"Yes, another friend," she nodded with fleeting meaning, "I was at Vassar with Elsie Gossamer."
Face to face with a woman like Sally Madeira the thought of a woman like Miss Gossamer must necessarily stay hazy in a man's brain. As with another Romeo, Rosaline had but laid the velvet up which came the surer feet of Juliet. "Well," said Steering happily, "all this is going to make us acquainted, isn't it?"
"It may, if you like." She had a splendid comradeship of manner. Her father's energy stopped short of bluster in her. Borne up on her breezy westernism was a fragrant reserve, a fine reticence that disengaged a tantalising promise.
"Oh, I'll like!" cried Bruce with conviction. "Do you live in Canaan?"
"Out at Madeira Place. Father said you were to come out to dine with us to-day. I hope you will."
"He will, he will! Trust me for that!" Madeira came through the space between the wall and the Force's cage noisily. For the first timethat morning Steering felt no repugnance to that disposition of Madeira's to take charge of him, and he went off with Madeira, a moment later, across Court House Square to the recorder's office, with tread elastic and eyes sparkling.
When the two men had left her, the girl moved over to the plate-glass window and watched Steering, a little smile on her lips, an adequate enjoyment of his undoing dancing mercilessly in her long amber-hued eyes.
Steering stopped behind Madeira at the door of the recorder's office and, looking back at the plate-glass window unexpectedly, saw the girl's eyes fixed demurely on the floor where her boot showed under the hem of her long straight gown. It was a very little moment that they stood thus, he with his eyes on her, she with her eyes on her boot, but it was an electric moment. With him it was a cycle of self-abuse for the unadvised rot that he had talked to Piney, an era of gratitude to Piney for being the sort who would not report any of it to Miss Madeira. (Even so little did Steering understand that a boy like Piney would necessarily have to tell a woman like Miss Madeira about all that he knew;tell it exuberantly, bubblingly, without ever being quite conscious that he was telling anything.) Steering followed Madeira inside the recorder's office slowly, and the girl went on standing at the plate-glass window, studying her foot.
"Yes, indeed, sir," she began calling to him soundlessly, and broke off abruptly and stood there at the window for a time, motionless and thoughtful. She was a tall girl, of a broad-shouldered, athletic type, a college girl by the sign of the austere cut of her gown, but a western girl by the sign of the flying ends of the scarf about her throat, the unafraid looseness of her bright hair. Her face, lit by her amber eyes and crowned by those loose masses of hair, had a rare, dusky-gold beauty. Despite her hair she was dark-skinned, smooth and warm like bisque, and that same gold-dusted radiance that was in her hair and that same amber-gold light that was in her eyes glowed ineffably from beneath her skin. She was a pulse of light, colourful and vibrant. "Yes, indeed, sir," she resumed after a while, jabbing the hat-pin into the hat relentlessly, "thisis what a Missouri girl is like!"
My dear Carry:
I should have written you sooner, save that the developments here have given me so little that is pleasant to write about. My experience with Grierson's agent has been too exasperating for description, and I should have given up and have got out at once had it not been for the Missouri in me, and had I not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences.
To begin with: When I reached Missouri, I lit out for the southwestern part of the State by train. At Springfield I fell in with some English fellows who are over at Joplin in the interests of a Welsh company. They had an expedition all planned to take in some of the Southwest by team on their way back to Joplin, and as they were going to push down pretty close to my objective point, I joined the expedition. There was a great deal of enthusiasm among us about zinc,—jack they call itdown here,—and the talk at first was all of the stupidity of Missourians in not getting at this part of their State, as well as the section about Joplin, in the search for ore. I noticed that as we got into the rough-going of the ridge roads, and the hills got steeper and the woods denser and the rocks thicker, the opinion seemed to grow upon us that Missourians might understand their country better than we did. We had a driver who knew the roads well, when he could find them. We had a geological expert who got sadder and sadder every time we spilled out of the waggons and speared around in the rocks for a little while. And we had a great deal of bacon. Still, when we reached Bessietown, where we struck the steam-cars, the Joplin crowd broke for the train on a run. From Bessie there was a straight trail over the Ridge to Canaan and I decided to make the trip on horseback. I had got stubborn.
Well, by and by, and more and more full of bacon, I was at Canaan, and had found Crittenton Madeira, that agent with whom we had the correspondence. I walked in upon Madeira with a pretty little notion that you and I had had something to do with the projection of a plan for developing and mining the Tigmores; I could have sworn that we originated the idea of hypothecating my heirship to the Canaan Tigmores; I remembered that in New York the fact that I would inherit from Grierson seemed to make my association with any enterprise for the development of the Tigmores of vital importance. I had not forgotten that that was our argument, and I was nursing a feeling that I was fairly necessary to any permanency of operations in the Tigmores. I am all straightened out on that score now, thanks to Madeira. The situation that I find here is this: Madeira has calmly taken over our ideas, and his plans of organisation are about complete. He is qualified to act for Grierson absolutely. The company that he will organise is to be known as The Canaan Mining and Development Company. He appreciates stingily that it may be some advantage to have me associated with the company, for the purpose of imparting a feeling of confidence to investors, but he does not begin to attach the importance to me that you and I did. He will let me in if I want to come in, but it is quite evident that he can getalong without me, and yet more evident that if he takes me in, I must resign myself to his dictation,—dictating is his strong suit. To the gentleman who expected to be the president of the Steering-Grierson Company, that is not a pleasant programme; yet, my dear Carington, my circumstances are so precarious that I might attempt to fill it, if I did not see through Madeira's lack of principle, negatively speaking,—rascality, positively speaking. Now, I may have winked one eye occasionally during my business career, but I have never yet been able to shut both at once. It may be taste and it may be morals. Heretofore I have taken business too casually really to know how I am equipped for it. I have never before really met myself, spoken to myself, as I hustled through the few commercial hours of each day of my life. But out here business has become a thing of wider import on the instant, and already I am face to face with something stiff and hard on the inside of me that promises not to be very malleable under Madeira's hands. Madeira's hands, my dear boy, are pot-black. The plan that with us was a fair and squareenterprise has become with him a clap-trap scheme to rob investors. I don't know how he means to do it, but he will do it. There is a chance that the company may get good money out of the Canaan Tigmores in zinc, but there is a much richer chance that Madeira will get good money out of the company, zinc or no zinc.
