I

On an afternoon of the second autumn following Lettice’s death Gordon was fetching home a headstall resewn by Peterman. The latter, in a small shed filled with the penetrating odor of dressed leather at the back of the hotel, exercised the additional trade of saddler. General Jackson ambled at Gordon’s heel.

The dog had grown until his shoulder reached the man’s knee; he was compact and powerful, with a long, heavy jaw and pronounced, grave whiskers; the wheaten color of his legs and head had lightened, sharply defining the coarse black hair upon his back.

October was drawing to a close: the autumn had been dry, and the foliage was not brilliantly colored, but exhibited a single shade of dusty brown that, in the sun, took the somber gleams of clouded gold. It was warm still, but a furtive wind, stirring the dead leaves uneasily over the ground, was momentarily ominous, chill.

The limp rim of a felt hat obscured Gordon’s features, out of the shadow of which protruded his lean, sharp chin. His heavy shoes, hastily scraped of mud, bore long cuts across the heels, while shapeless trousers, a coat with gaping pockets, hung loosely about his thin body and bowed shoulders. He passed the idlers before the office of the Bugle with a scarcely perceptible nod; but, farther on, he stopped before a solitary figure advancing over the narrow footway.

It was Buckley Simmons. He was noticeably smaller since his injury at the camp meeting; he had shrivelled; his face was peaked and wrinkled like the face of a very old man; the shadows in the sunken cheeks did not resemble those on living skin, but were dry and dusty like the autumn leaves. His gaze was fixed upon the ground at his feet; but, as he drew up to Gordon, he raised his head.

Into the dullness of his eyes, his slack lips, crept a dim recognition; among the ashes of his consciousness a spark glowed—a single, live coal of bitter hate.

“How are you, Buckley?” Gordon pronounced slowly.

The other’s hands clenched as the wave of emotion crossed the blank countenance. Then the hands relaxed, the face was again empty. He continued, oblivious of Gordon’s salutation, of his presence, upon his way.

Gordon Makimmon stood for a moment gazing after him. Then, as he turned, he saw that there was a small group of men on the Courthouse lawn; he saw the sheriff standing facing them from the steps, gesticulating.

II

The purpose of this gathering was instantly apparent to him, it stirred obscure memories into being.—A property was being publicly sold for debt.

The trooping thoughts of the past filled his mind; thoughts, it seemed to him, of another than himself. Surely it had been another Gordon Makimmon that, sitting before the Bugle office, had heard the sheriff enumerating the scant properties of the old freehold by the stream to satisfy the insatiable greed of Valentine Simmons. It had been a younger man than himself by fifteen years. Yet, actually, it had been scarcely more than three years since the storekeeper had had him sold out.

That other Makimmon had been a man of incredibly vivid interests and emotions. Now it appeared to him that, in all the world, there was not a cause for feeling, not an incentive to rouse the mind from apathy.

Stray periods reached him from the sheriff’s recounting of “a highly desirable piece of property.” His loud, flat voice had not changed by an inflection since he had “called out” Gordon’s home; the merely curious or materially interested onlookers were the same, the dragging bidding had, apparently, continued unbroken from the other occasion. The dun, identical repetition added to the overwhelming sense of universal monotony in Gordon Makimmon’s brain. He turned at the corner, by Simmons’ store, while the memories faded; the customary greyness, like a formless drift of cloud obscuring a mountain height, once more descended upon him.

At the back of the store a small open space was filled with broken crates, straw and boxes—the debris of unpacking. And there he saw a youthful woman sitting with her head turned partially from the road. As he passed a suppressed sob shook her. It captured his attention, and, with a slight, involuntary gasp, he saw her face. The memories returned in a tumultuous, dark tide—she reminded him vividly of Lettice. It was in the young curve of her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, and a sameness of rounded proportions, that the resemblance lay.

He stopped, without formulated reason, and in spite of her obvious desire for him to proceed.

“It’s hardly fit to sit here and cry before the whole County,” he observed.

“The whole County knows,” she returned in the egotism of youthful misery.

Her voice, too, was like Lettice’s—sweet with the premonition of the querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all good women.

A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn.

“They’re selling you out,” he hazarded, “for debt.”

She nodded, with trembling lips. “Cannon is,” she specified.

Cannon was the storekeeper for whom his brother-in-law clerked. He thought again, how monotonous, how everlastingly alike, life was. “You just let the amount run on and on,” he continued; “you got this and that. Then, suddenly, Cannon wanted his money.”

Her eyes opened widely at his prescience. “But there was sickness too,” she added; “the baby died.”

“Ah,” Gordon said curtly. The lines in his worn face deepened, his mouth was inscrutable.

“If it hadn’t been for that,” she confided, “we could have got through. Everything had started fine. Alexander’s father had left him the place: there isn’t a better in the Bottom. Alexander says Mr. Cannon has always wanted it. Now ... now ...” her blue gaze blurred with slow tears.

Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent—she presented the same order, her white shirtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling down upon him.

And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons’ store, brought the buried memories back into light. They disconcerted him, sweeping through the lassitude of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of fear.... The voice of the sheriff carried to them, describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.

“I nailed all the tar-paper on the—the chicken house,” she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness, the tears spilling over her round, flushed cheeks.

It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had gone; it assumed the aspect of an intentional reproach, of Lettice returned to bother him with her pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on his way. But, almost immediately, he stopped.

“Your name?” he demanded.

“Adelaide Crandall.”

The Crandalls, he knew, were a reputable family living in the valley bottom east of Greenstream village. Matthew Crandall had died a few years before, and, as this girl had indicated, had left a substantial farm to each of his sons. Cannon would get this one, and it was more than probable, the others.

The old enmity against Valentine Simmons, directed at Cannon, flamed afresh. Simmons or the other—what did the name matter? they were the same, a figurative apple press crushing the juice out of the country, leaving but a mash of hopes and lives. He stood irresolute, while Adelaide Crandall fought to control her emotions.

The badgering voice of the sheriff sounded again on his hearing. He crossed the road, pushed open the grinding iron gate of the fence that enclosed the Courthouse lawn, and made his way through the sere, fallen leaves to the steps.

III

“Twenty-seven hundred and ninety dollars,” the sheriff reiterated; “only twenty-seven ninety ... this fine bottom land, all cleared and buildings in best repair. Going! Going!”

“Three thousand,” a man called from the group facing the columned portico.

“Three thousand! Three thousand! Sale must be made. Going—”

“Thirty-one hundred,” Gordon pronounced abruptly.

A stir of renewed interest animated the sale. Gordon heard his name pronounced in accents of surprise. He was surprised at himself: his bid had been unpremeditated—it had leaped like a flash of ignited powder out of the resurrected enmity to Valentine Simmons, out of the memories stirred by the figure that resembled Lettice.

The sheriff immediately took up his bid. “Thirty-one hundred! thirty-one, gentlemen; only thirty-one for this fine bottom land, all cleared—”

There was a prolonged pause in the bidding, during which even the auctioneer grew apathetic. He repeated the assertion that the buildings were in the best repair; then, abruptly, concluded the sale. Gordon had purchased the farm for thirty-one hundred dollars.

He despatched, in the Courthouse, the necessary formalities. When he emerged the group on the lawn had dwindled to three people conversing intently. A young man with heavy shoulders already bowed, clad in unaccustomed, stiff best clothes, advanced to meet him.

“Mr. Makimmon,” he began; “you got my place.... There’s none better. I’ve put a lot of work into it. I’ll—I’ll get my things out soon’s I can. If you can give me some time; my wife—”

“I can give you a life,” Gordon replied brusquely. He walked past Alexander Crandall to his wife. She turned her face from him. He said:

“You go back to the Bottom. I’ve fixed Cannon ... this time. Tell your husband he can pay me when it suits; the place is yours.” He swung on his heel and strode away.

IV

The fitful wind had, apparently, driven the warmth, the sun, from the earth. The mountains rose starkly to the slaty sky.

Gordon Makimmon lighted a lamp in the dining room of his dwelling. The table still bore a red, fringed cloth, but was bare of all else save the castor, most of the rings of which were empty. The room had a forlorn appearance, there was dust everywhere; Gordon had pitched the headstall into a corner, where it lay upon a miscellaneous, untidy pile.

“I reckon you want something to eat,” he observed to General Jackson. He proceeded, followed by the dog, to the kitchen. It revealed an appalling disorder: the stove was spotted with grease, grey with settled ashes; a pile of ashes and broken china rose beyond; on the other side coal and wood had been carelessly stored. A table was laden with unwashed dishes, unsavory pots, crusted pans.

Gordon stood in the middle of the floor, a lamp in his hand, surveying the repellent confusion. It had accumulated without attracting his notice; but now, suddenly detached from the aimless procession of the past months, it was palpable to him, unendurable. “It’s not fit for a dog,” he pronounced.

An expression of determination settled on his seamed countenance; he took off his coat and hung it on a peg in the door. Outside, by an ash-pit, he found a bucket and half-buried shovel. A minute after the kitchen was filled with grey clouds as he shoveled the ashes into the bucket for removal. He worked vigorously, and the pile soon disappeared; the wood and coal followed, carried out to where a bin was built against the house. Then he raked the fire from the stove.

It was cold within, but Gordon glowed with the heat of his energy. He filled a basin with water, and, with an old brush and piece of sandsoap, attacked the stove. He scrubbed until the surface exhibited a dull, even black; then, in a cupboard, he discovered an old box of stove polish, and soon the iron was gleaming in the lamplight. He laid and lit a fire, put on a tin boiler of water for heating; and then carried all the movables into the night. After which he fed General Jackson.

He flooded the kitchen floor and scrubbed and scraped until the boards were immaculate. Then, with a wet towel about a broom, he cleaned the walls and ceiling; he washed the panes of window glass. The dishes followed; they were dried and ranged in rigid rows on the dresser; the pots were scoured and placed in the closets underneath. Now, he thought vindictively, when he had finished, the kitchen would suit even Sim Caley’s wife—the old vinegar bottle.

