The Call of the South - Robert Lee Durham

The President had called upon the Governors for troops; and the brilliantly lighted armory was crowded with the citizen-soldiers who followed the standards of the 71st Ohio, waiting for the bugle to call them to order for the simple and formal ceremony of declaring their desire to answer the President's call.

A formal and useless ceremony surely: for it was a foregone conclusion that this gallant old regiment, with its heroic record in two wars, would volunteer to a man. It was no less certain that, presenting unbroken ranks of willing soldiers, it would be the first selected by the Governor to assist Uncle Sam's regulars in impressing upon the Kaiser the length and breadth and thickness of the Monroe Doctrine.

For many bothersome years the claimant nations had abided by the Hague Tribunal's award, though with evidently decreasing patience because of Venezuela's lame compliance with it. Three changes of government and dwindling revenues had made the collection of the indebtedness by the agent of the claimants more and more difficult. Finally on the 6th of January, 191-, Señor Emilio Mañana executed his coup d'état, overthrew the existing government, declared himself Protector of Venezuela, and "for the people of Venezuela repudiated every act and agreement of the spurious governments of the last decade," seized the customs, and gave the agent of the creditor allies his passports in a manner more effective than ceremonious: all of this with his weather eye upon the Monroe Doctrine and a Washington administration in some need of a rallying cry and a diverting issue.

The Kaiser's patience was exhausted, and his army and navy were in the pink of condition. On the 10th of January his ministers informed the allies that their most august sovereign would deal henceforth with Venezuela as might seem to him best to protect Germany's interests and salve the Empire's honour.

In less than a week the President sent to Congress a crisp message, saying that the Kaiser and the great doctrine were in collision. The Senate resolution declaring war was adopted after being held up long enough to permit fifty-one Senators to embalm their patriotism in the Congressional Record, and, being sent to the House, was concurred in in ten minutes after the clerk began to read the preamble.

The country was a-tremble with the thrill and excitement of a man who is preparing to go against an antagonist worthy of his mettle, and in the 71st's armory a crowd of people jammed the balconies to the last inch. The richly varicoloured apparel of the women, in vivid contrast to the sombre walls of the armory, the kaleidoscopic jumble and whirl of soldiers in dress uniforms on the floor, the frequent outbursts of hand-clapping and applause as favourite officers of the regiment were recognized by the galleries, the surging and unceasing din and hubbub of the shouting and gesticulating mass of people on floor and balcony, gave the scene a holiday air which really belied the feelings of the greater number both of soldiers and onlookers. There was a serious thought in almost every mind: but serious thoughts are not welcome at such times to a man who has already decided to tender his life to his country, nor to the woman who knows that she must say good-bye to him on the morrow. So they both try to overwhelm unwelcome reflections by excited chatter and patriotic enthusiasm. They will think of to-morrow when it comes: let the clamour go on.

On the very front seat and leaning over the balcony rail are seated three women who receive more than the ordinary number of salutes and greetings from the officers and men on the floor. Two young women and their mother they are, and any one of the three is worthy of a second glance by right of her looks. The mother, who, were it not for the becoming fulness of her matronly figure, might be mistaken for an elder sister of the older daughter, has a face in which strength and dignity and gentleness and kindliness and a certain air of distinction proclaim her a gentlewoman of that fineness which is Nature's patent of nobility. The older daughter is a young woman of eighteen years perhaps, inheriting her mother's distinction of manner and dignity of carriage, and showing a trace of hauteur, attributable to her youth, which is continually striving with a spirit of mischief for possession of her gray eyes and her now solemn, now laughing mouth. The younger daughter, hardly more than a child, has an undeveloped but fast ripening beauty which her sister cannot be said to possess. They have gray eyes and erect figures in common; but there the likeness ceases. The younger girl's mass of hair, impatient of its braids, looks black in the artificial light; but three hours ago, with the setting sun upon it, a stranger had thought it was red. Her skin indeed, where it is not tinted with rose, is of that rare whiteness which sometimes goes with red hair, but never unaccompanied by perfect health. She has been straining her eyes in search of some one since the moment she entered the gallery, and finally asks impatiently, "Why doesn't papa come out where we can see him? The people would shout for him, I know."

"Don't be a fidget," answers her sister in a low voice, "he will come presently;" and continues, "I declare, mamma, I believe Helen thinks all these soldiers are just for papa's glorification, and that if papa failed to volunteer the country would be lost."

"Well, there isn't any one to take his place in the regiment, for I heard Captain Elkhard say so."

"Captain Elkhard would except himself, I suppose, even though he thought like you that papa is perfection."

"Yes, and I suppose that you would except Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan, wouldn't you? Humph! he is too young sort, too much like a lady-killer to be a soldier. I don't care if I do think papa is perfection. He is most—isn't he, mamma?"

A roar of applause drowns the mother's amused assent; and they look up to see this father, the colonel of the 71st, uncover for a moment to the noisy greeting whose vigour seems to stamp with approval his younger daughter's good opinion of him. In a moment a trumpet-call breaks through and strikes down and overwhelms all this clamour of applause, and there is no sound save the hurrying into ranks of the men on the floor. Then comes the confused shouting of a dozen roll-calls at once, the cracking of the rifle-butts on the floor, the boisterous counting of fours, a succession of sharp commands and trumpet-calls,—and the noise and confusion grow rapidly less until only is heard the voice of the adjutant as he salutes and presents the regiment in line of masses to the colonel, saying, "Sir, the regiment is formed."

A short command brings the rifles to the floor, and there is absolute quiet as every one waits to catch each word that its commander will say in asking the regiment to volunteer. But Colonel Phillips knows the value of the psychological moment and the part that emotion plays in patriotism, and he does not intend to lose a feather-weight of force in his appeal to the loyal spirits of his men. So he brings the guns again quickly to salute as the colour-guard emerge from an office door behind him, bearing "Old Glory" and the 71st's regimental colours; and, turning, he presents his sword as the field music sounds To the Colour and the bullet-torn standards sweep proud and stately to their posts in the centre battalion. This sudden and unexpected adaptation of the ceremony for The Escort of the Colour, which for lack of space is never attempted in the armory, is not without effect. The men in the ranks, being restrained, are bursting to yell. The onlookers, free to cheer, cannot express by cheap hand-clapping what wells up in them at sight of the flags, and they, too, are silent. When the rifle-butts again rest on the floor the Colonel begins his soldierly brief address:

"The President has asked the Governor for six regiments. While under the terms of their enlistment he could name any he might choose, he prefers volunteer soldiers as far as may be. So you are here this evening to indicate the extent of your willingness and wishfulness to answer the President's call. I need make no appeal to you. The 71st is a representative regiment in its personnel. Its men are of all sections and classes and parties. My mother was a South Carolinian, my father from Massachusetts. Your colour-sergeant is a Texan, and your regimental colours are borne by a native of Ohio, grandson of him who placed those colours on the Confederate earthworks at Petersburg. You in the aggregate most fitly represent the sentiment of the whole people of this union of states. This sentiment is a loyalty that has never to this moment failed to answer a call to arms. It is not to be supposed that the present generation is degenerate either in courage or patriotism. When the trumpet sounds forward the ranks will stand fast, and such as for any reason may not volunteer will fall out to the rear and retire."

At the lilting call there was silence for ten seconds, in which not a breath was taken by man or woman in the house: then the galleries broke out to cheer. Not a man had moved; though not a few felt as did Corporal Billie Catling, who remarked to his chum when the ranks were dismissed, "It's going to be devilish hard for my folks to get along without my salary; but to fall out to the rear when that bugle said 'forward'—damned if I could do it."

One of the most deeply interested spectators of the scene in the armory had stood back against the wall in the gallery during the whole time, and had apparently not wished to be brought into notice of the crowd, mostly women, packed in the limited gallery space. His goodly length enabled him to see over the heads of the other spectators everything of interest happening on the floor. A long overcoat could not conceal his perfectly developed outlines; and many heads were turned to look a second time at him, attracted both by his appearance and by the fact that he seemed to be an utter stranger to every one around him, not having changed his position nor spoken to a soul since coming up into the gallery. He was broad of shoulder, full-chested, straight-backed, with a head magnificently set on; and had closely cropped black hair showing a decided tendency to curl, dark eyes, evenly set teeth as white as a fox-hound's, a clean-shaved face neither full nor lean, and pleasing to look upon, a complexion of noticeable darkness, yet all but white and without a trace of colour. While nine-tenths of the people who saw him that evening had no impression at all as to his race or nationality, an observant eye would have noted that he was unobtrusively but unmistakably a negro.

He had been quite unconscious of anything around him in his absorbed interest in the ceremony below him. This manifest interest was evidenced by his nervous hands which he clinched and opened and shut as varying expressions of enthusiasm, resentment and disappointment, humiliation, disdain and determination came and went over his face. He, Hayward Graham, had applied to enlist in this regiment a month before, and had been refused admission because of the small portion of negro blood in his veins,—and that in a manner, too, that added unnecessary painfulness to the refusal. He rather despised himself for coming to witness the regiment's response to the call for troops, but his patriotic interest and his love for his friend Hal Lodge, who had loyally assisted his effort to enlist in the 71st, overcame his pride, and he had come to see the decision of Hal's enthusiastic wager that nine-tenths of the regiment would volunteer.

The first trumpet-call had stirred his enthusiasm, only to have it turned to chagrin and resentfulness when the roll-calls brought to him the realization that his name was not among the elect, and the black humiliation of the thought that he might not even offer to die for his country in this select company because he was part—so small a part—negro; and he gnawed his lips in irritation. But when the flags had come in so suddenly—he involuntarily straightened up and took in his breath quickly to relieve the smothering sensation in his throat, and forgot his wrongs in an exaltation of patriotic fervour.

He stood abstracted for some time after the outflow from the galleries began, and came down just behind the three women of the Colonel's family. At the foot of the stairs Lieutenant Morgan met the party and said, "Mrs. Phillips, the Colonel told me to bring you ladies over to his office."

"So that's the Colonel's wife and daughters," thought Graham, as he passed out into the street. "Where have I seen that little one?"

CHAPTER II

After lingering at the entrance of the armory for a few minutes to see Hal Lodge, and failing to find him, Graham, still gloomily and resentfully meditating upon his rejection by the regiment, started briskly toward the temporary lodgings of his mother and himself as if he had some purpose in mind. Arrived there, he began catechizing her even while removing his overcoat.

"Look here, mother, put down that work for awhile, and tell me all about my people."

"What is it, Hayward? What do you want to know?" his mother asked.

"I want you to tell me all about my father and grandfathers and grandmothers, everything you know—who they were, and what they were, and what they did, and where they lived—the whole thing."

"And what is the matter that you want to know all that at once? Are you still worrying about not getting into that regiment?"

"Yes; I want to know why I am not good enough to go to war along with respectable people—if there is any reason."

"Honey, you are just as good as any of them, and better than most. I wouldn't think about it any more if I were you."

"Well, I'm not going to think about it any more—after to-night; but I want to know all about it right now. Where was father from? You have never told me that."

"Well, honey, I don't know myself; for he never told me nor any one else that. All I know is that something—he never would say what—made him leave his father and mother when he was not twenty years old and he never saw them afterwards,—didn't let them know where he was or even that he was alive. Your pa was mighty high-spirited, and he never seemed to forget whatever it was that came between him and his father; though he would talk about him some too, and appeared to worship his mother's memory. They must have been very prominent people from what he said of them. His mother died very soon after he left home, he told me; and your grandfather was killed not long after that in a battle right at the beginning of the war, I've heard him say; but he didn't seem to like to talk of them."

"Didn't father say which side my grandfather was on?"

"On our side—the Union side."

"And father was in the war?"

"Yes, but I forget what he did. He had some sort of a badge or medal tied up with a red, white and blue ribbon that I found in his trunk after he died; but I gave it to you to play with when you were little and you lost it. That had something to do with the war, but I didn't understand exactly what. He didn't like to talk about the war. When we were first married he used to say that the war was the first battle and the easiest, and that he was enlisted for the second and intended to see it through. But before he died I often heard him say that the war was only clearing away the brush, and what the crop would be depended on what was planted and how it was tended, and that his great-grandchildren might see the harvest."

"Where did you first meet him?"

"Down in Alabama. He went down there soon after the war to teach school, just as I did. I had been to college and got my diploma and I wanted to teach; but it seemed I could not get a position in the whole State of New Hampshire. So when some of the people offered to send me down to Alabama to teach the negroes, I went. Your father had a school for negroes not very far from mine, and he had had a hard time from the very first. None of the respectable white people would have anything to do with him, and he could not get board from any one but negroes. But the worse the people treated him the harder he worked, and his school grew. Finally it became so large that he could not do the work alone. He tried every way to get another teacher, but could not. As a last resort he asked me to combine my school with his and see if we could not manage in that way to teach all the children who came. I never saw anybody with a heart so set as his was on giving every little negro a chance to learn.

"So we combined the schools and were getting along very well when one day as your father was coming out of the post-office in the little town near which we taught, a young man named Bush stepped up in front of him and cursed him and said something about me that your father never would tell me. Your father knocked him down and he was nearly killed by striking his head against a hitching-post as he fell. The next morning a committee of some of the citizens came to the schoolhouse, and Colonel Allen, who was one of them, told your father that the community was greatly aroused by the condition of affairs, and that the injury done to young Bush, while they didn't approve of Bush's conduct, had brought the trouble to a head. He said that sober-minded citizens didn't want any outbreak, but that the peculiar relation existing between your father and me outraged the sentiments of every respectable man and woman in the county."

"Did father hit him?"

"No, honey; but he rose right up without waiting to hear any more and told Colonel Allen that as for the injury to young Bush he had done nothing more than defend the good name of a woman and had no apologies or explanations to offer. He talked quite a long time to them, and I could see that they didn't like some of the things he said. As he finished he told them that he could see that our condition, cut off as we were from association with respectable people by prejudice and from the lower classes because of their dense ignorance, and thrown into intimacy by our work, was somewhat unusual, but that was because of conditions we could not control and be true to our work. He would try to arrange, he told them, if they would give him a week, so that there would be no grounds for these criticisms. They asked him what he proposed to do, but he said he couldn't answer them then.

"They gave him the week he asked for, and left us. He dismissed the school when the committee was gone, and when all the children had scampered out of the schoolhouse he told me that while we could not be blamed for the way things had come about, it was true that our being so much together and cut off from everybody else gave our critics a chance to talk, and his solution of the difficulty was for us to be married—at once. He went on to say a whole lot of things, honey, that I never imagined he thought of, and wound up by declaring that I owed it to the work we had begun to make any sacrifices to carry it on. Now, honey, there was never a better, braver man than your father, nor a better looking one, I think, and there was no reason why I should not love him. I was younger then than I am now and I was not a bad-looking girl myself, and I did not think till long afterwards that when he spoke of my sacrifices he was thinking of his own.

"Well, he made what arrangements were necessary that evening, and we were married by a Bureau officer of some kind or other next morning before time for school. When school assembled he sent a note by one of the boys to Colonel Allen, saying that we had arranged the matter so that there could be no further objection to our running the school in together, and informed him that we were married."

"And what reply did Colonel Allen send to that note?" Hayward asked his mother with great interest.

"He didn't send any," she replied; "but came along with some others of the committee in about half an hour to bring his answer himself."

"What did he say?"

"Well, he started off by saying to your father that there could be no doubt that what we had done would make the people forget their former objections, but he thought it would be because the former offence against their notions of propriety would be lost sight of in their unspeakable indignation at this method we had adopted, which, he said, struck at the very foundation of their civilization. He talked very high and mighty, I thought, and though he pretended to try to hold himself down and not get mad, he ripped and charged a long time right there before the whole school, and finally told us he would do all he could to keep the people from doing us harm, but he advised us to leave the community just as soon as we could, as he wouldn't be responsible for the result of our act."

"What did father say to that?" Hayward asked eagerly.

"Well, he waited until Colonel Allen got through and then said very quietly that he had done what he had because he had appreciated the force of the objections that had been raised to our intimate association and was always willing to be governed by the proprieties, but that he did not agree with Colonel Allen about uprooting any principle of civilization, that times and conditions had changed, and, while he knew the sentiment of the people would be against our marriage, he thought that sentiment was wrong and would have to give way before the pressure of the new order of things, that the law had married us and we would look to the law to protect us. He said that the work we were doing was worthy of any man's effort, that he had consecrated himself to it and was not going to be driven from it by any predictions of danger, that I was his wife and he would protect me."

"What did the honourable committee think of that?"

"I don't know. Colonel Allen and the other men just turned around without saying another word and left the schoolhouse."

"Did you run the school on after that?"

"Yes, honey, but not for long. One night when those awful people came to destroy things at the schoolhouse as they had done several times before, your father was there to meet them and identify them. Instead of running away as he thought they would, they crowded around him, and after a struggle in the dark they left him lying just outside the door with a broken arm, a pistol-ball through his side, and unconscious from a lick on the head. Some of the coloured people who lived near there heard the row, and after it was all over and all those folks were gone, they slipped up there and found your father and brought him home.

"It was hard for us to get a doctor at first. A young one who lived nearest to us wouldn't come, though we sent for him, and we were all frightened nearly to death. We could hear those awful people yell every once and awhile away off on all sides of the house, then they would fire off guns and pistols—it was an awful night, Hayward. At last old Doctor Wright came about three o'clock in the morning. He lived ten miles or more from us, and we thought that your father, who was raving and moaning, would surely die before he got there. But the old doctor told us as soon as he examined him that he would pull through all right. He said that he had been a surgeon in Stonewall Jackson's corps and that he had seen men forty times worse hurt back in the army in two months. That made us feel a great deal better, I tell you. Your father came to his senses before the old man quit working with him, and when he heard that the young doctor had refused to come to see him (because he was scared, the negro who went for him said), and that the old man had ridden so far through a very cold and wet night to help him, I never heard any one say more to express his thanks than your father did. The old doctor listened to it all without making any answer except an occasional grunt. When he got ready to go home I asked him if he would not prefer to wait till daylight, for fear those awful men would hurt him."

"And did he wait?" interrupted Graham.

"No. He stiffened up as straight as his rheumatism would let him and stumped indignantly out of the house with his pill-bags in one hand and in the other an old pair of home-knit woollen gloves he wouldn't stop to put on—I can see him now."

"Did he ever come back?" asked Graham.

"Oh, yes. The sight of him on his tall pacing bay mare made us glad every two or three days till your father got well."

"The old doctor evidently didn't agree with his neighbours about you and father, then."

"I don't know about that. He never would discuss our troubles or speak any words of sympathy; and on the last day he came, when your father was thanking him as he had done so often for his kindness to him, the old man asked him in his rather curt manner, 'Don't they need school-teachers up north?'"

"Did you and father leave that place as soon as he got well?"

"No. Your father said that we would stick to it to the end; and as soon as he was able to teach we opened the school again, but in less than a week the schoolhouse was burned down. We rented another after some trouble, but that was burned promptly also. Then it became impossible to get one.

"We decided it would be best for us to go away to some place where the people were not prejudiced against us. We moved more than a dozen times, but were never able to stay longer than a few months at most, and often had to pack up almost before we finished unpacking. Finally we lost all hope of being able to teach the negroes in the South, and decided to go home. Your father did go so far as to suggest that if I would go back North and leave him down there alone the people might not molest him. He certainly did have his heart in the work. As I did not like the idea, however, he dropped it."

"And that's when father got the professorship at Oberlin?"

"Yes; and kept it till his death."

"I can hardly recollect father at all," said the son, "though it seems sometimes I remember how he looked. I wish I could have been older before he died."

"Well, you were not two years old at your father's death, Hayward, and really saw very little of him. He never seemed to care for children. Your two sisters that died before you were born—it seemed that sometimes a week would pass without his being conscious that they were in the house. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn't have time for anything else. His hard work and disappointment over the failure that he had made down South was what killed him, I have always thought. Though he lingered for many years, he was so broken-spirited after we went to Ohio that his health gave way, and he was not more than a shadow when he died. I am not sorry that you do not remember how he looked at the last.

"But, honey," the mother continued after some moments of silence, "you ought to be proud of your father. I wish you could have heard the funeral sermon Doctor Johnson preached. He did not say anything about your father's being in the war of the rebellion, but he told about his trials and struggles to teach the negroes in the South, and said that in that work John Graham was as much a soldier and was as brave and faithful as any man who ever fought for the flag. If these folks here could have heard that sermon they never would have voted to keep you from joining the regiment."

"Oh, it's not because of what my father did or did not do," said Graham impatiently; "nor is it because of what I've done or left undone, nor of what they think I would do or would not do if they kindly permitted me to enlist. No, no. It's because I'm part negro—though I'm quite as white as a number I saw there to-night. Now, mother, exactly how much negro am I? You've told me your father was a white man; but who was your mother, and what do you know about her?"

"Yes, my father was a white man. He was a German just come over to this country. He had a beer saloon in a New Hampshire town—at least he bought it afterwards. He worked in the saloon when my mother, who had run away from Kentucky, was hired to work in his employer's house. He boarded there and she was treated something like a member of the family, although she was a servant, and they were married after awhile. Some few of the people didn't like it, I've heard mammy say, but they got along without any trouble; and when my father saved up some money he bought the little saloon from his employer and made some little money before he died. We had a hard enough time getting it, though, goodness knows. I moved back to New Hampshire from Ohio after your father's death in order to push the case through the—"

"Yes, yes, I've heard that before," said Hayward; "but tell me about your mother's running away from her master. You have never told me anything about her, except that her name was Cindy or Lucinda, and that she belonged to General Young."

"Well, honey, she was just a slave girl that belonged to General Young over in Kentucky. She ran away and got across the river without being caught, and some of the white people helped her to get on as far as New Hampshire and got her that place to work where my father boarded. She and my father were—"

"Yes, yes, I know," the son interrupted again, "but what made her run away and leave her father and mother—did she know her father and mother?"

"I don't know that I remember it all," said the mother evasively, "and it doesn't make any difference anyway."

"Oh, well, go on and tell what you know or have heard. Let's get at the bottom of it. I declare I believe you don't like my being a negro any better than those dudes in the 71st."

The mother laughed at his statement; and seemed pleased at the interruption, for she made no move to proceed with the narrative. Graham looked at her quietly a few moments, and, ascribing her reticence to unwillingness to descant upon the negro element in her ancestry, which was indeed a part but a very small part of her motive, repeated his demand for information sharply.

"Oh, honey," cried his mother, "don't ask me any more about it. I just made mammy tell me all about her father and mother and her running away from Kentucky, and I wish to the Lord I never had! It was just awful."

"So! Well, now I must know. Go on and tell it. The quicker you do the sooner it will be over. Go on, I say. What was your mother's father named?"

"Gumbo—Guinea Gumbo."

"Poetic name that! And her mother's name, what was it?"

"Big Lize."

"Not so poetic, though it sounds like some poetry I've read, too. And now what did this pair do or suffer that was so terrible? It's no use dodging any longer."

"Well, child, if I must, I suppose I must. My mother's mother didn't do anything that was awful; but Guinea Gumbo—I wish I knew I was no kin to him. Mammy said he was brought right from Africa and was as wild as a wolf. Nobody could understand much that he said, and General Young had a time keeping him from tearing things up. He used to run away and stay in the swamp for weeks at a time. The children on the place, black and white, were as scared of him as death, and none of the slave women would ever go about him if they could help it. Not long after General Young bought him, Gumbo and his first wife, who was brought over from Africa with him, had the plans all fixed to steal one of the General's little boys, five or six years old, and carry him off to the river-swamp and have a regular cannibal feast of him. General Young found it out in time; and mammy said the old negroes on the plantation said that was what killed the woman, the whipping she and Gumbo got for it. It laid Gumbo up for a long time, but he got over it. It seemed that nothing but shooting could kill him."

"Did they shoot him to kill him? What was that for?" asked Graham.

"Honey, that is the awful part of it. Mammy said that one day her young mistis, the General's oldest daughter, didn't come home from a ride she had taken, and the whole plantation was turned out to find her. But some one came along and told the General that she had eloped across the river with a young man he had forbidden to come on the place, and all the people on the plantation went back to their quarters. As the young man could not be found, everybody thought that he and Miss Lily had run away and married and were too much afraid of her father to come back home. The next day, however, the young man turned up, and swore he had not seen Miss Lily in a week. Then the plantation was in terror.—Honey, I can't tell you the rest.—They found her.—When they were calling out all the people from the quarters, the General learned that Gumbo had not been seen since Miss Lily was lost. He had run away so often that no attention was paid to it, for he always came back after a time.—They got the bloodhounds, mammy said, and went to the swamp. After a long time the dogs struck Gumbo's trail, and—yes, they found her,—tied hands and feet and her clothing torn to strings, in a kind of hut made of bark and brush way back in the swamp. She was dead, but she had not been dead an hour, from a gash in her head made by an axe. The dogs followed a hot scent from the hut for another hour, and led the men to where they had run Gumbo down. That was where they shot him—and left him. He still had the axe, and had killed one of the dogs, and nobody could get to him. They didn't want to, I suppose."

Graham had listened to his mother's last words without breathing, and when she stopped he dropped his face in his hands with a groan.... She began again in a few moments:

"Mammy said that when they brought her young mistis back home the General went off in a fit, and raved and cursed till the doctors and the rest of 'em had to hold him to keep him from killing somebody. Mammy was one of her old mistis's house-girls, and she heard all the General's ravings and screams that he would kill every nigger on the place; and he kept it up so long and kept breaking out again so after they thought they had him pacified that mammy said she was scared so bad she just couldn't stay there any longer: and that's what made her run away the very next night. She had a hard time getting across the river, but after she got over safe she didn't have much trouble, for some of the white people took charge of her and helped her to get further on north. Pappy always said—"

"Oh, Lord, that's enough!" the son broke in, raising his head out of his hands, and interrupting his mother's flow of words, of which he had noted little since hearing the tragic story of his savage great-grandfather. He rose from his chair impatiently.

"So I am Hayward Graham, son of Patricia Schmidt, daughter of Cindy—nothing, daughter of Gumbo—nothing."

"Guinea Gumbo," corrected his mother.

"Oh, I beg my distinguished ancestor's pardon for presuming to credit him with only one name. A gentleman with his record ought to have as many as Kaiser Bill," drawled Graham sarcastically. Then with better humour he said to his mother, "And will you please to inform me from which of your ancestors you inherited that name of Patricia?"

"Mammy named me that for her old mistis."

* * * * *

Graham stood for awhile looking at the blank wall. Then he spoke as if he had settled his problem.

"Yes I'm a negro—no doubt about that; and a negro I'll be from to-morrow morning."

"Why, honey, you are not going to lower yourself to—"

"No, no. I'm not going to lower myself to anything; but I'm going to go with my own crowd, where I'll not be insulted by people who are no better than I am. I got along very well at college, but these people here are different. I'll show 'em. I'll go to the war, and I'll get as much glory out of it as any of 'em. My father was a soldier, and his father died in battle: I rather guess I can't stay out of it. Good night, mummer."

And he took himself off to bed.

CHAPTER III

Hayward Graham was twenty-three years old. He had half finished his senior year at Harvard—with credit, it must be said—when the imminence of war drove all desire for study from his mind. He wrote to Harry Lodge a former college chum who had graduated in the class ahead of him and gone to Ohio to make a name for himself—fortune he had already—and asked that his name be proposed for membership in Lodge's company of the 71st, as a regiment most likely to get in the scrimmage when it came. Lodge had done this and had written to Graham that doubtless he would be received on the next meeting night as war was at that time a certainty. Whereupon Graham had bundled up his traps and come without delay.

Graham's mother also had travelled to Ohio, for the double purpose of telling her soldier good-bye and making a passing, and what promised to be a last visit to some, of her old Oberlin friends, drawing for expenses upon limited funds she had religiously hoarded and applied to her son's tuition.

Her husband had always impressed upon her, and in his last moment enjoined, that the boy should be educated; and she had obeyed his wishes to the limit of her power and as a command from heaven. She had husbanded her small patrimony, recovered after a costly suit at law, slow-dragging through the New Hampshire courts, and had allowed it to accumulate while her son was in the graded schools against the time when it would be needed to send him to college. When that time had come it required no little faith to see how the small bank account would be sufficient to meet the expenses of four years at Harvard. She would better have sent the boy to a less expensive school, but no: John Graham had gone to Harvard, and nothing less than Harvard for his son would satisfy her idea of loyalty to his father's memory and admonitions. So to Harvard she sent him, while she planned and worked to stretch and patch out the limited purse; and—miracle of financiering—she had fetched him to the half of his last year, and could have carried him to his graduation and still had enough dollars left to attend that momentous ceremony in a new frock.

Hayward Graham had repaid his mother's sacrifices by diligence in his studies. He had been a close second to the leader of his class at the graded school, an exemplary and hard-working pupil in the grammar school, and at college his literary labours were diminished only by his efforts in athletics, which, indeed, did his work as a student little serious damage. He was quick to learn everything that his college career offered, not only the lore of books, but good-fellowship, easy manners and how to get on. His naturally friendly disposition did him little service at first in finding or making friends at Harvard, where there seemed to him to be so many desirable circles that he would be glad to enter, and he had thought for awhile his colour would bar him from any close friendships there. However, near the end of his freshman year he had occasion by personal combat to demonstrate his willingness to fight for the honour of his class and to show that his pugilistic powers were of no mean calibre, by thoroughly dressing down a couple of sophomores who had held him up to tell him what they thought of the whole tribe of freshmen, and who, upon his being so bold as to take issue with them, had attempted to "regulate" him. Kind-hearted Harry Lodge, himself a sophomore, had witnessed the trial of Graham's courage, class loyalty and fistic abilities, and being struck with admiration had shaken hands with him and congratulated him on his prowess. From that moment Graham was by every token a member of the small coterie known as "Lodge's Gang," to whom Lodge had introduced him as "the only freshman I know that's worth a damn."

From the time of his admission into this set of good fellows Graham's social side was provided with all it desired. Lodge and his friends seemed to think nothing at all of Graham's colour; or, if they did, made the more of him in their enthusiastic support of the idea that "a man's a man for a' that." They had enough rollicking fun to keep their spare hours filled to the brim and sought the society of women very seldom; but when they did go to pay their vows at the shrine of the feminine, Graham was as often of the party as any other of "the gang."

The young women they visited seemed to find no fault with his coming; for he could do his share of stunts, had a good voice and a musical ear, and was never at a loss for something to say, while his colour meant no more to them than that of a Chinaman or a Jap. He was promptly and effectually smitten with each new pretty face that he saw on these occasional forays, just as were Hal and Jim Aldrich; but his ever-changing devotions showed plainly that it was as yet to no one woman, but to women, that his soul paid homage. As for the young women, any of them as soon would have thought of marrying one of the Chinese students in the University as him. In fact they did not associate him with the matrimonial idea, but were interested in him as in an unusual species of that ever-interesting genus, man. They made quite a lion of him for a time after his performance in the Harvard-Yale football game of 19—; so much so that he had become just a mite vain, which condition of mind precluded his falling in love with anybody for several weeks.

It was right at the height of his popularity that he had left Harvard to join the ranks of the 71st. But Corporal Lodge had written with too much assurance. Lieutenant Morgan of Lodge's company caught the sound of that name, Hayward Graham, and remarked casually, "He has the same name as that Harvard nigger who was smashed up in the Yale game."

