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Then I'll Come Back to You

by Larry Evans · English · Gutenberg #18894 · 626,896 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Then I'll Come Back to You

Author: Larry Evans


        
Release date: July 22, 2006 [eBook #18894]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU

by

LARRY EVANS

Author of
Once to Every Man

Illustrated by Will Stevens







[Frontispiece: "I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I
Ain't Never Seen More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't
Never Been Outen the Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More
Now--Before I Get Done."]




New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers
Copyright, 1915, by
The H. K. Fly Company.
Copyright, 1915, by
The Metropolitan Magazine Company.




To the Memory of

My Mother




CONTENTS.


Chapter

     I. I DON'T MIND IF I DO!
    II. THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN
   III. THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS
    IV. I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST
     V. THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
    VI. MY MAN O'MARA
   VII. HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!
  VIII. GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
    IX. A MATTER OF ORNITHOLOGY
     X. NOT A CHANCE IN THE WORLD
    XI. I NEVER DID LIKE TO BE BEATEN
   XII. THAT WOODS-RAT
  XIII. THIS LITERARY THING
   XIV. A GIRL LIKE HER
    XV. LAW AND LUMBER
   XVI. ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
  XVII. HONEY!
 XVIII. I'M TELLING YOU GOOD-BYE
   XIX. SOME LETTERS AND A REPLY
    XX. BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY
   XXI. SETTING THE STAGE
  XXII. IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS
 XXIII. TO-MORROW--
  XXIV. --AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW
   XXV. IN REAL LIFE TOO




ILLUSTRATIONS


"I Ain't Never Seen Nothin'," He Stated Patiently.  "I Ain't Never Seen
More'n Three Houses in a Clearin' Before.  I Ain't Never Been Outen the
Timber--Till To-Day.  But I Aim to See More Now--Before I Get
Done." . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

"I've Always Had to Wait a Long Time for Everything I've Wanted," the
Boy Answered, "But I Always Get It, Just the Same, if I Only Want it
Hard Enough."

"Blessings, My Children," He Called to the Two in the Shadow.  "My
Felicitations! and E'en though I know Not Your Identity, Still I May
Sense Your Fond Confusion."

"Oh, I Can't Tell You How Glad I Am to See You So--So Well!"




THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU


CHAPTER I

I DON'T MIND IF I DO!

That year no rain had fallen for a score of days in the hill country.
The valley road that wound upward and still upward from the town of
Morrison ran a ribbon of puffy yellow dust between sun-baked,
brown-sodded dunes; ran north and north, a tortuous series of loops on
loops, to lose itself at last in the cooler promise of the first
bulwark of the mountains.  They looked cooler, the distant wooded
hills; for all the shimmering heat waves that danced and eddied in the
gaps and glanced, shaft-like, from the brittle needles of the pines
which sentineled the ridges, they hinted at depths to which the sun's
rays could not penetrate; they hinted at chasms padded with moss,
shadowed and dim beneath chapel arches of spruce and hemlock, even
chilly with the spray of spring-fed brooks that brawled in miniature
rocky canyons.  And they made the gasping heat of the valley a little
more unendurable by very contrast.

Since early afternoon Caleb Hunter had been sitting almost immobile in
the shade of the trellis which flanked the deep verandas of his huge
white, thick-pillared house on the hill above the river.  It was
reminiscent of another locality--the old Hunter place on the valley
road.  When Caleb Hunter's father had come north, back when his loyalty
to a flag and his pity for a gaunt and lonely figure in the White House
had been stronger than bonds of blood, he had left its counterpart down
on the Tennessee.  Afterward, with one empty sleeve pinned across his
breast, he had directed with the other hand the placing of the columns.
And finally, when he had had to leave this home in turn, along with its
high, white painted walls and glossy green shutters, he had passed down
to his son his inborn love of the warmth, his innocent delight in
indolence--and an unsurpassed judgment of mint.  The mint bed still lay
where he had located it, to the west of the house, moist and fragrant
in the shadow.

Caleb Hunter had been drowsing contentedly since early afternoon, his
chin on his chest and the bowl of his pipe drooping down over his
comfortably bulging, unbuttoned waistcoat.  The lazy day was in his
blood and even the whine of the sawmills on the river-bank, a mile or
more to the south, tempered as it was by the distance to the drone of a
surly bumble-bee, still vaguely annoyed him.  Tiny dots of men in
flannel shirts of brilliant hue, flashing from time to time out across
the log-choked space between the booms, caught his eye whenever he
lifted his head, during the passage of a green-sprayed glass from the
veranda rail to his lips, and almost reminded him of the unnatural
altitude of the mercury.  He, without being analytical about it, would
have preferred it without the industry and the noise, even softened as
both were by the distance.

Morrison had changed since Caleb Hunter's father topped with the
white-columned house that hill above the river.  In those days it had
been little more than a sleepy, if conservatively prosperous and
self-sufficient, community, without industry of any sort, or, it might
be added, ambition or seeming need of one.  The Basin where the river
widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's
father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs
of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then
and smoked incessantly.  And now even the low-lying foothills in which
the elder Hunter had tried to see from homesick eyes a resemblance to
the outguard of his own Cumberlands were no longer given over to
pasturage.  They had taken on an entirely different aspect.

The northern streets of the town were still dotted with the homes of
those families who had been content with just the shade and the silence
and the sheen of the river, and an ample though inaugmented income.
But the outside world, ignoring the lack of an invitation too long in
the coming, had in the last year or so grown in to meet it more than
half way.  From the Hunter verandas a half-dozen red-roofed,
brown-shingled bungalows, half camps and half castles, were visible
across the land stretches where the cattle had grazed before.  And just
beyond Caleb Hunter's own high box hedge, Dexter Allison's enormous
stucco and timber "summer lodge" sprawled amid a round dozen acres of
green lawn and landscape gardening, its front to the river.

To Dexter Allison's blame or credit--the nature of the verdict
depending entirely upon whether it was rendered by the older or the
newer generation--was laid the transformation of Morrison, the town
proper.  Caleb Hunter had known Allison at college, where the latter
had been prominent both because of the brilliance of his wardrobe and
the reputed size of his father's steadily accumulating resources.
Since that time seven-figure fortunes such as the younger Allison had
inherited, had become too general to be any longer spectacular.  But
Dexter Allison's garments had always retained their insistent note.
Hunter himself had sold Allison the ground upon which the stucco house
stood; he had heartily agreed that it was an ideal spot for a loafing
place--and the fishing was good, too!  Now whenever Caleb thought of
those first conferences which had preceded the sale, and recalled
Allison's accentuation of the natural beauties of the spot, Caleb
allowed himself to smile.

The fishing was still far above reproach, a little further back
country--and Dexter Allison owned the sawmills that droned in the
valley.  His men drove his timber down from the hills in the north; his
men piled the yellow planks upon his flat cars which ran in over his
spur line that had crept up from the south.  His hundreds and hundreds
of rivermen already trod the sawdust-padded streets of the newer
Morrison that had sprung into being beyond the bend; they swarmed in on
the drives, a hard-faced, hard-shouldered horde, picturesque,
proficient and profane.  They brought with them color and care-free
prodigality and a capacity for abandonment to pleasure that ran the
whole gamut of emotions, from raucous-roared chanties to sudden, swift
encounters which were as silent as they were deadly.  And they spent
their money without stopping to count it.

The younger generation of the older Morrison was quick to point out the
virtues of this vice.  And after a time, when the older generation
found that the rivermen preferred their own section of the town,
ignoring as though they had never existed the staid and sleepy
residential streets above, they heaved a sigh of partial relief and
tried to forget their proximity.

Little more than a year had been required for that transformation.  The
boards of some of the newer shacks down river were still damp with
pitch.  And twice during that period Dexter Allison had come into the
hills to take up a transitory abode in the stucco house which had been
quite six months in the building:--once, two years before, when he had
disappeared into the mountains upon a prolonged fishing trip, to return
fishless but with an astonishing mass of pencilled data and contour
maps; and the second time for an even longer stay, a year ago when the
mill was being erected.

Since then the stucco and timber place had been closed, with no one but
a doddering old caretaker and a gardener or two about the premises,
until early that last hot August week.  On Monday Caleb Hunter had
noticed that the blinds had been thrown open to the air; on Wednesday,
from his point of vantage upon the porch, he had watched a rather
astounding load of trunks careen in at the driveway, piloted by a mill
teamster who had for two seasons held the record for a double-team load
of logs and was making the most of that opportunity to prove his skill.
And the next morning the tumult raised by a group of children racing
over the shorn lawns had awakened him; he had descended to be hailed by
Dexter Allison's own booming bass from behind the intervening high box
hedge.

It was the hottest day of the hottest fortnight that the hill country
had known in years.  The very temperature gave color to Allison's
statement that the heat had driven them north from the shore--him and
his wife and Barbara, their daughter of ten, and the half-dozen or more
guests whose trunks, coming on the next day, made an even more imposing
sight than had Allison's own.  And yet as he sat there in the shadow,
methodically pulling upon his pipe, Caleb Hunter smiled from time to
time, reminiscently.  He last of all would have been the one to admit
that the owner of the big stucco place and the mills, and--yes, of the
newer Morrison itself--had not given a good account of the talents and
tens of talents which had been passed down to him.  But the use of so
much evasion, where no evasion at all seemed necessary, rather puzzled
as well as amused Caleb; and yet, after all, this merely branded him as
old-fashioned, so far as the newer business methods were concerned
which were crowding into Morrison.  Allison's way of going about a
thing made him think of the old valley road that wound north in its
series of loops on loops; and yet, reflecting upon that parallel, he
had to admit to himself, too, that the road achieved final heights
which, in a straightaway route across country would have necessitated
more than a few wearisome and heart-breaking grades.

The comparison pleased Caleb.  He was nodding his head over it as he
buried his nose in the mint-sprayed glass again, when a haze of dust to
the north caught his vagrant attention.  Quite apparently it was raised
by a foot-traveler, and the latter were not frequent upon that road,
especially foot-travelers who came from that direction.  Trivial as it
was, it piqued his interest, and he lay back and followed it from
lazily half-closed eyes.  It topped a rise and disappeared--the dust
cloud--and reappeared in turn, but not until it had advanced to within
a scant hundred yards of him could he make out the figure which raised
it.  And then, after one sharp glance, with a quick intake of breath,
he rose and went a trifle hastily out across his own lawn toward the
iron picket fence that bordered the roadside.  He went almost hurriedly
to intercept the boy who came marching over the brow of the last low
hill.

Caleb Hunter, particularly in the last year or so, had seen many a
strange and brilliant costume pass along that wilderness highway, but
as he hung over the front gate he remembered that none of them had ever
before drawn him from his deep chair in the shadow.  For him none of
them had ever approached in sensationalism the quite unbelievable garb
of the boy who came steadily on and on--who came steadily nearer and
nearer.

With a little closer view of him the watching man understood the reason
for the dense cloud of dust above the lone pedestrian.  For when the
boy raised his feet with each stride, the man-sized, hob-nailed boots
which encased them failed to lift in turn.  Indeed, the toes did clear
the ground, but the heels, slipping away from the lean ankles, dragged
in the follow-through.  And the boy's other garments, save for his
flannel shirt and flapping felt hat, were of a size in keeping with the
boots.

His trousers had once been white cotton drill, but the whiteness had
long before given up the unequal struggle against grime and grease and
subsided to a less conspicuous, less perishable grey.  They had been
cut off just below the knees and, unhemmed, hung flapping with every
step he took above a stretch of white-socked, spindly shanks.  But it
was the coat he wore which held Caleb spellbound.  It was of a style
popularly known as a swallowtail, faced with satin as to lapels and
once gracefully rounded to a long, bisected skirt in the rear.  The
satin facings were gone and the original color of the fabric, too, had
faded to a shiny, bottle-green.  But the long skirts--at least all that
was left of them--still flapped bravely, as did the trousers.  For
they, like the nether garments, had been cut off, with more regard for
haste than accuracy, so that the back of the coat cleared the ground by
a good foot and a half.  The sleeves, rolled back from two slender,
browned wrists, were cuffed with a six-inch stretch of striped, soiled
lining.

For a time Caleb had been at a loss to make out the object which the
boy carried upon one shoulder, balanced above a blanket tight-rolled
and tied with string.  Not until the grotesque little figure was within
a dozen paces of him did he recognize it, and then, at the same moment
that he caught a glimpse of an old and rusted revolver strapped to the
boy's narrow waist, he realized what it was.  The boy was toting a
double-springed steel trap, big enough it seemed to take all four feet
of any bear that ever walked--and it was beautifully dull with oil!

Caleb stood and stared, mouth agape.  A moment or two earlier he had
had to fight off an almost uncontrollable desire to roar with laughter,
but that mood had passed somehow as the boy came nearer.  For the
latter was not even aware of his presence there behind the iron fence;
he was walking with his head up, thin face thrust forward like that of
a young and overly eager setter with the bird in plain sight.  The
world of hunger in that strained and staring visage helped Caleb to
master his mirth, and when, at a tentative cough from him, the small
figure halted dead in his tracks and wheeled, even the vestige of a
smile left the wide-waisted watcher's lips.  Then Caleb had his first
full view of the boy's features.

There were wide, deep shadows beneath the grey eyes, doubly noticeable
because of the heavy fringe of the lashes that swept above them; there
was a pallid, bluish circle around the thin and tight-set lips.  And
the lean cheeks were very, very pale, both with the heat of the sun and
a fatigue now close to exhaustion.  But the eyes themselves, as they
met Caleb's, were alight with a fire which afterward, when he had had
more time to ponder it, made him remember the pictured eyes of the
children of the Crusades.  They fairly burned into his own, and they
checked the first half-jocular words of greeting which had been
trembling upon his lips.  His voice was only grave and kindly when he
began to speak.

"You--you look a trifle tired, young man," he said then.  "Are
you--going far?"

The boy touched his lips delicately with the point of his tongue.  His
gravity more than matched that of his questioner.

"Air--air thet the--city?"

The words were soft of accent and a little drawling; there was an
accompanying gesture of one thumb thrown backward over a thin shoulder.
But Caleb had to smile a little at the breathless note in the query.

"The city?" he echoed, a little puzzled.  "The city!  Well, now--I----"
and he chuckled a bit.

The boy caught him up swiftly, almost sharply.

"Thet's--ain't thet Morrison?" he demanded.

And then Caleb had a glimmer of comprehension.  He nodded.

"Yes," he answered quietly.  "That's the city.  That's Morrison down
there."

The shoulders of the ancient coat lifted and fell with a visible sigh
as the strange little figure turned again, head keenly forward, to gaze
hungrily down at the town in the valley.  And Caleb translated that
long-drawn breath correctly; without stopping to reason it out, he knew
that it meant fulfillment of a dream most marvelous in anticipation,
but even more wonderful in its coming true.  Words would have failed
where that single breath sufficed.  The man remained quiet until the
boy finally turned back to him, eased the heavy trap to his other
shoulder and wet his lips once more.

"I thought it war," he murmured, and a thread of awe wove through the
words.  "I thought it est nachelly _hed_ to be!  Haow--haow many houses
would you reckon they might be daown--daown in thet there holler?"

The owner of the white-columned house gave the question its meed of
reflection.

"Well, I--I'd say quite a few hundred, at least."

The odd little figure bobbed his head.

"Thet's what Old Tom always sed," he muttered, more to himself than to
his hearer.  "An'--an' I guess I ain't never rightly believed him till
naow."  And then: "Is--is New Yor-rk any bigger?" he asked.

The man at the picket fence smiled again, but the smile was without
offense.

"Well, yes," he answered.  "Yes, considerably bigger, I should judge.
Twice as large, at least, and maybe more than that."

The boy did not answer.  He just faced about to stare once more.  And
then the miracle came to pass.  Around a far bend in Dexter Allison's
single spur track there came careening an ashmatic switch engine with a
half-dozen empty flats in tow.  With a brave puffing and blowing of
leaky cylinder heads, it rattled across an open space between piles of
timber in the mill-yard and disappeared with a shrill toot of warning
for unseen workmen upon the tracks ahead.  The boy froze to
granite-like immobility as it flashed into view.  Long after it had
passed from sight he stood like a bit of a fantastic figure cut from
stone.  Then a tremor shook him from head to foot, and when it came
slowly about Caleb saw that his small face was even whiter than it had
been before beneath its coat of tan and powdery dust.

He swallowed hard, and tried to speak--and had to swallow again before
the words would come.

"Gawd--I--may--die!" ho broke out falteringly then.  "There goes a
injine!  A steam injine--wan't it?"

Long afterward, when he had realized that the boy's life was to bring
again and again a repetition of that sublime moment of realization--a
moment of fulfillment unspoiled by surfeit or sophistication or a
blunted capacity to marvel, which Caleb had seen grow old and stale
even in the children he knew, he wondered and wished that he might have
known it himself, once at least.  Years of waiting, starved years of
anticipation, he felt after all must have been a very little price to
pay for that great, blinding, gasping moment.  But at the time, amazed
at the boy's white face, amazed at the hushed fervor in the words he
forgot,--he spoke before he thought.

"But haven't you ever seen an engine before?" he exclaimed.

As soon as the question had left his lips he would have given much to
have had it back again; but at that it failed to have the effect which
he feared too late to check.  Instead of coloring with hurt and shame,
instead of subterfuge or evasion, the boy simply lifted his eyes
levelly to Caleb's face.

"I ain't never seed nuthin'," he stated patiently.  "I ain't never seed
more'n three houses together in a clearin' before.  I--I ain't never
been outen the timber--till today.  But I aim to see more, naow--before
I git done!"

The man experienced a peculiar sensation.  The boy's low, passionlessly
vehement statement somehow made him feel that it wasn't a boy to whom
he was talking, but a little and grave old man.  And suddenly the
desire seized him to hear more of that low, direct voice; the impulse
came to him and Caleb, whose whole life had been as free from erratic
snap-judgments as his broad face was of craft, found joy in acting upon
it forthwith, before it had time to cool.

"The view is excellent from my veranda," he waved a hand behind him.
"And--you look a little warm and tired.  If your business is not of too
pressing a nature--have you----" he broke off, amazed at his helpless
formality in the matter--"have you come far?"

And he wondered immediately how the boy would receive that suggestion
that he hesitate, there with the "city" in front of him, a fairy-tale
to be explored.  And again he was allowed to catch a glimpse of age-old
spirit--a glimpse of a man-sized self-discipline--beneath the childish
exterior.