The Caleys had left his house the morning following Lettice’s funeral. Mrs. Caley had departed without a word; Sim with but a brief, awkward farewell. Since then Gordon had lived alone in the house; but he now realized that it was not desirable, practicable. Things, he knew, would soon return to the dirt and disorder of a few hours ago. He needed some one, a woman, to keep the place decent. His necessity recalled the children of his sister.... There was only Rose; the next girl was too young for dependence. The former had been married a year now, and had a baby. Her husband had been in the village only the week before in search of employment, which he had been unable to secure, and it was immaterial where in the County they lived.

V

The couple grasped avidly at the opportunity to live with him. The youth had already evaporated from Rose’s countenance; her minute mouth and constantly lifted eyebrows expressed an inwardly-gratifying sense of superiority, an effect strengthened by her thin, affected speech. Across her narrow brow a fringe of hair fell which she was continually crimping with an iron heated in the kitchen stove, permeating the room with a lingering and villainous odor of burned hair.

William Vibard was a man with a passion—the accordion. He arrived with the instrument in a glossy black paper box, produced it at the first opportunity, and sat by the stove drawing it out to incredible lengths in the production of still more incredible sounds. He held one boxlike end, with its metallic stops, by his left ear, while his right hand, unfalteringly fixed in the strap of the other end, operated largely in the region of his stomach.

He had a book of instructions and melodies printed in highly-simplified and explanatory bars, which he balanced on his knee while he struggled in their execution.

He was a youth of large, palpable bones, joints and knuckles; his face was long and preternaturally pale, and bore an abstracted expression which deepened almost to idiocy when bent above the quavering, unaccountable accordion.

The Vibard baby was alarmingly little, with a bluish face; and, as if in protest against her father’s interminable noise, lay wrapped in a knitted red blanket without a murmur, without a stir of her midgelike form, hour upon hour.

VI

Some days after the Vibards’ arrival Gordon Makimmon was standing by the stable door, in the crisp flood of midday, when an ungainly young man strode about the corner of the dwelling and approached him.

“You’re Makimmon,” he half queried, half asserted. “I’m Edgar Crandall, Alexander’s brother.” He took off his hat, and passed his hand in a quick gesture across his brow. He had close-cut, vivid red hair bristling like a helmet over a long, narrow skull, and a thrusting grey gaze. “I came to see you,” he continued, “because of what you did for Alec. I can’t make out just what it was; but he says you saved his farm, pulled it right out of Cannon’s fingers, and that you’ve given him all the time he needs to pay it back—” He paused.

“Well,” Gordon responded, “and if I did?”

“I studied over it at first,” the other frankly admitted; “I thought you must have a string tied to something. I know Alexander’s place, it’s a good farm, but ... I studied and studied until I saw there couldn’t be more in it than what appeared. I don’t know why—”

“Why should you?” Gordon interrupted brusquely, annoyed by this searching into the reason for his purchase of the farm, into the region of his memories.

“I didn’t come here to ask questions,” the other quickly assured him; “but to borrow four thousand dollars.”

“Why not forty?” Gordon asked dryly.

“Because I couldn’t put it out at profit, now.” Edgar Crandall ignored the other’s factitious manner: “but I can turn four over two or three times in a reasonable period. I can’t give you any security, everything’s covered I own; that’s why I came to you.”

“You heard I was a fool with some money?”

“You didn’t ask any security of Alexander,” he retorted. “No, I came to you because there was something different in what you did from all I had ever known before. I can’t tell what I mean; it had a—well, a sort of big indifference about it. It seemed to me perhaps life hadn’t got you in the fix it had most of us; that you were free.”

“You must think I’m free—with four thousand dollars.”

“Apples,” the other continued resolutely. “I’ve got the ground, acres of prime sunny slope. I’ve read about apple growing and talked to men who know. I’ve been to Albermarle County. I can do the same thing in the Bottom. Ask anybody who knows me if I’ll work. I can pay the money back all right. But, if I know you from what you did, that’s not the thing to talk about now.

“I want a chance,” he drove a knotted fist into a hardened palm; “I want a chance to bring out what’s in me and in my land. I want my own! The place came to me clear, with a little money; but I wasn’t content with a crop of fodder. I improved and experimented with the soil till I found out what was in her. Now I know; but I can’t plant a sapling, I can’t raise an apple, without binding myself to the Cannons and Hollidews of the County for life.

“I’d be their man, growing their fruit, paying them their profits. They would stop at the fence, behind their span of pacers, and watch me—their slave—sweating in the field or orchard.”

“You seem to think,” Gordon observed, “that you ought to have some special favor, that what grinds other men ought to miss you. Old Pompey sold out many a better man, and grabbed richer farms. And anyhow, if I was to money all that Cannon and Valentine Simmons got hold of where would I be?—Here’s two of you in one family, in no time at all.... If that got about I’d have five hundred breaking the door in.”

The animation died from Edgar Crandall’s face; he pulled his hat over the flaming helmet of hair. “I might have known such things ain’t true,” he said; “it was just a freak that saved Alec. There’s no chance for a man, for a living, in these dam’ mountains. They look big and open and free, but Greenstream’s the littlest, meanest place on the earth. The paper-shavers own the sky and air. Well, I’ll let the ground rot, I won’t work my guts out for any one else.”

He turned sharply and disappeared about the corner of the dwelling. Gordon moved to watch him stride up the slope to where a horse was tied by the public road. Crandall swung himself into the saddle, brought his heels savagely into the horse’s sides, and clattered over the road.

Gordon Makimmon’s annoyance quickly evaporated; he thought with a measure of amusement of the impetuous young man who was not content to grow a crop of fodder. If the men of Greenstream all resembled Edgar Crandall, he realized, the Cannons would have an uneasy time. He thought of the brother, Alexander, of Alexander’s wife, who resembled Lettice, and determined to drive soon to the Bottom and see them and the farm. He would have to make a practicable arrangement with regard to the latter, secure his intention, avoid question, by a nominal scheme of payment.

VII

He knew, generally, where Alexander Crandall’s farm lay; and, shortly after, drove through the village and mounted the road over which plied the Stenton stage. In the Bottom, beyond the east range, he went to the right and passed over an ill-defined way with numerous and deep fords. It was afternoon; an even, sullen expanse of cloud hid the deeps of sky through which the sun moved like a newly-minted silver dollar. A sharp wind drew through the opening; the fallen leaves rose from the road in sudden, agitated whirling; the gaunt branches, printed sharply on the curtain of cloud, revealed the deserted nests of past springs.

He drove by solitary farms, their acres lying open and dead among the brush; and stopped, undecided, before a fenced clearing that swept back to the abrupt wall of the range, against which a low house was scarcely distinguishable from the sere, rocky ascent. Finally he drove in, over a faintly marked track, past a corner of the fence railed about a trough for sheep shearing, to the house. A pine tree stood at either side of the large, uncut stone at the threshold; except for a massive exterior chimney the somberly painted frame structure was without noticeable feature.

He discovered immediately from the youthful feminine figure awaiting him at the door that he was not at fault. Mrs. Crandall’s face radiated her pleasure.

“Mr. Makimmon!” she cried; “there’s just no one we’d rather see than you. Step right out, and Alexander’ll take your horse. He’s only at the back of the house.... Alec!” she called; “Alec, what do you suppose?—here’s Mr. Makimmon.”

Alexander Crandall quickly appeared, in a hide apron covered with curlings of wood. A slight concern was visible upon his countenance, as though he expected at any moment to see revealed the “string” of which his brother had spoken.

Gordon adequately met his salutation, and turned to the woman. He saw now that she was more mature than Lettice: the mouth before him, although young and red, was bitten in at the corners; already the eyes gazed through a shadow of care; the capable hands were rough and discolored from toil and astringent soaps.

“Come in, come in,” Crandall urged, striving to banish the sudden anxiety from his voice.

“And you go right around, Alec,” his wife added, “and twist the head off that dominicker chicken. Pick some flat beans too, there’s a mess still hanging on the poles. Go in, Mr. Makimmon.”

He was ushered into the ceremonious, barely-furnished, best room. There was a small rag carpet at the door, with an archaic, woven animal, and at its feet an unsteady legend, “Mary’s Little Lamb”; but the floor was uncovered, and the walls, sealed in resinous pine, the pine ceiling, gave the effect, singular and depressing, of standing inside a huge box.

“It’s mortal cold here,” Mrs. Crandall truthfully observed; “the grate’s broken. If you wouldn’t mind going out into the kitchen—”

In the kitchen, from a comfortable place by the fire, Gordon watched her deft preparations for an early supper. Crandall appeared with the picked dominicker, and sat rigidly before his guest.

“I don’t quite make out,” he at last essayed, “how you expect your money, what you want out of it.”

“I don’t want anything out of it,” Gordon replied with an almost bitter vigor; “leastways not any premium. I said you could pay me when you liked. I’ll deed you the farm, and we’ll draw up a paper to suit—to suit crops.”

The apprehension in Alexander Crandall’s face turned to perplexed relief. “I don’t understand,” he admitted; “but I haven’t got to. It’s enough to know that you pulled us out of ruination. Things will come right along now; we can see light; I’m extending the sheep-cots twice.”

Supper at an end he too launched upon the lack of opportunity in Greenstream. “Some day,” he asserted, “and not so far off either, we’ll shake off the grip of these blood-money men; we’ll have a state lawed bank; a rate of interest a man can carry without breaking his back. There’s no better land than the Bottom, or the higher clearings for grazing ... it’s the men, some of ’em....”

