A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. ·007 was an eight-wheeled ‘American’ loco, slightly different from others of his type, and as he stood he was worth ten thousand dollars on the Company’s books. But if you had bought him at his own valuation, after half an hour’s waiting in the darkish, echoing round-house, you would have saved exactly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents. A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cowcatcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting.

‘Where did this thing blow in from?’ he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam.

‘It’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,’ was the answer, ‘without lookin’ after your back-numbers. ‘Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.’

·007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.

Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.

‘Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?’

·007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.

‘We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘That—er—peanut-stand’s old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.’

‘He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoken at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?’ said the switching-loco.

‘You ought to be in the yard, Pony,’ said the Mogul, severely. ‘We’re all long-haulers here.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the little fellow replied. ‘You’ll know more ’fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there—oh, Christmas!’

‘I’ve trouble enough in my own division,’ said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlour-car. They’ve hitched her back of all, and she hauls worse’n a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off some day sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!’

‘They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?’ said Pony. ‘Thought so. Commuters and truck-waggons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled——’

‘Haul! You?’ said the Mogul contemptuously. ‘It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—’ he paused a little to let the words sink in—‘I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.’

‘Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,’ began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.

‘No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,’ Pony interrupted.

‘Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Pony; but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brake-men fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’ ’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.’

‘Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?’ said a curious, husky voice from a corner.

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‘Who’s that?’ ·007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.

‘Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?’

‘I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.’ The Compound seemed to be talking from halfway up her smoke-stack.

‘Sure,’ said the irreverent Pony, under his breath. ‘They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.’

‘But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your outrecuidance——’

‘Outer which?’ said the Mogul freight.

‘Simple cylinders are good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps I should have, said faroucherie,’ hissed the Compound.

‘I don’t hold with any make of papier-mâché wheel,’ the Mogul insisted.

The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.

‘Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?’ said Pony. ‘That’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.’

‘If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,’ the New Jersey commuter snapped. ‘Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hot-box, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and whirled her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! That’s what Comanche is.’

Then ·007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?

‘Paint my bell sky blue!’ said Pony, the switcher. ‘Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hardwood skirtin’-board round my wheels! Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled “American” don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flat-car!’

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ·007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

‘A hot-box,’ began the Compound, picking and choosing the words as though they were coal, ‘a hot-box is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!’

‘Hot-box!’ said the Jersey Suburban. ‘It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack short-haulers, as a rule.’

‘We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.’

‘Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,’ said the Mogul. ‘You think because you use worse grades than our road ’ud allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you . . . Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.’

He rolled forward majestically to the turntable, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. ‘But as for you, you pea-green swivellin’ coffee-pot [this to ·007], you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! S’long.’

‘Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,’ said Pony. ‘There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn you own smoke. ’Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.’

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too—first the Compound, then the Consolidation, then ·007.

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Now, deep down in his fire-box, ·007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ·007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled flyers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:

‘Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?’ And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying ‘Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?’

The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ·007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ·007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice-water on the tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flat-cars with truck-waggons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked and chalked. Men—hot and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.

He was pushed forward a foot at a time, whirled backwards, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchants’ Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and ·007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.

‘’Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,’ said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. ‘But you’re cumin’ on pretty fair. Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.’

Pony was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp ‘Whutt!’ A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit, it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.

‘My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,’ he said, returning. ‘Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.’

·007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.

‘No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night—Sundays and week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.’ He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend—an M.T.K. box-car.

‘Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate. Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?’

‘Wish I knew,’ whimpered Homeless Kate. ‘I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick—I’m just achin’ homesick.’

‘Try Chicago, Katie,’ said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting; ‘I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.’

‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,’ he explained to ·007. ‘I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ’fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”

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Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.

‘I’m goin’ home,’ he said proudly.

‘Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ’em in half, Dutchy! ‘cried Pony. But it was ·007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferryboat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.

After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.

‘That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,’ said the small engine reverently. ‘But he don’t care. He lets ’em cuss. He’s the Czar—King—Boss! He says “Please,” and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ to-day’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.’

A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages; flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.

‘Ki-yah!’ shrieked little Pony. ‘Ain’t it great?’

A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose.

The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight-receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.

‘Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L.Y.S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten west-bound. All straight except the two last. Cut ’em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.’ The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lawd Gawd made them all!

·007 moved the cars out and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life.

‘Curious, ain’t it?’ said Pony, puffing, on the next track. ‘You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste and not know what we’d done; but—up there—with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way . . .’

‘I know,’ said ·007. ‘Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.’

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switch-tower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul ·007’s string to some faraway northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B.&A.

‘You’re young; you’re young,’ she coughed. ‘You don’t realise your responsibilities.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Pony sharply; ‘but he don’t lie down under ’em.’ Then, with a sidespurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting ‘There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she carries on as if ’twere a hundred thousand—same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track. . . . She’s stuck on a dead-centre again—bein’ specially designed not to.’

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

‘Now I’ll show you something worth,’ said Pony. ‘When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is——’

‘Boom!’ went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away ·007 heard a full vibrating ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

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With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!

The last defiant ‘yah! yah!’ was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depôt; but ·007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road—the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

‘Ooh!’ said ·007.

‘Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the roundhouse just as democratic as I would. And I—cuss—my wheel-base!—I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.’

·007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to ·007’s engineer: ‘Got any steam?’

‘ ’Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,’ said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

‘Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew’ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.’

‘Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,’ said Pony, as ·007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools—a flat-car and a derrick behind it. ‘Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ saw-edged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill and five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!’

Before he knew well what had happened, ·007 was flying up the track into the dumb dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse, and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He swept down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly-laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed; and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,
And the Cannon-ball go hang,
When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,
And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tara-ra!)
’Way for the Breakdown Gang!

‘Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.’

‘Sniff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint. That’s——’

A burning pain shot through ·007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

‘This,’ said ·007, as he flew, ‘is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!’

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‘Het a bit, ain’t she?’ the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

‘She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. ‘Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,’ said the engineer, his hand on the brake-lever. ‘I’ve seen men snapped off——’

But the crew fled laughing. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ·007 found his drivers pinned firm.

‘Now it’s come!’ said ·007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

‘That must be the emergency-stop Pony guyed me about,’ he gasped, as soon as he could think. ‘Hot-box—emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.’

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call ·007 his ‘Arab steed,’ nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad-worded ·007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

‘’T weren’t even a decent-sized hog,’ he said. ‘’T were a shote.’

‘Dangerousest beasts they are,’ said one of the crew. ‘Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?’

‘Don’t they?’ roared Evans, who was a red headed Welshman. ‘You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an’ look what he’s done!’

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with. a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking, ‘’Twas his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!’ Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But ·007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and ·007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while ·007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men’ were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and ·007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

‘’T weren’t even a hog,’ he repeated dolefully; ‘’t were a shote; and you—you of all of ’em—had to help me on.’

‘But how in the whole long road did it happen?’ asked ·007, sizzling with curiosity.

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‘Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more’n squealed once ’fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ “Sally, Sally Waters” in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lying’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.’

‘Umm!’ said ·007. ‘What d’ you reckon you weigh?’

‘Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.’

‘And the shote?’

‘Eighty. Call him a hundred pounds at the outside. He’s worth about four’n a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve——’ and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,’ said ·007, soothingly; ‘an’—an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.’

‘If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water, an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared: but to be ditched by a shote—an’ you to help me out—in a corn-field—an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse! . . . Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine. They’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.’

And ·007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

‘Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain’t ye?’ said the irrepressible Pony, who had just come off duty. ‘Well, I must say you look it. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o’ your hair, an’ git ’em to play the hose on you.’

‘Leave him alone, Pony,’ said ·007 severely, as he was swung on the turn-table, ’or I’ll——’

‘’Didn’t know the old granger was any special friend o’ yours, kid. He wasn’t over civil to you last time I saw him.’

‘I know it; but I’ve seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off me. I’m not going to guy any one as long as I steam—not when they’re new to the business an’ anxious to learn. And I’m not goin’ to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin’-ears. ’Twas a little bit of a shote—not a hog—just a shote, Pony—no bigger’n a lump of anthracite—I saw it—that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess.’

‘Found that out already, have you? Well, that’s a good beginnin’.’ It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate-glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day’s fly.

‘Let me make you two gen’lemen acquainted,’ said Pony. ‘This is our Purple Emperor, kid, whom you were admirin’ and, I may say, envyin’ last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him, but, so far as a serving brother can, I’ll answer for him.’

‘’Happy to meet you,’ said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. ‘I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin’. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as Head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce No. ·007 a full and accepted Brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank, and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the Degree of Superior Flier, it bein’ well known and credibly reported to me that our Brother has covered forty-one miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself will communicate to you the ‘Song and Signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognised in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly-entered Brother among Locomotives!’

Now, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth, that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor, tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a faraway sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then, a hundred feet to each word:

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah! Yah
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter!  Yah! Yah! Yah
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah!

That is ·007 covering his one hundred and fifty six miles in two hundred and twenty-one minutes.

page 1 of 6

DAN had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome.

From lordly Volaterrae,
Where scowls the far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the ‘Godlike Kings,’ and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants.’

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for ‘Volaterrae’ is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook’s Hill lay below her, and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge. The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.

Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully:

‘Verbenna down to Ostia
Hath wasted all the plain;
Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
And the stout guards are slain.’

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture. Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs.

‘Now welcome—welcome, Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult—

‘Now welcome to thy home!
Why dost thou stay, and turn away?
Here lies the road to Rome.’

She fired into the face of the lull, to wake up the cowardly wind, and heard a grunt from behind a thorn in the pasture.

‘Oh, my Winkie!’ she said aloud, and that was something she had picked up from Dan. ‘I b’lieve I’ve tickled up a Gleason cow.’

‘You little painted beast!’ a voice cried. ‘I’ll teach you to sling your masters!’

She looked down most cautiously, and saw a young man covered with hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom. But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind. She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder-plates.

‘What does the Faun mean,’ he said, half aloud to himself, ‘by telling me the Painted People have changed?’ He caught sight of Una’s yellow head. ‘Have you seen a painted lead-slinger?’ he called.

‘No-o,’ said Una. ‘But if you’ve seen a bullet—’

‘Seen?’ cried the man. ‘It passed within a hair’s-breadth of my ear.’

‘Well, that was me. I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?’ He smiled.

‘Not if you mean Puck. I thought you were a Gleason cow. I—I didn’t know you were a—a—— What are you?’

He laughed outright, showing a set of splendid teeth. His face and eyes were dark, and his eyebrows met above his big nose in one bushy black bar.

‘They call me Parnesius. I have been a Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion—the Ulpia Victrix. Did you sling that bullet?’

‘I did. I was using Dan’s catapult,’ said Una.

‘Catapults!’ said he. ‘I ought to know something about them. Show me!’

He leaped the rough fence with a rattle of spear, shield, and armour, and hoisted himself into Volaterrae as quickly as a shadow.

‘A sling on a forked stick. I understand!’ he cried, and pulled at the elastic. ‘But what wonderful beast yields this stretching leather?’

‘It’s laccy—elastic. You put the bullet into that loop, and then you pull hard.’

The man pulled, and hit himself square on his thumb-nail.

‘Each to his own weapon,’ he said, gravely, handing it back. ‘I am better with the bigger machine, little maiden. But it’s a pretty toy. A wolf would laugh at it. Aren’t you afraid of wolves?’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

‘Never believe it! A wolf’s like a Winged Hat. He comes when he isn’t expected. Don’t they hunt wolves here?’

‘We don’t hunt,’ said Una, remembering what she had heard from grown-ups. ‘We preserve—pheasants. Do you know them?’

page 2

‘I ought to,’ said the young man, smiling again, and he imitated the cry of the cock-pheasant so perfectly that a bird answered out of the wood.

‘What a big painted clucking fool is a pheasant,’ he said. ‘Just like some Romans!’

‘But you’re a Roman yourself, aren’t you?’ said Una.

‘Ye-es and no. I’m one of a good few thousands who have never seen Rome except in a picture. My people have lived at Vectis for generations. Vectis. That island West yonder that you can see from so far in clear weather.’

‘Do you mean the Isle of Wight? It lifts up just before rain, and you see it from the Downs.’

‘Very likely. Our Villa’s on the South edge of the Island, by the Broken Cliffs. Most of it is three hundred years old, but the cow-stables, where our first ancestor lived, must be a hundred years older. Oh, quite that, because the founder of our family had his land given him by Agricola at the Settlement. It’s not a bad little place for its size. In spring-time violets grow down to the very beach. I’ve gathered sea-weeds for myself and violets for my Mother many a time with our old nurse.’

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

‘No, a Numidian. Gods be good to her! A dear, fat, brown thing with a tongue like a cowbell. She was a free woman. By the way, are you free, maiden?’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Una. ‘At least, till tea-time; and in summer our governess doesn’t say much if we’re late.’

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

‘I see,’ said he. ‘That accounts for your being in the wood. We hid among the cliffs.’

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

‘Did we not? A Greek, too. She had a way of clutching her dress when she hunted us among the gorse-bushes that made us laugh. Then she’d say she’d get us whipped. She never did, though, bless her! Aglaia was a thorough sportswoman, for all her learning.’

‘But what lessons did you do—when—when you were little?’

‘Ancient history, the Classics, arithmetic, and so on,’ he answered. ‘My sister and I were thickheads, but my two brothers (I’m the middle one) liked those things, and, of course, Mother was clever enough for any six. She was nearly as tall as I am, and she looked like the new statue on the Western Road—the Demeter of the Baskets, you know. And funny! Roma Dea ! How Mother could make us laugh!’

‘What at?’

‘Little jokes and sayings that every family has. Don’t you know?’

‘I know we have, but I didn’t know other people had them too,’ said Una. ‘Tell me about all your family, please.’

‘Good families are very much alike. Mother would sit spinning of evenings while Aglaia read in her corner, and Father did accounts, and we four romped about the passages. When our noise grew too loud the Pater would say, “Less tumult! Less tumult! Have you never heard of a Father’s right over his children? He can slay them, my loves—slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!” Then Mother would prim up her dear mouth over the wheel and answer: “H’m! I’m afraid there can’t be much of the Roman Father about you!” Then the Pater would roll up his accounts, and say, “I’ll show you!” and then—then, he’d be worse than any of us!’

‘Fathers can—if they like,’ said Una, her eyes dancing.

‘Didn’t I say all good families are very much the same?’

‘What did you do in summer?’ said Una. ‘Play about, like us?’

‘Yes, and we visited our friends. There are no wolves in Vectis. We had many friends, and as many ponies as we wished.’

‘It must have been lovely,’ said Una. ‘I hope it lasted for ever.’

‘Not quite, little maid. When I was about sixteen or seventeen, the Father felt gouty, and we all went to the Waters.’

‘What waters?’

‘At Aquae Sulis. Every one goes there. You ought to get your Father to take you some day.’

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

The young man looked astonished for a moment. ‘Aquae Sulis,’ he repeated. ‘The best baths in Britain. Just as good, I’m told, as Rome. All the old gluttons sit in hot water, and talk scandal and politics. And the Generals come through the streets with their guards behind them; and the magistrates come in their chairs with their stiff guards behind them; and you meet fortune-tellers, and goldsmiths, and merchants, and philosophers, and feather-sellers, and ultra-Roman Britons, and ultra-British Romans, and tame tribesmen pretending to be civilised, and Jew lecturers, and—oh, everybody interesting. We young people, of course, took no interest in politics. We had not the gout: there were many of our age like us. We did not find life sad.

‘But while we were enjoying ourselves without thinking, my sister met the son of a magistrate in the west—and a year afterwards she was married to him. My young brother, who was always interested in plants and roots, met the First Doctor of a Legion from the City of the Legions, and he decided that he would be an Army doctor. I do not think it is a profession for a well-born man, but then—I’m not my brother. He went to Rome to study medicine, and now he’s First Doctor of a Legion in Egypt—at Antinoe, I think, but I have not heard from him for some time.

‘My eldest brother came across a Greek philosopher, and told my Father that he intended to settle down on the estate as a farmer and a philosopher. You see’—the young man’s eyes twinkled—’his philosopher was a long-haired one!’

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

page 3

‘Not all. She was very pretty. I don’t blame him. Nothing could have suited me better than my eldest brother doing this, for I was only too keen to join the Army. I had always feared I should have to stay at home and look after the estate while my brother took this.’

He rapped on his great glistening shield that never seemed to be in his way.

‘So we were well contented—we young people—and we rode back to Clausentum along the Wood Road very quietly. But when we reached home, Aglaia, our governess, saw what had come to us. I remember her at the door, the torch over her head, watching us climb the cliff path from the boat. “Aie! Aie!” she said. “Children you went away. Men and a woman you return!” Then she kissed Mother, and Mother wept. Thus our visit to the Waters settled our fates for each of us, Maiden.’

He rose to his feet and listened, leaning on the shield-rim.

‘I think that’s Dan—my brother,’ said Una.

‘Yes; and the Faun is with him,’ he replied, as Dan with Puck stumbled through the copse.

‘We should have come sooner,’ Puck called, ‘but the beauties of your native tongue, O Parnesius, have enthralled this young citizen.’

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

‘Dan said the plural of “dominus” was “dominoes,” and when Miss Blake said it wasn’t he said he supposed it was “backgammon,” and so he had to write it out twice—for cheek, you know.’

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

‘I’ve run nearly all the way,’ he gasped, ‘and then Puck met me. How do you do, Sir?’

‘I am in good health,’ Parnesius answered. ‘See! I have tried to bend the bow of Ulysses, but——’ He held up his thumb.

‘I’m sorry. You must have pulled off too soon,’ said Dan. ‘But Puck said you were telling Una a story.’

‘Continue, O Parnesius,’ said Puck, who had perched himself on a dead branch above them. ‘I will be chorus. Has he puzzled you much, Una?’

‘Not a bit, except—I didn’t know where Ak—Ak something was,’ she answered.

‘Oh, Aquae Sulis. That’s Bath, where the buns come from. Let the hero tell his own tale.’

Parnesius pretended to thrust his spear at Puck’s legs, but Puck reached down, caught at the horse-tail plume, and pulled off the tall helmet.

‘Thanks, jester,’ said Parnesius, shaking his curly dark head. ‘That is cooler. Now hang it up for me . . . .

‘I was telling your sister how I joined the Army,’ he said to Dan.

‘Did you have to pass an Exam?’ Dan asked, eagerly.

‘No. I went to my Father, and said I should like to enter the Dacian Horse (I had seen some at Aquae Sulis); but he said I had better begin service in a regular Legion from Rome. Now, like many of our youngsters, I was not too fond of anything Roman. The Roman-born officers and magistrates looked down on us British-born as though we were barbarians. I told my Father so.

‘“I know they do,” he said; “but remember, after all, we are the people of the Old Stock, and our duty is to the Empire.”

‘“To which Empire?” I asked. “We split the Eagle before I was born.”

‘“What thieves’ talk is that?” said my Father. He hated slang.

‘“Well, Sir,” I said, “we’ve one Emperor in Rome, and I don’t know how many Emperors the outlying Provinces have set up from time to time. Which am I to follow?”

‘“Gratian,” said he. “At least he’s a sportsman.”

‘“He’s all that,” I said. “Hasn’t he turned himself into a raw-beef-eating Scythian?”

‘“Where did you hear of it?” said the Pater.

‘“At Aquae Sulis,” I said. It was perfectly true. This precious Emperor Gratian of ours had a bodyguard of fur-cloaked Scythians, and he was so crazy about them that he dressed like them. In Rome of all places in the world! It was as bad as if my own Father had painted himself blue!

‘“No matter for the clothes,” said the Pater. “They are only the fringe of the trouble. It began before your time or mine. Rome has forsaken her Gods, and must be punished. The great war with the Painted People broke out in the very year the temples of our Gods were destroyed. We beat the Painted People in the very year our temples were rebuilt. Go back further still.” . . . He went back to the time of Diocletian; and to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had become a little large-minded.

‘I knew nothing about it. Aglaia never taught us the history of our own country. She was so full of her ancient Greeks.

‘“There is no hope for Rome,’ said the Pater, at last. ‘She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain. To do that, we must keep the Painted People back. Therefore, I tell you, Parnesius, as a Father, that if your heart is set on service, your place is among men on the Wall—and not with women among the cities.”’

‘What Wall?’ asked Dan and Una at once.

‘Father meant the one we call Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll tell you about it later. It was built long ago, across North Britain, to keep out the Painted People—Picts you call them. Father had fought in the great Pict War that lasted more than twenty years, and he knew what fighting meant. Theodosius, one of our great Generals, had chased the little beasts back far into the North before I was born: down at Vectis of course we never troubled our heads about them. But when my Father spoke as he did, I kissed his hand, and waited for orders. We British-born Romans know what is due to our parents.’

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‘If I kissed my Father’s hand, he’d laugh,’ said Dan.

‘Customs change; but if you do not obey your father, the Gods remember it. You may be quite sure of that.

‘After our talk, seeing I was in earnest, the Pater sent me over to Clausentum to learn my foot-drill in a barrack full of foreign auxiliaries—as unwashed and unshaved a mob of mixed barbarians as ever scrubbed a breastplate. It was your stick in their stomachs and your shield in their faces to push them into any sort of formation. When I had learned my work the Instructor gave me a handful—and they were a handful!—of Gauls and Iberians to polish up till they were sent to their stations up-country. I did my best, and one night a villa in the suburbs caught fire, and I had my handful out and at work before any of the other troops. I noticed a quiet-looking man on the lawn, leaning on a stick. He watched us passing buckets from the pond; and at last he said to me: “Who are you?”

‘“A probationer, waiting for a command,” I answered. I didn’t know who he was from Deucalion!’

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

‘“Yes, if you were born in Spain,” I said, for he neighed his words like an Iberian mule.

‘“And what might you call yourself when you are at home?” he said, laughing.

‘“That depends,” I answered; “sometimes one thing and sometimes another. But now I’m busy.”

‘He said no more till we had saved the family gods (they were respectable householders), and then he grunted across the laurels: “Listen, young sometimes-one-thing-and-sometimes-another. In future call yourself Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth, the Ulpia Victrix. That will help me to remember you. Your Father and a few other people call me Maximus.”

‘He tossed me the polished stick he was leaning on, and went away. You might have knocked me down with it!’

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

‘Maximus himself, our great General! The General of Britain who had been Theodosius’s right hand in the Pict War! Not only had he given me my Centurion’s stick direct, but three steps in a good Legion as well! A new man generally begins in the Tenth Cohort of his Legion, and works up.’

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

‘Very. I thought Maximus had chosen me for my good looks and fine style in marching, but, when I went home, the Pater told me he had served under Maximus in the great Pict War, and had asked him to befriend me.’

‘A child you were!’ said Puck, from above.

‘I was,’ said Parnesius. ‘Don’t begrudge it me, Faun. Afterwards—the Gods know I put aside the games!’ And Puck nodded, brown chin on brown hand, his big eyes still.

‘The night before I left we sacrificed to our ancestors—the usual little Home Sacrifice—but I never prayed so earnestly to all the Good Shades, and then I went with my Father by boat to Regnum, and across the chalk eastwards to Anderida yonder.’

‘Regnum? Anderida?’ The children turned their faces to Puck.

‘Regnum’s Chichester,’ he said, pointing towards Cherry Clack, and—he threw his arm South behind him—‘Anderida’s Pevensey.’

‘Pevensey again!’ said Dan. ‘Where Weland landed?’

‘Weland and a few others,’ said Puck. ‘Pevensey isn’t young—even compared to me!’

‘The headquarters of the Thirtieth lay at Anderida in summer, but my own Cohort, the Seventh, was on the Wall up North. Maximus was inspecting Auxiliaries—the Abulci, I think—at Anderida, and we stayed with him, for he and my Father were very old friends. I was only there ten days when I was ordered to go up with thirty men to my Cohort.’ He laughed merrily. ‘A man never forgets his first march. I was happier than any Emperor when I led my handful through the North Gate of the Camp, and we saluted the guard and the Altar of Victory there.’

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

Parnesius smiled, and stood up, flashing in his armour.

‘So!’ said he; and he moved slowly through the beautiful movements of the Roman Salute, that ends with a hollow clang of the shield coming into its place between the shoulders.

‘Hai!’ said Puck. ‘That sets one thinking!’

‘We went out fully armed,’ said Parnesius, sitting down; ‘but as soon as the road entered the Great Forest, my men expected the pack-horses to hang their shields on. “No!” I said; “you can dress like women in Anderida, but while you’re with me you will carry your own weapons and armour.”

‘“But it’s hot,” said one of them, “and we haven’t a doctor. Suppose we get sunstroke, or a fever?”

‘“Then die,” I said, “and a good riddance to Rome! Up shield—up spears, and tighten your foot-wear!”

‘“Don’t think yourself Emperor of Britain already,” a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum had never treated me so.

‘Then, quietly as a cloud, Maximus rode out of the fern (my Father behind him), and reined up across the road. He wore the Purple, as though he were already Emperor; his leggings were of white buckskin laced with gold.

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

‘He said nothing for some time, only looked, with his eyes puckered. Then he crooked his forefinger, and my men walked—crawled, I mean—to one side.

page 5

‘“Stand in the sun, children,” he said, and they formed up on the hard road.

‘“What would you have done,” he said to me, “if I had not been here?”

‘“I should have killed that man,” I answered.

‘“Kill him now,” he said. “He will not move a limb.”

‘“No,” I said. “You’ve taken my men out of my command. I should only be your butcher if I killed him now.” Do you see what I meant?’ Parnesius turned to Dan.

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair, somehow.’

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

But Maximus frowned. “You’ll never be an Emperor,” he said. “Not even a General will you be.”

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

‘“I came here to see the last of you,” he said.

‘“You have seen it,” said Maximus. “I shall never need your son any more. He will live and he will die an officer of a Legion—and he might have been Prefect of one of my Provinces. Now eat and drink with us,” he said. “Your men will wait till you have finished.”

‘My miserable thirty stood like wine-skins glistening in the hot sun, and Maximus led us to where his people had set a meal. Himself he mixed the wine.

‘“A year from now,” he said, “you will remember that you have sat with the Emperor of Britain—and Gaul.”

‘“Yes,” said the Pater, “you can drive two mules—Gaul and Britain.”

‘“Five years hence you will remember that you have drunk”—he passed me the cup and there was blue borage in it—“with the Emperor of Rome!”

‘“No; you can’t drive three mules; they will tear you in pieces,” said my Father.

‘“And you on the Wall, among the heather, will weep because your notion of justice was more to you than the favour of the Emperor of Rome.”

‘I sat quite still. One does not answer a General who wears the Purple.

‘“I am not angry with you,” he went on; “I owe too much to your Father——”

‘“You owe me nothing but advice that you never took,” said the Pater.

‘“——to be unjust to any of your family. Indeed, I say you may make a good Tribune, but, so far as I am concerned, on the Wall you will live, and on the Wall you will die,” said Maximus.

‘“Very like,” said my Father. “But we shall have the Picts and their friends breaking through before long. You cannot move all troops out of Britain to make you Emperor, and expect the North to sit quiet.”

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

‘“Follow it, then,” said my Father, pulling up a fern root; “and die as Theodosius died.”

‘“Ah!” said Maximus. “My old General was killed because he served the Empire too well. I may be killed, but not for that reason,” and he smiled a little pale grey smile that made my blood run cold.

‘“Then I had better follow my destiny,” I said, “and take my men to the Wall.”

‘He looked at me a long time, and bowed his head slanting like a Spaniard. “Follow it, boy,” he said. That was all. I was only too glad to get away, though I had many messages for home. I found my men standing as they had been put—they had not even shifted their feet in the dust, and off I marched, still feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and’—he turned about and looked at Pook’s Hill below him—‘then I halted yonder.’ He pointed to the broken, bracken covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind old Hobden’s cottage.

‘There? Why, that’s only the old Forge where they made iron once,’ said Dan.

‘Very good stuff it was too,’ said Parnesius, calmly. ‘We mended three shoulder-straps here and had a spear-head riveted. The Forge was rented from the Government by a one-eyed smith from Carthage. I remember we called him Cyclops. He sold me a beaver-skin rug for my sister’s room.’

‘But it couldn’t have been here,’ Dan insisted.

‘But it was! From the Altar of Victory at Anderida to the First Forge in the Forest here is twelve miles seven hundred paces. It is all in the Road Book. A man doesn’t forget his first march. I think I could tell you every station between this and——’ He leaned forward, but his eye was caught by the setting sun.

It had come down to the top of Cherry Clack Hill, and the light poured in between the tree trunks so that you could see red and gold and black deep into the heart of Far Wood; and Parnesius in his armour shone as though he had been afire.

‘Wait,’ he said, lifting a hand, and the sunlight jinked on his glass bracelet. ‘Wait! I pray to Mithras!’

He rose and stretched his arms westward, with deep, splendid-sounding words.

Then Puck began to sing too, in a voice like bells tolling, and as he sang he slipped from Volaterrae to the ground, and beckoned the children to follow. They obeyed; it seemed as though the voices were pushing them along; and through the goldy-brown light on the beech leaves they walked, while Puck between them chanted something like this:

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‘Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria
Cujus prosperitas est transitoria?
Tam cito labitur ejus potentia
Quam vasa figuli quæ sunt fragilia.’

They found themselves at the little locked gates of the wood.

‘Quo Cæsar abiit celsus imperio?
Vel Dives splendidus totus in prandio?
Dic ubi Tullius——’

Still singing, he took Dan’s hand and wheeled him round to face Una as she came out of the gate. It shut behind her, at the same time as Puck threw the memory-magicking Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves over their heads.

‘Well, you are jolly late,’ said Una. ‘Couldn’t you get away before?’

‘I did,’ said Dan. ‘I got away in lots of time, but—but I didn’t know it was so late. Where’ve you been?’

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dan. ‘It was all that beastly Latin.’

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THERE had been rather a long sitting at Lodge ‘Faith and Works,’ 5837 E.C., that warm April night. Three initiations and two raisings, each conducted with the spaciousness and particularity that our Lodge prides itself upon, made the Brethren a little silent, and the strains of certain music had not yet lifted from them.‘There are two pieces that ought to be barred for ever,’ said a Brother as we were sitting down to the ‘banquet.’ ‘“Last Post” is the other.’‘I can just stand “Last Post.” It’s “Tipperary” breaks me,’ another replied. ‘But I expect every one carries his own firing-irons inside him.’

I turned to look. It was a sponsor for one of our newly raised Brethren—a fat man with a fish-like and vacant face, but evidently prosperous. We introduced ourselves as we took our places. His name was Bevin, and he had a chicken farm near Chalfont St. Giles, whence he supplied, on yearly contract, two or three high-class London hotels. He was also, he said, on the edge of launching out into herb-growing.

