Part 4

Albion felt a sudden uneasy thrill and drew back. He dreaded to hear Jay Dee's spiritless complaining voice, too much in the nature of that dusky, uncanny place. He felt as if something cold, damp and impalpable were drawing closer to him, whispering, calling his attention to the gorge, how black and steep! to the presence of Jay Dee, how near! to the close secret hemlocks covering the sky. This was not agreeable to a positive man, a man without fancies. Jay Dee sighed at last, softly, and spoke, piping, thin, half-moaning:

“You're following me. Let me alone!”

“I'm not following you,” said Albion hoarsely. “Crank your wheel!”

“You're following me. I'm an old man. You're only fifty.”

Albion breathed hard in the darkness. He did not understand either Jay Dee or himself. After a silence Jay Dee went on:

“I haven't any kin but you, Albion, except Stephen Ballister and the Winslows. They're only fourth cousins.”

Albion growled.

“What do you mean?”

“Without my making a will it'd come to you, wouldn't it? Seems to me as if you oughtn't to pester me, being my nearest kin, and me, I ain't made any will. I got a little property, though it ain't much. 'Twould clear your mortgage and make you easy.”

“What d'you mean?”

“Twenty dollars and costs,” moaned Jay Dee. “And me an old man, getting ready for his latter end soon. I ain't made my will, either. I ought to've done it.”

What could Jay Dee mean? If he made no will his property would come to Albion. No will made yet. A hinted intention to make one in favor of Stephen Ballister or the Winslows. The foundry was mortgaged.--Jay was worth sixty thousand. Diggory Gorge was a dark whispering place of ancient crime, of more than one unexplained accident. The hemlocks whispered, the brook gurgled and glimmered. Such darkness might well cloak and cover the sunny instincts that look upwards, scruples of the social daylight. Would Jay Dee trap him to his ruin? Jay Dee would not expect to enjoy it if he were dead himself. But accidents befall, and men not seldom meet sudden deaths, and an open, free-speaking neighbor is not suspected. Success lies before him in the broad road.

It rushed through Albion's mind, a flood, sudden, stupefying--thoughts that he could not master, push back, or stamp down.

He started and roused himself; his hands were cold and shaking. He sprang from his buggy and cried angrily:

“What d'ye mean by all that? Tempt me, a God-fearing man? Throw ye off'n the gorge! Break your old neck! I've good notion to it, if I wasn't a God-fearing man. Crank your wheel there!”

He jerked his buggy free, sprang in, and lashed his horse. The horse leaped, the wheels locked again. Jay Dee's buckboard, thrust slanting aside, went over the edge, slid and stopped with a thud, caught by the hemlock trunks. A ghostly glimmer of white hair one instant, and Jay Dee was gone down the black pit of the gorge. A wheezing moan, and nothing more was heard in the confusion. Then only the complaining murmur of the brook, the hemlocks at their secrets.

“Jay! Jay!” called Albion, and then leaped out, ran and whispered, “Jay!”

Only the mutter of the brook and the shimmer of foam could be made out as he stared and listened, leaning over, clinging to a tree, feeling about for the buckboard. He fumbled, lit a match and lifted it. The seat was empty, the left wheels still in the road. The two horses, with twisted necks and glimmering eyes, were looking back quietly at him, Albion Dee, a man of ideas and determination, now muttering things unintelligible in the same tone with the muttering water, with wet forehead and nerveless hands, heir of Jay Dee's thousands, staring down the gorge of Diggory Brook, the scene of old crime. He gripped with difficulty as he let himself slide past the first row of trees, and felt for some footing below. He noticed dully that it was a steep slope, not a precipice at that point. He lit more matches as he crept down, and peered around to find something crushed and huddled against some tree, a lifeless, fearful thing. The slope grew more moderate. There were thick ferns. And closely above the brook, that gurgled and laughed quietly, now near at hand, sat Jay Dee. He looked up and blinked dizzily, whispered and piped:

“Twenty dollars and costs! You oughtn't to pester me. I ain't made my will.”

Albion sat down. They sat close together in the darkness some moments and were silent.

“You ain't hurt?” Albion asked at last. “We'll get out.”

They went up the steep, groping and stumbling.

