O. Henry memorial award prize stories of 1923

by Unknown

IV

Emmanuel watched the patient go out of his office. He hadn’t been able to do anything for the girl. He hadn’t dared to do anything for her. In fact, he had shaken his head even before hearing her request. Her eyes had told him. Sorry for the girl? Yes. Of course he was sorry for her. But it wasn’t ethical.... He had to laugh at the word. Ethics—smug euphemism. Simply afraid, that was the truth. Couldn’t risk it. He, the well-known physician, member of medical associations, “a respected member of the community.”

Seven years ago, perhaps, when money had been needed. When impatient eyes were watching him. Four pairs of eyes—no, six, because there had been Etta’s family, too. Now there was enough money. Now there was his office. The mahogany desk with its impressive medical volumes, the white enamel instrument cabinet. An X-ray apparatus. The elaborate washstand with its gleaming appointments. The blue-lettered sign on the window: E. Manfred Woll, M.D.

“That’s not I, of course,” he told himself.

E. Manfred Woll.... Etta’s doing.

“You can’t have a kike name in a swell neighbourhood like this,” she had told him.

All right, the physician, medicinæ doctor, that was E. Manfred Woll. But then where was Emmanuel Wolkowitz? He didn’t know.

There used to be a street. That wasn’t any more. Upstairs there was only his apartment, with every piece of correct furniture just so, with every proper picture just so, every cushion rigid, every piece of china, every vase as the interior decorator had planned it. He was living in an interior decorator’s apartment! Etta’s doing.

Etta herself, his wife, composed of a pretty face, a carefully, painfully, pretty face, of just so much obedient, matter-of-fact sex, so much wifely devotion, solicitude:

“Dearie, you’re so tired!” Every day.... “Here, let me get the girl to make you a nice hot cup of tea.”

There used to be a melody.... In the beginning he had attempted to get Etta to sing. She had replied:

“Oh, I don’t know! Too much trouble. Lessons and everything. Of course, if I was a single girl it would be nice to learn and get a job in a show or in vaudeville. But ain’t I got the best husband in the world to take care of me now?”

Well, she didn’t understand! Emmanuel watched the things in the office, he watched himself seated at the desk of E. Manfred Woll, M.D. Funny, that was!

Etta came in. As usual:

“Am I disturbing you, dear?”

He didn’t reply. She would come in, anyway. She seated herself on the edge of his desk, her pretty legs two silken flashes as they rocked. She toyed with his paper knife, the self-consciously ornamental onyx knife, her gift.

“That car salesman is going to come around to-morrow. What shall I tell him?”

“The salesman. I don’t know! What do you want to tell him?”

Etta pouted. In spite of the usual smile she had so carefully cultivated during the last seven years, her eyes were cold.

“It isn’t what I want to tell him. You know that. I’m not the one for whose sake we’re getting that limousine. But you can’t be driving around in that dingy sedan. You ought to have a real car. People expect it of you.”

Always that argument. The apartment people expected of him, her dresses people expected of him, his name people expected of him. Nothing for her. Everything for him. Oh, a good wife!

“You expect it of me, too, don’t you, Etta?”

“Well....”

“You all expect it of me? Your father expected an interest on his money: a nice home for you, nice clothes for you. He got it. My family.... Well, they’re well off now, they’ve no troubles. A nice home in the Bronx. Reba got her dowry, she got her lawyer.... Aren’t you, all of you, satisfied yet? What else do you want?”

“Manny, I don’t understand you.”

“No!”

“What is the matter with you to-day?”

To-day.... Seven years, nine, twelve....

“Etta, what would you say if I told you I’m through?”

“What do you mean, ‘through’?”

“That I’m going away?”

“Where are you going?”

He couldn’t answer that. Where would he be going? To the street? The street....

Etta had left him, shrugging her shoulders. She didn’t bother to try to understand him. One of his unaccountable fits! Alone, Emmanuel continued sitting at his desk. Would he really go away?

The telephone rang. He recognized the voice. His uncle. For years the “support of the family,” who had helped him through college, helped his father with the basement penny business. A self-satisfied, ruthless, self-made man, narrow, full of many hatreds. A charitable, religious Jew, a good father. Cloaks and suits.

“Manny, my son Dewey is gonna have for him a graduation party from high school. I want you positively to come.”

Emmanuel promised. He liked Dewey, a boy who was forced to be bright, who was forced to be the best student in his class, Dewey, who had once received a beating in his presence for daring to read a novel on a Saturday instead of going to the synagogue. Was Dewey perhaps like himself?

Emmanuel walked out of the house. At the door his chauffeur asked:

“Shall I get the car, sir?”

“No, I’ll walk.”

The man touched his cap, looked after Emmanuel stupidly. It was raining. Emmanuel didn’t care. The rain would do him good to-day, he thought. It would be good to walk into the street while it was raining. Already the afternoon, dusk-cloaked, was slipping away and in the coming darkness the pavement of the street would reflect the light from the windows. Yellow pools of light.... It would be a long walk. The street was far away.

Too far away. After some five blocks Emmanuel stopped. Could that distance to the street be covered to-day? Could it be covered in a year, in a lifetime? Perhaps it wasn’t there at all. There was no melody now—perhaps there never had been a melody....

And did it matter now? He was a doctor. Could he tell that to the street? Could he tell about his family, about Etta?

Was there nothing else than to go back home? That he couldn’t answer. After all the years, that distant street was still calling Emmanuel. Maybe.... Even if there should be no melody, one could go on toward the street. But—home? He walked on.

Then he remembered. Wasn’t there something he had intended to do on the way? What? Oh, Dewey.... The graduation party would be a grand affair. He wouldn’t go, of course, but a gift would be expected. A set of books?

A set of books for Dewey? Who was so much like himself? Books? Dewey was like himself! But then....

“They were my tools,” the thought came to him. “I couldn’t use them. They weren’t the right tools.... Yes, they were.... Those others weren’t right.... The ones at college. Now they’re at home. Etta’s? She can have them. Let her have them. Wrong tools, all of them wrong tools.... The others, too.... All the books I’ve ever had!” And then the zig-zag pattern: “Tools, books, tools, tools....”

He entered a shop. No books.... He pointed to a table. To the clerk he muttered:

“These....”

He gave Dewey’s name, the address. He stood there, watching the large package being wrapped up. He nodded:

“That’s right....”

A set of carpenter’s tools. A hammer, a saw, a plane.

Out of the shop. He went on. How far the street was! No—there it was, approaching him, coming toward him. There, that was the street. He stopped for a breath. These were the stones ... his feet were touching the pavement.... And the street was dark. But this end had always been dark, he remembered. Emmanuel lifted his head, his eyes searched the darkness. Nothing yet. But he knew. The yellow pools would be farther on, much farther on....

THE WAGER
By ISA URQUHART GLENN
From Argosy-All Story

“Kirwin, you’ll find rain in hell as soon as you will a straight girl in a dance hall in Manila! Don’t wax sentimental over a pretty blonde, out here, until you know the circumstances which landed the lady among the half-breeds. I’ll wager that girl is as tough as they make ’em in even this off country.”

This from young Angier.

“I’ll take you! There’s something in her face that one can tie to. Call her over, at the end of this dance, and let’s settle it. Long wait ahead of us, anyway, until Mayhew shows up. He won’t be in a hurry, with this deluge. Been roughing it sufficiently; he’ll be taking it easy while he is in town.” Kirwin’s older and somewhat graver face was turned toward the dancing couples. He stared at them from underneath beetling brows, dispassionately appraising the girl whom they were discussing.

“Ever find out why Mayhew is in the islands?” asked Angier idly. “Secretive cuss! Acts like a Secret Service bird—prowling around unlikely places, such as this joint in which he arranged to meet us to-night.”

“Job brought him. That’s straight enough. But I see what you mean. He does seem to be looking for something outside the job. Now, as to that bet——”

Seriously they arranged the terms of the wager. In the byways of the world, trifles are serious when big things are not happening.

“Two to one——”

It was young Angier who plunged the deepest. He was at the age when a man is sure that he knows the woman game.

“It will be the same old tale,” he said. “Men! One man; then two men; then a few more—and the streets.”

It rained—as if a gigantic bucket of water were being emptied from the clouds that lowered over the city.

Manila, like all ladies, has moods; and when she weeps it means trouble. Her rainy mood is sinister—reminiscent of untold horrors. The Moat, evil in even its modernized form, seems, when bespattered by the raindrops that turn oily as they strike, to be hiding dark secrets of a past age. Over the wet and slippery Bridge of Spain many men have gone to their ruin; through the Puerta Isabella Dos many women have reached the bottom. Manila blinks through the downpour, knowing full well that men are strong, and men are weak, but no man can be both. And well does Manila know that few women in her clutches have achieved the first.

The tin roof reverberated under the bombardment of the rain. The wind hit the building, which vibrated. A breath of damp, cool air blew in to the crowded dance hall. The dancers paused, for an instant taken aback by the fury of the storm. They felt the insecurity of the human being in the face of the elements. The clamour of the trap drum was unaccompanied by the sliding sound of feet; even the feet faltered. The wind died down as suddenly as it had arisen. The music of the Filipino jazz band broke forth with renewed vigour. The dancers again set out upon the vast floor, moving along in the fox trot as interpreted by the two hemispheres.

At a table near the dancing floor sat the two officers who had made the bet. They waited for their white uniforms to dry out from the storm that had caught them unprepared. Amusement showed in their sunburnt faces as they watched the many odd variations of the great American dance. The dancers circled past their table, the mestizos throwing out their feet with waving motions inherited from the Spanish habanera, the full-blood natives flopping carelessly along in heelless chinelas which necessitated exaggerated glides, the Chinamen shuffling. Dancing with these assorted breeds were girls as unmistakably Caucasian as their partners were Oriental. These girls clung precariously to the loose sleeves of the Chinaman, the unconfined shirt tails of the Filipino, the starched coat of the mestizo. The painted faces looked up at the yellow, brown, and bistre skins of their partners. White teeth gleamed from the men’s open mouths; gold fillings flashed between the dangerously smiling lips of the girls.

Angier grinned.

“Watch your pure and very blonde lady leering up at that greasy old chino! Young for it, too. Now you, Kirwin—you never believe wrong of a pretty woman, though you agree about the shortcomings of the ugly ones. But you are wrong, old top! Sin overtakes the fair, not the unlovely. Look at that girl’s dress. Disreputable! What decent woman would show all of her naked shoulders and most of her back to this crowd? Do you suppose that the chino dancing with her thinks she is decent? Not on your life he doesn’t! His decent women swathe themselves in stiff brocades and padded coats.”

“So do his indecent ones. Stick to facts.”

They ordered another round of the sickeningly sweet and depressingly lukewarm soft drinks of a reformed Manila. The straws wilted as soon as touched, and fell over the sides of the tall glasses in the manner of Victorian heroines who swoon.

The music stopped. The dancers separated, going to the different tables.

Pink and shabby, tawdry skirts; very lovely hair in long and thick curls down her back and hanging in her eyes—that variety of soft blue eye which, when angry, suggests steel heated to the white pitch, but which crinkles engagingly when merry; face hard and sophisticated—the dancer of the wager!

Easy to induce her to sit down at their table; impossible to persuade her to take a drink from the flasks with which they were armed against contingencies. She insisted on soda water—and then more soda water.

“I want something sweet and cold,” she told them. “God—how I’ve missed it! I hate places where there’s not enough ice for ice cream.”

Before the soda water arrived the music started again. Kirwin half rose from his chair and bowed ceremoniously to the girl. “Will you give me the pleasure of this dance?”

“Gee!” exclaimed the young person. “And the soda water on the way!”

“I thought you’d like it,” muttered the man.

“Like it? Like to dance?” She broke into laughter. “Say—don’t you know yet that a person’s job is never fun? It’s bread and butter for me to move my feet, not pleasure.”

She seized the glass of purplish mixture that was being placed before her and plunged the spoon, and after that her nose, into its enticing depths.

“Now, this is real joy!” she announced.

“Where you living?” Angier was already at the business of winning his bet.

The girl turned on him a cold and wary look that, as she studied his frank boyish face, softened into good fellowship.

“Over in the Tondo—a Ford-sized life in a Ford-sized room. I take my shower under an oil can, and that after I’ve gone out and fetched in the water that’s in the can. And if the water runs out before the soap’s off, I’ve got to hustle into my kimono and get some more to fill up the darned can—and then jump under it like the house was on fire, so’s the water won’t give out again. That’s comfort for you! And me used to Broadway! I tell you—give me Broadway, with the human toads staring at you! Out here, there’s nothing to stare at you except half-breed frogs. I’m not strong for half-breeds. That’s the reason I came over here when you called me—because you fellows are white.” She gave them another of her wary looks; prepared for their unbelief.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Miss Casey—to you!” replied the girl promptly, and with emphasis on the title.

“What’s your name to the chinos?” asked the amused Angier.

The girl’s face turned a dark and painful red. She glanced helplessly at the man whose manner toward her was marked by a difference.

Kirwin smiled kindly in response to this glance.

“That’s enough, Angier,” he said with some sternness in his voice. “Miss Casey, my friend is distinctly young and rather flippant; take him with a grain of salt.”

“Sure!” responded Miss Casey. “I’ve often met ’em like that. They’re harmless.”

Angier lifted his glass to his merry young mouth. From the glass issued a gurgle or two. Miss Casey eyed him for a moment; then turned to Kirwin with a degree of confidence.