‘There’s a demand for herbs,’ said he; ‘but it all depends upon your connections with the wholesale dealers. We ain’t systematic enough. The French do it much better, especially in those mountains on the Swiss an’ Italian sides. They use more herbal remedies than we do. Our patent-medicine business has killed that with us. But there’s a demand still, if your connections are sound. I’m going in for it.’

A large, well-groomed Brother across the table (his name was Pole, and he seemed some sort of professional man) struck in with a detailed account of a hollow behind a destroyed village near Thiepval, where, for no ascertainable reason, a certain rather scarce herb had sprung up by the acre, he said, out of the overturned earth.

‘Only you’ve got to poke among the weeds to find it, and there’s any quantity of bombs an’ stuff knockin’ about there still. They haven’t cleaned it up yet.’

‘Last time I saw the place,’ said Bevin, ‘I thought it ’ud be that way till Judgment Day. You know how it lay in that dip under that beet-factory. I saw it bombed up level in two days—into brick-dust mainly. They were huntin’ for St. Firmin Dump.’ He took a sandwich and munched slowly, wiping his face, for the night was close.

‘Ye-es,’ said Pole. ‘The trouble is there hasn’t been any judgment taken or executed. That’s why the world is where it is now. We didn’t need anything but justice—afterwards. Not gettin’ that, the bottom fell out of things, naturally.’

‘That’s how I look at it too,’ Bevin replied. ‘We didn’t want all that talk afterwards—we only wanted justice. What I say is, there must be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.’

A thin, dark brother on my left, who had been attending to a cold pork pie (there are no pork pies to equal ours, which are home-made), suddenly lifted his long head, in which a pale blue glass eye swivelled insanely.

‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘My motto is “Never again.” Ne-ver again for me.’

‘Same here—till next time,’ said Pole, across the table. ‘You’re from Sydney, ain’t you?’

‘How d’you know?’ was the short answer

‘You spoke.’ The other smiled. So did Bevin, who added: ‘I know how your push talk, well enough. Have you started that Republic of yours down under yet?’

‘No. But we’re goin’ to. Then you’ll see.’

‘Carry on. No one’s hindering,’ Bevin pursued.

The Australian scowled. ‘No. We know they ain’t. And—and—that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you.’ He threw back his head and laughed the spleen out of him. ‘What can you do with an Empire that—that don’t care what you do?’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ Bevin laughed, and his fat sides shook. ‘Oh, I know your push inside-out.’ .

‘When did you come across us? My name’s Orton—no relation to the Tichborne one.’

‘Gallip’li—dead mostly. My battalion began there. We only lost half.’

‘Lucky! They gambled us away in two days. ’Member the hospital on the beach?’ asked asked Orton.

‘Yes. An’ the man without the face—preaching,’ said Bevin, sitting up a little.

‘Till he died,’ said the Australian, his voice lowered.

‘And afterwards,’ Bevin added, lower still.

‘Christ! Were you there that night?’

Bevin nodded. The Australian choked off something he was going to say, as a Brother on his left claimed him. I heard them talk horses, while Bevin developed his herb-growing projects with the well-groomed Brother opposite.

At the end of the banquet, when pipes were drawn, the Australian addressed himself to Bevin, across me, and as the company re-arranged itself, we three came to anchor in the big anteroom where the best prints are hung. Here our Brother across the table joined us, and moored alongside.

The Australian was full of racial grievances, as must be in a young country; alternating between complaints that his people had not been appreciated enough in England, or too fulsomely complimented by an hysterical Press.

‘No-o,’ Pole drawled, after a while. ‘You’re altogether wrong. We hadn’t time to notice anything—we were all too busy fightin’ for our lives. What your crowd down under are suffering from is growing-pains. You’ll get over ’em in three hundred years or so—if you’re allowed to last so long.’

‘Who’s going to stoush us?’ Orton asked fiercely.

This turned the talk again to larger issues and possibilities—delivered on both sides straight from the shoulder without malice or heat, between bursts of song from round the piano at the far end. Bevin and I sat out, watching.

‘Well, I don’t understand these matters,’ said Bevin at last. ‘But I’d hate to have one of your crowd have it in for me for anything.’

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‘Would you? Why?’ Orton pierced him with his pale, artificial eye.

‘Well, you’re a trifle—what’s the word?—vindictive?—spiteful? At least, that’s what I’ve found. I expect it comes from drinking stewed tea with your meat four times a day,’ said Bevin. ‘No! I’d hate to have an Australian after me for anything in particular.’

Out of this came his tale—somewhat in this shape:

It opened with an Australian of the name of Hickmot or Hickmer—Bevin called him both—who, finding his battalion completely expended at Gallipoli, had joined up with what stood of Bevin’s battalion, and had there remained, unrebuked and unnoticed. The point that Bevin laboured was that his man had never seen a table-cloth, a china plate, or a dozen white people together till, in his thirtieth year, he had walked for two months to Brisbane to join up. Pole found this hard to believe.

‘But it’s true,’ Bevin insisted. ‘This chap was born an’ bred among the black fellers, as they call ’em, two hundred miles from the nearest town, four hundred miles from a railway, an’ ten thousand from the grace o’ God—out in Queensland near some desert.’

‘Why, of course. We come out of everywhere,’ said Orton. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Yes—but—— Look here! From the time that this man Hickmot was twelve years old he’d ridden, driven—what’s the word?—conducted sheep for his father for thousands of miles on end, an’ months at a time, alone with these black fellers that you daren’t show the back of your neck to—else they knock your head in. That was all that he’d ever done till he joined up. He—he—didn’t belong to anything m the world, you understand. And he didn’t strike other men as being a—a human being.’

‘Why? He was a Queensland drover. They’re all right,’ Orton explained.

‘I dare say; but—well, a man notices another man, don’t he? You’d notice if there was a man standing or sitting or lyin’ near you, wouldn’t you? So’d any one. But you’d never notice Hickmot. His bein’ anywhere about wouldn’t stay in your mind. He just didn’t draw attention any more than anything else that happened to be about. Have you got it?’

‘Wasn’t he any use at his job?’ Pole inquired.

‘I’ve nothing against him that way, an’ I’m—I was his platoon sergeant. He wouldn’t volunteer specially for any doings, but he’d slip out with the party and he’d slip back with what was left of ’em. No one noticed him, and he never opened his mouth about any doings. You’d think a man who had lived the way he’d lived among black fellers an’ sheep would be noticeable enough in an English battalion, wouldn’t you?’

‘It teaches ’em to lie close; but you seem to have noticed him,’ Orton interposed, with a little suspicion.

‘Not at the time—but afterwards. If he was noticeable it was on account of his unnoticeability—same way you’d notice there not being an extra step at the bottom of the staircase when you thought there was.’

‘Ye-es,’ Pole said suddenly. ‘It’s the eternal mystery of personality. “God before Whom ever lie bare——” Some people can occlude their personality like turning off a tap. I beg your pardon. Carry on!’

‘Granted,’ said Bevin. ‘I think I catch your drift. I used to think I was a student of human nature before I joined up.’

‘What was your job—before?’ Orton asked.

‘Oh, I was the young blood of the village. Goal-keeper in our soccer team, secretary of the local cricket and rifle—oh, lor’!—clubs. Yes, an’ village theatricals. My father was the chemist in the village. How I did talk! What I did know!’ He beamed upon us all.

‘I don’t mind hearing you talk,’ said Orton, lying back in his chair. ‘You’re a little different from some of ’em. What happened to this dam’ drover of yours?’

‘He was with our push for the rest of the war—an’ I don’t think he ever sprung a dozen words at one time. With his upbringing, you see, there wasn’t any subject that any man knew about he could open up on. He kept quiet, and mixed with his backgrounds. If there was a lump of dirt, or a hole in the ground, or what was—was left after anythin’ had happened, it would be Hickmot. That was all he wanted to be.’

‘A camouflager?’ Orton suggested.

‘You have it! He was the complete camouflager all through. That’s him to a dot. Look here! He hadn’t even a nickname in his platoon! And then a friend of mine from our village, of the name of Vigors, came out with a draft. Bert Vigors. As a matter of fact, I was engaged to his sister. And Bert hadn’t been with us a week before they called him “The Grief.” His father was an oldish man, a market-gardener—high-class vegetables, bit o’ glass, an’—an’ all the rest of it. Do you know anything about that particular business?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ said Pole, ‘except that glass is expensive, and one’s man always sells the cut flowers.’

‘Then you do know something about it. It is. Bert was the old man’s only son, an’—I don’t blame him—he’d done his damnedest to get exempted—for the sake of the business, you understand. But he caught it all right. The tribunal wasn’t takin’ any the day he went up. Bert was for it, with a few remarks from the patriotic old was-sers on the bench. Our county paper had ’em all.’

‘That’s the thing that made one really want the Hun in England for a week or two,’ said Pole.

‘Mwor osee! The same tribunal, havin’ copped Bert, gave unconditional exemption to the opposition shop—a man called Margetts, in the market-garden business, which he’d established since the war, with his two sons who, every one in the village knew, had been pushed into the business to save their damned hides. But Margetts had a good lawyer to advise him. The whole case was frank and above-board to a degree—our county paper had it all in, too. Agricultural producevital necessity; the plough mightier than the sword; an’ those ducks on the bench, who had turned down Bert, noddin’ and smilin’ at Margetts, all full of his cabbage and green peas. What happened? The usual. Vigors’ business—he’s sixty-eight, with asthma—goes smash, and Margetts and Co. double theirs. So, then, that was Bert’s grievance, an’ he joined us full of it. That’s why they called him “The Grief.” Knowing the facts, I was with him; but being his sergeant, I had to check him, because grievances are catchin’, and three or four men with ’em make Companies—er—sticky. Luckily Bert wasn’t handy with his pen. He had to cork up his grievance mostly till he came across Hickmot, an’ Gord in Heaven knows what brought those two together. No! As y’were. I’m wrong about God! I always am. It was Sheep. Bert knew’s much about sheep as I do—an’ that’s Canterbury lamb—but he’d let

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Hickmot talk about ’em for hours, in return for Hickmot listenin’ to his grievance. Hickmot ’ud talk sheep—the one created thing he’d ever open up on—an’ Bert ’ud talk his grievance while they was waiting to go over the top. I’ve heard ’em again an’ again, and, of course, I encouraged ’em. Now, look here! Hickmot hadn’t seen an English house or a field or a road or—or anything any civ’lised man is used to in all his life! Sheep an’ blacks! Market-gardens an’ glass an’ exemption-tribunals! An’ the men’s teeth chatterin’ behind their masks between rum-issue an’ zero. Oh, there was fun in Hell those days, wasn’t there, boys?’

‘Sure! Oh, sure!’ Orton chuckled, and Pole echoed him.

‘Look here! When we were lying up somewhere among those forsaken chicken-camps back o’ Doullens, I found Hickmot making mud-pies in a farmyard an’ Bert lookin’ on. He’d made a model of our village according to Bert’s description of it. He’d preserved it in his head through all those weeks an’ weeks o’ Bert’s yap; an’ he’d coughed it all up—Margetts’ house and gardens, old Mr. Vigors’ ditto; both pubs; my father’s shop, everything that he’d been told by Bert done out to scale in mud, with bits o’ brick and stick. Haig ought to have seen it; but as his sergeant I had to check him for misusin’ his winkle-pin on dirt. ‘Come to think of it, a man who runs about uninhabited countries, with sheep, for a livin’ must have gifts for mappin’ and scalin’ things somehow or other, or he’d be dead. I never saw anything like it—all out o’ what Bert had told him by word of mouth. An’ the next time we went up the line Hickmot copped it in the leg just in front of me.’

‘Finish?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no. Only beginnin’. That was in December, somethin’ or other, ’16. In Jan’ry Vigors copped it for keeps. I buried him—snowin’ blind it was—an’ before we’d got him under the whole show was crumped. I wanted to bury him again just to spite ’em (I’m a spiteful man by nature), but the party wasn’t takin’ any more—even if they could have found it. But, you see, we had buried him all right, which is what they want at home, and I wrote the usual trimmin’s about the chaplain an’ the full service, an’ what his captain had said about Bert bein’ recommended for a pip, an’ the irreparable loss an’ so on. That was in Jan’ry ’17. In Feb’ry some time or other I got saved. My speciality had come to be bombin’s and night-doings. Very pleasant for a young free man, but—there’s a limit to what you can stand. It takes all men differently. Noise was what started me, at last. I’d got just up to the edge—wonderin’ when I’d crack an’ how many of our men I’d do in if it came on me while we were busy. I had that nice taste in the mouth and the nice temperature they call trench-fever, an’—I had to feel inside my head for the meanin’ of every order I gave or was responsible for executin’. You know!’

‘We do. Go on!’ said Pole in a tone that made Orton look at him.

‘So, you see, the bettin’ was even on my drawin’ a V.C. or getting Number Umpty rest-camp or—a firing party before breakfast. But Gord saved me. (I made friends with Him the last two years of the war. The others went off too quick.) They wanted a bomb in’-instructor for the training-battalion at home, an’ He put it into their silly hearts to indent for me. It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. You know!’ The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.

‘I was never keen on bombin’ myself,’ said Pole. ‘But bomb in’-instruction’s murder!’

‘I don’t deny it’s a shade risky, specially when they take the pin out an’ start shakin’ it, same as the Chinks used to do in the woods at Beauty, when they were cuttin’ ’em down. But you live like a home defence Brigadier, besides week-end leaf. As a matter o’ fact, I married Bert’s sister soon’s I could after I got the billet, an’ I used to lie in our bed thinkin’ of the old crowd on the Somme an’—feelin’ what a swine I was. Of course, I earned two V.C.’s a week behind the traverse in the exercise of my ord’nary duties, but that isn’t the same thing. An’ yet I’d only joined up because—because I couldn’t dam’ well help it.’

‘An’ what about your Queenslander?’ the Australian asked.

‘Too de sweet! Pronto! We got a letter in May from a Brighton hospital matron, sayin’ that one of the name of Hickmer was anxious for news o’ me, previous to proceedin’ to Roehampton for initiation into his new leg. Of course, we applied for him by return. Bert had written about him to his sister—my missus—every time he wrote at all; an’ any pal o’ Bert’s—well, you know what the ladies are like. I warned her about his peculiarities. She wouldn’t believe till she saw him. He was just the same. You’d ha’ thought he’d show up in England like a fresh stiff on snow—but you never noticed him. You never heard him; and if he didn’t want to be seen he wasn’t there. He just joined up with his background. I knew he could do that with men; but how in Hell, seein’ how curious women are, he could camouflage with the ladies—my wife an’ my mother to wit—beats me! He’d feed the chickens for us; he’d stand on his one leg—it was off above the knee—and saw wood for us. He’d run—I mean he’d hop—errands for Mrs. B, or mother; our dog worshipped him from the start, though I never saw him throw a word to him; and—yet he didn’t take any place anywhere. You’ve seen a rabbit—you’ve seen a pheasant—hidin’ in a ditch? ’Put your hand on it sometimes before it moved, haven’t you? Well, that was Hickmot—with two women in the house crazy to find out—find out—anything about him that made him human. You know what women are! He stayed with us a fortnight. He left us on a Sat’day to go to Roehampton to try his leg. On Friday he came over to the bombin’ ground—not saym’ anything, as usual—to watch me instruct my Suicide Club, which was only half an hour’s run by rail from our village. He had his overcoat on, an’ as soon as he reached the place it was mafeesh with him, as usual. Rabbit-trick again! You never noticed him. He sat in the bomb-proof behind the pit where the duds accumulate till it’s time to explode ’em. Naturally, that’s strictly forbidden to the public. So he went there, an’ no one noticed him. When he’d had enough of watchin’, he hopped off home to feed our chickens for the last time.’

‘Then how did you know all about it?’ Orton said.

‘Because I saw him come into the place just as I was goin’ down into the trench. Then he slipped my memory till my train went back. But it would have made no difference what our arrangements were. If Hickmer didn’t choose to be noticed, he wasn’t noticed. Just for curiosity’s sake I asked some o’ the Staff Sergeants whether they’d seen him on the ground. Not one—not one single one had—or could tell me what he was like. An’, Sat’day noon, he went off to Roehampton. We saw him into the train ourselves, with the lunch Mrs. B. had put up for him—a one-legged man an’ his crutch, in regulation blue, khaki warm an’ kit-bag. Takin’ everything together, per’aps he’d spoken as many as twenty times in the thirteen days he’d been with us. I’m givin’ it you straight as it happened. An’ now—look here!—this is what did happen.

‘Between two and three that Sunday morning—dark an’ blowin’ from the north—I was woke up by an explosion an’ people shoutin’ “Raid!” The first bang fetched ’em out like worms after rain. There was another some minutes afterwards, an’ me an’ a Sergeant in the Shropshires on leaf told ’em all to take cover. They did. There was a devil of a long wait an’ there was a third pop. Everybody, includin’ me, heard aeroplanes. I didn’t notice till afterwards that——’

Bevin paused.

‘What?’ said Orton.

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‘Oh, I noticed a heap of things afterwards. What we noticed first—the Shropshire Sergeant an’ me—was a rick well alight back o’ Margetts’ house, an’, with that north wind, blowin’ straight on to another rick o’ Margetts’. It went up all of a whoosh. The next thing we saw by the light of it was Margetts’ house with a bomb-hole in the roof and the rafters leanin’ sideways like—like they always lean on such occasions. So we ran there, and the first thing we met was Margetts in his split-tailed nightie callin’ on his mother an’ damnin’ his wife. A man always does that when he’s cross. Have you noticed? Mrs. Margetts was in her nightie too, remindin’ Margetts that he hadn’t completed his rick insurance. An’ that’s a woman’s lovin’ care all over. Behind them was their eldest son, in trousers an’ slippers, nursin’ his arm an’ callin’ for the doctor. They went through us howlin’ like flammemwerfer casualties—right up the street to the surgery.

‘Well, there wasn’t anything to do except let the show burn out. We hadn’t any means of extinguishing conflagrations. Some of ’em fiddled with buckets, an’ some of ’em tried to get out some o’ Margetts’ sticks, but his younger son kept shoutin’, “Don’t! Don’t! It’ll be stole! It’ll be stole!” So it burned instead, till the roof came down, top of all—a little, cheap, dirty villa, In reel life one whizz-bang would have shifted it; but in our civil village it looked that damned important and particular you wouldn’t believe. We couldn’t get round to Margetts’ stable because of the two ricks alight, but we found some one had opened the door early an’ the horses was in Margetts’ new vegetable piece down the hill which he’d hired off old Vigors to extend his business with. I love the way a horse always looks after his own belly—same as a Gunner. They went to grazin’ down the carrots and onions till young Margetts ran to turn ’em out, an’ then they got in among the glass frames an’ cut themselves. Oh, we had a regular Russian night of it, everybody givin’ advice an’ fallin’ over each other. When it got light we saw the damage. House, two ricks an’ stable mafeesh; the big glasshouse with every pane smashed and the furnace-end of it blown clean out. All the horses an’ about fifteen head o’ cattle—butcher’s stores from the next field—feeding in the new vegetable piece. It was a fair clean-up from end to end—house, furniture, fittin’s, plant, an’ all the early crops.’

‘Was there any other damage in the village?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to it—the curious part—but I wouldn’t call it damage. I was renting a field then for my chickens off the Merecroft Estate. It’s accommodation-land, an’ there was a wet ditch at the bottom that I had wanted for ever so long to dam up to make a swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks.’

‘Ah!’ said Orton, half turning in his chair, all in one piece.

‘S’pose I was allowed? Not me. Their Agent came down on me for tamperin’ with the Estate’s drainage arrangements. An’ all I wanted was to bring the bank down where the ditch narrows—a couple of cartloads of dirt would have held the water back for half-a-dozen yards—not more than that, an’ I could have made a little spill-way over the top with three boards-same as in trenches. Well, the first bomb—the one that woke me up—had done my work for me better than I could. It had dropped just under the hollow of the bank an’ brought it all down in a fair landslide. I’d got my swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks, an’ I didn’t see how the Estate could kick at the Act o’ God, d’you?’

‘And Hickmot?’ said Orton, grinning.

‘Hold on! There was a Parish Council meetin’ to demand reprisals, of course, an’ there was the policeman an’ me pokin’ about among the ruins till the Explosives Expert came down in his motor car at three p.m. Monday, an’ he meets all the Margetts off their rockers, howlin’ in the surgery, an’ he sees my swim-hole fillin’ up to the brim.’

‘What did he say?’ Pole inquired.

‘He sized it up at once. (He had to get back to dine in town that evening.) He said all the evidence proved that it was a lucky shot on the part of one isolated Hun ’plane gom’ home, an’ we weren’t to take it to heart. I don’t know that anybody but the Margetts did. He said they must have used incendiary bombs of a new type—which he’d suspected for a long time. I don’t think the man was any worse than God intended him to be. I don’t reelly. But the Shropshire Sergeant said——’

‘And what did you think?’ I interrupted.

‘I didn’t think. I knew by then. I’m not a Sherlock Holmes; but havin’ chucked ’em an’ chucked ’em back and kicked ’em out of the light an’ slept with ’em for two years, an’ makin’ my livin’ out of them at that time, I could recognise the fuse of a Mills bomb when I found it. I found all three of ’em. ’Curious about that second in Margetts’ glasshouse. Hickmot mus’ have raked the ashes out of the furnace, popped it in, an’ shut the furnace door. It operated all right. Not one livin’ pane left in the putty, and all the brickwork spread round the yard in streaks. Just like that St. Firmin village we were talking about.’

‘But how d’you account for young what’s—hisname gettin’ his arm broken?’ said Pole.

‘Crutch!’ said Bevin. ‘If you or me had taken on that night’s doin’s, with one leg, we’d have hopped and sweated from one flank to another an’ been caught half-way between. Hickmot didn’t. I’m as sure as I’m sittin’ here that he did his doings quiet and comfortable at his full height—he was over six feet—and no one noticed him. This is the way I see it. He fixed the swim-hole for Mrs. Bevin’s ducks first. We used to talk over our own affairs in front of him, of course, and he knew just what she wanted in the way of a pond. So he went and made it at his leisure. Then he prob’ly went over to Margetts’ and lit the first rack, knowin’ that the wind ’ud do the rest. When young Margetts saw the light of it an’ came out to look, Hickmot would have taken post at the back-door an’ dropped the young swine with his crutch, same as we used to drop Huns comin’ out of a dug-out. You know how they blink at the light? Then he must have walked off an’ opened Margetts’ stable door to save the horses. They’d be more to him than any man’s life. Then he prob’ly chucked one bomb on top o’ Margetts’ roof, havin’ seen that the first rick had caught the second and that the whole house was bound to go. D’you get me?’

‘Then why did he waste his bomb on the house?’ said Orton. His glass eye seemed as triumphant as his real one.

‘For camouflage, of course. He was camouflagin’ an air-raid. When the Margetts piled out of their place into the street, he prob’ly attended to the glasshouse, because that would be Margetts’ chief means o’ business. After that—I think so, because otherwise I don’t see where all those extra cattle came from that we found in the vegetable piece—he must have walked off an’ rounded up all the butcher’s beasts in the next medder, an’ driven ’em there to help the horses. And when he’d finished everything he’d set out to do, I’ll lay my life an’ kit he curled up like a bloomin’ wombat not fifty yards away from the whole flamin’ show—an’ let us run round him. An’ when he’d had his sleep out, he went up to Roehampton Monday mornin’ by some tram that he’d decided upon in his own mind weeks an’ weeks before.’

‘Did he know all the trains then?’ said Pole.

‘Ask me another. I only know that if he wanted to get from any place to another without bein’ noticed, he did it.’

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‘And the bombs? He got ’em from you, of course,’ Pole went on.

‘What do you think? He was an hour in the park watchin’ me instruct, sittin’, as I remember, in the bomb-proof by the dud-hole, in his overcoat. He got ’em all right. He took neither more nor less than he wanted; an’ I’ve told you what he did with ’em—one—two—an’ three.’

‘’Ever see him afterwards?’ said Orton.

‘Yes. ’Saw him at Brighton when I went down there with the missus, not a month after he’d been broken in to his Roehampton leg. You know how the boys used to sit all along Brighton front in their blues, an’ jump every time the coal was bein’ delivered to the hotels behind them? I barged into him opposite the Old Ship, an’ I told him about our air-raid. I told him how Margetts had gone off his rocker an’ walked about starin’ at the sky an’ holdin’ reprisal-meetin’s all by himself; an’ how old Mr. Vigors had bought in what he’d left—tho’ of course I said what was left—o’ Margetts’ business; an’ how well my swim-hole for the ducks was doin’. It didn’t interest him. He didn’t want to come over to stay with us any more, either. We were a long, long way back in his past. You could see that. He wanted to get back with his new leg, to his own God-forsaken sheep-walk an’ his black fellers in Queensland. I expect he’s done it now, an’ no one has noticed him. But, by Gord! He did leak a little at the end. He did that much! When we was waitin’ for the tram to the station, I said how grateful I was to Fritz for moppin’ up Margetts an’ makin’ our swim-hole all in one night. Mrs. B. seconded the motion. We couldn’t have done less. Well, then Hickmot said, speakin’ in his queer way, as if English words were all new to him: “Ah, go on an’ bail up in Hell,” he says. “Bert was my friend.” That was all. I’ve given it you just as it happened, word for word. I’d hate to have an Australian have it in for me for anything I’d done to his friend. Mark you, I don’t say there’s anything wrong with you Australians, Brother Orton. I only say they ain’t like us or any one else that I know.’

‘Well, do you want us to be?’ said Orton.

‘No, no. It takes all sorts to make a world, as the sayin’ is. And now’—Bevin pulled out his gold watch—‘if I don’t make a move of it I’ll miss my last train.’

‘Let her go,’ said Orton serenely. ‘You’ve done some lorry-hoppin’ in your time, haven’t you—Sergeant?’

‘When I was two an’ a half stone lighter, Digger,’ Bevin smiled in reply.

‘Well, I’ll run you out home before sun-up. I’m a haulage-contractor now—London and Oxford. There’s an empty of mine ordered to Oxford. We can go round by your place as easy as not. She’s lyin’ out Vauxhall-way.’

‘My Gord ! An’ see the sun rise again! ’Haven’t seen him since I can’t remember when,’ said Bevin, chuckling. ‘Oh, there was fun sometimes in Hell, wasn’t there, Australia?’; and again his hands went down to tighten the belt that was missing.

[a short tale]

“A LITTLE more beef, please!’ said the fat man with the grey whiskers and the spattered waistcoat. “You can’t eat too much o’ good beef—not even when the prices are going up hoof over hock.” And he settled himself down to load in a fresh cargo.

Now, this is how the fat man had come by his meal. One thousand miles away, a red Texan steer was preparing to go to bed for the night in the company of his fellows—myriads of his fellows. From dawn till late dusk he had loafed across the leagues of grass and grunted savagely as each mouthful proved to his mind that grass was not what he had known it in his youth. But the steer was wrong. That summer had brought great drought to Montana and Northern Dakota. The cattle feed was withering day by day, and the more prudent stock owners had written to the East for manufactured provender. Only the little cactus that grows with the grasses appeared to enjoy itself. The cattle certainly did not; and the cowboys from the very beginning of spring had used language considered profane even for the cowboy. What their ponies said has never been recorded. The ponies had the worst time of all, and at each nightly camp whispered to each other their longings for the winter, when they would be turned out on the freezing ranges—galled from wither to croup, but riderless—thank Heaven, riderless. On these various miseries the sun looked down impartial. His business was to cake the ground and ruin the grasses.

The cattle—the acres of huddled cattle—were restless. In the first place, they were forced to scatter for graze; and in the second, the heat told on their tempers and made them prod each other with their long horns. In the heart of the herd you would have thought men were fighting with single-sticks. On the outskirts, posted at quarter-mile intervals, sat the cowboys on their ponies, the brims of their hats tilted over their sun-skinned noses, their feet out of the big brown-leather hooded stirrups, and their hands gripping the horn of the heavy saddle to keep themselves from falling on to the ground—asleep. A cowboy can sleep at full gallop; on the other hand, he can keep awake also at full gallop for eight and forty hours and wear down six unamiable bronchos in the process.

Lafe Parmalee; Shwink, the German who could not ride but had a blind affection for cattle from the branding-yard to the butcher’s block; Michigan, so called because he said he came from California but spoke not the Califomian tongue; Jim from San Diego, to distinguish him from other Jims, and The Corpse, were the outposts of the herd. The Corpse had won his name from a statement, made in the fulness of much McBrayer whisky, that he had once been a graduate of Corpus Christi. He spoke truth, but to the wrong audience. The inhabitants of the Elite Saloon, after several attempts to get the hang of the name, dubbed the speaker The Corpse, and as long as he cinched a broncho or jingled a spur within four hundred miles of Livingston—yea, far in the south, even to the unexplored borders of the sheep-eater Indians—he was known by that unlovely name. How he had passed from college to cattle no man knew, and, according to the etiquette of the West, no man asked. He was not by any means a tenderfoot—had no unmanly weakness for washing, did not in the least object to appearing at the wild and wonderful reunions held nightly in “Miss Minnie’s parlour,’’ whose flaring advertisement did not in the least disturb the proprieties of Wachoma Junction, and, in common with his associates, was, when drunk, ready to shoot at anything or anybody. He was not proud. He had condescended to take in hand and educate a young and promising Chicago drummer, who by evil fate had wandered into that wilderness, where all his cunning was of no account; and from that youth’s quivering hand—outstretched by command—had shot away the top of a wineglass. The Corpse was recognised in the freemasonry of the craft as “one of the C.M.R.’s boys, and tough at that.”

The C.M.R. controlled much cattle, and their slaughter-houses in Chicago bubbled the blood of beeves all day long. Their salt-beef fed the sailor on the sea, and their iced, best firsts, the housekeeper in the London suburbs. Not even the firm knew how many cowboys they employed, but all the firm knew that on the fourteenth day of July their stockyards at Wachoma Junction were to be filled with two thousand head of cattle, ready for immediate shipment to Chicago while prices yet ruled high, and before the grass had withered utterly. Lafe, Michigan, Jim, The Corpse and the others knew this too, and were heartily glad of it, because they would be paid up in Chicago for their half-year’s work, and would then do their best towards painting that town in purest vermilion. They would get drunk; they would gamble, and would otherwise enjoy themselves till they were broke; and then they would hire out again.

