Part 20

Feeling the slack reins on their backs, the horses slowed up till they were plodding along lazily. Suddenly the sled began to drag on the clay road where the wind had bared it of snow, and the horses stopped of their own accord, looking back at their increased burden inquiringly. Alan made no effort to start them on again. It was a sequestered spot, well hidden from the rest of the road by an old hedge of Osage orange bushes.

“We must not stop, _dear_,” Dolly said, laying her hand again on his arm. “You know driving is--is different from this. As long as we are moving in any direction, I have no scruples, but to stop here in the road--no, it won't do.”

“I was just wondering if we can start them,” he said, a mischievous look in his laughing eye.

“Start them?” She extended her hand for the reins, but he held them out of her reach. “Why, what do you mean?”

“Why, you saw the way they were started at the hotel,” he answered, in quite a serious tone. “Ray has trained them-that way. They won't budge an inch unless--”

“Oh, you silly boy!” Dolly was flushing charmingly.

“It's true,” he said. “I'm sorry if you object, for it's absolutely the only available way.”

She raised her full, trusting eyes to his.

“You make me want to kiss you, Alan, but--”

He did not let her finish. Putting his arm around her, he drew her close to him and kissed her on the lips. “Now, darling,” he said, “you are mine.”

“Yes, I am yours, Alan.”

As they were nearing her house he told her that Wilson had agents out secretly buying land, and that she must not allow her father to dispose of his timbered interests until it was decided whether the railroad would be built.

She promised to keep an eye on the Colonel's transactions and do all she could to prevent him from taking a false step. “You may not know it,” she said, “but I'm his chief adviser. He 'll be apt to mention any offer he gets to me.”

“Well, don't tell him about the railroad unless you have to,” he said, in parting with her at the gate. “But it would be glorious to have him profit by our scheme, and I think he will.”

“We are going to hope for success, anyway, aren't we?” she said, leaning over the gate. “I have believed in you so much that I feel almost sure you are to be rewarded.”

“Miller thinks the chances are good,” he told her, “but father is afraid those men over there will do their best to ruin the whole thing.”

Dolly waved her handkerchief to some one at a window of the house. “It's mother,” she said. “She's shaking her finger at me.”

“I reckon she's mad at me,” said Alan, disconsolately.

“Not much,” Dolly laughed. “She's simply crazy to come out and gossip with us. She would, too, if she wasn't afraid of father. Oh, young man, you 'll have a mother-in-law that will reverse the order of things! Instead of her keeping you straight, you 'll have to help us manage her. Father says she's 'as wild as a buck.'”

They both laughed from the fulness of their happiness. A buggy on runners dashed by. It contained a pair of lovers, who shouted and waved their hands. The sun was shining broadly. The snow would not last long. The crudest sled of all passed in the wake of the other. It was simply a plank about twelve inches wide and ten feet long to which a gaunt, limping horse was hitched. On the plank stood a triumphant lad balancing himself with the skill of a bareback rider. His face was flushed; he had never been so full of joy and ozone. From the other direction came a gigantic concern looking like a snow-plough or a metropolitan street-sweeper. It was a sliding road-wagon to which Frank Hillhouse had hitched four sturdy mules. The wagon was full of girls. Frank sat on the front seat cracking a whip and smoking. A little negro boy sat astride of the leading mule, digging his rag-clothed heels into the animal's side. Frank bowed as he passed, but his face was rigid.

“He didn't intend to ask me,” said Dolly. “He hardly speaks to me since--”

“Since what?” Alan questioned.

“Since I asked him not to come to see me so often. I had to do it. He was making a fool of himself. It had to stop.”

“You refused him?”

“Yes; but you must go now.” Dolly was laughing again. “Mother will be out here in a minute; she can't curb her curiosity any longer. She'd make you take her riding, and I wouldn't have you do it for the world. Good-bye.”

“Well, good-bye.”

“Now, you must hope for the best, Alan.”

“I'm going to. Good-bye.”

XXXIV

OLLY had the opportunity to warn her father in regard to his financial interests sooner than she expected. The very next morning, as she sat reading at a window in the sitting-room, she overheard the Colonel speaking to her mother about an offer he had just had for his mountain property.

