"Tell Joe Gregory he kin come in," shouted the voice of the besieged man. "I'm ready ter surrender terhim—but not ter nobody else!"
"No," shouted back Gregory, who already wore a bandage about a grazed arm; "you come out, and come with your hands high."
So it was that Saul's single convert came, and it was three weeks afterwards that, the jury having spoken and the higher court having denied an appeal, Joe sat in a day-coach leaving Marlin Town, while in the seat facing him sat Dog Burtree, with irons on his wrists, and a journey before him which should have no return. He was going to the electric chair at Eddyville.
Word ran mysteriously through the length of the train that the slight, youthful prisoner in charge of the tall, grave-faced sheriff was the Holly Hill murderer, and passengers sauntered, with specious carelessness and inquisitive side glances, past the section where he sat.
The condemned man gave them back stare for stare, seeking the sorry refuge of a bravado which, when he forgot his pose and gazed out of the window, sagged into a spiritless and haunted misery. The face of his captor was harder to read, yet the young woman who had also boarded the train at Marlin Town with a group of settlement school children bound for trachoma treatment in Lexington thought that it held an unusual magnetism.
Simplicity and courage were written in the sober eyes; responsibility and self-knowledge were stamped on the firm mouth-line and jaw-angle.
Joe, who had once come to Frankfort to seek Boone's aid in curbing the violence of Gregory wrath, was going through the capital now on another mission, and he made no effort to conceal his heaviness of heart. He was taking a fellow-man to die, and though the duty lay as clear-writ as when it had called him into rifle fire from the fugitive's barricade, it was no longer so easy to obey.
From time to time the condemned man leaned forward and talked, and Joe bent with as considerate an attention as though he were listening to a dignitary. Sometimes he smiled in answer to a forced jest; sometimes to a more sincere and less brazen effort he nodded grave response. One would have said that the two were friends, and against the approaches of the morbidly curious Joe interposed an aloofness as repellent as bayonets. What were they, he thought, but men anxious to see the wheels turn in a head that was soon to wear a cap with electrodes fitting against shaven temples?
From across the car Happy Spradling watched the mingled strength and gentleness of the law's servant, and felt that she would like to know this neighbour, whom, as it happened, she had never met.
The girl was going home, a few days after that, on the same train that carried the returning sheriff—this time travelling alone—and coming to her seat somewhat diffidently, he held out a book.
"If you'll excuse me for introducing myself," he said, "I'll give you this. You left it in your seat when you got off the train coming down."
Happy smiled, and, since they were, after all, neighbours, talked with him for the rest of the journey. Though it had been a long while since her heart had admitted a flutter at the glances or speeches of a man, the young woman found herself awakening to the discovery that she was still young. He asked if he might come to see her, and often after that his horse stood hitched at the settlement school. When one night a few months later he smiled his grave smile and said, "I've come to bid you farewell; I'm going away tomorrow," she acknowledged a sudden sharpness of pang.
"Where?" she demanded. And he answered:
"Over there."
They were standing on the squared log that made a foot bridge between the thicketed banks of Little Laurel, and through a heavy mass of clouds the moon was just emerging into a narrow field of pearl and opal.
Because it was rising and still hung low, its face was not pallid but rosy, and the top plumes of a single hemlock-clump showed outlined, and swaying. Elsewhere the sky was still cloud-dark.
"I haven't known you long," Joe Gregory was saying, "and I've always been a mighty plain, uninteresting sort of man, but if I come back, there'll be things I've got to say to you." He paused, and there was a touch of eager hope in his voice as he finished. "The war'll change lots of things. Maybe it'll change me some, too."
"Don't let it change you too much, Joe," the girl cautioned him, and he bent forward to assure himself that the light which he thought he saw in her eyes was real.
Paris by night was a dancer who has taken the veil. Paris by day, when the siren screamed its air-raid warning, was a bold spirit not cowed but sobered with a realization of death. Yet today Paris was vibrantly alive along her boulevards where, despite the shadow, bright currents flowed and sparkled.
For was not this the Fourth of July, the national day of the sister republic across the sea? And this afternoon would not the avenues echo to the tramp of the first marching feet, as columns in khaki swung along under the flag of the new ally?
Paris had bled as she waited; France had given life and treasure and made no lament, but now the vanguard of mighty reinforcements had arrived, and this afternoon, in the welcome poured out upon them, Paris would voice her quickened spirit of confidence restored and doubt dispelled.
Along sidewalks, where once the world had come to behold the gaiety and taste the enchantment, trooped civilian crowds, linking elbows with the uniformed sleeves of France, of Italy, of Britain, of Belgium and of Portugal. Everywhere flashed and rang the cheer of a great day, and everywhere showed the sobering of black with the tunics of horizon blue. With the fluttering flags went the white of bandages, and with tramp of feet mingled the stumping of theblessé'scrutch.
Boone Wellver had been in Paris a short time only, and tomorrow he was leaving for England—and then home. He felt that Congress was no longer his place of first duty—and he meant to resign. Pitched to a tone as much deeper than feud hatreds as the bay of artillery is deeper than rifle-fire, the voice which called for vengeance rang in his ears, and his hands ached for the feel of the musket.
He would have preferred that today, his last in Paris, should have been left untrammelled. He wanted to drift with the laughing crowds between the chestnut trees and to return the gay salutation of eyes that gleamed the more brightly because they had been washed with tears. He wanted to lose himself in that general picture which portrayed the spirit of France so simply and gloriously valiant that, as one laughed, one felt a catch in the throat for the background of tragedy against which all the brightness was painted.
