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The Cottage of Delight: A Novel

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Title: The Cottage of Delight: A Novel

Author: Will N. Harben


        
Release date: September 12, 2010 [eBook #33715]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COTTAGE OF DELIGHT: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Annie McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Google
Print archive.









THE COTTAGE OF DELIGHT




BOOKS BY
WILL N. HARBEN

  THE COTTAGE OF DELIGHT
  THE HILLS OF REFUGE
  THE TRIUMPH
  ABNER DANIEL
  ANN BOYD
  THE DESIRED WOMAN
  DIXIE HART
  THE GEORGIANS
  GILBERT NEAL
  THE INNER LAW
  JANE DAWSON
  KENNETH GALT
  MAM' LINDA
  THE NEW CLARION
  PAUL RUNDEL
  POLE BAKER
  SECOND CHOICE
  THE SUBSTITUTE
  WESTERFELT

       *       *       *       *       *

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]




[Illustration]




THE COTTAGE OF DELIGHT

A NOVEL


BY

WILL N. HARBEN

_Author of "Ann Boyd," "Abner Daniel,"
"The Triumph," "The Hills of Judgment," etc._


[Illustration]


HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON


Copyright 1919, by Harper & Brothers




PART I




CHAPTER I


John Trott waked that morning at five o'clock. Whether it was due to the
mere habit of a working-man or the blowing of the hoarse and mellow
whistle at the great cotton-mills beyond the low, undulating hills
half a mile away he did not know, but for several years the whistle
had been his summons from a state of dead slumber to a day of toil.
The morning was cloudy and dark, so he lighted a dingy oil-lamp with a
cracked and smoked chimney, and in its dim glow drew on his coarse
lime-and-mortar-splotched shirt and overalls. The cheap cotton socks he
put on had holes at the heels and toes; his leather belt had broken and
was tied with a piece of twine; his shoes were quite new and furnished
an odd contrast to the rest of his attire.

He was young, under twenty, and rather tall. He was slender, but his
frame was sinewy. He had no beard as yet, and his tanned face was
covered with down. His hair was coarse and had a tendency to stand erect
and awry. He had blue eyes, a mouth inclined to harshness, a manner
somewhat brusk and impatient. To many he appeared absent-minded.

Suddenly, as he sat tying his shoes, he heard a clatter of pans in the
kitchen down-stairs, and he paused to listen. "I wonder," he thought,
"if that brat is cooking breakfast again. She must be, for neither one
of those women would be out of bed as early as this. It was three
o'clock when they came in."

Blowing out his light, he groped from the room into the dark passage
outside, and descended the old creaking stairs to the hall below. The
front door was open, and he sniffed angrily. "They didn't even lock it.
They must have been drunk again. Well, that's their business, not mine."

The kitchen was at the far end of the hall and he turned into it. It was
almost filled with smoke. A little girl stood at the old-fashioned
range, putting sticks of wood in at the door. She was about nine years
of age, wore a cast-off dress, woman's size, and was barefooted. She had
good features, her eyes were blue, her hair abundant and golden, her
hands, now splotched with smut, were small and slender. She was not a
relative of John's, being the orphaned niece of Miss Jane Holder, who
shared the house with John's mother, who was a widow.

The child's name was Dora Boyles, and she smiled in chagrin as he stared
down on her in the lamplight and demanded:

"Say, say, what's this--trying to smoke us to death?"

"I made a mistake," the child faltered. "The damper in the pipe was
turned wrong, and while I was on the back porch, mixing the
biscuit-dough, it smoked before I knew it. It will stop now. You see it
is drawing all right."

With an impatient snort, he threw open the two windows in the room and
opened the outer door, standing aside and watching the blue smoke trail
out, cross the porch floor, and dissolve in the grayish light of dawn.

"The biscuits are about done," Dora said. "The coffee water has boiled
and I'm going to fry the eggs and meat. The pan is hot and it won't take
long."

"I was going to get a bite at the restaurant," he answered, in a
mollified tone.

"But you said the coffee was bad down there and the bread stale," Dora
argued, as she dropped some slices of bacon into the pan. "And once you
said the place was not open and you went to work without anything. I
might as well do this. I can't sleep after the whistle blows. Your ma
and Aunt Jane waked me when they came in. They were awfully lively. The
fellows were singing and cursing and throwing bottles across the street.
Aunt Jane could hardly get up the stairs and had one of her laughing
spells. I think your ma was sober, for I could hear her talking steady
and scolding Aunt Jane about taking a dance from her with some man or
other. Did you see the men? They were the same two that had 'em out last
Friday night, the big one your ma likes and the one Aunt Jane says is
hers. I heard your ma say they were horse-traders from Kentucky, and
have lots and lots of money to spend. That jewelry drummer--do you
remember, that gave me the red pin?--he sent them with a note of
introduction. The pin was no good. The shine is already off of
it--wasn't even washed with gold."

John was scarcely heeding what she said. He had taken a piece of paper
from his pocket, and with a brick-layer's flat pencil was making some
calculations in regard to a wall he was building. The light was
insufficient at the door and he was now bending over the table near the
lamp.

"Do you want me to make you some flour-and-cream gravy?" she asked,
ignorant of his desire to be undisturbed. "The milk looks good and rich
this morning."

"No, no!" And he swore under his breath. "Don't you see I'm figuring?
Now I'll have to add up again."

She made the gravy, anyway. She took out the fried bacon, sprinkled
flour in the brown grease, stirred the mixture vigorously, and then
there was a great sizzling as she added a cup of milk, and, in a cloud
of fragrant steam, still stood stirring. "There," she said, more to
herself than to him. "I'm going to pour it over the bacon. It is better
that way."

He had finished his figuring and now turned to her. "Are your biscuits
done?" he asked. "I think I smell them."

"Just about," she answered, and she threw open the door of the oven,
and, holding the hot pan with the long skirt of her dress, she drew it
out. "Good! Just right!" she chuckled. "Now, where do you want to
eat--here or in the dining-room? The table is set in there. Come on. You
bring the coffee-pot."

Still absently, for his thoughts were on his figures, he followed her
into the adjoining room. It was a bare-looking place, in the dim light
of the lamp which she placed in the center of the small, square table
with its red cloth, for there was no furniture but three or four chairs,
a tattered strip of carpeting, and an old-fashioned safe with perforated
tin panels. Two windows with torn Holland shades and dirty cotton
curtains looked out on the side yard. Beneath the shades the yellowing
glow of approaching sunlight appeared; a sort of fog hovered over
everything outside and its dampness had crept within, moistening the
table-cloth and chairs. John poured his own coffee while standing, and
Dora went to bring the other things. His mind was busy over the work he
was to do. Certain stone sills must be placed exactly right in the
brickwork, a new scaffold had to be erected, and he wondered if the
necessary timbers had arrived from the sawmill which his employer,
Cavanaugh, had promised to have delivered the night before in order that
the work might not be delayed. John sat down. He burnt his lips with the
hot coffee, and then pouring some of it into his saucer, he drank it in
that awkward fashion.

"How is it?" Dora inquired. "Is it strong enough?" She was putting down
a dish containing the fried things and eyed his face anxiously.

"Yes, it is all right," he said. "Hurry, will you? Give me something to
eat. I can't stay here all day." He took a hot biscuit and buttered it
and began to eat it like a sandwich. She pushed the dish toward him and
sat down, her hands in her lap, watching his movements with the stare of
a faithful dog.

"Your ma and Aunt Jane almost had a fist-fight yesterday while they was
dressing to go out," she said, as he helped himself to the eggs and
bacon and began to eat voraciously. "Aunt Jane said she used too much
paint and that she was getting fat. Your ma rushed at her with a big
hair-brush in her hand. She called her a spindle-shanked old hag and
said she was going to tell the men about her false teeth. It would
really have been another case in court if the two horse-men hadn't come
just then. They quieted 'em down and made 'em both take a drink
together. Then they all laughed and cut up."

"Dry up, will you?" John commanded. "I don't want to hear about them.
Can't you talk about something else?"

"I don't mean no harm, brother John." She sometimes used that term in
addressing him. "I wasn't thinking."

"Well, I don't want to hear anything about them or their doings," he
retorted, sullenly. "By some hook or crook they manage to get about all
I make--I know that well enough--and half the time they keep me awake at
night when I'm tired out."

She remained silent while he was finishing eating, and when he had
clattered out through the hall and slammed the gate after him she began
to partake daintily of the food he had left. "He's awfully touchy," she
mused; "don't think of nothing but his work. Bother him while he is at
it, and you have a fight on your hands."

Her breakfast eaten, Dora went to the kitchen to heat some water for
dish-washing. She had filled a great pan at the well in the back yard
and was standing by the range when she heard some one descending the
stairs. It was Mrs. Trott, wearing a bedraggled red wrapper, her
stockingless feet in ragged slippers, her carelessly coiled hair falling
down her fat neck. She was about forty years of age, showed traces of
former beauty, notwithstanding the fact that the sockets of her gray
eyes were now puffy, her cheeks swollen and sallow.

"Is there any hot coffee?" she asked, with a weary sigh. "My head is
fairly splitting. I was just dozing off when I heard you and John making
a clatter down here. I smelled smoke, too. I was half asleep and dreamed
that the house was burning down and I couldn't stir--a sort of
nightmare. Say, after we all left yesterday didn't Jim Darnell come to
see me?"

"No, not him," Dora replied, wrinkling her brow, "but another fellow
did. A little man with a checked gray suit on. He said he had a date
with you and looked sorter mad. He asked me if I was your child and I
told him it was none of his business."

"That was Pete Seltzwick," Mrs. Trott said, as she filled a cup with
coffee from the pot on the stove and began to cool it with breath from
her rather pretty, puckered and painted lips. "You didn't tell him who
we went off with, did you?"

"No, I didn't," the child replied, then added, "Do you reckon Aunt Jane
would like some coffee before she gets up?"

"No. She's sound asleep, and will get mad if you wake her. Oh, my head!
My head! And the trouble is I can't sleep! If I could sleep the pain
would go away. Did John leave any money for me? He didn't give me any
last week."

"No," Dora answered, "he said the hands hadn't been paid off yet. You
know he doesn't talk much."

Mrs. Trott seemed not to hear. Groaning again, she turned toward the
stairway and went up to her room.




CHAPTER II


John had passed out at the scarred and battered front door, crossed the
floor of the veranda, and reached the almost houseless street, for he
lived on the outskirts of the town, which was called Ridgeville. On the
hillside to the right was the town cemetery. The fog, shot through with
golden gleams of sunlight, was rising above the white granite and marble
slabs and shafts. Ahead of him and on the right, a mile away, could be
seen the mist-draped steeples of churches, the high roof and cupola of
the county court-house. He heard the distant rumble of a coming
street-car and quickened his step to reach it at the terminus of the
line near by before it started back to the Square. The car was a toylike
affair, drawn by a single horse and in charge of a negro who was both
conductor and driver.

"Got a ride out er you dis time, boss," the negro said, with a smile, as
John came up. "Met some o' yo' hands goin' in. Want any mo' help ter
tote mortar en' bricks? 'Kase if you do, I'll th'o' up dis job. De
headman said maybe I was stealin' nickels 'kase de traffic is so low dis
spring, en' I didn't turn in much. If you got any room fer--"

"You'll have to see Sam Cavanaugh," John answered, gruffly. "If you
climb a scaffold as slow as you drive a car you wouldn't suit our job."

"Huh! dat ain't me; it's dis ol' poky hoss. I'm des hired to bresh de
flies offen his back."

The negro gave a loud guffaw over his own wit and proceeded to unhitch
the trace-chains and drive the horse around to the opposite end of the
car. John entered and took a seat. He drew from the pocket of his short
coat a blue, white-inked drawing and several pages of figures which
Cavanaugh had asked him to look over. A rather pretentious court-house
was to be built in a Tennessee village. Bids on the work had been
invited from contractors in all directions and John's employer had made
an estimate of his own of the cost of the work and had asked John's
opinion of it. John was deeply submerged in the details of the estimate
when the car suddenly started with a jerk. He swore impatiently, and
looked up and scowled, but the slouching back of the driver was turned
to him and the negro was quite unconscious of the wrath he had stirred.
For the first half-mile John was the only passenger; then a woman and a
child got aboard. The car jerked again and trundled onward. The woman
knew who John was and he had seen her before, for he had worked on a
chimney Cavanaugh had built for her, but she did not speak to him nor he
to her. That he had no acquaintances among the women of the town and few
among the men outside of laborers had never struck John as odd. There
were gaudily dressed women who came from neighboring cities and visited
his mother and Jane Holder now and then, but he did not like their
looks, and so he never spoke to them nor encouraged their addressing
him. A psychologist would have classified John as a sort of genius in
his way, for his whole thought and powers of observation pertained to
the kind of work in which he was engaged. Cavanaugh half jestingly
called him a "lightning calculator," and turned to him for advice on all
occasions.

Reaching the Square, John sprang from the car and, with the papers in
his hand and the pencil racked above his ear, he hurried into a
hardware-store and approached a clerk who was sweeping the floor.

"We need those nails and bolts this morning," he said, gruffly. "You
were to send them around yesterday."

"They are in the depot, but the agent hasn't sent 'em up yet," the clerk
answered. "We'll get them around to you by ten o'clock sharp."

"That won't do." John frowned. "We could have got them direct from the
wholesale house, and have had them long ago, but Sam would deal with
you. He is too good-natured and you fellers all impose on him."

"Well, I'll tell you what I'll do," the clerk proposed. "I'll send a
dray for them this minute and you'll have them on the ground in a
half-hour."

"All right," John said, coldly, and turned away.

The building on which he was at work was a brick residence in a
side-street near by which was being erected for a wealthy banker of
Ridgeville, and as John approached it he saw a group of negro laborers
seated on a pile of lumber at the side of the half-finished house.

"Here comes John now," one of them said, and it was significant that his
given name was used, for it was a fact that a white man in John's
position would, as a rule, be spoken of in a more formal manner, but to
whites and blacks alike he was simply "John" or "John Trott." This was
partly due, perhaps, to his youth, but there was no doubt that John's
lack of social standing had something to do with it. He had been nothing
but a dirty, neglected street urchin, a playmate of blacks and the
lowest whites, till Cavanaugh had put him to work and had discovered in
him a veritable dynamo of physical and mental energy.

"Good morning," several of the negroes said, cordially, but John barely
nodded. It was his way, and they thought nothing of it.

"Has Sam got here yet?" he inquired of a stalwart mortar-mixer called
Tobe.

"No, suh, boss, he 'ain't," said the negro. "I was gwine ter see 'im.
I'm out o' sand--not mo' 'n enough ter las' twell--"

"Four loads will be dumped here in half an hour," John broke in. "Did
you patch that hose? Don't let the damn thing leak like it did
yesterday."

"It's all right, boss. She won't bust erg'in." The negro smiled.
Evidently he had not washed his face that day, for splotches of
whitewash with globules of dry mortar were on his black cheeks and the
backs of his hands.

The whistle at a shingle-factory blew. It was eight o'clock, the hour
for work to begin.

"Mort'!" John's command was directed to two mortar-carriers, who
promptly grasped their padded wooden hods and made for the mortar-bed
where Tobe was already shoving and pulling the grayish mass to and fro
with a hoe.

John hung up his coat on the trunk of an apple-tree into which some
nails had been driven, and took his trowel and other tools from a long
wooden box with a sloping water-proof lid. He was about to ascend the
scaffold when he saw Cavanaugh approaching and signaling to him to wait.

The contractor was a man of sixty years, whose beard and hair were quite
gray. He was short and stocky, slow of movement, and gentle and genial
in his manner. He had been a contractor for fifteen years, and had
accumulated nothing, which his friends said was owing to his good nature
in not insisting on his rights when it came to charges and settlements.
Widows and frugal maiden ladies would have no one else to build for
them, for Sam Cavanaugh was noted for his honesty and liberality, and he
was never known to use faulty material.

"Mort' there! Get a move on you, boys!" John was eying his employer with
impatience as he approached. "Fill all four boards and scrape the dry
off clean!"

"Wait a minute, John!" Cavanaugh said, almost pleadingly. "I want to see
you about the court-house bid. I want to mail it this morning."

"What! And hold up this whole gang?" John snorted, impatiently.

"Oh, let 'em wait--let 'em wait this time," Cavanaugh said. "Where are
the papers?"

With a suppressed oath, John went to his coat and got them. "I haven't
time to go over all that, Sam," he answered. "Wait till dinner-time."

"But I thought you was going to look it over at home," the contractor
said, crestfallen, as he took the papers into his fat hands.

"Oh, I've looked them over, all right," John replied, "and that's the
trouble--that's why it will take time to talk it over."

"You mean-- I see." Cavanaugh pulled at his short, stiff beard
nervously. "I'm too high, and you are afraid I'll lose the job."

"Too high nothing!" John sniffed, with a harsh smile. "You are so damned
low that they will make you give double security to keep you from
falling down on it. Say, Sam, you told me you was in need of money and
want to make something out of this job. Well, if you do, and want me to
go up there in charge of the brickwork, you will have to make out
another bid. I'm done with seeing you come out by the skin of your teeth
in nearly every job you bid on. When a county builds a court-house like
that they expect to pay for it."

"Why, I thought-- I thought--" Cavanaugh began.

But John broke in: "You thought a thousand dollars would cover the
ironwork. It will take two. The market reports show that steel beams
have gone out of sight. Nails are up, too, and bolts, screws, locks, and
all lines of plumbing material."

"Why, John, I thought--"

"You don't keep posted." John glanced up at the scaffold as if anxious
to get to work. "Then look at your estimate of sash, doors, blinds, and
glass. You are under the cost by seven hundred at least. And where in
God's world could you get slate at your figure? And the clock and bell
according to the requisition? Sam, you made those figures when you were
asleep."

"Then you think I could afford-- I want the job bad, my boy--do you
reckon I could land it if I raised my offer, say by fifteen hundred?"

"You will have to raise it four thousand," John said, thoughtfully.
"Think of the risk you would be running. If the slightest thing goes
crooked the official inspectors will make you tear it down and do it
over. Look at your estimate on painting," pointing with the tip of his
trowel at a line on the quivering manuscript which the contractor held
before his spectacled eyes. "You are away under on it. White lead is
booming, and oil and varnish, and you have left out stacks of small
items--sash cords, sash weights, and putty."

"Then you think this won't do?" Cavanaugh's face was turning red.

"Do? It will do if you want to present several thousand dollars to one
of the richest counties in Tennessee. Why, one of those big farmers up
there could build that house and give it to the state without hurting
himself, while you hardly own a roof over your head."

"You may be right about my figures," Cavanaugh muttered. "Say, John, I
want to get this bid off. Leave the bricklaying to Pete Long and come
over to the hotel and write it out for me."

"And let him ruin my wall?" John snorted. "Not on your life! His mortar
joints are as thick as the mud in the cracks of a log cabin. I'll do it
to-night after I go home, but not before. I don't believe any man ought
to let one job stand idle in order to try to hook another. To-morrow is
Saturday. They couldn't get the bid anyway till Monday. There will be
plenty of time."

As John finished he was turning to the scaffold. "Well, all right,"
Cavanaugh called after him. "That will have to do."




CHAPTER III


When the steam-whistles of the shops and mills of Ridgeville blew that
afternoon at dusk John descended from the scaffold and put his tools
away. He was the last of the workers on the spot, and when he had put on
his coat he went around to the side of the building and with a critical
eye scanned the wall he had worked on that day.

"It will look all right when it is washed down with acid," he mused.
"That will straighten the lines and tone it up."

He was too late for the car and walked home. He found Jane Holder in the
kitchen, preparing supper. She was a slight woman of thirty-five, dark,
erect, with brown, twinkling eyes and short chestnut hair which had not
regained its normal length since it was cut during a spell of fever the
preceding winter. Touches of paint showed on her yellowish cheeks, and
her false teeth gave to her thin-lipped mouth a rather too full, harsh
expression.

"Oh, here you are!" She smiled. "I know you are hungry as a bear, but I
had my hands full with all sorts of things. I was sewing on my new
organdie and got the waist plumb out of joint. Your ma promised to help
fit it on me, but Harrington, one of those horse-dealers, come by in a
hurry to drive her to Rome behind two brag blacks, and she dropped me
and my work to get ready. She is always doing me that way. She makes a
cat's-paw of me. May Tomlin is going to have a dance at her house
to-night and wrote Harrington to bring her. She left me clean out,
though when May stayed here that time I was nice to her and introduced
her to all my friends. Your ma didn't care a rap about me. She was
going, and that was enough for her."

John simply grunted and turned away. He had not heard half she said. On
the back porch was a tin wash-basin and a cedar pail. He wanted to bathe
his face and hands, for his skin was clammy and coated with sand and
brick-dust, but the pail was empty, so he took it to the well close by
and filled it. He was about to return to the porch when he saw Dora, the
woman's skirt pinned up about her slight waist, coming from the cow-lot
with a tin pail half filled with milk.