Albion half lifted his enemy into the buckboard, and led the horse, his own following. They were out into the now almost faded daylight. Jay sat holding his lines, bowed over, meek and venerable. The front of his coat was torn. Albion came to his wheel.

“Will twenty dollars make peace between you and me, Jay Dee?”

“The costs was ten,” piping sadly.

“Thirty dollars, Jay Dee? Here it is.”

He jumped into his buggy and drove rapidly. In sight of the foundry he drew a huge breath.

“I been a sinner and a fool,” and slapped his knee. “It's sixty thousand dollars, maybe seventy. A self-righteous sinner and a cocksure fool. God forgive me!”

Between eight and nine Jay Dee sat down before his meagre fire and rusty stove, drank his weak tea and toasted his bread. The windows clicked with the night wind. The furniture was old, worn, unstable, except the large desk behind him full of pigeonholes and drawers. Now and then he turned and wrote on scraps of paper. Tea finished, he collected the scraps and copied:

Mr. Stephen Ballister: I feel, as growing somewhat old, I ought to make my will, and sometime, leaving this world for a better, would ask you to make my will for me, for which reasonable charge, putting this so it cannot be broken by lawyers, who will talk too much and are vain of themselves, that is, leaving all my property of all kinds to my relative, James Winslow of Wimberton, and not anything to Albion Dee; for he has not much sense but is hasty; for to look after the choir is not his business, and to sit on an old man and throw him from his own wagon and pay him thirty dollars is hasty, for it is not good sense, and not anything to Stephen Ballister, for he must be rich with talking so much in courts of this world. Put this all in my will, but if unable or unwilling on account of remorse for speaking so in the court, please to inform that I may get another lawyer. Yours,

Jay Dee.

He sealed and addressed the letter, put it in his pocket, and noticed the ruinous rent in his coat. He sighed, murmured over it complainingly, and turned up the lapel of the coat. Pins in great variety and number were there in careful order, some new, some small, some long and old and yellow. He selected four and pinned the rent together, sighing. Then he took three folded bills from his vest pocket, unfolded, counted and put them back, felt of the letter in his coat gently, murmured, “I had the best of Albion there; I had him there,” took his candle and went up peacefully and venerably to bed.

A NIGHT'S LODGING

FATHER WILISTON was a retired clergyman, so distinguished from his son Timothy, whose house stood on the ridge north of the old village of Win-throp, and whose daily path lay between his house and the new growing settlement around the valley station. It occurred at odd times to Father Wiliston that Timothy's path was somewhat undeviating. The clergyman had walked widely since Win-throp was first left behind fifty-five years back, at a time when the town was smaller and cows cropped the Green but never a lawn mower.

After college and seminary had come the frontier, which lay this side of the Great Lakes until Clinton stretched his ribbon of waterway to the sea; then a mission in Wisconsin, intended to modify the restless profanity of lumbermen who broke legs under logs and drank disastrous whiskey. A city and twenty mills were on the spot now, though the same muddy river ran into the same blue lake. Some skidders and saw-tenders of old days were come to live in stone mansions and drive in nickel-plated carriages; some were dead; some drifting like the refuse on the lake front; some skidding and saw-tending still. Distinction of social position was an idea that Father Wiliston never was able to grasp.

In the memories of that raw city on the lake he had his place among its choicest incongruities; and when his threescore and ten years were full, the practical tenderness of his nickel-plated and mansioned parishioners packed him one day into an upholstered sleeping car, drew an astonishing check to his credit, and mailed it for safety to Timothy Wiliston of Winthrop. So Father Wiliston returned to Winthrop, where Timothy, his son, had been sent to take root thirty years before.

One advantage of single-mindedness is that life keeps on presenting us with surprises. Father Wiliston occupied his own Arcadia, and Wisconsin or Winthrop merely sent in to him a succession of persons and events of curious interest. “The parson”--Wisconsin so spoke of him, leaning sociably over its bar, or pausing among scented slabs and sawdust--“the parson resembles an egg as respects that it's innocent and some lopsided, but when you think he must be getting addled, he ain't. He says to me, 'You'll make the Lord a deal of trouble, bless my soul!' he says. I don't see how the Lord's going to arrange for you. But'--thinking he might hurt my feelings--'I guess he'll undertake it by and by.' Then he goes wabbling down-street, picks up Mike Riley, who's considerable drunk, and takes him to see his chickens. And Mike gets so interested in those chickens you'd like to die. Then parson goes off, absent-minded and forgets him, and Mike sleeps the balmy night in the barnyard, and steals a chicken in the morning, and parson says, 'Bless my soul! How singular!' Well,” concluded Wisconsin, “he's getting pretty young for his years. I hear they're going to send him East before he learns bad habits.”

