The sensitive soul of the girl had seen the tragedy before she rushed into the library. At the first shot she sprang to her feet, her heart in her throat. The report had sounded queerly through the closed doors and she was not sure. She had entered the hall, holding her breath, when the second shot rang out its message of death.
She was not the woman who faints in an emergency. She paused just a moment in the door, saw the ghastly heap on the floor and rushed to the spot.
She tore Tom's collar open and placed her ear over his heart:
"O God! He's alive—he's alive!"
She turned and saw Cleo leaning against the table with blanched face and chattering teeth.
"Call Andy and Aunt Minerva—and go for the doctor—his heart's beating—quick—the doctor—he's alive—we may save him!"
She knelt again on the floor, took Tom's head in her lap, wiped the blood from the clean, white forehead, pressed her lips to his and sobbed:
"Come back, my own—it's I—Helen, your little wife—I'm calling you—you can't die—you're too young and life's too dear. We've only begun to live, my sweetheart! You shall not die!"
The tears were raining on his pale face and her cries had become little wordless prayers when Andy and Minerva entered the room.
She nodded her head toward Norton's motionless body:
"Lift him on the lounge!"
They moved him tenderly:
"See if his heart's still beating," she commanded.
Andy reverently lowered his dusky face against the white bosom of his master. When he lifted it the tears had blinded his eyes:
"Nobum," he said slowly, "he's done dead!"
The tick of the little French clock on the mantel beneath the mother's portrait rang with painful clearness.
Helen raised her hand to Minerva:
"Open the windows and let the smoke out. I'll hold him in my arms until the doctor comes."
"Yassum——"
Minerva drew the heavy curtains back from the tall windows, opened the casements and the perfumed air of the beautiful Southern night swept into the room.
A cannon boomed its final cry of victory from the Square and a rocket, bursting above the tree-tops, flashed a ray of red light on the white face of the dead.
When Dr. Williams entered the room Helen was still holding Tom's head in her lap.
He had stirred once with a low groan.
"The major is dead, but Tom's alive, doctor!" she cried through her tears. "He's going to live, too—I feel it—I know it—tell me that it's so!"
The lips trembled pitifully with the last words.
The doctor felt the pulse and was silent.
"It's all right? He's going to live—isn't he?" she asked pathetically.
"I can't tell yet, my child," was the calm answer.
He examined the wound and ran his hand over the blonde hair. His fingers stopped suddenly and he felt the head carefully. He bent low, parted the hair and found a damp blood mark three inches above the line of the forehead.
"See!" he cried, "the ball came out here. His head was thrown far back, the bullet struck the inner skull bone at an angle and glanced."
"What does it mean?" she asked breathlessly.
The doctor smiled:
"That the brain is untouched. He is only stunned and in a swoon. He'll be well in two weeks."
Helen lifted her eyes and sobbed:
"O God!"
She tried to bend and kiss Tom's lips, her body swayed and she fell backward in a dead faint.
Andy and Minerva carried her to her room, left Cleo to minister to her and returned to help the doctor.
He examined Norton's body to make sure that life was extinct and placed the body on an improvised bed on the floor until he should regain his senses.
In half an hour Tom looked into the doctor's face:
"Why, it's Doctor Williams?"
"Yes."
"What—what's happened?"
"It's only a scratch for you, my boy. You'll be well in a few days——"
"Well in a few days"—he repeated blankly. "I can't get well! I've got to die"—his head dropped and he caught his breath.
The doctor waited for him to recover himself to ask the question that was on his lips. He had gotten as yet no explanation of the tragedy save Cleo's statement that the major had shot Tom and killed himself. He had guessed that the ugly secret in Norton's life was in some way responsible.
"Why must you die, my boy?" he asked kindly.
Tom opened his eyes in a wild stare:
"Helen's my wife—we married secretly without my father knowing it. He has just told me that Cleo is her mother and I have married my own——"
His voice broke and his head sank.
The doctor seized the boy's hand and spoke eagerly:
"It's a lie, boy! It's a lie! Take my word for it——"
Tom shook his head.
"I'll stake my life on it that it's a lie"—the old man repeated—"and I'll prove it—I'll prove it from Cleo's lips!"
"You—you—can do it!" the boy said hopelessly, though his eyes flashed with a new light.
"Keep still until I return!" the doctor cried, "and I'll bring Cleo with me."
He placed the revolver in his pocket and hastily left the room, the boy's eyes following him with feverish excitement.
He called Cleo into the hall and closed Helen's door.
