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The Place Beyond the Winds

by Harriet T. Comstock · English · Gutenberg #18488 · 497,655 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Place Beyond the Winds

Author: Harriet T. Comstock

Illustrator: Harry Spafford Potter


        
Release date: June 2, 2006 [eBook #18488]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18488

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Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
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[Illustration: "It was a beautiful thing, that dance, grotesque, pagan
and yet divine"]




THE PLACE BEYOND THE WINDS

BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK


_Illustrated by_
HARRY SPAFFORD POTTER

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1914




FOREWORD


The In-Place cannot be found; you must happen upon it! Hidden behind its
rugged red rocks and hemlock-covered hills, it lies waiting for something
to happen. It has its Trading Station, to and from which the Canadian
Indians paddle their canoes--sometimes a dugout--bearing rare, luscious
blue berries invitingly packed in small baskets with their own green
leaves. And to the Station, also, go the hardy natives--good English,
Scotch, or "Mixed"--with their splendid loads of fish.

"White fish go: pickerel come"--but always there is fish through summer
days and winter's ice.

There is a lovely village Green, around which the modest homes cluster
sociably. Poor, plain places they may be, but never dirty nor untidy. And
the children and dogs! Such lovely babies; such human animals. They play
and work together quite naturally and are the truest friends.

A little church, with a queer pointed spire and a beautiful altar,
stands with open doors like a kindly welcome to all. Back of this, and
apologetically placed behind its stockade fence, is the jail.

To have a jail and never need it! What more can be said of a community?
But you are told--if you insist upon it--that the building is preserved
as a warning, and if any one should by chance be forced to occupy it, "he
will have the best the place affords"--for justice is seasoned with mercy
in the In-Place.

If you would know the aristocracy of the hamlet you must leave the
friendly Green and the pleasant water of the Channel, climb the red
rocks, tread the grassy road between the hemlocks and the pines, and find
the farms. For, be it understood, by one's ability to wrench a living
from the soil instead of the water is he known and estimated. To fish is
to gamble; to plant and reap is conservative business.

Dreamer's Rock and One Tree Island, Far Hill Place and Lonely Farm,
safely sheltered they lie, and from them, in obedience to the "Lure of
the States," comes now and again an adventurous soul to make his way, if
so he may; and never was there a braver, truer wanderer than Priscilla of
Lonely Farm. Equipped with a great faith, a straight method of thinking,
and an ideal that never faded from her sight, she, by the help of the
Poor Property Man, found her place and her work awaiting her. Love, she
found, too--love that had to be tested by a man's sense of honour and a
woman's determination, but it survived and found its fulfilment before
the Shrine in the woods beyond Lonely Farm, where, as a little child,
Priscilla had set up her Strange God and given homage to it.

Harriet T. Comstock.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"It was a beautiful thing, that dance, grotesque, pagan and yet divine"
_Frontispiece_

"'And now,' she cried, 'I'll keep my word to you. Here! here! here!' The
bottles went whirling and crashing on the rocks near the roadway"

"'You mean, by this device you will make me marry you! You'll blacken
my name, bar my father's house to me, and then you will be generous
and--marry me?'"

"In one of those marvellous flashes of regained consciousness, the man
upon the bed opened his eyes and looked, first at Travers, then at
Priscilla"

"'It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open
sea'"




The Place Beyond the Winds




CHAPTER I


Priscilla Glenn stood on the little slope leading down from the farmhouse
to the spring at the bottom of the garden, and lifted her head as a young
deer does when it senses something new or dangerous. Suddenly, and
entirely subconsciously, she felt her kinship with life, her relation to
the lovely May day which was more like June than May--and a rare thing
for Kenmore--whose seasons lapsed into each other as calmly and
sluggishly as did all the other happenings in that spot known to the
Canadian Indians as The Place Beyond the Wind--the In-Place.

Across Priscilla's straight, young shoulders lay a yoke from both ends of
which dangled empty tin pails, destined, sooner or later, to be filled
with that peculiarly fine water of which Nathaniel Glenn was so proud.
Nathaniel Glenn never loved things in a human, tender fashion, but he was
proud of many things--proud that he, and his before him, had braved the
hardships of farming among the red, rocky hills of Kenmore instead of
wrenching a livelihood from the water. This capacity for tilling the soil
instead of gambling in fish had made of Glenn, and a few other men, the
real aristocracy of the place. Nathaniel's grandfather, with his wife and
fifteen children, had been the first white settlers of Kenmore. So eager
had the Indians been to have this first Glenn among them that it is said
they offered him any amount of land he chose to select, and Glenn had
taken only so much as would insure him a decent farm and prospects. This
act of restraint had further endeared him to the natives, and no regret
was ever known to follow the advent of the estimable gentleman.

The present Glenn never boasted; he had no need to; the plain statement
of fact was enough to secure his elevated position from mean attack.

Nathaniel had taught himself to read and write--a most unusual thing--and
naturally he was proud of that. He was proud of his stern, bleak religion
that left no doubt in his own mind of his perfect interpretation of
divine will. He was proud of his handsome wife--twenty years younger than
himself. Inwardly he was proud of that, within himself, which had been
capable of securing Theodora where other men had failed. Theodora had
caused him great disappointment, but Nathaniel was a just man and he
could not exactly see that his disappointment was due to any deliberate
or malicious act of Theodora's; it was only when his wife showed weak
tendencies toward making light of the matter that he hardened his heart.

In the face of his great desire and his modest aspirations--Theodora had
borne for him (that was the only way he looked at it) five children--all
girls, when she very well knew a son was the one thing, in the way of
offspring, that he had expected or wanted.

The first child was as dark as a little Indian, "so dark," explained
Nathaniel, "that she would have been welcome in any house on a New Year's
Day." She lasted but a year, and, while she was a regret, she had been
tolerated as an attempt, at least, in the right direction. Then came the
second girl, a soft, pale creature with ways that endeared her to the
mother-heart so tragically that when she died at the age of two Theodora
rebelliously proclaimed that she wanted no other children! This blasphemy
shocked Nathaniel beyond measure, and when, a year later, twin girls were
born on Lonely Farm, he pointed out to his wife that no woman could fly
in the face of the Almighty with impunity and she must now see, in this
double disgrace of sex, her punishment.

Theodora was stricken; but the sad little sisters early escaped the
bondage of life, and the Glenns once again, childless and alone, viewed
the future superstitiously and with awe. Even Nathaniel, hope gone as to
a son, resignedly accepted the fate that seemed to pursue him. Then,
after five years, Priscilla was born, the lustiest and most demanding of
all the children.

"She seems," said Long Jean, the midwife, "to be made of the odds and
ends of all the others. She has the clear, dark skin of the first, the
blue eyes of the second, and the rusty coloured hair and queer features
of the twins."

Between Long Jean and Mary Terhune, midwives, a social rivalry existed.
On account of her Indian taint Long Jean was less sought in aristocratic
circles, but so great had been the need the night when Priscilla made her
appearance, that both women had been summoned, and Long Jean, arriving
first, and, her superior skill being well known, was accepted.

When she announced the birth and sex of the small stranger, Nathaniel,
smoking before the fire in the big, clean, bare, living-room, permitted
himself one reckless defiance:

"Not wanted!" Long Jean made the most of this.

"And his pretty wife at the point of death," she gossiped to Mrs. McAdam
of the White Fish Lodge; "and there is this to say about the child being
a girl: the lure of the States can't touch her, and Nathaniel may have
some one to turn to for care and what not when infirmity overtakes him.
Besides, the lass may be destined for the doing of big things; those
witchy brats often are."

"The lure don't get all the boys," muttered Mary McAdam, cautiously
thinking of her Sandy, aged five, and Tom, a bit older.

"All as amounts to much," Long Jean returned.

And in her heart of hearts Mary McAdam knew this to be true. The time
would come to her, as it had to all Kenmore mothers, when she would have
to acknowledge that by the power of the "lure" were her boys to be
tested.

But Priscilla at Lonely Farm showed a hardened disregard of her state.
She persisted and grew sturdy and lovely in defiance of tradition and
conditions. She was as keen-witted and original as she was independent
and charming. Still Theodora took long before she capitulated, and
Nathaniel never succumbed. Indeed, as years passed he grew to fear and
dislike his young daughter. The little creature, in some subtle way,
seemed to have "found him out"; she became, though he would not admit it,
a materialized conscience to him. She made him doubt himself; she laughed
at him, elfishly and without excuse or explanation.

Once they two, sitting alone before the hearth--Nathaniel in his great
chair, Priscilla in her small one--faced each other fearsomely for a
time; then the child gave the gurgling laugh of inner understanding that
maddened the father.

"What you laughing at?" he muttered, taking the pipe from his mouth.

"You!" Priscilla was only seven then, but large and strong.

"Me? How dare you!"

"You are so funny. If I screw my eyes tight I see two of you."

Then Nathaniel struck her. Not brutally, not maliciously; he wanted
desperately to set himself right by--old-time and honoured methods--force
of authority!

Priscilla sprang from her chair, all the laughter and joyousness gone
from her face. She went close to her father, and leaning toward him as
though to confide the warning to him more directly, said slowly:

"Don't you do that or Cilla will hate you!"

It was as if she meant to impress upon him that past a certain limit he
could not go.

Nathaniel rose in mighty wrath at this, and, white-faced and outraged,
darted toward the rebel, but she escaped him and put the width of the
room and the square deal table between them. Then began the chase that
suddenly sank into a degrading and undignified proceeding. Around and
around the two went, and presently the child began to laugh again as
the element of sport entered in.

So Theodora came upon them, and her deeper understanding of her husband's
face frightened and spurred her to action. In that moment, while she
feared, she loved, as she had never loved before, her small daughter. If
the child was a conscience to her stern father, she was a materialization
of all the suppressed defiance of the mother, and, ignoring consequences,
she ran to Priscilla, gathered her in her arms, and over the little, hot,
panting body, confronted the blazing eyes of her husband.

And Nathaniel had done--nothing; said nothing! In a moment the fury,
outwardly, subsided, but deep in all three hearts new emotions were born
never to die.

After that there was a triangle truce. The years slipped by. Theodora
taught her little daughter to read by a novel method which served the
double purpose of quickening the keen intellect and arousing a
housewifely skill.

The alphabet was learned from the labels on the cans of vegetables and
fruits on Theodora's shelves. There was one line of goods made by a firm,
according to its own telling, high in the favour of "their Majesties So
and So," that was rich in vowels and consonants. When Priscilla found
that by taking innocent looking little letters and stringing them
together like beads she could make words, she was wild with delight, and
when she discovered that she could further take the magic words and by
setting them forth in orderly fashion express her own thoughts or know
another's thoughts, she was happy beyond description.

"Father," she panted at that point, her hands clasped before her, her
dark, blue-eyed face flushing and paling, "will you let me go to Master
Farwell to study with the boys?"

Nathaniel eyed her from the top step of the porch; "with the boys" had
been fatal to the child's request.

"No," he said firmly, the old light of antagonism glinting suddenly under
his brow, "girls don't need learning past what their mothers can give
them."

"I--do! I'm willing to suffer and _die_, but I do want to know things."
She was an intense atom, and from the first thought true and straight.

A sharp memory was in her mind and it lent fervour to her words. It
related to the episode of the small, fat mustard jar which always graced
the middle of the dining table. They had once told her that the contents
of the jar "were not for little girls."

They had been mistaken. She had investigated, suffered, and learned!
Well, she was ready to suffer--but learn she must!

Nathaniel shook his head and set forth his scheme of life for her,
briefly and clearly.

"You'll have nothing but woman ways--bad enough you need them--they will
tame and keep you safe. You'll marry early and find your pleasure and
duty in your home."

Priscilla turned without another word, but there was an ugly line between
her eyes.

That night and the next she took the matter before a higher judge,
and fervently, rigidly prayed. On the third night she pronounced
her ultimatum. Kneeling by the tiny gable window of her grim little
bedchamber, her face strained and intense, her big eyes fixed on a red,
pulsing planet above the hemlocks outside, she said:

"Dear God, I'll give you three days to move his stony heart to let me
go to school; if you don't do it by then, I'm going to worship graven
images!"

Priscilla at that time was eight, and three days seemed to her a generous
time limit. But Nathaniel's stony heart did not melt, and at the end of
the three days Priscilla ceased to pray for many and many a year, and
forthwith she proceeded to worship a graven image of her own creation.

A mile up the grassy road, beyond Lonely Farm and on the way toward the
deep woods, was an open space of rich, red rock surrounded by a soft,
feathery fringe of undergrowth and a few well-grown trees. From this spot
one could see the Channel widened out into the Little Bay: the myriad
islands, and, off to the west, the Secret and Fox Portages, beyond which
lay the Great Bay, where the storms raged and the wind--such wind as
Kenmore never knew--howled and tore like a raging fiend!

In this open stretch of trees and rock Priscilla set up her own god. She
had found the bleached skull of a cow in one of her father's pastures;
this gruesome thing mounted upon a forked stick, its empty eye-sockets
and ears filled with twigs and dried grasses, was sufficiently pagan
and horrible to demand an entirely unique form of worship, and this
Priscilla proceeded to evolve. She invented weird words, meaningless but
high-sounding; she propitiated her idol with wild dances and an abandon
of restraint. Before it she had moments of strange silence when, with
wonder-filled eyes, she waited for suggestion and impression by which to
be guided. Very young was she when intuitively she sensed the inner call
that was always so deeply to sway her. Through the years from eight to
fourteen Priscilla worshipped more or less frequently before her secret
shrine. The uncanny ceremony eased many an overstrained hour and did for
the girl what should have been done in a more normal way. The place on
the red rock became her sanctuary. To it she carried her daily task of
sewing and dreamed her long dreams.

The Glenns rarely went to church--the distance was too great--but
Nathaniel, looming high and stern across the table in the bare kitchen,
morning and night, set forth the rigid, unlovely creed of his belief.
This fell upon Priscilla's unheeding ears, but the hours before the
shrine were deeply, tenderly religious, although they were bright and
merry hours.

Of course, during the years, there were the regular Kenmore happenings
that impressed the girl to a greater or lesser degree, but they were like
pictures thrown upon a screen--they came, they went, while her inner
growth was steady and sure.

Two families, one familiar and commonplace, the other more mystical than
anything else, interested Priscilla mightily during her early youth.
Jerry and Michael McAlpin, with little Jerry-Jo, the son of old Jerry,
were vital factors in Kenmore. They occupied the exalted position of
rural expressmen, and distributed, when various things did not interfere,
the occasional freight and mail that survived the careless methods of the
vicinity.

The McAlpin brothers were hard drinkers, but they were most considerate.
When Jerry indulged, Michael remained sober and steady; when Michael fell
before temptation, Jerry pulled himself together in a marvellous way, and
so, as a firm, they had surmounted every inquiry and suspicion of a
relentless government and were welcomed far and wide, not only for their
legitimate business, but for the amount of gossip and scandal they
disbursed along with their load. Jerry-Jo, the son of the older McAlpin,
was four years older than Priscilla and was the only really young
creature who had ever entered her life intimately.

The other family, of whom the girl thought vaguely, as she might have of
a story, were the Travers of the Far Hill Place.

Now it might seem strange to more social minds that people from a distant
city could come summer after summer to the same spot and yet remain
unknown to their nearest neighbours; but Kenmore was not a social
community. It had all the reserve of its English heritage combined with
the suspicion of its Indian taint, and it took strangers hard. Then,
added to this, the Traverses aroused doubt, for no one, especially
Nathaniel Glenn, could account for a certain big, heavy-browed man who
shared the home life of the Hill Place without any apparent right or
position. For Mrs. Travers, Glenn had managed to conjure up a very actual
distrust. She was too good-looking and free-acting to be sound; and her
misshapen and delicate son was, so the severe man concluded, a curse, in
all probability, for past offences. The youth of Kenmore was straight and
hearty, unless--and here Nathaniel recalled his superstitions--dire
vengeance was wreaked on parents through their offspring.

With no better reason than this, and with the stubbornness he mistook for
strength, Glenn would have nothing to do with his neighbours, four miles
back in the woods, and had forbidden the sale of milk and garden stuff to
them.

All this Priscilla had heard, as children do, but she had never seen any
member of the family from the Far Hill Place, and mentally relegated them
to the limbo of the damned under the classification of "them, from the
States." Their name, even, was rarely mentioned, and, while curiosity
often swayed her, temptation had never overruled obedience.

The McAlpins, with all their opportunity and qualifications, found little
about the strangers from which to make talk. The family were reserved,
and Tough Pine, the Indian guide they had impressed into summer service,
was either bought or, from natural inclination, kept himself to himself.

So, until the summer when she was fourteen, Priscilla Glenn knew less
about the Far Hill people than she did about the inhabitants of heaven
and hell, with whom her father was upon such intimate and familiar terms.

Once, when Priscilla was ten, something had occurred which prepared her
for following events. It was a bright morning and the McAlpin boat
stopped at the wharf of Lonely Farm. While old Jerry went to the
farmhouse with a package, Jerry-Jo remained on guard deeply engrossed in
a book he had extracted from a box beneath the seat. He appeared not to
notice Priscilla, who ran down the path to greet him in friendly fashion.

The boy was about fifteen then, and all the bloods of his various
ancestors were warring in his veins. His mother had been a full-blooded
Indian from Wyland Island, had drawn her four dollars every year from the
English Government, and ruled her family with an iron hand; his father
was Scotch-Irish, hot-blooded and jovial; Jerry-Jo was a composite
result. Handsome, moody, with flashes of fun when not crossed, a good
comrade at times, an unforgiving enemy.

He liked Priscilla, but she was his inferior, by sex, and she sorely
needed discipline. He meant to keep her in her place, so he kept on
reading. Priscilla at length, however, attracted his attention.

"Hey-ho, Jerry-Jo!"

"Hullo!"

"Where did you get the book?"

"It's for him up yonder."

And with this Jerry-Jo stood up, turned and twisted his lithe body into
such a grotesque distortion that he was quite awful to look upon, and
left no doubt in the girl's mind as to whom he referred. He brought the
Far Hill people into focus, sharply and suddenly.

"He has miles of books," Jerry-Jo went on, "and a fiddle and pictures and
gewgaws. He plays devil tunes, and he's bewitched!"

This description made the vague boy of the woods real and vital for the
first time in Priscilla's life, and she shuddered. Then Jerry-Jo
generously offered to lend her one of the books until his father came
back, and Priscilla eagerly stepped from stone to stone until she could
reach the volume. Once she had obtained the prize she went back to the
garden and made herself comfortable, wholly forgetting Jerry-Jo and the
world at large.

It was the oddest book she had ever seen. The words were arranged in
charming little rows, and when you read them over and over they sang
themselves into your very heart. They told you, lilting along, of a road
that no one but you ever knew--a road that led in and out through wonders
of beauty and faded at the day's end into your heart's desire. Your
Heart's Desire!

And just then Jerry-Jo cried:

"Hey, there! you, Priscilla, come down with that book."

"Your Heart's Desire!" Priscilla's eyes were misty as she repeated the
words. Indeed, one large, full tear escaped the blue eyes and lay like a
pitiful kiss on the fair page, where there was a broad, generous space
for tears on either side of the lines.

"Hist! Father's coming!"

Then Priscilla stood up and a demon seemed to possess her.

"I'm not going to give it back to you! It's mine!" she cried shrilly.

Jerry-Jo made as if he were about to dash up the path and annihilate her,
but she stayed him by holding the book aloft and calling:

"If you do I'll throw it in the Channel!" She looked equal to it, too,
and Jerry-Jo swore one angry word and stopped short. Then the girl's mood
changed. Quite gently and noiselessly she ran to Jerry-Jo and held the
opened book toward him. His keen eye fell upon the tear-stain, but his
coarser nature wrongly interpreted it.

"You imp!" he cried; "you spat upon it!"

But Priscilla shook her head. "No--it's a tear," she explained; "and, oh!
Jerry-Jo, it is mine--listen!--you cannot take it away from me."

And standing there upon the rock she repeated the words of the poem, her
rich voice rising and falling musically, and poor Jerry-Jo, hypnotized by
that which he could not comprehend, listened open-mouthed.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now, again, it was spring and Priscilla was fourteen. Standing in the
garden path, her yoke across her shoulders, her ears straining at the
sound she heard, the old poem returned to her as it had not for years.
She faltered over the words at the first attempt, but with the second
they rushed vividly to her mind and seemed set to the music of that
"pat-pat-pat" sound on the water. An unaccountable excitement seized
her--that new but thrilling sense of nearness and kinship to life and the
lovely meaning of spring. She was no longer a little girl looking on at
life; she was part of it; and something was going to happen after the
long shut-in winter!

And presently the McAlpin boat came in sight around Lone Tree Island
and in it stood Jerry-Jo quite alone, paddling straight for the
landing-place! For a moment Priscilla hardly knew him. The winter
had worked a wonder upon him. He was almost a man! He had the manners,
too, of his kind--he ignored the girl on the rocks.

But he had seen her; seen her before she had seen him. He had noted
the wonderful change in her, for eighteen is keen about fourteen,
particularly when fourteen is full of promise and belongs, in a
sense, to one.

