Maud Welliver tiptoed cautiously forward on the lawns on the further side of Duane Street in Bidwell, looking across at the dark house where she had come to live. In Fort Wayne she had known nothing like this. What a terrible thing might have happened in Bidwell but for May Edgley! The scene in the rich man’s home faded and was replaced by another. She saw May standing in the forest with Jerome Hadley. How he had changed! He stood alert, intent, determined, holding the poison package in his hand and he was threatening, threatening and pleading. In the other hand he held money, a great package of bills. He thrust the bills forward and pleaded with May Edgley and then grew angry and threatened again.
Before him stood the small, white-faced woman, frightened now, but terribly determined also. The word “never” was upon her lips. And now the man threw the money away into the bushes and sprang forward. His hand was at the woman’s throat, the murderous hand of the infuriated mail clerk. It pressed hard. May fell to the ground.
Jerome Hadley did not quite dare let the woman die. Too many people had seen the two go into the wood together. He stood over her until she had a little recovered and then the threatening and pleading began again, but all the time the little woman stood firm, shaking her head and saying the brave word “never.” “Kill me if you will,” she said, “but I’ll take no part in this murder. My reputation is gone and I am an outlaw among men and women but I’ll take no part in this murder, and if you go on with it I will betray you.”
The September evening when May uttered the startling sentences, regarding a strange man and a mysterious black, set down at the head of this section of the story of her adventures, was warm and clear. Brightly the stars shone in the sky and in the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door all the little ponds had become dry. Since that first evening when she had met May a great change had taken place in Maud. May had led her up to the ramparts of the tower of romance and as often as possible now the two sat together under a tree in the field or on the floor by the open window in May’s room. To the field they went through the kitchen door, along the creek where the elders and willows grew and over stones in the bed of the creek itself, to a wire fence. How alone and how far away from the life of the town they were in the field at night! Buggies and the few automobiles then owned in Bidwell passed on distant roads, and over the town, soft lights played on the sky and soft lights seemed to play over the spirits of the two women. On a distant street, that led down to the town waterworks, a group of young men went tramping along on a board sidewalk. They were singing a song. “Listen, May,” Maud said. The voices died away and another sound came. Jerry Haden, a cripple who walked with a crutch and who delivered evening papers, went along quickly, his crutch making a sharp clicking sound on the sidewalks. What a hurry he was in. “Click! click!” went the crutch.
It was a time and place for the growth of romance. A desire to reach out to life, to command life grew within Maud. One evening she, alone and unaided, mounted the tower of romance and told May of how a young man in Fort Wayne had wanted to marry her. “He was the son of the president of a railroad company,” she said. The matter was of no importance and she only spoke of it to show what men were like. For a long time he came to the house almost every evening and when he did not come he sent flowers and candy. Maud had cared nothing for him. There was a certain air he had that wearied her. He seemed to think himself in some way of better blood than the Wellivers. The idea was absurd. Maud’s father knew his father and knew that he had once been no more than a section hand on the railroad. His pretensions wearied Maud and she finally sent him away.
Maud told May, on several evenings of the imaginary young man whom, because of his pride of blood, she had cast adrift, and on the September evening wanted to speak of something else. For two or three evenings she had been on the point of saying what was in her mind but could not bring the matter to her lips. It trembled within her like a wild bird caught and held in her hand, as, in the dim light, she looked at May. “She won’t do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought.
In Fort Wayne, before she came to Bidwell, and when she had just graduated from the high school Maud had for a time walked upon the border line of love, had stood for a moment in the very pathway of Cupid’s darts. Near the house where the Wellivers then lived there was a grocery run by an alert erect little man of forty-five, whose wife had died. Maud often went to the store to buy supplies for the Welliver home and one evening she arrived just as the grocer, a man named Hunt, was locking the store for the night. He unlocked the door and let her in. “You won’t mind if I don’t light the lights again,” he said. He explained that the grocerymen of Fort Wayne had made an agreement among themselves that they would sell no goods after seven in the evening. “If I light the lights and people see us in here they will be coming in and wanting to be waited on,” he explained.
Maud stood in the uncertain light by a counter while the grocer wrapped her packages. At the back of the store there was a lamp fastened to a bracket on the wall and burning dimly and the soft yellow light fell on her hair and on her white smiling face as the grocer fumbled in the darkness back of the counter and from time to time looked up at her. How beautiful her long pale face in that light! He was stirred and delayed the matter of getting the packages wrapped. “My wife and I were not very happy together but I was happy when I lived alone with my mother,” he thought. He let Maud out at the door, locked it and went along beside her carrying the packages. “I’m going your way,” he said vaguely. He began to speak of his boyhood in a town in Ohio and told of how he had married at the age of twenty-three and had come to Fort Wayne where his wife’s father owned the store that was now his own. He spoke to Maud as to one who knew most of the details of his life. “Well, my wife and her father are both dead and I own the place—I’ve come out all right,” he said. “I wonder why I left my mother. I thought more of her than anyone else in the world but I got married and went away and left her, went away and left her, to live alone until she died,” he said. They came to a corner and he put the packages into Maud’s arms. “You got me started thinking of mother. You’re like her,” he said suddenly and then hurried away.
Maud had got into the habit of going to the store, just at closing time in the evening and when she did not come the grocer was upset. He closed the store and, walking to a nearby corner, stood under an awning before a hardware store, also closed for the night, and looked down along the street where Maud lived. Then he took a heavy silver watch from his pocket and looked at it. “Huh!” he exclaimed and went off along another street to his boarding house, stopping several times in the first block to look back.