Chapter 4

Tracey Tanner saw him first, having driven down to the station with his father's surrey on the off-chance of picking up a quarter or so from some drummer wishing to be conveyed to the Bigelow House. Only outlanders pay money for hacks in Radville; everybody else walks, of course. Naturally Tracey took The Mysterious Stranger for a drummer; he had three trunks and a heavy packing-box, so Tracey's misapprehension was pardonable. Instinctively he drove him to the Bigelow House; Will now and again makes Tracey a present of a bottle of sarsaparilla or lemon-pop, with the result that Tracey calls Tannehill, who runs the opposition hotel, a skinflint and never takes strangers there except on their express desire. The Mysterious Stranger merely asked to be driven to the best hotel. This is not like most commercial travellers, who as a rule know where they want to go, even in a strange town, having made inquiry in advance from their brothers of the road. Tracey made a note of this, and is further on record as having observed that this stranger was rather better dressed than the run of drummers, if not so nobbily. Moreover, he was reticent under the cross-fire of Tracey's irrepressible conversation, and failed to ask the name of the first pretty girl they passed; who happened to be Angle Tuthill. Finally The Mysterious Stranger actually tipped Tracey a whole quarter for carrying his suit-case into the hotel office.

With these incitements it would have been unreasonable to expect Tracey to do otherwise than linger around for the good health of his sense of inquisitiveness, which would else have been severely sprained.

Will Bigelow was dozing behind the desk, lulled by the sound of Hi Nutt's voice in the barroom, as he explained to all and sundry just how he had inadvertently permitted Watty the tailor to best him at checkers that morning. Otherwise the office was deserted. Tracey wakened Will by stamping heavily across the floor, and Will mechanically pushed down his spectacles and dipped a pen in ink, slewing the register round for the guest's signature. He says he knew at a glance that The Mysterious Stranger was no travelling man, but this is a moot point, Tracey's memory being minutely accurate and at variance with Will's assertion.

The Mysterious Stranger was a young man, rather severely clothed in a dark suit which excited no interest in Bigelow's understanding, although I, when I saw him later, had no difficulty in realising that it had never been made by a tailor whose place of business was more than five doors removed from Fifth Avenue. He was tallish, but not really tall, and carried himself with a slight stoop which took way from his real height. Tracey says he had a way of looking at you as if he was smiling inside at some joke he'd heard a long time ago; and I don't know but that's a fairly apt description of his ordinary expression. He had a way, too, of nodding jerkily at you--just once--to show he recognised you or understood what you were driving at; at other times he carried his head a trifle to one side and slightly forward. He was a man you wouldn't forget, somehow, though what there was about him that was remarkable nobody seemed to know.

He nodded that jerky way in answer to Will Bigelow's "G'devenin'," and without saying anything took the pen and started to register. He had to stop, however, for Tracey was pressing him so close upon the right that he couldn't get any play for his elbow, and after a minute or two he asked Tracey politely would he mind stepping round to the left, where he could see just as well. So Tracey did. Then he wrote his name in a good round hand: "Nathaniel Duncan, N.Y."

"I'd like a room with a bath," he told Will: "something simple and chaste, within the means of a man in moderate circumstances."

Will thought he was joking at first, but he didn't smile, so Will explained that there was a bathroom on the third floor at the end of the hall, though there wasn't much call for it. "I could give you a room next to that," he said, "but you wouldn't want it, I guess."

"Why not?" asked The Mysterious Stranger.

"Because," said Will, "'taint near the sample-room."

"That doesn't make any difference; I'm on the wagon."

The only sense Will could get out of that was that the young man was travelling for a buggy house and hadn't brought any samples with him. "I thought," he allowed, "as how you'd be wantin' a place to display your samples, but of course if you're in the wagon business--"

"Oh," said Mr. Duncan, "I thought you meant the 'sample-room' over there." He nodded toward the bar. "That's what you call the dispensaries of intoxicating liquors in this part of the country, is it not?"