The short, ugly frock Priscilla wore could not hide the beauty and grace
of her young body--the winter had wiped out forever her awkward length of
limb. Her reddish hair was twisted on the top of her head and made her
look older and more mature. Her uplifted face had the shining radiancy
that was its chief charm, and as Jerry-Jo looked he was moved to
admiration, and for that very reason he assumed indifference and gave
undivided attention to his boat.




CHAPTER II


With skill and grace Jerry-Jo steered his boat to the landing-place at
the foot of the garden. He leaped out and tied the rope to the ring in
the rocks, then he waited for Priscilla to pay homage, but Priscilla was
so absorbed with her own thoughts that she overlooked the expected
tribute of sex to sex. At last Jerry-Jo stood upright, legs wide apart,
hands in pockets, and, with bold, handsome face thrown back, cried:

"Well, there!"

At this Priscilla started, gave a light laugh, and readjusting her yoke,
walked down to the young fellow below.

"It's Jerry-Jo," she said slowly, still held by the change in him; "and
alone!"

"Yes." Jerry-Jo gave a gleaming smile that showed all his strong, white
teeth--long, keen teeth they were, like the fangs of an animal.

"Where are the others?" asked Priscilla.

"Uncle's dead," the boy returned promptly and cheerfully; "dead, and a
good thing. He was getting cranky."

Priscilla started back as if the mention of death on that glorious day
cast a cloud and a shadow.

"And your father, Jerry-Jo, is he, too, dead?"

"No. Dad, he is in jail!"

"In--jail!" Never in her life before had Priscilla known of any one being
in Kenmore jail. The red, wooden house behind its high, stockade fence
was at once the pride and relic of the place. To have a jail and never
use it! What more could be said for the peaceful virtues of a community?

"Yes. Dad's in jail and in jail he will stay, says he, till them as put
him there begs his pardon humble and proper."

Priscilla now dropped the yoke upon the rocks and gave her entire thought
to Jerry-Jo, who, she could see, was bursting with importance and a sense
of the dramatic.

"What did your father do, Jerry-Jo?"

"It was like this: Uncle Michael died and the wake we had for him was the
most splendid you ever saw. Bottles and kegs from the White Fish and
money to pay for all, too! Every one welcome and free to say his say and
drink his fill. I got drunk myself! Long about midnight Big Hornby he
said as how he once licked Uncle Michael, and Dad he cried back that to
blacken a man's name when he was too dead to stand up for it was a dirty
trick, and so it was! Then it was forth and back for a time, with
compliments and what not, and if you please just as Dad sent a bit of a
stool at Big Hornby, who should come in at the door but Mr. Schoolmaster,
him as had no invite and was not wanted! The stool took him full on the
arm and broke it--the arm--and folks took sides, and some one, after a
bit, got Dad from under the pile and tried to make him beg pardon! Beg
pardon at his own wake in his own home, and Schoolmaster taking chances
coming when he was not invited! Umph!"

Jerry-Jo's eyes flashed superbly.

"'I'll go to jail first and be damned,' said Dad, and that put it in the
mind of Big Hornby, and he up and says, 'To jail with him!' And so they
takes Dad, thinking to scare him, and claps him into jail, not even
mending the lock or nailing up the boards. That's three days since, and
yesterday Hornby he comes to Dad and says as how a steamer was in with
mail and freight and who was to carry it around? And Dad says as how I
was a man now and could hold up the honour of the family, says he, and
moreover, says Dad, 'I'll neither eat nor come out till you come to your
senses and beg pardon for mistaking a joke for an insult!'"

Jerry-Jo paused to laugh. Then:

"So here am I with the boatload--there's a box of seeds for your
father--and then I'm off to the Hill Place, for them as stays there has
come, and there are boxes and packages for them as usual."

Jerry-Jo proceeded to extract Mr. Glenn's box from the boat, and
Priscilla, her clear skin flushed with excitement, drew near to examine
the cargo.

"More books!" she gasped. "Oh, Jerry-Jo, do you remember the first book?"

"Do I?" Jerry-Jo had shouldered the box of seeds and now bent upon the
girl a glad, softened look.

"Do I? You was a wild thing then, Priscilla. And I told him about the
slob of a tear and he laughed in his big, queer way, and he said, I
remember well, that by that token the book was more yours than his, and
he wanted me to carry it back, but I knew what was good for you, and I
would not! See here, Priscilla, would you like to have a peek at this?"
And then Jerry-Jo put his burden down, and, returning to the boat, drew
from under the seat a book in a clean separate wrapper and held it out
toward her.

"Oh!" The hands were as eager as of old.

"What will you give for it?" A deep red mounted to the young fellow's
cheeks.

"Anything, Jerry-Jo."

"A--kiss?"

"Yes"--doubtfully; "yes."

The book was in the outstretched hands, the hot kiss lay upon the smooth,
girlish neck, and then they looked at each other.

"It--is _his_ book?"

"No. Yours--I sent for it, myself."

"Oh! Jerry-Jo. And how did you know?"

"I copied it from that one of his."

Priscilla tore the wrappings asunder and saw that the book was a
duplicate of the one over which, long ago, she had loved and wept.

"Thank you, Jerry-Jo," the voice faltered; "but I wish it--had the tear
spot."

"That was _his_ book; this is yours." An angry light flashed in
Jerry-Jo's eyes. He had arranged this surprise with great pains and had
used all his savings.

"But it cannot be the same, Jerry-Jo. Thank you--but----"

"Give us another kiss?" The young fellow begged.

Priscilla drew back and held out the book.

"No." She was ready to relinquish the poems, but she would not buy them.

"Keep the book--it's yours."

Jerry-Jo scowled. And then he shouldered the box and ran up the path.
When he came back Priscilla was gone, and the spring day seemed
commonplace and dull to Jerry-Jo; the adventure was over. Priscilla had
filled her pails and had carried them and the book to the house.
Something had happened to her, also. She was out of tune with the
sunlight and warmth; she wanted to get close to life again and feel, as
she had earlier, the kinship and joy, but the mood had passed.

It was after the dishes of the midday meal were washed that she bethought
her of the old shrine back near the woods. It was many a day since she
had been there--not since the autumn before--and she felt old and
different, but still she had a sudden desire to return to it and try
again the mystic rite she had practised when she was a little girl. It
was like going back to play, to be sure; all the sacredness was gone, but
the interest remained, and her yearning spurred her to her only resource.

At two o'clock Nathaniel was off to a distant field, and Theodora
announced that she must walk to the village for a bit of "erranding." She
wanted Priscilla to join her, thinking it would please the girl, but
Priscilla shook her head and pleaded a weariness that was more mental
than physical. At three o'clock, arrayed in a fresh gown, over which hung
a red cape, Priscilla stole from the house and made her way to the
opening near the woods. As she drew close the power of suggestion
overcame the new sense of age and indifference; the witchery of the place
held her; the old charm reasserted itself; she was being hypnotized by
the Past. Tiptoeing to the niche in the rock she drew away the sheltering
boughs and branches she had placed there one golden September day. The
leaves had been red and yellow then; they were stiff and brown now. The
leering skull confronted her as it had in the past and changed her at
once to the devotee.

Before the dead thing the live, lovely creature bowed gravely. After all,
had not the image, instead of God, answered her first prayer? Nathaniel's
heart had not been softened and school had not been permitted, but there
had been lessons given by the master when she told him of her new god.
How he had laughed, clapping his knees with his long, thin, white hands!
But he had taught her on hillside and woodland path. No one knew this but
themselves and the strange idol!

A rapt look spread over Priscilla's face; the look of the worshipper who
could lose self in a passion. But this was no dread god that demanded
unlovely sacrifice. It was a glad creature that desired laughter, song,
and dance. Priscilla had seen to that. A repetition of her father's creed
would have been unendurable.

"Skib, skib, skibble--de--de--dosh!"

Again the deep and sweeping courtesy and chanting of the weird words. The
final "dosh!" held, in its low, fierce tone, all the significance of
abject adoration. With that "dosh" had the child Priscilla wooed the
favour and recognition of the god. It was a triumph of appeal.

And then the dance began--the wild, fantastic steps full of grace and joy
and the fury and passion of youth. Round and round spun the slight form,
with arms over head or spread wide. The red cape floated, rising and
falling; the uplifted face changed with every moment's flitting thought.
It was a beautiful thing, that dance, grotesque, pagan, and yet divine,
and through it all, panting and pulsing, sounded the strange,
incomprehensible words:

"Skib, skib, skibble--de--de--dosh!"

While the rite was at high tide a young fellow, lying prone under a
clump of trees beyond the open space, looked on, first in amaze mingled
with amusement, and then with delight and admiration. He had never
seen anything at once so heathenish and so exquisite. To one hampered
and restricted as he was in bodily freedom, the absolute grace was
marvellous, but the uncanny words and the girl's apparent seriousness
gave a touch of unreality to the scene. Presently, from sheer inability
to further control himself, the looker-on gave a laugh that rent the
stillness of the afternoon like a cruel shock.

Priscilla, horrified, paused in the midst of a wild whirl and listened,
her eyes dilating, her nostrils twitching. She waited for another burst
that would make her understand.

Having given vent to that one peal of mirth, Richard Travers pulled
himself to a sitting position, and, by so doing, presented his head and
shoulders to the indignant eyes of Priscilla Glenn.

"Oh!" cried she; "how dare you!"

And now Travers got rather painfully upon his feet, and, with fiddle
under one arm and book under the other, came forward into the open and
inclined his uncovered head. He was twenty then, fair and handsome, and
in his gray eyes shone that kindliness that was doomed later on to bring
him so much that was both evil and good.

"I beg your pardon. I did not know I was on sacred ground. I just
happened here, you see, and I could not help the laugh; it was the only
compliment I could pay for anything so lovely--so utterly lovely."

Priscilla melted at once and fear fled. Not for an instant did she
connect this handsome fellow with the crooked wrongdoer of the Hill
Place. Jerry-Jo's long-ago description had been too vivid to be
forgotten, and this stranger was one to charm and win confidence.

"Will you--oh! please do--let me play for you? You dance like a nymph. Do
you know what a nymph is?"

Priscilla shook her head.

"Well, it's the only thing that can dance like you; the only thing that
should ever be allowed to dance in the woods. Come, now, listen sharp,
and as I play, keep step."

Leaning against a strong young hemlock, Dick Travers placed his fiddle
and struck into a giddy, tuneful thing as picturesque as the time and
occasion. With head bent to one side and eyes and lips smiling, Priscilla
listened until something within her caught and responded to the tripping
notes. At first she went cautiously, feeling her way after the enchanted
music, then she gained courage, and the very heart of her danced and
trembled in accord.

"Fine! fine! Now--slower; see it's the nymph stepping this way and that!
Forward, so! Now!"

And then, exhausted and laughing madly, Priscilla sank down upon a rock
near the musician, who, seeing her worn and panting, played on, without
a word, a sweet, sad strain that brought tears to the listener's
eyes--tears of absolute enjoyment and content. She had never heard music
before in all her bleak, colourless life, and Dick Travers was no mean
artist, in his way.

"And now," he said presently, sitting down a few feet from her, "just
tell me who you are and what in the world prompts you to worship, so
adorably, that hideous brute over there?"

Between fourteen and twenty lies a chasm of age and experience that
ensures patronage to one and dependence to the other. Travers felt aged
and protecting, but Priscilla grew impish and perverse; besides, she
always intuitively shielded her real self until she capitulated entirely.
This was a new play, a new comrade, but she must be cautious.

"I--I have no name--he made me!" She nodded toward the grinning skull.
"On bright sunny afternoons in spring, when flowers and green things are
beginning to live, he lets me dance, once in a great while, so that I can
keep alive!"

Priscilla, with this, gave such a beaming and mischievous smile that
Travers was bewitched.

"You----" But he did not put his thought into words; he merely gave smile
for smile, and asked:

"Did he teach you to dance?"

"No. The dance is--is me! That's why he likes me. He's so dead that he
likes to see something that is alive."

"The whole world would adore you could it see you as I just have!"

Then Travers, with the artist's eye, wondered how dark hair could
possibly hold such golden tints, and how such a dark face could make
lovely the blue, richly lashed eyes. He knew she must be from Lonely
Farm--Jerry-Jo used to speak of her; lately he had said nothing, to be
sure, but this certainly must be the child who had once cried over a
book of his. Poor, little, temperamental beggar!

"Come up and deliver!" Travers gave a laugh. "I'm Robin Hood and I want
you to explain yourself. Why do you bow down before that brazen and
evil-looking brute?"

Priscilla hugged her knees in her clasped hands, and said, on the
defence:

"He's the only god that answered my prayer. I tried father's God and--it
didn't work! Then I fixed up this one, and--it did!"

"What was it you wanted?"

"I wanted to learn things! I wanted to go to school. I prayed to have
father's heart softened, but it stayed--rocky. Then I began to worship
this"--the right hand waved toward the bleached and grinning skull--"and
my wish came true. I told the schoolmaster. Do you know Mr. Anton
Farwell?"

"I've heard of him."

"I told him I wanted to learn, and after he got through laughing he said
he'd been sent by my god to teach me all I wanted to know; but of course
he can't do that!"

"Do what?" Travers was fascinated by the child's naïvety.

"Teach me all I want to know. Why, I'm going to suffer and know many
things!"

"Good Lord!" ejaculated Travers; "you won't mind if I laugh?"

"I don't think there's anything to laugh at!" Priscilla held him sternly.
"Have you ever suffered?"

The laugh died from Travers's face.

"Suffered!" he repeated. "Yes! yes!"

"Well, doesn't it pay--when you get what you want and know things?"

"Why, see here, youngster--it does! You've managed to dig out of your
life quite a brilliant philosophy, though I suppose you do not know what
that is. It's holding to your ideal, the thing that seems most worth
while, and forcing everything else into line with that. Now, you see I
had a bad handicap--a clutch on me that made me a weak, sickly fellow,
but through it all I kept my ideal."

Priscilla was listening bravely. She was following this thought as she
had the music; something in her was responding. She did not speak, and
Travers went on talking, more to himself than to her.

"Always before the poor thing I really was, walked the fine thing I would
be. I _thought_ myself straight and strong and clean. Lord! how it hurt
sometimes; but I grew, after a time, into something approaching the ideal
going on before me, thinking high and strong thoughts, forgetting the
meannesses and aches--do you understand?"

This was a fairy story to the listener. Rigid and spellbound she replied:

"Yes. And that's what I've been doing--and nobody knew. I've just been
working hard for that _me_ of _me_ that I always see. I don't care what
I have to suffer, but--" the throbbing words paused--"I'm going to know
what--it is all about!"

"It?" Again Travers was bewildered and bound.

"Yes. Life and me and what we mean. I'm not going to stay here; when the
lure of the States gets me I'm--going!"

Things were getting too tense, and Travers yielded to a nervous impulse
to laugh again. This brought a frown to Priscilla's brow.

"Forgive me!" he pleaded. "And now see here, little pagan, let us make
a compact. Let us keep our ideals; don't let anything take them from us.
Is it a go?"

He stretched his hand out, and the small, brown one lay frankly in it.

"And we'll come here and--and worship before that fiend, just you and I?
And we won't ever tell?"

Priscilla nodded.

"And now will you dance once more, just once?"

The girl bounded from the rock, and before the bow struck the strings she
was poised and ready. Then it was on again, that strange, wild game. The
notes rang clear and true, and as true tripped the twinkling feet. With
head bent and eyes riveted on the graceful form, Travers urged her on by
word and laugh, and he did not heed a shadow which fell across the
sunlighted, open space, until Priscilla stopped short, and a deep voice
trembling with emotion roared one word:

"You!"

There stood Nathaniel Glenn, his face twitching with anger and something
akin to fear. How much he had heard no one could tell, but he had heard
and seen enough to arouse alarm and suspicion. In his hand was a long
lash whip, and, as Priscilla did not move, he raised it aloft and sent it
snapping around the rigid figure.

It did not touch her, but the act called forth all the resentment and
fierce indignation of the young fellow who looked on.

"Stop!" he shouted. Then, because he sought for words to comfort and
could think of no others, he said to Priscilla, "Don't let them kill your
ideal; hold to it in spite of everything!"

"Yes," the words came slowly, defiantly, "I'm going to!"

"Go!" Nathaniel was losing control. "Go--you!"

Then, as if waking from sleep, the girl turned, and with no backward
look, went her way, Nathaniel following.

Travers, exhausted from the excitement, stretched himself once more upon
the mossy spot from which Priscilla had roused him. He was sensitive to
every impression and quivering in every nerve.

What he had witnessed turned him ill with loathing and contempt.
Brutality in any form was horrible to him, and the thought of the pretty,
spiritual child under the control of the coarse, stern man was almost
more than he could bear. Then memory added fuel to the present. It was
that man who had conjured up some kind of opposition to his mother--had
made living problems harder for her until she had won the confidence of
others. The man must be, Travers concluded, a fanatic and an ignoramus,
and to think of him holding power over that sprite of the woods!

He could not quite see how he might help the girl, but, lying there, her
dancing image flitting before his pitying eyes, he meant to outwit the
rough father in some way, and bring into the child's life a bit of
brightness. Then he smiled and his easy good nature returned.

"I'll get her to dance for me, never fear! I'll teach her to love music,
and I'll tell her stories. I must get her to explain about the lure of
the States. What on earth could the little beggar have meant? It sounded
as if she thought America had some sinister clutch on the Dominion. And
those infernal-sounding words!"

Travers shook with laughter. "That '_dosh_' was about the most
blasphemous thing I ever listened to. In a short space of time that child
managed to cram in more new ideas, words, and acts than any one I've ever
met before. I shouldn't wonder if she proves a character."




CHAPTER III


The day of warmth and song and dance changed to a cool evening. There was
a glowing sunset which faded into a clear, starry night.

Dick Travers, encased in a heavy sweater, lingered, after the light
failed, on the broad piazza facing the still purpled sky, and looked out
toward the Georgian Bay, which was hidden from sight by the ridge of hill
through which the Fox and Secret Portages cut. The mood of the afternoon
had fallen, as had the day, into calmness and restfulness. The fiddle,
which was never far from Travers, lay now beside him on the deep porch
swing, and every few moments he took it up and began an air that broke
off almost at once, either to run into another, or into silence.

"Choppy," muttered Doctor Ledyard as he sat across the hearth from his
hostess and looked now at her fair, tranquil face and then at the
cheerful fire of hemlock boughs.

"He's always happiest when he's--choppy." Helen Travers smiled. "I wonder
why I take your words as I take your pills, without question?"

"You know what's good for you."

"And so you really think there is no doubt about Dick? He can enter
college this fall?"

"As sure as any man can be. He'll always be a trifle lame probably,
though that will be less noticeable when he learns to forget the cane and
crutch periods; as for his health--it's ripping, for him!"

"How wonderful you have been; what a miracle you have performed. When I
recall----"

"Don't, Helen! It's poor business retracing a hard road unless you go
back to pick something up."

"That's why--I must go back. Doctor Ledyard, I must tell you something!
Now that Dick's semi-exile and mine are to end in the common highway, he
and--you must know why I have done many things--will you listen?"

From under Ledyard's shaggy brows his keen eyes flashed. There had been
a time when he had hoped Helen Travers would love him; he had loved
her since her husband's death, but he had never spoken, for he knew
intuitively that to do so would be to risk the only thing of which he
was, then, sure--her trusting friendship. He had not dared put that to
the test even for the greater hope. That was why he had been able to
share her lonely life in the Canadian wilds--she had never been disturbed
by a doubt of him. And this comradeship, safe and assured, was the one
luxury he permitted himself in a world where he was looked upon as a
hard, an almost cruel, man.

"I do not want you to tell anything in order to explain your actions
now, or ever. I am confident that under all circumstances you would act
wisely. You are the most normal woman I ever knew."

"Thank you. But I still must speak--more for Dick than for you. I need
your help for him."

Outside, the fiddle was repeating again and again a nocturne that Helen
particularly loved.

"Dick is not--my son!" she said quickly and softly from out the shadows.
She was rarely abrupt, and her words startled Ledyard into alertness. He
got up and drew his chair close to hers.

"What did you say?" he whispered, keeping his eyes upon her lowered face.

"I said--Dick is not my son."

"And--whose is he--may I ask?"

There was a tenseness in the question. Now that he saw the gravity of the
confession Ledyard wished beyond all else to cut quick and deep and then
bind up the wound.

"He is the child of--my husband, and--another woman."

In the hush that followed, Dick's fiddle, running now through a delicious
strain of melody, seemed like a current bearing them on.

"Perhaps you had better--tell me," Ledyard was saying, and his words
blended strangely with the tune. "Yes, I am sure you ought to tell me."

Helen Travers, sitting in her low wicker chair, did not move. Her
delicate face was resting on the tips of her clasped hands, and her long,
loose, white gown seemed to gather and hold the red glow of the fire.

"I suppose I have done Dick a bitter wrong, but at first, you know, even
you thought he could not live and so it would not have mattered, and then
I--I learned to love the helpless little chap as women of my sort do who
have to make their own lives as best they may. He clung to me so
desparately, and, you see, as he grew older I either had to accept his
belief in me or--or--take his father from him. They were such close
friends, Dick's father and he! And now--I must lay everything low, and I
am wondering what will come of it all. He is such a strange fellow; our
life apart has left him--well, so different! How will he take it?"