So here I am in a pleasant situation. I can take my choice between a block of shares in the new company, my vote to be in Madeira's control, and a place far back, where I can watch Madeira operate my land to his profit while I wait for old Grierson to die. I am holding off as yet, dazzled by both prospects. Meantime the organisation of Madeira's company is being effected among the local capitalists, the store-keepers and the substantial farmers, and it's only a question of a few days until the directorate shuts in my face. Madeira is to take me over to Joplin to-morrow,—to let the showing there have its effect upon me, to let me catch the ore fever, I suspect.
Immediately upon my arrival here, I looked into the history of my relationship to Grierson, and also looked up the record of the Peele will. Grierson isthe grandson of one of the sisters of old Bruce Peele, while I am the great-great-grandson of another sister. My great-grandfather did not like pioneer life and went back East to live and cultivate the Steering family-tree into me, as the last, topmast, splendid blossom. The Grierson family stayed in Missouri and petered out into this Bruce Grierson. He is of my grandfather's generation, though he is a much younger man than a grandfather of mine could possibly be with the record of my age and my father's age to be accounted for.
Two branches of the family tree
I got profoundly excited in studying out the two branches of the family that are involved in the entail. Here is a map of the relationship for your benefit.
You can understand from that, can't you, Carington?[1]
The Peele will is simple. Old Bruce Peele lived a long life as a bachelor, with a strong aversion to matrimony. Toward the end he suffered one of those revolutions in valuations that sometimes upturn people of extreme prejudices. His will sets forth emphatically that he came tardily to realise that posterity is the best thing a man can leave behind him. He had two sisters, both of whom were well along in life, unmarried, and possessed of their brother's disinclination to marry. To encourage them to cross the Rubicon he made the will that entailed the Canaan Tigmores to the heirs, first of one and then the other, under the following provisions: the land was to go to the male heirs of his sister Nancy Peele, from oldest son to oldest son so long as there were male heirs, provided that in each generation the oldest male representative of Nancy married before he reached the age of thirty-five. If, in any generation, Nancy's representative fails to marry at thirty-five, the Canaan Tigmores pass to the male representative of Kate Peele, uponthe death of the man who failed. Nancy Peele married a Grierson, and so pronounced was the inherited aversion to matrimony in the house of Grierson that compliance with the terms of the will has lasted through two generations only. The present Bruce Grierson let the time-limit overtake and pass him twenty years ago, but, unmarried and grouchy, he has stood between me and the Canaan Tigmores ever since. I don't count until he dies, and not then unless I am married before I am thirty-five. (However, I feel that I might be more disposed to meet the will's requirements than the Griersons have been.)
The present Grierson is utterly unapproachable. He has not lived in this section for many years. He is particularly unapproachable on the subject of the Canaan Tigmores because he spent a great part of his youth prospecting through these hills, hoping and being disappointed. At last he turned his back upon Canaan, bitterly disillusioned, and he has been a wanderer upon the face of the earth ever since, sometimes hunting gold in the Rockies, sometimes after silver in Mexico. Half the time even Madeira does not know where he is.
The queerest thing about the mining business, Carington, is the "hunches." The Englishmen told me that down at Joplin a man would rather have a dream that he walks two miles sou'-sou-west, turns around three times on his heels and finds ore under his left heel, than to have a geologist assure him that his house sits on a ledge of Cherokee limestone that ought to be all right for zinc. I have met great numbers of miners who are hunchers. The most interesting is a man named Bernique, an old chap of education and refinement from St. Louis. He has a hunch about the Canaan Tigmores—at least so far in my intercourse with him I have not found anything more tangible than a hunch. I fell in with him just before I reached Canaan, and though he then declared his intention of being absent for some days, he did not go away, sought me out in Canaan next day and has spent a good deal of time with me ever since. He is a splendid old character. Missouri is chuck full of character, for the matter of that. Besides old Bernique, I have made another friend, named Piney. Isn't that a pretty nice name? He is a sort of gipsy lad who roams thewoods in company with old Bernique. I have seen him nearly every day since I have been here, because old Bernique and I ride about the Tigmores, and Piney is sure to fall in with us somewhere along the road. I have also met some others.
You can have no conception, Carry, of the strength of pull that Missouri can exert over a fellow. You stand up on a hill and look at her, and something, your dead forefathers maybe, comes up to you in waves of influence. "Come back to your own!" says the Something, "I am waiting for you! By me conquer!" The longer I stay in Missouri, the longer I mean to stay. I have accepted the challenge of this great unconquered, waiting land. It is my own country.
Sorry to have kept you so long over all this, but I thought that you ought to know. Shall write you the out-look after the Joplin trip. I have a notion that things will be adjusted toward the future after that.
Give my love to the fellows.Yours, B. S.
P. S. Please express me one of those fold-up, carry-around-with-you bath-tubs.
When Carington, in the office down on Nassau Street, had read that, all of it, he turned over the last sheet and looked blankly at its blankness, quoted from the first paragraph, "Had I not got a feeling of encouragement from other experiences"; reread the entire letter, and was still afflicted with a sense of something lacking.
"Now where the dickens did he get the encouragement?" cried Carington fretfully. "Psha! he has not put that in at all!"
As a matter of entity and quiddity, it is well-nigh impossible to put into a letter the little quivering lift of spirit that may come to a man just because a girl's hair is lustrous, her eyes winey, her voice delicious, her smile one of gay fellowship.
FOOTNOTE:[1]Carington could not.
[1]Carington could not.
[1]Carington could not.
"Here we are! This is the town that jack built, this is the town the poet wrote about!" Madeira was leaning forward from the rear seat of a high road-cart to talk to Steering, who sat on the front seat beside the driver. Madeira had the back seat by himself, but, leaning forward, with both arms spraddled out behind Steering and the driver, he seemed now and then to take possession of the front seat, too.
"Yes!" cried the driver, who, fearless, confident, glowing, was managing her spirited horses skilfully, "at Joplin's gates, you must chant the classic, 'Hey this, what's this?'"