“Say—what did you two fellows call me over here for? I know it wasn’t just to have a good time. You can’t fool Mary. I know the difference in men. He’s guying me, but he isn’t tough.”

Kirwin bowed, growing respect in his deep-set eyes.

“Miss Casey, we owe you an apology. We did an unpardonable thing; we made a bet on you. It isn’t what men should do about a woman——”

“ ...But you did it about me, because I’m not a woman—I’m just a dance-hall girl in the Orient? Oh, don’t apologize; I understand. I’m used to it.”

There was no longer a trace of the ironic in Kirwin’s deference. Something of old-fashioned ceremony crept into his manner and softened the girl. She smiled at him without rancour.

“Don’t say a word,” she said kindly, with the obvious intent of putting him at his ease. “You haven’t hurt my feelings a bit. I know when to get mad; and I know when not to. I don’t think either of you meant a thing. And it’s a comfort to be sitting here with two men from home. Forget it!”

Angier withdrew his face from the tall glass. He put his hand on the roughened hand of the girl as it rested on the table beside her soda water.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “And I want to ask you something quite aside from the bet. We’re all Americans, as you said. Is there anything that we could do for you?”

Mary Casey put her other hand on top of his and pressed it. For a moment there was a mist over her blue eyes.

“You’re a nice boy. Much obliged. But there isn’t anything. I’m taking care of myself; and I can pay my rent, and pick up my meals one way or another. And not from men!” The guarded look was again in evidence as she said this. Then she laughed. “You see how mean I am, about suspecting men! But I have to be that way. There aren’t too many you can trust.”

To the jerky strains of Manila’s latest jazz—a tune already, in America, a year old and buried—she leaned across the rickety table and looked from one to the other of the men.

It was a direct, level look.

“What was the bet?”

“Oh, I say! Miss Casey!” began Angier uncomfortably. “See here: I’ve already said I was sorry I’d made it.” He took out his cigarette case. He struck a match. There was a tinge of nervousness in his manner.

Mary extended her hand for a cigarette.

“Might as well have one,” she said; “though it does register guilt, in the movies, for a woman to smoke!” She leaned back in her cane chair and absently watched the thin blue vapour that curled up from her nose. Her rouged lips were parted in a rather hard smile. “Never occurred to you, did it, that women could stay straight easier if you men weren’t so keen on saying we were crooked? Of course I can guess what the bet was! And I can very nearly guess which of you it was who bet for me. And—on account of one of you having taken a chance on me—I may tell you a thing or two before the evening is over. I’d somehow like a man who had the nerve to take a chance like that—on my side—to win his bet!”

The muchacho approached the table for orders. He bowed obsequiously to the two officers and brushed his arm contemptuously across the shoulder of Mary Casey. He drew back suddenly, rubbing his cheek. Miss Casey’s hand had administered a smart slap on that yellow expanse. She glanced apologetically at the two Americans.

“It’s the only way to treat ’em,” she informed them. “Treat ’em rough, and in a hurry! That’s my way, and it works. If you don’t know the game, this is no place for you.”

She looked out over the floor. A stout and perspiring mestizo, with the unmistakable Chinese look, was approaching.

“I must dance with this bum. He’s one of the ‘influential patrons,’ and the management would have a fit and bounce me if I turned him down. I’ll be back after he’s walked a mile on my feet.”

The two men watched her as she steered the lumbering mestizo through the crowd. Neither of them spoke.

At the end of the dance she returned to the table and sat down as a matter of course. This was the Orient, and a long way from home and its standards of caste. And these Americans had been decent to her—kind to her.

“Ain’t it fierce, to have to dance with a man that’s a hop toad and an elephant all in one?” she inquired with a passing annoyance.

“Know the game? Sure I know the game—and a darned good thing I do!” she continued, taking up the conversation where they had left it. “I’ve known it since I was a kid. I’m twenty-three now; and I’ve been thanking my stars all that time that I knew it. You put yourself through the China Coast, and you need to know the ropes of life. You think I’d want to be one of those sweet, innocent dunces that you men always like to believe we blondes are—and that we aren’t, so many times? I’d have fallen into the paws of a Chink—I would! Innocent sweetness can’t come through the China Coast whole, and don’t you forget it! I’ve walked straight, but it wasn’t by being sweet and innocent that I did it. It was by knowing every devilment that men can be up to. They are all alike—the men I meet. Their skins are different colours, but their ideas are the same. All yellow inside, and black and brown and white outside.”

Musingly, she sipped her soda water. In this repose her mouth showed hard lines in crescents at the corners. There were wrinkles raying out from her eyes—baby eyes, at times. These eyes now turned contritely to the two officers.

“That was hitting below the belt, wasn’t it? My turn to apologize now! But it isn’t often I meet fellows like you—fellows who’ll talk to me instead of wanting to paw me—guys who are drunk, and——” Her voice trailed off. She stared unseeingly at the crowd as it pranced past the table. “God! I don’t blame men for the way things are with us girls! If I was a man I’d play the game that way, too, I guess. They haven’t got a thing staked on the turn of the wheel. But we’ve got everything to lose. And if we aren’t careful we lose it; that’s all.”

The wind came up again and tore at the house, and around the house, with concentrated enmity. It played with the loose shell windows as the cat with the mouse. Inspired by this lack of control in the elements, Kirwin became elemental in his questioning of the girl.

“Born and brought up in New York, on Eighth Avenue, you say? Then why out here?”

“What’s a girl who’s poor to do to feed herself? Not but what the men’ll feed her—if she’s a fool! A man goes and marries, and gets a girl baby. And does he have that girl baby taught a trade when she leaves grammar school, like he does his sons? He does, like hell! He throws her out—in front of men—to catch a husband! ’Tisn’t fair to the girls. Look at me: I didn’t know how to do a thing except dance. I’d learned how to do that on the sidewalks, to hurdy-gurdies.”

The noise of the rain on the roof deadened her voice, so that the men had to lean across the table in order to hear her next words.

“I said I’d tell you a few things. All right! I will! It may help you in your bets on other women.”

Her voice became shriller, more filled with excitement. The rain no longer deadened it; it was charged with an electricity that carried it above the storm.

“When I knew that if I didn’t want to marry one of the poor simps I met—with his hair slicked down with grease till it looked like shiny black shoes—I’d have to scratch for my living, I got busy and hunted a job in a cheap dance hall in that part of town. My job was to dance with any dirty, smelly man who came in and hadn’t got a girl along. Not much of a trade, but it was a long sight better than the one my sister took up—on the streets! That was another trade you didn’t have to be trained for!

“‘Mary, be careful!’ my mother kept telling me. ‘A girl has got to be careful—because the men won’t be careful for her.’

“By the time I’d learned the game of taking care of myself, I’d worked up to a sweller dance hall on Broadway. The fellows who came in there were clean, except in their minds. But I kept saying to myself: ‘Mary, be careful!’

“And then, one evening, in came a seedy-looking man who made you think he’d seen better times and a fatter living. Always shaved clean, and smelled of talcum powder. But his clothes were brushed until there wasn’t a bit of nap left on them, I used to think when I was dancing with him and looking at his shoulder. He was an actor, out of a job, he told me. They tell you the story of their lives when they’re dancing with you.

“Once he came in downright hungry. I shared with him that night the dinner the management gave me.

“I got in the habit of looking for him, and sharing my dinner with him. I respected myself a lot because I was giving him dinner instead of him feeding me. Silly, wasn’t it?” She looked at Kirwin.

Kirwin nodded gravely. “I understand that perfectly,” he said. “You would feel that way. So should I, in your place.”

“Thanks!” said Mary Casey. “Well—you know—after you’ve fed a man when he’s hungry, you get to sort of think you own him. You feel like you’re his mother, you might say. I got to feeling that way about Teddy. I felt like he was mine. I don’t suppose I thought about marrying; I knew he couldn’t support me. But I never thought about anything that I’d be doing, way off in life, when we were older, without thinking about him being right there with me. You know what I mean? I just didn’t think we’d ever be anywhere without the other one being there, too. Not that he said anything much, only—‘I’m awful fond of you, kid!’ But I didn’t mind. I was fool happy, dancing afternoons with all sorts of men, and all the time thinking that pretty soon Teddy’d be coming in by the doorkeeper, and looking around for me—and then sit in the darkish restaurant eating part of my dinner—though it did used to leave me pretty hungry, for the dinner the management gave us wasn’t much on size. Some of the girls used to kick about those dinners; you’re awful hungry after you’ve been dragged around the floor for hours and hours by heavy-footed hicks. But the management laughed at the complaints; said the girls would keep their figures if they didn’t eat too much. I’ll say I kept mine! I was ’most starved every night when I got to bed. My stomach used to feel as if it was sticking to my backbone. I was on the floor every dance. I was popular with the men who came there. It isn’t that I’m pretty; I’m not. And so they look again to see what the deuce I am. And that gets a man’s goat—when he can’t make out what he likes about a girl.

“Anyhow, if I’d ever been pretty I’d have lost it by now. I’ve been so darned careful; and when a girl’s careful, and suspects everybody, she gets hard and mean looking. The other girls—those that aren’t careful—get hard and tough. It all comes to the same thing; they look the same way in the face. Women can’t look soft in the face unless they’re taken care of by their people.”

“When you are talking this way, you don’t look hard,” interrupted Kirwin.

“That’s because it’s a comfort to sit here and say everything that comes into my head. Most times, when I’m across a table from a man, I have to think before I open my mouth: ‘Will this give him a handle?’ And so I just say: ‘Oh! Isn’t this a lovely floor?’ And: ‘My! But you are a dandy dancer!’ When like as not he’s stepped all over me.”

“Men are brutes! They even step on the ladies’ toes!” the laughing Angier remarked.

“They step on more than their toes,” the girl countered. “They step on anything the girl gives them a chance to step on! At least, most of them do. I never saw but one who wouldn’t. And I lost him—lost sight of him, I mean—on account of losing his card.” She lifted her long and thick lashes of a golden brown that caught the light from the swinging oil lamps and formed a delicate nimbus around her serious eyes. “But I’m going to tell you about him. I’d like you to know I’ve met one man I could respect. Men who hang around dance halls not even a boob could think much of!

“It was this way:

“Times got worse. I got so I couldn’t make out. They raised my rent on me. I couldn’t go to live with my people. They bunked and washed and cooked in one room, with a window and the fire escape for their excitement; and I’d got used to better. I couldn’t go back there—not with Teddy in my head. He’d have looked down on me, see?

“So Teddy says to me: ‘Why don’t you try South America? I’ve been told they pay high, down there, for American dancers. And board and lodging thrown in,’ he says. And he says that he’ll see if he can get me a chance, through a friend of his that’s in town looking for girls to go down to Colon. This friend came in to talk to me about it. It’s a swell chance to make big money, he says. The Panamanians are ready spenders, he says, and crazy over dancing. And Teddy kept trying to make me go.

“I went. The boat got in about seven o’clock in the evening. The man they sent to meet me said that I was to hop into my dance clothes and hurry along with him to the hall. My trunk would go up afterward.

“Say, I’m telling you—I never did see a dance hall like that one! It was a scream! The guy hadn’t told me that the Panamanians were all colours! Everything was sitting at the tables, from putty-coloured dudes with diamonds in their embroidered shirts to jet-black niggers in fine clothes. Each man had poured a bottle of scent over himself. The smell of that perfume, and the smell of the different breeds of people, all hot and perspiring, was something fierce. It made me feel queer, all of a sudden.

“I sat down at one of the tables, and the fat, cream-coloured woman who ran the place came over and gave me something to drink, to cool me off, she said. It made me cool, but odd feeling. I leaned my head on my hand, so’s the floor would stop going around. And something—the heat, maybe—made me so sleepy I thought to myself I’d swap my job for a bed, if I could of found a bed. And then I realized that somebody was stroking my arm; long, pressing strokes like you give a cat’s back. There wasn’t much feeling in my arm, it was sorter dead; but I knew darned well that somebody was fooling with it. I opened my eyes wide. It was a coon who was fooling with my arm! A real coon, like we have at home—only this one spoke a lingo that I guess was Spanish. Any rate, I didn’t understand a word he said. And I jumped away from him; I never had had a coon stroke my arm, and I didn’t like it a bit. So I says to him: ‘You get away from me!’ But he laughed so all his teeth showed; and he reached over and grabbed me. That waked me up sure enough; and I kicked and screamed. And the next thing I knew a white man had come across the room and lifted that coon by the scruff of his neck and thrown him in a corner. I’ve seen fights in my day—but say! I never saw a prettier one than that! The white man cleaned out the crowd!

“The cream-coloured woman rushed over and began jabbering at him; and the dudes with the diamond buttons stood close by and laughed and whispered to each other in their crazy talk, and pushed their shoulders up in the air until you couldn’t see their big ears; but that American paid no attention to them. He treated them so like scum that I was proud to be standing by him.

“The American took me by the arm—not spoony; just sort of as if he was boss around those diggings—and walked me over to a table in a far corner, away from the jabbering dudes. We sat down. I was sorter nervous by that time. There was something I didn’t get, if you know what I mean? So that man tells me:

“‘This is no place for an American girl! How’d you come here?’

