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David Malcolm

by Nelson Lloyd · English · Gutenberg #23741 · 566,751 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: David Malcolm

Author: Nelson Lloyd


        
Release date: December 5, 2007 [eBook #23741]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23741

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAVID MALCOLM ***




Produced by Al Haines










DAVID MALCOLM


BY

NELSON LLOYD




CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

NEW YORK

1913




COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published August, 1913




TO

THE RARE, SWEET MEMORY OF

SUSANNE LIVINGSTON GREEN LLOYD

MY WIFE AND THE DEAR COMPANION

WHO WORKED

WITH ME OVER THESE PAGES




DAVID MALCOLM


CHAPTER I

"Take care not to tumble into the water, David," said my mother.

She was standing by the gate, and from my perch on the back of the
off-wheeler, I smiled down on her with boyish self-assurance.  The idea
of my tumbling into the water!  The idea of my drowning even did I meet
with so ludicrous a mishap!  But I was accustomed to my mother's
anxious care, for as an only child there had fallen to me a double
portion of maternal solicitude.  In moments of stress and pain it came
as a grateful balm; yet more often, as now, it was irritating to my
growing sense of self-reliance.  To show how little I heeded her
admonition, how well able I was to take care of myself, as I smiled
loftily from my dangerous perch, with my legs hardly straddling the
horse's back, I disdained to secure myself by holding to the harness,
but folded my arms with the nonchalance of a circus rider.

"And, David, be careful about rattlesnakes," said my mother.

Had I not seen in her anxious eyes a menace against all my plans for
that day I should have laughed outright in scorn, but knowing it never
wise to pit my own daring against a mother's prudence, I returned
meekly, "Yessem."  Then I gave the horse a surreptitious kick, trying
thus to set all the ponderous four in motion.  The unsympathetic animal
would not move in obedience to my command.  Instead, he shook himself
vigorously, so that I had to seize the harness to save myself from an
ignominious tumble into the road.

"You won't let David wander out of your sight, now, will you, James?"
my mother said.

James was climbing into the saddle.  Being a deliberate man in all his
actions, he made no sign that he had heard until he had both feet
securely in the stirrups, until he had struck a match on his boot-leg
and had lighted his pipe, until he had unhooked the single rein by
which he guided the leaders and was ready to give his horses the word
to move.  Then he spoke in a voice of gentle protest:

"You hadn't otter worry about Davy, ma'am, not when he's with me."  His
long whip was swinging in the air, but he checked it, that he might
turn to me and ask: "Now, Davy, you're sure you have your hook and
line?"

I nodded.

"And your can o' worms for bait?"

Again I nodded.  The whip cracked.  And I was off on the greatest
adventure of my life!  My charger was a shaggy farm-horse, hitched
ignominiously to the pole of a noisy wood-wagon; my squire, the lanky,
loose-limbed James; my goal, the mountains to which were set my young
eyes, impatiently measuring the miles of rolling valley which I must
cross before I reached the land that until now I had seen only in the
wizard lights of distance.

Every one lives a story--every man and every woman.  A million miles of
book-shelves could not hold the romances which are being lived around
you and will be unwritten.  I am sure that when your own story has been
lived, when it is stored in your heart and memory, you will follow the
binding thread of it, and find it leading you back, as mine leads me to
one day like that day in May when I went fishing.  There will be your
Chapter I.  Before that, you will see, you were but a slip of humanity
taking root on earth.  My own life began ten years before that May
morning, but on that May morning began my story.  Then I rode all
unconscious of it.  I was simply going fishing for trout.  Yet, as I
clung to my heavy-footed horse and kept my eyes fixed on the distant
mountains, my heart beat quick with the spirit of adventure, for to
fish for trout in mysterious forests meant a great deal to one who had
known only the sluggish waters in the meadow and the martyrlike
resignation of the chub and sunny.  I might begin my story on that
winter morning when I came into the world and bleated my protest
against living at all, but I pass by those years when I was only a slip
of humanity taking root on earth and come to that May day which is the
first to rise distinctly on my inward vision when I turn to retrospect.
Even now I mark it as a day of great adventure.  Since then I have
battled with salmon in northern waters, I have felt my line strain
under the tarpon's despair, I have heard my reel sing with the rushes
of the bass, yet I do not believe that a whale with my harpoon in his
side, as he thrashes the sea, would give me the same exulting thrill
that came with a tiny trout's first tug at my hook.  Filled with so
exciting a prospect, I did not look back as we swung down the hill from
the farmhouse.  I dared not, lest I should see my too solicitous mother
beckoning me home to the protection of her eyes.  Though I clutched the
harness and bounced about on my uncomfortable seat, the horse's rough
gait had no terrors for me when every clumsy stride was carrying me
nearer to the woods.  As we rattled into the long street of the
village, it seemed to me that all the people must have come out just to
see us pass.  The fresh beauty of the spring morning might have called
them forth, but from the proud height where I sat looking down on them
they had all the appearance of having heard in some mysterious way that
David Malcolm was going fishing.  They hailed me from every side.  Even
the Reverend Mr. Pound added to the glory of my progress, leaving his
desk and his profound studies of Ahasuerus to stand at the open window
as we passed.

With boyish exultation I called to him: "I'm goin' a-fishin', Mr.
Pound--fishin' for trout."

In Mr. Pound's personal catechism his own chief end was to utter
trenchant and useful warnings to all who came within reach of his
voice.  Even to a lad riding forth under careful guidance to fish in a
little mountain stream he had to sound his alarm.  The soft fragrance
of the May-day air, and the restful green and white of the May-day
coloring had brought to the minister's face a smile of contentment in
spite of his melancholy ponderings over the weaknesses of Ahasuerus; he
looked on me benignly from his window until I spoke, and then his face
clouded with concern.

"David, David," he cried, stretching out his hand with fingers
wide-spread, "don't fall into the water."

There was a mysterious note in his reverberating tones, which expressed
a profound conviction that not only should I fall into the water, but
that I should be drowned, and looking at his solemn face I could feel
the cold pool closing over my head.  I tried to laugh away the fear
which seized me, but chill, damp currents seemed to sweep the shaded
street.  Not till we reached the open sunlit square did my sluggish
blood start again.  There I came under the genial influence of Squire
Crumple's radiating smile, and Mr. Pound and his lugubrious warning
were forgotten.  The squire was trimming his lilac-bush, and from the
green shrubbery his round face lifted slowly, as the sun rises from its
night's rest in the eastward ridges and spreads its welcome light over
the valley.

"Well, Davy, where are you bound?" he shouted, so pleasantly that I
could well believe my small wanderings of interest to so great a man.

"Fishin'," I answered, drawing myself up to a dignity far above the
chub and sunny--"fishin' for trout."

"Fishin', eh?  Well, look out for rattlers."  His voice was so cheery
that one might have thought these snakes well worth meeting for their
companionship.  "This is the season for 'em, Davy--real rattler season,
and you're sure to see some."  To make his warning more impressive, the
squire gave a leap backward which could not have been more sudden or
violent had he heard the dreaded serpent stirring in the heart of his
lilac.  "Watch out, Davy; watch sharp, and when you meet 'em be sure to
go backward and sideways like that."

He gave a second extraordinary leap, which was altogether too realistic
to be pleasant for the boy who saw the mountains, sombre and black,
beyond the long street's end, yet very near him.  I forced a laugh at
his antics, but I rode on more thoughtfully, my hands clutching the
harness, my eyes fixed on my horse's bobbing mane.  I feared to look up
lest I should meet more of these disturbing warnings, and yet enough of
pride still held in me to lift my head at the store.  I had always
looked toward the store instinctively when I passed that important
centre of the village life, and now, as always, I saw Stacy Shunk on
the bench.

He was alone, but alone or in the company of half a score, in silence
or in the heat of debate, Stacy had a single attitude, and this was one
of distortion in repose.  Now, as always, he was sitting with legs
crossed, his hands hugging a knee, his eyes contemplating his left
foot.  In the first warm days of spring, Stacy's feet burst out with
the buds, casting off their husks of leather.  So this morning his foot
had a new interest for him, and he was absorbed in the study of it, as
though it were something he had just discovered, a classic fragment
recently unearthed, at the beauty of whose lines he marvelled.  He did
not even look up when he heard the rumble of our wagon.  Stacy Shunk
never troubled to look up if he could avoid it.  He seemed to have a
third eye which peered through the ragged hole in the top of his hat,
and swept the street, and bored through walls, a tiny search-light, but
one of peculiarly penetrating power.  I saw his head move a little as
we drew near, and his body shifted nervously as would a mollusk at the
approach of some hostile substance.  Yet sitting thus, eying me only
through the top of his hat, he saw right into my mind, he saw right
into my pockets, he saw the mustard can full of worms, he saw the line,
and the fish-hooks which my mother had thoughtfully wrapped in a
pill-box.  How else could he have divined all that he did?

"Well, Davy," he said in a wiry voice, which cut through the din of
rattling harness and creaking wagon, "I see you're goin' a-fishin' for
trout?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Shunk," I returned, with a politeness that told my
respect for his occult powers.

"Well, mind," he said, intently studying his foot as though he were
reading some mystic signals wigwagged from the gods, "mind, Davy, that
you don't fall into the hands of the Professor.  If the Professor
catches you, Davy--"  The foot stopped wiggling.  The oracle was
silent.  Did it fear to reveal to me so dreadful a fate as mine if I
fell into the Professor's clutches?  I waved a hand defiantly to the
seer and I rode on.  Rode on?  I was dragged on by four stout horses
through the village to the mountains, for in my heart I was calling to
my mother, wishing that her gentle warnings had turned me back before I
heard the voice of doom sounding from the depths of Mr. Pound; before I
had seen the comic tragedy enacted by Squire Crumple; above all, before
the man who saw through the top of his hat had uttered his enigmas
about the Professor.

There is something innately repugnant to man in the word "professor."
It makes the flesh creep almost as does the thought of the toad or
snake.  Though when a boy of ten I had never seen a "professor," the
word alone was so full of portent that the prospect of seeing one, even
without being caught by him, would have frightened me.  I suppose that
the chill which reverberated through my spine and legs echoed the
horror of many generations of my ancestors who had known professors of
all kinds, from those who trimmed their hair and dosed them with
nostrums to those who sat over them with textbook and rod.  Being
myself thus perturbed, it was astonishing that James should show no
sign of fear, but should keep his horses in their collars, pulling
straight for the mountains where the dreaded creature lived.  He smoked
his pipe nonchalantly, as though a hundred professors could not daunt
him.  I was sure that there was something of bravado in his conduct
until he began to sing, and his voice rang out without a tremor, so
full and strong that it fanned a spark of courage into my cowering
heart.  James had a wonderfully inspiring way of singing.  He tuned his
voice to the day and to the time of the day.  This morning the sky was
clear blue above us, and about us the orchards blossomed pink and
white, and the fresh green fields were all awave under the breeze, not
the grim wind of winter, but the soft yet buoyant wind of spring.  So
his song was cheery.  The words of it were doleful, like the words of
all his songs, but under the touch of his magic baton, his swinging
whip, a requiem could become a hymn of rejoicing.  Now the birds in the
meadows seemed to accompany him, and our heavy-footed four to step with
a livelier gait in time to his rattling air, all unconscious that he
sang of "the old gray horse that died in the wilderness."  It was a
boast of his that he could sing "any tune there was," and I believed
him, for I had a profound admiration of his musical ability.  Indeed, I
hold it to this day, and often as I sit in the dark corner of an
opera-box and listen to the swelling harmonies of a great orchestra, I
close my eyes and fancy myself squatting on the grassy barn-bridge at
James's side when the shadows are creeping over the valley and he weeps
for Nellie Grey and Annie Laurie in a voice so mighty that the very
hills echo his sorrow.

This May morning, as James sang, my spirits rose with his soaring
melody from the depths into which they had been cast in the passage of
the village, and when the last note had died away and he was debating
whether to light his pipe or sing another song, I asked him with quite
a show of courage:

"Is it very dangerous in the mountains?"

James looked down at me.  A smile flickered around the corners of his
mouth, but he suppressed it quickly.

"Yes--and no," he drawled.

Inured as I was to his cautious ways, I was not taken aback by this
non-committal reply, but pursued my inquiry, hoping that in spite of
his vigilance I might elicit some encouraging opinion.

"Am I likely to tumble into the water while I'm fishing, James?"

"That depends, Davy."  James looked profoundly at the sky.

"And what's the chance of my being bit by a rattlesnake, James?"

"I wouldn't say they was absolutely none, nor yet would I say they was
any chance at all."  At every word of this sage opinion James wagged
his head.

We rode some distance in silence, and then I came to the real point of
my examination.  "James, what kind of a man is a professor?"

James looked down at me gravely.  "I s'pose, Davy, you have in mind
what Stacy Shunk said about him catchin' you."

"Oh, dear, no," I protested.  "I was just wondering what kind of a man
he was."

"Well, Davy," James said, in a voice of mockery which silenced as well
as encouraged me, "if you can fall into the creek, be bit by a rattler,
and catched by the Professor all in the one-half hour we will be in the
mountains while I loaden this wagon with wood, I'll give you a medal
for being the liveliest young un I ever heard tell of.  Mind, Davy,
I'll give you a medal."

With that he checked further questioning by breaking into a song, and
had he once descended from the heights to which he soared and shown any
sign that he was aware of my presence, pride would have restrained me
from pressing my trembling inquiry.

So, singing as we rode, we crossed the ridge, the mountain's guarding
bulwark; we left the open valley behind us and descended into the
wooded gut.  We passed a few scattered houses with little clearings
around them, and then the trees drew in closer to us until the green of
their leafy masonry arched over our heads.  At last I was in the
mountains!  This was the mysterious topsy-turvy land, the land of
strange light and shadow to which I had so often gazed with wondering
eyes.  In the excitement of its unfolding, in the interest with which I
followed the windings of the narrow road, I forgot the dangers which
threatened me in these quiet, friendly woods; and when I cast my line
into the tumbling brook I should have laughed at Mr. Pound, at Squire
Crumple, and Stacy Shunk, had I given them a thought.  But even James's
kindly warnings were now uncalled for.  That he should admonish me at
all I accepted as merely a formal compliance with his promise to my
mother that he would keep an eye on me.  For him to keep an eye on me
was a physical impossibility, as the road plunged deeper into the
woods, bending just beyond the little bridge where he had fixed me for
my fishing.  He was soon out of my sight, and his warning to me to stay
in that spot went out of my mind before the rumble of his wagon had
died away.  Had he turned at the bend he would have seen me lying flat
on my back on the bridge, unbalanced by the eagerness with which I had
answered the first tug at the hook.

I could have landed a shark with the strength which I put into that
wild jerk, but I saw only the worm bait dangling above my astonished
face.  With my second cast I lifted a trout clear of the water; then
caught my line in an overhanging branch and saw my erstwhile prisoner
shoot away up-stream.  The tangled line led me from my post of safety.
Had I returned to it; had I remembered the admonition of the cautious
James, and held to the station to which he had assigned me--my life
might have run its course in another channel.  Now, as I look back, it
seems as though my story became entangled with my line in that
overhanging branch, as though there I picked up the strong, holding
thread of it, and followed its tortuous windings to this day.

My blood was running quick with excitement.  I had no fear.  A
wonderful catch, a game fish six inches long filled me with the pride
of achievement, and with pride came self-confidence.  The stream lured
me on.  The rapids snapped up my hook, and with many a deceitful tug
enticed me farther and farther into the woods.  The brush shut the
bridge from my view, but I knew that it was not far away, and that a
voice so mighty as James could raise would easily overtake my slow
course along the bank.  So I went from rock to rock with one hand
guiding my precious rod, and the other clutching overhanging limbs and
bushes.

What sport this was for a lad of ten who had known only the placid
brook in the open meadow and the amiable moods of its people!  How many
a boyish shout I muffled as I made my cautious way along that
boisterous stream and pitted my wits against its wary dwellers!  I
wormed through an abatis of laurel; I scampered over the bared and
tangled roots of a great oak; I reached a shelf of pebbly beach.
Around it the water swept over moss-clad rocks into a deep pool; above
it the arched limbs broke and let in the warm sunlight, making it a
grateful spot to one chilled by the dampness of the thicker woods.
Eager to try my luck in that enticing pool, I leaped from the massed
roots to the little beach without troubling to see what others might
have come here to enjoy with me a bit of open day.  My hook touched the
stream; my line ran taut; my rod almost snapped from my hands.  I
clutched it with all my strength.  Every muscle of arms, legs, and body
was bent to land that gigantic fish.  That it was gigantic I was sure,
from the power of its rush.  I pitted my weight against his and felt
him give way.  Then, shouting in exultation, I fell over backward.  I
saw him leave the water, not quite the leviathan I had fancied; I saw
him fly over my head and heard him flopping behind me.  Getting to my
feet, I turned to rush at my prize and capture him.  I was
checked--first by my ears, for in them rang the sharp whir of a rattle.
Cold blood shot from my heart to the tips of my toes and the top of my
head.  I needed nothing more to hold me back, but there before my eyes
was the other visitor to this pleasant sunny spot, his head rising from
his coiled body, his tail erect and lashing in fury.

Since that day I have learned that the rattler when disturbed by man
will seek refuge in flight, and fights only when cornered.  This
particular snake, I think, must have been told that a boy will glide
away into the bushes if a chance is given him, for he seemed determined
to stand his ground and let me flee.  But where was I to escape when he
held the narrow way to the bank, and behind me roared the stream, grown
suddenly to mighty width and depth?  How was I to move at all when
every nerve was numbed by the icy currents which swept through my
veins?  Could I escape?  Was it not foreordained that I should meet my
end in these woods?  Had I not spurned the chance of life given me
through the prophecies of good Mr. Pound and the warning of the squire?

The snake before me grew to the size of a boa-constrictor.  The brook
behind me roared in my ears like Niagara.  The snake began to drive his
head toward me, showing his fangs as though he were making a
reconnoissance of the air before his spring.  He was so terrible that I
knew that when he did hurl himself at me I must go backward and fulfil
the prophecy of Mr. Pound.  I had forgotten the man who saw through the
top of his hat.  I awaited helplessly the triumph of Mr. Pound.

From out of the bush, from out of the air, as though impelled by a
spirit hand, a long stick swung.  It fell upon my enemy's head and
drove it to the ground.  He lifted his head and turned from me,
striking madly, but the rod fell again upon his back.  He uncoiled and
tried to run; he twisted and turned in his dying agony and lashed the
air in futile fury.  The merciless rod broke him and stretched him to
his full length.  But even though dead he was terrible to me, for had I
not heard that a snake never dies until sunset; could I not see the
body still quivering; might not the bruised head dart at me in dying
madness!

I took a step backward, and hurtled into the water.  For a long time I
groped in the depths of the pool.  To me it seemed that I struggled
there for hours in the blackness; that serpents drew their slimy
lengths across my face; that fishes poked their noses with bold
inquisitiveness about me and dared to nibble at my hands; that Mr.
Pound looked up at me from the abyss, benignly in his triumph, and that
his solemn voice joined with the roaring of the torrent.  Knowing well
that my end had come and that the prophecy was being fulfilled, I
struggled without hope, but my fingers clutching at the water at last
met some solid substance and closed on it.  I felt myself turn, and
suddenly opening my eyes saw the sunlight pouring through the green
window in the tree-tops.  My legs straightened; my feet touched the
stony bottom; my shoulders lifted from the stream, and I looked into a
small girl's face, while my hand was tightly clasped in hers.

Since that day the sun's soft brown has faded from her cheeks,
uncovering their radiance; since then she has grown to fairest
womanhood, and I have seen her adorning the art of Paris and Vienna;
but to me she has given no fairer picture than on that May morning
when, shamefaced, I climbed from the mountain stream and looked down
from my ten years of height on the little girl in a patched blue frock.
Nature had coiffed her hair that day and tumbled it over her shoulders
in wanton brightness, but she had caught the crowning wisp of it in a
faded blue ribbon which bobbed majestically with every movement of her
head.  Had some woodland Mr. Pound told her that I was coming?  Since
then I have seen her more daintily shod than when her bare brown legs
hurried from view into broken shoes of twice her size.  Since then the
hard little hand has turned white and thin and tapering, to such a hand
as women are wont to let dawdle over the arms of chairs.  Then I was a
boy, with a boy's haughty way of regarding girlish softness.  I was
haughtier that day because I sought in my pride to cover up my debt to
her.  Now I am a man, but the boy's picture of Penelope Blight, the
little girl in the patched blue frock and broken shoes, standing by the
mountain stream, holds in the memory with clear and softening colors.

She leaned, a tiny Amazon, on the stick which towered to twice her
height, and she said to me: "Boy, you hadn't otter be afraid of snakes."