The sun dropped behind the rolling hills; and the cattle halted for the night, cheered and cooled by a little wandering breeze. The red steer’s mother had been caught in a hailstorm five years ago. Till she went the way of all cow-flesh she missed no opportunity of telling her son to beware of the hot day and the cold wind that does not know its own mind. “When it blows five ways at once,” said she, “and makes your horns feel creepy, get away, my son. Follow the time-honoured instinct of our tribe, and run. I ran”—she looked ruefully at the scars on her side—“but that was in a barbwire country, and it hurt me. None the less, run.” The red steer chewed his cud, and the little wind out of the darkness played round his horns—all five ways at once. The cowboys lifted up their voices in unmelodious song, that the cattle might know where they were, and began slowly walking round the recumbent herd. “Do anybody’s horns feel creepy?” queried the red steer of his neighbours. “My mother told me”—and he repeated the tale, to the edification of the yearlings and the three-year olds breathing heavily at his side.

The song of the cowboys rose higher. The cattle bowed their heads. Their men were at hand. They were safe. Something had happened to the quiet stars. They were dying out one by one and the wind was freshening. “Bless my hoofs!” muttered a yearling, “my horns are beginning to feel creepy.” Softly the red steer lifted himself from the ground. “Come away,” quoth he to the yearling. “Come away to the outskirts, and we’ll move. My mother said . . . ” The innocent fool followed, and a white heifer saw them move. Being a woman she naturally bellowed “Timber wolves!” and ran forward blindly into a dun steer dreaming over clover. Followed the thunder of cattle rising to their feet, and the triple crack of a whip. The little wind had dropped for a moment, only to fall on the herd with a shriek and a few stinging drops of hail, that stung as keenly as the whips. The herd broke into a trot, a canter, and then a mad gallop. Black fear was behind them, black night in front. They headed into the night, bellowing with terror; and at their side rode the men with the whips. The ponies grunted as they felt the raking spurs. They knew that, an all-night gallop lay before them, and woe betide the luckless cayuse that stumbled in that ride. Then fell the hail—blinding and choking and flogging in one and the same stroke. The herd opened like a fan. The red steer headed a contingent he knew not whither. A man with a whip rode at his right flank. Behind him the lightning showed a field of glimmering horns, and of muzzles flecked with foam; a field of red terror-strained eyes and shaggy frontlets. The man looked back also, and his terror was greater than that of the beasts. The herd had surrounded him in the darkness. His salvation lay in the legs of Whisky Peat—and Whisky Peat knew it— knew it until an unseen gopher hole received his near forefoot as he strained every nerve—in the heart of the flying herd, with the red steer at his flanks. Then, being only an over-worked cayuse. Whisky Peat fell, and the red steer fancied that there was something soft on the ground.

It was Michigan, Jim and Lafe who at last brought the herd to a standstill as the dawn was breaking. “What’s come to The Corpse?” quoth Lafe. Jim loosened the girths of his quivering pony and made answer slowly: “Onless I’m a blamed fool, the gentleman is now livin’ up to his durned appellation ’bout fifteen miles back—what there is of him and the cayuse.” “Let’s go and look,” said Lafe, shuddering slightly, for the morning air, you must understand, was raw. “Let’s go to—a much hotter place than Texas,” responded Jim. “Get the steers to the Junction first. Guess what’s left of The Corpse will keep.”

And it did. And that was how the fat man in Chicago got his beef. It belonged to the red steer.

[a short tale]

IT was pyjama time on the Madura in the Bay of Bengal, and the incense of the very early morning cigar went up to the stainless skies. Every one knows pyjama time—the long hour that follows the removal of the beds from the saloon skylight and the consumption of chota hazri. Most men know, too, that the choicest stories of many seas may be picked up then—from the long-winded histories of the Colonial sheep-master to the crisp anecdotes of the Californian; from tales of battle, murder and sudden death told by the Burmah-retumed subaltern, to the bland drivel of the globe-trotter. The Captain, taste-fully attired in pale pink, sat up on the signal-gun and tossed the husk of a banana overboard.

“It looked in through my cabin-window,” said he, “and scared me nearly into a fit.” We had just been talking about a monkey who appeared to a man in an omnibus, and haunted him till he cut his own throat. The apparition, amid howls of incredulity, was said to have been the result of excessive tea-drinking. The Captain’s apparition promised to be better.

“It was a menagerie—a whole turnout, lock, stock, and barrel, from the big bear to the little hippopotamus; and you can guess the size of it from the fact that they paid us a thousand pounds in freight only. We got them all accommodated somewhere forward among the deck passengers, and they whooped up terribly all along the ship for two or three days. Among other things, such as panthers and leopards, there were sixteen giraffes, and we moored ’em fore and aft as securely as might be; but you can’t get a purchase on a giraffe somehow. He slopes back too much from the bows to the stem. We were running up the Red Sea, I think, and the menagerie fairly quiet. One night I went to my cabin not feeling well. About midnight I was waked by something breathing on my face. I was quite cahn and collected, for I had got it into my head that it was one of the panthers, or at least the bear; and I reached back to the rack behind me for a revolver. Then the head began to slide against my cabin—all across it—and I said to myself: ‘It’s the big python.’ But I looked into its eyes—they were beautiful eyes—and saw it was one of the giraffes. Tell you, though, a giraffe has the eyes of a sorrowful nun, and this creature was just brimming over with liquid tenderness. The seven-foot neck rather spoilt the effect, but I’ll always recollect those eyes.”

“Say, did you kiss the critter?” demanded the orchid-hunter en route to Siam.

“No; I remembered that it was dam valuable, and I didn’t want to lose freight on it. I was afraid it would break its neck drawing its head out of my window—I had a big deck cabin, of course—so I shoved it out softly like a hen, and the head slid out, with those Mary Magdalene eyes following me to the last. Then I heard the quartermaster calling on heaven and earth for his lost giraffe, and then the row began all up and down the decks. The giraffe had sense enough to duck its head to avoid the awnings—we were awned from bow to stem—but it clattered about like a sick cow, the quartermaster jumping after it, and it swinging its long neck like a flail. ‘Catch it, and hold it!’ said the quartermaster. ‘Catch a typhoon,’ said I. ‘She’s going overboard.’ The spotted fool had heaved one foot over the stem railings and was trying to get the other to follow. It was so happy at getting its head into the open I thought it would have crowed—I don’t know whether giraffes crow, but it heaved up its neck for all the world like a crowing cock. ‘Come back to your stable,’ yelled the quartermaster, grabbing hold of the brute’s tail.

“I was nearly helpless with laughing, though I knew if the concern went over it would be no laughing matter for me. Well, by good luck she came round—the quartermaster was a strong man at a rope’s end. First of all she slewed her neck round, and I could see those tender, loving eyes under the stars sort of saying: ‘Cruel man! What are you doing to my tail?’ Then the foot came on board, and she humped herself up under the awning, looking ready to cry with disappointment. The funniest thing was she didn’t make any noise—a pig would ha’ roused the ship in no time—only every time she dropped her foot on the deck it was like firing a revolver, the hoofs clicked so. We headed her towards the bows, back to her moorings—just like a policeman showing a short-sighted old woman over a crossing. The quartermaster sweated and panted and swore, but she never said anything—only whacked her old head despsiringly against the awning and the funnel case. Her feet woke up the whole ship, and by the time we had her fairly moored fore and aft the population in their night-gear were giving us advice. Then we took up a yard or two in all the moorings and turned in. No other animal got loose that voyage, though the old lady looked at me most repmachfully every time I came that way, and ‘You’ve blasted my young and tender innocence’ was the expression of her eyes. It was all the quartermaster’s fault for hauling her tail. I wonder she didn’t kick him open. Well, of course, that isn’t much of a yarn, but I remember once, in the city of Venice, we had a Malayan tapir loose on Hm deck, and we had to lasso him. It was this way”:

“Guzl thyar hai,” said the steward, and I fled down the companion and missed the tale of be tapir.

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THE DAY after they came home from the sea-side they set out on a tour of inspection to make sure everything was as they had left it. Soon they discovered that old Hobden had blocked their best hedge-gaps with stakes and thorn-bundles, and had trimmed up the hedges where the blackberries were setting.‘It can’t be time for the gipsies to come along,’ said Una. ‘Why, it was summer only the other day!’

‘There’s smoke in Low Shaw!’ said Dan, sniffing. ‘Let’s make sure!’

They crossed the fields towards the thin line of blue smoke that leaned above the hollow of Low Shaw which lies beside the King’s Hill road. It used to be an old quarry till somebody planted it, and you can look straight down into it from the edge of Banky Meadow.

‘I thought so,’ Dan whispered, as they came up to the fence at the edge of the larches. A gipsy-van—not the show-man’s sort, but the old black kind, with little windows high up and a baby-gate across the door—was getting ready to leave. A man was harnessing the horses; an old woman crouched over the ashes of a fire made out of broken fence-rails; and a girl sat on the van-steps singing to a baby on her lap. A wise-looking, thin dog snuffed at a patch of fur on the ground till the old woman put it carefully in the middle of the fire. The girl reached back inside the van and tossed her a paper parcel. This was laid on the fire too, and they smelt singed feathers.

‘Chicken feathers!’ said Dan. ‘I wonder if they are old Hobden’s.’

Una sneezed. The dog growled and crawled to the girl’s feet, the old woman fanned the fire with her hat, while the man led the horses up to the shafts, They all moved as quickly and quietly as snakes over moss.

‘Ah!’ said the girl. ‘I’ll teach you!’ She beat the dog, who seemed to expect it.

‘Don’t do that,’ Una called down. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’

‘How do you know what I’m beating him for?’ she answered.

‘For not seeing us,’ said Dan. ‘He was standing right in the smoke, and the wind was wrong for his nose, anyhow.’

The girl stopped beating the dog, and the old woman fanned faster than ever.

‘You’ve fanned some of your feathers out of the fire,’ said Una. ‘There’s a tail-feather by that chestnut-tot.’

‘What of it?’ said the old woman, as she grAbbéd it.

‘Oh, nothing!’ said Dan. ‘Only I’ve heard say that tail-feathers are as bad as the whole bird, sometimes.’

That was a saying of Hobden’s about pheasants. Old Hobden always burned all feather and fur before he sat down to eat.

‘Come on, mother,’ the man whispered. The old woman climbed into the van, and the horses drew it out of the deep-rutted shaw on to the hard road.

The girl waved her hands and shouted something they could not catch.

‘That was gipsy for “Thank you kindly, Brother and Sister,”’ said Pharaoh Lee.

He was standing behind them, his fiddle under his arm. ‘Gracious, you startled me!’ said Una.

‘You startled old Priscilla Savile,’ Puck called from below them. ‘Come and sit by their fire. She ought to have put it out before they left.’

They dropped down the ferny side of the shaw. Una raked the ashes together, Dan found a dead wormy oak branch that burns without flame, and they watched the smoke while Pharaoh played a curious wavery air.

‘That’s what the girl was humming to the baby,’ said Una.

‘I know it,’ he nodded, and went on:

He passed from one odd tune to another, and quite forgot the children. At last Puck asked him to go on with his adventures in Philadelphia and among the Seneca Indians.

‘I’m telling it,’ he said, staring straight in front of him as he played. ‘Can’t you hear?’

‘Maybe, but they can’t. Tell it aloud,’ said Puck.

Pharaoh shook himself, laid his fiddle beside him, and began:

‘I’d left Red Jacket and Cornplanter riding home with me after Big Hand had said that there wouldn’t be any war. That’s all there was to it. We believed Big Hand and we went home again—we three braves. When we reached Lebanon we found Toby at the cottage with his waistcoat a foot too big for him—so hard he had worked amongst the yellow-fever people. He beat me for running off with the Indians, but ’twas worth it—I was glad to see him,—and when we went back to Philadelphia for the winter, and I was told how he’d sacrificed himself over sick people in the yellow fever, I thought the world and all of him. No, I didn’t neither. I’d thought that all along. That yellow fever must have been something dreadful. Even in December people had no more than begun to trinkle back to town. Whole houses stood empty and (they)  was robbing them out. But I can’t call to mind that any of the Moravian Brethren had died. It seemed like they had just kept on with their own concerns, and the good Lord He’d just looked after ’em. That was the winter—yes, winter of ’Ninety-three—the Brethren bought a stove for the church. Toby spoke in favour of it because the cold spoiled his fiddle hand, but many thought stove-heat not in the Bible, and there was yet a third party which always brought hickory coal foot-warmers to service and wouldn’t speak either way. They ended by casting the Lot for it, which is like pitch-and-toss. After my summer with the Senecas, church-stoves didn’t highly interest me, so I took to haunting round among the French emigres which Philadelphia was full of. My French and my fiddling helped me there, d’ye see. They come over in shiploads from France, where, by what I made out, every one was killing every one else by any means, and they spread ’emselves about the city—mostly in Drinker’s Alley and Elfrith’s Alley—and they did odd jobs till times should mend. But whatever they stooped to, they were gentry and kept a cheerful countenance, and after an evening’s fiddling at one of their poor little proud parties, the Brethren seemed old-fashioned. Pastor Meder and Brother Adam Goos didn’t like my fiddling for hire, but Toby said it was lawful in me to earn my living by exercising my talents. He never let me be put upon.

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‘In February of ’Ninety-four—No, March it must have been, because a new Ambassador called Faucher had come from France, with no more manners than Genet the old one—in March, Red Jacket came in from the Reservation bringing news of all kind friends there. I showed him round the city, and we saw General Washington riding through a crowd of folk that shouted for war with England. They gave him quite rough music, but he looked ’twixt his horse’s ears and made out not to notice. His stirrup brished Red Jacket’s elbow, and Red Jacket whispered up, “My brother knows it is not easy to be a chief.” Big Hand shot just one look at him and nodded. Then there was a scuffle behind us over some one who wasn’t hooting at Washington loud enough to please the people. We went away to be out of the fight. Indians won’t risk being hit.’

‘What do they do if they are?’ Dan asked.

‘Kill, of course. That’s why they have such proper manners. Well, then, coming home by Drinker’s Alley to get a new shirt which a French Vicomte’s lady was washing to take the stiff out of (I’m always choice in my body-linen) a lame Frenchman pushes a paper of buttons at us. He hadn’t long landed in the United States, and please would we buy. He sure-ly was a pitiful scrattel—his coat half torn off, his face cut, but his hands steady; so I knew it wasn’t drink. He said his name was Peringuey, and he’d been knocked about in the crowd round the Stadt—Independence Hall. One thing leading to another we took him up to Toby’s rooms, same as Red Jacket had taken me the year before. The compliments he paid to Toby’s Madeira wine fairly conquered the old man, for he opened a second bottle and he told this Monsieur Peringuey all about our great stove dispute in the church. I remember Pastor Meder and Brother Adam Goos dropped in, and although they and Toby were direct opposite sides regarding stoves, yet this Monsieur Peringuey he made ’em feel as if he thought each one was in the right of it. He said he had been a clergyman before he had to leave France. He admired at Toby’s fiddling, and he asked if Red Jacket, sitting by the spinet, was a simple Huron. Senecas aren’t Hurons, they’re Iroquois, of course, and Toby told him so. Well, then, in due time he arose and left in a style which made us feel he’d been favouring us, instead of us feeding him. I’ve never seen that so strong before—in a man. We all talked him over but couldn’t make head or tail of him, and Red Jacket come out to walk with me to the French quarter where I was due to fiddle at a party. Passing Drinker’s Alley again we saw a naked window with a light in it, and there sat our button-selling Monsieur Peringuey throwing dice all alone, right hand against left.

‘Says Red Jacket, keeping back in the dark, “Look at his face!”

‘I was looking. I protest to you I wasn’t frightened like I was when Big Hand talked to his gentlemen. I—I only looked, and I wondered that even those dead dumb dice ’ud dare to fall different from what that face wished. It—it was a face!

‘“He is bad,” says Red Jacket. “But he is a great chief. The French have sent away a great chief. I thought so when he told us his lies. Now I know.”

‘I had to go on to the party, so I asked him to call round for me afterwards and we’d have hymn-singing at Toby’s as usual. “No,” he says. “Tell Toby I am not Christian tonight. All Indian.” He had those fits sometimes. I wanted to know more about Monsieur Peringuey, and the emigre party was the very place to find out. It’s neither here nor there, of course, but those French emigre parties they almost make you cry. The men that you bought fruit of in Market Street, the hairdressers and fencing-masters and French teachers, they turn back again by candlelight to what they used to be at home, and you catch their real names. There wasn’t much room in the washhouse, so I sat on top of the copper and played ’em the tunes they called for—“Si le Roi m’avait donne,” and such nursery stuff. They cried sometimes. It hurt me to take their money afterwards, indeed it did. And there I found out about Monsieur Peringuey. He was a proper rogue too! None of ’em had a good word for him except the Marquise that kept the French boarding-house on Fourth Street. I made out that his real name was the Count Talleyrand de Perigord—a priest right enough, but sorely come down in the world. He’d been King Louis’ Ambassador to England a year or two back, before the French had cut off King Louis’ head; and, by what I heard, that head wasn’t hardly more than hanging loose before he’d run back to Paris and prevailed on Danton, the very man which did the murder, to send him back to England again as Ambassador of the French Republic! That was too much for the English, so they kicked him out by Act of Parliament, and he’d fled to the Americas without money or friends or prospects. I’m telling you the talk in the washhouse. Some of ’em was laughing over it. Says the French Marquise, “My friends, you laugh too soon. That man ‘ll be on the winning side before any of us.”

‘“I did not know you were so fond of priests, Marquise,” says the Vicomte. His lady did my washing, as I’ve told you.

‘“I have my reasons,” says the Marquise. “He sent my uncle and my two brothers to Heaven by the little door,”—that was one of the emigre names for the guillotine. “He will be on the winning side if it costs him the blood of every friend he has in the world.”

‘“Then what does he want here?” says one of ’em. “We have all lost our game.”

‘“My faith!” says the Marquise. “He will find out, if any one can, whether this canaille of a Washington means to help us to fight England. Genet” (that was my Ambassador in the Embuscade) “has failed and gone off disgraced; Faucher” (he was the new man) “hasn’t done any better, but our Abbé will find out, and he will make his profit out of the news. Such a man does not fall.”

‘“He begins unluckily,” says the Vicomte. “He was set upon today in the street for not hooting your Washington.” They all laughed again, and one remarks, “How does the poor devil keep himself?”

‘He must have slipped in through the washhouse door, for he flits past me and joins ’em, cold as ice.

‘“One does what one can,” he says. “I sell buttons. And you, Marquise?”

‘“I?”—she waves her poor white hands all burned—“I am a cook—a very bad one—at your service, Abbé. We were just talking about you.”

‘They didn’t treat him like they talked of him. They backed off and stood still.

‘“I have missed something, then,” he says. “But I spent this last hour playing—only for buttons, Marquise—against a noble savage, the veritable Huron himself.”

‘“You had your usual luck, I hope?” she says.

‘“Certainly,” he says. “I cannot afford to lose even buttons in these days.”

‘“Then I suppose the child of nature does not know that your dice are usually loaded, Father Tout-a-tous,” she continues. I don’t know whether she meant to accuse him of cheating. He only bows. ‘“Not yet, Mademoiselle Cunegonde,” he says, and goes on to make himself agreeable to the rest of the company. And that was how I found out our Monsieur Peringuey was Count Charles Maurice Talleyrand de Perigord.’

Pharaoh stopped, but the children said nothing.

‘You’ve heard of him?’ said Pharaoh.

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Una shook her head. ‘Was Red Jacket the Indian he played dice with?’ Dan asked.

‘He was. Red Jacket told me the next time we met. I asked if the lame man had cheated. Red Jacket said no—he had played quite fair and was a master player. I allow Red Jacket knew. I’ve seen him, on the Reservation, play himself out of everything he had and in again. Then I told Red Jacket all I’d heard at the party concerning Talleyrand.

‘“I was right,” he says. “I saw the man’s war-face when he thought he was alone. That’s why I played him. I played him face to face. He’s a great chief. Do they say why he comes here?”

‘“They say he comes to find out if Big Hand makes war against the English,” I said.

‘Red Jacket grunted. “Yes,” he says. “He asked me that too. If he had been a small chief I should have lied. But he is a great chief. He knew I was a chief, so I told him the truth. I told him what Big Hand said to Cornplanter and me in the clearing—‘There will be no war.’ I could not see what he thought. I could not see behind his face. But he is a great chief. He will believe.’

‘“Will he believe that Big Hand can keep his people back from war?” I said, thinking of the crowds that hooted Big Hand whenever he rode out.

‘“He is as bad as Big Hand is good, but he is not as strong as Big Hand,” says Red Jacket. “When he talks with Big Hand he will feel this in his heart. The French have sent away a great chief. Presently he will go back and make them afraid.”

‘Now wasn’t that comical? The French woman that knew him and owed all her losses to him; the Indian that picked him up, cut and muddy on the street, and played dice with him; they neither of ’em doubted that Talleyrand was something by himself—appearances notwithstanding.’

‘And was he something by himself?’ asked Una.

Pharaoh began to laugh, but stopped. ‘The way I look at it,’he said, ‘Talleyrand was one of just three men in this world who are quite by themselves. Big Hand I put first, because I’ve seen him.’

‘Ay,’ said Puck. ‘I’m sorry we lost him out of Old England. Who d’you put second?’

‘Talleyrand: maybe because I’ve seen him too,’ said Pharaoh.

‘Who’s third?’said Puck.

‘Boney—even though I’ve seen him.’

‘Whew!’ said Puck. ‘Every man has his own weights and measures, but that’s queer reckoning.’

‘Boney?’ said Una. ‘You don’t mean you’ve ever met Napoleon Bonaparte?’

‘There, I knew you wouldn’t have patience with the rest of my tale after hearing that! But wait a minute. Talleyrand he come round to Hundred and Eighteen in a day or two to thank Toby for his kindness. I didn’t mention the dice-playing, but I could see that Red Jacket’s doings had made Talleyrand highly curious about Indians—though he would call him the Huron. Toby, as you may believe, was all holds full of knowledge concerning their manners and habits. He only needed a listener. The Brethren don’t study Indians much till they join the Church, but Toby knew ’em wild. So evening after evening Talleyrand crossed his sound leg over his game one and Toby poured forth. Having been adopted into the Senecas I, naturally, kept still, but Toby ’ud call on me to back up some of his remarks, and by that means, and a habit he had of drawing you on in talk, Talleyrand saw I knew something of his noble savages too. Then he tried a trick. Coming back from an emigre party he turns into his little shop and puts it to me, laughing like, that I’d gone with the two chiefs on their visit to Big Hand. I hadn’t told. Red Jacket hadn’t told, and Toby, of course, didn’t know. ’Twas just Talleyrand’s guess. “Now,” he says, my English and Red Jacket’s French was so bad that I am not sure I got the rights of what the President really said to the unsophisticated Huron. Do me the favour of telling it again.” I told him every word Red Jacket had told him and not one word more. I had my suspicions, having just come from an emigre party where the Marquise was hating and praising him as usual.

‘“Much obliged,” he said. “But I couldn’t gather from Red Jacket exactly what the President said to Monsieur Genet, or to his American gentlemen after Monsieur Genet had ridden away.”

‘I saw Talleyrand was guessing again, for Red Jacket hadn’t told him a word about the white men’s pow-wow.’

‘Why hadn’t he?’ Puck asked.

‘Because Red Jacket was a chief. He told Talleyrand what the President had said to him and Cornplanter; but he didn’t repeat the talk, between the white men, that Big Hand ordered him to leave behind.’

‘Oh!’ said Puck. ‘I see. What did you do?’

‘First I was going to make some sort of tale round it, but Talleyrand was a chief too. So I said, “As soon as I get Red Jacket’s permission to tell that part of the tale, I’ll be delighted to refresh your memory, Abbé.” What else could I have done?

‘“Is that all?” he says, laughing. “Let me refresh your memory. In a month from now I can give you a hundred dollars for your account of the conversation.”

‘“Make it five hundred, Abbé,” I says. ‘”Five, then,” says he.

‘“That will suit me admirably,” I says. “Red Jacket will be in town again by then, and the moment he gives me leave I’ll claim the money.”

‘He had a hard fight to be civil, but he come out smiling.

‘“Monsieur,” he says, “I beg your pardon as sincerely as I envy the noble Huron your loyalty. Do me the honour to sit down while I explain.”

‘There wasn’t another chair, so I sat on the button-box.

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‘He was a clever man. He had got hold of the gossip that the President meant to make a peace treaty with England at any cost. He had found out—from Genet, I reckon, who was with the President on the day the two chiefs met him. He’d heard that Genet had had a huff with the President and had ridden off leaving his business at loose ends. What he wanted—what he begged and blustered to know—was just the very words which the President had said to his gentlemen after Genet had left, concerning the peace treaty with England. He put it to me that in helping him to those very words I’d be helping three great countries as well as mankind. The room was as bare as the palm of your hand, but I couldn’t laugh at him.

‘“I’m sorry,” I says, when he wiped his forehead. “As soon as Red Jacket gives permission—”

‘“You don’t believe me, then?” he cuts in.

‘“Not one little, little word, Abbé,” I says; “except that you mean to be on the winning side. Remember, I’ve been fiddling to all your old friends for months.”

‘Well, then his temper fled him and he called me names.

‘“Wait a minute, ci-devant,” I says at last. “I am half English and half French, but I am not the half of a man. I will tell thee something the Indian told me. Has thee seen the President?”

‘“Oh yes!” he sneers. “I had letters from the Lord Lansdowne to that estimable old man.”

‘“Then,” I says, “thee will understand. The Red Skin said that when thee has met the President thee will feel in thy heart he is a stronger man than thee.”

‘“Go!” he whispers. “Before I kill thee, go.”

‘He looked like it. So I left him.’

‘Why did he want to know so badly?’ said Dan.

‘The way I look at it is that if he had known for certain that Washington meant to make the peace treaty with England at any price, he’d ha’ left old Faucher fumbling about in Philadelphia while he went straight back to France and told old Danton—“It’s no good your wasting time and hopes on the United States, because she won’t fight on our side—that I’ve proof of!” Then Danton might have been grateful and given Talleyrand a job, because a whole mass of things hang on knowing for sure who’s your friend and who’s your enemy. just think of us poor shop-keepers, for instance.’

‘Did Red Jacket let you tell, when he came back?’ Una asked.

‘Of course not. He said, “When Cornplanter and I ask you what Big Hand said to the whites you can tell the Lame Chief. All that talk was left behind in the timber, as Big Hand ordered. Tell the Lame Chief there will be no war. He can go back to France with that word.”

‘Talleyrand and me hadn’t met for a long time except at emigre parties. When I give him the message he just shook his head. He was sorting buttons in the shop.

‘I cannot return to France with nothing better than the word of an unsophisticated savage,” he says.

‘“Hasn’t the President said anything to you?” I asked him.

‘“He has said everything that one in his position ought to say, but—but if only I had what he said to his Cabinet after Genet rode off I believe I could change Europe—the world, maybe.”

‘“I’m sorry,” I says. “Maybe you’ll do that without my help.”

‘He looked at me hard. “Either you have unusual observation for one so young, or you choose to be insolent,” he says.

‘“It was intended for a compliment,” I says. “But no odds. We’re off in a few days for our summer trip, and I’ve come to make my good-byes.”

‘“I go on my travels too,” he says. “If ever we meet again you may be sure I will do my best to repay what I owe you.”

‘“Without malice, Abbé, I hope,” I says.

‘“None whatever,” says he. “Give my respects to your adorable Dr Pangloss” (that was one of his side-names for Toby) “and the Huron.” I never could teach him the difference betwixt Hurons and Senecas.

‘Then Sister Haga came in for a paper of what we call “pilly buttons,” and that was the last I saw of Talleyrand in those parts.’

‘But after that you met Napoleon, didn’t you?’ said Una.

‘Wait Just a little, dearie. After that, Toby and I went to Lebanon and the Reservation, and, being older and knowing better how to manage him, I enjoyed myself well that summer with fiddling and fun. When we came back, the Brethren got after Toby because I wasn’t learning any lawful trade, and he had hard work to save me from being apprenticed to Helmbold and Geyer the printers. ’Twould have ruined our music together, indeed it would. And when we escaped that, old Mattes Roush, the leather-breeches maker round the corner, took a notion I was cut out for skin-dressing. But we were rescued. Along towards Christmas there comes a big sealed letter from the Bank saying that a Monsieur Talleyrand had put five hundred dollars—a hundred pounds—to my credit there to use as I pleased. There was a little note from him inside—he didn’t give any address—to thank me for past kindnesses and my believing in his future, which he said was pretty cloudy at the time of writing. I wished Toby to share the money. I hadn’t done more than bring Talleyrand up to Hundred and Eighteen. The kindnesses were Toby’s. But Toby said, “No! Liberty and Independence for ever. I have all my wants, my son.” So I gave him a set of new fiddle-strings, and the Brethren didn’t advise us any more. Only Pastor Meder he preached about the deceitfulness of riches, and Brother Adam Goos said if there was war the English ’ud surely shoot down the Bank. I knew there wasn’t going to be any war, but I drew the money out and on Red Jacket’s advice I put it into horse-flesh, which I sold to Bob Bicknell for the Baltimore stage-coaches. That way, I doubled my money inside the twelvemonth.’

‘You gipsy! You proper gipsy!’ Puck shouted.

‘Why not? ’Twas fair buying and selling. Well, one thing leading to another, in a few years I had made the beginning of a worldly fortune and was in the tobacco trade.’

‘Ah!’ said Puck, suddenly. ‘Might I inquire if you’d ever sent any news to your people in England—or in France?’

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‘O’ course I had. I wrote regular every three months after I’d made money in the horse trade. We Lees don’t like coming home empty-handed. If it’s only a turnip or an egg, it’s something. Oh yes, I wrote good and plenty to Uncle Aurette, and—Dad don’t read very quickly—Uncle used to slip over Newhaven way and tell Dad what was going on in the tobacco trade.’

‘I see—

Go on, Brother Square-toes,’ said Puck. Pharaoh laughed and went on.

‘Talleyrand he’d gone up in the world same as me. He’d sailed to France again, and was a great man in the Government there awhile, but they had to turn him out on account of some story about bribes from American shippers. All our poor emigres said he was surely finished this time, but Red Jacket and me we didn’t think it likely, not unless he was quite dead. Big Hand had made his peace treaty with Great Britain, just as he said he would, and there was a roaring trade ’twixt England and the United States for such as ’ud take the risk of being searched by British and French men-o’-war. Those two was fighting, and just as his gentlemen told Big Hand ’ud happen—the United States was catching it from both. If an English man-o’-war met an American ship he’d press half the best men out of her, and swear they was British subjects. Most of ’em was! If a Frenchman met her he’d, likely, have the cargo out of her, swearing it was meant to aid and comfort the English; and if a Spaniard or a Dutchman met her—they was hanging on to England’s coat-tails too—Lord only knows what they wouldn’t do! It came over me that what I wanted in my tobacco trade was a fast-sailing ship and a man who could be French, English, or American at a pinch. Luckily I could lay my hands on both articles. So along towards the end of September in the year ’Ninety-nine I sailed from Philadelphia with a hundred and eleven hogshead o’ good Virginia tobacco, in the brig Berthe Aurette, named after Mother’s maiden name, hoping ’twould bring me luck, which she didn’t—and yet she did.’