“I told him all about the contract I’d signed to dance there. And I told him about Teddy, and everything else I could think of. He was a comfort in the midst of all those funny people. He didn’t smell of perfume, and he had on plain white clothes, and they were clean around the collar and cuffs. Different, that’s all. While I was talking, he sat there looking at me with his eyes half shut, like he was sizing me up. And every now and then he’d nod his head. Once I heard him muttering something about: ‘My first assay would be—pure gold!’ And I got scared; I thought that he was crazy, too. But when he saw how I was getting as far away in my chair as I could, he laughed—first time he’d laughed. And I noticed that his nose stayed quiet while he was laughing, instead of working up and down like the dagos’ noses did. And his eyes laughed; and the dagos’ eyes don’t laugh. That made me trust him.

“He told me that he was a mining engineer, down there on a job for a Denver crowd.

“‘Miss Casey,’ the engineer fellow said then, ‘I’m not going to leave you here! Do you know what sort of place you’re in?’

“I told him all over again about the contract to dance. He frowned, and beat on the table with his forefinger. And when I stopped talking he told me what kind of place it was. I don’t suppose I need to tell you?

“I never would have got out of there whole except for that American. I tell you what, I burn candles in the church for that man!

“He explained it all to me; just what business Teddy’s friend was up to, shipping girls down to the dance halls in South and Central America. But I didn’t like to believe Teddy knew what that friend of his was wishing on me. The American thought he knew; and he called him an awful word. I felt mad—and sick—and I told him that he was lying about Teddy. But I didn’t believe he was lying. And he was awful nice about it; said he didn’t blame me for talking up for my friends! But say! What men are friends to girls like me? Never but one man was straight with me—that fellow in Panama!”

The blue eyes were not hard now; neither did they crinkle merrily. Mary Casey’s soul looked out of them.

“That engineer fellow was the man I told you I could respect,” she stated gravely. “You know what he did for me? He helped me get away from that place! He worked our way through the jabbering crowd until we were near the door; and then, when the music was blaring loud, he threw his coat over my dance dress and grabbed me with his left arm while he pushed off the men who ran in front of us with his right fist. He had a heavy fist—that fellow! I saw one man’s nose start bleeding. And a few more were knocked over like ninepins. It only takes one white man to ball out a crowd of niggers and spinnachers.

“‘Sorry for the rough-house, Miss Casey,’ said the engineer fellow, ‘but we have to make our get-away before these nigger police show up.’

“We made it! We ran along the crooked streets that I’d thought were so funny when I drove up from the boat; but they weren’t quite as funny when we were running along them in the dark and I was catching my heels in the holes between the big paving blocks that didn’t fit even against each other. One of the heels came off, and we didn’t have time to go back and pick it up. I hobbled along as well as I could, holding on to the engineer fellow’s nice hard arm. I didn’t want to fuss when he was being such a good sport.

“All the way down to the docks the engineer fellow was telling me, as well as he could for running and dodging from shadow to shadow of the squatty houses, and looking up and down each street that we had to cross, what I was to do when I got to New Orleans. But I didn’t hear a word he said: I was so busy thinking how nice it was to have a man like that taking care of me—and how strong his arm was. If I’d stopped thinking about his arm and thought more about what he was saying to me, I’d have been better off. But you never are foxy at the time that you ought to be.

“He swung me aboard a ship just as the gangplank was drawn up. All he had time to do was to push a card into my hand.

“‘Here’s my address,’ he said. ‘Let me know how you are coming on, and where you are.’ And then he said: ‘Hasta la mañana!’ which I’d picked up in the dance hall, and knew meant that he was going to see me some time.

“The captain was looking over the rail of the ship. The engineer fellow threw him a little package twisted up in a piece of paper that he tore from a notebook; and he said something to the captain in Spanish.

“So there I was, on a banana ship—in my dance dress and one heel off my slippers, and the engineer fellow’s coat over my shoulders! I must have struck that captain dumb! But I didn’t care. I was too busy staring at the engineer fellow back there on the dock.

“A puff of wind came up and blew the card that he had given me out of my hand and down into the water. I leaned way over the rail and saw it sucked under by the churning of the machinery. And then I remembered that I hadn’t read it. I’d been too busy staring at him to read his note. I ran after the captain and asked him if he knew the name of the fellow. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he’d never seen the chap before.’ I took the fellow’s coat off and looked through the pockets to see if there wasn’t another card in one of them. But there wasn’t a thing except some papers scrawled all over with his figuring—his mining work, I guess.

“That’s the way I lost out. But I’ve always kept the coat. It reminds me that I once met a good man.

“When we got to New Orleans with those bananas, I was still a long way from home. And I didn’t have a cent of money; my purse was in the trunk that they’d been going to send up to the dance hall at Colon. I said to the captain the day we made port:

“‘I don’t know how I am to pay you, unless you wait until I get a job in this town.’

“The captain told me that the engineer fellow had paid my passage, and fifty dollars over for me to get a start on—buy some clothes to wear when I was out looking for a job. That was a real man, that fellow! And as I didn’t know his name having been such a fool about not reading his card for looking at him, I couldn’t hunt him up to pay it back. So I burn candles for him.”

Silence—except for the noise of the jazz band and the shuffling feet.

Kirwin broke this silence. He leaned nearer the girl; his voice was very kind as he spoke to her.

“You shouldn’t have come out here. No girl should come out here so long as she can make a cent in the States.”

“Dance halls in the States are supposed to be respectable. They’ll keep girls on that they suspect a lot about; but they bounce her as soon as all the people outside the business know about her. See? Everybody who went to dance halls in New York knew I’d left on that contract; I’d been such a fool I’d told it all around, trusting Teddy and his friend as I did. That closed the doors of every place I tried to get an engagement. I’ve chased half way round the world, now, trying to get to some place where they couldn’t find out about it. San Anton—’Frisco—Honolulu—I’ve tried ’em all. And I’ve sloped out of all of ’em for the same reason. Running away from the flag, I was, instead of following it like the cocktails did. Somebody’d always show up who was there that night in Colon, or who had heard about it; and nobody believed my tale. I don’t blame ’em! I wouldn’t have believed it if any girl had tried to pass off on me that she’d been such a fool. Girls like me are supposed to know their way around. But I’d been too smashed on Teddy to see straight. That was my one big mistake: to get soft on him. Girls like me can’t afford to care for a man.

“It did me one good turn—that jolt at Colon. It knocked Teddy out of my head. I couldn’t help seeing the difference between him and the engineer fellow.”

She absently stirred the sediment at the bottom of her glass.

“Listen: now I’ve told you all this—there’s one more thing I want to tell you—I’ve walked straight, even out here. You believe me?” Her voice was tense.

Kirwin and Angier spoke at once. “Yes!”

“I wish I could see that engineer fellow again, and tell him that, too. He did a lot for me.”

The rattle of the trap drum, the bellow of the brasses rose above the storm that still raged outside. The rain beat on the roof in rivalry with the drum.

“Nice night to be getting back to the Tondo in a shaky carromata!” said Mary Casey. “But it’s near closing time. You can tell by the state of the chinks’ camisas. When they are soaked through, it’s early morning. Chinks don’t heat up as soon as other men. Ain’t they a sweet lot? And heavy on their feet! Oof!” She lifted one slippered foot and rubbed it tenderly.

A Filipino walked up with mincing gait. He thrust out a dance ticket. With a shrug of her thin shoulders Mary Casey went on the floor and abandoned herself to his arms.

Angier turned a sober face to Kirwin.

“You win!” he said.

Kirwin twisted his wrist around until he could see the face of the watch strapped there.

“No use to wait for Mayhew. It’s two o’clock.”

He clapped his hands together sharply. He settled their score with the muchacho who came in response to that summons. The two men arose from the table of empty glasses.

Fresh air came in to them as they opened the door. Seeming a part of that fresh air was the tall and lean man whom they encountered on the narrow sidewalk. A man in white linen of unmilitary cut, on his close-cropped head a slouched panama that had seen better days. As the three hailed a passing calesa and took refuge within its cramped depths from the downpour, the man took off the battered panama and carefully drained the water from its brim. The little horse attached to the calesa by casual harness ambled down the street.

Above the sloshing sound made by the little horse’s feet as he wandered through the puddles, the tall man lifted up his voice and spoke:

“Hard time getting away from the dames at the hotel,” he announced grimly. “Those women would chew over a bit of heaven itself until it was as pallid and unappetizing as an over-masticated piece of bacon! I fled for my life, finally. Healthier down in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by gold that doesn’t belong to me, and that I am merely passing on for the chaps who are buying up Masbate.”

“Does it never make you want some gold of your own, Mayhew?” inquired the curious Angier. “I’d not be able to stand the strain of being a mining expert. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. That sort of stuff.”

“Might if I hadn’t been very busy with something else. I’ve been prospecting for human gold. Struck the vein once, and lost it through a fluke.” He turned a rather shame-faced gaze on his friends. “What would you say if I told you that for years I’d been chasing a pipe-dream from pillar to post—always trying to catch up with it and see if I was right in my assay? Taking unlikely jobs which would carry me to unlikely places—never overlooking a dance hall this side of hell—with only one thing tangible enough to prove to me that it wasn’t actually a dream—a broken slipper heel that I’d picked up in the street on my way back from—from the vision, you might say!”

“So it’s a woman you’ve been sleuthing, you old son of a gun!” howled gleefully the unobservant Angier.

But Kirwin leaned forward and touched the cochero on the shoulder. “Mano!” he commanded. “And hurry that plug along!”

The calesa turned a corner on one of its two inadequate wheels. The three men were thrown against each other.

“What the devil, Kirwin——” began Angier. “Oh, I see!” He whistled softly.

“Sila!” Kirwin directed the cochero.

The calesa veered around a curve on its other wheel.

“Poco más!”

The calesa came to an abrupt halt in front of the dance hall that they had quitted a short time before. The men of the jazz band were coming out, their swathed instruments under their arms. The proprietor was fitting the key into the lock of the door.

Kirwin leaned from the calesa and looked anxiously up and down the narrow street. A solitary female figure, huddled under a dripping umbrella, was picking its way, with the delicate step of the dancer, between the pools of water that overflowed from the gutter on to the sidewalk.

Kirwin sprang from the calesa. He pulled the astonished Mayhew after him. With one hand on Mayhew’s shoulder, he turned him in the direction of the huddled figure under the umbrella.

“Go fit that heel to Cinderella!” he laughed.

CÉLESTINE
By JAMES HOPPER
From Collier’s

IN March the war came much nearer to the town, and an aviation camp was set up just outside, in the wheatfields by the National Road. It took shape, as it were, overnight, as if by some enchantment; Célestine, from the round window of her garret room in the inn, saw the planes alighting like white birds in the rose of the dawn. They came five by five from the east; for two days they remained as they had landed, shelterless and inert, as if worn out. Then heavy trucks came rumbling, threw off bales of canvas and partitions of thin wood, and soon a flying camp stood complete, with its tents and its sheds, its hundreds of busy mechanics.

Many of the white birds seemed wounded. Holes were in the wings, some of the wings trailed. The conductors of those weary dragons were sunken-eyed; their faces tattooed with oil, their hair matted. But a lull had come; somewhere in the hills to the east the new drive at last had been stopped; you could hear at night the soft drumming of the guns. The flying men cleaned up. Primp, in freshly pressed uniforms and shining boots, they strolled about, very young men, slim and elegant, twirling swagger sticks and parading gaiety. Gaiety, although each one of them bore stamped upon his heart, as pure gold is stamped, a small secret figure which stood for a certain day, a certain hour, the end of youth, of joy, of adventure and love. Mostly they passed by the inn, on their way to the brighter cafés at the centre of the town; but some of them stopped at the inn and sat at the tables under the trees. Célestine’s heart beat faster when they were there; she watched them as she worked; from a distance, for she did not wait on the tables.

She was not allowed to wait on the tables because she was not pretty.

The mistress of the inn believed in pretty serving maids, and Célestine was not pretty. The thick skin of her face was a mask which let pass not a ray of the iridescences of the soul; before that sad dead face men stood embarrassed or even angry. So she did not wear the white aprons and caps, the lacy waists of the tablemaids, but rough blue garments; and did not flit outside under the trees, but was held to the bedrooms and the kitchen’s back regions. She was the drudge; she started with the day. She polished boots, laid fires, carried hot water and trays up countless stairs, made beds, swept rooms, swabbed halls. She carried heavy luggage upstairs and obeyed the rageful tyranny of the bells. Midnight would strike before she threw herself upon her narrow pallet under the eaves.

Every afternoon, from four to six, she took the baby of the mistress of the inn out in its perambulator. This was her recreation and her rest. After the flying field had been established on the National Road, it was there she would go. The place had become the town promenade. Out to it, along the road, especially on Sundays, the inhabitants would go in family groups—in family groups in which there were no men, unless, perhaps, some brittle old grandfather.

Once at the field, they stood about respectfully noting everything avidly and calling one another’s attention to what they saw; and small boys, terribly interested in what for several years now had been the male’s sole interest, slipping under the ropes, got to where they had no business to be.

Célestine, still more shy than the rest, took her station across the road from the camp and a little to one side. From here she could see across the plains to the hills in the east, and also that part of the flying field from which the planes sprang into the air or hoveringly landed. She sat in the clover; it was peaceful here; the baby slept; her own soul drowsed. An old farmer across the way ploughed slowly behind his one old horse; now and then a lark went high up in the air and sang. It was hard to remember that in the low hills beyond, pretty as opals, red carnage boiled and men died.

From those far hills the planes came winging back late in the afternoon. Far-fixed eyes of mechanics on the field, a pointing finger here or there, were the first signs to Célestine.