"And up from the city rolls the triumphant answer, 'This is the town that jack built!'" declaimed Steering, glancing down into the driver's face with accordant appreciation. He felt accordant and he felt appreciative. He had enjoyedthe little railway journey from Canaan in company with the Madeiras. He had enjoyed the night before, which he had spent at the house of a Joplin friend of the Madeiras. He was enjoying the ride now. The friend of the Madeiras had put good horses at Madeira's disposal and Miss Sally Madeira could get speed out of good horses as easily as other women get a purr out of a kitten. Even Madeira, just behind him, crowding forward upon him, did not very much bother Steering. It was all enjoyable.
They were on a long wide street that presented violently contrasted activities, hard to encompass with one pair of eyes. For blocks the buildings lined off on either side, low, flimsy and hastily constructed—mining-camp architecture, that gave way at abrupt intervals to tall and sightly brick-and-stone structures, built for the future metropolis rather than for the present camp. A section of an electric railway that was thirty-two miles long ran through the street, and the handsomely equipped cars on it clipped past mud-encrusted mule teams from distant hill farms, prairie schooners, and dilapidated carryalls. The scene was tremendously,occidentally irregular, setting forth that merciless clutch of the future upon the past that makes the present mere transition. The town was hard pushed to catch up with its own vast possibilities. A small place, set suddenly forward as one of the world's great ore markets, it could not even house the mining business that had poured in upon it, and that made of its main thoroughfare a tossing, turbulent stream of people. Almost every building that Steering saw was crowded to the doors with mining brokers' desks, mining brokers' desks spilled out on the side-walk, desks could be seen at the doors of the retail stores and desks kept banking-house doors from shutting. The windows of the newspaper offices and of the mineral companies were crowded with displays of ore. The hub-bub about these places was fierce, unbearable. Young men, with their handkerchiefs in their collars, hurried from one office to another, warm with excitement, flapping great bunches of letters and memoranda in their hands as they hurried. Messenger boys ran up and down the streets with telegrams. Buyers from the Kansas smelters, smelters in Illinois, smelters up about St. Louis, smelters inIndiana, smelters in Wales, nosed around like ferrets. Fine young men, who were supposed to look after the interests of the big foreign companies, sauntered out of bar-rooms, doing violence to the supposition. Map-sellers whacked their hands with folders. Wooden booths flung signs to the streets bigger than the booths themselves: "Mineral Companies Promoted," "Mining and Smelting," "Mines, Options, Leases,"—there was no end to the variations of the eternal theme of mining. Town lots, switches of flats, and hill ridges were being swapped and sold and leased from the curb-stone; leases were being made from buggies and options were being granted from a horse's back.
"Whewee!" marvelled Steering, with a little itch of fear for the ore-mad people, "legal forms are being put to fearful strains, are they not, with all this heedless buying and selling?"
Madeira laughed loudly, "God bless you, legal forms! All that a man who wants to sell has to do is to throw a plank, any little rotten plank, across the chasm of future litigation and ten buyers will walk it with nerves of steel." He patted Steering's shoulder. "My boy, it's this headlong impetus that assures the success of the Canaan Company. If I get that thing started once, all I have to do is to advertise it down here a week. The stock will go like hot-cakes. People don't care what they buy, just so they buy. They've got no sense of value left. Why, a man found an outcrop of a zinc lode under his chicken-coop yesterday—and to-day the price of chicken-coops has gone up." Madeira patted Steering's shoulder again and laughed again, pleased at his aptness in figuring the thing out.
"He's just exactly right," said the girl, nodding at Steering. "Over here the average man needs a guardian to keep him out of the clutches of the 'boodlers.' I almost hate to see this sort of excitement come into Canaan. Father has been pretty busy all his life looking after infant men, but from now on his plight is going to be pitiable. I saw that yesterday afternoon, Dad, when the farmers were filing into the bank to put their money into your hands." The girl, turning back to smile at Madeira, was the cause of Steering's turning back, too, and he was surprised to see a patriarchal, benign expression on Madeira's face, as though areflection of the girl's illusions about his character lay warm upon him.
"Oh, I don't mind my job as nurse for the Canaanites, Pet," said Madeira softly, and then waved one hand out toward the city and changed the subject. "Pretty good for a lazy semi-southern State, eh, Steering?" He nudged the girl next and added: "Before we are through with him we'll have convinced the New Yorker that a good deal happens outside New York. Won't we, Pet?"
"Yes, sirree," said the girl, imitating her father's manner adroitly, as she put her horses through the crowded thoroughfare, "the United States of America has more than one way of living the life strenuous, and Broadway, New York, doesn't begin to be the only place where she lives it. Look abroad, look abroad!" She was altogether fascinating as she pointed out to Steering little typical features that he would have missed without her humourous, boastful sallies.
As they continued on their way, Madeira and the girl bowed and smiled to acquaintances, and once the horses were stopped at the curb to enable Madeira to talk to some man whom he knew well. While waiting, with the road-cart drawn up close to the curb, Steering and the girl could hear talk all about them,—zinc and lead, jack, jack, jack! Flying chips of conversation assailed their ears as the people scurried by; references to old companies and their latest projects, and to new companies and new finds; talk about the menace of the runs pinching out, and talk about the danger of over-stocking the world's zinc markets; grumbling talk about the wildcat exploitation going on at every corner, and envious talk about a report that some wildcat promoter had just succeeded in selling a face of ore that had cut blind under the drill of the buyer in a few lamentable days; condemnatory talk about what an extremely gold-brick country this was, and awed talk about the remarkable prices that some of the gold bricks fetched. All the talk was frankly of millions. The scale was gigantic. Even poor men seemed to have acquired a familiarity with the sound of great sums that made them take themselves as somehow richer and bigger. Voices shook with eagerness and avidity; hands worked constantly at button-holes, or at lapels, orwith watch-guards. When acquaintances passed on the street they did not say "how-do-you-do"; they looked at each other's bulging pockets and said, "lemme see your rock." What Steering and the girl heard as they waited in the road-cart was fragmentary but significant: "Scotch Company will divide off another one hundred thousand acres, so they say—No, sirree-bob, no more hand-jigging for me—Wouldn't take one-quarter of a million for it, if you'd give it to me—Boston Company is bound to make millions—Yes, that's Madeira,—Canaan Tigmores—Oh, he will mint money out of it, no doubt in the world about that he goes in to win——"
The girl turned to Steering with pleased pride. "You see? He always wins. People expect him to." Madeira was over at the edge of his seat, talking earnestly to the man on the curb. Steering, beside the girl, looking down at her, not seeing Madeira because of her, nodded approvingly, the approval being for her honesty, her sweetness, her vitality. Something, perhaps the near climax for her father's enterprise at Canaan, seemed to have keyed her to a high pitch. Steering, who by nowhad had opportunities to see her often, had never seen her so beautiful, nor so quick of expression in word and look. Her voice thrilled him; and while he was thrilling, Madeira's voice came on to him: "You needn't hold back on that account," Madeira was saying: "God bless you, I've got the next heir in the deal, too."
