Hallelujah Jones Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on Job, xxi, 3
From over the way Harry gazed at the tall, stooping figure, pitilessly betrayed by the thin alpaca coat, at the ascetic face burned a brick-red from exposure to wind and sun, at the flashing eyes, the impassioned earnestness. He paused at the curb and listened curiously, for Hallelujah Jones with his evangelism mingled a spice of the rancor of the socialist. In his thinking, the rich and the wicked were mingled inextricably in the great chastisement. He was preaching now from his favorite text:Woe to them that are at ease in Zion.
Harry smiled grimly. He had always been "at ease in Zion." He wore sumptuous clothes—the ruby in his ring would bring what this plodding exhorter would call a fortune. At this moment, Hede, his dapper Finn chauffeur, was polishing the motor-car for him to take his cool evening spin. That very afternoon he had put into the little safe in the chapel study two thousand dollars in gold, which he had drawn, a part for his charities and quarterly payments and a part to take withhim for the exigencies of his trip. The street evangelist over there, preaching paradise and perdition to the grinning yokels, often needed a square meal, and was lucky if he always knew where he would sleep. Yet did the Reverend Henry Sanderson, after all, get more out of life than Hallelujah Jones?
The thread of his thought broke. The bareheaded figure had ended his harangue. The eternal fires were banked for a time, while, seated on a camp-stool at his crazy melodeon, he proceeded to transport his audience to the heavenly meads of the New Jerusalem. He began a "gospel song" that everybody knew:
"I saw a wayworn traveller,The sun was bending low.He overtopped the mountainAnd reached the vale below.He saw the Golden City,His everlasting home,And shouted as he journeyed,'Deliverance will come!"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"I saw a wayworn traveller,The sun was bending low.He overtopped the mountainAnd reached the vale below.He saw the Golden City,His everlasting home,And shouted as he journeyed,'Deliverance will come!
"I saw a wayworn traveller,
The sun was bending low.
He overtopped the mountain
And reached the vale below.
He saw the Golden City,
His everlasting home,
And shouted as he journeyed,
'Deliverance will come!
"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
The voice was weather-cracked, and the canvas bellows of the instrument coughed and wheezed, but the music was infectious, and half from overflowing spirits, andhalf from the mere swing of the melody, the crowd chanted the refrain:
"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
Two, three verses of the old-fashioned hymn he sang, and after each verse more of the bystanders—some in real earnestness, some in impious hilarity—shouted in the chorus:
"'Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
Harry walked on in a brown study, the refrain ringing through his brain. There came to him the memory of Hugh's old sneer as he looked at his book-shelves—whereon Nietzsche and Pascal sat cheek by jowl withTheron WareandRobert Elsmere—"I wonder how much of all that you really believe!" How muchdidhe really believe? "I used to read Thomas à Kempis then," he said to himself, "and Jonathan Edwards; now I read Rénan and theOrigins of Christian Mythology!"
At the chapel-gate lounged his chauffeur, awaiting orders.
"Bring the car round, Hede," said Harry, "and I shan't need you after that to-night. I'll drive her myself. You can meet me at the garage."
Hede, the dapper, good-looking Scandinavian, touched his glossy straw hat respectfully. It was a piece of luck that his master had not planned a motor trip instead of a tour afoot. For a month, after to-night, his time was his own. His quarter's wages were in his pocket, and he slapped the wad with satisfaction as he sauntered off to the bowling-alley.
The study was pitch-dark, and Rummy halted on the threshold with a low, ominous growl as Harry fumbled for the electric switch. As he found and pressed it and the place flooded with light, he saw a figure there—the figure of a man who had been sitting alone—beside the empty hearth, who rose, shrinking back from the sudden brilliancy.
It was Hugh Stires.
Harry Sanderson stared at the apparition with a strange feeling, like rising from the dead. There flashed into his mind the reflection he had seen once in the mirror above the mantel—the face on which fell the amber ray from the chapel window, shining through the figure of the unrepentant thief—the face that had seemed so like his own!
The likeness, however, was not so startling now. The aristocratic features were ravaged like a nicked blade. Dissipation, exposure, shame and unbridled passion had each set its separate seal upon the handsome countenance. Hugh's clothes were shabby-genteel and the old slinking grace of wearing them was gone. A thin beard covered his chin, and his shifty look, as he turned it first on Harry and then nervously over his shoulder, had in it a hunted dread, a dogging terror, constant and indefinable. From bad to worse had been a swift descent for Hugh Stires.
The wave of feeling ebbed. Harry drew thewindow-curtains, swung a shade before the light, and motioned to the chair.
"Sit down," he said.
Hugh looked his old friend in the face a moment, then his unsteady glance fell to the white carnation in his lapel as he said: "I suppose you wonder why I have come here."
Harry did not answer the implied question. His scrutiny was deliberate, critical and inquiring. "What have you been doing the last year?" he asked.
"A little of everything," replied Hugh. "I ran a bucket-shop with Moreau in Sacramento for a while. Then I went over in the mining country. I took up a claim at Smoky Mountain—that's worth something, or may be sometime."
"Why did you leave it?"
Hugh touched his parched lips with his tongue—again that nervous, sidelong look, that fearful glance over his shoulder.
"I had no money to work it. I had to live. Besides, I'm tired of the whole thing."
The backward glance, the look of dread, were tangible tokens. Harry translated them:
"You are not telling the truth," he said shortly. "What have youdone?"
Hugh flinched, but he made sullen answer: "Nothing. What should I have done?"
"That is what I am now inquiring of myself," said Harry. "Your face is a book for any one to read. I see things written on it, Hugh—things that tell a story of wrong-doing. You are afraid."
Hugh shivered under the regard. Did his face really tell so much?
"I don't care to be seen in town," he said. "You wouldn't either, probably, under the circumstances." His gaze dropped to his frayed coat-sleeve. In his craven fear of something that he dared not name even to himself, and in his wretched need, he remembered a night once before, when he had sidled into town drunken and soiled—to a luxurious room, a refreshing bath, clean linen and a welcome. Abject drops of self-pity started in his eyes.
"You're the only one in the world I dared come to," he said miserably. "I've walked ten miles to-day, for I haven't a red cent in my pocket. Nor even decent clothes," he ended.
"That can be partly remedied," said Harry after a pause. He took a dark coat from its hook and tossed it to him. "Put that on," he said. "You needn't return it."
Hugh caught the garment. In another moment hehad exchanged it for the one he wore, and was emptying the old coat's pockets.
"Don't sneak!" said Harry with sudden contempt. "Don't you suppose I know a deck of cards when I see it?"
The thin scar on Hugh's brow reddened. He thrust into his pocket the pasteboards he had made an instinctive move to conceal and buttoned the coat around him. It fitted sufficiently. His eyes avoided the well-set figure standing in white negligée shirt, norfolk jacket and leather belt. As they had been wont to do in the comfortable past, they fixed themselves on the little safe.
