The Power and the Glory by Grace MacGowan Cooke (page 4)

yo’ ruthers.”

It was almost large enough for that, and the great load of hickory logs which Himes hauled into the yard from the neighbouring mountain-side was cut to length. Fire was kindled in the new chimney; it drew perfectly; and Pap himself carried Laurella in his arms and laid her on some quilts beside the hearthstone, demanding eagerly, “Thar now–don’t that make you feel better?”

“Uh-huh.” The ailing woman turned restlessly on her pallet. The big, awkward, ill-favoured old man stood with his disproportionately long arms hanging by his sides, staring at her, unaware that his presence half undid the good the leaping flames were doing her.

“I wish’t Uncle Pros was sitting right over there, t’other side the fire,” murmured Laurella dreamily. “How is Pros, Johnnie?”

For nobody understood, as the crazed man in the hospital might have done, that Laurella’s bodily illness was but the cosmic despair of the little girl who has broken her doll. It had been the philosophy of this sun-loving, butterfly nature to turn her back on things when they got too bad and take to her bed till, in the course of events, they bettered themselves. But now she had emerged into a bleak winter world where Uncle Pros was not, where Johnnie was powerless, and where she had been allowed by an unkind Providence to work havoc with her own life and the lives of her little ones; and her illness was as the tears of the girl with a shattered toy.

The children in their broken shoes and thin, ill-selected clothing, shivered on the roads between house and mill, and gave colour to the statement of many employers that they were better off in the thoroughly warmed factories than at home. But the factories were a little too thoroughly warmed. The operatives sweated under their tasks and left the rooms, with their temperature of eighty-five, to come, drenched with perspiration, into the chill outside air. The colds which resulted were always supposed to be caught out of doors. Nobody had sufficient understanding of such matters to suggest that the rebreathed, superheated atmosphere of the mill room was responsible.

Deanie, who had never been sick a day in her life, took a heavy cold and coughed so that she could scarcely get any sleep. Johnnie was desperately anxious, since the lint of the spinning room immediately irritated the little throat, and perpetuated the cold in a steady, hacking cough, that cotton-mill workers know well. Pony was from the first insubordinate and well-nigh incorrigible–in short, he died hard. He came to Johnnie again and again with stories of having been cursed and struck. She could only beg him to be good and do what was demanded without laying himself liable to punishment. Milo, the serious-faced little burden bearer, was growing fast, and lacked stamina. Beneath the cotton-mill regime, his chest was getting dreadfully hollow. He was all too good a worker, and tried anxiously to make up for his brother’s shortcomings.

“Pony, he’s a little feller,” Milo would say pitifully. “He ain’t nigh as old as I am. It comes easier to me than what it does to him to stay in the house and tend my frames, and do like I’m told. If the bosses would call me when he don’t do to suit ’em, I could always get him to mind.”

Lissy had something of her mother’s shining vitality, but it dimmed woefully in the rough-and-ready clatter and slam of the big Victory mill.

The children had come from the sunlit heights and free air of the Unakas. Their play had been always out of doors, on the mosses under tall trees, where fragrant balsams dropped cushions of springy needles for the feet; their labour, the gathering of brush and chips for the fire in winter, the dropping corn, and, with the older boys, the hoeing of it in spring and summer–all under God’s open sky. They had been forced into the factory when nothing but places on the night shift could be got for them. Day work was promised later, but the bitter winter wore away, and still the little captives crept over the bridge in the twilight and slunk shivering home at dawn. Johnnie made an arrangement to get off from her work a little earlier, and used to take the two girls over herself; but she could not go for them in the morning. One evening about the holidays, miserably wet, and offering its squalid contrast to the season, Johnnie, plodding along between the two little girls, with Pony and Milo following, met Gray Stoddard face to face. He halted uncertainly. There was a world of reproach in his face, and Johnnie answered it with eyes of such shame and contrition as convinced him that she knew well the degradation of what she was doing.

“You need another umbrella,” he said abruptly, putting down his own as he paused under the store porch where a boy stood at the curb with his car, hood on, prepared for a trip in to Watauga.

“I lost our’n,” ventured Pony. “It don’t seem fair that Milo has to get wet because I’m so bad about losing things, does it?” And he smiled engagingly up into the tall man’s face–Johnnie’s own eyes, large-pupilled, black-lashed, full of laughter in their clear depths. Gray Stoddard stared down at them silently for a moment. Then he pushed the handle of his umbrella into the boy’s grimy little hand.

“See how long you can keep that one,” he said kindly. “It’s marked on the handle with my name; and maybe if you lost it somebody might bring it back to you.”

Johnnie had turned away and faltered on a few paces in a daze of humiliation and misery.

“Sis’ Johnnie–oh, Sis’ Johnnie!” Pony called after her, flourishing the umbrella. “Look what Mr. Stoddard give Milo and me.” Then, in sudden consternation as Milo caught his elbow, he whirled and offered voluble thanks. “I’m a goin’ to earn a whole lot of money and pay back the trouble I am to my folks,” he confided to Gray, hastily. “I didn’t know I was such a bad feller till I came down to the Settlement. Looks like I cain’t noways behave. But I’m goin’ to earn a big heap of money, an’ buy things for Milo an’ maw an’ the girls. Only now they take all I can earn away from me.”

There was a warning call from Johnnie, ahead in the dusk somewhere; and the little fellow scuttled away toward the Victory and a night of work.

Spring came late that year, and after it had given a hint of relieving the misery of the poor, there followed an Easter storm which covered all the new-made gardens with sleet and sent people shivering back to their winter wear. Deanie had been growing very thin, and the red on her cheeks was a round spot of scarlet. Laurella lay all day and far into the night on her pallet of quilts before the big fire in the front room, spent, inert, staring at the ceiling, entertaining God knows what guests of terror and remorse. Nothing distressing must be brought to her. Coming home from work once at dusk, Johnnie found the two little girls on the porch, Deanie crying and Lissy trying to comfort her.

“I thest cain’t go to that old mill to-night, Sis’ Johnnie,” the little one pleaded. “Looks like I thest cain’t.”

“I could tell Mr. Reardon, and he’d put a substitute on to tend her frames,” Lissy spoke up eagerly. “You ask Pap Himes will he let us do that, Sis’ Johnnie.”

Johnnie went past her mother, who appeared to be dozing, and into the dining room, where Himes was. He had promised to do some night work, setting up new machines at the Victory, and he was in that uncertain humour which the prospect of work always produced. Gideon Himes was an old man, pestered, as he himself would have put it, by the mysterious illness of his young wife, fretted by the presence of the children, no doubt in a measure because he felt himself to be doing an ill part by them. His grumpy silence of other days, his sardonic humour, gave place to hypochondriac complainings and outbursts of fierce temper. Pony had hurt his foot in a machine at the factory and it required daily dressing. Johnnie understood from the sounds which greeted her that the sore foot was being bandaged.

“Hold still, cain’t ye?” growled Himes. “I ain’t a-hurtin’ ye. Now you set in to bawl and I’ll give ye somethin’ to bawl for–hear me?”

The old man was skilful with hurts, but he was using such unnecessary roughness in this case as set the plucky little chap to sobbing, and, just as Johnnie entered the room, got him heavy-handed punishment for it. It was an unfortunate time to bring up the question of Deanie; yet it must be settled at once.

“Pap,” said the girl, urgently, “the baby ain’t fit to go to the mill to-night–if ever she ought. You said that you’d get day work for them all. If you won’t do that, let Deanie stay home for a spell. She sure enough isn’t fit to work.”

Himes faced his stepdaughter angrily.

“When I say a child’s fitten to work–it’s fitten to work,” he rounded on her. “I hain’t axed your opinion–have I? No. Well, then, keep it to yourself till it is axed for. You Pony, your foot’s done and ready. You get yourself off to the mill, or you’ll be docked for lost time.”

The little fellow limped sniffling out; Johnnie reached down for Deanie, who had crept after her to hear how her cause went. It was evident that sight of the child lingering increased Pap’s anger, yet the elder sister gathered up the ailing little one in her strong arms and tried again.

“Pap, I’ll pay you for Deanie’s whole week’s work if you’ll just let her stay home to-night. I’ll pay you the money now.”

“All right,” Pap stuck out a ready, stubbed palm, and received in it the silver that was the price of the little girl’s time for a week. He counted it over before he rammed it down in his pocket. Then, “You can pay me, and she can go to the mill, ‘caze your wages ought to come to me anyhow, and it don’t do chaps like her no good to be muchin’ ’em all the time. Would you ruther have her go before I give her a good beatin’ or after?” and he looked Johnnie fiercely in the eyes.

Johnnie looked back at him unflinching. She did not lack spirit to defy him. But her mother was this man’s wife; the children were in their hands. Devoted, high-couraged as she was, she saw no way here to fight for the little ones. To her mother she could not appeal; she must have support from outside.

“Never you mind, honey,” she choked as she clasped Deanie’s thin little form closer, and the meagre small arms went round her neck. “Sister’ll find a way. You go on to the mill to-night, and sister’ll find somebody to help her, and she’ll come there and get you before morning.”

When the pitiful little figure had lagged away down the twilight street, holding to Lissy’s hand, limping on sore feet, Johnnie stood long on the porch in the dark with gusts of rain beating intermittently at the lattice beside her. Her hands were wrung hard together. Her desperate gaze roved over the few scattered lights of the little village, over the great flaring, throbbing mills beyond, as though questioning where she could seek for assistance. Paying money to Pap Himes did no good. So much was plain. She had always been afraid to begin it, and she realized now that the present outcome was what she had apprehended. Uncle Pros, the source of wisdom for all her childish days, was in the hospital, a harmless lunatic. Of late the old man’s bodily health had mended suddenly, almost marvellously; but he remained vacant, childish in mind, and so far the authorities had retained him, hoping to probe in some way to the obscure, moving cause of his malady. Twice when she spoke to her mother of late, being very desperate, Laurella had said peevishly that if she were able she’d get up and leave the house. Plainly to-night she was too sick a woman to be troubled. As Johnnie stood there, Shade Buckheath passed her, going out of the house and down the street toward the store. Once she might have thought of appealing to him; but now a sure knowledge of what his reply would be forestalled that.

There remained then what the others called her “swell friends.” Gray Stoddard–the thought brought with it an agony from which she flinched. But after all, there was Lydia Sessions. She was sure Miss Sessions meant to be kind; and if she knew that Deanie was really sick–. Yes, it would be worth while to go to her with the whole matter.

At the thought she turned hesitatingly toward the door, meaning to get her hat, and–though she had formulated no method of appeal–to hurry to the Hardwick house and at least talk with Miss Sessions and endeavour to enlist her help.

But the door opened before she reached it, and Mavity Bence stood there, in her face the deadly weariness of all woman’s toil and travail since the fall.

