Chapter 7

"I won't believe it--its too sickening!" he cried, "Jim Wardwell's a gentleman! I--I--why I admired him more than--good God, he's a _friend_ of mine!"

The man smiled faintly.

"Oh, Jimmy has fine friends," he said almost complacently, "he's always gone with the best. He's very particular."

Lindsay's forehead was a network of pain and doubt.

"But Jimmy has plenty of money," he insisted, "he always had the--his things--oh, it's idiotic! You're crazy, that's all."

"Oh, yes, he always had plenty," the man said simply.

In the pause that followed they heard the soft chink of silver through the wall; Caroline was evidently busy.

Lindsay twisted his face into an ugly smile.

"And I thought he was the squarest of the lot," he said slowly, "I've said so often. We all did. Pretty easy, weren't we?"

"He is!" The man half rose, but fell back with a grunt of pain.

"Oh, _damn_ this heart!" he complained fretfully. "I don't know what's the matter with me. That fortune woman, she knew. Last week it was I went. 'You're making a plan to end up your business,' she says to me, 'and so you will, mister, but not the way you think. There's some trouble coming to you and a child's mixed up in it. Look out for strange dogs,' she says, they all tell me that--'and run no risks this month. I don't just like the looks of your hand,' she says. And when I saw that child, it was all up with me, I thought. I didn't think the machine would ever get started again. And then that infernal dog...."

"We were speaking of--of--did you say that Jim--" Lindsay's voice sounded strange, even to himself.

The man blinked a moment.

"What?" he said vaguely, "what about Jim? Oh--he don't know anything about it, of course. I sh'd think you'd know enough for that. That's what I'm telling you, if you'd keep still a minute."

He stared thoughtfully at the floor and Lindsay waited. Caroline ran up the front stairs, and he had counted each step before the man went on.

"So I sent the money regular every quarter," he muttered, as if continuing some tale, "and I'd go to see him sometimes all dressed up, and I tried to talk like he did. He thought I was traveling and didn't want to be bothered. But I couldn't see him much--was I going to drag him down, just as I'd got him started right? Not much. 'Go and visit your friends, o' course,' I used to tell him, 'and you can write to me.' The best schools I picked out, the very best. And they came high. But I was good for it."

He shifted in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

"I had a hunch when I bought the ticket," he muttered. "It just come over me--'you ought not to go to a place you got the idea of from Jim,' something seemed to say to me, 'it's unlucky.' And everything so still, and the stuff so easy--'twas like finding it in the road. And the last time, too--the last time."

"But Jim--he thought--" Lindsay prompted. A dreadful curiosity held him.

"So then he wrote, 'of course it's Yale, dad,' he wrote, 'we're all going up together. You don't mind if it costs a little to get settled, do you?' And was I going to go to him--he was head of his class, mind you--and say, the Trust has treated me the way I wouldn't treat a dog--it's all up with me and you? I can go back and be foreman again at the works--we're bought up, chewed up and spit out like a wad o' paper?' Not much, I guess. No. Here's where I quit the honesty game, I said, for it don't pay. You stole my patent, and I shut up because I couldn't afford to fight you, and you raised me and raised me--and let me into the firm when you knew it was going to bust! Now, I says, since my boy's education has been stole from me, I'll steal it back, I says, and only from them that can afford it, too! And I'll use no lawyer to do it, either, and we'll have no trick-work with papers. I'll get it straight from the wives and daughters of the big thieves that pass the plate on Sundays."

Lindsay listened to Caroline moving over their heads; her steps seemed the only reality in this horrid dream.

"It--it will just about kill Jim," he said slowly.

"It would have killed him not to go to college," the man returned sharply, "and he had a right to go."

"But, good heavens, there are ways--he could have earned money--he's clever enough to work his way through a dozen colleges!" Lindsay cried despairingly.

"There wasn't any working his way through for _my_ boy," said the man, with a cunning grin; "I've done enough o' that for the family, thank you. So did his mother--she died of it. No, there's money enough for all, and it only needs a little planning. The thing is, never take a risk. Wait for a sure thing. Take from the kind that takes from _your_ kind--they'll never miss it. Work alone, and never try to get too much. Who are the ones that get caught? The 'pals'! No, I've just done for myself, and contented to sell at a big loss, and only wanted to get my twenty-five hundred a year for Jim, and something over for his vacations--those camps cost a lot--and enough to dress as I may need to."