‘Where was you bound for?’ Puck asked.

‘Er—any port I found handiest. I didn’t tell Toby or the Brethren. They don’t understand the ins and outs of the tobacco trade.’

Puck coughed a small cough as he shifted a piece of wood with his bare foot.

‘It’s easy for you to sit and judge,’ Pharaoh cried. ‘But think o’ what we had to put up with! We spread our wings and run across the broad Atlantic like a hen through a horse-fair. Even so, we was stopped by an English frigate, three days out. He sent a boat alongside and pressed seven able seamen. I remarked it was hard on honest traders, but the officer said they was fighting all creation and hadn’t time to argue. The next English frigate we escaped with no more than a shot in our quarter. Then we was chased two days and a night by a French privateer, firing between squalls, and the dirty little English ten-gun brig which made him sheer off had the impudence to press another five of our men. That’s how we reached to the chops of the Channel. Twelve good men pressed out of thirty-five; an eighteen-pound shot-hole close beside our rudder; our mainsail looking like spectacles where the Frenchman had hit us—and the Channel crawling with short-handed British cruisers. Put that in your pipe and smoke it next time you grumble at the price of tobacco!

‘Well, then, to top it off, while we was trying to get at our leaks, a French lugger come swooping at us out o’ the dusk. We warned him to keep away, but he fell aboard us, and up climbed his JAbbéring red-caps. We couldn’t endure any more—indeed we couldn’t. We went at ’em with all we could lay hands on. It didn’t last long. They was fifty odd to our twenty-three. Pretty soon I heard the cutlasses thrown down and some one bellowed for the sacri captain.

‘“Here I am!” I says. “I don’t suppose it makes any odds to you thieves, but this is the United States brig Berthe Aurette.”

‘“My aunt!” the man says, laughing. “Why is she named that?”

‘“Who’s speaking?” I said. ’Twas too dark to see, but I thought I knew the voice.

‘“Enseigne de Vaisseau Estephe L’Estrange,” he sings out, and then I was sure.

‘“Oh!” I says. “It’s all in the family, I suppose, but you have done a fine day’s work, Stephen.”

‘He whips out the binnacle-light and holds it to my face. He was young L’Estrange, my full cousin, that I hadn’t seen since the night the smack sank off Telscombe Tye—six years before.

‘“Whew!” he says. “That’s why she was named for Aunt Berthe, is it? What’s your share in her, Pharaoh?”

‘“Only half owner, but the cargo’s mine.”

‘“That’s bad,” he says. “I’ll do what I can, but you shouldn’t have fought us.”

‘“Steve,” I says, “you aren’t ever going to report our little fall-out as a fight! Why, a Revenue cutter ’ud laugh at it!”

‘“So’d I if I wasn’t in the Republican Navy,” he says. “But two of our men are dead, d’ye see, and I’m afraid I’ll have to take you to the Prize Court at Le Havre.”

‘“Will they condemn my ’baccy?” I asks.

‘“To the last ounce. But I was thinking more of the ship. She’d make a sweet little craft for the Navy if the Prize Court ’ud let me have her,” he says.

‘Then I knew there was no hope. I don’t blame him—a man must consider his own interests, but nigh every dollar I had was in ship or cargo, and Steve kept on saying, “You shouldn’t have fought us.”

‘Well, then, the lugger took us to Le Havre, and that being the one time we did want a British ship to rescue us, why, o’ course we never saw one. My cousin spoke his best for us at the Prize Court. He owned he’d no right to rush alongside in the face o’ the United States flag, but we couldn’t get over those two men killed, d’ye see, and the Court condemned both ship and cargo. They was kind enough not to make us prisoners—only beggars—and young L’Estrange was given the Berthe Aurette to re-arm into the French Navy.

‘”I’ll take you round to Boulogne,” he says. “Mother and the rest’ll be glad to see you, and you can slip over to Newhaven with Uncle Aurette. Or you can ship with me, like most o’ your men, and take a turn at King George’s loose trade. There’s plenty pickings,” he says.

‘Crazy as I was, I couldn’t help laughing.

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‘“I’ve had my allowance of pickings and stealings,” I says. “Where are they taking my tobacco?” ’Twas being loaded on to a barge.

‘“Up the Seine to be sold in Paris,” he says. “Neither you nor I will ever touch a penny of that money.”

‘“Get me leave to go with it,” I says. “I’ll see if there’s justice to be gotten out of our American Ambassador.”

‘“There’s not much justice in this world,” he says, “without a Navy.” But he got me leave to go with the barge and he gave me some money. That tobacco was all I had, and I followed it like a hound follows a snatched bone. Going up the river I fiddled a little to keep my spirits up, as well as to make friends with the guard. They was only doing their duty. Outside o’ that they were the reasonablest o’ God’s creatures. They never even laughed at me. So we come to Paris, by river, along in November, which the French had christened Brumaire. They’d given new names to all the months, and after such an outrageous silly piece o’ business as that, they wasn’t likely to trouble ’emselves with my rights and wrongs. They didn’t. The barge was laid up below Notre Dame church in charge of a caretaker, and he let me sleep aboard after I’d run about all day from office to office, seeking justice and fair dealing, and getting speeches concerning liberty. None heeded me. Looking back on it I can’t rightly blame ’em. I’d no money, my clothes was filthy mucked; I hadn’t changed my linen in weeks, and I’d no proof of my claims except the ship’s papers, which, they said, I might have stolen. The thieves! The door-keeper to the American Ambassador—for I never saw even the Secretary—he swore I spoke French a sight too well for an American citizen. Worse than that—I had spent my money, d’ye see, and I—I took to fiddling in the streets for my keep; and—and, a ship’s captain with a fiddle under his arm—well, I don’t blame ’em that they didn’t believe me.

‘I come back to the barge one day—late in this month Brumaire it was—fair beazled out. Old Maingon, the caretaker, he’d lit a fire in a bucket and was grilling a herring.

‘“Courage, mon ami,” he says. “Dinner is served.”

‘“I can’t eat,” I says. “I can’t do any more. It’s stronger than I am.”

‘“Bah!” he says. “Nothing’s stronger than a man. Me, for example! Less than two years ago I was blown up in the Orient in Aboukir Bay, but I descended again and hit the water like a fairy. Look at me now,” he says. He wasn’t much to look at, for he’d only one leg and one eye, but the cheerfullest soul that ever trod shoe-leather. “That’s worse than a hundred and eleven hogshead of ’baccy,” he goes on. “You’re young, too! What wouldn’t I give to be young in France at this hour! There’s nothing you couldn’t do,” he says. “The ball’s at your feet—kick it!” he says. He kicks the old fire-bucket with his peg-leg. “General Buonaparte, for example!” he goes on. “That man’s a babe compared to me, and see what he’s done already. He’s conquered Egypt and Austria and Italy—oh! half Europe!” he says, “and now he sails back to Paris, and he sails out to St Cloud down the river here—don’t stare at the river, you young fool! —and all in front of these pig-jobbing lawyers and citizens he makes himself Consul, which is as good as a King. He’ll be King, too, in the next three turns of the capstan—King of France, England, and the world! Think o’ that!” he shouts, “and eat your herring.”

‘I says something about Boney. If he hadn’t been fighting England I shouldn’t have lost my ’baccy—should I?

‘“Young fellow,” says Maingon, “you don’t understand.”

‘We heard cheering. A carriage passed over the bridge with two in it. ‘“That’s the man himself,” says Maingon. “He’ll give ’em something to cheer for soon.” He stands at the salute.

‘“Who’s t’other in black beside him?” I asks, fairly shaking all over.

‘“Ah! he’s the clever one. You’ll hear of him before long. He’s that scoundrel-bishop, Talleyrand.”

‘“It is!” I said, and up the steps I went with my fiddle, and run after the carriage calling, “Abbé, Abbé!”

‘A soldier knocked the wind out of me with the back of his sword, but I had sense to keep on following till the carriage stopped—and there just was a crowd round the house-door! I must have been half-crazy else I wouldn’t have struck up “Si le Roi m’avait donne Paris la grande ville!” I thought it might remind him.

‘“That is a good omen!” he says to Boney sitting all hunched up; and he looks straight at me.

‘“Abbé—oh, Abbé!” I says. “Don’t you remember Toby and Hundred and Eighteen Second Street?”

‘He said not a word. He just crooked his long white finger to the guard at the door while the carriage steps were let down, and I skipped into the house, and they slammed the door in the crowd’s face. ‘“You go there,” says a soldier, and shoves me into an empty room, where I catched my first breath since I’d left the barge. Presently I heard plates rattling next door—there were only folding doors between—and a cork drawn. “I tell you,” someone shouts with his mouth full, “it was all that sulky ass Sieyes’ fault. Only my speech to the Five Hundred saved the situation.”

‘“Did it save your coat?” says Talleyrand. “I hear they tore it when they threw you out. Don’t gasconade to me. You may be in the road of victory, but you aren’t there yet.”

‘Then I guessed t’other man was Boney. He stamped about and swore at Talleyrand.

‘“You forget yourself, Consul,” says Talleyrand, “or rather you remember yourself—Corsican.”

‘“Pig!” says Boney, and worse.

‘“Emperor!” says Talleyrand, but, the way he spoke, it sounded worst of all. Some one must have backed against the folding doors, for they flew open and showed me in the middle of the room. Boney whipped out his pistol before I could stand up.

“General,” says Talleyrand to him, “this gentleman has a habit of catching us canaille en deshabille. Put that thing down.”

‘Boney laid it on the table, so I guessed which was master. Talleyrand takes my hand—“Charmed to see you again, Candide,” he says. “How is the adorable Dr Pangloss and the noble Huron?”

‘“They were doing very well when I left,” I said. “But I’m not.”

‘“Do you sell buttons now?” he says, and fills me a glass of wine off the table.

‘“Madeira,” says he. “Not so good as some I have drunk.”

‘“You mountebank!” Boney roars. “Turn that out.” (He didn’t even say “man,” but Talleyrand, being gentle born, just went on.)

page 7

‘“Pheasant is not so good as pork,” he says. “You will find some at that table if you will do me the honour to sit down. Pass him a clean plate, General.” And, as true as I’m here, Boney slid a plate along just like a sulky child. He was a lanky-haired, yellow-skinned little man, as nervous as a cat—and as dangerous. I could feel that.

‘“And now,” said Talleyrand, crossing his game leg over his sound one, “will you tell me your story?”

‘I was in a fluster, but I told him nearly everything from the time he left me the five hundred dollars in Philadelphia, up to my losing ship and cargo at Le Havre. Boney began by listening, but after a bit he dropped into his own thoughts and looked at the crowd sideways through the front-room curtains. Talleyrand called to him when I’d done.

‘“Eh? What we need now,” says Boney, “is peace for the next three or four years.”

‘“Quite so,” says Talleyrand. “Meantime I want the Consul’s order to the Prize Court at Le Havre to restore my friend here his ship.”

‘“Nonsense!” says Boney. “Give away an oak-built brig of two hundred and seven tons for sentiment? Certainly not! She must be armed into my Navy with ten—no, fourteen twelve- pounders and two long fours. Is she strong enough to bear a long twelve forward?”

‘Now I could ha’ sworn he’d paid no heed to my talk, but that wonderful head-piece of his seemingly skimmed off every word of it that was useful to him.

‘“Ah, General!” says Talleyrand. “You are a magician—a magician without morals. But the brig is undoubtedly American, and we don’t want to offend them more than we have. “

‘“Need anybody talk about the affair?” he says. He didn’t look at me, but I knew what was in his mind—just cold murder because I worried him; and he’d order it as easy as ordering his carriage.

‘“You can’t stop ’em,” I said. “There’s twenty-two other men besides me.” I felt a little more ’ud set me screaming like a wired hare.

‘“Undoubtedly American,” Talleyrand goes on. “You would gain something if you returned the ship—with a message of fraternal good-will—published in the Moniteur” (that’s a French paper like the Philadelphia Aurora).

‘“A good idea!” Boney answers. “One could say much in a message.”

‘“It might be useful,” says Talleyrand. “Shall I have the message prepared?” He wrote something in a little pocket ledger.

‘“Yes—for me to embellish this evening. The Moniteur will publish it tonight.”

‘“Certainly. Sign, please,” says Talleyrand, tearing the leaf out.

‘“But that’s the order to return the brig,” says Boney. “Is that necessary? Why should I lose a good ship? Haven’t I lost enough ships already?”

‘Talleyrand didn’t answer any of those questions. Then Boney sidled up to the table and jabs his pen into the ink. Then he shies at the paper again: “My signature alone is useless,” he says. “You must have the other two Consuls as well. Sieyes and Roger Ducos must sign. We must preserve the Laws.”

‘“By the time my friend presents it,” says Talleyrand, still looking out of window, “only one signature will be necessary.”

‘Boney smiles. “It’s a swindle,” says he, but he signed and pushed the paper across.

‘“Give that to the President of the Prize Court at Le Havre,” says Talleyrand, “and he will give you back your ship. I will settle for the cargo myself. You have told me how much it cost. What profit did you expect to make on it?”

‘Well, then, as man to man, I was bound to warn him that I’d set out to run it into England without troubling the Revenue, and so I couldn’t rightly set bounds to my profits.’

‘I guessed that all along,’ said Puck.

The children laughed.

‘It’s comical enough now,’ said Pharaoh. ‘But I didn’t laugh then. Says Talleyrand after a minute, “I am a bad accountant and I have several calculations on hand at present. Shall we say twice the cost of the cargo?”

‘Say? I couldn’t say a word. I sat choking and nodding like a China image while he wrote an order to his secretary to pay me, I won’t say how much, because you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘“Oh! Bless you, Abbé! God bless you!” I got it out at last.

‘“Yes,” he says, “I am a priest in spite of myself, but they call me Bishop now. Take this for my episcopal blessing,” and he hands me the paper.

‘“He stole all that money from me,” says Boney over my shoulder. “A Bank of France is another of the things we must make. Are you mad?” he shouts at Talleyrand.

‘“Quite,” says Talleyrand, getting up. “But be calm. The disease will never attack you. It is called gratitude. This gentleman found me in the street and fed me when I was hungry.”

‘”I see; and he has made a fine scene of it, and you have paid him, I suppose. Meantime, France waits. “

‘“Oh! poor France!” says Talleyrand. “Good-bye, Candide,” he says to me. “By the way,” he says, “have you yet got Red Jacket’s permission to tell me what the President said to his Cabinet after Monsieur Genet rode away?”

‘I couldn’t speak, I could only shake my head, and Boney—so impatient he was to go on with his doings—he ran at me and fair pushed me out of the room. And that was all there was to it.’ Pharaoh stood up and slid his fiddle into one of his big skirt-pockets as though it were a dead hare.

‘Oh! but we want to know lots and lots more,’said Dan. ‘How you got home—and what old Maingon said on the barge—and wasn’t your cousin surprised when he had to give back the Berthe Aurette, and—’

‘Tell us more about Toby!’ cried Una.

‘Yes, and Red Jacket,’ said Dan.

‘Won’t you tell us any more?’ they both pleaded.

Puck kicked the oak branch on the fire, till it sent up a column of smoke that made them sneeze. When they had finished the Shaw was empty except for old Hobden stamping through the larches.

‘They gipsies have took two,’he said. “My black pullet and my liddle gingy-speckled cockrel.’

‘I thought so,’ said Dan, picking up one tail-feather that the old woman had overlooked.

‘Which way did they go? Which way did the runagates go?’ said Hobden.

‘Hobby!’ said Una. ‘Would you like it if we told Keeper Ridley all your goings and comings?’

[a short tale]

THE man from Manila held the floor. “Much care had made him very lean and pale and hollow-eyed.” Added to which he smoked the cigars of his own country, and they were bad for the constitution. He foisted his Stinkadores Magnificosas and his Cuspidores Imperiallissimos upon all who would accept them, and wondered that the recipients of his bounty turned away and were sad. “There is nothing,” said he, “like a Manila cigar.” And the pink pyjamas and blue pyjamas and the spotted green pyjamas, all fluttering gracefully in the morning breeze, vowed that there was not and never would be.

“Do the Spaniards smoke these vile brands to any extent?” asked the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure as he inspected a fresh box of Oysters of the East. “Smoke ’em!” said the man from Manila; “they do nothing else day and night.” “Ah!” said the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure, in the low voice of one who has received mortal injury, “that accounts for the administration of the country being what it is. After a man has tried a couple of these things he would be ready for any crime.”

The man from Manila took no heed of the insult. “I knew a case once,” said he, “when a cigar saved a man from the sin of burglary and landed him in quod for five years.” “Was he trying to kill the man who gave him the cigar?” said the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure. “No, it was this way: My firm’s godowns stand close to a creek. That is to say, the creek washes one face of them, and there are a few things in those godowns that might be useful to a man, such as piece-goods and cotton prints—perhaps five thousand dollars’ worth. I happened to be walking through the place one day when, for a miracle, I was not smoking. That was two years ago.” “Great Cæsar! then he has been smoking ever since!” murmured the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure.

“Was not smoking,” continued the man from Manila. “I had no business in the godowns. They were a short cut to my house. When half-way through them I fancied I saw a little curl of smoke rising from behind one of the bales. We stack our bales on low saddles, much as ricks are stacked in England. My first notion was to yell. I object to fire in godowns on principle. It is expensive, whatever the insurance may do. Luckily I sniffed before I shouted, and I sniffed good tobacco smoke.” “And this was in Manila, you say?” interrupted the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure.

“Yes, in the only place in the world where you get good tobacco. I knew we had no bales of the weed in stock, and I suspected that a man who got behind print bales to finish his cigar might be worth looking up. I walked between the bales till I reached the smoke. It was coming from the ground under one of the saddles. That’s enough, I thought, and I went away to get a couple of the Guarda Civile—policemen, in fact. I knew if there was anything to be extracted from my friend the bobbies would do it. A Spanish policeman carries in the day-time nothing more than a six-shooter and machete, a dirk. At night he adorns himself with a repeating rifle, which he fires on the slightest provocation. Well, when the policemen arrived, they poked my friend out of his hiding-place with their dirks, hauled him out by the hair, and kicked him round the godown once or twice, just to let him know that he had been discovered. They then began to question him, and under gentle pressure—I thought he would be pulped into a jelly, but a Spanish policeman always knows when to leave oflf—he made a clean breast of the whole business. He was part of a gang, and was to lie in the godown all that night. At twelve o’clock a boat manned by his confederates was to drop down the creek and halt under the godown windows, while he was to hand out our bales. That was their little plan. He had lain there about three hours, and then he began to smoke. I don’t think he noticed what he was doing: smoking is just like breathing to a Spaniard. He could not imderstand how he had betrayed himself and wanted to know whether he had left a leg sticking out imder the saddles. Then the Guarda Civile lambasted him all over again for trifling with the majesty of the law, and removed him after full confession.

“I put one of my own men under a saddle with instructions to hand out print bales to anybody who might ask for them in the course of the night. Meantime the police made their own arrangements, which were very comprehensive.

“At midnight a lumbering old barge, big enough to hold about a himdred bales, came down the creek and pulled up under the godown windows, exactly as if she had been one of my own barges. The eight ruffians in her whistled all the national airs of Manila as a signal to the confederate, then cooling his heels in the lock-up. But my man was ready. He opened the window and held quite a long confab with these second-hand pirates. They were all half-breeds and Roman Catholics, and the way they called upon all the blessed saints to assist them in their work was edifying. My man began tilting out the bales quite as quickly as the confederate would have done. Only he stopped to giggle now and again, and they spat and swore at him like cats. That made him worse, and at last he dropped yelling with laughter over the half door of the godown goods window. Then one boat came up stream and another down stream, and caught the barge stem and stem. Four Guarda Civiles were in each boat; consequently, eight repeating rifles were pointed at the barge, which was very nicely loaded with our bales. The pirates called on the saints more fluently than ever, threw up their hands, and threw themselves on their stomachs. That was the safest attitude, and it gave them the chance of cursing their luck, the barge, the godown, the Guarda Civile, and every saint in the calendar. They cursed the saints most, for the Guarda Civile thumped ’em when their remarks became too personal. We made them put all the bales back again. Then they were handed over to justice and got five years apiece. If they had any dollars they would get out the next day. If they hadn’t, they would serve their full time and no ticket-of-leave allowed. That’s the whole story.”

“And the only case on record,” said the Young Gentleman travelling for Pleasure, “where a Manila cigar was of any use to any one.” The man from Manila lit a fresh Cuspidore and went down to his bath.

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BEFORE he was thirty he discovered that there was no one to play with him. Though the wealth of three toilsome generations stood to his account, though his tastes in the matter of books, bindings, rugs, swords, bronzes, lacquer, pictures, plate, statuary, horses, conservatories, and agriculture were educated and catholic, the public opinion of his country wanted to know why he did not go to office daily, as his father had before him.So he fled, and they howled behind him that he was an unpatriotic Anglomaniac, born to consume fruits, one totally lacking in public spirit. He wore an eye-glass; he had built a wall round his country house, with a high gate that shut, instead of inviting America to sit on his flower-beds; he ordered his clothes from England; and the press of his abiding city cursed him, from his eye-glass to his trousers, for two consecutive days.

When he rose to light again, it was where nothing less than the tents of an invading army in Piccadilly would make any difference to anybody. If he had money and leisure, England stood ready to give him all that money and leisure could buy. That price paid, she would ask no questions. He took his cheque-book and accumulated things—warily at first, for he remembered that in America things own the man. To his delight, he discovered that in England he could put his belongings under his feet; for classes, ranks, and denominations of people rose, as it were, from the earth, and silently and discreetly took charge of his possessions. They had been born and bred for that sole purpose—servants of the cheque-book. When that was at an end they would depart as mysteriously as they had come.

The impenetrability of this regulated life irritated him, and he strove to learn something of the human side of these people. He retired baffled, to be trained by his menials. In America, the native demoralizes the English servant. In England, the servant educates the master. Wilton Sargent strove to learn all they taught as ardently as his father had striven to wreck, before capture, the railways of his native land; and it must have been some touch of the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt Hangers, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling interests in several thousand miles of track—not permanent-way—built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally whistled for grade-crossings, and parlour-cars of fabulous expense and unrestful design skated round curves that the Great Buchonian would have condemned as unsafe in a construction-line. From the edge of his lawn he could trace the chaired metals falling away, rigid as a bowstring, into the valley of the Prest, studded with the long perspective of the block-signals, buttressed with stone, and carried, high above all possible risk, on a forty-foot embankment.

Left to himself, he would have builded a private car, and kept it at the nearest railway station, Amberley Royal, five miles away. But those into whose hands he had committed himself for his English training had little knowledge of railways and less of private cars. The one they knew as something that existed in the scheme of things for their convenience. The other they held to be ‘distinctly American’; and, with the versatility of his race, Wilton Sargent had set out to be just a little more English than the English.

He succeeded to admiration. He learned not to redecorate Holt Hangers, though he warmed it; to leave his guests alone; to refrain from superfluous introductions; to abandon manners, of which he had great store, and to hold fast by manner which can after labour be acquired. He learned to let other people, hired for the purpose, attend to the duties for which they were paid. He learned—this he got from a ditcher on the estate—that every man with whom he came in contact had a decreed position in the fabric of the realm, which position Wilton would do well to consult. Last mystery of all, he learned to golf—well; and when an American knows the innermost meaning of ‘Don’t press, slow back, and keep your eye on the ball,’ he is, for practical purposes, denationalised.

His other education proceeded on the pleasantest lines. Was he interested in any conceivable thing in heaven above, or the earth. beneath, or the waters under the earth? Forthwith appeared at his table, guided by those safe hands into which he had fallen, the very men who had best said, done, written, explored, excavated, built, launched, created, or studied that one thing—herders of books and prints in the British Museum; specialists in scarabs, cartouches, and dynasties Egyptian; rovers and raiders from the heart of unknown lands; toxicologists; orchid-hunters; monographers on flint implements, carpets, prehistoric man, or early Renaissance music. They came, and they played with him. They asked no questions; they cared not so much as a pin who or what he was. They demanded only that he should be able to talk and listen courteously. Their work was done elsewhere and out of his sight.

There were also women.

‘Never,’ said Wilton Sargent to himself, ‘has an American seen England as I’m seeing it’; and he thought, blushing beneath the bedclothes, of the unregenerate and blatant days when he would steam to office, down the Hudson, in his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht, and arrive by gradations, at Bleecker Street, hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist. If any of his guests had seen him then they would have said, ‘How distinctly American!’ and—Wilton did not care for that tone. He had schooled himself to an English walk, and, so long as he did not raise it, an English voice. He did not gesticulate with his hands; he sat down on most of his enthusiasms, but he could not rid himself of The Shibboleth. He would ask for the Worcestershire sauce. Even Howard, his immaculate butler, could not break him of this.

It was decreed that he should complete his education in a wild and wonderful manner, and that I should be in at that death.

Wilton had more than once asked me to Holt Hangers, for the purpose of showing how well the new life fitted him; and each time I had declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangers livery met me at Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangers I was received by a person of elegance and true reserve, and piloted to my luxurious chamber. There were no other guests in the house, and this set me thinking.

Wilton came into my room about half-an-hour before dinner, and though his face was masked with a drop-curtain of highly embroidered indifference, I could see that he was not at ease. In time, for he was then almost as difficult to move as one of my own countrymen, I extracted the tale—simple in its extravagance, extravagant in its simplicity. It seemed that Hackman of the British Museum had been staying with him about ten days before, boasting of scarabs. Hackman has a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring and in his trouser pockets. Apparently, he had intercepted something on its way to the Boulak Museum which, he said, was ‘a genuine Amen-Hotep—a queen’s scarab of the Fourth Dynasty.’ Now Wilton had bought from Cassavetti, whose reputation is not above suspicion, a scarab of much the same scarabeousness, and had left it in his London chambers. Hackman at a venture, but knowing Cassavetti, pronounced it an imposition. There was long discussion—savant versus millionaire, one saying: ‘But I know it cannot be’; and the other: ‘But I can and will prove it.’ Wilton found it necessary for his soul’s satisfaction to go up to town, then and there—a forty-mile run—and bring back the scarab before dinner. It was at this point that he began to cut corners with disastrous results. Amberley Royal station being five miles

page 2

away, and the putting in of horses a matter of time, Wilton had told Howard, the immaculate butler, to signal the next train to stop; and Howard, who was more of a man of resource than his master gave him credit for, had, with the red flag of the ninth hole of the links which crossed the bottom of the lawn, signalled vehemently to the first up-train, and it had stopped. Here Wilton’s account became confused. He attempted; it seems, to get into that highly indignant express, and a guard restrained him with more or less force—hauled him, in fact, backwards from the window of a locked carriage. Wilton must have struck the gravel with some vehemence, for the consequences, he admitted, were a free fight on the line, in which he lost his hat, and was at last dragged into the guard’s van and set down breathless.

He had pressed money upon the man, and very foolishly had explained everything but his name. This he clung to, for he had a vision of tall headlines in the New York papers, and well knew no son of Merton Sargent could expect mercy that side the water. The guard, to Wilton’s amazement, refused the money on the grounds that this was a matter for the Company to attend to. Wilton insisted on his incognito, and, therefore, found two policemen waiting for him at St. Botolph terminus. When he expressed a wish to buy a new hat and telegraph to his friends, both policemen with one voice warned him that whatever he said would be used as evidence against him; and this had impressed Wilton tremendously.

‘They were so infernally polite,’ he said. ‘If they had clubbed me I wouldn’t have cared; but it was, “Step this way, sir,” and, “Up those stairs, please, sir,” till they jailed me—jailed me like a common drunk, and I had to stay in a filthy little cubby-hole of a cell all night.’

‘That comes of not giving your name and not wiring your lawyer,’ I replied. ‘What did you get? ‘

‘Forty shillings or a month,’ said Wilton, promptly,—‘next morning bright and early. They were working us off, three a minute. A girl in a pink hat—she was brought in at three in the morning—got ten days. I suppose, I was lucky. I must have knocked his senses out of the guard. He told the old duck on the bench that I had told him I was a sergeant in the army, and that I was gathering beetles on the track. That comes of trying to explain to an Englishman.’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, I said nothing. I wanted to get out. I paid my fine, and bought a new hat, and came up here before noon next morning. There were a lot of people in the house, and I told ’em I’d been unavoidably detained, and then they began to recollect engagements elsewhere. Hackman must have seen the fight on the track and made a story of it. I suppose they thought it was distinctly American—confound ’em! It’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever flagged a train, and I wouldn’t have done it but for that scarab. ’Twouldn’t hurt their old trains to be held up once in a while.’

‘Well, it’s all over now,’ I said, choking a little. ‘And your name didn’t get into the papers. It is rather transatlantic when you come to think of it.’

‘Over!’ Wilton grunted savagely. ‘It’s only just begun. That trouble with the guard was just common, ordinary assault—merely a little criminal business. The flagging of the train is civil, and means something quite different. They’re after me for that now.’

‘Who?’

‘The Great Buchonian. There was a man in court watching the case on behalf of the Company. I gave him my name in a quiet corner before I bought my hat, and—come to dinner now; I’ll show you the results afterwards.’

The telling of his wrongs had worked Wilton Sargent into a very fine temper, and I do not think that my conversation soothed him. In, the course of the dinner, prompted by a devil of pure mischief, I dwelt with loving insistence on certain smells and sounds of New York which go straight to the heart of the native in foreign parts; and Wilton began to ask. many questions about his associates aforetime—men of the New York Yacht Club, Storm King, or the Restigouche, owners of rivers, ranches, and shipping in their playtime, lords of railways, kerosene, wheat and cattle in their offices. When the green mint came, I gave him a peculiarly oily and atrocious cigar, of the brand they sell in the tessellated, electric-lighted, with-expensive-pictures-of-the-nude-adorned bar of the Pandemonium, and Wilton chewed the end for several minutes ere he lit it. The butler left us alone, and the chimney of the oak-panelled dining-room began to smoke.

‘That’s another! ‘said he, poking the fire savagely, and I knew what he meant. One cannot put steam-heat, in houses where Queen Elizabeth slept. The steady beat of a night-mail, whirling down the valley, recalled me to business. ‘What about the Great Buchonian? ‘I said.

‘Come into my study. That’s all—as yet.

It was a pile of Seidlitz-powders-coloured correspondence, perhaps nine inches high, and it looked very businesslike.