"I had trouble with the cow," she said, wistfully, in her quaint,
half-querulous voice. "While I was milking, she turned around to see her
calf and mashed me against the fence. I pushed and pushed, but I
couldn't move her. Once I thought my breath was gone entirely. The calf
run along the fence, and she went after it, and that let me loose. I
lost nearly half the milk, and Aunt Jane will give me the very devil
about it. Well, Liz-- I mean your mother's gone for the night, and we
won't need quite so much. She's been drinking it for her complexion.
Some woman told her--"

"Oh, cut it out!" John cried, with a suppressed oath. "You chatter like
a feed-cutting machine."

He took the water to the porch, filled the basin, and washed his face,
hands, and neck. He was just finishing when Dora came to him with a
tattered cotton towel. "It is damp," she explained, apologetically. "I
ironed them in a hurry when they were too wet. They ought to have been
hung out in the sun longer, but the sun was low when I got through
washing, and so I brought some of them in too soon. Your ma and Aunt
Jane use the best ones in their rooms, and leave the ragged ones for
us."

"You forgot something you promised to do, brother John," she added,
timidly, as he stood vigorously wiping his face and neck.

"What was that?" he mumbled in the towel.

"Why, you promised to send a nigger to cut me some stove-wood and
kindling. I tried to cut some myself to-day, but the ax is dull and I
had trouble getting enough wood for to-night and in the morning. Will
you send him to-morrow?"

"Yes," he nodded. "I'll make one of the boys come over and cut it and
store it under the shed. There is a lot of pine scraps at the building.
I'll send a load of them over, too."

After supper, which he had with Jane Holder and her niece in the dimly
lighted dining-room, he went up to his room and prepared to work on the
estimates for Cavanaugh. He was very tired, and yet the calculations
interested him and drove away the tendency to sleep. Down-stairs he
heard Jane laughing and talking to some masculine visitor. He had a
vague impression that he knew the man, a young lawyer who was a
candidate for the Legislature. John had been approached by the man, who
had asked for his vote, but John was not of age and, moreover, he had no
interest in politics. In fact, he scarcely knew the meaning of the word.
Politics and religion were mysteries for which he had little but
contempt. He used to say that politicians were grafters and preachers
fakers, though he did believe that Cavanaugh, who was a devout
Methodist, was, while deluded, decidedly sincere. He heard Dora's voice
down-stairs as she timidly asked her aunt if she might go to bed.

"Have you washed the dishes and put them up?" Jane asked.

"Yes, 'm," the child said, and John heard her ascending the stairs to
her room back of his. She used no light, and he heard her bare feet
softly treading the floor as she undressed in the dark. Soon all was
quiet in her room, and he plunged again into his work.

Finally it was concluded, and he folded the sheets on which he had
written so clearly and so accurately and went to bed. It was an hour
before he went to sleep. He could still hear the low mumbling, broken by
laughter, below, but that did not disturb him. It was his figures and
estimates squirming like living things in his brain that kept him awake
till near midnight.

The next morning he decided to walk to the Square, that he might stop at
Cavanaugh's cottage and hand him the papers.

The little house of only six rooms stood in another part of the town's
edge. Close behind it was a swamp filled with willow-trees and bracken,
and farther beyond lay a strip of woodland that sloped down from a
rugged mountain range. There was a white paling fence in front, a few
fruit-trees at the sides, and a grape-arbor and vegetable-garden behind.
Mrs. Cavanaugh, a portly woman near her husband's age, was on the tiny
porch, sweeping, and she looked up and smiled as John entered the gate.

"Sam's just gone down to the swamp to see what's become of our two
hens," she said. "He'll be back in a few minutes. He'd like to see you.
He thinks a lot of you, John."

"I haven't time to wait," John explained, taking the papers from his
pocket and handing them to her. "Give these to him. He will know all
about them."

"I know-- I understand. They are the bid on that court-house." She
smiled broadly. "Sam was awfully set back. He told me all about it last
night. He admits he was hasty, but, la me! he is so anxious to land that
contract that he can hardly sleep. You see, he thinks maybe it is our
one chance to lay by a little. You see, Sam hasn't the heart to charge
stiff prices here among Ridgeville folks, but he feels like he's got a
right to make something out of a public building like that one. He says
you insisted on a bigger bid and he is between two fires. He wants to
abide by your judgment and still he is afraid you may have your sights
too high. You see, he says some of the biggest contractors will send in
bids and that they will cut under him because they are bigger buyers of
material."

"Sam's off there," John said, thoughtfully. "He can borrow all the money
he needs for a job like that and he can get material as cheap as any of
them. The main item is brick, and that is made right here in town, and
the stone is got out and cut here, too."

"You may be right," the woman said. "But to tell you the truth, John,
Sam is afraid you are too young to decide on a matter as big as this
deal. Several men he knows have advised him to make as low a bid as
possible."

"Well, if he cuts under the estimates I've made in those papers," John
returned, "he'll lose money or barely get out whole. I want to see him
make something in his old age. I'm tired of seeing folks ride a free
horse to death. He may be underbid on this, and if he loses the job
he'll curse me out, but I'm willing to risk it." John turned away.
"Just hand 'em to him," he said, from the little sagging gate, "and tell
him that is my final estimate. If he wants to change it he may do so.
I'm acting on my best judgment."

Half an hour later, as John was on the scaffold at work, Cavanaugh
crossed the street and slowly ascended the ladders and runways till he
stood on the narrow platform at the young mason's side. He held a long
envelop which had been stamped and addressed in his fat hand. John saw
him, but, being busy cutting a brick with his trowel and fitting into a
mortar-filled niche a bat of exactly the right size, he did not pause or
speak. It was his way, and had so long been his way that Cavanaugh had
become used to it.

"Hey, hey! Get a move on you down there!" John shouted. "This mort' is
getting dry!"

"Hold up a minute, John!" the contractor said. "My wife handed me the
papers. I wrote the letter and stamped it and put in the bid exactly as
you had it and was on the way to the post-office with it when I met
Renfro going in the bank by the side door. You know he expects to lend
me the money if it goes through--my bid, I mean--and he asked me what I
was going to do. I told him, and he wanted to look over the bid. I let
him, and he looked serious. He said he thought you was too steep, and if
I wanted to get the job, why, I'd better--"

"I know," John sneered. "He thinks he knows something about building,
but he is as green as a gourd. I've given you my judgment--take it or
not, Sam, as you think fit. As big as I've made that bid, I'm afraid you
will be sorry you didn't make it bigger."

"Renfro says young folks always aim too high," Cavanaugh ventured,
tentatively. "He's got the money ready, he says, and wants me to win."

John was cutting another brick in halves. His steel trowel rang like a
bell as he tossed the red brick like a ball in his strong, splaying
hand. Cavanaugh took a small piece of a tobacco-plug from the pocket of
his baggy trousers and automatically broke off a tiny bit and put it
into his hesitating mouth:

"I want that job, John," he faltered, as he began to chew. "I've set my
heart on it. It is the biggest deal I ever tackled, and I'd like to put
it through. I want me and you to go up there and work on it. It would be
a fine change for us both."

"Well, I don't want to go if it is a losing proposition," John said, as
he filled his trowel with mortar and skilfully dashed it on the highest
layer of bricks. "And if you cut under my estimate you will come out at
the little end of the horn."

Cavanaugh stood silent. A negro was dumping the contents of a hod on
John's board and scraping out the clinging mortar with a stick. When the
man had gone down the cleated runway and John was raising his line for
another layer of bricks, Cavanaugh sighed deeply.

"Well," he said, "I'll tell you what I'm going to do, John. I'm going to
mail the bid just as you made it out and trust to luck. I'm going to do
it. I admit I've been awfully upset over it, but I can't remember that
you ever gave me wrong advice, young as you are. My wife says I ought to
do it, and I feel so now, anyway."

It was as if John had not heard his employer's concluding words. He was
standing on his tiptoes, leaning over and carefully plumbing the wall on
the outside.

"Yes, I'm going to drop it in the post-office right now," Cavanaugh
said, as he started down the planks. "After all, there may be a hundred
bids sent in, and some of the bidders may have all sorts of political
pulls."

Again John seemed not to hear. He was tapping a protruding brick with
the handle of his trowel and gently driving it into line. "All
right--all right," he said, absently, and he frowned thoughtfully as he
applied his plumb to the wall and eyed it critically.




CHAPTER IV


The residence on which John was at work was almost finished. He was on
the highest scaffold one morning, superintending the slating of the
roof, when, hearing Cavanaugh shouting on the sidewalk below, he glanced
down. The contractor, with his thin alpaca coat on his arm, was
signaling to him to come down.

"All right," John said. "In a minute. I'm busy now. Don't throw the
broken ones away," he added to the workers. "Stack 'em up. We get
rebates on them, and have to count the bad ones."

"Right you are, boss," a negro answered, with a chuckle. "Besides, we
might split somebody's skull open."

"Oh, come on down!" Cavanaugh shouted again, with his cupped hands at
his lips. "I want to see you."

"I can't do two things at once," John said, with a frown and a
suppressed oath. "Say, boys, get that next line straight! Look for
cracked slate, take 'em out, and lap the smooth ones right."

He found Cavanaugh near the front fence. The contractor was fond of
jesting when he was in a good humor, and from his smiling face he seemed
to-day to be in the best of spirits.

"No use finishing the roof," he said, squinting along the north wall of
the building. "That wall is out of plumb and has to come down. Great
pity. Foundation must have settled. That's bad, my boy."

"Well, it was _your_ foundation, not mine," John retorted, seeing his
trend. "What do you want?"

Slowly Cavanaugh took a letter from the pocket of his baggy trousers and
held it in his fat hands. "What you think this letter is about?" He
smiled with tobacco-stained lips.

"How the devil would I know?" John asked, impatiently.

"Well, I'll tell you," Cavanaugh continued. "It is from the Ordinary of
Chipley County, Tennessee. He says he is writing to all the many bidders
on that court-house to let 'em know the final decision on the bids. He
was powerful sorry, he said, to have to tell me that I was nowhere nigh
the lowest mark. Read what he says."

Wondering over his friend's mood, John opened the letter. It was a
formal and official acceptance of the bid made by Cavanaugh. Without a
change of countenance John folded the sheet, put it into the envelop,
and handed it back. Some negroes were passing with stacks of slates on
their shoulders.

"Be careful there, Bob!" he ordered, sharply. "You drop another load of
those things and I'll dock you for a day's pay."

"All right now, boss," the negro laughed. "I got erhold of 'em."

"Well, what do you think?" Cavanaugh's gray eyes were twinkling with
delight. "Lord! Lord! My boy, I feel like flying! I've laid awake many a
night over this, and now it is ours. Gee! I could dance! I told Jim Luce
about it at the post-office just now. He is going to write it up in his
paper. Gosh! I'm glad this house is finished! We are foot-loose now and
can set in up there whenever we like."

It was like John Trott to make no comments. He was watching the workers
on the roof with a restless eye. The air resounded with the clatter of
the hammers and the grating of the slates one against the other as they
were selected and put down.

"You are an odd boy," Cavanaugh said, with a pleased chuckle. "What are
you looking at up there?"

"They are not on to that job." John frowned. "Those coons work like they
were at a corn-shucking. They don't drive the nails right. They are
breaking a lot of slate and losing enough nails to shingle a barn."

"Oh, they are all right." Cavanaugh spat and chewed unctuously. "Gee!
What if they do break a few slates? We are in the swim, my boy, and
we'll give that county the prettiest court-house in the state, and the
people will appreciate it." Therewith, Cavanaugh put his hand on John's
arm and the look of merriment passed. "I've got to say it, my boy, and
be done with it. You kept me from making a dern fool of myself and
losing the little I have saved up. If it hadn't been for you--"

"Oh, cut it out, Sam!" There was an expression of embarrassed irritation
on the young man's face. He was turning to leave, but Cavanaugh, still
holding his arm, drew him back.

"I won't cut it out!" He all but gulped, cleared his throat, and went
on: "I owe you my thanks and an apology. Only yesterday I got weak-kneed
because I hadn't heard from up there, and told Renfro and some others
who wanted to know about the bid that I had done wrong to listen to as
young a man as you are. I said that, and even talked to my wife about it
the same way, and now we all see you was right. John, I don't intend to
let you keep on at your old wages. You are not getting enough by a long
shot, and from now on I'll give you a third more. I'm going to make some
money out of this deal and you deserve something for what you have
done."

John looked pleased. "Oh, I'll take the raise, all right," he said, with
one of his rare smiles. "I can find a use for the money."

"Say, John"--Cavanaugh pressed his arm affectionately--"this will be our
first jaunt away any distance together. We can have a lot o' fun. I'm
going to order me a new suit of clothes, and I am going to make you a
present of one, too. You needn't kick," as John drew back suddenly, "it
will be powerful small pay for all the figuring you did at night when
you was plumb fagged out."

"Well, I'll take the suit, too," John said, and smiled again. "You are
liberal, Sam, but you always was that way."

"Well, we'll go to the tailor shop together at noon," Cavanaugh said,
delightedly. "You can help me pick out mine and I'll see that Parker
fits you. You have got some shape to you, my boy, and you will cut a
shine up there."

Leaving his employer, John ascended to the roof again, this time through
the interior of the almost finished house, and out by a dormer window.
The old town stretched out beneath him. To the east the hills and
mountains rose majestically in their blue and green robe under the
mellow rays of the sun. A fresh breeze fanned John's face. A man near
him broke a slate by an unskilful stroke of the hammer and raised an
abashed glance to John.

"It is all right, Tim," he said. "I'm no good at slating myself. You
are doing pretty well for a new hand. Say, Sam's landed that court-house
contract."

The nailers and their assistants had heard. The hammers ceased their
clatter. Cavanaugh was seen standing in the middle of the road, looking
up at them. A man raised a cheer. Hats and hammers were waved and three
resounding cheers rang out. Cavanaugh took off his straw hat and stood
bowing, smiling, and waving.

"Lucky old duck!" Tim, who was a white man, said, "and he was afraid it
would fall through."

John's glance roved over the town, the only spot he had ever known.
Beyond the outskirts ran the creeks in which he had fished and bathed as
a ragged boy. Toward the south rose the graveyard a mile away. He could
see the dim roof of the ramshackle house in which he had lived since he
was five years of age. John looked at his watch.

"Get a move on you, boys," he said, in his old tone. "Say, that last
line is an eighth too low at this end. Lift it up. Take off the three
slates this way and nail 'em back. Damn it! Take 'em off, even if you
break 'em. I won't have a line like that in this job. It shows plain
from this window."




CHAPTER V


Two weeks later Cavanaugh and John left for Cranston, the Tennessee
village where the new building was to be erected. They had on their new
clothes and were smoking cigars which Cavanaugh had bought. Some of the
negroes and whites who had worked under them came to the depot to see
them off, and they all stood on the platform, waiting for the train.
There was much mild gaiety and frequent jests. Cavanaugh was quite
talkative, but John, as usual, was silent. The men had jested with the
contractor about his new clothes, but no one dared to allude to John's.
Indeed, John seemed unconscious of his change of appearance. But for his
coarse red hands, his rough, tanned face, and stiff, unkempt hair, he
would have appeared rather distinguished-looking. A bevy of young ladies
of the best social set of the town, accompanied by several of their
young men associates, had gathered to see one of their number off. They
passed close to John, but paid not the slightest attention to him, and
they made no impression on him. That there was such a thing as social
lines and castes had never occurred to him. He saw the young lawyer who
stealthily visited Jane Holder join the group and stand chatting, but
even this gave him no food for reflection. In regard to extraneous
matters John Trott seemed asleep, but in all things pertaining to his
work he was wide awake. His mental ability, strength of will, and dearth
of opportunity would have set a psychologist to speculating on his
future, but there were no psychologists in Ridgeville. Ministers,
editors, teachers, fairly well-read citizens, met John Trott almost
daily and passed him without even a thought of the complex conditions of
his life and of the inevitable awakening ahead of him.

When the train came, John and Cavanaugh said good-by to their friends
and got aboard. They threw their cigars away and found seats in the best
car on the train. It was the first trip of any length that John had ever
taken, and yet he did not deport himself like a novice. Cavanaugh bought
peanuts, candy, and a newspaper from the train "butcher," but John
declined them. His employer had spoken to him about some inside walls
and partitions which had to be so arranged in the new building as to
admit of some alcoves and recesses not down in the specifications, and
John was turning the matter over in his mind.

A few miles from Ridgeville a young couple got on the train and came
into the car. The young man was little older than John and looked like a
farmer in his best clothes. He was flushed and nervous. His companion
was a dainty girl in a new traveling-dress. They sat near an open window
and through it came showers of rice, a pair of old slippers, and merry
jests from male and female voices outside.

"Bride and groom," Cavanaugh whispered, nudging his companion. "She is a
cute little trick, ain't she? My, my! how that takes me back!"

The entire car was staring at the self-conscious pair, who were trying
to appear unconcerned. The train moved on. John was no longer thinking
of his work. His whole being was aflame with a new thought. Strange, but
the idea of marriage as pertaining to himself had never come to him
before. The sight of the pair side by side, the strong masculine neck
and shoulders, and the slender neck and pretty head of the girl with the
tender blue eyes, fair skin, and red lips appealed to him as nothing had
ever done before.

"That is the joy due every healthy pair in the world," Cavanaugh went
on, reminiscently. "Life isn't worth a hill of beans without it. These
young folks will settle down in some neat little cottage filled with
pure delight--that's what it will be, a cottage of delight for them.
He'll work in the field and she will be at home ready for him when he
gets back. Look how they lean against each other! I can't see from here,
but I will bet you he is holding her little soft hand."

For the next half an hour the couple was under John's observation. He
found himself unable to think of anything aside from his own
mind-pictures of their happiness.

Cavanaugh was full of the idea also. "It is ahead of you, too, my boy,"
he said. "You are old enough and are now making enough money to start
out on. Pick you some good, sweet, industrious girl. There are plenty of
the right sort, and they will love a man to death if he treats 'em
right. Look, she's got her head on his shoulder, but she's not going to
sleep. She's just playing 'possum. There, by gum! he kissed her! If he
didn't I am powerfully mistaken. Well, who has a better right?"

The pair left the train at a station in the woods where there were no
houses and two wagon-roads crossed and where a buggy and a horse stood
waiting. Through the window John saw the bridegroom leading the bride
toward it. Beyond lay mountain ranges against the clear sky, fields
filled with waving corn and yellowing wheat. The near-by forests looked
dank, dense, and cool.

"It is ahead of you, too, my boy!" The old man's words rang again in
his ears as the train moved on and the pair and their warm faces were
lost to view. John took out some notes he had made in regard to the
masonry of a vault in the new building and tried to fix his mind on
them, but it was difficult to do. The mental picture of that young
couple filled his whole being with a strange titillating warmth. Within
an hour his view of life had broadened wonderfully. He was not devoid of
imagination and it was now being directed for the first time away from
the details of his occupation. He could not have analyzed his state of
mind, but he had taken his first step into what was a veritable new
birth.

"It is ahead of you, too, my boy!" Nothing Cavanaugh had ever said to
him could have meant so much as those words. A home, a wife all his own.
Why had he never thought of it before? He was conscious of a sort of
filial love for the old contractor that was as new as the other feeling.
He was conscious, too, of a new sense of manhood, and a pride in his
professional ability that was bound to help him forward.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived at Cranston. The
Ordinary of the county, at Cavanaugh's request, had arranged board for
the two men at the house of a farmer, there being no hotel in the
village where board could be had by the week at a rate low enough for a
laborer's pocket. So at the station they were met by the farmer himself,
Richard Whaley, who stepped forward from a group of staring mountaineers
and stiffly introduced himself.

He was a man of sixty-five, bald, gray as to hair and beard, and
slightly bent from rheumatism. His skin was yellowish and had the brown
splotches which indicate general physical decay.

"My old woman is looking for you," he said, coldly. "She made the
arrangement. I have nothing to do with it. She and my daughter do all
the cooking and housework. If they want to make a little extra money I
can't object. The whole county is excited over the new court-house. They
act and talk like it was Solomon's temple, and will look on you two as
divine agents of some sort. Folks are fools, as you no doubt know."

"A little bit--from experience," Cavanaugh joked. "The Ordinary tells me
you are a Methodist. That's what I am, brother, and I'll love to live
under a Methodist roof once more."

"Yes, thank God! that's what I am," Whaley said. "My wife is, too. I'll
show you our meeting-house when we pass it. I've got a Bible-class. It
is the biggest in the county--twenty-two members."

"That is a whopper," Cavanaugh said. "I'd like to set and listen
sometimes. I've had fresh light given me many a day by other men's
interpretations of passages I'd overlooked."

"We are very thorough," Whaley responded, warming up to the subject.
Then he turned to John. "What church do you belong to?" he asked, rather
sharply.

"I haven't joined any yet," John answered. He was slightly embarrassed
and yet could not have told why.

"Oh, he will come around all right before long," Cavanaugh thrust in,
quickly. "I've got him in charge."