Johnnie moved to her quickly, putting a hand on her shoulder, remembering with swift compunction that the poor woman’s burdens were trebled since Laurella lay ill, and Pap gave up so much of his time to hanging anxiously about his young wife.

“What is it, Aunt Mavity?” she asked. “Is anything the matter?”

“I hate to werry ye, Johnnie,” said the other’s deprecating voice; “but looks like I’ve jest got obliged to have a little help this evenin’. I’m plumb dead on my feet, and there’s all the dishes to do and a stack of towels and things to rub out.” Her dim gaze questioned the young face above her dubiously, almost desperately. The little brass lamp in her hand made a pitiful wavering.

“Of course I can help you. I’d have been in before this, only I–I–was kind of worried about something else, and I forgot,” declared Johnnie, strengthening her heart to endure the necessary postponement of her purpose.

She went into the kitchen with Mavity Bence, and the two women worked there at the dishes, and washing out the towels, till after nine o’clock, Johnnie’s anxiety and distress mounting with every minute of delay. At a little past nine, she left poor Mavity at the door of that wretched place the poor woman called her room, looked quietly in to see that her mother seemed to sleep, got her hat and hurried out, goaded by a seemingly disproportionate fever of impatience and anxiety. She took her way up the little hill and across the slope to where the Hardwick mansion gleamed, many-windowed, gay with lights, behind its evergreens.

When she reached the house itself she found an evening reception going forward–the Hardwicks were entertaining the Lyric Club. She halted outside, debating what to do. Could she call Miss Lydia from her company to listen to such a story as this? Was it not in itself almost an offence to bring these things before people who could live as Miss Lydia lived? Somebody was playing the violin, and Johnnie drew nearer the window to listen. She stared in at the beautiful lighted room, the well-dressed, happy people. Suddenly she caught sight of Gray Stoddard standing near the girl who was playing, a watchful eye upon her music to turn it for her. She clutched the window-sill and stood choking and blinded, fighting with a crowd of daunting recollections and miserable apprehensions. The young violinist was playing Schubert’s Serenade. From the violin came the cry of hungry human love demanding its mate, questing, praying, half despairing, and yet wooing, seeking again.

Johnnie’s piteous gaze roved over the well-beloved lineaments. She noted with a passion of tenderness the turn of head and hand that were so familiar to her, and so dear. Oh, she could never hate him for it, but it was hard–hard–to be a wave in the ocean of toil that supported the galleys of such as these!

It began to rain again softly as she stood there, scattered drops falling on her bright hair, and she gathered her dress about her and pressed close to the window where the eaves of the building sheltered her, forcing herself to look in and take note of the difference between those people in there and her own lot of life. This was not usually Johnnie’s way. Her unfailing optimism prompted her always to measure the distance below her, and be glad of having climbed so far, rather than to dim her eyes with straining them toward what was above. But now she marked mercilessly the light, yet subdued, movements, the deference expressed when one of these people addressed another; and Gray Stoddard at the upper end of the room was easily the most marked figure in it. Who was she to think she might be his friend when all this beautiful world of ease and luxury and fair speech was open to him?

Like a sword flashed back to her memory of the children. They were being killed in the mills, while she wasted her thoughts and longings on people who would laugh if they knew of her presumptuous devotion.

She turned with a low exclamation of astonishment, when somebody touched her on the shoulder.

“Is you de gal Miss Lyddy sont for?” inquired the yellow waitress a bit sharply.

“No–yes–I don’t know whether Miss Sessions sent for me or not,” Johnnie halted out; “but,” eagerly, “I must see her. I’ve–Cassy. I’ve got to speak to her right now.”

Cassy regarded the newcomer rather scornfully.

Yet everybody liked Johnnie, and the servant eventually put off her design of being impressive and said in a fairly friendly manner:

“You couldn’t noways see her now. I couldn’t disturb her whilst she’s got company–without you want to put on this here cap and apron and come he’p me sarve the refreshments. Dey was a gal comin’ to resist me, but she ain’t put in her disappearance yet. Ain’t no time for foolin’, dis ain’t.”

Johnnie debated a moment. A servant’s livery–but Deanie was sick and–. With a sudden, impulsive movement, and somewhat to Cassy’s surprise, Johnnie followed into the pantry, seized the proffered cap and apron and proceeded to put them on.

“I’ve got to see Miss Sessions,” she repeated, more to herself than to the negress. “Maybe what I have to say will only take a minute. I reckon she won’t mind, even if she has got company. It–well, I’ve got to see her some way.” And taking the tray of frail, dainty cups and saucers Cassy brought her, she started with it to the parlour.

The music was just dying down to its last wail when Gray looked up and caught sight of her coming. His mind had been full of her. To him certain pieces of music always meant certain people, and the Serenade could bring him nothing but Johnnie Consadine’s face. His startled eyes encountered with distaste the cap pinned to her hair, descended to the white apron that covered her black skirt, and rested in astonishment on the tray that held the coffee, cream and sugar.

“Begin here,” Cassie prompted her assistant, and Johnnie, stopping, offered her tray of cups.

Gray’s indignant glance went from the girl herself to his hostess. What foolery was this? Why should Johnnie Consadine dress herself as a servant and wait on Lydia Sessions’s guests?

Before the two reached him, he turned abruptly and went into the library, where Miss Sessions stood for a moment quite alone. Her face brightened; he had sought her society very much less of late. She looked hopefully for a renewal of that earlier companionship which seemed by contrast almost intimate.

“Have you hired Johnnie Consadine as a waitress?” Stoddard asked her in a non-committal voice. “I should have supposed that her place in the mill would pay her more, and offer better prospects.”

“No–oh, no,” said Miss Sessions, startled, and considerably disappointed at the subject he had selected to converse upon.

“How does she come to be here with a cap and apron on to-night?” pursued Stoddard, with an edge to his tone which he could not wholly subdue.

“I really don’t understand that myself,” Lydia Sessions told him. “I made no arrangement with her. I expected to have a couple of negresses–they’re much better servants, you know. Of course when a girl like John gets a little taste of social contact and recognition, she may go to considerable lengths to gratify her desire for it. No doubt she feels proud of forcing herself in this evening; and then of course she knows she will be well paid. She seems to be doing nicely,” glancing between the portieres where Johnnie bent before one guest or another, offering her tray of cups. “I really haven’t the heart to reprove her.”

“Then I think I shall,” said Stoddard with sudden resolution. “If you don’t mind, Miss Sessions, would you let her come in and talk to me a little while, as soon as she has finished passing the coffee? I–really it seems to me that this is outrageous. Johnnie is a girl of brains and abilities, and we who have her true welfare at heart should see that she doesn’t–in her youth and ignorance–fall into such errors as this.”

“Oh, if you like, I’ll talk to her myself,” said Miss Lydia smoothly. The conversation was not so different from others that she and Stoddard had held concerning this girl’s deserts and welfare. She added, after an instant’s pause, speaking quickly, with heightened colour, and a little nervous catch in her voice, “I’ll do my best. I–I don’t want to speak harshly of John, but I must in truth say that she’s the one among my Uplift Club girls that has been least satisfactory to me.”

“In what way?” inquired Stoddard in an even, quiet tone.

“Well, I should be a little puzzled to put it into words,” Miss Sessions answered him with a deprecating smile; “and yet it’s there–the feeling that John Consadine is–I hate to say it–ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful,” repeated her companion, his eyes steadily on Miss Sessions’s face. “To leave Johnnie Consadine out of the matter entirely, what else do you expect from any of your protegees? What else can any one expect who goes into what the modern world calls charitable work?”

Miss Sessions studied his face in some bewilderment. Was he arraigning her, or sympathizing with her? He said no more. He left upon her the onus of further speech. She must try for the right note.

“I know it,” she fumbled desperately. “And isn’t it disappointing? You do everything you possibly can for people and they seem to dislike you for it.”

“They don’t merely seem to,” said Stoddard, almost brusquely, “they do dislike and despise you, and that most heartily. It is as certain a result as that two and two make four. You have pauperized and degraded them, and they hate you for it.”

Lydia Sessions shrank back on the seat, and stared at him, her hand before her open mouth.

“Why, Mr. Stoddard!” she ejaculated finally. “I thought you were fully in sympathy with my Uplift work. You–you certainly let me think so. If you despised it, as you now say, why did you help me and–and all that?”

Stoddard shook his head.

“No,” he demurred a little wearily. “I don’t despise you, nor your work. As for helping you–I dislike lobster, and yet I conscientiously provide you with it whenever we are where the comestible is served, because I know you like it.”

“Mr. Stoddard,” broke in Lydia tragically, “that is frivolous! These are grave matters, and I thought–oh, I thought certainly–that I was deserving your good opinion in this charitable work if ever I deserved such a thing in my life.”

“Oh–deserved!” repeated Stoddard, almost impatiently. “No doubt you deserve a great deal more than my praise; but you know–do you not?–that people who believe as I do, regard that sort of philanthropy as a barrier to progress; and, really now, I think you ought to admit that under such circumstances I have behaved with great friendliness and self-control.”

The words were spoken with something of the old teasing intonation that had once deluded Lydia Sessions into the faith that she held a relation of some intimacy to this man. She glanced at him fleetingly; then, though she felt utterly at sea, made one more desperate effort.

“But I always went first to you when I was raising money for my Uplift work, and you gave to me more liberally than anybody else. Jerome never approved of it. Hartley grumbled, or laughed at me, and came reluctantly to my little dances and receptions. I sometimes felt that I was going against all my world–except you. I depended upon your approval. I felt that you were in full sympathy with me here, if nowhere else.”

She looked so disproportionately moved by the matter that Stoddard smiled a little.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I see now that I have been taking it for granted all along that you understood the reservation I held in regard to this matter.”

“You–you should have told me plainly,” said Lydia drearily. “It–it gives me a strange feeling to have depended so entirely on you, and then to find out that you were thinking of me all the while as Jerome does.”

“Have I been?” inquired Stoddard. “As Jerome does? What a passion it seems to be with folks to classify their friends. People call me a Socialist, because I am trying to find out what I really do think on certain economic and social subjects. I doubt that I shall ever bring up underneath any precise label, and yet some people would think it egotistical that I insisted upon being a class to myself. I very much doubt that I hold Mr. Hardwick’s opinion exactly in any particular.” He looked at the girl with a sort of urgency which she scarcely comprehended. “Miss Sessions,” he said, “I wear my hair longer than most men, and the barber is always deeply grieved at my obstinacy. I never eat potatoes, and many well-meaning persons are greatly concerned over it–they regard the exclusion of potatoes from one’s dietary as almost criminal. But you–I expect in you more tolerance concerning my peculiarities. Why must you care at all what I think, or what my views are in this matter?”

“Oh, I don’t understand you at all,” Lydia said distressfully.

“No?” agreed Stoddard with an interrogative note in his voice. “But after all there’s no need for people to be so determined to understand each other, is there?”

Lydia looked at him with swimming eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me not to do those things?” she managed finally to say with some composure.

