Night had fallen, the dark relieved by the dim lustre of a thin new moon, when Sevier rose and sauntered back to the platform. The train was passing through a defile and laboriously puffing up a grade. He looked back into the lighted car; no one was observing him. He buttoned his coat close about him and poising on the lowest step to choose his ground, sprang off into a snowbank.
He had made his leap with all the care possible, but the speed of the train was such that only the snow and his padded clothing saved him from serious injury. As it was it was some minutes before he could regain his breath, and then it came with a keen stab that seemed a sword piercing his shoulder—a sharp complaint from the recent wound. He rose painfully, but at the first step collapsed with a groan, realising that he had twisted his ankle badly. With lips compressed from the wretched pang, he rose again and set the injured member to the ground, forcing it to bear his weight. For a while each step was agony, then this dulled somewhat and he went steadily on, limping along the uneven ties.
When he came to the crest of the rise he stopped and looked about him. He knew, roughly, where he was. Across the dark valley unrolling at his feet under a sky that shook with stars, he could dimly make out another darker ridge. Beyond lay a deeper valley and beyond that the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, and there, forty miles away as the crow flies—how far by the irregular route he must take he could not estimate—lay his mountain lodge, the lonely little demesne of forest and stream, whither he had been wont to go for summer weeks of hunting and fishing, with its rough but spacious bungalow presided over by his care-taker, old "Jubilee Jim," whose father had been a slave of his father before the Civil War.
Forty miles as the crow flies! Across a difficult and sparsely-settled country, with now only the faint moonlight and a natural instinct of direction to guide him, in patent-leather shoes and with a sprained ankle!
He set his teeth and plunged down the declivity through the tumbled rocks and snow-drifts.
Echo stood at the gate of Midfields, her gloved hand delaying to close it, her eyes gazing down the featureless street along which yellow window-squares were beginning to spring out, and vague figures moved, now standing out sharply under the newly lighted arc-lamps at the crossing, now vanishing beyond into the chill windless dusk. Behind her lay the purpling lawn, with its tumult of leaves under the acacias, the oaks with their red-lipped foliage and the tall chrysanthemums at the edge of the frost-touched grass that stretched like the skins of young fawns about the great house with its fluted columns, dim and grey now in the deepening twilight. About her were only the quiet of the cold evening, the bewildered shadows huddling beneath the shrubs, and the faint snap of frosty tree-branches in the tightening of the first bonds of winter, above only the windless silence and a wild white moon flowing through dusky wreaths of cloud.
But she felt no soothing influence in the hush.
Her mind was far away, in another city and state; her thought had entered again the gloomy prison which she had visited with Nancy Langham and Malcolm—on a day when a prisoner had intervened to save the Warden's life. The peace of autumn evenings brought no comfort to that place, save it were the mere rest of wearied bodies. A city of itself, it was as alien to that city so near it, of comfortable homes and pleasant people which she had visited, as the deep life of the coal-miner is alien to that of the free hunter who breathes the sweeter air a thousand feet above the other's sunless toil. Outside of those walls folk were eager and merry; inside lights were dim, life itself sluggish and inept; there were sore hearts, sterile hopes, smouldering hatreds, an oligarchy of despotism ruling with slow cruelties, a community of apathy and despair.
Since her return from the Langhams she had moved, so it seemed to her, in a kind of sombre dream in which her daily duties were mechanical and involuntary and her only real life that inner consciousness which had writhed and struggled unceasingly. A sense of actual, personal guilt bound her, by a bond stronger than steel, to that unknown prisoner in the Penitentiary, weighing upon her spirit as heavy as a promise to the dead.
What should she—what was she bound to do? Which way should she turn? There was Mason's opinion, based upon a long and sensitive intercourse, that the man was no criminal; that, had he been absolved of attempted murder, he could have cleared himself of the baleful association. But that, after all, was only Mason's opinion. He might be wrong. And if so, though the man had not fired the shot, he was a partner in his comrade's iniquity, a party to the greater guilt. An enemy to society, his penalty was just and right. Was she called upon, on such an empty hypothesis, to take upon herself a horrible mantle of notoriety? So she had reasoned, but the self-accusation had remained, not to be argued back by casuistry, a stern visitant that stood insistently before her, pointing the stern finger of denunciation.
As she stood by the gate in the dusk, she shivered as though the still cold penetrated beneath her furs. She must tell the truth! Whatever the result, she must disclose the part she had played. She had no thought that this might be accomplished without publicity, or that testimony which might be basis for executive action could be secret. In imagination she pictured herself standing before the same tribunal by which an innocent man had been condemned, telling her story to the impartial and impersonal Law—telling it openly, before all the world!
