"Right down hyar in Adamson Countee—Where they have no church of our Lord—"
"Right down hyar in Adamson Countee—Where they have no church of our Lord—"
Carroled one of the horsemen, and I joyously recognized the young man who, on the night of Mrs. Weighborne's arrival, had slipped out into the shadow of Cal Marcus' kitchen to reconnoiter.
In another moment I had been given a place behind the mountain boy, and soon the three of us were ambling through the squalid square of the county seat. Though groups of men stood everywhere, and eyed each other suspiciously, no one recognized, in the ragged stubble-faced wreck astride a doubly loaded horse, the kidnaped witness.
They did not take me to the court-room, but made me dismount at the back door of Cal Marcus' law office, just a stone's throw away across the narrow street. Marcus, himself, came to me there in response to a hurried summons. He listened with no show of expression or emotion and at the end of my recital gave me brief instructions, and reduced a part of my evidence to the form of an affidavit.
"Both crowds are out strong," he told me succinctly; "Garvin's gang has been instructed to start no trouble. Whether that order will stand when I spring my surprise I don't know. It will certainly be a severe test of discipline. They feel quite safe about you, and they mustn't suspect your escape. Watch that window in the court-room and when I appear and raise my hand to pour a glass of water come into court. Say nothing except in answer to my questions."
With those instructions he left me and as he crossed the alley-like space, he passed between thick clusters of mountain men who formed a practical cordon about him. I had perhaps an hour to spend alone with my eyes against the narrow slit of the slightly raised sash. I could see the lounging crowds and recognize the tensity of conditions. There was an assumption of nonchalance which sat upon these men with the stamp of spuriousness. Lines of shaggy horses hitched along two sides of the square told of many long rides. Swift, furtive glances cast backward and forward indicated the nerve strain and caution of hostile forces mingling with a show of cordiality; each bent on giving no offense, but each watchful and tightly keyed for defensive action.
A group of several young men entered the enclosure of the court-house together, and from their clothes and appearance I recognized them as the reporters from Louisville and Lexington. With the eye of the outside world upon him; with every utterance from the bench being recorded by these scribes against whom he dare not let a hand be lifted, the head of the murder syndicate must rely absolutely on chicane. He must play the fox's game and must not, under any provocation, show the wolf's teeth.
So the stage was being set, and I, waiting there in concealment, was to afford the climax of the play.
After an interminable time the lean, Lincoln-like face of Cal Marcus appeared at the dusty window of the court-room and I saw him pour a tumblerful of water from the broken pitcher. At the same instant one of the waiting clansmen threw open the door to announce, "They're callin' yer in co'te."
I needed no urging. My cue had come. They closed around me in a square and escorted me to the court-room door and as I went I heard the voice of a deputy sing-songing my name. I even imagined that in his tone was conviction that the summons would meet with no response.
In order to make clear the exact effect of my appearance, I must go back and summarize briefly, from accounts later given me by Marcus and Weighborne, the occurrences of that half-hour which preceded my calling to the witness stand.
Garvin had appeared in his court-room with his usual affability. He had even paused to shake hands with Weighborne and express regrets for his unfortunate "accident." His Honor had announced that he would prefer, in default of objection, passing all criminal cases to the foot of the docket, first disposing of several matters of probate and minor importance. To this Marcus had agreed.
When the reporters appeared the judge was surprised, but his wily composure had betrayed no evidence of chagrin, and he had halted affairs to chat with the pencil-wielders while his bailiff provided them with a table and chairs just below the rostrum.
Then had come the call of the cases against the alleged murderers of Rat-Ankle, and the attorney's prompt motion to swear Garvin off the bench. In support of his motion, Marcus launched into a dispassionate, but unsoftened charge that the judge, himself, had been the chief instigator of the ambuscade. Garvin had listened with growing amusement.
"Whose affidavits have you to file, Mr. Marcus?" he purred with unruffled composure.
"That of myself—"
"Is that all?"
"Also that of Mr. Deprayne."
"I've done been informed," drawled the Court, "that Mr. Deprayne was seen leaving for the Virginia line some days back, and that he told several people he was going home. If I'd known of his plans I'd certainly have held him as a material witness, but unfortunately it's too late now."
"Here is his affidavit," responded Marcus. "I submit it to Your Honor in support of my motion."
