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Diane of the Green Van

by Leona Dalrymple · English · Gutenberg #16101 · 519,186 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Diane of the Green Van

Author: Leona Dalrymple

Illustrator: Reginald B. Birch


        
Release date: June 21, 2005 [eBook #16101]
                Most recently updated: December 11, 2020

Language: English

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DIANE OF THE GREEN VAN

by

LEONA DALRYMPLE

Illustrations by Reginald Birch

Chicago
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Third printing

1914







  "_In Arcadie, the Land of Hearte's Desire,
    Lette us linger whiles with Luveres fond;
  A sparklynge Comedie they playe--with Fire--
    Unwyttynge Fate stands waytynge with hir Wande._"




Diane of the Green Van was awarded the $10,000.00 prize in a novel
contest in which over five hundred manuscripts were submitted.



[Frontispiece: "Excellency, as a gentleman who is not a coward, it
behooves you to explain!"]




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

       I  Of a Great White Bird Upon a Lake
      II  An Indoor Tempest
     III  A Whim
      IV  The Voice of the Open Country
       V  The Phantom that Rose from the Bottle
      VI  Baron Tregar
     VII  Themar
    VIII  After Sunset
      IX  In a Storm-Haunted Wood
       X  On the Ridge Road
      XI  In the Camp of the Gypsy Lady
     XII  A Bullet in Arcadia
    XIII  A Woodland Guest
     XIV  By the Backwater Pool
      XV  Jokai of Vienna
     XVI  The Young Man of the Sea
    XVII  In Which the Baron Pays
   XVIII  Nomads
     XIX  A Nomadic Minstrel
      XX  The Romance of Minstrelsy
     XXI  At the Gray of Dawn
    XXII  Sylvan Suitors
   XXIII  Letters
    XXIV  The Lonely Camper
     XXV  A December Snowstorm
    XXVI  An Accounting
   XXVII  The Song of the Pine-Wood Sparrow
  XXVIII  The Nomad of the Fire-Wheel
    XXIX  The Black Palmer
     XXX  The Unmasking
    XXXI  The Reckoning
   XXXII  Forest Friends
  XXXIII  By the Winding Creek
   XXXIV  The Moon Above the Marsh
    XXXV  The Wind of the Okeechobee
   XXXVI  Under the Live Oaks
  XXXVII  In the Glades
 XXXVIII  In Philip's Wigwam
   XXXIX  Under the Wild March Moon
      XL  The Victory
     XLI  In Mic-co's Lodge
    XLII  The Rain Upon the Wigwam
   XLIII  The Rival Campers
    XLIV  The Tale of a Candlestick
     XLV  The Gypsy Blood
    XLVI  In the Forest
   XLVII  "The Marshes of Glynn"
  XLVIII  On the Lake Shore
    XLIX  Mr. Dorrigan
       L  The Other Candlestick
      LI  In the Adirondacks
     LII  Extracts from the Letters of Norman Westfall
    LIII  By Mic-co's Pool
     LIV  On the Westfall Lake




ILLUSTRATIONS

   "Excellency, as a gentleman who is not a coward it behooves you to
   explain." . . . _Frontispiece_

   Diane swung lightly up the forest path

   White girl and Indian maid then clasped hands

   "No, I may not take your hand."





CHAPTER I

OF A GREAT WHITE BIRD UPON A LAKE

Spring was stealing lightly over the Connecticut hills, a shy, tender
thing of delicate green winging its way with witch-rod over the wooded
ridges and the sylvan paths of Diane Westfall's farm.  And with the
spring had come a great hammering by the sheepfold and the stables
where a smiling horde of metropolitan workmen, sheltered by night in
the rambling old farmhouse, built an ingenious house upon wheels and
flirted with the house-maids.

Radiantly the spring swept from delicate shyness into a bolder glow of
leaf and flower.  Dogwood snowed along the ridges, Solomon's seal
flowered thickly in the bogs, and following the path to the lake one
morning with Rex, a favorite St. Bernard, at her heels, Diane felt with
a thrill that the summer itself had come in the night with a
wind-flutter of wild flower and the fluting of nesting birds.

The woodland was deliciously green and cool and alive with the piping
of robins.  Over the lake which glimmered faintly through the trees
ahead came the whir and hum of a giant bird which skimmed the lake with
snowy wing and came to rest like a truant gull.  Of the habits of this
extraordinary bird Rex, barking, frankly disapproved, but finding his
mistress's attention held unduly by a chirping, bright-winged caucus of
birds of inferior size and interest, he barked and galloped off ahead.

When presently Diane emerged from the lake path and halted on the
shore, he was greatly excited.

There was an aeroplane upon the water and in the aeroplane a tall young
man with considerable length of sinewy limb, lazily rolling a
cigarette.  Diane unconsciously approved the clear bronze of his lean,
burned face and his eyes, blue, steady, calm as the waters of the lake
he rode.

The aviator met her astonished glance with one of laughing deference
even as she marveled at his genial air of staunch philosophy.

"I beg your pardon," stammered Diane, "but--but are you by any chance
waiting--to be rescued?"

"Why--I--I believe I am!" exclaimed the young man readily, apparently
greatly pleased at her common sense.  "At your convenience, of course!"

"Are you--er--sinking or merely there?"

"Merely here!" nodded the young man with a charming smile of
reassurance.  "This contraption is a--er--I--I think Dick calls it an
hydro-aeroplane.  It has pontoons and things growing all over it for
duck stunts and if the water wasn't so infernally still, I'd be
floating and smoking and likely in time I'd make shore.  That's a
delightful pastime for you now," he added with a lazy smile of the
utmost good humor, "to float and smoke on a summer day and grab at the
shore."

"I was under the impression," commented Diane critically, "that in an
hydro-aeroplane one could rise from the water like a bird.  I've read
so recently."

"One can," smiled the shipwrecked philosopher readily, "provided his
motor isn't deaf and dumb and insanely indifferent to suggestion.  When
it grows shy and silent, one swims eventually and drips home, unless a
dog barks and a rescuer emerges from the trees equipped with sympathy
and common sense.  I've a mechanician back there," he added sociably.
"He--he's in a tree, I think.  I--er--mislaid him in a very dangerous
air current."

"Are you aware," inquired the girl, biting her lip, "that you're
trespassing?"

"Lord, no!" exclaimed the aviator.  "You don't mean it.  Have you by
any chance a reputable rope anywhere about you?"

"No," said Diane maliciously, "I haven't.  As a rule, I do go about
equipped with ropes and hooks and things to--rescue trespassing
hydroaviators, but--" she regarded him thoughtfully.  "Do you like to
float about and smoke?"

The sun-browned skin of the young aviator reddened a trifle, but his
eyes laughed.

"I'm an incurable optimist," he lightly countered, "or I wouldn't have
tried to fly over a private lake in a borrowed aeroplane."

"I believe," said Diane disapprovingly, "that you were cutting giddy
circles over the water and dipping and skimming, weren't you?"

"I did cut a monkeyshine or two," admitted the young man.  "I was
having a devil of a time until you--until the--er--catastrophe
occurred."

"And Miss Westfall, the owner," murmured Diane with sympathy, "is
addicted to firearms.  Hadn't you heard?  She _hunts_!  The Westfalls
are all very erratic and quick-tempered.  Didn't you know she was at
the farm?"

The young man looked exceedingly uncomfortable.

"Great guns, no!" he exclaimed.  "I presumed she was safe in New
York. . . .  And this is her lake and her water and her waves, when
there are any, and no matter how I engineer it, I've got to poach some
of her property.  Some of it," he added conversationally, "is in my
shoe.  Lord, I am in a pickle!  Are you a guest of hers?"

"Yes," said Diane calmly.

"I'm staying over yonder on the hill there with Dick Sherrill," offered
the young man cordially.  "They are opening their place with a party of
men, some crack amateur aviators--and myself.  Do you know the
Sherrills?"

"Perhaps I do," said Diane discouragingly.  "Why didn't you float about
and smoke on Mr. Sherrill's lake?" she added curiously.  "It's ever so
much bigger than this."

"Circumstances," began the young man with dignity, and lighted another
cigarette.  "My mechanician," he added volubly, after an uncomfortable
interval of silence, "is an exceedingly bold young man.  He'll fly over
anything, even a cow.  Isn't really mine either; he's borrowed, too.
Dick keeps a few extra mechanicians on hand, like extra cigars.  It's
Dick's fault I'm out alone.  He lent my mechanician to another chap and
nobody else would come with me."

"I thought," flashed Diane pointedly, "I thought your mechanician was
somewhere in a tree."

The aviator coughed and reddened uncomfortably.

"Doubtless he is," he said lamely.  "He--he most always is.  Do you
know, he spends a large part of his spare time in trees--and
swamps--and once, I believe, he was discovered in a chimney.  I--I'd
like to tell you more about him," he went on affably.  "Once--"

"Thank you," said Diane politely, "but you've really entertained me
more now than one could expect from a gentleman in your distressing
plight.  Come, Rex."  She turned back again at the hemlocks which
flanked the forest path.  "I'll ask Miss Westfall to send some men,"
she added and halted.

For Diane had surprised a look of such keen regret in the young
aviator's face that they both colored hotly.

"Beastly luck!" stammered the young man lamely.  "I _am_ disappointed.
I--I don't seem to have another match."

"Your cigarette is burning splendidly," hinted Diane coolly, "and
you've a match in your hand."

For a tense, magnetic instant the keen blue eyes flashed a curious
message of pleading and apology, then the aviator fell to whistling
softly, struck the match and finding no immediate function for it,
dropped it in the water.

"I don't in the least mind floating about," he stammered, his eyes
sparkling with silent laughter, "and possibly I'll make shore directly;
but Lord love us! don't send the sharp-shooteress--please!  Better
abandon me to my fate."

Slim and straight as the silver birches by the water, Diane hurried
away up the lake-path.

"The young man," she flashed with a stamp of her foot, "is a very great
fool."

"Johnny," she said a little later to a little, bewhiskered man with
cheeks like hard red winter apples, "there's a sociable, happy-go-lucky
young man perched on an aeroplane in the middle of our lake.  Better
take a rope and rescue him.  I don't think he knows enough about
aeroplanes to be flying so promiscuously about the country."

Johnny Jutes collected a band of enthusiasts and departed.

"Nobody there, Miss Diane," reported young Allan Carmody upon
returning; "leastwise nobody that couldn't take care of himself.  Only
a chap buzzin' almighty swift over the trees.  Swooped down like a hawk
when he saw us an' waved his hand, laughin' fit to kill himself, an'
dropped Johnny a fiver an' gee! Miss Diane, but he could drive some!
Swift and cool-headed as a bird.  He's whizzin' off like mad toward the
Sherrill place, with his motor a-hummin' an' a-purrin' like a cat.
Leanish, sunburnt chap with eyes that 'pear to be laughin' a lot."

Diane's eyes flashed resentfully and as she walked away to the house
her expression was distinctly thoughtful.




CHAPTER II

AN INDOOR TEMPEST

"If you're broke," said Starrett, leering, "why don't you marry your
cousin?"

Carl Granberry stared insolently across the table.

"Pass the buck," he reminded coolly.  "And pour yourself some more
whiskey.  You're only a gentleman when you're drunk, Starrett.  You're
sober now."

Payson and Wherry laughed.  Starrett, not yet in the wine-flush of his
heavy courtesy, passed the buck with a frown of annoyance.

A log blazed in the library fireplace, staining with warm, rich shadows
the square-paneled ceiling of oak and the huge war-beaten slab of
table-wood about which the men were gathered, both feudal relics
brought to the New York home of Carl Granberry's uncle from a ruined
castle in Spain.

"If you've gone through all your money," resumed Starrett offensively,
"I'd marry Diane."

"_Miss_ Westfall!" purred Carl correctively.  "You've forgotten,
Starrett, my cousin's name is Westfall, _Miss_ Westfall."

"Diane!" persisted Starrett.

With one of his incomprehensible whims, Carl swept the cards into a
disorderly heap and shrugged.

"I'm through," he said curtly.  "Wherry, take the pot.  You need it."

"Damned irregular!" snapped Starrett sourly.

"So?" said Carl, and stared the recalcitrant into sullen silence.
Rising, he crossed to the fire, his dark, impudent eyes lingering
reflectively upon Starrett's moody face.

"Starrett," he mused, "I wonder what I ever saw in you anyway.  You're
infernally shallow and alcoholic and your notions of poker are as
distorted as your morals.  I'm not sure but I think you'd cheat."  He
shrugged wearily.  "Get out," he said collectively.  "I'm tired."

Starrett rose, sneering.  There had been a subtle change to-night in
his customary attitude of parasitic good-fellowship.

"I'm tired, too!" he exclaimed viciously.  "Tired of your infernal
whims and insults.  You're as full of inconsistencies as a lunatic.
When you ought to be insulted, you laugh, and when a fellow least
expects it, you blaze and rave and stare him out of countenance.  And
I'm tired of drifting in here nights at your beck and call, to be sent
home like a kid when your mood changes.  Mighty amusing for us!  If
you're not vivisecting our lives and characters for us in that
impudent, philosophical way you have, you're preaching a sermon that
you couldn't--and wouldn't--follow yourself.  And then you end by
messing everybody's cards in a heap and sending us home with the last
pot in Dick Wherry's pocket whether it belongs there or not.  I tell
you, I'm tired of it."

Carl laughed, a singularly musical laugh with a note of mockery in it.

"Who," he demanded elaborately, "who ever heard of a treasonous
barnacle before?  A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite
to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the
ship was keeled in gold.  Nevertheless, you're right.  I'm all of what
you say and more that you haven't brains enough to fathom.  And some
that you can't fathom is to my credit--and some of it isn't.  As, for
instance, my inexplicable poker _penchant_ for you."

To Starrett, hot of temper and impulse, his graceful mockery was
maddening.  Cursing under his breath, he seized a glass and flung it
furiously at his host, who laughed and moved aside with the litheness
of a panther.  The glass crashed into fragments upon the wall of the
marble fireplace.  Payson and Wherry hurriedly pushed back their
chairs.  Then, suddenly conscious of a rustle in the doorway, they all
turned.

Wide dark eyes flashing with contempt, Diane Westfall stood motionless
upon the threshold.  The aesthete in Carl thrilled irresistibly to her
vivid beauty, intensified to-night by the angry flame in her cheeks and
the curling scarlet of her lips.  There were no semi-tones in Diane's
dark beauty, Carl reflected.  It was a thing of sable and scarlet, and
the gold-brown satin of her gypsy skin was warm with the tints of an
autumn forest.  Carelessly at his ease, Carl noted how the bold eyes of
the painted Spanish grandee above the mantel, the mild eyes of the
saint in the Tintoretto panel across the room and the flashing eyes of
Diane seemed oddly to converge to a common center which was Starrett,
white and ill at ease.  And of these the eyes of Diane were loveliest.

With the swift grace which to Carl's eyes always bore in it something
of the primitive, Diane swept away, and the staring tableau dissolved
into a trio of discomfited men of whom Carl seemed But an indifferent
onlooker.

"Well," fumed Starrett irritably, "why in thunder don't you say
something?"

"Permit me," drawled Carl impudently, with a lazy flicker of his
lashes, "to apologize for my cousin's untimely intrusion.  I really
fancied she was safe at the farm.  Unfortunately, the house belongs to
her.  Besides, your crystal gymnastics, Starrett, were as unscheduled
as her arrival.  As it is, you've nobly demonstrated an unalterable
scientific fact.  The collision of marble and glass is unvaryingly
eventful."

Bellowing indignantly, Starrett charged into the hallway, followed by
Payson.  Presently the outer door slammed violently behind them.
Wherry lingered.

Carl glanced curiously at his flushed and boyish face.

"Well?" he queried lightly.

Wherry colored.

"Carl," he stammered, "you've been talking a lot about parasites
to-night and I'd like you to know that--money hasn't made a jot of
difference to me."  He met Carl's laughing glance with dogged
directness and for a second something flamed boyishly in his face from
which Carl, frowning, turned away.

"Why don't you break away from this sort of thing, Dick?" he demanded
irritably.  "Starrett and myself and all the rest of it.  You're
sapping the splendid fires of your youth and inherent decency in unholy
furnaces.  Yes, I know Starrett drags you about with him and you
daren't offend him because he's your chief, but you're clever and you
can get another job.  In ten years, as you're going now, you'll be an
alcoholic ash-heap of jaded passions.  What's more, you have infernal
luck at cards and you haven't money enough to keep on losing so
heavily.  Half of the poker sermons Starrett's been growling about were
preached for you."

Now there were mad, irreverent moments when Carl Granberry delivered
his poker sermons with the eloquent mannerisms of the pulpit, save, as
Payson held, they were infinitely more logical and eloquent, but
to-night, husking his logic of these externals, he fell flatly to
preaching an unadorned philosophy of continence acutely at variance
with his own habits.

Wherry stared wonderingly at the tall, lithe figure by the fire.

"Carl," he said at last, "tell me, are you honestly in earnest when you
rag the fellows so about work and decency and all that sort of thing?"

Carl yawned and lighted a cigar.

"I believe," said he, "in the eternal efficacy of good.  I believe in
the telepathic potency of moral force.  I believe in physical
conservation for the eugenic good of the race and mental dominance over
matter.  But I'm infernally lazy myself, and it's easy to preach.  It's
even easier to create a counter-philosophy of condonance and
individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian
socialist and a cynic.  Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and
inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John
Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he
treacherously deepens it--but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to
irresistible fits of moral atrophy.  All of which has nothing at all to
do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy.  Wherefore," with a
flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean it--for the other
fellow."

Wherry glanced at the handsome face of his erratic friend with frank
allegiance in his eyes.

Carl flung his cigar into the fire, poured himself some whiskey and
pushed the decanter across the table.

"Have a drink," he said whimsically.

Dick obeyed.  It was an inconsistent supplement to the sermon but
characteristic.

"Carl," he said, flushing under the ironical battery of the other's
eyes, "I don't think I understand you--"

Carl laughed.

"Nobody does," he said.  "I don't myself."




CHAPTER III

A WHIM

The fire in the marble fireplace died down, leaping in fitful shadow
over the iron-bound doors riveted in nail-heads.  They too were relics
from the Spanish castle which Norman Westfall had stripped of its
ancient appurtenances to fashion an appropriate setting for the
beautiful young Spanish wife whose death at the birth of Diane had
goaded him to suicide.  That Norman Westfall had regarded the vital
spark within him as an indifferent thing to be snuffed out at the will
of the clay it dominated, was consistent with the Westfall intolerance
of custom and convention.

By the fire Carl smoked and stared at the dying embers.  For all his
insolent habit of dominance and mockery he was keenly sensitive and
to-night the significant defection of Starrett and Payson after months
of sycophantic friendship, had made him quiver inwardly like a hurt
child.  Only Wherry had stayed with him when his career of reckless
expenditure had arrived at its inevitable goal of ruin.

There remained, financially, what?  Barely four thousand a year in
securities so iron-bound by his mother's will that he could not touch
them.

Black resentment flamed hotly up in his heart at the memory of the
Westfall custom of willing the bulk of the great estate to the oldest
son.  It had left his mother with a patrimony which Carl, inheriting,
had chosen contemptuously to regard as a dwarfish thing of gold
sufficient only for the heedless purchase of one flaming, brilliant
hour of life.  That husbanded it might purchase a lifetime of gray
hours tinged intermittently with rose or crimson, Carl had dismissed
with a cynical laugh, quoting Omar Khayyam.

Starrett had sneeringly suggested that, to remedy his fallen
fortunes--he might marry Diane!  Carl laughed softly but recalling
suddenly how Diane had looked as she stood in the doorway, the flame of
her honest anger setting off her primitive grace, he frowned
thoughtfully at the fire, swayed by one of the mad, reckless whims
which frequently rocketed through his brain to heedless consummation.
Wherefore he presently dispatched a servant to Diane with a note
scribbled carelessly upon the face of the ace of diamonds.

"May I see you?" it ran.  "I am still in the library.  If you like,
I'll come up."

She came to the library, frankly surprised.  Carl rarely saw fit to
apologize or seek advice.

With his ready gallantry, habitually colored by a subtle sex-mockery,
Carl rose, drew a chair for her and leaned against the mantel, smiling.

"I'm sorry," said he civilly, "I'm sorry Starrett so far forgot
himself."

"So am I," said Diane.  "Bacchanalian tableaus are not at all to my
liking."

"Nor mine," admitted Carl.  "As an aesthete I must own that Starrett is
too fat for a really graceful villain.  I fancied you were indefinitely
domiciled at the farm.  Aunt Agatha has been fussing--"

"I was," nodded Diane.  "A whim of mine brought me home."

Carl dropped easily into a chair and glanced at his cousin's profile.
The delicate oval of her face was firelit; her night-black hair one
with the deeper shadows of the room.  There was mystery in the lovely
dusk of Diane's eyes--and discontent--and something mute and wistful
crying for expression.

"I've a proposition to make," said Carl lightly.  "It's partly
commercial, partly belated justice, partly eugenic and partly personal."

"Your money is quite gone, is it not?" asked Diane, raising finely
arched expressive eyebrows.

"It is," admitted Carl ruefully.  "My career as a bibulous meteor is
over.  Last night, after an exquisite shower of golden fire, I came
tumbling to earth in the fashion of meteors, a disillusioned stone.  In
other words--stone broke.  May I smoke?"

"Assuredly."

Carl lighted a cigarette.

"And the proposition which is at the same time commercial, eugenic
and--er--personal?" reminded Diane curiously.  Carl ignored the
delicate note of sarcasm.

"It is merely," he said with a flash of impudence, "that you will marry
me."

Diane's eyes widened.

"How frankly commercial!" she murmured.

"Isn't it?" said Carl.  "And an excellent opportunity for belated
justice as well.  My mother, save for our infernal Salic law of
inheritance, was entitled to half the Westfall estate."

Diane stared curiously at the fire-rimmed hem of her satin skirt.
There was something of Carl's lazy impudence in the arch of her
eyebrows.

"There yet remains the eugenic inducement and, I believe, a personal
one!" she hinted.

"Thank heaven," exclaimed Carl devoutly, "that we're both logicians.
The eugenic consideration is that by birth and brains and breeding I am
your logical mate."

Diane's eyes flashed with swift contempt.

"Birth!" she repeated.

The black demon of ungovernable temper leaped brutally from Carl's
eyes.  Leaning forward he caught the girl's hands in a vicious grip
that hurt her cruelly though for all her swift color she did not flinch.

"Listen, Diane," he said, his face very white; "if there is one thing
in this rotten world of custom and convention and immoral morality
which I honestly respect, it is the memory of my mother.  Therefore you
will please abstain from contemptuous reference to her by look or word."

