So it came about that like two children they played together, worked, walked, or read and talked by the open fire when cold storms came. Every morning she came over the wood-road that led by winding ways from her valley, and at sunset she went back over the trail alone. He might go as far as the outlook half way over the mountain where the path begins to go down, but no farther; as for any fear, she seemed to know nothing of its workings, and the revolver she wore in a case that hung from her belt was a mere convention.
One morning she came with eyes dancing—it was to be an especial day—a fête—and the gods had smiled on her planning and given them perfect weather. Never such sunshine, such crystal air, such high-hung clouds! Breakfast over, they hurried about the miniature housework, and packed the kit for a long day's tramp. Then they started forth, the cat following, tail aloft. Beyond a dim peak, where the clove opens southward, by the side of a tiny lake they lunched and took their noonday rest. She watched the smoke curl up from his pipe where he lay at peace with the scheme of things.
"Do you know, Man, dear," she said, "I am glad I don't in the least guess who you are! I have no doubt you write the most delightful stories in the world—but never put me in one, please!"
He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at her long before he replied.
"Woman, dear," he said, "I have put you in a place—your own place—and it is not in my novels!"
She scrambled to her feet laughing.
"It's very well to make stories, but it is really more diverting to live them! Come, I must lead you now with your eyes shut tight to my surprise!"
So hand in hand they went along a smooth green wood-road until she stopped him.
"Look," she cried, "now look!"
Straight away till the road narrowed to a point of light against the sky where the mountain dipped down, banks of mountain laurel rose on either side in giant hedges of rose and white, while high above them waved the elms and beeches of the forest.
"It is the gardening of the gods!"
"It is my own treasure-trove! I found it last year and I have been waiting to bring you to it on my fête—what you call birthday! And now wish me some beautiful thing—it may come true! There is a superstition in my country—but I shall not tell you—unless the wish comes true!"
He broke off a spray of the waxen buds and crowned her solemnly where she stood.
"I have already wished for you—the most beautiful thing in the world!"
She shook her head, sorrowful. "Man, dear, the only thing in all the world I still want is the impossible!"
"Only the impossible is worth while—and I have wished!"
She shook her head again, laughing a little ruefully. "It could not arrive—my impossible—and yet you almost tempt me to hope!"
"Anything—everything may arrive! You once thought that such a friendship as this of ours could not, and lo, we have achieved it!"
"I wonder"—her eyes seemed fixed on some far prospect, a world beyond the flowery way—"I wonder if we have! And I wonder why you have never made a guess about my world when you have at least let me get a peep now and then into yours?"
"I don't care a rap about your 'world,'" he smiled into her eyes, "while I have you!"
"No curiosity about my—my profession?"
"Not a bit—though it was clear enough from the first that it was the stage!"
She made an odd little outcry at his powers of divination.
"Then I must look it—before the footlights from my birth! Since you are so clever, Mr. Man, will you also be merciful when you come to weigh me in those scales you try to hide beneath the garment of your kindness? Think, when you judge me, what it is for a woman never to be herself—always to have to play a part!"
He reached and took her hand suddenly, drawing her to him with a movement that was almost rough.
"This is no play acting—this is real! No footlights—no audience—only you and me in all this world!"
But she drew away, insistently aloof. She would have none of his caresses.
"This, too," she said, as she moved apart and stood waiting for him to follow, "is a part of the play—I do not deceive myself! When I go back to my world—my trade, I shall remember this little time that you and I have snatched from the grudging grasp of life as an act—a scene only! It's a perfect pastoral, Man, dear, but unreal—absurdly unreal—and we know it ourselves while we play the game!"
Down through the flower-bordered vista the cat went stalking his prey, his sinuous body a tawny streak winding along the green path. These trivial humans, with their subtle attractions and compunctions, were as though they never had been when the chase was on—the real business and purpose of life!
For the rest of the time they were together they avoided the personal. Each felt the threat in the air and tacitly averted it. For that one perfect day there should be no past, no future, nothing but the golden present.
Swinging in his breeze-rocked hammock between door and window the man lay awake through the long watches of the night, thinking, thinking, while his heart sang. Toward dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which he was only awakened by the cat springing up to lick his face in reminder of breakfast.
It was when he came back from his plunge in the pool that he first noticed a paper pinned to his door-post. Within its folds his doom was penned!
"Even you, dear Man, could not wish me the impossible! That superstition of my country is that to come true it must be the first wish of your fête day—and by one who loves you! Alas, my old servant had already wished—that he might get me started for home to-day! Clever Friedrich—for he had also packed! When you read this I shall be far on my way. You could never find me though you searched the earth—but you will never try! It is well as it is, for you see—it was not friendship after all!"
And yet there was a sequel. During the following year there dropped to the man in his hard-pressed literary life, one of those errant plums from the political tree that now and then find their way to the right basket. He was named for an excellent diplomatic post. His friends congratulated him and talked a good deal about "material" and opportunities for "unique local color;" his wife chattered unceasingly about gowns and social details, while he armed himself, with the listless reticence that was become habit, to face new responsibilities and rather flavorless experiences. He had so withdrawn himself of late to the inner creative life that he moved in a kind of phantasmagoria of outer unrealities. It was the nearest to a comfortable adjustment for the mis-mating of such a marriage as his, but it was not the best of preparations for the discharge of public duties, and he walked toward his new future with reluctant feet, abstractedly. In some such mood as this, his mind bent on a problem of arrangement of fiction puppets, seeing "men as trees walking," he found himself one day making his bows at a court function. Along the line of royal highnesses and grand duchesses with his wife he moved, himself a string-pulled puppet, until—but who, in heaven's name is this?
For one mad moment, as he looked into her eyes, he thought the tightened cord he sometimes felt tugging at his tired brain had snapped, and the images of sight and memory gone hopelessly confused. She stood near the end of the line with the princesses of secondary rank, and the jewels in her hair were not more scintillant than her eyes as he bent over her hand. She went a little pale, but she greeted him bravely, and when they found themselves unobserved for a moment she spoke to him in her soft, careful English:
"You recognized me, you remember, for a play actor, and now you are come from the world's end to see me perform on my tiny stage! Alas, dear critic, since my last excursion, I am no longer letter perfect in my part!"