Some of the men thought the lieutenant said the applicant was a negro, and began to question Lodge. When that gentleman stood up to speak for his friend he quite captured them with his description of Graham's courage and other excellences, but when he answered "yes" to a direct question whether his candidate was a negro, the enthusiasm and Graham's chance of enlistment in the 71st died together, and suddenly. Lieutenant Morgan, who was presiding at the company meeting, sneered, "This is not a negro regiment," and the ballot was overwhelmingly adverse.

Lodge was offended deeply at Graham's rejection, and said hotly that if the regiment was too good for Graham it was too good for him, and he would apply for his discharge at once. Lieutenant Morgan replied drily that "one pretext is as good as another if a man really doesn't want to get into the fighting." This angered Harry to the point of profanity, but he thought no more of a discharge.

This blackballing of his name was Graham's first rebuff, and it bore hard upon his spirits. He had never had an occasion to take an inventory of the elements in his blood, and this sudden jolt to his pride and eager patriotic impulses made him first angry, then heart-sick, then cynically scornful.

The morning after his mother had gone into the history of his ancestry, as far as she knew it, he sought an army recruiting station without delay. The gray-headed captain in charge did not betray the surprise he felt when Graham told him he desired to enlist,—his recruits, especially negroes, did not often come from the class to which Graham evidently belonged.

"May I join any branch of the service I prefer?" Hayward asked.

"Yes," said the officer; and added, as a fleeting suspicion entered his mind that this negro might intend passing himself off for a white man if possible, "that is, of course, infantry or cavalry. There are no negroes in the artillery."

Graham winced in spite of himself at this blunt reminder of his compromising blood, and mentally resented the statement as an unnecessary taunt. But he had determined to fight for the flag if he had to swallow his pride, and he was quickly put through all the necessary formalities of enlistment. His physical qualifications aroused the unbounded admiration of the examining surgeon, who called the old captain back into the room where Graham stood stripped for the examination, to look upon his perfect physique.

"I don't know about that broken leg, though," the surgeon said. "How long has it been well?"

"I've had the full use of it for more than a month now," Graham answered. "It's as good as the other, I think. It wasn't such a bad break anyway."

"How did you break it?"

"In the Yale game at Cambridge last November."

"Say," the surgeon broke out, "were you the Harvard man that was laid out in that last rush?"

"Yes."

"Well, I saw that game," the surgeon went on; "and I say, Captain, be sure to assign this young fellow to a regiment that will get into the scrimmage. Nothing but the firing-line will suit his style."

"Which do you prefer, infantry or cavalry?" questioned the Captain briefly.

"As I've walked all my life, I think that I'll ride now that I have the chance," Graham answered.

"Very well. You are over regulation weight and length for a trooper, but special orders will let you in for the war only."

"The fighting is all I want," said Graham

"All right," replied the officer. "I'll send you to the 10th. They have always gotten into it so far, and likely nobody will miss seeing service in this affair."

Graham was given a suit of uniform and ordered to report morning and afternoon each day till his squad would be sent to join the regiment. He carried the uniform to a tailor to have it fitted to his figure, in which he took some little pride; and lost no time in getting into it when the tailor had finished with it, and hurrying to parade himself before his mother's admiring eyes. That worthy woman was as proud of him as only a combination of mother love, womanly admiration for a soldier, and a negro's surpassing delight in brass buttons, could make her.

Graham busied himself with the study of a book on cavalry tactics borrowed from the old sergeant at the recruiting station, and with that experienced soldier's help he picked up in the ten days that elapsed before he was sent away no little knowledge of the business before him. He was an enthusiastic student, took great pains to perfect himself in the ceremonious side of soldiering, and delighted in the punctilios which the regulations prescribed. He went at every opportunity to witness the drills of the national guard troops who were preparing to leave for the front; and began to acquire the feeling of superiority which the regular has for the volunteer, and to sniff at the little laxities of the guardsmen, and with the air of a veteran comment sarcastically upon them to the old sergeant: till he finally persuaded himself that his good angel had saved him from these amateurs to make a real soldier of him.

Two days before Graham was sent away the 71st gave its farewell parade. Graham was there, of course. It was near sunset. The wide street was lined with spectators. The ranks were standing at rest, and the soldiers and their friends were saying all manner of good-byes. The band was blowing itself breathless in patriotic selections, and as it crashed into one after another soldiers and people cheered and shouted with gathering enthusiasm. Colonel Phillips, sitting on his horse by his wife's carriage, said, "Orderly, tell Brandt to play 'Dixie,'" and, addressing the crowd of friends about him, "My mother was a South Carolinian," he added jocularly. When the band burst in on that unaccountably inspiring air the assemblage stood on its toes to yell and scream, and the tall Texas colour-sergeant came near letting "Old Glory" fall in the dust in his conscientious effort to split his lungs.

Graham stood quite near the Colonel and his party, and was much interested in watching both this man of whom he had heard Harry Lodge speak so enthusiastically, and his daughters, Miss Elise and Miss Helen, who were abundantly attractive on their own account without the added distinction of being children of their father. It was interesting to him to note the differing expressions of patriotic enthusiasm as it forced itself through the well-bred restraint of the elder sister or bubbled up unrestrainedly in the unaffected girlish spirits of Helen. Her spontaneous outbursts were irresistibly fascinating to him, and he could hardly avoid staring at her.

When the parade was formed, however, he was true to his new learning; and after the bugle had sounded retreat, and while the band was swinging slow and stately through that grandest and most uplifting of military airs, "The Star-Spangled Banner," he for the first time had uncovered and stood at attention, erect and steady as a young ash, his heart thumping like that of a young devotee at his first orison.

As he looked up when the band had ceased, he met the full gaze of Helen Phillips. She was looking straight at him, with a rapt smile upon her fresh young face. Then he remembered where he had seen that face before.

It was at that Yale game at Cambridge. Harvard was due to win; but Yale had scored once in the first half, and all but scored again before the Harvard men pulled themselves together. During the intermission Captain "Monk" Eliot had corralled his crimson warriors in the dressing-room and addressed to them a few disjointed remarks that made history.

He began moderately; but as he talked his choler rose, and he took off the limit: "You lobsters are the blankety-blankedest crowd of wooden Indians that ever advertised a dope-house. You seem to think you are out here for your health. What in the blank is the matter with you? Do you think Soldiers Field is a Chinese opium joint where you can go to sleep and forget your troubles? Maybe you don't want to get your clothes dirty, or you are afraid some big, bad, blue Yale man will eat you up without salt. Now look here! I want you to understand that we've got to win this game if it breaks every damn one of our infernal necks, and if any of you overgrown babies doesn't like what I say or hasn't the nerve to go into the second half on that basis, just say so right now, damn you, and I'll give you the job of holding some man's sweater for the rest of this game—and we'll settle it when it's over."

It was a desperate crowd of men in crimson who went into that second half; and their collision with the Yale line was terrific. But Eli didn't seem to change his mind about winning the game—for he hadn't heard the crimson captain's crimson speech.

For twenty minutes the giants reeled and staggered in an equal struggle. Yale then saw that she must win by holding the score as it was, and began all manner of dilatory tactics. This drove Captain Eliot frantic. He must score in five minutes—or lose. Fifty-five yards in five minutes against that wall of blue fiends!—nothing but desperation could accomplish it. He glanced at his squad of reserves on the side-lines; and with spendthrift recklessness that counted not the cost he began to burn men up. He sent his best and strongest in merciless repetition against the weakest—no, not that—against the least strong man in the Yale line.

Harvard began to creep forward slowly, so slowly; and the five minutes were no longer five, but four—three—two and a half—hurry! Still forward the crimson surged with every hammering shock. But flesh and blood could not stand it! Out went Field, the pick of the Harvard flock, carried off mumbling like a crazy man, with a bleeding cut across his forehead. Next went Lee, then Carmichael, then Eliot himself, after a desperately reckless dash, with a turned ankle.

Can Harvard score? Perhaps,—if the time and the men last long enough.... Graham was a substitute. Eliot, supported between two of his men and breathing threatenings and slaughter against those who would carry him off, called Graham's name; and with a nervous shiver the negro was out of his sweater in a jiffy. Eliot whispered to the crimson quarter, "Graham's fresh; send him against that tackle till he faints."

Bang—Smash. Bang—Smash. Yes, he's making it every time, but hurry! hurry!

"Kill that nigger," growls Chreitsberg, the Kentucky Captain of the Blue, between his set teeth: and now "that nigger" comes up with his nose dripping blood, next with his ear ground half off. But he will score this time! No, the Yale eleven are on him like a herd of buffaloes. He stands up and draws his sleeve across his nose with a determined swipe. Eliot screams from the side-lines, "You must make it this trip—time's up,"—but he can't hear his own voice in the pandemonium.

A last crunching, grinding crash,—and the twenty-two maniacs heave, and reel, and topple, and stagger, and slowly wring and twist themselves into a writhing mass of bone and muscle which becomes motionless and quiet at the bottom while still struggling and tearing without let-up on the outside. They refuse to desist even when the referee's whistle sounds the end of the game, for no man knows just where under that mass of players which is lying above the goal-line is the man with the ball. The referee and the umpire begin to pull them off one by one in the midst of an indescribable tumult: and at the bottom, with a broken leg, but with the ball hugged tight against his breast and a saving foot and a half beyond the line, they find Graham.

He is picked up by the roughly tender hands of his steaming, breathless fellows, who are ready to cry with exultation, and hurried to a carriage. It was while they were carrying him off the field he had redeemed that he first saw Helen Phillips. She was standing on the rear seat of a big red touring-car, waving a crimson pennant and excited beyond measure. As she looked down on him as they carried him past, there came into her face a look of childish admiration and pity commingled; and she hesitated a moment, then impulsively pitched out the pennant she held, and it fell across his chest like a decoration and was carried with him thus to his room across the Charles.

When he had surprised her gaze at him as he turned from the parade of the 71st, and saw her smile upon him, he thought she had recognized him as the line-smashing half-back,—and he very properly drew in his middle and shoved out his chest another notch. But not so! She did not recognize him nor remember him. In her overflowing patriotism she saw only a soldier of the Republic; and her smiling face had but unconsciously paid tribute to an ideal.

CHAPTER IV

On the first day of April, 191-, Hayward Graham, wearing the single-barred yellow chevrons of a lance-corporal in Troop M of the 10th Cavalry, was sitting flat on the ground, perspiring and inwardly grumbling as he rubbed away at his sawed-off rifle, and mentally moralizing on his inglorious condition. There was he, almost a graduate of Harvard, a gentleman, accustomed to a bath-tub and a toothbrush, bound up hard and fast for three years' association with a crowd of illiterate, roistering, unwashed, and in the present situation unwashable, negroes of every shade from pale yellow to ebony. Why, thought he, should negroes always be dumped all into one heap as if they were all of one grade? Didn't the government know there were negroes and negroes? Whimsically he wondered why the officers didn't sort them out among the troops like they did the horses, according to colour,—blacks, browns, yellows, ash-coloured, snuff-coloured. Then what possibilities in matching or contrasting the shades of the troopers with those of their mounts: black horse, yellow rider,—bay horse, black rider,—sorrel horse, gingersnap rider—no, that wouldn't do, inartistic combination! And what colour of steed would tastily trim off that freckled abomination of a sergeant yonder? Can't be done,—scheme's a failure!—damn that sergeant anyhow, he had confiscated Graham's only toothbrush to clean his gun with. Graham again records his oath to thrash him when his three years is up.

But three years is an age. It will never roll round. Only two months has he been a soldier, and yet everything that happened before that is becoming vague—even the smile on Helen Phillips' face. He cannot close his eyes and conjure up the picture as he did at first.

Graham was out of temper. Cavalry wasn't what it is cracked up to be, and a horse was of more trouble than convenience anyway, he was convinced. In the battle-drills the men had been put through so repeatedly day after day the horse played no part, and what riding Graham had done so far had served only to make him so sore and stiff that he could neither ride nor walk in comfort. He heartily repented his choice and wished he had taken the infantry, where a man has to look out only for himself and his gun. Oh, the troubles, the numberless troubles, of a green soldier!

All of Corporal Graham's military notions were affronted, and his right-dress, upstanding ideas of soldiering were shattered. The reality is a matter of pushing a curry-comb, getting your nose and mouth and eyes filled with horse-hairs, which get down your neck and up your sleeves, and stick in the sweat and won't come off and there's no water to wash them off. Then the drills—save the mark!—not as much precision in them as in a football manoeuvre,—just a spreading out into a thin line and running forward for five seconds perhaps, falling on your belly and pretending to fire three rounds at an imaginary foe, then jumping up and doing it all over again till you feel faint and foolish,—every man for himself, no order, no alignment, one man crouching behind a shrub, another falling prone on the ground, another hiding behind a tree,—surely no pomp or circumstance or glory in that business. Graham's study of punctilios did him no service there. Not a parade had the regiment had. Mobilized at a Southern port only three days before the sailing of the transport, it had taken every hour of the time to load the horses and equipment and supplies. Graham had found that fighting is a very small part of soldiering, which is mostly drudgery, and he had revised his idea of war several times since his enlistment.

He thought as he sat cleaning his rifle that surely the preliminaries were about over, and, if camp rumour counted for anything, that the day of battle could not be more than one or two suns away. He would have his gun in fine working order, for good luck might bring some shooting on the morrow. At any rate his carbine must glisten when he becomes part of to-morrow's guard, and he hoped that he would be put right on the point of the advance picket. He hadn't had a shave in three weeks, and his uniform was sweat-stained and dusty, and he could not hope to look spick and span; but his gun could be shiny, and he knew Lieutenant Wagner well enough by that time to have learned that a clean gun counted for more with him than a clean shirt. So he hoped and prayed that he would be selected for some duty that was worth while.

The brigades under General Bell, which had been landed at Alta Gracia with difficulty, were pressing forward with all haste to cut off a garrison of Germans that had been thrown into Puerto Cabello from the German cruisers, and to prevent the arrival of reinforcements which were being rushed to their aid from Caracas. Reports from native scouts and communications from General Mañana himself placed the number of these reinforcements at from five to seven thousand. General Bell doubted that this force was so large, but was anxious to meet it, whatever its size.

Despite the vigilance of the all too meagre patrol of warships for Venezuelan waters which the United States had been able to spare from the necessary guard for her Atlantic and Gulf ports, the forehanded and ever-ready Kaiser had landed seven or eight thousand troops from a fleet of transports at Cumana, and with characteristic German promptness had occupied Caracas and Barcelona before Uncle Sam had been able to put any troops on Venezuelan soil. It seemed nonsense for either Germany or the United States to care to fight any battles down in that little out-of-the-way place. They could find other more accessible and far more important battle-grounds: but no, as the Monroe Doctrine forbade Germany to make a foothold in Venezuela and her doing so was the casus belli, the ethics of the affair demanded that there should be a bona fide forcible ejectment of the Kaiser's troops from Venezuelan territory by the United States. The battles there might be only a side issue, and the real test of strength might come at any or all of a dozen places on land and sea, but there must be some fighting done in Venezuela just to prove that the cause of war was not fanciful.

General Bell's brigades were one under General Earnhardt, consisting of the 5th, 7th, 10th and 15th Cavalry, and a second, including the 4th and 11th regular infantry, the 71st Ohio, and the 1st X——, under General Cowles, with a battalion of engineers and four batteries of field artillery. General Earnhardt's cavalry brigade was striving to reach the Valencia road, the only passable route from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, before the German force should pass. General Mañana had sent a courier to say that he would hold the Germans in check till Earnhardt's arrival.

On the morning of April 2d Graham was among the advance pickets and almost forgot his saddle pains and creaking joints in the excitement of expected battle. For half a day Earnhardt pushed forward as fast as the trail would permit. He had halted his troops for five minutes' rest about noon, when a native on a wiry pony, riding like one possessed, dashed into the picket and came near getting his head punched off before he could make Graham understand that he was a friend with a message for the Americano capitan. Graham carried him before General Earnhardt, who at the head of his column was reclining on a bank beside the trail, perspiring and dusty and brushing viciously at the flies and mosquitoes that swarmed around him. The general did not change his position when the native, who was clad in a nondescript but much-beribboned uniform, slid from his horse and with a ceremonious bow and salute informed him that he was Captain Miguel of General Mañana's staff, and had the honour to report that he was despatched by General Mañana to say that, despite that gentleman's earnest and desperate resistance, a large and outnumbering force of German cavalry had forced a passage of the road to Puerto Cabello about eleven o'clock that morning. While Captain Miguel was delivering his elaborate message to the disgusted cavalryman, the picket passed in an old soldier of the 10th who had been detailed as a scout at the beginning of the campaign; and this scout rode up to report just as the native captain finished speaking. Earnhardt turned impatiently from Mañana's aide to his own trusted man and said:

"Well, Morris, what is it?"

"Small force of German cavalry, sir, had a scrimmage with General Mañana's troops this morning on the Valencia road, and rode on in the direction of Puerto Cabello."

"How many Germans got through?" asked the general.

"All of them, sir; about two troops, as near as I could count."

"And how many men did Mañana have?" the question came sharply.

"Something like fifteen hundred I should judge, sir, from the sound of the firing and what I could see," answered the scout.

General Earnhardt, without rising, turned with unconcealed contempt to Captain Miguel and said:

"My compliments to General Mañana, and he's a —— old fraud and I don't want to have anything more to do with him;" and while the red-splashed aide was trying to solve the curt message which he but half understood, the trumpeter at a word from the angry cavalryman sounded mount and forward and the brigade was again off at top speed, hoping still to cut off the main relief force sent out from Caracas. General Earnhardt considered himself a lucky soldier to find that this force had not passed when at last he reached the road (which was hardly worthy of the name highway, though one of the thoroughfares of Venezuela); and he hastily disposed his forces to meet the German advance.

It was not long in coming. The crack of a rifle was the first notice Corporal Graham had that he was about to be under fire. He felt a cold breeze blow upon his back for a moment, and then as the popping began to approach a rattle the joy of contest entered his soul and sent his blood bounding.

But the joy was short-lived. When the Germans came near enough to see that they were opposed by men in Uncle Sam's uniform, and not by the nagging natives who had been popping harmlessly away at them from the roadside, they decided it was best not to be too precipitate. They stopped and began to feel for the American line. After some desultory sharpshooting they finally located it, and quieted down to wait till the German commander could get his little army up and into line of battle.

Then Hayward Graham had to sit still and hold his gun while the exhilaration and enthusiasm died down in him like the fiz in a glass of soda-water. He had worked his nerves up to such a tension that the reaction was nothing less than painful, and he was full of impatience and profanity. He could hardly wait for to-morrow, when Germany and Uncle Sam would get up after a good night's rest and lay on like men.

Again what was his unspeakable disgust and almost unbearable disappointment when the next morning came and he was detailed as stable guard, and given charge of the 10th's corral, quite a distance in rear of the line of battle and absolutely out of all danger. Profanity was a lame and feeble remedy for that situation. He sat down and growled.

"Oh, for an assorted supply of languages in which to separately and collectively and properly consign this whole bloody system of details to the cellar of Hades!"

A veteran sergeant of Graham's troop, who on occasions wore a medal of honour on his blouse, and at all times bore an unsightly scar on his cheek as a souvenir of Wounded Knee, sought to soothe the young man's feelings.

"It all comes along in the run of the business, corporal," he said. "Soldiering is not all fighting. A man earns his money by doing whatever duty is assigned to him."

Graham answered with heat: "I didn't come into this nasty, sweaty, horse-smelly business for any such consideration as fifteen dollars a month and feed, and if I am to miss the scrapping and the glory I prefer to cut the whole affair."

His temper improved, however, as the day began to drag itself away with no sound of conflict from the battle-line save the occasional pop of a pot-shot by the pickets, and as the rumour began to leak back to the corral that both sides must be waiting for their guns to come up. This was doubtless true: for the four batteries of American artillery arrived late in the afternoon, and the infantry brigade was all up by nightfall.

CHAPTER V

The two small armies were separated by the valley of a small stream which ran in a broad circle around the low wooded hills or range of hills upon which the Germans were entrenched. This valley was from a mile to a mile and a half wide, and the water-course was much nearer the outer or American side. The bed of this stream would furnish an excellent breastwork or entrenchment for the American troops if they should see fit to use it, but it was not tenable by the Germans because it was at most all points subject to an enfilading fire from the American position. The surface of the valley was slightly broken and undulating on the German side, but clear of timber and covered only with grass, while on the American side the rise was more precipitous and covered with a scattering growth of trees and bush.

On arriving and looking over the ground General Bell ordered that during the night his artillery should be placed and concealed on the commanding heights which his position afforded; and that his fighting-line, composed of the 5th and 15th Cavalry as his left wing, the 1st X—— as his centre, and the 4th and 11th Infantry as his right wing, be moved forward down the slope and into the bed of the stream, leaving as a reserve the 71st Ohio and the 10th Cavalry located approximately in rear of the centre of his line of battle. The 7th Cavalry he had sent out toward Puerto Cabello to hold in check any possible German troops that might appear from that quarter.

Corporal Hayward Graham, back at the 10th's corral, had recovered his spirits as the day dragged along without any sound of battle, and he began to congratulate himself that he would finish up in good time all details that would keep him out of the fighting. When he walked over to the line late in the afternoon, however, and learned that the whole regiment was to be held out of the fight as a reserve, he immediately surmised that the 10th was kept out of it because they were negroes, and that the others from the general down wanted to scoop all the glory for the white soldiery,—and again he sat down and cursed the negro blood in his veins. The only salve to his outraged spirit was the information that those high and mighty prigs of the 71st were also to miss the glory. He even chuckled when he thought of the chagrin of Lieutenant Morgan and pictured to himself the scene of the lieutenant's meeting with Miss Elise Phillips if he should have to go back and explain to her how he came not to be under fire. Then he remembered Helen Phillips and the crimson pennant locked up in his trunk, and he felt that the whole war would count for naught if he had no chance to do something worthy of that pennant and of her. He wandered listlessly along the lines and tried to forget his troubles in listening to the talk of the fortunates who were going in.

He came to where a crowd of 1st X—— men were chaffing a squad of the 71st for "taking a gallery-seat at the show." Corporal Billie Catling of the 71st replied that they took the "gallery-seat" under orders and were put behind the 1st X—— to see that they didn't dodge a fight again like they did in Cuba.

"That's a damn lie!" came the 1st X——'s rejoinder in chorus; to which one of them added, "The 1st X—— never ran out of any fight in Cuba, and you gallery-gods can go to sleep or go to the devil, for we'll stay here till hell freezes over so thick you can skate on the ice."

"Well, you may not have run out of any fight in Cuba, but it's blamed certain you didn't run into one," retorted the 71st's spokesman.

"Now, sonny," yelled the X—— man, "don't get sassy because you're not permitted to sit down along with your betters. Run along and wait for the second table with the niggers!"

The 71st's contingent could not find a suitable retort to this sally, and, as fighting was out of the question, they walked away muttering imprecations amid the jeers of the men from X——.

Graham enjoyed the discomfiture of the 71st; but he was more than ever convinced that the colour of the 10th accounted for its being robbed of a chance for fame in this campaign: and he went back to his duty in a mutinous mood. He could not know that General Bell had held this veteran negro regiment in reserve because of its proved steadiness and valour; nor that he had placed the untried 1st X—— in his centre because it would thus be in the easiest supporting distance of his reserves.

The battle opened on April 3d the moment it became light enough for the gunners to locate the half-hidden German lines and artillery. For awhile the cannoneers had it all between themselves; and in this duel the advantage was with the Americans, for their position gave them better protection—the fighting-line being sheltered by the stream-bed and the guns and reserves by the hill. The Germans were entrenched on a hill as high as the Americans, but it was much flatter and afforded less natural cover.

After two or three hours of pounding the Germans with his artillery, which was evidently inflicting great damage, General Bell ordered his line forward to carry the German position by assault. Then the battle began in earnest. The German machine-guns opened on the American line as it rose out of the stream-bed and began its slow and terrible journey across the open valley by short rushes. The first breath of lead and iron that dashed in the faces of the American troops as they stood up began the work of death; and it came so promptly and so viciously that it overwhelmed the raw discipline and untempered metal of the 1st X——; for before advancing thirty paces the line wavered and broke and retreated ignobly to the sheltering bank of the stream. Not all the regiment broke at once; but the break and stampede of one company quickly spread along the entire regimental front, and back into the ditch they dived. Some of the officers cursed and commanded and entreated; but to no purpose. The wings of the American line were advancing steadily but slowly, standing up for a few moments to dash forward a dozen yards, and then lying as close to the ground as possible while returning the terrible fire from the hills in front of them.

General Bell from his position of vantage saw the failure of the 1st X—— to advance, and waited a few moments in hope that a half-dozen officers who were recklessly exposing themselves in their attempts to urge the men forward might succeed in their efforts. As it became evident that the regiment would not face the deadly fire of the Germans, however, and as the wings of the battle-line were diverging as they advanced because of the formation of the ground in their front, General Bell waited no longer, but ordered forward both the 10th Cavalry and the 71st Ohio. These came over the hill on the run and dropped down the slope into the water-course, where the heroic handful of officers were still making frantic efforts to have the 1st X—— go forward. A captain was violently berating his men for their cowardice and imploring them to advance, while his first lieutenant squeezed down behind the bank was yelling at them not to move. A major of one battalion was standing up straight and fully exposed, waving his sword and appealing to his men by every token of courage, while another major was lying as close to the bottom of the ditch as a spreading-adder. At places the men seemed to want to move, while the officers crouched in fear; while at others officers by no amount of commands or entreaties could get a man out of the ditch. A panic of terror seemed to be upon the regiment which the few untouched spirits were not able to overcome by any power of sharp commands, or violent pleading, or reckless examples of courage.

The boys of the 71st and the negro troopers of the 10th did not treat the X—— men tenderly as they passed over them. They jumped down upon them as they lay in the ditch and tramped upon them or kicked them out of the way contemptuously, while the fear-smitten creatures were as unresentful as hounds. Corporal Graham, near the left flank of the 10th, heard an officer of the 71st yell as they passed over the ditch, "Why don't you go forward? What the devil are you waiting for?" to which Billie Catling, as he knocked a cowering X—— man from his path, cried out in answer, "It's too hot for 'em, captain. They are going to stay here till this hell freezes over!"

As many perhaps as a fourth of the 1st X——, officers and men, fell in with the 71st and the 10th and bravely charged with them up the long slope. The remainder waited till the battle was so far ahead of them that their belated advance could not wipe out the black shame of cowardice.

In the hurry of their rush into the breach the adjoining flanks of the 10th and the 71st overlapped and were confused; but it was well that the two regiments were sent to replace the one, for the loss was appalling as they surged forward toward the German lines, and they were not long in being thinned out to an uncrowded basis.

The first sight of a man struck and falling to the ground shook Corporal Graham's nerves, and he had to pull himself together sharply to save himself from the weakening horror death always had for him. He turned his eyes resolutely away from the first half-dozen, that were knocked down, and applied himself religiously and consciously to the prescribed method of advancing by rushes; but all his faculties were alert to the dangers of the situation, and he could not shake off his keen sense of peril and of the tragedies around him. Not for long did he suffer thus, however, for as he rose up from the grass for one rush forward a bullet grazed his shin—and changed his whole nature in a twinkling. It did him no real damage and little blood came from the wound, but the pain was intense. He dropped on the earth and grabbed his leg to see what the harm was, and was surprised to find himself uninjured save for the burning, stinging sensation. Then he forgot everything but his pain, and became as pettishly angry in a moment as if he had collided with a rocking-chair in the dark. In that moment he conceived a personal enmity and grudge against the whole German army, and proceeded to avenge his injury on a personal basis. He became as cool and collected as if he were playing a game of checkers, and went in a business-like way about reducing the distance between himself and the gentlemen who had hurt his shin. His anger had dissolved his confusion and neutralized the horrors that were at first upon him. He was more than ever conscious of the falling men about him; but he had his debt to pay,—let them look after their own scores. He saw Lieutenant Wagner stagger and fall and raise up and drag himself into a protecting depression in the ground; he saw the colonel of the 1st X——, fighting with a carbine in his hand right alongside the black troopers of the 10th, drop in a heap and lie so still he knew he was dead; he saw Corporal Billie Catling straighten up and pitch his gun from him as a bullet hit him in the face and carried away the whole back of his head;—yet Graham stopped not to help or to think. He had only one purpose—to reach the man who hit his shin. He saw man after man, many of his own troop, drop in death or blood or agony—and his purpose did not change. Then, a little distance to his left and somewhat to his rear, he saw Colonel Phillips of the 71st go down in the grass; he saw him try to gain his feet, and fail; and then try to drag himself from his very exposed position, and fail. Then Corporal Graham forgot his personal grievance, and thought of the girl and the pennant. He ran across to Colonel Phillips and, finding him shot through both legs, picked him up and carried him for forty yards or more through the hurricane of lead to where the Valencia road made a cut in the long slope; and in this cut, down behind a sheltering curve, he placed him. Not a moment too promptly had the trooper acted, for of all the unfortunates who had fallen anywhere near Colonel Phillips not one but was found riddled with the bullets of the machine-guns when the battle was ended. Graham's own hat was shot away from his head and the officer in his arms received another wound as he bore him out of harm's way.... At the Colonel's request the negro tried to remove the boot from the bleeding right leg, which was broken below the knee. As this was so painful Colonel Phillips handed him a pearl-handled pocket-knife and asked him to cut the boot-top away. Graham did so, and bound a handkerchief around the leg to stop the flow of blood. Having made every other disposition for the officer's comfort which his situation permitted, he looked out in the direction of the battle so wistfully that the Colonel told him he might return to the fight. He did so with a rush, absent-mindedly pocketing the pearl-handled knife as he ran.

"CARRIED HIM FOR FORTY YARDS OR MORE THROUGH THE HURRICANE OF LEAD."

The firing-line had advanced quite a distance while Graham was rescuing Colonel Phillips and ministering to him; and in his overweening desire to be right at the front of the battle he ran forward without the customary stops for lying down and firing. That they should carry him safe through that driving rain of bullets, despite his indifference to the ordinary rules of the desperate game, was more than reasonably could have been expected of the Fates which had protected him up to that moment from serious harm; and—down he crashed in the grass and lay still without design, while the battle passed farther and farther up the long slope, away from him. In dim half-consciousness he realized what had befallen him; and the only two ideas which found place in his mind were the uncomfortable thought that he would be buried without a bath, and a feeling of satisfaction that the god of battle at least had dignified him with a more respectable wound than a bruised shin-bone.

CHAPTER VI

When two strong, alert men, disputing, come to the final appeal to battle, the decision is usually made quickly. It is only the weak or the unprepared who prolong a fight.

So was it that late summer in 191- saw an end of war between Germany and the United States—thanks partially to the intervention of the Powers. And with what result? The result does appear so inadequate! The Monroe Doctrine was still unshaken—and that was worth much perhaps; but ten thousand sailors and the flower of two navies were under the tide, and half as many soldiers dead of fever or fighting in Venezuela; small armies of newly made orphans and widows in Germany and America; mourning and despair in the houses of the desolate,—some hope in the heart of the pension attorney; a new set of heroes on land and sea,—at the top. Long, who at the battle of the Bermudas, finding his own small craft and a wounded German cruiser left afloat of twenty-odd vessels that had begun the fight, in answer to her demand for his surrender, had torpedoed and sunk the German promptly, and to his own everlasting astonishment had managed to save his neck and prevent the battle's becoming a Kilkenny affair by beaching his riddled boat and keeping her flag above water: from Long an endless list of real and fictitious heroes, dwindling by nice gradations in importance as they increased in numbers, till they touched bottom in the raw volunteer infantryman whose wildest tale of adventure was of his exemplary courage in a great storm that swept the God-forsaken sand-bar on which his company had been stationed,—to prevent the German navy's purloining the new-laid foundations of a fort to guard Catfish River.