She saw dots, small and incredibly high. They became moths, shining—white—and quick as thunder the fliers were near. They came from great battles, and jousts, and fabulous adventures; and as they neared, with hearts seemingly full of a secret joy at terrible pranks they had played, they gambolled and capered and tumbled along the skies.

Usually they came in by fives, in arrow formation, but there were two that always went paired. Célestine learned to distinguish these two. One was a young Frenchman who, on the ground, wore the dark blue of an Alpine chasseur; but the other, in a drab uniform, was a foreigner. These two homed it later than the others: so late that sometimes Célestine could not wait and had to go away without seeing them. When they alighted, the pilots who had come in ahead, and the mechanics who stayed on the ground, strolled to the two planes; they asked questions and looked amused, and sometimes laughed loudly. One day Célestine heard herself resume to herself in words the effect this daily scene had upon her. “These two are the favourites,” she said to herself. “They are the Benjamins of the camp!”

The civilian onlookers, loitering about the camp, called the one in yellow uniform “l’Américain” and credited him with great deeds. “There’s a rough boy!” they would say. “There’s one who does tricks in the air!” For him Célestine felt a secret preference. The way he landed delighted her. As his plane, swirling down, touched the earth, he looked, in his leather helmet and armour, like some fabulous knight of the air; but even as his plane still rolled along the ground, he snatched off the leather helmet and became a red-headed boy. He always landed thus. While still rushing along the ground at tremendous speed, he snatched off his helmet and became a boy with carrot-red hair. Then something laughed within Célestine, and a bubble of tenderness burst softly in her heart.

Years ago, when a little girl in her native village in Brittany, she had loved secretly the neighbour’s son, whose hair was just like that. Now, whenever the plane landed, she saw her native village; she saw the small port, the stone mole, the painted boat heaving, the blue sea.

Gradually Célestine’s life, her drab beastlike life, became lit with a dim radiance as from a shaded lamp; her life centred itself altogether on the flying field. In the morning she kept running to her garret room as she worked; and, if she had any luck, saw the planes depart, five by five, five by five, then two. In the afternoon she was at her post in the clover field across the road from the camp. The farmer ploughed over there, a lark singing over his bent head. Farther, the hills were like opals in the sun. And on the other side of those hills the war was going on. She imagined the two fliers in the sky over there. Holding her eyes shut, she saw them in the great heights, wheeling and circling, falling and rising, in a cloud of enemy planes. She saw them, in manœuvres abrupt as lightning, pierce again and again the hostile envelopment—and planes fell, many, falling slowly, like snow drifting.

Late in the afternoon the two came home. The others came first, by fives, sometimes in quick succession, sometimes with long waits between. Sometimes, instead of five, there were four, the winged squadron was broken and on the field there would be much agitation, runnings to and fro, anxious questionings. But the two for whom Célestine waited usually came last, and came always in joy, tumbling like clowns down the skies. The American struck the earth—fabulous and formidable like a god. He snatched off his helmet—and he was a boy, a laughing red-haired boy. Through Célestine’s tired body a dull thud of tenderness went resounding deliciously.

About this time the enemy began to bomb the town at night. When came the first of these air raids Célestine did not know what was happening. She was awakened by a rapping of machine guns, by a boom-rrump, boom-rrump of upward shooting cannon, and, leaning out of her garret window, saw pretty cracklings of light up in the sky, as of many fireflies flashing into life suddenly and then dying. Then came an enormous single explosion, and everything went quiet. Célestine slid out into the black silent streets which were ghostily filling with whispering, shivering people; and following them came to a place, near the railroad track, where a little house had stood which she knew very well. The house was no longer there; where it had stood was only a great black hole.

But next night was worse. As, awakened again by the machine guns, Célestine stood uncertain in the narrow hallway outside of her room, a great explosion pressed both walls against her flanks as if they were going to meet, and another, following still nearer, shook the inn as if it were coming down like a pack of cards. Explosion followed explosion for hours as the malevolent birds buzzed in the dark sky overhead; and when at last they had gone, in the light of dawn Célestine saw that a whole block of houses near by lay ripped open, with red-quilt shreds of pulverized beds waving slowly in the cold morning wind.

The people of the town began to go out into the fields every night. By five every afternoon the iron shutters of all the shops clattered shut simultaneously, and along the streets went processions of women, children, babes, and old men, carrying their blankets out to the fields for the night; by sundown the city was an empty city. Célestine remained in her garret room and, lying on her back in her narrow bed, shook to ecstasies of fear and exulting vision. Lying there, rocked by terrific concussions, the whole world seemingly going to pieces beneath and about her body, small kernel in a cosmic chaos, she looked upward out of her soul into the night’s black inverted bowl and saw her champions flying there. In thunder-swift chargings, they darted to and fro among the night-enshrouded invaders. The American led all. For a time she saw him as pilot of a plane; then suddenly the wings attached themselves to his body, and he was an archangel with terrible swift sword; then again he was a boy, a laughing red-headed boy—and her withered heart, compressed layer and layer upon itself, opened out like a flower in the midst of her ignoble terror.

Just as abruptly as the night raiding had begun, it ceased for a time, and one evening the two fliers appeared at the inn and took rooms for the night. They had a ten-days’ leave, were going to Paris on the early morning train, and were very gay. Célestine watched them from her work with beating heart as they sat at their table in the court, lingering over their wine; and when finally she understood that they had taken rooms and were to be here for the night, a great excitement possessed her. She ran up to the rooms, although she had made them up early in the day, and made them up all over again; and when they had retired she stationed herself in the dark hallway, to await a possible call for service, hopeful at once and afraid.

After a while the door opened, light splashed out into the hall, and a voice called.

She rushed to answer it. The young Frenchman stood in the doorway. “Dis-donc, Madelon,” he said lightly, giving her the name of the song. “Dis-donc, Madelon, you know, we are freezing in this big tomb of yours!”

She ran swiftly down the three flights to the cellar, and came back with kindling and paper; she ran down once more and returned with a basket full of small logs. She squatted before the hearth and built up a fire.

She felt, rather than saw, the two armchairs behind her, spread side by side before the hearth as for a vigil of friendship. The young Frenchman was in one; the other was empty. Her heart gave a queer jump as she heard a step approach. It came from the other room, approached, stopped; there was the creak of crushed springs. He was there too, now, the other one, the American, in his big chair. She tried to strike a match, and failed.

The young Frenchman began to twit her amorously. Seen from behind, she was attractive enough, with firm white neck upon which strayed ringlets of her yellow hair. He rose, he stooped, he was near her. “Allons, Madelon, my lass—a little kiss. Just one small one, there where thy hair makes shadow!”

At another time probably she would not have been displeased: it was so seldom a man mistook and made love to her. But, somehow, the American’s being here made a difference. Somehow, this was not the way she wished to be seen by the American. She turned toward her gay persecutor the mask of her face—usually this was enough. But this time, perhaps because of the wine, or because of the frolic in his veins at the thought of his leave from Death’s incessant haunting, or merely because the flame of the fire left her in shadow, the boy did not quit, but rather increased his half-mocking demonstration of a half-assumed order, and finally, unconsciously, she turned to the other the eyes of one harassed. He sat there at ease, half smiling, but immediate communication leaped to him from her. “Come,” he cried, “Pierre! Quit this—you’re an utter nuisance!”

And smiling at her, he added, enunciating very slowly and carefully: “One must pardon him, mademoiselle: he is a little saoul, vous savez.”

The contrast between his scrupulous manner and his use of that word “saoul,” supposed to be uttered only by such low-class people as she, and not by gentlemen like him; the funny mewing drawl of his “voo-oo-ah saaav-ez”; and something so simple about him—these things suddenly created in her a tender delight, and she broke out laughing. He joined in, laughing at himself; the other joined in: all three were laughing. The young Frenchman, content with himself, and rather glad to have been stopped, let her be.

But then, after they had laughed, there was no more reason for staying. The fire was now drawing finely; everything about the room was in order; the two friends, in their chairs, were lighting their pipes. Célestine tiptoed out and closed the door.

She was out in the dark cold hall once more, all alone. But something of them was there. Their boots. They stood at the door, two pairs of them; one pair standing up stiff, as if at attention, the other pair careened over, as if tired. She gathered them up to her bosom, and took them up to her room to clean them.

By the light of the candle, reflected in her cracked mirror, she looked at them long after she had set them up on her washstand. One pair was light, of fine leather moulded to slender leg, and just a little fussy with many hooks; the other two were heavy and honest, and with enormous feet—ah, enormous!

She held the boots up before her eyes to realize fully the enormity of those feet, and laughed delightedly—then passed her hands over them in caress.

She now set to work and scrubbed and polished with adoration till late into the night.

They left early in the morning, and she did not see them. Once they called for hot water, but seized the pitcher with disembodied hands that reached out at the end of bare arms thrust through the door’s narrow crack. And when they came downstairs, all ready to go, her first intention, which had been to view them in their lustrous boots, dissolved into a sudden panic which sent her scurrying into the farthest depths of the black corridor.

So she did not see them, and when they returned they did not stop at the inn, but reported directly to the camp. The first she knew of their return was when, from her daily stationing in the field, she saw them, winged once more, swooping down like thunder out of the drifting opalescence of a sunset sky. The old relation reëstablished itself; every afternoon, in the field across the way from the Fliers’ Camp, Célestine stood and waited, and watched them as they homed.

As she stood thus in the clover field one late afternoon a plane came winging all alone from afar toward the camp—fast, with the directness of a wounded thing seeking its lair to die. As it came near, it did not approach the ground in the usual gradual circlings, but lit straight, with a sort of desperate urgency—and Célestine recognized the young Frenchman. Even as he still rolled along the ground, his helmet-framed face was turned sidewise toward the sheds, and with open mouth he was shouting out a question. Everybody about the camp was running to him; when the plane at last came to a standstill, all the men of the camp, pilots and mechanics, were grouped about it. Sagging in his seat, again he was asking the question. Célestine, from where she stood, could not hear at all, but just as surely as if she had heard, she knew that it was a question he was thus asking with his open mouth, and what question.

The men about the plane all shook their heads negatively; then, all together, they raised their heads and looked afar toward the east, the seams in their faces showing deep.

The flier climbed stiffly out of his cockpit and stood among the others. He was relating something. Not able to hear a word, Célestine followed what he said, terribly, by the way his hands went. There had been a combat. Two planes high in flight—this the two hands showed—and then many, many attacking them. The two hands, in fight and flight, darted here, darted there, rose, fell, turned over, slid sidewise down, for a while stubbornly together. Then the two hands went apart—and the tale continued, told by only one hand—the tale of one plane only—of the teller’s own plane. That plane was alone, cut off, pursued by many, in dire distress; it twisted and strove like a moth in a flame. Finally it abandoned itself, it fell; fell long, forsaken and loose like a dead leaf—it was doomed. But no—abruptly, the descriptive hand, almost touching the earth, straightened out with a supple movement; the plane, at full speed, went scuttling along the heads of the wheat, the pursuit shaken off, free!

The narrator halted. Again he shouted his question, fiercely, as though the violence of it might have potency in creating the right answer. But the others, all shaking their heads, stepped free from the plane and looked upward in the sky, toward the east.

It was time for Célestine to go, but she could not go. In the field she remained, waiting—but out of the east no more planes were coming. The crying of the child in its carriage finally recalled her to herself.

During the following days she saw that the young Frenchman was not flying; he loitered aimlessly among the sheds. He began to come to the inn. He would sit in a corner, looking fixedly at his table, drinking one glass of strong stuff after the other, till finally, told that the place was shutting up for the night, he would stiffly depart without a glance at the one who had spoken.

Then one day he shook himself and rose after the first drink. And the following afternoon Célestine saw that he was flying once more, captain of a squadron of five.

This, somehow, settled her last doubt, and when night had come, in a corner of the inn garden, she made a little grave.

It was thus they did in her native village, in Brittany. There, when a fisherman, gone to the far banks of Iceland, did not return at the end of the season, little untenanted graves were made along the churchyard wall in memory of those who had thus vanished.

Célestine made such a grave, in a corner of the garden where two thick stone walls met behind a thick chestnut tree. The recess was well hidden; few ever came there. She made a rectangular outline with white pebbles, drawing it thin so that one happening here should not quite be sure of what he saw; she bought a small Virgin of green porcelain and set it at the head. The little Virgin stood there always, a rosary drawn through her rudimentary hand, and with downcast eyes seemed to meditate upon the grave.

Every night now, no matter how weary she was, Célestine came here, and in the silence and the darkness said a prayer. This is all she had of what had passed—the little make-believe grave, and the nightly prayer, there in the secret silence behind the tree. The war had moved on to the east; there was talk of great victories; and the flying camp had gone to other parts as suddenly as it had come a few months before.

The moment of prayer at the end of the day came to have for her a sweet importance. It coloured the day, the long hard day. It lay there ahead, through the effort, the sweat, and the grime, like a small still harbour of pure blue water. And its peace overflowed back into the day; it made of the whole day a still, white peace. Within the peace she moved and toiled as if in a haze, deliciously numb of life’s asperities and life’s screams.

The war ended; she held to her grave, her prayer, and her secret, and a year went by. Then, one summer day, suddenly he reappeared, solid, alive, in flesh and blood.

She was washing the red flagging at the entrance of the court, and was on her knees amid soap and suds, as the omnibus, come from the station with many valises on its top, halted before the entrance. And he, leaping out, turned to give his hand to a fair-haired girl who was stepping down after him.

