"In livery?" I could not help asking.
"What, ain't proud, are you?"
"Oh, no, but I'd rather not wear livery."
"It strikes me that anything would be an improvement over the clothes you've got on. But I guess we can fix you out. You must be from the country. An American farmer may wear patches, but he won't put on livery. We'll put you on a special, and you may start in to-morrow."
CHAPTER XXIV.
MAGNOLIA LAND.
My wages were small, and I saved every possible penny; I gave up smoking, slept in the stable, and rarely paid more than fifteen cents for a meal. In my mind I settled upon the island of Vancouver, and I resolved to go as soon as I could save money enough to buy a suit of clothes and a railway ticket to Seattle. And from my exile I would dare write to the Senator. "Why not now?" I thought as I sat on my cab. "But he might believe the story set up by circumstances; he might long ago have condemned me as guilty of Estell's blood. And what must she think?" The beginning of my musings mattered not, for the end was always the same, with the woman. And in the night, when the fierce wind howled about the barn, with the stamping and snorting of horses beneath me, I lay in the dark and the cold, and gazed into my heart's illuminated memory. Her face was always frank and, though her lips were dumb, her eyes were full of whispers. "But what must she think now?" always came to drive her away into the dark and the cold.
In impatience, and sometimes in fear, I watched the slow growth of my savings. Once a man, a detective I was sure, came to the stable to ask, he said, concerning a woman whom I had that day driven to a railway station. He may have told the truth, but he put me in distress, and the next day when I counted my money I said, "I will go to-morrow." But on that day a paragraph leaped out of a newspaper and smote me. "In Magnolia Land" was soon to be produced at McVicker's Theatre. I had cause to believe that I was suspected of at least some sort of crookedness, since in my mind it was almost settled that the man had come to the stable to look me over in the hope of finding a "bargain," but I was resolved to take the risk to see the play. And I read the newspapers at night and at morning, nervous with the fear of finding an announcement that the drama was the work of a man now charged with the murder of Mississippi's Treasurer. As the time drew near the press agent multiplied his licks; the play was by a man who chose to call himself "The Elephant;" it had been read by "several of our leading dramatists and pronounced a masterpiece of originality, character, and strength." But to me the faith of Manager Maffet did not hold the piece above an ordinary experiment, a truth set forth by the meagerness of his "paper;" and, as nothing was said of the cast, I knew that my lines were not to be given over to well-known "people."
Would the day, which had sounded so near, never come! "Who are you?" a snail inquired of a wild pigeon. "I am Time," the pigeon answered. "No," said the snail. "You may have been Time and you may be again, some day, but I am Time now."