For the first time she considered Evan Bartholomew Pell as a human being. Never before had he been human to her, but a crackling, parchment creature, not subject to joys and sorrows, not adaptable to friendships and social relations. She had pictured him carelessly as an entity to himself, unrelated to the world which moved about him, and loved and hated and coveted and covered itself with a mantle of charity. He had aroused her sympathy by his helplessness and his incapacity—a rather contemptuous sympathy.... Her contempt was gone, never to return. She speculated upon the possible workings of his mind; what was to become of him; why he was as he was. He became a human possibility in her mind, capable of something. She saw how there resided in him, in spite of his wasted years, in spite of the incubus of precocity which had ridden him from childhood, the spirit of which men are created.... She wondered if he were capable of breaking through the crust and of emerging such a man as the world might admire.... She doubted it. The crust was so thick and so hard.
Of one thing she was certain—never again could she sneer at him or treat him with supercilious superiority, for, whatever his patent defects, she had been compelled to recognize that the foundations of him were admirable.... She vowed, in her impulsive way, to make amends. She went even farther, as is the way with girls both impulsive and calculating—she determined to remake Evan Pell, to remodel him along lines of her own designing.... Women love to renovate men; it is, perhaps, the major side line to the primary business of their lives—and God knows what that may be!
Carmel paid scant attention to the road she followed. It was a pleasant road, a silvery-bright road. It contented her and seemed a road which must lead to some desirable destination. The destination was vague and distant; she did not hope to reach it, but it amused and stirred her to think there must be such a terminal.
She walked away from Gibeon for an hour before she realized that every step she took meant two steps, one coming and one returning. She was unconscious of loneliness, nor did she feel any apprehension of the silent woods. The spot where she paused was lovely with cold light and warm shadows and she looked about for a place to sit and rest a moment before her return journey. She stepped from the roadside and seated herself upon a fallen, rotting log, partially screened from the thoroughfare by clump growth of young spruce.
Hardly had she taken her seat when a small automobile roared around a bend and jounced and rattled toward Gibeon. It was going at high speed. On the front seat she saw two male figures, but so uncertain was the light and so rapid the passage that she was unable to identify them. She started to her feet to stare after the car, when, to her amazement, it came to a skidding stop, with screaming of brakes, a scant hundred yards beyond her. It maneuvered a moment, and then, departing from the road, groaning through the dry ditch that bordered it, the car forced its way into the woods where there was no road at all.
Carmel was intrigued by this eccentric behavior. Automobiles, as she knew them, did not habitually leave excellent roads to roam about in a trackless forest. The cars she knew were creatures of habit, adhering to the beaten paths of hurrying civilization. She could not imagine one adventuring on its own, and most especially she could not conceive of one rambling about in the woods. She had a feeling that it was not right for one to do so—which was natural to her as a human being, for all human beings have a firm belief that anything not sanctioned by immemorial custom must be evil. New paths lead inevitably to damnation.
She was startled, but not frightened. Whatever was going on here could not threaten her, for she knew herself to have been unseen; appreciated how easy it would be to remain in concealment.
Presently she heard the sound of axes.... She crouched and waited—possibly for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time the car pushed its rump awkwardly out of the woods again, swung on to the road, and, stirring a sudden cloud of dust, sped toward Gibeon.... It was only then she realized the car had been traveling without lights.
She waited. The sound of the automobile vanished in the distance and she judged it safe to investigate. Somewhat gingerly she emerged upon the road and walked toward the spot where the car had entered the woods. The wheel tracks were plainly to be seen, and she followed them inward. It was but a step, perhaps fifty yards. At the end there was nothing but a pile of freshly cut sprucelings. Had the season been other than summer, she would have concluded some one was cutting Christmas trees for the market—but one did not cut Christmas trees in July! But why were the little spruces cut? There must be a reason. She stirred them with her foot. Then, with impulsive resolution, she began flinging them aside.
Underneath she came upon a square of canvas—a cover—and concealed by this the last thing in the world she would have expected to come upon.... Bottles and bottles and bottles, carefully laid and piled. Instantly she knew, even before she lifted a bottle and read the label which identified it as whisky of foreign distillage, she had witnessed one step in a whisky smuggler’s progress; had surprised a cache of liquor which had evaded the inspectors at the border, a few miles away. She did not count the bottles, but she estimated their number—upward of a hundred!