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NELSON’S LIBRARY.

She loosed his horse’s rein, and led it rapidly towards
her own horse.

The War
of the
Carolinas

By
MEREDITH
NICHOLSON

THOMAS NELSON
AND SONS

Oh, for you that I never knew,

Only in dreams that bind you!—

By Spring’s own grace I shall know your face

When under the may I find you!

H. C. Bunner.

TO YOU AT THE GATE.

There was a daisy-meadow, that flowed brimming to the stone wall at the roadside, and on the wooded crest beyond a lamp twinkled in a house round which stole softly the unhurried, eddyless dusk. You stood at the gate, your arms folded on the top bar, your face uplifted, watching the stars and the young moon of June. I was not so old but that I marked your gown of white, your dark head, your eyes like the blue of mid-ocean sea-water in the shadow of marching billows. As my step sounded you looked up startled, a little disdainful, maybe; then you smiled gravely; but a certain dejection of attitude, a sweet wistfulness of lips and eyes, arrested and touched me; and I stole on guiltily, for who was I to intrude upon a picture so perfect, to which moon and stars were glad contributors? As I reached the crown of the road, where it dipped down to a brook that whispered your name, I paused and looked back, and you waved your hand as though dismissing me to the noisy world of men.

In other Junes I have kept tryst with moon and stars beside your gate, where daisies flow still across the meadow, and insect voices blur the twilight peace; but I have never seen again your house of shadows among the trees, or found you dreaming there at the gate with uplifted face and wistful eyes. But from the ridge, where the road steals down into the hollow with its fireflies and murmuring water, I for ever look back to the star- and moon-hung gate in the wall, and see your slim, girlish figure, and can swear that you wave your hand.

Katonah, June 30, 1908. M. N.

CONTENTS.

THE
WAR OF THE CAROLINAS.

CHAPTER I.
TWO GENTLEMEN SAY GOOD-BYE.

“IF anything really interesting should happen to me I think I should drop dead,” declared Ardmore, as he stood talking to Griswold in the railway station at Atlanta. “I entered upon this life under false pretenses, thinking that money would make the game easy, but here I am, twenty-seven years old, stalled at the end of a blind alley, with no light ahead; and to be quite frank, old man, I don’t believe you have the advantage of me. What’s the matter with us, anyhow?”

“The mistake we make,” replied Griswold, “is in failing to seize opportunities when they offer. You and I have talked ourselves hoarse a thousand times planning schemes we never pull off. We are cursed with indecision, that’s the trouble with us. We never see the handwriting on the wall, or if we do, it’s just a streak of hieroglyphics, and we don’t know what it means until we read about it in the newspapers. But I thought you were satisfied with the thrills you got running as a reform candidate for alderman in New York last year. It was a large stage, and the lime-light struck you pretty often. Didn’t you get enough? No doubt they’d be glad to run you again.”

Ardmore glanced hastily about and laid his hand heavily on his friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t mention it—don’t think of it! No more politics in mine. The world may go hang if it waits for me to set it right. What I want is something different, a real adventure—something with spice in it. I have bought everything money can buy, and now I’m looking for something that can’t be tagged with a price.”

“There’s your yacht and the open sea,” suggested Griswold.

“Sick of it! Sick to death of it!”

“You’re difficult, old man, and mighty hard to please. Why don’t you turn explorer and go in for the North Pole?”

“Perfectly bully! I’ve thought of it a lot, but I want to be sure I’ve cleaned up everything else first. It’s always up there waiting—on ice, so to speak—but when it’s done once there will be nothing left. I want to save that for the last call.”

“You said about the same thing when we talked of Thibet that first evening we met at the University Club, and now the Grand Lama sings in all the phonographs, and for a penny you can see him in a kinetoscope, eating his luncheon. I remember very well that night. We were facing each other at a writing-table, and you looked up timidly from your letter and asked me whether there were two g’s in aggravate; and I answered that it depended on the meaning—one g for a mild case, two for a severe one—and you laughed, and we began talking. Then we found out how lonesome we both were, and you asked me to dinner, and then took me to that big house of yours up there in Fifth Avenue and showed me the pictures in your art gallery, and we found out that we needed each other.”

“Yes, I had needed you all right!” And Ardmore sniffed dolefully, and complained of the smoke that was drifting in upon them from the train sheds. “I wish you wouldn’t always be leaving me. You ought to give up your job and amuse me. You’re the only chap I know who doesn’t talk horse or automobile or yacht, or who doesn’t want to spend whole evenings discussing champagne vintages; but you’re too good a man to be wasted on a college professorship. Better let me endow an institution that will make you president—there might be something in that.”

“It would make me too prominent, so that when we really make up our minds to go in for adventures I should be embarrassed by my high position. As a mere lecturer on ‘The Libelling of Sunken Ships’ in a law school, I’m the most obscure person in the world. And for another thing, we couldn’t risk the scandal of tainted money. It would be nasty to have your great-grandfather’s whisky deals with the Mohawk Indians chanted in a college yell.”

The crowd surged past them to the Washington express, and a waiting porter picked up Griswold’s bags.

“Wish you wouldn’t go. I have three hours to wait,” said Ardmore, looking at his watch, “and the only Atlanta man I know is out of town.”

“What did you say you were going to New Orleans for?” demanded Griswold, taking out his ticket and moving towards the gate. “I thought you exhausted the Creole restaurants long ago.”

“The fact is,” faltered Ardmore, colouring, “I’m looking for some one.”

“Out with it—out with it!” commanded his friend.

“I’m looking for a girl I saw from a car window day before yesterday. I had started north, and my train stopped to let a south-bound train pass somewhere in North Carolina. The girl was on the south-bound sleeper, and her window was opposite mine. She put aside the magazine she was reading and looked me over rather coolly.”

“And you glanced carelessly in the opposite direction and pulled down your shade, of course, like the well-bred man you are——” interrupted Griswold, holding fast to Ardmore’s arm as they walked down the platform.

“I did no such thing. I looked at her and she looked at me. And then my train started——”

“Well, trains have a way of starting. Does the romance end here?”

“Then, just at the last moment, she winked at me!”

“It was a cinder, Ardy. The use of soft coal on railways is one of the saddest facts of American transportation. I need hardly remind you, Mr. Ardmore, that nice girls don’t wink at strange young men. It isn’t done!”

“I would have you know, Professor, that this girl is a lady.”

“Don’t be so irritable, and let me summarize briefly on your own hypothesis. You stared at a strange girl, and she winked at you, safe in the consciousness that she would never see you again. And now you are going to New Orleans to look for her. She will probably meet you at the station, with her bridesmaids and wedding cake all ready for you. And you think this will lead to an adventure—you defer finding the North Pole for this—for this? Poor Ardy! But did she toss her card from the window? Why New Orleans? Why not Minneapolis, or Bangor, Maine?”

“I’m not an ass, Grissy. I caught the name of the sleeper—you know they’re all named, like yachts and tall buildings—the name of her car was the Alexandra. I asked our conductor where it was bound for, and he said it was the New Orleans car. So I took the first train back, ran into you here, and that’s the whole story to date.”

“I admire your spirit. New Orleans is much pleasanter than the polar ice, and a girl with a winking eye isn’t to be overlooked in this vale of tears. What did this alleviating balm for tired eyes look like, if you remember anything besides the wicked wink?”

“She was bareheaded, and her hair was wonderfully light and fluffy, and it was parted in the middle and tied behind with a black ribbon in a great bow. She rested her cheek on her hand—her elbow on the window-sill, you know—and she smiled a little as the car moved off, and winked—do you understand? Her eyes were blue, Grissy, big and blue—and she was perfectly stunning.”

“There are winks and winks, Ardy,” observed Griswold, with a judicial air. “There is the wink inadvertent, to which no meaning can be attached. There is the wink deceptive, usually given behind the back of a third person, and a vulgar thing which we will not associate with your girl of the Alexandra. And then, to be brief, there is the wink of mischief, which is observed occasionally in persons of exceptional bringing up. There are moments in the lives of all of us when we lose our grip on conventions—on morality, even. The psychology of this matter is very subtle. Here you are, a gentleman of austerely correct life; here is a delightful girl, on whom you flash in an out-of-the-way corner of the world. And she, not wholly displeased by the frank admiration in your eyes—for you may as well concede that you stared at her——”

“Well, I suppose I did look at her,” admitted Ardmore reluctantly.

“Pardonably, no doubt, just as you would look at a portrait in a picture gallery, of course. This boarding-school miss, who had never before lapsed from absolute propriety, felt the conventional world crumble beneath her as the train started. She could no more have resisted the temptation to wink than she could have refused a caramel or an invitation to appear as best girl at a church wedding. Thus wireless communication is established between soul and soul for an instant only, and then you are cut off for ever. Perhaps, in the next world, Ardy——”

Griswold and Ardmore had often idealized themselves as hopeless pursuers of the elusive, the unattainable, the impossible; or at least Ardmore had, and Griswold had entered into the spirit of this sort of thing for the joy it gave Ardmore. They had discussed frequently the call of soul to soul—the quick glance passing between perfect strangers in crowded thoroughfares—and had fruitlessly speculated as to their proper course in the event the call seemed imperative. A glance of the eye is one thing, but it is quite another to address a stranger and offer eternal friendship. The two had agreed that, while, soul-call or no soul-call, a gentleman must keep clear of steamer flirtations, and avoid even the most casual remarks to strange young women in any circumstances, a gentleman of breeding and character may nevertheless follow the world’s long trails in search of a never-to-be-forgotten face.

The fact is that Ardmore was exceedingly shy, and a considerable experience of fashionable society had not diminished this shortcoming. Griswold, on the other hand, had the Virginian’s natural social instinct, but he suffered from a widely-diffused impression that much learning had made him either indifferent or extremely critical where women are concerned.

Ardmore shrugged his shoulders and fumbled in his coat pockets as though searching for ideas. An austere composure marked his countenance at all times, and emphasized the real distinction of his clean-cut features. His way of tilting back his head and staring dreamily into vacancy had established for him a reputation for stupidity that was wholly undeserved.

“Please limit the discussion to the present world, Professor.”

When Ardmore was displeased with Griswold he called him Professor, in a withering tone that disposed of the academic life.

“We shall limit it to New Orleans or the universe, as you like.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Grissy. You don’t take this matter in the proper spirit. I’m going to find that girl, I tell you.”

“I want you to find her, Ardy, and throw yourself at her feet. Be it far from me to deprive you of the joy of search. I thoroughly admire your resolute spirit. It smacks of the old heroic times. Nor can I conceal from you my consuming envy. If a girl should flatter me with a wink, I should follow her thrice round the world. She should not elude me anywhere in the Copernican system. If it were not the nobler part for you to pursue alone, I should forsake my professorship and buckle on my armour and follow your standard—

With the winking eye

For my battle-cry.”

And Griswold hummed the words, beating time with his stick, much to Ardmore’s annoyance.

“In my ignorance,” Griswold continued, “I recall but one allusion to the wink in immortal song. If my memory serves me, it is no less a soul than Browning who sings:

‘All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye

Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.’

You seem worried, Ardy. Does the wink press so heavily, or what’s the matter?”

“The fact is, I’m in trouble. My sister says I’ve got to marry.”

“Which sister?”

“Mrs. Atchison. You know Nellie? She’s a nice girl and she’s a good sister to me, but she’s running me too hard on this marrying business. She’s going to bring a bunch of girls down to Ardsley in a few days, and she says she’ll stay until I make a choice.”

Griswold whistled.

“Then, as we say in literary circles, you’re up against it. No wonder you’re beginning to take notice of the frolicsome boarding-school girl who winks at the world. I believe I’d rather take chances myself with that amiable sort than marry into your Newport transatlantic set.”

“Well, one thing’s certain, Grissy. You’ve got to come to Ardsley and help me out while those people are there. Nellie likes you; she thinks you’re terribly intellectual and all that, and if you’ll throw in a word now and then, why——”

“Why, I may be able to protect you from the crafts and assaults of your sister. You seem to forget, Ardy, that I’m not one of your American leisure class. I’m always delighted to meet Mrs. Atchison, but I’m a person of occupations. I have a consultation in Richmond to-morrow, then me for Charlottesville. We have examinations coming on, and while I like to play with you, I’ve positively got to work.”

“Not if I endow all the chairs in the university! You’ve not only got to come, but you’re going to be there the day they arrive.”

Thomas Ardmore, of New York and Ardsley, struck his heavy stick—he always carried a heavy stick—smartly on the cement platform in the stress of his feeling. He was much shorter than Griswold, to whom he was deeply attached—for whom he had, indeed, the frank admiration of a small boy for a big brother. He sometimes wondered how fully Griswold entered into the projects of adventure which he, in his supreme idleness, planned and proposed; but he himself had never been quite ready to mount horse or shake out soil, and what Griswold had said about indecision rankled in his heart. He was sorry now that he had told of this new enterprise to which he had pledged himself, but he grew lenient towards Griswold’s lack of sympathy as he reflected that the quest of a winking girl was rather beneath the dignity of a gentleman wedded not merely to the law, but to the austere teaching profession as well. In his heart he forgave Griswold, but he was all the more resolved to address himself stubbornly to his pursuit of the deity of the car Alexandra, for only by finding her could he establish himself in Griswold’s eyes as a man of action, capable of carrying through a scheme requiring cleverness and tact.

Ardmore was almost painfully rich, but the usual diversions of the wealthy did not appeal to him; and having exhausted foreign travel, he spent much time on his estate in the North Carolina hills, where he could ride all day on his own land, and where he read prodigiously in a huge library that he had assembled with special reference to works on piracy, a subject that had attracted him from early youth.

It was this hobby that had sealed his friendship with Griswold, who had relinquished the practice of law, after a brilliant start in his native city of Richmond, to accept the associate professorship of admiralty in the law department of the University of Virginia. Marine law had a particular fascination for Griswold, from its essentially romantic character. As a law student he had read all the decisions in admiralty that the libraries afforded, and though faithfully serving the university, he still occasionally accepted retainers in admiralty cases of unusual importance. His lectures were constantly attended by students in other departments of the university for sheer pleasure in Griswold’s racy and entertaining exposition of the laws touching the libelling of schooners and the recovery of jettisoned cargoes. Henry Maine Griswold was tall, slender, and dark, and he hovered recklessly, as he might have put it, on the brink of thirty. He stroked his thin brown moustache habitually, as though to hide the smile that played about his humorous mouth—a smile that lay even more obscurely in his fine brown eyes. He did violence to the academic traditions by dressing with metropolitan care, gray being his prevailing note, though his scarfs ventured upon bold colour schemes that interested his students almost as much as his lectures. The darkest fact of his life—and one shared with none—was his experiments in verse. From his undergraduate days he had written occasionally a little song, quite for his own pleasure in versifying, and to a little sheaf of these things in manuscript he still added a few verses now and then.

“Don’t worry, Ardy,” he was saying to his friend as “all aboard” was called, “and don’t be reckless. When you get through looking for the winking eye, come up to Charlottesville, and we’ll plan The True Life of Captain Kidd that is some day going to make us famous.”

“I’ll wire you later,” replied Ardmore, clinging to his friend’s hand a moment after the train began to move. Griswold leaned out of the vestibule to wave a last farewell to Ardmore, and something very kind and gentle and good to see shone in the lawyer’s eyes. He went into the car smiling, for he called Ardmore his best friend, and he was amused by his last words, which were always Ardmore’s last in their partings, and were followed usually by telegrams about the most preposterous things, or suggestions for romantic adventures, or some new hypothesis touching Captain Kidd and his buried treasure. Ardmore never wrote letters; he always telegraphed, and he enjoyed filing long, mysterious, and expensive messages with telegraph operators in obscure places where a scrupulous ten words was the frugal limit.

Griswold lighted a cigar and opened the afternoon Atlanta papers in the smoking compartment. His eye was caught at once by imperative headlines. It is not too much to say that the eye of the continent was arrested that evening by the amazing disclosure, now tardily reaching the public, that something unusual had occurred at the annual meeting of the Cotton Planters’ Association at New Orleans on the previous day. Every copy-reader and editor, every paragrapher on every newspaper in the land, had smiled and reached for a fresh pencil as a preliminary bulletin announced the passing of harsh words between the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina. It may as well be acknowledged here that just what really happened at the Cotton Planters’ Convention will never be known, for this particular meeting was held behind closed doors; and as the two governors were honoured guests of the association, no member has ever breathed a word touching an incident that all most sincerely deplored. Indeed, no hint of it would ever have reached the public had it not been that both gentlemen hurriedly left the convention hall, refused to keep their appointments to speak at the banquet that followed the business meetings, and were reported to have taken the first trains for their respective capitals. It was whispered by a few persons that the Governor of South Carolina had taken a fling at the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence; it was rumoured in other quarters that the Governor of North Carolina was the aggressor, he having—it was said—declared that a people (meaning the freemen of the commonwealth of South Carolina) who were not intelligent enough to raise their own hay, and who, moreover, bought that article in Ohio, were not worth the ground necessary for their decent interment. It is not the purpose of this chronicle either to seek the truth of what passed between the two governors at New Orleans, or to discuss the points of history and agriculture raised in the statements just indicated. As every one knows, the twentieth of May (or was it the thirty-first?), 1775, is solemnly observed in North Carolina as the day on which the patriots of Mecklenburg County severed the relations theretofore existing between them and his Majesty King George the Third. Equally well known is the fact that in South Carolina it is an article of religious faith that on that twentieth day of May, 1775, the citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, cheered the English flag and adopted resolutions reaffirming their ancient allegiance to the British crown. This controversy and the inadequacy of the South Carolina hay crop must be passed on to the pamphleteers, with such other vexed questions as Andrew Jackson’s birthplace—more debated than Homer’s, and not to be carelessly conceded to the strutting sons of Waxhaw.

Griswold read of the New Orleans incident with a smile, while several fellow-passengers discussed it in a tone of banter. One of them, a gentleman from Mississippi, presently produced a flask, which he offered to the others, remarking, “As the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina,” which was, to be sure, pertinent to the hour and the discussion, and bristling with fresh significance.

“They were both in Atlanta this morning,” said the man with the flask, “and they would have been travelling together on this train if they hadn’t met in the ticket office and nearly exploded with rage.”

The speaker was suddenly overcome with his own humour, and slapped his knee and laughed; then they all laughed, including Griswold.

“One ought to have taken the lower berth and one the upper to make it perfect,” observed an Alabama man. “I wonder when they’ll get home.”

“They’ll probably both walk to be sure they don’t take the same train,” suggested a commercial traveller from Cincinnati, who had just come from New Orleans. “Their friends are doing their best to keep them apart. They both have a reputation for being quick on the trigger.”

“Bosh!” exclaimed Griswold. “I dare say it’s all a newspaper story. There’s no knife-and-pistol nonsense in the South any more. They’ll both go home and attend to their business, and that will be the last of it. The people of North Carolina ought to be proud of Dangerfield; he’s one of the best governors they ever had. And Osborne is a first-class man, too, one of the old Palmetto families.”

“I guess they’re both all right,” drawled the Mississippian, settling his big black hat more firmly on his head. “Dangerfield spoke in our town at the state fair last year, and he’s one of the best talkers I ever heard.”

Therefore, as no one appeared to speak for the governor of South Carolina, the drummer volunteered to vouch for his oratorical gifts, on the strength of an address lately delivered by Governor Osborne in a lecture course at Cincinnati. Being pressed by the Mississippian, he admitted that he had not himself attended the lecture, but he had heard it warmly praised by competent critics.

The Mississippian had resented Griswold’s rejection of the possibility of personal violence between the governors, and wished to return to the subject.

“It’s not only themselves,” he declared, “but each man has got the honour of his state to defend. Suppose, when they met in the railway office at Atlanta this morning, Dangerfield had drawed his gun. Do you suppose, gentlemen, that if North Carolina had drawed South Carolina wouldn’t have followed suit? I declare, young man, you don’t know what you’re talking about. If Bill Dangerfield won’t fight, I don’t know fightin’ blood when I see it.”

“Well, sir,” began the Alabama man, “my brother-in-law in Charleston went to college with Osborne, and many’s the time I’ve heard him say that he was sorry for the man who woke up Charlie Osborne. Charlie—I mean the governor, you understand—is one of these fellows who never says much, but when you get him going he’s terrible to witness. Bill Dangerfield may be Governor of North Car’line, and I reckon he is, but he ain’t Governor of South Car’line, not by a damned good deal.”

The discussion had begun to bore Griswold, and he went back to his own section, having it in mind to revise a lecture he was preparing on “The Right of Search on the High Seas.” It had grown dark, and the car was brilliantly lighted. There were not more than half a dozen other persons in his sleeper, and these were widely scattered. Having taken an inventory of his belongings to be sure they were all at hand, he became conscious of the presence of a young lady in the opposite section. In the seat behind her sat an old coloured woman in snowy cap and apron, who was evidently the young lady’s servant. Griswold was aware that this dusky duenna bristled and frowned and pursed her lips in the way of her picturesque kind as he glanced at her, as though his presence were an intrusion upon her mistress, who sat withdrawn to the extreme corner of her section, seeking its fullest seclusion, with her head against a pillow, and the tips of her suède shoes showing under her gray travelling skirt on the farther half of the section. She twirled idly in her fingers a half-opened white rosebud—a fact unimportant in itself, but destined to linger long in Griswold’s memory. The pillow afforded the happiest possible background for her brown head, her cheek bright with colour, and a profile clear-cut, and just now—an impression due, perhaps, to the slight quiver of her nostrils and the compression of her lips—seemingly disdainful of the world. Griswold hung up his hat and opened his portfolio; but the presence of the girl suggested Ardmore and his ridiculous quest of the alluring blue eye, and it was refreshing to recall Ardmore and his ways. Here was one man, at least, in this twentieth century, at whose door the Time Spirit might thump and thunder in vain.

The black woman rose and ministered to her mistress, muttering in kind monotone consolatory phrases from which “chile” and “honey” occasionally reached Griswold’s ears. The old mammy produced from a bag several toilet bottles, a fresh handkerchief, a hand mirror, and a brush, which she arranged in the empty seat. The silver trinkets glowed brightly against the blue upholstery.

“Thank you, Aunt Phœbe, I’m feeling much better. Just let me alone now, please.”

The girl put aside the white rose for a moment and breathed deeply of the vinaigrette, whose keen, pungent odour stole across the aisle to Griswold. She bent forward, took up the hand mirror, and brushed the hair away from her forehead with half a dozen light strokes. She touched her handkerchief to the cologne flask, passed it across her eyes, and then took up the rose again and settled back with a little sigh of relief. In her new upright position her gaze rested upon Griswold’s newspapers, which he had flung down on the empty half of his section. One of them had fallen open, and lay with its outer page staring with the bold grin of display type.

TWO GOVERNORS AT WAR.

What did the Governor of North Carolina say
to the Governor of South Carolina?

The colour deepened in the girl’s face; a slight frown gathered in her smooth forehead; then she called the coloured woman, and a brief colloquy followed between them. In a moment Griswold was addressed in a tone and manner at once condescending and deferential.

“If yo’ please, suh, would yo’ all ’low my mistus t’ look at yo’ newspapahs?”

“Certainly. Take them along.”

And Griswold, recalled from a passage in his lecture that dealt with contraband munitions of war, handed over the newspapers, and saw them pass into the hands of his fellow-passenger. He had read the newspapers pretty thoroughly, and knew the distribution of their contents, so that he noted with surprise the girl’s immediate absorption in the telegrams from New Orleans relating to the difficulty between the two governors.

As she read she lost, he thought, something of her splendid colour, and at one point in her reading her face went white for a moment, and Griswold saw the paper wrinkle under the tightening grasp of her hands. The tidings from New Orleans had undoubtedly aroused her indignation, which expressed itself further in the rigid lines of her figure as she read, and in the gradual lifting of her head, as though with some new resolution. She seemed to lose account of her surroundings, and several times Griswold was quite sure that he heard her half exclaim, “Preposterous! Infamous!”

When she had finished the New Orleans telegrams she cast the offending newspapers from her; then, recalling herself, summoned the black woman, and returned them to Griswold, the dusky agent expressing the elaborate thanks of her race for his courtesy. The girl had utterly ignored Griswold, and she now pulled down the curtain at her elbow with a snap and turned her face away from him.