The boy hesitated a moment, but it was his uncertainty as to just what
Caleb's invitation had offered, and not the lure of the town which made
him pause.  He took one step forward.

"I been comin' since last Friday," he explained.  "I been comin' daown
river for three days naow--and I been comin' fast!"

Again that measuring, level glance.

"An' I ain't got no business--yit," he went on.  "Thet's what I aim to
locate, after I've hed a chance to look around a trifle.  But I am
tired a little, an' so if you mean thet you're askin' me to stop for a
minit--if you mean thet you're askin' me that--why, then . . . then, I
guess I don't mind if I do!"

"That's what I mean," said Caleb.

And the little figure preceded him across his soft, cropped lawn.




CHAPTER II

THE LOGICAL CUSTODIAN

Caleb Hunter had never married, and even now, at the age of forty and
odd, in particularly mellow moments he was liable to confess that,
while matrimony no doubt offered a far wider field for both general
excitement and variety, as far as he himself was concerned, he felt
that his bachelor condition had points of excellence too obvious to be
treated with contumely.  Perhaps the fact that Sarah Hunter, four years
his senior, had kept so well oiled the cogs of the domestic machinery
of the white place on the hill that their churnings had never been
evidenced may have been in part an answer to his contentment.

For Sarah Hunter, too, had never married.  To the townspeople who had
never dared to try to storm the wall of her apparent frigidity, or been
able quite to understand her aloof austerity, she was little more than
a weekly occurence as dependable as the rising and setting of the sun
itself.  Every Sunday morning a rare vision of stately dignity for all
her tininess, assisted by Caleb, she descended from the Hunter equipage
to enter the portals of the Morrison Baptist church.  After the service
she reappeared and, having complimented the minister upon the sagacity
of his discourse, again assisted by Caleb, she mounted to the rear seat
of the surrey and rolled back up the hill.

That was as much as the townspeople ever saw of "Cal Hunter's maiden
sister" unless there happened to be a prolonged siege of sickness in
the village or a worse accident than usual.  Then she came and camped
on the scene until the crisis was over, soft-voiced, soft-fingered and
serenely sure of herself.  Sarah had never married, and even though she
had in the long interval which, year by year, had brought to Caleb a
more placid rotundity grown slender and slenderer still, and
flat-chested and sharp-angled in face and figure, Caleb knew that
underneath it all there had been no shrinkage in her soul--knew that
there were no bleak expanses in her heart, or edges to her pity.

They often joked each other about their state of single blessedness,
did Caleb and his sister.  Often, hard upon his easy boast of
satisfaction with things as they were, she would quote the fable of the
fox and the high-hanging grapes, only to be taunted a moment later with
her own celibacy.  But the taunt and the fable had long been stingless.
For Sarah Hunter knew that one end of Caleb's heavy gold watch chain
still carried a bit of a gold coin, worn smooth and thin from years of
handling; she knew that the single word across its back, even though it
had long ago been effaced so far as other eyes were concerned, was
still there for him to see.  And Caleb, rummaging one day for some lost
article or other, in a pigeonhole in Sarah's desk in which he had no
license to look, had come across a picture of a tall and black-haired
lad, brave in white trousers and an amazing waistcoat.  Caleb
remembered having been told that he had died for another with that same
smile which the picture had preserved--the tall and jaunty youngster.
And so their comprehension was mutual.  They understood, did Caleb and
his sister.

But sure as he was of Sarah's fundamental kindness, Caleb experienced a
twinge of guilty uncertainty that August afternoon as he closed the
iron gate behind the grotesque little figure which had already started
across his lawn.  For the moment he had forgotten that the sun was low
in the west; he had overlooked the fact that it was customary for the
Hunter establishment to sup early during the warm summer months.  But
when he turned to find Sarah watching, stiff and uncompromising, from
the doorway, he remembered with painful certainty her attitude toward
his propensity to pick up any stray that might catch him in a moment of
too pronounced mellowness--stray human or feline or lost yellow dog.

Sarah's gaze, however, was not for her brother at that moment.  Her
eyes were fixed unswervingly upon the figure in the once-white drill
trousers and bobbed swallow-tail coat and shuffling boots.  She was
staring from wide and, Caleb noted, rather horror-stricken eyes at the
huge steel trap above the blanket pack.  But the boy who must have
received her glance full in his face had not faltered a step in his
advance.  He went forward until he stood at the foot of the low steps
which mounted to the veranda; and there he stopped, looking up at her,
and removed his battered hat.  Caleb ranged awkwardly up alongside him
and looked up at her in turn.  He, searching desperately for a neat and
cleverly casual opening speech, could not know that beneath her
forbidding manner a peal of soft laughter was struggling for utterance;
could not know that, at that moment, she was telling herself that, of
the two, Caleb was far the younger.

At last he cleared his throat, oratorically, and then she promptly
interrupted him.

"Supper is served, Cal," she drawled in her gentle, almost lisping
voice.

Caleb received the statement as if it were an astounding bit of
hitherto undreamed-of news.

"Comin', Sarah!" he chirped briskly.  "Comin' this blessed minute!"

And then, with an attempt at disingenuousness:

"I--I've a friend here, Sarah, whom I'd like to--er--present to you!
This is my sister, Miss Hunter," he announced to the silent boy, "and
this young man, Sarah, this young man is--er--ah--Mr.----"

"I'm Steve," said the boy, mildly.  "I'm just Stephen O'Mara!"

"Certainly!" gasped Caleb.   "Quite so--quite so!  Sarah, this is just
Steve."

The frail little woman with her quaint dignity of another decade failed
to move; she did not unbend so much as the fraction of an inch.  But
hard upon the heels of Caleb's last words the boy went forward
unhesitatingly.  Hat in the hand that balanced his big steel trap, he
stopped in front of her and offered one brown paw.

"Haow dye do, Miss Hunter," he saluted her, gravely.  And with a slow
smile that discovered for her a row of white and even teeth: "Haow dye
do?  I--I reckon you're the first--dressed-up lady I ever did git to
know!"

The calm statement took what little breath there had been left in
Caleb's lungs; it left Sarah breathless, too.  But after an
infinitesimal moment of waiting she held out her own delicate fingers
and took the outstretched hand.

"Haow dye do, Steve?" she answered, and Caleb was at a loss to
interpret the suppressed quality of her voice.  "And I--some day I am
sure it will be a great pleasure to remember that I was the--first!"

Then she faced her brother.

"Will you--will your friend, Mr.--Steve--remain for supper, Cal?" she
asked.

And Caleb, quick to see an opening, made the most of this one.

"Stay for supper," he repeated her question, and he laughed.
"Stay--for--supper!  Well, I should hope he would.  Why--why, he's
going to stop for the night!"

From the vantage place there at the top of the steps Sarah stood and
surveyed her brother's wide and guileless face for a second.  Then her
lips began to twitch.

"Very clever, Cal," she told him.  "Quite clever--for you!"

And she nodded and withdrew to see that the table was laid for three.

Caleb, chuckling, watched her go; then with a nod to the boy, he
started to follow her in.  But Steve paused at the threshold, and when
the man stopped and looked back to ascertain the cause of his delay he
found that the boy was depositing the bear trap upon the porch
floor--found him tugging to free the rusty old revolver from his belt.

"I'll leave Samanthy here," the one called Steve stated, and Caleb
understood that he meant the trap.  "An' I reckon I'd better not lug my
weapon into the house, neither, hed I?  She might----"  He nodded in
the direction of Sarah's disappearance--"Old Tom says womin folks
that's gentle born air kind-a skittish about havin' shootin' irons
araound the place.  And I don't reckon it's the part of men folks to
pester 'em."

Caleb didn't know just what to say, so he merely nodded approval.
Again he had been made to feel that it was not a boy but some little
old man who was explaining to him.  Silently he led the way upstairs,
and after he had seen the blanket pack deposited in one corner of
Sarah's beloved guest-room, after he had seen the rusty coat peeled off
as a preface to removing the dust accumulation of the long hot day from
hands and face, an inspiration came to him.  While the boy was washing,
utterly lost to everything but that none-too-simple task, he went out
of the room on a still-hunt of his own, and came back presently with
the thing for which he had gone searching.  He found the boy wrestling
a little desperately with a mop of wavy chestnut hair which only grew
the more hopeless with every stroke of the brush.

"Never mind that."  Caleb met the misapprehension in the boy's eyes.
"Never mind that!  And I--I've taken the liberty of digging out this
old canvas shooting coat.  It's one I got for Sarah--for my
sister--but, as you say, women folks are mighty skittish about anything
that has to do with a gun.  She never would go even so far as to try it
on, but if you don't mind----  That coat of yours must be a trifle hot
for this weather, I should say."

Steve reached out a hand that trembled a little and took the coat.  He
took it and stared at it with that same strained and hungry look which
he had bestowed a half hour before upon the "City."

"Do you mean," he asked, and his lips remained parted breathlessly upon
the question, "do you mean--this yere's for me?"

Caleb thought of the "injine"--the "_steam_ injine."

"I mean just that, if you'll have it," he replied.  The boy slipped his
little body into the garment and wheeled to survey himself in a mirror.
In comparison with the dismembered swallowtail it was the purple of a
Solomon.  There was a cartridge web across its front, with loops, and
after he had looked long and long at his reflection, the boy thrust
both his thumbs into the belt it made.

Then: "Them's fer ketridges," he announced solemnly.

He scowled judiciously and nodded.

And, "I'll hev to git me some, the first thing in the mornin'," he said.

That was his only remark then, and yet Caleb felt amply repaid.  Later
he had more to say, but for the time being he merely followed Caleb
back downstairs, walking very stiff and straight except when, with
every few steps, he leaned over the better to see the looped webbing
across his middle.

And at table that evening the man came to know another trait in the odd
little stranger's odd makeup which, coupled with those which he had
already mentally tabulated for future private contemplation, set him to
wondering more than a little.

With the appearance of the first dish upon the table that night the boy
was very frankly nonplussed at the array of implements upon each side
of his plate, placed there for him to manipulate.  He scarcely knew one
from the other, and the separate uses for each not at all.  But the way
in which he met the problem made Caleb lift his eyes and meet Sarah's
inscrutable glance with something akin to triumph.  For there was no
awkwardness in the boy's procedure, no flushing embarrassment, no
shame-facedness nor painfully self-conscious attempt to cover his
ignorance.  Instead, he sat and waited--sat and watched openly until
Miss Sarah had herself selected knife or fork, as the case might
be--and then, turning back to those beside his own place, frowning
intently, he made painstaking selection therefrom.  Nor did he once
make a mistake.  And Caleb, after he had begun to mark a growing
softness in the color of his sister's thin cheeks, ventured to draw
into conversation their small guest.

The boy talked freely and openly, always with his wide eyes upon the
face of his questioner, always in the grave and slightly drawling
idioms of the woods.  Again he confided that he had never before been
out of the timber; he explained that "Old Tom's" untimely taking-off a
fortnight back had been alone responsible for this pilgrimage.  And
that opened the way for a question which Caleb had been eager to ask
him.

"I suppose this--this 'Old Tom' was some kin of yours?" he observed.

The boy shook his head.

"No," he answered, "no, I ain't never hed no kin.  I ain't never hed
nobody--father ner mother, neither!"

Caleb saw Sarah start a little and bite her thin lips.  But the
bird-like movement of surprise was lost upon the speaker.

"I ain't never hed nobody," he re-averred, and Caleb, straining to
catch a note of self-pity or plea for sympathy in the words, realized
that the boy didn't even know what the one or the other was.  "I ain't
never hed nobody but Old Tom.  And he was--he wasn't nuthin' but what
he called my--my"--the sentence was broken while he paused to get the
phrase correctly--"he was what he called my 'logical custodian.'"

Guiltily Caleb knew that his next question would savor of indelicacy,
but he had to ask it just the same.

"Still, I suppose his--his taking-off must have been something in the
nature of a blow to you?" he suggested.

The boy pursed his lips.

"Wall, no," he exclaimed at last, nonchalantly.  "No-o-o!  I can't
say's it was.  We'd both been expectin' it, I reckon.  Old Tom, he
often sed he knew that some day he'd go and git just blind, stavin'
drunk enough to try an' swim the upper rapids--and two weeks ago he
done so!"

And the rest of the words were quite casual.

"I kind-a reckon he'd hev made it, at that," he offered his opinion,
"if they'd hev been a trifle more water.  But the rocks was too close
to the surface fer comfortable swimmin'.  The Jenkinses found him down
in the slack water, Sunday noon or thereabouts, and they sed he'd never
be no deader, not even if he'd a-died in a reg'lar bed, with a doctor
helpin' him along."

Caleb threw his sister one lugubriously helpless glance.  Sarah had
choked, apparently upon a crumb of bread, and was coughing,
stranglingly.  And Caleb made to change the drift of the conversation,
but he was not quick enough.

"I ain't never been much of a hand for licker," Steve finished naively.
"Old Tom sed he never could understand it in me, neither, but he
reckoned it was lucky in a way fer both of us.  He sed he'd whale the
life outen me if he ever caught me even smellin' of a cork; and as fer
him--well, it come in handy for him, havin' a sober hand round the
shack when he wan't quite hisself!"

This time when Caleb lifted his eyes he met a startled gleam behind
Sarah's half dropped lashes.  She was peering steadily into the boy's
lean, untroubled face.  Caleb voiced the query which he knew must be
behind her quiet intentness.

"You said your name was O'Mara, I believe.  I suppose that was--ah--Old
Tom's last name, too?"

Steve laughed; he laughed frankly for the first time since he had
halted, hours before, outside in the dusty road.

"Why, Old Tom had a dozen different names in the last few years," he
replied.  "He had a new one every time he went outen the woods fer a
trip.  But he always sed he mostly favored Brown or Jones or Smith,
they bein' quiet and common and not too hard to remember.  He just
changed names whenever he got tired of his old one, Old Tom did.  But
he always did say, too, that if he'd hed as good a one as O'Mara, he'd
a kept it--and kept it proud."

At the conclusion of that statement it was Miss Sarah's gaze which went
searching across the table for her brother's eyes.  But the boy just
ran on and on, totally oblivious to their glances.

He told them of his lonely days in the woods shack, when Old Tom went
down river and was three or four weeks in returning; he dwelt upon
blissful days in the spring when he had been allowed to play a man's
part in the small drives which he and Old Tom and the "Jenkinses"
began, and which Old Tom and the Jenkinses alone saw through to market
in Morrison.  He touched lightly and inconsequentially upon certain
days when Old Tom would hang for hours over an old tin box filled with
soiled and ink-smeared memoranda, periods which were always followed by
days of moody silence and a week or more of "lessons" in a tattered and
thumbed reader which the woodsman had brought up-river--lessons as
painful and laborious to Old Tom as they were delightful to the starved
mentality of the pupil.  And Old Tom, the boy explained, was pretty
likely to be "lickered up fer quite a spell" after such a session which
invariably began with an exploration of the battered tin box.

The boy told Caleb of days and nights on the trail--boasted
unconsciously of Old Tom's super-cunning with trap and deadfall, and
even poison bait.  And that brought him to the beautifully oiled bear
trap which he had left outside the door.

"I brung Samanthy along with me," he stated.  "I brung her just because
somehow I kind-a thought mebby Old Tom'd be glad if I did.  Next to me
he always sed he set a heap o' store on thet ole critter.  He sed
Samanthy was as near to hevin' a woman around the house as anything he
knew on--she hed a voice like a steel trap, and when she got her teeth
sot in a argument she never did let up.  I brung her along with me, and
the gun he give me, but I didn't take nuthin' else."

Caleb waited there until he knew that the boy had finished.

"You never bothered about that old tin box?" he inquired casually.

The boy shook his head again.

"Old Tom, whenever he went away for a spell, always sed I wan't to
meddle with it," he explained.  "This time I reckoned his goin' was
just about the same thing, only he won't be comin' back, so I--I just
locked the box up in the cubberd and hitched the staple into the door
and come down myself."

By the time that meal was finished the boy's eyes were so heavy-lidded
that, fight as he would, they still persisted in drooping till the long
lashes curled over his cheeks.  And in spite of Caleb's remonstrance it
was Sarah who saw him upstairs and into the huge guest-room with its
four-poster and high-boy and spindle-backed chairs.

When she came back downstairs her eyes were shining more than a little
and the flush upon her cheeks was undeniably rose.  Her brother, from
his seat before the unlighted fireplace, puffed methodically upon his
pipe and barely lifted his head at her coming.  He was deep in
meditation.  She stood looking at him for a time from the foot of the
stairway.

"He's asleep," she began finally in a very little voice.  "He fell
asleep almost before his cheek touched the pillow."

Caleb made no answer.  He nodded but his eyes were vacant with thoughts
of his own.

"Cal," she went on, "did you give him that old coat of mine?"

Caleb nodded again--an affirmative.

"Well, the last thing he asked before he slept was that I deliver a
message to you.  'Tell him thanks for me,' he said.  'Tell him I clean
forgot it til now!'  And as for me, Cal--why--why, 'he'd git me
anuther, anytime I took the notion thet I wanted one!'"

And still Caleb nodded.  The room was quiet for a long time.

"Sarah," he murmured at last.

"Yes, Cal," she answered.

"Has that boy's--yarn--set you to thinking a little?"

"It was very interesting and unusual," she admitted.  Then she rose and
crossed over to his chair and perched herself, with odd, elfish,
girlish grace upon its arm.

"Do you mean Old Tom's tin box?" she asked gently.

And he nodded.

"Yes, in part--yes," he said.  "But not just that alone, either.  I
mean everything, Sarah.  The way he handles himself; the way he looks
one in the face when he is talking.  The--the--now what are you
grinning over?"

She stroked his sparse hair.

"Cal, you old romancer, you.  Who'd ever suspect it in a man of your
age and--and avoirdupois!"

"Avoirdupois!" he snorted.  "Can't a man continue to have ideas now and
then, even if he does become a--a trifle plump.  And that boy--why,
Sarah I tell you----!"

And then his sister put one hand over his lips.

"I know, Cal," she interrupted placidly.  "I know!  You're going to
tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that
backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless
bronze--or--or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and
provided with the chance.  It sounds--it sounds very big and grand and
romantic, Cal, but has it ever occurred to you that anyone big enough
for things like those would find the way himself?"

Immediately, jerkily, Caleb started to straighten up.
Argumentatively--and then she checked him.

"Oh, I know you don't believe it and I--I don't think I do myself, Cal.
A man has to know what opportunity is before he can go out and hunt up
his own big chance.  I just said it for the sake of argument, Cal.
I--I'm like Samanthy--ole Samanthy, you know!  I'm a woman, and when I
git my teeth sot in a argumint I never do let up.  Have your dreams,
you--you boy!  And in the meantime, if you have any plans, tell me,
please, what are you going to do with him in the morning?"

