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.