Chapter 4

"No one knows how much there is, or how little there is," said the Bishop. "The man lied to you, Jeffrey. The road has no eminent domain. But they can get it if they get the options on a large part of the farms. Then, when they have the right of eminent domain, they will let the options lapse and buy the properties at their own prices."

"I'll start back to warn the people to-night," said Jeffrey, jumping up. "Maybe they made that offer to other people besides me!"

"Wait," said the Bishop, "there is more to think of. The railroad, if you serve it well, will, no doubt, buy your farm for much more than it is worth to you. There is your mother to be considered first. And they will, very likely, give you a chance to make a small fortune in your commissions, if you are faithful to them. If you go to fight them, they will probably crush you all in the end, and you will be left with little or nothing. Better go slowly, young man."

"What?" cried Jeffrey. "Take their bribe! Take their money, for fooling and cheating the other people out of their homes! Why, before I'd do that, I'd leave that farm and everything that's there and go up into the big woods with only my axe, as my grandfather did. And my mother would follow me! You know that! My mother would be glad to go with me, with nothing, nothing in her hands!"

"And so would I!" said Ruth, springing to her feet. "I _would_! I _would_!" she chanted defiantly.

"Well, well, well!" said the Bishop, smiling.

"But you are not going up into the big woods, Jeffrey," Ruth said demurely. "You are going back home to fight them. If I could help you I would go back with you. I would not be of any use. So, I'm going back, to the convent, to face my fight."

"But, but," said Jeffrey, "I thought you were running away."

"I did. I was," said Ruth. "Last night I heard the voice of something calling to me. It was such a big thing," she went on, turning to the Bishop; "it seemed such a pitiless, strong thing that I thought it would crush me. It would take my life and make me do what _it_ wanted, not what I wanted. I was afraid of it. I ran away. It was like a Choir Unseen singing to me to follow, and I didn't dare follow.

"But I heard it again, just now when Jeffrey spoke that way. Now I know what it was. It was the call of life to everybody to face life, to take our souls in our hands and go forward. I thought I could turn back. I can't. God, or life won't let us turn back."

"I know what you mean, child. Fear nothing," said the Bishop. "I'm glad you came away, to have it out with yourself. And you will be very glad now to go back."

"As for you, young man," he turned to Jeffrey, "I should say that your mother _would_ be proud to go anywhere, empty-handed with you. Remember that, when you are in the worst of this fight that is before you. When you are tempted, as you will be tempted, remember it. When you are hard pressed, as you will be hard pressed, _remember it_."

III

GLOW OF DAWN

Twinkle-tail was gliding up Beaver Run to his breakfast. It was past the middle of June, or, as Twinkle-tail understood the matter, it was the time when the snow water and the water from the spring rains had already gone down to the Big River: Beaver Run was still a fresh, rushing stream of water, but it was falling fast. Soon there would not be enough water in it to make it safe for a trout as large as he. Then he would have to stay down in the low, deep pond of Beaver River, where the saw-dust came to bother him.

He was going up to lie all the morning in the shallow little pond at the very head of Beaver Run, where the hot, sweet sun beat down and drew the flies to the surface of the pond. He was very fond of flies and the pond was his own. He had made it his own now through four seasons, by his speed and his strong teeth. Even the big, greedy, quarrelsome pike that bullied the river down below did not dispute with him this sweet upper stretch of his own stream. No large fish ever came up this way now, and he did not bother with the little ones. He liked flies better.

His pond lay all clean and silvery and a little cool yet, for the sun was not high enough to have heated it through: a beautiful breakfast room at the bottom of the great bowl of green banks that ran away up on every side to the rim of the high hills.

Twinkle-tail was rather early for breakfast. The sun had not yet begun to draw the flies from their hiding places to buzz over the surface of the water. As he shot into the centre of the pool only one fly was in sight. A rather decrepit looking black fly was doddering about a cat-tail stalk at the edge of the pond. One quick flirt of his body, and Twinkle-tail slid out of the water and took the fly in his leap. But that was no breakfast. He would have to settle down by the cat-tails, in the shadows, and wait for the flies to come.

