Part 15

It was quiet to-night; all the Cadara children and all the Doanes were out looking for the government goat. The government goat was increasing her range. She seemed to know that, being a government goat, she was protected from harm. If a government goat comes in your yard, you are a little slow to fire a tin can at her--not knowing just how treasonous this may be. Nobody in Cape's End knew the exact status of a government goat, and each one hesitated to ask for the very good reason that the person asked might know and you would then be exposed as one who knew less than some one else. So the government goat went about where she pleased, and to-night she had pleased to go far. It left the neighborhood quiet--the government goat having many guardians.

Joe Doane felt like saying something to Mrs. Cadara. Not the rough, wild thing he had wanted to say a moment before, but just say something to her. He and she were the only people around--children all away and his wife up-stairs with a headache. He felt lonesome and he thought she looked that way--standing there against the sea in light that was getting dim. She and Joe Cadara used to sit out on that bulkhead. She moved toward him, as if she were lonesome and wanted to speak. On his side of the fence, he moved a little nearer her. She said,

"My, I hope the goat's not lost!"

He said nothing.

"That goat, she's so tame," went on Joe Cadara's wife with pride and affection, "she'll follow anybody around like a dog."

Joe Doane got up and went in the house.

It got so he didn't talk much to anybody. He sometimes had jokes, for he'd laugh, but they were jokes he had all to himself and his laughing would come as a surprise and make others turn and stare at him. It made him seem off by himself, even when they were all sitting round the table. He laughed at things that weren't things to laugh at, as when Myrtie said, "Agnes Cadara had a letter from Mrs. MacCrea and a _mourning_ handkerchief." And after he'd laughed at a thing like that which nobody else saw as a thing to laugh at, he'd sit and stare out at the water. "Do be _cheerful_," his wife would say. He'd laugh at that.

But one day he burst out and said things. It was a Sunday afternoon and the Cadaras were all going to the cemetery. Every Sunday afternoon they went and took flowers to the stone that said, "Lost at Sea." Agnes would call, "Come, Tony! We dress now for the cemetery," in a way that made the Doane children feel that they had nothing at all to do. They filed out at the gate dressed in the best the Summer folk had left them and it seemed as if there were a fair, or a circus, and all the Doanes had to stay at home.

This afternoon he didn't know they were going until he saw Myrtie at the window. He wondered what she could be looking at as if she wanted it so much. When he saw, he had to laugh.

"Why, Myrt," said he, "_you_ can go to the cemetery if you want to. There are lots of Doanes there. Go on and pay them a visit.

"I'm sure they'd be real glad to see you," he went on, as she stood there doubtfully. "I doubt if anybody has visited them for a long time. You could visit your great-grandfather, Ebenezer Doane. Whales were so afraid of that man that they'd send word around from sea to sea that he was coming. And Lucy Doane is there--Ebenezer's wife. Lucy Doane was a woman who took what she wanted. Maybe the whales were afraid of Ebenezer--but Lucy wasn't. There was a dispute between her and her brother about a quilt of their mother's, and in the dead of night she went into his house and took it off him while he slept. Spunk up! Be like the _old_ Doanes! _Go_ to the cemetery and wander around from grave to grave while the Cadaras are standin' by their one stone! My father--he'd be glad to see you. Why, if he was alive now--if Captain Silas Doane was here, he'd let the Cadaras know whether they could walk on the sidewalk or whether they were to go in the street!"

Myrtie was interested, but after a moment she turned away. "You only go for near relatives," she sighed.

He stood staring at the place where she had been. He laughed; stopped the laugh; stood there staring. "You only go for _near_ relatives." Slowly he turned and walked out of the house. The government goat, left home alone, came up to him as if she thought she'd take a walk too.

"Go to hell!" said Joe Doane, and his voice showed that inside he was crying.

