PAST MASTERS

NINETY-NINE

Produced and Edited by Terry Walker ("Pulpmeister") from short stories in magazines, newspapers and other sources, and all in the Life + 70 years public domain.

26 September 2022

Contents

1: Twelve Years Later / Mark Hellinger

2: The Flight of the Silver Eagle / Arthur Leo Zagat

3: The Toss Up / George Allen England

4: When Time Turned / Ethel Watts Mumford

5: The Great White Serpent of the Malorli / Alexander Ricketts

6: The Inventor of Meltite / C. J.·Cutcliffe Hyne

7: Triplets and Trouble / Robert V Carr

8: The Secret of the White Castle / Julia Magruder

9: Changed / Gordon Young

10: Grandfather's Courtship / Henry Lawson

11: "Look Behind You!" / Albert Payson Terhune

12: The Girl in the Crowd / Albert Payson Terhune

13: The Perfumed Ghost / Peter Cheyney

14: Blind Man's Buff / Malcolm Jameson

15: The Silver Christ / "Ouida"

16: Our Casualty / George A. Birmingham

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1: Twelve Years Later

Mark Hellinger

1903-1947

Guinea Gold (Papua New Guinea) 30 April 1944

AS FAR as Arthur Billings was concerned, money wasn't merely the most important thing in life; it was the only thing. To this man with money-mania, nothing else mattered. He dreamed money. He lived for it.

"All that sentimental nonsense about money not bringing happiness is just so much bunk," he would set forth. "How can you be happy if you are hungry? Money may not buy happiness, but it'll buy just about everything else."

He could go on that way for hours at a time, and usually it was Evelyn who was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of his orations. Not that Evelyn considered herself unfortunate. Far from it. She was in love with Arthur, and regardless of what he said, his words sounded like the sweetest of music.

Evelyn didn't agree with his statements, but she never let him know it. They were merely the harmless ravings of a man with one set idea, she figured. But she was due for a rude awakening. Arthur hesitated a long time before he mustered up enough courage to tell Evelyn the truth. But when he did, he plunged immediately into his subject.

"You know I like you and all that," he began. "I hope you understand, Evelyn. It's just that I wouldn't have any chance of getting anywhere if I was married. "I want money, Evelyn. I want it more than anything— more than marriage."

The two parted soon after that. The woman was tearful, but Arthur was merely impatient.

"I'll be rich someday," he assured her by way of fond farewell. "Maybe I'll come back and we can be friends again. Maybe you'll still like me then."

"I'll never love anyone else," Evelyn sobbed. "Never."

THE years skipped by, almost a dozen of them. During those years Arthur  worked hard, and his labor wasn't entirely without results. There had never been another woman after Evelyn. He thought more and more often of Evelyn. As he grew older, married life seemed more attractive. And so, in that frame of mind, Arthur made the journey back to the old neighborhood. After a few inquiries in the right places he learned that Evelyn was still living in that vicinity. She was living here— and she was married to another man.

The discovery was something of a shock, but it didn't swerve Arthur from his purpose, if anything, it merely increased his desire to see her again.

Thus we find the man and his long-lost sweetie surveying each other sadly over their beer and pretzels. Evelyn had changed, of course, but to Arthur she wits more attractive than ever.

"You're not happy, are you, my dear?" he inquired softly. "Don't deny it. Evelyn, I can tell that this marriage hasn't turned out right for you."

"You're right, Arthur," the woman sighed. "I'm far from happy. You see, I— I married the wrong man. My husband is hardiy what you'd call a successful figure. He's stodgy and dull. I know now that I made a frightful mistake."

There was great joy in Arthur's breast at that moment. He nodded sympathetically.

"Divorce?" he suggested.

"Henry would never consent," Evelyn murmured. "Though I know I can't go on much longer. I don't love him— never have, I'm afraid. Oh, Arthur—"

The man reached over and patted her hand.

"Things will come out right, " told her.

ARTHUR returned to the city, and on the way he did some heavy thinking. Now that he knew Evelyn still loved him, nothing could keep them apart. And yet she was married to another man.

If he could persuade her husband to divorce her, everything would be smooth sailing. And he could persuade him, he felt sure. Not with arguments. Arthur had a better way than that. In his opinion, nothing would carry more weight than a little present of money. Such things were done. Money, if you had enough of it, could accomplish anything. Hadn't he always known that?

The meeting with Henry was easily arranged. He merely called up and requested an interview— alone. Then, when the two men were together in the shabby living-room of .Henry's home, Arthur began his little speech.

EVELYN, he declared, loved another man. Her husband must have known that, surely. If he would put no obstacles in the way of her divorce, there would be a little present for him.

Arthur slapped down the bills and smiled with satisfaction as the other man's eyes grew wide.

"It's too late to hope that you can hold her," Arthur pointed out. "In return for this money, the— the man she is going to marry hopes that you'll be agreeable in all matters pertaining to the divorce."

Henry nodded rapidly. He counted, the money eagerly, and seemed well content with his part of the bargain.

"You ain't the man," he stated, "so I ain't got no quarrel with you. And I don't mind tellin' you I'm kinda glad to get this money."

"I'm merely working for the man in this case," Arthur hastened to assure him. He reached for his hat nervously. There would be nothing gained he figured, in starting any trouble right now. As he reached the door the other man began to speak again.

"I knew you wasn't," he went on. "I know the man, all right. Yes, sir: I'm not as dumb as Evelyn took me for. I was wise to what was going on alright. For two years now she's been struck on that guy that lives down the road from us. I seen 'em together lots of times.

"That's why I wasn't surprised at all when she packed up her things and ran away with him last night."

__________________

2: The Flight of the Silver Eagle

Arthur Leo Zagat

1895-1949

Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1937

1: The Empty Stratocar

AGAINST a sky glorious with flung streamers of scarlet and purple, New York's leaping towers and arching aerial streetways traced a prismatic arabesque epitomizing the wonder and the beauty of the Twenty-first Century. But Don Atkins, his lithe, compact body poised on big-thewed legs widespread and firmly planted, was as oblivious to that far-off glory as to the bustle of the Federal Skyport all about him.

He stood beneath the high loom of the landing trap, squinting into the west out of slitted eyes from whose corners weather wrinkles rayed threadlike, and he was conscious of only two things.

Under the yellow silk of his airman's tunic a small, hard lump was cold against his breast. It was the talisman of the Silver Eagle, the throbbing pulse in his temples reminded him, symbol of the gallant fellowship into whose fold he had been inducted at last. The secret that for months had lain prickling between him and his one close friend, Bart Thomas, was a secret no longer. Bart himself, darting from the distant Pacific, would be here in minutes now to receive from him the twisting handgrip of the order. In minutes— in seconds—now—

A siren howled across the field. A black speck notched the low sun's upper rim.

"On time to the dot!" Atkins exclaimed. A white blur in the air was suddenly a silver, tear-drop shape caught in the high-reaching fingers of the landing trap's gaunt girders, a thousand feet above him. The gigantic beam surged down, pivoting on its huge hinge, perilously fast at first, then more and more slowly as its hydraulic shock-absorbers sapped the stratocar's incredible momentum.

Atkins dashed for the spot where the duraluminum-skinned, man-carrying projectile would ground to end Thomas' half-hour flight from 'Frisco Skyport.

A knot of brown-garbed mechanics clotted around the tiny car. Their wrenches clanged against the bolt-heads that had clamped tight the hatch cover against the airlessness of upper space. Twirling metal rasped against metal. The shining, oval door swung back. With eager impatience Atkins shoved past the mechanics, thrust head and shoulders into the aperture.

"Happy landing, old sock," he shouted. "Welcome to—"

The greeting froze on his lips. The tiny cubicle was unoccupied; was starkly, staringly vacant. In the heatless light of the ceiling tube the teleview screen mirrored the Skyport tarmac, glimmered from the glossy leather of the cushion on which Thomas should have lain outstretched. But Thomas wasn't there—

Atkins' skin was a tight, prickling sheath for his body. The thing was grotesquely, weirdly impossible! Impossible for his chum to have got out of the stratocar unless someone had unbolted the hatch from outside. Impossible for it to have landed somewhere so that that might have been done. To have arrived on the dot of its schedule the stratocar must never have relented from the uttermost limit of its speed. Time lost in any halt could not have been made up.

Impossible for there to have been any halt; the device was propelled by the blast of an electrostatic catapult at its starting point and had no power of its own. Once stopped it could not have taken up its flight again. And it had come straight as an arrow to the landing-trap's hooks at which 'Frisco had aimed it.

A fleck of white on the cushion caught Atkins' eye. He reached in, snatched it up. It was a bit of paper, and on it—

"Mr. Atkins," a peremptory voice battered at his giddy brain, "Conceal that and bring it to me at once."

The airman thrust the scrap into his pocket, whirled. The groundmen were crowding in around him, their swart countenances curious, but it was evident that none of them had spoken. Then he recalled the tiny receiver clamped against the bone behind his ear, and he knew whence the summons had come.

"This device hasn't been perfected yet," the grey man in the hidden room had said, "but within the limits of the field I can speak to you through it secretly and at will."

There had been a view-screen before him, too, whose cosmic-ray eye could scan anything within fifty miles.

"Close it up," Don Atkins snapped, "and say nothing to anybody."

Then he was running across the long, level tarmac, was dashing up the broad steps of Flight Headquarters Building, was hurrying through the interminable maze of corridors within.

The chaos within his skull took on a pattern as the amazing revelations of his initiation came back to him. The nation dreamed itself at peace with all the world. The Asafrican Alliance, Americans fatuously thought, having driven out the white races from the continents they had so long dominated, wanted nothing but to be left alone.

THEY reckoned without the driving ambition of Hung-Chen, the new Genghis Khan, who had forged an irresistible war machine behind the inscrutable mask of the East and awaited the auspicious moment to launch it against the Occident and the Americas. If he could not be stopped, war, rapine, slaughter, must inevitably destroy the Golden Age to which civilization had at last attained. But here was the wall-panel, in a guarded corridor, whose curious quality he had been taught less than an hour before. Atkins halted, glanced cautiously left and right. He was unobserved. He bent to get his lips close against a certain whorl in the blue tracings with which the marble was figured, whispered a password. A whirring sound, seeming to come from the very stone itself, told him that the impact of his voice had set in motion the sound-lock within. The apparently solid marble slid open and the airman went through.

The wall thudded shut behind him. In the windowless room he entered a short, grave-faced man, mouse-like in grey silk, looked up from his desk.

"Let me see what you found," he said without preamble.

Atkins fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers, pushed the paper across the desk to the chief of the Silver Eagle. The red lines on it leered at him again, the ominous design that had pronged him with knowledge of the catastrophe that had overtaken Thomas. A deftly drawn dragon was coiled around the orb of Earth, one taloned claw sprawling triumphantly to obliterate the double triangles of the Americas. The chief's grey face was almost expressionless as he touched the thing with a fingertip, but under his pale, inscrutable eyes little muscles twitched uncontrollably.

"The token of Hung-Chen," he said. "Like him to let us know that he's defeated our last device against his spies."

"What does it mean?" Atkins groaned, mental agony making him forget rank for the moment. "What does it mean?"

The other's tones were very calm— only the vaguest flatting betrayed the despair that must be closing in on him like a pall.

"It means that the key to the gaps in the West Coast electro-barrage is in his hands, the only thing he needed to enable him to strike. Thomas was bringing the plan to Army Headquarters, and he's got Thomas."

"But— but you said that the Silver Eagle memorizes all its messages. You said that Hung-Chen's spies had tapped every means of secret communication we've had and that's why the Sliver Eagle was organized—"

"Correct. We thought that a band of glorified couriers, shot across the continent at a speed greater than any yet known, would circumvent him. But we've failed. This lets us know that we have failed. They will get it out of Thomas—"

"No!" Atkins' fist pounded down on the desk. "Bart will never tell. He'll die before he tells."

"He won't die until they know. They'll strip his brain—" The chief broke off. "But that may take time. If we can find him before—"

He ripped a long tape from a machine on his desk. A straight purple line traced on it wavered at a single point.

"Look here. This deflection in the flight-graph shows that an extra amount of power was being absorbed between three minutes, twelve seconds out of 'Frisco and seven minutes, forty-six seconds after the start. I noticed it and thought that the projectile had swerved slightly from its course, was taking additional energy to straighten it out. But it occurs to me—"

"What, sir?" Atkins demanded, excitedly. "What?"

"That something may have come into the field, there between three hundred and twenty and seven hundred and seventy miles from the Pacific, on the great circle course. We might look that region over."

"I'm going, sir!"

Grey eyes stabbed keenly at the trembling airman, "You're new, Atkins. I don't know—"

"Bart Thomas is my friend, Chief. More than a brother—"

"Very well," the grey man made his decision. "You may go. And God help you if you are caught. Listen—"

2: The Kappa-Ray

A GREEN light from Traffic Control flashed the "all clear" signal and Atkins thrust his throttle home. His gyrocopter leaped straight up from the fields, shot up through the night past the successive glows of the level markers. The red of the lumbering freighter-lane, the yellow of the local-flight zone, the cerulean blue of the five-thousand-foot level in which the great transoceanic liners plied comet-like; they surged past in his view-screen, dropped below.

Sunburst came to him from over the bulge of the rounding terrain as his 'ceptor staggered logily. Its roaring vanes could no longer find any support in the near vacuum of the stratosphere. Atkins twisted the controls.

The lifting-vanes collapsed into their slotted grooves. The flyer was a sleek silver fish from whose tail the crimson flame of rocket gases fanned out. It darted westward, silent and swift as a bat out of hell.

Atkins throttled down, reluctant but obedient to the chief's instructions. He must not overtake the sun; darkness would be his best aid. Two red spots burned bright on his cheeks and secret fires flickered in his glowing eyes.

"I'm coming, old man," he muttered between his teeth. "I'm coming, Bart. Stick to it. Don't give in. Don't tell them—"

Endlessly blurred Earth streaked underneath him, endlessly the red position dot drifted with nerve-shredding slowness across the map framed at the flyer's elbow. He shut off the feed, unfolded once more the gyro-vanes. He drifted down through the darkness, silent as a cloud in a foggy night as invisible. A rugged mountainside, forest-cloaked, swam up into dim view.

Atkins checked the descent, hovered. A twist of his wrist, and the beam of his kappa-ray projector was searching the serried carpet of the trees. To the unaided eye that beam was utterly imperceptible, but on the specially treated screen at which the airman peered avidly a flickering disc cut through imaged foliage, through dark underbrush. To the kappa-ray all organic matter is transparent; only earth, stone, or metal can reflect it and become visible.

Minutes dragged. Bare ground, only bare ground, netted by branching streamlets. Then— what was that?

Atkins held the ray steady, quivering with bowstring tenseness. An irregular cube of stone showed mistily. A house! A human habitation in the wilderness! His heart bumped crazily against his ribs. But— wait a minute— it might be a Ranger station, a depot of the men who patrolled this primeval forest that was preserved as a national park. Beyond the house a metal something, huge, curiously formed, bulked vaguely.

Atkins' pulse leaped. He had found that which he sought. Thomas' captors thought themselves well hidden beneath the leafy screen. Evidently the kappa-ray was one secret that had been successfully kept from them.

Lower still Don Atkins dropped, until he was a bare hundred feet above the treetops. Too bad his search beam could not reveal human forms. He dared not send the map coordinates of this place by radio. He would be overheard, the gang would be warned and escape. But at full power it would take him seven minutes to reach 'Frisco Skyport. Then a hundred pursuit rockets would leap into the air. In minutes the mountain could be surrounded by well-armed men. He reached for the throttle.

The sea of foliage, almost black in the long evening shadows, glowed suddenly into green flame. Just above the strange building an orange pin-point leaped into existence. An inverted cone of radiance soared lightning-swift from that focal point. Instantly the 'copter was bathed in the flare. Intolerable heat struck at Atkins. The steel walls about him flamed cherry-red. He was frying in the torrid blast.

Already his senses were leaving him— with despairing instinct he thrust at the release lever of the emergency hatch beneath his seat—no time to snatch at the parachute cone, He was falling, falling—

ATKINS lifted slowly back to consciousness. His body was seared with pain. An iron band constricted his chest and his blood was salty warm on his lips. A black silence enveloped Flight of the Silver Eagle 5 him, broken by vague rustlings and the sound of trickling water. His dazed eyes adjusted themselves to the dimness, and, he saw twisted tree branches, moonlight sifting through leaves all about him. He was lying across a sturdy, gnarled bough. Above him he could make out broken branches, a funneled path torn through thick interlacing foliage.

Slowly it dawned on him what occurred. Plunging down, he had struck the lofty crown of some forest giant. The smaller branches, the massed verdure at the top of the tree, had absorbed the force of his fall. This larger branch had caught and held him, had kept him from crashing through to the ground.

He had failed miserably. The realization wrenched a groan from him. Suddenly he tensed, clinging tightly to his bough, listening acutely. A voice sounded. Heavy bodies threshed through the underbrush. A yellow glow flickered among the trees below, and was gone. It came again, held steady as it grew brighter. Two bulking shadows appeared, forcing through the thick growth. The dim back-throw of a lantern beat against the dull green of a Ranger's uniform, familiar to Atkins from hunting and fishing expeditions in these very woods.

This was luck! Their post could not be far off, with its radio-phone. He'd chance a coded message to the chief. His throat tightened to a cautious call—

The lantern-bearer stumbled, ripped out an oath. It was not in English! His light found his face. High cheekbones, thick lips, narrow, slanted eyes. They were Orientals! They were searching for something!

Of course— it was he for whom they were looking— his body. They wanted to make sure of his death, make sure that his crumpled form, lying perhaps near a trail, would not betray their hiding place. The lantern glow flashed dartingly along the ground, into the treetops. Atkins tried to make himself a part of the limb. Rough bark rasped a deep wound in his palm. He flinched uncontrollably, lost his grip. He was slipping, was falling... A desperate tightening of his gripping knees, a flexing of his aching arm muscles, stopped the disastrous fall. But the leaves still rustled with his movements.

A sharp challenge ripped the forest silence. A tube in the yellow hand of one of the searchers spurted blue flame. It shot through the leaves and its heat, the acrid smoke of seared greenery, stung Atkins' nostrils. A second bolt came still nearer. Even if they missed him the light of those ray-tube flashes must reveal him to the hunters.

"Cut it out, Mingai," the other Asiatic's voice rasped in English. "It's nothing but a wildcat, or some other animal."

"I do not think so. I do not like that we have not found the body of the flyer."

"Forget it. He was burned up in the ray."

"The orange ray does not slay. It merely accelerates the electronic vibration of metallic atoms until the melting point is reached. But I forget, you would not understand. You are as stupid about scientific matters as the Americans among whom you have been raised. You even speak their barbarous tongue better than the language of your ancestors."

"You give me a pain. Come on, let's get back. We'll tell Fu-Kong to do his own dirty work."

"VERY brave, you are, when he cannot hear you," Mingai sneered. "But in his presence you cringe and are meek like the rest of us. No, friend Li-San, we do not return as yet."

"All right, if you're going to be that way. Let's look further." "

Not till I discover what there is in this tree."

Hope died in Atkins' brain.

"Going to keep on raying till we're spotted by some snooping Ranger?"

"No, there is a better way." Mingai turned back to the tree. His cylinder again jetted its blue flame. It was continuous now— was boring across the trunk. Back and forth the steady yellow hand drew the disintegrating beam. The great bole quivered, started to sway. Atkins got his feet beneath him on the perch, leaped down. His aim was true. His heavy boots struck square on Mingai's shoulder. He felt bone crack beneath the impact of his weight. Even as the man dropped the American jumped sideward, catlike, his lithe form twisting in mid-air so that he faced the other Oriental. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a startled countenance—then the saffron face was obliterated by the crashing thud of his fist. He whirled away, hurtled into the shadowed brush.

Thorned tendrils caught and tore at Atkins. A root tripped him, and he crashed headlong into a tree trunk. He thudded to the ground— lay there— his tortured lungs laboring— his outstretched hands plucking at the earthy loam. From behind, Atkins heard a thin whistle, shrill almost above the range of human hearing.

From far to his right another, responding. Evidently the men from whom he had escaped were signaling for aid. He struggled erect. He was unarmed, alone, bruised and battered, terribly fatigued. But he knew now that he could escape by working down the hill, to his left. In the other direction were desperate men, weapons at their ruthless command that could whiff him into eternity at will. He turned to the right.

3: The Pursuit Squadron

DON ATKINS crouched in the shelter of a bush. Before him the stone structure he had seen from the air loomed blackly. Over the clearing a rope network carried a camouflage of tree branches that his kappa-ray had pierced. He could hear a murmur of voices, but the sounds came from beyond or within the squat building.

On the side toward him there was silence, and nothing moved. The darkness of the wall he faced was relieved by a horizontal line, a thread of light, almost imperceptible. The American's eyes clung to it. Then he was crawling across the bare ground that lay between. Twenty feet of shelterless surface, flecked with the revealing light of the moon. Could he make it, unobserved?

Inch by crawling inch, every muscle, every nerve, taut with expectation of a sudden hail, of a blue flash that would sear him into nothingness, Atkins slid toward the beckoning line of light. After an eternity, he was in the solid shadow of the wall. He raised himself cautiously and found the place where the light shone through. It was the lower edge of a steel-shuttered window, just at the level of his eyes.

He could not see much of the room within, the aperture was a mere slit. But what he saw was enough! Just within range of his vision was a table-top, black, and glistening like glass. Fastened to its surface, leather straps cutting deep into the flesh of his arms and legs, was Thomas! His friend's stocky body was stark naked. In a cold lurid light that beat down, Atkins could see his knotted muscles writhe snakelike, the sweat of agony gleaming on his skin.

Thomas' face was deathly white, his clenched teeth were revealed by lips that curved away, his eyes were closed and his cheek muscles were quivering. His forehead, his hair, were covered by a metal helmet, from which wires curled away out of sight.

A low, mechanical hum rose steadily in pitch. Bart Thomas' form arched slowly up from the table, straining against its creaking bonds. Suddenly the hum stopped, and the twisted body slumped flaccidly, inertly, down. A yellow hand, slim, its long fingers ending in pointed nails, came into view, holding a small sponge to Thomas' nostrils. The prisoner D Flight of the Silver Eagle 7 quivered, his eyes opened, and Atkins' fists clenched as he read the despair that stared from them.

He heard a voice, suavely cruel.

"It is very painful, this searching of your brain. If you chose to talk you would save yourself much anguish."

Atkins' scalp was a tight cap for his skull as the bound man's eyelids dropped, and lifted again. Even, speech seemed too great an effort for him, but his lips moved. A hand was clamped over Atkins' mouth, a powerful arm wound around him from behind, pinning his own arms to his sides. He was lifted from the ground. He drove a desperate heel backward into a hard shin. Something crashed against the back of his head and he hung, dazed and barely conscious, in huge arms that carried his hundred and fifty pounds as though he were a child.

The room whirled dizzily about Don Atkins. He saw men, a television screen, a black tube that rose through the ceiling from some unknown device. He was carried through another door and a saffron-hued face, lengthened by a wisp of grey beard and drooping mustachios under a hawk nose, drifted hazily before him. Only the eyes were clear; black eyes, piercing behind their slanted lids.

Atkins was set down in a chair. Hands fumbled at him, passed a rope around him, binding him to his seat. He scarcely noted it, spellbound by those glittering eyes. His fogged brain cleared a bit and he saw a tall Oriental, imperturbable. There were banked tubes glowing behind him, and bright copper coils. To one side, a table, its black top glistening like glass. Thomas, strapped down, was looking at him with eyes in which incredulity and horror flared.

The tall Oriental spoke.

"Who is this, Na-Garri?"

FROM behind Don a huge black came in view. Dressed, like the others of the gang, in the olive-green of the Rangers, he was still redolent of the jungle. His skin was a deep, dull black that swallowed light. His bullet head sat queerly on wide shoulders from which arms thick as saplings hung loosely almost to his knees, His voice was a throaty rumble.

"I don't know, Lord Fu-Kong. But the electric-eye alarm he flash, and I find this one peeking in. So I bring him to you. Maybe he the one who we bring down from the plane, the one who jump on Mingai and Li-San."

The other nodded.

"Probably. He seems very persistent." To Atkins: "You display a great deal of interest in our proceedings. I hope you are satisfied with your present opportunity to observe them."

He reached out a clawlike hand and ripped away the front of the airman's shirt. He snatched at the token hanging there. The fine gold chain snapped, and he had it in his hand. A faint smile crossed the jaundiced mask of his face and he held the tiny bird out to the black. Not a half inch long it was, but exquisitely wrought. An eagle, poised as if in flight, it seemed almost alive.

"See, Na-Garri, this is another of the brood. They wear talismen about their necks, like your own tribesmen, to bring them good luck. But I fear the Dragon of Hung-Chen is too strong for their puny godlet."

He turned back to the American.

"I shall deal with you in a moment, when I have finished with your comrade. Watch closely, American, and I wish you joy of what you see."

Now he was talking to Thomas, and his voice was a crawling threat. "Have you decided to answer my questions?"

"No!" Thomas' voice was a tortured whisper, but his lips closed tight and firm. Fear and despair drew haggard lines across his face. Fu-Kong shrugged, stepped to the wall where a tall slate panel glittered with switch-points, gauges, gleaming ebony wheels.

"Still stubborn. You will not believe me, then, that this searcher will delve deeper and deeper into the core of your brain till it wrenches the uttermost secrets of your ego from you. Yet it was an American who first proved that thought is an electric process, who first measured the tiny currents that flow along the nerves, Well, if you must have it—"

His fingers closed on a lever just above binding posts to which the wires trailing from the helmet on Thomas' head trailed.

"Now—"

"Fu-Kong. Fu-Kong," a shrill cry from the outer room stopped him. "Another plane has appeared above."

Atkins forced his head around. Mingai was in the doorway, his shoulder bandaged, his right arm in a sling.

"Well, why burst in on me like this?" Fu-Kong was imperturbable. "Send someone to dispose of the remains."

The other's face was a sickly green.

"But it got away," he gasped.

"It got away?" The phrase was like the purr of an enraged cat.

"Yes. My broken arm— I had to use my left— I missed with the orange ray, and before I could aim again he was out of range."

Mingai's voice trailed away in an apologetic murmur.

"You—" the other began, fury breaking through the stony mask of his face.

But again there was an interruption. A sallow Hindu appeared.

"Master, the plane that escaped is signaling to 'Frisco Skyport, and their rocket squadron is taking off."

The chief had not failed them! He had sent a following plane that by great good luck had escaped the Asiatics' lethal ray. Atkins calculated hastily. In ten minutes now this nest would be surrounded, the spies captured, Thomas freed and his secret safe.

BUT Fu-Kong was snapping peremptory orders. Mingai and the Hindu had disappeared, Na-Garri was unstrapping Thomas, was carrying him out. The Oriental leader himself, ray-tube in hand, was unfastening the rope that bound Atkins.

"Get up and precede me."

The spy gestured with his weapon. The American obeyed, staggering on limbs that were needling with returning blood. He was through the outer room, his captor close behind him; was in the open. Straight ahead loomed a monstrous metal shape. Egg-shaped it was, save for one end that was sliced off sharply, and there was an opening, man-high, in its side. Na-Garri was just vanishing within, with his burden. Atkins followed. Fu-Kong clanged shut the slide behind him.

A steel ladder mounted through a dim green light, curving over an inner shell. Atkins' head came through a trapdoor above, and he was in a low, long chamber. Then he was once more tightly bound. A rough shove from the black sent him sliding across the floor to thud against Thomas' trussed and naked form.

Li-San was just closing the trapdoor. Mingai, fear in his eyes, was thrusting up on a valve-handle that projected from a large vertical pipe in the wall. At the far end, before a large view-screen, the Hindu was seated, black discs of phone receivers clamped to his ears. Beside him Fu-Kong bent over a serried row of gauges and levers atop a metal console. A large view-screen before him showed the forest-bordered clearing and the stone building that had been vacated in such haste.

Fu-Kong pushed at a lever, and the view-screen was a flare of flame. It cleared. Where the house had been was a gaping hole in the ground, The Oriental's hand moved again. The screen was a down-rushing blur. It cleared once more. Velvet-black, star-strewn, the night sky was about them, and the far-below forest was a dark, mysterious sea.

"Don, old man," the whispering voice in his ear was Thomas', "how on earth did you ever get into this mess?"

"I came to find you," Atkins said grimly. "And I did. How are you?"

"Pretty rocky. But I'll keep until Fu-Kong gets a chance to work on me again."

"I can't understand how he ever got hold of you. Your carrier came in right to the dot. What happened?"

"I was zipping along, watching the U. S. shoot past in the screen, when suddenly something flashed over me and dropped down in front."

"Shot over you! I thought the rocket-stratocars were the fastest things ever produced."

"So did I, until I saw this craft. I'll bet it can make three hundred miles a minute. It passed me as if I were standing still. At any rate, there it was, right ahead of me, and slowing. The blunt end was toward me, and I thought sure I was going to crash into it. No way to swerve those carriers, you know. But just as I reached it, a hole opened and I sailed right inside."

"Good Lord! Then it's a—"

"A sort of flying trap. Damned ingenious, eh? I can figure out the rest of it now. You say the stratocar reached New York on time? That means they closed the stern and speeded up again till they were making just the rate I was. Afterward they went faster once more, got clear of my boat and dropped away. They had just picked me out of it on the fly.

"ALL I knew at the time was that my hatch opened, and the big black was pointing a ray-gun at me. He told me to get out, and I got. We were in an air-lock, and there was a rope ladder hanging down. I climbed it and found myself in this room. Fu-Kong was here, and the Hindu. Then in a little while we were down in the clearing, where the others were waiting. After that my troubles really began— Look at the screen!" he said sharply.

Atkins twisted himself back to his original position. In the distance a score of scarlet lights made a dancing crescent on the view-screen. They rose and fell, but came on steadily. He thrilled at the sight. These were the army flyers from 'Frisco Skyport. No mistaking that formation.

Those far-spreading wings would sweep around as the center checked, and the Asafrican craft would be caught in an enfilading fire. Fu-Kong and his gang were doomed! Peculiar how calmly they were taking it.

Eastern fatalism, he supposed. Eastern fatalism, hell! Memory fanged him! Thomas had just told of the incredible speed at Fu-Kong's command. The spy master was not trapped, far from it. He could get away at will. Why was he hanging here motionless, watching those oncoming flyers, a sardonic smile tinging his yellow face?

Nearer and nearer the lights came. The dim shapes of the army rocket-planes showed, phantomlike. The central ship dipped, minutely, and the long line began to expand. The motley crew of the spy ship clustered behind their leader in the bow.

"Near enough." Fu-Kong's voice rang like a sentence of doom.

A long pencil of orange light shot out from his vessel, wavered, impinged on the nearest plane. The flyer flared red, then dazzling white, at the tip of the beam. Then—there was nothing there. The death ray moved on to the next in line.

All along that far-flung line a coruscation of green swept, as the indomitable fighters shot out their futile answer. Lethal enough, those rays, but their range was far short. Another plane was caught in the orange beam and vanished! Another! But the squadron came on, their mile-long fire-tails lashing them through the night.

If one, only one, could get near enough to spear the Asafrican craft with its beam! Taking that one desperate chance the birdmen rushed into the face of destruction, never faltering, never wavering, as ship by ship the orange scythe reaped its deadly harvest. Only ten ships were left of the score that had first appeared, only nine— and still the green rays were miles short of their mark.

Minutes passed that were long as eternity. Eight of the intrepid attackers remained, then seven. But now the stabbing darts of emerald death were almost reaching their mark. A little more— only a little more. Suddenly the floor vibrated and Atkins heard the muted thunder of the craft's rocket blasts. The spy ship was moving at last.

Fu-Kong would escape— that was unavoidable. The terrific speed of his strange vessel could never be matched by the combination plane-and-rocket-craft of the Americans. But at least the pitiful handful remaining would escape the holocaust. Seeing the futility of their courageous attempt they would return to their base, perhaps effectuate plans for a countrywide encircling movement that might in the long run bring the yellow ship down. No— Atkins' mouth twisted in a soundless oath—the Oriental had no intention of permitting that.

The distance between the spy-craft and the nearest attacker did not increase. The Asiatic was keeping just beyond the range of the green rays— was taking toll on the American aviators with false hope while the merciless orange beam flared out, mowing the velvet night with destruction.

4: The Dragon of Hung-Chen

BUT of the twenty flyers who had soared to the attack a bare six still charged on. They were insane! They couldn't win—

But couldn't they? Atkins stifled a gasp, was taut with sudden hope. Five of the squadron's remnant had startlingly changed their tactics. They were zigzagging, were darting left and right, up and down, in what seemed a last panicky attempt to evade the Asiatic's ray.

Senseless, it seemed— but there was one ship that had left the group. Its green ray was doused, only the pinpoint red of its tail-flame betrayed its course to Atkins. He flung out his soul in a wordless prayer that neither Fu-Kong nor his aides would notice that stealthy climb.

Steadily the squadron leader mounted till the scarlet dot that marked him out was touching the upper margin of the view-screen. Ten thousand feet below, his comrades flitted about in their macabre dance, cheating the orange death again and again by breathless inches. The attention of the enemy crew was concentrated on those darting shapes, on their darting, ineffective rays.

Atkins' eyes flicked back to the lone flyer. He saw the sudden crimson burst, saw the downward curve of its flaring wake as a terrific swoop began, saw the green ray dart out ahead, spearhead of the diving hawk. Down and down and down, adding the pull of Earth to his own driving blasts, the avenger plunged in one last, magnificent effort to catch the destroyer unaware; zipping faster and faster until even in that tenuous air the steel plane-body glowed dull red with the friction of its unleashed speed.

A minute's grace— sixty unobserved seconds of that lightning slant— and it would snip the yellow menace from the skies.

"Look— Fu-Kong— look!" It was Mingai who yelped the alarm.

The orange ray swept up. Jammed. By luck— by the luck with which the gods award the greatly daring— the down-darting American had found the one vulnerable angle of the spy ship. Green flame licked out hungrily, but Fu-Kong's hand was light-quick in its flash to the throttle lever. His ship lurched— jerked aside in the last possible moment of safety.

The American was under, now, right under the spy-craft. But the dragon ship was driving ahead. In an eye-blink Fu-Kong would be able to bring his death ray to bear on the daring flyer! Don Atkins flung heavily across the floor by the sudden jerk, saw, not quite three feet above him, a gleaming copper handle— the valve at which Mingai had twisted just before the take-off.

Legs lashed, arms bound, sweat pouring from his lined brow, eyes bulging from their sockets, by sheer power of stomach and trunk muscles alone he swung his torso from the floor. His head came level with that handle. His teeth clamped around it. Corded sinews stood out on his neck as he drove the valve lever down. Suddenly he was snatched loose by a lurch of the craft, and his preposterously twisted body crashed down.

But that very lurch told him of success! It was the main fuel-valve! He had cut off the rocket-tube's supply! In an instant, now, the vessel would be caught in the ray-beam of the pilot below, Atkins tensed to meet the green flash that would mean oblivion for Fu-Kong and his myrmidons— and for Bart Thomas and himself.

It never came! A shrill, high-pitched oath, footsteps running toward him, pulled open his eyes. Fu-Kong was bending over him, face livid with wrath, ray-gun rising for the coup de grace. Behind him Li-San came up, a strange glow between his slant lids. Atkins' eyes nicked past the couple. In this final moment of life he must know what had happened, why his intended sacrifice had failed.

A BLUE electric veil, shimmering and sparking in a cerulean network of tiny lightnings, curved all across the view-screen. Beyond it the misty shapes of the attacking aircraft spat their green beams. The emerald death rays spattered harmlessly on the ionic curtain, and were quenched. From within, the orange ray thrust futilely against the hollow, defensive sphere of force.

This Atkins saw in a single, flashing glance. Then he was staring up at the enraged Oriental, was waiting in a timeless void for the blue spurt that would sear thought and consciousness and life itself from his despairing brain.

"Wait, Master!" Li-San snatched at Fu-Kong's hand, swerved it aside from its aim. "Wait! That way is too easy for the pale-skinned dog. Let me and Mingai take care of him. We have a debt to pay for what he did to us in the wood!"

In the other's slitted eyes a glint of satisfaction showed.

"I had my doubts of you, Li-San. Twice you have shown deplorable softness in your tasks. This I like much better. You may have your wish. But take him below— I have much to do and do not wish to be disturbed."

Atkins' skin crawled. Death he could face calmly— but that which the fanatic gleam in Li-San's saffron mask promised made him a coward.

"Fu-Kong," he croaked, barely able to force the words through his constricted throat. "Don't give me to him! Kill me yourself. That would be clean and honest."

But the Oriental was walking away.

They took him down through the trapdoor, carried him down, flung him heavily on the plates in the narrow space between the entrance hatch and the curving inner shell.

"Untie him, Mingai." There was an undercurrent of eager excitement in Li-San's tones. Even in the face of what was to come, Atkins wondered at the gratuitous cruelty of the Oriental mind. Mingai stooped to him, fumbled at his lashings. As they fell away, the American leaped up to make a fight of it. Hopeless, of course, Li-San had his ray-gun poised for action. Better to go out that way than to suffer the planned revenge of the sadistic duo. Now—

"Hands up, Mingai! Quick!"

The virulent threat in Li-San's voice made the low command seem a crashing shout. Mingai straightened. His arms flew above a saffron face from which amazement and horror had stripped its habitual mask. Li-San was braced on spread feet, his ray-gun thrust before him. His countenance was alight with a strange flame, and his eyes snapped menace.

"One whimper from you and I flash!"

There was an instant of stunned silence. Then Li-San spoke again.

"Here, you American! Grab those ropes. Tie him up and gag him, Quick, man!"

Dazed by the sudden turn, Atkins obeyed. What lay behind this sudden act on the Asiatic's part? Had he suffered a sudden change of heart— He recalled, in the wood, Li-San trying to argue Mingai out of his determination to search the tree in which he was hiding. He recalled Li-San's intervention with Fu-Kong a moment ago that had certainly saved his life— His task was finished— Mingai tightly bound, and a strip from his own tunic jammed none too gently into his mouth.

Before Atkins could voice his questions there was a sudden dull roar which shook the vessel.

"He's getting under way again," Li-San barked. "We've no time to lose."

He plucked Mingai's ray-gun from his belt, thrust it into the American's hand.

"Come on!"

He was flitting silently up the ladder, Atkins, perforce, after him.

THEY were just beneath the rivet-studded trap. Li-San lifted the lid, slowly, till a narrow crack of brighter light showed along its edge. Atkins managed to crush in alongside of him on the narrow step, and together they peered through the slit.

The blue defensive sphere was gone and the attacking ships had vanished. But something else showed in the sky; a long, slim, torpedo-like object that sped straight for the spy ship. From its nose a white light flickered in a rapid series of dots and dashes. Atkins felt an electric quiver of tenseness run through the yellow man against whose body his own was crushed.

A strange pattern formed itself in the American's mind as he crouched there, waiting for he know not what. That oncoming shape had the very form of the rocket-stratocars used by the Silver Eagle. Yet this was no messenger, waylaid as Thomas had been. He had signaled to Fu-Kong. Why had the spy-craft waited here, chancing the fight with the American planes, when it might have been away and gone with only the slightest effort? What was it that glowed from Li-San's eyes, that shook him with an ague of eagerness?

Nearer came the speeding rocket, and nearer still, until it passed out of sight at the lower edge of the view-screen. The larger craft lurched, and lurched again. Fu-Kong thrust at his levers, there was a hiss of rushing air. Then a buzzer shrilled.

"He's picking up the stratocar," Li-San whispered. "Get ready."

"All right, Na-Garri," Fu-Kong called. "The air in the entrance lock is at normal pressure. Open up."

The black bent to a ring in the center of the floor, and pulled on it. A round manhole lid came away. A head appeared, and a squat, broad body followed it. Straight black hair, tiny black eyes almost hidden by high cheekbones, broad flat nose over thick, red lips— this was a Tatar face, a throwback to the Mongol hordes that in the Thirteenth Century ruled half the then-known world by force of arms. From that stocky figure emanated an aura of power, of dominance. Unbounded ambition, lust for power, savage cruelty, were stamped on the round, flaccid countenance.

Li-San clutched Atkins' arm, his fingers sinking into the flesh.

"It's Hung-Chen! Come himself to receive Fu-Kong's reports. Tomorrow the attack."

Atkins understood why the spymaster had been unable to flee. He had had to wait here for his chief— no way to change the course of the stratocar once it had started. The huge black bowed low. The Hindu joined him in humble obeisance. The haughty Fu-Kong came away from his controls, abject servility in every line of his tall body. The Mongol spoke sharply, and there was a rapid exchange in a shrill, high-piping tongue.

"Now!" The snapped word from Li-San galvanized Atkins into action. He thrust upon the hatch, leaped. Clang! The yellow men swung to the sound of the falling trapdoor, saw two apparitions spring into view, ray-guns at the ready.

"Throw up your hands! Up with them!" Atkins' shout drove through the chamber. "Up, or we wipe you out!"

Li-San's eyes were blazing pits of wrath. Na-Garri's simian arms went ceiling-ward, the Hindu's, Hung-Chen's. Fu-Kong ripped out a virulent, "Traitor!" at Li-San and snatched at the cylinder in his belt.

"S-s-s-s-s!"

Blue lightning hissed from Atkins' weapon. A blackened corpse crumpled lowly to the floor.

"Any more?" His voice was thick with fury. But the remaining three stood statuelike.

"We surrender," came the voice of the captured overlord. "Don't flash."

THEIR captives tightly bound, the two— Don Atkins, the American, and Li-San, the Chinese, turned to one another. Atkins' hand went out to the other, then hesitated— drew back. Li-San straightened.

"No," he answered the question in the American's eyes, "I am not a traitor to my own people. Here," his hand tapped his own breast, "there are two loyalties— one to the race among whom I was born, among whom I have lived my life and have my friends, the other to the race of my ancestors. War between them was unthinkable to me."

He glanced down at Hung-Chen, bound and glowering, looked up again, a wistful smile hovering on his saffron face.

"Now there will be no war. I'm sorry I couldn't save the squadron of planes. I had to wait until he arrived, you see. And it was too dangerous before to attempt to capture the ship."

"You joined their rotten gang, risked death and worse, to defeat their plans— to save your own people, and mine, from the horrors of war!" Atkins exclaimed. "By God, Li-San, you are a man!"

Yellow hand and white met and clasped.

"Hey, you fellows," came Bart Thomas' weak voice from the floor. "When you get time you might take three or four of these ropes off me and get me something to wear. You'll get all the handshaking you want when we get back to New York."

_______________

3: The Toss Up

George Allen England

1877-1936

Harper’s Weekly, 4 July 1913

INTO the stagnant heat of the "Bald Eagle," right at the desert's edge— heat that rendered languid even the forced profanity of the poker players and flattened the beverages to tangless poison— fell the mangled stranger, like a bolt from the blue.

Just how he came, or whence, who could tell? A groan, a gasp, a limping shuffle, a creak of the swinging back door, and there he was. A skeleton of a man, brush-bearded, overhung with rags, powdered with dust which had caked on face and neck and clogged his bloodshot eyes—eyes that lagged and blinked, half blind, wholly terrible. Into his matted hair he thrust his fingers; he swayed a moment, then, like an empty gunny-sack, flattened into a chair, fell face down across a table, gasped, "Water!" and thereafter grew very still.

One moment, no response. Then chairs scraped, necks craned, men crowded toward him; and, over all, rose the voice of Buck Dawson:

"Water—hell! Hey, Bo, a slug o' Five-X! Jump!"

But, as Bo Squires, behind the bar, stood rooted, Buck's own paw swiped up a long-necker, slopped four fingers into a fly-specked glass, and (just a second later, as Chato Andrews pulled back the stranger's head) emptied it down the blackened throat. Some of the stuff trickled through the man's beard and drizzled off upon his naked, bony chest.

Gulping, babbling broken odds and ends of speech, the derelict caved again. Two or three in the crowd tried to hold him up, but Chato interfered.

"Aw, drop him, you ring-boned pintos!" he bellowed angrily. "Kain't you-all see as how he's plumb winded? Let him rest, you, ef he 'lects to. Why— look a' thar!"

Staring, he pointed with a horn-like forefinger at the floor beside the stranger's right foot. There, slowly widening, spread a trickle of blackish blood. They saw that the man's boot was all sodden and seepy, with a bullet-hole obliquely through the ankle. His trouser-knees were torn as if from crawling far, far, over rocks and sand. His hands were just one great articulated rawness— nails worn down to the quick, fingers stripped of their skin.

"Scratchin' fer water, where thar wa'n't none!" squeaked the voice of old Pop Hadlock. "What in Tophet has he went ag'in'?"

Chato whipped out a seven-inch blade and slit the cloth, exposing the lip of a ghastly tear in the flesh of the leg high up on the calf— a wound clumsily dressed with a band of shirting that had slipped half off. Something like a communal oath of commiseration escaped the gang.

"An' he ain't bled to death yit?" marveled Dexter, of Tres Picos. "Well, durned ef he ain't got vytality! Reminds me of—"

"Here, Bo! One o' them 'ar towels!" Chato interrupted. A moment later he was kneeling to bind the gap. "Chuck another gargle inta him, some un!" he commanded.

Shorty McGeoch tried to obey; but the stranger, getting a grip on the table-edge, shook his ghastly head. They heard his breath catch. Up came his face, white as a clown's under its mottles of dirt. Still blind-seeming, he bleared around. Then a sort of smile cracked his parchment lips, and he held up one hand as if for silence. Shaking, it fell again, and with it the babel.

"What— what day—?" he whispered. It was hardly even a whisper; yet not a puncher in the Bald Eagle but heard its every syllable. "Boys, what day is—this?"

Blank astonishment; then Chato answered: "Friday. Why?"

The stranger shook his head again. "Three whole days since— I left him," they heard him mutter. Then, louder: "Where am I?"

"Bald Eagle, at Rawlin's."

"Rawlin's? Then I must ha'— went north. Didn't couldn't— tell—" His voice tailed off to nothing, though his lips still moved. McGeoch brought the glass to the mumbling mouth.

The stranger blinked. "No, no!" he objected. "Water—that's all!"

"Git him some— ef you-all kin find any!" cried Chato. "No 'countin' fer tastes. Humor him, kain't you?" With wolf-eagerness the derelict guzzled the lukewarm slop that Squires shoved across the bar to McGeoch.

"An' a riata," he continued haltingly. "A—? What fer?"

"Why, to string—me!"

"String you?" Dexter's voice was the only one that audibly gave vent to the universal stupefaction.

"Bug-house?" judged Dawson, behind his palm, to Shorty. The stranger, blinking, trying to lick his lips with a tongue all swollen and cracked, coughed:

"A riata! Yes, that's what— I said. Reckon that's what I— lived t' git here— for!"

IT must have been a full minute by the tin alarmclock back of the bar before anybody moved or tried to speak. Down dropped the stranger's head again. He lay there motionless, wheezing slowly, his hands still gripping the table.

Round him the cow-men ringed themselves, staring blankly. Chato rubbed the blunt nose that had given him his Greaser nickname. Pop Hadlock twitched his long mustachios. Shorty leaned an elbow on the table, and, his left hand on his cartridge-belted hip, bored at the man point-blank with eager eyes. The others, each in his own way, tried to digest that astonishing pronunciamento.

Then out of the stillness rose Squires' judgment:

"I've seed 'em took 'most every way, by Judas Priest! but this sort o' bug has got me skun!" And on his hard, close-cropped skull his knuckles tapped out his opinion. The stranger roused again. Into his fore spent body the Five-X had whipped a little life.

"No, not buggy," he thickly articulated. "I ain't that, not by a million miles. Know what I'm asayin'. It's right, too. Strung I'd oughta be, an' must be— what's left o' me to string. Huh? Don't you git me lucid? With a boss-rustler plumb virtuous beside o' me? Listen!"

THEY listened, hushed into tension. But for a time the stranger brought no words to utterance. He just sat there at the table, swinging a little from side to side, hands holding fast, eyes blearing. The blood-pool at his foot clotted and crusted. His face, beneath the beard and dirt, had gone the color of soggy pie-crust. Pop Hadlock made as if to stir him in the ribs, but Chato stayed the old man's hand.

"Cut that!" he warned. "Kain't you-all let him tell it the way he 'lects to? We'll git it soon enough! An'—"

Breaking the silence where one heard only the deep breathing of the punchers and the tick-tack of the impertinent clock, the stranger blurted in a raw, hasty, inhuman voice:

"There was him an' me. Just us two— savvy? Jackman. That was him. I'm Ryerson. Sam Ryerson— yes, sir. Sam K."

A sort of wondering murmur hummed into audibility. Two or three of the men glanced at one another. And Buck Dawson, peering into the stranger's face, let his list drop upon the table with a half-breathed imprecation.

"Sam K. Ryerson," the wounded man went on. "An' I ain't a-goin' to let nobody tie my laig up, nohow. Hell! What 'd be the use, when I'm done through with her? Sam K. I reckon you-all have heard o' me, down here south o' the Gila. Mebbe some o' you have even seen me, though you wouldn't noways place me now. No matter." He lapsed.

"Go on!" growled Buck.

"Huh?"

"How in hell 'd you ever git here, hey?"

"Oh, that? Say, I dropped the faro a spell back. All along o'— Jackman. Him an' me squared it an' took up with prospectin'. Got it? Lost! Burned, cooked, frizzled! An' starved! An' no water! Only them damn mirages— you savvy— lakes an' such, here an' there an' nowhere. An' turkey-buzzards, leetle specks of 'em, miles high, jest a-waitin', waitin'.

"Down on his knees— savvy? Clawin' at the hard bed o' the dry creek, rippin' his nails off. Tongue lollin' like a bust-winded cayuse, an' one hand jest a-goin' fer to grab one o' them little brown lizards out from behind a rock, 'cause, you see, we hadn't had one damn bite fer— oh, fer weeks, I reckon. " 'O you liz! Come yere, you little son-of-agun! I need you!' barks Jackman, an' snatches. But liz, she ain't there. Then I—"

DAWSON laid a hand on the bowed shoulders. "See here, pard," said he, " 'pears like there's a gap in your fences, an' your thoughts is some stampeded. Round 'em up, now, an' let's have it straight!"

The ex-gambler kept a moment's silence, blinking, while his mouth twisted into a dumb grin. Then, at last—

"Prospectin' with Jackman," he wheezed. "Say, where was I, boys?"

"Huntin' water," prompted McGeoch. "Cut that all out. Cut out lizards an' et cet. We know. Give us what happened. How you-all got that bum shaft."

He pointed at the wounded leg. "An' Jackman, where he is!"

"Jackman— oh!" gulped the wreck. Then silence again. "Must ha' crawled here, I reckon," he opined, brightening. This tangible reality cheered and steadied him. "Why, yes, sure!" he affirmed. "I sure did crawl. But that must ha' been after I went fer to shoot Tamale an' hit myself. 'Cause, you see—"

McGeoch shook him impatiently, despite Chato's growling prohibition.

"Say, can't you stick to it, pard?" he queried peevishly. "Here—take this!" And he proffered the glass. This time the gambler accepted it eagerly.

"Why, I am a-keepin' to it," he protested. "Tamale, that's the burro, see? Well, after me an' her leaves Jackman— leaves him a-settin' in the sand, you savvy— an' strikes out— 'cause, you see, Tamale can't carry us both—

"We gits lost, Tamale an' me does," he went on, after a pause. "Lost entire. Pretty soon I can't stand it no longer. I 'lights, an' pulls my gun.

" 'Now, Tamale,' says I, 'you got blood in you, an' I'm a-goin' to have some. It's wet, anyhow.'

"So I shoots. But things is rip-rarin' so, round an' round like, that— damn me if I don't plug my own self plumb through the ankle. Ain't that a joke, hey?"

He cackled into a laugh.

"I goes fer to hit Tamale, an' hits my own self!

"Well," he went on in a dead voice, with singsong intonations, "well, after that, I passes away some consid'able. Next thing, there's that she-devil of a burro rippin' away at my laig with her yaller teeth, suckin' my blood. I has to plunk her five times— five, that's right— afore I drops her. Now, ain't that a—"

"What happened?" insisted McGeoch, voicing the universal eagerness, while Pop swore under his breath.

"We-all ain't pinin' fer no news about burros—no, nor yet lizards or sich. It's you an' this yere Jackman we wants to hear about. Savvy that? How come you to git the critter, an' not him?"

THE ex-crook appeared to think for a moment, holding himself intent.

"Him?" he cried thickly. A faint flush oozed through his pasty skin. "Ho, ain't I told you that yit? Well, say! An' that's what I come fer! What— I—come— fer!"

The assembled punchers elbowed closer. "There was Jackman down on his knees," recommenced the wreck, "an' here was a little brown lizard, back of a stone, so-fashion. Well— oh, say, I done told you that a'ready, didn't I? Excuse me, pards. After that, y' see, Jackman says to me, says he—

" 'Sam,' says he, 'it ain't no use. We're done fer if we hangs together. But one of us might git away. One.'

"That's what he says, damned if he don't! An' I could prove it, too, if he was here, which he ain't. Well—"

"Yes, yes?"

"Well, then, so we talks things over, settin' in the alkali, an' agrees to split. One of us to take Tamale, you savvy. An' one of us, by that there same agreement, knows he got fer to cash in. Yes, sir; got fer to croak— pantin', tongue bloatin' out, skull crackin', brains oozin' out— same as 'most always happens when the desert gits a man— youall knows!