Twinkle-tail missed something from his pond this season. Always, in other years, two people, a boy and a girl, had come and watched him as he ate his breakfast. The girl had called him Twinkle-tail the very first time they had seen him. But Twinkle-tail had no illusions. They were not friends to him. He loved to lie in the shadow of the cat-tails and watch them as they crept along the edge of the bank. But he knew they came to catch him. When they were there the most tempting flies seemed to appear. Some of those flies fell into the water, others just skimmed the surface in the most aggravating and challenging manner. But Twinkle-tail had always stayed in the cat-tails and watched, and if the boy and girl came to his side of the pond, then a lightning twinkle of his tail was all that told them that he had scooted out of the pool and down into the stream. Once the girl had trailed a piece of flashing red flannel across the water, and Twinkle-tail could not resist. He leaped for it. A terrible hook caught him in the side of the mouth! In his fury and terror he dove and fought until he broke the hook. He had never forgotten that lesson.

But he was forgetting a little this season. No one came to his pool. He was growing big and fat, and a little careless.

As he lay there in the warming sand by the cat-tails, the biggest, juiciest green bottle fly that Twinkle-tail had ever seen came skimming down to the very line of the water. It circled once. Twinkle-tail did not move. It circled twice, not an inch from the water!

A single, sinuous flash of his whole body, and Twinkle-tail was out of the water! He had the fly in his mouth.

Then the struggle began.

Ruth Lansing sprang up, pole in hand, from the shoulder of the bank behind which she had been hiding.

The trout dove and started for the stream, the line ripping through the water like a shot.

The girl ran, leaping from rock to rock, her strong, slender, boy-like body giving and swaying cunningly to every tug of the fish.

He turned and shot swiftly back into the pool, throwing her off her balance and down into the water. She rose wet and angry, clinging grimly to the pole, and splashed her way to the other side of the pond. She did not dare to stand and pull against him, for fear of breaking the hook. She could only race around, giving him all the line she could until he should tire a little.

Three times they fought around the circle of the pool, the taut line singing like a wire in the wind. Ruth's hand was cut where she had fallen on the rocks. She was splashed and muddy from head to foot. Her breath came in great, gulping sobs. But she fought on.

Twice he dragged her a hundred yards down the Run, but she headed him back each time to the pond where she could handle him better. She had never before fought so big a fish all alone. Jeffrey or Daddy Tom had always been with her. Now she found herself calling desperately under her breath to Jeffrey to come to help her. She bit back the words and took a new hold on the pole.

The trout was running blindly now from side to side of the pond. He had lost his cunning. He would soon weaken. But Ruth knew that her strength was nearly gone too. She must use her head quickly.

She gathered herself on the bank for one desperate effort. She must catch him as he ran toward her and try to flick him out of the water. It was her only chance. She might break the line or the pole and lose him entirely, but she would try it.

Twinkle-tail came shooting through the water, directly at her. She suddenly threw her strength on the pole. It bent nearly double but it held. And the fish, adding his own blind rush to her strength, was whipped clear out on to the grass. Dropping the pole, she dove desperately at him where he fought on the very edge of the bank. Finally she caught the line a few inches above his mouth, and her prize was secure.

"It's you, Twinkle-tail," she panted, as she held him up for a good look, "sure enough!"

She carried him back to a large stone and despatched him painlessly with a blunt stick. Then she sat down to rest, for she was weak and dizzy from her struggle.

Looking down at Twinkle-tail where he lay, she said aloud:

"I wish Jeffrey was here. He'll never believe it was you unless he sees you."

"Yes, that's him all right," said a voice behind her. "I'd know him in a thousand."

She sprang up and faced Jeffrey Whiting.