Whatever her own personal sorrow was, Helen Travers made no moan, exacted
no sympathy. She had come alone to the parting of the ways, and she had
thought only for the boy whom she had mothered tenderly and successfully.
Ledyard did not interrupt the gentle flow of her thoughts. There was
time; he would not startle or hurry her, although her first statement had
shocked and surprised him beyond measure.

"I've always thought of myself as like one of those poor Asiatic
hornbills," she was saying. "It seems to me that all my life long some
one has walled me up in a nice, safe nest and fed me through my longings
and desires. I cannot get to life first hand. I'm not stupid exactly, but
I am terribly limited." Helen paused, then went on more rapidly: "First
it was my father. He and I travelled after mother's death continually,
and alone. He educated me and interpreted life for me; he was a man of
the world, I suppose, but he managed to keep me most unworldly wise. Of
course I knew, abstractly, the lights and shadows; but I wonder if you
will believe me when I tell you that, until after my marriage, I never
suspected that--that certain codes of honour and dishonour had place in
the lives of those closest to me? The evil of the world was classified
and pigeon-holed for me. I even had ambition to get out of my walled-up
condition and help some mystical people, detached and far from my safe,
clean corner. Father left me more money than was good for any young
woman, and my simple impulse was to use it properly."

"You were very young?" Ledyard interrupted.

Helen Travers shook her head.

"Not very. I was twenty-four when I married. I had never had but one
intimate friend in my life, and to her I went at my father's death. It
was her brother I married--John Travers."

Ledyard nodded his head; he knew of the Traverses--the older generation.

"This thing concerning Dick occurred some three or four years before my
marriage. My wedding was a very quiet one; it was not reported, and that
accounted for Dick's mother--Elizabeth Thornton--not knowing of it.

"It seems that there had been an alliance between John Travers and--and
Dick's mother, and it had been terminated some time before he met me, by
mutual consent. There was the child--Dick. The mother took him. There was
no question of money: there was enough for them, but she had told John
that should anything arise, such as illness or disaster, she would call
upon him. They had sworn that to each other.

"Well, my own baby came a year after my marriage and died a month later.
When I was least able to bear the shock, the call came from Elizabeth
Thornton. John had to tell me. I shall never forget his face as he did
it. I realized that his chief concern was for me, and even in all the
wreck and ruin I could but honour him for his bravery and sincerity. I
think he believed I would understand, but I never did; I never shall. The
shock was more surprise than moral resentment. I could not believe at
first that such a thing could possibly happen to--one of my own. I felt
as if a plague had fallen upon me, and I shrank from every eye, from
every touch with the world.

"Doctor Ledyard, you can understand, I hope, but John Travers was not a
bad man, and that girl, Dick's mother, was good. Yes; that's the only
word to use, strange as it seems to me even after all these years. You
see, she was not a hornbill. She came in touch with life at first hand;
she took from life what she wanted; she had, what were to me, unheard-of
ideas about love and the free gift of self, and yet she never meant to
hurt any one; and she had kept herself, amid all the confusion, the
gentlest and sweetest of souls.

"When she sent for John she was dying and she did not know what to do
about the boy. She had no family--no near friend.

"I went with my husband to see her. There did not seem to be anything
else to do. I had no feeling; it was plain duty. Even with the touch of
death upon her, Elizabeth Thornton was the most beautiful woman I have
ever seen. I cannot describe the sensation she made upon me; but she was
like an innocent, pure child who had played with harmful and soiled toys
but had come wearily to the day's end, herself unsullied.

"When she knew about me she was broken-hearted. She wept and called to
little Dick, who sat in a small chair by her couch:

"'Oh! little son, we could have managed, couldn't we? We would not have
hurt any one for the world, would we, sonny?' And the boy got up and
soothed her as a man might have done, and he was only a little creature.
I think I loved him from the moment I saw him shielding that poor, dying
mother from her own folly. 'Course, mummy, course!' he repeated over and
again. Then he looked at me with the eyes of my own dead baby. Both
children were startlingly like the father. The look pleaded for mercy
from me to them--John, the mother, and the little fellow himself. And I,
who had vaguely meant to help the world some day, began--with them! Just
for a little time after Elizabeth Thornton's death I became human, or
perhaps inhuman. I resented the wrong that had been done me; I wanted to
fling John and the child away from me; but then a sense of power rallied
me. I had never tasted it before. I could cast the helpless pair from me,
or--I could save them from the world and the world's hideous pity for me.
I accepted the burden laid upon me. I think John thought I would forget,
would forgive. I cannot explain--my sort of woman is never understood
by--well, John's sort of man. I am afraid he grew to have a contempt for
me, but I lived on loving them both, but never becoming able to meet
John's hope of me. I knew he was often lonely--I have pitied him
since--but I could not help being what I was.

"I tried, but it was no use. We lived abroad for years, and little Dick
forgot--I am sure he forgot--his mother, and when I felt secure I gave
him all, all the passion and devotion of my life.

"John died abroad; I came home with my crippled boy; came home to--you.
That is all!"

Ledyard bent and laid a handful of boughs upon the fire. The room was
cold and cheerless, and the still, white figure in the chair seemed the
quiet, chill heart of it all. And yet--how she had loved and laboured for
the boy! Was she passionless or had her passion been killed while at
white heat?

"And--and I suppose Dick must know?"

"Yes. Dick must know."

There was no sternness, but there was determination in the strong, even
voice. Then:

"Helen, let me do this for you!"

For a moment the uplifted eyes faltered and fell away from the man's
face. Very faintly the words came:

"God bless you! I could not bear to see--him fail me. If he must--fail,
I cannot see him until--afterward."

The blaze rose higher, and the dark room was a background for that
deathlike form before the hearth.

Ledyard left the room silently, and a moment later Helen Travers heard
his heavy footfall on the porch outside. Presently the erratic violin
playing ceased and there seemed no sound on the face of the earth.

After what seemed hours, Pine, the guide, entered the room to replenish
the fire, and Helen told him he need not light the lamps. After his going
another aching silence followed through which, at last, stole the
consciousness that she was not alone. Some one had come into the room
from a long window opening on the piazza. Helen dared not look, for if it
were Ledyard she would know that things were very bad indeed. Then came
the slightly dragging step that she had learned to be so grateful for
after the helplessness of crippled childhood. Still she did not move, nor
deeply hope. The boy was kind, oh! so tenderly kind, he might only have
come because he must!

The red glow of the fire made the woman's form by the hearth vividly
distinct, and toward that Dick Travers went as if led by a gleam through
a new and strange experience. He knelt by her side and, for a moment,
buried his face against her clasped hands; then he looked up and she saw
only intensified love and trust upon his young face. She waited for him
to speak, her heart was choking her.

"You thought, dear, that I did not know--that I had forgotten? I wonder
if any lonely, burdened little chap could forget--what came before you
lifted the load and taught me to be a--child? Oh! she was so sweet; such
a playfellow. I realize it now even though she has faded into something
like a shadowy dream. But I recall, too, the loneliness; the fear that
she might leave me alone with no one to care for me. I can remember her
fear, too; always the fear that one of us might leave the other alone.
The recollection will always stand out in my memory. I shall never forget
her nor her sweetness. Afterward you came and my father. Only lately have
I understood all of--that part of my life and yours--but I knew he was my
father, and I wondered about you, because I could _not_ forget--my
mother!

"I learned to love you out of my great need and out of yours, too, I
realize now, and slowly, far too early, I saw that the happiest thing I
could do for you, who had given me so much, was to seem to forget and
rest only on one thought--you were my mother! Can I make you understand,
mother, what you are in my life--to-night?"

He kissed the cold hands clutching his hot ones, and with that touch the
barrier broke down forever between them. Travers took her in his arms,
but she did not burden his young strength as the earlier mother had done.
Even in her abandon, they supported each other bravely.

       *       *       *       *       *

The days that followed were busy ones. Dick's tutor came from New York,
plans were laid, and there was small opportunity, just then, for the
red-rock shrine.

"You see," Dick said to Ledyard one afternoon, "I've never voiced it
before--it seemed presumptuous--but now that I'm going to have the life
of a fellow, I can choose a fellow's career. I want, more than anything
else, to be a physician."

Ledyard's eyes flashed, but he lowered his lids.

"It's a devil of a life, boy."

"I think it's the finest of all."

"No hours you can call your own; never daring to ask for the common
things a man cares for. You see, women are mostly too jealous and small
to understand a doctor's demands. They usually raise hell sooner or
later. I had a friend whose wife used to look through the keyhole of his
consulting-room door. A patient tripped over her once and it nearly cost
my friend his practice. Doctors are only half human anyway, and women
can't go halves with their husbands."

Dick laughed.

"Between a wife and a profession," he said, "give me the profession."

"Besides," Ledyard went on; "you get toughened and brutal; most of us
drink, when we don't do something worse."

"You don't."

"How do you know?"

"I do know, and I'm sure you wouldn't let any one else say that about
your associates; they're the noblest ever and you know it!"

"Well, we're bound and gagged, and that's a fact. We're not given much
leeway. We are led up to a case and forced to carry out the rules. While
we're doctors we can't be men."

Dick recalled that years later with a bitter sense of its truth!

"All the same, if the profession will have me, I'll have it and thank
God. When I think of--well, of the little cuss I was, and of you--why,
I tell you, I cannot get too soon into harness. I'd like to specialize,
too. I've even gone so far as that."

"Good Lord! In what?"

"Oh, women and children, principally--putting them straight and strong,
you know."

"Umph," grunted Ledyard. "Well, at the first you'll probably be thankful
to get any old case that needs tinkering."

Dick Travers did not see Priscilla again that summer. After a while he
went to the rocks, and once he laid sacrilegious hands on the strange god
with a longing to smash the hideous skull, but in the end he left it and,
after a time, forgot the girl he had played for, even forgot the
fantastic dance, for his thoughts were of sterner stuff.

There were guests at the Hill Place, too, for the first time that year,
and some entertainment. There were fishing, and in due season, hunting,
at which Ledyard excelled, and the family returned to the States earlier
than usual, owing to Dick's affairs.




CHAPTER IV


Nathaniel Glenn had said some terrible things in Priscilla's presence the
evening of the day when he drove her before him while Richard Travers
implored her to hold to her ideal. Fortunately, youth spared Priscilla
from a full understanding of her father's words, but she caught the drift
of his thought. She was convinced that he feared greatly for her here on
earth, and had grave doubts as to her soul's ultimate salvation. There
was that within her, so he explained, which, unless curbed and corrected,
would cast her into eternal damnation! Those were Nathaniel's words.

"She looked a very devil as she danced and smirked at that strange
fellow," so had Glenn described the scene; "a man she says she had never
laid eyes on before! A daughter of Satan she seemed, with all the
witchcraft of her sort." To Nathaniel, that which he could not
understand, was wrong.

Theodora spoke not a word. Certain facts from all the evidence stood
forth and alarmed her as deeply--though not as bitterly--as they did her
husband. There certainly was a daring and brazenness in a young girl
carrying on so before a total stranger. In all the conversation the name
of the stranger was not mentioned, and oddly enough Priscilla did not
even then connect her friend of the music and laughter with the boy of
the Hill Place. How could she, when Jerry-Jo's description still stood
unchallenged in her mind? Indeed, the stranger did not seem wholly of the
earth, earthy. She had accepted him as another phase evolved by the
mysterious rite--a new revelation of the strange god.

From all the torrent of misinterpretation Nathaniel gave vent to, one
startling impression remained in Priscilla's mind. Sitting in the bare,
unlovely kitchen of the farmhouse, with her troubled parents confronting
her, a great wave of realization overpowered the girl. She could never
make them understand! There was no need to try. She did not really belong
to them, or they to her, and she must--get away!

That was it, of course. The lure had caught her. They all felt as she
was now feeling--the Hornbys, all the boys and men who left Kenmore.
Something always drove them to see they must go, and that was what the
lure meant.

Priscilla laughed.

As usual, this angered Nathaniel beyond control.

"You--laugh--you! Why do you laugh?"

Priscilla leaned back in her hard wooden chair.

"The lure's got me!" she panted.

"The--lure?"

"Yes. It means getting away. You have to follow the lure and find your
true place. Some people are put in the wrong place--then the lure gets
them!"

At this Theodora gave a moan of understanding. They had driven the child
too far, been too hard upon her, and the impulse to fly from the love
that was seeking to hold her was the one thing to be avoided.

"I'm tired of things. Once I wanted to go to school, but you wouldn't let
me." The blazing eyes were fixed upon Nathaniel. "You're always trying
to--to hold me back from--from--my life! I want to go away somewhere!
I want"--a half-sob shook the fierce, young voice--"I want to be part
of--things, and you--you won't let me! I hate this--this place; I'm
choking to death!"

And with this Priscilla got up and flung her arms over her head, while
she ejaculated fiercely: "I want to be--doshed!"

The effect of this outburst upon the two listeners was tremendous.
Theodora recognized with blinding terror that her daughter was no longer
a child! The knowledge was like a stroke that left her paralyzed. What
could she hope to do with, and for, this new, strange creature in whose
young face rising passion and rebellion were suddenly born? Nathaniel was
awed, too, but he managed to utter the command: "Leave the room, hussy!"

When the parents were alone they took stock of the responsibility that
was laid upon them. Helplessly Theodora began to cry. She could no more
cope with this situation than a baby. She had never risen above or beyond
the dead level of Kenmore life, and surely no Kenmore woman had ever
borne so unnatural a child. She feared hopelessly and tremblingly.

With Nathaniel it was different. He was a hard man who had forced
himself, as he had others, along the one grim path, but he had the male's
inheritance of understanding of certain traits and emotions. Had any one
suggested to him that his girl had derived from him--not her colourless
mother--the desire for excitement through the senses, he would have flung
the thought madly from him. Men were men; women were women! Even if
temptation came to a girl, only a bad, an evil-natured girl would
recognize it and succumb. His daughter, Nathaniel firmly believed, was
marked for destruction, and he was frightened and aroused not only for
Priscilla herself but for his reputation and position. He had known
similar temptation; had overcome it. He understood, or thought he did!

He gave the girl no benefit of doubt; his mind conceived things that
never had occurred. He believed she had often met the young fellow from
the Hill Place. God alone knew what had gone before!

"What shall we do?" sobbed Theodora. "We cannot make a prisoner of her;
we cannot watch her every move--and she's only a bit over fourteen!"

Had the girl died that night Nathaniel would not have mourned her, he
would have known only relief and gratitude.

"She was unwelcomed," he muttered to his weeping wife; "and she has
become a curse to us. It lies with us to turn the punishment into our
souls' good; but what can we do for her?"

Priscilla did not die that night. She slept peacefully and happily with
the red, pulsing planet over the hemlock shining faithfully upon her. The
next day she reappeared before her parents with a cloudless face and a
willingness to make such amends as could be brought about without too
much self-abnegation. In the broad light of day the mother could not hold
to the horrors of the evening before. She had been nervous and
overwrought; it wasn't so bad as they had thought!

"I want you to go erranding," she said to Priscilla soon after the midday
meal and by way of propitiation. "It's one by the clock now. Given an
hour to go, another to return, and a half hour for the buying, you should
be back by four at the latest."

Priscilla looked laughingly up at her mother, "Funny, little mother," she
said; "he's made you afraid of me. Hadn't you better tie a string to my
foot?" But all the time the girl was thinking. "An hour for both going
and coming will be enough, and that will leave an hour for the
schoolmaster."

Aloud she said: "I was fiercely angry last night, mother, for he read me
wrong and would not believe me, but it made me feel the _lure_; it really
did."

"You must never speak so again, child," Theodora replied, thinking she
was impressing the girl; "and, Priscilla, what did you mean by saying you
wanted to be--be doshed? That was the most unsanctified word I ever
heard. What does it mean? Where did you learn it?"

At this Priscilla doubled over with laughter but managed to say:

"Why, it means just--doshed! Haven't you ever wanted to be doshed,
mother, when you were young, and before father took the dosh out of
you?"

Theodora was again overcome by former fears, and to confirm her terror
Priscilla sprang toward her with outstretched, gripping fingers and wide,
eager eyes.

"It means," she breathed, advancing upon her mother's retreating form,
"it means skib, skib, skibble--de--de--dosh!"

At this she had her mother by the shoulders and was seeking to kiss the
affrighted and appalled face.

Theodora escaped her, and realized that a changeling had indeed entered
her home. An unknown element was here. It was as if, having been
discovered, Priscilla felt she no longer needed to hide her inner self,
but was giving it full sway.

If they could only have known that the spring of imagination and joy
had been touched in the girl and merely the madness of youth and the
legitimate yearning for expression moved her! But Theodora did not
understand and she tried to be stern.

"You are to be back in this house at four!" she cried; "at quarter after
at the latest."

So Priscilla started forth. The mother watched her from the doorway.
Suspicion was in her heart; she feared the girl would turn toward the
woods; she was prepared for that, but instead, the flying figure made for
the grassy road leading to Kenmore and was soon lost to sight.

Three miles of level road, much of it smooth, moss-covered rock, was
easy travelling for nimble feet and a glad heart. And Priscilla was
the gladdest creature afield that day. Impishly she was enjoying the
sensation she had created. It appealed to her dramatic sense and animal
enjoyment. In some subtle fashion she realized she had balked and
defeated her father--she was rather sorry about her mother--but that
could be remedied later on. There was no doubt that she had the whip hand
of Nathaniel at last, and the subconscious attitude of defiance she
always held toward her father was strengthened by the knowledge that
he was unjustly judging her.

There were many things of interest in Kenmore that only limited time
prevented Priscilla from investigating. She longed to go to the jail and
see if the people had prevailed upon old Jerry McAlpin to discharge
himself. She admired Jerry's spirit!

She wanted to call upon Mrs. Hornby and question her about Jamsie, her
last boy, who had succumbed to the lure of the States. She longed to know
the symptoms of one attacked by the lure. Then there was the White Fish
Lodge--she did so want to visit Mrs. McAdam. The annual menace of taking
Mrs. McAdams' license from her was man's talk just then, and Mrs. McAdam
was so splendid when her rights were threatened. On the village Green
she annually defended her position like a born orator. Priscilla had
heard her once and had never got over her admiration for the little, thin
woman who rallied the men to her support with frantic threats as to her
handling of their rights unless they helped her fight her battle against
a government bent upon taking the living from a "God-be-praised
widow-woman with two sons to support."

It had all been so exactly to Priscilla's dramatic taste that she with
difficulty restrained herself from calling at the White Fish.

There was a good hour to her credit when the erranding was finished and
the time needed for the home run set aside, so to the little cabin, built
beside the schoolhouse, she went with heavily loaded arms and an
astonishingly light heart.

Since the day when Anton Farwell had undertaken Priscilla's
enlightenment, asserting that he had been ordained to do so by her god,
he had had an almost supernatural influence upon her thought. For her,
he was endowed with mystery, and, with the subtle poetry of the lonely
young, she deafened her ears to any normal explanation of the man.

Reaching the cabin, she pushed gently against the door, knowing that if
it opened, Kenmore was free to enter. Farwell was in and, when Priscilla
stood near him, seemed to travel back from a far place before he saw her.
Farwell was an old-young man; he cultivated the appearance of age, but
only the very youthful were deceived. His long, dark hair fell about his
thin face lankly, and it was an easy matter, by dropping his head, to
hide his features completely.

He was tall and, from much stooping over books or the work of his garden,
was round-shouldered. When he looked you fully in the face, which he
rarely did, it was noticed that his eyes were at once childishly friendly
and deathly sad.

The older people of Kenmore had ceased to wonder about him. Having
accepted him, they let matters drop. To the children, to all helpless
animals, he was an enduring solace and power. When all else failed they
looked to him for solution. For this had Priscilla come.

"To be sure!" cried Farwell at length. "It's Priscilla Glenn. Bad child!
It's many a day since we had a lesson. There! there! no excuses. Sit down
and--own up!"

While he was speaking Farwell replenished the wood on the fire and
brushed the ashes from the hearth. Priscilla, in a chair, sat upright and
rather breathlessly wondered how she could manage all she wanted to say
and hear in the small space of time that was hers.

Anton's back was toward her when she uttered her first question and the
words brought him to an upright position, facing her at once.

"Mr. Farwell, where did you come from--I mean before the wreck?"

For a moment the master looked as if about to spring forward to lock the
door and bar the windows. Real alarm was in his eyes.

"Who told you to ask that?" he whispered.

"No one. No one has to tell me questions; I have more of my own than I
can ask. I never thought before about you, Mr. Farwell, we're so used to
you, but now it's because of _me_. I want to know. Somebody has got to
help me--I feel it coming again."

"Feel what coming?" Farwell sat limply down in the chair he had lately
occupied.

"Why, the lure. It comes to the boys, Mr. Farwell. They just get it and
go off to the States, and it's come to me! I've always known it would.
You see, I've got to go away; not just now, but some time. I'm going out
through the Secret Portage. I'm going away, away to find my real place.
I'm going to do something--out where the States are. I hoped you came
from there; could tell me--how to go about it. Do you know, I feel as if
I had been dropped in Kenmore just to rest before I went on!"