"Well, he is old enough to affiliate somewhere," the farmer said,
crisply. "It is getting entirely too common these days to meet young
folks that think they can get along without divine guidance. That is our
meeting-house there. We are laying off to put a fresh coat of paint on
it in the fall."

They passed the little steepled structure and walked on down the thinly
inhabited street which was as much a country road as a street, till they
came to a two-story house with a small farm behind it. A tall, thin
woman in a gingham dress sat on the long veranda and rose at their
approach.

"This is the house and that's my wife," Whaley explained. "The property
isn't mine. I'm just a renter, but I can keep it as long as I want to.
We've been here ten years." He opened the gate and let the new-comers
enter ahead of him. They were introduced. Mrs. Whaley shook hands as
stiffly as had her husband.

"Come right in," she said, smiling. "I know you've had a hot, dusty
train-ride, and I reckon you will want to rest."

They put down their bags in the little bare-looking hallway from which a
narrow flight of stairs ascended, and followed her into a big parlor on
the right. Here they took chairs. The afternoon sun shone in through six
wide windows and fell on the clean, carpetless floor. A wide fireplace
was filled with the boughs of mountain cedar, and the hearth had been
freshly whitewashed. There was a table in the center of the room, a tiny
cottage organ between two windows, and some crude and gaudy print
pictures in mahogany frames on the walls. The four individuals formed an
awkward, purposeless group, and no one seemed able to think of anything
to say. John was wondering what could possibly happen next, when Mrs.
Whaley said:

"I know you both must be thirsty. I'll get Tilly to fetch in some fresh
water from the well."

She rose stiffly and left the room. "Oh, Tilly! Tilly! where are you?"
they heard her calling in the back part of the house. "Leave the
churning a minute and draw up a bucket of fresh water. They are here."

Through the open windows from the shaded back yard John heard a girlish
voice answering, "I'm coming, mother." Then there was a whir of a loose
wooden windlass and the dull thump of a bucket as it struck the surface
of the water. This was followed by the slow creaking of the windlass and
a sound of pouring water.

"We didn't come here to be waited on like a couple of nabobs," Cavanaugh
jested. "Let's go out to the well. We ought to begin right and be done
with it. The last time I boarded in the country I chopped my own
fire-wood and toted it in. I'd have washed the dishes I messed up, but
the women of the house wouldn't let me."

Without protest Whaley got up and led the way through the sitting-room,
dining-room, and kitchen to the well in the yard where Mrs. Whaley and
her daughter, a girl of about eighteen years of age, stood filling some
glasses on a tray.

"My daughter Tilly," Whaley said, indifferently. "The only one I have
left. Her two sisters married and moved off West. Her brother Tom died
awhile back."

The girl seemed shy, and scarcely lifted her eyes as she advanced and
held out her hand first to Cavanaugh and then to John. She was slight of
build, not above medium height, and had blue eyes and abundant chestnut
hair.

"Pass the water 'round," her mother instructed her, but both John and
Cavanaugh stepped forward and helped themselves. For a moment Tilly
stood hesitating, and then she turned to her churn at the kitchen door
and began to raise and lower the dasher. She had rolled up her sleeves,
and John, who was covertly watching her, saw her round white wrists and
shapely fingers. The way her unbound hair fell about her neck and lay
quivering on her moving shoulders caught and held his fancy. How
gloriously different she seemed from the only girls he had ever met, the
bedizened creatures whom he sometimes saw at his home with his mother
and Jane Holder! And, strange to say, he almost pitied Tilly for being
bound as she was to the two unemotional old people who seemed to rule
her as with a rod of iron. What a patient little sentient machine she
seemed!

"You'll want to see your rooms, I reckon," Whaley said. "Amelia'll show
you up-stairs. The Ordinary said he didn't think you'd be
over-particular. They have plenty of air and light."

John was delighted with his room. It was palatial compared to the sordid
den he inhabited at home in its constant disorder and dirt. As he
glanced about him, noted the snowy whiteness of the towels at the
wash-stand, the freshly laundered white window-curtains, and the clean
pillows and coverlet of the great wide bed, he had a sense of meeting a
new experience in life that was vastly gratifying. He heard Cavanaugh
clattering about in his room across the narrow passage, and smiled. The
old man's words, "A cottage filled with pure delight," rang in his ears
like a haunting strain of music.




CHAPTER VI


They had supper at six o'clock in the big dining-room. The sun was not
yet down, and through the open windows and door John looked out on a
small but orderly arranged flower-garden upon which the slanting rays of
the sun rested. Whaley sat at the head of the table, his wife at the
foot. Tilly was not in sight. She was in the adjoining kitchen, and as
he sat with his wrinkled hands crossed over his down-turned plate, her
father suddenly called out to her.

"Tilly," he cried, "come set down till the blessing is asked, and then
you can bring the things in."

Her face flushed as from the heat of the stove, the girl came in and
slipped demurely into a chair opposite John and next to Cavanaugh. John
had never gone through such an ordeal before, and he felt awkward. He
noticed that all the others had lowered their heads, and he did
likewise, though he had a certain rebellious feeling against it.

"I don't know what you have been accustomed to," Whaley suddenly said,
looking at Cavanaugh, "but I have always held, as a principle, that the
head of a house ought to ask the blessing on it; so you will understand,
sir, that in failing to call on you I mean no disrespect."

"Oh, not at all," the contractor mumbled. "I think you are right about
that. I always do it at home. Of course, if there is an ordained
minister on hand, I ask him, but otherwise I don't."

"Well, I don't even in that case," Whaley answered, crustily. "I've
always made it a rule, and I stick to it." Then he cleared his throat,
lowered his head again, and prayed aloud at some length. John could not
have recalled afterward what it was that he had said, for the most of
the words used were unusual and high-sounding.

The prayer was no sooner ended than Tilly rose and hastened from the
room. She came back almost instantly with a great platter of fried ham
and eggs and a plate of steaming biscuits, and began to pass them
around.

"What is the matter with your hand, Tilly?" her mother asked, and John,
who was helping himself from the dish the girl was offering him, noted
that a red welt lay across the back of one of her small hands.

"I burnt it getting the biscuits out," Tilly answered, almost beneath
her breath.

"How foolish!" her mother retorted. "You are getting more and more
careless. Bring in the coffee next. I want to be pouring it out. Most
folks like to start a meal that way."

Tilly disappeared and returned with the coffee-pot. Somehow John, as he
ate his supper, found himself thinking of the painful burn on Tilly's
hand, and was oblivious of the conversation regarding religious matters
between Cavanaugh and Whaley and his wife.

"Now, come set down and eat your supper," Mrs. Whaley said to her
daughter, and Tilly took the chair she had occupied while grace was
being said. She kept her eyes downcast, and John noticed her long,
slightly curled lashes as they rested on her flushed cheeks and her
pretty, tapering hands. She said nothing during the entire meal.

When supper was over, Whaley led the two men into the parlor and lighted
an oil-lamp which stood on the mantel-piece, for it was growing dark.
They had seated themselves when Whaley rose and took a song-book from
the cottage organ and extended it to Cavanaugh.

"Have you got this new book of revival hymns down your way?" he
inquired.

"I don't think so," the contractor answered, inspecting it.

"Well, it is by all odds the best all-round collection I've ever run
across," Whaley said. "Tilly plays all of 'em pretty well, and we have a
regular song-service here whenever we feel like it. Do you sing,
Mr.--Mr. Trott?"

"No, sir," John replied. "I have no turn that way."

"Well, maybe you'll get the hang of it while you are here," Whaley
smiled coldly. "I don't believe there is any way in the world that a man
can get to God quicker, straighter, or closer than in sacred song. I've
seen a congregation stand out against the finest appeal ever made from
the stand, and the minute some good singer started a rousing hymn they
were all ablaze, like soldiers following fife and drum." Herewith Whaley
went to the door and called out:

"Amelia, let the dishes rest and you and Tilly come in. We want some
music."

"Good! Good!" Cavanaugh chimed in, rubbing his hands. "We are in luck,
John. If there is anything on earth I like after a hearty meal it is
hymn-singing. It takes me back to the good old camp-meeting days when
everybody, young and old, sang, and even shouted when the spirit was on
them."

Tilly and her mother came in. The girl went to the organ on which her
father was placing the lamp, and sat on the stool. The light fell on her
face and John, sitting against the wall on her right, had a full view of
it and her graceful figure. Her father had opened the song-book and
placed it on the music-rack. Her slender fingers rested on the yellow
keys; the red welt on her hand showed plainly, and John wondered if it
pained her much. There was no way of deciding, for she showed no sign of
suffering. She began to pump the organ with her little feet. She drew
out the stops and began to play. She did it badly, but there were no
expert musical critics in the room. Whaley and his wife stood behind her
and both of them sang loudly. Cavanaugh had never heard the song, and so
he did not take active part, though John saw him beating time with his
finger and now and then contributing a suitable bass note. Cavanaugh was
delighted with the hymn.

"Why don't you join in, little girl?" he asked, gently, as he beamed on
Tilly.

"I can't sing and play at the same time," she explained, modestly,
catching John's attentive stare and avoiding it, her brown lashes
flickering.

They sang some old familiar hymns now, and all three of the singers
joined in together.

"I tell you we make a good trio," Whaley exulted. "You've got a roaring
bass, Brother Cavanaugh. We'll surprise the natives some night at
prayer-meeting. We'll set to one side like and spring it on 'em all at
once."

John felt like an alien in the religious and musical atmosphere and was
somewhat irritated by the announcement later from Whaley that he always
had a chapter read from the Bible and a prayer before going to bed, and,
as he believed in retiring early, he suggested that they have the
service over with. Accordingly, he removed the lamp from the organ to
the table, and from the sitting-room brought a big family Bible. A
further surprise was in store for John, for Whaley placed a chair under
the lamplight and called on his daughter to sit in it. He smiled coldly
as she obeyed and opened the Bible. "You may think it odd,
Brother--er--Cavanaugh--you've got a hard name to remember, sir. I say,
you may think it odd for me to call on my daughter to read out loud this
way. I admit it isn't the general custom, but, the truth is, I
discovered that she'd got the habit of not listening to me while I was
reading, or commenting, either. So I made up my mind that I'd have her
do the reading herself. It has worked pretty well. She is in my
Bible-class, and now answers as many questions right as any of the rest,
no matter the age or the education."

Tilly was blushing as she lowered her head over the big tome with its
brass corners and clasps, and John was sorry for her. A storm of rage
against her father ran through him. This was dispelled quickly, however,
for when the girl began to read in her clear and sweetly modulated voice
he sat transfixed by the sheer charm and music of the delivery. Her neck
was bare, and he saw her white throat throbbing like that of a warbling
bird. He did not grasp the full sense of what she read, for some of the
words were unusual to him. Had she been reading in a foreign tongue, it
would have been no more marvelous to him. Her flush had died down; her
eyes rested unperturbed on the page; one little hand curved around a
corner of the big book; the fingers of its mate held a leaf ready to be
turned. The lamplight fell into the brown mass of hair that crowned her
well-poised head like a halo. Her long lashes seemed mystic films
through which he glimpsed her eyes. Looking across the room, he saw
Cavanaugh, his rough fingers interlocked over his knee, staring steadily
at the reader. Was it imagination or were the old man's eyes actually
moist? They seemed to glitter in the light.

Tilly finished the chapter and slowly closed the book, fastening the
clasps carefully. She raised her eyes to John's face and quickly, almost
guiltily, looked away. Her father had risen and stood holding the back
part of his chair with his two hands.

"Now we'll kneel down and pray," he said. "Brother--er--er--Cavanaugh, I
don't know what your habit or turn is, but I'm going to ask you to lead
if you feel so inclined."

Cavanaugh was rising. "I make a poor out," he said, "but I'll do my
best. I--I don't often refuse when called on." He was looking at John
almost appealingly. "I--I regard it as a duty to--to my religion and
membership."

The strange, alien feeling swept over John again. He had never heard his
jovial associate pray, though he had been told that Cavanaugh did so now
and then; besides, John felt as if he were being personally imposed
upon. He was not religious; he had never even been to church, and here
he was expected to kneel down with the others. Whaley and his wife knelt
side by side, the worn bottoms of their coarse shoes standing steadily,
their heels upward. As John knelt he felt the uneven planks of the floor
press into his knees unpleasantly, and he moved them for a more
comfortable spot. He had an impulse to laugh over his own predicament,
but checked it, for, glancing to his right, he saw Tilly bent over her
crude split-bottom chair like a wilted human flower. She looked so weary
and so utterly helpless, and yet so brave and patient. As he feasted on
her sweet profile he wondered if she, like himself, were thinking of
other things than the ceremony at hand. He could not decide. Surely, he
thought, she could not be so silly, with that broad brow and those
discerning eyes, as to believe that there was an invisible being away
off somewhere who was now listening to what Cavanaugh was saying in his
faltering, singsong tone. Somehow he expected absolute truthfulness to
be found in the girl. As for the others, they knew what they claimed was
untrue. They--even Cavanaugh--were hypocrites, and in their secret souls
they knew it.

Cavanaugh's prayer was labored--it did not flow as from the tongue of a
man who loves the sound of his own mouthing--and it was soon ended.
Whaley's smug omission of any comment on it showed the farmer's estimate
of its value or lack of value in any religious campaign.

Now that they were all standing, John found himself near Tilly. He felt
that he was expected to say something, for she had raised a dubious
glance to his face, but his tongue was tied. How could he speak there
under such circumstances when he had never met a girl of her sort on any
terms of social equality? He grew hot from head to foot. In kneeling his
trousers had caught a white thread from the floor. He saw it and bent to
remove it. It was too delicate for his thick, brick-worn fingers to
grasp, and he stood awkwardly trying, now to lift it, again to brush it
off. He failed, and then he forgot and swore softly. Tilly may not have
heard the oath, but something excited her mirth and she smiled--smiled
straight into his eyes. He smiled in return, for he had never seen such
a smile as hers before. In rippling streams of delight it seemed to go
through his whole being. He saw her pretty hand start down toward the
thread and then check itself as she noticed her mother looking at her.
It was as if she had started to remove the thread herself and decided
that the act would invoke criticism from her elders as a thing too
forward for a girl to do.

With a laugh that was bold now in its sheer merriment John took out his
pocket-knife, opened the blade, and managed to pick up the thread.

"Well, I reckon you are both tired and we are early to bed and early to
rise here," Whaley was saying. "You both know the way up-stairs."

There were no formal good-nights exchanged. The Whaleys withdrew to
their rooms on the ground floor and John and Cavanaugh went up the
stairs. John thought Cavanaugh would go straight into his room, but he
followed him into his and helped him find and light his lamp.

"I want to tell you something, my boy," he began, his eyes shifting back
and forth from John's face to the jagged flame of the small lamp. "I
want to get something out of me and be done with it. I made a regular
fool of myself there to-night."

"I don't understand," John said, in surprise.

"Well, I did," Cavanaugh went on, flushed, and in a voice that shook a
little. "That prayer of mine was the worst mixed-up mess I ever got off.
You see, I never have talked much religion to you boys down home, and as
far as I know none of you ever heard me pray out loud in public. Well,
I--somehow when I got down to-night I just got to thinking about what
_you_ thought--you see, I've heard you sneer at the belief I hold in
common with many others, and somehow to-night--well, I found that I was
thinking more about what you thought of me than what I was prepared to
say, and so I balled it all up. I can do first-rate in meeting at home,
but I slid from it to-night. Why, I almost heard Brother Whaley grunt
when I suddenly forgot what I started to say and switched off to
something else. Oh, I made a fool of myself! Now, really didn't you
think so?"

"I didn't hear what you were saying," John answered. "I wouldn't care if
I was you."

"Well, I _do_ care," Cavanaugh muttered. "If ever a man insulted his
God, I did mine to-night. I was reeling off a lot o' stuff, but not one
word of it was from the heart, and a prayer that don't come from the
heart ain't worth shucks. Mine wasn't much more than a song and dance
before the Throne, and I'm ashamed of it."

"I wouldn't care," John repeated, still absently.

"Well, I don't know as I do care much about what that old hard-shell
codger, or his wife that is just like him, thinks, but I do for that
little girl. My Lord! ain't she sweet?"

John stared straight and warmly, but said nothing. He was conscious of
the intensest interest and that he was trying not to show it.

Cavanaugh stood slowly shaking his head in the negative way that implies
affirmation. "Yes, yes, she is a wonderful, wonderful little trick.
While she was reading there to-night I seemed to be listening to the
voice of an angel that had just come from behind the clouds. I was
shedding tears of joy from every pore of my old body. I could have taken
her in my arms and cried my heart out. That is why I wish I could have
done better in my prayer. What she read was from her soul. '_The Lord is
my shepherd; I shall not want!_' I'll never to my dying day forget them
words, and the sweet twist she gave to them. I never had a child, John,
and if I could have had one like her, I--I-- And just think of it! They
make her work like a slave, even with her little hand blistered like it
was to-night! Old Whaley thinks he walks side by side with God in all
his rules and regulations, but his child is one of God's own glories,
and don't you forget it."

Turning suddenly, as if overcome with emotion, Cavanaugh stalked out
through the door and crossed the passage into his own room. As John
undressed he heard the old man's heavy tread on the floor. A window was
raised. There was sudden silence. Cavanaugh was looking out into the
starlight.

John was tired, but he remained awake till near midnight. Fancies filled
his mind which he had never had before. Why did he think so often of the
bride and bridegroom he had seen on the train that morning?

"It is ahead of you, too, my boy," Cavanaugh's words rang in his ears.
Could such a thing be for him, really for him? How could it be? He had
given no thought to women. He had never dreamed of marriage, but
to-night the sheer idea of it was fairly tearing his being to shreds,
and the flame of the impulse had risen in the face of a girl--a poor,
abused, misunderstood girl. The world lay before him. He would rise in
his trade, and earn money which he would lavish on the little filial
slave he already adored.

He slept and dreamed that he heard Cavanaugh saying: "It is the cottage
of delight, my boy, and it is for you and her--for you and her. Don't
forget, for you and her!"




CHAPTER VII


The foundation for the court-house was soon laid. The county officials
had announced to Cavanaugh that a day had been appointed for a
ceremonious laying of a corner-stone, to which all the countryside had
been invited. A block of marble properly marked and dated was ordered
and came. The occasion was to be a great one. A brass band was expected
from a near-by town. There was to be a barbecue, with speeches and
singing from a hastily improvised platform.

John himself supervised the construction of the platform and the long
tables upon which the food was to be served.

The day arrived. The weather was most favorable, there being cool
breezes from the mountains and sufficient clouds to shut off the heat of
the sun. The speakers' stand was hung with flags and decorated with
flowers and evergreens. Long trenches had been dug in the earth. Fires
had been going in them all day. The dry hickory wood was reduced to live
coals and the pork, beef, and lamb were suspended over them. Negro men,
expert in the work, were busy turning and basting the meat, the aroma of
which floated on the air. A little organ from a near-by church had been
placed amid some chairs for choir-singers, and then John discovered that
Tilly was expected to play the instrument.

"The regular organist is away," Cavanaugh explained to John, "but I'll
bet our little girl will do it all right."

John said nothing, for he had caught sight of Tilly seated with her
mother in the front row of benches. She was dressed in white muslin from
head to foot. She wore a cheap sailor straw hat he had never seen her
wear before, and some flowers were pinned on her breast. The whiteness
of her attire seemed to accentuate the rare pinkness of her face, which
deepened as she caught his stealthy glance. She was the last of the
choir to take her place, the others being seated when she finally went
forward, seated herself on the organ-stool, and began to look over the
music. How calm and unruffled she seemed to John! On the platform sat a
candidate for the Governorship of the state, several ministers, the
Ordinary of the county, the Sheriff, an ex-judge, and several other men
of prominence, and yet in the eyes of the younger spectators John Trott,
who was to place and seal the stone, and stood with a new trowel in his
hand, was the most envied person there. He was well dressed,
good-looking, possessed with a forceful demeanor, and it was rumored
that he was a mason who could demand any wages he liked. It was little
wonder that poor young farmers who lived from hand to mouth to eke out
an existence should deem him most fortunate, and that the girls should
regard him with favor.