Professor Griswold’s eyes wandered repeatedly from his manuscript to the car ceiling, then furtively to the uncompromisingly averted shoulder and head of the young lady, then back to his lecture notes, until he was weary of the process. He wished Ardmore were at hand, for his friend would find here a case that promised much better than the pursuit to which he had addressed himself. The girl in this instance was at least a self-respecting lady, not given to flirtations with chance travellers, and the brown eyes, of which Griswold had caught one or two fleeting glimpses, were clearly not of the winking sort. The attendance of the black mammy distinguished the girl as a person of quality, whose travels were stamped with an austere propriety.

Her silver toilet articles testified to an acquaintance with the comforts if not the luxuries of life. The alligator-hide suit-case thrust under the seat bore the familiar label of a Swiss hotel where Griswold had once spent a week, and spoke of the girl’s acquaintance with an ampler world. When Phœbe had brought it forth, the initials “B. O.” in small black letters suggested Baltimore and Ohio to Griswold’s lazy speculations, whereupon he reflected that while Baltimore was plausible, the black servant eliminated Ohio; and as every Virginian knows every other Virginian, he tried to identify her with Old Dominion family names beginning with O, but without result. He finally concluded that, while her name might be Beatrice or Barbara, it could not be Bessie, and he decided that very likely the suit-case belonged to her brother Benjamin, in whom he felt no interest whatever.

He went out to supper, secured the only remaining table for two, and was giving his order when the young lady appeared. She had donned her hat, and as she stood a moment in the entrance, surveying the line of tables, her distinction was undeniable. There were but two vacant places in the car, one facing Griswold, the other across the aisle at a larger table where three men were engaged in animated discussion. The girl viewed the prospect with evident disappointment as the waiter drew out the vacant chair at Griswold’s table. She carried herself bravely, but wore still a triste air that touched Griswold’s sympathy. He rose, told the waiter that he would sit at the other table, and the girl murmured her thanks with a forlorn little smile as she took his seat.

The appearance of Griswold aroused the Mississippian to a renewal of the discussion of the New Orleans incident. He was in excellent humour, and had carried to the car a quart bottle, which he pushed toward Griswold.

“As the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina——”

“No, thank you,” and as he spoke Griswold’s eyes fell upon the girl, and he saw annoyance written fleetingly on her face.

“You needn’t be afraid of that whisky. It’s all right,” the Mississippian protested.

“I’m confident of that; but some other time, thank you.”

“Well, sir,” the Mississippian declared, “after you left us a while ago we got to talking about Dangerfield and his trouble with Osborne. There’s something back of this rumpus. You see, if they lived in the same state you might account for a fierce rivalry between them. Both of ’em, for example, might have the senatorial bee in their bonnets; but either one of ’em could make the senate any time he pleased. I guess they’re the two biggest men in the South right now. They’re too big to be touchy about any small matter; that’s why I reckon there’s something behind this little racket over there at New Orleans. No passing remark would send men off that way, so wild that they wouldn’t travel on the same train together. Why, gentlemen——”

“Please pass the salt,” interposed Griswold.

The Mississippian enjoyed the sound of his own voice, which boomed out above the noise of the train with broad effects of dialect that these types will not be asked to reproduce. Griswold’s eyes had again met those of the girl opposite, and there was, he felt, a look of appeal in them. The discussion distressed her, just as the telegrams from New Orleans in the afternoon papers had distressed her, and Griswold began at once to entertain his table companions with his views on a number of national political issues, that were as vital to Arizona or Wyoming as to the Carolinas. He told stories to illustrate his points, and told them so well that his three companions forgot the estrangement of the belligerent governors.

Griswold ran on in the low, musical voice that distinguishes the cultivated Virginian in any company anywhere in the world, and the noisy loquacity of the Mississippian went down before him. He was so intent on holding their attention that his dishes were taken from him almost untouched. The others lingered until his coffee was brought. He was so absorbed that he failed to see the smile that occasionally passed over the girl’s face as some fragment of one of his stories found its way to her. He had undertaken to deflect the talk from a channel which had, it seemed, some painful association for her, but he had done more in unwittingly diverting her own thoughts by his droll humour. He did not cease until she had left the car, whereupon he followed his trio of auditors to the smoking compartment, and there suffered the Mississippian to hold uninterrupted sway.

When he went back into the car at eleven o’clock he found the girl and her maid still sitting in their sections, though most of the other berths, including his own, had been made up. The train was slowing down, and wishing a breath of air before retiring, he went to the rear platform of the sleeper, which was the last car of the train. The porter had opened the door in the vestibule to allow the brakeman to run back with his torpedoes. The baggage car had developed a hot box, and jumping out, Griswold saw lanterns flashing ahead where the trainmen laboured with the sick wheel. The porter vanished, leaving Griswold alone. The train had stopped at the edge of a small town, whose scattered houses lay darkly against the hills beyond. The platform lamps of a station shone a quarter of a mile ahead. The feverish steel yielded reluctantly to treatment, and Griswold went forward and watched the men at work for a few minutes, then returned to the end of the train. He swung himself into the vestibule and leaned upon the guard rail, gazing down the track toward the brakeman’s lantern. Then he grew impatient at the continued delay and dropped down again, pacing back and forth in the road-bed behind the becalmed train. The night was overcast, with hints of rain in the air, and a little way from the rear lights it was pitch dark. Griswold felt sure that the train would not leave without the brakeman, and he was further reassured by the lanterns of the trainmen beside the baggage car. Suddenly, as he reached the car and turned to retrace his steps, a man sprang up, seemingly from nowhere, and accosted him.

“I reckon y’u’re the gov’nor, ain’t y’u?”

“Yes, certainly, my man. What can I do for you?” replied Griswold instantly.

“I reckoned it was y’u when y’u fust come out on the platform. I’m app’inted to tell y’u, Gov’nor, that if y’u have Bill Appleweight arrested in South Car’lina, y’u’ll get something one of these days y’u won’t like. And if y’u try to find me y’u’ll get it quicker. Good-night, Gov’nor.”

“Good-night!” stammered Griswold.

The least irony had crept into the word governor as the man uttered it and slipped away into the darkness. The shadows swallowed him up; the frogs in the ditch beside the track chanted dolorously; then the locomotive whistled for the brakeman, whose lantern was already bobbing toward the train.

As Griswold swung himself into the vestibule the girl who had borrowed his newspapers turned away hurriedly and walked swiftly before him to her section. The porter, who was gathering her things together, said, as she paused in the aisle by her seat,—

“Beginnin’ to get ready, Miss Osbo’n. We’re gwine intu Columbia thirty minutes late all account dat hot box.”

Griswold passed on to the smoking compartment and lighted a cigar. His acquaintances of the supper table had retired, and he was glad to be alone with his thoughts before the train reached Columbia. He dealt harshly with himself for his stupidity in not having associated the girl’s perturbation over the breach between the governor of North Carolina and the governor of South Carolina with the initials on her travelling bag; he had been very dull, but it was clear to him now that she was either the daughter or some other near relative of Governor Osborne. In a few minutes she would leave the train at Columbia, where the governor lived, and, being a gentleman, he would continue on his way to Richmond, and thence to the university, and the incident would be closed. But Griswold was a lawyer, and he had an old-fashioned Southern lawyer’s respect for the majesty of law. On the spur of curiosity or impulse he had received a threatening message intended for the governor of South Carolina, who, from the manner of the delivery of the message, had been expected on this train. Griswold argued that the man who had spoken to him had been waiting at the little station near which they had stopped, in the hope of seeing the governor; that the waiting messenger had taken advantage of the unexpected halt of the train; and, further, that some suggestion of the governor in his own appearance had deceived the stranger. He felt the least bit guilty at having deceived the man, but it was now clearly his duty to see that the governor was advised of the threat that had been communicated in so unusual a manner.

He was pondering whether he should do this in person or by letter or telegram, when the rattle of the train over the switch frogs in the Columbia yards brought him to the point of decision.

The porter thrust his head into the compartment.

“Columbia, sah. Yo’ berth’s all ready, sah. Yo’ gwine t’ Richmond—yes, sah.”

His hands were filled with the young lady’s luggage. The lettering on the suit-case seemed, in a way, to appeal to Griswold and to fix his determination.

“Porter! Put my things off. I’ll wait here for the morning train.”

CHAPTER II.
THE ABSENCE OF GOVERNOR OSBORNE.

Griswold spent the night at the Saluda House, Columbia, and rose in the morning with every intention of seeing Governor Osborne, or some one in authority at his office, as soon as possible, and proceeding to Richmond without further delay. As he scanned the morning newspaper at breakfast he read with chagrin this item, prominently headlined:

Governor Osborne, who was expected home from the Cotton Planters’ Convention yesterday morning, has been unavoidably detained in Atlanta by important personal business. Miss Barbara Osborne arrived last night and proceeded at once to the governor’s mansion.

Several matters of considerable importance await the governor’s return. Among these is the matter of dealing with the notorious Bill Appleweight. It is understood that the North Carolina officials are unwilling to arrest Appleweight, though his hiding-place in the hills on the border near Kildare is well known. Although he runs back and forth across the state line at pleasure, he is a North Carolinian beyond question, and it’s about time Governor Dangerfield took note of the fact. However, the governor of South Carolina may be relied on to act with his usual high sense of public duty in this matter.

Professor Griswold was not pleased to learn that the governor was still absent from the capital. He felt that he deserved better luck after the trouble he had taken to warn the governor. His conscience had got the better of his comfort—he knew that, and he wrote a telegram to the law firm at Richmond with which he was consultant, asking that a meeting with certain clients arranged for to-day be deferred twenty-four hours. It was now Tuesday; he had no further lectures at the university until the following Monday, and after he had taken his bearings of Columbia, where it occurred to him he had not an acquaintance, he walked toward the capitol with a well-formed idea of seeing the governor’s private secretary—and, if that person appeared to be worthy of confidence, apprising him of the governor’s danger.

Standing in the many-pillared portico of the capitol, Griswold turned to look down upon Columbia, a city distinguished to the most casual eye by streets an acre wide! And having an historical imagination and a reverence for the past, Griswold gave himself for a moment to Memory, hearing the tramp of armed hosts, and the thunder of cannon, and seeing flames leap again in the wake of battle. It was a glorious day, and the green of late May lay like a soft scarf upon the city. The sky held the wistful blue of spring. Griswold bared his head to the faint breeze, or perhaps unconsciously he saluted the bronze figure of Hampton, who rides for ever there at the head of his stubborn legion. He turned into the capitol with a little sigh, for he was a son of Virginia, and here, in this unfamiliar scene, the Past was revivified, and he felt the spell of things that were already old when he was born.

It was not yet nine o’clock when he entered the governor’s office. He waited in the reception-room, adjoining the official chamber, but the several desks of the clerical staff remained unoccupied. He chafed a bit as time passed and no one appeared, for his north-bound train left at eleven, and he could not fairly be asked to waste the entire day here. He was pacing the floor, expecting one of the clerks to appear at any moment, when a man entered hurriedly, walked to the closed inner door, shook it impatiently, and kicked it angrily as he turned away. He was a short, thick-set man of thirty-five, dressed in blue serge, and his movements were quick and nervous. He growled under his breath and swung round upon Griswold as though to tax him with responsibility for the closed door.

“Has no one been here this morning?” he demanded, glaring at the closed desks.

“If you don’t count me I should answer no,” replied Griswold quietly.

“Oh!”

The two gentlemen regarded each other for a moment, contemptuous dislike clearly written on the smaller man’s face, Griswold half-smiling and indifferent.

“I am waiting for the governor,” remarked Griswold, thinking to gain information.

“Then you’re likely to wait some time,” jerked the other. “The whole place seems to be abandoned. I never saw such a lot of people.”

“Not having seen them myself, I must reserve judgment,” Griswold remarked, and the blue serge suit flung out of the room.

Presently another figure darkened the entrance, and the coloured servant whom Griswold had seen attending Miss Osborne on the train from Atlanta swept into the reception-room, and grandly ignoring his presence, sat down in a chair nearest the closed door of the inner chamber. Griswold felt that this was encouraging, as implying some link between the governor and his domestic household, and he was about to ask the coloured woman if she knew the business hours of the office when the closed door opened and Miss Osborne appeared on the threshold. The coloured woman rose, and Griswold, who happened to be facing the door when it swung open with such startling suddenness, stared an instant and bowed profoundly.

“I beg your pardon, but I wish very much to see Governor Osborne or his secretary.”

Miss Osborne, in white, trailing a white parasol in her hand, and with white roses in her belt, still stood half withdrawn inside the private office.

“I am very sorry that Governor Osborne and his secretary are both absent,” she answered, and the two eyed each other gravely. Griswold felt that the brown eyes into which he looked had lately known tears; but she held her head high, with a certain defiance, even.

“That is unfortunate. I stopped here last night on purpose to see him, and now I fear that I must leave”—and he smiled the Griswold smile, which was one of the secrets of his popularity at the university—“I must leave Columbia in a very few minutes.”

“The office does not keep very early hours,” remarked the girl, “but some one will certainly be here in a moment. I am sorry you have had to wait.”

She had not changed her position, and Griswold rather hoped she would not, for the door framed her perfectly, and the sunlight from the inner windows emphasized the whiteness of the snowy gown she wore. Her straw hat was shaped like a soldier’s campaign hat, with sides pinned up, the top dented, and a single feather thrust into the side.

“It was not I,” said Griswold, “who so rudely shook the door. I beg that you will acquit me of that violence.”

The girl did not, however, respond to his smile. She poked the floor with her parasol a moment, then raised her head and asked,—

“Who was it, if you please?”

“A gentleman with a brown beard, a red necktie, and a bad disposition.”

“I thought as much,” she said, half to herself, and her eyes were bent again upon the point of her parasol, with which she was tracing a design in the rug. She lifted her head with the abruptness of quick decision, and looked straight at Griswold. The negress had withdrawn to the outer door, by which she sat with sphinx-like immovability.

“I am Miss Osborne. Governor Osborne is my father. Would you mind telling me whether your business with my father is——”

She hesitated, and her eyes met Griswold’s.

“Miss Osborne, as I have no acquaintances here, let me introduce myself. My name is Griswold. My home is Charlottesville. Pardon me, but you and I were fellow-passengers from Atlanta yesterday evening. I am unacquainted with your father, and I have no business with him except——”

He was not yet clear in his mind whether to tell her that her father’s life was threatened; it did not seem fair to alarm her when he was powerless to help; but as he weighed the question the girl came out into the reception-room and sat down near the window.

“Won’t you have a seat, Mr. Griswold? May I ask you again whether you know the gentleman who came in here and beat the door a while ago?”

“I never saw him before in my life.”

“That is very well. And now, Mr. Griswold, I am going to ask you to tell me, if you will, just what it is you wish to say to my father.”

She was very earnest, and the request she made rang the least bit imperiously. She now held the white parasol across her lap in the tight clasp of her white-gloved hands.

“I should not hesitate——” began Griswold, still uncertain what to do.

“You need not hesitate in the fear that you may alarm me. I think I know”—and she half-smiled now—“I think perhaps I know what it is.”

“My reason for wishing to see your father is, then, to warn him that if a criminal named Appleweight is brought back from his hiding-place on the North Carolina frontier, and tried for his crimes in South Carolina, the governor of that state, your father, will be made to suffer by Appleweight’s friends.”

“That is what I thought,” said the girl, slowly nodding her head.

“And now, to be quite honest about it, Miss Osborne, I must confess that I received this warning last night from a man who believed me to be the governor. To tell the truth, I told him I was the governor!”

The girl’s eyes made a fresh inventory of Griswold, then she laughed for the first time—a light laugh of honest mirth that would not be gainsaid. The beautiful colour deepened in her cheeks; her eyes lighted merrily, as though at the drollery of Griswold standing, so to speak, in loco parentis.

“I have my own confession to make. I heard what you said to that man. I had gone to the rear platform to see what was the matter. The stop there in that preposterous place seemed interminable. You must have known that I listened.”

“I didn’t suppose you heard what that man said to me or what I said to him. I don’t know how I came to palm myself off as the governor—I am not in the habit of doing such things, but it was due, I think, to the fact that I had just been saying to a friend of mine at Atlanta——”

He ceased speaking, realizing that what he might have said to Ardmore was not germane to the point at issue. His responsibility for the life and security of Governor Osborne of the sovereign state of South Carolina was at an end, and he was entering upon a social chat with Governor Osborne’s daughter. Some such thought must have passed through her mind, too, for she straightened herself in her chair and dropped the point of her parasol to the floor. But she was the least bit curious, in spite of herself. The young man before her, who held his hat and gloves so quietly and who spoke with so nice a deference in a voice so musical, was beyond question a gentleman, and he had stopped at Columbia to render her father a service. There was no reason why she should not hear what he had said to his friend at Atlanta.

“What had you been saying, Mr. Griswold?”

“Oh, really nothing, after all! I’m ashamed of it now! But he’s the most amusing person, with nothing to do but to keep himself amused. We discuss many daring projects, but we are never equal to them. I had just been telling him that we were incapable of action; that while we plan our battles the foe is already breaking down the outer defences and beating in the gates. You see, we are both very ridiculous at times, and we talk that sort of idiocy to keep up our spirits. And having berated my friend for his irresolution, I seized the first opportunity to prove my own capacity for meeting emergencies. The man flattered me with the assumption that I was the governor of South Carolina, and I weakly fell.”

Distress was again written in Miss Osborne’s face. She had paid little heed to the latter half of Griswold’s recital, though she kept her eyes fixed gravely upon him. In a moment the gentleman in blue serge who had manifested so much feeling over the governor’s absence strode again into the room.

“Ah, Miss Osborne, so you are back!”

He bowed over the girl’s hand with a great deal of manner, then glanced at once toward the door of the private office.

“Hasn’t your father come in yet? I have been looking for him since eight o’clock.”

“My father is not home yet, Mr. Bosworth.”

“Not home! Do you mean to say that he won’t be here to-day?”

“I hardly expect him,” replied the girl calmly. “Very likely he will be at home to-night or in the morning.”

Griswold had walked away out of hearing; but he felt that the girl purposely raised her voice so that he might hear what she said.

“I must know where he is; there’s an important matter waiting—a very serious matter it may prove for him if he isn’t here to-day to pass on it. I must wire him at once.”

“Very good. You had better do so, Mr. Bosworth. He’s at the Peach Tree Club, Atlanta.”

“Atlanta! Do you mean to say that he isn’t even in this state to-day?”

“No, Mr. Bosworth, and I advise you to telegraph him immediately if your business is so urgent.”

“It isn’t my business, Barbara; it’s the state’s business; it’s your father’s business, and if he isn’t here to attend to it by to-morrow at the latest, it will go hard with him. He has enemies who will construe his absence as meaning——”

He spoke rapidly, with rising anger, but some gesture from the girl arrested him, and he turned frowningly to see Griswold calmly intent upon an engraving at the farther end of the room. The coloured woman was dozing in her chair. Before Bosworth could resume, the girl spoke, her voice again raised so that every word reached Griswold.

“If you refer to the Appleweight case, I must tell you, Mr. Bosworth, that I have all confidence that my father will act whenever he sees fit.”

“But the people——”

“My father is not afraid of the people,” said the girl quietly.

“But you don’t understand, Barbara, how much is at stake here. If some action isn’t taken in that matter within twenty-four hours your father will be branded as a coward by every newspaper in the state. You seem to take it pretty coolly, but it won’t be a trifling matter for him.”

“I believe,” replied the girl, rising, “that you have said all that I care to hear from you now or at any further time, Mr. Bosworth, about this or any other matter.”

“But, Barbara——”

Miss Osborne turned her back and walked to the window. Bosworth stared a moment, then rushed angrily from the room. Griswold abandoned his study of the picture, and gravely inclined his head as Bosworth passed. Then he waited a minute. The girl still stood at the window, and there was, Griswold felt, something a little forlorn in her figure. It was quite time that he was off if he caught his train for Richmond. He crossed the room, and as he approached the window Miss Osborne turned quickly.

“It was kind of you to wait. That man is the state’s attorney-general. You doubtless heard what he said to me.”

“Yes, Miss Osborne, I could not help hearing. I did not leave, because I wished to say——”

The associate professor of admiralty in the department of law of the University of Virginia hesitated and was lost. Miss Osborne’s eyes were brown, with that hint of bronze, in certain lights, that is the distinctive possession of the blessed. Health and spirit spoke in her bright colour. She was tall and straight, and there was something militant in her figure as she faced Griswold.

“I beg to say, Miss Osborne, that if there is any way in which I can serve you, my time is wholly at your disposal.”

“I thank you. I fear that you have already given yourself too much trouble in stopping here. My father will wish to thank you on his return.”

Her lips trembled, and tears were bright in her eyes. Then she regained control of herself.

“Mr. Griswold, I have no claim whatever on your kindness, but I am in very great distress. I don’t see just where I can turn for aid to any one I know. But you as a stranger may be able to help me—if it isn’t asking too much—but then I know it is asking too much!”

“Anything, anything whatever,” urged Griswold kindly.

“Mr. Bosworth, the attorney-general, warns me that if my father does not use the power of the state to capture this outlaw Appleweight, the results will be disastrous. He says my father must act immediately. He demanded his address, and, and—I gave it to him.”

“But you must remember, Miss Osborne, that the attorney-general probably knows the intricacies of this case. He must have every reason for upholding your father; in fact, it’s his sworn duty to advise him in such matters as this.”

“There’s another side to that, Mr. Griswold,” and the girl’s colour deepened; but she smiled and went on. It was quite evident that she was animated now by some purpose, and that she was resolved to avail herself of Griswold’s proffered aid. “I have my own reasons for doubting Mr. Bosworth’s motives; and I resent his assumption that my father is not doing his full duty. No one can speak to me of my father in that way—no one!”

“Certainly not, Miss Osborne!”

“This whole matter must be kept as quiet as possible. I can appeal to no one here without the risk of newspaper publicity which would do my father very great injury. But if it is not altogether too great a favour, Mr. Griswold, may I ask that you remain here until to-night—until my father returns? His secretary has been ill and is away from town. The other clerks I sent away on purpose this morning. Father had left his office keys at home, and I came in to see if I could find the papers in the Appleweight case. They are there, and on the top of the packet is a requisition on the governor of North Carolina for Appleweight’s return.”

“Signed?”

“Signed. I’m sure he had only deferred acting in the case until his return, and he should have been back to-day.”

“But of course he will be back; it is inconceivable that he should ignore, much less evade, a duty as plain as this—the governor of a state—it is preposterous! His business in Atlanta accounts for his absence. Governor Osborne undoubtedly knows what he is about.”

“My father is not in Atlanta, Mr. Griswold. He is not at the Peach Tree Club, and has not been. I have not the slightest idea where my father is!”

The echoing whistle of the departing Virginia express reached them faintly as they stood facing each other before the open window in the governor’s reception-room.

CHAPTER III.
THE JUG AND MR. ARDMORE.

Mr. Thomas Ardmore, of New York and Ardsley, having seen his friend Griswold depart, sought a book-shop where, as in many other book-shops throughout the United States, he kept a standing order for any works touching piracy, a subject which, as already hinted, had long afforded him infinite diversion. He had several hours to wait for his train to New Orleans, and he was delighted to find that the bookseller, whom he had known only by correspondence, had just procured for him, through the dispersion of a Georgia planter’s valuable library, that exceedingly rare narrative, The Golden Galleons of the Caribbean, by Dominguez y Pascual—a beautifully bound copy of the original Madrid edition.

With this volume under his arm, Ardmore returned to the hotel where he was lodged and completed his arrangements for leaving. It should be known that Mr. Thomas Ardmore was a person of democratic tastes and habits. In his New York house were two servants whose sole business it was to keep himself and his wardrobe presentable; yet he preferred to travel unattended. He was by nature somewhat secretive, and his adventurous spirit rebelled at the thought of being followed about by a hired retainer. His very wealth was, in a way, a nuisance, for wherever he went the newspapers chronicled his movements, with speculations as to the object of his visit, and dark hints at large public gifts which the city honoured by his presence at once imagined would be bestowed upon it forthwith. The American press constantly execrated his family, and as he was sensitive to criticism he kept very much to himself.

It was a matter of deep regret to Ardmore that his great-grandfather, whose name he bore, should have trifled with the morals of the red men, but he philosophized that it was not his fault, and if he had known how to squeeze the whisky from the Ardmore millions he would have been glad to do so. His own affairs were managed by the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, and Ardmore took little personal interest in any of his belongings except his estate in North Carolina, where he dreamed his dreams, and had, on the whole, a pretty good time.