In my shame I answered nothing and my teeth chattered, for I was very
cold from fright and the ducking.

Then she said to me: "Boy, you had otter come over to our house and get
warm."

I remembered my dignity, and, in a tone of patronage assumed by right
of the one year of difference in our ages, I asked: "Where is your
house, young un?"

She pointed over her shoulder, over the quivering body of the snake,
across the bushes, and through the green light of the woods.  There I
saw a bit of blue sky, cut by a thin spire of smoke.

"Yonder's our patch," she said, "and father will give you something to
warm you up."

I asked: "Who is your father, little un?"

She drew herself up very straight, and even the blue ribbon in her hair
rose in majesty as she answered.  Then I almost tumbled into the pool
again, for she said: "Some call him the Professor."




CHAPTER II

The words of Penelope Blight fell on my ears as chillingly as the
rattler's whir.  That the prophecies of Mr. Pound and Squire Crumple
had come to nothing was little consolation for me.  So near had they
been to fulfilment that it seemed that I must have been spared only for
a harder fate, and the figure of Stacy Shunk peering at me through the
top of his hat, uttering his ominous warning, rose before my startled
eyes.  I should have run, but my retreat was barred, the girl blocking
the way over the shelving beach.  I took a backward step and for an
instant the Prophet Pound's star was in the ascendant, for the foot
touched the water.  So great was my dread of the Professor that had I
been in a position to choose my course I should have taken my chances
in the stream, but I lost my self-control with my balance and made a
desperate clutch at the air.

Again the brown hand caught mine, and this time it did not release me.

"Come with me," my small captor said in a tone of command.

I did not resist, but I went with fear.  To resist would have been a
confession of cowardice, and there is no pride of courage like that of
a boy of ten in a girl's presence.  I might have made excuses, but with
that little spire of smoke so close at hand, promising a fire, I,
dripping and shivering as I was, could think of nothing to say in
protest.  I did declare feebly that I was not cold.  My teeth
chattered, and my body shook, and the girl looked up at me and laughed,
and led me on.

James, a man of a superstitious and imaginative mind, in the quiet
evenings on the barn-bridge had often told me strange stories in which
giants and dwarfs, witches and fairies, entangled men in their spells.
One of these tales, a favorite of his, came to me now and caused my
feet to lag and my eyes to study my guide with growing distrust.  It
was of a lady called "Laura Lee," who, James said, sat on the bank of
the big river combing her hair and singing, the beauty of her face and
voice luring too curious sailormen to their destruction.  It was a far
cry from the big river to the mountain brook, from the lovely "Laura
Lee" to this tiny girl, about whom all my careful scrutiny could
discover no sign of a comb.  Yet it did seem to me that there was a
resemblance between the creature of the story, "the beautiful lady with
blue eyes and golden hair who hung around the water," and this child of
the woods who had no fear of snakes and boasted a professor for a
father.  She felt the tug of my resisting hand.

"You're not afraid of me, are you, boy?" she asked, turning to me
sharply.

I, a boy of ten, afraid of this mite!  Had she really been what I was
beginning to suspect, a decoy sent out by the Professor to lure me to
his den, she could not have used more cunning than to put to me such a
question.  I afraid?  Though the blood still waved through me, I
squared my shoulders, dissembled a laugh, and stepped before her, and
it was I who led the way along the path into the open day of the
clearing.  There I came face to face with the Professor.

First I saw that he was human in shape and attire.  Indeed, both his
appearance and his occupation were exceedingly commonplace.  When we
came upon him he was leaning on a hoe and watching a passing cloud.
Had he smiled at me, I think I must have fallen to my knees and lifted
my hands in pleading, but he gave no sign of pleasure that another
victim had fallen into his toils.  In fact, there was something
reassuring in the perfect indifference with which he regarded me.  When
the crackling of the bushes called his eyes to us, he threw one glance
our way as though a trifle annoyed at being disturbed in his study.
Then he returned to the contemplation of the sky.  So I stood on the
edge of the woods my hand holding the girl's, and watched him, and as
the seconds passed and he did not change his form, but remained a lazy
man leaning on a hoe in a patch of riotous weeds, fear left me and
wonder took its place.

There was nothing about this man to merit the opprobrium of his name,
and from appearances Stacy Shunk had as well warned me against being
caught by Mr. Pound.  In the village Mr. Pound was the mould of
respectability.  He always wore a short frock-coat of glossy black
material, which strained itself to reach across his chest.  So did the
Professor.  But his black had turned to green in spots, and he was so
thin and the tails were so short and the coat so broad that it seemed
as though its length and breadth had become transposed.  It was a
marvellously shabby coat, but even in its poverty there was no
mistaking its blue blood.  It was a decayed sartorial aristocrat, ill
nourished and sad, but flaunting still the chiselled nose and high,
white brow of noble lineage.  Here it was all out of place.  Mr. Pound
wore a great derby which swelled up from his head like a black ominous
cloud, and so dominated him that it seemed to be in him the centre of
thought and action, and likely at any moment to catch a slant on the
wind and carry him from earth.  The Professor wore a great derby, too,
but one without the buoyant, cloud-like character of Mr. Pound's.  It
was a burden to him.  Only his ears kept it from dragging him to earth
and smothering him, and now as he looked up at the sky I saw clear cut
against its blackness a thin quixotic visage, shaded by a growth of
stubble beard.  I marvelled at a man working in such attire, for the
sun baked the clearing, but watching, I saw how little he swung his hoe
and how much he studied the sky.  The whole place spoke of one who kept
his coat on while he worked, and gazed at the clouds more than he hoed.
It was wretched and dismal.  It hid itself away in the woods from very
shame of its thriftlessness.  Age had twisted the house askew, so that
the mud daubing crumbled from between the logs, and the chimney was
ready to tumble through the roof with the next puff of wind.  The
shanty barn was aslant and leaned heavily for support on long props.
The hay burst through every side of it, and the sole occupant, an
ancient white mule, had burst through too, and with his head projecting
from an opening and his ears tilted forward, he was regarding me
critically.  Everywhere the weeds were rampant.  Everywhere there were
signs of a feeble battle against them, bare spots where the Professor
had charged, cut his way into their massed ranks, only to retreat
wearied and beaten by their numbers.

Over this wretchedness the girl waved her hand and said: "Here is our
farm."  The blue ribbon in her hair bobbed majestically as she pointed
across the stretch of weeds to the cabin.  "And yonder is our house."
She pinched my arm as a sign of caution.  "And there is father," she
added in a voice of muffled pride.  "He's studying.  Father's always
studying."

She would have led me on in silence, not to disturb his labors with
either mind or hoe, but he looked down and asked in a tone of yawning
interest: "Who's the lad, Penelope?"

"I don't know," she answered.  "He fell into the creek, and I pulled
him out.  I've brought him in to warm him up."

Wet, shivering boys emerging suddenly from the woods might have been a
common sight about the Professor's home, did one judge from the way he
received his daughter's explanation.  He merely nodded and fell upon
the weeds with newly acquired vigor.  As we walked on we heard the
spasmodic crunching of his hoe.  But the noise stopped before we
reached the house door, and the silence caused us to turn.  He was
standing erect looking at us.

"I think you'd better have something, lad," he cried, and, dropping the
hoe, he hurried after us.

So it came that the Professor did me the honors of his home, and with
such kindness that all my fear of him was soon gone.  He stirred the
fire to a roaring blaze and placed me in front of it.  He spread my
coat before the stove and drew my boots, and quickly my clothes began
to steam, and I was as uncomfortably warm as before I had been
uncomfortably cold.  The shy politeness of my age forbade my protesting
against this over-indulgence in heat, and not until the Professor
declared that he must give me a dose to ward off sickness did I raise a
feeble voice in remonstrance.

My protest was in vain.  From the cupboard he brought a large black
bottle.  Had I seen my mother approaching me with a bottle as ominous
as that, even her favorite remedy that I knew so well, the Seven Seals
of Health and Happiness, I should have fled far away, but now the girl
had my coat, and was turning it before the fire, while her father stood
between me and my boots.  He smiled so benignly that had he offered me
our family nostrum I should have taken it without a grimace.  I
accepted the proffered glass and drank.  Never had anything more
horrible than that liquid fire passed my lips.  In a moment I seemed to
be turned inside out and toasting at a roaring blaze, and to increase
my discomfort the Professor poured another dose, many times larger than
the first.  Had he held it toward me I should have abandoned my coat
and boots, but to my relief he raised it to his lips and drained it off
with a smile of keen appreciation of its merits.

"Now I feel better," he said, putting the bottle and glass on the
table, and dropping into a chair.

It was strange to me that he, who was perfectly dry, should prescribe
for himself exactly the same remedy that he had given to me for my
wringing wetness.  Yet there was no denying the beneficence of the
dose, for I was most uncomfortably warm, and had he been feeling badly
he was certainly now in fine spirits.

Drawing his daughter between his knees, he enfolded her in his arms
protectingly.  "Well, boy, I warrant you feel better," he said.

I replied that I did, and if he did not mind I should like to sit a
little farther from the stove.

He consented, laughing.  "And now we should introduce
ourselves--formally," he went on.  "You have met my daughter, Miss
Blight--Miss Penelope Blight.  I am Mr. Blight--Mr. Henderson
Blight--in full, Andrew Henderson Blight.  And you?"

"I am David Malcolm, sir," I answered.

"Ah!"  He lifted his eyebrows.  "You are one of those bumptious
Malcolms."

"Yes, sir," I returned proudly, for the word "bumptious" had a ring of
importance in it, and I had every reason to believe that the Malcolms
were persons of quite large importance.

Why Mr. Blight laughed so loud at my reply I could not understand, but
I supposed that in spite of his saturnine appearance he was a man of
jovial temperament and I liked him all the more.

The wave of merriment past, he regarded me gravely.  "Then you must be
the son of the distinguished Judge Malcolm."

"Yes, sir," I said, pride rising triumphant over my polite humility.

"Penelope," he said, as though addressing only his daughter, "we are
greatly honored.  Our guest is a Malcolm--a sop of the celebrated Judge
Malcolm."

By this adroit flattery my host won my heart, and in the comfort he had
given me I lost all care for passing time.  When I recalled James, it
was with the thought that I was safe and he would find me, and I was
troubled by no obligation to save him worry.  This strange man
interested me, he held my family in high regard, and I was well
satisfied to see more of him.  So I fixed my heels on the rung of my
chair, folded my hands in my lap, sat up very straight, and watched him
gravely.  In this was the one grudge that I long bore against the
Professor--that he baited me as he did, played with my child's pride,
and with my innocent connivance vented his contempt on all that I held
most dear.  I did not understand the covert sneer against my father.
Years have given me a broader view of life than was my father's, and at
times I can smile with Henderson Blight at the solemnity with which he
invested his judgeship, but mine is the smile of affection.  With no
knowledge of the law, with a power restricted to county contracts, when
he sat on the bench in court week with his learned confrère, drew his
chin into his pointed collar, and furrowed his brow, Blackstone beside
him would have appeared a tyro in legal lore.  The distinguished Judge
Malcolm!  So Henderson Blight spoke of him in raillery and so he was in
truth, distinguished in his village and his valley, and as I have come
to know men of fame in larger villages and broader valleys I can still
look back to him with loving pride.  Yet that day I sat complacently
with my feet on the chair-rung, regarding the Professor with growing
friendliness.

"You know my father?" I asked, seeking to draw forth more of this
agreeable flattery.

"I have not the honor," he replied.  "You see I am comparatively new in
these parts--driven here, as you may suspect, by temporary adversity.
But a man with ideas, David, must some day rise above adversity.  All
he needs is a field of action."  He looked across the bare room and out
of the door, where the weeds were charging in masses against the very
threshold; he looked beyond them, above the wall of woods, to a small
white cloud drifting in the blue.  Young as I was, I saw that in his
eyes which told me that could he reach the cloud he might set the
heavens afire, but under his hand there lay no task quite worthy of
him.  "A field of action--an opportunity," he repeated meditatively.
"It's hard, David, to have all kinds of ideas and no place to use them.
When a man knows that he has it in him and----"

"Is that why Mr. Shunk calls you the Professor?" I interrupted.

Henderson Blight turned toward me a melancholy smile.  "Yes," he said.
"They all call me that, David, down in the village.  Ask them who the
Professor is.  They will tell you, a vagrant, a lazy fellow with a gift
of talking, a ne'er-do-well with a little learning.  Ask Stacy Shunk.
Ask Mr. Pound--wise and good Mr. Pound.  He will tell you that ideas
such as mine are a danger to the community, that I speak out of
ignorance and sin.  As if in every mountain wind I could not hear a
better sermon than he can give me and find in every passing cloud a
text to ponder over.  They don't understand me at all."

The Professor drew his little daughter close to him and regarded me
fixedly, as though to see if I understood.

"Yes, sir," I said.  "I will ask them."

At this matter-of-fact reply his mouth twitched humorously.  "And
perhaps you will find that they are right," he said.  "That's the worst
of it.  Even dull minds can generate a certain amount of unpleasant
truth; that's what sets me on edge against them--when they ask me why I
don't carry out some of my fine ideas instead of criticising others."

"Why don't you?"  The question was from no desire to drive my host into
a corner, but came from an innocent interest in him and a wish to get
at something concrete.

He took no offence at my presumption, but rose slowly, lifted his arms
above his head, and stretched himself.  Unconsciously he answered my
question.

"Had I the last ten years to live over again I would," he said as he
paced slowly up and down the room.  "Perhaps I shall yet.  Long ago,
when I was home on a little farm with the mountains tumbling down over
it, I used to plan getting out in the world and doing something more
than to earn three meals a day.  It is stupid--the way men make meals
the aim of their lives.  I wanted something better, but to find it I
had to have the means, and means could only be had by the most
uncongenial work.  So here I find myself on a still smaller farm with
the mountains coming down on my very head.  It was different with
Rufus."

"Rufus who?" I demanded with the abruptness of an inquisitive youth who
was getting at the facts at last.

The Professor halted by my chair.  "My brother Rufus.  You see, David,
I taught school because it was easy work and gave me time to think.
Rufus was a blockhead.  He never had a real idea of any kind, but he
could work.  When he owned a cross-road store he was as proud as though
he had written 'Paradise Lost.'  He went to conquer the county town and
did it by giving a prize with every pound of tea.  He wrote me about it
and you might have supposed that he had won a Waterloo.  Yet he had his
good points.  Now if Rufus and I could have been combined, his physical
energy with my mental, we should have done something really worth
while."

"Yes, sir--yes, indeed, sir," I said politely.  My conception of the
Professor's meaning was very faulty, but I found him engrossing because
he talked so fluently and made so many expressive gestures.  He, I
suspect, was pleased with a sympathetic listener, though one so small.

Laying a hand on my shoulder, he asked: "David, what are you going to
do when you grow up?"

"I am going to be like my father," I replied.

"Like the distinguished Judge Malcolm?" he exclaimed.  "That's a high
ambition--for the valley."  He was standing over me pulling his chin,
and from the manner in which he eyed me I believe that he quite
approved my choice of a model.  Suddenly his arms shot out.  "Try to be
more, David.  Try to be what Rufus and I combined would have been.  Try
to work for something better than three meals a day.  Wake up, David,
before you fall asleep in a land where everybody dozes like the very
dogs."

To enforce his admonition his hands closed on my shoulders; he lifted
me from my chair and began to shake me.  Being so much in earnest he
was rather violent, so that James, now in the doorway, saw me wincing
and looking up with a grimace of fright and eyes of pleading.

"Steady there, man," he cried.  He thought that he was just in time to
rescue me from torture, and came forward with his whip raised.

"I beg your pardon," said the Professor, dropping me gently into my
chair.  "I didn't mean to hurt you, David.  Did I hurt you?"

"Not at all, sir," I answered, and feeling more at ease with James near
I made a dive for my coat and hat.

"Well," said James, glaring at my host.  "I advise you to keep your
hands off anyway, for if I catch you a-hurting of him again--"  There
was a terrible threat in the eyes and in the upraised butt of the whip,
but suddenly the manner changed, for James was looking at the bottle on
the table and it had a strangely quieting influence on his temper.  The
blaze died away from his eyes; his voice became soft to meekness; the
whip fell limply.  "I might think you'd done it a-purpose, Professor,
and you know I allus tries to be friendly."

"I hardly believe David will complain of my treatment," returned the
Professor.  "You see he came to us all wet and cold from a tumble into
the creek."

James turned to me with wide-opened eyes.  "And I suppose you met a
rattler," he cried.

"Oh, yes," I answered, as though this was but a petty incident of my
day.

"Well, you are a boy!"  From me his eyes moved to the bottle again, and
as he looked at it he began to tremble and his legs lost their strength
and he sank to a chair by the table.  "You'll be the death of me yet,
Davy.  Why, my nerves has all gone from just thinking of what might
have happened."

His hand was groping toward the bottle, and he gave the Professor a
glance that asked for his permission.

"Penelope," the Professor said quietly, "the gentleman would like a
glass of water."

Evidently the gentleman did not think that water would quiet his
nerves, for he did not hear the command and was contented with the
healing power nearer at hand.  He poured the tumbler almost full of the
fiery liquid and raised it to his lips.  He winked gravely at Mr.
Blight, threw back his head, and drained the glass without taking
breath.  The Professor failed to see the humor of the act, and, seizing
the bottle, drove the cork in hard, while the unabashed James beamed on
him, on Penelope, and on me.

"Thank you," he said, rising, and slowly drawing his sleeve across his
mouth; "I feel better--much better.  Another drop would set me up all
right, but, as you say--"  He looked hopefully from the bottle in the
Professor's hands to the Professor's face, but finding there no promise
of more of the sovereign remedy, he took my arm and led me to the door.
"Davy, you must thank Mr. Blight and the young lady."

"You'll come again, Davy," Penelope cried.

"And all by yourself, Davy," the Professor added.

To me this remark was of the kindest, but it irritated James.  He
picked up his whip and fumbled with it while he stared at our host, who
stood by the table, with one hand on the bottle and the other pointing
the way over the clearing.  "You're a good talker, Professor," James
drawled.  "You can argue down Stacy Shunk and make Mr. Pound tremble,
but when it comes to manners--the manners of a gentleman--I never see
such a lack of them."

With this parting shot he strode away so fast that I could hardly keep
pace with him.  At the edge of the woods, I looked back and saw the
father and child in the slanting doorway waving their hands to me.
From his window in the barn the white mule was watching with ears
pricked, and now he brayed a hostile note, as though he divined the
trouble which could come at the heels of a wandering boy.  I waved my
hat and plunged into the bush.

"Now, Davy, tell me how it all happened," said James, drawing himself
up very straight in the saddle as he started the horses toward home.

I began to tell him.  He broke into a song.  When I tried to make
myself heard, his voice swelled up louder.  Never before had James sung
as he was singing now, and I watched him first with wonder and then
with increasing terror.  As we dragged our way up the ridge, out of the
narrow gut, he droned his music in maudlin fashion in time to the slow
motion of the beasts.  When the valley stretched before us he fairly
thundered, striving to make himself heard across the broad land.  I
hoped that before we entered the village exhaustion would silence him,
but in answer to my appeals he raised his voice to a pitch and volume
that brought the people running out of their houses, and he seemed to
find great pleasure in the attention that he was attracting.  The high
throne from which I had looked down so proudly that morning as I rode
to my fishing became a pillory of shame.  I could not escape from it,
for the whip was swinging in time to the music, and the horses,
confused by the riot, were rearing and plunging.  I had to cling to the
harness with all my strength.  We halted at the store.  It was quite
unintentional and made the climax of a boisterous progress.  James,
lurching back in his saddle, would have fallen but for the support of
the rein.  The horses stopped suddenly.  He shot forward, clutching at
the air, and hurtled into the road.  From my height and from my shame,
I saw the whole world running to witness our plight--men, women, and
children, it seemed to me hundreds of them, who must have been lying in
wait for this very thing to happen.  Through them Mr. Pound forced his
way, waving back the press until he reached the side of the fallen man.

"James," he said, looking down and speaking not unkindly, "how often
have I warned you!"

The answer was a look of childish wonder.

"Come, come," said Mr. Pound, taking a limp, sprawling arm and lifting
the culprit to his feet.  "Tell me, who was the tempter who brought you
to this?"

James gazed stupidly at the minister.  Then a devil must have seized
him, for in his nature he was a gentle soul, as I knew, who had heard
him so often crooning over his horses or sitting on the barn-bridge of
an evening sorrowing for Annie Laurie and Nellie Grey, women whom he
had never seen.  Before all the town he raised his hand and brought it
crashing down on Mr. Pound's cloud-like hat.