Will made a noise resembling an affirmative, and as soon as he got his breath explained that travelling men generally wanted a sort of a showroom next to theirs and that that was called a sample-room, too.

"But I'm not a travelling man," said The Mysterious Stranger. "So I shall have as little use for the one as the other."

"Then the room on the third floor'll do for you," said Will. "How long do you calculate on stayin'?"

"That will depend," said Mr. Duncan: "a day or so--perhaps longer; until I can find comfortable and more permanent quarters."

In his amazement Will jabbed the pen so hard into the potato beside the ink-well that he never could get the nib out and had to buy a new one. "You don't mean to say you're thinkin' of coming here to live?" he gasped.

"Yes, I do," said the young man apologetically. "I don't think you'll find me in the way. I shall be very quiet and unobtrusive. I'm a student, looking for a quiet place in which to pursue my studies."

"Well," said Will, "you've found it all right. There ain't no quieter place in Pennsylvany than Radville, Mr. Duncan. I hope you'll like it," he said, sarcastic.

"I shall endeavour to," said the young man.

"And now may I go to my room, please? I should like to renovate my travel-stained person to some extent before dinner."

"You'll have time," said Will; "dinner's at noon to-morrow. I guess you're thinkin' about supper. That's ready now. Here, Tracey, you carry this gentleman's things up to number forty-three."

But Tracey had already gone, and such was his haste to spread the news that he forgot to take the horse and surrey back to the stable, but left it standing in front of the hotel till eight o'clock; for which oversight, I am credibly informed, his father justly dealt with him before sending him to bed.

I have never been able to understand how we failed to hear of it at Miss Carpenter's before seven o'clock. That was the hour when, having finished supper and my first evening pipe, I started down-town to the _Citizen_ office, intending to stop in at the Bigelow House on the way and confound Will with the list of the day's happenings. Main Street was pretty well crowded for that hour, I remember noticing, and most of the townsfolk were grouped together on the corners, underneath the lamps, discussing something rather excitedly. I paid no particular attention, realising that between Caesar, Pete Willing, Roland Burnette's suit and the checker game, they had enough to talk about. So it wasn't until I walked into the Bigelow House office that I either heard or saw anything of The Mysterious Stranger.

Will Bigelow was in his usual place behind the desk, and looked, I thought, rather disgruntled. His reply to my "Howdy, Will?" sounded somewhat snappish. But he got out of his chair and moved round the end of the desk just as the young man came out of the dining-room door. Then Will pulled up and I realised that he was calling my attention to the stranger.

So far as I could see, he seemed an ordinary, everyday, good-looking, good-natured young man, whose naturally sunny disposition had been insulted by the food recently set before him. He wandered listlessly out upon the porch and stood there, with his hands in his pockets, looking up and down Centre Street, just then being shadowed into the warm, purple June dusk, beneath its double row of elms. We've always thought it a rather attractive street, and that night it seemed especially lively with its trickle of girls and boys strolling up and down, and the groups of grown folks on the corners, and Roland Burnette's summer suit conspicuous through Sothern and Lee's plate-glass windows; and I supposed the young man was admiring it all. But now I know him better. He felt just the same about Main Street, corner of Centre, Radville, as I should have about Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, if you had set me down there and told me I'd got to get accustomed to the idea that I must live there. He was saying, deep down in his heart: "O _Lord_!"--with the rising inflection.

Will grabbed my arm, without saying anything, and pulled me into the bar.

"Hello!" I said, as he went round behind and opened the cigar-case, "what's up?"

He took out two boxes of the finest five-centers in town and placed them before me. "Them's up," he said. "You win. Have one."

It staggered me to have him give in that way; I had been looking forward to a long and diverting dispute. "I guess you've heard everything worth hearing about to-day's history," I said, disappointed, as I selected the least unpleasant looking of the cigars.

"No, I haven't," he said. "I didn't have to hear anything. What earned you that smoke took place right here in this office.... Here," he said, striking a match for me.