They met but once again. It was in the crush of guests in the great hall where her old Prince, in the splendor of his decoration-covered coat, was waiting to hand her to her carriage. There was a brief time in which to snatch the doubtful sweetness of a few hurried words. She was leaving in the early morning for the petty Balkan province where her husband held a miniature sway, over a handful of half-savage subjects. Hardly more than a renewal of greeting and a farewell, and she was gone!
As the old Prince wrapped her more carefully in her furs, and the carriage rolled away in the darkness, he spoke to her, somewhat puzzled:
"I should be sorry to think the American Ambassador has been taking too much wine—as you well know, my knowledge of the barbarous English tongue is but limited, and yet—I thought, as I joined you, he was talking some farrago of nonsense about aYellow Cat!"
That year the Yellow Cat came home lean and gaunt, a chastened, humble creature, as one who has failed in a long quest, and is glad to stretch his weary length before the hearth and reap the neglected benefits of the domestic life.
"It is really very odd" said the minister, quite as if he were saying something he had never thought of saying before, "where that cat goes in the summer!"
"Isn't it?" responded the minister's wife—just as she always did. "It fires the imagination! He walks off some fine morning and completely shuts the door on our life here—as if he gave us notice not to pry into his movements. But this time"—she was leaning to stroke the tawny sides with a pitying touch—"this time you may be sure something very sad and disappointing happened to him—something in that other life went quite wrong! How I wish we could understand what it was!"
It happenedup in Lancashire, and the truth can be vouched for by at least half a hundred spectators. It fell in this wise: Bob O' Tims owned a game-cock which was the envy of the whole street for lustre of coloring and soundness of wind. Its owner was almost unduly proud of his possession, and would watch it admiringly as it stalked majestically about among its family of hens.
"There's a cock for you!" he would say, with a little wave of his pipe. "There's not many cocks like that one. The king himself has got nothing like it down at Windsor Castle."
Now, Jimmy Taylor had always been a rival of Bob O' Tims's. Jimmy's grandfather had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. This gave him great prestige, and it was almost universally believed, in Chellowdene, that the preëminence of the British Empire was mainly due to the battle-zeal of Jimmy's ancestry. But whenever Jimmy talked about his grandfather, Bob skilfully turned the conversation to his game-cock. This made Jimmy testy, and one day he told Bob, in contemptuous tones, that "he'd be even wi' him yet, in the matter o' game-cocks, as well as everything else."
That was one Monday evening, and the following Wednesday Bob O' Tims's cock disappeared. When Bob discovered his loss, his face went quite pale with anger. Without a word, he flung on his cap and set off for Jimmy Taylor's cottage.
When he reached it, he went still whiter. For Jimmy was sitting at the door, and up and down the yard in front of him strutted a magnificent game-cock.
Bob O' Tims stretched out his forefinger, pointed at the cock, and with a stubborn look forming about his mouth and jaw, observed:
"Yon's mine."
"It isn't," responded Jimmy. "It's mine."
"I tell thee, yon's mine. Yo've prigged it."
"It's mine! I bought it at th' fair."
"Thee never bought yon cock at any fair. It's mine, I tell thee."
Words grew high between the disputants, as the cock, in all its bronze and golden splendor, marched up and down the yard, until the argument between the two men terminated in a quarrel so violent that half-a-dozen neighbors came in to see what was the matter. It ended in Bob O' Tims insisting that he would take the matter into court. He was as good as his word, and the next time that the bench met, Bob O' Tims summoned Jimmy Taylor on a charge of having stolen his game-cock.
The magistrates listened to the witnesses on either side. Half-a-dozen people were ready to swear that the cock belonged to Bob. But Jimmy brought up a couple of witnesses to testify that they had seen him buy a similar animal at Turton Fair. The cock was then brought into court. It clucked and choked indignantly, and the partisans of Bob and Jimmy swore against each other as hard as ever they could. The bench appeared perplexed; and it was owing to their inability to come to any decision that the magistrate's clerk made his famous suggestion.
"The case appears to me impossible to prove as it stands, your worships," he said to the bench. "I would suggest, if I may be allowed, that you direct an officer of the court to take the cock to some spot at an equal distance between the houses of the plaintiff and of the defendant. If he is there placed upon the ground, and left to his own devices, he is pretty sure to make his way straight home."
The magistrates accepted the suggestion of the clerk, and gave judgment accordingly. A policeman was ordered to carry out their instructions. Now, this officer was young and raw, and had only recently been enrolled in the constabulary. He was a fat, rosy man, with an air of self-importance. He set out from the court with the cock under his arm. An excited crowd streamed after the policeman, who stalked on with no little pomposity. When he reached the common, which lay between the houses of the rival claimants, he stood still for a minute or two, grasping the cock and looking judiciously from one side of the broken land to the other.
The crowd eagerly commenced to give information.
"You're a bit nearer Bob O' Tims's than you are to Jimmy's!" cried one.
"Nay! Nay!" interposed another spectator, who was a partisan of Bob O' Tims. "There's a corner to turn afore you get to Bob's. It's not fair, not to make allowance for that."
"Stand back!" cried the policeman majestically—"Stand back, every man of you. The critter will be too much put about to go anywhere if you don't keep still tongues in your heads."
The officer still stood, with his legs wide apart, turning his head slowly from side to side. Once he made a pace in the direction of Jimmy Taylor's; then, changing his mind, he took a couple of steps toward Bob O' Tims's. Finally, he decided that he had fixed upon the exact locality commanded by the law, and with a magisterial air, he again waved back the crowd and deposited the cock upon the ground in front of him.
Everybody held their breath. The first thing that the cock did was to shake himself until he resembled nothing so much as a living mop. Then he began to smooth his feathers down again. Then he stretched his neck, flapped his wings and crowed. Finally, with a blink of his bright eyes, which almost appeared like a wink to the hushed and expectant crowd, he made two solemn steps with his slender legs in the direction of Jimmy Taylor's cottage.
"He's going to Jimmy's!" exclaimed the crowd with one voice.