"Oh-ho," said the girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted, aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to exercise the habit while he could.
Madeira was turning from the man on the curb: "All right, I'll allot you one thousand shares, eh? Good-day.—Pet, you'd better drive on out to Chitwood, lickety-split."
Miss Madeira put the whip to her horses, and they left the Joplin streets behind them, and sped out a gritty white road that crossed a lean sweep of prairie. Ahead of them Steering could see presently a sort of settlement; wooden sheds, wide and low; hoister shafts, tall and slim, on stilts; scaffolding; pipes; chimneys; tramways; surface railways. His eyes leaped from moundlike piles oftailings, the powdery crush spit out by the concentrating mills, to boulder-like heaps of rocks that had been wheeled away to save the teeth of the mills, and his ears turned distraught from the groaning clank of unwieldy iron tubs, swinging up through skeleton shafts, to the sputtering plunk-plunk of drill engines and the booming roar of machinery.
"Hard to keep up with, eh? God bless us, it certainlyishard to keep up with!" cried Madeira. "Drive into the enclosure there at the Howdy-do, Pet, Throcker will be expecting us. I telephoned him. Yes, sir, this is the place to see what zinc means." Madeira was leaning forward again, one arm about his daughter and the other arm fathering Steering. "This is the place to understand what can be done by seeing what has been done." He seemed to want to fire Steering with the idea that just such another astounding development could be wrought out down there in the Canaan Tigmores, and though Steering was aware that he would soon be at a crisis where he would need an austere strength of judgment, uncoloured by enthusiasm of any kind, he could not help respondingto the aura of enthusiasm into which he was entering. The great plant of the Howdy-do mine disseminated enthusiasm in shaking vibrations. Milled enthusiasm stood about in cars, ready for the smelters. Enthusiasm roared and whirred from the concentrating mill where wheels were turning and bands were slipping; where a tub, ore-laden, was jerking and clanking through the hoister shaft; where men on an upper platform were shovelling the dump from the tub into great crusher rolls; where the rolls were grinding and pounding, and the water was fashing and gurgling down the jigs. The whirr of it all, the whizz and bang of it, the whole effect of it all, was, to any man interested in the development of ore, a great forward impetus that swung him far out, limp and dizzy.
"Waiting for you, Mr. Madeira!" cried a man, who fairly shone with enthusiasm, and whose voice tinkled gladly as he came across to the hitching rail where Miss Madeira had stopped her horses. "Mighty glad to see you, Miss Sally—Mr. Steering, glad to meet you, sir. Here you, Mike! come and look after these horses. Miss Sally, I'm a-going to have to take you round to the tool-house forsome covers, please ma'am." The accommodating and friendly mine-boss of the Howdy-do led Madeira's party to a shed opposite his mill and there outfitted them with rubber coats and caps, talking to them all the while in that tinkling voice, with the glad note singing in it.
"God bless my soul, Throcker, how much did the last blast bring down?" Madeira turned to Steering before Throcker could reply. "Whenever a miner's voice shakes and sings like that, his last blast has meant a heap."
"You are right, sir!" cried Throcker, "we opened up a face yesterday that,—well, it's going to take us weeks to handle even the loose ore we've brought down, sir. Come this way, Miss Sally, please ma'am."
Steering began to wish that the mine-boss were not so happy. It had an electric effect upon him. And he began to wish that he himself were not so happy. He dreaded developments that would surely be change.
"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs inhis pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing, tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to "run up here."
In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it, so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it like that.
But there came a jolt and a jar, the cage settled upon the stope, and the journey was over. Throcker led the way through a thick underground gloom. Great masses of crush-rock slid under foot, there was a black drip from ceiling and walls, and the excavation was filled with the hollow boom of the water-and air-pumps. With lights flaring uncertainly, they followed the mine-boss out upon a rocky crag that gave upon a deep abyss,faintly illuminated by the flicker of the lamps of the working force below and by torches set in the wall. There was an upward slope in the formation of the ledge from the bottom of the cavern to the spur upon which they stood, but it was made by irregular juttings with ugly, saw-tooth projections. Unless they were very near the edge they could not follow the dim outline of the slope at all. Throcker in his eagerness to point out the ore, shining like specks of gold all up and down the slope, worked dangerously near the edge, but he was accustomed and recovered his balance easily when a piece of his support crumbled away under his feet. Steering, who was agile and athletic, had no difficulty in keeping up with the miner, but Madeira had to be watchful. The miner would not let Miss Madeira come far out on the crag, though he let the men follow him, calling warnings to them as they came.
"From where you stand, Miss Sally," Throcker turned toward the girl who waited below the summit of the crag, "from where you stand up to here, the loose ore is worth about sixty-five thousand dollars!"
The girl looked up at them responsively. Standing there under the strange flickering light of her torch, with the black folds of the rubber coat swathing her, her face, with its fine eyes, was cut out for Steering sharp as a cameo.
"I am delighted for your sake, Mr. Throcker," she called gaily, but with a little uneasiness in her voice. "Father, please be careful."
"Sixty-five thousand dollars! Why, Lord love you, Throcker, a hundred thousand, if one." Madeira, taking charge of the probabilities in the case, moved toward the edge to support his estimate by measuring with his eye the distance down the crag.
"Father, please be careful. Watch him, Mr. Steering,—O-h-h-h!" A woman's cry of horror rang though the tunnelled walls as Madeira's great frame toppled on the edge of the crag, and disappeared.
Throwing out his right arm protectingly, as though in answer to the girl below, Steering had been able to knot the sinewy fingers of one hand about Madeira's collar as the latter fell. The force of the fall brought Steering to his knees,then flat out across the ledge, to get all the purchase power he could. Madeira's weight was terrific, even after Steering had brought his other hand into requisition; and though Throcker sprang to the rescue, Throcker was a weak man and the best aid that he could render was to assume a small share of Madeira's weight by getting down flat upon the ledge, after Steering's fashion. In the black hole below the miners saw what had happened and two burly men began to clamber up the treacherous slope.