The steadiness and repetition of Timothy's worldly career and semi-daily walk to and from his business therefore seemed to Father Wiliston phenomenal, a problem not to be solved by algebra, for if _a_ equalled Timothy, _b_ his house, _c_ his business, _a + b + c_ was still not a far-reaching formula, and there seemed no advantage in squaring it. Geometrically it was evident that by walking back and forth over the same straight line you never so much as obtained an angle. Now, by arithmetic, “Four times thirty, multiplied by--leaving out Sundays--Bless me! How singular! Thirty-seven thousand five hundred and sixty times!”

He wondered if it had ever occurred to Timothy to walk it backward, or, perhaps, to hop, partly on one foot, and then, of course, partly on the other. Sixty years ago there was a method of progress known as “hop-skip-and-jump,” which had variety and interest. Drawn in the train of this memory came other memories floating down the afternoon's slant sunbeams, rising from every meadow and clump of woods; from the elder swamp where the brown rabbits used to run zigzag, possibly still ran in the same interesting way; from the great sand bank beyond the Indian graves. The old Wiliston house, with roof that sloped like a well-sweep, lay yonder, a mile or two. He seemed to remember some one said it was empty, but he could not associate it with emptiness. The bough apples there, if he remembered rightly, were an efficacious balm for regret.

He sighed and took up his book. It was another cure for regret, a Scott novel, “The Pirate.” It had points of superiority over Cruden's Concordance. The surf began to beat on the Shetland Islands, and trouble was imminent between Cleveland and Mor-daunt Mertoun.

Timothy and his wife drove away visiting that afternoon, not to return till late at night, and Bettina, the Scandinavian, laid Father Wiliston's supper by the open window, where he could look out across the porch and see the chickens clucking in the road.

“You mus' eat, fater,” she commanded.

“Yes, yes, Bettina. Thank you, my dear. Quite right.”

He came with his book and sat down at the table, but Bettina was experienced and not satisfied.

“You mus' eat firs'.”

He sighed and laid down “The Pirate.” Bettina captured and carried it to the other end of the room, lit the lamp though it was still light, and departed after the mail. It was a rare opportunity for her to linger in the company of one of her Scandinavian admirers. “Fater” would not know the difference between seven and nine or ten.

He leaned in the window and watched her safely out of sight, then went across the room, recaptured “The Pirate,” and chuckled in the tickling pleasure of a forbidden thing, “asked the blessing,” drank his tea shrewdly, knowing it would deteriorate, and settled to his book. The brown soft dusk settled, shade by shade; moths fluttered around the lamp; sleepy birds twittered in the maples. But the beat of the surf on the Shetland Islands was closer than these. Cleveland and Mordaunt Mertoun were busy, and Norna--“really, Norna was a remarkable woman”--and an hour slipped past.

Some one hemmed! close by and scraped his feet. It was a large man who stood there, dusty and ragged, one boot on the porch, with a red handkerchief knotted under his thick tangled beard and jovial red face. He had solid limbs and shoulders, and a stomach of sloth and heavy feeding.

The stranger did not resemble the comely pirate, Cleveland; his linen was not “seventeen hun'red;” it seemed doubtful if there were any linen. And yet, in a way there was something not inappropriate about him, a certain chaotic ease; not piratical, perhaps, although he looked like an adventurous person. Father Wiliston took time to pass from one conception of things to another. He gazed mildly through his glasses.

“I ain't had no supper,” began the stranger in a deep moaning bass; and Father Wiliston started.

“Bless my soul! Neither have I.” He shook out his napkin. “Bettina, you see “--

“Looks like there's enough for two,” moaned and grumbled the other. He mounted the porch and approached the window, so that the lamplight glimmered against his big, red, oily face.

“Why, so there is!” cried Father Wiliston, looking about the table in surprise. “I never could eat all that. Come in.” And the stranger rolled muttering and wheezing around through the door.

