THRIFTY STOCK
AND OTHER STORIES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

EVERED

The Story of the Famous Red Bull

“I read this through from first page to last without leaving my chair. It is a powerful story.”—William Lyon Phelps.

BLACK PAWL

“Ben Ames Williams has chosen a theme such as might have appealed to one of the old Greek dramatists, and has handled it with a skill that entitles him to high rank among the novelists of today.”—The New York Times.

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

THRIFTY STOCK
AND OTHER STORIES

BY
BEN AMES WILLIAMS
AUTHOR OF “EVERED,” “BLACK PAWL,” ETC.

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1923
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

To
ROBERT H. DAVIS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following stories of this collection have been previously published: “Old Tantrybogus” and “One Crowded Hour,” in The Saturday Evening Post; “They Grind Exceeding Small,” in The Saturday Evening Post and Current Opinion, and in one of the O. Henry Memorial Volumes; “Mine Enemy’s Dog,” “Not a Drum was Heard,” “Success” (under the title of “So My Luck Began”) and “Sheener,” in Collier’s Weekly; “His Honor,” “The Coward” and “The Man Who Looked Like Edison,” in Cosmopolitan Magazine; “Jeshurun Waxed Fat,” in The Century Magazine; “The Field of Honor,” in The American Magazine; “Thrifty Stock,” in McCall’s Magazine; and “The Right Whale’s Flukes,” in The Bellman. To the editors of these magazines the author makes the customary acknowledgement.

PREFACE

The first seven stories in this volume have either locale or characters in common. The village called Fraternity is an actual one; and the surrounding countryside has a beauty which grows with long acquaintance. It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the characters are—with one exception—fictitious. The exception is Mr. A. L. McCorrison, better known as Bert McCorrison, who introduced me to the trout brooks and the woodcock covers thereabouts. To him I here make affectionate acknowledgment for all that introduction has meant to me. He appears in some of the stories, under the name of Chet McAusland.

The third story in the book, “Old Tantrybogus,” is—so far as the dog is concerned—a true story. I never saw old Job, but Bert has told me many things about him, and his exploits are well attested. For the excessive length of this story, an ancient fondness for dogs is my only apology.

The last two stories in the Fraternity group, “Jeshurun Waxed Fat” and “Epitome,” together with the succeeding seven, are each less than four thousand words in length. These stories represent successive attempts to combine brevity with other and more elusive attributes.

It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that “The Field of Honor” and “The Unconquered” were written during the summer of 1918.

Two of the stories in this book have not been published in any magazine. The two are “Epitome” and the allegory, “A Dream.” In each case, the story has been rejected by numerous editors; the fact that the author has still a stubborn faith in them is his only excuse for including them in this volume.

B. A. W.

CONTENTS

THRIFTY STOCK
AND OTHER STORIES

THRIFTY STOCK

I

THE girl, stormful and rebellious, had come out of the old farmhouse above Fraternity, and without much caring in which direction she turned, walked across the stubble of the freshly cut meadow toward the edge of the woods at the crest of the hill. This meadow was really a high plateau; it was fringed with bushes which grew along the crumbling stone wall which bordered it, and with birch and wild cherry trees here and there along its edge. Between these trees she could look abroad across a wooded valley, down whose middle meandered the dead water of the George’s River, backed up by the mill dam at the village. There had been a light shower at dawn, scarce sufficient to settle the dust; and the air, thus clarified, lent lovely colors to the countryside. Deep green of hemlock and spruce and pine, straggling tracery of hackmatack, lighter green of the birch tops almost yellow in the heart of the woods; the blue of distant hillsides; the blue of the sky; the yellow glory of sunlight drenching everything. In an uncut strip of meadow white daisies bloomed. There were birds about. But to all these matters, Lucia Moore was oblivious. She knew only that her father was stubborn and unreasonable, her mother supine, the world at an ill turn. Drops of water on the stubble wet her ankles; dust and water combined to muddy her impracticable shoes; an occasional bramble tore at her silken stockings. She came to the stone wall at the brink of the hill and chose a large boulder half-shaded by an apple tree that was all run to suckers, and sat down on it, her feet propped upon a stone below, her elbows on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands. The girl’s eyes were sulky, and her lips pouted. There was a hint of color not their own upon these lips of hers, and her eyebrows were plucked to a thin line, their smooth arch distorted by the frown she wore. Her gingham dress was short, and her present posture revealed her thin, unformed legs, which confirmed the almost emaciated slimness of her figure. She stared unseeingly across the lovely land.

Down the slope below her and to the right, Johnny Dree was dusting his orchard. His well-trained team knew their work; they drew the sledge on which he had secured the dusting machine up and down between the wide-spaced rows; and Johnny himself controlled and directed the blast of dust which smothered the trees, depositing itself on every leaf and twig. Now and then, at the turnings, he called a command to the horses; or ran ahead to tug at their reins. He was doing two men’s work, and doing it with very little effort. His voice, pitched musically, carried far across the still hillside on this quiet morning; and the whir of the duster carried further. The spouting clouds of heavy dust rose above the trees, to settle swiftly down again. Lucia Moore heard his voice, heard the duster’s purring, punctuated by the bark of the exhaust; she looked in his direction and saw the violently spouting dust, and wondered who he was and what he was doing. She had an uncontrolled curiosity, and after a few moments her awakened interest brought her down the hill. She entered the orchard at the side where the Wolf Rivers were planted, a hundred trees of them, the fruit already filling and coloring. Johnny’s father had set out this small orchard with discretion; a hundred Wolf Rivers, a hundred Starks, a hundred Ben Davises. Hardy apples, easily tended, easily handled, easily marketed. Wolf Rivers for fancy trade, for the great city hotels to bake and to serve, crisply browned, with rich cream; Starks and Ben Davises for keeping through the winter. Johnny was in the middle of the Starks when he saw Lucia coming toward him among the trees. After the fashion of the countryside, he looked at her with frank curiosity. He had seen her, at some distance, once or twice before, since Walter Moore bought the run-down farm on the hilltop above his orchard. Had summarized his impressions of rouge, plucked brows, short dresses in a single phrase, “A city girl.” There was no malice in the appellation; it was simply a classification. Her approach now did not embarrass him; there is a self respect in such men, not easily disturbed. She had paused between two trees at a point he was approaching, and when he came near where she stood, he stopped the horses and waited for her to speak her errand.

Lucia looked at him curiously. She was just twenty years old, but he was only two or three years older, and she was used to boys. His overalls were patched and faded from much washing; his blue shirt seemed fresh and clean; she thought him nice looking, and when she was sure of this, smiled most dazzlingly. Johnny tugged off his cap at that smile, and Lucia said precisely:

“How do you do?”

“Howdo, Miss Moore,” Johnny replied.

Her eyes widened in a pretty affectation. “Oh, how did you know my name?”

His lips were inscrutable, but his eyes were amused. “I guess everybody around here knows you.”

She pouted a little. “That doesn’t sound nice.”

“It don’t do any harm,” he said equably; and she was a little disappointed, had expected flattery. She pointed to the machine, whose engine still racketed.

“What’s that?”

“A duster,” he told her. “Kills the bugs on the trees.”

She made a grimace. “I should think it would. But what a nasty way to do. Smother them with that dust.”

He did smile this time. “The dust’s poison,” he explained. “It sticks to the leaves, and they eat it with the leaves, and it kills them.”

“Why?” she asked.

He understood that she was interested not in the process but the reason for it. “So they won’t hurt the trees; so the trees will bear better,” he told her.

“Papa doesn’t do that to our trees,” she said.

He turned away, and she thought he smiled. “That’s right,” he agreed.

She looked around her. “And there are lots more apples on your trees than on ours, too.”

“That’s because I dust ’em and spray ’em and take care of them,” he said. “You’ve got to treat an apple tree right if you want it to bear right.”

She came gingerly to his side and inspected the duster and asked questions about it, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the dust; and he answered her questions, warming a little at her interest in that which was dear to him. She perceived that she pleased him, and pretended even greater interest, and smiled at him in her most charming fashion. Turned from the machine to the trees about them, plucked an apple and bit into it and threw it away with a grimace. His engine still coughed and barked; he showed no disposition to shut off its ignition and give his time to her. She discovered a waxy bandage upon one of the trees and asked what it was and he told her it was a graft, and would have added some explanation, but her attention flitted elsewhere.

“Where do you live?” she asked presently. “That house up there?”

“Yes.”

“Is it your house?”

“My mother’s and mine,” he replied.

She turned the full battery of her eyes upon him. “Why haven’t you come up to see a fellow?” she asked. “I’ve been awfully lonesome here.”

He was not at all disconcerted, as she had expected him to be. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. “I’m pretty busy.”

“You’ll think of it now, won’t you?” she begged prettily. She was, this morning, in a reckless mood; she had been, was still, a spoiled child.

“I might,” he assented, and she thought again there was a smile deep hidden in his eyes.

“I’m used to having boys crazy to come and see me,” she said wistfully; and he did smile; and she was satisfied with this much of victory, and turned and ran away. She ran prettily, and she knew her skirts were none too long. From the border of the orchard, she looked back and lifted her hand to him. He touched his hat in a restrained fashion by way of response; and she ascended the hill, at peace with the world again.

And this was the first encounter between the tender of trees and Lucia Moore.

II

Her father had bought the farm during the winter from Dan Howe, who moved away to Augusta. Dan, Fraternity said, made a good thing out of it. He had paid eighteen hundred, two years before, and had sold off three hundred dollars’ worth of hard wood for ship timbers, carted to Camden. The price Moore paid him was thirty-three hundred dollars. Moore had thought the figure high; but there was in the man a hunger for contact with the soil. His father had been a farm boy, had harked back to his youthful days in reminiscence during his later years. His death left Moore some fifty-two hundred dollars, and made it possible for him to escape from the small store he had run for years in Somerville, at a yearly profit less than he might have earned as salary. He and his wife had perceived, by that time, that Lucia—they had christened her Lucy—was a problem in need of solving. Lucia liked moving pictures, and dancing, and boys, and she was not strong. Country life, they thought, would be good for her; and Moore did not cavil at Dan Howe’s price. Save for a few hundred dollars, he put the remainder of his legacy, and his own savings, into a newly organized automobile company which seemed to him promising, and came to the hills above Fraternity.

Since then, he had been learning by experience that a horse which can be bought for seventy dollars is probably not worth it, and that pigs cannot profitably be raised with no milk to feed them, and that the directions in printed manuals of the art of farming are not so complete and so reliable as they seem. He was not a practical man. Even the automobile investment had turned out badly; the company was now quietly defunct, without even the formality of a receiver. And he owed a mounting bill at Will Bissell’s store. If it had been possible, he would have escaped from the farm and returned to bondage; but no one would buy the place, and his debts anchored him.

It was Lucia—she had, it appeared, some grain of sense in her—who suggested one day that he might raise apples. “Johnny Dree does,” she explained. This was in early fall, and she had seen Johnny once or twice since that first encounter—at her instance, and not at his. Also she had asked questions, surprisingly shrewd.

Her father nodded. “He’s got a good orchard,” he agreed.

“He’s been picking Wolf Rivers right along,” said Lucia wisely. “He says you can pick the big ones, and the others will grow to make up for it, and he’s going to have hundreds of barrels to sell next month.”

“I’ve looked at our trees,” her father told her. “The apples aren’t good for anything but cider. Full of worms and things.”

“Johnny Dree says you’ve got to take care of a tree,” she insisted impatiently. “But he says—” She hesitated, seeking to remember the word he had used. “He says your trees are good, thrifty stock.”

“It takes years to make an orchard, Lucy,” he said wearily. “You’re talking about impossible things.”

The swift temper which sometimes possessed the girl flamed up at him. “You make me sick!” she cried. “You just sit back and let the world walk over you. You’ve stuck yourself with this damned farm, and now you’re going to sit still and let it smother you. Why don’t you try to do something, anyway? Johnny says you’ve got good orchard land as there is. But you just look wise and think you know it all, and won’t do anything.”

Her mother said wearily: “Lucy, you oughtn’t to swear at your father.”

“Well, he makes me mad!” the girl cried, furiously defiant. “He’s such a damned stubborn fool!”

Moore wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and smiled weakly. “I guess I’m a failure, all right, Lucia,” he agreed. “You’re right to swear at a father like me.”

At his humility, her revulsion was as swift as her anger had been; tenderness swept her. She pressed against him, where he sat beside the table, and with her thin arm drew his head against her fleshless bosom. “You’re not, either, papa!” she cried passionately. “You’re always so patient with me. But I do wish you’d talk to Johnny Dree!”

He reached up to touch her cheek caressingly. “That’s all right, honey,” he said.

“But you will talk to Johnny?”

The man nodded, at last. “All right, Lucy. Yes, I’ll talk to him.”

III

Johnny Dree found a little time, even during the busy weeks of the apple picking, to go with Moore through his orchard, and to search out the trees scattered along the stone walls. He began the work of pruning and trimming them, showed Moore, and showed Lucy, how to continue it. Bade Moore plow under the thick sod around the base of each tree. “Nothing like grass to steal the water an apple tree needs,” he explained. “Grass is worse than weeds.” Before the snow came, much had been done. Moore said once, diffidently:

“I’d like to hire you to help me along with this, Dree!”

But Johnny shook his head. “You don’t want to hire help only when you have to,” he said. “I just come up when I’m not busy at home. You can help me with haying and things, some time.”

The seasons marched monotonously on. The crisp sunshine of fall days, with frost tingling in the air, gave way to bleaker weather, and then to the full rigors of harsh cold, when snow lay thick across the hills, blanketing everything. The routine of little tasks laid itself upon Moore, and upon his wife. Even Lucia, in greater and greater degree, submitted to it. But revolt was always very near the surface in the girl. One day she met Johnny Dree upon the road, and he asked in a friendly way: “Well, you getting to like it here?”

She was in ill humor that morning, and she flamed at him. “Oh, I hate it! I hate it!” she cried. “I wish to God I’d never seen this damned hole. But papa’s got us into it, and we can’t get out, and there’s nothing to do but work and work. Sometimes I wish I were dead.”

He had never heard her swear before; and he looked at her in some astonishment. She was, he thought, so small, and so serenely sweet to look upon that there was something incongruous in her profanity. But he did not speak of his thought at that time; said merely:

“Why, that’s too bad. I thought you were getting to like it, maybe.” And so passed on, leaving her curiously chastened by his very mildness.

There was an interminable sameness in the days. To rise early, to do the morning chores, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and dust, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and sew, and cook, and eat, and wash dishes, and read the paper, and go fumingly to bed. This was Lucia’s bitter life. But because it is impossible to hold indignation always at its highest pitch, there were hours when she forgot to be unhappy; there were hours when she found something like pleasure in this ordered simplicity of life. Now and then Johnny came in of an evening, and sat in the dining room with them all and talked with her father about apple trees; and Lucia liked, at first, to practice her small cajoleries upon him. He quickly began to call her Lucia, then Lucy as her father and mother did. She preferred the simpler name, upon his simple lips. When the snow thinned and disappeared, and new grass pushed greenly up through the brown that clothed the fields, she was stronger than she had ever been. Her arms were rounding, her figure assuming the proportions for which it was designed; and her color no longer required external application. When Johnny took Moore into his own orchards and showed him how to apply the dormant spray, and how to search out the borers in the base of the trees and kill them with a bit of wire, or with a plug of poisoned cotton, and all the other mysteries of orchardry, Lucy liked to go along, and learned to do these tasks as well as Johnny, and better than her father did. The trees, fed with well-rotted manure which Johnny preferred to any chemical preparation, and freed from the competition of the grass and weeds which had surrounded them and blanketed their thirsty roots, throve and put out a great burst of bloom, and all the hillside was aglow with color. Lucy began to see hope of release from this long bondage here. When the apples were sold, if the market was good, Johnny thought they might make five or six hundred dollars in a year....

Then one midnight she awoke shivering in a sharp blast from her open window, and drew fresh blankets over her; and in the morning there was white frost on the ground, and Johnny came up the hill with a philosophic smile upon his face. Moore met him at the kitchen door.

“Well,” said Johnny slowly. “We won’t do well this year. This frost has nipped them. I guess not bearing will give your trees a chance to get a better start.”

Moore accepted the calamity with mild protest. Said blankly: “No apples. Why, I’ve got to have something....”

But Lucy was not so mild. From the kitchen behind her father she pushed past him and out upon the porch, her eyes ablaze. “No apples!” she cried, in a voice like a scream. “Why not?”

“This frost has killed them,” said Johnny, his eyes hardening.

She almost sprang at him, beat on his broad chest with her fists, and tears streamed down her face. “You fool! You damned fool!” she cried. “There’ve got to be apples. There’ve got to be! You said there would be! You said if we worked, there would be! If we sprayed the damned trees! Oh, you make me sick, with your lies! Oh, I hate this farm! I hate the damned trees....”

Johnny surprised her. He took her by the shoulders, gripping them till she winced. “Stop it, Lucy,” he commanded.

“I won’t!” she cried. “Let go of me....”

“Be still your noise,” he said, no more loudly than before. But the insistence in his voice constrained her, and she began to weep bitterly, and slumped against him, shaken and half fainting. “You can’t talk that way,” he told her. “It’s no way to talk. You got to be a sport. It’s a part of the business, Lucy. Now you go in the house and wash your face and help with breakfast. I want to talk to your father. Go along.”

Her father watched her; and his face was white with surprise and consternation. But Lucy turned and went obediently into the house, and he looked after her, and looked at Johnny Dree; and Johnny grinned, a little sheepishly.

“You see,” he said, ignoring what had happened. “Thing is, you can raise some garden stuff, and some chickens and things, and get along. We’re due for a good year next year.”

Walter Moore nodded. “That’s all right,” he assented, and looked again at the door through which Lucy had gone. “But I’d like to shake hands with you, Dree. I’d like to shake your hand.”

IV

The stoic patience of the farmer, who serves a capricious master and finds his most treasured works casually destroyed by that master’s slightest whim, takes time to learn, but is a mighty armor, when it has been put on. It was Johnny Dree’s heritage; it was, in remoter line, the heritage also of Walter Moore. It bore them through that summer, and through the frost-hued glory of the fall. There is a pleasure in a task well done, regardless of reward; and when Moore surveyed his trees, he found this pleasure. Johnny Dree confirmed it. “They’re like money in the bank, Mr. Moore,” he said. “You can’t lose it, and it pays you interest right along. We’re due for a good apple year, next year.”

Moore nodded. “I’m beginning to like it here,” he assented. “It was tough, at first. But I’m no worse in debt than I was last year, and I ought to pull out when the trees begin to bear.”

“Aye,” said Johnny Dree. “You’ve got something to build on, now. It’ll go easier, from now on.”

Moore had learned many things, in these months that had gone; and so had Lucy. And so had Johnny Dree. Lucy was teaching him a thing he had never had time to learn; she was teaching him to play. When snow came, he brought her, one day, snow-shoes; and thereafter they occasionally tramped the woods together, following the meandering trails of the small creatures of the forest, marking where a partridge had left a delicate tracery of footprints in the snow, exploring the great swamp below the hill where the cedars had been stripped of browse by the moose that wintered there. He found where deer were yarded, and took her to the place, and once they caught glimpses of the startled creatures, bounding away through the cumbering snow. There was a deepening understanding between these two; when they were together she talked almost constantly, and he scarce at all; but she could read his silences, and he understood her fountain-like loquacity. Through a keener understanding, she found matters to love in these hills and woods which were his world; she was, by slow degrees, forgetting the more obvious pleasures of her life before she came to Fraternity to dwell. They were, for the most part, as much isolated as though they lived upon an island in the sea; for, save for the nightly gatherings at Will Bissell’s store, Fraternity folk are not overly social in their inclinations. Once he took her to a grange dance, and she found him surprisingly adequate in this new rôle, found an unsuspected pleasure in the rustic merry-making she would, two years before, have scorned. Johnny did not smoke, and she asked him why; he said he didn’t want to waste the money. Yet once when he went to East Harbor, he brought her a flower, in a pot; and when she asked him if that wasn’t wasting money, he smiled a little and said he did not think it was. One day, to torment him, she cried: “I’d give a lot for a cigarette. I haven’t had one for days. Will you get me some, next time you’re at the store. I don’t dare buy them there.”

Johnny merely smiled at her and replied: “I guess if you ever did smoke them, you don’t any more.”

One day her snow-shoe caught on a broken stub and threw her forward into the snow. She said: “Oh, damn!” More in jest than in anger. Lifting her to her feet, he commented:

“I shouldn’t think a girl would swear much.”

“I like to,” she insisted. “It makes me feel good when I’m mad.”

“I never could see it helped me any,” he rejoined, mildly enough. But she thereafter guarded her tongue, until the necessity for restraint had disappeared. Self discipline was one of the things she learned from Johnny.

You could hardly say they had a romance. They grew together, as naturally as stock and scion grafted by his skilful hands. They had this great community of interest in the trees which were his work, which she had come to love. Their forward looking eyes were centered on the harvest time, now a scant year away, when the fruition of their labors could be expected; and their anticipations were tranquil and serene.

They talked, sometimes, of what he meant to make of his life. “You won’t always be a farmer, will you?” she asked.

“I guess I will,” he told her.

“Slaving away here!”