Garvin took the paper and read it slowly. It was in general terms and did not make clear to him that it had been so recently penned. After the perusal he delivered himself slowly.
"Learned counsel has made some mighty grave charges against this Co'te; counsel has been led astray by personal feelin'. The Co'te must protect its own dignity. The Co'te sees no reason to regard this paper as genuine, unless Mr. Deprayne himself will state that he swore to it. The Co'te regrets that it can't produce that witness for the learned counsel. The Co'te wishes only—" here he glanced significantly at the press table—"to have the full facts brought out."
"Will Your Honor," suggested Marcus, "instruct the sheriff to call Mr. Deprayne?"
Garvin had looked up with an expression of surprise and then he had smiled. "Mr. Sheriff," he instructed, "call Mr. Deprayne."
After that there had been a silence. While Garvin went through the formality of waiting to hear the announcement "the witness does not answer," he bent over the desk and once more exchanged compliments with the reporters. These scribes had been sent to expose him and he was bent on weaving about them the spell of his personality. Then it was that I entered. From the door where for an instant I halted, I took in the stained clapboard walls, carved over with crude initials; and the dingy benches full of men in jeans and hodden gray. I caught my breath as a dash of color struck my eyes and I recognized back of the gaunt standing frame of Marcus, the seated figures of Weighborne and the lady who had been so strangely important in my life. My cheeks flushed and bracing back my shoulders, I walked down the center aisle, dust-stained, with four days' growth of beard on my face, and one eye still discolored. As I came, I was conscious of a murmur of astonishment rising incredulously from the benches, and of an excited shuffling of feet.
Called out of his conversation by this sound, Garvin raised his face, still wreathed in its bland and smiling suavity—and our eyes met. For an instant I think he did not recognize me. I must have been a rather ludicrous and unprepossessing figure of a man, and possibly it was the very obvious scars of battle on my disfigured countenance that first told him my identity. At all events, the change that for an unguarded interval crossed his florid face was startling.
The smile died instantaneously and he leaned forward to stare at me as at some apparition. He quickly recovered himself, but the reporters caught the tableau of his astonishment and put a paragraph into their stories which was the preface to history-making in Adamson County.
I took my seat on the witness stand and raised my hand to be sworn, not daring to meet the eyes of the woman who sat at the attorney's elbow, though I felt her gaze upon me. Then I heard the cold modulation of Marcus's voice.
"Mr. Deprayne, state your name, age and place of residence." I did so.
"Do you aver that an affidavit charging Judge Garvin with conspiracy to murder and suppress evidence was made by you, and that it is true?"
"I do."
The shuffling of brogans and boots had died out. The fall of a pin might have been heard at the ends of the room. Every Garvin heeler and every Marcus adherent was sitting on the edge of his seat. Hands crept furtively to holsters. There was a general gasp of surprise, then as by a single impulse a number of men at one side near the back rose, and across the aisle another group came silently to its feet. The factions stood taut and motionless, eying each other with hatred. Marcus did not for an instant resume his questioning and the utter silence was as oppressive as the stillness that goes ahead of a cyclone. I knew what it meant, as every one in the room knew. The feud-factions were crouching for a spring. In another moment the ceiling might ring and rattle with the cracking of pistols and reek with the stench of burnt powder. The mountain territory has annals of such holocausts.
Every one sat very still lest an excited movement or gesture precipitate the storm. From my place on the slightly elevated witness chair I had a full view of the scene in all its ominous tensity. It was as though breathing had not alone stopped, but all living animation had for the second been suspended. The body of men had been fixed as though photographed. An incautious start or the sweep of a hand pocket-ward, and the outburst would be inevitable.
There were three exceptions among those whom I may term non-combatants. One reporter began edging down behind the table. Weighborne unostentatiously shifted his position so as to place his bulky shoulders between Frances Weighborne and the crowd, and She with an impatient shifting declined his shielding and sat steadily looking to the front. She was pale, as I suppose we all were, but perfectly composed.
Then Marcus wheeled and faced the rear of the room, deliberately turning his back on the enemies who might kill him as they had killed his partner. With both hands raised above his head and his thin, cuffless wrists stretching out of his threadbare sleeves, he stood for a tense moment in silence. His rugged countenance was black with the vehemence of feeling and his deep eyes were burning.