The world? It was not this thought which in this moment of harrowing decision seemed to scratch her soul like an etcher's needle. She was thinking now only of Harry Sevier. He stood out alone, sharply, clearly defined against the meaningless multitude. She could no longer take refuge in her pride; that had vanished long ago in the misery of his absence. She wanted him, and him only, desired him with all the strength of her woman's love, which had been sharpened and deepened by the experiences through which she had been passing. When he returned, it would be to find her the centre of an open scandal, sprung to new and sensational life—the "mysterious woman" who had been blazoned in a hundred headlines, her name no longer spotless, but cheapened by tawdry mystery and smirched by innuendo! Would it not kill any vestige of love his heart might still hold for her?
And yet beneath her dread and apprehension there had come to her in her struggle the awakening of something as deep and imperative as her love—the insistent "Thou shalt!"—the nascent must of truth and honour, fruit of generations of clean ancestry, which brought clearer vision and resolve.
She turned from the gate at length, her step dragging as if from weariness. She had a strange feeling that in that final hour of decision she had grown physically and mentally old.
As she neared the house, there came from the placid street the raucoushonkof a motor and the sound of masculine voices lifted in a song whose refrain solicitously inquired as to the whereabouts of a certain dog named Rover. The chording was somewhat uncertain, but any lack was more than made up by laughter and noise. She recognised the baritone as that of her brother, Chisholm.
Chilly jumped down at the gate, and as the automobile turned and sped back, its occupants calling jovial good-byes, he ran after her up the drive. Overtaking her, he leaned to kiss her cheek, as she caught a familiar odour upon his breath. She turned her face aside.
He noted this with a little laugh. "Come, prunes and prisms," he said, "out with it! Yes, I've had a drink—numerous ones, in fact. Now on with the lecture; let joy be unconfined!"
"When did I ever lecture you, Chilly?" Echo answered, dully.
"Youhavebeen pretty decent, that's a fact, Echo," he responded, with humorous lugubriousness. "I wish father took after you more!"
They had reached the porch now and he stole a quick glance through the window. "I discern the shadow of my doting parent aforesaid," he remarked flippantly, "and having a due regard for the proprieties—and peace—I think I'll slip in the side-door and give the prodigal a wash-up and a clove before he enters the lion's den."
He nodded laughingly and left her to enter the front door alone.
A few minutes later, divested of coat and furs, she came into the drawing-room where her father and mother sat, the former with his magazine and the latter perusing the evening paper. Mrs. Allen withdrew her lorgnette and looked up.
"By the way, Echo," she said. "Here's the closing chapter of the adventure you and Nancy had at the jail." She turned the page and read aloud:
"It became known to-day that a dangerous criminal escaped day before yesterday and got clean away from the Penitentiary of our sister state. The prisoner, who was serving a term of twenty years for burglary, a few months since shot down Mr. Cameron Craig, the well known financier, in his library at midnight. It is to be hoped that there will be a close examination into what appears to be a glaring exhibition of lax methods and unpardonable carelessness on the part of the prison authorities."
Echo could not have had a deeper sensation of amazement and relief. A wave of excitement had passed over her, leaving her cool and self-possessed, and able to take a natural part in the conversation that followed. But in her heart she was saying over and over:
"I am safe—safe! There is no question now of my telling! The secret is mine—mine—mine!"
In his little cabin, close by a big log-walled bungalow on a lonely slope of the Blue Ridge, now snugly frozen in by its winter snows, old "Jubilee Jim" lay in a deep sleep. The moonlight, paling before the coming dawn, came through the single window, lighting dimly the seamed black face on the pallet, the sacks of flour and beans in the corner, a side of bacon hung against the wall and strings of dried red-peppers and bunches of herbs suspended from the rafters. On the floor before the fire-place, in which a few red embers still glowed, snored a yellow hound, gaunt and long of limb.
There was no other house within miles of the place, but solitariness was a habit with Jubilee Jim, and he did not miss human companionship. Ten years before, the man who had chosen that wild spot and had built the bungalow for occasional summer outings with his chosen comrades, in which they might shoot and fish and live in primitive, health-giving fashion, has ensconced the old negro there as general cook and care-taker. He had built himself a tight little cabin close at hand and remained there year in and year out to guard the building against the frequent forest fires. In his pottering negro way he was a Jack of many trades, in the summer cultivating a little cleared patch of "garden truck" back of his cabin and in winter trapping small game, and of evenings poring over his Bible, spelling out the words laboriously—a gift he had learned many years before from some country "missioner." Three or four times a year, leaving the lean hound in possession, he trudged ten miles to the nearest village for what supplies he needed. But on these occasions he felt no temptation to remain with his kind, toiling back contentedly to his little cabin, his hound, and his Bible.
Suddenly, in the tense frozen silence, the great hound stirred and lifted his head with a low guttural growl. His master woke and turned on the creaking couch.
"He-e-sh!" he said impatiently. "Whut fo' yo' want ter mek dat noise en steal mah sleep!"