“Tell you not to do things that you had thought out for yourself and decided on?” asked Stoddard. “Oh, no, Miss Sessions. What of your own development? I had no business to interfere like that. You might be exactly right about it, and I wrong, so far as you yourself were concerned. And even if I were right and you wrong, the only chance of growth for you was to exploit the matter and find it out for yourself.”

“I don’t understand a word you say,” Lydia Sessions repeated dully. “That’s the kind of thing you used always to talk when you and I were planning for John Consadine. Development isn’t what a woman wants. She wants–she needs–to understand how to please those she–approves. If she fails anywhere, and those she–well, if somebody that she has–confidence–in tells her, why then she’ll know better next time. You should have told me.”

Her eyes overflowed as she made an end, but Stoddard adopted a tone of determined lightness.

“Dear me,” he said gently. “What reactionary views! You’re out of temper with me this evening–I get on your nerves with my theorizing. Forgive me, and forget all about it.”

Lydia Sessions smiled kindly on her guest, without speaking. But one thing remained to her out of it all. Gray Stoddard thought ill of her work–it carried her further from him, instead of nearer! So many months of effort worse than wasted! At that instant she had sight of Shade Buckheath’s dark face in the entry. She got to her feet.

“I beg your pardon,” she said wanly, “I think there is some one out there that I ought to speak to.”

CHAPTER XVII

A VICTIM

In the spinning room at the Victory Mill, with its tall frames and endlessly turning bobbins, where the languid thread ran from hank to spool and the tired little feet must walk the narrow aisles between the jennies, watching if perchance a filament had broken, a knot caught, or other mischance occurred, and right it, Deanie plodded for what seemed to her many years. Milo and Pony both had work now in another department, and Lissy’s frames were quite across the noisy big room. Whenever the little dark-haired girl could get away from her own task and the eye of the room boss, she ran across to the small, ailing sister and hugged her hard, begging her not to feel bad, not to cry, Sis’ Johnnie was bound to come before long. With the morbidness of a sick child, Deanie came to dread these well-meant assurances, finding them almost as distressing as her own strange, tormenting sensations.

The room was insufferably close, because it had rained and the windows were all tightly shut. The flare of light vitiated the air, heated it, but seemed to the child’s sick sense to illuminate nothing. Sometimes she found herself walking into the machinery and put out a reckless little hand to guard her steps. Sister Johnnie had said she would come and take her away. Sister Johnnie was the Providence that was never known to fail. Deanie kept on doggedly, and tied threads, almost asleep. The room opened and shut like an accordion before her fevered vision; the floor heaved and trembled under her stumbling feet. To lie down–to lie down anywhere and sleep–that was the almost intolerable longing that possessed her. Her mouth was hot and dry. The little white, peaked face, like a new moon, grew strangely luminous in its pallor. Her eyes stung in their sockets–those desolate blue eyes, dark with unshed tears, heavy with sleep.

She had turned her row and started back, when there came before her, so plain that she almost thought she might wet her feet in the clear water, a vision of the spring-branch at home up on Unaka, where she and Lissy used to play. There, among the giant roots of the old oak on its bank, was the house they had built of big stones and bright bits of broken dishes; there lay her home-made doll flung down among gay fallen leaves; a little toad squatted beside it; and near by was the tiny gourd that was their play-house dipper. Oh, for a drink from that spring!

She caught sight of Mandy Meacham passing the door, and ran to her, heedless of consequences.

“Mandy,” she pleaded, taking hold of the woman’s skirts and throwing back her reeling head to stare up into the face above her, “Mandy, Sis’ Johnnie said she’d come; but it’s a awful long time, and I’m scared I’ll fall into some of these here old machines, I feel that bad. Won’t you go tell Sis’ Johnnie I’m waitin’ for her?”

Mandy glanced forward through the weaving-room toward her own silent looms, then down at the little, flushed face at her knee. If she dared to do things, as Johnnie dared, she would pick up the baby and leave. The very thought of it terrified her. No, she must get Johnnie herself. Johnnie would make it right. She bent down and kissed the little thing, whispering:

“Never you mind, honey. Mandy’s going straight and find Sis’ Johnnie, and bring her here to Deanie. Jest wait a minute.”

Then she turned and, swiftly, lest her courage evaporate, hurried down the stair and to the time keeper.

“Ef you’ve got a substitute, you can put ’em on my looms,” she said brusquely. “I’ve got to go down in town.”

“Sick?” inquired Reardon laconically, as he made some entry on a card and dropped it in a drawer beside him.

“No, I ain’t sick–but Deanie Consadine is, and I’m goin’ over in town to find her sister. That child ain’t fitten to be in no mill–let alone workin’ night turn. You men ort to be ashamed–that baby ort to be in her bed this very minute.”

Her voice had faltered a bit at the conclusion. Yet she made an end of it, and hurried away with a choke in her throat. The man stared after her angrily.

“Well!” he ejaculated finally. “She’s got her nerve with her. Old Himes is that gal’s stepdaddy. I reckon he knows whether she’s fit to work in the mills or not–he hired her here. Bob, ain’t Himes down in the basement right now settin’ up new machines? You go down there and name this business to him. See what he’s got to say.”

A party of young fellows was tramping down the village street singing. One of them carried a guitar and struck, now and again, a random chord upon its strings. The street was dark, but as the singers, stepping rythmically, passed the open door of the store, Mandy recognized a shape she knew.

“Shade–Shade Buckheath! Wait thar!” she called to him.

The others lingered, too, a moment, till they saw it was a girl following; then they turned and sauntered slowly on, still singing:

“Ef I was a little bird, I’d nest in the tallest tree, That leans over the waters of the beautiful Tennessee.”

The words came back to Buckheath and Mandy in velvety bass and boyish tenor.

“Shade–whar’s Johnnie?” panted Mandy, shaking him by the arm. “I been up to the house, and she ain’t thar. Pap ain’t thar, neither. I was skeered to name my business to Laurelly; Aunt Mavity ain’t no help and, and–Shade–whar’s Johnnie?” Buckheath looked down into her working, tragic face and his mouth hardened.

“She ain’t at home,” he said finally. “I’ve been at Himes’s all evening. Pap and me has a–er, a little business on hand and–she ain’t at home. They told me that they was some sort of shindig at Mr. Hardwick’s to-night. I reckon Johnnie Consadine is chasin’ round after her tony friends. Pap said she left the house a-goin’ in that direction–or Mavity told me, I disremember which. I reckon you’ll find her thar. What do you want of her?”

“It’s Deanie.” She glanced fearfully past his shoulder to where the big clock on the grocery wall showed through its dim window. It was half-past ten. The lateness of the hour seemed to strike her with fresh terror, “Shade, come along of me,” she pleaded. “I’m so skeered. I never shall have the heart to go in and ax for Johnnie, this time o’ night at that thar fine house. How she can talk up to them swell people like she does is more than I know. You go with me and ax is she thar.”

The group of young men had crossed the bridge and were well on their way to the Inn. Buckheath glanced after them doubtfully and turned to walk at Mandy’s side. When they came to the gate, the woman hung back, whimpering at sight of the festal array, and sound of the voices within.

“They’ve got a party,” she deprecated. “My old dress is jest as dirty as the floor. You go ax ’em, Shade.”

As she spoke, Johnnie, carrying a tray of cups and saucers, passed a lighted window, and Buckheath uttered a sudden, unpremeditated oath.

“I don’t know what God Almighty means makin’ women such fools,” he growled. “What call had Johnnie Consadine got to come here and act the servant for them rich folks?–runnin’ around after Gray Stoddard–and much good may it do her!”

Mandy crowded herself back into the shadow of the dripping evergreens, and Shade went boldly up on the side porch. She saw the door opened and her escort admitted; then through the glass was aware of Lydia Sessions in an evening frock coming into the small entry and conferring at length with him.

Her attention was diverted from them by the appearance of Johnnie herself just inside a window. She ran forward and tapped on the pane. Johnnie put down her tray and came swiftly out, passing Shade and Miss Sessions in the side entry with a word.

“What is it?” she inquired of Mandy, with a premonition of disaster in her tones.

“Hit’s Deanie,” choked the Meacham woman. “She’s right sick, and they won’t let her leave the mill–leastways she’s skeered to ask, and so am I. I ‘lowed I ought to come and tell you, Johnnie. Was that right? You wanted me to, didn’t you?” anxiously.

“Yes–yes–yes!” cried Johnnie, reaching up swift, nervous fingers to unfasten the cap from her hair, thrusting it in the pocket of the apron, and untying the apron strings. “Wait a minute. I must give these things back. Oh, let’s hurry!”

It was but a moment after that she emerged once more on the porch, and apparently for the first time noticed Buckheath.

“To-morrow, then,” Miss Sessions was saying to him as he moved toward the two girls. “To-morrow morning.” And with a patronizing nod to them all, she withdrew and rejoined her guests.

“I never found you when I went up to the house,” explained Mandy nervously, “and so I stopped Shade on the street and axed him would he come along with me. Maybe it would do some good if he was to go up with us to the mill. They pay more attention to a man person. I tell you, Johnnie, the baby’s plumb broke down and sick.”

The three were moving swiftly along the darkened street now.

“I’m going to take the children away from Pap,” Johnnie said in a curious voice, rapid and monotonous, as though she were reciting something to herself. “I have obliged to do it. There must be a law somewhere. God won’t let me fail.”

“Huh-uh,” grunted Buckheath, instantly. “You can’t do such a thing. Ef you was married, and yo’ mother would let you adopt ’em, I reckon the courts might agree to that.”

“Shade,” Johnnie turned upon him, “you’ve got more influence with Pap Himes than anybody. I believe if you’d talk to him, he’d let me have the children. I could support them now.”

“I don’t want to fall out with Pap Himes–for nothing” responded Shade. “If you’ll say that you’ll wed me to-morrow morning, I’ll go to Pap and get him to give up the children.” Neither of them paid any attention to Mandy, who listened open-eyed and open-eared to this singular courtship. “Or I’ll get him to take ’em out of the mill. You’re right, I ain’t got a bit of doubt I could do it. And if I don’t do it, you needn’t have me.”

An illumination fell upon Johnnie’s mind. She saw that Buckheath was in league with her stepfather, and that the pressure was put on according to the younger man’s ideas, and would be instantly withdrawn at his bidding. Yet, when the swift revulsion such knowledge brought with it made her ready to dismiss him at once, thought of Deanie’s wasted little countenance, with the red burning high on the sharp, unchildish cheekbone, stayed her. For a while she walked with bent head. Heavily before her mind’s eye went the picture of Gray Stoddard among his own people, in his own world–where she could never come.

“Have it your way,” she said finally in a suffering voice.

“What’s that you say? Are you goin’ to take me?” demanded Buckheath, pressing close and reaching out a possessive arm to put around her.