VIII

It was dark when Gordon closed the stable door and turned to his dwelling. A light streamed from a chink in the closed kitchen shutter like a gold arrow shot into the night. From within came the long-drawn quaver of William Vibard’s performance of the Arkansas Traveller. He was sitting bowed over the accordion, his jaw dropped, his eyes glazed with the intoxication of his obsession. Rose was rigidly upright in a straight chair, her hands crossed at the wrists in her meager lap.

The fluctuating, lamentable sounds of the instrument, Rose’s expression of conscious virtue, were suddenly petty, exasperating; and Gordon, after a short acknowledgment of their greeting, proceeded through the house to the sitting room beyond.

No fire had been laid in the small, air-tight stove; the room had a closed, musty smell, and was more chill than the night without; his breath hung before him in a white vapor. Soon he had wood burning explosively, the stove grew rapidly red hot and the chill vanished. He saw beyond the lamp with its shade of minute, variously-colored silks the effigy of Mrs. Hollidew dead. Undisturbed in the film of dust that overlaid the table stood a pink celluloid thimble ... Lettice had placed it there....

His thoughts turned to Alexander Crandall and his wife, to the extended sheep-cots, and the “light” which they now saw. He recalled the former’s assertion that the land was all right, but that the blood-money men made life arduous in Greenstream. He remembered Edgar Crandall’s arraignment of the County as “the littlest, meanest place on earth,” a place where a man who wanted his own, his chance, was helpless to survive the avarice of a few individuals, the avarice for gold. He had asked him, Gordon Makimmon, to give him that chance. But, obviously, it was impossible ... absurd.

His memory drifted back to the evening in the store when Valentine Simmons had abruptly demanded payment of his neglected account, to the hopeless rage that had possessed him at the realization of his impotence, of Clare’s illness. That scene, that bitter realization of ruin, had been repeated across the breadth of Greenstream. As a boy he had heard men in shaking tones curse Pompey Hollidew; only last week the red-headed Crandall had sworn he would let his ground rot rather than slave for the breed of Cannon. It was, apparently, a perpetual evil, an endless burden for the shoulders of men momentarily forgetful or caught in a trap of circumstance.

Yet he had, without effort, without deprivation, freed Alexander Crandall. He could have freed his brother, given him the chance his rebellious soul demanded, with equal ease. He had not done that last, he had said at the time, because of the numbers that would immediately besiege him for assistance. This, he realized, was not a valid objection—the money was his to dispose of as he saw fit. He possessed large sums lying at the Stenton banks, automatically returning him interest, profit; thrown in the scale their weight would go far toward balancing the greed of Valentine Simmons, of Cannon.

He considered these facts totally ignorant of the fact that they were but the reflection of his own inchoate need born in the anguish of his wife’s death; he was not conscious of the veering of his sensibility—sharpened by the hoarse cry from the stiffening lips of Lettice—to the world without. He thought of the possibility before him neither as a scheme of philanthropy nor of revenge, nor of rehabilitation. He considered it solely in the light of his own experience, as a practical measure to give men their chance, their own, in Greenstream. The cost to himself would be small—his money had faded from his conceptions, his necessities, as absolutely as though it had been fairy gold dissolved by the touch of a magic wand. He had never realized its potentiality; lately he had ignored it with the contempt of supreme indifference. Now an actual employment for it occupied his mind.

The stove glowed with calorific energy; General Jackson, who had been lying at his feet, moved farther away. The lamplight grew faint and reddish, and then expired, trailing a thin, penetrating odor. In the dark the heated cylinder of the stove shone rosy, mysterious.

Gordon Makimmon was unaware of his own need; yet, at the anticipation of the vigorous course certain to follow a decision to use his money in opposition to the old, established, rapacious greed, he was conscious of a sudden tightening of his mental and physical fibers. The belligerent blood carried by George Gordon Makimmon from world-old wars, from the endless strife of bitter and rugged men in high, austere places, stirred once more through his relaxed and rusting being.

He thought, aglow like the stove, of the struggle that would follow such a determination, a struggle with the pink fox, Valentine Simmons. He thought of himself as an equal with the other; for, if Simmons were practised in cunning, if Simmons were deep, he, Gordon Makimmon, would have no necessity for circuitous dealing; his course would be simple, unmistakable.—He would lend money at, say, three per cent, grant extensions of time wherever necessary, and knock the bottom out of the storekeepers’ usurious monopoly, drag the farms out of Cannon’s grasping fingers.

“By God!” he exclaimed, erect in the dark; “but Edgar Crandall will get his apples.”

The dog licked his hand, faithful, uncomprehending.

IX

On an afternoon of mid-August Gordon was sitting in the chamber of his dwelling that had been formerly used as dining room. The table was bare of the castor and the red cloth, and held an inkpot, pens upright in a glass of shot, and torn envelopes on an old blotter. An iron safe stood against the wall at Gordon’s back, and above it hung a large calendar, advertising the Stenton Realty and Trust Company.

A sudden gloom swept over the room, and Gordon rose, proceeded to the door. A bank of purple cloud swept above the west range, opened in the sky like a gigantic, menacing fist; the greenery of the valley was overcast, and a white flash of lightning, accompanied by a shattering peal of thunder, stabbed viciously at the earth. There was no rain. An edge of serene light followed in the west a band of saffron radiance that widened until the cloud had vanished beyond the eastern peaks. The sultry heat lay like a blanket over Greenstream.

He turned back into the room, but, as he moved, he was aware of a figure at the porch door. It was a man with a round, freshly-colored countenance, bland eyes, and a limp mustache, clad in leather boots and a worn corduroy gunning coat. Gordon nodded familiarly; it was the younger Entriken from the valley beyond.

“I came to see you about my note,” he announced in a facile candor; “I sh’d take it up this month, but times are terrible bad, Gordon, and I wondered if you’d give me another extension? There’s no real reason why you sh’d wait again; I reckon I could make her, but it would certainly be accommodating—” he paused interrogatively.

“Well,” Gordon hesitated, “I’m not in a hurry for the note, if it comes to that. But the fact is ... I’ve got a lot of money laid out. What’s been the matter?—the weather has been good, it’s rained regular—”

“That’s just it,” Entriken interrupted; “it’s rained too blamed regular. It is all right for crops, but we’ve got nothing besides cattle, and steers wouldn’t hardly put on anything the past weeks. Of course, in a way, grass is cattle, but it just seems they wouldn’t take any good in the wet.”

“I suppose it will be all right,” Gordon Makimmon assented; “but I can hardly have the money out so long ... others too.”

X

The heat thickened with the dusk. The wailing clamor of William Vibard’s accordion rose from the porch. He had, of late, avoided sitting with Rose and her husband; they irritated him in countless, insignificant ways. Rose’s superiority had risen above the commonplace details of the house; she sat on the porch and regarded Gordon with a strained, rigid smile. After a pretense at procuring work William Vibard had relapsed into an endless debauch of sound. His manner became increasingly abstracted; he ate, he lived, with the gestures of a man playing an accordion.

The lines on Gordon’s thin, dark face had multiplied; his eyes, in the shadow of his bony forehead, burned steady, pale blue; his chin was resolute; but a new doubt, a constant, faint perplexity, blurred the line of his mouth.

From the road above came the familiar sound of hoof-beats, muffled in dust, but it stopped opposite his dwelling; and, soon after, the porch creaked under slow, heavy feet, and a thick, black-clad figure knocked and entered.

It was the priest, Merlier.

In the past months Gordon had been conscious of an increasing concord with the silent clerical. He vaguely felt in the other’s isolation the wreckage of an old catastrophe, a loneliness not unlike his, Gordon Makimmon’s, who had killed his wife and their child.

“The Nickles,” the priest pronounced, sudden and harsh, “are worthless, woman and man. They would be bad if they were better; as it is they are only a drunken charge on charity and the church. They have been stewed in whiskey now for a month. They make nothing amongst their weeds.—Is it possible they got a sum from you?”

“Six weeks back,” Gordon replied briefly; “two hundred dollars to put a floor on the bare earth and stop a leaking roof.”

“Lies,” Merlier commented. “When any one in my church is deserving I will tell you myself. I think of an old woman now, but ten dollars would be a fortune.” Silence fell upon them. Then:

“Charity is commanded,” he proceeded, “but out of the hands of authority it is a difficult and treacherous virtue. The people are without comprehension,” he made a gesture of contempt.

“With age,” the deliberate voice went on, “the soul grows restless and moves in strange directions, struggling to throw off the burden of flesh. But I that know tell you,” Merlier paused at the door, “the charity of material benevolence, of gold, will cure no spiritual sores; for spirit is eternal, but the flesh is only so much dung.” He stopped abruptly, coughed, as though he had carried his utterance beyond propriety. “The Nickles,” he repeated somberly, “are worthless; they make trouble in my parish; with money they make more.”

XI

The year, in the immemorial, minute shifting of season, grew brittle and cold; the dusk fell sooner and night lingered late into morning.

William Vibard moved with his accordion from the porch to beside the kitchen stove. He was in the throes of a new piece, McGinty, and Gordon Makimmon was correspondingly surprised when, as he was intent upon some papers, Rose’s husband voluntarily relinquished his instrument, and sat in the room with him.

“What’s the matter,” Gordon indifferently inquired; “is she busted?”

William Vibard indignantly repudiated that possibility. A wave of purpose rose to the long, corrugated countenance, but sank, without finding expression in speech. Finally Gordon heard Rose calling her husband. That young man twitched in his chair, but he made no other move, no answer. Her voice rose again, sharp and urgent, and Gordon observed:

“Your wife’s a-calling.”

“I heard her, but I’d ruther sit right where I am.”

She appeared in the doorway, flushed and angry.

“William,” she commanded, “you come straight out here to the kitchen. I got a question for you.”

“I’ll stay just where I am for a spell,” he replied, avoiding her gaze.

“You do as I tell you right off.”

A stubborn expression settled over his face and shoulders. He made her no further reply. Rose’s anger gathered in a tempest that she tried in vain to restrain.