At the remonstrance the lean tail thumped the board floor, but another louder growl, deep and menacing, came from the shaggy throat. The old negro lifted himself and listened.
"Sumpen out dar!" muttered Jubilee Jim, straining his ears, for now he caught the sound that had pricked the acuter hearing of the animal—a curious, struggling sound like something wallowing in heavy snowdrifts.
"Sumpenbig!" Jubilee Jim's wrinkled face looked puzzled in the moonlight and his eyes rolled to the wall where, on two wooden pegs, sat an old-fashioned shot-gun. "Don' reck'n et's er bar!" he whispered to the hound. "Ain't ben no bar eroun' hyuh en mawn thuhty yeahs!" He got up and set his ear to the crack of the door. As he bent his stooped frame, something lunged against the wall outside, and at the sound the hound's bristles rose and he sent forth a fierce, rumbling bay that rattled the window.
"Et's erman!" said Jubilee Jim. He turned hastily to the rough-hewn table and lighted a lantern; then snapping a chain into the dog's collar and tethering him to the wall, he went to the door and lifted its heavy bar. It opened inward and there half stumbled, half fell across the threshold a snowy figure that collapsed at his feet.
"Mah Lawd!" ejaculated the old man. "What he doin' hyuh?"
With a sharp word to the leaping, raging hound, he dragged the recumbent body inside, shut the door, and lighted a bundle of pine knots in the fire-place. In the bright yellow light that flooded the cabin he knelt down and examined the man who lay there. He drew off the frosty fur cap from the close-clipped head. The coat was stiff with frost so that he had trouble to unbutton and remove it, and the shoes were broken. He took a knife and carefully cut them off from the feet, noticing with quick pity that one ankle was swollen to twice its natural size.
"Reck'n yo' mos' froze ter def!" said Jubilee Jim. "En starved too!" He rummaged on a shelf, found an iron skillet containing some broth and set it close to the blazing wood. Then, he drew the limp figure upon his couch and began to remove the clothing, now wet and clinging.
As he opened the shirt, however, he started back with an exclamation.
Well he knew what that jacket with its black and yellow-grey stripes meant! Had he not often seen the sullen chain-gang breaking stone on the mountain roads? The man who lay before him was a criminal in desperate flight in stolen garments! He could tie him fast, unconscious and helpless as he was, and leave the dog to guard him, while he went down to the town for officers. But as he thought, something else came to his mind. "Sick en in prison, en ye visited me!" he muttered. "De Good Man he say dat. Dis hyuh man done been in prison, en he moughty sick too. What dee Good Man do, Ah wondah? Reck'n he ain' gwine lock him up, not 'treckly, nohow!"
He saw a crimson stain that spread over the stripes. He touched it—it was blood.
Five minutes later, in the warming cabin, he was examining an opened wound in the shoulder of the insensible man. He washed it carefully and bound it up with some of the medicinal herbs that hung from the rafters. This done, he took the skillet from the fire-place and with a spoon forced a little of the hot liquid, drop by drop, between the clenched teeth. Under these ministrations a semblance of life began to return to the exhausted frame, and with it the chilled body rushed into a fever. The head began to roll from side to side and the lips to mutter indistinguishably.
The hound had grown quiet now, and released from the chain, came to sniff at the bunk. All at once he flung up his great head with a low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung down.
All at once the hound flung up his great head with a low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung downAll at once the hound flung up his great head with a low howl,then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung down
All at once the hound flung up his great head with a low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung downAll at once the hound flung up his great head with a low howl,then, crouching, licked the nerveless hand that hung down
Jubilee Jim looked in startled amaze, then seized the lantern and held it close. "Who dis hyuh?" he said.
As if at the challenge, the eyes in the white face opened and for a single instant consciousness flickered there. "Jube—" said a weak voice, "you—old—scoundrel—" Then the eyes closed and the mutterings recommenced.
The lantern rattled on the floor, as the old negro fell upon his knees by the pallet. "Et's him!" he cried. "Dee Lawd he'p! Et's Marse Harry hese'f!" He leaned and looked, with a painful bewilderment, at the striped garments, the smooth, clipped scalp. "Huccome he got dem close on?" he said to himself, half-fearfully. He stood a moment looking from them to the pallet, then hastily rolled the sodden things into a bundle and thrust it out of sight behind one of the sacks on the floor.
Late the next afternoon the smoke from the stone chimney of the big bungalow rose in a pale spiral into the keen windless air. Inside a leaping fire of chestnut wood burned on the huge hearth and Harry lay on a comfortable, blanket-covered couch in the corner. All day long Jubilee Jim had watched beside him, as he tossed in delirium, now and then touching the hot hand, laying cooling cloths on the fevered wound, or feeding him with a spoon. He had not dared go down the mountain to fetch a doctor, fearing to leave his patient so long alone.
