his like a great still emotion asking for release and to be appropriated. She drew it away when she spoke. He did not help to relieve her of her burden of feeling. It was the free output seeking only an unbarred avenue of EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 93 escape. She touched him lightly on the shoulder. "Listen Henry!" The music of her voice was a low contralto. "The wind in the pines! It is the first time in my life I have heard it all peaceful neither coming nor going but just at rest making music in the needles. Down in Rapid it rushes ceaselessly out of the prairie on to the mountains, and it has always seemed to me stirs from a bot- tomless pit of unrest gathering into a fierce cry of unused power; till in its highest rage, there is a note of joy in the freedom of wild abandonment. When I was here a child-girl, from somewhere deep- er than I had known, my nature answered it. It must have been my cradle song. I have not my true identity without it." Will you be another Catharine when I take you East?" he asked. "The canyons swallow up the wind," she said. "We have plugged the bottomless pit of unrest with- in me. I have found the stoppage." The look in her face drew the man's arms around her. He strained her close in a vain attempt to surmount the passion in her eyes and voice. She only smoothed back the fair hair from his forehead with her calm, deft hand. CHAPTER VI JOHN came into their living room, sometimes called the library, sometimes the back par- lor, and walked across to Mrs. Allen's desk. It sat open revealing orderly filled pigeon holes. Her pen and pencil lay in a silver tray and in front rested two twin prayer books in modest black leather bindings. He opened the nearest and read on the fly leaf, "John Allen, from The one who loves him best." He realized the truth of the phrase as he turned the leaves of the prayer book through his fingers ner- vously. During the six years of their life together, he had been subject to intermittent attacks of ac- tive devotion to Mrs. Allen when, had the existing relation not precluded it, he would have courted and counted it a blessed attainment to have married her. In the absence of any goal to be reached, any obs- tacle to be overcome, there had been nothing to im- press, to leave as a permanent reminder on his cons- ciousness the development to florescence and the succeeding seed growth of such emotional blossom- ings. Yet they had not altogether lacked lustrous 94 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 95 climaxes. Under the emphasis of external defer- ence toward her and through the medium of her un- failing thought for him, he would perceive her place of eminence in the town, and a winningly boyish pride in her and in his possession of her swelled in- to a manifestation that approached the publicity of acclaim. The harvest of each season of effusive love was an aggravation of the woman's guarded tenderness for him. It frequently followed upon an equally unrecorded enthusiasm for some other woman, when, with a sense of virtuous abnegation he observed the young brides who were being brought back from various localities more or less remote. At present he was "in love" with Mrs. Allen and to his own satisfaction eliminated all des- crepancy of age by feeling that, though young in years, he was old in experience. He turned back the cover of the other prayer book, and seeing that the fly leaf was clean, took up the pen, dipped it in the ink and paused. He was not quick at fitting a sentiment with words, not because his vocabulary was limited but because the sentiment had seldom been submitted to clarifying sincerity. He wrote, "Mrs. Allen, my wife, from John." He had always called her Mrs. Allen. The first time it was the magnanimous assertion, the second an embarrassed question. "Why not just Mrs. Allen?" had been the answer. So they had let it stand. It had come to the public to hold a quaint appropriate- ness; to them, when the moment allowed it, a con- 96 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE notation of the nearest intimacy." John easily thought of her as his wife. In the re-action periods against the trivial qualities of young femininity and its attractions, he observed that she performed the economic and social functions of wifeliness in a highly superior manner. But to grasp the actuality of himself as a husband was a little more difficult. Small stress had been laid upon that side of the re- lation. For some seconds he scrutinized what he had written and not finding it quite adequate, added, "with love," to the last line. Then he walked up and down the room. John had no power of repose. His never mitigated restless activity was at once a cause and a residual throwing off of his commercial timeliness. On occasions of presumable relaxation, Mrs. Allen gave it the appearance of productivity by feeding the machinery of his body with tran- siently renumerative objects of exertion. Now she came down the steps ; and, turning from the large window of the front parlor, he watched her. If she was not altogether graceful, she had an air of the distinguished. There was a matronly heaviness of person, a disciplined firmness of fea- ture, an assured slowness of movement. Her black gown fitted closely but was of yielding stuff, and soft white was around the neck and wrists. She went straight to the desk and John followed. As she lifted first one then the other of the covers, he put his hand on her shoulder. When she turned to hand him the one that contained his name, he drew her to him and they kissed. She laid her EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 97 gloved hand on his coat sleeve. "Boy!" she said. Her fingers tightened on his arm and her voice caught with a struggle. They were to be confirmed at the first confirmation ser- vice in the little stone chapel ; and, after a night of battle, she would offer up the most precious fruit of all her sins. "Do you remember the other time we stood at the altar?" she demanded. He shifted in discomfort from one foot to the other. "I can hardly forget it when you are always with me." "Yet, by it, I should not wish to hold you always. I should always want you, I think, as a mother wants her son. I love you in a thousand ways. I do not desire to think of myself," Mrs. Allen insist- ed. "You don't want a divorce, do you?" he asked jocosely. "No, but for your sake I would sue for one. I bound you. If the time should come I would release you." "Ah," he saw now at thirty that six years ago he was a boy and she had bound him. "Well, may be the match was of your making, but you may be sure, old girl, that I'll stand for it as long as you do." "I don't hold you to that either," she said, "but, John," a foreboding had come not from any specific aberration of affection but from a general manifes- tation of susceptibility. "John," she pleaded, "When you tire of me, it will be because there is 98 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE someone else. Only let it be a worthy woman." He might have told her that the worthy woman would never consider him except for the passing cor- diality of the dance, the dinner party, or the re- ception room. He was only angered, "Well," he ex- claimed, "having made one pre-eminently success- ful choice, if I should make another, I guess I'd have enough sense to be the judge." "Be sure, John, you do not want to be free. I'll never die opportunely," she had played with the no- tion of that greatest of all casualities, and dismissed it. It is he who cares more for his life than for an- other's who builds for the other's welfare on the possibility of his own death. Mrs. Allen would have been ready to die. "The sum of my life's problem will be written. I do not want it to comprise some grievous wrong to you." It must be admitted that, covertly, by the subtle ways of intervention of which the worldy wise wo- man is the most consumate master, she had kept John in unsuspecting tutelage in all his social rela- tions. In the beginning it had been selfishly to hold him. Recently, she had thought there were higher motives. She protected him from the designing. His latest flirtation had taxed her greviously. Safe- ly muffled in far reaching generalizations, she had thrown out her illuminating hints. She had built up a multitude of diversions in other directions. In a fervor of anxiety, not that she might lose him but that he might be appropriated by a scheming woman under her very eyes, she strained the limits EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 99 of her adroit deception, which like other arts at the summit of highest perfection, expresses itself in un- challengeable simplicity and directness. But fortu- nately, John passed quickly from an incensed intima- tion of the recondite purpose behind the manifest openness, to a shamed acknowledgment of benefit de- rived. After modestly worded vows of everlasting soul allegiance, the object of his infatuation preci- pitately deserted him and flaunted a like absorption in someone else. Two months before Mrs. Allen would not have made the offer she now made. It might have received more weighty consideration. The time was apropos to her to give him up when she did not hold him but he clung to her. It voiced no defeat, no grasp on the results of victory. "Why should we be married," she argued. "I could be your housekeeper if we wanted to live together. I am almost fifty. You are only at least a young man. To sever the bond in this way might save us the retribution of pain." It would have taken the maturer genius of a deep- er self probing nature for the man to have compre- hended her meaning. He only saw how laughably unheard-of it would be to divorce a woman and live with her as his housekeeper, and how overwhelm- ingly lonely it would be to live without Mrs. Allen. "Well, if it's really left to me, I'll have you know that when I'll think of marrying is about twenty years after you are in the grave. As for a divorce, I'm surprised that with your high ideas of life, you would seriously entertain such an idea, and just be- 100 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE fore our confirmation." His arm was very strong around her waist. But she did not rest against him. She had never rested. "At thirty, after six years of daily intercourse, you take me to be your wedded wife, or rather fore- go the marriage relation for the privilege of my closer friendship?" she questioned. "Pshaw!" John answered to the last phrase and to the first one, "I guess I do and I think you are the dandiest wife any man ever had." She never forgot the heartiness of the avowal. "Boy! My boy!" she whispered. With his vow between them, they went out together, to their con- firmation service. The day was a wonderful one to the woman. It was the little chapel she had helped to build. On the altar was the cloth she had worked, and before it the lilies she had nourished and arranged. Beside her knelt the boy who had kept pure, unsullied in the moral laxity of the town. In her humility she did not say that she had done it. At least she had not contaminated him. The sweet face of Mrs. Paine smiled up at her in the confidence of devoted friendship. All this was undreamed of when the stage coach brought her into Rapid six years before. The deeper significance of her chance was revealed as each achievement pointed her to a better ambi- tion. By some infallible touch stone of her nature, she had ever emulated and herself attracted such vomen as Mrs. Paine. After the service, as she and John left the church, EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 101 Catharine and her mother preceded them. When they came into the bright warmth of the clear sum- mer air, Mrs. Allen did not see the girl but turned to the woman. The eyes of both were brimming with an intimation of the beatific as they held each other's hands and kissed. Catharine in the mean time shook John's hand pref unctorily and remarked upon the success of the floral decorations. "I can't help it, mamma", she stated apologetical- ly, opening the gate of their own yard, "but the Aliens invariably excite in me malicious curiosity. I am incensed too, that, when I am with her, I can no more keep from being deferential than a Briton could from paying homage to the Prince of Wales." "I think, dear, the analogy does not reach very far. In one case it is a homage to what he could not throw away, in the other to what has been won in spite of calumny." "Calumny!" Catharine repeated vehemently. "Rather well grounded tradition. It's her success that enrages me." "Be not quick to anger," Mrs. Paine quoted. She had a habit of throwing out Biblical phrases which to Catharine, in a state of excitement, unfailingly appeared malapropos and added fuel to her wrath. Frequently she only recognizes "the source by the sacred form of the pronoun or the verb. But upon catching the ear marks, she retired to calm what she candidly condemned in herself as an unreason- ably ruffled temper. CHAPTER VII CATHARINE climbed briskly up the steep slope of Cemetery Hill. Half way to the top she stopped to get strength to go on ; and turned that the wind might blow her hair from her face. She placed one foot firmly behind, leaned for- ward and felt the onward current of air. Henry wondered that she came when there was such a gale and she laughed that he could think that she might be deterred because of it. And he thought he knew it all in knowing that she came to meet him- self. She put her back to the stiff breeze and mount- ed up the last pitch of ascent without a pause; and, arriving precipitately, was almost tilted over the rim of the projecting ridge. She sat down, took off her cap, put its edge securely under her heel, rested her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand and worked it out in regard to Rapid. There it lay below her, the broad metropolitan streets, and the houses, situated at intervals, making scragged fringes on either side. The cotton woods and maples which were uniformly planted in straight rows before the houses, and trimmed to the top in anticipation of a more umbrageous growth, at 102 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 103 present fluttered their little tufts of leafage lustily. Yes, she had come to her decision about Rapid. True, often there were deviations from it, but here alone on her vantage point of observation, guided by her innate sanity, free from the domination of busi- ness maturity, she recurred to her independent con- clusion of the day before. Two nights ago her father brought a "promoter" to dinner and last night there were Kentucky men with money to in- vest whom the promoter had intoxicated with vivid presentation of possible returns from speculation. Their creed had been that wealth was acquired by insight and daring and it left no room for a dis- crimination between insight and credulity. The plausibility of the city laid out on charts became a guarantee of its translation into brick and stone. As if the merit of the architect's drawing could of itself occasion the building of the edifice. "No," Catharine argued, "the temple rises to the need of worshippers, an auspicious site for a mart cannot of itself bring traffic." The second railroad had gone to Deadwood. Deadwood was a horrid town built in a gulch straight up the sides of the moun- tain. But the smelters, the chlorination plants, the stamp mills thrived at Deadwood because the gold was mined in the rocks near at hand. Rapid was very busy borrowing on visionary security to invest in city lots bound round with prairie. But how could there be but one result from all that. Catha- rine did not suspect the collapse of the "boom" any more than, with the blood flowing swift through her 104 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE healthy young body, she could have conceived the blight of disease. By the same well balanced im- agination, she could not entertain the likelihood of a ten foot growth of regetation in a single night. "I don't believe but I shall be here, loving, doubting, she thought "but I shall be here, loving, doubting, working, accepting, planning when all the schemers have deserted for new fields of plunder. And yet would she be here?" She paused there with medita- tive stillness. A few days since her father had re- marked that he'd rather have a daughter marry an honest rancher than a fellow stuffed full of book knowledge who couldn't manage the men with whom he had to deal. With hot face, she had stood up to flee at the end of her retort, "What honest man can hold his own while others who claim to be honest give credence to the insidious disparagements of those they know are scoundrels." "I reckon you'll find out some time it takes more than honesty to support a family," had followed her as she ran fearfully, from what her anger might bring to her lips. In the same terror of herself again she sprang to her feet and began her walk. The wind from behind pressed her on faster than she could possibly go forward by the process of putting one foot before the other. So there was the necessity of holding herself back while she carried herself forward. At the same time her cap was constantly dislodged from her head and thrown over her nose. Taking it off she caught her golf cape in a tight grip, and let the EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 105 wind blow her. The sting of outraged loyality that had brought her to her feet, was carried out on the wind and, delighted she was hurried on to her lover. The mesa stretched out before her for a mile or more; to the casual glance, smooth as a well kept lawn. Cemetery Hill was a long, narrow elevation that protruded into the circle of foot hills surround- ing the town. The descent on all sides was steep and abrupt. Since the burial ground at the end toward which she walked had been abandoned, no one mounted it except for vigorous exercise or the enjoyment of a scenic view of a not very popular sort. Catharine felt a proprietorship in the locality, and with the exception of a few grazing cattle had never yet encountered a trespasser. Henry shared her claims by very natural sufferance. Below her on the right the prairie rolled off, broken only by one lorn tree ; and on her left, except for the railroad, the station, the red water tank, the Park hotel and a few widely scattered living houses, a like barren stretch reached across to the rise where the old stage coach route had been. On this side the valley road follows the base of the plateau and just across where it rounded the futherest end was the School of Mines. Well into the middle of the mesa where the landmarks below were lost to view, it was diffi- cult to be sure where one was coming out. Catharine always walked toward a tall white tomb stone. But she seldom reached it before she ceased to be con- scious of the marble obelisk and saw instead only the swinging form of Henry's tall lithe figure. To-day 106 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE she frequently turned to face the wind and rest, and it was standing thus that she felt him coming, and waited with her back to him as he hastened nearer, till his arm was around her. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she closed her eyes and received the em- brace of the wind and of his arms. Then with her left hand she drew his right from around her and held it as they walked on. His long graceful strides had carried him over the mesa quicker than usual. His arms had seemed the least bit stronger when he touched her. The wind had brought a pink glow to his fair cheeks. It deepened as he looked at Cath- arine with an exhilaration of perfect trust as to how she would receive the question with which presently he must confront her. It was October now and they were to have been married in the early spring. So much a part of his thoughts it had become that, in accepting what must prevent it, the reality of it was still present. For a moment it seemed he would not show her the letter in his vest pocket and then he knew he must. She was smiling in the face of the wind, her flying hair tossed back from around her happy face. The clasp of his hand lent animation but the decisive vigor of her step was her own. Reaching the town- ward descent, they paused. There was a lull in the wind and across the town, behind Hangman's Peak the sinking sun had left the hues of molten metals. She sank down and he seated himself beside her. "Oh! I love it, and you", she pressed his hand against her cheek and held herself aloft. "How can EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 107 a woman deny and trifle with her love. You must know sometime. To conceal would only be to wield the shackles of a secret bondage. I can love, love but I will not be bound." "Catharine ! My wonderful Catharine !" In spite of her words it was the old way of woman in love At his move she leaned against him with the still- ness that is more eloquent than words or caresses. "For all that," he laughed, "you only suffer your- self to be kissed." She drew away and would have arisen, but he de- tained her. The brilliancy behind Hangman's Peak was deepening into darkness. He took the letter from his pocket and laid it open on her knee. She smoothed it carefully and her eyes ran down the first page, her lips parting with satisfaction and pleasure. It was an appreciation of Henry's scholarship as an undergraduate. She turned the page, read it and the next, to the end ; even then did not lift her eyes, but sat gazing across to Hangman's Peak. All that was remaining of the splendor and brightness was a dull glow along the outline of the heavy massive ridge, looming huge and impressive in the dusk. She took it in, it and the meaning of the message before her. It was the offer of four years of foreign study and then a position. It was the vocation to which he was adapted. For success in Rapid, there was re- quired a broad grasp of soulless schemes, a quick wit at detecting and clearing away the snares of petty tricksters which, if ignored, must at some time trip him disastrously. He had not suspected the possi- 108 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE bility of failure, but she had already met it for him and gloried in the inadequacy that made him an easy prey. Now he would never know. This other open- ing was opportune. But Henry was without money and during the years of study could not be encum- bered with a wife. He began to speak tossing out his thoughts as they came. He would gladly throw away his chance but there was his duty to himself, to her, to fix their lives on the highest plain. Four years would pass quickly, no, it was an eternity. He bent to her waiting. One word of protest and the wires would have flashed back a prompt refusal. She sat without a sign comprehending far into the future. For her, the night had descended in the midst of noon day. Rapid was a cage too small for her to exercise her parts. With Henry, and a home of her own, she could have worked out the way, have suffered, perhaps and given of herself to some effect. Four years! It was as long as the college course. For her occupation, only church fairs, card games with Mildred, Fred, and John Allen; gathering flowers and reading fairy stories with Margie ; now and then an aimless pleasure trip. She had not des- pised them as diversions ; but she had the energy for a woman's work and all this incidentally. She had the energy to buy and sell, make a fortune, lose it, and go to work to retrieve the calamity. She could not span the four years. She too had her limitations There was no potion that might put 'the prin- cess to sleep till the prince returned. Henry would EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 109 be growing beyond her. She would have no beauty, no distinctively social charm by which to claim him. It was never through these avenues, her actual bless- ings had come to her. Laying her hand on his arm, she lifted her head, lifted it as if it were a leaden weight. He read the cost of the decision, read it thrilled with its tribute to their love, with a swift flood of wonder and res- ponse, but without inquisitive penetration; as we read the agony of the passing stranger, forced to ap- preciation by the inherent tensity, then go our ways. "Of course you will go", she said, "we have no right deliberately to chose anything except what we think must lead to the highest achievement." She looked at him out of the depth of her woman's thought and he felt he was on holy ground. "Not only for our- selves but for those who might have the right to call us to account for what they are, we must work out our best selves. We shall not love each other in the same way, after four years, but it must be a better love that larger men and women give each other." There was no enthusiasm in her voice. She found no ecstacy in sacrifice. To her, in that brief moment of decision, life had become an inevitable sequence where one must take each step into joy or sorrow without hesitation. "I knew you wouldn't let us off", he answered, see- ing before him the four years of exacting application and at the end the reward of success, his success that was to include them both. He put his arm around her tenderly. She was to share it all. 110 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE Hangman's Peak was a cloud of black against a colorless sky. There was a sitr of air, then a swift rush. She caught him and his gentle- ness brought no commanding peace. "Hear it, Henry," and her low voice was tuned to its wail. "The bonds are broken. It is from the bottomless pit of unrest." CHAPTER VIII FATHER may I come in?" Mr. Paine did not answer but his newspaper dropped to the horizontal and he surveyed the insistent figure of the tall girl standing in the doorway, over the top of his glasses. At this Catharine came forward and stood before him. The newspaper descended to his knees, his eyes to the compass of the glass lens, and he waited plainly on the defensive. In fact Catharine held something the position of an obtrusive creditor whom for reasons justified to himself, Mr. Paine meant to turn away unsatisfied. "Have you decided father?" the girl demanded. Her face and figure were passive and composed but the voice betrayed decided effort of control. The only response was a harassed shifting of the fine clear eyes behind the glass lens. His strength against hers never weakened Catharine, but this persecuted distress tormented her into a sensation of guilt which took outward expression in varied forms. Now she returned the look intensified by the youth of her face. Dropping on her knees, she leaned her head against the arm of his chair. Ill 112 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Can't you see, father?" she pleaded, "I must do something." There was no emotional response. The man hardened his heart. He had been a good father, in times past, shielding his family from want by the most strenuous and self exacting means, till at last his unswerving morality and persistent energy brought them into toil-paid luxury. Then his daughter put aside his offering and demanded an unheard-of thing. "It's always the absurd that you want, Catharine", he complained with the air of overworded indul- gence. If it were music or painting, the sort of thing a girl ought to do, but medicine!" The girl straightened herself, "You know, father, I worked at those because you desired it. But I couldn't throw away my energy and yours on the pretense. Is it my fault I have no talent? It's just because I am a Paine. I might blame you for what I am. But I don't. I am too glad to be a Paine. We've looked up to the stars, off to the hills, 'yearned beyond the sky line,' and all that from the beginning of time. But we haven't paraded our ideals on little squares of canvas. We have just handed them down like heir looms, bound up in the Paine consciousness, from father to son, yes", she said with bitterness, "and to a daughter. It's be- cause I'm a Paine that I will do the thing I can do." "How do you think young Burton will like a pro- fessional wife!" he asked abruptly. Catharine stood inscrutable. "You know, father EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 113 Mr. Burton has gone to Paris." Mr. Paine desired further elucidation but Cath- arine was plainly intrenched behind an impregnable reserve. There seemed to be no immediate demand for continuing the conversation and Mr. Paine made his usual move toward closing it. "You might just as well give it up, Catharine, I will not have it. That settles the matter", and he fortified himself be- hind his paper. "It may settle this father, but I shall think of something else if I can't study medicine", she re- turned his conclusive tone, "I shall teach school, here in Rapid", she threatened. The paper descended again, and Mr. Paine looked at her with the expression of his original greeting renewed. He saw the interview with startling variations endlessly repeated. "Why did I ever send you to college?", he groaned. "Because you couldn't keep me away. Because I won the high school scholarship and you couldn't let your daughter go on charity." "Yes", he answered, "I have always given my children anything they ought to have. But to study medicine isn't what a woman ought to do. I should have the right to decide." "Why?" The deliberateness of that interrogation was as startling an inovation of argument as had ever before burst from her lips to confound and amaze. "Well, I am your father", she was not a Paine if she held slightingly the family bond. 114 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Mamma thinks it is what a woman should do. She is my mother!" "Very well, go to your mother about it." He smiled as might a mediaeval prince with his armed retinue about him while he tells the turbulent peasant to take his right. Catharine flashed back as merciless as himself. "I would," she said, "Only her business manager has appropriated the savings of her life time. I can't study medicine on sympathy." Then with a strange inconsistency, her anger vanished before the pain in the kindly face beneath the soft white hair. At last he spoke gravely. "You are most unkind," he said. "Did I ever refuse you or your mother any- thing because of the money it cost?" Catharine had been invited by Mrs. Warner to dine with some English guests and in response to a hurried whisper had gowned herself as for a func- tion ; and on her return came into her father's room still in her evening attire. Her homeliness was em- phasized by her simple exquisite gown. In the pause, while her mind worked, her hands unfastened the ornaments at her neck and wrists, carelessly laying them on the desk before her. A rebellious questioning restrained her easily aroused contri- tion. Why was it her mother and father saved and worked together during the long years, one not more than the other, and in the end all, even the mother, took each dollar as from her father's bounty, and he gave it as only his. She longed to cry out and accuse him; but he suffered, and her voice pleaded. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 115 "Father, you give me only what you wish me to have. I am hungry for bread and you load me with candies. I crave work, intelligent, womanly work and you give me these." She pushed the gold and jewels away impatiently. "I thought they represent- ed love. They may. I can't say they don't. But it isn't a love that nourishes. It isn't a love I have earned or can hold by any effort of my own. I want the means to command love or," The father did nob discern the gasp of fear in the pause or the salient plunge that engrossed it. "or, as a man does, when he must, achieve and do without it. What are gowns, hats and laces to me? You might as well take the water that could irrigate acres of alfalfa to make a flower garden in a rock on the hill side as to deck me always for social ac- tivities. I could go to medical college on half the money you give me to buy these things." "Very well, you may do it, Catharine on half your present allowance," Mr. Paine interrupted in the tone with which he had often caught up a marvel- ously fine trade out of the confusion of extravagant presentation which, when reduced to literalness, em- bodied unintended concessions. It was not a cun- ning advantage ever but the quick decision of his astute matter of fact mind which, with an uncons- cious irony for other men's digression from the prac- tical, extracted the imaginative excess, so often an instrument of unplanned deception, and turned it against the object of its conception. Catharine stood dazed. 116 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Well, are you satisfied?" The imprecation of the tone was a goad that was to be ever with her. Other women might fail, yield, go home in their diffi- culties but she was bound to work out her life. "Thank you father." The humility of the voice might have been a pleading for a loosening of the thongs. But Mr. Paine had turned resolutely to his paper. "Good-night," she said. The tone was an en- treaty. "Good-night," he answered. It was an imperious dismissal. As she put her hand on the knob to open the door, it trembled. But in the hall to close it the grasp was firm. "To be up against it" but to be young and strong is an exhilaration. The compul- sion she could not escape took hold of her. The door closed swift and noiseless and with a quick sure step she went up the stairs. In her own room, she stood in the dark. There was no tremor but she was dizzy with many emotions. If she could have been altogether like him, it might have been easier ; but to his probing shrewdness was added her mother's brooding passion to be loved and to be right, and worthy of love. Her relation with her father had ever, until now, been the same and this vertiginous pause was portentous in that forever after all was to be different. In the midst of unbridled exertions on the part of her parents she had been brought into the world. With their backs to defeat, they were facing the unknown wildness when she was EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 117 born. Every obstacle to the attainment of each end must be removed, no difficulty must affright be- cause behind was failure, and when failure had scored once, once more and he may possess the vic- tim as a habit. That alertly strenuous period gave place to calmer, more complacent years, but to Catharine was bequeathed its indominable genius. From childhood, novel desires possessed her as the demand of a far-reaching necessity. With her mother she had reigned and had her way. When she was older, she was referred to her father. Each time she assailed him with a fine bravado beneath which lurked a fear she would not own. Each time he was moved with light disdain to dismiss her need by a wave of the hand. Then ever urged on by a whim or by precocious foresight she would persist. At last doused coldly on the red heat of her insistence would come the consent, depleting- ly depriving her of the tonic of enthusiasm, chal- lenging her to the fulfillment of its madest protesta- tions. Each time with a strength that held less of recuperative ardor and more of grim resolve, she had met the challenge. She braced her body against the foot board of her bed. "I will not be bitter. He can't make me." She was not speaking but the flow of thought came as distinctly as the spontaneous expression of the moment-borne orator. "If he loves me, he will have to find another way of demonstrating it than by lay- ing me prostrate and throwing me what I wanted when I stood erect. I'll never go to him in need. 118 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE I'll never let him help, if I am starving body and soul. And my child," every woman says it without thought of man "My child shall go to the work that calls her with all the zest and vitality of its first conception to sustain her. She shall not be maimed for every undertaking, not for a single one." She reached up for a match and lit the gas. Henry's patrician, victorious face smiled at her from the desk. She knelt down and looked at it long and stead- ily as she so often did ; loving, understanding, hault- ing yearningly. It was in his pictured likeness that she began to see her fate. The answer to her love did not penetrate beneath a certain strata of her soul. But, Oh ! he was so brilliantly fair. Her arms encircled the small guilt frame, and her head drop- ped to the desk. She sobbed struggling frantically not to arouse the house. Hearing her mother's step, she sprang up, turned off the light and held her breath. "Why, dear, I thought I saw your light," Mrs. Paine remarked in the doorway. "I just came in," Catharine answered. "Anything the matter?" "No," in the dark the girl still felt the sobs in her throat and waited impatiently. "Goodnight, dear," came the answer solicitously interrogative. "Wait a moment, mamma." She came into control of her vocal organs, scratched a match decisively, and held it to the gas. Standing under it, she look- ed down at her mother who came up to her. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 119 "It is decided, mamma, I am to go," she said. Mrs. Paine put her arms around her clingingly. "I am so glad, Kitty, I knew it would all come right." Catharine gazed over her head at the wall oppo- site with a hard difficult smile. She too might have been glad. How could she think it had not come right? Wasn't it what she had wanted? "Yes," she answered with steeled gentleness. "You needn't worry any more, little mother." Still Mrs. Paine lingered. The girl released her- self. "Good-night. Good-night," she repeated. She was wild to be alone. An hour later, Catharine lay motionless in her bed, hands clasped above her head Two questions chas- ed each other in and out of her troubled thoughts, "Am I right? Can I do it on four hundred dollars a year? She lay so tense she did not hear the door open slowly till a child's voice repeated three times, each time a little louder than before. "Kitty, dearest, are you asleep?" Margie often came thus persevering in her question till she obtain- ed the satisfactory answer. Catharine stretched out her arms, "Margie, and without your slippers again? Quick, love, don't stand in the cold." The little barefoot, white-gowned figure ran for- ward and with much laughter, groped her way under the blankets. "I couldn't go to sleep." the child apologized with entire belief in her own truthfulness, as she put her 120 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE short fat arms around her sister's neck. "Kitty," this youngest Paine volunteered after a moment, "don't give up about the medicine. I know you are right." Catharine laid her head against the little one on her shoulder. "Margie, I am going", she said. "Oh, Kitty," and the little arms tightened, "there won't be anybody to let me do what I want to when I want to do it, but I am glad you are going just the same", she ended with childish unction. "I will come back before you are a woman, and what you do at all you shall do in the first enthu- siasm of wanting it." "Yes," replied the irrelevant Margie, "and I'll have my party before you go?" Catharine laughed happily. The spell of her father's imprecation was broken "It shall be to- morrow," Catharine declared and both fell peace- fully asleep. When the door had closed behind his daughter, Mr. Paine methodically wiped his glasses with his handkerchief, and brushed it across his eyes. He took up first the gold band, then the necklace with its sparkling pendant. There was a large diamond in the center set around with rubies. He held them in front of the light with troubled scrutiny. Catha- rine seemed pleased when he brought them to her a year before. Then he dropped each in a little drawer and locked it thinking much after the fashion of King Lear when he sent Cordelia away. He had hoped much from Catharine and she had failed him. CHAPTER IX CATHARINE sat on Mrs. Warner's front steps. She had rung the bell and leisurely awaited an admittance. Frequently in a morning rush, Mrs. Warner did not answer a ring at the door; but, when sufficient interval had clasped, she would stealthily appear behind the lace covered glass, inspect the receding figure and if desirable call her back with apologies. Those who were per- mitted to continue their ways criticised Mrs. War- ner. Catharine was not one of these and was in- clined to leniency. She found it convenient to adapt herself to the excentricities of her friends and to cherish no rancor in respect to habits clearly subservient to necessary domestic arrangements. She was far from impatient there, with her back to the door, her face to the hills. She could almost think such a morning had come to nourish back the vitality of her hopes. There was always balm for the little tragedy of heart sickness with which she set forth on each new venture. To-day it was In- dian summer and there was a forest fire far up in the hills. A blue haze hung from the sky to the earth. The stir of air was at once soft, tender with 121 122 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE warmth, and penetrating. It was as if a breeze from some distant southern sea, had fought its way to this northern inland spot, and lingered here be- fore it died, in its last moments full of the gentle- ness brought from its sunny beach, yet full too in the peacefulness of its ending with the thrill for the onward move that had grown into it during its long journey over mountain and desert. Catharine let her light coat down from her shoulders and dreamily thought that through years of such days, Henry might have been reared into the beauty of his harmonious manhood. There was no langour in the air, only rest, still breathing the vigor of forgotten tempests. All the rugged lines of the mountains were softened. She leaned back against the newell post with closed eyes. "Henry, Henry," and in the benevolent fanning of her cheeks, it seemed he must be near, yet it is only in the seeming that we answer nature, from within sprang the presage of the fury of the blast. In a fierce sweep of rebellion, she knew that he would never come back to her with his gift of peace. She was staring blankly before her, when Fred Tyler crossed the street, and slip- ping her shoulders into her coat, she went down to the gate to hail him. He saw her and stopped. "I am going, Fred," she said. "Yes, I knew you would." Oh, Fred, you say just enough and say it in the right way. I am frantic over ought and oughtn't. I must go as you must go to the court house to-day, sooner or later." EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 123 "Yes, you must," he answered. Her face thanked him for all he did not say. "It has done me a world of good to tell you." He went on his way and Catharine turned back. "Kitty Paine," Mrs. Warner welcomed her from the very edge of the piazza, "last night you were entrancing." Catharine pulled her down on the steps. "Not so bad as that," she answered. "It is too beautiful to go in. How can a forest fire burn so long and there be anything left." She fixed her hand securely in the strap of Mrs. Warner's long sleeved, brown gingham apron. "I won't keep you long but you shall stay a moment." "Everything is put away and a lunch of leavings set aside," Mrs. Warner assured her. "I am going," Catharine announced. "Kitty Paine," Mrs. Warner wailed, "I knew you would and you never will marry." "Oh, yes, I shall. It has nothing to do with marry- ing," Catharine's mood had become logical. "Your father has no business to let you. It's a miserable shame." Catharine put her arm around her shoulder. "You'll see," she laughed. "There's Mildred left to tell and I must go home and burn letters and pack. I leave to-morrow night and make a party for Margie this afternoon. "Teased your father into it, and won't give him time to reconsider." "He won't reconsider because he never considered. 124 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE He just decided." "There's the grocery man." Mrs. Warner sur- reptitiously unbottoned the back strap of her apron on both sides, and escaped. "I'll phone for Mildred while I'm in. She's huffy because I didn't have her last night, and I want to bring you both some ice." Mildred came across the street in her dressing sack. It was Saturday and she had been washing out handkerchiefs. "You are the luckiest was her comment upon receiving the information, "But you aren't the only one this time." "I'm glad. Aren't you going to tell me?" "Of course, I'm to be John's typewriter, private secretary, general utility woman about the office. I don't think Mrs. Allen likes it but I don't care. She's kept John in leading strings about long enough. I made him give his word before she got wind of it, or by some mischance it would have fallen through." "Mildred," Catharine observed her unpreturbed face seriously, "if you didn't talk so much I'd think you had designs." "I've designs to get out of teaching," Mildred answered. "It seems to me, I'd rather teach," Catharine de- murred. "It's very well to say that when you haven't ever taught," Mildred retorted. "I am hardly in a position to express a prefer- ence," Catharine fairly admitted to herself as well as to Mildred. BOOK THREE CHAPTER I MRS. ALLEN steadily poured another cup of coffee. There had been the faintest assertive- ness in John's manner of telling her. It was puzzling together with the heightening background of silence that preceded it. Till now she had read him as an open book and he had never felt her turn the leaves, indeed, had turned them for her. A script of coniusing cipher would have pleased her, as a token of more mature development; instead there was only a furtive covering of the pages. "How did it happen you didn't mention it be- fore?" She also was ostensibly an open book, and if there was an indelible writing between the lines, he had not suspected it nor, by chance, happened upon any psychic chemical to bring it to his mental vision. "Why should I mention it?" His eyes challenged although her attitude held no hint of acquisation. "Interesting conversation, good matter for table talk." She lightly ignored his tone, which chafed at some intangible bondage. "Must a man discuss all his business with his 127 128 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE wife?" He became awkwardly jocose. "Not his business but that of his next door neigh- bor. From the standpoint of Mildred, it was news that with variations would have given matter for conjecture through two meals." She thus dismissed the verbal obstructions to communication by which they had been confusing each other with an ease that relieved and harrassed him. "Try to catch a load of wood on the street, John," she requested as he pushed back his chair from the breakfast table. When she returned from an errand to the kit- chen, he was in the hallway, righting his coat on his shoulders and his hat in his hand. "Good-bye," she said moving a step into the hall from the dining room." "Good-bye," he answered hurriedly sweeping out the front door. She stood with her hands holding the draperies of the arch between the two rooms. It was not that Mildred was to be his office companion. It was the unwonted taciturnity that surrounded the arrange- ment, and to cap it the omitted kiss that held her in perplexity. Business reticence between them was ridiculous. He had worked out every undertaking orally under the inspiration of her presence. She had anticipated each success and been the first with congratulations. With guarded depreciations she had inhibited too extravagant projects or with quick pertinent modification had brought the sanely plan- ned to logical acumination. All happy results she EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 129 applauded as due entirely to his judgment. Now like an anxious parent, self exacting, clear of vision "It was not his fault if he had intended to deceive," she told herself. "It was not his nature." At noon the kiss which had been omitted was bestowed with reassuring gusto, and there were truculent criticisms of Mildred's inefficiency. These Mrs. Allen molli- fyingly reconstructed for a future mood. After that, three years passed by in the lives of John and Mrs. Allen uneventfully calm. Three years is a short time in a town which is dead especially to those whose life has become rou- tine. It was in the three years after Catharine's departure and Mildred's change of vocation that the collapse of the boom which had in reality begun be- fore Catharine's return from Vassar, gradually forced a recognition upon the little settlement left in the wake of the passing Westward sweep of popula- tion as the debris of a glacier is left to mark the course from which it has receded. There was no- thing to hold an undue number of people in Rapid so when the influx, which during the rush had been balanced by the efflux ceased, there was remaining a very small residuum. Except for fires and deaths Rapid became stationary. Advantages, however, accrued from this curtailment of growth. From hurrying so sanguinely on the town began to look back. It developed traditions, grounded in a newly realized past. As John Allen and Mr. Paine stood out more and more staunchly retarding the retreat of prosperity, their prominence was augmented by 130 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE association with this plenteous past which was a? much further away in men's minds than the few in- tervening years, as the debauch of the night is more distant from the heaviness of morning than the hours between. What John and Mr. Paine were to the town finan- cially, Mrs. Paine and Mrs. Allen were to it socially. The two women transformed in themselves the ef- fusive gusto which was the concomitant of the boom's credulity, into a dignity of moderate hope- fulness. They were at once the conservative res- traint and the definite impetus in every enterprise. Mrs. Allen was the stronger, positive figure. But, however, she piloted Rapid's public opinion, Mrs. Paine's instinct was the cloud veiled polar star she was ever striving to discern as the director of her course. Mrs. Paine approvingly noted the right and pleasant ways they went and never suspected that she had beckoned to the watchful one at the wheel. Mildred also occupied a place whose permanency was well founded in the past. By virtue of being a part of Rapid almost from the beginning, her do- ings were followed with kindly, over solicitous closeness. Her democratic geniality, assuaged all criticism of her indiscretions. As a teacher she had sailed under flaunting flags of youth mandatory of indulgence. But at the period of business associa- tion with John Allen, she began to draw them in. Rapid had looked askance at the arrangement, only to be surprised into unequivocal commendation of EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 131 Mildred. Her smile and laughter was no less indis- criminately cordial, but her ways became circum- spect. She did not lunch with John at the Harney on busy days, she did not walk with him to and from the office, there were a thousand conspicuous, innocent things she did not do that she might have done. Three years went smoothly by and sceptical prognostications dispersed into attenuated protest against the unfaltered opportunities. Mrs. Allen from the first experienced a strangely trammeled, sinuous course of meditation. As the town, she recognized that the relation of John and Mildred was exemplarily that of the employer and the employee of equally balanced intelligence and of different sexes. Yet more and more often till they became well nigh chronic John presented torment- ingly insolvable moods, which instinctively she as- sociated with Mildred. When she attacked the problem, her mind worked in a circle of revolving questioning and she discovered no cue to ferret out the source of the inexplicable in John, and the fear in herself. The fear was of phantom indistinctness and defied analysis. It was during the early part of the fourth year of the present chapter that her bewilderment was dispelled for a few weeks, only to gather befogging density. There was enacted a little comedy, John became occupied with one of his innocuous love affairs. That is it was innocuous so far as it in- volved John and Mrs. Allen. An inconceivably large number of women had been, in turn, the re- 132 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE ceptacle for his short lived amatory ebullition, each to be deserted to a serred sense of bereavement. He was one of the lovable people who have a genius for transient, abandonment to a devotion which passes to leave the victim trapped in the misery of the permanent response it has elicited. Mrs. Allen had given little thought to the women he had hurt. They had on the whole been inferior creatures not worthy to be more than contributors to John's temporary diversion. In the most highly moral sense he was unquestionably honorable, peculiarly unimpeachable. The time came when Mrs. Allen admitted a certain poetic justice in that the fruit of the seeds of pain he sowed was loyalty to him and rancor for her. She was actually to each suc- cessive sufferer the obstacle to the happy consuma- tion. In several instances her subtle supervision of his affections was as evident to the woman as it was hidden from John. She welcomed and over-worked this last of his oddly open, non-resultant infatua- tions. She took refuge in it. John's step lost some of its restless hurry, the old directness returned to his glance. She praised the girl's dimpled hands and dimpled cheeks. She let him find them sewing together when he came to dinner, made her the fourth hand at cards and sent him for her. It was not wily premeditation. Every man's method in smoothing his own way of daily existence becomes fixed. Mrs. Allen merely drifted into excess. Then, as if an enemy had stolen the weapon she had discarded, John would have no more to do with the EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 133 girl she still petted. Her dimples were inane. Her simpering voice bored him. He didn't like to oe run after. He bowed to her from the hall with the air of business preoccupation. He was feeimg very mature just then. The girl was only eighteen. In the events that followed she was one of the few, who took Mrs. Allen's part. CHAPTER II 1 w OHN ALLEN", Mildred slipped her hand away. There was no high indignation. *-^ She tentatively awaited his next move. "Why not?" he laughed. "Mrs. Allen will scent it and I'll lose my job", her voice slightly derided him. "Do you think Mrs. Allen controls me?" The blood mounted to his cheecks. "Well she is your wife. We aren't any of us con- verts to Mormanism as yet." She leaned back against the window casement; and, standing in her white shirt waist, and dark skirt, her figure large and full, her poise straight and vigorous, she was what is nominated a fine looking woman. She stretched her arm along the bar of the window frame and surveyed him with enticing indifference. Fascinatingly she held him