"Look here, Harry," he began, "you were a good fellow in the old days. I'm sorry I never paid you the money I borrowed. I would have, but for—what happened. But you won't go back on me now, will you? I want to get out of the country and begin over again somewhere. Will you loan me the money to do it?"
Hugh was eager and voluble now. The man to whom he appealed was his forlorn hope. He had come with no intention of throwing himself upon his father's mercy. He had wished to see anybody in the world but him. In his urgent need, he had had a wild thought of appealing to Jessica, or at worst to get speech with Blake, the old butler who many a time of old had hidden hisbackslidings from the parental eye. But he had found the white house in the aspens closed and desolate, the servants gone. Harry Sanderson was his last resort.
"If you will, I'll never forget it, Harry!" he cried. "Never, the longest day I live! I'll use every dollar of it just as I say! I will, on my honor!"
But the sight of the poker deck had been steel to Harry's soul. It had touched an excoriated spot that in the past months had grown as sensitive as an exposed nerve. The pictured squares were the ironic badge of Hugh's incorrigibility. They had ruined him, and the ruin had broken his father's heart, and wrecked the life of Jessica Holme. And out of this havoc a popular rector named Harry Sanderson had emerged pitifully the worse.
"Honor!" he said. "Have you enough to swear by? You are what you are because you are a bad egg! You were born a gentleman, but you choose to be a rogue. Do you know the meaning of the word honor, or right, or justice? Have you a single purpose of mind which isn't crooked?"
"You're just like the rest, then," Hugh retorted. "Just because I did that one thing, you'll give me no more chance. Yet the first thing I did with that money was to square myself. I paid every debt of honor I had.That's why I'm in the hole now. But I get no credit for it, even from you. I wish you could put yourself in my place!"
Harry had been looking steadily at the sallow face with its hoof-print of the satyr, not seeing it, but hearing his own voice say to Jessica: "I was my brother's keeper! I see it now." And out of the distance, it seemed, his voice answered:
"Put myself in your place! I wish I could! I wish to God I could!"
The exclamation was involuntary, automatic, the cumulative expression of every throe of conscience Harry had endured since then, the voice of that remorse that had cried insistently for reparation, dinning in his ears the fateful question that God asked of Cain! Suddenly a whirl of rage seized him, unmeasured, savage, malicious. He had despised Hugh, now he hated him; hated him because he was Jessica's husband, and more than all, because he was the symbol of his own self-abasement. A dare-devil side of the old Satan Sanderson that he had chained and barred, rose up and took him by the throat. He struck the oak wainscoting with his fist, feeling a red mist grow before his eyes.
"So you paid every 'debt of honor' you had, eh? You acknowledge a gamester's honor, but not the obligationof right action between man and man! Very well! Give me that pack of cards. You want money—here it is!"
He swiftly turned the clicking combination of the safe, wrenched open the door and took out two heavy canvas bags. He snapped the cord from the neck of one of these and a ringing stream of double-eagles swept jingling on the table. He dipped his hand in the yellow pile. A thought mad as the hoofs of runaway horses was careening through his brain. He felt an odd lightness of mind, a tense tingling of every nerve and muscle.
"Here is two thousand dollars!—yours, if you win it! For you shall play for it, you gambler who pays his debts of 'honor' and no other! You shall play fair and straight, if you never play again!"
Hugh gazed at Harry in a startled way. This was not the ministerial Harry Sanderson he had known—thisgauchefigure, with the white infuriate face, the sparkling eyes and the strange, veiled look. This reminded him of the reckless spirit of his college days, that he had patterned after and had stood in awe of. Only he had never seen him look so then. Could Harry be in earnest? Hugh glanced from him to the pile of coin and back again. His fingers itched.
"How can I play," he said, "when you know very well I haven't asou markee?"
Harry stuffed the gold back into the bag. He snatched the cards from Hugh's hand and a box of waxen envelope wafers from his desk. There was a strange light in his eye, a tremor in his fingers.
"It is I who play with money!" he said. "My gold against your counters! Each of those hundred red disks represents a day of your life—a day, do you understand?—a red day of your sin! A day of yours against a double-eagle! What you win you keep. But for every counter I win, you shall pay me one straight, white day, a clean day, lived for decency and for the right!"
He was the old Satan Sanderson now, with the blood bubbling in his veins—the Satan Sanderson who could "talk like Bob Ingersoll or an angel," as the college saying was—the cool, daring, enigmatical Abbot of The Saints, primed for any audacity. It was the old character again, but curiously changed. The new overlaid it. Under the spur of some driving impulse the will was travelling along a disused and preposterous channel to a paramount end.
Hugh's eyes were fastened on the gold in Harry's fingers. Two thousand dollars! If luck came his way he could go far on that—far enough to escape the nameless terror that pursued him in every shadow. Moneyagainst red wafers? Why, it was plenty if he won, and if he lost he had staked nothing. What a fool Harry was!
Harry saw the shrewd, calculating look that came to his eyes. He caught his wrist.
"Not here!" he said hoarsely. He flung open the chapel door and pushed him inside. He seized one of the altar candles, lit it with a match and stuck it upright in its own wax on the small communion table that stood just inside the altar-rail, with the cards, the red wafers and the bags of coin. He dragged two chairs forward.
"Now," he said in a strained voice, "put up your hand—your right hand—and swear before this altar, on the gambler's honor you boast of, win or lose, to abide by this game!"
Hugh shrank. He was superstitious. The calculating look had fled. He glanced half fearfully about him—at Harry's white face—at the high altar with its vases of August lilies—at the great rose-window, now a mass of white, opaque blotches on which the three black crosses stood out with weird distinctness—at the lurking, unlighted shadows in the corners. He looked longingly at the gold, shining yellow in the candle-light. It fascinated him.
He lifted his hand. It was trembling.
"I swear I will!" he said. "I'll stand by the cards, Harry, and for every day you win, I'll walk a chalk line—so help me God!"
Harry Sanderson sat down. He emptied one of the bags at his elbow, and pushed the box of wafers across the table. He shuffled the cards swiftly and cut.
"Your deal!" he said.
Hallelujah Jones had finished his labor for the night. The crowd had grown restive, and finally melted away, and, his audience gone, he folded the camp-stool, turned off the gasoline flare, shut down the lid of his melodeon, and trundled it up the street. A goodly number of coppers had rattled into his worn hat, and to the workman belonged his wage. There was a little settlement on the river, a handful of miles away, and the trudge under the stars would be cool and pleasant. If he grew tired, there was his blanket strapped atop the melodeon, and the open night was dry and balmy.
As he pushed up the street he came to a great motor-car standing at the curb under the maples. There was no one in it, but somewhere in its interior a muffled whirring throb beat evenly like a double, metallic heart. He stopped and regarded it inquisitively; a rich man's property, to be sure!