When he had finished packing his trunk he went down to the dinner he had ordered to be in readiness at a certain hour, at a certain table, carefully chosen beforehand; for Ardmore was very exacting in such matters, and had an eye to the comforts of life, as he understood them.

As he crossed the hotel lobby on his way to the restaurant he was accosted by a reporter for the Atlanta Palladium, who began to question him touching various Ardmores who were just then filling rather more than their usual amount of space in the newspapers. Ardmore’s family, with the single exception of his sister, Mrs. Atchison, bored him immensely. His two brothers and another sister, the Duchess of Ballywinkle, kept the family name in display type a great deal of the time, and their performances had practically driven Thomas Ardmore from New York. He felt keenly his shame in being brother-in-law to a dissolute duke, and the threatened marriage of one of his brothers to a chorus girl had added, he felt, all too great a burden to a family tree whose roots, he could not forget it, were soaked in contraband rum. The reporter was a well-mannered youth, and Ardmore shook his hand encouragingly. He was rather curious to see what new incident in the family history was to be the subject of inquisition, and the reporter immediately set his mind at rest.

“Pardon me, Mr. Ardmore, but is it true that your sister, the Duchess of Ballywinkle, has separated from the duke?”

“You may quote me as saying that while I am not quite sure, yet I sincerely hope the reports are true. To be frank with you, I do not like the duke; in fact, strictly between ourselves, I disliked him from the first,” and Ardmore shook his head gravely, and meditatively jingled the little gold pieces that he always carried in his trousers pockets.

“Well, of course, I had heard that there was some trouble between you and your brother-in-law, but can’t the Palladium have your own exact statement, Mr. Ardmore, of what caused the breach between you?”

Ardmore hesitated and turned his head cautiously.

“You understand, of course, that this discussion is painful to me, extremely painful. And yet, so much has been published about my sister’s domestic affairs——”

“Exactly, Mr. Ardmore. What we want is to print your side of the story.”

“Very decent of you, I’m sure. But the fact is”—and Ardmore glanced over his shoulder again to be sure he was not overheard—“the fact is——” and he paused, batting his eyes as though hesitating at the point of an important disclosure.

“Yes, Mr. Ardmore,” encouraged the reporter.

“Well, I don’t mind telling you, but don’t print this. Let it be just between ourselves.”

“Oh, of course, if you say not——”

“That’s all right; I have every confidence in your discretion; but if this will go no further, I don’t mind telling you——”

“You may rely on me absolutely, Mr. Ardmore.”

“Then, with the distinct understanding that this is sub rosa—now we do understand each other, don’t we?” pleaded Ardmore.

“Perfectly, Mr. Ardmore,” and the perspiration began to bead the reporter’s forehead in his excitement over the impending revelation.

“Then you shall know why I feel so bitter about the duke. I assure you that nothing but the deepest chagrin over the matter causes me to tell you what I have never revealed before—not even to members of my family—not to my most intimate friend.”

“I appreciate all that——”

“Well, the fact is—but please never mention it—the fact is that his Grace owes me four dollars. I gave it to him in two bills—I remember the incident perfectly—two crisp new bills I had just got at the bank. His Grace borrowed the money to pay a cabman—it was the very day before he married my sister. Now let me ask you this: Can an American citizen allow a duke to owe him four dollars? The villain never referred to the matter again, and from that day to this I have made it a rule never to lend money to a duke.”

The reporter stared a moment, then laughed. He abandoned the idea of getting material for a sensational article and scented the possibilities of a character sketch of the whimsical young millionaire.

“How about that story that your brother, Samuel Ardmore, is going to marry the chorus girl he ran over in his automobile?”

“I hope it’s true; I devoutly do. I’m very fond of music myself, and, strange to say, nobody in our family is musical. I think a chorus girl would be a real addition to our family. It would bring up the family dignity—you can see that.”

“The wires brought a story this afternoon that your cousin, Wingate Siddall—he is your cousin, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so. What’s Siddy’s latest?”

“Why, it’s reported that he’s going to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. Can you tell us anything about that from the inside?”

“Well, the ocean is only four miles deep; I’d take more interest in Cousin Siddy’s ballooning if you could make it a couple of miles more to the dead men’s chests. And now, much as I’d like to prolong this conversation, I’ve got to eat or I’ll miss my train.”

“If you don’t mind saying where you are going, Mr. Ardmore?”

“I’d tell you in a minute, only I haven’t fully decided yet; but I shall probably take the Sambo Flyer at 9.13, if you don’t make me lose it.”

“You have large interests in Arkansas, I believe, Mr. Ardmore?”

“Yes; important interests. I’m searching for the original fiddle of the Arkansaw Traveller. When I find it I’m going to give it to the British Museum. And now you really must excuse me.”

Ardmore looked the reporter over carefully as they shook hands. He was an attractive young fellow, alert and good-humoured, and Ardmore liked him, as, in his shy way, he really liked almost every one who seemed to be a human being.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. If you’ll forget this rot we’ve been talking and come up to Ardsley as soon as I get home, I’ll see if I can’t keep you amused for a couple of weeks. I don’t offer that as a bribe; my family affairs are of interest to nobody but hostlers and kitchen-maids. Wire me at Ardsley when you’re ready, throw away your lead-pencil, then come on and I’ll show you the finest collection of books on Captain Kidd in the known world. What did you say your name is? Collins—Frank Collins? I never forget anything, so don’t disappoint me.”

“That’s mighty nice of you, but I don’t have much time for vacations,” replied the reporter, who was, however, clearly pleased.

“If the office won’t give you a couple of weeks, wire me, and I’ll buy the paper.”

The young man laughed outright. “I’ll remember; I really believe you mean for me to come.”

“Of course I do. It’s all settled; make it next week. Good-bye!”

Ardmore ate his dinner oblivious of the fact that people at the neighbouring tables turned to look at him. He overheard his name mentioned, and a woman just behind him let it be known to her companions and any one else who cared to hear that he was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Ballywinkle. Another voice in the neighbourhood kindly remarked that Ardmore was the only decent member of the family, and that he was not the one whose wife had just left him, nor yet the one who was going to marry the chorus girl whose father kept a delicatessen shop in Hoboken. It is very sad to be unable to dine without having family skeletons joggle one’s elbow, and Ardmore was annoyed. The head waiter hung officiously near; the man who served him was distressingly eager; and then the voice behind him rose insistently:

“—worth millions and yet he can’t find anybody to eat with him.”

This was almost true, and a shadow passed across Ardmore’s face and his eyes grew grave as he humbly reflected that he was indeed a pitiable object. He waved away his plate and called for coffee, and at that moment a middle-aged man appeared at the door, scanned the room for a moment, and then threaded his way among the tables to Ardmore.

“I heard you were here and thought I’d look you up. How are you, Ardy?”

“Very well, thank you, Mr. Billings. Have you dined? Sorry; which way are you heading?”

The newcomer had the bearing of a gentleman used to consideration. He was, indeed, the secretary of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, whose business was chiefly the administration of the Ardmore estate, and Ardmore knew him very well. He was afraid that Billings had traced him to Atlanta for one of those business discussions which always vexed and perplexed him so grievously, and the thought of this further depressed his spirits. But the secretary at once eased his mind.

“I’m looking for a man, and I’m not good at the business. I’ve lost him and I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it,” and the secretary seemed to be half-musing to himself as he sat down and rested his arms on the table.

“You might give me the job. I’m following a slight clue myself just at present.”

The secretary, who had no great opinion of Ardmore’s mental capacity, stared at the young man vacantly. Then it occurred to him that possibly Ardmore might be of service.

“Have you been at Ardsley recently?” he asked.

“Left there only a few days ago.”

“You haven’t seen your governor lately, have you?”

“My governor?” Ardmore stared blankly. “Why, Mr. Billings, don’t you remember that father’s dead?”

“I don’t mean your father, Ardy,” replied Billings, with the exaggerated care of one who deals with extreme stupidity. “I mean the Governor of North Carolina—one of the American states. Ardsley is still in North Carolina, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes, of course. But bless your soul, I don’t know the governor. Why should one?”

“I don’t know why, Ardy; but people sometimes do know governors and find it useful.”

“I’m not in politics any more, Mr. Billings. What’s this person’s name?”

“Dangerfield. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?” demanded the secretary, striving to control his inner rage. He was in trouble, and Ardmore’s opaqueness taxed his patience. And yet Tommy Ardmore had given him less trouble than any other member of the Ardmore family. The others galloped gaily through their incomes; Tommy was rapidly augmenting his inheritance from sheer neglect or inability to scatter his dividends.

“No; I quit reading newspapers after the noble Duke of Ballywinkle didn’t break the bank at Monte Carlo that last time. I often wish, Mr. Billings, that the Mohawks had scalped my great-grandfather before they bought his whisky. That would have saved me the personal humiliation of being brother-in-law to a duke.”

“You mustn’t be so thin-skinned. You pay the penalty of belonging to one of the wealthiest families in America,” and Billings’s tone was paternal.

“So I’ve heard, but I’m not so terribly proud of it. What about this governor?”

“That’s what troubles me—what of the governor?” Billings dropped his voice so that no one but Ardmore could hear. “He’s missing—disappeared.”

“That’s the first interesting thing I ever heard of a governor doing,” said Ardmore. “Tell me more.”

“He’s had a row with the Governor of South Carolina, at New Orleans. I was to have met him here on an important matter of business this afternoon, but he’s cleared out and nobody knows what’s become of him. His daughter even, who was in New Orleans with him, doesn’t know where he is.”

“When was she in New Orleans with him?” asked Ardmore, looking at his watch.

“She—who?” asked Billings, annoyed.

“Why, the daughter!”

“I don’t know anything about the daughter, but if I could find her father I’d give him a piece of my mind,” and the secretary’s face flushed angrily.

“Well, I suppose she isn’t the one I’m looking for, anyhow,” said Ardmore resignedly.

“I should hope not,” blurted Billings, who had not really taken in what Ardmore said, but who assumed that it must necessarily be something idiotic.

“She had fluffy hair,” persisted Ardmore to this serious-minded gentleman whose life was devoted to the multiplication of the Ardmore millions. Ardmore’s tone was that of a child who persists in babbling inanities to a distracted parent.

“Better let girls alone, Tommy. Mrs. Atchison told me you were going to marry Daisy Waters, and I should heartily approve the match.”

“Did Nellie tell you that? I wonder if she’s told Daisy yet? You’ll have to excuse me now, for I’m taking the Sambo Flyer. I’d like to find your governor for you; and if you’ll tell me when he was seen last——”

“Right here, just before noon to-day, and a couple of hours before I reached town. His daughter either doesn’t know where he went or she won’t tell.”

“Ah! the daughter! She remains behind to guard his retreat.”

“The daughter is still here. She’s a peppery little piece,” and Billings looked guardedly around the room. “That’s she, alone over there in the corner—the girl with the white feather in her hat who’s just signing her check. There—she’s getting up!”

Ardmore gazed across the room intently, then suddenly a slight smile played about his lips. To gain the door the girl must pass by his table, and he scrutinized her closely as she drew near and passed. She was a little girl, and her light fluffy hair swept out from under a small blue hat in a shell-like curve, and the short skirt of her tailor-made gown robbed her, it seemed, of years to which the calendar might entitle her.

“She gave me the steadiest eye I ever looked into when I asked her where her father had gone,” remarked Billings grimly as the girl passed. “She said she thought he’d gone fishing for whales.”

“So she’s Miss Dangerfield, is she?” asked Ardmore indifferently; and he rose, leaving on the plate, by a sudden impulse of good feeling towards the world, exactly double the generous tip he had intended giving. Billings was glad to be rid of Ardmore, and they parted in the hotel lobby without waste of words. The secretary of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company announced his intention of remaining another day in Atlanta in the hope of finding Governor Dangerfield, and he was so absorbed in his own affairs that he did not heed, if indeed he heard, Ardmore’s promise to keep an eye out for the lost governor. Like most other people, the secretary of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company did not understand Ardmore, but Thomas Ardmore, having long ago found himself ill-judged by the careless world, lived by standards of his own, and these would have meant nothing whatever to Billings.

Ardmore’s effects had been brought down, and were already piled on a carriage at the door. In his pocket were his passage to New Orleans and a stateroom ticket. At the cashier’s desk Miss Dangerfield paid her bill, just ahead of him.

“If any telegrams come for my father, please forward them to Raleigh,” said the girl. The manager came out personally to show her to her carriage, and having shut the door upon her, he wished Ardmore, who stood discreetly by, a safe journey.

“Off for New Orleans, are you, Mr. Ardmore?” asked the manager courteously.

“No,” said Ardmore, “I’m going to Raleigh to look at the tall buildings,” whereat the manager returned to his duties, gravely shaking his head.

At the station Ardmore caught sight of Miss Dangerfield, attended by two porters, hurrying toward the Tar Heel Express. He bought a ticket to Raleigh, and secured the last available berth from the conductor on the platform at the moment of departure.

Ardmore did not like to be hurried, and this sudden change of plans had been almost too much for him, but he was consoled by the reflection that after all these years of waiting for just such an adventure he had proved himself equal to an emergency that required quick thought and swift action. He had not only found the girl with the playful eye, but he had learned her identity without, as it were, turning over his hand. Not even Griswold, who was the greatest man he knew—Griswold with his acute legal mind and ability to carry through contests of wit with lawyers of highest repute—not even Griswold, Ardmore flattered himself, could have managed better.

The stateroom door stood open, and from his seat at the farther end of the car Ardmore caught a fleeting glimpse of Miss Dangerfield as she threw off her jacket and hat; then she summoned the porter, gave him her tickets, bade him a smiling good-night, and the door closed upon her. The broad grin on the porter’s face—a grin of delight, as though he had spoken with some exalted deity—filled Ardmore with bitterest envy.

He went back to smoke and plan his future movements. For the first time in his life he faced to-morrow with eager anticipations, resolved that nothing should thwart his high resolves, though these, to be sure, were somewhat hazy. Then, from a feeling of great satisfaction, his spirit reacted, and he regretted that he had been deprived of the joy of prolonged search. If he could only have followed her until, at the last moment, when about to give up for ever and accept the frugal consolations of memory, he met her somewhere face to face! These reflections led him to wonder whether he might not have been mistaken about the wink after all. Griswold, with his wider knowledge of the world, had scouted the idea. Very likely if one of those blue eyes had actually winked at him it had been out of mere playfulness, and he would never in the world refer to it when they met. Billings had applied the term peppery to her, and he felt that he should always hate Billings for this; Billings was only a financial automaton anyhow, who bought at the lowest and sold at the highest, and bored one very often with strangely-worded papers which one was never expected to understand. He did not know why Billings was so anxious to find Miss Dangerfield’s father, but as between a man of Billings’s purely commercial instincts and the governor of a great state like North Carolina, Ardmore resolved to stand by the Dangerfields to the end of the chapter. He was proud to remember his estate at Ardsley, which was in Governor Dangerfield’s jurisdiction, and had been visited by the game warden, the state forester, and various other members of the governor’s official household, though Ardmore could not remember their names. He had never in his life visited Raleigh, but far down some dim vista of memory he saw Sir Walter covering a mud-puddle with his cloak for Queen Elizabeth. It was a picture of this moving incident in an old history that rose before him, as he tried vainly to recall just how it was that Sir Walter had lost his head. He wondered whether Miss Dangerfield’s name was Elizabeth, though he hoped not, as the name suggested a town in New Jersey where his motor had once broken down on a rainy evening when he was carrying Griswold to Princeton to deliver a lecture.

Ardmore smoked many pipes, and did not turn in until after midnight. The car was hot and stuffy, and he slept badly. At some hour of the morning, being again awake and restless, he fished his dressing-gown and slippers out of his bag and went out on the rear platform. His was the last car, and he found a camp-stool and crouched down upon it in a corner of the vestibule and stared out into the dark. The hum and click of the rails soothed him, and he yielded himself to pleasant reveries. Griswold was well on his way back to Virginia, he remembered—“Dear old Grissy!” he murmured; but he resolved to tell Griswold nothing of the prosperous course of his quest. Griswold would never, he knew, countenance so grave a performance as the following of a strange girl to her home; but this would be something for later justification.

Ardmore was half-dozing when the train stopped so abruptly that he was pitched from the camp-stool into a corner of the entry. He got himself together and leaned out into the cool moist air.

The porter came out and stared, for a gentleman in a blue silk wrapper who sat up all night in a vestibule was new to his experience.

“What place is this, porter?”

“Kildare, sah. This place is wha’ we go from South C’lina into No’th C’lina. Ain’t yo’ be’th comfor’ble, sah?”

“Perfectly, thank you.”

Kildare was a familiar name, and the station, that lay at the outskirts of the town, and a long grim barracks-like building that he identified as a cotton mill, recalled the fact that he was not far from his own ample acres which lay off somewhere to westward. He had occasionally taken this route from the north in going to Ardsley, riding or driving from Kildare about ten miles to his house. In this way he was enabled to go or come without appearing at all in the little village of Ardsley.

The porter left him. He felt ready for sleep now, and resolved to go back to bed as soon as the train started. Just then a dark shadow appeared in the track, and a man’s voice asked cautiously,—

“Air y’u the conductor?”

The questioner saw that he was not, before Ardmore could reply, and hesitated a moment.

“The porter’s in the car; you can get aboard up forward,” Ardmore suggested.

“Be Gov’nor Dangerfield on this train?” asked the man, whom Ardmore now saw dimly outlined in the track below.

“Certainly, my friend. The governor’s asleep, but I’m his private secretary. What can I do for you?”

“Well, hyeh’s somethin’ fer ’im—it’s confidential. Sure, air ye, th’ gov’nor’s in they?”

The man—a tall, bearded countryman in a slouch hat, handed up to Ardmore a jug—a plain, brown, old-fashioned American gallon jug.

“It’s a present fer Gov’nor Dangerfield. He’ll understand,” and the man vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared, leaving Ardmore holding the jug by its handle, and feeling a little dazed by the transaction.

The train lingered, and Ardmore was speculating as to which one of the Carolina commonwealths was beneath him, when another figure appeared below in the track—that of a bareheaded, tousled boy this time. He stared up at Ardmore sleepily, having apparently been roused on the arrival of the train.

“Air y’u the gov’nor?” he piped.

“Yes, my lad; in what way can I serve you?” and Ardmore put down his jug and leaned over the guard rail. It was just as easy to be the governor as the governor’s private secretary, and his vanity was touched by the readiness with which the boy accepted him in his new rôle. His costume, vaguely discernible in the vestibule light, evidently struck the lad as being some amazing robe of state affected by governors. The youngster was lifting something, and he now held up to Ardmore a jug, as like the other as one pea resembles another.

“Pa ain’t home, and ma says hyeh’s yer jug o’ buttermilk.”

“Thank you, my lad. While I regret missing your worthy father, yet I beg to present my compliments to your kind and thoughtful mother.”

He had transferred his money to his dressing-gown pocket on leaving his berth, and he now tossed a silver dollar to the boy, who caught it with a yell of delight and scampered off into the night.

Ardmore had dropped the jugs carelessly into the vestibule, and he was surveying them critically when the train started. The wheels were beginning to grind reluctantly when a cry down the track arrested his attention. A man was flying after the train, shouting at the top of his lungs. He ran, caught hold of the rail, and howled,—

“The gov’nor ain’t on they! Gimme back my jug.”

“Indian-giver!” yelled Ardmore. He stooped down, picked up the first jug that came to hand, and dropped it into the man’s outstretched arms.

The porter, having heard voices, rushed out upon Ardmore, who held the remaining jug to the light, scrutinizing it carefully.

“Please put this away for me, porter. It’s a little gift from an old army friend.”

Then Mr. Ardmore returned to his berth, fully pleased with his adventures, and slept until the porter gave warning of Raleigh.

CHAPTER IV.
DUTY AND THE JUG.

Mr. Thomas Ardmore, one trunk, two bags, and a little brown jug reached the Guilford House, Raleigh, at eight o’clock in the morning. Ardmore had never felt better in his life, he assured himself, as he chose a room with care, and intimated to the landlord his intention of remaining a week. But for the ill luck of having his baggage marked he should have registered himself falsely on the books of the inn; but feeling that this was not quite respectable, he assured the landlord, in response to the usual question, that he was not Ardmore of New York and Ardsley, but an entirely different person.

“Well, I don’t blame you for not wanting to be taken for any of that set,” remarked the landlord sympathetically.

“I should think not!” returned Ardmore, in a tone of deep disgust.

The Guilford House coffee was not just what he was used to, but he was in an amiable humour, and enjoyed hugely the conversation of the commercial travellers with whom he took his breakfast. He did not often escape from himself or the burden of his family reputation, and these strangers were profoundly entertaining. It had never occurred to Ardmore that man could be so amiable so early in the day, and his own spirits rallied as he passed the sugar, abused the hot bread, and nodded his approval of bitter flings at the inns of other southern towns of whose existence he only vaguely knew. They spoke of the president of the United States and of various old world monarchs in a familiar tone that was decidedly novel and refreshing; and he felt that it was a great privilege to sit at meat with these blithe spirits. Commercial travellers, he now realized, were more like the strolling players, the wandering knights, the cloaked riders approaching lonely inns at night, than any other beings he had met out of books. It was with the severest self-denial that he resisted an impulse to invite them all to visit him at Ardsley or to use his house in Fifth Avenue whenever they pleased. When the man nearest him, who was having a second plate of corn-cakes and syrup, casually inquired his “line,” Ardmore experienced a moment of real shame, but remembering the jug he had acquired in the night, he replied,—

“Crockery.”

“Mine’s drugs. Do you know Billy Gallop?—he’s in your line.”

“Should say I did,” replied Ardmore unhesitatingly. “I took supper with him in Philadelphia Sunday night.”

“How’s trade?”

“Bully,” replied Ardmore, reaching for the syrup. “I broke my record yesterday.”

The drug man turned to listen to a discussion of the row between Governors Osborne and Dangerfield precipitated by one of the company who had fortified himself with a newspaper, and Ardmore also gave ear.

“Whatever did happen at New Orleans,” declared a Maiden Lane jewellery representative, “you can be quite sure that Dangerfield won’t get the hot end of the poker. I’ve seen him, right here at Raleigh, and he has all the marks of a fighting man. He’d strip at two hundred, and he’s six in his socks.”

“Pshaw! Those big fellows are all meat and no muscle,” retorted the drug man. “I doubt if there’s any fight in him. Now Osborne’s a different product—a tall, lean cuss, but active as a cat. A man to be governor of South Carolina has got to have the real stuff in him. If it comes to a show-down you’ll see Dangerfield duck and run.”

This discussion was continued at length, greatly to Ardmore’s delight, for he felt that in this way he was being brought at once into touch with Miss Dangerfield, now domiciled somewhere in this town, and to whom he expected to be properly introduced just as soon as he could devise some means to that end. As he had not read the newspapers, he did not know what the row was all about, but he instinctively aligned himself on the Dangerfield side. The Osbornes were, he felt, an inferior race, and he inwardly resented the imputations upon Governor Dangerfield’s courage.

“I wonder if the governor’s back yet?” asked one man.

“The morning paper says not, but he’s expected to-day,” replied the man with the newspaper.

“About the first thing he’ll have to do will be to face the question of arresting Appleweight. I was in Columbia the other day, and everybody was talking of the case. They say”—and the speaker waited for the fullest attention of his hearers—“they say Osborne ain’t none too anxious to have Appleweight arrested on his side of the line.”

“Why not?” demanded Ardmore.

“Well, you hear all kinds of things. It was only whispered down there, but they say Osborne was a little too thick with the Appleweight crowd before he was elected governor. He was their attorney, and they were a bad lot for any man to be attorney for. But they haven’t caught Appleweight yet.”

“Where’s he hiding? don’t the authorities know?”

“Oh, he’s up there in the hills on the state line. His home is as much on one side as the other. He spends a good deal of time in Kildare.”

“Kildare?” asked Ardmore, startled at the word.

“Yes, it’s the county seat, what there is of it. I hope you never make that town?” and the inquirer bent a commiserating glance upon Ardmore.

“Well, they use jugs there, I know that!” declared Ardmore; whereat the table roared. The unanimity of their applause warmed his heart, though he did not know why they laughed.

