“I didn’t kill Rogers. I wish I had––I wish I had.”
And south and north of the Chain the fire rolled away into the west.
The Bishop of Alden looked restlessly out of the window as the intolerable, sooty train jolted its slow way northward along the canal and the Black River. He had left Albany in the very early hours of the morning. Now it was nearing noon and there were yet eighty miles, four hours, of this interminable journey before he could find a good wash and rest and some clean food. But he was not hungry, neither was he querulous. There were worse ways of travel than even by a slow and dusty train. And in his wide-flung, rock-strewn diocese the Bishop had found plenty of them. He was never one to complain. A gentle philosophy of all life, a long patience that saw and understood the faults of high and low, a slow, quiet gleam of New England humour at the back of his light blue eyes; with Christ, and these things, Joseph Winthrop contrived to be a very good man and a very good bishop.
But to-day he was not content with things. He had done one thing in Albany, or rather, he would have said, he had seen it done. He had appealed to the conscience of the people of the State. And the conscience of the people had replied in no mistakable terms that the U. & M. Railroad must not 149 dare to drive the people of the hills from their homes for the sake of what might lie beneath their land. Then the conscience of the people of the State had gone off about its business, as the public conscience has a way of doing. The public would forget. The public always forgets. He had furnished it with a mild sensation which had aroused it for a time, a matter of a few days at most. He did not hope for even the proverbial nine days. But the railroad would not forget. It never slept. For there were men behind it who said, and kept on saying, that they must have results.
He was sure that the railroad would strike back. And it would strike in some way that would be effective, but that yet would hide the hand that struck.
Thirty miles to the right of him as he rode north lay the line of the first hills. Beyond them stood the softly etched outlines of the mountains, their white-blue tones blending gently into the deep blue of the sky behind them.
Forty miles away he could make out the break in the line where Old Forge lay and the Chain began. Beyond that lay Bald Mountain and the divide. But he could not see Bald Mountain. That was strange. The day was very clear. He had noticed that there had been no dew that morning. There might have been a little haze on the hills in the early morning. But this sun would have cleared that all away by now.