Diane met the clear, compelling rebuke of his fine eyes with unwavering
directness.

"My mother," said Carl steadily, "was a fine, big, splendid woman,
unconventional like all the Westfalls, and a century ahead of her time.
Moreover, she had a code of morality quite her own.  If Aunt Agatha's
shocked sensibilities had not eliminated her from your life so early,
contact with her broad understanding of things would have tempered your
sex insularity."  He glanced pityingly at Diane.  "You've fire and
vision, Diane," he said bluntly, "but you're intolerant.  It's a
Westfall trait."  He laughed softly.  "How scornfully you used to laugh
and jeer at boys, because you were swifter of foot and keener of vision
than any of them, because you could leap and run and swim like a wild
thing!  Intolerance again, Diane, even as a youngster!"

He rose restlessly, smiling down at her with a lazy expression of
deference in his eyes.

"Wonderful, beautiful lady of fire and ebony!" he said gently, with a
bewildering change of mood which brought the vivid color to Diane's
dark cheek.  "There's the wild, sweet wine of the forest in your very
blood!  And it's always calling!"

"Yes," nodded Diane wistfully, "it's always calling.  How did you know?"

"By the wizardry of eye and intuition!" he laughed lightly.  "And the
personal consideration," he added pleasantly; "we've come at last to
that."

A tide of color swept brightly over Diane's face.

"Surely, Carl," she exclaimed with a swift, level glance, "you don't
mean that you care?"

"No," said Carl honestly, "I don't.  I mean just this.  Will you permit
me to care?  To-night as you stood there in the doorway I knew for the
first time that, if I chose, I could love you very greatly."

"Love isn't like that," flashed Diane.  "It comes unbidden."

"To different natures come different dawnings of the immortal white
fire!" shrugged Carl.  "My love will be largely a matter of will.  I'm
armored heavily."

"For a golden key!" scoffed Diane, rising.

"Ah, well," said Carl impudently, "it was well worth a try!  I'm sure I
could love with all the fiery appurtenances of the Devil himself if I
shed the armor."




CHAPTER IV

THE VOICE OF THE OPEN COUNTRY

"Aunt Agatha!"  Diane rapped lightly at her aunt's bedroom door.  "Are
you asleep?"

"No, no indeed!" puffed Aunt Agatha forlornly.  "Certainly not.  When
in the world did you come back from the farm, child?  I've worried so!
And like you, too, to come back as unexpectedly as you went."  She
opened the door wider for her niece to enter.  "But as for sleep,
Diane, I hope I'm not as callous as that.  I shan't sleep a wink
to-night, I'm sure of it."

Aunt Agatha dabbed ineffectually at her round, aggrieved eyes.

"Carl's a terrible responsibility for me, Diane," she went on, "though
to be sure there have been wild nights when I've put cotton in my ears
and locked the door and if I'd only remembered to do that I wouldn't
have heard the glass crash--one of the Florentine set, too, I haven't
the ghost of a doubt.  I feel those things, Diane.  Mamma, too, had a
gift of feeling things she didn't know for sure--mamma did!--and the
servants talk--of course they do!--who wouldn't?  I must say, though,
Carl's always kind to me; I will say that for him but--"

The excellent lady whose mental convolutions permitted her to speculate
wildly in words with the least possible investment of ideas, rambled by
serpentine paths of complaint to a conversational _cul-de-sac_ and
trailed off in a tragic sniff.

Diane resolutely smothered her impatience.

"I--I only ran down overnight.  Aunt Agatha," she said, "to--to tell
you something--"

"You can't mean it!" puffed Aunt Agatha helplessly.  "What in the world
are you going back to the farm for?  Dear me, Diane, you're growing
notional--and farms are very damp in spring."

Diane walked away to the window and stood staring thoughtfully out at
the metropolitan glitter of lights beyond.

"Oh, Aunt Agatha!" she exclaimed restlessly, "you can't imagine how
very tired I grow of it all--of lights and cities and restaurants and
everything artificial!  Surely these city days and nights of silly
frivolity are only the froth of life!  Have you ever longed to sleep in
the woods," she added abruptly, "with stars twinkling overhead and the
moonlight showering softly through the trees?"

"I'm very sure I never have!" said Aunt Agatha with considerable
decision.  "And it's not at all likely I ever shall.  There are bugs
and things," she added vaguely, "and snakes that wriggle about."

"I've always wanted to lie and dream by a camp fire," mused Diane,
unconscious of a certain startled flutter of Aunt Agatha's dressing
gown, "to hear the wind rising in the forest and the lap of the lake
against the shore."  She wheeled abruptly, her eyes bright with
excitement.  "And I'm going to try it."

"To sleep by a lake in springtime!" gasped Aunt Agatha in great
distress.  "Diane, I beg of you, _don't_ do it!  I once knew a man who
slept out somewhere--such a nice man, too!--and something bit him--a
heron, I think, or a herring.  No!  It couldn't have been either.
Isn't it funny how I do forget!  Strangest thing!  But to sleep by a
lake in springtime, think of that!"

"Oh, no, no, no, Aunt Agatha!" laughed Diane.  "I didn't mean quite
that.  I'm merely going back to the Glade farm to-morrow to--" she
glanced with furtive uncertainty at her aunt and halted.  "Aunt Agatha,
I've been planning a gypsy cart!  There!  It's out at last and I
dreaded the telling!  When the summer comes, I'm going to travel about
in my wonderful house on wheels and live in the free, wild, open
country!"

"I can't believe it!" said Aunt Agatha, staring.  "I can't--I won't
believe it!"

"Don't be a goose!" begged the girl happily.  "All winter the voice of
the open country has been calling--calling!  There's quicksilver in my
veins.  See, Aunt Agatha, see the spring moon--the 'Planting Moon' an
Indian girl I used to know in college called it!  How gloriously it
must be shining over silent woods and lakes, flashing silver on the
pines and the ripples by the shore.  And the sea, the great, wide,
beautiful, mysterious sea droning under a million stars!"

"Think of that!" breathed Aunt Agatha incredulously.  "A million stars!
I can't believe it.  But dear me, Diane, there are seas and stars and
moons and things right here in New York."

With a swift flash of tenderness Diane slipped her arm about Aunt
Agatha's perturbed shoulders.

"You're not going to mind at all!" she wheedled gently.  "I'm sure of
it.  I'd have to go anyway.  It's in my blood like the hint of summer
in the air to-night."

Aunt Agatha merely stared.  The Westfalls were congenital enigmas.

"A gypsy cart!" she gurgled presently, rising phoenix-like at last from
a dumb-struck supineness.  "A gypsy cart!  Well!  A wheelbarrow
wouldn't have surprised me more, Diane, a wheelbarrow with a motor!"

"Don't you remember Mrs. Jarley's wagon?" reminded Diane.  "It had
windows and curtains--"

"Surely," broke in Aunt Agatha with strained dignity, "you're not going
in for waxworks like Mrs. Jarley!"

"Dear, no!" laughed Diane, with a sparkle of amusement in her eyes.
"There are so many wild flowers and birds and legends to study I
shouldn't have time!"

"Great heavens," murmured Aunt Agatha faintly, "my ears have gone queer
like mother's."

"And maybe I'll not be back for a year," offered Diane calmly.  "I can
work south through the winter--"

Aunt Agatha fell tragically back in her chair and gasped.

"Didn't we take a whole year to motor over Europe?" demanded Diane
impetuously.  "And that was nothing like so fascinating as my gypsy
house on wheels."

"If I could only have looked ahead!" breathed Aunt Agatha, shuddering.
"If only I could have foreseen what notions you and Carl were fated to
take in your heads, I'd have refused your grandfather's legacy.  I
would indeed.  Here I no more than get Carl safely home from hunting
Esquimaux or whatever it was up there by the North Pole--walravens,
wasn't it, Diane?--well, walrus then!--than you decide to become a
gypsy and sleep by a lake in springtime under a planting moon and stay
outdoors all winter, collecting birds, when I fancied you were safely
launched in society until you were married."

"But Aunt Agatha," flashed the girl, "I'm not at all anxious to marry."

Aunt Agatha burst into a calamitous shower of tears.

"Aunt Agatha," said Diane kindly, "why not remember that you're no
longer burdened with the terrible responsibility of bringing Carl and
me up?  We're both mature, responsible beings."

Aunt Agatha dabbed defiantly at her eyes.

"Well," she said flatly, "I shan't worry, I just shan't.  I'm past
that.  There was a time, but at my time of life I just can't afford it.
You can do as you please.  You can go shoot alligators if you want to,
Diane, I shan't interpose another objection.  But the trials that I've
endured in my life through the Westfalls, nobody knows.  I was a
cheerful, happy person until I knew the Westfalls.  And your father was
notional too.  I was a Gregg, Diane, until I married your uncle--he
wasn't really your uncle, but a sort of cousin--and the Greggs, thank
heavens! are mild and quiet and never wander about.  Dear me, if a
Gregg should take to sleeping by a lake in spring-time under a planting
moon, I would be surprised, I would indeed!  There was only one in our
whole family who ever galloped about to any extent--Uncle Peter
Gregg--and you really couldn't blame him.  Bulls were perpetually
running into him, and once he fell overboard and a whale chased him to
shore.  Isn't it funny?  Strangest thing!  But there, Diane, I wonder
your poor dear grandfather doesn't turn straight over in his grave--I
do indeed.  Many and many a time your poor father tried him sorely--and
Carl's mother too."  Aunt Agatha sniffed meekly.

"Will you go alone?" she ventured, wiping her eyes.

"Bless your heart, Aunt Agatha, no!" laughed Diane radiantly.  "I'm
going to take old Johnny Jutes with me!"

Diane kissed her aunt lightly on the forehead.

"Well," said Aunt Agatha in melancholy resignation, "if you must turn
gypsy, my dear, and wander about the country, Johnny Jutes is the best
one to go along.  He's old and faithful and used to your whims and
surely after thirty years of service, he won't break into tantrums."

Silver-sweet through the quiet house came the careless ripple of a
flute, showering light and sensuous music.  There was a dare-devil lilt
and sway to the flippant strains and Aunt Agatha covered her face with
her hands.

"Oh, Diane," she whispered, shuddering, "when he plays like that he
drinks and drinks and drinks until morning."

"Poor Aunt Agatha!" said the girl pityingly.  "What troublesome folk we
Westfalls are!  And I no less than Carl."

"No, no, my dear!" murmured Aunt Agatha.  "It's only when Carl plays
like that--that I grow afraid."

Aunt Agatha went to bed to listen tremblingly while the dare-devil
dance of the flute tripped ghostlike through the corridors.  And
falling asleep with the laughing demon of wind and melody cascading
wildly through the mad scene from Lucia, she dreamt that Carl had
captured an Esquimau with his flute and weaving a suit of basket armor
for him, had dispatched him by aeroplane to lead Diane's gypsy cart
into the Everglades of Florida, the home-state of Norman Westfall until
his ill-fated marriage.




CHAPTER V

THE PHANTOM THAT ROSE FROM THE BOTTLE

The demon of the flute laughed and fell silent.  The house grew very
quiet.  A fresh log built its ragged shell of color within the library
and Carl drank again and again, watching the play of firelight upon the
amber liquor in his glass.  It pleased him idly to build up a
philosophy of whiskey, an impudent, fearless reverie of fact and fancy.

"So," he finished carelessly, "every bottle is a crystal temple to the
great god Bacchus and who may know what phantom lurks within, ready to
rise and grow from the fumes of its fragrant incense into a nebulous
wraith of gigantic proportions.  Many a bottle such as this has made
history and destroyed it.  A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of
romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery and irony
and blood and death, whose temper no man may know until he tests it
through the alchemy of his brain and soul!"

To Starrett it gave a heavy courtesy; to Payson a mad buffoonery; to
Wherry pathos; to Carl himself--ah!--there was the rub!  To Carl its
message was as capricious as the wind--a moon-mad chameleon changing
its color with the fickle light.  And in the bottle to-night lay a
fierce, unreasoning resentment against Diane.

"Fool!" said Carl.  "One mad, eloquent lie of love and she would have
softened.  Women are all like that.  Tell me," Carl stared whimsically
into his glass as if it were a magic crystal of revelation, "why is it
that when I am scrupulously honest no one understands? . . .  Why that
mad stir of love-hunger to-night as Diane stood in the doorway?  Why
the swift black flash of hatred now?  Are love and hatred then akin?"

The clock struck three.  Carl's brain, flaming, keen, master of the
bottle save for its subtle inspiration of wounded pride and resentment,
brooded morosely over Diane, over the defection of his parasitic
companions, over the final leap into the abyss of parsimony and Diane's
flash of contempt at the mention of his mother.  Half of Diane's money
was rightly his--his mother's portion.  And he could love vehemently,
cleanly, if he willed, with the delicate white fire which few men were
fine enough to know. . . .  In the soft hollow of Diane's hand had lain
the destiny of a man who had the will to go unerringly the way he
chose. . . .  Love and hunger--they were the great trenchant appetites
of the human race: one for its creation, the other for its
perpetuation. . . .  To every man came first the call of passion; then
the love-hunger for a perfect mate.  The latter had come to him
to-night as Diane stood in the doorway, a slender, vibrant flame of
life keyed exquisitely for the finer, subtler things and hating
everything else.

Still he drank, but the fires of hell were rising now in his eyes.
There was treachery in the bottle. . . .  Diane, he chose to fancy, had
refused him justice, salvation, respect to the memory of his
mother! . . .  So be it! . . .  His to wrench from the mocking,
gold-hungry world whatever he could and however he would. . . .  Only
his mother had understood. . . .  And Diane had mocked her memory.
Still there had been thrilling moments of tenderness for him in Diane's
life. . . .  But Diane was like that--a flash of fire and then
bewildering sweetness.  There was the spot Starrett's glass had struck;
there the ancient carven chair in which Diane had mocked his mother;
there was red--blood-red in the dying log--and gold.  Blood and
gold--they were indissolubly linked one with the other and the demon of
the bottle had danced wild dances with each of them.  A mad trio!
After all, there was only one beside his mother who had ever understood
him--Philip Poynter, his roommate at Yale.  And Philip's lazy voice
somehow floated from the fire to-night.

"Carl," he had said, "you've bigger individual problems to solve than
any man I know.  You could head a blood revolution in South America
that would outrage the world; or devise a hellish philosophy of
hedonism that by its very ingenuity would seduce a continent into
barking after false gods.  You've an inexplicable chemistry of
ungovernable passions and wild whims and you may go through hell first
but when the final test comes--you'll ring true.  Mark that, old man,
you'll ring true.  I tell you I _know_!  There's sanity and will and
grit to balance the rest."

Well, Philip Poynter was a staunch optimist with oppressive ideals, a
splendid, free-handed fellow with brains and will and infernal
persistence.

Four o'clock and the log dying!  The city outside was a dark, clinking
world of milkmen and doubtful stragglers, Carl finished the whiskey in
his glass and rose.  His brain was very drunk--that he knew--for every
life current in his body swept dizzily to his forehead, focusing there
into whirling inferno, but his legs he could always trust.  He stepped
to the table and lurched heavily.  Mocking, treacherous demon of the
bottle!  His legs had failed him.  Fiercely he flung out his arm to
regain his balance.  It struck a candelabrum, a giant relic of ancient
wood as tall as himself.  It toppled and fell with its candled branches
in the fire.  Where the log broke a flame shot forth, lapping the dark
wood with avid tongue.  With a crackle the age-old wood began to burn.

Carl watched it with a slight smile.  It pleased him to watch it burn.
That would hurt Diane, for everything in this beautiful old Spanish
room linked her subtly to her mother.  Yes, it would hurt her cruelly.
Beyond, at the other end of the table, stood a mate to the burning
candlestick, doubtless a silent sentry at many a drinking bout of old
when roistering knights gathered about the scarred slab of table-wood
beneath his fingers.  A pity though!  Artistically the carven thing was
splendid.

Cursing himself for a notional fool, Carl jerked the candlestick from
the fire and beat out the flames.  The heavy top snapped off in his
hands.  The falling wood disclosed a hollow receptacle below the
branches . . . a charred paper.  Well, there was always some insane
whim of Norman Westfall's coming to light somewhere and this doubtless
was one of them.

The paper was very old and yellow, the handwriting unmistakably
foreign.  French, was it not?  The firelight was too fitful to tell.
Carl switched on the light in the cluster of old iron lanterns above
the table and frowned heavily at the paper.  No, it was the precise,
formal English of a foreigner, with here and there a ludicrous error
among the stilted phrases.  And as Carl read, a gust of wild,
incredulous laughter echoed suddenly through the quiet room.  Again he
read, cursing the dizzy fever of his head.  Houdania!  Houdania!  Where
was Houdania?  Surely the name was familiar.  With a superhuman effort
of will he clenched his hands and jaws and sat motionless, seeking the
difficult boon of concentration.  Out of the maelstrom of his mind
haltingly it came, and with it memory in panoramic flashes.

Once more he heard the clatter of cavalry galloping up a winding
mountain road to a gabled city whose roofs and turrets glinted ruddily
in the westering sun.  There had been royalty abroad with a brilliant
escort, handsome, dark-skinned men with a lingering trace of Arab about
the eyes, who galloped rapidly by him up the winding road to the little
kingdom in the mountains.  Houdania!--yes that was it--of course.
Houdania!  A Lilliputian monarchy of ardent patriots.  There had been a
flaming sunset behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed
up--up--up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the
tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe.
And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver
rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery
had offered him a cell of retreat.

Houdania!  Yes, he had found Houdania.  Philip Poynter had told him of
the monastery months before.  Philip liked to seek and find the
picturesque.  Thus had he come into Andorra in the Pyrenees and Wisby
in the Baltic.  And he--Carl--had found Houdania.  But what of it?  Ah,
yes, the burning candlestick--the paper--the paper!  And again a gust
of laughter drowned the fitful crackle of the fire.  There was gold at
his hand--great, tempting quantities of it!

"When the test comes, you'll ring true," came the crackle of Philip's
voice from the fire.  "Mark that, old man, you'll ring true.  I tell
you, I know."  Well, Philip Poynter was his only friend.  But Philip
was off somewhere, gone out of his life this many a day in a
characteristic burst of quixotism.

Carl laughed and shuddered, for a mad instant he held the tempting
yellow paper above the fire--and drew it back, stared at the charred
candlestick and laughed again--but there was nothing of laughter in his
eyes.  They were darkly ironic and triumphant.  There was blood in the
fire--and gold--and Diane had mocked his mother.  With a groan Carl
flung his arms out passionately upon the table, torn by a conflict of
the strangely warring forces within him.  And with his head drooping
heavily forward upon his hands he lay there until the melancholy dawn
grayed the room into shadowy distinctness, his angle of vision twisted
and maimed by the demon of the bottle.  The candlestick loomed
strangely forth from the still grayness; the bottle took form; the
yellowed paper glimmered on the table.  Carl stirred and a spasm of
mirthless laughter shook him.

"So," he said, "Philip Poynter loses--and I--I write to Houdania!"

So from the bottle rose a phantom of glittering gold and temptation to
grow in time to a wraith of gigantic proportions.  In the bottle
to-night had lain tears and jest and love unending, romance and
passion, treachery and irony--blood and the shadow of Death.




CHAPTER VI

BARON TREGAR

Lilac and wistaria flowered royally.  Carpenter, wheelwright and painter
departed.  The trim green wagon, picked out gayly in white, windowed and
curtained and splendidly equipped for the fortunes of the road, creaked
briskly away upon its pilgrimage, behind a pair of big-boned piebald
horses from the Westfall stables, with Johnny at the reins.  On the seat
beside him Diane radiantly waved adieu to her aunt, who promptly
collapsed in a chair on the porch and dabbed violently at her eyes.

"I shall never get over it," sniffed Aunt Agatha tragically.  "Carl may
say what he will, I never shall.  But now that I've come up here to see
her off, I've done my duty, I have indeed.  And I do hope Carl hasn't any
wild ideas for the summer--I couldn't stand it.  Allan, as long as Miss
Diane is camping within reasonable distance of the farm, you'd better
take the run-about each night and find her and see if she's all
right--and brush the snakes and bugs and things out of camp.  If
everything wild in the forest collected around the camp fire, like as not
she wouldn't see them until they bit her."

The boy shifted a slim, bare leg and sniggered.

"Miss Westfall," he said, "Miss Diane she says she's a-goin' to a spot by
the river and camp a week an'--an' if she finds anybody a-follerin' or
spyin' on her from the farm, she'll skin him alive an'--an' them black
eyes o' her'n snapped fire when she said it.  An' Johnny, he's got
weepons 'nough with him to fight pirutes."

Aunt Agatha groaned and rocking dolorously back and forth upon the porch
reviewed the calamitous possibilities of the journey.

But the restless young nomad on the road ahead, sniffing the rare, sweet
air of early summer, had already relegated the memory of her
long-suffering aunt to the forgotten things of civilization.  For the
summer world, sweet with the scent of wild flowers, was very young, with
young leaves, young grass and flowering, sun-warm hedges, and beyond the
Sherrill place on the wooded hill, the sun flamed yellow through the
hemlocks.

"Oh, Johnny Jutes!  Oh, Johnny Jutes!" sang the girl happily, with the
color of the wild rose in her sun-brown cheeks.  "It's good--it's good to
be alive!"

With a chuckle of enthusiasm Johnny cracked his whip and opined that it
was.

Now even as the great green van rolled forth upon the country roads,
bound for an idyllic spot by the river where Diane had planned to camp a
week, two men appeared upon the wide, white-pillared Sherrill porch,
smoking and idly admiring the bluish hills and the rolling meadowlands
below bright with morning sunlight.  To the east lay the silver glimmer
of a tree-fringed lake; beyond, a church spire among the trees and a
winding country road traveled by the solitary van of green and white.

"A singular conveyance, is it not, Poynter?" inquired the older man, his
careful articulation blurred by a pronounced foreign accent.  Staring
intently at the sunlit road, he added: "Is it a common mode of
travel--here in America?"

The younger man, a lean, sinewy chap with singularly fine eyes of blue
above lean, tanned cheeks, frowned thoughtfully.

"By no means," said he pleasantly.  "Indeed it's quite new to me.  Seems
to have blowy white things at the sides like window curtains, doesn't it?"

"A nomadic young woman, I am told," shrugged the older man carelessly.
He stood watching the dusty trail of the nomad with narrowed, thoughtful
eyes, unaware that his companion's eyes had wandered somewhat expectantly
to the Westfall lake.