“I said yes,” Johnnie shivered, pushing his hand away; “but–but it’ll only be when you can come to me and tell me that the children are all right. If you fail me there, I–“

Back at the Victory, downstairs went Reardon’s messenger to where Pap Himes was sweating over the new machinery. Work always put the old man in a sort of incandescent fury, and now as Bob spoke to him, he raised an inflamed face, from which the small eyes twinkled redly, with a grunt of inquiry.

“That youngest gal o’ yours,” the man repeated. “She’s tryin’ to leave her job and go home. Reardon said tell you, an’ see what you had to say. The Lord knows we have trouble enough with those young ‘uns. I’m glad when any of their folks that’s got sand is around to make ’em behave. I reckon she can’t come it over you, Gid.”

Himes straightened up with a groan, under any exertion his rheumatic old back always punished him cruelly for the days of indolence that had let its suppleness depart.

“Huh?” he grunted. “Whar’s she at? Up in the spinnin’ room? Well, is they enough of you up thar to keep her tendin’ to business for a spell, till I can get this thing levelled?” He held to the mechanism he was adjusting and harangued wheezily from behind it. “I cain’t drop my job an’ canter upstairs every time one o’ you fellers whistles. The chap ain’t more’n two foot long. Looks like you-all might hold on to her for one while–I’ll be thar soon as I can–’bout a hour”; and he returned savagely to his work.

When Mandy left her, Deanie tried for a time to tend her frames; but the endlessly turning spools, the edges of the jennies, blurred before her fevered eyes. Everything–even her fear of Pap Himes, her dread of the room boss–finally became vague in her mind. More and more she dreaded little Lissy’s well-meant visitations; and after nearly an hour she stole toward the door, looking half deliriously for Sister Johnnie. Nobody noticed in the noisy, flaring room that spool after spool on her frame fouled its thread and ceased turning, as the little figure left its post and hesitated like a scared, small animal toward the main exit. Pap Himes, having come to where he could leave his work in the basement, climbed painfully the many stairs to the spinning room, and met her close to where the big belt rose up to the great shaft that gave power to every machine in that department.

The loving master of the big yellow cat had always cherished a somewhat clumsily concealed dislike and hostility to Deanie. Perhaps there lingered in this a touch of half-jealousy of his wife’s baby; perhaps he knew instinctively that Johnnie’s rebellion against his tyranny was always strongest where Deanie was concerned.

“Why ain’t you on your job?” he inquired threateningly, as the child saw him and made some futile attempt to shrink back out of his way.

“I feel so quare, Pap Himes,” the little girl answered him, beginning to cry. “I thes’ want to lay down and go to sleep every minute.”

“Huh!” Pap exploded his favourite expletive till it sounded ferocious, “That ain’t quare feelin’s. That’s just plain old-fashioned laziness. You git yo’self back thar and tend them frames, or I’ll–“

“I cain’t! I cain’t see ’em to tend! I’m right blind in the eyes!” wailed Deanie. “I wish Sis’ Johnnie would come. I wish’t she would!”

“Uh-huh,” commented Bob Conley, who had strolled up in the old man’s wake. “Reckon Sis’ Johnnie would run things to suit her an’ you, Himes, you can cuss me out good an’ plenty, but I take notice you seem to have trouble makin’ your own family mind.”

“You shut your head,” growled Pap.

Reardon had added himself to the spectators.

“See here,” the foreman argued, “if you say there’s nothing the matter with that gal, an’ she carries on till we have to let her go home, she goes for good. I’ll take her frames away from her.”

Pap felt that a formidable show of authority must be made.

“Git back thar!” he roared, advancing upon the child, raising the hand that still held the wrench with which he had been working on the machinery down stairs. “Git back thar, or I’ll make you wish you had. When I tell you to do a thing, don’t you name Johnnie to me. Git back thar!”

With a faint cry the child cowered away from him. It is unlikely he would have struck her with the upraised tool he held. Perhaps he did not intend a blow at all, but one or two small frame tenders paused at the ends of their lanes to watch the scene with avid eyes, to extract the last thrill from the sensation that was being kindly brought into the midst of their monotonous toilsome hours; and Lissy, who was creeping up anxiously, yet keeping out of the range of Himes’s eye, crouched as though the hammer had been raised over her own head.

“Johnnie said–” began the little girl, desperately; but the old man, stung to greater fury, sprang at her; she stumbled back and back; fell against the slowly moving belt; her frock caught in the rivets which were just passing, and she was instantly jerked from her feet. If any one of the three men looking on had taken prompt action, the child might have been rescued at once; but stupid terror held them motionless.

At the moment Johnnie, Shade and Mandy, coming up the stairs, got sight of the group, Pap with upraised hammer, the child in the clutches of imminent death.

With shrill outcries the other juvenile workers swiftly gathered in a crowd. One broke away and fled down the long room screaming.

“You Pony Consadine! Milo! Come here. Pap Himes is a-killing yo’ sister.”

The old man, shaking all through his bulk, stared with fallen jaw. Mandy shrieked and leaped up the few remaining steps to reach Deanie, who was already above the finger-tips of a tall man.

“Pap! Shade! Quick! Don’t you see she’ll be killed!” Mandy screamed in frenzy.

Something in the atmosphere must have made itself felt, for no sound could have penetrated the din of the weaving room; yet some of the women left their looms and came running in behind the two pale, scared little brothers, to add their shrieks to the general clamour. Deanie’s fellow workers, poor little souls, denied their childish share of the world’s excitements, gazed with a sort of awful relish. Only Johnnie, speeding down the room away from it all, was doing anything rational to avert the catastrophe. The child hung on the slowly moving belt, inert, a tiny rag of life, with her mop of tangled yellow curls, her white, little face, its blue eyes closed. When she reached the top, where the pulley was close against the ceiling, her brains would be dashed out and the small body dragged to pieces between beam and ceiling.

Those who looked at her realized this. Numbed by the inevitable, they made no effort, save Milo, who at imminent risk of his own life, was climbing on a frame near at hand; but Pony flew at Himes, beating the old man with hard-clenched, inadequate fists, and screaming.

“You git her down from thar–git her down this minute! She’ll be killed, I tell ye! She’ll be killed, I tell ye!”

Poor Mandy made inarticulate moanings and reached up her arms; Shade Buckheath cursed softly under his breath; the women and children stared, eager to lose no detail.

“I always have said, and I always shall say, that chaps as young as that ain’t got no business around whar machinery’s at!” Bob Conley kept shouting over and over in a high, strange, mechanical voice, plainly quite unconscious that he spoke at all.

The child was so near the ceiling now that a universal groan proceeded from the watchers. Then, all at once the belt ceased to move, and the clash and tumult were stilled. Johnnie, who had flown to the little controlling wheel to throw off the power, came running back, crying out in the sudden quiet.

“Shade–quick–get a ladder! Hold something under there! She might–Oh, my God!” for Deanie’s frock had pulled free and the little form hurled down before Johnnie could reach them. But the devoted Mandy was there, her futile, inadequate skirts upheld. Into them the small body dropped, and together the two came to the floor with a dull sort of crunch.

When Johnnie reached the prostrate pair, Mandy was struggling to her knees, gasping; but Deanie lay twisted just as she had fallen, the little face sunken and deathly, a tiny trickle of blood coming from a corner of her parted lips.

“Oh, my baby! Oh, my baby! They’ve killed my baby! Deanie–Deanie–Deanie–!” wailed Mandy.

Johnnie was on her knees beside the child, feeling her over with tremulous hands. Her face was bleached chalk-white, and her eyes stared fearfully at the motionless lips of the little one, from which that scarlet stream trickled; but she set her own lips silently.

“Thar–right thar in the side,” groaned Mandy. “She’s all staved in on the side that–my pore little Deanie! Oh, I tried to ketch her, but she broke right through and pulled my skirts out of my hand and hit the floor.”

Pap had drawn nearer on shaking limbs; the children crowded so close that Johnnie looked up and motioned them back.

“Shade–you run for a doctor, and have a carriage fetched,” she ordered briefly.

“Is–Lord God, is she dead?” faltered the old man.

“Ef she ain’t dead now, she’ll die,” Mandy answered him shrilly. “They ain’t no flesh on her–she’s run down to a pore little skeleton. That’s what the factories does to women and children–they jest eats ’em up, and spits out they’ bones.”

“Well, I never aimed to skeer her that-a-way,” said Himes; “but the little fool–“

Johnnie’s flaming glance silenced him, and his voice died away, a sort of a rasp in his throat. Mechanically he glanced up to the point on the great belt from which the child had fallen, and measured the distance to the floor. He scratched his bald head dubiously, and edged back from the tragedy he had made.

“Everybody knows I never hit her,” he muttered as he went.

CHAPTER XVIII

LIGHT

Gray Stoddard’s eyes had followed Lydia Sessions when she went into the hall to speak to Shade Buckheath. He had a glimpse of Johnnie, too, in the passage; he noted that she later left the house with Buckheath (Mandy Meacham was beyond his range of vision); and the pang that went through him at the sight was a strangely mingled one.

The talk between him and his hostess had been enlightening to both of them. It showed Lydia Sessions not only where she stood with Gray, but it brought home to her startlingly, and as nothing had yet done, the strength of Johnnie’s hold upon him; while it forced Gray himself to realize that ever since that morning when he met the girl on the bridge going to put her little brothers and sisters in the Victory mill, he had behaved more like a sulky, disappointed lover than a staunch friend. He confessed frankly to himself, that, had Johnnie been a boy, a young man, instead of a beautiful and appealing woman, he would have been prompt to go to her and remonstrate–he would have made no bones of having the matter out clearly and fully. He blamed himself much for the estrangement which he had allowed to grow between them. He knew instinctively about what Shade Buckheath was–certainly no fit mate for Johnnie Consadine. And for the better to desert her–poor, helpless, unschooled girl–could only operate to push her toward the worse. These thoughts kept Stoddard wakeful company till almost morning.

Dawn came with a soft wind out of the west, all the odours of spring on its breath, and a penitent warmth to apologize for last night’s storm. Stoddard faced his day, and decided that he would begin it with an early-morning horseback ride. He called up his stable boy over the telephone, and when Jim brought round Roan Sultan saddled there was a pause, as of custom, for conversation.

“Heared about the accident over to the Victory, Mr. Stoddard?” Jim inquired.

“No,” said Gray, wheeling sharply. “Anybody hurt?”

“One o’ Pap Himes’s stepchildren mighty near killed, they say,” the boy told him. “I seen Miss Johnnie Consadine when they was bringing the little gal down. It seems they sent for her over to Mr. Hardwickses where she was at.”

Gray mounted quickly, settled himself in the saddle, and glanced down the street which would lead him past Himes’s place. For months now, he had been instinctively avoiding that part of town. Poor Johnnie! She might be a disappointing character, but he knew well that she was full of love; he remembered her eyes when, nearly a year ago, up in the mist and sweetness of April on the Unakas, she had told him of the baby sister and the other little ones. She must be suffering now. Almost without reflection he turned his horse’s head and rode toward the forlorn Himes boarding-house.