Head down, he walked along the beach as far as the breakwater. He started out on it, not thinking of what he was doing. So the only thing he could do for Myrtie was give her a reason for going to the cemetery. She _wanted_ him in the cemetery--so she'd have some place to go on Sunday afternoons! She could wear black then--_all_ black, not just a ribbon round her neck. Suddenly he stood still. Would she _have_ any black to wear? He had thought of a joke before which all other jokes he had ever thought of were small and sick. Suppose he were to take himself out of the way and then they didn't _get_ the things they thought they'd have in place of him? He walked on fast--fast and crafty, picking his way among the smaller stones in between the giant stones in a fast, sure way he never could have picked it had he been thinking of where he went. He went along like a cat who is going to get a mouse. And in him grew this giant joke. Who'd _give_ them the fireless cooker? Would it come into anybody's head to give young Joe Doane a sail-boat just because his father was dead? They'd rather have a goat than a father. But suppose they were to lose the father and _get_ no goat? Myrtie'd be a mourner without any mourning. She'd be _ashamed_ to go to the cemetery.

He laughed so that he found himself down, sitting down on one of the smaller rocks between the giant rocks, on the side away from town, looking out to sea.

He forgot his joke and knew that he wanted to return to the sea. Doanes belonged at sea. Ashore things struck you funny--then, after they'd once got to you, hurt. He thought about how he used to come round this Point when Myrtie was a baby. As he passed this very spot and saw the town lying there in the sun he'd think about her, and how he'd see her now, and how she'd kick and crow. But now Myrtie wanted to go and visit him--_in the cemetery_. Oh, it was a joke all right. But he guessed he was tired of jokes. Except the one _great_ joke--joke that seemed to slap the whole of life right smack in the face.

The tide was coming in. In--Out--Doanes and Doanes. In--Out--Him too. In--Out--He was getting wet. He'd have to move up higher. But--_why move?_ Perhaps this was as near as he could come to getting back to sea. Caught in the breakwater. That was about it--wasn't it? Rocks were queer things. You could wedge yourself in where you couldn't get yourself out. He hardly had to move. If he'd picked a place he couldn't have picked a better one. Wedge himself in--tide almost in now--too hard to get out--pounded to pieces, like the last vessel Doanes had owned. Near as he could come to getting back to sea. Near as he deserved to come--him freezing fish with ginnies. And there'd _be_ no fireless cooker!

He twisted his shoulders to wedge in where it wouldn't be easy to wedge out. Face turned up, he saw something move on the great flat rock above the jagged rocks. He pulled himself up a little; he rose; he swung up to the big rock above him. On one flat-topped boulder stood Joe Doane. On the other flat-topped boulder stood the government goat.

"Go to hell!" said Joe Doane, and he was sobbing. "Go to _hell_!"

The government goat nodded her head a little in a way that wagged her beard and shook her bag.

"Go home! Drown yourself! Let me be! Go 'way!" It was fast, and choked, and he was shaking.

The goat would do none of these things. He sat down, his back to the government goat, and tried to forget that she was there. But there are moments when a goat is not easy to forget. He was willing there should be _some_ joke to his death--like caught in the breakwater, but he wasn't going to die before a _goat_. After all, he'd amounted to a little more than _that_. He'd look around to see if perhaps she had started home. But she was always standing right there looking at him.

Finally he jumped up in a fury. "What'd you come for? What do you _want_ of me? How do you expect to get home?" Between each question he'd wait for an answer. None came.

He picked up a small rock and threw it at the government goat. She jumped, slipped, and would have fallen from the boulder if he hadn't caught at her hind legs. Having saved her, he yelled: "You needn't expect _me_ to save you. Don't expect anything from _me_!"

He'd have new gusts of fury at her. "What you out here for? Think you was a _mountain_ goat? Don't you know the tide's comin' in? Think you can get back easy as you got _out_?"

He kicked at her hind legs to make her move on. She stood and looked at the water which covered the in-between rocks on which she had picked her way out. "Course," said Joe Doane. "Tide's in--you fool! You damned _goat_!" With the strength of a man who is full of fury he picked her up and threw her to the next boulder. "Hope you kill yourself!" was his heartening word.

But the government goat did not kill herself. She only looked around for further help.

To get away from her, he had to get her ashore. He guided and lifted, planted fore legs and shoved at hind legs, all the time telling her he hoped she'd kill herself. Once he stood still and looked all around and thought. After that he gave the government goat a shove that sent her in water above her knees. Then he had to get in too and help her to a higher rock.