“I believe it's a good chance for me to get rid of it,” he was saying, as he stood at the mantel-piece dipping his pipe into his blue tobacco-jar.

“I never did see any sense in paying taxes on land you have never seen,” said Mrs. Barclay, at her sewing-machine. “Surely you can put the money where it will bring in something.”

“Milburn wants it because there is about a hundred acres that could be cleared for cultivation. I'm of the opinion that it won't make as good soil as he thinks, but I'm not going to tell him that.”

“Would you be getting as much as it cost you?” asked Mrs. Barclay, smoothing down a white hem with her thumb-nail.

“About five hundred more,” her husband chuckled. “People said when I bought it that I was as big a fool as old Bishop, but you see I've already struck a purchaser at a profit.”

Then Dolly spoke up from behind her newspaper: “I wouldn't sell it, papa,” she said, coloring under the task before her.

“Oh, you wouldn't?” sniffed her father. “And why?”

“Because it's going to be worth a good deal more money,” she affirmed, coloring deeper and yet looking her parent fairly in the eyes.

Mrs. Barclay broke into a rippling titter as she bent over her work. “Alan Bishop put that in her head,” she said. “They think, the Bishops do, that they've got a gold-mine over there.”

“You must not sell it, papa,” Dolly went on, ignoring her mother's thrust. “I can't tell you why I don't want you to, but you must not--you 'll be sorry if you do.”

“I don't know how I'm to keep on paying your bills for flimflam frippery if I don't sell something,” retorted the old man, almost and yet not quite angry. Indirectly he was pleased at her valuation of his property, for he had discovered that her judgment was good.

“And she won't let Frank Hillhouse help,” put in Mrs. Barclay, teasingly. “Poor fellow! I'm afraid he 'll never get over it. He's taken to running around with school-girls--that's always a bad sign.”

“A girl ought to be made to listen to reason,” fumed Barclay, goaded on to this attack by his wife, who well knew his sore spots, and liked to rasp them.

“A girl will listen to the right sort of reason,” retorted Dolly, who was valiantly struggling against an outburst. “Mamma knows how I feel.”

“I know that you are bent on marrying a man without a dollar to his name,” said her father. “You want to get into that visionary gang that will spend all I leave you in their wild-cat investments, but I tell you I will cut you out of my property if you do. Now, remember that. I mean it.”

Dolly crushed the newspaper in her lap and rose. “There is no good in quarrelling over this again,” she said, coldly. “Some day you will understand the injustice you are doing Alan Bishop. I could make you see it now, but I have no right to explain.” And with that she left the room.

Half an hour later, from the window of her room up-stairs, she saw old Bobby Milburn open the front gate. Under his slouch hat and big gray shawl he thumped up the gravelled walk and began to scrape his feet on the steps. There was a door-bell, with a handle like that of a coffee-mill, to be turned round, but old Bobby, like many of his kind, either did not know of its existence, or, knowing, dreaded the use of innovations that sometimes made even stoics like himself feel ridiculous. His method of announcing himself was by far more sensible, as it did not even require the removal of his hands from his pockets; and, at the same time, helped divest his boots of mud. He stamped on the floor of the veranda loudly and paused to listen for the approach of some one to admit him. Then, as no one appeared, he clattered along the veranda to the window of the sitting-room and peered in. Colonel Barclay saw him and opened the door, inviting the old fellow into the sitting-room. Old Bobby laid his hat on the floor beside his chair as he sat down, but he did not unpin his shawl.

“Well, I've come round to know what's yore lowest notch, Colonel,” he said, gruffly, as he brushed his long, stringy hair back from his ears and side whiskers. “You see, it's jest this way. I kin git a patch o' land from Lank Buford that will do me, in a pinch, but I like yore'n a leetle grain better, beca'se it's nigher my line by a quarter or so; but, as I say, I kin make out with Buford's piece; an' ef we cayn't agree, I 'll have to ride over whar he is workin' in Springtown.”

At this juncture Dolly came into the room. She shook hands with the visitor, who remained seated and mumbled out some sort of gruff greeting, and went to her chair near the window, taking up her paper again. Her eyes, however, were on her father's face.