In the long list of heroes Colonel Hayne Phillips was not without prominence. The sailormen were first for their deeds were more numerous and spectacular; but among the soldiers who were in the popular eye he was easily the most lauded. He was a volunteer; and that was everything in his favour, for it put him on a par with members of the regular establishment of ten times his merit. He was nothing more than a brave and patriotic man with a taste for the military and with but little of a professional soldier's knowledge or training; and yet his demonstrated possession of those two qualities alone, patriotism and personal courage (which most men indeed possess, and which are so inseparably associated with one's thought of a regular army officer as to add nothing to his fame or popularity),—the possession of these two simple American virtues had brought to Colonel Phillips the enthusiastic admiration of a hero-loving people, and—what was of more personal advantage to him—the consequent consideration and favour of party-managers in need of a popular idol.

These political prestidigitators, mindful of the political successes of the soldiers, Taylor, Grant and Roosevelt, took him and his war record in hand and proceeded to work a few easy miracles. The love and plaudits of a great State and a great nation for a favourite regiment coming home with honour and with the glory of hard-won battle upon its standards were skilfully turned to account for partisan political uses. The deeds and virtues of a thousand men were deftly placed to the credit of one, and before the very eyes of the people was the legerdemain wrought by which one political party and one Colonel Phillips drew all the dividends from the investment of treasure and of blood and of patriotic energy and devotion which that thousand men had made without a thought of politics or pay.

The partisan press, as always advertent to the peculiar penchant hero-worship has for ignoring patent absurdities, overdrew the picture—but no harm was done: for while truth of fact was disregarded and abused, essential truth suffered no hurt. Although enterprising newspapers did furnish for the political campaign one photogravure of Colonel Phillips leading the 71st regiment over the German earthworks at the battle of Valencia, and another of him in the act of receiving the German commander's sword on that occasion—these things did the gallant Colonel no injustice. He gladly would have attended to those little matters of the surrender in place of the veteran officer of regulars who officiated. It was through no fault of the 71st's commander that shortness of breath made it impossible for him to keep pace with his men up that long slope; nor in the least to his discredit that he was shot down in the rear of the regiment and his life saved through the bravery of a negro trooper.

The Colonel's courage was indeed of the genuine metal and he willingly would have met all the dangers and performed all the mighty deeds accredited to him if opportunity had come to him. Being conscious of this willingness in his own soul, he took no measures to correct impressions of his prowess made upon the minds of misinformed thousands of voters. The error was not in a mistaken public opinion as to his valour, for that was all that was claimed for it, but in the people's belief in certain spectacular exhibitions of that valour which were really totally imaginary. He knew that he was as brave a man as the people thought: why then quibble over facts that were entirely incidental? The hero-idolaters swallowed in faith and ecstasy all the details which an inventive and energetic press bureau could turn out, and cried for more: and the nomination for the presidency practically had been tendered to him by acclamation almost a year before the convention assembled which officially commissioned him its standard-bearer.

Colonel Phillips' campaign was attended by one wild hurrah from start to finish. It was pyrotechnic. Other candidates for this office of all dignity have awaited calmly at home the authoritative call of the people; but the materia medica of politics teaches that to quicken a sluggish pulse in the electorate a hero must be administered directly and vigorously into the system. So the Colonel was sent upon his mighty "swing around the circle."

In that sweeping vote-drive many weapons were displayed, but only one saw any real service. That was the Colonel's gray and battered campaign hat. He wore it for the sake of comfort, to be sure; but, like the log cabin and grandfather's hat of the Harrisons, the rails of Lincoln, and the Rough Riders uniform of Roosevelt, it was the tumult-raising and final answer to every argument and appeal of the opposition. It uprooted party loyalties, silenced partisan prejudices, overrode eloquence and oratory, beat back and battered down the shrewd attacks and defences of political manipulation, and contemptuously kicked aside anything savouring of serious political reasoning. The convention which nominated him had indeed formulated and declared an admirable platform upon which he should go before the people, and he placed himself squarely on that platform; but the gaze of the people never got far enough below that campaign hat to notice what its wearer was standing on.

Colonel Phillips was a sincere, honest, candid, plain-spoken politician—for politician he was if he was anything, while yet so fearless of party whips and mandates that his name was synonymous with honesty and lofty civic purpose. So, feeling his own purposes ringing true to the declarations of his party's platform he did not deem it necessary to direct the distracted attention of the people to these prosy matters of statecraft when they were taking such a friendly interest in his headgear. If they were willing to blindly follow the hat, he knew in his honest heart that the man under it would carry that hat along paths of political righteousness.

He was indeed playing upon every chord of popular feeling and seeking the favour of every man with a ballot. He had always fought to win in every contest he had entered, from single-stick to war, and he made no exception of this race for the chieftaincy of the Republic. It was to be expected, therefore, that the large negro vote in pivotal States, as well as his natural love of justice and his admiration for a brave soldiery, would lead him to pay enthusiastic and deserved tribute to the negro troops who had served in the Venezuelan campaign. He paid these tributes religiously and brilliantly in every speech he made, but always in general and impersonal terms and without a hint of his own debt to a corporal of the 10th Cavalry. There was no need for such minutiæ of course, for that was a purely personal affair between him and an unknown negro who might be dead and buried for all he knew; while, besides, a recital of these unimportant details would necessitate a fruitless revision of other incidental ideas now pleasantly fixed in the public mind. He sometimes entertained his wife and daughters with the story of how a trooper of the 10th had saved his life, but never did he sound the personal note in public.

Colonel Phillips made votes with every speech and it looked as if he would win. He deserved to win, for he was honest, capable, clean. As election day drew near the opposing candidate received a confidential letter from his campaign manager in which that veteran politician said:

"I have lost and won many hats in my political career, but this is the first time I have ever been called upon to fight a hat—just a hat—to settle a Presidency. This is a hat campaign; and you have evidently made the mistake of going bareheaded all your life. You seem, too, to have limited yourself to a home-grown ancestry. The Colonel is simply wearing a hat and claiming kin with everything from a Plymouth Rock rooster to a palmetto-tree. The newspapers are getting on my nerves with their unending references to that campaign-hat and Phillips' ding-dong about the unity and virility of American blood and his mother's being a South Carolinian."

* * * * *

"The cards are running against us."

CHAPTER VII

Colonel Phillips' daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the slightest check the flow of Helen's joy in life, for the matter of sex in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour's sport was quick-witted, quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans Rutledge a source of much fun.

"Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly.

"Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?"

"Because if you are you may be my brother sometime. Elise likes you a little, I think, and she thinks your hair would curl beautifully if you didn't crop it so close—but you will have to be a hero. You needn't fear Mr. Morgan. He failed to be a hero when he had the chance, and now his chance is gone. Nobody but a hero can interest Elise for keeps."

"When did Morgan have his chance?" asked Rutledge, amused at the mischief-maker's plain speaking.

"He went to Venezuela in papa's regiment, but never had a shot fired at him the whole time he was gone. That's what he did. Elise cannot love a man like that."

"Perhaps it was not his fault. He may have been detailed to such duties as kept him away from the shots."

"Yes, I think he says he was; but what of that? He wasn't in the fighting, and that's what it takes to make a hero. Oh, I wish I were a man. I would ride a horse and hunt lions and tigers, and I would have gone to the war in Venezuela and nobody's orders would have kept me from the firing-line—I believe that's what papa calls it—the place where all the fun and danger is. When papa talks about it I can hear my heart beat. Elise says she wouldn't be a man for anything; but I've heard her say that she could love a man if he was a man—brave and strong—you know—a man who did things. I would prefer to do the things myself. I wouldn't love any man I ever saw—unless he was just like papa. What regiment were you in, Mr. Rutledge?"

"I wasn't in any regiment," said Rutledge meekly.

"What! Didn't you volunteer?" asked Helen in surprise.

"I did not volunteer"—a trifle defiantly.

"Why?" Helen demanded scornfully. "If I had a brother and he had failed to volunteer I would never have spoken to him again! I thought all South Carolinians were fighters."

"I had other things to attend to," said Rutledge shortly. "Where is Miss Phillips this afternoon?"

"She's out on the river with Mr. Morgan. They will not be back till dinner, so you would just as well sit down here and talk to me.... But I'm sorry you didn't volunteer—you will never be my brother now.... And I was beginning to like you so much."

"I thank you, little girl, for your attempt to think well of me. I see that I have sinned past your forgiveness in not being a hero. Remember that it is only because ninety and nine men are commonplace that the hundredth may be a hero. I am one of the ninety and nine that make the hero possible—a modest king-maker, in a way. A hero must have some one else to fight for, or die for, or live for. He cannot do these things for himself, for that would make him anything but a hero. So you see that the second person is as necessary to the process of hero-making as the hero himself. It's all in the process and not in the product, anyway. It's the hero in act and not in fact, in the making and not in the taking, that enjoys his own heroism and is worth our interest. While he is making himself he thrills with the effort and with the uncertainty as to whether he will get a commission, a lathe-and-plaster arch, or a court of inquiry; and we the ninety and nine, we thrill with the gambling fever and make wagers that his trolley will get off the wire. But when he gets himself done—clean done, so to speak, wrapped in tinfoil and ready for use—then there is nothing left for the hero to do but to pose and await our applause—which is most unheroic; and we, after one whoop, forget him in the excitement of watching the next candidate risk his neck. Besides, the hero's work in hero-making is temporary and limited, for he stops with making one; but we, when we have finished with one, turn to the making of another, and our work is never done. While I am not even one hero, I have helped to make a hundred. Come now—you are generous and unselfish—which would you most admire, one finished hero listening for applause, or a hero-maker, who, without reward or the hope of reward, modestly and continuously assists in thus bringing glory to an endless procession of his fellows?"

"You think you are brilliant, Mr. Rutledge," answered Helen with an impatient toss of her head, "but you can't confuse me by any such talk as that. You needn't think you will be able to persuade Elise by any long jumble of words that you are greater than a hero. A king-maker!" She laughed mockingly at him.

"Don't fear that I will use any sophistry or doubtful method to become your brother," Rutledge rejoined amusedly. "I have only one thing to tell Miss Phillips."

"And what is that?" asked Helen with interest.

"I am inexpressibly pained to refuse your lightest wish," said Rutledge grandiloquently, "but to grant your request would be—telling; and I may—not tell,—perhaps,—even Miss Phillips."

"Do not suffer so," said Helen with an assumption of great indifference. "I don't care to hear it."

"Yes, I predict that you will be delighted to listen to it when it is told to you," said Rutledge confidently. "And it will be beyond doubt. But you are too young to hear such things yet. Be patient. You'll get older if you live long enough."

It fretted Helen to be told that she was young, as she was told a dozen times a day—not that she disliked her youth, but because of the suggestion that she was not free to do as she pleased; and her eyes began to flash at Rutledge's taunt and her mind to form a suitable expression of resentment—when that gentleman walked away from her smiling at her petulant anger.

Evans Rutledge had more interest in Helen's words about her sister than he showed in his manner or conversation. He had not told Elise what his heart had told him for many days past, though she did not need spoken words to know. He, manlike, thought that he was keeping this knowledge of his supreme affection for her a secret in his own soul, to be delivered as a startling and effective surprise when an impressive and strategic opportunity should come to tell her of it. She, womanlike, read him as easily as a college professor is supposed to read Greek, and concerned herself chiefly with feigning ignorance of his interest in her.

Elise's true attitude toward Rutledge was a sort of neutrality. She was neither for him nor against him. She was attracted by everything she saw or knew of him, and looked upon him with that more than passing interest which every woman has for a man who has asked or will ask her to be his wife.

On the other hand she was decided she could not accept Rutledge. She had but crossed the threshold of her unfettered young womanhood, and her natural and healthy zest in its pleasures overcame any natural impulse to choose a mate. Added to this were the possibilities held out in her romantic imagination as the increasing newspaper prophecies concerning her father induced day-dreams of court-like scenes and princely suitors when she should be the young lady of the White House, the most exalted maiden in great America, with the prerogative of a crown princess. A temporary prerogative surely, but well-nigh irresistible when combined with the compelling charm of American womanhood, that by right of genius assumes the high positions for which nature has endowed the gentlewomen of this republic, and by right of fine adaptability and inborn queenliness establishes and fortifies them, as if born to the purple, in the social high places of older civilizations.

Elise Phillips, with all her democratic training, with her admirable good common sense, with her adorable kindliness of heart and friendliness of spirit for every man and woman of high or low degree, with her sincere admiration for true manliness and pure womanliness unadorned by any tinsel of arbitrary rank, with all her contempt for the shams and pretences of decayed nobilities parading dishonoured titles, was yet too much a woman and too full of the romantic optimism of life's spring-time not to dream of princely youths wearing the white flower of blameless lives who would come in long procession to attend her temporary court.

And in that procession as it even now passed before her imagination, she kept watch for him,—the ideal of her maiden soul, the master of her virgin heart;—him, with the blue eyes and flaxen hair and the commanding figure that looked down upon all other men;—him, with the look and gesture of power that men obeyed and women adored, and that became tender and adoring only for her;—him, with a rank that made him to stand before kings with confidence, and a clean life that might stand before her white soul and feel no shame;—him, with a strength and courage that failed not nor faltered along the rocky paths by which the laurel and Victoria Crosses grow, and that yet would falter and tremble with love in her presence. Oh, the wonderful dreams of Youth! How real they are, and how powerful in changing the issues of life and of death.

Had Rutledge taken counsel of his mother or heeded her disapprobation of Miss Elise Phillips, he would have saved himself at least from the pain of a flouted love; and if he could have made his heart obey his mother's wish he would have avoided the stress of many heartaches and jealousies, and of slow-dying hope.

Mrs. Rutledge had her young womanhood in the heart-burning days of the Great War, and the partisan impress then seared into her young soul was ineradicable. She had a youth that knew fully the passions and the sorrows of that awful four years of blood and strife: for every man of her house, father and five brothers, had she seen dead and cold in their uniforms of gray; and her antipathy for "those people" who had sent anguish and never-ending desolation into her life might lie dormant if memory was unprovoked, but it could never change nor lose its sharp vehemence.

She had objected to Elise from the moment her son showed a fancy for her, and began quietly to sow in his mind the seeds she hoped would grow into dislike and aversion. She told him that "those people," as she invariably called persons who came from that indefinite stretch of country which her mind comprehended in the term "the North," were "not of our sort,"—that they were intelligent and interesting in a way;—that Elise Phillips was unquestionably fascinating to a young man, that her money had given her a polish of mind and manner that was admittedly attractive; but that she was not fitted to be the life companion of a man whose culture and gentlemanliness was not a product of schools and of dollars but a heritage from long generations of gentle ancestors who had bequeathed to him converging legacies of fine and gentle breeding.

Evans Rutledge, however, was of a new day; and his mother's theory that good blood was a Southern and sectional product found no place in his thought. He was tender, however, and considerate of his mother's prejudices, and was never so rude as to brush them aside contemptuously. He always treated them with deference and tried always to meet them with some show of reason. In the case of Elise Phillips he sought to placate his mother's whim and capture her prejudice by tacitly agreeing to the general proposition while excepting Elise from it by the use of Colonel Phillips' well-worn statement that his mother was a South Carolinian.

"That makes Miss Phillips a granddaughter of South Carolina," said Rutledge to his mother; "and surely there cannot be much degeneracy in two generations,—especially when the Southern blood was of the finest strain."

Mrs. Rutledge admitted that the argument was not without force, but solemnly warned her son there was no telling when the common strain might crop out.

"What's bred in the bone will come out in the blood," she said, "and bad blood is more assertive than good."

Evans loved his mother better than any other soul except Elise, and he would go far and deny himself much to obey even her most unreasonable whim, but his love for Elise was too fervid a passion to be stifled for the sake of a war-born prejudice. He would win her; yes, he must win her; and he waited only the winning moment to plead openly for his happiness.

CHAPTER VIII

It was a morning in late September that Elise and Rutledge went for their last canoe ride on the mighty river. Mrs. Phillips and her daughters were to leave for home on an early afternoon train, and Mrs. Rutledge and Evans for Montreal an hour later.

It was a day to live. By an occasional splash of yellow or red among the green that lined the riverside and clothed the diminutive island in the stream, Summer gave notice that in thirty days Nature must find another tenant; and a taste of chill in the air was Winter's advance agent looking over the premises and arranging to decorate them in the soberer grays and browns for the coming of his serious and mighty master.

The lassitude of the hot days was gone, and life and impulse were in the autumn breeze. There was not a suggestion of melancholy or decay or death in earth, air or sky. It was more as if a strong man was risen from drowsy sleep and stretching his muscles and breathing a fresh air into his lungs for a day of vigorous doing. Not exhaustion but strength, not languor but briskness, not the end but the beginning, was indicated in every breath and aspect of Nature.

It was a morning not to doubt but to believe: and Rutledge felt the tightening spring in mind and body and heart, and the bracing influence made his love and his hopes to vibrate and thrill. As with easy strokes he sent the canoe through the water he drank in the fresh beauty of Elise as an invigorating draught. She was so en rapport with the morning and the sunlight and the life as she sat facing and smiling upon him, her cheeks aglow with health and her face alight with the exquisite keenness of joy in living, that she seemed to him the incarnate spirit of the day.

The crisp tingle in the air was not without its spell upon Elise. No blood could respond more quickly than hers to Nature's quickening heart-beats, and it sang in her pulses with unaccustomed sensations that morning. She looked upon Rutledge as he smartly swung the paddle, and was struck with the strength he seemed to possess without the coarse obtrusion of muscle. She accredited the easiness of his movements to the smooth water, in which he had kept the canoe because of his desire to be as little distracted as possible from contemplation of Elise's charms and graces. The swing of his body and arms was as graceful as if he had learned it from a dancing-master, and there was a touch of daintiness about it which was his only personal trait that Elise had positively designated in her mind as not belonging to her ideal man. She did not object to it on its own account, but surmised it might have its origin in some vague unmanly weakness—and weakness in a man she despised.

She had talked to him of a score of things since they had embarked, passing rapidly from one to another in order to keep him away from the one subject he seemed attracted to from any point of the conversational compass. At the moment she had been so clearly impressed with his almost feminine gracefulness the conversation was taking a dangerous swerve, she thought; and for a minute she was at a loss how to divert the course of language from the matter nearest his heart. In a blind effort to do so she unthinkingly challenged him to prove his sterner strength which she had never seen put to the test.

"It's easy going here, isn't it?" she said. "What a pity we couldn't have one visit to the island before we go away."

"Do you wish to go there?" asked Rutledge.

"I would like to," she replied, "but of course we cannot attempt it without an experienced canoe-man. It is about time for us to return; don't you think so?"

"That depends on whether you really want to go to the island," returned Rutledge, who was quick to see and resent the intimation that he was not equal to the business of putting her across the racing water between them and the small cluster of trees and shrubs growing among a misshapen pile of rocks nearly across the river.

"I am told no one but these half-breed guides have ever tried the passage," he continued. "Not because it is so very dangerous, I suppose, but because it is too small to attract visitors to try the rough water."

"They can get to it easily from the other side, can't they? It seems so near to that," said Elise.

"No. Jacques tells me that the narrow water on the other side runs like a race-horse, and has many rocks to smash the canoe. Even going from this side I would prefer to leave you here, Miss Phillips, and of course that would make the visit without inducement to me."

"You allow your carefulness of me and your politeness to me to reason you out of the danger," said Elise, without any sinister purpose; but Rutledge recalled Helen Phillips' words about Elise and heroes, and became uncomfortable.

"I used them to reason you out of the danger," he replied. "If the argument does not appeal to you I am ready for your orders."

"Then let's go over," said Elise, prompted half by the challenge in his eyes and half by her subconscious desire to see him vindicate his feminine grace.

"I admit I am a coward," Rutledge remarked as he turned the canoe toward the island.

"Oh, if you confess to being afraid!" said Elise in mingled surprise and pity. "I certainly cannot insist. Let's return to the hotel."

"You mistake me," Rutledge replied as he sent the light craft on toward the rapids. "My cowardice is in permitting you to bully me into carrying you into some danger. I should have the courage to refuse."

"You would have me believe in your courage, then, whether you choose danger or avoid it. That is artful," Elise rejoined.

The word "artful" nettled Rutledge, and he put his resentment into the strokes which sent the canoe forward. If Elise Phillips could believe of him that he would attempt to establish a reputation for courage by a trick of words, words would be inadequate, of course, to defend him from the imputation. There was no chance now to convince her, he thought, save to try the passage. So, despising the weakness which would not let him point the canoe homeward, he set his strength against the increasing current, and soon lost thought of the argument in the zest of sparring with the river.

Elise became absorbedly interested in the contest and in his handling of the boat. The interest of both became more and more intense as the water began to slap the canoe viciously and toss them with careless strength. A wave rolling over a sunken rock rushed upon them with a gurgle and swash and passed under the canoe with a heave and splash that tilted them uncomfortably and threw a hatful of water over the side. Another came with a more impatient toss, and Elise crouched upon the seat to preserve her equilibrium. Rutledge looked round at her face, which was unsmiling but without fear, and asked:

"Shall we go back?"

"No," the girl answered.

They soon found that the water was swifter than they had judged it from the shore, and that they had not put across far enough up-stream to make the island easily. They were nearing it, but the current was becoming boisterous and they were drifting faster and faster down-stream. Swifter water and rougher met the canoe at every paddle-stroke. Rutledge with his back to Elise dropped on one knee in the water in the canoe bottom and gave every energy to his work. If Elise had not been with him he would have liked nothing better.

As for the girl, she would not insist on this wild ride again, but, being in, she was having many thrills of pleasure. Rutledge's manner gave her confidence that they would reach the island, but with how much discomfiture she was as yet uncertain. She was drenched with water from the slapping waves and the swiftly flying paddle, which was Rutledge's only weapon against the wrath of the river. She saw in his resolute efforts that their situation was at least serious if not dangerous, and she hardly took her eyes from him; but with her closest scrutiny she did not detect the slightest indecision or apprehension.

Only once did fear come to her, and that but for a moment. The struggle was now quick and furious. They were in the mad whirl of crushing water that tore alongside the island and was ripped and ground among the bullying rocks. She heard Rutledge stifle a cry as he sent the canoe out with a back-stroke that almost threw her overboard, and the rioting current slammed them past a jagged vicious-looking rock just under the river's surface which would have smashed their cockle-shell to splinters. When she looked down upon it as they were shot past she thought for an instant of death and dead men's bones. Then—

"Out! Quick—now!" yelled Rutledge, as with a strength that seemed as much of will as of muscle, he shoved the canoe's nose up against the island and held it for a moment against the fury of the water.

Elise rose at his sharp command and leaped lightly out upon a bare rock, giving the canoe a back kick which sent it swinging around broad across the current. As it swung off Rutledge, seeing no favourable place below him to make another landing, quickly gave his end of the boat a cant toward the island, dropped the paddle in the canoe, grabbed the mooring chain and jumped for the land. He jumped and alighted unsteadily but without further mishap than so far capsizing the canoe that it shipped enough water to more than half submerge it and threaten to sink it. With his effort to draw it up on the rock and save it from sinking entirely, the water in the canoe rushed to the outer end, sending that completely under and floating the paddle out and away. He yanked the canoe up on the island and, turning, looked straight into Elise's eyes for ten seconds without speaking.

"Why don't you say it?" the young woman asked with amused defiance.

"Say what?" inquired Rutledge.

"What you are dying to tell me."

"I love you," answered Rutledge simply.

"Oh! You—you—impudent—you horrible!" cried Elise with a gasp. "To presume I would invite you to tell me—that! How dare you!"

"I dare anything for you," said Rutledge. "I love you and—"

"Stop! Not another word on that subject—lest your presumption become unbearable! You know very well, Mr. Stupidity, that I expected you to say 'I told you so.'"

"I have told you—so—your—exp—"

"Stop, I say! I will not listen to another word. Your persistence is almost—insulting!"

"Insulting!" said Rutledge in amazement. "Then pardon me and I'll not offend again;" and he turned to take a look at the fast-riding paddle as it turned and flashed far down the river.

Elise was glad of the chance to gather her wits together and prepare a defence against this abrupt method of wooing. Indeed she was on the defensive against her own heart. One fact alone, however, would justify her deliberation: that she was not certain of her own mind. Friendship may halt and consider, admiration may sit in judgment; but love that questions, or is of two minds, or hesitates, is not love.

She turned away from him and the river to give attention to this new problem which was of more immediate interest to her than the question of how they were to get away from the island. Rutledge came to her after awhile.

"Miss Phillips," he said, "I have the honour to report that, while we are prisoners on this island now, our imprisonment will not be lengthy. Fortunately I saw Jacques on the other side of the river and made him understand, I think, that we have lost our paddle. At any rate he put off toward the hotel at great speed, and will be down with another canoe I hope before you become tired of your island." And he added, as if to relieve the tense situation: "While we wait I shall be glad to show you over the premises and to talk about anything that you may prefer to discuss."

Elise could not tell from the formal manner of Rutledge's words whether he was really offended or humourously stilted in his speech. She could be as coldly polite as any occasion demanded; but, believing that she had effectually put an end to his love-making for the day, she met his formality of manner in her naturally charming and friendly spirit.

"Sit down here then, and tell me where you learned to handle a canoe. I did not know canoeing was a Southern sport."

"It is not," Rutledge said, taking the place she gave him at her feet. "I was never in a canoe till I came here this summer."

"Now, Mr. Rutledge, don't ask too much of credulity. One surely cannot become skilful without practice."

"I did not mean that I have never been on the water before," said Rutledge; "but in my country we do not have these curved and graceful canoes. We navigate our rivers with the primitive dugout or pirogue. I have used one of those on my father's Pacolet plantation since I was a boy. The dugout is made by hollowing out a section of a tree. That makes the strongest and best boat, for it never leaks or gets smashed up. It is very narrow and shallow, however, and it takes some skill to handle it in a flood."

"Were you ever in a flood?—a worse flood than this?" asked Elise.

"Yes. When our little rivers get up they are as bad as this or worse. I have seen them worse. During the great flood on the Pacolet some years ago, when railroad bridges, mill dams, saw-mills, cotton mills, houses, barns, cotton bales, lumber, cattle, men, women and children were all engulfed in one watery burial, the little river was for six hours a monster—a demon."

"Tell me about that," Elise said; and to entertain her Rutledge told her at length the story of that cataclysm of piedmont South Carolina. He went into the details without which such description is only awful, not interesting. Many were the incidents of heroism and hairbreadth escapes and unspeakable calamity which he related; and he told the stories with such vividness of portraiture, dramatic fire and touches of pathos that, with the roar of many waters actually pounding upon her ear-drums, Elise could close her eyes and see the scenes he depicted.

In looking upon the pictures he drew with such living interest she found herself straining her tight-shut eyes in search of his figure among the throng that lined the river-bank or fought the awful flood. Time after time as he described an act of heroic courage in words that burned and glowed and crackled with the fire that could stir only an eye-witness or an actor in the unstudied drama he was reproducing, she would clothe the hero with Rutledge's form, identify his distinctive gestures and movement and catch even the tones of his voice as it shouted against the booming of the waters: but with studied regularity and distinctness Rutledge at some point in every story, incidentally and apparently unconsciously, would make it plain that the hero of that incident was a person other than himself.

He might have told her, indeed, many things to his own credit: especially of a desperate ride and struggle in one of those dugouts which he had volunteered to make in order to prevent an old negro man adrift on a cabin-top from going over Pacolet Dam Number 3, where so many unfortunates went down and came not up again; but at no time could Elise infer from his speech that he was the hero of his own story. Her word "artful" still rankled in his memory, and he swore to his own soul that she should never, never hear him utter a word that might show he possessed or claimed to possess courage.

The only method by which Elise could deduce from his words the conclusion that Rutledge was of courageous heart was that courage seemed such a commonplace virtue among the people of his section that he probably possessed his share of it. Her curiosity was finally aroused to know whether by any artifice she might induce him to tell of his own exploits, which his very reticence persuaded her must be many and interesting, and she brought all her powers into play to draw him out: but to no purpose. She refrained from any direct appeal to him in fear that a personal touch might turn the conversation along dangerous lines; and Rutledge, having been properly rebuked, waited for some intimation of permission before presuming to discuss other than impersonal themes.

While indeed it only confirmed her woman's intuition, Elise was unconsciously happier because of Rutledge's blunt statement of his love, for it made certain a fact that was not displeasing to her. Yet she would hold him at arm's length, for she could with sincerity bid him neither hope nor despair. The glamour of her day-dreams made the reading of her heart's message uncertain. Rutledge had not the glittering accessories that attended the wooer of her visions; and yet as he talked to her she was mentally placing him in every picture her mind drew of the future, and was impressed that whether in the soft scenes where knightly gallantry and grace wait upon fair women, or in the stern dramas where bitter strength of mind and heart and body is poured out in libation to the god of grinding conflict, he, in every scene, looked all that became a man.

Rutledge's flow of narrative and Elise's absent-minded reverie were broken in upon by the hail of Jacques, who was approaching them from almost directly up-stream. His canoe was doing a grapevine dance as he pushed it yet farther across the river and dropped rapidly down to a landing on the far side of the island.

"Sacre! Wrong side!" he exclaimed when he came across and saw where Rutledge had pulled his canoe out of the water. "Here I lose two canoe sometime. How you mek him land?"

Rutledge did not answer the question but set about getting his canoe across the island to the point designated by Jacques as the place for leaving it. He had no desire to stay longer since all hope of further tête-à-tête with Elise was gone; and in a few minutes they were ready to embark.

"No hard pull, but kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," said Jacques in explaining the course by which they were to return, the which was plainly beset with numberless rocks and shoals.

"Sweem out seex times befor I lairn road," he added as a comforting proof of the thoroughness of his knowledge. The return was a simple matter of dropping off from the far side of the island, floating down a few rods, and then picking along through the rocks across the river as the canoe gathered speed down-stream.

"Miss Phillips," Rutledge said when they were ready, "perhaps you had better take ship with Jacques. He knows the road."

Their rescuer looked pleased at the honour, and turned to pull his canoe within easier reach.

"No, thank you," she said to Rutledge. "I prefer to go with you."

Rutledge caught his breath at the loyalty and the caress in her voice, and ungratefully wished Jacques at the bottom of the river. He handed her into his canoe with a tenderness that was eloquent; and Jacques, seeing through the game which robbed him of the graceful young woman for a passenger, put off just ahead of them, saying:

"I go fairst. Follow me shairp."

It was no easy task to follow that canoe; and Elise, as she watched the precision with which Rutledge used the "kvick paddle lak feesh-tail," was convinced that such skill had not gone to waste at the Pacolet flood. As she looked at him when the rough water was past and he was sending the canoe up the river with even swing again, graceful as before, her eyes had a light in them that would have gladdened his heart to see.

They landed near the hotel and hurried straight to it upon Elise's plea that she was late and must hurry to dress for her train. Rutledge walked beside her down the long hall of the hotel, and at the foot of the stairway, feeling that opportunity was slipping past him, he stopped her short with—

"Your answer, Elise! In heaven's name, your answer!"

Elise was again startled by his abruptness, and her unrestrained heart's impulse sent a look of tenderness to her eyes that would have crowned Rutledge's life with all happiness, had not that glamour of her daydreams, fateful, insistent, overclouded and banished it in a moment. She looked at him confusedly a moment more, then took a quick step away from him, hesitated, and, turning quickly, said:

"There is no answer,"—and fled up the stairs.