He smiled a little. “There’s a man up in Winterport,” he said. “He planted some apple trees twenty years ago, and more and more since, and he’s got ten thousand trees, now. I went up there two years ago on the orchard tour the Farm Bureau runs. He cleared over twenty thousand dollars, that year, on his apples. Ten thousand trees. I’ve only got four hundred; but I’m putting in two hundred more next spring, and more when I can, and my land is better than his, and there’s more around me I can buy. It’s clean work. You can learn a lot from an apple tree, and eating apples never did anybody much harm. And you’ve time for thinking, while you work on the trees....”

She slipped her hand through his arm in understanding, as they tramped along.

In December his mother, who had suffered for half a dozen years from a mysterious weakness of the heart, was taken sick with what at first seemed a slight cold. In early January, she died. Walter Moore and his wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the receiving tomb where—because the frost had fortified the earth against the digging of a grave—his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth. After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said.

Moore and his wife, when the door had closed behind her, looked at each other with deep understanding. “Well,” he said, “I guess Lucy’s gone.”

But his wife smiled through misty eyes. “She’s come back to us these last two years,” she said. “No matter what happens, she can’t really go away again.”

V

Down at Johnny’s house, Lucy knocked at the kitchen door and Johnny let her in. He was washing dishes and putting them away. “I’ve finished supper, just finished supper,” he said awkwardly.

“I wanted to comfort you, Johnny,” Lucy told him.

He looked at her, rubbing his plate in his hands with the cloth. “That’s—mighty nice,” he said.

“You mustn’t be unhappy. I don’t want you to be unhappy,” she explained, still standing just within the door. She was plucking away her wraps, laid her coat aside.

“You’re a mighty sweet girl,” Johnny told her, rubbing his plate as though the motion of his hands had hypnotized him.

“I want to take care of you,” said Lucy.

Johnny considered, and saw that she had come a little nearer where he stood. “I guess it would be nice if we got married,” he suggested. “Wouldn’t it?”

Lucy suddenly smiled, tenderly amused at him. Her eyes, full of tears, were dancing. “I think it would be nice, Johnny,” she agreed. And moved a little nearer still. She did not have to go all the way.

The plate, unbroken by its fall, rolled across the floor toward the stove, and tilted over there, and whirled to rest like a dying top, oscillating to and fro on its rim with a sound faintly like the sound of bells.

VI

They were married in March; and as though upon a signal, winter drew back from the land, taking with it the snow; and in due time the grass burst up through the sod, and the buds swelled more swiftly, it seemed to these two, than they had ever swelled before. Yet it was not too warm; the blossoms in the orchards came in their season, and not before. And the air was full of the hum of the bees as they went to and fro upon their mysterious mating of the trees. The color of the blossoms, faintly glowing, was in Lucy’s cheeks; the wonder of the springtime in her eyes while she walked here and there with Johnny about his tasks. When the petals fluttered down, it became at once apparent that the apples had set in great profusion; and through the summer they watched the fruit swell and take form and color, and now and then they pared the skin away from an apple to see the white, sweet meat inside.

Johnny began to pick Wolf Rivers early, choosing the largest and reddest fruit; yet it seemed he had no sooner picked one apple than another swelled to take the place of two. Toward the summer’s end, they knew that the crop would be enormous. And this was one of those years when elsewhere the orchards had failed, so that prices were enhanced and buyers were eager.

One day in early October, one Sunday afternoon, when Johnny and Lucy had gone up the hill to have dinner with the older folk, Johnny and Walter Moore walked into the orchard and surveyed the trees.

“A big year,” Johnny said. “The biggest I ever saw. Your apples will bring you close to seven hundred dollars.”

Moore nodded. “It makes me—kind of humble,” he said. “It doesn’t seem possible. And—it’s so different from what my life has been. So great a change, these last two years....”

Johnny looked up at him. “You’ve told me,” he assented. And he smiled a little. “You know, I’ve said to Lucy some times, you can learn a lot from an apple tree. If it’s got grass and weeds around its roots, they starve it for water; and the scale and the aphis and the borer hurt it; and the suckers waste its strength. You were kind of like that, when you came up here. You’d been crowded in with a lot of other folks—grass and weeds around you, cutting off the air and the good things you needed. And the way you lived, there were all sorts of things hurting you; no exercise, and no time to yourself, and Lucy’s dancing all night, and smoking, and your inside work and all, the way the bugs hurt a tree.” He smiled apologetically. “And things like that automobile stock of yours, sucking your money the way suckers drain a tree....”

“That’s right,” Moore agreed. “I couldn’t see it then; but I felt it, even then. And I couldn’t believe these trees would come back, any more than I expected to be so different, myself, up here. I feel new, and strong, now. Like the trees. The suckers and the bugs and all the wasteful things trimmed out of our lives. Mrs. Moore was never so well. And Lucy ... I have to thank you for Lucy, Dree. She used to worry me. She doesn’t, now.”

Johnny, looking off across the orchard, saw his wife and her mother coming toward them. Mrs. Moore erect where she had drooped, laughing where she had been sad; and Lucy, full with the promise of the greatest fruition of all. “Aye,” he said, with the reverent honesty of a man who sees beauty in all the growth of life. “Aye, Lucy’s like the trees. She’s come to bearing now.”

THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL

I

I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. “Hazen,” I asked, “are you going to town today?”

“Yes, yes,” he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. “Of course I’m going to town.”

“I’ve a matter of business,” I suggested.

“Come along,” he invited brusquely. “Come along.”

There was not another man within forty miles to whom he would have given that invitation.

“I’ll be down in ten minutes,” I promised him; and I went to pull on my Pontiacs and heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the sandy snow. It was bitterly cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay—I could see it from my window—was frozen over for a dozen miles east and west and thirty north and south; and that had not happened in close to a score of years. Men were freighting across to the islands with heavy teams. Automobiles had beaten a rough road along the course the steamers took in summer. A man who had ventured to stock one of the lower islands with foxes for the sake of their fur, counting on the water to hold them prisoners, had gone bankrupt when his stock in trade escaped across the ice. Bitterly cold and steadily cold, and deep snow lay upon the hills, blue-white in the distance. The evergreens were blue-black blotches on this whiteness. The birches, almost indistinguishable, were like trees in camouflage. To me the hills about Fraternity are never so grand as in this winter coat they wear. It is easy to believe that a brooding God dwells upon them. I wondered as I plowed my way down to Hazen Kinch’s farm whether God did indeed dwell among these hills; and I wondered what He thought of Hazen Kinch.

This was no new matter of thought with me. I had given some thought to Hazen in the past. I was interested in the man and in that which should come to him. He was, it seemed to me, a problem in fundamental ethics; he was, as matters stood, a demonstration of the essential uprightness of things as they are. The biologist would have called him a sport, a deviation from type, a violation of all the proper laws of life. That such a man should live and grow great and prosper was not fitting; in a well-regulated world it could not be. Yet Hazen Kinch did live; he had grown—in his small way—great; and by our lights he had prospered. Therefore I watched him. There was about the man the fascination which clothes a tight-rope walker above Niagara, an aeronaut in the midst of the nose dive. The spectator stares with half-caught breath, afraid to see and afraid to miss seeing the ultimate catastrophe. Sometimes I wondered whether Hazen Kinch suspected this attitude on my part. It was not impossible. There was a cynical courage in the man; it might have amused him. Certainly I was the only man who had in any degree his confidence. I have said there was not another within forty miles whom he would have given a lift to town; I doubt if there was another man anywhere for whom he would have done this small favor. He seemed to find a mocking sort of pleasure in my company.

When I came to his house he was in the barn harnessing his mare to the sleigh. The mare was a good animal, fast and strong. She feared and she hated Hazen. I could see her roll her eyes backward at him as he adjusted the traces. He called to me without turning:

“Shut the door! Shut the door! Damn the cold!”

I slid the door shut behind me. There was within the barn the curious chill warmth which housed animals generate to protect themselves against our winters.

“It will snow,” I told Hazen. “I was not sure you would go.”

He laughed crookedly, jerking at the trace.

“Snow!” he exclaimed. “A man would think you were personal manager of the weather. Why do you say it will snow?”

“The drift of the clouds—and it’s warmer,” I told him.

“I’ll not have it snowing,” he said, and looked at me and cackled. He was a little, thin, old man with meager whiskers and a curious precision of speech; and I think he got some enjoyment out of watching my expression at such remarks as this. He elaborated his assumption that the universe was conducted for his benefit, in order to see my silent revolt at the suggestion. “I’ll not have it snowing,” he said. “Open the door.”

He led the mare out and stopped by the kitchen door.

“Come in,” he said. “A hot drink.”

I went with him into the kitchen. His wife was there, and their child. The woman was lean and frail; and she was afraid of him. The countryside said he had taken her in payment of a bad debt. Her father had owed him money which he could not pay.

“I decided it was time I had a wife,” Hazen used to say to me.

The child was on the floor. The woman had a drink of milk and egg and rum, hot and ready for us. We drank, and Hazen knelt beside the child. A boy baby, not yet two years old. It is an ugly thing to say, but I hated this child. There was an evil malevolence in his baby eyes. I have sometimes thought the gray devils must have left just such hate-bred babes as this in France. Also, he was deformed—a twisted leg. The women of the neighborhood sometimes said he would be better dead. But Hazen Kinch loved him. He lifted him in his arms now with a curious passion in his movement, and the child stared at him sullenly. When the mother came near, the baby squalled at her, and Hazen said roughly:

“Stand away! Leave him alone!”

She moved back furtively; and Hazen asked me, displaying the child: “A fine boy, eh?”

I said nothing, and in his cracked old voice he mumbled endearments to the baby. I had often wondered whether his love for the child redeemed the man; or merely made him vulnerable. Certainly any harm that might come to the baby would be a crushing blow to Hazen.

He put the baby down on the floor again and said to the woman curtly: “Tend him well.” She nodded. There was a dumb submission in her eyes; but through this blank veil I had seen now and then a blaze of pain.

Hazen went out of the door without further word to her, and I followed him. We got into the sleigh, bundling ourselves into the robes for the six-mile drive along the drifted road to East Harbor. There was a feeling of storm in the air. I looked at the sky and so did Hazen Kinch. He guessed what I would have said and he answered me before I could speak.

“I’ll not have it snowing,” he said, and leered at me.

Nevertheless, I knew the storm would come. The mare turned out of the barnyard and plowed through a drift and struck hard-packed road. Her hoofs beat a swift tattoo; our runners sang beneath us. We dropped to the little bridge and across and began the mile-long climb to the top of Rayborn Hill. The road from Hazen’s house to town is compounded of such ups and downs.

At the top of the hill we paused for a moment to breathe the mare; paused just in front of the big old Rayborn house, that has stood there for more years than most of us remember. It was closed and shuttered and deserted; and Hazen dipped his whip toward it and said meanly:

“An ugly, improvident lot, the Rayborns were.”

I had known only one of them—the eldest son. A fine man, I had thought him. Picking apples in his orchard, he fell one October and broke his neck. His widow tried to make a go of the place, but she borrowed of Hazen and he had evicted her this three months back. It was one of the lesser evils he had done. I looked at the house and at him, and he clucked to the mare and we dipped down into the steep valley below the hill.

The wind had a sweep in that valley and there was a drift of snow across it and across the road. This drift was well packed by the wind, but when we drove over its top our left-hand runner broke through the coaming and we tumbled into the snow, Hazen and I. We were well entangled in the rugs. The mare gave a frightened start, but Hazen had held the reins and the whip so that she could not break away. We got up together, he and I, and we righted the sleigh and set it upon the road again. I remember that it was becoming bitter cold and the sun was no longer shining. There was a steel-grey veil drawn across the bay.

When the sleigh was upright Hazen went forward and stood beside the mare. Some men, blaming the beast without reason, would have beaten her. They would have cursed, cried out upon her. That was not the cut of Hazen Kinch, But I could see that he was angry and I was not surprised when he reached up and gripped the horse’s ear. He pulled the mare’s head down and twisted the ear viciously. All in a silence that was deadly.

The mare snorted and tried to rear back and Hazen clapped the butt of his whip across her knees. She stood still, quivering, and he wrenched at her ear again.

“Now,” he said softly, “keep the road.”

And he returned and climbed to his place beside me in the sleigh. I said nothing. I might have interfered, but something had always impelled me to keep back my hand from Hazen Kinch.

We drove on and the mare was lame. Though Hazen pushed her, we were slow in coming to town and before we reached Hazen’s office the snow was whirling down—a pressure of driving, swirling flakes like a heavy white hand.

I left Hazen at the stair that led to his office and I went about my business of the day. He said as I turned away:

“Be here at three.”

I nodded. But I did not think we should drive home that afternoon. I had some knowledge of storms.

II

That which had brought me to town was not engrossing. I found time to go to the stable and see Hazen’s mare. There was an ugly welt across her knees and some blood had flowed. The stablemen had tended the welt, and cursed Hazen in my hearing. It was still snowing, and the stable boss, looking out at the driving flakes, spat upon the ground and said to me:

“Them legs’ll go stiff. That mare won’t go home to-night.”

“I think you are right,” I agreed.

“The white-whiskered skunk!” he said, and I knew he spoke of Hazen.

At a quarter of three I took myself to Hazen Kinch’s office. It was not much of an office; not that Hazen could not have afforded a better. But it was up two flights—an attic room ill lighted. A small air-tight stove kept the room stifling hot. The room was also air-tight. Hazen had a table and two chairs, and an iron safe in the corner. He put a pathetic trust in that safe. I believe I could have opened it with a screwdriver. I met him as I climbed the stairs. He said harshly:

“I’m going to telephone. They say the road’s impassable.”

He had no telephone in his office; he used one in the store below. A small economy fairly typical of Hazen.

“I’ll wait in the office,” I told him.

“Go ahead,” he agreed, halfway down the stairs.

I went up to his office and closed the drafts of the stove—it was red-hot—and tried to open the one window, but it was nailed fast. Then Hazen came back up the stairs grumbling.

“Damn the snow!” he said. “The wire is down.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“My house, man! To my house!”

“You wanted to telephone home that you—”

“I can’t get home to-night. You’ll have to go to the hotel.”

I nodded good-naturedly.

“All right. You, too, I suppose.”

“I’ll sleep here,” he said.

I looked round. There was no bed, no cot, nothing but the two stiff chairs. He saw my glance and said angrily: “I’ve slept on the floor before.”

I was always interested in the man’s mental processes.

“You wanted to telephone Mrs. Kinch not to worry?” I suggested.

“Pshaw, let her fret!” said Hazen. “I wanted to ask after my boy.” His eyes expanded, he rubbed his hands a little, cackling. “A fine boy, sir! A fine boy!”

It was then we heard Doan Marshey coming up the stairs. We heard his stumbling steps as he began the last flight and Hazen seemed to cock his ears as he listened. Then he sat still and watched the door. The steps climbed nearer; they stopped in the dim little hall outside the door and someone fumbled with the knob. When the door opened we saw who it was. I knew Marshey. He lived a little beyond Hazen on the same road. Lived in a two-room cabin—it was little more—with his wife and his five children; lived meanly and pitiably, groveling in the soil for daily bread, sweating life out of the earth—life and no more. A thin man, racking thin; a forward-thrusting neck and a bony face and a sad and drooping mustache about his mouth. His eyes were meek and weary.

He stood in the doorway blinking at us; and with his gloved hands—they were stiff and awkward with the cold—he unwound the ragged muffler that was about his neck and brushed weakly at the snow upon his head and his shoulders. Hazen said angrily:

“Come in! Do you want my stove to heat the town?”

Doan shuffled in and he shut the door behind him. He said: “Howdy, Mr. Kinch.” And he smiled in a humble and placating way.

Hazen said: “What’s your business? Your interest is due.”

Doan nodded.

“Yeah. I know, Mr. Kinch. I cain’t pay it all.”

Kinch exclaimed impatiently: “An old story! How much can you pay?”

“Eleven dollars and fifty cents,” said Doan.

“You owe twenty.”

“I aim to pay it when the hens begin to lay.”

Hazen laughed scornfully.

“You aim to pay! Damn you, Marshey, if your old farm was worth taking I’d have you out in this snow, you old scamp!”

Doan pleaded dully: “Don’t you do that, Mr. Kinch! I aim to pay.”

Hazen clapped his hand on the table.

“Rats! Come! Give me what you’ve got! And Marshey, you’ll have to get the rest. I’m sick of waiting on you.”

Marshey came shuffling toward the table. Hazen was sitting with the table between him and the man, and I was a little behind Hazen at one side. Marshey blinked as he came nearer, and his weak nearsighted eyes turned from Hazen to me. I could see that the man was stiff with the cold.

When he came to the table in front of Hazen he took off his thick gloves. His hands were blue. He laid the gloves on the table and reached into an inner pocket of his torn coat and drew out a little cloth pouch and he fumbled into this and I heard the clink of coins. He drew out two quarters and laid them on the table before Hazen, and Hazen picked them up. I saw that Marshey’s fingers moved stiffly; I could almost hear them creak with the cold. Then he reached into the pouch again.

Something dropped out of the mouth of the little cloth bag and fell soundlessly on the table. It looked to me like a bill, a piece of paper currency. I was about to speak, but Hazen without an instant’s hesitation had dropped his hand on the thing and drawn it unostentatiously toward him. When he lifted his hand the money—if it was money—was gone.

Marshey drew out a little roll of worn bills. Hazen took them out of his hand and counted them swiftly.

“All right,” he said. “Eleven-fifty. I’ll give you a receipt. But you mind me, Doan Marshey, you get the rest before the month’s out. I’ve been too slack with you.”

Marshey, his dull eyes watching Hazen write the receipt, was folding the little pouch and putting it away. Hazen tore off the bit of paper and gave it to him. Doan took it and he said humbly: “Thank’e, sir.”

Hazen nodded.

“Mind now,” he exclaimed, and Marshey said: “I’ll do my best, Mr. Kinch.”

Then he turned and shuffled across the room and out into the hall and we heard him descending the stairs.

When he was gone I asked Hazen casually: “What was it that he dropped upon the table?”

“A dollar,” said Hazen promptly. “A dollar bill. The miserable fool!”

Hazen’s mental processes were always of interest to me.

“You mean to give it back to him?” I asked.

He stared at me and laughed. “No! If he can’t take care of his own money—that’s why he is what he is.”

“Still, it is his money.”

“He owes me more than that.”

“Going to give him credit for it?”

“Am I a fool!” Hazen asked me. “Do I look like so much of a fool?”

“He may charge you with finding it?”

“He loses a dollar; I find one. Can he prove ownership? Pshaw!” Hazen laughed again.

“If there is any spine in him he will lay the thing to you as a theft,” I suggested. I was not afraid of angering Hazen. He allowed me open speech; he seemed to find a grim pleasure in my distaste for him and for his way of life.

“If there were any backbone in the man he would not be paying me eighty dollars a year on a five-hundred-dollar loan—discounted.”

Hazen grinned at me triumphantly.

“I wonder if he will come back,” I said.

“Besides,” Hazen continued, “he lied to me. He told me the eleven-fifty was all he had.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “There is no doubt he lied to you.”

Hazen had a letter to write and he bent to it. I sat by the stove and watched him and considered. He had not yet finished the letter when we heard Marshey returning. His dragging feet on the stair were unmistakable. At the sound of his weary feet some tide of indignation surged up in me. I was minded to do violence to Hazen Kinch. But again a deeper impulse held my hand from the man.

Marshey came in and his weary eyes wandered about the room. They inspected the floor; they inspected me; they inspected Hazen Kinch’s table, and they rose at last humbly to Hazen Kinch.

“Well?” said Hazen.

“I lost a dollar,” Marshey told him. “I ’lowed I might have dropped it here.”

Hazen frowned.

“You told me eleven-fifty was all you had.”

“This here dollar wa’n’t mine.”

The money-lender laughed.

“Likely! Who would give you a dollar? You lied to me; or you’re lying now. I don’t believe you lost a dollar.”

Marshey reiterated weakly: “I lost a dollar.”

“Well,” said Hazen, “there’s no dollar of yours here.”

“It was to git medicine,” Marshey said. “It wa’n’t mine.”

Hazen Kinch exclaimed: “By God, I believe you’re accusing me!”

Marshey lifted both hands placatingly.

“No, Mr. Kinch. No, sir.” His eyes once more wandered about the room. “Mebbe I dropped it in the snow,” he said.

He turned to the door. Even in his slow shuffle there was a hint of trembling eagerness to escape. He went out and down the stairs. Hazen looked at me, his old face wrinkling mirthfully.

“You see?” he said.

I left him a little later and went out into the street. On the way to the hotel I stopped for a cigar at the drug store. Marshey was there, talking with the druggist.

I heard the druggist say: “No, Marshey, I’m sorry. I’ve been stung too often.”

Marshey nodded, humbly.

“I didn’t ’low you’d figure to trust me,” he agreed. “It’s all right. I didn’t ’low you would.”

It was my impulse to give him the dollar he needed, but I did not do it. An overpowering compulsion bade me keep my hands off in this matter. I did not know what I expected but I felt the imminence of the fates. When I went out into the snow it seemed to me the groan of the gale was like the slow grind of millstones, one upon the other.

I thought long upon the matter of Hazen Kinch before sleep came that night.

III

Toward morning the snow must have stopped; and the wind increased and carved the drifts till sunrise, then abruptly died. I met Hazen at the post office at ten and he said: “I’m starting home.”

I asked: “Can you get through?”

He laughed.

“I will get through,” he told me.