"Baron Tregar!" whispered Ann Sherrill in a remote corner of the veranda
to a girl she had brought up to the farm with her late the night before.
"Has a _real_ air of distinction, hasn't he, Susanne?  And such deep,
dark, _compelling_ eyes.  Rather Arabic, I think, but mother says Magyar.
Dick says he's immensely interested in the war possibilities of
aeroplanes and fearfully patriotic.  Touring the States, I believe.  Dad
picked him up in Washington.  Philip's teaching him to fly.  Philip was
up once before, you know, in the spring and Dad urged him to come up
again and bring the Baron along to learn aeroplaning.  Philip _Poynter_,
of course, the Baron's secretary!" in scandalized italics.  "Didn't you
know, _really_? . . .  _The_ Philip Poynter. . . .  And I say it's
absolutely _sinful_ for a man to be so good-looking as long as the
world's monogamous."

"Quarreled with his father or something, didn't he?" asked Susanne
vaguely.

"Quarreled!" exclaimed Ann righteously.  "Well, I should say he did.  My
dear, the young man's temper simply splintered into a million pieces and
he hasn't found them yet.  Flatly refused to take a _cent_ of his
father's money because he'd discovered it was made dishonestly.  _Think_
of it!  And Dad says it's true.  Old Poynter is a pirate, an
unscrupulous, money-mad, villainous old pirate and he did something or
other most unpleasant to Dad in Wall Street.  And would you _believe_ it,
Susanne, Philip went fuming off huffily to some ridiculous little
mountain kingdom in Europe that he was awfully keen about--Houdania--and
rented himself out as a secretary to Baron Tregar.  Just _imagine_!  Dick
says he organized an aviation department there and won some kind of a
prize for an improved model and in the midst of it all, Susanne, Philip's
grandfather up and died, after quarreling for years and _years_ with the
whole family, and left Philip _all_ his money!  _I_ think Philip's
quarrel with his father pleased him.  But the very queerest part is that
Philip actually _likes_ to work and dabble in foreign politics and he
flatly refused to give up his job!  Isn't it romantic?  Philip was
_always_ keen for adventure.  Dick says you never could put your finger
on a spot on the map and say comfortably, 'Philip Poynter's here!' for
most likely Philip Poynter was bolting furiously somewhere else!"

Unaware of Susanne's furtive interest in his career, Philip scanned the
calm, unruffled waters of the Westfall lake and sighing turned back to
his chief.  There was a tempting drone of motors back among the hangars.

"We fly this morning?" he inquired smiling.

"Unfortunately not," regretted the Baron, and led the way indoors to a
room which Mrs. Sherrill had hospitably insisted upon regarding as a
private den of work and consultation for the Baron and his secretary.

"There is a mission of exceeding delicacy," began Baron Tregar slowly,
"which I feel I must inflict upon you."  His deep, penetrating eyes
lingered intently upon Philip's face.  "It concerns the singular
conveyance of green and white and the lady within it."

Philip looked frankly astonished.

"I take it then," he suggested, "that you know the nomadic lady, Baron
Tregar?"

"No," said the Baron.

Philip stared.

"Your Excellency is pleased to jest," he said politely.

"On the contrary," said the Baron, "I am at a loss for suitable words in
which to express my singular request.  I am assured of your interest,
Poynter?"

"Of my interest, assuredly!" admitted Philip.  "My compliance," he added
fairly, "depends, of course, upon the nature of the mission."

"It is absurdly simple," said the Houdanian suavely.  "Merely to discover
whether or not the nomadic lady feels any exceptional interest--in
Houdania.  For the information to be acquired in a careless,
disinterested manner without arousing undue interest, requires, I think,
an American of brains and breeding, a compatriot of the nomad.  It has
occurred to me that you are equipped by a habit of courtesy and tact
to--arrive accidentally in the path of the caravan--"

"I thank you!" said Philip dryly.  "I prefer," he added stiffly, "to
confine my diplomatic activities to more conventional channels."

"When I assure you," purred the Baron with his maddening precision of
speech, "that this information is of peculiar value to me and without
immediate significance to the lady herself, I am sure that you will not
feel bound to withhold your--hum--your coöperation in so slight a
personal inconvenience, singular as it may all seem to you, I am right?"

Philip reddened uncomfortably.

"I am to understand that I would undertake this peculiar mission equipped
with no further information than you have offered?"

"Exactly so," said the Baron.  "I must beg of you to undertake it without
question."

"Pray believe," flashed Philip, "that I am not inclined to question.
That fact," he added coldly, "is in itself a handicap."

"The lady's name," explained the Baron quietly, "is Westfall--Diane
Westfall."

"Impossible!" exclaimed Philip and savagely bit his lip.

"Ah, then you know the lady!" said the Baron softly.

"I regret," said Philip formally, "that I have not had the honor of
meeting Miss Westfall."  But he saw vividly again a girl straight and
slender as a silver birch, with firm, wind-bright skin and dark, mocking
eyes.  There were hemlocks and a dog--and Dick Sherrill had been
talkative over billiards the night before.

"Miss Westfall," added Philip guilelessly, "is the owner of the Glade
Farm below here in the valley."

"Ah, yes," nodded Tregar.  "It is so I have heard."  His glance lingered
still upon Philip's face in subtle inquiry.  Bending its Circean head,
Temptation laughed lightly in Philip Poynter's eyes.  The girl in the
caravan was winding away by dusty roads--out of his life perhaps.  And
singular as the mission was, its aim was harmless.

"Our lady," said the Baron smoothly, "camps by night.  From an aeroplane
one may see much--a camp--a curl of smoke--a caravan.  Later one may walk
and, walking, one may lose his way--to find it again with perfect ease by
means of a forest camp fire."

Somehow on the Baron's tongue the escapade became insidious duplicity.
Philip flushed, acutely conscious of a significant stirring of his
conscience.

"I may fly with Sherrill this afternoon," he said with marked reluctance.

"And at sunset?"

"I may walk," said Philip, shrugging.

"Permit me," said the Baron gratefully as he rose, "to thank you.  The
service is--ah--invaluable."

Uncomfortably Philip accepted his release and went lightly up the stairs.

"I am a fool," said Philip.  "But surely Walt Whitman must have
understood for he said it all in verse.  'I am to wait, I do not doubt, I
am to meet you again,'" quoted Philip under his breath; "'I am to see to
it that I do not lose you!'"




CHAPTER VII

THEMAR

The door which led into the Baron's bedroom from his own was slightly
ajar.  Philip, about to close it, fancied he heard the stealthy rustle
of paper beyond and swung it noiselessly back, halting in silent
interest upon the threshold.

Themar, the Baron's Houdanian valet, was intently transcribing upon his
shirt-cuff, the contents of a paper which lay uppermost in the drawer
of a small portable desk.

Catlike, Philip stole across the room.  The man's hand was laboriously
reproducing upon the linen an intricate message in cipher.

"Difficult, too, isn't it?" sympathized Philip smoothly at his elbow.

With a sharp cry, Themar wheeled, his small, shifting eyes black with
hate.  They wavered and fell beneath the level, icy stare of the
American.  Philip's fingers slipped viselike along the other's wrists
and Philip's voice grew more acidly polite.

"My dear Themar," he regretted, falling unconsciously into the language
of his chief, "I must spoil the symmetry of your wardrobe.  The
hieroglyphical cuff, if you please."

Themar's snarl was unintelligible.  Smiling, Philip unbuttoned the
stiff band of linen and drew it slowly off.

"A pity!" said he with gentle, sarcastic apology in his eyes.  "Such
perfect work!  And after all that infernal bother of stealing the key!"

Philip lightly dropped the cuff into the pocket of his coat.

"And the key, Themar," he reminded gently, "the key to the Baron's
desk? . . .  Ah, so it's still here.  Excellent!  And now that the
drawer is locked again--"

The hall door creaked.  Simultaneously Themar and Philip wheeled.  The
Baron stood in the doorway.

Philip smiled and bowed.

"Excellency," said he, "Themar in an over-zealous desire to rearrange
your private papers has acquired your private key and I have taken the
liberty of confiscating it, knowing that you prize its possession.
Permit me to return it now."

"Thank you, Poynter!" said the Baron and glanced keenly at Themar.  "It
is but now that I had missed it."

"Excellency," burst forth Themar desperately, "I found it this morning
on the rug."

"But," purred the Baron, "why seek a keyhole?"

Themar's dark face was ashen.

Philip, with a wholesome distaste for scenes, slipped away.

"Excellency," burst forth Themar passionately as the door closed, "it
is unfair--"

The Baron raised his hand in a gesture of warning.

"Permit me, Themar," he said coldly as the sound of Philip's footsteps
died away, "permit me to remind you that my secretary is quite unaware
of our peculiar relations.  He is laboring at present under the
necessary delusion that your arrival here was entirely the result of my
fastidious distaste for the personal services of anyone but a fellow
countryman.  Presumably I had cabled home for you.  I prefer," he
added, "that he continue to think so."

Themar's eyes flashed resentfully.

"Excellency," he said sullenly, "it is unfair that I am denied the
knowledge of detail that I need.  That is why I sought to read the
cipher."

"And yet, Themar," said the Baron softly, "I fancy Ronador has told
you--something--enough!"  He shrugged, his impenetrable eyes narrowing
slowly.  "But that I need you," he said evenly, "but that your
knowledge of English makes you an invaluable ally--and one not easily
replaced--I would send you back to Houdania--disgraced!  As it is, we
are hedged about with peculiar difficulties and I must use--and watch
you."

He glanced significantly at the desk drawer and thence to Themar's
dark, unscrupulous face, resentful and defiant.

"Now as for the cryptogram which tempted you so sorely," went on the
Baron smoothly.  "Its chief mission, as I have repeatedly assured you,
was to convert my journey of pleasure in America into one of
immediate--hum--service.  I have spoken to you of a certain paper--"

"There was more," said Themar sullenly.

"Merely," smiled the Baron with engaging candor, "that you are fully
equipped with definite instructions which I am to see are fulfilled."

"There is a girl," said Themar bluntly.

The Baron stared.

"What?" he rumbled sharply.

"I--I learned of her and of the cipher in Houdania!" stammered Themar.

"You know something more of detail than you need to know," said the
Baron dryly.  "Moreover," he added icily, "you will confine your
professional attentions to the other sex.  You are sure about the
paper?"

"Yes."

"Your trip to New York last night was--hum--uneventful?"

"Yes."

"You will go again to-night?"

"It is unnecessary.  Granberry is at the Westfall farm."

"Ah!"

"But, Excellency," reminded Themar glibly, "there is still the girl--"
Deep, compelling, Tregar's eyes burned steadily into menace.

"Must I repeat--"

"Excellency," stammered Themar blanching.

"You may go!" said the Baron curtly.

There had been no word of the scribbled cuff, Themar remembered.  And
surely one may steal away one's own.




CHAPTER VIII

AFTER SUNSET

The sun had set.  Back from his flight over the hills with Sherrill,
Philip had bathed and shaved, whistling thoughtfully to himself.  Now
as he descended the steep Sherrill lane to the valley, ravine and
hollow were already dark with twilight.  From the rustling trees
arching the lane overhead came the occasional sleepy chirp and flutter
of a bird.  Off somewhere in the gathering dusk a lonely owl hooted
eerily.  Still there was storm in the warm, sweet air to-night and back
yonder over the hills to the north, the sky brightened fitfully with
lightning.

Slipping his hand carelessly into his coat pocket for a pipe, Philip
laughed.

"My Lord!" said he lightly.  "The hieroglyphical cuff!  I should have
given that to the Baron. . . .  Themar," added Philip, packing his
pipe, "is an infernal bounder!"

Diane's camp lay barely two miles to the west.  Homing at sunset Philip
had veered and circled over it.  Now as he turned westward toward the
river, the nature of his errand chafed him sorely.

"Nor can I see," mused Philip, puffing uncomfortably at his pipe, "why
in the devil he wants to know!"

A soft, warm nose suddenly insinuated itself into his hand with a frank
bid for attention and Philip turned.  A shaggy, soft-footed shadow was
waggling along at his heels, Dick's favorite setter.

"Hello, old top!" exclaimed Philip cheerfully.  "When did you hit the
trail?"

Old Top barked joyously but didn't appear to remember.

"Well," said Philip, lazily patting the dog's head, "you're welcome
anyway.  I'm a diplomat to-night," he added humorously, "bound upon a
'mission of exceeding delicacy' and only a companion of your
extraordinary reticence and discretion would be welcome."

Man and dog turned aside into a crossroad.  It was very dark now, the
only spot of cheer save for the lightning behind the hills, the coal of
Philip's pipe.

"Tell me, old man," begged Philip whimsically, "what would you do?  May
we not wander casually into camp and look at my beautiful gypsy lady
without fussing unduly about this infernal mission?  More and more do
we dislike it.  And in the morning we may respectfully rebel.  Ah, an
excellent point, Nero.  To be sure our chief will be very smooth and
insistent but we ourselves, you recall, have possibilities of extreme
firmness.  And the lady is Diane, though we only call her that, old
top, among ourselves.

"Splendid decision!" exclaimed Philip presently with intense
satisfaction.  "Nero, you've been an umpire.  We'll rebel.
Nevertheless, we must assure ourselves that the camp of our lady is
ready for storm."

It was.  Following a forest path, Philip presently caught the flicker
of a camp fire ahead.  There was a huge tarpaulin over the wagon and a
canopy above the horses.  Storm-proof tents loomed dimly among the
trees.  A brisk little man whose apple cheeks and grizzled whiskers
Philip instantly approved, trotted importantly about among the horses,
humming a jerky melody.  Johnny was fifty and looked a hundred, but
those unwary ones who had felt the steely grip of his sinewy fingers
were apt evermore to respect him.

Diane was piling wood upon the fire with the careless grace of a
splendid young savage.  The light of the camp fire danced ruddily upon
her slim, brown arms and throat bared to the rising wind.  A beautiful,
restless gypsy of fire and wind, she looked, at one with the
storm-haunted wood about her.

There came a patter of rain upon the forest leaves.  The tents were
flapping and the fire began to flare.  There were curious wind crackles
all about him, and Nero had begun to sniff and whine.  Somewhere--off
there among the trees--Philip fancied he caught the stealthy pad of a
footfall and the crackle of underbrush.  Every instinct of his body
focusing wildly upon the thought of harm to Diane, he whirled swiftly
about, colliding as he did so with something--vague, formless,
heavy--that leaped, crouching, from the shadows and bore him to the
ground.  The lightning flared savagely upon steel.  Philip felt a
blinding thud upon his head, a sharp, stinging agony along his shoulder.

Somewhere in the forest--a great way off he thought--a dog was barking
furiously.




CHAPTER IX

IN A STORM-HAUNTED WOOD

"The storm is coming!" exclaimed Diane with shining eyes.  "Button the
flaps by the horses, Johnny.  We're in for it to-night.  Hear the wind!"

Overhead the gale tore ragged gaps among the fire-shadowed trees,
unshrouding a storm-black sky.  Fearlessly--the old wild love of storm
and wind singing powerfully in her heart--the girl rose from the fire
and faced the tempest.

Rex pressed fearfully beside her, whining.  Off there somewhere in the
wind and darkness a dog had barked.  It came now again, high above the
noise of the wind, a furious, frightened barking.

"Johnny!"  exclaimed  Diane  suddenly.  "There must be something wrong
over there.  Better go see.  No, not that way.  More to the east."  And
Johnny, whose soul for thirty years had thirsted for adventure, briskly
seized an ancient pistol and charged off through the forest.

But Aunt Agatha had talked long and tearfully to Johnny.  Wherefore,
reluctant to leave his charge alone in the rain and dark, he turned
back.

"Go!" said Diane with a flash of impatience.

Johnny went.  Looking back over his shoulder he saw the girl outlined
vividly against the fire, skirts and hair flying stormily about her in
the wind.  So might the primal woman stand ere the march of
civilization had over-sexed her.

The wind was growing fiercer now, driving the rain about in angry
gusts.  Thunder cannonaded noisily overhead.

Veering suddenly in a new direction--for in the roar of the storm the
bark of the dog seemed curiously to shift--Johnny collided violently
with a dark figure running wildly through the forest.  Both men fell.
Finding his invisible assailant disposed viciously to contest
detention, Johnny fell in with his mood and buried his long, lean
fingers cruelly in the other's throat.

The fortunes of war turned speedily.  Johnny's victim squirmed
desperately to his feet and bounded away through the forest.

Now as they ran, stumbling and finding their way as best they might in
the glitter of lightning, there came from the region of the camp the
unmistakable crack of a pistol.  Two shots in rapid succession
followed--an interval of five seconds or so--and then another.  The
final trio was the shot signal of the old buffalo hunters which Diane
had taught to Johnny.

"Where are you?" barked the signal.

Drawing his ancient pistol as he ran, Johnny, in vain, essayed the
answer.  The veteran missed fire.  After all, reflected Johnny
uncomfortably, one signal was merely to locate him.  If another came--

The lightning, flaming in a vivid sheet, revealed a lonely road ahead
and on the road by the farther hedge, a man desperately cranking a
long, dark car.  The lamps of the car were unlighted.

With a yell of startled anger, the man who bore the bleeding marks of
Johnny's fingers redoubled his speed and darted crazily for the
roadway.  Before he had reached it the man by the car had leaped
swiftly to the wheel and rolled away.

From the forest came again the signal: "Where are you?"

Johnny groaned.  Frantically he tried the rebel again.  It readily spat
its answer this time, an instantaneous duplicate of shots.

"I'm here.  What do you want?"

In the lightning glare the man ahead made off wildly across the fields.

Running, Johnny cocked his ears for the familiar assurance of one shot.

"All right," it would mean; "I only wanted to know where you are," but
it did not come.

Instead--two shots again in rapid succession--an interval--and then
another.

"I am in serious trouble," barked the signal in the forest.  "Come as
fast as you can."

With a groan Johnny abandoned the chase and retraced his steps.  Thus a
perverse Fate ever snipped the thread of an embryo adventure.

A light flickered dully among the trees to the east.  Johnny cupped his
hands and yodeled.  The light moved.  A little later as he crashed
hurriedly through the underbrush, Diane called to him.  She was holding
a lantern high above something on the ground, her face quite colorless.

"I'm glad you're here!" she said.  "It's the aviator, Johnny.  He's
hurt--"

The aviator stirred.

"He's comin' 'round," said Johnny peering down into the white face in
the aureole of lantern-light.  "The rain in his face likely. . . .
Well, young fellow, what do you think of yourself, eh?"

"Not much," said Philip blankly and stared about him.

"Can you follow us to the camp fire yonder?" asked Diane
compassionately.

Philip, though evidently very dizzy, thought likely he could, and he
did.  That his shoulder was wet and very painful, he was well aware,
though somehow he had forgotten why.  Moreover, his head throbbed
queerly.

There came a tent and a bed and a blur of incidents.

Mr. Poynter dazedly resigned himself to a general atmosphere of
unreality.




CHAPTER X

ON THE RIDGE ROAD

At the Westfall farm as the electric vanguard of the storm flashed
brightly over the valley, the telephone had tinkled.  In considerable
distress of mind Aunt Agatha answered it.

"I--I'm sure I don't know when he will be home," she said helplessly
after a while. . . .  "He went barely a minute ago and very foolish
too, I said, with the storm coming. . . .  At dinner he spoke some of
going to the camp--Miss Westfall's camp. . . .  I--I really don't know.
. . .  I wish I did but I don't."

The lightning blazed at the window and left it black.  Beyond in the
lane, a car with glaring headlights was rolling rapidly toward the
gateway.  Aunt Agatha hung up with an aggrieved sniff.

Catching the reflection of the headlights she hurried to the window.

"Carl!  Carl!" she called through the noise of wind and thunder.

The car came to a halt with a grinding shudder of brakes.

"Yes?" said Carl patiently.  "What is it, Aunt Agatha?"

"Dick Sherrill phoned," said his aunt plaintively.  "I thought you'd
gone.  He wanted you to come up and play bridge.  Oh, Carl, I--I do
wish you wouldn't motor about in a thunder shower.  I once knew a
man--such a nice, quiet fellow too--and very domestic in his
habits--but he would ramble about and the lightning tore his collar off
and printed a picture of a tree on his spine.  Think of that!"

Carl laughed.  He was raincoated and hatless.

"An arboreal spine!" said he, rolling on.  "Lord, Aunt Agatha, that was
tough!  Moral--don't be domestic!"

"Carl!" quavered his aunt tearfully.

Again, throbbing like a giant heart in the darkness, the car halted.
Carl tossed his hair back from his forehead with a smothered groan, but
said nothing.  He was always kinder and less impatient to Aunt Agatha
in a careless way than Diane.

"Will you take Diane an extra raincoat and rubbers?" appealed Aunt
Agatha pathetically.  "Like as not the pockets of the other are full of
bugs and things."

"Aunt Agatha," grumbled Carl kindly, "why fuss so?  Diane's equipped
with nerve and grit and independence enough to look out for herself."

Aunt Agatha sniffed and closed the window.

"I shan't worry!" she said flatly.  "I shan't do it.  If Carl comes
home with a tree on his spine, it's his own concern.  Why _I_ should
have to endure all this, however, I can't for the life of me see.  I've
one consolation anyway.  A good part of my life's over.  Death will be
a welcome relief after what _I've_ gone through!"

Shrugging as the window closed Carl drove on rapidly down the driveway.

It pleased him to ride madly with the wind and storm.  The gale, laden
with dust and grit, bit and stung and tore rudely at his coat and hair.
The great lamps of the car flashed brilliantly ahead, revealing the
wind-beaten grasses by the wayside.  Somewhere back in his mind there
was a troublesome stir of conscience.  It had bothered him for days.
It had driven him irresistibly to-night at dinner to speak of visiting
his cousin's camp, though he bit his lip immediately afterward in a
flash of indecision.  The turbulent night had seemed of a sort to think
things over.  Moonlit fields and roads were enervating.  Storm whipping
a man's blood into fire and energy--biting his brain into relentless
activity!--there was a thing for you.

Whiskey did not help.  Last night it had treacherously magnified the
voice of conscience into a gibing roar.

Money!  Money!  The ray of the lamps ahead, the fork of the lightning,
the flickering gaslight there at the crossroads, they were all the
color of gold and like gold--of a flame that burned.  Yes, he must have
money.  No matter what the voice, he must have money.

At the crossroads he halted suddenly.  To the south now lay his
cousin's camp, to the north the storm.

Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north.  A conscience was
a luxury for a rich man.  Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon
of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions,
breed its own results.

It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now
for weeks.  Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had
bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which
had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a
flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her
with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.

Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was
covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without
taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.

But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him
through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker
forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and
mockery.