Caleb Hunter bobbed his head, vehemently.  Rapidly he related to her
the episode of the switch engine in Dexter Allison's millyards.

"And I believe what I believe," he insisted, doggedly.  "And to-morrow
I aim to give that boy a ride in one of Allison's 'steam injine' cabs,
if it's all I do!"

"I thought so," said Miss Sarah.

For a time she sat there upon his arm chair.  Neither spoke, nor felt
the need for words.  Just before she rose to go upstairs, she broke
that quiet.

"He has an odd, strange, half-wild beauty," she mused aloud.  "A beauty
that is quite unusual, I should say, in children of his--his station.
His hair is silken and, oh so thick!  And his eyes and square chin with
that little cleft.  And his nose--his nose, I should say, might be said
to denote estheticism--and--a--a--ah----"

Caleb Hunter threw back his head at the telltale little quaver in the
voice and found Sarah Hunter smiling down at him, whimsically.

"Get all the amusement out of it that you can," he invited her.
"And--and trust a woman to take note of such points as you have
mentioned!"

From the stairs she gave him one backward glance.

"Forgive me, Cal," she hogged.  "I meant it all--truly!  Even the
estheticism, which I only included to tease you.  And if you don't want
to trust to a woman's judgment on such points as I have mentioned, I
would suggest that you peep in on him when you retire, and--and confirm
them for yourself."

Hours later Caleb acted upon her suggestion.  Every characteristic
which Sarah had mentioned he found and noted in that half-lighted
moment or two while he stood at the bedside.

And he noted more than just that.  Sarah's old canvas hunting coat was
folded into a small bundle and lay, guarded by one outflung,
loose-fingered brown hand, beside the sleeping boy's face on the pillow.

Caleb went to bed with a half dozen wild notions whirling in his head,
and a strange something tugging at his heart.




CHAPTER III

THREE QUARTERS AND SIX EIGHTHS

Saturday morning dawned as hot and dry and windless as had been the
other days of the week which had preceded it.  Caleb Hunter, rising
from an uneasy night, blamed his sleeplessness upon the weather.  It
was fully an hour before his usual, not-too-early hour of rising, when
he slowly descended the wide stairway; and yet he was but little
surprised to find the boy already there before him, seated upon the top
step of the verandah, when he strolled outside.

The little stranger with the grave voice, who had introduced himself as
Stephen O'Mara, had not heard Caleb's step and the latter stood for a
time in the doorway, contemplating the small, square-set shoulders in
the canvas coat which had been his sister Sarah's, and the small,
shapely head above them.

Throughout the night while he lay awake pondering the fantastic
possibilities which the boy's story had stirred him into half
believing, Caleb had had gradually lengthening moments of doubt in
which he admitted to himself that his sister was right in her chafing
analysis of him, her brother.  Before morning came he had told himself
a dozen times that he was nothing more than a sentimental old romancer,
who saw in every beggar a worthy spirit bewitched by Destiny, and a
Circumstance-enchanted fairy-prince in every ragamuffin who chanced to
have big eyes.  Merely because they had so persistently denied him
sleep--those thoughts of Old Tom and his cherished tin box and the
boy's own unmistakable poise and surety of self which even the
shuffling boots and ragged clothes had only made the more
impressive--merely because they persisted in endless procession through
his brain, while he rolled and tossed and re-arranged the pillow, he
had grown more and more peevishly eager to discount and discredit them,
during the darkness.  But when morning came, and he rose and went into
the big guest room to find it empty, he experienced a moment of panicky
disappointment; suddenly anxious for another opportunity to verify all
that which, in the hours of sleepless pro's and con's, had become
figment-like and whimsical, he wondered if the boy really could have
gone without even waiting to bid them good-bye.  He could not make that
abrupt sort of a leave-taking harmonize with the rest of the
youngster's actions--and then he caught a glimpse of him, motionless
there on the verandah steps.

The boy did not hear Caleb's coming that morning.  His head was tilted
forward in that keen attitude of straining intentness which to the man
had already become eloquently characteristic of his hungry spirit.  And
for a time Caleb withheld his greeting; instead of speaking he stood
and studied him, and while he studied it all came back again, until the
illusion, if such it were, was far more vivid, far more compelling than
it had been the night before.  Caleb told himself that to look only
meant the discovery of new and compelling "points" both in feature and
body, new and surprising suggestions of inbred fineness totally at
variance with the unhemmed white drill trousers and uncouth shoes.  And
then, while he was nodding to himself, he realized that the boy was not
looking down into the town in the valley.

Chin in palm, elbow upon knee, Steve was gazing fixedly in the
direction of Dexter Allison's stucco and timber "summer lodge," and
although Caleb could not have known it, there had been no need for his
silence, for the boy's rapt preoccupation was sound-proof.  Caleb heard
voices coming from behind the shrubbery and just as he, a little
perplexed, turned to follow the direction of that fascinated gaze,
Allison himself squeezed through a narrow aperture in the box hedge and
hailed him jovially from the far edge of the lawn.  And Caleb Hunter's
brows drew together in a bit of a frown when a slender figure in kilted
black velvet and bright-buckled low shoes, hatless and with thick,
gleaming hair bobbed short in a style strange to Morrison in those
days, flashed through behind him.  For Caleb heard the short gasp which
came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
hand at him.

Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
what had been holding so closely his attention.  He understood
absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
help but think----  His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.

All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
daughter, Barbara.  No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
for his body.  Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force.  He
recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
morning garb.  But that Saturday morning he realized what the woman was
to be like, when the hem of the velvet skirt no longer hung high above
spindly black legs and the bobbed hair had been allowed to grow and
grow, far below the tiny ears which it now barely covered.

To Caleb who, without knowing it, from sheer sympathy was viewing her
through the untaught eyes of the boy at his feet, she was no longer a
mere slip of a girl-child, dark-eyed, bewildering of mood and pulsingly
alive.  Caleb caught his first illuminating glimpse of the woman she
was to be--of the dainty grace and more than usual beauty which was
there in the promise of the years.  And he who was fond of insisting to
his sister Sarah, that there was many a boy back in those hills who,
with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized
how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the
fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to
approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was
typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter.

He was no snob--Caleb Hunter--and yet the little girl's bearing at that
moment doubly accented for him the gulf which lay between her and the
hills-boy, by name Steve.  For though she did pause to stare at his
white drill trousers and unbelievable man-sized boots with frankly
childish astonishment, the next instant she had recovered herself and
without another glance preceded her father across the grass.  Quite as
though Steve had not been there at all she passed him, to hesitate
demurely at Caleb's side.

"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she greeted him.

And then, quite suddenly, Caleb didn't feel so very sorry after all for
his little visitor.  He stopped pitying him.  Steve's eyes had not
wavered once from the little girl's face, from the time she appeared in
the hedge gap until she mounted the steps, utterly oblivious to his
nearness; but when she brushed against his elbow, the boy rose and
stood, hat in hand, gravely quiet, gravely possessed, and silently sure
of himself.

Even after he had answered Barbara Allison's greeting and turned with
his grown-up, ponderous courtesy to present the boy to her, only to be
left with the words hanging upon tongue-tip by her instant
disappearance inside in search of Sarah, Caleb caught no hint of the
thoughts behind those impassive and steady eyes.  And yet he knew that
Steve had risen in order that he might bow as he had the night before,
when Caleb introduced him to his sister.

Dexter Allison, coming up in less airy fashion across the lawn,
surprised Caleb with his mouth still open.

"Well?" said Dexter Allison--and Caleb recovered himself.

"Well?" he countered; and then they both laughed softly and shook
hands.  It was their unvaried formula of greeting, whether they had not
seen each other for twenty-four hours or twenty-four months.

And while they were shaking hands the boy turned quietly and re-seated
himself upon the top step.  But Allison gave him more notice than had
his daughter Barbara.  He stood with his pudgy hands in his pockets,
gazing at the averted face, unconcealed and growing amusement in the
scrutiny, until Caleb, not yet aware of the boy's woods-taught habit of
seeing while seeming not to see, was simultaneously annoyed at
Allison's fatuous grin, and glad of the fact that Steve apparently was
looking the other way.  After a time Allison raised quizzical eyes to
Caleb's face.

"Wel-l-l?" he intoned, and with a little reluctance as reasonless as it
was unnoticed, Caleb answered the inferred question.

"This--this is a little friend of mine, Dexter," he said, "down from
the hills.  He's in to have a look at the city which you have been so
instrumental in arousing to its present state of teeming activity.
This is Stephen O'Mara.  Steve--this is Mr. Allison, Steve!"

Then the boy turned and again rose to his feet, and at that moment
Caleb could have hugged him for his deliberation.  The boy inclined his
head; he bowed, without a word.  And it was Dexter Allison who first
offered a hand.

"Glad to make your acquaintance, Stephen," the latter exclaimed with
quite violent good humor.  "And how are you?"

Steve took the hand and closed his brown fingers hard upon the puffy
white ones.  For an instant he stood, his eyes, grave and inscrutable,
full upon Allison's smaller ones.  "I'm tol-lable," he drawled soberly.
"And--haow be you--yourself?"

Allison gasped, stood with mouth agape, and then burst into one of his
rather too-frequent, too-hearty laughs.

"Well, I'm----" he began his favorite phrase of ejaculation, and then
stopped to look down again into the small face before him.  "Well,
I'm----" and he stopped to chuckle.  Then he turned back to Caleb.

"I suppose, Cal, you know what this early morning call presages?" he
suggested.

Caleb recalled himself with an effort from a contemplation of the
sudden, prideful something which had warmed him while Steve was shaking
hands.  He smiled, mechanically.

"I suppose it's the usual raid upon the commissary," he answered.

Allison mounted heavily to the verandah.

"Right!" he exclaimed.  "Right!  You'll notice that Barbara has already
gone on ahead.  She's the skirmish line--scouts--videttes--whatever you
please to call 'em.  There's no-one up yet--none of the family--over to
our place.  We are hungry, Cal.  I hope this is waffle morning?"

Caleb smiled at him, less impersonality in the mirth.  It was a regular
custom, this truancy of Barbara Allison and her father--one of the
little human foibles which Caleb often told himself accounted, in part
at least, for his real liking of the man.

"Waffles it is," he said, and he turned toward the boy.

"Would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" he asked.  "Will you tell
her, please, that we are to be subjected to another neighborly
imposition?"

After the boy had disappeared Caleb followed the larger man to a chair.
And this time it was Caleb who met Allison's silence with a
challenging, "Well?"

"Where did you get him, Cal?" Allison demanded.  "Where _did_ you get
him?  Those shoes, and those trousers--pants, I guess is the word, eh?
And say, how that little beggar did squeeze my hand!  Look here!"

He held one soft hand up for inspection.  There were faint red welts
still visible across the finger joints.

"Friend of yours, did you say?"

Without stopping to think about it, Caleb was not so keen to enlarge
upon the boy's obvious "points" as he had been with Sarah.  He omitted
to mention his thoughts of the night before, and he omitted any
reference to Old Tom, except for the most hazy explanation that the boy
had no immediate kin.  But with an increasing eagerness he dilated upon
the small foot traveler's first view of the "city," his breathless
reception of Allison's own switch engine, and his avowed intention to
"look around a trifle," before he located something to do.

"I thought I'd take him down this morning and get McLean to give him a
ride in the cab of one of those sheet-iron steam relics of yours," he
finished.

If Caleb had expected his unadorned recitation of the boy's appearance
to make any impression upon his hearer he would have been disappointed.
But, without any confessed reason for so doing, Caleb had aimed rather
at the opposite effect.  And Allison turned from it with a large,
matter-of-fact indifference, to rise and bow to Sarah Hunter, who
appeared that moment in the doorway.

"Surely--surely," he echoed Caleb's suggestion.  "Take him down and
give him a ride!  McLean'll be glad of the chance to show someone his
pet buzz-saws and things.  I'll walk down with you, myself, after
breakfast.  I may be away for a day or two, and I want to leave
directions for changes to be incorporated while I'm gone."

At the table that morning Caleb noted that there was no hesitation in
Steve's selection from the silver beside his plate, no waiting to
follow in the lead of Sarah Hunter's choice.  He noticed, too, that the
boy's eyes did not once lift to those of Barbara Allison, opposite him.
And while the little girl from time to time joined in the conversation,
he not once opened his mouth to speak, until they were almost ready to
rise from their places.

Allison had been growling genially at the lack of water and the
prolonged drouth which was burning the pasturage to a crisp and
juiceless brown.

"If that everlasting sun would only stop shining for a while," he said,
"if it'd only rain a bit, I'd like to take a trip back north,
a-fishing, before it gets too late in the season."

"You mean you'd like a fishing trip as an excuse to go back north,
don't you, Dexter?" Caleb badgered him.

Allison was smiling blandly, for Caleb's joke over his round-about
methods was an old, old joke, when Stephen O'Mara spoke.

"It's goin' to rain," said the boy.

Allison turned toward him, his eyes again quizzical.

"I suppose so," he admitted.  "In the general course of things it'll
come, no doubt, but----"

The boy interrupted him, shaking his head.

"It's goin' to come before mornin'," he stated inflectionlessly, "and
it's comin' to stay fer a spell, too!"

And Allison did not try to hide his broad grin of amusement.

"You think so, do you, sonny?" he dismissed the matter not unkindly.
"Well, at that, your guess when it comes to the weather, is about as
good as the next man's."

Once more the boy shook his head.

"I ain't guessin'," he finished unabashed.  "Ner I ain't thinkin' it
will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sun-up, and it'll be good for 'til
Wednesday, fer sure!"

Caleb, watching the boy's face, was on the point of offering to wager
two bits with Allison that the prophecy held good, but Sarah's
well-known attitude toward the vice of gambling checked him in the rash
offer.  Besides, he wondered how he could make sound anything but
foolish an offer to back the certainty of a weather forecast which was
based upon nothing but the unassuming and quiet finality of the prophet.

Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill
that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one
of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy
tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.

"All right, then," he gave in.  "If you want to come as much as all
that, but--but you--now run along, then, with Stephen."

On the way down the hill he voiced his perplexity to Caleb.

"When it comes to dealing with men," he said, "I pride myself upon
being able to go back, rather incisively, to first motives.  But the
other sex is beyond me!  She's always turned up her dainty nose at the
noise and dirt before, and--and now she's ready to cry because I
suggest that she wait with Miss Sarah until we return!"

Caleb's eyes rested upon the oddly matched little couple ahead in the
road.  The boy was carrying his battered hat in his hand, but Barbara
walked with small head up, without a single glance for her escort.
Caleb, noting that Steve's head was forward-thrust, knew that his eyes
must be fastened hungrily upon the town in the valley; and he
understood the reason for the disdainful tilt of the little girl's
chin.  For even at the age of ten Barbara Allison was not accustomed to
inattention.  Caleb smiled, rather covertly for him.

"I never knew but one woman whose motives were absolutely transparent,"
he mused.  "And she--she was the most uninteresting, unsuccessful
female person I ever did know."

As Allison had promised they found McLean, the white-haired mill
superintendent, only too eager at the prospect of an audience for one
of his voluble tours of the premises.  But when Caleb had explained the
main errand upon which they had come, after a long, keen scrutiny of
the boy's face, the burly river-man led the way, without a word, to a
wheezing old two-wheeler in the piling yard.

"So you'll be wantin' to take a spin in one av me ingines, is it?" he
asked then.  And, after a moment: "An' do you think you'll be able to
hang on, whin she gets to r-rollin'?"

Steve's eyes were like bits of polished steel, so bright they were.  It
was a struggle for him to take them, even for a moment, from the engine
before him.

"I cal'late I kin," he quavered.

"Well, thin, we'll see."  McLean looked up and winked at the engineer
in the diminutive cab.  "It's car-reful you'll be, Misther engineer,"
he cautioned, "an' watch your steerin' on the cur-rves!"

He leaned over to lift the boy to the running-board, but Steve, with
one foot upraised, hung back.  He faced toward Caleb and, without a
glance in the girl's direction, said:

"Mebby she--mebby she'd like to go, too?"

Barbara Allison, chin lifted a little higher, half wheeled and slipped
her hand within that of her father.

"Thank you, but I don't care to," she refused.

Steve caught the little toss of her head from the corner of his eye,
and his face went pink.  Without another word he clambered up beside
the driver and the engine rolled out of the yard and went clanking down
the uneven, crooked track, leaving a dissolving trail of steam behind.
When it returned the little face at the cab window was tense and
somewhat pale beneath its tan, but the hand upon the throttle beside
the engineer's lay steady as a little pine knot.

"Well, an' what do you think av her?" McLean demanded with an
assumption of anxiety as the boy dropped to the ground.

Steve turned and patted the footboard with a proprietary hand.  As
grave of mien as his questioner he bobbed his head.

"She--she certainly kin git up and step," he volunteered.  And then,
cocking his head judiciously: "I'll hev to be a-gittin' me one of them
fer myself, some day!"

McLean chuckled--he chuckled in deep delight within his white
whiskers--and led the way to the mills.  But once there the amusement
in his eyes rapidly deepened to amazement, for there were few steps in
the processes upon which the boy could not talk as fluently and
technically as did the mill boss himself.  And he knew timber; knew it
with the same infallibility which had, even in McLean, always seemed to
border upon the uncanny.

It was Allison himself who first called attention to an unsawed log
which was being discarded.

"That looks like too good a stick to be wasted, doesn't it, McLean?" he
asked.

Before McLean could answer the boy spat gravely into a pile of sawdust,
his piping voice rising above the shrill scream of the saws.

"She's holler," he stated succintly.  "Dry rotten above the stub!"

And when Allison raised his brows, interrogatively, McLean dropped one
hand upon the boy's shoulder, a bit of pride in the gesture.

"Holler she is," he agreed, and he added: "An' I'll be afther knowin'
where to find a riverman av the old school, I'm thinkin', some day whin
the need arises!"

A man came hunting for McLean at that moment with news that the tram
which carried the logs up from the basin to the saws needed his
attention.  They followed him out, Steve hard at his heels, and Barbara
Allison, lips pouted, tight to her father's side.  After a brief
examination of the trouble McLean gave a half dozen hurried orders;
then turned to the boy beside him and jerked one thumb over his
shoulder.

"Run down to the smithy shop, lad," he directed, "an' tell the smith
that I'll be wantin' a strip av str-rap iron, two feet in lingth, av
quarter inch stuff--and three-quarters av an inch wide."