CHAPTER III

My mother was a McLaurin of Tuckapo Valley.  In the mid-part of the
eighteenth century, when that valley was a wild forest, her
great-grandfather, Angus McLaurin, came out of the air, out of the
nothingness of a hiatus in our genealogy, and settled along the banks
of the Juniata.  His worldly goods were strapped on the back of a cow;
his sole companion was his wife; his sole defence his rifle.  To the
dusky citizens of the valley he seemed a harmless person, and they sold
him some thousands of acres for a few pounds of powder and beads.  They
must have smiled when he attacked the wilderness with an axe, as we
should smile at the old woman who tried to ladle up the sea.  With what
chagrin must they look down now from the Happy Hunting Ground to see
McLaurinville the busy metropolis of McLaurin township, and McLaurins
rich and poor, McLaurins in brick mansions and McLaurins in log cabins
where they once chased the deer and bear!  My mother was one of _the_
McLaurins, which is to say that she was born on the very spot where
Angus felled the first tree in Tuckapo.  These McLaurins were naturally
the proudest of all their wide-spread family, some of whom had gone
down to the poor-house, and some up and over the mountains to be lost
and snubbed among the great ones of other valleys.  There was a
tradition in our family, which grew stronger as the years covered the
roots of our family tree, that Angus was really _The_ McLaurin, chief
of the clan, and had fled over the sea to save his head after Prince
Charlie's futile struggle for a crown.  With my mother tradition had
become history.  She had one grudge against Walter Scott, whose novels,
with the Bible, made her sole reading, and this was that he never
mentioned "our chief," as she called him.  More than once I can
remember her looking up from the pages of "Redgauntlet," and declaring
that had the Prince been a more capable man we should be living in a
castle in Scotland.  From the incompetence of Prince Charlie, then, it
came that my mother entered life in a red brick house in McLaurinville
instead of in a highland keep, and as it is just six miles as the crow
flies over the ridges to Malcolmville in Windy Valley, she met my
father in the course of time, and in the course of time the two great
families were united in my small self.  The Malcolms were a great
family, too.  They were a proud people, though not in the same way as
my McLaurin kin.  They had no fine traditions based on the fragments of
a Scotchman's kilt.  Quite to the contrary, my father used to boast
that they had been just simple, God-fearing folk, Presbyterians in
every branch for generations, and sometimes he delighted in the idea
that he was a self-made man.  As he always chose a large company to
make this boast in, it was to my mother a constant source of
irritation, and she would contradict him with heat, and point out that
his father before him had farmed three hundred acres of land, while his
grandfather on his mother's side had been for fifty years the pastor of
the Happy Hollow church.

Knowing this little of our family history, it is possible to realize
the consternation which prevailed when in the middle of a formal
dinner-party, in the presence of Mr. Pound, Squire Crumple, and that
most critical of women, Miss Agnes Spinner, in the presence of these
and a half-dozen others of the most important persons in the
neighborhood, in the silence which followed the appearance of the first
asparagus of spring, I, a small boy, suddenly projected my head from
the shadow of the good minister and asked: "Mother, what is a bumptious
Malcolm?"

Mr. Pound lowered his fork, turned half around, and looked at me.  Miss
Agnes Spinner began to choke and had to cover her face with her napkin,
while Squire Crumple with great solicitude fell to patting her very
hard between the shoulders.  Mrs. Pound glanced at my father, and then
found a sudden interest in her coffee, pouring it from her cup into her
saucer, and from her saucer into her cup, so often that she seemed to
be reducing it to a freezing mixture.  Mrs. Crumple discovered
something awry with the lace of her gown, for she drew in her chin, and
one eye examined her vertical front while the other covertly circled
the table.  Old Mr. Smiley, never an adroit man in society, crossed his
knife and fork on his plate, lifted his napkin half across his face
like a curtain, and over the top of it stared at my mother as though he
were waiting with me to learn just what a bumptious Malcolm could be.

My father never lost his self-command.  He seemed not to have heard me,
for he leaned over the table, and in a voice designed to smother any
further interruptions from my quarter, said: "Mrs. Malcolm, my dear,
Mr. Pound's coffee is all."  As a matter of fact Mr. Pound's coffee was
not "all."  My mother, never niggardly, had just filled it for the
third time to overflowing, and a full cup rose from a full saucer; but
she had an opportunity, while turning solicitously to her guest, to
give me a frown, which in private would have found fuller expression in
a slipper.  As Miss Spinner was still choking, my father proposed
dropping a brass door-key down her back as the most efficacious of
cures.  Had she consented to this heroic treatment I might have been
shunted into silence, but her prompt refusal to allow any one to do
anything for her left diplomacy at its wit's end.  In the portentous
silence which followed I was able to repeat my question with more
incisive force.

"Yes, but, mother, what is a bumptious Malcolm?"

"David," said my father sternly, "children should be seen and not
heard!"

"But, father," I exclaimed, being aroused by this injustice to defend
myself, "Professor Blight said that I must be one of those bumptious
Malcolms.  Those were his exact words--bumptious Malcolms."

As the horse saith among the trumpets, ha! ha! and smelleth the battle
afar off--the thunder of the captains and the shouting--so Mr. Pound
lifted his great mane at the mention of the Professor and swept the
table with eyes full of fire.

"Ha!  Judge Malcolm, what have I not told you of this man?  Don't you
recall that I warned you we should have to deal with him?  When I found
him making trouble in my flock, setting the sheep against the shepherd,
I told you the time would come when he would strive to set the son
against the father."

While I could not understand in what way I had turned against my
father, it was plain to me that the term which the Professor had
applied to my family was one of opprobrium.  It was clear, too, that it
had considerable explosive power, for after the first frightened hush
it stirred the whole company into a terrific outburst against my friend
of yesterday.  Even Miss Spinner stopped choking, and announced that
she "declared."  What she declared was not imparted, but as the general
trend of exclamation was against the Professor I knew that did she
continue her statement it must be aimed at him.

My father leaned back and grasped the knobs of his chair-arms.
"David," he said slowly, "when did Henderson Blight speak in terms so
disrespectful--no, that is not the word I want--in this sarcastic--that
is hardly correct--when did he speak thus of us?"

"Yesterday, sir," I answered, "when I was in his house getting warm.
But he didn't mean anything bad, father.  Why, he told me that you were
the celebrated Judge Malcolm."

I expected that such gentle flattery would propitiate my father.
Instead, his brows knitted, and he shot forward his head and asked:
"The what kind of a judge, David?"

Before I could reply Mr. Pound injected himself into the examination.

"Pardon me, Judge, but I should like to ask my young friend if
Henderson Blight smiled as he said it."

"No, sir," I answered promptly.  "He was just as solemn as you are now."

Miss Spinner fell to choking again.  My mother gave vent to a
long-drawn "Dav-id!" an exclamation which I had come to fear as much as
the Seven Seals, and her use of it now so unjustly made me feel as if
every man's hand were against me, for Mr. Pound was solemn, and in
using the best comparison at hand I meant no ill.

"Dav-id!" said my mother again, lifting an admonishing finger.

The good minister saw nothing offensive in my remark, but even repeated
it with a nod of understanding.  "As solemn as I am now.  Judge
Malcolm, your son has quite accurately described this man Blight's way
of speaking--of saying one thing when he means quite another.  I should
hardly dare repeat some of the terms which have come to my ears as
having been applied by him to me.  Just the other day, as we were
walking through town, I overheard him talking to Stacy Shunk, and he
referred to my wife as the lovely Mrs. Pound.  Now I have no objections
to persons speaking of my wife as lovely, but I want them to mean it
and not to infer quite the opposite."

It was Mrs. Pound's turn to "declare," but she was clearer in the
meaning than Miss Spinner.  She would have told us some of the things
Mr. Blight had said of Mr. Pound with a meaning quite as inverted.  My
mother, seeing the tempest rising, sought to still it by protesting
that she was sure that in this instance the Professor was quite sincere.

"I know he meant it," she said over and over again, until Mrs. Pound
was unable to make herself heard and retired to silence and coffee.

But Mr. Pound, a believer in truth at all hazards, would not admit that
the Professor did mean it.  "A person of such an insinuating character
is a danger to the community," he said.  "I have repeatedly warned the
judge against him, Mrs. Malcolm, and now my warning has come home.
Yesterday's deplorable incident has been forgotten by me; I have
blotted it from my memory because I realized that you were in spirit
struck down as I was, though not so publicly.  I have forgiven James.
Since he has come to me sober and penitent, and confessed where he got
the liquor, I have passed his part in the affair by with a kindly
warning.  But I cannot pass by the real culprit, the man who struck at
me through the weak James, and almost felled me before the town, the
man who furnished James with the sources of his intoxication.  His
punishment I leave to you."  Mr. Pound drove his fork into an asparagus
stalk to show that he had said all that could be said and all that he
would say.  That he had said enough to bring others to his way of
thinking was evident from the gravity with which my father shook his
head.

"David, when I questioned you as to yesterday's unfortunate occurrence
you confessed that this man Blight gave James the liquor."

"No, sir," I returned quickly.  "I didn't say that."

"How was it, then?" my father asked.

I had pleaded with my mother to allow me to be one of this great
dinner-party, that I might partake, first-hand, of the good things
which I had seen preparing.  I was to enjoy the feast in a silence
proper to my years.  So I had promised.  And now one of those dangerous
questions which rise like a rocket from a boy's lips had transformed me
from a small guest whose part was to sit silently in the shadow of the
mighty clergyman, and there only to even up the side of the table, into
a person of unpleasant importance.  Had my father rapped for order,
risen, and announced that we had the good fortune to have with us
Master David Malcolm, who would tell us where James found the source of
his intoxication, he could not have made me more dreadfully
conspicuous.  I wanted to run, but, if nothing else, my father's eyes
would have held me.  I wanted, above all, to keep silent because I
loved James, who from the day when I had first toddled out of the house
into the broad world of hay and wheat fields had been almost my sole
playfellow.  As yet I did not know what a bumptious Malcolm was; I did
not understand the man who always said what he did not mean; I
remembered him only as the kindly host who had found me dripping and
cold and had made me gloriously warm.  And more than that, I remembered
the little girl who had dragged me from the creek.  Something in the
gaunt man who lived among the clouds, something in the ragged creature
who lifted a smiling face and ribboned head above the weeds of that
lonely clearing, had touched me strangely.  It seemed that I must be
their only friend, and for them I would tell the truth.  I should have
told the truth but for Mr. Pound.

"I said, sir," I answered my father, "that James just took the bottle
and----"

"The bottle was Blight's, was it not?" broke in Mr. Pound.

"Yes, sir," I said.

It had dawned on me the afternoon before, as James and I rode home,
just what was the medicine I had taken.  It was hard for me to believe
that the vilely tasting stuff was whiskey, which I had heard men drank
for pleasure, but when all doubt was removed by the exclamations of the
crowd who hovered about the prostrate man I was overwhelmed by a sense
of my own sin.  Yet I had feared to confess to my mother the dose which
I had taken.  It would only make her unhappy, I had told myself, and I
had tried to still my turbulent conscience with the plea that my
silence was saving others.  Now simple justice demanded that I tell
everything, even to the admission of my own fault.

"Father," I cried, "the Professor didn't want James----"

"It is high time the community were rid of this man," Mr. Pound
interrupted.

"David!" said my father, and I shrank into the minister's shadow.

"And it seems to me, Squire Crumple," Mr. Pound went on, "it is clearly
your duty as a justice of the peace to act."

"Act how?" cried the astonished squire.

"Have him arrested!" replied Mr. Pound, making the dishes rattle under
the impact of his fist on the table.

At this suggestion every one forgot the dinner and sat up very
straight, staring in amazement at the bold propounder of it.

"Arrest him," exclaimed the squire, "and for what?"

"For anything that will rid the community of him," snapped Mr. Pound.
"Do you not agree with me, Judge?"

The Judge quite agreed with Mr. Pound.  He admitted that until the
unfortunate occurrence of yesterday he had opposed any proceedings
which were not altogether regular in law.  "And yet," he said gravely,
"it is incumbent on us to rid the community of him.  We all know that
from the porch of Snyder's store he has been preaching doctrines that
are not only revolutionary but, if the ladies will pardon me, I will
call damnable.  What good is it for us to have Mr. Pound in the pulpit
for one day of the week, and this glib-tongued man contradicting him
for seven.  Yet no statute forbids him to do this.  What can you
suggest, Mr. Pound?"

Mr. Pound sought an inspiration in the ceiling.  "The man has no
visible means of support," he said after a moment.  "His child is badly
clothed, and, I presume, badly fed.  Right there is an indictment.
Vagrancy."

This bold suggestion was greeted with general approval save by the
squire, who protested that a man could not be called a vagrant who had
paid seventy dollars in cash for his clearing and was never known to
beg or steal.

"But I tell you he is a moral vagrant," argued Mr. Pound, "and I will
make such a charge against him.  It will be your duty then, Squire
Crumple, to offer him his choice between six weeks in jail and leaving
the valley and taking his bottle with him."

Still the squire was unconvinced, but he saw himself being overawed by
my father and the minister, and his efforts to combat them evolved
futile excuses.

"Who will arrest him?" he pleaded.

"Haven't we a constable?" retorted my father.  "What did we elect Byron
Lukens for?"

"Precisely!" cried Mr. Pound.

"The one arrest he has made was a source of endless trouble," returned
Squire Crumple.  "He had to lock the prisoner overnight in his best
room, and his wife has since said distinctly and repeatedly that----"

"You can avoid trouble with Mrs. Lukens by arresting him in the
morning," said Mr. Pound.

"And the chances are he will leave the valley rather than go to jail,"
my father added.

"But suppose he is cantankerous and chooses jail, what will we do with
the girl?" argued the reluctant magistrate.

"The girl?"  Mr. Pound waved his great hands about the table.  "Surely
we can find her a better home and better parents than she has now.
Surely there are among us good women who will esteem it a privilege to
care for an orphaned child."

My mother said "surely," too, and so did all the other good women at
the board.  Even Miss Spinner, while not prepared to receive the child
into her home, was ready to teach her "as she should be taught."

"And she should be taught," my mother broke in.  "Her father has been
the stumbling-block.  I heard him say myself to a committee of our
Ladies' Aid that he would gladly place her in Miss Spinner's
Sunday-school class if Miss Spinner could convince him that she had any
knowledge worth imparting.  I never liked to tell you that before, Miss
Spinner; I feared it might hurt your feelings."

Miss Spinner's feelings were decidedly hurt, and she began to vie with
Mr. Pound in urging that the valley be rid of the obnoxious Professor.
So drastic were the measures which she called for, and so vigorous her
demands on the gentle squire, that he retreated on Mr. Pound for aid,
advocating all that the minister had proposed as the most humanitarian
method of dealing with the case.

"A warrant will issue to-night, but to avoid trouble with the
constable's wife I shall order it served in the morning," he said at
last as he stood by his chair, folding his napkin.  Thus he eased his
conscience by making the warrant responsible for its own existence, and
his words struck deeper into my heart for their impressive legal form.

A warrant will issue!  As I slipped out by the kitchen this rang in my
ears with the insistence of a refrain.  Because I had disobeyed, left
my post of safety, and plunged into the woods in pursuit of a few small
trout, a warrant would issue, a ghoulish offspring of my reckless
spirit, seize the gentle Professor in its claws and drag him to
ignominy.  A warrant would issue!  And the blue ribbon would no longer
bob majestically in Penelope's hair, but would droop with her father's
shame.  The picture of them standing in the cabin door, waving their
farewell and calling to me to come again, was very clear in my mind,
and made sharper the sense of the trouble which I had brought to them.
Three times I ran around the house wildly, as though I would blur the
picture by merely travelling in a circle; but instead it grew clearer,
and the Professor seemed to regard me with eyes more kindly and
Penelope to call to me in a more friendly voice.  So became clearer my
obligation to help them, and intent on making my plea I burst into the
parlor.  The scene there chilled my ardor.  In the dim evening light,
like sombre ghosts, the company sat in a wide circle about the borders
of the room, erect and uncomfortable as one must sit on slippery
horse-hair, listening to Miss Spinner at the piano droning through the
first bars of "Sweet Violets."

"Ssh!" exclaimed my father, and even the gloom could not hide his frown.

"But, father, the Professor didn't----"

My mother tiptoed across the room and gently pushed me out of the door.
"David, go to bed!" she commanded.

To bed I went, but not to sleep.  Did I close my eyes I saw the
Professor in the clutches of Byron Lukens being dragged along the
village street amid the jeers of the people.  Swallows fluttered in the
chimney, and I heard there the echoes of the struggle when the
constable laid his hand on the shoulders of my friend.  The wind moaned
in the trees, and I fancied Penelope now upbraiding me for the trouble
I had brought upon them, now pleading with me to send her father home
to her.  A faint crowing sounded from the orchard, hailing the shadow
of the morning, the gray ghost rising from the dark ridges.  I slipped
from my bed to the window, and watched the valley as it shook itself
from sleep.  How slowly came that day!  The birds stirred in their
nests, but, like me, they dared not venture forth into a world so
filled with uncanny shadows.  Yet the day did come.  Over by the dark,
towering wall that hemmed in the valley the gray turned to pink, and I
could see the trees on the ridge-top like a fringe against the
brightening sky.  Louder sounded the crowing in the orchard, and to me
it brought a warning that I must hurry.  I looked to the northward, and
saw only the mists covering the land, and in my fancy beyond them the
mountains where bear and wildcat lurked.  There the Professor and
Penelope lay unconscious that even now the terrible warrant might be
issuing and at any moment would fall upon them.  There was only one
thing for me to do, and though when I had closed the house door softly
behind me and turned my back to the reddening east the mists were
tenfold more mysterious and the mountains tenfold more forbidding, I
ran straight down the road into the gloom, as though the warrant were
racing with me.




CHAPTER IV

When with a last desperate spurt I ran into the clearing, I saw the
Professor sitting in the cabin door, smoking his pipe and basking in
the sunshine as though life held no trouble for him.  I believed that I
was in time to warn him of the threatening danger, that I had outsped
the warrant, that I had outrun the redoubtable Lukens, and in the
luxury of that thought my overtaxed strength ebbed away and I sank down
on a stump, hot and panting.  I had run a hard race for so small a boy.
At times it seemed as though the mountains drew back from me, that
every one of the five miles had stretched to ten, but I kept bravely
on, going at top speed over the level places, dragging wearily up the
steep hills, cutting through fields and woods where I could save
distance, following every brief rest with a spasmodic burst of energy,
and now I had come to the last stretch, the ragged patch of weeds,
exhausted.  I tried to call my friend, but my throat was parched and I
could not raise my voice above a whisper, and as my head barely lifted
over the wild growth of his farm, he smoked on, unconscious of my
presence.  Something in a distant tree-top engaged his attention,
something vastly interesting, it seemed to me, for he never turned my
way to see my waving hand.  So I struggled to my feet and staggered on.
At last he heard me, sprang up, and came striding over the clearing.
Then my tired legs crumpled up; I sat down suddenly and, supported by
my sprawling hands, waited for him.

"Davy--Davy Malcolm," he cried, "who has been chasing you now?"

"A warrant!" I gasped.  "Mr. Lukens, he is coming with a warrant to
arrest you!"

The tall form bent over me and I was raised to my feet.  Supporting me
in his strong grasp, he held me off from him, and for a moment regarded
me with grave eyes.

"And you've come to warn me, eh, Davy?" he said.

"Yes, sir," I answered.  "Mr. Pound he thinks you are a dangerous man.
Mr. Pound he wants to get you out of the valley.  Mr. Pound he----"

The Professor seemed to have little fear of Mr. Pound and as little
interest in him.  "Never mind the learned Doctor Pound," he exclaimed,
and his mouth twitched in a smile inspired by the mere thought of the
minister.  "The point is, Davy, that you left home before daylight to
tell me, and you must have run nearly all the way--eh, boy?"

"I had to," I panted.  "You see, Mr. Lukens he was to come here early
for you, and I thought if I was in time you might run away."

To run away seemed to me the only thing for the Professor to do, and I
expected that at the mere mention of the terrible Lukens he would
scurry to the mountain-top as fast as his legs would carry him.  Yet he
held the constable in as little terror as he did Mr. Pound, for instead
of fleeing he drew me to him, and held me in an embrace so tight as to
make me struggle for breath and freedom.

"Davy, Davy!" he cried; "you understand me, boy.  You are a friend, a
real friend--my only friend."

Again and again he said it--that I was his only friend--and not until I
cried out that I had had no breakfast and would he please not squeeze
me so tight did he release me, and then it was to keep fast hold on my
arm and lead me to the house.  Penelope had heard us and met us
half-way, running, halting suddenly before us, and staring wide-eyed at
the bedraggled boy who lurched along at her father's side.

"Davy," she cried, "have you come fishin' again?"