I had been trying to put the cigar away so that I might dispose of it without hurting Will's feelings, but he had me, so I recklessly poked the thing into the automatic clipper and then into my mouth. "What do you mean?" I asked, puffing.

"Come 'long outside," said Will; and we went out on the porch just in time to see Mr. Duncan going wearily upstairs to his room. "I mean," said Will, _"him"_. And then he told me all about it.

"But things like that don't happen every day," he wound up defensively. "I'll go you another cigar on to-morrow."

"No, you won't," I said indignantly; and furtively dropped the infamous thing over the railing.

I am never successful in my little attempts at deception, even in self-defence. In all candour I believe my disposition of that cigar would have gone undetected but for my notorious bad luck. Of course Bigelow's setter, Pompey, had to be asleep right under the spot where I dropped the cigar, and equally of course the burning end had to make instantaneous connection with his nerve centres, via his hide, with such effect that he arose in agony and subsequently used coarse language. Investigation naturally discovered my empty-handed perfidy. To no one else in Radville would this have happened.

On the other hand, no one else in Radville would have thrown away the cigar.

V

MARGARET'S DAUGHTER

Discomfort roused Duncan from his rest at an early hour, the morning following his arrival in Radville. I must confess that the beds in the Bigelow House are no better than they should be; in fact, according to Duncan, not so good. Duncan ought to know; he has slept in one of them, or tried to; a trial thus far to me denied. From what he has said, however, I shudder to think what will become of me should I ever lose the shelter of Miss Carpenter's second-story front and be thrown out into a heartless world to choose between the Bigelow House and Frank Tannehill's Radville Inn....

Duncan arose and consulted the two-dollar watch which he had left on the pine washstand by the window. It was half-past seven o'clock, and that seemed early to him. He was tired and would willingly have turned in again, but a rueful glance at the couch of his night-long vigil sufficed him. He lifted a hand to Heaven and vowed solemnly: "Never again!"

As he bent over the washstand and poured a cupful of water into the china basin, thus emptying the pitcher, he was conscious of a pain in his back; but a thought cheered him. "They must have decent stables in this town," he considered, brightening. "The haymows for mine, after this."

He dressed with scrupulous care, mindful of Kellogg's parting words, the sense of which was that first impressions were most important. "All the same," Duncan thought, "I don't believe they count in a dead-and- alive place like this. There's no one here with sufficient animation to realise I'm in town." This shows how little he understood our little community. A day of enlightenment was in store for him.

Pansy Murphy was scrubbing out the office when he came down for breakfast. She is large, of what is known as a full complexion, good-hearted and energetic. His pause at the foot of the stairs, as he surveyed in dismay the seven seas of soapy water that occupied the floor, aroused her. She sat back suddenly on her heels and looked her fill of him, with her blue Irish eyes very wide, and her mouth a trap. He bowed politely. Pansy saved herself from falling over backwards by a supreme effort, scrubbed her hair out of her eyes with a very wet hand, and gave him "Good-marrin', Misther Dooncan," in a brogue as rich as you could wish for.

He started violently. "Heavens!" he said. "I am discovered!"

"Make yer moind aisy about thot," Pansy assured him. "'Tis known all over town who ye arre, what's yer name, how manny troonks ye've brought wid ye, and th' rayson f'r yer comin' here."

"A comforting thought, thank you," he commented: "to awake to find one's self grown famous over-night!..."

"Now ye know," she returned, emboldened, "what it is to be a big toad in a small puddle."

"I thank you." He nodded again, with a comprehensive survey of the reeking floor. "I'm afraid I do." With which he slipped and slid over to and through the swinging wicker doors of the dining-room.

It was deserted. From the negligee of the tables, littered with the plates and dishes, dreary survivors of a dozen breakfasts, he divined that he was the tardiest guest in the household. A slatternly young woman in a soiled shirt-waist--the waitress--received him with great calm and waved him toward a table by the window, where an unused cover was laid. He went meekly, dogged by her formidable presence. She stood over him and glared down.