Lindsay cleared his throat.

"Do you mean to say that Jim never asked you what your business was?"

"He didn't know I ever changed till last month. He thought I traveled for the Comp'ny. Of course he didn't like that any too well--you know, you wouldn't expect him to, brought up as he's been--and I guess he thought 'twould be kinder to me not to mention it much. He thought I didn't know, but I did. Last month--last month--" the man paused and his mouth worked, though he bit his lips.

"Well, last month?" Lindsay repeated pitilessly.

"I got my hunch to quit. That fortune woman and--and other things. The doctor told me to keep quiet and not get on my nerve. And I sort of fixed it up with Jim in a letter. I told him I'd sold out my interest in the firm and I was going to send him one more thousand for graduatin' with and I was going to let him try for himself after that. I knew that was all right, because he's told me of plenty of rich young swells who had to. Fathers believed in it."

"He was going with Buck Williamson on the ranch," said Lindsay slowly.

"That's it! Buck Williamson. He asked me wouldn't I look 'em up after they got settled and try it out there. It was an awful nice letter," said the man softly, "he's a real gentleman."

Lindsay jerked his head toward the dining-room.

"Was this the 'thousand'?" he asked coldly.

The man nodded.

"I've never been with him more than a day or two, you see, and I thought I'd go up to New Haven this spring--when he graduated, and see him. Just a day or two. And then I was planning to drop out. Of course I never meant to see him much. I was always deadly afraid something'd happen, and I didn't want to get connected up with Jim. But I've been careful. There's not a line o' writing anywhere, and the man that sold the stuff for me in Jersey City is close as wax."

"But your friends--" Lindsay was wrung with an angry pity.

"I don't care for much of anybody but Jim," said the man.

Caroline was moving restlessly about in the dining-room again. Lindsay shook himself nervously.

"Of course, this is very awkward for me," he began, "I mean--I--oh, the devil! You know what I've got to do, of course?"

The man looked appealingly at him. "You've got it all back," he said quickly, "and you know Jim--"

"Yes, plague take it--I know Jim," the boy muttered, "we all know Jim."

"Known well, isn't he?" the man inquired eagerly, "there's no cleverer scholar there, much cleverer, I mean, is there?"

Lindsay shook his head. "Not that amounts to anything," he said shortly.

"I'll bet there's no better fellow there than Jim--none of the big bugs?"

"There is no better fellow anywhere," said Lindsay.

Caroline tapped fretfully on the door. "Aren't we ever going, Lin?" she begged; "it's all put back."

"Yes, yes, in a minute!" he answered, and turned to the man. "I'm damned sorry to have to do it," he began, "it's a horrible thing to do, but I can't see that there are any two ways about it. I don't want to hear you say any more. If you'll come quietly, well and good. If it was anybody else--but in my uncle's house--and the community--and--well, will you come?"

The man sighed. He looked ten years older. "All right," he said, "I didn't know but--well, never mind. My nerve's gone. I never had a failure, you see. An' I always knew I couldn't stand one. Never even left a trail. I couldn't afford to, workin' as I did. I always knew 'twas bound to come, though, and here it is. But it's hard. Jim was telling me last month about this singer that he'd heard was so careless, and I noted it down for use some day. You have to notice those things. He never said his friends lived here. I--it makes me feel dreadful when I think how he'd feel if he knew I'd been working his _friends_ this way--he'd never stand for that, Jim wouldn't. It makes me feel--oh, well, what's the odds? But I wish you didn't belong to Yale College."

Lindsay scowled and motioned to the door.

"Shut up and come on, will you?" he blurted.

The man got up.

"I guess I won't see Jim again, then," he said, "will I? Of course there isn't one chance in a hundred he'll ever know. But I couldn't explain why I didn't go up to New Haven, nor send the thousand, and it'll be five years, anyhow--ten, maybe. And I shan't hold out that. The doctor only gave me two."

"Ten years? Oh, no!" Lindsay cried.

"It's grand larceny," said the man simply.

"Lin, Lin, come _on_!" called Caroline.