“You handle crockery?” asked a man from the end of the table. “Well, I guess Dilwell County consumes a few gross of jugs all right. But you’d better be careful not to whisper jugs too loud here. There’s usually a couple of revenue men around town.”

They all went together to the office, where they picked up their sample cases and sallied forth for a descent upon the Raleigh merchants; and Ardmore, thus reminded that he was in the crockery business, and that he had a sample in his room, sat down under a tree on the sidewalk at the inn door to consider what he should do with his little brown jug. It had undoubtedly been intended for Governor Dangerfield, who was supposed to be on the train he had himself taken from Atlanta to Raleigh. There had been, in fact, two jugs, but one of them he had tossed back into the hands of the man who had pursued the train at Kildare. Ardmore smoked his pipe and meditated, trying to determine which jug he had tossed back; and after long deliberation, he slapped his knee, and said aloud,—

“I gave him the wrong one, by jing!”

The boy had said that his offering contained buttermilk, a beverage which Ardmore knew was affected by eccentric people for their stomach’s sake. He had sniffed the other jug, and it contained, undeniably, an alcoholic liquid of some sort.

Jugs had not figured prominently in Ardmore’s domestic experiences; but as he sat under the tree on the curb before the Guilford House he wondered, as many other philosophers have wondered, why a jug is so incapable of innocency! A bottle, while suggestive, is not inherently wicked; but a jug is the symbol of joyous sin. Even the soberest souls, who frown at the mention of a bottle, smile tolerantly when a jug is suggested. Jugs of many centuries are assembled in museums, and round them the ethnologist reconstructs extinct races of men; and yet even science and history, strive they never so sadly, cannot wholly relieve the jug of its cheery insouciance. A bottle of inferior liquor may be dressed forth enticingly, and alluringly named; but there’s no disguising the jug; its genial shame cannot be hidden. There are pleasant places in America where, if one deposit a half-dollar and a little brown jug behind a certain stone, or on the shady side of a blackberry bush, jug and coin will together disappear between sunset and sunrise; but lo! the jug, filled and plugged with a corn-cob, will return alone mysteriously, in contravention of the statutes in such cases made and provided. Too rare for glass this fluid, which bubbles out of the southern hills with as little guilt in its soul as the brooks beside which it comes into being! But, lest he be accused of aiding and abetting crime against the majesty of the law, this chronicler hastens to say that on a hot day in the harvest field, honest water, hidden away in a little brown jug in the fence corner, acquires a quality and imparts a delight that no mug of crystal or of gold can yield.

As Mr. Ardmore pondered duty and the jug a tall man in shabby corduroy halted near by and inspected him carefully. Mr. Ardmore, hard upon his pipe, had not noticed him, somewhat, it seemed, to the stranger’s vexation. He patrolled the sidewalk before the inn, hoping to attract Ardmore’s attention, but finding that the young man’s absorption continued, he presently dropped into a neighbouring chair under the maple tree.

“Good-morning,” said Ardmore pleasantly.

The man nodded but did not speak. He was examining Ardmore with a pair of small, shrewd gray eyes. In his hands he held a crumpled bit of brown paper that looked like a telegram.

“Well, I reckon you jest got to town this mornin’, young fella.”

“Yes, certainly,” Ardmore replied promptly. He had never been addressed in quite this fashion before, but it was all in keeping with his new destiny, and he was immediately interested in the stranger, who was well on in middle age, with a rough grizzled beard, and a soft hat, once black, that now struggled for a compromise tint between yellow and green.

“Ever been hyeh befo’?”

“Never; but I’m crazy about the place, and I’ll be seen here a good deal hereafter.”

Ardmore produced his cigar-case and extended it to the stranger. The man, awed by the splendour of the case, accepted a cigar a little gingerly.

“Drummer, I reckon?”

“Commercial traveller, we prefer to be designated,” replied Ardmore, with dignity.

“I guess drummer’s good enough down hyeh. What y’u carry?”

“Jugs. I’m in the jug business. Never had any business but jugs.”

The man paused in lighting his cigar, stared at Ardmore over the flaming match, drew the fire into the cigar several times, then settled back with his hands in his pockets.

“Full ’r empty?”

“The jugs? Oh, empty jugs; but it’s no affair of mine what becomes of the jugs afterwards.”

“Y’u likely got samples with y’u?”

“Well, not many. You see my line is so well known I don’t have to carry samples any more. The trade knows our goods.”

“Stop at Kildare on the way up?” and the stranger looked about guardedly.

“Certainly, my friend, I always ‘make’ Kildare,” replied Ardmore, using a phrase he had acquired at breakfast.

“Train runs through the’ pretty late at night?”

“Beastly. But I hardly ever sleep, anyhow. A man in my splendid health doesn’t need sleep. It’s a rotten waste of time.”

Silence for several minutes; then the stranger leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees, and said in a low tone,—

“I got a telegram hyeh says y’u got a jug thet y’u ain’t no right t’ last night at Kildare. I want thet jug, young fella.”

“Now that’s very unfortunate. Ordinarily I should be delighted, but I really couldn’t give away my Kildare jug. Now if it was one of my other jugs—even my Omaha jug or my dear old Louisville jug—I shouldn’t hesitate a minute, but that old Kildare jug! My dear man, you don’t know what you ask!”

“Y’ll give me thet jug, or it’ll be the worse for y’u. Y’u ain’t in thet game, young fella.”

“Not in it! You don’t know whom you are addressing. I’m not only in the game, but I’m in to the finish,” declared Ardmore, sitting upright in his chair. “You’ve got the wrong idea, my friend, if you think you can intimidate me. That jug was given me by a friend, a very old and dear friend——”

“A friend of yourn!”

The keen little gray eyes were blinking rapidly.

“One of the best friends I ever had in this world,” and Ardmore’s face showed feeling. “He and I charged side by side through the bloodiest battles of our Civil War. I will cheerfully give you my watch, or money in any sum, but the jug—I will part with my life first! And now,” concluded Ardmore, “while I should be glad to continue this conversation, my duties call me elsewhere.”

As he rose, the man stood quickly at his side, menacingly.

“Give me thet jug, or I’ll shoot y’u right hyeh in the street.”

“No, you wouldn’t do that, Old Corduroy. I can see that you are kind and good, and you wouldn’t shoot down an unarmed man. Besides, it would muss up the street.”

“Y’u took thet jug from my brother by lyin’ to ’im. He’s telegraphed me to git it, and I’m a-goin’ to do it.”

“Your brother sent you? It was nice of him to ask you to call on me. Why, I’ve known your brother intimately for years.”

“Knowed my brother?” and for the first time the man really seemed to doubt himself. “Wheh did y’u know Bill?”

“We roomed together at Harvard, that’s how I know him, if you force me to it! We’re both Hasty Pudding men. Now if you try to bulldoze me further, I’ll slap your wrists. So there!”

Ardmore entered the hotel deliberately, climbed to his room, and locked the door. Then he seized the little brown jug, drew the stopper, and poured out a tumblerful of clear white fluid. He took a swallow, and shuddered as the fiery liquid seemed instantly to cause every part of his being to tingle. He wiped the tears from his eyes and sat down. The corn-cob stopper had fallen to the floor, and he picked it up and examined it carefully. It had been fitted tightly into the mouth of the jug by the addition of a bit of calico, and he fingered it for a moment with a grin on his face. He was, considering his tranquil past, making history rapidly, and he wished that Griswold, whom he imagined safely away on his law business at Richmond, could see him now embarked upon a serious adventure, that had already brought him into collision with a seemingly sane man who had threatened him with death. Griswold had been quite right about their woeful incapacity for rising to emergencies, but the episode of the jugs at Kildare was exactly the sort of thing they had discussed time and time again, and it promised well. His throat was raw, as though burned with acid, and it occurred to him for an anxious moment that perhaps he had imbibed a poison intended for the governor.

He was about to replace the cob stopper when, to his astonishment, it broke in his fingers, and out fell a carefully folded slip of paper. He carried it to the window and opened it, finding that it was an ordinary telegraph blank on which were written in clear round characters these words:

The Appleweight crowd never done you harm. If you have any of them arrested you will be shot down on your own doorstep.

When Mr. Thomas Ardmore had read this message half a dozen times with increasing satisfaction he folded it carefully and put it away in his pocket-book.

Taking half a sheet of notepaper he wrote as follows:

Appleweight and his gang are cowards. Within ten days those that have not been hanged will be in jail at Kildare.

He studied the phraseology critically, and then placed the paper in the cob stopper, whose halves he tied together with a bit of twine. As the jug stood on the table it was, to all appearances, exactly as it had been when delivered to Ardmore on the rear of the train at Kildare, and he was thoroughly well pleased with himself. He changed the blue scarf with which he had begun the day for one of purple with gold bars, and walked up the street toward the state house.

This venerable edifice, meekly reposing amid noble trees, struck agreeably upon Ardmore’s fancy. Here was government enthroned in quiet dignity, as becomes a venerable commonwealth, wearing its years like a veteran who has known war and tumult, but finds at last tranquillity and peace. He experienced a feeling of awe, without quite knowing it, as he strolled up the walk, climbed the steps to the portico and turned to look back from the shadow of the pillars. He had never but once before visited an American public building—the New York city hall—and he felt that now, indeed, he had turned a corner and entered upon a new and strange world. He had watched army manœuvres abroad with about the same attention that he gave to a ballet, and with a like feeling of beholding a show contrived for the amusement of spectators; but there was not even a policeman here to represent arsenals and bayonets. The only minion of government in sight was the languid operator of a lawn-mower, which rattled and hummed cheerily in the shadow of the soldiers’ monument. There was something fine about a people who, as he learned from the custodian, would not shake down these historic walls obedient to the demands of prosperity and growth, but sent increased business to find lodgment elsewhere. He ascended to the toy-like legislative chambers, where flags of nation and state hung side by side, and where the very seats and desks of the law-makers spoke of other times and manners.

Mr. Ardmore, feeling that he should now be about his business, sought the governor’s office, where a secretary, who seemed harassed by the cares of his position, confirmed Ardmore’s knowledge of the governor’s absence.

“I didn’t wish to see the governor on business,” explained Ardmore pleasantly, leaning upon his stick with an air of leisure. “He and my father were old friends, and I always promised my father that I would never pass through Raleigh without calling on Governor Dangerfield.”

“That is too bad,” remarked the young man sympathetically, though with a preoccupation that was eloquent of larger affairs.

“Could you tell me whether any members of the governor’s family are at home?”

“Oh yes; Mrs. Dangerfield and Miss Jerry are at the mansion.”

“Miss Jerry?”

“Miss Geraldine. We all call her Miss Jerry in North Carolina.”

“Oh yes; to be sure. Let me see; it’s over this way to the mansion, isn’t it?” inquired Ardmore.

“No; out the other end of the building—and turn to your right. You can’t miss it.”

The room was quiet, the secretary a young man of address and intelligence. Here, without question, was the place for Ardmore to discharge his business and be quit of it; but having at last snatched a commission from fleeting opportunity, it was not for him to throw it to another man. As he opened the door to leave, the secretary arrested him.

“Oh, Mr.—pardon me, but did you come in from the south this morning?”

“Yes; I came up on the Tar Heel Express from Atlanta.”

“To be sure. Of course you didn’t sit up all night? There’s some trouble brewing around Kildare. I thought you might have heard something, but, of course, you couldn’t have been awake at two o’clock in the morning?”

The secretary was so anxious to acquit him of any knowledge of the situation at Kildare that it seemed kindest to tell him nothing. The secretary’s face lost its anxiety for a moment, and he smiled.

“The governor has an old friend and admirer up there who always puts a jug of fresh buttermilk on board when he passes through. The governor was expected home this morning, and I thought maybe——”

“You’re positive it’s always buttermilk, are you?” asked Ardmore, with a grin.

“Certainly,” replied the secretary, with dignity. “Governor Dangerfield’s sentiments as to the liquor traffic are well known.”

“Of course, all the world knows that. But I’m afraid all jugs look alike to me; but then, the fact is I’m in the jug business myself. Good-morning.”

The governor’s mansion was easily found, and having walked about the neighbourhood until his watch marked eleven, Ardmore entered the grounds and rang the bell at the front door.

Once within, the air of domestic peace, the pictures on the walls, a whip and a felt hat with a blue band on the hall table, and a book on a chair in the drawing-room, turned down to mark the absent reader’s place, rebuked him for his impudence. If he had known just how to escape he would have done so; but the maid who admitted him had said that Miss Dangerfield was at home, and had gone in search of her with Ardmore’s card. He deserved to be sent to jail for entering a gentleman’s house in this way. He realized now, when it was too late, that he ought to have brought letters to one of the banks and been introduced to the Dangerfields by some gentleman of standing, if he wished to know them. The very portraits on the walls, the photographs on the mantel and table, frowned coldly upon him. The foundations of his character were set in sand; he knew that, because he had found it so easy to lie, and he had been told in his youth that one sin paved the way for another. He would take the earliest train for Ardsley and bury himself there for the remainder of his days. He had hardly formed this resolution when a light step sounded in the hall, and Miss Geraldine Dangerfield stood at the threshold. His good resolutions went down like a house of cards.

“Miss Dangerfield,” he began, “I had the pleasure of meeting your father in New Orleans the other day, and as I was passing through town unexpectedly, I thought I should give myself the pleasure of calling on him. He said that in case I found him absent I might call upon you. In fact, he wrote a line on a card for me to present, but I stupidly left it at my hotel.”

They faced each other in the dim, cool room for what seemed to him endless centuries. She was much younger than he had imagined; but her eyes were blue, just as he remembered them, and her abundant light hair curled away from her forehead in pretty waves, and was tied to-day with a large bow of blue ribbon. For an instant she seemed puzzled or mystified, but her blue eyes regarded him steadily. The very helplessness of her youth, the simplicity of her blue linen gown, the girlish ribbon in her hair, proclaimed him blackguard.

“Won’t you please sit down, Mr. Ardmore?”

And when they were seated there was another pause, during which the blue eyes continued to take account of him, and he fingered his tie, feeling sure that there was something wrong with it.

“It’s warm, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is. It’s a way summer has, of being mostly warm.”

He was quite sure that she was laughing at him; there was a tinge of irony in the very way in which she pronounced “wa’m,” lingeringly, as though to prolong her contempt for his stupidity in not finding anything better to say.

She had taken the largest chair in the room, and it seemed to hide her away in its shadows, so that she could examine him at her leisure as he sat under a window in the full glare of its light.

“I enjoyed meeting your father so much, Miss Dangerfield. I think we are always likely to be afraid of great men, but your father made me feel at home at once. And he tells such capital stories—I’ve been laughing over them ever since I left New Orleans.”

“Father has quite a reputation for his stories. When did you leave New Orleans, Mr. Ardmore?”

“Sunday night. I stopped in Atlanta a few hours and came on through. What a fine old town Atlanta is! don’t you think so?”

“I certainly do not, Mr. Ardmore. It’s so dreadfully northernized.”

When she said “no’thenized” her intonation gave the word a fine, cutting edge.

“I suppose, Mr. Ardmore, that you saw papa at the luncheon at the Pharos Club in New Orleans?”

“Why, yes, Miss Dangerfield. It was there I met the governor!”

“Are you sure it was there, Mr. Ardmore?”

“Why, I think that was the place. I don’t know my New Orleans as I should, but——”

Ardmore was suddenly conscious that Miss Dangerfield had risen, and that she stood before him, with her fair face the least bit flushed, her blue eyes alight with anger, and that the hands at her sides were clenched nervously.

“My father was not at luncheon at the Pharos Club, Mr. Ardmore. You never saw my father in your life. I know why it is you came here, and if you are not out of that door in one second I shall call the servants and have them throw you out.”

She ceased abruptly and turned to look into the hall where steps sounded.

“Is that you, Jerry?”

“Yes, mamma; I’ll be up in just a minute. Please don’t wait for me. It’s only the man to see about the plumbing.”

The lady who had appeared for an instant at the door went on slowly up the stairs, and the girl held Ardmore silent with her steady eyes until the step died away above.

“I know what you want my father for. Mr. Billings and you are both pursuing him—it’s infamous, outrageous! And it isn’t his fault. I would have you know that my father is an honourable man!”

The bayonets were at his breast: he would ask for mercy.

“Miss Dangerfield, you are quite mistaken about me. I shall leave Raleigh at once, but I don’t want you to think I came here on any errand to injure or annoy your father.”

“You are one of those Ardmores, and Mr. Billings represents you. You thought you could come here and trick me into telling where my father is. But I’m not so easily caught. My mother is ill because of all this trouble, and I must go to her. But first I want to see that you leave this house!”

“Oh, I’m sorry you are in trouble. On my honour, Miss Dangerfield, I know nothing of Billings and his business with your father.”

“I suppose you will deny that you saw Mr. Billings in Atlanta yesterday?”

“Why, no. I can’t exactly——”

“You’d better not! I saw you there talking to him; and I suppose he sent you here to see what you could find out.”

The room whirled a moment as she dealt this staggering blow. Billings, of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, had said that Miss Dangerfield was peppery, but his employment of this trifling term only illustrated his weak command of the English language. It is not pleasant to be pilloried for undreamed-of crimes, and Ardmore’s ears tingled. He must plunge deeper and trust to the gods of chance to save him. He brought himself together with an effort, and spoke so earnestly that the words rang oddly in his own ears.

“Miss Dangerfield, you may call me anything you please, but I am not quite the scoundrel you think me. It’s true that I was not in New Orleans, and I never saw your father in my life. I came to Raleigh on a mission that has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Billings; he did not know I was coming. On the way here a message intended for your father came into my hands. It was thrown on the train at Kildare last night. I had gone out on the platform because the sleeper was hot, and a warning to your father to keep his hands off of Appleweight was given to me. Here it is. It seems to me that there is immediate danger in this, and I want to help you. I want to do anything I can for you. I didn’t come here to pry into your family secrets, Miss Dangerfield, honestly I didn’t!”

She took the piece of paper into her slim little hands and read it, slowly nodding her head, as if the words only confirmed some earlier knowledge of the threat they contained. Then she lifted her head, and her eyes were bright with mirth as Ardmore’s wondering gaze met them.

“Did you get the jug?”

“I got two jugs, to tell the truth; but when they seemed dissatisfied and howled for me to give one back, I threw off the buttermilk.”

“You threw back father’s buttermilk to the man who gave you the applejack? Oh! oh!”

Miss Jerry Dangerfield sat down and laughed; and Ardmore, glad of an opportunity to escape, found his hat and rushed from the house.

CHAPTER V.
MR. ARDMORE OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZED.

“She never did it; she never, never did!”

Mr. Ardmore, from a bench in the State House Park, thus concluded a long reverie. It was late afternoon, and he had forgotten luncheon in his absorption. There was no manner of use in recurring again to that episode of the lonely siding. He had found the girl—indubitably the girl—but not the wink! Miss Jerry Dangerfield was not the winking sort; he was well satisfied on that point, and so thoroughly ashamed into the bargain that he resolved to lead a different life and be very heedful of the cry of the poor in the future. His emotions had never been taxed as to-day, and he hoped that he might never again suffer the torture he had experienced as he waited in the governor’s drawing-room for Miss Dangerfield to appear. After that agony it had been a positive relief to be ordered out of the house. Her anger when she caught him lying about having met her father in New Orleans was superior to any simulated rage he had ever seen on the stage, and no girl with a winking eye would be capable of it. He was not clever; he knew that; but if he had had the brains of a monkey he would not have risked his foolish wits against those of a girl like Geraldine Dangerfield, who had led him into an ambush and then shot him to pieces.

“She threatened to have the servants throw me out!” he groaned. And her slight, tense figure rose before him, and her voice, still the voice of young girlhood, rang in his ears. As she read the threatening message from Kildare he had noted the fineness of her hands, the curve of her fair cheek, the wayward curls on her forehead, and he remembered all these things now, but more than anything else her wrath, the tiny fists, the flashing eyes as she confronted him. As he sat dejectedly on his park bench he was unaware that Miss Geraldine Dangerfield, walking hurriedly through the park on her way from the governor’s mansion to the state house, passed directly behind him. His attitude was so eloquent of despair that it could not have failed to move a much harder heart than that of Miss Dangerfield, yet she made no sign; but a few minutes later the private secretary came out on the steps of the state house, and after a brief survey of the landscape crossed the lawn and called Ardmore by name.

“I beg your pardon, but Miss Dangerfield wished me to say that she’d like to see you for a minute. She’s at the governor’s office.”

A prisoner, sentenced to death, and unexpectedly reprieved with the rope already on his neck, could not experience greater relief than that which brought Mr. Thomas Ardmore to his feet.

“You are sure of it—that there’s no mistake?”

“Certainly not. Miss Dangerfield told me I was to bring you back.”

Enthroned at the secretary’s desk, a mass of papers before her, Miss Geraldine Dangerfield awaited him. He was ready to place his head on the block in sheer contrition for his conduct, but she herself took the initiative, and her tone was wholly amiable.

“This morning, Mr. Ardmore——”

“Oh, please forget this morning!” he pleaded.

“But I was rude to you; I threatened to have you thrown out of the house; and you had come to do us a favour.”

“Miss Dangerfield, I cannot lie to you. You are one of the most difficult persons to lie to that I have ever met. I didn’t come to Raleigh just to warn your father that his life was threatened. I can’t lie to you about that——”

“Then you are a spy?” and Miss Dangerfield started forward in her chair so suddenly that Ardmore dropped his hat.

“No! I am not a spy! I don’t care anything about your father. I never heard of him until yesterday.”

“Well, I like that!” ejaculated Miss Dangerfield.

“Oh, I mean that I wasn’t interested in him—why should I be? I don’t know anything about politics.”

“Neither does father. That’s why he’s governor. If he were a politician he’d be a senator. But”—and she folded her hands and eyed him searchingly—“here’s a lot of telegrams from the sheriff of Dilwell County about that jug. How on earth did you come to get it?”

“Lied, of course. I allowed them to think I was intimately associated in business with the governor, and they began passing me jugs. Then the man who gave the jug with that message in the cork got suspicious, and I dropped the buttermilk jug back to him.”

“You traded buttermilk for moonshine?”

“I shouldn’t exactly call it moonshine. It’s more like dynamite than anything else. I’ve written a reply to the note and put it back in the cork, and I’m going to return it to Kildare.”

“What answer did you make to that infamous effort to intimidate my father?” demanded Miss Dangerfield.

“I told the Appleweight gang that they are a lot of cowards, and that the governor will have them all in jail or hanged within ten days.”

“Splendid! Perfectly splendid! Did you really say that?”

“What else could I do? I knew that that’s what the governor would say—he’d have to say it—so I thought I’d save him the trouble.”

“Where’s the jug now, Mr. Ardmore?”

“In my room at the hotel. The gang must have somebody on guard here. A gentleman who seemed to be one of them called on me this morning, demanding the jug; and if he’s the man I think he is, he’s stolen the little brown jug from my room in the hotel by this time.”

Miss Dangerfield had picked up a spool of red tape, and was unwinding it slowly in her fingers and rewinding it. They were such nice little hands, and so peaceful in their aimless trifling with the tape that he was sure his eyes had betrayed him into imagining she had clenched them in the quiet drawing-room at the mansion. This office, now that its atmosphere enveloped him, was almost as domestic as the house in which she lived. The secretary had vanished, and a Sabbath quiet was on the place. The white inner shutters swung open, affording a charming prospect of the trees, the lawn, and the monument in the park outside. And pleasantest of all, and most soothing to his weary senses, she was tolerating him now; she had even expressed approval of something he had done, and he had never hoped for this. She had not even pressed him to disclose his real purpose in visiting Raleigh, and he prayed that she would not return to this subject, for he had utterly lost the conceit of his own lying gift. Miss Dangerfield threw down the spool of tape and bent toward him gravely.

“Mr. Ardmore, can you keep a secret?”

“Nobody ever tried me with one, but I think I can, Miss Dangerfield,” he murmured humbly.

“Then please stand up.”

And Ardmore rose, a little sheepishly, like a school-boy who fears blame and praise alike. Miss Dangerfield lifted one of the adorable hands solemnly.

“I, acting governor of North Carolina, hereby appoint you my private secretary, and may God have mercy on your soul. You may now sit down, Mr. Secretary.”

“But I thought there was a secretary already. And besides, I don’t write a very good hand,” Ardmore stammered.

“I am just sending Mr. Bassford to Atlanta to find papa. He’s already gone, or will be pretty soon.”