But a requirement of civility had robbed him of that full liberty and left him no choice but to follow the instructions which had been contained in a letter from a New York member of the House of Representatives.
"If you have the opportunity in Paris," his colleague had written, "my wife and I wish very much that you would look up some close friends of ours.
"They are a little group of New York women who, with some reconstruction unit, have been doing worth-while work in stricken territories of France and Belgium. Our particular friend is Mrs. L. N. Steele, and while I can't direct you to her, at the enclosed address they can give you greater particulars. I understand they are occasionally in Paris, and, if so—" Boone had groaned impatiently, then had dutifully made inquiries, with the result that at noon today he was to meet and lunch with a party including his friend's friend.
Now he reluctantly made his way along the thronged streets to the designated restaurant in the Rue de Rivoli.
Even of her grim necessity, Paris had made a decorative virtue. The pasted-paper designs on the shop windows—put there to prevent bomb-shattered panes from flying dangerously—seemed to have had no other purpose than the expression of their designers' originality and temperament. The piled sand-sacks that buttressed monuments and arches had a certain deftness of arrangement that escaped the unsightly.
Boone crossed the Place de la Concorde—where once the guillotine had stood—and turned under the arches, looking at the signs.
He entered a restaurant that was, today, crowded, looking vaguely about him, and with a shepherding urbanity of deportment the head waiter came forward to his assistance.
Boone paused, still searching the tables across the colour scraps which two colours always dominated—horizon-blue and mourning black.
Then he saw a gloved hand raised in a signalling gesture, and recognized the lady of whom he had made his inquiries for Mrs. Steele.
He had seen only the one face, for that particular group sat partly screened behind the inevitable centre stand crowned with its masterpiece of decoration, where a huge lobster lay in state on an ice-cake, surrounded by a variegated cordon ofhors d'oeuvres.
Then Boone made his way between the tables and found himself being presented to several other women, to a pair of liaison officers on leave and, because it all took place in a moment, suddenly felt the floor grow unsteady under his feet, and saw, as the one clear vision in a blur of indistinctness, the slender figure of a woman whose hair was a disputed dominion along the borderland of gold and brown.
As Anne rose to meet him—for she did rise—the man looked into the face for which he had so long been seeking, and found it paler and thinner than he had known it, yet paradoxically older only in the sense of being perfected and tempered.
The violet eyes held undimmed the light that he had worshipped, and if one could see that sometimes they had looked on ghosts one could see too that they had prevailed over their haunting.
Boone forgot the others about him.
"I have been searching for you," he said.
It was not until late that day that they found themselves alone, sitting in the gardens of the Luxembourg on the south side of the Seine. Convalescent veterans, some of them pitifully young, were taking the air there as the day cooled toward evening, and Boone and Anne Masters sat on a bench, contented for a while to let the silence rest upon them.
Much had been said and much remained to be said. Finally Boone declared fervently; "At all events, I've found you!"
"Somehow," her voice was low and a little tremulous, "I always felt that if—we ever found ourselves—we would find each other."
"And I think," he responded gravely, "we've done that."
"It wasn't an easy road," she told him, and then as suddenly as an April sun may break dartingly through rainclouds she laughed, and in her violet eyes flashed the old merriment and whimsical humour. "I can laugh now, Boone, but I couldn't then.... Once I could have reached out my hand and touched you."
His eyes widened, and his vanity suffered a sharp sting. He would have sworn that his heart-hunger would have declared her nearness at any hour of that long period of search, and he told her so, but she laughed again.
"That's in romance, Boone dear. We were in life."
"When was it?"
"It was on Fifth Avenue—just off of Washington Square, one night when sleet was falling. I remember the wet pavements, because I had a hole in one shoe. I was wrestling with an umbrella that the wind tried to turn inside out—and we all but collided..."
"And you didn't speak to me!"
"No. I hurried away as fast as my feet could carry me—including the one with the leaky shoe."
"But, Anne!" The reproach in his voice was almost an outcry, and the girl laid a hand gently, for a moment, over his.
"If I'd let you find me, Boone—just then—I'd never have found myself. It would have been surrender."
"But why!"
"Because—just then, I wasn't far from being hungry, and I was very—very close to despair."
The man shuddered, and after a long silence he asked:
"But how did you come into this work?"
"It was logical enough. I graduated into it out of an East Side settlement, but I went intothatbecause it was all I could get to do. I don't deserve any credit."
She sketched for him what her life had been here in ruined and desolate towns, and made him see vividly the picture of the reclamation work. She had been in places where the war tide had flowed near and spoke shudderingly of the stark things which a generous world had been slow to believe, and at the end he told her of McCalloway's death, but not of his true identity, for that one secret he might not share with her.
"And now," he questioned, "now that I have found you—after these years of search?"
Her violet eyes met his, and he read in them an answer that sent turbulent and rejoicing currents, like wine, through his veins.
"There is no one else, Boone—but I've enlisted for the war."
He nodded. "I shall soon be in uniform, too," he said. "I'm going to come back here with some of those barbarians that I was born among—I think it's with them I'd rather visit the German trenches. But when the war is over, dearest—"
"Après la guerre," she murmured. "How often have I heard that here! After the war we shall have our lives."
A blindpoiluwent by on the arm of a girl and, though his eyes were covered with a bandage and his free hand moved gropingly, his laugh was that of a lover, and not a hopeless one. Boone's fingers closed over those of the girl.
"After the war!" he breathed, in a low and vibrant voice.