Very well, then; he would tell Diane of the yellowed paper; he would
tell her to-night.  However he played the game there was gold at the
end.

He laughed suddenly and shrugged and swept erratically into a lighter
mood of impudence and daring.  There was rain beating furiously in his
face and his hair was wet.  Well, the car pounding along beneath him
had known many such nights of storm and wild adventure.  It had pleased
him frequently to mock and gibe at death, with the wheel in his hand
and a song on his lips, and now wind and storm were tempting him to
ride with the devil.

So, dashing wildly through the whirl of dirt and wind, heavy with the
odor of burnt oil, he bent to the wheel, every nerve alert and leaping.
As the great car jumped to its limit of speed, he fell to singing an
elaborate sketch of opera in an insolent, dare-devil voice of splendid
timbre, the exhaust, unmuffled, pounding forth an obligato.

The lightning flared.  It glittered wickedly upon the unlighted lamps
of a car rolling rapidly toward him.  With a squirt of mud and a
scatter of flying pebbles, Carl swung far to the side of the road and
slammed on his brakes, skidding dangerously.  The other car, heading
wildly to the left, went crashing headlong into a ditch from which a
man crawled, cursing viciously in a foreign tongue.

"You damned fool!" thundered Carl in a flash of temper.  "Where are
your lights?"

The man did not reply.

Carl, whose normal instincts were friendly, sprang solicitously from
the car.

"I beg your pardon," said he carelessly.  "Are you hurt?"

"No," said the other curtly.

"French," decided Carl, marking the European intonation.  "Badly shaken
up, poor devil!--and not sure of his English.  That accounts for his
peculiar silence.  Monsieur," said he civilly in French.  "I am not
prepared to deliver a homily upon wild driving, but it's well to drive
with lights when roads are dark and storm abroad."

"I have driven so few times," said the other coldly in excellent
English, "and the storm and erratic manner of your approach were
disquieting."

"_Touché_!" admitted Carl indifferently.  "You have me there.  Your
choice of a practice night, however," he added dryly, "was unique, to
say the least."

He crossed the road, frowned curiously down at the wrecked machine and
struck a match.

"_Voila_!" he exclaimed, staring aghast at the bent and splintered
mass, "_c'est magnifique, Monsieur_!'"

A sheet of flame shot suddenly from the match downward and wrapped the
wreck in fire.  Conscious now of the fumes of leaking gasoline, Carl
leaped back.

"Monsieur," said he ruefully, and turned.  The reflection of the
burning oil revealed Monsieur some feet away, running rapidly.  Angered
by the man's unaccountable indifference, Carl leaped after him.  He was
much the better runner of the two and presently swung his prisoner
about in a brutal grip and marched him savagely back to the blazing
car.  Again there was an indefinable peculiarity about the manner of
the man's surrender.

"It is conventional, Monsieur," said Carl evenly, "to betray interest
and concern in the wreck of one's property.  _Voila_!  I have
effectively completed what you had begun.  If I am not indifferent,
surely one may with reason look for a glimmer of concern from you."

Shrugging, the man stared sullenly at the car, a hopeless torch now
suffusing the lonely road with light.  There was a certain suggestion
of racial subtlety in the careful immobility of his face, but his dark,
inscrutable eyes were blazing dangerously.

Carl's careless air of interest altered indefinably.  Inspecting his
chafing prisoner now with narrowed, speculative eyes which glinted
keenly, he fell presently to whistling softly, laughed and with
tantalizing abruptness fell silent again.  Immobile and subtle now as
his silent companion, he stared curiously at the other's fastidiously
pointed beard, at the dark eyes and tightly compressed lips, and
impudently proffered his cigarettes.  They were impatiently declined.

"Monsieur is pleased," said Carl easily, "to reveal many marked
peculiarities of manner, owing to the unbalancing fact, I take it, that
his mind is relentlessly pursuing one channel.  Monsieur," went on
Carl, lazily lighting his own cigarette and staring into his
companion's face with a look of level-eyed interest, "Monsieur has been
praying ardently for--opportunities, is it not so?  'I will humor this
mad fool who motors about in the rain like an operatic comet!' says
Monsieur inwardly, 'for I am, of course, a stranger to him.  Then,
without arousing undue interest, I may presently escape into the storm
whence I came--er--driving atrociously.'"

The man stared.

"Monsieur," purred Carl audaciously, "is doubtless more interested
in--let us say--camp fires for instance, than such a vulgar blaze as
yonder car."

"One is powerless," returned the other haughtily, "to answer riddles."

Carl bowed with curiously graceful insolence.

"As if one could even hope to break such splendid nerve as that!" he
murmured appreciatively.  "It is an impassiveness that comes only with
training.  Monsieur," he added imperturbably, "I have had the
pleasure--of seeing you before."

"It is possible!" shrugged the other politely.

"Under strikingly different conditions!" pursued Carl reminiscently.
There was a disappointing lack of interest in the other's face.

"Even that is possible," assented the foreigner stiffly, "Environment
is a shifting circumstance of many colors.  The honor of your
acquaintance, however, I fear is not mine."

Carl's eyes, dark and cold as agate, compelled attention.

"My name," said he deliberately, "is Granberry, Carl Westfall
Granberry."

The brief interval of silence was electric.

"It is a pity," said the other formally, "that the name is unfamiliar.
Monsieur Granberi, the storm increases.  My ill-fated car, I take it,
requires no further attention."  He stopped short, staring with
peculiar intentness at the road beyond.  In the faint sputtering glow
of the embers by the wayside his face looked white and strained.

A slight smile dangerously edged the American's lips.  With a careless
feint of glancing over his shoulder, he tightened every muscle and
leaped ahead.  The violent impact of his body bore his victim, cursing,
to the ground.

"Ah!" said Carl wresting a revolver from the other's hand, "I thought
so!  My friend, when you try a trick like that again, guard your hands
before you fall to staring.  A fool might have turned--and been shot in
the back for his pains, eh?  Monsieur," he murmured softly, pinioning
the other with his weight and smiling insolently, "we've a long ride
ahead of us.  Privacy, I think, is essential to the perfect adjustment
of our future relations.  There are one or two inexplicable features--"

The eyes of the other met his with a level glance of desperate
hostility.

With an undisciplined flash of temper, Carl brutally clubbed his
assailant into insensibility with the revolver butt and dragged him
heavily to the tonneau of his car, throbbing unheeded in the darkness.
Having assured himself of his guest's continued docility by the
sinister adjustment of a handkerchief, an indifferent rag or so from
the repair kit and a dirty rope, he covered the motionless figure
carelessly with a robe and sprang to the wheel, whistling softly.  With
a throb, the great car leaped, humming, to the road.

At midnight the lights of Harlem lay ahead.  The ride from the hills,
three hours of storm and squirting gravel, had been made with the
persistent whir and drone of a speeding engine.  But once had it rested
black and silent in a lonely road of dripping trees, while the driver
hurried into a roadside tavern and telephoned.

Now, with a purring sigh as a bridge loomed ahead, the car slackened
and stopped.  Carl slowly lighted a cigarette.  At the end of the
bridge a straggler struck a match and flung it lightly in the river,
the disc of his cigar a fire-point in the shadows.

The car rolled on again and halted.

A stocky young man behind the fire-point emerged from the darkness and
climbed briskly into the tonneau.

"Hello, Hunch," said Carl.

"'Lo!" said Hunch and stared intently at the robe.

"Take a look at him," invited Carl carelessly.  "It's not often you
have an opportunity of riding with one of his brand.  He's in the
_Almanach de Gotha_."

"T'ell yuh say!" said Hunch largely, though the term had conveyed no
impression whatever to his democratic mind.

Cautiously raising the robe Hunch Dorrigan stared with interest at the
prisoner he was inconspicuously to assist into the empty town house of
the Westfalls.




CHAPTER XI

IN THE CAMP OF THE GYPSY LADY

From a garish dream of startling unpleasantness, Philip Poynter stirred
and opened his eyes.

"Well, now," he mused uncomfortably, "this is more like it!  This is
the sort of dream to have!  I wonder I never had sufficient wit to
carve out one like this before.  Birds and trees and wind fussing
pleasantly around a fellow's bed--and by George! those birds are making
coffee!"

There was a cheerful sound of flapping canvas and vanishing glimpses of
a woodland shot with sun-gold, of a camp fire and a pair of dogs
romping boisterously.  Moreover, though his bed was barely an inch from
the ground to which it was staked over a couple of poles, it was
exceedingly springy and comfortable.  Not yet thoroughly awake, Philip
put out an exploring hand.

"Flexible willow shoots!" said he drowsily, "and a rush mat!  Oberon
had nothing on me.  Hello!"  A dog romped joyfully through the flapping
canvas and barked.  Philip's dream boat docked with a painful thud of
memory.  Wincing painfully he sat up.

"Easy, old top!" he advised ruefully, as the dog bounded against him.
"It would seem that we're an invalid with an infernal bump on the back
of our head and a bandaged shoulder."  He peered curiously through the
tent flap and whistled softly.  "By George, Nero," he added under his
breath, "we're in the camp of my beautiful gypsy lady!"

There was a bucket of water by the tent flap.  Philip painfully made a
meager toilet, glanced doubtfully at the coarse cotton garment which by
one of the mystifying events of the previous night had replaced the
silk shirt he had worn from Sherrill's, and emerged from the tent.

It was early morning.  A fresh fire was crackling merrily about a pot
of coffee.  Beyond through the trees a river of swollen amber laughed
in the morning sunlight under a cloudless sky.  The ridge of a distant
woodland was deeply golden, the rolling meadow lands of clover beyond
the river bright with iridescent dew.  But the storm had left its trail
of broken rush and grasses and the heavy boughs of the woodland dripped
forgotten rain.

A girl presently emerged from the trees by the river and swung lightly
up the forest path, her scarlet sweater a vivid patch in the lesser
life and color all about her.

[Illustration: Diane swung lightly up the forest path.]

"Surely," she exclaimed, meeting Philip's glance with one of frank and
very pleasant concern, "surely you must be very weak!  Why not stay in
bed and let Johnny bring your breakfast to you?"

"Lord, no!" protested Philip, reddening.  "I feel ever so much better
than I look."

"I'm glad of that," said Diane, smiling.  "You lost a lot of blood and
bumped your head dreadfully on a jagged rock.  Would you mind," her
wonderful black eyes met his in a glance of frank inquiry, "would you
mind--explaining?  There was so much excitement and storm last night
that we haven't the slightest notion what happened."

"Neither have I!" exclaimed Philip ruefully.

The girl's eyes widened.

"How very singular!" she said.

"It is indeed!" admitted Philip.

"You must be an exceedingly hapless young man!" she commented with
serious disapproval.  "I imagine your life must be a monotonous round
of disaster and excitement!"

"Fortuitously," owned Philip, "it's improving!"

Piqued by his irresistible good humor in adversity, Diane eyed him
severely.

"Are you so in the habit of being mysteriously stabbed in the shoulder
whenever it storms," she demanded with mild sarcasm, "that you can
retain an altogether pernicious good humor?"

Philip's eyes glinted oddly.

"I'm a mere novice," he admitted lightly.  "If my shoulder didn't throb
so infernally," he added thoughtfully, "I'd lose all faith in the
escapade--it's so weird and mysterious.  A crackle--a lunge--a knife in
the dark--and behold!  I am here, exceedingly grateful and hungry
despite the melodrama."

To which Diane, raising beautifully arched and wondering eyebrows, did
not reply.  Philip, furtively marking the firm brown throat above the
scarlet sweater, and the vivid gypsy color beneath the laughing dusk of
Diane's eyes, devoutly thanked his lucky star that Fate had seen fit to
curb the air of delicate hostility with which she had left him on the
Westfall lake.  Well, Emerson was right, decided Philip.  There is an
inevitable law of compensation.  Even a knife in the dark has
compensations.

"Johnny," said Diane presently, briskly disinterring some baked
potatoes and a baked fish from a cairn of hot stones covered with
grass, "is off examining last night's trail of melodrama.  He's greatly
excited.  Let me pour you some coffee.  I sincerely hope you're not too
fastidious for tin cups?"

"A tin cup," said Philip with engaging candor, "has always been a
secret ambition of mine.  I once acquired one at somebody's spring
hut--er--circumstances compelled me to relinquish it.  It was really a
very nice cup too and very new and shiny.  Since then, until now, my
life, alas! has been tin-cupless."

Diane carved the smoking fish in ominous silence.

"Do you know," she said at length, "I've felt once or twice that your
anecdotes are too apt and--er--sparkling to be overburdened with truth.
Your mechanician, for instance--"

Philip laughed and reddened.  The mechanician, as a desperate means of
prolonging conversation, had served his purpose somewhat disastrously.

"Hum!" said he lamely.

"I shan't forget that mechanician!" said Diane decidedly.

"This now," vowed Philip uncomfortably, "is a _real_ fish!"

Diane laughed, a soft clear laugh that to Philip's prejudiced ears had
more of music in it than the murmur of the river or the clear, sweet
piping of the woodland birds.

"It is," she agreed readily.  "Johnny caught him in the river and I
cooked him."

"Great Scott!" exclaimed Philip, inspecting the morsel on his wooden
plate with altered interest, "you don't--you can't mean it!"

"Why not?" inquired Diane with lifted eyebrows.

Philip didn't know and said so, but he glanced furtively at the girl by
the fire and marveled.

"Well," he said a little later with a sigh of utter content, "this is
Arcadia, isn't it!"

"It's a beautiful spot!" nodded Diane happily, glancing at the scarlet
tendrils of a wild grapevine flaming vividly in the sunlight among the
trees.  There was yellow star grass along the forest path, she said
absently, and yonder by the stump of a dead tree a patch of star moss
woven of myriad emerald shoots; the delicate splashes of purple here
and there in the forest carpet were wild geranium.

"There are alders by the river," mused Diane with shining eyes, "and
marsh marigolds; over there by a swampy hollow are a million violets,
white and purple; and the ridge is thick with mountain laurel.  More
coffee?"

"Yes," said Philip.  "It's delicious.  I wonder," he added humbly, "if
you'd peel this potato for me.  A one cylinder activity is not a
conspicuous success."

"I should have remembered your arm," said Diane quickly.  "Does it pain
much?"

"A little," admitted Philip.  "Do you know," he added guilelessly,
"this is a spot for singularly vivid dreams.  Last night, for instance,
exceedingly gentle and skillful hands slit my shirt sleeve with a pair
of scissors and bathed my shoulder with something that stung
abominably, and somehow I fancied I was laid up in a hospital and
didn't have to fuss in the least, for my earthly affairs were in the
hands of a nurse who was very deft and businesslike and beautiful.  I
could seem to hear her giving orders in a cool, matter-of-fact way, and
once I thought there was some slight objection to leaving her
alone--and she stamped her foot.  Odd, wasn't it?"

"Must have been the doctor," said Diane, rising and adding wood to the
fire.  "Johnny went into the village for him."

"Hum!" said Philip doubtfully.

"He had very nice hands," went on Diane calmly.  "They were very
skillful and gentle, as you say.  Moreover, he was young and
exceedingly good-looking."

"Hum!" said Philip caustically.  "With all those beauty points, he must
be a dub medically.  What stung so?"

"Strong salt brine, piping hot," said the girl discouragingly.  "It's a
wildwood remedy for washing wounds."

"Didn't the dub carry any conventional antiseptics?"

"You are talking too much!" flashed Diane with sudden color.  "The
wound is slight, but you bled a lot; and the doctor made particular
reference to rest and quiet."

"Good Lord!" said Philip in deep disgust.  "There's your pretty
physician for you!  'Rest and quiet' for a knife scratch.  Like as not
he'll want me to take a year off to convalesce!"

"He left you another powder to take to-night," remarked Diane severely.
"Moreover, he said you must be very quiet to-day and he'd be in, in the
morning, to see you."

Something jubilant laughed and sang in Philip's veins.  A day in
Arcadia lay temptingly at his feet.

"Great Scott," he protested feebly.  "I can't.  I really can't, you
know--"

"You'll have to," said Diane with unsmiling composure.  "The doctor
said so."

"After all," mused Philip approvingly, "it's the young medical fellows
who have the finest perceptions.  I _do_ need rest."

Off in the checkered shadows of the forest a crow cawed derisively.

"Did you like your shirt?" asked Diane with a distracting hint of
raillery under her long, black lashes.

"It's substantial," admitted Philip gratefully, "and democratic."

"You've still another," she said smiling.  "Johnny bought them in the
village."

"Johnny," said Philip gratefully, "is a trump."

Diane filled a kettle from a pail of water by the tree and smiled.

"There's a hammock over there by the tent," she said pleasantly.
"Johnny strung it up this morning.  The trees are drying nicely and
presently I'm going to wander about the forest with a field glass and a
notebook and you can take a nap."

Philip demurred.  Finding his assistance inexorably refused, however,
he repaired to the hammock and watched the camp of his lady grow neat
and trim again.

On the bright embers of the camp fire, the kettle hummed.

"There now," said Philip suddenly, mindful of the hot, stinging
wound-wash, "that is the noise I heard last night just after you
stamped your foot and _before_ the doctor came."

"Nonsense!" said Diane briskly.   "Your head's full of fanciful
notions.  A bump like that on the back of your head is bound to tamper
some with your common sense."  And humming lightly she scalded the
coffeepot and tin cups and set them in the sun to dry.  Philip's glance
followed her, a winsome gypsy, brown and happy, to the green and white
van, whence she presently appeared with a field glass and a notebook.

"Of course," she began, halting suddenly with heightened color, "it
doesn't matter in the least--but it does facilitate conversation at
times to know the name of one's guest--no matter how accidental and
mysterious he may be."

"Philip!" he responded gravely but with laughing eyes.  "It's really
very easy to remember."  Diane stamped her foot.

"I _do_ think," she flashed indignantly, "that you are the most trying
young man I've ever met."

"I'm trying of course--" explained Philip, "trying to tell you my name.
I greatly regret," he went on deferentially, "that there are a number
of exceptional circumstances which have resulted in the brief and
simple--Philip.  For one thing, a bump which muddles a man's common
sense is very likely to muddle his memory.  And so, for the life of me,
I can't seem to conjure up a desirable form of address from you to me
except Philip.  And Philip," he added humbly, "isn't really such a bad
sort of name after all."

There was the whir and flash of a bird's wing in the forest the color
of Diane's cheek.  An instant later the single vivid spot of crimson in
Philip's line of vision was the back of his lady's sweater.




CHAPTER XII

A BULLET IN ARCADIA

"It's time you were in bed," said Diane.  "Johnny's out staring at the
moon and that's the final chore of the evening.  Besides, it's nine
o'clock."

"I shan't go to bed," Philip protested.  "Johnny spread this tarpaulin
by the fire expressly for me to recline here and think and smoke and
b'jinks! I'm going to!  After buying me two shirts yesterday and
tobacco to-day--to say nothing of bringing home an unknown chicken for
invalid stew, I can't with decency offend him."

"I can't see why he's taken such a tremendous shine to you!" complained
Diane mockingly.

"Nor I!" agreed Philip, knocking the ashes from his pipe.

"You've been filling his pockets with money!" accused Diane
indignantly.  "It's the only explanation of the demented way he trots
around after you."

"Disposition, beauty, singular grace and common sense all pale in the
face of the ulterior motive," Philip modestly told his pipe.  "What a
moon!" he added softly.  "Great guns, what a moon!"

Beyond, through the dark of the trees, softly silvered by the moon
above the ridge, glimmered the river, winding along by peaceful forest
and meadows edged with grass and mint.  There was moon-bright dew upon
the clover and high upon the ridge a tree showed dark and full against
the moon in lonely silhouette.  It was an enchanted wood of moonlit
depth and noisy quiet, of shrilling crickets, the plaintive cries of
tree frogs, the drowsy crackle of the camp fire, or the lap of water by
the shore, with sometimes the lonely hoot of an owl.

"A while back," mused Diane innocently, "there was a shooting star
above the ridge--"

"Yes?" said Philip puffing comfortably at his pipe.

"I meant to call your attention to it but 'Hey!' and 'Look!' were
dreadfully abrupt."

"There is always--'Philip!'" insinuated that young man.  Diane bit her
lip and relapsed into silence.

"You didn't tell me," said Philip presently, "whether or not you found
any more flowers this morning."

"Only heaps of wild blackberry," Diane replied briefly.  "But the trees
were quite as devoid of new birds as Johnny's detective trip of clues."

"Too bad!" sympathized Philip.  "I'll go with you in the morning."

"The bump on your head," suggested Diane pointedly, "is growing
malignant!"

"By no means!" said Philip lazily.  "With the exception of certain
memory erasures, it's steadily improving."

"Why," demanded Diane with an unexpected and somewhat resentful flash
of reminiscence, "why did you tell me your motor was deaf and dumb and
insane when it wasn't?"

"I didn't," said Philip honestly.  "If you'll recall our conversation,
you'll find I worded that very adroitly."

Thoroughly vexed Diane frowned at the fire.

"Was it necessary to affect callow inexperience and such a
happy-go-lucky, imbecile philosophy?" she demanded cuttingly.

"Hum!" admitted Philip humbly.  "I'm a salamander."

"And you said you were waiting to be rescued!" she accused indignantly.

Philip sighed.

"Well, in a sense I was.  I saw you coming through the trees--and there
are times when one must talk."  He met her level glance of reproach
with one of frank apology.  "If I see a man whose face I like, I speak
to him.  Surely Nature does not flash that subtle sense of magnetism
for nothing.  If I am to live fully, then must I infuse into my insular
existence the electric spark of sympathetic friendship.  Why impoverish
my existence by a lost opportunity?  If I had not alighted that day
upon the lake and waited for you to come through the trees--" he fell
suddenly quiet, knocking the ashes from his pipe upon the ground beside
him.

"The moon is climbing," said Diane irrelevantly, "and Johnny is waiting
to bandage your shoulder."

"Let him wait," returned Philip imperturbably.  "And no matter what I
do the moon will go on climbing."  He lazily pointed the stem of his
pipe at a firelit tree.  "What glints so oddly there," he wondered,
"when the fire leaps?"

"It's the bullet," replied Diane absently and bit her lip with a quick
flush of annoyance.

"What bullet?" said Philip with instant interest.  "It's odd I hadn't
noticed it before."

"Some one shot in the forest last night while Johnny was off chasing
your assailant.  Likely the second man he saw cranking the car.  It
struck the tree.  Johnny and I made a compact not to speak of it and I
forgot.  My aunt is fussy."

"Where were you?" demanded Philip abruptly.

"By the tree.  It--it grazed my hair--"

Philip's face grew suddenly as changeless as the white moonlight in the
forest.

"Accidental knives and bullets in Arcadia!" said he at length.  "It
jars a bit."