My answer was to hold out my hand to her, and together we three went
into the house.  There, with my breath regained, and my parched throat
relieved, and my tired legs dangling from the most luxurious of
rocking-chairs, my spirits rose with my returning strength.  It nettled
me to see the Professor giving so little heed to my warning.  I had
performed what was for me a herculean task, and yet the precious
moments which I had fought so hard to gain for him were being frittered
away in preparations for a breakfast for me.  He was evidently grateful
for what I had done, but he was getting no good from it.  Had I run all
those miles to tell him that the bogie man was coming he could not have
moved about his cooking with less concern.  For a time I watched him
with growing indignation, yet I hesitated to mention the purpose of my
errand before Penelope, who had fixed herself before my chair and, with
her hands clasped behind her back and her head lifted high, was gazing
at me in admiring silence.  My uneasiness increased as the minutes flew
by, and when the first sharp demands of appetite had been satisfied I
looked at the Professor, now seated at the other side of the table, and
nodded my head toward his daughter, and winked with a sageness beyond
my years.

"Mr. Blight, hadn't you otter be going?" I asked.

The Professor, in answer, laughed outright.  He clasped his hands to
his sides and rocked on two legs of his chair in exuberance.
"Davy--Davy, you'll be the death of me yet!"

To me this seemed a very hard thing to say, as I had no wish to be the
death of the Professor; but, quite to the contrary, had made a great
effort and had risked much trouble at home in my desire to help him.
Now I was beginning to think that I had done as well to drop a
post-card in the mail to warn him of his danger.  The disappointment
brought tears to my eyes.  He saw them.  His face turned very gentle
and he leaned across the table toward me.

"Davy, I can't thank you enough for what you have done.  But don't
worry about me--I'm not afraid of Byron Lukens."

At the name of the constable Penelope broke into laughter, and placed a
hand on my arm to draw my eyes to her.  "Mr. Lukens was here this
morning, Davy, just before you came.  And, oh, you should have seen
father knock him down!"

My fork and knife clattered to the plate as I turned to the girl, and
she saw doubt and wonder in my eyes.

"He did!" she cried.  "And oh, Davy, you'd have died laughing if you
had seen Mr. Lukens tumble over the wood-pile and hit his head against
the rain-barrel."

I stared at the Professor.  I had liked him for his kindness to me and
had pitied him for his misfortune.  Now I was filled with admiration
for the physical prowess of this man who could whip the intrepid
constable, for in Malcolmville there was no one whom I held in so much
awe as Byron Lukens.  He was mighty in bulk; his voice was proportioned
to his size; his words fitted his voice.  Often I had sat on the
store-porch and listened to his stories of his feats, and I believed
that to cross him in any way must be the height of daring.  The tale of
the men whom he had whipped in the past and promised to whip in the
future if they raised a finger against him would almost have made a
census of the valley.  That this frail man should have resisted him,
that those thin hands should have been raised against him, that the
intellectual Professor should have knocked down the Hercules of our
village, was beyond my comprehension.  So my friend across the table
saw amazement welling up from my open mouth and eyes.

He shrugged his shoulders.  "There was nothing else to do, Davy.  He
beat you here after all.  Probably you missed him in your short cuts
over the fields.  Why, it was hardly light when I heard him pounding at
the door.  He said he had come to arrest me."  Rising and drawing
himself to his full height, the Professor began to tell me of the early
morning conflict, forgetting, in his indignation, how small were his
two auditors, and throwing out his voice as though to reach a
multitude.  "He had come to arrest me--me; said that I was a vagrant;
spoke to me as you wouldn't speak to a dog, and told me to come
along--to come along with him, a hulking, boastful brute.  Why, it was
all I could do to keep my temper, Davy.  I answered him as politely as
I could, said that I had done no wrong, and certainly would not allow
myself to be arrested.  And then----"

"Then father knocked him down," cried Penelope, clapping her hands.
"Oh, Davy, you'd otter seen it."

"Should have, Penelope, should have seen," said the Professor
reprovingly, and having done his duty as a father and a man of
education he drove his fist into the air to show with what quickness
and force he could use it.  "Yes, that's the way I did it, David.  He
applied an oath to me and laid a hand on my shoulder.  What else could
I do?  I appeal to you--what else could I do but knock him down?"

"And didn't he whip you for it, sir?" I cried, still doubting that the
giant could have fallen beneath such a blow.

"Whip me?" The Professor laughed.  "Do you think that great bully could
whip me?  Why, David, you quite hurt my feelings.  By the time he had
gone over the wood-pile into the rain-barrel there wasn't any fight
left in him.  He didn't even speak till he was safe across the
clearing.  Then you should have seen him.  He has gone down to the
village to get help; he is going to teach me what it means to assault
an officer of the law; he is going to send me to jail for life."  The
Professor glared out of the open doorway as fiercely as though the
constable were standing there and he defying him.  Then suddenly he
leaned over the table to me, and fixing his eyes on mine asked in a
hoarse voice: "David, did you ever hear of such injustice?"

"No, sir," I answered.  "But Mr. Pound said----"

At the mention of Mr. Pound the Professor sat down and the table reeled
under his fist.  "Pound--he is at the bottom of it all.  He has said
that I am a good-for-nothing loafer and the county should be rid of me.
Maybe he is right.  But he won't have his way.  I have done nothing and
I will not go--do you hear that, Davy, I will not go.  Now tell me what
Mr. Pound said."

In a faltering voice I began my story with that fateful home ride with
James.  As I went on I lost my diffidence in my interest in the tale,
and spoke rapidly till the need of breath slowed me down.  There were
retrogressions to speak of things which I had forgotten, and many
corrections where I had slightly misquoted Miss Spinner, Mr. Smiley, or
some other equally unimportant person.  I told the story as a small boy
recites to his elders the details of some book which he has read; so
the Professor had to check me frequently with admonitions not to mind
what Mrs. Crumple said about my mother's ice-cream and such matters,
but to tell him exactly what my father said of him.  Still I persisted
in my own way, bound that whatever I did should be done thoroughly,
even though he might hold in contempt my effort to be of service to
him.  When at last there was not a word left untold, he leaned back in
his chair and gazed at me with a look of utter helplessness.

"Well, what am I to do now?" he cried.  His head shot toward me and his
hands were held out in appeal.  "Davy, can't you suggest something?"

In my pride at being asked for advice by one so old, I sat up very
straight as I had seen my father do and allowed a proper interval of
silence before I spoke.

"Yes," I replied slowly.  "If you were me I'd run away before Mr.
Lukens got back."

This excellent suggestion was met by a frown so fierce that I pushed
back from the table in alarm.

"Run away?" he exclaimed.  "Why, that's just what they want me to do.
What have I done that I should run away?  And if I did, what would
become of Penelope?"

He drew his little daughter close to his side, while he looked out of
the door into the patch of blue sky, seeking there some inspiration.
His lips moved, and I knew that he was asking again and again of that
little patch of sky what he should do.  Then suddenly he rose, as
though the answer had been given, for he clapped on his hat, stood
erect with shoulders squared and hands clasped behind him, facing the
open door with the demeanor of a man whose mind was made up, who was
ready to meet the world and defy it.  This, to me, was the hero who had
knocked down the constable, and I imagined him confronting a dozen like
Byron Lukens and piling them one on top of the other, for surely things
had come to pass that the man would have to hold the clearing against
an army.  But as suddenly the shoulders drooped, the back bowed, the
head sank, and he turned to me.

"Davy, Davy, what shall I do?" he asked in a hoarse whisper.

As I was silent, he addressed the same appeal to Penelope, and she, in
answer, ran to the door and pointed across the clearing.

"Look, father," she shouted; "he has come back."

Byron Lukens had indeed returned and with a heavy reinforcement.  Five
men climbed out of the wagon which had appeared from the road, and now
they began a careful reconnoissance of the house.  As they stood on the
edge of the woods looking toward us I marked each one of them, and the
problem uppermost in my mind concerned what I should do myself, for I
was fairly cornered.  I could not run away, for they were watching
every exit from the cabin, and there was not one of them who would not
recognize me did I flee over the open.  The presence of James alone
meant my undoing, and there he was, standing by the constable, eying
the place with a lowering glare which threatened a storm, for here he
had fallen and here he would redeem himself by some act of exceptional
daring.  Caught in this net, I hid behind the door-post and peered
around it through a protecting shield made by the Professor's
coat-tails.  In the silence I could hear my heart beat.

There was one thing for the Professor to do now, and he did that well.
He gathered his scattered senses and stood quietly in the doorway,
smoking, leaving to the invaders the burden of action.  Their
indecision gave him strength.

"The idea of my giving in to a crew like that," he said to me in a
steady voice.  "It's a pity Mr. Pound didn't come, and your father too,
David, that they might see how little I cared for their warrants."
Then, to show how undisturbed he was by their presence, he called to
them pleasantly: "Good morning, gentlemen."

This mild greeting gave courage to our foes and Stacy Shunk advanced.
His coming was a sign that reason was to be used before force, and with
his first step he began to gesticulate and to protest his friendly
purpose.  But he could not argue with any acumen while his bare feet
were traversing a carpet of briers, and a silence followed, broken by
exclamations as he came on slowly but resolutely as though he walked on
eggs.  Half-way over the clearing he stopped with a cry of pain, and
the herald's mission was forgotten in the search for a thorn.  The
picture of Stacy Shunk balancing on one foot while he nursed the other
in his hands made the Professor laugh hilariously and he called to him
to hurry.

But Stacy would come no farther.  He planted himself firmly on his
bleeding feet; his great black hat-brim hid his face, but the voice
which came from under it was soft, and he held out his hands as though
he offered his dear friend the protection of his arms.

"You know what these other fellows want, Professor, and you know I'd
only come along to help you.  The whole thing was only a joke first
off, but you've gone and assaulted the constable, and there'll be
trouble if you don't settle it and be reasonable.  Now, my advice
is----"

"Thank you for your advice, Stacy Shunk," exclaimed the Professor.
"But you know as well as I do that I have done nothing that I can be
arrested for."

"Of course I do," returned the herald.  "But you hadn't otter upset the
preacher so.  You'd otter believe what he says, and when he preaches
about Noah and the like you hadn't otter produce figures in public to
show that Noah and his boys couldn't have matched up all the animals
and insects in the time they was allowed, let alone stabling 'em in a
building three hundred cupids long and thirty cupids wide and three
stories high.  Now I allus held----"

"I don't care what you held," said the Professor sharply.  "You can't
get me into an argument now.  I suppose it was unwise of me to try to
make you people think, but you can't arrest a man for simply being
unpopular.  This is my home, and no law of your twopenny village can
make me leave it."

"I'm not going to argue about Noah," protested Stacy Shunk.  "As your
friend, I'm trying----"

"As my friend, you had best go home and take your other friends with
you."  The Professor's voice was dry and crackling.

He reached behind the door and took up the long rifle which leaned
against the wall.  There was no threat in his action, for he held it
under his arm and looked off to the mountain-top as though he were
trying to make up his mind whether or not it was a good day for
hunting.  Stacy Shunk saw another purpose beneath this careless air,
and he abandoned argument.  Without heeding the briers, he fled to his
friends; he did not even stop there, but plunged into the bushes, and
above them I saw his head and hands moving together in an excited
colloquy.  The ludicrous figure which he cut in his retreat excited the
Professor to laughter, in which Penelope joined, clapping her hands
with mirth.  I, wiser than she as to the danger of firearms, and
trusting less to her father's mild intentions, broke into tearful
pleading.

"Please don't shoot, Professor," I whimpered, tugging at his coat-tails
to drag him back.  "They won't hurt you, I know they won't."

"Don't worry, Davy," the Professor said with a reassuring smile.  "They
wouldn't hurt any one, nor would I.  Didn't Shunk run at the mere sight
of a gun?  Why, if I pointed it at the rest of them they would fly like
birds."

It was not fair to judge the courage of the others by the cowardice of
Stacy Shunk.  The constable's boasts came out of the past to goad him
into action, and while Joe Holmes, the blacksmith, might have been very
weak in the knees, he was not ready to retreat so early in the action
when his helper, Thaddeus Miller, was watching him.  As for James,
despite the fall his moral qualities had taken in my estimation, I
believed him to be a man of unflinching bravery, and he it was that I
feared most when at last the advance began across the clearing, the
four moving abreast with military precision, while Stacy Shunk hurled
at them many admonitions to be cautious.  I knew that nothing would
stop James; that while his comrades might scatter like birds, he would
come on to a deadly hand-to-hand conflict, and I pictured the Professor
and him swallowing each other like the two snakes of tradition.  I
forgot my own safety, and threw both arms about one of the Professor's
legs and tried to pull him into the house.  Penelope, too, lost her
courage when she saw the numbers of the enemy and their bold advance,
and she clung, wailing, to her father's waist.  He shook us off, and
for the first time spoke to us sharply, and so sharply that the child
reached her hand to mine and together we slunk into a dark corner.

Of what followed we saw nothing.  We heard the voices, nearer and
nearer.  Then the men seemed to halt and to address the Professor in
tones of argument.  We are a peaceable folk in our valley and little
given to the use of firearms, and I suspect that the constable and his
aids really knew the Professor to be a peaceable man or they would not
have come thus far with such boldness.  To come farther they hesitated
until they had made it perfectly clear that they acted in his best
interests.  Even Byron Lukens was willing to let "bygones be bygones."

"I'm just doing of my duty, Mr. Blight," he said in a wheedling tone,
"and if you'll come along quiet-like I'll say nothing about it to the
squire."

"You can fix it all up with the squire," I heard Joe Holmes say.
"There's really nothing again you, only you must comply with the law."

Then James spoke--to my astonishment not in a bold demand that the
Professor surrender, but softly, asking him to be careful with the gun.

"Nobody has nothing again you, Professor," he said as gently as he
would have spoken to me, and hearing this I took heart, for with James
in such a temper there seemed no danger of a serious clash.

"No one has nothing against me," the Professor repeated in a tone of
irony.  "You only want to drag me through the village before the
squire.  Tell the squire to come here to me and explain."

There was a moment of silence.  It was so quiet outside that even the
birds seemed to be listening and watching; then came the swish of weeds
trampled under foot.

"Be off, the whole crew of you," cried the man in the doorway, and I
saw the butt of the gun rise to his shoulder.

I wanted to cry out, but my throat was parched with fright, and
Penelope was clinging to my neck in silent terror.

There was another moment of silence.  Then James began to laugh in that
vast ebullient way of his, and a bit of dry brush snapped sharply under
some foot.  The report of the rifle shook the cabin.  It must have
shaken the mountains too, it seemed to me, for the floor beneath me
rocked in time to the echoes of it rattling among the hills, and I
heard a wild scream, the cry of a man hurt to death, and the shrill
cries of startled birds fleeing to the hiding of the trees.  A puff of
wind swept a thin veil of smoke into the room, but for me the air was
filled with sickening fumes, and I sank to my knees and closed my eyes
as a child does at night to shut out the perils of the darkness.  I
felt Penelope's arms gripped tightly about my neck, her dead weight
dragging me down.  I heard the last echoes of the shot, faintly, down
the narrow valley, and outside the incoherent shouts of men.  Then
there was a silence, broken only by Penelope's sobs.  It seemed to me
long hours I was there on my knees before I dared to open my eyes and
bring myself into the world again.  And when I did it was to see the
room darkened and the Professor leaning against the closed door with
his hands wide-spread, as though with every muscle braced to hold it
against an onslaught.  Yet he trembled so that a child might have
brushed him aside.

There was no onslaught.  I waited the moment when the door would be
crashed in.  I heard the clock ticking monotonously on the cupboard and
the wood crackling in the stove.  The birds were singing again, and
outside in the clearing it was as peaceful as on that day when I first
came upon it, wet and shivering, to find joy in its cheerful sunniness.

I broke from Penelope's embrace and got to my feet.  The Professor,
hearing me, raised his head from the door and turned to me a face
chalky-white, whiter for the dishevelled hair that hung about it.

"Davy," he whispered, "look out of the window and tell me what you see."

I had no care for any trouble that might lie ahead for me.  I wanted to
be seen.  I wanted to be taken from this stifling cabin with its
deafening noises and sickening fumes and above all from this mad fellow
who looked as I had seen a rat look when cornered in a garner.  I ran
to the window and peered through the smutted panes, but there was no
one outside to see or to help me.  The clearing was as quiet as in the
earlier morning when I had looked over it at the Professor studying the
distant tree-top.

"What do you see, Davy?" he asked in a hoarse voice.

"Nothing," I answered.  "They've gone away."

"And isn't Lukens there--out there in the weeds?"

I rubbed the smutted glass and peered through it again into every
corner of the clearing.  "No," I said, "there's nothing there."

The Professor drew back from the door and stood before me brushing his
matted hair from his face.

"I didn't mean it, Davy," he said.  "It was all a mistake.  They were
going away and I was dropping the gun, and somehow I touched the
trigger and Lukens fell.  They've taken him home, but they'll come
back--a hundred of them this time.  Oh, Davy, Davy, help me!"

I knew that I could not help him.  My thought then was for myself, and
I did not answer, but measured the distance to the door and waited my
chance to dart to it and get away, for in him before me, driving his
long fingers through his hair and staring at me with frightened eyes, I
saw the man whom I had pictured in fear that first morning when I came
to the mountains.  This was the real Professor and I was caught.

"Oh, let me go!" I cried.

"Why, Davy!"  He gave a start of surprise.  The frightened look passed
and he reached out his hands to my shoulders.  I shrank back.  The
scream of Byron Lukens still rang in my ears, and to me there was
something very terrible in this man who had dared to kill, this man for
whom all the valley would soon be hunting, this man who even now might
be standing in the shadow of the gallows.  He saw the terror in my
face; to his eyes came that same look my dog would give me when I
struck him.

"Why, Davy," he said, holding out two trembling hands.  "Boy, I thought
you were my only friend."

This was the cry of a man worse hurt than Byron Lukens, and in a rush
of boyish pity for him I forgot my dread and running to him threw my
arms about him, hugged him as I should have hugged my dog in a mute
appeal for pardon.  So we three stood there in silence, the Professor,
Penelope, and I, with arms intertwined and our heads close together.
Then after a moment he raised himself and shook us off gently.

"I've been a fool, Davy," he said, speaking quietly.  "I've been an
idle, worthless fool and now I must pay for it.  Soon they'll be coming
for me and I must run.  But I'll come back; I'll make it all up--some
day Penelope will be proud of me.  Until then, Davy, my friend, you'll
take care of Penelope, won't you--till I come back?"

Hearing this, Penelope dragged his face down to hers imploring him to
take her with him.  He kissed her.  Then he lifted her high in his arms
as though in play and held her off that she might see how gayly he was
smiling and take heart from it.

"I don't know where I am going, child," he said, "but I am coming back
for you very soon, and you will see what a man your father really is.
I haven't been fair to you, Penelope--but wait--wait till I come back.
And Davy will take care of you--won't you, Davy?"

"Yes, sir," I said boldly.

What else could a boy have said in such a case, when every passing
moment meant danger to his friend?  I had no thought of the full
meaning of my promise, for I did not look beyond that day, and that day
my goal was home.  Home there was safety for me and for Penelope as
well.  Home all perplexing problems solved themselves.  Home was a
place of great peace, and my father and mother benign genii who lived
only to make others happy.  It was easy to lead Penelope home, and I
was sure that if I told my father and mother of my promise to take care
of her, they would make the way easy for me.  So when the Professor had
kissed the child and lowered her to the floor, I put out my hand and
took hers in a self-reliant grasp.

The Professor picked up the fallen rifle and put it away in its corner;
he pushed the kettle to the back of the stove; he seemed to be tidying
up the house.  He blew the dust from his hat and crushed it down on his
head.  Then standing in the open doorway, he surveyed the room
critically as if to make sure that all was in order before he strolled
down to the village.

"Good-by, Penelope," he said in a quiet voice.  "Stay with Davy till I
come back--I'll come back soon."

For a moment Penelope believed him.  "Good-by, father," she called as
he turned and walked away.

He had passed the door.  Hearing her voice, he gave a start, then broke
into a run.  He ran as never I had seen a man run.  He was not alone a
man in flight.  Every limb was filled with fear and moving for its
life.  Even his hat and coat were sensate things, struggling madly to
get away to a safe refuge.  Seeing him flying thus across the clearing
toward the mountains, Penelope broke from me with a cry, but I caught
her and held her in my arms.  She called to him wildly, yet he did not
turn, and in a moment had plunged into the bush.

Long after he had gone we two stood in the cabin door searching the
silent wall of green for some sign of him.  None was given.  The shadow
of the ridge crept away as the sun climbed higher and the clearing was
bathed in its brightness.  A crow called pleasantly from a tall pine.
The birds, back from their hiding, sang as though on such a day there
could be no trouble.