"Can't you all be quiet for a moment or two," interposed the policeman, indignantly. "I tell you, if you don't keep still, you'll upset the critter's mind, and make the magistrates' decision just good for nothing."
The crowd appeared ashamed and relapsed once more into silence.
The policeman stood erect and tall, a few paces in front of them, watching the cock with great solemnity. It was standing still now, jerking its neck a little. Then it looked round, and, retracing its paces, began stepping slowly off in the opposite direction.
"It's going to Bob's!" cried the crowd.
But the cock was doing no such thing; it paused again, scratching in an imaginary dust-heap, and then, with a loud crow, stretched its wings and flew up into a small tree.
This was disconcerting. The policeman turned with anger upon the crowd.
"I told you you were not giving the critter a chance!" he exclaimed. "You'd best be off home. Come, move on! Move on!"
The crowd retreated, but it had no intention of going home. Some of those less interested strolled away, but the partisans of Bob and Jimmy remained at a little distance, eagerly watching to see what would happen next.
The cock, after jerking his head round several times, settled down comfortably among his feathers, and went to sleep in the tree.
This was altogether beyond the expectancy of the policeman. Not knowing what else to do, he sat down on a broken bit of fence under the tree and waited.
The day advanced. The cock slept on and the policeman began to doze. Now and then he awoke with a start, and looked up at the obstinate biped above his head. Presently the man got down from the fence and shook himself.
The partisans of Bob and Jimmy still remained at a discreet distance, watching the progress of events. The policeman stood still for a few moments, staring at the cock; then he approached the small, stumpy tree and clapped his hands vigorously.
The cock woke up, gurgled, and went to sleep again.
The policeman clapped his hands a second time, and then with shrill indignation the creature flew down from the tree, and set off in the direction of the distant moors.
The proceedings promptly assumed the aspect of a hunt. The cock ran along with outstretched wings and neck, and the policeman and the crowd ran after it. At last it reached a small cottage, belonging to a widow of the name of Gammer. Exerting a final effort, it flew up toward her open window and ensconced itself on the top of the good woman's tester-bed.
Now Mrs. Gammer was a woman of character. She heard the noise outside; and when the breathless policeman arrived at the door of her kitchen, she was wiping the soapsuds off her plump red arms, ready for any dispute or fray. She stood with her arms held akimbo, as the man in blue explained his errand. When he had finished his recital she looked at him defiantly.
"And I should like to know what you call yourself, policeman or no policeman, to be chasing a poor harmless critter across 'em blazing commons on a day like this! You want to go and poke him down from my tester-bed, do you? Well, you can just go back and tell the magistrates as Mrs. Gammer's got him, and if they want him they must come for him themselves."
This was direct defiance of the law, and the policeman commenced a remonstrance. His remarks were, however, cut short by Mrs. Gammer.
"I have always said as magistrates was as ignorant as babies, and I only wish that they was as harmless," she persisted, in open contempt of the government of her country. "You can go back, and tell 'em as Mrs. Gammer says so. My house is my house, magistrate or no magistrate, and I won't have any policeman messing about on the top of my tester-bed."
The policeman was not certain whether the authority which had been entrusted to him in the matter would justify his making a deliberate prisoner of Mrs. Gammer. And, as she showed every sign of resorting to violence, should he attempt to pass the door, which she barred with her stout figure, he decided upon beating a retreat. He went outside again and reasserted his shattered dignity by once more driving away the crowd; then, not knowing what else to do, he returned to the police station and reported the matter to the chief constable.
The chief laughed, and so did everybody else who heard the story. The policeman was directed to return to Mrs. Gammer's cottage later in the day, and serve her with an order requiring her to give up the cock immediately. But when he handed Mrs. Gammer the official paper, she laughed in his face.
"You can look round the house for the cock now if you like," she said contemptuously, slapping down the order upon the table, "and you can see if you can find him."
"Is he still on the top of your tester-bed?" demanded the policeman.
"Go and look," responded Mrs. Gammer, with a snort. "You can take the turk's-head brush and brush him down!"
So, armed with the turk's-head brush, the policeman ascended Mrs. Gammer's small, steep staircase. When he reached her bedroom, he poked into every cranny and corner with the handle of his brush. But no cock was to be found.
He descended the stairs, and stood again in the little kitchen. A savory smell of cooking arose from a stew-pan on the fire.
"Where's the critter gone to?" he demanded.
"How should I know?" replied Mrs. Gammer testily.
The policeman, still standing in the kitchen, wished that Mrs. Gammer would give him an invitation to supper. The widow glanced up sharply at him and saw what was in his mind.
"You'd like some supper, I make no doubt, after your wild-goose chase," she said. "Sit down at t' table and take a bit o' stew."
The policeman seated himself with alacrity. The stew which Mrs. Gammer placed before him consisted of a mixture of barley, onions and some white meat. He ate a hearty supper, and when he stood up he drew his hands across his mouth.
"Thank you kindly," he said. "I must be off now, and see where that cock has gone to."
Then it was that Mrs. Gammer gave a short and derisive laugh. She began to pile up the empty plates and to put the spoons and forks in the basin by the sink.
"If you go a-chasing of that cock until you are black and blue in the face," she said, "you'll never find him. And the reason why, is that you have just helped to eat him up."
"I have eat him up!" he gasped.
"Aye," responded Mrs. Gammer, with brevity. "I made him into soup!"
The policeman remained open-mouthed, staring at the impenitent widow.
"You'd no business ever to do such a thing," he said. "The cock belonged to the Law."
"I care nowt for your Law," retorted Mrs. Gammer. "Anyway you've helped to eat him!"
A vague sense of cannibalism was haunting the policeman's mind; he felt almost as dismayed as if he had made a hearty supper off the magistrate's clerk himself.
"You're a very wicked woman," he said to Mrs. Gammer. "And—and——"
He broke off, entirely nonplussed by the situation in which he found himself. Mrs. Gammer continued to wash up the spoons and forks with utter indifference to his consternation.
"The cock's eat up, and there's an end of it," she said. "You'd best go and tell the magistrates all about it."
Sheepish and disconcerted, the policeman slunk home. The next morning the chief asked him if he had served the order on Mrs. Gammer.
