The Way Out

“WELL, Marcia, here we are,” said James Haddon, as at last their long railway journey drew to its close in the swift sweep of the train up the gates of the great city by the sea...

THE single hotel of Windsor was a raw and rambling structure, for the most part frequented by raftsmen and mill hands. Joslin knew the proprietor, commonly known as Old Man Bent...

DAVID JOSLIN did not come to renew his invitation to Marcia Haddon to ride into the mountains. She saw him no more. Nor did she herself even yet keep her oft-renewed promise to...

ONE day, without explanation to his fellows, Joslin ceased in his labors, and started down the hill. No one asked him his intention, for he rarely spoke of his own plans. They s...

IF EVER was happy wayfarer, that was David Joslin, as now he held his course back to the little Ohio village which had been his home these past two years. He walked eagerly, hur...

The old woman who spoke—a wrinkled dame she was, bowed down by years and infirmity, her face creased by a thousand grimed-in, wrinkled lines—moved with an odd sprightliness as s...

IN THE two years that passed after David Joslin left his home, no word was received from him by any of his friends or his kin, even by his old grandma left alone in the hill cab...

THE young man who had been dismissed from his father’s house walked unmindful of the rain still falling in the evening gloom, nor looked back to the door now closed behind him....

BY MORNING, Haddon had become a trace more possible in his comportment. He did not need to speak to Joslin further about the joining of forces up the river, for the latter had h...

DAVID JOSLIN turned from his own wastrel fire, his own decrepit gate, as but now he had from his father’s, and he did not look back at what he had left. Steadily his feet slushe...

THE new doctor from the new town on the new railroad came not only once, but many times to call upon Marcia Haddon, seriously ill at Granny Williams’ home. A high fever held her...

MARCIA HADDON’S lawyers wrote with greater and greater insistence from New York, asking her return to care for the matters of the estate of James Haddon, but she still shrank fr...

THE cynically smiling driver of Haddon’s car at a late hour that morning deposited a solitary passenger at the door of a certain apartment building high up on Manhattan Island....

IN THE Cumberlands, at the Forks of the Kentucky life went on as it had from time immemorial. There were few more houses than there had been a hundred years ago, no more roads,...

AS JOSLIN wandered along a street unknown to him, lighted by flickering arc lights, he was not conscious of the exercise of any of his faculties, but a faint, sweetish smell cam...

WHEN Joslin finally rose and set his face away from the sight of the hearth fire he had known, with staff and scrip to start out into the world, he followed along the winding he...

IT WAS late afternoon when David Joslin and Calvin Trasker, his kinsman, started into the hills. They rode in silence as they followed the winding little path which led up into...

THE civic center of the village at the river forks might have been called the long building, in which were located the post-office and the blacksmith shop. It was here that, on...

IN THE old apple orchard of Preacher Joslin—whose gnarled trees had been planted by some unknown hand unknown years ago—a long and narrow rift showed in the rocky soil. The owne...

THE hours dragged leaden for the women, cooped up, silent, as in the old block-house days, but for the men the great adventure of going out to war, born in their ancient Highlan...

GRANNY JOSLIN was accurate in one statement regarding her neighbor’s household, but was not so accurate in other details. Had Polly Pendleton known surely that Marcia Haddon was...

THE unusual sounds of the street still came to the ears of all in the little village, but Marcia Haddon, agitated, held to her own room and tried to rest, to forget. She was aro...

HADDON, puffy about the eyes, trembling of fingers, sat at table the next day offering a very fine example of the morning after organized hilarity. The man opposed to him, hagga...

WHEN, on the afternoon of a later day, Marcia Haddon and her ancient chaperone re-entered the long and straggling street at the forks of the river, they noted certain signs of e...

DAVID JOSLIN wished nothing so much as to be quite alone. He did not rejoin his companions on the hill. Pleading his errand at Windsor, he set out at once down stream with no co...

THE mountaineer’s keen eye noted a change in the river along which his pathway led. There had been rain back in the hills, and now what the mountaineers call a “tide” was coming...

WHEN next Haddon and his wife met at the breakfast table Haddon was more than ordinarily out of sorts, his wife rather more than ordinarily grave and silent. At length he flung...

THE sun was gone, and the shadows were black in the defile. The ancient river went on with its mocking of them, now low and hoarse, now cynically shrieking, as the voice of flow...