"Sit down!" he thundered. He said no other word, but as he ripped out that crisp and brief command he swept both arms and hands downward, and, like hypnotic subjects answering the gesture of the demonstrator, his clansmen dropped into their seats. Garvin took the cue. He pounded on his desk with the gavel. "Order in the court-room," he shouted, and his henchmen also subsided into their benches.
A deep breath of relief swept over the place. The crisis was averted. Garvin beckoned Marcus and the opposing counsel to his side. "Gentlemen," he said coolly, "the boys seem a little excited. Unless there is an objection I'm goin' to adjourn co'te for a half-hour, and then keep this room clear of spectators." But the moment of peril had passed and when I reached the square with the attorney, who hastily spirited me out by the back door, I saw the two elements mingling with a semblance of entire peace.
Marcus took me directly to his office where we were busied with a supplemental and more exact affidavit, and I did not see the Weighbornes. I knew that any meeting must be a most unhappy occasion, and until this matter was disposed of I was willing to postpone that final clash. We were shortly interrupted by the arrival of the county attorney, who announced that at the reconvening of court he would move to dismiss the cases. He said he realized that there could be no conviction and would not risk precipitating a conflict. Marcus could hardly refuse to allow his clients to go free, and so for the time he had to accept that surrender and reserve his ammunition for later effectiveness.
To the Marcus house we rode in cortège. I had not intended running at all, but when I came out of the law office I found that Weighborne had been much fatigued and had already started back with another guard, and I could hardly run away without facing the two of them. Marcus too, insisted that I must return, even if only for a day. Much of our business remained unfinished, and I inferred from his attitude that he knew nothing of the inevitable reckoning which I must face at the hands of my business partner. We started late and our small army arrived after nine o'clock. It was again a night of sparkle and starlight and frost. We learned that supper had been saved for us and the attorney and I ate it in silence. The Weighbornes had not waited for us. I quite understood that they might not care to break bread with me, and yet I was puzzled, because in that paralyzed moment in the court-room when I had, for the only time during the day, looked full in the lady's eyes, I had seen no anger in them. I had almost fancied that her lips half-shaped a smile. But she was a remarkable woman, and whatever her feeling, she might be magnanimous enough and big enough at such a moment, when we were all in equal danger, to lay aside for the nonce her just resentment. Now we should meet again as though that had not happened, and I had no hope of seeing her smile on me again.
Probably she had retired and I should not have to meet her until to-morrow. I rose from the table and turned to Marcus.
"Where do I sleep to-night?" I inquired.
"Your same place, sir," he answered, and when I had said good-night I turned and walked along the porch and opened the door of the room which served jointly as parlor and bedroom.
Once more, precisely as on that other night, I halted in surprise. Indeed, it might have been the other night, except that Weighborne lay where he had thrown himself down fully dressed across the big bed. But just as before, he was sleeping, and just as before She sat before the fire alone, in much the same attitude. On her face was the same trace of wistful loneliness.
I could not escape the feeling that this was in reality a part of the other evening—that it had been momentarily interrupted and that all which had transpired since I had opened this same door in this exact way, and seen this precise picture, was only the figment of disordered imagination. But it was now too late to turn back, and after all there was nothing to gain by deferring the reckoning. The three of us were here, and it would take only a moment to wake the sleeping man.
I closed the door, and my heart began the wild beating that meeting her must always bring. As I started across the room she looked up and rose. I halted where I stood, waiting for her to speak. This evening she wore a very simple gingham dress, and the chill of the room had led her to add the sweater. For a breathing space we stood there, she as slender and youthful as a school-girl; I as awkward and disheveled as a bumpkin, with my head hanging shamefacedly—awaiting sentence.
Then to my total bewilderment she smiled and held out her hand.
Had she stricken me down with a lightning bolt as the savages thought she had stricken down the profaning native, I should have been less astonished. I stood there unable to understand such forgiveness, and while I waited, she spoke.
"Now," said the voice which had been ringing in my heart ever since I had last heard it, "will you be good enough to explain things, or are you still to be the man of mystery?"
How could I explain things? How could I make a commencement? And yet it was just that which I had come to attempt.
"If I can explain at all," I said, very miserably, "it will be in one word—madness."