"I—served it," said he, scratching his head.
"And did you get the bird given up?" demanded his superior officer.
"No, I can't say as I did," replied the policeman.
"Was it still on the top of the tester-bed?" pursued his awkward questioner.
"No. It was not on the tester-bed," replied the policeman.
"Then where was it?" insisted the chief.
For several seconds the policeman was silent, then he told a lie.
"I canna say," he answered, "it war gone."
The chief shrugged his shoulders, and sent the man about the business of the day. The next time that the magistrates met, the question of Bob O' Tims's cock was again brought into court. The magistrate's clerk demanded if the case were settled.
To the great relief of the policeman, who was waiting in attendance, Bob O' Tims spoke up from the spot where he stood.
"Jim hadna stolen my cock after all, sir," he said, "for it came home the next morning."
"Then what happened to the cock that was brought into court on Tuesday?" demanded the magistrate's clerk. But nobody seemed to know.
Only, people used to wonder why Widow Gammer almost always gave a peculiar kind of snort when she spoke of Police Constable X, and why that worthy officer avoided her cottage ever after, and invariably turned down a side street if he saw the widow within speaking distance of him.
"In thewords of Macaulay this, ladies and gentleman, is the saddest spot on earth." The white-haired old Tower guard in charge of the little chapel of Saint Peter waved his hand impressively toward the open door. "Through that door"—the heads of the American tourists who were doing the Tower all turned in unison—"you may see the block upon which many a royal head has rested, and beneath these very stones lie buried two dukes between two queens—Dukes of Northumberland and of Somerset, with the Queens Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard—all beheaded."
The chapel was a crypt-like place, windowless, dark, and musty, and at this mournful climax one of the tourists who was nervous moved suddenly off that particular stone upon which she had been standing; the school teachers out for self-improvement began to write it all in their note-books, while a stout matron evidently of good old Dutch stock looked sadly down at the flat, gray stones. "Poor things!" she murmured, "and there ain't one of them got a respectable white tombstone with a wreath carved on it." Then, in their usual two-by-two line, the party moved down the aisle wearily, but triumphant in the fact that they had succeeded in doing the Tower, the Abbey, and the Museum all in one day. Peggy Wynne, in demurely severe blue suit and jaunty panama, lagged at the end of the line while she looked critically at her compatriots.
"The animals went out two by two,The elephant and the kangaroo,"
"The animals went out two by two,The elephant and the kangaroo,"
she murmured to herself, "and I'm so tired of playing Noah's Ark or a Christian Association out for a lark," she continued in unconscious poetical despair. Then, warned by the attitude of the guard, that wonderful attitude of the haughty Briton in hopes of a tip, she opened her ridiculously tiny gold-linked purse and gave herself up to the absorbing question as to which of the pieces therein was a shilling. Having at last decided this, she presented it to the guard with a dazzling smile. It had been so long since Peggy had had an opportunity to smile at anything masculine that the smile was unusually bright.
She had already passed through the little door when she suddenly turned back. The other tourists, noses in Baedekers, were hurrying on before, the guard was busily counting his sixpences, and she slipped back into the dim chapel unperceived.
"They'll think I've gone back to those dingy lodgings," she reflected, as she groped her way between the benches into an even more shadowy corner—a little recess, with a tiny niche in the wall, that had probably been the sanctuary of some pious king. She seated herself comfortably behind the pillar in the corner and gazed pensively at the stones.
"Tombs and tombs and tombs!" she murmured mournfully, "even in Paris, instead of Maxim's and the cafes, nothing but tombs! The next time I want to see where anybody is buried I will just go out to the cemetery instead of coming across that dreadful ocean. Oh, just to have one adventure before I go home!" she continued with a long sigh, "a real adventure with a real man in it—not a horrid, womanish Frenchman or a stolid, conceited Britisher, but a nice, safe American—like—like—like—my American."
Then the dimple in her right cheek that was probably responsible for the calling her Peggy, in spite of her many protests for her rightful dignity of "Margaret," came out suddenly as it always did when she thought of her American. She had called him that from the time when, in the midst of the perplexities of the English luggage system, she had looked up and found him watching her. The cut of his gray suit and his shoes had told her his nationality at once, and they had looked for a moment at each other with that peculiar friendliness that compatriots in a strange land always feel. She had forgotten him until, leaning from a taxi-cab in the Rue de la Paix, she had met the same eyes, this time so unrefrainedly joyful in their recognition that she had suddenly blushed. When, a week later at Calais, as she stood by the rail of the departing Channel steamer she caught a glimpse of him on the dock, he had seemed like an old friend, and before she had thought she had smiled in answer to his lifted hat. She had grown so sure of seeing him that now when they had been in London a week and he had not appeared she found herself suddenly sick of tombs and tourists.
Peggy's day had been a strenuous one of trams, motor-busses, abbeys, and galleries, and though she realized an adventure might probably await her outside, it was pleasant to sit for awhile in the dimness of the quiet chapel. From her recess she could look out through the open doors upon the tragic Tower Green, where in the sunlight two sparrows were frivolously flirting. Even as she watched, the sparrows grew dim, her ridiculously tiny purse slipped from her hand, her head with its thick dark hair dropped against the pillar, and her lashes touched her cheek. After awhile a cautious footfall sounded in the chapel, then somewhere a heavy door closed, and all was still.
When Peggy sat up indignantly with the queer sensation that she had been violently shaken, darkness surrounded her, a darkness so deep that she could not see her hand as she ran it along the bench in front of her. With the movement came remembrance of her surroundings, and also a realization in strained and aching muscles that a stone pillar is not a wise choice for a head-rest.
"Oh!" she gasped painfully.
"Don't be frightened," entreated a voice quite near to her, and out of the lesser darkness a tall black figure rose suddenly.
"I am not at all frightened," said Peggy at once. In spite of the bigness of the figure there was something reassuring in the voice with its crisp, humorous note and its intonation that Peggy at once recognized as American.
"What are you doing here?" she continued, inhospitably addressing the darkness before her.
"I went to sleep" the voice explained, "on the other side of the pillar."
"How silly!" said Peggy, severely, "didn't you see me here?"