"Well, then, which one is it a-goin' to be? That there's the question.

" 'You go, Sam,' says he to me. 'You're younger 'n what I be. Ten year, mebbe more. Take the devil an' pull your freight,' says he. 'I'll stay.'

" 'No,' says I. 'No. We-all can't settle it that-away. This yere has got to be done proper an' decent— done right,' says I. Yet, all that time, you savvy—well, wait. You'll see why I ast fer that there riata. Listen!"

"We're a-listenin'!"

"Keep right on. 'This yere has got to be done right,' says I. So I takes a quarter out o' my pocket. A quarter, you savvy? One what I'd had a long, long time. You bet I had!

" 'Flip fer it?' says I. "Jackman, he nods.

" 'First go, or two out o' three?'

" 'Two out o' three,' says he. "He's lookin' almighty bad, Jackman is, an' he's tremblin' when he says that.

" 'You toss an' I'll holler,' says I, an' hands him the quarter. He flips her with his thumb, O.K.

"Up she spins, flickerin' in the sun, an' down she spuds into the sand.

" 'Heads,' says I, an' so it was. Jackman, he smiles kind of, an' pitches ag'in.

" 'Tails!' I calls her, an' loses. Oh, yes, I loses that time, all right enough. You'll see.

" 'Well, anyway, this time settles it,' says Jackman, his mouth a-workin' so he can't hardly make no sound at all, but game, game! Well, then—"

THE voice of the narrator died down to nothing. Chato and Pop Hadlock spilled another drink into him, unresisting, and after a little while he went along:

"There was a little brown lizard, you savvy. Both of us tried fer t' ketch him, but—" But the old man interrupted with:

"Say, drap that varmint, you, an' give us the third toss-up, kain't ye?"

"Oh, say, I told you that already, didn't I, 'bout that there pestiferous reptile? Excuse me, boys. Where was I? Tossin' up—that's it. Well, then, Jackman spins her the third time, an' down she comes.

" 'Heads!' says I." The stranger stopped short. All about him, the silence became lethal. Squires burst out:

"An' it was?"

"Why, fer sure! Why wouldn't it be? Heads it was, all right, all right. So then me an' Tamale hiked. Jackman, he set still."

A long pause. Then spoke McGeoch:

"Well, boys, that was sure rough. Rough it was, but sich like kain't always be helped in these yere parts. Our friend here seems to be a-sufferin' from a case of inflamed conscience. I think he done acted plumb justifiable, an' I motions we-all exonerates him. Anybody differ?"

Up tottered the wounded man. By the table he stood, his lips writhen into a sardonic laugh, his eyes glazed and wide.

"Turkey-buzzards," he creaked. "Pickin' an'— pickin' away. An'— here's what— done— it!" Into his pocket he fumbled a palsied hand, swaying the while. Out he fetched a coin. "Look, you-all!" he shouted, as if with a last gush of breath; and flung the coin so high that it clicked against the ceiling-poles.

THEN he fell, knocking the table over. The glass spangled into slivers. In the hubbub, some one clapped a foot down on the gyrating coin and it spiraled over the floor. And, even before McGeoch and Chato had lifted the body, a cry went up:

"Gawd's sake! Look! Look a' yere!"

On to the bar, close beside where they had laid the ex-gambler, Hadlock slapped the quarter.

"Heads?" queried Squires. He turned it over. "Heads ag'in! Heads! Both sides!" Then, through the sudden hush, Chato gave judgment.

"Boys," said he, laying his ear against the derelict's chest and holding up a significant hand. "Boys, I reckon as how this yere deceased has saved us a power o' hard rope-pullin', after all!"

________________

4: When Time Turned

Ethel Watts Mumford

1873-1940

The Black Cat, Jan 1901

I DROPPED in at my friend Dr. Lamison's rooms, for I had been dull and bored all day, and Lamison, partly by reason of his profession, partly because of his own odd humor and keen insight, is a delightful companion. To my disgust he was not alone, but deep in an animated discussion with an elderly gentleman of pleasant appearance. Being in no mood to talk to strangers I was about to make my excuses and retire, but Lamison signed to me to remain.

"Let me present my friend Robertson, Mr. Gage," he said politely, as we both bowed with due formality.

"Robertson," he continued, addressing me, "you will be interested in what this gentleman has to say on the Philippines— he has spent some years out there."

Mr. Gage smiled reminiscently. "Yes, I spent some little time in the Islands. In fact, I am just on the point of going there now, and am very sorry I shall not see them again."

"What?'' I asked. "If you're going, why do you say you will never see the place again?"

Lamison broke in abruptly. "That is a long story. Let's go on with the question we had in hand. You were saying that the Malays are singularly srhrewd and cunning."

Mr. Gage brightened visibly. "They are, indeed. Now, when I was in Manila,"— and he launched into a highly instructive lecture on the Malay and all his works, talking rapidly aud tersely; his phrases full of vigor and originality, his descriptions vivid and picturesque ; in fact, it has rarely been my good fortune to listen to so brilliant a conversationalist— though conversation it could hardly be called, for by common consent he had the floor to himself.

Occasionally I asked a question, or Lamison punctuated the discourse with nods of approval as he flicked his cigar ashes on the floor.

From the Philippines we wandered to the Chinese empire and its destiny. Gage had spent two years in Tientsin and Hong Kong and was as well informed and interesting as man could be. His observation was phenomehal, and his memory likewise, and he had a way of presenting his facts that was positively evocative. I felt, after listeni ng to him, that the recollections were my own, so distinctly did he force his mental pictures into my consciousness. He was eminently moderate in all his views, avoiding extremes and holding a mean of charity and common sense that is, to say the least, unusual.

A flash of lightning that stared suddenly through the windows, and was followed by a terrific thunder clap, made us start and pause. Mr. Gage arose and, going to the window, looked out into the murky night, remarking as he did so on the suddenness and violence of storms in the tropics. I seized the occasion to nod to Lamison.

"What a brilliant chap," I said. "I never heard a man express himself so well and sanely— who is he, anyway?"

"A gentleman and a scholar, also my guest for the present," my host answered. "So you think him well balanced?"

"Eminently so," I said heartily. " Not many men could state the facts of an international feud with such moderation."

Dr. Lamison smiled a strange, grave smile. Our companion came back from the window whereon the heavy wash of the rain was now playing, and refilled his glass from the pitcher of shandygaff.

"So you are just on the point of making your first trip to the East?" Lamison asked, to my unutterable amazement. Gage nodded.

"Yes. In a few days I shall have decided."

I looked blankly at him.

"Then I suppose you will have your quarrel with the family by next week?" my friend went on. Gage sighed deeply. "Yes, I shall have to go through with it again. Fortunately the worst stages come fhst, and I have been feeling the after effects for some days already."

Lamison looked at my confusion with amusement.

"Tell Robertson about it all, old man," he said. "He is perfectly trustworthy, and yours is such an interesting story. To begin with, tell him how old you are."

Gage laughed, a quick boyish chuckle, and sprang up gaily, stretching himself before the sparkling fire.

"Just three and twenty," he answered hilariously.

I looked at him carefully. His iron-gray hair, the infinitesimal tracery of lines that covered his face and hands like a fine-spun web, and the slight stiffness of his joints, in spite of his quick and rather graceful movements, bespoke a man in the later fifties. I understood now. He was doubtless one of the curious cases of mania which the doctor was constantly picking up and studying.

"Tell him how it happened," Lamison suggested.

Gage's face grew grave. "It's very sad, part of it— but on the whole I have been blest above all men, for I have lived my life twice over. It was this way"—  he sat down once more in the easy chair from which he had risen. "I was devotedly fond of my wife— one of the most charming women in the world, Mr. Robertson; but I lost her. She died, very suddenly, under singularly painful circumstances."

His mouth twitched, but he controlled himself.

"I was away on business in Washington when the news of her sudden illness reached me. I waited for nothing, but left by the first train. I remember giving ten dollars to the driver of the cab I hailed on my arrival, if he would reach my house in ten minutes. Aside from that the journey is only a blur of strain and horror. My memory becomes clear again with the moment when I saw my doorstep, wet and shining in the rain. I noted the reflected carriage lamp on the streaming pavement. The servant who opened the door at the sound of the stopping of my cab was crying. The house was brilliantly lit and I could hear hurried footsteps on the floor above and catch a glimpse of the blue-clad figure of a trained nurse. I rushed upstairs and into my wife's room. She raised one hand feebly toward me, and a flash of recognition lit up her face for an instant and then faded into waxen blankness. I can't describe that hour— it is too keenly terrible for me to repeat and it is not necessary to the story. At last it was all over, and her dear eyes closed forever, as I thought then. A great emptiness settled upon my brain and heart. Then came a slow tightening and straining sensation somewhere inside the dome of my skull, that seemed as fast as St. Peter's. A snap, sharp as a broken banjo string and perfectly audible, was its climax. Then I steadied myself and looked about. Nothing had changed. The room was still, for the others had gone n.nd we were left alone together— my wife and I. The silence was awful. Only the clock ticked louder and louder and louder till it beat like a drum. Then I glanced at the timepiece, an ordinary little porcelain thing that my wife kept by her on the medicine table, and a cold fear gripped me as I looked, for I realized that something wonderful and terrible was happening. With each tick the second hand jerked one second backwards— the hands were moving around the clock face from right to left. I started, and almost at the same instant I felt the hand I held in mine grow relaxed and warm. I gave a cry. The door opened. The nurse, who had been the last to leave the chamber of death, came in. I saw her do exactly what she had done before— but reversed. Then my sister backed in from the opposite side, exactly as she had walked out, and turning, showed me her tear-stained, convulsed face with the very movement with which she had left us. The others came in; it was a strange phenomenon. The doctor was there now, standing at the head of the bed. I looked a.t the clock. It was ticking and the hands slowly turning backwards. All at once I realized what had happened. Time had turned.

"I gasped when the thing dawned on me, it was so stupendous. But I saw my sweet wife's eyelids flutter, I saw her breath coming with difficulty, and I suffered once more with all my soul that terrible death agony. She turned toward me and lifted her hand with the gesture I had seen as I entered the room. In spite of myself I rose, and left her. I went down the stairs— the servant was there— I passed out into the street, to find the cab that had brought me standing before the door. I backed in. The horse trotted backward all the way to the station and I found myself on the train speeding backwards to the city I had left to come post haste to my darling's bedside.

"My reason shivered in my skull. If I could not sift this matter I knew I should go mad. The thing was strange past all endurance. So I sat in the train that was carrying me over the miles so recently covered, and considered. A dawn of delight came to me. It wou hl not be so long before all this horror would have doubly passed. I would have to go to the hotel and receive that terrifying, crushing telegram announcing Isabelle's illness once more. Then I should go over the business that had called me on to Washington, but after that I should go back to my wife to find her strong and well, to live over again the happy years of our married life, to watch her growing daily younger, while I grew young with her. What matter that little tiffs re-occurred— they were so few, and the joy of those years so infinitely great. And that, Mr. Robertson, is just what happened."

He went on, after a pause, in which he seemed lost in happy reverie.

"In a week I had grown somewhat accustomed to doing over again the things I had done, only reversed; it seemed almost a matter of course; and, after all, I cared little, for I knew I was soon going to find Isabelle, to be greeted by her good-bye kiss, the same with which she had bid me Godspeed on the fatal journey. I could hardly hold my impatience as, at last, I backed up to the house, and when I saw her standing on the porch as I had had last seen her, well and strong, dressed in the pretty gray cloth so becoming to her bright complexion and copper-colored hair, I could have cried with joy. She greeted me as I expected, with good-byes, but my heart sang with delight as we went into the house together. I put down my dress-suit case, and we ate luncheon together, beginning with dessert and ending with the delicate omelette she had prepared herself, in honor of my unusual freedom to lunch with her. We went over our old conversations. I was longing to tell her of my delight in her presence, of my gratitude for the extraordinary reversal of nature that gave her back to me, but I could not, I was under bondage of the past. I could only say what I had said, do what I had done.

" Luncheon over— or rather, correctly speaking, before it had begun— I bade her good-bye in my heart, but greeted her in my speech and went down to the treadmill round of my office work. My recent bereavement made me so tender of her presence, so hungry for the sight of her that my very soul longed to expand itself in loving words and acts; I yearned to do and say a thousand affectionate things, but I could only do as I had done. I began to appreciate how I had let our relations become commonplace, and I hated myself for it. I saw a thousand ways in which I could have made her happier, or spared her pain, yet I could not take advantage of my new realization of my love of her. Ah, it takes such an experience as mine to make a man understand what he has missed and what he might have been. But even if I could not lie to her what I so dearly longed to show myself, yet in my heart no gesture of hers went unnoted, no tone of her voice unloved. She delighted me wholly and completely, and the caresses that I gave her in seeming perfunctoriness, and the words seemingly mere habits of expression, were really the outlet of my soul's yearning to her. We were very happy. For years we were constantly together, and never was wife so appreciated. Then a great fear began to grip my heart. I remember it came suddenly, in the very midst of the little feast we were having to celebrate the first year of our wedded life— our first anniversary. I realized that soon, in the very joy of our honeymoon I must anticipate our separation— the wedding would take place, next we would be engaged, then mere acquaintances, and after that— oh, desolation— it would be before I met her, and I should never see her again. "I lived that year, our second honeymoon, and the last of our life together, torn between the joy of my returned happiness and the terrible knowledge of my coming loss. The wedding day came and I could have cried out in my agony, but I could give my pain no voice. I had no tears, only smiles aud laughter that must be gone through with, though my heart was breaking. Imagine it if you can, sirs. Was ever a man so tried? Then came the period of our engagement, when I knew we were drifting slowly and surely apart -and the happiness and misery of that time was, perhaps, the hardest of all to bear, even worse than the actual slow separation, though after my declaration, when our relations were formal and distant, it broke my heart to see her, whom I had loved so long, treat me as a mere acquaintance ; and with it was the awful knowledge that there was no future hope, no possibility of our meeting, on this earth at least. The poignant day of my first meeting with her arrived at last. I saw her, as I had seen her then, so many years before, lighting that conventional ballroom with her presence, a radiant vision, all gold and rose, her tall, graceful figure gowned in soft, filmy drapery. I saw her with all my heart and soul, with all the pent-up memories of my twice lived life, for I remembered it was the first, and knew it was the last time I should see her. She vanished and I was left alone. For some time afterwards, although I was living over my cheerful, happy-go-lucky bachelor days, I was internally of a suicidal turn of mind, even on my return journeys in the East. I could not resign myself to losing this girl that, according to reversed time, I had never met. But youth is gay, and its recuperative powers strong, and I am growing steadily younger, you see. Then, too, other loves came and went, or rather went and came, and in spite of myself I am able to contemplate my double past with the buoyancy of my second youth. Yet it is all very strange, and recently unaccountable intervals have intruded into my life, such as this evening, for instance. You, gentlemen, are not a part of my boyish past, and yet you seem to be interpolated into my otherwise coherently backward existence. This has been happening for some time, and grows more marked. You I may be dreams of my old life that I had forgotten, but I am at a loss to account for it fully. For instance— how could I have foretold then what the future had in store? and yet in one sense that is what I am doing now, in telling you my experience. You must admit that it is confusing."

Gage's story had fairly made me dizzy. I admitted that it was confusing. I hardly knew what to think. I even turned an anxious eye on the clock over the fireplace to assure myself that its bands still moved from left to right. As I faced it, Lamison regarded me with his amused but sympathetic eye.

"I hope to interpolate myself a great deal into your world, Gage," he said. " It's time you stopped in your mad career of growing younger. I don't want you on my hands when you become a troublesome stripling, or even when you have to unlearn your college education."

Gage laughed.

"It will be rather hard, but I did enjoy my Harvard days, before I had that row with the family. Whew! How the old man did blow me up! And when I think I have to hear all that over again, it makes me sick."

He paused again, and assisted his courage from the cheering pitcher.

"Another thing that worries me," he went on, "is this: Have you noticed that, although all the happenings of my life seem to follow in well ordered reverse sequence, what I say does not? For instance, by all rights I should repeat my sentences verbatim backwards. 'I am glad to see you,' in reversed language would be, 'You see to glad am I.' Now, in all my years of reversed experiences, although the order of conversation progresses backwards, the sentences themselves make perfect forward sense. This wives me to distraction."

The whole impossible proposition danced before me, but Lamison was evidently delighted.

"Good! Gage, splendid! You are making progress— your logic is returning. I am unspeakably glad."

Gage looked at him wonderingly.

"Why should you? It is only more confusing. Ah, well, I should not be unhappy if it were not for the awful prospect of being a baby again. That revolts me, like becoming senile. It is such a horrible thing to become a squirming, senseless infant— it makes me shiver, it keeps me from sleeping, it is a menace too ugly and loathsome to be endured. Fancy it, gentlemen, the ignominy of it— the hideous helplessness."

"We'll find a way to prevent that," Lamison said soothingly. "You are better already. It won't be long before we set it all straight. Come, come, be a man—" for Gage suddenly flung himself on the table, his face buried in his hands, moaning slowly, "I don't want to be a baby— I don't want to be a baby."

This exhibition was so pitiful that I turned to Lamison, almost with tears in my eyes.

"Is there any hope for him?" I asked.

Lamison nodded.

"Yes, he'll pull through. A condition brought on by overwork and the sudden death of his wife, of whom he was devotedly fond. You see how he is beginning to realize the discrepancies in his imaginary life. He will come out all right— in time."

Gage now had himself under control and sat up shamefacedly.

"Don't mind me, Mr. Robertson," he said. "I don't often break down this way, and I wouldn't have you imagine for one instant that I regret my life. I could not have asked a greater boon of Fate than those happy years restored to me, when time had turned."

He rose gravely, excused himself and left us, and we sat silent and deeply thoughtful, staring into the red embers of the fire.

_______________

5: The Great White Serpent of the Malorli

Alexander Ricketts

1867-1928

The Black Cat, December 1902

Ricketts is one of those authors who flourished very briefly, writing a small number of stories in a short period (1898-1905, more or less) before abandoning the field.  He was a lawyer who was born, lived and died in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

THE wedding ceremony was over, and Harding had congratulated the bride and groom in the calm, conventional manner. As he turned to go, he stood for a long moment in the doorway, gazing back on them with an inscrutable look. Then he went out into the night. All that night he tramped the streets with restless energy, but the morning found him leaning upon the rail of a liner, staring blankly at the shores of the bay as they glided by, and if any one had been rash enough to tell him that when he next saw them a wife would be standing at his side, he would have revelled in throwing his informant overboard.

And that was the last his friends saw of him for years.

Forgetting is a hard job for a man like Harding, but even he found, as time went by, that the memory of the girl he loved did not sting him so often or sharply, and the restless desire for change— any change, so long as it was a change— which had driven him hither and thither all over Europe and most of Asia, and plunged him recklessly into any adventure which suggested itself, did not lash him on so relentlessly. Instead, there came a time when any action became an effort, a time when all he sought was quiescence of mind and body.

He was not gloomy or misanthropic. He had never been either; but the fierce fires of his longing for her who had given herself to another were at last under his control, and he felt the reaction from the turmoil as a strong man does after strenuous conflict.

In this mood he turned his steps to North Africa.

On a prior visit fate had put it in his way to do a favor to the sheik of one of the desert tribes, and he now recalled the frank invitation to be his guest for as long as he would. With considerable difficulty Harding located the sheik, and at considerable danger joined him.

The tribesmen do not forget, and his welcome was undoubted. The life contented him. The dignified courtesy of the men, never intruding but always  cordially ready to companion him, the slow, infrequent speech, the long, thoughtful silences, all soothed his distracted spirit, and in aimless roving, either with the sheik's tribe or with others akin to it, he passed many year in the Desert.

The weird tales of the story-tellers, told in the flickering light of the camp-fire while the steady stars shone above them with the strong, full light of the desert nights, and all around stretched the vast reaches of barren sand, fascinated him. Particularly one it was hardly a story, simply a collection of rumors and guesses woven into a narrative— about the Great White Serpent of the Malorli interested him.

It was to the effect that somewhere in the forest on the further side of the Great Desert dwelt a tribe of serpent worshippers. The object of their adoration was a monstrous snake, pure white, and of prehistoric size. This god was fed upon human sacrifices, but refused all not white like itself. The worshippers being negroes of quite phenomenal blackness were therefore compelled to kidnap the sacrifices where they might.

Diligent inquiry convinced Harding that the tale had this much foundation. There was not a tribe among the desert rovers that had not for many, many years mysteriously lost a member. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes, a woman, but the lost was always youthful and always gone without a trace except that the following morning in the midst of the camp would be found a crudely carved ivory snake. Pursuit was invariably futile.

Again Harding's mood changed. He began to long for something different. What it should be he didn't care. Civilization did not attract him, but the aimless life he was living no longer satisfied him. Then it was that this fascinating story fastened upon his imagination, and he resolved to investigate it.

Upon making his determination known, the old sheik tried to dissuade him. Then he offered to accompany Harding, himself and his young men. This Harding refused, saying, with a smile,

"No, no, Sheik llderim; one man can go in a quest like this where two cannot. I go alone, and if I stay, there are few to mourn me."

"Then may Allah be with you, my son,'' replied Sheik Ilderim, stroking his beard sadly, but too courteous to offer further opposition to his guest. "If go you will, we will take you to the farthest oasis; there you shall take the two fleetest camels, for perchance if you fail to reach the forest on the first you can return on the second, and there, if you return not for ten years, you will always find some of us awaiting to welcome or succor you, and may Allah guide your camel. Allah is Allah!"

A month later amid the lamentations of the tribe Harding set out from the oasis. He travelled light, for he knew that speed was of the utmost importance. He carried a rifle, revolver and knife, but he knew that if strategy would not gain the goal he sought force could not. His precious store of parched grain and dried dates, with a water-skin, were loaded on the led-camel, the other—  they were both the pick of the herd— bore himself.

He travelled by night, shielding himself as best he could from the insupportable rays of the sun in the daytime, and urging his camels to their best speed.

Still, when at length the one he rode sank down dying, he could see nothing in all the world but the waste of desolate sand measuring away in all directions illimitably. But he had no thought of turning back. Lightening himself of the rifle, he mounted the spare camel, with no weapons but his revolver, a handful of extra cartridges and his knife, and pushed on.

Another night's travel, and another, and in the middle of the third his second camel fell beneath him with a gasp almost human. Slowly Harding scanned the horizon. Nothing but barren sand met his questioning gaze. Throwing away his revolver and cartridges, hesitating a moment over his knife, but deciding to retain that, he stuffed a handful of dates into his pocket, drained the last drops of water and pushed out on foot into the desert.

On and on he plodded, his mind set only on never giving up until he had reached the farthest point possible to human endurance. The sun came up and found him doggedly stumbling on. Suddenly he stopped, shaded his eyes with his hands for a minute, and gave a hoarse cry of wonder.

There, bearing directly down upon him was a group of perhaps a dozen camels, but they were of a size and strength and speed such as he had never seen, and leading them rose three repulsive negroes, black as glistening coal.

The next moment he was surrounded, and with lightning-like swiftness bound and laid in a covered litter slung between two of the camels. Then the whole party, turning directly back, bore him swiftly away, retracing its tracks; but in all of it, to his utter amazement, he was handled with the gentlest care.

A long day's journey brought them to the edge of a vast forest. There he was transferred to another party of negroes more repulsive, if that were possible, than his captors, and at once a march was begun into the forest.

Up to this time not a word had been spoken, but now he was surprised to find his guards quite ready to talk with him. Their speech was a sort of mongrel Arabic which he had little difficulty in comprehending, and they eagerly assured him that no harm was intended him, but upon the object of his capture they maintained a stolid silence. And all their actions bore out their assurances. Indeed, he was not only treated kindly, but with a deference and consideration which caused him the most gruesome anticipations.

For five days they marched steadily, deeper and deeper into the forest. On the sixth they reached a little village on the edge of a small lake, and the whole populace gave itself up immediately to feasting and rejoicing over their arrival. As the villagers thronged around him, Harding became quite uncomfortable over his prominence in the holiday, especially when the maidens openly admired his complexion and figure, and more so as the haunting suspicion never left him that it was due entirely to his being destined as the next sacrifice to the Great White Serpent, if that storied reptile really existed.  With a steadily sinking heart he reflected that he could only await developments, escape being clearly impossible, although he was allowed to go unbound.

A day and a night they rested in the village. The next, after elaborate and evidently ceremonial bathing in the lake, the party donned white robes, putting one also on Harding, and set forth along a well-used road leading from the village. An hour's walk brought them to a mighty river. Both its banks for a long distance up and down were  crowded with waiting negroes, maintaining a solemn silence, but what instantly riveted Harding's attention was a small island directly in the centre of the stream. It was covered, until in many places the water lapped the walls, with a circular stone structure some fifty feet high, and pierced here and there by gateways with pointed arches.

The arrival of the party was greeted with loud acclaim by the multitudes thronging the banks of the river, and as they marched through to a barge awaiting them, the cries of joy and welcome sounded like a death knell in Harding's ears, for he grimly suspected that he himself had little occasion to feel joyous. They were met at the largest gateway of the stone structure by a number of men robed in white also, and conducted into a lofty and spacious hall.

Harding's eyes rapidly swept the room in hopes some way of escape might appear, but as they scanned the lower end of it he felt his knees tremble beneath him, and the hand of fear upon his throat. The next second, however, he recovered himself, and, outwardly calm, gazed upon the most horrible sight he had ever had to face.

It was no mere story-teller's myth. There, coiled fold upon fold, was an enormous snake. It was a glistening, phosphorescent white, except where its heavy-lidded eyes shone like lifeless rubies, and it seemed to Harding that all the. hall was filled with a dull and sickly radiance shimmering from its coils. He could not guess what its length might be, but at the thickest its body was certainly as big around as a barrel. Around and around in a great circle in front of it swung the priests, their white robes swinging and swaying with their motions, chanting as they danced a dirge-like melody that sent the chills creeping up and down Harding's spine and stiffened the hairs upon the back of his neck. Faster and faster they circled, now contracting their ring, now expanding it, weaving and whirling, swaying and swinging, until Harding grew dizzy watching them.

Then, with a thunderous triumphant shout, they stopped, forming the two sides of a lane straight from Harding to the serpent. And then he rubbed his eyes in sheer bewilderment, forgetting his awful peril. For, from amongst the folds of the coiled serpent, lightly sprang a maiden so radiant in her pure loveliness that his heart stood still as she slowly and bashfully advanced up the lane between the silent priests, and stood blushing before him, but with her glorious eyes fixed confidently upon his, and her hands outstretched trustingly for his in a mute appeal. She was irresistible.

Harding gathered her hands firmly in his, and hardly knowing what he was doing, drew her closer and closer to him until his lips reverently touched her forehead. At this the priests burst into joyous acclaim, and from their midst came the oldest, who laid his hands upon their heads, saying, "Man and wife ye now are." Then, turning to the assembled priests, he cried, "Behold, O  Slaves of the Serpent, behold ye the Children of the Serpent! Let all worship and care for them as ye would the seed of the Great White Serpent shall not die."

They were then taken to the roof of the building and shown to the crowds outside with the same words, and from that multitude instantly rose shout after shout of joy and thanksgiving. From there they were conducted to another part of the building, separated from the Hall of the Serpent by heavy wooden doors, and left alone. Harding looked long upon the wife he had so unexpectedly married, and drew a long breath.

"We-ell," he said. "Well, this being food for a snake isn't so awful after all. Come here, little one."

With a glad little cry, the girl, who had been standing before him demurely waiting his pleasure. sprang to his side and clasped her hands upon his arm.

"You are content?" she asked, anxiously exploring his eyes.

"Content?" laughed Harding, putting his arms fondly around her. "More than that. I never expected to be so happy in my life. But what does it all mean? I thought I was to be fed to his Royal Snakeship as a particularly dainty tidbit."

Then Haidee, his wife, told him of the cult of the Serpent. The Great White Serpent was old, so old that no one knew when its worship had begun. Within the memory of the oldest priest, and of his father, and of his father before him, it had always lived in the temple; it on one side, and those known as its Children on the other, cared for and waited on by its slaves, the negroes. Six times in the year was it fed with a pure white bullock without spot or blemish. Then for days it lay torpid and motionless, and none dared intrude upon it. At other times it came and went up or down the river, a stream from which swept across the end of the Hall of the Serpent through doors made for that purpose, as it chose, but always it returned for the feeding. But, at intervals, it was fed upon human sacrifices. Harding shuddered, and drew Haidee c loser to him, questioning her eagerly. Yes, the Children of the Serpent were the sacrifices. If it were not so, the Slaves of the Serpent would perish miserably from the earth. When a child came to the Children of the Serpent it was taken from them, and carefully reared by a woman selected from all those who were Slaves of the Serpent. Then, when it was seen that it would live, was the time of the sacrifice, and both parents, instead of the bullock, were sacrificed to the Serpent. And when the child had grown to a marriageable age, the Desert Men were sent out on their strong and swift camels to find a mate for it, for they must both be white, nor did they ever fail to bring one, even as he himself had been brought. So the line of the Children of the Serpent never died, nor did the Great White Serpent ever lack its human sacrifices. But if there was no child?

No, Haidee did not know what then. It had never happened. Probably the Children of the Serpent would be sacrificed just the same, and the Desert Men would be sent out for both a man and a woman. She did not know, and why seek trouble? There was always a child.

During the days that followed, in all his happiness in Haidee, Harding's mind was ever busy planning their escape. He would not accept the dreadful fate which overhung them, with Haidee's fatalism, as inevitable, and it was a continual spur to his ingenuity, but without success. He learned that the priests who had crowded the Hall of the Serpent on the day of his arrival were also the chiefs of the villages scattered throughout the forest, and from their number he could easily see that for him and Haidee to traverse it without being discovered was an impossibility.

Escape by land was out of the question. But there was the river at their very door. If only they could float down that undiscovered it must take them to the sea, and whatever their fate then it must be less horrible than the one awaiting them. He had plenty of time and materials to construct a raft, for no one ever ventured to come to the temple unless they signalled for them to bring food, except upon the days of worship.

But the fishermen on the river, and the women and children always on its banks made such a scheme impossible in the daytime, and a quiet investigation showed Harding that, no matter how free they seemed to be, a close guard was kept upon every exit from the temple at night.

Almost he lost hope. One of his pleasures during all this time was in weaning his wife away from her superstitious worship of the Serpent. Brought up to reverence it as a god, as she of course had been, it was long before his patient teaching of higher and better things prevailed, nor could she ever look upon it with the utter abhorrence which filled his soul at the bare thought of it. Still, she did come, helped doubtless by her great love for him, to think of it as a mere reptile. Nor did she shudder any longer at the sacrilege when Harding, in his moments of despair, declared that before they should become its victims he would kill it, and endure whatever punishment the infuriated savages might inflict.

Twice had Harding been forced to witness the sacrifice of the white bullock to the Great White Serpent. Each time the sight of the slimy folds slowly crushing the living, screaming animal into a shapeless mass of broken bones and quivering flesh, the careful moistening of it with fetid saliva, and the deliberate deglutition of it had filled him with such sickening disgust and loathing that he could hardly stagger, faint and nauseated, from the horrid scene.

After the third time he covered his quivering face with shaking hands, and sank down weak and nerveless upon a skin at his wife's side. Quickly she caught his head to her bosom, and sought to soothe him by every endearment known to a loving woman.

"Oh, Haidee, Haidee," he cried, shivering with loathing even in her arms, "it— it actually screamed while being swallowed. It did. It did. It was alive yet. I heard it. Oh, my God!"

Little by little he regained command over his unstrung nerves, and ashamed of his outbreak, began fiercely planning the death of the great snake.

" I'll slash its head off to-morrow with that heavy knife I cut the rushes for your basket-making with,'' he declared, pacing excitedly back and forth. "I'll kill the beastly worm, and skin it, and make—" he stopped suddenly, and stood motionless for a few moments lost in thought. Then he continued, more excitedly, "Why didn't I think of this before ? It'll work. I know it'll work. That infernal snake can go wherever it pleases. And its hide is waterproof, of course. Haidee, my dearest, how long will it take you to weave two great baskets— so big?"

He held his hands wide apart.

"What is it, beloved  Tell me all," asked Haidee, alarmed by the wild excitement in his face. With rapid words Harding explained the plan that had flashed upon him, developing it as he spoke. He would kill the snake, and carefully skin it. Then he would place the basket-work inside the skin, and draw that up around it. It would make a canoe which he was sure would hold them, and the girth of the snake was so large that they could draw the skin clear over the top of the basket-work, and lie inside until they were safe from observation. The head be could held above water by running a pole up the neck, and a couple of poles spliced together would hold the tail out behind. The basket-work would give enough roundness to the body to deceive anybody, especially in the water, and as the snake swam up or down the river at pleasure no one would think anything strange at seeing it or would dare investigate too closely. It would certainly be a couple of days before they would be missed, perhaps longer, and by that time he hoped to be beyond pursuit. In any event, no more horrible fate could be theirs than the one to which they were doomed.

Haidee caught his enthusiasm, and at once set to work. They really, upon sober second thought, had plenty of time, for the snake never was seen for at least two weeks after it had gorged a bullock, during which time it lay torpid in its hall digesting its meal, and until the end of that time it would excite suspicion at once if it were seen in the river.

The day at last dawned, however, when the Great White Serpent would again be stirring. Haidee's basket-work, made as nearly waterproof as possible, was ready, and the knife had been sharpened to a razor-edge upon a smooth stone Harding had found on the bank of the river. Grasping it firmly, he gave his wife a long embrace, and swinging open the door, stepped rcsoh1tely within the Hall of the Serpent.

There it lay, stretched at its enormous length, inert and motionless still from its gorge, the Great White Serpent of the Malorli. Softly but swiftly Harding dashed towards its head. As he approached, it opened its eyes lazily and fixed them full upon him with a sinister stare. There was something so evil, so malignant, so cruel and devilish in their pallid depths that for an instant they halted him as an icy hand seemed to clutch his heart. The next, he had taken the last stride, and surely and mightily struck the blow.

The keen, heavy knife bit clear through the backbone, right at the base of the skull. There was a mighty heave of the huge body, and Harding leaped across it just in time to avoid being enveloped in the fatal embrace of its horrid folds. Writhing and twisting, coiling and uncoiling, now lashing out with tremendous force, next contracting into fearful knots, the enormous reptile thrashed wildly about the hall. A dozen times Harding missed an awful death by the least fraction of an inch before he gained the door his wife bravely held open for him. Breathless and panting they watched the earth-shaking death throes of the monster.

At last, with a mighty quiver from head to tail, it lay still in death. With a shout of triumph Harding sprang to its side, and slipped the point of his knife under the thick skin where his blow had laid it open. Rip, rip, rip, and he had it slit clear to the tail, still faintly moving.

He worked with feverish energy, Haidee valiantly helping, for now they had little time to spare, and he found that before their strength was equal to drawing the skin from under he had to cut the body into lengths. They hardly took time to breathe. The sweat streamed from them. A dozen times their strength seemed exhausted. But, as night fell, the basket-work was in place, the thick skin drawn up around it and sewn up, except for a slit big enough to admit them, and made as waterproof at the seam as possible with melted beeswax, the pole holding the head above water propped securely in place, the other spliced one extended the tail, and, as he held this oddest of vessels buoyantly floating upon the stream running across the end of the Hall, and noted its naturalness, Harding at last felt with an exultant thrill that escape was a possibility.

Haidee was already inside with a small store of provisions. Harding stepped lightly in and stretched himself upon the bottom, after one keen look around to see that all was right so far. He drew the skin together above them, and the current swept them out upon the broad bosom of the river. For good or ill their strange voyage had begun. And it went better than even Harding in his most sanguine moments had dared hope.

For three nights and two days they drifted with the current, without accident or molestation, and shortly after dawn of the third day he was suddenly awakened from the light doze he had permitted himself by the sound of rifle shots and the noise of bullets zipping into the water at his side. With his heart in his mouth he peered cautiously out. There, hardly a hundred yards away, came steaming up a little launch with a man, a white man, standing in the bow, blazing hopefully away at what he mistook for a snake. With a joyous shout Harding sprang to his feet.

"Hold on! Hold on there!" he shouted, waving his arms with reckless disregard of an upset. "Do you want to start international complications by shooting us?"

"Ah, beg pardon I'm sure," replied the sportsman, dropping his rifle in surprise. "I didn't know it was your private yacht, you know. But what the devil— oh, beg pardon, a lady, too."

Explanations were soon made. The stranger was an English sportsman exploring the river in his launch, but at once he turned back and carried them to the nearest port where steamships touched. The snake's skin probably adorns his home at this minute, as Harding, with great generosity, never wanting to set eyes on it again, presented him with it.

A few weeks later Harding and Haidee stood upon the deck of a vessel watching the shores of Africa fade into the distance.

"And now to get word of my safety to good old Sheik Ilderim," he murmured, looking fondly into her eyes, "and then home, my dearest."

And Haidee answered, the love-light shining back at him happily, "Where your home is, O beloved, there is mine."

__________________

6: The Inventor of Meltite

C. J.·Cutcliffe Hyne

1865-1944

Harmsworth's Magazine, Feb 1916

MR. S. J. LIVINGSTONE was not a poor man, but I think he may be described broadly as an ambitious man. He had an air that some people (other than customers) found arrogant.

Soon after the War began he tried to hold up the British Admiralty for a million sterling, free of tax, and an earldom; and when this did not come off he crossed Whitehall and tried the same game on the War Office. He got hold of some bland ass there who irritated him into saying more than was judicious, and left the building under arrest. The magistrate before whom he was hauled called in doctors to enquire into his mental state, and was with difficulty persuaded to dismiss him with a caution.

He had not gone to either of these seats of military learning on the strength of his appearance alone. He was a business man, and had no mind to be fubbed off with underlings. He knew it would require one of the Heads to be man enough to give him what he asked for, and he saw to it that weighty· introductions carried him direct to a Head— both at the Admirnltv and the War Office. The only trouble was, neither Head that he saw was big enough for his job, or S. J. Livingstone would have got what he asked for— or been taken out into the Yard and shot before he could talk. For myself, I think I should have shot him, as being on the whole the safer, and certainly the cleaner course. However, that is a matter of taste. You shall judge for yourself.

But read next a word or two about the man himself. Livingstone, he called himself, and by reason of a birth in Paisley, affected a Glasgow accent, rather of the Pollockshields variety. (This is a cross between cleft palate and German). His father had been Solomon Levenstein, who had exchanged brutal ill-treatment in the Frankfort Ghetto for the doubtful delights of being a rabbi in Scotland. (Conceive a Jewish priest in an atmosphere of Wee Frees, U.P.'s and Episcopalians!) S. J. Livingstone, son of Solomon Levenstein, had never visited Germany, but loathed it and all its contents from the bitter tales of Ghetto persecution dinned into him during his upbringing.

Old Solomon, in his way, was a well-read man; S. J. was a better— mainly in the direction of natural science. I think if somebody had subsidised S. J. and be had specialised in one or two branches of chemistry or chemical physics he might have been something big, though again this is open to question. It is on the cards that when he discovered something good—Meltite, for instance— he would have dropped pure research like a hot brick and struck out boldly for commercial affluence. He was a good deal of a mixture— which is perhaps the same thing as saying he was altogether a Jew. For instance, no outsider would have suspected him of collecting enamels; but he did, lavishly and worshipully ; and told no one, so that prices should not be raised against him.

In commercial life, S. J. Livingstone was a seller of dyewares in Bradford (Livingstone & Co., 29, Chapel Row. Agents for Dresdner Alizerin Gesellschaft. Telegrams: "Explorer," Bradford). Up to the beginning of the War, he did pretty well, sold a decent weight of goods in his office, and more, after the manner of his kind, at the political club where he lunched, and at the golf club where he kept his liver down to gauge on Saturdays. On Sundays he was invisible. He spent half that day in chemical research— he was chasing a cheaper synthetic indigo— and the other half in gloating over his enamels. No living soul ever caught him at either. Between whiles his housekeeper fed him sumptuously, although he bullied her.

After war began he made money hand over fist. How he ran German dyewares into England without getting dropped on I know, but shall not tell. Probably the Government know, too. The British Government makes a specialty of doing silly things, we all admit, but it is not what the Oriental calls an all-the-time Fool. We all knew the Government wanted dyewares to get into the country for khaki and other things, and presumably the Government knew when to wink.

Anyway, Livingstone & Co. were the firm with the goods, which they bought for shillings a pound, and sold for pounds a pound, to S. J.'s delight, and to the noted increase amongst his enamels. It was just after the December balance-sheet he cut out the big Yankee collectors over that bit of old Limoges that Christie's called the Scarlet Madonna. Also he bought twenty dozen Pommery '06.

Then one Sunday morning he blundered upon Meltite by an absolute fluke.

It was untamed enough when he first mixed it, and I gather that he narrowly escaped with life. As it was, he was badly burned, his laboratory in the cellar was wrecked, and the City Fire Brigade had an interesting time salving the balance of the house.

But he was skilled enough at his job, and once he knew the nature of the mixture he had stumbled upon, it was easy to arrange its proportions so that it could be handled in comparative safety. Incidentally the City Corporation helped him. They were using a mechanical mixture of an iron salt and powdered aluminium for welding together the ends of tramrails, and he studied their methods. The Corporation called their stuff Thermit. There is no secret about it. Thermit is used for a score of purposes, and latterly the ingenious German loads it into his Zeppelin bombs.

S. J. Livingstone's mixture was like Thermit, only more so. He added to his powdered aluminium a substance that gave up its oxygen with more astonishing quickness, with the result of producing even more amazing heat than burning Thermit gave out. After inspeeting the fused remains of his cellar, the inventor hit upon "Meltite" as a name for his discovery, and then spent a rapturous afternoon gloating over his enamels, and thanking Allah that he kept them in a fireproof safe.

He went to the Seascale links for a couple of days then, and because he was thinking of something else the whole time, played golf extremely badly. But exercise and sea air crisped his brain, and lifted his outlook from the retail view. Half the world was at war. This was no time for a new Limited Company, and anyway that infernal Treasury would probably stop a capital issue. Besides, if he took out a patent, and jublished a specification, Germany woul jump his claim as surely as mails ran to Rotterdam. "No," he declared— and smashed a new driver into the turf and sent the head flying. "No, a Government is my mark, and the British is the nearest. The German, of course, would be the easier to handle, but strafe Germany, anyway. The British Government— and keep the mixture a secret till they pay:— and then let them work it. Caddy, give me a club that won't break. I think I'll make an iron shot of this now."

Thereafter be sold the business of S. J. Livingstone & Co., 29, Chapel Row, Bradford, to an unintelligent Christian (being very shrewdly of opinion that no more German dyewares would slip through before the end of the war), and settled down to draw out a prospectus for Meltite that would convince even a high Government official.

Shells for naval and military cannon, loaded with Meltite, were the basis of his first idea. On leaving the gun they would be fired by means of an ordinary time fuse, and could (1) arrive as a mass of molten steel— highly recommended for annoyance to trenches; or (2) could warm up after penetrating armour— a special line this for setting fire to refractory warships. S. J.· Livingstone was not a literary genius. but he was a salesman, and a man that can unload dyewares in Bradford and Manchester can sell anything.

His prospectus of Meltite was a gem in its way, and he was justly proud of it. But he did not send it through the post. He got the best introductions possible to the biggest man available at the Admiralty, and took the prospectus in his hand to back up his voluble tongue. He failed at the Admiralty to make a sale, as has just been recorded, but I know no details. All I could get out of him was that the officials at that office were "a pretty tough lot, but, according to their limited lights, sound."

S. J. did not get his knife into the Admiralty as he did into the War Office, and I think it was more the particular "bland ass" (his term) who received him there than the failure to affect a bargain that got on his nerves. He was always rather an arroga'!t man with those he considered weaker than himself. For a moment, after that second rejection with its police-court sequel, he was minded to seek the sure market of Germany. They, at any rate, had no qualms about the methods by which they killed an enemy, so long as they killed him efficiently, and anyway Germans knew enough about elementary science to understand a first-class invention when they saw one. He dined on this, in style, and at the Cafe Royal, and came out, and shook a fist at darkened London.

"Curse you!" he said to Great Britain. " I don't care a row of beans about you, but I'm not going to help the blighters who tormented Solomon Lewenstein in Frankfort. And I am going to make Creation hear all about Meltite, even if I don't get paid C.O.D. Afterwards, when you fools here do get wise to what you've been ofiered, the price will be two millions instead of one, with the earldom thrown in as per before. Dirt cheap, too! Only twelve hours' cost of your blessed war. Then I'll settle down and marry— yes, marry some real nice girl with a lump of money— and have a family, and try to feel a real Englishman. And I'll have the best collection of enamels on earth not on view to the public, or they'd be raising my income-tax. The Earl and Countess of Livingstone invite you to Livingstone Castle t.o meat tea, and afterwards to view their celebrated enamels.' And perhaps we won't do it in style— I beg your pardon."

"Not 't, all," said the man whose hat he had bashed in.

"Just rehearsin' your speech, I suppose? Or have you been dinin'— like myself? What do you say to joining me in a small glass of particular old tine champagne brandy to keep it all quiet? You'll have to pay for yourself because of non-treating order, but I'll pay for myself next round, so that'll be all right."

Now S. J. was not in the mood to come down from the clouds and drink brandy with a stranger who had obviously dined already, and the stranger was sharp enough to notice this. Said he: "Don't strain yourself to come in here if you're due at the club. But I'm bound to talk to somebody about my yacht, or else I'll burst, and I thought you'd do."

Thoughts snapped and sizzled in S. J.'s brain.

" A yacht, have you!"

"Well, I call her that when I want to put on edge. Admirin' friends describe her as a coffin with the motor too far aft."

"Thank you," said S. J Livingstone. " I'll come in with you and have that cognac."

"Come along in then, or some sweet young thing will trip along and ask why I'm not soldierin', and I shall bring the blush to her damask cheek by explaining how few of my legal set of insides I've got left on the premises. You unsound, too?"

"Too old," said S. J., who was thirty five. "Turned forty-six, I'm sorry to say, though perhaps I don't look it. How big's this yacht of yours?"

"That depends whether you view her with the mellow eye of evening, or run her over with a cold two-foot rule. Just now I could take her round the world with a crew of one, and if there was a German to kill at the far end, I'd take her round twice. Gad, man, I'd give something to be sound! But it's no use lying to those infernal Army vets. I know. I've tried."

"It must be beastly Then she's an ocean-going yacht?"

"Good Heavens, yes, man; though, frankly, she's a bit damp if there'd much sea runnin'! But in anything like smooth water, if her sparking plugs are clean, and she's pleased with her mixture, she can kick out eleven— yes, and up to eleven-point eight sometimes, as easy as look at you. And I 've just shipped a patent washstand that'll beat the band. Can't leak in-board however rocky the valves get."

"Why haven't you hired her to Government?"

"Because the beasts don't know a soft thing when they see one. She fouled two of their blessed conditions out of eight hundred and forty-three. It was my own patent balance-rudder that floored her finally. They said she'd turn turtle if I gave her a hard-over helm at top speed. Well, so would a loco go smash if you ran it full pelt into the buffers. It's a thing a man doesn't do, that's all. But let's clear out of here! That pretty girl with the gold hat there by the pillar is going to shove a white feather on me. I know it by her thoughtful eye. And I shall be saying something I shall regret to-morrow morning if she does. Have you a club anywhere handy?"

"I haven't a London club."

"Well, I've a pot-house of sorts in St. James's Street. We'll go there. Drat that girl!"

IT WAS a queer and one-sided partnership that was fixed up between Jew and Gentile that night. The Gentile, who was Sir Thomas Hillcote (seventh baronet), hankered after nothing except "a bit of sport with the Germans." The Jew's single idea was to advertise Meltite so noisily that even the British Government must see the need to buy it up at maker's terms.

"Hallo, Tommy!" said a man coming into the club smoke-room. "How's Drowning Made Easy? Still afloat?"

"No, I've put her on wheels and made her into an armoured car," said the owner genially.

"Well, call on me when you want a spare shuvver. My neck's my own at present. Nobody seems to want it."

"That's Bell," said Hillcote, as the man carefully picked his way to a chair at the other side of the room. "He's got locomotor ataxy. He and I both crocked in the Navy the same week, and got fired out by a Medical Board on the same day. Rum, isn't it?"

"Oh, you're a naval gentleman, are you?" said S: J.

"There's another blow. I've got even Navy rubbed off me now, have I? As a matter of interest, was it one of our genial archbishops you took me for? Alack, my fatal gravity of manner."

"Then you can navigate, and all that?"

"I was a most promising officer. Everyone said it of me. It was a thing I couldn't avoid. The First Lord sobbed out that now, indeed, the country would go to the dogs when they lost me. I say, Mr. Isaacs, I mayn't stand you a drink because of the brutal Laws of the Land-Section: Treating. But you may absorb mine when I'm not looking. I've about got my load. My crumbs, but wasn't that a pretty girl with the gold hat?"

"If you carry out my scheme, you could marry ten girls with gold hats."

"Not 't all, my good chap. I'm not a Turk. But, by Jove, I'll tell you what ! If you'll let old Tinkle Bell chip in, we'll call it a deal. He's having a filthy time, poor dear, just now, what with pain, and being flinty, and all that, and if he saw a decent chance of being hung as a pirate, or anything in that line (which is what your scheme seems to amount to)— excuse me, Mr. Benjamin, if I'm a bit fuzzy about it— he'd freeze on to it with both claws. By the way, I suppose you are an Englishman?"

"Rather! Sorry if you thought I was anything else."

"Not 't all. But you will waggle your hands in moment's of excitement. Pedigree started in Asia, I suppose. I shall want a bit of proof that you can deliver the goods in the dynamite line you've been speaking about—"

"Meltite."

"Very likely. Never heard of it. I wasn't one of the scientific johnnies. I was merely a salt-horse lootenant. Well, prove to me and old Tinkle that this blowy-up stuff will eat holes in a ship's plating, as you say, and we'll motor you off to any old point in the North Sea you care to name till we've sunk all the shipping afloat, or run out of bombs, or been strafed ourselves, whichever comes first. Is it a bet?"

"You're just the gentleman I want. Look here ; read that ! There's a full specification of Meltite." " Nothing doing, most noble Abraham. I don't care a row of pins for typewritten matter. The letters jump about so. Nothing hut the genuine article at work will convince us. Let Tinkle and me see that with a sober morning eye, and we'll get busy with a speed that will surprise you."

Sir Thomas Hillcote's motor-boat does not appear in either Lloyd's or the Yachting Register as Drowning Made Easy, but as her real name brings up other memories, it may here be suppressed. Anyway, amongst her intimates and acquaintances she is sufficiently well known by her nick-name. She was the darling of her owner's heart, and largely the product of his lamentable inventive faculties. From her misplaced engines to her ridiculous bow, from her capstan (whose barrel would not bite) to an enormous balance rudder that would have capsized a battle-ship, she was a museum of enthusiastic ideas gone wrong. Ex-Lieutenant Thomas Hillcote swelled with pride every time she tried to shake him overboard.

Ex-Lieutenant Bell was glad to be at sea once again in anything that would float. He had been desperately afraid of dying in his bed these last few weeks, and now, with the low land of the Thames Estuary dropping into the grey seas astern, the fear was easing. There was war and work away through the North Sea mists ahead, and perhaps luck.

"Can you cook?" S. J. Livingstone was asked.

"I never tried. I've alwaYs been above that sort of thing."

"Then you've got to learn. You aren't a watch-keeper, and seeing as how we don't carry a crew this trip, you'll have to cook— and cook well, or you'll get the foul side of Tinkle's tongue. When we bring up alongside the enemy you'll be gunnery lootenant, and you take charge, and we two do as we're told. But till then vou're cook, Father Isaac; and as we're bare navy in the way of drinks, and there's no whisky on board, you're to stand-by with hot cocoa. whenever it's wanted. Got that? We'll worry along on cold tin and hiscuit for the rest. But we're not going to be done out of our lawful cocoa, and don't you forget it. You may be sick between-whiles, though what in thunder you're being sick for in smooth water like this beats me! Good Heavens ! there's a busy devil of a destroyer buzzing up at ahout fifty knots, and wasting my country·s fuel-oil most scandalously, just to interfere. Here, Tinkle, you talk to her, and tell her we're out after mackerel. Say I'm below, writing to a lady friend who wears a gold hat." '

Ex-Lieutenant Bell tried to be formal, but was recognised.

"Haw, haw ! You and your mackerel! Glad to see you looking so fit, Tinkle. You'll be back as a giddy brass-eyed commander before the week's out. Go easy with that wheel, or you'll twist off Tommy's patent rudder. If you stick to your present course you'll land on to the feather-edge of my fancy new mine field. You might call me up if they don't go off, and I'll come and set 'em better. You gay kipper, why doesn't Drowning carry a pilot ? But I suppose that's Tommy. Trust Tommy for running on a graveyard if there's one handy. You bear away four points starboard, Tinkle, and you'll live a. lot longer. Keep good."

The destroyer grunted and bucked, and ran away over the edge of the horizon at the speed of a railway train. She spread the news amongst the British sea police patrolling the North Sea, and they in their turn jeered at the motor-boat, and let her through.

An important small cruiser wig-wagged "Captain's compliments to Sir T. Hillcote, and he didn't care for mackeral, but would like brace of grouse."