As he drew near, he noticed a huddled figure at the head of the steps, and coming up made it out to be Himes himself, sitting, elbows on knees, staring straight ahead of him. Pap had not undressed at all, but he had taken out his false teeth “to rest his jaws a spell,” as he was in the habit of doing, and the result was startling. His cheeks were fallen in to such an extent that the blinking red eyes above looked larger; it was as though the old rascal’s crimes of callous selfishness and greed had suddenly aged him.

Stoddard pulled in his horse at the foot of the steps.

“I hear one of the little girls was hurt in the mill last night. Was she badly injured? Which one was it?” he asked abruptly.

“Hit’s Deanie. She’s all right,” mumbled Pap. “Got the whole house uptore, and Laurelly miscallin’ me till I don’t know which way to look; and now the little dickens is a-goin’ to git well all right. Chaps is tough, I tell ye. Ye cain’t kill ’em.”

“You people must have thought so,” said Stoddard, “or you wouldn’t have brought these little ones down and hired them to the cotton mill. Johnnie knew what that meant.”

The words had come almost involuntarily. The old man stared at the speaker breathing hard.

“What’s Johnnie Consadine got to do with it?” he inquired finally. “I’m the stepdaddy of the children–and Johnnie’s stepdaddy too, for the matter of that–and what I say goes.”

“Did you hire the children at the Victory?” inquired Stoddard, swiftly. Back across his memory came the picture of Johnnie with her poor little sheep for the shambles clustered about her on the bridge before the Victory mill. “Did you hire the children to the factory?” he repeated.

“Now Mr. Stoddard,” began the old man, between bluster and whine, “I talked about them chaps to the superintendent of yo’ mill, an’ you-all said you didn’t want none of that size. And one o’ yo’ men–he was a room boss, I reckon–spoke up right sassy to me–as sassy as Johnnie Consadine herself, and God knows she ain’t got no respect for them that’s set over her. I had obliged to let ’em go to the Victory; but I don’t think you have any call to hold it ag’in me–Johnnie was plumb impident about it–plumb impident.”

Stoddard glanced up at the windows and made as though to dismount. All night at his pillow had stood the accusation that he had been cruel to Johnnie. Now, as Himes’s revelations went on, and he saw what her futile efforts had been, as he guessed a part of her sufferings, it seemed he must hurry to her and brush away the tangle of misunderstanding which he had allowed to grow up between them.

“They’ve worked over that thar chap, off an’ on, all night,” the old man said. “Looks like, if they keep hit up, she’ll begin to think somethin’s the matter of her.”

Gray realized that his visit at this moment would be ill-timed. He would ride on through the Gap now, and call as he came back.

“I had obliged to find me a place whar I could hire out them chaps,” the miserable old man before him went on, garrulously. “They’s nothin’ like mill work to take the davilment out o’ young ‘uns. Some of them chaps’ll call you names and make faces at you, even whilst you’ goin’ through the mill yard–and think what they’d be ef they _wasn’t_ worked! I’m a old man, and when I married Laurelly and took the keepin’ o’ her passel o’ chaps on my back, I aimed to make it pay. Laurelly, she won’t work.”

He looked helplessly at Stoddard, like a child about to cry.

“She told me up and down that she never had worked in no mill, and she was too old to l’arn. She said the noise of the thing from the outside was enough to show her that she didn’t want to go inside–and go she would not.”

“But she let her children go–she and Johnnie,” muttered Stoddard, settling himself in his saddle.

“Well, I’d like to see either of ’em he’p theirselves!” returned Pap Himes with a reminiscence of his former manner. “Johnnie ain’t had the decency to give me her wages, not once since I’ve been her pappy; the onliest money I ever had from her–‘ceptin’ to pay her board–was when she tried to buy them chaps out o’ workin’ in the mill. But when I put my foot down an’ told her that the chillen could work in the mill without a beatin’ or with one, jest as she might see and choose, she had a little sense, and took ’em over and hired ’em herself. Baylor told me afterward that she tried to make him say he didn’t want ’em, but Baylor and me stands together, an’ Miss Johnnie failed up on that trick.”

Pap felt an altogether misplaced confidence in the view that Stoddard, as a male, was likely to take of the matter.

“A man is obliged to be boss of his own family–ain’t that so, Mr. Stoddard?” he demanded. “I said the chillen had to go into the mill, and into the mill they went. They all wanted to go, at the start, and Laurelly agreed with me that hit was the right thing. Then, just because Deanie happened to a accident and Johnnie took up for her, Laurelly has to go off into hy-strikes and say she’ll quit me soon as she can put foot to the ground.”

Stoddard made no response to this, but touched Sultan with his heel and moved on. He had stopped at the post-office as he came past, taking from his personal box one letter. This he opened and read as he rode slowly away. Halfway up the first rise, Pap saw him rein in and turn; the old man was still staring when Gray stopped once more at the gate.

“See here, Himes,” he spoke abruptly, “this concerns you–this letter that has just reached me.”

Pap looked at the younger man with mere curiosity.

“When Johnnie was first given a spinning room to look after,” said Gray, “she came to Mr. Sessions and myself and asked permission to have a small device of her own contrivance used on the frames as an Indicator.”

Pap shuffled his feet uneasily.

“I thought no more about the matter; in fact I’ve not been in the spinning department for–for some time.” Stoddard looked down at the hand which held his bridle, and remembered that he had absented himself from every place that threatened him with the sight of Johnnie.

Pap was breathing audibly through his open mouth.

“She–she never had nothin’ made,” he whispered out the ready lie hurriedly, scrambling to his feet and down the steps, pressing close to Roan Sultan’s shoulder, laying a wheedling hand on the bridle, looking up anxiously into the stern young face above him.

“Oh, yes, she did,” Stoddard returned. “I remember, now, hearing some of the children from the room say that she had a device which worked well. From the description they gave of it, I judge that it is the same which this letter tells me you and Buckheath are offering to the Alabama mills. Mr. Trumbull, the superintendent, says that you and Buckheath hold the patent for this Indicator jointly. As soon as I can consult with Johnnie, we will see about the matter.”

Himes let go the roan’s bridle and staggered back a pace or two, open-mouthed, staring. The skies had fallen. His heavy mind turned slowly toward resentment against Buckheath. He wished the younger conspirator were here to take his share. Then the door opened and Shade himself came out wiping his mouth. He was fresh from the breakfast table, but not on his way to the mill, since it was still too early. He gave Stoddard a surly nod as he passed through the gate and on down the street, in the direction of the Inn. Himes, in a turmoil of stupid uncertainty, once or twice made as though to detain him. His slow wits refused him any available counsel. Dazedly he fumbled for something convincing to say. Then on a sudden inspiration, he once more laid hold of the bridle and began to speak volubly in a hoarse undertone:

“W’y, name o’ God, Mr. Stoddard! Who should have a better right to that thar patent than Buck and me? I’m the gal’s stepdaddy, an’ he’s the man she’s goin’ to wed.”

Some peculiar quality in the silence of Gray Stoddard seemed finally to penetrate the old fellow’s understanding. He looked up to find the man on horseback regarding him, square-jawed, pale, and with eyes angrily bright. He glanced over his shoulder at the windows of the house behind him, moistened his lips once again, gulped, and finally resumed in a manner both whining and aggressive.

“Now, Mr. Stoddard, I want to talk to you mighty plain. The whole o’ Cottonville is full o’ tales about you and Johnnie. Yes–that’s the truth.”

He stood staring down at his big, shuffling feet, laboriously sorting in his own mind such phrases as it might do to use. The difficulty of what he had to say blocked speech for so long that Stoddard, in a curiously quiet voice, finally prompted him.

“Tales?” he repeated. “What tales, Mr. Himes?”

“Why, they ain’t a old woman in town, nor a young one neither–I believe in my soul that the young ones is the worst–that ain’t been talkin’–talkin’ bad–ever since you took Johnnie to ride in your otty-mobile.”

Again there came a long pause. Stoddard stared down on Gideon Himes, and Himes stared at his own feet.

“Well?” Stoddard’s quiet voice once more urged his accuser forward.

Pap rolled his head between his shoulders with a negative motion which intimated that it was not well.

“And lending her books, and all sich,” he pursued doggedly. “That kind o’ carryin’ on ain’t decent, and you know it ain’t. Buck knows it ain’t–but he’s willin’ to have her. He told her he was willin’ to have her, and the fool gal let on like she didn’t want him. He came here to board at my house because she wouldn’t scarcely so much as speak to him elsewhere.”

By the light of these statements Stoddard read what poor Johnnie’s persecution had been. The details of it he could not, of course, know; yet he saw in that moment largely how she had been harried. At the instant of seeing, came that swift and mighty revulsion that follows surely when we have misprized and misunderstood those dear to us.

“What is it you want of me?” he inquired of Himes.

“Why, just this here,” Pap told him. “You let Johnnie Consadine alone.” He leaned even closer and spoke in a yet lower tone, because a number of girls were emerging from the house and starting down the steps. “A big, rich feller like you don’t mean any good by a girl fixed the way Johnnie is. You wouldn’t marry her–then let her alone. Things ain’t got so bad but what Buck is still willin’ to have her. You wouldn’t marry her.”

Stoddard looked down at the shameful old man with eyes that were indecipherable. If the impulse was strong in him to twist the unclean old throat against any further ill-speaking, it gave no heat to the tone in which he answered:

“It’s you and your kind that say I mean harm to Johnnie, and that I would not marry her. Why should I intend ill toward her? Why shouldn’t I marry her? I would–I would marry her.”

As he made this, to him the only possible defence of the poor girl, Pap faltered slowly back, uttering a gurgling expression of astonishment. With a sense of surprise Stoddard saw in his face only dismay and chagrin.

“Hit–hit’s a lie,” Himes mumbled half-heartedly. “Ye’d never do it in the world.”

Stoddard gathered up his bridle rein, preparatory to moving on.

“You’re an old man, Mr. Himes,” he said coldly, “and you are excited; but you don’t want to say any more–that’s quite enough of that sort of thing.”

Then he loosened the rein on Roan Sultan, and moved away down the street.

Gideon Himes stood and gazed after him with bulging eyes. Gray Stoddard married to Johnnie! He tried to adjust his dull wits to the new position of affairs; tried to cipher the problem with this amazing new element introduced. Last night’s scene of violence when the injured child was brought home went dismally before his eyes. Laurella had said she would leave him so soon as she could put foot to the floor. He had expected to coax her with gifts and money, with concessions in regard to the children if it must be; but with a rich man for a son-in-law, of course she would go. He would never see her face again. And suddenly he flung up an arm like a beaten schoolboy and began to blubbler noisily in the crook of his elbow.

An ungentle hand on his shoulder recalled him to time and place.