Rutledge turned away dazed by the reply to his heart's question. "There is no answer!"—as if he were a "Buttons" who had carried to her ladyship an inconsequential message which deserved no reply. He could not get his mind to comprehend the import of it; and he was walking back down the hallway with a vexed frown upon his face trying to untangle his thoughts, when Helen Phillips passed him and, seeing him in such a mood after his parting ride with Elise, prodded him with—

"None but heroes need apply, Mr. Rutledge. I warned you."

Rutledge passed on with an irritated shrug of the shoulders; and Helen, laughing, ran to tease Elise for a history of the morning's ride and the reason "why Mr. Rutledge is so grumpy." Little satisfaction did she get from Elise, however, for that young woman evinced as much of reticence as Rutledge had shown of irritation.

"I told him none but heroes need apply," laughed Helen.

"What do you know of heroes?" asked Elise with a snap.

CHAPTER IX

Within a week after Evans Rutledge and Elise Phillips parted at the St. Lawrence resort, the newspapers told the people that at a Saratoga restaurant Colonel Phillips and his wife and daughter, and Doctor Martin, a negro of national reputation, had sat down to dine together. It was soon after this that one evening, at his home in Cleveland, Ohio, Colonel Phillips happened upon a mixed quartette (all negroes) who had been brought over from New York to sing at a sacred concert in one of the fashionable churches, but who could not obtain what they considered a respectable lodging-place. With characteristic impulsiveness the Colonel, who heard of it, invited the two men and two women up to his house and entertained them overnight.

On those occasions Mrs. Phillips had shown unmistakable opposition to the acts of her liege lord. Elise had more than seconded her mother in haughty indignation; though with her superb training in obedience she could not be openly rebellious. When he had brought the quartette into his home Mr. Phillips could not fail to see the pain in his wife's eyes as she asked:

"Was that necessary?"

"Why, can you not see," he replied with some hot feeling in his tones, "that it was the only thing to be done? They are very respectable people, all of them. They are intelligent and well-bred, as you can see. Why should the simple matter of colour alone keep me from doing what I just as quickly might have done for a white man?"

The unconscious humour of this way of putting it did not reach Mrs. Phillips, and the Colonel's tone and manner, not his words, kept her silent when he had finished. She could not quarrel with him; and he thought he had answered her reason, though he admitted inwardly that her prejudices were unconverted. Nevertheless he did not open the discussion again.

Helen, however, naturally siding with her father, did not hesitate to bring it up repeatedly, and youthfully to descant at length and with some elaboration of ideas on the propriety and admirableness of her father's act. Mrs. Phillips, with the sole purpose of preserving parental discipline and not wishing even slightly to encourage insubordination, had very little to say to Helen about it; while Elise answered all the younger girl's effusions with sniffs of disdain.

* * * * *

These incidents and Elise's womanly perversity and curiosity really gave Evans Rutledge a great opportunity if he only could have read the portents of circumstance and calculated to a nicety the eccentricity of a woman's heart. The entertainment of negro guests at the mansion of an aspirant for the presidency was given wide publicity by the press and was the subject of universal though temporary notice by newspapers and editorial writers of every class. Rutledge, in his capacity as Washington representative of a half-dozen newspapers over the country, contributed his share to the general chorus of comment.

When Elise read in a Cleveland paper a clipping accredited to "Evans Rutledge in Chicago American," she suddenly became desirous of seeing that young man again. The sentiments, stripped of the tartness in their expression and a seeming lack of appreciation of her distinguished father's dignity, were so in accord with hers that she was startled at the exact coincidence of thought—while still resentful of the free and fierce criticism.

Resentment and thoughts of coincidences were pushed out of her mind, however, by the question, "Would he tell me again he loves me?" This was both a personal and a sentimental question and was therefore of chief interest to her woman's mind. Not that she had a whit more of love for him than upon that last day upon the St. Lawrence—oh, no; but his love for her? his willingness to avow it? was it still hers? was it ever hers really?—for not a word or a line had he addressed to her since the day they fought the river. She would confess to a slight curiosity and desire to meet him when she should go to Washington on that promised visit to Lola DeVale.

Rutledge assuredly had escaped none of the untoward influences which the Phillips-negro incidents might have had upon his love for Elise. His good mother religiously attended to the duty of impressing upon him the disgraceful horrors of those affairs. She found no words forceful enough properly to characterize them, though she applied herself with each new day to the task. What might have been the result if her son's heart had been inclined to fight for the love of Elise of course cannot be known. His mother's philippics effected nothing, for the good reason that he had lost hope of winning Elise before the negro incidents occurred, and the personal turn his mother gave them was only tiresome to him. Elise's last words to him, "There is no answer," had put their affair beyond the effect of anything of that sort. She had not only refused him, but had flouted him, treated him with contempt: yes, had said to him in effect that his proffer of love was not worth even a negative answer. He had gone over every incident of their association, and, with a lover's carefulness of detail, had considered and weighed her every word and look and gesture; and, with a lover's proverbial blundering, had found as a fact the only thing that was not true.

* * * * *

When Elise came to Washington on her visit Rutledge knew of course that she was in town, and he kept his eyes open for her. His pride would not let him call upon her, for he had meditated upon her treatment of him till his grievance had been magnified many fold and his view had become so distorted that in all her acts he saw only a purpose to play with his heart. Yet, he wished to see her, wished very much to see her—doubtless for the same reason that a bankrupt will look in upon "the pit" that has gulfed his fortune.

They met unexpectedly at Senator Ruffin's, where only time was given them to shake hands in a non-committal manner before Mrs. Ruffin sent them in to dinner together. If each had spoken the thoughts in the heart a perfect understanding would have brought peace and friendship at least, but no words were spoken from the heart. All of their conversational sparring was of the brain purely. They fenced with commonplaces for some little time, each on guard. Rutledge, without a thought of Doctor Martin or the negro quartette, formed all of his speeches for the ear of a woman who had mocked his love; while Elise talked only for the man who had written the article in the Chicago American. She saw the change in his manner, in his polite aloofness, his insincere, careless pleasantries.

"It is delightfully kind of you, Miss Phillips, to come over and give Washington some of those thrills with which you have favoured Cleveland."

"What is the answer?" asked Elise blankly.

"My meaning is no riddle surely," said Rutledge. "The Cleveland newspaper reporters have taught us to believe that you are the centre of interest in that city and that, as one signing himself 'Q' wrote in yesterday's Journal,—something to the effect that you radiate a sort of three-syllable waves which make the younger men to thrill and the old beaux to take a new lease on life. When I read that, I could see a lot of small boys crowding around an electric machine, all wanting to get a touch of the current but fearful of being knocked endways."

"Now diagnose the form of your dementia," said the girl. "You not only read but you believe the statements of the penny-a-liners. Your case is hopeless."

"I must read somewhat of such things—to know my craft. I must believe somewhat of them—to respect my craft."

"Is either knowledge or respect necessary, Mr. Rutledge? The craft is admitted; but I had thought the purpose of all this craft was the penny-a-line,—not knowledge or truth—which are not only incidental but often unwelcome. Why read or believe the line after the cent has been paid?"

"You are unmerciful to us, Miss Phillips. It is true every news item of interest has its money value for a newspaper man, but you must understand that we try to use them honestly and say no more than we feel—often far less than we feel."

Rutledge's manner was serious when he had finished; and Elise, feeling sure that the same incident was in his mind as in hers, had it on her tongue's end to reply with spirit and point, when he continued lightly:

"But that is shop. It is good of you to come over now and gradually accustom us to those Q-waves instead of giving us the sudden full current when Colonel Phillips rents the White House. You will not care if some few become immune before that time, for there will be no end of rash youths to get tangled up with the wires."

Elise had not been a woman if Rutledge's impersonal "we" and "us" and suggestion of persons immune to her charms had not piqued her. He need not put his change of heart so bluntly, she thought. Yet what incensed her was not the loss of his love, but that that love had been so poor and frail a thing.

"I am glad you guarantee a full supply of the raw material, Mr. Rutledge. It is a very interesting study, I think, to watch the effect of the—current—on youths of different temperaments: on the black-haired, black-eyed one who raves and swears his love—to two women in the same month; or the light-haired, blue-eyed one who laughs both while the current is on and when it is off; or the red-headed lover who will not take 'no' for an answer; or the gray-eyed, brown-haired man who would appear indifferent while his heart is consuming with a passion that changes not even when hope is gone. I will depend on you to see that they all come along, Mr. Rutledge—even to that young Congressman over there who is so devoted to Lola," she added in an undertone, "if he can be persuaded to change his court."

"Oh, he will come. His present devotion does not signify. There is nothing true but Heaven," Rutledge replied, not to be outdone in cynicism by this young woman who had quite taken his breath away with her impromptu classification of lovers. His own hair was black and his eyes, like hers, were gray; and he saw she was making sport of him under both categories and yet betraying not her real thought in the slightest degree.

"Beware, Mr. Rutledge. Only woman may change her mind. Men must not usurp our prerogative."

"True," said Rutledge; "but a man does not know his mind or his heart either till he's forty. He is not responsible for the guesses he makes before that time. After that, he knows only what he does not want which is much; and, if undisturbed, can enjoy a negative consistency and content."

"I may not defend the sex against such an able and typical representative," said Elise as the diners arose.

Neither of these wholesome-minded young people had any taste for such a fictitious basis of conversation; but each was on the defensive against the supposed attitude of the other, and the moment their thoughts went outside conventional platitudes they were given an unnatural and cynical twist. Both felt a sense of relief when the evening was past. But despite this condition, which prevailed during Elise's visit, Rutledge could not put away the desire to see as much of her as an assumption of indifference would permit, if only with the unformulated hope that he might catch unawares if but for a moment the unstudied good camaraderie and congenial spirit which had won his heart on the St. Lawrence. But the sensitive consciousness of one or the other ever had been present to exorcise the natural spirit from their conversations.

Rutledge lived bravely up to his ideas of what a proper pride demanded of him, but his assumption of indifference was sorely tried from their first meeting at Senator Ruffin's. The mischief began with Elise's offhand little discourse on the colour of eyes and hair as indicia of the traits and fates of lovers—particularly with her statement that a red-headed man will not take a woman's "no" for an answer. The point in that which irritated the cuticle of Mr. Rutledge's indifference was that Mr. Second Lieutenant Morgan had a head of flame.

Now man—natural man—usually has the intelligence to know when a thing is beyond his reach, and the philosophy to content himself without it. He rejoices also in his neighbour's successes. But natural man, with all his intelligence and all his philosophy and all his brotherly love, cannot look with patience or self-deceit upon another's success or probable success where he himself, striving, has failed. In the whole realm of human experience there are exceptions to this rule perhaps; but in the tropical province of Love there is none. There a man may conclude that the woman he wants would not be good for him, even perforce may decide he loves her not: but the merest suggestion of another man as a probable winner will surely bring his decision up for review—and always to overrule it. So with Rutledge: from the moment of Elise's unstudied remark he conceded to his own heart that his indifference was the veriest sham and pretence—while still a pretence necessary to his self-respect.

CHAPTER X

Hayward Graham, with an honourable discharge from the service of the United States buttoned up in his blouse, was taking a look at Washington before going back to re-enlist. He liked the army life, with all its restrictions; and having by his intelligence and aptitude attained the highest non-commissioned rank, he was optimistic enough to believe he could win a commission before another term of enlistment expired. In this hope he was not without a fair idea of the obstacle which his colour placed in the path of his ambition; but in weighing his chances he counted much on the friendliness of the newly inaugurated executive for the negro race generally, and most of all on the President's according his deserts to a man who had saved his life. He would keep his identity in that respect a secret till the time was ripe, so that the President's sense of obligation, if it existed, might not be dulled by the granting of any premature favours—and then he would see whether gratitude would make a man do justice.

He had more than a month yet in which to re-enlist without loss of rank or pay, and his visit to Washington was intended to be short, as he had several other little picnics planned with which to fill out his vacation. He had been there ten days or more and he had walked and looked and lounged till he was thoroughly tired of the city and was decided to leave on the morrow.

But that last afternoon he saw Helen Phillips. Her carriage was driven slowly across the sidewalk in front of him to enter the White House grounds. The sudden quickening of his pulses at sight of her was unaccountable to him. His gaze followed her as she went away from him, and for the first time in months he remembered in dumb pain he was a negro. He tried to separate the thought of his blood from his thought of the young woman, and to put the first and its unpleasantness out of his mind while he enjoyed the latter and its association with his college victory and his patriotic enthusiasms: but he could not think of her without that indefinable and subconscious heartache.

When he came to his lodgings and opened up the afternoon paper, the only item among all the notes of interest that had the power to catch or hold his thought for a moment was a brief statement to the effect that the veteran White House coachman was dead. Hayward sat and turned this over in his mind a few minutes and then asked himself "Why not?"

Next morning he applied for the vacant position of coachman to the President. With the purpose to conceal his identity during his little adventure, as he thought of it, he gave only his Christian names: John Hayward. With similar purpose he had dressed himself in civilian clothes; but these could not conceal his magnificent lines, and, though another employee had been given the dead coachman's place, Hayward's fine appearance was so much in his favour that he was engaged as footman on trial. This was really better suited to his wishes than the other. He had not foregone his army ambition in a night, but neither had he been able to resist the temptation to spend a short time—the remainder of his furlough at least—where he could see something of the young woman who was so closely associated in his mind with the events in his life that were worth while.

Hayward was not in love with Helen Phillips in any sense—at least not in the ordinary sense; for that undefined pain, a dumb monitor of the impossible, kept him hedged away from that. On the other hand, to his mite of natural feeling of inferiority was added the respect for rank and dignity which his army life had hammered into him; and his attitude toward her was the devotion which a loyalist peasant soldier might have for the daughter of his king. He wished to be near her, to serve her; and he counted himself fortunate that this opportunity had come to him.

—And a superb footman he made, having every aptitude and manner both of mind and body for form and show; and being relieved of any humiliation of spirit by his secret feeling that he had set himself to guard and serve a crown princess.

A superb footman he made—and a new-rich Pittsburger offered him double wages to enter his service. The sneer with which Hayward told him that he was not working for money ever will be a riddle to that Pittsburg brain.

A superb footman he made; and with the added distinction of the President's livery he always drew attention and comment. The veteran Senator Ruffin was entertaining a few friends with reminiscences once when Hayward passed. One of the party said: "Look at that footman. Phillips has a fine eye for form, hasn't he?"

"Yes," Senator Ruffin answered, "if he saw him before he employed him, which he very likely did not.

"But do you know," he went on, "I never see that nigger but I think of John Hayward of whose last speech in Congress I was telling some of you yesterday. The nigger has his figure and carriage, even the set and toss of his head, about everything save his colour. The first time I saw him get down from the Phillips' carriage I thought of John Hayward, who is dead these fifty years.

"There was a man for you, gentlemen. No more knightly spirit was ever carried in a kinglier figure of a man. He was just out of college when I was a boy, but I can remember that even then John Hayward was a toast and a young man of mark down in Carolina. Our fathers' plantations adjoined, and he was the first man that ever stirred in my boyish heart the sentiment of hero-worship. The Haywards were men of note in my State in that day as in this, and young John Hayward's future was as brilliant and well-assured as wealth, fine family, abounding talent, high purpose and personal force of character could make it."

—"But we lost him. A former half-Spanish, half-devil overseer on his father's plantation, who had been discharged because of his cruelty and general wickedness, had bought a small farm near the elder Hayward's place, and was trying to establish himself as a land and slave holder. This overseer came back from one of his periodical trips bringing with him one of the likeliest mulatto girls, as I remember it now, that I ever saw. All the neighbours knew he could have no good purpose in buying her, for he needed no house-girl to keep dressed up in calico as he began to keep her. It was but a few days before reports of his terrible cruelty to her began to be circulated by both negroes and white people, who heard her screams as he whipped her day and night.

"Late one afternoon, a week perhaps after he had brought her home, John Hayward and Dick Whitaker were riding through the overseer's farm and heard the girl scream. John, who was acquainted with the situation, said, 'Come on, Dick, let's go up and stop that;' and put his horse at the little gate and was pounding on the overseer's door before Dick could reply.

"The sound of blows ceased and the overseer came and opened the door, revealing the girl crouched down on the floor moaning and sobbing. When the slave-driver saw it was John his eyes snapped in wrath.

"'What do you want?' he demanded.

"'I want you to quit whipping that nigger,' said John.

"'You go to hell,' retorted the overseer. 'I'll whip my slaves whenever they won't work like I—'

"'Oh, master, I work, I work,' protested the girl to John.

"'Shut up! you—' began the overseer.

"'Yes, I know you work,' said John to the girl; and he turned to the man, 'and I know—everybody knows—what your purpose is, you fiend! My God, it is crime enough for such as you to own the bodies of women without your tearing their souls!'

"'Get off my land, damn you!' ordered the overseer; and then, as if to show his contempt for Hayward and Whitaker, he turned again to begin flogging the cowering girl, saying: 'She's my property, and the law gives me the right to make her obey!'

"'Stop!' thundered John, laying his hand on his pistol as the slave-driver raised his arm to strike. 'You son of hell! The man who puts the weight of his hand on a woman, even his wife, to make her obey his passions, deserves to die!'

"Whitaker said it was all over before he could slide from his horse. The overseer struck the girl a vicious cut as John was speaking, and his whip was descending again when John's pistol flashed and the brute dropped to the floor with a ball through his brain...."

"HIS WHIP WAS DESCENDING AGAIN WHEN JOHN'S PISTOL FLASHED."

"That was why my State lost John Hayward," the Senator continued after a pause. "It was seen at once that he must not come to trial. While the plea of self-defence can always be set up, the fact that John had killed the overseer in his own house and after being ordered out, would have made the law quite too risky. But beyond that it would have been necessary, in order that the jury's sympathy might override the law, to make such a presentation of the proper limitations, and the abuses and horrors, of slave management as would be clearly inimical, if not actually dangerous, to public order and safety.

"So the State lost John Hayward," the Senator rambled on. "He exiled himself less for his own safety than for the sake of a system for which he had no sympathy, but in which seemed to be bound up the peace and happiness, the very existence, of his people.... He went away, but the shadow of the Black Peril was upon his life to the end.... He went to Massachusetts, located in Boston, and began to practise law. He was successful from the beginning, though he always spent everything he made. He married a most lovable and beautiful woman of the finest family, and life again promised all he had once seemingly lost.... He had been in Congress two terms when I was first elected to the House. Mrs. Hayward was the most gracious lady I ever knew, and they made my first years here at Washington altogether enjoyable, for they knew everybody that was worth knowing and were great entertainers. I remember that as a young bachelor Congressman I used to think that if I only had John Hayward's constituency and a wife the equal of his in beauty, intelligence and diplomacy, I could be President without trouble.... We served together in Congress till the beginning of the Great War. It was just before the outbreak that that fateful shadow fell again upon him. His son—named for him: John Graham Hayward—a boy that I had watched grow up from a lad and loved as my own, was a student at Harvard and had acquired many ideas of which his father had no knowledge, and which would have startled him—with all his well-known anti-slavery sentiments. The boy's mother looked on the negro race purely from a missionary standpoint, and had never given a serious thought, I am sure, to the negro's social status.

"You perhaps may imagine the shock that came to John Hayward on going home late one afternoon to dinner to find already seated at his table his wife, his son, and a young negro about his son's age whom the boy had brought in to dine with him.... John told me about it a few months afterward, and even then, with all his heart-break, his eyes would blaze with an insane anger as he thought of that nigger at his table.... He looked at the three for a moment; and then he said things that blasted his home. He kicked the nigger incontinently out of his house, and was beside himself in the furious wrath he hurled upon his wife and son. The boy resented his outburst, especially because of its cruel effect upon the mother. The father in uncontrollable anger at his son's resentful opposition ordered him to leave his roof, and told him that he was unworthy of the name of Hayward and had disgraced it beyond repair. The boy replied with spirit that he would not carry the name of Hayward away from the house, but would renounce both the house and it then, there and for ever, and walked out of the door.... On his knees did John implore his wife's forgiveness, and receive it; but neither father nor mother ever saw the boy again.... John tried, I think, to learn his whereabouts, and was driven to desperation as he met failure at every point. The moment the call came for troops, he resigned his seat in Congress, volunteered in a Massachusetts regiment and was killed at Bull Run....

"As he was lost to his native State, so he was lost to the nation—because the baleful shadow of the Black Peril seemed to be upon his life.... Heaven save my people—nine-tenths of whom, like him, would deal with the negro in justice and righteousness and helpfulness—from the stress and the blood of an open conflict against social equality with the negro race, and from the further unspeakable, unthinkable horror of defeat in such a conflict if it shall come upon them."

CHAPTER XI

There can be no doubt Hayward found scant recompense for his first month's service as part of the White House ménage. The money consideration of that service, as he told the gentleman from Pittsburg, he valued as nothing; and yet it was the money that held him over beyond the time limit he had set for his little adventure and his return to the army. He put his eyes on Helen but twice during the month, and that only for a moment, and he had taken his leave of Washington in less than a fortnight if his training in the service had not accustomed him to bear monotony with patience.

Before his time was up, however, a letter from his mother told him that she was hardly able longer to bear the burden of her own support or even to supplement his contributions by any appreciable efforts of her own. Too long and too closely indeed had she striven in his behalf, and the overwork was demanding its pound of flesh in severe and relentless compensation. Hayward thought he saw the hand of a kindly Providence in having already provided him with a wage sufficient to keep both his mother and himself from want—which his soldier's pay would not have accomplished; and he postponed his military ambition and brought her to Washington, where he might look after her comfort more carefully and less expensively. Very grateful was he for an opportunity to care and provide for her whose devotion he had always known, but the heroism and stress of whose struggles and the wonders of whose money-working he was beginning to appreciate only since leaving the all-providing care with which she and the quartermaster had hedged him about from the morning of his birth till ninety days ago.

While his intelligence, his spirit, his cultivated ideals would not let him rest in entire content as a menial—a footman to however high a personage—Hayward yet found his first real basis of self-respect in the consciousness of his responsibility for his mother's support and happiness, and in the feeling that he was equal to the duty so plainly laid upon him. However he had no thought but that his present work was temporary; and, to satisfy his taste for mental recreation and improvement as well as to have a definite purpose in his mental pursuits, he began in his spare hours to study the books that pertained to his proposed life-work as an officer of the army.

His first summer in Washington added no little to his stock of that knowledge which men acquire not out of books but at first hand. He had seen as an onlooker something of life on both sides of the earth, and had acquired more of the spirit of a cosmopolite than nine-tenths of the statesmen who foregathered in the nation's capital to formulate world-policies: and yet of the actual conditions of life, of living, which affected him as a bread-winner, as a social unit, as one having a part in the Kingdom of the Spirit, he was at the very beginning of knowledge when he donned the White House livery. His effervescence of interest in Helen Phillips in great measure subsided, naturally, among the many new problems that came to meet him, and with his frequent commonplace beholding of her.

He soon was brought to realize that rigid limitations were upon him not only by the colour-line which was drawn straight as a knife's edge from top to bottom of Washington, but by fences and barriers inside the confines of his own race against which he stumbled repeatedly and blindly before he dreamed they existed. On several occasions he had met with slight rebuffs in his friendly advances to persons of his own colour, and ascribed them to ill-temper or uncouth manners; but he finally received a jolt which waked him up—in this fashion:

He dropped in at the most imposing negro church in the city one Sunday evening, and heard a young woman of comely face and person, dressed in perfect taste, sing a solo which, in the sentiment and the purity and pathos of the singer's voice, met his idea of all that is exquisite in song. When the service was finished he spoke to a well-groomed man past middle age who had sat beside him.

"The young lady who sang did it with marvellous taste and beauty. She knows both how to sing and what to sing; and since I'm at it I may as well say that she's no-end good-looking."

The older man could not conceal his satisfaction and interest, for he had expended many dollars on the singer.

"I'm delighted you think so," he returned. "My daughter has had great advantages and she ought to sing well."

"Your daughter?" said Hayward. "You should be very proud of her. Will you not introduce me to her? I'd like to thank her for my share. I am John Hayward"—and feeling some identification was necessary—"footman at the White House."

"Excuse me, suh," said the other, with but a very slightly overdone manner; "we don't introduce strangers to our families—specially footmen."

The father's manner was not intended to be offensive, but his answer verily exploded in Hayward's face. Thanks to the younger man's training he did not wince or change countenance, but he was so bursting full of wrath that he never knew whether any further word was spoken between them. He moved with the throng toward the door, but stepped into a vacant pew for fear he would run over some one in furious impatience. True it was that in his attempt to volunteer three years before, he had been roughly impressed with the idea that there was some recognized difference between a white man and a negro, and in his association with the rough troopers of the 10th Cavalry he had become in a measure converted to the correctness of the proposition generally: "but," he thought in infuriated scorn, "I'm as good as any nigger that ever drew breath! A footman, am I?"—and he threw back his head with pride as he recalled his answer to the man from Pittsburg—but dropped it again with some humility at the thought that he was now a footman for the money it brought. At the door he spoke to an usher.

"Who was the young woman who sang?"

"Miss Porter—old Henry Porter's daughter."

"So the old scoundrel is Washington's richest negro," he thought. "Well, his manners and his money are not well matched. I'll even the score with him yet."

After the first heat of his resentment was off he admitted that his request to be presented to the negro magnate's daughter was abrupt, informal and unwarranted, perhaps, but he argued and insisted that old Porter ought to have seen that his unconventional request was an impulsive outcome of his admiration for the girl's singing, and at least have been a little more gracious in his refusal. No, he would not forgive the manner of it; and when he remembered the song and its delight to his senses he found it about as hard to forgive the refusal itself.

Not in three years, except for an occasional moment of patriotic uplift, had his soul had a taste of something to drink—till he heard that song. His spiritual sense had virtually lain dormant those three years in the monotonous round of his world-circling outpost duty. In successive enlistments he might indeed altogether have stifled it, while perfecting his intelligence, courage, strength and skill as a soldier: for the only possibility—and there is only possibility, no certainty or even probability—of spiritual uplift incident to the profession of arms, is that of developing a surpassing, unselfish love of the flag. This sentiment in its pure fulness of bloom is of the spirit, and is an exalted virtue; but not all even of the heroes whose ashes the nations keep have appropriated to their souls, untainted with selfish or fleshly impulse, this the very flowering recompense of their travail and heroism.

Hayward had enlisted at the bidding of the most admirable impulses and had made an excellent soldier; but the monotonous round of garrison duty after the brief war was ended had benumbed his purely patriotic motive, and left only a great desire for personal advancement. In the dull grind his very highest nature had become stagnated; and it was with the joy of one first awakened to unforeseen possibilities that he felt reawakened within him by that one song desires not of the flesh but of the spirit so long stupefied and unfed.

As he became acutely conscious of his need in this behalf, he was more seriously regretful than before that an acquaintance with the singer who had revivified his finer sensibilities might not be had to satisfy in a measure the need which her singing had recreated. Under the impulse of such desires he set about seeking associates, friendships, wherefrom he might appropriate to himself his God-given share in the kingdom of the Mind. In his quiet and unobtrusive search for friends among his race who would be congenial and satisfy the craving of his higher nature for companionship, success came with starving sloth. Most of the negroes with whom he came at first in contact were of an order of intelligence so far below his own that they met not in any degree the demand from within him, and the few that possessed the intelligence were so unbearable in manner that he found little pleasure in them.

He had held aloof from the troopers of the 10th with the certain feeling that they were below his type and below the type of the best negroes he knew must exist somewhere: but he came to doubt the correctness of his own estimate in his search for congenial spirits in Washington. Educated negroes? Yes, there were many that had seen as much of the schools as he, and more. Men of money? Yes, scores of negroes who could buy him ten times over with a month's income. And yet it seemed that he could not happen upon any in his limited and slowly growing acquaintance who did not in some way offend his tastes.

CHAPTER XII

When the heat of summer came down upon Washington, President Phillips' wife and daughters fled to the shades of the family summer home, "Hill-Top," at Stag Inlet on Lake Ontario. There, in a roomy, rambling old house set back on the low wooded bluffs which enclose in more than half-circle the peaceful little bay, he and his wife and daughters, with a few congenial but not too closely situated neighbours, passed the hot days of summer, and stayed on usually into the red-splashed autumn, when the little cove put on its most inviting dress and brewed its most exhilarating air.

It was Hayward's fortune to be carried to the Inlet with the family carriage and horses for the summer outing. He was happy enough to be quit of brick walls and asphalt pavements for a time, and to get into God's out-of-doors, for whose open air he had become so hungry in a few short months. His duties were not very onerous, and he had much time to employ himself with his own pleasures. One form which this took was in learning to handle the various kinds of diminutive water-craft with which his master's family and their neighbours helped to while away their summer vacations. Before the summer was over he was a fairly good fisherman, a safe skipper on any small sail-craft used in the inlet, and a devoted and skilful driver of the gasoline, naphtha and electric launches of which the cottagers had quite a number. He was quick and adept at any and everything that came to his hand, and so careful and entertaining of the children of the near-by families whom he met and amused when they came down to play by the water's edge, that he came to be quite in demand as one servant who "knew how" and could be depended upon in any circumstances.

Helen Phillips was still a girl, natural, ingenuous, untouched by pride or affectation. She looked forward with some zest of anticipation to the time of her début two winters to come; but was well content to have that time approach without haste. She evinced much interest in the plans that her mother and Elise made and re-made, discarded and revised for the social campaign of the next winter, and many lively and original suggestions did she make offhand and unasked. But as for her own personal plans she gave them no thought a day's time ahead. She was quite willing to receive her pleasures in the order chance ordained.

"I am so glad to get away from Washington and back to Hill-Top," she wrote to her Cleveland chum. "It was awful dull down there. Five whole days in the week I had to spend trying to catch the style dispensed at a Finishing School for Young Ladies there, where it is possible to take lady-like sips and nibbles at literature and music and art and things like that, but where the real purpose seems to be to teach young women to descend from a carriage gracefully. Just think! Another whole year of finishing touches will have to be applied to me before Miss Eugenia can in good conscience certify that I may be depended upon properly to arrange myself upon a chair in case it ever becomes necessary for me to sit down."

Helen's tastes were along lines widely different from the Finishing School's curriculum. She preferred above all things else a talk or a walk, a ride or a romp with her father. She had no brother to share her pranks and enthusiasms, her little sister Katherine was much too young to be companionable, and her father was her necessary and natural ally. Him did she not only love, but him did she glorify. Tall and straight, seemingly lacking in flesh but tough as whip-cord, with a patrician face, prematurely gray hair and moustache, Helen thought he was the model of all manly beauty. None in life or in fiction was to her thinking so brave or strong or good as he. Being in her esteem strong in body, unerring in wisdom, pure in purpose, fearless in spirit, he touched the periphery of her ideal of manhood at every point. Her mother and Elise often were amused at her headlong championship of him upon the slightest intimation of criticism, and rightfully were astonished at her information upon public questions as they affected or were connected with his political fortunes or good name. Helen devoured the newspapers (a limited number it is true) with no other purpose, seemingly, than to know what people said of him. Of those that favoured him and his policies she thought well, and mentally commended their good taste and excellent sense: but those that criticized! Woe to them had she had power to utter condemnation!

* * * * *

One morning in midsummer Hayward brought the saddle-horses to the door for the father and daughter to take a canter and prove Helen's new mount before the mother and Elise were up. They were about ready to be off when a telegram was brought out to Mr. Phillips by the operator who had an office in the house.