Farwell looked at the girl and something new and changed about her
startled him as it had her parents, but, being wiser, he felt no
antagonism. It was an amazing, an interesting thing. The girl had
suddenly developed: that was all. She was eager to try her wings at a
longer flight than any of her sex in Kenmore had ever before dreamed. It
was amusing even if it were serious.

Years before, Farwell had discovered the girl's keen mind and her
quaint originality. As much for his own pleasure as her advantage he
had taught her as he had some of the other village children, erratically,
inconsequently, and here she was now demanding that he fit her out with
a chart for deep-sea sailing.

How could he permit her to harbour, even for an idle moment, the idea of
leaving her shelter and going away? At this the thin, dark face grew
rigid and stern. But too well the man knew the folly of setting up active
opposition to any young thing straining against the door of a cage.
Better open the door even if a string on the leg or a clipped wing had
to be resorted to!

"Did you ever see the States?" The tense voice was imploring.

"Oh, yes. Why do you wish to go there?"

"Why do the boys?"

This was baffling.

"Well, there was Mrs. Hornby's oldest boy, he went to the States, got the
worst of it, and came home to die. He did not find them happy places."

"Yes, but all the other Hornbys went just the same, even Jamsie. It's the
chance, you know, the chance to try what's in you, even if you _do_ come
home and die! You never have a chance in Kenmore; and I don't mean to be
like my mother--like the other women. You see, Mr. Farwell, I'm willing
to suffer, but I _am_ going to know all I want to, and I am going to find
a place where I fit in, if I can."

So small and ignorant did the girl look, yet so determined and keen, that
Farwell grew anxious. Evidently Nathaniel had borne too hard upon her,
borne to the snapping point, and she had, in her wild fashion, caught the
infection of the last going away--Jamsie Hornby's. It was laughable, but
pathetic.

"What could you do?" Farwell leaned forward and gazed into the strange
blue eyes fixed upon him.

"Dance. Have you ever seen me dance? Do you want to?" She was prepared to
prove herself.

"Good Lord! no, no!"

"Oh! I can dance. If some one would play for me--play on--on a fiddle, I
could dance all day and night. Wouldn't people pay for that?"

This was serious business. By some subtle suggestion Priscilla Glenn had
introduced into the bare, cleanly room an atmosphere of danger, a curious
sense of unreality and excitement.

"Yes--they do pay," Farwell said slowly; "but where in heaven's name did
you get such ideas?"

The girl looked impishly saucy. She was making a sensation again and,
while Anton Farwell was not affected as her parents had been, he was
undoubtedly impressed.

"It's this way: You have to sell what you've got until you get something
better. There isn't an earthly thing I can do but dance now; of course I
can learn. Don't you remember the nice story about the old woman who went
to market her eggs for to sell? Master Farwell, I'm like her, and my
dancing is my--egg!"

She was laughing now, this unreasoning, unreasonable girl, and she was
laughing more at Farwell's perplexity than at her own glibness. She must
soon go, her time was growing short, but she was enjoying herself
immensely.

Looking at her, Farwell was suddenly convinced of one overpowering fact:
Priscilla Glenn was destined for--living! Hers was one of those natures
that flash now and then upon a commonplace existence, a strange soul from
an unknown port, never resting until it finds its way back.

"Poor little girl!" whispered Farwell, and then he talked to her.

Would she let him go to her father and mother?

"What's the use?" questioned Priscilla, and she told him of the
experience in the woods. "Father saw only evil when it was the most
beautiful thing that ever happened."

Farwell saw a wider stretch and more danger.

"But I will try, and anyway, Priscilla, if I promise to help you get
ready, will you promise me to do nothing without consulting me?"

This the girl was ready enough to do. She was restless and defiant under
her new emotion, but intuitively she had sought Farwell because he had
before aided her and sympathized with her. Yes, she would confide in him.

That night Farwell called at Lonely Farm. Followed by his two lean, ugly
sledge dogs he made his way to the barn where Nathaniel was doing the
evening's work. While the men talked, the dogs, behind the building,
fought silently and ferociously. Farwell had fed one before he left home
and a bitter jealousy lay between the animals. It was almost more than
one might hope that the master could influence Glenn or change his mind,
but Farwell did bring to bear an argument that, because nothing else
presented itself, swayed the father.

"You cannot get the same results from all children," Farwell said,
looking afar and smiling grimly; "there's no use trying to make an
abnormal child into a normal one. Priscilla is like a wild thing of the
woods. You may tame her, if you go about it right; you'll never be able
to force her. She's kind and affectionate, but she cannot be fettered or
caged, without mischief being done. Better let her think she is having
her own way, or--she may take it!"

"I'll break her will!" muttered Glenn.

"And if you do--what then?"

"She'll fall into line--women do! Their life takes it out of them. Once I
get her on the right track, she'll go straight enough. There's no other
way for her sex, thank God!"

"She'd be a poor, despicable thing if she was cowed." Contempt rang in
Farwell's voice.

"She'd serve her purpose." Glenn was so angry that he became brutal.
"Spirit ain't needed for her job."

"Purpose? Job?" Farwell repeated.

"Yes. Child-bearing; husband-serving. If they take to it naturally
they're all the better off; if they have to be brought to terms--well,
then----"

Gradually the truth dawned upon Farwell, and his thin face flushed, while
in his heart he pitied Theodora Glenn and Priscilla.

"I wish I'd kept to my first ideas!" Glenn was saying surlily, "and never
let the limb learn of you or another. I gave her her head and here we
are!"

"Had she been taught regularly by some one better fitted than I she would
have done great credit to you. She has a bright mind and a vivid
imagination."

To this Glenn made no response, but the energy with which he applied the
brush to his horse caused the animal to rear dangerously.

"Come, come," Farwell continued; "better loosen the rein and let her run
herself out--she may settle happily after a bit. If you don't, she may
run farther than you know."

"Run? Run where?" Nathaniel, safe from the horse's heels, glared at
Farwell.

"To the States. There is no sex line on the border."

"But there's good, plain law. I'd have her back and well cowed, if she
attempted that!"

And then Farwell played his card.

"See here, Mr. Glenn, you do not want to drive this girl of yours to--to
hell! Of course there is law and of course you have the whip hand while
Priscilla is in your clutch, but with a wit like hers, if she slipped
across the border she could lose herself so completely that neither your
hate nor legal power could ever find her. Do you want to drive her to
such lengths?"

Some of the truth of what Farwell was saying dashed Glenn's temper with
fear. Hard and cruel as he was, he was not devoid of affection of a
clammy sort, and for an instant Priscilla as a helpless girl wandering
among strangers replaced Priscilla, the rebellious daughter, and pity
moved him.

"Well, what do you suggest?" he asked grudgingly.

"Simply this: You can trust me. Good Lord you surely can trust me with
her! Let me teach her and bring a little diversion into her life. What
she wants is what all young things want--freedom and fun--pure, simple
fun. Don't let her think you are expecting evil of her; let her alone!"

The extent of Glenn's confusion may be estimated by the fact that he
permitted Priscilla thereafter to go, when she chose, to Kenmore and
learn of Farwell what Farwell chose to give her, and, for the first time
in the girl's life, she felt a glow of appreciation toward her father.

With this new freedom she became happier, less restless, and her
admiration for Farwell knew no bounds.

The schoolmaster managed to procure a violin and laboriously practised
upon it until an almost forgotten gift was somewhat restored. He did not
play as Travers did--he had only his ear to depend upon; he had never
been well taught--but his music sufficed to accompany Priscilla's nimble
feet, and it gave Farwell himself an added interest in his dull life.

"She'll marry Jerry-Jo McAlpin some day," the schoolmaster thought at
times; "and have a brood of half-breeds--no quarter-breeds--and all this
joy and gladness will become a blurred, or blotted-out, background. Good
God!"




CHAPTER V


Mrs. McAdam of the White Fish Lodge came out upon the village Green one
evening in late August and, in a loud voice, hailed Jerry McAlpin:

"I've heard it said," called she, "that you, you Jerry McAlpin, are not
against the taking away of my license; not against the making of Kenmore
a teetotal town!"

There was menace in the high-pitched voice; warning in the accusation.
But Jerry had not taken a drop to drink since his self-releasement from
jail (after an apology from Hornby), and he was uncannily clear headed.

"I've said that same!" he replied, and stopped short in his walk.

Two or three other men, followed by dogs, paused to listen. Then a boat,
coming in loaded with fish, tied up to the wharf, and the crew, leaning
over the sides, waited for developments.

"And for why?" called Mary, hands on hips and her sharp eyes blazing.

"For this: The drink turns us mad! I'm late finding it out, but I've
found it! It sent me to jail with my wits all afire. My boy drank that
night, drank like a young beast, and lay on the floor of the cabin, they
tell me, after I went away; and he only sixteen, and his dead uncle stark
there beside him for company!"

By this time a goodly gathering was on the Green, and Mary was in her
element.

"And so," she said calmly, waxing eloquent as her power grew, "you and
the like of you would take an honest woman's living from her, and she
a God-be-praised widow at that, because you can't control the beast in
yourselves and can't train the cubs of your kennels!"

This was going to great lengths, and many a listener who sided with Mary
was chilled by her offensive words.

"Come! come!" warned Hornby, the father of the recently lured Jamsie,
"them ain't exactly womanly terms, are they?"

But Mary was on her high horse. Availing herself of the safety her sex
secured for her, she struck left and right without grace or favour, and
her audience gaped while they listened.

"Oh, I know! 'Tis this year a dry town with me ruined, and it's next year
a wet town with McAlpin, Hornby, or another creature in trousers taking
my place; and after that there will be no more dry town for ever and
ever! It's not morals you are after, but a man-controlled tavern. Blast
ye!" A sneer marked Mary's thin, dark face. "You want your drinks and
your freedom, but you say you fear for your lads. Shame on you! Have
I no lads?"

Silence.

"Have I not trained them in the way they should go? Do I fear for them?"
A grave silence, and McAlpin glared at Hornby, while an irreverent youth,
with a fish dangling from his hands, laughed and muttered:

"Like gorrems!"

"Play a man's part, Jerry McAlpin. 'Tis not for Jerry-Jo you fear; it's
my business you'd get from me, and you know it! Teach that lad of yours
to be decent, as I've trained mine. I have no fear for my boys! I know
what I'm talking about, and I tell you now, if my lads were like yours
I'd fling the business over, but I don't see why a decent woman, and her
a God-be-praised widow, should lose her living because you can't train
your brats in the way they should go. But this is mine! If you don't
stand by me and swear to do it here and now, it's not another drink one
of you shall get in my place till after things are settled."

This was going farther than Mary McAdam had ever gone before. She had
threatened dire restrictions against them who failed to support her cause
should her cause be won in spite of them; she had even hinted at cash
payments to insure her against want if, possibly, her license was
revoked, but this shutting down upon human rights before election came
off was upsetting to the last degree. Hornby looked at McAlpin and
McAlpin dropped his eyes; there was a muttering and a grumbling, and a
general feeling prevailed that every man should be his own keeper and
the guardian of his own sons, and it would be a bitter wrong against a
God-be-praised widow to let family affairs ruin her business.

In the end Mary McAdam, with a manly following of stern upholders of
individual rights and the opportunity for mutual good fellowship, retired
to the bar of the White Fish and, waited upon by Mary herself and her two
exemplary sons, made merry far into the evening.

Tom and Sandy McAdam, handsome, carefree boys of sixteen and eighteen,
passed the drinks with many a jest and often a wink, but never a drop
drank they, not until the Lodge had closed its doors on all visitors, and
then Tom, the elder, with a final leer at Sandy the younger, drained off
a glass of bad whisky with a grace that betokened long practice.

"Hold, there!" cautioned Sandy, filling a glass of beer for himself;
"you'll not be able to hide it from the mother, you galoot."

"Oh, the night's long before the day breaks, and it's yourself as must
take the turn at house chores the morning."

The following day was cloudy and threatening, and why Mary McAdam should
take that time for suggesting that her boys go over to Wyland Island and
buy their winter suits, she herself could not have told. Perhaps, from
the assurance of last night, she felt freer with money; perhaps she
thought the boys could not be spared so well later; be that as it might,
she insisted, even against Sandy's remark that "a lad couldn't put his
mind to a winter outfit with the sweat rolling down his back," that they
should set forth by eleven o'clock.

"Make a lark of it," said she generously; "take that scapegoat Jerry-Jo
McAlpin with you and have it out with him about being a young beast and
worrying the heart out of old Jerry, who means well but ain't got no kind
of a headpiece. Take your lunch along and----"

Here she pointed her remarks with a lean, commanding finger: "You take
that sail off the launch! It's quiet enough now, but it ain't going to
last forever, and I couldn't rest with three flighty lads in a boat with
a sail _and_ an engine."

Mrs. McAdam always expected to be obeyed. Her personality was such that
she generally was; but always, when disobedience followed, it was hidden
from her immediate attention, and she was never one to show the weakness
of watching to see her orders carried out. That was why she, of all the
people in the little village, did not realize that her boys often drank
more than was good for them--always managed, by clever devices, to escape
her eye.

"A glass of harmless stuff now and again," she would say with a toss of
her head; "what's that but a proof of the lads' self-control? That's what
I'm a-telling you: make your lads strong and self-respecting."

Tom did not take the sail from the boat that day, neither did he expect
to use it. He furled it close and shipped it carefully, but it was late,
and, in the last hurry, he kept his mother's caution in mind, but did not
carry out her command. Then Sandy, when they were about to start, did a
bold thing. Stealing into the bar, he took a bottle of whisky and a
bottle of brandy; these he hid under his reefer, and, with a laugh at his
own cunning, put into the empty places on the shelves two partly filled
bottles, and ran to the wharf.

Mary McAdam waved them a farewell from the steps. She had packed the
hamper and stowed it under the very sail she had ordered off. In the
excitement of preparation she overlooked it entirely.

"You, Sandy, see to it that you buy a suit that you won't repent when the
winter nips you!" she called.

"And you, Tom, get a quiet colour and _no_ checks! When yer last year's
suit shrank and the squares got crooked ye looked like a damaged
checker-board!"

Jerry-Jo McAlpin from his seat in the stern roared with laughter at this,
and just then the sturdy little engine puffed, thudded, and "caught on,"
and off went the three with loud words of good-bye.

The Channel was as smooth as a summer brook, and the launch shot ahead.

"It's a bit chilly," Sandy said as they neared the mouth opening at
Flying Point into the Little Bay.

"Put on your storm coat," cautioned Tom, "and you, too, Jerry-Jo; we'll
get the wind when we pass Dreamer's Rock and strike the Big Bay."

The boys got out their coats and put them on, and then Sandy said:

"See what I've got! Snitched it from under the mother's eye, too!" He
held up the bottles. Tom laughed, but Jerry-Jo reached out for one.

"A nip will ward off the cold better than a coat," he said.

They all three indulged in this preventive.

Beyond Dreamer's Rock the wind fulfilled Tom's prophecy; it was not a
great wind, but it was a steady one, and, perhaps, because the whisky had
warmed Tom's blood too hastily and hotly, he grew reckless.

"What do you say, fellows, to eating our lunch and then trying sail and
engine together? We could beat the record and surprise folks by our time
in coming and going. The wind's safe; not a puff! What do you say?"

Jerry-Jo was something of a coward, but by the time he had eaten his
lunch and washed it down with more whisky than he had meant to take, he
was ready to handle the sail himself and proceeded to do so.

Little Bear Island was the last one before the entrance to Big Bay, and
when the launch passed that, either the wind had changed, or Tom, at the
engine and Jerry-Jo at the sail, had lost nerve and head, for the boat
became unmanageable. Sandy, keeping to the exact middle of the boat,
called to Jerry-Jo to lower the sail, but Jerry-Jo did not hear, or
failed to clearly comprehend. The little craft shot ahead like an arrow,
but Tom knew that when they went about there would be trouble. They were
fully a mile from either rock-bound shore. Wyland Island was a good two
miles before them, and home seven miles to the rear.

A biggish sea was rolling and the sky was clouding threateningly. The
liquor had done its worst for the boys: it had unnerved them, while at
the same time it had given them a mad courage.

"Keep straight ahead," shouted Tom, "until we get near shore, and then
pull in that infernal sail!"

What happened just then Jerry-Jo could never tell, and he alone remained
at the day's end for the telling!

They were in the water, all three of them! For a moment Jerry-Jo,
thoroughly sobered and keener witted than he had ever been before in his
life, believed he was the only one of the party ever again to appear in
that angry sea. Then he saw the over-turned boat, heard the last sobbing
pants of the engine as it filled with water; then Tom's black head and
agonized face appeared; then Sandy's red head. They all made for the boat
and the wide sail lying flat in the water!

They reached the launch, chilled and desperate, climbed upon it, and
gazed helplessly at each other. Through chattering teeth they tried to
speak, but only a moan escaped Tom's blue lips. The wind was colder; the
sun had gone behind a bank of dull storm clouds. After a long while
Sandy, looking over the expanse of ugly choppy waves, shuddered and
panted:

"It's going to be dark soon; it can't be more than a half mile to yonder
rock--I'm for swimming to it! Once on land we can move about, get our
blood going, and perhaps find a sheltered spot--till--morning!"

Tom looked at his brother vaguely; he was suffering keenly:

"Don't be a fool!" he shuddered. Jerry-Jo, huddled in a wet heap, was
sobbing like a baby--gone utterly to pieces.

Another hideous space of silence followed, then Sandy spoke again:

"I'm going to make the try. I'm dying of cold. It's the only chance for
any of us. Here goes!"

And before any one could interfere he made his leap and was in the water,
a bobbing speck among the ugly white caps!

"Good God!"

That was all Tom said, but his crazed eyes were upon that strained,
uplifted face. Jerry-Jo ceased his moaning and--laughed! It was a foolish
cackle, such as a maniac might give, mistaking a death-struggle for a bit
of play.

"He's--a good swimmer!" he gasped, and laughed again. Tom turned, for an
instant, wondering eyes upon him. He may have, in that moment, estimated
his own chance, his duty to Jerry-Jo, and his determination to be with
his brother. The perplexed gaze lasted but the briefest space of time and
then with:

"All right! here goes!" he was making for Sandy with a strength born of
despair and madness.

"Come back!" shrieked Jerry-Jo with the frenzy of one deserted and too
cowardly or helpless to follow: "Come back!"

But neither swimmer heard nor heeded. For a moment more the black and the
red heads bobbed about, the faces turned toward each other grimly. Even
in that waste and at the bitter last the sense of companionship held
their thought. Jerry-Jo, rigid and every sense at last alert in an effort
for self-preservation, saw Sandy smile. It was a wonderful smile: it was
like a flash of sunlight on that black sea; then Sandy's lips moved, but
no one was ever to know what he said, and then--Jerry-Jo was alone in the
coming night and the rolling waves!

"They should," said Mary McAdam, "be home by seven at the latest. The
wind's with them coming back; it was with them part of the way going!"

Anton Farwell sat on the steps of the Lodge, his dogs peacefully lying at
his feet. All day, since hearing of the boys' trip, he had been restless
and anxious. Farwell had his bad hours often, but he rarely permitted
himself companionship at such times, but to-day, after his noon meal, he
had been unable to keep away from the Lodge.

"Fall's setting in early," Mrs. McAdam went on; "pickerel come; whitefish
go. Beasts and fish and birds ken a lot, Mr. Farwell."

"They certainly do. The more you live with dumb creatures, the more you
are impressed with that. Is that Sandy's dog, Mrs. McAdam?"

A yellow, lank dog came sniffing around the side of the house and lay
down, friendly wise, by Farwell.

"Yes, and he's a cute one. Do you believe me, Mr. Farwell, that there
Bounder knows the engine of our boat! Any other boat can come into the
Channel and he don't take any notice, but let my boys be out late and
Bounder, lying asleep on the floor, will start up at the chugging of the
launch and make for the dock. He never makes a mistake."

Farwell laughed and bent over to smooth Bounder's back.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Six-thirty," Mary replied with alarming readiness. "Six-thirty, and the
clock's a bit slow at that."

Farwell felt sure it was a good ten minutes slow; but because of that he
turned the conversation.

"Jerry McAlpin was telling me to-day," he said in his low, pleasant
voice, "of how he and others used to smuggle liquor over the border.
Jerry seems repenting of his past."

Mary laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

"My man and Jerry, with old Michael McAlpin, were the freest of
smugglers. In them days the McAlpins wasn't pestered with feelings; they
was good sports. Jerry marrying that full-breed had it taken out of him
somewhat--she was a hifty one. Them Indians never can get off their high
heels--not the full-breeds. But I tell you, Mr. Farwell, and you take it
for truth, when Jerry begins to maudle about repentance, it's just before
a--debauch. I know the signs."

Just then Bounder raised his head and howled.

"None of that! Off with yer!" shouted Mary, making for the dog with
nervous energy. "Once," she went on, her lips twitching, "my man and
Michael McAlpin had a good one on the officers. They had a big load of
the stuff on the cart and were coming down the road back of the Far Hill
Place when they sensed the custom men in the bushes. What do they do but
cut the traces and lick the horses into a run; then they turned the
barrels loose, jumped off, letting them roll down the hill, and they,
themselves, made for safety. It was only a bit more trouble to go back in
a week's time and gather up the barrels; but those government devils
followed the horses like idiots and felt mighty set up when they overtook
them! But when they saw they had _only_ the horses, oh! good Lord!"