The boy was off like a deer and back again in a twinkling,
empty-handed, but with an astounding bit of news.

"The blacksmith says he ain't got no--no iron three-quarters of an inch
wide," he said, and the words were broken by his panting breaths.  "But
he says he's got plenty that's six-eighths.  Shall I--shall I git some
o' that?"

He waited the word, poised to go.

McLean had been kneeling upon the saw-dust strewn ground.  Now he rose
and stood, feet apart, gazing down into that face, afire with
eagerness, uplifted to his.  Quiet endured for a long time, and then,
at a chuckle from Allison, Steve wheeled--he wheeled just in time to
see Barbara Allison's brows arch and her lips curl in a queer little
smile.  And suddenly Allison burst into a loud guffaw.

Caleb had never seen a change so swift as that which came over the
boy's face.  The eager light faded from the gray eyes, until they were
purple where they had been gray before.  And Caleb had never seen a
face grow so white--so white and set and dangerous.  Stephen O'Mara's
head drooped, he turned and wavered away a step or two.  Allison
stopped laughing, abruptly.  Then McLean spoke.

"'Twas funny, mebby," he muttered.  "But it was not so damned funny,
aither!  An' I--I'll be goin' down now to teach that smith to kape his
funny jokes till afther hours."

He started toward the shop, and stopped again.

"It's all right, buddy," he said.  "'Tis nothing that you need feel
badly about, for 'twas I who made the mistake.  I should have sint you
out to estimate whether our spruce would cut two million feet or less,
an' you'd have come as close as mor-rtal man could, I'll wager.  'Twas
a trivial thing, lad.  What's a little matter av figures between min av
the river, eh?  We'll leave that to the capitalists who laugh at our
dinseness, me bhoy!"

With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.

Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill.  Not once
did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak
whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself.  He only knew
that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of
mirth.  Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own
gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark
whatsoever.

"I--you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that
three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he
tried to comfort him.  "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite
of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."

Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of
laughter.  He whirled--the boy--and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed,
bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones.  He shook with the very vehemence of
the words that came through twitching lips.

"_She_ didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out.  "If
I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between
them figgers, and _hedn't_ knowed, she could'a smiled.  But I--I ain't
hed my chance--yit!"

He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way
upstairs.

Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought
uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely
woman-wise.  A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to
himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling
up in the southwest.  One long finger of black cloud was already poked
up over the horizon.  He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast
table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and
he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing
trip on Monday--the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.

He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of
misery.  Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him
the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly,
come Monday!

And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him
alone for a while--alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than
the spare little body which housed it.




CHAPTER IV

I'LL TELL HER YOU'RE A BAPTIST

It rained that night.  The storm which hung for hours, a threatening
bank of black in the south, finally tore north at sundown, to break
with vicious fury.  And again Caleb spent a sleepless night, this time
alone before the fireplace, but the thoughts which kept him awake
failed to grow fantastic and romantically absurd with prolonged
contemplation, as they had the night before.

Never until that day had he considered his oft-repeated theory that
there was many a boy in those back-woods who, with a chance, might go
far, as anything but an idealistic truth, in the abstract.  The
realization that a chance had come to test it, in the concrete, stunned
him at first.

Dispassionately he summed up all the boy's characteristics that night
and reviewed them, one by one: His poise and utter lack of
self-consciousness, his fearless directness and faith in himself, in
all that he said or did; and they came through the mental assay without
fault or flaw.

He had already decided that he must go up-river and explore the old tin
box which had been left there, locked in the "cubberd," but he was a
little proud to make his decision before he learned all that it might,
or might not, reveal; he was proud to believe that he knew a
thorough-bred, without a pedigree for confirmation.  And when Sunday
morning dawned and the floodlike downpour had subsided to a gray and
steady rainfall, even Caleb, none too weatherwise, knew that it had
come to "stay fer a spell."  He knew that the boy who had come marching
down the valley road, two days before, was going to stay, too, if it
lay within his power to persuade him.

Steve was most taciturn at the table the following morning; his moody
silence puzzled even Sarah Hunter.  But when the latter, whose Sunday
schedule no storm could alter, came home from church and found Caleb
and the boy immersed in a mass of flies and leaders, and lines which
had been skeined to dry, her thorough disapproval loosed the boy's
tongue.  She stood in the doorway surveying with a frown their
preoccupied industry.

"It seems to me, Cal," she commented, "that even if _you_ haven't any
regard for the Sabbath, you might do better than lead those younger
than yourself into doing things which might better be left for days
which were meant for such things."

She swished upstairs before Caleb had a chance to answer.  But minutes
after she had gone Steve looked up from a line he was spooling.

"She ain't particularly pleased, I take it," he remarked.

"Not particularly," Caleb chuckled.  "It's funny, too, because I do
most of this sort of work on Sunday.  You'd think she'd become resigned
to it, but she doesn't."

The boy thought deeply for a while.

"Didn't--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" he asked
presently.

Up shot Caleb's head.

"Huh-h-h?" he gasped.

"I sed--didn't the 'Postles cast their nets on Sunday?" Steve repeated.
"Seems to me they did, but I can't just rec'lict now what chapter it
was in."

Caleb pulled his face into a semblance of sobriety.

"Seems to me they did," he agreed, a little weakly, "now that you
mention it.  I don't just recollect where it occurred, either, at the
moment, but we'll have to look it up, because, as a case of precedent,
it'll be a clincher for Sarah."

He chuckled for a full hour over the thought before he forgot it.  The
boy, however, upon whom Sarah's disapproval had made a more lasting
impression, recalled it to him later.

Allison joined them Monday morning at daybreak.  All day they drove
through the seeping rain--drove north in Caleb's buckboard, to turn off
finally upon a woods trail that ran into the cast, along the lesser
branch of the river.  During the ride Steve's bearing toward the third
member of the party was too plain to escape notice, for he never looked
at nor directed a word to Allison unless it was in reply to a direct
question, and then his answers were almost monosyllabic.  But Allison,
who, as usual, gave his undivided attention to the country through
which they were passing, in attitude toward the boy was even more
remarkable.

Once when they had halted at noon he pointed out a hillside of pine,
black beneath the rain, close-clustered and of mastlike straightness.

"There's a wonderful stand of pine, Cal," he remarked.  "I'd venture to
say that it would cut at least two million feet."

Instantly, although the remark was addressed to him, Caleb knew that it
was Stephen's comment for which Allison was angling.  And hard upon his
casual statement the boy's head came sharply around.

"She'll run nigh double that," he swallowed the bait.  "She'll run
double--and mebby a trifle more."

Nor did Allison even smile now.

"What makes you think so?" he asked.

Again there came the boy's pat answer.

"I ain't thinkin'," he said.  "It's jest there!  They're close
set--them trees--and they're clear, clean to the tops.  There ain't a
stump there that won't run near ten standard."

Allison squinted and finally nodded his head.

"Maybe," he agreed, "maybe."

But later Caleb saw him enter some figures in his small, black-bound
notebook.

That night the episode was repeated with a bit of variation.  They had
set up their tent and made camp, a little before nightfall.  Far below
them, hidden by the trees, the east branch cut a threadlike gash
through the center of a valley broad enough and round enough to have
been a veritable amphitheater of the gods.  The whole great hollow was
clothed with evergreen, a sea of dripping tops in the semi-gloom, and
Allison, when he had set aside his plate and lighted his pipe, lifted a
hand in a gesture which embraced it all.

"If you weren't so lazy-brained, Cal," he said, "that sight would stir
in you something more than a mere appreciation of what you call the
'sublimity of sheer immensity.'  For the man who can look ahead ten or
a dozen years there is an undreamed of fortune right here in this
alley."

Caleb yawned.

"No doubt," he agreed.  "But I didn't coin that phrase for immense
fortunes.  I guess I'm old-fashioned enough to like it a whole lot
better just as it is."

Then he became suddenly aware of the tense earnestness with which
Stephen O'Mara was listening.  And when Allison, thinking aloud, mused
that the cost of driving the timber down the shallow stream to the
far-off mills would be, perhaps, prohibitive, words fairly leaped to
the boy's lips.

"But they--they won't be drivin' that timber by floods, when they git
to tacklin' these here valleys," he exclaimed.  "Old Tom ses when they
really git to lumberin' these mountains they'll skid it daown to the
railroad tracks and yank it out by steam!"

That sober statement in the piping voice had a strange effect upon
Allison.  He leaned forward, a sort of guarded astonishment in his
attitude, to peer at the childish face in the fire-glow.  Then he
seemed to remember that it was just a bit of a woods-waif who had
spoken.  But Caleb, who was lazy-brained in some matters, sensed that
Steve had put into words Allison's own unspoken thought, just as
Allison at that moment voiced the question which he was about to utter
himself.

"I suppose it was this--this Old Tom who taught you all these things
you know about timber?" he said, curious.

Steve pondered the question.

"Wal-l-l, yes," he answered at last.  "Old Tom learned me some,
but--but most of it I kind of feel as if I always knowed."

The boy was fast asleep, curled up beneath the blankets, when Caleb
finally broached, that night, the matter which had kept him awake the
entire night before.  And when he had finished Allison sat quiet for a
long time before he offered any reply.

"You mean----" he began, at length.

"I just mean that I'm going to give him his chance," Caleb cut in.  His
voice was hushed, but vehement.  "Why, man, think what he has this
minute, to start with!  A brain as clear as a diamond, absolutely
fresh, absolutely unspoiled or fagged with the nonsensical fol-de-rol
which makes up the bulk of the usual boy's education of his age, and a
working knowledge, for instance, of this north country which most men
might envy.  Why, the possibilities are limitless!"

Allison puffed his pipe in silence.

"No doubt you're right," he admitted.  "In ten years, with a technical
education to back up his practical knowledge, he might prove priceless
to someone who had need of such a specialist.  Always assuming, of
course, that he developed according to promise.  But the possibilities
are limitless, too, in the other directions, aren't they?"

"Meaning?" invited Caleb.

"Well, you don't know any too much concerning his antecedents, do you?"
Allison suggested.  "And still----"

"I don't have to," Caleb interrupted, "not after one look at him!"

"--And still, if you catch a boy young enough," Allison finished
serenely, "you can make a fairly presentable gentleman out of almost
any material, with time enough and money enough to teach him what to
do."

"You can," Caleb came back, "but no matter how much money you spend,
you can't make the sort of a gentleman out of him, that knows without
being taught, what _not_ to do!  They--they have to be born to that,
Dexter."

And there they let it drop.  But the next morning, when they were alone
upon the brook, Caleb, after several false starts managed to re-open
the subject with the boy himself.

"Has it ever occurred to you, Steve," he asked, "that all these things
you know about the woods might be valuable, some day, to--to men who
pay well for such knowledge?"

Steve paid no apparent heed to the question until he had landed a trout
which he had hooked a moment before.  It was a heavy fish--and Caleb
had promised to teach him how to handle that fly-rod!  Then he looked
up.

"Once Old Tom sed they'd be payin' me more'n he ever earned in his
lifetime, jest to go a-raound and tell 'em how much good lumber they
was in standin' trees.  Is that--is that what you mean?"

"Partly--partly, but not entirely, either," Caleb went on.  "You said
last night that when they got to lumbering these mountains, they'd be
taking it out by steam.  When they do they'll want men who know the
woods--but they'll have to know how to bridge rivers and cross swamps,
too, won't they?"

The boy promptly forgot his fishing.  Knee-deep in the stream he faced
squarely around toward Caleb, and from that glowing countenance the man
knew that he had only repeated something which, long before, had
already fired the boy's imagination.

"They's places where I kin git 'em to learn me them things, ain't
they?" he demanded.

"Yes," said Caleb.  "There are places.  And you--you were thinking of
going to school?"

"Thinkin' of it?" echoed Steve.  "I always been thinkin' of it.  Why,
thet's all I come outen the timber fer!"

"But you said you meant to locate something to do," the man argued,
nonplussed, "after you had looked around a trifle."

Steve's eyes dropped toward the white drill trousers and big boots, the
latter half-hidden from sight by the swirling water.

"I got to earn money first," he explained patiently.  "I--I jest
couldn't git to go to school--in these here clothes!"

"Oh!" murmured Caleb.  "Oh!"  And then, recovering himself: "That'll
take a long time," he ventured.

The boy smiled, strangely--the first smile of man's sophistication
which Caleb had seen upon his face.

"I've always hed to wait a long time fer everything I've wanted," he
answered, "but I always git it, just the same, if I only want it hard
enough."

[Illustration: "I've always hed to wait a long time for everything I've
wanted," the boy answered, "but I always get it, just the same, if I
only want it hard enough."]

Caleb cleared his throat, self-consciously.

"Still," he argued again, "it would waste some very valuable years.
Now--now what do you think of staying with me, and--and starting in
this fall?"

The boy's lips fell apart while he stood and gaped up into Caleb's
slightly red face.

"You mean," he breathed, "you mean--jest live--with you?"

"That was my idea," said Caleb.

And then, slowly, the boy's head dropped again, as it had when he bowed
to gaze at his uncouth, begrimed clothes.  The man thought that he
caught the inference of that moment of silence.

"We can fix up the matter of clothes later," he made haste to forestall
any objection in that direction.  "That doesn't amount to anything,
anyway."

The clear eyes lifted again, steady and wide and very, very grave.

"I always knowed it was comin'," said Stephen O'Mara.  "I always knowed
it was a-comin'--this chance--even when I didn't know _haow_ it would
come.  Ner I wa'n't thinkin' about my clothes.  I reckon I kin learn
jest as fast in these as in any.  I was jest thinkin' about Miss Sarah.
She--she might not like it, hevin' two men folks a-raound the house,
under foot."

It was Caleb's turn to stand, agape.

"Miss Sarah?" he faltered, astonished--and then he remembered.  He
laughed, unsteadily, with relief.  For an instant he had been
inexplicably afraid that the boy was going to refuse his offer.

"Why, you musn't mind what Sarah said yesterday," he rushed on.
"She--she--well, she's a Baptist, Steve, and you know what that means."

He leaned forward a little, his voice quite stealthily confidential.

"But I can fix that all right," he promised.  "I can surely fix that.
For I'll tell her--I'll tell her you're a Baptist, too!  Will you--will
you stay?"

And after a time solemnly Steve nodded.  Later, when alone, Caleb
chuckled mountainously over his reply.

"Thet's--thet's what I cal'late I be," he said.




CHAPTER V

THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU

On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehearsed a half score of speeches
with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken;
but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the
entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the
facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything
else.  It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily
swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah
had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the
rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped
from cold.  So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace
when Caleb made known his decision.

"I've never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know,
Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct.  "And this
seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have.  You--you
like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"

While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
the face, once at least.  It was hard to know what she was thinking
when she sat like that, staring into the fire.  He waited, not without
grave misgivings, for her reply.

"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.

"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.

"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.

There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.

"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured.  "It is
pretty sudden--but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."

And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother.  Her eyes were
unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.

"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered.  "Why, I knew you
were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
veranda behind him.  I was certain of it, even then.  And if you hadn't
decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
came back from that endless fishing-trip!"

And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste.  For it was
Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening.  She ran on and
on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
beside her woman-hunger.  It astonished him, when he mentioned the
subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
deed.

"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
caught up his suggestion.  "To-day I explored for hours and found some
of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
worn at all.  I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
in the morning.  And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"

The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she
mentioned had been in vogue.  Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the
gurgle in her throat.  And so, the next morning, when a little figure
in velvet jacket and pantaloons--velvet of the same jet hue in which
Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two
before--stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed
of not one whit of its sensationalism.

Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever
have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have
stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance.  There were
red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been
encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of
sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver
buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which
fastened it across his small chest--silver buttons to match upon the
quaintly short sleeves.

Stephen O'Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he
started methodically down the stairs.  And immediately Caleb's
amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him
gave way to a newer wonder.  For the boy, in spite of the fact that his
small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness
of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable.  Then Caleb realized how
great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in
the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good
mornings he led the way to the table.

There was something in Sarah's fluttering delight over the boy's
appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her
brother.  For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the
boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss
Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his
first appearance.  They had a word together--Sarah and Caleb--after
breakfast.

"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
"Did you!  Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"

Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.

"I never did," he admitted.  And then, offhandedly: "What--did he say
anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this
morning."

"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little.  "No.  But he--Cal, he just sat
and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time.  He made me
think somehow of a puppy that knows he's going to be scrubbed and--and
dreads it exceedingly.  It's because of those dreadful things he's been
wearing, don't you suppose so?"

"No doubt of it," her brother said.  "No doubt!  And now I'm going over
to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him.  I was telling
him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."

When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he
searched the house through without finding the boy.  In his perplexity
he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.

"Where's Stephen?" he asked.

Sarah nodded to Allison.

"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought
you wouldn't be back for a while, I sent him downtown--I sent him to
the village----"

Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.

"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed.  "Did he--did he change
his clothes?"

"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.

"And of course he didn't!"  Suddenly her brother's face alarmed her.
"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven't done anything I shouldn't have done,
have I?"

Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.

"In--that--outfit!" he groaned.  "Down to the village, and it's a
lumber town!  He's gone, and if he doesn't have to fight his way back
then I----"

Sarah's alarm changed to fear instantly.  She stepped out upon the
porch.

"I never thought of that," she whispered.  "But you don't really
think----"

In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction.  But Allison,
after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an
expansive smile of anticipation upon his face, propped his feet upon
the rail.

"I think," he assured her, with no comfort in the assurance, "that this
will be well worth watching through to the finish!"

They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned.  As he
appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat,
half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair.  And even to
Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit
with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck.  The coat had
been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as
the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till
the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric
which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o'er-spread with egg.

After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet
and retreated none too steadily into the house.  But it wasn't the
condition of the boy's clothes which held Caleb's gaze.  He was
watching his face.  For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous
whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man.  His lips
were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in
one corner.  And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach
before Caleb spoke.  And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half
to see the two men who were waiting his coming.

"Well?" faltered Caleb.

The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head.  Both men heard that
breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.

"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again.  "Where have you
been?"

He hardly recognized the boy's voice.

"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words.  "I been daown to
git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs--and I run into trouble--daown
there--a-gittin' 'em!"

"I--I should assume that you had," murmured Caleb.  "But you've brought
the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren't
in particularly edible condition."

That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of
laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath.  And Steve,
teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.

"You'd better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised
him then.  "And I'll get you something less--less dangerous to wear
before night."

But the boy stood rigid still.