“For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” inquired Shade Buckheath’s voice harshly.

The old man gulped down his grief and made his communication in a few hurried sentences.

“An’ he’ll do it,” Pap concluded. “He’s jest big enough fool for anything. Ain’t you heard of his scheme for having the hands make the money in the mill?” (Thus he described a profit-sharing plan.) “Don’t you know he’s given ten thousand dollars to start up some sort o’ school for the boys and gals to learn their trade in? A man like that’ll do anything. And if he marries Johnnie, Laurelly’ll leave me sure.”

“Leave you!” echoed Buckheath darkly. “She won’t have to. If Gray Stoddard marries Johnnie Consadine, you and me will just about roost in the penitentiary for the rest of our days.”

“The patent!” echoed Pap blankly. He turned fiercely on his fellow conspirator. “Now see what ye done with yer foolishness,” he exclaimed. “Nothin’ would do ye but to be offerin’ the contraption for sale, and tellin’ each and every that hit’d been used in the Hardwick mill. Look what a mess ye’ve made. I’m sorry I ever hitched up with ye. Boy o’ yo’ age has got no sense.”

“How was I to know they’d write to Stoddard?” growled Shade sulkily. “No harm did if hit wasn’t for him. We’ve got the patent all right, and Johnnie cain’t help herself. But him–with all his money–he can help her–damn him!”

“Yes, and he’ll take a holt and hunt up about Pros’s silver mine, too,” said Himes. “I’ve always mistrusted the way he’s been hangin’ round Pros Passmore. Like enough he’s hearn of that silver mine, and that’s the reason he’s after Johnnie.”

The old man paused to ruminate on this feature of the case. He was pleased with his own shrewdness in fathoming Gray Stoddard’s mysterious motives.

“Buck,” he said finally, with a swift drop to friendliness, “hit’s got to be stopped. Can you stop it?

“Didn’t you tell me that Johnnie promised last night to wed you? Didn’t you say she promised it, when you was goin’ up to the Victory with her?”

Shade nodded.

“She promised she would if I’d get you to let the children stay out of the mill. Deanie’s hurt now, and you’re afraid to make the others go back in the mill anyhow, ‘count of Laurelly’s tongue. I can’t hold Johnnie to that promise. But–but there’s one person I want to talk to about this business, and then I’ll be ready to do something.”

CHAPTER XIX

A PACT

While Himes and Buckheath yet stood thus talking, the warning whistles of the various mills began to blow. Groups of girls came down the steps and stared at the two men conferring with heads close together. Mavity Bence put her face out at the front door and called.

“Pap, yo’ breakfast is gettin’ stone cold.”

“Do you have to go to the mill right now?” inquired the older man, timorously. He was already under the domination of this swifter, bolder, more fiery spirit.

“No, I don’t have to go anywhere that I don’t want to. I’ve got business with a certain party up this-a-way, and when I git to the mill I’ll be there.”

He turned and hurried swiftly up the minor slope that led to the big Hardwick home, Pap’s fascinated eyes following him as long as he was in sight. As the young fellow strode along he was turning in his mind Lydia Sessions’s promise to talk to him this morning about Johnnie.

“But she’ll be in bed and asleep, I reckon, at this time of day,” he ruminated. “The good Lord knows I would if I had the chance like she has.”

As he came in sight of the Hardwick house, he checked momentarily. Standing at the gate, an astonishing figure, still in her evening frock, looking haggard and old in the gray, disillusioning light of early morning, was Lydia Sessions. Upstairs, her white bed was smooth; its pillows spread fair and prim, unpressed by any head, since the maid had settled them trimly in place the morning before; but the long rug which ran from her dressing table to the window might have told a tale of pacing feet that passed restlessly from midnight till dawn; the mirror could have disclosed the picture of a white, anxious, and often angry face that had stared into it as the woman paused now and again to commune with the real Lydia Sessions.

She was thirty and penniless. She belonged to a circle where everybody had money. Her sister had married well, and Harriet was no better-looking than she. All Lydia Sessions’s considerable forces were by heredity and training turned into one narrow channel–the effort to make a creditable, if not a brilliant, match. And she had thought she was succeeding. Gray Stoddard had seemed seriously interested. In those long night watches while the lights flared on either side of her mirror, and the luxurious room of a modern young lady lay disclosed, with all its sumptuous fittings of beauty and inutility, Lydia went over her plans of campaign. She was a suitable match for him–anybody would say so. He had liked her–he had liked her well enough–till he got interested in this mill girl. They had never agreed on anything concerning Johnnie Consadine. If that element were eliminated to-morrow, she knew she could go back and pick up the thread of their intimacy which had promised so well, and, she doubted not at all, twist it safely into a marriage-knot. If Johnnie were only out of the way. If she would leave Cottonville. If she would marry that good-looking mechanic who plainly wanted her. How silly of her not to take him!

Toward dawn, she snatched a little cape from the garments hanging in the closet, flung it over her shoulders and ran downstairs. She must have a breath of fresh air. So, in the manner of helpless creatures who cannot go out in the highway to accost fate, she was standing at the gate when she caught sight of Shade Buckheath approaching. Here was her opportunity. She must be doing something, and the nearest enterprise at hand was to foster and encourage this young fellow’s pursuit of Johnnie.

“I wanted to talk to you about a very particular matter,” she broke out nervously, as soon as Buckheath was near enough to be addressed in the carefully lowered tone which she used throughout the interview. She continually huddled the light cape together at the neck with tremulous, unsteady fingers; and it was characteristic of these two that, although the woman had heard of the calamity at the Victory mill the night before, and knew that Shade came directly from the Himes home, she made no inquiry as to the welfare of Deanie, and he offered no information. He gave no reply in words to her accost, and she went on, with increasing agitation.

“I–this matter ought to be attended to at once. Something’s got to be done. I’ve attempted to improve the social and spiritual conditions of these girls in the mill, and if I’ve only worked harm by bringing them in contact with–in contact with–“

She hesitated and stood looking into the man’s face. Buckheath knew exactly what she wished to say. He was impatient of the flummery she found it necessary to wind around her simple proposition; but he was used to women, he understood them; and to him a woman of Miss Sessions’s class was no different from a woman of his own.

“I reckon you wanted to name it to me about Johnnie Consadine,” he said bluntly.

“Yes–yes, that was it,” breathed Lydia Sessions, glancing back toward the house with a frightened air. “John is–she’s a good girl, Mr. Buckheath; I beg of you to believe me when I assure you that John is a good, honest, upright girl. I would not think anything else for a minute; but it seems to me that somebody has to do something, or–or–“

Shade raised his hand to his mouth to conceal the swift, sarcastic smile on his lips. He spat toward the pathside before agreeing seriously with Miss Lydia.

“Her and me was promised, before she come down here and got all this foolishness into her head,” he said finally. “Her mother never could do anything with Johnnie. Looks like Johnnie’s got more authority–her mother’s more like a little girl to her than the other way round. Her uncle Pros has been crazy in the hospital, and Pap Himes, her stepfather–well, I reckon she’s the only human that ever had to mind Pap and didn’t do it.”

This somewhat ambiguous statement of the case failed to bring any smile to his hearer’s lips.

“There’s no use talking to John herself,” Miss Lydia took up the tale feverishly. “I’ve done that, and it had no effect on–. Well, of course she would say that she didn’t encourage him to the things I saw afterward; but I know that a man of his sort does not do things without encouragement, and–Mr. Buckheath don’t you think you ought to go right to Mr. Stoddard and tell him that John is your promised wife, and show him the folly and–and the wickedness of his course–or what would be wickedness if he persisted in it? Don’t you think you ought to do that?”

Shade held down his head and appeared to be giving this matter some consideration. The weak point of such an argument lay in the fact that Johnnie was not his promised wife, and Gray Stoddard was very likely to know it. Indeed, Lydia Sessions herself only believed the statement because she so wished.

“I reckon I ort,” he said finally. “If I could ever get a chance of private speech with him, mebbe I’d–“

There came a sound of light hoofs down the road, and Stoddard on Roan Sultan, riding bareheaded, came toward them under the trees.

Miss Sessions clutched the gate and stood staring. Buckheath drew a little closer, set his shoulder against the fence and tried to look unconcerned. The rising sun behind the mountains threw long slant rays across into the bare tree tops, so that the shimmer of it dappled horse and man. Gray’s face was pale, his brow looked anxious; but he rode head up and alert, and glanced with surprise at the two at the Sessions gate. He had no hat to raise, but he saluted Lydia Sessions with a sweeping gesture of the hand and passed on. A blithe, gallant figure cantering along the suburban road, out toward the Gap, and the mountains beyond, Gray Stoddard rode into the dip of the ridge and–so far as Cottonville was concerned–vanished utterly.

Buckheath drew a long breath and straightened up.

“I’m but a poor man,” he began truculently, “yit there ain’t nobody can marry the gal I set out to wed and me stand by and say nothing.”

“Oh, Mr. Buckheath!” cried Miss Lydia. “Mr. Stoddard had no idea of _marrying_ John–a mill girl! There is no possibility of any such thing as that. I want you to understand that there isn’t–to feel assured, once for all. I have reason to know, and I urge you to put that out of your mind.”

Shade looked at her narrowly. Up to the time Pap gave him definite information from headquarters, he had never for an instant supposed that there was a possibility of Stoddard desiring to marry Johnnie; but the flurried eagerness of Miss Sessions convinced him that such a possibility was a very present dread with her, and he sent a venomous glance after the disappearing horseman.

“You go and talk to him right now, Mr. Buckheath,” insisted Lydia anxiously. “Tell him, just as you have told me, how long you and John have been engaged, and how devoted she was to you before she came down to the mill. You appeal to him that way. You can overtake him–I mean you can intercept him–if you start right on now–cut across the turn, and go through the tunnel.”

“If I go after him to talk to him, and we–uh–we have an interruption–are you going to tell everybody you see about it?” demanded Shade sharply, staring down at the woman.

She crouched a little, still clinging to the pickets of the gate. The word “interruption” only conveyed to her mind the suggestion that they might be interfered with in their conversation. She did not recollect the mountain use of it to describe a quarrel, an outbreak, or an affray.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh, certainly not–I’ll never tell anything that you don’t want me to.”

“All right,” returned Buckheath hardily. “If you won’t, I won’t. If you name to people that I was the last one saw with Mr. Stoddard, I shall have obliged to tell ’em of what you and me was talkin’ about when he passed us. You see that, don’t you?”

She nodded silently, her frightened eyes on his face; and without another word he set off at that long, swinging pace which belongs to his people. Lydia turned and ran swiftly into the house, and up the stairs to her own room.