"I do hope," said Diane with definite disapproval, "that you're not
going to fuss.  I didn't.  I was frightened of course, for at first I
thought it had been aimed straight at me--and I was quite alone--but
startling things do happen now and then, and if you can't explain them,
you might as well forget them.  I hope I may count on your silence.  If
my aunt gets wind of it, she'll conjure up a trail of accidental shots
to follow me from here to Florida and every time it storms, she'll like
as not hear ghost-bullets.  She's like that."

"Florida!" ejaculated Philip--and stared.

"To be sure!" said Diane.  "Why not?  Must I alter my plans for
somebody's stray bullet?"

Philip frowned uneasily.  The instinctive protest germinating
irresistibly in his mind was too vague and formless for utterance.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered.  "But I fancied you were merely
camping around among the hills for the summer."

The girl rose and moved off toward the van looming ghostlike through
the trees.

"Good night--_Philip_!" she called lightly, her voice instinct with
delicate irony.

Philip stirred.  His voice was very gentle.

"Thank you!" he said simply.

Diane hastily climbed the steps at the rear of the van and disappeared.

"I hate men," thought Diane with burning cheeks as she seated herself
upon the cot by the window and loosened the shining mass of her
straight black hair, "who ramble flippantly through a conversation and
turn suddenly serious when one least expects it."

By the fire, burning lower as the moon climbed higher, Philip lay very
quiet.  Somehow the moonlit stillness of the forest had altered
indefinably.  Its depth and shadows jarred.  Fair as it was, it had
harbored things sinister and evil.  And who might say--there was peace
of course in the moon-silver rug of pine among the trees, in the
gossamer cobweb there among the bushes jeweled lightly in dew, in the
faint, sweet chirp of a drowsy bird above his head--but the moon-ray
which lingered in the heart of the wild geranium would presently
cascade through the trees to light the horrible thing of lead which had
menaced the life of his lady.

Well, one more pipe and he would go to bed.  Johnny must be tired of
waiting.  Philip slipped his hand into his pocket and whistled.

"So," said he softly, "the hieroglyphic cuff is gone!  It's the first
I'd missed it."

"Like as not it dropped out of my pocket when I fell last night," he
reflected a little later.  "I'd better go to bed.  I'm beginning to
fuss."




CHAPTER XIII

A WOODLAND GUEST

There was gray beyond the flap of Philip's tent, a velvet stillness
rife with the melody of twittering birds.  Already the camp fire was
crackling.  Philip rose and dressed.

Beyond, through the ghostly trees where the river glimmered in the gray
dawn with a pearly iridescence, a girl was fishing.  There were deeper
shadows in the hollows but the sky behind the wooded ridge to the east
was softly opaline.  As the river grew pink, mists rose and curled
upward and presently the glaring searchlight of the sun streamed
brilliantly across the river and the forest, flinging a banner of
shadow tracery over the wakening world.

The girl by the river caught a fish, deftly strung it on a willow shoot
beside some others and bathed her hands in the river.  Turning she
smiled and waved.  Philip went to meet her.

"Let me take your fish," he offered.

"Your arm--" began Diane,

"Pshaw!" insisted Philip.  "It's ever so much better.  I can even use
my hand."

To prove it, Philip presently armed himself with a fork and developed
considerable helpful interest in a pan of fish.  Whereupon a general
atmosphere of industry settled over the camp.  Rex and Nero
acrobatically locked forepaws and rolled over and over in a clownish
excess of congeniality.  Johnny trotted busily about feeding the
horses.  Diane made the coffee, arousing the frank and guileless
interest of Mr. Poynter.

The fish began to sizzle violently.  Considerably aggrieved by a
variety of unexpected developments in the pan, Philip harpooned the
smoking segments with indignant vim, burned his fingers, made reckless
use of the wounded arm and regretfully resigned the task to Johnny who
furtively bestowed certain hot sable portions of the rescued fish upon
the dogs, thereby arousing a snarling commotion of intense surprise.

"That's a wonderful bed of mine," commented Philip at breakfast.  "Tell
me where in the world did you get your camp equipment?"

"I made the bed myself," said Diane happily, "of red willow shoots from
the swamp, and I carved these forks and spoons out of wood Johnny
gathered."

"I do wish I were clever!" grumbled Philip in acute discontent.  "After
breakfast I'm going to whittle out a wildwood pipe and make a birch
canoe, and likely I'll weave a rush mat and a willow bed and carve some
spoons and forks and a sundial."

"Will you be through by noon?" asked Diane politely.

Philip laughed.

"As a matter of fact," he said easily, "I'm going with you to lamp
birds.  I want to duck that fool doctor."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Diane with decision, "for I'm
going to stay in camp and bake bread."

The bread was baking odorously and a variety of shavings flying
ambitiously from an embryo pipe by ten o'clock.  At noon the doctor had
not yet arrived.  Philip dexterously served a savory fish chowder from
a pot hanging within a tripod of saplings and refused to dwell upon the
thought of his eventual departure.

A man appeared among the trees to the east, switching absently at the
underbrush with a cane.

Philip sniffed.

"I thought so," he nodded.  "That medical dub carries a cane on his
professional rounds!  Like as not he wears a flowing tie, a monocle and
pink socks."

The man approached and raised his hat, smiling urbanely.  It was Baron
Tregar.

Philip leaped to his feet, reddening.

"Excellency!" he stammered.

"Pray be seated!" exclaimed the Baron with sympathy.  "Such a
disturbing experience as you have had affords one privileges."

"Permit me," said Philip uncomfortably to Diane, "to present my chief,
Baron Tregar.  Excellency, Miss Westfall, to whom I am eternally
indebted."  And Philip's eyes sparkled with laughter as he uttered her
name.

There was an old world courtliness in the Baron's bow and murmured
salutation.

"Ah," said he with gallant regret, "Fate, Miss Westfall, has never seen
fit to temper misfortune so pleasantly for me.  Poynter, you have been
exceedingly fortunate."

Diane laughed softly.  It was hers to triumph now.

"_Mr. Poynter_," she said with relish, flashing a sidelong glance at
that discomfited young man, "Mr. Poynter has been good enough to make
the chowder.  It would gratify me exceedingly, Baron Tregar, to have
you test it."

Heartily anathematizing his chief, who was gratefully expressing his
interest in chowder, Mr. Poynter stared perversely at his cuff.

"I wonder," he reflected uneasily, "just what he wants and how in
thunder he knew!"

The Baron, gracefully adapting himself to woodland exigencies, supplied
the answer.

"Dr. Wingate," he boomed, "is at the Sherrill farm.  Themar officiously
fancied he could fly and had a most distressing fall yesterday from the
smaller biplane."  His deep, compelling eyes lingered upon Philip's
face.  "Dr. Wingate spoke some of an unlucky young man marooned in a
forest with a knife wound in his shoulder--described him--and
behold!--my missing secretary is found after considerable bewilderment
and uneasiness on my part.  Wingate will stop here later."

Philip civilly expressed regret that he had not thought to dispatch
Johnny to the Sherrill farm with a message.

"It is nothing!" shrugged Tregar smoothly.

"One forgets under less mitigating causes."  And, having begged the
details of Philip's adventure, he listened with careful attention.

"It is exceedingly mysterious," he rumbled, after a frowning interval
of thought.  "But surely one must feel much gratitude to you, Miss
Westfall.  A night in the storm without attention and we have
complications."

Over his coffee, which he sipped clear with the appreciation of an
epicure, the Baron, in his suave, inscrutable way, grew reminiscent.
He talked well, selecting, discarding, weighing his words with the
fastidious precision of a jeweler setting precious stones.  Subtly the
talk drifted to Houdania.

There was a mad king--Rodobald--upon the throne.  Doubtless the Baron's
hostess had heard?  No?  Ah!  So must the baffling twist of a man's
brain complicate the destiny of a kingdom.  And Rodobald was hale at
sixty-five and mad as the hare of March.  There had been much talk of
it.  Singular, was it not?

Followed a sparkling anecdote or so of court life and shrugging
reference to the jealous principality of Galituria that lay beyond in
the valley.  To Galiturians the madness of King Rodobald was an
exquisite jest.

Philip grew restless.

"Confound him!" he mused resentfully.  "One would think I had
deliberately contrived to linger here merely to give him a graceful
opportunity to accomplish his infernal errand himself.  Thank Heaven
this lets me out!"  He glanced furtively at Diane.  The girl's interest
was wholesomely without constraint.

"Great guns!" decided Philip fretfully.  "I doubt if she's ever heard
of his toy kingdom before and yet he's probing her interest with every
atom of skill he can command."  Puzzled and annoyed he fell quiet.

"It is somewhat inaccessible--my country," Tregar was saying smoothly.
"One climbs the shaggy mountain by a winding road.  You have climbed it
perhaps--touring?"

"Excellency, no!" regretted Diane.  "I fear it is quite unknown to me."

"Ah!" exclaimed the patriotic Baron, "that is indeed unfortunate.  For
it is well worth a visit."  He turned to Philip.  "You are pale and
quiet, Poynter," he added kindly.  "A day or so more perhaps here where
it is quiet--"

Philip flushed hotly,

"Excellency!" he protested feebly.

The Baron bowed courteously to Diane.

"If I may crave still further hospitality and indulgence," he begged
regretfully.  "There is already much excitement at the Sherrill place
owing to the officious act of my man, Themar, and his accident.
Another invalid--my secretary--one flounders in a dragnet of
unfortunate circumstances.  And I am sensitive in the disturbance of my
host's guests--"

Diane's eyes as they rested upon Philip were very kind.

"Excellency," she said warmly, "Mr. Poynter's tent lies there among the
trees.  I trust he will not hesitate to use it until he is strong
again.  Fortunately we are equipped for emergency."

The Baron bowed gratefully.

"You are a young woman of exceeding common sense!" he said with deep
respect.

Philip was very grateful that the Baron had not misunderstood; a breath
might shatter the idyllic crystal into atoms.

Later, when the Baron had departed, Philip flushed suddenly at the ugly
suspicion rising wraithlike in his mind.  He was accustomed to the
Baron's subtleties.

"Mr. Poynter!" called Diane.

Mr. Poynter perversely went on whittling out the hollow of his wildwood
pipe.

"Mr. Poynter!"

The bowl, already sufficient for a Titan's smoke, grew a trifle larger
and somewhat irregular.  Carving had conceivably injured Mr. Poynter's
hearing, for he kept on whistling.

"Philip!" said Diane and stamped her foot.

"Yes?" replied Philip respectfully, and instantly discarded the Titan's
pipe to listen.

"Why are you so quiet?" flashed Diane.

"Well, for one thing," explained Philip cheerfully, "I'm mighty busy
and for another, I'm thinking."

"Do you withdraw into a sound-proof shell when you think?"

"Mr. Poynter does!" regretted Philip.  "_I_ do not."

"I do hope," said the girl demurely, "that you'll be able to hear when
the doctor gets here.  He's coming through the trees."




CHAPTER XIV

BY THE BACKWATER POOL

The sun had set with a primrose glory of reflection upon the river and
the ridge.  Over there in the west now there was a pale after-glow of
marigold.  It streamed across the dark, still waters of the backwater
pool by the river and faintly edged the drowsy petals of white and
yellow lilies.  Already distant outline and perspective were hazy,
there was purple in the forest, and birds were winging swiftly to the
woods.

By the pool with a great mass of dripping lilies at his side to carry
back to camp, Philip stared frowningly at the tangled float of foliage
at his feet.  Somehow that ugly flash of suspicion had persisted.  Why
had the Baron wished him to stay in the camp of Diane? . . .  What was
the portent of his peculiar interest anyway?

Philip sighed.

"Do you know, Nero," he confided suddenly, patting the dog's shaggy
head, "my life is developing certain elements of intrigue and mystery
exceedingly offensive to my spread-eagle tastes.  There's a knife and a
bullet now, Johnny's two men and the auto, and a cuff and a most
mysterious link between our lady and the Baron.  I'll be hanged if I
like any of it.  And why in thunder did Themar crib an aeroplane and
bump his fool head?"  He fell suddenly thoughtful.

"As for you, old top," he added presently, "you ought to go home.  Dick
will be fussing."

Nero waggled ambiguously.  Philip nodded.

"Right, old man," he admitted with sudden gravity.  "I can always
depend upon you to set me right.  It's nothing like so essential for
you to go as it is for me.  You did right to mention it.  I ought to
dig out--all the more because the Baron wants me to stay--but I've been
thinking a bit this afternoon and unusual problems demand unusual
solutions.  You'll grant that?"  Nero politely routed an excursive bug
from his path and lay down to listen.

"Mr. Poynter!" called a voice from the darkling trees behind him.

Mr. Poynter smiled and fell deliberately to filling the bowl of his
wildwood pipe.  Gnarled and twisted and marvelously eccentric was this
wildwood pipe and therefore an object of undoubted interest.  The bowl
had somehow eluded Philip's desperate effort to keep it of reasonable
dimensions and required a Gargantuan supply of tobacco.

"Mr. Poynter!"

"My Lord!" murmured Philip, staring ruefully into the pipe-bowl, "the
infernal thing is bottomless!  Exit another can of tobacco.  I'll have
to ask Johnny to buy me a barrel."  And Philip flung the empty can into
the pool whence a frog leaped with a frightened croak.

"Philip!"

"Mademoiselle!" said Philip pleasantly.

Darkly lovely, Diane's eyes met his with a glance of indignant
reproach.  Somehow her lips were like a scarlet wound in the gypsy
brown skin and her cheeks were hot with color.

"A wildwood elf of scarlet and brown!" thought Philip and hospitably
flicked away a twig or so with his handkerchief that she might sit down.

"There's water plantain over there in the bog," he said lazily, "and
swamp honeysuckle.  And see," he turned out his pockets, "swamp apples.
Queer, aren't they?  Johnny says they're good to eat.  The honeysuckle
was full of them."

Diane bit daintily into the peculiar juicy pulp.

"A man of your pernicious good humor," she said greatly provoked, "is a
menace to civilization.  You sap all the wholesome fire of one's most
cherished resentment."

"I know," admitted Philip humbly.  "I'll be hanged yet."

"I can't see what in the world you find so absorbing over here," she
commented with marked disapproval.  "All the while I was getting supper
I watched you.  And you merely smoked and flipped pebbles in the pool
and kept supper waiting."

"You're wrong there," said Philip.  "I've been thinking, too."

"I'd like to know just why you've been thinking so deeply!"

"Honest Injun?"

"Honest Injun!"

"Well," said Philip slowly, "I've been reviewing the possible mishaps
incident to a caravan trip to Florida."

"Mishaps!"  Diane studied him in frank displeasure.  "Are you a fussy
pessimist?"

"By no means.  Merely--prudent."  Philip's eyes narrowed thoughtfully
and he fell silent.

The iris shadows beyond the river deepened.  A firefly or so flickered
brightly above the fields of clover.  In the soft clear twilight,
fragrant with the smell of clover and water lily and rimmed now by the
rising moon, Philip found his resolution of the afternoon difficult to
utter.  The pool at his feet was a motionless mirror of summer stars.
Surely there could be nothing but peace in this tranquil world of tree
and grass and murmuring river.  And yet--

"Do take that ridiculous pipe out of your mouth and say something!"
exclaimed Diane restlessly.  "You look as if you were smoking a
pumpkin!  Besides, the supper's all packed up in hot stones and grass
to keep it hot.  Why moon so and shoot pebbles at the frogs?"

"Well," said Philip abruptly, "do you mind if I say that your trip
seems a most imprudent venture?"

"By no means!" replied Diane with maddening composure.  "But it's only
fair to warn you that my aunt's already said all there is to say on the
subject.  The horses may drop dead," she reviewed swiftly on her slim
brown fingers, "Johnny may fall heir to an apoplectic fit and fall on a
horse thereby inducing him to run away into a swamp and sink in
quicksand.  I may be kidnapped and held for ransom in the wilds of
Connecticut and the van may burn up some night when I'm asleep in it.
Then I may eat poison berries in a fit of absent-mindedness, I may fall
into a river while I'm fishing, forget how to swim, and drown, Johnny
may gather amanitas and kill us both, and something or other may bite
me.  There are one or two other little things like forest fires, floods
and brigands--"

"Help!" murmured Philip.

"Can you add anything to that?" demanded Diane politely.

Philip laughed.  Diane, delicately sarcastic, was irresistible.

"There is the bullet--" he reminded gravely.

"_Please_!" begged Diane faintly.

Philip flushed with a sense of guilt.

"Well," he owned, "I have bothered you a lot about it, that's a fact!
But it sticks so in my mind.  There's something else--"

"Yes?" said Diane discouragingly.

"Didn't you tell me yesterday that you'd had a feeling some one had
been spying on your camp?"

"Yes," said Diane in serious disapproval.  "I did.  I get seizures of
confidential lunacy once in a while.  Are you going to fuss about that?"

"No," said Philip gently.  "But the knife and the bullet and that have
made me wonder--a lot.  After all," he regretted sincerely, "my notions
are very vague and formless, but I feel so strongly about them
that--urging my friendship for Carl as my sole excuse for unasked
advice to his cousin--"

"Yes?"

Philip laid aside his pipe with a sigh.  The crisp music of his lady's
voice was not encouraging.

"I do hope you'll forgive me," he said quietly, "but I'm going to urge
you to abandon your trip to Florida!"

"Mr. Poynter!" flashed Diane indignantly.  "The bump on your head has
had a relapse.  Better let Johnny go for the doctor again."

"I know I'm infernally presumptuous," acknowledged Philip flushing,
"but I'm terribly in earnest."

Diane's eyes, wide, black, rebuking, scanned his troubled face askance.

"I ought to be exceedingly angry," she said slowly, "and if it wasn't
for the bump, like as not I would be--but I'm not."

"I'm truly grateful," said Philip with a sigh of relief.  And added to
himself, "Philip, old top, you're in for it."

"Why," exclaimed Diane, "I've never been so happy in my life as I have
been here by this beautiful river!"

"Nor I!" said Philip truthfully.

Diane did not hear.

"Every wild thing calls," she went on, impetuously.  "It always has.
Fish--bird--wild flower--the smell of clover--the hum of bees--I can't
pretend to tell you what they all mean to me.  Even as a youngster I
frightened my aunt half to death by running away to sleep in the
forest.  I'm sorry I'll ever have to go back to civilization!"

"And yet," insisted Philip inexorably, "to me it seems that you should
go back--to-morrow!"

"I do seem to feel a stir of temper!" said Diane reflectively.  "Maybe
I'd better go back and look at supper.  You can come after you're
through pelting that frog."

"There's still another reason," said Philip humbly, "which I can't tell
you.  Indeed, I ought not mention it.  I can only beg you to take it on
trust and believe that it's another forcible argument against your
trip.  Somehow, everything in my mind weaves into a gigantic warning.
So disturbing is the notion," added Philip unquietly, "that--"

"Yes?" queried Diane politely.

"That after much thought, I have decided to stay here in camp until you
abandon your nomadic scheme and break camp for home.  There'll come a
time, I'm sure, when you'll think as I do to get rid of me."

Diane rose with suspicious mildness.

"I'm hungry," she said, "and Johnny's yodeling."

"Well," said Philip provokingly, "I don't believe I want any supper
after all.  The atmosphere's too chilly."




CHAPTER XV

JOKAI OF VIENNA

It was insolent music, a taunt in every note.  Carl laid aside his
flute and inspected his prisoner with impudent interest.

"You _are_ the most difficult person to entertain!" he accused softly.
"Here Hunch has strained a sinuous spine performing our beautiful
native dances, the tango and the hesitation, and I've fluted up all the
wind in the room and still you glower."

"Monsieur," broke forth the prisoner, goaded beyond endurance by the
stifling heat and the stench of Hunch's pipe, "is it not enough to
imprison me here without reason, that you must taunt and gibe--" he
choked indignantly and stared desperately at the boarded windows.

"Let your voice out, do!" encouraged Carl.  "We dispensed with the
caretaker days ago, fearing you'd feel restricted."

The other's face was livid.

"Monsieur!" he cried imperiously, his eyes flashing.  "Take care!"

"I know," said Carl soothingly, "that you have deep, dark, sinister
possibilities within you--dear, yes!  You tried something of the sort
on the Ridge Road.  That's why your august head's so badly bruised.
But why aggravate your blood pressure now when it's so infernally hot
and you've work ahead.  Hunch," he added carelessly to the admiring
henchman who had once dealt away successive slices of his inheritance,
"go get a pitcher of ice water and rustle up another siphon of seltzer
and some whiskey.  Likely His Nibs and I will play chess again
to-night."

Hunch rose from a chair by the window where he had flattened his single
good eye against a knot hole, and slouched heavily to the door.

The face of the prisoner slowly whitened.  Every muscle of his body
quivered suddenly in horrible revulsion.  Nights of enforced
drunkenness had left his nerves strained to the breaking point.

"Monsieur," he panted, greatly agitated, "the whiskey--the thought of
it again to-night--is maddening."

Carl merely raised ironical eyebrows.

"You are not a man," choked the other, shaking.  "You are a nameless
demon!  Such hellish originality in the conception of evil, such
singular indignities as you have seen fit to inflict, they are the
freaks of a madman!"

"Thank you," said Carl politely.  "One likes to have one's little
ingenuities appreciated."

"I--I am ill--and the room is stifling."

"If I do not mind it," said Carl in aggrieved surprise, "why should
you?"

"You are a thing of steel and infernal fire.  I am but human."

"There is a way to stop it all," reminded Carl, lazily relighting his
cigar.  "Why not give me a logical reason for your presence in America?"

"I have done so.  Have I not said again and again that I am Sigimund
Jokai, of Vienna, touring in America?"

"You have said so," agreed Carl imperturbably, "but you lie.  There was
an empty chamber in your revolver, you were perilously close to my
cousin's camp.  Why?  Is it not better to tell me than foolishly to
waste such splendid nerve and grit as you possess?"

The prisoner moistened his bloodless lips and shrugged.

"Monsieur," he accused coldly, "you tinge commonplace incidents with
melodrama."

"Days ago--er--Jokai of Vienna," went on Carl thoughtfully, "I
dispatched a formal communication to your country.  Why has it been
ignored?  Why did my first inkling of its effect come in the sight of
your face in suspicious territory?  And why, Monsieur," purred Carl
softly, "did you seek to kill me by a trick?"

"Monsieur, you delayed me.  I am hot of temper--"

"And kill whoever angers you?  My dear Jokai, that's absurd.  As for
your singular indifference to the burning car--that's easy.  You'd
stolen it.  But why?"