“William,” she demanded, “where is it? It’s gone, you know what.”

“I ain’t seen it,” he answered finally; “I really ain’t, Rose.”

“That’s a story, only you knew. Come out here.”

“Get along,” Gordon interrupted testily. “How can I figure in this ruction?”

“I ain’t agoing a step,” William told them both; “I’m going to stop right here with Uncle Gordon.”

“Well, then,” the latter insisted, “get it through with—what is it?”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” William Vibard stammered; “it’s a hundred and forty dollars Rose held out on you and kept in a drawer, that’s what!”

Rose’s emotion changed to a crimson consternation.

“Why, William Vibard! what an awful thing to say. What little money I had put by was saved from years. What a thing to say about me and Uncle Gordon.”

“’Tain’t no such thing you saved it; you held it out on him, dollars at a time. You didn’t have no more right to it than I did.”

Gordon’s gaze centered keenly upon his niece’s hot face. She endeavored to sustain, refute, the accusation successfully; but her valor wavered, broke. She disappeared abruptly. He surveyed Vibard without pleasure.

“You’re a ramshackle contraption,” he observed crisply.

“I got as good a right to it as her,” the other repeated.

“A hundred and forty dollars,” Gordon said bitterly; “that’s a small business. Well, where is it? Have you got it?”

“No, I ain’t,” William exploded.

“Well?”

“You can’t never tell what might happen,” the young man observed enigmatically; “the bellowses wear out dreadful quick, the keys work loose like, and then they might stop making them. It’s the best one on the market.”

“What scrabble’s this? What did you do with the money?”

“They’re in the stable,” William Vibard answered more obscurely than before. “With good treatment they ought to last a life. They come cheaper too like that.”

Gordon relinquished all hope of extracting any meaning from the other’s elliptical speech. He rose. “If ‘they’re’ in the stable,” he announced, “I’ll soon have some sense out of you.” He procured a lantern, and tramped shortly to the stable, closely followed by Rose’s husband.

“Now!” he exclaimed, loosening the hasp of the door, throwing it open.

The former entered and bent over a heap in an obscure corner. When he rose the lantern shone on two orderly piles of glossy black paper boxes. Gordon strode across the contracted space and wrenched off a lid.... Within reposed a brand new accordion. There were nine others.

“You see,” William eagerly interposed; “now I’m fixed good.”

At the sight of the grotesque waste a swift resentment moved Gordon Makimmon—it was a mockery of his money’s use, a gibing at his capability, his planning. The petty treachery of Rose added its injury. He pitched the box in his hands upon the clay floor, and the accordion fell out, quivering like a live thing.

“Hey!” William Vibard remonstrated; “don’t do like that ... delicate—” He knelt, with an expression of concern, and, tenderly fingering the instrument, replaced it in the box.

Gordon turned sharply and returned to the house. Rose was in her room. He could hear her moving rapidly about, pulling at the bureau drawers. Depression settled upon him; he carried the lantern into the bedroom, where he sat bowed, troubled. He was aroused finally by the faint strains of William’s latest melodic effort drifting discreetly from the stable.

The next morning the Vibards departed. Rose was silent, her face, red and swollen, was vindictive. On the back of the vehicle that conveyed them to the parental Berrys was securely tied the square bundle that had “fixed good” William Vibard musically for life.

XII

Gordon Makimmon, absorbed in the difficult and elusive calculations of his indefinable project was unaware of the change wrought by their departure, of the shifting of the year, the familiar acts and living about him. He looked up abruptly from the road when Valentine Simmons, upon the platform of the store, arrested his progress homeward.

Simmons’ voice was high and shrill, as though time had tightened and dried his vocal cords; his cheeks were still round and pink, but they were sapless, the color lingered like a film of desiccated paint.

The store remained unchanged: Sampson, the clerk, had gone, but another, identical in shirt sleeves upheld by bowed elastics, was brushing the counters with a turkey wing; the merchandise on the shelves, unloaded from the slow procession of capacious mountain wagons, flowed in endless, unvaried stream to the scattered, upland homes.

Valentine Simmons took his familiar place in the glass enclosure, revolving his chair to fix on Gordon a birdlike attention.

“As an old friend,” he declared, “an old Presbyterian friend, I want to lay some of my experience before you. I want to complain a little, Gordon; I have the right ... my years, Pompey’s associate. The fact is—you’re hurting the County, you’re hurting the people and me; you’re hurting yourself. Everybody is suffering from your—your mistaken generosity. We have all become out of sorts, unbalanced, from the exceptional condition you have brought about. It won’t do, Gordon; credit has been upset, we don’t know where we stand, or who’s who; it’s bad.

“I said you suffered with the rest of us, but you are worse off still. How shall I put it?—the County is taking sad advantage of your, er—liberality. There’s young Entriken; he was in the store a little time ago and told me that you had extended his note again. He thought it was smart to hold out the money on you. There’s not a likelier farm, nor better conditioned cattle, than his in Greenstream. He could pay twenty notes like yours in a day’s time. I hate to see money cheapened like that, it ain’t healthy.

“What is it you’re after, Gordon? Is it at the incorruptible, the heavenly, treasure you’re aiming? But if it is I’ll venture this—that the Lord doesn’t love a fool. And the man with the talents, don’t overlook him.”

“I’m not aiming at anything,” Gordon answered, “I’m just doing.”

“And there’s that Hagan that got five thousand from you, it’s an open fact about him. He came from the other end of the state, clear from Norfolk, to get a slice. He gave you the address, the employment, of a kin in Greenstream and left for parts unknown. No, no, the Lord doesn’t love a fool.”

“I may be a fool as you see me,” Gordon contended stubbornly; “and the few liars that get my money may laugh. But there’s this, there’s this, Simmons—I’m not cursed by the dispossessed and the ailing and the plumb penniless. I don’t go to a man with his crop a failure on the field like, well—we’ll say, Cannon does, with a note in my hand for his breath. I’ve put a good few out of—of Cannon’s reach. Did you forget that I know how it feels to hear Ed Hincle, on the Courthouse steps, call out my place for debt? Did you forget that I sat in this office while you talked of old Presbyterian friends and sold me into the street?”

“Incorrigible,” Valentine Simmons said, “incorrigible; no sense of responsibility. I had hoped Pompey’s estate would bring some out in you. But I should have known—it’s the Makimmon blood; you are the son of your father. I knew your grandfather too, a man that fairly insulted opportunity.”

“We’ve never been storekeepers.”

“Never kept much of anything, have you, any of you? You can call it what you’ve a mind to, liberality or shiftlessness. But there’s nothing saved by names. There: it seems as if you never got civilized, always contemptuous and violent-handed ... it’s the blood. I’ve studied considerable about you lately; something’ll have to be done for the good of all.”

“What is it you want of me?”

“Call in your bad debts,” the other promptly responded; “shake off the worthless lot hanging to your pocket. Put the money rate back where it belongs. Why, in days gone by,” Valentine Simmons chuckled, “seventy per cent wasn’t out of the way for a forced loan, forty was just so-so. Ah, Pompey and me made some close deals. Pompey multiplied his talents. The County was an open ledger to him.”

“Didn’t you ever think of the men who had to pay you seventy per cent?” Gordon asked, genuinely curious.

“Certainly,” Simmons retorted; “we educated them, taught ’em thrift. While you are promoting idleness and loose-living.... But this is only an opening for what I wanted to say.—I had a letter last week from the Tennessee and Northern people, the Buffalo plan has matured, they’re pushing the construction right along.”

“I intended to come to you about that.”

“Well?”

“I ain’t going on with our agreement.”

Simmons’ face exhibited not a trace of concern.

“I may say,” he returned smoothly, “that I am not completely surprised. I have been looking for something of the kind. I must remind you that our partnership is a legal and binding instrument; you can’t break it, nor throw aside your responsibility, with a few words. It will be an expensive business for you.”

“I’m willing to pay with what I’ve got.”

The other held up a palm in his familiar, arresting gesture. “Nothing of that magnitude; nothing out of the way; I only wanted to remind you that a compensation should follow your decision. It puts me in a very nice position indeed. I gather from your refusal to continue the partnership that you do not intend to execute singly the original plan; it is possible that you will not hold the options against the coming of transportation.”

“You’ve got her,” Gordon declared; “I’m not going to profit seventy times over, tie up all that timber, from the ignorance of men that ought to rightly advantage from it. I—I—” Gordon rose to his feet in the harassing obscurity of his need; “I don’t want to make! I don’t want to take anything ... never again! I want—”

“You forget, unfortunately, that I am forced to be accessory to your—your change of heart. I may say that I shall have to pay dearly for your—your eleventh hour conversion. Timber will be—unsteady.”

“Didn’t you mention getting something out of it?”

“A mere detail to my effort, my time. What my timber will be worth, with what you throw on the market hawking up and down ... problematic.”

Gordon Makimmon hesitated, a plan forming vaguely, painfully, in his mind. Finally, “I might buy you out,” he suggested; “if you didn’t ask too dam’ much. Then I could do as I pleased with the whole lot.”

“Now that,” Valentine Simmons admitted, dryly cordial, “is a plan worth consideration. We might agree on a price, a low price to an old partner. You met the Company’s agents, heard the agreement outlined; a solid proposal. And, as you say, with the timber control in your own hands, you could arrange as you pleased with the people concerned.”

He grew silent, enveloped in thought. Then:

“I’ll take a hundred thousand for all the options I bought, for my interest in the partnership.”

“I don’t know as I could manage that,” Gordon admitted.

An unassumed astonishment marked the other’s countenance. “Why!” he ejaculated, “Pompey left an estate estimated at—” he stopped from sheer surprise.

“Some of the investments went bad,” Gordon continued; “down in Stenton they said I didn’t move ’em fast enough. Then the old man had a lot laid out in ways I don’t hold with, with people I wouldn’t collect from. And it’s a fact a big amount’s got out here lately. Of course it will come back, the most part.”