"Gently, boys, gently," warned Throcker, as the men came on; he and Steering could feel the rock upon which they lay vibrate; there was a rending and splitting going on all through the ledge. "Can you hold on a minute alone, sir?" gasped Throcker suddenly. "I have a bad heart and it's going back on me,"—he fell weakly beside Steering.
"Yes, I can hold on alone." Steering's face was in the loose crush, and his lips were cut by the rock when he opened them, so he stopped trying to talk.
"Get back, Mr. Throcker—let me get my handsdown and help Mr. Steering." It was the girl's voice, and the girl was beside Steering, quiet and capable.
"Oh, you?" said Steering. He had known all these seconds that he was doing this for her, but the strain that he was on had somehow pulled him beyond the comprehension of her as actual; for the last ten seconds she had been rather a big abstraction, a high principle of his soul, a good desire in his heart. To see her there before him was to see abstraction, principle, desire becoming adequately incarnate. "No, you mustn't try to reach down here,—your arms aren't long enough,—the commotion on the edge here is dangerous,—if you will just put something, your handkerchief, under my face where the sharp little rocks are at it,—ah, you should not have donethat!"—she had slipped her hands beneath his face, and the touch of her fingers was like velvet as she worked away the sticking, stinging bits of ore and rock that worried him. He had not known how chief a part in his sensation of discomfort those bits had played until he could bury his face in the relief of her soft hands. As a matter of fact, with those bits out ofhis cheeks,—and his face in her hands,—he felt no great discomfort at all. If it had not been for her shivering sigh of relief he would have been sorry when the miners drew Madeira up. Madeira had not spoken, and he was purple as they carried him to a place of safety some distance back on the ledge.
"He is just the sort of man physically who ought not to be subjected to choking experiences," said Steering. One of the miners had brought water, and Steering and Miss Madeira were reviving Madeira with it. Madeira did not seem to be unconscious, but his senses were obtunded, and it was some minutes before he could sit up.
"God bless my soul! God bless my soul!" he said, at last, and shivered. Then he turned to Steering: "My boy, you know how to hold on. I believe you've got as much stick-to-it-iveness as I have." It was his supremest form of acknowledgment, and, in making it, he made, too, an impression upon Steering that he resented the circumstances that compelled him to make it.
They got back to the upper air presently, followed by a cheer from the mine force below. Theminers had watched Steering perform one of those supernatural feats of strength and endurance that an onlooker can never explain afterward. Usually the performer knows that the thing was a matter of motive and will, not muscle.
Up in the daylight again, Madeira was quickly himself again. He resumed charge of affairs in his comprehensive way, and though the mine-boss, frightened and remorseful, was limp now, all his enthusiasm gone, Madeira's welled up again strong within him. They went back to their horses without loss of time, and, waving adieux to Throcker and some of his men who had gathered about, they were soon journeying back down the white road toward Joplin. Miss Madeira's hands were in bad condition for driving, Steering thought, but she had taken the reins just the same.
"We are all dilapidated for the matter of that," she said. "Father is as grey-faced as a rat, your cheeks are all cut and pricked—my hands don't count."
Twilight was coming on and a full moon was rising. The great sweep of flat stretched out about them in a mesh of soft light. The ride backwas gay, and when they stopped at the house of the Joplin man, who was their host, all three were still in nervously high spirits. A negro servant came out for the horses, and Steering helped Miss Madeira to alight. The girl had drawn off her driving gauntlets, and the ungloved hand that she gave him was scratched and scarred across its brown back.
"Isn't that shameful,—and you did it for me!" mourned Steering.
"Oh, if I could have done more!" she cried breathlessly, "if I could do more,—as much as you have done for me! If I have not thanked you, you know,"—what she was saying was fragmentary and confused, but her eyes were shining sweetly upon him,—"it's because I can't. You must understand that. I never can talk when I am busy feeling. How are your shoulders?"
"I don't know that I have any," replied Steering, with wretched prevarication.
"Come on, Honey, come on." Madeira was at the stone steps of the Joplin house, and the girl took his arm and climbed the steps with him. At the top Madeira turned back to Steering, who wasa step behind. "Well, old man, let's have it out now, before we go in and get mixed up with these strangers. What about those shares? Coming in with us, I reckon?" It was like Madeira to select a position of advantage like that, a higher place from which he could look down and dominate, with his daughter beside him, and it was like him to select a moment like that, a moment when the three were close, on the very summit of their friendship and sympathy. "We are to be all together on that deal, aren't we?"
Though the girl, her arm linked through her father's, was waiting for his answer, and though Steering saw that she expected his acquiescence as the right and natural thing, her influence upon him, despite that, was all for the rejection of Madeira's proposition. She looked so young, so straight, so honest, that, as an influence, she was ranged against Madeira, even though, in her ignorance, she imagined herself to be in harmony with him. Steering, looking at her first and Madeira next, knew that she really fashioned his answer, that it was really all because of her that his words came, swiftly, earnestly:
"Don't allot me any shares at all, Mr. Madeira. I have decided not to go into the company."
Madeira emitted a breezy "All right. God bless you, all right." The girl looked sorry and puzzled. Steering came on up the steps behind them, with a sense of mingled elation and sadness, and the three passed through the door of the Joplin man's house.
Madeira Place was the old Peele Farm, whose square brick house had been the boast of Canaan township ever since it had been put up,—out of brick hauled by team across three counties,—by the man who had established, but failed, despite his effort, to make permanent the fortunes of his family. When the grandnephew, Bruce Grierson, came on, the brick house was plastered with a mortgage that somehow passed eventually into the hands of the then alert young sapling land-agent, Crittenton Madeira. Crittenton took the house, and, by and by, Bruce Grierson, the second, took himself, with money borrowed from Madeira, out of Canaan, never to return. It was not long after this that Crittenton Madeira, who was still a slight man, with a young wife and a pretty baby out at the brick house, began to be named "our esteemed fellow townsman" by theCanaan Call. Madeirabuilt a hotel for Canaan, promoted the Canaan Short Line, and established the Bank of Canaan. His wife died, and his little girl grew, and he became large of girth. It was not until his daughter was twelve that he had to share honours with anyone as the foremost personage of Tigmore County. At twelve the daughter began to show that she had inherited her father's vitality, though the sphere of her activities was different. He bought and sold and made money. She lassoed heifers, broke colts, and rode up and down the Di in rickety skiffs. The community took as much pride in her adventures as it did in his achievements.