"You've got the pin, and I'll tear the picture up," said the man. "I've got it all planned, o' course--I give the name of Barker. And--and _if_ Jim ever says anything to you or any of his friends about me being mean about the thousand, when I'd promised it, just kind of give a hint, will you, that things may have happened so's I couldn't? I hope he'll think I died. I wish he was through Yale, though. The thousand won't make any difference with graduatin', will it?"

Lindsay swallowed hard; his nerves were strained to snapping.

"Good God, no!" he shouted. He stepped to the French window, opened it, and threw the revolver over the sill.

"Get out!" he said briefly, turning to the man, "get out of my sight! If Jim ever receives another penny from you, I'll tell him all I know."

The man swayed towards the chair. "Do you mean it?" he gasped, "honest?"

He began to sob and choke a little, and turning half bent over the chair, hunted with his hand for his hat.

"Get out!" Lindsay repeated violently, looking persistently sidewise.

The man leaned over and fumbled for the picture on the floor, found it and straightened himself.

Suddenly he leaped back and fell into the chair again; a dreadful pallor reached the roots of his hair.

"All up, I guess--twice to-day--'Jim good-by," he said very quickly, and rolled against Lindsay, the picture tight in his hand.

"Lin! If you don't come pretty soon"--Caroline pushed open the door a little.

"Hush! Run and bring that whisky!" her cousin whispered, his face drawn and frightened.

She waited outside while he labored mysteriously, breathing hard.

"Is Mr. Barker sick, Lin?" she whispered fearfully when he came back to the door.

"Y--yes. I guess he's pretty sick," he said slowly, stepping out with her and turning the knob carefully. The dining-room reeked with the whisky on his hands and his coat.

"We'll go for the doctor," he went on, "both of us, because we'll have to fix--I'll have to talk to you on the way. You needn't hurry so, Caroline. There's no--we don't have to hurry." He tried the outside door twice, to make sure it was latched, and glanced hastily at the library windows.

"I'd better wire Uncle Joe," he said half to himself; "he'll know what to do--oh, there's the dog. Come on, Hamlet--he's Buck Williams's--gentle as a kitten."

"Yes, he'll know," she repeated, contentedly, reaching for Hamlet's black muzzle.

"But I don't think that was right, do you, Lin, even for a joke?" she queried, following him down the side path. The big hound padded on behind them.

"No," he agreed briefly.

"Wasn't it funny he had one of your pins?" She was trotting rapidly, to keep up with him.

Lindsay stopped short and almost faced her. He looked very young and tired.

"I swear, Caroline, I believe worse men have worn it!" he said.

V

A PILLAR OF SOCIETY

Caroline slipped out of the woodshed with Henry D. Thoreau barking under his breath at her heels, and struck across the dusty mountain road into the trail. The advantages of the woodshed were many: it was cool and dark, the stacked wood had a soothing odor and a neat, restful appearance, and one was more or less forgotten there. More important, it lay directly under the long living-room, and sounds carried easily through the primitive plank floor. Up to now the murmur of the company's voices had been a negligible quantity, a background for thought, merely, but suddenly a familiar intonation had risen higher.

"Why, certainly, Caroline can show you--she knows all the trails. Yes, indeed, she'd be delighted, I'm sure.... Oh, any time you prefer. Don't let her dawdle along, though; she's such a strange child--sometimes it will take her ten minutes to get across the road, and then another time she will be as quick as a flash. I'll see where she is."

But even as the boards squeaked above her head, Caroline had fled, and Henry D. Thoreau, smarting from the indignity of her brown, berry-stained hand circling his muzzle, was expressing his feelings to the yellow birches and ground pine.

"Oh shut up, won't you, Henry D.?" she urged him indignantly, "do you want to take that fat old tiresome lady around our nice mountain? I don't b'lieve you do. You can be called 'girlie' if you want to--I don't. She is so hot and she creaks so when she walks! I _had_ to hold your nose."

Henry D., who had only wanted an explanation, subsided, and they trudged on in silence, Indian file, along the narrow trail.

The early afternoon sun filtered down through the birch and beech leaves on Caroline's brown head and Henry D.'s brindled back, pine needles crunched under their feet, thick glossy moss twinkled with last night's rain. They sniffed the damp, wholesome mold delightedly; from time to time Caroline kicked the rotten stump of some pithy, crumbling trunk or marked patterns with her finger nail in the thin new moss of some smooth slab. Indian pipes and glowing juniper berries embroidered the way; pale, late anemones, deceived by the cold mountain weather, sprang up between the giant mushrooms. It was as still as eternity.