"I was ordered not to wake you, sir, but to give it to you at once when you were up."

Mr. Phillips read it over slowly. Then he turned to Helen.

"Well, little girl, you must miss your ride again. I'm sorry, but it can't be helped."

"Oh, no, papa! Let the country go play till we come back. You promised me this ride sure when we missed the last one."

"Can't do it, little woman. Take the horses back, Hayward," he said, and turned to follow the telegraph man. But seeing the great disappointment in Helen's face, he called to the man.

"Here, Hayward. Get into a proper coat and on my horse and see that Miss Helen has her gallop round the Inlet and back without damage. Can you ride?"

"Yes, sir," answered Hayward.

"I thought so. You seem to be able to do everything else. Now you are fixed up, old girl," he said as he chucked Helen under the chin. "Don't let the mare all the way out. You don't know her yet,"—and he was gone.

Most of Helen's pleasure in the ride was lost with her father's absence, and yet there was much enjoyment in it for her. She felt the liberty to choose her own road, and decided to do a little exploring. She set out at a good canter, with Hayward swinging along a protective distance in the rear; and with the exercise her spirits rose and she gave herself up to the full joy of it. She forgot her father's injunction and sent the mare along several stretches of road with little restraint.

Hayward, on Mr. Phillips' favourite saddler, was having the time of his life, and for himself wished nothing better than that his young mistress would keep up the pace; though he did not altogether approve of her speeding down-hill. He did not like the way the mare managed her feet on the down grades. When Helen pulled up to ask him where a certain road led, he spoke, unconsciously with decision, out of his experience, but with all deference, and said:

"Pardon me, Miss Helen, but it is a little dangerous the speed with which you ride down-hill. I'm afraid your mount is not so sure-footed as she might be.... This road you speak of leads out by Mr. Radwine's cottage into the Lake Drive. It is worse riding than those you have tried."

Helen thought Hayward's apprehensions were creatures of his discomfort in keeping pace with her, and she was nothing more than amused at his attempts to limit the speed to his abilities under pretence of care for her safety. She thought she would give him one more shaking-up to tell her father about—and plunged off down the Radwine road, leaving him to follow as best he might.

Hayward had passed over that cross-road but a few days earlier and he knew its present condition. Helen heard him call to her, but her spirit of mischief was fully aroused at the thought of his bumping along after her, and she gave the mare free rein.

They were going down a longer and steeper hill than any they had passed, near the foot of which the summer rains had washed out the roadway. Hayward, knowing of this dangerous place ahead, and seeing that it was impossible to stop the young woman in his front before she reached it, sent Prince William after the mare under pressure of the spur and with the hope to come up with her in time. He arrived on the very moment of fate. The thundering horse tore alongside the flying mare just as she reached the washed-out road. Either through feminine excitability at being overtaken or because of the defective foot action Hayward had noted, the mare, when she struck the rough road, stumbled and went down. In that instant the open-eyed Prince William cleared the washout with a magnificent stride, and the ex-cavalryman swept his right arm about Helen and lifted her out of the saddle.

Slowly reining in his horse, Hayward brought him to a standstill and gently lowered his astonished young mistress to the ground. She was almost too overcome to stand, and walked unsteadily a few steps before she recovered herself. Hayward had thrown himself off Prince William and was leading him back down the road to where the mare had fallen. She had already picked herself up, minus a saddle and plus a few bruises, and was standing in the road comparatively unhurt but shaking as with an ague.

Hayward approached her quietly and she came eagerly up to him as if to escape from her fears. He looked her over carefully, and finding no serious damage done, set himself about brushing the dust from her with wisps of weeds and grass. Helen came down while he worked with the mare, and watched him some minutes without speaking. She hardly could think of anything civil to say. She knew that she had disobeyed orders and that he had warned her—and that made her angry. The very silence of the man became irritating to her.

When he had done all he could to put the mare in order he picked up Helen's saddle and started to put it on, but stopped to ask whether he should exchange mounts with her.

"No," his young mistress replied. "I've ridden her here and I will ride her home."

The negro put her saddle on the mare while the girl looked on. When he came to buckle the girth he found that the leather tongue was torn off. He lengthened the girth on the other side and proceeded to bore with his pocket-knife a new hole in the short broken tab. Helen's eyes fell at length on the knife. She looked at it uncertainly a few moments, and then lost interest in everything else. Finally she could keep quiet no longer.

"Where did you get that knife, Hayward?" she asked with something like accusation in her voice.

"Miss Helen, I got this knife in—that is, this knife belongs to—"

"Wait a moment," interrupted Helen. "Let me see it.... Yes, it's the same. I gave my father this knife on his birthday four years ago. I had the carving done at Vantine's. How long have you had it?"

"Miss Helen, I have had it long before I entered your father's service. I—"

"Yes, I know; but just how long have you had it, Hayward?"

"Well, Miss Helen, to be accurate, I've had it three years and—four months."

"Hayward, were you ever in the army—the cavalry—the 10th Cavalry?"

"Yes, Miss Helen."

"You were in the battle of Valencia?"

"Yes, Miss Helen."

"You took this knife from an officer whose life you had saved, didn't you?"

"Yes, Miss Helen."

"Papa says the negro trooper saved his life and stole his knife."

"But I did not steal the knife, Miss Helen—I did not know I had it till two months after the battle, when they gave me back my clothes in the hospital. There was—"

"That stealing part is one of papa's jokes, Hayward. But you didn't know it was papa, did you?"

"Yes, Miss Helen. I knew him when I saw him fall."

"What? And you've never let him know? Why have you kept it secret?"

Hayward did not answer. She continued.

"He would be very grateful. He does not know who it was, for I've heard him say so. All that he knows is that it was a trooper of the 10th."

She stopped and waited for an answer, but he stood in silent indecision as to what he should say to her. If he should now disclose himself the President would doubtless weaken the force of his obligation by giving him in token of his gratitude some appointment which not only would fall far short of the lieutenant's commission to which he aspired, but also would remove him from the young woman who in the last minute had become so simply and earnestly sympathetic in her manner. He weighed the pros and cons quickly.

"Why haven't you told him?" persisted Helen.

"I have preferred not, Miss Helen. In fact there are reasons why I cannot—must not—now."

"What reasons?" demanded Helen.

"Please, Miss Helen, I cannot tell you—nor him."

"You are not ashamed of it, surely?"

"No, Miss Helen. I would do it again this morning—willingly—at any cost to myself. But do not ask me to tell of it."

Helen regarded him narrowly for a minute in silence.

"And you kept me from—death—also. Am I not to tell him of that either?"

"Please no, Miss Helen. If I have done you a service and you think it worth reward, I ask that you repay me by telling no one that I am either your father's rescuer or your own."

Mystery always annoyed Helen unbearably, and she looked at Hayward as if uncertain whether to peremptorily demand his secret or to inform him she herself would acquaint her father with the facts he sought to conceal. Hayward saw something of her purpose in her eyes, and pleaded with her.

"Miss Helen, I beg you. My reasons are imperative—and honourable. When the time comes that I may I will gladly tell your father, but if now you would do me the greatest favour you will say nothing of it."

While Hayward was speaking it occurred to Helen that she willingly would have her father remain in ignorance of her disobedience and reckless riding and its consequent narrowly averted disaster. This consideration, together with Hayward's earnestness in his mystifying request, finally prevailed upon her.

"Very well, Hayward, if you insist. You only will be the loser. It is puzzling to me.... But tell me about your rescue of papa."

Hayward, glad to buy her silence, gave her a modest account of his very creditable bit of heroism, and in response to Helen's interested questioning he was still recounting incidents of the battle and his hospital experiences when they reached the Lake Drive and quickened their pace into a fast canter for home. They arrived and alighted and Hayward got the horses away to the stable without any one's seeing the dust-splashed mare.

Helen could hardly contain herself with her knowledge, but she was as scrupulously honest as she was impulsive, and stood by her promise not to divulge the footman's secret. She vainly tried to imagine some satisfactory explanation of his strange request, but could conceive none that seemed plausible. She finally came to believe that he was a heroic soul whom some implacable misfortune had denied the right to the fruits of his heroism, and in her heart she pitied him.

Hayward was not certain just how far his young mistress credited him with good and honest reasons for wishing his identity to remain undisclosed to her father. He feared that she must think any reason inadequate. He was very much afraid that in all her interested inquiries she would discover that he was not using his real name. If she became possessed of that knowledge she doubtless would think the circumstance sufficiently suspicious to warrant her laying all the facts before her father. This matter of his name perplexed him no little. He gladly would have Helen acquainted with the facts relating to the crimson pennant, and yet he must guard against it. That would reveal his masquerade, as she certainly would remember the name of the Harvard man who had saved his college from defeat. He heartily regretted the excess of caution which had made him place himself in this dilemma.

* * * * *

In the long and lazy summer days that came after that morning's ride Helen was given without seeking it some little opportunity to question the footman about the ever interesting matter of her father's rescue and allied incidents of battle and campaign. Her father insisted, on a few occasions when he could not accompany her, on her riding alone, with Hayward as a guard. In her sailing parties, also, in which Hayward was usually skipper of sailboat or launch, she was thrown occasionally with him alone before she had picked up, or after she had dropped off, her guests at the several landings around the Inlet.

She had a child's interest in listening to the ex-trooper's reminiscences of the battle of Valencia, the Venezuelan campaign, and of his world's-end following of the flag. The footman, never for a moment lacking in deference or presuming upon the liberty of speech allowed him, was an entertaining talker. He had used his eyes and his ears in his journeyings through the earth, and the lively imagination characteristic of his race and his negro knack of mimicry, together with his intelligence and his ability to use the English language with precision and skill, made him a raconteur of fascinating charm. Helen quite often wished to acquaint her father and mother and Elise with some of the things he recounted to her, but the tales were always so mixed in with his experiences as a soldier that she could not re-relate them without breaking her promise to respect his secret....

And thus the summer days dragged slowly to an end, with Helen and her footman becoming at odd times better acquainted with the thoughts and personal views each of the other on a wider and ever wider range of subjects. Helen was too unsophisticated in her thought to notice anything unusual in a lackey's being possessed of Hayward's intelligence and ease of manner. The ever present mystery of his refusal to exploit his heroic deeds dwarfed or overshadowed all other questions that might have arisen in her mind as to anything out of the ordinary in him. She did believe that he was suffering some sort of martyrdom in silence, and her womanly sympathy grew stronger as she knew more of him. Not for a moment was the relation of mistress and man lost sight of by either; but the revelation of the real woman and man, each to other, went steadily on.

CHAPTER XIII

The era of good feeling seemed to have been ushered in along with Mr. Phillips' inauguration. The country was prosperous to a degree. Labour was receiving steady employment and a fair wage and uttered no complaint. Capital was adding surplus to per cent., and was content. The Cuban skirmish with Spain and the trial-by-battle with Germany had cemented again in blood the sections divided by the Great War—so closely indeed that nobody, not even Presidents on hand-shaking junkets, thought to mention it. Any sporadic "waver of the bloody shirt" was considered an anachronism and laughed at as a harmless idiot. It was true that the negro question, being present in the flesh and incapable of banishment, was yet a momentous problem: but it was considered in cooler temper as being either a national or a local question—not sectional in any sense.

President Phillips in his first message to Congress, as in his inaugural address, felicitated his countrymen upon the unity of the American people and the American spirit, and on both occasions gave a new rhetorical turn and oratorical flourish to the statement that his father was from Massachusetts and his mother a South Carolinian. In sections of the South where his party was admittedly effete or undoubtedly odorous he hesitated not to appoint to office men of political faith radically differing from his own—and all good citizens applauded. Partisanry was settling itself down for a good long sleep, and strife had ceased. The lion and the lamb were lain down together, and there was none that made afraid in all the holy mountain of American good-will and fair prospect.

Into this sectionally serene and peaceful situation, which Mr. Phillips deemed largely the result of his personal effort as a non-sectional American executive, he deliberately or impulsively pitched an issue which set one-third of his admiring countrymen by the ears.

The good commonwealth of Mississippi was in a state of upheaval. A peaceable revolution was being attempted there which would have changed the essential nature and purpose of the State government. Incited by the wordy eloquence of a provincial governor, with a few scraps of statistics gone mad, good men, honest men, men of intelligence were seriously considering the proposition to so amend the State constitution as to put upon the negro in his ignorance and poverty the whole burden of his own education—by a division of the school fund between the races in proportion to the taxes each paid to the State.

This reactionary and truly astonishing proposition of Governor Wordyfellow was commonly known as the Wordyfellow Idea. It was giving great concern to the sober statesmanship of the entire nation, North and South—indeed greater concern to the thoughtful men of the South who realized its momentous import, its far-reaching effect upon Southern white people, than to the thoughtful outsiders who viewed it philosophically as having a speculative interest but no actual part in its settlement or effects.

The proposition to so divide the school funds indeed found its most violent and active opposition, as it found its strongest advocates, not only among the men of the South but even in the very State of Mississippi itself. The fact soon developed that this was to be the greatest political battle that was to be fought concerning the negro. All prior conflicts had been white man against negro. This was white man against white man, with the negro as an interested onlooker.

The lines were drawn roughly with the church, the schools and the independent press allied against the politicians, the political press and the less intelligent citizenship. Notable individual exceptions there were to this alignment—which all men remember—but the line of cleavage, taking it by and large, was as stated. Though the matter of an actual constitutional revision was presented as yet only to the people of Mississippi, the battle was being waged in serious purpose to a no less actual finish in every State from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.

It was into this situation, fraught with dire possibilities of course, but full of promise to the negro's friends, that the new President projected his impulsive and forceful personality. Anxious as always to be in the fight and leader in the fight, he set about to devise some plan for helping along the black man's cause. That he might do this more intelligently he conferred often with his most trusted advisers.

It was on the occasion of the memorable Home-Coming Week at Cleveland in 191- that he held the famous conference which gave that great civic celebration a fixed place in history. He stood loyally by his home city in its effort to enjoy and advertise itself, for he betook himself and family and several friends, including two members of his cabinet, away from busiest Washington for two days, and opened up his Cleveland home at great expense for that brief stay.

Doctor Woods, a negro of national reputation, also claimed Cleveland as his birthplace, and he had journeyed thither from afar to swell the throng of loyal sons of the city, and had brought with him Doctor Martin, now a bishop of the A.M.E. Zion Church, to add dignity and strength to the negro end of the programme. Meeting officially with these two dignitaries of colour suggested to Mr. Phillips a discussion of the Wordyfellow disturbance, and he called an impromptu consultation.

In between the review of a morning parade and luncheon, therefore, on the second day of his stay, he sandwiched this hurried conference. At it, beside Martin and Woods, were Secretary of the Navy Mackenzie, whose wisdom seemed to cover all politics and statecraft, and the Secretary of Agriculture, Baxter—himself a Mississippian, but thoroughly opposed to the Mississippi governor's policy.

The conference, which was held at Mr. Phillips' home, rejoiced his heart. He was pleased at the favourable reports which Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods gave of the situation in the several Southern States. He accepted with approval the suggestions of the sapient Mackenzie; and when he saw with what earnestness and vigour and assured personal knowledge of the situation Baxter was putting his energies into the fight and predicting victory even in Mississippi, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. The conference was of such interest that luncheon was announced before a definite plan of action was threshed out.

"By George, I'm hungry as a wolf!" exclaimed Mr. Phillips. "Come along to the dining-room, gentlemen, and we'll wind this thing up while we replenish our stores."

While this invitation was quite unexpected by the bishop and Doctor Woods, it completely confounded Secretary Baxter who was right in the middle of a little speech when the interruption and invitation came. He looked confused for a moment, and began mumbling some excuse as Mr. Phillips held open the door and his other guests passed out into the hall.

"Oh, you don't have to go," said Mr. Phillips. "Come on and finish up your idea. I know you have no other engagement, for you were to lunch with me to-day to discuss that Williams matter."

The Secretary of Agriculture saw he was caught, and his manner changed in a moment as he decided to meet the issue squarely.

"You will please excuse me, Mr. President," he said formally and finally.

"Why, Baxter, surely I do not have to explain to you that—"

"You certainly do not, Mr. President," interrupted the Secretary. "Good morning, gentlemen,"—and he bowed himself out.

President Phillips turned in ill-restrained anger and followed his guests to the dining-room. They found Mrs. Phillips and Helen awaiting them. With these Mr. Mackenzie shook hands, and to them the President introduced Doctor Woods. The bishop was already acquainted, and spoke of the dinner at the Saratoga restaurant.

Mrs. Phillips had long been accustomed to the surprises her husband made for her, and had too good control of her faculties to show any annoyance on beholding her unexpected and unwelcome guests.

Any possible shade of restraint in her manner would not have been noticed, however, in the general feeling of constraint which Mr. Baxter's abrupt departure had left on Mr. Phillips and his other guests. The host set himself to the task of throwing off this feeling by plunging volubly into a résumé of the discussion they had been having. His vigour and enthusiasm were such that by their very physical force he was bringing a wholesome situation to pass, when Elise came humming down the hall with Lola DeVale, stopped short in the doorway—and turned quickly back.

"ELISE ... STOPPED SHORT IN THE DOORWAY—AND TURNED QUICKLY BACK."

While there was nothing unusual or pointed in Elise's manoeuvre her father felt and resented her protest. He talked away for a few minutes in nervous hope that his supposition was wrong and that she would come and bring Lola in to lunch. When she did not his choler rose at this open mutiny in his own household, and he awkwardly tossed the ball of conversation to Mackenzie and busied himself keeping his indignation within bounds.

From this point the meal progressed uncertainly. In the midst of the embarrassment of it all there was brought to the President a note, upon opening which he read:

"SIR:—I have the honour to present my resignation as Secretary of Agriculture, to take effect at the earliest moment you may be able to relieve me of the duties of the office.

"With assurances of my highest consideration and sincerest good wishes for yourself and the success of your administration, I am

"Your obedient servant,

"W. E. BAXTER."

At the bottom of the page there was added:

"P.S.—I am willing to assign any plausible reason for this resignation that you may desire, or that may suggest itself to you as likely to relieve you of any embarrassment as a result of it. W.E.B."

Mr. Phillips punctuated his first hasty perusal of the note with a snort of contempt, and checked an outburst of sarcastic, wrathful comment to read it over a second time. Fortunately at this moment Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods rose and apologized for having to withdraw in order to catch a train.

Their host was loth to have them go, and expressed regret that they had not been able to arrive at some definite plan of campaign. He asked that they inform him if they should come to Washington, so that he might discuss the subject further with them. Expressing their great pleasure that the chief executive took such a lively and intelligent interest in the weal and progress of their race, the two negro worthies withdrew, Mrs. Phillips dismissing them with a formal bow and smile and Helen, following her father, giving them a cordial hand-shake as they retired.

When they had gone Mr. Phillips thrust the letter of resignation at Mackenzie, and exploded:

"Mac, just read that! The provincial, patronizing, postscript-writing popinjay! Could you have imagined the impudence of it! Does not wish me to be embarrassed as a result of his quitting us—the conceited ass! I wonder if he thinks I care a rap, or that the people care, for his cheap little melodramatics. I might have known that it was too much to have expected a sensible secretary from that cursed negro-phobia State! But he was so strongly pressed for a cabinet appointment, and really did appear to be such a strong fellow. I might have guessed his apparent excellences were too good to be true! Oh, but the patronizing insolence of his offer to hush it up for us! I swear it's unbearable. Damn the superior high-and-mighty airs these Southerners assume! My mother was a South Carolinian, but I can't feel a sympathetic tremor in my blood for any such damnable bigotry. I'll give Mr. Baxter and all his hide-bound, moss-backed, supercilious gang to know that this is one administration that proposes to make a democratic government a reality in this democratic country. A man shall be measured by the essential qualities of manhood he possesses, and dealt with accordingly, whatever his position, pull, size, sentiments, claims or colour! What do you think of that infernal note?"

"He does show great consideration for us—distinguished consideration, I may say. He will not tell it on us," sarcastically commented Mackenzie.

"The devil take his distinguished consideration!" snapped Mr. Phillips. "I'll accept his little resignation before he can wink, and give the papers a full statement of the circumstances just as they occurred. I'll show the upstart what a small potato he is—damn his impudence! And then just to think, Mac, of the inexpressible insult in refusing to lunch with persons that I deem worthy to dine with my wife and daughters! It really makes it almost too damnably personal to be overlooked. He must understand that respectability, presentability, acceptability, in my home is a matter that is as sacred to me as such things are to him with all his Bourbon notions!—but thank God he may understand also that such acceptability is based on true merit, and that a man's colour has absolutely nothing to do with it.... Come along with me to the library and we will accept this little resignation before it gets cold, and have it at his hotel before he gets cold!"

CHAPTER XIV

Mrs. Phillips, ill at ease during the luncheon, had taken the opportunity to retire offered by the departure of the negro guests, and had taken Helen with her; but that young lady, feeling the electric condition of the atmosphere and full of lively curiosity, had returned to hover around the dining-room door and learn what all the row was about. She heard her father's outburst with great interest—being no little shocked at his sulphurous words, but no less deeply concerned at the suggestion of embarrassment to him politically, and forcibly and enthusiastically impressed with his fine scorn of subterfuge and manly decision to fight out his battles in the open.

When President Phillips came in to dinner and asked for his daughters, their mother told him Helen was in her room and Elise had gone driving with Lola. "I did not like Elise's conduct at lunch. It was too pointed, entirely too pointed. I shall talk to the young lady very plainly."

"Now, Hayne, don't worry the child with this affair. It is bad enough as it is. I hope—"

"Bad enough as it is! Why, one would think you wished to resign also. Were you insulted, too?"

"Not insulted, Hayne; but ever since you sent me to the pinelands of North Carolina that winter for Elise's throat I have not been able to think of a negro as I did before—and Elise feels the same way, I know. It is so plain down there: the negroes are so many and so—different. I can't receive them with any sort of pleasure. Just think of what the Southern papers will have to say. The awful things they said about your negro quartette were almost unbearable, and I know that was mild to what this will be. I do wish you had not brought them in to lunch, Hayne."

"Why, May, you are surely not going over against me with those supercilious Southern fanatics?"

"Hayne! That is almost insulting. You know that I am for you against the world, whatever comes. No one, not even Elise or Helen, has ever heard me offer the least criticism of anything you have done—and no one ever will, my dearest"—she spoke simply and earnestly as she held her hands up toward him in a gesture eloquent of abiding love—"but I cannot have pleasure in receiving negroes. I have seen the negro as he really is, and I cannot feel that some soap and water and a silk hat make a—"

"Stop, May, right there"—Mr. Phillips' arms went about his wife in tenderness as he placed a hand upon her lips. "Listen to me. You dear women are creatures of impulse and sentiment—and thank Heaven for that, too: for when the time ever comes that you shall judge men from your heads instead of your hearts, woe to us!"—and he kissed her hair in reverent gentleness—-"but—"

"Well, this is an idyllic scene!" exclaimed Elise, coming into the room with Helen. "It is better than a play. Daddy dear, you do it beautifully. You should have gone on the stage."

Mr. Phillips' state of mind, his bottled-up vexation because of Elise's behaviour at luncheon, his impatience at the interruption of his conversation with his wife at the point where she seemed to have made out her case against him and before he had opportunity to demolish her sentiment with masculine logic, added to Elise's lightness of manner and speech, which nettled him in his serious concern over Baxter's resignation, were, all together, too much for moderation.

"Now look here, young lady," he growled out ungraciously, "you have presumed entirely too much upon your privileges to-day. When did you become too good to dine with people your mother and sister were entertaining?"

"Why, papa!" the girl exclaimed in amazement at the roughness of his manner;—but the sternness of his face did not relax, and she stumbled along seeking some excuse. "Lola and I did not want any lunch, and all those men—"

"Stop! Don't be a dodger! You know very well, miss, that you declined to lunch because Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods were there. Now you must understand that I am as regardful of your honour as you are, that my life is at your service to protect it against the slightest affront, but that I will not be sponsor for any silliness, and will certainly not overlook or permit any high-flown impertinence that affronts me in the presence of guests of my choosing. What do you suppose Mr. Mackenzie thinks of your high-and-mighty rebuke to him for sitting at my table in that company? He must feel very properly subdued, I suppose you think. And the bishop and Doctor Woods—they are doubtless overcome with humiliation because of your refusal to meet them."

He dropped his overbearing manner as Elise's face turned from crimson to white and her lips began to tremble—for he was a tender-hearted and gallant gentleman.

"Now let me say once for all, my daughter, that I must be the judge of who is a proper person to be entertained in this household, and I want no more such exhibitions of filial disrespect as you made to-day. I think no explanation is due: but I will tell you that one of the gentlemen who lunched with us to-day is a bishop in his church and a leader of ten million citizens of this country, while Doctor Woods is a graduate of Harvard and Heidelberg, a man whose learning is surpassed by that of very few men in America, and is the very best type of his own race and a creditable product of any race. Both these gentlemen are entirely worthy of your highest respect."

"But, papa, they are negroes!" said Elise, emboldened to attempt a defence when her father dropped his browbeating tone and assumed to address her reason.

"Negroes?—and what of that? It is not the first time a negro has lunched with a President of the United States. Calm your misgivings by remembering that it is assuredly safe, either socially or politically, to follow any precedent set by Mr. Roosevelt. But further, my daughter, what does the term 'negro' impute to these men more than a colour of skin? Nothing. My child, 'the man's the thing,'—his colour is absolutely nothing. A negro must be judged individually, by his own character and ability—you judge white men so. He is not responsible for the whole race, but for himself, and must stand or fall upon his individual merit and not upon his colour or caste. It is the glory of our America that it has but one order of nobility—a man; and when that order is abolished or others established our democratic institutions will be a hollow pretence and our decadence have set in. Heaven defend a daughter of mine should be either dazzled by a tinselled rank or class pretension, or fail to appreciate simple, genuine, personal excellence."

Elise was glad enough her father had calmed down and branched off into generalities. She was discreetly, not impudently, silent, and took the first opportunity to retire.

* * * * *

On that afternoon Elise had met Evans Rutledge and had really found pleasure in his friendliness. She speculated whether his manner would have been quite so cordial if he had known of the luncheon then but two hours past. She had seen no little of him in a casual way since living in Washington, for he was an acceptable visitor at most of the desirable places. With repeated meetings they had come to an unspoken truce, Elise being impelled to friendly simplicity by her very nature, and Rutledge by the love which would not permit him to deny himself any opportunity to be near her despite some rebellious notions of self-respect.

Rutledge's vacillation of mind concerning Elise was evidenced by his presence in Cleveland. It comported very well with his former status as a freelance correspondent that in search of "copy" he should have followed the President out to Ohio, but he confessed to himself that it was somewhat below the dignity of his present position and standing as an editorial writer that he should have asked for the assignment as news representative allotted to his paper on the Presidential special. He called himself a fool, and—thought of many situations that might happen to evolve themselves on the train.... They didn't evolve.

Only one paltry three minutes' talk with Elise did he win for all his journeying. He had stood by her carriage that afternoon as she waited for Lola DeVale in front of Vantine's, and they had talked in the unaffected manner of the first days of their acquaintance until Lola came out and invited him to join them on an evening at the end of the week at an informal gathering of young people at her home in Washington. He had accepted with what he afterward thought was childish and compromising eagerness.

"I like that Mr. Rutledge so much. I invited him for you, Elise," Lola said as they drove homeward.

"Why for me?" asked Elise.

"Perhaps I should say because of you. Can't you see the reason in his eyes every time he looks at you? I can."

"You are mistaken there, my dear. I happen to know that Mr. Rutledge loves, or once loved, a young woman who has greatly disappointed him."

"How?"

"He has learned that her family—and perhaps she—is impossible."

"How did you know of his love for the girl?"

"He told me himself," Elise answered with a nonchalant air that proved her an actress of the finest art.

"He did! You were playing with fire, Elise. The sympathetic 'other girl' is always in a dangerous role. Did he tell you of his disappointment also?"

"Oh, no. But that was—and is—evident."

"But the girl? Was she really—nice—better than her people?"

"Yes. No—yes—that is, nice. Of course you know Mr. Rutledge would not love a woman who was not—nice."

"Oh, certainly; but if he was really disappointed in her, all the more reason he might find a solace in your smiles."

"It was her family rather than herself, I think. He is uncertain about her—is afraid to love her."

"He does seem to have an uncertain look at times that has puzzled me. I think you are responsible for some of his uncertainty, however; or perhaps the other girl makes him uncertain about you. If it were not for her you would have to look to your defences.... He must have loved her very much or he could not stand the temptation you are to him.... I'm glad you've solved the riddle, but very sorry you told me. I have liked Mr. Rutledge; but I despise any man who would not brush aside all obstacles to marry the woman he loves and who loves him. Don't you?"

"Oh," said Elise uncertainly, "but, really, it was—it may have been—because she did not love him. I do not think he lacks courage—exactly. He simply would not—pursue—the young woman because her father's—because the—the obstacle was—seemed—insurmountable,—but really I must not be violating confidences. There is no reason why you should not at least respect him, Lola. His course is not without some justification, for the objection, from his point of view, is—vital."

"But what if the girl loves him? Does she love him?"

"Really, Lola, he—he did not inform me—whether she does or not. He has not made the slightest reference to the subject, nor spoken the smallest of confidences to me since that summer on the St. Lawrence.... I think he regrets ever having told me anything about his—heart's affairs. I suppose I should not repeat them—they were spoken under peculiar circumstances."

"There is nothing peculiar, my dear. It is easy to see why a man who is not free to make love to you will choose the next best thing and talk of love with you.... You would better be careful of Mr. Rutledge, however, for I fear his loyalty to that first love totters on its throne every time he looks into your gray eyes. You must not shatter his faith in his own faithfulness."

CHAPTER XV

The second morning's papers were aflame with the news of it! President Phillips, true to his outspoken character, himself had called in the Associated Press representative immediately on his return to Washington and dictated a concise statement of all the circumstances leading to Mr. Baxter's resignation. The Secretary's house was besieged by reporters, but all were referred to the White House for information. The daily newspapers featured the item in every conceivable style of display head-lines, and the affair was a nine-day sensation in Washington and a reverberating tempest throughout the South.

Evans Rutledge by the force of his genius, his wide knowledge of men and affairs and the accuracy of his political information had gone rapidly toward the front rank in his profession. He was now the leading editorial writer on the Washington Mail, an anti-administration organ.

Of that paper Elise sought the first issue with surreptitious eagerness. She picked it up fully expecting to read quite the most scathing philippic she had ever seen in print. She was surprised to find that the former correspondent had put off his extravagances for a more judicial editorial manner. She recognized his work by several phrases that had been in the Chicago American article.

The editorial was severe, but dignified and fairly respectful. Rutledge commended Secretary Baxter for his prompt and emphatic refusal to lunch with a negro even though at the table of a President of the United States and at the President's personal invitation or "command." He said the fact that Mr. Phillips had intended no insult made the insult no less real; and that Baxter had done the only possible thing—the duel being no longer in vogue—declined and resigned.

He went on to say that there was an irreconcilable difference between the Northern and the Southern ideas of the social equality of the races; that the Southern man's idea was bred in the bone, and no amount of argument or abuse or lofty advice from the Northern press, or boyish impulsiveness in the President's chair, could change that idea one iota; that while their fears sometimes might be lulled to sleep, might be forgotten like other ills in the interest or excitement of other concerns, the black peril was their great Terror in both their waking and sleeping hours, and even when asleep they slept upon their arms.