Farwell laughed absently; his eyes were fixed on the water. Even in the
Channel it had an angry look. The current was set from the Bay, and the
stream rose and fell as if it had an ugly secret in its keeping.

"Mrs. McAdam," he said suddenly, "I'm going out to--to meet the boys!"

"God save ye, Mr. Farwell--for which?"

When Mary fell into that form of speech she was either troubled or
infuriated.

"I'm restless; I feel like a fling. Come on, you scamps!" to his dogs,
"get home and keep house till I come back."

His dogs leaped to him and then made for the Green. Without another word
Farwell walked to his launch at the foot of the wharf steps and prepared
for his trip.

A black wave of fear enveloped Mary McAdam. She was overcome by a
certainty of evil, and, when Farwell's boat had disappeared, she strode
to the Green and gave vent to her anxiety. There were those who
comforted, those who jeered, but the men were largely away on fishing
business, and the women and boys were more interested in her excitement
than they were in her cause for fear.

It was eight o'clock and very dark when Doctor Ledyard, driving down
from Far Hill Place for the mail, paused to listen to Mrs. McAdam's
expressions of anxiety. Young Dick Travers was beside him, and Mary's
words held him.

"Was Jerry-Jo with your boys, Mrs. McAdam?" he asked.

"He was that! And Jerry-Jo always brings ill-luck on a trip. I should
have known better than to let the half-breed scamp go. 'Twas pity as
moved me. Jerry-Jo is one as thinks rocking a boat is spirit, and yelling
for help, when no help is needed, a rare joke. The young devil!"

Doctor Ledyard and Dick stayed on after getting the mail. A strange,
tense feeling was growing in the place. Mary's terror was contagious.

"If the men would only come back," moaned the distracted mother; "I'd
send the lot of them out after the young limbs!"

At eight-thirty the storm broke. A dull, thick storm which had used most
of its fury out beyond Flying Point, and in the breast of the sullen wind
came the sound of an engine panting, panting in the darkness that was
shot by flashes of lightning and rent by thunder-claps. Mary McAdam gazed
petrified at Bounder, who had followed her to the Green.

"Why don't yer yelp?" she muttered, giving the dog a kick. But Bounder
blinked indifferently as the coming boat drew near and nearer.

Every boy, woman, and child, with the old men and lazy young ones, were
at the wharf when the launch emerged from the darkness. Some one was
standing up guiding the boat, ready to protect it from violent contact;
some one was huddled on the floor of the boat--some one who made no cry,
did not look up. They two were all! Just then a lurid flash of lightning
seemed to photograph the scene forever on the minds of the onlookers.

Ledyard, with Dick, was close to the boat when it touched the dock. By
the lurid light of electricity the face of the man in the launch rose
sharply against the darkness and for one instant shone as if to attract
attention.

Farwell was known by reputation to the doctor; he had probably been seen
by him many times, but certainly his face had never made an impression
upon him before. But now, in the hour of anguish and excitement, it held
Ledyard's thought to the exclusion of everything else.

"Who? where?" The questions ran through his mind and then, because every
sense was alert, he knew!

"Jerry-Jo!" Dick was calling, "where are the others?"

It was a mad question, but the boy, huddling in the launch, replied
quiveringly:

"Gone! gone to the bottom off Dreamer's Rock."

Then he began to whimper piteously.

A shuddering cry rang out. It was Mary McAdam, who, followed by her dog,
ran wildly, apron over head, toward the White Fish Lodge.

Farwell, casting all reserve aside, worked with Ledyard over the
prostrate Jerry-Jo. The recognition was no shock to him; he had always
known Ledyard; had cleverly kept from his notice heretofore, but now the
one thing he had hoped to escape was upon him, and he grew strangely
indifferent to what lay before.

He obeyed every command of the doctor as they sought to restore Jerry-Jo.
More than once their eyes met and their hands touched, but the contact
did not cause a tremor in either man.

When the inevitable arrives a strength accompanies it. Nature rarely
deserts either friend or foe at the critical moment.




CHAPTER VI


The bay was dragged, various methods being used, but the bodies of Sandy
and Tom McAdam were not recovered. Mary McAdam with strained eyes and
rigid lips waited at the wharf as each party returned, and when at last
hope died in her poor heart, she set about the doing of two things that
she felt must be done.

The behaviour of the boys in the boat on the day of the accident had at
last reached her ears, for, with such excitement prevailing and Jerry-Jo
reduced to periods of nervous babbling as he repeated again and again the
story, Mary was certain of overhearing the details. As far as possible
she verified every word. That her sons had disobeyed her about the sail
there could be no doubt, and when she went to the shelf of the bar and
discovered the half-filled bottles which Sandy had put in the places of
the brandy and whisky, her heart gave up doubt. She relinquished all that
she had prided herself upon in the past. They had defied and deceived
her! They had permitted her to be mocked while she prated of her
superiority! It was bitter hard, but Mary McAdam made no feeble cry--she
prepared for the final act in the little drama. Beyond that she could
not, would not look.

"Dig me two graves," she commanded Big Hornby; "dig them one on either
side of my husband's."

"You'll be thinking the bodies will yet be found, poor soul?" Hornby had
a tender nature kept human by his hunger for his absent boys.

"I'm not thinking. I'm doing my part; let others do the same."

And then Mary went to Anton Farwell. Farwell, since the night of the
tragedy, was waiting, always waiting for the inevitable. Every knock at
his door brought him panting to his feet. He knew Doctor Ledyard would
come; he fervently hoped he would, and soon, but the days dragged on.
There were moments when the man had a wild desire to shoulder his bag and
set forth under shadow of the night and the excitement, for one of his
long absences, this one, however, to terminate as far from Kenmore as
possible. Once he had even started, but at the edge of the water where
his boat lay he halted, deterred by the knowledge that his safer course
lay in facing what he must face sooner or later. Now that he was known to
be alive it were easier to deal with one man than with the pack of
bloodhounds which that one man might set upon him. Always the personal
element entered in--it was weak hope, but the only one. He might win
Ledyard; he could not win the pack!

When Mary McAdam knocked on Farwell's door he thought the time had come,
but the sight of the distracted mother steadied him. Here was something
for him to do, something to carry him away from his lonely forebodings.

"Come in, Mrs. McAdam. Rest yourself. You look sorely in need of rest."

It was the early evening of a hot day. It was lighter out of doors than
in the cottage, for the shades were drawn at Farwell's windows; he
disliked the idea of being watched from without.

"I can't rest, Master Farwell, till I've done my task," said the poor
soul, sinking into the nearest chair. "And it's to get your help I've
come."

"I'll do what I can," murmured Farwell. "What I'll be permitted to do,"
he felt would be more true.

"I've said more than once, Mr. Farwell, that were my boys like other boys
I'd give up the business of the White Fish. Well, my lads were like
others, only they were keener about deceiving me. I thought I'd made them
strong and sure, but I did the same hurt to my flesh and blood that I did
to others. I put evil too close and easy to them. I prided myself on what
I had never done! They'll come back to me no more. Could I have a talk
with them, things might be straightened out; but I must do what is to be
done alone."

Not a quiver shook the low, severe voice. The very hardness moved Farwell
to deep pity.

"It's now, Mr. Farwell, that I'd have you come to the Lodge and help me
with my task, and when it's over I want you to stand with me beside those
two empty graves and say what you can for them who never had the right
mother to teach them. I'm no church woman; the job of priest and minister
sickens me, but I know a good man when I see one. You helped the lads
while they lived; you risked your life to help them home at the last; and
it's you who shall consecrate the empty beds where I'd have my lads lie
if the power were mine!"

Farwell got up and paced the room restlessly. Suddenly, with Ledyard's
recognition, the poor shell of respectability and self-respect which,
during his lonely years, had grown about him, was torn asunder, and he
was what he knew the doctor believed him. To such, Mary McAdam's request
seemed a cruel jest, a taunt to drive him into the open. And yet he knew
that up to the last ditch he must hold to what he had secured for
himself--the trust and friendship of these simple people. Hard and
distasteful as the effort was he dared not turn himself from it. Full
well he knew that Ledyard's magnifying glass was, unseen, being used
against him even now. The delay was probably caused by the doctor's
silent investigation of his recent life, his daily deeds. He could well
imagine the amusement, contempt, and disbelief that would meet the story
of his poor, blameless years during which he had played with children,
worked in his garden, been friends with the common folk, not from any
high motive, but to keep himself from insanity! He had had to use any
material at hand, and it had brought about certain results that Ledyard
would dissect and toss aside, he would never believe! Still the attempt
to live on, as he had lived, must be undertaken. A kind of desperation
overcame him.

What did it matter? He might just as well go on until he was stopped. He
was no safer, no more comfortable, sitting apart waiting for his summons.
He would, as far as in him lay, ignore the menacing thing that hovered
near, and play the part of a man while he might.

"I'm ready to go with you, Mrs. McAdam," he said, turning for his hat,
"and as we go tell me what you are about to do."

It was no easy telling. The mere statement of fact was so crude that
Farwell could not, by any possibility, comprehend the dramatic scene he
was soon to witness and partake of.

"I'm going to keep my word," Mary McAdam explained. "I'll not be waiting
for the license to be given, or taken away, I'll keep my word."

It was a still, breathless night, with a moon nearly full, and as Mrs.
McAdam, accompanied by Farwell, passed over the Green toward the Lodge,
the idlers and loiterers followed after at a respectful distance. Mary
was the centre of attraction just then, and Farwell always commanded
attention, used as the people were to him.

"Come on! come on!" called Mary without turning her head. "Bring others
and behold the sight of your lives. Behold a woman keeping her word when
the need for the keeping is over!"

A growing excitement was rising in Mary's voice; she was nearing the end
of her endurance and was becoming reckless.

By the time the Lodge was reached a goodly crowd was at the steps leading
up to the bar. Jerry McAlpin was there with Jerry-Jo beside him. Hornby,
just come from the digging of the two graves, stood nearby with the scent
of fresh earth clinging to him.

Suddenly Mary McAdam came out of the house, her arms filled with bottles,
while behind her followed Farwell rolling a cask.

What occurred then was so surprising and bewildering that those who
looked on were never able to clearly describe the scene. Standing with
her load, Mary McAdam spoke fierce, hot words. She showed herself no
mercy, asked for no pity. She had dealt in a business that threatened the
souls of men and boys, made harder the lives of women. She had blinded
herself and made herself believe that she and hers were better, stronger
than others, and now----

Mary was magnificent in her abandon and despair. Her words flowed freely,
her eyes flashed.

[Illustration: "'And now,' she cried, 'I'll keep my word to you. Here!
here! here!' The bottles went whirling and crashing on the rocks near the
roadway"]

"And now," she cried, "I'll keep my word to you. Here! here! here!"

The bottles went whirling and crashing on the rocks near the roadway.

"And you, Master Farwell, break open the keg and set the evil thing
free."

This Farwell proceeded to do with energy born of the hour. "And fetch out
all that remains!" shrieked Mary. "Here, you! McAlpin, I'll have none of
your help! Stay in your place; I'd not trust you inside when all's as
free as it is to-night. You have your lad--heaven help you! Keep him and
give him a clean chance. Nor you, Hornby! Out with you! It's a wicked
waste, is it? Better so than what I suffer. Your lads are above ground,
though out of your sight, Hornby, while mine----Here, Master, more! more!
let us water the earth."

The mad scene went on until the last drop of liquor was soaking into the
earth or dripping from the rocks.

White-faced and stern, Farwell carried out the mother's commands and
heeded not the muttered discontent or the approach of the horse and buggy
bearing Doctor Ledyard and Dick Travers. He was one in the drama now and
he played his part.

At the close a dull silence rested on the group, then Mary McAdam made
her appeal. Her voice broke; her hands trembled. She looked aged and
forlorn.

"And now," she said; "who'll come to the graveyard with me?"

She need not have asked. To the last child they followed mutely. They
were overcome by curiosity and fear, and the faces in the dull light of
the late day and early night looked ghostly.

As Farwell stood near Mary McAdam by the newly made graves, he raised
his eyes and found Ledyard's stern, yet amused, ones on his face. For
a moment he quivered, but with the courage of one facing an operation,
the outcome of which he could not know, he returned the look steadily.
He heard his own voice speaking words of helpfulness, words of
memory-haunted scenes. He told of Tom's courage and Sandy's sunshiny
nature. 'Twas youth, he pleaded for them, youth with its blindness and
lack of foresight. He recalled the last dread act as Jerry-Jo had
depicted it. The older brother risking all for the younger. The
smile--Sandy's last bequest--the moving lips that doubtless spoke words
of affection to the only one who could hear them. Together they had
played their pranks, had trod the common path; together they
went--Farwell paused, then returned Ledyard's sneering gaze
defiantly,--"To God who alone can understand and judge!" This was
flung out boldly, recklessly.

With ceremony and the sound of sobbing, the empty graves were refilled,
and the strange company turned away.

Then, alone and spent, Farwell returned to his cottage with a sure sense
that before he slept he would know his fate, for he acknowledged that his
fate lay largely, now, in the hands of the man who no longer had any
doubt of his identity.

It was half-past eight when the buggy passed Farwell's window bound for
the Hill Place. Young Travers was driving and the seat beside him was
empty! Nine o'clock struck; the lights went out in the village, but
Farwell rose and trimmed his lamp carefully. Ten o'clock--all Kenmore,
excepting Mary McAdam, slept. Still Farwell waited while his clock ticked
out the palpitating seconds. The moonlight flooded the Green. Where was
he, that waiting man who was to come and give the blow?

It was nearly eleven when Farwell saw him advancing across the Green. He
had been down by the water, probably hiding in some anchored boat until
he was sure that he would not be seen. As he reached the door of
Farwell's house a clear voice called to him:

"Will you come in, or would you prefer to have me come out?"

This took Ledyard rather at a disadvantage. He could hardly have told
what he expected, but he certainly did not look for this calm acceptance
of him and his errand.

"I'll come in. I see you have a light. Thank you"--for Farwell had
offered a chair near the table--"I hope I'm not disturbing you."

The irony of this was apparently lost upon Farwell. He sat opposite
Ledyard, his arms folded on the table, waiting.

"So you're alive!"

"So it seems--at least partly so." Farwell parried the blows as one does
even when he sees failure at hand.

"Perhaps you know your death was reported some years ago? There was a
full account. You were escaping into Canada. The _La Belle_ was the name
of the boat. It went down near here?"

"Off Bleak Head," Farwell broke in.

"Thanks. There was even a picture of you in the papers," Ledyard said.

"A very poor one, I recall." Now that he was on the dissecting table,
Farwell found himself strangely calm and collected. He saw that his
manner irritated Ledyard; felt that it might ruin his chances, but he
held to it grimly.

"So you saw--the papers?" The eyes under the shaggy brows looked ugly.

"Oh, yes. I had them all sent to me. It was very interesting reading
after I got over the shock of the wreck and had accepted my isolated
position."

"I suppose--Boswell keeps in touch with you--damn him!"

"Do you begrudge me--this one friend?"

"Yes. You have put yourself outside the pale of human companionship and
friendships."

To this Farwell made no rejoinder. Again he waited.

"What do you think I'm going to do about it, now that I've run you down
so unexpectedly?"

"I have supposed you would tell me, once we got together."

"Well, I've come to tell you!"

Ledyard leaned back in his chair and stretched his long legs out before
him.

"But first I'm going to ask you a few questions. Your answers won't
signify much one way or the other, but I'm curious. Why did you make such
a fight--just to live? It must have been a devil of a game."

Farwell leaned against the table and so came nearer to his inquisitor.

"It was," he said quietly, "and I wonder if you can understand why it is
that I'm glad to tell--even you about it? I don't expect sympathy, pity,
or--even justice, but when a man's been on a desert isle for years it's a
relief to speak his own tongue again to any one who can comprehend and
who will listen."

"I'm prepared to listen," Ledyard muttered, and shrugged his heavy
shoulders; "it will pass the time."

"After the thing was done," Farwell plunged in, "the thing I--had to
do--I was dazed; I couldn't think clear. I'd been driven by drink
and--and other things into a state bordering on delirium. Afterward, when
they had me and I was forced to live normally, simply, I began to think
clearly and suffer. God! how I suffered! I faced death with the horror
that only an intelligent person can know. I saw no escape. The trial, the
verdict, brought me closer and closer to the hideous reality. At first
I thought it could _not_ happen to me--to me! But it could! I sat day
in and day out, looking at the electric chair! That was all I could see:
it stood like a symbol of all the torture. I wondered how I would
approach it. Would I falter, or go as most poor devils do--steadily? I
saw myself--afterward--all that was left of me to give back to the world.
Oh! I suffered, I suffered!"

The white, haggard face held Ledyard's fascinated gaze, but drew no word
from him.

Farwell loosened the neck of his shirt--he was stifling, yet feeling
relief as the past dreams of his lonely life formed themselves into
words.

"At night I was haunted by visions," the low, vibrant voice rushed on.
"It was worse at night when semi-unconsciousness made me helpless. I'd
wake up yelling, not with fright, but pain, actual pain--the hot, knifing
pain of an electric current trying to find my heart and brain.

"Then they said I was mad. Well, so I was; and the fight was on! At first
there was a gleam--the chair faded from sight. If I lived--there was
hope; but I was mistaken. You know the rest. The legal struggle, the
escapes and captures. One friend and much money did what they could; it
wasn't much.

"You've seen a cat play with a mouse? The mouse always runs, doesn't it?
Well, so did I, though I didn't know where in God's world I was running,
nor to what."

For some minutes Farwell had been speaking like a man distraught by
fever. He had forgotten the listener across the table; he was remembering
_aloud_ at last, with no fear of consequences. He did not look at
Ledyard, and when he spoke again it was in a calmer tone.

"It was on the last run--that I was supposed to have drowned. Well, I did
die; at least something in me died. I lost breath, consciousness, and
when I came to I was a poor, broken thing not worth turning the hounds
on. I'm done for as far as the past's concerned. I'm a different man--not
a reformed one! God knows I never played that rôle. I'm another man. I
took what I could to keep me from insanity. I had to do something to
occupy my time. That's why I've taught these poor little devils; it
wasn't for them, it was for me; and when they grew to like me and trust
me--I was grateful. Grateful for even that!"

Ledyard was holding the white, drawn face by his merciless eyes. So he
looked when a particularly interesting subject lay under his knife and he
was all surgeon--no man.

"But you're not equal to going back to the States without being hauled
there--and taking your medicine?" he asked calmly.

"No. I suppose in the final analysis all that justice demands is that I
should be put out of the way--out of the way of harming others? Well,
that's accomplished. I don't suppose your infernal ideas of justice claim
that a man should be hounded beyond death, and every chance for right
living be barred from him? If a poor devil ever can expatiate his sin and
try to live a decent life, why shouldn't he be given the opportunity here
and now instead of in some mythical place among creatures of one's
fancy?"

"You didn't argue that way when you shot Charles Martin down, did you? He
was my friend; he had to--take his medicine!" Ledyard almost snarled out
these words. "He may have deserved his punishment for the lapses of his
life--but you were not the one to deal it. His family demand and should
have justice for him--I mean to see that they shall. Martin, for all his
folly was a genius, and gave to the world his toll of service. Why should
you, who gave nothing, escape at his expense?"

"Martin was no better, no worse, than I. He and I lived on the same plane
then; had the same interests. Had I not killed him, he would have killed
me. He swore that."

"But you took him--at a disadvantage, like the damned----" Ledyard
paused; he was losing his self-control. The calm, living face across the
table enraged him.

"I met him in the open; I did not know he was unarmed. I drew my pistol
in full view. A week before he had done the same; I escaped. No one
believed that when I told it at the trial. I had no witnesses; he had
many when I took my revenge."

"Who could believe you? What was your life compared with his?"

"Exactly. Perhaps that is why I--I kept running. Martin only dipped into
such lives as mine was then; he always scurried back to respectability
and honour; I grovelled in the mire and got stuck! When you get stuck you
get what the world calls--justice."

"I recall"--Ledyard's face was hardening--"I recall you always squealed.
You were always the wronged one; society was against you. Bah!"

Farwell sat unmoved under this attack.

"I'm not squealing now," he said quietly; "I am merely defending myself
as I can. That's the prerogative of any human being, isn't it? Why, see
here, Ledyard, there's one thing men like you never comprehend. On the
different stratas of life exactly the same passions, impulses, and
emotions exist; it's the way they're dealt with, how they affect people,
that makes the difference. Up where you live and breathe they love and
hate and take revenge, don't they? That's what happened down where I
wallowed and where Martin sometimes came--to enjoy himself!"

And now Farwell clutched his thin hands on the table to stay their
trembling as he went on:

"I loved--the woman in the case. That sounds strange to you, but it's the
only thing I warn you not to laugh at! I loved her because she was
beautiful, fascinating, and as--as bad as I. I knew the poor creature had
never had half a show. She was born in evil and exploited from the cradle
up. Martin knew it, too, and took advantage. She was fair game for him
and his money. When he came down to hell to play, he played with her and
defied me. But on my plane it was man against man, you see, and when he
flung his plaything aside, she came to me; that's all! She told me how he
had brought her where she was--yes, damn him! when she was innocent! She
paid her toll then, _not_ for his money--though who would believe
that?--but for the chance to be decent and clean. He told her, when
she was only sixteen, that the one way she could prove her vows to him
was to give herself to him. If she trusted him so far, he could trust
her. She trusted, poor child! Two years later he married up on his higher
plane--your plane--and laughingly offered a second best place to her. It
was the only bargain she could make then! The rest was an easy downhill
grade.