At first Célestine did not believe her eyes; then, when she did, she began to tremble. Kneeling there on the wet flagging, she trembled and trembled, her big opaque blue eyes raised to the newcomers as if they had been gods arisen from the sea.

His eyes fell upon her. “Hello,” he said shortly, “there’s Madelon!”

“Bonjour, Madelon,” he said, in that French which had so delighted her that day so long ago. “Bonjour, Madelon—do you not remember me?”

The fair-haired girl, standing by his side, her hand trustingly resting on his arm, also was looking down at the kneeling woman. Célestine rose suddenly, and, altogether shaken out of her usual heavy reticence, cried: “My faith—I had thought you dead!”

A burst of laughter from both, after a moment’s hesitation followed her words, and she, too, found herself laughing.

“My faith,” she explained, “you flew away and never came back!”

“It was to Germany I flew, Madelon—not because I wanted to. And you’re not the only one who thought me gone to another place. But now I live in America once more, and this is my new little wife. Shake hands with my little wife, Madelon.”

Célestine wiped her hands laboriously on her apron, and took, in one thick red one, the little white one offered her.

“And now me,” he said, and pumped her hand up and down, while she felt her face distended in a stupid grin.

But there were things to see about, many things. She ran to the valises and began to carry them in. She ran upstairs to the room, and refreshed the sheets and pillow slips; brought clear water. A sort of mad joy was in her heart, and her thick legs were light. In a moment, between jobs, she ran out into the court and, stooping behind the chestnut tree, with one large gesture of her heavy hand, scattered the little white pebbles and whisked the little Virgin into her pocket.

They remained three days, the young man and his bride; three days during which Célestine spent herself in an adoration of service.

Then they were gone—away to some of the other battlefields they went to visit—gone for ever.

For some time the happiness of those three days remained in Célestine’s heart like a vague resonance of music, then little by little her life discoloured into a bleak emptiness. The memory of the return, the fact that he whom she had mourned was really alive—these things her mind somehow would not hold; little by little they ceased to be in her; they were no guard and no refuge, and she missed greatly what had been before.

The happy haze in which she had then stirred was gone; life once more was sharp and screamed; out of the profundities of a deep stillness, like a happy dead disturbed, she had been brought up to a surface of raw airs and intolerable glitters.

After a time she knew what she missed; now and then the knowledge brought her, hesitant, to the small inclosed space behind the chestnut tree.

Then one night her mind was made up. From her small room beneath the eaves she stole down into the darkened garden.

Down on both knees, in the dark damp space behind the chestnut tree she outlined with white pebbles a small simulated grave; she placed at its head the little porcelain Virgin.

There—it was done. With bowed head, she said a prayer. Every night now she came here and said a prayer.

And little by little the old happiness returned, and finally it was as though he had never come back. At the end of each day stood the awaiting moment of prayer like a small still harbour of pure blue water. Its peace overflowed back into the day; it made of the entire day a still, white peace. The delicious numbness once more enwrapped her in its soft haze, deadening life’s sharp angles and sharp screams.

It was as though he had not returned; the memory of this interruption grew fainter and fainter; flattened out; ceased to be. She was left with her sweet dim sorrow; her grave, her secret, and her prayer.

WITCH MARY
By GENEVIEVE LARSSON
From Pictorial Review

“Has any one of you seen Witch Mary of late?” Wise Olaf, keeper of the country store, asked the question of the farmers gathered in a group on the “grocery side.” A curious, vivid silence followed. They had been rejoicing over their fields of grain, which stood, as one man had exultantly proclaimed, high as a man’s arms, and were heavy with promise. Some made as if to speak, shifted uneasily, sucked back the half-formed words.

“Well?” questioned Wise Olaf.

Through the summer stillness a wind swept up from the river, came sighing in through the open door, and rattled the loose papers about. There was something eery, electric, about it, as though it carried with it an unseen presence.

“Hush! The women will hear you!” cautioned one, glancing across the room.

“Not seen a sign of her all summer; but that’s a good sign,” nervously ventured a gnarled, bent old man, stooping over the counter to pick up a stray coffee bean. He rubbed it between his horny palms, and then fell to munching it, his long chin nearly meeting his nose in the process. Assuming an attitude of cheerfulness, he glanced around carelessly, and then slumped back into a chair.

The women across the room were busy examining the rolls of blue and brown denim that Wise Olaf’s Kaisa displayed upon the counter, and had been chattering together busily. The summer was a good one, and they could buy extra yards. Underlying their Northern speech, in which were represented various provincial dialects of Sweden, was an undercurrent of wistful melancholy, as though they feared to be too joyous, lest some unforeseen disaster come upon them in the midst of their plenty. Now, quick to note a change of feeling in the men’s talk, they stopped, broken sentences suspended in the air, reluctantly left the goods upon the counter, and crossed to the other side.

“But what is it?” asked Kaisa, looking around at the guilty faces.

“We were just talking about Witch Mary,” answered Wise Olaf.

“We agreed, long ago, not to talk of her.” Kaisa’s voice was high-pitched, nervous. Her keen, rather hard-featured face lit up with a curious, avid expression. “As long’s you’ve started, has any one seen her?”

“Not one time during the whole summer,” answered Olga, a fair, comely matron. “Though from my place I can see the top of the hill. Sometimes I run out, when the sun is high, thinking to catch a glimpse of her. The trees must have grown up about the hut. Every day, I remember, the year of the drought, I could see her standing there, waving her cane with one hand, and the other held to her brow, looking out over the valley.”

“The river, you mean,” put in Wise Olaf, carefully tying a package with his knotted hands.

A tremor passed over the crowd.

“I doubt not it was the river,” said Olga, rebuked. The men, some standing, others seated on chairs, placed conveniently about, puffed more heavily at their long corn-cob pipes.

“Sometimes,” Olga continued shamefacedly, “she looked so lonely standing there. Just as if she were turned to a statue of grief. I wanted to run up and comfort her. But I never dared. Besides, Sven would not permit me. And there is no road, only this path, leading down to the river.”

“A good thing for you that you didn’t go,” said the gnarled old man, trying to speak lightly. “Silent Sven would have been left a widower.” The men laughed relievedly, and the shy young giant standing beside the counter flushed to the roots of his yellow hair.

“Oh, I don’t know,” finished Olga, weakly. “I—I am sorry for her, poor old soul!”

“Some say she was seen the day Black Eric left,” Kaisa’s shrill voice broke in. “She stepped in front of him on the road, and the horses stopped dead. She cursed him as usual. ‘So you are going away,’ she screamed; ‘but I will follow you—I will follow you!’ He struck at her with his whip, but she avoided him. ‘I hope you die!’ he shouted at her, and she screamed back, ‘Ay, though I were dead a thousand years, my hate for you would bring me back!’”

“Ja, käre Gud!” sighed a wrinkled old crone. “Let us stop talking of this and finish our buying.” She turned to cross the store; nobody heeded her, and, as though reluctant to miss anything, she stayed.

“Perhaps Black Eric took her with him”—the man who spoke laughed hollowly—“for not once since, as near as I can figure, has she been seen.”

“That’s likely!” retorted Wise Olaf. “She’s the only thing he was ever afraid of.”

“I didn’t think he’d stay away this long,” said the old man, “He loved his power over us too much. And now he’s gone since last November.”

“Oh, he’ll be back soon enough,” answered Wise Olaf. “I saw Young Eric the other day. He’s expecting him any time.”

“I was having a good time,” grumbled the old crone, puffing away at her pipe, “and you’ve made me ill with your talk!”

“Always in the winters before,” continued Kaisa, “I have seen her coming down the path on her skis. At night, thinking no one would see her. There she’d come, swiftly, her skirts flying behind her, and straight down she would go, over the bank, and out to the spot where her daughter was drowned. You should have heard her moaning, and wringing her hands! And she would cry something terrible. Many times I’ve asked Olaf to build us a house elsewhere, and not live here in the store like heathen folk, where we had to see such a sight and listen to such things. ’Tis not good for the children.”

“I’ve heard,” said Olga, her voice soft and pitying, “that she was just like other people before she lost the girl. That they were very happy, even though they were so poor, with their little garden and their hut. Perhaps she is like others still, only we are afraid of her, and that makes her queer. Perhaps we should go up and see if anything has happened to her?” She looked around questioningly, her blue eyes pleading.

“I’ve often said so to Kaisa,” answered Wise Olaf. “It’s you women, I said, should go——”

“How can you expect us to go,” asked Kaisa angrily, “when you men are afraid?”

“And with good reason,” cackled the old man, his toothless gums still busy with the coffee bean. “I’m old here, and I know. I was with those that went up, shortly after we’d found the daughter, and Witch Mary had had her brought up there, and buried beside the hut——”

“Beside the hut—think of that! That was no Christian thing to do. You must have known then there was something wrong.”

“Why, no. We thought that natural enough, crazed with grief as she was. Never shall I forget when we found the body and carried it home. One of us could have carried her easily, so light she was. And beautiful, even when dead. Like an angel that’s been caught asleep.” His voice took on a dreamy, far-away tone. “Her hair was loose, and so long it swept the ground. It looked alive, and we dared not touch it, so we carried her high——”

The room was silent. Outside rang the voices of children playing among the willows.

“And the water fell from her hair, like great tears, all along the path——”

In the heavy silence the women stood motionless, eyes downcast. The men held their bodies rigidly. A burst of wind entered, passed through with a long, drawn-out sigh. It died with a moan. They started up apprehensively.

Kaisa rudely broke the silence. “But go on,” she said. “What happened when you went up afterward? After the girl was buried? We’ve never heard the real truth about that.”

“A week later, all in a friendly spirit, we went to her, thinking to buy her trees. The rest of us were cleaning out our timber. And she had the best trees of all, standing on the level stretch behind the hut, where they could easily be rolled right down to the river and taken to the mill. It would have relieved her poverty, and we thought that would help. We didn’t look for her to take on so, seeing we came for that——”

“Well?” questioned Kaisa, her black eyes snapping with curiosity.

“Black Eric was with us,” the old man went on. “That was a mistake, I suppose, seeing she blamed it all on him. Though I don’t know that he was guilty. He said she jumped right out of the boat, and that he couldn’t save her——”

“There are those,” said Olga, darkly, “that think he wouldn’t. That he’d coaxed her into the boat against her will, and that she had no choice. It was death—or something worse. That was like him!” Her breast heaved with excitement.

“What use to dig it up?” asked the old man gently. “No one really knows. Anyway, Black Eric went along, though he acted queer. One of the men had told him he daren’t. That’s how he came to go. Too much of a blusterer to take a dare. Everything was quiet when we got there. We rapped at the door, and no one answered. Then we went on to where the girl was buried, near the hut between two large oaks. There lay Mary, with the cloth tied around her head, and her red shawl around her shoulders, just as we’ve seen her dressed ever since. Lying flat down on the grave. I thought at first she was dead. So must the rest have thought, and Black Eric shrieked out, ‘O God, she’s dead!’ Then we heard a dreadful weeping, and she got up—no, I did not see her get up, but there she stood.

“In a few days she’d grown into an old woman, though she wasn’t young, even when the girl was born. But such a face as she turned to us! Like an old parchment containing saga lore. Wrinkled and mad with grief, but with a power! Almost as if she could have swept us away with one hand. Her eyes bored through us—they were like burnt-out cinders, dead, but yet terribly alive. When she saw Black Eric she went wild. She shrieked and whirled before us until I was dizzy. Some of the men were so afraid they didn’t even see her; she blinded them. She hurled her curses. Never, never have I seen such a sight!”

“Oh, poor thing, poor thing!” choked Olga, thinking, no doubt, of her own mother, lonely and bent with work in far-away Vermland.

“She drove us down the hill. Frightened as we all were, no one of us was shaken with terror as Black Eric was. Never has any one ventured near her since, though God knows how she lives. It’s not often we let a neighbour go without food. That’s not our way. But what could we do? There was a little clearing where she had her garden, and she and her girl used to work in the old days, but she’s old now, and even if she were able——”

“She has never so much as bought a pound of coffee here,” hastened Kaisa. “Half starved she must be, and frozen in the winter.”

“I hope he never comes back!” cried Olga passionately.

“He? Who?” questioned Kaisa.

“Black Eric. He’s evil—he’s——”

“Oh, as for that,” said the old man, “no one knew if he was guilty or not. There was no proof. And I’ve heard said he’s coming—soon. But one should not blame him too much. He was young when this happened, and he loved the girl——”

“Love? You call that love?” Olga’s tones were hot with wrath. She looked at her husband, Silent Sven, and her face changed and softened. Her little girl came running in through the open door, clasping a bunch of purplish-blue flowers in her hand. She pushed through the crowd and burrowed her golden head in her mother’s skirts.

“I am, afraid, Mamma; I am afraid,” she panted, trembling violently.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, lillä vannen,” comforted her mother, trying to steady her own voice. “We are right here where we can see you through the windows.”

“Where did you get those flowers?” Kaisa’s tones were sharper than usual. “Not on the river bank, surely.”

“Gerda and I—we went up—up the path a little ways just a little ways,” said the girl, “to pick them.”

“That’s blue vervain!” screamed Kaisa, raising her arms in horror. “Throw it away, child; it’s cursed!”

The little girl dropped the flowers.

“Pick it up and throw it out!” she ordered.

“Hush!” said Olga, stooping for the flowers. “Do not frighten the little one. That’s but an old foolish superstition.”