“You’re in haste.”

“I want to see that boy of mine,” said Hazen Kinch. “A fine boy, man! A fine boy!”

“I’m ready,” I said.

When we took the road the mare was limping. But she seemed to work out the stiffness in her knees and after a mile or so of the hard going she was moving smoothly enough. We made good time.

The day, as often happens after a storm, was full of blinding sunlight. The glare of the sun upon the snow was almost unbearable. I kept my eyes all but closed, but there was so much beauty abroad in the land that I could not bear to close them altogether. The snow clung to twigs and to fences and to wires, and a thousand flames glinted from every crystal when the sun struck down upon the drifts. The pine wood upon the eastern slope of Rayborn Hill was a checkerboard of rich color. Green and blue and black and white, indescribably brilliant. When we crossed the bridge at the foot of the hill we could hear the brook playing beneath the ice that sheathed it. On the white pages of the snow wild things had writ here and there the fine-traced tale of their morning’s adventuring. We saw once where a fox had pinned a big snowshoe rabbit in a drift.

Hazen talked much of that child of his on the homeward way. I said little. From the top of the Rayborn Hill we sighted his house and he laid the whip along the mare and we went down that last long descent at a speed that left me breathless. I shut my eyes and huddled low in the robes for protection against the bitter wind, and I did not open them again till we turned into Hazen’s barnyard, plowing through the unpacked snow.

When we stopped Hazen laughed.

“Ha!” he said. “Now, come in, man, and warm yourself and see the baby! A fine boy!”

He was ahead of me at the door; I went in upon his heels. We came into the kitchen together.

Hazen’s kitchen was also living room and bedroom in the cold of winter. The arrangement saved firewood. There was a bed against the wall opposite the door. As we came in a woman got up stiffly from this bed and I saw that this woman was Hazen’s wife. But there was a change in her. She was bleak as cold iron and she was somehow strong.

Hazen rasped at this woman impatiently: “Well, I’m home! Where is the boy?”

She looked at him and her lips moved soundlessly. She closed them, opened them again. This time she was able to speak.

“The boy?” she said to Hazen. “The boy is dead!”

The dim-lit kitchen was very quiet for a little time. I felt myself breathe deeply, almost with relief. The thing for which I had waited—it had come. And I looked at Hazen Kinch.

He had always been a little thin man. He was shrunken now and very white and very still. Only his face twitched. A muscle in one cheek jerked and jerked and jerked at his mouth. It was as though he controlled a desire to smile. That jerking, suppressed smile upon his white and tortured countenance was terrible. I could see the blood drain down from his forehead, down from his cheeks. He became white as death itself.

After a little he tried to speak. I do not know what he meant to say. But what he did was to repeat—as though he had not heard her words—the question which he had flung at her in the beginning. He said huskily: “Where is the boy?”

She looked toward the bed and Hazen looked that way; and then he went across to the bed with uncertain little steps. I followed him. I saw the little twisted body there. The woman had been keeping it warm, with her own body. It must have been in her arms when we came in. The tumbled coverings, the crushed pillows spoke mutely of a ferocious intensity of grief.

Hazen looked down at the little body. He made no move to touch it, but I heard him whisper to himself: “Fine boy.”

After a while he looked at the woman. She seemed to feel an accusation in his eyes. She said: “I did all I could.”

He asked: “What was it?”

I had it in me—though I had reason enough to despise the little man—to pity Hazen Kinch.

“He coughed,” said the woman. “I knew it was croup. You know I asked you to get the medicine—ipecac. You said no matter—no need—and you had gone.”

She looked out of the window.

“I went for help—to Anne Marshey. Her babies had had it. Her husband was going to town and she said he would get the medicine for me. She did not tell him it was for me. He would not have done it for you. He did not know. So I gave her a dollar to give him—to bring it out to me.

“He came home in the snow last night. Baby was bad by that time, so I was watching for Doan. I stopped him in the road and I asked for the medicine. When he understood, he told me. He had not brought it.”

The woman was speaking dully, without emotion.

“It would have been in time, even then,” she said. “But after a while, after that, baby died.”

I understood in that moment the working of the mills. And when I looked at Hazen Kinch I saw that he, too, was beginning to understand. There is a just mercilessness in an aroused God. Hazen Kinch was driven to questions.

“Why—didn’t Marshey fetch it?” he asked.

She said slowly: “They would not trust him—at the store.”

His mouth twitched, he raised his hands.

“The money!” he cried. “The money! What did he do with that?”

“He said,” the woman answered, “that he lost it—in your office; lost the money there.”

After a little the old money-lender leaned far back like a man wrenched with agony. His body was contorted, his face was terrible. His dry mouth opened wide.

He screamed!

IV

Halfway up the hill to my house I stopped to look back and all round. The vast hills in their snowy garments looked down upon the land, upon the house of Hazen Kinch. Still and silent and inscrutable.

I knew now that a just and brooding God dwelt among these hills.

OLD TANTRYBOGUS

I

TO this day, when Chet McAusland tells the tale his voice becomes husky and his eyes are likely to fill—and, “It was murder,” he will say when he is done. “I felt like a murderer and that’s what I was. But it was too late then.” Sometimes his listeners are silent, appearing to agree with him. More often, those to whom he speaks seek to reassure him, for it is plain to any man that there is no murder in Chet, nor any malice nor anything but a very human large-heartedness toward every man and beast.

In Tantry’s time Chet was a bachelor living alone at his farm above Fraternity, cooking and caring for himself, managing well enough. He had been a granite cutter, a fisherman upon the Banks, a keeper of bees. Now he farmed his rocky hillside farm. He was a man of middle age—a small man with a firm jaw and a pair of bushy eyebrows and deep-set piercing eyes. When he laughed he had a way of setting his head firmly back upon his neck, his chin pressed down, and his laughter was robust and free and fine. I have spoken of his occupations; he had also avocations. All his life he had fished, had hunted, had traversed the forests far and wide. A man who loved the open, loved the woods, loved the very imprint of a deer’s hoof in the mud along the river. A good companion, open-hearted, with never an evil word for any man.

He was, as has been said, a bachelor; but this was not of Chet’s own choosing, as at least one person in Fraternity well knew. Old Tantrybogus knew also—knew even in the days when he was called young Job. He knew his mistress as well as he knew his master; knew her as truly as though she dwelt already at the farm upon the hill. Between her and Chet was his allegiance divided. None other shared it ever, even to the end.

Chet as a bachelor kept open house at his farm upon the hill and this was especially true when there was fishing or gunning to be had. A Rockland man came one October for the woodcock shooting. He and Chet found sport together and found—each in the other—a friend. The Rockland man had fetched with him a she dog of marvelous craft and from her next litter he sent a pup to Chet. In honor of the giver Chet called the dog Job. And Job—Old Tantrybogus that was to be—learned that the farm upon the hill was his world and his home.

Chet’s farm, numbering some eighty acres, included meadows that cut thirty or forty tons of hay; it included ample pasturage for a dozen cows; and it ran down to the George’s River behind the barn, through a patch of hardwood growth that furnished Chet with firewood for the cutting—a farm fairly typical of Fraternity. No man might grow rich upon its fruits, but any man with a fair measure of industry could draw a pleasant living from it and find time for venturing along the brooks for trout or through the alder runs after woodcock or into the swamps for deer, according to the season. From the wall that bounds the orchard you may look down to where the little village lies along the river. A dozen or so of houses, each scrupulously neat and scrupulously painted; a white church with its white spire rising above the trees; the mill straddling the river just below the bridge, and a store or two. Will Bissell’s store is just above the bridge, serving as market place and forum. The post office is there, and there after supper the year round Fraternity foregathers.

In Fraternity most men own dogs; not the cross-bred and worthless brutes characteristic of small towns in less favored countrysides, but setters of ancient stock or hounds used to the trail of fox or rabbit. Now and then you will see a collie or a pointer, though these breeds are rare. Utilitarian dogs—dogs which have tasks to do and know their tasks and do them.

Most men in Fraternity own or have owned some single wonderful dog of which they love to tell—a dog above all other dogs for them, a dog whose exploits they lovingly recount. And it was to come to pass that Job, better known as Old Tantrybogus, should be such a dog to Chet McAusland.

II

Your true setter is born, not made. The instincts of his craft are a part of his birthright. Nevertheless they must be guided and cultivated and developed. There are men whose profession it is to train bird dogs, or as the phrase goes, to break them. With some of these men it is a breaking indeed, for they carry a lash into the field, nor spare to use it. Others work more gently to a better end. But any man may make his dog what he will if he have patience coupled with the gift of teaching the dog to understand his wishes.

Chet decided to train Job himself. He set about it when the pup was some six months old, at a season when winter was settling down upon the farm and there were idle hours on his hands. He had kept as trophies of the gunning season just past the head and the wings of a woodcock. These he bound into a ball of soft and woolly yarn and on a certain day he called Job to his knee and made him sniff and smell this ball until the puppy knew the scent of it. Job wished to tear and rend the pleasantly soft and yielding plaything, but Chet forbade this by stern word, backed by restraining hand, till the pup seemed to understand.

Then he looped about the dog’s neck a stout cord and he held this cord in his hand, the pup at his feet, while he tossed the woolen ball across the kitchen floor. The pup turned and leaped after the ball.

Before he could make a second jump Chet said sharply, “Whoa!”

And he snubbed the cord he held so that Job was brought up short in a tumbling heap, his toe nails scratching on the floor.

Chet got up and crossed and picked up the ball; he returned to his chair, called the pup to his knee, tossed the ball again. Again Job darted after it and again Chet said, “Whoa,” and checked Job with the cord. At which the puppy, with the utmost singleness of purpose, caught the cord in his mouth, squatted on the floor and set about gnawing his bonds in two. Chet laughed at him, called him in, fetched the ball, and tried again.

After Chet had checked him half a dozen times with voice and string the pup sat on its small haunches, looked at Chet with his head on one side and wrinkled its furry brow in thought. And Chet repeated slowly over and over:

“Whoa, Job! Whoa! Whoa!”

The lesson was not learned on the first day or the second or the third. But before the week was gone Job had learned this much: That when Chet said “Whoa” he must stop, or be stopped painfully. Being a creature of intelligence, Job thereafter stopped; and when he was sure the pup understood, Chet applauded him and fed him and made much of him.

One day in the middle of the second week, Job having checked at the word of command, Chet waited for a moment and then said, “Go on!”

Job looked round at Chet, and the man motioned with his hand and repeated, “Go on, Job!”

The pup a little doubtfully moved toward where lay the woolly ball. When he was within a yard of it Chet said again, “Whoa!”

When he stopped this time he did not look back at Chet but watched the ball, and Chet after a single glance threw back his head and laughed aloud and cried to himself, “Now ain’t that comical?”

For Job, a six-months’ puppy, was on his first point. Head low and flattened, nose on a line toward the ball, legs stiff, tail straight out behind with faintly drooping tip, the pup was motionless as a graven dog—a true setter in every line.

And Chet laughed aloud.

This laughter was a mistake, for at the sound the pup leaped forward, the cord slipped through Chet’s fingers and the dog caught the woolly ball and began to worry it. Chet, still laughing, took the ball from him, caressed him, praised him and ended the lesson for that day. And by so doing he permitted the birth in Job of one fault which he would never be able to overcome. The pup supposed he had been applauded for capturing the woolly ball and that notion would never altogether die in his dog brain. Job would break shot, as the gunners say, till the end of his days.

III

By October of his second year Job was sufficiently educated to be called a good working dog. He would stop at the word of command; he would swerve to right or left at a hand gesture; he would come to heel; he would point and hold his point as long as the bird would lie. He was a natural retriever, though Chet had to correct a tendency to chop the object that was retrieved. The man did this by thrusting through and through the woolen teaching ball a dozen long darning needles. When the dog, retrieving this ball, closed his jaws too harshly these needles pricked his tender mouth. He learned to lift the ball as lightly as a feather; he developed a mouth as soft as a woman’s hand; and even in his second year he would at command retrieve an egg which Chet rolled across the kitchen floor and never chip the shell.

His one fault, his trick of breaking shot, was buttressed and built into the dog’s very soul by an incident which occurred in his first year’s hunting. He and Chet left the farmhouse one afternoon and started down through the fringe of woodland toward the river. It was near sunset. Chet had his gun, and as he expected, they found game; Chet had ample warning when he saw Job stiffen at half point, his tail twitching. He watched until the dog began to move forward with slow steps, and he said to himself, “He’s roding a pa’tridge. I knew there’d be one here.”

Job’s head was high, evidence in itself that he had located partridge rather than woodcock. Chet skirted the fringe in the open land, studying the ground well ahead of the dog, alert for the burst of drumming wings. He moved quietly and Job moved among the trees, his feet stirring the leaves. The dog was tense; so was the man. And presently the dog froze again, this time in true point, tail rigid as an iron bar.

Chet knew that meant the partridge had squatted, would run no more. Forced to move now, the bird would fly. He waited for a long half minute, but the partridge waited also. So Chet, rather than walk in among the trees and spoil his chance for a shot, stooped to pick up a stone, intending to toss it in and frighten the bird to wing.

When he stooped, out of position to shoot, he heard the drum of pinions and saw rise not one partridge but two. They swept across the open below him, unbelievably swift, and Chet whipped up his gun and fired once and then again. And never a feather fell. The birds on set wings glided out of his sight into the edge of an evergreen growth down the hill where it would be hopeless to try for a shot at them again.

And Job pursued them. As the birds rose the dog had raced forward. As they disappeared among the tops of the low hemlocks the dog went out of sight after them. Ejecting the empty shells from his gun, Chet swore at himself for his poor shooting and swore at Job for breaking shot and loudly commanded the dog to return. Job did not do so; did not even respond when Chet put his whistle to his lips and blew. So the man started after the dog, whose bell he could faintly hear, and promised to find Job and teach him a thing he needed to know. He started toward the cover, whistling and shouting for Job to come to heel.

When he was half way across the open Job did emerge from the shelter of the evergreens, and he came toward Chet at a swift trot, head held high. Chet started to abuse him. And then when the dog was still half a dozen rods away he saw that Job carried a cock partridge in his mouth. The bird, wounded unto death, had flown to the last wing beat far into the wood. And Job pursuing had found the game and was fetching it in.

For consistency’s sake and for the dog’s sake Chet should still have punished Job—should still have made him understand that to break shot was iniquity. But—Chet was human and much too warm-hearted to be a disciplinarian. Perhaps he is not to be blamed for praising Job after all. Certainly the man did praise the dog, so that Job’s dog brain was given again to understand that if he chased a bird and caught it he would be applauded. The fault dwelt in him thereafter.

“I tried to break him all his life,” Chet will say. “I put a rope on him and a choke collar and I shook him up—everything I knew. It wan’t no good. But it was my fault in the beginning. I never really blamed Old Tantry—never could.”

IV

This is not properly the story of Job’s youth or of his life, but of his aging and the death of him. Nevertheless there was much in his life that was worth the telling. His reputation rests not on Chet’s word alone—the village knew him and was proud of him. His renown began in his third year in deep winter when Chet and Jim Saladine went fishing one day through the ice on Sebacook Pond. Chet and Saladine became separated, one on either side of the lower end of the pond, and Jim had the pail of bait. Chet made Job go after the pail clear across the pond and fetch it to him and take it back to Saladine again. The dog’s sagacity and understanding, evidenced then and chronicled by Saladine at Bissell’s store that night, were to wax thereafter for half a dozen years; and even when the dog grew old his understanding never waned.

It was in his ninth year that Job had his greatest day—a day into which he crowded epic deeds enough to make heroes of half a dozen dogs. And the tale of that day may perhaps be worth the telling.

Chet had taken Job out the night before to try for a partridge in the fringes of the wood below the farm. They were late in starting, but within fifteen minutes Job was marking game and just at sunset the bird rose and wheeled toward the thickets of the wood. Chet had a snap shot; he took it and he saw the bird’s legs drop and dangle before it disappeared. He knew what that meant. A body wound, a deadly wound. The bird would fly so long as its wings would function, then set its pinions and glide in a long slant to earth, and when it struck ground it would be dead.

He sent Job into the wood, himself followed the dog, and he was in haste, for dark was already coming down. He hunted till he could no longer see—found nothing. In the end he called Job in, and the dog reluctantly abandoned the search at Chet’s command and followed his master back to the farm.

Two Rockland men telephoned that evening asking if they might come to the farm next day and try for birds; and Chet, who can always find time for a day’s gunning, bade them come. Doctor Gunther, who was telephoning, said: “Hayes and I’ll be there by half past eight. Mind if we bring our dogs?”

“Mind? No,” said Chet. “Sure!”

“They’re wild,” said the doctor, “but I’d like to have them work with Job—do them good.”

“Best thing in the world for them,” Chet agreed. “Let them back him on a few points and it’ll steady them. I’ll look for you.”

In the morning he rose early and busied himself with his chores so that he might be ready when the hunters came. It was not an ideal hunting day. The morning was lowery and overcast and warm and there was a wind from the east that promised fog or rain. With an eye on the clouds Chet worked swiftly. He fed Job in the shed where the dog usually slept and it chanced that he left the door latched so that Job was a prisoner until the others arrived. They were a little ahead of time and Chet asked them to wait a little. He had been picking apples in the orchard behind the shed and he took them out there to see the full barrels of firm fruit. Job went out into the orchard with them and no one of the men noticed that the dog slipped away beyond the barn toward the woods.

When a little later they were ready to start Chet missed the dog. He is a profane man, and he swore and whistled and called. Hayes, the man who had come with Gunther, winked at the doctor and asked Chet: “Is he a self-hunter? Has he gone off on his own?”

“Never did before,” Chet said hotly. His heat was for Job, not for Hayes. “I’ll teach him something!”

He went out behind the barn, still whistling and calling, and the others followed him. Their dogs were in the car in which they had come from Rockland. The three men walked across the garden to the brow of the hill above the river and Chet blew his whistle till he was purple of countenance. The other two were secretly amused, as men are apt to be amused when they find that an idol has feet of clay. For Job was a famous dog.

Hayes it was who caught first sight of him and said, “There he comes now.”

They all looked and saw Job loping heavily up the slope through an open fringe of birches. But it was not till he scrambled over the wall that they saw he bore something in his mouth.

Hayes said, “He’s got a woodchuck.”

Chet, with keener eyes, stared for a moment, then exclaimed exultantly: “He’s got that partridge I killed down there last night! I knew that bird was dead.”

They were still incredulous, even after he told them how he had shot the bird the night before.

They were incredulous until Job came near enough for them all to see, came trotting to Chet and proudly dropped the splendid bird at his master’s feet. When they could no longer doubt they exclaimed. For such a feat is alone enough to found a dog reputation on.

As for Chet, though he was swelled with pride, he made light of the matter.

“You’ll see him work to-day though,” he said. “The scent lies on a day like this. But it’ll rain by noon—we want to get started.”

They did get started and without more delay. They went in the car, and after a mile or so stopped on a rocky ledge beside the road at what Chet was used to call the Dummy Cover—an expanse of half a dozen acres tangled with alders and birches and thorn and dotted with wild apple trees here and there. Two or three low knolls lifted their heads above the muck of the lower land—an ideal place for woodcock when the flight was on.

The men got out and belled their dogs and old Job stood quietly at Chet’s heel while Chet filled his pockets with shells. The other dogs were racing and plunging, breaking across the wall, returning impatiently at command, racing away again. When they were ready the three men went through the bars, and with a gesture Chet sent Job into an alder run to the right. The great dog began his systematic zigzagging progress, designed to cover every foot of the ground, while the younger dogs circled and scuffled and darted about him, nosing here and there, wild with the excitement of the hunt.

Such dogs flush many birds and one of these dogs flushed a woodcock now fifty yards ahead of where old Job was working. The bird started to circle back, saw the men and veered away again. Though the range was never less than forty yards, Chet, who had a heavy far-shooting gun, took a snap shot through the alder tops as the bird turned in flight and he saw it jump slightly in the air as though the sound of the gun had startled it. Chet knew what that little break in its flight had meant and he watched the bird as long as he could see it and marked where it scaled to earth at last in the deeps of the cover ahead of them.

It was while his attention was thus distracted that Job disappeared. When Chet had reloaded he looked round for the dog and Job was gone. He listened and heard no sound of Job’s bell. He blew his whistle and blew again. The other two dogs came galloping to their masters, heads up, eyes questioning, but Job did not appear.

The man Hayes said: “He’s gone off alone. I wouldn’t have a dog I couldn’t keep in.”

Chet looked at him with a flare of his native temper in his eyes.

“He’s got a bird,” said Chet. “He’s right here somewhere and he’s got a bird.”

He turned and began to push his way into the alders and the other two men kept pace with him, one on either side. It was hard going; they could see only a little way. Now and then Chet whistled again, but for the most part they went quietly. Woodcock may not be found in open stubble like the obliging quail. You will come upon them singly or by twos in wet alder runs or upon birch-clad knolls or even in the shelter of a clump of evergreens—in thick cover almost always, where it is difficult for a man to shoot; and the bird must usually be killed before it has gone twenty yards in flight or it goes scot-free.

In such a cover as this the men were now hunting for Job; and at the end of fifteen minutes, in which they had worked back and forth and to and fro without discovering the dog, Hayes and the doctor were ready to give up.

“Call him in,” Hayes told Chet. “Maybe we’ll see the bird get up. We can’t find him and we’re wasting time.”