“But I thought your father would be home to-night.”

Miss Dangerfield looked out of the open window upon the park, then into the silent outer hall, to be sure she was not overheard.

“Papa will not be at home to-night, or probably to-morrow night, or the night afterward. I’m not sure we’ll wait next Christmas dinner for papa.”

“But, of course, you know where he is! It isn’t possible——” and Ardmore stared in astonishment into Miss Dangerfield’s tranquil blue eyes.

“It is possible. Papa is ducking his official responsibilities. That’s what’s the matter with papa! And I guess they’re enough to drive any man into the woods. Just look at all this!”

Miss Dangerfield rested one of those diminutive hands of hers on the pile of documents, letters, and telegrams the secretary had left behind him; with a nod of the head she indicated the governor’s desk in the inner room, and it too was piled high with documents.

“I supposed,” faltered Ardmore, “that in the absence of the governor the lieutenant-governor would act. I think I read that once.”

“You must have read it wrong, Mr. Ardmore. In North Carolina, in the absence of the governor, I am governor! Don’t look so shocked; when I say I, I mean I—me! Do you understand what I said?”

“I heard what you said, Miss Dangerfield.”

“I mean what I said, Mr. Ardmore. I have taken you into my confidence because I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. I don’t want to know anything about you. I’d be ashamed to ask anybody I know to help me. The people of North Carolina must never know that the governor is absent during times of great public peril. And if you are afraid, Mr. Ardmore, you had better not accept the position.”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you,” blurted Ardmore.

“I’m not asking you—I would not ask you—to do anything for me. I am asking you to do it for the Old North State. Our relations, Mr. Ardmore, will not be social, but purely official. Do you accept the terms?”

“I do; and I warn you now that I shall never resign.”

“I have heard papa say that life is short and the tenure of office uncertain. I can remove you at any time I please. Now do you understand that this is a serious business? There’s likely to be a lot of trouble, and no time for asking questions, so when I say it’s so it’s so.”

“It’s so,” repeated Ardmore docilely.

“Now, here’s the sheriff at Kildare, on our side of the line, who writes to say that he is powerless to catch Appleweight. He’s afraid of the dark, that man! You see, the grand jury in Dilwell County—that’s Kildare, you know—has indicted Appleweight as a common outlaw, but the grand jurors were all friends of Appleweight, and the indictment was only to satisfy law-and-order sentiment and appease the Woman’s Civic League of Raleigh. Now, papa doesn’t—I mean I don’t want to offend those Appleweight people by meddling in this business. Papa wants Governor Osborne to arrest Appleweight in South Carolina; but I don’t believe Governor Osborne will dare do anything about it. Now, Mr. Ardmore, I am not going to have papa called a coward by anybody, particularly by South Carolina people, after what Governor Osborne said of our state.”

“Why, what did he say?”

“He said in a speech at Charleston last winter that no people who fry their meat can ever amount to anything, and he meant us! I can never forgive him for that; besides, his daughter is the stuck-upest thing! And I’d like Barbara Osborne to tell me how she got into the Colonial Dames, and what call she has to be inspector-general of the Granddaughters of the Mexican War; for I’ve heard my grandfather Dangerfield say many a time that old Colonel Osborne and his South Carolina regiment never did go outside of Charleston until the war was over and the American army had come back home.”

One tiny fist this time! Ardmore was sure of it. Her indignation against the Osbornes was so sincere, the pouting petulance to which it diminished so like a child’s, and the gravity of the offence so novel in his simple experiences, that Ardmore was bound in chains before her speech was finished. The little drawl with which she concluded gave heightened significance to her last three words, so that it seemed that all the veterans of the war with Mexico trudged by, bearing the flag of North Carolina and no other banner.

“Governor Osborne is a contemptible ruffian,” declared Ardmore, with deep feeling.

Miss Dangerfield nodded judicial approval, and settled back in her chair the better to contemplate her new secretary, and said,—

“I’m a Daughter of the Confederacy and a Colonial Dame. What are you?”

“I suppose you’ll never speak to me again; papa sent three expensive substitutes to the Civil War.”

“Three! Horrible!”

“Two of them deserted, and one fell into the Potomac on his way south and was drowned. I guess they didn’t do you folks much harm.”

“We’ll forgive you that; but what did your ancestors do in the Revolution?”

“I’m ashamed to say that my great-grandfather was a poor guesser. He died during Washington’s second administration still believing the Revolution a failure.”

“Do you speak of the war of 1861 as the Rebellion or as the war between the states? I advise you to be careful what you say,” and Miss Jerry Dangerfield was severe.

“I don’t believe I ever mentioned it either way, so I’m willing to take your word for it.”

“The second form is correct, Mr. Ardmore. When well-bred Southern people say Rebellion they refer to the uprising of 1776 against the British oppressor.”

“Good. I’m sure I shall never get them mixed. Now that you are the governor, what are you going to do first about Appleweight?”

“I’ve written—that is to say, papa wrote before he went away—a strong letter to Governor Osborne, complaining that Appleweight was hiding in South Carolina and running across the state line to rob and murder people in North Carolina. Papa told Governor Osborne that he must break up the Appleweight crowd, or he would do something about it himself. It’s a splendid letter; you would think that even a coward like Governor Osborne would do something after getting such a letter.”

“Didn’t he answer the letter?”

“Answer it? He never got it! Papa didn’t send it; that’s the reason! Papa’s the kindest man in the world, and he must have been afraid of hurting Governor Osborne’s feelings. He wrote the letter, expecting to send it, but when he went off to New Orleans he told Mr. Bassford to hold it till he got back. He had even signed it—you can read it if you like.”

It was undoubtedly a vigorous epistle, and Ardmore felt the thrill of its rhetorical sentences as he read. The official letter paper on which it was typewritten, and the signature of William Dangerfield, governor of North Carolina, affixed in a bold hand, were sobering in themselves. The dignity and authority of one of the sovereign American states was represented here, and he handed the paper back to Miss Dangerfield as tenderly as though it had been the original draft of Magna Charta.

“It’s a corker, all right.”

“I don’t much like the way it ends. It says, right here”—and she bent forward and pointed to the place under criticism—“it says, ‘Trusting to your sense of equity, and relying upon a continuance of the traditional friendship between your state and mine, I am, sir, awaiting your reply, very respectfully, your obedient servant.’ Now, I wouldn’t trust to his sense of anything, and that traditional friendship business is just fluffy nonsense, and I wouldn’t be anybody’s obedient servant. I decided when I wasn’t more than fifteen years old, with a lot of other girls in our school, that when we got married we’d never say obey, and we never have, though only three of our class are married yet, but we’re all engaged.”

“Engaged?”

“Of course; we’re engaged. I’m engaged to Rutherford Gillingwater, the adjutant-general of this state. You couldn’t be my private secretary if I wasn’t engaged; it wouldn’t be proper.”

The earth was only a flying cinder on which he strove for a foothold. She had announced her engagement to be married with a cool finality that took his breath away; and not realizing the chaos into which she had flung him, she returned demurely to the matter of the letter.

“We can’t change that letter, because it’s signed close to the ‘obedient servant,’ and there’s no room. But I’m going to put it into the typewriter and add a postscript.”

She sat down before the machine and inexpertly rolled the sheet into place; then, with Ardmore helping her to find the keys, she wrote:

I demand an imediate reply.

“Demand and immediate are both business words. Are you sure there’s only one m in immediate? All right, if you know. I reckon a postscript like that doesn’t need to be signed. I’ll just put ‘W. D.’ there with papa’s stub pen, so it will look really fierce. Now, you’re the secretary; you copy it in the copying press and I’ll address the envelope.”

“Don’t you have to put the state seal on it?” asked Ardmore.

“Of course not. You have to get that from the secretary of state, and I don’t like him; he has such funny whiskers, and calls me little girl. Besides, you never put the seal on a letter; it’s only necessary for official documents.”

She bade him give the letter plenty of time to copy, and talked cheerfully while he waited. She spoke of her friends, as Southern people have a way of doing, as though every one must of course know them—a habit that is illuminative of that delightful Southern neighbourliness that knits the elect of a commonwealth into a single family, that neither time and tide nor sword and brand can destroy. Ardmore’s humility increased as the names of the great and good of North Carolina fell from her lips; for they were as strange to him as an Abyssinian dynasty. It was perfectly clear that he was not of her world, and that his own was insignificant and undistinguished compared with hers. His spirit was stayed somewhat by the knowledge that he, and not the execrable Gillingwater, had been chosen as her coadjutor in the present crisis. His very ignorance of the royal families of North Carolina, which she recited so glibly, and the fact that he was unknown at the capital, had won him official recognition, and it was for him now to prove his worth. The political plot into which he had been most willingly drawn pleased him greatly; it was superior to his fondest dream of adventure, and now, moreover, he had what he never had before, a definite purpose in life, which was to be equal to the task to which this intrepid girl assigned him.

“Well, that’s done,” said Miss Jerry, when the letter, still damp from the copy-press, had been carefully sealed and stamped. “Governor Osborne will get it in the morning. I think maybe we’d better telegraph him that it’s coming.”

“I don’t see much use in that, when he’ll get the letter first thing to-morrow,” Ardmore suggested. “It costs money to telegraph, and you must have an economical administration.”

“The good of it would be to keep him worried and make him very angry. And if he told Barbara Osborne about it, it would make her angry, too, and maybe she wouldn’t sleep any all night, the haughty thing! Hand me one of those telegraph blanks.”

The message, slowly thumped out on the typewriter, and several times altered and copied, finally read:

Raleigh, N. C.

The Honourable Charles Osborne,
Governor of South Carolina,
Columbia, S. C.:

Have written by to-night’s mail in Appleweight matter. Your vacillating course not understood.

William Dangerfield,
Governor of North Carolina.

“I reckon that will make him take notice,” and Miss Jerry viewed her work with approval. “And now, Mr. Ardmore, here’s a telegram from Mr. Billings which I don’t understand. See if you know what it means.”

Ardmore chuckled delightedly as he read:

Cannot understand your outrageous conduct in bond matter. If payment is not made June first your state’s credit is ruined. Where is Foster? Answer to Atlanta.

George P. Billings.

“I don’t see what’s so funny about that! Mr. Bassford was walking the floor with that message when I came to the office. He said papa and the state were both going to be ruined. There’s a quarter of a million dollars to be paid on bonds that are coming due June first, and there isn’t any money to pay them with. That’s what he said. And Mr. Foster is the state treasurer, and he’s gone fishing.”

“Fishing?”

“He left word he had gone fishing. Mr. Foster and papa don’t get along together, and Mr. Bassford says he’s run off just to let those bonds default and bring disgrace on papa and the state.”

Ardmore’s grin broadened. The Appleweight case was insignificant compared with this new business with which he was confronted. He was vaguely conscious that bonds have a way of coming due, and that there is such a thing as credit in the world, and that it is something that must not be trifled with; but these considerations did not weigh heavily with him. For the first time in his uneventful life vengeance unsheathed her sword in his tranquil soul. Billings had always treated him with contempt, as a negligible factor in the Ardmore millions, and here at last was an opportunity to balance accounts.

“I will show you how to fix Billings. Just let me have one of those blanks.”

And after much labour, and with occasional suggestions from Miss Jerry, the following message was presently ready for the wires:

Your famous imputation upon my honour and that of the state shall meet with the treatment it deserves. I defy you to do your worst. If you come into North Carolina or bring legal proceedings for the collection of your bonds I will fill you so full of buckshot that forty men will not be strong enough to carry you to your grave.

“Isn’t that perfectly grand!” murmured Jerry admiringly. “But I thought your family and the Bronx Loan and Trust Company were the same thing. That’s what Rutherford Gillingwater told me once.”

“You are quite right. Billings works for us. Before I came of age he used to make me ask his permission when I wanted to buy a new necktie, and when I was in college he was always fussing over my bills, and humiliating me when he could.”

“But you mustn’t make him so mad that he will cause papa trouble and bring disgrace on our administration.”

“Don’t you worry about Billings. He is used to having people get down on their knees to him, and the change will do him good. When he gets over his first stroke of apoplexy he will lock himself in a dark room and begin to think hard about what to do. He usually does all the bluffing, and I don’t suppose anybody ever talked to him like this telegram in all his life. Where is this man Foster?”

“Just fishing; that’s what Mr. Bassford said, but he didn’t know where. Father was going to call a special session of the legislature to investigate him, and he was so angry that he ran off so that papa would have to look after those bonds himself. Then this Appleweight case came up, and that worried papa a great deal. Here’s his call for the special session. He told Mr. Bassford to hold that, too, until he came back from New Orleans.”

Ardmore read Governor Dangerfield’s summons to the legislature with profound interest. It was signed, but the space for the date on which the law-makers were to assemble had been left blank.

“It looks to me as though you had the whole state in your hands, Miss Dangerfield. But I don’t believe we ought to call the special session just yet. It would be sure to injure the state’s credit, and it will be a lot more fun to catch Foster. I wonder if he took all the state money with him.”

“Mr. Bassford said he didn’t know and couldn’t find out, for the clerks in the treasurer’s office wouldn’t tell him a single thing.”

“One should never deal with subordinates,” remarked Ardmore sagely. “Deal with the principals—I heard a banker say that once, and he was a man who knew everything. Besides, it will be more fun to attend to the bonds ourselves.”

He seemed lost in reverie for several minutes, and she asked with some impatience what he was studying about.

“I was trying to think of a word they use when the government has war or any kind of trouble. It’s something about a corpse, but I can’t remember it.”

“A corpse? How perfectly horrid! Can it be possible, Mr. Ardmore, that you mean the writ of habeas corpus?” The twinkle in his eye left her unable to determine whether his ignorance was real, or assumed for his own amusement.

“That’s it,” beamed Ardmore. “We’ve got to suspend it if worst comes to worst. Then you can put anybody you like into a dungeon, and nobody can get him out—not for a million years.”

“I wonder where they keep it?” asked Jerry. “It must be here somewhere. Perhaps it’s in the safe.”

“I don’t think it’s a thing, like a lemon, or a photograph, or a bottle of ink; it’s a document, like a Thanksgiving proclamation, and you order out the militia, and the soldiers have to leave their work and assemble at their armouries, and it’s all very serious, and somebody is likely to get shot.”

“I don’t think it would be nice to shoot people,” said Jerry. “That would do the administration a terrible lot of harm.”

“Of course we won’t resort to extreme measures unless we are forced to it. And then, after we have exhausted all the means at our command, we can call on the president to send United States troops.”

He was proud of his knowledge, which had lingered in his subconsciousness from a review of the military power of the states which he had heard once from Griswold, who knew about such matters; but he was brought to earth promptly enough.

“Mr. Ardmore, how dare you suggest that we call United States troops into North Carolina! Don’t you know that would be an insult to every loyal son of this state? I should have you know that the state of North Carolina is big enough to take care of herself, and if any president of the United States sends any troops down here while I’m running this office, he’ll find that, while our people will gladly die, they never surrender.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that by what I said,” pleaded Ardmore, frightened almost to tears. “Of course, we’ve got our own troops, and we’ll get through all our business without calling for help. I shouldn’t any more call on the president than I’d call on the Czar of Russia.”

She seemed satisfied with this disclaimer, and produced a diary in which Governor Dangerfield had noted his appointments far into the future.

“We’ll have to break a lot of engagements for papa. Here’s a speech he promised to make at Wilmington at the laying of the corner-stone of the new orphan asylum. That’s to-morrow, and papa can’t be there, so we’ll send a telegram of congratulation to be read instead. Then he was to preside at a convention of the Old Fiddlers’ Association at Goldsboro the next day, and he can’t do that. I guess we’d better telegraph and say how sorry he is to be delayed by important official business. And here’s—why, I had forgotten about the National Guard encampment, that’s beginning now.”

“Do you mean the state militia?” Ardmore inquired.

“Why, of course. They’re having their annual encampment over in Azbell County at Camp Dangerfield—they always name the camp for the governor—and father was to visit the camp next Saturday for his annual inspection. That’s near your county, where your farm is; didn’t you know that?”

Ardmore was humble, as he always was when his ignorance was exposed, but his face brightened joyfully.

“You mustn’t break that engagement. Those troops ought to be inspected. Inspecting his troops is one of the most important things a governor has to do. It’s just like a king or an emperor. I’ve seen Emperor William and King Humbert inspect their soldiers, and they go galloping by like mad, with all the soldiers saluting, and it’s perfectly bully. And then there have to be manœuvres, to see whether the troops know how to fight or not, and forced marches and sham battles.”

“Papa always speaks to the men,” suggested Jerry, a little abashed by the breadth and splendour of Ardmore’s knowledge. His comparison of the North Carolina militia with the armies of Europe pleased her.

“I think the ladies of the royal family inspect the troops too, sometimes,” he continued. “The queens are always honorary colonels of regiments, and present them with flags, which is a graceful thing to do.”

“Colonel Gillingwater never told me that, and he’s the adjutant-general of the state and ought to know.”

“What’s he colonel of?” asked Ardmore gloomily.

“He was colonel in the Spanish war, or was going to be, but he got typhoid fever, and so he couldn’t go to Cuba, and papa appointed him adjutant-general as a reward for his services; but everybody calls him Colonel just the same.”

“It looks like a pretty easy way of getting a title,” murmured Ardmore. “I had typhoid fever once, and nearly died, and all my hair came out.”

“You oughtn’t to speak that way of my fiancé. It’s quite impertinent in a mere private secretary to talk so.”

“I beg your pardon. I forgot that you were engaged. You’ll have to go to Camp Dangerfield and inspect the troops yourself, and they would a lot rather have you inspect them than have your father do it.”

“You mustn’t say things like that! I thought I told you your appointment carried no social recognition. You mustn’t talk to me as though I was a girl you really know——”

“But there’s no use of making-believe such things when I do know you!”

“Not the least little tiny bit, you don’t! Do you suppose, if you were a gentleman I knew and had been introduced to, I would be talking to you here in papa’s office?”

“But I pretend to be a gentleman; you certainly wouldn’t be talking to me if you thought me anything else.”

“I can’t even discuss the matter, Mr. Ardmore. A gentleman wouldn’t lie to a lady.”

“But if you know I’m a liar, why are you telling me these secrets and asking me to help you play being governor?” and Ardmore, floundering hopelessly, marvelled at her more and more.

“That’s exactly the reason—because you came poking up to my house and told me that scandalous fib about meeting papa in New Orleans. Mr. Bassford is a beautiful liar; that’s why he’s papa’s secretary; but you are a much more imaginative sort of liar than Mr. Bassford. He can only lie to callers about papa being engaged, or write encouraging letters to people who want appointments which papa never expects to make; but you lie because you can’t help it. Now, if you’re satisfied, you can take those telegrams down to the telegraph office; and you’d better mail that letter to Governor Osborne yourself, for fear the man who’s running the lawn-mower will forget to come for it.”

The roll of drums and the cry of a bugle broke in upon the peace of the late afternoon. Miss Jerry rose with an exclamation and ran out into the broad portico of the state house. Several battalions of a tide-water regiment, passing through town on their way to Camp Dangerfield, had taken advantage of a wait in Raleigh to disembark and show themselves at the capital. They were already halted and at parade rest at the side of the street, and a mounted officer in khaki, galloping madly into view, seemed to focus the eyes of the gathering crowd. He was a gallant figure of a man; his mount was an animal that realized Job’s ideal of a battle-horse; the soldiers presented arms as the horseman rode the line. Miss Dangerfield waved her handkerchief, standing eagerly on tiptoe to make her salutation carry as far as possible.

“Who is that?” asked Ardmore, with sinking spirit.

“Why, Rutherford Gillingwater, of course.”

“Fours right!” rang the command a moment later, and the militiamen tramped off to the station.

It was then that Ardmore, watching the crowd disperse at the edge of the park, saw his caller of the morning striding rapidly across the street. Ardmore started forward, then checked himself so suddenly that Miss Jerry Dangerfield turned to him inquiringly.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded.

“Nothing. I have been robbed, as I hoped to be. Over there, on the sidewalk, beyond the girl in the pink sunbonnet, goes my little brown jug. That lank individual with the shabby hat has lifted it out of my room at the hotel, just as I thought he would.”

CHAPTER VI.
MR. GRISWOLD FORSAKES THE ACADEMIC LIFE.

Miss Osborne had asked Griswold to await the outcome of the day, and, finding himself thus possessed of a vacation, he indulged his antiquarian instincts by exploring Columbia. The late afternoon found him in the lovely cathedral churchyard, where an aged negro, tending the graves of an illustrious family, leaned upon his spade and recited the achievements and virtues of the dead. Men who had been law-makers, others who had led valiantly to battle, and ministers of the Prince of Peace, mingled their dust together; and across the crisp hedges a robin sang above Timrod’s grave.

As the shadows lengthened, Griswold walked back to the hotel, where he ate supper, then, calling for a horse, he rode through the streets in a mood of more complete alienation than he had ever experienced in a foreign country; yet the very scents of the summer night, stealing out from old gardens, the voices that reached him from open doorways, spoke of home.

As he reached the outskirts of town and rode on toward the governor’s mansion, his mood changed, and he laughed softly, for he remembered Ardmore, and Ardmore was beyond question the most amusing person he knew. It was unfortunate, he generously reflected, that Ardmore, rather than himself, had not been plunged into this present undertaking, which was much more in Ardmore’s line than his own. There would, however, be a great satisfaction in telling Ardmore of his unexpected visit to Columbia, in exchange for his friend’s report of his pursuit of the winking eye. He only regretted that in the nature of things Columbia is a modern city, a seat of commerce as well as of government, a place where bank clearings are seriously computed, and where the jaunty adventurer with sword and ruffles is quite likely to run afoul of the police. Yet his own imagination was far more fertile than Ardmore’s, and he would have hailed a troop of mail-clad men as joyfully as his friend had he met them clanking in the highway. Thus modern as we think ourselves, the least venturesome among us dreams that some day some turn of a street corner will bring him face to face with what we please to call our fate; and this is the manifestation of our last drop of mediæval blood. The grimmest seeker after reality looks out of the corner of his eye for the flutter of a white handkerchief from the ivied tower he affects to ignore; and, in spite of himself, he is buoyed by the hope that some day a horn will sound for him over the nearest hill.

Miss Osborne met him at the veranda steps. Indoors a mandolin and piano struck up the merry chords of The Eutaw Girl.

“My young sisters have company. We’ll sit here, if you don’t mind.”

She led the way to a quiet corner, and after they were seated she was silent a moment, while the light from the windows showed clearly that her perplexity of the morning was not yet at an end. The music tinkled softly, and a breeze swept in upon them with faint odours of the garden.

“I hope you won’t mind, Mr. Griswold, if I appear to be ashamed of you. It’s not a bit hospitable to keep you outside our threshold; but—you understand—I don’t have to tell you!”

“I understand perfectly, Miss Osborne!”

“It seems best not to let the others know just why you are here. I told my sisters that you were an old friend—of father’s—who wished to leave a message for him.”

“That will do first-rate!” he laughed. “My status is fixed. I know your father, but as for ourselves, we are not acquainted.”

He felt that she was seriously anxious and troubled, and he wished to hearten her if he could. The soft dusk of the faintly-lighted corner folded her in. Behind her the vines of the verandah moved slightly in the breeze. A thin, wayward shaft of light touched her hair, as though searching out the gold. When we say that people have atmosphere, we really mean that they possess indefinite qualities that awaken new moods in us, as by that magic through which an ignorant hand thrumming a harp’s strings may evoke some harmony denied to conscious skill. He heard whispered in his heart a man’s first word of the woman he is destined to love, in which he sets her apart—above and beyond all other womenkind; she is different; she is not like other women!

“It is nearly nine,” she said, her voice thrilling through him. “My father should have been here an hour ago. We have heard nothing from him. The newspapers have telephoned repeatedly to know his whereabouts. I have put them off by intimating that he is away on important public business, and that his purpose might be defeated if his exact whereabouts were known. I tried to intimate, without saying as much, that he was busy with the Appleweight case. One of the papers that has very bitterly antagonized father ever since his election has threatened to expose what the editor calls father’s relations with Appleweight. I cannot believe that there is anything wrong about that; of course there is not!”

She was controlling herself with an effort, and she broke off her declaration of confidence in her absent father sharply but with a sob in her voice.