An ugly tug, with a three-inch gun stuck through her towing-bridge, hailed through a megaphone that she could supply a stale tinned tongue for bait if fish were not biting freely.

A draggle-tailed motor patrol-boat, whose crew all wore forked beards in polite imitation of Admiral Tirpitz, offered to bet Drowning Made Easy three gallons of petrol to a pint of lubricating oil she hadn't got more than three cylinders firing at that precise moment—and the bet, for painful reasons, could not be taken.

"We're making a dreadful stir," said S. J. Livingstone once, between spasms. "I'd no idea there were so many British ships about."

"Who did you think ran the North Sea?" Bell asked. "The Germans? You've been reading the papers, Uncle Reuben. You're entirely wrong. It's ceased to be the German Ocean quite a lot of months now, and we've taken possession of it ourselves for keeps. Bring me a bowl of cocoa, Reuben, hot and gummy, and mind you don't slop it about on the oilcloth like you did last time. Also bring me of the sandwiches, cold-dog variety, one class, non-refundable. I have a twist on me, Reuben, for the first time for three months. After you have completed your important duties as steward, you can stand-by, and get a couple of your torpedoes, or whatever you call 'em, ranged ready for action. We are not exactly on our cruising ground yet, but there's a good thick North Sea fog coming down, and you meet all sorts of funny things in fogs."

"I don't think I can do it," said S. J. faintly. " This beastly little boat lurches so, and I've been so sick, I've no strength left."

The man with locomotor ataxy dropped his drawl, and yapped in the old style of the quarter-deck. "Carry out your orders! This is wartime! If you don't do as you are told, I will fling you overboard. We've no use here for extra. ballast. If you can't do it yourself, I'll take charge of your Meltite, or whatever you call it, and make what I can of it myself."

"You coolly say you'll rob me?"

"Like a bird. Carry on, now!"

S. J. Livingstone found himself doing as he was told. These ex-naval lieutenants at sea were very different people from the thirsty souls he had talked with in a St. James's Street club, and he suddenly found himself scared. The attitude of Sir Thomas Hillcote on the matter clinched things.

"I resent Mr. Bell's treatment," said S. J., as he was bringing aft the ordered cocoa.

"You can resent till you're black in the face," the baronet informed him cheerfully.

"And I shall square up for it when I get home."

"Home ! Who's thinking of getting home! We're out here to play games with Germany, with half the British Fleet standing-by ready to interfere. You haven't a cat-in-hell chance of seeing your happy home again, Moses, my dear. You carry on and don't worry about the future, or you'll meet with present trouble that'll cause you pain. That's a sound tip. Old Tinkle's got the devil of a temper now he's seedy, and he'll break your arm or crack your jaw as soon as look at you if you don't carry out orders smartly. I'll help him if necessary."

Now I don't think S. J. was a coward, but he was first and foremost a business man, and he was beginning to regret very much that he had launched Meltite with these strange associates. His idea, of course, was (with their help) to advertise the stuff and sell it. Theirs was an entirely different proposition. They looked forward to doing the maximum of damage with it— and there their programme ended. They did not anticipate getting back to England. They had no care whatever for the future of Meltite or its inventor. The disgusting part of it was there was no wriggling out of the deal. His earldom, his two millions, his beautiful enamels—

"Below there. Stand-by with those torpedo things. Tommy, bear a hand to do as Reuben tells you. Neither of you is to use a word of English. Hear that, Reuben! If you let out a word of English I'll shoot you like a rat. I'll do all the patter. Understand? And, Tommy, fish out those German uniform caps for the pair of you. I've got mine bent."

S. J. Livingstone went out presently into the cold, foggy air on deck with heavy burdens, and to his amazement saw a German naval ensign whipping and snapping from the motor-boat's jackstaff, and her wheel held by a starched and arrogant German officer in whom he could hardly recognise the late Mr. Bell, of St. James's Street.

A steamer of 3,000-tons loomed through the fog, and the motorboat was edging down on to her on a parallel course.

"What steamboat's that?" The hail went in harsh German.

"Steamship Rhein, Rotterdam-Amerika Line, Vanrennan Master, from Galveston for Rotterdam. Cotton loaded."

"Heave-to, and I will see if I must sink you."

" But, thousand devils, captain, I'm carrying cotton I tell you, and it's for Germany."

"That's what I wanted to know. Get out your port boats, and row clear as soon as you like. I'm coming up to starboard."

The Dutch skipper danced on his bridge, but his crew carried out the orders without waiting for him to repeat them. Then Bell put the motor-boat alongside, and S. J. did the rest with the efficient help of Sir Thomas Hillcote. The charge of Meltite was made fast to an electro-magnet, which was fed by an accumulator of S. J. 's own design. This was not active till it was clapped against a ship's plating, but once then, a switch was automatically thrown in, and the whole n.fiair. clung in place like a limpet. Simultaneously a small detonator fired the Meltite. Drowning Made Easy slid away with a spurting, sputtering spray of molten iron pursuing her, and a fine firework effect taking place over her counter.

"My God !" said Hillcote, "That fiery stuff is eating the plating away as if it was so much tissue paper, and inside the hole things look like a blast-furnace. That's the cotton, I suppose. Aren't those ducks getting out their boats in a number-one hurry? There goes the owner down off the bridge to get the ship's papers before he leaves for home. By gad, look! The deck's catching now. Aaron, my lad, your stuff's big medicine, but it advertises itself a bit too much for my taste. We shall have the British Navy round here with fire engines and first-aid kit in two jiffs; and we don't want to meet them. No, not any. Tinkle, my humble friend, bear away to the cold North for half an hour, and I'll hop below and whoop up the coffee-mill another knot or so."

"You might strike that infernal flag before you go; and, here, take my fancy hat with you."

They fired a second ship that night, copper-laden, and were fired at by a third. The third ship carried a profane Yankee officer on her bridge who had apparently been ruffled by the British Navy in the immediate past, and said he would see all Germans in hell before he answered their questions. He backed up his remarks with a .380 automatic Colt, with which he made some remarkably close shooting.

Next day Sir Thomas Hillcote broke down and was put in his bunk.

"I told you my insides were unreliable," he gasped at them between spasms. " Leave me the morphia, and I shall be quite merry and bright. Don't you worry about me; Tinkle. l'll dream about that girl with the gold hat. You carry on, and Jonadab will help you. Jon's getting quite a second Nelson with all his experience. Oh, corkscrews! that was a twinge. I'd take a cast closer in to Rotterdam if I were you."

"We've only just about enough petrol to get home on," said S. J.

"Who wants to get home, my good Jeremiah. There's lots more mischief to be done out. here if all goes well and the British Navy doesn't butt in. Just think: all this stuff into or out of Rotterdam is for or from Germany, and because Germany's got a pull in London, the British Government doesn't interfere."

"That's true enough," said the man who had run dyewares. "Well we, not being politicians, and knowing what's good for the country, do interfere. That's all. I suppose a lot of pious people will want to hang us for our pains, but till we are hung we'll go on with the missionary effort. Tinkle, get busy .There's a steamer coming. I can feel the vibration of her propeller on my sore liver. No, propellers; she's twin screw. Hop, you lazy scoundrel, or she'll be past us."

"Sir Thomas is bad," said S. J., when they got back on deck.

"Have you only just found that out? That new fellow's coming towards us. I'm going to turn round. Mind you don't get shot overboard when I give her the helm! Here! Stay on deck there, you Reuben. You needn't worry about Tommy shooting out of his berth. I'll keep him on the lee side."

Once more ex-lieutenant Bell appeared as the complete German naval officer, and barked his remarks in a foreign tongue. The new ship was a Swede, out of Rotterdam for New York, full to the hatches with German leather goods, dyewares, and chemicals.

"Those beasts of English," announced her captain, " are respecting the rights of neutrals this week, whatever they may do next."

"Got good freights?"

The Swede shrugged apologetically. "Well, in war time, illustrious Herr, we neutrals all look to make a little extra bit. Be careful— Himmel ! be careful; you will run me down."

"Not a bit of it. I'm not going to ram. It's only a sort of game like 'Tig' we're  playing. Now then Rube. On the port quarter. Clap on your poultice when I swing her in, and don't get flung overboard if you can help it. Poor old Tommy's patent rudder's a bit fierce. Great Scott! man, but you set that fuse mighty short! You'd better put some oil on those burnt hands before the air gets to them."

"You Gennan beasts," the Swede stonned. "you have set my ship on fire."

"I hope so, Mr. Neutral. Rather pretty effect I call it. To see a big chunk of plating dissolve out into mere sparks and roman candles is astonishingly pretty to the simple sailorman. I should call away your boats if I were you, or you'll get wet feet. Excuse my butting in with advice, but you seem rather to have lost your head, and by the smell, those leather goods you were bucking about are beginning to singe."

Now the night was dark and the night was clear, and it sang with wind; and the steamboat flamed like a torch; and by the rules of war Drowning Made Easy should have faded from the scene of her exploit with all possible speed. But the Swede bungled his boat-lowering badly, and Bell could not tear himself away. He bawled advice with an acid tongue, and in the event of the advice not being acted upon efficiently, he stood by to save life.

"We shall be seen here," said S. J., frostily.

"Bound to be. Party in the front seats at the firework show always is spotted by the whole audience. But a man couldn't clear out whilst there was a possibility of those fellows frying unless he was a darn German. I'm sure you of that, Rube ? "

"Yes," said S. J. Livingstone, and stepped down into the after well and sat there. Something inside him bumped with heavy foreboding.

The German submarine must have come up awash, and quietly stalked them by the light of the burning Swede. Bell did not see her till she was close alongside. They called on him to surrender. He very naturally turned on his power, and tried to bolt. At the same time he threw into the grey North Sea the last remaining Meltite firemaker, where it burst into torrid flame, and exploded in a volcano of fire and steam.

After a careful inspection— a very careful inspection— the Germans shot Bell in six places. Then they bore down alongside, and made fast. The boarding party found Sir Thomas Hillcote dead in a bunk below. He had bitten through his lower lip because he did not wish to call out and disturb his two shipmates on deck who were trying to give a lift to the British Empire. They examined S. J. curiously, enquired his name, and, on hearing it, transhipped him with politeness.

One of the officers leaned over Bell, who was very nearly gone.

"Ha, I thought I knew you. We met once at Kiel, if you remember, at the regatta. I'm sorry, but it's the fortune of war."

"Don't apologise," gasped the man with locomotor ataxy. " I've got to windward of the Admiralty this trip, and died in my boots— at sea. At sea! l've had luck."

Down below in a clammy cabin of the U-boat, S. J. Livingstone found himself treated with a curious courtesy that after a while began to chill. It flashed upon him that cannibals might be similarly courteous to a missionary that they proposed to— well— attend to later.

These German officers knew his name, the style of his firm in Bradford, the nature of his proceedings at the British Admiralty, his rejection by the "bland ass" at the War Office. They mentioned that eminent officer's name, and could imitate his manner. They even knew about S. J.'s taste for enamals, and had a catalogue of his more recent purchases. It was all most uncanny. They gave him his favourite Pommery to drink. They knew all about the powers of Meltite, and recited to him a list of ships destroyed and a description of what they looked like as they burned. It was all very accurate and scientific and un-nerving.

An outside observer would have noticed one curious change in S. J. He was not the least arrogant now, either in manntr or look. I don't say he cringed, but— well, there was a change. They even, in a wooden way, got on to his pedigree.

"You are not English! No!"

"Certainly I am. My name is Livingstone. Unless you call it Scotch."

"Livingstone? Ah, but before you changed it. What?"

S. J. kept a sullen silence.

"Answer me. Was it not Levenstein?"

"Yes," said S. J., and felt his self-respect oozing from him.

"So! And now you are going to tell me— pleasantly, and without pressure— how Meltite is made?"

" I do not know. I forget."

" So! Then I hope you like chlorine. Because, until you remember, l shall put you in the compartment with our accumulators, which just now are gassing, and there you will perhaps recover your memory before it is too late."

But S. J. Livingstone came of a race that in the past had had teeth pulled rather than draw cheques which they did not consider lawfully due, and he coughed, and spat, and choked, but parted with no formua.

He was pretty far gone when the U-boat ran into her home port, but he showed not the smallest signs of yielding. The Germans were eminently business-like. S. J. Levenstein, dead, was no use to them. Alive, he was full of Meltitic possibilities. So they kept him alive, and alternately treated him well and vilely. He was interviewed by small personages and great, all of them in uniform, some of them polite, most of them overbearing, some of them proffering gifts, many of them offering threats; but to all of them he was unyielding. He might be this Levenstein they were talking about. He might have heard of Meltite. But, anyway, at the moment he had forgotten the composition of Meltite, if, indeed, he had ever beard it. They could not budge him past that, by either kindness or cruelty. At last be was brought before the Greatest Personage of all, a tragic, twitching cripple, and he set himself out to charm.

"I understand, Mr. Livingstone, that you were a Prussian by birth, a British subject by early up-bringing, and are a cosmopolitan by taste. Well, it is our loss, because you are a man of ideas. But l am not going to quarrel with your choice. You have made a great invention in Meltite. You see, I am not going to belittle it. And if I say it is great, it is great. You offered it to the London Government. They, being fools, as I have shown many times already, refused it. I believe they did not even refuse it civilly. You have stated your price— a million sterling and a peerage. I will give it you."

"My price is two millions, now that Meltite is proved."

"Two millions be it. I do not quibble over marks about a thin.cz I intend to get."

"There is also the British peerage."

"I can buy that for you, too— as I have bought for money down other British titles for my people when I wanted them."

"Very well, sire," said S. J. Levenstein. "Get me from. the politicians an English earldom, and give me two million British pounds sterling, and I will give you the formula for Meltite."

"That shall be arranged," said the Greatest Personage, and S. J. was taught by his guide how to back out from the Presence.

THERE the matter rests for the present. S. J. Levenstein (or Livingstone) resides in dignified seclusion and security in a Prussian castle full of enamels, while arrangements are being made to pay him his price. They feed him on the richest food he cares to order, and he may bathe in Pommery '06 if he so desires. But there is one very sound reason why the Germans will not succeed in buying Meltite. George V., King of England, grants titles; he does not sell them.

________________

7: Triplets and Trouble

Robert V Carr

1877-1930

New Story Magazine, Jul 1914

Robert V. Carr served in the Spanish American War in the Phillipines, and in broken health returned to the USA, where he became a noted "western" poet and author. He made a living in journalism, editing and working on several western newspapers such as the Denver Times. He moved to Southern California in 1918, where he died in 1930. He was survived by his widow.

I'VE always held that a man kin stand anything if he will jes' put his mind to it. It's jes' beyond me how some poor angleworm-backed critters kin have so little pride in theirselves as to holler as soon as they're scratched or feel a little pain. Take me, and, if I do say it myself, no matter what's ail in' me I suffer in silence. None of this groanin' or gruntin' fer Jack Jetts— jes' suffer it out. I'm like steel when it comes to endurin' pain— yes, siree, like chilled steel.

But them triplet brothers of mine are diff'rent from me — can't stand the least thing, neither of them. Take the time Jeb got a crick in his neck. Joe claims Jeb got that crick in his neck from lookin' at the girls the last time we was in Miles City. Jeb don't pay- no 'tention to Joe's slurs, jes' groans and rubs his neck with some hoss lin'ment.

Yet, after a spell, Jeb has to have his little whine.

"It jes' seems," he sniffles, "when I go to look at something, the world has done come to an end."

Joe laughs a cruel laugh.

"I warned you," teases brother Joe. "You would be a-snappin' your head at them Miles City fillies. You'd no more than see one pretty maid than you'd jerk your head around to see another. If you could think about something besides skirts once in a while, maybe you wouldn't be gruntin' around with a Charley hoss in your neck. Foller my smoke? You never hear me botherin' my head about girls."

"Oh, no," growls Jeb, as full of sarcasm as a rattler of pisen. "Oh, no, you never talk about the girls! Well, I never heard you talk about anything else. You're always rainbowin' about some piece of calico."

"There's where you don't understand your dear brother," Joe joshes him, fer that same Joe kin be a cunning devil at times. "Take us lit'rary fellers and we got a sacred right to dream about the little maids. All I has to do to have thoughts of music, as the feller says, is to think of some girl with the roses in her cheeks and the sunlight in her eyes."

"Pass the mush, mother," growls Jeb. "You can't slip any of that suds and sunshine clown my neck, Joe Jetts. When I think about the girls I think right, and it's how much they've cost me. Take a girl and all she thinks of is what you're goin' to bring her. If you ain't got nothin', fog on, pretty boy, fog on. That lit'rary stuff reads all right, but it's fur from the trooth."

Then Jeb turns his head all of a sudden, and his neck hurts, and he cusses something frightful. Then I breaks in.

"Jeb," I tells him like a true friend and brother, "no real man will grunt like you do over a little pain. You cer-tin-ly make me ashamed that I'm related to you. A little crick in the neck, and you a-whinin' like you was nigh to kickin' out."

"That's what I say," chimes in Joe, fer a wonder takin' sides with me. "A man shows what he's made of by the way he endures pain. Take us lit'rary fellers, and we never holler under no con-dition."

I gave Joe a quick, sharp look, but said nothin'; he was on my side fer once, and I couldn't afford to ree-fer to some things I knowed about him.

"Take me," Joe goes on, widenin' his loop, "take me and grind me up in a machine, and I'll never whimper. Though I has a ree-fined nature, I kin suffer, as brother Jack says, in silence. You has many good points, Jeb, but standin' pain ain't one of them. I ain't a word to say agin' you as a brother, but when it comes to standin' pain you fall a little short, Jeb— jes' a little short."

Jeb, seein' that we're both agin' him, don't try to fight— jes' groans and holds his neck. And so we lets up on him. Later in the day I feels like spurrin' brother Jeb some more, and makes a few ree-marks about a full-grown man a-babyin' around with a crick in his neck.

Jeb comes up close to me, and looks me fair in the eye.

"Jack," he says, and there's no mistakin' the look in his eye, "don't drive me too fur. I'm in a terrible conition, as any man kin see. I think you're lackin' a whole lot in kindness to hurraw a suff'rin brother."

"That's all right, Jeb," I comes back, "but it's fer your own good. When I git anything the matter with me and whine or show the white feather, you kin hurraw me fer all you're worth and never a word will I say."

"You have stated my views to an ant's whisker," agrees Joe. "I makes the same offer. If something happens to me and I whine, jes' you trot out all the cruel ree-marks you kin think of. I'm thinkin' you'll never have the chance, fer, like Jack, I'll suffer in silence."

"Fer gosh-a'mighty's sake, keep still, you two!" howls Jeb, all of a sudden; "you're drivin' me loco with your gab- blin'."

Joe titters, and begins hummin':

"Jeb, Jeb, poor old Jeb,

He got a crick in his neck.

He snapped his head at some cal-i-co,

And now his life's a wreck."

Jeb then reaches fer his gun, and we leave him be.

Well, after a spell, between the hoss medicine and cussin', Jeb finally gits the crick out of his neck and is his old self ag'in.

About that time Joe begins to look a little sad, and sort of set around alone. By and by, he admits that he's the makin's of a boil under his collar. Jeb grins a little, and insists on lookin' at Joe's boil. I take gappin's at it, too; it's a daisy, and growin' fast.

"Joe," I advises him, after he'd been awake two or three nights with his boil, and kept us jumpin' sideways with poultices and other truck, "that there young mountain on your neck is ripe fer carvin'."

Jeb is lyin' on his bunk, readin' a love story, but he sets up and joins right in with me.

"That's the idee, Joe. That there little raise on your neck should be slashed. Always heard that when a boil comes to a head the proper deal is to stick it. We'll slash her with a razor."

I must say that Joe hasn't whimpered much; but, when we go to talkin' razor, he looks kind of sick.

"All you have to do, Joe," says Jeb, cruel as a wolf, "is to suffer in silence. Recollect what you said when I had a crick in my neck. You made up a piece of po'try about it even. Why don't you make up something on a boil?"

"Jeb is right," I tells Joe. "A boil is nothin'. Be a man, Joe, and let us carve her. It will all be over in a second. One slash and it's good-by boil."

By that time Jeb has got the razor and is stroppin' it and testin' the edge. Joe looks at him like a dyin' calf.

I goes over to Joe, sayin' to brother Jeb over my shoulder, "I'll hold his head."

Now Joe Jetts is a game fighter, and afraid of nothin' that walks. Besides, he is a top cow-puncher, and will crawl on to any outlaw that ever sunfished, but when it comes to havin' cold steel laid across a boil

Joe looks up into our faces as pitiful as a lost child.

"Boys," he whimpers, "you couldn't be so cruel to a brother what has al- ways been good to you. You couldn't carve 'me— you couldn't carve me!"

"It's fer your own good," says the hard-hearted Jeb, and I'm forced to agree with him. Jeb flourishes the razor and rolls up his sleeves.

"I'll give her the cross slash," Jeb hands it out to Joe. "One slash north and one slash east; that will fix her."

"I wonder," moans Joe, "if there's a drop of licker on the place."

"That ain't fair," decides Jeb, mighty short. "A man stands up agin' the steel without the help of licker. Your time has come, Joe— your time has come. It's up to you to show what you're made of."

"Maybe it ain't come to a head yet," says Joe, prayin' fer time. "You hadn't ought to stick it till it's blossomed."

"Don't worry about that," I braces him, and gittin' a good grip on his head. "She's ripe, all right, all right. Come on, Jeb, with the steel."

Poor Joe, seein' that he's gone, goes limp under my hands. Then Jeb, with a wink at me, makes a few false motions with the razor, and then, kazooric! he slashes the boil.

Joe peeps twice, and falls back in my arms. In spite of all I kin do, I has to laugh. Jeb jes' whoops and hollers.

When Joe comes to, and gets squared around, he takes a good look at me and brother Jeb.

"Have all the fun you want, but let me tell you there is no livin' man what won't holler if you twist him hard enough."

"Well, you sure hollered," I reminds him.

"Yes, and he was the boy who was tellin' me how to stand pain," Jeb rowels him.

Joe is feelin' fairly good now, and he begins to take up the talk ag'in.

"Suppose," he says, and he's got a imagination like an old maid, "suppose the Injuns captured you, Jack. First, say, they pulls your toenails, and then trims your ears— swallowforks both your wind fans. Then, say, they lay a red-hot ramrod across your eyes. Then, suppose, after that they take off an inch of your hide at a time. What do you reckon you'd do under them con-ditions? Don't you figger that you'd holler?"

"Never a cheep out of me," I tells him flat. "I'd look them red devils right in the eye and die game as a white man should."

"Joe," complains Jeb, "don't go into details about Injun torture ag'in. You got a way of dee-scribin' a thing that gives me the jerks. That toenail-pullin' idee starts my mind to millin'. I'm free to say that, when they went to work on my feet, I'd yell till you could hear me in Omaha. I was always ticklish about the feet."

"Them's my sentiments," declares Joe, who is jes' as likely to argue fer a thing one minute and agin' it the next. "About the time they lifted my hoof, you could hear me holler on t'other side of Jordan."

I am compelled to laugh. I see that I has about all the cold nerve of the Jetts family. Jeb got whiny with a crick in his neck, and Joe let a boil make him white around the gills. I'm all that's left to keep the name of Jetts lookin' like it belonged to nervy white men.

I tells them boys jes' exactly how I would come through that Injun torture— game to the last, askin' no mercy, a white man and a stayer. They see that I had 'em, and jes' shut up. People that have whined about a little crick in the neck or a boil ain't much to say about what they'd do in Injun torture. 'Bout all they kin do is to keep still while a real man tells 'em where to head in.

In a day or two we're headed fer the stage station to git the mail. We never got no mail, but we always went fer it.

I don't know why I never noticed it before, but that mornin' I got a little suspicion that my left jaw was beginnin' to swell. As we rode along I begin to see that I was kerrect in that there suspicion. 'Bout a mile from the stage station one of my left-hand grinders begin to r'ar and charge and speak pieces.

I'm forced to tell them brothers of mine, jes' in a careless way, that I think I'm due to have the toothache.

Jeb looks at Joe, and Joe looks at Jeb. Both of the miserable hounds grin like they'd jes' thought of some joke.

"Well," advises Jeb, who, when you come to know him, has the nature of a devil, "jes' hang on to your nerve. A oothache is nothin' aside of havin' your toenails lifted. I'm surprised you even mentions it. What's toothache as agin' Injun torture?"

"That's what gits me," breaks out Joe. "A man of Jack's nerve mentionin' a triflin' thing like the tooth-ache ! Queer, very queer !"

Say, and I know I hadn't ought to talk about a brother this way, but that Joe Jetts, regardless of his lit'rary ways, has one of the crudest natures this side of the jump-off. He has a cunnin' cruelty, Joe has.

By that time that grinder has got a collar-and-elbow holt on my brain, and is beginnin' to hang and twist— hang and twist. I pets my jaw with my finger; it's swelled some.

"All I got to say," laughs Jeb to Joe, "is that I hope we don't meet no pocket gophers. They might take Jack fer a brother of theirn ; he sure looks a lot like one."

"That's what," Joe agrees. "Sure a strong family resemblance between Jack Jetts and a pocket gopher."

I'm in no shape to take up their insults. I now sees that my only hope is to beg, borrow, or steal some whisky at the stage station, and be durned soon about it, too. I'd always heard that whisky was good fer the toothache ; anyway, I was willin' to try it. Every minute the old bean masher was a-pitchin' harder and faster. By the time we racked into the stage station she was jumpin' seven ways fer Sunday and comin' down hard.

'Bout half crazy, and a-packin my face in my hands, I runs around tryin' to locate some licker. But my luck was agin' me; not a drop in the place. Plum' discouraged, and all in, I set down on a wagon tongue and try to control my jaw. I had to hold it tight with both hands or it would 'a' jumped out of my face.

Jeb and Joe both come up to me, grinnin' like hell cats.

"All you got to do," advises Jeb, in a slow, draggy, irritatin' voice, "is to show the red devils how a white man kin suffer and die."

"You have spoken a great trooth, or words to that effect," adds Joe.

I looks up at them, and then, hangin' on to my jaw, ree-marks, cold and desp'rate :

"Remember the limit, boys. Men have kicked out with their boots on fer less than you two have said to me. Anyhow, it will all be over in a little while. I can't live this way much longer."

They grin, but don't say nothin' fer a spell.

Finally Jeb suggests: "Why not go to town and have it yanked out? You can't stand that pain much longer."

"That's the idee," Joe trails in right in after Jeb. "Go to town and have the condemned thing jerked out." Then, with a wink at Jeb: "It hadn't ought to hurt more than a crick in the neck or a boil. It hadn't ought to take as much nerve to have a tooth yanked as to have a boil carved. I never had a tooth pulled, but they say it don't feel no worse than havin' your brain scraped with a garden hoe."

"I've heard tell," Jeb explains, nice and cheerful, "that havin' a tooth pulled is a whole lot like havin' your head weatherboarded. But Jack wouldn't mind a little thing like that. Them nervy devils like Jack jes' set right down and let one of them tooth jerkers yank out every nipper they got, and crack jokes while he's doin' it. Of course, you and me, Joe, would cheep a little, but take Jack, and I'm here to say he'll suffer in silence— suffer in silence."

Fer some derned reason Joe smoothes a grin off'n his freckled face— the homely son of a gun!

I see plain enough that them scoundrels have got it in their heads that I ain't the nerve to waltz into town and haye that tooth jerked. They require to be shown, and I'm the boy that kin show 'em.

I ties a handkerchief around my jaw, jumps my hoss, and yells out of one side of my mouth:

"Come on, you two cold-hearted coyotes! I'm goin' to show you what a nervy man kin do. Some day you'll want a little sympathy from me, and you'll git nothin' but sneers and insults."

They laughs backward and forward, like they has a great joke between 'em, but don't say nothin'.

We fogs it fer town.

Now and then I am compelled to stop fer a sup of hot water, although I inquires fer whisky all along the trail. One feller had some wood alcohol, but my brothers thought I'd better ask a doctor before tacklin' that stuff. Not a drop of real licker in the country; it was a killin' ride.

Before we reaches town my old grinder had quit her reg'ler pitchin' and got down to fancy buckin'. She'd go up in the air, whirl twice, hit the ground all spraddled out, and throw herself over nine sections of land. Then up she'd come ag'in, fall backward fer eleven miles, and land on her ear in a pile of rock. Sometimes she'd sail, turnin' over and over, and then, all of a sudden, fall fer days, sickishlike. Once she took a run and jump and batted out her brains agin' a stone wall. Anyhow, that's how it felt.

"Jumpin' Judas H. Priest, boys!" I am compelled to ree-mark, "ain't there nothin' in this suff'rin' world you kin do fer me? I'll go crazy in a minute."

"Nothin'," replies Jeb, and I'll leave it to you if you ever heard of a cruder man bein' allowed to live, "but call your attention to them ree-marks of yourn concernin' Injun torture."

Joe is softer-hearted than Jeb, and tries to jolly me along. But there is nothin' you kin say to jolly a man with

the toothache. All he kin do is to hang on to his jaw with both hands and pant fer air. All a real friend kin do fer him is to take a club and knock him in the head and put him out of his misery.

In seven hundred and fifty-four years, nine months, seven weeks, five days, twenty-three hours, forty-nine minutes, and fifty-eight seconds we gits in sight of town. I know jes' how long it took us, fer I put in my time iiggerin'.

I'm fer headin' into a saloon and drinkin' it out of house and home, but Jeb won't let me. He's appointed hisself round-up boss, and I'm too mis- erable to fight him. I'm so crazy with pain that I'm willin' to admit anything. I sure overlooked the jumpin' toothache when I took that stand on Injun torture. Injun torture is a shampoo as compared to the pitchin' toothache.

We rides up to the buildin' where a dentist has his death trap upstairs. I lets go all holts and falls off'm my hoss. With a brother supportin' me on each side, I stumbles up the stairs.

Then a funny thing happens. Bury me alive fer a liar, if that tooth don't ca'm right down and quit achin'. It's the ca'm after a storm, soothin' and quiet.

I stops in my tracks, and laughs. It weren't no full-grown laugh, but it was a laugh jes' the same.

"Boys," I tells my brothers, mighty relieved, "she's done quit achin'. No use in goin' further. Let's head back to a saloon, and drink to my recoverin' from a little spell of illness, as the feller says."

Jeb laughs his old heartless, cruel laugh.

"That old dodge won't work, Jack Jetts," he sneers. "You can't pull nothin' over us that-o'-way. That's what all the chicken hearts say when their nerve bogs down. Come on; the red devils are waitin'."

Did you ever notice how easy some folks kin say, "Come on," when it's the other feller's funeral? Jeb Jetts is one of them kind of inhuman devils.

I tries to lay back in the traces, but they pull me up the stairs.

We see a sign on the door. "Walk in," it says. Jeb and Joe "walk in," but I drag in.

As we enter that place, a feller— say, he was the cruelest-faced man I ever laid eyes on— stuck his head out from another room and says, in a cold, sneerin' voice:

"I'll be ready fer you in a minute."

That's jes' the way he said it, like he had a grudge agin' the world. No mercy in that feller — nothin' but a dee-sire to hurt and pain.

We get down. I hung my face in my hands, while Jeb and Joe looked around as cheerful as hound pups. While we're a-settin' there, we hears a deep, dyin', save-me-I'm-gone groan come out of the room where the dentist puts the kibosh on his victims. That cruel gobbler has got some poor yap down, and is pullin' his soul out by the roots. I never heard such a sound come out of a mortal. There wasn't enough hope in it to grease the mainspring on a flea's watch.

"He's sure got that gobbler where he wants him," Jeb observes, grinnin' like he was Iookin' forward to some- thing pleasant. "When a man unhitches a cry like that, he's hurt where he lives. That's mighty nigh the death rattle."

"You have sure stated a fact," agrees Joe. "When a man jerks a groan like that out of a feller mortal, he has cer-tin-ly penetrated his inner nature."

Sweet, encouragin' talk, if you don't care what you say.

Pretty soon we hear a lot of floun- derin' around, and some more of them down-in-the-well groans.

"He wound up his little ball of yarn that trip," laughs Jeb. "Nothin' left

now but to carry out the remains. I wouldn't give a cent fer what's left of that poor gazabel. Plain case of murder in the first degree."

"Boys," I cheeps, tryin' to locate the door, "I'm goin' after a drink. I'll be back directly."

They grab me, and slam me down in the chair.

"None of them old dodges, Jack Jetts," warns the heartless Jeb. "If you don't know enough to pertect your health, me and Joe will have to take charge of you. You've made your brags, too, and, fer the sake of the Jetts' name, you got to come clean. Don't try any of them old ketches or drives on us ; they won't work. We're jes' a little mite too cute fer you. There's no way you kin escape."

"But, Jeb, fer Heaven's sake "

Jes' then the poor feller that the dentist had had down broke away and bolted past us, talkin' hog Latin and whirlin' his eyes. I would have went with him, but Jeb and Joe caught me as I was climbin' his coat tail.

Then the dentist come out and looked us over. Seems that something— a little bird, maybe— tells him I'm the next to be dragged up to the fire and branded and ear-marked. He lays a moss-agate eye on me. Had the eye of a murderer that dentist had— a dead eye with no light in it. And a long, cruel face that showed no sign of mercy, love, ner kindness.

He crooks a long, capable finger at me. I try to git up, but my feet have fell asleep and I seem unable to move. Jeb and Joe help me up, and, after a little wabblin', I head the death march. It was sure a sick'nin' outlook.

The dentist don't have much to say. I've always noticed that them natural- born murderers are short on conversation.

With the help of my brothers he slams me down in a sway-backed plush chair and begins sortin' his tools. I look around at Jeb and Joe, pleadin' fer help, but they stand off from me like they is ashamed to acknowledge we're related.

The dentist takes out a young monkey wrench, a posthole digger, a hoe, and a pair of wire nippers. Then he scratches his head like he'd overlooked something, and dives down in his tool chest and brings up a brace and bit, a crosscut saw, a bootjack, and a hackamore.

I begin to see that that dentist feller is a man who believes in bein' pre- pared fer all deals.

He makes a third dive fer more tools, bujt by that time I've made it to the door and am on my way back to the open range. But there's no gittin' by Jeb and Joe. They circle me and throw me back into the chair.

"Now," says the tooth jerker, cold and tiredlike, "let's have a look at it,"

I opens my mouth, and he looks in as fur back as the kitchen.

Jeb and Joe take a look, too.

"Huh," exclaims Jeb, "I thought fer a minute somebody had opened the door."

"He ought to take that trap down to the harness maker's and have the corners stitched up," says Joe, thinkin' to be cute.

I can't say nothin' back to them scoundrels, fer by that time the dentist feller has crawled inside and is persnippercatin' around with a young crowbar. He finds the right grinder all, all right. When he found it. I slid down on my neck, but that didn't bother him. He jes' follered me on down, gougin' and diggin'.

After a sweatin' spell he gits off'n me, and says to my brothers: "Have to extract it."

They yank rae up in the chair.

The dentist reaches fer a pair of tongs.

"It won't hurt much," he tells me, about as comfortin' as a rattlesnake in a dark room. Then to the boys: "Hold his hands!"

"Wait, please wait!" I begs. "The derned thing ain't achin' a bit."

"Hold his hands!"

My brothers grab me, and the dentist gits up on my chest. I can't even blat.

Then down come those cold tongs on that tooth till they dip right into the jumpin', quiverin' center of where I live. As soon as he's sure he's fastened, he begins what the feller calls a rotary motion. He begins twistin' my face the same as a woman twists the lid on a jar of preserves.

My stomach come on up in my neck, my heart flopped over.

"There it is," says the dentist feller, holdin' in front of me what I first thought was a cottonwood stump. "One dollar, please!"

It was some time afterward that I noticed a pair of boots stickin' out from a clump of sagebrush. On lookin' closer I see that them boots belonged to Jeb Jetts. Joe was near the jug, and the jug was empty. We must have had quite a time, fer we was miles from town.

When we gits all squared around, and lined out fer the ranch, Jeb looks at Joe, and says:

"Speakin' of Injun torture—"

"Enough said," I cuts him off sharp ; but I can't stop Joe from singin' when the spirit moves him.

I even join in the chorus when he lets go all holts and warbles:

You can't tell what a man will do,

Till he does it, till he does it;

You never know if he'll come through,

Till he does it, till he does it.

Fer talk is cheap and hot air, too,

And that hits me. and likewise you,

No man alive knows what he'll do,

Till he does it, till he does it.

And so, with the understandin' that the best of men has their little weak spots, we fogs across the good old range.

_________________

8: The Secret of the White Castle

Julia Magruder

1854-1907

The Black Cat, Oct. 1895

WHEN I became the occupant of the Chateau Blanc, in the neighborhood of Fontainebleau, I found that my wish for a place of complete seclusion was likely to be realized to the full. I was not in a state of mind for society, and I had deliberately given myself three months in which to fight out a certain battle with myself, for which I needed solitude and reflection.

When the old woman who acted as keeper and caretaker of the place took me through it, on a tour of inspection, there were three things which, in spite of my preoccupation with my own affairs, struck me very forcibly. The first was the forlorn remnants of the body of a white swan, which must once have been a creature of splendid size and shape. My informant told me that this swan had been a great pet of the former owner of the chateau, until some accident had killed it; after which it had been stuffed and fastened in its place upon the surface of the little lake under his window. There it was still— what remained of it— a mass of weather-beaten and dirty feathers.

Another thing that compelled my strong attention was a certain picture which hung in the bedroom of the late owner, and which I was informed was his own portrait, painted by himself. This room, by the way, was sinister and mysterious in its effect beyond any I had over entered. One reason for this was the fact that all the furniture, which was elaborately carved and which must once have been of beautiful polish and color, had been ruthlessly covered with a coat of black paint— the bed, the table, chairs, wardrobe, chests of drawers, and even the great leather easy-chair which was placed just under the picture, facing the opposite wall.

It was a wretched piece of work, that picture, representing a mail dressed in some sort of court dress of the last century, and it would have seemed ineffectual and amateurish to the last degree but for the truly marvelous expression of the eyes, which were fixed on a certain spot in the wall opposite with an earnestness and intensity which made me feel that there was some hidden significance in this look. The man not only looked at the spot himself, but he compelled me to do the same, and forced me, by the insistent command of his eyes, to look again and again.

And yet there was nothing to see. The wall was perfectly bare in that place and covered with a meaningless sort of wall-paper, which gave me no encouragement whatever.

Another thing that I noticed specially, with a feeling of being imperiously directed to do so, was a large rusty key that hung on the wall directly under the picture. When I inquired of the old woman what this key belonged to she answered that she had never known, but that it had been hung there by the late proprietor and had been undisturbed since his death. That event had occurred a great many years ago, and it was owing to the provisions of the will left by him that no one had ever occupied the house in the interval. The prescribed time had only just expired, and I was the first person to rent the chateau, the revenue from which was to go to a nephew, who lived abroad.

The somberness of the black chamber suited my frame of mind, and I decided on taking it for my room. Besides this, the picture, the key, and the white swan all interested me, and, as it was the first time that an outside interest had made any headway against the melancholy of my own thoughts, these objects, far from cheerful as they were in themselves, afforded a grateful diversion.

So continually did I wonder why the picture looked always and could compel me to look at that one spot, and why the key had been hung in that place and had kept its position so many years undisturbed, as if some ghostly guardian watched over it, and why, ever and always, the old white swan compelled me, as if by some irresistible power, to connect it with these other things, that I kept myself awake at night, weaving all sorts of stories concerning these objects, and spent half my days in looking from the picture to the wall, and back again to the key, and then out of the window at the battered effigy of a noble bird beneath it, until the confusion of mind thus produced seemed likely to drive me crazy.

I expended all the ingenuity of which I was master in questioning the old woman, who had lived here in the time of the former owner, but the satisfaction of my curiosity in that direction was rather meager.

She told me that her former master had had a wife whom he adored, fair as an angel, and gifted with a divinely beautiful voice, such as none had ever heard, before or since. This young wife had been snatched from him by a sudden and frightful death. The fever which seized her had been so contagious, the woman said, that every one had fled the premises, except one woman servant and the master himself. These, with the help of the doctor, had nursed the young wife through her brief illness until its end.

My informant had heard it said that the circumstances of her death were very peculiar— that, in her delirium, on the very last night of her illness, those who had ventured to linger about the premises had heard her singing more gloriously than ever in her life; that it had reminded them of the great white swan, which but the night before had sung its last sweet song on the lake, in the moonlight, and had been found dead in the morning.

The woman who had remained to help the master in his last sad ministrations to his dying and dead wife had gone away the day after the funeral, and had never been heard of since.

That funeral, in the quaint old church but a few paces from the house, had been, from the woman’s account, a melancholy affair enough. Scarcely any one dared to come to it, so malignant had been this fever, and it was feared that the few men who were willing to act as pall-bearers would not be equal to the task; but the poor lady had always been slight and fairy-like in figure, and so wasted was she from this consuming fever that the bearers declared that her weight was scarcely more than that of an empty coffin. The woman further said that, as the small funeral cortege was leaving the church, it had surprised every one to see the husband, who was directly behind the coffin, pause abruptly under a statue of the Virgin, and single out, from the great bunch of white ribbons which hung there, the long strip which his young wife had placed there on the day of her marriage to him, less than a year before. It was an old custom connected with this church. Every girl ever married there had conformed to it, and some of the ribbons were yellow with time and almost dropping to pieces. The longest and freshest bit of all had been put there by the beautiful and beloved young creature now lying dead in the flower of her youth and loveliness.

No one ever knew, the woman went on to say, how the master spent his days after the funeral was over. He had forbidden every servant to return, and turned a deaf ear to the rings and knocks of visitors. Months had passed, and no one held speech with him. They knew he was alive, because people who had looked through the palings had seen him walking in the garden, and one person reported having seen him carry from the house the stuffed body of the great swan and fasten it in its place on the lake, where it could be plainly seen from his window. He must have embalmed or stuffed it himself, the old woman said, for he was known to have remarkable knowledge and skill in such strange arts, and had once had a great room filled with birds and beasts, which he had preserved by methods studied in foreign lands.

As was inevitable, after hearing all this, my interest in the picture, and swan, and the key deepened sensibly. There was certainly a spell of the supernatural about these things for me. I had only to stand near the spot on which the eyes of the picture were fastened to experience the strangest, the most overwhelmingly significant sensations I had ever known. The spot was haunted by a pretence for me, and as often as I stood there I would feel my heart throb and cease throbbing, my breath pant and cease panting, my very flesh turn cold and moist with consciousness and apprehension. I tried to account for all this on natural grounds, but I found it was quite impossible to do so.

One day— it was the 19th of August— a hot, sultry, close, indescribably gloomy day, when the heavy clouds that lowered seemed only to darken the whole earth without giving forth one drop of moisture,— the old woman came to my room and chanced to mention that it was the time of the death of the young mistress of the Chateau Blanc. She had died, it appeared, just at midnight between the 19th and 20th of August. After giving me this information, she said good-evening and left me to the reflections which it aroused.

I can scarcely call them reflections. They took the form, rather, of a sort of compulsion that was laid upon me to obey a certain force by which I felt myself suddenly dominated.

It was the picture that did it; this was certain, for, as often as I faltered, one look into that insistent, commanding, coercing face compelled me to go on. In obedience to its bidding, I did as follows:—

I went to an old desk in the room, and took from it some simple carpenter’s tools, with which I deliberately cut through, first, the wall-papering, and then a thin boarding, which covered all the space between a door and window opposite the picture. When this was done I saw— I cannot say whether most to my satisfaction or my horror, that I stood opposite a door,  a regular, ordinary door, with panels, hinges, and, more than all, a keyhole. I glanced at the picture. It seemed to me that the canvas positively lived with expression.

The eyes commanded me to get the rusty key. I got it, fitted it in the lock, in which it turned with difficulty, and then, with my heart almost choking me with its throbs, my knees shaking under me, my body covered with a cold sweat, and my tongue dry ill my mouth, I opened the door.

As it creaked on its rusty hinges, I saw, by the light of the candle which I held in my hand, a mass of cobwebs, heavily weighted with the dust of years, and, through these, a woman’s figure.

It was clad— for I obeyed the eyes, which commanded me to examine it, though my heart was cold with terror— in what I made out to be a white silk gown, above which was the face, withered and awfully livid, as I had heard the faces of embalmed corpses appear years after death. Still, it was recognizable as a real human face, and was surrounded by masses of yellow hair, which, even through the dust and cobwebs, gleamed with the brightness of gold. The hands held something in their shrunken fingers— a white ribbon, with the date of her marriage and death upon it, her husband's name and her own, and these words, which, under the compelling eyes of the picture, I laboriously studied out:—

“I have been able to keep you near me, even in death. I have never been separated from you, or from what was you to me once. But when death shall come to me you will have no power over my body, and they will take me from you. That I am unable to help. I think only of this: you cannot suffer for it, since you have so long ceased to be, and by that time my suffering also will be over. I shall put my spirit into the eyes of my picture, which will watch over you still.”

I looked from the paper to the picture. It seemed dull and inexpressive— mere canvas and paint. The power of the eyes was gone. Their spell over me was broken.

Suddenly I felt within me a long-absent yearning for human companionship— for life and love. I had come to this place impelled by a morbid and unhealthy desire for solitude, and my experiences here had made me more morbid and unhealthy still. They had culminated now in this awful revelation of disappointment and death, which threw into brilliant contrast the bright possibilities which still remained to me, and I resolved to go back into the world and do my best to deserve and win these.

_______________

9: Changed

Gordon Young

1886-1948

Adventure 3 Oct 1919

THEY called him "the coward" on board Dan McSpadden's schooner because he flinched every time a gun was fired; and when the cutter had been rowed off the beach at Santa Cruz and McSpadden and Old Billy had shot at the hundred howling savages flinging arrows toward the boat, he had dropped his oar and stopped his ears.

So it happened that the same night, when McSpadden, big and burly and afraid of nothing under heaven, had caught him in the moonlight by the main hatch whispering to Nina McSpadden— well, any other man would have been drowned, but the coward was like a fish in water. And Nina had screamed when her father flung the boy overboard; and the old man, who was not cruel, but very hasty and violent, had heaved to and lowered away.

Furlong might be a coward, but he was a great sailor. It could be said that the ship was his cradle and the ocean was his mother. He had been born the son of a trader— and he had been bom at that moment when Chinese pirates, ranging south a hundred miles off Canton, had taken it into their heads to board the little bark. There was fighting on deck and the roar of guns, and the infant's screams mingled with those of his frightened mother's. She died that night and so did his father— the father cleft from shoulder to collar-bone with a kris. And the mate of the bark had edged his way south and around the Australian coast to Sydney and, being an honest man, had told a true story and adopted the infant and left it with his wife in port.

Then the bark went down and the wife was widowed and had no love for the baby, which was bandied from hand to hand and sent to sea almost as soon as it could toddle, to be out of the way.

At eighteen Dick Furlong shipped with Dan McSpadden, trader. He shipped because he had caught sight of Dan McSpadden's daughter and learned that she went with her father wherever the White Wing threw her canvas to the winds.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Furlong had learned to swim before he could walk. No native was more at home in the water than he, and even native children dive deep for shells and frighten off or fight a shark as our children throw rocks at a dog.

"Dick," said the girl when she had found him at the wheel one night and knew that her father was asleep, "you are a coward. You know it."

Now, she said it tenderly, as one regretfully stating a fact that had to be faced. She did not want to love the boy; or rather she did not want to love a coward. But women's hearts are unruly.

"I know it," he said frankly. "Are you 'fraid of snakes?"

"No," she answered scornfully.

"Spiders?"

"No!"

"Are you afraid of anything, Nina?"

"These great big black cannibals— if I drink coffee at night, I'm sure to stay awake till eight bells and then put in the rest of the night fighting them!"

"I'm not afraid of them. Honest, Nina. But a gun— it isn't the bullet, you know. It's the noise. I can't stand it. On the Lucy B .—the last ship 'fore White Wing— they had a one-pounder. It was all I could do to keep from jumpin' overboard ever' time they fired her. I'll go aloft with the best, Nina. I've gone over the side with a knife and ripped open a shark that was after a black boy. But a gun— I wouldn't— I couldn't—fire a gun! I just simply can't help it!"

"And father liked you, too!" she said regretfully; for the old man had thought Furlong a great boy until that Santa Cruz affair.

Perhaps if Nina and her father and young Furlong had studied that modern science of psychoanalysis, and if they had known that Mrs. Furlong herself had always had a dread of firearms and had died more of fright than of anything else at the hour of Dick's birth, they would all have understood that the boy could no more have helped his fear of the guns' roar than he could have helped having deep, soft brown eyes.

"Billy," said McSpadden as the schooner came close to a bay on Guadalcanar, "I'm afraid we'll find trouble here. Never run from a nigger yet when I was on my own ship. Be-if I will now."

The schooner was no sooner headed into the bay than the wind began to die down. It was around noon. There was no surf, and the water was deep and clear as in a glass bowl. As the saying goes, one could count the scales on the belly of a shark.

The schooner was met by a swarm of natives. Ordinarily Captain McSpadden would not have dropped anchor in a strange bay where the savages were not to be trusted, but now he let go the anchor; for there was no wind to go about with, and if the schooner were left to drift she might go on the rocks and have to hang through low-tide even after the evening breeze came up.

The savages, in many little canoes and one big one, would not at first paddle closer than fifty yards. They kept a wary lookout, as if expecting to be fired on. And they said nothing, which was strange for savages. They would not even answer the hail of the captain. He had no way of knowing that less than a week before a recruiter had been along and kidnaped a dozen stalwart black boys, and that the tribe was sworn to be revenged on the next ship that came near.

Nina stood with her father on the poop and kept her eyes on the great war-canoe that could easily hold sixty men, though it was not quite full. At stem and stern a slender figure stood up over ten feet. This and the sides of the canoe were decorated with cowry shells and mother- of- pearl.

The fifty men in the canoe were evi dently the finest warriors of the village. They were big fellows, flat-featured, with bushy hair. Their dark bodies glistened with coconut oil. They were naked except for necklaces of boar's tusks, bracelets and armlets of cowry shell and a bark clout. No weapons were in sight but Nina knew very well that they might be in the bottom of the boat.

There were about two hundred of the natives on the water and probably twenty of the small canoes— dugouts with outriggers.

The great war-canoe, driven by the regular sweep of the twenty and more paddles that dipped the water on each side, was circling around and around the little schooner and gradually moving in closer..

Whether the natives were merely being cautious or intended to make an attack, Captain McSpadden could not tell.

"You go down to the cabin and lock yourself in," said the captain to Nina. "There may be trouble."

NINA looked at her father in exasperation. Or rather she looked at his back, for he had given her the orders and had turned away expecting them to be followed without further comment. She didn't want to go to the cabin. Of all places that was the one where she did not want to be. Down there alone, wondering how the fight was going and imagining the worst, would be more distressing than on deck watching. Be¬ sides, she was seventeen and had followed her father over the seas for ten years; she could shoot straight and she— well, she had no intention of doing what he told her, but she knew better than to argue with him.

So she went far enough down the com¬ panionway to be out of sight yet able to peep out and listen.

There were only sixteen men on the White Wing and twelve of those were natives, black boys— Samoans, Tongans and Fijians.

Old Billy came up the poop ladder, followed by four of the natives. All were armed and he was carrying three extra rifles, which he carefully stood up against the skylight. No one noticed when Nina's slender arm reached cautiously out and took one of the rifles.

Old Billy had been a man-o'-warsman in the British navy thirty years before. He was short and square-built, with legs bowed as if they had grown around the bottom of a boat. He wore a short bushy beard but out of deference to Queen Victoria's wishes regarding the barbering of her sailormen had kept his upper lip shaven.

He was over sixty and, though he might get out of breath a little sooner than in his younger days, he was still a man that could put up a fierce fight and keep it up. And he had no gods before Nina; and though he would not admit it to anybody, and after the Santa Cruz incident was rather ashamed of it himself, he had a pretty strong affection for Dick Furlong— coward.

"What'd you do with the coward?" said McSpadden.

"Stuck 'im on the deck-'ouse forrard, sir, with four black boys. I'm sendin' four more to the yards, an' they can 'elp pick cannibals off 'm there. I'll be forrard myself, sir."

"You think there is danger?" the captain asked.

Nina, venturing her pretty blond head around the edge of her hiding-place, fastened her bright blue eyes on Old Billy's weather-worn face and anxiously awaited the verdict.

"I know it!" said Old Billy positively.

"And are you sure they are going to attack?" asked Mr. Summers, who was a kind of supercargo and navigator com¬ bined, a man of education who had taken to the ocean for his health.

"I'm afraid so," said McSpadden, slowly turning and viewing the little canoes that edged closer and closer. "They will try to come over the fo'c'sle."

"I'll go forrard an' see as they don't," said Old Billy, moving away.

It happens that Nina knew her father as well as most daughters of seventeen do. She knew that if he caught sight of her aft he would make her go below; but she knew too that if there should be a fight and all came out well he would be in a good humor and readily forgive her for having disobeyed him. And if the fight didn't come out well— then it would make precious little difference where she was, except that it would be better to be dead with the rest of the ship's company than to have to shoot one's self as the cannibals broke through the cabin door.

Not that she reasoned all that out in so many words— but she understood the situation. And there was another and not uninfluential idea in her mind; she. believed that by her side, under her eyes, Furlong would not flinch from the roar of a rifle, and she did not want him to flinch. She wanted him to be conspicu¬ ously brave. Her father would forgive a brave man anything— even having stolen the heart of his daughter. Moreover, the forward deck-house would be safe for her with Old Billy on guard there, and although her father might see her he could not order her below— not after the cannibals had boarded.