She crossed to the door and flung the blossoms far. Coming back, she asked Silent Sven if he had some candy for the children. He pulled a bulky bag from his pocket.

“Do not go up the path again,” cautioned Olga. “Stay on the river bank. Now run and play with the others. Mind you give some candy to the rest!”

The girl reached eagerly for the bag and started for the door, drying her eyes with one hand. She ran off the board platform, darted between the wagons hitched in front of the store, and on down to the river bank where the children were swinging on the young willows.

“I do believe some one else is coming,” cried Olga, going to the window and peering out. She uttered a dismayed cry, and the rest crowded behind her.

Black Eric dashed up in a smart new buggy, to which were hitched two slim, shining horses. A moment later, whip in hand, he entered the store. He looked around, smiling at the group, and began shaking hands, greeting each one jovially.

“And here’s Olga, too,” he cried, his black eyes snapping with delight as he stepped up to her. The young woman’s face flushed hotly. Silent Sven edged nearer.

“My name is Mrs. Nillson,” she said coldly, refusing to take his hand.

“Ven can I come for coffee and some of your good äppelkaka?” he smirked, laughing at her dismay.

“Talk Swede so I can understand,” croaked the old woman puffing viciously at her pipe, “and leave Olga alone. You needn’t put on airs, for all you’ve been to the city.”

“Well, old sourface!” he answered good-naturedly. “Anything to please such a beauty as you! Ta’ mej fan, but I’m glad to be back!” He looked around from face to face, but saw no gleam of welcome. “What’s the matter?” he asked abruptly. They shrank away, as if fearing the ring of command in his voice.

Olga touched her husband’s arm. “Let’s go, dear,” she coaxed. “Let’s go at once.”

“We’ll stay yet awhile,” answered Sven, flashing her a reassuring smile.

“He’ll get them all in his power,” she whispered. “Just as he had them before. Every one of us. I can feel it in his voice.” She tugged at his sleeve.

“I’m not in his power, and I said we’d stay awhile,” he answered quietly.

“What brought you back, Eric?” asked Wise Olaf. “Love for Young Eric, I suppose?” The crowd responded with a smothered laugh.

Black Eric chose not to take offence. “Why, as for that,” he said, “perhaps I did want to see Young Eric. It’s natural enough for a father to want to see his son, isn’t it? But that wasn’t the real reason. I came because I couldn’t sleep. Night after night I lay awake, and always I heard a curious sound, like a tapping, tapping, tapping. I thought if I came back here I could rest again——”

“A tapping!” cried Olga. “Then you did take Witch Mary with you!”

Black Eric’s face, pale before, lost the last vestige of colour. He wheeled upon her. “What do you mean?” he demanded.

“The tapping of her cane!” she answered. “She’s not been seen since you left.”

“I hope to God she’s dead!” There was a note of defiant relief in Black Eric’s voice. At the shout of protest that greeted his words he became placating. “Well, she’s done us all harm, hasn’t she? She brought the drought upon us with her curse. She cursed yet again, and the dam broke up the river, and the flood came and drowned many of our cattle. She——”

Swarming in through the door came the children, cutting short his speech. They ran, terrified, to their mothers.

“I knew it!” sobbed Olga’s girl. “I knew something awful would come!”

“But what is it? What’s the matter?” cried the women, alarmed.

Kaisa’s boy, the oldest of the children, answered. “The Witch! Witch Mary! She came down the path to the river. Didn’t you hear her clicking her old cane? Didn’t you hear her curse?”

“Will she—will she—come in here, I wonder?” faltered one woman.

“She said the serpent of the river would get him! She cried it out! She waved her cane and said that!”

“No,” protested another child, “she said she would kill him!”

“I could not see her—I was so—so scared!” a third added, with chattering teeth.

Black Eric stood silent, his face pale and twitching. He was evidently fighting for control.

“Where’d she go?” he asked.

“Down to the river!”

“No, she went back in the woods. She went fast, like the wind!”

They crowded to the windows, the children still clinging to their mothers. Beyond the river bank stretched a sandbar, gleaming white in the sun. The river coiled and twisted like sensuous green snakes writhing together.

“There she is, Mamma! See her through the willows!” cried Kaisa’s boy excitedly.

“O God, yes, there she is! Her clothes are frayed, they blow about her, she waves her cane in the air!”

“Where, where?” pleaded a voice.

“Red shawl dragging on her shoulder, cloth around her head!”

“Ja käre Gud!” gasped one.

“Can’t you hear her, Mamma?” wailed the little girl. “She’s muttering——”

A peculiar moaning broke upon them.

“’Tis but the river, child,” soothed Olga. “Hush, vännen, do not cry so!” Her own voice was wavering, full of a nameless fear.

“Muttering her curses, of course,” finished Black Eric, laughing hideously.

“She’ll bring some awful thing upon us, even now, with our harvests full!” sobbed the old crone. Her pipe fell unheeded to the floor.

“Ta’ mej fan if she will!” cried Black Eric, suddenly straightening his shoulders and throwing back his head. “It’s a good thing I came back just in time. What are you, a parcel of weaklings, to let her bring you bad luck with her curses?”

“She has done no harm,” ventured Olga, but her words sounded feeble.

“Done no harm!” shrieked Black Eric, cracking his whip. “There was the time when the spring was well on the way. The grain was already up from the ground. The wheat was doing bravely, and the rye was a foot tall. She hadn’t been seen for some time——”

“You’d been gone, then, too, I remember,” accused Olga. “You’d been gone, and we hadn’t seen her, and when you returned she——”

“That’s nothing to do with it!” he snapped. “She appeared, and cursed us——”

“She cursed you, you mean.” Olga hid behind her husband, peering out at Black Eric with hate in her eyes. “She has never troubled us——”

“The bad luck fell upon all alike, didn’t it? With the grain as green as could be, and no crows to speak of. Everything pointed to a good summer. And what happened, I ask you?” His tones rang out clearly now, swept over them with hypnotic spell.

“Come, Sven, before he gets us in his power,” she whispered.

“The rains came down and washed it all away. We had to sow the second time, and then it was too late, and we lost everything, even the seed. And the rains washed away much of our land, dragged it into the ravines——”

“That is true!” sighed the old man, looking even older and more wrinkled.

The faces of the men lengthened, became sad and thoughtful. Memories of long, hard years of heart-breaking toil lingered with them. Many were bent and broken in the struggle, their joints swollen and knotted with rheumatism from the cruel winters. Ah, it had taken years to win their small farms from the hold of the forests, here on the hilly slopes of Wisconsin. They had given their lives to it.

“It might have happened anyway,” pleaded Olga, gazing fearfully around upon the altered faces of the men. “We can’t expect all the years to be good as this one. Farmers everywhere have some bad years——”

“And there was the time,” Black Eric, his eyes gleaming evilly, went on, paying no attention to her interruption, “that the children were coming home from school. They had made wreaths of poison-ivy and hung them around their necks. Witch Mary met them, and told them they would die at sundown. Did they not nearly die?” he demanded, this time addressing the women.

“What are you saying?” cried Olga, drawing the little girl closer. “I have never heard of that.”

“We thought best not to speak of it, lest the children get too frightened,” said Kaisa. “Young Eric nearly died, as it was. And certain it is they would all have died if they had not come home in time for us to treat them.”

Olga stooped to lift the little girl, passionately folding her close.

“Each time she has cursed us it has been something more terrible,” Black Eric’s voice rang out. “God knows what it will be this time! And always it has happened when our crops were doing nicely and our hopes were high——”

“That is true; yes, yes, that is true!”

“So now, with your barns so full of hay it sticks out for yards at the open sides and your grain ready to harvest, now—she comes cursing again! And you men are weak enough to let her rob you of this! And you women! What are you, that you will let her curse your children? Such mothers! Bah! Even a dog will protect its young! Yes, like as not it will fall upon the children this time——”

“No, no, no!” The women shrank from him. Some staggered as though they would have fallen, and sat weakly down. A brutal look was dawning in the faces of the men. Silent Sven alone was not moved; his arms were folded in front, his head thrown back.

“Even in the old days,” Black Eric went on, “before people were civilized, they destroyed the witches that brought them harm. They drove them out! They burned them at the stake!”

“No, no!” Olga found her voice with a choking effort. “You will not be so cruel—you will not burn her!”

Black Eric’s eyes gleamed savagely. He towered above them, triumphantly.

“I shouldn’t advise that,” he agreed, “but—to drive her out——”

“Who is to do this?” quavered a voice.

“Look, Mamma,” cried the little girl. “She is running back to the woods!”

“Running back to the hut,” shrilled Kaisa, peering out, “with her plaid shawl hanging over her bones!”

“Now is the time!” cried Black Eric. “Now, when you can catch her in the hut! Go quickly, you men!”

“And what about you?” Silent Sven addressed Black Eric for the first time.

“Me?” cringed Black Eric. “It—would not—do for me——”

“Oh, you daren’t!” Silent Sven flung the challenge at him.

“Daren’t! You can’t say that word to me! Come on, all of you! I will lead you! I will show you if I dare!” He started for the door, the men preparing to follow him.

“I will go, too!” cried Olga. “You shall not burn her; I can at least see to that!”

“I would burn her,” retorted Kaisa. “I would help light the fagots! Olaf, you stay in the store.”

“Is that so?” said Olaf, with gleaming eyes. “I shall be needed, like as not. ’Tis a woman’s place to stay at home.”

“I’m not going to be cheated of this!” Kaisa turned to the old crone. “You stay,” she coaxed. “You couldn’t climb the hill, anyway. It’s a long hill.”

“I can climb the hill,” quavered the old woman. “I can climb it as well as anybody. I shall go with the others. See, everyone is going. I shall not stay behind.”

“I will give you a pound of coffee, the best in the store. I will give you two yards of cloth for an apron.”

The old woman’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Five pounds of coffee,” she wheedled, “and five yards of your best goods, or I go with the rest!”

“Five pounds! No, that I will never——”

“And some tobacco! Yes, I think I must have some tobacco!”

“Oh, give it to her!” cried Wise Olaf. “Give it her, and let us be on!”

Cautioning the children to play on the bank until their return, they formed in a group at the base of the hill, where the path led up to Witch Mary’s hut. Black Eric cracked his whip. The men picked up long sticks, all except Silent Sven. Viking cruelty shone in their faces. The women would have clung to their arms, but the men shook them off and started ahead, Black Eric leading.

It was a tangled path, knotted across by roots of trees and shrubs. The branches of the trees interlaced above, forming a shady arch. All along, beside the way, slender spires of blue vervain lifted their purple blossoms to the random sun.

“See,” said Kaisa, awed by the luxuriant growth. “See how thick it is. And witches have always used it in their caldrons. No wonder it grows here!”

“But the vervain,” protested Olga, “the vervain grew on Mount Calvary, and it has the power of healing.”

“You will say next, I suppose,” Kaisa retorted, “that it has been watered by the old witch’s tears!”

“Come on, you women!” called Wise Olaf. “Do not lag behind!”

The women became silent, not stopping again to take note of the flowers beside the way. They panted after the men, who were climbing rapidly.

“Can you see the hut?” called Kaisa, pausing to get her breath.

“No, the trees have grown up about it. And don’t talk—she’ll hear us.”

“I’d no idea it was such a hard hill.” Kaisa’s face was red; her eyes were wildly excited.

“Do you think they will kill her?” whispered Olga. “Even Sven looked fierce.”

“’Twould serve her right.”

As they neared the top the women too picked up stout sticks. “Just to help us climb,” suggested one, as if ashamed.

“I want no stick,” said Olga, but she stopped for a moment with the others. “Oh, look! You can see the river from here—just the place, I believe, where the girl was drowned!”

The men called them again, and by the time they had caught up, the top of the hill was reached. They paused a moment at the edge of the clearing. Young trees had grown so high that they overshadowed the hut. The wind rattled through the leaves in hollow whispers. They saw the hut at last, sagging between the branches. The stovepipe had fallen, but still clung to the rotted shingles. The one window overlooking the river was broken and had not been repaired.

“It was a poor hut, at best,” said the old man. “Let us not be too hard on her.”

“Ho!” blustered Eric, swinging around to face the speaker savagely. “You are already weakening, are you?”

A debating silence followed, then the old man decided. “No, she must be driven out.”

They made their difficult way through tangled weeds and shrubs to the door, which faced the woods behind.

“You rap,” said Black Eric. “One of you, any one.”

“Not I.” Wise Olaf shook his head. The others shrank back.

“What about you?” Silent Sven again challenged the leader. “You—you are afraid to!”

“I am afraid, am I?” he sputtered. He walked unsteadily to the door, his face haggard with fear.

“Everything is silent—silent as the grave,” whispered Olga, clinging to her husband’s arm, openly afraid.

“What’s that?” a startled voice cut in. “Sobbing? Was that sobbing?” A wailing note swept through the trees.

“Hush!”

Black Eric raised his hand. The knob was rusty, the door sunken in. He rapped, feebly at first, his hands trembling like aspen-leaves. Getting no response but an empty echo from within, he struck his fist heavily against the door. It almost gave way.

“Open the door, Witch!” he cried. “You can’t hide from us!”

“Don’t be so harsh,” begged Olga, her voice the wraith of a whisper. “You will frighten her to death!”

Goaded to desperation, he raised his fist, and gave the door a terrific blow. It fell with a soft thud, the rotted wood crumbling on the floor. He stepped in, the rest following.