“I hardly know what to say,” answered Barclay, deliberately. “Your price the other day didn't strike me just right, and so I really haven't been thinking about it.”

There was concession enough, Dolly thought, in Milburn's eye, if not in his voice, when he spoke. “Well,” he said, carelessly, “bein' as me'n you are old friends, an' thar always was a sort o' neighborly feelin' betwixt us, I 'll agree, if we trade, to hire a lawyer an' a scribe to draw up the papers an' have 'em duly recorded. You know that's always done by the party sellin'.”

“Oh, that's a _little_ thing,” said the Colonel; but his watchful daughter saw that the mere smallness of Milburn's raise in his offer had had a depressing effect on her father's rather doubtful valuation of the property in question. The truth was that Wilson had employed the shrewdest trader in all that part of the country, and one who worked all the more effectively for his plainness of dress and rough manner. “That's a little thing,” went on the Colonel, “but here's what I 'll do--”

“Father,” broke in Dolly, “don't make a proposition to Mr. Milburn. Please don't.”

Milburn turned to her, his big brows contracting in surprise, but he controlled himself. “Heigho!” he laughed, “so you've turned trader, too, Miss Dolly? Now, I jest wish my gals had that much enterprise; they git beat ef they buy a spool o' thread.”

The Colonel frowned and Mrs. Barclay turned to Dolly with a real tone of reproof. “Don't interfere in your father's business,” she said. “He can attend to it.”

The Colonel was not above making capital of the interruption, and he smiled down on the shaggy visitor.

“She's been deviling the life out of me not to part with that land. They say women have the intuition to look ahead better than men. I don't know but I ought to listen to her, but she ain't running me, and as I was about to say--”

“Wait just one minute, papa!” insisted Dolly, with a grim look of determination on her face. “Just let me speak to you a moment in the parlor, and then you can come back to Mr. Milburn.”

The face of the Colonel darkened under impatience, but he was afraid failure to grant his daughter's request would look like over-anxiety to close with Mil-burn, and so he followed her into the parlor across the hallway.

“Now, what on earth is the matter with you?” he demanded, sternly. “I have never seen you conduct yourself like this before.”

She faced him, touching his arms with her two hands.

“Father, don't be angry with me,” she said, “but when you know what I do, you will be glad I stopped you just now. Mr. Milburn is not buying that land for his own use.”

“He isn't?” exclaimed the Colonel.

“No; he's secretly employed by a concern worth over two million dollars--the Southern Land and Timber Company of Atlanta.”

“What?” the word came out as suddenly as if some one had struck him on the breast.

“No,” answered the girl, now pale and agitated. “To save Mr. Bishop from loss, Alan and Rayburn Miller have worked up a scheme to build a railroad from Darley to the Bishop property. All arrangements have been made. There can be no hitch in it unless the citizens refuse to grant a right of way. In a week from now a meeting is to be advertised. Of course, it is not a certainty, but you can see that the chance is good, and you ought not to sacrifice your land.”

“Good Heavens!” ejaculated Barclay, his eyes distended, “is this a fact?”

“I am telling you what I have really no right to reveal,” said Dolly, “but I promised Alan not to let you sell if I could help it.”

The Colonel was staggered by the revelation; his face was working under strong excitement. “I thought that old rascal”--he meant Milburn--“was powerfully anxious to trade. Huh! Looky' here, daughter, this news is almost too good to be true. Why, another railroad would make my town-lots bound up like fury, and as for this mountain-land--whew! It may be as you say. Ray Miller certainly is a wheel-horse.”

“It was not his idea,” said Dolly, loyally. “In fact, he tried his best to discourage Alan at first--till he saw what could be done. Since then he's been secretly working at it night and day.”

“Whew!” whistled the Colonel. “I don't care a cent _whose_ idea it is; if it goes through it's a good one, and, now that I think of it, the necessary capital is all that is needed to make a big spec' over there.”

“So you won't sell to Mr. Milburn, then?” asked Dolly, humbly grateful for her father's change of mood.