“I have no doubt in the world that the explanation you gave the newspapers is the truth of the matter. Your father must be absent a great deal—it is part of a governor’s business to keep in motion. But we may as well face the fact that his absence just now is most embarrassing. This Appleweight matter has reached a crisis, and a failure to handle it properly may injure your father’s future as a public man. If you will pardon me, I would suggest that there must be some one whom you can take into your confidence—some friend, some one in your father’s administration that you can rely on?”

“Yes; father has many friends; but I cannot consider acknowledging to any one that father has disappeared when such a matter as this Appleweight case is an issue through the state. No; I have thought of every one this afternoon. It would be a painful thing for his best friends to know what is—what seems to be the truth.” Her voice wavered a little, but she was brave, and he was aware that she straightened herself in her chair, and, when wayward gleams of light fell upon her face, that her lips were set resolutely.

“You saw the attorney-general this morning,” she went on. “As you suggested, he would naturally be the one to whom I should turn, but I cannot do it. I—there is a reason”—and she faltered a moment—“there are reasons why I cannot appeal to Mr. Bosworth at this time.”

She shrugged her shoulders as though throwing off a disagreeable topic, and he saw that there was nothing more to be said on this point. His heart-beats quickened as he realized that she was appealing to him; that, though he was only the most casual acquaintance, she trusted him. It was a dictum of his, learned in his study and practice of the law, that issues must be met as they offer—not as the practitioner would prefer to have them, but as they occur; and here was a condition of affairs that must be met promptly if the unaccountable absence of the governor was to be robbed of its embarrassing significance.

As he pondered for a moment, a messenger rode into the grounds, and Miss Osborne slipped away and met the boy at the steps. She came back and opened a telegram, reading the message at one of the windows. An indignant exclamation escaped her, and she crumpled the paper in her hand.

“The impudence of it!” she exclaimed. He had risen, and she now turned to him with anger and scorn deepening her beautiful colour. Her breath came quickly; her head was lifted imperiously; her lips quivered slightly as she spoke.

“This is from Governor Dangerfield. Can you imagine a man of any character or decency sending such a message to the governor of another state?”

She watched him as he read:

Raleigh, N. C.

The Honourable Charles Osborne,
Governor of South Carolina,
Columbia, S. C.:

Have written by to-night’s mail in Appleweight matter. Your vacillating course not understood.

William Dangerfield,
Governor of North Carolina.

“What do you think of that?” she demanded.

“I think it’s impertinent, to say the least,” he replied guardedly.

“Impertinent! It’s the most contemptible, outrageous thing I ever heard of in my life! Governor Dangerfield has dilly-dallied with that case for two years. His administration has been marked from the beginning by the worst kind of incompetence. Why, this man Appleweight and his gang of outlaws only come into South Carolina now and then to hide and steal, but they commit most of their crimes in North Carolina, and they always have. Talk about a vacillating course! Father has never taken steps to arrest those men, out of sheer regard for Governor Dangerfield; he thought North Carolina had some pride, and that her governor would prefer to take care of his own criminals. What do you suppose Appleweight is indicted for in this state? For stealing one ham—one single ham from a farmer in Mingo County, and he’s killed half a dozen men in North Carolina.”

She paced the corner of the veranda angrily, while Griswold groped for a solution of the problem. The telegram from Raleigh was certainly lacking in diplomatic suavity. It was patent that if the governor of North Carolina was not tremendously aroused, he was playing a great game of bluff; and on either hypothesis a prompt response must be made to his telegram.

“I must answer this at once. He must not think we are so stupid in Columbia that we don’t know when we’re insulted. We can go through the side door to father’s study and write the message there,” and she led the way.

“It might be best to wait and see what his letter is like,” suggested Griswold, with a vague wish to prolong this discussion, that he might enjoy the soft glow of the student lamp on her cheek.

“I don’t care what his letter says; it can’t be worse than his telegram. We’ll answer them both at once.”

She found a blank and wrote rapidly, without asking suggestions, with this result:

The Honourable William Dangerfield,
Raleigh, N. C.:

Your extremely diverting telegram in Appleweight case received and filed.

Charles Osborne,
Governor of South Carolina.

She met Griswold’s obvious disappointment with prompt explanation.

“You see, the governor of South Carolina cannot stoop to an exchange of billingsgate with an underbred person like that—a big, solemn, conceited creature in a long frock-coat and a shoestring necktie, who boasts of belonging to the common ‘peo-pull.’ He doesn’t have to tell anybody that, when it’s plain as daylight. The way to answer him is not to answer at all.”

“The way to answer him is to make North Carolina put Appleweight in jail, for crimes committed in that state, and then, if need be, we can satisfy the cry for vengeance in South Carolina by flashing our requisition. There is a rule in such cases that the state having the heaviest indictments shall have precedence; and you say that in this state it’s only a matter of a ham. I am not acquainted with the South Carolina ham,” he went on, smiling, “but in Virginia the right kind of a ham is sacred property, and to steal one is a capital offence.”

“I should like to steal one such as I had last winter in Richmond,” and Miss Osborne forgot her anger; her eyes narrowed dreamily at an agreeable memory.

“Was it at Judge Randolph Wilson’s?” asked Griswold instantly.

“Why, yes, it was at Judge Wilson’s, Mr. Griswold. How did you know?”

“I didn’t know—I guessed; for I have sat at that table myself. The judge says grace twice when there’s to be ham—once before soup, then again before ham.”

“Then thanksgiving after the ham would be perfectly proper!”

Miss Osborne was studying Griswold carefully, then she laughed, and her attitude toward him, that had been tempered by a certain official reserve, became at once cordial.

“Are you the Professor Griswold who is so crazy about pirates? I’ve heard the Wilsons speak of you, but you don’t look like that.”

“Don’t I look like a pirate? Thank you! I had an appointment at Judge Wilson’s office this morning to talk over a case in which I’m interested.”

“I remember now what he said about you. He said you really were a fine lawyer, but that you liked to read about pirates.”

“That may have been what he said to you; but he has told me that the association of piracy and law was most unfortunate, as it would suggest unpleasant comments to those who don’t admire the legal profession.”

“And you are one of those tide-water Griswolds, then, if you know the Randolph Wilsons. They are very strong for the tide-water families; to hear them talk you’d think the people back in the Virginia hills weren’t really respectable.”

“It’s undeniably the right view of the matter,” laughed Griswold, “but now that I live in Charlottesville I don’t insist on it. It wouldn’t be decent in me. And I have lots of cousins in Lexington and through the Valley. The broad view is that every inch of the Old Dominion is holy ground.”

“It is an interesting commonwealth, Mr. Griswold; but I do not consider it holy ground. South Carolina has a monopoly of that;” and then the smile left her face and she returned to the telegram. “Our immediate business, however, is not with Virginia, or with South Carolina, but with the miserable commonwealth that lies between.”

“And that commonwealth,” said Griswold, wishing to prolong the respite from official cares, “that state known in law and history as North Carolina, I have heard called, by a delightful North Carolina lady I met once at Charlottesville, a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit. That seems to hit both of us!”

“North Carolina isn’t a state at all,” Miss Osborne declared spitefully; “it’s only a strip of land where uninteresting people live. And now, what do you say to this telegram?”

“Excellent. It’s bound to irritate, and it leaves him in the dark as to our—I mean Governor Osborne’s—intentions. And those intentions——”

During this by-play he had reached a decision as to what should be done, and he was prepared to answer when she asked, with an employment of the pronoun that pleasantly emphasized their relationship,—

“What are our intentions?”

“We are going to catch Appleweight, that’s the first thing—and until we get him we’re going to keep our own counsel. Let me have a telegraph blank, and I will try my hand at being governor.” He sat down in the governor’s chair, asked the name of the county seat of Mingo, and wrote without erasure or hesitation this message:

To the Sheriff of Mingo County,
Turner Court House, S. C.:

Make every possible effort to capture Appleweight and any of his gang who are abroad in your county. Swear in all the deputies you need, and if friendliness of citizens to outlaws makes this impossible wire me immediately, and I will send militia. Any delay on your part will be visited with severest penalties. Answer immediately by telegraph.

Charles Osborne,
Governor of South Carolina.

“That’s quite within the law,” said Griswold, handing Barbara the message; “and we might as well put the thing through at a gallop. I’ll get the telegraph company to hold open the line to Turner Court House until the sheriff answers.”

As Barbara read the message he saw her pleasure in the quick compression of her lips, the glow in her cheeks, and then the bright glint of her bronze-brown eyes as she finished.

“That’s exactly right. I didn’t know just how to manage such a thing, but I see that that is the proper method.”

“Yes; the sheriff must have his full opportunity to act.”

“And what, then, if the sheriff refuses to do anything?”

“Then—then”—and Griswold’s jaw set firmly, and he straightened himself slightly before he added in a quiet tone—“then I’m going down there to take charge of the thing myself.”

“Oh, that is too much! I didn’t ask that; and I must refuse to let you take any such responsibility on yourself, to say nothing of the personal danger. I merely wanted your advice—as a lawyer, for the reason that I dared not risk father’s name even among his best friends here. And your coming to the office this morning seemed so—so providential——”

He sought at once to minimize the value of his services, for he was not a man to place a woman under obligations, and, moreover, an opportunity like this, to uphold the dignity, and perhaps to exercise the power, of a state laid strong hold upon him. He knew little enough about the Appleweight case, but he felt from his slight knowledge that he was well within his rights in putting spurs to the sheriff of Mingo County. If the sheriff failed to respond in proper spirit and it became necessary to use the militia, he was conscious that serious complications might arise. He had not only a respect for law, but an ideal of civic courage and integrity, and the governor’s inexplicable absence aroused his honest wrath. The idea that a mere girl should be forced to sustain the official honour and dignity of a cowardly father further angered him. And then he looked into her eyes and saw how grave they were, and how earnest and with what courage she met the situation; and the charm of her slender figure, that glint of gold in her hair, her slim, supple hands folded on the table—these things wrought in him a happiness that he had never known before, so that he laughed as he took the telegram from her.

“There must be no mistake, no failure,” she said quietly.

“We are not going to fail; we are going to carry this through! Within three days we’ll have Appleweight in a North Carolina jail or a flying fugitive in Governor Dangerfield’s territory. And now these telegrams must be sent. It might be better for you to go to the telegraph office with me. You must remember that I am a pilgrim and a stranger, and they might question my filing official messages.”

“That is perfectly true. I will go into town with you.”

“And if there’s an official coach that everybody knows as yours, it would allay suspicions to have it,” and while he was still speaking she vanished to order the carriage.

In five minutes it was at the side door, and Griswold and Barbara, fortified by the presence of Phœbe, left the governor’s study.

“If they don’t know me, everybody in South Carolina knows Phœbe,” said Barbara.

“A capital idea. I can see by her eye that she’s built for conspiracy.”

Griswold’s horse was to be returned to town by a boy; and when this had been arranged the three entered the carriage.

“The telegraph office, Tom; and hurry.”

CHAPTER VII.
AN AFFAIR AT THE STATE HOUSE.

Barbara filed the messages herself with the manager of the telegraph company, who lifted the green shade from his eyes and smiled upon her.

“We’ll rush them, Miss Osborne. Shall I telephone the answers if they come to-night? No; your father likes his telegrams delivered, I remember.”

“I will call for them,” said Griswold. “Governor Osborne was only at home a few hours this evening, and he left me in charge of these matters.”

The manager’s face expressed surprise.

“Oh! I didn’t know the governor was at home,” he remarked, as he finished counting the words and charging them against the state’s account. “I will send them myself, and ask the operators at the other end to look lively about the answers. You are Mr.——”

“This is Major Griswold,” said Barbara, conferring the title with a vague feeling that it strengthened her cause.

“Major,” repeated the manager, as he nodded to Griswold with an air that implied his familiarity with official secrets. “You will call? In a couple of hours, Major.”

As Barbara and Griswold turned to leave, a young man who had been writing a message at the standing desk in the lobby lifted his hat and addressed Barbara. He was a reporter for the Columbia Intelligencer, and his manner was eager.

“Oh, Miss Osborne, pardon me, but I’ve been trying to get you on the telephone. Can you tell me where your father is to-night?”

“Father was in town only a few hours, and then left on state business.”

The young man glanced from one to the other. He was a polite youngster, and Miss Barbara Osborne was—Miss Barbara Osborne, and this, to the people of South Carolina, was a fact of weight. Still the reporter twirled his hat uncertainly.

“Well, I thought I had met all the trains, but I guess I missed the governor.”

“No; you didn’t miss him,” smiled Barbara. “Father drove in from the country and went back the same way. He didn’t come into town at all.”

The news instinct is the keenest with which man may be blessed, and the reporter scented events. Griswold, seeing the light flash in the young man’s eye, felt that here was an opportunity to allay public criticism.

“Governor Osborne is engaged upon important public business. He will be absent from town for a day—perhaps a week. He will not return to Columbia until the business is thoroughly disposed of.”

“May I ask if it’s the Appleweight case? The Raleigh papers have wired for information, and we’d like to know here.”

“I cannot answer that question. It’s enough that the governor is absent on state business, and that the business is important. You may print that in the Intelligencer, and repeat it to Raleigh.—There is no harm in that, is there, Miss Osborne?”

“No; certainly not,” Barbara replied.

“But the papers all over the state are talking about the Appleweight gang. They intimate that those people enjoy immunity from prosecution, and that the governor—you will pardon me, Miss Osborne—will take no steps to arrest them, for personal reasons.”

“Your question is quite proper,” replied Griswold. “The governor’s acts are subject to scrutiny at all times, and it is just as well to have this matter understood now. I am employed by the governor as special counsel in some state matters. My name is Griswold. Take out your book and come to the desk here, and I will give you a statement which you may publish as by the authority of the governor.”

The three found seats at a table, and Griswold dictated while the reporter wrote, Barbara meanwhile sitting with her cheek resting against her raised hand. She was experiencing the relief we all know, of finding a strong arm to lean upon in an emergency, and she realized that Griswold was not only wise, but shrewd and resourceful.

“Please print this exactly as I give it: It having been intimated in certain quarters that the Appleweight gang of outlaws, which has been terrorizing the North Carolina frontier for several years, enjoys immunity from prosecution in South Carolina owing to the fact that Governor Osborne was at some time attorney for Appleweight, Governor Osborne begs to say that steps have already been taken for the arrest of this man and his followers, dead or alive. The governor presents his compliments to those amiable critics who have so eagerly seized upon this pretext for slurring his private character and aspersing his official acts. The governor has no apologies to proffer the people of South Carolina, who have so generously reposed in him their trust and confidence. He is intent upon safeguarding the peace, dignity, and honour of the state through an honest enforcement of law, and he has no other aim or ambition.”

Griswold took the reporter’s notebook and read over this pronunciamiento; then he handed it to Barbara, who studied it carefully.

“I think that sounds just right, only why not substitute for ‘honest’ the word ‘vigorous’?”

“Excellent,” assented Griswold, and thus amended the statement was returned to the reporter.

“Now,” said Griswold to the young man, “you are getting a pretty good item that no other paper will have. Please wire your story to Raleigh; Governor Osborne is very anxious that the people up there shall understand fully his attitude in the Appleweight matter.”

“I reckon this will wake up old Dangerfield all right,” said the reporter, grinning. “He’ll be paralyzed. May I use your name in this connection, sir?”

“Not at all. My engagement with Governor Osborne is of the most confidential character, and our purposes would be defeated by publicity. Remember, you get the exclusive use of this story—the return and immediate departure of the governor, his statement to the people in the Appleweight case—all with the understanding that you use what you have to the best advantage.”

“This is all right, is it, Miss Osborne?” asked the reporter.

“Major Griswold has full authority to act, and you need question nothing he tells you,” Barbara replied.

“I suppose the governor didn’t see the attorney-general to-day?” asked the reporter detainingly, as Barbara rose. She exchanged a glance with Griswold.

“Father didn’t see Mr. Bosworth at all, if that’s what you mean!”

“Didn’t see him? Well, Bosworth didn’t exactly tell me he had seen him to-day, but I asked him about the Appleweight case an hour ago at his house, and he said the governor wasn’t going to do anything, and that was the end of it so far as the administration is concerned.”

“Print his story and see what happens! We have no comment to make on that, have we, Miss Osborne?”

“Nothing at all,” replied Barbara scornfully.

“I’m at the Saluda House at present. See me to-morrow and I may have another story for you!” and Griswold shook the reporter warmly by the hand as they parted at the carriage door.

“Home,” said Barbara for the reporter’s benefit, and then, to Griswold: “I must speak of another matter. Drive with me a little way until we can throw the reporter off.”

She spoke quietly, but he saw that she was preoccupied with some new phase of the situation, and as the carriage gained headway she said earnestly,—

“That young man told the truth—I am sure of it—about Mr. Bosworth. I knew he would do something to injure father if he could, but I did not know he had the courage to go so far.”

“It’s only politics, Miss Osborne,” said Griswold lightly. “Besides, you may be sure the Intelligencer will print the governor’s side of it in its largest type.”

“No; it is not politics. It is more despicable, more contemptible, more ungenerous even than politics. But he shall be punished, humiliated, for his conduct.”

“You shall fix his punishment yourself!” laughed Griswold; “but the state’s business first. We have a little more to do before I am satisfied with the day’s work.”

“Yes, of course. We must leave nothing undone that father would do were he here to act for himself.”

“We must be even more careful in his absence to safeguard his honour than the case really requires. We not only have his public responsibility but our own into the bargain in so far as we speak and act for him. And there’s always the state—the Palmetto flag must be kept flying at the masthead.” Their eyes met as they passed under an electric lamp, and he saw how completely she was relying on his guidance.

They were now at the edge of town, and she bade him stop the carriage.

“We must go to the state house,” said Griswold. “We must get that requisition, to guard against treason in the citadel. Assuming that Governor Osborne really doesn’t want to see Appleweight punished, we’d better hold the requisition anyhow. It’s possible that your father had it ready—do pardon me!—for a grand-stand play, or he may have wanted to bring Appleweight into the friendlier state—but that’s all conjectural. We’d better keep out of the principal streets. That reporter has a sharp eye.”

She gave the necessary directions, and the driver turned back into Columbia. It was pleasant to find his accomplice in this conspiracy a girl of keen wit who did not debate matters or ask tiresome questions. The business ahead was serious enough, though he tried by manner, tone, and words to minimize its gravity. If the attorney-general was serving a personal spite, or whatever the cause of his attitude, he might go far in taking advantage of the governor’s absence. Griswold’s relation to the case was equivocal enough, he fully realized; but the very fact of its being without precedent, and so beset with pitfalls for all concerned, was a spur to action. In the present instance a duly executed requisition for the apprehension of a criminal, which could not be replaced if lost, must be held at all hazards, and Griswold had determined to make sure of the governor’s warrant before he slept.

“Have you the office keys?” he asked.

“Yes; I have been afraid to let go of them. There’s a watchman in the building, but he knows me very well. There will not be the slightest trouble about getting in.”

The watchman—an old Confederate veteran—sat smoking in the entrance, and courteously bade them good-evening.

“I want to get some papers from father’s office, Captain.”

“Certainly, Miss Barbara.” He preceded them, throwing on the lights, to the governor’s door, which he opened with his own pass-key. “It’s pretty lonesome here at night, Miss Barbara.”

“I suppose nobody comes at night,” remarked Griswold.

“Not usually, sir. But one or two students are at work in the library, and Mr. Bosworth is in his office.”

The veteran walked away jingling his keys. Barbara was already in the private office, bending over the governor’s desk. She found the right key, drew out a drawer, then cried out softly. She knelt beside the desk, throwing the papers about in her eagerness, then turned to Griswold with a white face.

“The drawer has been opened since I was here this morning. The requisition and all the other papers in the case are gone.”

Griswold examined the lock carefully and pointed to the roughened edges of the wood.

“A blade of the shears there, or perhaps the paper-cutter—who knows? The matter is simple enough, so please do not trouble about it. Wait here a moment. I want to make some inquiries of the watchman.”

He found the old fellow pacing the portico like a sentry. He pointed out the attorney-general’s office, threw on a few additional lights for Griswold’s guidance, and resumed his patrol duty outside.

The attorney-general’s door was locked, but in response to Griswold’s knock it was opened guardedly.

“I am very sorry to trouble you, Mr. Bosworth,” began Griswold, quietly edging his way into the room, “but one never gets wholly away from business these days.”

He closed the door himself, and peered into the inner rooms to be sure the attorney-general was alone. Bosworth’s face flushed angrily when he found that a stranger had thus entered his office with a cool air of proprietorship; then he stared blankly at Griswold for a moment before he recalled where he had seen him before.

“I don’t receive visitors at night,” he blurted, laying his hand on the door. “I’m engaged, and you’ll have to come in office hours.”

He shook the door as though to call Griswold’s attention to it.

“Do you see this thing? it’s the door!” he roared.

“I have seen it from both sides, Mr. Bosworth. I intend to stay on this side until I get ready to go.”

“Who the devil are you? What do you mean by coming here at this time of night?”

“I’m a lawyer myself, if you will force the ignoble truth from me. Now, when you are perfectly quiet, and once more the sane, reasonable human being you must be to have been trusted with the office you hold, we’ll proceed to business. Meanwhile, please put on your coat. A man in his shirt-sleeves is always at a disadvantage; and we Virginians are sticklers for the proprieties.”

The attorney-general’s fury abated when he saw that he had to deal with a low-voiced young man who seemed unlikely to yield to intimidation. Griswold had, in fact, seated himself on a table that was otherwise covered with law books, and he sniffed with pleasure the familiar atmosphere of dusty law calf, which no one who has had the slightest acquaintance with a law office ever forgets. To his infinite amusement Bosworth was actually putting on his coat, though it may have been a little absent-mindedly to give him an opportunity to decide upon a plan for getting rid of his visitor. However this may have been, Bosworth now stepped to the side of the room and snatched down the telephone receiver.

Griswold caught him by the shoulder and flung him round.

“None of that! By calling the police you will only get yourself into trouble. I’m bigger than you are, and I should hate to have to throw you out of the window. Now”—and he caught and hung up the receiver, which was wildly banging the wall—“now let us be sensible and get down to business.”

“Who the devil are you?” demanded Bosworth, glaring.

“I’m special counsel for Governor Osborne in the Appleweight case. There’s no use in wasting time in further identification, but if you take down that volume on Admiralty Practice just behind you, you will find my name on the title-page. Or, to save you the trouble, as you seem to be interested in my appearance, I will tell you that my name is Griswold, and that my address is Charlottesville, Virginia.”

“You are undoubtedly lying. If you are smart enough to write a book, you ought to know enough about legal procedure to understand that the attorney-general represents the state, and special counsel would not be chosen without his knowledge.”

“Allow me to correct you, my learned brother. You should never misquote the opposing counsel—it’s one of the rules of the game. What I said a moment ago was that I represented the governor—Governor Osborne. I didn’t say I represented the state, which is a different matter, and beset with ultra vires pitfalls. There is no earthly reason why a governor should not detach himself, so to speak, from his office and act in propria persona, as a mere citizen. His right to private remedy is not abridged by the misfortune of office-holding. Whether he can himself be made defendant in an action at law touches that ancient question, whether the monarch or the state can be sued. That’s a question law students have debated from the beginning of time, but we must not confuse it with the case at issue. The governor, as a citizen, may certainly employ such counsel as he pleases, and just now I represent him. Of course, if you want me to furnish a brief——”

Griswold’s manner was deliberate and ingratiating. He saw that the attorney-general had not the slightest sense of humour, and that his play upon legal phrases was wasted. Bosworth grinned, but not at the legal status of monarchs and states. He had thought of a clever stroke, and he dealt the blow with confidence.

“Let us assume,” he said, “that you represent Mr. Osborne. May I ask the whereabouts of your client?”

“Certainly. You may ask anything you please, but it will do you no good. It’s an old rule of the game never to divulge a client’s secret. Governor Osborne has his own reasons for absenting himself from his office. However, he was at home to-night.”

“I rather guess not, as I had all the trains watched. You’ll have to do a lot better than that, Mr. Griswold.”

“He has issued a statement to the public since you lied to the Intelligencer reporter about him to-day. I suppose it’s part of your official duty to misrepresent the head of the state administration in the press, but the governor is in the saddle, and I advise you to be good.”

The attorney-general felt that he was not making headway. His disadvantage in dealing with a stranger whose identity he still questioned angered him. He did not know why Griswold had sought him out, and he was chagrined at having allowed himself to be so easily cornered.

