Wayne rode back to the city in the motor that had carried him home, and at the garage Joe, gossiping with the loafing chauffeurs, heard him order out his racing machine.
They had not met since Wayne’s long absence in the hills, but Joe had learned from Paddock that Wayne was in a place of safety. Wayne’s appearance at the garage and demand for the racer brought Joe up standing, and he took charge of the machine without a word.
Wayne hardly noticed him, so deep was his preoccupation; and this in itself seemed ominous to Joe.
“So you’re going are you, Joe? Well, we’re likely to be gone a long time,” Wayne said, throwing his bags into the car. At the Allequippa Club he cashed a check for a thousand dollars and supplied himself with cigars.
And so they plunged into the night, over the rough roads of spring.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE HEART OF THE BUGLE
THEY came to Harrisburg, with the sun low in the west and a soft haze enfolding the capitol dome—that proud assertion of a commonwealth’s strength and power that greets the eye of western pilgrims bound for Washington, and speaks of the pride of statehood—and no mean state, this!
The iron bones of the ponderable earth shook mightily when Pennsylvania was born. No light day’s business, the bringing forth of this empire! Mountains to rear and valleys to cut; broad rivers to set flowing in generous channels; forests to marshal and meadows to unroll, fair and open and glad with green things growing. Winter, running before the hounds of spring, hides snow like a miser in a myriad pockets of the hills and flies northward across the blue lakes to escape the gleeful laughter of freed springs and singing brooks.
Scratch the crust and you may kindle the world’s hearth; scatter seed and fields were never so green. A fair prospect for the eye, but greater the hope in the heart of man. Fortunate nation this, to have so secure a keystone in the arch of states! The spirits of the pioneers, haunting the hilltops, gaze down in pride upon the teeming valleys. You, sober ones of the broad brims, the axe has gone deep into the forests you came to people; and you in whose blood the Scottish pipes skirl and in whose heads flash the wit of Irish mothers, no land ever received sounder or saner or nobler pilgrims. And you, too, plodding Dutchmen, far-flung drift of the Rhenish Palatinate, you were not so slow and dull after all, but wise in your sowing and reaping. And call the roll of names dear to the Welsh hills and mark the lusty response. The soundest race-stocks in the world are grafted here. Let us be wary of these tales of plunder and corruption. The soil that knew Franklin is not so lightly to be yielded to perdition. Let us have patience, sneering ones; the last lumbering Conestoga has hardly faded into the west, and the making of states is rather more than a day’s pastime! Verily, you paid dearly for this house of your law-makers—marble and bronze and lapis lazuli forsooth! But have a care that Wisdom and Honour are enthroned in those splendid halls—and with no pockets in their togas! Then let him that defileth the temple perish by the sword!