CHAPTER XX

MISSING

When Stoddard did not come to his desk that morning the matter remained for a time unnoticed, except by McPherson, who fretted a bit at so unusual a happening. Truth to tell, the old Scotchman had dreaded having this rich young man for an associate, and had put a rod in pickle for his chastisement. When Stoddard turned out to be a regular worker, punctual, amenable to discipline, he congratulated himself, and praised his assistant, but warily. Now came the first delinquency, and in his heart he cared more that Stoddard should absent himself without notice than for the pile of letters lying untouched.

“Dave,” he finally said to the yellow office boy, “I wish you’d ‘phone to Mr. Stoddard’s place and see when he’ll be down.”

Dave came back with the information that Mr. Stoddard was not at the house; he had left for an early-morning ride, and not returned to his breakfast.

“He’ll just about have stopped up at the Country Club for a snack,” MacPherson muttered to himself. “I wonder who or what he found there attractive enough to keep him from his work.”

Looking into Gray’s office at noon, the closed desk with its pile of mail once more offended MacPherson’s eye.

“Mr. Stoddard here?” inquired Hartley Sessions, glancing in at the same moment.

“No, I think not,” returned the Scotchman, unwilling to admit that he did not exactly know. “I believe he’s up at the club. Perhaps he’s got tangled in for a longer game of golf than he reckoned on.”

This unintentional and wholly innocent falsehood stopped any inquiry that there might have been. MacPherson had meant to ‘phone the club during the day, but he failed to do so, and it was not until evening that he walked up himself to put more cautious inquiries.

“No, sah–no, sah, Mr. Gray ain’t been here,” the Negro steward told him promptly. “I sure would have remembered, sah,” in answer to a startled inquiry from MacPherson. “Dey been havin’ a big game on between Mr. Charley Conroy and Mr. Hardwick, and de bofe of ’em spoke of Mr. Gray, and said dey was expectin’ him to play.”

MacPherson came down the stone steps of the clubhouse, gravely disquieted. Below him the road wound, a dimly conjectured, wavering gray ribbon; on the other side of it the steep slope took off to a gulf of inky shadow, where the great valley lay, hushed under the solemn stars, silent, black, and shimmering with a myriad pulsating electric lights which glowed like swarms of fireflies caught in an invisible net. That was Watauga. The strings of brilliants that led from it were arc lights at switch crossings where the great railway lines rayed out. Near at hand was Cottonville with its vast bulks of lighted mills whose hum came faintly up to him even at this distance. MacPherson stood uncertainly in the middle of the road. Supper and bed were behind him. But he had not the heart to turn back to either. Somewhere down in that abyss of night, there was a clue–or there were many clues–to this strange absence of Gray Stoddard. Perhaps Gray himself was there; and the Scotchman cursed his own dilatoriness in waiting till darkness had covered the earth before setting afoot inquiries.

He found himself hurrying and getting out of breath as he took his way down the ridge and straight to Stoddard’s cottage, only to find that the master’s horse was not in the stable, and the Negro boy who cared for it had seen nothing of it or its rider since five o’clock that morning.

“I wonder, now, should I give the alarm to Hardwick,” MacPherson said to himself. “The lad may have just ridden on to La Fayette, or some little nearby town, and be staying the night. Young fellows sometimes have affairs they’d rather not share with everybody–and then, there’s Miss Lydia. If I go up to Hardwick’s with the story, she’ll be sure to hear it from Hardwick’s wife.”

“Did Mr. Stoddard ever go away like this before without giving you notice?” he asked with apparent carelessness.

The boy shook his head in vigorous negative.

“Never since I’ve been working for him,” he asserted. “Mr. Stoddard wasn’t starting anywhere but for his early ride–at least he wasn’t intending to. He hadn’t any hat on, and he was in his riding clothes. He didn’t carry anything with him. I know in reason he wasn’t intending to stay.”

This information sent MacPherson hurrying to the Hardwick home. Dinner was over. The master of the house conferred with him a moment in the vestibule, then opened the door into the little sitting room and asked abruptly:

“When was the last time any of you saw Gray Stoddard?”

His sister-in-law screamed faintly, then cowered in her chair and stared at him mutely. But Mrs. Hardwick as yet noted nothing unusual.

“Yesterday evening,” she returned placidly. “Don’t you remember, Jerome, he was here at the Lyric reception?”

“Oh, I remember well enough,” said Hardwick knitting his brows. “I thought some of you might have seen him since then. He’s missing.”

“Missing!” echoed Lydia Sessions with a note of terror in her tones.

Now Mrs. Hardwick looked startled.

“But, Jerome, I think you’re inconsiderate,” she began, glancing solicitously at her sister. “Under the circumstances, it seems to me you might have made your announcement more gently–to Lydia, anyhow. Never mind, dearie–there’s nothing in it to be frightened at.”

“I’m not frightened,” whispered Lydia Sessions through white lips that belied her assertion. Hardwick looked impatiently from his sister-in-law to his wife.

“I’m sorry if I startled you, Lydia,” he said in a perfunctory tone, “but this is a serious business. MacPherson tells me Stoddard hasn’t been at the factory nor at his boarding-house to-day. The last person who saw him, so far as we know, is his stable boy. Black Jim says Stoddard rode out of the gate at five o’clock this morning, bareheaded and in his riding clothes. Have any of you seen him since–that’s what I want to know?”

“Since?” repeated Miss Sessions, who seemed unable to get beyond the parrot echoing of her questioner’s words. “Why Jerome, what makes you think I’ve seen him since then? Did he say–did anybody tell you–“

She broke off huskily and sat staring at her interlaced fingers dropped in her lap.

“No–no. Of course not, Lydia,” her sister hastened to reassure her, crossing the room and putting a protecting arm about the girl’s shoulders. “He shouldn’t have spoken as he did, knowing that you and Gray–knowing how affairs stand.”

“Well, I only thought since you and Stoddard are such great friends,” Hardwick persisted, “he might have mentioned to you some excursion, or made opportunity to talk with you alone, sometime last night–to–to say something. Did he tell you where he was going, Lydia? Are you keeping something from us that we ought to know? Remember this is no child’s play. It begins to look as though it might be a question of the man’s life.”

Lydia Sessions started galvanically. She pushed off her sister’s caressing hand with a fierce gesture.

“There’s nothing–no such relation as you’re hinting at, Elizabeth, between Gray Stoddard and me,” she said sharply. Memory of what Gray had (as she supposed) followed her into the library to say to her wrung a sort of groan from the girl. “I suppose Matilda’s told you that we had–had some conversation in the library,” she managed to say.

Her brother-in-law shook his head.

“We haven’t questioned the servants yet,” he said briefly. “We haven’t questioned anybody nor hunted up any evidence. MacPherson came direct to me from Stoddard’s stable boy. Gray did stop and talk to you last night? What did he say?”

“I–why nothing in–I really don’t remember,” faltered Lydia, with so strange a look that both her sister and Hardwick looked at her in surprise. “That is–oh, nothing of any importance, you know. I–I believe we were talking about socialism, and–and different classes of people…. That sort of thing.”

MacPherson, who had pushed unceremoniously into the room behind his employer, nodded his gray head. “That would always be what he was speaking of.” He smiled a little as he said it.

“All right,” returned Hardwick, struggling into his overcoat at the hat-tree, and seeking his hat and stick, “I’ll go right back with you, Mac. This thing somehow has a sinister look to me.”

As the two men were leaving the house, Hardwick felt a light, trembling touch on his arm, and turned to face his sister-in-law.

“Why–Jerome, why did you say that last?” Lydia quavered. “What do you think has happened to him? Do you think anybody–that is–? Oh, you looked at me as though you thought I had something to do with it!”

“Come, come, Lyd. Pull yourself together. You’re getting hysterical,” urged Hardwick kindly. Then he turned to MacPherson. As the two men went companionably down the walk and out into the street, the Scotchman said apologetically:

“Of course, I knew Miss Lydia would be alarmed. I understand about her and Stoddard. It made me hesitate a while before coming up to you folks with the thing.”

“Well, by the Lord, you did well not to hesitate too long, Mac!” ejaculated Hardwick. “I shouldn’t feel the anxiety I do if we hadn’t been having trouble with those mountain people up toward Flat Rock over that girl that died at the hospital.” He laughed a little ruefully. “Trying to do things for folks is ticklish business. There wasn’t a man in the crowd that interviewed me whom I could convince that our hospital wasn’t a factory for the making of stiffs which we sold to the Northern Medical College. Oh, it was gruesome!

“I told them the girl had had every attention, and that she died of pernicious anaemia. They called it ‘a big dic word’ and asked me point blank if the girl hadn’t been killed in the mill. I told them that we couldn’t keep the body indefinitely, and they said they ‘aimed to come and haul it away as soon as they could get a horse and wagon.’ I called their attention to the fact that I couldn’t know this unless they wrote and told me so in answer to my letter. But between you and me, Mac, I don’t believe there was a man in the crowd who could read or write.”

“For God’s sake!” exclaimed the Scotchman. “You don’t think _those_ people were up to doing a mischief to Stoddard, do you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” protested Hardwick. “Yes; they are mediaeval–half savage. The fact is, I have no idea what they would or what they wouldn’t do.”

MacPherson gave a whistle of dismay.

“Gad, it sounds like the manoeuvres of one of our Highland clans three hundred years ago!” he said. “Wouldn’t it be the irony of fate that Stoddard–poor fellow!–a friend of the people, a socialist, ready to call every man his brother–should be sacrificed in such a way?”

The words brought them to Stoddard’s little home, silent and deserted now. Down the street, the lamps flared gustily. It was after eleven o’clock.

“Where does that boy live that takes care of the horses–black Jim?” Hardwick inquired, after they had rung the bell, thumped on the door, and called, to make sure the master had not returned during MacPherson’s absence.

“I don’t know–really, I don’t know. He might have a room over the stable,” MacPherson suggested.

But the stable proved to be a one-story affair, and they were just turning to leave when a stamping sound within arrested their notice.

“Good God!–what’s that?” ejaculated MacPherson, whose nerves were quivering.

“It’s the horse,” answered Hardwick in a relieved tone. “Stoddard’s got back–“

“Of course,” broke in old MacPherson, quickly, “and gone over to Mrs. Gandish’s for some supper. That is why he wasn’t in the house.”

To make assurance doubly sure, they opened the unlocked stable door, and MacPherson struck a match. The roan turned and whinnied hungrily at sight of them.

“That’s funny,” said Hardwick, scarcely above his breath. “It looks to me as though that animal hadn’t been fed.”

In the flare of the match MacPherson had descried the stable lantern hanging on the wall. They lit this and examined the stall. There was no feed in the box, no hay in the manger. The saddle was on Gray Stoddard’s horse; the bit in his mouth; he was tied by the reins to his stall ring. The two men looked at each other with lengthening faces.

“Stoddard’s too good a horseman to have done that,” spoke Hardwick slowly.

“And too kind a man,” supplied MacPherson loyally. “He’d have seen to the beast’s hunger before he satisfied his own.”

As the Scotchman spoke he was picking up the horse’s hoofs, and digging at them with a bit of stick.