The big war-canoe continued to circle the schooner. The savages seemed to be considering whether or not to come closer. The chief of the chiefs, or king— in the villages there are often many chiefs and the greatest of these is king— sat in the stem. He might be distinguished by a large moon-shaped piece of white shell about the size of a dinner plate that was suspended on his breast. He was a small, wiry man with a withered face; a cunning man, who was circling and circling the White Wing and counting the number of the crew.

At a word from him the paddles dipped slower, so that the canoe seemed scarcely to move through the water. It passed within twenty-five yards of the White Wing's stem and fifty black, flat faces, many with long bits of bone stuck through the end of the nose, stared up at Captain McSpadden.

He called to them in a friendly tone, holding up one of the trade axes which are greatly prized by all natives, to show that he had come as a peaceful man of commerce, but there was no answer. The canoe passed on slowly, slowly, and as silently as though rowed by black shadows.

Suddenly, as it rounded the schooner's bow, the king leaped to his feet with a yell. With one stroke of the paddles the war- canoe was brought around short and the second sweep of the paddles sent it, head on, straight for the bow of the White Wing.

And at once, all about the ship, those black forms that had moved about like voiceless specters became as howling demons. Their yells filled the air. The little canoes that were farthest away splashed frantically to come in close. Those nearer dropped their paddles and snatched tomahawks from where they had been lying at their feet.

The war-canoe came straight for the bow, grazed alongside, and the natives— some of them seizing the jib-stay and coming over the bowsprit, some of them leaping to the shoulders of their fellows and springing from there above the freeboard— began climbing on to the schooner.

From the deck-house, from the yards and from the poop the rifles were cracking; and though a native, even when not ex¬ cited, is rarely a good shot, the rifles made a wicked noise and the cannibals were too thick for many of the bullets to go astray. Besides, those rifles in the hands of Old Billy, Captain McSpadden and Mr. Summers were steady and true; while Dick Furlong, stubbornly grinding his teeth and shutting both eyes each time he pulled the trigger, aimed blindly down at the swarming savages.

Nina, who had been slipping forward so that she could not be called back, was caught by the rush just forward of the main hatch.

She could not have been in a more dangerous place. That she was not instantly cut down was due to the fact that she had backed herself against the deck-house and coolly shot down the first savage that came at her. Another thing that saved her and perhaps the others was that savages, when they succeed in boarding a ship, are much more intent on plundering in it than in getting rid of the crew. Those who broke into the trade-room and deck-houses were safely out of the fire zone and searched busily for loot.

Dick had been standing at the edge of the deck-house when Nina's rifle went off just below him. He gave a cry— a wild cry of alarm and consternation— and leaped; and as he went he turned his gun into a club so that as he came down it was laid across the head of a cannibal that was running forward at the girl.

Cannibal and sailor went to the deck, but Dick was up, elbow and knee, at once. From his left side he drew the long knife that always swung to his wrist from a lanyard when he went into shark-infested water. One hand held the knife, the other the war-club snatched from the fingers of the dead savage, and, flinging himself before the girl, he struck right and left.

IT WAS hot and fast work, but the boy's muscles were tough as rat- lines; his lungs, stretched and tempered with ocean breeze from the very first breath, were as near to leather as lungs can be; and than he a tiger-fish was scarcely more quick or fierce.

Old Billy had sworn in contemptuous rage when he saw the boy jump, for he thought panic had set him crazy. But at a glance below Old Billy's great voice roared out hearty oaths of encouragement.

"Out cutlasses and board!" yelled the old fellow, in his excitement echoing a command of those naval days when ships came alongside of each other and men struggled from deck to deck.

And as he yelled his cutlass came out and he dropped feet first and with a mighty slash stained the steel and cleared space for the free swinging of his powerful arm.

Old Billy stood before Nina and to her right. Dick stood before her and to the left. Between them the girl, her face pale and tense, stood wanting to pray but not daring to take the time, for as fast as she could load and shoot she did.

From the poop Captain McSpadden and the others saw the hand-to-hand fighting of Old Billy and Dick, but between poop and deck-house the deck was alive with cannibals. The native sailors, from deckhouse, yards and poop, were comparatively safe and shot fast, so that the scuppers ran blood.

Wounded savages fling themselves overboard and those unwounded fight fiercely only when it is easy to win. If victory be in doubt, they run. There were many who went overboard. The savages still in the canoes, seeing such numbers dropping away wounded and in terror, paddled off to a safe distance and waited.

McSpadden was not the man to hesitate when his daughter was in peril; with rifle and trade ax in either hand he lunged down the ladder to hack his way through. Summers came after him, firing as he went. And the Tongans on the poop gave a mighty war-cry and plunged after the white men. Fire spat from the yards and Old Billy, with revolver and cutlass, pressed forward.

As if at a signal, the cannibals became panic-stricken and started for the side. Pell-mell and headlong scores of them dived into the water. But some of the warriors held their ground.

A sudden rush to the side and a blow from behind— Old Billy went down. Dick yelled a warning too late and with a gesture and a cry to Nina lifted her up so that the reaching native sailors a-top the deckhouse grabbed her arms and pulled her to safety. And as she left his arms Dick wheeled with up-raised knife to meet the cunning cannibal that had laid Old Billy for a time motionless on the deck.

He was not a big savage, but he had a hideous face and a big moon' disk was on his chest. Dick ducked low to avoid the downward blow of the tomahawk— struck out— missed— and the next instant he had grabbed the arm that held the tomahawk and his own knife-arm was seized; he was at death-grips with the cannibal king.

The cannibal was crafty and alert, but Dick clung to him like a clamped vise. Nina snatched a rifle from one of the sailors but did not dare to shoot; the bullet would have been sent too near the boy she loved. She cried for the native sailors to jump down to his aid, but they were not Tongans.

The cannibal could not strike. Dick could not use his knife. They twisted and turned. Then the old savage, looking fore and aft, saw the danger he was in; his men were fleeing over the side and McSpadden and Summers were coming on with blow on blow.

Nearer and nearer the side the old king drew the boy. Then suddenly he lurched overboard.

Nina shrieked louder than if it were her own death she had been pulled to.

The water is very nearly as much the South Sea Islander's home as his hut, and the cunning old king thought the boy's grip would be easily broken and his head split under the water. But as he fell Dick sucked his lungs full of air. He was as much at home in the water as any islander. No sooner was he plunged into it than he wrapped his legs around the cannibal's waist and began squeezing as hard as he could; and down, down, down they sank together.

And Dick hung on, though his lungs began to ache and it seemed that he could not restrain his breath another inoment. He set his teeth, but he did not shut his eyes. Then it seemed that his lungs must explode in the next instant; his ears roared and a black fog came into his eyes; but stubbornly he winked his lids and kept his eyes open. He knew the cannibal, too, was in great pain— and it would be the first to yield that would die.

The old cannibal had not gained his kingship and held it with craft all those years for nothing. He was wily and quick as a fish. Suddenly he dropped his tomahawk, released his grip on Dick's wrist and, prying with both hands— at the same time expelling the air from his own lungs— began to sink even deeper. The unexpectedness of the move let him break away. At once with overhand strokes he began shooting toward the surface of the water.

Dick, fiercely stroking with his legs and one arm and as used to using his eyes under water as in twilight, streaked upward as a shark rises, and like a shark he turned on his back so that the cannibal was above and breast-down to him.

Out of the water they came together, almost breast to breast. Dick's upraised hand swept down, ripping the savage from short rib to thigh. And Nina saw, and McSpadden saw, and even Old Billy, having limped to the side, had looked down to where Nina pointed.

The last of the cannibals who were able to run had leaped from the waist of the ship almost as soon as their king toppled overboard.

The fight was over. The native sailors continued to fire at the savages in the water; but the white men stood looking down at the vague shapes barely visible under it, fascinated by the strangeness of the duel.

Dick puffed once or twice; then with long strokes he reached the side and scrambled up a line that Captain McSpadden himself held. And when he reached the deck the captain's arm went around his shoulder and his great hoarse voice cried huskily:

"Great God, boy! Who— who— in the —— ever called you a coward!"

AND that night, as the White Wing plowed along in the moonlight to look for a more friendly village to trade with, Dick and Nina nestled together in the shadow of the long-boat and overheard Captain McSpadden say to Mr. Summers:

"I'm gettin' along in years, you know, and in three or four I'll be ready to drop anchor. I can give him half-interest in White Wing, and it'll be pretty nice to have a son-in-law like him workin' for me. Nobody'll dare monkey with his ship!"

Then Captain McSpadden pulled down his right eye in an elaborate and prolonged wink and jerked his head in the direction of the long-boat, where two forms were merged into one shapeless shadow.

____________________

10: Grandfather's Courtship

Henry Lawson

1867-1922

Reprinted in The Australian Women's Weekly, 29 Jan 1958

Originally published in "The Lone Hand" magazine, date unknown, but likely a Christmas issue. A total of 166 issues are on-line at the Australian National Library through TROVE but no searchable digital index exists and I have been unable to pinpoint the date of first publication.

IT WAS Christmas time, and a younger brother, a younger uncle and I had come with a couple of doubtful shotguns and the fisherman's faith to spend the holidays with Grandfather at Mount Victoria. He was a caretaker in an old mountain residence at the head of a ragged gully, and we had spent the day before Christmas in helping him to bring the timber he had split up from the head of the gully. In the evening he and I decided to rest and smoke while the other two went into the township.

Grandfather sat against the wall smoking his pipe, which he had cleared and filled with the deliberate care of an old bushman. I was trying to smoke too, being over twenty-one, and allowed that privilege by Grandfather. We were both gazing into the broad moonlight across the old orchard to the cliffs on the other side of the gully and the blue peaks beyond. After a spell of silence I had asked Grandfather to sing, and he had sung "The Golden Glove" and "The Mistletoe Bough". Then we were quiet again for a while, and the silence was broken by Grandfather.

"Henery, did I ever tell you how I courted your Grandmother?"

I had heard the story, but I kept that dark, and then Grandfather told me all about it.

"I was a young man then, Henery," said Grandfather, "about your age— but they did say I was something to look at." Grandfather paused, with his quizzical side-long glance at me; but I didn't take the matter up, so Grandfather went on, evidently disappointed: "An' I didn't wear la-di-dah clothes, an' write poetry for the papers, an' talk like a 'en (hen) to make meself look like what I wasn't."

I let that pass, too, considering it weak and unworthy of Grandfather.

"Howsomenever, we was all livin' at a place between Windsor and Penrith on the upper Hawkesbury— on the Nepean— nearabouts where we were all born and brought up, at a place called Never Mind— at least, that's what we called it. It would be called Kick-up-a-Fuss in these here la-di-dah days. We had a saw-pit and timber-trucks— they're all gone now, tyres and all, and the saw-pit's gone too, an' so's the timber. They're making new forests, I've heered, but they won't be like the old 'uns. The last time I took a holiday trip down there to see the place there was nothing but a heap of stones with tangle growin' over 'em, an' a frill lizard thinkin' in the sun; he must have been a old 'un, fer he seemed to remember me and didn't make to go away. But there was a dint in the ground yit where the saw-pit was; an' dirty water; an' some tadpoles an' maybe a crawfish or two— the water was too muddy for me to see; an' some ducks holdin' a mothers' meetin', about me comin', I s'pose!"

"Go on, Grandfather."

"Howsomenever. It was Saturday and we knocked off at one o'clock and I went home dog-tired. I had a slush and went in and sat down to dinner. Mother was away, monthly nursin', at the minister's house— the parsonage near Penrith; an' my sister Margaret was keeping house. You never saw your great-aunt Margaret, Henery?"

(I saw the old lady since and she recognised me and said she'd know one of our tribe if she saw the skin spread out on a gooseberry bush. Then I recognised her.)

"Howsomenever, Father— that's your great-grandfather— was at home, growlin' round, which was about all he did, nowadays. You see, he had crotchety old country ideas. Howsomenever, we wanted a growler in the family to make the home complete. It was a big family, but poor old Father filled the job right down to the ground and up to the roof.

"After dinner I stretched out on the broad of me back on the big home-made sofa and smoked 'n' rested. It was good. Arter a while, Margaret (yer great-aunt) said:

"'I want you to take the clean clothes to Mother at the minister's place this afternoon, Harry, if you will.' You see, she was washing for the parsonage.

"'Oh, confound it!' I said, 'You're allers a worrit-worrit-worriting the life out of a man; ain't a man to get no rest at all? Let some of the others do it!' Margaret didn't say anything, but went on folding and ironing an' fillin' the basket. She always knew what she was about. Bimeby I felt rested and got restless and oneasy, and sat up.

"'You wimmin is always worrit-worrit-worritin' a man,' I said, 'he don't git no peace at all.'

"'What's the matter with you now, Harry?' she says. 'Who's a-worritin' you?'

"'Have you got those clothes ready?' I shouted.

"'Presently,' she said, 'you needn't howl about it.'

"I went and tidied up a bit and put on my boots. We didn't wear our boots every day in the week then. And then I hoisted the basket onto my shoulder an' started up the river to the minister's place.

"When I got there I went round to the back and knocked at the kitchen door; it was shut, being a windy day. It was opened, and I seen the prettiest girl east of the mountains. She was short and slight and had blue eyes and hair like new straw— (but all you rascals are dark, like me). I was taken aback, not expectin' her, though I had heerd that there was a young English servient girl at the parsonage, but I took no notice of it; so I was flustered and took up the baskit agen, like a big fool, to have somethin' to 'old onto; and was offerin' it to her as if it had been a bokay. But she wasn't no more flustered at seein' me there than if I'd been the cat come home— or she'd been one. Wimmin are like cats in some ways. I recollicted myself presently and put the basket down an' scraped off me hat. 'If you please, Miss,' I said, 'I'd like to hassertain if Mother is in. Missis Albury, Miss,' I says.

" 'Oh! you're Harry,' she said. 'I beg your pardon— Mr Albury. Come in and sit down. Put the basket down anywheres, and I'll go and tell your mother you're here.'

"I went in and put down the basket in the middle of the big brick floor where it 'ud be in everyone's road. It was one of them old style kitchens, with everything big and scrubbed, and white and bright and yellow, and red. She started to drag a big old-fashioned cane chair out, with legs spread out like a kangaroo dog runnin', an' a dished back, all string-bound. I put me hat down very carefully in a corner on the brick floor, where it wouldn't fall off.

"Then I went to help her with the chair, an' accidentally touched her hand, and it took all the presence of mind out of me that was left in me, it was so small and cool and soft. I said, 'Beg yer pardon, Miss,' for nothing, and set down suddenly, an' the chair set down too— the legs went all ways for Sunday; and that didn't improve matters."

"What did you do then, Grandfather?"

"Got up, o' course, you ass. Do you think I was going to sit there all day?"

"She'd have thought it rather strange, Grandfather, if you had. But what did she say? Did she laugh?"

"No! She didn't; she wasn't a lot of thund'rin' jumpt-up laughing Jack-hasses, like my grandchildren. She looked— she looked— well— "

"Demure, Grandfather?"

"Now, I don't want none of your la-di-dah words! She looked well— "

"Concerned?" I ventured.

"Consarn you. She looked— hanxious. She wanted to hassertain if I was hurt."

"To what!"

"Well, to know, if you must know. I said I wasn't. I was concerned, as you call it, about the chair. I wanted to take it out an' mend it right away, but she wouldn't hear of it. She said it was all her fault; the cook ought to have had it put in the lumber room long ago; the minister, Mr Kinghorn, had told them to; but how it could be all her fault and the cook's too, I didn't think at the time. 'An' would you carry it into the shed for me, please, Mr er- r— Harry?' And Mr-Herr-Harry pleased. When I came back she was dragging out a big old grandfather chair from a nook— the cook's special, I s'pose— and I reckoned she must be a big woman. I took the chair from her and put it near the door and sat down, it seemed safer there, and she started for the foot of the stairs; but Mother called over the rail:

"'What's that noise, Harriet? Who's there?' I s'pose she knowed all the time.

"'It's Mr— Mr Harry, ma'am,' said Harriet, 'the chair broke!'

"'The what?' says Mother.

"'The chair, ma'am,' says Harriet, 'it broke.'

" 'Weil, you ain't been losin' much time,' says Mother, 'I must say— well, keep him there till I come down, an' don't let him fall inter the fire.'

"I wanted to go up and smother Mother— about the chair, I mean. But I don't think Harriet guessed what Mother was drivin' at. Anyways, Harriet said so afterwards, that she didn't.

"Well I set still, and Harriet said nothing. She was the quietest little housemaid I ever see. Mousemaid, rather. It was the cook's arternoon out, I s'pose. Harriet moved round like a mouse, polishin' and brightenin' up already, an' we went on sayin' nothing to each other just as fast as ever we could.

"Arter about two years hard, I think, I heern Mother coimin' downstairs, pat, pat, pat, pat, with a basket of dirty clothes— at least I wouldn't a' called 'em dirty— "

"Soiled linen, Grandfather?"

"Right! Some of yer lah-di-dandy. Howsomenever, when Mother got to the foot of the stairs, and turns round like a stopper in a bottle (she was short and stout like a Yorkshire dumpling, like yer Granny was when you knew her— a bundle as long as she was broad. Strange how all our mothers and wives are so short and dumpy, an' we so long, an' sometimes lanky, like you). Howsomenever, Mother squinted at me an' then at Harriet.

" 'Weil. You are makin' a lot o' noise between you, you two,' says she, 'for sich new acquaintances. Leastways, when I was a gal we waited till we was introduced at least. Well, how are they all at home, Harry?'

"That's the first time that I ever see Harriet— that's your Grandmother— redden up. She flushed to the roots of her hair, as the sayin' is (an' half way down her back perhaps, though I didn't see it). She went crimson, the more so that she was fair, and it become her wonderfully. I wanted to smother Mother agen, but had to kiss her instead.

"Harriet went inside, arter some business of her own, while Mother heard the news an' give me some messages for Margaret. Mother wanted me to stay an' have a cup o'tea; but I wouldn't. I'd had enough, an' besides, I didn't know how I'd manage a cup an' sarser; especially if Harriet was in the kitchen— though the parson's kitchen crockery was big an' homely enough, it skeered me to think o' tryin'. You see, we used mugs or pannikins at home. So I said I was going somewheres that arternoon, and wanted to get home.

" 'Very well, then,' says Mother, tyin' a cloth over the basket; 'but ain't you goin' to wait an' say good-bye to Harriet. Where's yer manners?'

" 'Is her name Harriet, Mother?' I says.

" 'Yes. Of course it is,' says Mother; 'Henrietta— Harriet. Didn't yer hear me call her so, half-a-dozen times?'

" 'Well, that's funny,' I says, scratchin' my head.

" 'What's funny? You great galoot!' says Mother.

" 'Why, my name's Henery— an' Harry, too,' I said.

" 'But it ain't Henrietta, nor yet Harrieta,' says Mother; 'though you've been lookin' an' actin' more like it than she has, all the arternoon. Or like a Mary Ann rather. Why can't you hold yer own an' be a man when yer meet a good-lookin' gal? Your father could, worse luck, an' so can your brothers.'

"Jist then Harriet came back an' see me standing by the baskit, ready.

" 'Why! Isn't Mr Albury going to stay an' have some tea, Mrs Albury?' she said. 'I'll get it ready in a minute.'

" 'No, thank you, Miss,' I said, 'I've got to go somewheres; an' besides, I'm as full as a new straw bed tick.'

"I could 'a' bitten me tongue out for makin' such a hole in me manners; but it was too late now, an' I dived for the basket.

" 'Well! Say good-bye to Harriet,' says Mother.

"So I blundered up to Harriet, an' nearly over her; an' she held out her little hand a little way. Gosh, it gave me a skeer. It was soft an' cool and small— I never thought a girl could have such a small hand. It seemed alive an knowin', too, like a tame white rat in your hand. It startled me, an' I must have gripped it in my nervousness; for she gave a little sound, like a small 'Oh!' an' put both her hands behind her. Then she recollected herself, an' put em' in front, under her apron, where she was rubbing the numbness off the one she geve me with the other, I s'pose. It was all just like as if she'd given me a tame frog, unexpected, to take home and take keer of for her— that little hand was. I seen I'd hurt her, so I dived for the basket, hoisted it on me shoulder, and kissed Mother on the nose— or on the chin— I didn't know which; they both stuck out like yours will when you lose a few more teeth; and then I collared the parson's garden hat, that was hangin' on a peg on the wall, and bolted."

I waited, expectant, while Grandfather saw to his pipe and then studied the moonlight reflectively.

"Talkin' o' teeth," said Grandfather, "I wonder how you young ones all seem to lose your teeth so early. I s'pose it's the la-di-dah tucker an' soft slush you get in Sydney. It wasn't so in my time when we had to gnaw raw pumpkin an' cob corn when the floods cut the teams off."

"Confound it, Grandfather, why don't you go on with the story?"

"How kin I, when yer always keep int'ruptin' me?" said Grandfather. "Will you hold your tongue?" (Pause for reply, but I didn't fall in.) "Howsomenever, I'd gone about a mile along the road before I recollected that I hadn't said good-bye to Harriet arter all. That will show you how a— "

"Grandfather," I said, severely, "what did you take the minister's hat for?"

"How was I to know?" said Grandfather, in a suspiciously mild and injured tone, "an' how in thunder am I to know now, five an' forty years afterwards?"

"I beg your pardon, Grandfather."

"Well, don't do it agen. You're allers breakin' a thread in me dish-cloth, as old Betty Campney uster say.— Howsomenever, I didn't know I had the parson's hat on till I got home. I thought it strange, arterwards, in a funny sort o' way, that a parson should have the same size head as I had. But then agen, come to think of it, why shouldn't he?— Howsomenever, some of 'em I passed, agoin' into Penrith in carts an' on horseback, did look unusual hard at me, I noticed, an' I wondered what devilment I'd been up to in town last Saturday. One or two on horseback called out to ask if Harry Albury was ordained yet; if I'd taken 'oly Horders; and I couldn't make out what they were drivin' at, unless they guessed I'd come from the minister's place. They'd soon 'a' found out what they was drivi?' at if I hadn't 'a' bin afoot; for we wasn't scoffers, whatever else we might 'a' been. An' don't you go in for none of that (he referred to scoffing), Henery, because, if you ain't sorry arterwards, you'll be ashamed. Ver Grandmother was struck in those matters, you remember; bein' a poor minister's darter afore she immigrated. She might have been more comfortable for all on us," Grandfather went on reflectively, "if she hadn't had such strick convictions about shirt sleeves on Sundays, and little things like that. But I forgit. You see the hat was, well, a parson's 'at; it was of a— a— "

"A clerical cut, Grandfather?"

"A whatter?"

"Clerical cut."

"Clerical," said Grandfather, trying it on himself, "sounds like the name of a bantam rooster, it seems to me— well, alright, it will do for the present, you can tell me the meaning of it arterwards."

So I had at last, got at least one la-di-dah word accepted conditionally.

"What's dimure?" said Grandfather suddenly, and somewhat aggressively, it seemed to me. I could see that he had been turning it over, all unsuspected, in his second mind, part of the time. Like many keenly intelligent but totally uneducated men, he would be attracted by the sound of a word— the shorter the better. I explained that "demure" as well as I could and handed it over to Grandfather. So I saw that I had a second la-di-dah word accepted, unconditionally, this time; and was sure of meeting it again, later on, in Grandfather's possession.

"Howsomenever. When I got home I went into the kitchen an' put the basket down. 'There yer are,' I says to Margaret, 'now it's to be hoped you'll stop worritin' an' let a man have a little rest.'

"Margaret looked at the basket, an' then at me; an' then she looked at my head— and then she looked harder at it. It was brushed back on the back of me head by the arm I used steadyind the basket, over-arm; I must have wore it home most of the way that way, an' no wonder Margaret looked, to see me with a gamecock clarrickle hat on the back of me head.

" 'Well, you'll know me presently,' I said; 'better look at me feet to make sure.'

" 'Why, Harry,' she said, 'whatever have you got on?'

" 'Me clothes,' I said, thinkin' she was referring to me coimin' so early, and wonderin' what devilment I was up to, fer we never hung about the saw-pits on Saturday afternoon. They was monotonous enough all the week. I took off me hat to throw it on the kitchen sofa, and when I felt it and caught sight of it, I stared at it harder than Margaret did. I thought at first, someone must have played a trick on me. It couldn't have bin the parson, for I didn't see him.

" 'Well, I'm bewitched!' I said.

"Margaret thought a second— she was the quickest thinkin' woman I ever saw, was your great-aunt Margaret, Henery. Then she said, 'I think you are, Harry.'

" 'It must be the parson's hat,' I said.

" 'It must be,' says Margaret.

" 'I muster wore it home by mistake,' I says.

" 'You must have,' says Margaret.

"I hung the hat up an' took out me pipe, and set down on the kitchen sofa to bluff Margaret. You see, I was suspicious of her. I knew her. I think it's a cowardly thing to take your hat an' walk away from a woman's tongue, no matter how soft it is, an' she thinks so too. You see, it jinerally hurts her— her pride or something; an', if she happens to be a wife naggin', it's worse, an' sometimes more dangerous, than sittin' silent, or whistlin' 'The Last Rose o' Summer'. She might go, too— home to her mother.

"Margaret was ironin' out our Sunday things. She was ironin' one o' Father's big white shirts, with frills like a jew-lizard all down the front of it, like they wore in them days, for Father to go to Chapel in on Sunday. She ironed a couple of frills down very carefully (I supposed Grandfather meant 'tucks' or 'pleats') and then she says:

" 'Did yer bring anything else home from the minister's, Harry?'

"I brought the dirty clothes. There's the baskit under yer nose. Can't yer see it? What in thunder else would I bring?'

"Then I thought. I brought a message from Mother,' I said; 'but your jackhassin' put it clean out o' me head.' An' I give the message, to head her off from whatever she had comin'.

"She ironed down another frill.

" 'Did you leave anything at the minister's except your hat, Harry?' she asked.

"I left the clean clothes,' I said. 'What in thunder are yer drivin' at at all?'

"That was a slip; it's allers a mistake to swear— it spoils the rest of what you say. An' it's a bigger mistake to ask a woman what she means.

"Margaret ironed down another frill, very carefully; lookin' what you'd call 'demure', only not just that way. Presently she says:

" 'See anyone at the minister's, Harry?'

"I seen Mother,' I said; 'who else did yer think I'd see? The parson was out. Did yer expect me to go up to Mrs Parson's bedroom and ask her how many teeth the baby had? It was only born last week.'

"She ironed down another frill, a middle one, very carefully, from top to bottom, looking more demurer in another sort of a way— a sisterly sort of a way— than ever. She said nothin' when she'd finished it, but started on another frill, one of the shorter ones; an' I got uneasy. She was like the cattle stringin' off in the dark. At last I thought I'd ride ahead of where I thought their lead was, and have done with it, one way or the other.

"I seen the job-man there,' I said, 'an' he wasn't much to look at; an' a gal— a nursemaid or something they call Mary-Ann or some such name; an' I seen some fowls an' the pig. Now are yer satisfied!'

" 'Oh! That was Harriet Wynn,' says Margaret.

" 'Harriet what?'

" 'Wynn,' says Margaret, 'that's her name, Harriet Wynn. Didn't Mother tell you?'

" 'Oh! the gal!' I said. 'I thought you meant the pig. I didn't know the parson had taken to christening pigs, as well as kids. Well, I've had enough o' naggin' fer one day,' I said. I'm goin' out to have some peace and quietness.' And I got me old workin' hat and went out."

Short pause, and then Grandfather gave me one of his quizzical glances to see what I thought of his address and strategy in the matter. And I nodded my head emphatically at the still moonlight path with all the worldly wisdom of twenty-one.

"But I kept the girl's name in me mind for 'future reference', as you'd call it.

"I went an' lay down on a bank on the grass, with my hands under me head. The sun was low down over the poplars, and the willows, and the mountains. They was purple, mostly, o' mornin's, but was dark green, an' deep blue, an' light blue, now, and lighter the further away you got till they went into the sky; an' I got thinkin'— which reminds me," said Grandfather, "that I want to think a bit now, while I fill me pipe."

I WAS thinking, too. Thinking of Great-aunt Margaret, on Berry's Estate, North Sydney, old and withered, but wiry and bright-eyed; dressed in a quaint, prim, old-fashioned Early Victorian style that was the fashion when she was a girl, and considered neither gaunt nor prim then. There was Granny as I last saw her, taking off the old black bonnet and putting on the little old lace cap; chin and nose coming closer together, crotchety, rather, and too unpleasantly truthful (or "tactless") for these "la-di-dah" days; and with a growing tendency to get hold of the wrong end of little things with those little old hands, and hold on tight. (What work those hands had done in her time!) With stronger views than ever on the subject of shirt sleeves on Sundays; and with a most uncomfortable and unconquerable distrust of clocks and watches on those days when she donned her black silk— or lustre, or cashmere, or whatever it was— and black Sunday bonnet and gloves that all looked as good as if they were bought last week. Thinking of her I could see the black bonnet go bobbing up past the railings to church. Brave old eyes that had seen more of the wildest of the early days— more of drought, flood, wilderness, hardship, and danger, by track and tent and hut, than would fill volumes. Brave old eyes that had looked at the downcast ones of Syd Lardner, Frank Wall, and "Bunny" Hughson, whilst she lectured those foolish, hunted men on the evil of their ways, and gave them honest advice; what time the bushrangers fumbled with their cabbage-tree hats; or sat in a row on a bench like scolded schoolboys; what time the brave old hands, not withered then, set forth damper and "junk" on the rough slab table, and made hot coffee. Their bowed heads were grace enough. Granny could make coffee.

And here was Grandfather, unbent with age— he kept himself straight carrying timber— but with hair and frill beard getting dusty very fast. Square and strong of face, with chin, mouth, and cheeks clean shaven to the world. (His razor had wakened me that morning, like an early-style stripping machine going through a heavy crop of wheat at a little distance.)

And, hey presto! The river above Windsor; a hint of willows down in the bend, and the long unconquerable mountains above; back to the left, up-river, a row of poplars against the skyline in a mile-distant by-lane. Homes in English style and dress, with old red brick, gable-ends, ivy; and one with the great long motherly roof coming close down to the ground on each side, like the wings of a good old hen with a big clutch of chickens. Margaret, a handsome, buxom young woman, elder sister— sister mother, in charge; wise and witty, with an instinctive knowledge of the world and its ways. Away behind the poplars the minister's place, with the nursemaid, young Harriet Wynn, a minister's daughter herself "at home"— pretty, winsome, and "demure". And Grandfather, tall, straight, strong, with thick, wavy, black hair. He might have said, in all seriousness, that he was something to look at then. Aunt Bess used to tell me, as a boy, that he "looked like a Greek god" in his young days; and I wondered where she had seen a Greek god, for Uncle-by-marriage-Mack wasn't one (going by what I'd seen in some old book decorations)— unless Greek gods were short and sandy, and bow-legged from much riding, and walked like a hen, and had the "drought peer", and had their hair blown off in many nor'-wester dust storms on the overland route. No, Uncle Mack was a grand chap and a king of drovers, but I'd seen him in swimming, and Uncle Mack wasn't any Greek god.

"Howsomenever," said Grandfather, "wheer was I? You're always int'ruptin'."

I hadn't interrupted, unless it was by the thinking, but I said nothing, fearing a trap.

"Howsomenever. Next Saturday I come home from the saw-pit as tired an' happy, an' proud as two dogs that had followed their master ridin' home all day, and chased every kangaroo rat a mile off the track, and caught a native cat in a holler log at last an' spoiled the skin by pulling the cat in halves. We'd put in a good week's work. Abel was out with the timber-trucks, and I'd been in the pit all the morning with a bag over me head to keep the sawdust off, fer Bill was top-sawyer and he had a touch of sandy blight an' couldn't take his shift below.

"I went home an' got towel an' soap and some clean things, an' had a dip in the swimmin' hole, way down amongst the willers. All the young fellers round used to swim an' scrub themselves an' dress there on Sunday mornin's for chapel— or some other devilment amongst the girls. When I went in to dinner, Margaret says:

" 'Someone's cleanin' up early this week, I notice, Harry.'

" 'You mind yer own P's and Q's, Margaret,' I said. (She was shelling peas for Sunday.) I'm goin' into Penrith this arternoon to see what's on. There's a kick-up of some sort there. D'yer expect a young feller to be allers slave-slavin' an' worritin', an' list'nin' to wimmin's clack an' Father's growlin'? Ain't a man to have any pleasure at all?'

"Margaret said nothing, but got me my dinner an' went on shellin' peas. After dinner I took a turn out of the sofa, and had a grand rest an' smoke, expectin' Margaret to say something about them clothes— but she didn't. She could take her time, could your Great-aunt Margaret, when she wanted to get at something, or do something.

"Presently I got up an' went to finish tidying meself. 'Margaret!' I shouted, from the skillion.

" 'Yes, Harry,' she said, as meek as mild.

"If you've got anything to take to Mother you'd better get it ready quick. I don't want to waste the whole arternoon. (I'd twigged the basket of clothes ready on the big kitchen dresser.)

" 'O-o-h! Will you take them, Harry?' she said. 'I didn't like to ask you after doin' it last Saturday.'

" 'Oh come, I'll take 'em!' I said. 'Haven't I told you so half-a-dozen times? How many more times do you want me to tell yer?'

" 'But, you know, Harry,' she says (see how a woman hangs on to a thing), 'but, yer know, Harry,' she said, 'you spoilt your last Saturday half holiday.'

"'Hang last Saturday!' I shouted, It hain't this Saturday, is it? Haven't I yelled at yer a hundred times that I'm goin' to Penrith, an' it's only a step up a lane outer me way?'

" 'But Abel's goin' to ride in on his mare just as soon as he comes down from the mountain— an' Bill's goin' in, too, later on, on the colt,' said Margaret, still hangin' on, woman-like, 'an' either of 'em could take the basket in easy on the horse in front of 'em, and save you the trouble.'

" 'Hang Abel!!' I shouted. 'He'll be tireder than me, an' the mare too. Haven't I told you a dozen times I gotter get me 'at an' take back the parson's?'

" 'Bill or Abel could do that,' said Margaret, quiet like.

" 'An' me go in in me old 'un!' I yelled. 'An' them at the parson's thinkin' I was too shamefaced to face 'em. Get them clothes ready quick or I won't take 'em at all.'

"'They're all ready, Harry,' says Margaret, soft and meek-like, 'an' the minister's hat too.'

"Then I squinted through a crack and seen me sister Margaret laughin' on the quiet to herself over the peas. Yes, she was awfully tickled about somethin'; and I knowed I was bein' had all the time.

"No: I wasn't jealous of me own brothers already," says Grandfather, looking at me narrowly out of the corners of his eyes, "as you're thinkin', Henery," (I didn't protest) "only I knowed Bill and Abel.

"Besides, they'd been pokin' it at me all the week about the parson's hat; and I hearn 'em talkin' about the pretty girl at the minister's, and Harry, in their skillion one night; so they wanted a lesson. I didn't want 'em hangin' round the parson's place when I wasn't there to take keer on 'em— or any other time jist now, for that matter, interruptin' me. At first I thought of lettin' Bill's colt out of the yard by accident— it was hard to ketch— an' so save him the trouble of goin' to Penrith at all. He wanted rest, anyways, an' besides, the night air was bad for his eyes. But we three brothers didn't play no tricks like that on each other; so I went into their skillion and borrowed Abel's best hat because it suited me better'n Bill's. Bill's was a bit tight. I seen Abel comin' down the mount'in with the bullocks, an' expected Bill at any minute; so I histed the baskit an' started to start. The parson's hat was on top, well brushed an' done up in brown paper— an' brown paper was skeerce round our place in them days.

"Jist as I was goin', Margaret says: 'Harry!' says she, 'if you happen to see Harriet, remind her of her promise to come over. Tell her I've been expectin' her ever since I was there last.'

" 'There yer go agen!' I says, 'expectin' me to go carryin' messages and clack-clackin' round amongst a parsil o' girls! Alright! Now are yer satisfied?' an' off I goes.

"I seemed to get to the parson's long before I was ready," said Grandfather. "But I wasn't the first," he reflected, looking at the fire, "an' I mightn't be the last," he continued, with a side squint at me. "I seemed to get there before I started— in a dream like. (Some goes in a nightmare.) Howsomenever, I put the baskit down, very quietly, inside the gate, an' looked round for somethin' to mend, an' presently I seen a back gate wanted attendin' to; and then I was satisfied. So I took up the baskit an' went to the kitchen door, an' there was Harriet. She seemed half expectin' to see me— p'r'aps she saw me comin' along the road through the side window; it was open, now I come to think of it. They was hinged windows they had in them days, that opened sideways and outwards, with vines and roses round 'em," reflected Grandfather; "Not the la-di-dah, barefaced go-up-an'-down windows they have nowadays. Howsomenever— She seemed to have her best bib-an'-tucker on, now I come to look at her; an' she was lookin' as pretty as she was an' that's sayin' a lot. Fresh as the flowers o' May, as Mother used to say. She seemed a bit flushed and flustered, too, an' that gave me more strength, so to speak. I was all on a sudden a lot more stiddy on me pins than I was the last time.

" 'Oh! Mr Albury!' says Harriet, I'm glad you come— Mother was expectin' you.' (She didn't say she was.) 'Come in an' put the basket down, anywheres. An' sit down. You must be tired after your day's work and walk.'

" 'Thank you, Miss,' I said, 'but I ain't a bit tired. I bin on'y loafin' round all the mornin'.' An' I put the baskit down in one corner, steady, an' took off me hat. I took the parson's hat off the top of the clothes an' handed it to her without droppin' it or makin' a bungle between the two. It was quite a bit of sleight o' hand.

" 'I had to call an' bring Mr Kinghorn's hat,' I said, 'seein' that none of the others had the sense to send it, or bring it. An' apologise,' I said, 'an' hassertain if Mr Kinghorn was anyways annoyed or inconvenienced.' Kinghorn was the parson's name— an' he was a Man, by the way.

" 'No; not at all,' she said. 'Mr Kinghorn only laughed when your mother told him. But I'm sorry you forgot your hat, Mr Albury. But sit down, Mr Albury. Then she looks at my hat— or rather Abel's, and then she goes on, rather quick and glad like: 'But I'm so glad you've got another good hat. It might have been inconvenient.'

"So she bustled round, very busy doin' nothin' as a woman can be.

"Presently I gets up again.

" 'Yes, Miss,' I said. It would of. But I generally have two or three handy, in case of the wind and floods. I lost a good one in the river last flood time.' So I had; but I didn't tell her that the other two I had handy belonged to Abel and Bill.

" 'Oh! I'm so sorry you lost that hat,' she said; 'but I'm glad you've got more, Mr Albury.'

"I looked at her but couldn't see anything. But I didn't know how much Mother'd been tellin' her about me, an' I wanted to have done with the hat subject. She looked too demure, as you'd put it.

" 'But sit down, Mr Albury,' she says; 'your Mother's busy just now, but she'll be down in few minutes.'

"Presently I gets up agen.

" 'Oh! you're not goin', Mr Albury,' she says, all in a flutter. 'Mother'd be down in a minit.'

" 'O' course I'm not goin', Miss,' I said. 'What made you think that? But I seen a back gate that wants lookin' to and I might as well do it while I'm waitin', if so be you'll be kind enough to show me where the tool box is kept. I ain't in no particular hurry this afternoon.

" 'Oh! I'm so glad,' she began, an' then she caught herself an' gasped an' blushed, an' showed me where the tools was.

"While I was mendin' that gate she took courage to come out, an' said it would be just lovely; an' it was allers a nuisance, an' Mr Kinghorn tried to mend it himself, an' I must be very clever. An' while I was talkin' to her about gates and things, and showin' her how they ought to be made an' fitted, I seen Abel ridin' past at the foot of the lane. He had on what looked like Bill's hat, in the distance; so I s'pos'd he'd borrered Bill's an' Bill got a rest for his eyes. Then we both saw Mr Kinghorn comin' up the lane in his gig, and Harriet run inside.

"But Mr Kinghorn had a new kind of duck that interested me vastly. They was called Muscovies; and they hadn't been long imported, I think— leastways, I hadn't seen any before anywheers. They was about twice as big as an ordinary Quack, ony they didn't quack; ony just gibber and whisper. I christened 'em the Gibberers. No, they couldn't talk, not even old Mrs Muscovy; they was the only females I'd seen as couldn't speak.

"I said I'd like to come and potter round a bit next Saturday and fix up things for him, and maybe run up a new fowl-shed; and he said, 'Well, Harry, it will keep you out of mischief anyhow, an' I'll be very thankful.' (You see he knew me.) He said he'd give me a pair of young Gibberers to breed from as soon as they was ready, an' that suited me down to a T.

" 'An', now, Harry,' says Mr Kinghorn, 'run in an' see if Harriet can't knock you up a snack. You must be hungry; young fellows mostly are. I think I see your mother wavin' from the back door.'

"Mother showed me where to sit down. I never seen a table set so well as that before, an' I was a bit shy of it. There was some white stuff rolled up in two rings on the table, and I asked Mother what them things was.

" 'They're napkins,' she says.

"Presently Harriet comes down, an' I noticed she seemed to have titivated her hair up a different way, but it ony made her prettier. She redded a bit when Mother looked at her— I saw that. I watched Mother drinkin' her tea, an' managin' her bread and butter, an' did accordin', an' finished my cup at the same time. Then Harriet put her left hand on Mother's shoulder an' says, 'Will you have another cup o' tea, Mrs Albury?' An' Mother says, 'Thank you, Harriet,' an' handed up her cup. Then Harriet put her right hand on my shoulder an' she says:

" 'Will you have another cup, Mr Harry?'

"By gosh! it rattled me," said Grandfather. "It rattled the crockery too, for I upset the cup in the sarser handin' it up to her an' spilt the tea that was left. But she caught 'em from me all right an' quick, or I'd have dropped both over my shoulder. You see she had— she had—"

"Tact, Grandfather?" I ventured.

"No! Nor tacks neither!" said Grandfather. "She had— the way about her. Mother said: 'Why! Wheers your manners, Harry?' And that's what I wanted to know. They'd bolted like a flock of kangaroos at the sight of a kangaroo dog. You see, Henery, that was the first time your Grandmother ever touched me with her hand and voice.

"She touched me more than once with both— arterwards," Grandfather mused presently; "but ony when I deserved it— I wish she could do it now. But— never-mind. Wheers was I?

"If you please, Miss,' I said, over me shoulder, as soon as I got me wits together a bit; 'but ony half a cup.' So she pours out about three-quarters of a cup an' puts it down keerfully alongside me plate. I couldn't see her face; an' Mother was very intent on her tea. She seemed to be enjoying it.

"Presently I got up an' said, 'Ah well! Mother, I must be goin';' and when she'd finished givin' me a message to Margaret I turned round an' Harriet was standin' there waitin' with her hands behind her back. She looked very— demure," said Grandfather, with a quick glance at me. "I thought at first she was frightened I'd hurt her agen; but she brings one hand round an' there was my own hat in it— brushed, an' the veil fixed up, as I seen arterwards. (We wore sort o' puggeree veils in those days.)

" 'Thank you very much, Miss,' I said, takin' it from her. An' then I gave her Margaret's message, in a hurry, without bunglin' much; whilst holdin' me hat very tight in both hands and lookin' round for it everywheers.

"Then I heern Mother gulpin' over her third cup o' tea, an' looked an' seen what I was a-doin' of. Then she laughed out an' said, 'What are yer lookin' for, Harry?' An' then Harriet laughed a little an' pointed to the hat in me hand, an' then I laughs an' we was all comfortable again. And I shook hands with her without hurtin' her this time; and said good-bye to Mother; an' got out 'n' started for home.

"Down near the foot of the lane I seen Abel's mare, 'Gipsy', comin' home alone along the road from Penrith with the bridle hangin' loose. She'd lost Abel somewheers, or got disgusted with the way he started carrying on. She wasn't goin' to stay with him on the spree all night, so she come home, as she'd done once or twice before. She stopped at the bottom of the lane, when she seen me, and waited for me to get on; but I didn't feel like ridin'; I wanted a walk, an' a long 'un to think happy; so I fixed up her bridle fer her an' went on ahead.

"So I walks on an' on an' on an' on, thinkin' and thinkin' as happy as Larry— You'll know what I was thinkin' about some day— I suppose it was the touch of that there gal's hand on me shoulder an' the sound of her voice half-callin' me by my Christian name. I didn't feel the ground beneath me feet I was— I was—"

"Elated, Grandfather?" I suggested.

"Alright!" said Grandfather. "E-lated.(I didn't pay fer yer edgication.) I was B-lated, too, by the way, for it was broad moonlight an' I didn't know what time it was. I didn't feel the ground, as I said— it was like a light tread-mill— but I was goin' up all the time. I walks right past the house in a dream, and about half a mile beyond when I thought I heers something behind me an' pulls up sudden.

"It was just about where Fisher's Ghost was seen last; and I thought all on a sudden of other ghosts that harnted round there. There was the ghost of a man leanin' against the fence in the moonlight with his back tords yer; and the ghost of the lamed Horse with the Trailin' Bridle whose master was murdered with a fence rail. I peered back, but couldn't see anythin' in the black moonlight shadders o' the big gum trees by the roadside; but presently I heers a haltin' step right enough, an' my own legs took me into the next stretch of moonlight in double-quick time— with no haltin' steps, I can tell you, Henery. An' sure enough a limpin' horse did come out of the shadders! But afore I threw up me heart quite, or me stummick quite froze, I seen it was 'Gipsy'.

"She'd followed me all the way at leisure and watched my carryin's on— I might 'a' been wavin' me arms an' singin' or recitin' a bit, part o' the way— or maybe practisin' a step dance; howsomenever, she'd seen me go past home, an' got anxious, an' hurried on, jerked her bridle loose in her hurry, an' that was what was trippin' her. So I waited till the old gal come up, took her nose under me arm, an' told her I was alright. An' then I got on an' she swung round contented and took me home.

"When I got home, Margaret was still up, finishin' up ready to begin agen on Sunday. She ain't done yet, your Great-aunt Margaret. She said nothin', but I was ready for her an' sed nothin' too, but stood by the fire.

"Presently she said:

" 'Well Harry?'

"And I said, 'Well Margaret?' an' went to bed.

"An' it was not till then that it struck me, somehow, that I'd forgotten Abel's hat. It was wonderful how much mischief an innercent lookin' parson's hat could do. It nearly bust up a lifelong friendship between three livin' brothers in the mornin'. Bill had growled round a bit about his hat and then gone fishin' in the cool."

"NEXT SATURDAY I had no bother at home. Abel got home first an' went to Windsor in my hat, an' Bill got home next an' went somewheers else in his; but that didn't matter— I was workin' at the parson's now an' ony wanted clean an' decent workin' clothes. So I borrered a clean pair o' cords that Abel had ready to take timber down to Sydney on Monday in, an' Bill's goin'-to-work coat, that was better'n mine— it was summer weather, so that was all right. An' I borrered Father's workday waistcoat that he never went to work in at all, so it was pretty clean, an' nearly as good as new. But I didn't ask him, for he was asleep— restin' arter a hard week's growlin'. Besides Father was allers very touchy an' particular about his workin' clothes, an' always wanted them clean an' ready to go to work in on Monday.

"On the way to the parson's I felt like I was bein' roped in, like a two-year-old, for brandin' and breakin'; but I was very happy an' contented about it an' I didn't let the rope slacken all the way to the parson's this time."

"I was branded alright by-an'-by too," Grandfather mused, looking at the fire. He might have said that the letters were on his heart still.

"Howsomenever. We all had a comfortable afternoon. I got up the frame of the fowlhouse agenst the fence in a couple of hours, and put the roof on an' roosts in, for I was a good bush carpenter in them days. But I left the rest till next Saturday, in case things didn't hurry up, for I had some sense— even in them days.

"I didn't see Harriet about when I came in for some tea, an' I got awfully disappointed and anxious. I thought perhaps it was her comin' out an' she'd gone somewheers; but I wouldn't risk askin' Mother for the world.

"Well, jist as I was givin' it up an' feelin' sinkin', Mother said, as if she'd just remembered it: 'Oh! by-the-way, Harry; it's Harriet's day out tomorrow, an' she was thinkin' o' spendin' the day with Margaret; so I told her she must be a bit tired o' the house— she ain't had a Sunday out since the baby came— so if she liked, you'd take her along tonight, an' she'd have a chance of a longer chat with Margaret, an' Margaret 'ud fix her up in the spare room for the night.

" 'Weil, Mother,' I said, arter a while, 'what did she say to that?'

" 'She didn't say much,' said Mother. 'She's upstairs gettin' ready now. So you'll have to bring her back in good time tomorrow evenin', mind— that's if you've got nothin' else on. Anyways, in that case,' says Mother, I dare say one of the others would do it; so that'll be all right.'

" 'Alright, Mother,' I says.

"Presently Harriet comes down all flustered up and dressed, I don't know how, in some dark stuff an' a bonnet like you see in old portraits, an' the big crinoline they wore to keep off intruders. Young fellers couldn't get so close to their girls in them days, an' it was quite right. So I took the dirty clothes— they wasn't much— an' Harriet came along with me with Mother's messages to Margaret, and Abel's hat in brown paper. I wished she hadn't taken that trouble— it would have done in the basket.

"An' so we went along down the lane an' into the road, an' it was moonlight agen." Grandfather sat silent for awhile— I knew he was looking back along those roads and lanes.

"An' what did you talk about, Grandfather?" I asked, after a decent pause.

"Hens," said Grandfather, reflectively, without changing his attitude.

" 'I see, Miss Wynn,' I said, 'that hen they call yours has got all her chickens out alright,' an' that started us.

"You see, Henery," said Grandfather, "no two hens ever acts or lays or sits, or brings up their chickens exactly alike. It's the same with the animals an' things, I think; an' maybe with fishes and snakes. Male, female, or neuter (it's the same with trees and plants) no two things o' the same kind an' gender ever acts prezactly alike. There's as much— as much— "

"Individuality, Grandfather."

"Difference!" said Grandfather decidedly; and I saw that another la-di-dah word had missed fire. "There's as much difference between 'em as there is between human bein's. Miss Harriet had noticed it with hens; but the parson hadn't. He seemed more interested in me noticin' it when I spoke to him about it."

"And what did Harriet have to say to all this?"

"She wasn't Harriet yet," said Grandfather reprovingly. "She might 'a' been, though, in these— howsomenever, she said, 'Yes, Mr Albury' an' 'No, Mr Albury', an' she'd noticed that herself, and she seemed to listen very respectfully to all I said. She was about the first that did.

"Then we got talkin' of the timber birds, and things round there, just like a new brother an' sister talkin' contented an' interested of the things that was round us. I hurried her on, for the wrong clouds were comin' up, an' I knowed Hawkesbury weather. The first drops fell afore we got home; an' Margaret took charge of Harriet an' her bonnet just as if she was a big child— an' so she was; come to think of it.

"We all got cosy and comfortable round the fire, the more so because it rained heavens hard and it was a cold rain. Even Father lost his growl an' told some yarns, as he could tell 'em; and when I went to bed I felt more happy and contented an' satisfied than I'd ever been in my life afore. An', bein' abed," reflected Grandfather, after a think, "did you ever hear how I come to swear at your Grandmother for the first time? I s'pose you have— I never heered the last on it.

"Howsomenever, next mornin' it fined up, an' Margaret packed us off to chapel in Windsor (and Father found his growl— about his workin' weskit— an' went in the gig somewheers); but Harriet would stay an' help Margaret with the dinner. She seemed happy there, an' freer, an' seemed to like some of our happy-go-lucky ways.

"At dinner time I noticed one or two more young fellers than usual hangin' round our place. They stayed to dinner, of course— there was allers plenty for everybody. Arter dinner I kept 'em away from about the kitchen with my yarns.

" 'I see ye're doin' some work for the parson, Harry,' one on 'em remarks to the Blue Mountains, scratching behind his ear like a cross between a donkey an' a cockatoo. The Blue Mountains said nothin' an neither did I.

" 'Is that so?' said another. 'How much are yer gettin' the ararternoon— Harry— five bob?'

" 'Mor'n that,' I said.

" 'Ten?'

" 'Mor'n that!' I said. He shied then. Thought I was leadin' him on to a slippery bridge.

"An' that was all. Abel had said, to Nobody At All at breakfast that morning, that he'd heerd that the parson's housemaid was a judge o' gates, and that it was unusual in a new chum. But the girl was in the house now; an' there was no jokin' about her. That's the sort of young fellers there was in them days.

"Arter dinner we had a row on the river in the two boats; but Harriet kept clcloseo Margaret while Abel and Bill and the others did the pulling and I fished an' saw to things generally; an', arter tea, Margaret said, 'You'd better take Harriet away along home now, or Mother'll be gettin' anxious.' While Harriet was gettin' ready, Joe Buckman— Margaret's boy— came ridin' past from Penrith, an' stopped to say something to Margaret, an' I heerd Margaret say that she was glad Father had took the gig, and that the big galoot would have to help her over the crick now; but I didn't know what she meant till Harriet 'an me got to a little cross crick about half way to the parson's. Last night's rain had swelled it, and the steppin' stones was awash even now. I don't know how it happened, but we got no time to argy. I just ketched her up round the waist, and splashed right through with her, in spite o' the crinoline— it went all to the other side, anyhow. By gum, but my knees nearly give at the feel of her, and my heart was thumpin' by the time I got acrost as if I'd carried a bullock over; an' she was light as a feather to me. An' she was pantin' too, when I set her down, as if she'd carried me over. There was a big dry white log on the bank in the moonlight.