"Haman neggs," she said defiantly, "steakan nomlette."

"I'll be a martyr," he told her civilly. "Me for the steak."

She frowned gloomily and tramped away. He folded his hands and, cheered by an appetising aroma of warm water and yellow soap from the office, considered the prospect from the window by his side. Three children and a yellow dog came along and watched him do it, dispassionately reviewing his points in clear young voices. Tracey Tanner ambled into view on the other side of the street and beamed at him generously, his round red face resembling, Duncan thought, more than anything else a summer sun rising through mist. Josie Lockwood (he was to discover her name later) passed with her pert little nose ostentatiously pointed away from him; none the less he detected a gleam in the corner of her eye.... Others went by, singly or in groups, all more or less openly interested in him.

He tried to look unconscious, but with ill success. There was nothing particularly engaging in the view: the broad, dusty street lined with commonplace structures of "frame" and brick, glowing in the morning sunshine. There were, to be sure, cool shadows beneath the trees, but the suggestion was all of summer heat. There was a watering-trough and hitching-rail directly opposite, a little to one side of Hemmenway's feed-store, and there a well-fed mare stood, drooping dejectedly between the shafts of a dilapidated buggy. On the corner was a two-storey brick building with large plate-glass windows on the ground floor for the display of intimate articles of feminine apparel. The black and gold sign above proclaimed it: "The Fair. Dry Goods & Notions. Leonard & Call." Duncan considered it with grave respect. "The scene of my future activities," he observed.

By this time his audience had become too large and friendly for his endurance. He rose and retired to a less public table.

In her own good time the waitress returned with a plate, and a small oval platter in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She placed them before him with a manner that told him plainly he could never make himself the master of her affections. The small oval platter was discovered to contain a small segment of dark-brown ham and two fried eggs swimming in grease.

Duncan questioned the woman with mute, appealing eyes.

"Steak's run out," she told him curtly.

"Leaving no address?" he inquired with forced gaiety.

A suppressed smile softened her austerity, and she turned away to hide it. "To think," he wondered, "that a sense of humour should inhabit that!" He broke a roll and munched it gloomily, pondering this revelation. "And such humour !" he added, with justice.

After an interval the woman returned. He had refrained from the staple dish. She indicated it with a grimy forefinger.

"Please!" he begged plaintively. "I'm never very hungry in the morning."

"I guess you don't like the table here," she observed icily, clearing away.

"Do you?"

"I don't have to; I live home."

He stared. Could it be possible...?

"I know a good old one, too," he ventured hopefully. "Now here." He drew his coffee cup toward him and began to stir with energy. "You say: 'It looks like rain'; and I'll say: 'Yes, but it tastes a little like coffee.'"

She clattered away indignantly. He rose, depressed, and sighing sought the outer air.

In the course of a forenoon's stroll Radville discovered itself to him in all its squalor and its loveliness. It sits in the centre of a broad valley of rolling meadow-land, studded with infrequent homesteads, broken into rather extensive farms, threaded by a shallow silver stream that gives its all in tribute to the Susquehanna far in the south. The barrier mountains rise about it like the sides of a bowl, with a great V-shaped piece chipped out of the southern wall. This break we call the Gap; through it the railroad comes to us, through it the river escapes. The hills rear high and steep, their swelling flanks cloaked in sombre green and grey, with here and there a bald spot like a splash of ochre where there's been a landslide, climbing directly from the plain, with no foothills. A recluse, I have thought, must have chosen this spot for a town site; sickened of the world, he sought seclusion--and found it here to his heart's content. Until the coke-ovens come, following the miners, with their attendant hordes of Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians, we shall be near to God, for we shall know peace....