Chet hesitated, then he said: “I’ll shoot. Maybe that’ll scare up the bird.”

On the last word his gun roared and through its very echoes each of the three men heard the tinkle of a bell, and Chet, who was nearest, cried: “There he is! Careful! The bird’s moving.”

The dog was in the very center of the cover they had traversed—in a little depression where he chanced to be well hidden. They had passed within twenty feet of him, yet had he held his point. Hayes was the first to do homage.

“By gad,” he cried, “that is some dog, McAusland!”

“You be ready to shoot,” Chet retorted. “I’ll walk up the bird.”

They said they were ready; he moved in to one side of Job and the woodcock got up on whistling wings. Hayes’ first shot knocked him down.

Job found another bird a little farther on and Chet killed it before it topped the alders. Then they approached the spot where he had marked down that first woodcock, the one which had been flushed by the too-rangy dogs. He called Job, pointed, said briefly: “Find dead bird, Job.”

The dog went in, began to work. When the other men came up Chet said: “I think I hurt that first bird. He dropped in here. Job will find him.”

“Let’s send the other dogs in, too,” Hayes suggested. “Mine hasn’t learned retrieving yet.”

Chet nodded and the other two dogs plunged into the cover to one side of Job and began to circle, loping noisily. Job looked toward them with an air of almost human disgust at such incompetency, then went on with his business of finding the bird.

The men, watching, saw then a curious thing: they saw old Job freeze in a point and as he did so the other dogs charged toward him. One, Gunther’s, caught the scent ten feet away and froze. The other hesitated, then came on—and Job growled, a warning deadly growl. The other dog stopped still.

Chet exclaimed: “Now ain’t that comical? Hear old Job tell him to freeze?”

Hayes nodded and the three stood for a moment, watching the motionless dogs, silent. Then the young dog stirred again and Job moved forward two paces and flattened his head so low it almost touched the ground and—growled again.

Chet laughed.

“All right, Job,” he called. “Dead bird! Fetch it in!”

Job did not move, and Hayes said: “Maybe it’s not dead.

“I’ll walk in,” Chet told him. “I won’t shoot. You do the shooting.”

They nodded and he began to work in through the alders toward where Job stood. The others waited in vantage points outside. Chet came abreast of Job and stopped. But the dog stood still, and this surprised Chet, for Job was accustomed to rush forward, flushing up the bird as soon as he knew that Chet was near at hand. So the man studied the ground ahead of Job’s nose, trying to locate the bird; and he moved forward a step or two cautiously and at last began to beat to and fro, expecting every minute to hear the whistle of the woodcock’s wings as it rose.

Nothing happened. The two younger dogs broke point with a careless air as though to say they had not been pointing at all; that they had merely been considering the matter. They began to move about in the alders. And at last Chet, half convinced that Job was on a false point, turned to his dog and said harshly: “There’s nothing here, Job. Come out of it. Come along. Come in.”

Job watched Chet, but did not move. His lower jaw was fairly resting on the ground, and Chet exclaimed impatiently and stooped and caught his collar to drag him away. When he did this he saw the bird—saw its spreading wing beneath Job’s very jaw—and he reached down and lifted it, stone dead, from where it lay. Not till Chet had taken up the woodcock did Job stir, but when he saw it safe in his master’s hand he shook himself, looked at the other dogs with a triumphant cock of his ears and turned and trotted on down the run.

They left that cover presently, put in an hour in the Fuller pasture, where a partridge and two woodcock fell to their guns, and then drove back to the farm. It was beginning to rain—the thick brush soaked them. Chet bade them come and have dinner at the farm and wait on the chance that the afternoon would see a clearing sky. So they had a dinner of Chet’s cooking, and afterward they sat upon the side veranda watching the rain, smoking.

Chet McAusland is an extravagantly generous man. If you go fishing with him you take home both your fish and his own. He will not have it otherwise. Likewise if you go into the covers the birds are yours.

“Sho, I can get woodcock any time! You take them,” he will say. “Go on now.”

And it is so obvious that he is happier in giving than in keeping that he usually has his way.

After dinner he brought out the birds that had been killed in the morning and laid them on an empty chair beside him and began to tie their legs together so that they could be conveniently handled. Job was on the floor a yard away, apparently asleep. The men were talking. And Job growled.

Chet looked down, saw there were kittens about—there were always kittens at the farm—and reproved Job for growling at the kits. He was a little surprised, for Job usually paid no attention to them, even permitted them to eat from his plate. He said good-naturedly: “What are you doing, Job? Scaring that little kitten? Ain’t you ashamed!”

Job was so far from being ashamed that he barked loudly and Chet bent to cuff him into silence. Then he saw and laughed aloud. “Now ain’t that comical!” he demanded. “Look a-there!”

One of the kittens under Chet’s very chair was laboring heavily, trying to drag away a woodcock that seemed twice as large as itself. The other men laughed; Chet rescued the woodcock; the kitten fled and Job beamed with satisfaction and slapped his tail upon the floor.

Hayes cried: “By gad, McAusland, that dog has sense! I’d like to buy him.”

“You don’t want to buy him. He’s getting old. He won’t be able to hunt much longer.”

“Is he for sale?”

“Oh, you don’t want him,” Chet said uncomfortably. He hated to refuse any man anything.

“I’ll give you three hundred for him,” said Hayes.

Now three hundred dollars was as much cash as Chet was like to see in a year’s time, but—Job was Job. He hesitated, not because the offer attracted him but because he did not wish to refuse Hayes. He hesitated, but in the end he said, “You don’t want old Job.”

Gunther touched Hayes’ arm, caught his eye, shook his head; and Hayes forbore to push the matter. But he could not refrain from praising Job.

“I never saw as good a dog!” he declared.

“He is a good dog,” Chet agreed. “He’ll break shot, but that’s his only out. He’s staunch, he’ll mind, he works close in and he’s the best retriever in the County.”

“You don’t lose many birds with him,” Hayes agreed.

“I can throw a pebble from here right over the barn and he’ll fetch it in,” said Chet. “There’s nothing he won’t bring—if I tell him to.”

Gunther laughed.

“You’re taking in a good deal of territory, Chet.”

“I could tell you some things he’s done that would surprise you,” Chet declared.

Hayes chuckled.

“Let’s try him out,” he suggested.

“All right.”

Hayes pointed toward the barn. The great doors were open and a yellow and black cat was coming through the barn toward them. As Hayes pointed her out she sat down in the doorway and began to lick her breast fur down.

“Have him fetch the cat,” said Hayes.

Chet laughed. He stooped and touched the dog’s head.

“Job,” he said, “come here.”

Job got up and stood at Chet’s knee, looking up into his master’s face, tail wagging slowly to and fro. Chet waved his hand toward the barn.

“Go fetch the cat,” he said. “Go fetch the cat, Job.” The dog looked toward the barn, looked up at Chet again. Chet repeated, “Fetch the cat, Job.”

And the dog, a little doubtfully, left them and walked toward the barn. The cat saw Job coming, but was not afraid. They were old friends. All creatures were friends on Chet’s farm. It rose as Job approached and rubbed against his legs. Job stood still, uncertain; he looked back at Chet, looked down at the cat, looked back at Chet.

“Fetch, Job!” Chet called.

Then the dog in a matter of fact way that delighted the three men on the porch closed his jaws over the cat’s back, at the shoulder. The cat may have been astonished, but it is cat instinct to hang quietly when lifted in this wise. It made no more than a muffled protest; it hung in a furry ball, head drawn up, paws close against its body.

Job brought the cat gravely to Chet’s knee, and Chet took it from his mouth and soothed it and applauded Job.

“I’ll give you five hundred for that dog,” said Hayes.

“You don’t want to buy him,” Chet replied slowly, and the two men saw that there was a fierce pride in his eyes.

V

A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the fount of many tears. If boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood together, and together grow old, and so in due course die, full many a heartache might be avoided. But the world is not so ordered, and dogs will die and men will weep for them so long as there are dogs and men.

A setter may live a dozen years—may live fifteen. Job lived fourteen years. But the years of his prime were only seven, less than his share, for in his sixth year he had distemper and hunted not at all then or the year thereafter. For months through his long convalescence he was too weak to walk and Chet used to go in the morning and lift the dog from his bed in the barn into a wheelbarrow; and he would wheel Job around into the sun where he might lie quietly the long day through. But in his eighth year he was himself again—and in his ninth and tenth he hunted.

When he was eleven years old his eyes failed him. The eye is the first target of old age in a setter. It fails while the nose is still keen. In August of Job’s eleventh year he went into the fields with Chet one day when Chet was haying, and because the day was fine the dog was full of life, went at a gallop to and fro across the field.

Chet had begun to fear that Job was aging; he watched the dog now, somewhat reassured; and he said to Jim Saladine, who was helping him, “There’s life in the old dog yet.”

“Look at that!” said Saladine.

But Chet had seen. Job going full tilt across the field had run headlong into a bowlder as big as a barrel, which rose three feet above the stubble. He should have seen it clear across the field; he had not seen it at all. They heard his yelp of pain at the blow upon his tender nose and saw him get up and totter in aimless circles. Chet ran toward him, comforted him.

The dog was not stone blind, but his sight was almost gone. It must have gone suddenly, though Chet looking backward could see that he should have guessed before. Job was half stunned by the blow he had received and he followed Chet to the barn and lay down on a litter of hay there and seemed glad to rest. Chet, his eyes opened by what had happened, seemed to see the marks of age very plain upon the old dog of a sudden.

He took him into the covers that fall once or twice and Job’s nose functioned as marvelously as ever. But Chet could not bear to see the old dog blundering here and there, colliding with every obstacle that offered itself. After the third trial he gave up and hunted no more that fall. He even refused to go out with others when they brought their dogs.

“My old Job can’t hunt any more,” he would say. “I don’t seem to enjoy it any more myself. I guess I’ll not go out to-day.”

Hayes was one of those who tried to persuade Chet to take the field. An abiding friendship had grown up between these two. And late in October Hayes brought another puppy to the farm.

“He’ll never be the dog Job was,” he told Chet. “But he’s a well-blooded dog.”

“There won’t ever be another Job,” Chet agreed. “But—I’m obliged for the puppy—and he’ll be company for Job.”

He called the new dog Mac and he set about Mac’s training that winter, but his heart was not in it. That Job should grow old made Chet feel his own years heavy upon him. He was still in middle life, as hale as any man of twenty. But—Job was growing old and Chet’s heart was heavy.

Mary Thurman in the village—it was she whom Job called his mistress—saw the sorrow in Chet. She was full of sympathetic understanding of the man. They were as truly one as though they had been married these dozen years.

Annie Bissell, Will Bissell’s wife, said to her once: “Why don’t you marry him, Mary? Land knows, you’ve loved him long enough.”

Mary Thurman told her: “He don’t need me. He’s always lived alone and been comfortable enough and never known the need of a woman. I’ll marry no man that don’t know he needs me and tells me so.”

“Land knows, he needs someone to rid up that house of his. It’s a mess,” the other woman said.

“Chet don’t need me,” Mary insisted. “When he needs me I reckon I’ll go to him.”

She saw now the sorrow in Chet’s eyes and she tried to talk him out of it and to some extent succeeded.

Chet laughed a little, rubbed Job’s head, said slowly: “I hate to see the old dog get old, that’s all.”

“Sho,” said Mary, “he’s just beginning to enjoy living. Don’t have to work any more.”

In the end she did bring some measure of comfort to Chet. And it was she who christened Job anew. He and Chet came down one evening, stopped on their way for the mail, and she greeted Chet and to the dog said, “Hello, Old Tantrybogus.”

Chet looked at her, asked what she meant.

“Nothing,” Mary told him. “He just looks like an old tantrybogus, that’s all.”

“What is a tantrybogus?” Chet asked. “I don’t believe there’s any such thing.”

“Well, if there was he’d look like one,” said Mary.

The name took hold. Mary always used it; Chet himself took it up. By the time Job was twelve years old he was seldom called anything else.

Chet had expected that Mac, the young dog, would prove a companion for Job, but at first it seemed he would be disappointed. To begin with, Job was jealous; he sulked when Chet paid Mac attention and was a scornful spectator at Mac’s training sessions. This early jealousy came to a head about the time Mac got his full stature—in a fight over a field mouse. It happened in the orchard, where Chet was piling hay round his trees. Mac dug the mouse out of the grass, Old Tantrybogus stole it and Mac went for him.

Tantry was old, but strength was still in him, and some measure of craft. He got a neck hold and it is probable he would have killed Mac then and there if Chet had not interfered. As it was, Chet broke the hold, punished both dogs and chained them up for days till by every language a dog can muster they promised him to behave themselves. They never fought again. Mac had for Tantry a deep respect; Job had for Mac—having established his ascendancy—a mild and elderly affection.

In Tantry’s thirteenth year during the haying Mac caught a mouse one day and brought it and gave it to the older dog; and Chet, who saw the incident, slapped his knee and cried, “Now ain’t that comical?”

About his twelfth year old Tantry’s bark had begun to change. Little by little it lost the deeper notes of the years of his prime; it lost the certainty and decision which were always a part of the dog. It began to crack, as an old man’s voice quavers and cracks. A shrill querulous note was born in it. Before he was thirteen his bark had an inhuman sound and Chet could hardly bear to hear it. On gunning days while Chet was preparing to take the field with Mac, Old Tantrybogus would dance unsteadily round him, barking this hoarse, shrill, delighted bark.

It was like seeing an old man gamboling; it was age aping youth. There was something pitiful in it, and Chet used to swear and chain Tantry to his kennel and bid him—abusively—be still.

The chain always silenced Tantry. He would lie in the kennel, head on his paws in the doorway, and watch Chet and Mac start away, with never a sound. And at night when they came home Chet would show him the birds and Tantry would snuffle at them eagerly, then hide his longing under a mask of condescension as though to say that woodcock had been of better quality in his day.

In his thirteenth year age overpowered Tantry. His coat by this time was long; it hung in fringes from his thin flanks, through which the arched ribs showed. His head drooped, his tail dragged; his long hair was clotted into tangles here and there, because he was grown too old to keep himself in order. The joints of his legs were weak and he was splayfooted, his feet spreading out like braces on either side of him. When he walked he weaved like a drunken man; when he ran he collided with anything from a fence post to the barn itself. His eyes were rheumy. And he was pathetically affectionate, pushing his nose along Chet’s knee, smearing Chet’s trousers with his long white hairs. In his prime he had been a proud dog, caring little for caresses. This senile craving for the touch of Chet’s hand made Chet cry—and swear. It was at this time that Mary Thurman told Chet he ought to put Tantrybogus away.

“He’s too old for his own good,” she said—“half sick, and sore and uncomfortable. He ain’t happy, Chet.”

Chet told her that he would—some day. But the day did not come, and Mary knew it would not come. Nevertheless she urged Chet more than once to do the thing.

“You ought to. He’d be happier,” she said—“and so would you. You ain’t happy with him around.”

Chet laughed at her.

“I guess Old Tantry won’t bother me long as he wants to live,” he said.

“He makes you feel like an old man, Chet McAusland, just to look at him,” she protested. But Chet shook his head.

“I won’t feel old long as I can see you,” he told her.

So Old Tantry lived on and grew more decrepit. One day in the winter of his thirteenth year he followed Chet down into the wood lot and hunted him out there—and was so weary from his own exertions that Chet had to carry the dog up the hill and home and put him to bed in the barn.

“I ought to put you away, Tantry,” he said to himself as he gave the weary old creature a plate of supper. “It’s time you were going, old dog. But I can’t—I can’t.”

His fourteenth year saw Tantrybogus dragging out a weary life. Till then there had been nothing the matter with him save old age, but in his fourteenth summer a lump appeared on his right side against the ribs, and it was as large as a nut before Chet one day discovered it. Thereafter it grew. And at times when the old dog lay down on that side he would yelp with pain and get up hurriedly and lie down on the other side. By September the lump was half as large as an apple. And when Chet touched it Tantry whined and licked Chet’s hand in a pitiful appeal. Even then Chet would not do that which Mary wished him to do.

“He’ll go away some day and I’ll never see him again,” he told her. “But as long as he wants to stay—he’ll stay.”

“It’s cruel to the dog,” Mary told him. “You keep him, but you won’t let him do what he wants to do. I’m ashamed of you, Chet McAusland.”

Chet laughed uncomfortably.

“I can’t help it, Mary,” he said.

VI

October came—the month of birds, the month when a dog scents the air and feels a quickening in his blood and watches to see his master oil the gun and break out a box of shells and fetch down the bell from the attic. And on the third day of the season, a crisp day, frost upon the ground and the sun bright in the sky, Chet decided to go down toward the river and try to find a bird.

When the bell tinkled Mac came from the barn at a gallop and danced on tiptoe round his master so that Chet had difficulty in making him stand quietly for as long as it took to adjust the bell on his collar. Old Tantrybogus had been asleep in the barn, and he was as near deaf as he was blind by this time, so that he heard nothing. But the stir of Mac’s rush past him roused the old dog and he climbed unsteadily to his feet and came weaving like a drunken man to where Chet stood. And he barked his shrill, senile, pitiful bark and he tried in his poor old way to dance as Mac was dancing.

Chet looked down at the old dog and because there were tears in his eyes he spoke harshly.

“Tantry, you old fool,” he said, “go lie down. You’re not going. You couldn’t walk from here to the woods. Go lie down and rest, Tantry.”

Tantry paid not the least attention; he barked more shrilly than ever. He pretended that it was a matter of course that Chet would bell him and take him along. This is one of the favorite ruses of the dog—to pretend to be sure of the treat in store for him until his master must have a heart of iron to deny him.

Tantry continued to dance until Chet walked to the kennel and pointed in and said sternly, “Get in there, Tantry!”

Then and only then the old dog obeyed. He did not sulk; he went in with a certain dignity, and once inside he turned and lay with his head in the door, watching Chet and Mac prepare to go. Chet did not chain him. There was no need, he thought. Tantry could scarce walk at all, much less follow him to the fringe of woodland down the hill.

When he was ready he and Mac went through the barn and across the garden into the meadow and across this meadow and the wall beyond till the hill dropped steeply toward the river. Repeated commands kept Mac to heel, though the dog was fretting with impatience. Not till they were at the edge of the wood did Chet wave his hand and bid the dog go on.

“Now find a bird, Mac,” Chet commanded. “Go find a bird.”

And Mac responded, moving into the cover at a trot, nosing to and fro. They began to work along the fringe down toward the river, where in an alder run or two Chet hoped to find a woodcock. Neither of them looked back toward the farm and so it was that neither of them saw Old Tantrybogus like a shadow of white slip through the barn and come lumbering unsteadily along their trail. That was a hard journey for Tantry. He was old and weak and he could not see and the lump upon his side was more painful than it had ever been before. He passed through the barn without mishap, for that was familiar ground. Between the barn and the garden he brushed an apple tree that his old eyes saw too late. In the garden he blundered among the dead tops of the carrots and turnips, which Chet had not yet harvested. He was traveling by scent alone, his nose to the ground, picking out Chet’s footsteps. He had not been so far away from the farm for months; it was an adventure and a stiff one. The wall between the garden and the meadow seemed intolerably high and a rock rolled under him so that he fell painfully. The old dog only whimpered a little and tried again and passed the wall and started along Chet’s trail across the meadow.

Midway of this open his strength failed him so that he fell forward and lay still for a considerable time, tongue out, panting heavily. But when he was rested he climbed to his feet again—it was a terrible effort, even this—and took up his progress.

The second wall, which inclosed Chet’s pasture, was higher and there was a single strand of barbed wire atop it. Tantry failed twice in his effort to leap to the top of the unsteady rank of stones and after that he turned aside and moved along the wall looking for an easier passage. He came to a bowlder that helped him, scrambled to the top, cut his nose on the barbed wire, slid under it and half jumped, half fell to the ground. He was across the wall.

Even in the trembling elation of this victory the old dog’s sagacity did not fail him. Another dog might have blundered down into the wood on a blind search for his master. Tantrybogus did not do this. He worked back along the wall until he picked up the trail, then followed it as painstakingly as before. He was increasingly weary, however, and more than once he stopped to rest. But always when a thin trickle of strength flowed back into his legs he rose and followed on.

Chet and Mac had found no partridges in the fringe of the woods, so at the river they turned to the right, pushed through some evergreens and came into a little alder run where woodcock were accustomed to nest and where Chet expected to find birds lying on this day. Almost at once Mac began to mark game, standing motionless for seconds on end, moving forward with care, making little side casts to and fro. Chet’s attention was all on the dog; his gun was ready; he was alert for the whistle of the woodcock’s wings, every nerve strung in readiness to fling up his gun and pull.

If Mac had not found game in this run, if Chet and the dog had kept up their swift hunter’s gait, Old Tantrybogus would never have overtaken them, for the old dog’s strength was almost utterly gone. But Chet halted for perhaps five minutes in the little run, following slowly as Mac worked uphill, and this halt gave Old Tantry time to come up with them. He lumbered out of the cover of the evergreens and saw Chet, and the old dog barked aloud with joy and scrambled and tottered to where Chet stood. He was so manifestly exhausted that Chet’s eyes filled with frank tears—they flowed down his cheeks. He had not the heart to scold Tantry for breaking orders and following them.

He reached down and patted the grizzled old head and said huskily: “You damned old fool, Tantry! What are you doing down here?”