He looked up—it was at the gate of the chapel. No doubt it belonged to the fashionable rector who had been pointed out to him on the street the day before.He remembered the young, handsome face, the stylish broadcloth. He thought he would have liked to lean over the Reverend Henry Sanderson's shoulder and lay his finger on a text:How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Yet it was a beautiful edifice that wealth had built there for Christ! He saw dimly the stone angel standing in the porch, and, leaving his melodeon on the pavement, entered the gate to examine it.
He noticed now a dim flicker that lit one corner of the great rose-window. Moving softly over the cropped grass, he approached, tilted one of the hinged panels, and peered in. Two men were there, behind the altar-railing, seated at the communion table.
Hallelujah Jones started back. There on the table was a bag of coin, cards and counters. They were playing—he heard the fall of the cards on the hard wood, saw the gleam of a gold-piece, the smear of melted wax marring the polished oak. The reddish glow of the candle was reflected on the players' faces. Well he knew the devil's tools: had he not sung and exhorted in Black Hill mining camps and prayed in frontier faro "joints"? They were gambling! At God's holy altar, and on Christ's table! Who would dare such a profanation?
He craned his neck. Suddenly he gave a smothered cry. The player facing him he recognized—it was the rector himself! He bent forward, gazing with a tense and horrified curiosity.
In that hazard within the altar-rail strange forces were contending, whose meaning he could not fathom. Between the two men who played, not a word had been spoken save those demanded by the exigencies of the game. Harry had seemed to act almost automatically, but his mind was working clearly, his hand was firm and cool as the blossom on his coat; he made his play with that old steely nonchalance with which, once upon a time, he had staked—and lost—so often. But in his brain a thousand spindles were whirring, a maze of refractory images was rushing past him into an eddying phantasmagoria. A kind of exaltation possessed him. He was putting his past into the dice-box to redeem a soul in pawn, fighting the devil with his own fire, gambling for God!
Five times, ten times, the cards had changed hands, and with every deal he lost. The gold disks had slipped steadily across the table. But Harry had seemed to be looking beyond the ebb and flow of the jettons and the pale face opposite him that gloated over its yellow pile. Though that pile grew larger and larger, Harry's facehad never changed. Hugh's was the shaking hand when he discarded, the convulsed features when he scanned his draw, the desperate anxiety when for a moment fortune seemed to waver. He had never in his life had such luck! He swept his winnings into his pockets with a discordant laugh as he noted that, of the contents of the opened bag, Harry had but one double-eagle remaining.
Harry paused an instant. He snapped the little gold cross he wore from its silken tether and set it upright by him on the table.
His hand won, and the next, and the next. Hugh hoarded his gold: he staked the red wafers—each one a day! He had won almost a thousand dollars, but the second bag had not yet been opened, and the vampire intoxication was running molten-hot in his veins. The untouched bag drew him as the magnet mountain drew the adventurous Sindbad—he could have snatched it in his eagerness.
But the luck had changed; his red counters diminished, melted; he would soon have to draw on his real winnings. Cold beads of sweat broke on his forehead.
Neither had heard the creak of the rose-window as the hinged panel drew back. Neither saw the face pressed against the aperture. Neither guessed the wildand terrible thoughts that were raging through the mind of the solitary watcher as he peered and peered.
This minister! This corrupt, ungodly shepherd! He could be neither hanged nor put in jail, yet he committed a crime for which hell itself scarce held adequate penalty and punishment! The street preacher's eyes dilated, the hand that held the panel trembled, spots of unhealthy white sprang into his burning cheeks. The flaring candles—the table with its carven legend,This Do In Remembrance of Me—the little gold cross, set there, it seemed to him, in a satanic derision! It was the evil the Apostle Paul wrestled against, of "wicked spirits in high places." It was sacrilege! It was blasphemy! It was the Arch-Fiend laughing, making a mock of God's own altar with the guilty pleasures of the pit—a very sacrament of the damned!
Scarce knowing what he did, he closed the panel softly and ran across the chapel lawn. On the pavement outside he met a man approaching. It was the bishop, on his way to his contemplated chat with Harry Sanderson. The excited evangelist did not know the man, but his eye caught the ministerial dress, the plain, sturdy piety of the face. In his zeal he saw an instrument to his hand. He grasped the bishop's arm.
"Quick! Quick!" he gasped. "There's devil's workdoing in there! Come and see!" He fairly pulled him inside the gate.
The puzzled bishop saw the intense excitement of the other's demeanor. He saw the faint glow in the corner of the rose-window. Were there thieves after the altar-plate?
He shook off the eager hand that was drawing him toward the window. "Not there—come this way!" he said, and hurried toward the porch. He tried the chapel door—it was fast. He had a key to this in his pocket. He inserted it with caution, opened the door noiselessly and went in, the street preacher at his heels.
What the bishop saw was photographed instantaneously on his mind in fiery, indelible colors. It ate into his soul like hot iron into quivering flesh, searing itself upon his memory. It was destined to haunt his sleep for many months afterward, a phantom of regret and shame. He was, in his way, a man of the world, travelled, sophisticated, acquainted with sin in unexpected forms and places. But this sight, in all its coarse suggestion of license, in its harrowing implication of hidden vice and hypocrisy, was damning and appalling. The evangelist of the pave had been horrified, shocked to word and action; the bishop was frozen, inarticulate, impaled. For any evil in Hugh Stires hewas prepared—since the forgery. But Hugh's companion now was the man whom he himself had ordained and anointed, by the laying on of hands, with the chrism of his holy ministry.
It was sin, then, that had set the look he had marvelled at in Harry Sanderson's face—sin, flaunting, mocking and terrible! He whom the church had ordained to shepherd its little ones, to comfort its afflicted, to give in marriage and to bless, to hold before the world the white and stainless banner—a renegade, polluting the sanctuary! A priest apostate, surprised in a hideous revel, gambling, as the Roman soldiers gambled for the seamless garment, at the foot of the cross! An irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.
With the sound both men at the table started to their feet. Hugh, with a single glance behind him, uttering a wild laugh, leaped the railing, dashed through the study, and vanished into the night; Harry, as though suddenly turned to stone, stood staring at the accusatory figure, with the eager form of the evangelist behind it. It was as if the horror on the stern, set face of the bishop mirrored itself instantaneously upon his countenance, his imagination opening in a shocked, awed way to the concentrated light of feeling, so that he stood bewildered in the paralysis of a like dismay.
To the bishop it seemed the attitude of guilt detected.