The Madeiras were very happy together all through those days, and very proud of each other. She recognised that her father was superior to the Canaan men, that they did what he told them to do, and he recognised that she was the most wonderful child, and the most beautiful, that had ever come into the world. His convictions on that score were so profound that they seemed to him something surer and bigger than the customary paternal pride and affection. As the girl grew older he spent a great deal of his money on her educationand pleasure—at first blindly, guided only by a big impulse to have her as good as the best, an impulse that resulted in some funnily pathetic scenes where the little girl, frightfully over-dressed, wandered through the St. Louis shops, holding to the big man's finger, trying to think up something else that she might possibly want. Later, under the girl's own direction, the money went to better purpose.
His daughter's way of spending the money early became, in Madeira's manner of getting at the thing, a sort of balance-wheel to his way of making it. Although he had made money in the same way before she was born, and although he would have made it in the same way had she never been born, he grew to like the feeling that what he did he did for her, and that his desire to make money had a soul in his desire to have her spend it. This feeling was in the ascendant always when he was with her. Unconsciously she fanned it within him. She had spent her young life couched rosily on his love for her and hers for him; at home she was lonely; at home Madeira was well-nigh perfect, and the girl's imagination made all her ideals live in thebig, handsome, assertive man who was at once father to her and hero. Perceiving this, Madeira, with her, entered into a sort of world of make-believe, and, with her, was sometimes able to take himself for what she held him, a man whose honour matched his ability, and, with her, sometimes surprised in himself the little glow that she seemed to get when she was profoundly appreciating him.
One Sunday afternoon they were sitting, father and daughter, in the garden, behind the brick house, he with a St. Louis paper on his knee, his head bare, his waistcoat loose, his feet in slippers. His chair was tilted back against a crab-apple tree at the side of one of the garden walks. For several weeks his face had been showing some sort of strain, but at this moment he looked comfortable. She had been telling him that she was glad that he had put up the new watering trough in Court House Square, and the way she had talked about it had made him feel sure that he had had some notion, when he did it, of benefiting the community, instead of insuring that the farmers would stop in front of the Grange store, in which he was interested.
She sat on a bench near him, quite idle; her gown, a tawny drapery, whose half-hidden suggestions of blue were like shy spring flowers, was sheathed closely about her; her eyes were following the pale wide river below the garden; her hair, so light that it made her eyes seem lighter, was piled above the warm, creamy tan of her forehead; there was a little drowsy droop on her face; the dusky-gold radiance was all about her.
"Daddy," she said, by and by, "do you know that I swam the Di once?" He laughed sleepily. He remembered. "I wonder if I could do it now—I was pretty awful as a youngster, wasn't I, Daddy?"
"You certainly had a reputation," he admitted.
"Do you know that I still have a good deal of a reputation"—she turned upon him with more directness and a little laughing pugnacity—"as though I were the same terrible child, up to the same riotous tricks as when I was twelve!"
"Hump-mmh, hump-mmh!" He looked at her from under his slanted lids and shook his head, while his big face quivered with amusement. "You haven't given up all your riotous tricks even yet—don't tell me." He spoke with the indulgence that had allowed free rein to her caprices all her life.
"Never you mind, I do precious little that is riotous any more; I am getting used to harness," she made answer, and looked as though she did not mean to be interfered with in the precious little that was riotous that she still clung to, and then looked as though she were threatening herself with sweeping reform. "Go back to sleep, Daddy. You will be in my way presently, anyhow."
"Anybody coming?"
"Your Mr. Steering."
"'My!'" Madeira's face clouded over, and he thrust out his jaw grimacingly. "If heweremine, you know what I should do with him?" he asked, in a sharp voice.
"No, I don't know. What would you do with him?"
"I should send him packing back East. This country don't need,—aw, the people of this country are good enough for the country and the country is good enough for them. We don't need outsiders."
He was so vehement that she regarded him questioningly. "Don't you like him any more?" she inquired, with a little dubious shake of her head.
"I don't like"—Madeira got up and walked back and forth under the crab-apple tree—"I don't like for a man without any practical knowledge or experience to get a lot of ideas about a thing and bring them to a field and try to push other chaps out, other chaps who are already in the field."
"Yes, but——" It occurred to her that she was defending Steering—"but if he brings the ideas, he ought to have the credit for originating the ideas, oughtn't he?"
"No! No!" Madeira's voice rang up, urgent, strident; he did not seem conscious that he was talking to her; he seemed rather to be having something out with himself. The strain of the past weeks had come back to his face. "Plenty of people before this Steering have thought of ore in the Canaan Tigmores. Look at old Grierson himself! Originate the idea! Grierson had the idea before Steering was born! We can get ideas in this country, and work 'em out, too, without any help from outsiders."
"Mr. Steering is not exactly an outsider, is he?"
"Yes, he is, too. He hasn't any more claim to this land now than you have; it isn't any more his business what's done here during Grierson's lifetime than it's Rockefeller's business. Not a bit. Let Steering wait till the land is his."
"Well,"—she was troubled,—"in the meantime, what is old Grierson going to do?"
Madeira seemed to be trying to quiet himself. He went down to the garden fence and looked at the oak forest on the other side of the Di, puckered up his mouth, as though to whistle, but stopped short of it, and came sauntering back toward his daughter. "He is going to do what I tell him to do, Honey," he made answer. "And I'm telling him to put the Canaan Mining and Development Company into the Tigmores after zinc."
"I should think, though," she said then, slowly, "that even if the matter is in your hands now, it would be to your ultimate advantage to have Mr. Steering in with you. He is the next owner, and, if old Grierson should die, whatever work you have done on the Tigmores would go for nothing. Ishould think it would be almost essential for you and Mr. Steering to be together."