Tantry looked up at him and barked again and again and there was a rending ring of triumph in the old dog’s cackling voice.

Chet said gently: “There now, be still. You’ll scare the birds, Tantry. Behave yourself. Mac’s got a bird here somewhere. Be still—you’ll scare the birds.”

For answer, as though his deaf old ears had caught the familiar word and read it as an order, Tantry shuffled past his master and worked in among the alders toward where Mac was casting slowly to and fro. Chet watched him for a minute through eyes so blurred he could hardly see and he brushed his tears away with the back of his hand.

“The poor old fool,” he said. “Hell, let him have his fun!”

He took one step forward to follow the dogs—and stopped. For old Tantrybogus, a dog of dogs in his day, had proved that he was not yet too old to know his craft. Unerringly, where Mac had blundered for a minute or more, he had located the woodcock—he was on point. And Mac, turning, saw him and stiffened to back the other dog.

Tantrybogus’ last point was not beautiful; it would have taken no prize in field trials. His splayfeet were spread, the better to support his body on his tottering legs. His tail drooped to the ground instead of being stiffened out behind. His head was on one side, cocked knowingly, and it was still as still. When Chet, frankly weeping, worked in behind him he saw that the old dog was trembling like a leaf and he knew this was no tremor of weakness but a shivering ecstacy of joy in finding game again.

Chet came up close behind Old Tantry and stopped and looked down at the dog. He paid no heed to Mac. Mac was young, unproved. But he and Tantry, they were old friends and tried; they knew each the other.

“You’re happier now than you’ve been for a long time, Tantry,” said Chet softly, as much to himself as to the dog. “Happy old boy! It’s a shame to make you stay at home.”

And of a sudden, without thought or plan but on the unconsidered impulse of the moment, Chet dropped his gun till the muzzle was just behind Old Tantry’s head. At the roar of it a woodcock rose on shrilling wings—rose and flew swiftly up the run with never a charge of shot pursuing. Chet had not even seen it go.

The man was on his knees, cradling the old dog in his arms, crying out as though Tantry still could hear: “Tantry! Tantry! Why did I have to go and—I’m a murderer, Tantry! Plain murderer! That’s what I am, old dog!”

He sat back on his heels, laid the white body down and folded his arms across his face as a boy does, weeping. In the still crisp air a sound seemed still ringing—the sound of a dog’s bark—the bark of Old Tantrybogus, yet strangely different too. Stronger, richer, with a new and youthful timbre in its tones; like the bark of a young strong dog setting forth on an eternal hunt with a well-loved master through alder runs where woodcock were as thick as autumn leaves.

VII

Half an hour after that Will Bissell chanced by Chet’s farm and saw Chet fetching pick and shovel from the shed, and something in the other’s bearing made him ask: “What’s the matter, Chet? Something wrong?”

Chet looked at him slowly, said in a hoarse voice: “I’ve killed Old Tantrybogus. I’m going down to put him away.”

And he went through the barn and left Will standing there, down into the wood to a spot where the partridges love to come in the late fall for feed, and made a bed there and lined it thick with boughs and so at last laid Old Tantry to sleep.

His supper that night was solitary and cheerless and dreary and alone. But—Will Bissell must have spread the news, for while Chet was washing the dishes someone knocked, and when he turned Mary Thurman opened the door and came in.

Chet could not bear to look at her. He turned awkwardly and sat down at the kitchen table and buried his head in his arms. And Mary, smiling though her eyes were wet, came toward him. There was the mother light in her eyes, the mother radiance in Mary Thurman’s face. And she took Chet’s lonely head in her arms.

“There, Chet, there!” she whispered softly. “I reckon you need me now.”

ONE CROWDED HOUR

I

JEFF RANNEY lived on the road from East Harbor to Fraternity, some eight miles from the bay. He was, at the period of which I write, a man fifty-seven years old, and his life had been as completely uneventful as life can be. He had never had an adventure, had never suffered a catastrophe, had never achieved any great thing, had never even been called upon to endure a particularly poignant grief. He was born in the house where he still lived and save for one trip to Portland had never crossed the county line. He married the daughter of a man whose farm lay on the other side of Fraternity. She was not particularly pretty at any time; and he had never any passion for her, though he had always liked her well enough, and had always been kind. His father and mother lived till he was in his forties, then died peaceably in their beds. He had been a child of their later years, and before they died they had become almost completely helpless, so that he felt it was time for them to go. He and his wife had three children, all of whom grew to maturity. The oldest, a girl, married an East Harbor boy who later moved to Augusta; the other two, boys, went to Augusta to work in a factory there, preferring the ordered hours of confined toil to the long and irregular tasks upon the farm.

Now and then Jeff’s wife departed to visit her daughter, leaving him to keep bachelor hall alone. He managed comfortably enough; his life, then as always, followed a well-ordered and familiar routine. He rose at daylight, cared for his stock, made his own breakfast, did whatever tasks lay before him for the day, finished his chores before cooking supper at night, washed the dishes, read the evening paper till he fell asleep in his chair, and then went to bed. Now and then in the spring and summer months he found time to catch a mess of trout; now and then in the fall or winter he shot a partridge or a rabbit. When there was a circus in East Harbor, or a fair, he went to town for the day. When there was a dance in the Grange Hall he and his wife had used to go; but they had long since ceased these frivolities.

Jeff’s farm was well kept; he had a profitable orchard, his cows were of good stock. When the price of feed made the enterprise worth while he raised a few pigs. There was no mortgage on the farm, his taxes were paid, he owed no bills, his buildings were in good condition, he owned a secondhand automobile and a piano, and he had some few hundred dollars in the bank. It is fair to say that by the standards of the community in which he lived he was a prosperous man. He was also a just man, and he had a native sense and wit which his neighbors respected.

One November day, some years before this time of which I propose to write, he woke early and looked from his kitchen window and saw a deer feeding on the windfalls in his orchard. He shot the animal through the open window; and the spike horns, still attached to a fragment of the skull, were kept on the marble-topped table in the parlor of the farmhouse. The shooting of this deer was the most exciting, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Jeff until that series of incidents in which romance and drama were so absorbingly mingled, and which is to be here set down.

It was a day in October. He had planned to go down into his woodlot and manufacture stove wood, to be stored for use during the winter that was still twelve months away. But when he awoke in the morning a cold rain was lashing his window, and a glance at the sky assured him the rain would continue all that day. He decided to postpone the outdoor task. A few errands in town wanted doing, so he put before his animals sufficient water for their needs till night, threw a thing or two into the tonneau of his car, secured the curtains, cranked the engine and started for East Harbor. Since the road was muddy and somewhat rutted, and he had no chains, it was necessary for him to drive slowly; and his late start made it almost noon when he slid down the steep and muddy hill into the town. He parked his car at an angle in the middle of the street and went to the restaurant presided over by Bob Bumpass for his midday meal. Eating at a restaurant on his trips to town was one of the things Jeff accounted luxuries.

Bob, fat and amiable as a Mine Host out of Dickens, asked Jeff what he wanted; and Jeff ordered Regular Dinner Number Three: Vegetable soup, fried haddock, pie and coffee; thirty-five cents. Not till he had given his order did Jeff perceive that a certain excitement was in the air.

There were two other customers having lunch near where he sat. One was Dolph Bullen, whose haberdashery was among the most prosperous of East Harbor mercantile establishments; the other was the chief of police, Sam Gallop, a wordy man. Bob Bumpass, having taken Jeff’s order and served his soup, leaned against the counter to talk with these two men. Jeff perceived that Sam was telling over again a story that had evidently been told before.

“Yes, sir,” said Sam, “he came right along when I took a hold of him. And he had the necklace in a kind of a leather case in his pocket the whole time.”

“You took him right off the Boston boat, didn’t you?” Dolph asked.

“Yep,” said Sam. “Right out of his stateroom. He had his suitcase open on the bunk when I knocked on the door. I didn’t wait for him to let me in. Just opened her right up and went in; and he looked at me kind of impudent; and he says, ‘Hullo,’ he says. ‘What’s the matter?’ Cool as you want.”

“He come in here one day this summer, when the yacht was in here,” Bob commented. “I kind of liked his looks.”

Sam shook his head ponderously. “Them’s the worst kind. But he didn’t fool me.”

“Name’s Gardner, isn’t it?” Dolph asked.

Bob nodded. “Frank Gardner. He’s worked for old Viles for six-seven years, he said.”

The chief of police was not willing that his part in the affair should be forgotten. He was a round-faced, bald, easy-going man; but he knew his rights, knew that in this drama which had been played he had a leading rôle.

“I says to him, ‘Matter enough,’” he continued importantly. “‘I got a warrant for you,’ I says. And he asked me what for; and I told him for stealing Mrs. Viles’ jewels. He got red enough at that, and mad looking, I’ll tell you. And he started to say something. But I shut him up. ‘You can tell that to someone else,’ I says. ‘My job’s to take you up to jail.’ Then he asked who swore out the warrant; and I told him old Viles did; and at that he shut up like a clam, and snapped his suitcase shut, and came along. I found the things when I went through his clothes, up’t the jail.”

He had more to tell, and when Bob Bumpass had brought Jeff his fried haddock and resumed his place as auditor Sam took up the telling. How Leander Viles had come to him, demanding the arrest of his secretary; how he had insisted that the millionaire swear out a warrant; how incensed Viles had become at this insistence.

“I’ll tell you,” said Sam emphatically, “he got right purple, till I thought the man’d burst; and he sort of fell down in a chair, grabbing at his chest; and then he got white as can be.”

Dolph nodded. “Men like him, big and fat, and full of whisky all the time—they go that way. He’s got a temper too. Some day when he’s good and mad that heart of his will crack on him.”

Their talk continued, and Jeff continued to listen. In any issue it is instinctive for mankind to take sides. Dolph and Bob Bumpass were inclined to think a mistake had been made. “I don’t believe he aimed to steal that necklace at all,” said Bob; and Jeff found himself agreeing with the restaurant man. The three were still discussing the matter when Jeff finished his pie, paid his score and went his way.

His errands kept him busy all that afternoon. An ax handle, two or three pounds of nails, four feet of strap iron and a box of shells from the hardware store; a pair of overalls from Dolph Bullen; oatmeal, coffee, sugar and salt from the grocer; a bag of feed from the hay and grain market at the foot of the street. These errands were attended with much casual conversation, chiefly concerned with the arrest of the jewel thief. Late in the afternoon Jeff sought out Ed Whalen, who dealt in coal and wood, and made a deal by which Ed would buy from him a dozen cords of stove wood, to be delivered while snow was on the ground. Ed’s office was near the water front; and when Jeff came out he perceived the Viles yacht at her anchorage a little above the steamboat wharf. Jeff studied the craft for a while admiringly, and he wondered how much she had cost. “As much as my whole farm,” he guessed. “Or mebbe more.”

Night was coming swiftly; the lights aboard the yacht were turned on while he stood there, and her portholes appeared like round and luminous eyes. He could dimly see a sailor or two, in oilskins, under the deck lamps. Rain was still falling, cold and implacable. “Guess the folks that live on her are keeping dry, inside,” he hazarded. He tried to picture to himself their manner of life, so different from his own, as he went back up the hill toward where he had left his car.

A farmer from Winterport, whom he had not seen for years, halted him on the corner above Dolph’s store, and they talked together for a space in the shelter of the entrance to the bank. A whistle down the harbor announced the coming of the Boston boat; and before they separated another whistle told of her departure. Then Jeff had trouble cranking his car. He had forgotten to cover the hood, and the ignition wires and plugs were wet. One cylinder caught at last; and then another; and finally all four. He had already loaded in his purchases on the floor and seat of the tonneau. The bag of feed lay along the seat.

The Winterport man had reported that the steamship line would make a new rate for apples by the barrel to Boston that fall; and Jeff decided to go down to the wharf and make inquiries. He parked his car on the edge of the wharf, in the lee of the freight sheds, and this time threw an old rubber blanket over the hood to keep the plugs dry, before turning toward the office. With the departure of the boat, business hereabouts was done for the day; and save for a light in the office, and another on the pier toward shore, the wharf was dark. Jeff’s errand occupied some ten minutes’ time; and while he was inside a fiercer squall of rain burst over the harbor. He could hear the water drumming on the roof.

When the squall had passed he returned to his car and took the blanket off the hood and threw it into the dark cavern of the tonneau, then cranked the engine and turned around and started home. His lights, run from the magneto, were dim and uncertain; his attention was all upon the road. The car skidded and slid and slued and bumped; but it came to no disaster. He drove into his own barn toward seven o’clock in the evening, and left his purchases untouched while he went into the house to change into overalls, so that he might do his chores.

When he came back into the barn he saw someone standing motionless beside the machine. He lifted the lantern which he carried, so that its light flooded the still figure, and perceived that the person who stood there, facing him, was a woman.

II

This woman, in these surroundings, was an amazing apparition. Against the background of his old hayrick, still half full of hay, Jeff saw her outlined. She wore a sailor’s oilskin coat, buttoned about her throat; and beneath the skirts of the draggled coat he glimpsed slim silk-clad ankles and badly soiled white satin pumps. She wore no hat; her hair was wet and all awry; and there was a thin streak of blood from a scratch upon her temple that had trickled down across the bridge of her nose in a slanting direction. Yet in spite of these difficulties he perceived that she was very beautiful.

At sight of her Jeff had stopped in his tracks and still stood motionless with surprise, the lantern in his lifted hand. The woman’s white fingers fumbled nervously at the fastenings of the oilskin coat she wore; she waited for a moment in silence; but when he did not speak she nodded in an uneasy little way and stammeringly said to him, “Good evening!” Her voice was full and throaty and pleasantly modulated.

Jeff replied, “Howdo!”

She began to speak very rapidly.

“You’re probably wondering how I came here. I was in your car. On the floor of the back seat. Almost crushed. That big bag fell off the seat on top of me when you hit that terrible bump. It banged my head down on a piece of iron. I’m afraid it has bled a little. I was almost smothered. The road was so rough.”

She was panting as though she had run a race; and Jeff watched her steadfastly for a moment, and then, for sheer relief from his astonishment, gripped the commonplace with both hands.

“You better come in the house and wash up,” he told her slowly, “and get warm. I guess you’re kind of wet.”

She nodded. “Yes. I’d like that. I’d like to do that.”

He perceived that she was fighting for self-control, putting down the revolt of jangling nerves.

“Come through here, ma’am,” he bade her, and led the way through the woodshed and into the kitchen. There he set his lantern on the table and brought fresh water from the pump. “I’ve been away since morning,” he explained. “The water in the tank is cold. You want to wait till I heat some up?”

She shook her head. “This will do finely.”

He went through into the bedroom and returned with a heavy porcelain bowl, which he set in the sink, removing the granite-ware wash-basin. The woman had sunk down limply in a chair beside the table. Jeff, careful not to distress her by his scrutiny, unwrapped a fresh bar of soap, brought out a clean towel. Then with half a dozen motions he threw shavings and bits of kindling into the stove, touched a match to them, laid a stick or two of hardwood atop. “That’ll warm the kitchen up pretty quick,” he told her. He understood that she wished to be alone, yet was not sure what he should do. At last he said awkwardly, “I’ll be doing the chores,” and lighted a lamp for her, then took the lantern and departed through the shed again.

When he had gone only a few steps he stopped, considered, then returned and knocked upon the door through which he had come out. She bade him enter; and when he did so he found her on her feet, unfastening the long black coat.

“You could go into the bedroom,” he said tentatively.

She shook her head, smiling gratefully. “I’m sure this is fine. But I would like a comb.”

“I’ll get my wife’s for you,” he replied; and brought it to her. Mrs. Ranney was a good housekeeper; the comb was as clean as new. “Would there be anything else?” he asked when she had thanked him for it.

“No. But you’re very kind to me.”

“I’ll get the chores done,” he replied uncomfortably, and this time departed in good earnest to the barn.

When he had fed and watered the stock, finding a relief in the familiar routine, he removed his purchases from the car. Saw where the woman had crouched on the floor. The rubber blanket which he had thrown in at the wharf must have fallen across her back; the heavy sack of feed might well have crushed her. “Lucky she wa’n’t worse hurt,” he told himself. He was full of speculations, full of questions, half dazed with wonder. Women of such a sort as this were as though they lived in another world. Yet she was in his kitchen now.

It was necessary for him to go back to the house to get the milking pails. Again he knocked upon the door, and the woman bade him come in. She had laid aside the oilskins; he was not able at once to understand just what it was she wore. A dress, but of a sort unfamiliar to his eyes. He had seen magazine pictures of such things. An evening gown, décolletté. Her hair was loose in a warm cloud about her smooth shoulders, and she was leaning above the stove.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, flushing with some confusion. “I’m trying to get it dry.”

He would have backed out of the kitchen. “I’m not in a hurry, ma’am.”

But she cried warmly, “No, no, it’s all right. Come in.”

“I come to get the milk pails,” he explained. “I scalded them out this morning.” He took them from the draining board at one end of the sink. “I’ll go milk now.”

She asked diffidently, “Can’t I be starting supper while you’re doing that?”

Jeff smiled faintly. “I’m used to cooking. I know where the things are.”

“I can cook,” she assured him. “What are we going to have for supper?” She was beginning to see some humor in the situation.

“Why I just figured to scramble some eggs, and make coffee,” Jeff confessed. “The things are in the pantry, in through the dining room,” he added.

“I’ll have supper all ready when you come back,” she promised.

He said reluctantly, “Well, all right,” and left her there.

When he returned, half an hour later, he found her, her hair in a loose braid, wearing one of his wife’s aprons, busy about the kitchen table. “I’ve everything ready,” she told him, “but I waited, so that things would be nice and hot.”

“I got to separate the milk first,” he explained.

She nodded and, while he performed that operation, busied herself with egg beater and mixing bowl. He took the cream down cellar, set the skim milk in the shed for his hogs. When he had washed his hands and face she summoned him to supper in the dining room. She had made an omelet and toast, and her coffee was better than his. He ate with the silent intentness of a hungry man. Afterward she insisted on washing the dishes, while he read, fitfully enough, yet with an appearance of absorption, the paper that had been left that afternoon in the mail box before the door. There was something grotesquely domestic in the situation, and Jeff’s pulses were pounding with wonder at it all.

He had asked the woman no single question. There were a thousand questions he desired to ask, but an innate delicacy restrained him. The glamour of the hour had dazed this man; his senses were confused. There was an unreality about the whole experience. The dishes, rattling in the sink, sounded no differently than when his wife washed them. The illusion that it was his wife who had come home in this guise had for a moment dominion over him. The lines of newsprint staggered and swam before his inattentive eyes. He wondered, wondered, wondered. But he asked no question of his guest.

When she had finished her self-appointed task and come into the dining room where he was sitting she seemed to expect a catechism; but Jeff kept his eyes upon his paper, as a man clings to a safe anchorage, till at last she was forced to speak.

“I’ve been expecting you to question me,” she said uncertainly.

Jeff looked up at her and then found some reassurance in the fact that the silence was thus broken. “I’ve been expecting you’d tell me without asking,” he said, smiling faintly at her.

“I ought to,” she nodded. “But there’s so much to tell; and it must sound so incredible to you. I hid in your car at the wharf, blindly, not knowing who you were. I had to get away; wanted to get away. Anywhere. To hide. For a little while. I can pay you.” She spoke uncertainly, unwilling to give offense.

Jeff shook his head good-humoredly. “I don’t run a boarding house, ma’am.”

“I have to find some place where I can stay.”

He was thoughtfully silent for a little, then asked, “How long?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps only a little while.”

“I guess you can stay here a while,” he said.

“You spoke of your wife?” she suggested.

“She’s visiting my daughter, over in Augusta,” Jeff explained. “Won’t be back for a week anyways. I reckon it’d be easier for you if she was here; but you’re welcome anyways.”

She looked down helplessly at the gown she wore. “It was a mad thing to do,” she whispered, half to herself. Jeff guessed what she was thinking.

“I reckon you could wear some of my wife’s things,” he suggested.

“Have you room for me?”

There were two bedrooms on the ground floor of the farmhouse; but he thought she would prefer a measure of isolation. “I can make the bed in the room upstairs,” he replied.

“Won’t your neighbors be surprised that I am here?”

Jeff considered that for a long time in silence, till she began to be afraid the obstacle was insuperable. Then his eyes lighted with recollection, and he said slowly, “My brother moved to California and married there, and his girl has been talking about coming to see us. We can let on you’re her.”

She cried with sudden friendly warmth in her tones, “You’re ever so kind to me. I appreciate it. Your taking me in so unquestioningly.”

“That’s all right,” he told her.

“I’m going to take you at your word,” she exclaimed. “I’m going to stay.”

III

Jeff Ranney was a man habituated to routine; he fell naturally into a regular way of doing even irregular things. The next morning his life was on the surface as it had always been. He rose to his chores, returned to his breakfast, went into the woodlot and set about the task he had postponed the day before. The woman cooked breakfast and did the work about the kitchen that his wife might have done. It would have been easy for any outsider to accept as fact her pretended status as Jeff’s niece from California.

But Jeff was not deceived by the apparent normality of this new existence. The man was immensely curious about her, absorbed in the mystery which she personified. His thoughts all that day were full of conjectures, full of hypotheses, formed and as quickly thrown away. One guess he clung to as probable fact. It seemed to him certain she had come ashore from that yacht which he had seen lying in East Harbor the night before; had come ashore as one who flees. But to the questions who she might be and why she had fled, he found a thousand answers and accepted none of them.