"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"

Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.

"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket
and handed the coin to the boy.  "Now what do you----Here, where are
you going now?"

Steve had turned and was marching down the steps.  He paused a minute
to explain, however.

"Why, I'm goin' back daown to the city," he grated out.  "I'm goin'
back after Miss Sarah's eggs!"

And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which
held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer's
counter.

"Well I'm--I'm damned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the
house.  "I _am_ damned!  You'll have to bring that youngster over, Cal,
and introduce him to the children."

Caleb couldn't help it.

"I told you so!" he said.

That was only a beginning.  The next fortnight was filled with more new
experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
be crammed into twenty times that duration.  And Caleb spent most of
his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
astonishing traits which he found in the boy.

Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
impressed itself upon Caleb.  As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
after Caleb himself had suggested it.  And more often than not he would
be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills.  It puzzled Caleb
mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.

Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
of frank and undisguised wonder and worship.  Whatever they did, no
matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
bobbed head.  For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
her for approbation.  And in return for that worship Barbara's
treatment of him was truly feminine.  He out-ran the other boys as a
deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
dark-eyed Barbara.  She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
understanding.  More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the
little girl's disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve's reluctance to
leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
about it.

"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares
enough for her so that she can really hurt him!  If that Barbara was a
boy I'd catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"

At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.

"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
so much."  The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb.  "That
isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them.  They have been
laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
openly--mocking his speech and--and manners!  All of them, that is,
save Garry Devereau."

Caleb's face hardened.

"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.

"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed.  "And you musn't mention it to him.  I just
gathered it from something he let drop the other day.  You know, Cal,
he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
marvelous.  He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
didn't talk as--as he read.  He didn't know what I meant at first, but
he understood the minute I tried to explain.

"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.

"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
face began to go red.

"'Do--do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk--like
books?'

"So you see!  And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
mental process which is habit with him."  Sarah's face grew resentful.
"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place.  We
should have known!  For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
which he doesn't catch.  And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
depths of his sensitiveness."

"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly.  "We'll keep him away from
them."  And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
heard him say in her presence.

But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home.  Without some
suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
the voices behind the high hedge.  More and more often Garry Devereau
came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
daily trips down to the mills.  A quick intimacy had grown up between
the two boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
because of the very contrast between them.

Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
the matter of knowledge.  Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father.  For
the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game."  The
skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile.  And Caleb
often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
rather than at him.  The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
all that.  It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.

Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter.  It seemed to him then that he
should have foreseen it from the very first.  But as it was, when the
denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.

From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases.  But it was
the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
the pages.  And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand.  After she had
caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table.  His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.

Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge.  And after
dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly,
that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while.  Allison
himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting,
stopped to shake hands with him gravely.  So it came about that they
were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when
Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears.  They
waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set
them to running across the lawn.  But the scene which met Caleb's eyes
when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.

There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon
the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic--all save Garry
Devereau.  He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer,
crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable
Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the
infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison
frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of
fists--a man's contempt for another man who does not take his
punishment in silence.  For the howls of the Honorable Archie were
louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little
girls who were watching.

Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot
make his feet obey the commands of his brain.  It was only when Barbara
Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and
legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little
hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to
him.  He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his
weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar,
jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave.  That effort raised the
Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his
antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.

It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering
sternly down into his battle-streaked features.  Allison strode quietly
up in that moment.

"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"

The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to
rearranging his crumpled raiment--fell to dabbling at a bruised and
swollen nose.  When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief
he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for
Steve's answer.

Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not
have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question.
The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead
with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.

"Nuthin'--nuthin' much," he qualified the statement.  "Only we was
goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table!  He
wanted to be her knight"--an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the
Honorable Archie--"and--and so did I."  This time his eyes went to
Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip.  "He wanted to
be her knight--an'--an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of
trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her!  He couldn't fight good
enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better.  I--I just
licked him to prove it!"

And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.

Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the
boy away from his shrieking rival.  But while he stood there, looking
down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a
situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope.  Already
it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison--but it
seemed symbolic to Caleb.  He sensed how close it lay to tragedy
itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which
he had thought to deliver.

"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained
ponderously, "the--the fair ladies always chose their own knights,
didn't they?"

But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy.  For,
instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face,
it only softened it.  Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe
of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his
shoulders and faced Barbara full.  The move was unmistakable--he was
just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice.  And,
instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled
her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.

"You--you--_my_ knight?" she half whispered, "_You_!"  And she turned
her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.

Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious
amusement, at the livid change which came over Steve's face with that
answer which she flung at him.  The boy fell away a step before her
fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her
fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before.  And then her meaning
struck him like a blow between the eyes.

Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and
started for the gap in the hedge.  Caleb could not move, nor did
Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things.  But Garry
Devereau followed and overtook his friend.  He did not speak to him; he
merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders.  And yet the men,
had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was
in that second of contact.  For it proved electrical in its effect.
Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now--back to the
group which had not moved.  Straight up to Barbara he went and faced
her once again.

"I wa'n't good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a
hushed and vibrant voice.  "I--I don't know enough, ner I can't talk
good enough, to be your knight.  I ain't good enough fer you!  But I'm
a-goin' to be--do you hear?  I'm a-goin' to be--an' when I am . . .
when I am . . . then I'll come back to you!"

This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight.  Caleb stood
staring at the ground.  Allison stood and stared at the horizon.

And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the
stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home.  It was the
first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in
anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all
that was his!

Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless
face had told Sarah too much and too little.  After her brother had
explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.

"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said.  "It has
been coming for days, this thing.  I think I knew it would come--but
how could we have stopped it, Cal?  And you won't believe me, but it's
because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy's little finger than she
could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she--she said what she did.
Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can't tell you why!"

Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed
to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his
room, fear in their hearts.  The bed had not been slept in; the sheets
were not even disarranged, but there was a scrap of paper pinned to one
pillow-slip.  It wasn't written in "book language"--that short
message--for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:


I'm a-comin' back--I'm comin' back to you, someday when they won't be
no need fer you to be ashamed fer me.  I'm takin' my new clothes with
me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to--and the shoes, too.  I'm
askin' you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her--and Miss
Sarah ain't got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o'
myself.


It was signed "Stephen O'Mara."

Sarah's face went white when she had read it through.  Her knees
weakened under her and she had to sit down.

"Why, Cal--why, Cal, he's--he's gone," she quavered.

And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.

"Yes--he--he's gone," he breathed.

Sarah swallowed hard.  Then two bright tears crept out from under her
eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks.  She rose and groped her way
to her own room.

Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still
numb from the shock, went back downstairs.  She came up to him and
stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the
other.

"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.

Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.

"Steve isn't here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.

The child didn't understand.

"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly.  "I'm to tell
him that I'm sorry.  But I--I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn't
have him for my knight--I--I wouldn't ever have any knight at all!"

Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.

"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.

A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.

"He'll be back for breakfast, won't he?" she asked, hopefully.

"I'm afraid not, Barbara.  I'm afraid now that he may never come
back--again."

She didn't understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to
explain.  But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper
there was no further need of explanation.  She ran then and threw
herself in a passion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner.  Caleb
found his chair.  And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.

"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
"Please--please!  Because he _is_ coming back!  He told me he would--he
told me he would, himself!"




CHAPTER VI

MY MAN O'MARA

For a week and more Caleb Hunter scoured the surrounding country.  He
whipped over the hills in every direction, half hopeful that he might
overtake the boy who had gone in the night.  But none of the farmers on
the outlying roads had seen pass their way a little foot traveler such
as he described, and after a time even that small hope died.

When Dexter Allison came over the next day, his face far more perturbed
than Caleb had ever before seen it by the news which Barbara, in tears,
had carried to him, Caleb found that his anger had somehow oozed away
during the night.  Allison's concern was too genuine to be feigned; and
Caleb learned too, that morning, that beneath his neighbor's amusement
at the boy there had always been a strain of admiration for his sturdy
gravity and more than a bit of wonder at his uncanny knowledge of
things which were as sealed books to Dexter.

Together the two men searched for Steve, driving in silence through the
country, until they both realized that the search was useless.  And at
last one day in early fall, Caleb started alone upon his errand into
that stretch of timber to the north which the boy himself had vaguely
designated as "up-river."

He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
before.  But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
ridge alone, by trail.  And even then, when he did locate the
"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
one.  Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll.  And they stood and stared
in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather
puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
shut behind him.

Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
there came an opportunity to spend it.  And Sarah was waiting at the
door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
dusk, two days later.

"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
entered the hall.

Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.

"No, I haven't found _him_, Sarah," he said gently enough.  "But
I--I've found out _who he is_!"

They forgot their supper that night.  With heads close together they
hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
yielded up.  Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
was very, very clear.

There was one picture--a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
hair.  Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable.  Sarah found that
and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts.  These
puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
a folded and legal-looking document.  He opened that and then he
understood--he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
Tom had been able to earn.  After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
it to Sarah at all.  Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
reason was there.  At length he turned to his sister.

"It's not hard to understand now, is it?" he said.  "It's pretty plain
now why he had to go.  And we, Sarah--we who were going to 'make
something of him'--why, we should have known absolutely, without this
evidence.  They laughed at him; they made fun of him--and there isn't
any better blood than flows in that boy's veins!  He was Stephen
O'Mara's son, and no more brilliant barrister than O'Mara ever
addressed a jury of a prisoner's peers and--and broke their very hearts
with the simplicity of his pleading."

Sarah folded her thin hands over the woman's picture.

"I like his mother's face," she murmured, faintly.  "And I'm jealous of
her, Cal!  You don't have to remind me of the rest of it, either, for I
recall it all.  She died, and he--he went all to pieces.  They said, at
his death, that he was destitute.  And when he did follow
her--across--they hunted everywhere, didn't they, and never found the
boy?  Didn't some of the newspapers argue that a servant--a
gardener--had stolen him?"

Caleb nodded his head.

"Most of them ridiculed the suggestion, but it was true, just the same.
That servant was Old Tom.  And the only defense he makes is just one
line or so in--in this."  Caleb dropped a hand upon the half legible
pages.  "He says that he wasn't going to let civilization make of the
boy's life the wreck which he, poor, queer, honest soul, thought it had
made of his father's.  And do you know, Sarah, do you know, I can't
help but believe that this over-zealous thing which the law would have
prosecuted was the best thing he could have done?  I'll take these
things, now, and lock them in the safe for the boy, until he--until he
comes back home!"

But Sarah Hunter kept the picture of Stephen O'Mara's mother separate
from the rest; she took it upstairs with her when she went, white and
tired-faced, to bed.  And it was Sarah's faith which outlasted the
years which followed.  She never weakened in her belief that some day
the boy would come back--she and one other whose faith in his last
boyish promise, phrased in bitterness, also endured.  For during the
next five years there was not a summer which brought Allison into the
hills but what the first question of his daughter Barbara, motherless
now herself, was of Steve.

"Has--has Stephen come back?" she asked invariably.

At first the query was marked by nothing more than a child's naïve
eagerness; and later, when it was brought up in a casual, by-the-way
fashion, it was, nevertheless, tinged with hope.  Five years lengthened
into ten, and still Steve did not come.  But whenever Barbara asked
that question Caleb remembered, as though it had happened only
yesterday, that morning when she first appeared to the boy.

He wondered sometimes what Steve's reception of her would be now--if he
did come back!  The thought supplied many idle hours with food for
speculation for Barbara Allison, year by year, had grown into that
slender, dark-eyed creature of more than usual beauty whom Caleb had
seen, as through the boy's own eyes, in the promise of the years.
Caleb had long before given up all hope, but he wondered just the same.
And then there came a morning when he didn't have to wonder any more.
There came a morning when that self-same scene was staged again by
Chance--staged with Caleb for an audience.  There came a morning when
Stephen O'Mara did return.

More than a few times in those intervening years the Hunter home had
been closed.  Sarah Hunter developed an uneasy restlessness which would
have worried her brother had it not been for the light of wistful
expectancy which never left her eyes.  She developed what her brother
termed a habit of "seeing America first and last, and in the interval
between."  But he, beneath his jocularity, was glad enough to accompany
her upon those rambling journeys which, without itinerary, led them
from coast to coast and he never smiled--at least not so that she might
see him--even though he was certain that she, in her simplicity of
spirit, was really looking for the boy.

All winter and throughout the summer, too, the Hunter place had been
closed, until that day in late October.  It had been a warm week--a
week of such unseasonable humidity for the hills that Caleb, rising
somewhat before his usual hour, had blamed his sleeplessness, as usual,
upon the weather.  He was glad to be home again that morning; he had
been so lonely away from home that he was warmed unaccountably by the
thought that Allison was in the hills, too.  And he was sure of that
fact, for the night before, when their train pulled into the station
which occupied the spot where Allison's mill-yards had stood before,
the bright brass work upon the private car of the owner of the stucco
place next his own had been unmistakable.

Caleb was even wondering if Barbara would be with her father on this
trip.  Barbara had, he knew, been two years on the continent,
"finishing," Allison called it, always with a wry face and a gesture
toward his wallet pocket.  He was wondering, as he came down the
stairs, if she would ask him again if--if . . . and then, at the sight
of a seated figure outside on the top step of the veranda, he pulled up
sharp in the doorway.

Caleb didn't have to wonder any longer!

The attitude of that figure before him was so like the picture which
time had been unable to erase--so absolutely identical in everything
save garb and size alone--that the man, recoiling a little, dragged one
hand across his forehead as though he doubted his own eyes.  But when
he looked again it was still there, sitting chin in palm, small head
under a rather weather-beaten felt hat thrust slightly forward, gazing
fixedly toward the stucco house beyond the shrubbery.  And before Caleb
could move, before he was more than half aware of the painful pulse in
his throat, it all happened again, just as it had happened years and
years before.

Caleb heard voices in the adjoining grounds, and as he half turned in
that direction Allison's bulky form, vivid in a far more vivid plaid,
appeared in the hedge gap.  While Caleb stared another figure flashed
through ahead of him, laughter upon her lips, and paused a-tip-toe, to
wave a hand in greeting.  And instantly, as they had a dozen years
before, Barbara Allison's eyes swung in instant scrutiny of the one who
was seated at Caleb's feet.  She hesitated, and recovered herself.  But
when, with quite dignified deliberation, she finally came forward to
pass that motionless figure upon the steps, every pulse in her body was
beating consciousness of his nearness.  And yet, at that, when she
paused at Caleb's side and bobbed her head with a characteristic
impetuosity which she had never lost she seemed completely oblivious to
the presence of anyone save Caleb and herself.

"Good morning, Uncle Cal," she murmured, very demurely.

Then the man upon the steps moved; he rose and turned and swept his
rather weather-beaten hat from his head.  His hair was still wavy,
still chestnut in the shadows.  And Caleb, though he could not force a
word from his tightened throat, marveled how tall the boy had
grown--how paradoxically broad of shoulder and slender of body he
seemed to be.

It was a man's face which was lifted to his, tanned and wrinkled a
little at the corners of the eyes by much exposure to sun and wind.
But the eyes themselves hadn't changed a bit.  They were still the same
steady and unwavering gray.  A smile crept into them, a smile crept
across the even lips, and for all the change there was in that slow
mirth it might have been the little figure of other days--the boy in
the white drill trousers and uncouth boots--who was smiling up at Caleb.

Standing there in his blue flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, clasped
tight to knee by high brown boots below them, Stephen O'Mara held out a
sinewy brown hand.  His voice was a little unsteady, but the mimicry of
his own drawling speech of former years held an echo of boyhood--a
twanging, boyish echo--which dragged at Caleb's very heartstrings.

"Haow--haow d'ye do, Uncle Cal?" he quavered.

Barbara had turned and started indoors in search of Miss Sarah.  Now
she halted, her slim back toward the two men at the veranda's edge, and
stood motionless at the sound of that voice.  When, little by little,
she faced around at last, it was fairly to feel those grave gray eyes
resting upon her own face.  The blood of a sudden came storming up into
Barbara's cheeks.  And Caleb, even if he did not know what all of the
girl's emotions were at that moment, knew that he knew one of them at
least.  Caleb had just learned himself what it was to see a ghost.

Dexter Allison, coming up less airily across the lawn, surprised his
daughter poised with one hand outstretched, red lips half open.  Ho
found her staring, velvet eyed and pink of face, at a tall figure in
blue flannel and corduroy, and although he had never seen him in all
the months that the latter had been in his employ, Allison knew this
must be the one in whose keeping lay, directly or indirectly, the
success or failure of the biggest thing he had ever attempted in this
north country--the man to whom he always referred, whenever he boasted
of his exploits, as "my man O'Mara."

Beyond that point, however, Allison's immediate recognition did not go.
The past interested him but little, except as a matter for precedent or
a record of past performances.  But memory fairly clamored in the
girl's ears that morning.  There was not one tiniest detail of the
strangely intense, sturdily confident little hill-boy's bearing but
what came back to her at that moment.  She remembered them all, and
seconds later, when Steve's fingers had closed over her own
outstretched hand, she realized that she was staring at him in a
childishly concentrated effort to read again in the man's gaze the
undisguised worship and wonder which had always followed her from the
eyes of the boy who had fought to be her knight.  And she realized
suddenly that he had sensed the effort behind her eager scrutiny, even
though his own eyes remained whimsically unreadable.

"I always told them that you would come back," she murmured then.
"Just as you--you said you would."

The remark was barely loud enough for even Steve to hear, but hard upon
its utterance she caught her breath in anger at herself for her own
senseless confusion, which had led her into saying the one thing she
least of all had wanted to voice.  Even an inane remark concerning the
weather would have been better than that girlish naiveté which she felt
seemed to force upon him, too, a recollection of the very letter of a
promise which had, no doubt, long since become in his mind nothing but
a quaint episode not untinged with absurdity.

She realized that her hand still lay in his; she grew hotly conscious
of her father's rather perplexed survey of the tableau.  And in that
instant when Allison's first words reached her burning ears, even
before Steve could reply to her greeting, she wrung free her fingers
with an abruptness which, when she remembered it afterward, only added
to her fury at her absurd confusion.

"Hum-m-m," puffed Allison.  "Hum-m-m!"  He spoke directly to Stephen
O'Mara, who half turned his head at the first heavily facetious
syllable.  "So you did get my message, eh?  I rather thought that it
wouldn't reach you, up-river, until to-day."  An ample smile embraced
the tall figure in riverman's garb and his own daughter's crimson
countenance--a most meaningful smile of roguery.  "Well, from what I've
heard," he stated, "and what I've . . . seen, I should say that you are
my man, O'Mara.  Mr. Elliott himself has informed me that your quite
spectacular success in one or two vital campaigns has been entirely due
to the fact that you are an--er--opportunist!  I agree with Mr.
Elliott, absolutely--that is, if my first premise is correct."