A thick carpet of dust lay over the floor. No imprint upon it, except some tracks left by wandering rats. A stove, red with rust and warped beyond recognition, stood on one side, supporting an old country metal coffeepot, filmed with black. Cobwebs hung from the rude rafters overhead. The round home-made rugs, once brave with gay colours, looked like little mounds of earth. Beside the broken window stood a sagging spinning wheel, so long unused that it drooped in utter dejection, one spindle fallen down.

At first bewildered, utterly struck dumb, then filled with horror too deep for words, the people looked around the room, its silent pathos striking like icy hands across their consciousness.

“She has not—lived here!” Kaisa found her voice first. She stooped and picked up a rusty pan lying beside the stove, and hung it on a bent nail, as though in this small act she found consolation.

“What—what is that—over there?” She pointed to a curtain drawn over an object on one side.

There was a gasp. “Maybe—maybe she is—dead—behind——”

“Dead! You fools!” shrieked Black Eric. “Didn’t we just see her?” He staggered to the curtain, grasped it roughly. It fell, a crumpled mass of dust and decayed cloth, disclosing the two built-in bunks, now empty, where Mary and her daughter had slept.

“There, you see! She must be living in the outhouse, the barn. She—she kept the cow there. Let’s look for her there.” And he passed over what had been the door, the rest following.

“The grave!” cried the old man. “I remember where it was. Let us look for the grave!”

“Leave the grave alone!” choked Black Eric, his face twitching horribly. “She is out in the barn, I tell you! See, I think she is there!” He pointed a shaking finger to another broken-down hut between the trees.

“We will find the grave,” said Silent Sven. “You said it was between the oaks.”

“I won’t go there!” gasped Black Eric. “Let us look——”

“You’ll come with us!” Silent Sven commanded, grasping Black Eric by the shoulder and dragging him along. Silent and awed, the crowd proceeded through the tangle of weeds and young trees to the side of the hut between the two oaks. Some of the men began to poke around with their sticks, but Olga stopped them.

The old man motioned silently to a depression in the ground. “It is long ago,” he whispered. “The grave—is sunken.”

Olga fell on her knees, sobbing convulsively. She reached out her hands and reverently brushed aside the leaves that lay upon the grave, then started up, a cry of terror on her lips.

Within the depression, where she had scraped the leaves away, a human skeleton lay bleaching, stained almost to the colour of brown twigs. As they bent over they saw a skull, through the sockets of which rose the slender spires of a plant, covering it mercifully with clusters of purplish-blue flowers. A rusty iron cross lay beside it.

“That is—that is where she lay—when we came up,” quavered the old man. “She lay there——”

The women began to sob unrestrainedly, Kaisa’s voice wailing above the others. The men turned upon Black Eric, their sticks raised high, terror forgotten in a mighty wave of revenge that swept its fire over them.

“It isn’t true!” he gasped, his teeth clicking together. “It isn’t, I tell you! Haven’t we seen her—all these years? Didn’t we—see her—this——”

Before the look in their faces he slunk away. He stumbled past the hut, the thorny branches reaching out their hands, catching him, tearing his clothes. On down the path, his terrified flight impeded by the gnarled roots.

Behind him followed a human avalanche, great cries issuing from their throats, sticks raised, ready to strike. Silent Sven fought his way to the front, called them to silence. “Let him go!” His voice rang out. “Let him go! His fear will punish him, far, far more than we could punish him! It will follow him, as it has followed him all these years. But never again will it affect us, and she is at rest!”

Before him, in the gap left by the branches, lay the river, coiling and twisting in the sun, a waiting, hungry look upon its face.

THE BAMBOO TRAP
By ROBERT S. LEMMON
From Short Stories

“A letter, patrón.”

One corner of the mosquito bar that made of the tent fly an airy, four-walled room was lifted and a brown hand thrust in the envelope with its array of foreign postmarks and smudgy thumb-prints, all but concealing the familiar American stamp. Outside, the steady roar of the Chanchan River, softened by distance as it charged down the last pitches of the Andes on its way to the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Pacific, blended into a musical background for the messenger’s guttural voice.

John Mather laid down the birdskin on which he was working and reached eagerly for the missive. Any word from the outside world was a godsend here in the jungle—doubly so when it came in the form of a letter whose bulk proclaimed several pages of home news. He ripped open the flap with dexterous, capable fingers and flattened the folded sheets on the camp table before him among the litter of skinning tools, cotton, and specimen labels.

For a space he read absorbedly, sensing behind the cold impersonality of the typewritten words the analytical mind of the man who had dictated them. Not until he came to the last page did his expression change and a half frown pucker the corners of his eyes.

“Hell!” he growled. “Isn’t that the way of things? Just when I’m finishing up my collections here, too, and planning to catch the next steamer north. No Christmas at home this year! Let’s see—how many of the damn things does he say he wants?” He re-read the final paragraphs of the letter, mumbling them half aloud in the manner of one in whom many years of living alone in the back of the world’s beyond have bred the habit of self-conversation:

“The Department of Entomology is extremely desirous of securing several specimens of the Cuabandan spider, to complete their habitat group of insects from the high Andes. It seems that the ones they intended to use proved to be rather poorly prepared and could not be mounted satisfactorily.

“Also, I am in receipt of a letter from the International Museum in Chicago offering to exchange a valuable collection of humming-bird skins from Guatemala for a complete series of these same spiders. You know how incomplete our Guatemalan material is, and therefore how anxious I am to secure these specimens from Dr. Huston. He asks that we furnish him with at least a dozen Cuabandans of both sexes, and perhaps twice that number of immature ones.

“You will find the spiders inhabiting the slopes of the mountain Chuquipata, probably between the 9,000-and 12,000-foot levels, although reliable data on this point is impossible for me to secure. The species is decidedly rare, and I can give you little information to help you in your search. Beyond their appearance and great size, with which you are perhaps familiar, and the fact that they are carnivorous and often prey upon small birds, nothing is really known of them. I shall depend upon you to remain in the region long enough to gain at least an outline of their life habits.

“I am sorry to have to give you this new assignment, Mather, because I judge from your last letter that you have about finished your field work on the west side of the mountains and are looking forward to your return to New York. But I know that you will appreciate my position and postpone sailing for the few additional weeks which the Chuquipata expedition will entail.

“All good wishes to you from myself and the Staff.

“Sincerely yours,
“Eliot A. Rodgers,
“Curator of Ornithology.”

Mather folded the letter thoughtfully and thrust it into the pocket of his flannel shirt. With the buttoning down of the flap he seemed to dismiss his irritation and become again the seasoned museum collector, taking each task as it comes and subjugating all personal desires to the duties of his calling. As he turned again to the half-skinned bird before him he summoned his Indian guide and general assistant in the terse Spanish fashion, “Pedro—ven aquí!”

“Ahora sí, patrón,” sing-songed the Quichua from the cooking lean-to near by. “Yo no más!” In a moment he stood before the white man, a squat, stolid figure with the humble eyes of a whipped dog.

Mather snipped the wing bones of the bird close to the body and stripped the skin down the neck and over the skull to the eyes, turning it inside out skilfully. A few crunching clips with his scissors separated head from neck and exposed the base of the brain. He set the raw body aside and commenced scooping out the clotted, grayish matter from the interior of the skull.

As he worked he spoke pointedly. “You know Chuquipata, Pedro?”

A grunt and nod signified the Indian’s assent. In the presence of the American his words were customarily few, a reticence inspired not so much by awe of his employer as by inherited fear of the whites handed down from the days of the first enslaving of his race by the Spanish conquistadores four centuries ago.

“Rough country, isn’t it? Muchas quebradas—no?”

Another affirmative, more vehement this time. Then, “You not go there, patrón?”

Mather finished cleaning the birdskin, dusted its inner surface with arsenic and alum powder to cure and preserve it, and turned it right side out again.

“Yes, we go to Chuquipata in three days,” he answered as he shook the ruffled feathers into place and began filling out the skin with cotton. “You will go to the village to-morrow and get cargadores to carry the outfit. Four good men I will need, Pedro. Or, if you can find them, two mules instead; pack animals are better than men, but there are not many to be had. See what you can do.”

He dismissed the man with a wave of the hand, and tied an identifying label to the crossed feet of his specimen. As carefully as if it were of the most fragile and costly porcelain he wrapped the tiny green and yellow effigy of the bird in cotton to hold it in shape until feathers and skin should dry, and added it to the rows of similar mummies in the tray of his collector’s trunk.

“That makes eight hundred from this region,” he commented as he made the entry in a record book. “Not bad for three months’ work, considering the weather I’ve had. It brings the total up to nearly two thousand for the whole trip, and several of the species are new to science, too. Well, I suppose I’ll have to let it go at that and begin to get ready for this Chuquipata hike. It’ll take nearly a day just to pick up my small mammal traps in the jungle around here.”

Toward the southward end of that semi-arid plateau which stretches for three hundred rolling miles between the East and West Cordillera of the Ecuadorian Andes lies a land that God forgot. High in the air it is, as men measure such things—a matter of two vertical miles above the slow lift of the Pacific out beyond the sunset. Tumbled and stark too, a dumping ground of the Titans, a scrap heap from the furnaces in which the world was made. For in ages far beyond the memory of man, volcanic peaks whose summits have long been smoothed by the erosion of the centuries belched forth their hot lava and ash and laid a blight upon the land. Ravine, hillock, mountain, wind-swept, gaunt, and all but uninhabited, magnificent in the splendour of their distances—such is the setting of Chuquipata to-day, and such will it remain until Vulcan kindles his forge anew.

Up into this sky-top world John Mather rode on a day as glittering and telescopically clear overhead as it was harsh and dusty underfoot—up out of the green rankness of the coast jungles into a land of illimitable space. To the condor swinging a thousand feet in air, his pack-train seemed like ants crawling in single file across a rugged boulder.

Where a ravine gashed the side of Chuquipata he pitched camp on a little grassy flat protected on three sides by the crumbly walls of the cut, and braced his tent pegs with rocks against the tugging of a wind that pounced down in unexpected gusts. Scrubby brush and the stunted, gnarly trees of the high altitudes straggled here and there, promising firewood in limited and smoky quantities. A score of feet from the tent door a brooklet tinkled under overhanging wire grass, ice-cold and diamond-clear. And above it all, stupendous in miles of waving, yellowish páramo, dwarfing men and camp to pigmy size, the mountain swept up and up into a cap of clouds.

When the equipment was unloaded, Mather dismissed his packers and their two mules, for he had no way of telling how long his search for the giant spiders might last, and there was no point in feeding idle mouths week after week. Only Pedro he retained, to do the camp chores and leave him entirely free for his collecting work. Besides, the Indian would be useful when, at the end of the stay, new carriers would have to be secured from one of the villages a day’s march away.

It was mid-afternoon before the camp was fully arranged and Mather set out for his first survey of the area he might have to cover as with a fine tooth comb. Hopeless enough it seemed, as he looked up at it from the ravine head, an appallingly vast and rugged haystack in which to search for one small needle. Were his quarry a bird that flew or an animal that ran, the task would not have looked so hopeless. But a spider, a crawling creature of the grass and brush, probably never coming into fair view—that was different.

He set to work methodically, covering every type of ground that lay between the points which his aneroid told him were eight and twelve thousand feet above the sea. Bunch grass, scrub, rocks, volcanic ash—he went over them all with keen and patient thoroughness but no success. Inquiries of Pedro and the occasional mountain Quichuas whom he met elicited no information of value; either his attempts to describe the creatures he sought were not understood, or the spiders were so rare that even the natives were unfamiliar with them. Evening after evening he returned wearily to camp, empty-handed save for a brace of mountain partridges or a few wild pigeons which he had shot for food, or the half-dozen smaller birds of which his collection stood in need.

“If I had only had some line on the habits of the beasts it would be easier,” he mused as he ate his cornbread lunch one day beside a stream that plunged down the mountain far to the north of where his camp lay. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know even whether they’re day or night feeders. About the only thing I’m sure of is that they’re not to be found on the south slope where I’ve been working. Pedro and I will have to move the outfit around to this side, I guess; the vegetation is quite different here—thicker and not so dried, as though it got more rain. I’ll take a look down this spur and then work back around the base. There may be a good camp site down that way.”

He picked up his gun and started to descend the ridge that dropped sharply toward a valley so far below that its brush and trees blended to a uniform sage-green carpet of marvellous softness. Rocks and beds of loose pumice that broke and slid treacherously as he crossed them covered the slope. He edged his way down cautiously, grasping the rare handholds of bush or tough grass, above him the blue spaces of the sky, the patchwork quilt of the world far-flung below.

A half-hour of this, and then the knife edge fanned out into a broader, easier descent across which trailing bamboo had spread an unbroken mat. As far as Mather could see on either side, and forward to the last steep pitch that dropped to the valley floor, that tangle of interlacing stems and offshoots extended, three feet or so above the ground and in some places strong enough to support a man’s full weight. Had a leafy cloth been woven to cover the mountain’s bareness it could not have more perfectly concealed what lay beneath.

“I’m not very keen to tackle that,” Mather muttered, halting at the edge of the tangle. “Too tough to smash through, and not quite tough enough to walk on—I’ve tried ground cane before.”

He looked back at the pitch he had just descended and shook his head.

“About six of one and half a dozen of the other, I guess. Damned if I’ll shin up that ridge again. Can’t work around the edge of this bamboo, either—those cliffs block me off. Well, here goes for a bad two hours’ work.”

