Chapter 22

IT HAPPENS IN BOOKS

It is said that men remember many things when death is imminent; and for days and days something had been dying hard in Stephen O'Mara's breast. His step was slow that afternoon when he drew apart to take up his position alone upon a bit of higher ground, his shoulders heavy and drooping; yet his brain was feverishly active. Recollection of many long gone days--thoughts of many things--came darting to his mind; but they were not thoughts of desperate, last-minute expedients which might stave off this present crisis. For if he had believed that force alone would win for him; if he had had faith that mere numbers could save his construction, he would not have left Garry Devereau with his scores of laborers, busy five miles to the south. Steve was not thinking of his construction now; it had become a dim and remote consideration. It had lost its importance in his scheme of things.

They came slowly at first--Wickersham's logs--thudding heavily, one by one, into the underpinnings of the bridge, sliding free or lodging cross-current as the case might be; then in a thicker and thicker tide that ground and up-ended and settled with the weight of the coffee-colored flood behind it. In the beginning the handful of men who had put those timbers into place set themselves, doggedly, to save their completed structure, until the man who had worked with them, shoulder to shoulder, through the night called them with a nod back to the bank. Obediently then they collected in a small knot behind him, murmurous, gutterally grumbling; waiting his further word they squatted on their haunches, staring hungrily at their chief who stood in seeming surrender, head bowed before them.

The coming of Wickersham's men was not a thing of degrees. They poured into view through the brush fringe at the north edge of the marsh and halted, but only for an instant.

"Who is your friend at the time when you need a friend?----Harrigan, that's me!"

The maudlin menace of that chorus rocketed from ridge to ridge. Then, a tight-ranked mass of humanity, they had formed and were sweeping forward again, stepping out to the beat of the ragtime which was their marching hymn. And still the man who stood apart from the rest gave no sign that he was aware of their approach. Once he did straighten; when separate faces began to be distinguishable in that reeling mob he turned and gazed, emptily, toward the group a few yards away--Wickersham putty-skinned before this storm which he had brewed; Allison himself pale; and the girl whose eyes were staring back at him with no clear understanding in their depths. He made no move toward action, not even when the singing pack surged up and spread out before him, until a jostling crescent, straggling at the points, half encircled him and swallowed up as well the little knot behind which had come bristling to its feet. Their onslaught had seemed an irresistible thing, bent upon instant violence; and yet little by little their syncopated defiance died away until they, too, were staring uncertainly at that worn and mud-stained figure which seemed to hang its head. His very inertia robbed them of their impetus.

"Harrigan, that's me!" they faltered now, and there came a lull in the valley at Thirty-Mile, broken only by heavy breathing and the crunch of logs jamming beneath the bridge, and the ugly swirl of backed-up water. It held quiet while Steve looked up, mildly, and scanned the ring in front of him and nodded in recognition to a sullen few; then oaths broke that silence, and a command for room to pass. An upheaval disrupted the crescent's centre. Steve saw Big Louie's face high above the heads of his shorter companions; he watched him plow heavily forward. Shayne he glimpsed, automatically, and Fallon, faithful henchmen. And then Harrigan stood forth.

Long arms dangling, palms back, almost to his knees, that red-headed one minced forward on the balls of his feet. Harrigan was redeeming a promise many weeks overdue. It was spring, and Harrigan had come back!

"I'm here," he spoke to that bowed head, "if you are afther carin' to welcome me!"

"I've been expecting you, Harrigan."

Again that startling mildness.

There is little wonder that it deceived the riverman. Listening, watching O'Mara's slack form even Fat Joe's face burned; even Archie Wickersham's dared flash in triumph. And Harrigan's went savagely exultant.

"You talked out loud to me, once," he taunted. "Is it so difficult you find it now to speak up so I can hear?"

"Would you promise to listen to argument, Harrigan?"

Vilification tore at the other's lips, until friend and enemy marveled at what Steve took in silence.

"You have begun many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade ended. "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys. You've made a gr-reat success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime. For when you aimed to turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something too big for you to finish. I'm taking it off your hands, now. Can't you even talk back like a man?"