‘You can go through it,’ said Wilton. ‘Now I could take a chair and a red flag and go into Hyde Park and say the most atrocious things about your Queen, and preach anarchy and all that, y’ know, till I was hoarse, and no one would take any notice. The Police—damn’ em!—would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a little thing like flagging a dirty little sawed-off train,—running through my own grounds, too,—I get the whole British Constitution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don’t understand it.’

‘No more does the Great Buchonian—apparently.’ I was turning over the letters. ‘Here’s the traffic superintendent writing that it’s utterly incomprehensible that any man should . . . Good heavens, Wilton, you have done it!’ I giggled, as I read on.

‘What’s funny now?’ said my host.

‘It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty Northern up.’

‘I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the engine-driver up.’

‘But it’s the three-forty—the “Induna”—surely you’ve heard of the Great Buchonian’s “Induna”?’

‘How the deuce am I to know, one train from another? They come along about every two minutes.’

‘Quite so. But this happens to be the “Induna,” the one train of the whole line. She’s timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped——’

‘I know! Since William the Conqueror came over, or King Charles hid in her smoke-stack. You’re as bad as the rest of these Britishers. If she’s been run all that while, it’s time she was flagged once or twice.’

The American was beginning to ooze out all over Wilton, and his small-boned hands were moving, restlessly.

page 3

‘Suppose you flagged the Empire State Express, or the Western Cyclone?’

‘Suppose I did. I know Otis Harvey—or used to. I’d send him a wire, and he’d understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That’s exactly what I told this British fossil company here.’

‘Have you been answering their letters without legal advice, then?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Oh, my sainted Country! Go ahead, Wilton.’

‘I wrote ’em that I’d be very happy to see their president and explain to him in three words all about it; but that wouldn’t do. ’Seems their president must be a god. He was too busy, and—well, you can read for yourself—they wanted explanations. The stationmaster at Amberley Royal—and he grovels before me, as a rule—wanted an explanation, and quick, too. The head sachem at St. Botolph’s wanted three or four, and the Lord High Mukkamuk that oils the locomotives, wanted one every fine day. I told ’em-—I’ve told ’em about fifty times—I stopped their holy and sacred train because I wanted to board her. Did they think I wanted to feel her pulse?’

‘You didn’t say that?’

‘“Feel her pulse” Of course not.’

‘No. “Board her.”’

‘What else could I say?’

‘My dear Wilton, what is the use of Mrs. Sherborne, and the Clays, and all that lot working over you for four years to make an Englishman out of you, if the very first time you’re rattled you go back to the vernacular?’

‘I’m through with Mrs. Sherborne and the rest of the crowd. America’s good enough for me. What ought I to have said? “Please,” or “Thanks awf’ly,” or how?’

There was no chance now of mistaking the man’s nationality. Speech, gesture, and step, so carefully drilled into him, had gone away with the borrowed mask of indifference. It was a lawful son of the Youngest People, whose predecessors were the Red Indian. His voice had risen to the high, throaty crow of his breed when they labour under excitement. His close-set eyes showed by turns unnecessary fear, annoyance beyond reason, rapid and purposeless flights of thought, the child’s lust for immediate revenge, and the child’s pathetic bewilderment, who knocks his head against the bad, wicked table. And on the other side, I knew, stood the Company, as unable as Wilton to understand.

‘And I could buy their old road three times over,’ he muttered, playing with a paper-knife, and moving restlessly to and fro.

‘You didn’t tell ’em that, I hope!’

There was no answer; but as I went through the letters, I felt that Wilton must have told them many surprising things. The Great Buchonian had first asked for an explanation of the stoppage of their Induna, and had found a certain levity in the explanation tendered. It then advised ‘Mr. W. Sargent’ to refer his solicitor to their solicitor, or whatever the legal phrase is.

‘And you didn’t?’ I said, looking up.

‘No. They were treating me exactly as if I had been a kid playing on the cable-tracks. There was not the least necessity for any solicitor. Five minutes quiet talk would have settled everything.’

I returned to the correspondence. The Great Buchonian regretted that owing to pressure of business none of their directors could accept Mr. W. Sargent’s invitation to run down and discuss the difficulty. The Great Buchonian was careful to point out that no animus underlay their action, nor was money their object. Their duty was to protect the interests of their line, and these interests could not be protected if a precedent were established whereby any of the Queen’s subjects could stop a train in mid-career. Again (this was another branch of the correspondence, not more than five heads of departments being concerned), the Company admitted that there was some reasonable doubt as to the duties of express-trains in all crises, and the matter was open to settlement by process of law till an authoritative ruling was obtained—from the House of Lords, if necessary.

‘That broke me all up,’ said Wilton, who was reading over my shoulder. ‘I knew I’d struck the British Constitution at last. The House of Lords—my Lord! And, anyway, I’m not one of the Queen’s subjects.’

‘Why, I had a notion that you’d got yourself naturalised.’

Wilton blushed hotly as he explained that very many things must happen to the British Constitution ere he took out his papers.

‘How does it all strike you?’ he said. ‘Isn’t the Great Buchonian crazy?’

‘I don’t know. You’ve done something that no one ever thought of doing before, and the Company don’t know what to make of it. I see they offer to send down their solicitor and another official of the Company to talk things over informally. Then here’s another letter suggesting that you put up a fourteen-foot wall, crowned with bottle-glass, at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Talk of British insolence! The man who recommends that (he’s another bloated functionary) says that I shall “derive great pleasure from watching the wall going up day by day”! Did you ever dream of such gall? I’ve offered ’em money enough to buy a new set of cars and pension the driver for three generations; but that doesn’t seem to be what they want. They expect me to go to the House of Lords and get a ruling, and build walls between times. Are they all stark, raving mad? One ’ud think I made a profession of flagging trains. How in Tophet was I to know their old Induna from a way-train? I took the first that came along, and I’ve been jailed and fined for that once already.’

‘That was for slugging the guard.’

‘He had no right to haul me out when I was half-way through a window.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Their lawyer and the other official (can’t they trust their men unless they send ’em in pairs?) are coming here to-night. I told ’em I was busy, as a rule, till after dinner, but they might send along the entire directorate if it eased ’em any.’

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Now, after-dinner visiting, for business or pleasure, is the custom of the smaller American town, and not that of England, where the end of the day is sacred to the owner. Verily, Wilton Sargent had hoisted the striped flag of rebellion

‘Isn’t it time that the humour of the situation began to strike you, Wilton?’ I asked.

‘Where’s the humour of baiting an American citizen just because he happens to be a millionaire—poor devil!’ He was silent for a little time, and then went on: ‘Of course. Now I see!’ He spun round and faced me excitedly. ‘It’s as plain as mud. These ducks are laying their pipes to skin me.’

‘They say explicitly they don’t want money!’

‘That’s all a blind. So’s their addressing me as W. Sargent. They know well enough who I am. They know I’m the old man’s son. Why didn’t I think of that before?’

‘One minute, Wilton. If you climbed to the top of the dome of St. Paul’s and offered a reward to any Englishman who could tell you who or what Merton Sargent had been, there wouldn’t be twenty men in all London to claim it.’

‘That’s their insular provincialism, then. I don’t care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I’ll do it in dead earnest! I’ll show ’em that they can’t bulldose a foreigner for flagging one of their little tin-pot trains, and—I’ve spent fifty thousand a year here, at least, for the last four years.’

I was glad I was not his lawyer. I re-read the correspondence, notably the letter which recommended him—almost tenderly, I fancied—to build a fourteen-foot brick wall at the end of his garden, and half-way through it a thought struck me which filled me with pure joy.

The footman ushered in two men, frock-coated, gray-trousered, smooth-shaven, heavy of speech and gait. It was nearly nine o’clock, but they looked as newly come from a bath. I could not understand why the elder and taller of the pair glanced at me as though we had an understanding, nor why he shook hands with an unEnglish warmth.

‘This simplifies the situation,’ he said in an undertone, and, as I stared, he whispered to his companion: ‘I fear I shall be of very little service at present. Perhaps, Mr. Folsom had better talk over the affair with Mr. Sargent.’

‘That is what I am here for,’ said Wilton.

The man of law smiled pleasantly, and said that he saw no reason why the difficulty should not be arranged in two minutes’ quiet talk. His air, as he sat down opposite Wilton, was soothing to the last degree. His companion drew me upstage. The mystery was deepening, but I followed meekly, and heard Wilton say, with an uneasy laugh:

‘I’ve had insomnia over this affair, Mr. Folsom. Let’s settle it one way or the other, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Ah! Has he suffered much from this lately?’ said my man, with a preliminary cough.

‘I really can’t say,’ I replied.

‘Then I suppose you have only lately taken charge here?’

‘I came this evening. I am not exactly in charge of anything.’

‘I see. Merely to observe the course of events—in case——’ He nodded.

‘Exactly.’ Observation, after all, is my trade.

He coughed again slightly, and then came to business.

‘Now,—I am asking solely for information’s sake,—do you find the delusions persistent?’

‘Which delusions?’

‘They are variable, then. That is distinctly curious, because—but do I understand that the type of the delusion varies? For example, Mr. Sargent believes that he can buy the Great Buchonian.’

‘Did he write you that?’

‘He made the offer to the Company—on a half-sheet of note-paper. Now, has he by chance gone to the other extreme, and believed that he is in danger of becoming a pauper? The curious economy in the use of a half-sheet of paper shows that some idea of that kind might have flashed through his mind; and the two delusions can coexist, but it is not common. As you must know, the delusion of vast wealth—the folly of grandeurs, I believe our friends the French call it—is, as a rule, persistent, to the exclusion of all others.’

Then I heard Wilton’s best English voice at the end of the study

‘My dear sir, I have explained twenty times already, I wanted to get that scarab in time for dinner. Suppose you had left an important legal document in the same way?’

‘That touch of cunning is very significant,’ my fellow—practitioner-since he insisted on it—muttered.

‘I am very happy, of course, to meet you; but if you had only sent your president down to dinner here, I could have settled the thing in half a minute. Why, I could have bought the Buchonian from him while your clerks were sending me this.’ Wilton dropped his hand heavily on the blue and white correspondence, and the lawyer started.

‘But, speaking frankly,’ the lawyer replied, ‘it is, if I may say so, perfectly inconceivable, even in the case of the most important legal documents, that any one should stop the three-forty express—the Induna—our Induna, my dear sir.’

‘Absolutely!’ my companion echoed; then to me in a lower tone: ‘You notice, again, the persistent delusion of wealth. I was called in when he wrote us that. You can see it is utterly im possible for the Company to continue to run their trains through the property of a man who may at any moment fancy himself divinely commissioned to stop all traffic. If he had only referred us to his lawyer—but, naturally, that he would not do under the circumstances. A pity—a great pity. He is so young. By the way, it is curious, is it not, to note the absolute conviction in the voice of those who are similarly afflicted,—heart-rending, I might say,—and the inability to follow a chain of connected thought.’

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‘I can’t see what you want,’ Wilton was saying to the lawyer.

‘It need not be more than fourteen feet high—a really desirable structure, and it would be possible to grow pear-trees on the sunny side.’ The lawyer was speaking in an unprofessional voice. ‘There are few things pleasanter than to watch, so to say, one’s own vine and fig-tree in full bearing. Consider the profit and amusement you would derive from it. If you could see your way to doing this, we could arrange all the details with your lawyer, and it is possible that the Company might bear some of the cost. I have put the matter, I trust, in a nutshell. If you, my dear sir, will interest yourself in building that wall, and will kindly give us the name of your lawyers, I dare assure you that you will hear no more from the Great Buchonian.’

‘But why am I to disfigure my lawn with a new brick wall?’

‘Gray flint is extremely picturesque.’

‘Gray flint, then, if you put it that way. Why the dickens must I go building towers of Babylon just because I have held up one of your trains—once?’

‘The expression he used in his third letter was that he wished to “board her,”’ said my companion in my ear. ‘That was very curious—a marine delusion impinging, as it were, upon a land one. What a marvellous world he must move in—and will before the curtain falls. So young, too—so very young!’

‘Well, if you want the plain English of it, I’m damned if I go wall-building to your order. You can fight it all along the line, into the House of Lords and out again, and get your rulings by the running foot if you like,’ said Wilton, hotly. ‘Great Heavens, man, I only did it once!’

‘We have at present no guarantee that you may not do it again; and, with our traffic, we must, in justice to our passengers, demand some form of guarantee. It must not serve as a precedent. All this might have been saved if you had only referred us to your legal representative.’ The lawyer looked appealingly around the room. The deadlock was complete.

‘Wilton,’ I asked, ‘may I try my hand now?’

‘Anything you like,’ said Wilton. ‘It seems I can’t talk English. I won’t build any wall, though.’ He threw himself back in his chair.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said deliberately, for I perceived that the doctor’s mind would turn slowly, ‘Mr. Sargent has very large interests in the chief railway systems of his own country.’

‘His own country?’ said the lawyer.

‘At that age? ‘said the doctor.

‘Certainly. He inherited them from his father, Mr. Sargent, who is an American.’

‘And proud of it,’ said Wilton, as though he had been a Western Senator let loose on the Continent for the first time.

‘My dear sir,’ said the lawyer, half rising, ‘why did you not acquaint the Company with this fact—this vital fact—early in our correspondence? We should have understood. We should have made allowances.’

‘Allowances be damned! Am I a Red Indian or a lunatic?’

The two men looked guilty.

‘If Mr. Sargent’s friend had told us as much in the beginning,’ said the doctor, very severely, ‘much might have been saved.’ Alas! I had made a life’s enemy of that doctor.

‘I hadn’t a chance,’ I replied. ‘Now, of course, you can see that a man who owns several thousand miles of line, as Mr. Sargent does, would be apt to treat railways a shade more casually than other people.’

‘Of course; of course. He is an American; that accounts. Still, it was the Induna; but I can quite understand that the customs of our cousins across the water differ in these particulars from ours. And do you always stop trains in this way in the States, Mr. Sargent?’

‘I should if occasion ever arose; but I’ve never had to yet. Are you going to make an international complication of the business?’

‘You need give yourself no further concern whatever in the matter. We see that there is no likelihood of this action of yours establishing a precedent, which was the only thing we were afraid of. Now that you understand that we cannot reconcile our system to any sudden stoppages, we feel quite sure that——’

‘I shan’t be staying long enough to flag another train,’ Wilton said pensively.

‘You are returning, then, to our fellow-kinsmen across the—ah—big pond, you call it?’

‘No, sir. The ocean—the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s three thousand miles broad, and three miles deep in places. I wish it were ten thousand.’

‘I am not so fond of sea-travel myself; but I think it is every Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the great branch of our Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean,’ said the lawyer.

‘If ever you come over, and care to flag any train on my system, I’ll—I’ll see you through,’ said Wilton.

‘Thank you—ah, thank you. You’re very kind. I’m sure I should enjoy myself immensely.’

‘We have overlooked the fact,’ the doctor whispered to me, ‘that your friend proposed to buy the Great Buchonian.’

‘He is worth anything from twenty to thirty million dollars—four to five million pounds,’ I answered, knowing that it would be hopeless to explain.

‘Really! That is enormous wealth, but the Great Buchonian is not in the market.’

‘Perhaps he does not want to buy it now.’

‘It would be impossible under any circumstances,’ said the doctor.

‘How characteristic!’ murmured the lawyer, reviewing matters in his mind. ‘I always understood from books that your countrymen were in a hurry. And so you would have gone forty miles to town and back—before dinner—to get a scarab? How intensely American! But you talk exactly like an Englishman, Mr. Sargent.’

‘That is a fault that can be remedied. There’s only one question I’d like to ask you. You said it was inconceivable that any man should stop a train on your system?’

‘And so it is—absolutely inconceivable.’

‘Any sane man, that is?’

‘That is what I meant, of course. I mean, with. excep——’

‘Thank you.’

The two men departed. Wilton checked himself as he was about to fill a pipe, took one of my cigars instead, and was silent for fifteen minutes.

Then said he: ‘Have you got a list of the Southampton sailings on you?’

Far away from the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangers runs a river called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles; and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht Columbia, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an average speed of seventeen knots,—and the barges can look out for theme selves,—Wilton Sargent, American.

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IT CAME without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine. The New York doctors called it overwork, and he lay in a darkened room, one ankle crossed above the other, tongue pressed into palate, wondering whether the next brain-surge of prickly fires would drive his soul from all anchorages. At last they gave judgment. With care he might in two years return to the arena, but for the present he must go across the water and do no work whatever. He accepted the terms. It was capitulation; but the Combine that had shivered beneath his knife gave him all the honours of war: Gunsberg himself, full of condolences, came to the steamer and filled the Chapins’ suite of cabins with overwhelming flower-works.“Smilax,” said George Chapin when he saw them. “Fitz is right. I’m dead; only I don’t see why he left out the ‘In Memoriam’ on the ribbons!”“Nonsense!” his wife answered, and poured him his tincture. “You’ll be back before you can think.”

He looked at himself in the mirror, surprised that his face had not been branded by the hells of the past three months. The noise of the decks worried him, and he lay down, his tongue only a little pressed against his palate.

An hour later he said: “Sophie, I feel sorry about taking you away from everything like this. I—I suppose we’re the two loneliest people on God’s earth to-night.”

Said Sophie his wife, and kissed him: “Isn’t it something to you that we’re going together?”

They drifted about Europe for months—sometimes alone, sometimes with chance met gipsies of their own land. From the North Cape to the Blue Grotto at Capri they wandered, because the next steamer headed that way, or because some one had set them on the road. The doctors had warned Sophie that Chapin was not to take interest even in other men’s interests; but a familiar sensation at the back of the neck after one hour’s keen talk with a Nauheimed railway magnate saved her any trouble. He nearly wept.

“And I’m over thirty,” he cried. “With all I meant to do!”

“Let’s call it a honeymoon,” said Sophie. “D’ you know, in all the six years we’ve been married, you’ve never told me what you meant to do with your life?”

“With my life? What’s the use? It’s finished now.” Sophie looked up quickly from the Bay of Naples. “As far as my business goes, I shall have to live on my rents like that architect at San Moritz.”

“You’ll get better if you don’t worry; and even if it takes time, there are worse things than—How much have you?”

“Between four and five million. But it isn’t the money. You know it isn’t. It’s the principle. How could you respect me? You never did, the first year after we married, till I went to work like the others. Our tradition and upbringing are against it. We can’t accept those ideals.”

“Well, I suppose I married you for some sort of ideal,” she answered, and they returned to their forty-third hotel.

In England they missed the alien tongues of Continental streets that reminded them of their own polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one tongue, speciously like American to the ear, but on cross-examination unintelligible.,

“Ah, but you have not seen England,” said a lady with iron-grey hair. They had met her in Vienna, Bayreuth, and Florence, and were grateful to find her again at Claridge’s, for she commanded situations, and knew where prescriptions are most carefully made up. “You ought to take an interest in the home of our ancestors as I do.”

“I’ve tried for a week, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, “but I never get any further than tipping German waiters.”

“These men are not the true type,” Mrs. Shonts went on. “I know where you should go.”

Chapin pricked up his ears, anxious to run anywhere from the streets on which quick men, something of his kidney, did the business denied to him.

“We hear and we obey, Mrs. Shonts,” said Sophie, feeling his unrest as he drank the loathed British tea.

Mrs. Shonts smiled, and took them in hand. She wrote widely and telegraphed far on their behalf till, armed with her letter of introduction, she drove them into that wilderness which is reached from an ash-barrel of a station called Charing Cross. They were to go to Rockett’s—the farm of one Cloke, in the southern counties—where, she assured them, they would meet the genuine England of folklore and song.

Rocketts they found after some hours, four miles from a station, and, so far as they could, judge in the bumpy darkness, twice as many from a road. Trees, kine, and the outlines of barns showed shadowy about them when they alighted, and Mr. and Mrs. Cloke, at the open door of a deep stone-floored kitchen, made them slowly welcome. They lay in an attic beneath a wavy whitewashed ceiling, and, because it rained, a wood fire was made in an iron basket on a brick hearth, and they fell asleep to the chirping of mice and the whimper of flames.

When they woke it was a fair day, full of the noises, of birds, the smell of box lavender, and fried bacon, mixed with an elemental smell they had never met before.

“This,” said Sophie, nearly pushing out the thin casement in an attempt to see round the, corner, “is—what did the hack-cabman say to the railway porter about my trunk—‘quite on the top?’”

“No; ‘a little bit of all right.’ I feel farther away from anywhere than I’ve ever felt in my life. We must find out where the telegraph office is.”

“Who cares?” said Sophie, wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire the illustrated weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard.

But there was no rest for the alien soul till he had made sure of the telegraph office. He asked the Clokes’ daughter, laying breakfast, while Sophie plunged her face in the lavender bush outside the low window.

“Go to the stile a-top o’ the Barn field,” said Mary, “and look across Pardons to the next spire. It’s directly under. You can’t miss it—not if you keep to the footpath. My sister’s the telegraphist there. But you’re in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this door from Pardons village.”

“One has to take a good deal on trust in this country,” he murmured.

Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night’s wheels, at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still orchard about the half-timbered house.

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“What’s the matter with it?” she said. “Telegrams delivered to the Vale of Avalon, of course,” and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile stood against the skyline, and, “I wonder what we shall find now,” said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.

It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling shrilly.

“No roads, no nothing!” said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers. “I thought all England was a garden. There’s your spire, George, across the valley. How curious!”

They walked toward it through an all abandoned land. Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond—old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.

“All this within a hundred miles of London,” he said. “Looks as if it had had nervous prostration, too.” The, footpath turned the shoulder of a slope, through a thicket of rank rhododendrons, and crossed what had once been a carriage drive, which ended in the shadow of two gigantic holm-oaks.

“A house!” said Sophie, in a whisper. “A Colonial house!”

Behind the blue-green of the twin trees rose a dark-bluish brick Georgian pile, with a shell-shaped fan-light over its pillared door. The hound had gone off on his own foolish quests. Except for some stir it the branches and the flight of four startled magpies; there was neither life nor sound about the square house, but it looked out of its long windows most friendlily.

“Cha-armed to meet you, I’m sure,” said Sophie, and curtsied to the ground. “George, this is history I can understand. We began here.” She curtsied again.

The June sunshine twinkled on all the lights. It was as though an old lady, wise in three generations’ experience, but for the present sitting out, bent to listen to her flushed and eager grandchild.

“I must look!” Sophie tiptoed to a window, and shaded her eyes with her hand. “Oh, this room’s half-full of cotton-bales—wool, I suppose! But I can see a bit of the mantelpiece. George, do come! Isn’t that some one?”

She fell back behind her husband. The front door opened slowly, to show the hound, his nose white with milk, in charge of an ancient of days clad in a blue linen ephod curiously gathered on breast and shoulders.

“Certainly,” said George, half aloud. “Father Time himself. This is where he lives, Sophie.”

“We came,” said Sophie weakly. “Can we see the house? I’m afraid that’s our dog.”

“No, ’Tis Rambler,” said the old man. “He’s been, at my swill-pail again. Staying at Rocketts, be ye? Come in. Ah! you runagate!”

The hound broke from him, and he tottered after him down the drive. They entered the hall—just such a high light hall as such a house should own. A slim-balustered staircase, wide and shallow and once creamy-white, climbed out of it under a long oval window. On either side delicately moulded doors gave on to wool-lumbered rooms, whose sea-green mantelpieces were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low relief.

“What’s the firm that makes these things?” cried Sophie, enraptured. “Oh, I forgot! These must be the originals. Adams, is it? I never dreamed of anything like that steel-cut fender. Does he mean us to go everywhere?”

“He’s catching the dog,” said George, looking out. “We don’t count.”

They explored the first or ground floor, delighted as children playing burglars.

“This is like all England,” she said at last. “Wonderful, but no explanation. You’re expected to know it beforehand. Now, let’s try upstairs.”

The stairs never creaked beneath their feet. From the broad landing they entered a long, green-panelled room lighted by three full-length windows, which overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden, and wooded slopes beyond.

“The drawing-room, of course.” Sophie swam up and down it. “That mantelpiece—Orpheus and Eurydice—is the best of them all. Isn’t it marvellous? Why, the room seems furnished with nothing in it! How’s that, George?”

“It’s the proportions. I’ve noticed it.”

“I saw a Heppelwhite couch once”—Sophie laid her finger to her flushed cheek and considered. “With, two of them—one on each side—you wouldn’t need anything else. Except—there must be one perfect mirror over that mantelpiece.”

“Look at that view. It’s a framed Constable,” her husband cried.

“No; it’s a Morland—a parody of a Morland. But about that couch, George. Don’t you think Empire might be better than Heppelwhite? Dull gold against that pale green? It’s a pity they don’t make spinets nowadays.”

“I believe you can get them. Look at that oak wood behind the pines.”

“‘While you sat and played toccatas stately, at the clavichord,”’ Sophie hummed, and, head on one; side, nodded to where the perfect mirror should hang:

Then they found bedrooms with dressing-rooms and powdering-closets, and steps leading up and down—boxes of rooms, round, square, and octagonal, with enriched ceilings and chased door-locks.

“Now about servants. Oh!” She had darted up the last stairs to the chequered darkness of the top floor, where loose tiles lay among broken laths, and the walls were scrawled with names, sentiments, and hop records. “They’ve been keeping pigeons here,” she cried.

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“And you could drive a buggy through the roof anywhere,” said George.

“That’s what I say,” the old man cried below them on the stairs. “Not a dry place for my pigeons at all.”

“But why was it allowed to get like this?” said Sophie.

“Tis with housen as teeth,” he replied. “Let ’em go too far, and there’s nothing to be done. Time was they was minded to sell her, but none would buy. She was too far away along from any place. Time was they’d ha’ lived here theyselves, but they took and died.”

“Here?” Sophie moved beneath the light of a hole in the roof.

“Nah—none dies here excep’ falling off ricks and such. In London they died.” He plucked a lock of wool from his blue smock. “They was no staple—neither the Elphicks nor the Moones. Shart and brittle all of ’em. Dead they be seventeen year, for I’ve been here caretakin’ twenty-five.”

“Who does all the wool belong to downstairs?” George asked.

“To the estate. I’ll show you the back parts if ye like. You’re from America, ain’t ye? I’ve had a son there once myself.” They followed him down the main stairway. He paused at the turn and swept one hand toward the wall. “Plenty room, here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men at each end wouldn’t brish the paint. If I die in my bed they’ll ’ave to up-end me like a milk-can. ’Tis all luck, dye see?”

He led them on and on, through a maze of back kitchens, dairies, larders, and sculleries, that melted along covered ways into a farm-house, visibly older than the main building, which again rambled out among barns, byres, pig-pens, stalls and stables to the dead fields behind.

“Somehow,” said Sophie, sitting exhausted on an ancient well-curb—“somehow one wouldn’t insult these lovely old things by filling them with hay.”

George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of silvery-oak weather-boarding; buttresses of mixed flint and bricks; outside stairs, stone upon arched stone; curves of thatch where grass sprouted; roundels of house-leeked tiles, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows and the repentant Rambler. He had not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two and a half hours.

“But why,” said Sophie, as they went back through the crater of stricken fields,—“why is one expected to know everything in England? Why do they never tell?”

“You mean about the Elphicks and the Moones?” he answered.

“Yes—and the lawyers and the estate. Who are they? I wonder whether those painted floors in the green room were real oak. Don’t you like us exploring things together—better than Pompeii?”

George turned once more to look at the view. “Eight hundred acres go with the house—the old man told me. Five farms altogether. Rocketts is one of ’em.”

“I like Mrs. Cloke. But what is the old house called?”

George laughed. “That’s one of the things you’re expected to know. He never told me.”

The Clokes were more communicative. That evening and thereafter for a week they gave the Chapins the official history, as one gives it to lodgers, of Friars Pardon the house and its five farms. But Sophie asked so many questions, and George was so humanly interested, that, as confidence in the strangers grew, they launched, with observed and acquired detail, into the lives and deaths and doings of the Elphicks and the Moones and their collaterals, the Haylings and the Torrells. It was a tale told serially by Cloke in the barn, or his wife in the dairy, the last chapters reserved for the kitchen o’ nights by the big fire, when the two had been half the day exploring about the house, where old Iggulden, of the blue smock, cackled and chuckled to see them. The motives that swayed the characters were beyond their comprehension; the fates that shifted them were gods they had never met; the sidelights Mrs. Cloke threw on act and incident were more amazing than anything in the record. Therefore the Chapins listened delightedly, and blessed Mrs. Shonts.

“But why—why—why—did So-and-so do so-and-so?” Sophie would demand from her seat by the pothook; and Mrs. Cloke would answer, smoothing her knees, “For the sake of the place.”

“I give it up,” said George one night in their own room. “People don’t seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in. The way she tells it, Friars Pardon was a sort of Moloch.”

“Poor old thing!” They had been walking round the farms as usual before tea. “No wonder they loved it. Think of the sacrifices they made for it. Jane Elphick married the younger Torrell to keep it in the family. The octagonal room with the moulded ceiling next to the big bedroom was hers. Now what did he tell you while he was feeding the pigs?” said Sophie.

“About the Torrell cousins and the uncle who died in Java. They lived at Burnt House—behind High Pardons, where that brook is all blocked up.”

“No; Burnt House is under High Pardons Wood, before you come to Gale Anstey,” Sophie corrected.

“Well, old man Cloke said—”

Sophie threw open the door and called down into the kitchen, where the Clokes were covering the fire “Mrs. Cloke, isn’t Burnt House under High Pardons?”

“Yes, my dear, of course,” the soft voice. answered absently. A cough. “I beg your pardon, Madam. What was it you said?”

“Never mind. I prefer it the other way,” Sophie laughed, and George re-told the missing chapter as she sat on the bed.

“Here to-day an’ gone to-morrow,” said Cloke warningly. “They’ve paid their first month, but we’ve only that Mrs. Shonts’s letter for guarantee.”

“None she sent never cheated us yet. It slipped out before I thought. She’s a most humane young lady. They’ll be going away in a little. An’ you’ve talked a lot too, Alfred.”

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“Yes, but the Elphicks are all dead. No one can bring my loose talking home to me. But why do they stay on and stay on so?”

In due time George and Sophie asked each other that question, and put it aside. They argued that the climate—a pearly blend, unlike the hot and cold ferocities of their native land—suited them, as the thick stillness of the nights certainly suited George. He was saved even the sight of a metalled road, which, as presumably leading to business, wakes desire in a man; and the telegraph office at the village of Friars Pardon, where they sold picture post-cards and pegtops, was two walking miles across the fields and woods.

For all that touched his past among his fellows, or their remembrance of him, he might have been in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had been very largely spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had no wish to leave this present of God. The unhurried meals, the foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft sky under which they walked together and reckoned time only by their hunger or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms—Griffons, Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where Iggulden of the blue smock-frock would waylay them, and they would ransack the old house once more; the long wet afternoons when, they tucked up their feet on the bedroom’s deep window-sill over against the apple-trees, and talked together as never till then had they found time to talk—these things contented her soul, and her body throve.