It was after he had thus saved the government goat from the sea out of which the government goat had cheated him that he looked ahead to see there were watchers on the shore. Cadaras had returned from the cemetery. Cadaras and Doanes were watching him bring home the government goat.

From time to time he'd look up at them. There seemed to be no little agitation among this group. They'd hold on to each other and jump up and down like watchers whose men are being brought in from a wreck. There was one place where again he had to lift the government goat. After this he heard shouts and looked ashore to see his boys dancing up and down like little Indians.

Finally they had made it. The watchers on the shore came running out to meet them.

"Oh, Mr. Doane!" cried Mrs. Cadara, hands out-stretched, "I am _thankful_ to you! You saved my goat! I _have_ no man myself to save my goat. I _have_ no man. I _have_ no man!"

Mrs. Cadara covered her face with her hands, swayed back and forth, and sobbed because her man was dead.

Young Cadaras gathered around her. They seemed of a sudden to know they had no father, and to realize that this was a thing to be deplored. Agnes even wet her mourning handkerchief.

Myrtie came up and took his arm. "Oh, Father," said she, "I was so 'fraid you'd hurt yourself!"

He looked down into his little girl's face. He realized that just a little while before he had expected never to look into her face again. He looked at the government goat, standing a little apart, benevolently regarding this humankind. Suddenly Joe Doane began to laugh. He laughed--laughed--and laughed. And it _was_ a laugh.

"When I saw you lift that goat!" said his wife, in the voice of a woman who may not have a fireless cooker, but--!

Young Joe Doane, too long brow-beaten not to hold the moment of his advantage, began dancing round Tony Cadara with the taunting yell, "You ain't _got_ no pa to save your goat!" And Edgar lispingly chimed in, "Ain't _got_ no pa to save your goat!"

"Here!" cried their father, "Stop devilin' them kids about what they can't help. Come! Hats on! Every Doane, every Cadara, goes up to see if Ed. Smith might _happen_ to have a soda."

But young Joe had suffered too long to be quickly silent. "You ain't _got_ no pa to get you soda!" persisted he.

"Joe!" commanded his father, "stop pesterin' them kids or I'll _lick_ you!"

And Joe, drunk with the joy of having what the Cadaras had not, shrieked, "You ain't _got_ no pa to lick you! You ain't _got_ no pa to lick you!"

THE STONE[12]

[Note 12: Copyright, 1919, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1920, by Henry Goodman.]

BY HENRY GOODMAN

From _The Pictorial Review_

"Martha Sloan is goin' the way o' Jim," said Deems Lennon to his wife. "See," and he pointed through the open window toward the cemetery. "I seen her before Jim's stone, beggin' on her knees an' mumblin' with her hands stretched out. She been that way a number o' times when I come upon her as I was fixin' up the graves."

Mrs. Lennon, a stout, pleasant-faced woman, looked in the direction indicated by her husband. Together they watched Martha Sloan, white-haired, thin, and bent, making her way up the cemetery path. She was nervous and her walk was broken by little, sudden pauses in which she looked about.

"Poor soul," said Mrs. Lennon, "she's afraid. She ain't been herself sence Dorothy died. Losin' the two children right after Jim has broken her up completely."

"She's afraid for herself," said her husband. "If you heard her up there by that stone you'd have thought she was speakin' to some one alive, to some one who could do her things."

"Oh well, that's enough to make any one queer," Mrs. Lennon said. Then she stopped, and watched the figure on the hillside.

"Look," said Mrs. Lennon, "look at her. She's down on her knees."

Deems stood by her near the window.

"That's it," he exclaimed. "That's exactly what she's been doing now for some time. I heard her speak. I don't know where she got the idea. She thinks Jim's following her--reaching out for her--trying to grasp her. I heard her plead. I don't know what'll come of it."

They were both startled when, as suddenly as Martha Sloan had knelt, she rose from her place before the gravestone and, moving in nervous haste, ran down the pathway.