“They’re as clean as if they’d just been washed,” he said, as he straightened up. “By Heaven! I have it, Hardwick–that fellow came into town with his hoofs muffled.”

The younger man looked also, and assented mutely, then suggested:

“He hasn’t come far; there’s not a hair turned on him.”

The Scotchman shook his head. “I’m not sure of that,” he debated. “Likely he’s been led, and that slowly. God–this is horrible!”

Mechanically Hardwick got some hay down for the horse, while MacPherson pulled off the saddle and bridle, examining both in the process. Grain was poured into the box, and then water offered.

“He won’t drink,” murmured the Scotchman. “D’ye see, Hardwick? He won’t drink. You can’t come into Cottonville without crossing a stream. This fellow’s hoofs have been wet within an hour–yes, within the half-hour.”

As their eyes encountered, Hardwick caught his breath sharply; both felt that chill of the cuticle, that stirring at the roots of the hair, that marks the passing close to us of some sinister thing–stark murder, or man’s naked hatred walking in the dark beside our cheerful, commonplace path. By one consent they turned back from the stable and went together to Mrs. Gandish’s. The house was dark.

“Of course, you know I don’t expect to find him here,” said Hardwick. “I don’t suppose they know anything about the matter. But we’ve got to wake them and ask.”

They did so, and set trembling the first wave of that widening ring of horror which finally informed the remotest boundaries of the little village that a man from their midst was mysteriously missing.

The morning found the telegraph in active requisition, flashing up and down all lines by which a man might have left Cottonville or Watauga. The police of the latter place were notified, furnished with information, and set to find out if possible whether anybody in the city had seen Stoddard since he rode away on Friday morning.

The inquiries were fruitless. A young lady visiting in the city had promised him a dance at the Valentine masque to be held at the Country Club-house Friday night. Some clothing put out a few days before to be cleaned and pressed was ready for delivery. His laundry came home. His mail arrived punctually. The postmaster stated that he had no instructions for a change of address; all the little accessories of Gray Stoddard’s life offered themselves, mute, impressive witnesses that he had intended to go on with it in Cottonville. But Stoddard himself had dropped as completely out of the knowledge of man as though he had been whisked off the planet.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SEARCH

The fruitless search was vigorously prosecuted. On Saturday the Hardwick mill ran short-handed while nearly half its male employees made some effort to solve the mystery. Parties combed again and again the nearer mountains. Sunday all the mill operatives were free; and then groups of women and children added themselves to the men; dinners were taken along, lending a grotesque suggestion of picnicking to the work, a suggestion contradicted by the anxious faces, the strained timbre of the voices that called from group to group. But night brought the amateur searchers straggling home with nothing to tell. It should have been significant to any one who knew the mountain people, that information concerning Gray Stoddard within a week of his disappearance, was noticeably lacking. Nobody would admit that his had been a familiar figure on those roads. At the utmost they had “seed him a good deal a while ago, but he’d sorter quit riding up this-a-way of late.” But on no road could there be found man, woman, or child who had seen Gray Stoddard riding Friday morning on his roan horse. The whole outlying district seemed to be in a conspiracy of silence.

In Watauga and in Cottonville itself, clues were found by the police, followed up and proved worthless. All Gray’s Eastern connections were immediately communicated with by telegraph, in the forlorn hope of finding some internal clue. The business men in charge of his large Eastern interests answered promptly that nothing from recent correspondence with him pointed to any intention on his part of making a journey or otherwise changing his ordinary way of living. They added urgent admonitions to Mr. MacPherson to have locked up in the Company’s safe various important papers which they had sent, at Stoddard’s request, for signature, and which they supposed from the date, must be lying with his other mail. A boyhood friend telegraphed his intention of coming down from Massachusetts and joining the searchers. Stoddard had no near relatives. A grand-aunt, living in Boston, telegraphed to Mr. Hardwick to see that money be spent freely.

Meantime there was reason for Johnnie Consadine, shut in the little sister’s sick room day and night, to hear nothing of these matters. Lissy had been allowed to help wait upon the injured child only on promise that nothing exciting should be mentioned. Both boys had instantly begged to join a searching party, Milo insisting that he could work all night and search all day, and that nobody should complain that he neglected his job. Pony, being refused, had run away; Milo the rulable followed to get him to return; and by Sunday night Mavity was feeding both boys from the back door and keeping them out of sight of Pap’s vengeance. Considering that Johnnie had trouble enough, she cautioned everybody on the place to say nothing of these matters to the girl. Mandy, a feeble, unsound creature at best, was more severely injured than had been thought. She was confined to her bed for days. Pap went about somewhat like a whipped dog, spoke little on any subject, and tolerated no mention of the topic of the day in Cottonville; his face kept the boarders quiet at table and in the house, anyhow. Shade Buckheath never entered the place after Deanie was carried in from the hastily summoned carriage Thursday night.

The doctors told them that if Deanie survived the shock and its violent reaction, she had a fair chance of recovery. They found at once that she was not internally injured; the blood that had been seen came only from a cut lip. But the child’s left arm was broken, the small body was dreadfully bruised, and the terror had left a profound mental disturbance. Nothing but quiet and careful nursing offered any good hope; while there was the menace that she would never be strong again, and might not live to womanhood.

At first she lay with half-closed, glazed eyes, barely breathing, a ghastly sight. Then, when she roused a bit, she wanted, not Lissy, not even Johnnie; she called for her mother.

When her child was brought home to her, dying as they all thought, Laurella had rallied her forces and got up from the pallet on which she lay to tend on the little thing; but she broke down in the course of a few hours, and seemed about to add another patient to Johnnie’s cares.

Yet when the paroxysms of terror shook the emaciated frame, and the others attempted to reassure Deanie by words, it was her mother who called for a bit of gay calico, for scissors and needle and thread, and began dressing a doll in the little sufferer’s sight. Laurella had carried unspoiled the faculty for play, up with her through the years.

“Let her be,” the doctor counselled Johnnie, in reply to anxious inquiries. “Don’t you see she’s getting the child’s attention? The baby notices. An ounce of happiness is worth a pound of any medicine I could bring.”

And so, when Laurella could no longer sit up, they brought another cot for her, and she lay all day babbling childish nonsense, and playing dolls within hand-reach of the sick-bed; while Johnnie with Lissy’s help, tended on them both.

“You’ve got two babies now, you big, old, solemn Johnnie,” Laurella said, with a ghost of her sparkling smile. “Deanie and me is just of one age, and that’s a fact.”

If Pap wanted to see his young wife–and thirst for a sight of her was a continual craving with him; she was the light of the old sinner’s eyes–he had to go in and look on the child he had injured. This kept him away pretty effectually after that first fiery scene, when Laurella had flown at him like a fierce little vixen and told him that she never wanted to see his face again, that she rued the day she married him, and intended to leave him as soon as she could put foot to the ground.

In the gray dawn of Monday morning, when Johnnie was downstairs eating her bit of early breakfast, Pap shambled in to make Laurella’s fire. Having got the hickory wood to blazing, he sat humped and shame-faced by the bedside a while, whispering to his wife and holding her hand, a sight for the student of man to marvel at. He had brought a paper of coarse, cheap candy for Deanie, but the child was asleep. The offering was quite as acceptable to Laurella, and she nibbled a stick as she listened to him.

The bald head with its little fringe of grizzled curls, bent close to the dark, slant-browed, lustrous-eyed, mutinous countenance; Pap whispered hoarsely for some time, Laurella replying at first in a sort of languid tolerance, but presently with little ejaculations of wonder and dismay. A step on the stair which he took to be Johnnie’s put Himes to instant flight.

“I’ve got to go honey,” he breathed huskily. “Cain’t you say you forgive me before I leave? I know I ain’t fitten fer the likes of you; but when I come back from this here raid I’m a-goin’ to take some money out of the bank and git you whatever you want. Look-a-here; see what I’ve done,” and he showed a little book in his hand, and what he had written in it.

“Oh–I forgive you, if that’s any account to you,” returned Laurella with kindly contempt. “I never noticed that forgiving things undid the harm any; but–yes–oh, of course I forgive you. Go along; I’m tired now. Don’t bother me any more, Gid; I want to sleep.”

The old man thrust the treasured bankbook under Laurella’s pillow, and hurried away. Downstairs in the dining room Johnnie was eating her breakfast.

“Johnnie,” said Mavity Bence, keeping behind the girl’s chair as she served the meal to her at the end of the long table, “I ain’t never done you a meanness yet, have I? And you know I’ve got all the good will in the world toward you–now don’t you?”

“Why, of course, Aunt Mavity,” returned Johnnie wonderingly, trying to get sight of the older woman’s face.

Mrs. Bence took a plate and hurried out for more biscuits. She came back with some resolution plainly renewed in her mind.

“Johnnie,” she began once more, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you. Your Uncle Pros has got away from ’em up at the hospital, and to the hills, and–and–I have obliged to tell you.”

“Yes, I know,” returned Johnnie passively. “They sent me word last night. I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it. Maybe he won’t come to any harm out that way. I can’t imagine Uncle Pros hurting anybody. Perhaps it will do him good.”

“Hit wasn’t about your Uncle Pros that I was meaning. At least not about his gettin’ away from the hospital,” amended Mavity. “It was about the day he got hurt here. I–I always aimed to tell you. I know I ort to have done it. I was always a-goin’ to, and then–Pap–he–“

She broke off and stood silent so long that Johnnie turned and looked at her.

“Surely you aren’t afraid of me, Aunt Mavity,” she said finally.

“No,” said Mavity Bence in a low voice, “but I’m scared of–the others.”

The girl stared at her curiously.

“Johnnie,” burst out the woman for the third time, “yo’ Uncle Pros found his silver mine! Oh, yes, he did; and Pap’s got his pieces of ore upstairs in a bandanner; and him and Shade Buckheath aims to git it away from you-all and–oh, I don’t know what!”

There fell a long silence. At last Johnnie’s voice broke it, asking very low:

“Did they–how was Uncle Pros hurt?”

“Neither of ’em touched him,” Mavity hastened to assure her. “He heard ’em name it how they’d get the mine from him–or thought he did–and he come out and talked loud, and grabbed for the bandanner, and he missed it and fell down the steps. He wasn’t crazy when he come to the house. He was jest plumb wore out, and his head was hurt. He called it yo’ silver mine. He said he had to put the bandanner in yo’ lap and tell you hit was for you.”

Johnny got suddenly to her feet.

“Thank you, Aunt Mavity,” she said kindly. “This is what’s been troubling you, is it? Don’t worry any more, I’ll see about this, somehow. I must go back to Mother now.”

Laurella had said to Pap Himes that she wanted to sleep, and indeed her eyes, were closed when Johnnie entered the room; but beneath the shadow of the sweeping lashes burned such spots of crimson that her nurse was alarmed.

“What was Pap Himes saying to you to get you so excited?” she asked