“Have you realized,” she asked one morning, “that we’ve been here absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?”

“Have you counted them?” he asked.

“Did you like them?” she replied.

“I must have. I didn’t think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I’ve only had two or three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”

“Climate, all climate.” Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes’s barn.

“One must take hold of things though,” he said, “if it’s only to keep one’s hand in.” His eyes did not flicker now as they swept the empty fields. “Mustn’t one?”

“Lay out a Morristown links over Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire it.”

“No, I’m not as English as that—nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the farms here could be made to pay.”

“Well, I’m Anastasia in the ‘Treasure of Franchard.’ I’m content to be alive and purr. There’s no hurry.”

“No.” He smiled. “All the same, I’m going to see after my mail.”

“You promised you wouldn’t have any.”

“There’s some business coming through that’s amusing me. Honest. It doesn’t get on my nerves at all.”

“Want a secretary?”

“No, thanks, old thing! Isn’t that quite English?”

“Too English! Go away.” But none the less in broad daylight she returned the kiss. “I’m off to Pardons. I haven’t been to the house for nearly a week.”

“How’ve you decided to furnish Jane Elphick’s bedroom?” he laughed, for it had come to be a permanent Castle in Spain between them.

“Black Chinese furniture and yellow silk brocade,” she answered, and ran downhill. She scattered a few cows at a gap with a flourish of a ground-ash that Iggulden had cut for her a week ago, and singing as she passed under the holmoaks, sought the farm-house at the back of Friars Pardon. The old man was not to be found, and she knocked at his half-opened door, for she needed him to fill her idle forenoon. A blue-eyed sheep-dog, a new friend, and Rambler’s old enemy, crawled out and besought her to enter.

Iggulden sat in his chair by the fire, a thistle-spud between his knees, his head drooped. Though she had never seen death before, her heart, that missed a beat, told her that he was dead. She did not speak or cry, but stood outside the door, and the dog licked her hand. When he threw up his nose, she heard herself saying: “Don’t howl! Please don’t begin to howl, Scottie, or I shall run away!”

She held her ground while the shadows in the rickyard moved toward noon; sat after a while on the steps by the door, her arms round the dog’s neck, waiting till some one should come. She watched the smokeless chimneys of Friars Pardon slash its roofs with shadow, and the smoke of Iggulden’s last lighted fire gradually thin and cease. Against her will she fell to wondering how many Moones, Elphicks, and Torrells had been swung round the turn of the broad Mall stairs. Then she remembered the old man’s talk of being “up-ended like a milk-can,” and buried her face on Scottie’s neck. At last a horse’s feet clinked upon flags, rustled in the old grey straw of the rickyard, and she found herself facing the vicar—a figure she had seen at church declaiming impossibilities (Sophie was a Unitarian) in an unnatural voice.

“He’s dead,” she said, without preface.

“Old Iggulden? I was coming for a talk with him.” The vicar passed in uncovered. “Ah!” she heard him say. “Heart-failure! How long have you been here?”

“Since a quarter to eleven.” She looked at her watch earnestly and saw that her hand did not shake.

“I’ll sit with him now till the doctor comes. D’you think you could tell him, and—yes, Mrs. Betts in the cottage with the wistaria next the blacksmith’s? I’m afraid this has been rather a shock to you.”

Sophie nodded, and fled toward the village. Her body failed her for a moment; she dropped beneath a hedge, and looked back at the great house. In some fashion its silence and stolidity steadied her for her errand.

Mrs. Betts, small, black-eyed, and dark, was almost as unconcerned as Friars Pardon.

page 5

“Yiss, yiss, of course. Dear me! Well, Iggulden he had had his day in my father’s time. Muriel, get me my little blue bag, please. Yiss, ma’am. They come down like ellum-branches in still weather. No warnin’ at all. Muriel, my bicycle’s be’ind the fowlhouse. I’ll tell Dr. Dallas, ma’am.”

She trundled off on her wheel like a brown bee, while Sophie—heaven above and earth beneath changed—walked stiffly home, to fall over George at his letters, in a muddle of laughter and tears.

“It’s all quite natural for them,” she gasped. “They come down like ellum-branches in still weather. Yiss, ma’am.’ No, there wasn’t anything in the least horrible, only—only—Oh, George, that poor shiny stick of his between his poor, thin knees! I couldn’t have borne it if Scottie had howled. I didn’t know the vicar was so—so sensitive. He said he was afraid it was ra—rather a shock. Mrs. Betts told me to go home, and I wanted to collapse on her floor. But I didn’t disgrace myself. I—I couldn’t have left him—could I?”

“You’re sure you’ve took no ’arm?” cried Mrs. Cloke, who had heard the news by farm-telegraphy, which is older but swifter than Marconi’s.

“No. I’m perfectly well,” Sophie protested.

“You lay down till tea-time.” Mrs. Cloke patted her shoulder. “They’ll be very pleased, though she ’as ’ad no proper understandin’ for twenty years.”

“They” came before twilight—a black-bearded man in moleskins, and a little palsied old woman, who chirruped like a wren.

“I’m his son,” said the man to Sophie, among the lavender bushes. “We ’ad a difference—twenty year back, and didn’t speak since. But I’m his son all the ’same, and we thank you for the watching.”

“I’m only glad I happened to be there,” she answered, and from the bottom of her heart she meant it.

“We heard he spoke a lot o’ you—one time an’ another since you came. We thank you kindly,” the man added.

“Are you the son that was in America?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. On my uncle’s farm, in Connecticut. He was what they call rood-master there.”

“Whereabouts in Connecticut?” asked George over her shoulder.

“Veering Holler was the name. I was there six year with my uncle.”

“How small the world is!” Sophie cried. “Why, all my mother’s people come from Veering Hollow. There must be some there still—the Lashmars. Did you ever hear of them?”

“I remember hearing that name, seems to me,” he answered, but his face was blank as the back of a spade.

A little before dusk a woman in grey, striding like a foot-soldier, and bearing on her arm a long pole, crashed through the orchard calling for food. George, upon whom the unannounced English worked mysteriously, fled to the parlour; but Mrs. Cloke came forward beaming. Sophie could not escape.

“We’ve only just heard of it;” said the stranger, turning on her. “I’ve been out with the otter-hounds all day. It was a splendidly sportin’ thing “

“Did you—er—kill?” said Sophie. She knew from books she could not go far wrong here.

“Yes, a dry bitch—seventeen pounds,” was the answer. “A splendidly sportin’ thing of you to do. Poor old Iggulden—”

“Oh—that!” said Sophie, enlightened.

“If there had been any people at Pardons it would never have happened. He’d have been looked after. But what can you expect from a parcel of London solicitors?”

Mrs. Cloke murmured something.

“No. I’m soaked from the knees down. If I hang about I shall get chilled. A cup of tea, Mrs. Cloke, and I can eat one of your sandwiches as I go.” She wiped her weather-worn face with a green and yellow silk handkerchief.

“Yes, my lady!” Mrs. Cloke ran and returned swiftly.

“Our land marches with Pardons for a mile on the south,” she explained, waving the full cup, “but one has quite enough to do with one’s own people without poachin’. Still, if I’d known, I’d have sent Dora, of course. Have you seen her this afternoon, Mrs. Cloke? No? I wonder whether that girl did sprain her ankle. Thank you.” It was a formidable hunk of bread and bacon that Mrs. Cloke presented. “As I was sayin’, Pardons is a scandal! Lettin’ people die like dogs. There ought to be people there who do their duty. You’ve done yours, though there wasn’t the faintest call upon you. Good night. Tell Dora, if she comes, I’ve gone on.”

She strode away, munching her crust, and Sophie reeled breathless into the parlour, to shake the shaking George.

“Why did you keep catching my eye behind the blind? Why didn’t you come out and do your duty?”

“Because I should have burst. Did you see the mud on its cheek?” he said.

“Once. I daren’t look again. Who is she?”

“God—a local deity then. Anyway, she’s another of the things you’re expected to know by instinct.”

Mrs. Cloke, shocked at their levity, told them that it was Lady Conant, wife of Sir Walter Conant, Baronet, a large landholder in the neighbourhood; and if not God; at least His visible Providence. George made her talk of that family for an hour.

“Laughter,” said Sophie afterward in their own room, “is the mark of the savage. Why couldn’t you control your emotions? It’s all real to her.”

“It’s all real to me. That’s my trouble,” he answered in an altered tone. “Anyway, it’s real enough to mark time with. Don’t you think so?”

page 6

“What d’you mean?” she asked quickly, though she knew his voice.

“That I’m better. I’m well enough to kick.”

“What at?”

“This!” He waved his hand round the one room. “I must have something to play with till I’m fit for work again.”

“Ah!” She sat on the bed and leaned forward, her hands clasped. “I wonder if it’s good for you.”

“We’ve been better here than anywhere,” he went on slowly. “One could always sell it again.”

She nodded gravely, but her eyes sparkled.

“The only thing that worries me is what happened this morning. I want to know how you feel about it. If it’s on your nerves in the least we can have the old farm at the back of the house pulled down, or perhaps it has spoiled the notion for you?”

“Pull it down?” she cried. “You’ve no business faculty. Why, that’s where we could live while we’re putting the big house in order. It’s almost under the same roof. No! What happened this morning seemed to be more of a—of a leading than anything else. There ought to be people at Pardons. Lady Conant’s quite right.”

“I was thinking more of the woods and the roads. I could double the value of the place in six months.”

“What do they want for it?” She shook her head, and her loosened hair fell glowingly about her cheeks.

“Seventy-five thousand dollars. They’ll take sixty-eight.”

“Less than half what we paid for our old yacht when we married. And we didn’t have a good time in her. You were—”

“Well, I discovered I was too much of an American to be content to be a rich man’s son. You aren’t blaming me for that?”

“Oh, no. Only it was a very businesslike honeymoon. How far are you along with the deal, George?”

“I can mail the deposit on the purchase money to-morrow morning, and we can have the thing completed in a fortnight or three weeks—if you say so.”

“Friars Pardon—Friars Pardon!” Sophie chanted rapturously, her dark gray eyes big with delight. “All the farms? Gale Anstey, Burnt House, Rocketts, the Home Farm, and Griffons? Sure you’ve got ’em all?”

“Sure.” He smiled.

“And the woods? High Pardons Wood, Lower Pardons, Suttons, Dutton’s Shaw, Reuben’s Ghyll, Maxey’s Ghyll, and both the Oak Hangers? Sure you’ve got ’em all?”

“Every last stick. Why, you know them as well as I do.” He laughed. “They say there’s five thousand—a thousand pounds’ worth of lumber—timber they call it—in the Hangers alone.”

“Mrs. Cloke’s oven must be mended first thing, and the kitchen roof. I think I’ll have all this whitewashed,” Sophie broke in, pointing to the ceiling. “The whole place is a scandal. Lady Conant is quite right. George, when did you begin to fall in love with the house? In the greenroom that first day? I did.”

“I’m not in love with it. One must do something to mark time till one’s fit for work.”

“Or when we stood under the oaks, and the door opened? Oh! Ought I to go to poor Iggulden’s funeral?” She sighed with utter happiness.

“Wouldn’t they call it a liberty now?” said he.

“But I liked him.”

“But you didn’t own him at the date of his death.”

“That wouldn’t keep me away. Only, they made such a fuss about the watching”—she caught her breath—“it might be ostentatious from that point of view, too. Oh, George”—she reached for his hand—“we’re two little orphans moving in worlds not realized, and we shall make some bad breaks. But we’re going to have the time of our lives.”

“We’ll run up to London to-morrow, and see if we can hurry those English law solicitors. I want to get to work.”

They went. They suffered many things ere they returned across the fields in a fly one Saturday night, nursing a two by two-and-a-half box of deeds and maps—lawful owners of Friars Pardon and the five decayed farms therewith.

“I do most sincerely ’ope and trust you’ll be ’appy, Madam,” Mrs. Cloke gasped, when she was told the news by the kitchen fire.

“Goodness! It isn’t a marriage!” Sophie exclaimed, a little awed; for to them the joke, which to an American means work, was only just beginning.

“If it’s took in a proper spirit”—Mrs. Cloke’s eye turned toward her oven.

“Send and have that mended to-morrow,” Sophie whispered.

“We couldn’t ’elp noticing,” said Cloke slowly, “from the times you walked there, that you an’ your lady was drawn to it, but—but I don’t know as we ever precisely thought—“ His wife’s glance checked him.

“That we were that sort of people,” said George. “We aren’t sure of it ourselves yet.”

“Perhaps,” said Cloke, rubbing his knees, “just for the sake of saying something, perhaps you’ll park it?”

“What’s that?” said George.

“Turn it all into a fine park like Violet Hill”—he jerked a thumb to westward—“that Mr. Sangres bought. It was four farms, and Mr. Sangres made a fine park of them, with a herd of faller deer.”

page 7

“Then it wouldn’t be Friars Pardon,” said Sophie. “Would it?”

“I don’t know as I’ve ever heard Pardons was ever anything but wheat an’ wool. Only some gentlemen say that parks are less trouble than tenants.” He laughed nervously. “But the gentry, o’ course, they keep on pretty much as they was used to.”

“I see,” said Sophie. “How did Mr. Sangres make his money?”

“I never rightly heard. It was pepper an’ spices, or it may ha’ been gloves. No. Gloves was Sir Reginald Liss at Marley End. Spices was Mr. Sangres. He’s a Brazilian gentleman—very sunburnt like.”

“Be sure o’ one thing. You won’t ’ave any trouble,” said Mrs. Cloke, just before they went to bed.

Now the news of the purchase was told to Mr. and Mrs. Cloke alone at 8 p.m. of a Saturday. None left the farm till they set out for church next morning. Yet when they reached the church and were about to slip aside into their usual seats, a little beyond the font, where they could see the red-furred tails of the bellropes waggle and twist at ringing time, they were swept forward irresistibly, a Cloke on either flank (and yet they had not walked with the Clokes), upon the ever-retiring bosom of a black-gowned verger, who ushered them into a room of a pew at the head of the left aisle, under the pulpit.

“This,” he sighed reproachfully, “is the Pardons’ Pew,” and shut them in.

They could see little more than the choir boys in the chancel, but to the roots of the hair of their necks they felt the congregation behind mercilessly devouring them by look.

“When the wicked man turneth away.” The strong, alien voice of the priest vibrated under the hammer-beam roof, and a loneliness unfelt before swamped their hearts, as they searched for places in the unfamiliar Church of England service. The Lord’s Prayer “Our Father, which art”—set the seal on that desolation. Sophie found herself thinking how in other lands their purchase would long ere this have been discussed from every point of view in a dozen prints, forgetting that George for months had not been allowed to glance at those black and bellowing head-lines. Here was nothing but silence—not even hostility! The game was up to them; the other players hid their cards and waited. Suspense, she felt, was in the air, and when her sight cleared, saw, indeed, a mural tablet of a footless bird brooding upon the carven motto, “ Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.”

At the Litany George had trouble with an unstable hassock, and drew the slip of carpet under the pewseat. Sophie pushed her end back also, and shut her eyes against a burning that felt like tears. When she opened them she was looking at her mother’s maiden name, fairly carved on a blue flagstone on the pew floor: Ellen Lashmar. ob. 1796. aetat 27.

She nudged George and pointed. Sheltered, as they kneeled, they looked for more knowledge, but the rest of the slab was blank.

“Ever hear of her?” he whispered.

“Never knew any of us came from here.”

“Coincidence?”

“Perhaps. But it makes me feel better,” and she smiled and winked away a tear on her lashes, and took his hand while they prayed for “all women labouring of child”—not “in the perils of childbirth”; and the sparrows who had found their way through the guards behind the glass windows chirped above the faded gilt and alabaster family tree of the Conants.

The baronet’s pew was on the right of the aisle. After service its inhabitants moved forth without haste, but so as to block effectively a dusky person with a large family who champed in their rear.

“Spices, I think,” said Sophie, deeply delighted as the Sangres closed up after the Conants. “Let ’em get away, George.”

But when they came out many folk whose eyes were one still lingered by the lychgate.

“I want to see if any more Lashmars are buried here,” said Sophie.

“Not now. This seems to be show day. Come home quickly,” he replied.

A group of families, the Clokes a little apart, opened to let them through. The men saluted with jerky nods, the women with remnants of a curtsey. Only Iggulden’s son, his mother on his arm, lifted his hat as Sophie passed.

“Your people,” said the clear voice of Lady Conant in her ear.

“I suppose so,” said Sophie, blushing, for they were within two yards of her; but it was not a question.

“Then that child looks as if it were coming down with mumps. You ought to tell the mother she shouldn’t have brought it to church.”

“I can’t leave ’er behind, my lady,” the woman said. “She’d set the ’ouse afire in a minute, she’s that forward with the matches. Ain’t you, Maudie dear?”

“Has Dr. Dallas seen her?”

“Not yet, my lady.”

“He must. You can’t get away, of course. M-m! My idiotic maid is coming in for her teeth to-morrow at twelve. She shall pick her up—at Gale Anstey, isn’t it?—at eleven.”

“Yes. Thank you very much, my lady.”

“I oughtn’t to have done it,” said Lady Conant apologetically, “but there has been no one at Pardons for so long that you’ll forgive my poaching. Now, can’t you lunch with us? The vicar usually comes too. I don’t use the horses on a Sunday”—she glanced at the Brazilian’s silver-plated chariot. “It’s only a mile across the fields.”

“You—you’re very kind,” said Sophie, hating herself because her lip trembled.

“My dear,” the compelling tone dropped to a soothing gurgle, “d’you suppose I don’t know how it feels to come to a strange county—country I should say—away from one’s own people? When I first left the Shires—I’m Shropshire, you know—I cried for a day and a night. But fretting doesn’t make loneliness any better. Oh, here’s Dora. She did sprain her leg that day.”

page 8

“I’m as lame as a tree still,” said the tall maiden frankly. “You ought to go out with the otter-hounds, Mrs. Chapin. I believe they’re drawing your water next week.”

Sir Walter had already led off George, and the vicar came up on the other side of Sophie. There was no escaping the swift procession or the leisurely lunch, where talk came and went in low-voiced eddies that had the village for their centre. Sophie heard the vicar and Sir Walter address her husband lightly as Chapin! (She also remembered many women known in a previous life who habitually addressed their husbands as Mr. Such-an-one.) After lunch Lady Conant talked to her explicitly of maternity as that is achieved in cottages and farm-houses remote from aid, and of the duty thereto of the mistress of Pardons.

A gate in a beech hedge, reached across triple lawns, let them out before tea-time into the unkempt south side of their land.

“I want your hand, please,” said Sophie as soon as they were safe among the beech boles and the lawless hollies. “D’you remember the old maid in ‘Providence and the Guitar’ who heard the Commissary swear, and hardly reckoned herself a maiden lady afterward? Because I’m a relative of hers. Lady Conant is—”

“Did you find out anything about the Lashmars?” he interrupted.

“I didn’t ask. I’m going to write to Aunt Sydney about it first. Oh, Lady Conant said something at lunch about their having bought some land from some Lashmars a few years ago. I found it was at the beginning of last century.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Really, how interesting!’ Like that. I’m not going to push myself forward. I’ve been hearing about Mr. Sangres’s efforts in that direction. And you? I couldn’t see you behind the flowers. Was it very deep water, dear?”

George mopped a brow already browned by outdoor exposures.

“Oh no—dead easy,” he answered. “I’ve bought Friars Pardon to prevent Sir Walter’s birds straying.”

A cock pheasant scuttered through the dry leaves and exploded almost under their feet. Sophie jumped.

“That’s one of ’em,” said George calmly.

“Well, your nerves are better, at any rate,” said she. “Did you tell ’em you’d bought the thing to play with?”

“No. That was where my nerve broke down. I only made one bad break—I think. I said I couldn’t see why hiring land to men to farm wasn’t as much a business proposition as anything else.”

“And what did they say?”

“They smiled. I shall know what that smile means some day. They don’t waste their smiles. D’you see that track by Gale Anstey?”

They looked down from the edge of the hanger over a cup-like hollow. People by twos and threes in their Sunday best filed slowly along the paths that connected farm to farm.

“I’ve never seen so many on our land before,” said Sophie. “Why is it?”

“To show us we mustn’t shut up their rights of way.”

“Those cow-tracks we’ve been using cross lots?” said Sophie forcibly.

“Yes. Any one of ’em would cost us two thousand pounds each in legal expenses to close.”

“But we don’t want to,” she said.

“The whole community would fight if we did.”

“But it’s our land. We can do what we like.”

“It’s not our land. We’ve only paid for it. We belong to it, and it belongs to the people—our people they call ’em. I’ve been to lunch with the English too.”

They passed slowly from one bracken-dotted field to the next—flushed with pride of ownership, plotting alterations and restorations at each turn; halting in their tracks to argue, spreading apart to embrace two views at once, or closing in to consider one. Couples moved out of their way, but smiling covertly.

“We shall make some bad breaks,” he said at last.

“Together, though. You won’t let anyone else in, will you?”

“Except the contractors. This syndicate handles, this proposition by its little lone.”

“But you might feel the want of some one,” she insisted.

“I shall—but it will be you. It’s business, Sophie, but it’s going to be good fun.”

“Please God,” she answered flushing, and cried to herself as they went back to tea. “It’s worth it. Oh, it’s worth it.”

The repairing and moving into Friars Pardon was business of the most varied and searching, but all done English fashion, without friction. Time and money alone were asked. The rest lay in the hands of beneficent advisers from London, or spirits, male and female, called up by Mr. and Mrs. Cloke from the wastes of the farms. In the centre stood George and Sophie, a little aghast, their interests reaching out on every side.

“I ain’t sayin’ anything against Londoners,” said Cloke, self-appointed clerk of the outer works, consulting engineer, head of the immigration bureau, and superintendent of woods and forests; “but your own people won’t go about to make more than a fair profit out of you.”

“How is one to know?” said George.

page 9

“Five years from now, or so on, maybe, you’ll be lookin’ over your first year’s accounts, and, knowin’ what you’ll know then, you’ll say: ‘Well, Billy Beartup’—or Old Cloke as it might be—‘did me proper when I was new.’ No man likes to have that sort of thing laid up against him.”

“I think I see,” said George. “But five years is a long time to look ahead.”

“I doubt if that oak Billy Beartup throwed in Reuben’s Ghyll will be fit for her drawin-room floor in less than seven,” Cloke drawled.

“Yes, that’s my work,” said Sophie. (Billy Beartup of Griffons, a woodman by training and birth, a tenant farmer by misfortune of marriage, had laid his broad axe at her feet a month before.) “Sorry if I’ve committed you to another eternity.”

“And we shan’t even know where we’ve gone wrong with your new carriage drive before that time either,” said Cloke, ever anxious to keep the balance true with an ounce or two in Sophie’s favour. The past four months had taught George better than to reply. The carriage road winding up the hill was his present keen interest. They set off to look at it, and the imported American scraper which had blighted the none too sunny soul of “Skim” Winsh, the carter.

But young Iggulden was in charge now, and under his guidance, Buller and Roberts, the great horses, moved mountains.

“You lif’ her like that, an’ you tip her like that,” he explained to the gang. “My uncle he was roadmaster in Connecticut.”

“Are they roads yonder?” said Skim, sitting under the laurels.

“No better than accommodation roads. Dirt, they call ’em. They’d suit you, Skim.”

“Why?” said the incautious Skim.

“Cause you’d take no hurt when you fall out of your cart drunk on a Saturday,” was the answer.

“I didn’t last time neither,” Skim roared.

After the loud laugh, old Whybarne of Gale Anstey piped feebly, “Well, dirt or no dirt, there’s no denyin’ Chapin knows a good job when he sees it. ’E don’t build one day and dee-stroy the next, like that nigger Sangres.”

“She’s the one that knows her own mind,” said Pinky, brother to Skim Winsh, and a Napoleon among carters who had helped to bring the grand piano across the fields in the autumn rains.

“She had ought to,” said Iggulden. “Whoa, Buller! She’s a Lashmar. They never was double-thinking.”

“Oh, you found that? Has the answer come from your uncle?” said Skim, doubtful whether so remote a land as America had posts.

The others looked at him scornfully. Skim was always a day behind the fair. Iggulden rested from his labours. “She’s a Lashmar right enough. I started up to write to my uncle—at once—the month after she said her folks came from Veering Holler.”

“Where there ain’t any roads?” Skim interrupted, but none laughed.

“My uncle he married an American woman for his second, and she took it up like a like the coroner. She’s a Lashmar out of the old Lashmar place, ’fore they sold to Conants. She ain’t no Toot Hill Lashmar, nor any o’ the Crayford lot. Her folk come out of the ground here, neither chalk nor forest, but wildishers. They sailed over to America—I’ve got it all writ down by my uncle’s woman—in eighteen hundred an’ nothing. My uncle says they’re all slow begetters like.”

“Would they be gentry yonder now?” Skim asked.

“Nah—there’s no gentry in America, no matter how long you’re there. It’s against their law. There’s only rich and poor allowed. They’ve been lawyers and such like over yonder for a hundred years but she’s a Lashmar for all that.”

“Lord! What’s a hundred years?” said Whybarne, who had seen seventy-eight of them.

“An’ they write too, from yonder—my uncle’s woman writes—that you can still tell ’em by headmark. Their hair’s foxy-red still—an’ they throw out when they walk. He’s in-toed-treads like a gipsy; but you watch, an’ you’ll see ’er throw, out—like a colt.”

“Your trace wants taking up.” Pinky’s large ears had caught the sound of voices, and as the two broke through the laurels the men were hard at work, their eyes on Sophie’s feet.

She had been less fortunate in her inquiries than Iggulden, for her Aunt Sydney of Meriden (a badged and certificated Daughter of the Revolution to boot) answered her inquiries with a two-paged discourse on patriotism, the leaflets of a Village Improvement Society, of which she was president, and a demand for an overdue subscription to a Factory Girls’ Reading Circle. Sophie burned it all in the Orpheus and Eurydice grate, and kept her own counsel.

“What I want to know,” said George, when Spring was coming, and the gardens needed thought. “is who will ever pay me for my labour? I’ve put in at least half a million dollars’ worth already.”

“Sure you’re not taking too much out of yourself?” his wife asked.

“Oh, no; I haven’t been conscious of myself all winter.” He looked at his brown English gaiters and smiled. “It’s all behind me now. I believe I could sit down and think of all that—those months before we sailed.”

“Don’t—ah, don’t!” she cried.

“But I must go back one day. You don’t want to keep me out of business always—or do you?” He ended with a nervous laugh.

Sophie sighed as she drew her own ground-ash (of old Iggulden’s cutting) from the hall rack.

“Aren’t you overdoing it too? You look a little tired,” he said.

“You make me tired. I’m going to Rocketts to see Mrs. Cloke about Mary.” (This was the sister of the telegraphist, promoted to be sewing-maid at Pardons.) “Coming?”

page 10

“I’m due at Burnt House to see about the new well. By the way, there’s a sore throat at Gale Anstey—”

“That’s my province. Don’t interfere. The Whybarne children always have sore throats. They do it for jujubes.”

“Keep away from Gale Anstey till I make sure, honey. Cloke ought to have told me.”

“These people don’t tell. Haven’t you learnt that yet? But I’ll obey, me lord. See you later!”

She set off afoot, for within the three main roads that bounded the blunt triangle of the estate (even by night one could scarcely hear the carts on them), wheels were not used except for farm work. The footpaths served all other purposes. And though at first they had planned improvements, they had soon fallen in with the customs of their hidden kingdom, and moved about the soft-footed ways by woodland, hedgerow, and shaw as freely as the rabbits. Indeed, for the most part Sophie walked bareheaded beneath her helmet of chestnut hair; but she had been plagued of late by vague toothaches, which she explained to Mrs. Cloke, who asked some questions. How it came about Sophie never knew, but after a while behold Mrs. Cloke’s arm was about her waist, and her head was on that deep bosom behind the shut kitchen door.

“My dear! My dear!” the elder woman almost sobbed. “An’ d’you mean to tell me you never suspicioned? Why—why—where was you ever taught anything at all? Of course it is. It’s what we’ve been only waitin’ for, all of us. Time and again I’ve said to Lady—” she checked herself. “An’ now we shall be as we should be.”

“But—but—but—” Sophie whimpered.

“An’ to see you buildin’ your nest so busy—pianos and books—an’ never thinkin’ of a nursery!”

“No more I did.” Sophie sat bolt upright, and began to laugh.

“Time enough yet.” The fingers tapped thoughtfully on the broad knee. “But—they must be strange-minded folk over yonder with you! Have you thought to send for your mother? She dead? My dear, my dear! Never mind! She’ll be happy where she knows. ’Tis God’s work. An’ we was only waitin’ for it, for you’ve never failed in your duty yet. It ain’t your way. What did you say about my Mary’s doings?” Mrs. Cloke’s face hardened as she pressed her chin on Sophie’s forehead. “If any of your girls thinks to be’ave arbitrary now, I’ll—But they won’t, my dear. I’ll see they do their duty too. Be sure you’ll ’ave no trouble.”

When Sophie walked back across the fields heaven and earth changed about her as on the day of old Iggulden’s death. For an instant she thought of the wide turn of the staircase, and the new ivory-white paint that no coffin corner could scar, but presently, the shadow passed in a pure wonder and bewilderment that made her reel. She leaned against one of their new gates and looked over their lands for some other stay.

“Well,” she said resignedly, half aloud, “we must try to make him feel that he isn’t a third in our party,” and turned the corner that looked over Friars Pardon, giddy, sick, and faint.

Of a sudden the house they had bought for a whim stood up as she had never seen it before, low-fronted, broad-winged, ample, prepared by course of generations for all such things. As it had steadied her when it lay desolate, so now that it had meaning from their few months of life within, it soothed and promised good. She went alone and quickly into the hall, and kissed either door-post, whispering: “Be good to me. You know! You’ve never failed in your duty yet.”

When the matter was explained to George, he would have sailed at once to their own land, but this Sophie forbade.

“I don’t want science,” she said. “I just want to be loved, and there isn’t time for that at home. Besides,” she added, looking out of the window, “it would be desertion.”

George was forced to soothe himself with linking Friars Pardon to the telegraph system of Great Britain by telephone—three-quarters of a mile of poles, put in by Whybarne and a few friends. One of these was a foreigner from the next parish. Said he when the line was being run: “There’s an old ellum right in our road. Shall us throw her?”

“Toot Hill parish folk, neither grace nor good luck, God help ’em.” Old Whybarne shouted the local proverb from three poles down the line. “We ain’t goin’ to lay any axe-iron to coffin-wood here not till we know where we are yet awhile. Swing round ’er, swing round!”