“Sell to that old dough-faced scamp?” snorted Barclay. “Well, he 'll think I won't in a minute! Do you reckon I don't want to have some sort o' finger in the pie? Whether the road's built or not, I want my chance.”

“But remember I am giving away state secrets,” said Dolly. “He must not know that you have heard about the road.”

“I 'll not give that away,” the old man promised, with a smile, and he turned to the door as if eager to face Milburn. “Huh! That old scamp coming here to do me one! The idea!”

The two men, as they faced each other a moment later, presented an interesting study of human forces held well in check. The Colonel leaned on the mantel-piece and looked down at the toe of his boot, with which he pushed a chunk of wood beneath the logs.

“You never can tell about a woman' s whims, Mil-burn,” he said. “Dolly's set her heart on holding onto that land, and I reckon I'm too easily wriggled about by my women folks. I reckon we'd better call it off.”

“Oh, all right--all right!” said Milburn, with a start and a sharp contraction of his brows. “I'm that away some myse'f. My gals git me into devilish scrapes sometimes, an' I'm always sayin' they got to stop it. A man loses too much by lettin' 'em dabble in his business. But I was jest goin' to say that I mought raise my bid fifty cents on the acre ruther than trapse away over to Springtown to see Buford.”

There was silence through which several kinds of thoughts percolated. The raise really amounted to so much that it materially increased Barclay's growing conviction that the railroad was next to a certainty. “Huh!” he grunted, his eyes ablaze with the amusement of a winner. “I wouldn't listen to less than a dollar more on the acre.” And as the gaze of Milburn went down reflectively the Colonel winked slyly, even triumphantly, at his smiling daughter and said: “Dolly thinks it will make good land for a peach-orchard. Lots of money is being made that way.”

“Bosh!” grunted Milburn. “It don't lie right fer peaches. You kin git jest as much property nigh the railroad as you want fer peaches. You are a hard man to trade with, but I reckon I 'll have to take yore offer of--”

“Hold on, hold on!” laughed the Colonel, his hand upraised. “I didn't say I'd _take_ that price. I just said I wouldn't listen to less than a dollar raise. I've listened to many a thing I didn't jump at, like a frog in muddy water, not knowing what he's going to butt against.”

Under his big shawl Milburn rose like a tent blown upward by wind. He was getting angry as he saw his commission money taking wing and flitting out of sight. He had evidently counted on making an easy victim of Barclay. For a moment he stood twisting his heavy, home-knit gloves in his horny hands.

“Now if it's a fair question,” he said, as the last resort of a man ready and willing to trade at any reasonable cost, “what _will_ you take, cash down, on your honor between us--me to accept or decline?”

The Colonel's pleasure was of the bubbling, overflowing kind. Every move made by Milburn was adding fuel to his hopes of the proposed railroad, and to his determination to be nobody's victim.

“Look here,” he said, “that land has been rising at such a rate since you came in that I'm actually afraid to let it go. By dinner-time it may make me rich. Dolly, I believe, on my word, Milburn has discovered gold over there. Haven't you, Milburn? Now, honor bright.”

“It will be a long time before you find gold or anything else on that land,” Milburn retorted, as he reached for his hat and heavily strode from the room.

“Well! I do declare,” and Mrs. Barclay turned to Dolly and her father. “What on earth does this mean?” The Colonel laughed out, then slapped his hand over his mouth, as he peered from the window to see if Milburn was out of hearing. “It's just this way--”

“Mind, father!” cautioned Dolly. “Do you want it to be all over town by dinner-time?”

“Dolly!” cried Mrs. Barclay, “the idea of such a thing!”

Dolly smiled and patted her mother on the cheek.

“Don't tell her, papa,” she said, with decision.

“The truth is,” said the Colonel, “Dolly really wants to plant peaches. I don't think there's much in it, but she will have her way.”

“Well, I call that _mean_ of you,” retorted Mrs. Barclay, dark with vexation. “Well, miss, I 'll bet you didn't tell your father who you went sleigh-riding with.”

The old man frowned suddenly. “Not with Alan Bishop,” he said, “after my positive orders?”

“He came to tell me about the--the”--Dolly glanced at her mother suddenly--“about the peaches, papa.”