"It was a little dim," the voice apologized and, Peggy's silence still condemning, "you should have snored," it continued extenuatingly.
Peggy arose with a dignity that she hoped penetrated the darkness. Then she groped along the bench.
"My purse," she explained anxiously, "and it had a sixpence for tea and two shillings for tips," she continued with an unconscious epitome of the joys of traveling. As she groped along bench and floor she was conscious of assistance from her companion, and just as she grasped the discovered purse she felt purse and hand caught and retained in a firm grip.
"I apologize," he said at once, still however, holding on to her hand, "I thought it was the purse."
Peggy jerked her hand loose indignantly, and speechless with wrath she hurried toward the door only to find that she had mistaken her direction. In her effort to recover her bearings she become hopelessly confused, stumbled noisily over a bench, and fell headlong into the arms of her companion.
"You had better sit down again," he remarked coolly as he returned her to her seat and sat down calmly beside her. As he did so Peggy noted curiously the dim attractive silhouette of his head and the remarkably good line from ear to shoulder.
"I am going at once," she said haughtily, but without moving.
"You can't," the man beside her replied, "and if you promise not to cry or fall over any more benches I will tell you why—although I myself do not object to the latter," he continued judicially, "but for the sake of your own bones, merely."
Peggy ignored the last.
"Why can't I go?" she said defiantly.
"Because the door is locked," he explained succinctly.
"We can both scream or you can throw a bench through the window," said Peggy triumphantly.
The unseen laughed a nice laugh that Peggy liked.
"In that latter case, beside the fact that there is no window, we would surely be had up before the head-warden of this old jail. Besides, do you know what time it is?"
"About tea time," said Peggy who had lunched frugally at one of the tea-shops on a cup of tea and a jam roll.
"Just before you woke up," said her companion, "I used my last match—it always is the last in a case like this—to look at my watch. It was half-past twelve. Remember, you promised——" at a warning gurgle from Peggy.
Then suddenly a laugh rang out sweet and clear in the darkness of the musty chapel, a laugh that echoed into the recesses of the old tombs—perhaps in its musical cadences stirring pleasantly the haughty slumber of their noble occupants.
"What are you laughing at?" said the voice suspiciously.
"An adventure at last!" Peggy cried, clapping her hands applaudingly.
"I am glad you take it so cheerfully," returned her companion. "There is only one thing to do," he continued practically, "I thought it out for myself before you woke up and complicated matters by your appearance. Of course with sufficient yelling we can arouse the barrack sentry, and for our pains we'd probably have the whole barrack out to arrest us. There is no way in which you can offend the noble and independent Briton more deeply than by treating lightly his worship of royalty, dead or alive, and we would probably be held for committinglese majesteby getting ourselves locked up with the numerous relicts of Henry the Eighth. But if we wait until morning we can run good chances of slipping out unperceived with the first crowd of tourists."
"I feel just like the little princes in the Tower, or Queen Mary or Charlotte Corday," murmured Peggy in ecstatic historical confusion, "or somebody noble and romantic and beheaded. I think I shall play at being Queen Mary. I once learned a piece about her. It was very sad, but I always stuck at the fifth line and had to sit down. Since we have to stay here till morning we might as well amuse ourselves and you may be Rizzio."
"Who was he?" asked her companion sceptically, "sounds like one of those Italian fellows."
"He was Queen Mary's chaperon," Peggy explained vaguely, "and he sang her love songs."
"Good," said the voice agreeably.
"Can't you think of something else for me?" said the unseen, gloomily appalled by the prospect of having doughnut recipes pronounced over his remains.
"How would you like to be Darnley?" said Peggy. "He was her husband." "I'll be Darnley," came from the darkness so decidedly that Peggy jumped.
"You have to get blown-up right off," she hastened to add. "Darnley did."
"Oh he did, did he?" the voice spoke with deeper gloom.
"Queen Mary did it," added Peggy.
"Well, even in the Dark Ages matrimony seems to have given your sex the same privileges," philosophized her companion cynically.
"How mean!" said Peggy coldly, "I shall play at being Elizabeth all alone."
"It wouldn't suit you," said her discarded leading man, "not with your voice."
"Why not?" said Peggy.
"Because it's not hard and cold and metallic enough. Because it has too much womanly sweetness in it and not enough harsh masculinity."
"What a good dramatic critic you would make!" said Peggy a little spitefully, "and since you are reading voices I can tell quite well by yours that you are fat and red faced."
The man laughed.
"And by the same token you are all sweetness and blue eyes and dearness and dimples," he punished her. Then the banter in his tones died suddenly out.
"There's something I want to tell you," he said abruptly, with a movement that seemed in the darkness like a sudden squaring of his shoulders. "But first I want you to tell me your name."
"What a sudden descent from romance and poetry to mere stupid facts," hedged Peggy. "Think, in this atmosphere of royalties if it should be Bridget, or, still more horrible, Mamie."
"Please," the voice persisted in its gravity, "we have been fellow-prisoners, you know, and you should be kind."
Peggy told him with the full three-syllabled dignity of the "Margaret."
"Mine," he continued, "is John Barrett."
"Now," cried Peggy, "if this were a proper adventure we have reached the place when I should be able to say, 'Why! not the Jack Barrett that Brother Billy knew at Harvard?' Then you would cry, 'And this is my old chum William's little sister Peggy that used to send him fudge!' and then everything would be all right. But I haven't any brother at all," she finished regretfully.
"And Harvard wasn't my college," said her companion. "However," he went on, "it would take more than the conventional backing of many brother Billies to put me right with you after I've told you what I have to tell you."
"Then don't do it," said Peggy softly.
"If I didn't know you'd find it out in a very few minutes I wouldn't," he confessed shamelessly. "But before I tell you I want you to know what finding you here meant to me. You've got to realize the temptation before you can understand the fall. You always got away from me, from that first time in Liverpool——"
"Oh!" said Peggy with a gasp.
"And at Paris and at Calais when you smiled adorably at me——"
"I didn't" said Peggy, blushing in the darkness.