Simmons’ expression grew skeptical.

“I know you too,” Gordon added; “you’ll want the price in your hand.”

“I’m getting on,” the storekeeper admitted; “I can’t wait now.”

“I don’t know if I can make it,” Gordon repeated; “it’ll strip me if I do.”

Valentine Simmons swung back to his desk. “At least,” he observed, “keep this quiet till something’s settled.”

Gordon agreed.

XIII

Even if he proved able to buy out Simmons, he thought walking home, it would be a delicate operation to return the timber rights to where he thought they belonged. He considered the possibility of making a gift of the options to the men from whom they had been wrongfully obtained. But something of Simmons’ shrewd knowledge of the world, something of the priest’s contemptuous arraignment of material values, lingering in Gordon’s mind, convinced him of the potential folly of that course. It would be more practical to sell back the options to those from which they had been purchased at the nominal prices paid. He had only a vague idea of his balances at the Stenton banks, the possibilities of the investments from which he received profit. He was certain, however, that the sum asked by Valentine Simmons would obliterate his present resources. Yet he was forced to admit that it did not seem exorbitant.

He continued his altruistic deliberations throughout the evening at his dwelling. It might be well, before investing such a paramount sum, to communicate with the Tennessee and Northern Company, receive a fresh ratification of their intention. Yet he could not do that without incurring the danger of premature questioning, investigation. It was patent that he would have to be prepared to make an immediate distribution of the options when his intention became known in Greenstream. He was aware that when the coming of a railroad to the County became common knowledge the excitement of the valley would grow intense.

Again, it might be better first to organize the timber of Greenstream, so that a harmonious local condition would facilitate all negotiations, and avert the danger, which Valentine Simmons had pointed out, of individual blindness and competition. But, in order to accomplish that, he would have to bring into concord fifty or more wary, suspicious, and largely ignorant adults. He would have to deal with swift and secret avarice, with vain golden dreams born of years of bitter poverty, privation, ceaseless and incredible toil. The magnitude of the latter task appalled him; fact and figure whirled in his confused mind. He was standing, and he suddenly felt dizzy, and sat down. The giddiness vanished, but left him with twitching fingers, a clouded vision. He might get them all together, explain, persuade.... Goddy! it was for their good. They needn’t be cross-grained. There it would be, the offer, for them to take or leave. But, if they delayed, watch out! Railroad people couldn’t be fooled with. They might get left; that was all.

This, he felt, was more than he could undertake, more than any reasonable person would ask. If he paid Valentine Simmons all that money, and then let them have back their own again, without a cent to himself, they must be content. They should be able to bargain as well as he—who was getting on and had difficulty in adding figures to the same amount twice—with the Tennessee and Northern.

The following morning he departed for Stenton.

XIV

Gordon paid Valentine Simmons eighty-nine thousand dollars for the latter’s share of the timber options they had held in common. They were seated in the room in which Gordon conducted his peculiar transactions. He turned and placed Simmons’ acknowledgment, the various papers of the dissolved partnership, in the safe.

“That finishes all I had in Stenton,” he observed.

Valentine Simmons made no immediate reply. He was intent, with tightly-folded lips, on the cheque in his hand. His shirt, as ever, was immaculately starched, the blue button was childlike, bland; but it was cold without, and hot in the room where they sat, and the color on his cheeks resembled dabs of vermilion on buffers of old white leather; the tufts of hair above his ears had dwindled to mere cottony scraps.

“Prompt and satisfactory,” he said at last. “I tell you, Gordon, you can see as far as another into a transaction. Promises are of no account but value received ...” he held up the cheque, a strip of pale orange paper, pinched between withered fingers.

Suddenly he was in a hurry to get away; he drew his overcoat of close-haired, brown hide about his narrow shoulders, and trotted to the door, to his buggy awaiting him at the corner of the porch.

XV

Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency, presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the slightly-varying sums paid—the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original, individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.

Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal, often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, “The piney trees on Pap’s and mine but not Henny’s for nineteen years.” Another bore, above the date, “In this year of Jesus Christ’s holy redemption.”

The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record, the signatures were all witnessed.

It was a slow, fatiguing process. A number of the original vendors, Gordon knew, had died, their families were scattered; others had removed from the County; logical substitutes had to be evolved. The mere comparison of the various entries, the tracing of the tracts to the amounts involved, was scarcely within Gordon’s ability.

He labored through the swiftly-falling dusk into the night, and took up the task early the following morning. A large part of the work had to be done a second, third, time—his brain, unaccustomed to concentrated mental processes, soon grew weary; he repeated aloud a fact of figures without the least comprehension of the sounds formed by his lips, and he would say them again and again, until he had forced into his blurring mind some significance, some connection.

He would fall asleep over his table, his scattered papers, in the grey daylight, or in the radiance of a large glass lamp, and stay immobile for hours, while his dog lay at his feet, or, uneasy, nosed his sharp, relaxed knees.

No one would seek him, enter his house, break his exhausted slumbers. Lying on an outflung arm his head with its sunken, closed eyes, loose lips, seemed hardly more alive than the photographed clay of Mrs. Hollidew in the sitting room. He would wake slowly, confused; the dog would lick his inert hand, and they would go together in search of food to the kitchen.

On the occasions when he was forced to go to the post-office, the store, he went hurriedly, secretively, in a coat as green, as aged, as Pompey’s own.

He was anxious to finish his labor, to be released from its responsibility, its weight. It appeared tremendously difficult to consummate; it had developed far beyond his expectation, his original conception. The thought pursued him that some needy individual would be overlooked, his claim neglected. No one must be defrauded; all, all, must have their own, must have their chance. He, Gordon Makimmon, was seeing that they had, with Lettice’s money ... because ... because....

The leaves had been swept from the trees; the mountains were gaunt, rocky, against swift, low clouds. There was no sunlight except for a brief, sullen red fire in the west at the end of day. At night the winds blew bleakly down Greenstream valley. Shutters were locked, shades drawn, in the village; night obliterated it absolutely. No one passed, after dark, on the road above.

He seemed to be toiling alone at a hopeless, interminable task isolated in the midst of a vast, uninhabited desolation, in a black chasm filled with the sound of whirling leaves and threshing branches.

The morning, breaking late and grey and cold, appeared equally difficult, barren, in vain. The kitchen stove, continually neglected, went continually out, the grate became clogged with ashes, the chimney refused to draw. He relit it, on his knees, the dog patiently at his side; he fanned the kindling into flames, poured on the coal, the shining black dust coruscating in instant, gold tracery. He bedded the horse more warmly, fed him in a species of mechanical, inattentive regularity.

Finally the list of timber options he possessed was completed with the names of their original owners and the amounts for which they had been bought. A deep sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment, took the place of his late anxiety. Even the weather changed, became complacent—the valley was filled with the blue mirage of Indian summer, the apparent return of a warm, beneficent season. The decline of the year seemed to halt, relent, in still, sunny hours. It was as though nature, death, decay, had been arrested, set at naught; that man might dwell forever amid peaceful memories, slumberous vistas, lost in that valley hidden by shimmering veils from all the implacable forces that bring the alternation of cause and effect upon subservient worlds and men.

XVI

As customary on Saturday noon Gordon found his copy of the weekly Bugle projecting from his numbered compartment at the post-office. There were no letters. He thrust the paper into his pocket, and returned to the village street. The day was warm, but the mists that had enveloped the peaks were dissolving, the sky was sparkling, clear. By evening, Gordon decided, it would be cold again, and then the long, rigorous winter would close upon the valley and mountains.

He looked forward to it with relief, as a period of somnolence and prolonged rest—the mental stress and labor of the past days had wearied him of the active contact with men and events. He was glad that they were, practically, solved, at an end—the towering columns of figures, the perplexing problems of equity, the far-reaching decisions.

In rehearsing his course it seemed impossible to have hit upon a better, a more comprehensive, plan. There was hardly a family he knew of in the valley of which some member might not now have his chance. That, an opportunity for all, was what Gordon was providing.

A number of horses were already hitched along the rail outside Valentine Simmons’ store; soon the rail would hardly afford room for another animal. He passed the Presbyterian Church, Dr. Pelliter’s drugstore and dwelling, and approached his home. Seen from the road the long roof was variously colored from various additions; there were regions of rusty tar-paper, of tin with blistered remnants of dull red paint, of dark, irregular shingling.

It was a dwelling weather-beaten and worn, the latest addition already discolored by the elements, blended with the nondescript whole. It was like himself, Gordon Makimmon recognized; in him, as in the house below, things tedious or terrible had happened, the echoes of which lingered within the old walls, within his brain.... Now it was good that winter was coming, when they would lie through the long nights folded in snow, in beneficent quietude.

There were some final details to complete in his papers. He took off his overcoat, laid it upon the safe, and flung the Bugle on the table, where it fell half open and neglected. The names traced by his scratching pen brought clearly before him the individuals designated: Elias Wellbogast had a long, tangled grey beard and a gaze that peered anxiously through a settling blindness. Thirty acres—eight dollars an acre. P. Ville was a swarthy foreigner, called, in Greenstream, the Portugee; every crop he planted grew as if by magic. Old Matthew Zane would endeavor to borrow from Gordon the money with which to repurchase the option he had granted.

He worked steadily, while the rectangles of sunlight cast through the windows on the floor shortened and shifted their place. He worked until the figures swam before his eyes, when he laid aside the pen, and picked up the Bugle, glancing carelessly over the first page.

His attention immediately concentrated on the headlines of the left-hand column, his gaze had caught the words, “Tennessee and Northern.”

“Goddy!” he exclaimed aloud; “they’ve got it in the Bugle, the railroad coming and all.”