"Why, where did you come from? Your mother told me you wouldn't be back till to-morrow."

"Well, I can go back again and stay till to-morrow if you want me to," said Jeffrey, smiling.

"Oh, Jeff, you know I'm glad to see you. I was awfully disappointed when I got home and found that you were away up in the hills. How is your fight going on? And look at Twinkle-tail," she hurried on a little nervously, for Jeffrey had her hand and was drawing her determinedly to him. She reached for the trout and held him up strategically between them.

"Oh, _Fish_!" said Jeffrey discontentedly as he saw himself beaten by her ruse.

The girl laughed provokingly up into his sullenly handsome face. Then she seemed to relent, and with a friendly little tug at his arm led him over to the edge of the pool and made him sit down.

"Now tell me," she commanded, "all about your battle with the railroad people. Your mother told me some things, but I want it all, from yourself."

But Jeffrey was still unappeased. He looked at her dress and shoes and said with a show of meanness:

"Ruth, you didn't catch Twinkle-tail fair, on your line. You just walked into the pond and got him in a corner and kicked him to death brutally. I know you did. You're always cruel."

Ruth laughed, and showed him the jagged cut in her hand where she had fallen on the rocks.

Instantly he was all interest and contrition. He must wash the hand and dress it! But she made him sit where he was, while she knelt down by the water and bathed the smarting hand and bound it with her handkerchief.

"Now," she said, "tell me."

"Well," he began, when he saw that there was nothing to be gained by delay, "the very night that the Bishop of Alden told me that they had found iron in the hills here and that they were going to try to push us all out of our homes, I started out to warn the people. I found I wasn't the only man that the railroad had tried to buy. They had Rafe Gadbeau, you know he's a kind of a political boss of the French around French Village; and a man named Sayres over on Forked Lake.

"Gadbeau had no farm of his own to sell, but he'd been spending money around free, and I knew the railroad must have given it to him outright. I told him what I had found out, about the iron and what the land would be worth if the farmers held on to it. But I might as well have held my breath. He didn't care anything about the interests of the people that had land. He was getting paid well for every option that he could get. And he was going to get all he could. I will have trouble with that man yet.

"The other man, Sayres, is a big land-owner, and a good man. They had fooled him, just as that man Rogers I told you about fooled me. He had started out in good faith to help the railroad get the properties over on that side of the mountains, thinking it was the best thing for the people to do to sell out at once. When I told him about their finding iron, he saw that they had made a catspaw of him; and he was the maddest man you ever saw.

"He is a big man over that way, and his word was worth ten of mine. He went right out with me to warn every man who had a piece of land not to sign anything.

"Three weeks ago Rogers, who is handling the whole business for the railroad, came up here and had me arrested on charges of extortion and conspiring to intimidate the land-owners. They took me down to Lowville, but Judge Clemmons couldn't find anything in the charges. So I was let go. But they are not through. They will find some way to get me away from here yet."

"How does it stand now?" said Ruth thoughtfully. "Have they actually started to build the railroad?"

"Oh, yes. You know they have the right of way to run the road through. But they wouldn't build it, at least not for years yet, only that they want to get this iron property opened up. Why, the road is to run from Welden to French Village and there is not a single town on the whole line! The road wouldn't have business enough to keep the rust off. They're building the road just the same, so that shows that they intend to get our property some way, no matter what we do. And I suppose they will, somehow," he added sullenly. "They always do, I guess."

"But the people," said Ruth, "can't you get them all to join and agree to sell at a fair price? Wouldn't that be all right?"

"They don't want to buy. They won't buy at any fair price. They only want to get options enough to show the Legislature and the Governor, and then they will be granted eminent domain and they can have the land condemned and can buy it at the price of wild land."