“Will you not bring a chair? And you might use the bread knife. These are fried eggs. And a little cold chicken? Really, I'm very glad you dropped in, Mr.”--

“Del Toboso.” By this time the stranger's mouth was full and his enunciation confused.

“Why”--Father Wiliston helped himself to an egg--“I don't think I caught the name.”

“Del Toboso. Boozy's what they calls me in the push.”

“I'm afraid your tea is quite cold. Boozy? How singular! I hope it doesn't imply alcoholic habits.”

“No,” shaking his head gravely, so that his beard wagged to the judicial negation. “Takes so much to tank me up I can't afford it, let alone it ain't moral.”

The two ate with haste, the stranger from habit and experience, Father Wiliston for fear of Bettina's sudden return. When the last egg and slice of bread had disappeared, the stranger sat back with a wheezing sigh.

“I wonder,” began Father Wiliston mildly, “Mr. Toboso--Toboso is the last name, isn't it, and Del the first?”

“Ah,” the other wheezed mysteriously, “I don't know about that, Elder. That's always a question.”

“You don't know! You don't know!”

“Got it off'n another man,” went on Toboso sociably. “He said he wouldn't take fifty dollars for it. I didn't have no money nor him either, and he rolled off'n the top of the train that night or maybe the next I don't know. I didn't roll him. It was in Dakota, over a canyon with no special bottom. He scattered himself on the way down. But I says, if that name's worth fifty dollars, it's mine. Del Toboso. That's mine. Sounds valuable, don't it?”

Father Wiliston fell into a reverie. “To-boso? Why, yes. Dulcinea del Toboso. I remember, now.”

“What's that? Dulcinea, was it? And you knowed him?”

“A long while ago when I was younger. It was in a green cover. 'Don Quixote'--he was in a cage, 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance.' He had his face between the bars.”

“Well,” said Toboso, “you must have knowed him. He always looked glum, and I've seen him in quad myself.”

“Yes. Sancho Panza. Dulcinea del Toboso.”

“I never knowed that part of it. Dulcinea del Toboso! Well, that's me. You know a ruck of fine names, Elder. It sounds like thirteen trumps, now, don't it?”

Father Wiliston roused himself, and discriminated. “But you look more like Sancho Panza.”

“Do? Well, I never knowed that one. Must've been a Greaser. Dulcinea's good enough.”

Father Wiliston began to feel singularly happy and alive. The regular and even paced Timothy, his fidgeting wife, and the imperious Bettina were to some extent shadows and troubles in the evening of his life. They were careful people, who were hemmed in and restricted, who somehow hemmed in and restricted him. They lived up to precedents. Toboso did not seem to depend on precedents. He had the free speech, the casual inconsequence, the primitive mystery, desired of the boy's will and the wind's will, and travelled after by the long thoughts of youth. He was wind-beaten, burned red by the sun, ragged of coat and beard, huge, fat, wallowing in the ease of his flesh. One looked at him and remembered the wide world full of crossed trails and slumbering swamps.

Father Wiliston had long, straight white hair, falling beside his pale-veined and spiritual forehead and thin cheeks. He propped his forehead on one bony hand, and looked at Toboso with eyes of speculation. If both men were what some would call eccentric, to each other they seemed only companionable, which, after all, is the main thing.

“I have thought of late,” continued Father Wiliston after a pause, “that I should like to travel, to examine human life, say, on the highway. I should think, now, your manner of living most interesting. You go from house to house, do you not?--from city to city? Like Ulysses, you see men and their labors, and you pass on. Like the apostles--who surely were wise men, besides that were especially maintained of God--like them, and the pilgrims to shrines, you go with wallet and staff or merely with Faith for your baggage.”

“There don't nothing bother you in warm weather, that's right,” said Toboso, “except your grub. And that ain't any more than's interesting. If it wasn't for looking after meals, a man on the road might get right down lazy.”

“Why, just so! How wonderful! Now, do you suppose, Mr. Toboso, do you suppose it feasible? I should very much like, if it could be equably arranged, I should very much like to have this experience.”

Toboso reflected. “There ain't many of your age on the road.” An idea struck him suddenly. “But supposing you were going sort of experimenting, like that--and there's some folks that do--supposing you could lay your hands on a little bunch of money for luck, I don't see nothing to stop.”