“You seem to know a good deal,” he sneered. “How did you get into this thing anyhow?”

“My dear sir, I was chosen by the governor because of my superior attainments, don’t you see? But I’m in a hurry now. I came here on a particular errand. I want that requisition in the Appleweight case—quick!—if you please, Mr. Bosworth.”

He jumped down from the table and took up his hat and stick.

“Mr. Griswold, or whoever you are, you are either a fool or a blackguard. There isn’t any requisition for Appleweight. The governor never had the sand to issue any, if you must know the truth! If you knew anything about the governor, you would know that that’s why Osborne is hiding himself. He can’t afford to offend the Appleweights, if you must know the disagreeable truth. Your coming here and asking me for that requisition is funny, if you had the brains to see it. Poor old Osborne is scared to death, and I doubt if he’s within a hundred miles of here. You don’t know the governor; I do! He’s a dodger, a trimmer, and a coward.”

“Mr. Bosworth,” began Griswold deliberately, “that requisition, duly signed and bearing the seal of the secretary of state as by the statutes in such cases made and provided, was in Governor Osborne’s desk this morning at the time you were so daintily kicking the door in your anxiety to see the governor. It has since been taken from the drawer where the governor left it when he went to New Orleans. You have gone in there like a sneak-thief, pried open the drawer, and stolen that document; and now——”

“It’s an ugly charge,” mocked the attorney-general.

“It’s all of that,” and Griswold smiled.

“But you forget that you represent Mr. Osborne. On the other hand, I represent Governor Osborne, and if I want the Appleweight papers I had every right to them.”

“After office hours, feloniously and with criminal intent?” laughed Griswold.

“We will assume that I have them,” sneered Bosworth, “and such being the case I will return them only to the governor.”

“Then”—and Griswold’s smile broadened—“if it comes to concessions, I will grant that you are within your rights in wishing to place them in the governor’s own hands. The governor of South Carolina is now, so to speak, in camera.”

“The governor is hiding. He’s afraid to come to Columbia, and the whole state knows it.”

“The papers, my friend; and I will satisfy you that the governor of South Carolina is under this roof and transacting business.”

“Here in the state house?” demanded Bosworth, and he blanched and twisted the buttons of his coat nervously.

“The governor of South Carolina, the supreme power of the state, charged with full responsibility, enjoying all the immunities, rights, and privileges unto him belonging.”

It was clear that Bosworth took no stock whatever in Griswold’s story; but Griswold’s pretended employment by the governor and his apparent knowledge of the governor’s affairs piqued his curiosity. If this was really the Griswold who had written a widely accepted work on admiralty and who was known to him by reputation as a brilliant lawyer of Virginia, the mystery was all the deeper. By taking the few steps necessary to reach the governor’s chambers he would prove the falsity of Griswold’s pretensions to special knowledge of the governor’s whereabouts and plans. He stepped to an inner office, came back with a packet of papers, and thrust a revolver into his pocket with so vain a show of it that Griswold laughed aloud.

“What! Do you still back your arguments with firearms arms down here? It’s a method that has gone out of fashion in Virginia!”

“If there’s a trick in this it will be the worse for you,” scowled Bosworth.

“And pray, remember, on your side, that you are to give those documents into the hands of the governor. Come along.”

They met the watchman in the corridor, and he saluted them and passed on. Bosworth strode eagerly forward in his anxiety to prick the bubble of Griswold’s pretensions.

Griswold threw open the door of the governor’s reception-room, and they blinked in the stronger light that poured in from the private office. There, in the governor’s chair by the broad official desk, sat Barbara Osborne reading a newspaper.

“Your Excellency,” said Griswold, bowing gravely and advancing, “I beg to present the attorney-general.”

“Barbara!”

The papers fell from the attorney-general’s hands. He stood staring until astonishment began to yield to rage as he realized that a trap had been sprung upon him. The girl had risen instantly, and a smile played about her lips for a moment. She had vaguely surmised that Griswold would charge Bosworth with the loss of the papers, but her associate in the conspiracy had now given a turn to the matter that amused her.

“Barbara!” blurted the attorney-general, “what game is this—what contemptible trick is this stranger playing on you? Don’t you understand that your father’s absence is a most serious matter, and that in the present condition of this Appleweight affair it is likely to involve him and the state in scandal?”

Barbara regarded him steadily for a moment with a negative sort of gaze. She took a step forward before she spoke, and then she asked quickly and sharply,—

“What have you done, Mr. Bosworth, to avert these calamities, and what was in your mind when you pried open the drawer and took out those papers?”

“I was going to use the requisition——”

“How?”

“Why, I expected——”

“Mr. Bosworth expected to effect a coup for his own glory during the governor’s absence,” suggested Griswold.

“How?” and Barbara’s voice rang imperiously and her eyes flashed.

“Send this unknown person, this impostor and meddler away, and I will talk to you as old friends may talk together,” and he glared fiercely at Griswold, who stood fanning himself with his hat.

“I asked you how you intended to serve my father, Mr. Bosworth, because you sent me this afternoon a letter in which you threatened me—you threatened me with my father’s ruin if I did not marry you. You would take advantage of my trouble and anxiety to force that question on me when I had answered it once and for all long ago. Before this stranger I want to tell you that you are a despicable coward, and that if you think you can humiliate me or my father or the state by such practices as you have resorted to you are very greatly mistaken. And further, Mr. Bosworth, if I find you interfering again in this matter, I shall print that letter you wrote me to-day in every newspaper in the state! Now, that is all I have to say to you, and I hope never to see you again.”

“Before you go, Mr. Bosworth,” said Griswold, “I wish to say that Miss Osborne has spoken of your conduct with altogether too much restraint. I shall add, on my own account, that if I find you meddling again in this Appleweight case, I shall first procure your removal from office, and after that I shall take the greatest pleasure in flogging you within an inch of your life. Now go!”

The two had dismissed him, and before Bosworth’s step died away in the hall, Griswold was running his eye over the papers.

“That man will do something nasty if he is clever enough to think of anything.”

“He’s a disgusting person,” said Barbara, touching her forehead with her handkerchief.

“He’s all of that,” remarked Griswold, as he retied the red tape round the packet of papers. “And now, before we leave we may as well face a serious proposition. Your father’s absence and this fiction we are maintaining that he is really here cannot be maintained for ever. I don’t want to trouble you, for you, of course, realize all this as keenly as I. But what do you suppose actually happened at New Orleans between your father and the governor of North Carolina?”

She leaned against her father’s desk, her hands lightly resting on its flat surface. She was wholly serene now, and she smiled and then laughed.

“It couldn’t have been what the governor of North Carolina said to the governor of South Carolina in the old story, for father is strongly opposed to drink of all kinds. And in the story——”

“I’ve forgotten where that story originated.”

“Well, it happened a long time ago, and nobody really knows the origin. But according to tradition, at the crisis of a great row between two governors, the ice was broken by the governor of North Carolina saying to the governor of South Carolina those shocking words about its being a long time between drinks. What makes the New Orleans incident so remarkable is that father and Governor Dangerfield have always been friends, though I never cared very much for the Dangerfields myself. The only tiffs they have had have been purely for effect. When father said that the people of North Carolina would never amount to anything so long as they fry their meat, it was only his joke with Governor Dangerfield—but it did make North Carolina awfully mad. And Jerry—she’s the governor’s daughter—refused to visit me last winter just on that account. Jerry Dangerfield’s a nice little girl, but she has no sense of humour.”

CHAPTER VIII.
THE LABOURS OF MR. ARDMORE.

While he waited for Miss Jerry Dangerfield to appear Mr. Thomas Ardmore read for the first time the constitution of the United States. He had reached the governor’s office early, and seeking diversion, he had picked up a small volume that bore some outward resemblance to a novel. This proved, however, to be Johnston’s American Politics, and he was amazed to find that this diminutive work contained the answers to a great many questions which had often perplexed him, but which he had imagined could not be answered except by statesmen or by men like his friend Griswold, who spent their lives in study.

He had supposed that the constitution of a great nation like the United States would fill many volumes, and be couched in terms bewildering and baffling; and it was perhaps the proudest moment in Mr. Ardmore’s life when, in the cool and quiet of the May morning, in the historic chambers of the governor of North Carolina, it dawned upon him that the charter of American liberty filled hardly more space than the stipulations for a yacht race, or a set of football rules; and that, moreover, he understood the greater part of it, or thought he did. Such strange words as “attainder” and “capitation” he sought out in the dictionary, and this also gave him a new sensation and thrill of pleasure at finding the machinery of knowledge so simple. He made note of several matters he wished to ask Griswold about when they met again; then turned back into the body of the text, and had read as far as Burr’s conspiracy when Jerry came breezily in. He experienced for the first time in his life that obsession of guilt which sinks in shame the office-boy who is caught reading a dime novel. Jerry seemed to tower above him like an avenging angel, and though her sword was only a parasol, her words cut deep enough.

“Well, you are taking it pretty cool!”

“Taking what?” faltered Ardmore, standing up, and seeking to hide the book behind his back.

“Why, this outrageous article!” and she thrust a newspaper under his eyes. “Do you mean to say you haven’t seen the morning paper?”

“To tell you the truth, Miss Dangerfield, I hardly ever read the papers.”

“What’s that you were reading when I came in?” she demanded severely, withholding the paper until she should be answered.

“It’s a book about the government, and the powers reserved to the states and that sort of thing. I was just reading the constitution; I thought it might help us—I mean you—in your work.”

“The constitution help me? Hasn’t it occurred to you before this that what I’m doing is all against the constitution and the revised statutes and all those books you see on the shelf there?”

“But the constitution sounds all right. It seems remarkably reasonable. You couldn’t ask anything fairer than that!”

“So are the ten commandments fair enough; but you’re on the wrong track, Mr. Ardmore, if you’re trying to support the present administration with stupid things in books. I don’t follow precedents, Mr. Ardmore; I create them.”

“But I should think you would have to be awfully careful not to mix up the business of the executive and judicial branches of the government. I think I heard Grissy speak of that once, though I’m not certain. Grissy knows more than almost any other living man.”

“I don’t doubt that your friend is a well-educated person, but in times like these you’ve got to rise above the constitution; and just now it’s more convenient to forget it. There’s a constitution of North Carolina, too, if you’re looking for constitutions, but in good society such things are not mentioned. Papa always refers to the constitution with tears in his eyes when he’s making speeches, but papa’s very emotional. If I could make a speech I should tell the people what I think of them—that they’re too silly and stupid for words.”

“You are right, Miss Dangerfield. I have felt exactly that way about the people ever since I was defeated for alderman in New York. But let me have the paper.”

She turned to the morning mail while he read and opened the envelopes rapidly. Such of the letters as she thought interesting or important she put aside, and when Ardmore finished reading a double-leaded telegram from Columbia, in which the governor of South Carolina was quoted as declaring his intention of taking immediate steps for the apprehension of Appleweight, she was still reading and sorting letters, tapping her cheek lightly meanwhile with the official paper-knife.

“Here, Mr. Ardmore,” she said, drawing a paper from her pocket, “is the answer to that telegram we sent yesterday evening. Suppose you read that next, and we can then decide what to do.”

She was making the letters into little piles, humming softly meanwhile; but he felt that there was a storm brewing. He read the message from Columbia a number of times, and if the acting governor had not been so ominously quiet he would have laughed at the terse sentences.

“There must be a mistake about this. He wouldn’t have used ‘diverting’ that way; that’s insulting!”

“So you appreciate its significance, do you, Mr. Ardmore? The iron enters your soul, does it? You realize that I have been insulted, do you?”

“I shouldn’t put it that way, Miss Dangerfield. Governor Osborne would never have sent a message like that to you—he thought he was sending it to your father.”

“He’s insulted me and every other citizen in the Old North State; that’s who he’s insulted, Mr. Ardmore. Let me read it again;” and she repeated the telegram aloud:

“‘Your extremely diverting telegram in Appleweight case received and filed.’ I think it’s the extremely that’s so perfectly mean. The diverting by itself would not hurt my feelings half so much. He’s a good deal smarter man than I thought he was to think up a telegram like that. But what do you think of that piece in the newspaper?”

“He says he’s going to catch Appleweight dead or alive. That sounds pretty serious.”

“I think it’s a bluff myself. That telegram we sent him yesterday must have scared him to death. He was driven into a corner and had to do something to avoid being disgraced, and it’s easy enough to talk big in the newspapers when you haven’t the slightest intention of doing anything at all. I’ve noticed that father talks the longest and loudest about things he doesn’t believe at all.”

“Is it possible?” whispered Ardmore incredulously.

“Of course it’s possible! Father would never have been elected if he’d expressed his real sentiments; neither would anybody else ever be elected if he said beforehand what he really believed.”

“That must have been the reason I got defeated for alderman on the reform ticket. I told ’em I was for turning the rascals out.”

“That was very stupid of you. You’ve got to get the rascals to elect you first; then if you’re tired of office and don’t need them any more you bounce them. But that’s political practice; it’s a theory we’ve got to work out now. Governor Osborne’s telegram is much more important than his interview in the newspapers, which is just for effect and of no importance at all. He doesn’t say the same things in the telegram to father that he said to the reporter. A governor who really meant to do anything wouldn’t be so ready to insult another governor. The newspapers are a lot of bother. I spent all yesterday evening talking to reporters. They came to the house to ask where papa was and when he would be home!”

“What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything. I sent out for two other girls, and we all just talked to them and kept talking, and gave them lemon sherbet and ginger cookies; and Eva Hungerford played the banjo—you don’t know Eva? Of course you don’t know anybody, and I don’t want you to, for it would spoil you for private secretary. But Eva is simply killing when she gets to cutting up, and we made those reporters sing to us, and all they say in the papers, even the opposition papers, this morning is that Governor Dangerfield is in Savannah visiting an old friend. They all tell the same story, so they must have fixed it up after they left the house. But what were you doing, Mr. Ardmore, that you didn’t come around to help? It seems to me you don’t appreciate the responsibilities of being secretary to a governor.”

“I was afraid you might scold me if I did. And besides I was glued to the long distance telephone all evening, talking to my manager at Ardsley. He read me my letters and a lot of telegrams that annoyed me very much. I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on me, for I have trifling troubles of my own.”

“I didn’t suppose you ever had troubles; you certainly don’t act as though you ever had.”

“No one who has never been brother-in-law to a duke has the slightest idea of what trouble is.”

“I’ve seen the Duke of Ballywinkle’s picture in the papers, and he looks very attractive.”

“Well, if you’d ever seen him eat celery you’d change your mind. He’s going down to Ardsley to visit me; for sheer nerve I must say my relations beat the world. I got my place over here in North Carolina just to get away from them, and now my sister—not the duchess, but Mrs. Atchison—is coming down there with a lot of girls, and Ballywinkle has attached himself to the party. They’ll pass through here to-day, and they’ll expect to find me at Ardsley.”

“If the duke’s really coming to our state I suppose we ought to recognize him officially,” and Jerry’s eyes were large with reverie as she pondered her possible duty.

“Do something for him!” blazed Ardmore. “I hope you don’t labour under the delusion that a duke’s any better than anybody else? If you’d suffered what I have from being related to a duke you’d be sorry to hear he was even passing through your state, much less stopping off for a couple of weeks.”

“Because you don’t like him is no reason why every one else should feel the same way, is it? I’ve read about the Duke of Ballywinkle, and he belongs to one of the oldest families in England, and I’ve seen pictures of Ballywinkle Castle——”

“Worse than that,” grinned Ardmore, with rising humour, “I had to chip in to pay for it! And the plumbing isn’t yet what it ought to be. The last time I was over there I caught cold and nearly died of pneumonia. I make it a rule now never to visit dukes. You never know what you’ll strike when you stay in those ancestral castles, even when they’ve been restored with some silly American girl’s grandfather’s money. Those places are all full of draughts and malaria and ghosts, and they make you drink tea in the afternoon, which is worse than being haunted.”

“I suppose we might invite his Grace to inspect our militia,” persisted Jerry. “It would sound well in the papers to have a real duke inspect the North Carolina troops.”

“It would sound better than he would look doing it, I can tell you that. Old Wellington may have been all right, but these new dukes were never made for horseback.”

“He might appear in a carriage, wearing his orders and ride the lines that way, with all the troops presenting arms.”

“Or you might pin his debts on him and mount him on a goat on the rifle-range and let the sharpshooters pepper away at him! Please let us not talk about Ballywinkle any more; the thought of him gives me that sinking feeling.”

He had opened an atlas and was poring over it with a magnifying glass.

“It’s positively funny,” he murmured, laughing a little to himself, “but I know something about this country over here. Here’s Ardsley, in the far corner of Dilwell County, and here’s Kildare.”

“Yes; I understand maps. Dilwell is green, and there’s the state line, and that ugly watery sort of yellow is Mingo County, South Carolina, and Turner Court House is the county seat of it. Those little black marks are hills on the border, and it’s right there that these Appleweight people live, and dance on the state line as though it were a skipping-rope.”

“That’s exactly it. Now what we want to do is to arrest Appleweight and put him in jail in South Carolina, which relieves the governor of North Carolina, your honoured father, of all embarrassment.”

She snatched the paper-cutter and took possession of the map for a moment, then pointed, with a happy little laugh.

“Why, that will be only too easy. You see there’s Azbell County, where the militia is encamped, just three counties away from Dilwell, and if we needed the soldiers it wouldn’t hurt the troops to march that far, would it?”

“Hurt them, nothing!” exclaimed Ardmore. “It will be good for them. You have to give orders to the adjutant-general, and, being engaged to him, he would be afraid not to obey your orders, even if you told him to go in balloons.”

“Well, of course, I’d send him an official order; and if he was disobedient I could break our engagement. When I broke my engagement with Arthur Treadmeasure, it was only because he was five minutes late coming to take me to a dance.”

“You were perfectly right, Miss Dangerfield. No gentleman would keep you waiting.”

“But he didn’t keep me waiting! I was sick in bed with a sore throat, and mamma wouldn’t let me go; but I thought it was very careless and taking too much for granted for him to think he could come poking along any time he pleased, so I ended everything.”

It would have interested Ardmore to know the total of Miss Dangerfield’s engagements, but the time did not seem propitious for such inquiries; and, moreover, his awe of her as a young person of great determination and force of character increased. She spoke of employing the armed forces of the state as though playing with the militia were a cheerful pastime, like horseback riding or tennis. His heart sank as he foresaw the possibility of the gallant Gillingwater coming out of the Appleweight affair with flying colours, a hero knighted on the field for valour. The remembrance of Gillingwater receiving the salutes of the militia and riding off to the wars to the beat of drums had deprived Ardmore of sleep all night.

“Well, there’s the map, and there’s that insulting telegram; what are you going to do about it?” asked Jerry.

She seemed to be honestly inviting suggestions, and the very thought of this affected him like wine. He deliberated for several minutes, while she watched him. A delicious country quiet lay upon the old state house; in the tranquil park outside the birds whistled their high disdain of law and precedent. It was no small thing to be identified with a great undertaking like this, with the finest girl in the world; and he could not help thinking of the joy of telling Griswold, the sober professor and sedate lawyer, of this adventure when it should be happily concluded. Never again should Grissy taunt him with his supineness before the open door of opportunity!

“A governor,” he began, “is always a dignified person who doesn’t bother his head about little things like this unless everybody else has gone to sleep. Now, who’s the chief of police in a county like Dilwell—what do you call him?”

“Do you mean the sheriff, Mr. Ardmore?”

“Certainly. Now, give me those telegraph blanks, and I’ll drop him a few lines to let him know that the government at Raleigh still lives.”

It is in the telegram alone that we Americans approach style. Our great commanders did much to form it; our business strategists took the key from them. “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer” is not more admirable than “Cancel order our number six hundred and eighteen,” or “Have drawn at sight.” Through the most familiar and commonplace apparatus clicks and ticks the great American epic in phrases concise, unequivocal, and apt. Von Moltke, roused at night with news of war, merely waved his hand to the long-prepared orders in his chiffonier and went to sleep again; but the great Prussian has his counterpart in the American magnate who ties up a railroad by telegraph over his after-dinner coffee. Telegrams were, however, with Mr. Thomas Ardmore, something more than a form of communication or a mere literary exercise. Letter-writing seemed to him the most formidable of human undertakings, but with a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand his spirit soared free. All untrammelled by the horror of the day tariff, whose steep slopes have wrought so much confusion and error among the economical, he gave to the wires and the wireless what he never would have confided to a stamp. He wrote and submitted to Miss Jerry Dangerfield the following:

To the Sheriff of Dilwell County,
Kildare, N. C.:

What is this I hear about your inability to catch Appleweight and the rest of his bunch? Your inattention to your duties is a matter of common scandal, and if you don’t get anxious pretty soon I shall remove you from your job and then come. I shall be down soon to see whether you are pitching quoits at the blacksmith shop or fishing for lobsters in Raccoon Creek, instead of attending to your knitting. Your conduct has annoyed me until I am something more than vexed by your behaviour. The eyes of the great North State are upon you. Wire me at length just what you propose doing or not doing in this matter.

William Dangerfield,
Governor of North Carolina.

“What do you think of that?” he asked, his pride falling as she scanned the paper carefully.

“Isn’t it pretty expensive?” Jerry inquired, counting the words to ten and then roughly computing the rest.

“I’ll take care of that, Miss Dangerfield. What I want to know is whether you think that will make the sheriff sit up.”

“Well, here’s what father sent him only about a week ago. I found it in his private letter book, and it’s marked confidential in red ink.”

She read:

“‘Act cautiously in Appleweight case. Indictment by grand Jury is undoubtedly faulty, and Foster threatens trouble in case parties are arrested.’

“And there’s more like that! Papa never intended to do anything, that’s as plain as daylight. Mr. Foster, the treasurer, comes from that county. He thought papa was going to have to do something, so he’s holding back the payment of the state bonds just to frighten papa. You see, the state owes the Bronx Loan and Trust Company that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and if it isn’t paid June first the state will be everlastingly disgraced.”

“Oh yes; I’d forgotten about that.”

“I don’t see how you could forget about it. That must be almost as much money as there is in the world, Mr. Ardmore.”

“We’ve got to raise it, anyhow, even if we go to the pawn-shop. I pawned my watch once when I was in college and Billings—he was my guardian—had shut me off. Grissy—he’s my friend—Grissy says pawn-broking is only a more vulgar form of banking. There was a fellow in my class at college who pawned his pawn-ticket to get money to pay his laundress, and then gave the new ticket to a poor blind man. He’s a big man in Wall Street—has a real genius for finance, they say. But please don’t worry about this rascal Foster. We’ll put some digitalis into the state’s credit when the time comes.”

“I think your telegram to the sheriff is all right,” said Jerry, reading it again. “If you’ll go to the door and whistle for the messenger we’ll get it off. I’ll sign it with the rubber stamp. Papa hardly ever signs anything himself; he says if you don’t sign documents yourself you can always repudiate them afterward, and papa’s given prayerful thought to all such things.”

Ardmore addressed himself once more to the map. It was clear that the Appleweight gang was powerful enough to topple great states upon their foundations. It had, to Ardmore’s own knowledge, driven a governor into exile, and through the wretched Foster, who was their friend, the credit of the state was gravely menaced. The possibilities of the game fascinated Ardmore. He was eager for action on the scene of this usurpation and defiance. Responsibility, for the first time, had placed a warrant of trust in his hands, and, thus commissioned, the spurs of duty pricked his sides.

“I’ll wait for the sheriff’s answer, and if he shows no signs of life I’ll go down there this afternoon.”

“Then you will undoubtedly be shot!” Jerry declared, as though announcing a prospect not wholly deplorable.

“That has its disagreeable side, but a great many people have to be shot every year to keep up the average, and if the statistics need me I won’t duck. I’ll call up my man on the telephone this forenoon and tell him to put my forester at Ardsley to work. He’s a big fellow who served in the German army, and if he’s afraid of anything I haven’t heard of it. If we can drive the gang into South Carolina, right along here, you see”—and Miss Dangerfield bent her pretty head over the map and saw—“if we can pass the chief outlaw on to Governor Osborne, then so much the better, and that’s what we will try to do.”

“But you’re only the private secretary, and you can’t assume too much authority. I shall have to go to Kildare to visit my aunt, who is a nice old lady that lives there. The fried corn mush and syrup at her house is the best I ever tasted, and if papa should come when he sees that something is being done quite different from what he intended, then I should be there to explain. If you should be killed, Mr. Ardmore, no one would be there to identify you, and I have always thought it the saddest thing in the world for any one to die away from home——”

“It would be sad; but I hope you would be sorry.”