What was Harry Sanderson thinking, as, under that speechless regard, he mechanically gathered the scattered cards and lifted the little cross and the unopened bag of double-eagles from the table? Where was the odd excitement, the strange exaltation that had possessed him? The spindles in his brain had stilled, and an algid calm had succeeded, as abrupt as the quiet, deadly assurance with which his mind now saw the pit into which his own feet had led him. The paradoxical impulse that had bred this sinister topsyturvydom had fallen away. The same judicial Harry Sanderson who had said to Jessica, "I was my brother's keeper," arraigned and judged himself, and pronounced the sentence on the bishop's face conclusive, irrefutable, without the power of explanation or appeal.
He blew out the candle, replaced it carefully in its altar bracket, made shift to wipe the wax from the table, and slowly, half blindly, and without a word, went into the study.
The bishop came forward, drew the key from the inside of the study door, closed it and locked it from the chapel side. Harry did not turn, but he was acutely conscious of every sound. He heard the door shut sharply, the harsh grate of the key in the lock, and thesound came to him like the last sentence—the realization of a soul on whom the gate of the good closes for ever.
In the dark silence of the chapel Hallelujah Jones smote his thin hands together approvingly, as he followed the bishop to the outer door. There the older man laid his hand on his shoulder.
"Let him that thinketh he standeth," he said, "take heed lest he fall! Let not this knowledge be spread abroad that it make the unrighteous to blaspheme. When you pray for your own soul to-night, pray for the soul of that man from whom God's face is turned away!"
Something in the churchless evangelist bowed to the voice of ecclesiastical authority. He went without a word.
In the study Harry Sanderson stood for a moment with the cards and the bag of double-eagles in his hand. In his soft shirt and disordered hair, with his preternaturally bright eyes, the white blossom on his lapel, and the brilliant light upon his face, he might have been that satin-sleeved colonial ancestor of his, in dissolute maturity, coming from an unclerical bout at Loo, two hundred years ago.
Finally he put the cards and the canvas bagmethodically into the safe and closed it. Then he knelt by his desk and said, clearly and aloud—to that cold inner symbol of consciousness in his soul:
"O God, I do not know if Thou art, as has been said, a seer of the good that is in the bad, and of the bad that is in the good, and a lover of them both. But I know that I am in a final extremity. I can no longer do my labor consistently before the world and before Thee. If I am delivered, it must be by some way of Thine own that I can not conceive, for I can not help myself. Amen."
He rose to his feet, mechanically put on a coat that was lying on a chair—Hugh's coat, but he did not notice this—and bareheaded passed out to the street. The motor-car stood there. He took his place in the forward seat, and threw on the power.
Barking joyously, Rummy, the brown spaniel, tore out of the gate, but his master did not stop. The little creature pursued the moving car, made a frantic leap to gain his seat, but missed, and the huge armored wheel struck and hurled him to the gutter.
Harry did not hear the sharp yelp of pain; his hand was on the lever, pushing it over, over, to its last notch, and the great mechanism, responding with a leap, sped away, faster and faster, through the night.
Harry Sanderson was acting in a kind of fevered dream. His head and hands were bare, his face white and immobile, and his eyes stared straight before him with the persistent fixity of the sleep-walker's. They did not see a bowed, plodding figure pushing a rickety, wheeled melodeon, who scurried from before the hurtling weight that had all but run him down. Nor could they see far behind in the eddying dust a little dog, moaning, limping piteously on three legs, with tongue lolling and shaggy coat caked with mud—following the hopeless, bird-like flight.
One mile, two miles, three miles. The streets were far behind now. The country road spun before him, a dusty white ribbon, along which the dry battered corn rattled as if in a surge of torrid wind. The great motor-car was reeling off the distance like a maddened thing, swooping through the haloed dark, the throttle out, the lever pushed to its utmost limit of speed, rocking drunkenly, every inch of tested steel ringing and throbbing. Yet Harry's fingers had no tremor, no hesitancy, no lack of cunning. His heart was beating measuredly.He kept the road by a kind of instinct as rudimentary as that which points the homing carrier-pigeon. He seemed to be moving in a mental world created by some significant clairvoyancy, in which the purpose operated without recourse to the spring of reason. The light of neurasthenia burned behind his eyelids; he felt at once a consuming flame within, a paralyzing frost without. The light autumn mist drenched him like a fine, sifting rain; the wheel-flung dust adhered like yellow mud, and above the clatter of the exhaust the still air shrieked past like a shrewd wind.
Five miles, through the dark, under the breathless, expectant stars. The car was on the broad curve now, where the road bent to the bluff above the river to pass the skeleton railroad bridge. But Harry knew neither place nor time. He was conscious only of motion—swift, swallow-like, irresistible—this, and the racing pictures in his brain, stencilled on the blur of night that closed around him. These pictures came and went; the last revel of The Saints when he was Satan Sanderson—Hugh sneering at his calling—Jessica facing him with unbandaged eyes—Hallelujah Jones, preaching on the street corner. The figure of the street evangelist recurred again and again with a singular persistency. It grew more tangible! It threatened him!
Something in Harry's brain seemed to snap. A tiny shutter, like that of a camera, fell down. His hands dropped from the steering-wheel, and, swaying in his seat, he began to sing, in a voice made high and uneven by the speed of the car:
"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
"'Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
He sang but the three lines. For suddenly the car left the road—the inflated tires rebounded from the steel ridge of the railroad track—the forward axle caught an iron signal post—and the great motor-car, its shattered lamp jingling like a gong, its pistons thrusting in midair, reared on two wheels, hurling its occupant out like a pebble thrown from a sling, half-turned, and, leaving a trail of sparks like the tail of a rocket behind it, plunged heavily over the rim of the bluff into the river.
A moment later the deep black waters of "the hole" had closed above the mass of sentient steel. The swift current had smoothed away every trace of the strange monster it had engulfed, and there, by the side of the track, huddled against the broken signal post, his clothing plastered with mud and grime, motionless, and with a nasty cut on the temple, lay Harry Sanderson.
A long saturating peace, a deep and drenching darkness, had folded Harry Sanderson. Dully at first, at length more insistently and sharply, a rhythmic pulsing sound began to annoy the quietude. K-track, k-track, k-track—it grew louder; it grew more momentous and material; it irritated the calm that had wrapped the animate universe. Shreds of confusing impression had begun to arrange themselves on a void of nothingness, blurred inchoate images to struggle through a delicious sensation of indifference and repose. Outlines were filling, contours growing distinct; the brain was beginning to resume its interrupted function. As though from an immeasurable distance he heard a low continuous roar, and now and again, through the roar, nearer voices.
Harry awoke. His mind awoke, but his eyes did not open at once, for the gentle swaying that cradled him was pleasant and the muffled clack and hum soothed him like opium. He was as serenely comfortable as a stevedore who dozes out of the long stupefaction of exhaustion to the realization that the day is a holiday.His blood was coursing like quicksilver. He felt a buoyancy, a volatile pleasure, a sense of complete emancipation from all that clogged and cloyed—the sensuous delight of the full pulse and the perfect bodily mechanism.
He opened his eyes.