" 'Oh! Mr Albury,' she said. I do feel so giddy. Do let us sit down on that log for a minute; I feel quite faint!'

"I'm afraid you muster been frightened, Miss Wynn,' I said, sitting down an' puttin' my arm round her shoulders to steady her in case she fainted off the log. I'm afraid I was too sudden.

" 'Oh, no! not at all,' she said, though she didn't mean it that way. I'll be all right directly, Mr Albury— I don't know what came over me.'

"I kept stiddyin' her.

"Arter a while she gave a sort o' sigh, an' she said, I'm all right now, Mr Albury, thank you. I don't know what could have come over me. I think we'd best go on now. Your mother'll be waitin' up.'

"So I helped her up and took her along the road."

"Still steadying her, Grandfather?" I said.

"Never you mind," said Grandfather. "I had to keep her out of the puddles in the shadders. Presently, when we got in sight of the house, I said:

" 'Ah well! It's a lonely world, Miss Wynn.'

" 'It is, Mr Albury,' she said.

"I waited, and presently she asked,

" 'Do you feel lonely, Mr Albury?'

"I do, Miss Wynn,' I said, an' presently I said, 'Do you ever feel lonely, Miss Wynn?' "'Yes,' she says, I do, very much, sometimes.'

"Then I said, 'Well! Are yer satisfied then?' And she said, 'Perfectly, Mr Albury.' An' that settled it.

"An' now, Henery," said Grandfather, sittin' up an' stretching himself, "it's about time those young shavers turned up; an' besides, we've been maggin' enough, Lord knows, for one night. Jist put the billies on the coals, will you?"

"Grandfather," I said, sternly, "d'ye mean to say the story's finished?"

"Yes. What else?"

"Do you mean to tell me that's how you proposed?"

"Proposed what?"

"Marriage, of course— to Harriet!"

"Marriage yer Grandmother!" said Grandfather. "We didn't go a-courtin' in that way in my time. Courtin' came a-courtin' us. I tell you I only proposed keepin' company with Harriet an' I hassertained if she was willin'."

"But didn't you kiss her, Grandfather?"

"No, I did not! We didn't go huggin' an muggin' on sight in them days."

"And you had your arm round her waist all the time, 'steadying her', as you call it."

"You thund'rin' jumpt-up fool, how could I? You saw your Grandmother an' she hadn't grow'd since. I tell yer I had me arm round her shoulders! Put the billy on the coals." But presently Grandfather relented.

"Listen here, Henery— is it your courtship or mine?"

"Yours of course, Grandfather."

"Did you ever court your Granny except for lolly money, or to be let stay at her place?"

"Well, maybe. I beg pardon, Grandfather."

"Then don't interrupt agen, an' don't hurry me. I'm gettin' old— tho' I'll see close on the hundred, and that's more'n some of you will.

"Howsomenever. We went on to the parson's gate; but I wouldn't go in. I seen a light in the kitchen winder an' knowed Mother was up and about, but I said goodbye an' Harriet run inside quick and I started back home. But I hadn't gone a dozen yards down the lane when I heers Mother callin':

" 'Harry! You! Harry!'

"So I goes back.

" 'What are yer rennin' off like that for?' said Mother. 'Been misbehavin' yerself?'

"I thought you was in bed, Mother,' I said.

" 'Then thought's your master agen,' says she. 'Come in an' dry yer feet.'

"So I slips off my boots on the verandah and went in. There was a good fire. Harriet had gone up to take off some of her armour.

"Presently Mr Kinghorn comes into the passage. He must have overheerd something. "'Better give Harry a dry pair o' socks er mine, Mrs Albury,' he says, 'and a spare pair o' dry boots of any o' mine that'll fit him. They might, since me hat does.'

"Next minute Harriet comes down, all practical, with socks, an' went to hunt up a pair of boots while I changed 'em. It's allers that way. When a girl gets a man's heart she starts to look arter the rest o' him straight away. I noticed her clingin' an' hoverin' round Mother a good deal more than usual. Now I wonder," reflected Grandfather, "if them two was in collision all the time?"

"I think they all were, Grandfather," I said (he meant collusion), "I could have betted on Great-aunt Margaret, anyhow."

"Anyways," concluded Grandfather, "when I was goin' Mother said: 'You'd best see that big galoot safe out the gate, Harriet, or he'll forget to shut it; and Harriet did as she was told."

"And then it happened, Grandfather?"

"Well, I s'pose it did. You ought to know," in a loud voice: "I know all about you and the baker's daughter down by the Gatehouse night afore last."

I was dumb with surprise. It was such a very close guess.

________________

11: "Look Behind You!"

Albert Payson Terhune

1872-1942

Argosy, 9 Dec 1933

"MAYBE there's better lookers," concluded Gratton, as he rumpled the ears of the shaggy, rangy mongrel that sprawled at his feet in the garage doorway, "though he looks plenty good to me. But I'm here to say here isn't a wiser dog this side of the Atlantic. Besides— Tatters is my pal. There's the whole thing in one mouthful of words."

The big mongrel wagged his stump ofa tail at the sound of his own name; then he drowsed again, shifting his shaggy head so that it lay athwart Gratton's boot.

The motion brought into sight, through the piles of rusty throat fur, a magnificient collar. It was fully four inches wide, made of thick maroon leather studded with brass bosses and equipped with an ornate clasp. The collar would have suited better the neck of a champion Great Dane, rather than this overgrown crossbreed whose intrinsic cash value was perhaps ninety cents. On Tatters the collar had the look of a sable scarf worn with a soiled calico dress.

Gratton's visitor, a fellow mechanic from a mile-distant filling station, stooped to peer more closely.

"That neckband must have set you back a good slice of your week's pay," he commented. "I thought you said you was saving up to buy a share in a garage somewheres. If—"

"It didn't," said Gratton, tersely. ''And I am. It didn't set me back a plugged dime. It was a present to Tatters from the boss: Kind of pretty, isn't it? Tatters is as proud as Punch over it. That fancy clasp is getting a little loose, though. I'll have to fix that, when I get around to it. You see, Mr. Brayle—"

"Pete Brayle bought that collar for— your dog!" exclaimed the visitor. "Cut out the comedy! Brayle never spent a nickel on anybody but himself. And that classy collar must have cost—"

''Mr. Brayle gave it to me," insisted Gratton. ''Gave it to Tatters. Same thing. I'll own up I was some surprised, myself. He didn't seem to me like that kind of man. But he didit— You never can tell what any human is li'ble to do for a dog he takes a fancy to. And Mr. Brayle sure took the biggest liking to 'latters of anvone I ever saw."

"Last time I was here— just after you landed this job with him— you said Brayle was kind of sore at having Tatters hanging around the garage. You said he didn't like dogs."

"He didn't. But he does now. He got strong for Tatters, here, ever since the good old purp found his way back to the garage all by himself, the time he fell out of the truck, over beyond Heckerville. I was driving fast. and I never missed him. But I told Mr. BraYle the dog would find his way back all right. Isaid he always did— Tatters is clever that wav. Some dogs are. It's what I heard a feller call 'homing instinct,' once— And sure enough, when we got back to the garage here was Tatters waiting to welcome us. That made a terrific hit with Mr. Brayle. From then on, he's been mighty fond of Tatters, even if Tatters can't seem to get overfond of him. Mr. Brayle even takes him on some of those all-day rides of his, drumming up trade. He says Tatters is better comp'ny than a human."

"Drumming up trade, hey? It seems to me he'd make more cash sticking on the job here at his own place than to go hustling for it. Traipsing round the country to drum up trade for a garage is a new one on me."

"It isn't for the garage. Mr. Brayle's got both the county agency and the Ontario agency for the Defiance Motor Accessories Company. He goes from one burg to another, persuading dealersto handle the Defiance people's line. Makes a lot more money that way, he says than by this place."

"Hmph! Then I should think he could afford more than just one assistant, here. He keeps you hustling overtime, and he's making a slave out of you, just because you're easy. If I was you, I'd strike for double pay; or else make him hire an extra man. It's just his meanness, the fat old skin-flint!"

"Maybe, yes. Maybe, no. Maybe it's nobody's business. With jobs so scarce and such a swad of good men out of work. I'm not going to be fool enough to risk mine. Besides, he pays me mighty well; and he likes Tatters, and—"

''How about the movies this evening?"

"Can't. It's my night on the late shift. I—"

The one-man late shift, hey? Well, ifyou're content, it's no misfortune of mine. So long."

Left alone in the doorway, Gratton finished his supper; then shook the remaining contents of his dinner pail onto a sheet of newspaper and snapped his fingers to Tatters. The dog had been awaiting the signal. He jumped up eagerly and began to eat. Despite his bulk and seeming awkwardness, the crossbreed devoured his food daintily, scattering none off the paper. This was one of the myriad minor accomplishments which hhis master had taught him. Gratton looked on in approval.

The glass door of the garage's little cubbyhole office swung wide. Out strolled a man whose height and breadth had all but filled the tiny office to overflowing. As he came forward, Gratton looked up, apprehensive lest his employer might have overheard the visitor's unenthu- siastic words concerning him. But Peter Brayle gave no sign.

"I thought you'd gone home long ago," said Gratton, rolling up the sheet of greasy paper and getting to his feet.

"I was waiting for a long distance call," returned Brayle, in a voice as big as his body. "It just came through. By the way, Gratton," he went on, stooping to pat Tatters, an attention which the dog endured with no atom of the gay affection which a caress from his own master always called forth, "by the way, I'm sorry to make you come to work at eight, tomorrow, after you'll have been on the late shift tonight, but I've got to run across to Pawle, in the morning, to tackle two new prospects I've lined up. That was the phone call I was waiting for. So I'll have to ask you to be here early. You can have the afternoon off. You don't mind if I take Tatters along, for company, do you ?"'

"Sure," assented Gratton. "Take him along. It's a change for him, from sticking around here all day. Sure."

"Thanks. By the way, that friend of yours who was jawing out here a few minutes ago— didn't he say you ought to strike for a raise? Oh, that's all right." Bravle hurried on. forestalling Gratton's mumble of embarrassment. ''I wasn't listening. I just happened to catch a word or two, while I was waiting in there for my call. It got me to thinking. You're working pretty long hours and you're doing pretty good work. And you've got a following of your own, among my customers. Next week, and from then on, there'll be an extra five-spot on Saturdays, for you. Good night."

Perhaps to avoid listening to Gratton's thanks, Brayle strode off into the gathering dusk. Gratton stared after him with shining eyes.

"Tatters," he said aloud, to his dog, "Tatters, there goes one white man! I'm proud to work for him."

As if in reply, the lanky crossbreed yawned cavernously, and with a sound which, in a human, might have been mistaken for one of contempt- uous dissent.

At eight, next morning, Peter Brayle set forth in his trig little roadster. On the seat beside him rode Tatters. The dog sat high and proudly. Whether or not he cared for his seat-mate's companionship, it was evident that the dog was delighted at the prospect of a drive.

Gratton smiled to himself at the crossbreed's smug, toplofty air. Then he went back to his work. The village of Pawle was just across the Canadian border, a bare fifteen miles away. Brayle expected to get home by noon; as he had promised his assistant the afternoon off, in return for the double shift.

At about eleven o'clock a stocky, middle-aged man dropped in at the garage and asked to see Brayle. Gratton told the stranger the boss would be back in an hour or so at most, and asked if he would call again or if he cared to leave a message.

The stranger seemed genuinely disappointed at missing the garage owner. He was an affable chap and fell into easy chat with Gratton. He greeted with flattering interest the very trivial news that Brayle had driven across the border to Pawle. He sat around for a time on a keg, seeming to ask practically no questions, yet eliciting much information, such as it was.

Gratton was mildly pleased to have his own morning labors lightened by such good company. He was sorry when, at last, the stranger said he must be going. The man's name was easy to remember, too, to tell Brayle. The name was Smith— William Smith.

Brayle drove into the garage almost on the dot of noon. His wide face was couded.

"Gratton.'' he began. Unhappily, as the roadster halted, "I'm ashamed to come back here to you. I've— well, I've lost Tatters again! I let him stroll around a few minutes while I was ladling out a sales talk. When | came out of the shop he was gone. I hunted everywhere for him. And I— Say, Gratton, I wouldn't have had this happen for a hundred dollars! You trusted him to my care; and you think such a whale of a lot of him— And so do I, for that matter."

Don't worry yourself about him, Mr. Brayle," said Gratton, touched by his employer's chagrin. "Old Tatters will take care of himself, all right, all right. He always does. Most likely, he got tired of waiting for you and started back home. It's only fifteen miles. He'll be along presently. He has sense enough to keep out of the ways of cars, and he has too much sense to tire himself out by galloping. He'll just loaf along; and presently he'll be here. Don't worry."

"It's fine of you to take it that way," said Brayle, gratefully. "If he doesn't come soon I'll go out and look for him. This is the second time he's given me the slip, in Pawle. Even though he got back sately the other time, I'm sore on myself for not being more careful, today. Next time, I'll tie him in the car when I go into any shop. That is, if you'll trust me with him again. By the way, Gratton, I meant to tell you this morning. Mrs. Van Leouw wants that limousine of hers towed here to have the timer adjusted. I told her I'd send for it at noon today. Suppose vou just buzz up there and tow it in. You can get back by one, and still have your afternoon off. Hurry, won't you ?"

When Gratton towed the limousine into the garage yard, a minute or so before one o'clock, Tatters was lying in the doorway. At sight of his master, the dog jumped up and began to caper merrily toward him.

"You were right," called Brayle, coming out of his office. "And I'm mighty glad you were. You hadn't been gone ten minutes before the grand old dog came trotting in and began looking around for you. Now chase along, the two of you. Have a good time on your afternoon off."

Brayle went back into his office. Not until he himself went to bed that night did Gratton chance to remember that he had not told Brayle about the visit of the conversational William Smith. Oh, well, it didn't matter. Gratton had told Smith when Brayle was expected back. No doubt the pleasant-spoken man had called again, later in the day.

ON BRAYLE'S next business trip to Pawle, Tatters rode beside him again, on the roadster's seat. As usual Tatters was eagerly happy over the prospect of the jaunt. And as before, the urbane Mr. William Smith strolled into the garage a little later in the morning. Again, he was disappointed at missing Brayle. And again he showed real interest in the petty news that Brayle had crossed the border. For perhaps halt an hour, Smith sat chatting. Then, promising to come back, he went away.

It was mid morning when the telephone jangled. Gratton answered the summons, to find Peter Brayle on the tar end of the wire.

"Gratton!" fairly shouted the boss. "I'm in a jam. A fool car ran into me. here at Ueckervill, not ten minutes after I had crossed back into the States. It was the other man's fault, but the hick cops have run us both in. I've phoned for bail, and it'll be along in an hour or so; I'll be back home in less than two hours. But there's something I want you to do in a rush. I want you to drive over to the Defiance factory at Gusepple, and see if that case of parts is ready. I'm in a big hurry for it. It was due, yesterday. Drop everything and start now! Goodbye."

The big man's big voice vibrated with excitement tinged with something that sounded like terror. There could be no possible mistaking the stark urgency of its command.

Gratton was puzzled. It was not like his calmly self-assured employer to show such perturbation at a minor mishap like a motor arrest. It was still less like him to exhibit fevered anxiety for a case of motor parts which he surely could not need in any mad haste.

The trip to the factory at Gusepple was a full two-hour trip. 'There and back would take four full hours out of that day. That meant the garage must be shut until Brayle should get back. Well, Brayle was the boss— and orders were orders!

Gratton went out into the yard where the light truck was kept.

But before he could board the truck, a rakish sport car drew up at the garage door. Its occupants were two sunburned young women in sports clothes. They hailed Gratton by name. Reluctantly he came forward, recognizing them as the daughters of immensely rich old Mrs. Van Leouw.

Long and ardently Brayle had: craved the exclusive motor custom of this Van Leouw family; whose cars were legion and were forever getting out of order. Of late several of their minor jobs had come to the Brayle garage. Such work had been performed quickly and skillfully. There was hope that at this rate the Van Leouws would transfer all their custom from a garage man whose methods they had grown to dislike, and turn it all over to Brayle.

Now Gratton must either disobey his employer's orders to drive at once to the Defiance factory, or else he must risk offending the all-de- sirable Van Leouws bv refusing to wait on them. His quandry deepened when he learned that the repair job on their racer would take the better part of an hour to complete. He thought fast, and he decided he would be serving Brayle's interests far better by mending the Van Leouw car than by getting the case of parts. At most, he would lose only an hour. In either event, he was in for a rebuke from Brayle.

Just as the two sports-clothed damsels were driving their newly-im- ported racer out of the yard, Tatters trotted in from the road and frisked joyously up to his master.

Apparently the dog had once more tired of waiting for Brayle, and had come home. Evidently, too, part of his journey had been through cross-country short cuts, for his thick coat was fairly bristling with burrs, and his legs were bodv-deep in black mud.

"Tatters,'' reproved Gratton, "you're a right disgraceful spectacle. Take shame to yourself! If I let you go along with me, you'll muddy up the truck. Yet if I leave you here you'll muddy up the floor and you'll strew burrs all over it. Well, five minutes more or less won't make any difference, now. I'll spend that time making you look less like a scarecrow. Come on inside."

The garage was not large. It consisted of a single none too spacious room with a concrete floor; a room whose farthest corner was partitioned into Brayle's tiny glass-doored office.

Gratton drew a pail of water, found a handful of rags and a broken- toothed comb, and brought them to the center of the floor.

At sight of these loathed preparations, Tatters backed modestly away, and seemed to be considering a bolt for freedom.

"Come here, you old ruffian!'' commanded Gratton. "If you hate to be washed, then you ought not to get yourself dirty."

Slowly, miserably, the dog obeyed. On his stomach he slunk along the concrete toward his master and toward the abhorred bath. He made appealing little gestures with his muddy forepawsashe advanced, and his mouth twisted into horrible expressions of grief. Gratton disregarded these mute entreaties. and set to work with a will, swabbing the dirty paws and legs with the wet rags.

"Chest and throat all black mud, too!" he grumbled. "Splashed up on them when you took a short cut through a swamp, hey?— Off comes your fine collar, too, if I want to get vour throat clean. Off it comes—"

The man fell silent: he stared down at the wide collar in his hands. Its elaborate catch had been almost dangerously loose for more than a month, and Gratton had meant to repair it. But now it was so tight that he had had trouble in unfastening it. Moreover, it was an almost brand-new catch. It did not seem to have been used a half-dozen times, at most.

"Perhaps the old one came off," mused Gratton, "and the boss was able to buy a new catch, up at Pawle. But—"

Again he tell silent as he turned the collar over and over in his hands. He remembered clearly that its strip of pale chamois lining had been soiled and puckered by much wear and by swims, the last time he had taken it off to bathe Tatters. But this lining was immaculately clean— clean and palpably new.  Once more Gratton turned the collar from side to side. One of the brass bosses on the maroon leather surface of Tatters' collar had fallen off, and another was dented. But now every boss on this collar was in place, and none had a dent in it.

"This— why, this isn't your collar at all, Tatters!" exclaimed Gratton. "And yet it isn't one that Mr. Brayle could have bought at any shop this morning. It's been worn before, that's plain, but not very often. It—"

Tatters' collar had been thick, by reason of the padding between the leather and the chamois lining. But now Gratton noted that it was more than twice as thick as formerly and that the stuffing had gathered into lumps and ridges here and there.

His wondering eye tell once more on the lining. Where the chamois had been neatly machine-stitched to the leather at the upper and lower edges, now only one of the two edges were thus stitched. The other edge was merely basted to its moorings. Awkwardly basted, at that, even though very strongly, and by stout shoemaker's thread.

Long the man stood pondering. Then he took out his knife and began to sever the basting threads. When the last of them was cut, he laid open the strip of chamois. Inside, close packed, end to end, lay two ten-inch oilskin envelopes, bulging full.

Laying one of these on a bench, Gratton opened the other by un- doing the line of snappers which held its top. Out came an oblong of cotton wool. Gratton could feel, through the soft substance, a double line of lumps. Carefully he divided the cotton. In its center lay embedded a score of fairly large and more than usually brilliant diamonds. They seemed to generate light from within themselves; light that pulsated through the gloom of the garage and dazzled their dumfounded discoverer.

Presently, the man restored the cotton and its precious contents to the oilskin envelope, and laid it on the bench. He picked up the second and fatter -oilskin. There was no lumpiness in this. It was packed as flatly as a sausage skin. With much caution, he opened it. It was stuffed tight with a fluffy snow-white powder.

Memories of newspaper feature stories worked their way into Gratton's horrified memory; feature stories setting forth the smuggling activities at the Canadian and Mexican borders and the tireless efforts of the United States secret service to check them. Recollection of one such account flashed over him as he saw the white powder. From his dry throat came the one gasping word:

"Dope!"

It his brain had been dazed to undue slowness at first, now it fairly raced. The tangled skeins of seemingly unimportant happenings wove themselves with bewildering speed and accuracy into a clear pattern.

Thrice, Peter Brayle had taken Tatters across the border with him. The first two times he claimed to have lost the dog, and both times Tatters had arrived at the garage about an hour behind Brayle. Brayle had managed to send Gratton away on some errand, so as to be alone when the dog should return— alone, to take off the contraband-stufted collar and to replace the original collar on the animal's throat.

Yes, and doubtless, he must have arranged for a confederate on the Canada side, to keep Tatters tied up until Brayle should have had more than an hour's start; then to let him loose, to reach home at a time when Brayle should be there and Gratton should not.

Gratton recalled vividly, now, that at the outset Brayle had disliked having the mongrel at the garage— until he had learned of Tatter's unerring homing instinct. That must have given him his idea. In his effusive way, he had set himself to make friends with the dog; he had had a duplicate collar made. It was all sickeningly logical, now that the clew lay at hand. An accomplice in Canada awaited the periodic comings of man and dog. Into the trick collarthe contraband was packed, and the other collar was pocketed by Brayle, to be put back on Tatters after the dog's return. In case of suspicion and of search at the border, Brayle thus had nothing incriminating on him.

Gratton realized the keen brilliance and simplicity of the scheme. With ordinary good luck, the game might have gone on indefinitely. But today Brayle had had the misfortune to collide with another motorist, and had been jailed. Presumably, his confederate had known nothing of this and had released the dog at the agreed time.

At last Gratton understood that note of frantic terror in his employer's voice, when Brayle had telephoned him. The man had wanted him to be well out of the way when Tatters returned; he had wanted to send Gratton far enough so he could not get back to the garage again until Brayle himself should have arrived and changed the collars.

Presently, as he stood there, Gratton's face began to grow dark with the hot blood that pounded in his temples. He was of placid temper, as a rule. Never had he heard the grimly wise adage, 'Beware the anger of a patient man'; but at this moment, he was justifying a hundredfold the truth of that old warning.

Strangely enough, his wrath grew hottest over the part which Brayle had caused Tatters to play in the dirty scheme, and at the man's pretended affection for the dog. Tatters was so clean of heart, so fine, such a splendid pal to his lonely young master! And now this blackguard had dragged the dog into his foul dope smuggling !

Worse, the newspapers had told of dogs that were trained to run con- traband between Belgium and France, and of how they were hunted down by the law as though they were rabid, and were shot on sight. If the Federal authorities should find that 'Tatters was a canine smuggler they would probably kill him, as a preventive measure. Yes, they would track the grand old fellow down and kill him.

Hotter and more fiercely, the blood pounded in Gratton's temples. Then of a sudden he went calm. After a moment of wordless thought, he got into his ramshackle little runabout, jamming thetrick collar inside the breast of his dungaree shirt. At a snap of his fingers, Tatters sprang to the ragged seat beside him; and the car set off.

Peter Brayle drove into the garage cranky and nervous. He glanced about him. Gratton was gone. That was good. It would be hours before the assistant could get back from the Defiance factory. Now to get hold of Tatters, and to switch collars!

He whistled loudly, and yet more loudly. But the dog was not there. Brayle scowled. Always, Tatters hung around the garage except when he was out with Gratton or with the boss. By Brayle's reckoning, the accomplice up at Pawle should have set the mongrel free in time for him to have returned before now.

Brayle started for the telephone in the cubbyhole office; but halfway to the glass door, he stopped. Into the garage Gratton was driving— driving the runabout, not the truck. On the seat beside him rode Tatters, and the dog wore no collar. Brayle gaped, stupefied.

Gratton climbed down trom his seat, and went back to the garage doors. These he shut. Then, crossing to the office, he ordered Tatters inside it and closed the door behind him. The assistant's face was bone white; his mouth was a lipless gash; his eyes smoldered queerly. With bewilderment, Brayle watched his preparations and sought to read his new expression.

At last Gratton spoke. Moving slowly toward Brayle, he said:

"I've shut Tatters in there to make it fairer for you. Not that you deserve it, after the filthy risks you made him run.— Now shut up!"— forestalling a blustering interruption. "I know the whole rotten thing. I've grinned when I've read about booze-running. Jewel smuggling didn't jar me much, either. But there isn't a decent man on God's green earth who doesn't see red when he thinks of dope smuggling. You've used me, and you've used my dog, to help you get dope spread all over the country. That's more damnable than to spread smallpox germs! That isn't on the free list, Brayle, and there's only one way I can make you pay the bill which you owe Tatters and me."

His voice was deadly quiet, almost muffled, but that quiet voice, and the smolder in Gratton's half-shut eyes held Peter Brayle momentarily speechless and without motion.

Gratton broke the spell by striking his employer's wide face heavily with his open palm. "Fight!" he snarled, springing at the big man.

Instead, Brayle leaped back with an agility not to be expected in one so bulky. As he leaped, he whipped his right hand to his hip. Then he was standing still, covering Gratton with a squat automatic pistol, a very toad of a weapon. In his gaze was stark murder.

"Look behind you !" shrilled Gratton, in wild excitement.

The ruse was old. If Brayle had been his wontedly cool self, it might not have served. But instinctively, he glanced backward— only for the fraction of a second, but long enough for a lightning-quick swipe of Gratton's fist to knock the pistol out of his hand. Gratton kicked the fallen weapon toward the doors.

Then the two men came together with a breath-taking shock. In a trice, they had become primal brutes. Brayle was a good half head taller, and forty pounds heavier than Gratton. But he had taken on fat, and his once mighty muscles were soft. His wind was bad.

Gratton, however, had the advantage of youth, speed, wiriness, and perfect physical condition. Moreover, he had boxed many friendly bouts, and he had a born fighter's instincts. Thus, his fury was blended with science and with wise caution. He attacked, fiercely, in whirlwind fashion. Yet he did not lay himself open foolishly to the heavier man's assault.

Back and forth across the oil-flecked concrete floor the battle raged. The fighters caromed off cars; their impact opened the shut outer doors; their feet slipped and stamped on the treacherous oil smears. The thud of fists on human flesh echoed from the low roof.

From the tiny office came the roaring of Tatters as the dog tore vainly at the wooden lower panels of the glass door, striving to come to his master's aid.

Then a left-hander to the wind and a right hook to the mouth sent Brayle reeling. His toe slithered on a patch of grease. He crashed backward against the running board of a car on which Gratton had been at work that morning. From there he sprawled to the floor.

His opponent stepped back to let him rise, while the dog's yells and the growls continued to echo from the office. Slowly, painfully, Brayle began to get up. As he rose, his hand slipped behind him again, and this time it groped for a heavy wrench that had been lett on the running board of the car. Swinging this formidable weapon aloft, he bounded to his feet and hurled himself at the unarmed Gratton.

Even as Brayle sprang, Tatters sprang, too. Finding that he could not break down the wooden paneling of the office door, the dog had drawn back and gathered for a jump. Now, there was a multiple tinkle and a crash of broken glass. Through the glazed upper half of the door flashed the mongrel. He bled from cuts where the broken glass and sash had scored him in passing, but he had no time now to think of these super- ficial hurts...

Through the air like a flung spear whizzed the mighty dog. His flying body smote Peter Brayle's shoulder, almost knocking the man off balance again. His curved white eye-teeth shore deep, and all but met in the man's plump shoulder flesh.

Brayle staggered at the impact, but he kept his head. With his left hand he seized Tatters by the hairy throat. Swiftly, yet with methodical precision, his right hand wielded the six-pound wrench. Down swished the weapon, driven by all Brayle's force toward the skull of the ravening dog.

But the iron did not reach its mark. This because Gratton rushed in and struck the blow aside. Only partly deflected, the wrench-head smote Gratton glancingly on the right arm, numbing it to the shoulder.

Pushing Tatters aside with his free hand, and yelling to the dog to keep out of the fight, Gratton ran into a clinch. Before his numbed arm could let him gain his hold, a jaw smash from Brayle's fist sent him reeling. Back he dashed to the fight, seeking to bore in.

But Brayle was no longer there. The big man had taken full advantage of the second's respite given him by his punishing blow to the jaw, and had darted across the room toward the partly opened garage doors. Just before he reached them he stooped and caught up the automatic pistol, kicked there by Gratton. As the younger man charged at him, the automatic confronted him once more.

Again in the level eyes of his adversary, Gratton read murder. He knew that Brayle could not afford to let him live, with the secret he had blundered on. He knew that red hatred was reenforcing logic, in goading Brayle to shoot him down.

With a glance, he measured the distance between his foe and himself. No, there was no chance of diving in and trying to disarm Brayle. He was wholly at the slayer's mercy— at the mercy of the merciless. The shot would hardly be likely to rouse attention from the road outside. At nightfall, the victim's body could be driven, weighted, to the river.

Brayle's finger tightened on the trigger, slowly, in a luxury of de- liberation.

"Look behind you!" shrilled Gratton once more.

A smile of tired scorn curled Brayle's fat mouth, a mouth swollen and bleeding. Gratton could see that Brayle was wondering in derisive contempt why his assistant should try to fool him a second time with that trick.

The finger pressed tighter on the trigger. Then two sinewy arms were flung about Brayle from behind, pinioning him, and the pistol went off resoundingly. The bullet crashed through the shingle roof, and the next moment the weapon was torn away from its wielder.

Strong fingers gripped his plump wrists in expert fashion. There was a click; and his wrists were neatly handcuffed behind his back.

He was spun about and allowed to stand alone. Three State troopers filled the doorway, and in front of them, panting from his expertly quick exertions in subduing Brayle, stood that pleasant conversationalist, Mr. William Smith, better known to the authorities in Washington as Roy McKeogh, a star officer in the secret service.

At present, Mr. Smith-McKeogh was more conversational than pleasant. Glowering at the disheveled Gratton, he demanded: "What does this mean, you young idiot? We told you to come here, ahead of us, while we got the place surrounded and while the warrant was made out. We told you to hold Brayle in talk till we got here, if he had come back— Is this the way you hold a man in talk?"

"I'm not under your orders," sullenly retorted Gratton. 'When I took that dog collar to the State Police and told them my story, and then told it to you, after they'd phoned for you— then I had done my duty, and all my duty. It was up to me to pay my debt and Tatters' debts — mostly Tatters'— in the only satisfying way it could be paid— And I paid it!" he ended, with a glance at his bloody, bruised and reeling adversary.

"If we hadn't showed up just when did,'' countered McKeogh, "it would have been paid the other way around. You tackled an armed man twice your size. What did you expect?"

"I expected to pay a debt. I told you that. It couldn't be paid just by sicking the law onto him."

"H'm!" said McKeogh, a reluctant grin twitching his craggy lips. "Well; you sure got out of the red, to judge by the way he looks. And you're due to get out of the red, financially, too, if you happen to be in it. Do you know the size of the government reward coming to you for this day's work?"

"No. And it doesn't concern me. I won't claim it, an' I won't take it. I'll ask them to turn it over to some relief association. I won't touch blood money— I don't need it, either. With what I've put by, and with the nice following I've got here, I'm going to take over the lease on this garage and run it myself. There's good cash in it, for the right man. I've figured that out— And I'm the right kind of man."

"You concede that, hey?'' laughed McKeogh. "Going to play a lone hand here, are you ?"

"No. With a side partner. The dandiest side-kick any guy ever had. You've met him. His nameis Tatters. 'Gratton& Tatters' has a fine sound to it.

"And the firm is going to be just as fine as it sounds. Isn't it, Tatters?— Say! Stop scratching that flea and come over here and shake hands with your new partner!"

________________

12: The Girl in the Crowd

Albert Payson Terhune

Blue Book,  Oct 1917

STRETCH an invisible cord knee-high across the sidewalk at Broadway and Forty-second Street, and in five minutes a hundred prettier girls than Daisy Reynolds will stumble over it. (A hundred homelier girls too, for that matter!)

Daisy was just the Girl in the Crowd. Look down the aisle of your subway- or surface- or L-car on the way home to-night, and you will see her. You will see her by the dozen.

But you will not observe her, unless you look hard. She is not the type of girl to make you murmur fatuously: "Gee, but I wish she was my stenographer!" Nor is she the sort that excites pity for her plainness. She is— yes, my term "the Girl in the Crowd" best fits her.

For three years, after she left high school, Daisy occupied twenty-eight inches of space along one of the two sides of a room whose walls were wainscoted in honeycombed metal. At shelves in front of the honeycombing sat double lines of girls with ugly steel appliances over their frizzed or lanky hair. Their hands were ever flitting from spot to spot in the perforated wainscoting, deftly shifting plugs from hole to hole.

An excrescence, like a misshapen black-rubber lily, jutted forth from the wall facing each girl. Into these lily-mouths the damsels were wont to croon such airy sentiments as these:

"Schuyler 9051 don't answer. — Yes, I'm ringing Aud'bon 2973.— Beekman 4000 is busy. — I'll give you Inf'mation.— 'Xcuse it, please.— No'm, I didn't cut you off. What number was you talking to?— Schuyler 4789 is still busy.— It's just twelve-forty-two, by the c'rect time.— Number, please."

Up and down the double rank marched a horribly efficient woman who discouraged repartee and inter-desk conversation. The long room buzzed with the rhythmic droning of fifty voices and with the purring of countless plugs clicked into innumerable sockets.

To end, once and for all, the killing suspense, the room wherein Daisy Reynolds toiled for the first three years of her business career was a telephone exchange.

And at the three years' end, she was assigned to the job of day-operator at the Clavichord Arms.

The pay at the hotel was no larger than at the exchange; but there was always the possibility of tips, and the certainty of Christmas-money. Besides, there were chances to rest or to read between calls. On the whole, Daisy rejoiced at the change— as might a private who is made corporal.

The Clavichord Arms is a glorious monument to New York's efforts at boosting the high cost of living. The building occupies nearly a third of a city block, in length and depth, and it towers to the height of nine stories. Its facade and main entrance and cathedral-like lobby are rare samples of an architecture whose sacred motto is, "Put all your goods in the show-window."

When the high cost of living first menaced our suffering land, scores of such apartment-houses sprang into life, in order that New Yorkers might do their bit toward the upkeep of high prices. Here, at a rental ranging from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars a year, one may live in quarters almost as commodious as those for which a suburbanite or smaller city's dweller pays fifty dollars a month.

And nobly did New York rally to the aid of the men who sought thus to get its coin. So quickly did the new apartments fill with tenants that more and yet more and more such buildings were run up.

Men who grumbled right piteously at the advance of bread from five to six cents a loaf eagerly paid three thousand dollars a year for the privilege of living in the garish-fronted abodes, and they sneered at humbler friends who, for the same sum, rented thirty-room mansions in the suburbs.

And this, by prosy degrees, brings us back to Daisy Reynolds.

THE CLAVICHORD Arms' interior decorator had used up all his ingenuity and his appropriation before he came to the cubby-hole behind the gilded elevators— the cubby-hole that served as the telephone-operator's quarters. The cubby-hole was airless, windowless, low and sloped of ceiling, calcimined of wall, and equipped with no furniture at all except the switchboard-desk, a single kitchen chair, one eight-candle-power electric light and an iron clothes-hook.

Here, for eight hours a day, sat Daisy Reynolds. Here, with stolid conscientiousness, she manipulated the plugs, that the building's seventy tenants might waste their own and their friends' time in endless phone-chats.

It was dull and uninspiring and lonely in the dark cubby-hole, after the lights and the constant work and companionship of the Exchange. There was much more leisure, too, than at the Exchange.

Daisy at first tried to enliven this leisure by reading. She loved to read; book or magazine— it was all the same to Daisy, so long as the hero and heroine at last outwitted the villain and came together at the altar.

But there are drawbacks to reading all day— even to reading union-made love stories, by eight-candle-power light and with everlasting interruption from the switchboard. So Daisy, by way of amusement, began to "listen in."

"Listening in" is a plug-shifting process whereby the telephone-operator may hear any conversation over the wire. In some States, I understand, it is a misdemeanor. But perhaps there is no living operator who has not done it. In some private exchanges it is so common a custom that the cry of "Fish!" warns every other operator in the room that a particularly listenable talk is going on. This same cry of "Fish" is an invitation for all present to listen in.

(Yes, your telephonic love-talk, your fierce love-spats and your sacredest love-secrets have been avidly heard— and possibly repeated— again and again, by Central. Remember that, next time. When you hear a faint click on the wire during your conversation,— and sometimes when you don't,— an operator is pretty certain to be listening in.)

At first Daisy was amused by what she heard. The parsimonious butcher-order of the house's richest woman, the hiccoughed excuses of a husband whom business detained downtown, the vapid chatter of lad and lass, the scolding of slow dressmakers, the spicy anecdotes told by half-hour phone-gabblers— all these were a pleasant variation on the day's routine. But at last, they began to pall. And just as they waxed tiresome— romance began.

THE VOICE in Apartment 60— a clear voice, girlish and vibrant— called up 9999-Z Worth. And Worth 9999-Z replied in a tone that fairly throbbed with eager longing. That was the beginning. Shamelessly— soon rapturously— Daisy Reynolds listened in.

The voice in Apartment 60 belonged to a girl named Madeline. And Worth 9999-Z (whose first name, by the way, was Karl) spoke that foreign-sounding name Madeline as though it were a phrase of hauntingly sweet church music. He and Madeline had known each other, it appeared, for some months; but only recently had they made the divine discovery of their mutual love. It was then that the phone talks had begun— the talks that varied in number from three to seven a day, and in length from three to thirty minutes.

Always, now, promptly at nine o'clock in the morning, Karl called up his sweetheart. And always, an hour or so later, she called him up for a return-dialogue. Their talk was not mushy; it was beautiful. It thrilled with a love as deathless as the stars, a love through whose longing ran a current of unhappiness that Daisy could not understand.

Daisy grew to live for those talks. They became part of her very life— the loveliest part. She was curt, almost snappish, when other calls interfered with the bliss of listening-in. More than once she shamelessly broke off the connection when Madeline chanced to be talking to some old bore at a time when Karl sought to speak to her.

Karl, it seemed, was a downtown business man. As scientists reconstruct an entire fossil animal from a single bone of its left hind leg, so Daisy Reynolds built up a vision of Karl from his deep and powerful voice. He was tall, slender, graceful, yet broad of shoulder and deep of chest. Brown curls crisped above his white Greek forehead. His eyes were somber yet glowing. His age was from twenty-eight to thirty. He dressed like a collar advertisement.

Madeline was still easier to reconstruct, from her voice. She too was tall. She was willowy and infinitely graceful— gold-brown of hair, dark blue of eye, with soft-molded little features and long jetty lashes. With such a voice, she could not have been otherwise.

Daisy gathered from their earlier talks that Madeline's family disapproved the match. She even learned, from something Karl said, that there was another suitor— one Phil— on whom the family smiled and whom Madeline cordially detested. Once or twice, too, Phil called up Apartment 60. He had a husky voice and spoke brief commonplaces. Madeline answered him listlessly and still more briefly. But he seldom phoned to her. And she never, by any chance, phoned to him.

SO THE ARDENT, tenderly melancholy love-story wore on. The lovers would make appointments for clandestine meetings— would speak in joyous retrospect of luncheons or motor-drives of the preceding day. Evidently, Madeline's cruel family kept stern watch upon her movements. Daisy used to smile in joyous approval at the girl's dainty cleverness in outmaneuvering them and meeting her sweetheart.

Ever through the glory of their love ran that black thread of melancholy. Apparently all the glad secret meetings and the adoring phone-talks could not make up to them for the family's opposition. Daisy had to bite her lips, sometimes, to keep from breaking in on the conversation and demanding:

"Why don't you two run off and get married? They'd have to come around, then. And if they didn't, why should you care?"

To a girl cooped up alone all day in a stuffy cubby-hole, imagination is ten times stronger than to the girl whose thoughts can be distracted by outside things. To Daisy, immured in her dim-lighted cupboard behind the elevators, this romance of Karl and Madeline was fast becoming the very biggest thing in her drab life.

These two lovers were as romantic, as poetical, as yearningly adoring as Romeo and Juliet. Karl was as desperately jealous as Othello or as the hero of one of Laura Jean Libbey's greatest books. Madeline was the Captive Maid come to life again. Oh, it was all very, very wonderful!

Then came the day of jarring disillusionment, a day which Daisy followed by sobbing until midnight on her none-too-soft boarding-house bed, three blocks to westward.

PROMPTLY at nine that morning, as usual, Karl called up Apartment 60.

"Sweetheart," he joyfully hailed Madeline, "I've just bought the new car. It's a beauty. And you're going to be the very first person to ride in it— to consecrate it."

"That's darling of you!" replied Madeline in evident delight. "I'd rather ride in a wheelbarrow with you than in a Rolls-Royce with— with—"

"With Phil?" asked Karl almost savagely.

"With anybody," she evaded. "Tell me more about the car. Is it—"

"I'm not going to tell you," he refused. "I'm going to show it to you instead. Here's my idea: I'll knock off work at noon and bring the car uptown. I'll meet you at the subway kiosk at half-after twelve; we can run up to the Arrowhead to lunch, and then on up to the Tumble Inn for—"

"But I can't, dear— I can't!" expostulated Madeline. "Don't you remember? I told you I have to lunch with Phil and those people from Buffalo, at the Knickerbocker, at one o'clock. Oh, dear! I wish I didn't have to. But I—"

"Phone him you're sick," urged Karl. "I've set my heart on christening the new car this way."

"I could get away to-morrow—" she began.

"But I can't," he said. "I've a directors' meeting at three. Oh, come along to-day, Beautiful! Tell Phil you're sick and—"

"And have him come rushing up here, in a fidget, for fear I'm going to die?" she suggested. "That is just what Phil would do. No, dear, I—"

"Then tell him you don't want to lunch with him," urged Karl, losing patience as a man will when some babyishly cherished woman-plan of his is upset. "Tell him you have to go to your sister's or—"

"I can't, Karl!" she declared; and she added, beseechingly: "Don't be unreasonable, dear boy. Please don't. And don't be cross; it makes me so unhappy when you are. You know how hard I try to do everything you want me to— and how glad I am to. But I can't get out of this luncheon. Phil especially wants me to be there. These Buffalo people are old friends of his."

"Why should you have to go there, just because he wants you to?" demanded Karl, far more crankily than ever Daisy had heard him speak. "Why do you? You aren't his slave."

"No," returned Madeline, her own temper beginning to fray, "but I am his wife. You seem to forget that."

"I don't forget it half as often as you do!" flashed Karl.

At which brutally truthful reply, the receiver of Apartment 60's wire clanked down upon its hook. Nor could all of Karl's repeated efforts bring Madeline back to the telephone.

DAISY REYNOLDS slumped forward upon the switchboard desk, her face in her hands, her slim body a-shake. She felt as though her every nerve had been wrenched. She was sick all over. This, then, was the wondrous romance in which she had reveled. This was the melancholy, beauteous love-story which had become part of her own colorless life! A vulgar intrigue between a married woman (not a wife, but a married woman— Daisy now realized the difference between the two) and a man not her husband!

The iridescent bubbles of romance burst into thinnest air. Daisy was numb with the horror and disgust of it all. Even of old she had fastidiously refused to listen in when another girl's merry cry of "Fish!" had told that some such illicit dialogue was on the wire. And now, for weeks, she had been raptly listening to just such talks.

She loathed herself for the silly bubbles she had blown. Their lovely sheen was miasmic slime. They were filled with foul gases. A great shame possessed Daisy Reynolds.

Next morning Daisy came to work swollen-eyed from futile crying over the death of her dreams, and dull-headed from too little sleep. Half an hour later, promptly at nine, Karl called up Apartment 60.

Daisy's hand trembled as she made the connection. She hated herself for listening in. Yet from morbid fascination she did it.

"Darling!" was Karl's remorsefully passionate greeting as Madeline answered the phone-bell's summons. "I'm so sorry! So horribly sorry! I spoke rottenly to you yesterday. Wont you forgive me? Please do!"

"Please don't let us speak about it," began Madeline stiffly.

Then her shell of offendedness collapsed, and she went on with a break in her sweet voice.

"Oh, I'm so glad you called up! I was so afraid you wouldn't. And I was going to try so hard not to phone to you. But I knew I'd do it— I knew I would— if you didn't call me first. I've been terribly unhappy, dear."

"You've had nothing on me, in that," he made answer. "I haven't slept all night, thinking how I spoke to you. It was our first quarrel. And it was all my fault."

"It wasn't," she contradicted chokily. "It was all mine. I shouldn't have been hurt by what you said about my forgetting so often that—"

"Don't, dear," he begged. "Don't! It was a rotten thing for me to say."

"It was— it was true," she replied, her voice quavering as she fought back the tears. "But you told me yourself that you don't blame me. You know what my life with him has been, from the very beginning. And till I met you I used to wish I were dead. Oh, you can't blame me for forgetting him, for— for you!"

"You're an angel!" he declared. "I'm not fit to touch your hand. But my love for you is the only thing there is in my life. And it's brought me the only happiness I ever knew. I used to think I'd like to kill myself if it weren't for my mother. And now you've given me something— everything— to live for. I love you so, Madeline! Are you sure you've forgiven me?"

"Forgiven you?" she echoed. "Why, Karl, I love you."

Yes, the reply was banal enough. But the tone was not, nor was the wordless exclamation of worship with which Karl received it. And to her own self-disgust Daisy felt a stir of answering emotion in her own breast.

Just then she was required to connect Apartment 42 with the market, and at once afterward to put through a long-distance call for the building's superintendent. And when next she sought to listen in, Karl and Madeline were finishing their talk. All Daisy could catch was Madeline's childish query:

"Can't we please try out the new car to-morrow, if the directors' meeting is going to keep you this afternoon?"

And he answered gayly:

"To blue blazes with the directors! We're going to Tumble Inn to-day, you and I, sweetheart— even if New York doesn't get a stroke of business done south of Canal Street all afternoon. Good-by. You'll be sure to call me up later, wont you?"

DAISY sat back in her wabbly chair to take mental account of stock.

She was amazed at herself— amazed, and a bit displeased, though not as much so as she could have wished. All her ideas and ideals seemed to be as wabbly as the kitchen chair she sat in. Womanlike, she straightway began to justify herself. True, an hour earlier, she had been filled with contempt for these two. Equally true, she was now irresistibly drawn to them again— which most certainly called for a reason; so she supplied the reason:

Madeline had been forced into a marriage, in mere childhood, with a man she did not love. And had she not said, "You know what my life with him has been, from the very beginning?" That alone told the story— the heartbreaking story of neglected wifehood, of ill-treatment, of a starved soul.

Who was Daisy to blame this pathetic young wife if she had at last let love into her heart after years of bondage to a brute? Daisy recalled Phil's husky voice. From it she built up a physique that was a blend of Simon Legree's and Falstaff's, with a tinge of Bill Sikes. And, her moral sense deserting her, she realized that right or wrong she was steadfastly on the side of the lovers.

During the days that followed, she listened in again, with all her old-time hero-and-heroine-worship. Now she understood the strain of melancholy in these two people's love. It was the hopelessness of that love which made them so sad, in the midst of their stolen happiness.

Once, in a free moment, Daisy slipped from her cubby-hole and into the superintendent's office, to ask for a stronger light-bulb. There on the wall hung a typed list of the house's tenants. Stealing a glance at it while the superintendent's back was turned, Daisy ran her eye down the list until she came to the number she wanted:

Apartment 60— Mr. and Mrs. Philip Caleb Vanbrugh.

Caleb! Yes, that was the sort of middle name her ugly-tempered clod of a husband would have been likely to own. The names Madeline and Caleb could no more blend than could violets and prunes. Doubly, now, Daisy's heart was with the lovers.

One qualm, only, marred her sympathy. From the fact that Karl always spoke of Vanbrugh by his first name, the men apparently were friends. And to woo one's friend's wife is black vileness. Even Daisy knew that. So she readjusted matters in her elastic mind, and decided the men were merely close business acquaintances, and that friendship did not enter into their relations. Daisy felt better about it, after that— much better.

One morning when Daisy connected the wire for the lovers and prepared for her daily feast of listening in, a sharp whir from another apartment in the house drew her back to earth. In her nervous haste to make the new connection and get back to her listening, she awkwardly knocked out a plug or two. Absent-mindedly she readjusted them, trying meantime to catch what the second caller was trying to say to her.

This caller was a fussy woman in Apartment 12, who first wanted to know the correct time and then asked for a wire to Philadelphia. A full minute elapsed before Daisy could get back to the lovers. And as she turned again to their talk, she realized with a guilty start that in the mix-up of the various plugs she had left the switch open.

Have you ever called up a telephone number and been let in on a conversation already going on between the person you called up and somebody else? It gives one an absurdly guilty feeling. And it means the switch has carelessly been left open, so that anybody calling up can tap the wire. That is the condition in which Daisy had chanced to leave the switch to Apartment 60. Eagerly she stretched forth her hand to repair the error. As she did so, three sentences struck her ear. They were spoken in quick succession by three people— as follows:

"Good-by, darling," said Karl. "I'll be there at one."

"Good-by, boy dear," answered Madeline. "I'll call you up again before then."

"Who in hell are you?" bellowed a third and huskier voice. "And what do you mean by calling my wife darling?"

Click! All three wires were shut off by one lightning swirl of Daisy's fingers.

SHE SAT aghast. The third voice had most assuredly been Phil's— Philip Caleb Vanbrugh's. What had she done? What hadn't she done? Then she became aware of a buzzing call.

"Clavichord Arms," she said primly in reply as she sought to rally her shaky nerves.

"That the house operator?" harshly demanded the husky voice. "I called up my apartment— Apartment 60— a minute ago, and my wife was talking over the phone. What number was she talking to?"

"What apartment did you say?" asked Daisy.

"Sixty!"

"Apartment 60 hasn't had a call this morning," solemnly answered Daisy, her throat tightening under the grip of outraged conscience. "Nor it hasn't sent in one, either."

"I'd swear that was my wife's voice," growled the man. "I couldn't place the man's. But it was my wife's, all right. And—"

"It may 'a' been Sarah Bernhardt's voice, for all I know," snapped Daisy. "But it didn't come from Apartment 60. Not any calls have been turned in from there since I came on."

"You're sure?" he asked in sour doubt.

"You can look at my slip here on the desk," pertly retorted Daisy. "All the calls are marked on that."

"No," said the man slowly, "I wont do that— because, if you've lied, you wouldn't be past altering the slip. What I'm going to do is to ask the building's superintendent for an itemized list of all the calls from my apartment for the past month or two. He's obliged to furnish it on demand. That ought to tell me something."

HE HUNG UP. Daisy sat gasping. Before her mental gaze ranged the memory of forty-odd calls a month to Worth 9999-Z. Then she came to a decision. Out into the marble-lined hallway she went. There she corralled the second elevator-boy and bribed him with twenty-five cents to take charge of the switchboard for a few minutes. A moment or so later, a colored maid was ushering her into Apartment 60.

In the middle of a garish living-room stood Daisy, trying desperately to think straight. The curtains parted, and a woman came into the room. Daisy blinked at her in bewilderment— then said:

"I should like to speak to Mrs. Vanbrugh, please. It's very important."

"I'm Mrs. Vanbrugh," answered the woman, eying the girl with curiosity.

"I— I mean Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh," faltered the girl.

"I am Mrs. Madeline Vanbrugh," was the answer, and now Daisy recognized the voice, "—Mrs. Philip C. Vanbrugh. What can I do for you?"

Daisy could not answer at once. Around her dumfounded head the bubbles were bursting like a myriad Roman-candle balls.

This woman framed in the doorway was Madeline— her Madeline? This woman whose dumpy figure was swathed in a bedraggled negligee that had once been clean! This woman whose scalp was haloed by a crescent of kid-curlers that held in hard lumps her brass-hued front hair! This woman with the hard, light eyes and sagging mouth-lines and beaklike nose— this woman whose face was sallow and coarse, because it had not yet received its daily dress of make-up! This— this was Madeline!

"What can I do for you?" the woman was saying for the second time, her early air of curiosity merging into one of dawning hostility.

"I am the switchboard operator downstairs," said Daisy faintly.

A LOOK of terror that had all along lurked in the hard eyes now sprang to new light.

"What do you want of me?"

"I want to tell you your husband heard the last part of your phone-talk just now," returned Daisy conscientiously, though her heart was no longer in her mission of rescue. "He called me up about it. I—"

"You told him?" blithered the woman in panic.

"I told him your apartment hadn't had a call all morning."

