Chapter 6

At this, he came to a pause and tried to think. He stood on a commanding spot, somewhere not far from Stansby, though he could not identify it. The moon was up, and the wide, leafy landscape was spread out in utter silence for miles around him. For a brief space, while collecting his thoughts, he saw everything as it was. Then, as if at the stroke of a wand, horrible deformity appeared to fall upon the whole scene; the thousand trees below him writhed as if in multitudinous agony; and, where the thick moonlight touched house or road, or left patches of white on river and pool, there the earth seemed smitten as with leprosy. Silverthorn, reaching his room in an hour after Vibbard had left it, was not at first surprised at his absence. Afterward he grew anxious; he went out, ran all the way to Winwood's house, and came back, hoping to find that his friend had returned while he was searching for him. He sat down and waited; he kept awake very late; his head grew heavy, and he fell asleep in his chair, dreaming with a dull sense of pain, and also of excitement, about his new access of comparative wealth.

A heavy step and the turning of the door-knob awoke him. Moonlight came in at the window--pale, for the dawn was breaking--and his lamp still flickered on the table. Streaked with these conflicting glimmers, Vibbard stood before him,--his clothes torn, his hat gone, his face pale and fierce.

"What have you been doing?" asked Silverthorn wearily, and without surprise, for he was too much dazed.

"You--_you_!" said Vibbard, hoarsely, pointing sharply at him, as if his livid gaze was not enough. "You have been taking her from me!"

"Ida?" queried Silverthorn, with what seemed to the other to be a laughing sneer.

"Are you shameless?" demanded Vibbard. "Why don't you lie down there and ask me to forgive you for demanding so little? I've no doubt you are sorry that you couldn't get the whole of my money! But I suppose you were afraid you wouldn't receive even the half, if you told me beforehand what you meant to do."

Silverthorn was numb from sleeping in a cramped posture and without covering; but a deeper chill shook him at these words. He tried to get up, but felt too weak, and had to abandon it. He shivered heavily. Then he put his hand carefully into the breast of his coat, and after a moment drew out his pocket-book.

"Here it is," said he, very quietly. "I came home intending to give you back your money, but you were not here."

"You expect me to believe that?" retorted Vibbard, scornfully, "when I know that you went from here after receiving the check, and--ah! I couldn't have believed it, if I hadn't heard--"

"You overheard us, then? You came, though I warned you not to? And what did you hear?" Silverthorn's lips certainly curled with contempt now.

Vibbard answered: "I heard you pleading with Ida to promise herself to you."

"That's a lie," said Silverthorn, calmly.

"Didn't you say to her, 'You have never yet fully engaged yourself to me?' Weren't you pleading?"

"Yes. I was begging that she would forget all the words of love I had ever spoken, and listen to you when you should come to tell her your story."

Vibbard's head bowed itself in humiliation and wonder. He came forward two or three steps, and sank into a chair.

"Is this possible?" he inquired, at last.

"And you, too, had loved her!"

Silverthorn vouchsafed no reply.

Vibbard, struggling with remorse, uncertainty, and a dimly returning hope, brought himself to speak once more, hesitatingly.

"What did she say?"

"At first she would not tolerate my proposal. I saw there was a conflict in her mind. Something warned me what it was, yet I could not help fancying that she might really be unwilling to give me up. So then I said I had made up my mind any way, as things stood, to return you your money. I--forgive me, Bill, but it was not treachery to you--only justice to all--I asked her if she would wish to marry me as I was, poor and without a future."

"And she--" asked Vibbard, trembling. "What did she say?"

Silverthorn let the pocket-book fall, and buried his face in his hands. It was answer enough for his friend.

Vibbard came over and knelt beside him, and tried to rouse him. He stroked his pale brown hair, and called him repeatedly "Dear old boy."

"Poor Thorny, I wish I could do something for you," he said, gently. "Are you sure you understood her?"

The other suddenly looked up.