It was daylight. He was lying on dusty boards that rattled and vibrated beneath him—the floor of an empty freight car in motion. The sliding door was part-way open, and through it was borne the moist air of a river bay and the purring wash of the tide. A small brown dog, an abject, muddied and shivering morsel, was snuggled close to his side. It whined, as if with joy to see his eyes opened, and its stubby tail beat the floor.
Harry turned his head. Two men in dingy garments were seated on the floor a little distance away, thumbing a decrepit pack of cards over an empty box. He could see both side-faces, one weather-beaten and good-humored, the other crafty—knights of the road.
The sudden movement had sent a momentary twinge to his temple; he put up his hand—it touched a coarse handkerchief that had been bound tightly about it. The corner hung down—it was soiled and stiff with blood. What was he doing there? Where was he?Who was he?
It came to him with a start that he actually for the moment did not know who he was—that he had ridiculously slipped the leash of his identity. He smiled at his predicament. He would lie quietly for a few moments and it would come: of course it would come!
Yet it did not come, though he lay many moments, the fingers of his mind fumbling for the latch of the closed door. He had waked perfectly well—all save the slight cut on his temple, and that was clearly superficial, a mere scratch. Not a trouble or anxiety marred his soul; his mind was as clear and light as a lark's. Body and brain together felt as if they had never had a serious ache in the world. But all that had preceded his awakening was gone from him as completely as though it had had no existence. His mind, so far as memory of incident was concerned, was wiped clean, as a wet sponge wipes off a slate. Yet he felt no trouble or anxiety. That part of his brain which had vibrated to these emotions was, as it were, under a curious anesthesia. Goaded and overkeyed into a state of hypertension, it had retaliated with insensibility. All that had vexed and hurt was gone into the limbo with its own disturbing memories.
Stealthily he rose to a sitting posture and, with a frown of humorous perplexity, took a swift and silentinventory. Here he was, in a freight car, speeding somewhere or other, with a sore and damaged skull. The dog clearly belonged to him, or he to the dog—there was an old intimacy in the fawning fondness of the amber eyes. Yonder were two tramps, diverting themselves in their own way, irresponsible and questionable birds of passage. He scanned his own clothing. It was little better than theirs. His coat was threadbare, and with mud, oil and coal-dust, was in a more disreputable state. His wristbands were grimy, and one cuff-link had been torn away. He had no hat.
He bethought himself of his pockets, and went through them methodically one by one. They yielded several dollars in coin, a penknife and a tiny gold cross, but not a letter, not a scrap of paper, nothing to serve him. The gleam of a ring on his finger caught his eye; he rubbed away the dirt and carefully examined it, wondering if the stone was real. His hand was slightly cut and swollen, and the circlet would not come off, but by shifting it slightly he could see the white depression made by long wear. The setting was an odd one, formed of the twisted letters H. S. Those naturally should be his initials, but there he stopped. He repeated to himself all the names he could think of beginning with S, but they told him nothing.
He looked himself over again, carefully, reflectively—many a time of old he had regarded himself with the same amused, fastidious tolerance when dressed for a "slumming" expedition—his head a little to one side, the ghost of a smile on his lips. He put out his hand and laid it on the spaniel's head.
Its rough tongue licked his fingers; it held up one forepaw mutely and lamely. He drew the feverish, dirty little creature into his lap and examined the limp member. It was broken.
"Poor little beggar!" said he under his breath. "So you've been knocked out, too!" With his knife he cut a piece from the lining of his coat and with a splinter of wood from the floor he set the fractured bone and wrapped the leg tightly. The dog submitted without a whimper, and when he set it down, it lay quietly beside him, watching him with affectionate canine solicitude.
"I wonder who we are, you and I," muttered Harry Sanderson whimsically. "I wonder!"
His gaze turned to where he could see the sunshine dancing and shimmering from the tremulous water. He sniffed the warm air—it was clear and sweet. Not a cloud was in the perfect sky. How fine he felt, broken head and all!
He looked across the car, where the card players were still absorbed. Over the shoulder of one he could see the hand he held—a queen, two aces, a seven and a deuce. For an instant something in his brain snapped and crackled like the sputtering spark of an incomplete insulation—for an instant the fingers almost touched the latch of the closed door. Then the sensation faded, and left a blank as before. He rose to his feet and walked forward.
The players looked around. One of them nodded approvingly.
"Right as a trivet!" he said. "I made a pretty good job of that cut of yours. Hurt you much?"
"No," said Harry. "I'm obliged to you for the attention."
"Foolish to walk on a railroad track," the other went on. "By your looks, you've been on the road long enough to know better. We figgered it out that you was just a-going to cross the railroad bridge when the freight raised merry hell with you. We stopped to tank there and we picked you up, you and your four-legged mate. Must have been a bit squiffy, eh?"
He winked, and took a flask from his pocket. "Have a hair of the dog that bit you?" he said.
Harry took the flask, and, wiping the top on hissleeve, uncorked it. Something in the penetrating odor of the contents seemed to cleave through far mental wastes to an intimate, though mysterious goal. He put it to his lips and drank thirstily.
As the burning liquid scorched his throat, a recrudescence of old impulses surged up through the crust of more modern usage. Mentally, characteristically, he was once more the incongruous devil-may-care figure in whom conspicuous achievement and contradictory excesses had walked hand in hand. The Harry Sanderson of the new, remorseful, temperate life, of chastened impulses, of rote and rule and reformed habit—the rector of St. James—had been lost on that wild night ride. The man who had awakened in the freight car was the Satan Sanderson of four years before, who, under stress of mental illness and its warped purview, in that strenuous scene in the chapel, had regained his ancient governance.
Harry handed back the flask with a long breath. There was a composed yet reckless light in his eye—the old veiled gleam of vagary, and paradox, and escapade. He seated himself beside them.
"Thank you," he said. "With your permission, gentlemen, I will take a hand in the game."
Since that tragical wedding-day at the white house in the aspens, Jessica had passed through a confusion of experiences. She had always lived much in herself, and to her natural reserve her blindness had added. As a result her knowledge both of herself and of life had been superficial. She had been drawn to Hugh by both the weakest and the noblest in her, in a self-obliterating worship that had counted her restored sight only an ornament and glory for her love. In the baleful hour of enlightenment she had been lost, whirled away, out into the storm and void, every landmark gone, every light extinguished, her feet set in the "abomination of desolation." The first bitter shock of the catastrophe, however, seemed to burn up in her the very capacity for further poignant suffering, and she went through the motions of life apathetically.
Change of scene and the declining health of David Stires occupied, fortunately, much of her waking thoughts. After the first few months of travel he failedsteadily. His citric-acid moods were forgotten, his harsh tempers put aside. Hour after hour he lay in his chair, gazing out from the wide sun parlor of the sanatorium on the crest of Smoky Mountain, whither their journeying had finally brought them. He had never spoken of Hugh. But Jessica, sitting each day beside him, reading to him till he dropped asleep, seeing the ever-increasing sadness in his face, knew the hidden canker that gnawed his heart.