"Well, I took her. I was all you say, but I meant to do the right
thing by her, and she knew it! Yes, she knew it, and later he came back
and tried to get her away. After I shot him and went to her with the
story--she told me she'd pull herself together and wait for me
until--until I came for her. She understood!"

Ledyard moistened his lips and set his jaws harshly. The story had not
moved him to pity.

"And--where is she now?" he asked.

"In New York, I suppose. She thinks me dead."

"Boswell tells you that?"

"Yes. And he will never let her know. Unless I----"

"You expect to go back--some day?"

Farwell gave a dry, mirthless laugh at this, and then replied:

"After I've been dead long enough, when I've been good long enough,
perhaps. You know even in a disembodied spirit hope dies hard. Yes--I
_had_ hoped to go back."

"I--I thought so." Ledyard leaned forward and across the table; his face
was not three feet from Farwell's.

"I like to trace diseases down to the last germ," he said. "You're a
disease, Farwell Maxwell, a mighty, ugly, dangerous one. You oughtn't to
be alive; you're a menace while you have breath in your body; you should
have died years ago in payment of your debt, just as Martin did, but you
escaped, and now some one has got to keep an eye on you; see that you
don't skip quarantine. You understand?"

Farwell felt the turning of the screw.

"I'm going to be the eye, Maxwell. You're going to stay right where you
are until you pass off this sphere. Remembering what you once were, your
pastimes and love of luxury, this seems as hellish a place and existence
as even you deserve. When I saw you last night"--and here Ledyard
laughed--"it was all I could do to control myself. You play your part
well; but you always had a knack for theatricals. I know I'm a hard,
unforgiving man, but there is just one phase of human nature that I will
not stand for, and that is the refusal to take the medicine prescribed
for the disease. What incentive have people for better living and upright
thinking if every devil of a fellow who gets through his beastiality is
permitted to come up into the ranks and march shoulder to shoulder with
the best? If it's living you want and will lie for, steal for, and beg
for--have it; but have it here where the chances are all against your old
self. You'll probably never murder any one here or ruin the women; so
grovel on!"

As he listened Farwell seemed to shrink and age. In that hour he
recognized the fact that through all the years of self-imposed exile he
had held to the hope of release in the future: the going back to that
which he had once known. But looking at the hard, set face opposite he
knew that this hope was futile: he must live forever where he was, or, by
departing, bring about him the bloodhounds of justice and vengeance.
Ledyard had but to whistle, he knew, and again the pursuit would be keen,
and in the end--a long blank lay beyond that!

"You will--stay where you are!" Ledyard was saying.

"Surely. I intend to stay right here."

Then Farwell laughed and leaned back in his chair.




CHAPTER VII


Life settled into calm after the storm and subsequent happenings. Mary
McAdam, having done what she felt she must do, grimly set her house in
order and prepared for a new career. The bar, cleansed and altered,
became her private apartment. With the courage and endurance of a martyr
she determined to fight her battle out where there would be the least
encouragement or comfort.

"I'll drink to the dregs," she said to Mary Terhune, who gave up her
profession to share the solitude and fortunes of the White Fish; "but
while I'm drinking there's no crime in serving my kind. Come summer I'll
open my doors to tourists and keep the kind of house a woman--and a
God-bepraised widow one at that--should keep. Time was when the best
would not come to me, the bar being against their liking. Well, the best
may come now and find peace."

"'Tis a changed woman you are, Mrs. McAdam."

"No, just a stricken one, Mary. When I sit by those empty graves back of
the pasture lot I seem to know that I must do the work of my boys as well
as my own--and the time's short! I'm over sixty."

"And looking forty, Mrs. McAdam." The manners of her trade clung to Mrs.
Terhune.

"The shell doesn't count, Mary, if the heart of you is old and worn."

The people from the Far Hill Place returned early to town that year, and
Anton Farwell breathed easier and sunk back into his old life when he
knew they were gone.

In resurrecting the man Farwell once was, Ledyard had all but slain the
man he had, perforce, become.

Whether former characteristics were dead or not, who could tell?
But certainly with temptation removed, with the routine of a bleak,
uninteresting existence his only choice, Farwell was a harmless creature.
Gradually he had found solace in the commonplaces that surrounded
him. Like a person relieved of mortal agony he was grateful for
semi-invalidism. Previous to Ledyard's recognition of him he had sunk to
a monotonous indifference, waiting, he realized now, for the time when he
might safely shake off his disguise and slip away to what was once his
own. Now, with his exit from Kenmore barred, he found that he no longer
could return to his stupor; he was alert, keen, and restless. In the
past he had often forced himself to exercise in order that he might be
ready to journey on when the time of release came. His walks to the
distant town, his long hours on the water, had all been preparations
for the final leave-taking from his living tomb.

But now that he had no need of lashing himself into action, he found
himself always on the move. He worked early and late at trifling tasks
that occupied his hands while sharpening his wits. With shades drawn at
night, he drew, with pencil and paper, plans of escape. He must choose
a calm spell after a storm; he would take his launch, with a rowboat
behind, to the Fox Portage. He'd set his launch free and shoulder his
boat. Once he reached the Little Bay, he'd take his chances for an
outgoing steamer. He'd have plenty of money and a glib story of a bad
connection. It would go. He must defeat Ledyard.

Then he would tear the sheets of paper in bits, toss them on the coals,
and laugh bitterly as he realized that he was imprisoned forever.

Foolish as all this was, it had its effect upon the man. He played with
the thought as a child might play with a forbidden toy. Then he decided
to test the matter. He would have to buy clothes and provisions for the
winter--he always made a pilgrimage about this time. There would be a
letter from Boswell, too. There always was one in September. So on a
certain morning Farwell turned the key in his lock and quite naturally
set forth with a sense of exaltation and freedom he had imagined he would
never feel again.

Followed by his dogs, he went to his boat, which happened just then to be
tied at the ricketty dock of the White Fish.

"It's off for a tramp you are, maybe?" asked Mrs. McAdam from her
doorway. "God keep you, Mr. Farwell, and bring you back safe and sound."

At this Farwell paused.

"I think I'll leave the dogs behind," he said. "I may wish to hurry back,
and a brace of dogs, keen on scents and full of spirits, is a handicap on
a journey."

"Sure I'll feed and care for the two, and welcome, and if their staying
behind brings you quicker home, 'tis a good piece of work I'm doing for
Kenmore."

With this Mary McAdam came down to the boat and looked keenly at Farwell.

"Are you well?" she asked with a gentleness new and touching. "'Tis pale
you look, and thin, I'm thinking. I'm getting to depend upon you, and the
thought of anything happening to you grieves the heart of me. In all
Kenmore there's no one as I lean on like you. There be nights when I look
out toward your house and see your light a-shining when all else is dark,
and say to myself, 'The master and me' over and over, and I'm less
lonely."

For a moment Farwell could not speak. Once an inward desire to laugh,
to scoff, would have driven him to supernatural gravity; now he merely
smiled with grave pleasure, and said:

"A tramp will do me good, Mrs. McAdam. Thank you. I'll take your words
with me for comfort and cheer."

The first night Farwell slept beside his fire, not ten miles from
Kenmore. He had revelled in his freedom all day, had played like a boy,
often retracing his steps, carefully using the same footprints, and
laughing as he imagined the confusion of any one trying to follow him;
the vague somebody being always Ledyard.

After a frugal meal, Farwell smoked his pipe, even attempted a snatch of
rollicking song, then, rolling himself in a blanket, fell into natural
and happy slumber.

At four he awoke with the creeping sensation of unexplainable fear. He
first thought some animal was prowling near, and, raising himself on his
elbow, looked keenly about. The appearance of the fire puzzled him. It
looked as if fresh wood had been laid upon it, but, as no one was in
sight he concluded that his own wood had been damp, and, therefore, had
burned slower.

He did not sleep again, however, and his excited thoughts trailed back to
his past and the one woman who had magically caught and held all the best
that was in him. To what point of vantage had she, poor, disabled little
soul, drifted? The world was a hard enough place for a woman, God knew,
and for her, with her sudden-born determination to rise above the squalor
of her early youth, it would be a serious problem. Boswell told him so
little. He could count on his fingers the few sharp facts his friend had
given him with the promise that if conditions changed he should know, but
if all remained well, he might be secure in his faith and hope for the
future. The future! Was there any future for him except Kenmore? And if
she heard now that he was alive, had only _seemed_ dead for her safety
and his own, would she come to him and share the dun-coloured life of the
In-Place?

She was alive; she was faithful. Boswell was making her comfortable with
Farwell's money. She was accepting less and less because she was winning
her way to independence in an honourable line. Since no man had entered
her life after Farwell's death was reported, Farwell could readily see
why.

Over and over, that first night in the woods, Farwell rehearsed these
facts for comfort's sake. Suppose he made an escape. Suppose he lost
himself in the city's labyrinth--what then?

And then, just at daybreak, a vivid and sharp memory of the woman's face
came to him as he had last seen it pressed against the bars of his cell.
Behind the squares of metal it shone like an angel's. Fair, pitiful,
wonder-filled eyes, and quivering mouth. All day the picture haunted him
and seemed to draw him toward it. He walked twenty miles that day and
came at sunset to a dense jungle where he made his camp and stretched
himself exhaustedly before the fire.

Sleep did not come easily to him; he was too excited and nerve worn. The
white face checked by iron bars would not fade, and in the red glow of
the flames it began to look wan and haggard, as if the day had tired it
and it could find no rest or comfort.

The feeling of suffocation Ledyard had managed to create, returned to
him. He grew nervous, ill at ease, and fearful.

Then he fell to moralizing. He was not often given to that, or
introspection. Longing and alternate hope and despair had been his
comrades and bedfellows, but he rarely indulged in calm consideration.
Smoking his pipe, stretched wearily on the moss, he wondered if men knew
how much they punished while fulfilling their ideals of justice?

"If only the sense of vindictiveness could be left out," he thought; "the
Lord knows they have it all in their power once the key is turned on us.
I deserved all they meant to inflict, but no human being deserves all
that was given unconsciously."

Then Farwell relived his life, while the wood crumbled to ashes and the
moon came up over the hills. A misguided, misspent boyhood; too much
money; too little common sense; then the fling in the open with every
emotion and desire uncurbed. Well, he had to learn his lesson and God
knew he had; but why, in the working of things, shouldn't one be given
a chance to prove the well-learned task; an opportunity, while among the
living, to settle the question?

However, such fancies were idle, and Farwell shook the ashes from his
pipe and gave a humorous shrug.

It would be a fine piece of work to slip from the clutches of the past
and make good! This idea caused him to tremble. Surely no one would look
for him in the camp of the upright. Walking the paths of the clean and
sane he would be more surely secure from detection than anywhere else on
earth. That was what his past had done for him. The truth of this sank
into the lonely man's soul with sickening finality. And as he realized
it, and compared it with the fact of his youth, he groaned. What an
infernal fool he had been! What fools all such fellows were who, like
him, wasted everything in their determination to make the unreal, real.
He did not now desire to be a drivelling repentant; he wanted, God knew
he really wanted, a chance to be decent and live; but in order to live he
must go on acting a part and cringing and hiding.

These thoughts led nowhere and unfitted him for his journey, so he made
the fire safe, lay down beside it, and slept as many a better man would
have given much to sleep.

At four he awoke as on the previous night. So quietly, however, did he
open his eyes that he took by surprise a man crouching by the fire as if
stealing a bit of warmth. Farwell turned over, and the two eyed each
other with wide, penetrating gaze.

Tough Pine, the guide, finding himself discovered, grinned sheepishly; he
was loathing himself for being taken off guard, and muttered:

"Me share fire? me helped keep it."

Farwell raised himself on his elbow, all the light and courage gone from
his face. It was the old story, the dream of freedom and--the prison
bars!

"Where are you going?" he asked, though he knew full well.

"Where--you go? There, Pine go! Pine--good friend and good guide."

They questioned each other no more. Farwell finished his errand in dull
fashion, bought his goods, found a letter, long waiting him, read all the
papers he could lay hands on, and then set his face toward Kenmore. And
that winter he devoted himself as he never had before to the simple
people who were the means of keeping him sane.

Upon this newly restricted and devastated horizon Priscilla Glenn loomed
large and vital. With Nathaniel's loosened rein and Theodora's restored
faith, the girl developed wonderfully. Farwell made no more objection to
her dancing or her flights of fancy. He fiddled for her and fed the flame
of her imagination. She was the sunniest creature he had ever known;
the bleak life of Lonely Farm had spurred her to greater lengths of
self-defence; nothing could daunt her. She had an absorbing curiosity
about life, out and beyond the Kenmore confines; and more to keep his own
memory clear than to satisfy Priscilla, Farwell set himself to the task
of educating the girl in ways that would have appalled Nathaniel and
reduced Theodora again to tears and apprehension.

The bare room of the master's house was the stage upon which were set, in
turn, the scenes of distant city life. Vicariously Priscilla learned the
manners of a "real lady" under the most trying circumstances. Farwell
told her of plays, operas, and, over his deal table, they chatted in
brilliant restaurants. They walked gay streets and stood bewildered
before flashing shop windows. It was all dangerous, but fascinating, and
in the playing of the game Farwell grew old and drawn, while Priscilla
gradually came into her Heart's Desire of delight.

"My Road!" she proudly thought. "My Road!"

The old poem was recalled and was often repeated like a litany, while
life became more and more vital and thrilling with dull Kenmore as a
background and setting.

Just about this time Jerry-Jo took to wearing his Sunday suit on week
days, thus proclaiming his aspirations and awaking the ribald jests of
his particular set.

Mary Terhune, now partner of Mrs. McAdam, took note of Jerry-Jo's
appearance, and, on a certain afternoon in midwinter, when she, Long
Jean, and Mary McAdam sat by the range in the White Fish kitchen, fanned
a lively bit of gossip into flame.

"Trade's a bit poor these days, eh, Jean?"

Jean grunted over her cup of green tea.

"Not so many children born as once was, eh? What you make of it,
Jean--the woman getting heady or--which?"

Mary McAdam broke in.

"What with poverty and the terrors of losing them, there's enough born to
my thinking. Time was when the young 'uns happened; they're thought more
on, these days. Women _should_ have a say. If there's one thing a man
should keep his tongue off it's this matter of families!"

To this outrageous sentiment the listeners replied merely by two audible
gulps of tea, and then Mary Terhune found grace to remark:

"You certainly do talk most wonderful things, Mary McAdam. You be an
ornament to your sex, but only such women as you can grip them audacious
ideas. Let them be sowed broadcast and----"

"Where would me, and such as me, be?" Long Jean muttered, defending her
profession.

Mrs. Terhune tactfully turned the conversation:

"Have you noticed the change in Jerry-Jo McAlpin?" she asked with a
mysterious shake of her head.

"Any change for the better would be welcome," Mrs. McAdam retorted. "Have
another cup, Jean? Strong or weak?"

"Strong. I says often, says I, that unless tea curls your tongue you
might just as well take water. When I'm on duty I keep a pot on the back
of the stove week in and week out; it do brace me powerful."

Mrs. McAdam poured the tea into the outstretched cup and proceeded to
discuss Jerry-Jo.

"Why doesn't the scamp go to the States and find himself instead of
worrying old Jerry's very life out of him--the vampire!"

"He may have it in his mind," soothed Mary Terhune, "but the lad's deep
and far seeing like his Injun mother--beg pardon, Jean, the term's a
compliment, God save me!"

"You've saved your face, Mrs. Terhune. Go on!"

Jean had begun to resent, but the explanation mollified her.

"More tea," she said quietly, "and you might stir the dregs a mite, Mrs.
McAdam; it's plain sinful to let the strength go to waste."

"If I was Theodora Glenn," Mary Terhune went on, monotonously stirring
the cold liquid in her cup, "I'd have my eye on that girl of hers."

And now the ingredients were prepared for the mixing!

"What's Priscilla Glenn got to do with Jerry-Jo McAlpin?" Mrs. McAdam
asked sharply, fixing her little ferret eyes on the speaker.

Long Jean bridled again and interjected:

"And for why not? Young folks is young folks, and there ain't too many
boys for the gels. What with the States and the toll to death, the gels
can't be too particular, not casting my flings at Jerry-Jo, either. He's
a handsome lad and will get a footing some day. Glenn's girl ain't none
too good for him; he'd bring her to her senses. All that dancing and
fiddle-scraping at Master Farwell's is not to my liking. The goings-on
are evil-looking to my mind. The girl always was a parcel of
whim-whams--made up of odds and ends, as it was, of her fore-runners.
What _all_ the children of the Glenns might have been--Priscilla is!"

"So Jerry-Jo's fixed his bold eyes on the girl?" asked Mary McAdam. "It
bodes no good for her. She's a sunny creature and mighty taking in her
ways. I wish her no ill, and I hate to think of Jerry-Jo shadowing her
life till she forgets to dance and sing. For my part, I wish the master
were twenty-five years younger and could play for the lass to dance to
the end of their days."

"And a poor outlook for me!" grumbled Jean humorously. "Another cup of
the tea, Mary Terhune, and make it stronger. I begin to feel the bitter
in my toes."

And while this talk and more like it was permeating Kenmore, Jerry-Jo,
adorned and uncomfortable, did his own thinking and planned his own plans
after the manner of his mixed inheritance. He could not settle to any
task or give heed to any temptation from the States until he had made
Priscilla secure. The girl's age in no wise daunted McAlpin. His eighteen
years were all that were to be considered; he knew what he wanted, what
he meant to have. He could wait, he could bide the fulfillment of his
hopes, but one big, compelling subject at a time was all he could master.

He secretly and furiously objected to the dancing and visits in Farwell's
cottage. He was ashamed to voice this feeling, for Farwell was his friend
and had taught him all he knew, but Farwell's age did not in the least
blind Jerry-Jo to the fact that he was a man, and he did not enjoy seeing
Priscilla so free and easy with any other of the male sex, be he ancient
enough to topple into the grave.

"She'll dance for me--for me!" the young fellow ground his teeth. "I'll
make her forget to prance and grin unless she does it for me. The
master's just training her away from me and putting notions in her head.
I'll take her to the States--maybe her dancing will help us both there.
I don't mean to drudge as Jamsie Hornby does! Better things for me!"

Sex attraction swayed Jerry-Jo madly in those days and he thought it
love, as many a better man had done before him. The blood of his mother
controlled him largely and he wished that he might carry the girl off to
his wigwam, and, at his leisure, with beads and blankets, or other less
tangible methods, win her and conquer her. But present conditions held
the boy in check and compelled him to adopt more modern tactics. He
stole, when he couldn't beg, from his poor father all the money Jerry
wrenched from an occasional day's work. With this he bought books for
Priscilla, vaguely realizing that these would most interest her, but his
selection often made her laugh. Piqued by her indifference, Jerry-Jo
plotted a thing that led, later, to tragic results. Remembering the
favour Priscilla had long ago shown for the book from Far Hill Place, he
decided to utilize the taste of the absent owner, and the owner himself,
for his own ends, not realizing that Priscilla had never connected the
cripple Jerry-Jo had described, with the musician of the magic summer
afternoon that had set her life in new currents.

It was an easy matter to enter the Far Hill Place, and, where one was
not troubled with conscience, a simple thing to select at random, but
with economy, books from the well-filled shelves. These gifts presently
found their way to Priscilla, cunningly disguised as mail packages.
Inadvertently the very book Priscilla had once cried over came to her and
touched her strangely.

"Why should he send me these--send me this?" she asked Jerry-Jo, who had
brought the package to her.

"He always wanted you to have it. I told you that; he remembers, I
suppose, and wants you to have it. He said it was more yours than his."
To test her Jerry-Jo was hiding behind Travers.

"I'd walk a hundred miles over the rock on bare feet to thank him," the
girl replied, her big eyes shining. And with the words there entered into
Jerry-Jo's distorted imagination a concrete and lasting jealousy of poor
Dick Travers, who was innocent of any actual memory of Priscilla Glenn.
Travers at that time was studying as few college men do, always with the
spur of lost years and a big ambition lashing him on.

During that winter the stolen books from the Far Hill Place caused
Priscilla much wonderment and some little embarrassment. She had to keep
them secret owing to her father's sentiment, and, for some reason, she
did not confide in Farwell. This new and unexpected interest in her life
was so foreign to anything with which the master had to do that she felt
no inclination to share it.

"But I cannot understand," she often said to Jerry-Jo. "I'd like to write
to him. Do you think you could find out for me where he is? That he
should even remember me! I would not have him think me so ungrateful as
I must seem."

She and Jerry-Jo were in the path leading to Lonely Farm from Kenmore as
she spoke, and suddenly something the young fellow said brought her to a
sharp standstill.

"Oh! I suppose, after your cutting up in the woods that day he wants to
make you remember him."