The question of her identity was solved that night, for on the first page of his Boston paper a headline caught his eye. It read thus:

Millionaire Viles’
Wife is a Suicide

His eyes moved down the closely printed column, intent on each word. Save for journalistic padding the first paragraph told the story:

East Harbor, Me., Oct. 18—Lucia Viles, wife of Leander Viles, the millionaire banker, committed suicide here last night by drowning. She left the Viles’ yacht, which is anchored in the harbor, in a small rowboat, at a moment when a heavy squall of rain had driven the crew to shelter; and it is presumed that she threw herself into the water as soon as she had reached a sufficient distance so that she would not be seen. The tide was running out; and the rowboat was picked up by an incoming fisherman early this morning, down below the bell buoy, three miles from the yacht’s anchorage. The body has not been recovered. Mr. Viles, millionaire husband of the dead woman, said to-day that she had been subject to fits of melancholy for some time.

Jeff read this while his guest was washing the dishes after supper. She had thrown herself zealously into these household tasks, as though her overstrained nerves found relief in them. When she came into the dining room afterward he laid the paper down in such a manner that she must see the headline which had caught his eye.

She did see it, caught up the paper, read hurriedly, looked up when she was done, to find him watching her.

“You’ve read it?” she asked. He nodded. “I didn’t think they’d have it in the papers,” she cried, as though appalled at what she had done.

“Guess you didn’t make your boat fast when you landed,” Jeff suggested.

She shook her head. “No. I pushed it off. I hoped they would think this.”

He studied her, surprised and thoughtful. “Won’t your husband be kind of worried about you?” he suggested mildly, and was startled at the fierce anger behind her reply.

“I want him to be worried! Oh, I want him to be tortured!” she cried, and became absorbed once more in that which was printed on the page before her. “The body has not been recovered,” she read aloud after a moment; and with a quick change of mood laughed at him, shuddering faintly. “It does give me a creepy feeling,” she said.

“I should think it might,” Jeff assented mildly. “Yes, I should think it would.”

She was wearing a gingham dress belonging to his wife, which he had found at her request. Now, sitting across the table from him, she began to tremble and to laugh in nervous bursts of sound.

Jeff asked, “What’s the matter! What you laughing at?”

“I can’t stop,” she told him helplessly. “It just strikes me as funny. I can’t help laughing. If I didn’t laugh I should cry. They think I’m dead. Dead!” The word was high pitched, almost like a scream.

Jeff had seen feminine hysteria before; he said sternly, “You got to stop. Now you be still.”

The woman controlled herself at once, nodding reassuringly. “Yes, I’ll be still. I will be still,” she promised. “You won’t let them find me here, will you? You won’t let them know I’m here?”

“Andy Wattles stopped here this morning, in the truck,” Jeff answered. “I told him you’d come. He’d heard me say you was thinking of coming. It was safest to tell him.”

“But I wasn’t thinking of coming!” she cried, appalled.

“My brother’s girl from California was,” he reminded her; and she nodded over and over, as a child nods, to show her understanding and her acquiescence. Her trembling had ceased; her fright was passing. She went to bed at last, somewhat reassured.

But the paper next day, in even larger headlines, announced that doubt was cast upon the theory that she was a suicide.

“Mr. Viles,” the reporter wrote, “said to-day he thought it possible his wife might have become temporarily insane; that she was subject to hours of extreme nervous depression. It is known that she took a considerable sum of money from a safe in her cabin before she left the yacht. It is possible that she went ashore upon some errand and was assaulted and robbed. The three possibilities which the police of East Harbor are considering are suicide, robbery and murder, or an insane flight.” Jeff smiled at the picture of Sam Gallop, the “police of East Harbor,” considering anything. “In order to enlist every possible helper in the search for the missing woman,” the reporter added, “Mr. Viles has offered a reward of a thousand dollars for her body or of ten thousand for information that will lead to her discovery alive.”

The woman, when she read this, shivered with dread. “They will find me,” she told Jeff wearily. “Oh, I hoped they would believe me dead.”

“I dunno as they’ll find you,” Jeff argued. “They’re not apt to look out this way. They’re more likely to think you headed for Boston or somewheres.”

“It’s hopeless,” she insisted. “I think you’d better go tell them where I am, and get the money. The ten thousand dollars. Some good will come out of it, that way. I’d like you to have the money. You’ve been kind to me.”

The man laughed reassuringly. “Shucks, ma’am,” he said. “What would I do with a lot of money like that? It’s no good except to buy things with, and I’ve got more things than I can take care of now. Don’t you fret yourself. They ain’t going to find you, ma’am.”

“Everyone knows I’m here. Those women who came to-day—” She moved her hands drearily. “Someone will tell.”

Jeff shook his head. “No, they won’t. That was Will Bissell’s wife and Mrs. McAusland. They heard from the store that you was here; and they’d heard my wife say you was coming.”

“Oh, they must have seen that I was—” She paused, unwilling to hurt him.

“Different from us folks?” he asked, smiling at her understandingly. “Well, California folks are different from people around here. They’d have thought it was funny if you was like us.”

“And my wearing your wife’s dress.”

“I told ’em your trunk was lost. You had to have something to work around the house in.”

She was, in the end, unwillingly persuaded to a more hopeful point of view. But when she had gone up the stairs to her room Jeff sat for a long time, turning the newspaper in his hands, reading over and over that which was written there. She was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen; and the gown she wore when she came to the farm had stamped itself upon his visual memory as a part of her beauty. That a reward of ten thousand dollars should have been offered for her discovery did not surprise Jeff; though it added to the glamour which cloaked her in his eyes.

“She’s worth more,” he told himself softly. “If she was mine I’d give a hundred times that much to get her back again.” And he thought of this husband of hers, whom she wished to torture, and wondered what he had done to her, and hated this man he had never seen because the woman hated him. “He’s not going to get her back,” Jeff swore in his thoughts. “If I can help her keep away from him he’ll not get her again.” There was nothing possessive in the feeling which was awakening in him. His devotion to her was a completely unselfish force.

It was also the most powerful emotion Jeff had felt in all his fifty-seven years.

IV

Will Belter stopped at the farm next morning, and lingered, talking with Jeff, watching furtively for a glimpse of the woman; asked at last, point-blank, if it was true that Jeff’s niece had come to visit him. He and Jeff were on the porch, outside the kitchen door; and Jeff nodded and, raising his voice, called to the woman, who was inside. He called her by his niece’s name.

“Mary!”

She came slowly to the door, dreading this contact with a stranger.

“This here’s Will Belter, one of our neighbors,” Jeff said by way of introduction. “He lives up on the ridge beyond the village.”

Will, greedy eyes upon her, said, “Howdo, ma’am!”

The woman watched him through the screen door, and answered, “How do you do!”

He said no more, and after a moment she turned back into the obscurity of the kitchen.

Will told Jeff, “She’s older than I figured she’d be.”

“She looks older,” Jeff agreed. “That long train trip was pretty hard; and she was kind of sick.”

“Ain’t but twenty-two or three, is she? I’d think she was thirty, anyway.”

“Twenty-four,” Jeff told him.

When Will presently went on his way Jeff watched his disappearing figure with stern eyes, and there was trouble in his countenance when he turned and saw the woman standing inside the screen door and also watching.

“Who was that?”

“I’d as soon he hadn’t come here,” Jeff confessed. “He’s a mean hound. A natural-born talebearer. Maybe we fooled him though.”

She made no comment, but both understood that her desire to remain hidden was imperiled by this man’s appearance. The shadow hung over them all that day. In the evening they read the paper together, found in it little that was new.

Afterwards the woman sat for a long time, thoughtfully silent, and at last said abruptly, “I think I’d better tell you why I ran away.”

Jeff looked across at her in surprise, hesitated. Then: “You needn’t, ’less you’re a mind to,” he assured her. “It don’t matter a bit in the world to me.”

“It is your right to know,” she decided. “And—I’d like to be able to talk about it with you. It would be a relief, I believe.”

Jeff nodded. “I expect that’s so,” he assented.

She took the paper from him, opened it to an inner page and pointed to a paragraph under a separate headline, beneath the story of her own disappearance.

“You saw this about Mr. Viles’ secretary being arrested?” she asked.

Jeff looked at the paper. The paragraph recited the fact that after a preliminary hearing Franklin Gardner, secretary to Leander Viles, had been held for the grand jury on a charge of stealing gems belonging to the missing woman.

Ranney nodded. “I heard about his being arrested, in town that day,” he told her.

“That was why I had to run away!” she cried, a sudden passion in her tones. “That was why I had to get away. Because it was I who saw him take them, and if they made me tell he would have to go to jail.”

She was leaning across the table, resting on her elbows, her fingers twisting together; and she watched Jeff anxiously, hungrily, as though to be sure he understood.

Jeff considered what she had said for a moment, and at length asked slowly, “Saw him steal them?”

“It’s a necklace,” she explained desperately. “Pearls, and a pendant set with diamonds, very beautifully. Mr. Viles used to boast how much he paid for it. He was ever so proud of it, you see. He wanted to show it to a man who is on the yacht with him, and that’s why he asked me to go down to the cabin and get it from the safe.”

Jeff was trying to fill out the gaps in her story. “That’s when you found out the necklace was gone, eh?” he inquired.

She nodded. Her words came in a rush:

“I saw Mr. Gardner come out of my cabin door, with the leather case in his hand. He dodged away; and I suppose he thought I had not seen him. And when I opened the little safe in my cabin the necklace was gone.”

Jeff grinned a little at that. “So your husband didn’t get to show it off, and brag about it, after all?”

His antipathy toward this husband of hers was increasing.

The woman shook her head. “I had to go back and tell him it was gone,” she assented. “And he went into one of his terrible rages. I was frightened. The doctors have warned him. So I tried to reassure him, told him that Mr. Gardner had the necklace.” Her hands were tightly clasped, the knuckles white. “Oh, I shouldn’t have let him know!” she cried wearily. “But I thought he must have asked Mr. Gardner to get it, must have given him the combination of the safe. Only he and I had it.”

Memories silenced her; and Jeff had to prompt her with a question: “But he hadn’t done that?”

“He hadn’t! He hadn’t!” she assented in a voice like a wail. “And when we tried to find Mr. Gardner he was gone. Gone off the yacht. Had run away. So then Mr. Viles went ashore himself, and by and by he came back, very well pleased, and said they had caught Mr. Gardner on the boat and had the necklace back again.”

“Did you run away right then?” he asked, when he saw she had forgotten to go on.

She hesitated, as though choosing her words.

“No,” she told him. “That was the day before. I was very unhappy even then. But until the next day I did not realize. Mr. Viles made me see. It was just before dinner, and I met him in the main cabin. He was very expansive and very good-humored and triumphant. He spoke of Mr. Gardner. And he said this to me.”

She repeated the words in a curious, parrot-like tone, as though they were engraved upon her memory. “He said: ‘It’s lucky you saw him, Lucia. If you hadn’t actually seen him come out of your cabin with the necklace in his hands we probably couldn’t send him to jail, even now!’”

Jeff was watching her attentively, waiting.

“I hadn’t really understood, before, that they would send him to jail,” the woman cried. “I asked Mr. Viles if he meant to do that, and begged him not to; and he just laughed at me. He said: ‘He’ll do ten years for this little piece of work, Lucia. And you’ll be the one whose testimony will send him up. That ought to be a satisfaction to you.’”

She added, with a movement of her hands as though everything were explained, “So I ran away. There was a sailor who helped me and gave me his coat, and I ran away, and got in your car because it was raining so hard and that was the first place I saw where I could hide and be sheltered from the rain.”

She broke off abruptly; and neither of them spoke for a period, while Jeff considered that which she had told him.

At length he asked gently, “You didn’t want to see this here Gardner in jail?”

The woman cried passionately, “No! No! Oh, he was wrong to steal. If I had not seen him I would never have believed—But I didn’t want to put him in jail!”

“I guess you liked him pretty well,” Jeff said. His tone was sympathetic, not inquisitive.

“Yes,” she nodded sadly, as though she spoke of one who were dead. “Yes, I did.” With a sudden confidence she added, “Why, he was my best friend. We knew each other so well. It was through him I met Mr. Viles. And then Frank had to go to Europe on business for Mr. Viles, and he was away so long, and I did not hear from him. I used to work, you know. I was a buyer in one of the New York stores. And Mr. Viles was ever so good to me, and I was tired, and he begged me so. That was how I came to marry him.”

“I don’t figure you ever loved him very much,” Jeff suggested after an interval.

“He was good to me at first,” she protested. “I think he meant to be good to me.”

Silence fell upon them both once more, and this time it persisted. By and by Jeff rose from his chair, passed behind hers and touched her shoulder roughly with his heavy hand.

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t worry too much if I was you.”

She looked up at him and smiled through sudden tears. “You’re good to me,” she told him.

“You run along to bed,” Jeff bade her. “Just forget your bothers and run along to bed.”

But when she had gone upstairs the man remained for a long time in his chair beside the warm lamp, thinking over what she had told him, supplying for himself the things she had not told. Jeff had a shrewd common sense; he was able to fill in many of the gaps, to see the truths to which even Lucia was blind. And as he thought, his eyes clouded with slow anger and his brows drew somewhat together; and when he got up at last to turn toward his bedroom there was a ferocity in his expression that no one had ever seen on Jeff Ranney’s face in all his fifty-seven years. He spoke slowly, half aloud, addressing no one at all.

“Damn the man,” he muttered. “I’d like to bust him a good one. It’d do him good.”

Upon this wish, which had a solemnity about it almost like a prayer, Jeff went to bed.

V

Next morning, when Andy Wattles drove by the farm with Will Bissell’s truck on his way to East Harbor, Jeff saw that Andy had a passenger. Will Belter was riding to town with Andy. They hailed him as they passed the barn, and Andy waved a hand in greeting as they disappeared. Jeff’s perceptions were quick; it was no more than half a dozen seconds before he understood that there was menace in this move on Belter’s part. His first thought was to stop the man and bring him back, but the truck was already far away along the townward road. He shook his head; there was nothing he could do. If Belter meant harm the harm was done.

But the incident put Jeff on his guard, so that he made it his business to stay about the house that day; and when, in the early afternoon, an automobile stopped in the road before the farm he saw it and was ready. He had given the woman no warning, but she heard the machine, and came to his side in the dining room and looked out through the window. Themselves hidden, they could see the car. Three men were in it—the chauffeur, Will Belter and another. Jeff knew this other man; it needed not the woman’s exclamation to inform him. Her husband had found her hiding place.

When Lucia saw him she sank weakly in a chair beside the table, said in a voice like a moan, “He’s found me! He’s found me!”

But for this crisis of his adventure Jeff was ready; he rose to meet the moment, gripped her shoulder.

“Just mind this,” he told her swiftly. “Keep your head, ma’am, and mind what I say. You don’t have to go back with him unless you want. He can’t make you, ha’n’t no legal way to make you; and if you don’t want to go you don’t have to go. I’ll see he don’t take you unless you say the word.”

She looked up at him in swift gratitude; and he smiled at her and asked, “Now can’t you take a little heart from that, ma’am?”

“He’s coming,” she whispered.

And Jeff looked through the window again and saw that Viles had left Belter and the chauffeur in the car he had hired in East Harbor. He himself came steadily toward the kitchen door, while the two other men watched him from the road. Jeff and the woman heard his loud knock upon the door.

At this summons Jeff left her where she sat, her strength returning. He opened the kitchen door and faced the man he had learned to hate so blindingly that the passion intoxicated him. Yet his countenance was calm, his features all composed.

Viles was a large man without being fat; one of those men who have about them the apparent solidity of flesh which is the attribute of such dogs as Boston terriers. He may have been six feet tall, but he was inches broader across the shoulders than most men of his height. His countenance was peculiarly pink, as though rich blood coursed too near the surface of his skin. Jeff marked that he was subject to a certain shortness of breath, that his eyes were too small, and that even now a little pulse was beating in the man’s throat.

Yet Viles spoke in a smooth and pleasant voice, said a jovial good afternoon and asked if this was Jeff Ranney’s farm. Jeff said it was.

Viles asked, “Are you Ranney?”

“I’m Ranney,” Jeff assented. He had not asked the other to come in; the screen door still separated them.

“Ah,” said Viles. “I am told your niece from California is visiting you. I have a rather important bit of business to transact with her.”

Jeff shook his head. “She ain’t my niece,” he answered frankly. “She’s your wife, that had to run away from you.”

His voice was stony; but at his words Viles moved backward a step, as though under the impact of a blow, and Jeff saw the swift rage mount his cheeks in a purple flood. Then the rich man laid his hand upon the screen door, opened it.

Jeff did not move to one side, and Viles said hoarsely, “Get out of my way, you impudent fool!”

Jeff shook his head. “Listen, mister,” he said softly. “This is my house. You can’t come in here on your own say-so. I’m not fooling with you either. If you want to come in, you ask.”

Viles lifted one clenched hand as though to sweep the other aside; and Jeff added, “I’ve heard enough about you so I’d like right well to mix it up with you a little bit—if you want to try anything like that. Do you?”

“I want to come in,” said Viles hoarsely.

Jeff considered this for a moment, then he spoke to the woman, over his shoulder. “Do you want to see him?” he asked her.

“I suppose so,” she told him wearily.

Jeff nodded. “All right, mister,” he said to Viles. “Come in and take a chair.”

Viles had somewhat recovered himself. He followed Jeff’s indifferent back into the dining room. The woman did not rise. Jeff set a chair across the table from her, and Viles sat down in it while Jeff himself crossed to shut the door that led into the parlor, then came back and leaned against the kitchen door, watching this husband and wife, waiting for what they would say.

Viles had drawn a velvet glove over the iron hand. He asked the woman gently, “Are you all right, my dear?” She nodded. “You are well?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I am well.”

He looked toward Jeff. “Mrs. Viles is unfortunately subject to moments of great depression,” he explained courteously. “In these moments—” He stopped, arched his eyebrows meaningly, as though Jeff must understand.

“You mean she has crazy spells?” Jeff asked bluntly. Viles protested wordlessly. “She don’t act crazy to me,” Jeff commented. “But you may be right. She married you.”

He was seeking quite deliberately to goad the other man into violence, but Viles controlled himself, said across the table to his wife, “We have been greatly concerned, my dear.”

“I’m sorry,” she said unconvincingly.

“It is a relief to know that you have not suffered. That scratch across your temple—”

Lucia touched with her fingers the slight wound. “It is nothing.”

“You must have a good rest in bed when we get back to the yacht,” he told her. There was an elephantine sportiveness in the man’s demeanor. “I’m going to enjoy taking care of you.”

She was silent for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t think I’ll go back,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ll go back at all.”

He tried to laugh easily. “You’re fancying things, Lucia. It is your home. You belong there.”

She faced him with a moment of decision. “If you withdraw the charge against Frank I’ll go back with you, Leander.”

“Withdraw it?” he asked in pretended astonishment.

“I can’t bear to have him go to jail,” she cried softly.

“But, my dear, the man’s a thief; has betrayed the trust I reposed in him.”

“I can’t help it. I can’t help it. I don’t want him to go to jail.”

Viles dropped his eyes to the oilcloth that covered the table and drummed upon it with his fingers for a moment, then turned to Jeff.

“I’d be obliged for a few moments’ talk with my wife alone,” he said, a sardonic note in his tone.

Jeff held his eyes for a minute, then looked toward the woman. “What shall I do, ma’am?” he asked, as though it were a matter of course that he should defer to her.

She made a weary gesture. “He has a right to that,” she said.

Jeff nodded. “I’ll come back in fifteen minutes, mister,” he told Viles menacingly.

But Viles smiled in affable assent. “That will do finely,” he agreed.

Jeff went out through the kitchen into the shed. When he was gone Viles rose and crossed to listen at the door, and heard Jeff go on into the barn. He returned to the dining room and stood above his wife, and when she did not move he gripped her chin harshly and turned her face up to his. No velvet glove upon the iron hand now. She winced a little with the pain, but made no sound. There was triumph and malice in his grin.

“Thought you could get away with it, did you, Lucia?” he asked. She said nothing. “Thought I wouldn’t find you?” Still she made no sound. “Where’d you pick up this rural squire of yours?”

His tone was insult, and her continued silence seemed to anger him; he loosed her chin with a gesture as though he flung her aside; rounded the table again and sat down facing her and lighted a cigar, watching his wife through the smoke. For a long minute neither of them moved or spoke; then she lifted her head, very slowly, and met his eyes.

After an instant he laughed at her mockingly and leaned forward, gesturing with the cigar, dropping flecks of ash upon the oilcloth.

“Lucia, my dear,” he said, “you haven’t played fair with me. You and that tame cat of yours. And now I’m going to even the score. If you loved him you shouldn’t have married me. Or having married me you should have ceased to love him. Isn’t that a fair statement of the ethics of the case?”

“I didn’t know, Leander,” she said pitifully. “He had been so long away.”

“I sent him away,” the man admitted harshly. “I wanted a clear field, and got it and got you. Thought I was getting the whole of you. But when he came back I saw within six months’ time that it was only the husk of you I had won.”

“You’re unfair!” she cried. “Frank never spoke to me—there was never anything—”

“What do I care?” Viles demanded. “Don’t you suppose I know that? Don’t you suppose I’ve seen to it that you were both pretty closely looked after? But you loved him, and he loved you. A blind man could see that whenever you were together.”