To the northward the slope of the mountain fell gradually to fields of violet-eyed alfalfa, and twice a day a self-important little donkey-engine drew a single car up and down between the great glass building on the ridge and the junction of the northern railroad. This view did not attract her; she liked best the southern exposure, with its flushed, serrated snow-peaks in the distance, the warmer brown shadows of the gulch-seamed hills unrolling at her feet, and at their base the treeless, busy little county-seat two miles away. In time her fiercer pain had dulled, and her imagination—naturally so importunate—had begun to seize upon her surroundings. In the summer season the sanatorium had few guests, and for this she was thankful. Doctor Brent, its head, rallying her on her paleness, drove her out of doors with good-natured severity, and when shewas not with David Stires she walked or rode for hours at a time over the mountain trails. Breathing in the crisp air of altitude her spirits grew more buoyant. The beauty of shrub and flower, of cloud and sky, began to call to her, and the breath of October found a tinge of color in her cheek. She fed the squirrels, listened to the pert chirp of the whisky-jack and the whirring drum of the partridge, or sat on a hidden elevation which she named "The Knob," facing across the shallow valley to the south.
The Knob overlooked a little grassy shelf a few hundred feet below, where stood a miner's cabin, with weed-grown gravel heaps near by, in front of which a tree bore the legend, painted roughly on a board: "The Little Paymaster Claim." From its point of vantage, too, unobserved, she could look down into the gulch far below, where yellowish-brown cones reared like gigantic ant-hills—the ear-marks of the placer miner—and gray streaks indicated the flumes in which, by tortuous meanderings, the water descended to do its work in the sluices. She could even watch the toiling miners, hoisting the gravel by windlasses, or shovelling it into the long narrow boxes through which the foaming water raced. So limpid was the air that in the little town she could distinguish each several building lining the singlestraight street—a familiar succession of gilded café, general emporium and drug store, with the dull terra cotta "depot" at one end, and on the other, on a sunburned acre of its own, the glaring white court-house, flanked by the post-office and the jail. She could see the clouds of dust, the wagons hitched at the curb and the drab figures grouped at the corners or passing in and out of doorways.
Her interest had opened eagerly to these scenes. The solitudes soothed and the life of the community below, frankly primitive and uncomplicated, attracted her. Between the town of Smoky Mountain and the expensive sanatorium on the ridge a great social gulf was fixed; the latter's patrons for the most part came and went by the narrow-gage road that linked with the northern junction; the settlement far below was only a feature of the panorama for which they paid so well. Even Doctor Brent—who had perched this place of healing where his patients could breathe air fresh from the Pacific and cooled by the snow-peaks—knew it chiefly through two of its citizens, Mrs. Halloran, the capable, bustling wife of the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, the town's single hostelry, who brewed old-fashioned blackberry wine and cordials for his patients, and Tom Felder, a young lawyer whom he had known on thecoast before ill health had sent him to hang out his shingle in a more genial altitude.
The latter sometimes came for a chat with the physician, and on one of these calls Jessica and he had met. She had liked his keen, good-humored face and waving, slightly graying hair. She had met him once since on the mountain road, and he had walked with her and told her quaint stories of the townspeople. She did not guess that more than once since then he had walked there hoping to meet her again. He had taken her to Mrs. Halloran, whose heart she had won by praise of her cherry cordial.
As Mrs. Halloran said afterward: "'Twas no flirt with the bottle and make love to the spoon! She ain't a bit set up. Take the word I give you, Tom Felder, an' go and swap lies with the doctor at the santaranium soon again. Ye can do worse."
This had been Jessica's first near acquaintance with the town, but since that time she had often reined up at the door of the neat hotel to pass a word with Mrs. Halloran or to ask for another bottle of the cherry cordial, which the sick man she daily tended found grateful to his jaded palate.
"It brings back my boyhood," David Stires said to her one afternoon, tapping the bottle by his wheel-chair."That was before the chemist married the vintner's daughter. Somehow this has the old taste."
"It is nearly gone," she said. "I'll get another bottle—I am going for a ride now. I think it does you good."
"Before you go," he said, "fetch my writing-case and I will dictate a letter."
She brought and opened it with a trouble at her heart, for the request showed his increasing weakness. Until to-day the few letters he had written had been done with his own hand. Thinking of this as she waited, her fingers nervously plucked at the inside of the leather cover. The morocco flap fell and disclosed a slip of paper. It was a canceled bank-draft. It bore Hugh's name, and across its face, in David Stires' crabbed hand, written large, was the venomous wordForgery.
The room swam before her eyes. Only by a fierce effort could she compel her pen to trace the dictated words. Hugh's misdeed, evil as it was, had been to her but an abstract crime; now it suddenly lay bare before her, a concrete expression of coarse thievery, a living symbol of crafty simulation. Scarce knowing why she did it, she drew the draft covertly from its receptacle, and slipped it into her bosom. Her fingers trembled as they replaced the flap, and her face was pale when she put away the writing-case and went to don her habit.
The evidence of Hugh's sin! As the horse pounded down the winding road, she held her hand hard against her breast, as though it were a live coal that she would press into her flesh in self-torture. That paper must remain, as the sin that made it remained—the sign-manual of her dishonor and loss! The man whose hand had penned its lying signature was the man she had thought she loved. By that act he had thrust himself from her for ever. Yet he lived. Somewhere in the world he walked, in shame and degradation, beyond the pale of honorable living—and she was his wife!
She was his wife!The words hummed in the hoof-beats and taunted her. The odors of the balsam boughs about her became all at once the scent of jasmin, the sigh of the wind turned to the chanting of choir voices, and beneath her closed eyelids came a face seen but once, but never to be erased or forgotten, a face startled, quivering with a strange, remorseful flush—which she had not guessed was guilt!
She was his wife!Though she called herself Jessica Holme, yet, in the law, his name and fame were hers. There was deep in her the unreasoned, intuitive regard, handed down through inflexible feminine generations, for the relentless mandate, "let not man put asunder;" but she had no finical conception of woman's duty toconvention. To break the bond? To divorce the husband to whom she was wife in name only? That would be to spread abroad the disgrace under which she cringed! She thought of the old man she had left—uncomplaining, growing feebler every day. To shame him before the world, whose ancestors had been upright and clean-handed? To add the final sting to his sufferings—who had done her only good? No, she could not do that. Time must solve the problem for her in some other way.
The main street of the town was busy, yet quiet withal, with the peculiar quiet which marks the absence of cobblestone and trolley-bell. Farmers from outlying fruit ranches gossiped on the court-house square; here and there a linen collar and white straw hat betokened the professional man or drummer; and miners in overalls and thong-laced boots kept a-swing the rattan half-doors of the saloons.
