That ended the efforts to stop the duel, and night with its grief and penitence came on all interested in the parties to it. On the dowager in her cushioned chair, with a finger in the prayer-book, seeing the portrait of her only son brought home stricken to death by his own gun thirty years ago, as it changed from the long curls and blue eyes of childhood to a handsome but weak bearded face of a man, dreadfully like that other face as she saw it on the bed under the white seals of death. On a homely old mother lying in the back room of a village store, and a short, square man walking up and down and saying, "Don't take on so, old gal: you'll hurt yourself. It's just them newspaper lies. Our Bob wouldn't fight no dule." And the woman's sob: "Lost, body and soul! soul and body!—our boy Bob, John! our boy Bob!" On poor little Sue with her headache as she answers her mother's inquiry that she's "Better, mamma;" but as her father asks the same question she puts up her arms about his neck, and says, "Oh, papa! oh, papa!" and the shrewd, worldly man kneels down and prays with her for the life of that alien sinner yonder as he has not prayed since he was a man. On Bob himself at the hotel quietly reading to the listening major, "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live," as if every comforting word was a denunciation.
CHAPTER VI.
After his victory over his aunt, Mason's spirits had been continually rising. That humorist Payne, who thought it such a hoax to pit two cocktails against each other and pull the strings of the puppets, writhed under his merciless chaff. Mason had called for candles, and, chipping balls of the spermaceti blacked in an æsthetic spirit with pencil-dust, had used them for practice with a parlor pistol, alleging that the leaden balls damaged the furniture. When Lee came to cast bullets, using the brazier's furnace in the room, Mason made him sit down, took the moulds and threw them in the Brown duelling pistol-case, and set himself to entertain the party and chaff Payne. He lolled back in his chair, his handsome figure showing to advantage, now rallying Payne on the prospect of figuring in a "ring-tailed gaberdine" as a victim of the dowager's anger, and now reciting marvellous horse-stories, mixed with anecdotes pertinent and impertinent. The party consisted of an editor, a surgeon, a German geologist prospecting that wonderful fossil bed of the Falls, and evidently looking on Mason as a miracle excelling anything dug up, and the seconds.
Mason rattled on with his racing and racy anecdotes: "Yes, sir, it was a perfectly white mare, sky-blue mane and tail. I put her in the racing-buggy on Aunt Fanny's round quarter-track, and she spun around so fast the off wheels never touched the turf from the quarter-post to the judges' stand. Fact, gentlemen! fastest trotting-time on record. Rather peculiar color too."
"Very," said the German in admiration of his host. "A remarkable peculiarity in the pigment granules. What became of this singular animal?"
"Singular, as you say," said Mason easily. "She took navicular and jolted off her pins: trotted ten miles an hour on the stubs after she cast her hoofs."
"Eggsdraordinary vitality!" ejaculated the German in deep gutturals, and looking around as if distrustful of Mason's rapid utterance. "How did you call it?"
"Skylight," said Mason carelessly. "Imp. Milky Way by dam Cerulean, as the stud-books rather profanely style it. Tremendous vitality, though!" passing a pair of moulds to Lee and winking to attract his attention, "I thought to preserve the hair and hide as a curiosity. Wouldn't do—wouldn't begin to do! Digestive function so strong action continued from the skin. Had to substitute brickdust and charcoal. Drop into my private museum some day. Happy to show you that and some other curiosities picked up in my rather remarkable adventures."
Lee was now busy casting bullets, and Mason's spirits seemed to rise with the operation. Some listened, others laughed, but Mason had a cool way of perking up his eyebrows and going on negligently, as much as to say, "If you deprive yourself of the satisfaction of believing, the fault lies with the listener." He seemed divided between a wish to distract Lee from careful observation of his employment and to chaff Payne. Once Payne started suddenly as if about to say something to Lee, but a look quenched him.
"Friend of my youth, this goblet sip," laughed Mason. "For what says the Psalmist?—'Let the galded jade wince, our wethers is unwrung.' But never be it said," rising and speaking with theatrical emotion—"Not while Reason holds her throne in this distracted globe—never, while Mason lives, shall his Damon, his caster, be cast in prison-bonds by a ravaging female she-aunt. Never shall penitential garb encase those manly limbs nor base turnkey's shears clip those auburn locks for which ripe beauty in melting accents is wont to plead in vain."