off. Rolling down the top of his desk, he let it fall with a click and a thud. She remained pleasantly unsmiling till he had got his hat and coat, then while he delayed with nothing to do but clink the change in his trouser pockets and watch her, she took her own hat from a hook behind the door and reached up her arms to 124 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 135 fasten the pins in place. She was very deliberate. As a final concession on her part they went out into the street together. That evening at dinner his restlessness pervaded the room as distractingly as the scurrying antics of a cat eluding capture. He was always a careless server and to-night slashed down into the veal roast and hacked around the protruding bone. "John, I can't endure it one night longer. There is no getting a smooth slice of cold meat for lunch. I am going to teach you to carve with propriety.." Accordingly, Mrs. Allen got up and started around the table ; but he shoved the platter across to her in lowering silence, drew the plate he had served near- er to him and began to eat. She had expected a bantering remonstrance and a jocular fretted ridi- cule of her way of doing it. Still the act was in conformity with the mood that was becoming so distressingly familiar. Bursts of petulance quite out of proportion to the source of irritation were of frequent occurance ; and, though ever weighed down by a sense of vicarious accountability, she had with- out fail maintained an attitude of unruffled cheerful- ness. The nervous expenditure that might easily have been flung into exacerbation, she controlled to be used in devising relief rather than aliment for his asperity. But each repetition of the effort of restraint left her less equipped for the next. Pushing back the platter and straightening the gravy bowl which had been dislocated at its side, she said with gentleness, "We need not be rude about 136 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE it. It does not matter to that extent," and went back to her place. "So I am also to be instructed in manners!" he fumed, and continued to eat unheeding the empty plate before him and the unspoken apology of her patient serenity. "What is the matter, John? You must admit." She threw off the pretense of easy dismissal of the latent discord and with subdued pain begged for elu- cidation of the trouble. "Oh, Lord, yes", he broke in. I admit anything but I am weary of being pecked at." Since John was obdurate, and she knew the falacy of attempting to put out a fire by contributing fuel or to lower the tone of a mandoline by tightening the cords that are struck, she went over and served a plate for herself very daintily. When she took her seat John, with a feeling of being wronged, no- ticed how old she looked. Only by a distortion she kept her face calm. The lips were set in drawn lines, that deepened into the last preceeding hurt she had pressed behind them. There was a sudden convulsive twitch. John lowered his eyes in the impatient indignation of the man who never strikes a blow yet encounters the shrinking fear of a child. "Am I so fault finding?" she asked pleading for the enlightenment of an accusation. "Heavens, drop it!" he retorted pushing back his plate. He was ready for the next course and she touched the bell. While she was transfering the chocolate custard EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 137 from the cut glass bowl into the small white dishes a few of the much used expedients for amusing John passed through her mind. She might telephone up a chafing dish, or a card, or a bowling party, but she was abashed and balked at the new note in his un- rest, a weariness of her presence. For that there had been innumerable preventatives but she had no remedy. She was driven to the wall and from the hard pressing closeness of it, looked at him with probing appeal. He evaded in the preoccupation of consuming the custard. After all the contact of sound masonry is not a bad support for developing rigidity of position. Against his obstancy, she set herself the hard part to wait and see. She chained herself against the wall. When they left the dinner table, she turned on the electric light in the middle of the library table that was in the back parlor; placed two chairs so that a person sitting in either was equally access- ible to its rays; then settled herself with a recent novel. John, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, walked aimlessly back and forth through the rooms with long strides. Mrs. Allen read to the bottom of the page and was about to turn the leaf, when with a grimly pathetic amusement, it occured to her that it would be equally profitable to begin again at the top of the one she had just completed. After a while he came and sat down in the chair that invited him. One hand still in his pocket the other reached for the Omaha Bee. She made some comments on the political situation, and he answer- 138 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE ed in monosyllables without looking up from the paper. Her book lay open for a few moments in her lap. Having once more reached the bottom of the page, she methodically marked her place, and producing a thin waist from her work basket began to make button holes. She had no sooner readjust- ed herself than John threw the Bee on the table and stretched out his legs. She glanced at him then quickly back at her work. All the boyish innocence had gone out of his eyes. They observed her as if he had done some ignoble thing and facing her did not care. But he had not. In all that the world's moral code calls sin, he was as guiltless as when she married him. She bent miserable over her work. He got up and went to her desk rummaging in the pigeon holes till he found note paper and en- velopes to fit. Evenly her stitches followed each other, and the line of overcasting crept out along the narrow slit. But she was conscious of each halt of his pen and the mental or volitional hesitation it punctuated. When in hurried eagerness, the lines of ink were left behind the scratching of steel, the beating of her heart was stilled as if he wrote with the blood of it. He was conscious of her conscious- ness of him. She was across the room and his body was between her and his writing. Yet when he blotted, he held the blue pad down with a relief as if she sat within that questionable range where one might see but could not be suspected of doing so. Hastily directing the envelope, he put it in his pocket and arose. She bent over and threw up a EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 139 window. "I am stifling," she gasped. He looked at her strangely, coldly. It had been one of her regrets that even at the times of most harmonious felicity, an evening alone palled upon them. She had never fagged before the the uninterrupted doing but often yearned for the conscious communication that comes only in the pause. They had not shrank from it until now. They would have welcomed it. Had her zest for his daily hourly contentment been less efficient, out of some necessity to fill the passing moments, a deeper hunger might have been borne and satisfied. They might have developed some finer medium of inter- course than the primitive ones to which they were confined. They had never found each other in a common uplift at a peal of music, a swift glance of comprehension at the motive of the artist, poet or painter or hardly in appreciation at a delicate turn of phrasing that brings its nascent meaning into words as old as the race. If her love had soared to the exaltation of the maternal passion, his had been the childish content of being satisfied in petty, daily demands. She saw it now that it was too late. It was only nine o'clock. They might even yet pay a call. "No, no," she accused the habit, "I have always saved us from ourselves. We must know what is there." Resolutely she returned to her work, and the fine close stitches followed each other with unerring regularity. He picked up one of the new magazines and by turning the pages read the headings of the stories and articles even continued 140 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE the cursory perusal half way through the advertis- ing supplement, then abruptly tossed it on top of the Bee, making a disorder on the table. Impelled by no decision, but driven aimlessly by a little higher surge of unrest, he sprang up and left the house, CHAPTER III HE went to the office and fumbled about. He was not wrestling with his perplexity but was tossed by it. He was not endeavoring to solve a problem by any principle of mo- rality. He had not formulated any proposition; was merely looking for an advantageous way out, of what he hardly knew. It was the business method. When the worth of his valley property became dependent upon the priority of irrigation rights, it was not to delve for an underlying legal or economic equity that he set the lawyers to work but to lay hold of some short sighted act of legis- lation which might be interpreted so as to establish claims by which he would be able to gain the neces- sary advantage over Mr. Faine; not that he cherish- ed any emulative animosity toward Mr. Paine but that by the coincidence of common forethought, it happened to be his profit that conflicted with his own. Mr. Paine maintained that there was enough water for everyone and that future legislation should be in the direction of more careful destri- bution and less lavishly wasteful use, rather than further complication of already contradictory res- 141 142 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE trictions. John candidly endorsed this view, as far as the ultimate solution of the difficulties went but for his own part, intended to provide for the pos- sible contingency of scarcity in the meantime. With a slight effort at wire pulling during the present legislative session, he was confident that this could be accomplished. Therefore a day or so previous he had told Mrs. Allen that he was to be called to Pierre on business. She had responded to his vague- ly indefinite statement that she hoped the irrigation matter could be arranged without detriment to their own or Mr. Paine's interest, and he had responded that he guessed Mose Paine could look out for him- self but that he, John, was not suing for a compro- mise. He was pleased at the prospect of being pit- ted against such a worthy competitor. Mildred had no knowledge of his contemplated departure. The following day she watched him non- chalantly to all appearances. It was not her inten- tion to be used for his amusement and cast aside. She had always liked John but had observed him so long with unbiased closeness before the slightest thought of actual eligibility had entered into her considerations that her vision was never obstructed by any obfuscating devotion. Mildred also ordered her ways on business methods. The objective point opened to her only along the line of petty impedi- ments cleared away by petty ruthless maneuvers. The early part of the afternoon, she passed swiftly from one task to another. Her gift for turning off work was unusual, later in the lull when no one EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 143 came, her fingers tapped the type-writer in dislu- tory fashion. She was ready for the sequel to the episode of the day before. But John was exactly where her mild repulse had left him. It was the point beyond which he had never gone very far. He had no far reaching desire. It was an immediate one, but more poignant than any of like nature he had ever experienced. The positive prohibition she imposed upon him worked the accumulative effect of a fine restraint. All day it had kept in his pocket the letter he addressed to her, and augmented the emotion that produced it. When he went for his hat, she rolled out one sheet of paper and rolled in another; and, while he loitered restively, hunting a misplaced glove, unlocking his desk and searching for an unnecessary pencil, standing with his hat in hand delaying for no reason whatever, she smiled up at him and complacently back at her machine. The yielding intimacy of the smile satisfied and the comfortable return to her work piqued. He wheel- ed and left her. She turned out the unfinished let- ter, tore it twice across and sat with pursed lips. "Very well, John Allen," she soloquized. That night she played whist with Dr. Gillette and Mr. and Mrs. Warner; and by chance Mrs. Warner communicated the fact to John over the telephone. The unaccountable aversion of the Paines and Aliens had not shut Dr. Gillette out of such convivialities as he deigned to adorn with his swagger. Recently it was explained by the adherents of the reverend Warner's policy of meeting the sinner half way, 144 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE and in the end affecting a compromise between pas- toral sanctity and satanic ardor, that Dr. Gillette was under the special ministration of the Warner's social patronage as the opening of an avenue of ap- proach for the eventual betterment of his soul's welfare. He was very much at home with the War- ners as was Mildred. On this occasion by the ar- rangement for two exclusively pleasure seeking af- ternoons together, following fast on each other at the earliest possible dates, there was organized one of those temporary groups which in a small commu- nity invariably attract observation and comment. The next day was Sunday and after church, they went off with lunch baskets. Monday on Mildred's return from the noon meal, John noted that she wore her plumed hat and otter collar. It was a sun warmed winter's day as the one before had been, and she stated without an intimation of the em- ployee's deference that she would leave the office at three and told him in order that he might take the proper precautions in case he went out. "A woman's club?" he asked depreciatorily. She shook Iher head. When the hour arrived and she went down the stairs, he looked from the window in time to see Dr. Gillette assist her into the front of a double carriage and to see Mrs. Warner wave to him from the back seat. An unreasoning fury possessed him. Conceit and jealousy can at any time consider them- selves deceived. He was cognizant of all the tacit concessions with which she had led him on but the flattering significance of this deliberate display of EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 145 other sources of enjoyment, eluded him. Before he locked up, he took the letter, now two days old, from his pocket and tore it into shreds. After all it was a noncommittal epistle. At dinner Mrs. Allen's wrinkles touched him with contrition. When they went into the library, he pulled her down on the arm of the great leather covered chair. He occupied its body. "Dear old girl," he said and laid his face against her sleeve. She put her arm around his neck. The dry sob was in her throat, an ocean of tears that would never be shed behind the blank stare of her wide open eyes. They sat thus and he took her hand and put it against his face. All the years of her unswerving devotion were borne in upon him and also the mean- ing if it had not been waiting for him that night. He did not word the humility of his gratitude into admission but to fill the moment with preciousness for her, it was there. "Boy, my boy," she whispered and he laughed contentedly. "John, I have thought I would go East with Mrs. Paine for a few months." "Are you tired? Do you want to go?" The face against her shoulder lay still, questioningly. "I think it is best," she answered. "Why not go with me to Pierre?" he suggested. She stroked his large hand with her own. Yes, he wished it. Some joyous change had been wrought. But she could not accept the future on the face value of the present. "No, it would be 146 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE good," she reasoned, "for him to be in Pierre alone, to be unimcumbered by her presence." Without its reminder, he was a care free, precocious boy to all who met him. Mrs. Allen treasured the first letter that came from Pierre, just an open boyish, boastful letter. The next message was on a postal card, a brief catagorical statement of address, health, and cli- mat'.c conditions. In the meantime he had received business in- formation from Mildred and a post script added, "Do settle Mr. Paine before the full moon comes again and return to your duties in Rapid. It is dull play pretending to enjoy the world with Doc." CHAPTER IV ON John's return from Pierre, he went direct to the office. There was nothing impera- tive to take him there rather than home and there assuredly was no premeditation in what re- sulted. Tossing his grip into the express wagon, he joined a travelling companion. During his absence the station had been moved from the situation of its expectant isolation to a block below Main street in real nearness to the business part of the town. "A darned convenience to cut out that mile and a half bus ride," John remarked. "Where it should have been to start with." Mr. Millard perforce nodded but with some reserve. He had fallen from the proprietorship of an elaborate real estate company to the position of book-keeper in another man's wholesale .grocery establishment. To reduce his former prominence to the significance of a particle of the extenuated common place out of which the promoters blew the bubble of the boom, was to extract from his self esteem the element of temporary adversity with which he excused the present source of his liveli- hood. To John the relegation of Rapid to small 147 148 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE town mediocrity evinced the sagacity of his predict- ions. They argued the subject mildly the three blocks of their walk together. Mr. Millard conser- vatively regarded the change premature, and John smiled with compassion. "So long," he said with that careless motion toward his hat and turned into the steps which led to his office. He had been away the months of March and April. Mildred was seated at the desk when he en- tered, and at the sight of her back, he knew why he had come immediately to the office. She wore a silk waist of blue and white. Her heavy hair was piled smoothly in familiar coils. There was a straight trim shapeliness about her back. She turn- ed her head and sprang up, crying delightedly, "John!" It was the