Elise read that in face of this Terror all other questions were insignificant, and all arguments, prejudices, passions, loves and hates (she put her fingertip on the words) among Southern gentlemen melted away or were fused into a mighty and unalterable sentiment to go down to death rather than to permit social intermingling with the negro race.

The editorial concluded that the Southern feeling on this subject was ineradicable, and was so deep-seated and universal that it became a great Fact which any man of fair discretion and sensible purpose would have recognized and reckoned with; that no President with an abiding sense of the proprieties would have proposed the luncheon to Baxter, and no gentleman of the South would have hesitated for a moment in declining the insulting invitation. The subject was dismissed with the prediction that the cause of the negro immediate and remote would be damaged immeasurably by this act of the impulsive gentleman in the White House who would take the Southern situation by the seat of the trousers as though it were a self-willed small boy pouting in a cellar and yank it incontinently up the Phillips stairs of progress.

There was no other subject discussed in hotel lobbies, committee-rooms or wherever else two or more men were gathered together on the day after the facts were known. In the afternoon in one of the committee-rooms of the Senate, Senators Ruffin and Killam, Representatives Smith and Calhoun of Killam's State, and Representative Hazard of a New York City district, were ventilating their views on the matter when Rutledge joined them, on the hunt for Calhoun.

The comments on the President's negro luncheon were all adverse, though expressed in terms of varying elegance and force from the keen and polished irony of Mr. Ruffin to Mr. Killam's brutal outbursts and picturesque profanity. Mr. Hazard, not having the same sectional view-point as the others, though of the same political creed, was an interested listener. Senator Ruffin referred to the editorial in The Mail and drew Evans into the discussion.

The young man, glad to be untrammelled by editorial discretion, gave free rein to his indignation, but in deference to Mr. Hazard's presence was careful to make some allowance and excuses for the opinion of Northern people on the matter of social amenities to negroes. However, to compensate for this concession and leave no doubt of his opinion, he was even more picturesque than Mr. Killam, if not so profane—and consequently more forcible, Hazard thought—in paying his respects to Mr. Phillips' negro policy.

But Senator Killam resented even the suggestion of excuse for Northern opinion, and opened up an even more choice and outrageous assortment of profanity and invective. Rutledge, Calhoun and Senator Ruffin were ashamed at his disregard of ordinary decencies, while Hazard assumed a look of polite amusement. Mr. Killam's satellite, Smith, however, was vastly tickled at his master's performance, and took pains to show his surpassing admiration. Smith was a raw-boned, half-washed giant with long hair that never knew a shampoo, who owed his election to Congress to a gift of stump-speaking and a consistent devotion to Senator Killam's political fortunes. He usually kept quiet when his chief was there to speak. He did so on that afternoon till, carried away by Mr. Killam's extravagances about niggers in white dining-rooms, he blurted out:

"Yes; I suppose now Miss Elise Phillips will be getting sweet on Doctor Woods. The nig—"

Smash!

Rutledge struck him on the point of the jaw and he fell in an awkward heap between a chair and the wall. He was up in a moment growling like a mastiff, but was restrained by Calhoun and Hazard. Rutledge was standing perfectly still, his thumbs in his trousers pockets, showing no excitement save in the glint of his eye. Smith was muttering his desire to fight it out. He could not talk plainly, for the blow had unhinged his loosely clacking jaw. Hazard, Killam and Calhoun held him by force till he was quiet. It would have been impossible to prevent his forcing a further clash perhaps if Senator Ruffin had not insisted on ending the matter just there.

"Gentlemen!" he said, "this must stop right here. None of us can afford to pursue the miserable affair further. We should all be ashamed that a young lady's name has been used in this discussion at all, and especially in such a manner was it unpardonable! Mr. Smith certainly forgot himself; and while Mr. Rutledge acted from a chivalrous impulse he will learn when he is older that a blow usually advertises rather than suppresses an insult to a woman."

It began to dawn upon Mr. Smith by this time that he had committed a woeful breach of good manners, and with a parvenu's awe of "propriety" he was more than anxious to have the affair hushed up. None the less did he wish to keep secret his knockdown. He got out as quietly as possible in search of a surgeon. Rutledge retired with Calhoun, who slapped him on the back as they went down the corridor and whispered, "Good old boy! Served him right, the damn dog."

Senator Ruffin sent for the attendant who had left the committee-room as soon as quiet was restored, and bought his silence with a five-dollar bill. This honest man was true to his promise to keep his mouth shut, but he overlooked informing the Senator that he had already given the first of his co-labourers he met in the hall a fragmentary account of the mix-up. He had given the names only of Senators Ruffin and Killam, as he did not know the others, all of whom he thought were members of the Lower House.

The reporters were on the trail in an hour. They interviewed the Senators, but these were dumb. They found that the Senate attendant who had his information second-hand was the only source of news supply. What this fellow lacked in knowledge, however, he supplied out of his imagination; and the details grew and multiplied as different reporters interviewed him. At best there was much to be supplied by the young gentlemen of the press, and the result was as many different stories as there were men on the job. The nearest any of them got to the truth was to say that two Congressmen had been discussing the negro question and had come to blows because some woman's name had been dragged in, and that one had broken the other's jaw. This much in the evening papers.

By the next morning the newspaper ferrets had located all the actors and eye-witnesses and gave their names to the public. Fortunately the attendant had not caught Smith's remark but only his rebuke by Senator Ruffin. So that the public knew only that Evans Rutledge had unset or broken the jaw of Congressman Smith because of some improper use of a young lady's name. Whose, none of the gentlemen would say.

* * * * *

Evans Rutledge was in a fever of anxiety lest that name should get to the public. He was sure that he could not face Elise again if it did. Senator Ruffin's rebuke had sunk deep into his heart and he felt more guilty than Smith. He looked over the morning and evening papers very carefully to see whether they had discovered the young woman, before he finally decided to go to Senator DeVale's as he had promised Lola. When he arrived he found, beside Elise, only Alice Mackenzie, Hazard and young MacLane, an under-secretary of the British embassy. Others who were to come failed to appear.

Elise was not pleased with the situation. She was quite willing to be ordinarily civil to Mr. Rutledge, but she knew that nothing could separate MacLane and Alice Mackenzie, and that Hazard had known Lola so long and had proposed to her so regularly and insistently that he was for her or for nobody. It looked a little too much, therefore, as if she had chosen Evans for her very own for the evening. She did not want him to think such a thing possible. She remembered his point-blank editorial utterance that those small sentiments—loves and hates—melted away before exhibitions of social equality with negroes—so at least she construed it—and she could not but resent it, though she would not admit she troubled herself to do that.

"Now, young people," said Lola, "as the programme has been spoiled we will make this an evening of do-as-you-please."

"Good, very good," commented Hazard. "In that case you will please to come over here and take this chair and let's finish that conversation we were having last night when the unpronounceable Russian took you away from me."

"I am afraid that conversation is a serial story," she laughed, taking the chair he placed for her.

MacLane asked Alice Mackenzie some vague question about a song, which only she could interpret, and they by common impulse went through the wide door to the piano in the back parlour, where after she had hummed a short love ballad for him to piano accompaniment they dropped into a pianissimo duet of love without accompaniment.

Elise, feeling that she was being thus thrown at Mr. Rutledge's head, came to the mark with spirit and kept him guessing for an hour. She resented his possible inference that she had chosen him for an evening's tête-à-tête, and set about to show him that such was not the fact by a display of perversity and brilliance which dazzled while it irritated him. She would assume for a moment an intimately friendly, even confiding, manner that like the breath of the honeysuckle at his Pacolet plantation home would set his senses a-swim,—and in the next moment chill his glowing heart with the iciest of conventional reserve or answer his sincerest speeches with the light disdain and indifference of a mocking spirit. At one time she would kindle his admiration for her quickness of thought and keenness of repartee; and again appear so dull and careless that he must needs explain his own essays at wit.

Her caprices, so plainly intentional yet inexplicable, exasperated him almost to the point of open rebellion, and the more evident his perturbation became, the more spirit she put into the game. She won him back from a half-dozen fits of resentful impatience to the very edge of intoxication,—only to bait him again more outrageously.

Lola DeVale, perfectly familiar with the theme of Oliver Hazard's serial, found time even while admiring Hazard's ability to decorate his story in ever-changing and ever pleasing colours, to note that Elise was giving Rutledge a tempestuous hour.

"It's a shame for her to treat him so," she said to Hazard, interpreting her meaning by a nod toward Elise and Evans.

"I hadn't noticed. What's she doing to him?"

"I believe he loves her, and she has been treating him shamefully all evening."

"So that was it," murmured Hazard. "She certainly ought to be good to him."

"Beg pardon, I didn't understand you," said Lola.

"I said she ought to be good to him."

"I heard that. But the other remark you made?"

Hazard caught himself, and looked at Lola steadily. "I was so bold as to express an opinion—which had not been requested—and to aver that—she—er—ought to be good to him," he repeated with an over-done blankness of countenance.

"You come on," said Lola as she rose. "We are going to scare up something for you people to eat," she remarked to the others.

"Now, sir," she said when she had gotten him into the dining-room, "I'll see what sort of a reporter I could be. Stand right there, and look at me. Now.—why did Mr. Rutledge knock Congressman Smith down? No, no, stand perfectly still—and no evasion."

"What are you talking about?" asked Hazard.

"Don't be silly," the girl said impatiently. "I read something more than the society and fashion columns in the newspapers. Tell me. Why did he break Mr. Smith's jaw?—who was the young lady?—and what did Mr. Smith say of her? I know it was Elise; but tell me about it—and hurry, for those people are getting hungry."

"I must not tell that, Lola," Hazard answered her seriously.

"A man should have no secrets from his—proposed—wife."

"Make it promised wife and I'll agree," Hazard replied eagerly, taking her hand.

"No; we'll leave it proposed awhile longer," she answered him archly. "I've become so accustomed to it that way that I'd hate to change it." The smile she gave him as she slowly drew away her hand would have bribed any man to treason.

"But we will compromise it," Lola continued. "I will be real careful of your honour. I'll ask you a question, and if the answer is yes you needn't answer it. Now—was it not an insult to Elise that Mr. Rutledge resented?"

"Lola, when you said that word wife a moment since you were—heavenly."

"Hush your nonsense, Ollie.... I knew it was Elise when you said that thing in the parlour.... Did Mr. Rutledge really break his jaw?"

"Oh, it was beautiful, beautiful," said Hazard with enthusiasm. "Such a clean left-hander! Dropped him like a beef—he's big as two of Rutledge—in a wink—before he could finish his sentence,—the low-bred dog! Yes, beautifully done, beaut—"

"Here they come," said Lola. She was busily breaking out the stores from the sideboard when Elise and Rutledge appeared.

"Here, Mr. Hazard, take this dish in to that mooning young couple in the back parlour. And you, Mr. Rutledge, just force them to eat enough of these pickles to keep their tempers in equilibrium."

* * * * *

"Oh, my dear," she exclaimed when the two men were gone, "I've discovered the name of the young woman Mr. Rutledge fought for. Ollie let it get away from him—not the name, but I figured it out. And for whom do you suppose it was?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," answered Elise in all truthfulness.

"Of all women you should. I told you I could see it in his eyes,"' laughed Lola.

"Not for me?" Elise cried in genuine surprise.

"For you."

"What did the man say?" she asked quickly.

"Some caddish thing, of course. Men are so nasty. I didn't have time to get the particulars before you and Mr. Rutledge followed us in here. But Ollie says it was just b-e-a-u-t-iful the way Mr. Rutledge dropped him—and he's three times as big as Mr. Rutledge, too—"

"We've tried moral suasion, strategy, force, every expedient," interrupted Hazard as he and Rutledge came back into the dining-room, "but the Scotch lass and her laddie positively decline to be fed by us. They are fully supplied by their own ravings—ho! don't throw that salad at me!"

"Here, take a dose of celery quick—a biblical pun like that is a too serious tax upon the simple Congressional brain," said Lola.

Hazard looked foolish, and he felt like a fool; but what real manly lover outside the story-books was ever else than foolish when love's fit was upon him?

None of the quartette in the dining-room was the least bit hungry, and it was but a very few moments till the young hostess led the way back to the parlour, Elise and Rutledge following slowly. When they reached the stairway Elise seated herself on the third step and by the gesture with which she arranged her skirts invited Evans to a seat below her.

"Look at that," said Lola to Hazard, glancing over her shoulder as they passed into the parlour. "Now she's going to be good to him."

"In the name of heavens, woman, you didn't tell her!"

"Why not? She's the very one that ought to know. She will not inform the reporters."

"But what will she think of me?" asked Hazard in some concern.

"You? Why, you don't count! You are only a pawn in their game." As his eyes flashed she added, with a bewildering tilt of her chin: "I promise to make good all your losses."

"May my losses prosper!" prayed Hazard audibly.

* * * * *

Elise used a makeshift conversation with Rutledge till she heard the humming accents of the others well going, and then—

"Mr. Rutledge," she said. "I wish to speak to you of your defence of my name when that Mr. Smith—"

The suddenness of it routed all Rutledge's cool senses.

"Oh, Miss Phillips," he broke in, "I am so sorry that I should have done anything to accentuate that abominable fellow's remark. I am so heartily ashamed of my unpardonable boyish thoughtlessness and lack of consideration that I cannot find words to express my contempt for myself," etc., to the same effect, without giving Elise a chance to speak, till she was surprised in turn, then amused, then annoyed. Finally, in order to bring him to a reasonable coherency, she interrupted his self-denunciations.

"What did Mr. Smith say of me, Mr. Rutledge?"

"I can't repeat that to you, Miss Phillips."

"You must if the words are decent. Tell me at once. I must know."

"He simply coupled your name with that of—Doctor Woods—the negro who—lunched at your home in Cleveland."

Evans forced out the last half-dozen words with a visible effort—which the girl may have misinterpreted.

"Oh!" She dropped her face in her hands. She had not dreamed of that explanation. But she gathered herself in a moment. Every pennyweight of her admirable pride came to her support. At the mention of "negro luncheon" she was on guard against Rutledge, her kindly purpose forgotten. She sat straight up and with a perfect dignity said:

"I thank you, Mr. Rutledge, for your well-meant efforts in my behalf, but my father is abundantly able both to choose the guests who shall dine at his table, and to protect my name, whenever indeed it shall need a champion." She closed the discussion by rising.

Evans did not tarry long. He was too badly scattered. The other guests soon followed, except Elise, who remained overnight at Lola's insistence.

"Come right up to my room and tell me all about it.... What did you do to that miserable man? You ought to be spanked, Elise."

"I did nothing to him."

"And why didn't you? I said to Ollie when you sat down on the stairs, 'Now she's going to be good to him.' Did you tell him you knew?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He—apologized," said Elise with a nervous laugh.

"Apologized! For mercy's sake!—and what else?"

"I accepted his apology—on condition he would not do it again;" and she broke out into real mirth at sight of Lola's scandalized face.

CHAPTER XVI

If The Mail's editorial was conservative, other papers were not so respectful. It was worse even than Mrs. Phillips had predicted. All over the South the papers ran the whole gamut of indignation and abuse from lofty scorn all the way down to plain editorial fits. The entire Southern press, Democratic, Republican, and Independent, except a few sheets edited by negroes, were of one mind on the subject of negroes dining with white men. Papers that had supported Mr. Phillips heartily were all severe, some of them bitter, in their denunciations.

The Wordyfellow element in the school-fund fight welcomed the President's act as a boon from heaven. They raised a howl that was heard in every nook and corner of the Southland, and that by the very thundering shock of its roar broke through and drove back the forces of the negro's friends. The weak-willed were borne down and the timid and the doubting were carried away by the purely physical force of noise or by having lashed to fury their sometimes latent but ever-present terror of the Black Peril. And not only the weak, indeed, and the timid and the doubting went in crowds to the Wordyfellow camp, but strong men, fearless men, men of the most philanthropic impulses toward the negro race, men who had fought openly and ably the Wordyfellow propaganda, became silent and began to waver, or deserted the negro's cause and unhesitatingly espoused the other side.

In vain did the negro's staunchest friends proclaim their indignation at the President's lunching with Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods, and try to convince their people that the South should be true to its own interests and do simple justice to the negro despite any act of his fool friends. It was useless. The Southern people—the floating vote, the balance of power—were in no mood to draw fine distinctions, nor to listen to theories in face of facts. A careless hand had struck the wavering balance, and the beam went steadily down.

Reports of defections began to come rapidly to Mr. Phillips. Those from the negroes in the South told of the losses faithfully, but gave any other than the true reason for the change of sentiment; while letters from his white advisers told him more or less plainly that his negro luncheon had done the damage and that the cause was as good as lost.

These reports roused the President's fighting blood. He sent for Mackenzie.

"Read that stack of letters, Mac, and you will see that the negroes in the South are in a fair way to be trampled to death. Now I must head this thing off, and I want your help. I am determined to defeat that Wordyfellow movement if there is power in the Federal government. I'll not be content to have the laws annulled by the Federal Supreme Court after they are passed, even if that can be done. We must find some way to win this fight in the elections and thus give the lie to these prophecies that that luncheon has lost the battle."

So he and the astute Mackenzie rubbed their heads together for a week: and finally came to a remedy so simple that they were ashamed not to have thought of it at once. Simple indeed—if they could apply it. In less than another week, Mr. Hare, the recognized administration mouthpiece in the House, introduced a bill appropriating moneys from the national treasury to the States in proportion to population for purposes of public education. The milk in this legislative cocoanut was a provision that the money apportioned to each State should be so distributed among the individual public schools of the State that, when taken together with the State's own appropriation, all the schools in the State should be open for terms of equal length.

From statistics carefully compiled in the office of the Commissioner of Education Mr. Phillips and Mr. Mackenzie had calculated the amount of the appropriation so that if the Southern States adopted the Wordyfellow plan the negro race would get virtually the whole of the appropriation from the national government.

Elise Phillips, persuading herself that she was on the lookout for reasons to despise Mr. Rutledge, regularly read the editorial column of The Mail.

There one morning she learned that "the immediate effect of the introduction of the Hare Bill in the House has been to transfer the fight from the South to Washington. True, the Wordyfellow speakers and press have raised a more ear-splitting howl, and opened up with every gun of argument, appeal, abuse, expletive and rant; but they see clearly that this bill if passed will bring all their schemes to naught, and that the issue has been taken out of their hands. It is tantalizingly uncertain to them whether the bill will become a law; for there are many incidental questions and considerations which complicate the issue here at Washington. But all men know that when Mr. Phillips sets his head for anything he will move heaven and earth to attain it. Few doubt his power to whip many Representatives and Senators into line or his readiness to wield the whip if the fate of any pet measure demands it. There is much of the Jesuit in Mr. Phillips' philosophy of life and action. When he believes a thing is right he believes that no squeamish notion should prevent his bringing it to pass. Keep your eyes on him! It is always interesting to see how he does it."

"Pity he is not a Senator!" Elise commented with scornful impatience as she threw the paper down, "that papa might whip him into becoming modesty!"

* * * * *

At the moment Elise was so delivering her mind, a telegraph boy was handing Rutledge a message. He tore it open and read:

"COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-.

"EVANS RUTLEDGE,

"Washington, D.C.

"Exactly how old are you and where do you vote?

"W. D. ROBERTSON."

Evans looked around behind the telegraph-sheet as if seeking an explanation. He gazed quizzically at the messenger-boy, but that young gentleman only grinned and then looked solemn.

"Well," Evans muttered, "what the devil's up Robbie's back now?"

He sat down and thought the thing over awhile. Then he constructed a reply.

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 9th, 191-.

"W. D. ROBERTSON, Atty.-General,

"Columbia, S.C.

"Your telegram received. If it is official I decline to answer. Entre nous I will be thirty-one on the 29th of February at something like twenty minutes past three in the morning—they didn't have a stopwatch in the house. I vote in Cherokee County, Pacolet precinct, generally of late in a cigar-box in the shed-room of Jake Sims's store where Gus Herndon used to run a barber-shop when you and I were young, Maggie. Why? EVANS RUTLEDGE."

"Send that collect, youngster. We'll make old Robbie pay for his impertinence."

"Look here, sonny," he called to the boy who had gotten out the door, "bring any answer to that down to the Capitol. I am going to have a look at the Senate."

He was sitting beside Lola DeVale in the members' gallery when the answer came.

"COLUMBIA, S.C, Jan. 9th, 191-.

HON. EVANS RUTLEDGE,

"Washington, D.C.

"Nothing much. The governor of South Carolina simply did not feel like giving a United States Senatorship either to a boy or to a man from another State. He is just mailing your commission as Jones's successor. Don't decline it before you hear the whole story. Congratulations to you.

"W. D. ROBERTSON."

"This has 'an ancient and fish-like smell.' Read it," Rutledge said to Lola when he had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to speak.

She took the telegram and while she was trying to interpret its import Senator Killam came hurriedly into the gallery and seized upon Rutledge.

"I got a telegram from the governor half an hour ago and have been trying to find you ever since," he exclaimed. "He has appointed you—oh, you have heard, I see. Well, come right down with me. I want to present you to your colleagues."

Evans could doubt no longer, and Lola DeVale had grasped the meaning of it.

"I am so glad to be the first to congratulate you," she said, and he felt the sincerity of her good wishes in her warm hand-grasp. Then Senator Killam carried him off.

* * * * *

"I know it came 'like a bolt from the blue' to you," Robertson wrote to him; "but the whys and wherefores need not mystify you. There cannot be the slightest doubt of your ability to fill the office—full to the brim; and the rest is easy. You know the old man fully intended all along to contest for the place with Jones, whose term would have expired with the old man's term as governor. Jones's demise, however, presented a problem to him that has driven him to the verge of lunacy for a week. He couldn't give himself the commission, of course. He couldn't resign and get it, for the lieutenant-governor has been the avowed supporter of LaRoque for the Senatorship. He couldn't give it to LaRoque or Pressley, for the three of them are too evenly matched.... When he finally came to the idea of appointing some one to fill the vacancy who was clearly not in the running so that the primaries might settle it among the three of them, I suggested you. He jumped at the idea.... The old man has every reason to feel kindly toward you both for your father's sake and for your own excellent work's sake, and he does not doubt your friendliness to himself.... You will have less than six months in which to make a name for yourself, but—perhaps—who can tell? ... I wish I had such an opportunity. I am heartily glad you have it."

* * * * *

Senator Rutledge was pitched right into the middle of the fight on the Hare Bill—and fight it was for him. Senator Killam essayed to take the young man under his wing and chaperone his conduct according to his ideas of the political proprieties, but he found that the junior Senator had a mind of his own, and could not be managed, overawed or bullied. This roused Mr. Killam's ire at once. He wasn't accustomed to it. The dead Senator Jones had never had the effrontery to think for himself; and for this youngster to presume to walk alone was more than Mr. Killam could forgive.

Solely because of Mr. Killam's personal attitude and treatment of him, Rutledge wished it were over and done with long before the finish; but he never lost his nerve.

* * * * *

It seemed that the suspense would be ended quickly when the House under pressure of the rules passed the Hare Bill almost without debate: but when it came before the Senate it was evident at once that those dignitaries would take abundance of time to consider it,—if for no other reason than to prove to themselves they were the greatest deliberative body on earth.

However, with all the Senate's deliberation the very frenzy of the Wordyfellow crowd's screams evidenced their realization that their game was balked—and that, too, in a manner that was maddening: for it left them not the frenzied pleasure of fighting their precious battle against the negro out to the end and going down to harmless defeat in pyrotechnic glory. No; it placed them in a dilemma where they must humiliate themselves by a surrender before the battle, or fight it to a barren victory at the polls, which would not only bring actual benefit to the negro in the South but also give to the Northern States the lion's share of a large appropriation.

Facing this dilemma, they lost heart if they lost nothing of noise. In all of the interested States except Mississippi serious discussion of the question grew less and less rapidly, and was postponed until after the Senate should vote. In Mississippi, however, the tension was increased by the Senate's deliberation because the date set for the election on the proposed Wordyfellow amendment to the State constitution was some time before the Senate would be forced to vote. The Mississippians could not decide for their lives whether they preferred to vote on their amendment first or have the Senate vote first on the bill. With a faint hope that the bill might not pass, they were in obvious difficulties in either case.

Southern Senators were overwhelmed with all manner of conflicting and confusing petitions, and as a result about one half of them favoured the bill for one reason or another, while the other half more or less bitterly opposed it. The discussion, when the bill finally came out of committee, took the widest range,—from the constitutional objections raised by the Texas Senator (whose State, having a large school-fund income, did not need the appropriation) and the savage attacks upon the negro race generally by Senator Killam, to the purely pro-educational reasoning of most of the supporting Senators from the South—among whom was Senator Ruffin—and the pro-negro speech of the young Senator Rutledge.

The adjective pro-negro may give an erroneous impression of Senator Rutledge's ideas. The term is the Senator's own. From his speech in full in the Congressional Record the reader may determine for himself whether the term is apt.

CHAPTER XVII

Senator Rutledge gave notice that on February 23d he would address the Senate on the Hare Bill. On that day the galleries were crowded to hear him, his State's delegation in the House was present in a body, accompanied by many other representatives from North and South. No one knew how he would vote, for he had listened much and talked little. He said:

"Mr. President: There have been many terms used on this floor and in the public prints since this bill was introduced, by which to distinguish and define and lay open to public view the motives which are supposed to lie behind the votes that will be cast for and against it.

"We have heard 'unconstitutional,' 'anti-negro,' 'pro-educational,' 'watch-dog of the treasury,' and others equally descriptive if less parliamentary. I have not heard 'pro-negro.'

"So, to save my friends—and enemies, if I have any—the trouble of search and imaginings, I adopt that term, 'pro-negro,' as descriptive of my attitude toward the matters affected by this bill.

"It is an open secret, Mr. President, that this measure, which bears the non-committal title of 'an act to promote education' is a White House production designed and introduced for the single purpose of defeating what is known as the Wordyfellow school-fund movement in the South generally, more specifically now in the State of Mississippi. Because I think it will accomplish that purpose, both general and special,—because I am 'for the negro,'—for him on his own account,—for his elevation as a race to the highest level which his essential nature in the purposes of God will permit him to attain,—because I believe the success of the Wordyfellow movement would mean his degradation, his hopeless continuance in his present low estate,—because, in a word, I am pro-negro; I shall vote for this bill.

"I should despise myself, sir, if I had within me other sentiments toward any man or race of men, and I feel, therefore, that it is not unbecoming in me to arrogate to myself the pure unselfishness of this motive. And yet, sir, if the love of one's race may be called a selfish passion, I must confess that right alongside of this unselfish desire for the negro's welfare, there lies in my heart a selfish passion for the progress, the multiplying prosperity and more abounding happiness of my own people, the white men and women of the South, which desire also with no less power but indeed with compelling forcefulness bids me to oppose the Wordyfellow idea with every faculty and expedient, and therefore to vote for this measure.

"I wish to make it clear at the outset that, while I shall heartily support this White House bill, I give not the slightest credit to the President for having prepared it and sent it here. He deserves none. The bill is a necessity, and as such I vote for it: but the President is the one man who has made it a necessity.

"If he had not injected into the situation his negro luncheon (and to that I will pay my respects before I have finished), my people would have defeated the Wordyfellow movement; for the battle was going our way. It is as little as President Phillips can do now to suggest this method, expensive though it is, to repair the damage he has done the negro's cause in the South. He comes praying us to pay the negro out of the difficulty in which he has involved him, and as friends of the negro there is nothing for us to do but furnish the money, however much we may deplore the Executive folly that makes the outlay imperative.

"Now, Mr. President, let us inquire directly into the merits of the Wordyfellow plan. The proposed amendment to the constitution of Mississippi provides that the school fund shall be divided between the white and negro schools in proportion to the taxes paid to the State by each of the two races for school purposes. As there are six negroes to four whites in the State, and as the negroes pay less than ten per cent of the school taxes, such a division of the school fund will give the white children thirteen days' schooling to the negro's one.

"Such a proposition is illogical, pernicious, insane.

"Look at the logic of it. Governor Wordyfellow defends the general proposition by some scattering statistics which prove to his mind that education generally is not good for the negro; but he justifies the division of the school fund on the basis of contribution upon the supposed principle that the negro will get back all that he pays in and therefore cannot rightly demand more.

"That so-called principle will not hold water a moment. I would say to the gentlemen from the South, Mr. President,—to those who are supporting the Wordyfellow propaganda—that if they proceed on that theory they must give to every man what he pays into the treasury: which means that the State must expend more for the tuition of the sons of the rich than the sons of the poor. If every man has a right to demand for his own children the taxes he pays for school purposes, then the State has no right to tax one man to educate another's child—and the promoters of this idea have pulled down the whole public school system about their ears.

"If such a division is proposed on the ground that no sort of education is good for the negro, and we believe that, then let us take away from the negro by constitutional amendment all the money collected from him by the State for school purposes and give it to the white children. That would be logical, that would be sensible, that would be Scriptural. Let us be logical and sensible and fearless about this matter.

"But I cannot think these leaders of the Wordyfellow forces believe that, Mr. President, though I fear that they have persuaded thousands of their less intelligent following to believe it thoroughly. No, you do not believe it; but you do believe that some particular kinds of education—literary education, for example—is positively harmful to the negro, while some other particular sort—industrial education, perhaps—is beneficial and would uplift the negro race.

"If you admit that,—and it has been conceded on this floor by some of the leaders of the Wordyfellow movement that industrial education is good for the negro and will make a better man and a better citizen of him; then in face of the appalling menace of his ignorance and depravity which have been painted in such lurid colours here, let us by constitutional amendment give him more than his per capita share of the school tax. Yes, let us give to him proportionately in keeping with our keenest fears, our wildest terror, of the Black Peril—all if need be—to educate him in that particular line that will uplift him and make a safe citizen of him, in order that we may save ourselves alive and escape the woes of that peril. All education administered by the State is given in the exercise of a sort of quasi police power—to protect itself from the violence of ignorance: and we would be well within an ancient principle if we should lay out extraordinary funds to police the black cesspools that threaten our civic life.

"It is clearly demonstrable, therefore, that upon any theory of the negro's inability or limited ability to be benefited by education, or upon the assumption of its positive hurtfulness to him, the Wordyfellow amendment is absolutely illogical. The whole Wordyfellow proposition is based upon a false assumption in the first place, and the Wordyfellow remedy does not have the merit of being true even to the fictitious Wordyfellow premises. For all this agitation against the education of the negro race proceeds upon the theory that the negro is not altogether a man, that he is without the one aptitude common to all other peoples, white, yellow or red—the disposition to be uplifted in civilization by the spread of a higher intelligence among his race.

"That theory, Mr. President, is false! And while I believe the great majority of my people reject it despite the insistence with which it has been in small measure openly, in large measure indirectly, presented to them for acceptance, I have thought it worth while to inquire closely and specifically into the effect of the higher literary education upon the black men and women who have been so fortunate as to acquire it. I give to the Senators not only as the result of my investigation but as the result of my personal observation as a man brought up in the South, my sincere opinion that education of the negro in the usual literary studies from the kindergarten to the college, as well as along industrial lines, is as a rule beneficial and uplifting to him.

"It is true that a smattering of education in some instances gives a negro the idea that he is to get a living without work, and that such notions would not be wholesome if prevailing among a population which must do manual labour. This need not alarm us, however; for it is not an unusual thing for a college education to give a white boy the same notion. We do not limit his education on that account. In the post-graduate school of Hard Knocks he always finds out—and no less surely will the negro boy of similar delusion learn—especially as education becomes more and more a possession of the masses and not a privilege of the few—that the great majority of men, whether black or white, lettered or unlettered, must work, and work with their hands.