He let his chair down angrily. "There isn't a big enough scheme in the universe to accommodate Steering and me together! He is a blamed idiot," he said doggedly. And it became clear to her that in his bull-headed way he had forged all the links of one of his intense antagonisms. He had been like that all his life; of pronounced personality himself, he had never been able to abide pronounced personality in those with whom he came in contact. He had ridden rough-shod over inferior men all his life; he liked to ride rough-shod; he was never pleased when his path crossed people over whom he could not ride rough-shod. Generally she had accepted his classification of those who opposed him strongly as "blamed idiots"; sometimes with a little of her laughing banter, but usually, his superiority standing out sharp and clear when opposed to the dull Canaanites, endorsing his opinion. "I sort of wish," he went on, with that keen, wire-edged exasperation still sawing in his voice, "that you wouldn't have much to do with that chap. He isn't my kind of people. Ishouldn't mind if, now that you've given him a good high swing, you'd let him drop."
"Why, Father! You oughtn't to forget that there was one time in your life when he might have let you drop—and didn't!"
He saw that he had got himself before her in too keen a light.
"Yes, but you don't expect me to let him hold me up by the collar forever, do you, Pet? That's his dog-on way, anyhow—wants to dictate. I can't stand a man who wants to dictate. I think we've had enough of him. That's what I mean, and all I mean." He patted her hands and got up from his chair again. "There comes Samson with the mail," he said nervously.
A negro man rode up through the big gate at the front of the grounds and came on to Madeira, who took two letters from him. "One for you, Sally," said Madeira, "and one for me."
"Oh, from Elsie Gossamer!" she cried, and took her letter and sat, unobservant of him, for several moments, the little frown that his words had brought out still on her brow. Presently she looked up and saw that he had read his letter, andhad put it in his pocket; he was tilted back against the crab-apple tree again, his forehead knit, his eyes brilliant, a peculiar fixity in their gaze. "Oh, here!" she cried protestingly, "you look as though you had just decided to become the President of the United States of America! Stop scowling and listen; Elsie is after me again to join her in Europe. She is fairly eloquent with the project——"
He broke in upon her with a sudden intensity of interest: "Do it!" he cried. "It's the very thing. You go. You go and have a good time."
"I don't want to go so awfully," she began hesitatingly. "I've been away from you a lot in the last two years. I don't care so much about it."
"Yes, you do; you go." He was always keen for her pleasure, but in the present case he seemed especially earnest.
"Want to get rid of me, huh?"
"No; you know I'll half die without you. But I am going to be fearfully busy from now on,"—his mouth seemed hot and dry as he talked,—"it will suit better now than ever. You go."
"Well, maybe," she said. She was accustomedto let her own fancy settle such questions for her. "Maybe I'll go. Maybe I shan't." There was a click at the front gate. "I expect that's Mr. Steering," she announced.
Madeira got out of his chair quickly. "If it is, I don't want to see him," he said, "he—oh, he irritates me, that man,—always wanting to dictate. I'll go in. Don't want ever to see him again,—and say, Pet?"
"Well, Dad?"
"I'd be glad if you would never see him again. Just stop where you are, will you?"
She drew a long sighing breath. "Just stop where I am? Well, I'll see," she said, laughing and flushing in the warm, rich fashion of her skin, but there was the faint far call of uneasiness in her laughter, like a wind-whisper of coming rain. "Tell Samson to bring Mr. Steering out here to me," she commanded, and Madeira went off toward the house and disappeared through the green-latticed porch.
Inside the house he retired to the room that was known as his office, locked the door and came over to his desk. As he did it a peculiar consciousnessof himself suffused him like the first fumes of a deadly narcotic. He began to see that he was lifting his feet stealthily, advancing them stealthily, stealthily setting them down, with the soundless fall of a cat's foot on velvet. Reaching his desk, he half fell into a chair there, a thin line of white froth between his lips, his big face purplish. "Eh, God?" he cried, "what's this? what's this?"
The seizure passed as suddenly as it had come. By and by he heard Steering pass through the house under Samson's escort. When the sound of Steering's foot-steps had died away, Madeira took a letter from his pocket, spread it open before him and read it over and over.
"Dear Crit," [the letter said] "I have thought this thing to a finish. I want you to turn the Tigmores over to my cousin, Bruce Steering. Let him start at once on the jack trail, that primrose path of dalliance. As for me, my dear sir, by the time this reaches you, I shall be on the long trail. You needn't blow any trumpets about it, for B. G. will have no funeral. The name that I gave you as the name that I live here under is goodenough to die here under. The certain fact for your consideration is that I die at once, and that the question of this property entail is now confided to you to arrange for my heir, young Steering. Write to the clerk of Snow Mountain County for the documents that I have left with him for you. They establish everything. Tell my cousin that, besides the Tigmores, I bequeath him my debts to you. This leaves me not at all envious of the job ahead of him, and, as ever,
"Your blindly devoted servant,
"Bruce Grierson."
Crittenton Madeira's daughter wandered down the garden path, singing softly, after her father had left her, but there was in her song, as there had been in her laughter, a little tremble of unrest. The garden was a delicious place, whose fragrance beat up in waves of sweetness at every turn. All the flowers were in their luxuriant last bloom. There were great roses and sweet elysium, mignonette, peppermint pinks, crêpe myrtle, riotous vines and creepers. Long ago she had taken everything out of the garden that was not sweet. She had a fancy that fragrance was one of the spirit's tremulous paths into heaven, and out in the garden she liked to shut her eyes and, with her little straight nose in the air, go drifting off toward what was infinitely good, fine, strong, imperishable. It sometimes seemed to her that the most intimate and exquisite happinesses of her life had come to her with her eyesshut in that garden. She called it the Garden of Dreams.
When Steering found her, she was waiting for him, her arms on an old vine-covered stump, that dusky-gold radiance of hers playing over her and from her, the most beautifully, glowingly alive woman in the world. What he said to her was "How-do-you-do?" But what he wanted to say was, "Oh, stand there so forever, and let every grace, every beauty burn into my brain, so that all my life I may carry you about with me, your wine-warm eyes, your sunlit hair, the whole sweet glow of you,—having you perfectly, knowing you perfectly everywhere, everyhow, near, far, in the sunshine, in the dark!" And when a man wants to talk like that "how-do-you-do" is as good a catchphrase as the next to keep his tongue discreet.
"I do very well," she told him, smiling at him, maddening him, "I always do well, here in my garden,—but you, you put my sense of well-being to shame. You look so glad!"