"Don't blame her, Bill," he said, beseechingly. "Don't let it hurt your love for her. There was nothing mercenary. She hesitated a moment--and then I saw that it had all been a dream of the impossible. I had always associated this money with myself. It turned back the whole current of her ideas, and upset everything, when I separated myself from it. All the plans of going away--all that life I had talked of--had to be scattered to the winds in a moment. She did not love me enough, for myself alone!"

"Poor Thorny!" again murmured his friend.

* * * * *

Love, amid all its other resemblances, is like the spirit of battle. It fires men to press on toward the goal, even though a brother by their side, pushing in the same direction, should fall with a mortal wound. And the fighter goes on, to wed with victory, while his brother lies dead far behind cheated of his bride.

Vibbard offered himself to Ida the next day. It was a strange and distressful wooing; but she could not deny that, in a way unknown to herself till now, she had loved Vibbard from the beginning, more than his friend. In her semi-engagement with Silverthorn, she had probably been loving Vibbard through his friend. But when the strong man, who had gained a place in the world for her sake, returned and placed his heart before her, she could no longer make a mistake.

Silverthorn would not keep the money, neither could his friend persuade him to come and take a share in his business. He would not leave Stansby. Where he had first seen Ida, there he resolved to dwell, with the memory of her.

When I saw him again, and he told me of this crisis, he said:

"I am not 'poor Thorny,' as Vibbard called me; for now I have a friendship that will last me through life. It has stood the test of money, and hate, and love, and it is stronger than them all."

POOR OGLA-MOGA.

BY DAVID D. LLOYD.

_Harper's Magazine, April, 1882._

I.

It was a great day when Miss Slopham, so many years conspicuous in our best society, discovered the North American Indian--not for the Indian, perhaps, but certainly for Miss Slopham. Envious and slanderous tongues said that Miss Slopham was afflicted with an ambition. She wanted a mission--not a foreign mission, in any sense of the words. She was debarred from one kind by her sex, and the other involved the possibility of crocodiles and yellow fever, not to mention the chance of being sacrificed to some ugly heathen god. She could not paint, or write, or sing. The stage had never offered any attractions to her, for various reasons, one of which was, so said the same untrustworthy authority, that she had never offered any attractions to the stage. She was tall and spare, and of a dry and autumnal aspect. She wanted fame, but she wanted it respectable. Therefore it was, said gossip, that this excellent woman turned to philanthropy. Even here her fate was against her. If she had not been a woman, she would have mourned the ill-luck that brought her into the world rather late for the anti-slavery agitation. The malicious rumor, by-the-way, which declared that she wore a bib and tucker at the time of Jackson's war with the United States Bank, was wickedly false. Miss Slopham tried tenement-house reform, but fled before the smells. She had a little practice in the hospitals and orphan asylums, but found the sphere too contracted. She felt that she needed the stimulus of public approval. She was almost in despair, when, as if by accident, her eye lighted on the North American Indian. For centuries he had been chasing the buffalo and the white man, shooting and being shot, taking up the tomahawk and perishing by the rifle, robbing and being robbed, massacring and pillaging whenever massacre and pillage suited his grim humor, and being all this while alternately pampered and starved, cajoled and cheated, by a government which at the same time that it furnished him with guns for shooting its own soldiers, often failed to fulfil the solemn treaties it had made with him.

He had been having this lively and variegated experience for a century or so, without any intimation, prophetic or present, of Miss Slopham's existence, when that lady discovered him, and when that happened she exclaimed: "He is mine!" Hers, she meant, for the purposes of philanthropy. Wicked tongues had suggested that in Miss Slopham's philanthropy distance lent enchantment to the view.

Only a day or two later, and before she had had time to form any plans, the postman brought a letter with the postmark of St. Louis. It read as follows:

"ST. LOUIS, _October 20, 1881_.