"Let me add, lest I be misunderstood, that while I believe the negro race as a race will be hewers of wood and drawers of water for generations to come, and that education will be beneficial to them as a toiling class, I am not of those who believe that when by education you spoil a negro field-hand you have committed a crime. I have no sympathy with a sentiment that would confine any man to a limited though respectable and honourable work when he has within him the aspiration and the ability to serve his race and his time in broader fields.

"Those, in a nutshell, Mr. President, are the primary reasons why I am opposed to the Wordyfellow movement, and shall vote for this bill. The secondary reasons are hardly less forceful.

"I want this bill passed and passed quickly in order to avoid the pernicious incidental effects of the agitation of this question among my people. It has bred and is breeding antagonisms between the white and black races in the South such as did not result from the horrors of reconstruction or the excitement of negro disfranchisement. In those issues the negro truthfully was told and well may have believed that the white man was driven to protect himself against the ignorance and depravity of the black. In this case, however, the negro feels, and rightly, that the white man would condemn him perpetually to that ignorance and depravity. From the negro's view-point the white man's motive is now what it never was before: base, worse than selfish, wantonly, vindictively cruel.

"Again the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea teaches incidentally that in this democratic country, where by the very nature of our institutions the welfare of each is the welfare of all, where forsooth a Christian civilization has reached its highest development, even here, the strong may desert the weak and leave them to their own pitiful devices and defences.

"It teaches also the doctrine—more potent for evil—that the government may take note of racial classes for the purpose of dealing out its favours and benefits with uneven hands, preferring one to the other. If it may do this when the class differences are racial, it is but half a step to the proposition that it may do so when the differences exist whether they be racial or other. It takes no seer to see that after that proposition—no, with that proposition—comes the deluge.

"Such, Mr. President, are some, not all, of the incidental effects of the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea which clearly and with vast conservatism may be called pernicious. But there is yet another effect which will be inevitable upon the adoption of the Wordyfellow plan, and which has been in large measure produced already by the discussion of it, in the light of which deliberate advocacy of the Wordyfellow idea fairly may be called insane; and that is the severing of all bonds of sympathy and good-will between the races when the negro is told by white men, 'Here, take the pitiful portion that is yours, and go work out your own bitter, black salvation, alone—if you can.'

"All this agitation, all our concern, is predicated upon the deadly menace which this people, numbering one-third of the population of the South and gathered in many sections in overwhelming majorities, is to our civic and industrial happiness and progress: and it does seem the sheerest insanity to sever the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness which now bind the races together, surrender all our interest and right to control in the method of the negro's uplifting, and leave him to develop along any haphazard or dangerous lines without sympathy, respect, or regard for us, our ideas, or our ideals.

"The negro has been enough of a problem and a terror to my people with all our ability to control him through his ignorance, his fears, his affection and his respect for us. We have been careless at times perhaps as to how we made use of these instruments for his management. The more fools we if we now throw away his affection and his respect, cut loose from him entirely, and leave him to develop under teachers of his own race who with distorted vision or prejudiced heart will replace his ignorance with a knowledge at least of his brute strength, and cancel his fears with hate.

"My people give freely hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to the degraded of other lands in whom they have only the interest which Christians have in universal humanity, and they place in the calendar of the saints the names of the godly men and women who go to work personally to uplift the heathen. I do not think that in their cool senses their Christian impulses, to which is added the motive of self-interest, will permit them to cut off their contributions to and support of any instrumentality which will elevate the degraded in their own land whose depravity is so pregnant with dire possibilities to them. I pray the day to come when, among my people, it shall be thought just as praiseworthy, as noble, as saintly for a Southern white man to give his life and energies to the personal instruction, uplifting and redemption of the negroes in America as of the negroes in Africa or the heathen in any land.

"That prayer, Mr. President, which is sincerely from my heart, brings me to the discussion of President Phillips' negro policy. I shall not expect to see the prayer answered so long as the Chief Executive of this nation shows a disposition to deal so carelessly, so arbitrarily, with such cock-sure flippancy, with the convictions, prejudices if you will, of the brave and generous people who are face to face in their race problem not with a far-away academic question about which they may safely speculate and theorize, but face to face with a present, tangible, appalling issue in whose solution is life or death to them.

"To my people the consequences are so vital that they sometimes are led perhaps beyond what is really necessary in the way of defence,—for any sane man prefers to be doubly guarded against death. So it has been that while they are not favourable to the Wordyfellow plan they have been stampeded to it by the Phillips negro luncheon.

"Let me explain that when I speak of the President's negro policy I do not mean to include his appointments of negroes to office. I think we of the South have in these matters to some extent confused the issues, and proportionately weakened our position before the outside public. Not that I approve of appointing negroes to office in the South, for I do not. I think the weight of all considerations is against it. But the considerations either for or against it are considerations of expediency. They are not vital. If the President wishes to vindicate his negro appointments on the ground that his appointees are of his party, the best men of his party, and fairly efficient,—let him. Such reasons have been given for political appointments time out of mind, although they are not conclusive in any case and especially not in the matter of negro office-holding in the South. But let him not go into cheap heroics such as were indulged in by a recent negro appointee, who tragically exclaimed that if his appointment was not confirmed his race would be set back thirty years!

"Such rant is only ridiculous. Office-holding is not a recognized or an actual instrumentality for uplifting or civilizing a people; and it is not a theory of this or any other form of government that its mission or method is to uplift its citizenship, white or black, by making place-holders of them. It is not closing any legitimate door of hope to negro or white man to refuse him a Presidential appointment. The 'door of hope,' whatever else it may be to white or black, is not the door to a government office.

"The real basis of the race issue, Mr. President, has nothing to do with politics or political appointments, with office-getting or office-holding. If by some trick of chance a negro—some prodigy lofty in character and in the science and wisdom of statecraft—were President of this nation to-day, and were by unanimous consent a model Executive, the real race problem would not be affected a feather's weight. The world must understand that the Southern white people in the measures they have taken and will take to protect themselves against the negro are impelled by weightier considerations than the pre-emption of the dignities or emoluments of politics. It is true that they have taken the governments of the Southern States into their own hands, away from negro majorities in many sections. It may be true that in order to do this they have nullified provisions of the Federal constitution. But they have done so from no such small motive as a desire to hold public office.

"My people have all respect for the wisdom of the makers of the constitution, who framed an instrument perfectly suited to the conditions as they existed at the time and continued to exist for eighty years, prescribing the method of majority rule for a people who were of an approximately equal civic intelligence and virtue. But when the conditions were changed and a vast horde of illiterate and—in the hands of unscrupulous leaders—vicious voters were added to the electorate, stern necessity forbade them longer to give a sentimental support to so-called fundamental principles in the constitution and permit ignorance to rule intelligence and vice to rule virtue.

"The 'fundamental principles' in that constitution, Mr. President, are nothing more or less than wisely conceived policies which were tried, proved, and found good under the conditions for which they were devised. The 'fundamental principle' upon which the race problem of the South may be solved will have been discovered with certainty only after a solution has been accomplished by the conscientious effort and best thought of Southern white men.

"And they will solve this problem. It can never be settled, of course, till Southern white men acquiesce in its settlement. They will settle it in righteousness and will accept with gratefulness any suggestion which their fellow countrymen have to offer in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. But it may as well be understood that any such exhibition as the President's negro luncheon, which affronts the universal sentiment of the final arbiters of this question, must necessarily put further away the day of settlement. The negro problem cannot be worked out by any simple little rule o' thumb, and the negro will always be the loser by any such melodramatic display of super-assertive backbone and misinformed conscience.

"The President would settle this matter upon a purely theoretical academic basis, this matter that in its practical effects will not touch him nor his family nor his section, but will affect vitally the happiness, the lives, the destiny of a chivalrous people whose ideas, traditions, sentiments and convictions he carelessly ignores or impetuously insults. Such exhibitions do not become a brave man. They betoken, rather, a headstrong man, an inconsiderate man, a thoughtless man, a fanatical man. It does seem that President Phillips would have learned wisdom from the experience of his illustrious predecessor, President Roosevelt, who did somewhat less of this sort of thing once—and only once.

"Mr. President, it has been repeatedly said that the hostility of the white people of the South to social intermingling with the negro race is an instinct—a race instinct. I do not so consider it,—and for two reasons: first, because many men of Anglo-Saxon blood—and of these President Phillips is the most conspicuous example—do not have such an instinct; second, because instinct is not the result of reason, while the Southern white man's opposition to social recognition of the negro is defensible by the purest, most dispassionate reason. These convictions are so well fixed in the Southern mind that they may appear to be instinctive and measurably serve the purpose of instinct; but the vital objections of my people to intermingling socially with the negro are not founded in any race antipathy, whim, pretence, or prejudice. They are grounded in the clearest common sense, and as such only do I care to present or defend them.

"In face of the disaster to be averted, I could wish that it were an instinct; for instinct does not fail in a crisis. But men are more than beasts: the power to rise is given to them conditioned upon the chance to fall. So in this race matter: instinct does not forbid a white man to marry a black woman; instinct—more's the horror!—does not forbid a white woman to wed a negro man. For this reason it is—for the very lack of a race instinct is it—that the social intermingling of the white and black races, as advocated and practised by President Phillips, would inevitably bring to pass an amalgamation of the races with all its foul brood of evils.

"President Phillips, living in a section of the country where negroes are few—especially such as are of sufficient intelligence to be interesting to a man of his attainments—does not dream of amalgamation. I would not insult him by assuming such a thing. And yet upon a superficial estimate of conditions in the South he gives us this impulsive exhibition of what in one of his high official position is criminal carelessness.

"The positive element of crime in it is not in the affront which a Presidential negro luncheon puts upon Southern sentiment, but in the suggestion to Southern and Northern people alike that a social intermingling of the races—which means amalgamation, however blind he may be to the fact—is the solution of the race problem. The crime would be complete in all its horror if the South, if the nation, should follow his lead and achieve the logical result of his teaching.

"From long and intimate acquaintance with the negro's character, my people know that the Phillips negro luncheon stimulates not the negro's ambition and endeavour to improve himself as it tickles and arouses his vanity. When the ordinary darkey hears of it he thinks it not a recognition of the superior abilities of Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods, but a social recognition of the negro race; and forthwith deems himself the equal of the white man and desires unutterable things. And not without reason.

"The black people appreciate what the President's act means for them. They do not misinterpret its tendency. A prominent negro said in a recent mass meeting in Richmond: 'No two peoples having the same religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been kept apart. This is well known and is one of the reasons why the dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South. I am afraid we are anarchistic and I give warning that if this oppression in the South continues the negro must resort to the torch and the sword, and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.'

"This inflammatory utterance indicates the interpretation put by negroes upon President Phillips' open-dining-room-door policy, and the nature of the hopes and aspirations it arouses in the black man's heart. And the serious thing is the element of truth in the negro's erroneous statement. It is true as gospel that no two races of people, living together, have ever intermingled socially without amalgamating. It is hardly necessary to cite evidence of that fact or to give the reasons underlying it. It might be taken as axiomatic that social intermingling means amalgamation.

"If men and women were attracted to each other and loved and mated because of equal endowments of virtue, or intelligence, or beauty, or upon any basis of similar accomplishments, tastes, or mental, moral or physical excellences, then a gulf-stream of Anglo-Saxon blood might flow unmixed and pure through a sea of social contact with the negro race; but until love and marriage are placed among the exact sciences, social intermingling of races will ever result as it ever has resulted: in the general admixture of racial bloods.

"When racial barriers are broken down and it is proper for negroes and whites to associate freely and intimately, when you—white men—receive negroes on a plane of social equality, your women will marry them, your sons will take them to wife. Shall you say to your daughter of the negro whom you receive in your home: 'He is an excellent man but—do not marry him'? Shall you say to your son enamoured of a quadroon: 'She is a very worthy young woman and an ornament to our circle of friends, but—I have chosen another wife for you'? When did such considerations ever guide or curb the fancy of the youthful heart or diminish the travel to Gretna Green? No, the line never has been drawn between free social intercourse and intermarriage; and while the Southern people believe they could draw that line if any people could, they do not propose to make any reckless experiments where all is to be lost and nothing gained.

"A president of one of our great universities is quoted as saying: 'The Southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with a negro; he sees in being the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The Northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all. To be the host or the guest of a negro, a Mexican or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between Northern white and Southern white.'

"In noting significant differences between Northern white and Southern white this authority must have been advertent to the fact that the pride of race of his 'Northern white' does not prevent them from furnishing the overwhelming majority of interracial marriages with negroes, as well as with Chinese, Japanese and every other alien race—this, too, with a very small negro population. If the negroes were proportionately as numerous in the North as in the South and such sentiments prevailed, how long, with interracial marriages increased in numbers in proportion to opportunity, would there be an Anglo-Saxon 'Northern white' to have a pride of race? If with these facts before his eyes the distinguished educator sees no race danger in the social mingling of white and black people, it easily may be inferred that he sees no objection to amalgamation.

"The Southern white man does see a race danger in these social amenities, Mr. President; for he cannot view amalgamation or the faintest prospect of it with any sentiment save horror: and he fortifies himself against that danger not only with the peculiar pride of race—of which he has a comfortable supply—but with every expedient suggested by his common sense, his experience, and by the horrible example which that distinguished educator's 'Northern white' has furnished him.

"In providing against this danger my people are moved from without by the sight of no occasional negro such as at odd times crosses this New Englander's vision, nor from within by any unreasonable or jealous hatred of the negro such as has characterized certain 'Northern whites' from the time they burned negro orphan asylums in resentment at being drafted to fight their country's battles down to this good day when they mob a negro for trying to do an honest day's work. No! the Southern white man is driven to his defences by a sentiment void of offence toward the negro, and by the daily impending spectacle of black, half-barbarous hosts who menace the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South and of the nation.

"President Phillips has modestly borrowed from one of his predecessors words with which to defend his social amenities to negroes. He quotes and says he would 'bow his head in shame' were he 'by word or deed to add anything to the misery of the awful isolation of the negroes who have risen above their race.' Two things may be said of that, Mr. President: first, isolation has been the price of leadership in all ages, and the negroes who are the pioneers of their race in their long and painful journey upward may not hope to escape it: second, the President's borrowed sentimental reason cuts the ground from under his feet, for that forcible Rooseveltian phrase, 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race,' concedes the premises on which the South's contention is based, since it admits there is such a great gulf between the negro race and the risen negro that his isolation fitly may be described in the words 'misery,' 'awful.' It is a peculiar order of Executive intellect and sensibility that can have such a keen sense of the misery which association with the lowly of his own race brings to an educated negro—who cannot in the very nature of things have put off all his hereditary deficiencies and tastes in a generation; and that yet seems not to be touched with any sense of the unspeakable misery such association and its inevitable consequences would have for my people—his Anglo-Saxon brethren—who, if there be any virtue in the refining processes of civilization, any redemptive power in the Christian religion, any progression in the purposes of God in the earth, are a thousand years ahead of the negro—any negro—in every racial excellence.

"Oh, but, you say, President Phillips means for us to associate only with those who are worthy, those who have 'risen.' Even that would be fatal, Mr. President. Beyond the truth already stated that considerations of merit will be forgotten and brushed aside if the social racial barrier is broken down at any point, and that social intermingling inevitably leads to intermarriage, there is a greater fact, a deeper truth, underlying this question. That fact, that truth, is that in estimating the result of mixing racial bloods not the man only and his personal accomplishments or individual culture must be considered, but his heredity, his race peculiarities and proclivities, every element that has gone into his blood.

"An occasional isolated negro may have broken the shackles of ignorance, measurably and admirably brought under control the half-savage passions of his nature, acquired palpable elegances of person and manner, and taken on largely the indefinable graces of culture: yet beneath all this creditable but thin veneer of civilization there slumber in his blood the primitive passions and propensities of his immediate ancestors, which are transmitted through him as latent forces of evil to burst out in his children and grandchildren in answer to the call of the wild. A man is not made in one generation or two. Every man gets the few ruling passions of his life from the numberless endowments of a hundred progenitors, and these few show out, while scores of others run so deep in his blood that they never crop out in his deeds but pass quietly on as static forces of good or evil to his children and their children before rising to the surface as dynamics in life and character.

"A Northern gentlewoman in a recent magazine article, defending her willingness to offer social courtesies to a prominent negro, speaks of him as one 'of whom an exquisite woman once said he has the soul of a Christian, the heart of a gentleman, and the eyes of the jungle.' That illustrates the idea perfectly, Mr. President,—the eyes of the jungle. Despite the fact that it is easier to breed up physical than temperamental qualities in man or beast, easier to breed out physical than mental or moral or spiritual blood-traits, this negro, with all his culture, with a large mixture of white blood in his veins, has yet in his very face that sinister mark—the eyes of the jungle: and in his blood who shall say what jungle passions, predilections and impulses, nobly and hardly held in check, that hark back to the African wilds from which they are so lately transplanted.

"A negro—any primitive being—may be developed mentally in one or two generations to the point where a certain polish has been put upon his mind and upon his manners; his purposes may be gathered and set toward the goal of final good; the whole trend of his life may be set upward: but there is yet between his new purposes and the savagery of the primitive man in him a far thinner bulwark of heredity than protects a white man from the elemental brute and animal forces of his nature. A number of educated negroes in this country to-day are superior in culture of mind and in personal morals to many white men, but even these individual shining lights of the negro race do not possess the power to endow their offspring so favourably as white men of less polish but longer seasoned hereditary strength of mental and moral fibre.

"It always offends a proper sense of decency to hear the suggestion that the negro may be bred up by crossing his blood with that of white men,—for the obvious reason that with our ideas of morals the most common principles of the breeder's art cannot be applied to the problem: but one single fact which eliminates such cold-blooded animal methods from our consideration is that when animals are cross-bred it is in the hope and for the purpose of combining mutually supplementary elements of strength and of eliminating supplementary weaknesses; while in this race matter the Anglo-Saxon is the superior of the negro in every racial characteristic—in physical strength and grace, in mental gifts and forces, and in spiritual excellence. Even if amalgamation did the very best that could be expected of it, it offers to the world nothing and to the white man less than nothing: for it would be a compromise, a striking of an average, by which naught is added to the total: it would pull down the strong to upraise the weak, degrade the superior to uplift the inferior: it would be a levelling process, not a method of progress. And yet amalgamation does not even that much, for it does not make an average-thick, even-thick retaining wall of culture between the hybrid product and the weaknesses of his mottled ancestry. There are always blow-holes in this mongrel culture, for heredity does not work by averages. It is an elusive combination of forces whose eccentricities and resultants cannot be formulated, calculated, or fore-determined. It is certain only that by no mere manipulation of it can the slightest addition be made to the stock of ancestral virtues. Only slow processes working in each individual through generation after generation can add increments of strength to racial fibre.

"Therefore, if the negro will insist upon some race manipulation in order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. But, you scream, that would be to suggest the annihilation of a race God has put here for some wise purpose! Even so: but amalgamation would no less surely annihilate the race—two races—and fly in the face of a Providence that has segregated all races with no less distinctness of purpose, and so far has visited with disaster all attempts to violate that segregation.

"Now, Mr. President, what is the immediate past history, status and condition in Africa and America of this race with which Southern white men are asked to mingle socially? What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike?

"Let answer the scientists and explorers, missionaries and travellers,—a long list of them, English, French, German, stretching all the way back a hundred years before there was a negro problem in the South. I quote verbatim, as nearly as the form will permit, their very words and phrases. Listen.

"The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure 'Without law except in its very crudest form'—'no law at all as we conceive it'—'in densest savage ignorance'—'no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences'—'some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning'—'in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel'—'without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear'—'particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power'—'dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire'—'indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care'—'given to uncleanness'—'an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead'—'vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping'—'of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits'—'his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man's relation to man'—'thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft'—'national character strongly marked by duplicity'—'lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment'—'a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere'—'cruelly obliges his women to work'—'sensual, polygamous, unchaste'—'buying and selling his women'—'valuing his daughter's virginity solely as a marketable commodity'—'accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband's property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent's property in daughters as destroying their marketable value'—'wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband's will'—'no conception of chastity as a virtue'—'of strong sexual passions'—'a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods'—'sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.'

"Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are 'the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,' and, Ellis says, are 'the dregs and offscourings of Africa.'

"Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear.

"He finds the colouring too vividly heavy and some details untrue for a picture of the negro in America to-day: but the negro as the Southern white man knows him is too alarmingly alike, too closely akin to, that African progenitor. He has advanced—yes! but just how much, and just how little, from out the shadow of that awful category of horrors, my people know.

"They know that he has but just emerged from those depths that those bestial racial traits held in check by the man's law have only well begun to be refined by a change of environment and the slow processes of heredity: and yet we, white men of the South, are in a way advised to treat as our social equals certain immediate heirs to such a blood inheritance because, forsooth, they have risen.

"We resent bitterly the insulting suggestion, however high or respectable or official its source: and we call upon you, white men of the North, to warn you against appeals for social recognition as a balm for 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race.' When the blood of your daughter or your son is mixed with that of one of this race, however risen, redolent of newly applied polish or bewrapped with a fresh culture, how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment, and under your name and in a face and form perhaps where a world may see your very image in darker hue there shall be disported primitive appetites, propensities, passions fit only to endow an Ashanti warrior or grace the orgies of an African bacchanalia? In Heaven's name think to the bottom of this question!—and think now! Await not the day 'when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.' Do not be distracted by considerations that are superficial and incidental—such for example as the negro's record for criminal assaults upon women. The crime of rape will be abated by some means, but long after that must the negro develop before he loses his primal jungle habit of regarding woman as a personal possession. It is a matter of attitude and not of assault: and as in his fundamental attitude toward women, so in every racial characteristic the superiority of the white man is blood deep, generations old, ingrained, inherent, essential.

"Knowing this, my people despise President Phillips' social amenities to negroes of high degree. They do not fear the issue; but what insults and outrages them is that a personage in the highest official position, by an act in itself impulsive, empty, and futile, should put desires and hopes of miscegenation into the minds and hearts of the inflammable, muttering, passionate black masses of the South. Standing themselves ever in the shadow of dire calamity which they are facing and must face for long years to come as they painfully work out a righteous and practical solution of their problem, my people cry out to you, oh, white men of the North, of the insidious danger in these sentimental social practices of an exuberant Executive; and we tell you that, however well or ill you may guard the purity and integrity of your race, we will stand fast. Whatever else may or may not be true, we will never acknowledge any equality on the negro's side that does not overtake the white race in its advancing civilization, and we will certainly not submit to an equality produced by degrading the white race to or toward the negro's level. We will not make with the negro a common treasure of our Anglo-Saxon blood by putting it in hotch-pot with his in a mongrel breed.

"The Anglo-Saxon has blazed the way of civilization for a world to follow in: but if he, the torch-bearer, the pioneer, goes back to join hands with the tribes who are following afar his torch and trail, then the progression of civilization and of character must not only stop but must actually recede for him to effect a juncture with the black and backward race in the blood of a hybrid progeny. There the fine edge would be taken off every laudable characteristic of the white man. There the splendid Anglo-Saxon spirit of leadership and initiative would be neutralized by the sluggish blood of the Ethiop race. There the Anglo-Saxon's fine energies and clear sensibilities would be deadened and muddled by the infusion of this soporific into his veins. There vile, unknown, ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood, would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart.

"You may believe that in the dim beginning God by imperial decree set the dividing line between these races; or, less orthodox and more coldly scientific, you may know that Nature, impartial mother of men, giving her white and black sons equal endowment and an even start in body, mind and spirit, since has stood, in unerring wisdom still impartial, to watch the white bound away from the black in his rush toward that perfection of mind, of heart, of character, which she has set as goal for the striving of her children. From whichever view-point you look upon the age-long history of men and the age-long lead of white men over their black brothers,—whether evolutionist or traditionist, scientist or mystic, you offer violence to your own particular deity, be it God or Nature, when in their present measureless inequality of development you by amalgamation would beat back the white into the lagging footsteps and gross animalism of the black.

"Menacing thus the effectiveness and integrity of a race which is the pathfinder for the progress of a world of men, the danger is not only a race danger, but a danger to universal civilization; and the preventative is a social separation of the white and black races in America from the lowest to the highest,—at least, yes in all reason, at the dictate of the plainest common sense, at least, if so be, till the black becomes approximately equal to the white in racial excellence. After which let the ethnologists take the question and give us the answer of science as to the advisability of mixing racial bloods.

"Naturally you ask me when the time of equality in racial excellence will come. I answer that I commit myself unreservedly to the support of every means used for the negro's uplifting; I admit—nay more, I contend—that we white men cannot be dogs in the manger with civilization; we cannot as a Christian people even hope that the negro race may not come up to our level, nor can there be any reason why we should refuse to acknowledge that race as our equal if it shall indeed become our equal. And yet, while I would not in puny wisdom presume to foretell the purposes of God in the earth, nor to set bounds to the efficacy of his unspeakable redemption, nor to appoint the places of white, black, yellow, red or brown men in the pageantry of 'that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves'—yet, I say, with carefully acquired information of the negro's history and habits in Africa, and with an intimate knowledge of his present status and rate of progress toward civilization in America, I tell you frankly that the day of his approximate equality in racial excellence with the white man is beyond the furthest reach of my vision into the future."

CHAPTER XVIII

Senator Killam was against the bill tooth and nail,—and he was against Rutledge. He obtained the floor and began to speak in a desultory but picturesque fashion in ridicule of some of the junior Senator's new-fangled heresies almost before Rutledge had caught his breath, and his vitriolic opening stayed the steps of many who in courtesy would have gone over to Rutledge's seat to felicitate him upon his maiden effort. Mr. Killam presented his felicitations openly and with such a mixture of sarcasm, irony and some seeming admiration that his colleague was puzzled. When Mr. Killam talked his dearest enemy would stop to listen. Rutledge, tired and blown, leaned back in his chair to hear him thunder.

As he sank back into a comfortable pose he caught sight for the first time of Lola DeVale and Elise Phillips in the gallery. They had heard his speech from start to finish,—and were differently affected by it. Lola was more impressed with the Senator's manner than by his words.

"Senator Rutledge verily believes all that he says against the negroes," she had commented; "but surely they are not so black as he paints them. Papa says that it is impossible for a Southern man to judge the negro fairly."

Elise did not reply. She was filled with revulsion amounting almost to nausea, and her temper was on edge. As her father's daughter, the personal element was unbearably irritating to her. She resented the entire situation and discussion. She had not known what was under consideration, nor who was to speak, and she would have left the gallery if she had not felt that it would be beating a retreat. She also had a desire to see whether Evans had the impudence to say what he thought right in her face.

In her stay in the South she had seen a very disreputable class of negroes, and under the spell of Rutledge's words her antipathies were over-excited to such a degree that she was faint with disgust. On the other hand she was full of barely suppressed anger. Rutledge smiled a salutation to the young women; and though Elise was looking straight at him she did not join Lola in her gracious acknowledgment.

"Don't you see Mr. Rutledge, Elise? He waits for your smile like a dog for a bone."

"I wish that man were dead," Elise declared.

Lola raised her eyebrows and scanned the profile of her friend for some moments, and there came into her mind an idea that appeared to be worth some thinking over....

If Senator Rutledge was distasteful to her, Elise had little cause to complain of him: for seldom had any of the scores of young fellows who followed in her train the good fortune of a minute's talk with her alone; and Rutledge, oppressed by the result of their last meeting at Senator DeVale's, unsatisfied with the empty nothings which passed for conversation in the brief glimpses he had of her at formal gatherings, and chilled by the coldness of her manner which had been oh, so different in that halcyon summer when he had lost his heart to her, was well content to stand further and further away from her in the crowd that was always about her, and to worship in spirit the real Elise Phillips unfettered by convention and unaffected by untoward incident. He took what comfort he could from the fact that as yet no favoured one appeared among Elise's admirers, and that among the sons of fortune, army officers, attachés, and all that sort who aspired to make life interesting for the President's eldest daughter it seemed none could flatter himself he was preferred above another.

As for those who exhibited the liveliest interest in Elise, gossip gave that distinction to two. One evening at a reception at Secretary Mackenzie's Senator Rutledge was talking to Lola DeVale when Elise passed, accompanied by a stalwart young fellow whom Rutledge had never seen.

"Who is Sir Monocle?" he asked.

"Where?" asked Lola.

"Miss Phillips' escort."

"Oh. He has no monocle."

"I know. But he should have. He looks it. Who is he?"

"Captain George St. Lawrence Howard, second son of the Earl of Duddeston. He was taking a look at America, but an introduction to Elise seems to have persuaded him to limit his observations to Washington City."

"Sensible fellow," commented Rutledge.

"Yes," said Lola, "and a very likable fellow. He won his captaincy with Younghusband in the Thibetan campaign before he was twenty; and the fact that an invalid brother is all that stands between him and the earldom doesn't make him any the less interesting."

"Titles are talismanic—whether military or other. With two, he ought to be fairly irresistible."

"Yes, and besides that he has plenty of money and leisure to make love with a thorough care for detail."

"With all those and a manifest supremely good taste," said Rutledge, "I would back him for a winner."

"You are forgetting Senatorial courtesy!"

"How now?"

"Senator Richland."

"What of him?"

"He also is in the running."

"Richland? I hadn't heard."

"Yes; and remember that his fortune is ten times that of the Earl of Duddeston, and his brains are of the same grade as his bank account."

Rutledge was interested. He had a thorough respect for Richland's ability.

"He is nearly twice Elise's age," Lola continued, "and Senatorial dignity will not permit a display of violent enthusiasm. But Senator Richland has acquired the habit of winning, and he is young enough and abundantly able to make the game interesting both for Elise and for any rivals. He is young indeed for his honours, has the ear of the people, and is a politician of rare acumen. His followers predict for him nothing less than the Presidency itself when his time is ripe. What more could a girl wish? Don't lay all your salary on the Englishman—you might lose."

* * * * *

Lola DeVale had not misread Senator Richland's purposes. He was seriously in the running. Elise was the first woman he had ever thought of marrying. She seemed to him to fit perfectly into all the plans which his ambition had made for the future. He had met her at Mr. Phillips' inauguration, and after thinking over her charms during the summer vacation had come back to Washington in December fully determined to wage a vigorous campaign for her hand.

Of the other men who were rash enough to dream of Elise it is needless and would be tiresome to go into detail. They were more or less interested, enamoured or devoted: but the Senator and Captain Howard were too fast company for them, and they are of interest only as a numerous field which made the running more or less difficult for the leaders.

Evans Rutledge willingly would have entered the lists against Richland or the Englishman—against anybody—if Elise had been ordinarily civil to him; but he had been in such evident disfavour since the Smith knock-down that he deemed himself one of "the gallery" at this game of hearts. Elise when indeed she had time to think of it, felt that she had dealt with him ungenerously if not unjustly, but that only made his presence less grateful to her.

The unreasonableness of Elise's attitude toward Rutledge and Rutledge's behaviour whenever she saw him near Elise, mildly stirred the womanly curiosity of Lola DeVale to the point of investigation. She found Elise averse to the slightest discussion of Senator Rutledge or of anything connected with him. Baffled there, she turned with more determination and softer skill to the man. He will never know how he came upon terms of such friendliness and sympathy with Miss DeVale. Soon doubtless he would have confided the story of his love to her. But events came about differently.