All day, as he watched, his slow brain had been busy with the strangeness of that arrival—most of all with the mystery of the striped clothes. To his simple intelligence, unvexed by the complexities of life in communities, evil and good stood out in sharp and irreconcilable contradistinction, and the garments were a harrowing symbol. But deep in him was that profound, unreasoning belief—the South's touching legacy of ante-bellum days—that trust and confidence that is dog-like and unswerving.
Towards evening, when the sick man became easier and he lay more quietly, though his fever ran high, Jubilee Jim opened the door, and stood looking out onto the lone, frosty hillside. The sun was going down amid a flutter of scarlet scarfs and the marbled pines stood in sombre clusters outlined like sentinels above the pansied twilight of the snowy valley. At length he knelt down and with gnarled hands clasped and eyes still on the colourful sky, he said:
"O Lawd, Ah don' know what mek Marse Harry come hyuh lak dis. But yo' knows what he done fo' ole Jube. Keep him yeahs en yeahs, feed him, en when he so sick he gwine die, tek en git er doctah en cure him up. When ah so old ah ain' no good no mo' he gimme dee lan' up hyuh fo' tuh live on. Don' do nuffin cep'n watch dee house, en when he come sometimes Ah cooks fo' him—das all! Ah don' know whaffuh he have on dem wicked clo's—don' keer nuth'n erbout dat. Kase, Lawd, Marse Harry ain' ben fo' tuh do nuth'nbad. Dey tek yo' darlin' son, dee Book says, en put er crown o' tho'ns on he beautiful haid, en he ain' done nuth'n 'tall cep'n good. Ah don' keer what Marse Harry have on; Ah reck'n when he come lak dis, Yo' gwine he'p me he'p him—kase das what he done fo' me!"
As the earnest voice ceased, another spoke behind him. "Jube!"
The old man rose hastily and came to the couch. "Yo' knows me ergen, Marse Harry?"
"Yes, Jube. When—did I get here?"
"Dis mawnin', suh, befo' sun-up."
"Was any one else here?"
"No, Marse. Ain' ben nobody up hyuh sence dee fust snow-fall."
Sevier was silent a moment, his eyes fixed on the black, affectionate face. "Jube—bring me the things I—had on."
The other crossed the room and came back with a suit which he laid on the blanket.
Sevier shook his head feebly. "Not those. The—others."
Jubilee Jim hesitated, then turned and left the room. When he came back the striped garments were in his hands.
"Do you—know what—those are?"
The faithful, old face turned a little away. "Ah reck'n dem am some new-fangelly fishin'-close," he said, after a pause.
A faint flicker of a smile touched the sick man's face. He understood. "Put them—into—the fire."
Sevier watched him, as he obeyed. He was very weak and his blood, poisoned from the opened wound, was throbbing with fever. He was preserving consciousness only by a great effort, but his gaze held Jubilee Jim's steadily.
"Jube, I want—no one to—know when I—came, or that I—am here—at all ...No one... Do you—understand?"
"Yas, suh."
"I'm going—to be—sick. But—no matter—how sick I—no one is to—be brought here ... not a doctor ... nor—any one." Harry's strength was failing now, and the words trailed into indistinctness.
"Yas, Marse Harry."
"I ... trust you ... Jube!"
That was all. He was gone again into the fevered delirium.
All that night, and for many days and nights thereafter, old Jubilee Jim, faithful to his word, struggled with death over the body of Harry Sevier.
Harry stood in the doorway of the Bungalow, one hand shading his eyes, looking down the twisting trail to where, far below, a dark blotch toiled up the slope. During three days he had been alone, for Jubilee Jim had gone upon a journey to the city where lay the old life from which Harry had fled on the day he had ceased to be himself. The snows were gone and an early spring day of azure and gold lay over the satiny stillness of the folded hills. The fresh, pleasant air was full of the whirr of birds and the smell of new bark and bursting buds, the slender birches were unfurling the virginal green of their young leaves, and here and there on the hillsides blossoms were showing. All nature was fulfilling its annual mission of rebirth, audaciously triumphing over autumn's death and winter's sepulture.
The stalwart figure standing on the threshold was good to see. The fever that had followed that terrible night of physical exhaustion had been worsted at last by Jubilee Jim's homely medicaments and the balm of peace and sleep. There had been days when Harry had been perilously near the Great Adventure, but assiduous nursing and a splendid native constitution had in the end conquered. The pure air of the balsam forest and the comfort of the solitude had at length had their way with him. The flesh had come back to the wasted frame, the old brightness to the eye, and the flush of perfect health to the skin. Now, with his curling hair and his crisp dark beard, trimmed as of old, he was again the Harry Sevier of a year before—save that back of the eyes was a steady something, a deep conscious strength that had come to him from those bitter prison months when his soul had been tried in a fiery furnace of pain.