"Is that all?" she questioned. In her eyes was the whimsical challenge that had, on the previous occasion, swept me away from my moorings. The question that I had asked myself once before came back to my mind. Could it be that my goddess was so far from my ideal that, after all, what had occurred needed no explanation? I would not admit such a possibility, and yet her next words seemed to confirm it.
"When I first came here," she mused reflectively and only half-aloud, "you stayed outside for an hour, and then you disappeared. Of course you were a prisoner, but to-day you had the opportunity to see us. You didn't—and yet—" she flushed deeply, and I knew that her thoughts too were going back to the moment when I had, without words, avowed myself so savagely.
"I stayed out there that night," I said bluntly, "because I could hardly be an interloper, when you had ridden these infernal hills to be withhim—" I jerked my head savagely toward the bed. Then I went doggedly on, determined that since she had forced me this far we should hereafter stand in the certain light of understanding. "I also stayed out there because, as it happens, I'm a fool. I couldn't endure witnessing a reunion between yourself and your husband." It seemed to me that she should first have called on me for other explanations.
At the last word her face clouded with an expression of absolute bewilderment, and her eyes widened as she gazed at me.
"My—mywhat?" she demanded.
"Your husband," I repeated. "Mr. Weighborne."
She contemplated me as though I were a new and rather interesting variety of maniac, then her laugh was long and delicious. Her clouded eyes cleared and danced like skies in which the sun has suddenly burst through rain.
"Oh," she said finally. "I understand now." Once more her face grew grave and she added with a catch in her voice.
"And, thank God, Idounderstand."
"For Heaven's sake," I implored, "tell me what you understand! As for me, I understand nothing."
"Why, you totally unspeakable idiot," she explained, as though she had known me always, and as though we had long been close comrades, "I haven't any husband—yet. That's my brother. Didn't you know that?"
I stood at gaze, dazed, stupefied, open-mouthed; every thing that denotes the gawky fool. Then I dropped fervently on my knees at her feet and shamelessly seized her hands in mine and kissed them. She made no effort to release them and I crushed them greedily while my tongue could find no words, until, as I afterward learned, her rings cut into the flesh.
"But," I stammered finally, "you are Frances Weighborne. His wife is Frances Weighborne. Bob Maxwell told me—"
She laughed again, and Weighborne's heavy breathing became almost a snore. After all, first impressions are best. Weighborne was a capital fellow, one could not help liking him.
"Correct," said the lady indulgently, as though she were teaching a small boy his primer lessons. "I am Frances Weighborne. My sister-in-law was also christened Frances in baptism, and acquired the surname of Weighborne in matrimony. There may, so far as I know, be various other Frances Weighbornes. We have never copyrighted the name."
"Oh, my God!" I groaned helplessly. "What an unspeakable imbecile I've been—but you're wrong, dearest, youarethe only one."
"Do you think it necessary to swear about it?" she inquired. "And are you now quite certain that I'm the right one?"
"There isn't any time to swear," I assured her, "there is so infinitely much to say—but not here. Come out under the stars, where one can breathe. Give me five minutes. Unless I speak now I shall die of suppressed emotion. All my life I've been a supposedly extinct volcano. I'm no longer extinct." I halted my rush of words; then added, "Yes, you're the right one." I rose and, still holding her hands, lifted her to her feet. At the door, with my hand on the latch, I paused.
"No," I exclaimed, hardly realizing that I was speaking aloud. "You open it. In the dream it is always you who open the door into the other world."
She wheeled and looked me in the eyes, her own pupils wide and incredulous.
"Do you have it, too?" she demanded breathlessly. "Do you dream my dream? Do I come to you in some vague danger and lead you through a door?"
She laid her hand on the bolt, just as I had so often seen her do in my vision, and we stepped together out into the glory of the frost and moon.
"As you are doing now," I answered; then with a new wonder I demanded, "But tell me, how in Heaven's name could you dream of me before you knew me?"
She laughed mockingly.
"Perhaps," she vouchsafed, "if you make yourself very agreeable I may tell you."
The railings and uprights of the porch were strips of jet against a world swimming in blue and silver gray. The planks creaked under our feet. A confusion of saddles and farm gear hung against the log walls. The tin basin stood on its accustomed shelf. The world of magic was jumbled with the commonplace. I led her over to the corner where the eye could gather in the widest vista. She stood there before me very upright and slim and her eyes held mine as frankly as a child's might have done. I gazed at her for a moment more, then my arms went out and encircled her, and I talked very fast and very low.