"Look at that steady hand, now, an' her hair as red as glory!" said Mrs. Halloran, gazing admiringly from the doorstep where she had been chatting with Tom Felder. "Ye needn't stare yer gray eyes out though, or she'll stop at th' joolry shop to buy ye a ring—to shame ye fer jest hankerin' and sayin' nothin'!"
Felder laughed as he crossed the street, raising hisfelt hat gallantly to the approaching rider. Mrs. Halloran was a privileged character. The ravage of drudgery had not robbed her of comeliness that gave her face an Indian summer charm, and she was as kindly as her husband was morose. It was not Michael Halloran who kept the Mountain Valley House popular! The old woman hurried to the curb and tied the horse as Jessica dismounted.
"How did ye guess I made some more this day?" she exclaimed. "Sure, if ye drink it yerself, my dearie, them cheeks is all th' trade-mark I need!" She led the way into the little carpeted side room, by courtesy denominated "the parlor." "I'll go an' put it up in two shakes," she said. "Sit ye down an' I'll not be ten minutes." So saying she bustled away.
Left alone, Jessica gazed abstractedly about her. Her mind was still full of the painful reflections of her ride. A door opened from the room into the office. It was ajar; she stepped close and looked in.
A group of miners lounged in the space before the front windows—familiarly referred to by its habitués as "the Amen Corner"—chatting and watching the passers-by.
Suddenly she clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. A name had been spoken—the name that was inher thought—the name of "Hugh Stires." She leaned forward, listening breathlessly.
"I wonder where the young blackleg's been," said one, peering through the windows. "He'd better have stayed away for good, I'm thinking. What does he want to come back for, to a place where there aren't three men who will take a drink with him?"
The reply was as contemptuous.
"We get some rare black sheep in the hills!" The voice spoke meaningly. "If I had my way, he'd leave this region almighty quick!"
Jessica looked about her an instant wildly, guiltily. She could not be mistaken in the name! Was Hugh here, whither by the veriest accident she had come—here in this very town that she had gazed down upon every day for weeks?Was he?She pressed her cold hands to her colder cheeks. The contempt in the voices had smitten through her like a sword.
A revulsion seized her. No, no, it could not be! She had not heard aright. It was only a fancy! But she had an overwhelming desire to satisfy herself with her own eyes. From where she stood she could not see the street. She bethought herself of the upper balcony.
Swiftly, on tiptoe, she crossed to the hall door, threw it open, and ran hastily up the stair.
If the man who had been the subject of the observations Jessica had heard had been less absorbed, as he walked leisurely along on the opposite side of the street, he would have noticed the look of dislike in the eyes of those he passed. They drew away from him, and one spoke—to no one in particular and with an oath offensive and fervid. But weather-beaten, tanned, indifferently clad, and with a small brown dog following him, the new-comer passed along, oblivious to the sidelong scrutiny. He did not stare about him after the manner of a stranger, though, so far as he knew, he had never been in the place before. So far as he knew—for Harry Sanderson had no memories save those which had begun on a certain day a month before in a box-car. He walked with eyes on the pavement, absorbed in thoughts of his own.
But Harry Sanderson now was not the man who had ridden into oblivion in the motor-car. The rector of St. James was in a strange eclipse. Mentally and externallyhe had reverted to the old Satan Sanderson, of the brilliant flashing originality, of the curt risk and daring. The deeply human and sensitive side, that had developed during his divinity years, was in abeyance; it showed itself only in the affection he bestowed on the little nameless dog that followed him like a brown, shaggy shadow.
He was like that old self of his, and yet, if he had but known it, he was wonderfully like some one else, too—some one who had belonged to the long ago and garbled past that still eluded him; some one who had been a part also of the life of this very town, till a little over a month before, when he had left it with dread dogging his footsteps!
Curious coincidences had wrought together for this likeness. In the past weeks Harry had grown perceptibly thinner. A spare beard was now on his chin, and the fiery sun that had darkened his cheeks to sallow had lightened his brown hair a shade. The cut on his brow had healed to the semblance of a thin red birth-mark. Most of all, the renaissance of the old character had given his look, to the casual eye, a certain flare and jauntiness, which dissipation and license, unclogged now with memory or compunction, had matured and vitalized. His was now a replica of the face he had once seen, in that lost life of his, mirrored in his chapel study—his own face, with the trail of evil upon it, and yet weirdly like Hugh Stires'.
Fate—or God!—was doing strange things for Harry Sanderson!
Harry's game of cards in the freight-car had been a sequent of the game in the chapel. It was an instinctive effort of the newly-stirring consciousness to relink the broken chain, utilizing the mental formula which had been stamped deeply upon it when the curtain of oblivion descended—which had persisted, as the photograph of the dead retina shows the scene upon which the living eye last looked. The weeks that followed were reversionary. Rebellion against convention, dissipation—these had been the mask through which the odd temperament of Satan Sanderson had looked at life. This mask had fallen before a career of new meanings and motives. These blotted suddenly out with their inspirations and habits, and, the old spring touched, the mind had automatically resumed its old viewpoint.
He had studied himself with a sardonic,ex parteinterest. He had found at his disposal a well-stocked mind, a copious vocabulary. Terms of science, historic references, the thousand and one allusions of the daily newspaper that the unlearned pass over, all had theirsignificance for him. He was no superficial observer, and readily recognized the evidences of mental culture. But the cord that had bound all together into character had snapped. He was a ship without a rudder; a derelict, drifting with the avid winds of chance on the tide of fate. A thousand ways he had turned and turned. A thousand tricks he had tried to cajole the unwilling memory. All were vain. When he had awakened in the freight-car, many miles had lain between him and his vanished history, between him and St. James parish, the town he had impressed, the desolate white house in the aspens, the chapel service and surplice, and the swift and secret-keeping river. Between him and all that these things had meant, there lay a gulf of silence and blankness as wide as infinity itself.
But drifting, adventuring, blown by the gipsy wind of chance, learning the alphabet and the rule of three of "the road," the man was at once a part of it and apart from it. The side that rejoiced in the liberty and madcap adventure was overlaid by another darkling side whose fingers were ever feeling for the lost latch. In the nomad weeks of wind and sun, as the tissues of the brain grew slowly back to a state of normal action, the mind seized again and again upon the bitter question of his identity. It had obtruded into clicking leagues onsteel-rails, into miles afoot by fruit-hung lanes, on white Pacific shell-roads under cedar branches, on busy highways. It had stalked into days of labor in hop-fields, work with hand and foot that brought dreamless sleep and generous wage; into nights of less savory experience in city purlieus, where a self-forgotten man gamed and drank, recklessly, audaciously, forbiddingly. Who was he? From what equation of life had he been eliminated? Had he loved anything or anybody? Had he a friend, any friend, in the world? At first it was not often that he cared; only occasionally some deep-rooted instinct would stir, subtly conscious, without actual contrast, of the missed and evaded. But he came to ask it no longer quizzically or sardonically, but gloomily and fiercely. And lacking answer, the man of no yesterdays had plunged on toward the ardent, alien to-morrow, and further into audacious folly. He had drunk deeper, the sign-posts of warning were set in his countenance, and his smile had grown as dangerous as a sunstroke.