The wood grew steadily thicker, the light pierced down in golden arrows only, the silence was almost oppressive. Caroline stepped suddenly out of the tiny path, pushed aside a clump of fern, buried her arm up to the elbow in a hollow stump and produced a large crumbling molasses cooky.

"Just where I left it, Henry D., just exactly!" she whispered delightedly. "I wish now I'd left 'em both, but I didn't feel able to spare 'em at the time."

They ate the cooky pleasantly, Henry D. receiving every third bite with scrupulous accuracy.

"I used to think maybe that huckleberry-boy followed us up and discovered our places, but this proves he don't," she announced, as the last crumb disappeared; "he's not so smart as he thinks he is, is he, Henry D.?"

They trotted on, moving more quickly as the faint, regular crash of an axe on wood came nearer and nearer. A barbed-wire fence had sprung up unaccountably in the wood, following a devious course among the thick trees, and as they scrambled carefully under it, Henry D. pausing with accustomed gallantry while his mistress disentangled two petticoats and an unfortunate stocking, a little gray-shingled cottage jumped out suddenly from the gray beeches, and they emerged into its front yard.

It was a ridiculously operatic little cottage, composed chiefly of bulging balconies, scarlet and yellow with geraniums and nasturtiums, casement windows with tiny leaded panes, and double Dutch doors, evidently practicable. It had all the air of having retired from the other scenery to practice for its own act, and it seemed highly probable that a chorus of happy short-skirted peasantry would skip out from behind it and tunefully relate the fortunes of the heroine within.

But the only person in sight was obviously impossible of such classification. Though she was chopping wood, and chopping it very well, though she wore what is sometimes called a Mother Hubbard wrapper and a stiff, clean blue-checked apron, she was not in the least a peasant. Her figure was tall and spare, her hair gray and drawn into an uncompromising knot, her face wrinkled and shrewd, her eyes soft, and full of the experience that middle-age brings to the native American woman who has lived all her life in the sparsely-settled country districts.

Her face relaxed at sight of her visitors. "How d'ye do?" she called cheerfully, "ma want anything?"

"I don't believe so," Caroline returned sociably, "I've just come up, that's all."

"I thought maybe your ma was worried about them shirt-waists, but she needn't be: I'll have 'em back by Friday, sure. It'll be all I can do, though--he's on the rampage these days, and I've got my hands full, I tell you."

"Is Old Grumpy bad to-day?" Caroline inquired.

"Bad? Child, that old fellow is just about the worst I ever saw, and I've seen plenty. What's on his mind the Lord knows, but it's a lesson to us all to keep our tempers and not have secret thoughts preying on us night and day! Just now he told me the truth for once. 'I'm so worried I can't digest, Luella,' he says to me, 'and I digest so damnably that it's enough to worry an archangel!' There--I shouldn't 'a' said that before you, but--"

"Oh, I know 'damn,' Luella," Caroline assured her, "and it isn't as if you said it purposely, anyway; you just repeated it. It makes all the difference."

"I guess it does," Luella assented, "s'long's you understand it. But then, you understand everything, more or less, 'seems to me. Where you picked it all up at your age--"

"What's that, Luella? Who is talking out there? What's going on _now_ behind my back?"

A petulant and gray-haired gentleman rushed out at them, very much like a wiry Scotch terrier, and glared fiercely at Caroline and Henry D. Thoreau.

"Nothin's goin' on behind your back that I know of, Mr. Wortley," Luella returned composedly. "This little girl comes up to see me every once 'n a while--I do washing for her mother at one of the cottages--and we were just talkin' back and forth, that's all."

"You fried that liver!" the gentleman burst forth abruptly, "you know you fried it, Luella! I might as well have eaten a shingle off the cottage--it's killing me! Ugh! As if I hadn't enough to bear without being murdered with fried liver!"

"I do' know what you've got to bear, Mr. Wortley," and Luella gathered her apron full of kindlings, "but you needn't add fried liver to it, 'cause it was broiled."

"Never!" exploded the fiery gentleman.

"I'd ought to know," said Luella firmly, "I had the grid-iron to wash."

"As for children," he veered off again, "you couldn't have poorer company. Think what they'll grow into--think!"