"I may, at times, seem extremely abrupt," I confessed, "but I'm not. I've worshiped you upon a coral reef and I've made love to you through endless days and nights with stars for my witnesses much larger than these—and softer. And now I've found you—I've found you, and it doesn't matter what you say, because I shall never again let you go."
She tilted her face upward and her eyes were dancing as she quoted, "'Nobody asked you, sir.'"
She stood there, facing me, within the circle of my arms, with her chin as proudly tilted as though she were not surrendering, and with the old incomparable smile lingering on her lips.
And as I gazed at her in the witchery of the moon, the utter improbability of it all dawned upon me, until I felt that a moment would bring awakening and the old gnawing despair. The expression was that which I knew so well, and she seemed no more and no less real than she had been, looking out from the mate's chest, with the circle of mahogany-skinned savages sitting silent before her shrine.
That I had loved her was inevitable. It was written, but that was the lesser part. Here she stood looking at me out of eyes that were accepting my love without question. Why did she, without even the siege of a long wooing, so permit me to step into the temple of her life, as naturally as though it were the shrine of the coral island where I belonged as high-priest and demi-god?
She had, before to-night, met me only once, and then I had been the churl, brusquely rebuffing her sweet courtesy. Yet she had ridden across the hills, and something sang to me that it was to me she had ridden, though she may have called it coming to her brother. Why was it? Had I really conjured her soul to me by wishing it across the world? Had supreme forces compelled us both, so that preliminary details were superfluous between us?
However that might be, the gracious smile died slowly on her lips to a seriousness far sweeter, and as she looked into my face her eyes widened, and dropped all concealment until I was gazing into her soul.
When a woman meets the eyes of a man in that fashion he ceases to question, and wishes only to do reverence. It is like rolling back the waters of the sea and revealing the wonders of the deeps. For it is decreed that the eyes of a woman are given her in defense, to hide behind their dance and sparkle the things which lie beneath—and to disarm. When once they have opened in the miracle of self-revelation and surrendered their secret, one must be unworthy who feels himself worthy of such a manifestation.
And the secret I read there was that she loved me beyond all doubting. It mattered no longer how the wonder had come to pass. That was a mere point of god-craft. It had happened, and the stars were singing.
I dropped on one knee and lifted her hand to my lips.
Later, I sketched rapidly, agitatedly, the story of the coming of her portrait to the island, of its place on the chest and its subsequent worship. I told her of meeting Keller on the steamer and Maxwell in New York. I summarized the chain of evidence which had to my mind proved her to be Mrs. Weighborne. I have no doubt that I told it badly, but that was of no consequence, since back of my broken narration was the pent-up rush of emotion, and to her this seemed important. Nor did my story, so fantastic that I hardly expected her to accept it without proof, seem to surprise her.
"And," I concluded, "I am going to build you a new temple which will make the Taj Mahal a tawdry mosque, for every block and rafter will be love, and each year we live I shall add new minarets of worship—and not only five times each day but a hundred, itsmuezzinshall call me to prayer."
Her eyes were glowing, and her laugh trembled.
"I came quite a long way," she told me, "to make you say that, but after all you have done it very nicely."
"But," I admitted after a long pause, "I don't yet understand—not that it matters now—but why? That word is beating at my brain—why in the names of all the gods should you care?"
"Why shouldn't I?" she indignantly countered.
"You have known me," I said blankly, "a few days—and I should have imagined that I made a sorry impression."
She laughed again.
"I have known you always," she replied.
I shook my head wonderingly.
"Listen," she commanded. "Once upon a time—that's the way all fairy stories start—I saw you. You didn't notice me much. I was just a kid, but I fell in love with you. To be exact, it was ten years ago this month."
There was no end to wonders. All the loose threads of coincidence were being plaited into a single cable, and the cable was my life line.
"As I grew up I met a lot of men and they insisted on saying nice things to me; but they were all things of one kind and that wasn't the kind I wanted—besides, you see, I was waiting. I knew that some day you would come and that if you had anything to say it would be different. I compared them all with you. It wasn't just a girl's romantic foolishness. There was destiny in it. You know the Moslem text—'man's fate is about his neck.' You had no chance to escape me."