The town has been laid out with great rectangularity; the river divides it unequally. On the western bank is the larger community--locally, the Old Town, retaining its characteristics of sobriety, quiet and comfort; here, also, is the business centre--such business as there is. Here Duncan found homely residences sitting back from the street in ample grounds--grounds, perhaps, not very carefully groomed, but in spite of that attractive and pleasant to the eye. With one or two exceptions, none were strongly suggestive of wealth. He detected a trace of ostentation, and no taste whatever, in Lockwood's new villa (I'm told that's the polite designation for the edifice he caused to be erected what time the plague of riches smote him and the old home on Cherry Street became too small for the collective family chest), and there was quiet dignity in the quaintly columned facade of the Bohun mansion, now occupied solely by old Colonel Bohun, lonely and testy, reputed the richest as well as the most miserable man in the county. But as to his wealth, I doubt if rumour runs by more than tradition; Blinky Lockwood's new-found hundred-thousands are growing rapidly toward the million mark, unless Blinky's a worse business man than the town takes him to be.

An old stone arch (whereon lovers linger in the moonlight) spans the stream and links the Old Town with the new, which we sometimes term the Flats, but more often simply Over There. It is a sordid huddle of dingy and down-at-the-heel tenements, housing the poorer working classes and the frankly worthless and ruffianly riff-raff of the neighbourhood. There are eight gin-mills Over There as against two sample-rooms in the Old Town, and of the local constabulary two-thirds lead exciting lives patrolling the Flats; the remaining third is ordinarily to be found dozing in the backroom of Schwartz's, and if roused will answer to the name and title of Pete Willing, Sheriff and Chief of Police.

Duncan reviewed both sides of the municipal face with fine impartiality--the Flats last; and turned back to the Old Town. "There's one thing," he communed as he reached the bridge: "If these people ever find me out they'll run me across the river--sure."

He paused there, looking up and down the valley with contemplative gaze; and it was there I found him.

As is my custom, I had devoted the earlier morning hours to the compilation of that work which is to gain for the name of Littlejohn a trifle more respect than, I fear, it owns in Radville nowadays; and afterwards, again in accordance with habit, had started out for my morning constitutional. As I was about to leave the house Miss Carpenter waylaid me and, in a voice still tremulous from the shock of yesterday, asked me to hunt up Jake Sawyer in the Flats and tell him to come and cut the grass.

I was not in the least unwilling, for the walk was not long, and the morning very pleasant--not too warm, and bright with the smiling spirit of June. I don't remember feeling more cheerful and at peace with the world than when I marched off on my mission. The cloud I might, of course, have anticipated: clouds always come, and a lifetime has taught me to be sceptical of that tale about the silver lining. And even when it came it seemed no more depressing, of no more significant moment, than the cloud shadow that scurries across a wheat-field with no effect other than to enhance the beauty of the sunshine that pursues it.

Old Colonel Bohun was the cloud-shadow of that morning. I met him turning into Main Street from Mortimer--at the head of which his mansion stands. He came down the sidewalk, but with a hint of haste in his manner: a tall old man, bending beneath the burden of his years, his fierce old face and iron-grey hair shaded as always by the black slouch hat with the flapping brim, his rounded shoulders cloaked with the black Inverness cape he wore summer and winter. In spite of his age and evident decrepitude, he bodied forth the spirit of what he had been, and none could pass him without knowledge of his presence; he drew eyes as a magnet draws filings, and drawing, held them in respect. I doubted if there were a man in Radville who could meet the old colonel with anything but a mingling of fear and deference--with one or two exceptions. For myself I hated him heartily, and he, looking down at me from the peak of pride whereon his iron soul perched, despised me with equal intensity. So we got along famously at our infrequent encounters.

This morning I caught a flash of fire from his red-rimmed old eyes, and told myself I was sorry for whoever crossed his path before he returned to his lonely castle. It was his habit at odd intervals to foray down the village streets with one grievance or another rankling in his bosom, seeking some unlucky one upon whose head to wreak his resentment. We had come to recognise the heavy, slow tapping of his thick cane as a harbinger of trouble, even as you might prognosticate a thunderstorm from the rumbling beneath the horizon.