A score of young people were at Senator DeVale's country-place one evening in May. Elise had met Evans with something of her old-time friendliness and he was in an uncertain state of happiness.

"Now don't make an ass of yourself because the Lady Beautiful is in a mood to be gracious," he solemnly admonished his heart. "Sir Monocle may just have proposed and been accepted."

The thought was as bracing as a cold shower and gave him a vigorous grip on his rebellious affections. Then he danced with her—on the wide, dimly lighted veranda—a slow, lotus-land waltz, just coming back in vogue after more than a decade of galloping two-steps.

He took another grip on himself. He must not think of the woman in his arms. Luckily the old-fashioned dance was diverting: while the movement was intoxicating it was reminiscent. He remembered his first waltz—the Carolina hill-town—the moonlight, the smell of the roses—the plump little girl in the white dress, with the red, red sash, and the cheeks as red, with the black eyes and the blacker hair, with the indefinable sensuous physical perfume of Woman, and the very Spirit of the Dance,—she who—yes, she who married the station-agent and was now such a motherly person. He began a speech that would have been cynical. Elise stopped him.

"Don't talk," she said. "Let's dream."

Tumult! Riot! What's the use to hold one's pulses steady when the Lady Beautiful herself incites revolt!

"Let's dream." His heart-strings were set a-tremble by the vibrant richness of her voice, which seemed to have caught the dreaminess and rhythm and resonance of the violins that drew them on. And—

"Don't talk." No: he would not profane the enchantment of that waltz with words; and yet surely My Lady Beautiful were heartless indeed not to catch the messages of love which, pure of the alloy of breath and speech, his every pulse-beat sent unfettered to her heart.

He held her for a moment after the violins had ceased, and the spell of the slow-swinging waltz was still upon them both—when a quick jerk of the fiddles in the ever rollicking two-step brought Sir Monocle to Elise's side. Evans resigned her with a bow and, without so much as a "thank you," went out on the lawn to commune with his heart.

How long that two-step continued, he, seated in a retired nook, did not know. Sometime after it was finished he saw Elise and the Englishman walk down the winding path that led from the front door to the roadside. They stood talking together a minute perhaps till Captain Howard boarded a passing car city-bound. Rutledge noted with a twinge of jealousy the cordial good-bye the girl gave the man, but even at that distance and through the uncertain light he thought he saw—and, queer to say, resented—a certain formality in Captain Howard's adieus to the woman.

He watched her through the trees as she came slowly back up the hill following the turns of the smooth hard walk as it wound through darkness and half lights from the broad gateway to the house. She moved along, a white shadow, slowly at first, and Evans imagined that she was in some such mood as possessed him. Then she started suddenly and ran at a stone stairway which mounted a terrace. She tripped, stumbled and fell against the granite steps.

Rutledge was flying to her before she was fairly prone. He spoke to her and tried to help her up. She made no answer, and her hand and arm were limp.

"Elise!" he said, with fear in his voice. Still no answer.

He took her in his arms and made directly up the hill for the front door.

"Elise," he whispered fearfully again. "Oh, my heart, speak to me!"

Her cheek was against his shoulder. He buried his face in her hair, as he prayerfully kissed the snow-white part visible even in that darkness. Her head dropped limply back, and a sigh came from her lips so close to his. Still she answered not his call. He loved her very much and—he kissed her again, softly, where the long lashes lay upon her cheek, and—"Elise!" he murmured appealingly. She turned her face feebly away from him, like a child restless in sleep.

He had not delayed his climb to the house.

"Here!" he cried. "Get Dr. Sheldon quick! Miss Phillips is dangerously hurt!"

There were excited screams among the women and a stir among the men as he carried his burden across the piazza and into the wide hall. There in the full light he saw—Miss Elise Phillips talking quietly to Donald MacLane. He almost let fall the woman in his arms. He looked again at her face. She was Lola DeVale.

Dr. Sheldon and Lola's mother fortunately were at hand. At their direction Rutledge carried the young woman up the stairs and laid her on a couch in her sitting-room. She opened her eyes and smiled languidly at him as he put her down.

Elise and all the other young people knew of Rutledge's mistake as to Lola's identity, but Elise could not understand why he blushed so furiously as he gave her an account of the mishap.

* * * * *

At her next tête-à-tête with Rutledge Lola gave him her very sincerest thanks and—laughed at him till he was uncomfortable. Finally she said: "You are a very gallant but a very mercenary knight, Mr. Rutledge." Rutledge was hopelessly confused.

Lola continued, mischief in her eyes: "Alas! the spirit of commercialism has pervaded even Southern Chivalry, and forlorn maidens must pay as they go." Rutledge was plainly resentful.

"Now I am very unselfish, Mr. Rutledge, and—I wish it had been Elise." Her mischief dissolved in a confiding smile, full of sympathy,—and Rutledge was very humble.

Lola DeVale's sympathy was warm and irresistible, and before he was aware he was telling her of his love for Elise in a way to set her interest a-tingle.

"Why don't you tell her of it?" asked Lola. "Tell her that it just overwhelms all earlier loves."

"Earlier loves? I never loved any other woman," Rutledge answered.

"Oh, of course not." Lola could scarcely repress a smile at the thought that a man always swears only his last passion is genuine.

"But tell her—tell her!" she repeated.

"I have told her."

"When?"

"Three years ago."

"Plainly? or with artistic indirectness?"

"Plainly."

Lola looked at him incredulously, but saw that he was telling the truth.

"The sly thing!" she exclaimed under her breath. "But tell her again! I declare if I were a man and loved Elise—and I would love none else—I'd tell her so every time I saw her."

"Oh I'll not love another—no fear of that," Evans replied half lightly; "but as for telling her again, self-respect will not—"

"Self-respect—fudge! If I loved a girl I'd tell her so a hundred times—and marry her too—in spite of everything."

"Perhaps so," Evans commented skeptically.

Lola was shooting in the dark, but her warm heart would not let her leave the matter at rest. Both because of her desire, being happily in love herself, to see the love affairs of her friends go smoothly, and because of the riddle it presented to her, she approached Elise again in order to straighten out the tangled skein for everybody's satisfaction. She thought to match her wits against Elise's and proceeded with more caution.

"By the way, Elise," she said, apropos of nothing at all, "I think you were right about Senator Rutledge's being very much in love with that young woman you told me about."

Elise exhibited a perfect indifference and said nothing.

"I asked him about her, after becoming duly confidential and sympathetic, of course, and he confirmed your statement. He still loves the girl—oh, you ought to hear him tell of it. 'He will never love another till he's dead, dead, dead,'—or words to that effect: but he will not tell her—"

Elise was listening with a polite but languid interest.

"—again. He thinks his self-respect forbids; but I think—"

"Did he say that? To you?" Elise demanded.

"Yes; when I asked h—"

"Well now, once and for all, Lola, I tell you I despise that man, and never must you mention his name to me again!"

"But Elise, I think he—"

"Stop, Lola! I'll not hear another word!"

"But let me tell you, Elise. He—"

"No! Stop now! Not another word if you care for my friendship. I'll never speak to you again if you speak of him to me!"

Elise's anger was at white heat, and she looked and spoke like her father. Lola was frightened at her manner, but made another brave attempt to set matters straight, which was met by such a blaze of personal resentment in Elise's eyes that she gave up in abject defeat—though she did pluck up courage to fire a parting shot.

"Very well, my dear," she said, as if dismissing the subject.... "I have something of yours I must give you before I go. There—take it," and she kissed the expectant Elise warmly on the lips as she added: "Senator Rutledge gave it to me by mistake as he carried me up the hill the other night."

CHAPTER XIX

Lily Porter finally became conscious that she was the special attraction for a stranger who regularly every other Sunday evening sat in a forward pew and listened to her singing with attentive interest, but who showed little or no care for any of the service beside. Several months had gone by before she noticed him and his faithful attention to herself. When she did realize his presence she was conscious that he had been paying her this tribute for a long time. She observed him quietly and satisfied herself that he came only to see or to hear her. He did not force himself upon her vision, but none the less did she understand that she was the chief object of his respectful consideration.

The preacher's manner and style of thought did not appeal to Hayward, while Lily Porter's face and voice did. He always sat where he could look at her in the choir-loft, for he argued that as he went only to see her he would see as much of her as possible. His face was mobile and easily read, and as he was good to look upon and so evidently appreciative of her efforts the girl came ere long to sing with an eye to his approval and admiration—to sing for him and to him. This interested her for a time, but she was piqued at length for that he seemed content to admire at a distance and made no effort to come nearer to her.

One evening, unexpectedly to them both, a negro prominent among his race because of his position as Registrar for the District, John K. Brown, with whom Hayward had picked up a mutually agreeable though casual acquaintance, introduced him to the singer in the aisle of the church.

"Miss Lily, I want to introduce my friend Mr. John Hayward, who goes into extravagances about your singing—as he very properly should."

Hayward was overjoyed at his good fortune. To be presented as John Brown's friend was a passport to the best negro society in Washington. He was as much pleased to know that Brown regarded him so favourably as he was delighted to meet the young woman. As he walked with her to the door she presented him to her mother, a bright mulatto woman about fifty or more, who did the grand dame to the best of her ability: which was indeed perfect as to manner but was betrayed the moment she tried to do too many things with the English language.

When he had opportunity Hayward was profuse in his thanks to Brown, and told him volubly of his love for music. Finding a sympathetic listener, he was led on to an impulsive story of the social longings and lackings in his life. Brown, more than ever impressed with the young fellow's intelligence and worthiness, was at some pains thereafter to look after him and set him going in a congenial social current.

With Brown's approval and his own gifts and graces it was not remarkable that Hayward won his way to social popularity as fast as his confining duties would permit. He began to see much of Lily Porter and was consistent in his devotion to her despite the fact that the habit of his college days of being attracted by each new and pretty face still measurably clung to him. His information and accomplishments were of a sort superior to that of any of the young women he met, and none made a serious impression on his heart. Lily Porter was more nearly his equal in education and general cultivation of mind and manner, and was really the most attractive to him; but his harmless vanity could not forego the admiration of the others, and he gave some little time to small conquests. He did homage to Lily by his evident admiration of her talents and comeliness and by his unconcealed pleasure in her friendship. At the same time he met her petty tyrannies and autocratic demands with an unmoved indifference.

He had become very well acquainted with Lily and had called on her several times before Henry Porter knew that his daughter was receiving the footman whom he had snubbed some months before.

"Lily, who was that young man that called on you last night?"

"Mr. Hayward."

"Umhuh, I thought he was the same fellow. You'll have to drop him. I don't want you to be receivin' no footman in this house. We must draw the line somewhere."

"He's no footman, papa. He's one of Mr. Brown's friends. Mr. Brown introduced him to me himself. I think he is connected with Mr. Brown's office."

"No such thing. Hayward's footman at the White House—told me so hisself 'bout a year ago, and I saw him on the President's carriage no longer'n yesterday. Nice lie he's told you 'bout bein' in Brown's office."

"Oh, he didn't say so, papa. I supposed so because Mr. Brown said he was his friend and has introduced him to all the nice people. Surely you can't object to one of Mr. Brown's friends. Everybody likes Mr. Hayward and he is received everywhere."

"Everybody likes him, do they? Well you see to it you don't like him any too much. I can't kick him out if Brown stands for him, but you make it your business to let him down easy. Have you seen Bob Shaw lately?"

"He was here last night when Mr. Hayward came," answered Lily; and she seemed to be amused at something.

"Well, what's funny 'bout that?"

Lily knew that she must not tell her father what she was laughing at. She created a diversion.

"Mr. Shaw is so backward, and so—dark."

"Dark! He's jus' a good hones' black,—so'm I—all African and proud of it. Mebbe I'm too dark to suit yuh. Bob Shaw is not backward, miss. He's got the bes' law practice of all the niggers in the Distric', and he'll be leader of the whole crowd in a few years. He's the bes' one in the bunch of these fellers who tag after you and you better take him. My money and his brains and pull with the party 'd make a great combernation."

Lily did not commit herself. She was accustomed to her father's blunt method of indicating his wishes. She liked Shaw well enough, but old Henry's awkward interference and zeal did the lawyer's cause no good. Shaw was below the ordinary in the matter of good looks, and in his love for Lily was too submissive to her whims. He had not Hayward's easy manner, nor his assurance—for the footman was not at all abashed by Henry Porter's money nor his daughter's gentle arrogance. It is needless to say the girl preferred the serving-man to the lawyer.

After the first flush of interest in Lily and her songs had subsided Hayward made love to the pampered belle warmly or indifferently as the mood was upon him. He noted that, taking her charms in detail, they were alluring without exception; and such moments of reflective analysis were always followed by a more determined pursuit of her. Yet the careless moods came. However, he always delighted in and could be extravagant in praising her singing, even when the personal attraction was the weakest, and the general effect on the woman was a continuous tattoo of love-taps at the door of her heart.

The negro magnate's favourite, Shaw, clearly was being outdistanced, and the outraged father stamped and threatened and commanded: but to no purpose. When Hayward discovered the bitterness of the old man's opposition he chuckled.

"Here's where I get even," he said; and became more assiduous in his attentions to Lily and more aggressive in his methods.

"Your father does not appear to hold much love for me," he told Lily one evening after she had sung him into an affectionate frame of mind and the conversation had drifted along to the confidential and personal stage.

"Did I ever tell you what he did with my first request for an introduction to you?"

"No. What?"

"He stamped the feathers off of it," said Hayward, and laughingly told her the details.

"Papa thinks—everybody—should be a lawyer, or a politician with a pull," Lily commented complainingly.

The temptation to vindicate his dignity was too much for Hayward.

"I was not always a footman and do not intend always to be a footman; and yet, footman as I am, if your father values a pull with the President, perhaps, if he knew—oh, well, he might think better of me."

"Oh, you have a pull? How interesting. Do tell me about it. I have read so much about pulls that I am dying to know what one is like. How do you work it? I believe you work a pull, don't you? Or do you pull the—"

"I haven't pulled mine yet. I'm waiting," said Hayward. "But it will work when the time comes."

"And when will the time come? Tell me. I'm so anxious to see the wheels go round in a genuine political machine. How many Southern delegates can you influence in the next national convention? That's the mainspring, isn't it?"

"I'm no politician or vote vender. I've never had the pleasure of influencing my own vote yet, and won't as long as I live in the District."

"What! Without politics or votes, and yet you have a pull?"

"It is a personal matter entirely," Hayward answered carelessly, as if personal friendships with Presidents were very ordinary affairs for him. Lily Porter was a mite skeptical, but she hoped he spoke the truth, for it would more than confirm her estimate of him and would be such an effective counter to her father's nagging opposition.

"Oh, isn't that interesting! Tell me all about it!"

"Really I cannot. I have never told that, even to my mother. There is only one other person who knows of it. It is my one secret, and my life—that is, my future—depends largely upon it. There's too much at stake."

"Would you fear to trust your life—your future—in my hands?" asked the woman softly. "I could be a very good and a very faithful friend."

The lure in her voice was irresistible.

"I would trust my soul with you," he answered, and with the spoken faith the trust was perfected in his heart. "Listen."

He told her all about himself, of his name and his history, of his life and his hopes. He was modest in his recital of the creditable things he had done; but when he had told her of his claim upon the President's gratitude and the purpose toward which he would use it, and began to talk of his ambition and his dreams, his heart was fired by its own fervour, and before the very warmth of his own eloquence all obstacles and difficulties faded as mists before the sun, and he felt that he needed only to put forth his hands to grasp his heart's desires.

The girl was touched with his fire. She listened with ready sympathy to the beginning of his story, heard with quickening pulses of his rescue of Colonel Phillips, and in the telling of his hopes was caught in the current of his transporting fervency and carried along with him to realize the vision of his martial career.

"And that is the picture of your life! It is—it will be—glorious!" She rose in her enthusiasm. "Oh, that a woman might—"

"Glorious—yes," the man said; "and till to-night it had seemed perfect to me. But I have been blind to its greatest lack. You have made me conscious of it." Hayward stood up and moved toward the girl, who wavered uncertainly between reserve and complaisance.

"I would paint another figure into that picture, Lily—the figure of a woman." He put his hands out toward her, and her coldness was melting when—"Lily," said her father from the hall, "what did you do with the evenin' paper? I want to read Mr. Shaw's speech before the convention this mornin'. Mr. Brown told me that it is the greates' speech that's been made yet."

Henry Porter came into the parlour in time to catch a glimpse of confusion and unusual attitude in his daughter and Hayward. He thought best to mount guard, and decided to talk Hayward into flight. He began with a panegyric on Shaw. Hayward caught the hint and took his leave, pulling Lily to the front door by a chain of conversation.

"Now remember," he murmured tenderly, "you hold my secret; and must keep it sacredly."

"Have no fear of me. Watch your other confidante," Lily whispered, her manner full as his of tenderness.

"Oh, she is—"

"Shaw told 'em," began the persistent and suspicious parent, coming out of the parlour;—but the footman was gone down the steps.

Hayward's mood changed in a twinkling and with a jolt. He walked a hundred paces thinking confusedly.

The question slowly framed itself in his mind.... "Do I love Lily?"

But he did not answer it.

CHAPTER XX

The oncoming summer promised to be long and uneventful for Helen Phillips. Late in May her mother took her and her two little sisters to Stag Inlet, leaving a perspiring father to await the perverse pleasure of a stubborn Congress before beginning his vacation, and Elise to set out upon a round of visiting that would permit her to see very little of home during the hot months. To Mrs. Phillips the restfulness of "Hill-Top" was gratefully refreshing after her trying first winter in Washington. She gave herself over fully to its soothing quiet and arranged her daily programmes on the simplest lines.

Hayward, because of his versatile abilities an indispensable part of the simple Hill-Top outfit, did not have an opportunity before leaving for Stag Inlet to see Lily Porter again. Nor indeed was he regretful on that account. He was in a state of indecision and wanted time to think. He heartily wished that he had not been so free with his confidences: yet could not justify this feeling when he sought a reason for it.

After awhile he wrote Lily a letter which was a model of diplomacy—which said much and said nothing. It did not disappoint or displease her. She read between the lines an admirable modesty and restraint, complimentary to herself and true to the artistic instinct which, she had read somewhere, always saves a full confession for a personal interview. She took her own good time to answer it. She felt sure of the man's devotion, despite the fact that his other and unknown confidante was a woman other than his mother. The tenor of her reply was reserved, though not discouraging. Hayward's impatience was not excited by the delay, nor his interest quickened by the coy missive.

* * * * *

The first morning Helen was on the lake after coming to the Inlet her launch passed a small catboat commanded by Jimmie Radwine and flying a Yale pennant from her diminutive masthead. The crew, consisting of Captain Jimmie and another youngster, both younger than Helen, were yelling themselves dizzy.

"What's Jimmie Radwine saying, Helen?" asked Nell Stewart.

Jimmie had no intention of leaving them uninformed. He had put his boat about, and come up alongside.

"Hello, Helen!" he shouted, "Harvard can't play ball! Quincy can't pitch! Tom got a home run and two two-baggers off him in four times up! Rah! rah! rah! YALE!"

Helen was a famous Harvard partisan, and many a verbal tilt had she had with Jimmie, whose brother Tom was Yale's right-fielder, as to the comparative merits of the blue and the crimson in all things from scholarship to shot-putting.

"What was the score, Jimmie?" she asked him.

"Wasn't any score—for Harvard: all for Yale. Wow! Yale—Yale—Yale!" he yelled.

Helen looked a dignified reproof of his unmannerly enthusiasm, but Jimmie's youth was proof against any such mild rebuke, and her irritation only kindled his joy. She nodded to Hayward for more speed, but as Jimmie was favoured by a stiff breeze they could not shake him off. He followed them for two miles or more up the lake, volunteering much information sandwiched between cheers for Eli, which, when he had delivered it fully and in detail, he began to repeat in order to impress it upon them. Hayward cheerfully would have bumped him with the launch.

Having so thoroughly enjoyed the morning's sport, Captain Jimmie regularly afterward flew the blue pennant from his mast, and was ever on the alert to greet Helen with the Yale yell and further particulars.

* * * * *

Less than a month later the Harvard crew rowed rings around the Yale men at New London. Helen's cup was full. The next day she and Nell Stewart and Nancy Chester were sitting out on the lawn reading an account of the race when they saw Jimmie's catboat beating about the lake.

"Come, girls," exclaimed Helen, "we must carry the news to Jimmie!"

"Hayward, come here," she called to the footman, who was tinkering at a gasoline runabout a hundred yards from them. "Get the launch ready," she added when he came nearer, "we want to overtake Mr. Radwine's boat out there."

"I guess Jimmie will haul down that blue flag now," said one of the girls when they had come to the boat-house.

"Hayward," said Helen, "run up to the house and tell mamma to give you the Harvard pennant that is in my room—and hurry!"

Hayward needed no urging. Out of the chatter he had caught the news of Harvard's victory at the oars, and he was as full of excited pleasure as Helen herself. He hurried up the hill and, not finding Mrs. Phillips, rushed to his own quarters and turned out from his trunk the crimson pennant.

Helen was too intent on the chase of Jimmie Radwine to notice that the short staff of the flag Hayward brought her, and the faded and wrinkled folds of the cloth, did not belong to the crimson emblem which was part of the decoration of her dressing-table. Jimmie, already informed of Yale's bitter defeat, surmised the purpose of the Phillips launch's coming, and tried to sail away and away: but he was relentlessly pursued and overtaken, and mercilessly repaid for all of his taunts of the last fortnight. As they came up with him Helen cried out to her friends:

"Now, everybody give the Harvard yell!"

The feminine chorus was shrill, but lacked volume.

"Again! and louder!" she commanded. "You too, Hayward!"

That was the most grateful order Hayward had received since the 10th was sent into the charge at Valencia. He stood up to drive the deep-mouthed, long-drawn rah-rah-rah's from his lungs, and added a few kinks and wrinkles at the end in orthodox phrasing and intonation by way of trimming off the severely plain Harvard slogan. Helen looked at him in some surprise, and saw that he was oblivious to his situation and seemed bent on "rattling" the hostile blue skipper. He came to himself at last, and pulled himself together in some confusion to give attention solely to his duties in running the launch. Helen thought his behaviour unusual, and watched him covertly while the badgering of Jimmie Radwine was in progress.

Jimmie was far from an easy mark, however, for by his unblushing impudence and boyish pretension to vast knowledge of facts and figures he time and again crowded Helen to her defences. Hayward could hardly keep his tongue when Jimmie presumed too much on the ignorance of the young women as to the athletic history of the blue and the crimson, and Helen could see that the negro was keeping quiet with difficulty. At one of Jimmie's most reckless statements, which overwhelmed Helen, Hayward, bending over the launch's little engine, shook his head in violent dissent.

"What is it, Hayward?" his mistress called to him.

"Beg pardon, Miss Helen, but he's—he's—misstating it!" Hayward answered with vigour.

"Then tell him of it!" Helen exclaimed impulsively.

"Pardon me, but you are altogether mistaken about that, Mr. Radwine," the negro sang out to Jimmie, shoving the launch up a little nearer the boat's windward quarter.

"What do you know about it?" Jimmie demanded scornfully.

"I know all about it," retorted Hayward with rising spirit; and he went into details in a way to take Jimmie's breath. Warming up, he did not desist on finishing the matter in dispute, but challenged others of Jimmie's audacious inaccuracies and proceeded to straighten them out. Jimmie demurred and replied more recklessly, and was soon in a rough and tumble discussion covering the whole field of college excellences. He found he was no match for Hayward either in information and enthusiasm or in assurance. Before the argument was half finished the footman was talking to him in a patronizing and fatherly way that pricked him like needles. He did not relish the idea of a controversy with, much less being routed by, this serving-man, especially in the presence of the young women. He wished the girls anywhere else so that he might smother the lackey with a sulphurous blast. But he had to stand to the losing game while Helen and her friends laughed at his defeat or waved the crimson flag and cheered the Harvard hits in a shrill treble. Helen indeed felt some compunctions for having brought about the situation but was enjoying Jimmie's discomfiture too much to end it.

Hayward had forgotten he was a lackey, had forgotten he was a negro, had forgotten he was anything save a Harvard man proud of his college, proclaiming her fair record with love and joy, confident in himself as one of her sons.... "As a man thinketh. so is he." ... The occasion was trivial, but the transforming power of thought, its triumph over circumstance, was strikingly evidenced in the footman's face. Helen noted that his bearing had lost every trace of conventional or conscious servility, that he looked easily and confidently a man, calling no man master.

After harrying Captain Jimmie enough to pay off all old scores they gave him good-bye with a final yell for the crimson, and turned the launch for home. In the run back Helen had her first opportunity to notice the pennant. It was not hers.

"Hayward, whose flag is this?"

"Mine, Miss Helen. I could not find your mother quickly, and I brought that to save time."

She looked from the flag to the negro. A nebulous idea floated through her mind, and she tried to fix it, but it was too elusive. She put Nell and Nancy off at their landings, and tried to grasp the intangible explanation that was hovering about her brain. It was characteristic of her to prefer working out her own answers to looking at them in the back of the book. Finally, however, she decided she did not have a full statement of the problem.

"When did you go to Harvard, Hayward?" she ventured.

"Class of 191-, Miss Helen."

"191-. Then you did not finish. The battle of Valencia was—"

"No, Miss Helen, I did not finish: but I understand two others of my class who volunteered were passed on the spring term's work and graduated by a special resolution of the Overseers. I think I will apply for my diploma sometime—if I need it."

Hayward spoke lightly, but his last words brought to Helen the same question which had occurred to her so often in the last year since she had discovered in him her father's rescuer. They only made the question more insistent.

He was a Harvard man,—to Helen's mind a title of all excellence and dignity. That explained much. His intelligence, even his physical grace and soldierly courage, seemed to fit naturally into that character. But why a flunkey?—shirking higher duties and the honours that pertained to his degree, careless of the evidence of his scholarly merit, putting aside the rewards of his soldierly heroism.

"Do you care nothing for everything, Hayward?—except this flag? You seem to have valued it."

"It is the one possession dearest to my heart," he answered in simple truth, and then showed the first faint trace of embarrassment she had ever seen him exhibit.

"Yes, you have loved the Harvard pennant but concealed your Harvard lineage. You champion Harvard's name enthusiastically against Jimmie Radwine's gibes, but you affect to be careless of Harvard's diploma. You carry the Harvard culture, and yet—you choose to be a footman."

Hayward winced. Helen tempered the thrust by adding:

"You do a soldier's work, but decline a soldier's honours. You are too modest. You overdo the part."

"I hope yet to do something worthy of Harvard, Miss Helen. I am not without ambition, however much you may think it. Indeed I fear I have too much ambition."

A Harvard man need set no limit to his ambition. Helen spoke with the wisdom and confidence of youth and loyalty.

The launch was at the landing. The girl climbed out and up the steep stairs. At the top she bethought herself and turned about.

"Oh, here's your 'heart's dearest possession,'" she said with a laugh, and she pitched the little crimson flag down upon Hayward, who was making the boat fast.

The man looked up to catch the flag as it fell, and memory in that instant worked the magic which brought the scene on Soldiers Field clearly before Helen's mind. She knew him in that moment. She gazed at him without speaking. She looked at the flag and then at him—once, and again. All the incidents of the driving finish of that ever memorable football game came back to her, bringing to her pulses an echoing tremor of its tense excitement and wild enthusiasm and her unstinted girlish admiration for the player who had saved his college, her Harvard, from black defeat.

At last she remembered his words about the pennant which she had quoted to him a moment since. Her cheek flushed and she was in two minds whether to be offended or amused. Graham saw her look of surprised recognition, her glances at the pennant, and read the significance of her rising colour. He felt the presumption of his very presence, and, conscious and guilty, he looked abjectly out across the lake.

The man's humility went far to mollify Helen's anger or levity; but she could not spare him entirely.

"So you prefer another name to your own," she said. "Why is that?"

"Oh, no, Miss Helen. I am not ashamed of my name. There's no reason why I should be. I—"

"Then why use another?"

"My name is John Hayward Graham. I am using my own, but not all of my own."

"But why the masquerade? It doesn't look well. What have you done to be afraid of your full name?"

"Nothing, Miss Helen, I declare upon honour. I'll tell you the whole story. You have been kind to respect my wishes not to make known my services to your father, and I'll gladly tell you all about it. But I must go now, if you will excuse me? Mrs. Phillips ordered the carriage for five o'clock and it's nearly that time now."

"I'll excuse you, Hayward," Helen answered, intending a dismissal of the subject as well as of the servant.

CHAPTER XXI

For a year now Helen had had an unconsciously growing regard for her footman's mental abilities and for his gift of entertaining her with his tales of battle and camp and other incidental themes of conversation which at odd times had beguiled the moments of the past summer after his identity had been revealed to her as "the trooper of the 10th" of her father's most thrilling battle story. It was but natural that conversation with a man of his cultivation of mind and wide information should dull the sense of caste and superiority and enhance a feeling of genuine respect. It was only occasionally now that she assumed an air of command:—at best it is a difficult thing to patronize intellect.

Helen did not have an opportunity to hear Hayward's proffered explanation for quite a long time, and she cared little to know anything further of it; but her attitude of mind toward him had changed. Formerly she sometimes had wondered that a footman should be so intelligent. Finding that he was a Harvard man, however, had reversed the problem. It raised him to a level of respectability above his calling, and left the fact that he was a serving-man to be accounted for as anomalous. That he was a negro counted with her, of course, for naught one way or the other. He was nothing less than a footman.

However, with all her democratic ideas, she was a President's daughter; and that he was a footman, until it was explained, and even after it was explained,—as long, in fact, as he remained a footman,—would cause that vacillation between anger and amusement which came to her yet with the remembrance of his embarrassed declaration that her pennant was his heart's dearest possession.... She was somewhat annoyed by her own mild self-consciousness—an unusual mental state for her; more so than by any forwardness on the man's part in speaking the speech,—for there had been nothing of that.... She would not think of it.... Why should she think of it? The idea was ridiculous. She would laugh it away.... Of course the pennant was a dear possession: the man prized it as a memento of his college life and his daringly won victory.... Certainly, it was a very dear possession: she had similar school-day souvenirs which were precious to her heart though recalling moments of less energy of loyalty and wild delirium of joy.... Besides he may have meant, he could have meant, nothing personal to herself,—for he could not have known her—she was nothing more than a child seeing her first great football match—and he had caught but a glimpse of her in all that yelling throng—if he had seen her at all.... It would be a miracle if he remembered her... And yet he seemed to remember.... Though why should she think so? He had said nothing to indicate it.... But he knew—she was sure that he knew.... And what if he did know, and did value the pennant on that account? The personal consideration was not imperative. Was she not the President's daughter, and would not any man deem it an honour to be decorated by her hand or high privilege to carry her flag? The lowest menial might properly take pride in her approbation and set great store by a token of her approval.... But—this man is neither low nor menial, for all his servile livery. He is a gentleman by every token: educated, brave, strong, modest, self-sacrificing, chivalrous. It is hard to consider him as an underling—a footman.... And why is he a footman? ... She does not care why he is a footman ... or that he is a footman.... He must keep his place.

CHAPTER XXII

Helen was taking her early morning ride. She pulled her horse up sharply and waited for her groom to overtake her.

"Why are you a footman, Hayward?"

Hayward was startled. The girl had been uncertain in her treatment of him for a month, and he was expecting anything that might happen, from a plain discharge to arrest as a suspicious character. He was confused by the suddenness of the question, and by the peculiar mingling of sympathy and impatience in Helen's voice.

"Who are you, and what are you trying to do?"