John was young; he was human, and he was experiencing a sort of new
birth. Aside from Cavanaugh, no one present knew of his mother's
reputation or of the social wall between him and the citizens of
Ridgeville, and here to-day he was being treated as he had never been
treated before. He felt strangely, buoyantly, at his ease. He was too
happy to analyze his wonderful transition. He wanted to do his part
well, not chiefly on account of Cavanaugh and the contract, or the
dignitaries about him, but it must be admitted that above all he was
considering Tilly. It pleased the poor boy to think of her as
conducting the music, and of himself as having charge of the other
details. There was a vague, new, and even confident dignity about his
erect figure, face, and tone of voice as he directed the laborers to
bring the corner-stone forward. There was a square cavity in the stone
into which souvenirs were to be placed, and it devolved upon John to
collect them from the audience. He did it well. He was a man drawn out
of an old environment by the dazzling experience of being in love. A
copy of a fresh issue of the county weekly was handed to him by the
paper's editor; the Ordinary contributed a photograph of the old
court-house, some one else put in a sheet containing the autographs of
leading citizens, and there were coins and various trinkets of more or
less historic significance. John placed them in the cavity, and under
the eyes of all began to close the opening. His new trowel tinkled
softly as he worked in the dead silence on all sides. When it was
finished the band played. There was much applause, and then the choir
sang. During this part of the program John had a chance to look at Tilly
without being seen by her. She sat very erectly at the organ, unabashed,
unperturbed. John, even from where he stood at one side, saw the red
welt on her hand. He told himself, sentimentally, that those were the
same little hands which churned daily, washed dishes, made fires in the
range, washed, hung out, and ironed clothes, and he marveled. Once as
she turned a page of the music-book she looked at him, seemed in a flash
to sense his admiration, and dropped her eyes. Something came into her
face which he could not have described, but it played there for an
instant like a beam of rose-colored light, and he throbbed and thrilled
in his whole being.

The speeches passed off. The band played again and John was asked by
the Ordinary to announce that the barbecue was ready to be served at the
tables.

John had never spoken in public, and yet to-day a new daring possessed
him. Quite unperturbed, he rang his trowel on the corner-stone till
quiet was restored, and then, with a half-jest, appropriately worded, he
made the announcement. Immediately the audience was on its feet and
surging toward the aromatic trenches and tables. The platform was soon
vacated, and John saw Tilly alone at the organ, putting up the
music-books. He longed to go to her, but a vast and sudden embarrassment
checked him. He started, but stopped and pretended to be inspecting the
corner-stone. She was behind him now, but she was the light and breath
of his new existence and he half saw, half felt her presence. He told
himself that she must think him an awkward fool, and yet he could not
approach her.

Suddenly he saw something for which he was not prepared. A tall, thin
young man with a scant brown mustache and rather long hair, who was
tanned like a farmer, and who had large, coarse hands and wore a
frock-coat which was thick enough for winter, was stepping upon the
platform and approaching Tilly.

"You must come get some of the barbecue," he said. "You are doing most
of the work and must be fed. I saw your ma and pa over at the first
table."

"I'm not very hungry, Joel," John heard Tilly say, and from the corner
of his eyes he saw that she was shaking hands with the young man. A
moment later they were passing close behind John. He knew that to
pretend still to be inspecting the corner-stone would be absurd and so
he turned and faced the couple. Tilly smiled, nodded, and glanced at the
stone.

"It is very pretty," she said, pausing and looking at the work he had
done. "This is my friend, Mr. Joel Eperson--Mr. Trott," she added.

The hands of two laboring-men met and swung up and down before the
little maid. "Pleased to meet you," both men said, and they stared at
each other, dumb, concealed thoughts in the depths of their eyes.

"You ran that singing all right." John dug the words from his perturbed
self-consciousness. "It went off fine."

"Yes, you certainly did that," the young farmer agreed. "You all must
have met and practised."

"Only once, last night," Tilly said. "We met at the church."

"We are going to get some of that barbecue," Eperson said, rather
stiffly, to John. "Won't you come along with us? I've got two places
reserved and can easily make room for another."

"Two places reserved!" The words had an unpleasant sound to John.
Evidently the fellow had been counting on eating with Tilly even before
he invited her. John hesitated. He noticed that Tilly had nothing to
say, and that irritated him.

"Oh, I'm not a bit hungry," he answered, now in his old, rough,
Ridgeville way, and he frowned.

"Well, you might come and see the rest of the animals fed," Eperson
jested. "I'd like to talk to you. Tilly wrote me about you coming. I
certainly would like to have a job like yours. Farming has gone to
pieces in this section."

Tilly had written him. Again John was conscious of irritation and a
strange, deep-seated uneasiness. Were the two on such terms of
familiarity that they exchanged letters while living so near together?
John was still hesitating when Cavanaugh suddenly elbowed his way
through the surging throng to his side.

"They expect you and me to set at the Ordinary's table along with the
speakers," he announced, momentously. "I've been looking for you all
about."

"We just asked him to go with us, Mr. Cavanaugh," Tilly said, "but of
course, if the Ordinary wants him we'll have to excuse him." She
introduced Eperson, and Cavanaugh smiled.

"I've heard about Mr. Eperson already," he said. "And I'll tell 'im to
his face that he has fine taste and knows a good thing in the female
line when he sees it."

The young farmer flushed red and smiled, but Tilly's face was unchanged.
"I see you are a tease," she said, indifferently. "Well, we'd better be
going."

John felt Cavanaugh grasp his arm and begin to lead him through the
crowd toward a distant table which was smaller than the others and at
which several local dignitaries were seated.

"We might as well give them young turtle-doves a chance to coo on a
perch by themselves," the contractor said, with a low chuckle. "I
understand the fellow don't get many chances to see his girl. They say
he has been in love with her ever since he was a little boy, but old
Whaley don't seem to like him. They say the old chap has shut down on
Eperson's visits--don't let 'im come around as often as he used to. I
reckon to-day is one of the fellow's chances to see her. My! what a nice
little trick she is! And take it from me--she deserves a better fate
than to marry a slow-going farmer like that one. She'd just change one
life of drudgery for another."

As if in a tantalizing dream, John heard these things as he walked
along, still tightly clutched by his old friend. He told himself that
it was incredible that he should care so much about the affairs of a
simple country girl whom he had known such a short time, but the
startling fact remained and haunted him.

They found their places at the table and sat down. The Ordinary, a
genial man of middle age, with a full brown beard, had a big jug of
fresh cider in front of him and was filling some tin cups with the amber
fluid.

"We are going to drink to the health and success of these two
gentlemen," he announced, when every one at the table had received his
cup of the beverage. "They are both agreeable men and are an honor to
our community. Moreover, I am satisfied that they are going to give us
the finest public building for the money in the state."

They all drank standing, and, as they resumed their seats, they glanced
at Cavanaugh as if expecting a response from him.

"I am much obliged," Cavanaugh stammered. "I can't make a speech or I'd
tell you how tickled I am by your compliment, and my young friend on my
right is, too. We are combining business and pleasure on this jaunt and
are having a fine time."

John was gloomily unconscious of the fact that he, too, was expected to
say something. Seeing Cavanaugh sit down, he did likewise. He was
watching Eperson and Tilly, who at one of the long tables near by sat
facing him. Eperson was bending eagerly toward her, smiling and saying
something in her ear. Tilly seemed to be listening, for she was smiling
also. Farther down the same table sat her father and mother. Whaley had
a plate heaped high with the meat and its accompanying peppery relish,
and was eating voraciously. Mrs. Whaley was chatting with a woman at
her side and scarcely eating at all. The brass band was playing, there
was a great clatter of knives and forks and tin cider-cups. John was in
one of his surliest moods. He was really hungry enough to have enjoyed
the feast, but his thoughts kept him from doing so. Presently he managed
to slip away from the table, and found himself alone. He wandered
aimlessly about the foundation of the new building, trying to make
himself believe that he was inspecting the work already done. The band
had ceased playing. The crowd of white citizens was thinning out, and
the negroes were falling into the vacant places at the tables. John saw
Cavanaugh and the elder Whaleys trudging homeward. Where was Tilly? he
wondered. Then he saw Eperson driving a poor horse drawing a ramshackle
buggy around from the public hitching-rack. Tilly stood waiting for him
alone on the edge of the sidewalk. Eperson got out, helped her into the
seat, and then got in beside her and drove her homeward.

John lingered about the foundations for half an hour. Then he saw
Eperson returning in the buggy alone. He had to pass close to where John
stood, but John refused to look up as he went by and turned into the
country road. There was a vague look of placid content on the earnest
face of the man which portended things John dared not think about.




CHAPTER VIII


The work on the new building went on apace. John was always tired when
night came, but a new expectation at the end of each day had come into
his hitherto uneventful life. It was not often that he saw Tilly alone,
but he had come to look forward eagerly even for the mere sight of her
in the evening, at the supper-table, on the veranda, or in the yard with
the others. Both he and Cavanaugh immediately changed their clothing
when the day's work was over, and this formality was a new and pleasant
thing for the young mason. The change always made him feel more
respectable. It gave him the sense of throwing off the grime and toil of
the day. It was the first ordering of his life on any social plane, and
it charmed him.

"You are certainly a wonder," the old man remarked to him one afternoon
as they were dressing in John's room.

"In what way?" John asked, curiously.

"Why, you are different, that's all"--the contractor laughed--"as
different from what you used to be down at home as night from day. You
used to have a grouch on you nearly all the time, but now you are as
pleasing as a basket of chips. Your mind seems brighter. You often say
funny things, and you ain't as rough with the boys that work under you
as you used to be. If they are a little slow with brick or mortar you
don't fuss so much, and--say--you have mighty nigh quit cursing. I'm
glad of that, too, I must say I am, for taking the Lord's name in vain
never helped a man get ahead. You see it is a slap in the face to so
many well-meaning folks. Gee! ain't we having a fine time? It is about
as hard to understand myself as to understand you--I mean this
combination picnic and hard labor we are at. There is one point about it
that I wouldn't dare tell my wife. By gum! I don't know that I'm ready
to admit it even to myself yet, but it is a queer notion."

"What is that?" John asked, only half attentively, for he was listening
to the sounds in the kitchen below and picturing Tilly at work.

"Why"--the old man stared gravely as he answered--"it is a fact that I
don't miss Mandy at all--hardly at all, and it has set me
wondering--wondering. I know I love her, you see; that fact is as solid
and plain to me as that brush you've got in your hand, and why I don't
miss her more I don't know. I lay in bed awake between four and five
this morning, turning it over in my mind, but to no effect. However, it
may be this way: a man and a woman may actually be--well, almost too
well suited to each other, if such a thing is possible."

"You are getting tangled up." John laughed as he tied afresh a new
cravat he had just bought and thrust a cheap, gaudy pin into its folds.

"You may think so, but I hain't," Cavanaugh denied. "I mean this, John.
A couple may live together so long and become so near alike that nothing
exciting happens to either one of 'em, and along with that may come a
sort of strain of marriage responsibility. Down at Ridgeville somehow I
was always wondering what Mandy would want done and what not, but up
here when my day's work is over I can slap on a clean shirt and my best
suit, brush my shoes, light my pipe, and sit around till bedtime and
have a good free evening of it. And I sleep--I'll admit it--I even sleep
sounder and seem to get more out of it. At home I lie with one eye open,
you might say. If Mandy has a bad cold, I can hear her sniffling, and if
she has an attack of rheumatism I can smell the liniment she rubs on. I
don't mind it, you understand, oh no, not one bit! but the--the very
worry about her upsets me. She's the same about me. I know it is a fair
deal between us, for she takes it powerful hard even if I come home with
a cut or any little injury. I said that it was a fair deal on both
sides, but I'll take that back. It is not. The woman gets the worst of
married life, and I reckon that's what is bothering my conscience. I
sent mine off once for a week at a big camp-meeting over in Canton. She
sewed and fixed and packed and cooked for three weeks to get ready, and
was gone just two days and a night. She hired a special team to fetch
her back, and come acting like she'd been off for a year and had escaped
from ten thousand ills and misfortunes. You see, she just couldn't live
without her pans and pots and chickens and the cow and calf which she
was afraid I wouldn't feed--and, I don't know, maybe--me. And that's
what hurts. She keeps writing now about what I'm fed on, how my duds are
washed and mended, and how long it will be before I get back home. All
that when I'm cracking jokes and arguing with old Whaley over some of
his hidebound Bible views about the end of the world. Why, he couldn't
predict the outcome of a county election, and yet he knows to the day
and hour when him and some more are going to be lifted up on a cloud of
glory and all the rest of us stand looking on, wringing our hands like
the bunch Noah left without a thing to cling to. But don't you let
anything I say about marriage influence you against it, my boy. It is
the greatest institution in the world to-day, and while I don't somehow
miss my wife, I'd die if I lost her. I know that as well as I know I'm
alive. There must be such a thing as loving folks you don't want to be
with all the time."




CHAPTER IX


That evening a wonderful thing happened to John. It was a moonlit night
and Cavanaugh took the two older Whaleys down to see the progress on the
new building. That left John and Tilly on the veranda together. At first
the poor boy's tongue was tied, but under the influence of Tilly's calm
self-possession he soon found himself conversing with her quite easily.
There was a sort of commotion in the chicken-house near the barn and
they started down there to see what had caused it. He had seen young men
of the better class at Ridgeville walking with young ladies, holding to
their arms at night, and in no little perturbation he wondered if he
ought to offer Tilly his arm. He did not know, and he wondered what Joel
Eperson would do in the circumstances. Finally he plunged into the
matter. "Won't you take my arm?" he asked, so naturally that he was
surprised at himself.

She did so, although the path was clear and the distance short, and the
gentle pressure of her hand on his arm sent an inexplicable thrill
through him. She even leaned slightly and confidently against his
shoulder, and that, too, was a wonderful experience. He was filled with
ecstatic emotion. He slowed down his step and clumsily adapted his long
stride to her shorter one. There was a vast, swelling joy in his throat.
At the barn-yard gate she released his arm and opened it, and at once he
had a fear that he had made a mistake in not forestalling her. He was
flooded with shame at the thought that Joel Eperson would have known
what was proper and have acted quicker.

"Excuse me," the poor fellow stammered, his eyes on hers. He had never
used such words before and they sounded as strange to him as if they had
belonged to a foreign tongue.

"Excuse you, why?" she inquired, perplexed.

"Because--because I didn't open the gate for you," he replied. "I wasn't
thinking."

"Oh, that doesn't matter," she answered, evidently pleased, and there
was something in her eyes that he had never seen there before. Her face
seemed to fill with a warm light, and her pretty lips were slightly
parted. They walked on. The chicken-house, a shack with a lean-to roof
against the barn, was near and he stood by her as she looked in at the
open door.

"One of the planks they roost on fell down," she explained. "Too many of
them got on it. They will huddle together, warm as it is."

"I can fix it," he proposed, "but I'd have to have a light."

Tilly hesitated, looking again into the shack. There was a low chirping
from the perches overhead.

"Never mind to-night," she said. "They have found new places and will
soon settle down."

She turned back, facing him, and slowly they started toward the house.
This time she took his arm without being asked, and the act gave him
additional delight. He allowed the natural weight of his arm to gently
press her hand against his side and she did not resent it. In fact, he
felt as if her touch was responsive. The moonlight fell on her bare head
and played in her wonderful hair, upon which the moisture of the night
was settling. Half-way between the barn and the house there was an
empty road-wagon. Its massive tongue stood out straight a foot or so
above the ground. To his wonderment, Tilly sat down on it, thrusting her
little feet out in front of her.

"Let's sit here," she said. "They won't be back for some time yet."

He complied, his wonder and delight growing. They were silent. Finally
she spoke again.

"You are the strangest man I ever saw," she said, looking into his face
with her calm, probing eyes.

"Am I?" he asked. "Why, how so?"

"I don't know," she made answer, thoughtfully, and she locked her little
hands in her lap and looked down. "I can't make you out. You are so--so
gentle and tender with me. You are a mystery, a deep mystery. You don't
seem to take to women in general, and yet, and yet with me--" She sighed
and broke off abruptly.

In his all but dazed delight he could not supply the words she had
failed to summon, though he knew what he would have said could he but
have untangled his enthralled tongue.

"Oh, I'm no mystery!" He tried to laugh away his awkwardness. "I'm as
plain as an old shoe; no frills about me. You ask the boys that work
with me."

She was unconvinced. He saw her shake her wise little head and twist her
fingers together as she answered:

"A girl I know who saw you on the platform that day said she'd bet you'd
had an unfortunate love-affair. She said nothing else would make as--as
fine a young man as you are shun all the girls like you do. She even
hinted that maybe you were--were married down in Georgia and for some
reason or other was not telling it."

"Oh no, I'm not married," he laughed. "Gee! Sam would think that is
funny. Me married!"

"Then you _have_ had a--a love-affair with some girl, and--"

"Wrong again!" he laughed, deep in the throat of his ebullient joy.
"I've just been a sort of stay-at-home, pretty busy, you know. I've had
my hands full of night work, figuring, writing, and planning, and
through the day I've been hard at it, as a general thing. No, I'm just,
I reckon, not a natural ladies' man." How could he explain to her what
he had never understood or even tried to fathom, the reason why he was
different from other young men of his age whose manner of life he had
only superficially observed?

Tilly seemed still unconvinced. "That girl was Sally Teasdale," she went
on. "She was here yesterday. You may remember her--the tall, dark-haired
girl that sang in the choir that day and turned my music for me once.
She is going to have a party at her house down the road Wednesday night.
She is--is dead set on having you there. She says all the girls want to
get acquainted with you, and she--she wanted me to--to take you to it."

"To take me to it?" he repeated, hardly understanding what was really
meant, for how could a young lady be asking him to a party at her house
when no home of that sort had ever been open to him? How could that be
true, and that another girl of Tilly's social rank should really be
inviting him to escort her?

"I see, you don't want to go," Tilly said, with a touch of mild
resentment. "Well, that is for you to decide, and I would not have asked
you but there was no way out of it. Even mother advised me to mention
it."

Never had his confusion been greater. "Why, I want to go!" he blurted
out. "I don't see how you could doubt it. And you say that you will let
me go along with you?"

"Yes, but it was Sally's idea; not mine," Tilly urged. "Don't think I go
about inviting boys to take me places. You see, you are stopping at our
house, and that is why Sally mentioned it to me, but the fact that you
pay us board doesn't give me the right to pull you into things you don't
care for. You must be your own judge. No doubt you are frightfully tired
at night, and if you have writing and figuring to do after work hours,
why, it would be wrong of you to bother with a crowd of silly country
girls that you never saw before."

"Me tired? Oh no! Leave that out of the question," he warmly thrust in.
"I've set up with the boys when they were sick all night long, and
worked the next day without feeling it. What ails you? Why don't you
think I'd like to go with you? Well, I would-- I do want to go."

"Well then, we'll go," Tilly said. "I know you will like the
girls--Sally, especially, for she is crazy, simply crazy about you. Huh!
and you don't know it? Why, she goes to town nearly every day just to
pass the new court-house. Shucks! she knows every layer of brick that
goes in it, and every man by name that works under you."

"I think I remember the girl you mean." John was not absorbing the
compliment. "She is a tall, dark girl, as straight as an Indian squaw.
She stopped one day and asked me some questions about the rooms on the
lower floor. Sam come and showed her around-- I was too busy. Sam's on
the ladies' entertainment committee-- I am not."

"She told me she had never met you." Tilly leaned toward him as she
spoke. She clasped her hands over her knee. She was staring steadily,
her eyes flashing. "Oh, my! what won't some girls do to get in with a
new man? Huh! She has failed to get at you in every other way and is now
making a cat's-paw of me."

"I declare I don't know what you mean," John asserted, "but if you are
in earnest--about the party, I mean--why, you can count me in. I've
never been a party man--I wouldn't know what to do or say--but if you
will go with me, I'll be ready long before you are, I'll bet you. I'll
hire a horse and buggy at the livery-stable, and--"

"Oh no, I seldom ride," Tilly protested. "It is only about a mile and we
can walk that far in pretty weather like this. They all live close about
except Joel Eperson. He always drives in and brings his sister, Martha
Jane."

"Oh, so _he's_ going--_that feller_ is going!" John exclaimed in a
crestfallen tone. "I see--I see--_he's_ going."

"Yes. He is Sally's first cousin."

The uncouth mason sat silent. He folded his ponderous hands and scowled
as he did when displeased with the work of a bungling assistant. Tilly
was covertly and studiously regarding his profile.

"Why do you say it like that?" she inquired. "Is there anything strange
about Joel going to a party?"

"Strange? Not if he knows you are to be there. Does he?"

"I suppose he _does_ think I may be there, but what of it--what of it?"

John turned and stared toward the house. It was as if he were trying to
keep her from seeing the fierce expression he knew had clutched his
face. Tilly leaned closer to him. Her shoulder touched his. She sat
waiting for him to turn his head toward her again. Presently he looked
at her, his honest eyes holding a famished expression.

"What is there strange about Joel going?" she asked, softly and all but
propitiatingly.

"Nothing strange about it--just the reverse," he sighed. "I've heard
that he has been loving you ever since he was a little boy, and that he
comes to see you every chance he gets. I've heard that your father
doesn't like him. I see--his cousin has got this party up so you and he
can--"

Tilly sprang to her feet. John kept his seat, unaware that even rural
courtesy demanded that he rise when she did. But Tilly was no stickler
for conventions. She was a working-girl; he was a laborer, and there was
something to be fathomed in the man before her which lurked deep within
him. She was angry, or perhaps only impatient, but the mood passed as if
melting into the moonlight which laved her dainty form like some
supernal fluid.