He was glad that the information had been printed, it would materially assist in the announcement and carrying out of his plan. He folded the paper more compactly, leaned back in his chair to read ... Why!... Why, damn it! they had it all wrong; they were entirely mistaken; they had printed a deliberate—a deliberate—

He stopped reading to marshal his surprised and scattered faculties. Then, with a rigid countenance, he pursued the article to the end. When he had finished his gaze remained subconsciously fastened upon the paper, upon the advertisement of a man who paid for and removed the bodies of dead animals.

Gordon Makimmon’s lips formed, barely audibly, a name; he whispered, “Valentine Simmons.”

At last the storekeeper had utterly ruined him. He raised the paper from where it had fallen and read the article once more. It was a floridly and violently written account of how a projected branch of the Tennessee and Northern System through Greenstream valley, long striven for by solid and public-spirited citizens of the County, had been prevented by the hidden avarice of a well-known local figure, an ex-stage driver.

The latter, the account proceeded, with a foreknowledge of the projected transportation, had secured for little or nothing an option on practically all the desirable timber of the valley, and had held it at such a high figure that the railroad had been forced to abandon the scheme.

“What Greenstream thus loses through blind gluttony cannot be enumerated by a justly incensed pen. The loss to us, to our sons and daughters.... This secret and sinister schemer hid his purpose, it now appears, in a cloak of seeming benevolence. We recall a feeling of doubt, which we generously and wrongfully suppressed at the time, concerning the motives of such ill-considered ...”

“Valentine Simmons,” he repeated harshly. He controlled the Bugle in addition to countless other industries and interests of Greenstream. This article could not have been printed without Simmons’ cognizance, his co-operation. It was the crown of his long and victorious struggle with Gordon Makimmon. The storekeeper had sold him the options knowing that the railroad was not coming to the valley—some inhibition had arisen in the negotiations—he had destroyed him with Gordon’s own blindness, credulity. And he had walked like a rat into the trap.

The bitter irony of it rose in a wave of black mirth to his twisted lips; he, Gordon Makimmon, was exposed as an avaricious schemer with the prospects of Greenstream, with men’s hopes, with their chances. While Simmons, it was plainly intimated, had labored faithfully and in vain for the people.

He rose and shook his clenched hands above his head. “If I had only shot him!” he cried. “If I had only shot him at first!”

It was too late now: nothing could be gained by crushing the flickering vitality from that aged, pinkish husk. It was, Gordon dimly realized, a greater power than that contained by a single individual, by Valentine Simmons, that had beaten him. It was a stupendous and materialistic force against the metallic sweep of which he had cast himself in vain—it was the power, the unconquerable godhead, of gold.

The thought of the storekeeper was lost in the realization of the collapse of all that he had laboriously planned. The destruction was absolute; not an inner desire nor need escaped; not a projection remained. The papers before him, so painfully comprehended, with such a determination of justice, were but the visible marks of the futility, the waste, of his dreaming.

He sank heavily into the chair before his table. He recalled the younger Entriken’s smooth lies, the debauchery of his money by the Nickles; William Vibard’s accordions mocked him again ... all, all, had been in vain, worthless. General Jackson rose, and laid his long, shaggy, heavy head upon Gordon’s knee.

“We’re done for,” he told the dog; “we’re finished this time. Everything has gone to hell.”

XVII

He felt strangely lost in the sudden emptiness of his existence, an existence that, only a few hours before, had welcomed the prospect of release from its bewildering fullness. He had gathered the results of his slowly-formulating consciousness, his tragic memory, to a final resolve in the return of the options to a county enhanced by the coming of a railroad whose benefits he would distribute to all. And now the railroad was no more than a myth, it had vanished into thin, false air, carrying with it....

He swept his hand through the papers of his vain endeavor, bringing a sudden confusion upon their order. His arm struck the glass of shot, and, for a short space, there was a continuous sharp patter on the floor. He rose, and paced from wall to wall, a bent shape with open, hanging hands and a straggling grey wisp of hair across his dry, bony forehead.

Footsteps crossed the porch, a knock fell upon the door, and Gordon responded without raising his head.

It was Simeon Caley.

He had not been in the house since, together with his wife, he had left it after Lettice’s death. Sim’s stained felt hat was pushed back from a wet brow, his gestures were urgent.

“Get your horse in the buggy!” he exclaimed; “I’ll help you. Light out.”

“’Light out’?” Gordon’s gaze centered upon the other’s excitement, “where?”

“That doesn’t make much difference, so’s you light. The County’s mad clear through, and it’s pretty near all in the village.” Sim turned to the door. “I’ll help you, and then—drive.”

“I ain’t agoing to drive anywhere,” Gordon told him; “I’m where I belong.”

“You don’t belong in Greenstream after that piece in the Bugle,” his hand rested on the knob. “Tie up anything you need, I’ll hitch the buggy.”

“Don’t you touch a strap,” Gordon commanded; “because I won’t put a foot in her.”

“It’ll all settle down in a little; then maybe you can come back.”

“What’ll settle down?”

“Why, the deal with the railroad.”

“Sim,” Gordon demanded sharply, “you never believed that in the paper?”

“I don’t know what to b’lieve,” the other replied evasively; “a good many say those are the facts, that you have the options.”

“Get out of here!” Gordon shouted in a sudden moving rage; “and stay out; don’t come back when you find what’s what.”

“I c’n do that. And I’ll point out to you we just came for Lettice, we never took nothing of yours. I only stopped now to warn you away ... I’ll hitch her up, Gordon; you get down the road.”

“It’s mine now, whose ever it was awhile back. I’ve paid for it. You go.”

Simeon Caley lingered reluctantly at the door. Gordon stood rigidly; his eyes were bright points of wrath, his arm rose, with a finger indicating the world without. The former slowly opened the door, stepped out upon the porch; he stayed a moment more, then closed himself from sight.

XVIII

The stir and heat of Sim’s presence died quickly away; the house was without a sound; General Jackson lay like an effigy in ravelled black and buff wool. Gordon assembled the scattered papers on the table into an orderly pile. He moved into the kitchen, abstractedly surveyed the familiar walls; he walked through the house to the sitting room, where he stood lost in thought:

The County was “mad clear through”; Sim, supposing him guilty, had warned him to escape, advised him to run away.... That had never been a habit of the Makimmons, he would not form it now, at the end. He was not considering the mere probability of being shot, but of the greater disaster that had already smashed the spring of his living. His sensibilities were deadened to any catastrophe of the flesh.

At the same time he was conscious of a mounting rage at being so gigantically misunderstood, and his anger mingled with a bitter contempt for Simeon Caley, for a people so blind, so credulous, so helpless in the grasp of a single, shrewd individual.

He heard subdued voices without, and, through a window, saw that the sweep by the stream was filling with a sullen concourse of men; he saw their faces, grim and resentful, turned toward the house; the sun struck upon the dusty, black expanse of their hats.

He walked deliberately through the bedroom and out upon the porch. A sudden, profound silence met his appearance, a shifting of feet, a concerted, bald, inimical stare.

“Well?” Gordon Makimmon demanded; “you’ve read the Bugle, well?”

He heard a murmur from the back of the throng,

“Give it to him, we didn’t come here to talk.”

“‘Give it to him,’” Gordon repeated thinly. “I see Ben Nickles there, behind that hulk from the South Fork; Nickles’ll do it and glad. It will wipe off the two hundred dollars he had out of me for a new roof. Or there’s Entriken if Nickles is afraid, his note falls due again soon.”

“What about the railroad?”

“What about it? Greenstream’s been settled for eighty years, why haven’t you moved around and got one? Do you expect the President of the Tennessee and Northern to come up and beg you to let them lay tracks to your doors? If you’d been men you’d had one long ago, but you’re just—just stock. I’d rather be an outlaw on the mountain than any of you; I’d ruther be what you think I am; by God!” he cried out of his bitterness of spirit, “but I’d ruther be Valentine Simmons!”

“Have you got the options?” Entriken demanded—“all them that Pompey had and you bought?”

Gordon vanished into the house, and reappeared with the original contracts in his grasp.

“Here they are,” he exclaimed; “I paid eighty-nine thousand dollars to get them, and they’re worth—that,” he flung them with a quick gesture into the air, and the rising wind scattered them fluttering over the sere grass. “Scrabble for them in the dirt.”

“You c’n throw them away now the railroad’s left you.”

“And before,” Gordon Makimmon demanded, “do you think I couldn’t have gutted you if I’d had a mind to? do you think anybody couldn’t gut you? Why, you’ve been the mutton of every little storekeeper that let you off with a pound of coffee, of any note shaver that could write. The Bugle says I let out money to cover up the railway deal, but that’d be no better than giving it to stop the sight of the blind. God A’mighty! this transportation business you’re only whining about now was laid out five years ago, the company’s agents have driven in and out twenty times....”

“Let him have it!”

“Spite yourselves!” Gordon Makimmon cried; “it’s all that’s left for you.”

General Jackson moved forward over the porch. He growled in response to the menace of the throng on the sod, and jumped down to their level. A sudden, dangerous murmur rose:

“The two hundred dollar dog! The joke on Greenstream!”

He walked alertly forward, his ears pricked up on his long skull.

“C’m here, General,” Gordon called, suddenly urgent; “c’m back here.”

The dog hesitated, turned toward his master, when a heavy stick, whirling out of the press of men, struck the animal across the upper forelegs. He fell forward, with a sharp whine, and attempted vainly to rise. Both legs were broken. He looked back again at Gordon, and then, growling, strove to reach their assailants.

Gordon Makimmon started forward with a rasping oath, but, before he could reach the ground, General Jackson had propelled himself to the fringe of humanity. He made a last, convulsive effort to rise, his jaws snapped.... A short, iron bar descended upon his head.

Gordon’s face became instantly, irrevocably, the shrunken face of an old man.

The clustered men with the dead, mangled body of the dog before them; the serene, sliding stream beyond; the towering east range bathed in keen sunlight, blurred, mingled, in his vision. He put out a hand against one of the porch supports—a faded shape of final and irremediable sorrow.