Sevier dropped his hand with a long sigh of relief, for at a turn in the path, the dark blotch had resolved itself into the figure of a man, followed by a great dog harnessed to a little cart. "It's Jube!" he said aloud. "He's made the trip safely, and he's got the things!"
This journey had been the outcome of much thought on Harry's part. Lying there in the long weeks of convalescence, his mind had been busy with the problem of the future. What to do? He could not stay forever there on the mountain, a lonely hermit. Somewhere, he must take up life again. When he had beguiled those dark prison moods with thoughts of freedom, his imagination had pictured flight to some distant country where, under a borrowed name, he might find a refuge, barren as that refuge might be of all life's sweetness. Freedom now was his. Should he put the past forever behind him, make his disappearance good, and without more ado drop out of sight and sound forever? All his instinct rebelled against this drastic solution, this cavalier denial of life and its mental exercise for a career of empty futility.
What remained then? To go back to the life he had left behind him on the day he ceased to be Harry Sevier?
Why not? He was free—free to be himself again. Only one, beside Echo, had known that he and the captured house-breaker were identical—that was Craig. And Craig had been taken from his path. And who else would connect Harry Sevier, the lawyer, the club-man of well-known and reputable past, the favourite of drawing-rooms—who could ever associate him with a tawdry burglar and desperate convict who had escaped from a penitentiary in another State? Once more bearded and eye-glassed, without scar or mark to point resemblance or beckon identification, recognition would be the wildest improbability.
Once, as he bettered, Jubilee Jim had gone to the valley below to return with a bundle of back-copies of the County newspaper, and as Harry pored over these avidly, the old life had cried to him from every line. The movement that had been called into life by the Civic Club, in the hour when he had made the first speech of his life that had been untinctured with any personal ambition or selfish motive, had gained momentum; it had taken on party organisation and would be a force to be reckoned with in the coming campaign. On that day he had had his first taste of the joy of battle for a principle, and he longed inexpressibly to throw the power, of which he was now more than ever conscious, into the struggle for the new ideal.
Suppose he went back, and Craig recovered the mind that was now in eclipse—recovered and remembered? What then?
His safety lay in the fact that no one possessed the clue to the unthinkable reality. Craig, if he recovered, would possess this, and if he in his right senses denounced him, the accusation, spectacular and incredible as it might seem, would have to be seriously met. And he could not meet it, for it would be true! So long as Craig lived, the harrowing danger would always be there—a veritable Sword of Damocles! Would not his future be forever a dubious adventure, haunted always by a torturing shadow and the dread of discovery and shame? In fancy he saw himself seized—to be suddenly confronted with that shameful thing, to face a cloud of witnesses, be dragged back to a cell, despised and broken, once more a convict—that, or else flight, cringing and furtive, with the hounds of the law in cry!
And yet, did not the chances that Craig would not regain his faculties vastly preponderate? The newspapers Harry had read had not contained the item chronicling Craig's journey to Buda-Pesth, and recovery was not an imminent possibility to his mind. A year had gone by, and all the skill that wealth could invoke had no doubt been applied, and vainly. Even if sometime he to some extent recovered, it was more than likely that his memory of that fatal night in his library would be impaired. So Harry told himself.
Over and over he followed the trail of painful reflection, in a vicious circle that centred always in the one thought that sent his mind shrinking in upon itself—Echo. What would that old life be to him, denied its old relations? He and she were nothing to one another any more: she was only a stinging memory. And he would see her, meet her, talk with her, always with that sickening pretence of ignorance between them, in a painful hypocrisy, till she should love and marry—some one else than him! A wave of sick revolt had surged over him at the thought. What to him was freedom, even life itself, if each hour held the thumb-screw and the rack?
Thus his resolve had swung back and forth, pendulum-like, tiring itself with the endless question, and much thinking had brought him no nearer a solution. Meanwhile time had been passing, and pending final decision it was necessary for him in some measure to pick up the old threads. There were responsibilities which he had not yet laid down. There were his apartment, his servants, his office—for though provision of a sort had fortunately been made for a time, his affairs must now be put upon a securer basis which would permit of his taking whatever course should seem best. So, finally, he had sent Jubilee Jim on the long journey, after thoroughly schooling the old man on the part he was to play. By him he had sent a letter to his man of business, with minute instructions which would enable his affairs to be put in order, another to his bank directing the sale of certain securities for cash to be held at his instant demand, a third to Suzuki, his Japanese valet, instructing him to send clothes, and other needful articles, his private papers and a few books—for solace in this solitude until he should have determined what to do.
"Good, Jube!" said Harry, as the old negro came into the room carrying the big bundle from his little cart. "You got everything, then?"
"Yas, Marse Harry. Ah brung dem all—dee papers, en dee close, en dee money f'um dee bank, en all. Moughty glad ah got dis 'yer ole dawg erlong, wid sech er heap o' money on me! Reck'n Ah spent er lot—had tuh pay er qua'tah bof ways fo' him tuh ride on dee baggage-cyah: wouldn't let him in dee smokah nohow. Dey argyfied he too big."