He took the shells out of his gun, slung the weapon on his back so as to leave both hands free, and started down, choosing what appeared to be the least rugged part of the slope.

It was rough going. On hands and knees he would crawl along for a few yards over the bamboo, then strike a weak spot and smash through to the ground in a smother of leaves and hampering tendrils, scramble out and go on. By the time he was half way to the bottom of the valley he was soaked with perspiration and nearly fagged out. Only his indomitable will and the knowledge that to turn back now would be doubly impossible kept him going.

It was nearly sunset when he reached a comparatively level stretch beyond which the mountain dropped away suddenly as though to make up for lost time. Across this place the cane was unusually thick, and he was getting along quite well, when, a few yards short of the steep slope the supporting mat broke with a ripping, tearing noise and he slithered down sickeningly into hot, pitchy darkness. Then a crunching jar, red lights flickering before his eyes, and unconsciousness.

How long he lay insensible he could not tell. It must have been many hours, for when he came to he was stiff and sore and the blood from a long scratch across his wrist had dried. A thousand tiny hammers seemed beating on his brain, each stroke an ache that quivered through a nerve. Dazedly he tried to sit up, failed, and lay flat on his back, hands clutching at the ground as he fought for control of his twitching eyes.

Gradually things steadied, and he saw that he was in a sort of pear-shaped cave perhaps a dozen yards in diameter and half as high. Daylight filtered through a ragged hole at its apex, pitifully weak, but enough to disclose the mingled rocks and earth that formed the walls of the enclosure and the whitish, diseased-looking vines that twined up them to the opening.

“That’s where I fell through—that hole,” Mather croaked. “Yes—that hole—fell through—yes, fell through. I’ve got to—get out—up there.”

He wavered to his knees and waited grimly for the whirling in his head to abate.

“Now, let’s—see,” he whispered hoarsely, creeping toward the wall.

Twice he made the circuit of the cave, groping his way over boulders and loose débris that gave out a dank, nauseous odour. His hands pawed uncertainly at the walls, seeking firm holds, but finding nothing except the mass of vine stems, clammy and breaking at the first hard pull.

“Fool!” he growled at last. “I couldn’t get up there anyway. It slopes in. A man can’t climb on a ceiling. God!”

He slumped back and tried to think rationally.

“Let’s see, now. I was coming down the mountain, headed west. The steepest part was just ahead of me when I fell—forty-five-degree slope, about. Not more than twenty feet or so away. This hole, now—yes, it’s close to forty feet wide at the bottom—maybe five feet through to the face of the slant——”

He started up eagerly, the realization that he could burrow his way out clearing his brain and putting new life in his racked body. He reached for the sheath knife at his belt, the only digging tool he had. As he stood there with it in his hand a thought flashed over him that drove all the zest from his face.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he muttered. “Which is the west side?”

He looked about helplessly at the prison that hemmed him in. Somewhere, to right or left, ahead or behind, that mass of earth and rock must be comparatively thin, hardly more than a shell separating him from freedom and the broad reaches of the sky. If he could find that spot, strike that downhill side, he might be able to dig through to the outer world in a few hours. If he missed it, started work on the wrong side, his burrowing would only lead him deeper into the mountain, wasting his strength and the precious element of time. And between those two extremes, the heart-warming right and the hopelessly wrong, was no faintest clue to guide him to a decision. Yes, there was one—his compass, of course! Stupid not to have thought of that before; the surest possible proof. Everything was all right now.

He fumbled in the side pocket of his coat and drew out the instrument, a watchlike affair in a heavy nickel case. His first glance showed the needle bent crazily beneath the shattered glass, twisted and utterly ruined by the crash of his fall.

Mather’s face went hard as he tilted the broken thing in his hand, testing its uselessness with a sort of grim irony.

“So-o,” he said bitterly. “You’re about as much good to me as a piece of cheese, aren’t you? Or a chunk of lead—because I could eat the cheese. Well, I guess I’ll have to depend on Old Lady Luck to help me out. I may as well pick out a place that looks like easy digging, anyhow.”

He stumbled across the cave and began to pick a way at the wall where the earth was crumbly and yielded readily to knife and hands. A few inches in he struck rock. Working along it, he came finally to loose rubble, but the mass was too large for him to dislodge without starting a disastrous cave-in from above. He would have to try another place. And an hour had been wasted.

A second location was even less promising, but the third gave him hope. He burrowed on stubbornly, his fingers torn and bleeding from the sharp fragments of rock embedded in the soil like chips of glass, his muscles aching from their exertions in the cramped space which his progress created. Two feet, a yard—at this rate he ought to break through in a few more hours, unless he were working in the wrong direction. At thought of that contingency he redoubled his efforts, determined to end the uncertainty as soon as possible. And a few inches farther on he came squarely up against another boulder that defied every attempt to move it.

Exhausted and reeking with perspiration, he backed out of the hole and stretched full length on the floor of the cave. In a little while, when the cramps had left his back and shoulders, he would start in again. Yes, just a few minutes rest, and then—then he was roused from uneasy half-sleep by a slow, insistent rustling like a snake crawling through grass. He listened tensely, eyes closed in concentration, striving to locate its direction. The sound came closer, louder, on all sides of him, filling the cave with eerie whispers. Then suddenly it seemed to reach a focus close by, and a creeping hairy body brushed against his neck. With a leap he gained his feet, his eyes wide with horror.

The light in the cave had dimmed, but he could see that the walls were alive with huge spiders, thick-legged and hideous, their bodies as large as a sparrow’s and covered with straggly fuzz. Some were blackish in colour, others were a sort of cherry red. They were crawling sluggishly, as though gorged with food, down the vines that reached the opening above his head. A dozen had gained the floor; others were nearly there. Hundreds more were creeping in at the hole and groping for convenient stems down which to clamber.

With a shudder Mather knew—knew that here, in this dark prison, was the night shelter, the universal rendezvous, of the beasts he had come so far to catch. By day they hunted through the cane tangle that covered the mountainside, perfectly concealed and safe from all detection, and as night approached they convened here from all directions to take refuge from the rains which each night spilled across the land. They were gathering now, crawling, crawling with that infernal rustling sound——

“God!” he muttered. “And he said they were rare!” Full darkness came, bringing to John Mather the torture of eternal nightmare. With hands, coat, hat, he beat and crushed the furry hordes that swarmed over him. But for every one killed two more were ready to take its place; there seemed no end to their numbers. Their curved jaws clipped into him wherever his skin was exposed. Though he could see nothing in the pitchy darkness, an odour of decay told him that shreds of flesh from their victims of days before still clung to them, and the dread of blood-poisoning obsessed him. In a quiver of loathing and fear he fought on bitterly hour after hour, dropping into snatches of exhausted sleep only to struggle up again when the writhing burden on his face threatened to choke off his breath.

At last the blackness began to gray. Dawn was coming up over the mountains, and as the light strengthened, the spiders scattered, climbing the vines again to the open air and the sunshine. Singly and in battalions they went rank after rank up the stems of their living ladders. And as the last stragglers disappeared through the opening above him Mather sat with head sunk between his hands, fighting to retain a sanity that hung on the very edge of destruction.

It must have been midday before he pulled himself together enough to eat some of the emergency rations which were as much a part of his collecting outfit as his gun or butterfly net. The food helped to steady him, and presently he began moving about under the hole at the cave’s peak, trying to determine the points of the compass by the appearance of the scraps of sky he could see through the openings in the bamboo. A few minutes’ study convinced him of the hopelessness of this, for leaden clouds had blotted out the sun. So uniform was their mass that he could not even detect their own direction of movement, which, if he could have ascertained, would have served as a fairly accurate indication here in this land where the prevailing wind at the higher levels blows from the east.

“I’d better get back to my digging,” he told himself finally. “It’s the only chance, for Pedro would never find me among all those acres of cane, even if he knew enough to come this way to look. I didn’t tell him which way I was going, when I left camp.”

He groped his way into the tunnel he had started the day before and renewed his struggle with the rocks that blocked its end. He felt stronger now, and the physical work helped to shove into the background of his mind the horror that he knew the night would bring again. Perhaps he could break his way through before dark—a mere chance, but enough to add incentive to his labour.

By superhuman effort he worked out the largest rock at last, backed into the cave with it, and wriggled in again to the attack. Prying and digging with his knife, he burrowed on through earth that gave way more readily as he progressed. Sweat streamed from him unheeded; with each foot that he advanced the air in the tunnel grew warmer. A nauseating, steamy odour crept into it, so faint at first as to defy analysis, but increasing momentarily.

Presently Mather drew his hand back with an exclamation of surprise. His fingers had touched a rock so hot that it almost burned them.

“What the hell?” he growled, then lay still, thinking, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath.

Crushingly the explanation came to him: The burrow was leading into the mountain, straight forward toward those infernal caverns of molten lava and steam which underlie that whole mighty continental backbone from Cape Horn to Panama. Already he had dug far enough through the mountain’s outer shell to reach the heat that radiated from them.

Mather’s heart sank with the realization that all his work had gone for nothing. Then a great wave of hope swept over him as the thought came that out of this very failure sprang success, for since he had been digging toward the mountain’s centre, the opposite way must lead to light and life and freedom.

He wormed his way backward, gulping with relief as he reached the cooler air near the tunnel’s mouth. A few more wriggles, and his knee struck something that crushed flabbily under the pressure. Across one hand dragged a fat, rough body, paused and sent a tingle of pain up his forearm as he shook it off with a jerk. The spider army had returned. Through the endless hours of that second night of horror John Mather clung to two things with the desperation of a wave-buffeted man whose arm is crooked across a slippery, floating spar: the knowledge that daylight would bring relief from his tormentors, and the hope that before another evening drove them scurrying back to shelter he would have won his way through the cave wall. Every atom of will power, every drop of that fine essence of determination which some men call upon to carry them against impossible odds he threw into the mental struggle, knowing that to lose sight of his goal would mean gibbering madness.

And in the end he won. Taut and quivering as a plucked string, he sensed rather than saw that the crawling hosts were gone.

“Now!” he rasped, the sound of his own voice grating across his nerves. “Now you dig.”

He hurled himself savagely into the work, slashing and tugging at the hard-packed earth and stone opposite the mass of débris he had scooped out the day before. His knife wedged between two rocks and the blade snapped short off as he tried to extricate it. He cursed chokingly and hacked away with the haft, pitifully futile by comparison.

“Got to make it!” he muttered. “Got to make it to-day! I’ll go crazy—crazy, I tell you!”

Inch by inch, a foot, two feet, three, he won ahead through the darkness, driving his battered hands without mercy. Out there somewhere beyond that stubborn, unseen barrier against which he pressed were fresh air and the sane, unhampered sweep of God’s world. Behind, unspeakable gloom and torture more horrible than death. He must, he must keep going!

It was nearly noon when he stopped from sheer inability to do more and slithered back into the cave for a few minutes’ rest. For a moment he thought night was coming on, so dark was it as he emerged from the tunnel, but as he glanced up at the opening above his head he saw that the shadows came from masses of blue-black clouds that swirled together ominously and dropped lower even as he watched. A dull pulsing shook the air, as of huge drums thudding afar off. Lightning ripped across the clouds, so close that Mather heard its white-hot crackle an instant before the smash of the thunder beat against his brain. He threw an arm across his face to shut out the flash and what it revealed—thousands of noisome, hairy beasts that came scuttling on fat legs through the opening to take refuge from the storm.

Then it rained. The heavens opened and crashed down. A torrent of mud and water poured through the cave roof, ripping the opening to twice its former size. Like a huge bucket the cave caught and held the flood. Momentarily the water rose—to Mather’s ankles, his knees, his waist. The spiders struggled in it, dropping from walls and roof by dozens. They swarmed over him horribly as they fought with each other for safety on his body and head. He tried to brush them off, to drown them by sousing himself under the cascade that spilled down from above, but they clung to him like leeches.

The water was up to his chest, now. Presently he was swimming, his head a mass of spiders that thickened by the minute and nearly suffocated him. For an age he struggled, growing weaker and weaker, knowing that in the end he must sink under that chaotic mass. The thought of it nerved him to a few more feeble strokes, a final effort to rid his head of the clammy bodies. Then, miraculously, a clatter and splash of falling rocks and earth, a sucking sound as from a giant sluice pipe suddenly cleared, and his feet touched bottom.

He staggered blindly, trying to gain his balance on the uneven rocks. With arms arched he crushed and rubbed his head free of its loathsome blanket and saw that the water was but waist deep and falling rapidly. Through the lightening darkness he could make out the whirlpool which told where, at the end of the tunnel he had been digging, the wall had given way before the pressure from within. Even as he looked the last of the water swashed out, and stooping down, he caught a glimpse of daylight. On hands and knees he crept through the opening and emerged to the free sweep of the hills, soft and dripping and peaceful against the background of the retreating storm.

For minutes he lay there, a sodden, shaken figure, looking out across that far-flung view with hollow eyes from which the stare of horror slowly faded. Then he got to his knees, his feet, and drew a great, shuddering breath. His eyes dropped to the slope immediately before him, strewn with scores of drowned spiders.

“Well,” he said shakily, “it looks as though there are enough here for all the museums in the world. I’ll make a good haul while I’m about it.”

With swollen, bruised hands, he began gathering up the draggled bodies and piling them beside a rock.

THE HAT OF EIGHT REFLECTIONS
By JAMES MAHONEY
From Century