"I am the gladdest man on earth," Bruce told her, knowing chiefly that he had her hand in his. He barely remembered in time that she was rich ingold and lands and cattle, and that he was poor, and that the positivism of his personality had already incurred the ill-will of her father. "Still, I don't think there is any doubt in the world how it is all going to end," he said hazily. He still had her hand. She had the hardest hand to put down that he had ever taken up.
"I don't quite follow? All what?" She bit her lip; her eyes flashed off across the Di, bright and swift as mating birds, as she drew her hand gently away.
"I was only thinking that a man may go on and on through so many meaningless years, of no special significance to himself or to anybody else and then suddenly,—think everything is going to be all right some day." He clasped his hands and leaned on the other side of the vine-covered stump and looked at her wishfully, and she laughed at him, with her eyes still on the pale river.
"How do you like my garden?" she asked divertingly. For answer he shut his eyes and breathed deeply. "Oh, how good!" she cried, satisfied, "that's the only way really to follow the path of fragrance,—that's my own way!" Heblessed his stars that he had sniffed at the roses. "Where did the path lead you?" she queried, as he opened his eyes dreamily upon her golden beauty. "Into heaven," he murmured with sublime conviction, and she clasped her slender hands, delighted at their mystical congeniality.
"I am so glad that we like the same thing," she continued, hurrying a little; "haven't you noticed?—we both like the garden,—and we both like Piney. When did you see Piney?"
"Piney? Oh, I see Piney often." He rather wished that she had not mentioned Piney. Since he had come to know the tramp-boy better his first ache for him had become sharper and sharper. "Piney and I were out on the hills together only yesterday. Poor Piney!"
"Why," she took his hand and led him forward through a tangle of rose-bushes; she would not look at him, but the bewildering sweetness of her hair, her gown, the curve of her cheek came back to him—"whypoorPiney?" She was guiding him to a bench of twisted grape-vines from which they might look down upon the river. "Sit down," she said, "and tell me why poor Piney?"
"Well," he sat down and looked at the river, half-frowning, "it has seemed to me—I've had a notion—oh, I don't know. I suppose it is not poor Piney after all."
"Tell me," she insisted, "tell me what you started to tell me."
"Well, it has seemed to me ever since I first met Piney that he was in the way of trouble," he dashed on more abruptly, thinking only of Piney for a moment—"I have come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity. At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody of living—and—oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made Steering stand too determinedly to suit Crittenton Madeira made him forge ahead determinedly now. "Piney would be apt to suffer less if he were wholly the sylvan, irresponsible creature, the faun, he sometimes seems to be. But, alas, Piney has a man'sheart, Miss Madeira. He will have to suffer for that, for he will have to love. That's why 'poor' Piney; because he will have to love."
"Would that be so terrible?" The flash from the amber eyes that she turned up to him made the world go zig-zagging through a long space while Steering looked on with a great tremulous intake of breath. Then he steadied again to what he wanted to say to her and could say to her for Piney's sake.
"It would be for Piney. Piney is going to love hopelessly," he saw that a little shiver caught her and he was glad of it. "Yes, it would be terrible to love hopelessly, wouldn't it?" he said, to strengthen his hidden appeal for Piney. He wanted to make her realise what she was doing for Piney, realise that for sheer kindness, kindness as to a dumb thing, she should never let the lad come near her. He had forgotten the woman in her when he began to formulate that appeal. She laughed a light, mocking laugh.
"I believe that you think that Piney loves me!" she cried. "Piney, the spirit of the oaks! the song of the night-wind! Piney suffer! Piney love!" Steering was sorry to hear the note ofevasion in her voice. No woman, he remembered, too late, could be brought to treat man's love or boy's love quite honestly. His eyes clouded. He felt masculinely, sanely sympathetic with Piney.
"I wish," he said gloomily, "that you would sometimes put yourself in the place of a man who loves you, put yourself in Piney's place."
Her eyes crinkled up again. "I'll just do it," she said gaily, "I'll do it now. Presto," she shut her eyes. "Now I have his point of view. Now I'm seeing what he sees—that Miss Sally Madeira likes to hear him sing, and humours him and pets him because he is gay and glad to be alive, and because Uncle Bernique says that he needs somebody to mother him. I mother Piney. Can't you see that." She laughed again and arose and stood in front of him, gay, mocking, nonchalant. "Piney love! And if Piney could love, that you should fancy that he might dare love Salome Madeira!"
He forgot about Piney. She blocked his farther vision like a shaft of light. He could not see an inch beyond her. Madeira's voice rang down the garden walk. Steering did not hear it."Salome! Salome!" he murmured, "Is that it, Salome?"
"Yes, that's it, Salome. Isn't it foolish? The Di down there is the Diaphanous, too. Some pioneer poet named it for its shimmer, but what good did it do? Missouri promptly called it the 'Di.' No more good is it to name a child Salome in the backwoods of Missouri. She's bound to grow up Sally. I've always been Sally, except at school. I'll always be Sally down here with my own people."
"No, you won't always be Sally—no you won't always be down here with your own people either,"—he leaned back on the bench and watched her, his eyes half shut, his whole sense of being illumined by her, his tongue playing audaciously with his discretion.
"Yes, I shall always be Sally, too." That bisque-warm skin of hers flushed wondrously and she seemed to talk out of a little confused audacity of her own. Madeira's voice rang down the walk again. "Yes, Father!—and down here with my own people, too. Yes, Father!"
"Company's here, Sally."
"All right, Father, coming."
"And I have to go?" asked Steering piteously.
"Oh no, come up to the house and meet our sixteen-to-one congressman, Quicksilver Sam."
"No—I'll go," chose Steering. "Say, can't I get through from the garden here, and go down the river road?"
"Yes, you can. Samson shall bring your horse around, if you like. There's a bridle-path down to the river; it's Piney's way."
"Well, if you will be so good as to have the horse brought, I'll take Piney's path. I'm going to the hills to try to find Piney and Uncle Bernique. Think I'll sleep in the hills with them to-night. I feel so sad. When may I come back?"
"Well, you see," the trouble crept into her voice again, misty, tremulous—"you see, I may go away."
"Oh!" he cried, and then again, "Oh!" a bitter wailing note.
"Yes, I may," she said hastily. "You see, your friend, Miss Gossamer, wants me to join her in Europe. She is very insistent about it."
"And you may go?"
"And I may go."
He knew that she said that she would see him again before going, if it came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:
"Damn Miss—Europe!"