Harry spread out the clothing on the table—suits of fashionable cut, speaking loudly and insistently of the old life. Those he wore at the moment had once been modish too, but their one-time owner would no longer have recognised them, for they were threadbare and as battered as the home-made moccasins on Harry's feet. At the first opportunity he purposed anonymously to send John Stark double their value, with certain articles the garments had contained—watch, cigarette-case, cuff-links and what-not—now wrapped in a little package in a safe hiding-place.
Harry turned. "Well, Jube, tell me all about it. When you got off the train, where did you go first?"
"To de bank fust. Man dah was moughtily s'prised tuh git yo' lettah. 'Reck'n Mistah Sevier gwine tuh Africy er sumwhah,' he say."
"Where did you go next?"
"To Marse Dick Brent's office—whah dey meks dee newspapahs. Foun' him settin' dah wid er pipe in he mouf, lookin' jes' ez nachul ez life, same ez when he up hyuh wid yo'-all dat time. Ah cert'n'y glad tuh see Marse Brent, en he ax pow'ful lot o' questions 'bout yo'. 'Mah lan'!' he say; 'Tuh think he up in dat ole mount'n all dis God's-blessed time, loafin' eroun' en gittin' fat ez er buzzard, when we-alls is wu'kin' ouah souls tuh deff, en polytics gittin' red-hot. Whaffoh he do dat? When he come up dar, Jube?' 'Well,' Ah says, 'Ah ain' got no haid fo' gogerfy, Marse Brent, but Ah reck'n et mus' a ben las' fall sometime. En den Marse Harry ben moughty sick in dee fall en wintah.' 'Sick!' he say. 'Yo' ole rascal, yo' ain' got no mo' sense dan er snake have hips! Why yo' don' sen' no word home erbout it?' 'Marse Harry he say not tuh,' I say. 'Clar' he ain' gwine be no trubbil tuh nobody. So Ah doctahs him en nusses him, en aftah while he git all right ergen. On'y he so fon' o' de ole bungalow he jes' cain' bear tuh leave et.' 'Sho!' he say. 'When Ah thinks o' dis hyuh ole wuk, Ah reck'n Ah don' blame him none.' Den he tek me down tuh yo' place fo' dee clo's en things—walkin' erlong wid me jes' lak Ah been yo'-se'f. 'Moughty lot er folkses sorry yo' Marse Harry ain' erbout no mo', Jube,' he say. 'Speakin' o' dat,' he say, 'dahs one o' dem ar' folkses, Ah reck'n, comin' down dee street dis minute!' Ah looks up en Ah sees er moughty pretty young lady, tall en white lak er big lily. 'Dat Miss Echo Allen,' he say."
Harry turned away abruptly and looked out of the open doorway. His face had paled.
"Marse Brent tek off he hat, en he say, 'Miss Echo, what yo' reck'n dee las' spectaculous news is? Harry Sevier been up at ole Blue Mount'n all dis yeah!' Well, suh, seems lak dat lady so s'prised she mos' faint right on dee spot. Den dee colah come back in huh cheeks en she laugh—moughty happifyed laugh, but somehow, et got er little cry en it too, sumwhah. She look at me, en huh eyes jes' de coloh o' er cat-buhd's aig. 'Dis 'yer Jubilee Jim Sandahs,' Marse Brent say, 'whut cook fo' Sevier's outfit up dah, en he also er numbah one nuss, kase dee young loafah ben sick. Bet yo' ben ovah-feedin' him, Jube.' Miss Echo she walk down dee street wid we-all, clar tuh yo' house. Ax how yo' is now, how yo' look, is yo' got thinnah—fifty hundud things she ax erbout. Ole Jube he sho' reck'n dat lady think er pow'ful sight o' yo', Marse Harry!"
Harry choked back an exclamation of misery. Every word had been like a hot needle thrust into a quivering nerve. Her face, with its ivory clearness, under its wonderful whorl of red-gold hair—her eyes deep as sky-mirroring pools in late sun-light—her laugh, her voice! He suddenly seemed to feel the actual touch of her hand in his, as vastly sweet as the shadow of rose-leaves.
"Marse Harry," said Jubilee Jim, humbly, "dee ole man don' know whuffoh yo' come hyuh dis time, er whuffoh yo' so long 'way f'om home. Ain' mah biz'ness, Ah knows. But dee mount'n ain' no place fo' folks tuh stay, cep'n fo' ole Jube whut lib hyuh allus. En Marse Harry, down dah in dee city, ev'y one jes' waitin' en watchin' fo' yo'. Marse Brent, en ... en dee pretty lady, en all!"
There was a long silence. At last Harry turned from the doorway.