There must be fire starting over in the north-east, Steve meditated with an irrelevance strange even to himself--and that reference to her surely was not needed! Yes, there was a smudge of smoke rising behind Twin-face; people should be more careful whore they dropped matches in an unseasonably hot spring like this--and Harrigan's sneer for the boy who had come, wonder-eyed, out of the wilderness and looked upon the picture-thing in kilted velvet which she had been was certainly squandered viciousness now. Past and present they trouped before him, thoughts that spanned years of time and covered leagues of country, yet long before Harrigan had finished with his question Steve knew how he was going to answer it. He didn't have to debate that, and deliberation only gave him the keener joy of anticipation.

All his life opposition had been a familiar of his. Days of hunger he had known and cold, and nights of black discouragement, but never so black until now but what he had been able to hold his vision clear. But that vision was not his any longer to contemplate.

Circumstance had been his handicap; Circumstance he had met and thought to bend to his will; and yet Circumstance had beaten him; in the end Custom was laughing in his face. Beside those intangible antagonists which had been his this personal enemy was only puny, only braggard and swaggering and cheap. But it was a bone and muscle antagonist; it was an entity--a thing upon which one might hurl oneself and spend one's bitter intoleration.

Steve had stopped thinking; he had had too much of thought. Suddenly that question which had been a riddle to him was a riddle no longer. He had the answer, and could see himself as others no doubt had seen him--a fool who had believed in the supremacy of fineness; a boy who had reached for the moon. But it left the issue clearer now. He, too, was a riverman; the degree was different, that was all. And rivermen did not vex their brains with abstract problems; they fought with their hands. His bowed head came back then, and the mass of men, catching sight of the mad, glad light that flared in his eyes, rolled back to give them room. He laughed at Harrigan. He was laughing at himself. They heard and marveled at the pleasantry of his answer.

"Maybe you are right, Harrigan," he said. "You may be--I do not know. I have started big things and left them unfinished. But you are wrong for the rest of it, Harrigan, for I am going--to--finish--you!"

Men tell of that encounter now; it is already epic on the river. One may listen to its details, and he chance into any of a half dozen places:--Mulcahy's, Laduc's, or Whitted's that once was Brown's. And always one will hear different details, but always one accord of verdict. They will tell you that no man ever went through worse vengeance and stayed a living man.

For like a blast of wrath O'Mara lifted and struck him. Harrigan's hands had not left his hips before he met the ground, and he was back on his feet like a bounding ball only to go down again before the smashing impact of those blows. Caution he tried to use in rising and they searched out his face, his chin, and drove him hither and yon. Open fighting was not the river style of fighting and he closed this time and wrapped his gorilla arms about this fury who fought with lightning strokes to keep him off. His greater weight o'erbore them both; he broke away and his hob-nailed boots, lashing out, bit the flesh of O'Mara's temple--they tore the turf where his face had been.

There was madness in Harrigan's hideous roarings of hate, madness in his blind rushes; but his bull-strength availed at first. He weathered destruction and managed to close again. This time the lighter man was ready for the scuff of those armed boots; he twisted and covered his face with his shoulder, and only his shirt ripped open to let blood stream from the rent. On their feet they rocked--to their knees! Faces grinding into the earth they strained and broke away. And always Harrigan came back and found him, blindly. Once his hairy hands searched O'Mara's face and O'Mara's forehead went wet with the agony of fingers tearing at his eye-sockets. Dropping he escaped that gouging grip, coming up he caught Harrigan's chin and turned him over backward.

Harrigan squandered his strength in drunken rushes, his breath in screams of hate. He tore forward when the other had already stepped aside, and Steve, shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets into his eyes, met him returning. There came a time when Harrigan's enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had to stand up and fight. And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set himself to chop his face to pieces. Flail-like blows he side-stepped, and whipped to the other's eyes. That open guard he feinted wider and laid flesh open raw. Harrigan could no longer curse, for his lips were puffy things pulped between his own teeth and those merciless knuckles. He could only sob, great groaning gasps for breath--and then he couldn't see!

And now Steve was laughing aloud. He knew that _she_ was watching; knew what loathing was in her eyes. And he--he was a riverman! Sobbing himself for air, dripping crimson from forehead and shoulder, he set himself and swung from the waist. Like a pole-axed ox, Harrigan stopped as he was lurching in. His mouth sagged; his eyes flew wide in a fixed and stupid stare. Then his legs folded under him and he swayed limply down. But that blast of wrath would not let him lie! It raised him and beat him down again; raised him and beat him down. By his throat Steve swung him up--by throat and buckled belt. High over his head he swung that bulk and lashed forward from his heels. And Harrigan went back to his panting followers; twisting and spinning, his body swept Shayne and Fallon to the ground.