“Why, I think there is some in my desk.” Toboso leaned forward and pulled his beard. The table creaked under his elbow. “How much?”

“I will see. Of course you are quite right.”

“At your age, Elder.”

“It is not as if I were younger.”

Father Wiliston rose and hurried out.

Toboso sat still and blinked at the lamp. “My Gord!” he murmured and moaned confidentially, “here's a game!”

After some time Father Wiliston returned. “Do you think we could start now?” he asked eagerly.

“Why sure, Elder. What's hindering?”

“I am fortunate to find sixty dollars. Really, I didn't remember. And here's a note I have written to my son to explain. I wonder what Bettina did with my hat.”

He hurried back into the hall. Toboso took the note from the table and pocketed it. “Ain't no use taking risks.”

They went out into the warm night, under pleasant stars, and along the road together arm in arm.

“I feel pretty gay, Elder.” He broke into bellowing song, “Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”

“Really, I feel cheerful, too, Mr. Toboso, wonderfully cheerful.”

“Dulcinea, Elder. Dulcinea's me name. Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!”

“How singular it is! I feel very cheerful. I think--really, I think I should like to learn that song about Jinny. It seems such a cheerful song.”

“Hit her up, Elder,” wheezed Toboso jovially. “Now then”--

“Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”

So they went arm in arm with a roaring and a tremulous piping.

The lamp flickered by the open window as the night breeze rose. Bettina came home betimes and cleared the table. The memory of a Scandinavian caress was too recent to leave room for her to remark that there were signs of devastating appetite, that dishes had been used unaccountably, and that “Fater” had gone somewhat early to bed. Timothy and his wife returned late. All windows and doors in the house of Timothy were closed, and the last lamp was extinguished.

Father Wiliston and Toboso went down the hill, silently, with furtive, lawless steps through the cluster of houses in the hollow, called Ironville, and followed then the road up the chattering hidden brook. The road came from the shadows of this gorge at last to meadows and wide glimmering skies, and joined the highway to Redfield. Presently they came to where a grassy side road slipped into the highway from the right, out of a land of bush and swamp and small forest trees of twenty or thirty years' growth. A large chestnut stood at the corner.

“Hey, Jinny!” wheezed Toboso. “Let's look at that tree, Elder.”

“Look at it? Yes, yes. What for?” Toboso examined the bark by the dim starlight; Father Wiliston peered anxiously through his glasses to where Toboso's finger pointed.

“See those marks?”

“I'm afraid I don't. Really, I'm sorry.”

“Feel 'em, then.”

And Father Wiliston felt, with eager, excited finger.

“Them there mean there's lodging out here; empty house, likely.”

“Do they, indeed. Very singular! Most interesting!” And they turned into the grassy road. The brushwood in places had grown close to it, though it seemed to be still used as a cart path. They came to a swamp, rank with mouldering vegetation, then to rising ground where once had been meadows, pastures, and plough lands.

Father Wiliston was aware of vaguely stirring memories. Four vast and aged maple trees stood close by the road, and their leaves whispered to the night; behind them, darkly, was a house with a far sloping roof in the rear. The windows were all glassless, all dark and dead-looking, except two in a front room, in which a wavering light from somewhere within trembled and cowered. They crept up, and looking through saw tattered wall paper and cracked plaster, and two men sitting on the floor, playing cards in the ghostly light of a fire of boards in the huge fireplace.

“Hey, Jinny!” roared Toboso, and the two jumped up with startled oaths. “Why, it's Boston Alley and the Newark Kid!” cried Toboso. “Come on, Elder.”

The younger man cast forth zigzag flashes of blasphemy. “You big fat fool! Don't know no mor' 'n to jump like that on _me!_ Holy Jims! I ain't made of copper.”

Toboso led Father Wiliston round by the open door. “Hold your face, Kid. Gents, this here's a friend of mine we'll call the Elder, and let that go. I'm backing him, and I hold that goes. The Kid,” he went on descriptively, addressing Father Wiliston, “is what you see afore you, Elder. His mouth is hot, his hands is cold, his nerves is shaky, he's always feeling the cops gripping his shirt-collar. He didn't see no clergy around. He begs your pardon. Don't he? I says, don't he?”

He laid a heavy red hand on the Newark Kid's shoulder, who wiped his pallid mouth with the back of his hand, smiled, and nodded.