"When you didn't smile adorably at me, then," pursued the voice relentlessly. "It was always the same. I found you and you were gone—snatched away by an unkind fate in the form of your man from Cook's. When you sailed away from me at Calais I was booked to leave that same day from Antwerp, but I came on here after you instead. London is small—the American tourist London, that is—the Abbey, the Museum, the galleries, and the Tower, but I seemed to miss you everywhere. It was fate again that sent me here to find you asleep in the corner."
"Now I know you are going to tell something very foolish," said Peggy reflectively, "when people begin to talk about fate like that you always find they are just trying to shift the responsibility."
"I want you to know it wasn't premeditated, however," pursued the voice. "It wasn't till the guard shut the door that I thought of it. You will believe that, won't you?" he pleaded.
The dimple appeared suddenly in Peggy's cheek. There came an echo from without of many footsteps.
"And so," she took up the tale quickly, "having nicely planned it all out you shook me rudely to wake me up, told me the door was locked, and that it was midnight when it was only four in the afternoon. And it wasn't at all necessary to shake me so hard," she continued, "because I woke up when you came in."
"Peggy you knew!" the voice cried with a sudden realization, "you knew and you stayed!" He caught her hand, and in the darkness she could feel his nearness. Then suddenly the door opened letting into the chapel a flood of bright sunlight. "Ladies and gentlemen," the sonorous voice of the old guard came to them, "this, in the words of Macaulay, is the saddest spot on earth," continued the mournful recital, even as, in happy contradiction, Peggy and her American, secure in their little recess, looked blissfully into each other's eyes.
Theoldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company. Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a passenger train when Jimmie Brady was running—and Jimmie afterward enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.
There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men, struck by the gold fever, were abandoning their trains even at way-stations and striking across the divide for Clark's Crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, trainmaster, was putting in every man he could pick up without reference to age or color. Porter (he died at Julesburg afterward) was a great "jollier," and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth. One day a war party of Sioux clattered into town and tore around like a storm. They threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below, under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them interested in it. That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to have been one of that original war party.
Now this is merely a caboose story, told on winter nights when trainmen get stalled in the snow that drifts down from the Sioux country. But what follows is better attested.
Sankey, to start with, had a peculiar name—an unpronounceable, unspellable, unmanageable name. I never heard it, so I can't give it to you; but it was as hard to catch as an Indian pony, and that name made more trouble on the payrolls than all the other names put together. Nobody at headquarters could handle it; it was never turned in twice alike, and they were always writing Tom Porter about the thing. Tom explained several times that it was Sitting Bull's ambassador who was drawing that money, and that he usually signed the pay-roll with a tomahawk. But nobody at Omaha ever knew how to take a joke. The first time Tom went down, he was called in very solemnly to explain again about the name, and being in a hurry and very tired of the whole business, Tom spluttered: "Hang it, don't bother me any more about that name! If you can't read it make it Sankey, and be done with it."
They took Tom at his word. They actually did make it Sankey; and that's how our oldest conductor came to bear the name of the famous singer. And more I may tell you: good name as it was—and is—the Sioux never disgraced it.
I suppose every old traveler on the system knew Sankey. He was not only always ready to answer questions; but, what is more, ready to answer the same question twice. It is that which makes conductors gray-headed and spoils their chances for heaven—answering the same questions over and over again. Children were apt to be startled a bit at first sight of Sankey, he was so dark. But Sankey had a very quiet smile that always made them friends after the first trip through the sleepers, and they sometimes ran about asking for him after he had left the train. Of late years—and this hurts a bit—these very same children, grown ever so much bigger, and riding again to or from California or Japan or Australia, will ask, when they reach the West End, about the Indian conductor. But the conductors who now run the overland trains pause at the question, checking over the date limits on the margins of the coupon tickets, and handing the envelopes back, look at the children, and say quietly: "He isn't running any more."
If you have ever gone over our line to the mountains or to the coast, you may remember at McCloud, where they change engines and set the diner in or out, the pretty little green park to the east of the depot, with a row of catalpa trees along the platform line. It looks like a glass of spring water. If it happened to be Sankey's run and a regular West End day, sunny and delightful, you would be sure to see standing under the catalpas a shy, dark-skinned girl of fourteen or fifteen years, silently watching the preparations for the departure of the Overland. And after the new engine had been backed champing down, and harnessed to its long string of vestibuled sleepers; after the air-hose had been connected and examined; after the engineer had swung out of his cab, filled his cups, and swung in again; after the fireman and his helper had disposed of their slice-bar and shovel and given the tender a final sprinkle, and after the conductor had walked leisurely forward, compared time with the engineer, and cried, "All Abo-o-o-ard!" then, as your coach moved slowly ahead, you might notice, under the receding catalpas, the little girl waving a parasol or a handkerchief at the outgoing train. That is, at Conductor Sankey; for she was his daughter, Neeta Sankey. Her mother was Spanish, and died when Neeta was a wee bit. Neeta and the Limited were Sankey's whole world.
When Georgie Sinclair began pulling the Limited, running west opposite Foley, he struck up a great friendship with Sankey. Sankey, though he was hard to start, was full of early-day stories. Georgie, it seemed, had the faculty of getting him to talk; perhaps because when he was pulling Sankey's train he made extraordinary efforts to keep on time; time was a hobby with Sankey. Foley said he was so careful of it that he let his watch stop when he was off duty just to save time. Sankey loved to breast the winds and the floods and the snows, and if he could get home pretty near on schedule, with everybody else late, he was happy; and in respect of that, as Sankey used to say, Georgie Sinclair could come nearer gratifying Sankey's ambition than any engine-runner we had. Even the firemen used to observe that the young engineer, always neat, looked still neater on the days when he took out Sankey's train.
By and by there was an introduction under the catalpas. After that it was noticed that Georgie began wearing gloves on the engine—not kid gloves, but yellow dogskin; and black silk shirts—he bought them in Denver. Then—such an odd way engineers have of paying compliments—when Georgie pulled into town on Number Two, if it was Sankey's train, the big sky-scraper would give a short, hoarse scream, a most peculiar note, just as it drew past Sankey's house, which stood on the brow of the hill west of the yards. Thus Neeta would know that Number Two and her father, and naturally Mr. Sinclair, were in again, and all safe and sound.