moment that each woman's physical expression of herself must attain in its own way the beauty of completeness. Mildred's was a sudden glowing fullness of life. The careless exuberance reached a dignity after its own kind. It was an expansion that could not be resisted. It radiated the culminating of spontaneous blossom- ing. She was almost as tall as John, every feature rounded and distinct. The entire face, the brown eyes, the regular mouth, the cheeks that dimpled faintly, smiled welcomingly without restraint. Her rich color deepened. She did not move. She was not designing. She was laying no snare to entrap. She was being herself. He, too, only answered the foremost call of his nature at the moment, closed EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 149 the door; and what then occured is evident. What succeeded is not so outside condemnation. "What do you mean John Allen?" she exacted. If her composure had been lost, it was quickly re- covered. John was still flushed, and found it diffcult to con- trol his voice. "What does any man mean?" he re- plied huskily. "Well, yes, what does any man mean?" she de- manded. His eyes lowered then lifted. The manliness that Mrs. Allen loved straightened the droop of his shoulders. "I'll tell Mrs. Allen. She will get a divorce and then I shall ask you to marry me." "You'll tell her that you are going to marry, to marry me?" Mildred smiled only with her lips this time. "Yes," John maintained against the smile. Mildred laughed outright and took up her pen as if to revert to her figures. "I don't know how she'd do it, John; and very probably you would never know either but it would never come off." "I'd have to tell her to get the divorce," he ans- wered. "Yes, but not that you are going to marry, to marry me. I am sure I don't know why, but she never has liked me." At the assertion previously unnoted episodes far back in his life with Mrs. Allen convinced him that Mildred was right. He twirled his watch fob. Her voice was guarded, alluring. "I love you, 150 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE John, and it's so dirierent with you and Mrs. Allen from other married people that I don't know why I haven't the right to. I couldn't care for anyone else. I never really have. I know it wouldn't be your way to fool with a girl ; but Mrs. Allen mana- ges so that you have seemed to." She was drawing little circles on the sheet of paper and hesitated at the critical point of completing a square of them. In the pause there recurred to him circumstances in his relations with other women that did show up Mrs. Allen as Mildred hinted she should be seen. "I am a poor girl," she went on winningly, "You know I send money home. I can't let myself be talked about." "You'll marry me when I get the divorce?" John had not escaped all the gambling ventures, in min- ing stock and city boulevards, to stake, here entirely without security. "You won't get it. You'll give Mrs. Allen a cue and quick as a whistle she will know the rest, and I'll be done for. Oh John, " she seemed to yield before his darkening face. He took the seat next to the desk and she relinquished the pen for him to hold her hand. Her nearness was the one thing in the world that counted and yet he was angered. "John," she soothed, "I do trust you but I am all alone and Mrs. Allen is so keen and well " She suddenly drew away her hand and took up the pen. Someone was on the stairs. John assumed the business air more quickly than she had thought him capable of doing. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 151 When he went home for lunch, Mrs. Allen, open ai med, came down the walk to meet him ; and at the touch of his prefunctorily kiss, shrank with that groopirg timidity with which the finer nature meets the repulse of a cruder loved one. In that sharpest of all lonelinesses by the side of the one most dearly cared for, she walked back to the porch. He was bruskly hurried and while they waited for the maid to set forth the meal, he told her none of the details of the trip, the rehearsal of which so often made the occasion of his return from somewhere a bright one for them both, but instead he paced the length of the parlors, about every third turn looked at his watch and snapped it shut. The papers had given her the facts which stood for his success in Pierre. An old law buttressed by a new one would protect his lower valley farms from the encroachments, upon the water supply, of the upper valley land and of the Great Ditch contemplated for ranches on the divide. Never did she realize more than to-day the ability of the man who was such a boy to her. He gave her no opportunity for applause, and she did not force it upon him. Lunch was twenty minutes of impatience to be off. She made no effort to detain him. She was ex- hausted in another struggle and had no force for this one. During his absence, her past had come back to harass her, in no external way ; in all that, ten years before in Dr. Gillette's office, she vowed to achieve she was secure. She had not lied. She had not concealed, she had kept silent and disowned the 152 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE past with the daily contradiction of the present. Then, because there was no more to attain from recognition, because she could not lose herself in the contest to establish her place among her fellows, all that had been hatefully, acutely repugnant re- turned to possess her, tauntingly claimed her, lived again accentuated against the contrast of the last ten years. She had never shuddered at the trans- piring experience, but she shuddered at the memory that perpetuated it. That evening Mrs. Paine sat with her on the piazza. The trees were budded, the blades of grass were freshly tipped with green and yellow and white below, the air was soft with the breath of spring. Her friend on the lower step laid her head against her knee and talked of Walter. He was growing so tall and thinking of college. The mother was loath for him to leave her, yet expectant in regard to his going. Mrs. Allen listened think- ing of John. Suddenly she heard only with her ears ; and her demons held sway, and her soul cried for aid against them; she would have drawn her sister into the darkness where they lurked. The oil of her single lamp was burned out, could not light the dusty haunts from which they came. But at the thought of the other's consternation, she drew her protectingly, calmly. Again it was the abysmal aloneness. She held this gentlest, most faithful friend, and there was no help in her own deepest need. "You would be such a refuge in sorrow," Mrs. Paine said. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 153 "Do you think so?" Mrs. Allen asked steadily. "I know so," said Mrs. Paine with sweetness. Mrs. Allen went to the gate with her when she departed but for once she was glad when she was gone. It was eleven at night when Mrs. Allen looked up from her desk and John stood over her. She had been lying several hours, her head on her folded arms in a state abjectly hopeless, exhausting like long uninterrupted hours of physical toil, dull like heavy sleep. She had stirred, as under a crushing weight, with the humiliating sense that she could not rise, that she could not connect her prostration, or the malady that had preceded it with any ade- quate cause. It seemed her spirit was dying and it was not fitting her body should survive. One of the old fierce flings of despair and she would have known she was still heroic in the strife, but she was exhausted. John's step sounded on the porch and she was motionless. He was standing above her and she lifted her head. Her gray hair tumbled around her deep creased face, her blue eyes looked out from unguarded misery. In the strength of brute manhood he glowered upon her. He was fresh from Mildred's embrace; Mildred's warning still rang in his ears, "She'll make you tell. I know she will." "Mrs. Allen," the name came strangely, and he would have withdrawn it but could not, "four years ago you wanted a divorce. Now I want one." "Yes, John." There was no change in her face, 154 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE hardly in feeling. Upon the dull suffering was im- posed the dull comprehension of its source. He waited, then turned to go. "John!" She was throbbing with the pangs of regret that had ever been her surest tokens of vitality. He paused unnerved and was rigid again. "Who is it John?" she asked. From the concession of a reluctant profile he fronted her squarely. "Who said there was anyone. I must be free. I've had no natural youth. What business have you to ask?" His voice thickened threateningly as the clenching of a fist. "Oh, my boy !" and he could not escape the claim of her love. "I want to know her. I want I appreciate it sounds incongruous, but everything wonderfully precious, beyond the grasp of the average man, is preposterous to the common place conception I want to love her. I want her to know that I wouldn't keep you from her. You are all I have. I can't let you go altogether. Can't you understand? Why shouldn't you tell me?" He did understand because he knew, because he was the only one who could ever know that she spoke from a heart of mother love. His arms drop- ped around her. If she could have left it there she might have saved to them both a portion of igno- rance. But upon the silence he did not interrupt broke the revelation that made clear all the mystery of her fears. "It's Mildred," she stated frantically, EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 155 He pushed her off with a kind of hatred. "It isn't Mildred. It isn't anyone," he declared harshly and was gone. The first clause denied the second, the second con- firmed the falsehood of the first. "He lied. I made him lie," was her thought and the whole meaning of her loss gripped her. She was standing flooded with it when, like the lash of a life line striking numbed limbs, there broke upon her passive acceptance, a long, insistent, pealing jangle of the door bell. Some- one held the finger pressed hard, imperiously upon the button. The ringing ceased, the door opened and Margie Paine ran through the darkened hallway and parlor into the lighted room. At the strange aloftness of the tall black gowned figure and the desolate stricken face, the propelling urgency which brought her thus far precipitately left her unsus- tained, and she paused, a tall straight wisp of a child, an appealing image of bewildered disarray. Between the folds of the long straight coat, hung the lines of a blue kimona. The silken scarf, hastily caught up fell back from a fair slender face. "Yes, dear, tell me. Something has happened," and Margie sobbed at the sound of her voice. "I came mamma wants you Walter, I can't say it they are bringing him home from Brennan. He is so reckless, he won't ever listen and he fell." She was weeping fiercely now. "He was going to Chicago on the cattle train," Mrs. Allen soliloquized. "He is killed?" she added. Her voice was pitched low but sharp and clear. 156 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "Yes and cut to pieces," Margie was suddenly still. It was the terror and excitement that spread through the house that sent her speeding on her errand. Out of Mrs. Allen's voice, was borne the reality of her brother's death." "He's dead. He's dead. I came right away." She was ashamed that it had not penetrated that it was death. "He's dead," she whispered caring for no- thing but that Walter was dead. John opened a door above and called, "What is it?" They went into the hall. At the foot of the tairs, Mrs. Allen spoke up to him. "Good God!" The exclamation was all sympathy. "I must go back," Margie's white lips were tight. "No, wait a moment. I shall prepare to stay. You can go with me," Mrs. Allen commanded. "I'll take her in a second," and John went back for his coat. Mrs. Allen started up the stairs as he came down and each stopped on the middle landing. "You are going to Mrs. Paine," he said. "Yes." They paused saying nothing. To each it was like the would-be suicide awakening to the dearness of the existence he had attempted to escape. He went on down the stairs. "Poor little girl," he said gently to Margie. The door closed on them and Mrs. Allen grasped the banister. "If it might have been death. If he might never have come back from Pierre to refute the loving manliness of the farewell with which he departed." CHAPTER V IN the early morning Mrs. Allen knelt with her right arm around her friend. "Close your eyes, dear, even if you cannot sleep", she begged, and laid her left hand over them. When she lifted it Mrs. Paine had obeyed. In res- ponse to a groping movement she surrndered the hand to the clinging clasp of Mrs. Paine's fingers; and was appropriated entirely, could not stir a muscle except in sympathy. "Yes," Mrs. Paine turned her face on the pillow and quoted from all the empty words that had been uttered since midnight, "He never had an evil thought." "In the years that come you will seem to follow him into a stainless manhood," Mrs. Allen added. "I believe I shall; but oh! " Mrs. Paine opened her eyes and at the sight of the face above her, the rising sob was stifled. "How can you feel so much for another?" The question kept her from falling into the abyss of her own absorbing grief at the verge of which yawning depth she was stumbling. "Can't you rest?" Mrs. Allen answered. Each moment it seemed the next she must tear herself 157 168 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE away yet the touch of her hands, the expression of eyes and lips, of the lines of her face gave out the infinite support and tenderness that reaches be- neath all smiles and sobs. "I shall rest," Mrs. Paine whispered, "in the arms of the Lord and " she modified honestly "of you." She lay still and only by the varying pressure of the fingers around her hand, Mrs. Allen knew she did not sleep. Twice she attempted to draw away and the clasp tightened and held her. At last, Mrs. Paine did sleep and Mrs. Allen stealthily released herself. Standing, she tensely lifted her arms above her head and her face worked. What a ridi- culous episode if she should arouse the household with a shriek of agony. She lowered her arms and went noiselessly across the room. The top sheet of an open tablet on Mrs. Paine's desk was scatter- ed with telegrams, first maudlin and wordy then trimmed to ten word suscintness. She sat down and started to tear off the page but the breaking of the glue resounded above the even pulse of Mrs. Paine's breathing. Pushing it back, she reached for note paper and wrote : "John, dear: It is morning and Mrs. Paine is sleeping. I have asked Fred to meet us to-morrow, no, I mean to-day, Tuesday, eleven a. m. at our house. The divorce can be obtained quickly, without publi- city. "Can't our love be the same as it has been? That you may know my heart does not hesitate, I let EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 159 nothing afford an excuse for delay. "With love, all love, of friend, sister, mother, every love except of wife, Mrs. Allen" Without pausing, on the next sheet, she addressed Fred, "Please meet myself and John to-day, eleven o'clock, at our house. I know you will come. It is I who ask it. It will be possible to leave Mrs. Paine only a few moments so we must each of us be prompt. Sincerely, "Mrs. Allen." The following morning a few minutes before the appointed time, Fred entered John's office. "I thought I'd call for you as I passed," he announced from the doorway. Mildred bent over her work, ears alert. John took his hat without a word. When they came into the street, "I appreciate your compliance," he said. "Not at all, Mrs. Allen compelled me", Fred gra- ciously waved aside the thanks. "I did not intend to infer you would come in fond- ness for me", not for the first time John wasted anger on Fred. In the answering silence the wound to his self pride festered. "Mrs. Allen", John cleared his throat. He thought the business in hand had assuredly been stated "has wanted a divorce for a long time." "Indeed, she ordinarily acts with alacrity." John bit his lip. He began to feel that Fred's 160 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE connection with the case was indelicate. There were lawyers who could have been held wi f hin the bounds of legal advice. Mrs. Allen had from the first rushed ahead regardless of decency and of him- self. "Don't you think I have a right to my free- dom?" he flarred. His face was very red. "Your freedom?" Fred sneered so normally that an accentuation of the expression could be detected only in the discomfort it produced. "Fred, you've never been my friend since I mar- ried. If you think so well of Mrs. Allen, why should it have been unpardonable for me to have married her?" "My affection didn't keep her from being a hard case", Fred laughed. "And you treat me like a cad for desiring a divorce." "She is a fine woman, due no doubt to later as- sociations." The tone of Fred's laugh was a con- tinuation of the same key." "I was merely a boy", John fumbled for some source of exoneration. Fred's condemnation was hard to ignore and even more difficult to combat, being assertive only in unworded confirmation of inner misgivings which the condemned one attempt- ed to deny. "Ah, my son, father to the man", he agreed. "Perhaps, you would like to marry her yourself." If it was an attempt at counter irritation, by the nature of the surface it struck it could only come bounding back. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 161 "Perhaps, if you do the square thing." Fred did not laugh this time. His smile was more signifi- cant. But John, in missing the double implication of his thrust, escaped the slash althogether. Of course he would do the square thing. He did not have to pre- pare by penetential meditation to be sure of that. Moreover they reached the door of the house and he was occupied in opening it. There was a pre- ceptible pause which recalled that Fred had never entered the house before; then, as if the coming were a social habit, a quick step through the door- way to take Mrs. Allen's hand also recalled that his absence had been expressed in continued avoidance rather than avowed unwillingness. In that hand clasp of Mrs. Allen and Fred, John suffered a feel- ing of jealous isolation; and likewise in the con- ference of three, he seemed to be left out like a child whose welfare is being considered by his elders with sacrificial solicitude but with only a very nominal deference to his own views. When they were seat- ed, Mrs. Allen spoke at once of the matter that had brought them together. "John has told you? I wish a divorce and he has given his consent." To the slight interrogative inflection, Fred's face assented. "You will be my lawyer?" she asked. "Yes, your lawyer." "I can file the complaint. He will answer. Wave time. It can be tried in chamber and granted before 162 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE the Journal has wind of it." John fidgeted. He had not thought it out. There was no opening for him in the conversation. "The alimony?" Fred responded. "I desired to speak of that. As my lawyer you must understand. When I married John, I paid him fifty thousand dollars. It was not as when a young wife puts her capital into the company of two. It was payment in advance for, for, what is now, value received. It was a contract the terms of which have been met on his side as on mine. Rapid takes me for what I am. As long as I live I shall be called, 'Mrs. Allen.' If from love John gives me ought for my old age, in love I shall receive it. He and his lawyer can make out an agreement and I shall sign it without demur." Fred sat with his hands on the arms of the large leather chair. "Mrs. Allen" He spoke with the sweet seriousness which was the more wonderfully sweet because so seldom heard from his lips. "I wouldn't do that. It isn't the money. It is what we are unworthy to possess unless we can take it without testing, that you may lose." "It is not for a test. It is for a token. And I shall have it." In the quick proud look for John there went out from her the last ecstasy of faith. "I hope so", Fred answered rising. John did not know him as the same man with whom he walked along the street fifteen minutes before, but there came to him vividly, the image of the man he had bunked with until the stage came into Rapid that EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 163 October day. If now that voice and manner had been for him, John might have been saved to his truer self. Departing, Fred precluded any inclina- tion on John's part to accompany him. With the hardness he had tempered to protect his own sensi- tiveness, he meted out his contempt; deftly, goad- ingly John was passed over in his leave taking. John did not follow them to the door, and when Mrs. Allen returned to the back parlor, he stood with his hand on the rim of his hat. "Don't John! Don't seem to want to be gone. There isn't much time but there is enough." His forehead drew down between them and the look of hateful manhood greeted her from his eyes. "I have one request. I did ask for a divorce four years ago but I asked for it then. I cannot regret these happy years yet that you refused, and I yielded to your decision gives me a claim. You know I do not often press claims. But I press this one." "Well, what is it? He was indignant in advance. "Promise me," Seeing the answer in his clouded face, she wavered but, by what ever name she might call them, her nature exacted pledges. Her persis- tency ignored the omens of defeat. "Promise me that you will let six months go. by before you marry." She shrank from his anger. It mounted to crush- ing rage. "I can fight for the divorce if you do not give it." His voice fell heavy as an iron sledge. "You know I have given it." Thus far she was 164 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE calm. Then there was the break. "It's for your sake I ask it." "For my sake! As if I were in knickerbockers, my character to be molded and hedged about by your solicitude." "Why shouldn't I desire it to be a woman too pure, too reverent of the marriage bond to take you fresh from its demolition?" As an intuitive certainty had informed her, it made plain to him that she knew all that had been so carefully guarded, all that he had lied to conceal. He had nothing upon which her penetration did not intrude. From her wizard insight he cried for re- lease. "Purity ! The sacred marriage bond !" His voice thundered as the rumble before the culminating crash. "What right have you to talk of these?" "Right!" Her eyes defied. Her face was bright as the sky illumined with the lightning flash that leaves it darker. After the first word the light was gone. Hers was the claim that knows not its own glory. "The right of the Magdeline to spill her ointment on the feet of the Lord, of the barren wo- man to pray for her sister's child." He took his hat. There was no argument but escape. She caught him and held her hands on his shoul- ders. He dropped his to his side and remained frozenly immovable with averted face. "Six months is so short a time to wait for a true love." The pleading nettled him. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 165 "You must let me go." The angry rumble deep- ened. He lifted his man's hands, pushed her force- fully into a chair, roughly pinioned her, loosened his hold, and was gone. Ten minutes later she went back to Mrs. Paine, CHAPTER VI 44 W OHN, keep down any alimony wrangle," I Mildred counseled. She occupied his office chair and tilted it back with her toe on the corner of the desk. "Thank heavens! I am spared that!" John's introductory phrase was purely exclamatory and the last a malediction for what it did not include. The furrows were becoming fixed between his eyes and Mildred's placid unruffled presence did not stay their deepening. The divorce as a requisite pre- lude to marriage was to John a harrassing persecu- tion of fate. 'You dear, magnanimous, afflicted boy!" Mildred soothed. "Just there's the rub. It's on the money phase of the proposition that you assuredly will be misjudged." "I shall do what's right," John asserted. That prefatory announcement was the pasting of a label for any decision that might be evolved. It was a syllogism to him, that if he desired to be right, and did what he desired, what he did must indisputably be right. "But everything is so tied up. I haven't an acre of land or a share of bank or mining stock 166 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 167 that I am ready to surrender to the ruination of a woman's business indiscretion." "How much does she stand for?" Mildred was imperturbably inclined to reduce the problem to terms of addition and subtraction. She rocked comfortably back and forth, and her skirts fell down from the polished tip of her shoe in ripples of silk ruffling between trim boundaries of serge. "She leaves it entirely with me," he replied. Mildred's chair dropped, and her feet came to the floor. "I call that clever!" "Clever?" John had not so considered it." "Don't you see?" Mildred put her hands on her knees and looked down at her feet. "If she made a big claim, people might say she had been exorbitant ; if she made a small one, no one could find fault with you that it was not larger. By the travesty of humility and confidence, she fixes upon you the criticism of the town." "Good God ! It takes a woman to trick a man." "And a woman to rescue the victim." Neither in word or thought did Mildred take issue to John's generalization. She had ever basked in masculine patronage and so ridden in contemptuous acquies- cence above any bitterness toward her sex. She raised one knee above the other and once more con- templated her toe as the sustaining point for falling undulations of silk. Since she had lately rehemmed the bottom frills before and after office hours, the satisfaction of the glance was not unmixed vanity, but had something of the thrifty workman's right- 168 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE eous pleasure in viewing the successful renovation of a modest habitation. "If you give her land and she sells it at the most inauspicious moment, or stock and she keeps it till it falls in value, the ver- dict will be that you so designed it. Who's going to remember how you have supported her these ten years, how she persisted in living in a small house when you were consumed with eagerness to build a large one, how she determinedly stayed at home when you went on jaunts, how she abhorred latest styles and elaborate parties. And she would live just the same if she had a million. Her idea of feli- city is to sit in the back parlor with Mrs. Paine, hem table linen and expound the mercy of God's chastisements or to squat in the back yard and hoe out dandelion roots from around the rose bushes. I can't see what she does want with so much money except to cripple you and hinder us from having things while we are young and know how to enjoy them. If she knew I was in it, that would be reason enough. And I surmise she does know. I tell you John, she's a witch. I believe she brews potions and finds out things by necromancy." John was naturally responsive to Mildred's wit but his face did not relax over it to-day. "But does she want so much?" he protested. Deeper verities than the facts and deductions she had set forth so logically rose in John's mind to arraign them. It must be granted, Mildred had no knowledge of the marriage contract, it was excusable that like Mrs. Paine she should refuse credence to all rumors. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 169 "If she don't want a great deal, why didn't she set some reasonable amount, or ask for some specific property?" she demanded. "Whatever I do I shall be blamed," John answer- ed. "So you might as well do what's right and not care," Mildred agreed. "Damn it! What people think!" The tone was defiantly heavy but it came from no greater depth than the roof of his mouth. Tuesday morning Mrs. Allen went to Fred's office to make her depositions. It had been conceded that in the trial the next day her presence might be ex- cused owing to the bereavement in the Paine house- hold. She had sent a note requesting John to meet her there with the alimony agreement. He sent the paper without apology for his failure to appear in person. She did not speak as if she had expected him. Fred assisted her very kindly in setting forth plausible, unvindictive claims for the divorce. When he considered that the legal exigencies had been met, he handed her the long typewritten folios upon which was the answer to her last challenge to life for a guarantee of faith in love. While she read it out between the lines of legal phraesology, Fred sat opposite w r ith folded hands, manifestingly fol- lowing her, yet without obtrusiveness. At the end of the last page she lifted her eyes and they looked at each other. Neither flinched. Their faces did not question. It was a death certificate that lay be- tween them. They did not dispute its meaning 1 . 170 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE "The death of a soul, a boy's beautiful soul," she said. Fred's hushed delicate face did not deny it. "I have killed it, strangled it in my suffocating love, sold it for the less precious boon of my own salvation," and she shivered as she shivered that day in Dr. Gillette's office. "It never lived," Fred answered. "May I be judged in the judgment of Israel's God. I want no mercy," she replied. "One might almost laugh," Fred observed se- riously. "Land without irrigation rights ! Stock of a bank ready for the receiver !" she groaned. "But there is our home, my home. It wouldn't bring much but I love it. I am glad he thought of that. He knew I'd want that. I would like to take it and refuse the other. I can't let him deceive himself with a pretense. I won't starve. I always could make money." "You are older," Fred argued. "It is only a part of what is yours. Wouldn't Mrs. Paine say you were accountable for its use? You can make that upper valley profitable. Of course Black Hills Bank stock," and Fred did laugh. "As for John, no- thing will alter him. Nothing really alters any of us. Does it?" "Yes, yes, we learn to see." ^ "If we have no eyes, none are supplied us. But you who have must command the means to help where the blind find only pampered fortune." EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 171 "Curse again with my vision and my unearned ducats!" "If the vision curses it curses only yourself," he comforted. "It cursed him," she protested. 'Oh! might this little part of the wealth I lent him hold all its curse.' ' "As I promised I accept what he gives, and I shall love, love love to the end" and she slowly took up the pen. CHAPTER VII CATHARINE entered the small dingy hallway of the boarding house, hung her hat and note book on the rickety old fashioned rack and turned to the mail box for her letters. She shifted them into an orderly heap, then passed them quickly through her hands, at the same time moving toward a chair by the window. The import of some was evident from a glance at the envelope ; some re- quired at least an inspection of the signature within and others a hurried perusal. There were invita- tions to teas and other social functions of the last week of college mixed in with bills receipted and un- receipted. Yes, and Dr. Williams would be glad to have her prepare the slides for certain microscopic work. She figured on the back of the envelope with her pencil, and with a relieved sigh decided she could pull through commencement. All told, from the expected parchment itself, to the shoe laces and hair pins purchased during the four years, she had kept within the four hundred dollars a year. It had been hard only because of the knowledge that the petty economies and toilsome vacations were im- posed as a penalty for daring to choose for herself. 172 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 173 Just now, however, even that was forgotten in the satisfaction of achievement. Moreover, the protruding corner of a pale blue envelope excited undiluted cheerfullness. It was a characteristic communication from Margie whose penmanship had passed from the model curves of the grammar grades to more original but less eli- gible high school crinkles. She inclosed money for certain small purchases and gave minute directions concerning the articles desired. A most beautiful graduating present was in the way of construction for "her doctor sister." She was, "so proud of her darling Kitty" and marked off each day on her calendar till her sister's return. Catharine mar- veled gratefully at a child's memory, as she passed the tinted stationery to the bottom. Suddenly her hands paused, and her breath caught in her throat. She knew it would come. A week ago the papers reported that Mr. Burton and some of his companions had sailed for America. But at the end of a college course, a week is as an hour. His letter followed so fast upon her repressed expectan- cy. Besides she had no assurance of his coming to her. In the first hard year of her undertaking, she ruthlessly cut herself off from him as from other associations that were dear. One tired, anxious night she wrote the final words. "I am resolved to go through with what I have begun and dare not dissipate my already somewhat dilapidated facul- ties in fruitless discussion concerning your aversion to my work. Since you cannot concede to me the 174 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE responsibility of choosing the details of my life so long as we are bethrothed, in assuming it, I release myself and you from all the pledges we have made to each other. As this will be my last letter, I wish to say, I be- lieve as eagerly as ever that you will attain the best manhood. If my faith is any incentive, as it seem- ed to be, it is yours now, and always to the utmost. But, as I give it back to you, I take my own free- dom, even to marrying another man if I could desire it. Yours, Catharine." While the girl had still lingered over an impas- sioned postcript, there was a knock at the door; and, as she turned to welcome the intruding caller, with an infromal greeting, her hands quickly fold- ed the letter into its envelope, sealed, directed and tossed it aside. That was over three years ago. This was the answer. It was written from New York. She ran her pencil down the end of the envelope, pulled out the flimsy sheet and read: "Dear Catharine, Arrived this morning. Shall come at once to Philadelphia. Telegraph your address im- mediately. I send this in care of the college. Yours as ever, Henry." The evening of the next day he came and was re- ceived in the so-called family sitting room of the EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 175 boarding house. It was in the front of the second floor, facing the narrow street below. Catharine heard his step on the stair, paused from her measured tread up and down the room and waited. She stood by the side of a small table, from its traditionary position in the room known as the center table. It supported a tin copper colored lamp which emitted a dim light through the double obs- truction of smutty chimney and dusty paper shade. Sad-eyed Madonnas looked dismally down from the walls. The exalted rapture of their expressions had perished in the printing operation. Catharine herself presented no brightening contrast to her surroundings. In the old days a touch of the illus- trious pervaded her plain features. Now two small lines diverging from the middle of her forehead in the direction of either eye, fixed the tone of her face more in accordance with its general outline. Henry came upon her tall and straight in his add- ed manhood, impatient for the meeting. During the past four years he kept this moment before him and longed for it anew as each fresh token of ability and success was heaped upon him. Yet, in spite of changed conditions, he could not evade, the picture he made for himself was always set in the large airy rooms of Catharine's western home, where the lavish golden flames from the pine logs leaped up between the andirons, and the sound of the wind sweeping from the prairie to the canyon gorged mountains beyond, spoke of scope and freedom, un- tamed forces without, calm and repose within. For 176 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE him the four years had been ones of strengthening sinews and growing powers. He would bask in Catharine's effortless strength that should have passed beyond him, a beacon light always bright and never for a moment dim from added fuel. The two-faced each other as strangers without means