“I played fair with you,” his wife pleaded. “And he did too.”

“That’s because you were afraid to do anything else,” he assured her scornfully. “That’s because you’re weaklings. I’m not a weakling, my dear. In his place I’d have you. In my place I’ve evened the score—against both of you.”

She began to sense that there was something more, something she did not know. “What?” she asked faintly. “What have you done to him?”

He puffed at his cigar, relishing it, relishing the situation. “You two blind fools! Did you think I was also blind?”

She shook her head helplessly. “What are you trying to say?”

The man swung around for a moment to look toward the road and make sure the two men who had come with him were still in the car, then leaned across the table toward her, speaking softly.

“I gave Frank the combination of your safe,” he told her, grinning with delight in this moment of his triumph. “I told him to get the necklace, and take it to Boston. To have it restrung; a surprise for you. Told him not to let you see him, not to let you know. The poor fool believed me.”

She was staring at him, half understanding. “He didn’t steal it? He didn’t steal it, then?”

“And the pretty part of it was the way I rang you in,” her husband assured her mockingly. “Sending you down to the cabin at a moment when I knew he would be there. So that you might catch him in the very doing of it. So that your own testimony, my dear, might send this sweetheart of yours to jail.” Her eyes widened, she was white as snow; and he threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Ah, you see it now?”

Lucia came swiftly to her feet. “He didn’t steal it? He didn’t steal it?” she cried. “Oh, he won’t have to go to jail!”

Her husband chuckled, watching her narrowly. “Not so quick on the trigger, Lucia. Not so fast. He’ll go to jail, right enough. Don’t worry about that. And you’ll send him there.”

“But he didn’t do it, Leander?” she urged pleadingly. “He’s not a thief at all!”

“Of course he isn’t,” Viles assented. “That’s the beauty of the little trap I laid.”

Flames were burning in her cheeks now; her head was high. “I won’t testify against him,” she said swiftly. “You can’t do it without me, and I won’t—”

“That was why you ran away?” he asked casually. “To avoid testifying? I thought as much.”

“I won’t go back!” she cried. “I’ll go away again!”

He smiled. “There were others who saw,” he told her mildly. “Do you suppose I would be content with so loose a plan? They saw him, as well as you. Saw you also.” He leaned toward her ferociously. “You’ll testify, and you’ll tell the truth, or I’ll convict you of perjury on your own lie, my dear. He’ll go to jail certainly; and you also if you choose.”

The woman was very intent, her thoughts racing. And suddenly she laughed in his face. “And I’ll tell what you’ve just told me,” she reminded him. “How long will your scheme stand then?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no, you won’t, my dear.”

“I will.”

“There is,” he said equably, “a little provision in the law of evidence which will prevent you. A wife cannot testify to any private conversation between herself and her husband. Did you suppose I would be so mad as to let you slip out of this trap so easily? The judge himself will forbid your saying one word as to what I have told you here.”

She was trembling with despair. “I won’t obey him!” she cried. “I’ll tell anyway. The jurymen will believe me.”

“If you blurt out such a thing against the order of the court you will be jailed for contempt, and the jury will be forbidden to believe you, will be told to forget what you have said.” He shook his head mockingly. “No, Lucia, my dear, there’s no way out. I have told you this simply in order that you might appreciate the pains I have taken.” He laughed a little. “What a thoughtful husband you have!”

He was still sitting, watching her with a cruel satisfaction; but she was trembling, broken, her knees yielding beneath her. By littles she sank into her chair, and put her head down upon her arms and wept bitterly.

Her husband watched her from across the table and puffed at his cigar.

Then Jeff Ranney opened the parlor door and came into the room. Viles, at the sound of the opening door, looked up in surprise, looked toward the kitchen through which Jeff had disappeared, looked at Jeff again.

“What were you doing there?” he demanded, coming to his feet in sudden anger.

“Listening to you talk,” said Jeff equably.

“Listening? How long?”

“Oh, I came right around the house and in the front door, soon as I went out the back. Heard all you said, I guess.”

Lucia had stopped crying; she lifted her head and dried her eyes and looked at Jeff. He looked down at her and smiled, a reassuring smile that gave her somehow comfort.

Viles swung toward him, cried aloud, “You dog! I’ll teach you manners!”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeff slowly. “I’d like right well to mix it up with you.”

Viles stopped in his tracks; the man was convulsed and shaking with his own ferocious rage. “But it ain’t fair to pick on you,” Jeff decided; “you’re such a fool.”

Lucia came to her feet, turned to Jeff appealingly. “You heard what he said?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is it true? Can he do this? Is the law that way?”

Viles reached toward his wife, would have taken her arm. “Lucia!” he cried. “Come away from here. Come away from here with me.”

But Jeff put an arm between them, swept the big man back against the table. For an instant no one of them moved. Then Jeff said slowly, “I had a lawsuit once, so I happen to know. What he says is all right. On private conversations. But you see, this wa’n’t private. I heard.”

“You heard?” she whispered, not understanding.

Jeff nodded. “Sure. And I can tell anything I heard; and I guess—not sure, but it don’t matter much, anyhow—I guess you can tell it, too, if I heard what he said.”

He was looking down at her, had for the moment forgotten her husband. But Lucia had not forgotten, and it was Lucia’s cry that warned Jeff. Viles was tugging a pistol from his pocket.

Jeff swung his right leg upward, kicked cunningly at the big man’s hand. The pistol flew across the room; and Viles, roaring with pain, swung in at Jeff to grapple him. They came breast to breast, stood thus for an instant, each straining terribly, exerting utmost strength.

Then Viles’ big head drooped with a little snapping jerk as all his body let go; and he slid limply through Jeff’s arms to the floor. Jeff’s one great hour was done.

An hour later Jeff drove Lucia back to town. He would send a man who made such matters his profession, to care for what was left of Leander Viles.

VI

A day or two later Mrs. Ranney came home from Augusta. By that time Jeff had settled into the old routine once more. His life had become again as uneventful as any life can be. Save for one or two echoes of his great adventure—when Lucia wrote that she and Gardner were to wed, and when their first baby was born—his existence continued in its old accustomed way. He lived some dozen years or so on his farm eight miles out of East Harbor. Last winter, while working in his woodlot, he became overheated and then chilled with the coming of night; and a few days later he died.

MINE ENEMY’S DOG

I

FRATERNITY has not changed in a hundred years; yet is there always some new thing in Fraternity. It may be only that Lee Motley’s sow has killed her pigs, or that choleric Old Man Varney has larruped his thirty-year-old son with an ax helve, or that Jean Bubier has bought six yearling steers. But there is always some word of news, for the nightly interchange in Will Bissell’s store, before the stage comes in with the mail. You may see the men gather there, a little after milking time, coming from the clean, white houses that are strung like beads along the five roads which lead into the village. A muscular, competent lot of men in their comfortable, homely garments. And they sit about the stove, and talk, and smoke, and spit, and laugh at the tales that are told.

Fraternity lies in a country of little towns and villages, with curious names something more than a century old. Liberty is west of Fraternity, Union is to the southward, Freedom lies northwest. Well enough named, these villages, too. Life in them flows easily; there is no great striving after more things than one man can use. The men are content to get their gardening quickly done so that they may trail the brooks for trout; they hurry with their winter’s wood to find free time for woodcock and partridge; and when the snow lies, they go into the woods with trap for mink or hound for fox.

Thirty years ago there were farms around Fraternity, and the land was clear; but young men have gone, and old men have died, and the birches and the alders and the pines have taken back the land. There are moose and deer in the swamps, and a wildcat or two, and up in Freedom a man killed a bear a year ago....

The hills brood over these villages, blue and deeper blue from range to farther range. There is a bold loveliness about the land. The forests, blotched darkly with evergreens, or lightly splattered with the gay tops of the birches, clothe the ridges in garments of somber beauty. Toward sunset a man may stand upon these hilltops and look westward into the purple of the hills and the crimson of the sky until his eyes are drunk with looking. Or in the dark shadows down along the river he may listen to the trembling silences until he hears his pulses pound. And now and then, with a sense of unreality, you will come upon a deer along some old wood road; or a rabbit will fluster from some bush and rise on haunches, twenty yards away.

The talk in Will Bissell’s store turns, night by night, upon these creatures of the woods that lie about the town; and by the same token the talk is filled with speech concerning dogs. The cult of the dog is strong in Fraternity. Every man has one dog, some have two. These, you will understand, are real dogs. No mongrels here; no sneaking, hungry, yapping curs. Predominant, the English setter, gentlest and kindest and best-natured of all breeds; and, in second place, the lop-eared hounds. A rabbit hound here and there; but not many of these. Foxhounds more often. Awkward, low-bodied, heavy dogs that will nevertheless nose out a fox and push him hard for mile on mile. These are not such fox-hounds as run in packs for the sport of red-coated men. These are utilitarian dogs; their function is to keep the fox moving until the hunter can post himself for a shot. A fox skin is worth money; and cash money is scarce in Fraternity, as in all such little towns, and very hard to come by.

There are few sheep in Fraternity, so the dogs are free of that temptation; but there are deer. The deer is sacrosanct, to be taken only with rifle and ball, and by a woodcraft that bests the wild thing at its own game. No dog may justly chase a deer; and a dog so pursuing is outlawed and may legally be shot by any man. Men without conscience and dogs without honor will thus pursue the deer, in season and out; nevertheless, deer running is for the dogs of Fraternity the black and shameful crime.

They were talking dogs, on a certain night in late September, in Will Bissell’s store. A dozen men were there; most of them from the village itself, two or three from outlying farms. Jim and Bert Saladine, both keen hunters of the deer, who killed their legal quota year by year, leaned side by side against the candy counter, and Andy Wattles sold them licorice sticks. Lee Motley had driven down from his farm above the Whitcher Swamp; and Jean Bubier had come in from the head of the Pond; and there was Gay Hunt; and there was George Freeland, and two or three besides. Proutt was one of these others, Proutt of South Fraternity, a farmer, a fox hunter, and a trainer of setter dogs. Finally, Nick Westley, a North Fraternity man, appointed within six months’ time to be game warden for the district; a gentle man, well liked in spite of his thankless job; a man with a sense of humor, a steady and persistent courage, and a kindly tongue.

This night, as it happened, was to be the beginning of the enmity between Proutt and Westley. One-sided at first, this ill feeling. Two-sided at the last, and bitter enough on either side. A strange thing, dramatic enough in its development, fit to be numbered among the old men’s tales that were told around the stove....

Proutt, the dog breaker, was a man who knew dogs. None denied him that. “Yes,” they would say; “Proutt’ll break a dog for you. And when he gits done with your dog, your dog’ll mind.” If you scented some reservation in word or tone, and asked a question, you got no explanation. But your informant might say casually: “Hepperton’s a good man with a dog, too. Over in Liberty. Gentles ’em.”

Persistent inquiry might have brought out the fact that Hepperton never whipped a dog; that Proutt knew no other method. Lee Motley, who loved dogs, used to tell an incident. “Went out with Proutt once,” he would explain. “After woodcock, we was. He was breaking a two-year-old. Nice a dog as I ever see. First bird, she took a nice point; but she broke shot. He had him a rawhide strap; and he called her in and I never see a dog hurt worse. And after that he, couldn’t get her out from under his legs. Ain’t been out with him since. Not me.”

Proutt was not liked. He was a morose man, and severe, and known to nurse a grudge. But he turned out dogs which knew their business, and none denied him this. So had he his measure of respect; and his neighbors minded their own affairs and kept out of the man’s harsh path.

Curiously enough, though he trained setters, Proutt did not like them. He preferred the hound; and his own dog—a lop-eared brown-and-white named Dan—was his particular pride. This pride was like the pride of a new father; it showed itself in much talk of Dan’s deeds and Dan’s virtues, so that Fraternity’s ears were wearied with the name of Dan, and it was the fashion to grin in one’s sleeve at Proutt’s tales and to discredit them.

Proutt spoke, this night, of a day’s hunting of the winter before. How, coursing the woods, he had heard a hound’s bay far below him, and had taken post upon a ledge across which he thought the fox would come. “Dan ’uz with me,” he said, in his hoarse loud voice. “I says to Dan: ‘Set’ and he set on his ha’nches, right aside me, cocking his nose down where t’other dog was baying, waiting, wise as an owl.

“I had my old gun, with Number Threes in both bar’ls; and me and Dan stayed there, awaiting; and the baying come nearer all the time, till I see the fox would come acrost that ledge, sure.

“Cold it was. Wind ablowing, and the snow acutting past my ears. Not much snow on the ground; but it was froze hard as sand. I figured Dan’d get uneasy; but he never stirred. Set where I’d told him to set; and us awaiting.

“Time come, I see the fox, sneaking up the ledge at that long, easy lope o’ theirs. Dan see him too. His ears lifted and he looked my way. I says: ‘Set.’ And he let his ears down again, and stayed still. Fox come along, ’bout five rods below us. Crossed over there. So fur away I knowed I couldn’t drop him. Never pulled; and he never saw me; and old Dan set where he was. Never moved a mite.

“After a spell, Will Belter’s hound come past; and then come Will himself, cutting down from where he’d been waiting. Says: ‘See a fox go by?’ And I told him I did. He ast why I didn’t shoot; and I says the fox was too fur off. And he says: ‘Where was your dog?’ So I told him Dan was setting right by me.”

Proutt laughed harshly, and slapped a triumphant hand upon his knee. “Will wouldn’t believe me,” he declared, “till I showed him tracks, where he wuz, and where the fox went by.”

He looked around for their admiration; but no one spoke at all. Only one or two glanced sidewise at each other, and slowly grinned. The tale was all right, except for a thing or two. In the first place, Proutt was no man to let a fox go by, no matter how long the shot; and, in the second place, Dan was known to be a surly dog, not overly obedient, unruly as his master. And, in the third place, this incident, thoroughly authenticated, had happened two years before to another man and another dog, as everyone in the store knew. Proutt had borrowed his tale from a source too close home....

So they knew he lied; but no one cared to tell him so. Only, after a little silence, Nick Westley, the game warden, said with a slow twinkle in his eye: “Proutt, that reminds me of a story my father used to tell.”

Proutt grunted something or other, disgusted with their lack of appreciation; and Westley took it for encouragement, and began to whittle slow, fine shavings from a sliver of pine which he held in hand, and told the tale.

“It was when he was younger,” he explained, “before he was married, while he still lived at home. But I’ve heard him tell the story many a time.

“My Uncle Jim was living then; and he and my father had a hound. Good dog he was, too. Good as Dan, I think, Proutt.

“Well, one winter morning, with six or eight inches of loose snow on the ground, they were working up some old wood in the shed; and they saw the old hound drift off into the pasture and up the hill. And after a spell they heard him yelling down by the river.

“Jim said to my father: ‘He’s got a fox.’ And father said: ‘Jim, let’s go get that fox.’ So they dropped their axes, and went in and got their guns, and they worked up through the pasture and over the hill till they located the dog’s noise, and they figured the fox would come up around the hill by a certain way; and so they posted themselves there, one on either side of the path they thought he would take. And set to waiting. And it was cold as could be, and cold waiting, and they stamped their feet a little, but they couldn’t move much for fear the fox would see them.

“So they were both well pleased when they saw the fox coming; and they both shot when he came in range, because they were cold and in a hurry and anxious to be done.

“Well, they shot into each other. Jim yelled: ‘Damn it, my legs are full of shot!’ And my father said: ‘Mine too, you clumsy coot!’ So they made remarks to each other for a spell; and then Jim said: ‘Well, anyway, there’s the fox; and I’m full of your shot, and I’m half froze. Let’s skin the darn critter and get home.’

“So father agreed; and they went at it. The old dog had come up by then, and was sitting there with an eye on the fox, as a dog will. And father took the front legs and Jim took the hind legs, and they worked fast. And they kept cussing their hurts, and the cold, and each other. But they slit the legs down, and skinned out the tail, and trimmed up the ears and all, knives flying. And when they got about done, Jim, he said:

“‘Look ahere, there’s not a bullet in this fox.’

“Well, they looked, and they couldn’t find a hole. Only there was a blue streak across the fox’s head where a bullet had gone. And that was queer enough, but father said: ‘I don’t give a hoot. There’s bullets enough in me. Skin out his nose and let’s go.’

“So they cussed each other some more, and finished it up; and Jim, he heaved the carcass out into the brush, and father slung the skin over his shoulder, and they turned around to start home.

“Well, just about then the old dog let out behind them, and they whirled around. And father always used to say that, mad as they were at each other, they forgot all about it then; and they bust out laughing. He said you couldn’t blame them. He said you never saw anything funnier.

“You see, that fox was just stunned. The cold snow must have revived him. Because when my father and Uncle Jim looked around, that skinless fox was going up over the hill like a cat up a tree—and the old dog hot on his heels.”

The store rocked with their mirth as Westley stopped. Lee Motley roared, and the Saladines laughed in their silent fashion, and Will Bissell chuckled discreetly behind Proutt’s back. Westley himself displayed such surprise at their mirth that they laughed the more; and fat little Jean Bubier shook a finger at Proutt and cried:

“And that will put the bee to your Dan, M’sieu Proutt. That will hold your Dan for one leetle while, I t’ink.”

Proutt himself was brick-red with fury; and his eyes were black on Westley; but he pulled himself together, and he laughed ... shortly.

His eyes did not leave Westley’s face. And Lee Motley found a chance to warn the warden a little later. “It was a good joke,” he said. “You handed it to him right. But look out for the man, Westley. He’s mad.”

Westley, still smiling, was nevertheless faintly troubled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did it for a joke.”

“He can’t take a joke,” said Motley.

The warden nodded, considering. “I’ll tell you,” he told Motley. “I’ll square it with him.”

“If it was me,” Motley agreed, “I would.”

Westley did not like to make enemies. And there had been only the friendliest malice in his jest. He took his measures to soothe Proutt before they left the store that night.

Westley had a dog, a setter, clean-blooded, from one of the country’s finest kennels. A New York man who had shot woodcock with the warden the year before had sent the dog as a friendly gift, and Westley accepted it in the same spirit. In its second year and still untrained, it had nevertheless won Westley and won his wife and his children. They all loved the dog, as they loved each other....

Originally this dog had been called Rex. The Westleys changed this name to Reck, which may be short for Reckless, or may be a name by itself. At any rate, it pleased them, and it pleased the dog....

The dog was untrained, and Westley had no time for the arduous work of training. He had meant to send Reck, this fall, to Hepperton, in Liberty; but, to make his amends to Proutt, he took the latter aside this night and asked Proutt to take the training of the dog.

On longer consideration, he might not have done this; but Westley was a man of impulse and, as has been said, he was anxious to keep Proutt as a friend. Nevertheless, he had no sooner asked Proutt to take the dog than he regretted it, and hoped Proutt would refuse. But the dog trainer only gave a moment to slow consideration, with downcast eyes.

Then he said huskily: “I charge fifty dollars.”

“Sure,” said Westley.

“He’s a well-blooded dog,” said Proutt. “I’ll come to-morrow and fetch him.”

And with no further word—they were outside the store—he drove away. Westley, watching him go, was filled with vague disquiet. He wished he might withdraw; he wished Proutt would change his mind; he wished the trainer might not come next day....

But Proutt did come, and Westley himself bade Reck into the trainer’s buggy and watched the dog ride away with wistful eyes turned backward.

Westley’s wife was more concerned than he; and he forgot his own anxiety in reassuring her.

II

There are a thousand methods for the training of a bird dog, and each man prefers his own. There are some dogs which need much training; there are others which require little or none.

Reck was so nobly blooded that the instincts of his craft were deeply bedded in him. On his first day in the alder swamps with Proutt he proved himself to the full. Proutt was a dog beater, as all men know, but he did not beat dogs which obeyed him, and he did not beat Reck. This first day he was merely trying the dog.

Reck found a bird, and took stanch point, steady as a rock. It was not yet October, the season was not yet open; and so Proutt had no right to shoot. Nevertheless he did walk up this bird, and flushed it from where it lay six feet before Reck’s nose, and knocked it over before it topped the alders.

Reck stood at point till the bird rose; when its whistling wings lifted it, his nose followed it upward, followed its fall.... But he did not stir, did not break shot; and Proutt, watching, knew that this was indeed a dog.

When the bird had fallen, Proutt said softly: “Reck! Fetch dead bird.”

Now, this is in some measure the test of a setter. There are many setters which take a natural point and hold it; there are some few which are also natural retrievers, without training. Reck had been taught by Westley’s children to fetch sticks or rocks at command. He knew the word.

He went swiftly forward and brought the woodcock, scarce ruffled, and laid it in Proutt’s hand. And Proutt took the bird, and stood still, looking down at Reck with a darkly brooding face. Considering, weighing.... After a little he began to curse softly, under his breath; and he turned and stamped out of the alder run, and bade Reck to heel, and went home. And Reck trotted at his heels, tongue out, panting happily....

There are many ways by which the Devil may come at a man. One of them is through hatred, and another way is to put a helpless thing in that man’s hands. If the good in him outweighs the bad, well enough; but if the evil has ascendancy, then that man is utterly lost and damned.