To this day, then, that sudden kink in the straight line across the upper pasture remains a mystery to Sophie and George. Nor can they tell why Skim Winsh, who came to his cottage under Dutton Shaw most musically drunk at 10.45 p.m. of every Saturday night, as his father had done before him, sang no more at the bottom of the garden steps, where Sophie always feared he would break his neck. The path was undoubtedly an ancient right of way, and at 10.45 p.m. on Saturdays Skim remembered it was his duty to posterity to keep it open—till Mrs. Cloke spoke to him once. She spoke likewise to her daughter Mary, sewing maid at Pardons, and to Mary’s best new friend, the five-foot-seven imported London house-maid, who taught Mary to trim hats, and found the country dullish.

But there was no noise—at no time was there any noise—and when Sophie walked abroad she met no one in her path unless she had signified a wish that way. Then they appeared to protest that all was well with them and their children, their chickens, their roofs, their water-supply, and their sons in the police or the railway service.

“But don’t you find it dull, dear?” said George, loyally doing his best not to worry as the months went by.

“I’ve been so busy putting my house in order I haven’t had time to think,” said she. “Do you?”

“No—no. If I could only be sure of you.”

She turned on the green drawing-room’s couch (it was Empire, not Heppelwhite after all), and laid aside a list of linen and blankets.

“It has changed everything, hasn’t it?” she whispered.

“Oh, Lord, yes. But I still think if we went back to Baltimore “

“And missed our first real summer together. No thank you, me lord.”

“But we’re absolutely alone.”

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“Isn’t that what I’m doing my best to remedy? Don’t you worry. I like it—like it to the marrow of my little bones. You don’t realize what her house means to a woman. We thought we were living in it last year, but we hadn’t begun to. Don’t you rejoice in your study, George?”

“I prefer being here with you.” He sat down on the floor by the couch and took her hand.

“Seven,” she said, as the French clock struck. “Year before last you’d just be coming back from business.”

He winced at the recollection, then laughed. “Business! I’ve been at work ten solid hours to-day.”

“Where did you lunch? With the Conants?”

“No; at Dutton Shaw, sitting on a log, with my feet in a swamp. But we’ve found out where the old spring is, and we’re going to pipe it down to Gale Anstey next year.”

“I’ll come and see to-morrow. Oh, please open the door, dear. I want to look down the passage. Isn’t that corner by the stair-head lovely where the sun strikes in?” She looked through half-closed eyes at the vista of ivory-white and pale green all steeped in liquid gold.

“There’s a step out of Jane Elphick’s bedroom,” she went on—“and his first step in the world ought to be up. I shouldn’t wonder if those people hadn’t put it there on purpose. George, will it make any odds to you if he’s a girl?”

He answered, as he had many times before, that his interest was his wife, not the child.

“Then you’re the only person who thinks so.” She laughed. “Don’t be silly, dear. It’s expected. I know. It’s my duty. I shan’t be able to look our people in the face if I fail.”

“What concern is it of theirs, confound ’em!”

“You’ll see. Luckily the tradition of the house is boys, Mrs. Cloke says, so I’m provided for. Shall you ever begin to understand these people? I shan’t.”

“And we bought it for fun—for fun!” he groaned. “And here we are held up for goodness knows how long!”

“Why? Were you thinking of selling it?” He did not answer. “Do you remember the second Mrs. Chapin?” she demanded.

This was a bold, brazen little black-browed woman—a widow for choice—who on Sophie’s death was guilefully to marry George for his wealth and ruin him in a year. George being busy, Sophie had invented her some two years after her marriage, and conceived she was alone among wives in so doing.

“You aren’t going to bring her up again?” he asked anxiously.

“I only want to say that I should hate any one who bought Pardons ten times worse than I used to hate the second Mrs. Chapin. Think what we’ve put into it of our two selves.”

“At least a couple of million dollars. I know I could have made—” He broke off.

“The beasts!” she went on. “They’d be sure to build a red-brick lodge at the gates, and cut the lawn up for bedding out. You must leave instructions in your will that he’s never to do that, George, won’t you?”

He laughed and took her hand again but said nothing till it was time to dress. Then he muttered “What the devil use is a man’s country to him when he can’t do business in it?”

Friars Pardon stood faithful to its tradition. At the appointed time was born, not that third in their party to whom Sophie meant to be so kind, but a godling; in beauty, it was manifest, excelling Eros, as in wisdom Confucius; an enhancer of delights, a renewer of companionships and an interpreter of Destiny. This last George did not realise till he met Lady Conant striding through Dutton Shaw a few days after the event.

“My dear fellow,” she cried, and slapped him heartily on the back, “I can’t tell you how glad we all are. Oh, she’ll be all right. (There’s never been any trouble over the birth of an heir at Pardons.) Now where the dooce is it?” She felt largely in her leather-boundskirt and drew out a small silver mug. “I sent a note to your wife about it, but my silly ass of a groom forgot to take this. You can save me a tramp. Give her my love.” She marched off amid her guard of grave Airedales.

The mug was worn and dented: above the twined initials, G.L., was the crest of a footless bird and the motto: “Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.”

“That’s the other end of the riddle,” Sophie whispered, when he saw her that evening. “Read her note. The English write beautiful notes.”

George stared at his wife.

“Go on,” she twinkled, from the pillows.

“Well, I’m—”

page 12

“Don’t swear,” said Sophie. “Bad for the infant mind.”

“But how in the world did she get at it? Have you ever said a word about the Lashmars?”

“You know the only time—to young Iggulden at Rocketts—when Iggulden died.”

“Your great-grandmother’s brother! She’s traced the whole connection—more than your Aunt Sydney could do. What does she mean about our keeping quiet?”

Sophie’s eyes sparkled. “I’ve thought that out too. We’ve got back at the English at last. Can’t you see that she thought that we thought my mother’s being a Lashmar was one of those things we’d expect the English to find out for themselves, and that’s impressed her?” She turned the mug in her white hands, and sighed happily. “‘Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.’ That’s not a bad motto, George. It’s been worth it.”

“But still I don’t quite see—”

“I shouldn’t wonder if they don’t think our coming here was part of a deep-laid scheme to be near our ancestors. They’d understand that. And look how they’ve accepted us, all of them.”

“Are we so undesirable in ourselves?” George grunted.

“Be just, me lord. That wretched Sangres man has twice our money. Can you see Marm Conant slapping him between the shoulders? Not by a jugful! The poor beast doesn’t exist!”

“Do you think it’s that then?” He looked toward the cot by the fire where the godling snorted.

“The minute I get well I shall find out from Mrs. Cloke what every Lashmar gives in doles (that’s nicer than tips) every time a Lashmite is born. I’ve done my duty thus far, but there’s much expected of me.”

Entered here Mrs. Cloke, and hung worshipping over the cot. They showed her the mug and her face shone. “Oh, now Lady Conant’s sent it, it’ll be all proper, ma’am, won’t it? ‘George’ of course he’d have to be, but seein’ what he is we was hopin’—all your people was hopin’—it ’ud be ‘Lashmar’ too, and that ’ud just round it out. A very ’andsome mug quite unique, I should imagine. ‘Wayte awhyle—wayte awhyle.’ That’s true with the Lashmars, I’ve heard. Very slow to fill their houses, they are. Most like Master George won’t open ’is nursery till he’s thirty.”

“Poor lamb!” cried Sophie. “But how did you know my folk were Lashmars?”

Mrs. Cloke thought deeply. “I’m sure I can’t quite say, ma’am, but I’ve a belief likely that it was something you may have let drop to young Iggulden when you was at Rocketts. That may have been what give us an inkling. An’ so it came out, one thing in the way o’ talk leading to another, and those American people at Veering Holler was very obligin’ with news, I’m told, ma’am.”

“Great Scott!” said George, under his breath. “And this is the simple peasant!”

“Yiss,” Mrs. Cloke went on. “An’ Cloke was only wonderin’ this afternoon—your pillow’s slipped my dear, you mustn’t lie that a-way—just for the sake o’ sayin’ something, whether you wouldn’t think well now of getting the Lashmar farms back, sir. They don’t rightly round off Sir Walter’s estate. They come caterin’ across us more. Cloke, ’e ’ud be glad to show you over any day.”

“But Sir Walter doesn’t want to sell, does he?”

“We can find out from his bailiff, sir, but”—with cold contempt—“I think that trained nurse is just comin’ up from her dinner, so ‘m afraid we’ll ’ave to ask you, sir … Now, Master George—Ai-ie! Wake a litty minute, lammie!”

A few months later the three of them were down at the brook in the Gale Anstey woods to consider the rebuilding of a footbridge carried away by spring floods. George Lashmar Chapin wanted all the bluebells on God’s earth that day to eat, and—Sophie adored him in a voice like to the cooing of a dove; so business was delayed.

“Here’s the place,” said his father at last among the water forget-me-nots. “But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.”

“We’ll get ’em down if you say so,” Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.

“But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren’t building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Cloke.

“An’ I’ve nothin’ to say against larch—If you want to make a temp’ry job of it. I ain’t ’ere to tell you what isn’t so, sir; an’ you can’t say I ever come creepin’ up on you, or tryin’ to lead you further in than you set out—”

A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

“All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp’ry job of it; and by the time the young master’s married it’ll have to be done again. Now, I’ve brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we’ve ever drawed. You put ’em in an’ it’s off your mind or good an’ all. T’other way—I don’t say it ain’t right, I’m only just sayin’ what I think—but t’other way, he’ll no sooner be married than we’ll lave it all to do again. You’ve no call to regard my words, but you can’t get out of that.”

“No,” said George after a pause; “I’ve been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can’t get out of it.”

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IF you remember my improper friend Brugglesmith, you will also bear in mind his friend McPhee, Chief Engineer of the Breslau, whose dinghy Brugglesmith tried to steal. His apologies for the performances of Brugglesmith may one day be told in their proper place: the tale before us concerns McPhee. He was never a racing engineer, and took special pride in saying as much before the Liverpool men; but he had a thirty-two years’ knowledge of machinery and the humours of ships. One side of his face had been wrecked through the bursting of a water-gauge in the days when men knew less than they do now; and his nose rose grandly out of the wreck, like a club in a public riot. There were cuts and lumps on his head, and he would guide your forefinger through his short iron-gray hair and tell you how he had come by his trade-marks. He owned all sorts of certificates of extra-competency, and at the bottom of his cabin chest of drawers, where he kept the photograph of his wife, were two or three Royal Humane Society medals for saving lives at sea. Professionally—it was different when crazy steerage-passengers jumped overboard—professionally, McPhee does not approve of saving life at sea, and he has often told me that a new hell is awaiting stokers and trimmers who sign for a strong man’s pay and fall sick the second day out. He believes in throwing boots at fourth and fifth engineers when they wake him up at night with word that a bearing is red-hot, all because a lamp’s glare is reflected red from the twirling metal. He believes that there are only two poets in the world: one being Robert Burns of course, and the other Gerald Massey. When he has time for novels he reads Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade—chiefly the latter—and knows whole pages of Hard Cash by heart. In the saloon his table is next to the captain’s, and he drinks only water while his engines work.He was good to me when we first met, because I did not ask questions, and believed in Charles Reade as a most shamefully neglected author. Later he approved of my writings to the extent of one pamphlet of twenty-four pages that I wrote for Holdock, Steiner, and Chase, owners of the line, when they bought some ventilating patent and fitted it to the cabins of the Breslau, Spandau, and Koltzau. The purser of the Breslau recommended me to Holdock’s secretary for the job; and Holdock, who is a Wesleyan Methodist, invited me to his house, and gave me dinner with the governess when the others had finished, and laced the plans and specifications in my hand, and wrote the pamphlet that same afternoon. It was called ‘Comfort in the Cabin,’ and brought me seven pound ten, cash down—an important sum of money in those days; and the governess, who was teaching Master John Holdock his scales, told me that Mrs. Holdock had told her to keep an eye on me, in case I went away with coats from the hat rack. McPhee liked that pamphlet enormously, for it was composed in the Bouverie-Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo embellishments; and afterward he introduced me to Mrs. McPhee, who succeeded Dinah in my heart; for Dinah was half a world away, and it is wholesome and antiseptic to love such a woman as Janet McPhee. They lived in a little twelve-pound house, close to the shipping. When McPhee was away Mrs. McPhee read the Lloyd’s column in the papers, and called on the wives of senior engineers of equal social standing. Once or twice, too, Mrs. Holdock visited Mrs. McPhee in a brougham with celluloid fittings, and I have reason to believe that, after she had played owner’s wife long enough, they talked scandal. The Holdocks lived in an old-fashioned house with a big brick garden not a mile from the McPhees, for they stayed by their money as their money stayed by them; and in summer you met their brougham solemnly junketing by Theydon Bois or Loughton. But I was Mrs. McPhee’s friend, for she allowed me to convoy her westward, sometimes, to theatres, where she sobbed or laughed or shivered with a simple heart; and she introduced me to a new world of doctors’ wives, captains’ wives, and engineers’ wives, whose whole talk and thought centred in and about ships and lines of ships you have never heard of. There were sailing-ships, with stewards and mahogany and maple saloons, trading to Australia, taking cargoes of consumptives and hopeless drunkards for whom a sea voyage was recommended; there were frouzy little West African boats, full of rats and cockroaches, where men died anywhere but in their bunks; there were Brazilian boats whose cabins could be hired for merchandise that went out loaded nearly awash; there were Zanzibar and Mauritius steamers, and wonderful reconstructed boats that plied to the other side of Borneo. These were loved and known, for they earned our bread and a little butter, and we despised the big Atlantic boats, and made fun of the P.&O. and Orient liners, and swore by our respected owners—Wesleyan, Baptist or Presbyterian, as the case might be.

I had only just come back to England when Mrs. McPhee invited me to dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the notepaper was almost bridal in its scented creaminess. When I reached the house I saw that there were new curtains in the window that must have cost forty-five shillings a pair; and as Mrs. McPhee drew me into the little marble-paper hall, she looked at me keenly, and cried:

‘Have ye not heard? What d’ye think o’ the hat-rack?’

Now, that hat-rack was oak—thirty shillings at least. McPhee came downstairs with a sober foot—he steps as lightly as a cat, for all his weight, when he is at sea—and shook hands in a new and awful manner—a parody of old Holdock’s style when he says good-bye to his skippers. I perceived at once that a legacy had come to him, but I held my peace, though Mrs. McPhee begged me every thirty seconds to eat a great deal and say nothing. It was rather a mad sort of meal, because McPhee and his wife took hold of hands like little children (they always do after voyages), and nodded and winked and choked and gurgled, and hardly ate a mouthful.

A female servant came in and waited; though Mrs. McPhee had told me time and again that she would thank no one to do her housework while she had her health. But this was a servant with a cap, and I saw Mrs. McPhee swell and swell under her garance-coloured gown. There is no small free-board to Janet McPhee, nor is garance any subdued tint; and with all this unexplained pride and glory in the air I felt like watching fireworks without knowing the festival. When the maid had removed the cloth she brought a pineapple that would have cost half a guinea at that season (only McPhee has his own way of getting such things), and a Canton china bowl of dried lichis, and a glass plate of preserved ginger, and a small jar of sacred and imperial chow-chow that perfumed the room. McPhee gets it from a Dutchman in Java, and I think he doctors it with liqueurs. But the crown of the feast was some Madeira of the kind you can only come by if you know the wine and the man. A little maize-wrapped fig of clotted Madeira cigars went with the wine, and the rest was a pale-blue smoky silence; Janet, in her splendour, smiling on us two, and patting McPhee’s hand.

‘We’ll drink,’ said McPhee slowly, rubbing his chin, ‘to the eternal damnation o’ Holdock, Steiner, and Chase.’

Of course I answered ‘Amen,’ though I had made seven pound ten shillings out of the firm. McPhee’s enemies were mine, and I was drinking his Madeira.

‘Ye’ve heard nothing?’ said Janet. ‘Not a word, not a whisper?’

‘Not a word, nor a whisper. On my word, I have not.’

‘Tell him, Mac,’ said she; and that is another proof of Janet’s goodness and wifely love. A smaller woman would have babbled first, but Janet is five feet nine in her stockings.

‘We’re rich,’ said McPhee. I shook hands all round.

‘We’re damned rich,’ he added. I shook hands all round a second time.

page 2

‘I’ll go to sea no more—unless—there’s no sayin’—a private yacht, maybe—wi’, a small an’ handy auxiliary.’

‘It’s not enough for that,’ said Janet. ‘We’re fair rich—well-to-do, but no more. A new gown for church, and one for the theatre. We’ll have it made west.’

‘How much is it?’ I asked.

‘Twenty-five thousand pounds.’ I drew a long breath. ‘An’ I’ve been earnin’ twenty-five an’ twenty pound a month!’ The last words came away with a roar, as though the wide world was conspiring to beat him down.

‘All this time I’m waiting,’ I said. ‘I know nothing since last September. Was it left you?’

They laughed aloud together. ‘It was left,’ said McPhee, choking. ‘Ou, ay, it was left. That’s vara good. Of course it was left. Janet, d’ye note that? It was left. Now if you’d put that in your pamphlet it would have been vara jocose. It was left.’ He slapped his thigh and roared till the wine quivered in the decanter.

The Scotch are a great people, but they are apt to hang over a joke too long, particularly when no one can see the point but themselves.

‘When I rewrite my pamphlet I’ll put it in, McPhee. Only I must know something more first.’

McPhee thought for the length of half a cigar, while Janet caught my eye and led it round the room to one new thing after another—the new vine-pattern carpet, the new chiming rustic clock between the models of the Colombo outrigger-boats, the new inlaid sideboard with a purple cutglass flower-stand, the fender of gilt and brass, and last, the new black-and-gold piano.

‘In October o’ last year the Board sacked me,’ began McPhee. ‘In October o’ last year the Breslau came in for winter overhaul. She’d been runnin’ eight months—two hunder an’ forty days—an’ I was three days makin’ up my indents, when she went to dry-dock. All told, mark you, it was this side o’ three hunder pound—to be preceese, two hunder an’ eighty-six pound four shillings. There’s not another man could ha’ nursed the Breslau for eight months to that tune. Never again—never again! They may send their boats to the bottom, for aught I care.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Janet softly. ‘We’re done wi’ Holdock, Steiner, and Chase.’

‘It’s irritatin’, Janet, it’s just irritatin’. I ha’ been justified from first to last, as the world knows, but—but I canna forgie ’em. Ay, wisdom is justified o’ her children; an’ any other man than me wad ha’ made the indent eight hunder. Hay was our skipper—ye’ll have met him. They shifted him to the Torgau, an’ bade me wait for the Breslau under young Bannister. Ye’ll obsairve there’d been a new election on the Board. I heard the shares were sellin’ hither an’ yon, an’ the major part of the Board was new to me. The old Board would ne’er ha’ done it. They trusted me. But the new Board was all for reorganisation. Young Steiner—Steiner’s son—the Jew, was at the bottom of it, an’ they did not think it worth their while to send me word. The first I knew—an’ I was Chief Engineer—was the notice of the Line’s winter sailin’s, and the Breslau timed for sixteen days between port an’ port! Sixteen days, man! She’s a good boat, but eighteen is her summer time, mark you. Sixteen was sheer flytin’, kitin’ nonsense, an’ so I told young Bannister.

‘“We’ve got to make it,” he said. “Ye should not ha’ sent in a three hunder pound indent.”

‘“Do they look for their boats to be run on air?” I said. “The Board is daft.”

‘“Fen tell ’em so,” he says. “I’m a married man, an’ my fourth’s on the ways now, she says.”’

‘A boy—wi’ red hair,’ Janet put in. Her own hair is the splendid red-gold that goes with a creamy complexion.

‘My word, I was an angry man that day! Forbye I was fond o’ the old Breslau, I looked for a little consideration from the Board after twenty years’ service. There was Board meetin’ on Wednesday; an’ I sat overnight in the engine-room, takin’ figures to support my case. Well, I put it fair and square before them all. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I’ve run the Breslau eight seasons, an’ I believe there’s no fault to find wi’ my wark. But if ye haud to this”—I waggled the advertisement at ’em—“this that I’ve never heard of till I read it at breakfast, I do assure you on my professional reputation, she can never do it. That is to say, she can for a while, but at a risk no thinkin’ man would run.”’

‘“What the deil d’ye suppose we pass your indent for?” says old Holdock. “Man, we’re spendin’ money like watter.”

‘“I’ll leave it in the Board’s hands,” I said, “if two hunder an’ eighty-seven pound is anything beyond right and reason for eight months.” I might ha’ saved my breath, for the Board was new since the last election, an’ there they sat, the damned deevidend-huntin’ ship-chandlers, deaf as the adders o’ Scripture.

‘“We must keep faith wi’ the public,” said young Steiner.

‘“Keep faith wi’ the Breslau then,” I said. “She’s served you well, an’ your father before you. She’ll need her bottom restiffenin’, an’ new bed-plates, an’ turnin’ out the forward boilers, an’ re-borin’ all three cylinders, an’ refacin’ all guides, to begin with. It’s a three months’ job.”

‘“Because one employé is afraid?” says young Steiner. “Maybe a piano in the Chief Engineer’s cabin would be more to the point.”

‘I crushed my cap in my hands, an’ thanked God we’d no bairns an’ a bit put by.

‘“Understand, gentlemen,” I said. “If the Breslau is made a sixteen-day boat, ye’ll find another engineer.”

‘“Bannister makes no objection,” said Holdock.

‘“I’m speakin’ for myself,” I said. “Bannister has bairns.” An’ then I lost my temper. “Ye can run her into Hell an’ out again if ye pay pilotage,” I said, “but ye run without me.”

‘“That’s insolence,” said young Steiner.

‘“At your pleasure,” I said, turnin’ to go.

page 3

‘“Ye can consider yourself dismissed. We must preserve discipline among our employés,” said old Holdock, an’ he looked round to see that the Board was with him. They knew nothin’—God forgie ’em—an’ they nodded me out o’ the Line after twenty years—after twenty years.

‘I went out an’ sat down by the hall porter to get my wits again. I’m thinkin’ I swore at the Board. Then auld McRimmon—o’ McNaughton and McRimmon—came oot o’ his office, that’s on the same floor, an’ looked at me, proppin’ up one eyelid wi’ his forefinger. Ye know they call him the Blind Deevil, forbye he’s onythin’ but blind, an’ no deevil in his dealin’s wi’ me—McRimmon o’ the Black Bird Line.

‘“What’s here, Mister McPhee?” said he.

‘I was past prayin’ for by then. “A Chief Engineer sacked after twenty years’ service because he’ll not risk the Breslau on the new timin’, an’ be damned to ye, McRimmon,” I said.

‘The auld man sucked in his lips an’ whistled. “Ah,” said he, “the new timin’. I see! “He doddered into the Board-room I’d just left, an’ the Dandie-dog that is just his blind man’s leader stayed wi’ me. That was providential. In a minute he was back again. “Ye’ve cast your bread on the watter, M’Phee, an’ be damned to you,” he says. “Whaur’s my dog? My word, is he on your knee? There’s more discernment in a dog than a Jew. What garred ye curse your Board, McPhee? It’s expensive.”

‘“They’ll pay more for the Breslau,” I said. “Get off my knee, ye smotherin’ beastie.”

‘“Bearin’s hot, eh?” said McRimmon. “It’s thirty year since a man daur curse me to my face. Time was I’d ha’ cast ye doon the stairway for that.’

‘“Forgie’s all!” I said. He was wearin’ to eighty, as I knew. “I was wrong, McRimmon; but when a man’s shown the door for doin’ his plain duty he’s not always ceevil.”

‘“So I hear,” says McRimmon. “Ha’ ye ony objection to a tramp freighter? It’s only fifteen a month, but they say the Blind Deevil feeds a man better than others. She’s my Kite. Come ben. Ye can thank Dandie, here. I’m no used to thanks. An’ noo,” says he, “what possessed ye to throw up your berth wi’ Holdock?”

‘“The new timin’,” said I. “The Breslau will not stand it.”

‘“Hoot, oot,” said he. “Ye might ha’ crammed her a little—enough to show ye were drivin’ her—an’ brought her in twa days behind. What’s easier than to say ye slowed for bearin’s, eh? All my men do it, and—I believe ’em.”

‘“McRimmon,” says I, “what’s her virginity to a lassie?”

‘He puckered his dry face an’ twisted in his chair. “The warld an’ a’,” says he. “My God, the vara warld an’ a’! But what ha’ you or me to do wi’ virginity, this late along?”

‘“This,” I said. “There’s just one thing that each one of us in his trade or profession will not do for ony consideration whatever. If I run to time I run to time, barrin’ always the risks o’ the high. seas. Less than that, under God, I have not done. More than that, by God, I will not do! There’s no trick o’ the trade I’m not acquaint wi’——”

‘“So I’ve heard,” says McRimmon, dry as a biscuit.

‘“But yon matter o’ fair runnin’ ’s just my Shekinah, ye’ll understand. I daurna tamper wi’ that. Nursing weak engines is fair craftsmanship; but what the Board ask is cheatin’, wi’ the risk o’ manslaughter addeetional. Ye’ll note I know my business.”

‘There was some more talk, an’ next week I went aboard the Kite, twenty-five hunder ton, ordinary compound, a Black Bird tramp. The deeper she rode, the better she’d steam. I’ve snapped as much as nine out of her, but eight point three was her fair normal. Good food forward an’ better aft, all indents passed wi’out marginal remarks, the best coal, new donkeys, and good crews. There was nothin’ the old man would not do, except paint. That was his deeficulty. Ye could no more draw paint than his last teeth from him. He’d come down to dock, an’ his boats a scandal all along the watter, an’ he’d whine an’ cry an’ say they looked all he could desire. Every owner has his non plus ultra, I’ve obsairved. Paint was McRimmon’s. But you could get round his engines without riskin’ your life, an’, for all his blindness, I’ve seen him reject five flawed intermediates, one after the other, on a nod from me; an’ his cattle-fittin’s were guaranteed for North Atlantic winter weather. Ye ken what that means? McRimmon an’ the Black Bird Line, God bless him!

‘Oh, I forgot to say she would lie down an’ fill her forward deck green, an’ snore away into a twenty-knot gale forty-five to the minute, three an’ a half knots, the engines runnin’ sweet an’ true as a bairn breathin’ in its sleep. Bell was skipper; an’ forbye there’s no love lost between crews an’ owners, we were fond o’ the auld Blind Deevil an’ his dog, an’ I’m thinkin’ he liked us. He was worth the windy side o’ twa million sterling’, an’ no friend to his own blood-kin. Money’s an awfu’ thing—overmuch—for a lonely man.

‘I’d taken her out twice, there an’ back again, when word came o’ the Breslau’s breakdown, just as I prophesied. Calder was her engineer—he’s not fit to run a tug down the Solent—and he fairly lifted the engines off the bed-plates, an’ they fell down in heaps, by what I heard. So she filled from the after-stuffin’-box to the after-bulkhead, an’ lay star-gazing, with seventy-nine squealin’ passengers in the saloon, till the Camaralzaman o’ Ramsey and Gold’s Carthagena Line gave her a tow to the tune o’ five thousand seven hunder an’ forty pound, wi’ costs in the Admiralty Court. She was helpless, ye’ll understand, an’ in no case to meet ony weather. Five thousand seven hunder an’ forty pounds, with costs, an’ exclusive o’ new engines! They’d ha’ done better to ha’ kept me—on the old timin’.

‘But, even so, the new Board were all for retrenchment. Young Steiner, the Jew, was at the bottom of it. They sacked men right an’ left that would not eat the dirt the Board gave ’em. They cut down repairs; they fed crews wi’ leavin’s and scrapin’s; and, reversin’ McRimmon’s practice, they hid their defeeciencies wi’ paint an’ cheap gildin’. Quem Deus vult perrdere prrius dementat, ye remember.

‘In January we went to dry-dock, an’ in the next dock lay the Grotkau, their big freighter that was the Dolabella o’ Piegan, Piegan, and Walsh’s Line in ’84—a Clyde-built iron boat, a flat-bottomed, pigeon-breasted, under-engined, bullnosed bitch of a five thousand ton freighter, that would neither steer, nor steam, nor stop when ye asked her. Whiles she’d attend to her helm, whiles she’d take charge, whiles she’d wait to scratch herself, an’ whiles she’d buttock into a dockhead. But Holdock and Steiner had bought her cheap, and painted her all over like the Hoor o’ Babylon, an’ we called her the Hoor for short.’ (By the way, McPhee kept to that name throughout the rest of his tale; so you must read accordingly.) ‘I went to see young Bannister—he had to take what the Board gave him, an’ he an’ Calder were shifted together from the Breslau to this abortion—an’ talkin’ to him I went into the dock under her. Her plates were pitted till the men that were paint, paint, paintin’ her laughed at it. But the warst was at the last. She’d a great clumsy iron nineteen-foot Thresher propeller—Aitcheson designed the Kite’s—and just on the tail o’ the shaft, before the boss, was a red weepin’ crack ye could ha’ put a penknife to. Man, it was an awful crack!

page 4

‘“When d’ye ship a new tail-shaft?” I said to Bannister.

‘He knew what I meant. “Oh, yon’s a superfeecial flaw,” says he, not lookin’ at me.

‘“Superfeecial Gehenna!” I said. “Ye’ll not take her oot wi’ a solution o’ continuity that like.”

‘“They’ll putty it up this evening,” he said. “I’m a married man, an’—ye used to know the Board.”

‘I e’en said what was gie’d me in that hour. Ye know how a dry-dock echoes. I saw young Steiner standin’ listenin’ above me, an’, man, he used language provocative of a breach o’ the peace. I was a spy and a disgraced employé, an’ a corrupter o’ young Bannister’s morals, an’ he’d prosecute me for libel. He went away when I ran up the steps—I’d ha’ thrown him into the dock if I’d caught him—an’ there I met McRimmon, wi’ Dandie pullin’ on the chain, guidin’ the auld man among the railway lines.

‘“McPhee,” said he, “ye’re no paid to fight Holdock, Steiner, Chase, and Company, Limited, when ye meet. What’s wrong between you.”

‘“No more than a tail-shaft rotten as a kailstump. For ony sakes go and look, McRimmon. It’s a comedietta.”

‘“I’m feared o’ yon conversational Hebrew,” said he. “Whaur’s the flaw, an’ what like?”

‘“A seven-inch crack just behind the boss. There’s no power on earth will fend it just jarrin’ off.”

‘“When?”

‘“That’s beyon’ my knowledge,” I said.

‘“So it is; so it is,” said McRimmon. “We’ve all oor leemitations. Ye’re certain it was a crack?”

‘“Man, it’s a crevasse,” I said, for there were no words to describe the magnitude of it. “An’ young Bannister’s sayin’ it’s no more than a superfeecial flaw!”