And his laughter rumbled softly.

Barbara's face had cooled a little in that moment since Steve's eyes
had left her face.  Now she forgot her confusion--forgot to be annoyed,
even at her father's clumsy banter.

"_Your_ man, O'Mara!" she exclaimed indignantly.  "_Your_ man!  Why,
he--he's _my_--" and that was as far as she went.

Her voice thinned into nothingness, but words were not necessary to
tell either Caleb or Steve that she had been about to assert a prior
claim which dated back years and years.

The man whose smile was still that of the boy turned slowly back to
Barbara.  His quiet mirth, which crinkled the corners of his eyelids,
seemed totally detached and impersonal; and yet it hinted, too, at an
intimate enjoyment of the situation which they alone could appreciate.
Steve merely held out his hand again and took her slim fingers within
his own.

"I have always insisted to Mr. Elliott," he said, "that the solution of
all the difficulties, which he chooses to view as gloriously romantic
tilts with Destiny, depends one-half upon luck, and the other half on
being on the ground personally, when the--affair--starts."  He half
faced toward Allison.  "I am O'Mara," he finished very briefly, "your
man, O'Mara--if you happen to be the East Coast Development and Timber
Company?"

There was at most no more than the barest suggestion of it in Steve's
crisp question, but Caleb sensed immediately that Allison's placid
appropriation of the blue flannel-shirted one as his own particular
property was not a mutually accepted status.  Dexter, however, failed,
or chose, to read nothing in the drawling question.

"I'm it," he agreed, jovially.  "That is--I and two or three others,
including Mr. Elliott, our esteemed president."

He mounted the steps heavily and stood contemplating the small hand
still within the larger, browner one.

"The introductions seem to have outstripped me," he remarked,
"but--er--any objection to shaking hands with me, too, Mr. O'Mara?"

Stephen laughed aloud.  Allison's attempted lugubrity was really funny.
From the door Barbara echoed his laughter in bubbling, throaty
amusement at it all.

"Poor, blind papa!" she chanted mockingly, and disappeared on swift
feet.

Allison scowled after her.

"Not so blind as some--the unprincipled jade!" he retorted.  "But
that's another thing I've heard about you, Mr. O'Mara, if you will
pardon a garrulous old gossip's personalities.  They tell me that you
aren't particularly--susceptible?"

And then the bantering tone was dropped entirely.  In the rest of
Allison's greeting was all that Caleb found most lovable in the man's
whole make-up--his proneness to accept men as men, for what they had
done or might do, in a man's world.

"I've heard much of you, Mr. O'Mara; I've looked forward to this
meeting," he said, as he shook hands.  "Now I want to tell you that I
am proud to know you.  And so you didn't get my message, after all?"

The handclasp left Allison staring ruefully at his reddened fingers.
Steve shook his head.

"I had to come down river, yesterday," he explained.  "Your telegram
found me here, and I waited over until this morning, as you suggested."

"Surely . . . surely!  I see . . . I see!"  Allison emphasized his
comprehension.  "Not that it was anything of vital importance.  I just
wanted a short conference with you, yourself, that was all.  Elliott's
own reports on the work are so tinged with his eternal optimism, so
colored by what you aptly termed his romantic zest for the game, that I
wanted your own opinion concerning the possibility of the East Coast
Company finishing that railroad in time to fulfil their contracts.  No
hurry about it; but that's my house over yonder.  You were just one
place too far north to find me."

He turned to face Caleb.  There was a flood of questions upon the
latter's lips.  Caleb wanted to seize the boy by the shoulder, and spin
him around toward the light and stare and stare into his face; but he
waited because he found much that was hugely diverting in Dexter's
bland ignorance, which had even accepted Steve's presence there as a
case of misdirection.

"I suppose you know what this early morning call presages, Cal?"
Allison challenged.

Before Caleb could reply Steve knew what the answer was to be.  The
request found him already at the door, grinning broadly.

"Would you--would you mind finding Miss Sarah, Steve?" Caleb asked.
"Will you tell her, please, that we are to be subjected to
another--neighborly imposition!"

Steve's going left Allison frowning a little.

"We've played this farce through a hundred times, Cal," he murmured,
"and it wasn't according to formula--that last remark of yours.  But,
do you know, just for a minute it sort of reminded me of
something--something that seems to have happened before, and I can't
recall just what."

He shook his head and led the way to a chair.

"It wasn't our nonsense that affected me, either," he finished.  "I
believe it was O'Mara himself who . . . but I didn't know that you were
acquainted with him, Cal.  Have you known him long?"

"Um-m-m--yes!" Caleb weighed his reply.  "Quite some time, I think I
might say."

He shook with scarcely suppressed laughter, but Allison ignored his
senseless mirth.

"I'd like to claim that boy as my own discovery," he avowed, "but I
can't--not without fear of successful contradiction on Elliott's part.
And in point of service it isn't fair to call him a boy, either, though
I suppose both of us are old enough to be his father.  He's Elliott's
find.  Elliott suggested him as the one man for this job, when I
consolidated with the Ainnesley crowd and they took up the contract to
move the Reserve timber from Thirty-Mile and the valleys above.
Elliott knew of him, but I've been looking up his record pretty
closely, since he took hold in earnest.

"He's in his twenties, as near as I can make out, but he's come through
on one of two jobs that might well make an old campaigner envious.  He
took a fortune in hard woods out of San Domingo for a Berlin concern;
he was the only man on the St. Sebastian River job who said the
construction was too light.  He said it wouldn't stand when the ice
began to move in the spring--and it didn't!  Oh, he knows his business!
But it wasn't his successes which caught Elliott's eye.  It's the way
he has failed a couple of times, fighting right back to the last
ditch--and fighting and fighting!--when all the rest had quit, that
made me anxious to get a look at him.  Perhaps there are older men who
can outfigure him on loads and stresses, but as a field general he
stands alone.  He can handle men.  And, when it comes to meeting
conditions just as they arise, Elliott says he's a wonder--he can
outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!"

There was grave appreciation in Allison's voice--honest appreciation of
a man who had himself achieved, for another man's achievement.  And yet
Caleb, in spite of the proud pumping of his heart, in spite of his
desire to murmur, "But I told you so, Dexter, years ago," still found
room to wonder at a thin strain of speculation which seemed to underrun
the speaker's words.  In his reiteration of O'Mara's qualities Allison
seemed almost to be assuring himself that infallibility was not a human
attribute.  And his next remark only served to heighten that suggestion.

"That's why the East Coast Co. brought him up here to build their bit
of road," he went on slowly.  "They've got to move that Reserve Company
timber.  They have a contract that'll break 'em--break us--if we fall
down.  And do you know, Cal, I--I can't help but believe that the thing
is beyond the pale of possibility.  I believed it six months ago, when
Elliott and Ainnesley and the rest of them were so keen for it, and I
believe it still, even though I have seen Elliott's engineer and know
what he has already accomplished.  That track'll never go through on
schedule--and that's why I'm up here for the winter.  It's going to be
a hot little race against time, with some millions for a purse.  It'll
break the East Coast Co. if he fails, and"--his voice became oddly
intense--"and I tell you again that it--can't--be--done!"

Then Allison became aware of Caleb's mild astonishment at his vehemence.

"An amateur's opinion, of course, Cal," he laughed, "which is strictly
_entre nous_.  But, win or lose, this man O'Mara will be a valuable man
to have around after the thing is decided."

"You said that he reminded you of something," Caleb began rather
heavily.  "It recalled something to me, too.  I wonder if you remember
a little fishing trip that we took, some ten or twelve years ago,
Dexter, up into the hills?  It was to the headwaters of the cast
branch, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Reserve Company's
holdings, I should say."

"Why, yes," the other answered, off-handedly.  "Why, yes, now that you
mention it, I do remember.  May I ask your reason for speaking of it?"

"No reason in particular," Caleb hesitated.  "Only this O'Mara reminded
me of something, too--something that you said, that night at the
camp-fire."

"Well?"

Allison's monosyllable was coolly noncommittal.

"Can you remember what it was?" Caleb asked, positively uncomfortable
now.

"I think I remarked that there was a fortune for some man in that
valley, if he was far-sighted enough.  Was that it?"

Then Caleb understood the challenge in his friend's voice.  He thought
he understood.  The names of the stockholders of the Reserve Company
were all strange to Caleb save one.  The Honorable Archibald
Wickersham, who was said to represent huge foreign interests, he had
known as a boy.  And Caleb had seen Dexter indescribably sore, before
this, from having overlooked, as he termed it himself, "a sure thing
bet."  He laughed, more like his placid self again.

"Bless you, no!" he exclaimed.  "What have I ever done to make you
believe that a mere commercial estimate would remain with me this long?
It--it was something that you said concerning the making of a
gentleman.  I just wondered if you were of your early way of thinking.
I wondered if you would consider that--that----"

Allison lay back in his chair and breathed deeply, slowly--and Miss
Sarah appeared that moment in the doorway, pinker of cheek and more
tremulous of lip than her brother had ever seen her before.  She
dropped Allison an old-fashioned curtsy, which was an exceedingly
frivolous performance for Sarah.

"Breakfast is served, Cal," she fairly chortled, "and there are two
very hungry children inside."




CHAPTER VII

HARRIGAN, THAT'S ME!

Never before had the air of that long, paneled room been so surcharged
with half-suppressed hilarity.  At first her father merely scowled at
Barbara's intermittent little gurgles, which refused to stay entirely
pent-up; he frowned at her seemingly inane interruptions of the
technical discussion into which he had immediately plunged with the
East Coast Company's engineer, until he could no longer ignore the
smile which pulled at the lips of the latter, too, at every fresh
attempt of the girl to swing the conversation into an utterly
irrelevant channel.  He looked around the table then and caught the
gleam in Caleb's eyes; he took note of Miss Sarah's illuminated face,
and gave way to a burst of querulousness not all simulation.

"_What_ is the joke?" he demanded in a voice that set them all to
rocking in their chairs.  "Let me in on it--let me laugh, too--if there
is anything worth laughing at.  Cal, you're growing old--old and
feeble-witted!"

He turned sternly to his daughter, but the darkly glowing eyes which
she lifted to his absolutely silenced him for an instant.  Twin devils
of mischief fairly danced in their shimmering, liquid depths.  The
girl's face, even to him who had long before grown overfamiliar with
its beauty, was a wonderfully lovely thing.  Allison sat and stared at
her for a moment, blankly, and when he went on his voice had become
less testy.

"And you," he growled, "you have interrupted me a dozen times already,
always with some nonsense of which I can make neither rime nor reason.
Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to get Mr. O'Mara's reason for
establishing his headquarters at Thirty-Mile, instead of directing the
work from Morrison, which would seem to be far more convenient."

Barbara bobbed her head, meekly.  Her giggle, however, was shameless.

"But Mr. O'Mara has been trying to tell you," she defended in a
suffocated small voice, "that it's because the work at this end is not
so difficult.  There are several miles of swamp work, I think he said,
and a bridge or something, which promises trouble.  I--I am sorry if I
interrupted.  I only wanted to ask Mr. O'Mara a question myself--a--a
very unimportant question, I'm afraid!"

Allison had had experience with his daughter's seeming meekness.
Moreover, the working of Caleb's and Sarah's faces baffled him.  He
waited, fuming.

"Just before you and Uncle Cal came in we--we were talking about the
weather," the girl struggled on.  "Mr. O'Mara predicted it would rain
soon and I just wanted to ask him what made him think so."

"Yes?" Allison temporized.

It was very quiet for a moment.  Steve sat, a little red of face
himself, gazing across into the girl's starry eyes.

"Go ahead!" she prompted him with a gasp.

Then his lips began to curl until a smile overspread his face and
half-closed his eyes.  He leaned back and raised obediently a quaintly
solemn, quaintly boyish treble.

"I wa'n't guessin'," he averred soberly, "ner I wa'n't thinkin' it
will.  It'll jest be rainin', come sunup, and it'll be good fer till
Wednesday, for sure!"

At the beginning of that quavering statement Dexter Allison's lips fell
apart.  They remained open long after Steve had finished.  Once he
started to rise, and then dropped back into his chair, dumfounded.
There was no doubt concerning the success of his daughter's query.  At
last he got to his feet and padded around the table.  With a hand on
either of the boy's shoulders, he turned that browned face up to his
own.

"You," he murmured, weakly.  "You!  And Elliott said that you could
outguess dear old Mother Nature herself!  Well, I--I'm damned!"

They talked no more business at table that morning, and Allison found
scant opportunity to make himself heard at all.  Even the reticence
which seemed a part of Steve's grave face and big body was swept aside
before the tumult of questions that tumbled from Barbara's lips,
promptly to be supplemented by Caleb whenever her breath gave out.

"And to think that you didn't recognize him, even when you met him face
to face," she rallied her father.  "It was dense enough of me not to
have known instantly who it must be, the first day you began your
endless reiteration of 'my man, O'Mara.'  I, at least, should have
known, because--because"--she faltered a little--"well, they always do,
in books!"

It raised another storm of laughter--that faltering, ingenuous reason
of hers--and Barbara hastened to explain that the phrase was a relic of
her own childhood, which she had once coined in extenuation of conduct
to which her mother had objected.  She still employed it, she
explained, in particularly irresponsible moments.

It was minutes before Allison could wedge in a single remark, longer
than that before he stopped frowning to himself in a fashion which made
Caleb remember that moment of inexplicable vehemence, outside on the
veranda.  They had retrogressed as far as the "injine"--the "steam
injine"--when Allison finally made himself heard.

"What I can't remember is just why you left us so suddenly.  I know it
was some sort of a rumpus, with Barbara in it--there's always a woman,
of course--but I can't recall----"

He paused to ponder--paused and became aware immediately of Barbara's
swift silence and Steve's hint of self-consciousness.  Then it all
returned to him with a rush.  He had his turn.

"Oh, but I do remember," he drawled.  "Why, of course--_of course_!  It
was a matter of knight-errantry and ladies fair!  But who was it whose
choice conflicted with your own?"

He cocked his head on one side, mock thoughtful; then he fell to
pounding his knee and roared with laughter.

"Archie Wickersham!" he shouted.  "Archie Wickersham--oh, Lord!  I
never really appreciated that _mêlée_ until this minute.  And you
promised that you'd be back, didn't you, and--well, b'gad, here you
are!  And now don't suffer any longer, Barbara, though I must state
that this is the first time I ever knew you to search so diligently
beneath the table for renewed composure.  I am not going to expound Mr.
O'Mara's reasons for going, any more than I could dilate upon those
which have brought him back.  But please shake hands again--Steve.
And, if I may be pardoned the idiom, allow me to assure you that it was
some battle!"

If it did nothing else, Allison's ponderous raillery served one end.
It removed any sentimental awkwardness which might have attached to the
episode, and yet the girl rather resented its being so completely
reduced to terms of farce-comedy.  When the men rose, after breakfast,
to go down into the town, she, too, declared her intention of
accompanying them, as though it were the expected thing.  She crossed
the lawn at Steve's side, ahead of her father and Caleb, with Miss
Sarah watching from the door.  Both men walked for a time in silence,
their eyes upon the slender figure in short skirt and woolly sweater
beside the taller one in blue flannel before them.  And, as usual,
Allison was the first to speak.

"Now I know what you meant when you referred to that trip up the west
branch, Cal," he said.  "And you were right.  It does take stuff to
make that sort of a gentleman.  Isn't there anything more to tell me?
I am truly interested, Cal."

So Caleb told him then of "Old Tom's" tin box.  And while he was
explaining the man and girl ahead, all in one breath, skipped back to
that day-before-yesterday now many years gone.  There was a quality of
camaraderie in the girl's half-parted lips and eager impulsiveness of
tongue that morning that was entirely boyish.  Her very unconsciousness
of self intensified and emphasized it for the man whose steady gaze
rarely left her warm face.  And more than once she caught herself
watching for his slow smile to spread and crinkle the corners of his
eyelids; once or twice, in a little lull, she found time to wonder at
that new and quite frivolous mood of hers.  But when Steve finally
asked for Devereau--Garry Devereau, who had followed him to the
hedge-gap that day and laid one hand upon his bowed, shamed
shoulder--the light went from Barbara's eyes.  And Stephen O'Mara, who
did not understand at first the quick hurt which entered them, stopped
smiling, too.

"I liked him," Steve said simply.  "I've always remembered and liked
him.  Thinking of him and--and--has often kept me from being too lonely
nights when I was lonely enough."

That statement concerning his friend contained the first personal note
which had come from his lips.  Barbara did not answer immediately, and
Steve thought that she was phrasing her own reply.  He could not know
that she wanted a moment in which to contemplate the little hint of
diffidence in his voice and to wonder at herself for not having
wondered before if he had not, many, many times, been very lonely
indeed.

"Do you remember a little girl who was at our place the summer you were
here?" she asked finally.  "A pale, red-lipped, very shy little thing
named Mary Graves?"

Stephen nodded.

"And do you remember how, even then, Garry seemed to care for her?  He
was always supercilious with the rest of us; he tormented us or ignored
us entirely, but never her."

Again the inclination of the head.

"Well, he grew up just that way," Barbara went on, thoughtfully.  "One
never could tell what was behind his indifference or--or flippancies.
He mocked at things . . . customs and courses of action, which we have
come to accept and . . . and recognize.  But he was always gentle with
her, and kind, and--oh, I think reverend is the right word!  Now,
knowing Garry as I do--as you will, when you see him again--the phrase
may seem a strange one to apply to him.  And yet it describes best his
bearing toward Mary Graves, two years ago."

She was walking more slowly now, without knowing it.

"I doubt if Garry ever revered anything on earth, or above it, except
just little, white, shy Mary Graves, who never grew much bigger than
she was when you knew her.  I don't know whether you know it--of course
you don't!--but his father cared that way for a woman, cared just as
utterly.  And everybody thought this match was an assured thing; they
even wondered at it a little, she was so . . . so mouselike, and Garry
so brilliant and hard and--I don't like the word sophisticated.  It
seemed to me that Garry's wisdom was not a thing which he had acquired
himself.  It seemed more the accumulated wisdom of ages and ages which
was his just by--by instinct.