"MY DEAR MISS SLOPHAM,--I want to make an appeal to your benevolence, which I know never fails in case of need. There is in this city at this moment, in hiding, at the house of one of our friends, a poor persecuted Kickapoo. A Kickapoo is an Indian, you know. He has fled from his reservation because, he says, he cannot endure any longer the persecutions and wrongs he has received at the hands of the agent who has charge of the tribe. This agent must be a very bad man. Poor Ogla-Moga--that is his name; it means Young-man-who-digs-up-seed-potatoes-and-feeds-them-to-his-pony, he says, but we call him by his Indian name because it's so much prettier--says that this agent has repeatedly refused to let them go hunting, which is the only amusement the poor things have, on the miserable pretext that the hay must be got in; and he once took away the gun of one of the Kickapoos because he pretended to believe that the man had shot a settler, whereas there was no proof of it at all, except, Ogla-Moga says, that the man died soon after the gun went off. Ogla-Moga says nothing wounds the self-respect of an Indian so deeply as to take his gun away from him, and we have all felt a great deal of sympathy with that poor insulted Kickapoo. Isn't it a shame that a great government should deliberately and maliciously oppress these unfortunate and high-spirited people?

"But I had almost forgotten what it was that I had to ask. Poor dear Ogla-Moga--he is so quiet and gentle and sad that we have all really grown fond of him--says that it won't be safe for him to stay here: the officers will soon be after him for having left his reservation. Now we have arranged to send him eastward with Mr. Michst. He is the new lecturer before our Ethical Circle, which meets every Sunday in Azure Hall. I read a paper there last Sunday, called, 'Is there Anything?' which Mr. Michst says contains the most triumphant series of negations he ever heard. He says I completely disprove the existence of everything, including many things we all know to be true. My friends in the Circle are begging me to publish it, and I think of doing so, under the title of 'The Everlasting No Indeed.'

"But I am wandering again. When Mr. Michst brings Ogla-Moga to you, can't you get him shelter somewhere? Mr. Michst thinks of taking him on to Washington, so that he may lay the whole matter before the President. We have all been studying this Indian question for the last ten days, and we are convinced that the whole trouble is that the President doesn't understand it. Mr. Michst feels sure that if the President will give him, say, three days of his time, he can make it perfectly clear to him. Please answer by telegraph.

"Your friend, "CLARA O. VERRAUGHT."

Now Miss Slopham lived in a neat and æsthetic apartment in a fashionable apartment-house, and it might have been supposed that she was hardly prepared to set up an asylum for fugitive Kickapoos. But that intrepid woman never faltered. Her answer went whirling by wire before she had paused to think of the ways and means of caring for poor Ogla-Moga.

"_October 23._

"_Miss Clara O. Verraught, St. Louis, Missouri_:

"Let him come at once, and send his Indian costumes with him. I have a special reason for this request.

"AMELIA SLOPHAM."

Miss Slopham formed a plan. What it was will presently appear.

II.

Not many mornings after, there was the sound of a strange footstep in Miss Slopham's kitchen, and Bridget emitted a half-shriek. "Mither of Moses! what's that?" It was Ogla-Moga, who had just arrived. His costume was an extraordinary mixture of blanket and trousers and coat, hardly consistent with the requirements of civilization. A broad slouched hat hid his coarse black locks, and cast a friendly shadow over his piercing eyes and swarthy face.

"Here, Bridget," said Miss Slopham, "get some breakfast for this--a--a--gentleman at once." Miss Slopham was not accustomed to meeting Indians in a social way. She hardly knew whether to call him chief; she thought wildly for a moment of sheik; but compromised upon gentleman.

To Bridget's astonishment, her mistress hovered about while the strange dark man gobbled his food and glared upon her with his wild eyes. Still another stranger had come in with them; but this one wore the garments of civilization as if he were used to them. He was a bald young man--in fact, one of the baldest young men that ever was seen. He seemed to be bald all over. He had no ascertainable eyebrows, or eyelashes, or hair, and this, with his bright, fresh complexion and his big spectacles, gave him a very unworldly appearance.