"Thank you, Jube," he said in a low voice. "Now—tell me about Aunt Judy."
In the big living-room, now flooded with the mountain sunshine that streamed in through the open door, Richard Brent leaned to knock the ashes from his pipe against the end of the hewn bench on which he sat. Then he looked up at Sevier standing in front of the empty fire-place.
"Well," he asked, "what do you think of it? How's that for a chance, eh?"
Sevier nodded. One hand was tugging at his dark beard, the other was clasping and unclasping nervously behind him. "The new organisation can't win, of course," he answered quietly. "Politically speaking it's too young, and it lacks leaders. But it can make a strong showing, I should think."
Brent laughed as he explored his capacious tobacco-pouch. "Especially if the platform is built wide enough." He pointed to a newspaper he had brought with him, that lay beside him. "That editorial of mine hits the nail squarely on the head. There is one issue and only one which will draw in all the elements opposed to the party that now rules—that is the liquor issue. Thatmustgo in!"
A quick gleam crossed Harry's face. None but he knew what liquor had done for him, no eye but his might see the pitiful trail it had dragged across his burnished life!
Brent laughed again. "It's strange that they don't see it!" he said. "Can't they deduce anything. Look at the growth of similar movements in other states. Do they really believe that any genuine good-government party can sit in the same saddle with John Barleycorn? That's why the thing has always failed in the past—compromise, temporise, fusion. Fiddlesticks! why can't they take the bull by the horns? They would, too, if there was some one who would crystallise the thing in their minds." He shot a keen side-glance at Harry. "When you made that Civic Club speech last year," he said shrewdly, "I picked you for the Peter the Hermit of the new Gospel. And then, confound it! you bury yourself in the wilds up here, while every one thinks you've gone abroad, and I have to pack my rheumatic bones twenty miles on an infernal burro, to dig you out of your shell!"
Harry's eyes had been absently fixed on the spread-out newspaper. Something in the other's words, in his manner, caught him. A colour came to his cheeks. "Dig me out of my shell?" he repeated. "What do you mean by that?"
Brent looked at him intently for a long second. During the past year he, like others, had wondered at his friend's long absence. At first he had put it down to natural need of vacation and the other's failure to communicate with his friends had seemed significant of no more than the mild eccentricity which had always flavoured his actions. Only later the thought had come to him that Harry's absence might be due to an affair of the heart. This to him had pointed unerringly to Echo Allen, and conviction had leaped to a certainty on the day when he had seen her reception of Jubilee Jim's news of Harry's whereabouts. Had it been a lovers' quarrel? he had wondered. If so, and she had sent him away, she had repented of it, that was manifest. The news of Harry's whereabouts, in his mind, had dovetailed with his knowledge of the political situation and its need of leadership, and the second day thereafter had found him on horseback, following the difficult trail to Harry's mountain eyrie. He had come to grips now with his errand. He sat suddenly upright.
"Sevier," he said, "you've got to do it. You are the only one who can. You've got to speak at that convention on the seventeenth and nail that plank into the platform hard and fast!"
Harry made a quick gesture, then left the fireplace and began to stride up and down the room. During that silent, insistent gaze it had come to him with a strange glow of excitement what Brent intended to say. His heart was beating quickly, and a host of conflicting emotions were rioting in his mind. The allusion to his speech of a year ago had brought a throb of the old ecstasy of power—that power which he knew was his now, and in greater degree. If he only might use it for this good purpose!
Brent, looking at him, uncrossed his long legs with a smile. "I agree," he said, "that we may not be able to win this time, but it will start it off right, and it will be a good fight. I'll bet you what you like that within a week—if that plank is rightly hammered in—the Good-Government Clubs all over the State will be wiring allegiance!"
He got up, his lank, nervous figure braced with interest.
"And what if we do lose this Governorship? It will be the first real nail in John Barleycorn's coffin in this State!"
Sevier had sat down on the blanketed couch. His gaze went past the eager face before him and lingered on the sweet, warm world outside, with all its suggestions of new growth and virile strength. But what he really saw was very far away. Was he a poor coward then, to shrink from a woman's smile, a woman's eyes? He put his face in his hands. Possibilities were beckoning to him, dead things springing up alive, old longings, ambitions, appetences plucking at him.
For a time Brent did not speak. He had turned away and stood in the sunny doorway, looking down the trail. At length he faced about.
"Sevier," he said quickly. "What do you say? Will you do it?"
Harry looked up. The colour had faded from his face, but it was alight with a new energy and resolution. The call had found him, and at that moment the harrowing dread—the problem itself, which had shown so imminent—seemed to have grown dim, to have drawn into the far distance.
"Yes," he answered slowly, "yes, Brent. I will come."