The old man seized her hand with a cruel grip:
"Do you dare tell me that this girl is your daughter?"
She trembled and faltered:
"Yes!"
"You're a liar!" he hissed. "You may have fooled Norton for twenty years, but you can't fool me. I've seen too much of this sort of thing. I'll stake my immortal soul on it that no girl with Helen's pure white skin and scarlet cheeks, clean-cut features and deep blue eyes can have in her body a drop of negro blood!"
"She's mine all the same, and you know when she was born," the woman persisted.
He could feel her body trembling, looked at her curiously and said:
"Come down stairs with me a minute."
Cleo drew back:
"I don't want to go in that room again!"
"You've got to come!"
He seized her roughly and drew her down the stairs into the library.
She gripped the door, panting in terror. He loosedher hands and pushed her inside before the lounge on which the body of Norton lay, the cold wide-open eyes staring straight into her face.
She looked a moment in abject horror, shivered and covered her eyes:
"Oh, my God, let me go!"
The doctor tore her hands from her face and confronted her. His snow-white beard and hair, his tense figure and flaming anger seemed to the trembling woman the image of an avenging fate as he solemnly cried:
"Here, in the presence of Death, with the all-seeing eye of God as your witness, and the life of the boy you once held in your arms hanging on your words, I ask if that girl is your daughter?"
The greenish eyes wavered, but the answer came clear at last:
"No——"
"I knew it!" the doctor cried. "Now the whole truth!"
The color mounted Tom's cheeks as he listened.
"My own baby died," she began falteringly, "I was wild with grief and hunted for another. I found Helen in Norfolk at the house of an old woman whom I knew, and she gave her to me——"
"Or you stole her—no matter"—the doctor interrupted—"Go on."
Helen had slipped down stairs, crept into the room unobserved and stood listening.
"Who was the child's mother?" the doctor demanded.
Cleo was gasping for breath:
"The daughter of an old fool who had disowned her because she ran away and married a poor white boy—the husband died—the father never forgave her. Whenthe baby was born the mother died, too, and I got the child from the old nurse—she's pure white—there's not a stain of any kind on her birth!"
With a cry of joy Helen knelt and drew Tom into her arms:
"Oh, darling, did you hear it—oh, my sweetheart, did you hear it?"
The boy's head sank on her breast and he breathed softly:
"Thank God!"
The years brought their healing to wounded hearts. Tom Norton refused to leave his old home. He came of a breed of men who had never known how to quit. He faced the world and with grim determination took up the work for the Republic which his father had begun.
With tireless voice his paper pleads for the purity of the race. Its circulation steadily increases and its influence deepens and widens.
The patter of a baby's feet again echoes through the wide hall behind the white fluted columns. The young father and mother have taught his little hands to place flowers on the two green mounds beneath the oak in the cemetery. He is not old enough yet to understand, and so the last time they were there he opened his eyes wide at his mother's tears and lisped:
"Are 'oo hurt, mama?"
"No, my dear, I'm happy now."
"Why do 'oo cry?"
"For a great man I knew a little while, loved and lost, dearest—your grandfather for whom we named you."
Little Dan's eyes grew very serious as he looked again at the flower-strewn graves and wondered what it all meant.
But the thing which marks the Norton home with peculiar distinction is that since the night of his father's death, Tom has never allowed a negro to cross the threshold or enter its gates.
THE LEOPARD'S SPOTS: A Story of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900. With illustrations by C. D. Williams.
A tale of the South about the dramatic events of Destruction. Reconstruction and Upbuilding. The work is able and eloquent and the verifiable events of history are followed closely in the development of a story full of struggle.
THE CLANSMAN.With illustrations by Arthur I. Keller.
While not connected with it in any way, this is a companion volume to the author's "epoch-making" storyThe Leopard's Spots. It is a novel with a great deal to it, and which very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers. * * * It is, first of all, a forceful, dramatic, absorbing love story, with a sequence of events so surprising that one is prepared for the fact that much of it is founded on actual happenings; but Mr. Dixon has, as before, a deeper purpose—he has aimed to show that the original formers of the Ku Klux Klan were modern knights errant taking the only means at hand to right intolerable wrongs.
THE TRAITOR.A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire. Illustrations by C. D. Williams.
The third and last book in this remarkable trilogy of novels relating to Southern Reconstruction. It is a thrilling story of love, adventure, treason, and the United States Secret Service dealing with the decline and fall of the Ku Klux Klan.