"Deems, we must go to her," said Mrs. Lennon. "Maybe we can do something for her." And as they both hurried into the kitchen and out of the house, Martha Sloan, panting and white-faced with fright, rushed to the house.

"Deems," she gasped. "Deems, it's Jim. He's reaching out. He's reaching out to seize me."

"Martha, calm yourself," said Deems, taking Martha Sloan's shaking hand in his. "That ain't right. You're sensible. You mustn't think so much of it. You must keep your mind away."

"That's right, Martha," Mrs. Lennon said, as she helped Martha Sloan into the house. "You mustn't keep thinking of Jim, and keep going up there all the time. There's many things waiting for you at home, and when you're through there why don't you come over to us?"

But Martha Sloan, either not hearing or not heeding the words of Deems and his wife, sat huddled, nervously whispering, more to herself than to her friends. "It's Jim. It's his hand reaching out to me. He took Dorothy. He took Joseph, and he's reaching out now to me. He can't stand having me living."

She was nervous and in the power of a fear that was stronger than her will. She sat uneasily looking about her as if knowing that she was safe in the house of friends, but as if feeling herself momentarily in the presence of something strange and frightful. She cast frightened looks about her, at the room, at Mrs. Lennon, and at Deems. She looked at them in silence as if she did not know how to speak to them until, prompted by great uneasiness, she spoke in a loud whisper, "Take me home. Take me home, Deems. I want to get away."

Deems slipped into his coat, said to his wife, "I'll be back soon," then, helping Martha from the chair, walked out with her.

"Come now, Martha, you know us well enough. We're your friends, aren't we? And we tell you there's nothing to fear. It's all your believing. There's nothing after you. There's nothing you need fear."

"You don't know. It was he took my two children. He took Dorothy. When they laid her out in the parlor, I could just see him standing at her head. He was cruel when he lived. He beat them; Dorothy and Joseph, they hated him. And when they laid out Joseph after his fall, when the bridge gave way, Jim was standing by his head, and his eyes were laughing at me like he'd say, 'I took him, but now there's you.' And he's trying for me now."

Deems was pleased that she was speaking. He hoped that in conversing she would find respite from her thoughts.

"No, Martha," he said, "that wasn't Jim took Dorothy and Joseph. You know there's a God that gives and takes. Their years were run. Can't you see, Martha?"

"It was Jim who took. He couldn't see them living. When he lived he couldn't see them growing up to be themselves. He took them like he took me from you. D' you remember, Deems, how he came and in no time I was his? He owned me completely."

Deems was silent. There was no arguing. Even now there was vividly alive in his mind, and, he knew, in the minds of the other villagers, the recollection of that sense of possession which went with Jim Sloan. He recalled that William Carrol had hanged himself when he could not pay Jim Sloan the debt he owed him. It was true that Jim Sloan had owned his children as if they were pieces of property. The whole village had learned to know this fact soon after these children had grown up. Deems, recalling his feelings for Martha Sloan, remembered now the amazement, the astonishment, with which he had viewed the change that came over Martha immediately after her marriage to Jim Sloan.

She had been light-hearted and joyful as if overflowing with the vitality natural to the country about the village. There had been gladness in her laugh. Immediately after her marriage all this had changed.

Martha had been wont to run lightly about her father's house. Her movements had become suddenly freighted with a seriousness that was not natural to her. Her laughter quieted to a restrained smile which in turn gave way to a uniform seriousness. The whole village noted and remarked the change. "He is older than she," they said, "and is making her see things as he does."

When they reached the house, Martha, without a word, left Deems and hurried in. Deems turned away, looking back and shaking his head, the while he mumbled to himself, "There's no good in this. There's no good for Martha."

He was struck motionless when suddenly he beheld Martha by the window. He had thought her slightly composed when she had left him, for her manner was more quiet than it had been. Now he was startled. Out of the window she leaned, her eyes fastened on the distant gravestone--white, large, and dominating--a shaft that rose upright like a gigantic spear on the crest of the hill. He watched her face and head and saw that her movements were frightened. As she moved her head--it seemed she was following something with her eyes which, look as closely as he could, he failed to make out--there was a jerkiness of movement that showed her alert and startled.