Looking back upon that day, Sevier was often to wonder whether indeed he had missed Fate's purpose, and blinded by a personal ambition, had set its plan at naught. For that instant's decision was to prove the key to a series of fateful doings which bore him on, irresistibly, into a line of action from which, deliberately, he must have shrunk.
But having set his hand, it was characteristic of him that he did not falter. It had required resolution to put Echo and his relations with her into the background, but he accomplished even this, and he allowed no thought of possible complications to affect his mental serenity. His face was composed and determined as he descended from the train, at dusk of the sixteenth, at the familiar city station, to find—as Brent had arranged—his motor waiting for him, with Bob, his chauffeur, wearing a broad grin of welcome, at its door. So pleasantly habitual it all seemed, so sharply remembered was each sight and sound as the car sped through the glimmering traffic, that almost he could have believed the past year, full as it had been of pain, a vacuous dream and that no hideous hiatus had lain between the then and now.
He was sensible for the first time of the intense mental strain he had been labouring under since his sluggish prison routine had opened into this dubious freedom—the tension of his struggle, the instinct of impending catastrophe, and the ghastly doubt of himself where Echo was concerned. The lassitude and inaction of the Bungalow had added to this strain. The relief now of movement and action brought surcease, and a feeling of present confidence, if not of definite security. Before he reached his apartment, he was sufficiently himself to give the welcome he received from Aunt Judy and from Suzuki a feeling of usualness. Brent, with two or three others who saw eye to eye with him, so far as the exigencies of the political situation were concerned, spent a part of the later evening with him and the talk furnished the final tonic—if any had been needed—to brace him for the task that awaited. That night, for the first time in many months, he slept the deep, fortifying sleep of utter and dreamless unconsciousness.
With the morning he felt no misgiving or shadow of self-doubt. His mind temporarily was clear and untroubled, all of the vexing problem was pushed, by the singleness of his purpose, into the unknown future. By his express wish, his arrival had not been published, and, except for a few of its leaders with whom Brent had conferred, the circles of the convention, then in session in the biggest auditorium the city boasted, were no more aware than were the hosts of his friends, of his coming. He spent the morning alone in his room, sitting movelessly hour after hour, marshalling his ideas, assembling his forces, stirred as he had never before been stirred by the quick suggestion of a living issue and an unrivalled opportunity.
He lunched quietly alone with Brent in a private room at the club, and immediately afterward drove with him to the hall. Throughout the morning the platform had been under discussion; the debate was now about finished. It was the psychological moment for his effort.
As Harry stood silent before the sea of faces, in the instant that followed his recognition and introduction, he was conscious of a tense and vital concentration that swept from him the last vestige of self-consciousness. With his first measured words, too, the outline which he had pondered during the morning vanished utterly from his brain. He remembered nothing save the one thing he had come to do, saw with his mind's eye only the monstrous evil against which he stood.
Words came to him in a flood—words magically compelling, that burned and quivered in their intense appeal. For an hour he held the interest of the great assembly as no orator had done, sketching with hard and pitiless directness the ramifications of the grim traffic that blasted whatsoever it touched, that knew no social bar, before which the magnate's mansion and the labourer's tenement were as one, against which no bolt or chain—save it be one wrought by the law of a Sovereign Commonwealth—might avail.
In his words was no tang of the study, none of the didactic methods of the arm-chair student, no array of statistics. What he expressed had been seared upon his soul, in inextinguishable letters and as he spoke shooting pictures etched themselves as if on some quivering panorama in his brain: he saw the black bottle in the wall-cabinet of his inner office—the hidden sanctuary where he had signed away his talent and linked his years to the demon of remorse: he saw the representative of the great Corporation, whose power flowed from that traffic, holding in his merciless hand the happiness of a woman that had been dearer than his own life: he saw the cringing hatred in the eyes of Paddy the Brick, the furtive drink-lined faces of the jail corridors. And in his passionate denunciation, he called upon those who heard him to do their part to rid the state of its Master and to set it free. Lastly, in a peroration which carried all before it, he pictured a community from which the unendurable stain had been forever wiped away, the pitfalls of its youth filled up, the shame of its prisons lightened—a community ruled no longer by King Alcohol, but by the Genius of the Home, to which freedom no longer stood for ribald license and self-harm, but for the Common Good.
He stopped amid a dense silence—the truest tribute to real oratory—then with a great burst, the storm of approval came.
It filled the hall with electric feeling, surging in waves that overtopped all decorum and made the hour significant and momentous. Near him Harry saw the party leaders, among them Judge Allen, newly-elected President of the Civic Club; they showed a singular self-assurance overlaid by vivid excitement. In the galleries were banks of feminine faces, tier on tier, merged in a tumultuous hand-clapping like silver rain. Below, the house was on its feet, a sea of waving flags and handkerchiefs.
The tumult swelled, then died away to pulsing band-music and in the subsidence, Brent leaned over Harry's shoulder to give him the quick pressure of a hand—words could not have said so much.