"Oh, yes; I remember now. That's what the Bishop said. Isn't it strange," she went on slowly, "how he seems to come into everything we do. How he saved my Daddy Tom's life that time at Fort Fisher. And how he came here that night when Daddy was hurt. And how he picked us up and turned us around and sent me off to convent. And now how he seems to come into all this.

"Everybody calls him the Shepherd of the North," she went on. "I wonder if he comes into the lives of _all_ the people that way. At the convent everybody seems to think of him as belonging to them personally. I resented it at first, because I thought I had more reason to know him than anybody. But I found that everybody felt the same way."

"He's just like the Catholic Church," said Jeffrey suddenly, and a little sharply; "he comes into everything."

"Why, Jeffrey," said Ruth in surprise, "what do you know about the Church?"

"I know," he answered. "I've read some. And I've had to deal a lot with the French people up toward French Village. And I've talked with their priest up there. You know you have to talk to the priest before it's any use talking to them. That's the way with the Catholic Church. It comes into everything. I don't like it."

He sat looking across the pool for a moment, while Ruth quietly studied the stubborn, settling lines of his face. She saw that a few months had made a big change in the boy and playmate that she had known. He was no longer the bright-faced, clear-eyed boy. His face was turning into a man's face. Sharp, jagged lines of temper and of harshness were coming into it. It showed strength and doggedness and will, along with some of the dour grimness of his fathers. She did not dislike the change altogether. But it began to make her a little timid. She was quick to see from it that there would be certain limits beyond which she could not play with this new man that she found.

"It's all right to be religious," he went on argumentatively. "Mother's religious. And Aunt Letty's just full of it. But it don't interfere with their lives. It's all right to have a preacher for marrying or dying or something like that; and to go to hear him if you want to. But the Catholic Church comes right in to where those people live. It tells them what to do and what to think about everything. They don't dare speak without looking back to it to find out what they must say. I don't like it."

"Why, Jeffrey, I'm a Catholic!"

"I _knew_ it!" he said stubbornly. "I knew it! I knew there was something that had changed you. And I might have known it was that."

"That's funny!" said the girl, breaking in quickly. "When you came I was just wondering to myself why it had not seemed to change me at all. I think I was half disappointed with myself, to think that I had gone through a wonderful experience and it had left me just the same as I was before."

"But it has changed you," he persisted. "And it's going to change you a lot more. I can see it. Please, Ruth," he said, suddenly softening, "you won't let it change you? You won't let it make any difference, with us, I mean?"

The girl looked soberly and steadily up into his face, and said:

"No, Jeffrey. It won't make any difference with us, in the way you mean.

"So long as we are what we are," she said again after a pause, "we will be just the same to each other. If it should make something different out of me than what I am, then, of course, I would not be the same to you. Or if you should change into something else, then you would not be the same to me.

"It's too soon," she continued decisively. "Nothing is clear to me, yet. I've just entered into a great, wonderful world of thought and feeling that I never knew existed. Where it leads to, I do not know. When I do know, Jeffrey dear, I'll tell you."

He looked up sharply at her as she rose to her feet, and he understood that she had said the last word that was to be said. He saw something in her face with which he did not dare to argue.

He got up saying:

"I have to be gone. I'm glad I found you here at the old place. I'll be back to-night to help you eat the trout."

"Where are you going?"

"Over to Wilbur's Fork. There's a couple of men over there that are shaky. I've had to keep after them or they'd be listening to Rafe Gadbeau and letting their land go."

"But," Ruth exclaimed, "now when they know, can't they see what is to their own interest! Are they blind?"

"I know," said Jeffrey dully. "But you know how it is with those people. Their land is hard to work. It is poor land. They have to scratch and scrape for a little money. They don't see many dollars together from one year's end to the other. Even a little money, ready, green money, shaken in their faces looks awful big to them."

"Good luck, then, Jeff," she said cheerily; "and get back early if you can."

"Sure," he said easily as he picked up his hat.