Allison had not stirred, nor putty-faced Wickersham, nor the girl who stood with hands at breasts. And now toward them Stephen O'Mara wheeled. His legs would fail him, and he steadied them; blood blinded him, and he wiped it away. Swaying giddily, he managed, somehow, a smile.

"Wickersham, I have met the man whom you hired to fight for you," he called clearly, "and he has earned his wage! Are you man enough to step forward now and fight for yourself?"

Wickersham clucked drily in his throat, and lifted an elbow to shield his face. Shrinking back behind the first shelter that chance afforded him he put the girl between him and his fear. And then weakness seized upon that sick and swaying man, but he spoke to her--to the unspeakable horror in her eyes.

"Barbara," he called thickly, "Barbara!"

He groped toward her, and she cried out, and drew back from such hands as those. Then a black wall rose before him and shut her from his sight. Fat Joe caught him as he fell.

Like huddled sheep, O'Mara's men and Wickersham's watched Joe bear him up the hill. Shayne and Fallon were bending over Harrigan; by the others he lay ignored. It was a mob without a leader until, as is the way in all crises, a new leader arose. Big Louie, stolid face no longer stolid, strode between those two factions and achieved the unknown heights for which his eyes had always hungered.

"I work for no man but is a man," he boomed. "That bridge--she still is hold!"

Steve had bidden Hardwick Elliott watch these men if their big moment ever came. And Elliott and Allison watched now. They were sheep no longer, nor malcontents, nor misled tools of cunning. Like wolves they followed that nameless man who was out upon the jam. Wickersham's men were back on the river, but that bridge would continue to hold! And while they worked, while Elliott and her father watched spellbound, blindly Barbara Allison turned, with no thought of what she was doing, and walked blindly into the brush.

The river was running clear by dusk when they raised the first hue and cry for her. It was dark when a runner bore the news to the cabin on the hillside that she was missing. And when men had been beating the woods for her for twelve hours as best they could in the dark, and no word came that she was found, Fat Joe no longer dared let lie in sleep his friend whose body he had cleansed and bandaged. At daybreak Joe waked him and told him Barbara was lost. They tried to argue with him, for his knees were still unsteady; even Allison whose jovial body seemed to have shrunk during his hours of waiting tried to convince him that the men now looking for her would find her soon or had already found her, perhaps. But he brushed them away while he was dressing; he threw off the hands that tried to detain him. And it was Steve who found her, as he had known it would he, just before a second night of dread was closing in upon her.

In circles of ever increasing radius he traveled at a foxtrot which thoughts of Fallon and Shayne and Harrigan would not let him abandon; but he had to run her down when he caught sight of her, for she fled like a wild thing before him. Floundering in a cedar swamp, soaked to the knees, little blue be-furred suit heavy with black muck, he came up with her. She was kneeling, shaking with terror, face hidden by her loosened hair, when he bent over her and raised her to her feet.

"Please," she whimpered, "Oh, please----"

Yet when he spoke her name her head leaped back and she recognized him instantly.

"I tried to wait," she chattered with all the voice she had left. "I tried to sit still until someone came for me, but I thought I knew the way. I tried not to listen to the noises; I remembered about the stars; and I knew I shouldn't run. But I thought you were--I thought you were----"

Remembered terror choked her. Consciousness slipped away.

By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight, though in the wrong direction. But it was long after dark when the river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and glassy in the deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles. A grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to him; and Steve had to travel slowly. His head was spinning from fatigue and the throb of the jagged tear above his temple when the log building, streaked white with clay chinking, loomed up ahead, and yet involuntarily he stopped there a moment with his burden.

He had pictured, many times, a night when he would bring her there, with both of them watching the moon in the rapids and listening to the waves lipping the banks. This was not that night; that night would never be. But the rebellion and bitterness was gone from his heart. After he had removed her wet shoes and stockings and brush-whipped suit and sheer black blouse, and she slept the sleep of exhaustion into which she had slipped from unconsciousness without even opening her eyes, he built a fire and sat before it until morning came. And when it dawned and she waked dazedly while he was preparing breakfast, he had finished reconstructing many things.