I felt the blue ribbon brush my cheek, and two small bare arms about my
neck.

I turned to Penelope and said: "Don't cry, little 'un.  I'll take care
of you."




CHAPTER V

To Nathan, the white mule, I owed it that I was able to take good care
of Penelope Blight in the first hours of my guardianship.  But for him
I should have brought her face to face with the mob that rode out of
Malcolmville to storm the clearing.  I knew but one road home from the
gut, and that was the way James had brought me fishing.  Had we
followed it, we should have hardly crossed the ridge before we met the
van of an ill-organized but determined army, and then to her grief
terror must have been added by the wagons filled with men armed as
though they were going into battle.  The obstinate temperament of the
mule served us a good turn.  When Penelope and I led him from the barn
and climbed to his back, he must have supposed that we were going to
the store and should leave him tied for hours in the hot sun, switching
flies, while we sat comfortably in the shade of the porch discussing
the universe's affairs.  Believing this, he protested, stopping in the
middle of the clearing to enjoy a few tidbits of sprouting corn.
Discovering that the small boy on his back lacked his master's strength
and courage, he decided to go on, but as he chose.  He chose first a
trot.  To Penelope and me it seemed a mad gallop, and I clung
desperately to his scanty mane while she clutched my waist and pleaded
with me to halt him and let her down.  In this eternity of
suffering--ten minutes really--her greater grief was forgotten, and she
was spared the pang of a last look at her deserted home, for when
Nathan decided to walk she turned her head to see only a long archway
of trees ending in a green wall.

"Davy," she cried, "please let me get off!"

Now I wanted to get off myself, but I suspected her desire to run back
to the clearing, and my over-powering thought was to carry her away
from that forbidding place.  I had promised the Professor to take care
of the girl, and responsibility had added years to my age and inches to
my stature.  I was no longer a shivering, frightened boy clinging to
her hand, and, though I was not the master of the mule, while we stayed
on his back I was Penelope's master, and that was what I had determined
to be.

"Don't be afraid, little 'un," I returned boldly, when I had recovered
my breath and balance.  "I can handle him all right."

To make good my boast, I even dared to kick Nathan, fearing lest a
pause in our journey might allow her to slip from his back.

"I want to find father--to go with him," she pleaded.  It was the
hundredth time she had told me that.

"He said you were to come with me, Penelope," I argued.  "And he told
me particular that he wouldn't be home till a week from Monday."

This last was a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the
circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father
had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with
like imaginings if only I could keep her with me.  She did not, and her
cheerier tone quieted my conscience.

"Is he?" she cried.  "Do you really think he will come home, Davy?"

"Didn't he tell me so?" I returned haughtily.  "And besides, what would
he stay away any longer for?"

Still Penelope was inclined to doubt.  She knew that the morning's
strange events had brought her father into great trouble, and she could
not believe that a vain search for him would satisfy his enemies.  Two
weeks, she thought, would suffice to wear them out, but two weeks in
her small mind was an eternity when it was to be faced without him.

"Oh, Davy, I wish he hadn't done it," she cried.  "If he hadn't shot
Mr. Lukens, then he wouldn't have to run away, would he?"

"That was just a mistake," I replied, as though shooting constables
were quite a favorite sport where I lived.  "He told me particular he
didn't mean it, but having done it, and they not understanding that he
didn't mean it, he kind of had to get out till things blowed over."

"Didn't he do wrong to shoot Mr. Lukens?"

"Wrong?"  My tone expressed the greatest astonishment at such an idea.
"Why, Penelope, if I was him I'd have done exactly the same
thing--exactly."

My approval of her father's act was a great consolation to her.  The
pressure of her encircling arms made me gasp, and there was a note of
gratitude in her voice.  "Oh, Davy, I know you would; you are so brave."

"And I'll take care of you, Penelope," I said, quite as though I
seconded her approval of my courage and had forgotten that there were
such things as rattlesnakes.  "As long as you are with me you needn't
be afraid of anything."

Nathan's pace was quieter and steadier, and being secure on his back I
felt capable of any heroism.  We had passed the worst part of the road.
It was broader, the trees parted overhead, letting in the sunshine, and
danger never seems so near when one moves in the bright day; so my
heart grew lighter, and, had I known the words of any rollicking song,
I should have sung, like James, but lacking these I had recourse to
whistling.  Nerves which had been set on edge by the rifle's report,
the fumes of smoke, the cries of pain and fright, were quieted first by
long-drawn, melancholy notes, and then I swung into a bold trilling,
more suited to my adventurous spirit, throwing back my head, extending
my lips heavenward, addressing my melody to the sky.  Pausing,
exhausted, I expected to hear from behind me some expression of
astonishment and pleasure at my birdlike song.  Instead there was only
a muffled sobbing.

"Little 'un," I said in a chiding voice, "you hadn't otter cry when I'm
taking care of you.  There's nothing to be afraid of.  Why, we're going
home."

Oh, wise Nathan!  Then I thought him obstinate and contradictory.
Halting, he planted his feet as though no power on earth could move
him, and shot forward his long ears.  Then it seemed to me that he was
trying to show how futile my boast, and in my anger I dared to kick
him.  A fly would have moved him as well.  His long ears trembled as he
watched the road rising to cross the ridge, and he seemed to see over
the crest and to hear noises too distant and indistinct for me.  Then I
thought him obstinate; now I suspect that while the Professor had given
Penelope to my care, he must have ordered Nathan to watch over us both.
The mule looked right through that hill.  He saw the threatening army
charging the other slope.  He turned.  The bushes opened, and we
plunged into a narrow path which skirted the base of the ridge.  In
vain I tried to pull him back.  In vain Penelope addressed to him her
appeals.  He was fixed in his purpose neither to hear nor to obey, and
struck into a steady canter.  I clung to his mane; Penelope, to me.
The earth swung around us.  Solid became fluid.  The path moved up and
down, and flowed beneath us like running water.  Great trees broke from
their roots and ran at us, and when Nathan dodged them, they swung down
their branches to blind us with their leaves, and sometimes almost to
lift us in the air like Absalom.  The memory of Absalom was very clear
in my mind, for just a week before I had seen his picture in our
Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing
trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a
limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down.  There was
something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson.
Here was another warning neglected.  With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk,
Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess.  She had taught me that boys
who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed
her.  She had demonstrated beyond all doubt that boys who defied their
parents and ran away from home must come to a dreadful end in the
entangling limbs of trees.  With Absalom's example before me I had run
away from home, and here I was being carried through the forest on a
mad steed, and here were the trees running at me from every side,
reaching out their forked limbs to seize my hair.  Penelope was
forgotten.  More than once I tried to avert my impending fate by
letting go of Nathan's mane and taking my chances with his heels and
the stony path, but as I was about to close my eyes and let myself go
he rose in the air, and the distance between me and the earth seemed so
stupendous as to become the greater peril.  Had the mule kept on his
wild career I might at last have gathered courage for the fall, but the
path came to an end, our pace slackened, the trees took root again; I
was conscious of Penelope's encircling arms, and raising my head saw
that we were in a broad road, and, better still, we were climbing the
hill; each step was carrying us nearer the clearest and bluest of skies
that always held over my home; I knew that from that line where ridge
and sky met, I should look down and see home itself.

We reached the top of the ridge, and the valley lay beneath us.  It was
young and cheerful in its fresh green, with here a brown checkering of
fallow, and there a white barn glistening in the sun, and orchards in
the full glory of their blossom.  Below us a stone mill grumbled over
its unending task, and from the meadows came the blithe call of the
killdee.  It was all home to me from the fringing pines on the
ridge-top, across the land to the mountains by the river, for on such a
threshold one casts off fear.  Danger might lurk about us in the
shadows of the woods, but never out there in the broad day under the
kindly eye of God.  Nathan might gallop through tangled brush, but here
even his mood changed and he walked sedately.  Even the strange road
was friendly to me, for it led into a friendly land.  It descended the
ridge, passed the mill, rose again over a hill; there at the crest I
lost it, but only for a moment while it crossed the hollow and came
into view on the easy slope beyond, going straight into the valley's
heart and beckoning me on.

"It's all right now, Penelope," I cried, and I pointed to the two
steeples of Malcolmville, and then led her eyes to the right to a long
stone house, almost hidden in a clump of giant oaks.  I could find it
by our barn, for our barn would dominate any land.  In the distance it
seemed a mighty marble pile, lifting its white walls into the blue, and
then ambitiously reaching higher with red-tipped cupolas.  The
Colosseum to-day is not half so large as our barn when placed in memory
beside it.  So there was pride in my voice as I spoke.

"Yon's our home, little 'un, and yon's our barn, and just the other
side is the meadow and the creek where I'll take you fishing."

The splendid promise of fishing had little effect on Penelope's
spirits.  Such a prospect as I offered, such a home, a Babylonian
palace beside the cabin in the clearing, with the added joys of the
meadow and the creek, should have compensated in part, at least, for
the temporary loss of her father, and I was much surprised that she
gave no sign of pleasure.  She made no answer even, and I had no
evidence of her nearness to me but the two brown hands clasped before
me and the brush of the ribbon against my neck.  So we rode on in
silence, save when I whistled, and I did not whistle very much, for my
thoughts were too busy with the morning's adventure and forecasting the
days to come.  My mind was wonderfully clear about the future; the way
seemed very easy.  Thereafter I should listen to warnings.  I had
brought myself to unpleasant passes by a reckless disregard of
warnings, and now if Mr. Pound told me to beware, or Stacy Shunk to
look out, or Miss Spinner to remember Absalom, I should heed their
admonitions, yet those unpleasant passes became in retrospect
delightful adventures, and I congratulated myself that I was coming
through them with so much credit.  That I was conducting myself with
credit, I had no doubt.  My father could not have accepted the
Professor's charge more confidently than I, nor could he have used more
adroitness in persuading Penelope to leave the clearing.  So I was sure
of commendation when I brought her home.  Home was such a bountiful
place.  My mother had impressed that on me very often.  She had laid
emphasis on my obligation to share my riches with others--generally
when I had to carry heavy baskets down to the parsonage.  To-day I was
mindful of that injunction, and to take care of Penelope was a pleasant
task, since for the present it meant simply to share with her from an
inexhaustible store.  Considering the future, I wandered into hazy and
very muddled dreams.  Did the Professor never return, I was quite
willing to keep my promise and to care for his daughter always.  This
did not mean that I was contemplating matrimony at some remote time.
Matrimony, to my youthful observation, was a prosaic state.  It did not
seem to me that my father and mother led an interesting life.  If they
were happy in it, then it was in a very strange way, for they only knew
a dull routine of work and worry.  Sometimes they laughed, and when
they did it was hard to discover the sources of their mirth.  How my
father could find pleasure in Mr. Pound's sermons was a mystery, and
when my mother declared that the meeting of the Ladies' Aid had been
most enjoyable I was sure that she was pretending.  No; the future held
something better for me than such dull days.  Somehow, somewhere, when
I became a man I should live days like this day, I should live as now I
rode, with every sense keyed to the joy of living, and Penelope's arms
would encircle me and the blue ribbon would gently brush my neck.

These pleasant dreams were disturbed by realities.  I had come to one
of those dreadful moments when danger rises like an appalling cloud,
through which we can see no gleam of light beyond.  This cloud, "at
first no larger than a man's hand," arose from a fence in the person of
Piney Savercool.  I saw him with pleasure, for I knew that I was coming
to familiar roads, and then he was such a very small boy that I had not
that sense of humiliation which I must have felt had one of my own age
seen me riding with a girl.

"Morning, Piney," I said grandly.

For an answer Piney simply opened his mouth very wide, and his eyes
started from his head.

My effect upon him was very pleasing to me, and I ventured still more
grandly: "Pleasant day, Piney."

Then he found his voice, "Ma-ma--come quick!" he shrieked.  "Davy
Malcolm's runnin' away with a lady!"

This announcement brought Mrs. Savercool from the house, and in a few
bounds she was before us, checking our further advance with a
wide-spread apron.

"Dav-id Malcolm," she cried, "the idea of you lettin' such a little 'un
as her set on such a dangerous animal.  Stop!  Get down, I say, both on
you!"

I could not break through that apron, and my heart sank, for, instead
of riding grandly home and presenting Penelope to my parents with a
proper speech, we were threatened with an ignominious journey in the
Savercool buggy.  With Mrs. Savercool's charge that we were foolish
children, and that she could never forgive herself if she did not stop
our wild career at once, years dropped from my age and inches from my
stature, and I was at the point of obeying her meekly.  But Nathan took
offence at her tone.  He bolted.  Just what happened I could not see,
for I had to take myself to his mane again, and he held his terrific
pace until we reached the pike, and along the pike to the fork where
the road branched off to our farm.  When he paused here it was to
consider whether he would go on toward Malcolmville or into the quiet,
shaded lane.  He must have recalled the hitching-rail, the sun, and the
flies, and preferred to risk even a road that he did not know, for on
he went--quietly.

We crossed the little knoll and the house came into view.  The cry of
exultation which rose to my lips was checked when I saw, stretching
from the gate down the road, a long line of vehicles.  The first held
the hitching-post.  The others took to the fence--buggies, buckboards,
phaetons, single horses, and teams, an ominous picture.  Not since my
grandfather's funeral had I seen quite such a sight before our house,
and my heart sank.  Could death have come in my absence?  On second
thought I remembered how brief that absence had been, measured in
hours, and I sought another reason for the gathering.  I began at the
last vehicle and carried my eye along the line, to find that I knew
them all.  There was Doctor Pearl's buckboard, with his mustang eating
a fence post; Squire Crumple's gray mare in his narrow courting buggy;
old Mr. Smiley's ponderous black with his comfortable phaeton, speaking
the presence of Mr. Pound and Mrs. Pound, who used it as their own; the
Buckwalters' rockaway and the Rickabachs' spring-wagon.  Even Miss
Agnes Spinner's bicycle had a fence panel all to itself, as though it
were very skittish and likely to kick and set the whole road in
commotion.  To my own unimportant self I never attributed this assembly
of all the great folk of the valley.  There was some more potent
reason.  As I pondered, hunting for it, we came to the lane.  Until I
found that reason it seemed wise for me to turn there, and under the
cover of the orchard to reach the hiding of the barn, where I could
leave Penelope while I scouted and had a peep through the keyhole of
the back door.  But Nathan saved me from such an ignominious return.
He kept right on.  My efforts to stop him only made him trot, and in a
moment we were at the gate.  He seemed to like the house and the shade
of the oaks, for he halted, let himself down on three legs complacently
and began to switch at flies.  And I, with nothing left to do, was
measuring the distance to a safe landing when I heard a cry from the
door.

"Davy!  Davy!"  I saw my mother running down the path with her arms
outstretched, and after her came a great company.

"Davy--Davy, dear--we thought you had been drowned!" she cried.

Here, then, was the reason for this great gathering.  What a commotion
for so small a reason--as though a boy's chief end were to tumble into
the water, as though he never were to be trusted out of his mother's
sight?  I dropped the reins; my eyes and my mouth opened wide with
astonishment.

"Your father's dragging the mill-dam for you this very minute."  She
was at the gate.  "Where--where have you been?"

She did not let me answer.  She lifted her hands and caught me in her
embrace, and Penelope's arms were clutching me about the neck as she
was swung with me from Nathan's back.

My mother was crying, from gladness I took it, for there certainly was
joy in her eyes when she held me off and looked down at me.  Then came
astonishment, and she lowered her spectacles from the top of her head
to make sure that she saw aright.

"But who--who is this?" she said.

For answer I took Penelope's hand and faced the whole company; faced
Mr. Pound and the squire, old Mr. Smiley and Miss Spinner, Mrs. Pound,
and a score of others of the great folk of the valley.  I faced them
with defiance in my eyes, for were not they the authors of the
Professor's troubles and was I not his only friend?

"It's Penelope Blight," I said, "and I promised the Professor to take
care of her."

"What?" cried Mr. Pound.  "The Professor's daughter--the man who almost
killed Constable Lukens?  Dav-id!"

"Yes, sir," I said.  Penelope's hand was tightening in mine, and I
glanced to my side, to see her standing very straight, and the blue
ribbon was tilted as proudly as on that morning when we met by the
mountain brook.

"Dav-id!" cried my mother.

"Yes, sir," I said, looking right at Mr. Pound.  "I promised the
Professor that I would take care of her--always."




CHAPTER VI

It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my
parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of
my essentiality to their happiness.  My mother had long been haunted by a
conviction that I should meet an early death by drowning or an accidental
gunshot, and this very morning she had awakened from a dream in which she
saw her only child floating on the murky waters of the mill-dam.  Rushing
to my room and finding me gone, she had had her worst fears confirmed,
and at the moment of my reappearance Mr. Pound was endeavoring to console
her for her loss and to bring her to a state of Christian resignation.
So all was forgotten in the joy of my unexpected return, and though in
the eyes of the minister, Miss Spinner, and the others I was just a small
black sheep about whose absence an unnecessary pother had been raised,
there was only rejoicing in the home fold.  Even my father did not
humiliate me with forgiveness, but took me in his arms silently and held
me there, as he might have held me had he just rescued me from the depths
of the mill-dam.  To follow such a greeting with chastisement, however
well merited, was quite out of the question.  In the seclusion of my own
room I did meet with gentle chiding for the anguish I had caused, but my
mother remembered her dream, and my father his hours of futile searching,
and I knew that the hands which pressed mine would not be raised against
me in harsh reproof.  Below us, I was sure, ears were strained to hear
some real evidence that I was receiving my deserts, for there was a
silence there like that outside of the prison wall when the crowd waits
for the doleful tidings tolled by the prison bell.  Perhaps the listeners
were disappointed.  I remember that Mr. Pound looked rather nonplussed as
he saw us coming down-stairs, my father leading the way, smiling gravely,
my mother following, clutching my hand as though she would never release
it.

I had told them everything then.  The story I had tried in vain to tell
them at dinner on the previous day was now listened to with eagerness,
and my father, knowing the truth of James's fall from grace, was
outspoken in his declaration that an injustice had been done the
Professor.  In a solemn conference in the parlor, with Mr. Pound and the
squire, Doctor Pearl, Mr. Smiley, and all the other important men of the
neighborhood, he decried the attack on Henderson Blight as an outrage; he
found solace alone in the fact that the constable had been more
frightened than hurt, for it seemed that the bullet had only clipped the
flesh of his leg; he took upon himself all the blame for the affair, on
the ground that he, at least, should have known better.  Squire Crumple
heartily agreed with my father, and pointed out that on his part he had
only allowed the warrant to issue under protest; henceforth he would rely
on his own judgment and would not interpret the law to suit the whims of
his friends.  Mr. Pound was contrite, but he took comfort in the thought
that they had acted for the best in the light of their knowledge of the
circumstances, but now, knowing the facts, he advised that the whole
matter be allowed to simmer down quietly.  He still took issue with his
respected friend the squire on the illegality of the means used to rid
the community of a most undesirable member.  The squire replied with
heat, referring to the case of The Commonwealth _versus_ Hodgins, and the
subsequent action of Hodgins _versus_ The Commonwealth for damages.  It
was very evident that he would be relieved in mind if the case of The
Commonwealth _versus_ Blight did simmer down.  But there was one obstacle
to this programme of forgetting.  It was not the constable.  Lukens could
be quieted easily.  It was Penelope.  Even the gentlest ministrations of
Miss Spinner had failed to bring the small girl to a realization of the
happy change in her lot.  Even Mr. Pound was touched by her grief and so
troubled that he offered amends in a home under the parsonage roof.  He
realized now that the reason he had never been blessed with a child of
his own was that when the time came there might be a place at his board
and a nook in his heart for this abandoned little girl.  On the strength
of her husband's offer Mrs. Pound was claiming Penelope as her own, and
very soon was complaining that she had a most troublesome child to deal
with.  Penelope had divined that Mr. Pound was her father's arch-enemy,
and she met his most benign approach with her head tilted defiantly and
her eyes flashing, so that now, in a quandary, he asked: "What shall we
do with the child?"

The question was a sign that he surrendered her.  He had shown an honest
desire to take her under his roof, and no one could say that if he had
fired the train which had wrecked her home, he was not willing to make
atonement.

"What shall we do with the child?" my father repeated.  He rose to show
that the conference was ended and the question settled.  "David has
already answered that," he said, laying a hand upon my shoulder.  "My boy
promised Henderson Blight to take care of her until he returned.  They
have settled it among themselves, and I shall do nothing to interfere
with them."