"You did?" cried the woman, her sweet voice sharpening to a peacock screech of relief. "Good for you! Good for you! And you were perfectly right to come directly up here for your pay. What do you think would be fair reward? Don't be afraid to say. You've done me a great service, and—"

"I don't understand you," stammered Daisy. "I don't understand you at all. If you think I did this for money—"

"My dear," laughed the woman nervously, "we do everything for money. So you needn't be ashamed. We don't always say it's for money. But it is. That's why I got into this scrape. My husband is the stingiest man in New York. He pretends his business is on such a ragged edge that he can't give me any extra cash. But I know better. That's why I let myself get interested in Mr. Schreiner. He is a widower, and he has more money than he can—"

"Oh!" cried Daisy in sick horror.

"So he'll make it good to you for all that you've done for us," prattled on the woman, without noticing. "He'll—"

"That isn't why I came up here!" broke in Daisy angrily. "And I don't want your filthy money, either. I wont touch it. I came up here to warn you that your husband is going to—"

THE BUZZ of the flat's front-door bell interrupted her. The woman, too, turned nervously to look. They heard the maid fumble with the knob. Then some one brushed past the servant and into the living-room.

The intruder was a chunky and yellowish man, of late middle years— incredibly bald of head and suspiciously black of eyebrows. He caught sight of Mrs. Vanbrugh, who chanced to be standing between him and Daisy. And he exclaimed:

"I jumped into a taxi and hustled here, as soon as I left the phone. I didn't dare call up again. Do you suppose he recognized me?"

Yes, the voice was indubitably the voice of Karl. But the fat and elderly swain was in anything but a loverly mood. He was a-quake with terror. Beads of sweat trickled down on his brows and mustache. His yellowish complexion was blotchy from fear. He was not a pretty sight.

Daisy by this time should have been past surprise. Yet her preconceived vision of Karl— of young, athletic, hero-featured Karl— died hard and in much and sudden pain. Poor Daisy! Until he spoke, she had mistaken him for the husband.

"If he knew my voice," babbled the man, "we're up against it. I'd better get out of town for a while, I suppose. Maybe he—"

"Don't worry!" interposed Madeline acidly. "You wont have to run away from town and leave me to face it all. This girl has gotten us out of it. She is the operator downstairs. Phil called up and asked her all sorts of questions. And she told him the apartment hadn't had a call all morning. Isn't she a brick?"

A sound like the exhaust of an empty soda-siphon broke from between Karl's puffy lips— a sound of pure if porcine reaction from dread.

"Good girl!" he croaked, still hoarse with recent fright. "Dandy girl!"

He sought to pat Daisy approvingly on the shoulder with one pudgy hand. She recoiled.

"How much?" he asked jovially, not observing the stark repulsion in her face and gesture as she shrank away. "How much, little girl? You've done a mighty big stroke of business this day. What do you say I owe you? Or will you leave it to me to do the right thing by you?"

He juggled a bloated wad of bills from his trousers pocket as he spoke. And at his motion something in Daisy's taut brain seemed to snap.

THE GIRL did not "see red." She saw only two fat and greasy creatures who thought she was as vile as they— who took it for granted that she had done this thing to extort a rich tip from them, for covering up their sin. And wrath gave her back her momentarily lost power of speech.

"Oh!" she cried in utter loathing, "you'd dare pay me for trying to help you? If I'd known what you both are, all the money in New York wouldn't have gotten me to lift a finger for you. You horrible—"

"There, there, my dear!" oilily soothed Karl. "You're a little bit excited. Calm down and tell us how much—"

"If you don't want pay," shrilled Madeline, "what did you come here for?"

"What did I come here for?" echoed Daisy, white with rage. "To make a fool of myself, of course. To warn you that your husband is going to get the call-lists for the past month from the super, and find out from them what numbers you've been calling up. That's—"

"Good Lord!" gabbled the woman in crass horror.

Karl's fat jaw dropped upon his fatter throat. He tried to speak. He could only gargle.

"That's why I came here!" finished Daisy, striding past them toward the door. "To warn you. And now I've done it. Your husband's liable to be streaking back home any minute now. And I'm going. And if either of you says any more about money, I'll—"

She was making for the outer door. But for all her start, Karl reached it three lengths ahead of her. He banged it shut after him as he darted out. Through the panel Daisy could hear him ringing frantically for the elevator.

Daisy was following, when a choking sound made her turn back. The woman still stood in the middle of the living-room. Her hard, light eyes were dark and dilated. Her sallow face was haggard and ghastly. Yet her features were unmoved. There was about her bearing and expression a certain hopeless courage that lent dignity to the squat figure.

DAISY hesitated— then turned back into the room. The woman stared dully past her toward the doorway through which Karl had vanished. She acknowledged the girl's presence by muttering, in a curiously dead voice, more to herself than to Daisy:

"Men are queer animals, aren't they? He has sworn to me, time and again, that he'd stand by me to the end."

"Yes," assented Daisy in perfect simplicity, "I've heard him say it to you myself— twice."

"He's gone," went on the woman in that same dead voice so unlike her own. "He's gone. And I'm left to hold the bag. I— I think I'm cured. There are worse things than a husband who loves you— even if he can't give you all the money you want to spend. Phil would never have run away like that, from anything— not that the lesson is likely to do me any good, now."

"Here!" exclaimed the girl, shaking the dazed Madeline roughly by the shoulder. "I'm going to get you out of this. I don't know why, but I am. Maybe I've a bill of my own to pay, as well as you have. We've all done some learning to-day, I guess. And learning isn't on the free-list."

"But—"

"Go to the phone right away," commanded Daisy, "and call up the super. Tell him you've got to see him, up here, in a hurry. Act scared. Tell him it can't wait a single minute. Get him up here. That's the main thing. Then— then tell him you want new faucets in the bathroom. Or tell him anything at all. Do as I say. Jump! There isn't much time to waste. Hubby's sure to be hotfooting it home. And when hubby comes, deny everything. Deny! And keep on denying. He wont have any proof, remember that. He'll have no proof. Pay for the lie by being a whole lot decenter to him, forever-after-amen."

MOVING AWAY from the dumfounded woman, Daisy bolted out of the flat and was lucky enough to catch a down-going elevator. She reached the ground floor just as the building's perplexed superintendent came to the shaft on his way to answer Madeline's urgent summons.

Into the superintendent's deserted office sped Daisy. Going directly to his unlocked desk, she rummaged feverishly amid its drawers until she found what she wanted.

Crumpling and pocketing the telephone-sheets for the past two months, she crossed to the file cabinet, hunted through a stack of dusty papers and drew forth the sheaf of penciled telephone-slips for the preceding year.

Selecting from these the slips for the two corresponding months, she put back the rest of the sheaf. Then, changing with eraser and pencil the date of the year on the two slips she had abstracted from the cabinet, she put them in the drawer. After which, feeling oddly weak about the knees, she started out of the office.

At the door she almost collided with the returning superintendent. Vexed at having been called upstairs in such haste on an utterly trivial errand, he very naturally wreaked his ill-temper on the first subordinate he chanced to meet— which was Daisy.

"What are you doing away from your switchboard?" he snarled. "I won't stand for any loafing. Get that into your mind, once and for all. What did you want in here, anyhow?"

"I came in to see you, sir," was the girl's demure reply.

"What do you want of me?" he rasped.

"I wanted to tell you I'm leaving here to-morrow," said Daisy. "I'm going back to work at the Exchange. I'm lonesome on this job. There aren't enough things happening at the Clavichord Arms. It's too slow— not enough excitement for a live wire like me. That's all, sir."

__________________

13: The Perfumed Ghost

Peter Cheyney

1896-1951

Britannia and Eve, Jan 1940

I WAS leaving the office when the telephone rang. Lefty took off the receiver. After a minute he put his hand over the transmitter and turned to me. 'It's a woman,' he said, 'with a pretty voice. She wants to see you. Says it's urgent. She's introduced by Van Dine.'

I don't usually see clients at nine-thirty at night, but Van Dine was a good friend of mine and if he'd sent this woman I thought I'd better see her. I nodded to Lefty. 'Tell her to come round,' I said. Lefty spoke to her, then he hung up.

'She says she'll be round in ten minutes, chief,' he said with a grin. 'Gee, has that dame got a swell voice! Do I stay?'

'You stay,' I said. 'You go in the other office and turn on the dictaphone so that we have a record of what she says.'

I had been running an investigation office in the Rue Clery, Paris, since I left the U.S. Infantry at the end of the war. Paris is an amusing place, and the investigation business was a profitable one. Lots of Americans get into trouble in Paris, and they like someone to get them out.

At the moment I was wondering about this woman who'd telephoned. It had to be pretty urgent for her to ring up the office at nine-thirty. In a few minutes the outer office door bell rang and Lefty let her in.

She was a picture! She was of good height, with a superb figure. She had a complexion like cream, and turquoise eyes that might have melted the heart of a stone image. She was superbly dressed too, and as she came into my office she brought with her a very attractive and faint perfume. I have got a memory for scent. I solved one of my most important cases with my nose, but I certainly could not place this rare and exotic perfume which emanated from my visitor.

Lefty gave her a chair and went into his own room. After a second I heard the faint click which denoted that he had switched on the wall dictaphone. She came straight to the point. Her voice matched the rest of her. It was low, charming and had an indescribable quality,

'I must apologize for coming so late, Mr. Valentine, but there was no time to be lost. Mr. Van Dine told me that I would be perfectly safe in dealing with you.'

She smiled and I understood the fable of Helen of Troy launching a thousand ships. I gave her a cigarette.

'Do you know Mr. Van Dine well?' I asked.

She nodded.

'My name is Mrs. Cynthis Severn,' she said. 'I am an Englishwoman. I have known Mr. Van Dine for a long time.'

I nodded.

'I wonder, did you know his great friend Duborg, another client of mine?' I asked. She smiled agreement.

'I knew him too,' she said. 'I have known both of them for some years.'

I sat down in my chair again.

'Now for the story,' I said. 'Having satisfied ourselves about each other, we might as well get on.'

'I am afraid you will laugh at me, Mr. Valentine,' she said, 'but I've come to see you about something which will probably seem very silly to you. Frankly, the situation is this:

'Up to a year ago, I was living in a flat just off the Faubourg St. Antoine. I was very fond of the flat, but always there seemed to me something mysterious about it, something which unsettled me in a vague way.

'Eventually, the night before I left, I saw a ghost, or at least I thought I saw a ghost. It was the figure of a most charming man, dressed in modern clothes and looking very distressed. I was going to leave the flat in any event, but this thing decided me. I left next day, and since then I've done nothing but worry.'

'About what?' I queried.

She laughed quietly.

'About whether I really saw the ghost or not. Can you understand that?'

'Oh, yes,' I said, 'I understand perfectly. Ever since you have wondered whether you saw the ghost or whether your eyes played you false. You are not certain.'

'Quite,' she said. I am not certain, and I want to be certain. That's why I have come to you.'

I smiled.

'This sounds as if it's going to be an interesting case, Mrs. Severn,' I said,' and a rather nicer one than those which usually come my way.'

'I am glad to hear that,' she said. 'What I want you to do is this. After I left the fiat I made enquiries and I found that there were rumours about the place being haunted. It is said that this ghost appears once a year, and the anniversary on which it is due is to-morrow night. The day after I am leaving Paris and returning to England, but before I go I must know about this ghost.'

'And so...?' I queried.

'Well,' she said, 'to-morrow I want you to come with me to the flat, which is now unoccupied, and then we can see whether there is a ghost or whether I was suffering from nerves or imagination. What will your fee be, Mr. Valentine?'

I laughed.

'I don't know,' I said. 'It's difficult to assess the value of my services as a layer of ghosts.'

She opened her handbag and placed an envelope on the corner of my desk.

'There are two thousand francs in that envelope,' she said, smiling. 'Will that be enough?' I grinned.

'More than enough,' I said. 'That's a very nice fee for such a short job of work.' She smiled and held out her hand.

'Excellent,' she said. 'Then it's all settled. Will you come for me tomorrow night at my hotel, the Splendide, at eleven o'clock? Then we might have some coffee and go round to the flat some time about the witching hour of midnight.'

I got up and showed her to the door. As I helped her with the expensive fur which had slipped from her shoulders another whiff of that superb perfume came to my nostrils.

'I shall be there, Mrs. Severn,' I said.

I watched her as she walked towards the lift. Then I went back to the office.

Lefty was waiting for me.

'Well, what do you know about that, chief?' he said. 'So you're going to be a ghost layer. What a swell job! Two thousand francs for that!' I sat down in my chair and looked at him.

'You never learn anything, do you, Lefty?' I said. 'Don't you realize there's something very funny about this business?'

'Funny?' he queried. 'How?'

'Work it out for yourself,' I said. 'Here is a woman, a very charming and beautiful woman, who has been worried for over a year as to whether she's seen a ghost or not, so she has to wait till half-past nine to-night to phone this office about it. That's point No. 1

'Point No 2 is that she's introduced by Van Dine. You heard that I was careful to ask her whether she knew his great friend Duborg, another client of mine. She said she did. Very well then, why didn't she get Duborg to introduce her to us? He is in Paris, whereas Van Dine, whose name was mentioned in the first place, is in Italy, and we couldn't check up if we wanted to.

'In any event, and this is point No. 3, to prevent us checking up she pays a large fee of two thousand francs in advance. Well?'

Lefty scratched his head.

'You always see something that I don't,' he said. 'Well, chief, where do we go from here?'

This is an interesting business, Lefty,' I said, 'but I think there's something behind it. Go out right away. Walk round to this flat, this haunted flat, she talks about, and have a look round and see if there's a way we can get in without disturbing the neighbourhood or the police. I'd like to take a look at that flat, and I'd like to do it to-night.'

IT WAS eleven o'clock when Lefty and I, having secured admittance to the flat through a back window, which abutted on a garage, examined the place. It was large, empty and desolate. All the rooms, of which there were many, led off the main corridor, and we went through them one by one. We found nothing.

Eventually, we came to the last room— the bathroom. It had one of those large marble baths sunk flush with the floor, and as I stood on the edge something vague stirred within my mind. At last I got it.

'Well, Lefty,' I said, 'what do you know about this?'

He looked at me vacantly.

'I don't know anything, chief,' he said. 'All I can see is a bath.' I smiled.

'Well, get down on your knees and smell it,' I said. 'Then tell me what you think.'

He did so and looked up at me from the floor with amazement written all over his face.

'Well, what do you know about that, chief,' he said. 'This bath smells of the same perfume as she did.'

'Right first time, Lefty,' I said. 'And what does that tell you? Bath salts don't hang about a bathroom for a year, you know. It means that woman was using that bath up to the last two or three days. The odour of the bath salts has not had time to evaporate. Now we'll go home.'

We made our exit by the same means as we had entered. Outside I sent Lefty off. For myself I lit a cigarette and walked slowly back to my flat on the Boulevard Montmartre.

I was very interested in Mrs. Cynthis Severn.

NEXT morning I sent Lefty out to make some enquiries about the haunted flat. He came through to the office at noon, and had some interesting information to give me.

The flat had been occupied up to a few days before by a Russian woman, a blonde named Madame Alexia Starinoff. A fortnight, before, this lady reported that a valuable diamond had been stolen from the flat and brought a claim against the Lyons-Marseilles Insurance with whom the gem was insured. She then left the flat because, apparently, she was afraid of further burglaries, as she was the owner of other valuable jewellery.

I did a little quiet thinking and went round and saw the insurance people. They were not particularly satisfied with the case, but had decided that they would have to pay as the lady was pressing them.

I managed to get an exact description of the stolen diamond from them, and, at my request, they also procured a photograph of the jewel. Armed with this, and Madame Alexia Starinoff's address, I dropped in at the Cafe de la Paix, drank two grenadines, and made up my mind. I took a cab and went over to Papa Dubinet— Dubinet was the best 'fence' and general jewel crook in Paris— and got him to work.

Then I had lunch and proceeded to instruct Lefty.

THAT night I picked up Cynthis Severn at the Splendide. She looked ravishing in an evening gown that must have cost a small fortune. I drank some coffee with her, and we took a taxi round to the haunted flat in the Faubourg. She had secured the keys and permission to inspect the place from the agents.

When we arrived the flat looked very much the same as on the night before. Moonlight flooded through the windows, making grotesque shadows on the bare floors, and as we walked along the corridor I felt my companion give a little shudder.

Eventually we stood in a corner of what had been the drawing-room, and I lit myself a cigarette after she had refused one.

'I'm much too excited and frightened to smoke,' she said. 'What do you think about it all, Mr. Valentine?'

I grinned.

'I'm thinking that it's the easiest two thousand francs I've ever earned,' I said.

The words were hardly out of my mouth before she gripped my arm. She was standing on my left and she pinched hard in her excitement.

'Look,' she whispered excitedly. 'Look— the ghost!'

I looked towards the door, but saw nothing at all. I had a .32 Colt automatic in a shoulder holster under my left arm and I drew the gun and went out into the corridor with Cynthis Severn at my heels. I walked through the flat but there wasn't a sign of any ghost. I told her so.

'I don't care,' she whispered. 'I saw it, and now my mind is at rest.'

I laughed.

'So now you can go back to England,' I said, 'two thousand francs the poorer, but with a mind at peace. Let's go.'

I slipped the automatic back into its holster, and we made our way towards the flat entrance. Outside she took my arm with a charming little gesture of friendliness.

'Come back to the hotel and have just one little drink,' she said, 'in honour of the ghost!'

We drove back and I drank a whisky and soda with her in the lounge at the Splendide. After a minute or two I asked to be excused and went into a telephone box and phoned Lefty who was waiting at the office.

'Put a phone call through to here in three minutes' time,' I instructed him, 'and ask for Mrs. Severn. When she gets into this booth pretend there's some mistake. Keep her here for just a moment.

'After that get round here and wait for me on the door. Just follow me and don't interfere. Do just what I told you to do.'

I went back and finished my drink.

Two and a half minutes afterwards I made some complimentary remarks about my companion's evening bag. It was a pretty trifle in white and black silk, with a big jade clasp and her initials in ivory. I asked to look at it and she handed it to me. As she did so a bell-boy told her she was wanted on the telephone and she asked to be excused, leaving the bag in my hands.

Whilst she was away listening to Lefty apologizing for getting the wrong Mrs. Severn, I opened the bag and did what I wanted. I had just replaced it on the table and lit a cigarette when she returned.

We talked for a little while and then she thanked me prettily for my services and we shook hands. She told me to go and see her if ever I was over in England. Then I said good night.

I walked out of the Splendide and went in the direction of the Boulevard Montmartre. I walked up to the Rue Clichy and turned down one of the dark side streets. I had got about ten yards down the street when somebody who had come up behind me sandbagged me and I went out on the pavement, my last thought being that I wasn't particularly surprised.

I came to about five minutes later to find a very concerned Lefty, doing a first-aid act with a wet handkerchief. I had a big bump on my head like a duck's egg, but beyond the headache I was fairly happy. Lefty got us a taxi and took me home. I went to bed with a cold compress on my head and slept like a top.

NEXT morning I got up early and went round to Madame Starinoff's address in the Rue Bercere. The flat was situated in a handsome block on the first floor. I rang the door bell and the door was opened by a Russian girl— obviously a maid. I told her I wanted to see Madame Starinoff.

'Pardon, m'sieu,' she said. 'But it is impossible. Madame can see no-one.'

I laughed, pushed her into the flat, followed her in and shut the door behind me. I walked straight across the hall to a room next to a bathroom in which I could hear the water splashing. I tapped at the door and looked in.

Cynthis Severn, looking perfectly sweet in an ivory negligée, was taking her breakfast in bed. Her pretty mouth opened in surprise.

'Good morning, Madame Alexia Starinoff,' I said. 'How are you this morning, and aren't you surprised to see the big bad wolf breaking in on you like this? Now be a good girl and order another cup for some coffee for me. I'm going to talk turkey to you, as we say in the United States.'

She took it very well. She made a little moue and then she rang for the maid and ordered another cup.

'Well, where do we go from here?' she said as she poured out my coffee. 'I had an idea that you were a little more clever than you look.'

'That's my failing,' I said. 'You see I was on to your game when I went to that haunted flat the same night that you came to see me, and smelt your bath salts in the bath. That perfume you use is very distinctive, you know. Next morning we checked up on Madame Starinoff's jewel robbery.

'I got the idea at once. You had been living in the flat as Madame Starinoff, wearing a blonde wig and talking Russian like a near-Cossack. Then you stage a fake robbery and claim from the Lyons-Marseilles people. But you know that they are a little bit suspicious and likely to make some very close enquiries and possibly do a little detective work on their own.

'Of course the diamond was never really stolen. You just left it in the flat stuck under a ledge in a piece of putty.

'Two days ago the Company said that they would pay, and your next job is to regain possession of the diamond.

'In order to do this you've got to get into the flat, and naturally you want to go back there as Mrs. Severn not Madame Starinoff. So you come round to my office and you tell me that fairy story about the ghost and you pay me my fee in advance. You've got to have me for two reasons. One is that you're going to pick up the diamond when we visit the flat, but you think that there is just a chance that someone might recognize you when we come out as the recent tenant— Madame Alexia Starinoff— the woman whose diamond has been lost.

'The only person likely to do this would be an investigator on the Insurance Company staff, in which case you would have indignantly denied that you were Madame Starinoff, produced your passport to prove that you were Mrs. Cynthis Severn, and if he had continued to be suspicious you would have insisted on being searched. I should have supported your story that you were Mrs. Cynthis Severn, have explained our reasons for returning to the flat, and, of course, no-one would have thought for a moment that the diamond was attached to the inside of my left-hand coat sleeve where you stuck it when you grabbed my arm at the time you pretended to be excited about seeing the ghost.

'We then go back to your hotel, and when I leave some hired thug of yours sandbags me near the Place Pigalle, removes the diamond and returns it safely to you.

'To-day the insurance people would have paid up and you would have had both the money and the diamond. Then off you go to England, leaving me with a bump on the head and two thousand francs.'

She laughed.

'You're pretty good I must say,' she said. 'Well— what are we going to do about it?'

'I don't think we'll do anything much,' I said. 'You see, I've seen the insurance people this morning, and stopped them from paying. I told them that you'd sent me round to tell them that you'd found the diamond, so that's all right.'

'You've got a nerve, I must say,' said Cynthis severely. 'And I needed that money too. You know I can't sell the diamond very easily at the moment and I do need money badly, and I've never done anything crooked before, I promise you.'

'Let this be a lesson,' I said. 'You see, now you haven't got either the diamond or the money!'

'What do you mean?' she said, 'I have got the diamond. It's in the drawer over there.'

'No, it's not,' I said. 'What you have got in the drawer over there is a very good paste imitation Papa Dubinet made for me and which I substituted for the real one whilst we were driving back to your hotel after our visit to the flat!'

'Well, I am surprised,' she said, 'and I thought you were such a nice honest man. And so you've stolen my diamond, have you? Will you tell me why I shouldn't telephone for the police at once?'

I laughed.

'The joke is, Cynthis,' I said, 'you can't even do that. You see, I haven't got the diamond. You have; but unless you're a good girl I won't tell you where it is!'

'And what do I have to do to be a good girl?' she asked demurely.

I smiled. 'You pay me another two thousand francs and I tell you where it is,' I said.

'Oh dear,' she said. 'I am in trouble, aren't I? Just hand me my bag from that dressing-table, will you, Mr. Al Capone?'

I handed her the bag. She opened it and peeled off two one-thousand-franc notes from a roll.

'There you are,' she said. 'Now where's my diamond?'

'I stuck it under the clasp of your evening handbag,' I replied, 'whilst you were having that phoney telephone call with my assistant. You remember I admired your bag and you left it with me whilst you went to the telephone?'

'Dear me,' she said. 'The man is clever, isn't he? Marietta!' she called to the maid. 'Bring me my black and white evening bag.'

Marietta brought it and we found the real stone just where I had stuck it, right under the clasp.

'Let this be a lesson to you, Cynthis,' I said. 'Don't try to pull any more phoney business with Insurance Companies.'

She smiled. She was really adorably pretty.

'I won't, sir,' she said. 'And now would you please get out of my bedroom so that I can dress? I've got to go to England.'

I got up.

'I wouldn't if I were you,' I said. 'There's a very nice race meeting at Auteuil to-day. I think that you should lunch with me and we might possibly find a winner.'

'What's the good?' she pouted. 'I've got no money to back a horse with—even if I wanted to.'

I grinned.

'Here's your four thousand francs,' I said, handing her the money. 'I've worked for you for nothing. Let's see if you can find a winner to put that on!'

'I can't take that,' she said. 'After all, two thousand of it was your fee, and you blackmailed me for the other two thousand—it's all legally yours. Besides, I don't see why I should make money out of you. I don't know that I like you!'

'Have no scruples, Cynthis,' I said, 'because the Insurance Company paid me ten thousand francs this morning for my services over this little matter.'

She raised her eyebrows.

'What a man!' she said. 'Well—go away and I'll think it over. I might come racing with you.'

___________

14: Blind Man's Buff

Malcolm Jameson

1891-1945

Astounding Science-Fiction, Feb 1945

The idea that Venus was a very, very wet, but habitable planet (like living in a nonstop monsoon) was very popular in science fiction from the 30s to the 50s, but was finally exploded by space probes in the later 60s and ealy 70s.  Still, it was fun while it lasted.

THE BRIGHT DOT had grown to a disk days before, now it was a dazzling silvery sphere, looming straight ahead. Lorimer, the assistant umpire, sat in the radio booth dozing, his headphone strapped on. Hartley made a few last adjustments to his adored Maggy— the instrument with the X-ray eye— and then walked over to where Travis sat staring into the visiscreen.

"The big money sure ganged up on us," remarked Hartley, surveying the outside scene as reflected before them.

"They've got numbers, if that is what you mean," said Travis, with a grim chuckle, "but I'm not so sure about the brains. The Farrington-Driscoll combine always did their dirty work statistically. They're doing it now. Most of those poor devils you see out there won't be alive this time tomorrow. Driscoll's game is as simple as the Rule of Three. The mortality of ships trying to land on Venus is roughly a hundred to one. Ergo! He sends a hundred and some odd ships. His competitors— like you and me and old Buck Turner— are playing singletons. All of us combined, if we were combined— which we are not— haven't a ghost of a show along with his bird dogs."

"Unless we're smarter," amended Hartley.

"Yes," grunted Travis.

Other ships were to the right and left of them, abreast but curving downward in a great circle that closed forty miles below their keel. The formation centered on the lone cruiser that carried the chief umpire and which followed the base course between the Earth and the planet of their destination. Shortly they would arrive at the point ten diameters distant from Venus, and that was where the take-off would be. After that it would be a free-for-all scramble for the honor— and untold riches— of being the first man down.

Most of the ships carried the yellow-and-blue markings of the newly formed Venusian Land Development Co., the Farrington-Driscoll enterprise. Buck Turner's rusty old tub floated somewhere on the far side of the circle. Nearby were two crazily converted yachts manned by adventure-struck college kids. A quadrant away there were several other independent entries, all of an impractical nature. One was a man who fondly held the theory that the only way to tear away the deadly veil of Venus was to take actual soundings with wire drags and then drop kite balloons with moorings. His idea was to plant buoys, so to speak, to mark the more dangerous crags. Another was a fellow who claimed to be an expert meteorologist, and whose ship was fitted with bins containing colored flours. By dumping those on the Venusian cirrus he hoped to make stains whose motions he could study. By charting the general circulation of the upper air and noting the presence of updrafts and eddies, he hoped to deduce the locations of the hazards below.

Travis and Hartley's own hope was pinned on magnar— the Maggy, as they preferred to call it— a squat machine that embodied all the virtues of super-radar plus, but inverted. Where old-style radio used oscillating electric currents to generate magnetic waves, magnar operated on reverse principles. Surges of magnetrons set up electric strains which reacted from the surroundings. The results were incomparably more satisfactory than with standard electronic equipment since it was penetrative and analytic as well. But marvelous as the instrument was in its tests under terrestrial conditions, its behavior on Venus was yet to be ascertained. Curious magnetic phenomena had been observed there, due probably to the proximity to the fierce radiation of the sun. Auroras were encountered at all latitudes, and there was known to be a low belt practically opaque to all but long waves. But for better or for worse, they intended to depend on their device to get them safely down, and for the later complying with the strict rules laid down by the Bureau of Genomics in the staking out of their claim.

A gong struck warningly, and Lorimer came to life.

"It's the standby signal," he said, and cut in the loudspeaker.

"All ships, attention," boomed the voice of the chief umpire. "In five minutes we will arrive at the take-off point. See that you are not ahead of the station or you will be disqualified. Everyone listen carefully while I refresh you on the rules. Ships will go in with open mikes, so that I can keep track of your whereabouts. Upon making your planetfall you are to ground your ship where it may be, leaving the assistant umpire on board for communication purposes. Set up a radio beacon at once so that if necessary I can visit you to check up. After that you are free to explore the territory about you."

There was a pause for acknowledgments up to that point. Travis nodded. He knew the rules. The signals came through loud and clear. Violent earthquakes and torrents of boiling volcanic mud falling as rain drove him away shortly after he landed, but the beacon he left behind served long enough to allow him to regain the stratosphere safely. It ceased sending within the hour, indicating that subsequent earthquakes had destroyed it, but it showed what was possible.

"After your reconnaissance," went on the voice from the cruiser, "you should then stake out your claims. Vague descriptions, wooden stakes, blazes on trees, or loosely piled stone cairns will not do. There was too much litigation arising from the careless early surveying of Mars. Good topographic maps must be submitted, tracts described by metes and bounds, and the corners tied to salient landmarks. If possible, the survey should be tied to the planetary grid. In cases of conflict, title will be awarded to the most accurately mapped.

"Imagine that!" sniffed Hartley. "Expecting good topography in a dense fog. It's a good thing we have the Maggy."

Travis was silent. He was wondering how those clauses happened to be in the conditions. Could it be that Driscoll had a hand in it, knowing their meaninglessness but having devised some way to beat the game? For the term planetary grid implied either a previous triangulation survey or the establishment of circles of latitude and longitude, a manifest impossibility in view of the record. Perhaps Driscoll meant to perform such a survey. He had an army of men, and was known to have taken aboard a great quantity of infrared equipment. Given time and men enough, Venus could be triangulated, using heat detectors and directional walkie-talkies. It was a disturbing thought.

"Ten seconds to go," warned the cruiser, after which came the long buzz.

"Hop to it, and good luck," were the umpire's final words.

The screen was no longer jet-black with the bright silver ball in its center. It was half-and-half silver and black, the velvety star-spangled sky covering the upper part, and the dazzling shell of Venus the lower. The dividing line had been a strongly curving arc— a segment of the upper limb of the planet. But it had flattened little by little until it showed no curvature. It was a straight line— a horizon. What lay below appeared to be an endless, featureless field of snowy white, flat as a floor. It looked like snow, but it was not. It was an expanse of spicules of ice, the frozen upper cirrus that marked the boundary between the stratosphere and the zone of cloud and fog. Travis shifted the controls. He took the ship off its tangent and put it into gently curving "level" flight. The altimeter stood steady now. Its reading was twelve kilometers.

They had not hurried. At the signal "GO" some of Driscoll's bird dogs had, as well as the enthusiasts among the other entrants. All wanted to be the first in, as the bursts of violent fire from their reserve tubes showed. But as they fanned out, each toward the assigned section of the Venusian perimeter, Travis hung back. There was no rush. Most of the early birds would die, if history was any guide, and he did not choose to be among them. He saw that Driscoll cagily hung back too, and the strategy of it was plain. The foxy financier would wait to see which of his scouts survived, then follow in on his beam. If none survived— well, he could write the expedition off and go home again. There would always be another time.

"What do you hear?" snapped Travis, addressing Lorimer, who cringed in the radio booth listening through headphones to the other ships. The man's face was white and his eyes large and glazed, and at times he shuddered violently.

"I... it is a shambles down there." he said, licking his lips. "They're crashing right and left. You hear 'em reporting, then all of a sudden there's a scream... something about a pinnacle looming up in the mist... or else no sound but a burst of static... oh, sir, don't you think we'd better turn back?"

"We're not as crazy as we look," said Travis grimly. "But we're not turning tail yet."

He made other adjustments to the ship. Much of the momentum had been braked down by the air resistance. Now only one tube was jetting, and that at just a trickle to maintain steerageway. Travis pulled the levers, that extruded the vessel's stubby wings and stabilizer fins. From here in the ship would have to be handled as a glider, but with ample reserve power at the throttle.

"Warm up the Maggy," he said, "and start shooting."

Hartley turned on the magnetoscope. That was an attachment that converted distances and bearings into light rays. Magnetronic tubes did the trick, throwing the resultant visual image onto a concave screen on the far side of the compartment. For a moment the screen showed nothing but haze, but as fog dissolves and pictures emerge from behind it, the haze melted. What was revealed was truly amazing.

The layer of frozen cirrus vanished. Several miles below its level there suddenly appeared what seemed to be an azure sea sprinkled with scattered rocky islets, arranged in long, twisting chains. But it was like no ocean man had ever looked upon. Its surface appeared hard and glistening, as if of ice, but that illusion of rigidity rose and fell in mighty pulses, now covering, again revealing more of the rough crags that jutted through it. There was a mirage-like quality about the whole scene, for nowhere did any of the islets show shores or beaches, though their jagged outlines expanded and contracted in phase with the heave of the strange crystalline sea.

"That must be your ionosphere," ventured Travis, squinting at the astonishing vista. "That is the phenomenon that distorts radio beams, though it seems to stop ours cold. But at least we are able to define it sharply. That is some help."

"Go down as close as you can and see what it does," suggested Hartley. "Maybe the angle of incidence has something to do with it. Maybe it will recede or vanish."

"Right-o," said Travis, and nosed the ship over into a dive.

INEXORABLY the gleaming surface seemed to rise up to meet them. It did not give an iota, or fade. It was an absolute thing. The magnetoscope version may have been pure illusion, but what met their eyes appeared hard and unyielding. If Travis maintained his angle of dive, it could be but a matter of minutes until the ship would be put to the acid test. It would either crash against reality or else plunge through— what?

"Stop! Don't go on down. Please don't!" wailed Lorimer. Unnoticed he had stolen over and was staring wildly at the screen. "It's suicide, I tell you."

Travis eased off on the controls and half-way flattened out.

"What do you mean?" he asked, roughly.

Lorimer was thoroughly frightened. Trembling and whimpering he blurted out what he had been overhearing on the inter-ship. Most of the other entrants were gone— all the independents and scores of Driscoll's ships. Many shattered themselves against hidden crags, a few reported themselves stuck in morasses that were about to engulf them. A number of the Driscoll vessels had mutinied and turned tail. Only one was down safely, and he was complaining to Driscoll and the umpire of his plight. He was being tossed about on a turbulent ocean and shipping water with every giant wave, for his altimeter had been at fault and he cracked his plates on striking. Venus was living up to her deadly reputation.

Lorimer never finished his piteous narration. He caught another glimpse of the pseudo-sea over Travis' shoulder. It was now but a matter of yards away and impact was at hand. Lorimer uttered a little moan and keeled over in a dead faint. Travis shot the slumped figure a contemptuous glance and flicked a lever.

"Shall I try the chute stunt?" asked Hartley, cheerfully, as Travis pulled the ship into a saving climb.

Travis shook his head.

"Too risky. I had rather we stick together. What about supersonic frequencies. Can you tune the Maggy to those? I doubt if anyone ever thought of using them for soundings."

"I can try," said Hartley, and proceeded to alter the magnostat setting. He was not sorry to hear the parachute alternative was out, since it had been a forlorn hope at best. One of them was to jump overboard with the automatic beacon, trusting to luck that he fell near a place where the ship could land. If radio failed there was still hope of sending up messages tied to soundage ballonets. But snaring those, or even seeing them in the upper air would be a tough task for a fast-moving vessel.

The sonic soundings did work. The Maggy was not geared to convert that data to vision, but Hartley could interpret the echoes.

"That string of islands to the right," he said, "terminates in a sheer cliff. What I get from beyond it is very faint and much delayed. I think the precipice is a high escarpment or else the near wall of an immensely wide canyon. Try it there."

"Here goes," said Travis, grimly, and started the hazardous plunge.

THE PASSING through the mysterious ionosphere was an impressive moment. They winced in spite of themselves at what looked like imminent deadly impact. Then the magnetoscope faded into a blur of milky blue, matching the formless haze of swirling mists that still showed on the standard visiscreen. The terrible uncertainty lasted for a second, and then the picture cleared again, this time with the strangely oscillating azure surface vaulting close overhead. Stretched out below them was a magnificent vista— incredibly weird, but as open to their gaze as any bird's-eye view ever obtained on Earth. Magnar had pierced the veil of the promised land. Venus was theirs!

The terrain was a magnificent jumble of Earth forms. The sierra that formed the crenellated top of the escarpment was lost above the ionosphere, but all else was there for the seeing. Steep talus slopes at the foot of the mighty cliff led down to what on a normal planet would have been a plain. But this plain was broken by scores of volcanic cones, many of which were shrouded in a curious pall of dirty brown— probably volcanic ash turned to falling mud by the ever present moisture. Elsewhere there were badly tilted plateaus and solitary mesas, between which meandered great rivers. Far away and to the right lay the sea. It was a real sea this time, and dappled with islands, great and small, many surrounded by reef-inclosed lagoons. The borderline between the sea and land was a vague marshy area where the rivers lost their identity in a maze of tortuous bayous, deltas and lagoons. Over all, wherever the ground was fairly level, there were vast forests of incredibly high trees.

Travis cruised along with his eye peeled for the best place to land, for once they were down they would have to leave the ship and proceed as best they might in the amphibious crawler in the hold. Suddenly he caught sight of a curious arrangement of naked stones near the crest of one of the tilted plateaus.

"That's a funny outcropping," he began. "it looks for all the world like—"

The rest of the sentence died on his lips, for Lorimer came suddenly to life. The man was crazed with fear. He dashed across the room, screaming with hysterical frenzy.

"I won't let myself be murdered," he howled. "You are not going through with this madness!"

Travis and Hartley hurled themselves at him, but Hartley's flying tackle and Travis' vicious uppercut landed too late. The damage was done. Lorimer slumped back into unconsciousness, but it was by the eerie light reflected from the still glowing visiscreen. Everything else was dark. The magnetoscope was dead. Lorimer's wildly clawing hands had managed to yank half the switches on the panel open. The emergency lights slowly blinked on, but meter pointers still oscillated wildly, especially those having to do with the magnetic circuits. The abrupt interruption of the current had set up magnetronic eddies that would not die down for minutes.

"Get the supersonics going again if you can," said Travis between his teeth, "but it looks as if I'll have to land this baby blind."

He cursed fervently, trying to recall all the varied detail of the topography he had been studying. But there was no time for reasoned action. The altimeter reading stood at a bare kilometer, and was dropping fast. Before he could get the vessel under control it lurched heavily to the crackle of snapping branches and the scraping of tree-tops along the underside of the hull. The lurch turned into a bucking forward fall punctuated by many jolts and bumps. For a moment the ship seemed to tear itself clear but only to go into free fall. There was the briefest sickening instant of thudding impact, and their voyage was ended. With a squishy thud and a lazy roll, the ship came to rest. Travis and Hartley sat up in the respective corners into which they had been pitched and listened. To their ears came the steady lapping of water alongside their keel and the patter of raindrops on the roof.

"So this is Venus!" said Hartley, wryly.

"Uh-huh," grunted Travis, hauling himself to his feet. "So it seems. Better get the beacon set up. I'll take stock."

"Dismal place," was Hartley's comment. He was gluey mud to his midriff, having just climbed back into the entry port. Back of him was a curtain of hot rain that splashed to the ground only to rise instantly in clouds of steamy vapor. Dimly seen below was the crawler, itself mired to the hubs of the half-track rotors. Gurgling rivulets of water ran past it toward a larger stream they could hear roaring in the background. Vision stopped five yards away. Beyond that was only uncanny yellowish light, of equally mild intensity in every direction. Sogginess, and a dispiriting sort of amber semi-light was the keynote of Venus.

"What's the lay?" asked Travis. A distinctly chastened Lorimer peered over his shoulder.

"Trees, mostly. Unbelievable trees," said Hartley. "The California redwoods would be saplings here. If it's organics they want, we've got 'em. Shade doesn't seem to mean anything here with the light evenly diffused the way it is, because between the big trees there are all sorts of others, some with fruits like melons. And underneath everything is giant brush. Gosh. The going is plenty tough. I'm glad we don't have to survey this planet inch by inch."

"We'd better get going with the Maggy, then," said Travis. "Lorimer helped me set it up. All we need now is the pantos and your expert assistance."

Hartley washed the worst of the mud off him and then followed Travis up the ladder that led to the dome hatch. The instrument rested on the flatter part of the roof, shielded from the downpour by a hastily stretched tarpaulin. By it stood the box that was to receive the scale relief map the Maggy was to construct. It was a three-sided, open-topped affair, made of plates of transparent synthetic crystal. Travis fastened the pantograph's arms to lugs extending out of the magnar's side, and attached the quills at their tips. When he finished the rigging, the pantos extended out into the receiving box.

"We'd be sunk without our Maggy," said Travis, gazing at the veil of water that poured down on all sides. "Driscoll's men brought along a flock of infrared equipment and bolometers, but even with those they will find surveying this country a tough job. What the—"

The ship groaned and trembled beneath them, and they were shaken until their teeth rattled. They had to cling at the swaying stanchions to keep from being tossed off the ship. But the earthquake, though severe, did not last long. It died out in a series of shuddering tremors and then there was quiet again— the watery quiet of splashing rain and gurgling ravines.

"Log the time of that," Travis called down the hatch to Lorimer.

"Ready to ride," announced Hartley, promptly putting the earthquake out of his mind and going back to the machine. "Let's make this first try accurate. They'll be more like to accept the later abbreviated ones if we can show them all our paces. I'll start with the underlying igneous rocks and fill in above as I go. Use black for that."

Travis filled the panto quills with a tarry substance that when exuded hardened quickly into a dark glass. That was the symbol that stood for granite in their code. He had other plastics for the other rocks— dark red for sandstone, olive green for shale, a dirty yellow for limestone, and so on. Hartley cut in the juice.

It took the Maggy an hour to lay the foundation for their work. The weaving pantos worked in and out in an every widening arc as directed by the operator, squirting the colored plastics onto those laid before. Where volcanic necks intervened— and there were many— Hartley stepped up the current so as to force the reluctant radiation through, since when it was set to be reflected by basalt it would bounce back from the nearer surface. It took skill and understanding, but in the end they were well pleased with the result.

What stood in their box was the skeleton of what was to be a diorama of their surroundings— so far just the naked land on which they rested. One could walk around the crystal box and see just how far down the basic magma lay, and how the stratified rocks above were twisted, folded, and faulted. It was the geologist's dream come true. If they had been interested in ores, they would have had only to adjust the radiation to the proper setting and delineated it neatly in any special color they chose. As it was, in case of challenge, a simple drill rig could verify their claim in a short time.

Hartley stopped long enough to have a smoke, though the sodden tobacco did not draw well. Then he changed his tuning slightly and ran in the mantle of soil and mud that clothed the bedrock. Toward the sea the alluvial muck was quite deep.

"Say," said Travis, "we have to put up with the ship's shadow, but what is that thing up there?"

He pointed to a narrow pointed, irregular wedge lying sidewise on the model's surface. It was a wedge of emptiness, in which nothing had registered. Except for its queer shape, it was the counterpart of the conical hollow in the very center of the model. That was the shadow cast vertically downward by the hull of the ship itself, since no amount of power would push the magnetrons through that thickness of alloy steel. Hence the pantos could only build an irregular empty cone topped off by the cigar-shaped upper contours of the vessel.

Hartley scrutinized the wedge of vacancy.

"It may be thrown by a moraine. Who knows, they may have had glaciers here once upon a time. Put the black pigment in and I'll test for granite."

The result he got was surprising.

"That's a funny thing," frowned Travis.

"No action of ice or water ever left detritus like that, and I can't think of any normal upheaval that would cause it."

The cause of the shadow was granite, but in a form most unnatural. Far away from any known outcropping, it lay there in thin slabs. In the scale model they were of paper thinness, meaning that actually they were less than a yard thick. They were about ten times wider and occurred in all lengths up to several hundred yards. Not only did the slabs exist contrary to all known laws of granite cleavage, but their disposition was unorthodox. They lay roughly end to end, though by no means continuously since in spots there were wide vacancies. The pattern was that of a circuitous line that sometimes wound around low hills and at others went straight over them.

"What do you make of it?" asked Hartley. "The remnants of an old wall, perhaps, overthrown by an earthquake?"

"Too thin for a wall," shrugged Travis, "but let it go just now. When we extend the survey we will have to go up that way and then we'll take a look. Let's get on with the rest of the topography now. The light is getting dimmer and this rain is chilly."

HARTLEY put the Maggy to defining water, and the irregularities of the Venusian surface swiftly filled with clear plastic. Ravines turned into streams and saucerlike depressions into lakes. It was necessary for them to know the depths of the water hazards before they set out later in the crawler. And then, after shifting the quills, the pantos began sketching in the vegetable matter, reporting only what was composed of cellulose. The forests took shape, but not as clusters of individual trees. The scale was too small for that. They came out as masses of greenish glass or as a thin glaze where only grasses were.

"Hey," exclaimed Travis, pointing. "What's that there— another shadow?"

A clean V-shaped vacancy had been left by the moving arms— a tapering semi-conical tunnel through the tree mass where it intersected it, and barrenness beyond. It was far too regular to have occurred in nature.

The appearance of it puzzled Hartley, for it terminated where it met the face of a mesa he had run in earlier. That would indicate that the unseen obstruction was softer than the sedimentary rocks but harder than wood. Hartley twisted a dial. The shadow persisted. He twisted other dials and stepped up the power. Nothing went through. Whatever it was was exceedingly hard.

"A ship!" said Travis, as the outlines of it suddenly began to grow under the weaving pantos. It was a cigar-shaped affair, and beside it were a pair of flat objects of the same material. Its lines were familiar. It was Driscoll's Pathfinder, and the two other objects were his crawlers. Their steel effectively masked what lay beyond them.

"It must have just landed," said Hartley. "It couldn't have been there before or I couldn't have shown the mesa complete."

"He used our beam to come in on, the skunk," said Travis, huskily, and wheeled toward the hatch.

"What are you going to do?"

"Call up the chief umpire and protest."

The umpire answered soothingly.

"Now, now, Mr. Travis— there is no need of distressing yourself. Venus is big. Tremendously big. There's room enough for both of you. I would suggest that you make contact and reach an agreement. One of you go one way, the other the other. After all, Mr. Driscoll has suffered terrific losses in ships and men and you can afford to be generous. As for that, there is nothing in the rules to cover a conflict of this sort. Later you may take your complaint to the courts, but it is beyond my jurisdiction. Moreover, no part of Venus belongs to you yet— not until you have made an adequate survey."

"But we have," insisted Travis, raging. "My partner and I have developed an instrument that maps in total darkness, or through solid barriers for that matter. It is by means of that that we discovered this trespasser. I demand—"

"Ridiculous," said the umpire, crisply. "My assistants have reported conditions down there. You are overruled."

The click of the severed connection left Travis in a state of sputtering fury. The umpire's stupid action was not final, of course. A display of the map would show his error. But Driscoll's intrusion was not only not sportsmanlike, it had an ominous quality. For he had power and the cunning to exploit every technicality. It would have been bad enough to have him on the other side of the planet, for sooner or later they were bound to meet. But to enter into conflict at the very outset was bad. Very bad.

Travis strode to the safe and took out the rules. He scanned them, fuming, but in the end had to concede that the umpire was partly right. The rules were silent on the point. Everything hinged on the quality of the survey made. The best mapped claim would win, regardless of priority. Travis relaxed a little. In that field the Maggy should win hands down over the clumsy bolometric methods Driscoll would probably employ. Hartley agreed with him in deciding to ignore Driscoll for the time being, and carry on.

"Tomorrow," Travis declared that night, as the three of them were at supper, "we will stow the topographic map in the hold, dismantle the Maggy, and move on to the far edge of what we've already done and add another sheet from there. Lorimer will have to stay here to maintain outside communications. We'll keep in touch with him by means of our walkie-talkies."

Lorimer nodded agreement, when Travis suddenly sat bolt upright.

"Psst! Do you hear what I hear?"

Outside was the rush and hiss of the rain that never stopped falling, but over it was a louder sound— the rumble and grating of heavy gears and the burbling of an exhaust pipe half submerged in slime. A crawler was coming. Then they heard a hail, faint and unintelligible. The crawler noises grew louder, then ceased. Someone was rapping on the hull.

"In the ship there— ship, ahoy!" came the hail again. Travis rose scowling and spat viciously. The voice was Driscoll's.

Under the distress clauses of the interplanetary code, he could not be denied entrance, but Travis' greeting when he opened the lock was frosty.

"I can't keep you out," he said, "but your gorillas stay in the crawler."

He closed the door in the faces of the four strong-arm men that Driscoll carried with him whenever he visited one of the outplanets.

"Now what do you want?"

"I?" laughed Driscoll, with easy politeness. "Why, nothing for myself. I wanted to see if you were all right, that's all. This is a beastly place, you know."

"You know we are all right," said Travis, sternly. "You followed down on our beam and have doubtless been eavesdropping ever since. Quit beating about the bush and come to the point."

Driscoll raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.

"Your hostility amazes me. However, I did have another purpose in coming. My assistant umpire carelessly came off without a sufficient supply of report forms. He asked me to obtain some from your man."

Travis silently indicated Lorimer, who rose and went to his booth. Travis and Hartley looked on with steely eyes as Driscoll followed. Nothing apparently passed between them except the pad of government forms, but there was justification in being profoundly suspicious of anything Driscoll did. Driscoll pocketed the forms and uttered profuse thanks all around, but just as he was about to leave he added.

"As I am here, we may as well discuss our future relations, since it seems we are the only two to get through."

"Now it comes out," said Travis, with a curl of the lip. "Let's have it."

The two partners listened stonily as the financier unreeled his come-on talk. Venus, he said suavely, was too vast a field to be exploited on a shoestring... skyports must be established and immense amounts of capital devoted to transportation alone... the orderly development of the immense resources would require an army of technicians and astronomical amounts of specialized equipment. Simple pioneers could not cope with the problem. They simply cluttered up the field and impeded others.

"All right," snapped Travis. "So we impede. That is our right."

Driscoll was not upset. Look at the history of all such undertakings, he suggested, patiently. When did a pioneer ever cash in on his potentialities? Wouldn't it be better to accept the honor of having paved the way and then retire gracefully to easier fields? Would a million valors tempt them? Each, that is? No? Five million? Ten? Ten million valors was a lot of money. How much then? There need be no cutthroat race to stake out land. They could become partners in the big company by virtue of the transfer of their rights. Blocks of stock could be had in addition to the cash. Why not see the light?

"You're keeping us up," yawned Travis elaborately. "We've had a hard day. Good night."

Driscoll never dropped the mask of buttery smoothness, but as he bowed himself out there was an ominous glint in his eye.

"I never make an offer but once," he said.

"Fair enough," said Travis, and twisted the dogs home with a bang.

IT WAS the earthquake that woke them up. It came in the middle of the night, just eleven hours after the shock of the afternoon. The din in the ship was terrific as every loose article banged against its neighbor. The dim standing lights flickered on and off and the bunks pitched wildly.

"We'd better get topside and check on the Maggy," said Hartley, blinking. "Rouse Lorimer to give us a hand."

But Lorimer was not in his bunk. They found him on the roof plate, since they wasted no time getting up there when they saw the hatch was open. It was Travis who was first up. He climbed through the hatch and stepped outside the shaft of light that stabbed upward into the misty haze of night. The beam from his sweeping torch fell upon no magnar or diorama, though the stanchions still stood swaying under the tarpaulin. The ruptured power lead still snaked across the slightly curving dome, but it terminated in a frayed end a yard away. There was nothing but a startled man in night clothes squinting into the flashlight's rays.

"I... I came up to secure the equipment you left here," stammered Lorimer. "I... it's not here!"

"We see it isn't," said Travis, grimly. He cast his light down onto the hull plates. They were beaded with moisture and streaked with rivulets, but a wide, glistening smear showed where something heavy had slid over.

"We'll have to allow for these earthquakes hereafter. They may be tidal," he said. His voice was harsh, but he held it rigidly even. There was no hint of reproach or dismay. "It's too dark to assess the damage now. Let's go back to bed."

Down below. Hartley cautiously closed the door of their room behind them.

"You took it calmly."

"Why not?" asked Travis, wearily. "The rat pushed them over, of course, but there isn't a vestige of proof. The earthquake might have done it, you know. But it serves to tip us off to what to expect."

"Like?"

"That Driscoll's preparations for surveying this accursed fogbound land are not so hot... that Lorimer is by now on his payroll, and probably tipped him off to the excellent performance of the Maggy... that that umpire up in the stratosphere is probably not his creature after all, but just a dope. Otherwise Driscoll wouldn't have slogged over here through the mud to make us those fancy offers. I knew then that he was afraid of us, but I didn't expect him to act so quickly. He was slick about it, too. Our evidence is nothing but surmise that would be laughed out of any court in the world."

"Then you think we're licked?"

Travis gave a short, hard laugh.

"After we dig the Maggy out of the muck in the morning I'll tell you more. There's no use worrying about it now."