‘“Weel, I tak’ it oor business is to mind oor business. If ye’ve ony friends aboard her, McPhee, why not bid them to a bit dinner at Radley’s?”

‘“I was thinkin’ o’ tea in the cuddy,” I said. “Engineers o’ tramp freighters cannot afford hotel prices.”

‘“Na! na!” says the auld man, whimperin’. “Not the cuddy. They’ll laugh at my Kite, for she’s no plastered with paint like the Hoor. Bid them to Radley’s, McPhee, an’ send me the bill. Thank Dandie; here, man. I’m no used to thanks.” Then he turned him round. (I was just thinkin’ the vara same thing.)

‘“Mister McPhee,” said he, “this is not senile dementia.”

‘“Preserve’s!” I said, clean jumped oot o’ mysel’. “I was but thinkin’ you’re fey, McRimmon.”

‘Dod, the auld deevil laughed till he nigh sat down on Dandie. “Send me the bill,” says he. “I’m lang past champagne, but tell me how it tastes the morn.”

‘Bell and I bid young Bannister and Calder to dinner at Radley’s. They’ll have no laughin’ an’ singin’ there, but we took a private room—like yacht-owners fra’ Cowes.’

McPhee grinned all over, and lay back to think.

‘And then?’ said I.

‘We were no drunk in ony preceese sense o’ the word, but Radley’s showed me the dead men. There were six magnums o’ dry champagne an’ maybe a bottle o’ whisky.’

‘Do you mean to tell me that you four got away with a magnum and a half apiece, besides whisky?’ I demanded.

McPhee looked down upon me from between his shoulders with toleration.

‘Man, we were not settin’ down to drink,’ he said. ‘They no more than made us wutty. To be sure, young Bannister laid his head on the table an’ greeted like a bairn, an’ Calder was all for callin’ on Steiner at two in the morn’ an’ painting him galley-green; but they’d been drinkin’ the afternoon. Lord, how they twa cursed the Board, an’ the Grotkau, an’ the tailshaft, an’ the engines, an’ a’! They didna talk o’ superfeecial flaws that night. I mind young Bannister an’ Calder shakin’ hands on a bond to be revenged on the Board at ony reasonable cost this side o’ losing their certificates. Now mark ye how false economy ruins business. The Board fed them like swine (I have good reason to know it), an’ I’ve obsairved wi’ my ain people that if ye touch his stomach ye wauken the deil in a Scot. Men will tak’ a dredger across the Atlantic if they’re well fed, and fetch her somewhere on the broadside o’ the Americas; but bad food’s bad service the warld over.

‘The bill went to McRimmon, an’ he said no more to me till the week-end, when I was at him for more paint, for we’d heard the Kite was chartered Liverpool-side.

‘“Bide whaur ye’re put,” said the Blind Deevil. “Man, do ye wash in champagne? The Kite’s no leavin’ here till I gie the order, an’—how am I to waste paint on her, wi’ the Lammergeyer docked for who knows how long, an’ a’!”

‘She was our big freighter—McIntyre was engineer—an’ I knew she’d come from overhaul not three months. That morn I met McRimmon’s head-clerk ye’ll not know him—fair bitin’ his nails off wi’ mortification.

‘“The auld man’s gone gyte,” says he. “He’s withdrawn the Lammergeyer.”

‘“Maybe he has reasons,” says I.

‘“Reasons! He’s daft!”

‘“He’ll no be daft till he begins to paint,” I said.

‘“That’s just what he’s done—and South American freights higher than we’ll live to see them again. He’s laid her up to paint her—to paint her—to paint her!” says the little clerk, dancin’ like a hen on a hot plate. “Five thousand ton o’ potential freight rottin’ in drydock, man; an’ he dolin’ the paint out in quarterpound tins, for it cuts him to the heart, mad though he is. An’ the Grotkau—the Grotkau of all conceivable bottoms—soaking up every pound that should be ours at Liverpool!”

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‘I was staggered wi’ this folly—considerin’ the dinner at Radley’s in connection wi’ the same.

‘“Ye may well stare, McPhee,” says the headclerk. “There’s engines, an’ rollin’ stock, an’ iron bridges—d’ye know what freights are noo?—an’ pianos, an’ millinery, an’ fancy Brazil cargo o’ every species pourin’ into the Grotkau—the Grotkau o’ the Jerusalem firm—and the Lammergeyer’s bein’ painted!”

‘Losh, I thought he’d drop dead wi’ the fits.

‘I could say no more than “Obey orders, if ye break owners,” but on the Kite we believed McRimmon was mad; an’ McIntyre of the Lammergeyer was for lockin’ him up by some patent legal process he’d found in a book o’ maritime law. An’ a’ that week South American freights rose an’ rose. It was sinfu’!

‘Syne Bell got orders to tak’ the Kite round to Liverpool in water-ballast, and McRimmon came to bid’s good-bye, yammerin’ an’ whinin’ o’er the acres o’ paint he’d lavished on the Lammergeyer.

‘“I look to you to retrieve it,” says he. “I look to you to reimburse me! ’Fore God, why are ye not cast off? Are ye dawdlin’ in dock for a purpose.?”

‘“What odds, McRimmon?” says Bell. “We’ll be a day behind the fair at Liverpool. The Grotkau’s got all the freight that might ha’ been ours an’ the Lammergeyer’s.” McRimmon laughed an’ chuckled—the pairfect eemage o’ senile dementia. Ye ken his eyebrows wark up an’ down like a gorilla’s.

‘“Ye’re under sealed orders,” said he, tee-heein’ an’ scratchin’ himself. “Yon’s they”—to be opened seriatim.

‘Says Bell, shufflin’ the envelopes when the auld man had gone ashore: “We’re to creep round a’ the south coast, standin’ in for orders—this weather, too. There’s no question o’ his lunacy now.”

‘Well, we buttocked the auld Kite along—vara bad weather we made—standin’ in alongside for telegraphic orders, which are the curse o’ skippers. Syne we made over to Holyhead, an’ Bell opened the last envelope for the last instructions. I was wi’ him in the cuddy, an’ he threw it over to me, cryin’: “Did ye ever know the like, Mac?”

‘I’ll no say what McRimmon had written, but he was far from mad. There was a sou’-wester brewin’ when we made the mouth o’ the Mersey, a bitter cold morn wi’ a gray-green sea and a gray-green sky—Liverpool weather, as they say; an’ there we lay choppin’, an’ the men swore. Ye canna keep secrets aboard ship. They thought McRimmon was mad, too.

‘Syne we saw the Grotkau rollin’ oot on the top o’ flood, deep an’ double deep, wi’ her newpainted funnel an’ her new-painted boats an’ a’. She looked her name, an’, moreover, she coughed like it. Calder tauld me at Radley’s what ailed his engines, but my own ear would ha’ told me twa mile awa’, by the beat o’ them. Round we came, plungin’ an’ squatterin’ in her wake, an’ the wind cut wi’ good promise o’ more to come. By six it blew hard but clear, an’ before the middle watch it was a sou’wester in airnest.

‘“She’ll edge into Ireland, this gait,” says Bell. I was with him on the bridge, watchin’ the Grotkau’s port light. Ye canna see green so far as red, or we’d ha’ kept to leeward. We’d no passengers to consider, an’ (all eyes being on the Grotkau) we fair walked into a liner rampin’ home to Liverpool. Or, to be preceese, Bell no more than twisted the Kite oot from under her bows, and there was a little damnin’ betwix’ the twa bridges. Noo a passenger’—McPhee regarded me benignantly—‘wad ha’ told the papers that as soon as he got to the Customs. We stuck to the Grotkau’s tail that night an’ the next twa days—she slowed down to five knots by my reckonin’—and we lapped along the weary way to the Fastnet.’

‘But you don’t go by the Fastnet to get to any South American port, do you?’ I said.

‘We do not. We prefer to go as direct as may be. But we were followin’ the Grotkau, an’ she’d no walk into that gale for ony consideration. Knowin’ what I did to her discredit, I couldna blame young Bannister. It was warkin’ up to a North Atlantic winter gale, snow an’ sleet an’ a perishin’ wind. Eh, it was like the Deil walkin’ abroad o’ the surface o’ the deep, whuppin’ off the top o’ the waves before he made up his mind. They’d bore up against it so far, but the minute she was clear o’ the Skelligs she fair tucked up her skirts an’ ran for it by Dunmore Head. Wow, she rolled!

‘“She’ll be makin’ Smerwick,” says Bell.

‘“She’d ha’ tried for Ventry by noo if she meant that,” I said.

‘“They’ll roll the funnel oot o’ her, this gait,” says Bell. “Why canna Bannister keep her head to sea?”

‘“It’s the tail-shaft. Ony rollin’ ’s better than pitchin’ wi’ superfeecial cracks in the tail-shaft. Calder knows that much,” I said.

‘“It’s ill wark retreevin’ steamers this weather,” said Bell. His beard and whiskers were frozen to his oilskin, an’ the spray was white on the weather side of him. Pairfect North Atlantic winter weather!

‘One by one the sea raxed away our three boats, an’ the davits were crumpled like rams’ horns.

‘“Yon’s bad,” said Belt, at the last. “Ye canna pass a hawser wi’oot a boat.” Bell was a vara judeecious man—for an Aberdonian.

‘I’m not one that fashes himself for eventualities outside the engine-room, so I e’en slipped down betwixt waves to see how the Kite fared. Man, she’s the best geared boat of her class that ever left the Clyde! Kinloch, my second, knew her as well as I did. I found him dryin’ his socks on the main steam, an’ combin’ his whiskers wi’ the comb Janet gied me last year, for the warld an’ a’ as though we were in port. I tried the feed, speered into the stoke-hole, thumbed all bearin’s, spat on the thrust for luck, gied ’em my blessin’, an’ took Kinloch’s socks before I went up to the bridge again.

‘Then Bell handed me the wheel, an’ went below to warm himself. When he came up my gloves were frozen to the spokes, an’ the ice clicked over my eyelids. Pairfect North Atlantic winter weather, as I was sayin’.

‘The gale blew out by night, but we lay in smotherin’ cross-seas that made the auld Kite chatter from stem to stern. I slowed to thirty-four, I mind—no, thirty-seven. There was a long swell the morn, an’ the Grotkau was headin’ into it west awa’.

‘“She’ll win to Rio yet, tail-shaft or no tailshaft,” says Bell.

‘“Last night shook her,” I said. “She’ll jar it off yet, mark my word.”

page 6

‘We were then, maybe, a hunder and fifty mile west-sou’west o’ Slyne Head, by dead reckonin’. Next day we made a hunder an’ thirty—ye’ll note we were not racin’ boats—an’ the day after a hunder and sixty-one, an’ that made us, we’ll say, Eighteen an’ a bittock west, an’ maybe Fifty-one an’ a bittock north, crossin’ all the North Atlantic liner lanes on the long slant, always in sight o’ the Grotkau, creepin’ up by night and fallin’ awa’ by day. After the gale, it was cold weather wi’ dark nights.

‘I was in the engine-room on Friday night, just before the middle watch, when Bell whustled doon the tube: “She’s done it”; an’ up I came.

‘The Grotkau was just a fair distance south, an’ one by one she ran up the three red lights in a vertical line – the sign of a steamer not under control.

‘“Yon’s a tow for us,” said Bell, lickin’ his chops. “She’ll be worth more than the Breslau. We’ll go down to her, McPhee! “

‘“Bide a while,” I said. “The sea’s fair throng wi’ ships here.”

‘“Reason why,” said Bell. “It’s a fortune gaun beggin’. What d’ye think, man?”

‘“Gie her till daylight. She knows we’re here. If Bannister needs help he’ll loose a rocket.”

‘“Wha told ye Bannister’s need? We’ll ha’ some rag-an’-bone tramp snappin’ her up under oor nose,” said he; an’ he put the wheel over. We were gaun slow.

‘“Bannister wad like better to go home on a liner an’ eat in the saloon. Mind ye what they said o’ Holdock and Steiner’s food that night at Radley’s? Keep her awa’, man—keep her awa’. A tow’s a tow, but a derelict’s big salvage.”

‘“E-eh!” said Bell. “Yon’s an inshot o’ yours, Mac. I love ye like a brother. We’ll bide whaur we are till daylight”; an’ he kept her awa’.

‘Syne up went a rocket forward, an’ twa on the bridge, an’ a blue light aft. Syne a tar-barrel forward again.

‘“She’s sinkin’,” said Bell. “It’s all gaun, an’ I’ll get no more than a pair o’ night-glasses for pickin’ up young Bannister—the fool!”

‘“Fair an’ soft again,” I said. “She’s signallin’ to the south of us. Bannister knows as well as I that one rocket would bring the Kite. He’ll no be wastin’ fireworks for nothin’. Hear her ca’!”

‘The Grotkau whustled. an’ whustled for five minutes, an’ then there were more fireworks—a regular exhibeetion.

‘“That’s no for men in the regular trade,” says Bell. “Ye’re right, Mac. That’s for a cuddy full o’ passengers.” He blinked through the nightglasses where it lay a bit thick to southward.

‘“What d’ye make of it? “I said.

‘“Liner,” he says. “Yon’s her rocket. Ou, ay; they’ve waukened the gold-strapped skipper, an’—noo they’ve waukened the passengers. They’re turnin’ on the electrics, cabin by cabin. Yon’s anither rocket. They’re comin’ up to help the perishin’ in deep watters.”

‘“Gie me the glass,” I said. But Bell danced on the bridge, clean dementit. “Mails—mails—mails!” said he. “Under contract wi’ the Government for the due conveyance o’ the mails; an’ as such, Mac, ye’ll note, she may rescue life at sea, but she canna tow!—she canna tow! Yon’s her night-signal. She’ll be up in half an hour!”

“Gowk! “I said, “an’ we blazin’ here wi’ all oor lights. Oh, Bell, but ye’re a fool.”

‘He tumbled off the bridge forward, an’ I tumbled aft, an’ before ye could wink our lights were oot, the engine-room hatch was covered, an’ we lay pitch-dark, watchin’ the lights o’ the liner come up that the Grotkau ’d been signallin’ for. Twenty knot she came, every cabin lighted, an’ her boats swung awa’. It was grandly done, an’ in the inside of an hour. She stopped like Mrs. Holdock’s machine; doon went the gangway, doon went the boats, an’ in ten minutes we heard the passengers cheerin’, an’ awa’ she fled.

‘“They’ll tell o’ this all the days they live,” said Bell. “A rescue at sea by night, as pretty as a play. Young Bannister an’ Calder will be drinkin’ in the saloon, an’ six months hence the Board o’ Trade ’ll gie the skipper a pair o’ binoculars. It’s vara philanthropic all round.”

‘We lay by till day—ye may think we waited for it wi’ sore eyes—an’ there sat the Grotkau, her nose a bit cocked, just leerin’ at us. She looked pairfectly rideeculous.

‘“She’ll be fillip’ aft,” says Bell; “for why is she doon by the stern? The tail-shaft’s punched a hole in her, an’-we’ve no boats. There’s three hunder thousand pound sterlin’, at a conservative estimate, droonin’ before our eyes. What’s to do?” An’ his bearin’s got hot again in a minute; for he was an incontinent man.

‘“Run her as near as ye daur,” I said: “Gie me a jacket an’ a life-line, an’ I’ll swum for it.” There was a bit lump of a sea, an’ it was cold in the wind—vara cold; but they’d gone overside like passengers, young Bannister an’ Calder an’ a’, leaving the gangway doon on the lee-side. It would ha’ been a flyin’ in the face o’ manifest Providence to overlook the invitation. We were within fifty yards o’ her while Kinloch was garmin’ me all over wi’ oil behind the galley; an’ as we ran past I went outboard for the salvage o’ three hunder thousand pound. Man, it was perishin’ cold, but I’d done my job judgmatically, an’ came scrapin’ all along her side slap on to the lower gratin’ o’ the gangway. No one more astonished than me, I assure ye. Before I’d caught my breath I’d skinned both my knees on the gratin’, an’ was climbin’ up before she rolled again. I made my line fast to the rail, an’ squattered aft to young Bannister’s cabin, whaur I dried me wi’ everything in his bunk, an’ put on every conceivable sort o’ rig I found till the blood was circulatin’. Three pair drawers, I mind I found—to begin upon—an’ I needed them all. It was the coldest cold I remember in all my experience.

‘Syne I went aft to the engine-room. The Grotkau sat on her own tail, as they say. She was vara short-shafted, an’ her gear was all aft. There was four or five foot o’ watter in the engine-room slummockin’ to and fro, black an’ greasy; maybe there was six foot., The stokehold doors were screwed home, an’ the stokehold was tight enough; but for a minute the mess in the engine-room deceived me. Only for a minute, though, an’ that was because I was not, in a manner o’ speakin’, as calm as ordinar’. I looked again to mak’ sure. ’Twas just black wi’ bilge: dead watter that must ha’ come in fortuitously, ye ken.’

‘McPhee, I’m only a passenger,’ I said, ‘but you don’t persuade me that six foot o’ water can come into an engine-room fortuitously.’

page 7

‘Wha’s tryin’ to persuade one way or the other?’ McPhee retorted. ‘I’m statin’ the facts o’ the case—the simple, natural facts. Six or seven foot o’ dead watter in the engine-room is a vara depressin’ sight if ye think there’s like to be more comin’; but I did not consider that such was likely, and so, ye’ll note, I was not depressed.’

‘That’s all very well, but I want to know about the water,’ I said.

‘I’ve told ye. There was six feet or more there, wi’ Calder’s cap floatin’ on top.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘Weel, in the confusion o’ things after the propeller had dropped off an’ the engines were racin’ an’ a’, it’s vara possible that Calder might ha’ lost it off his head an’ no troubled himself to pick it up again. I remember seein’ that cap on him at Southampton.’

‘I don’t want to know about the cap. I’m asking where the water came from, and what it was doing there, and why you were so certain that it wasn’t a leak, McPhee?’

‘For good reason—for good an’ sufficient reason.’

‘Give it to me, then.’

‘Weel, it’s a reason that does not properly concern myself only. To be preceese, I’m of opinion that it was due, the watter, in part to an error o’ judgment in another man. We can a’ mak’ mistakes.’

‘Oh, I beg your pardon! Go on.

‘I got me to the rail again, an’, “What’s wrang?” said Bell, hailin’.

‘“She’ll do,” I said. “Send’s o’er a hawser, an’ a man to help steer. I’ll pull him in by the life-line.”

‘I could see heads bobbin’ back an’ forth, an’ a whuff or two o’ strong words. Then Bell said: “They’ll not trust themselves—one of ’em—in this watter—except Kinloch, an’ I’ll no spare him.”

‘“The more salvage to me, then,” I said. “I’ll make shift solo.”

‘Says one dock-rat at this: “D’ye think she’s safe?’

‘“I’ll guarantee ye nothing,” I said, “except, maybe, a hammerin’ for keepin’ me this long.”

‘Then he sings out: “There’s no more than one life-belt, an’ they canna find it, or I’d come.”

‘“Throw him over, the Jezebel,” I said, for I was oot o’ patience; an’ they took haud o’ that volunteer before he knew what was in store, and hove him over in the bight of the life-line. So I e’en hauled him up on the sag of it, hand-over-fist—a vara welcome recruit when I’d tilted the salt watter oot of him; for, by the way, he could not swum.

‘Syne they bent a twa-inch rope to the life-line, an’ a hawser to that, an’ I led the rope o’er the drum of a hand-winch forward, an’ we sweated the hawser inboard an’ made it fast to the Grotkau’s bitts.

‘Bell brought the Kite so close I feared she’d roll in an’ do the Grotkau’s plates a mischief. He hove anither life-line to me, an’ went astern, an’ we had all the weary winch-work to do again wi’ a second hawser. For all that, Bell was right: we’d a long tow before us, an’ though Providence had helped us that far, there was no sense in leavin’ too much to its keepin’. When the second hawser was fast, I was wet wi’ sweat, an’ I cried Bell to tak’ up his slack an’ go home. The other man was by way o’ helpin’ the work wi’ askin’ for drinks, but I e’en told him he must hand reef an’ steer, beginnin’ with steerin’, for I was goin’ to turn in. He steered—ou, ay, he steered, in a manner o’ speakin’. At the least, he grippit the spokes an’ twiddled ’em an’ looked wise, but I doubt if the Hoor ever felt it. I turned in there an’ then to young Bannister’s bunk, an’ slept past expression. I waukened ragin’ wi’ hunger, a fair lump o’ sea runnin’, the Kite snorin’ awa’ four knots; an’ the Grotkau slappin’ her nose under, an’ yawin’ an’ standin’ over at discretion. She was a most disgracefu’ tow. But the shameful thing of all was the food. I raxed me a meal fra galley-shelves an’ pantries an’ lazareetes an’ cubbyholes that I would not ha’ gied to the mate of a Cardiff collier; an’ ye ken we say a Cardiff mate will eat clinkers to save waste. I’m sayin’ it was simply vile! The crew had written what they thought of it on the new paint o’ the fo’c’sle, but I had not a decent soul wi’ me to complain on.

There was nothing’ for me to do save watch the hawsers an’ the Kite’s tail squatterin’ down in white watter when she lifted to a sea; so I got steam on the after donkey-pump, an’ pumped oot the engineroom. There’s no sense in leavin’ watter loose in a ship. When she was dry, I went doon the shaft-tunnel, an’ found she was leakin’ a little through the stuffin’-box, but nothin’ to make wark. The propeller had e’en jarred off, as I knew it must, an’ Calder had been waitin’ for it to go wi’ his hand on the gear. He told me as much when I met him ashore. There was nothin’ started or strained. It had just slipped awa’ to the bed o’ the Atlantic as easy as a man dyin’ wi’ due warnin’—a most providential business for all concerned. Syne I took stock o’ the Grotkau’s upper works. Her boats had been smashed on the davits, an’ here an’ there was the rail missin’, an’ a ventilator or two had fetched awa’, an’ the bridge-rails were bent by the seas; but her hatches were tight, and she’d taken no sort of harm. Dod, I came to hate her like a human bein’, for I was eight weary days aboard, starvin’—ay, starvin’—within a cable’s length o’ plenty. All day I lay in the bunk reading the Woman-Hater, the grandest book Charlie Reade ever wrote, an’ pickin’ a toothful here an’ there. It was weary, weary work. Eight days, man, I was aboard the Grotkau, an’ not one full meal did I make. Sma’ blame her crew would not stay by her. The other man? Oh, I warked him to keep him crack. I warked him wi’ a vengeance.

‘It came on to blow when we fetched soundin’s, an’ that kept me standin’ by the hawsers, lashed to the capstan, breathin’ betwixt green seas. I near died o’ cauld an’ hunger, for the Grotkau towed like a barge, an’ Bell howkit her along through or over. It was vara thick up-Channel, too. We were standin’ in to make some sort o’ light, and we near walked over twa three fishin’-boats, an’ they cried us we were o’er close to Falmouth. Then we were near cut down by a drunken foreign fruiter that was blunderin’ between us an’ the shore, and it got thicker and thicker that night, an’ I could feel by the tow Bell did not know whaur he was. Losh, we knew in the morn, for the wind blew the fog oot like a candle, an’ the sun came clear; and as surely as McRimmon gied me my cheque, the shadow o’ the Eddystone lay across our tow-rope! We were that near—ay, we were that near! Bell fetched the Kite round with a jerk that came close to tearin’ the bitts out o’ the Grotkau; an’ I mind I thanked my Maker in young Bannister’s cabin when we were inside Plymouth breakwater.

‘The first to come aboard was McRimmon, wi’ Dandie. Did I tell you our orders were to take anything found into Plymouth? The auld deil had just come down overnight, puttin’ two an’ two together from what Calder had told him when the liner landed the Grotkau’s men. He had preceesely hit oor time. I’d hailed Bell for something to eat, an’ he sent it o’er in the same boat wi’ McRimmon, when the auld man came to me. He grinned an’ slapped his legs and worked his eyebrows the while I ate.

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‘“How do Holdock, Steiner, and Chase feed their men?” said he.

‘“Ye can see,” I said, knockin’ the top off another beer-bottle. “I did not take to be starved, McRimmon.”

‘“Nor to swim, either,” said he, for Bell had tauld him how I carried the line aboard. “Well, I’m thinkin’ you’ll be no loser. What freight could we ha’ put into the Lammergeyer would equal salvage on four hunder thousand pounds—hull and cargo? Eh, McPhee? This cuts the liver out o’ Holdock, Steiner, Chase, and Company, Limited. Eh, McPhee? An’ I’m sufferin’ from senile dementia now? Eh, McPhee? An’ I’m not daft, am I, till I begin to paint the Lammergeyer? Eh, McPhee? Ye may weel lift your leg, Dandie! I ha’ the laugh o’ them all. Ye found watter in the engine-room?”

‘“To speak wi’oot prejudice,” I said, “there was some watter.”

‘“They thought she was sinkin’ after the propeller went. She filled with extraordinary rapeedity. Calder said it grieved him an’ Bannister to abandon her.”

‘I thought o’ the dinner at Radley’s, an’ what like o’ food I’d eaten for eight days.

‘“It would grieve them sore,” I said.

‘“But the crew would not hear o’ stayin’ an’ takin’ their chances. They’re gaun up an’ down sayin’ they’d ha’ starved first.”

‘“They’d ha’ starved if they’d stayed,” said I.

‘“I tak’ it, fra Calder’s account, there was a mutiny a’most.”

‘“Ye know more than I, McRimmon,” I said. “Speakin’ wi’oot prejudice, for we’re all in the same boat, who opened the bilge-cock?”

‘“Oh, that’s it—is it?” said the auld man, an’ I could see he was surprised. “A bilge-cock, ye say?”

‘“I believe it was a bilge-cock. They were all shut when I came aboard, but someone had flooded the engine-room eight feet over all, and shut it off with the worm-an’-wheel gear from the second gratin’ afterwards.”

‘“Losh!” said McRimmon. “The ineequity o’ man’s beyond belief. But it’s awfu’ discreditable to Holdock, Steiner, and Chase, if that came oot in court.”

‘“It’s just my own curiosity,” I said.

‘“Aweel, Dandie’s afflicted wi’ the same disease. Dandie, strive against curiosity, for it brings a little dog into traps an’ suchlike. Whaur was the Kite when yon painted liner took off the Grotkau’s people? “

‘“Just there or thereabouts,” I said.

‘“An’ which o’ you twa thought to cover your lights? “said he, winkin’.

‘“Dandie,” I said to the dog, “we must both strive against curiosity. It’s an unremunerative business. What’s our chance o’ salvage, Dandie?”

‘He laughed till he choked. “Tak’ what I gie you, McPhee, an’ be content,” he said. “Lord, how a man wastes time when he gets old. Get aboard the Kite, mon, as soon as ye can. I’ve clean forgot there’s a Baltic charter yammerin’ for you at London. That’ll be your last voyage, I’m thinkin’, excep’ by way o’ pleasure.”

‘Steiner’s men were comin’ aboard to take charge an’ tow her round, an’ I passed young Steiner in a boat as I went to the Kite. He looked down his nose; but McRimmon pipes up: “Here’s the man ye owe the Grotkau to—at a price, Steiner—at a price! Let me introduce Mister McPhee to you. Maybe ye’ve met before; but ye’ve vara little luck in keeping your men—ashore or afloat!”

‘Young Steiner looked angry enough to eat him as he chuckled an’ whustled in his dry old throat.

‘“Ye’ve not got your award yet,” Steiner says.

‘“Na, na,” says the auld man, in a screech ye could hear to the Hoe, “but I’ve twa million sterlin’, an’ no bairns, ye Judeeas Apella, if ye mean to fight; an’ I’ll match ye p’und for p’und till the last p’und’s oot. Ye ken me, Steiner? I’m McRimmon o’ McNaughton and McRimmon!”

‘“Dod,” he said betwix’ his teeth, sittin’ back in the boat, “I’ve waited fourteen year to break that Jew-firm, an’ God be thankit I’ll do it now.”

‘The Kite was in the Baltic while the auld man was warkin his warks, but I know the assessors valued the Grotkau, all told, at over three hunder and sixty thousand—her manifest was a treat o’ richness—and McRimmon got a third for salvin’ an abandoned ship. Ye see, there’s vast deeference between towin’ a ship wi’ men on her and pickin’ up a derelict—a vast deeference—in pounds sterlin’. Moreover, twa—three o’ the Grotkau’s crew were burnin’ to testify about food, an’ there was a note o’ Calder to the Board in regard to the tail-shaft that would ha’ been vara damagin’ if it had come into court. They knew better than to fight.

‘Syne the Kite came back, and McRimmon paid off me an’ Bell personally, and the rest of the crew pro rata, I believe it’s ca’ed. My share—oor share, I should say—was just twenty-five thousand pounds sterlin’.’

At this point Janet jumped up and kissed him.

‘Five-and-twenty thousand pound sterlin’. Noo, I’m fra the North, and I’m not the like to fling money awa’ rashly, but I’d gie six months’ pay—one hunder an twenty pound—to know who flooded the engine-room of the Grotkau. I’m fairly well acquaint wi’ McRimmon’s eediosyncrasies, and he’d no hand in it. It was not Calder, for I’ve asked him, an’ he wanted to fight me. It would be in the highest degree unprofessional o’ Calder—not fightin’, but openin’ bilge-cocks—but for a while I thought it was him. Ay, I judged it might be him—under temptation.,

‘What’s your theory?’ I demanded.

‘Weel, I’m inclined to think it was one o’ those singular providences that remind us we’re in the hands o’ Higher Powers.’

‘It couldn’t open and shut itself?’

‘I did not mean that; but some half-starvin’ oiler or, maybe, trimmer must ha’ opened it a while to mak’ sure o’ leavin’ the Grotkau. It’s a demoralisin’ thing to see an engine-room flood up after any accident to the gear—demoralisin’ and deceptive both. Aweel, the man got what he wanted, for they went aboard the liner cryin’ that the Grotkau was sinkin’. But it’s curious to think o’ the consequences. In a’ human probability, he’s bein’ damned in heaps at the present moment aboard another tramp-freighter; an’ here am I, wi’ five-an’-twenty thousand pounds invested, resolute to go to sea no more—providential’s the preceese word—except as a passenger, ye’ll understand, Janet.’

McPhee kept his word. He and Janet went for a voyage as passengers in the first-class saloon. They paid seventy pounds for their berths; and Janet found a very sick woman in the second-class saloon, so that for sixteen days she lived below, and chatted with the stewardesses at the foot of the second-saloon stairs while her patient slept. McPhee was a passenger for exactly twenty-four hours. Then the engineers’ mess—where the oilcloth tables are–joyfully took him to its bosom, and for the rest of the voyage that company was richer by the unpaid services of a highly certificated engineer.