The Price

by Francis Lynde

It is a trite saying that many a gulf, seemingly impassable, has been safely bridged in sleep. Bathed, refreshed and with the tramping stains removed, Griswold went down to dinner with the lost appetite regained. A leisurely hour spent in the restorative atmosphere of the well-filled dining-room added its uplift, and at the end of it the troublesome perplexities and paradoxes had withdrawn—at least far enough so that they could be held in the artistic perspective. Afterward, during the cigar-smoking on the cool veranda, he struck out his plan. In the morning he would send in town to Mrs. Holcomb for a few necessaries, and telephone to Raymer. After which, he would try what a fallow day or two would do for him; an interval in which he could weigh and measure and think, and possibly recover the lost sense of proportion.

As the plan was conceived, so it was carried out. Early on the following day he sent a note to Mrs. Holcomb by one of the Inn employees; but the copy of the Daily Wahaskan laid beside his breakfast plate made it unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of his life—gone beyond recall.

After that, there was all the better reason why he should grapple with himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost, even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same imperfect social system partly responsible for the quasi-criminal attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it; willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved, he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be true.

It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency, stirred him apprehensively, bringing a suggestive return of the furtive fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.

Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come. Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty as charged—to open the door to chaos.

It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could choose his own time for an evening call.

It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly, and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of passengers from the lately met northbound train.

Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and gripped him.

"Why, Griswold, old man!—well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold. Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank, in New Orleans."

Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for the Louisianian, turning up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the after-deck of the coastwise steamer Adelantado to prove it to him.