The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no moment now.

One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W. Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set all these things going, whose ruthless hand was to be recognised in every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the hills.

Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was 291 an act which had revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to those heights.

After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?

Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the office of Clifford Stanton.

Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had chiselled the Bishop’s face into a single, simple expression of will power was not to be found in the other’s face. In its stead there was a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man 292 behind the face had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.

Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one of the strongest willed men that he had ever met, and that he must test out the other man to the depths and be himself tried out to the limit of his strength.

“It is some years since I’ve seen you, Bishop. But we are both busy men. And––well–– You know I am glad to have you come to see me. I need not tell you that.”

The Bishop accepted the other man’s frank courtesy and took a chair quietly. Stanton watched him carefully. The Bishop was showing the last few years a good deal, he thought. In reality it was the last month that the Bishop was showing. But it did not show in the steady, untroubled 293 glow of his eyes. The Bishop wasted no time on preliminaries.

“I have come on business, of course, Mr. Stanton,” he began. “It is a very strange and unusual business. And to come at it rightly I must tell you a story. At the end of the story I will ask you a question. That will be my whole business.”