He smiled slightly and picked up his flute.  With infinite softness a
waltz danced lightly through the quiet room.  To such a fanciful, eerie
piping might the ghost of a child have danced.  Then without pause or
warning it swung dramatically into a stirring melody of power and
dignity.

The wretched man by the table buried his face in his hands and groaned.

"Ah!" said Carl softly.  "So Monsieur has heard that tune before?  That
in itself is illuminating."

With a leer Hunch entered and deposited a tray upon the table.  Carl
poured himself some whiskey and pushed the decanter toward his guest
with a significant glance.  Jokai of Vienna poured and drank with a
shudder of nausea.

"We've a new chessboard," said Carl.  "It's most ingenious.  Hunch
spent a large part of his valuable morning shopping for it.  The board
and chessmen are metal and I myself have added one or two unique
improvements.  Help yourself to some more whiskey--do."

"Monsieur," faltered Jokai desperately, "I--I can not."

"Hunch," said Carl softly.  "His Nibs won't drink."

Instantly from the wired metal points of Jokai's chair a stinging
electric current swept fiendishly through his body.  Last night it had
goaded him unspeakably.  To-night, with every tortured nerve leaping,
it was unbearable.  Shaking, he poured again and drank--great drops of
sweat starting out upon his forehead.  Where the rope bound his ankles
the flesh was aching dully.

"Mercy!" he choked.  "I--I can not bear it."

"There is a way to stop it!" reminded Carl curtly.  "The ivory chessmen
for me, Hunch.  And whenever he refuses to drink--start the current."

With the metal chessboard before him, Carl idly arranged his ivory men.
Jokai touched a metal pawn and shuddered violently.  The metal board
was wired.  Thenceforth every move in the game he must play with the
metal men would complete the circuit and send the biting needles
through his frame.  It was delicately gauged, a nerve-racking
discomfort without definite pain, a thing to snap the dreadful tension
of a man's endurance at the end.

"Ah!  Monsieur!" cried Jokai wildly.  "It is inconceivable--"

"Play!" said Carl briefly.  White and grim his guest obeyed.

In terrible silence they played the game through to the end.

"Let me pour you some more whiskey," insisted Carl with infernal
courtesy.  "Let us understand each other.  Whenever I drink, I expect
you to do the same.  As for you, Hunch, you'll kindly stay sober!"

Jokai gulped the nauseating torture to the end.  He was faint and sick.
By the end of the third game, every move had become convulsive.  The
insidious bite of the current was getting horribly on his nerves.
Still with desperate will he played on.  Drunk and dizzy--his veins hot
and pounding, he stared in fascinated horror at the face of his
merciless opponent.  Through the film of smoke it loomed vividly dark,
impudent, ironic, the mobile mouth edged satirically with a slight
smile.

"Are you man or devil?" he whispered.

Carl laughed.  His hand, for all his drinking, was calm and steady, his
handsome eyes clear and cold and resolute.

"Hunch," he said curtly, "if you touch that bottle again, I'll break it
over your head.  You're drunk now."

To Jokai his voice trailed off into curious nothingness.  Somewhere he
knew in a room stifling hot and hazy with the fumes of vile tobacco
there was a voice, musical, detached and very far away.

"Monsieur," it was saying, "there are still the questions."

With shaking hand Jokai touched a metal king and screamed.  The heat
and the hell-board hard upon his days and nights of enforced drinking
were too much.  With a strangled sob, Jokai of Vienna pitched forward
upon the board unconscious.

Carl swept the metal men away with a shrug.

"Poor devil!" he said pityingly.  "All this hell sooner than answer a
question or two.  By to-morrow night, with another dose of the same
medicine, he'll feel differently.  Likely I'll run up to Connecticut
to-night, Hunch, to see my aunt.  I'll be back by noon to-morrow.  Tear
off the window boards and give him some more air.  You can move him to
another room in the morning."

Hunch obeyed, and presently as the street door slammed behind his
chief, Hunch's single eye roved expectantly to the forgotten whiskey on
the table.  Jokai lay in a motionless stupor by the window.  It would
be morning before the hapless drinker would be quite himself again.
With brutal, powerful arms, Hunch bore his charge to an adjoining room
and consigned him disrespectfully to a bed.  Then with a fresh bottle
of whiskey in his hand, he returned to the open window, leered
pleasantly at the dizzy glare of city lights beyond and henceforth
devoted himself to getting very drunk.  Having gratified this bibulous
ambition to the uttermost, he fell asleep.  The morning sunlight
flaming at last on his coarse, bloated face awoke him to resentful
consciousness.  Glowering at the bright, warm light with his single
eye, Hunch rolled away into the shadow and went to sleep again.

Below on the porch, with an outraged caretaker's letter in her hand
bag, Aunt Agatha turned her latchkey resolutely in the lock.

"I just will not have it!" reflected Aunt Agatha defiantly.  "I
certainly will not.  And I'd have been here yesterday if Mary hadn't
insisted upon my spending the night with her.  Well do I remember how
Carl installed himself here last year with a Japanese servant and
invited that good-looking Wherry boy to come and scratch the furniture.
I don't suppose Carl invited him for that purpose," added Aunt Agatha
fairly, "but he did it, anyway.  I can't for the life of me see why it
is that young Mr. Wherry is perpetually making scratches where his feet
rest.  And I'm sure he left his footprint on the piano and thundered
through every roll on the player, for they're all out of place, and the
Williston caretaker heard him, though like as not it was Carl for that
matter.  He's a Westfall, and he'd do it if he felt like it, dear
knows!  Though I must say Carl detests bangy music."

Still rambling, Aunt Agatha, having fussed considerably over the
extraction of the key, halted in the hallway, appalled by the utter
loneliness of the darkened rooms.  Beyond in the library a clock boomed
loudly through the quiet.  Somewhere upstairs a dull, choking rasp
broke the soundless gloom.  Aunt Agatha began to flutter nervously up
the stairway.

"It's Carl of course!" she murmured in a panic.  "I just know it is.
I've never known him to even gurgle--much less snore in his sleep.
Like as not his windows are still boarded up and he's suffocating.
Only a Westfall would think of such a thing."

Puffing, Aunt Agatha halted at her nephew's door.  That and the one
adjoining were locked.  There was a den beyond.  Making her way to a
door of which Hunch was ignorant.  Aunt Agatha opened it and gasped.
Fully clothed, a man whose feet and hands were securely bound, lay
muttering upon the bed, his jargon incomprehensibly foreign.

"God deliver us from all Westfalls!" wept Aunt Agatha.  "Carl's
kidnapped an immigrant!"

With unwavering determination in her round, aggrieved eyes, she swept
majestically to the bed and shook the sleeper severely.

"My good man," she demanded, "what do you mean by lying here on a lace
spread with your feet tied and your head scarred?"

Jokai of Vienna stirred and moaned.  Aunt Agatha fumbled for her
smelling salts and administered a most heroic draft.  Sputtering, Jokai
awoke from his restless stupor and stared.

From the room adjoining came again the dull, choking rasp of Hunch's
heavy slumber.  Fluttering hurriedly to the doorway, Aunt Agatha stared
in horror at the littered room and Hunch, the latter no reassuring
sight at his best, and thence with fascinated gaze at Jokai of Vienna.
With wild imploring eyes Jokai glanced at his hands and feet.
Miraculously Aunt Agatha understood.  After an interval of petrified
indecision, during which she trembled violently and made inarticulate
noises in her throat, she fluttered excitedly from the room and
returned with a pair of scissors.  Urged to noiseless activity by
Jokai's fear of the sleeper in the farther room, she cut the ropes
which bound him and led him stealthily to the hall below.

"You poor thing!" whispered Aunt Agatha in hysterical sympathy.
"You're as pale as a ghost.  I don't wonder--"

But Jokai of Vienna was already bolting wildly through the street door
and down the steps.  Aunt Agatha burst into aggrieved tears.

"I don't in the least know what it's all about," she sniffed, greatly
frightened, "but what with the immigrant bolting out of the house in
his shirt sleeves without so much as a word of thanks--such a nice
distinguished fellow as he was, too, for all he smelt of liquor!--and
Carl nowhere in sight--and a fat young man, with a hairy chest exposed,
sleeping on a whiskey bottle and snoring like a prisoner file, it does
seem most mysterious--that's a fact!  And my knees have folded up and I
can't budge.  Mother's knees used to fold up this way, too.  God bless
my soul!" wept the unfortunate lady.  "I do wish I were dead."

With a desperate effort Aunt Agatha unfolded her knees sufficiently to
bear her weight and turning, screamed wildly.  Hunch Dorrigan was
stealing catlike down the stairs, his bloated vicious face leering
threateningly at her over the railing.

"You old she-wolf!" roared that elegant young man.  "Where's His Nibs?"

Aunt Agatha moistened her dry lips and, gurgling fearfully, fainted.
When at length she became conscious again.  Hunch, glowering fiercely,
was returning from a futile chase.  With a resentful flash of brutality
he towered suddenly above her and began to curse.  Aunt Agatha,
bristling, sat up.

"Don't you dare speak to me like that after breathing vulgar liquor
fumes all over my niece's house and tying up that nice foreign
gentleman," she quavered weakly.  "Don't you dare!  I live in this
house, young man, and Carl will see to it that I'm protected.  He
always has.  He's very good to me."

Hunch glowered sullenly at her, fearful, in the face of her
relationship to Carl, of committing still another unforgivable offense.

"I once knew a stout young man with a glass eye," she gulped with
increasing courage, "and he was hanged by the neck until he was
dead--quite dead--and then they cut his body down and his relatives
took it away in a cart and on the way home it came to life--"

Aunt Agatha halted abruptly, vaguely conscious that this somewhat
felicitous ending to the tragedy, as an object lesson to Hunch, left
much to be desired.

"Leave the house!" she commanded with shrill magnificence, for all her
hair and dress were awry, and her round face flushed.  "Leave the
house."

Hunch shrugged and obeyed.  It was nearly noon and there was no single
east-side acquaintance--no, not even Link Murphy, the terrible--whom he
feared as he feared Carl Granberry.

Weeping, Aunt Agatha watched him go.




CHAPTER XVI

THE YOUNG MAN OF THE SEA

Diane was to learn that the infernal persistence of the Old Man of the
Sea of Arabian origin could find its match in youth.  A week slipped
by.  Philip wove an unsatisfactory mat of sedge upon a loom of cord and
stakes, whittled himself a knife and fork and spoon which he initialed
gorgeously with the dye of a boiled alder, invented a camp rake of
forked branches, made a broom of twigs, and sunk a candle in the floor
of his tent which he covered with a bottomless milk bottle.  All in
all, he told Nero, he was evoluting rapidly into an excellent woodsman,
despite the peculiar appearance of the sedge mat.

When Diane was honestly indignant, Philip was quiet and industrious,
and accomplished a great deal with his knife and bits of wood.  When,
finding his cheerful good humor irresistible, she was forced to fly the
flag of truce, he was profoundly grateful.

"When do you think you'll go?" demanded Diane pointedly one morning as
she deftly swung her line into the river.  "Unless you contrive to get
stabbed again," she added doubtfully, "I really don't see what's
keeping you."

"When I may help you break camp and escort you back to your aunt,"
replied Philip pleasantly, "I'll pack up my two shirts and my wildwood
pipe and depart, exceedingly grateful for my stay in Arcadia."

Diane bit her lip and frowned.

"Suppose," she flashed, with angry scarlet in her cheeks, "suppose I
break camp and leave you behind!"

"I'll go with you," shrugged Philip.  "Don't you remember?  I told you
so before.  And I'll sit on the rear steps of the van all the way to
Florida and play a tin whistle."

Appalled by the thought of the spectacular vagaries which this Young
Man of the Sea might develop if she took to the road, Diane said
nothing.

"No matter how I view you," she indignantly exclaimed a little later,
"you're a problem."

"Settle the problem," advised Philip.  "It's simple enough."

"He'll go presently," she told herself resentfully.  "He'll have to."

"How it amuses these fish to watch me murder worms!" exclaimed Philip
in deep disgust.  "Look at the audience over there!  I attract 'em and
you get 'em!  Miss Westfall, are you a slave driver?"

"What do you mean?" asked Diane cautiously.

Philip's most innocent beginnings frequently led into argumentative
morasses for his opponent.

"Does Johnny have complete freedom in your camp?"

"Certainly!" exclaimed  Diane warmly.  "Johnny is old and faithful.  He
may do as he pleases."

Philip changed an angemic worm of considerable transparency for one of
more interest to his river audience and smiled.

"Johnny," said he cheerfully, "has been good enough to invite me to
stay in camp with him indefinitely.  I'm his guest, in fact, until you
go home.  I imagine that as Johnny's guest I ought to enjoy immunity
from sarcastic shafts, but I may be mistaken.  I've washed and drained
most of these worms.  Will you lend me an inch or so of that stout
invertebrate climbing out of the can by you?"

Thoroughly out of patience, Diane reeled in her line and returned to
camp, whence she presently heard Philip blithely whistling a
fisherman's hornpipe and urging Nero to retrieve certain sticks he had
thrown into the river.  A little later he caught a sunfish and swung
into camp with such a smile of irresistible pride and good humor on his
sun-browned face, that Diane laughed in spite of herself.

"How ridiculous it is!" she mused uncomfortably.  "Here I may not
depart for fear a happy-go-lucky young man will play a tin whistle on
the steps of the van, and I will not go home.  What in the world am I
to do with him?  Are you an orphan?" she asked with guileful curiosity.

"No," said Philip.

"I'm sorry," said Diane maliciously.  "For then I could take out papers
of adoption--"

"I'll stay without them," promised Philip.  And Diane added wood to the
fire with cheeks like the scarlet sunset.

"I'm going to send for my aunt," she announced a few days later.

"Yes?" said Philip.

"Unconventionality of any sort shocks her dreadfully.  Like as not
she'll faint dead away at the sight of you domiciled in my camp as if
you own it.  She'll see that you go."

"Better not," advised Philip.

"Why?"

"I'll produce credentials proving I'm a reputable victim of
circumstances.  I'll suggest that in complete concurrence with her I
deem it unsafe for a young and attractive girl to tour about the
country--and that I do not feel that I can conscientiously depart.
Between the two of us you'll likely have a most uncomfortable hour or
so."

Aunt Agatha was impressionable.  It needed but a spark of concurrence
to arouse her dreadfully.  Diane dismissed the project.

"I think," she said hopefully, "that you'll most likely go to-night."

"In any circumstances," said Philip easily, "I fear that would be
impossible.  Johnny's behind with the laundry and I haven't a
collarable shirt."  Whereupon he whistled for Nero and set off amiably
through the woods to gather an inaccessible flower he knew his lady
would prize.

By nine that night Diane was asleep in the van.  Philip, with whom she
had indignantly crossed swords a little earlier, lay thoughtfully by
the fire watching the snowy curtains of the van windows billowing
lazily in the warm night wind.  He felt restless and perturbed and
presently sought his tent, where he lit the bottled candle to look for
the predecessor of his insatiable wildwood pipe, but halted suddenly
with a peculiar whistle.

The silk shirt he had worn from Sherrill's lay conspicuously upon the
bed, washed and ironed and beautifully mended up the slashed sleeve and
along the shoulder.  As a laundress of parts, Johnny was a jewel, but
he could not mend!

Now oddly enough as Mr. Poynter stared at the shirt upon the bed, his
appearance was that of a young man decidedly out of sorts.  Presently
with an ominous glint of temper in his fine eyes, he noiselessly
rearranged his tent, viciously donned the offending shirt, whistled for
Nero and leaving the camp of his lady as unexpectedly as he had entered
it, set out for Sherrill's.

Even the most equable of tempers, it would seem, may now and then prove
crotchety.

And who may say?  Mr. Poynter was a young man of infinite resource.
And there were other ways.




CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH THE BARON PAYS

"Excellency," said Philip politely, "I have returned."

"Ah!" said the Baron cordially, marveling somewhat at the forbidding
glint in the young man's eyes.  He was to learn presently its portent.

Within doors, a few men chatted in the billiard room.  A girl was
singing.  The Baron, however, was the only occupant of the comfortable
porch-room with the green-shaded lamp, to which Philip had come,
passing Themar, who had left a tray of ice and _crème de menthe_ upon
the table.

With his customary deliberation the Baron selected a glass, filled it
with shaved ice, which he as carefully covered with green _crème de
menthe_, and pushed the delectable result across the table to his
secretary.

Philip accepted with a formal expression of thanks.

"I am delighted," rumbled the Baron, sipping his iced mint with keen
appreciation, "to see that you are fully recovered."

"And Themar?" inquired Philip coldly.

"He was not injured so badly as I feared," admitted Tregar slowly.
"His accident," commented Philip quietly, "was to say the least
coincidental--and convenient."

"Just what do you mean?"

"Just why," begged Philip icily, "did you wish me to intrude further
upon the hospitality of Miss Westfall?"

"There was an errand," reminded the Baron blandly.  "Having discharged
it myself, Poynter, I might--er--trust to you to report its
consequences.  There are possibilities of confidences over a camp
fire--"

"You expected me to--spy upon Miss Westfall?"

"Even so.

"Pray believe," said Philip stiffly, "that any confidence of Miss
Westfall's would have been to me--as your own."

"I am to understand then," commented His Excellency suavely, "that you
made absolutely no effort--"

"You are to understand just that," said Philip quietly.  "Moreover," he
manfully met his chief's level glance with one of inexorable decision,
"I sincerely regret that hereafter I shall be unable to discharge my
duties as your secretary."

The Baron stirred.

"I may be honored by your reasons, Poynter?" he inquired quietly.

"The duties of a spy," flashed Philip, "are peculiarly offensive to me.
So is Themar."

"Themar!"

"Excellency," said Philip curtly, "to-night as I entered, the lamplight
fell full upon the face and throat of your valet."

"Yes?"

"Themar's throat, Excellency, bears peculiar scars."

"My dear Poynter!  Themar's fall injured him severely about the face
and hands."

"I have not forgotten," insisted Philip grimly, "that Miss Westfall's
servant sunk his terrible fingers into the throat of the man whose
knife scar I bear.  Whether or not his knife was meant for me, I can
not say.  Nor have I sufficient proof openly to accuse him, but of this
much I am convinced.  Themar's presence near the camp of Miss Westfall
is, in the face of your peculiar and secretive errand, ominously
significant."

The Baron sighed.  There was frank hostility in Philip's eyes.

"Miss Westfall," added Philip hotly, "is the unsuspecting victim of a
peculiar network of mystery of which I feel you hold the key.  Her camp
is constantly spied upon.  Upon the night of the storm there were two
men lurking mysteriously in the forest near her camp fire.  The knife
of one I was unfortunate enough to receive.  The other," Philip's eyes
glinted oddly, "the other, Excellency," he finished slowly, "tried, I
firmly believe--to kill Miss Westfall."

"Impossible!" exclaimed the Baron, greatly shocked.

"If I might know the nature of your peculiar interest in Miss
Westfall," urged Philip bluntly, "I would have greater faith in your
apparent surprise."

The Baron reddened.

"That is quite impossible," he regretted formally.  "Pray believe that
you have magnified its importance into exceedingly ludicrous
proportions.  I fear I am obliged to dispense with your faith in my
integrity on the conditions you mention.  Your resolution to leave
me--that is final?"

"Entirely so."

"I am sorry," said the Baron simply.  And, meeting his chief's eyes,
Philip felt somewhat ashamed of one or two of his highly colored
suspicions and reddened uncomfortably.

"It is at least--comforting," observed the Baron quietly, "to feel that
whatever I may have said in confidence to you will be honorably
forgotten."

"Excellency," said Philip with spirit, "though I may not speak to Miss
Westfall of your interest or my suspicions, for reasons which need no
naming among gentlemen, it is but fair to warn you that henceforth I
shall regard myself as personally responsible for her safety."

"Gallantly spoken!" declared the older man, and watched his secretary,
as he bowed and withdrew, with more regret than he had seen fit to
express.  Then, lying back in his chair he listened with unsmiling
attention as Philip entered the billiard room with a laughing shot of
abuse for Dick Sherrill which aroused an immediate uproar of welcome.

Watching the Baron's narrowed eyes, one might have wondered greatly.
For Baron Tregar looked very tired and grim.  At length, having smoked
his cigar quite to the end, he went up to his room and summoned Themar.

"Ah, Themar!" said he softly, and laughed with peculiar relish.

Themar shifted restlessly.

"Excellency," he began, uncomfortably aware of unpleasant mockery in
his chief's keen eyes.

The Baron matched the tips of his powerful fingers and studied them
intently.

"Themar," said he acidly, "within a fortnight I have lost a car whose
burned remains were found several miles from here, and a secretary
whose friendship and invaluable service I prize more highly than your
life.  I feel that you can to some extent explain both of these
disasters."

"Excellency knows," reminded Themar glibly, "that the car was stolen
from the Sherrill garage."

"I have merely supposed so," corrected the Baron coldly.  And rising he
inspected the curious scars upon his valet's throat with interest.
"Odd!" he purred, "that an aeroplane may simulate the marks of tearing
fingers."  Swept by a sudden gust of terrible anger, he gripped
Themar's shoulders and shook him until the valet's face was dark with
fear.

"Why," hissed the Baron, "did you lie?  Why did you go to the Westfall
camp and attack Poynter?  Why did you swear these scars came from a
disastrous flight in a stolen aeroplane?  Why have you been spying upon
Miss Westfall when I expressly forbade it?"

"Excellency," choked Themar, horrified by the Baron's unprecedented
display of passion, "there was a blunder--I dared not tell."

"Who blundered?" thundered his chief.

"I.  Granberry, I thought, was to go to his cousin's camp," panted
Themar quaking.  "I heard Sherrill telephone--later he told some men--"

"You took the car--" prompted the Baron icily.

"I--I did not know it was Poynter until he fell," urged Themar
trembling.  "Granberry and he are similar in build."

"Who attempted to kill Miss Westfall?" blazed the Baron, shaking his
valet into chattering subjection.

"Excellency, I know not!" protested Themar swallowing painfully.
"There was still another man--he dashed ahead and stole the car."

After all, reflected the Baron wryly, in this damnable muddle he must
still use Themar.  To antagonize him now would be foolhardy.
Wherefore, with a civil expression of regret at his loss of temper and
certain curt instructions, he dismissed Themar, sullen and chastened,
and betook himself to an open window, where he sat smoking thoughtfully
until the house grew quiet and one by one the lights in the valley
faded out.  In the web which had engulfed one by one, himself, Themar,
Granberry, Miss Westfall and Poynter, a murderous stranger was
floundering.  Who and what he was, it behooved His Excellency to
discover.

"It would seem," reflected the Baron with grim humor as he thought of
his car and his secretary, "that I am paying heavily for my part in a
task not greatly to my liking."