He spoke so firmly that no one dared to remonstrate, and so it came that
I kept my promise to the Professor as far as it was in my power.  He must
have said himself that Penelope had a home better than any he could have
given her.  She had a mother's care--a care so loving that I should have
grown jealous had I not found a certain compensation in the fact that the
watchfulness over me relaxed and I was less hampered in my comings and
goings.  Before a month had passed my mother was confessing a dread that
the Professor might return and claim the child; she was pleading with my
father to abandon what she called a useless and an expensive search.
Chance had left the door open, and chance had brought me into the hall,
so I stopped and stood as silently as I could that I might not disturb
their conference.  I was frightened by the sternness in my father's
voice.  He spoke of his duty.  To him duty summed up life.  He had his
duty, even in the matter of so worthless a creature as this Henderson
Blight.  Declaring this, he stamped the floor in emphasis.

Often in the weeks that followed, when Penelope and I roamed over the
fields, when her merriment rang out the highest, and her laughter was so
free that it seemed she was forgetting the clearing and the days when her
sole companion was the gaunt and bitter-tongued Professor--often then I
would hear again the stamp of my father's foot and his stern avowal, and
to me it was as though he were conspiring against me in seeking to send
away the only comrade I had ever known, and would leave me to pass my
days in the wake of James.  I abhorred James now.  I had come to know the
pleasure of real companionship, and looked back to the old days wondering
how I had endured them, and with dread to those that seemed to lie ahead.
Penelope was a girl, to be sure, but she was not like the insipid
creatures of the village who were held in such contempt by boys of my
age.  Where I dared to go she followed.  Did I climb to the highest
girder in the barn and balance myself on the dizzy height, she was with
me.  Did I venture to run the wildest rapids of the creek in the clumsy
box which I called my canoe, she trusted her newest frock and ribbons to
my seamanship.  And better than all was the respect and admiration in
which she held me.  To her I was no longer the frightened, shivering boy
of the mountain brook.  I was in a land I knew and followed its familiar
ways without fear.  One day she saw me tumble from the bridge into the
deep swimming-hole, and while she cried out in fright I swam nonchalantly
ashore, a full dozen strokes, and as I dried myself in the sun I reproved
her for her little faith in me.  On another I presented her to old Jerry
Schimmel, sitting, a brown, dishevelled heap on his cobbler's bench, and
from my accustomed seat by his stove, in a voice cast into the echoing
hollows of my chest, I commanded him to tell us how he had fought in the
battle of Gettysburg.  From my familiarity with the stirring incidents of
the fight as Jerry described them, Penelope thought that I must have had
a part in it too, and my modest disclaimer hardly convinced her that I
had not been a companion-in-arms of this battle-worn veteran.

What days those were!  Even the fear that my father would find the
missing Professor grew less.  They drifted into weeks, and weeks into
months, and there was no sign of the fugitive.  I found myself looking
into the future as though in the quiet evening I were turning my eyes
over the valley to the west and the golden clouds hovering there.  I
dealt only with results.  I crossed mountains without climbing them, and
always Penelope shared my glory with me.  I look back now smiling at that
boyish self-reliance.  Mountains have been crossed, but with what
heart-breaking struggles?  Battles have been won, but with what a toll of
suffering?

As I recall the day when I first came face to face with real trouble,
with a trouble that leaves in the heart a never-healing wound, it was the
brightest of all that summer.  It was one of those days when there was
not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether
shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like
lakes of molten metal.  Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had
no thought of the tropic heat.  We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut
its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they
dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its
wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of paths, and the
clatter of the machine the sweetest of music.  Above the raucous clacking
I heard my mother calling, and, suspecting some needless injunction not
to get overheated, I pretended not to hear and looked the other way.  But
she was insistent.  When we had rounded the field again, she crossed the
road to the fence; the reaper stopped, and on a day so still that a dog's
bark carried a mile there was no escape from her uplifted voice.
Reluctantly Penelope and I abandoned our enchanting travel and obeyed the
summons.

"Penelope," my mother said, taking the girl by the hand, "come into the
house.  Your uncle is here."

Penelope stopped and looked up into my mother's face, and there was
wonder in her eyes.  She had forgotten her uncle, so rarely had she heard
her father speak of him, and I was quicker than she to grasp the meaning
of his coming, for I remembered that Rufus, who never had had a real
idea, who made his first success by giving away a prize with every pound
of tea.  I believed that he had come to take Penelope from me, and with
every step I saw my fears confirmed.

"Your Uncle Rufus," my mother said, and she closed her lips very tightly
as she walked on.

The parlor shades were up--an ominous sign, for the parlor would only be
opened to a person of importance.  Had the Professor visited us, the
humbler sitting-room would have been quite good enough to receive him in,
and it seemed a strange commentary on his harsh judgment that his brother
should be ushered into the stately chamber where the very air grew old in
dignified seclusion.  Still more forcibly was this idea impressed on my
mind when I stood at the door and saw my father sitting very erect, on a
most uncomfortable chair, listening respectfully to the stranger's rapid
words.

Rufus Blight spoke in a loud voice; he lolled in the big walnut rocker,
with his arm stretched across the centre table, to the peril of my
mother's precious Swiss chalet and the glass dome which protected it; on
the family Bible his fingers were beating a tattoo as carelessly as they
might have done on the counter of his general store.  There was nothing
in his appearance to suggest kin to the lean and cadaverous Professor.
The Professor always seemed to move with effort, but his brother was
alive all over.  Though short and fat, he had none of the placidity which
we associate with corpulence.  As he talked his hands moved restlessly;
his bristling red mustache accentuated the play of his lips; his heavy
gold watch-chain moved up and down with his breathing; even his hair was
alert.

"He is a remarkable man--I might say, a very remarkable man," were the
words that came to us as we entered the hall.  "Of course, you couldn't
understand him--few could.  He had to go his own way and would take help
from no one, not even his brother.  Upon my word, Judge----"

Our entrance checked him.  He rose, and with arms akimbo stood gazing
down at Penelope.  She, clinging to my mother, her cheek pressed against
her as she half turned from him, looked up at him, abashed and wondering,
for to her small mind there was in this stranger something awe-inspiring.
The sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes, with polished boots and
close-shaved, powdered, barbered face, was so different from her unkempt
father that she could hardly believe him kin.  Baal would have seemed as
near to her, and had the idol stretched out his arms to take her into his
destroying embrace, she could hardly have been more frightened than when
she saw Mr. Blight's fat hands reaching toward her.  Mr. Blight smiled,
and well he might, for this slip of a girl gazing up at him was of his
own blood, and all that was good in that blood found expression in her
sweetness.  He had come prepared to see a slattern, ill-fed, unkempt, the
true daughter of shiftless parents and a wretched mountain home; he had
found a graceful little body, and he wanted to take her into his
possession at once.

"Penelope," he exclaimed, "don't you know your Uncle Rufus?"

There was no particular reason why Penelope should know her Uncle Rufus.
She could have submitted herself as easily to the embrace of any
well-dressed, smiling stranger, and she shrank back, but my mother pushed
her forward within reach of the restless hands.

"It's your dear uncle, child," she said soothingly.  "He has come to take
you to a nice home."

"And he is going to bring you up," my father added in a wonderfully
cheerful voice, born either from his own escape from responsibility or
her brightened prospects.  "He is going to give you everything."

Penelope was on the verge of tears, but she held them back.  "I don't
want everything," she said, as she strove to check her forced advance by
planting her feet firmly and leaning back against my mother.  "I just
want to stay here till father comes."

"But your father will come to us--of course, he will come to us,
Penelope," Mr. Blight cried.  His hands closed on hers, he hooked an arm
about her and held her very cautiously, as though he were as afraid of
her as she of him.  "You mustn't be frightened, my dear," he went on,
and, soothed by his kindly tones, she leaned against his knee.  "That's
better, child."  Encouraged by her half-yielding attitude, he stroked her
hair.  To me, watching them from the hiding of my mother's skirt, she had
fallen into a magician's clutches and was being lulled by soft words into
an indifference to danger.

"I'm your father's brother, child," he pursued, in his insinuating tone.
"Next to him I'm nearer to you than any one else, and to me there is no
one as near as he.  We will try to find him together--you and I, eh?  And
we'll all live together in Pittsburgh.  You'll like Pittsburgh--it's a
very lively, pushing town."

"But I want to stay here with Davy," said Penelope in a low voice.

"With Davy?"  Mr. Blight stared at her in surprise.  Then he began to
laugh as though he were contrasting all he could give her with Davy's
humble powers.  "Child--child--you don't realize what you are refusing.
You don't realize what your Uncle Rufus is going to do for you.  I've no
one to look after--you will be the joy of a poor old bachelor's heart,
won't you, now?"

He spoke as though being a poor old bachelor was quite the pleasantest
possible condition, yet he rolled out the phrase twice as if to touch
Penelope's heart.  Remembering the only other bachelor I had ever seen, I
stared at him in wonder.  This other was Philip Spangler, who sat all day
in the store gazing vacantly at the stove.  Once I asked Stacy Shunk why
he stayed there, and Stacy, lifting a warning finger, whispered: "He's
jest a bachelor, Davy, an old, old bachelor."  Contrasting him with Mr.
Blight, I was puzzled.  If it was a terrible thing to be an old bachelor,
certainly he accepted the condition lightly; he was trying to arouse
sympathy when it was plain that he did not need or deserve it, for
evidently he was quite well satisfied with a single state, however
deplorable it might come to be.  Penelope was being enmeshed by unfair
means, and it was hard to keep still, but there was nothing that I could
do.

Now my father lifted his chin clear of the high points of his collar.
"Penelope," he began, "you are fortunate--very fortunate--in having such
an uncle.  Mr. Blight is a prominent man, and I might say"--glancing
apologetically at the guest--"a rich man."  Then, meeting no
contradiction, he added--"a very rich man, who can give you such
advantages as would be far beyond my means, even were you my daughter."

"I don't want advantages," said Penelope, hardly above a whisper, and for
want of a better resting-place she dropped her head on her uncle's
shoulder and burst into tears.

"There--there--there--" cried Mr. Blight, patting her clumsily on the
back.  Had she been a full-grown woman, he could hardly have been more
embarrassed, yet he was pleased that she clung to him thus, for he was
smiling.  "I'll not give you any advantages you don't want--I promise
you.  I just wish to make you happy.  What's the use of my working all my
life, piling up money, capturing the steel trade, adding mills and mills
to my plants, if I have no one to look after.  There--there--there--now,
child, don't cry.  Won't you come with your poor, lonely, old uncle?"

Even to my prejudiced mind, he was playing his part well, for this
awkward kindness touched Penelope at last.  She did not reply, nor did
she demur, but she clung closer to him in silence.  I saw my danger and
hers, and ran to him and grasped his knees.

"Oh, Mr. Blight, don't take her away!" I cried.  "I promised the
Professor I'd look after her.  I promised----"

"Dav-id!" exclaimed my father, and he grasped my arm and began to draw me
away.

My fear of him even could not restrain me, and I resisted, digging my
fingers into the knees, clutching the folds of the trousers where Mr.
Blight had so carefully arranged them to prevent them bagging.  He
intervened, as much, I think, to save his immaculate clothes as me from
being torn asunder.

"Dav-id!" cried my father.

"Mr. Blight--Mr. Blight--don't take her away!" I pleaded.

Mr. Blight began to laugh.  "Judge--Judge--release him," he said, and
freeing me from the paternal grasp, he drew me toward him.  When he had
ironed out the wrinkled knees with his hand, he patted me on the head.
"You are a good boy, David," he went on, "and I understand exactly how
you feel.  What you have done for Penelope will never be forgotten, will
it, my little girl?"  The emphasis on the last phrase of possession
extinguished the spark of hope in me, and had he stopped there I should
have surrendered feebly, but turning to my father, he added: "You have a
fine boy, Judge, and I like him.  When I get home I shall send him a gun.
What kind of a gun do you want, David?"

Young as I was then, I had not yet learned to value the good things of
life in terms of dollars, and to the power of the dollar my eyes were
just being opened.  This man wielded it.  He was enticing Penelope behind
the barrier of his fat, oily prosperity where I could not reach her.
Holding her there, he was magnanimously compensating me with a gun, as
though we were making a trade in which the profit were mine, as though he
were valuing her in money.  My dislike, born of the Professor's
contemptuous reference to him, had turned to distrust and aversion as I
watched him weaving his toils about Penelope.  Now I hated him and drew
back from him as though his touch were baneful; I stamped a foot and
shook a fist and shouted: "I don't want your old gun; Penelope doesn't
want your money.  You have no right----"

My father's arms were about me.  He lifted me from my feet and carried me
to the door, and as I struggled blindly to free myself and return to the
attack I looked back at Rufus Blight.  It was not to see him sinking
under the shame of my anathema.  Signs of anger in him would have
incensed me far less than his lofty unconcern.  He even interceded for
me, but this only proved how secure was his victory, and that to his view
what fell to me was of little moment.

"Don't be hard on Davy, Judge," he said, interrupting my father's
apologies for my rudeness.  "He's just a boy.  I don't know but what, if
I were in his place, I should do exactly the same thing--feel exactly the
same way."

This was small consolation to me, for Penelope's head was buried in his
shoulder; her face was hidden by her tousled hair, but I could hear her
sobbing: "Uncle--uncle--let me stay with Davy."

In the plea alone she acknowledged her kin to him and surrendered.  He
could well afford to be generous.  By every law of custom I had merited
severe punishment at my father's hands, and that his hands were stayed by
Mr. Blight's intercession was but another evidence of his power.  When my
father reasoned with me kindly, instead of whipping me, I yielded, not to
his sophistry but to that masterful influence before which even he seemed
to bend.  I realized the hopelessness of my cause, and found myself
facing Mr. Blight again, an humble suppliant for his pardon.  Humbly I
asked him if I might not soon see Penelope again, and she joined in my
petition.  Humbly I asked that some day he would bring her back to the
valley, and she seconded my prayer, standing at my side, clasping my hand
and looking up at her uncle from tearful eyes.  He promised everything.
He took my hand and hers, and for the moment it seemed that this little
circle was my real family, and that my father and mother, standing over
us, were hardly more than law-given preceptors.  Before our guest's
expanding smile and the magic of his tongue the clouds fled.  Those which
hung heaviest he brushed away with his restless hands.  Soon, very soon,
I was to go to that bustling, pushing town of Pittsburgh and with
Penelope explore its wonders.  We should ride behind the fastest pair of
trotters in the State--his trotters; we should see the greatest mills in
the country--his mills--where steel was worked like wax into a thousand
giant forms; we should take long excursions on the river in a wonderful
new boat--his boat--  Why it would make a boy of him just to have us with
him!

Under the spell of his words an hour flew by, and then my mother led
Penelope away to make her ready for the journey.  She brought her back to
us decked in a hat and frock born of many days of planning and three
trips to the county town.  The humble art of Malcolmville had not been
intrusted with so important a commission as Penelope's best clothes.  For
these the shops of Martinsburg, crammed with the latest fashions of
Philadelphia, had been ransacked; the smartest modiste in Martinsburg had
trimmed the hat with many yards of tulle and freighted it with pink
roses; the smartest couturiere in Martinsburg had created that wonderful
blue chintz frock, with ribbons woven through mazes of flounces; the last
touch was my mother's--the plait of hair, done so masterfully that even
the weight of the great blue bow could not bend it.

I looked at Penelope in awe.  She was no longer the little girl whom I
had met by the mountain stream.  I was still an uncouth boy, with face
smudged with the dust of the fields and hands blackened in play.  Yet she
did not see the wide gulf which separated us, and, forgetting the hat,
the frock, the chaff that clung to my matted hair and the grime of my
shirt, she ran to me, threw her arms about my neck and cried:
"Davy--Davy--I don't want to go!"

I knew that she had to go, and though the tears seemed to burst up in a
great flood from my heart, I would not show them in my eyes.  Tears are
unmanly--unboyly rather--and I fought them back, but for them I could not
speak.  My father took Penelope from me.  He lifted her in his arms and
carried her out of the house and down the path to the gate, where the
carriage was waiting.  He placed her on the seat; he straightened out her
rumpled frock, and even crossed her hands upon her lap, as though she
were quite incapable of doing anything for herself.  Then he kissed her.
It was the first time I had ever seen him kiss her.  When he spoke it was
to say good-by to Rufus Blight, who was in his seat, pulling on a pair of
yellow gloves.

"We shall all meet again, very soon," said Mr. Blight omnipotently, as
though Fate were a henchman of his.  "You must all come to Pittsburgh to
see us.  It's a lively, pushing town, and you'll enjoy it."  Leaning from
the carriage and holding out his hand to me, he added: "And you,
Davy--you will come very, very soon."

I believed him.  But the dream that he had conjured for us of the days to
come, of his lively, pushing town, the fastest trotters, the wonderful
boat, were shattered by contact with the harsh fact of this parting.

I looked past him at Penelope, sitting very straight, with her hands in
her lap as my father had placed them.  There was a giant frog in my
throat, but I conquered it as I had conquered my tears, and speaking very
steadily, I said: "Good-by, Penelope--I'll not forget.  Some day I will
take care of you."

She did not turn.  Her eyes held right ahead, but she answered bravely:
"Good-by, Davy.  I'll see you soon--very soon.  Remember----"

The rest I did not hear.  A medley of hoofs, harness and wheels broke in
and she was away to a new world and a new life.  The brave little figure
bowed suddenly, and the roses and the tulle, the precious creation of the
Martinsburg modiste, were ruthlessly crushed against the sleek bulk of
the man who had never had a real idea.




CHAPTER VII

That the Professor, with fear at his heels and the devils of
retribution clutching at his flying coat-tails, should have plunged
into silence when the bush closed around him was not strange.  Every
circumstance of his parting argued a long absence, a discreet
obliteration of self.  But Penelope left the valley in prosaic fashion,
in a livery wagon, with a man as easy to find as his own bustling,
pushing town; yet the dust-clouds which closed around them as they
drove away shut them from my ken as the mountains had enclosed her
father in their most secret hiding-places.  It was the fault of Rufus
Blight.  He had blown beautiful bubbles to divert us in those last
hours of his visit, and bubbles bursting silently into nothingness were
not more fragile than his promises.  To the true value of those
promises I awoke slowly, as the months went by and there came no hint
of their fulfilment.

I wrote to Penelope.  My letters would have made volumes were their
length commensurate with the pain of composition.  Even the heart of
Rufus Blight would have been touched could he have seen me, bent over a
table, digging my teeth into my tongue and my pen into the paper as
letter by letter and word by word I constructed those messages of my
boyish love.  But he knew only the finished gem, and not the labor of
its cutting.  The more I sought to break the silence, the surer I
became that he, the omnipotent one, had ordained it, and I fancied him
reading my letters and destroying them, a thin smile lighting his
chubby face as he thought of the easy way in which I was being
outwitted.  I went to my mother for help.  She knew nothing of my
unavailing struggles, and was herself offended and heart-sick.  At my
entreaty she overcame her pride and wrote to Mr. Blight inquiring as to
Penelope's welfare.  In return her existence was recognized; hardly
more than that, for the great man did not trouble himself with a
personal answer.  His reply was given vicariously, through one P. T.
Mallencroft, his secretary, on flawless paper, three sentences in bold
clear type and a Spencerian signature closing it.  It was a bloodless
thing.  It spoke the commands of omnipotence as though carved on
tablets of stone.

Mrs. Malcolm's favor of the 10th ultimo was acknowledged; Mr. Blight
instructed Mr. Mallencroft to thank Mrs. Malcolm for the interest which
she had shown, and to assure her that Miss Penelope was quite well.

It was perfectly polite.  It was the finished bow with which Rufus
Blight was backing from our presence, never to trouble us again.  I
knew this when I saw the sheet drop from my mother's limp fingers and,
sinking to a chair, she tossed her apron over her head and rocked
violently to an accompaniment of muffled sobs.

It was clear to me that Rufus Blight was not only neglectful of our
claims, but had been so with purpose, and as I wandered aimlessly
through the fields in the wake of James, and as in the evening I sat
again with him on the barn-bridge, looking over the darkening valley,
there held one enduring thought in the chaos of my brain.  Looking back
now, I see in my childish enmity toward Rufus Blight the impulse that
set me on my course.  But for that I might have stayed in the valley,
dozing, as the Professor had said, like the very dogs.  In Rufus Blight
I was conscious of an opposing force.  He had taken Penelope from me;
he had cheated me with flattery and broken promises; and the dominating
sense in my mind was one of conflict with him.  I looked to the west.
Mountains rose there, range beyond range, and beyond them, miles away,
was his bustling, pushing town.  To cross them and to close with him
was my one desire, and though time dulled the edges of my purpose and
the figures of the Professor, of Penelope and of Rufus Blight grew dim
in the distance, and at last the old motive was lost beneath a host of
new impelling forces, still it was Mallencroft's letter that touched
the quick and aroused me from my canine slumber.