Neither one of them went to sleep at once. For Travis' part he felt a sense of relief that the first blow was struck. It was outright warfare now, even if veiled. It served to remove inhibitions. Neither Travis nor Hartley had come to Venus inspired by greed. Their motives were otherwise— a compound of scientific curiosity; pride in their miracle-working machine, and to some extent the love of adventure. Vaguely behind it all there was the sober conviction that the human race must have new frontiers or stifle. They needed money, to be sure, as did everyone, but only in reasonable quantities. Yet Driscoll's avarice was such that he was attempting to defraud them of even that. Very well. The only retaliation the land shark could appreciate would be in kind. His lies and sabotage must be countered with blows where they hurt— in the pocketbook. Travis considered that angle dreamily, and then dropped off to sleep.

The severity of their loss did not become apparent until well after the dim, slow-creeping dawn. They found the fragments of the diorama deep in the slush beside the ship. It was broken into three big chunks and marred with jagged cracks. Glumly Hartley fished the pieces out and washed them off. But except for a few chips irretrievably lost, it could be fitted together and cemented back into a serviceable map. The Maggy that lay under it was different— it was beyond salvage.

It must have fallen first and then received the impact of the heavy mass of glass. Its unique tubes and delicate coils were hopelessly smashed. There were spare parts on board to make good some of the damage, but to fully restore the instrument meant a trip back to Earth. That they could not afford to do. Departure now would forfeit all they had gained.

"We're sunk," said Hartley, gloomily.

"You're never sunk until you admit you are," reminded Travis, grimly. "We still have the helios and the bolos, and a few other tricks up our sleeve."

"Like?"

"I've got a hunch I want to play. We'll talk about that later."

They carried the topographic model inside and repaired it. Then they took photographs of it and locked it away in the hold. The Maggy they sadly consigned to a vacant bin. The advantage it gave them was gone. From then on they would have to explore Venus the hard way.

"Pile our stuff into the crawler, Hartley, and warm the motor up."

Then Travis called the chief umpire by radio. He spoke with restraint, but he was firm in his demands. The umpire had certain duties and he should perform them. The stratosphere was not the place. He should bring his ship down to the surface and park it between the two contestants. Travis went on to report Lorimer's panic on the flight down and his subsequent "carelessness" in tumbling their equipment overboard while ostensibly trying to secure it. He wanted Lorimer's immediate replacement, and a guard for the ship, for he intended leaving it to carry out the required field work. He did not propose to submit tamely to being stabbed in the back while he was gone, and concluded by reminding the umpire what happened to some negligent officials after the scandals on Mars. The umpire sputtered indignantly but said he would come on down.

AN HOUR later Travis and Hartley piloted the slithering, splashing crawler away. Travis grinned at recalling the umpire's reaction when they showed him the map. The fellow had been honest in the belief that they could not possibly have accomplished so much in so brief a time. In other respects he was simply a run-of-the-mine civil servant, more afraid of violating the letter of his instructions than any other thing. He was weak and not too bright, but he was not venal. They could go off into the fog and leave him behind as a buffer with a fair degree of confidence, for before leaving they had seen that he sent through to Earth a complete report of progress to date.

"I still don't get what you're driving at," said Hartley, peering into the dirty yellow mist that had replaced the rain. He was steering. His chart was a photo of the model, his compass a gyro set to an arbitrary base line called "pseudo-north." He ducked one of the numerous ponds and got back on the course. It led straight to the nearest part of the curious winding granite slab formation.

"You will," said Travis cheerfully. He was less depressed by the crippling of the Maggy than his partner. "You thought those pieces of granite were the remnants of a wall. Maybe, but my theory is that they are what is left of a road. Our own ancients built some pretty good roads. It could be that this planet is inhabited, or was. If so, and that long line of broken slabs is a road, all we have to do is follow where it leads and maybe we'll bump into something that will help us."

"Yes, but I still don't see—" objected Hartley, still puzzled, but he had to pull up suddenly. They had been plowing through the gigantic grasses that rose in clumps to untold heights above them, but for a few moments the visibility happened to be amazingly good. There were instants when they could see all of fifty feet. And there before them lay one of the old slabs.

It was canted sharply and riven by stalks of the bamboolike growth that had upset it, but it was obvious that Travis' guess had hit the mark. Despite the slimy moss that clung to the flat, tilted surface, they could not miss the two deep grooves— distinct, parallel furrows, the marks left on a hard road by generations of shod cart-wheels. The distance between the treads was just short of six feet, indicating that whatever vehicles had made them were not dissimilar in size to those used by men.

"This does it," said Travis, triumphantly. "Now we're getting somewhere. Do you remember when Lorimer went crazy on the trip down and cut our lights? We were studying some funny rock shapes on the top of a plateau. It looked like the ruins of a town to me. If so, it can't be far from here. In any event, a road always runs from somewhere to somewhere else. Turn right and let's see where this one takes us."

They drove on. Often they lost the road, but for a while the map set them straight again. As Hartley manipulated the crawler's heavy wheel, Travis unloaded some of his views.

"We are required to make a survey. One look around shows how tough that is. Astronomical observations or triangulation as done on Earth are out of the question. We work in a medium that is worse than dark. That means we will have to triangulate by heat beacons, picked up by bolometer or radar or supersonics, all crude methods. A heat source is necessarily large, not a pinpoint like light. Radio is fuzzy in definition except where metal is the target. Supersonics are entirely unreliable in an atmosphere as humid as this. Now that the Maggy is on the blink it's a case of doing the best we can, and that best has to be better than Driscoll's."

"Well?" said Hartley, sheering to avoid a monster geyser that loomed up ahead. It was one of a row that was spouting boiling water thunderously into an already saturated air. The crawler slumped over into a quagmire and then had to wait other minutes while one of the recurrent earthquakes shook itself out. Simultaneously the thudding roar of a distant crater vomiting into action boomed in their ears.

"What a planet," gritted Hartley, hanging on to the bucking wheel. "When you do survey it what have you got? I bet whole gobs of this topography comes and goes overnight."

"Not improbable," said Travis, unperturbed. "Which makes it all the more desirable that we establish ourselves geographically— by latitude and longitude— if it could be done. Since that is tough we are left with a bolo survey. How good that will be will depend a lot on how good our base line is. Back there in the jungle where we were, and Driscoll is, it would take a year just to cut out one through those big trees. You would still have to mark the end of the line with a well-defined monument. Now cities are a lot more distinctive than trees or lakes or mountain peaks, and if we can find a few there, we have our corners ready made. Not only that, but cities promise other rewards— caches of ancient treasure, if the cities are as dead as the condition of this road seems to indicate they are."

Hartley nodded his agreement. By then they had progressed to the place where they were about to run off their Maggy built map.

"Just keep following the road," said Travis.

They continued to climb. After a bit the bamboo growth was less dense. It was also less gigantic, and the humid air was cooler, too, indicating a gain in altitude. The steamy vapor of the forest was replaced by the cold, swirling mists of the plateau. It was better going, and even seeing, in every way.

"Here we are," said Hartley, swerving to a stop as a rift in the fog showed what lay ahead, "and the dump is as dead as Babylon, from the looks of it."

Wreathed in trailers of clinging mist a high, crenellated wall stood athwart the road, pierced by a single, towered gate. To the left a part of it had been overthrown and tumbled forward into what may have been a moat, and chunks of rubble half filled the lower part of the gate. But Hartley surveyed it briefly and then slid in the crawler's gears. The clumsy vehicle grumbled, and then started to climb. In a moment it was through the relative gloom beneath the dark arch of the gate and clattering out into the streets of the dead city.

"Why, this town is half buried— like old Pompeii," exclaimed Travis, pointing. On either side there were rows of buildings, their lower floors submerged and with a mixture of mud and rubble masking the sills of the upper windows. "Its city walls have helped to hold the muck in or the rains should have washed it out long ago. No telling what we'll find when we go to digging."

They went on with their exploration. It was a fairly extensive town with many buildings of massive masonry, but it had been a dead city for a very, very long time. In the heart of it they came upon a great open square out of which protruded the upper portion of a sort of pyramid.

The pyramid was a six-sided affair, and curiously truncated. Slimy moss covered most of it, but they found handholds in crevices and managed to climb to the top. In that slanting surface they found a circular hole about a foot across, the only visible entrance, but when they crouched down and peered into it with sweeping flashlights they saw only a cavernous room half filled with stinking rain water.

"Well," said Travis, brightening and straightening up. "It looks as if we had something. Call up the umps on the walkie-talkie and tell him we have established our advanced base, but nothing more. Get it?"

THE DAYS that followed were ones of intensive exploration. They broke into the upper stories of the buried houses and dug out the volcanic ash and mud that filled them. They found bolted doors that had been forced, but beyond them they discovered passages leading to the nether parts of the house where the doomed Venusians had fled in fright when extinction came upon them.

Considering the prevalence of moisture, what they found was in a surprisingly good state of preservation. The original catastrophe must have been accompanied by dry heat, for the remains of the Venus creatures had dessicated to mummified cadavers easy to study. They were remarkably anthropoid, differing from man chiefly in that they were taller and more slender and also had six digits to the hand and foot. Beside them were an abundance of artifacts of every description, including weapons and armor. The armor was of incredible richness in many cases, being of gold and silver damascene inlay in hard steel, the whole crusted with gems of rare fire and color. In a single day the boys found wealth enough to satisfy the greediest.

Travis shortly left the work of cataloging the archeological finds to Hartley. It was imperative, now that they had come upon this antique city, that they stake out a claim that would stand up against any machination of the Driscoll crowd. Therefore he set up his instruments and began the patient accumulation of recorded data.

The diffusion of light and heat was practically perfect, and the unaided eye had but the vaguest notion where the sun rose or set or the path it followed. But the helio was an instrument of rare delicacy and Travis felt he could find the sun within an accuracy of a degree or two. The bolometer readings were less satisfactory, since the greatest heat recorded was in mid-afternoon, but between them he was able to roughly know when it was apparent noon and more or less what the altitude of the sun was. The time of sunrise and sunset was indefinite, in the absence of knowledge as to what the horizons were, so he could not say what was the length of the actual day. But the noon to noon intervals, and the regularity of the tidal earthquakes gave him the length of the mean day. Venus revolved about its axis once in every twenty-two hours and a few minutes.

It was a triumph, of a sort.

"The latitude here is about sixty-five degrees," he told Hartley, jubilantly.

"Yeh. What about the longitude?"

"Zero— a hundred— anything I want to call it," grinned Travis. "Longitude is arbitrary. The first maps at home used the westernmost of the Azores for the kickoff point, thinking the world began there. Later the Americans used Washington, the French Paris, and so on until they got together on Greenwich. It doesn't matter really. The guy that states it first and hollers loudest wins."

But Travis' elation was short-lived. His figures were rough, but they had a clear trend. Every noon's altitude was greater than on the day before. Venus' axis was also tilted to the ecliptic. She had seasons. The sun was climbing in the sky, which meant it was spring. Travis groaned. He might have expected it, but it was a shock. He would have to track that elusive area of light for a full Venusian year— two-hundred and twenty-five terrestrial days— to establish the full curve. And it would take another year or two on top of that to make sure he was right. It was too long. Driscoll would beat him to the gun with an inferior survey. Once the deeds were passed the jig would be up.

He frowned as he considered another difficulty. He would win over topography with astronomical latitude, given time, but at that his latitude was fuzzy. Within a degree or so was not good enough. It left a probable error of up to a hundred miles. He was wasting time. He had better drop this nonsense and tackle the slow but surer way of piecemeal triangulation. It was when he broke that news to Hartley that Hartley brought better news to him.

"Say," he said, "today I found this picture in the cellar of a house. We ought to break into that pyramid."

He produced a thin sheet of bronze on which was engraved a view of the central square. The lines were very fine, as if etched, and they depicted the great plaza as it must have looked in its days of glory. The massive pyramid dominated the picture, and throngs of people swarmed in the square, holding their hands up in apparent supplication. A group of what were probably priests stood on the sloping platform made by the truncation, looking down on the masses below. It was apparently the day of some great festival, but the significant feature was that it showed a large portal leading into the pyramid at the level of the street. Its wide doors were open, and the men and women were streaming into it.

Travis studied the etching. The great door was delineated as being on the face of the pyramid immediately below the lowest side of the truncation, a great help.

"Well," he said, "this tells where to dig. Let's get going."

DIGGING in the heavy, compact mud was hard going, but luckily it was not far. They hastened the work by rigging up a scraper and used the crawler for a drag. In the end they also had to employ the clumsy vehicle to batter in the heavy bronze leaves of the door, for they were securely fastened from within. Then the doors crashed inward and the crawler lunged through into the dim interior. They stopped and turned on its spotlight.

"It's a temple, not a tomb," pronounced Hartley.

It was a huge cubical room, bare of all furnishing except a high altar reached by a flight of wide steps. Above the altar rose a pylon on whose face was a glittering sunburst, evidently of pure gold and richly set with jewels. About the altar stood a few vases, and on the floor lay the smashed remnants of others. From them spilled mounds of gems of all colors that sparkled brilliantly under the beam of light.

Travis swung the light around and swept the walls. On either side of the pylon were two huge embossed characters of the Venusian language, and around the entire room ran a wide frieze covered with ornamentation of interlaced hexagons and duodecagons. Every square foot of the walls underneath was given to elaborate mosaics. The theme of most were battles, confirming the opinion already reached that the Venusians were a warlike people. One big picture represented a ceremony which might have been a coronation. The most revealing of all was the last they came to.

It was done in dark-blue glazed tiles, and spangled with diamonds set in tiny silver rayed settings. Across it ran a wavy line of narrow gold ribbon, the highest point of which was adorned with a replica of the sun symbol.

"As I live and breathe," shouted Travis. "A map of the sky. I hope whoever laid out that sun track was an astronomer, not an artist," and he hastily rigged his camera.

It took hours to give the pyramid a thorough search. By means of winding stairs behind that pylon they came to upper levels, each being smaller than the one below. Most were the living quarters of the priests, and there were some dark cells for the sacrificial prisoners. Some day archeologists would translate the hieroglyphics and learn what those about to die had scribbled on the walls. There were other caches of treasure, too, but the greatest of all was the library. Here they found many scrolls, most of which were still in tubes sealed with wax. The majority were unintelligible, but they took away for study all that furnished clues in the way of illustrations and diagrams.

The topmost level was barred by another bronze door that defied all their efforts. In the end they had to get dynamite from the crawler and plant a charge. It was well they took ample cover on the floor below, for the aftermath of the explosion was unexpected. A freshet of trapped water came tumbling down the stairs and spread out on the floors of the rooms below. After a little it shrank to a dribble, and they climbed the slick, weedy steps to see the ultimate compartment.

Here they found another pylon and sunburst, though mossy from the dammed up water, presiding over a flat stone altar faintly illuminated by the light that shone through the hole overhead. Travis cast his flash about. Clinging algae showed the high watermark overhead. In the corners of the room were some strange instruments deeply incrusted with damp verdigris. They proved to be astrolabes, octants and transits of bizarre design, and one was fitted with a rude crystalline lens.

Travis and Hartley stood for a long time in sober thought, sizing up the place and trying to visualize the rites that had been conducted there.

"I think I'm beginning to get this," said Travis, suddenly. "It's clear enough these people were sunworshipers. This is a combined temple and observatory. The Egyptians did something of the kind, and so did the Aztecs. My hunch is that that hole is set so that at the summer solstice and no other time the sun would shine in here and illuminate this altar. What blood orgies followed then don't concern us now. The thing is that we have a check on my own orientation— that truncation up there must face south, and, if I can dope out just where that ray hit the altar, I'll have a verification of the altitude of the sun on that day. It's not all I need, but it is a help."

"The climate must have been a lot different in the old days," said Hartley, peering up through the gloom at the small, blurry spot of light.

"Of course it was. Vulcanism is the answer. For a while this planet was stable, and then another era of mountain building set in. The scrap of geology we got from the Maggy showed us what the last upheavals have done. But it wasn't only earthquakes and eruptions that did the Venusians in. Extreme volcanic activity heaves a lot of water into the air. Our own ones do. They get it from the core of the earth where it is still held in solution in the general mass. The Venusians were losing cities fast and their skies were getting thicker. So the smarter ones of them got together and tried to escape. There must have been a very few advanced enough to conceive of space-ships— the Venusian Leonardo da Vincis, ahead of their time— but we know they managed it, and with a little better luck their race might have survived."

"All right," agreed Hartley. "But how does that help us?"

"We've got a swell observatory here— for Venus. The sun climbs higher every day. I'll keep checking it from the outside and you set up some equipment here. If your instruments register with mine the day it hits the solstice, my theory is proved. This will be the key point— longitude zero and whatever we find the latitude to be. Then we'll move on to another city and get another set of figures. It won't be long before we've whipped this thing."

THAT NIGHT they opened a bottle of their medical brandy and had a celebration. Then Hartley remembered that he hadn't made his routine report of the day. They didn't want well-meaning rescue parties come fumbling their way. He made the usual report that they were O.K., but finding the going slow.

"Ask how Driscoll is doing," prompted Travis, taking another swig.

"Not so good," said Hartley when he clicked off. "For us, that is. Umps says that he recalled the ships that got cold feet and deserted him, claiming that since they had not yet actually reached Earth they were still part of his expedition. So now he has scores of more parties out. Umps says he has taken in hundreds of square miles of territory on the other side of ours. They're even talking of sending for more gangs to start clearing a landing field."

"That's bad," growled Travis. He wouldn't have grudged it to any other man, but with Driscoll it was different. Calling in extra help was hitting below the belt. "Did he mention finding any cities?"

"Nope, but he said that Driscoll looked pretty cocky. He's probably playing it cagey like we are."

"Uh, huh," grunted Travis. It wasn't good news. There were plenty of smart men on Driscoll's payroll, and there was no copyright on unraveling antique mysteries.

The summer solstice occurred two days later, but it took several days more to make sure, for the sun declined too imperceptibly to make certain of it with his crude tools. Travis spent the time poring over the documents unearthed in the sacerdotal library and the photostats of those dug up in Persia. The hieroglyphics were quite beyond him except for the numerals. They stopped him for a while until he angrily noticed that he had persistently overlooked the fact that there were twelve characters employed and not the usual ten.

"Of course," he declared sourly, "people with six fingers and toes would have a duodecimal based numerical system. I should have guessed it from their ornament, the shape of the pyramids, and all."

After that it did not take long to unravel the simpler computations left by the ancients, but in the absence of explanatory texts they remained incomprehensible operations in arithmetic.

Hartley broke open another scroll and unwound it on their makeshift desk.

"Say—" he shouted.

"A map!" exclaimed Travis, jumping to him. Then his hopes sank. It was a map, but of what? There was no shorelines or rivers or mountain ranges, nor was it another star map. It partook of the qualities of both. Sprinkled over it was a myriad of little black sunbursts, some smaller, some larger, and they were connected by a network of lines jagged as conventional lightning streaks. Each of the tiny symbols bore a pair of hieroglyphic characters, evidently the name of the place or thing, but he could not read them. Over all there was a light rectangular grid with numerals in fine script at their ends. Four of the horizontal lines were heavier than the others, and between the middle pair and in the center of the map were two double sunbursts done in gold leaf— one just beneath the upper line, one just above the lower.

They puzzled over the map for hours. Travis got out his code table of numerical values and ran in the translation of the figures. The vertical lines were marked with figures running up to three digits, the values being from zero to 999 on the duodecimal scale— just one short of the cube of the base. The horizontal lines had no number higher than 499 on the same scale. But all the values were consecutive, the horizontal series running from the top down, the vertical ones from right to left. The extreme upper and lower parts of the map were otherwise blank.

"It is a dead ringer for a Mercator projection," insisted Hartley.

"I know... wait!" Travis came suddenly out of his gloom into life, then laughed. "This shows what a fixed idea can do to you. We keep thinking in terms of three-hundred and sixty degrees to the circle. These people had a simpler system. They had one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight degrees to the full circle— the cube of twelve! Now it makes sense."

He snatched open a drawer and yanked out the photos they had taken inside the pyramid temple. One was the picture of the giant pylon above the main lower altar. He grabbed a pair of reading glasses and gave one to Hartley.

"See if we can match those characters anywhere. They may stand for the temple or the town. My hunch is that it will be in the middle latitudes, so you take the upper half and I'll take the lower."

IN A LITTLE while Hartley let out a yelp. He found a matching pair. And a relentless search for the next half hour showed there was not another spot on the map with the same markings. That indicated that each of the small sunbursts stood for a pyramid, and the ragged lines between were probably the connecting highways. What they had was an ecclesiastical map of Venus.

There was much more to do before Travis was satisfied. He ran and dug out the measurements of the upper sacrificial chamber. He had all along suspected that the slope of the truncated roof was such as to be normal to the midsummer rays. It was twenty-one degrees from the horizontal. He deducted that value from the observed maximum altitude of the sun, sixty-seven. The answer was forty-six. That wasn't what the figures on the map showed, but the Venusian scheme was different. Latitude according to their convention ran from pole to pole, not from equator both ways. Travis did some fast subtracting and converting from the tiny Venusian degrees to the fat terrestrial ones. The answer was cheering. It came out to forty-six.

"It's in the bag now," chuckled Travis. "Now it all clears up. These golden double sunbursts denote the happy land— the Twice-Blest, so to speak. They get sun in the zenith twice a year inside the tropics, so the priests could have twice as many bloody parties. My money says that the temples there will be flat-topped, too. Way up here they had to tilt the top to let the sun in on the one day a year it did come, and the angle gets worse the closer you get to the poles. Up above the arctic circles there are days they don't have sun at all, so the temples are few and far between. But now that we have the key, what are we waiting for? Let's get going."

"Where to? The ship?"

"Not yet. We'll stop by at the next town and do a little double-check."

Without the map it would have been easy to have missed the place altogether. It lay in a shallow valley and all that showed above the reedy mud was a sloping piece of flat rock that might easily have passed for an outcropping of bedrock. They unplugged the solar hole of its muck and dropped a suction hose into the sacrificial chamber of the buried pyramid. The crawler's pump was set to work and soon the dark water was gushing out. The boys ate their lunch, and then went to work with crowbars to enlarge the hole. It was unnecessary to blast their way to the great hall far down in the base. The upper room was also adorned with the temple's designating characters. They scraped the slime off them and compared them with the map. They tallied.

When they were up in the crawler again and sheltered from the rain that had now grown from a steady, miserable drizzle to a roaring torrent, they sat through another spine-wrenching earthquake. They had time to think and appraise the magnitude of the fortune that had befallen them.

"This means that we own this whole dog-goned planet?" asked Hartley, a little awe-struck.

Travis nodded.

"Hands down."

"But what are we going to do with it? I wouldn't live here if they gave it to me."

"I dunno. Kick Driscoll out and give it to the poor, I guess."

He grinned.

"I wouldn't live here either."

________________

15: The Silver Christ

"Ouida"

Louise Rame, 1839-1908

The Ludgate Monthly, Oct-Nov 1893

English author of famously florid three-volume Victorian novels, who sedulously guarded her image and was prone to send lawyers to newspapers who dared write even slightly unflattering comments about herself or her works. (There is an amusing article in Truth, an Australian newspaper, of one such legal encounter.) She adopted the aristocratic sounding name of Maria Louisa de la Ramé (or sometimes Ramée). She was enormously popular for many years; then her popularity suddenly waned.  Her much reduced income was unable to support her fantastically extravagant lifestyle in Italy, where she lived the latter half of her life. She died in poverty there, supported by a State pension granted by the British Government. She is buried in the English Cemetery at Bagni di Lucca, the small resort town in Tuscany (not far from Pistoia), where she lived for several years.

GENISTRELLO is a wild place in the Pistoiese hills.

Its name is derived from the genista or broom which covers many an acre of the soil, and shares with the stone pine and the sweet chestnut the scanty earth which covers its granite and sandstone. It is beautiful exceedingly; but its beauty is only seen by those to whom it is a dead letter which they have no eyes to read. It is one of the many spurs of the Apennines which here lie overlapping one another in curve upon curve of wooded slopes with the higher mountains rising behind them; palaces, which once were fortresses, hidden in their valleys, and ruined castles, or deserted monasteries, crowning their crests.

From some of these green hills the sea is visible, and when the sun sets where the sea is and the red evening glows behind the distant peaks, it is lovely as a poet's dream.

On the side of this lonely hill, known as Genistrello, there dwelt a man of the name of Castruccio Lascarisi. He was called 'Caris' by the whole countryside; indeed, scarcely any knew that he had another patronymic, so entirely amongst these people does the nickname extinguish, by its perpetual use, the longer appellative.

His family name was of Greek extraction undoubtedly; learned Greeks made it familiar in the Italian Renaissance, at the courts of Lorenzo and of Ludovico; but how it had travelled to the Pistoiese hills to be borne by unlearned hinds none knew, any more than any know who first made the red tulip blossom as a wild flower amidst the wheat, or who first sowed the bulb of the narcissus amongst the wayside grass.

He lived miles away from the chapel and the hamlet. He had a little cabin in the heart of the chestnut woods, which his forefathers had lived in before him; they had no title which they could have shown for it except usage, but that had been title enough for them, and was enough for Caris.

It had been always so. It would be always so. His ideas went no further. The autumnal migration was as natural and inevitable to him as to the storks and herons and wild duck which used to sail over his head, going southward like himself as he walked through the Tuscan to the Roman Maremma. But his dislike to the Maremma winters was great, and had never changed in him since he had trotted by his father's side, a curly-pated baby in a little goatskin shirt looking like a Correggio's St. John.

What he longed for, and what he loved, were the cool heights of Genistrello and the stone hut with the little rivulet of water gushing at its threshold. No one had ever disturbed his people there. It was a square little place built of big unmortared stones in old Etruscan fashion; the smoke from the hearth went out by a hole in the roof, and a shutter and door of unplaned wood closed its only apertures.

The lichen and weeds and mosses had welded the stones together, and climbed up over its conical rush roof. No better home could be needed in summer-time; and when the cold weather came, he locked the door and went down with his pack on his back and a goatshair belt round his loins to take the familiar way to the Roman Maremma.

Caris was six-and-twenty years old; he worked amongst the chestnut woods in summer and went to the Maremma for field labour in the winter, as so many of these husbandmen do; walking the many leagues which separate the provinces, and living hardly in both seasons. The songs they sing are full of allusions to this semi-nomadic life, and the annual migration has been a custom ever since the world was young— when the great Roman fleets anchored where now are sand and marsh, and stately classic villas lifted their marble to the sun where now the only habitation seen is the charcoal-burner's rush-roofed, moss-lined hut.

Caris was a well-built, lithe, slender son of the soil, brown from sun and wind, with the straight features and the broad low brows of the classic type, and great brown eyes like those of the oxen which he drove over the vast plains down in the Maremma solitudes. He knew nothing except his work.

He was not very wise, and he was wholly unlearned, but he had a love of nature in his breast, and he would sit at the door of his hut at evening time, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees, and often forget to eat in his absorbed delight as the roseate glow from the vanished sunrays overspread all the slopes of the Pistoiese Apennines and the snow-crowned crests of the Carara mountains.

'What do you see there, goose?' said a charcoal-burner, once passing him as he sat thus upon his threshold with the dog at his feet.

Caris shrugged his shoulders stupidly and half-ashamed. He could not read the great book outspread upon the knees of the mountains, yet he imperfectly felt the beauty of its emblazoned pages.

The only furniture in the cabin was a table made of a plank, two rude benches, and one small cupboard; the bed was only dried leaves and moss. There were a pipkin, two platters, and a big iron pot which swung by a cord and a hook over the stones where the fire, when lighted, burned. They were enough; he would not have known what to do with more if he had had more. He was only there from May to October; and in the fragrant summers of Italian chestnut woods, privation is easily borne. The winter life was harder and more hateful; yet it never occurred to him to do else than to go to Maremma; his father and grandfather had always gone thither, and as naturally as the chestnuts ripen and fall, so do the men in autumn join the long lines of shepherds and drovers and women and children and flocks and herds which wind their way down the mountain slopes and across the level wastes of plain and marsh to seek herbage and work for the winter-time.

It never entered the head of Caris, or of the few who knew him or worked with him, to wonder how he and his had come thither. They were there as the chestnut-trees were, as the broom was, as the goats and squirrels and wood-birds were there. The peasant no more wonders about his own existence than a stone does. For generations a Lascaris had lived in that old stone hut which might itself be a relic of an Etruscan tomb or temple. No one was concerned to know further.

The peasant does not look back; he only sees the road to gain his daily meal of bread or chestnuts. The past has no meaning to him, and to the future he never looks. That is the reason why those who want to cultivate or convince him fail utterly. If a man cannot see the horizon itself, it is of no use to point out to him spires or trees or towers which stand out against it.

The world has never understood that the moment the labourer is made to see, he is made unhappy, being ill at ease and morbidly envious and ashamed, and wholly useless. Left alone, he is content in his own ruminant manner, as the buffalo is when left untormented amidst the marshes, grazing at peace and slumbering amidst the rushes and the canes.

Caris was thus content. He had health and strength, though sometimes he had a fever-chill from new-turned soil and sometimes a frost-chill from going out on an empty stomach before the sun had broken the deep shadows of the night. But from these maladies all outdoor labourers suffer, and he was young, and they soon passed. He had been the only son of his mother; and this fact had saved him from conscription. As if she had lived long enough when she had rendered him this service, she died just as he had fulfilled his twenty-third year; and without her the stone hut seemed for awhile lonely; he had to make his fire, and boil or roast his chestnuts, and mend holes in his shirts, and make his own rye loaves; but he soon got used to this, and when in Maremma he always worked with a gang, and was fed and lodged— badly, indeed, but regularly— at the huge stone burn which served such purposes on the vast tenuta where the long lines of husbandmen toiled from dusk of dawn to dusk of eve under the eye and lash of their overseer; and when on his native slopes of Genistrello he was always welcome to join the charcoal-burners' rough company or the woodsmen's scanty supper, and seldom passed, or had need to pass, his leisure hours alone. And these were very few.

His mother had been a violent-tempered woman, ruling him with a rod of iron, as she had ruled her husband before him; a woman loud of tongue, stern of temper, dreaded for miles around as a witch and an evil-eye; and although the silence and solitude which reigned in the cabin after her death oppressed him painfully at first, he soon grew used to these, and found the comfort of them. He brought a dog with him after his winter in Maremma which followed on his mother's loss— a white dog of the Maremma breed, and he and the dog kept house together in the lonely woods in fellowship and peace. Caris was gentle and could never beat or kick a beast as others of his kind do; and the oxen he drove knew this. He felt more akin to them and to the dogs than he did to the men with whom he worked. He could not have expressed or explained this, but he felt it.

He had little mind, and what he had moved slowly when it moved at all; but he had a generous nature, a loyal soul, and a simple and manly enjoyment of his hard life. It did not seem hard to him. He had run about on his bare feet all his childhood until their soles were as hard as leather, and he was so used to his daily meal of chestnuts in cold weather, and of maize or rye-bread with cabbage, or bean-soup, in the hot season, that he never thought of either as meagre fare. In summer he wore rough hempen shirt and trousers; in winter goatskin and rough homespun wool. In appearance, in habits, in clothing, in occupation, he differed little from the peasant who was on that hillside in the times of Pliny and of Properticus. Only the gods were changed; Pan piped no more in the thicket, the Naiad laughed no longer in the brook, the Nymph and Satyr frolicked never beneath the fronds of the ferns.

In their stead there was only a little gaudy chapel on a stony slope, and a greasy, double-chinned, yellow-cheeked man in black, who frowned if you did not give him your hardly-earned pence, and lick the uneven bricks of the chapel floor when he ordered you a penance.

Caris cared little for that man's frown.

He sat thus at his door one evening when the sun was setting behind the many peaks and domes of the Apennine spurs which fronted him. The sun itself had sunk beyond them half an hour before, but the red glow which comes and stays long after it was in the heavens and on the hills.

Genistrello was a solitary place, and only here and there a hut or cot like his own was hidden away under the saplings and undergrowth. Far away down in the valley were the belfries and towers of the little strong-walled city which had been so often as a lion in the path to the invading hosts of Germany; and like a narrow white cord the post-road, now so rarely used, wound in and out until its slender thread was lost in the blue vapours of the distance, and the shadows from the clouds.

Bells were tolling from all the little spires and towers on the hills and in the valleys, for it was a vigil, and there was the nearer tinkle of the goats' bells under the heather and broom as those innocent marauders cropped their supper off the tender chestnut-shoots, the trails of ground ivy, and the curling woodbine. Caris, with his bowl of bean-soup between his knees and his hunch of rye-bread in his hand, ate hungrily, whilst his eyes filled themselves with the beauty of the landscape. His stomach was empty— which he knew, and his soul was empty— which he did not know.

He looked up, and saw a young woman standing in front of him. She was handsome, with big, bright eyes, and a rosy mouth, and dusky glossy hair coiled up on her head like a Greek Venus.

He had never seen her before, and her sudden apparition there startled him.

'Good-even, Caris,' she said familiarly, with a smile like a burst of sunlight. 'Is the mother indoors, eh?'

Caris continued to stare at her.

'Eh, are you deaf?' she asked impatiently. 'Is the mother in, I want to know?'

'My mother is dead,' said Caris, without preamble.

'Dead! When did she die?'

'Half a year ago,' said Caris, with the peasant's confusion of dates and elongation of time.

'That is impossible,' said the young woman quickly. 'I saw her myself and spoke with her here on this very spot in Easter week. What makes you say she is dead?'

'Because she is dead!' said Caris doggedly. 'If you do not believe it, go and ask the sacristan and sexton over there.'

He made a gesture of his head towards the belfry of an old hoary church, dedicated to St. Fulvo, which was seven miles away amongst the chestnut woods of an opposing hillside, and where his mother had been buried by her wish, because it was her birthplace.

The girl this time believed him. She was dumb for a little while with astonishment and regret. Then she said, in a tone of awe and expectation, 'She left her learning and power with you, eh?— and the books?'

'No,' said Caris rudely. 'I had all the uncanny things buried with her. What use were they? She lived and died with scarce a shift to her back.'

'Oh!' said the girl, in a shocked tone, as though she reproved a blasphemy. 'She was a wonderful woman, Caris.'

Caris laughed a little.

'Eh, you say so. Well, all her wisdom never put bit nor drop in her mouth nor a copper piece in her hand that I did not work for; what use was it, pray?'

'Hush. Don't speak so!' said the maiden, looking timidly over her shoulder to the undergrowth and coppice growing dim in the shadows of the evening.

'Tis the truth!' said Caris stubbornly. 'I did my duty by her, poor soul; and yet I fear me the Evil One waited for her all the while, for as soon as the rattle came in her throat, a white owl flapped and screeched on the thatch, and a black cat had sat on the stones yonder ever since the sun had set.'

'The saints preserve us!' murmured the girl, her rich brown and red skin growing pale.

There was silence; Caris finished munching his bread; he looked now and then at his visitor with open-eyed surprise and mute expectation.

'You have buried the things with her?' she asked him, in a low tone, at length.

He nodded in assent.

'What a pity! What a pity!'

'Why that?'

'Because if they are underground with her nobody can use them.'

Caris stared with his eyes wider opened still.

'What do you want with the devil's tools, a fresh, fair young thing like you?'

'Your mother used them for me,' she answered crossly. 'And she had told me a number of things— ay, a vast number! And just in the middle uncle spied us out, and he swore at her and dragged me away, and I had never a chance to get back here till to-night, and now— now you say she is dead, and she will never tell me aught any more.'

'What can you want so sore to know?' said Caris, with wonder, as he rose to his feet.

'That is my business,' said the girl.

'True, so it is,' said Caris.

But he looked at her with wonder in his dark-brown, ox-like eyes.

'Where do you live?' he asked; 'and how knew you my name?'

'Everybody knows your name,' she answered. 'You are Caris, the son of Lisabetta, and when you sit on your doorstep it would be a fool indeed would not see who you are.'

'So it would,' said Caris. 'But you,' he added after a pause, 'who are you? And what did you want with Black Magic?'

'I am Santina, the daughter of Neri, the smith, by the west gate in Pistoia,' she said in reply to the first question, and making none to the second.

'But what wanted you of my mother?' he persisted.

'They said she knew strange things,' said the girl evasively.

'If she did she had little profit of them,' said Caris sadly.

The girl looked at him with great persuasiveness in her face, and leaned a little nearer to him.

'You did not really bury the charms with her? You have got them inside? You will let me see them, eh?'

'As the saints live, I buried them,' said Caris truthfully; 'they were rubbish, or worse; accursed maybe. They are safe down in the ground till the Last Day. What can such a bright wench as yourself want with such queer, unhallowed notions?'

The girl Santina glanced over her shoulders to make sure that no one was listening; then she said in a whisper:

'There is the Gobbo's treasure in these woods somewhere— and Lisabetta had the wand that finds gold and silver.'

Caris burst into a loud laugh.

'Ah, truly! That is a good jest. If she could find gold and silver, why did we always have iron spoons for our soup, and a gnawing imp in our stomachs? Go to, my maiden. Do not tell such tales. Lisabetta was a poor and hungry woman all her days, and scarce left enough linen to lay her out in decently, so help me Heaven!'

The girl shook her head.

'You know there is the treasure in the woods,' she said angrily.

'Nay, I never heard of it. Oh, the Gobbo's? Che-che! For hundreds of years they have grubbed for it all over the woods, and who ever found anything, eh?'

'Your mother was very nigh it often and often. She told me.'

'In her dreams, poor soul!'

'But dreams mean a great deal.'

'Sometimes,' said Caris seriously. 'But what is it to you?' he added, the suspicion always inherent to the peasant struggling with his admiration of the girl, who, unbidden, had seated herself upon the stone before the door. With feminine instinct she felt that to make him do what she wished, she must confide in him, or appear to confide.

And thereon she told him that unless she could save herself, her family would wed her to a wealthy old curmudgeon who was a cart-maker in the town; and to escape this fate she had interrogated the stars by means of the dead Lisabetta and of the astrologer Faraone, who dwelt also in the hills, but this latter reader of destiny would tell her nothing, because he was a friend of her father's, and now the witch of Genistrello was dead and had left her fate but half told!

'What did she tell you?' said Caris, wincing at the word witch.

'Only that I should go over the mountains to some city and grow rich. But it was all dark— obscure— uncertain; she said she would know more next time; and how could I tell that before I came again she would have died?'

'You could not tell that, no,' said Caris absently.

He was thinking of the elderly well-to-do wheelwright in the town, and he felt that he would have liked to brain him with one of his own wooden spokes or iron linchpins. For the girl Santina was very beautiful as she sat there with her large eyes shining in the shadows and the tears of chagrin and disappointment stealing down her cheeks. For her faith in her charms and cards had been great, and in her bosom there smouldered desires and ideas of which she did not speak.

She saw the effect that her beauty produced, and said to herself: 'He shall dig up the things before he is a week older.'

She got up with apparent haste and alarm; seeing how dark it had grown around her, only a faint red light lingering far away above the lines of the mountains.

'I am staying at the four roads with my aunt, who married Massaio,' she said as she looked over her shoulder and walked away between the chestnut sapling and the furze.

Caris did not offer to accompany or try to follow her. He stood like one bewitched watching her lithe, erect figure run down the hill and vanish as the path wound out of sight amongst the pines. No woman had ever moved him thus. He felt as if she had poured into him at once scalded wine and snow-water.

She was so handsome and bold and lissom, and yet she made his flesh creep talking of his mother's incantations, and bidding him knock at the door of the grave.

'What an awful creature for tempting a man is a woman,' he thought, 'and they will scream at their own shadows one minute and dare the devil himself the next!'

That night Caris sat smoking his black pipe on the stone before the door where she had sat, and the scalded wine and the snow-water coursed by turns feverishly through his veins, as once through Cymon's.

ii

'WHERE hast been, hussy?' said Massaio crossly, yet jokingly, to his niece when she went home that night.

The four roads was a place where the four cart-tracks at the foot of that group of hills met and parted; the man was a seller of wood, and his cottage and his wood-yards and sheds thatched with furze stood where the four roads met under some huge stone pines. The aunt of Santina had married there many years before.

They were people well-off, who ate meat, drank wine, and had a house full of hardware, pottery, and old oak: people as far removed from Caris and his like as if they had been lords or princes. He knew them by sight, and doffed his hat to them in the woods.

The thought that she was the niece of Massaio, the man who paid for his wood and charcoal with rolls of banknotes, and sent his own mules to bring the loads down from the hills, placed Santina leagues away from and above him.

The only women with whom he had ever had any intercourse had been the rude wenches who tramped with the herds, and dug and hoed and cut grass and grain on the wastes of the Maremma; creatures burnt black with the sun and wrinkled by the winds, and with skin hard and hairy, and feet whose soles were like wood— 'la femelle de l'homme,' but not so clean of hide or sweet of breath as the heifers they drove down along the sea-ways in autumn weather.

This girl who called herself Santina was wholesome as lavender, fresh as field thyme, richly and fairly odoured as the flower of the wild pomegranate.

When supper was over and the house was on the point of being bolted and barred, Santina threw her brown soft round arm round her uncle's neck.

'I went down to see Don Fabio, and he was out, and I sat talking with his woman and forgot the time,' she said penitently.

Don Fabio was the priest of the little gaudy church low down in the valley where the post-road ran.

Massaio patted the cheek, which was like an apricot, and believed her.

Her aunt did not.

'There is still snow where the man of God lives up yonder, and there is no water, only dust, on her shoes,' thought the shrewd observer.

But she did not say so; for she had no wish to put her husband out of humour with her kinsfolk.

But to Santina, when with her alone, she said testily:

'I fear you are going again to the black arts of that woman Lisabetta; no good ever is got of them; it is playing with fire, and the devil breathes the fire out of his mouth!'

'I cannot play with it if I wished,' said Santina innocently; 'Lisabetta is dead months ago.'

'That is no loss to anybody if it be true,' said Eufemia Massaio angrily.

Lisabetta had been such an obscure and lonely creature, that her death had been taken little note of anywhere, and the busy, bustling housewife of Massaio had had no heed of such an event. She had not even known the woman by sight; had only been cognizant of her evil repute for powers of sorcery.

Santina went up to her room, which she shared with three of the Massaio children. Long after they were sleeping in a tangle of rough hair and brown limbs and healthy rosy nudity, the girl, their elder, sat up on the rude couch staring at the moon through the little square window.

She was thinking of words that Lisabetta had said, as she had dealt out the cards and gazed in a bowl of spring water, 'Over the hills and far away; wealth and pleasure and love galore— where? how? when?— ay, that is hid; but we shall see, we shall see; only over the hills you go, and all the men are your slaves.'

How? when? where? That was hidden with the dead fortune-teller under the earth.

Santina did not for a moment doubt the truth of the prophecy, but she was impatient for its fulfilment to begin. She knew she was of unusual beauty, and the organist at the duomo in Pistoia had told her that her voice was of rare compass, and only wanted tuition to be such a voice as fetches gold in the big world which lay beyond these hills. But that was all.

She could sing well and loudly, and she knew all the 'canzoe' and 'stornelli' of the district by heart; but there her knowledge stopped; and no one had cared to instruct or enlighten her more. Her own family thought the words of the organist rubbish.

There are so many of these clear-voiced, flute-throated girls and boys singing in their adolescence in the fields and woods and highways; but no one thinks anything of their carols, and life and its travail tell on them and make them hoarse, and their once liquid tones grow harsh and rough from exposure to the weather, and from calling so loudly from hill to hill to summon their children, or their cattle, or their comrades, home.

The human voice is a pipe soon broken. The nightingale sings on and on and on, from youth to age, and neither rain nor wind hurt his throat; but men and women, in rough, rustic lives, soon lose their gift of song. They sing at all ages, indeed, over their furrows, their washing-tank, their yoked oxen, their plait of straw or hank of flax; but the voice loses its beauty as early as the skin its bloom.

Santina had no notion in what way she could make hers a means to reach those distant parts in which her fate was to await her if the cards spake truly. Only to get away somewhere, somehow, was her fixed idea; and she would no more have married the sober, well-to-do wheelwright her people picked out for her, than she would have thrown her vigorous and virgin body down the well.

'He shall get me the cards and the treasure wand out of her grave before this moon is out,' she said, between her white teeth, with which she could crack nuts and bite through string and grind the black bread into powder.

Caris took no definite shape in her eyes except as an instrument to get her will and ways. She was but a country girl just knowing her letters, and no more; but the yeast of restless ambition was fermenting in her.

She sat staring at the moon, while the tired children slept as motionless as plucked poppies. The moon was near its full. Before it waned she swore to herself that she would have Lisabetta's magic tools in her hands. Could she only know more, or else get money! She was ignorant, but she knew that money was power. With money she could get away over those hills which seemed drawn like a screen between her fate and her.

Marry Matteo! She laughed aloud, and thought the face in the moon laughed too.

The outfit was made, the pearls were bought, the 'stimatore' who is called in to appraise every article of a marriage corredo had fingered and weighed and adjudged the cost of every single thing, and the wheelwright had bought the bed and the furniture, and many other matters not usual or incumbent on a bridegroom, and her parents had said that such a warm man and so liberal a one was never seen in their day: and very little time was there now left wherein she could escape her fate.

All unwillingness on her part would have been regarded by her parents as an insanity, and would have only seemed to her bridegroom as the spice which is added to the stewed hare. There was no chance for her but to use this single fortnight which she had been allowed to spend in farewell at the four roads of Genistrello.

Her uncle and aunt had helped generously in the getting together of the corredo; and their wish to have her with them had been at once conceded. Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the Pistoiese Apennines.

The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed boots down the hillside into her father's house, and given her up to punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or dog.

The day for the ceremony had not been fixed, for in this country, where love intrigues speed by as swift as lightning, matrimonial contracts move slowly and cautiously; but the word was passed, the goods were purchased, the house was ready; and to break a betrothal at such a point would have been held a crime and a disgrace.

Santina herself knew that; she was well aware that decent maidens do not do such things when the dower clothing and linen are all stitched, and the marriage-bed bought by the bridegroom. She knew, but she did not care. She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in her little native town, in the wheelwright's old house with a jealous rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends on earth.

'Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half the cards unread?' she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose and see what it liked; and she was chained down here by her youth, and her sex, and her ignorance, and her poverty; and her only one faint hope of escape and aid lay in the closed grave of a dead old woman.

Though she was voluble and garrulous and imprudent and passionate, she could keep her own counsel.

Under her Tuscan volubility there was also the Tuscan secretiveness. Nobody saw inside her true thoughts. Her mind was like a little locked iron box into which no one could peep.

The Tuscan laughs quickly, weeps quickly, rages, fumes, smiles, jumps with joy; seems a merely emotional creature, with his whole heart turned inside out; but in his inmost nature there is always an ego wholly different to that which is shown to others, always a deep reserve of unspoken intents and calculations and desires.

It resembles a rosebush all bloom and dew and leaf and sunshine, inside which is made the nest of a little snake, never seen, but always there; sometimes, instead of the snake, there is only a flat stone; but something alien there always is under the carelessly blowing roses.

The Tuscan never completely trusts his nearest or dearest, his oldest friend, his truest companion, his fondest familiar; be he gentle or simple, he never gives himself away.

The homeliest son and daughter of the soil will always act as though he or she were cognizant of the axiom of the fine philosopher of courts: 'Deal with your friend at all times as though some day he would become your enemy.'

Santina, therefore, had told her secret intent to no living soul, and only Caris's old weird mother had been shrewd enough to guess it in the girl's flashing eyes and in her eager questioning of Fate.

The house of Massaio was a very busy house, especially so at this season of the year, when the purchasing and fetching and stacking of wood for the coming winter was in full vigour, and all the boys and girls were up in the woods all day long, seeking out and bringing down brushwood and pines and cut heather.

Santina with wonderful alacrity entered into the work, although usually she was averse to rough labour, fearing that it would spoil her hands and her skin before she could get to that unknown life of delight which she coveted.

But going with the heedless and unobservant children up on the hillsides where the heather and chestnut scrub grew, and farther up still where the tall stone pines grew, she had chances of meeting Caris or of again getting away to his hut unnoticed. He was usually at this season occupied in carrying wood or helping the charcoal-burners, and was now in one place, now in another, as men who have no fixed labour must be.

Moreover, her just estimate of her own attraction for him made her guess that this year he would choose to labour nearer the four roads than usual, if he could get employment, and she was in no manner surprised when she saw him amongst a group of men who were pulling at the ropes of one of her uncle's wood-carts, to prevent the cart and the mules harnessed to it from running amuck down the steep incline which led to that green nook at the foot of Genistrello, where the woodman's buildings and sheds were situated.

She gave him a sidelong glance and a shy smile as she passed them, and Caris, colouring to the roots of his hair, let his rope slacken and fall, and was sworn at fiercely by his fellow-labourers, for the cart lurched, and one of the wheels sunk up to its hub in the soft wet sand.

'Get away, lass!' shouted the carter roughly. 'Where women are men's work is always fouled.'

'You unmannerly churl!' shouted Caris; and he struck the carter sharply across the shoulders with his end of the rope.

The man flung himself round and tried to strike his assailant in return with the thong of his long mule-whip; but Caris caught it in his grip and closed with him.

They wrestled savagely for a moment, then the carter, freeing his right arm, snatched out of his breeches belt the knife which every man carries, however severely the law may denounce and forbid such a habit. It would have buried its sharp, narrow blade in the ribs or the breast of Caris had not the other men, at a shout from Massaio, who came hurrying up, thrown themselves on the two combatants, and pulled them apart.

'To —— with you both!' cried Massaio, furious to see his cart stuck in the sand, its load of wood oscillating, and the time wasted of men whom he paid by the day.

Santina had stood quietly on the bank above the mules and the men, watching with keen interest and pleasure.

'Why did you stop them, uncle?' she cried to Massaio pettishly. 'I do love to see two good lads fight. 'Tis a sight that warms one's blood like good communion wine.'

But no one heeded what she said.

On these hills women are used but never listened to by any man.

'The cows give milk, not opinions,' the men said to their womenkind.

Only Caris had seen in the sunlight that lithe erect figure amongst the gorse, and those two burning, melting, shining eyes, which had incited him to combat.

He was deeply angered with Massaio for stopping the duello.

A knife? What mattered a knife? He had one, too, in his breeches band; in another second he, too, would have had his out, and then Santina would have seen work fit for a brave, bold woman to watch, with the red blood running merrily through the thirsty sand and the tufted heather.

He was not quarrelsome or bloodthirsty; but any man who goes down into Maremma through the 'macchia,' where the 'mal-viventi' hide, learns to know very well how to sell his own life dearly, and hold the lives of others cheaply; and these contraband knives, which the law forbids so uselessly, cost very little to buy, and yet do their work surely, quickly, and well.

He cast one longing look up at Santina standing above amongst the gorse, and moved on sullenly with the other men and the mule, when the cart with rare effort had been pulled erect and dragged out of the sand. It was then only an hour or two after daybreak.

The day came and ended without Caris seeing his goddess again.

During the repose at noontide, when he with others broke bread and ate soup at the big table in Massaio's kitchen, she was not there. They were served by her aunt Eufemia. He had only accepted this work of fetching and stacking for sake of the vicinity to her which it offered; and his heart was heavy and his blood was turned, as he would himself have expressed it.

Chagrin and irritation, in the Italian's opinion, turns the blood as tempest changes milk. He was too shy and tongue-tied to venture to inquire for her; and the instinct of secrecy which characterizes all passion was joined to his natural hesitation in speech.

Massaio's people seemed, too, to him to be very grand folks, with their byres and stalls filled with beasts, and their casks of wine and great earthen jars of oil standing there for anybody to read in mute declaration of their prosperity.

A barrel of wine had never entered the hut of the Lascarises within the memory of man. No one took any notice of him. He was a 'bracciante,' paid by the day, nothing more. Had Eufemia known that he was the old witch's son he would have attracted her attention; but she did not know it. When there is quick rough work to be done, nobody notices who does it.

When the last wood of the day was brought in, Caris went home by himself, by ways he knew. He was downcast and dull. He had been baulked of his knife-play with the carter, and he had not seen Santina.

At a bend in the hill-path, where the chestnut saplings grew taller than usual, and aged pines with scaly scarred trunks were left standing, he heard a laugh amongst the leafy scrub, and in the dusk of the moonless evening a slender straight figure shot up from its screen of heather.

'Eh, Caris!' cried the girl to him. 'What a poor day's work! Have you left Black Simon without an inch of steel in him? Fie for shame! A man should always write his name large when he has a stiletto for his pen.'

Caris gazed at her dumb and agitated, the veins in his throat and temples throbbing.

'It was your uncle stopping the play,' he muttered; 'and I could not begin to brawl in his house.'

Santina shrugged her shoulders. 'Brave men don't want excuses,' she said unkindly.

'Ask of me in Maremma,' said Caris sullenly. 'They will tell you whether men taste my blade.'

'Maremma is far,' said Santina, sarcastic and jeering; 'and the men there are weak!'

'You shall see what you shall see,' muttered Caris, growing purple, red, and then pale. 'Tell me a man you have a quarrel with— nay, one who stands well with you— that will be better.'

'Those are words,' she said, with curt contempt.

'You shall see deeds. Who is it stands well with you?'

'No one. Many wish it.'

'Your promised man should; but he is old, and a poor creature. 'Twould be no credit to do away with him.'

'He is a poor creature,' said Santina, her lips curling. 'So are you, when to do a woman a pleasure you will not open a grave.'