"Oh, Miss Slobham," he said, "I haf been so much mofed wid de story of dis poor Indian! He iss a shild of nature. He hass been so quiet, and so goot and so sad! I haf talked to him by de hour, and he hass not interroopted me vonce. I haf exblained to him the viewss of our Ettical Surkle upon de future state, and he hass listened so attentifely, and ven I haf looked at him I haf found dat he wass asleep. Oh, his sleep wass so benign! I haf vept; I could not hellp it. He iss a shild of nature;" and good Mr. Michst wiped a tear from his eye.

"Good! good!" grunted Ogla-Moga, as he put a block of beefsteak in his mouth without the formality of a fork.

"He hass eaten all de vay from St. Louis to here, and he never seem to haf enough," said Mr. Michst, in awe, looking at Ogla-Moga very much as one might at the phenomenon of a menagerie.

"Poor creatures! I've often heard that their supplies were sometimes cut off for months at a time. I suppose this is a case of that kind. Ogla-Moga," said Miss Slopham, addressing him with her most reassuring and eleemosynary smile, "does the government feed you often, you--a--poor Indians?"

"Not had--what you call it?--round meal--no, square meal," the Indian replied, making an explanatory parallelogram with his hands, "in four moons."

"Moonss?--moonss? What does he mean by moonss?"

Before the lady had time to make sure of her own knowledge on the subject, Ogla-Moga began a wild and mysterious pantomime, which caused Bridget, who had her eye steadily on the strange monster, and kept close to the window as an avenue of desperate retreat, to exclaim: "Mither of Moses! what's the baste going to do?" Ogla-Moga was throwing his arm up in the air with a fierce swing, suddenly crooking his elbow, and bringing his closed hand to his mouth, while he rolled his eyes around the room with a melodramatic ferocity, evidently intended to convey the idea of extreme rapture.

"Poor Ogla-Moga!" said Miss Slopham; "he wants something to drink. Give him a glass of ice-water, Bridget, and have it perfectly clear. It may remind him of the water he used to drink from the brooks of his far-off forest home;" and here Miss Slopham, in her turn, wiped a tear from her eye. Indeed, the crystal particle was apparently so surprised to find itself on the good lady's cheek that it seemed to disappear of its own accord.

Ogla-Moga looked at the innocent glass of Croton that was handed him with undisguised disdain; but he swallowed his thoughts, whatever they were, with the water, and signified that his meal was ended.

And now for the first time the extent of the task she had undertaken became apparent to Miss Slopham. What was to be done with this terrible infant from the prairies during the week of seclusion that her plan made necessary? She lived alone, except for the companionship of Bridget, and it was asking a good deal of a timid and shrinking nature like Miss Slopham's to take into her little household a gentleman who rolled his eyes in such an alarming manner. Then, too, there were the proprieties, against which sins could not be committed even in the name of reform. Yet what else was there to be done? He could not be sent to a hotel: that meant publicity, and perhaps recapture by the emissaries of a cruel and unsympathetic government. She could not ask a friend to take him in. He could not be sent anywhere without danger. Finally a brilliant thought struck her just as she was on the verge of distraction, with Ogla-Moga's big eyes fastened on her all the while. There was the janitor of the apartment-house. He might easily be induced to take a boarder, and he would be discreet. Ogla-Moga could be kept in retirement in his rooms. She would act at once upon the idea. And yet what was she to say? How was she to account for the presence of this stranger in her little household? Ah! he needed clothes. His present costume was an impossible one. She would begin with this subject with the janitor's wife, and feel her way gradually. So she made her way to the top of the house.