The Professor's words came back to me.  The mountains seemed to echo
them always.  "Wake up, Davy!  Do something; be somebody; get out of
the valley."  Here was my shibboleth.  I must do something; I must be
somebody; I must get out of the valley!  And then I should go to
Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not
defraud me of my right in her.

In my father I found the first mountain on the way that I had chosen,
for to his mind my destiny was settled and to be envied.  All that was
his would some day be mine--the best farm in the county, his
Pennsylvania Railroad stock, his shares in the bridge company, and his
Kansas bonds.  The dear soul had arranged my course so comfortably and
in such detail that in me he would have been living his own life over
again.  And what my father said, my mother echoed.  Was I too proud to
follow in his footsteps?  Was I, a child in years, to hold myself above
the ways of my forebears?

Such arguments came too late to my rebellious spirit.  I should no
longer have told the Professor that I was going to be like my father.
Necessity had made me more ambitious.  I dreamed now of the power and
fame of a Washington, a Webster, a Grant--names which stood to me as
symbols of accomplishment.  So what my parents at first brushed aside
as the idle dreaming of a boy they soon realized to be a vague but
persistent purpose which must be beaten down.  They gave me a certain
dignity by descending to debate.  What did I want to be?  How could I
answer, who could not even name the vocations in which men won their
way to coveted heights?  My mother gave me the key which opened the
world to me.

"William," she said, addressing my father, "I do believe Davy is
thinking of being a minister and is kind of ashamed to own it."

I caught the softening note in my mother's voice and in her eyes a
light of pride as she regarded me inquiringly.  Whatever obligation lay
on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would
absolve it.  This she had pointed out.  My plans at once took a
concrete form, and though my first faltering assent might have savored
of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination.  And now the
opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at
the age of ten was stirred by the need of lost humanity.  My father
discovered that it had been his own early ambition to be a minister; it
was as though I was to erect the edifice to which he had feared to put
his strength, and it comforted him.  He delighted to lay his hand upon
my head in the presence of company and to announce that his David was
going to do the work to which he had always believed he had himself
been called.  With my mother the son's gifts became a subject on which
she never tired dilating, and naturally such flattery reconciled me to
a calling far removed from all my old ambitions; but had it been
intimated to me that I might become a plumber I should have accepted
that vocation just as readily, provided that by following it I should
go out of the valley, over the mountains, to Pittsburgh and the
presence of Rufus Blight.

Now arose Mr. Pound to help me.  Here was the crowning incongruity in a
chain of incongruous events.  I had never liked Mr. Pound.  He had
overwhelmed me too often.  His sermon was the rack on which I was
stretched for an hour every Sunday to endure untold agonies of
restlessness; his house the temple to which too often I had to carry
propitiatory offerings of vegetables and chickens.  And then his
persecution of my friend the Professor still rankled in me.  Yet I
found myself, of necessity, using him as the one known quantity in the
equation over which I worked.  He became my model.  I fancied myself
attaining a mien like his, a deep, resonant voice and a vocabulary of
marvellous words.  I dressed myself in material garments like his, in
spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his
immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness.  I faced Rufus Blight and
he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice
vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests.
Always I asserted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison.
And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like
sanctity and became as other men.  With it the great task of my
ministry was accomplished, though there was a certain charm in the idea
of continuing it in the hunting fields of Africa, an appeal of romance
in a kraal, a cork hat, and the picture of Penelope and me setting
forth with a band of faithful converts to the slaughter of elephants
and lions.

Idle dreams of boyhood!  Absurd, incongruous fancies!  And but for them
I might at this very moment be dozing in the valley; I might be another
distinguished Judge Malcolm, with my little court of ministers and
squires, with old Mr. Smiley as master-of-the-horse and Miss Agnes
Spinner as lady-in-waiting.  Instead?  I did not stay in the valley.
Aroused by the sense of antagonism to Rufus Blight, and spurred on by
the ambition to confront and defeat him, I began my struggle to cross
the mountains, and Mr. Pound became my support and guide.  He never
knew the real truth behind my commendable resolution.  The inspiring
thought in my mind, as he insisted on judging it, was born of his own
teaching.  As my father had planned to live his life over again in me,
so Mr. Pound saw a hope of his own intellectual immortality.  Were not
the evidences of grace so suddenly revealed in me the reward of his own
labors?

When he came to the house, summoned in consultation over my future, he
placed a hand upon my head and solemnly repeated the lines of the grand
old hymn: "God works in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform."
There was here a gentle hint that my past had not been altogether good
or full of promise, and as Mr. Pound undoubtedly believed this, it made
more generous his conduct toward me.  He was a narrow man, an egotist,
unlearned, too, save in the cruder forms of his calling, but he was
sincere.  He sought to mould me to what he thought the form a man
should take, and now as I look back on the five years through which he
labored with me, I may smile at the memory of his mien, his pomposity,
his bigotry, yet I smile too with affection.  He taught me without pay.
His study became my school-room, and when at times I chafed under his
vigilant tutelage and wearied in my well-doing, he steeled himself with
the remembrance that Job endured more than he without complaint.  In my
sulkiness or open rebellion he found evidences to confirm his belief in
the doctrine of innate evil; he seemed to rush singing into battle with
the devil that was in me.

Through this intimate association I became a little Mr. Pound.  How
could it have been otherwise when day after day, books in hand, I
walked down to his house to recite my lesson of Latin and Greek, and
with him worked through the mysteries of algebraic calculation and
studied the strange habits of the right line?  He pressed me into his
mould.  Years went by.  In the valley the Professor was forgotten, and
to me Penelope was but a dim figure in the past.  Even the memory of
Rufus Blight ceased to awaken rancor, and I could contemplate with
growing cynicism my old-time hatred of him.  Unconsciously new
ambitions stirred within me, and they were fostered by the flattery of
my elders.  In that Africa of my dream-land I no longer pictured myself
in a cork helmet slaying lions, but dying at the stake, a martyr to my
duty and--must I add it?--being preached about afterward from a
thousand pulpits.

Mr. Pound was my model of deportment, my glass of fashion.  I see him
now as we used to sit, vis-a-vis, at his study table.  Samson's
physical strength came from his hair.  From the same source, it seemed
to me, Mr. Pound derived that mental vigor with which he pulled down
the temples of ignorance and slew the thousand devils of unorthodoxy
which sprang from my doubting mind.  From the top of his head a red
lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in
cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself
in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a
rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many
folds.  His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and
pompous phrases.  From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a
cannon.  He seldom descended to conversation.  He declaimed.  He sought
to impress on me the importance of using resounding sentences which he
said would keep reverberating in the caverns of the mind.  For this
effect he had a theory that words ending in "ation" and "ention" were
especially fitted.  Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which
penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain.  I must admit that in the
practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty
years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the
announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the
preservation of the Jewish nation."  I can see him pausing in his
discourse to lubricate his vocal chords with a glass of ice-water, and
then drawing himself to his full height, fix his eyes on his hushed
people and cry: "What did I say the Jewish congregation was?  Let me
refresh your recollection."  His answer must ring to-day in the caverns
of many minds.  Others of his phrases, I know, still echo in my own.
But this is because so often in my own room I practised declaiming
them, striving to enunciate them with my mentor's finish.

Was it a wonder that I became a little Mr. Pound?  I suppose, too, that
I became a veritable little cad.  Conscious of my advantages in birth
and breeding, much impressed on me by my mother, I had never been
intimate with the village boys.  Now I shunned them altogether.  To me
they were thoughtless heathen and unprofitable company.  I strove for a
time to correct their evil ways and to bring them to repentance.  That
was something which I could properly do without unnecessary
association.  I had for my reward only taunts.  They called me "Goody"
and "Miss Malcolm," and like names contemplated to shame me from the
course which I had chosen, but in the martyrdom which they made me
suffer I only gloried, and I could have let them stone me to death and
forgiven them, provided, of course, that Mr. Pound preached about me
afterward and that my name were enrolled in the company of well-known
martyrs.  Looking back, I realize that I was playing.  There was a fine
excitement in being hunted in my comings and goings through the
village.  It became my Africa, where any tree might hide a deadly
enemy, and any fence an ambush.  I discovered secret passages through
backyards.  I matched cunning against overwhelming force, and
sometimes, when the odds were not too great against me, I remembered
Joshua and another David and turned on the Philistines and smote them
right manfully.  At other times the hostilities lagged, but they never
ceased entirely, and often they broke out suddenly with increased fury.
It was a mass and class war.  To the butcher's son and the blacksmith's
boy and their like, the restless masses, I was indeed a bumptious
Malcolm.  Conscious of the superior quality of the blood of the
McLaurins, and a little inflated with the pride of wealth, I had long
patronized them, so there was needed only my assumption of virtue to
fan the flames.  But as I grew in years and knowledge, and the days of
my departure from the valley drew nearer, I relied less on my fists for
protection and more on a defensive armor of dignity.  I became less a
target for missiles and more an object of jibes.  These I met with
contempt, for I was going to college; I was going to McGraw University,
the alma mater of Mr. Pound, and this thought alone nerved me to step
out of the course of a flying stone with unconcern and to move down the
street with Pound-like mien.

There never was any discussion in our family as to where I should take
my collegiate training.  Had there been, Mr. Pound would speedily have
quelled it.  McGraw was the one college of which I knew anything.  The
little that I could learn of others was through the sporting pages of
my father's Philadelphia paper, and here the name of Mr. Pound's alma
mater was strangely missing.  But he drew a real picture of it for me;
gave me a concrete conception which I could not form from records of
touch-downs and runs and three-baggers to left field.  Sometimes in the
study I would rise to points of information on Harvard, Princeton, or
Yale, but I was promptly declared out of order.  Mr. Pound admitted
that these universities were larger than McGraw, and acknowledged that
in some special lines of education they might be in advance of McGraw;
yet, withal, had he a son he would intrust him only to the care of
Doctor John Francis Todd.  As an educator and builder of character
Doctor Todd had no equal in the country.  Mr. Pound could prove this.
He pointed to his old friend Adam Silliman, who graduated at Princeton
and was to-day a struggling coal merchant in Pleasantville, and drank.
With him he contrasted Sylvester Bradley, who got his degree at McGraw
in exactly the same year, '73, and had been three times moderator of
the Pennsylvania Synod.  Of such comparisons between McGraw men who had
succeeded and other university men who had failed Mr. Pound had so many
at his fingers' ends as to be absolutely overwhelming.  So before I had
seen McGraw I was a McGraw man to the core, and my mentor, with a
subtlety astonishing for him, missed no opportunity to increase my
devotion.  He even taught me the college yell in one of his lighter
moments, and I, in turn, taught it to James that it might ring out with
more volume from the barn-bridge of an evening.

You may think that I was to be disillusioned.  That could not be.  When
first I saw McGraw she was a giantess to my eyes.  The time was to come
when I was to see her in a new light, to judge her from a new
perspective, to realize the incongruity between her aspiration and
accomplishment, to smile at her solemn adherence to academic ritual;
and yet to realize that in her littleness and poverty she gave me what
was good and all that was in her power.  I may regret that I did not
delve deeper into the mysteries of those foot-ball scores and discover,
through them, the greater seats of learning.  Perhaps I might have
known then that not all their sons became coal-merchants and drank, and
I might have gone much farther on that September day when first I set
out into the world beyond the mountains.  But for all that I cannot
imagine the four years which I spent at that tiny college taken from my
life.  For all the four years that might have been I would not exchange
them.

That September day?  It is a tall white mile-stone on my way.  I can
look back and see its every detail.  On its eve James and I sat for the
last time on the barn-bridge and he sang of Annie Laurie and Nellie
Gray.  And when we heard my mother calling me, we stood together and
gave the college yell.

"I s'pose, Davy," he said, as we were moving toward the house, "folks
will think I'm a little peculiar, but I'm going to give that cheer
every night, just for old times' sake--for your sake, Davy."

Our elders have a fashion of making like inopportune remarks when we
are struggling to keep our hearts high.  It seemed as though they were
trying to break my spirit.  My mother's white silence, my father's long
prayer, James feverishly coming and going on that last morning--little
things like these almost made me abandon my great plans.  But pride
sustained me--that same pride which sends men into battle for foolish
causes.  I wanted to hurry the fall of the blow.  I even protested
against my parents and Mr. Pound driving with me to the railroad, and
they did not understand.  I had to meet their last embraces under the
eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train,
and under such conditions I dared not show emotion.  Again they did not
understand and were a little hurt by my coldness.  I sprang up the car
steps jauntily.  To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and
waved a smiling farewell to the silent, wondering three.  I did not
wait there, as they waited, looking after me, but turned, tossed my new
bag into a rack, threw myself into a seat, and crossed my legs with the
nonchalance of one who left home every day.

The river travelled with me out of the valley.  I looked from the car
window and saw it at my side, and together we went away.  I was silent,
wondering at the shadow which seemed to overcast the earth.  The little
river was bright in the noonday sun--a cheery fellow-traveller through
the green land.  I leaned from the car window in the suddenly born hope
that I might see the three still figures, back there in the hot glare
of the station.  But the river had turned, and I saw not the roofs of
Pleasantville dozing in the sun like the very dogs, nor the court-house
tower and the tall steeples that pierced her shade, but a high wall of
mountains.  We seemed to be driving straight for their heart.  The
river's mood was mine.  It shrank from that forbidding wall and the
mysteries beyond; it swept in a wide curve into pleasant lowlands.  And
now I looked across it northward, to other mountains--to _my_
mountains, to the friendly heights that watched over _my_ valley.
Closing my eyes I saw it as on that morning when Penelope and I rode in
terror from the woods.  I looked across it as it lay in the broad day,
under the kindly eye of God, across the rolling green, checkered with
the white of blossoming orchards and the brown of the fallow, past the
village spires and up the long slope to the roof among the giant oaks.
You've had enough, the river seemed to say; and, turning, it charged
boldly into the other mountain's heart.  I went with it, but my face
was pressed against the pane, that those who travelled with me might
not see.




CHAPTER VIII

Harlansburg, with practical sense, shields itself from northern winds
by a high hill, spreading over the barren southern slope.  Trade clings
to the river-front, in a compact mass around the square, and from there
the town rises, scattering as it climbs, and the higher it goes the
larger are the houses and the more imposing, suggesting a contest in
which the stronger have overtopped their weaker brethren.  But the
university, I suspect, was never surfeited with practical sense, else
she would not have settled on the very crest of the hill, to shiver the
winter through in icy winds and in the summer to bake in tropic heat.
There was, indeed, a delightful lack of responsibility about the
university.  She had something of Micawber's nature, and was so inured
to adversity that she would have been ill at ease in a position less
imposing, even though less exposed.  She might shiver, but she would
dominate the town.  She was hopefully waiting for something to turn up,
and for such a purpose was well placed, for the railroad threaded the
narrow valley below, and at any moment some multi-millionaire might see
her from the car window, take pity and endow her.  This impression of
worth in honorable tatters, of virtue appealing for aid, is made on me
to-day when the train swings around the jutting hill and I behold the
roof of "Old Main" rising from the trees, and the smutted white dome of
the observatory.  But that afternoon when I first saw my alma mater, I
was quite overwhelmed by her magnificence.  Before that I had known
McGraw only by an ancient wood-cut of Mr. Pound's, which showed a long
building, supremely bare, set among military trees; with a barouche in
the foreground in which was a woman holding a parasol; with
wooden-looking gentlemen in beaver hats pointing canes at the windows
as though they were studying the beauties of imagined tracery.  The
military trees had grown, and through the gaps in the foliage as I drew
nearer I made out the detail of the most imposing structure I had ever
seen.  Not St. Peter's, nor the Colosseum, nor the Temple of the Sun
have awakened in me the same thrill of admiration that shot through my
veins when "Old Main" stretched its bare brick walls before me to
incomprehensible distances, and rising carried my eyes to the sky
itself, where the Gothic wood-work of the tower pierced it.

In the name, "Old Main," there is a suggestion of a score of collegiate
Gothic quadrangles clustering about their common mother, but these
existed only in the dreams of Doctor Todd, and the most tangible
expression they found was in a blue-print which was hung in a
conspicuous place in his study and presented his scheme of placing the
different schools in that hoped-for day when the multimillionaire
untied the strings of his money-bags.

"Our founder, Stephen McGraw," Doctor Todd was fond of explaining,
"gave us the nucleus of a great educational institution.  Our task is
to build on his foundation.  It is true that in fifty years not a new
stone has been laid, but that must not discourage us.  We shall go on
hoping and working."

Dear old Doctor Todd!  He still works on and hopes.  He has had bitter
disappointments, but they have never beaten him down.  Had Stephen
McGraw left his money and not his name to the university, the doctor's
task would have been easier, for it is not the way of men to beautify
another's monument.  Once, I remember, a Western capitalist was
persuaded to make a great gift to McGraw.  He made it with conditions,
and for a while our hopes blazed high and with exceeding fury.  The
collegiate Gothic quadrangles were within our reach, as near to us as
the grapes to Tantalus.  A half-million dollars was promised us if we
raised a like sum within a year.  Doctor Todd tried to effect a
compromise by accepting two hundred thousand dollars outright, but the
philanthropist did not believe in making beggars of institutions by
surfeiting them with charity.  So we cheered him right heartily and
went to work to gather our share.  I remember it all very well because
I sang in the glee-club concert which we gave in the opera house to
help the fund, and because our classroom work was very light, as the
president and half of the faculty were canvassing the State for aid.
We worked desperately--faculty, alumni, and students.  Even Mr. Pound
gave ten dollars from his meagre salary, and the Reverend Sylvester
Bradley, three times moderator of the synod, a round hundred.  With
only a month in which to make up a deficit of four hundred thousand
dollars, we did not abandon hope.  Every morning in chapel the doctor
prayed earnestly for a rain of manna or a visitation of ravens, which
we knew to be his adroit way of covering a more mercenary petition.
But heaven never opened, and a check never fluttered to earth from the
only source from which it could be expected.  The year ended and our
would-be benefactor gave his money outright to Harvard or Yale, I
forget which, for a swimming tank or a gymnasium.

Some day McGraw may get the coveted money.  I know that were it in my
power the collegiate Gothic quadrangles would rise on the lines of
Doctor Todd's faded blue-print.  I should build Todd Hall and McGraw
Library, but not one brick would I add to "Old Main."  There would be
the only condition of my gift of millions.  They might suggest oriel
windows to relieve the bare facade, buttresses to break the flatness of
the wall and pinnacles to beautify the roof, but I would have "Old
Main" always as I saw it on that September afternoon, when I had
climbed the hill, paused, set down my bag and stood with arms akimbo
while I scanned the amazing length and height of the splendid pile.  My
heart at each remove from home had become a heavier weight until I
seemed to carry within me a solid leaden load.  Now it lightened
mysteriously.  Face to face with a new life that had its symbol in this
noble breadth of wall, the cords which held me to the old snapped.
That very morning seemed the part of another age, and yesterday was
spent in another world.  I was wide awake at last.  The cheer which Mr.
Pound had taught me was on my lips, and I should have given it as a
paean of thanksgiving had I not been embarrassed by the scrutiny of a
group of young men who loitered on the steps before me.  So I picked up
my bag, a feather-weight to my new energy, and went boldly on.

My impression of the splendor of college life was heightened by the
first acquaintance I made in my new environment.  This was Boller of
'89, and today Boller of '89 holds in my mind as a true pattern of the
man of the world.  His was the same stuff of which was made "the
perfect courtier."  The difference lay solely in the degree of finish,
and justly considered, true value lies in the material, not in the
gloss.  Boller, polished by the society of Harlansburg, appeared to my
eyes quite the most delightful person I had ever met.  It was the
perfection of his clothes and the graciousness of his manner that awed
me and won my admiration.  In those days wide trousers were the
fashion, and Boller was, above all, fashion's ardent devotee.  His, I
think, exceeded by four inches the widest in the college.  Recalling
him as he came forth from the group on the steps to greet me, I think
of him as potted in his trousers, like a plant, so slender rose his
body from his draped legs.  His patent-leather shoes were almost
hidden, and from his broad base he seemed to converge into a gray derby
of the kind we called "the smoky city," the latest thing from
Pittsburgh.  Looking at him, so wonderfully garbed, I became conscious
of my own rusticity, so old-fashioned did the styles of Pleasantville
appear beside the resplendent garments of my new friend.  I was sure
that he must notice it.  If he did, he gave no sign.

"I'm Boller of '89," he said, grasping my hand cordially.  "What's your
name?"

"Malcolm, sir--David Malcolm," I answered.

Boller clapped an arm across my shoulders in friendly fashion.  "You're
three days late, Malcolm, but better late than never.  I suppose you
were hesitating between McGraw and Harvard."