This was an outburst that Jerry-Jo permitted himself without forethought.
He was using Travers as an old tribeman might have used torture, to test
his own bravery and endurance, but the effect upon Priscilla was so
startling and unexpected that he fell back bewildered.

"In--the--the--woods?" she gasped.

"Sure. That time your father drove you home."

For a full moment Priscilla stared helplessly, then she began to see
light.

"Do you mean," she gasped, "that he who made me dance--was the boy of the
Hill Place?"

"As if you did not know it!" Jerry-Jo grunted.

"But Jerry-Jo you said he--that boy was a poor, twisted thing, ugly past
all belief, while he who played and laughed that day was like an angel of
light just showing me the way to heaven!"

And now Jerry-Jo's dark face was not pleasant to look upon.

"Can't a twisted thing become straight?" he muttered; "can't a devil trap
himself out like an--an angel?"

"Oh! Jerry-Jo, he who played for me in the woods could never have been
evil. Why, all his life he had been making himself into something big
and fine. He put into words the things I had always thought and dreamed
about--an ideal was what he called it! And to think I never knew! And he
remembered and wanted to be kind! I shall worship him now while I live.
And when he comes back to the Hill Place I will go and thank him, even
if my father should kill me. I shall never be happy until I can explain.
What a stupid he must think me!"

After that the secret became the sacredest thing in Priscilla's life and
the most tormenting in Jerry-Jo's. They were both at ages when such an
occurrence would appeal to a girl's sentimentality and a young man's
hatred.

The family did not return to the Hill Place for many summers, and only
once during the following years did Priscilla's name pass Travers's
lips.

Apropos of something they were talking about he said to Helen Travers: "I
wonder what has become of that little dancing dervish up in Canada? She
wasn't plain, ordinary stuff, but I suppose she'll be knocked into shape.
Maybe that half-breed, Jerry-Jo, will get her when she's been reduced to
his level. There are not girls enough to go around up there, I fancy.
That little thing, though, was too spiritual to be crushed and
remodelled. As she danced that day, her scarlet cape flying out in the
breeze, she looked like a living flame darting up from the red rock.
And those awful words she uttered--poor little pagan! Jerry-Jo told
me afterward what the lure of the States meant: it's a provincial
expression. Mother, if the lure should ever control that girl of Lonely
Farm I wish we might greet her, for safety's sake."

But it was not likely that either of the Traverses for a moment conceived
of the reality of Priscilla leaving the In-Place, and in time even the
memory of her became blurred to Dick by the eternal verities of his
strenuous young life.

Gradually his lameness disappeared until a slight hesitation at times was
all that remained. Five years of college, two abroad--one with Helen, one
with Doctor Ledyard--and then Richard Thornton Travers (Helen had, when
he went to college, insisted for the first time upon the middle name)
hung out his modest sign--it looked brazenly glaring to him--under that
of Thomas R. Ledyard, and nervously awaited the first call upon him. He
was twenty-five when he started life, and Priscilla Glenn, back in
forgotten Kenmore, was nearing nineteen, with Jerry-Jo in hot pursuit
behind her. As to Anton Farwell, there was no doubt about his age now.
Not even the very old called him young, and there was a pathos about him
that attracted the attention of those with whom he had lived so long.

"He looks haunted," Mary Terhune ventured; "he starts at times when one
speaks sudden, real pitiful like. The look of his eyes, too, has the
queer flash of them as sees forward as well as back. Do you mind, Mrs.
McAdam, how 'tis said that them as comes nigh to drowning have a glimpse
on before as well as the picture of all that has past?"

"I've heard the same," nodded Mary McAdam.

"Belike the master remembers and often looks to the end of his journey.
Well, he's been a good harmless sort, as men go. He's kept the children
out of trouble far more than one could expect, and he's been a merciful
creature to humans and beasts. I wonder what he had in his life before he
washed up from the _La Belle_?"

All this seemed to end the discussion.

Mary McAdam was an important personage about that time. The White Fish
Lodge had become famous. Without bar or special privilege of any sort,
the house was patronized by the best class of tourist. Mary was a born
proprietress, and, while she extracted the last penny due her, always
gave full value in return. She and Mary Terhune did the cooking; a bevy
of clean, young Indian girls from Wyland Island served as waitresses and
maids, their quaint, keen reserve was charming, and no better public
house could have been found on the Little or Big Bay.

Priscilla drifted to the Lodge as naturally as a flower turns to the sun.
The easy-going people, the laughter and merriment appealed strongly to
her, and again did she cause Jerry-Jo serious displeasure and arouse her
father's lurking suspicions.

"Watch her! watch her!" was his warning, and Theodora returned to her
fears and tears.




CHAPTER VIII


Anton Farwell had, little by little, accepted the fate of those who,
deprived of many blessings, learn to depend on a few. As the remaining
senses are sharpened by the loss of one, so in this man's life the
cramping process, begun by his own wrongdoing, and prolonged and
completed by other conditions, had the effect of focussing all his power
on the atoms that went to the making up of the daily record of his days.
Had he kept a diary it would have been interesting from its very lack of
large interest. And yet, with all this narrowing down, a certain fineness
and purpose evolved that were both touching and inspiring. He never
complained, not even to himself. After recognizing the power which
Ledyard held in his life, he relinquished the one hope that had held him
to the past. Then, for a year or two, the light of the doctor's contempt,
which had been turned on him, took the zest from the small efforts he had
made for better living and caused him to distrust himself. He saw himself
what he knew Ledyard thought him--a mean, cowardly creature, and yet, in
his better moments, he knew this was not so.

"Men have made friends of mice and insects in prison," he argued; "they
have kept their reason by so doing; why, in heaven's name, shouldn't I
play with these people here and make life possible?"

But try as he might he found his courage failing, and more and more he
dwelt apart and clung to the few--Priscilla Glenn, Mary McAdam, and old
Jerry McAlpin--who regarded him in the light of a priest to whom they
might confess freely.

Then one of Farwell's dogs died and he was genuinely anxious at the
effect this had upon him.

"So this is what I've come to!" he muttered as he buried the poor brute,
while the tears fell from his eyes and the other dog whined dolorously
beside him--"broken hearted over--a mongrel!" But he got another dog!

For a time Farwell vigorously set himself against depending upon
Priscilla Glenn as a support in his narrowing sphere. Many things
threatened such a friendship--Nathaniel, Jerry-Jo, and the girl
herself--for Priscilla, during the first years of Nathaniel's relaxed
severity, was like a bee sipping every flower, and Farwell was not at
all confident that anything he had to give would hold even her passing
interest for long. Then, too, like a many-wounded creature, he dreaded
a new danger, even though for a moment it gave promise of comfort. But
finally Priscilla got her bearings and more and more brought all her
powers to bear upon one ambition.

The childish madness that prompted her to run away from anything that
hurt or angered her, gradually disappeared, and in its place came a staid
determination to seek her fortunes, soon, in some place distant from
Kenmore.

The tourists opened a new vista to her, but many of them, with stupid
ignorance, mistook her position and traditions. She was offered
occupations as cook, maid, or laundress. She had sense of humour enough
to laugh at these, and often wished she dared repeat them for her
father's edification.

"The daughter of the King of Lonely Farm," she said to Farwell one day
with her mocking smile and comical courtesy "is bidden to the service of
Mrs. Flighty High as skivvy. If this comes to the king's ears, 'twill
mean the head of Mrs. Flighty High!"

Farwell joined her in her amusement and felt the charm of her coming
womanhood.

"But there is one up at the Lodge," Priscilla went on more gravely, "who
is not such a wild fool. She has a sick baby, and for two nights she and
I have watched and tended together. She says I have the touch and nature
of the true nurse and she has told me how in the States, and England,
too, they train young girls in this work. She says we Canadians are in
great demand, and the calling is a wonderful one, Master Farwell."

This interested Anton Farwell a good deal and he and Priscilla discussed
it often after the woman who had just broached it had departed. It seemed
such a normal, natural opening for Priscilla if the time really came for
her to go away. The doubt that she would eventually go was slight in
Farwell's heart. He, keener than others, saw the closing-in of
conditions. He was not blind to Jerry-Jo's primitive attempts to attract
the girl's attention, but he was not deceived. When the moment came that
Priscilla recognized the half-breed's real thought, Farwell knew her
quick impulse would, as of old, be to fly away. She was like a wild bird,
he often pondered; she would give to great lengths, flutter close, and
love tenderly, but no restraining or harsh touch could do aught but set
her to flight.

At twenty-three Jerry-Jo surlily and passionately came to the conclusion
that he must in some way capture his prize. Other youths were wearing
gaudy ties and imperilling their Sunday bests; he was letting precious
time slip. Then, too, by Farwell's advice, old Jerry was growing rigid
along financial lines, and at last the _States_ took definite shape in
Jerry-Jo's mind, but he meant to have Priscilla before he heeded the
lure. With all his brazen conceit and daring he intuitively knew that
the girl had never thought of him as he thought of her, and he dared not
awaken her by legitimate means. Quite in keeping with his unrestrained
nature, he plotted, indirectly, to secure what otherwise might escape
him. Fully realizing Nathaniel's attitude toward his daughter, counting
his distorted conceptions and foolish pride, Jerry-Jo began to construct
an obstacle that would shut Priscilla from her father's protection and
cause her to accept what others had to offer--others, being always and
ever, himself!

Once Lonely Farm was closed to the girl, other houses in the serenely
moral In-Place would inevitably slam their doors. The cunning of the
half-breed was diabolic in its sureness. Anton Farwell could not assume
responsibility for Priscilla if all Kenmore turned its back on her, and
in that hour the girl would, of course, come running or crawling--never
dancing--to him, Jerry-Jo!

It was all for her own good, the evil fellow thought.

"I'll be kind to her when I get her. I'm only playing her with the hook
in her mouth."

But Jerry-Jo was scheming without considering the Lure, which never was
long absent from Priscilla's mind at that time.

One early September afternoon Priscilla presented herself at Farwell's
cabin in so startling a manner that she roused the man as nothing
previously in his association with her had ever done.

He was sitting at the west window of his living-room, his back toward the
door leading to the Green. For a wonder, what he was reading had absorbed
him, and he was far and away from the In-Place. He had taken to fine, old
literature lately and had found, to his delight, that his mind was
capable of appreciating it.

    "Wisdom, slow product of laborious years,
  The only fruit that life's cold winter bears,
    Thy sacred seeds in vain in youth we lay,
  By the fierce storm of passion torn away;
  Should some remain in rich, gen'rous soil,
  They long lie hid, and must be raised with toil;
  Faintly they struggle with inclement skies,
  No sooner born than the poor planter dies."

With such word-comfort did Farwell dig, from other's experiences, crude
guidings for himself! And at that moment a stir outside the open door
caused him to turn and confront what, in the excited moment, seemed an
apparition from the past, which, for him, was sealed and barred.

"Good Lord!" he ejaculated under his breath and started to his feet. A
visitor from the Lodge apparently had descended upon him.

"I beg pardon," he said aloud, and then a laugh, familiar and ringing,
brought the colour to his pale, thin face.

The girl came in, threw back the veil from her merry face, and confronted
Farwell.

"Miss Priscilla Glenn, sir! Behold her in the battered finery of the
place she is going to--to grace some day!"

Then Priscilla wheeled about lightly and displayed her gown to Farwell's
astonished eyes.

"Cast-offs," she explained; "the Honourable Mrs. Jones from the States
left them with Mrs. McAlpin for the poor. Just imagine the 'poor'
glinting around in this gay silk gown all frayed at the hem and in holes
under the arms! The hat and veil, too, go with the smart frock; likewise
the scarf of rainbow colours. But, oh! Mr. Farwell, how do I look as a
real lady in my damaged outfit?"

Farwell stared without speaking. He had grown so used to the change in
the girl since the time when he had prevailed upon Glenn to loosen the
rein upon her, that the even stream of their intercourse had been
unruffled. He had passed from teacher to friendly guide, from guide to
good comrade; but here he was suddenly confronting her--man to woman!

All his misfortune and limitations had but erected a shield of age about
him beneath which smouldered dangerously, but unconsciously, all the
forbidden and denied passions and sentiments of a male creature of early
middle life.

In thinking afterward of the shock Priscilla gave him, Farwell was always
glad to remember that his first thought was for her, her danger, her
need.

"I declare!" he exclaimed. "I did not know you, Priscilla Glenn."

His tone had a new ring in it, a vibration of defence--the astonished
male on guard against the attack of a subtle force whose power he could
not estimate.

"And no wonder. I did not know myself when I first saw myself. Do you
know, Mr. Farwell, I never thought about my--my face, much, but it is
really a--very nice face, isn't it? As faces go, I mean?"

"Yes," Farwell returned, looking at her critically and speaking slowly.
"Yes, you are very--beautiful. I had not thought of it before, either."

"Drop me down, now, in the States, Mr. Farwell, and I fancy that with my
looks and my dancing I might--well, go! What do you think?"

She was preening herself before a small mirror and did not notice the
elderly man, who, under her fascination, was being transformed.

"You're a regular Frankenstein," he muttered, while the consciousness
of the blue eyes in the dusky skin, the long slenderness of her body,
and the hue of her strange hair grew upon him. "Do you know what a
Frankenstein is?"

"No." And now Priscilla, weary of her play and self-contemplation, turned
about and took a chair opposite Farwell. "Tell me."

So he told her, but she shook her head.

"You've only helped me to find myself; you did not make me," she said
with a little sigh. "Oh, Mr. Farwell, I do--much thinking up at Lonely
Farm. The winters are long, and the nights, too. You know there is a
queer little plant beside the spring at the foot of our garden; it has
roots long enough and thick enough for a thing twice its size. It grew
strong and sure underground before it ventured up. It blossomed last
summer; an odd flower it had. I think I am like that. You've taught me
to--well, know myself. I shall not shame you, Master Farwell. You know we
of the lonesome In-Place make friends with strange objects; everything in
nature talks to us, if we will but listen. You have taught me to listen,
too. Back a piece in the woods are a strong young hemlock and a little
white birch. For years I have watched and tended them. When I was a small
girl I likened the hemlock to you, sir, and there was I, leaning and
huddling close to you, like the ghostly stripling of the woods. Well, I
noticed to-day, Mr. Farwell, the birch stands quite securely; it doesn't
bend for support on the hemlock, but it is standing friendly all the
same. I think"--and here Priscilla clasped her hands close and
outstretched them--"I think I am soon going away!"

Her eyes were tear-dimmed, her face very earnest.

"I wish--you would give up the childish folly, Priscilla." A fear rose
in Farwell's eyes. "What could you, such an one as you have become, do
out--in the States? It is madness--sheer, brutal madness."

Priscilla shook her head.

"You think it childish folly? Why, I have never lost sight of it for a
day. You have not understood me if you have imagined that. I have always
known I must go. Lately I have felt the nearness of the going, and it is
the _how_ to break away and begin that puzzle me. I am ready."

"Priscilla, you are a wild child still, playing with dangerous tools.
You cannot comprehend the trouble into which you are willing, in your
blindness, to plunge. Why, you are a--a woman; a beautiful one! Do you
know what the world does with such, unless they are guarded and
protected?"

"What does it do?" The true eyes held Farwell commandingly, and with a
sense of dismay he looked back at the only world he really knew: the
world of his own ungoverned passions and selfishness. A kind of shame
came over him, and he felt he was no safe guide. There were worlds and
worlds! He had sold his birthright; this woman, bent upon finding hers,
might inherit a fairer kingdom.

"What does it do, Master Farwell?"

"I do not know. It depends upon--you. It is like a great quarry--I have
read somewhere something like this--we must all mould and chisel our
characters; some of us crush them and chip them. It isn't always the
world's fault. God help us!"

Priscilla looked at him with large, shining eyes and the maternal in her
rose to the call of his sad recognition of failure where she was to go
with such brave courage.

"Do not fear for me," she said gently; "'twould be a poor return if I
failed, after all you have done for me."

"I--what have I done?"

"Everything. Have you ever thought what sort I would have been had Lonely
Farm been my only training?" she smiled faintly, and her girlish face, in
the setting of the faded hat and soiled veil, struck Farwell again by its
change, which now seemed to have settled into permanency. Of course it
was only the ridiculous fashion of the world he once knew, but he could
not free himself of the fancy that Priscilla was more her real self in
the shabby trappings than she had ever been in the absurd costumes of the
In-Place.

With the acceptance of the fact that the girl really meant to get away
and at once, a wave of dreariness swept over him. He thought of the time
on ahead when his last vital interest would be taken from him. Then he
aroused from his stupor and brought his mind to bear upon the inevitable;
the here and now.

"It's a big drop in your ambition, Priscilla," he said; "you used to
think you could dance your way to your throne."

"There is no throne now, Master Farwell. I'm just thinking all the time
of My Road."

"But there's the Heart's Desire at the end, you know."

"Yes; but I do not think I would want it to be a throne."

"What then?"

"Oh! love--my own life--the giving and giving just where I long to give.
It's splendid to tramp along your road, if it _is_ your road, and be
jolly and friendly with those you care for. It will all be so different
from Kenmore, where one has to take what one must."

"I wonder how Jerry-Jo will feel about all this?"

"Jerry-Jo! And what right has he to think at all--about me?"

The girl's eyes flashed with mischief and daring.

"Jerry-Jo!" she laughed with amusement. "Just big, Indian-boy Jerry-Jo!
We've played together and quarrelled together, but you're all wrong,
Master Farwell, if you think he cares about me! He knows better than
that--far, far, better."

But even as she spoke the light and fun left her eyes. She looked older,
more thoughtful.

"Isn't it queer?" she said after a pause.

"What, Priscilla?"

"Oh, life and people and the things that go to their making? You're quite
wrong about Jerry-Jo. I'm sure you're wrong."

Then suddenly she sprang up.

"I must go," she said abruptly; "go and exchange these rags for my own
plain things. I only wanted to surprise you, sir; and how deadly serious
we have grown."

She passed out of the cottage without a word more. Farwell watched her
across the Green and up to the Lodge. He was disturbed and restless. The
old fever of escape overcame him. With the thought of Priscilla's flight
into the open, he strained against the trap that Ledyard had caught him
in. The guide who, he knew, never permitted him to escape his vigilance,
became a new and alarming obstacle, and Farwell set his teeth grimly.
Then he muttered:

"Curse him! curse him!" and an emotion which he had believed was long
since dead rose hotly in his consciousness. Before the dread spectre,
suddenly imbued with vitality, Farwell reeled and covered his face.
Murder was in his heart--the old madness of desire to wipe out, by any
means, that which barred his way to what he wanted.

"My God!" he moaned; "my God! I--I thought I--was master. I thought it
was dead in me."

Farwell ate no evening meal that night. Early he closed and locked his
outer door, drew the dark green shades, and lighted his lamp. His hands
were clammy and cold, and he could not blot out with book or violin the
horror of Charles Martin's face as it looked up at him that night so long
ago. Way on toward morning Farwell paced his room trying to forget, but
he could not.

But Priscilla, after leaving Farwell, dressed again in her plain
serviceable gown and hat, had made her way toward the farm. Her happy,
light-hearted mood was past; she felt unaccountably gloomy, and as she
walked on she sought to explain herself to herself, and presently
Jerry-Jo came into focus and would not stir from her contemplation. Yes,
it was Jerry-Jo's personality that disturbed her, and it was Farwell's
words that had torn the shield she herself had erected, and set the truth
free. Yes, she had played with Jerry-Jo; she had tested her coquetry and
charm upon him for lack of better material. In her outbreaks of youthful
spirits she had claimed him as prey because the others of his sex were
less desirable. Jerry-Jo had that subtle, physical attraction that
responded to her youthful allurements, but the young fellow himself,
taken seriously, repelled her, and Farwell had taken Jerry-Jo seriously!

That was it! She was no longer a child. She was a woman and must remember
it. Undoubtedly Jerry-Jo himself had never given the matter a moment's
deep thought. Well, she must take care that he never did. Jerry-Jo in
earnest would be unbearable.

And then, just as she reached the pasture bars separating her father's
farm from the red rock highway, Jerry-Jo McAlpin strode in sight from the
wood path into which the highway ran. She waited for him and gave him a
nervous smile as he came near. His first words startled her out of her
dull mood.

"I've been up to the Hill Place. Him and her's there for a few days."

"Him and her!" Priscilla repeated, her face flushing. "Oh, him and her!"

"Sure!" McAlpin was holding her with a hard, fixed gaze.

In the mesh that was closing about Priscilla, strangely enough names
were always largely eliminated. They might have altered her course later
on, might have held her to the past, but Kenmore dealt briefly with
personalities and visualized whatever it could. The name Travers had
rarely, if ever, been spoken in Priscilla's presence. "The Hill Place
folks" was the title found sufficient for general use.

"And I was remembering," Jerry-Jo went on, "how once you said you wanted
to thank him for--for the books. We might take the canoe, come to-morrow,
and the day is fine, and pay a visit."

Still Priscilla did not notice the gleam in McAlpin's keen eyes.

"Oh! if I only dared, Jerry-Jo! What an adventure it would be, to be
sure. And how good of you to think of it."

"What hinders?"

"Father would never forgive me!"

"And are you always to be at the beck and whistle of your father even in
your pleasures?"

Priscilla was in just the attitude of mind to receive this suggestion
with appreciation.