"What you said is not kind or just," she objected, sweetly. "You
intimate that I'd meet Joel somewhere against my father's wishes. I
would not do so. I would not disobey my father or do anything on the sly
that he would oppose."

In dumb, almost stupid alarm John sat staring up at her. He quaked under
the sudden realization that he had offended her, and yet he had never
apologized to any one in his life. The fine sense of that sort of
restitution belonged to social paths John Trott had never traversed.
"Excuse me," he might have said, as he had said at the gate, but somehow
under her bent gaze he found himself unable to utter a word. It may have
been the sheer blank look in his eyes, or the helpless twitching of his
lips, that decided her, for she suddenly sat down by him again and
leaned forward till their eyes met.

"You did not mean to say that I'd do anything underhand, I'm sure," she
faltered. "I'm sure of it _now_."

"Oh no," he slowly shook his head and seemed to swallow an emotional
contraction in his throat. "I didn't mean any harm, but--but he _will_
be there, you say? He'll be there?"

"Yes, yes, of course," Tilly responded. "I suppose he will bring Martha
Jane. He usually does. But what of that?"

"He'll want to talk to you, I suppose?" John went on, his nether lip
hanging limp, his gaze steady.

"Why, yes--that is, maybe he will. Sometimes couples walk about between
the games and dances. I don't dance. My father and mother oppose it, and
our church does not sanction it; but you dance, don't you?"

"No, I've never even been to a dance. I hardly know what they are like.
The young folks at Ridgeville have them often at their club and at the
hotels and in their homes, but the boys are a lot of dudes that have
nothing else to do, and I hate them. I've always had to work for a
living and most of them are well off and look down on poor folks. People
here treat a fellow like me different somehow."

"It seems very strange that you don't dance," Tilly mused aloud,
"especially when you don't belong to the church. How does it happen that
you never joined?"

He shrugged and sniffed with uncurbed contempt, unaware of the fact that
what he was saying was an unheard-of thing in Tilly's circle. "I don't
believe in them," he jerked out. "They are a bunch of close-fisted,
grafting hypocrites. Most of them haven't the brains of a gnat. I've
helped build meeting-houses, run against the leaders, and know their
private lives. They say they believe there is a God-- I don't!"

Tilly sighed unresentfully. "You will see it differently some day," she
said. "Will you do me a favor?"

"Will I? Try me," he laughed, and he sat eagerly waiting for her to
continue.

In her earnestness she put her hand on his knee as she leaned closer to
him. "Then don't tell father how you feel about it--please don't. You
don't know him. You can't imagine how furious that would make him. A man
stopped at our house once to stay overnight. He was selling
harvesting-machines, and after supper he and my father had an argument
on the veranda. He said--the man said something like what you've just
said to me, and father made him leave the house--made him pack up and
leave at once, for father said it would be a sin for us to sleep under
the same roof. Mother did not object, either. She was glad to see him
go. Our preacher preached a sermon on it and said my father did right.
I'm sorry you believe as you do, but won't you promise me not to say
anything about it while you are here?"

"I'll promise you anything on earth you ask." John sat up straight. Her
little hand was still on his knee. He yearned to take it into his
calloused grasp and fondle into it his assurances of compliance with her
desires. "I don't object to any man's religion unless it rubs against my
rights as a man," he went on. "These church folks here may be better
than any I've run across, but down home the breed doesn't suit me. Why,
when I was a little fellow in the public school I've had them--women and
men--invite other boys to go to Christmas-tree parties, Sunday-school
festivals, or picnics, and leave me out. They would do it right before
my face, as if I was the very dirt under their feet. A thing like that
would be noticed by a little boy who wonders why he can't go along with
the rest."

"I didn't know there were such church members as that anywhere," Tilly
said, thoughtfully. "Oh, I see. I wonder if your folks are Catholics?"

"No. My father is dead. My mother doesn't go to any church."

"Oh, that's odd. Not any at all?"

"No. I guess she is like me. She doesn't know any of the members or care
a hill of beans about them. Why did you ask if we were Catholics?"

"Because Catholics are looked down on so much around here. If you had
said you were one, I was going to ask you not to mention that to my
father, either. The greatest trouble my family ever had came through the
Catholics. You see, I had a brother. He died five years ago. He was a
professing member of our church, and father was awfully proud of him
because he was a fine exhorter at revivals. When he wasn't more than
sixteen my brother actually preached in public, though he wasn't
ordained. They called him 'the boy wonder' and many people were
converted under him."

"I've seen his sort," John said, reflectively. "They had one down our
way, a sissy of a chap, that women fairly went crazy over, but you say
your brother died."

"Yes, but not before he caused us that great trouble," Tilly went on.
"It was this way. Father's chief ambition was to have him preach, and
when he was about twenty, and after father had saved and stinted to put
him through the Methodist seminary, an Irish family moved here. They
were Catholics. There was a girl in the family, and in some way or
other George got acquainted with her and got to visiting at her house.
You know the Catholics have no church here--there are so few of
them--but at her house my brother met Catholics who talked to him and
gave him books to read. The truth is, he fell in love with the girl and
our trouble began. She and her folks somehow convinced him that her
religion was the oldest one--that it was really established by our Lord,
and that all the other denominations had shot off from it. George had
the manhood to come to father and tell him what he believed and that he
was going to join the Catholics, so that he and the girl could marry
according to Catholic rites. I was too young to know what it was all
about, but I was terrified by father's fury. He acted like a crazy man.
He couldn't eat or sleep. He disowned my brother and drove him from
home. George married the girl and they all moved away. By accident we
heard that he had died of consumption away out West, and then a man--a
Catholic, some kin of George's wife--came to deliver some message George
had sent from his death-bed. We were all sitting in the parlor. Before
father would let him say what the message was father asked the man if
George died a Catholic, and when the man said he did and that a priest
had been called in, my father refused to hear the message and showed him
the door. My mother seemed willing to listen to it, but she always obeys
my father. They are almost exactly alike, and so she said nothing."

The gate latch clicked. Voices were heard from the house. "They are
back. I'll have to go in," Tilly said, and she sighed as from weighty
memories awakened by her recital.

John got up and Tilly took his arm again. It seemed to him that her hold
upon it was somehow insecure, and he took her hand and drew it higher
up. He had never touched her hand till now, and, while it was rough from
her accustomed toil, by contrast with his own brick-and-stone rasped
palm, it felt as soft as velvet. There was a warm lack of resistance in
it and he released it reluctantly. How glorious and bliss-drenching
seemed the moonlight as it lay on the landscape! And it was not to end,
he told himself. There was the party to look forward to. That would give
him another chance to see her alone. He was a strong man, and yet he was
all but swooning under emotions which he had never dreamed could exist.

"Oh, there they are!" he heard Mrs. Whaley exclaiming.

Tilly now released John's arm, stepped forward, and casually explained
the mishap in the chicken-house.

"The same thing happened some time ago," Mrs. Whaley said, pleasantly,
to John. "We've got too many chickens, anyway. I'm going to ship some of
them off."

He told her awkwardly that he would send one of the carpenters up to
repair the damage, and further showed his crudeness by adding that it
should not cost her anything, all of which struck her as being quite
gentlemanly of him, and proving his ability to command men who ranked
lower than himself in the scale of his trade.

They all separated for the night and John went to his bed stirred by
hopes and passions that kept sleep from his brain for hours.




CHAPTER X


The evening of the party came around. John was in his room, dressing for
it, and Cavanaugh was with him.

"It certainly is a new wrinkle for you," the old man said, with a broad
smile. "And I wouldn't bother about not knowing how to dance, either, if
I was you. There will be aplenty that won't take part in that, so you
won't feel odd. La me! I wish I could go look on! I love to see young
folks together. I spied you two the other night long before the others
did, and I noticed how Tilly was leaning against you, and it was by all
odds the prettiest sight I ever looked at, and took me back, back, back!
I believe there is a future life, and in it we'll be allowed to unreel
all the sweet and pretty things we ever wound up in our earthly passage.
I want to see the girls and boys I used to know at your age that have
gone on. Many of them had awful trouble and disgrace before they went,
and some died in pain and poverty, but I don't believe they are
suffering now, and they will come to meet me, too, and lend me some of
their joy. Old Whaley's eternal-damnation idea for some of God's
children don't go down with me. There is punishment--oh, I know that
well enough, but it is here in the consciences of folks that go crooked.
Wait, wait! You can't tie a cravat. It is the first time you ever wore a
white one, isn't it? Let me see if I can do it. I used to know how."

With a happy laugh, John bent downward and the contractor pulled the
narrow strip of lawn into place around the stiff collar and managed to
tie it fairly well. "You will cut a dash, my boy, for that is a dandy
suit, and it fits you like a kid glove. These mountain fellers don't get
as stylish a cut as that from these cross-roads stores, and no such
material by a long shot. I'm going to say something and I'm afraid you
will be hurt, but I hope you will remember that I feel like a father to
you."

"Shoot it out!" John laughed. "Fire away."

"Well, you can't accuse me of being foolish about what is style and what
ain't, John, but there are a few things that I wish you'd remember not
to do any more. You see, I never lived with you down home--never set
with you at the table and the like, and so I didn't notice anything out
of the way, but--" The contractor was avoiding John's questioning stare
and suddenly broke off.

"Why, what do you mean?" John asked. "Have I been doing anything wrong?"

"Oh no, and maybe not a single one has ever noticed what I have, but I
must say there are a few things that sometimes I wish you wouldn't do.
Oh, I'm going to tell you and be done with it, because if I don't some
young lady may and that would hurt worse. John, I don't like the way you
act at the table sometimes. I hope you won't get mad, but I don't."

"Well, what's wrong?" John asked, a look of shame crossing his face as
he stood mechanically brushing his coat-sleeve with his big, splaying
hand.

"There are several little things," Cavanaugh went on, lamely. "For
instance, there is always a big spoon on the bean-dish or the
cabbage-plate, and we are expected to use it when we are asked to help
ourselves, but I've seen you take your knife, fork, or teaspoon and
rake it out exactly as if you was scraping mortar from a board."

"Oh, I see, I see." John smiled in a sheepish sort of way. "So that is
wrong, eh?"

"Yes, and then you stick your knife in your mouth loaded to the brink
with stuff, and I've seen you use your fingers, John. I've seen you pick
up a chunk of meat with your fingers and ram it in like you was plugging
a hole in a sinking boat. You begin eating before the rest do, too, and
that don't look nice, I must say. You are all right--all right, but it
is just a few little things like those that you ought to watch out for
and try to avoid. These are plain-living folks, but still they seem to
have pretty good manners--that is, except the old man. He does a lot o'
things that he ought not to do. He drinks coffee out of a saucer, and,
although I saw him rubbing the back of a cat just before we sat down
yesterday, he broke off a piece of bread with his hands and handed it to
me that way, and not on a fork or a plate, as would be proper. If the
women hadn't been there and akin to him, I'd have throwed it down."

John had turned to the bureau for a handkerchief. He was angry, but more
at himself than his gentle companion.

"It is all poppycock," he said, suddenly. "I'm astonished, Sam, to hear
you say such fool things--you, a man of your age and trade. I thought
you was a plain, sensible man. Why, you are trying to be a dude."

Nevertheless, as the old man sat silent, John made up his mind that the
advice was worth heeding and he forced a smile.

"All right, Sam," he said; "I'll remember next time. I'm new at this
game."

"I thought you'd take it sensible," Cavanaugh said, in relief. "Now
there is another little thing. It seems to me that, as you are going to
escort Tilly there, you oughtn't to be behind time. You know you always
had a bad memory, and it wouldn't look exactly right for you to keep her
sitting somewhere waiting on you. A man ought to be first on deck in a
jaunt like this."

"I was wondering about that." John stared eagerly. "She didn't say what
time we'd leave the house. Do you suppose she'd want to start now?"

"I don't know, but I'll tell you what we'll do to be on the safe side.
Let's go down in the yard and set about. I've got two cigars. You take
one and I'll take one and we'll smoke till something turns up."

They went down the stairs and out into the yard. They saw no one about
the house and they took chairs under the trees near the fence. They had
hardly seated themselves when a horse and buggy stopped at the gate. A
man and a woman sat in the buggy. Giving the reins to his companion, the
man sprang down and came in at the gate. In the light of the rising moon
John saw that it was Joel Eperson.

"Good evening," the young farmer said to John. "Is Miss Tilly about?"

John sat immovable. He turned his cigar over in his mouth and looked up
fiercely. "What are you asking _me_ for?" he snarled. "I'm not keeping
the door."

"I beg your pardon;" Joel said, in a startled tone. "I meant no harm. My
sister and I came by to see if she'd like to go to a party over at my
cousin's house."

John made no reply. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and
pulled at his cigar. Cavanaugh saw that he was in a rage and rose to his
feet.

"I believe Miss Tilly is getting ready now," he explained, mildly. "She
is going with my young friend here, I understand; but, of course, if you
and your sister want to see her, why, maybe you'd better knock at the
door. Somebody will hear and come out."

"Oh no, no!" Joel was now flooded with embarrassment. "I didn't know she
was provided for so nicely, and-- No, we'll drive on. I wouldn't want to
hurry Miss Tilly. I can explain it to her at the party. She will
understand, anyway, for sister and I often come by after her."

Bowing politely and still confused, Eperson backed away a few feet, and
then, restoring his hat to his head, he rejoined his sister.

"I'm sorry to see you act that way, John," Cavanaugh deplored, as the
buggy disappeared down the road. "I know the reason of it, I reckon, but
still you went a bit too far. It is give and take in a game like the one
you and this chap are playing, and if you don't want to lose, you'd
better be careful."

John stared, still angry. "I've got no use for him," he sniffed. "He
looks like a jack-leg preacher or a mountain singing-teacher, bowing and
scraping and holding his hat in his hand before two men. He has no
backbone. He is as yellow as a pumpkin, and ought to have that long hair
of his parted in the middle and tied in a knot behind his head."

"I know, but he looks honest and straight, and he is dead in love.
That's one reason he's so timid, even with us. It works that way with
some men. You are different. It makes a wild man of you, especially when
the fair one is looked at by somebody else. But you've got to hold in.
This fellow has got prior rights to you in this deal, and if you are too
rough it may go against you. I don't say it will, but it may."




CHAPTER XI


John was about to make some retort when Tilly suddenly came out to them.
She was dressed in white, wore no head-covering, and appeared very
pretty and somehow changed.

"Oh, you are all ready to go!" she said, smiling on John. "Here is
something for you to wear." She held out a few leaves of geranium and a
white rosebud and proceeded to pin them on the lapel of his coat. "It
is the custom," she explained. "All the girls give them to the young men
they go with. Now, now, isn't that nice, Mr. Cavanaugh?"

"Fine! Beautiful! It sets him off just right!" the old man cried.

John looked pleased, but said nothing.

"Why don't he thank the little trick?" Cavanaugh wondered, resentfully.
"And why don't the goose stand up?"

"I don't believe you like flowers," Tilly said, pretending to pout.

Still John said nothing, but what astonished Cavanaugh was the fact that
Tilly evidently understood his mood, for she gave a little pat to a
wrinkle the pin had made in his lapel and smiled.

"I thought I heard wheels just now," she remarked. "They seemed to stop
here."

"It was that fellow Eperson with his sister," John blurted out. "They
came by to take you to the party. He acted like he owned you."

"Oh, it was Joel and Martha Jane!" Tilly smiled. "Oh no, he doesn't
think he owns me, by any means. Martha Jane put him up to it. She and I
are great friends and she was afraid I wouldn't get an escort."

John shrugged dubiously and answered: "You may look at it that way if
you want to, but I see through him. I know his brand."

To Cavanaugh's wonderment, Tilly seemed pleased rather than offended,
for she indulged in a little satisfied laugh.

"I suppose you told him we would be there?" she said, lightly, and it
was the old man who answered, seeing that John had nothing to say.

"Yes, he knows that now, Miss Tilly, though he looked sorter set back.
In my day and time about the last thing I'd want to do would be to take
a sister of mine to a shindig. Going and coming was always the biggest
part of the game, and you may bet there was times when I was in for
busting a party up as soon as supper was over so as to be on the road
again."

Tilly laughed merrily. "I'll make you a buttonhole bouquet if you will
wear it," she proposed.

"Well, not to-night--I thank you all the same," Cavanaugh returned, "but
you may some other time when I've got my best clothes on. I don't want
to part with you two, but don't you think you ought to be on the way?"

"Yes, it is time," Tilly said, and John rose to his feet and stiffly
held his arm out to her.

"Please tell mother that we are gone," she said, as she took John's arm
and the two turned away.

"What a purty sight!" the old man mused, standing and gazing after them
as they walked away in the moonlight. He followed as far as the gate and
leaned on it and watched them till they were out of sight.

Presently Mrs. Whaley came out and joined him. He delivered Tilly's
message and they sat down and chatted for half an hour; then she went
back into the kitchen.

She was making dough for bread to be baked the next day when her husband
came and stood beside her. He wore no coat and his coarse suspenders
hung loose over his hips; the collar of his shirt was open, showing his
hairy chest.

"I saw you out there talking to Cavanaugh," he began. "Did you say
anything about that matter?"

"I did--in a roundabout way," she said, taking the great lump of wheat
dough in her hands and rolling it into a heap of dry flour at one end of
the long wooden bowl. "I didn't want him to take up a notion that we
want to marry her off, but I tried to find out what I could. Mr. Trott
never has had any love-affairs. He is mighty young--younger than you'd
naturally think to have the job he has, and somehow he never has taken
to a girl before. Mr. Cavanaugh says this is the first time, and I know
he is telling the truth. Oh, he had a lot to say in Mr. Trott's favor.
He says he has a wonderful mind for building and the like, and that the
time will come when he will make piles of money. He already gets high
wages, and it is always cash, too. He doesn't have to wait till the end
of the year like Joel Eperson and other farmers do, and then be up to
their eyes in debt, with nothing left over to begin another crop on."

"Does he drink or gamble? That is what I want to know," Whaley put in
suddenly.

"No, he doesn't. Mr. Cavanaugh says he hardly thinks of anything but
figuring, planning, and calculating. He goes to bed early and gets up
early, and can handle a gang of men better even than he can, he's so
popular with them."

"Didn't you find out about the feller's religion?"

"No, I didn't. I sorter touched on that--said you wanted to know--but
Mr. Cavanaugh made light of it--said all that would come out right in
due time. He said he was no hand for hurrying up the young on those
lines. He said John Trott at bottom was the right sort, and that he
would count on him serving the Lord in the long run as well as the next
one."

"I don't know as I'd let that old skunk pick a religion for a son-in-law
of mine." Whaley's lip was drawn tight as he spoke. "He don't take
enough interest in doctrine, and when you force him to talk about it he
says entirely too much about salvation through works alone. I like a man
that knows what he believes and can point straight to Biblical authority
in page, line, and word. It behooves a Christian to watch out what sort
of a mate his daughter picks. Infidelity will breed at a fireside faster
than tadpoles under skum in a mud-puddle."

"Well, I'm for keeping that part out of it just now," Mrs. Whaley
suggested, timidly. "This is a good chance for the girl, and you know
you have made a lot of folks mad by the way you talk to them."

"Well, I haven't said anything to Trott yet," Whaley answered, "and I
may not, though he hasn't been out to meeting yet and that seems odd,
when the Sabbath is a day of rest and there is nothing else to do."

"I happened to hear him tell Tilly that he was going next Sunday," Mrs.
Whaley answered, "so you see that will work out all right."

"Well, we'll wait and see," Whaley returned. "They dance over there at
Teasdale's house, don't they?"

"Some do and some don't," was the answer, slowly made. "Tilly don't and
Mr. Trott never did in his life."

"There isn't much difference in actually dancing and giving sanction to
it by looking on," Whaley said, his heavy brows meeting in a frown, "an'
I'm in for calling a halt on Tilly going to such places. Looks like
there would be plenty of decent amusements without hot-blooded young
folks hugging up tight together and spinning around on the floor till
they are wet with sweat from head to foot. Sally Teasdale ought to be
churched, and she would be if she was a Methodist. The Presbyterians
ain't strict enough. Well, if I believed in foreordained baby damnation
as they do I'd let a child of mine dance her way into hell and be done
with it. They make me sick. I had an argument with old Bill Tye
yesterday and I fairly flayed up the ground with him--didn't leave him a
leg to stand on, but he was mad--oh, wasn't he mad? The crowd laughed at
him good."

Whaley turned away. He intended to chat with Cavanaugh outside, but he
met the contractor coming in at the front door on his way to bed.

"I found that passage from Paul and read the whole chapter," Whaley
began, but Cavanaugh stopped him.

"I'll see it to-morrow," he said. "My eyes are not strong enough to read
at night, even with my specs, and I'm a little bit tired, too. I walked
out to the sawmill--five miles and back--this morning, to see about
some timber, and it was quite a stretch for me. Good night."

"No wonder he didn't want to see it," Whaley smiled to himself as he
leaned in the doorway. "I had him beat and he knows it. I'll bet the old
skunk has already looked it up, or asked somebody about it."