COMRADES.Illustrations by C. D. Williams.
A novel dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which Mr. Dixon conducts the reader.
THE ONE WOMAN.A Story of Modern Utopia.
A love story and character study of three strong men and two fascinating women. In swift, unified, and dramatic action, we see Socialism a deadly force, in the hour of the eclipse of Faith, destroying the home life and weakening the fiber of Anglo Saxon manhood.
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, By Zane Grey. Illustrated by Douglas Duer.
In this picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago, we are permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible hand of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to conform to its rule.
FRIAR TUCK, By Robert Alexander Wason. Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood.
Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived among the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs and how he fought with them and for them when occasion required.
THE SKY PILOT, By Ralph Connor. Illustrated by Louis Rhead.
There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and the truest pathos.
THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, By Geraldine Bonner. Colored frontispiece by John Rae.
The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland pilgrimage, and the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two strong men for a charming heroine.
THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER, By A. M. Chisholm. Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson.
This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its central theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of subplot.
A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP, By Harold Bindloss.
A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through the influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic business of pioneer farming.
JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS, By Harriet T. Comstock. Illustrated by John Cassel.
A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling situations and dramatic developments.
THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but thefootprints of a girl. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish footprints led the young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."
THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME.Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest, from which often springs the flower of civilization.
"Chad" the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he came—he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery—a charming waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else in the mountains.
A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND.Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the mountaineers.
Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.
LAVENDER AND OLD LACE.
A charming story of a quaint corner of New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. The story centers round the coming of love to the young people on the staff of a newspaper—and it is one of the prettiest, sweetest and quaintest of old fashioned love stories, * * * a rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaniety.
A SPINNER IN THE SUN.
Miss Myrtle Reed may always be depended upon to write a story in which poetry, charm, tenderness and humor are combined into a clever and entertaining book. Her characters are delightful and she always displays a quaint humor of expression and a quiet feeling of pathos which give a touch of active realism to all her writings. In "A Spinner in the Sun" she tells an old-fashioned love story, of a veiled lady who lives in solitude and whose features her neighbors have never seen. There is a mystery at the heart of the book that throws over it the glamour of romance.
THE MASTER'S VIOLIN,
A love story in a musical atmosphere. A picturesque, old German virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the passion and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life—a beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into her heart and home, and through his passionate love for her, he learns the lessons that life has to give—and his soul awakes.
Founded on a fact that all artists realize.
CYNTHIA'S CHAUFFEUR.Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
A pretty American girl in London is touring in a car with a chauffeur whose identity puzzles her. An amusing mystery.
THE STOWAWAY GIRL.Illustrated by Nesbitt Benson.
A shipwreck, a lovely girl stowaway, a rascally captain, a fascinating officer, and thrilling adventures in South Seas.
THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS.
Love and the salt sea, a helpless ship whirled into the hands of cannibals, desperate fighting and a tender romance.
THE MESSAGE.Illustrated by Joseph Cummings Chase.
A bit of parchment found in the figurehead of an old vessel tells of a buried treasure. A thrilling mystery develops.
THE PILLAR OF LIGHT.
The pillar thus designated was a lighthouse, and the author tells with exciting detail the terrible dilemma of its cut off inhabitants.
THE WHEEL O'FORTUNE.With illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg.
The story deals with the finding of a papyrus containing the particulars of some of the treasures of the Queen of Sheba.
A SON OF THE IMMORTALS.Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
A young American is proclaimed king of a little Balkan Kingdom, and a pretty Parisian art student is the power behind the throne.
THE WINGS OF THE MORNING.
A sort of Robinson Crusoeredivivuswith modern settings and a very pretty love story added. The hero and heroine, are the only survivors of a wreck, and have many thrilling adventures on their desert island.
THE RULES OF THE GAME.Illustrated by Lajaren A. Hiller.
The romance of the son of "The Riverman." The young college hero goes into the lumber camp, is antagonized by "graft" and comes into the romance of his life.
ARIZONA NIGHTS.Illus. and cover inlay by N. C. Wyeth.
A series of spirited tales emphasizing some phases of the life of the ranch, plains and desert. A masterpiece.
THE BLAZED TRAIL.With illustrations by Thomas Fogarty.
A wholesome story with gleams of humor, telling of a young man who blazed his way to fortune through the heart of the Michigan pines.
THE CLAIM JUMPERS.A Romance.
The tenderfoot manager of a mine in a lonesome gulch of the Black Hills has a hard time of it, but "wins out" in more ways than one.