of introduction, till, with a melting flash of her old abandonment, Catharine went toward him. "How you have grown, Henry!" She stretched out her hands smiling, trembling. He held them crushed in his, looked at her and at the four close walls about them. A fierce anger rose against her. She had cheated them both. But quick above his resentment swelled the passionate tenderness of his larger manhood. Her obstinacy was forgiven and her old self would revive in the ease and honor of his success. He threw her hands away and, with his man's arms, drew her close. She yielded without a protest. "Why do I find you here, Catharine?" he demand- ed wrathfully, still holding her. She did not answer, but led him to the low camel hair sofa, and made him talk of self, working back from the joy thrill his letter brought her, to his ar- rival in New York, then his voyage home, and at last to the days in Paris. He poured it out to her, the uninterrupted process of his achievement, as if it were no more his than hers. She leaned back radiantly happy, at rest in his victorious gladness. She too had won her laurels. Her fellow students honored her as above envy. But the crown was EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 177 heavy with unforgotten hardships and discourage- ments. She willingly laid it aside. On the morrow it must be fastened down with thorns. They went for a sail and waited on the warm rocks in the mid-day sun of the early spring day, till the hour for the return of the ship. He was urgent for their immediate marriage. It galled him to leave her in the stuffy boarding house another day. In- deed he saw no real reason for waiting till after Commencement. Thus far the acquisition of taboo- ed knowledge had not intruded itself and he accept- ed the unavoidable conditions as a misfortune to be deplored and silently overlooked. Even in the stage of his most bitter protest, he could not have antici- pated her present attitude. She tossed pebbles into the waves, and at last spoke reluctantly. Her voice trembled in anticipa- tion of his pain and her own. "I am afraid," she said, "we shall have to wait another year. I wish to serve as interne in a hospital before I begin practice?" "Practice! And when do you intend to practice?" "As long as I live, Henry." The man could not believe she was in earnest. "If it is a joke, Catharine, I fail to catch the point." "Oh Henry, I am too weary to joke." She looked up with pleading misery. "My God, I wish I could see it your way, and wasn't forced to see it mine." Henry straightened himself. Her voice excited sudden appreciation of his magnanimity in passing over her former disregard of his opinion as to what 178 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE things were fitting for women. It was her father's air of abused indulgence confronting her again. The man's voice was assertive, deliberate and cold. "It is impossible," he said truthfully, "for me to detect the slightest sanity in your purpose. When at last I command a position worthy of you, why do you insist upon subjecting me to the igominy of having my wife hold daily office hours, and I sup- pose carry a leather case about the streets?" Catharine sighed hopelessly. Four years ago she could have conceived no palliative for another act- ing from her present conviction. Life had compel- led her to believe as she did. It was not choice. Feeling that no power of words unenforced by ex- perience could convince, she spoke without anima- tion. "If I were an heiress and could give you a higher place in society than you could command for yourself, would you be able to understand why you should still have a work of your own ? Position and marriage both are conditions, not occupations. I studied medicine because my life as it was then, lacked method, system, terminology by which to ex- press itself. I found them as I had never found them before. Is it strange I do not want to give them up?" "Wouldn't a home in a college community where thinking men and women came and went supply the same in a way that would bind us together instead of separating us?" "For some women, Henry, but not for me. I don't command in the distinctively social relations. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 179 I have no zest in attracting people simply for the satisfaction of being admired. Service seems so much more worth while. In the capacity of your wife, with nothing but wifeliness for a vocation, I should wreck our lives with impossible longings. As an individual I shall succeed. I have succeeded. I have striven and realized the self belief that impels to success. "Four years ago, I might have developed orthodox activities, but not now. Still, I think all could end for the best. We should come together in the home just the same. Why do I need to be there or to pre- tend to be there while you are away? When all is said, there is no home, but communion. Its one es- sential is the nearness of loved ones. The caterer, upholsterer and art designer do all else." Henry did not heed her train of thought but her voice dispelled his impatience. When he spoke, it was with a nobility of manner that excused his words. Consistent with his conception of manhood, he dared to assume unlimited responsibility in the life of the woman he loved. "Dearest," he entreated bending close to her, "Won't you marry me now, or in a month or two when your commencement is over, and you have been home a little while; give up this determination and be my wife just because I ask it and have all to offer that a man can offer in love and respect?" Catharine wavered. It is so easy to surrender to another's unreasoning certainty. It had been a lone- ly battle, why not take her happiness? "Henry, I 180 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE can't," she moaned, "I have no right." "Right," he burst out, "What do you mean by right? Did I have no right when I begged you not to outrage all my ideas of womanhood by this detes- table study?" She did not resent his bitterness. His standards for manhood justified his demands from the woman he loved. "Well," she answered, a dumb pain creep- ing into her face, "I suppose I mean the obligation of everyone to live out his life in the way he thinks best." "Are the lives of others nothing?" Henry inter- rupted, "If you had asked me not to go to Paris, would I have gone?" "No, but you would never have loved me if I had been a woman that could ask it." Don't you see?" he followed her up. "You have balanced the two enigmas against each other. You couldn't ask me to stay because you loved me. I must ask you to give up this profession because I love you. Its woman's love and man's, the one to inspire and encourage the other to protect and shield." "To protect and shield from what?" she demand- ed. "From meeting the vulgar necessities of living and from the brutal encounter of the laboring world. It pushes the weak to the bottom to make a pedestal where on the strong may climb." She looked at him with a touch of amused tender- ness. How little this petted child who never climb- EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 181 ed, but only stood erect while others lifted him knew of the brutal encounter. "The world is not cruel," she said slowly. "It is too thoughtless and uncaring of the individual not to let each man or woman according to his particu- lar fitness work into the place he can fill better than another. The necessities, food and clothing, are only the appropriate task matters set over everyone to keep him busy where he is, until he is worthy of something higher. In the open work-a-day world, general usefulness and the special demands of a man's nature shift him first one way, then an- other till he is justly placed. Women, because they have their positions established not by the relentless balancing of efficiency and desire but by the favor or success of another, often fret in a space too small, or grow frivolous in others too large." "Are we to have different positions and diverse interests?" Henry questioned with an air of suc- cinct rebuttal. "If our love can not make them converge to a point of mutual recognition, can artificial limita- tion?" Catharine asked, and the man immediately fell back on his personal preference. "Catharine," he pleaded, and his voice was se- ductively kind, "I know you are most womanly of woman, at heart so ready to lose yourself in your appreciation of another. Can't you Realize the hunger of my life, to have you for myself, sacred, above and outside the daily exacting existence? I want to guard you from contact with suffering you 182 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE connot mitigate, free you to be noble as you cannot be in trammeled, crowded ways. Won't you let me?" "If only I had been fashioned for the purple and ermine or for the white robes of the priestess. Some are, some are not. For me joy is in the rest that comes after the hand to hand conflict with misery. I must strive for complete nobleness, grow stronger and gentler touching the basest, prove myself by resistance. I do not know, I may be wrong, but sometimes I think man's coercive tenderness is grounded in a second rate love. I have felt it for my little sister. She is beautiful and untroubled. Not for her sake but for my own I could choose that a knowledge of the hard demands of life might never mar the perfect lines of her face. Her loveliness is such a joy. Her ignorance seems to spiritualize. Yet, for myself I would not surrender my sorrows more than my joys. They interpret each other. I shall not dare to deliberately limit her with my sel- fish fears; but, if the time comes, I will yield the better love that is willing to suffer with her, be- cause she must suffer to realize the comprehensive life. Forgive me, Henry, when life is hard, we think it out mercilessly. You deceive yourselves when you believe you can hedge us about with devotion. You do not keep us from cares and troubles but only restrict our means of subduing them. You concen- trate for us our portion of pain by closing upon it the doors of healthy diversion. We live in the sha- dows with phantom fears, which vanish in the sun- EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 183 light. You make us cowards rather than saints." They sat still on the rocks for a long time, and a hope sprang up in the woman's heart as the man gazed off to sea, then he turned to her with grave, sweet hesitancy. "Have you forgot," he said slowly," how it hap- pened that society came to be organized as it is? Are there to be no children in our home?" Catharine's face quivered and her voice was hush- ed. "I have thought there might be," she said. "In that, perhaps, would be the end of baffled efforts. It would revive the dead hope of knowing the woman I aimed to be. But she had better hear her cradle songs from a hireling's lips than that in her eager uncertain youth there should be no mother mind to point the way, no mother will to lift the barriers." She met him with softened face and compelling eyes. The same beauty he felt in the canyon ra- diated still. "Trust me," she said, "I shall yield all that a woman should yield when the time comes. But to be a complete woman, I must be much more than a woman, There are no words for it all. Only a great love demands a great faith. Henry can't you believe?" He could not doubt her woman's nature unsealed before him. Passionate, yearning, pleading she held him. "Catharine, I will try," he said lifting her up. She clung to him, and the face she hid was con- vulsed with her unexpected joy. Henry did try, but each morning anew, it seemed to him only a ridiculous whim. Again and again 184 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE they went over the endless arguments, till at last they began to hurt each other. The arguments were unheeded but bitter personal flings left their sting. A great weariness possessed the girl, and a wild exasperation made the man torment her to yield. At last it was finished. Catharine knew he could never understand. She knew too his manhood was tainted with a cowardice. He feared to face his family and comrades with a professional wife, one who had not studied merely for intellectual sport, but would practice in the common place manner, give service and count its value in money. In the dingy sitting room of the boarding house, Catharine made him believe that they could never marry. Her college friends had departed with their last farewells and her own trunk was packed in the little room above. The commencement day had been without joy. "You have chosen," Henry said, with the same voice of imprecation her father used four years be- fore. She braced herself on the back of the chair. They had risen for his departure. "No, Henry, it is not I, but you who have chosen against love. But I do not mean to accuse you this last night. You have given me the best that can come to a woman, the privilege to love to the fullest extent of her nature. I thought before I knew you that the great blessing was to be loved. Now I know it is the fire within that warms our little souls, and when it is kindled we need not let it die with all the unloved waifs in EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 185 high places and low to feed it. Of, course, if you were different we would be saved this parting. Yet I cannot blame you, because I did not choose another man. It was your instinctive fineness and easily gained completeness that won me. My love is not belittled in its object. That would be bitter. I think I must sit down. The packing has tired me." She dropped into the window seat, and rested her worn face on her thin hand. Henry's brow twitched with the impulsive sym- pathy we feel for the animal under the vivisection. It was to this he had yielded each day for the past week. Both felt the uselessness of words, the im- possibility of agreement. His heart had hardened. She was so mad to hurt them as she did. He held her hands for one tense moment, then broke away without a word. She sat motionless, listening as he went down the steps, turned and watched him from the window as he hailed the street car. There was the deepening glow of dying embers in her eyes and the tenseness that came so quickly to him seemed left behind; creeping up from within, fixed the drawn features and burned in the dark eyes. At last she stole up to her tiny room and sat alone in the night. She held her hands and looked out on the clear sky. Her woman's cry for her woman's life burst out, wildly it was flung into the infinite and beat against the Heavens only to be echoed back. Finally when the night was almost gone, she set her thin lips and calmed herself; and thought life 186 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE out, daringly disowned each fruitless faith, each groundless hope, without reservation looked into nothingness beyond, and in the ecstacy of despair found peace. From the joy of her vigor, to face the barrenness without, she believed in her power to keep love warm within. With an unquenched gladness in living, she threw up her little window, and felt the night air on her hot face. The dusky light of the city dawn diffused the night. She thought how the sun on the Western prairie made radient the whole broad East, and her spirit was joined to that of her fathers. It had been one from the beginning of America, and drove each Paine in the fullness of his energy, to throw himself away to make clear the path for those who might fulfill themselves. She lay her head upon the window sill and slept. When she awakened, it was to the sound of the landlady's shuffling slippered feet coming up the two flights of stairs. In her hand she carried the news of death, the summons home. CHAPTER VIII CATHARINE stepped off the train and was caught up in a struggle with the sleet filled blast that swept down the gap. It pelted her, swayed her, and switched her skirts coiling them bindingly around her limbs. She could not see or move, only contended to keep her standing ground. In the long journey, the sense of her brother's death had been merged into the realiza- tion of her deeper loss and each day the home com- ing yearning crowded closer on her grief, and Rapid reached nearer, a vision of approaching comfort. Each hour of the swift passing miles seemed to bear her forward beyond the quickest speed into the arms of the familiar, toward the refuge of a long free sob. But this May morning the train ploughed laboringly along the drift clotted track. Outside the white clouds whirling against the square pains of glass, shut from the vision all but the furied an- tics of the snow carrying gusts. To her eagerness, the warmth and comfort of the Pullman were the embellishments of prison bars. "To swing off from the impeded car and ride on the wind," was her thought. At last, five hours late, they had arrived ; 187 188 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE and she was alone in the blizzard rush battling to hold her poise against the storm, striving to find the direction of the wind that she might brace her feet and stand firm. Across the platform the dray, the bus and carriages were dark blurs in the driving, blinding whitness. A few stray figures propelled to an objective point beyond, swept past with heads lowered against the biting icy wind. She struck the angle in search for which she had been whirled this way and that and in the face of the gale, lifted her head. Ah! It was better than the long sob of rest. The sleet froze on her veil, glistened in her flying hair, brought the blood to her face. All sorrow was lost in a response to the rage of the element. Her cape swelled out around her, then twisted ; her hair switched on her wet cheek, her hat tossed up from her forehead. She reveled defiantly, against the battering force. It was her welcome. Out from the dim blur of the station, Mrs. Allen was thrown against her. Mrs. Allen had not in- tended to touch the younger woman but at the colli- sion they caught each other to keep from falling. "Your mother asked me to come", Mrs. Allen apologized shrilly above the voice of the wind. "It was very kind", Catharine's voice almost shrieked discordantly high. Once inside the carriage, they wiped their faces and shook out their skirts. Catharine leaned her face on the glass of the cab door watching the dray horses flounder in the drift and watched the sleet stung driver lash them till they floundered out. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 189 "I wish I could walk", Catharine said. "It would be ridiculous to walk. It would be splendid." "Yes", Mrs. Allen agreed, opposite her, "But your mother is waiting. The delay has been very trying." "You have been with her?" "Almost constantly", Mrs. Allen answered. All at once the girl saw the great hollows around her companion's eyes, the sharp tense lines of her face ; as her voice had brought to Margie the realiz- ation of death, her face brought it to Catharine. Suddenly there was present to her the casket, the little brother's lifeless face, the darkened room, the hushed whispers, her mother's tear-filled eyes, her father's stricken voice, the clinging clasp of Mar- gie's soft hand. "How frightful", she shuddered. They should not have waited. And to-day, they can't bury him to-day." "It was spring yesterday. The trees were bud- ded. They waited because your mother needed you. It may be bright in the morning." Catharine leaned back with set teeth. To her a carriage never went so quickly. Occasionally a swift gust cleared the snow cloud from familiar land marks." "It will be easier than you think. It will be a relief to be absorbed in another's grief," Mrs. Allen comforted. The girl scrutinized her. "Thank you", she said hoarsely and Mrs. Allen felt the relenting of her sternest judge. 190 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE It was an hour before the funeral service that Margie asked, "Where's Kitty?" and repeated soon, "Where is Kitty." Mrs. Paine echoed the query and Mrs. Allen went in quest of the answer. She dis- covered her on a side porch, back of the dining-room. "I can't stand it," she groaned when Mrs. Allen had closed the door behind them. She leaned on the side of the house, her dark agonized face thrown to one side, her palms pressing the weather boarding. Mrs. Allen reached out her hand. "It isn't just that! Death! Death is a peaceful symbol of the really terrible." Catharine spoke it defiantly. "I know, I know, dear," Mrs. Allen answered. "It isn't only the brother you are burying." "How do you know? What do you know?" Catha- rine seemed to be attempting to push back the side of the house in her effort of repulse. "Everything. Nothing," the woman pleaded. "Come child, you are younger than I. You cannot go back alone. Let me go with you." There was a slow relaxation. Mrs. Allen caught her. She laughed, one hysterical gulp. "I'm all right. I can't even faint. Oh, God! If I only could faint! If I could be ill! "You can sleep, dear. You will sleep tonight. You will be very tired." Catharine gave her one sweeping glance. "Thank you. I can go to the end now," and it was the girl who opened the door. CHAPTER IX CATHARINE did sleep that night as the laborer after hours of prolonged toil; and in the morning came down late to the delayed breakfast. When she entered the dining room, her parents who had been talking in low tones of amazement, paused. She took the place that had been Walter's and her mother handed her the morning Journal. Pushing it away in weary disgust, "It is worse than photographs of the flowers," she groaned. "It isn't that." Mrs. Paine's face was all a quiver Catharine picked it up and caught the heading on the second column. The first was devoted to Walter. "Didn't you know?" she exclaimed with a quick lift of her eyes after reading a few lines. Mrs. Paine shook her head. The Journal was given up primarily to recounting to its subscribers the dramatic culmination of the most personal episodes in the lives of one another. The reporter-editor employed such embellishments of language as he could command and attained a kindly confidential style, resembling that of the communica- tions published in the organ of a college fraternity. 191 192 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE The notice of interest read: A Very Pretty Ceremony. "Yesterday the reporter had the pleasure of at- tending a very charming wedding at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Warner. Mrs. Warner, as everyone knows, is a friend in sorrow as in happiness. On this occa- sion, she came almost direct from casting flowers on the new made mound to strew them on the bridal table. The Reverend Mr. Warner was unfortuna- tely absent and the Reverend Mr. Forbes of the Congregational church, officiated. "The prinicpals, Miss Mildred Larsh and John C. Allen, have been prominent among the young people from the beginning of Rapid; for both were here when the writer arrived and that's saying a good deal ; for there wasn't much when he came. "John has purchased the Clark house, which, be- ing the largest and finest residence in the city, will require furnishings in harmony. These, the bride and groom intend to purchase in Chicago. They left on the evening train for the East, will visit the parents of the bride in Iowa and other Eastern points. Mrs. Allen senior was granted a divorce Thurs- day and in the ample provision that was made for her, John Allen showed the generosity which has ever been his most distinctive characteristic, and the respectful consideration he has always honored her with. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 193 "The Journal joins with a host of friends in wishing them all happiness." Catharine put down her paper and stirred her coffee. "I feel for her?" Mrs. Paine very nearly sobbed. "It wasn't right but she did it for his sake." "What wasn't right? "Catharine asked. The calm of psychological investigation tinged the deli- berateness of the question After this college course as after the other she was to bridge between her mother and herself diverging points of view by an inclusive mental grasp of the common foundation upon which both were erected. "The divorce, Catharine!" her mother protested. "You don't believe in divorce?" "The wrong is behind the divorce. The marriage of John and Mrs. Allen was the sin. I don't know whether or not the retribution of a violated law can ever be escaped without universal detriment to the workings of the law. And yet, when one has re- pented, that for the universe he should submit to be smoothered by the results of error. Well, I am no Christ, who can commend to the Christ ordeal a fellow sinner. It is he who chooses the desolation of the Christ, who finds the virtue in the frailties of others, and would excuse them from the reward on the cross. I think we agree, mother. You believe Mrs. Allen is right, don't you ?" "Oh, Catharine!" Mrs. Paine was confused to tears. "Don't cry, dear." The girl leaned across the 194 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE table to take her hand. The divorce is wrong or the result of wrong. We must not wrangle for a dis- tinction. But Mrs. Allen is right. She would hardly be right to condemn John Allen to the payment of a penalty she is too old to share, when she herself is the primary offender no doubt. Whatever fallacies we topple down in correcting the contradictions, we will come back to what we started with. You dive for pearls of truth and find them. I get lost in hunting avenues to connect the beds. As I, you stand for Mrs. Allen, don't you?" she insisted. "I don't know. She has been so good to me." "Yes, you knew what she was when I was cum- bered with the rubbish of the past," Catharine mused. "You knew what she was without wasting yourself to learn to know. And yet ." She drank her coffee down and arose "I am going to her." "You! Now!" "She came to you." "It was only a sorrow. There was nothing that could not be mentioned." "Did she mention your grief? Was there any need?" Catharine replied. "You are a queer girl," the mother said proudly. Catharine took an umbrella from the rack in the hall and departed. Outside she raised it to shade her eyes. The sun glistened on the melting snow. In one day spring had returned. She went boldly to the door of the house she sought, and Mrs. Allen opened to her. Confronted by the object of her sympathy she became awkward and tongue-tied EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 195 "Yes dear," Mrs. Allen after inviting: her in, stepped out. "I came " Catharine was brought to a standstill. Mrs. Allen waited as a soldier for a call to duty. The water dripped from roof and trees. The grass shone greener through the silvery snow. "I thought," the girl blurted, as the child who speaks what he has prepared, because its inappro- priateness brings dismay which deprives him of the ability to improvise a fitting substitute. "I was driven and I came. I thought there was only one death or two at most. It must be there are a thousand." "A thousand lives then," Mrs. Allen responded with the air of gracious repartee. Chagrined and baffled, Catharine took one step down from the piazza. Her eyes fell on the morn- ing Journal in the snow by the sidewalk where it had been thrown from the carrier's hand. Mrs. Allen passed her, picked it up and folded it without a glance at the contents. "And how is your mother this morning?" she asked. Very gently but in a puzzled way, she was observ- ing the girl. The young face darkened. "Could it be she did not know, that she would learn it from the Journal," Catharine was questioning and to herself was ans- wered, "Yes." "Mrs. Allen !" she blurted again. "Would you be- lieve a girl could understand, not so finely, I would 196 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE not boast, but in a way her mother could not? I was insolent four years ago. I have been taught. I would not eaves-drop on your reception of grie- vous tidings. But I have lived and I have thrown my life away. I shall find it again, but Oh! I did not come to receive, I came to give." The com- prehension on the other's face made her pause. "When you are over the shock of the blow and can think " Mrs. Allen detected Catharine's furtive shifting of the eyes from the paper and her hand tightened on it. "I want you to know I came as you came to mother, as you came to me." Mrs. Allen folded the paper closer. She was prepared for the tidings. "I am going." Catharine put a promise of loyal return into the statement. She went down the walk. Mrs. Allen opened the Journal and read. She laid her head against the pillar of the piazza roofing. "My boy! My boy!" It throbbed. Then beyond, she saw Catharine's uncondoning, clear-eyed face, full of admiration, appeal, deference. For herself she had achieved. She had won back her birthright. CHAPTER X ITTY," Margie burrowed her head into the folds of Catharine's gown. "I want to say something, but I am afraid." Catharine fluffed the yellow hair from the girl's forehead. She made the touch very light and play- ful, because she felt it growing heavy with a pent in passion. "I know it's wrong," the girl laughed, only part- ly conscious of the wrong and of the consolation it held, "but I am glad you didn't marry." Catharine's fingers barely touched the flying ends of the ruffled pompadour and drew away. I hope, dear, sometime you will know how selfish the thought is." The voice sounded angry to the girl, but the touch of Catharine's lips on the upturned face un- deceived her. "Oh Kitty, I didn't know. I am not glad. I am sorry." Catharine smiled at her. "You shall know," she prayed. Margie lifted her head and arms and caressed her sister, refusing to desist until Fred turned in at the gate of their lawn, then laughing, she sprang up 197 198 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE and ran away. Catharine went down the steps of the piazza. "I came," Fred smiled, looking up and holding her hand, to give you, as I passed by, you, who have accepted the burden of the hero's crown, what you gave me, who refused it." "I don't know what to say, Fred. I am glad that you came and glad you said just that." "Because," he said slowly, loiteringly refusing to mount the piazza steps, "I didn't carry my crown, I want to be allowed to prevent yours from crushing you. The town knows everything. Perhaps Walter told his bosom chum. Some one in the bank report- ed the size of the checks that went to you. Mrs. Austin wrote back from Philadelphia how you did it. I want to lend you the money for the first years of practice. You will have to live. I have wfondered." "I am so glad, Fred. I could let you. I was go- ing away and fight it out, but one wants her own. You must not mind that I do not need your help. It is Mrs. Allen who is to assist me." He looked down with the sad quizzical twist at the corners of his mouth. "It is fair," he said. "Only when we have borne our own crowns can we claim a share in lightening those of our neighbors." "Aren't you coming in?" she begged, as he turned. He shook his head and she knew not how to urge or comfort him. So he went. She sat down on the edge of the piazza and lean- ed against the post of the railing. Her mother came EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 199 out and took the chair above her. "Well, mamma, my shingle goes up to-morrow." "You will succeed," the earnest voice replied ora- cularly. Catharine laughed. She was eager to begin. For the intervening month since her return, her mind had been full of it. But to-night, on its brink, She arose hurriedly, went into the hall and return- ed with a cap. "Where are you going dear?" her mother asked. "For a little walk," came the calm reply. But it was an impatient step with which she struck out into the middle of the road. Two minutes later she strode up the enbankment of Cemetery Hill. It sloped from the perpendicular, barely enough for her quick assent. At the top she dropped, struggling for breath and tussling with mounting sobs. She tossed her head, gulped them down and sat still and motionless. She had thought the old wound was healing with a nerveless scar, and now the pain of it gripped her with the accumulated strength of the four active years and the full ladened month. It took hold of her afresh as a new joy can seize one in the spring. "Why should it have come to me now?" she asked herself philosophically wondering. Then she fought a sob rebelliously. Getting up, she went blindly, swiftly across the level plateau on toward the tall white column that had guided her steps when she had gone to meet Henry four years before. No approaching figure turned her eyes from her goal. She went on with quick, even steps, till she 200 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE stumbled in a depression where a body had been removed to another resting place. It was then she saw the nearness of the tall white stone, the iron rail around the grave and Mrs. Allen leaning against it with her eyes turned toward the prairie. With the instinctive desire to be alone, she veered away, then whirled and walked to the side of her friend. It was sunset in the West behind them, but they looked out on the prairie, undulating off to rolling terraces beyond. The scene was gray, drab, and dull terra-cotta. There was a damp stillness in the air. Only a few clouds of pale blue stripped the sky. They recognized each other without smiling, for a moment without speaking. Out of the silence, Catharine's unrest burst forth. "Did you never," she asked, only the habit of life's restraint keeping her voice from rising shrilly, "wish sometime, when you found a friend that eminated a power, a strength you could not claim, to throw yourself upon her and sob, and sob your life away?" "Yes, yes, " answered Mrs. Allen, with great tenderness in her manner. "But that is not for you, my child. It is for them who, when it is over, can go back to the half love, the compromises, the condonments, the deadning self effacements with which women opiate their sorrows. For you, life's revelations must vitalize into helpful energy. That is the relief that leaves no apathy and brings the blessing of restful sleep and strength for to-mor- row's work. EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE 201 Catharine leaned wearily against the railing. "But I have so many years before me. I may live to be seventy. It may be only an eternity of ecstatic misery, such as this when I met you a moment ago and forgetful usefulness piling up energy for the next attack of despair. Her eyes roamed the prai- rie. Mrs. Allen smiled. "There are a thousand lives," she said, "The assurance of knowledge, the thrill of mastery, the opening of hearts. A thousand times you will lose your life and find it." Catharine shook her head. "I try, I succeed, and then " her voice was dry. "Sometime the pain will have passed. You will find that you have conquered." Catharine gazed upon the calm of her face. "And men will look upon me and will believe?" she whis- pered adoringly. When Mrs. Allen returned to her piazza, Fred looked up at her from one of the low chairs. "I have been meditating in the shadow of your house." He greeted her without rising. "May we not think together a little while?" she replied. "Of what?" "Of you." "Oh Lord!" he groaned. "I have been on the hill with Catharine." "Yes", came from an ; mmense gloom. The woman seated herself facing him. Her rug- ged features were relaxed from the struggle of 202 EVERY MAN HIS CHANCE years. At last she asked no more of life yet de- sired to live. "You are younger than I was when I came to Rapid", she mused. He knocked the ashes from his cigarette. "If, from the moment you loved her, you had re- solved to be greater than the reward you might not covet, to-day you could have married Kitty Paine." ''I know," he answered, rigid then smiling he added, "If I had had the insolence of righteousness." "The humblest may look beyond the prize," she averred. "An inquisition without tools," While he writhed the voice was tenderly accusing. "That you may know the eternal joys. I have questioned if the blessings we throw away are ever as wonderful as those we may yet win for ourselves." "You say that?" Suddenly he straightened slightly. "What is lost is lost," she warned. Yet missing the reward, to comprehend it, thus holding it within ourselves is not an empty victory." "Have you not learned," He seemed to be offering consolation "that no man can chose for another?" "But if he has never chosen for himself?" she urged. "Not to have striven is to have escaped the agony of defeat as well as to have been deprived the ecstacy of attainment.'" "It is never tj have lived." she declared. "Never to have lived," he agreed.