"There's no reason why I shouldn't go if I want to," she said with an
uplift of her head.

"And--don't you want to?" Jerry-Jo's eyes were taking in the loveliness
of the raised face as the setting sun fell upon it.

"Yes, I do want to! I'll go, Jerry-Jo."

Then McAlpin came close to her and said in a low voice:

"Priscilla, give us a kiss for pay."

So taken out of herself was the girl, so overpowered by the excitement
of adventure, that before she realized her part in the small drama of
passionate youth, she gave a mocking laugh and twisted her lips saucily.

Jerry-Jo had her in his arms on the instant, and the hot kiss he pressed
on her mouth roused her to fury.

"If you ever touch me again," she whispered, struggling into freedom,
"I'll hate you to the last day of my life!"

So had she spoken to her father years ago; so would she always speak when
her reservations were threatened. "I declare I am afraid to go with you
to-morrow."

McAlpin fell back in shamed contrition.

"You need not be afraid," he muttered. "I reckon I was bidding
you--good-bye. Him and me is different. Once you see him and he sees you,
it's good-bye to Jerry-Jo McAlpin."

Something in the words and tone of humility brought Priscilla, with a
bound, back to a kindlier mood. After all, it was a tribute that McAlpin
was paying her. She must hold him in check, that was all.

They parted with no great change. There had been a flurry, but it had
served to clear the atmosphere--for her at least.

But Nathaniel, that evening in the kitchen, managed to arouse in the girl
the one state of mind needed to drive her on her course.

"What was the meaning of that scuffling by the bars a time back?" he
asked, eyeing Priscilla with the old look of suspicious antagonism. Every
nerve in the girl's body twitched with resentment and her spirit flared
forth. She shielded herself behind the one flimsy subterfuge that Glenn
could never understand or tolerate.

"A kiss you mean. What's a kiss? You call that a scuffle?"

Theodora, who was washing the tea dishes while Priscilla wiped them, took
her usual course and began to cry dispiritedly and forlornly.

"What's between you and--McAlpin?" Nathaniel asked, scowling darkly.

"Between us? What need for anything between us?"

Priscilla ceased smiling and looked defiant.

"Maybe you better marry that half-breed and have done with it."

"It's more like--would _he_ marry me?"

This was unfortunate.

"And why not?" Nathaniel shook the ashes from his pipe angrily. "A little
more such performance as I saw to-day and no decent man will marry you!
As for Jerry-Jo, he'll marry you if I say so! You foul my nest, miss, and
out you go!"

"Husband! husband!" And with this Theodora dropped a cup, one of Glenn's
mother's cups, and somehow this added fire to his fury.

"And when the time comes, wife, you make your choice: Go with her, who
you have trained into what she is, or stay with me who has been defied in
his own home, by them nearest and closest to him."

Priscilla breathed fast and hard. The tangible wall of misunderstanding
between her and her father stifled her to-night as it never had before.
Again she realized the finality of something--the breaking of the old
ties, the helpless sense of groping for what lay hidden, but none the
less real, just on before.




CHAPTER IX


The next day was gloriously clear and threateningly warm. Such days do
not come to Kenmore in September except to lure the unheeding to acts of
folly. And at two o'clock in the afternoon Priscilla, from the kitchen
door, saw Jerry-Jo paddling his canoe in still, Indian fashion around
Lone Tree Island. Theodora was off erranding, and Nathaniel, as far as
human knowledge went, was in some distant field; he had started off
directly after dinner. Priscilla was ready for her adventure. With the
natural desire of youth, she had decked herself out in her modest
finery--a stiffly starched white gown of a cheap but pretty design, a
fluff of soft lace at throat and wrist, and, over it, the old red cape
that years before had added to her appearance as she danced on the rocks.
Perhaps remembering that, she had utilized the garment and was thankful
that cloth lasted so long in Kenmore!

The coquetry of girlhood rose happily in Priscilla's heart. Jerry-Jo had
become again simply a link in her chain of events; he had lost the
importance the flash of the evening before had given him; he was not
forgiven, but for the time he was, as a human being, forgotten. He was
Jerry-Jo who was to paddle her to her Heart's Desire! That was it, and
the old words, set to music of her own, were the signals used to attract
McAlpin's attention. But the merry call brought Glenn from out the barn
just as the canoe touched the rocks lightly, and Priscilla prepared to
step in.

"Where you two going?" he shouted in the tone that always roused the
worst in Priscilla's nature. Jerry-Jo paused, paddle in air, but his
companion whispered:

"Go on!" To Nathaniel she flung back: "We're going to have a bit of fun,
and why not, father? I'm tired of staying at home."

This was unfortunate: on the home question Glenn was very clear and
decided.

"Come back!" he ordered, but the little canoe had shot out into the
Channel. "Hi, there McAlpin, do you hear?"

"Go on!" again whispered Priscilla, and Jerry-Jo heard only her soft
command, for his senses were filled with the loveliness of her charming,
defiant face set under the broad brim of a hat around which was twined
a wreath of natural flowers as blue as the girl's laughing eyes.

Nathaniel, defied and helpless, stood by the barn door and impotently
fumed as the canoe rounded Lone Tree Island and was lost to his
infuriated sight.

"You'll catch it," Jerry-Jo comforted when pursuit was impossible, and he
had the responsibility of the rebel on his hands. "I wouldn't be in your
place, and you need not drag me in, for I'd have turned back had you said
the word."

A fleeting contempt stirred the beauty of the girl's face for a moment,
and then she told him of that which was seething in her heart.

"What does it matter, Jerry-Jo? All my life, ever since I can remember,
I have been growing surely to what is now near at hand. I cannot abide my
father; nor can he find comfort in me. Why should I darken the lives of
my parents and have no life of my own? The lure of the States has always
been in my thought and now it calls near and loud."

McAlpin stared helplessly at her, and her beauty, enhanced by her unusual
garments, moved him unwholesomely.

"What you mean?" he muttered.

"Only this: It would be no strange thing did a boy start for the States.
A little money, a ticket on a steamer, and--pouf! Off the boys and men
go to make their lives. Well, then, some day you will--find me gone,
Jerry-Jo. Gone to make my life. Will you miss me?"

This question caused McAlpin to stop paddling.

"You won't be--let!" he murmured; "you--a girl!"

"I, a girl!" Priscilla laughed scornfully. "You will see. This day, after
I have thanked him up yonder, I am going to ask his mother to help me get
away. Surely a lady such as she could help me. I will not ask much of
her, only the guiding hand to a safe place where I can--live! Oh! can you
understand how all my life I have been smothered and stifled? I often
wonder what sort I will be--out there! I'm willing to suffer while I
learn, but Jerry-Jo"--and here the excited voice paused--"I have a
strange feeling of--myself! I sometimes feel as if there were two of me,
the one holding, demanding, and protecting the other. I will not have men
always making my life and shielding me; the woman of me will have its
way. Men and boys never know this feeling."

And Jerry-Jo could, of course, understand nothing of this, but the thing
he had set out to do, more in rude, brutish fun than anything else,
assumed graver purpose. A new and ugly look grew in his bold eyes, a
sinister smile on his red mouth, which showed the points of his white,
fang-like teeth. But Priscilla, too absorbed with her own thoughts, did
not notice.

It was four o'clock when the canoe touched the landing spot of Far Hill
Place, and Priscilla sprang out.

"I'll bide here; don't be long," said McAlpin.

But Priscilla paused and glanced up at the sky.

"It's darkening," she faltered, a shyness overcoming her. "I
smell--thunder. Don't you think you better come up with me Jerry-Jo?
Suppose they are not at home?"

"They'll be back soon in that case, and as for a shower, that would
hasten them and you would be under shelter. I can turn the canoe over me
and be dry as a mouse in a hayrick. I'll not go with you, not I. Do your
own part, with them looking on as will enjoy it."

"I believe you are--jealous, Jerry-Jo." This was said idly and more to
fill in an awkward pause than for anything else.

"And much good that would do me, after what you've just said. If you're
bound for the devil, Priscilla, 'tis little power I have to stay you."

"I'm not--for the devil!" Priscilla flung back, and started sturdily up
the hill path toward the house hidden among the trees.

Out of McAlpin's sight, the girl went more slowly, while she sought to
arrange her mode of attack. If her host were what he once was, he would
make everything easy after she recalled herself to him. As for the
mother, Priscilla had only a dim memory of her, but something told her
that the call would be a happy and memorable one after the first moment.

A bit of tune cheered the girl; a repeating of the Road Song helped even
more, for it resurrected most vividly the young fellow who had introduced
music and happiness into her life.

"I'll be doshed!" she cried. The word had not passed her lips for years;
it brought a laugh and a complete restoration of poise. So she reached
the house. Smoke was issuing from the chimney. A fire had been made even
on this hot day, but like enough it was to dry the place after the years
of closed doors and windows. Evidently it was a many-houred fire, for the
plume of smoke was faint and steady. The broad door was set wide but the
windows were still boarded up at the front of the house, though the side
ones had escaped that protection.

Priscilla knocked and waited. No reply or sound came in response, and
presently a low muttering of distant thunder broke.

"That will bring them in short order," she said, "and surely they will
not object if I make myself comfortable until they come."

She went inside. The room had the appearance of one from which the owner
had long been absent, that unaccountable, vacant look, although a
work-bag hung on the back of a chair by the roaring fire, and a blot of
oil lay on the table near the lamp which had evidently been recently
filled. Back of these tokens lay a wide sense of desolation.

For a moment Priscilla hesitated before sitting down; her courage failed,
but a second thought reconciled conditions with a brief stay after long
absence, and she decided to wait.

And while she waited, suddenly and alarmingly, the storm burst! The
darkness of the room and the wooded space outside had deceived her: there
was no escape now!

She was concerned for the people she had come to see. Jerry-Jo, she knew,
would crawl under his boat and be as dry as a tortoise in its shell. But
those others!

With this thought she set about, mechanically, making the room
comfortable. She piled on fresh wood and noticed that it was so wet that
it sputtered dangerously. Presently the wind changed sharply, and a blast
of almost icy coldness carried the driving rain halfway across the floor.

It was something of a struggle to close the heavy door, for it opened
outward, and Priscilla was drenched by the time it was made secure.
Breathing hard, she made her way to the fire and knelt before it. The
glow drew her attention from the darkness of the space back and around
her.

It was unfortunate and depressing, and she had no choice but to make
herself as comfortable as she might, though a sense of painful uneasiness
grew momentarily. At first she imagined it was fear of what she must
encounter upon her return home; then she felt sure it was her dread of
meeting the people for whom she had risked so much. Finally Jerry-Jo
loomed in the foreground of her thought and an entirely new terror was
born in her soul.

"Jerry-Jo!" she laughed aloud as his name passed her lips. "Jerry-Jo, to
be sure. My! how thankful I'd be to see him this instant!"

And with the assertion she turned shudderingly toward the door. The gloom
behind her only emphasized her nervousness.

"I'll--I'll have to go!" she whispered suddenly, while the wind and the
slashing of sleety rain defied her. "It will be better out of doors, bad
as it is!"

The grim loneliness of four walls, compared with the dangers of the open,
was worse. But when Priscilla, trembling and panting, reached the door
and pushed, she found that the storm was pitting its strength against
hers and she could not budge it.

"Oh, well," she half sobbed; "if I must, I must." And she stealthily
tiptoed back to the warmth and light as if fearing to arouse something,
she knew not what, in the dim place.

There was no way of estimating time. The minutes were like hours and the
hours were like minutes while Priscilla sat alone. As a matter of fact,
it was after seven when steps, unmistakable steps, sounded on the porch
and carried both apprehension and relief to the storm-bound prisoner
inside.

"Thank heaven!" breathed she, and sprang to her feet. She was midway in
the room when the door opened, and, as if flayed forward by the lashing
storm, Jerry-Jo broke into the shadow and drew the heavy oak door after
him. In a black panic of fear Priscilla saw him turn the key in the lock
before he spoke a word to her; then he came forward, flung his wet cap
toward the hearth, and laughed.

"What's the matter?" he asked quickly as Priscilla's white face
confronted him. "Disappointed, I suppose. Do you begrudge me a bit of
warmth and shelter? God knows I'm drenched to the bone. The rain came up
from the earth as well as down from the clouds. It's a devil's storm and
no mistake. What you staring at, Priscilla? Had you forgotten me? Thought
me dead, and now you're looking at my ghost? Didn't I wait long enough
for you? Where are the--others?"

This seemed to clarify and steady the situation and Priscilla gave a
slight laugh:

"To be sure. You did not know. They--they were away. The storm came up
suddenly. I had to wait. You are wet through and through, Jerry-Jo. It's
good we have such a fire. You'll be comfortable in a moment. I'm glad you
came; I was getting--afraid."

"Let's see if there is any oil in the lamp!" Jerry-Jo exclaimed. He was
in no mood for darkness himself.

"They must have filled it before they went," Priscilla answered. "See,
there is some oil on the table."

McAlpin struck a match and soon the room was flooded with a new
brightness that reached even to the far corners and seemed to set free
the real loneliness that held these two together.

"I--I managed to keep this dry," McAlpin spoke huskily. "I always have
a bite with me when I take to the woods. Who can ever tell what may
happen!"

He pushed a coarse sandwich toward Priscilla and began eating one
himself.

"Go on!" he said.

"I'm not hungry, Jerry-Jo, and I want to start back home at once."

Jerry-Jo leered at her over his bread and meat.

"What's your hurry? I want to get warm and dry before I set out again.
This is an all-nighter of a storm, if I know anything about it."

"Get dry, of course, Jerry-Jo. It won't take long with this heat; then we
must start, storm or no storm."

The old discomfort and unrest returned, and she fixed her eyes on
Jerry-Jo.

"There's no great hurry," said he, munching away. "It's warm here and
cozy. What's got you, Priscilla? You was mighty keen to come, and you
ain't finished your errand yet. What's ailing you? No one could help the
storm, and we'd be swamped in the bay if we was there now."

Priscilla got up and walked slowly toward the door, but without any
apparent reason Jerry-Jo arose also, and, still chewing his bread and
meat, backed away from the table, keeping himself between the girl and
whatever her object was. Noticing this, a real terror seized upon
Priscilla and she darted in the opposite direction, reached the hearth,
and was bending toward a heavy poker which lay there, before she herself
could have explained her motive. Jerry-Jo was alert. Tossing his food
upon the table as he strode forward, he gripped her wrist.

"None of that!" he muttered. "What ails you, Priscilla?" They faced each
other at close range.

"I--I am afraid of you!"

At this McAlpin threw back his head and roared with laughter, releasing
her at the same time. With freedom Priscilla gained a bit of courage and
a keen sense of the necessity of calmness. She did not move away from
Jerry-Jo, but fixing him with her wide eyes she asked:

"Are--are the--family here--here in Kenmore?" Suspicion and anger shook
the voice. The slow, tense words brought things down to fact.

"No! God knows where they are! I don't know or care."

Brought face to face with great danger, mental or physical, the majority
of people rise to the call. Priscilla knew now that she was in grave
peril--peril of a deeper kind than even her tormentor could realize.
Every nerve and emotion came to her defence. She would hold this creature
at bay as hunters hold the wild things of the woods when gun or club
fail. Then, after that, she would have to deal with what must inevitably
confront her at home. She seemed to be standing alone amid cruel and
unfamiliar foes, but she was calm!

"You lied, then? What for?"

"What do you think?"

"You believe, by shutting me away from everything, every one, you can win
what otherwise you could not get?" It all seemed cruelly plain, now. She
felt she had always known it.

"Something like that, yes. You'll come to me fast enough, after to-night.
Once you come I'll--I'll do the fair and square thing by you, Priscilla."

The half-pleading caught the girl's thought.

"You mean, by this device you will make me marry you? You'll blacken
my name, bar my father's house to me, and then you will be generous
and--marry me?"

[Illustration: "'You mean, by this device you will make me marry you?
You'll blacken my name, bar my father's house to me, and then you will be
generous and--marry me?'"]

Jerry-Jo dropped his bold, dark eyes.

"I never cared for you, Jerry-Jo. I hate you, now!"

At this McAlpin raised his head and a fierce red coloured his face.

"You'll get over that!" he muttered. "Any port in a storm, you know.
You better not drive me now! I ain't--safe, and I've got you tight
for--to-night!"

Suddenly the pure flame of spirituality flashed into the soul of
Priscilla Glenn. Alone, undefended, facing a hideous possibility, beyond
which lay a black certainty of desolation, she rose supreme to protect
something that her rudely aroused womanhood must defend, even by death!

"You--beast!" she cried, and all her shrinking fear fell from her. "Go
back! Sit down! I have something to say to you--before----" She did not
finish, but the pause made Jerry-Jo understand that she recognized her
position.

"I'll stand here, by God!" he almost shouted, and came close.

The proximity of the rough, coarse body was the one thing the girl felt
she could not bear. She smelled the odour of his wet clothing, felt his
breath, and she shrank back a step.

"This--this body, Jerry-Jo McAlpin," she whispered, "is all you can
touch. That, I will kill to-morrow--the next day--it does not matter. But
the soul of me shall haunt you while you live. Night and day it shall
torment and clutch you until it brings your sinful spirit to--to God!"

"You--you devil!" cried McAlpin, all the superstitious fear of his mixed
blood chilling him. "You----" And then as if daring the fate she had it
in her power to evoke, he rushed toward her and clasped her close in his
strong arms. His face was bent over hers, his lips parted from his cruel
teeth, but he did not force them upon her.

So here she was--she, Priscilla Glenn, in the jaws of death, she who
would have laughed, danced, and sang her way straight into happiness!
Here she was, with what on ahead--if she lived?

She waited, she struggled, then she relaxed in the iron hold, and for a
moment, only a moment, lost the sense of reality. Presently words that
McAlpin was saying came to her in the black stillness of her
consciousness.

"I had--to have you! Now that I've shown you my power, I can wait until
you come whining to me. I ain't going to hurt you! I want you as you are
when you come a-begging of me. I only wanted to prove to you that--I've
got you!"

Again Priscilla was aware of the red warmth of the fire, the sickening
smell of drying wool, the loosening of the bands of McAlpin's arms.

"You--you who boast that when you hunt, out of season, you shoot
one shot in the air in order to give a poor wild thing a chance of
escape--you bring me here with a lie; close every hope to me,
and--call that--victory! You--you--fiend! What do you mean?"

She was standing free at last! She was so weak that she staggered to a
chair, fearing that McAlpin, seeing her need, might again lay hands upon
her.

"I mean--that I've fired my shot!" Her words had caught his fancy. "You
have your chance to--to get away! But where? Where?"

The dark face leered.

"See! I'm going to leave you. Go out into the night. You can try for
your--your life, but in the end you'll come to me. I don't care what they
of Kenmore will say, I'll know you are--what you are, and sympathy will
be with me, gal, when I take you. And you'll know, once you come to me,
proper and asking, I'll do--I'll do the best any man could do--for--I
love you!"

This was flung out desperately, defiantly.

"Yes, I love you as--Jerry-Jo McAlpin knows how to love. It's his way.
Remember that!"

Not a word rose to Priscilla's lips. She saw McAlpin turn and stride to
the door; she heard him turn the key and--she was alone! But a strange
thing happened just at that moment, a thing that did more to unnerve the
girl than anything that had gone before. As the heavy oak door slammed
after the retreating figure, the jar caused the tall clock, back among
the shadows of the far side of the room, to strike! One, two, three!
Then followed a whirring that faded into deathly silence. It was like the
voice of one, believed to be dead, speaking!

Frightened, but thoroughly roused to her only hope, Priscilla staggered
to the door, clutched the key in cold, trembling fingers, and turned it
in the lock. Then, sinking upon her knees, she crept back to the fire,
keeping close to the wall. If an eye were pressed to a knothole in the
shutter it could not follow her.




CHAPTER X


Priscilla kept the fire alive. She laid the sticks and logs on
cautiously; she turned wide eyes now and again on the tall clock whose
white face gleamed pallidly among the shadows like a dead thing that had
used its last breath to speak a message. If the clock struck again
Priscilla felt that she might go mad.

It was after midnight when Nature laid a commanding and relentless touch
upon the girl, and, crouching by the hearth, her head in her arms folded
upon a chair, she slept.

Outside the storm sobbed itself into silence; the rain dripped
complainingly from the roof of the porch and then ceased. At five o'clock
the new day, rosy and full of cheer, made itself felt in the dim room
where Priscilla, breathing evenly and softly, still slept. No gleam of
brightness made its way through the heavy shutters or curtains, but a
consciousness of day at last roused the sleeper. At first the experience
through which she had passed made no demand upon her. She got painfully
upon her feet and looked about. The fire was but embers, the air was hot
and stifling, and then, with the thought of opening a door or window, the
grim spectre of the black hours lay warning touch upon her. She shrank
back and began again to--wait! Of course McAlpin would return--and what
lay before her when he did? Her strength was spent, lack of food----And
here her eyes fell on the broken fragments of stale bread and meat that
Jerry-Jo had tossed aside.

She took the morsels and devoured them eagerly; the nerves of the stomach
were calling for nutrition, and even the coarse crumbs gave relief.

The moments passed slowly, but presently, with the knowledge that day lay
beyond her prison, she gained a new, a more desperate courage. If she
must die, she would die in the ope

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