It would be hard to say who was in the greatest flutter when the janitor's door was opened upon her, Miss Slopham, whose maiden bosom was agitated with strange embarrassments, or Mrs. Doherty, who was not accustomed to receive calls from the ladies of the house. The former was so confused that she walked against a chair and knocked it over, gave a little scream, and stepped on the baby, which was sprawling on the floor, whereat the baby screamed, and she screamed, and Mrs. Doherty screamed--all of which did not tend to diminish the mental excitement of either of the ladies, especially as Mrs. Doherty had up to that moment been trying to dust off a chair with one hand while she held another baby with the other arm, and motioned with her head to a little girl--or perhaps she ought to be called a baby--who had charge of still two other babies, to take them out of the room. Poor Miss Slopham thought she had never seen so many babies in her life before, and the spectacle somehow only increased her bewilderment. So perhaps it was not to be wondered at that when she had sunk into a chair she should begin the conversation with the extraordinary and utterly unprecedented question:

"Oh, Mrs. Doherty, could you--a--could you--a--lend me--a--a pair of pantaloons?"

"A pair of what, Miss Slopham?" said the astounded Mrs. Doherty, in a low voice which expressed both the proper deference of the janitor's wife and the natural amazement of the woman.

"Oh, of course, I--I didn't mean to say that," poor Miss Slopham stammered, in hopeless embarrassment. "The fact is, there's a gentleman down-stairs--a friend of mine, you know--he has no home, and very few clothes--and I want to get you to help me. He's down-stairs now, and he's going to stay--I don't see how I am going to help it--and I must get a suit of clothes for him this afternoon. I suppose you think this is all very queer," said the poor lady in breathless confusion, with a little nervous laugh, thinking to herself at the same time that it certainly _was_ very queer.

"I'm not at all sure that I understand ye, ma'am," said the bewildered woman, looking about her in an alarmed sort of way, as if she wondered whether Miss Slopham was quite a safe woman to be alone with.

"Oh, how can I explain it?" that lady cried, desperately. "Well," she said, drawing a long breath, "let's begin at the beginning. Of course you understand that I don't want any such clothes for myself?"

"No, ma'am, I suppose not," murmured Mrs. Doherty, evidently suspecting that the other was slightly insane.

"Well, I wanted to ask you about them, because I thought your husband might have some clothes he did not want. I'd pay him a good price for them, and they needn't be very good"--and again Miss Slopham struck that terrible snag of the conversation--"I want them for a gentleman who's got into trouble; I can't tell you what it is, but he's got to keep out of the way of people. And the thing I wanted to ask you most, Mrs. Doherty," she said, in a pleading voice, conscious that she was twisting it all into a sad snarl, "was whether I couldn't get you and Mr. Doherty to take him to board up here with you for a while," and here the good lady sighed a sigh of relief in spite of her misery and confusion. She had at last let the cat out of the bag.

Mrs. Doherty's eyes were growing very large. The man needed new clothes; must have them that afternoon; there was a reason for his keeping out of the way; Miss Slopham would not tell what it was; the man had got into trouble. The idea grew bigger and bigger in Mrs. Doherty's mind, until at last it burst out with,

"But is it a jail-bird ye've got there, ma'am?"

"No, no," cried Miss Slopham, badly frightened in her turn at the other's fear. "How could you think such a thing? He's a gentleman, you know; quite an important man where he comes from. There are reasons why I can't tell you who he is. He doesn't want anybody to know it either. But a jail-bird! why, wait till you see him, Mrs. Doherty. He looks so gentle, and he's really handsome."

Mrs. Doherty looked at Miss Slopham. Miss Slopham was a wealthy tenant, and paid a large rent, and Mrs. Doherty was only the janitor's wife. But, after all, Mrs. Doherty was a woman, and Miss Slopham was a woman also, and Mrs. Doherty looked at Miss Slopham in the way in which only a woman can look at another woman; looked at her gray and withered curls, and at her face, which had never, in the spring-time of Miss Slopham's youth, been the kind of face which painters celebrate and poets embalm in verse, and said nothing. What she may have thought, or whether she thought anything, was a matter of little consequence, for when the richer lady came to mention the terms at which she rated the hospitality of the Doherty household, Mrs. Doherty showed a positive anxiety to oblige her, and even murmured something about being glad to do anything in their power for such a kind lady.