The man of no memories gave no heed to the men on the street who looked at him askance. He sauntered along unconsciously, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. With a casual glance at the hotel across the way, he entered a saloon, where a score of patrons were standingat the bar, or shaking dice noisily at the tables ranged against the wall. The bartender nodded to his greeting—the slightest possible nod. The dog who had followed him into the place leaped up against him, its forepaws on his knee.
"Brandy, if you please," said the new arrival, and poured indolently from the bottle set before him.
The conversation in the room had chilled. To its occupants the man who had entered was no stranger; he was Hugh Stires, returned unwelcome to a place from which he had lately vanished. Moreover, what they felt for him was not alone the crude hatred which the honest toiler feels for the trickster who gains a living by devious knaveries. There was an uglier suspicion afloat of Hugh Stires! A blue-shirted miner called gruffly for his score, threw down the silver and went out, slamming the swing-door. Another glowered at the new arrival, and ostentatiously drew his glass farther along the bar.
The new-comer regarded none of them. He poured his glass slowly full, sipped from it, and holding it in his hand, turned and glanced deliberately about the place. He looked at everybody in the room, suddenly sensible of the hostile atmosphere, with what seemed a careless amusement. Then he raised his glass.
"Will you join me, gentlemen?" he said.
There was but one response. A soiled, shambling figure, blear, white-haired and hesitating, with a battered violin under its arm, slouched from a corner and grasped eagerly for the bottle the bartender contemptuously pushed toward him. No one else moved.
The man who waited studied the roomful with a disdainful smile, with eyes sparkling like steel points. He as wholly misunderstood their dislike as they misconstrued his effrontery—did not guess that to them he stood as one whom they had known and had good reason to despise. Their attitude struck him as so manifestly unreasonable and absurd—so primarily the sulky hatred of the laborious boor for the manifestly more flippant member of society—that it diverted him. He had drunk at bar-rooms in many strange places; never before had he encountered a community like this. His veiled, insolent smile swept the room.
"A spirit of brotherhood almost Christian!" he said. "If I observe that the town's brandy is of superior vintage to its breeding, let me not be understood as complimenting the former without reservation. I have drunk better brandy; I have never seen worse manners!"
He looked smilingly at the soiled figure beside him—a fragment of flotsam tossed on the tide of failure. "I erred in my general salutation," he said. "Gentility is,after all, less a habit than an instinct." He lifted his glass—to the castaway. "I drink to the health of the only other gentleman present," he said, and tossed the drink off.
A snort and a truculent shuffle came from the standing men. Their faces were dark. Tom Felder, the lawyer, entered the saloon just in time to see big Devlin, the owner of the corner dance-hall, rise from a table, rolling up flannel sleeves along tattooed arms. He saw him stride forward and, with a well-directed shove, send the shambling inebriate reeling across the floor.
"Two curs at the bar are enough at a time!" quoth Devlin.
Then the lawyer saw an extraordinary thing. The emptied glass rang sharply on the bar, the arm that held it straightened, the lithe form behind it seemed to expand—and the big bulk of Devlin went backward through the doorway, and collapsed in a sprawling heap on the pavement.
"For my part," said an even, infuriate voice from the threshold, "I prefer but one."
The face the roomful saw now as they pushed to the outer air, and which turned on the flocking crowd, bore anything but the slinking look they had been used to see on the face of Hugh Stires. The smile that meantdanger played over it; there was both calculation and savagery in it. It was the look of the man to whom all risks are alike, to whom nothing counts. In the instant confusion, every one there recognized the element of hardihood dumfounded. Here was one who, as Barney McGinn, the freighter, said afterward, "hadn't the sand of a sick coyote," bearding a bully and the most formidable antagonist the town afforded. Devlin himself was not overpopular; his action had been plainly enough a play to the galleries; and courage—that animal attribute which no circumstance or condition can rob of due admiration—had appeared in an unexpected quarter. But the man they despised had infuriated them with insult, and Devlin had the sympathy that clings to a fair cause. An ugly growl was running through the crowd, and several started forward. Even when Tom Felder put up his hand with a sharp, indignant exclamation, they fell back with an unwilling compulsion.
The prostrate man was on his feet in an instant, wiping the blood from a cleft lip, and peeled off his vest with a vile epithet.
"That is incidentally a venturesome word to select from your vocabulary," said the even voice, a sort of detonation in it. "You will feel like apologizing presently."
Devlin came on with a bull-like rush. The lawyer's eye, shrewdly gaging the situation, gave the slighter man short shrift, and for several intense seconds every breath stopped. Those seconds called up from some mysterious covert all the skill and strength of the old hard-hitting Satan Sanderson, all the science of parry and feint learned in those bluff college bouts with the gloves with Gentleman Jim. And this hidden reserve rushed into combat with an avid thirst and wild ferocity as strange as the steady eye and hand that cloaked them beneath a sardonic coolness.
It was a short, sharp contest. Not a blow broke the guard of the man whose back was to the doorway—on the other hand, Devlin's face was puffed and bleeding. When for a breath he drew back, gulping, a sudden glint of doubt and fear had slipped beneath the blood and sweat.
The end came quickly. Harry stepped to meet him, there was a series of swift passes—then one, two, lightning-like blows, and Devlin went down white and stunned in the dust of the roadway.
So high was the tension and so instantaneous the close, that for a moment the crowd was noiseless, the spell still upon them. In that moment Tom Felder came hastily forward, for, though sharing the general dislike,admiration was strong in him, and, knowing the temper of the bystanders, he expected trouble.
The man who had administered Devlin's punishment, however, did not see his approach. He was looking somewhere above their heads—at the upper balcony of the hotel opposite—staring, in a kind of strained and horrified expectancy, at a girl who leaned forward, her hands clenching the balustrade, her eyes fixed on his face. The late sunlight on her hair made it gleam like burnished copper over her green riding-habit, and her cheeks were blanched.
There was something in that face, in that intense look, that seemed to cleave the gray veil that swathed Harry Sanderson's past. Somewhere, buried in some cell of his brain, a forgotten memory tugged at its shackles—a memory of a time when, thousands and thousands of years ago, he had been something more than the initials "H. S." The look pierced through the daredevil present in which the mind astray had roved reckless and insensate, to a deeper stratum in which slept maturer qualities of refined taste, of dignity and of repute. It stripped off the protecting cicatrice and left him enveloped in an odd embarrassment. A flush burned his face.