From the musty, dark parlor Martha looked out on the cemetery. There, clear in the evening light, stood the large white stone--a terrible symbol that held her. To her nervous mind, alive with the creations of her fear, it seemed she could read the lines,

JAMES SLOAN BORN SEPT. 14, 1857 DIED NOV. 12, 1915

and below it, stamped clearly and illumined by her fright,

HIS FAITHFUL WIFE MARTHA SLOAN BORN AUG. 9, 1871. DIED----

At the thought of the word "Died," followed by the dash, she recoiled. The dash reaching out to her--reaching to her--swept into her mind all the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of life--all the hardness which had marked his possession of her. Was it her mind, prodded by terror, that visualized it? There, seeming to advance from the hill, from the cemetery, from the very gravestone which was beginning to blot and blurr in her vision, she saw a hand--his hand! It was coming--coming to her, to crush what of life was left in her.

Even in her own mind, it was a miracle that she had survived Jim's tenacity. When Jim had died, she began suddenly to recover her former manner of life. She began to win back to herself. It was as if, the siege of Winter having lifted, the breath and warmth of Spring might now again prevail.

Then had come the horrors of uncontrollable dreams followed by the death by fire of Dorothy. That had shaken her completely.

She recalled their rescuing Dorothy, how they had dragged her out of the fire, her clothes all burned off. They had sought to nurse her back to health, and in the week before her daughter died she had learned something of what had happened the night of the fire. In her sleep Dorothy had heard herself called and she thought it was her father's voice. She had arisen when she seemed to see beside her her father as he had looked in life.

She had followed him to the barn and suddenly he had told her that he had come back to take her with him as he had promised to before his death. In her struggle to escape him she had flung the lantern. In the parlor they had laid out Dorothy--a blackened, burnt frame.

All her care and love and solicitude she concentrated on Joseph. She thought that perhaps by an intenser, all embracing love for Joseph she would be enabled to defeat the spell that she felt hanging over her life. Then, when it seemed that life would begin anew to take on a definite meaning--Joseph, grown up, was giving purpose to it--she remembered that some one had knocked timidly on the door and had announced in a frightened voice: "Mrs. Sloan! There's been a terrible accident, the bridge fell----?" She remembered that she had screamed, "My Joseph! My boy!" and then had found herself in the parlor, the body laid out on the couch.

She remembered suddenly that the parlor had seemed to contain the presence of Jim. She had looked up to see dimly what seemed the figure and face of her dead husband. In the eyes that seemed to be laughing she read the threat, "I took him, but now there's you."

As these recollections flooded and flowed through her mind, a frightened nervousness seized upon Martha, standing by the window. Somehow she was being held by a fear to move. Something seemed to have robbed her of the strength and resolution to turn from the window.

There came to her the impression that there was some one in the room with her. The feeling grew subtly upon her and added to her fear of turning around. So she kept her eyes looking out of the window up at where the shaft of the gravestone stood. But, more clearly now than before, she sensed something that seemed to reach out from the gravestone and carry to her, and at the same time there grew the feeling that the presence in the room was approaching her.

She was held in fright. All her nervous impulses impelled her to flight. Like a whip that was descending over her head, came the mirage from the gravestone until, in a mad, wild attempt to evade it, she flung about in the room as if to dash across and away from the window. Suddenly she was halted in her passage by the presence of Jim. The dim parlor was somehow filled with a sense of his being there, and in the dusk near the mantelpiece and at the head of the couch, there stood in shadowy outline her husband, come back.

"Jim!" she uttered, in a frightened gasp, and threw her hands outward to protect herself from his purpose. But she saw clearly the shadowy face and eyes that said unmistakably, "I have come for you."

She was terror-bound. There was no advance, for moving forward meant coming closer to that presence, meant walking into his very grasp.

She was about to speak, to plead for herself, to beg, "Jim, leave me."

In her terror and dread of his approach, she turned hastily to the window and leaped down. Wildly she scrambled up, bruised and shaken, and screaming hoarsely, while in unthinking terror she moved her hands, as if beating off unwelcome hands, she ran pantingly up the road which led to Deems's house.