CHAPTER XII


A wide country road stretched out in the moonlight before John and
Tilly. They walked slowly. Tilly still held his arm and he was
transported with sheer ecstasy by that close contact with her. Once or
twice he started to speak, but found himself unable to think of anything
appropriate, and this both angered and alarmed him, for, he asked
himself, how was it that Eperson was always so ready with his tongue
when in Tilly's presence? But Tilly seemed to understand John's way and
not to care much whether he talked or was silent. As he dared to glance
down on her pretty head just below his left shoulder he remembered the
bride and the bridegroom on the train, and the contractor's words came
back to him like breeze music from the waving tops of celestial trees:
"It is ahead of you, my boy."

Ahead of him? Marriage? A home for Tilly and himself alone? She, his
wife?--actually his wife? Absurd! Impossible! The bare thought, checked
though it was, set fire to his brain and he was thrilled in all his
nerves and members. He caught her upward glance and she smiled almost as
if she had glimpsed his vision and was thus responding to it.

"You don't like Joel," she said, knowing full well that that remark
would prod his tardy speech.

"Well, what if I don't?" he answered, with querulous sharpness.

"Well, you shouldn't dislike him," the little minx continued,
designedly. "He hasn't done you any harm. How could he? You have known
each other such a short time."

Had John been other than the crude working-boy that he was, he might
have made a more adroit answer, but, even as it was, it was not
unpleasing to his sly tormentor.

"What is he hanging around you so much for?" John demanded. "I've heard
that your father doesn't like him. What does he mean by coming, at the
slightest excuse, like to-night, for instance?"

"Joel and I have been friends ever since we were tiny tots," Tilly
answered, as casually as a school-girl chewing gum. "And even if--if he
really does love me and--and wants me to be his wife, should he be
blamed for that?"

The very suggestion of her marriage to any one, and that man in
particular, drove John wild. He bit his lip; he swore under his breath,
and his oaths had never been guarded before meeting Tilly; his eyes
flashed from the fires behind them. He clenched his fists.

"You are mine, mine, mine!" he said to himself with the grinding teeth
of a cave-man, and he was all but unaware that his words were not
audible. She was smiling up at him, so sweetly, so placidly. What a
nimbus of transcendental charm hovered over the wonderful face in the
moonlight. Suddenly he checked his onward stride, caught her, and drew
her around facing him. What he might have said or done he never knew,
but Tilly gravely started on again, gently extracting her hand from his
fierce clasp and restoring it to his arm.

"We must not stop," she said. "I hear a horse behind us. It is somebody
going to the party, perhaps."

He said nothing as her fingers left his, and they walked on again. It
was a horse and a buggy containing a couple from the village. Tilly
spoke merrily to them and they answered back as they dashed on.

"It is Marietta Slocum and Fred Murray," Tilly explained. "They are
engaged."

"Engaged?" The word seemed to fill the entire consciousness of the crude
social anomaly. He told himself that an engagement must naturally
precede marriage, and how was that to come about with that helpless
tongue in his mouth? Besides, how did he know but that Tilly might
refuse him? How did he know but that there might even now be some
understanding between her and Eperson? The sheer thought chilled him
like a blast from a cavern of ice. She seemed to feel the limpness of
the arm she held or in some way to sense the despair that was on him so
quickly following the mood she had interrupted only a moment before.

"You are so strange!" she sighed, taking a better grasp on his arm, and
even bearing down on it slightly as she lowered her head thoughtfully.
"You are a mystery to me. I can't make you out."

He could not explain. He was not sure that he cared to explain the
terrible internal quakings which to him seemed so unmanly, so unlike any
feelings that had ever come to him. He wondered if Eperson had actually
spoken open words of love to her, and, if so, how had the fellow, with
all his suave ability, managed it?

Another buggy passed. Tilly explained who the occupants of it were after
she had greeted them. They were George Whitton and Ella Bell Roberts.
Then she added, with a touch of seriousness:

"You ought to have lifted your hat just now."

"Lifted my hat? Why, I don't know her-- I've never seen her before!" he
retorted, with the irritation of a great mind descending to a
triviality.

"Because he lifted his to me and you are with me," Tilly persisted in
her mild rebuke. "It is the custom here, but it may not be at
Ridgeville."

John was chagrined, but determined to hide it. "I have never heard of a
man bowing to a man or a woman he never saw before," he fumed. "I don't
care what you all do; it is foolishness out and out."

"Well, when you are in Rome," Tilly quoted in quite a grave tone, "you
ought to do as the Romans do."

The thing rankled within him. The blood had mounted to his brow and
stayed there. Even Tilly was telling him how to deport himself. He
adored her, but he was angry enough to have sworn in her gentle,
uplifted eyes. She observed his moody mien and playfully shook his arm.

"Don't be mad," she urged, sweetly. "I meant no harm, but I _do_ want
them all to like you, and I'm afraid they won't if you fail in little
things like that just now. They won't understand--they will think you
are stuck up, and I know you are not a bit vain. I am sure of that--as
sure as I'm alive. If you were I'd not like you."

She had intimated that she liked him, and that ought to have been
sufficient to quell the storm within him, but it did not quite. Her
rebuke hurt far more than any which had ever come to him. She adroitly
changed the subject. She spoke of the work on the court-house and
praised his part of it, but what did that matter? He knew what his work
was and he was just learning profound and relentless things about the
difference between himself and her--between her puzzling environment and
his, which was all too distinctly plain for his present comfort. As they
neared Teasdale's and saw the lights streaming from the open doors and
windows across the lush greensward and noted the considerable collection
of horses and vehicles under the shade-trees and along the fences, he
became conscious of an overwhelming timidity with which he felt unable
to cope. Had Tilly been like himself and feared the entry into the light
and easy gaiety of the chattering throng, he would not have felt so
isolated. But her very unconsciousness of the thing as any sort of
ordeal to be dreaded depressed him as emphasizing the fateful
demarcation between her walk of life and his.

They reached the steps of the large, rather rambling one-story
farm-house. There was a long veranda in front, both ends of which were
filled with merrymakers. There was a wide hallway, and it, too, was
filled with jolly, loud-talking couples, as well as the big parlor on
the right.

"Oh, here they are!" Sally Teasdale cried, coming forward and taking
Tilly into her slim, pretentious arms. "I heard of you two poking along
like snails on the big road. As if you couldn't see enough of Mr. Trott
at home! I am going to introduce myself to him, to pay you back. I'm
Sally Teasdale"--holding out her hand to John--"and I am glad you came
to my party."

John did not know what he said, if he said anything audible. It was the
damnable glibness of speech of others which he had to contend with and
which seemed to be as silly as unattainable.

"Now, dear, run back to my room and take off your wrap," Miss Teasdale
said to Tilly. "I'll show Mr. Trott the men's room."

"He has nothing but his hat," Tilly lingered to say, "and he can leave
that anywhere."

"Yes, if you like," his hostess said, leading him to a spot on the
veranda where many men's hats were hanging on nails driven into the
weather-boarding. He hung up his and immediately felt Sally clutch his
arm.

"Tilly says you don't dance," she ran on. "What a pity! It is great fun,
and a good way to get acquainted. I suppose you are a member of the
church. Which one?"

"None at all," he heard himself saying, as if in a dense fog and from a
great distance.

"How funny that you don't dance, then?" she went on, leaving an opening
for him which he did not enter. He did not like her. She was too tall
and angular, too harsh of voice and fluent of talk and irritating
suggestion. He had the sense of being managed when he wanted above all
to be unmolested. Besides, she had sent Tilly away, and without Tilly he
felt lost.

"I must introduce you to my father," Sally said. "He is old-fashioned
and wants his way about everything. He would scold me if I didn't
introduce you at once. He is inside. Come on. My stepmother is busy in
the kitchen fixing refreshments."




CHAPTER XIII


He wormed his way after her through the surging throng to the parlor,
where a fat man in dark trousers and a white-linen coat stood vigorously
cooling himself with a palm-leaf fan and talking to some middle-aged men
and women.

"Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Trotter--I mean Trott," he said,
extending a clammy hand. "I've seen you about the court-house several
times but you were always busy and I didn't want to climb up those
rickety planks to you. How is it moving along?"

"All right," John said, bluntly. He was not awed by the man, for he was
used to men of all types. Besides, John could not descend to empty
platitudes for the sake of making conversation, and he half resented the
unnecessary question about a matter that was obvious to every passer-by.

"Come in here with me." The old man took a large grasp on his arm and
began to fan lazy waves of warm air into his face as he drew him into an
adjoining room, which was evidently a sleeping-apartment from which the
bed had been removed. There was a table against the wall, and on its
snow-white cloth stood a great bowl of mint, some goblets, a pitcher of
water, a dish of sugar, and a brown jug containing whisky.

"I want you to try one of my juleps," Teasdale chuckled. "That is some
of the best old rye that ever slid down a thirsty throat."

"I don't drink," John said. "I won't take anything."

"What, what? You don't? Well, I won't insist--I never do--but stay with
me a minute till I take one straight. My old lady says I take too much
at every party Sally has, and unless some feller is in here with me she
thinks I am tanking up all by myself."

"Go ahead," John answered, and the farmer proceeded to help himself to
an ample supply of the amber fluid. While he drank, the sound of tuning
fiddles and the twanging of guitars came from the parlor.

"The niggers have come," Teasdale gurgled, as he smacked his lips and
screwed the corn-cob stopper back into the neck of the jug. "Sally will
start out with dancing, I reckon. I used to be a great hand at it, but
I'm too heavy now."

He led the way back to the parlor. Four black men sat in a corner
vigorously sawing and picking their instruments. One of them, the
leader, called out in stentorian tones, "All hands fer de fust set!" and
there was a laughing rush from the hall and the veranda of several
couples to secure places. Seeing a chance to get away from his host,
John drew back into the hall, where he found himself jostled and ignored
by the tempestuous human mass. He edged his way along a wall to the
veranda, and there saw something startlingly disagreeable. It was Joel
Eperson and Tilly standing side by side, their faces averted toward the
gate. Joel was regarding her with the eyes of dumb adoration and
listening closely to something she was saying. John saw that the
opposite end of the veranda was deserted and he went to it. He tried to
keep his eyes from the pair, but it was impossible. His misery
increased, seeming to ooze into him from some external reservoir of
pain. All around him surged a life bewilderingly new and fatuous. He
saw Joel bend down to pick up a flower Tilly dropped and saw him smile
as he gave it back to her. What could she be saying, with that sweet,
drawn look about her lips? What was Joel asking? He saw her nod, and
Joel took her arm and the two went down the steps to the gravel walk
that led from the house to the gate. Here back and forth they walked,
arm in arm, now in the full light from the door and windows, again in
the half-darkness near the fence. Once for fully five minutes they
lingered at the gate while the silent spectator of their movements
leaned tense and rigid against the balustrade. The promenade was quite
in accordance with rural propriety and custom, but John could not
understand why that pair in particular should be the only ones in the
entire company to engage in it. It did not seem right. How could it be
right?

The music, the sonorous calls to the dancers, the tripping of feet,
pounded his tortured brain. The whole world in its new aspect seemed to
meet him with fangs and claws exposed. He wanted to fight something
physically, to express by oaths and blows the resentment packed within
his primitive breast. He felt his gnarled and hardened fingers at Joel
Eperson's thin neck. He saw the long hair sway back and forth as he
shook the love-smitten man. His clutch tightened till Joel's eyes bulged
from their sockets, and then, in gloating fancy, John dashed him to the
ground, where he lay exposed to Tilly's view. But reality has little to
do with the tricks of the imagination, and there stood Eperson at the
fence with Tilly by his side.

Two girls were approaching. One was Sally Teasdale, the other Martha
Jane Eperson.

"They've told the truth about you," the former greeted John, with a
teasing laugh, as she introduced the slight, plain, dark girl whose
hand she held. "You are really a woman-hater, or you would not be off
here by yourself when all the girls want to know you."

Again he was scarcely conscious of what he was saying or leaving unsaid,
and suddenly waked to the fact that his hostess had hurried away, and
that the plain girl was in his care. After all, she was Eperson's
sister, and he eyed her curiously, wondering if she, too, were his
enemy.

"You've met my brother," she began. "He spoke about it the day the
corner-stone was laid. There he is out there with Tilly now. I didn't
want to come to-night, but he was crazy to be here so that he could see
her."

"I thought that was it," John permitted his slow lips to say. "They have
been going together a long time. That is, I've heard so."

"Yes, and I thought--we all thought that Tilly would end up by taking
him, but it is all off now," Miss Eperson sighed, her eyes on the pair
at the fence.

"All off?" John in his sober senses would have wondered at his ability
to talk so freely with a girl he had just met. "Why, what do you mean?"

"As if you didn't know--as if _everybody_ doesn't know!" Martha Jane
laughed half sardonically.

"But I don't know what you mean." Something new and bountiful in its
promise of joy filled John and drove the words from his palpitating
tongue.

"The idea!" scoffed Martha Jane. "Well, if you don't know it you are
blind as a bat in daytime. Brother knows it, I know it--everybody knows
it."

"Knows what?" John demanded, his breath checked, his eyes gleaming, his
whole being athrob under the dawn of an ecstasy the plain girl seemed to
offer.

"Well, I'm not going to tell you, if you don't know," the girl
answered, with a little shrug. "But if you want to understand, watch my
poor brother. He never had a look like that before. She has been his
very life. People that doubt real love ought to know Joel. He would go
through fire and water for Tilly. He'd steal, he'd kill, he'd do
anything. He is desperate to-night. When we got to her house and found
that you and she were going to walk out here, it was the last straw. But
he is a gentleman, my brother is, and he will never make a row over it."

Under the sheer blaze of this information, John stood speechless. He,
boldly now, gave his arm to his little companion and they started to
walk back and forth on the lawn as others were doing. His face was now
turned from Tilly, but subconsciously he could fairly feel her
proximity. John almost loved the little woman on his arm. How could he
help it? She was so kind to him.

They were turning toward the steps when Tilly and Eperson approached.
There was a wilted look of resignation on Eperson's face, a sentient
animation in Tilly's eyes and about her lips, when she said to John:

"I hope you are having a good time and meeting all the girls. Sally said
she would look after you."

He smiled and nodded. Something seemed to bear down on his brain and
befog his sight. The lights, the lawn, the people, swirled around him.

"Yes, I'm all right," he said.

They were all on the veranda now and Joel stood facing his rival, a look
of wondering respect in his shrinking gaze.

"Oh, Joel!" a voice was heard, and Sally Teasdale approached. "We need
you. Mother is going to serve the refreshments and all the men who know
the ins and outs of our kitchen are helping wait on the crowd. Will you
come? Father is already unable to walk steady."




CHAPTER XIV


Joel blandly and gallantly complied. His sister, now thrown with John
and Tilly after the others left, looked slightly embarrassed, and,
saying that she, too, would help serve the supper, she moved away. This
threw John and Tilly together again. Some couples had seated themselves
in chairs against the wall, and, as there were vacancies, they sat down
also. The negroes, to the accompaniment of guitars, began singing old
plantation melodies. The moon, higher in the heavens now, shed a
glorious sheen over the still landscape. John was too full of adoration
and joy to utter a word. Tilly seemed to sense his mood to its depths
and to blend a mood of like nature with it.

"I love you--I love you!" John's soul seemed to whisper, but his tongue
remained an inactive lump in his mouth.

"I know--I understand," Tilly's soul seemed to be saying in the same
inaudible way. He smelled the perfume of the geranium leaves on his
coat, and his big red fingers raised them to his nostrils. He told
himself that it was a silly, womanish act, but what did he care? Tilly's
fingers had pinned them there, the little fingers he longed to caress.

Joel served her first. He came past other girls and brought Tilly a
plate containing cake and a glass of sillibub and hastened away after
she had sweetly thanked him.

Tilly held the plate in her lap, idly toying with the spoon.

"Why don't you eat it?" John asked.

"Because the others haven't theirs yet," she answered.

"Oh, I see," he muttered, chagrined in spite of his happiness. "I'll
never get on to your ways. I've been brought up different. I've worked
hard since I was a boy--I-- I--" But he could not go farther. Why should
he allude to his sordid home life when it was a thing which he now so
utterly despised? How could he speak of his mother, who was so widely
and strangely different from the women Tilly knew? No, he would let
those things rest.

Various young men had served all the ladies on the veranda when Joel
came out with a plate and looked about as if trying to find some lady
who had been overlooked. Finding no one, he brought it to John.

"You take it, Mr. Trott," he said, suavely, and yet with a touch of
irrepressible dejection in his tone.

John stared in stupid bewilderment and then jerked out, "Keep it
yourself." It was just such a well-meant reply as he might have made to
one of his workmen who was offering him a cigar, and yet it quite
frustrated Joel, who stood awkwardly waiting, the plate still timidly
extended.

"Oh no! I'm going right back," Joel said. "I can't eat now, thank you.
We are just beginning to help the men."

"Well, you can't wait on me," John blurted out. The situation was
becoming tense and awkward, when Tilly half playfully reached out, took
the plate, and gave it to John.

"Take it," she said, firmly. "Joel is in a hurry. The others are
waiting."

John obeyed, but failed to thank Eperson. He was vaguely conscious that
Tilly was smoothly performing the duty for him and that Joel was bowing
himself away. Then they sat in silence. Others near by were boisterously
laughing, beating time with their feet and singing with the band, but
neither Tilly nor John had aught to say. It was as if the subject which
was at once burning and soothing their souls was too vast and sacred to
be touched upon in the neighborhood of others less profoundly stirred.

"Give me your plate. I'll take it in," John heard a young farmer saying
to the girl he sat with. "You don't want to hold it all night. We'll be
dancing again in a minute."

The girl obeyed, and the young man left with two plates in his hands.
John noticed that Tilly had finished, and he offered to take her plate.
She gave it to him. "Be careful," she warned him. "Sally borrowed most
of them from the neighbors and wants to return them in good order."

John chafed under the admonition as he rose with his plate and Tilly's
in either hand. He had, however, scarcely reached the door when, in
trying quickly to step out of the way of two girls who were approaching,
one of the plates and the goblet on it fell to the floor. John stood as
if paralyzed. Then he softly swore. Every one on the veranda stopped
talking and stared. What he would have done next John never knew, for
Tilly suddenly approached.

"Never mind," she said, calmly. "Take the other one to the kitchen."

Furious at himself and all the swirling, clattering, and chattering
company, John managed to make his way into the kitchen, where he
delivered the plate to a buxom negro woman at a big dish-pan full of hot
water. He saw Joel putting down some plates and glasses on a table near
at hand. Joel smiled in a friendly way.

"I saw your little accident," he said. "I barely escaped the same thing
just now. A fellow has to be a regular bareback rider or a tight-rope
walker to get through this crowd with his arms full of glassware and
crockery."

"No, I couldn't help it." John was conscious of a hot flow of blood to
his face, and a vague sense of gratitude. "I'm no good at this sort of
thing. I haven't been brought up to it."

Joel seemed to have no reply ready, and the two willingly parted. John
found his chair by Tilly still unoccupied and sat down in it. Why didn't
she say something about the accident, he wondered. He decided to bring
it up himself, so ignorant was he of the ways of the new world to which
she had introduced him.

"I'm sorry about those things I broke," he began, hurriedly. "It wasn't
my fault. Those girls came out all of a sudden and faced me. I had to
get out of their way, you see, or smash right into them. So I--"

"I know. I saw it," Tilly interposed. "Never mind. Let it pass."

"But I've got to fix it somehow," John blundered on. "Nobody shall lose
through me. I am able to pay for any damage I do. Tell me who they
belonged to and I'll send the owner a whole set of plates and goblets. I
might not match the ones I broke, but--"

"Don't, don't think of that," Tilly urged, her pretty lips twitching
with almost maternal sympathy. "If you were to offer to pay it would
offend Sally."

"Offend her? Why, in the name of common sense?"

"I don't know, but it would hurt _me_--it would hurt _anybody_. It is of
no consequence."

"But you talked differently before it happened," John insisted, his lip
hanging and quivering. "You said distinctly that the things were
borrowed and that Miss Sally wanted--"

"Yes, but it is done now and the only thing is to forget it. Don't even
mention it to Sally."

"Not mention it to her? Why not?" John's tongue was thick with the
mystery in which he was warmly floundering.

"Because that would not be right--not according to--to custom."

"Custom be--" John bit off the oath with exasperated teeth. "I don't
care a hill of beans what the custom is here in these backwoods. I want
to pay my way in this life. I laid a cigar down one day against a
fellow's hat, and burned a big hole in it. I bought him another and it
tickled him to death. It was the best hat in town, while his was an old
one, and--"

"But this is different," Tilly pleaded. "Let it drop, please do. For my
sake don't say anything more about it. I'll explain what I mean some
other time."

That had to suffice. There was more music and dancing and the game of
"Stealing partners" on the lawn. Tilly asked John if he wanted to play
the game, but he confessed that he did not know what it was like. Saying
that it would not look well for them to sit together so long, she led
him down to the grass, and they stood watching the big circle of
couples. It was very simple--far too simple to interest John. A
partnerless young man would dart across the ring, select the partner of
another, and they would merrily trip back to his "home" on the other
side.