"Oh, no!" I faltered, not fathoming his pleasantry.  "I had to wait
until the tailor finished my new suit.  It should have been done last
Monday, but----"

Something in Boller's eyes checked me.  He was regarding me from head
to foot so gravely that I divined that I might have joined the crew of
the Ark in my new clothes, judged by their cut.

"You have come here to study agriculture, I presume," he remarked most
pleasantly.

So subtle a reference to my bucolic appearance was lost on my innocent
mind.  He seemed quite serious and as he was mistaken I wanted to set
him right.  I was proud of my laudable ambition.  Proclaiming it had
brought me only commendation, and I proclaimed it now.

"I'm going to be a minister," I said, drawing myself up a little.

"Indeed--a minister--how interesting!" returned Boller, raising his
eyebrows.

Now had he laughed at me, had he called his fellows from the step to
mob me, in the glory of my martyrdom I should have held fast to my
purpose; or had he flattered me like Miss Spinner or Mr. Smiley, my
vanity would have carried me on my chosen path.  His middle course was
disconcerting.  He treated my ambition as though it were quite a
natural one and just about as interesting as to follow dentistry or
plumbing.

"I'm going to be a missionary," I said in a louder tone, hoping to
arouse in him either antagonism or adulation.

"Curious," he returned.  "Very curious.  Why I am thinking of taking up
the same line myself.  It makes a man so interesting to the girls.
I've a cousin who is a minister, and last year he received seventeen
pairs of knit slippers from the young ladies of his congregation.
That's going some--eh, Malcolm?"

What a different picture from my cherished one of cork hats and express
rifles!  The suggestion was horribly insidious.  To be interesting to
women _en masse_ was to my manly view exceedingly unmanly; to labor for
reward in knit slippers the depth of degradation.  I was about to
declare to Boller that I was not going to be his kind of a clergyman
when I stopped to ask myself if I had ever known any other kind, if my
own ideal were not as unattainable as to be another Ivanhoe or Captain
Cook.  Mr. Pound rose before me, his feet incased in the loving
handiwork of Miss Spinner.  From him my mind shot wide afield to the
Reverend Doctor Bumpus, fresh from the dark continent, thanking our
congregation for the barrel of clothing sent to his eleven children in
far-off Zululand.  Thoughts like these were as arrows in the heart of
my noble purpose.

"I haven't absolutely made up my mind," I said suddenly.

But Boller refused to accept such a qualification.  He had me firmly by
the arm and brought me face to face with the loungers on the step.

"Gentlemen," he said, "allow me to present to you the Reverend Doctor
David Malcolm!"

And the loungers on the step saluted me as gravely as if I had been
that friend of Mr. Pound's, the Reverend Sylvester Bradley, thrice
moderator of the synod.

It was thus that I became the Reverend David Malcolm, and this was all
the authority I ever had for so honorable a cognomen.  So it was that
by the insidious raillery of a moment, Boller shook the foundations
laid by Mr. Pound in five years of labor, and it was not long before
the whole structure of his building tumbled into ruins.  My first
violent protest against a nickname which seemed to me to savor of
sacrilege served only to fasten it to me more securely.  Resigning
myself to it, I came to regard it lightly, and the longer I bore it in
jest the less I desired to earn it in honor.  It was a far cry from Mr.
Pound to Boller of '89, but I doffed the vestment and donned the motley
that September day, for Boller became my mentor and in all things my
model.  I was flattered by his condescending treatment.  Before a week
had passed my engrossing ambition was to wear trousers as wide as his
and to crown myself with a "smoky city" derby.  Having accomplished
this ambition by going into debt, I realized a greater, and pinned to
the lapel of my gayly checked coat, the pearl and diamond-studded pin
of Gamma Theta Epsilon.  That, of course, was Boller's fraternity, and
I think he could have persuaded me to join whatever he asked, so wholly
was I captured by his kindness.

In the study of Doctor Todd to which he led me, in the presence of the
great man, he did not venture any airy presentation.  Boller of '89
inside of the study door was quite a different person from the Boller
without it.  The bold manner fled.  He was suppressed, obsequious; even
his clothes seemed to shrink and grow humbly dun.  We entered so
quietly that the doctor, bending over his desk, did not hear us, and we
had to cough apologetically to apprise him of our presence.

"David Malcolm, sir--a new freshman," Boller said.

The doctor rose.  I saw a little man with a very large head covered
with hair which shot in all directions in scholarly abandon.  His neck
seemed much too thin to carry such a weight, but that, I think, was the
effect of a collar much too large, and a white tie so long that its
ends trailed down over an expanse of crumpled shirt.  The doctor's
black clothes looked dusty; the doctor himself looked dusty, yet the
smile with which he greeted me was as warm as the sunshine breaking
through the mist.

"This is splendid," he cried, shaking my hand fervently.  "Mr. Malcolm,
you are welcome.  You make the thirty-ninth new man this year--a record
in our history.  McGraw is growing.  Have I not predicted, Mr. Boller,
that McGraw would grow?"

To this Boller very readily assented, and the doctor, rubbing his hands
with delight at his vindication, placed a chair for me at his side and
began talking rapidly, not of me, nor of my plans, but of the
university.  He did mention incidentally that he had heard of me
through his dear friend, Mr. Pound--a man of whom the university was
proud--yet, though I was sure Mr. Pound had spoken well of me, he made
no mention of it.  I was of interest to him simply because by my coming
I had broken the records of McGraw's freshman class.  Last year it
numbered thirty-eight; this year, thirty-nine.  Through me the
university had taken another stately step onward.  He showed me the
blue-print and explained it in detail.  He spoke so earnestly that in a
moment he had abandoned the subjunctive mood, and was describing the
buildings as though they actually existed--here the new dormitory,
there the chemical laboratory, the gymnasium, the chapel.  So potent
was his imagination that when I was dismissed and stood again on the
steps, I found myself sweeping the campus in search of the beautiful
structures which he had pictured for me.  Not finding them, I was prey
to disappointment, so small did the McGraw that was appear beside the
McGraw that should be.  I began to suspect that those other
universities upon which Mr. Pound looked with such contempt might
resemble the creation of Doctor Todd's imagination, that there might be
more behind those foot-ball scores than my old mentor had cared to
disclose.  Distrust of him was rising in me, but I was not allowed to
remain long pondering over these things, for Boller had been waiting
for me and I was quickly in his possession.

Had the murmurs of rebellion risen to a point where I was planning to
abandon McGraw, my new friend must have blocked me.  He regarded me as
his property.  He installed me in the bare little room which for four
years was to be my home.  He took me to his own quarters and there gave
me such a glimpse of my new life as to make me forget my momentary
disillusionment.  While he dressed, arrayed himself more impressively
than ever in evening clothes, I divided my eyes between him and the
pictures on the wall.  Here Boller, in foot-ball clothes, sat on a
fence, wonderfully dashing, with a foot-ball under his arm; there he
was in base-ball toggery, erect with bat lifted, ready to strike; here
holding a baton, a conspicuous figure in a group of young men, looking
exceedingly conscious and uncomfortable in evening clothes--the glee
club, he explained, taken on their last tour of the State.  And while
he dressed, he painted such a glowing picture of life at McGraw as to
make it of little moment to me now whether or not Doctor Todd's dream
ever came true.  That I should grow to Boller's size and fashion was
all I asked.

As I watched him soaping and brushing his hair, struggling a half hour
with his tie and setting that hair all awry again, soaping and brushing
once more and at last emerging flawless from the conflict, my own
self-confidence ebbed away and the sense of my own rusticity and
awkwardness oppressed me.  I was to go with him to the first important
social event of the year, the reception to the new students, and seeing
how my friend arrayed himself for it, I wanted to crawl away to my own
room and hide there.  But he would not let me.  He laughed at my
excuses.  To be sure my clothes were not the best form, but it was not
to be expected that a man new to university life should be--here Boller
surveyed himself in the glass and I understood the implication.  So I
polished my shoes, wetted and soaped my own hair to rival his and went
with him.  Had he been leading me into battle I could not have been
colder with fright.  Had he not had a fast hold on my arm I am sure
that when I came face to face with the formidable array of faculty and
faculty wives waiting to receive me, I should have beaten a precipitate
retreat.  I had never before been received; I had never before been a
guest at any formal social function, and it was appalling to have to
charge this battery of solemn eyes.  But there was no escape.  Boller
pushed me into the hands of Doctor Todd, who gave another hearty
handshake to the thirty-ninth and presented him to Mrs. Todd.  She
assured me that it was a great pleasure to meet me, a statement
entirely at variance with the severity of her countenance and the
promptness with which she passed me on to Professor Ruffle, who
combined the chair of modern languages with the business management of
the college.  He with a dexterous twist consigned me to his good lady,
and thus I passed from hand to hand down the dreaded line.

The ordeal was over.  I had had my baptism of social fire.  Fear left
me, but not embarrassment.  I forgot that thirty-eight other young men
were being received and were undergoing numberless bewildering
introductions.  It seemed that the whole college was there simply to
meet me, and I returned its greeting in a daze.  If I lost Boller in
the press, I felt the need of his supporting arm and peered longingly
among the jostling crowd to find him.  He was continually going and
coming, but he never forgot me for any time.  He was wonderfully kind
about informing as to whom it was worth my while to be agreeable. . . .
Don't trouble with Brown; be pleasant to Jones, but look out for
Robinson, the fellow with a Kappa Iota Omega pin.  He had hardly warned
me against Robinson, before that young man was addressing me with great
cheerfulness.  I saw nothing whatever repulsive about him; but to
Boller I was evidently in danger.

"There's a young lady here who is dying to meet you," he whispered in
my ear as he drew me from the sinister clutches.

Oh, subtle flattery!  This was the first time I had ever had a young
lady dying to meet me.  Of course I understood that Boller had spoken
figuratively, and yet I did not question that the young lady had seen
me, and I was vain enough to hold it not at all unlikely that something
in my appearance had interested her.  Had not vanity overcome my
embarrassment, curiosity would have done so.  I wanted to see what she
was like who had been so affected by the sight of me.  And when I did
see her, when I stood before her on shifting feet, I would have given
the world to be somewhere else, yet, by a curious contradiction,
nothing could have dragged me from the spot, so fair was she to look on.

"Miss Todd--Mr. Malcolm," said Boller of '89.  Then he mopped his brow
with a purple silk handkerchief and added that it was very warm.  I
said that it was very warm, and Miss Todd smiled quite the loveliest
smile that I had ever seen.

I realized that this Miss Todd was the doctor's daughter, of whom I had
heard Boller speak in the most extravagant terms, and now it seemed to
me that his praise had quite failed to convey an adequate idea of her
charms.  She was very fair, very pink and white, with a Psyche knot of
shimmering hair; a tall, slender girl, clad in clinging, gauzy blue.
To my mind came the picture of Penelope Blight, the only girl to whom I
had ever given a thought; I remembered her tanned cheeks, her brown
arms, and hard little hands, and it seemed to me that even she could
never grow to such loveliness as this.

I loved Miss Todd.  Had she offered herself to me at that moment, I
should have married her on the spot, and now there was shattered my
boyish contempt for all that was weak and gentle, however beautiful.
The ideas which composed my mind rattled and tumbled about like the
bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, and in a flash they formed a
softer and more harmonious design.  The world was something more to me
than a happy hunting-ground, life more than an exciting adventure.  The
world was the home of Gladys Todd; life was to win her love; happiness
was to sit at her side.

And now I was sitting at her side in a seventh heaven; in one of the
silent places of the seventh heaven, for we had little to say to each
other.  We were tyros in the art of conversing, and our promising ideas
born of long mental struggles were stilled with bludgeons of assent and
dissent.  We knew not how to nourish and embellish them, and yet,
though there were long stretches of embarrassed silence, we were not
unhappy.  Even Boller found his subterfuges to drag me away quite
futile, and Miss Todd herself seemed content, for she met a dozen like
efforts with a quiet and unpenetrable smile.

So Gladys Todd and I sat the evening through as on a calm cloud,
looking down to earth and the antics of little men.  They crowded close
to us, laughing and talking; they called up to us and we did not hear
them; they jostled one another and they jostled us, but they could not
entice us into their restless social game.  They offered us coffee,
sandwiches and cake, and we brushed them away.  The very thought of
food was repulsive to me, and this was not because I had reached that
point where the immeasurable yearning of the heart dwarfs all mean
desire.  I was really hungry, but I had no mind to spoil the impression
which it was evident I had made; I had no mind to let Miss Todd see me
with a half-eaten sandwich poised in one hand and scattering crumbs
untidily, and in the other a cup of muddy, steaming fluid.  She seemed
to have a like conception of the undignity of eating, for when she
declined the proffered feast it was with the air of one who never ate
at all, who never knew the pangs of appetite, but lived on something
infinitely higher.  She even spurned the cake, and I was glad to let
her deceive me.  I liked to coddle myself with the belief that she
never ate.  I knew that she did not want me to see her eating, for then
I must have classed her with the mass of women--with Mrs. Ruffle, whom
I heard choking on a bit of nutshell; with her mother, who was standing
near us talking in a voice muffled in food; I must have slipped off the
cloud to earth.

But Gladys Todd was wise, with that innate wisdom of her sex in matters
of appearance when appearance is to be considered, and we held in
silence, loftily on our cloud.  And looking back on that evening, my
recollection is of misty, nebulous things; not of a passing flow of
incident, but of a welling up of new thoughts as I sat awkwardly
pulling at my fingers and caressing my collar.  Yet there were
incidents, too, of high importance to McGraw.  Doctor Todd declared
that the evening was historical.  Standing in the centre of a hushed
company, he announced that the year had broken all records for
matriculation; McGraw was growing; McGraw could not long be contained
within her present walls, and the world must soon realize that in
simple justice something must be done for her.  The doctor was not cast
down by the fact that nothing had been done and that there was no sign
of anything being done.  Hope was his watchword, and so hopefully did
he speak of the future that the collegiate Gothic quadrangles began to
rise in the imaginations of the company as dreams almost accomplished,
and so infectious was his confidence that his hearers caught the high
pitch of his enthusiasm, and when he had finished Boller sprang to a
chair, and, waving a coffee-cup, struck the first deep tones of "Here's
to old McGraw, drink her down!" and everybody joined in as fervently as
though it were a hymn.  They were not satisfied with it once, but
Doctor Todd himself cried, "Again," and, waving an imaginary cup, led
us off once more into the bibulous and inspiring song.

I remember joining in the first bars, but not because I was unduly
stirred by the love of my alma mater.  It was rather to give Gladys
Todd a hint of the rich depths of my voice.  To make an impression on
Gladys Todd had become the business of my life.  I was glad that I had
come to McGraw, because here I had met her.  McGraw's past and future
were of no moment to me; her growth was nothing.  She might shrivel up
until I was the only student, yet I should still be happy in my
nearness to Gladys Todd.  And what of Penelope?  I did think of
Penelope that night as I sat alone in my room, cocked on two legs of my
chair, gazing blankly at the ceiling.  I remembered the foolish,
childish promises which I had made to her that I should never forget
her.  Of course I should never forget her, no more than I should forget
the moon because I had beheld the sun's dazzling splendor.

But a man's ideas change, I said; his view broadens.  And I remembered
Penelope as I first saw her, in her tattered frock and with the faded
ribbon tossing in her hair.  I liked Penelope.  I thought of her with
brotherly affection.  But I said to myself that she could never grow to
the wonderful beauty of this Miss Todd.




CHAPTER IX

I was not long at McGraw University before I had attained my ambition to
be like Boller of '89.  I draped my legs in wide folds of shepherd's
plaid; the corners of a purple silk handkerchief protruded from my top
pocket; and as long as the "smoky city" was the proper form I crowned
myself with one of them, and as promptly discarded it for the newer
tourist's helmet, and that in turn for a yachting cap.  Must I confess
it?--before Boller left McGraw I had quite surpassed him as a model of
fashion.  But my ambition did not end here.  The very conceit which had
made me such an insufferable youth in my last days at home was the spur
which drove me to win every honor that could come to an undergraduate.
As Boller stepped out of offices I stepped into them--in presidencies and
secretaryships almost innumerable, into editorships, and even
captaincies.  Physically timid, I endured much pain in winning these last
honors.  The stretch of rolling turf which we called the foot-ball field
became the arena in which I suffered martyrdom daily.  I hated the game.
When I donned my padded toggery it was with the secret spirit I should
have felt in preparing for the rack, yet I played recklessly for the
_éclat_ it gave me.  To-day I have an occasional reminder of those
struggles in a weak knee, which has a way of twisting unexpectedly and
causing excruciating pain, but I consider that these twinges are fair
payment for the pleasure with which I contemplated my picture years ago
in the Harlansburg _Sentinel_, showing me in my foot-ball clothes, poised
on a photographer's fence.  The subject, the _Sentinel_ explained, was
Captain Malcolm of McGraw, who had made the winning touch-down in the
Thanksgiving-Day game with the Northern University of Pennsylvania.  The
photographer's fence, you might think, was the summit of my career at
McGraw, reached as it was in my last year there.  To the admiring eyes of
my fellows it was, but the McLaurins of Tuckapo and the Malcolms of Windy
Valley were above all a practical people and to them I am indebted for a
little common-sense, which told me that I could not play foot-ball all my
life, nor would the heavy bass voice, so effective in the glee club,
support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a
family.  I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it
would rise when I dreamed of a home.  That home was not a plain stone
farm-house, hidden among giant trees.  My view had broadened.  I dreamed
of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and a flat clipped lawn, with
a cement walk leading over it to an iron gate.  I looked back with
affectionate contempt to the art I had known in my youth, to the Rogers
group, Lady Washington's ball, Lincoln and his cabinet, the lambrequin
and the worsted motto.  On my walls there would be a Colosseum,
Rembrandt's portrait of himself, a smattering of Madonnas, a Winged
Victory, and a Venus de Milo.  To preside with me over such a house, to
sit at the piano of an evening and play accompaniments while I sang
sentimental songs, to fly with me over the country in a side-bar buggy,
behind a fleet trotter, I thought only of Gladys Todd.  She was
accomplished, highly trained, it seemed to me, in all the finer arts of
life.  In our valley the women never rose above their petty household
problems.  They could talk, but only of recipes and church affairs, and
if they left this narrow environment at all it was to fare far--to India
and China, the foreign mission field.  My view had broadened.  Gladys
Todd had her being in higher airs.  She painted.  Pastels of flowers and
plaques adorned with ideal heads covered the walls of the Todd parlor.
She wrote.  Doctor Todd assured me, speaking without prejudice, that his
daughter's essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," which she had written
out of pure love of the labor, equalled, if it did not surpass, the best
work of the senior class.  She sang.  Perhaps I see her now in the same
wizard lights of distance that glorified the mountains in my boyhood, but
I always recall her as a charming old-fashioned picture, sitting at her
piano and babbling her little songs in French and German.  Of the quality
of her French and German I had no means of judging, but that she could
use them at all was to me surpassingly enchanting.

So Gladys Todd had her part in completing the wreck of my worthy
ambition.  What Boller had begun, she unconsciously finished.  Yesterday
I had planned to make self-sacrifice the key-note of my life.  To-day I
could not picture her contented to move in the narrow sphere of a Mrs.
Pound, cramping her talents in the little circle of the Sunday-school and
the Ladies' Aid.  Her influence for good must be a subtler one than this.
To wield it, she must have her being in higher airs, in an atmosphere of
Colosseums, of Rembrandts, and Madonnas.  Remember, she was no longer the
shy girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life.  Then
she was only in her fifteenth year.  I was a junior when she produced her
lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the
profundity of her mind.  To match her, I must sit many a night driving my
way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was
in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table
and my brain wearied itself with abstruse equations.

If Gladys Todd unconsciously wrecked my early scheme of life, she
unconsciously spurred me to the hard task of learning.  I flattered
myself that in the new calling which I had chosen I should be able to be
even a greater power for good than in the old.  Having attained to
Boller's perfection, as I had abandoned Mr. Pound for him, I now
abandoned him for ex-Judge Bundy.  As Harlansburg was far above
Malcolmville, so ex-Judge Bundy was above Mr. Pound.  He was not the
creator of Harlansburg, but he was its providence.  He owned the bank and
the nail works, he was a patron of its churches, the leading figure at
the bar, and a man of wonderful eloquence.  Every year he delivered the
graduation address at the university, and mentally I modelled my future
appearance on the rostrum from his benign demeanor, his forceful
gestures, his rolling periods.  Yet deep as was my admiration, he held
views on which I differed with him.  I felt that I had gone deeper than
he into the logic of things.  To him, for example, the high tariff was
the source of all good, of life, health, food, clothes, and even morals.
My view was broader.  I brushed aside the beneficent local effect of any
system and went on to study its relation to all mankind.  He was prone to
forget mankind, and yet his faults were those of his generation and he
rem

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