'Open a grave! Nay, nay, the saints forbid.'

'The saints! That is how all weaklings and cowards talk. What harm could it do any saint in heaven for you to get those magic things? If they be the devil's toys and tools, as you say, more reason to pluck them out of holy ground.'

'How you go on!' muttered Caris, whose slower brain was scared and terrified by his companion's rapid and fearless strides of thought. 'Heaven have mercy on us! You would have me commit sacrilege! Rifle a tomb! Holy Christ! and that tomb my mother's!'

The sweat stood on his brow, and made the chestnut curls of his hair wet as with dew or rain.

Santina poured into his all the magnetic force and fire of her own eyes, shining in the dusk like some wild cat of the woods.

'Sacrilege! whew! Where got you that big word? You put the things in; you can take the things out. Your mother will sleep sounder without them. I want them, my lad, do you understand? I want them. And what I want I get from those who love me; and those who deny me, hate me, and I hate them.'

Caris shuddered as he heard.

'I love you,' he stammered. 'Do not hate me— for pity's sake, do not hate me.'

'Obey me, then,' she said, with her dark level brows contracting over her luminous eyes.

'In anything else!'

'Oh, ay! It is always anything else, except the one thing which is wanted!'

'But what is it you want?'

'I want the charms and the wand and the book out of your mother's grave.'

'What could you do with them? Without the knowledge, they are no more than a dry twig and a few dirty play-cards.'

'How know you what knowledge I have? I want the things, that is all, I tell you.'

'They were accursed if they had any use in them. And what use had they? She who understood them lived and died all but a beggar. If they had any power in them, they cheated and starved her.'

The speech was a long one for Caris, whose thoughts were so little used to fit themselves to utterance.

Santina heard him with the passionate impatience and intolerance of a swift mind with a dull one, of a bold will with a timid nature.

She had set her soul on possessing these magic things; she was convinced that she should find the way to make them work; superstition was intense and overwhelming in her, and allied to a furious ambition, all the more powerful because given loose rein through her complete ignorance.

'Oh, you white-livered ninny!' she cried to him, with boundless scorn. 'Would to Heaven Black Simon had buried his blade into you! It would have rid the earth of a dolt and a dastard!'

'Then let me be, if I be worth so little,' said Caris sullenly, whilst his eyes devoured her beauty half seen in the darkness which preceded the late rising of the moon. Then she saw that she had mistaken her path, and she changed it. She let great tears come into her eyes, and her mouth trembled, and her bosom heaved.

'This was the lad I could have loved!' she murmured. 'This was the strong bold youth whom I thought would be my brave and bonny damo before all the countryside. Oh, what fools are women— what fools!— taken by the eye, with a falcon glance and a sheaf of nut-brown curls and a broad breast that looks as if the heart of a true man beat in it. Oh, woe is me! Oh, woe is me! I dreamed a dream, and it has no more truth in it than the slate shingle here has of silver.'

She kicked downward scornfully as she spoke the crumbling slate and mia which showed here and there betwixt the heather plants in the tremulous shadow relics of a quarry worked long centuries before, and forsaken when the fires of the camp of Hun and Goth had blazed upon those hillsides.

iii

CARIS STARED at her as she spoke, his whole frame thrilling and all his senses alive as they had never been before under a woman's glamour. He heeded not the derision, he thought not of the strangeness of the avowal; delicacy is not often a plant which grows in uncultured soil, and he had none of the intuition and suspicion which an educated man would have been moved by before such an avowal and such an upbraiding. He only knew, or thought he was bidden to know, that he had the power in him to please her fancy and awaken her desire.

'You love me! You can love me!' he shouted in a loud, vibrating, exultant voice which wakened all the echoes of the hills around him, and he sprang forward to seize her in his arms. But Santina, agile and strong, pushed him back, and stood aloof.

'Nay, nay, stand off!' she cried to him. 'Ne'er a coward shall touch me. All I said was, you might have won me.'

'I am no coward,' said Caris hotly. 'And why do you fool and tempt one so? 'Tis unfair. 'Tis unfair. You may rue it.'

His face was convulsed, his eyes were aflame, he breathed like a bull in a hard combat.

Santina smiled; that was how she liked to see a man look.

She had all the delight in watching and weighing the effects of the passion which she excited that moved the great queens of Asia and the empresses of Rome. She was only a poor girl, but the love of dominance and the violence of the senses were in her strong and hot and reckless.

In her was all that ferment of ambition and vanity and discontent which drives out from their hamlets those who are born with something in them different to their lot and alien to their fellows. She had never been anywhere farther afield than the hills and woods about Pistanse, but she knew that there were big cities somewhere, where men were made of money, and women wore satin all day long, and everybody ate and drank out of gold plates and silver vessels. She knew that; and to get to these kingdoms of delight was the one longing which possessed her day and night.

She wanted to get one thing out of this man— the means of liberty— and she cared nothing how she won it. Besides, he was so simple, so malleable, so credulous, it diverted her to play on him as one could play on a chitarra, making the strings leap and sigh and thrill and groan. And he was good to look at, too, with his tanned, fresh face, and his clustering curls, and his strong, straight, cleanly limbs.

'I only said you might have won me,' she repeated— 'nay, you may still, if you have the heart of a man and not of a mouse. Hearken!'

'Do not fool me,' said Caris sternly, 'or as the Lord lives above us—'

She laughed airily.

'Oh, big oaths cannot frighten me. It shall lie with you. I want those things of your mother's. When you bring them I will thank you— as you choose.'

He grew gray under his brown, bright skin.

'Always that,' he muttered— always that!'

'Naturally, it is what I want.'

'Go, get them, since you think it holy work.'

'I will,' said Santina, 'and then good-night to you, my good Caris; you will never see me more.'

She turned on her heel and began to run down the slope in the moonlight.

Santina would not have ventured inside the graveyard at night to get mountains of gold. She would not have passed after nightfall within a mile of its gate without crossing herself and murmuring Aves all the way. Superstition was born and bred in every inch of her bone and every drop of her blood, and she would no more have carried out her threat than she would have carried the mountain upon her shoulders.

But he did not know that. She was so bold, so careless, so self-confident, if she had told him she would split open the earth to its centre he would have believed her.

He overtook her as she fled down the slope and seized her in his arms.

'No, no!' he cried, close in her ear. 'It is not work for you. If it must be done I will do it. Will you swear that you will give yourself to me if I bring you the unholy things?'

'I love you!' she said breathlessly, while her lips brushed his throat— 'yes, I do love you! Go, get the things, and bring them hither at dawn. I will meet you. Oh, I will find the way to use them, never fear. That is my business. Get you gone. They are calling below. They shut the house at the twenty-four.'

No one was calling, but she wished to get rid of him. He was strong, and he was on fire with her touch and her glance; he strained her in his arms until her face was bruised against the hairy sinews and bones of his chest.

She thrust him away with a supreme effort, and ran down the stony side of the hill, and was swallowed up in the duskiness of the tangled scrub.

A little scops owl flitted past, uttering its soft, low note, which echoes so far and long in the silence of evening in the hills.

Caris shook himself like a man who has been half stunned by a heavy fall. He was on fire with the alcohol of passion, and chilled to the marrow by the promise he had made.

Open a tomb! Rifle a grave! See his mother again in her cere clothes— see all the untold and untellable horrors of which the dead and the earth make their secrets!

Oh, why had he ever admitted that he had sealed up the uncanny things in the coffin! He could have bitten his tongue out for its tell-tale folly.

He had thrust them in almost without consciousness of his act as he had hammered the lid down on the deal shell all alone with it in his cabin.

The things had been always under his mother's pillow at night; it had seemed to him that they ought to go with her down to the grave. He had had a secret fear of them, and he had thought that their occult powers would be nullified once thrust in sacred soil. He had been afraid to burn them.

The churchyard in which his mother lay was on the topmost slope of Genistrello, where the brown brick tower of the massive medieval church of St. Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and storm-scarred scarp.

Few were the dead who were taken there; meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.

It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.

But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether unmanly.

He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so powerful to him.

'Had she but asked me anything else! 'he thought piteously. 'Anything!— to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!'

But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm red lips breathe on his own.

He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard which were his goal.

A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night around him on every side.

The moon had now risen so high that the valleys were bathed in her light, and the sky was radiant with a brilliancy which seemed but a more ethereal day.

He had no eyes for its beauty. His whole soul was consumed by the horror of his errand. He only looked up at the pointers and the pole-star which he knew, so as to guide himself by them up the steep slopes to the church, for he had left the cart-tracks and mule-paths and struck perforce through the gorse and undergrowth westward, gradually ascending as he went.

'Poor mother! poor mother!' he kept saying to himself. It seemed horrible to him to go and molest her out in her last sleep and take those things which were buried with her. Would she know? Would she awake? Would she rise and strike him?

Then he thought of a dead woman whom he had found once in the 'macchia' in Maremma, lying unburied under some myrtle bushes; he remembered how hideous she had looked, how the ants and worms had eaten her, how the wild boars had gnawed her flesh, how the jaws had grinned and the empty eyeballs had stared, and how a black toad had sat on her breast.

Would his mother look like that?

No; for she was safe under ground, under sacred ground, shut up secure from wind and weather in that deal shell which he had himself made and hammered down; and she was in her clothes, all neat and proper, and the holy oil had been upon her.

No, she had been put in her grave like a Christian, witch though they said that she was. She could not look like the woman in Maremma, who had been a vagrant and a gipsy.

Yet he was afraid— horribly afraid.

iv

IT WAS a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.

The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.

He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard the voice of Santina crying to him, 'No coward shall win me,' he would have turned and fled.

He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.

It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.

The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below, the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country night.

On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness, the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.

But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the moon.

There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.

Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the church-gate.

The last time he had come thither he had climbed up with the weight of his mother's coffin on his shoulders; the ascent being too steep for a mule to mount and he too poor to pay for assistance.

The walls of the graveyard were high, and the only access to it was through a wooden iron-studded door, which had on one side of it a little hollowed stone for holy water, and above it a cross of iron and an iron crown. To force the door was impossible; to climb the wall was difficult, but he was agile as a wild cat, and accustomed to crawl up the stems of the pines to gather their cones, and the smooth trunks of the poplars in the valleys to lop their crowns.

He paused a moment, feeling the cold dews run like rain off his forehead, and wished that his dog was with him, a childish wish, for the dog could not have climbed: then he kicked off his boots, set his toe-nails in the first crevice in the brick surface, and began to mount with his hands and feet with prehensile agility.

In a few moments he was above on the broad parapet which edged the wall, and could look down into the burial-place below. But he did not dare to look; he shut his eyes convulsively and began to descend, holding by such slight aids as the uneven surface and the projecting lichens afforded him. He dropped at last roughly but safely on the coarse grass within the enclosure.

All was black and still; the graveyard was shut in on three sides by its walls, and at the fourth side by the tower of the church.

The moon had passed behind a cloud and he could see nothing.

He stood ankle-deep in the grass; and as he stirred he stumbled over the uneven broken ground, made irregular by so many nameless graves. He felt in his breeches pockets for his pipe and matches, and drew one of the latter out and struck it on a stone.

But the little flame was too feeble to show him even whereabouts he was, and he could not in the darkness tell one grave from another.

Stooping and stretching out his hands, he could feel the rank grass and the hillocks all round him; there were a few head-stones, but only a few; of such dead as were buried in the graveyard of St. Fulvo, scarce one mourner in a century could afford a memorial stone or even a wooden cross.

He stood still and helpless, not having foreseen the difficulty of the darkness.

He could feel the stirring of wings in the air around him. His sense told him that they were but owls and bats, of which the old tower was full; but he shivered as he heard them go by; who could be sure what devilish thing they might not be?

The horror of the place grew on him.

Still, harmless, sacred though it was, it filled him with a terror which fastened upon him, making his eyeballs start, and his flesh creep, and his limbs shake beneath him.

Yet he gripped his pickaxe closer and tighter, and held his ground, and waited for the moon to shine from the clouds.

Santina should see he was no white-livered boy. He would get her what she asked, and then she would be his— his— his; and the woods would hide their loves and the cold moss grow warm with their embrace.

Stung into courage and impatience by her memory, he struck violently upon one of the stones his whole handful of brimstone matches; they flared alight with a blue, sharp flash, and he saw there at his feet his mother's grave.

He could not doubt that it was hers; it was a mound of clay on which no grass had had time to grow, and there were the cross-sticks he had set up on it as a memorial, with a bit of an old blue kerchief which had been hers tied to them.

It was just as he had left them there four months before, when the summer had been green and the brooks dry and the days long and light. She was there under his feet where he and the priest had laid her, the two crossed chestnut sticks the only memorial she would ever have, poor soul!

She was there, lying out in all wind and weather alone— horribly, eternally alone; the rain raining on her and the sun shining on her, and she knowing nought, poor, dead woman!

Then the wickedness of what he came to do smote him all of a sudden so strongly that he staggered as under a blow, and a shower of hot tears gushed from his eyes, and he wept bitterly.

'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.

She had been a hard mother to him, and had had ways which he had feared and disliked, and a cruel tongue and a bad name on the hillside, but she had been his mother, and when she had lain dying she had been sorrowful to think that she would leave him alone.

She had been his mother, and he came to rifle her grave.

What a crime! What a foul, black crime, such as men and women would scarce speak of with bated breath by their hearths in the full blaze of day! What a crime! He abhorred himself for doing it, as he would have abhorred a poisoner or a parricide seeing them pass to the gallows.

'Oh, mother, mother, forgive me! She will have it so!' he sobbed with a piteous prayer.

He thought that, being dead, his mother would understand and forgive, as she would never have understood or forgiven when living.

Then he struck his spade down into the heavy clay on which no bird-sown seed of blade or blossom had yet had any time to spring.

He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his shoulders ached and his arms quivered.

He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around, his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action nerved him to feverish force.

'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones.

The moon came forth from the clouds, and the burial-ground grew white with her light where the shadows of the wall did not fall. He looked up once; then he saw black crosses, black skulls and cross-bones, rank grass, crumbling headstones, nameless mounds all round him, and beyond them the tower of the church.

But his mother's coffin he did not find. In vain he dug, and searched, and frantically tossed aside the earth in such haste to have ended and finished with his horrible task.

His mother's coffin he could not find.

Under the rays of the moon the desecrated ground lay, all broken up and heaped and tossed together, as though an earthquake had riven the soil. But the deal shell which he had made with his own hands and borne thither on his own shoulders, he could not find.

'She will never believe! she will never believe!' he thought.

Santina would never believe that he had come there if he met her at dawn with empty hands. He could hear in fancy her shrill, cruel, hissing shriek of mockery and derision; and he felt that if he did so hear it in reality it would drive him mad.

He dug, and dug, and dug, more furiously, more blindly, going unconsciously farther and farther away from where the two crossed chestnut sticks had been; they had been uprooted and buried long before under the first heap of clay which he had thrown out from the grave.

He had forgotten that they alone were his landmarks and guides; in the darkness which had been followed by the uncertain, misleading light of the moon, he had gone far from them.

His work had become almost a frenzy with him; his nerves were strung to an uncontrollable pitch of excitation, fear, and horror, and obstinacy, and a furious resolve to obtain what he sought, with a terrible dread of what he should see when he should reach it, had together, in their conflict of opposing passions, driven him beside himself.

He dug on and on, without any consciousness of how far he had gone from his goal, and no sense left but the fury of determination to possess himself of what he knew was there in the earth beneath him.

He stood up to his knees in the yawning clay, with the heavy clods of it flung up on either side of him, and the moon hanging up on high in the central heavens, her light often obscured by drifting cloud wrack, and at other times shining cold and white into his face, as though by its searching rays to read his soul.

How long he had been there he knew not; time was a blank to him; his supernatural terrors were lost in the anguish of dread lest he should be unable to do Santina's will.

He felt as though he strove with the fiend himself.

Who but some hideous power of evil could have moved the corpse and baffled and beaten him thus? Perhaps truly the charms had been things born of the devil, and the devil had taken them both to himself, and the body of his mother with them. He dug on and on frantically, deriving relief from the fever within him through that violent exertion which strained every vein and muscle in his body, till he felt as though beaten with iron rods.

He did not see, in the confusion of his mind and the gloom of the night, that he had come close under the graveyard wall, and was digging almost at its base. He believed himself still to be on the spot where he had buried his mother; and he had deepened the pit about him until he was sunk up to his loins. He never remembered the danger of the priest or the sacristan waking and rising and seeing him at his occult labour.

He never remembered that the bell would toll for matins whilst the stars would be still in their places, and the hills and the valleys still dark. All sense had left him except one set, insane resolve to obtain that by which the beauty of a woman was alone to be won.

Of crime he had grown reckless, of emotion he had none left; he was only frantically, furiously determined to find that which he had come to seek. Standing in the damp, clogging soil, with the sense of moving creatures about him which his labours had disturbed in the bowels of the earth, he dug and dug and dug until his actions had no purpose or direction in them, only hurling clod upon clod in breathless, aimless, senseless monotony and haste.

At last his spade struck on some substance other than the heavy soil and the slimy worms; he thrilled through all his frame with triumph and with terror.

At last! At last! He never doubted that it was the coffin he sought; he did not know that his mother's grave lay actually yards away from him. Oh, were there only light, he thought; it was so dark, for the moon had now passed down behind the wall of the graveyard, and there would be only henceforth growing ever darker and darker that dense gloom which precedes the dawn. He dared not go on digging; he was afraid that the iron of his spade should stave in the soft wood of the coffin, and cut and maim the body within it. He stooped and pushed the clay aside with his hands, trying to feel what the tool had struck.

What met his touch was not wood, but metal— rounded, smooth, polished; though clogged and crusted with the clay-bed in which it lay. He pushed the earth farther and farther away, and the object he had reached seemed to lie far down, under the soil, and to be held down by it.

He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light fall on what he had unearthed.

Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought.

Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook, his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image.

'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead mother, or the saints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him the evil of his ways.

In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain below.

But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris.

To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched them reverently, trembling in every nerve.

He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound disbelief.

His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a swoon.

v

TO CARIS miracles were as possible as daily bread.

He knew little of them, but he believed in them with his whole soul. It seemed wonderful that the heavenly powers should create one for such a poor and humble creature as himself; but it did not seem in any way wonderful that such a thing should be.

The Divine Child was there in the earth, keeping away all evil things by its presence, and he could not doubt that the saints who were with Mary, or perchance his own mother's purified spirit, had called the image there to save him from the fiend.

He sank on his knees on the clay, and said over breathlessly all the Aves he could think of in his awe. They were few, but he repeated them over and over again, hoping thus to find grace and mercy for his sin for having broken into these sacred precincts and disturbed the dead in their rest.

But what of Santina? Would she believe him when he told her of this wondrous thing?

If he went to her with his hands empty, would she ever credit that he had courage to come upon this quest? He could hear, as it were, at his ear, her mocking, cruel, incredulous laughter.

She had said, 'Bring me the magic toys.' What would the tale of a miracle matter to her? She wanted treasure and knowledge. She would care nothing for the souls of the dead or the works of the saints— nothing.

He knew that her heart was set on getting things which she knew were evil, but believed were powerful for good and ill, for fate and future.

Suddenly a thought which froze his veins with its terror arose in him, and fascinated him with its wickedness and his daring. What if he took the holy image to her in proof that he had tried to do her will, and had been turned from his errand by powers more than mortal?

Since she had believed in the occult powers of his mother's divining tools, surely she would still more readily believe in the direct and visible interposition of the dead?

If he bore the Gesu to her in his arms, she could not then doubt that he had passed the hours of this night in the graveyard of St. Fulvo.

She could not, before its sacred testimony, be angry, or scornful, or incredulous, or unkind.

But could he dare to touch the holy thing? Would the image consent to be so taken? Would not its limbs rebel, its lips open, its body blister and blast the mortal hands which would thus dare to desecrate it?

A new fear, worse, more unspeakable than any which had moved him before, now took possession of him as he knelt there on the bottom of the pit which he had dug, gazing through the blackness of the darkness to the spot where he knew the silver body of the Christ Child lay.

The thing was holy in his eyes, and he meant to use it for unholy purposes. He felt that his hands would wither at the wrist if they took up that silver Gesu from its bed of earth.

His heart beat loudly against his ribs, his head swam.

It was still dark, though dawn in the east had risen.

He crawled out of the pit of clay with difficulty, holding the silver image to his bosom with one arm, and stood erect, and gazed around him.

If saints or friends were there beside him, they made no sign; they neither prevented nor avenged the sacrilege.

The sweet, sharp smell of the wet blowing grasses was in his nostrils, and the damp clinging sods were about his feet, dragging at the soles of his boots, that was all.

He began to think of the way in which he could, thus burdened, climb the wall.

The silver Christ was heavy in his hold, and he needed to have both hands free to ascend the height above him.

He knew it was an image and not a living god; yet none the less was it in his sight holy, heaven-sent, miraculous, potent for the service of the saints, and to take it up and bear it away seemed to him like stealing the very Hostia itself.

True, he would bring it back and give it to the vicar, and let it, according to the reverend man's choice, be returned to its grave or laid on the altar of the church for the worship of the people, and the continued working of miracles.

Yes, he said to himself, assuredly he would bring it back. He would only bear it in his arms most reverently to Santina, that she might see and believe, and become his; and then he would return hither with it and tell the priest the wondrous story.

Yet he shook as with palsy at the thought of carrying the blessed image as though it were a mere living human babe.

It seemed to him as if no man could do such a deed and live. The anointed hands of a priest might touch it, but not his— his so hard and rough and scarred with work, never having held aught better than his pipe of clay and his tool of wood or of iron, and the horn haft of his pocket-knife.

Nor was even his motive for taking it pure. He wanted through it to justify himself in the sight of a woman, and to find favour with her, and to gratify a strong and furious passion. His reasons were earthly, gross, selfish; they could not redeem, or consecrate, or excuse his act. That he knew.

All was still, dusky, solitary; the church was wrapt in gloom, the daybreak did not reach it; only above the inland hills the white light spread where he could not see; behind the high wall of the graveyard, beyond the ranges of the inland hills, the gray soft light of daybreak had arisen.

He thought he heard voices all around him, and amongst them that of his mother warning him to leave untouched the sacred Child, and get up on his feet and flee. But above these he heard the laughter of Santina mocking him as an empty-handed, white-livered fool, who came with foolish tales of visions to hide his quaking soul.

Better that his arms should shrivel, that his sight should be blinded, that his body should be shrunken and stricken with the judgment of heaven, than that he should live to hear her red lips laugh and call him a feckless coward.

With all the life which was in him shrinking and sickening in deadly fear, he stooped down, groped in the dark until he found the image, grasped its metal breast and limbs, and dragged it upward from the encircling earth.

It was of the size of a human child of a year old.

He plucked it roughly upward, for his terror made him rude and fierce, and held it in his arms, whilst he wondered in his great awe and horror that no judgment of affronted heaven followed on his desperate act.

All was still well with him; he saw, he heard, he breathed, he lived; the cool night air was blowing about him, the clouds were letting fall a faint fine mist-like rain.

He undid the belt about his loins— a mere piece of webbing with a buckle— strapped it around the body of the Gesu, and taking the ends thereof between his firm, strong teeth, sought in the dark for the place whence he had descended, and found it.

He climbed the wall with slow, laborious, and painful effort, the dead weight of the silver figure encumbering him as he mounted with cat-like skill, cutting his hands and bruising his skin against the rough, undressed stones.

He dropped carefully down on the earth beneath, and began the descent of the hill.

'When I can bring the little Christ back, I can get the tools,' he thought. It seemed a small matter.

He was forced to leave behind him his spade and pickaxe.

vi

WHEN at last he reached the top of the coping, he saw that it was dawn. His heart leaped in his breast. Down in the chestnut coppice Santina would be awaiting him; and she would believe— surely, certainly she would believe— when she should see this holy Gesu brought out from the tomb.

He was in good time. It was barely day. He unslung the little Christ and took it again in his arms, as carefully as a woman would take a new-born child. The polished limbs grew warm in his hands; its small face leaned against his breast; he lost his awe of it; he ceased to fear what it might do to him; he felt a kind of love for it.

'Oh, Gesu, dear Gesu, smile on us!' he said to it; and although it was still too dark to see more than its outline faintly, he thought he saw the mouth move in answer.

Holding it to him, he started homeward down the stony slope. He was thankful to be out of that ghostly place of tombs; he was thankful to have escaped from that scene of terror whole in limb, and uncursed if unpardoned; the tension of his nerves in the past hours had given place to an unreasoning and overstrung gladness. But for his reverence for the burden he carried, he could have laughed aloud.

Only once now and then, as he went, his conscience smote him. His poor mother!— he had forgotten her; he had displaced the mark set above her grave; no one would ever now be sure where she was buried. Did it hurt her, what he had done? Would she be jealous in her grave of the woman for whom he did it? Was it cruel to have come away without smoothing the rugged earth above her bed and saying an Ave for her?

But these thoughts, this remorse, were fleeting; his whole mind was filled with the heat of passion and its expectation. Fatigued and overworked and sleepless as he was, he almost ran down the paths of the hills in his haste, and tore his skin and his clothes as he pushed his way through the brushwood and furze, guarding only the Gesu from hurt as he went.

The day had now fully dawned, and the sun had risen; its rosy flush was warm over all the land and sky; the woodlarks and the linnets were singing under the bushes; the wild doves were dabbling in the rivulets of water; the hawks were circling high in the light.

On the wooded hillside all was peaceful with the loveliness of the unworn day; the air was full of the smell of heather and wet mosses and resinous pine-cones; rain was falling above where the church was, but in these lower woods there was a burst of sunrise warmth and light. None of these things, however, did he note. He went on and on, downward and downward, holding the silver image close against his breast, scarcely feeling the boughs which grazed his cheeks or the flints which wounded his naked feet.

When he came within sight of the place where he had left Santina the night before, he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of her through the tangle of leaves and twigs and fronds. And true enough to her tryst she was there, waiting impatiently, fretting, wishing the time away, blaming her own folly in setting all her hopes of freedom and the future on a foolish, cowardly churl— for so she called him in her angry thought, as she crouched down under the chestnut scrub and saw the daylight widen and brighten.

She ran a great risk in hiding there; if any of her people or their carters saw her, their suspicions would be aroused and their questions endless. She would say that she came for mushrooms; but they would not believe her. She was too well known for a late riser and a lazy wench.

Still, she had imperilled everything to keep her word with him, and she waited for him seated on the moss, half covered with leaves, except at such times as her impatient temper made her cast prudence to the winds and rise and look out of the thicket upward to the hills.

She had made herself look her best; a yellow kerchief was tied over her head, her hair shone like a blackbird's wing, her whole face and form were full of vivid, rich, and eager animal beauty. To get away— oh, only to get away! She looked up at the wild doves sailing over the tops of the tall pines and envied them their flight.

Caris saw that eager, longing look upon her countenance before he reached her, and he thought it was caused by love for him.

He held the Gesu to his bosom with both hands and coursed like lightning down the steep slope which still divided him from her; he was unconscious of how jaded, soiled, and uncomely he looked after his long night's work and all his ghostly fears; his feet were scratched and bleeding, his shirt soaked in sweat, his flesh bespattered with the clay, his hair wet and matted with moisture; he had no remembrance of that, he had no suspicion that even in that moment of agitation, when she believed her errand done, her will accomplished, she was saying in her heart as she watched him draw nigh: 'He has got them, he has got them; but, Holy Mary! what a clown!— he has all the mud of fifty graves upon him!'

He rushed downward to her, and held the silver image out at arm's-length, and sobbed and laughed and cried aloud, indifferent who might hear, his voice trembling with awe and ecstasy.

'It is the Gesu Himself, the Gesu— and I have brought Him to you because now you will believe— and my mother must be well with them in heaven or they never had wrought such a miracle for me— and such a night as I have passed, dear God! such things as I have seen and heard— but the Child smiles— the Child is pleased— and now you will believe in me, though I could not find the magic things— and I said to myself when she sees the Gesu she will believe— and she will be mine— mine— mine! The Lord forgive me, that has been all my thought, though heaven wrought such a miracle for me!'

The words poured out of his mouth one over another like the rush of water let loose through a narrow channel. He was blind with his own excess of emotion, his own breathless desire; he did not see the changes which swept over the face of Santina in a tumult of wrath, wonder, fury, eagerness, suspicion, cupidity, as one after another each emotion went coursing through her soul and shining in her eyes, making her beauty distorted and terrible.

Her first impulse was fury at his failure to bring her what she wanted; the second was to comprehend in a flash of instantaneous insight the money value of that to which he only attached a spiritual merit.

She snatched the image from him, and in the morning light she saw the silver of it glisten through the earth which still in parts clung to it. It might be better, surer, more quick aid to her than the uncertain divining tools whereof she was ignorant of the full employ. Her rapid mind swept over in a second all the uses to which it might be put, and comprehended the superstitious adoration of it which moved Caris and made him control his passion for herself, as he stood gazing at it in her arms, his own hands clasped in prayer, and his whole frame trembling with the portentous sense of the mercy of heaven which had been made manifest to him.

She in a second divined that it had been part of some buried treasure which he had by accident disinterred, but she was too keen and wise to let him see that she did so; it was her part to humour and to confirm him in his self-deception.

She calmed the angry, gibing words which rose to her lips, she held back the exultant covetousness which flashed in her eyes and betrayed itself in the clutching grasp of her fingers; she gazed on the Gesu with a worship half real, half affected, for it was also a holy image to her, if its sanctity were to her outweighed and outshone by its monetary worth in precious metal.

'Tell me how you found this?' she asked, under her breath, as one almost speechless with awe before such a manifestation from on high.

She was really in genuine fear. He had been into precincts which none could enter without offending immortal and unseen powers. He had done it at her bidding. Who could be sure that the offending spirits would not avenge his sacrilege on her?

But through her fears she kept her hold upon the image, whilst she asked the question.

Tremblingly he told her how he had passed the awful hours of the night and failed to find his mother's tomb, but in its stead found this.

'And I brought it that you should know that I had been there,' he said in conclusion, 'that you might know I had been where you willed, and am no coward; and we will take it back together and give it to the holy man up yonder— and now— and now— and now—'

His hands touched her, his breath was upon her, his timid yet violent passion blazed in his eyes and quivered all over his frame: he had dared all things for his reward, and he claimed it. But, quick as lightning, and merciless as dishonest, she put the holy image between her and him. The sacred silver froze his burning lips.

His arms fell to his side as though they were paralyzed.

'Not while the Gesu is with us,' she murmured in rebuke. 'Let us not be unworthy— you say yourself a miracle was wrought.'

'But—'

He stood before her, checked, daunted, breathing heavily, like a horse thrown back on its haunches in full flight.

'Hush!' she said, with a scared look. 'There are people near; I hear them. We will take the Gesu back to the church, but that cannot be till dusk. I will keep Him safe with me. Go, you dear, and clean your skin and your clothes, lest any seeing you should suspect what you have done.'

'I will not go,' he muttered; 'you promised—'

'I promised, oh fool!' she said, with quick passion, 'and my word I will keep, but not while the Gesu is with us. I love you for all you have braved. I love you for all you have done. I will be yours and no other's. See! I swear it on the Holy Child's head!'

And she kissed the silver brow of the babe.

He was convinced, yet irresolute and impatient.

'Let us go back with it now, then,' he muttered. 'I did but bring him to show you in witness of what I had done.'

'No,' she said, with that imperious command in her voice and her gaze which made the resolve in him melt like wax beneath a flame. 'You cannot be seen with me in such a state as you are. I will carry the Christ back to the church if so be that He rests uneasily in common arms like ours, and then— well, I will pass by your cabin as I come down. Dost complain of that, my ingrate?'

A flood of warmth and joy and full belief swept like flame through the whole being of Caris. Her eyes were suffused, her cheek blushed, her lips smiled; he believed himself beloved; he thought himself on the threshold of ecstasy; the minutes seemed like hours until he should regain his hut and watch from its door for her coming.

'You will go now?' he asked eagerly.

'At once,' she answered, holding the Gesu to her as a woman would hold a sucking child.

Caris closed his eyes, dazed with her beauty and the wild, sweet thought of how she would hold to her breast some child of his on some fair unborn morrow.

'Then go,' he muttered. 'The sooner we part, the sooner we shall meet. Oh, my angel!'

She gave him a smile over her shoulder, and she pushed her way upward through the chestnut boughs, carrying the Gesu folded to her bosom.

Watching her thus depart, a sudden and new terror struck him.

'Wait,' he called to her. 'Will the priest be angered that I disturbed the graves, think you?'

'Nay, nay, not when he sees that you give him the image,' she called backward in answer.

Then she disappeared in the green haze of foliage, and Caris struck onward in the opposite direction, to take the way which led to his cabin on Genistrello. Her words had awakened him to a consciousness of his bruised, befouled, and tattered state.

He wished to avoid meeting anyone who might question him as to his condition.

He got as quickly as he could by solitary paths to his home, and was met with rapture by his dog. He entered the house, and drank thirstily; he could not eat; he washed in the tank at the back of the hut, and clothed himself in the best that he had: what he wore on holy and on festal days.

Then he set his house-door wide open to the gay morning light which, green and gleeful, poured through the trunks of the chestnuts and pines; and he sat down on his threshold with the dog at his feet, and waited.

It would be a whole working-day lost, but what of that? A lover may well lose a day's pay for love's crown of joy.

Hour after hour passed by, and his eyes strained and ached with looking into the green light of the woods. But Santina came not.

The forenoon, and noontide and afternoon went by; and still no living thing came up to his solitary house. The whole day wore away, and he saw no one, heard nothing, had no visitant except the black stoat which flitted across the path, and the grey thrushes which flew by on their autumn flights towards lower ground.

The long, fragrant, empty day crept slowly by, and at last ended. She had not come.

He was still fasting. He drank thirstily, but he could not eat, though he fed the dog.

He was in a state of nervous excitation almost delirious. The trees and the hills and the sky seemed to whirl around him. He dared not leave the hut, lest she should come thither in his absence. He stared till he was sightless along the green path which led down to the four roads. Now and then, stupidly, uselessly, he shouted aloud; and the mountains echoed his solitary voice.

The dog knew that something was wrong with his master, and was pained and afraid.

The evening fell. The night wore away. He put a little lamp in his doorway, thinking she might come, through shyness, after dark; but no one came. Of her there was no sign, or from her any word.

When the day came he was still dressed and sleepless, seated before his door; the flame of the little lamp burnt on, garish and yellow in the sunshine.

The sun mounted to the zenith; it was again noon. He went indoors, and took a great knife which he was accustomed to carry with him to Maremma. He put it in his belt inside his breeches, so that it was invisible.

Then he called the dog to him, kissed him on the forehead, gave him bread, and motioned to him to guard the house; then he took his way once more down the hillside to Massaio's house.

If she had fooled him yet again, she would not live to do it thrice. His throat was dry as sand; his eyes were bloodshot; his look was strange.

The dog howled and moaned as he passed out of sight.

He went onward under the boughs tinged with their autumnal fires, until he came to the place where the house and sheds and walls of the wood merchant's homestead stood. He walked straight in through the open gates, and then stood still.

He saw that there was some unusual stir and trouble in the place: no one was at work, the children were gaping and gabbling, the housewife was standing doing nothing, her hands at her sides; Massaio himself was seated drumming absently on the table.

'Where is Santina?' asked Caris.

They all spoke in answer, 'Santina is a jade'— Massaio's voice louder and rougher than the rest.

'She has gone out of the town and away, none knows where; and she has left a letter behind her saying that none need try to follow, for she is gone to a fine new world, where she will want none of us about her; and my brother says it is all my fault, giving her liberty out on the hills. And the marvel is where she got the money, for we and they kept her so close— not a stiver— not a penny— and it seems she took the train that goes over the mountains ever so far, and paid a power of gold at the station wicket.'

The voice of Caris crossed his in a loud, bitter cry. 'She sold the Gesu! As God lives— she sold the Gesu!'

Then the blood rushed from his nostrils and his mouth, and he fell face downwards.

viii

A FEW DAYS later he was arrested for having violated and robbed the tombs in the burial-grounds of St. Fulvo. The pickaxe and the spade had been found with his name burned on the wood of them; he was sentenced to three years at the galleys for sacrilege and theft.

When the three years were ended he was an old, gray, bowed man, though only twenty-nine years of age; he returned to his cabin, and the dog, who had been cared for by the charcoal-burners, knew him from afar off, and flew down the hill-path to meet him.

'The wench who ruined you,' said the charcoal-burners around their fire that night, 'they do say she is a fine singer and a rich madam somewhere in foreign parts. She sold the Gesu— ay, she sold the Gesu to a silversmith down in the town. That gave her the money to start with, and the rest her face and her voice have done for her.'

'Who has the Gesu?' asked Caris, hiding his eyes on the head of the dog.

'Oh, the Gesu, they say, was put in the smelting-pot,' said the charcoal-burner.

Caris felt for the knife which was inside his belt. It had been given back to him with his clothes when he had been set free at the end of his sentence.

'One could find her,' he thought, with a thrill of savage longing. Then he looked down at the dog and across at the green aisles of the pines and chestnuts.

'Let the jade be,' said the forest-man to him. 'You are home again, and 'twas not you who bartered the Christ.'

Caris fondled the haft of the great knife under his waistband.

'She stole the Gesu and sold Him,' he said, in a hushed voice. 'One day I will find her, and I will strike her: once for myself and twice for Him.'

________________

16: Our Casualty

George A. Birmingham

James Owen Hannay, 1865-1930

Pearson’s Magazine, Dec 1916

THERE is not in the whole British Isles a more efficient military body than the Ballyhaine Veterans' Corps. The men look like soldiers when they have their grey uniforms on and their brassards on their sleeves. They talk like soldiers. They have the true military spirit. There is not a man in the company under fifty years of age, but if the Germans attempt a landing on the Ballyhaine beach, by submarine or otherwise, they will be sorry for themselves afterwards— those of them who remain alive.

Ballyhaine is a residential suburb, entirely built over with villas of the better kind. Each villa has its garden. In times of peace we discuss sweet peas or winter spinach or chrysanthemums on our way into town in the morning, travelling, as most of us do, by the 9.45 train, with season tickets, first class.

When our boys went off from us, as they all did early in the war, we felt that it was time for us to do something too. There was not the least difficulty about enrolling the men. We all joined the corps, even poor old Cotter, who must be close on seventy, and who retired from business three years ago. He used to bore us all by talking about his rheumatism, but when the Volunteer Corps was formed he dropped all that, and went about saying that he had never suffered from pain or ache in his life, and could do twenty miles a day without feeling it. We made Cotter a corporal.

Our Commanding Officer is Haines, who plays the best hand at bridge of any man in the club. He held a commission in a line regiment before he went on the Stock Exchange. That was thirty-five years ago, and it is not to be supposed that his knowledge of soldiering is up-to-date, but he is the only one of us who has any knowledge of soldiering at all, so we chose him.

The women were a difficulty at first They insisted on regarding us as a joke, and used to repeat the absurd witticism of the street boys. I heard Janet say "Methusaleers" one day. She denied it, but I am perfectly certain she did not say "Fusiliers." My wife fussed about dry socks and wanted me to take my umbrella on a route march one wet Sunday.

Every other member of the corps had similar experiences. It was Tompkins who hit on a way of dealing satisfactorily with the women. Tompkins is our local doctor. He stays in Ballyhaine all day long when the rest of us go up to town, so he naturally knows a good deal about women. He enrolled them in a volunteer ambulance brigade, and after that they were just as keen as any of us. We did the thing handsomely for them. We bought six stretchers, a small motor ambulance waggon, and some miles of bandages. Janet and Cotter's youngest girl carried one of the stretchers. I should not like to say that my wife actually hoped I should be wounded, but I think she would have liked the chance of bandaging any other man in the corps. The rest of the women felt as she did.

The drawback to Ballyhaine as a centre of military activity is the difficulty of finding a place for practising field manoeuvres. There is the golf links, of course, but we got tired of marching round and round the golf links, and we did not want to dig trenches there. Haines, who does not play golf, drew up a plan of trench digging which would have ruined the golf links for years. But we would not have that. Nor could we dig in each other's gardens, or practise advancing over open country in skirmishing order when there was no open country. The whole district is a network of high walls with broken glass on top of them, a form of defence rendered necessary by the attacks of small boys on our fruit trees.

Fortunately, we had the sea beach. The strand— there are three miles of it— is one of the glories of Ballyhaine. We did most of our manoeuvring there and dug our trenches there. Haines was oppsed to this plan at first

"If the Germans come at all," said Cotter, "they'll come from the sea. They must, this being an island.''

"Of course," said Haines.

"Then," said Cotter, "the beach is the place where we shall have to meet them, and the strand is where our trenches ought to be."

There was no answering that argument. Even Haines gave way.

"With barbed wire entanglements," said Cotter, "down to the water's edge."

The weather round about Christmas-time was extraordinarily severe in Ballyhaine. We came in for a series of gales, accompanied by driving rain, and the days at that time of year are so short that most of our soldiering had to be done in the dark.

I got one cold after another, and so did every other member of the corps. Poor old Cotter limped pitifully on parade, but he did not say a word about riteumatism. The spirit of the men was splendid, and not one of us showed a sign of shirking, though Haines kept us at it with ferocity.

Haines varied the digging by making us practise a horrible manoeuvre called "relieving trenches." This was always done in the middle of the night, between twelve and one o'clock. Part of the corps went out early— about 10.30 p.m.— and manned the trenches. The rest of us marched forth at midnight and relieved them.

The worst evening we had all winter was December 8th. It was blowing terrifically from the south-east The sea was tumbling in on the beach in enormous waves, fringing the whole line of the shore with a broad stretch of white foam. The rain swept over the country pitilessly. I came out of town by the 5.10 train, and called at the club on my way home. I found a notice posted up:

Ballyhaine Veterans' Corps.

To-night, December the 8th, trenches will be relieved at 12 midnight. No. 1 and No. 2 Platoons to parade at 10.30, march to north end of the strand, and occupy trenches.

That meant a six-mile march for those platoons— three there and three back.

No. 3 and No. 4 Platoons to parade at 11 p.m., march to cliffs, descend rocks, and relieve trenches as soon as possible after mid-night.

I am in No. 3 Platoon, and I confess I shuddered. The rocks at the north end of the beach are abominably slippery. A year ago I should have hesitated about climbing down in broad daylight in the finest weather. My military training had done a good deal for me physically, but I still shrank from those rocks at midnight with a tempest howling round me.

When I reached home I put a good face on the matter. I was not going to admit to my wife or Janet— particularly to Janet— that I was afraid of night operations in any weather.

"Please have my uniform left out for me," I said, " I shall put it on before dinner."

"Surely," said my wife, " you're not going out to-night? I don't think you ought to."

"Duty, my dear," I said.

"Just fancy," said Janet, "if the Germans came and father wasn't there! We might be murdered in our beds!"

I am sometimes not quite sure whether Janet means to scoff or is in serious earnest. On this occasion I was inclined to think that she was poking fun at the Veterans' Corps. I frowned at her.

" You'll get dreadfully wet/' said my wife.

" Not the least harm in that/' I said cheerily.

" It'll give you another cold in your head/' said Janet.

This time she was certainly sneering. I frowned again.

"Of course," said my wife, "it won't matter to you. You're so strong and healthy. Nothing does you any harm."

I suspected her of attempting a subtle form of flattery, but what she said was quite true. I am, for a man of fifty-three, extremely hardy.

"I'm thinking," she said, "of poor old Mr. Cotter. I don't think he ought to go. Mrs. Cotter was round here this afternoon. She says he's suffering dreadfully from rheumatism, though he won't admit it, and if he goes out to-night... But he's so determined, poor old dear. And she simply can't stop him."

"Cotter," I said, "must stay at home."

"But he won't," said my wife.

"Military ardour is very strong in him," said Janet

"I'll ring up Dr. Tompkins," I said, "and tell him to forbid Cotter to go out Tompkins is Medical Officer of the corps, and has a right to give orders of the kind. In fact, it's his duty to see that the company's not weakened by ill-health."

"I'm afraid," said my wife, " that Dr. Tompkins can do nothing. Mrs. Cotter was with him before she came here. The fact is that Mr. Cotter won't give in even to the doctor's orders."

I rang up Tompkins and put the case very strongly to him.

"It will simply kill Cotter," I said, "and we can't have that. He may not be of any very great military value, but he's a nice old boy, and we don't want to lose him."

Tompkins agreed with me thoroughly. He said he'd been thinking the matter over since Mrs. Cotter called on him in the aftemoon, and had hit upon a plan which would meet the case.

"If only the CO. will fall in with it," he added.

Haines is in some ways a difficult man. He likes to manage things his own way, and resents any suggestions made to him, particularly by men in the ranks. However, Cotter's life was at stake, so I undertook to tackle Haines, even at the risk of being snubbed. Tompkins explained his plan to me. I rang up Haines, and laid it before him. I put the matter very strongly to him. I even said that the War Office would probably deprive him of his command if it was discovered that he had been wasting the lives of his men unnecessarily.

"The country needs us all," I said, "even Cotter. After all, G>tter is a non-commissioQed officer and a most valuable man. Besides, it'll do the Ambu- lance Brigade a lot of good"

It was this last consideration which weighed most with Haines. He had felt for some time that our ambulance ladies were coming to have too good an opinion of themselves. I had the satisfaction of going back to the drawing-room and telling Janet that the stretcher bearers were to parade at deven o'clock, and march in the rear of the column— Numbers 3 and 4 Platoons— which went to relieve trenches.

"Rot," said Janet " We can't possibly go out on a night like this."

"CO.'s orders," I said.

"The stretchers will be utterly ruined," she said, "not to mention our hats."

"CO.'s orders," I said severely.

"If we must go," said Janet, "we'll take the ambulance waggon."

"No, you won't," I said. "You'll take your stretchers and carry them. Yours not to reason why, Janet. And in any case you can't take the ambulance waggon, because we're marching along the beach, and you know perfectly well that the strand is simply scored with trenches. We can't have the ambulance waggon smashed up. It's the only one we have. If a few girls break their legs it doesn't much matter. There are too many about the place."

Platoons Numbers 1 and 2 marched off at 10.30 p.m. in a blinding downpour of rain. We watched them go from the porch of the golf pavilion, and promised to relieve them as quickly as we could. We paraded, according to orders, at 11 sharp, and I was glad to see that Janet and the other girls were wet and draggled long before we started.

Haines made us a short speech. He had to shoot at the top of his voice because the storm was making a dreadful noise. But we heard what he said. The business of relieving trenches, he told us, would be carried out under strictly war conditions, precisely as if enemy submarines were shelling us from the sea. There would necessarily, supposing the sub-marines to be actually there, be casualties in our force. Haines told off four men to act as casualties. The first on the list— this was the way Tompkins' plan worked out— was Corporal Cotter.

" Corporal Cotter," said Haines, " will drop out of the ranks as the column passes the third bathing-box, numbering from the south end of the beach, Mrs. Tompkins' bathing-box, which is painted bright green."

Haines was, very properly, most particular about defining the bathing-box exactly.

"Corporal Cotter and the other casualties," said Haines, "will take waterproof ground-sheets with them— two waterproof ground-sheets each— and keep as dry as possible. The stretcher bearers will follow the column at a distance of two hundred paces to pick up the casualties, affording first-aid on the spot, and, on reaching the field hospital, will apply restoratives under the directions of the Company's Medical Officer. For the purposes of these manoeuvres. Corporal Cotter's house will be regarded as the Field Hospital."

The other three casualties, all elderly and rather delicate men, were ordered to drop out of the ranks at places further along the beach. If it was Janet's luck to reach the furthest casualty she would walk, carrying a stretcher, about a mile and a half altogether. When she got home she would be less inclined to sneer at people who catch cold in the service of their country.

The night was extremely dark. I do not think I have ever experienced a darker night. We could hear the sea roaring on our left, and could see, when we looked back, a dim glow here and there from the windows of our houses; but it was quite impossible to see anything on the beach.

I missed Cotter when we had been stumbling along for about a quarter of an hour, and felt glad that he had done his share. In a minute or so, I hoped, he would be safe on a stretcher, and half an hour later would be drinking whisky and water, hot That, so Tompkins told me, was the restora- tive which was to be administered to all the casualties.

We got through the business of relieving the trenches in the end, though we had a tough struggle. The great difficulty was to find them. If Platoons Nimibers 1 and 2 could have shouted to us or flashed their electric torches we should have got them much sooner than we did. But noise and light were strictly forbidden. They would, so Haines said, attract the enemy's fire, and result in our being wiped out by shrapnel.

I got separated at one time from the rest of my platoon, and walked into the sea twice. Afterwards I fell over the Company Sergeant-Major, who was sitting in a pool beside a rock. He said he had sprained his ankle. But that turned out not to be true. He had only twisted it a little, and was able to limp home. In civil life our Company Sergeant-Major is one of the directors of the Corporate Banking Company Ltd., and drives into town in his own motor.

Then I came on Haines, wandering by himself on a sandhill. He was swearing viciously. It was, indeed, the sound of his oaths which led me to him. They were not loud, but they were uttered with an intensity which gave them the power of pierdng through the tumult of the storm. He and I and the Company Sergeant-Major stuck together, and at 1 a.m.— we took the time from Haines' luminous-faced wrist watch— we suddenly tumbled into the trench.

We found the whole four platoons waiting for us; but they would not have waited much longer. The senior Second Lieutenant— a very well-known solicitor— had taken command of the company, assuming, as he said, that Haines had become a casualty accidentally. His idea was to ooarch the men home, and then send the Ambulance Brigade to search for Haines, the Company Sergeant-Major, and me.

"That's the sort of thing," he said, "an ambulance is for. The men in the fighting line can't be expected to do it"

We marched home in pretty good order, considering that we were all very wet, greatly exhausted, and many of us bruised in various parts of our bodies. Our spirit was quite unbroken, and Haines, writing up the official diary afterwards, said that our moral was excellent. He did us no more than bare justice. There was not a man among us— except perhaps the Company Sergeant-Major, whose ankle was swelling up— who would not have welcomed a German attack.

We got back to the golf pavilion, and found the wbde place in an uproar. Women, all of them very wet, were rushing about Tompkins was giving confused and contradictory orders to the twelve stretcher bearers, who looked cowed and miserable. Mrs. Cotter was sitting on the floor in a comer of the room crying bitterly. We got the explanation out of Tompkins at last.

Three of the casualties had, it appeared, been successfully picked up and carried home. The stretcher bearers had somehow missed Cotter. Search parties had been sent out Tompkins himself had felt his way round each of the fifteen bathing-boxes. The nursing section of the Ambulance Brigade had waved electric torches and stable lanterns up and down the beach from the edge of the sea to the sandhills. The stretcher bearers, scourged by the remarks Tompkins made about their incompetence, had gone shouting through the storm until they were hoarse and utterly exhausted. Nothing had been seen or heard of Cotter.

Haines took charge of the situation at once. He formed up the four platoons, and marched us all back to the beach. There we assumed open order, and skirmished in a northerly direction. We were told to keep in touch with each other, and to leave no square yard of the sand unexamined. We were to go on skirmishing until we found Cotter, dead or alive. My own idea was that if we found anything it would be his corpse.

I did my best to obey orders, but I almost immediately lost touch with everybody else. The other men, so I learnt afterwards, had the same experience. However, I had the good luck to find Cotter. He came towards me, indeed he ran into me before I saw him. He was in charge of a policeman, who held him firmly but kindly by the arm. The moment Cotter saw me he burst out:

"Tell this infernal fool that I'm not drunk," he said

"If you're acquainted with the gentleman,'' said the policeman, Ït would be well for you to take him home to his bed. He's not in a fit state to be out by himself."

I drove off the policeman with some difficulty, making myself personally responsible for Cotter's safety. Then I questioned the old gentleman.

"What have you been doing?" I said.

"Waiting for the ambulance. I'd be waiting still if that ass of a policeman hadn't insisted that I was drunk and dragged me away."

"Good Lord!" I said, "and they've been looking for you for hours."

"I know that," said Cotter. "I saw their lights all over the place and heard them shouting."

"Then why on earth didn't you shout bade and let them know where you were?"

"Casualties don't shout," said Cotter. "They can't They're too weak. I groaned occasionally; but I suppose they didn't hear me."

"And how long did you mean to lie out in this storm?" I said.

"Till the stretcher bearers found me," said Cotter. "Those were the CO.'s orders."

I do not know whether any medals will be given to volunteers after the war. Cotter certainly deserves one. I have never heard a finer story of devotion to duty than his. When I had got rid of the policeman he actually wanted to go back and lie down again.

End

Table of Contents

1: Twelve Years Later / Mark Hellinger

2: The Flight of the Silver Eagle / Arthur Leo Zagat

3: The Toss Up / George Allen England

4: When Time Turned / Ethel Watts Mumford

5: The Great White Serpent of the Malorli / Alexander Ricketts

6: The Inventor of Meltite / C. J.·Cutcliffe Hyne

7: Triplets and Trouble / Robert V Carr

8: The Secret of the White Castle / Julia Magruder

9: Changed / Gordon Young

10: Grandfather's Courtship / Henry Lawson

11: "Look Behind You!" / Albert Payson Terhune

12: The Girl in the Crowd / Albert Payson Terhune

13: The Perfumed Ghost / Peter Cheyney

14: Blind Man's Buff / Malcolm Jameson

15: The Silver Christ / "Ouida"

16: Our Casualty / George A. Birmingham