In the adjoining room behind locked doors, Themar worked feverishly
upon a cipher inscribed upon a soiled linen cuff.




CHAPTER XVIII

NOMADS

"Johnny!" said Diane in crisp, distinct tones, "Mr. Poynter has slept
long enough.  You'd better call him."

Now it is a regrettable fact that ordinarily this attack would have
provoked a reply of mild impudence from Mr. Poynter's tent, but this
morning a surprising silence lay behind the flapping canvas.  Diane
began to hum.  When presently investigation proved that Mr. Poynter's
tent was in exemplary order--that Mr. Poynter and his mended shirt were
missing--she went on humming--but to Johnny's amazement, burned her
fingers on the coffeepot; sharply reproved Johnny for staring, and then
curtly suggested that he prepare to break camp that morning, as it was
high time they were on the road.

"As for Mr. Philip Poynter," reflected Diane with delicate disdain, as
she bent over the fire and rolled some baked potatoes away with a
stick, "what can one expect?  Men are exceedingly peculiar and
inconsistent and impudent.  I haven't the ghost of a doubt that he
found that ridiculous shirt and went off in a huff.  And I'm very glad
he did--very glad indeed.  I meant he should, though I didn't suppose
with his unconscionable nerve it would bother him in the least.  If a
man's sufficiently erratic to blow a tin whistle all the way to
Florida--as Philip certainly is--and maroon himself on somebody else's
lake for fear he'd miss an acquaintance, he'd very likely fly into a
rage when one least expected it and go tramping off in the night.  I do
dislike people who fall into huffs about nothing."

Diane burned her fingers again, felt that the fire was unnecessarily
hot upon her face, and indignantly resigning the preparation of
breakfast to Johnny, went fishing.

"He should have gone long ago," mused Diane, flinging her line with
considerable force into the river.  "It's a great mercy as it is that
Aunt Agatha didn't appear and weep all over the camp about him.  I'm
sorry I mended the shirt.  Not but that I was fortunate to find
something that would make him go, but a shirt's such a childish thing
to fuss about.  And, anyway, I preferred him to leave in a friendly,
conventional sort of way!"

There are times, alas, when even fish are perverse!  Thoroughly out of
patience, Diane presently unjointed her rod, emptied the can of worms
upon the bank, and returned to camp, where she found Johnny
industriously piling up a heap of litter.

"What are you going to do with these?" demanded Diane, indicating an
eccentric woodland broom and a rake of forked twigs and twine.  "Throw
them out?"

Johnny nodded.

"Well, I guess you're not!" sniffed Diane indignantly.  "They're mighty
convenient.  That rake is really clever."

Johnny's round eyes showed his astonishment.  He had heard his perverse
young mistress malign these inventions of Philip's most cruelly.

Then what a woodland commotion arose after breakfast!  What a cautious
stamping out of fire and razing of tents!  What a startled flutter of
birds above and bugs below!  What an excited barking on the part of
Rex, who after loafing industriously for a week or so, felt called upon
to sprint about and assist his mistress with a dirt-brown nose!  What a
trampling of horses and a creaking of wheels as the great green wagon
wound slowly through the shadowy forest road and took to the open
highway with Rex at His mistress's feet haughtily inspecting the
wayside.

And what a wayside, to be sure!  Past fields of young rye from which a
lazy silver smoke seemed to rise and follow the wind-billowing grain;
past fields of dark red clover rife with the whir and clatter of mowing
machines as the farmers felled the velvety stalks for clover hay; past
snug white farmhouses where perfumed peonies drooped sleepily over
brick walks; on over a rustic bridge, skirting now a tiny village whose
church spire loomed above the trees; now following a road which lay
rough and deeply rutted, among golden fields of buttercups fringed with
bunch grass.

Farmers waved and called; housewives looked and disapproved; children
stared and jealous canines pettishly barked at the haughty Rex; but
Johnny only chuckled and cracked his whip.  Day by day the green and
white caravan rumbled serenely on, camping by night in field and forest.

A country world of peace and sunshine--of droning bees and the nameless
fragrance of summer fields it was!  And the struggling nomads of the
dusty road!  Diane felt a kindred thrill of interest in each one of
them.  Now a Syrian peddler woman, squat and swarthy, bending heavily
beneath her pack amid a flurry of dust from the sun-baked roads her
feet had wearily padded for days; now a sleepy negro on a load of hay,
an organ grinder with a chattering monkey or a clumsy bear, another
sleepy negro with another load of hay, and a picturesque minstrel with
an elaborate musical contrivance drawn by a horse.  Now a capering
Italian with a bagpipe, who danced grotesquely to his own piping, and
piped the pennies out of rural pockets as if they had been so many
copper rats from Hamelin!

Peddlers and tramps and agents, country drummers and country circuses,
medicine men who shouted the versatile merits of corn salve by the
light of flaring torches, eccentric orators of eccentric theology,
tent-shows of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with real bloodhounds and unreal
painted ice, gypsies who were always expected to steal some one's
children and never did, peddlers with creaking, clinking wagons,
hucksters and motorcyclists, motorists and dusty hikers--one by one in
the days to come Diane was to meet them all and learn that the nomads
of the summer road were a happy-go-lucky guild of peculiar and
coöperative good humor.

But the girl herself was a truer nomad than many to whom with warm
friendliness she nodded and spoke.

Late one afternoon Diane espied a woodland brook.  Shot with gold and
shadow, it laughed along, under a waving canopy of green, freckled with
cool, clean pebbles and hiding roguishly now and then beneath a
trailing branch.  A brook was a luxury.  It was mirror and spring and
lullaby in one.

By six the tents of the nomad were pitched by the forest brook and the
nomad herself was smoothing back her ruffled hair over a crystalline
mirror.

A drowsy negro on a load of hay drove by on the road beyond.

Diane studied him with critical interest.

"Johnny," she said, "just why are there so many drowsy negroes about
driving loads of hay?  Or is that the same one?  And if it is, where
under Heaven has he been driving that hay for the last three days?"

Johnny didn't know.  Wherefore he pursed his lips and shook his head.

The hay wagon turned on into the forest on the farther side of the road
and halted.  The drowsy negro leisurely alighted and shuffled through
the trees until he stood before Diane with a square of birch bark in
his hand.  Greatly astonished--for this negro was apparently too lazy
to talk when he deemed it unnecessary--Diane took the birch bark and
inspected it in mystification.  A most amazing message was duly
inscribed thereon.


"Erastus has acquired a sinewy chicken from somebody's barn yard," it
read.  "Why not bring your own plate, knife, fork, spoon and a good saw
over to my hay-camp and dine with me?

"Philip."


Diane stared with rising color at the load of hay.  From its ragged,
fragrant bed, a tall, lean young man with a burned skin, was rising and
lazily urging a nondescript yellow dog to do the same.  The dog
conceivably demurred, for Philip removed him, yelping, by the simple
process of seizing him by the loose skin at the back of his neck and
dropping him overboard.  Having brushed his clothes, the young man
came, with smiling composure, through the forest, the yellow dog
waggling at his heels.

"I've read so much about breaking the news gently," apologized Philip,
smiling, "that I thought I'd better try a bit of it myself.  Hence the
sylvan note.  Ras, if you go to sleep by that tree, I'll like as not
let you sleep there until you die.  Go back to camp and build a fire
and hollow out the feathered biped."

Ras slouched obediently off toward the hay-camp.

"You've hay in your ears!" exclaimed Diane, biting her lips.

"I'm a nomad!" announced Philip calmly.  "So's Erastus--so's Dick
Whittington here.  I'm likely to have hay in my ears for months to
come.  Dick Whittington," explained Philip, patting the dog, "is a
mustard-colored orphan I picked up a couple of days ago.  He'd made a
vow to gyrate steadily in a whirlwind of dust after a hermit flea who
lived on the end of his tail, until somebody adopted him and--er--cut
off the grasping hermit.  I fell for him, but, like Ras, a sleep bug
seems to have bitten him."

"Most likely he unwinds in his sleep," suggested Diane politely.  And
added, acidly, "Where are you going?'

"Florida!" said Philip amiably.

The girl stared at him with dark, accusing eyes.

"The trip is really no safer now," reminded Philip steadily, "than it
was when I left camp."

"In a huff!" flashed Diane disparagingly.

"In a huff," admitted Philip and dismissed the dangerous topic with a
philosophic shrug.

"I won't have you trailing after me on a hay-wagon!" exclaimed Diane in
honest indignation.

"Hum!  Just how," begged Philip, "does one go about effecting a
national ordinance to keep hay-carts off the highway?"

As Philip betokened an immediate desire to name over certain rights
with which he was vested as a citizen of the United States, Diane was
more than willing to change the subject.  Persistence was the keynote
of Mr. Poynter's existence.

"Johnny," begged Philip, "get Miss Diane some chicken implements, will
you, old man?  And lend me some salt.  You see," he added easily to
Diane, "Ras and I are personally responsible for an individual and very
concentrated grub equipment.  It saves a deal of fussing.  I carry mine
in my pocket and Ras carries his in his hat, but he wears a roomier
tile than I do and never climbs out of it even when he sleeps.  Thank
you, Johnny.  I'll send Ras over with your supper.  But if it seems to
be getting late, look him up.  He may fall asleep."

After repeated indignant refusals which Mr. Poynter characteristically
splintered, Diane, intensely curious, went with Mr. Poynter to the
hay-camp for supper.

Now although the somnolent Ras had been shuffling drowsily about a
fresh fire with no apparent aim, he presently contrived to produce a
roasted chicken, fresh cucumbers, some caviare and rolls, coffee and
cheese and a small freezer of ice cream, all of which he appeared to
take at intervals from under the seat of the hay-cart.

"Ice cream and caviare!" exclaimed the girl aghast.  "That's treason."

"I've my own notions of camping," admitted Philip, "and really our way
is exceedingly simple and comfortable.  Ras loads up the seat pantry at
the nearest village and then we cast off all unnecessary ballast every
morning.  Of course we couldn't very well camp twice in the same
place--we decorate so heavily--but that's a negligible factor.  Oh,
yes," added Philip smiling, "we've blazed our trail with buns and
cheese for miles back.  Ras thinks whole processions of birds and dogs
and tramps and chickens are already following us.  If it's true, we'll
most likely eat some of 'em."

"Where," demanded Diane hopelessly, "did you get this ridiculous
outfit?"

"Well," explained Philip comfortably, "Ras was drowsing by Sherrill's
on a load of hay and I bought the cart and the hay and the horses and
Ras at a bargain and set out.  Ras is a free lance without an
encumbrance on earth and I can't imagine a more comfortable manner of
getting about than stretched out full length on a load of hay.  You can
always sleep when you feel like it.  And every morning we peel the
bed--that is, we dispense with a layer of mattress and _presto_!  I
have a fresh bed until the hay's gone.  We bought a new load this
morning."

Swept by an irresistible spasm of laughter, Diane stared wildly about
the hay-camp.

"And Ras?" she begged faintly.

"Well," said Philip slowly, "Ras is peculiarly gifted.  He can sleep
anywhere.  Sometimes he sleeps stretched out on the padded seat of the
wagon, and sometimes he sleeps under it--the wagon I mean; not in the
pantry.  And then of course he sleeps all day while he's driving and
once or twice I've found him in a tree.  I don't like him to do that,"
he added with gravity, "for he's so full of hay I'm afraid the birds
will begin to make nests in his ears and pockets."

"Mistah Poynteh," reflected Ras, scratching his head through his hat,
"is a lunatict.  He gits notions.  I cain't nohow understan' him but
s'long as he don' get ructious I'se gwine drive dat hay-cart to de Norf
Pole if he say de word.  I hain't never had a real chanst to make my
fortune afore."

"And what," begged Diane presently, "do you do when it rains?"

Mr. Poynter agreed that that had been a problem.

"But with our accustomed ingenuity," he added modestly, "we have solved
it.  Back there in a village we induced a blacksmith with brains and
brawn to fit a tall iron frame around the wagon and if the sun's too
hot, or it showers, we shed some more hay and drape a tarpaulin or so
over the frame.  It's an excellent arrangement.  We can have side
curtains or not just as we choose.  In certain wet circumstances, of
course, we'll most likely take to barns and inns and wood-houses and
corncribs and pick up the trail in the morning.  You can't imagine," he
added, "how ready pedestrians are to tell us which way the green moving
van went."

Whereupon the nomad of the hay-camp and his ruffled guest crossed
swords again over a pot of coffee, with inglorious defeat for Diane,
who departed for her own camp in a blaze of indignation.

"I'll ignore him!" she decided in the morning as the green van took to
the road again.  "It's the only way.  And after a while he'll most
likely get tired and disgruntled and go home.  He's subject to huffs
anyway.  It's utterly useless to talk to him.  He thrives on
opposition."

Looking furtively back, she watched Mr. Poynter break camp.  It was
very simple.  Ras, yawning prodigiously, heaved a variety of
unnecessary provisions overboard from the seat pantry, abandoned the
ice-cream freezer to a desolate fate by the ashes of the camp fire and
peeled the hay-bed.  Philip slipped a small tin plate, a collapsible
tin cup, a wooden knife, fork and spoon into his pocket.  Ras put his
in his hat, which immediately took on a somewhat bloated appearance.
Having climbed languidly to the reins, the ridiculous negro appeared to
fall asleep immediately.  Mr. Poynter, looking decidedly trim and
smiling, summoned Dick Whittington, climbed aboard and, whistling,
disappeared from view with uncommon grace and good humor.  The
hay-wagon rumbled off.

Diane bit her lips convulsively and looked at Johnny.  Simultaneously
they broke into an immoderate fit of laughter.

"Very well," decided the girl indignantly a little later, "if I can't
do anything else, I can lose him!"

But even this was easier of utterance than accomplishment.  Diane was
soon to learn that if the distance between them grew too great, Mr.
Poynter promptly unloaded all but a scant layer of hay, took the reins
himself, and thundered with expedition up the trail in quest of her,
with Dick Whittington barking furiously.  It was much too spectacular a
performance for a daily diet.

Diane presently ordered her going and coming as if the persistent
hay-gypsy on the road behind her did not exist, but every night she
caught the cheerful glimmer of his camp fire through the trees, and
frowned.




CHAPTER XIX

A NOMADIC MINSTREL

Striking west into New York State, Diane had come into Orange County,
whence she wound slowly down into northern Jersey, through the Poconos.
For days now the dusty wanderers had followed the silver flash of the
Delaware, coming at length from a rugged, cooler country of mountain
and lake into a sunny valley cleft by the singing river.  It was a
goodly land of peaceful villages tucked away mid age-old trees, of
garrulous, kindly folks and covered bridges, of long, lazy canals with
grassy banks banding each shore of the rippling river, of tow-paths
padded by the feet of bargemen and bell-hung mules and lock-tenders.

At sunset one night Diane paid her toll at a Lilliputian house built
like an architectural barnacle on to the end of a covered bridge, and
with a rumble of boards wound slowly through the dusty, twilight tunnel
into Pennsylvania.  A little later a drowsy negro passed through with a
load of hay, a barking dog and a mysterious voice, with a lazy drawl,
which directed the payment of the toll from among the hay.  Still later
a musical nomad driving an angular horse from the seat of a ramshackle
cart, accoutered, among other orchestral devices, with clashing
cymbals, a drum and a handle which upon being turned a trifle by the
curious tollgate keeper aroused a fearful musical commotion in the cart.

From her camp on a wooded spot by the river, Diane presently watched
the hay-camp anchor with maddening ease for the night.  Ras built a
fire, unhitched the horses, produced a variety of things from the seat
of the pantry and took his table equipment from his hat.  Philip
smoked, removed an occasional wisp of hay from his hair and shied
friendly pebbles at Richard Whittington.

Diane was busy making coffee when the third nomad appeared with his
music machine, and, halting near her, alighted and fell stiffly to
turning the eventful crank.

Instantly two terrible drumsticks descended and with globular
extremities thumped, by no visible agency, upon the drum.  The cymbals
clashed--and a long music record began to unfold in segments like a
papier-mache snake.

"Well," exclaimed Diane fervently, "I do wish he'd stop!  For all we've
seen him so often he's never bothered us like this before."

The unfortunate and frequently flagellated "Glowworm," however,
continued to glow fearfully, impelled to eruptive scintillation by the
crank, and the vocal lady "walked with Billy," and presently the
minstrel came through the trees with his hat in his hand, his dark eyes
very humble and deferential.

Now as Diane nodded pleasantly and smiled and held forth a coin, the
wandering minstrel suddenly swayed, clapped his hand to his forehead
with a choking groan and pitched forward senseless upon the ground at
her feet.  Diane jumped.

"Johnny!" she exclaimed in keen alarm, "we've another invalid.  Turn
him over!"  But it was not Johnny who performed this service for the
unfortunate minstrel.  It was Mr. Poynter.

"Hum!" said Philip dryly.  "That's most likely retribution.  A man
can't unwind all that hullabaloo without feeling the strain.  Water,
Johnny, and if you have some smelling salts handy, bring 'em along."

After one or two vigorous attentions on the part of Mr. Poynter, the
nomad of the music machine opened his eyes and stared blankly about
him.  That he was not yet quite himself, however, was readily apparent,
for meeting Mr. Poynter's unsmiling glance, he grew very white and
faint and begged for water.

Philip supplied it without a word.  After an interval of unsympathetic
silence, during which the minstrel's eyes roved uncertainly about the
camp and returned each time to Philip's face in a fascinated stare, he
feebly strove to rise but fell back groaning.

"If--if I might stay here for but the night," he begged pathetically,
his accent slightly foreign.

"That's impossible!" said Philip curtly.  "I'll help you to your rumpus
machine and back there in the village you will find an inn.  My man
will go with you."

"Philip!" exclaimed Diane with spirit.  "The man is ill."

"I'm not denying it," averred Philip stubbornly.  "Nor is there any
denying the existence of the inn."

"How can you be so heartless!"

"One may also be prudent."

"He'll stay here of course if he wishes.  The inn is a mile back."

"Diane!"

"Is he the first?" flashed Diane impetuously.

Philip reddened but his eyes were sombre.  The knife and the bullet had
engendered a certain cynicism.

"As you will!" said he.  And consigning to Johnny the care of the
invalid, who watched him depart with furtive relief, Philip strode off
through the woods.  Hospitality, reflected Philip unquietly, was all
right in its place, but Diane was an extremist.  After supper,
however--for Philip was inherently kind hearted and sympathetic--he
dispatched Ras to unhitch the minstrel's snorting steed and remove the
eccentric music machine from the highway.  Johnny had already
accomplished both.

Smoking, Philip stared at the firelit hollow where his lady's
fire-tinted tents glimmered spectrally through the trees.  He was
relieved to see that the camp's unbidden guest lay comfortably upon his
own blankets by the fire.

Somehow the minstrel's face, clean-shaven, strikingly brown of skin and
unmistakably foreign beneath the thatch of dark hair sparsely veined in
grey, lingered hauntingly in his memory.

"Where in thunder have I seen him before?" wondered Philip restlessly.
"There's something about his eyes and forehead--on the road probably,
for of course I've passed him a number of times.  Still--Lord!" added
Philip with a burst of impatience, "what a salamander I am, to be sure!
Whittington, old top, ever since I've known our gypsy lady, I've done
nothing but fuss."

But, nevertheless, when Diane's camp finally settled into quiet for the
night, there was a watchful sentry in the forest who did not retire to
his bed of hay until Johnny was astir at daybreak.  And Philip was to
find his bearings in a staggering flash of memory and know no peace for
many a day to come.




CHAPTER XX

THE ROMANCE OF MINSTRELSY

"I am glad to see that you are better," said Diane pleasantly.

The minstrel, who had bathed his hands and face in the river until they
were darkly ruddy, bowed with singular grace and ease.  That he was
grave and courtly of manner and strikingly handsome to boot, Diane had
already noticed with a flash of wonder.

"I owe you much," said he simply.  "My life perhaps--"

"I am sure," protested Diane, "that you greatly overrate my small
service."

"Day by day," exclaimed the minstrel sombrely, "I travel the summer
roads in quest of health."

Not a little interested, Diane raised frankly sympathetic eyes to his
in diffident question.

"The music?" said the minstrel with his slow, grave smile.  "Is there
not more romance and adventure in the life of a wandering minstrel than
in that of an idle seeker after health?  In the open one finds
happiness, health, color and life!"

Diane felt a sudden tie of sympathy link her subtly to this mysterious
nomad of the summer road.  Simply and naturally she spoke of her own
love of the wild things that filled the sylvan world with life and
color.

"You look much then at the wild flowers!" he exclaimed delightedly.
"There was a leaf back there on a mountain, the edge of white, a white
blossom in the heart like a patch of snow--"

"Snow-on-the-mountain!" exclaimed Diane.  "I've looked for it for days."

"It shall be my ambition to bring you some," said the minstrel
gallantly.  "I shall not forget."

Diane glanced furtively at the picturesque attire which her nomadic
guest wore with a certain dashing grace, and marveled afresh.  It was
of ragged corduroy with a brightly colored handkerchief about the
throat which foiled his vivid skin artistically.  Indeed there was more
of sophistication in the careful blending of colors than even the
normal seeker after health might deem expedient for his purpose.

"It is to few--to none indeed save you that I have confided the secret
of my minstrelsy," he said deferentially a little later.  "Illness,
love of adventure, a longing to brush elbows with the world, a hunger
for the woodland--in the eyes of unromantic men these things are
weaknesses.  You and I know differently, but nevertheless it is best
that I seem but a poor vagrant grinding forth a hapless tune for the
coppers by the wayside."

The minstrel gazed idly at the hay-camp.

"One does not quite understand," he suggested raising handsome eyebrows
in subtle disapproval; "the negro, the hay--the curious camp?"

Diane recalled Philip's unfeeling attitude of the night before.

"A happy-go-lucky young man with a taste for hay," she said.  "I know
little of him."

"One treasures one's confidence from the unsympathetic," ventured the
minstrel.  "Now the young man of the hay, I take it, is intensely
practical and let us say--unromantic.  Lest he laugh and scoff--" he
shrugged and glanced furtively at the girl's face.  It was brightly
flushed and very lovely.  The velvet dusk of Diane's eyes was sparkling
with the zest of woodland adventure.  To repose a confidence in one so
spirited and beautiful was fascinating sport--and safe.

Now the minstrel found as the morning waned that he was not so strong
as he had fancied.  Wherefore he lay humbly by the fire and talked of
his fortunes by the roadside.  Bits of philosophy, of sparkling jest,
of vivid description, to these Diane listened with parted lips and eyes
alive with wholesome interest as her guest contrived to veil himself in
a silken web of romance and mystery.