Proutt hated Westley; Proutt had in his hands Reck, a dog by Westley well-beloved. And Reck was pliant in Proutt’s hands, both because Proutt knew dogs and because Reck was by nature tractable, eager to please, anxious to do that which he was asked to do. The combination presented itself to Proutt full clearly, as he walked his homeward way that day, and it is to be supposed that he fought out what fight there was within himself, during that long walk, and through the evening that followed.

That Proutt had some battle with himself cannot be denied. No man sets out to destroy a soul without first overcoming the scruples which bind him; and there were scruples in Proutt. There must have been. He loved dogs, loved fine dogs, and Reck was fine. Yet the destruction of Reck’s honor and reputation and life—these were the ends which Proutt set himself to bring about—at what pain to his own heart no man may fully guess. It can only be known that in the end his hatred outweighed all else—that he threw himself into the thing he meant to do.

Reck, as has been shown, needed no training for his appointed work. Yet Proutt kept him, labored with him daily, for close to four long weeks, as all Fraternity men knew. None saw that training. It was known that Proutt took Reck far over the Sheepscot Ridge, where farms were all deserted, and no man was like to come upon him. But he had done that with dogs before, for woodcock lay thick in Sheepscot Valley. Once or twice men heard the barking of a dog in that valley; and there was a measure of pain in the notes. And three times men met Proutt driving homeward, with Reck lying weary and subdued upon the floor of the buggy, scarce fit to lift his head. It was remarked that Proutt was more dour and morose than ever; and Lee Motley thought the man was aging....

One man only, and that man Jim Saladine, caught some inkling of that which was afoot. Jim was a deer hunter; and toward mid-October, with a shotgun under his arm for luck’s sake, but never a buckshot in his cartridge pocket, he went one day into the Sheepscot Valley to search out the land. Deer lay in the swamps there; and Jim sought to locate them against the coming season. He moved slowly and quietly, as his custom was; ears and eyes open. And he saw many things which another man would never have seen.

Two things he saw which had significance. Once, in a muddy patch along the Sheepscot’s brim, he came upon a deer’s track; and other tracks beside it. A man’s track, and a dog’s.

Jim studied these tracks. They were sadly muddled; and he could make little of them. But he was sure of this much—that man and dog had been attentive to the tracks of the deer. And this stayed in Jim’s mind, because no dog in Fraternity has any business with the track of a deer, and no man may justly set a dog upon such track.

Later that day Jim was to find some explanation for what he had seen. Where Fuller’s brook comes into the Sheepscot, there lies an open meadow half a mile long, and half as broad; and near the lower end of the meadow half a dozen alders group about a lone tree in the open. Deer and moose, coming up the Sheepscot Valley, are like to cross the stream below and then traverse this meadow; and Jim Saladine stopped under cover at the meadow’s head—it was near dusk—to see what he should see.

He saw what you may see any day along the Sheepscot, and what, by the same token, you may go a weary year without seeing. He saw a deer, a proud buck, come up from the stream and follow the meadow toward where he lay. It passed the isolated alder clump, and something there gave it alarm; for Jim saw its head lift—saw then the quick leap and rush which carried the creature to cover and away....

Saw something else. Out from the alder clump burst a man, driving before him a dog. Dusk was falling, Jim could see their figures only dimly. But this much he saw. The man urged the dog after the deer, with waving arms; and the dog, ever looking backward shame-facedly, trotted slowly off upon the trail, the man still urging from behind.

They slipped into the brush where the deer had gone, and Jim caught no further glimpse of them.

Now, Saladine was an honest man, who loved the deer he hunted; and he was angry. But he was also a just man; and he could not be sure whom he had seen. So it was that he kept a still tongue, and waited, and through the weeks that followed he watched, patiently enough, for what should come.

He meant, in that hour, to take a hand.

III

With a week of October left, Proutt took Reck home to Westley. Westley was not there, but Mrs. Westley marked Proutt’s lowering eye, and was frightened of the man, and told Westley so when he came. But Westley was well enough pleased to have Reck back again; and he bade her forget Proutt.

Proutt had been, thus far, somewhat favored by fortune. The business of his office had taken Westley away from Fraternity for two weeks at a time, so that Proutt had had full time to do with Reck as he chose. Fraternity knew nothing of what had happened, though Jim Saladine may have guessed. There was one night at Will’s store when Jim and Proutt were near fisticuffs. Proutt had brought Dan with him to the store; and Jim, studying the surly dog, asked:

“Dan ever notice a deer, Proutt?”

Proutt exclaimed profanely. “No,” he said.

“I was over in the Sheepscot, t’other day,” said Jim evenly. “See tracks where a dog had been after a deer.”

“More like it was one of these setters,” Proutt declared, watching them all from beneath lowered lids. “They’ll kill a deer, or a sheep, give ’em a chance.”

“It was hound’s tracks,” Jim persisted mildly; and something in Jim’s tone, or in Proutt’s own heart, made the trainer boil into fury, so that he strode toward Saladine. But Will Bissell came between, and the matter passed.

Proutt, before this, had taken Reck home; and the Westleys made much of the dog. Reck had affable and endearing little tricks of his own. He had a way of giving welcome, drawing back his upper lip so that his teeth showed as though in a snarl, yet panting with dog laughter all the time; and he had a way of talking, with high whines of delight, or throaty growls that ran the scale. And he would lie beside Westley, or beside Westley’s wife, and paw at them until they held his paw in their hands, when he would go contentedly enough to sleep.

They thought the dog was unhappy when he came home to them. He had a slinking, shamed way about him. At first Westley supposed Proutt had whipped him; but Reck showed no fear of a whip in Westley’s hands. After two or three days this furtiveness passed away and Reck was the joyously affectionate creature he had always been. So the Westleys forgot his first attitude of guilt, and loved him ardently as men and women will love a dog.

Westley had opportunity for one day’s hunting with him, and Reck never faltered at the task to which he had been born and bred.

He had one fault. Chained, he would bark at the least alarm, in a manner to wake the neighborhood. So Westley had never kept him chained. It was not the way of Fraternity to keep dogs in the house of nights; so Reck slept in the woodshed, and Westley knocked a plank loose and propped it, leaving Reck an easy avenue to go out or in. It was this custom of Westley’s which gave Proutt the chance for which he had laid his plans.

October had gone; November had come. This was in the days when woodcock might be shot in November if you could find them. But most men who went into the woods bore rifles; for it was open season for deer. Now and then you might hear the snapping crash of a thirty-thirty in Whitcher Swamp, or at one of the crossings, or—if you went so far—in the alder vales along the Sheepscot. And one day in the middle of the month, when the ground was frozen hard, Proutt came to Nick Westley’s home.

He came at noon, driving his old buggy. Westley was at dinner when he heard Proutt drive into the yard; and he went to the door and bade the dog trainer come in. But Proutt shook his head, and his eyes were somber.

“You come out, Westley,” he said. “I’ve a word for you.”

There was something in Proutt’s tone which disturbed Westley. He put on his mackinaw, and drew his cap down about his ears, and went out into the yard. Reck had been asleep on the doorstep when Proutt appeared; he had barked a single bark. But now he was gone into the shed, out of sight; and when Westley came near Proutt’s buggy, the dog trainer asked:

“Did you see Reck sneak away?”

Westley was angry; and he was also shaken by a sudden tremor of alarm. He said hotly enough: “Reck never sneaks. He did not sneak away.”

“He knows I saw him,” said Proutt. “He heard me yell.”

Westley asked, with narrowing eyes: “What are you talking about? Where did you see him?”

“This morning,” Proutt declared. “Scant daylight. Down in the Swamp.”

Westley stood very still, trying to remember whether he had seen Reck early that morning. And he could only remember, with a shocking certainty, that Reck had not been at home when he came out of the house to do his chores. He had called and got no answer; and it may have been half an hour before the dog appeared. It had disturbed Westley at the time; and he scolded Reck for self-hunting. But any dog will range the home farm in the morning hours, and Westley had not taken the matter seriously.

Proutt’s words, and his tone more than his words, made the matter very serious indeed. Westley forced himself to ask: “What were you doing in the Swamp?”

“I was after a deer,” said Proutt; and when Westley remained silent, Proutt added huskily: “So was Reck.”

Westley cried: “That’s a lie.” But his own voice sounded strange and unnatural in his ears. He would not believe. Yet he knew that other dogs had chased deer in the past, and would again. He had himself shot half a dozen. It was the law; and he was the instrument of the law. And this was the very bitterness of Proutt’s accusation; for if it were true, then he must shoot Reck. And Westley would as soon have shot one of his own blood as the dog he loved.

In the little instant of silence that followed upon his word, he saw all this, too clearly. And in spite of his love for Reck, and in spite of his ardent longing to believe that Proutt had lied, he feared desperately that the man spoke truth. Westley’s wife would never have believed; for a woman refuses to believe any evil of those she loves. She is loyal by refusing to believe; a man may believe and be loyal still.

Westley did not know whether to believe or not; but he knew that he was terribly afraid. He told Proutt: “That’s a lie!” And Proutt, after a long moment, clucked to his horse and started on. Westley called after him: “Wait!”

Proutt stopped his horse; and Westley asked: “What are you going to do?”

“You’re game warden,” Proutt told him sullenly. “Nobody around here can make you do anything, less’n you’re a mind to. But I’ve told you what’s going on.”

Westley was sweating in the cold, and said pitifully: “Proutt, are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Proutt; and Westley cried: “What did you see?”

“I had a deer marked,” said Proutt slowly. “He’d been feeding under an old apple tree down there. I was there before day this morning, figuring to get a shot at him. Crep’ in quiet. Come day, I couldn’t see him. But after a spell I heard a smashing in the brush, and he come out through an open, and was away before I could shoot. And hot after him came Reck.”

“How far away?” Westley asked.

“Not more’n ten rod.”

“You couldn’t be sure.”

“Damn it, man, I know Reck. Besides, I wouldn’t want to say it was him, would I? He’s a grand dog.”

“What did you do?” Westley asked.

“Yelled at him to come in.”

“Did he stop?”

“Stopped for one look, and then one jump into the brush and away he went.”

Westley was almost convinced; he turned to call Reck, with some curious and half-formed notion that he might catechize the dog himself. But when he turned, he found Reck at his side; and the setter was standing steadily, legs stiff and proud like a dog on show, eyes fixed on Proutt. There was no guilt in his attitude; nor was there accusation. There was only steady pride and self-respect; and Westley, at sight of him, could not believe this damning thing.

He said slowly: “Look at him, Proutt. If this were true, he’d be ashamed, and crawling. You saw some other dog.”

Proutt shook his head. “He’s a wise, bold dog, is Reck. Wise as you and me. He’ll face it out if he can.”

Westley pulled himself together, dropping one hand on Reck’s head. “I don’t believe it, Proutt,” he said. “But I’m going to make sure.”

“I am sure,” said Proutt. “You can do as you please. But don’t ask me to keep my mouth shut. You was quick enough to shoot Jackson’s dog when you caught her on that doe.”

“I know,” said Westley; and his face was white. “I’ll be as quick with Reck, when I’m sure.”

“You’ll take pains not to get sure.”

Westley held his voice steady. “Did you ever have to call Reck off deer tracks?”

“No.”

“Then he’s never been taught not to run them?”

“Neither had Jackson’s dog.”

“What I mean,” said Westley, “is this. He doesn’t know it’s wrong to run deer.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I’m not excusing him.”

Proutt swore. “Well, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to take him into the swamp and find a deer,” said Westley slowly. “See what he does. He’s never been taught not to run them. So he’ll run any that we find. If it’s in him to do it, he’ll take after them—”

Proutt nodded; and there was a certain triumph in his eyes. “You take your gun along,” he said. “You’re going to need that gun.”

Westley, white and steady, said: “I’ll take the gun. Will you come along?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know where we can find a deer?”

“No; not this time o’ day.”

Westley turned toward the house. “Wait,” he said. “I’ll get my gun; and we’ll go pick up Jim Saladine. He’ll know.”

Proutt nodded. “I’ll wait,” he agreed.

Westley went into the house. Reck stood on the doorstep. Proutt, waiting, watched Reck with a flickering, deadly light in his sullen eyes.

IV

Saladine listened silently to Westley’s request; but he looked at Proutt with an eye before which Proutt uneasily turned away his head. Nevertheless, being by nature a taciturn man, he made no comment or suggestion. He only said: “I can find a deer.”

“Where?” Westley asked.

“Over in the Sheepscot,” said Saladine. “I’ve got mine for this season; but I know some hardwood ridges over there where they’re like to be feeding, come evening.”

Proutt said uneasily: “Hell, there’s a deer nearer than Sheepscot.”

“Where?” Westley asked.

“Everywhere.”

“We ain’t got time to cover that much territory to-day,” the hunter said mildly. “If the Sheepscot suits, I’ll go along. I’m most sure well pick up deer.”

Westley asked: “Do you think I’m testing Reck fair?”

Saladine spat. “Yes, I’d say so,” he agreed.

“I’ve got work to do,” Proutt still objected. “Sheepscot’s a danged long way.”

“I want you to come,” said Westley.

So Proutt assented at last; and they set off in his team. He and Westley in the front seat, Saladine and Reck behind. A five-mile drive over the Sheepscot Ridge. “Past Mac’s Corner,” Saladine told them; and they went that way.

The road took them by Proutt’s house; and old Dan, Proutt’s hound, came out to bark at them, and saw Proutt, and tried to get into the buggy. Proutt bade him back to the house; then, as an afterthought, got out and shut the hound indoors. “Don’t want him following,” he said.

Saladine’s eyes were narrow with thought, but he made no comment, and they moved on their way.

That part of Maine in which Fraternity lies is a curious study for geologists. A good many centuries ago, when the great glaciers graved this land, they slid down from north to south into the sea, and in their sliding plowed deep furrows, so that the country is cut up by ridges, running almost true north and south, and ending in peninsulas with bays between. Thus the coast line is jagged as a saw.

These ridges run far up into the State; and the Sheepscot Ridge is as bold as any one of them. There is no break in it; and it herds the little waterways down into Sheepscot River, and guides the river itself south till it meets the sea. There are trout in Sheepscot; and thirty years ago the valley was full of farms and mills; but these farms are for the most part deserted now, and the mills are gone, leaving only shattered dams to mark the spots where they stood. The valley is a tangle of second-growth timber, broken here and there by ancient meadows through which brooks meander. Here dwells every wild thing that the region knows.

Proutt’s old buggy climbed the long road up the eastern slope of the ridge; and the somber beauty of the countryside lay outspread behind them. The sun was falling lower; the shadows were lengthening; and a cold wind blew across the land. Across George’s Valley and George’s Lake lay the lower hills, the Appleton Ridge beyond, and far southeast the higher domes of Megunticook and the Camden Hills. The bay itself could not be seen, but the dark top of Blue Hill showed, twenty miles beyond the bay; and Mount Desert, ten miles farther still....

The men had no eyes for these beauties. They rode in silence, watching the road ahead. And they passed through Liberty, and past Mac’s Corner, and so up to top the ridge at last. Paused there to breathe Proutt’s horse.

Back at Proutt’s home, about the time they were in Liberty, some one had opened the door of the shed in which old Dan was locked; and the hound, watching his chance, scuttled out into the open. What well-founded habit prompted him can only be guessed; certain it is that he wheeled, never heeding the calls from behind him, and took the road by which Proutt had gone, hard on his master’s trail.

If the dog trainer had known this, matters might have turned out differently. But Proutt could not know.

V

The roads from Sheepscot Ridge down into Sheepscot Valley are for the most part rough and little used. An occasional farmer comes this way; an occasional fisherman drops from the steep descent to the bridge. But the frost has thrown boulders up across the road; and grass grows between the ruts, and the young hardwood crowds close on either side. Down this road, at Saladine’s direction, Proutt turned; and the westering sun shone through the leafless branches and laid a bright mosaic before the feet of the horse.

Halfway down the hill Saladine spoke. “Let’s light out,” he said. “We’ll find something up along this slope.”

Westley nodded; and Proutt, after a moment’s hesitation, stopped his horse. They got out, and Reck danced about their feet. Proutt tied the horse to a sapling beside the road; and they climbed the ruined stone wall and turned into the wood. Westley alone had a gun; the others were unarmed.

The course Saladine set for them was straight along the slope, moving neither up nor down; and the three men, accustomed to the woods, went quickly. Westley spoke to Reck now and then. His only word was the hunter’s command. “Get in there,” he said. “Get in. Go on.” And Reck ranged forward, and up, and down, covering a front of half a dozen rods as they advanced. Westley was in the middle, Saladine was below, Proutt above the other two.

Westley had suggested putting his hunting bell on Reck; but Proutt negatived that with a caustic word. “He’d know, then, you wanted birds,” he said. “And, anyways, it’d scare the deer.” So they followed the dog by sight or by the stirring of his feet among the leaves; and at times he was well ahead of them, and at times when he moved more slowly they were close upon his heels. At such moments Westley held them back till Reck should work ahead.

Whether Reck had any knowledge of what was in their minds, no man can say. There were moments when they saw he was uncertain, when he turned to look inquiringly back at them. But for the most part he worked steadily back and forth as a good dog will, quartering the ground by inches. And always he progressed along the ridge, and always they followed him. And Saladine, down the slope, watched Proutt as they moved on.

No man spoke, save that Westley urged Reck softly on when the dog turned back to look at them. And at the last, when he saw that Reck had found game, it needed no word to bring the three together, two or three rods behind the dog.

Reck, as the gunners say, was “marking game.” Nose down, he moved forward, foot by foot; and now and then he stopped for long seconds motionless, as though at point; but always he moved forward again. And Westley felt the cold sweat upon his forehead; and he looked at Proutt and saw the dog trainer licking his tight lips. Only Saladine kept a steady eye upon the dog and searched the thickets ahead.

After a rod or two Reck stopped, and this time he did not move. And Westley whispered to the others: “Walk it up, whatever it is. Move in.” So the men went slowly forward, eyes aching with the strain of staring into the shadows of the wood.

When Reck took his point he was well ahead of them. He held it while they came up beside him; and then, as they passed where the dog stood, something plunged in the brush ahead, and they all saw the swift flash of brown and the bobbing white tail as a buck deer drove straight away from them along the slope. And Proutt cried triumphantly:

“A deer, by God! I said it. I told you so. Shoot, Westley. Damn you, shoot!”

Westley stood still as still, and his heart was sunk a hundred fathoms deep. His hand was shaking and his eyes were blurred with tears. For Reck, who had no rightful concern with anything that roved the woods save the creatures which go on the wing, had marked a deer. Enough to damn him! Had hunted deer!...

He tried to lift the gun, but Saladine spoke sharply. “Hold on. Look at the dog. He didn’t chase the deer.”

Westley realized then that Reck was, in fact, still marking game, moving slowly on ahead of them. But Proutt cried: “He’d smelled it; he didn’t see it go. Or there’s another ahead.”

“He didn’t chase the deer,” said Saladine. Westley, without speaking, moved forward behind the dog. And of a second his heart could beat again.

For they came to where the buck had been lying, to his bed, still warm. And Reck passed over this warm bed, where the deer scent was so strong the men could almost catch it themselves; passed over this scent as though it did not exist, and swung, beyond, to the right, and up the slope. The buck had gone forward and down.

“He’s not after deer,” said Saladine.

They knew what he was after in the next instant; for wings drummed ahead of them, and four partridges got up, huge, fleeting shadows in the darkening woods. And Reck’s nose followed them in flight till they were gone, then swung back to Westley, wrinkling curiously, as though he asked:

“Why did you not shoot?”

Westley went down on his knees and put his arms about the dog’s neck; and then he came to his feet uncertainly as Proutt exclaimed: “Hell, he was after deer. He knew we were watching. Took the birds.”

Westley tried to find a word, but Saladine, that silent man, stepped forward.

“Westley,” he said, “wait a minute. You, Proutt, be still.”

They looked at him uncertainly, Proutt growling. And Saladine spat on the ground as though he tasted the unclean. “I’ve kept my mouth shut. Wanted to see. Meant to tell it in the end. Westley, Proutt broke your dog.”

Westley nodded. “Yes.” He looked at Proutt.

“He broke him to run deer.”

Westley began to tremble, and he could not take his eyes from Saladine; and Proutt broke out in a roaring oath, till Saladine turned slowly upon him.

The deer hunter went on: “I waited to see. I knowed what would come; but I wanted to see. A bird dog’s bred to birds. If he’s bred right, it’s in him. Reck’s bred right. You can make him run deer. Proutt did. But you can’t make him like it. Birds is his meat. You saw that just now. He didn’t pay any heed to that buck; but he did pay heed to the pa’tridge.”

Proutt cried: “Damn you, Saladine, you can’t say a thing like that.”

Saladine cut in: “I saw you. Month ago. Down by Fuller’s Brook. A deer crossed there, up into the meadow. You was in the alders with Reck, and you tried to set him on. He wouldn’t run, and you drove him. I saw you, Proutt.”

Westley looked down at Reck; and he looked at Proutt, the trainer; and he looked back at Reck again. There was something in Reck’s eyes which made him hot and angry; there was a pleading something in Reck’s slowly wagging tail.... And Westley turned to Proutt, cool enough now; and he said:

“I can see it now, Proutt. I’ve known there was something, felt there was something.” He laughed joyously. “Why, Proutt, you man who knows dogs. Didn’t you know you could not kill the soul and the honor of a dog like mine? Reck is a thoroughbred. He knows his work. And you—”

He moved a little toward the other. “Proutt,” he said, “I’m going to lick you till you can’t stand.”