"Some don't turn out so bad," she reminded him, starting toward the house.

"Ah, but when are you going to decide that they _have_ 'turned out'?" he demanded, trotting angrily beside her, "tell me that, will you? Perhaps you imagine that when they're of age, legally men and women, and you've managed to keep 'em out of the State Reform School up to then, you're justified in thinking they've 'turned out'? Hey?"

"Oh, now, I wouldn't go on so about the State Reform School, Mr. Wortley," Luella urged pacifically, "that's awful. I always say the young ones mean well, mostly; there ain't many that set out to be bad a-purpose. Only, accordin' to their judgment--"

"Their judgment! _Their_ judgment! For God's sake!" he thundered, and darted into the house, slamming the door so that the casements rattled.

"I guess you'd better run on, dear," Luella suggested, "he's bad to-day. Some days I just have my hands full with him, and then again he'll be real pleasant and amusin'--he'll say the cutest things. But he's perturbed to-day, and that's a fact. You stop in 'long in the afternoon, when he takes his nap and I'm at my ironing, and we'll have a good visit."

Caroline nodded soberly and took up her journey again, not a little depressed; he had been such a whirlwind of a gentleman.

Unconsciously she followed a tiny, all-but-overgrown trail that led straight up the hill against which the cottage was built and lost itself, apparently, in the thick wood at the top. A belt of tall beeches half way up blotted out everything behind it, and the dozens of chipmunks and red squirrels that scurried hither and yon, the fat hen-partridge schooling her brood under Caroline's very nose, the flame-colored, translucent lizards slipping under mossy roots at her feet, showed the neglect into which the trail had fallen. She pushed on, hardly certain now that she had not lost it, or that it had ever led anywhere, when she stumbled suddenly over a handsome meerschaum pipe, still warm, and colored to a nicety. She picked it up, poked experimentally at the ashes with a twig, smelled it distastefully and stared about her. No one was in sight, and she had walked at least a quarter of a mile before she encountered a young man sitting in a dejected attitude on the stump of a yellow birch.

He was peering gloomily into the hemlocks opposite him, his hands were deep in his pockets, his feet crossed at an uncomfortable angle. He was a pale young man with dark circles under darker eyes, and an expression of such settled melancholy that Caroline lost no time in assuaging it as far as she could.

"Here it is," she remarked, holding out the pipe, "how do you do?"

The young man started violently.

"Holy Bridget, who are you?" he demanded. "How did you get here? This is private property--didn't you see the sign?"

"There wasn't any sign the way we came," she returned placidly, "we came over the mountain. Don't you want your pipe?"

The young man blushed and scowled. "Thank you very much," he said, extending a thin, brown hand, "I'm afraid I was rather rude. Where did you find it?"

"Oh, down there," she answered vaguely.

He handled the pipe lovingly, knocked it against the birch stump and cleared it further with a curl of the polished, champagne-tinted bark.

"Nice dog," he suggested, "what's his name?"

"Henry D. Thoreau," she replied, studying the green scarab in his necktie and the heavy seal-ring on his left hand.

"For heaven's sake! Who named him?"

"My Uncle Joe," she returned simply, "because he takes to the woods whenever he gets the chance. Was that pin a bug once?"

"Not since I ran across it," said the young man, "before that, I can't say. Has your uncle any other animals?"

"Oh, yes," she assured him. "There's the donkey, his name is Rose-Marie; and the baby's cat, his name is Pharaoh Meneptah, but the baby calls him Coo-coo; and there's Miss Honey's rabbits, they're all named Eleanor, because you can't tell them apart, and one name does just as well; and the canary, his name is Jean and Edouard de Reszke."

The young man burst into laughter and fell off the stump abruptly.

"Those are fine names, all of them," he declared, picking himself up with great solicitude for the pipe, "but why did the canary get two?"

"Because Aunt Edith likes Jean the best, but Uncle Joe says there's more to Edouard," she explained, "so they named him both, because Uncle Joe said anything was better than a divided family."

"That's right," said the young man, "anything is."

His face, which had looked for a moment merry and boyish, darkened again, and his big eyes glowered intently at the shadowy hemlocks.

"Anything," he added, in a low voice, "but a sacrifice of principle, a sacrifice of truth, as it actually is, to the petty conventions of a rotten society!"