He exhibited neither the courage of resistance nor the superiority of contempt; he offered, apparently, nothing material whatsoever to satisfy the vengeance of a populace cunningly defrauded of their just opportunities and profits; he seemed to be no more colored with life, no more instinct with sap, than the crackling leaves blown by the increasing wind about the uneasy feet on the grass.

He lipped a short, unintelligible period, gazing intent and troubled at the throng. He shivered perceptibly: under the hard blue sky the wind swept with the sting of an icy knout. Then, turning his obscure, infinitely dejected back upon the silent menace of the bitter, sallow countenances, the harsh angular forms, of Greenstream, he walked slowly to the door. He paused, his hand upon the knob, as if arrested by a memory, a realization. The door opened; the house absorbed him, presented unbroken its weather-worn face.

A deep, concerted sigh escaped from the men without, as though, with the vanishing of that bowed and shabby frame, they had seen vanish their last chance for reprisal, for hope.

XIX

The cold sharpened; the sky, toward evening, glittered like an emerald; the earth was black, it resembled a ball of iron spinning in the diffused green radiance of a dayless and glacial void. The stream before the Makimmon dwelling moved without a sound under banked ledges of ice.

A thread of light appeared against the façade of the house, it widened to an opening door, a brief glimpse of a bald interior, and then revealed the figure of a man with a lantern upon the porch. The light descended to the ground, wavered toward a spot where it disclosed the rigid, dead shape of a dog. An uncertain hand followed the swell of the ribs to the sunken side, attempted to free the clotted hair on a crushed skull. The body was carefully raised and enveloped in a sack, laboriously borne to the edge of the silent stream.

There it was lost in the dark as the light moved to where it cast a limited, swinging illumination over the wall of a shed. It returned to the stiffly distended sack, and there followed the ring of metal on the iron-like earth. In the pale circle of the lantern a figure stooped and rose, a figure with an intent, furrowed countenance.

The digging took a long while, the frozen clods of earth fell with a scattering thud, the shadow of the hole deepened by imperceptible degrees. Once the labor stopped, the sack was lowered into the ragged grave; but the opening was too shallow, and the rise and fall of the solitary figure recommenced.

The sack was finally covered from sight, from the appalling frigidity and space of the sky, from the frozen surface of the earth wrapped in stillness, in night. The clods were scraped back into the hole, stamped into an integral mass; the spade obliterated all trace of what lay hidden beneath, returned to the clay from which it had been momentarily animated by the enigmatic, flitting spark of life.

The lantern retraced its path to the shed, to the porch; where, in a brief thread of light, in the shutting of a door, it disappeared.

XX

Gordon met Valentine Simmons squarely for the first time since the collapse of his laborious planning outside the post-office. The latter, with a senile and pleased chuckle, tapped him on the chest.

“Teach you to be provident, Gordon,” he said in his high, rasping voice; “teach you to see further than another through a transaction; as far ain’t near enough; most don’t see at all.”

The anger had evaporated from Gordon Makimmon’s parched being: the storekeeper, he recognized, was sharper than all the rest of the County combined; even now the raddled old man was more acute than the young and active intelligences. He nodded, and would have passed on, but the storekeeper, with a ponderous furred glove, halted him.

“We haven’t had any satisfaction lately with the Stenton stage,” he shrilled; “and I made out to ask—you can take it or leave it—if you’d drive again? It might be a kind of—he! he!—relax from your securities and investments.”

Gordon, without an immediate reply, regarded him. He thought, in sudden approbation of a part, at least, of the past, that he could drive a stage better than any other man in a hundred, in a thousand; there, at least, no humiliating failure had overtaken his prowess with whip and reins. The old occupation, the monotonous, restful miles of road sweeping back under the wheels, the pleasant, casual detachment of the passengers, the pride of accomplishment, irresistibly appealed to him.

Valentine Simmons’ rheumy eyes interrogated him doubtfully above the fixed, dry color of his fallen cheeks.

“By God, Valentine!” Gordon exclaimed, “I’ll do it, I’ll drive her, and right, too. It takes experience to carry a stage fifty miles over these mountains, day and day; it takes a man that knows his horses, when to slack up on ’em and when to swing the leather ... I’m ready any time you say.”

“The stage goes out from Greenstream to-morrow; you can take it the trip after. Money same as before. And, Gordon,—he! he!—don’t you go and lend it out at four per cent; fifty’s talking but seventy’s good. Pompey knew the trick, he’d have dressed you down to an undershirt, Pompey would.”

Gordon returned slowly, absorbed in new considerations, to his dwelling. It was obvious that he could not live there alone and drive the Stenton stage; formerly Clare had attended to the house for him, but now there was no one to keep the stoves lit, to attend to the countless daily necessities. This was Tuesday—he would take the stage out on Thursday: he might as well get together a few necessities and close the place at once.

“I’ll shut her right in,” he said aloud in the empty, echoing kitchen.

He decided to touch nothing within. In the sitting room the swift obscurity of the closing shutters obliterated its familiar features—the table with the lamp and pink celluloid thimble, the phonograph, the faded photograph of what had been Mrs. Hollidew. The darkness spread to the bedroom that had been Lettice’s and his: the curtained wardrobe was drawn, the bed lay smoothly sheeted with the quilt folded brightly at the foot, one of the many small glass lamps of the house stood filled upon the bureau. The iron safe was eclipsed, the pens upright in the glass of shot, the kitchen and spaces beyond.

Finally, depositing an ancient bag of crumbling leather on the porch, he locked himself out. He moved the bag to the back of the buggy, and, hitching the horse into the worn gear, drove up the incline to the public road, to the village, without once turning his head.

XXI

He rose at five on Thursday and consumed a hasty breakfast by a blur of artificial light in the deserted hotel dining room. It was pitch black without, the air heavy with moisture, and penetrating. He led the horses from the shed under which he had hitched them to the stage, and climbed with his lantern into the long-familiar place by the whip. A light streamed from the filmy window of the post-office, falling upon tarnished nutcrackers and picks in a faded plush-lined box ranged behind the glass. Gordon could see the dark, moving bulk of the postmaster within. The leather mail bags, slippery in the wet atmosphere, were strapped in the rear, and Gordon was tightening the reins when he was hailed by a man running over the road. It was Simmons’ clerk.

“The old man says,” he shot between labored breaths, “to keep a watch on Buck. Buckley’s coming back with you to-morrow. He’s been down to the hospital for a spell. There ain’t liable to be anybody else on the stage this time of year.”

The horses walked swiftly, almost without guidance, over the obscured way. The stage mounted, turning over the long ascent to the crown of the east range. Gordon put out the lantern. A faint grey diluted the dark; the night sank thinly to morning, a morning overcast with sluggish clouds; the bare trees, growing slowly perceptible, dripped with moisture; a treacherous film of mud overlaid the adamantine road.

The day broke inexpressibly featureless and dreary. The stage dropped to bald, brown valleys, soggy fields and clear, hurrying streams; it rose deliberately to heights blurred in aqueous vapors. The moisture remained suspended throughout the day; the grey pall hid Stenton as he drove up to the tavern that formed his depot on the outskirts of the city.

Later, in the solitude of his room, he heard the hesitating patter of rain on the roof. He thought, stretching his weary frame on the rigorous bed, that if it turned cold through the night, the frozen road would be dangerous to-morrow.

XXII

Buckley Simmons was late in arriving from the hospital, and it was past seven before the stage departed for Greenstream. Buckley sat immediately back of Gordon Makimmon; the former’s head, muffled in a long woolen scarf, showed only his dull, unwitting gaze.

They rapidly left the dank stone streets and houses. The smoke ascending from the waterworks was no greyer than the day. The rain fell in small, chill, gusty sweeps.

Gordon Makimmon settled resolutely to the long drive; he was oblivious of the miles of sodden road stretching out behind, he was not aware of the pale, dripping, wintry landscape—he was lost in a continuous train of memories wheeling bright and distant through his mind. He was looking back upon the features of the past as he might have looked at a series of dissolving pictures, his interest in which was solely that of spectator.

They were without unity, unintelligible in the light of any concerted purpose or result. They were, however, highly pleasant, or amazingly inexplicable. For example:

His wife, Lettice, how young she was smiling at him from the sunny grass! She walked happily toward him, with her shawl about her shoulders, but she didn’t reach him; she was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch ... the day faded, she was singing a little throaty song, sewing upon a little square of white—she was gone as swiftly, as utterly, as a shadow. The shape of Meta Beggs, animated with incomprehensible gestures, took its place in the procession of his memories. She, grimacing, came alike to naught, vanished. All stopped for a moment and then disappeared, leaving no trace behind.

He mechanically arrested the horses before the isolated buildings that formed the midday halt.

Buckley Simmons, crouching low over the table, consumed his dinner with formless, guttural approbation. The place above his forehead, where he had been struck by the stone, was puckered and dark. He raised his eyes—the unquenchable hatred of Gordon Makimmon flared momentarily on his vacuous countenance like the flame of a match lit in the wind.

Once more on the road the rain stopped, the cold increased; high above the earth the masses of cloud gathered wind-herded in the south. The dripping from the trees ceased, the black branches took on a faint glitter; the distant crash of a falling limb sounded from the woods.

Gordon, doubting whether the horses’ shoes had been lately roughed, descended, but, to his surprise, found that the scoring had been properly maintained, in spite of the fact that it had not had his attention. He had little cause to swing the heavy whip—the off horse, a raw-boned animal colored yellowish-white, never ceased pulling valiantly on the traces; he assumed not only his own share of the labor but was willing to accept that of his companion, and Gordon had continually to restrain him.