When the railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud there was a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor—a gold-plated lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton, who were very swell conductors and great rivals, were the favorites, and had the town divided over their chances for winning it. But at the last moment Georgie Sinclair stepped up to the booth and cast a storm of votes for old man Sankey. Doton's friends and Stewart's laughed at first; but Sankey's votes kept pouring in amazingly. The two favorites got frightened; they pooled their issues by throwing Stewart's vote to Doton. But it wouldn't do. Georgie Sinclair, with a crowd of engineers—Cameron, Kennedy, Foley, Bat Mullen, and Burns—came back at them with such a swing that in the final five minutes they fairly swamped Doton. Sankey took the lantern by a thousand votes. But I understood it cost Georgie and his friends a pot of money.
Sankey said all the time that he didn't want the lantern, but just the same he always carried that particular lantern, with his full name, Sylvester Sankey, ground into the glass just below the green mantle. Pretty soon, Neeta being then eighteen, it was rumored that Sinclair was engaged to Miss Sankey, and was going to marry her. And marry her he did; though that was not until after the wreck in the Blackwood gorge after the Big Snow.
It goes by just that name on the West End yet; for never were such a winter and such a snow known on the plains and in the mountains. One train on the northern division was stalled six weeks that winter, and one whole coach was chopped up for kindling wood. The great and desperate effort of the company was to hold open the main line, the artery which connected the two coasts. It was a hard winter on trainmen. Week after week the snow kept falling and blowing. The trick was not to clear the line; it was to keep it clear. Every day we sent out trains with the fear that we should not see them again for a week. Freight we didn't pretend to move; local passenger business had to be abandoned. Coal, to keep our engines and our towns supplied, we had to carry; and after that all the brains and muscle and motive power were centered on keeping One and Two, our through passenger trains, running.
Our trainmen worked like Americans; there were no cowards on our rolls. But after too long a strain men become exhausted, benumbed, indifferent; reckless, even. The nerves give out, and will-power seems to halt on indecision; but decision is the life of the fast train. None of our conductors stood the hopeless fight like Sankey. He was patient, taciturn, untiring; and in a conflict with the elements, ferocious. All the fighting blood of his ancestors seemed to course again in that struggle with the winter king. I can see him yet, on bitter days, standing alongside the track in a heavy pea-jacket and Napoleon boots, a sealskin cap drawn snugly over his straight black hair, watching, ordering, signaling, while Number One, with its frost-bitten sleepers behind a rotary, tried to buck through ten and twenty-foot cuts which lay bank-full of snow west of McCloud.
Not until April did it begin to look as if we should win out. A dozen times the line was all but choked on us. And then, when snow-plows were disabled and train crews desperate, there came a storm that discounted the worst blizzard of the winter. As the reports rolled in on the morning of the 5th, growing worse as they grew thicker, Neighbor, dragged out, played out, mentally and physically, threw up his hands. It snowed all day the 6th, and on Saturday morning the section men reported thirty feet in the Blackwood cañon. It was six o'clock when we got the word, and daylight before we got the rotary against it. They bucked away till noon without much headway, and came in with their gear smashed and a driving-rod fractured. It looked as if we were at last beaten. Number One pulled into McCloud that day eighteen hours late; it was Sankey's and Sinclair's run west.
There was a long council in the round-house. The rotary was knocked out; coal was running low in the chutes. If the line wasn't kept open for the coal from the mountains, it was plain we should be tied until we could ship it from Iowa or Missouri. West of Medicine Pole there was another big rotary working east, with plenty of coal behind her; but she was reported stuck fast in the Cheyenne Hills. Foley made suggestions, and Dad Sinclair made suggestions. Everybody had a suggestion left. The trouble was, Neighbor said, they didn't amount to anything, or were impossible. "It's a dead block, boys," announced Neighbor sullenly after everybody had done. "We are beaten unless we can get Number One through to-day. Look there: by the holy poker, it's snowing again."
The air was dark in a minute with whirling clouds. Men turned to the windows and quit talking. Every fellow felt the same—hopeless; at least, all but one. Sankey, sitting back of the stove, was making tracings with a piece of chalk. "You might as well unload your passengers, Sankey," said Neighbor. "You'll never get 'em through this winter."
And it was then that Sankey proposed his double-header.
He devised a snow-plow which combined in one monster ram about all the good material we had left, and submitted the scheme to Neighbor. Neighbor studied it, and hacked at it all he could, and brought it over to the office. It was like staking everything on the last cast of the dice, but we were in the state of mind which precedes a desperate venture. It was talked over an hour, and orders were finally given by the superintendent to rig up the double-header and get against the snow with it.
All that day and most of the night Neighbor worked twenty men on Sankey's device. By Sunday morning it was in such shape that we began to take heart. "If she don't get through, she'll sure get back again, and that's what most of 'em don't do," growled Neighbor, as he and Sankey showed the new ram to the engineers.
They had taken the 566, George Sinclair's engine, for one head, and Burns's, the 497, for the other. Behind these were Kennedy, with the 314, and Cameron, with the 296. The engines were set in pairs, headed each way, and buckled up like pack mules. Over the pilots and stacks of the head engines rose the tremendous plows, which were to tackle the worst drifts ever recorded, before or since, on the West End. The ram was designed to work both ways. Under the coal, each tender was loaded with pig-iron.
The beleaguered passengers on Number One, side-tracked in the yards, eagerly watched the preparations Sankey was making to clear the line. Every amateur on the train had his camera out taking pictures of the ram. The town, gathered in a single great mob, looked silently on, and listened to the frosty notes of the sky-scrapers as they went through their preliminary manœuvers. Just as the final word was given by Sankey, conductor in charge, the sun burst through the fleecy clouds, and a wild cheer followed the ram out of the western yard; it was looked on as a sign of good luck to see the sun again.
Little Neeta, up on the hill, must have seen them as they pulled out. Surely she heard the choppy ice-bitten screech of the 566; for that was never forgotten, whether the service was special or regular. Besides, the head cab of the ram carried this time not only Georgie Sinclair, but her father as well. Sankey could handle a slice-bar as well as a punch, and rode on the head engine, where, if anywhere, the big chances would come. What Sankey was not capable of in the train-service we never knew, because he rose superior to every emergency that ever confronted him.