"I, too, knew it was written," I told her, "but I was afraid we should meet too late. When I saw you at Lexington I thought it was too late."
"I was never afraid of that," she affirmed. "Sometimes I have known that you were in danger—and later I've known that you escaped. Then there was the dream—the one dream about the door that came over and over.... At times it seemed that you were very near. Once at Cairo I felt that I was going to meet you around some corner or in some bazaar—but I didn't."
"You might, if you had turned your head," I declared. "Did you by any chance lose a diary at Cairo?"
This time it was she who was surprised.
"I lost one somewhere," she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely she demanded, "You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool things?"
"It wasn't foolishness," I quoted. "There was destiny in it." And then I made full confession.
"I'm glad you wrote it," I added. "I owe that diary something and I want all my debt to be to you."
For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me once more with a charge of stupidity.
"And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?"
How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.
"In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis," I confessed. "How in the name of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable, impossible superman? You failed to give the name."
She looked at me and laughed.
"The man is also modest," she observed.
"Of course," I demurred, "it's great to see you treading the clouds, with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk together you must come down and join me."
"I'll take you up with me," she hospitably asserted, and though since then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness, refused to admit it.
"Dearest," I said very humbly, "I have been inconceivably boorish, and worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?"
"Because," she answered, "I'm a woman—and inquisitive. I knew how you felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington."
"I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt," I admitted.
"You didn't have to tell me—in words," she laughed. "You told me in a hundred other ways, that were just as plain."
"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which is new to you is the information that you were a goddess and I a high priest, out there in the South Seas?"
"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that, too."
"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic vision—"
"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at home that night."
She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.
"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I was, but I had not known it.
It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had its birth under such strange circumstances. The narrative went into a pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may have the full record before him. He is my little son.
He is teaching me a great many things and finding in me a willing pupil. When I first walked out into the public ways after his entrance to the stage whereon I hope he will be cast in a worthy part, I walked differently. I walked with the pride of an emperor. Not the pride of arrogance. I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear, "Remember, Cæsar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around the rocks of the island—though then my ears were deaf to its significance.
She has minted from the precious metal of her soul a life which, with the other lives of his day, will form the mosaic of his times. I have the prospect before me of new miracles as that new life unfolds. I feel the exaltation of being undeservedly linked with something vastly greater than myself. I made an awkward effort once to put some part of this idea into words, but Frances only laughed. To her it is all quite natural. Her only comment was that he is as much mine as hers, which was a flattery that even my egotism could scarcely assimilate.
We have not named him yet, but an idea struck me a day or two ago while I was sitting at my down-town desk, and I straightway called her up.
"I have just thought of a name," I said. "I want to call him Francis Ra-Tuiki. Of course," I hastened to add, realizing that the silence at the other end of the wire threatened protest, "of course we can dignify it with highly unphonetic spelling, if you like."
"I don't know," she judiciously reflected. Then with a sudden afterthought she added, "That might possibly do for a middle name. I have already decided upon the first."
I wonder what name she has in mind—and she had just finished telling me that I had a full half-interest in that kid!
A railroad now runs into Adamson County and the new order is replacing the old. My wife and I and our brother went down on the first train run over the new line. The people had gathered to see the spectacle, and incredible as it may seem, there were among them some who looked for the first time on a locomotive. Old Mrs. Marcus, a little more withered and monkey-like, was there, and as she contemplated the marvel she could only murmur in wonderment, "Well, Provi-dence!"
Calloway Marcus no longer rides in a hollow square, but goes openly to court to defend the railway's damage suits. Yet now that the law is becoming adequate, he will never have the opportunity to turn it, as his weapon of reprisal, against Jim Garvin. Retribution came to the head of the murder syndicate with grimmer and more appropriate drama than Marcus had planned. The judge fell behind his own counter, riddled with bullets bought from his own shelf, and fired by the hand of his own chief henchman and jackal.
Though one of the last of the terrorized juries sat in the box, to the end that the slayer "came cl'ar," it is now Curt Dawson who goes sunken-eyed and body-guarded, searching the shadows. Shots from the laurel are few—but occasional even now—and Garvin's boy is nearing manhood. At all events, Garvin's executioner seems convinced that reprisal will come to him. Perhaps it is a premonition.