“Well”--the Colonel was waxing angry--“I won't have it--that's all. I won't have you--”

“Wait, papa,” entreated the girl, sweetly, “wait till we see about the--peaches!” And, with a little teasing laugh, she left the room.

XXXV

HE mass-meeting at Springtown was a most important event. It was held in the court-house in the centre of the few straggling houses which made up the hamlet. The entire Bishop family, including the servants, attended. Pole Baker brought his wife and all the children in a new spring-wagon. Darley society was represented, as the Springtown _Gazette_ afterwards put it, by the fairest of the fair, Miss Dolly Barclay, accompanied by her mother and father.

The court-house yard was alive with groups of men eagerly talking over the situation. Every individual whose land was to be touched by the proposed road was on hand to protect his rights. Pole Baker was ubiquitous, trying to ascertain the drift of matters. He was, however, rather unsuccessful. He discovered that many of the groups ceased to talk when he entered them. “Some 'n' s up,” he told Alan and Miller in the big, bare-looking court-room. “I don't know what it is, but I smell a rat, an' it ain't no little one, nuther.”

“Opposition,” said Miller, gloomily. “I saw that as soon as I came. If they really were in favor of the road they'd be here talking it over with us.”

“I'm afraid that's it,” said Alan. “Joe Bartell is the most interested, and he seems to be a sort of ringleader. I don't like the way he looks. I saw him sneer at Wilson when he drove up just now. I wish Wilson hadn't put on so much style--kid gloves, plug hat, and a negro driver.”

“No, that won't go down with this crowd,” agreed Miller. “It might in the slums of Boston, but not with these lords of the mountains. As for Bartell, I think I know what ails him. He's going to run for the legislature and thinks he can make votes by opposing us--convincing his constituency that we represent moneyed oppression. Well, he may down us, but it's tough on human progress.”

Alan caught Dolly's eye and bowed. She was seated near her father and mother, well towards the judge's stand. She seemed to have been observing the faces of the two friends, and to be affected by their serious expressions. Adele sat at the long wood stove, several yards from her parents, who appeared quite as if they were in church waiting for service to begin. Abner Daniel leaned in the doorway opening into one of the jury-rooms. Wilson had given him a fine cigar, which he seemed to be enjoying hugely.

At the hour appointed for the meeting, to open, a young man who held the office of bailiff in the county, and seemed proud of his stentorian voice, opened one of the windows and shouted:

“Come in to court! Come in to court!” and the motley loiterers below began to clatter up the broad stairs and fall into the seats. Joe Bartell, a short, thick-set man in the neighborhood of fifty, with a florid face and a shock of reddish hair, led about twenty men up the aisle to the jury-benches at the right of the stand. They were the land-owners whose consent to grant the right of way was asked. Stern opposition was clearly written on the leader's brow and more or less distinctly reflected on the varying faces of his followers.

“Ef we needed it, it ud be a different matter,” Miller overheard him say in a sudden lull, as the big room settled down into sudden quiet, “but we kin do without it. We've got along so fur an' we kin furder. All of us has got good teams.”

Wilson, in his crisp, brusque way, made the opening speech. He told his hearers just what his company proposed to do and in much the same cold-blooded way as he would have dictated a letter to his stenographer, correctly punctuating the text by pauses, and yet, in his own way, endeavoring to be eloquent. He and his capital were going to dispel darkness where it had reigned since the dawn of civilization; people living there now would not recognize the spot ten years from the day the first whistle of a locomotive shrilled through those rocky gorges and rebounded from those lofty peaks--silent fingers pointing to God and speaking of a past dead and gone. All that was needed, he finished, was the consent of the property-owners appealed to; who, he felt confident, would not stand in their own light. They looked like intelligent men, and he believed they did not deceive appearances.

He had hardly taken his seat when Joe Bartell stood up. Alan and Miller exchanged ominous glances. They had at once recognized the inappropriateness of Wilson's speech, and did not like the white, twitching sneer on Bartell's smooth-shaven face. It was as if Bartell had been for a long time seeking just such an opportunity to make himself felt in the community, and there was no doubt that Wilson's almost dictatorial speech had made a fine opening for him.