Bucking snow is principally brute force; there is very little coaxing. West of the bluffs there was a volley of sharp tooting, like code signals between a fleet of cruisers, and in just a minute the four ponderous engines, two of them in the back motion, fires white and throats bursting, steamed wildly into the cañon. Six hundred feet from the first cut, Sinclair's whistle signaled again. Burns and Cameron and Kennedy answered; and then, literally turning the monster ram loose against the dazzling mountain, the crews settled themselves for the shock.
At such a moment there is nothing to be done. If anything goes wrong, eternity is too close to consider. There came a muffled drumming on the steam-chests; a stagger and a terrific impact; and then the recoil, like the stroke of a trip-hammer. The snow shot into the air fifty feet, and the wind carried a cloud of fleecy confusion over the ram and out of the cut. The cabs were buried in white, and the great steel frames of the engines sprung like knitting-needles under the frightful force of the blow. Pausing for hardly a breath, they began the signaling again; then backed up and up and up the line; and again the massive machines were hurled screaming into the cut. "We're getting there, Georgie," cried Sankey when the rolling and lurching had stopped.
No one else could tell a thing about it, for it was snow and snow and snow; above and behind and ahead and beneath. Sinclair coughed the flakes out of his eyes and nose and mouth like a baffled collie. He looked doubtful of the claim until the mist had blown clear and the quivering monsters were again recalled for a dash. Then it was plain that Sankey's instinct was right; they were gaining.
Again they went in, lifting a very avalanche over the stacks, packing the banks of the cut with walls hard as ice. Again, as the drivers stuck, they raced in a frenzy, and into the shriek of the wind went the unearthly scrape of the overloaded safeties. Slowly and sullenly the machines were backed again. "She's doing the work, Georgie," cried Sankey. "For that kind of a cut she's as good as a rotary. Look everything over now while I go back and see how the boys are standing it. Then we'll give her one more, and give it the hardest kind."
And they did give her one more; and another. Men at Santiago put up no stouter fight than these men made that Sunday morning in the cañon of the Blackwood. Once they went in, and twice. And the second time the bumping drummed more deeply; the drivers held, pushed, panted, and gained against the white wall; heaved and stumbled ahead; and with a yell from Sinclair and Sankey and the fireman, the double-header shot her nose into the clear over the Blackwood gorge. As engine after engine flew past the divided walls each cab took up the cry; it was the wildest crowd that ever danced to victory. Through they went and half-way across the bridge before they could check their monster catapult. Then, at a half full, they shot it back again at the cut, for it worked as well one way as the other.
"The thing is done," declared Sankey, when they got into position up the line for a final shoot to clean out the eastern cut and get head for a dash across the bridge and into the west end of the cañon, where there lay another mountain of snow to split. "Look the machines over pretty close, boys," said he to the engineers. "If nothing's sprung, we'll take a full head across the gorge—the bridge will carry anything—and buck the west cut. Then after we get Number One through this afternoon, Neighbor can put his baby cabs in here and keep 'em chasing all night. But it's done snowing," he added, looking at the leaden sky.
He had the plans all figured out for the master mechanic, the shrewd, kindly old man. I think, myself, there's no man on earth like a good Indian; and, for that matter, none like a bad one. Sankey knew by a military instinct just what had to be done and how to do it. If he had lived, he was to have been assistant superintendent. That was the word that leaked from headquarters afterward. And with a volley of jokes between the cabs and a laughing and yelling between toots, down went Sankey's double-header again into the Blackwood gorge.
At the same moment, by an awful misunderstanding of orders, down came the big rotary from the west end with a dozen cars of coal behind. Mile after mile it had wormed east toward Sankey's ram, and it now burrowed through the western cut of the Blackwood, crashed through the drift Sankey was aiming for, and whirled out into the open, dead against him, at forty miles an hour. Each train, in order to make the grade and the blockade against it, was straining the cylinders.
Through the swirling snow that half hid the bridge and interposed between the rushing plows Sinclair saw them coming. He yelled. Sankey saw them a fraction of a second later, and while Sinclair struggled with the throttle and the air, Sankey gave the alarm through the whistle to the poor fellows in the blind pockets behind. But the track was at the worst. Where there was no snow there were "whiskers"; oil itself couldn't have been worse to stop on. It was the old and deadly peril of fighting blockades from both ends on a single track. The great rams of steel and fire had done their work, and with their common enemy overcome, they dashed at each other like madmen across the Blackwood gorge.
The fireman at the first cry shot out the side. Sankey yelled at Sinclair to jump. But Georgie shook his head: he never would jump. Without hesitating, Sankey picked him from the levers in his arms, planted a sure foot, and hurled him like a coal shovel through the gangway far out into the gorge. The other cabs were already empty. But the instant's delay in front cost Sankey his life. Before he himself could jump the rotary crashed into the 566. They reared like mountain lions, pitched sideways and fell headlong into the creek, fifty feet. Sankey went under them. He could have saved himself; he chose to save George. There wasn't time to do both; he had to choose, and to choose instantly. Did he, maybe, think in that flash of Neeta and of whom she needed most—of a young and a stalwart protector rather than an old and failing one? I do not know; I know only what he did. Every one who jumped got clear. Sinclair lit in ten feet of snow, and they pulled him out with a rope: he wasn't scratched. Even the bridge was not badly strained. Number One pulled over it next day.
Sankey was right; there was no more snow; not even enough to cover the dead engines that lay on the rocks. But the line was open: the fight was won.
There never was a funeral in McCloud like Sankey's. George Sinclair and Neeta followed first, and of the mourners there were as many as there were spectators. Every engine on the division carried black for thirty days.
Sankey's contrivance for fighting snow has never yet been beaten on the high line. It is perilous to go against a drift behind it: something has to give. But it gets there, as Sankey got there—always; and in time of blockade and desperation on the West End they still send out Sankey's double-header; though Sankey, as the conductors tell the children, traveling east or traveling west—Sankey isn't running any more.