Seeing Tilly, a young man unknown to John came and "stole" her and drew
her into the circle.

"Now let the girls steal!" a voice cried out, and several girls sped
across the ring after partners. A lively minx with blue eyes and flowing
golden hair danced up to John. "Come get in with me," she laughed.
"Tilly Whaley hasn't introduced you to any of us. It is a shame. You may
have heard Tilly mention me. I'm Jennie Webster."

"No, I never heard of you before," John said, bluntly, as they settled
into their places in the ring.

Jennie laughed in her small handkerchief. She even bent her golden head
to give vent to her amusement.

"What is the matter?" John demanded, in slow irritation, his eyes on
Tilly, directly opposite with a young farmer whom he had once seen at
the Whaleys'.

"Why, you are as funny as they all say you are," Jennie tittered. "I
heard you were rough and outspoken, but I didn't think you'd admit that
you never heard of _me_ before. Why, sir, I'll have you know that I'm
somebody, _I am_. You may bet your boots. I got the first prize for
butter at the fair last fall and my father got two blue ribbons on a
white pig--one on its neck and the other on its stumpy tail."

John wondered if she was making sport of him, but soon decided that
there was no malice in the twinkling blue eyes.

"There goes Joel Eperson," she said, laying her small hand on John's
arm. "He is not in the game. Watch Tilly-- What did I tell you? I knew
she would steal him. My, my! that couple are a wonder!"

John saw Tilly leaving her partner and crossing the grass to Eperson.
"Come play," he heard her saying. "You've worked long enough for one
evening."

John saw Tilly and Joel find a place opposite him. How his new hopes
drooped at the sheer sight of them!

"You are living in her house; I guess you know about them," ran on
John's companion.

"Know about them--know _what_ about them?" he demanded, all but
fiercely.

"Huh!" ejaculated the girl. "Have you been so busy with your bricks and
mortar that you haven't heard that they have been sweethearts since they
were tiny tots? Why, even my mother and father always inquire, when I
get home from a party, whether Joel and Tilly got together? You see, few
folks sympathize with her hard-shell old daddy, and everybody loves
Joel--everybody, man, woman, and child. And I know why. It is because he
is so fine, noble, and constant. Some think--some few--that Tilly will
give in to her father and drop Joel, but take it from me--and I'm a
girl--she won't. She loves him--down deep she loves him, for no girl
could help it. She wouldn't be a true woman if she went back on
adoration like that. He is not handsome, but there is something in him
too sweet and good to talk about. Once we all were arguing at
Sunday-school whether anybody could actually forgive an enemy, and
nearly all of us agreed that we couldn't but that Joel Eperson could.
Wasn't that funny? When I talk to him I feel restful. If I was about to
do a bad thing and he spoke to me, I'd throw it up. He did once, but
never mind about that. It is too long to tell you now. But I'll
always--always love him for what he did and said right while I was
wavering."

John now saw that Joel had given Tilly his arm and was leading her
across the grass to a rustic seat under an oak-tree. The circle of forms
and faces became blurred to John's sight. There was much laughter, much
darting to and fro across the ring, but John heard only the voice of
the little analyst at his elbow.

"There they go for the second dose of soothing-syrup," she twittered.
"Old man Whaley doesn't know which side his bread is buttered on. By
trying to keep them apart he is only driving them together. 'Absence
makes the heart grow fonder,' and so does opposition. That pair is
lapping up stolen sweets to-night."




CHAPTER XV


The game was breaking up. The couples were moving toward the house. John
was desperate enough to have shaken the unconscious tantalizer now on
his arm. He could think of nothing to say and didn't care what his
companion thought about his inattention. He was wondering why Martha
Jane Eperson had said what she had said, and why he had been so foolish
as to believe it. Perhaps she had a motive. Perhaps it was sarcasm born
in the knowledge of his presumption. For aught he knew, she might now be
laughing over his credulity.

John was only a boy, and a crude one. Without excusing himself from his
companion, he left her at the steps and abruptly stalked away. He had
his choice of entering the crowded farm-house or sauntering about the
grounds. Taking a cigar from his pocket, he struck a match on the
door-step, lighted the cigar, and then turned toward the stables at one
side of the house. Here among the horses and vehicles he stood
reflecting gloomily, rebelliously. Across the lighted lawn he saw Joel
and Tilly still on the bench. How close they seemed to sit, one against
the other! The hot weight of rage again bore down on John's brain. He
forgot to smoke. His cigar died in his inert fingers. Again he wanted to
throttle his meek and placid rival. The man's sheer gentleness enraged
him, for it was a quality he himself did not possess, and till now had
denied. In the half-darkness he saw two young men come to a buggy not
far from him, take from under the seat a flask, and heard them joking as
they drank.

"I knew you had your arm around her, you sly dog!" one said, "and I held
my horse in to give you a chance."

"She is a little beauty, eh?" another voice said with a laugh. "She
nestled up against me like a sick kitten to a hot brick."

The flask was emptied. It whistled as it was hurled against the barn,
and the two men went back to the house. What could Tilly and Joel be
saying? She had said to John that he and she should not be seen too long
together, and yet for the second time that evening she and Eperson had
sequestered themselves like that. John told himself that he had been a
fool to hope as he had done, and his rage and despair joined forces
within him.

Presently he noticed that some of the young men were coming for their
buggies and driving them up to the veranda. Then he saw some couples
getting in and driving away. Still Joel and Tilly sat on the rustic
bench. Still John lurked and watched in the darkness.

"Oh, brother, we must go now!" It was Martha Jane calling from the
steps. "I don't want to hurry you, but we really must be going."

"Yes, yes, dear-- I'm coming!" and Joel and Tilly rose and arm in arm
slowly went to the house. A moment later Joel was coming for his buggy,
and John, fearing to be seen alone in the dark, quickly advanced by
another way to the veranda without meeting his rival.

He found Tilly ready to go and looking for him. "I wondered where you
were," she said, softly. "We must be on the way."

He went on the veranda for his hat, leaving her at the foot of the
steps. He joined her, the dead cigar in his mouth. He held out his arm.
She took it, started on, then paused suddenly.

"Have you said good night to the Teasdales?" she asked.

"No," he retorted, impatiently, even angrily, for Eperson stood near by,
hat in hand, extending a handkerchief to Tilly.

"You dropped it on the grass," he said. "I found it just now."

"Thank you," Tilly said, taking it and smiling sweetly. "Good night.
Remember what I told you." Then she turned back to John. "You must say
good night to them. They are rather particular, and will think it
strange if you don't. There they are in the hall, all three of them."

He obeyed. How he got through it he never knew. He bore away with him a
blurred impression of the farmer's red face, too affectionate handclasp;
Mrs. Teasdale's fat and squatting movement as she silently and timidly
bowed; and Sally's gushing appreciation of his coming, and her regrets
at not having seen more of him through the evening.

Joel and Martha Jane were getting into the buggy. The latter leaned over
a wheel to kiss Tilly. Joel raised his hat, and John found himself
imitating the salutation, and despising it. He gave his arm to Tilly and
they started home. The road ahead of them was dusty, and Joel's horse
stirred the powdered clay into a cloud as he trotted ahead of them. This
fact in itself angered John. He coughed and sniffed, but said nothing.

"I hope you liked the party," Tilly began. Her hand rested on John's arm
in the same confiding way as formerly, but it stirred him no longer.

"I thought it was awful, silly, stupid!" he declared. "I never knew that
grown-up people could act that way."

"I'm sorry," Tilly sighed. "I was afraid you would not enjoy so many
strangers. It would not be natural for you to feel as much at home as
the rest. You see, they have been going together for years, and,
moreover, you said you had not been accustomed to such things."

"No, and I have not missed anything," he threw back.

She made no denial. Her hold on his arm had a caressing quality that
would be hard to define. She seemed to understand him better than he
understood himself. "Yes, I was afraid you wouldn't like it," she
rejoined, "for you are different from most persons. You are the
strangest man I ever knew--the very, very strangest. Your face is as
smooth as a boy's, and yet somehow you seem old in--in experience--sad
experience, too, I should think. You are rough on the outside, but I
know you are pure gold on the inside."

"Pure gold, rubbish!" he sneered, inwardly. Had he not just heard a girl
say that Joel Eperson was the best man alive? What did a woman's opinion
amount to, anyway? And how could Tilly expect him to be such a fool as
to believe her when she had acted as she had that evening with another
man? The memory of this fired him afresh and he suddenly shook her hand
from his arm and with bowed head strode along. He was breathing now like
a beast of burden hard driven by pain.

"What is the matter?" Tilly asked, blandly, although she knew full well
that she was responsible for his present mood, and, reaching out, she
took his arm again. He did not lift it into place, and her hand slid
down his wrist till his fingers were clasped by her pleading ones.

"Don't be mad at me," she said, soothingly. "If you understood
everything you would not be."

Understood everything? Did she mean now that her engagement to Eperson
would explain, justify all that had taken place?

"I do understand," he said, aloud, his cheeks twitching, his lips tight,
his eyes gleaming. He had stopped short and now stood fairly panting,
facing her.

"Oh, you don't--you don't!" she insisted. "Nobody knows, but myself and
Joel, how he feels. I have tried to do right by him, and once I thought
that in time I might feel otherwise, but it is impossible. I love him
dearly in a certain way, but it is not as a woman ought to feel toward
the one man in all the world for her--the one given by God Himself. Joel
loves me in that way, and I am very, very unhappy about it. I see--I
see--you thought to-night that he and I-- But never mind. I was only
trying to get him to take a brighter view, for he is very, very
dejected."

"You mean to tell me, looking straight in my eyes," John cried--"you a
truthful girl--you mean to tell me that you don't love him?"

Tilly, with eyes full to their brink with sincerity, and in a voice that
rang true to its maidenly depths, answered: "No, I do not love him
as--as a wife ought to love her husband. I've tried, but I can't."

The moonlight seemed filled with darting arrows of bliss made as visible
as rockets against a black sky. John felt as if the vast earth were
rocking his fears to sleep. He took her hand and drew it into its place
on his arm. The ground seemed to fall away from each step he took as
they moved forward.

"I see, I see," he heard himself saying; "then it doesn't make any
difference. Poor devil! _That's_ what ailed him, eh? No wonder! No
wonder!"

Tilly's gentle pressure was on his arm and he was afraid she would feel
the wild throbs of his being, for, strong man that he was, he was as
much ashamed of them as of a secret sin. How could he open those
joy-tied lips of his and tell her how he felt--how he had felt since his
first sight of her? He tried to summon words that would be adequate, and
failed utterly. But Tilly knew. She seemed to gather a knowledge of his
emotions from the very moonlit silence that pervaded the fields and the
woods around them.

Suddenly she began to quicken her step. "We must walk faster," she said,
sighing, as one in joyous slumber about to wake. "Mother and father may
hear the buggies passing and think we ought to be home earlier. You see,
it is Saturday night, and if I'm out after midnight father says it is
breaking the Sabbath and is angry."

The house was still, save for a lamp burning in the hall, when they
arrived home. He helped her lock the front door, insisted on giving her
the lamp, and with a lighted match made his way up to his room. He had
not said good night to her. He remembered that with twinges of
self-contempt as he stood undressing in his room and heard Cavanaugh
snoring across the hall. Why had he overlooked it, he wondered. Why did
he have to be instructed on such matters like a little child learning to
walk, when they came so naturally to Tilly, to Joel Eperson and others?

He frowned as he jerked his necktie and gave up the problem. He would
tell her when he saw her that he was sorry for the oversight. How could
he tell her that it was partly due to his dazed happiness over what she
had said about not loving Eperson?

He tumbled into bed, but could not sleep for a long time. Cavanaugh
snored like the roar of a distant sawmill, but that didn't matter. The
events of the evening were unreeling in a series of mind-pictures filled
with lights and shadows and culminating in the blinding revelation of a
single fact--the fact that Joel Eperson had cause for his present gloom.
John knew that he himself was unlike the people he was meeting for the
first time in his life, and he was sure that he could never be as they
were, but he had come upon the marvelous belief that he and Tilly were
meant for each other. Somehow, by some intent of Fate, they were
destined to breast the world side by side, arm in arm, as they had
walked the dusty road that night. He was conscious of many stupid
shortcomings on his part, but she would overlook them. Indeed, she was
overlooking them already. Finally he slept, and, of all absurdities, he
dreamed of carrying bricks and mortar as a small, ragged boy for
Cavanaugh, who had just hired him for a few cents a day to see what
there was in him. Later he seemed to be telling his powdered and painted
mother of his success and displaying to her indifferent gaze the first
few cents Cavanaugh had ever paid him.




CHAPTER XVI


The next day being Sunday, the family rose an hour later than usual.
Cavanaugh came into John's room after the sun was well up in the sky and
found his young friend awake.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he jested. "Here you are flat on
your lazy back while that little last night's partner of yours is out
milking the cow and feeding the chickens. I saw her from my window just
now looking as fresh as a pink morning-glory wet with dew. Old Whaley
and his wife are hard masters even of their own child. I reckon Tilly
would love to lie and snooze after that late tilt of yours and hers, but
her folks don't allow it when there is work to be done. I don't want to
meddle, my boy, but take it from me for what it is worth, Tilly is the
kind of a girl to make a working-man a fine wife. Why? Well, because she
hasn't been raised with a gold spoon in her mouth, and a lot of fool
ideas about style, rank, and what not. She'd be industrious, saving, and
grateful for what her husband could give her. And you--well, I'm not
giving you taffy to tickle your vanity, but you'd lavish your last cent
on a wife of your choice. How do I know? Well, how do I know that mighty
nigh all you ever made--now, I'm going to speak plain--mighty nigh every
cent you ever made was lapped up by your ma and Jane Holder and that
poor little girl at your house? Huh! Don't I know that a big, strapping
fellow that will do all that for folks of--of that stripe will do even
more for the sweet little maid that leaves all her own kin to cleave
unto him?"

"You don't know what you are talking about," John said from the pillow
which half hid his flushed face.

"Well, maybe I don't," the contractor smiled benignly, "but you get up
and put on your best suit. We are all going to meeting to-day. You've
dodged that too often to help you along with old Whaley. He is wondering
where you stand, anyway, on these vital questions of man's duty to God
and His written law as Whaley reads it. Don't you forget about the way
he treated that son of his that tied up with a follower of the Pope. In
spite of his harsh ways Tilly loves her old daddy, and--and well, there
is no use of your rubbing the old hog's bristles the wrong way. They
might stick in your hand in the long run. You've talked too much to our
men on your line of free thought, I am thinking. I heard one say
yesterday that you claimed to be an out and out atheist. They all like
you, but they are members of some church or other and they were
scandalized to hear it. We are in a narrow, hidebound community up here
and we've got to watch where we step. Fellers like those will talk, and
what they say will be added to by others."

"I won't keep my mouth shut for anybody," John said, firmly, as he got
up and began to dress. "I don't want to go to-day, but I will if you say
so."

"Well, I _do_ say so," Cavanaugh answered. "And we will set out as soon
as the family does. I'm going to set, as usual, in the old man's Bible
class that comes before the regular discourse, though I can't say that I
get much profit out of it. I disagree with his interpretation of many
passages, but he'd crawl over the benches and have a fist fight with me
if I disputed his points. They say he is a regular devil when he is
mad. Church member though he is, he actually shot a man once, and it was
a wonder the chap didn't die. He carries a revolver. What do you think
of that for an active disciple of the great Prince of Peace?"

"They are all that way," John said, warmly. "They are crooks and haven't
brains enough to see how crooked their reasoning is."

Shortly after breakfast the three Whaleys started to church. Tilly
walked between her father and mother, and John and Cavanaugh followed
close behind. They found, on their arrival, a group of villagers,
mountaineers, and farmers loitering on the grass-plot in front of the
little building, but the Whaleys went straight in, and John and the
contractor did likewise. Cavanaugh went forward to the benches at the
front which were reserved for Whaley's Bible class. Eight or ten men and
women were already seated there, and they nodded appreciatively to him
and the Whaley family. John found himself quite alone on a bench near
the door. He saw Tilly and her mother chatting with some other women,
and Cavanaugh making himself quite at home as he shook hands with
various smiling members of the class. Only half an hour was to be given
to the class work and nearly all the students had arrived. John saw
Whaley open his worn and interlined Bible and then step back to a
bell-rope which hung down by the little white pulpit. He gave the rope a
single forceful jerk and the cast-iron bell on the roof creaked and
tapped lazily. That was a signal that the Bible class had begun its
session.

Just now, to John's great discomfiture, Whaley, with his Bible in his
stubby hands, came down the aisle to him.

"You can't hear back this far," Whaley said. "Move on up and join us."

"I'd rather not," John stammered, trying to steady his eyes and voice in
his bewilderment.

"Well, I can't see why. It certainly can't hurt you to hear us go
through the lesson, and you might learn a lot. Bible reading and study
is fairly sweeping broadcast over the country. Over in Dadeville they
have hired that woman blackboard teacher to come several hundred miles
and are paying five dollars a head for the course. I've read some of her
points in our Leaflet, and I'm here to tell you if she ever comes this
way I'll refute her, if they oust me for disorder. It would be my duty,
considering the light I have. Come on up."

There was nothing else to do, for the entire class, with the exception
perhaps of Tilly, was looking toward him. John rose and followed the old
man up the aisle, and found Cavanaugh gravely and sympathetically making
space for him at his side. Tilly and her mother were just in front of
him. John could have bent forward and whispered in the girl's ear, had
he dared. The exercises began by a chapter being read, first a verse by
Whaley and then a verse in turn by each of the class. John was fairly
chilled by the horror of his predicament. It was plain that Whaley would
expect him to read aloud, and he determined that he would refuse. He
told himself that he would refuse if the whole silly bunch of fanatics
were infuriated by it. He had been forced into the class and he would be
forced no farther. As luck would have it, the book was handed to
Cavanaugh before it reached John, and the old man read in a clear,
confident tone the verse which had fallen to him. Then he started to
hand the Bible to John, but John shook his head firmly.

"Pass it on to some one else," he said, almost aloud and with guttural
sullenness. "I won't do it."

Then Cavanaugh displayed friendly diplomacy. "I'll read for my young
friend, if it is all right," he said. "Me and him have a lot of talks on
these same lines, but usually I do the reading."

Whaley frowned and glared, but, being impatient with any delay, he said,
gruffly: "Well, well, go ahead. I don't know where Mr. Trott stands,
anyway. He is bound to see the light sooner or later, and then he won't
have to be begged to read the grandest Book the world ever saw, or be
slow about joining a class like this, either. As many of you know, with
pride, it is the best and biggest in the county, if not in the state."

Cavanaugh proceeded to read the verse, and the book went over to Mrs.
Whaley and then to her daughter. And as Tilly read in her clear,
unruffled voice John was conscious of a certain twinge of shame for his
avoidance of a thing so simple as she made the act seem.

The reading was concluded, and Whaley set in to analyze the text, line
by line. He would read a verse, and then ask the class what particular
significance it held to their understanding. Answers came rapidly from
all the class, and sometimes John noticed that, when all the others had
failed to grasp Whaley's particular version, he would call on Tilly to
reply and what she said always met with her father's approval, the
reason being that the girl had already gone over the chapter with her
parents at home. The lesson was concluded by a long-winded lecture from
Whaley, and then the bell was rung for the regular service.

John failed to hear what the aged minister was saying, but he did note
that Whaley now and then called out, "Amen!" in deep, self-satisfying
tones. John could not keep his eyes from the back part of Tilly's head.
He worshiped her hair, the very ribbons of her simple straw hat, the
curve of her brave little shoulders. What a marvel she was in human
form! It was almost impossible to realize that only a few hours before
she had been alone with him, telling that dazzling story of her
inability to love another man. He wondered if he might walk home with
her. He was afraid not, and yet could not tell whence his fears came,
unless they were due to his vague sense of having opposed her father's
religion.

When the service was over, however, the opportunity came. It might have
been brought about by deliberate design on the part of the contractor,
for Cavanaugh drew the husband and wife into conversation about the
sermon, and that threw Tilly and John together. The Whaleys seemed to
forget Tilly's existence, and John and she fell in behind the three.

"I wondered what you were going to do when father went back after you,"
Tilly said, with a smile. "I was afraid to look around."

"What did you think when I refused to read in the class?" John inquired,
forcing a lifeless smile.

"I hardly know," Tilly said, as she studied his face with bland
sincerity. "It almost frightened me. I was afraid father would forget
himself and storm out at you. But--but as for your reading out loud, of
course, if you really do not believe in the Bible and love it, you ought
not to read it in public. That would be sacrilege."

"And do you believe in it?" he demanded, almost rebukingly. "Do you
believe that that Book is the actual word of some far-off God that no
living man ever saw with his eyes or heard speak with his ears?"