The glitter spread transparently over the road; the horses dug their hoofs firmly into the frozen ruts. Suddenly a burst of sunlight enveloped the land, and the land responded with an instant, intolerable brilliancy, a blinding sheet of white radiance. Every limb, every individual twig and blade of grass, was covered with a sparkling, transparent mail; every mound of brown earth scintillated in a crisp surface of ice like chocolate confections glazed in clear sugar. The clouds dissolved; the trees, encased in crystal pipes, rose dazzling against a pale, luminous blue expanse. Gigantic swords of incandescence shifted over the mountainside; shoals of frosty sparks filled the hollows; haloes immaculate and uncompassionate hung above the hills.

Viewed from the necessity of the driver of the Stenton stage this phenomenon was highly undesirable,—the glassy road enormously increased the labor of the horses; Gordon’s vigilance might not for a minute be relaxed. The blazing sun blurred his vision, the cold crept insidiously into his bones. The stage slowly made its way into the valleys, over the ranges; and, with it, the sun made its way over valley and mountain toward the west.

At last the stage reached the foot of Buck Mountain; beyond lay the village, the end of day. The horses cautiously began the ascent, while Gordon, watching their progress, lent them the assistance of his judgment and voice. The road looped a cleared field against the mountain, on the left an icy slope fell away in a glittering tangle of underbrush. The stage turned and the opening dropped upon the right.

Gordon heard a thick, unintelligible sound from behind, and, looking about, saw Buckley Simmons clambering out over the wheel. He stopped the horses, but Buckley slipped, fell upon the road. However, he quickly scrambled erect, and walked beside the stage, over the incline. His head was completely hidden by the woollen scarf; in one hand he carried a heavy switch. The road swung about once more, and, at the turn, the fall was abrupt. Buckley Simmons stumbled across the space that separated him from the horses. And Gordon, with an exclamation of incredulous surprise, saw the other’s arm sweep up.—The switch fell viciously across the back of the yellowish-white horse.

The animal plunged back, dragging his companion against the stage. Gordon rose, lashing out with his voice and whip; the horses struggled to regain their foothold ... slipped.... He felt the seat dropping away behind him. Then, with a violent wrench, a sliding crash, horses, stage and man lurched down the incline.

XXIII

Gordon Makimmon rose to a sitting position on the glassy fall. Above him, to the right, the stage lay collapsed, its wheels broken in. Below the yellowish-white horse, upon his back, drew his legs together, kicked out convulsively, and then rolled over, lay still. From the round belly the broken end of a shaft squarely projected. The other horse was lost in a thrashing thicket below.

Gordon exclaimed, “God A’mighty!” Then the thought flashed through his mind that, extraordinarily, he had not been hurt—he had fallen away from the plunging hoofs, his heavy winter clothes had preserved him from serious bruises. His face was scratched, his teeth ached intolerably, but, beyond that....

He rose shakily to his feet. As he moved a swift, numbing pain shot from his right side, through his shoulder to his brain, where, apparently, it centered in a burning core of suffering. He choked unexpectedly on a warm, thick, salty tide welling into his throat. He said aloud, surprised, “Something’s busted.”

He swayed, but preserved himself from falling, and spat. Instantly there appeared before him on the shining ice a blot of vivid, living scarlet.

“That’s bad,” he added dully.

He must get up to the road, out of this damned mess. The stage, he, had not fallen far; the road was but a few yards above him, but the ascent, with the pain licking through him like a burning tongue, the unaccustomed, disconcerting choking in his throat, was incredibly toilsome, long.

Buckley Simmons was standing on the road with a lowered, vacant countenance, a face as empty of content, of the trace of any purpose, as a washed slate.

“You oughtn’t to have done that, Buck,” Gordon told him impotently; “you ought never to have done a thing like that. Why, just see....” Gordon Makimmon’s voice was tremulous, his brain blurred from shock. “You went and killed that off horse, and a man never hitched a better. There’s the mail, too; however it’ll get to Greenstream on contract to-night I don’t know. That was the hell of a thing to go and do!... off horse ... willing—”

The sky flamed in a transcendent glory of aureate light; the molten gold poured in streams over the land, dripped from the still branches. The crashing of falling limbs sounded everywhere.

They were, Gordon knew, not half way up Buck Mountain. There were no dwellings between them and Greenstream village, no houses immediately at their back. The road wound up before them toward the pure splendor of sheer space. The cold steadily increased. Gordon’s jaw chattered, and he saw that Buckley’s face was pinched and blue.

“Got to move,” Gordon articulated; “freeze out here.” He lifted his feet, stamped them on the hard earth, while the pain leaped and flamed in his side. He labored up the ascent, but Buckley Simmons remained where he was standing. I’ll let him stay, Gordon decided, he can freeze to death and welcome, no loss ... after a thing like that. He moved forward once more, but once more stopped.

“C’m on,” he called impatiently; “you’ll take no good here.” He retraced his steps, and roughly grasped the other’s arm, urging him forward. Buckley Simmons whimpered, but obeyed the pressure.

The long, toilsome course began, a trail of frequent scarlet patches marking their way. Buckley lagged behind, shaking with exhaustion and chill, but Gordon commanded him on; he pulled him over deep ruts, cursed him into renewed energy. This dangerously delayed their progress.

“I got a good mind to leave you,” Gordon told him; “something’s busted and I want to make the village soon’s I can; and here you drag and hang back. You did it all, too. C’m on, you dam’ fool: I could get along twice as smart without you.”

It seemed to Gordon Makimmon that, as he walked, the hurt within him was consuming flesh and bone; it was eating away his brain. The thick, salty taste persisted in his mouth, nauseating him.

The light faded swiftly to a mysterious violet glimmer in the sky, on the ground, a cold phosphorescence that seemed to emanate from the ice.

Buckley Simmons could scarcely proceed; he fell, and Gordon drew him sharply to his feet. Finally Gordon put an arm about his shoulder, steadying him, forcing him on. He must hurry, he realized, while the other held him back, delayed the assistance that Gordon so desperately needed.

“I tell you,” he repeated querulously, “I got to get along; something’s broke inside. I’ll leave you,” he threatened; “I’ll let you sit right here and go cold.” It was an empty threat; he struggled on, giving Buckley his support, his determination, sharing the ebbing store of his strength.

As they neared the top of the mountain a flood of light colder than the ice poured from behind. The moon had risen, transforming the world into a crystal miracle.... Far below them was the Greenstream valley, the village. They struggled forward, an uncouth, slipping bulk, under the soaring, dead planet. Gleams of light shot like quick-silver about their feet, quivered in the clear gloom like trails of pale fire igniting lakes of argent flame. It was magnificent and cruel, a superb fantasy rippling over treacherous rocks, rock-like earth.

“Y’ dam’ idiot,” Gordon mumbled, “if I die out here where’ll y’ be then? I’d like to know that.... Don’t sit down on me again, I don’t know’s I could get you up, don’t b’lieve I could. Like as not we won’t make her. That was an awful good horse. I’m under contract to—to ... government.”

Buckley Simmons sank to his knees: once more Gordon kicked him erect. He spat and spat, constantly growing weaker. “That’s an awful lot of blood for a man to lose,” he complained.

Suddenly he saw upon the right the lighted square of a window.

“Why!” he exclaimed weakly, “here’s the valley.”

He pushed Buckley toward the door, and there was an answering stir within ... voices.

XXIV

An overwhelming desire possessed Gordon Makimmon to go home. He forgot the pressing necessity for assistance, the searing hurt within ... he must go home. He stumbled forward, turning into an aside that led directly behind Dr. Pelliter’s drug store to the road above the Makimmon dwelling. He moved blindly, instinctively, following the way bitten beneath his consciousness by a lifetime of usage.

The house was dark, but it was hardly darker than Gordon’s brain. He climbed the steps to the porch; his hands fumbled among the keys in his pocket.

Feet tramped across the creaking boards, approaching him; a palm fell upon his shoulder; a crisp voice rang out uncomprehended at his ear. It said:

“I’d knocked on all the doors, and was just going. I wanted to see you at once—”

Gordon felt over the door in search of the place for the key.

“I say I wanted to see you,” the voice persisted; “it’s Edgar Crandall. You’ll take pleasure from what I’ve got to tell.”

The key slipped into its place and the bolt shot back.... Well, he was home. No other thought, no other consciousness, lingered in his mind; even the pain, the unsupportable white core of suffering in his brain, was dulled. He placed his foot upon the threshold, but the hand upon his shoulder arrested him:

“Greenstream’s going to have a bank,” the voice triumphantly declared; “it’s settled—part outside capital, part guaranteed right here. Paper shaving, robbery, finished ... lawful rate ... chance—”

It was no more to Gordon Makimmon than the crackling of the forest branches, no more than an inexplicable hindrance to a desired consummation.

“If it hadn’t been for you, what you did for me ... others ... new courage, example of bigness—Why! what’s the matter with you, Makimmon? That’s blood.”

Gordon made a tremendous effort of will, of grim concentration. He freed himself from the detaining hand. “Moment,” he pronounced. The single word was expelled as dryly, as lifelessly, as a projectile, from a throat insensate as the barrel of a gun. He vanished into the bitterly cold house.

The bare floors echoed to his plodding footsteps as he entered the bedroom beyond the dismantled chamber of the safe. A flickering desire to see led him to where, on the bureau, a lamp had been left. The chimney fell with a crash of splintering glass upon the floor, a match flared in his stiff fingers, and the unprotected wick burned with a choking, spectral blue light.

He saw, gazing at him from the black depths of the mirror above the bureau, a haggard face drained of all life, of all blood, with deep inky pools upon the eyes. A sudden emotion stirred in the chill immobility creeping upward through him.

“Lettice!” he cried in a voice as flat as a spent echo; “Lettice!”

He stumbled back, sinking.

Edgar Crandall found him kneeling at the bed, his arms outflung across the counterpane, his head bowed between, with a blackening stain beneath his clay-cold lips, beneath his face scarred with immeasurable suffering, fixed in a last surprise.