"And, say, Ruth." He turned back quietly to her. "If--if I shouldn't be back to-night, or to-morrow; why, watch Rafe Gadbeau. Will you? I wouldn't say anything to mother. And Uncle Catty, well, he's not very sharp sometimes. Will you?"

"Of course I will. But be careful, Jeff, please."

"Oh, sure," he sang back, as he walked quickly around the edge of the pond and slipped into the alder bushes through which ran the trail that went up over the ridge to the Wilbur Fork country on the other side.

Ruth stood watching him as he pushed sturdily up the opposite slope, his grey felt hat and wide shoulders showing above the undergrowth.

This boy was a different being from the Jeffrey that she had left when she went down to the convent five months before. She could see it in his walk, in the way he shouldered the bushes aside just as she had seen it in his face and his talk. He was fighting with a power that he had found to be stronger and bigger than himself. He was not discouraged. He had no thought of giving up. But the airy edge of his boyish confidence in himself was gone. He had become grim and thoughtful and determined. He had settled down to a long, dogged struggle.

He had asked her to watch Rafe Gadbeau. How much did he mean? Why should he have said this to her? Would it not have been better to have warned some of the men that were associated with him in his fight? And what was there to be feared? She laughed at the idea of physical fear in connection with Jeffrey. Why, nothing ever happened in the hills, anyway. Crimes of violence were never heard of. It was true, the lumber jacks were rough when they came down with the log drives in the spring. But they only fought among themselves. And they did not stop in the hills. They hurried on down to the towns where they could spend their money.

What had Jeffrey to fear?

Yet, he must have meant a good deal. He would not have spoken to her unless he had good reason to think that something might happen to him.

Withal, Ruth was not deceived. She knew the temper of the hills. The men were easy-going. They were slow of speech. They were generally ruled by their more energetic women. But they or their fathers had all been fighting men, like her own father. And they were rooted in the soil of the hills. Any man or any power that attempted to drive them from the land which their hands had cleared and made into homes, where the bones of their fathers and mothers lay, would have to reckon with them as bitter, stubborn fighting men.

Jeffrey Whiting was just coming to the bare top of the ridge. In another moment he would drop down the other side out of sight. She wondered whether he would turn and wave to her; or had he forgotten that she would surely be standing where he had left her?

He had not forgotten. He turned and waved briskly to her. Then he stepped down quickly out of sight. His act was brusque and businesslike. It showed that he remembered. He could hardly have seen her standing there in all the green by the pond. He had just known that she was there. But it showed something else, too. He had plunged down over the edge of the hill upon a business with which his mind was filled, to the exclusion, almost, of her and of everything else.

The girl did not feel any of the little pique or resentment that might have been very natural. It was so that she would wish him to go about the business that was going to be so serious for all of them. But it gave her a new and startling flash of insight into what was coming.

She had always thought of her hills as the place where peace lived. Out in the great crowded market places of the world she knew men fought each other for money. But why do that in the hills? There was a little for all. And a man could only get as much as his own labour and good judgment would make for him out of the land.

Now she saw that it was not a matter of hills or of cities. Wherever, in the hills or the city or in the farthest desert, there was wealth or the hope of wealth, there greedy men with power would surely come to look for it and take it. That was why men fought. Wealth, even the scent of wealth whetted their appetites and drew them on to battle.

A cloud passed between her and the morning sun. She felt the premonition of tragedy and suffering lowering down like a storm on her hills. How foolishly she had thought that all life and all the great, seething business of life was to be done down in the towns and the cities. Here was life now, with its pressure and its ugly passions, pushing right into the very hills.

She shivered as she picked up her prize of the morning and her fishing tackle and started slowly up the hill toward her home.

Her farm had been rented to Norman Apgarth with the understanding that Ruth was to spend the summer there in her own home. The rent was enough to give Ruth what little money she needed for clothes and to pay her modest expenses at the convent at Athens. So her life was arranged for her at least up to the time when she should have finished school.