Her eyes went from wall to wall, frightened still and questioning at first, so he merely nodded and went outside and left her to remember alone. Returning with wood on his arm he found recollection of much in her gaze. She was looking at the thin heeled, buttoned boots before the fireplace; the stockings and furred garments cleaned of mud and dried on the backs of chairs. A cloud of color stole up from the blanket edge at her throat to the line of her hair.

"You were wet," he explained simply, "and you were too spent to help yourself. I could not let you sleep in them."

"I understand," her answer faltered a little. "I was just thinking. . . . I knew such things happened, but I thought it was only in books."

Drowsily she watched him bending over frying pan and coffee pot, content herself to lie and rest. But after a time, with fuller awakening, the bandage about his head claimed her attention. To her it seemed impossible that this smoothly shaven man in clean blue shirt could be the same one who had emerged from a struggle still sickeningly brutish to her. Involuntarily she shuddered a little without knowing that he watched.

"I am going to the spring for fresh water," he told her then. "There will be time for you to dress; and breakfast will be ready when I come back."

Submissive before his tone she replied that she was hungry; that she would be ready, too. She had donned blouse and skirt and stocking and shoes and finished braiding her hair when he re-entered. He showed her a tin basin outside filled with icy water for her face and hands. And then they sat down in silence to breakfast.

Once he had dreamed what their first meal together in that room would be like. This morning when she insisted upon pouring the coffee and scorched her hand in the attempt and chided him for careless housekeeping, pain showed in his smile. But she did not immediately understand. She only realized how sombre he was; how thin he looked and tired. Again her eyes went to the bandage around his head. It had a fascination for her, even though it filled her with repulsion for a decision which, she knew now, might have been hers, two days before. But eventually it was to that topic she turned.

"You have been very good to me," she said. "Far better than I was to you--the day before yesterday. I can never hope to thank you enough for coming to help me."

Wistful she had seen him, and grave and sober-eyed, but never sad until now.

"I should have helped you," she went on. "I would have, only I had come expecting . . . I thought to see----" Two days before when she alighted from her father's car, her heart a tumult in her ears, she could have told him perhaps. She could not tell him now. "I am not used to such things," she finished weakly.

"I know," was all he replied, but the words were final, somehow. They thrust her back, roughly, from any share in his thoughts. They ate again in silence.

"Miriam would have helped," she forgot herself and argued aloud once. "She would not have failed. But--blood sickens me, I think."

"It was neither a pretty nor prepossessing sight," he helped to excuse her, but excuse nor pardon was not what she wanted.

"I told you that you would find out someday," she murmured. "I warned you you would wake suddenly and see how shallow I am."

Until she had finished eating he would not talk. But she had finished now. He faced her with an abruptness that startled her.

"Waking has been no sudden thing with me! I finished with dreams a long time back, but you are what you have been always in my thoughts. It's conditions I've waked to, not you!"

With unwitting gruffness he had sometimes spoken to her, but never with constrained vehemence such as that.

"Why should I find fault in anything you have done, or failed to do?" he demanded of both her and himself. "Why should you be apologetic or regretful. Such a thing as I had to do two days ago has held no place in your world, and never could, but I can't find it in myself to be apologetic, either, because it is a part of mine. I meant to kill him--wanted to kill him--because I was certain of your scorn! That was vindictive; that was foolish for a man. But as for the rest of it--I know I may have it all to do over again, any day. It was a vulgar brawl to you; to me----"

"Not just a brawl," she contradicted quickly, anxious to be understood. "Just--oh, so needlessly brutal. At first it left me only dazed and nauseated, but after I had had time to think, I made myself see your side of it. You must crush insubordination. And still it seems as though there might have been a less horrible way."

"He had balked my work," he told her sternly. "He has fired upon me from cover, when he dared not come out into the open. He has been taking money for his work from a man who was bent on beating me at any cost. Could I ask him please not to spoil my bridge? Is that your idea of a man's way?"

She had given no thought to Wickersham until that moment, and now she thought of him only in connection with a night when she had found him alone in her father's office and wondered at the stale odor of alcohol.

"I do not know," she hesitated. "I am not sure, only----"

"You should know!" But he was less vehement now. Wearily he set himself to get at it in his own fashion. "Some men are only physical cowards," he went on. "But you have almost made a moral coward of me. Yes, you had nearly made me afraid to be the man I must be, if I am to do my work."

"There are other fields----"

He would not let her argue that.