"He cared for her that way, Mr. O'Mara, and she married another man,
almost without a word of explanation to him.  Nobody ever cited Garry
as a shining example, but he--that man whom Mary Graves married--had an
unspeakable record!  Her family made the match--the newspapers call it
a union of America's fairest youth and powerful millions, don't they?
Well, he had them--and she married him.  And Garret Devereau dropped
out of the world for a long time.

"It was a year before he came back.  People had already begun to talk
about the way his father had gone before him--he shot himself, Mr.
O'Mara, when he became tired of waiting for Garry's mother to
return--and when Garry reappeared they talked more.  I never knew
before that a change so terrible could take place in anyone so much a
man as I know Garry to be.  It's not just his face and his rather
dreadful silence.  It's not the fact alone that he drinks too much, and
shows it, pitifully.  It's--oh, it's the pity that a brain so keen
could so deliberately commit suicide.

"They've begun to drop him, Mr. O'Mara, and you know what that means.
But I'll always care for him deeply.  That's why I have asked him up
this fall.  Don't you think you could come down again, Friday, if you
have to go back into the woods before then?  I'm going to have a party
for some week-end guests--a masque dance.  Garry needs his friends now,
more than he ever did, and--and when you meet him will you--will you,
please, not let him see that you notice how much he has changed?"

Barbara put one hand upon his elbow, and again in that moment of
contact the directness of her appeal made Steve think of a slim and
clear-eyed boy.  He realized that she cared for Garrett Devereau only
as he cared himself with fine and lasting appreciation for the
finenesses of him whom they had known together.  Steve nodded his
comprehension, and made no answer to her invitation to him, then.  But
they found conversation somehow less easy after that.  It was not until
they had traversed the streets of the lower village--long lanes of red
and blue and saffron-fronted saloon-hotels and rivermen's
lodging-houses--and reached the newer, huger mills down-river that the
girl regained in part her former vivacity.

Morrison had grown, inconceivably, in those elapsed years.  A railroad
station and freight-yard occupied the ground which had been occupied by
the former mills; a single track road stretched arrow-straight into the
south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty
odd miles below.  And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of
the town was different.  The men still swarmed in on the drives,
brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty
wide streets.  Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their
prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque
simplicity of it all seemed lacking--the simplicity which had once
mitigated much that would have been otherwise only brutish.  The
dingily gaudy saloon fronts, like drabs in blowsy finery, struck a too
sophisticated, sinister note--which, after all, only sums up completely
the change which had taken place.  Even the vices of the older
Morrison, in being systematized, had become infinitely more
complicated, too.  It was no longer a river village.  Morrison was a
city now.

Once, when a squatly huge, red-headed, red-shirted riverman with a
week's red stubble upon his cheeks, lurched out of a doorway ahead of
them and stood snarling malevolently at O'Mara, the girl shrank against
her companion and clutched his arm.  The red-shirted one fell to
singing after they had passed.  A maudlin rendition of "Harrigan,
That's Me," followed them long after they had rounded a corner.  Steve
looked down and smiled casually into Barbara's wide and startled eyes.

"That's a river-boss," he explained, "enjoying what he considers a
roaring good time.  His name is Harrigan.  He works on the Reserve
Company's cut, which we are to move in the spring, and whenever he has
had a trifle more than enough he always sings that song.  He's willing
to fight, too, to prove that it was written especially for him!"

The girl continued to gaze up at him.  His short laugh failed entirely
to clear her face of apprehension.

"He's not exactly a friend of yours, is he?" she said.

"Well, not exactly," Steve admitted.  "Not when he is in that frame of
mind!"

"Nor in any other," the girl persisted, and she glanced down at her
hand, still lying upon the blue-flannel sleeve.  "Did you know that
your arm grew as hard as iron for an instant?  I never knew that
anyone's arm could grow as hard as that.  And is that the way you
always prepare to receive your--friends?"

Steve colored a little.

"Perhaps I'm overcautious," he replied.  "But it has to be hard.  It
constitutes what one of my men, Joe Morgan, calls 'accident insurance.'"

Then her face lighted up again.  The delighted bob of her head with
which she greeted that name astonished the man.

"Do you--why, you must have heard of Joe," he exclaimed.

Mischief danced again in the dark eyes.

"Joe Morgan," she laughed.  "'Fat Joe,' isn't it?  And of course I have
heard of him.  You don't realize it, but I know more about this East
Coast work and--and the men who are doing it, than I had any idea
myself.  Why, I'll wager that you never knew, yourself, that he once
wrote in to the officials insisting that the entry of his name on the
files be changed from 'Joe Morgan, cook,' to 'Joseph Morgan, assistant
to Chief O'Mara'!"

Steve's chuckle of appreciation was answer enough.

"I didn't know," he admitted, "but it's like him.  And it was no more
than reasonable, either--that request--even if it is funny.  He has
been cook for me; but he's been doctor and nurse and countless other
things in as many crises.  He's the most trustworthy and capable
adviser, too, that any man ever had."

She scanned his face closely at the timbre of those words.  Then, with
face averted, "Didn't he embroider you a--a sofa-cushion, too, once?"
she inquired, quite demurely.

Steve grew very red.

"Who told you that?" he blurted, and Barbara giggled again.

"Mr. Ainnesley, I think.  Then it is true?  I--I never believed it
before."

Watching the blood creep up beneath his tanned skin, she told herself
that she did like more than a little the way his eyelids crinkled when
he grinned.

"We were in San Domingo that year," he explained none too composedly.
"It was near Christmas, and Joe wouldn't consider any of the native
wares as a gift.  So he--he worked it himself in--in yellow worsted on
a red background.  I have it still, displayed in a conspicuous place in
the shack up-river.  But now I'll wager that you can't guess what the
motto is across its front.  He told me that he didn't care for it
particularly himself, but it was the only one he could find.  You can't
guess, but you are permitted to try."

And he gasped when she threw back her head and burst into her gurgling,
throaty laugh.

"'What is home without a father?'" she sing-songed.  And when they were
both sober-faced again she added:

"I want to know him, please!  Can't I meet him, Mr. O'Mara?"

Side by side they turned in at the millyard, between towering piles of
aromatic raw planks.  Behind them Caleb and Allison had lost still more
ground while the latter paused to speak a peremptory word in the ear of
a mildly intoxicated, red-headed riverman who was pouring forth his
whole soul in the refrain of "Harrigan, That's Me!"  And almost
immediately, in answer to Barbara's question, Steve pointed across to a
short, plump figure in conversation with McLean, the mill
superintendent.  Even at that distance his broad face gleamed from the
closeness of a recent shave; even at that distance it was quickly
apparent to the girl that his garb was as near a replica of O'Mara's
own clothes as his lack of height and extra weight would permit.

"Will you bring him?" she asked eagerly.  "Will he come?"

But the question was unnecessary.  Joe Morgan--Fat Joe to the
river-front and the construction squad--was already hustling in their
direction, even before Steve, with that slow smile tugging at his lips,
had finished assuring her that it was never necessary to summon Joe
into the presence of an attractive member of the opposite sex.  He came
without being called.  Barbara had a closer and closer view of him,
until he stopped at last directly in front of them and bowed.  She
wanted to laugh at that wide face--at the grandiloquent flourish with
which he removed his hat--and would have had she not recalled the grave
respect with which the man beside her had referred to him a moment
before.  His eyes were palest blue, his nose a smooth pink mound in an
expanse of pink, pink cheeks.  She noted that his teeth were as white
and even as those of O'Mara himself.  Fat Joe bowed again.

"Morning, Chief," he saluted, in that thin and reedy tenor which none
but fat men have.

Then Barbara laughed.

Steve managed the presentation with extreme punctility and left them.
When he returned, almost an hour later, he heard them both laughing
long before he came into view, and on the way back up the hill the girl
detailed for him much of her conversation with Fat Joe.

"Hereafter I shall be more dignified when in your presence," she
informed him in as deep a bass as she could summon.  "I had no idea how
great and important a man was escorting me when I came down this hill!
But Mr. Morgan has enlightened me."

With that she discovered that she could still tease him, almost as
easily as she had teased the sturdy small boy of the uncouth shoes and
napping trousers.

"Joe is necessarily prejudiced in his opinion," he argued, "and
therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously."

"He told me that you had one regrettable characteristic, however," the
girl went on.  "He lamented your strength at the ancient and honorable
pastime of stud-poker!  And he also bewails your taste in literature.
Why, he tells me that you are indicted to Dickens and Dumas--he didn't
pronounce it that way, either--and even fall back upon Shakespeare, in
dark and dour hours.  No, I am positive that Mr. Morgan docs not
approve of such fiction.  He confided to me that he finds more
entertainment, of a winter's night, in perusing a Sears-Roebuck or a
Montgomery-Ward catalogue.  And--and do you know what I admitted to
him?  No?  Well, I told him that some of the happiest moments of my
life had been spent in just such fashion.  I've always thought they
were fascinating!"

She badgered him on the way back up the hill that morning, but when
they paused for a moment at the edge of the close-cropped lawn which
rolled back to the stucco and timber house facing the river, she
abandoned her facetiousness.

"Why should there be any--any element of personal danger in this work
you are doing, Mr. O'Mara?" she asked.  "And did I do wrong in
mentioning to Mr. Morgan how that man came out of that--place, and
glared so at you?"

His rejoinder should have been very reassuring.

"So Joe has been hinting at that mystery stuff again, has he?  After
listening to him one is almost compelled to believe that I run daily a
veritable gauntlet of nameless perils."

Barbara stood, small fists buried in her sweater pockets, studying his
smile of amusement.

"I shouldn't like to believe so," her voice was faintly diffident.
"And you--you haven't accepted my invitation for Friday.  May I expect
you?  I didn't tell you, but Archie--Archibald Wickersham--will be
there, as well as Garry.  So--so you won't be entirely unacquainted."

And then, at those words, his face changed.  All in one fleet second,
in spite of the whole morning's quick intimacy of mood and the spirit
of companionship which to her had seemed a delightfully new yet
time-tried thing, Barbara found that she could not read an inch behind
those grave gray eyes.  She found his quiet countenance as unreadable
as that of the utmost stranger might have been.  And while she waited,
not entirely certain how displeased she was at his deliberation, a
blackest of black horses soared splendidly over a fence to the north
and came cantering down the road.  The rider, a tall, bare-headed girl,
lifted her crop in salute as she caught sight of them.

"My friend, Miriam Burrell," the girl murmured in explanation to Steve,
and something had gone from her voice and left it conventionally
impersonal.  "She's riding Ragtime, and isn't he a beauty--almost as
much a beauty as she is herself?"

The horse came on, to be reined up at last directly in front of the two
at the roadside.  Stephen O'Mara met for a moment the level, measuring
glance of its rider, before Miriam Burrell turned to Barbara.

"I've enjoyed exceedingly our morning canter, Bobs," her alto voice
drawled.

Then, before Barbara could reply, she threw one booted leg from the
stirrup and dismounted.  With the reins looped over her elbow she faced
the man in blue flannel and corduroy, a tall, lithe figure with coppery
red hair and whitest skin and doubly vivid lips.

"You're Stephen O'Mara," she said, and the calmly direct statement
might have been overbrusk had it not been for the modulation of her low
voice.  "You're Stephen O'Mara, for a thousand!"

And she held out a gauntleted hand, the clasp of which corroborated the
suggestion of wirelike strength in that lithely straight body.

Barbara Allison had never been able to analyze her preference for
Miriam Burrell.  Even the girl's undeniable beauty of face had often
puzzled her, for, taken each feature by itself, it was far more
striking than beautiful.  There was no color in her pale skin; her red
mouth, if anything, was a trifle too wide, and her wide-set eyes were
tip-tilted in an almost Oriental slant.  Her utter lack of hypocrisy,
her unsparing arraignment of fundamental motives--her own and those of
all with whom she came in contact--often resulted in calmly direct
comments which were stunningly disastrous to casual conversation.  For
Miriam Burrell told the truth to others, which was unusual enough to
puzzle more than a few; she did not lie to herself, and that was an
enigma to almost all.  It resulted, of course, in a reputation for
"unconventionalism."

There was scarcely a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate
dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or
sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool
voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through
the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain
beneath.  Barbara did not know just why she cared so deeply for Miriam
Burrell--we scarcely ever realize that such a regard can be based only
upon the deepest of deep-founded faith--but at that moment, while she
and Steve were shaking hands so soberly, she felt very little, very
much ignored; felt as though she did not share at all the understanding
in their eyes.

"I've just asked Mr. O'Mara to come to my dance, Miriam," she said,
"and how did you know him, pray?  I've asked him, but he is
unflatteringly long in accepting."

"Know him?" she echoed.  "Know him!  Oh, Mr. O'Mara and I have met
before.  I think just before the fall of the Roman Empire, wasn't it,
Mr. O'Mara?  Weren't they dragging me in at the wheel of a chariot one
afternoon, when you were dealing out a gold piece to each of your
legionaries?"

She laughed, dryly, and Barbara felt smaller and more forlorn and
lonelier still.

"No doubt Mr. O'Mara hasn't time to be flattering, Bobs," she
commented.  "But you will have time to come Friday, for a little while,
won't you?" she asked.

Steve glanced down at the hand which still felt the pressure of her
buckskin clad fingers.

"I have to work--day and night--some weeks when things break badly," he
told her simply.  "If I can"--and he turned to Barbara--"if I can, I
want to come."

Miriam nodded her head with brisk finality.

"If you can," she agreed.  "Barbara, no doubt, has been telling you
about Garret Devereau, hasn't she?  Yes--come if you can.  I have
heard, Mr. O'Mara, that you have once or twice fought your way out of
the dark, when everybody else had lost hope.  I want an opportunity to
talk with--a specialist in such campaigns!"

Stephen O'Mara had read a meaning in the words of that contained, often
abrupt, straightly tall girl of which Barbara Allison had not even
dreamed.  He stood watching them when they turned up the driveway, the
horse Ragtime muzzling the woolly white sweater and following like a
dog.  But he wasn't thinking of Miriam Burrell or of Garry Devereau,
while he waited for Caleb and Dexter Allison to come up with him.  He
was wondering about Archie Wickersham--the Honorable Archie--thinking
about that funny brawl of years before, which had not been so funny
after all--wondering if----

It was past twelve that night when Miriam Burrell's door was pushed
softly open by a slim white figure which hesitated on the threshold;
but the night-light was still burning upon the table.  Barbara stood
for a moment, staring at her friend, who was sitting bolt upright in
bed.

"Then you aren't asleep," she faltered.  "Are you--reading?"

The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in
that mist of loosened hair.

"Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were
bookless.  "Yes, I'm reading.  I'm having a little squint at this
puzzle-scroll they call Life."

She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her.

"I--may I turn off the light?" she asked.

Miriam snapped the button.

"I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice.
"And I--I wanted--Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown
girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me!  From the moment when
I first recognized him and became so--tangled up--I've just chattered
and chattered.  You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do
you?"

"Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the
uncompromising voice she knew so well.

"Are you--you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated.  "Because
I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at.  And I have poise.  I
am not a child.  But looking back now, I can't quite account for all
my--shall I call it cordiality?  Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was
because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when
he was a boy?"

"Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically.

"Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice.  "And,
do you know, all day, even when we seemed so--such good friends, I
still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a
slight.  I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just
the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party.  It
was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who--who'd
almost charter a liner to come--if I'd invite them.  It would have
sounded conceited, but I wanted to _jolt_ him!  And he just said he'd
come if he could!"

"He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that
wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't
understand.  "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot
more worth asking, if they had to work, too.  I wish every man had
to--work--hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!"
Her voice slurred and she recovered it.  "I don't know whether he
remembers or not.  Probably not!  You've just had a unique experience
for one of our kind, that's all.  You've met a man!"

Barbara raised herself upon one elbow.

"You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie
Wickersham or my other friends, or--or Garry, aren't men?"

"Males!" snapped the other girl.  "Just males!  But"--and she seemed to
be arguing with herself--"but Garry might have been, though--he might
have been!"

Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.

"It's odd," she murmured once, "but we did seem so--so congenial.  I
can't remember when my brain has been so quick to catch a thought or
supplement one.  Have you ever wondered, Miriam, why we--we can't seem
to marry one who brings out the best in us, like that?"

"Can't?  You mean, dear child, that we don't!  Some of us because the
'best that is in us' is far, far too decently unexciting for daily
diet.  And some of us--oh, just because we haven't the sand and
backbone, I guess!"

But Barbara was too nearly asleep to catch the bitterness of that
reply.  Just once again, before she slept, she asked a question.

"Should I have told Mr. O'Mara that my engagement to Archibald
Wickersham was to be announced at the party?" she murmured.

"Why should you have?" Miriam crisply wanted to know.

"Oh, I don't know," she mused.  "Only I thought he might be interested.
You don't seem to realize that we are--very old friends!"

And long after Barbara was sound asleep, her face buried in the palm of
one hand, Miriam Burrell lay stiffly awake.  Once she smiled a little,
for such perplexities which, of themselves, must work out inevitably.
When dawn came it found her still struggling stubbornly with her own,
for which it seemed there could be no solution now.




CHAPTER VIII

GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!

It was late that night when Steve climbed into the rig which was
waiting with Pat Joe at the reins and they turned north into the hills.
For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in
the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that
ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years
before, in the shack up-river.  And the latter was surprised at
learning how much of it was no longer news.

"Yes, I know," Steve told them, after Caleb had finished relating, with
quite ponderous pride, many things which he ascertained concerning the
Stephen O'Mara who had gone before.  "I know!  Four or five years ago,
when I found out that it was--customary for one to be certain as to
such things, I started to look it up myself.  And when I found out from
the records that a boy by that name had disappeared--perhaps been
stolen by an old servant--I remembered instantly, of course, the box
over which Old Tom used to hang, hour after hour.  I came back into the
woods looking for it that summer and found it gone and nothing left of
the Jenkins' cabin but a pile of charred logs.  On my way out I stopped
here--somehow I thought that maybe you might have it--but the house was
closed.  And no one seemed to know where you had gone or when you would
return."

Caleb nodded, and his eyes turned to Sarah.

"We were sleuthing, Steve," he explained as soberly as he was able.
"We were ranging from border to border and coast to coast, looking for
you."  He stopped to scan the browned face closely for an instant.
"But couldn't you have written--or--or tried again?  We've been
waiting--boy!"

Steve's face colored a little.

"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't
have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or--or clothes,
either.  I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of
those visits, after I had tramped in overland.  The house was closed
both times I came.  And then I did write once--that was from San
Domingo--the third year after I left college.  I was so lonesome down
there that I had to write, I think.  But there--wasn't any reply, so I
sort of thought perhaps----"

He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough.  Caleb faced about
abruptly, his face sternly accusing.