"Yes," Tilly answered. "If I didn't believe it I'd be miserable. I can't
see how you can doubt the existence of God--how you can keep from
actually feeling His presence, especially when you are in trouble and
seriously need His help."

John sneered. He loved Tilly with his whole being, but he despised her
belief. "I can tell you why I don't believe," he said, a billow of
feeling behind his words. "I believe if there were a God, that God would
have to be a God of love, power, and pity, and with my own eyes I've
seen-- I have told you about that little orphan girl at home, Dora
Boyles. She is a little, helpless, overworked rat without father or
mother, in the care of an aunt who is no earthly good--and is crazy
about men--crazy about clothes, cards, liquor, and dancing. That little
dirty scrap of a girl is a child of God, the same as those polite,
well-fed, well-dressed girls and boys we met last night, eh? Well, tell
me what is God doing for her? As for me, myself, as I look back on what
I went through among those haughty, hidebound people at Ridgeville,
before Sam Cavanaugh held out a helping hand-- Well, never mind about
that, but I know I've been my own God, and I never run across any other
except in the dreams of persons who get the best things of life and
don't care whether anybody else gets them or not."

"You will think otherwise some day--you will _have_ to," was Tilly's
regretful ultimatum. "Someday you will need God so badly that you will
turn to Him. I did once, and was answered, too."

"You don't mean it," John disputed, warmly. "No prayer was ever answered
by any God, on the earth or off of it."

"Mine was," Tilly asseverated. "It was one night, and I was at home all
alone. Father had lost his temper at an election and--and wounded a man
in a dispute. Father was put in jail and mother hurried to him. The man
was bleeding to death--the doctors couldn't stop the flow of blood. You
can't imagine how I felt. I fell on my knees and prayed with all my soul
to God to save my father and the man he had shot. At two o'clock--oh, I
don't know how to express it!--at two o'clock I seemed to be lifted up
into something like light, but it wasn't that. It was something finer
and holier, but I knew, I knew that all was well. My mother came at
sunup. She said they had stopped the flowing blood at two
o'clock--exactly at two o'clock. My father was released the next day and
the man finally recovered."

"Things like that happen once in a thousand times," John said, with an
indulgent smile, "and people say it is in answer to prayer."

"But I know, for I _felt_ it," Tilly responded, simply, and she said no
more, for the three older persons had turned and were waiting for them
on the street corner.




CHAPTER XVII


One morning a week later Cavanaugh mounted the scaffold on which John
was working. He held some letters in his hand.

"That car of brick has been delayed," he announced. "It will be three
days before it can be delivered. The men won't like it, but we'll have
to shut down for that long, anyway."

John frowned and swore, as he stood scraping his trowel on the edge of a
brick which he had just tapped into line.

"Never mind; we needn't be idle--you and me, anyway," Cavanaugh said,
gently. "You heard about Mason & Trubel's storehouse being burned down
last week, didn't you? Well, the agents for the insurance company have
written me to come home and help adjust the loss. Some of the walls may
be usable in rebuilding, and they want me to be one of the arbitrators.
Now, there will be a lot of close figuring to do, and I want you to be
there. How about both of us going? There will be a fee for us that will
more than cover expenses, and the trip will do us good."

"I'll go with you," John said. "When will you start?"

"First train in the morning," was the reply, and the contractor went
about among the men, explaining the situation.

The two friends arrived at Ridgeville the following morning at ten
o'clock and at once started for their homes. To John's surprise, at the
end of the first street Cavanaugh did not turn toward his home, as would
have been natural, but kept on in the direction John was to go.

"You are out of your beat, aren't you?" John asked.

"I am and I ain't," Cavanaugh smiled. "I want to show you something--a
little house and lot that I hold a mortgage on. You know the cottage I
built for Pete Carrol, this side of your mother's house? Well, he
couldn't pay for it and it is on my hands. He went West, you know, and
left all his furniture in it. I've had a rent-sign on it for two months,
but haven't had a single applicant for it. I'd like to take a peep at
it."

The cottage was in quite an isolated spot, near the end of the street
railway, in full view of the lots containing shanties in which negroes
and the very poorest whites lived. Above the tree-tops, not far away,
could be seen the patched roof of John's ramshackle home.

"I hid the key under the door-step," Cavanaugh said, as they entered the
small front gate, and, bending down, he secured it. Then he crossed the
tiny, newly painted front porch and unlocked and opened the door.

There was a little hallway with rooms on each side of it, a tiny parlor
on the right which, on entering, they found neatly equipped with plain
oak furniture, and a rug or two on the floor, which was covered with
straw matting. They next entered the dining-room, which was furnished in
similar style. There was a small sideboard holding a modest supply of
table-linen, dishes, and glassware.

"Pete's wife was awfully particular, and she left things in apple-pie
order," Cavanaugh said, as they went into the kitchen adjoining. This
room, too, was supplied with all necessary utensils, a neat stove and a
sink with running water. Next they saw the bedroom. It held a table
with a lamp on it, and an oak bedstead in neat order with unsoiled
pillows and white coverlet. There was a bureau with a wide plate-glass
mirror, also a wash-stand with a white ewer and basin. The floor was
covered with new matting.

"A snug little nest, eh?" Cavanaugh asked, with a slow and rather
automatic smile. "Looks like somebody ought to rent it, cheap as I hold
it and ready furnished--only fifteen a month."

"It is all right," John answered, indifferently. "You ought to rent it
in the fall, anyway, when business picks up."

"I want to rent it by the time we finish the court-house,
anyway"--Cavanaugh continued to smile--"and I'd like to rent it to
somebody that would take care of it-- I mean somebody that I know about.
Gee! wouldn't this be a snug little nest for a pair of new-married
turtle-doves? Think of a fellow coming back from his day's work at night
to a cottage like this, with a little wife to meet him in a white bib
and tucker and a kiss and a glad smile?"

John had a sudden flash of comprehension, and he flushed from head to
foot. His great mouth made a failure of a smile, and that he was pleased
Cavanaugh did not doubt. "You think you have a joke on me," John said.
"Well, well, go it, Sam! I'm game for a little thing like that."

"You may call it a joke, but I don't," the contractor said, quite
seriously. "You see, I've got an ax to grind--two, in fact, for in the
first place I want to rent this house for enough to pay the taxes and
insurance, and in the next I want to tie you down to Ridgeville. I am
too old to move now, and I need you mighty bad. Say, you and I can
become partners before long."

"Well, what has that got to do with your--your other damn foolishness?"
John's face was averted as he spoke. They were back in the bedroom now,
and he made a pretense of examining the new sash-cords of the window. He
drew one of the weights up in its hidden groove and lowered it again. He
had never before examined a detail of a building so minutely. He looked
closely at the paint on the mullions and searched for flaws in the
glass.

"It has got this to do with it," Cavanaugh went on, now steadily and
without a vestige of his former smile. "I'm no fool, my boy. I know as
well as I stand here that you are not going to leave that sweet little
girl up there to do the drudgery for that irritable old hog and his
obedient wife. If you did I'd lose respect for you. You are making good
pay and you will make even better. In a little nook like this you could
make her as happy as the day is long. She could do all the housework and
not work a fourth as hard as she does now. Why, I saw her in the
corn-field the other day, toiling like an old-time slave with a heavy
hoe, while her rotten old daddy was in the house picking out passages in
the Bible to pin down some particular argument of his."

"I guess--I guess--" John stammered, "that the--the _girl_ would have
something to say on the subject."

"How _can_ she, in the name of all possessed"--Cavanaugh snorted and
laughed--"unless she is _asked_? I'm no fool. I know what two smudges of
red about the cheek-bones of a pretty girl mean when they never come in
sight till a big, hulking feller in overalls appears on the scene. I
know, too, that things have taken place that you haven't heard about. I
know that I've turned myself into a contractor of flesh and blood
instead of brick and mortar. Them old folks simply agreed one night, in
a talk with me, that I might run it. I told them I'd stand for you in
every way, and they-- Well, haven't you noticed for the last week that
they have slid off to bed early and left you and Tilly out under the
trees or on the porch, together? Well, that was my doings. The old man
was for having you come to him and state your intentions in plain words,
but I advised him against it. I told him that you could make a speech on
internal revenue, political economy, or any other big subject to an
audience a thousand strong, but that you'd fall down in an attempt to
tell a girl's daddy that you wanted to provide her grub and clothes. I
did have a big tussle, though, to keep one certain thing out of the
discussion, and that was your religion, or rather your lack of it. He
kept saying that he wanted to know what particular brand of theology
you'd impress on his daughter at your fireside. He said he never had
failed to see women go with their husbands sooner or later, and he was
afraid you hadn't been converted yet. However, I got him quiet on that
line. I told him, you see, that while you hadn't yet made an open
profession, I knew you well enough to be sure you'd end up all right and
make as good a citizen as any man I know."

"You have heard about a certain fellow by the name of Eperson, haven't
you?" John asked, as he strove manfully to quench the glad lights in his
eyes. "Well, he and Tilly have been sweethearts ever since they were
children."

"He has, but she hasn't." Cavanaugh emphasized the "he." "I know all
about it. He is as near dead as a man can be from disappointment. She
might have thought she cared for him, at one time, but when you came all
that was off. Now I'm going home to my old woman. Talking to you on
these lines makes me want to see her mighty bad. I feel younger, and
I'll bet she will look that way to me, too. But remember this, when we
get back to Cranston, sail right in and tell Tilly how you feel. She
knows, anyway, but you tell her straight out, like a man with a load of
hay to sell, and be done with it. I want to rent this house and I'm
going to do it."

They were outside the cottage now. Cavanaugh had closed the door and was
on his knees, hiding the key under the step. John stood over him.

"I wish you knew what you are talking about, Sam," he said, and it was
the first even indirect confession of the sacred tumult within him.
"I'll say that much. I wish--I wish it could be like you say it is. My
God! Sam, when I dare to think of it I go all to pieces. It is too good
to be true. Nothing has ever come my way that amounted to much in this
life. How could as big a thing as that be for me?"

"Well, it just is." Cavanaugh stood up, his fine face working in
sympathy. "The Lord has fixed it that way, my boy. You have had a hard
time, but your day is dawning. And listen to me. Under your full joy you
are going to wake up into a gratitude to the Creator for His great
gifts. You've been bitter--so bitter, for one reason or another, that
you've denied even God's existence, but with a believing wife like Tilly
at your side, and with children to bring up right, you will be
different. You are just a boy, anyway--a great, big, awkward, stumbling
boy, but you are going to make a man, and a good one."




CHAPTER XVIII


They parted outside the little gate, agreeing to meet at the Square in
the afternoon, and John pursued his way homeward. The very ground seemed
to fall away from his feet as he put them down. His whole body felt like
an imponderable thing over which he had little control. The swelling joy
within him fairly choked him.

"My God! My God!" he said several times, aloud. "Sam's a fool. Sam's a
fool. It can't be so. My Lord! how could it? And that little house. It
is a beauty and most women would like to run it and keep it in order. I
wonder if she would with me. I wonder."

He found Dora under an apple-tree in the front yard, playing with some
rag dolls she had made from scraps of finery cast off by her aunt and
Mrs. Trott. A brick represented a table, and on it were arranged bits of
china for plates. Other pieces of make-believe furniture were
constructed of cardboard cut and bent into shape. She glanced up as he
swung open the gate, smiled a welcome from a soiled face, and wiped her
itching nose on the back of her slender hand. She did not rise or make
any sort of physical demonstration by way of greeting.

"Where are the folks?" he asked, glancing into the house through the
open doorway.

"Asleep, I reckon," she said, busy with the pink sash of one of her
legless ladies, the tinseled hat of which was pinned askew over a pair
of eyes formed of green beads. "They've only been home about an hour.
Aunt Jane is sick. Your ma said she fainted at the party and they all
thought she was dead for a while."

"Those are not good dolls," John said, from the depths of his turbulent
joy. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll buy you a real wax one with
yellow hair and blue eyes. I saw one in a show-window as I came along
just now. It had on shoes and stockings and held a parasol in its little
hand."

"All talk--all wind, hot air!" the child said, indifferently, and she
had evidently picked up the expressions from her elders. "A drummer--the
fellow with the striped shirts that is always whistling and sells
cloaks--he told me he was going to get me a doll and a baby-carriage,
but he never came back--changed his rowt, so Aunt Jane said. But this
doll's all right. Don't you think so, brother John?"

"It will do till I get the other," he answered, and then he felt an
impulse that he had never felt before. He bent down and put his hand
caressingly on the almost matted hair, and she, not understanding,
impatiently shook it off and went on with her work, her mouth now full
of pins.

There was a chair near by and he sat down in it, bending toward the
child. Seldom had his boyishness been so apparent. He wanted to open his
cramped heart to some one--why not to her? He wanted to hear his own
voice applauding the things that were leaping, singing, shouting in the
penetralia of his being.

"Say, Dora," he began, clasping his warm hands between his knees, "can
you keep a secret?"

"A secret?" she repeated, letting her doll lie for an instant in her
ragged lap and staring straight at him with growing interest. "Have you
got one--a real one?"

He had. His smile and generous nod admitted it. "Can you keep your mouth
shut, that is what I want to know?"

"Yes, yes!" she exclaimed, eagerly. "You ask Aunt Jane if I ever let
your ma know--let her know--but never mind. I can keep one. Try me--that
is if you are not kidding. I don't want any foolishness from you or
anybody else. Life is too short."

"Well, listen!" he began, and something in the blaze of his eyes, the
tremolo of his erstwhile brusk voice, the warm look of his face, caught
and held her attention. "Did you ever think the day would come when I'd
go with a girl?"

"Who, you?" Dora sniffed. "Now I _know_ you are kidding."

"No, I'm not," he went on, riding the tide of his joyous self-emptying.
"I have done it often since I went to Cranston. I got acquainted with
one up there. Sam and I board with her pa and ma. You ought to see her,
Dora. She is all right--as nice and pretty as any stuck-up girl in this
town. Folks up there are different--very, very different from these down
here who don't know that you and I are alive. They are polite and decent
and civilized. Lord! somehow it makes me sick to think of living on
here, but I reckon I will. Say, did you ever notice the stunning little
cottage that Sam put up for Pete Carrol on the right-hand side of the
street as you go down? But never mind that. What would you think if I
was to tell you that before very long I might--" John was stalled. How
could he express by mere lip and tongue the transcendental thing which
so completely filled him?

"What are you trying to get through yourself?" It was another of the
child's picked-up expressions, and she leaned toward him with a slow
leer of wonder. "What is your great secret?"

"I was coming to it," he said, his words falling steadily now. "But you
mustn't tell it to a living soul. Kid, I'm thinking about getting
married."

"Married--you? Huh!" Dora laughed incredulously as she plucked a pin
from her lips. "Why, you are too young! I heard your ma say it would be
ten years before you ever thought of it, even if you did then, you old
goody-goody poke of a boy."

"I'm not too young." John flared up resentfully. "Sam says I'm not, and
he ought to know. It isn't settled yet, but it will be when I get back
up there. Sam says it is as good as settled now, and Sam is in a
position to know. Oh, she is all right, kid--believe me, she is a
wonder! I wish you could see her. She wouldn't turn up her nose at you
like some folks do around here. She is sweet and kind and gentle. They
are working her to death up there--her folks are, but all that will be
off when I bring her down here?"

"Are you in earnest--really dead in earnest?" Dora asked, her face still
blank.

"I am, and I don't want a word said about it. It is none of my mother's
business, you understand. She might try to pry into it and I want her to
keep out of it. This is my affair--mine and nobody's else. Sam knows it,
and you, but that's all."

"I won't tell it," Dora, now convinced, declared earnestly. "I'll never
tell it till you let me. Have you got a picture of her?"

"No, she's got some, but she never gave me one-- I never asked for it.
They are not good enough, nohow. They make her look too glum and pinched
about the eyes. To know what she is like, you have to see her and hear
her talk, or read the Bible out loud at prayer-time. She isn't big; her
hands and feet are nearly as little as yours are; but above all else in
the world, kid, she is good. The neighbors all love her. She waits on
them when they are sick. Away late at night not long ago a farmer come
to get her to go stay with his sick wife, and Tilly--that's her
name--was away till sunup, and then came home and milked the cows and
worked around the kitchen. She needs a long rest and she shall have it.
I'll see that she gets it, and plenty of clothes and pretty things,
besides. She is having an awfully hard time and that is one reason I
don't feel so bad about asking her to--to come with just me. I am going
into partnership with Sam later, and he and I will both make more money
and I'll buy things for her. She plays an organ. I'll get her one. She
shall tote the pocket-book, too. She has been skimped all her life. I
know. I've had my eyes open up there. She never buys a thing, even a bit
of ribbon, without her old daddy fingering it and calling her down for
spending money for show, and it was her money, too, bless your life! She
sells butter and eggs, takes them to the store herself. She has a little
garden-patch all her own, and I've seen her out in it even in the rain,
picking beans and peas to sell."

"If she is like that"--Dora was precociously and pessimistically wise
for one so young, the fact being due, no doubt, to the tutelage of the
two worldly women who were her sole companions--"if she is like that, it
looks like some lazy feller would have got her before this. Aunt Jane
says it takes money and clothes and lots of things to keep any man
coming regular."

"There is--there _was_ another fellow," John put in, unctuously, "but
she turned him down. Lord! Lord! it broke him all to pieces! She just
somehow couldn't tie to him. She told me so out of her own mouth."

"What is she like?" Dora then demanded. "What does she look like?"

"Don't ask me," John smiled. "I can't tell you. When we walk together
she strikes me about here," his hand on his left shoulder. "She has blue
eyes, brown wavy hair, a pretty mouth, and a nose with a cute little
tilt to it. There are bits of brown freckles on her wrists and cheeks,
but they don't matter. If anything, I like them. I wouldn't rub them
off. Folks don't say she is pretty--even Sam don't; but why I can't see,
for she is simply stunning, and you'll say so, kid, when you see her."

"Well, I won't tell-- I won't tell," Dora promised, returning with
lowered interest to her rag things after the flight with him into his
empyrean.

Here a voice sounded from the window of Mrs. Trott's room up-stairs.

"Dora, is that John down there?"

"Yes'm. He's just got back."

"Well, tell him to come up here right away."

The order did not need repeating. John stood up, the old practical frown
settling on his face. "I wonder what the ---- she wants?" he growled,
with fierce emphasis on the omitted word. "I thought she was asleep."

"Come on up, John; I want to see you," Mrs. Trott's querulous voice rang
out again, and without replying he turned away. He wore his best suit of
clothes, had recently shaved the fuzz from his face, and looked rather
more manly than formerly as he strode through the doorway and up the
rickety old stairs. Reaching the upper floor, he turned into his
mother's room, unceremoniously pushing the door open and standing on the
threshold, just as Mrs. Trott, in a soiled wrapper, was getting back
into bed after having been to the window. Her hair was in curl-papers,
and the little bristling tufts gave to her face an uncouth, bleak look
and left her penciled brows to a barren waste of forehead. Her cheeks
were still rouged from the night before. A brazen necklace, recently
doffed, had left dark streaks on her powdered bust.

"Why didn't you come on in?" Mrs. Trott demanded, irritably. "What did
you sit down there and talk with that brat for?"

"Oh, I don't know. What do you want?" He frowned in his turn, and all
but growled.

Mrs. Trott kicked the light covering down over her feet and wadded the
pillow so that her head was raised higher. "I've been short of money
ever since you went off," she explained, pettishly. "When you were here
you always had some on Saturday nights, but after you went off you
didn't send as much and Jane and I both got in a hole."

"Well, what do you want now?" he asked. "How much?"

"I'll have to think," Mrs. Trott said. "I borrowed five from Jane
yesterday. We were playing a little game and I lost. I was about to drop
out when Jane backed me. I lost again. My luck was against me, and her,
too. Jane needs the five. She is sick and will have to have a doctor.
You know they insist on cash--they won't come here, the silly fools,
unless you shake the money in their faces, though they run the accounts
of other people for years on a stretch."

"I haven't got that much with me," he gave in, wearily, "but I'm going
to the bank after dinner and will get it."

"How much have you got there?" Mrs. Trott inquired.

"That's _my_ business, not yours," he said, with an oath, for under
that roof it had always seemed natural for him to swear. "And don't you
be nosing into my business, either. You went there once and tried to get
money on my name, but don't you do it again. I've turned over a new
leaf. I have to. You throw money away like water, on cards, whisky,
beer, and what not. I can't keep that up, and I won't. I have to draw
the line somewhere."

She raised her head a little higher and fixed her eyes, in their puffy
sockets, on him in a sort of groping wonder.

"Why, what has got into you?" she asked, stupidly, and all at once he
seemed older to her, older and more dignified, more business-like, more
like his dead father, to whom she had been flagrantly untrue.

"Common sense, I reckon," he jerked out. "If I've been a fool I don't
always have to stay one. I'm going to need money--for myself, for my
_own_ self, do you understand? I--I don't intend to live on here always,
either. I'll be of age before long. I've thought it all over. I'm

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