It was sunset before the girl felt uncomfortably that he ought to go.
A little later, on her way to the van, she found a volume of Herodotus
in the original Greek which with a becoming air of guilt the minstrel
owned that he had dropped.

"Ah, Herodotus!" he murmured, smiling.  "After all, was he not the
wandering, romantic father of all of us who are nomads!"

"I wonder," said a lazy voice among the trees, "I wonder now if old
Herodotus ever heard of a hay-camp."

Removing a wisp of hay from his shoe with a certain matter-of-fact
grace characteristic of him, Mr. Poynter, who had been invisible all
day, arrived in the camp of the enemy.  Diane saw with a fretful flash
of wonder that he was immaculate as usual.  She saw too that the
minstrel was annoyed and that he dropped the volume of Herodotus into
his pocket with a flush and a frown.

"I trust," said Philip politely, "that you are better?"

Save for a slight dizziness, the minstrel said, he was.

"And yet," urged Philip feelingly, "I'm sure you'll not take to the
road to-night, feeling wobbly.  The inn back there in the village is
immensely attractive.  And a bed is the place for a sick man."

"He will remain where he is," flashed Diane perversely, "until he feels
quite able to go on."

"Will you?" asked Philip pointedly.

The minstrel rose weakly and glanced at Diane with profound gratitude.

"After all," he said hurriedly, "he is doubtless right.  Ill or not I
must go on."

"An excellent notion!" approved Philip cordially.  "I'll go with you."

Now whether or not the hurry and excitement of rising in these somewhat
frictional circumstances brought on a recurrence of the nomad's
singular disease, Diane did not know, but certainly he staggered and
fell back, faint and moaning by the fire, thereby arousing an immediate
commotion.

Philip grimly took his pulse and met Diane's sympathetic glance with
one of honest indignation.

"Diane," he said in a low voice, "he is tricking you into sympathy
merely for the comfort of your camp.  Twice now his fainting has been
attended by an absolutely normal pulse.  Let Ras and Johnny carry him
back to his rumpus machine and I'll drive him to the inn."

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" exclaimed the girl with flaming color.
"Why are you so suspicious?"

Philip sighed.




CHAPTER XXI

AT THE GRAY OF DAWN

It was very quiet in the wood by the river.  A late moon swung its
golden censer above the water by invisible chains, marking checkered
aisles of light in the silent wood, burnishing elfin rosaries of dew,
touching with cool, white fingers of benediction the leaf-cowled heads
of stately trees.  Like lines of solemn monks they stood listening
raptly to the deep, full chant of the moving river.  The sylvan mass of
the night was a thing of infinite peace and mystery, of silence and
solemnity.

Into the hush of the moonlit night came presently a jarring note, the
infernal racket of a motorcycle.  Philip, a lone sentry by the camp of
his lady, stirred and frowned.  The clatter ceased.  Once again the lap
of the restless river and the rustle of trees were the only sounds in
the silent wood.  Philip glanced at the muffled figure of the minstrel
asleep on the ground by the dead embers of the camp fire, and leaning
carelessly upon his elbow, fell again into the train of thought
disturbed by the clatter.

"Herodotus!" said Philip.  "Hum!"  And roused to instant alertness by
the crackle of a twig in the forest, he glanced sharply roadwards where
the trees thinned.

There was something moving stealthily along in the shadows.  With
narrowed eyes the sentry noiselessly flattened himself upon the ground
and fell to watching.

A stealthy crackle--and silence.  A moving shadow--a halt!

A patch of moonlight lay ahead.  For an interval which to Philip seemed
unending, there was no sound or movement, then a figure glided swiftly
through the patch of moonlight and approached the camp.  It was a man
in the garb of a motorcyclist.

Noiselessly Philip shifted his position.  The cyclist crept to the
shelter of a tree and halted.

The moon now hung above the wood.  Its light, showering softly through
the trees as the night wind swayed the branches, fell presently upon
the camp and the face of the cyclist.

It was Themar.

Now as Philip watched, Themar crouched suddenly and fell to staring at
the muffled figure by the camp fire.  For an interval he crouched
motionless; then with infinite caution he moved to the right.  A branch
swept his cap back from his forehead and Philip saw now that his face
was white and staring.

And in that instant as he glanced at the horrified face of the
Houdanian, Philip knew.  The stained skin, the smooth-shaven chin and
lip of the minstrel--if Themar had found them puzzling, the revealment
had come to him, as it had come to Philip, in a flash of bewilderment.

With a bound, the startled American was on his feet, stealing rapidly
toward the man by the tree.  To the spying, the mystery, the infernal
trickery and masquerading which dogged his lady's trail, Themar held
the key, wherefore--

Cursing, Philip forged ahead.  The carpet of dry twigs beneath him had
betrayed his approach and Themar was running wildly through the forest.

On and on they went, stumbling and flying through the moonlit wood to
the towpath.  But Philip was much the better runner and soon caught the
fleeing cyclist by the collar with a grip of steel.

"Poynter!" panted Themar, staring.

"At your service!" Mr. Poynter assured him and politely begged instant
and accurate knowledge of a number of things, of a knife and a bullet,
of Themar's spying, of a cuff, of the man by the fire who read
Herodotus, of a motorcyclist seeking for days to overtake a nomad.

"I--I dare not tell," faltered Themar, moistening his lips.  "I--I am
bound by an oath--"

"To spy and steal and murder!"

Themar stared sullenly at the river, gray now with the coming dawn.
His dark face was drawn and haggard.

And again Mr. Poynter shot a volley of questions and awaited the
answers with dangerous quiet.

Shaking, Themar refused again to answer.  With even more quietness and
courtesy Philip obligingly gave him a final opportunity and finding
Themar white and inexorable, smiled.

"Very well, then," said Mr. Poynter warmly, "I'll take it out of your
hide."  Which he proceeded to do with that consummate thoroughness
which characterized his every action, husbanding the strength of his
long, lean arms until a knife appeared in Themar's hand.  Then in
deadly silence Mr. Poynter reduced his treacherous assailant to a
battered hulk upon the towpath.

A mule bell tinkled in the quiet.

Upstream on the path between canal and river two mules appeared with a
man slouching heavily behind them.  The towline led to a grimy scow
which loomed out of the misty stillness like a heavier drift of the
dawn itself.

"Hello!" Philip hailed the mule driver.

"What's wantin'?" asked the man and halted.

Philip indicated Themar with his foot.

"Here is a gentleman," he explained, "whom I discovered lurking about
my camp a while ago.  He showed me his knife and I've mussed him up a
bit."

The mule-driver bent over Themar and sharply scanned the dark, foreign
face.

"One o' them damned black-and-tans, eh?" he growled.  "They're too
ready with their knives.  What ye goin' to do with him?"

"I'm wondering," shrugged Philip, smoothing his rumpled hair back from
his forehead with the palm of his hand, "if you'll permit me to pay his
passage to a hospital, the farther away, the better."

The mule-driver glanced searchingly at Mr. Poynter's face.  Apparently
satisfied, he cupped his mouth with his hands and called "Ho, Jem!"

"Jem" jerked sharply at the tiller and presently the scow scraped the
shore.  The mule-driver consigned the care of his mules to Philip and
scrambled down the grassy bank to the edge of the water.

"Where ye want him took?" demanded Jem, scratching a bristling shock of
hair which glimmered through the dawn like a thicket of spikes.

"Well," said Mr. Poynter indifferently, "where are you going?"

Jem named a town many miles away.  The mule-driver looked hard again at
Philip.

"Gawd, young feller," he admired, "you're a cool un all right!"

"Take him there," said Philip with the utmost composure.  "Deliver him
somewhere a reasonable distance off for repairs and I'll pay you fifty
dollars."

"See here," broke in Jem, somewhat staggered by the careless manner in
which Mr. Poynter handled fortunes, "hain't no foul play about this
here, eh?  Asher says he's mussed up considerable."

"Asher's right," admitted Mr. Poynter modestly.  "I did the best I
could, of course.  Come up and look him over.  He's decorated
mournfully with fist marks, but nothing worse.  There's his knife."

After a somewhat cautious inspection, Themar was hoisted aboard the
scow and harnessed discreetly with ropes.  Jem shared his companion's
distrust of black-and-tans.  With a tinkle of mule-bells the cortege
faded away into the gray of dawn.

Later, Mr. Poynter discovered an abandoned motorcycle by the roadside,
which with some little malice he had crated at the nearest town and
dispatched to Baron Tregar.

Thereafter, after a warning talk with Johnny, Philip slept by day and
watched by night.




CHAPTER XXII

SYLVAN SUITORS

Southward wound the green and white van; southward the hay-camp with
infrequent scurries to inn and barn for shelter; southward, his health
still improving, went the musical nomad, unwinding his musical
hullabaloo for the torture of musical crowds.

Now the world was a-riot with the life and color of midsummer.  Sleepy
cows browsed about in fields dotted with orange daisies, horses
switched their tails against the cloudless sky on distant hillsides,
sheep freckled the sunny pastures, and here and there beneath an apple
tree heavy with fruit, lumbered a mother-sow with her litter of pigs.
Sun-bleached dust clouded the highway and the swaying fields of corn
were slim and tall.

The shuttle of Fate clicked and clicked as she wove and crossed and
tangled the threads of these wandering, sun-brown nomads.  How
frequently the path of the music machine crossed the path of the van,
no one knew so well perhaps as Philip, but Philip at times was
tantalizing and mysterious and only evidenced his knowledge in peculiar
and singularly aggravating ways.

For the friendship between Diane and the handsome minstrel was steadily
growing.  By what subtle hints, by what ingenuous bursts of confidence,
by what bewildering flashes of inherent magnetism he contrived to
cement it, who may say?  But surely his romantic resources like his
irresistible charm of speech and manner, were varied.  A rare flower,
an original and highly commendable bit of woodland verse, some luxury
of fruit or camping device, in a hundred delicate ways he contrived to
make the girl his debtor, talking much in his grave and courtly way of
the gratitude he owed her.  Adroitly then this romantic minstrel spun
his shining, varicolored web, linking them together as sympathetic
nomads of the summer road; adroitly too he banned Philip, who by reason
of a growing and mysterious habit of sleeping by day had gained for
himself a blighting reputation of callous indifference to the charm of
the beautiful rolling country all around them.


"I'm exceedingly sorry," read a scroll of birch bark which Ras drowsily
delivered to Diane one sunset, "but I'll have to ask you to invite me
to supper.  Ras bought an unhappy can of something or other behind in
the village and it exploded.

"Philip."


"If I refuse," Diane wrote on the back, "you'll come anyway.  You
always do.  Why write?  Will you contribute enough hay for a cushion?
Johnny's making a new one for Rex."


It was one of the vexing problems of Diane's nomadic life, just how to
treat Mr. Philip Poynter.  It was increasingly difficult to ignore or
quarrel with him--for his memory was too alarmingly porous to cherish a
grudge or resentment.  When a man has had a bump upon his only head,
held Mr. Poynter, things are apt to slip away from him.  Wherefore one
may pardon him if after repeated commands to go home, and certain
frost-bitten truths about officious young men, he somehow forgot and
reappeared in the camp of the enemy in radiant good humor.

Philip presently arrived with a generous layer of hay under his arm and
a flour bag of tomatoes.

"Hello," he called warmly.  "Isn't the sunset bully!  It even woke old
Ras up and he's blinking and grumbling like fury."  Mr. Poynter fell to
chatting pleasantly, meanwhile removing from his clothing certain wisps
of hay.

"You're always getting into hay or getting out of it!" accused Diane.

Philip admitted with regret that this might be so and Diane stared
hopelessly at his immaculate linen.  Heaven alone knew by what
ingenuity Mr. Poynter, handicapped by the peculiar limitations of a
hay-camp, contrived to manage his wardrobe.  What mysterious toilet
paraphernalia lay beneath the hay, what occasional laundry chores Ras
did by brook and river, what purchases Mr. Poynter made in every
village, and finally what an endless trail of shirts and cuffs and
collars lay behind him, doomed, like the cheese and buns, as he
feelingly put it, to one-night stands, only Ras and Philip knew; but
certainly the hay-nomad combined the minimum of effort with the maximum
of efficiency to the marvel of all who beheld him.  Ras's problem was
infinitely simpler.  He never changed.  There was much of the original
load of hay, Philip said, dispersed about his ears and pockets and
fringing the back of his neck.

"Where did you get tomatoes?" inquired Diane at supper.

"Well," said Philip, "I hate to tell you.  I strongly suspect Ras of
spearing 'em with a harpoon he made.  Made it in his sleep, too.  It's
pretty long and he can spear whatever he wants from the wagon seat.
Lord help the rabbits!"  He lazily sprinkled salt upon a large tomato
and bit into it with relish.  "But why should I worry?" he commented
smiling.  "They're mighty good.  Johnny, old top, see if you can rustle
up a loaf of bread to lend me for breakfast, will you?  I'm willing to
trade three cucumbers for it.  And tell Ras when you take his supper
over that there's a herring under the seat for Dick Whittington's
supper.  Tell me," he added humorously to Diane, "just how do you
contrive to remember bread and salt?"

"I don't," said Diane, smiling.  "Johnny does.  Did the storm get you
last night, Philip?"

"It did indeed.  It's the third load of hay we've had this week.  We're
perpetually furling up the tarpaulin or unfurling it or skinning the
mattress or watching the clouds.  I'm a wreck."

"Where have you been all day?"

"Haying!" said Philip promptly.

"Sleeping!" corrected Diane with a critical sniff.

Mr. Poynter fancied they were synonyms.

"Do you know," he added pointedly, "I imagine I'd find ever so much
more romance and adventure about it if I only had some interesting
ailment and a music-mill.  I did think I had a bully cough, but it was
only a wisp of hay in my throat."

Philip's powers of intuition were most fearful.  Diane colored.

"Just what do you mean?" she inquired cautiously.

"Nothing at all," replied Philip with a charming smile.  "I never do.
Why mean anything when words come so easy without?  It has occurred to
me," he added innocently, "that it takes an uncommonly thick-skinned
and unromantic dub to tour about covered with hay.  Fancy sleeping
through this wild and beautiful country when I might be grinding up
lost chords to annoy the populace."

Diane had heard something of this sort before from quite another
source.  Acutely uncomfortable, she changed the subject.  There was
something uncanny in Philip's perfect comprehension of the minstrel's
tactics.

A little later Mr. Poynter produced a green bug mounted eccentrically
upon a bit of birch bark.

"I found a bug," he said guilelessly.  "He was a very nice little bug.
I thought you'd like him."

Diane frowned.  For every flower the minstrel brought, Philip contrived
a ridiculous parallel.

"How many times," she begged hopelessly, "must I tell you that I am not
collecting ridiculous bugs?"

Philip raised expressive eyebrows.

"Dear me!" said he in hurt surprise.  "You do surprise me.  Why, he's
the greenest bug I ever saw and he matches the van.  He's a nomad with
the wild romance of the woodland bounding through him.  I did think I'd
score heavily with him."

Diane discreetly ignored the inference.  Whistling happily, Mr. Poynter
poured the coffee and leaned back against a tree trunk.  Watching him
one might have read in his fine eyes a keener appreciation of nomadic
life--and nomads--than he ever expressed.

There was idyllic peace and quiet in this grove of ancient oaks shot
with the ruddy color of the sunset.  Off in the heavier aisles of
golden gloom already there were slightly bluish shadows of the coming
twilight.  Hungry robins piped excitedly, woodpeckers bored for worms
and flaming orioles flashed by on golden wings.  Black against the sky
the crows were sailing swiftly toward the woodland.

With the twilight and a young moon Philip produced his wildwood pipe
and fell to smoking with a sigh of comfort.

"Philip!" said Diane suddenly.

"Mademoiselle!" said Philip, suspiciously grave and courtly of manner.
The girl glanced at him sharply.

"It annoys me exceedingly," she went on finally, finding his laughing
glance much too bland and friendly to harbor guile, "to have you
trailing after me in a hay-wagon."

"I'll buy me a rumpus machine," said Philip.

"It would bother me to have you trailing after me so persistently in
any guise!" flashed the girl indignantly.

"It must perforce continue to bother you!" regretted Philip.
"Besides," he added absently, "I'm really the Duke of Connecticut in
disguise, touring about for my health, and the therapeutic value of hay
is enormous."

Now why Diane's cheeks should blaze so hotly at this aristocratic claim
of Mr. Poynter's, who may say?  But certainly she glanced with swift
suspicion at her tranquil guest, who met her eyes with supreme good
humor, laughed and fell to whistling softly to himself.  Despite a
certain significant silence in the camp of his lady, Mr. Poynter smoked
most comfortably, puffing forth ingenious smoke-rings which he lazily
sought to string upon his pipestem and busily engaging himself in a
variety of other conspicuously peaceful occupations.  All in all, there
was something so tranquil and soothing in the very sight of him that
Diane unbent in spite of herself.

"If you'd only join a peace tribunal as delegate-at-large," she said,
"you'd eliminate war.  I meant to freeze you into going home.  I do
wish I could stay indignant!"

"Don't," begged Philip humbly.  "I'm so much happier when you're not.

"There _is_ another way of managing me," he said hopefully a little
later.  "I meant to mention it before--"

"What is it?" implored Diane.

"Marry me!"

"Philip!" exclaimed the girl with delicate disdain, "the moon is on
your head--"

"Yes," admitted Philip, "it is.  It does get me.  No denying it.
Doesn't it ever get you?"

"No," said Diane.  "Besides, I never bumped my brain--"

"That could be remedied," hinted Philip, "if you think it would alter
matters--"

Diane was quite sure it would not and later Philip departed for the
hay-camp in the best of spirits.  In the morning Diane found a
conspicuous placard hung upon a tree.  The placard bore a bombastic
ode, most clever in its trenchant satire, entitled--"To a Wild
Mosquito--by One who Knows!"

Since an ill-fated occasion when Mr. Poynter had found a neatly indited
ode to a wild geranium written in a flowing foreign hand, his literary
output had been prodigious.  Dirges, odes, sonnets and elegies
frequently appeared in spectacular places about the camp and as Mr.
Poynter's highly sympathetic nature led him to eulogize the lowlier and
less poetic life of the woodland, the result was frequently of striking
originality.

Convinced that Mr. Poynter's eyes were upon her from the hay-camp,
Diane read the ode with absolute gravity and consigned it to the fire.

The minstrel's attitude toward the hay-nomad might be one of subtle
undermining and shrugging ridicule, but surely with his imperturbable
gift of satire, Mr. Poynter held the cards!

Still another morning Diane found a book at the edge of her camp.

"I am dropping this accidentally as I leave," read the fly leaf in
Philip's scrawl.  "I don't want you to suspect my classic tastes, but
what can I do if you find the book!"

It was a volume of Herodotus in the original Greek!




CHAPTER XXIII

LETTERS

Buckwheat was cut, harvest brooded hazily over the land and the fields
were bright with goldenrod when Diane turned sharply across Virginia to
Kentucky.

"It is already autumn," she wrote to Ann Sherrill.  "The summer has
flown by like a bright-winged bird.  For days now the forests have been
splashed with red and gold.  The orchards are heavy with harvest
apples, the tassels of the corn are dark and rusty, and the dooryards
of the country houses riot gorgeously in scarlet sage and marigold,
asters and gladiolas.  The twilight falls more swiftly now and the
nights are cooler but before the frost sweeps across the land I shall
be in Georgia.

"For all it is autumn elsewhere, here in this wonderful blue grass
land, it is spring again, a second spring.  The autumn sunlight over
the woods and pastures is deeply, richly yellow.  There are meadow
larks and off somewhere the tinkle of a cow bell.  Oh, Ann, how good it
is to be alive!

"Ages ago, in that remote and barbarous past when I lived with a roof
above my head, there were times when every pulse of my body cried and
begged for life--for gypsy life and gypsy wind and the song of the
roaring river!  Now, somehow, I feel that I have lived indeed--so fully
that a wonderful flood tide of peace and happiness flows strongly in my
veins.  I am brown and happy.  Each day I cook and tramp and fish and
swim and sleep--how I sleep with the leaves rustling a lullaby of
infinite peace above me!  Would you believe that I lived for two days
and nights in a mountain cave?  I did indeed, but Johnny was greatly
troubled.  Aunt Agatha stuffed his head with commands.

"The South thrills and calls.  After all, though I was born in the
Adirondacks, I am Southern, every inch of me.  The Westfalls have been
Florida folk since the beginning of time.

"There is an interesting nomad in a picturesque suit of corduroy who
crosses my path from time to time with an eccentric music-machine.
Sometimes I see him gravely organ-grinding for a crowd of youngsters,
sometimes--with an innate courtliness characteristic of him--for a
white-haired couple by a garden gate.  He is wandering about in search
of health.  Oddly, his way lies, too, through Kentucky and Tennessee,
to Florida.  He--and Ann, dear, this confidence of his I must beg you
to respect, as I know you will--is a Hungarian nobleman, picturesquely
disguised because of some political quarrel with his country.  He
writes excellent verse in French and Latin, is a clever linguist, and
has a marvelous fund of knowledge about birds and flowers.  Altogether
he is a cultured, courtly, handsome man whom I have found vastly
entertaining.  Romantic, isn't it?

"A letter to Eadsville, Kentucky, will reach me if you write as soon as
this reaches you.

"Ever yours,

"Diane."


Let him who is more versed in the science of a nomad's mind than I, say
why there was no mention of the hay-camp!

Ann's answer came in course of time to Eadsville.  As Ann talked in
sprightly italics, so was her letter made striking and emphatic by
numberless underlinings.


"How _very_ romantic!" ran a part of it.  "I am _mad_ about your
nobleman!  Isn't it _wonderful_ to have such unique and thrilling
adventures?  I suppose you hung things up on the walls of the cave and
built a delightfully smoky fire and that the Hungarian--_bless_ his
heart!--trimmed his corduroy suit with an ancestral stiletto, and paid
his courtly respects to the beautiful gypsy hermit and fell
_desperately_ in love with her, as well he might.  I would _myself_!

"Diane, I simply _must_ see him!  I'm dying for a new sensation.  Ever
since Baron Tregar's car was stolen from the farm garage and his
handsome secretary _mysteriously_ disappeared (by the way, it's Philip
Poynter--Carl knows him--do you?) and then reappeared with a most
unsatisfactory explanation which didn't in the least explain where he
had been--only to up and disappear again as strangely as before, and
the _very_ next morning--life has been terribly monotonous.  And mother
had a rustic seizure and made us stay at the farm _all_ summer.
Imagine!  Dick's aeroplaned the tops off _all_ the trees!

"_Do_ beg yo

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