“I should regret your death, and I’d make them give you a perfectly beautiful military funeral, with Chopin’s funeral march, and your boots tied to the saddle of your horse.”

“But don’t let them fuss about pulling off the boots, Miss Dangerfield, if I die with them on. It would be all right for you to visit your aunt, but I shouldn’t do it if I were you. I once visited my aunt, Mrs. Covington-Burns, at Newport for a week. It was a deep game to get me to marry my aunt’s husband’s niece, whose father had lost his money, and the girl was beginning to bore my aunt.”

“Was she a pretty girl?” asked Jerry.

“She was a whole basket of peaches, and I might have married her to get away from my aunt if it were not that I have made it a life-long rule never to marry the orphaned nieces of the husbands of my aunts. It’s been a good rule to me, and has saved me no end of trouble. But if my sister doesn’t change her mind, and if she really comes through Raleigh to-day in her car with those friends of hers, she will be delighted to have you join her for a visit at Ardsley. And then you would be near at hand in case some special edict from the governor seemed necessary.”

“But wouldn’t your sister think it strange——”

“Not in the least, Miss Dangerfield. Nothing is strange to my sister. Nobody ever sprang a surprise on Nellie yet. And besides, you are the daughter of the governor of a great state. She refuses to meet senators, because you can never be sure they are respectable, but she rather prides herself on knowing governors. Governors are very different. Since I read the constitution I can see very plainly that governors are much nearer the people, but I guess the senators are nearer the banks.”

“Well, I have some shopping to do, and it’s ten o’clock. It would be hospitable to ask you to luncheon, but mamma cries so much because she doesn’t know where papa is that our meals at the executive mansion are not exactly cheerful functions. And besides”—and she eyed Ardmore severely as she rose and accepted her parasol from him—“and besides, you know our relations are purely official. You have never been introduced to me, and socially you are not known to us.”

CHAPTER IX.
THE LAND OF THE LITTLE BROWN JUG.

Caboose 0186, with three box-cars and a locomotive attached, lay in the south-eastern yards at Raleigh late in the evening of the same day. In the observatory sat Mr. Thomas Ardmore, chatting with the conductor, while they waited for the right of way. Mr. Ardmore’s pockets were filled with papers, and he held half a dozen telegrams in his hand. The freight cars behind him were locked and sealed, and a number of men lounging near appeared to be watching them.

The reply of the sheriff of Dilwell County had precipitated the crisis. That official succinctly replied to Ardmore’s message:

Be good and acquire grace.

While this dictum had aroused Miss Dangerfield’s wrath and indignation, it calmed her fellow-conspirator, and for hours Ardmore had poured forth orders by telegraph and telephone. No such messages as his had ever before radiated from Raleigh. The tolls would have bankrupted the commonwealth if Ardmore had not cared for them out of his private purse. His forester, with an armed posse from Ardsley, was already following the streams and beating the brush in search of Appleweight. One car of Ardmore’s special train contained a machine gun and a supply of rifles; another abundant ammunition and commissary supplies, and the third cots and bags. The men who loafed about the train were a detail of strike-breakers from a detective agency, borrowed for the occasion. Cooke, the conductor of the train, had formerly been in the government secret service, and knew the Carolina hill country as he knew the palm of his hand. Ardmore had warned his manager and the housekeeper on his estate to prepare for the arrival of Mrs. Atchison, whose private car had come and gone, carrying Miss Geraldine Dangerfield on to Ardsley. Ardmore had just received a message from his sister at some way station, reporting all well and containing these sentences: “She is rather different, and I do not quite make her out. She has our noble brother-in-law a good deal bewildered.”

Cooke ran forward for a colloquy with the engineer over their orders; the guards climbed into one of the box-cars, and the train moved slowly out of the Raleigh yards to the main line and rattled away toward Kildare, with Mr. Ardmore, pipe in mouth, perched in the caboose cupola.

A caboose, you may not know, is the pleasantest place in the world to ride. Essentially a thing of utility, it is not less the vehicle of joy. Neither the captain of a trading schooner nor the admiral of a canal fleet is more sublimely autocratic than the freight conductor in his watch-tower. The landscape is disclosed to him in leisurely panoramas; the springs beneath are not so lulling as to dull his senses. If he isn’t whipped into the ditch by the humour of the engineer, or run down and telescoped by an enemy from behind, he may ultimately deliver his sombre fleet to its several destinations; but he is the slave of no inexorable time-table, and his excuses are as various as his cargoes.

Not Captain Kidd nor another of the dark brotherhood sailed forth with keener zest for battle than Mr. Ardmore. Indeed, the trailing smoke of the locomotive suggested a black flag, and the thought of it tickled his fancy. Above bent the bluest sky in the world; fields of corn and cotton, the brilliant crimson of German clover, and long stretches of mixed forest held him with enchantment. In a cornfield a girl ploughing with a single steer—a little girl in a sunbonnet, who reached wearily up to the plough handles—paused and waved to him, and he knew the delight of the lonely mariner when a passing ship speaks to him with flags. And when night came, after the long mystical twilight, the train passed now and then great cotton factories that blazed out from their thousand windows like huge steamships.

When they sought a lonely siding to allow a belated passenger train to pass, the conductor brewed coffee and cooked supper, and Ardmore called in the detectives and trainmen. The sense of knowing real people, whose daily occupations were so novel and interesting, touched him afresh with delight. These men said much in few words. The taciturnity of Cooke, the conductor, in particular, struck Ardmore as very fine, and it occurred to him that very likely men who have had the fun of doing things never talk of their performances afterward. One of the detectives chaffed Cooke covertly about some adventure in which they had been jointly associated.

“I never thought they’d get the lead out of you after that business in Missouri. You were a regular mine,” said the detective to Cooke, and Cooke glanced deprecatingly at Ardmore.

“He’s the little joker, all right.”

“You can’t kill him,” remarked the detective. “I’ve seen it tried.”

Before the train started the detectives crawled back into their car, and Cooke drew out some blankets, tossed them on a bench for Ardmore, and threw himself down without ado. Ardmore held to his post in the tower, as lone as the lookout in a crow’s-nest. The night air swept more coolly in as they neared the hills, and the train’s single brakeman came down as though descending from the sky, rubbed the cinders from his eyes, and returned to his vigil armed with a handful of Ardmore’s cigars.

For the greater part of the night they enjoyed a free track, and thumped the rails at a lively clip. Shortly after midnight Ardmore crawled below and went to sleep. At five o’clock Cooke called him.

“We’re on the switch at Kildare. One of your men is here waiting for you.”

Big Paul, the German forester, was called in, and Ardmore made his toilet in a pail of water while listening to the big fellow’s report. Cooke joined in the conversation, and Ardmore was gratified to see that the two men met on common ground in discussing the local geography. The forester described in clear, straightforward English just what he had done. He had distributed his men well through the hills, and they were now posted as pickets on points favourable for observation. They had found along the streams four widely scattered stills, and these were being watched. Paul drew a small map, showing the homes of the most active members of the Appleweight gang, and Ardmore indicated all these points as nearly as possible on the county map he had brought with him.

“Here’s Raccoon Creek, and my own land runs right through there—just about here, isn’t it, Paul? I always remember the creek, because I like the name so much.”

“You are right, Mr. Ardmore. The best timber you have lies along there, and your land crosses the North Carolina boundary into South Carolina about here. There’s Mingo County, South Carolina, you see.”

“Well, that dashes me!” exclaimed Ardmore, striking the table with his fist. “I never knew one state from another, but you must be right.”

“I’m positive of it, Mr. Ardmore. One of my men has been living there on the creek to protect your timber. Some of these outlaws have been cutting off our wood.”

“It seems to me I remember the place. There’s a log house hanging on the creek. You took me by it once, but it never entered my head that the state line was so close.”

“It runs right through the house! And some one, years ago, blazed the trees along there, so it is very easy to tell when you step from one state to another. My man left there recently, refusing to stay any longer. These Appleweight people thought he was a spy, and posted a notice on his door warning him to leave, so I shifted him to the other end of the estate.”

“Did you see the sheriff at Kildare?”

“I haven’t seen him. When I asked for him yesterday I found he had left town and gone to Greensboro to see his sick uncle.”

Ardmore laughed and slapped his knee.

“Who takes care of the dungeon while he’s away?”

“There are no prisoners in the Kildare jail. The sheriff’s afraid to keep any; and he’s like the rest of the people around here. They all live in terror of Appleweight.”

“Appleweight is a powerful character in these parts,” said Cooke, pouring the coffee he had been making, and handing a tin cupful to Ardmore. “He’s tolerable well off, and could make money honestly if he didn’t operate stills, rob country stores, mix up in politics, and steal horses when he and his friends need them.”

“I guess he has never molested us any, has he, Paul?” asked Ardmore, not a little ashamed of his ignorance of his own business.

“A few of our cows stray away sometimes and never come back. And for two years we have lost the corn out of the crib away over here near the deer park.”

“They’ve got the juice out of it before this,” remarked Cooke.

“That would be nice for me, wouldn’t it?” said Ardmore, grinning—“to be arrested for running a still on my place.”

“We don’t want to lose our right to the track, and we must get out of this before the whole community comes to take a look at us,” said Cooke, swinging out of the caboose.

Ardmore talked frankly to the forester, having constant recourse to the map; and Paul sketched roughly a new chart, marking roads and paths so far as he knew them, and indicating clearly where the Ardsley boundaries extended. Then Ardmore took a blue pencil and drew a straight line.

“When we get Appleweight, we want to hurry him from Dilwell County, North Carolina, into Mingo County, South Carolina. We will go to the county town there, and put him in jail. If the sheriff of Mingo is weak-kneed, we will lock Appleweight up anyhow, and telegraph the governor of South Carolina that the joke is on him.”

“We will catch the man,” said Paul gravely, “but we may have to kill him.”

“Dead or alive, he’s got to be caught,” said Ardmore, and the big forester stared at his employer a little oddly; for this lord proprietor had not been known to his employees and tenants as a serious character, but rather as an indolent person who, when he visited his estate in the hills, locked himself up unaccountably in his library, and rarely had the energy to stir up the game in his broad preserves.

“Certainly, sir; dead or alive,” Paul repeated.

Cooke came out of the station and signalled the engineer to go ahead.

“We’ll pull down here about five miles to an old spur where the company used to load wood. There’s a little valley there where we can be hidden all we please, so far as the main line is concerned, and it might not be a bad idea to establish headquarters there. We have the tools for cutting in on the telegraph, and we can be as independent as we please. I told the agent we were carrying company powder for a blasting job down the line, and he suspects nothing.”

Paul left the caboose as the train started, and rode away on horseback to visit his pickets. The train crept warily over the spur into the old woodcutters’ camp, where, as Cooke had forecast, they were quite shut in from the main line by hills and woodland.

“And now, Mr. Ardmore, if you would like to see fire-water spring out of the earth as freely as spring water, come with me for a little stroll. The thirsty of Dilwell County know the way to these places as city topers know the way to a bar. We are now in the land of the little brown jug, and while these boys get breakfast I’ll see if the people in this region have changed their habits.”

It was not yet seven as they struck off into the forest beside the cheerful little brook that came down singing from the hills. Ardmore had rarely before in his life been abroad so early, and he kicked the dew from the grass in the cheerfullest spirit imaginable. Within a few days he had reared a pyramid of noble resolutions. Life at last entertained him. The way of men of action had been as fabulous to him as the dew that now twinkled before him. Griswold knew books, but here at his side strode a man who knew far more amazing things than were written in any book. Cooke had not been in this region for seven years, and yet he never hesitated, but walked steadily on, following the little brook. Presently he bent over the bank and gathered up a brownish substance that floated on the water, lifted a little of it in his palm, and sniffed it.

“That,” said Cooke, holding it to Ardmore’s nose, “is corn mash. That’s what they make their liquor out of. The still is probably away up yonder on that hillside. It seems to me that we smashed one there once when I was in the service; and over there, about a mile beyond that pine tree, where you see the hawk circling, three of us got into a mix-up, and one of our boys was killed.”

He crossed the stream on a log, climbed the bank on the opposite shore, and scanned the near landscape for a few minutes. Then he pointed to an old stump over which vines had grown in wild profusion.

“If you will, walk to that stump, Mr. Ardmore, and feel under the vines on the right-hand side, your fingers will very likely touch something smooth and cool.”

Ardmore obeyed instructions. He thrust his hand into the stump as Cooke directed, thrust again a little deeper, and laughed aloud as he drew out a little brown jug.

Cooke nodded approvingly.

“We’re all right. The revenue men come in here occasionally and smash the stills and arrest a few men, but the little brown jug continues to do business at the same old stand. They don’t even change the hiding-places. And while we stand here, you may be pretty sure that a freckled-faced, tow-headed boy or girl is watching us off yonder, and that the word will pass all through the hills before noon that there are strangers abroad in old Dilwell. If you have a dollar handy, slip it under the stump, so they’ll know we’re not stingy.”

Ardmore was scrutinizing the jug critically.

“They’re all alike,” said Cooke, “but that piece of calico is a new one—just a fancy touch for an extra fine article of liquor.”

“I’ll be shot if I haven’t seen that calico before,” said Ardmore; and he sat down on a boulder and drew out the stopper, while Cooke watched him with interest.

The bit of twine was indubitably the same that he had unwound before in his room at the Guilford House, and the cob parted in his fingers exactly as before. On a piece of brown paper that had been part of a tobacco wrapper was scrawled:

This ain’t yore fight, Mr. Ardmore. Wher’s the guvner of North Carolina?

“That’s a new one on me,” laughed Cooke. “You see, they know everything. Mind-reading isn’t in it with them. They know who we are and what we have come for. What’s the point about the governor?”

“Oh, the governor’s all right,” replied Ardmore carelessly. “He wouldn’t bother his head about a little matter like this. The powers reserved to the states by the constitution give a governor plenty of work without acting as policeman of the jungle. That’s the reason I said to Governor Dangerfield, ‘Governor,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about this Appleweight business. Time is heavy on my hands,’ I said. ‘You stay in Raleigh and uphold the dignity of your office, and I will take care of the trouble in Dilwell.’ And you can’t understand, Cooke, how his face brightened at my words. Being the brave man he is, you would naturally expect him to come down here in person and seize these scoundrels with his own hands. I had the hardest time of my life to get him to stay at home. It almost broke his heart not to come.”

And as they retraced their steps to the caboose, it was Ardmore who led, stepping briskly along, and blithely swinging the jug.

CHAPTER X.
PROFESSOR GRISWOLD TAKES THE FIELD.

Barbara and Griswold stopped at the telegraph office on their way back to the executive mansion, and were met with news that the sheriff of Mingo had refused to receive Griswold’s message.

“His private lines of communication with the capital are doubtless well established,” said Griswold, “and Bosworth probably warned him, but it isn’t of great importance. It’s just as well for Appleweight and his friends, high and low, to show their hands.”

When they were again on the veranda, Griswold lingered for a moment with no valid excuse for delay beyond the loveliness of the night and his keen delight in Barbara’s voice and her occasional low laughter, which was so pleasant to hear that he held their talk to a light key, that he might evoke it the more. Professor Griswold’s last flirtation was now so remote that he would have been hard put to say whether the long-departed goddess’s name had been Evelyn or Laura. He had so thoroughly surrendered himself to the exactions of the law that love and marriage held small place in his speculations of the future. He had heard himself called a bachelor professor with the humorous tolerance of one who is pretty sure of himself, and who is not yet reduced to the cynical experiment of peering beneath the top layer of his box of strawberries to find the false bottom. He recalled the slender manuscript volume of verses in his desk at home, and he felt that it would be the easiest thing in the world to write a thousand songs to-night, beside which the soundest brief ever filed in any court would be the silliest of literary twaddle.

“You have done all that could be asked of you, Mr. Griswold, and I cannot permit you to remain longer. Father will certainly be here to-morrow. I assure you that it is not like him to avoid his public obligations. His absence is the most unaccountable thing that ever happened. I have my difficulties here at home, for since my mother’s death I have had the care of my young sisters, and it is not pleasant to have to deceive them.”

“Oh, but your father isn’t absent! He is officially present and in the saddle,” laughed Griswold. “You must not admit, even to me, that he is not here in full charge of his office. And as for my leaving the field, I have not the slightest intention of going back to Virginia until the Appleweight ghost is laid, the governor of North Carolina brought to confusion, and the governor of South Carolina visibly present and thundering his edicts again, so to speak, ex cathedra. My own affairs can wait, Miss Osborne. My university may go hang, my clients may be mulcted in direst damages, but just now I am your humble servant, and I shall not leave your service until my tasks are finished. I am consulting not my duty, but my pleasure. The joy of having a hand in a little affair like this, and of being able to tell my friend Tommy Ardmore about it afterward, would be sufficient. Ardmore will never speak to me again for not inviting him to a share in the game.”

He was more buoyant than she had seen him, and she liked the note of affection that crept into his tone as he spoke of his friend.

“Ardmore is the most remarkable person alive,” Griswold continued. “You remember—I spoke of him this morning. He likes to play the inscrutable idiot, and he carries it off pretty well; but underneath he’s really clever. The most amazing ideas take hold of him. You never could imagine what he’s doing now! I met him accidentally in Atlanta the other day, and he was in pursuit of a face—a girl’s face that he had seen from a car window for only an instant on a siding somewhere.”

“He must have a romantic temperament,” suggested Barbara.

“Quite that. His family have been trying to marry him off to some one in their own set ever since I have known him, but he’s extremely difficult. One of the most remarkable things about him is his amazing democracy. He owns a palace on Fifth Avenue, but rarely occupies it, for he says it bores him. He has a camp in the Adirondacks, but I have never known him to visit it. His place in North Carolina pleases him because there he commands space, and no one can crowd him or introduce him to people he doesn’t want to meet. He declares that the most interesting people don’t have more than a dollar a day to spend; that the most intelligent and the best-looking girls in America clerk in shops and work in factories. A philanthropic lady in New York supplies him every Christmas with a list of names of laundry girls, who seem to appeal particularly to Ardy’s compassion, though he never knew one in his life, but he admires them for the zeal with which they destroy buttonholes and develop the deckle-edge cuff; and he has twenty-dollar bills mailed to them quite mysteriously, and without any hint of who Santa Claus really is.”

“But the girl he saw from the car window—did she also appeal to him altruistically?”

“No; it was with her eye. He declared to me most solemnly that the girl winked at him!”

Griswold was aware that Miss Osborne’s interest in Ardmore cooled perceptibly.

“Oh!” she said, with that delightful intonation with which a woman utterly extinguishes a sister.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” said Griswold, guiltily aware of falling temperature. “He is capable of following a winking eye at a perfectly respectful distance for a hundred years, and of being entertained all the time by the joy of pursuit.”

“It seems very unusual,” said Barbara, with cold finality.

Griswold remembered this talk as, the next day aboard the train bound for Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, South Carolina, he pondered a telegram he had received from Ardmore. He read and re-read this message, chewing cigars and scowling at the landscape, and the cause of his perturbation of spirit may be roughly summarized in these words:

On leaving the executive mansion the night before, he had studied maps in his room at the Saluda House, and carefully planned his campaign. He had talked by telephone with the prosecuting attorney of Mingo County, and found that official politely responsive. So much had gone well. Then the juxtaposition of Ardmore’s estate to the border, and the possible use of the house as headquarters, struck in upon him. He would, after all, generously take Ardmore into the game, and they would uphold the honour and dignity of the great commonwealth of South Carolina together. The keys of all Ardmore’s houses were, so to speak, in Griswold’s pocket, and invitations were unnecessary between them; yet at Atlanta Ardmore had made a point of asking Griswold down to help while away the tedium of Mrs. Atchison’s house party, and as a matter of form Griswold had wired from Columbia, advising Ardmore of his unexpected descent.

Even in case Ardmore should still be abroad in pursuit of the winking eye, the doors of the huge house would be open to Griswold, who had entered there so often as the owner’s familiar friend. These things he pondered deeply as he read and re-read Ardmore’s reply to his message, a reply which was plainly enough dated at Ardsley, but which, he could not know, had really been written in caboose 0186 as it lay on a siding in the south-eastern yards at Raleigh, and thence despatched to the manager at Ardsley, with instructions to forward it as a new message to Griswold at Columbia. The chilling words thus flung at him were:

Professor Henry Maine Griswold,
Saluda House, Columbia, S. C.:

I am very sorry, old man, but I cannot take you in just now. Scarlet fever is epidemic among my tenants, and I could not think of exposing you to danger. As soon as the accursed plague passes I want to have you down.

Ardmore.

An epidemic that closed the gates of Ardsley would assume the proportions of a national disaster; for even if the great house itself were quarantined, there were lodges and bungalows scattered over the domain, where a host of guests could be entertained in comfort. Griswold reflected that the very fact that he had wired from Columbia must have intimated to Ardmore that his friend was flying toward him, pursuant to the Atlanta invitation. Griswold dismissed a thousand speculations as unworthy. Ardmore had never shown the remotest trace of snobbishness, and as far as the threatened house party was concerned, Griswold knew Mrs. Atchison very well, and had been entertained at her New York house.

The patronizing tone of the thing caused Griswold to flush at every reading. If the Ardsley date-line had not been so plainly written, if the phraseology were not so characteristic, there might be room for doubt; but Ardmore—Ardmore of all men—had slapped him in the face!

But scarlet fever or no scarlet fever, the pursuit of Appleweight had precedence of private grievances. By the time he reached Turner Court House Griswold had dismissed the ungraciousness of Ardmore, and his jaws were set with a determination to perform the mission intrusted to him by Barbara Osborne, and to wait until later for an accounting with his unaccountable friend.

Arrived at Turner’s, Griswold strode at once toward the court house. The contemptuous rejection of his message by the sheriff of Mingo had angered Griswold, but he was destined to feel even more poignant insolence when, entering the sheriff’s office, a deputy, languidly posed as a letter “V” in a swivel-chair, with his feet on the mantel, took a cob pipe from his mouth and lazily answered Griswold’s importunate query with:

“The sheriff ain’t hyeh, seh. He’s a-visitin’ his folks in Tennessy.”

“When will he be back?” demanded Griswold, hot of heart, but maintaining the icy tone that had made him so formidable in cross-examination.

“I reckon I don’t know, seh.”

“Do you know your own name?” persisted Griswold sweetly.

“Go to hell, seh,” replied the deputy. He reached for a match, relighted his pipe, and carefully crossed his feet on the mantelshelf. The moment Griswold’s steps died away in the outer corridor the deputy rose and busied himself so industriously with the telephone that within an hour all through the Mingo hills, and even beyond the state line, along lonely trails, across hills and through valleys, and beside cheery creeks and brooks, it was known that a strange man from Columbia was in Mingo County looking for the sheriff, and Appleweight, alias Poteet, and his men were everywhere on guard.

Griswold liked the prosecuting attorney on sight. His name was Habersham, and he was a youngster with a clear and steady gray eye. Instead of the Southern statesman’s flowing prince albert, he wore a sack-coat of gray jeans, and was otherwise distinguished by a shirt of white-and-blue check. He grinned as Griswold bent a puzzled look upon him.

“I took your courses at the university two years ago, Professor, and I remember distinctly that you always wore a red cravat to your Wednesday lectures.”

“You have done well,” replied Griswold, “for I never expected to find an old student who remembered half as much of me as that. Now, as I understood you over the telephone, Appleweight was indicted for stealing a ham in this county by the last grand jury, but the sheriff has failed or refused to make the arrest. How did the grand jury come to indict if this outlaw dominates all the hill country?”

“The grand jury wanted to make a showing of virtue, and it was, of course, understood between the foreman, the leader of the gang, and the sheriff that no warrant could be served on Appleweight. I did my duty; the grand jury’s act was exemplary; and there the wheels of justice are blocked. The same thing is practically true across the state line in Dilwell County, North Carolina. These men, led by Appleweight, use their intimate knowledge of the country to elude pursuers when at times the revenue men undertake a raid, and the county authorities have never seriously molested them. Now and then one of these sheriffs will make a feint of going out to look for Appleweight, but you may be sure that due notice is given before he starts. Three revenue officers have lately been killed while looking for these men, and the government is likely to take vigorous action before long.”