"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want----"
and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head.  "We
didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished.  "If we only had we--we
would have been less lonely waiting, too."

Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.

"I should have known that," he faltered.  "I should have known that
there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going,
for the mails to be infallible.  But I wasn't just sure----"

Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.

"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
which he has neglected to mention."

She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
with less difficulty than he had during her absence.  For a second or
so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
tucked away in his own iron box.  Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
and long at his mother's picture.  When he finally raised his head
again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.

"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
murmured.  "I can only tell you that I didn't know--I didn't
understand----"

Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand.  She did not
need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.

"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered.  "I
am going to ask far more than that of you.  I've kept her picture
always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
it greatly if I were not to see it often.  Do you mind leaving it here,
in your room upstairs?  I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
mind doing so, then I--I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
the--the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
you good-night now."

The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
world could ever have been.  After she had left them alone Steve turned
and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.

"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
said slowly.  "I wondered then if there could be other women with
voices just as kind.  And I--I'm wondering now."

Caleb smiled.

"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked.  "And I
don't know.  I don't know!  Sarah is pretty human--even for a Baptist,
eh?"

They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box.  Even if he had not
been entirely certain of it that first day when he had neglected to
show them to Sarah, he knew now just what reason underlay his secrecy.
Like Old Tom, he felt that his action was in a way more or less
extenuated by circumstance.  And still mindful of Dexter Allison's odd
moment or two of guarded antagonism that very morning, he gradually led
the conversation around to more recent things.

"I suppose you have had your conference with Mr. Allison, Steve?" he
suggested in a matter-of-fact way.

Instantly at that question all the boyishness left the other's face.
He looked away and looked back again, very deliberately.

"No more than a word," he answered.  "He asked me to come down again,
toward the end of the week, if I could get away.  He said no doubt I
would want to spend all the time I could to-day with you and Miss
Sarah."

"Of course," Caleb exclaimed, "of course!  I see.  Is it--is it
unethical if I ask, privately, your opinion of this job which the East
Coast Company has on its hands?  Do you believe they can swing it in
time to fulfill all their obligations?"

Again there followed a moment's pause while Steve's eyes roved
thoughtfully around the room.

"Mr. Elliott wouldn't have risked every cent he has," he finally
replied, "unless I had assured him that it wasn't so very much more
than a man-sized gamble.  Nor Mr. Ainnesley, either, I think.  So that
puts it up to me pretty squarely, doesn't it?  We'll have to win
through--because we have to, now!"

"Quite so!" murmured Caleb again.

He studied a long time over his next words, and it was a very vivid
vision of a rigid little figure in a wrecked black velvet suit--a
vision of a bleak-faced boy with bruised lips who had insisted upon
going back downtown for Miss Sarah's eggs--which eventually overbore
his distaste for anything that might savor of disloyalty to a friend.

"Of course there could arise unforeseen circumstances," he ventured.
"Unforeseen interference which, unless one guarded against it, might
defeat every effort."

The room seemed very, very quiet.

"Of course," came the calm answer at last; and Caleb could not see
Steve's face behind the cupped hands at his pipe bowl, "of
course--unless one more or less guarded against it."

And there, just as calmly, they dropped it.  The topic was not
discussed again that night, unless a bit of news which Fat Joe Morgan
himself delivered might be construed as somehow relative.  Fat Joe had
been driving for an hour, silent some of the time, but for the most
part devoted to a whole-hearted rendition of "Home, Sweet Home," in his
thin and bell-like tenor, when he broke off in the middle of a stanza
to chuckle.

"Say, Chief," he exclaimed, "I've got news for you that'll just fill
you plumb full of happiness and good cheer.  I hired another hand
to-day who'll be a distinct addition to our gang up-river.  Just to
while away the dark hours I'll let you guess for a while who he is.
I'll let you guess from here to Last Oak, above the cypress bend at the
rapids.  One, two, three--and the contest is on!"

The man beside Fat Joe stirred and opened his eyes.  Fat Joe couldn't
see it, for it was too dark, but Steve frowned somewhat at the levity
which had interrupted him.  He had just been thinking about the tight
grip of a slender hand which had fallen upon his arm that afternoon
when a red-headed riverman lurched drunkenly from a doorway ahead.
Joe's words were exactly coincident with that thought and the answer
came mechanically.

"Harrigan," grunted Steve.

And in the darkness Fat Joe sighed mournfully.

"Bull's-eye," he whimpered, "and there goes the whole evenin's
entertainment!  Why didn't you cast around, sort of fruitless for a
while, and prolong the excitement?  But you're right.  Harrigan, that's
him!  He'd just met up with that fat party who owns the plaster palace
on the hill--just met up with him, down the road a piece, and Allison
had fired him for keeps, he said.  He asked me if we didn't have room
for a nice steady hand, so I hired him.  And I'll leave it to you if it
ain't Harrigan's feet that's mostly unsteady, at that.  He seemed awful
cheerful for a man who'd just been allowed to resign, but who was I to
entertain dark doubts?  I hired him; I thought you might like the touch
of color his hair'll lend to the landscape.  It'll be comfortin', too,
havin' him around where we can have a look at him any time we take the
notion.  Don't you think so?"

Steve's grunted reply was hardly intelligible, but it seemed to satisfy
Fat Joe.  The latter had long before learned to read the signs; he knew
when his best efforts were only wasted words, and once more he gave his
attention to the jogging horses and his neglected melody.

Caleb Hunter, wondering after Steve had gone just how much he might
have seemed to insinuate, regretted that he had spoken at all.
Recollection of Allison's bluff cordiality with O'Mara only made him
the more ashamed of his suspicion, and yet the next morning at table he
attempted, covertly, to sound Sarah for an opinion, too.  She
invariably solved his perplexities or relegated them to the limbo of
gentle ridicule.

"Just why should he want this East Coast job to fail?" he puzzled
aloud.  "He's in it, along with Elliott and Ainnesley, even if he isn't
in so deep.  That is, of course, assuming that he does want it to fail."

The preoccupied gleam in Miss Sarah's eyes promised a reply that might
be worth considering, but when it came Caleb found trouble in
assimilating it.

"They did look so well together," she murmured absently.  "He's so much
broader--and a whole head taller, too!"

It didn't seem to be exactly a relevant answer, but Caleb nodded
patiently.

"Taller, yes," he admitted judiciously.  "But he isn't half so big
around."

Sarah sat, fork poised, and gazed at him.

"Not half so big as who?" she neglected her sentence structure.

"Why--Dexter!" said Caleb.  "Isn't that what we were talking about?"

"Maybe you were," Miss Sarah sniffed.  "But I was not discussing
Dexter's height or girth either.  I was referring to his daughter
and--and our boy, Stephen.  I was going to ask you if you thought she
could be entirely disinterested in him.  I don't believe any woman
forgets a man who has ever thought enough of her to fight for her."

"I suppose not," agreed Caleb humbly.

"And I was wondering, if that argument ever came up again--I'm
wondering if Archibald Wickersham wouldn't come out second best, just
as he did before?"

Then her brother understood.  He threw back his head and laughed until
Sarah's face registered a trace of vexation.

"Sarah," he saluted her, "I'm a mere babe in arms when it comes to
finesse, in comparison with you.  But since you have introduced the
subject I might remark that there are two individuals to be considered.
Maybe she might be--interested--as you so delicately phrase it.  But
the boy--well, he's had one mighty pointed lesson, you know."

But there was no mirth in Sarah's eyes.  She was most serious.

"That's the very thing which perplexes me," she confessed.  "I was
going to ask you about that.  For it was hurt pride that sent him away
and he hasn't forgotten the hurt, even yet.  He was going to tell us,
last night when I stopped him, that he hadn't written again because he
wasn't certain that we wanted to hear; and he was painfully conscious
of how childish it would sound in words, too.  Some men quit when they
are whipped once, but don't some of them refuse to recognize that
they've ever been whipped at all, Cal?  And then, she told me that she
had asked him to her party, Friday night.  If he comes I think I'll be
better able to tell just what----"

"He won't!" cut in Caleb flatly, and when she taxed him for it he
proceeded to elaborate at considerable length the reason for his
certainty.  His argument was rather tight and so, just because of that,
woman-fashion she believed the contrary.

All day Friday she watched the hills' road.  Not until the orchestra in
the lodge beyond the hedge had begun tunelessly to strum their
instruments, to insure their later tunefulness, did she reluctantly
abandon her position at the window.  But then, from his chair at the
fire, Caleb noticed how wistfully disappointed her face was.

It turned much colder with nightfall; a wind sharp with the tang of
autumn was blowing in off the river when Barbara, muffled from throat
to ankle in a sapphire fur-edged wrap, slipped in at the door, having
stolen away ostensibly to display to them her costume.  It was after
the hour of ten, but the girl lingered a little after she had executed
that mission; she stopped again in the door, indecisively worrying her
lip with small teeth, when she finally turned to depart.

"We are very sorry that Mr. O'Mara could not come," she hesitated.  "I
had promised both Garry and Archie Wickersham that he would be down."

The older woman nodded and accepted the statement for what it was--a
question which the girl's eyes failed to conceal.

"We haven't heard from him since he went back into camp," she answered.
"He, no doubt, has been unable to get away."

Barbara turned without replying and passed out, less airily than she
had entered.  But Miss Sarah's eyes were no longer disappointed as she
again took her place at a window.  And a second later, when she had
drawn back suddenly into the room with a muffled exclamation, her
brother was astonished at her beaming face.  A moment earlier he would
have sworn that it was only wistful, but before she went upstairs,
exclaiming still further at the lateness of the hour, it began to look
more than a little like veritable triumph to him.

Barbara Allison recrossed the lawn very slowly that night; she retraced
her steps with head bent, the fall of her slippered feet muffled by the
carpet of thick, unfrosted grass.  Vaguely troubled, vaguely disturbed
at herself for her inability to analyze that strange mood which, twice
in the last few nights, had sent her with aching throat and wet cheeks
into Miriam's room, she was within arm's length of the dark figure in
the hedge gap through which she had just come, before she was aware of
its presence.  Stephen O'Mara, weatherbeaten hat in hand, was standing
there in her path, peering steadily at the stucco and timber lodge
alight from end to end like a huge and sprawling glow-worm.

Even in that first moment when she stopped and caught her breath,
audibly, from sheer surprise, the girl sensed the indecision in the
attitude of the man before her.  But she could not know that it was not
a thing of the moment--that irresolution; could not know that
throughout the week Steve had periodically abused himself for his
inability to settle the question once and for all, and leave his brain
free for more important things.  Just as often as he told himself that
he would not go, he had found himself reopening the mental discussion,
and yet--and strangely enough--it was not the recollection of Barbara's
repeated invitations, or even her distress over Garry Devereau, who had
been ceaselessly in his thoughts ever since she had spoken of him,
which finally achieved the decision.  An insistent desire again to meet
the Honorable Archibald Wickersham in the end led him to request Fat
Joe to hook up the team, that day at noon, for the long drive down
river.  With Steve himself handling the reins, they had rolled the
thirty miles at a speed which might have mildly surprised Fat Joe had
he not been accustomed to putting two and two together to make six or
eight or more.  And Fat Joe's thin tenor was just drifting faintly off
down the hill--a mournful rendition of "Home, Sweet Home"--when the
girl stepped noiselessly forward and put a hand, feather-light, upon
the man's arm.

Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a
step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled.  She
even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face.  And then, the
cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and
shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him--a laugh a
little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the
spirit of youth itself.

"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked.

The man just stood and stared at her--stared much as if he mistrusted
his own ears and eyes.

"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
words were tinged with doubt.  "Not all my friends," he said.

And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness.  He
was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
above them.  Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
lain for a moment upon his arm.

"So you are--you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers.  "I
wasn't--just sure."

The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous
affirmative.  She looked down at the hand holding her own,
contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
his big palm.

Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
speak.

"Then it--must be you, too," she faltered.  "I wasn't sure, either,
even when I knew it must be.  I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . .  Will you please say that you
forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than
you can know?"

It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request.  The words were
stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand.  Silence
came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond.  Once,
in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mâché
pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the
pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
costume to him.

His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
which had come creeping over his face.  She saw it surge up in his
eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's
wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping.  She caught
her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though
they had gone dry of a sudden.  Involuntarily she stepped toward him,
that single pace which she had fallen away.  And above the tumult of
her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how
unsteady the effort was.

"Then you do forgive me?" she breathed.  "Do I--pass inspection?  Do
you like me--in my masquerade?"

Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened,
conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking.

"There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his
voice grave.  "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have
been that, always, yourself.  And you are not permitted to ask
forgiveness from me, nor pardon.  Men do not admit that there can be
need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped
you.  You knew I was coming. . . .  I've been coming ten years now.
But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."

The words were blurred as a far-off echo in her ears.  She started to
speak, but all that she would have said caught in her throat and hurt
her, and only her unsteady breath came from parted lips.  Her head
drooped forward again, while the small fist twisted and searched and
found and clasped tight one finger of the hand that held it.  She
realized that his free arm was lifted toward her.  As she started
forward, her ankles became entangled in the soft pile of satin at her
feet, and she stopped to free them--and started forward again.  But
when, at her inarticulate effort at speech, he bent his head to her
swiftly upflung face, her whole slender body tightened at the rough
contact of blue flannel against her cheek.  Almost before they held her
she struggled madly from the circle of his arms.  White of face, white
of lip, she broke away from him and darted through the gap in the
hedge, only to shrink back against him in panic the next instant before
the black shape upon a blacker horse, between her and the lights.

He was gazing in their direction--the man upon the horse.  He was
laughing softly.  And when he thrust back the black cowl that hid his
face and began to speak, Stephen O'Mara recognized that terribly pale,
terribly drawn face.  Garry Devereau rocked a little in the saddle and
waved a gracefully unsteady hand.

"Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the shadow, and his
tongue was not thick, but only wavering.  "My felicitations!  And e'en
though I know not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion.
And yet--why blush, dear unknowns?  'Tis in the air to-night.  Even I
myself have yielded to spirit of frivolity.  Two hours ago I appeared
masked in these dingy vestments as Love's Young Dream; but with me the
mood has passed.  Fellow romancers, you have witnessed a metamorphosis;
you are now gazing upon the Wrath of God, about to thunder forth upon a
coal black charger.  I merely paused to bid you haste inside, lest you
miss the crux of the evening.  When I withdrew the Honorable Archie was
already searching, with bravely concealed distraction, for the fair
daughter of the house.  The hour has struck--it's masks off--masks off,
from eyes and hearts!"

[Illustration: "Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the
shadow.  "My felicitations!  And e'en though I know not your identity,
still I may sense your fond confusion."]

He laughed again, a low and ugly chuckle.  Sparks flew from Ragtime's
hoofs when he touched the sleek flanks with his heels and the splendid
animal quivered and bunched hard thigh muscles and spurned the gravel.
White face whiter still against the background of his somber vestments,
debonaire and drunkenly insecure in the saddle, Garret Devereau tore
out into the main road and thundered off into the night.

Barbara Allison stood a long time motionless, her back to the
motionless man so near her.  She stood and stared, pale as had been
that black-robed horseman, straight ahead of her.  Then a tremor shook
her.  Mechanically she started forward, but at the first step Steve's
hand reached out and found her arm and drew her back to him.  She faced
about, and waited.

"Is that--true?" he asked her, quietly.

She made no move to answer.

"Is that true?" his low and gentle voice commanded this time.  "You
still mean to--marry--him?"

She recovered her voice then.  All her confusion and stunned
realization was swallowed up by that tide of fiercely unreasoning,
deadly resentment which his very gentleness evoked.  There was nothing
girlish in his reply--nothing boyish in that high-held chin and
stiffened body.  A hard note marred her utterance, a perfection of
insolence edged with scorn, which Steve's world did not know.  She
wanted but one thing in that moment; she knew but one impulse--a mad
desire to cut and tear and rend savagely his gravely possessed
kindliness.

"What I have done to-night I can never hope to explain," she told him.
"I can only hope that some day I may cease to despise myself as utterly
as you have taught me to, at this minute.  And since you choose to
regard it now as your right to ask that question, I'll answer it for
you.  I do not _mean_ to marry him.  I shall be proud to be his wife!"

The light that streamed over her shoulder fell full upon his face.  She
saw the blood pour up, staining throat and cheek and brow, and then ebb
away.  She gave him time to answer, but he did not speak; and suddenly
she knew what scene of another day he was remembering.  Her eyes
dropped to her imprisoned hand.

"You are--detaining me," she said.

He released her immediately, and yet she did not move.  And while she
waited he turned and stooped and turned to her again.  She stood like
stone while he wrapped her fur-edged sapphire cloak about her and
fastened it close beneath her uptilted chin.  He waited, bare of head,
in the hedge gap until she had crossed the lawn to the house that lay a
sprawling glow-worm in the darkness.  A tumult of voices leaped out to
him when she opened the door--a lilting crash of syncopated melody.
And then it was quiet again.

After a glimpse of his chief's eyes that night, Fat Joe essayed not so
much as one facetious protest against turning the fagged team homeward
with scarcely any rest at all.  And hour after hour he drove in
silence, checking himself apologetically once or twice when he forgot
himself long enough to burst into the opening strains of his inevitable
ballad.  He remained as quiet as that too quiet man beside him, until
Steve himself opened his lips.

"It's a--lonesome night," mused the latter at length.

Fat Joe could not have endured it much longer.  His pent-up spirit
leaped fervidly forth in reply.

"Lonesome!" he ejaculated.  "Man, it's lonesomer'n hell!  Hear that
damn wind sighin' in the branches, as your poets say.  Hear her moan!
And look at them clouds edgin' in on the moon like they was thugs
a-packin' blackjacks and waitin' for an openin' to whale in.  Lonesome?
Say, it gives me chills, a night like this.  It don't seem to have no
heart, somehow, nor mercy nor nuthin', does it?  It's all wrong!  It
ain't dark enough, and it ain't light enough; it's too quiet, and the
wind makes too much noise.  It keeps whisperin' over your shoulder,
tauntin' yuh with somethin' you can't understand.  No, sir, this kind
of a night ain't popular with me, at, all, at all! . . .  Say, Steve,
how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"

Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
speech were opened for Joe.

"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
wanted to be certain sure.  It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
of her name, any way you look at it.  And not that I've reached that
state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either.  I just aim to
be prepared, that's all."

He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
loomed up ahead.  And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
through the darkness.  At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
but he knew that the latter had not heard.  And when that night-bird's
call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
breastwork of trees.

Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of

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