CONJUROR'S HOUSE.Illustrated Theatrical Edition.
Dramatized under the title of "The Call of the North."
Conjuror's House is a Hudson Bay trading post where the head factor is the absolute lord. A young fellow risked his life and won a bride on this forbidden land.
THE MAGIC FOREST.A Modern Fairy Tale. Illustrated.
The sympathetic way in which the children of the wild and their life is treated could only belong to one who is in love with the forest and open air. Based on fact.
THE RIVERMAN.Illus. by N. C. Wyeth and C. Underwood.
The story of a man's fight against a river and of a struggle between honesty and grit on the one side, and dishonesty and shrewdness on the other.
THE SILENT PLACES.Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin.
The wonders of the northern forests, the heights of feminine devotion, and masculine power, the intelligence of the Caucasian and the instinct of the Indian, are all finely drawn in this story.
THE WESTERNERS.
A story of the Black Hills that is justly placed among the best American novels. It portrays the life of the new West as no other book has done in recent years.
THE MYSTERY.In collaboration with Samuel Hopkins Adams.
With illustrations by Will Crawford.
The disappearance of three successive crews from the stout ship "Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrutable. In the solution, there is a story of the most exciting voyage that man ever undertook.
THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS.By Meredith Nicholson. Illustrated by C. Coles Phillips and Reginald Birch.
Seven suitors vie with each other for the love of a beautiful girl, and she subjects them to a test that is full of mystery, magic and sheer amusement.
THE MAGNET.By Henry C. Rowland. Illustrated by Clarence F. Underwood.
The story of a remarkable courtship involving three pretty girls on a yacht, a poet-lover in pursuit, and a mix-up in the names of the girls.
THE TURN OF THE ROAD.By Eugenia Brooks Frothingham.
A beautiful young opera singer chooses professional success instead of love, but comes to a place in life where the call of the heart is stronger than worldly success.
SCOTTIE AND HIS LADY.By Margaret Morse. Illustrated by Harold M. Brett.
A young girl whose affections have been blighted is presented with a Scotch Collie to divert her mind, and the roving adventures of her pet lead the young mistress into another romance.
SHEILA VEDDER.By Amelia E. Barr. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.
A very beautiful romance of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome, strong willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A sequel to "Jan Vedder's Wife."
JOHN WARD, PREACHER.By Margaret Deland.
The first big success of this much loved American novelist. It is a powerful portrayal of a young clergyman's attempt to win his beautiful wife to his own narrow creed.
THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT.By Robert W. Service. Illustrated by Maynard Dixon.
One of the best stories of "Vagabondia" ever written, and one of the most accurate and picturesque of the stampede of gold seekers to the Yukon. The love story embedded in the narrative is strikingly original.
THE SECOND WIFE.By Thompson Buchanan. Illustrated by W. W. Fawcett. Harrison Fisher wrapper printed in four colors and gold.
An intensely interesting story of a marital complication in a wealthy New York family involving the happiness of a beautiful young girl.
TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY.By Grace Miller White. Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
An amazingly vivid picture of low class life in a New York college town, with a heroine beautiful and noble, who makes a great sacrifice for love.
FROM THE VALLEY OF THE MISSING.By Grace Miller White.
Frontispiece and wrapper in colors by Penthyn Stanlaws.
Another story of "the storm country." Two beautiful children are kidnapped from a wealthy home and appear many years after showing the effects of a deep, malicious scheme behind their disappearance.
THE LIGHTED MATCH.By Charles Neville Buck. Illustrated by R. F. Schabelitz.
A lovely princess travels incognito through the States and falls in love with an American man. There are ties that bind her to someone in her own home, and the great plot revolves round her efforts to work her way out.
MAUD BAXTER.By C. C. Hotchkiss. Illustrated by Will Grefe.
A romance both daring and delightful, involving an American girl and a young man who had been impressed into English service during the Revolution.
THE HIGHWAYMAN.By Guy Rawlence. Illustrated by Will Grefe.
A French beauty of mysterious antecedents wins the love of an Englishman of title. Developments of a startling character and a clever untangling of affairs hold the reader's interest.
THE PURPLE STOCKINGS.By Edward Salisbury Field. Illustrated in colors; marginal illustrations.
A young New York business man, his pretty sweetheart, his sentimental stenographer, and his fashionable sister are all mixed up in a misunderstanding that surpasses anything in the way of comedy in years. A story with a laugh on every page.
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