"There is no other field for me at present. This is my work and while I continue in it men who oppose me with their brains I will fight with my brain. But men who force me to meet them with fists I must beat with like weapons. There is no alternative. I have no choice--unless I quit. And that is the reason I know that this is the end, for you and me!"

Sadness she had never known before in his voice, nor the edge which was cutting all it came against. Now it grew gentler, with that gentleness he saved for her alone.

"Once we argued whether I was 'good enough' for you, and we wasted many words that day, for 'good enough' can cover too many qualities to be a safe basis for general comparison. I have been arguing it with myself, blind to the vital question, but I am blind no longer. Combat which sickened you has cleared my eyes. What if I did believe that I was not good enough to touch your little finger? What if you believed that too? Would that have hindered us, in the end? You know it wouldn't; you have seen too many women give themselves to men whom they knew were unworthy in a hundred ways, because they could not help themselves. But that way would never have done for me."

"It isn't that," she cut in desperately. "I know you are big and fine and clean. It isn't that----"

But he knew better than she did what it was she could not phrase. He left her dry of lip now, for he had read her thoughts.

"My ways would have had to be your ways, and we have learned at last what I have feared for long and long. They lie too far apart for them ever to meet. My man's way is not your woman's way, but I could not stay a man in your eyes if I let it become secondary to yours; and I would have to do just that to earn you. Once I thought that there was no height I could not scale to gain your side. I worked for you, but that is no way for a man to work. He must work because he is a man and needs must win as big as he can to keep his own self-respect.

"I promised to teach you to love me, and I've failed. And knowing that my failure is not all my own fault is not going to make it any easier for me. You've taught me loneliness I'm never going to forget as long as I live, but I don't love you any the less for that. I dreamed big dreams for both of us." His voice was dreary of a sudden. "I promised I'd make those dreams come true, because I thought my life could be your life. I've not done so; that thing could never be. I've talked bigger than I could practice, and that is not going to help my self-confidence any, but as it stands now I can earn it back. I couldn't have done that if I had married you, and waked some day to find you shrinking from me. It would have killed it, and my self-respect too, to have learned too late that you believed still in your own greater fineness."

"I tell you it is not that," she cried out. "Can't I make you understand----"

"You have made me understand till I am sure," he stated. "I am no longer vexing myself with trivial things. Birth? My name means as much as yours. Education? You would not tell me, would you, that I am not wiser in most ways you'd think to mention. I'd break any man who gave to your ears many things I have learned." He was whimsical for a flash. "I could outspell you without an effort; books have been my partners when you had rather dance. Oh, you could not lose me, no matter where you strayed in fields like that. In any way you care to mention I have outstripped you, for I decided long ago that I must know more than you. Yet I have not forgotten how to play, either.

"You have been uncertain; I have seen that. You are certain now. And the fundamental thing remains unchanged. In me there is that man who once man-handled Harrigan--and you didn't want me to touch you! You don't have to tell me any more that you can't love me. When you drew away from me, that was enough."

His voice held a question, but the girl couldn't answer at first.

"Wasn't it?" he repeated very gently, for he would have it from her own lips.

Her face lifted. Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she nodded in affirmation.

So roughly that the dishes rattled he rose.

"I do not want your pity," he ended it. "I am the wrong sort of a man for you."

She sat and watched him put the room in order, and that hurt her more than anything else, for he would not let her help. He made her change her high-heeled boots for moccasins which he brought and laced upon her feet; but the remainder of the day it was the old Steve who helped her over the bad bits of going and talked disconnectedly of many things meanwhile. And yet no longer the old Steve, who had been so entirely her own. Hers was the sad face when they entered the clearing at Thirty-Mile and a hoarse shout saluted her return. In her father's embrace she clung and wondered that she did not cry. And two pages had turned for her that day, for she sent Wickersham back his ring the same night the private car rolled down to Morrison.

Harrigan was with Archibald Wickersham when the package, unaccompanied by explanation, reached the latter in his hotel room in town. Harrigan was waiting for a reply to a question which he had just asked, when Wickersham opened the box and sat fingering for a while the thin hoop of gold with its single brilliant stone. Once Fat Joe had spoken prophetically; this was the hour he had foreseen. And when Wickersham raised his head the riverman's battered face lighted shockingly with triumph.

"Go out and get him," said Wickersham. "And see that you get him--for good!"